Podcasts about hohokam

Courtney Buzzard (she/her) is a M.S. of Sustainable Food Systems Candidate at Prescott College. She is the proud daughter of a long history of farmers on her father's side and her mother, a Nicaraguan immigrant to the United States. Beginning with a B.A. in Sustainably from Arizona State University, Courtney has long fostered a passion for environmental and social justice. She has worked for over a decade in the food and beverage industry, deepening her love of food and cooking. Courtney aims to inspire the communities of the Latin American diaspora to reincorporate cultural cuisine into their homes through her work. She lives in Arizona with her cat Frankie, where she aims to create meaningful change by improving cultural food access in low-income and immigrant communities. The land she lives and works on is home to the Hohokam and Tohono O'odham peoples.

The Anasazi, also called the Ancestral Puebloans, were an ancient Native American culture that flourished in the Four Corners region (present-day Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico) from roughly 100 AD to 1300 AD, known for their advanced agricultural practices, cliff dwellings, and pottery. The name "Anasazi" has come to mean "ancient people," although the word itself is Navajo, meaning "enemy ancestors." The Anasazi were one of four major prehistoric archaeological traditions recognized in the American Southwest along with the Mogollon, Hohokam, and Patayan, but of the four, the Anasazi were known as the deadliest and were known to mix human meat with maize as not only for ritual purposes but dietary as well. Jon from 21CD Podcast is back to join Joel on a fascinating journey of Oasisamerican discovery of the origins of corn and what its original purpose was as a gift from the "gods". They look at apocryphal texts like the Book of Enoch and Jubilees to understand the beginnings of genetically modified food. They then focus on Quetzalcoatl, "The Feathered Serpent", and the god's connection to human sacrifices and the eating of tlacatlaolli. Lastly, Joel and Jon explore the book, "Man Corn" by Christy G. Turner II, and his evidence for cannibalism among the Anasazi, by developing a set of six criteria for determining whether human cannibalism was likely to have occurred, based on analysis of archaeological remains. The 21CD Podcast YouTube | Website | Instagram Buy Me A Coffee: Donate Website: https://linktr.ee/joelthomasmedia Follow: Instagram | X | Facebook Watch: YouTube | Rumble Music: YouTube | Spotify | Apple Music Films: merkelfilms.com Email: freetherabbitspodcast@gmail.com Distributed by: merkel.media Produced by: @jack_theproducer INTRO MUSIC Joel Thomas - Free The Rabbits YouTube | Apple Music | Spotify OUTRO MUSIC Joel Thomas - Spinning YouTube | Apple Music | Spotify

In this week's episode Alan chats to Dr Aaron Wright, a leading archaeologist at Archaeology Southwest. With a Ph.D. in Anthropology, Aaron has spent years studying the Hohokam and Patayan traditions of the southwestern U.S., focusing on cultural landscapes and rock art. His groundbreaking work on the South Mountain Rock Art Project and his book Religion on the Rocks earned him the Don D. and Catherine S. Fowler Prize. Aaron is currently leading efforts to establish the Great Bend of the Gila National Monument, working to preserve and highlight the significance of this unique cultural landscape.Transcripts For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/rockart/137Links Dr Aaron WrightContact Dr. Alan Garfinkelavram1952@yahoo.comDr. Alan Garfinkel's WebsiteSupport Dr. Garfinkel on PatreonArchPodNet APN Website: https://www.archpodnet.com APN on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/archpodnet APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet APN on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archpodnet Tee Public StoreAffiliates and Sponsors Motion

In this week's episode Alan chats to Dr Aaron Wright, a leading archaeologist at Archaeology Southwest. With a Ph.D. in Anthropology, Aaron has spent years studying the Hohokam and Patayan traditions of the southwestern U.S., focusing on cultural landscapes and rock art. His groundbreaking work on the South Mountain Rock Art Project and his book Religion on the Rocks earned him the Don D. and Catherine S. Fowler Prize. Aaron is currently leading efforts to establish the Great Bend of the Gila National Monument, working to preserve and highlight the significance of this unique cultural landscape.Transcripts For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/rockart/137Links Dr Aaron WrightContact Dr. Alan Garfinkelavram1952@yahoo.comDr. Alan Garfinkel's WebsiteSupport Dr. Garfinkel on PatreonArchPodNet APN Website: https://www.archpodnet.com APN on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/archpodnet APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet APN on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archpodnet Tee Public StoreAffiliates and Sponsors Motion

Visiting museums and archaeological sites in the American Southwest, Louie García finds inspiration to revive the fiber techniques of the past. He has participated in creating several recreations of ancient textiles, including a replica of the 800-year-old Arizona Openwork Shirt, and is a member of the Cedar Mesa Perishables Project, which studies artifacts including baskets, plaited and twined yucca sandals, and most importantly cotton textile fragments that date back as much as two thousand years. But where others might see ruins, Louie sees connections to the Pueblo heritage that is part of his daily life. When rediscovering weaving, spinning, and cotton-growing skills, he says, “That's how I'm able to connect with my ancestors.” Navigating between his wish to maintain the role of fiber arts in his community with respect for the sacred nature of traditional knowledge, he founded the New Mexico Pueblo Fiber Arts Guild in in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He teaches classes to Pueblo weavers as well as a few non-Pueblo fiber arts enthusiasts. His handspun, handwoven gauze and weft-wrap openwork piece, inspired by a nearly 1,000-year-old Hohokam textile in the Ventana Cave excavation, was featured on the cover of Spin Off Summer 2020—one of just a few articles about Pueblo weaving written from a Pueblo perspective, he says. Looking at the piece, Cedar Mesa Perishables Project director Laurie Webster remarked, “It's probably been at least a thousand years since anyone has woven a piece like this.” Spin Off is excited to welcome Louie as an instructor at SOAR October 12-17, 2025, in Loveland, Colorado. Join us to hear how Louie connects the work of his hands with his dedication to Pueblo heritage. Links Openwork Shirt (sprang replica): Carol James, “The Arizona Openwork (Tonto) Shirt Project” (http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/pct7/25) (2017). PreColumbian Textile Conference VII / Jornadas de Textiles PreColombinos VII. 25. Cedar Mesa Perishables Project (https://www.friendsofcedarmesa.org/perishablesproject/) Indian Pueblo Cultural Center (https://indianpueblo.org/) Louie García, “Pueblo Cotton in the American Southwest: Ancient Gauze Weave and Weft-Wrap Openwork.” [Spin Off Summer 2020.](https://shop.longthreadmedia.com/products/spin-off-summer-2020) This episode is brought to you by: Treenway Silks is where weavers, spinners, knitters and stitchers find the silk they love. Select from the largest variety of silk spinning fibers, silk yarn, and silk threads & ribbons at TreenwaySilks.com (https://www.treenwaysilks.com/). You'll discover a rainbow of colors, thoughtfully hand-dyed in Colorado. Love natural? Treenway's array of wild silks provide choices beyond white. If you love silk, you'll love Treenway Silks, where superior quality and customer service are guaranteed. KnitPicks.com has been serving the knitting community for over 20 years and believes knitting is for everyone, which is why they work hard to make knitting accessible, affordable, and approachable. Knit Picks responsibly sources its fiber to create an extensive selection of affordable yarns like High Desert from Shaniko Wool Company in Oregon. Are you looking for an ethical, eco-friendly yarn to try? Look no further than Knit Picks' Eco yarn line. Need needles? Knit Picks makes a selection for knitters right at their Vancouver, Washington headquarters. KnitPicks.com (https://www.knitpicks.com/)—a place for every knitter. Knitters know Manos del Uruguay for their yarns' rich tonal colors, but the story of women's empowerment and community benefit enriches every skein. Discover 17 yarn bases from laceweight to super bulky made and dyed at an artisan owned cooperative in Uruguay. Ask for Manos at your local retailer or visit FairmountFibers.com (https://fairmountfibers.com/).

Conoce algo de la cultura Hohokam que habito Arizona y Sonora hasta el año 1500 y sus increíbles logros. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/a3misterio/message

Conoce algo de la cultura Hohokam que habito Arizona y Sonora hasta el año 1500 y sus increíbles logros. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/creativos/message

Dive into the ancient history of the area we live in.  Learn about the Hohokam tribe and the traces of their civilization scattered throughout the town.To view images referenced in the episode, visit: https://www.orovalleyaz.gov/Community/OV-50/50th-Features-Archive/Way-Way-Back-Signs-of-the-Hohokam-Right-here-in-Oro-Valley?transfer=8be4c7cc-8621-4a4c-98fa-36a4f5baeeec

Today on the podcast, Eva Jannotta joins us to discuss entrepreneurship, wellness, and growing your influence. Eva helps women leaders defy the status quo, amplify our influence and expand our wealth and power through thought leadership. Her Big Audacious Goal is to end gender and racial discrimination.  Her company, Medusa Media Group, works with women and nonbinary leaders to build thriving and profitable thought leader ecosystems. They also work with authors, helping them boldly launch bestselling books. Why? Their vision is to achieve gender parity in cultural, economic and social authority.  To that end, she's hosting a workshop in early February 2024 and you're invited! You can join her email list here to catch registration when it opens up: https://medusamediagroup.com/contact/  You can also participate in the Women & Nonbinary Authority Project survey! Its goal is to assess how women and nonbinary professionals (entrepreneurs and full-time employees) acquire authority in their careers by surveying 1000+ individuals in North America. A research report will be published in 2024, with emphasis on practical ways to acquire authority, and recommendations for individuals and institutions. Take it here: https://survey.zohopublic.com/zs/UtBUul  Eva is an INFJ and her Gallup Strengths include Intellection, Strategic, Input, Empathy, and Learner. She received her BA in Gender and Women's Studies and English Literature in 2012. When not working, Eva can be found weightlifting, reading female-centered fantasy novels, and learning about outer space.

Episode Summary This time on This Month in the Apocalypse, Brooke, Inmn, and Margaret talk about food insecurity, genocide in Armenia, a storm in Libya, battles for abortion care access, the government shut down, the state of water, and how everything can tie back to Lord of the Rings. Host Info Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke. Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery. Margaret can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript This Month in the Apocalypse: September, 2023 **Inmn ** 00:15 Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying [Brooke cheers] and this is our extra fun This Month in the Apocalypse section in which we talk about, unfortunately, most of the horrible things that happened in the last month. I'm one of your hosts today, Inmn, and I have with me some other folks.  **Margaret ** 00:36 Hi. **Brooke ** 00:36 The indomitable you. **Margaret ** 00:40 Brooke is Brooke. I'm...I'm Out-mn [like Inmn, but out] Margaret, **Brooke ** 00:45 I'll be Margaret, you be Out-mn. **Margaret ** 00:49 The inverse of Inmn. [Brooke laughing] Or, I'll be Margaret. And then Inmn can be Brooke. **Inmn ** 01:02 I don't know nearly enough about math to be Brooke, but I will try. **Margaret ** 01:07 Okay, we'll just switch each other's scripts and so that we each read what the other has researched. And y'all can go  with my shitty notes. **Inmn ** 01:17 Yeah, right. You know, that sounds great. But before we get to all of that, we are a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts and here is a jingle from another show on that network. Bah doo boop doo [Singing the words like a simple melody] **Inmn ** 02:21 And we're back. And, to start off the show, we have harped a lot on how horrible of a place Phoenix, Arizona is a lot this year.  **Brooke ** 02:38 Oh, I've definitely talked shit too, so...it's at least an "us" and not necessarily a "we."  **Margaret ** 02:42 I really appreciate you making this a "we" instead of me just talking shit on it. **Inmn ** 02:48 Yeah, no, I mean, it's the place, famously, where propane tanks explode because it's too hot and people fall on the ground and get burned. And, where they're trying to build some giant super future city that Bill Gates wants to trap us all in...or something. But a listener got a hold of me and told me about the history of the name, Phoenix, because it got brought up on the show. And, what he had to tell me about it was that Phoenix is named so because it was built from the ashes of a Hohokam civilization that was literally burned to the ground by white settlers. [Brooke boos] And they wanted to inspiringly build a city in its ashes. [laughing in a horrified way] So yeah, the surprising but not too surprising history of Phoenix.  **Margaret ** 03:58 It's more like the spell Animate Dead where you bring someone back to life but as a mindless zombie who serves you instead of their original purpose.  **Inmn ** 04:04 Yeah, totally. Yeah.  **Margaret ** 04:08 Brooke, what were you gonna say? Sorry.  **Brooke ** 04:09 Oh, just that I think that, as an indigenous person, we should go ahead and re-Phoenix, Phoenix. [Everyone laughs] It's time.  **Margaret ** 04:18 This is just a terrible transitional state that I was in before... **Brooke ** 04:21 I mean if it rises from the ashes, let's burn that motherfucker down and give it back to its proper people. **Inmn ** 04:29 It might do that on its own. The way the city is running it, it might...that might happen regardless of intention. **Brooke ** 04:38 Excellent. I'm glad to help, though. I will help the city towards that goal. **Inmn ** 04:44 Yeah. But, in a hopeful note for Arizona, I did find out that other cities in Arizona, not Phoenix, do weirdly have a pretty robust aquifer system. Like the city of Tucson, for example, only relies on the Colorado River for like 5% of its water, and otherwise, it's all aquifer driven and there's a lot of cool programs in place for--this is me defending that Arizona is a fine place to live. **Margaret ** 05:18 I know. And I'm going to talk about groundwater later [Laughing] and how aquifers are all drying up all over the country. **Brooke ** 05:24 Thank God, because I was going to insert some shit about there right now. So, I'll leave that for you, Margaret. **Inmn ** 05:28 Great. Well, to start us off today aside from Arizona... **Brooke ** 05:36 Phoenix getting burned down. **Inmn ** 05:36 ...Aside from Phoenix getting burned down. There are some bad things happening in the world. I know this is a shock to all of our listeners who came here for a list of joyful things about the apocalypse, right? But, so there's a new wave of activity in the Armenian Genocide from Azerbaijan. And, what's been happening is that on September 19th, Azerbaijan   launched a full assault on Nagorno-Karabakh targeting mostly civilian infrastructure. There have been--you know, this was as of September 19th--200 casualties so far. But, there are 120,000 people who are completely cut off from any kind of external supplies or aid. Nagorno-Karabakh, it's been contested for a really long time. It's been the subject of a lot of past conflicts. And, both sides have--there's been a, you know, an unsteady..."peace" isn't the right word, but, you know, non-attacking-each-other time. And both sides are kind of accusing each other of a military buildup. And while there's a lot of physical evidence that shows Azerbaijan amassing troops and building military infrastructure, the same cannot be said of Armenia, who has--there's a local defense army in that area. Because, the area is sort of technically part of Azerbaijan, but is controlled by an ethnically Armenian population. And, so, part of this big military buildup is that there was this blockade put on, essentially, the only route in and out of this area, was just put on full military blockade. And there was a big humanitarian response to it because they're like, "You're cutting off 120,000 people from all external like food, and medical, and, you know, any kind of supplies, and, in some instances, water. And, there was this big mass starvation happening in this area. And, humanitarian aid convoys that were trying to go into the area were literally being shelled by Azerbaijan. Which eventually culminated in this full assault on September 19th. And, as it stands right now, there's...literally 120,000 people have gotten into their cars and are attempting to leave the area since the... **Brooke ** 05:37 That's a lot of people  **Inmn ** 05:38 Yeah, yeah.  **Margaret ** 05:41 There was a ceasefire or something, right?  **Inmn ** 05:44 There was a ceasefire, which called for the unconditional surrender of the defense army. So, it's now a completely civilian population. And, there has been a call for the reintegration of the Armenian population, which locally is being viewed as a death sentence to pretty much everyone. Because, in the past, reintegration attempts by Azerbaijan have resulted in things like mass torture and rape of civilians and POWs.  **Brooke ** 09:22 Wow.  **Inmn ** 09:23 Yeah. And, to complicate things even more, there's like a...You know, it's in the world view right now. And people are like...Like, other countries are like, "Oh, should we do something?" And weirdly, Russia has been the peacekeeping mediator between the two. **Brooke ** 09:43 What?  **Margaret ** 09:44 So, it's not good. They're not doing good things.  **Inmn ** 09:47 No, they're not doing good things. And, a lot of people suspect them of playing this double game because Russia has publicly supported Armenia in a lot of the disputes, but they are the main arms supplier to Azerbaijan. So, there's obviously a lot of strange conflict. They're essentially...the world at large is viewing them as playing one side against the other. So... **Margaret ** 10:19 So, I don't know as much about this part. I've only been learning about some of this stuff recently. But, Russia, in general, has its own kind of equivalent of NATO, like its power-block type thing. But, Armenia is basically being slowly, kind of, shunted out of it or given less and less say in it, is the impression that I'm under. And, so there's a lot of tension of how Armenia is a little bit more looking to the west or whatever in a way that Russia isn't stoked about. That's the--I'm not 100% certain about this--that's the understanding I've been kind of learning. **Inmn ** 10:58 Yeah, yeah. And so, kind of, one of the big pressing issues right now is what is going to happen to this mostly ethnically Armenian population that is...Like there's a 70 mile line of cars trying to flee the area. And like, yeah, yeah, obviously... **Brooke ** 11:22 Where are they headed towards? **Margaret ** 11:25 Armenia. **Inmn ** 11:26 Yeah. **Margaret ** 11:27 They're in the border region.  **Brooke ** 11:29 Going into Armenia? Not going out of Armenia?  **Margaret ** 11:31 Yeah. No, into. Because, what it is, is there is a border area and that border area, most of it is now controlled by Azerbaijan and was taken, I believe, during the conflict a couple of years ago. However, several of the cities, or several of the population centers, are primarily Armenian even though they're now technically part of Azerbaijan because of this conflict, right? And so they need to get the fuck out because they're going to be genocided. And, they're very aware of the fact that they are going to be genocided. And a lot of the rhetoric that is coming up is genocidal. And, Armenians are being like fairly blunt that, like, "If the world doesn't do something right now, we're going to die." Like, hundreds of thousands of people are going to fucking die. **Inmn ** 12:22 Yeah.  **Brooke ** 12:23 Wow.  **Inmn ** 12:24 Yeah, it's...it's really bad. Yeah, but yeah, that's all I have on that. Brooke, I have heard that there's also some pretty bad things happening in India and Libya? **Brooke ** 12:41 Yeah, well, I can tell you about India, anyway. Well, we talk a lot about, of course, climate events going on. And there's been a lot of stuff that we've talked about this summer with various climate catastrophes, wildness, unusual behavior. And I think it's pretty well known that we're in an El Nino situation right now. One of the countries that has been affected by climate catastrophe this year is India, especially in the northern regions where they do a lot of growing of food. And they have had really unpredictable rainfalls. In some places there's been severe flooding, and other places, there's been less rain than usual, which overall is leading to a lot of problems with a lot of crops. So, some of the food staples in India have seen significant increases in prices. Tomatoes and onions are things popularly used in Indian cooking, and they've seen a five to six times increase in the price for them. [Margaret goes "phew!"] Yeah, yeah, massive increases. And then, and this is then also related to war in Ukraine and wheat and grain prices. The chicken feed has gone up significantly, and chicken is a pretty common meat in a lot of dishes. But, then the chicken has become too expensive--to buy chicken. And to have chickens and feed them and butcher your own chickens has also become too expensive. So, that big source of protein is kind of off the menu in a lot of places too. So, some families are eating, you know, just mashed up vegetables is their whole meal for the day. Other places, they're making just--it's not naan but it's breads that are...roti. Roti breads. They just make some roti bread in the morning and that's all the family has to eat for the day is just bread. A lot of lower income families get a wheat subsidy from the government. They get so many pounds of wheat every month. But, it's not enough to last through the whole month. And of course they're not able to get enough wheat from other sources to even keep up with the levels of demand that people have in the country. So, inflation is making it much harder to buy goods. And, it's due to the climate catastrophe. And in fact, India has gone so far as to ban some exports like rice and sugar. Yeah, they've banned exports on those, which, of course, all of the places that might turn to rice as a grain source when wheat runs out then can't get the rice that they would usually get. Not that they're interchangeable, but, you know? And, in fact, India is looking at importing some things that it historically never has to import, like tomatoes from Nepal. They're looking at having to import those. So, yeah, you know, it's already a very impoverished country. So, India is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, having some trouble with the food staples there. And, not gonna get, you know, better anytime soon because, of course, they're crops that you harvest and that you store. So, rice, you know, being a big one, they're pulling in a smaller rice harvest. There's not enough to go around right now. And then everything that they would usually put in a long term storage, they don't have enough for that. So, there's going to be even more food insecurity down the road, unless they're able to find ways to import some of that and do it in a way that they can afford to do. **Brooke ** 16:58 One more component of that whole foods situation--it's not like the food supply-but speaking of Ukraine, is that India imports fuel from Ukraine. And I can't remember the kind. But, they haven't been able to get as much fuel as they usually would, and so people that use that for cooking, don't have don't have the ability to do as much cooking because they can't afford it or they can't get the fuel that they need in order to cook. **Margaret ** 17:37 It's funny because one of the things I'm sort of hoping we can start doing with a lot of things--obviously, we can do it with all things--is to sort of talk about how to mitigate these problems or how to help with these problems, you know? And there's like two different parts of it. And one is like, you know--and I don't have the research and I'm just like thinking about a way to try and do this--but it's, you know, we don't have a way to necessarily impact food prices in India and so then it's like, "Oh, well, there's the things that we can do here." And then it's like, well, overall, not entirely, but, overall, the average person in America is a lot more privileged. But then it's like...just things like how tomatoes and other crops are also being threatened a lot in the United States right now, and we're probably going to see food prices on a lot of these staple crops, like vegetables and things, go up--not to the same degree, not five or 6...you know, 500%, or whatever, in one year. And it's interesting because there's some of these things that are easier to grow at home, as compared to staple crops. Like, large copper hydrates, corn, wheat, rice, can be grown at home, but very...it's way more complicated. And, you're also very unlikely to have a climate where you can grow all three of those things instead of just one of those things. **Brooke ** 18:54 Yeah, in my heart, I'm like, "Oh, yeah, the solution to this is, you know, everybody should plant a garden." But, that's such a privileged thing to say, to assume that they have space, resources, good soil, you know, with a thousand things that actually tries to do that. **Margaret ** 19:12 Yeah. Yeah. Well... **Brooke ** 19:15 But, if you can garden, you should learn how to do something, plant something. **Margaret ** 19:22 No, I mean, even as a as a prepper, sometimes when something goes wrong for one of my friends, I'm like, "Oh, I'm gonna get the thing that helps me if that goes wrong for me." I mean, I try and help them out first, right? But, you know, driving with someone and the muffler or the whole tailpipe detaches from their car, and they're like, "Oh, I need this metal strapping instead of, you know, I had like P-cord or something, right?" And now I have metal strapping in my car because why not? It's tiny and cheap and light, right? And that's not...this doesn't apply on a global level. I'm sorry everyone who's listening who's like, "Shut the fuck up." You're right. Okay, so we decided what we're gonna do is we're gonna do like foreign--foreign... [questions the phrasing] Whatever, international shit before we do shit that's like a little bit more...the shit that we already...the shit that's closer to home. So, the other big thing that I have from this year...from this month--Jesus Christ, it's been...this year...it's just not even.... [Pauses to rest] In Libya, the...Okay, there was a storm called Storm Daniel. And, it was the deadliest storm in the Mediterranean in recorded history. And, it happened on September 11th. Way higher count of dead people than anything--well, then the famous thing that happened on September 11th in United States. I don't know as much about the coup that happened on September 11th years ago. But, Storm Daniel, it's like...it's not a tropical storm because of like, it's not from the sparkling Champagne region of France or whatever...[Brooke laughs, getting the joke] Like...You know what I'm saying? [Affirmative noises] Like, in order for it to be a tropical storm it has to exist in this very specific way. But, it's like...it's a tropical storm, like in terms of its impact. Like, it's a sparkling nightmare. And, you know, so it's legally distinct. But, it hit a ton of Mediterranean countries, and it fucked a lot of things up. And, it most notoriously killed a fuck ton of people in Libya because there were these two aging dams outside of the city of Derna that broke on September 11th. The death toll is anywhere from 4,000 to 11,000 people with 9,000 people that are still missing, even though it's been several weeks. I believe that that 11,000 number includes those missing people. That's the best guess I can get. And, just basically a third of the city fucking washed out to sea. I'm being slightly hyperbolic. A third of the city was damaged and a fuck ton of it washed out into the sea. And...Yeah, the morgues were overfilled. Bodies were laid out in the main square on sidewalks. Eight people, eight officials have been arrested already over this, which is funny because it's better than what the United States would do, you know? And, we're all like, "Oh, look at these terrible, idiotic countries," or whatever. Like, no, they...So far, as of yesterday, as of recording, they've arrested eight people. **Inmn ** 22:32 Like on...because of...because of like what? Like preparation? **Margaret ** 22:36 Because they didn't fix the damn thing. Yeah, sorry. There are these two dams that for decades scientists...The dams were built in the 70's by, I want to say, a Turkish contractor. No, I'm not sure. A contractor from a different country. And, they've been showing signs of aging and they've just been unmaintained for like 50 years. And, in 2012-2013 $2 million was appropriated, like sent to fix them, but Libya has not been an incredibly stable place, and that money did not fix them. And so, yeah. Everyone was like...Scientists were sitting there being like, "There's a crack in this dam that's over the town. We should do something," and everyone's like, "Oh, yeah, totally." [In a tone suggesting they won't fix it] And, you know, I mean, that's, government for you? Like, like, you know? But, on the other hand...Whatever. Glad that people are at least trying to take it seriously. **Inmn ** 23:45 Sorry. Do you have more on that? **Margaret ** 23:47 No, no, let's talk about things in the Western world. **Inmn ** 23:50 Oh, yeah, I'm first. We'll start with the bad, unfortunately. So, the newest battleground for abortion access in Texas is that Texas is...There's this group of lawmakers who, you know, it's the same people who authored the Heartbeat Bill, who are trying to...Instead of making large state or national laws to target abortion, they're trying to target abortion on a very small level--which will have a huge and devastating impact--by building this network of what they call like "Sanctuary for the Unborn" cities. [Margaret scoffs] Yeah, no, it sounds pretty bad. And, so what they're doing is they're going to small towns, especially in West Texas, to try to get those towns to pass local ordinances that would create criminal penalties for traveling through those cities to access abortion care in states where abortion is still legal, like New Mexico. And, this is particularly impactful in West Texas because a lot of--there's a handful of new abortion clinics that have sprung up on the border of New Mexico and Texas specifically to serve people going from West Texas to New Mexico to access abortion care. And, two cities have passed the ordinances so far with as many as 51 cities who are thinking about it. And, the one currently in the news right now is Llano, Texas, which sits at an intersection of six different highways, including a pretty major highway, highway 87, which is a road that a lot of people who are going from Austin to New Mexico might use. And then there's a bunch of cities along I27 that have ordinances brewing for...similar ordinances. And, largely, though, what's interesting about this is that although two cities have passed this so far, there's a lot of conservative apprehension about passing these laws.  **Brooke ** 23:53 Really? **Inmn ** 24:23 And, this comes from...I think this comes from the intersection of like...these are probably more libertarian-minded people who think that it is an overreach for the government to create penalties based on travel, because they're worried about other ways that travel could be limited and for other reasons that travel could be limited. So, it's libertarians and conservatives who are not like...who are probably antiabortion, who probably support abortion bans, but they think that this kind of larger infrastructural travel thing goes way too far. So, there is a lot of conservative pushback from it, which is interesting. **Margaret ** 28:53 Okay, about abortion. Obviously, the State should not use--well, the State shouldn't exist--but, the State shouldn't use the Church or religious teachings in order to determine health care. I think that's a fairly understandable thing. However, if you, the listener, are religious in a Christian variety or if you want to argue with these people, this whole concept of being against abortion as a Christian is pretty fucking newfangled, is one of the things. The Church, the Catholic Church--which is a minority religion in the United States and is not a like primarily powerful force in the United States political sphere--the Catholic Church has only been against abortion since 1869. For almost all of the church's existence, abortion was only a problem during the third trimester after the Quickening, the Ensoulment, right, is what people want to argue about is like when a human gets a soul or whatever. And, until the late 19th century, the Ensoulment happened...people would argue either like...Most Jewish religious teaching, I believe, is that the Ensoulment--that's...I don't know if they use the word "Ensoulment''--but, the first breath of life, right? "You get your soul when your fucking born," is a very common traditional teaching. Also...Or, you get it at the Quickening, which is the fucking...like 24 weeks into pregnancy. And so, this whole idea of life beginning at conception is god damn new. All the people that the Catholics venerate didn't fucking believe that shit. And then, more than that, evangelicals, who are the main people pushing antiabortion shit, they didn't get into the shit until the 1970s. And they were like...basically were like, "Oh, how else can we be shitty?" And they were like, "Oh, we can be shitty by hating women. And so we're gonna fucking all of a sudden decide that we're against the following type of health care." I don't have as much of the facts about that in front of me, about exactly how that went, but basically, they joined...It used to be only the Catholics who were the people running around being shitty about abortion. And, I don't know. I, for some reason, I think that this matters...Like, just even in terms of like when you're talking about...Because people act like it's this like, "Well, I'm a Christian and therefore 2000 years of hating abortion," like that's just not the fucking case. **Inmn ** 31:17 Yeah, and even there was this one person in Llano, who was quoted as saying like--it was like a council person--who was like...she was like, "Yeah, I'm personally not in favor of abortion. But, I remember giving a friend, like picking up a friend from an abortion clinic in high school and like I didn't support it, but I picked them up. And, under this new law, I would be a criminal." So, what is interesting about this overstep to me is that it offers some ground for people to talk about things in a way that might not have been in the forefront before where like...Which is interesting. It's like the more that the government, or, you know, crazy far-right conservatives, overreach, it does have the potential to create these funny little fissures with, you know, just normal everyday people who are like, "Well, whoa, whoa, wait a second. Wait a second. I was against abortion, but this is looking more like Fascism." And, I think that is creating fissures, which is interesting. But... **Margaret ** 32:37 No, and it's good. That side should have fissures and we should make them...we should embiggen those fissures. There's a different word here.  **Brooke ** 32:46 I love it. **Inmn ** 32:51 But, yeah, that's mostly it for Texas. In a related note, Idaho recently became the first state to impose criminal penalties on people who help a minor leave the state for an abortion without parental consent, just as another wave of the war against abortion access. **Brooke ** 33:14 You know, this wasn't on my talking list, but, if I may, speaking of Idaho and abortion, I was reading about a lot of OB-GYN providers who are leaving Idaho in noticeable numbers, especially people who are specialists in like NICU care [Neonatal Intensive Care Unit] or early birth tiny baby death problem kind of things, those sort of high-level baby specialists, because they feel so at risk in Idaho that if something happens to a baby in their care, that they could be criminalized for it. I mean, they're taking jobs in other states and fleeing in such numbers that it's recognizable. And, there's some places that have--hospitals--in rural areas that have shut down their maternity wards. **Margaret ** 34:06 It's just so awful. **Inmn ** 34:09 Well, if state-by-state Christian nationalism bothered you, do I have some bad news, because recently it was unveiled that this horrifying thing called Project 2025, and it is a thousand page, essentially, playbook for conservative lawmakers to dismantle the federal government as it stands. And... **Margaret ** 34:40 Why do they always try to do the cool stuff? [Laughs at the dry joke] **Inmn ** 34:42 I know. I know. And, most of what they're looking at doing is completely dismantling the EPA and a lot of similar jobs that pertain to environmental regulation. But... **Margaret ** 34:54 Yeah, the stuff that we want to have keep happening once we have an organizational system instead of a government Yeah, I'm sure they're gonna keep the fucking cops and Border Patrol. Fuckers. Yeah. **Inmn ** 35:06 Yeah, it's pretty disconcerting. It's like trying...People view it as trying to pave the way for whatever the...whoever the next Republican president is to essentially become, you know a dictator in a more literal sense.  **Brooke ** 35:27 Well, the federal government is trying to fuck itself currently.  **Inmn ** 35:30 Oh, yeah?  **Brooke ** 35:31 If I can transition into that. Because, we are facing another federal government shutdown risk. [Makes an enthusiastic noise] **Margaret ** 35:42 Once again, they're gonna shut down the wrong parts of it, aren't they? **Brooke ** 35:44 Oh, yeah. Uh huh. They're gonna keep essential services, which is apparently not shit like OSHA, and Food and Drug inspections, and air traffic control. Those are not essential services. [Margaret laughing] **Margaret ** 35:58 I'm sure it's the goddamn Border Patrol and making sure poor people pay taxes and rich people don't. **Brooke ** 36:05 Yeah, shit like that. We talked about it one other time, government shutdowns on the show together, and in that context, it was talking about the debt ceiling, the government's self imposed limit on how much money they can borrow. And so, they were at risk of having to shut down because they weren't in agreement about being able to borrow more money. Well, this is the...now, we're facing the most beloved refuse-to-agree-on-a-budget federal government shutdown and fucking every time they have to redo the budget, it's always in the news, "Oh, it's gonna be a federal government shutdown!" And, sometimes it's more serious than others. So it's super hard to take it seriously. It hasn't really happened very many times that there's been a government shutdown. There was one that was back in like 2018-2019 that was 35 days or there abouts. And that one.... **Margaret ** 37:00 Which is the longest one in history?  **Brooke ** 37:02 Exactly. And that one was actually long enough to have an impact that mattered. If they have one right now, it's, you know, they probably won't have one there. And, if they do, it's going to be one of these stupid two or three day kind of things. It's really, really unlikely, because they just don't have the circumstances to have that long one happen again. If it did happen, and it goes on for a long time, then you get a lot of backups in the federal government. You have subsidy programs that won't send out payments, like SNAP benefits and Social Security benefits and housing assistance and financial aid for students. But again, it has to be a shutdown that's closer to a month long, because they're set up to do all of those payments, you know, for the next month. So, if they shut shut down today, October is all set to go and would automatically do its thing, and then November would be fucked if they stayed shut down. So, most likely not going to happen. If it does happen, probably a minimal one and longer interruptions. I guess if it happens and we're looking at a long one, we can talk about it some more and I can tell you all about what's actually going to go on and all the fucked-up-ed-ness. But, if you're seeing it in the news, it's just because this is the thing that the news likes to pick up right now and talk about this time of year. Yeah, don't stress out about it. Like, they fucking take the exact same article from the previous year and and, you know, move the paragraphs around. **Margaret ** 38:27 Well, it's like...it's like...Okay, it's like Covid. It's like...When Covid was first coming up, it was gonna be like another bird flu where we were like, "Oh, no, this thing that won't actually materially affect us that's just a news cycle panic thing." And then it's like every now and then it's a Covid, you know? And, eventually, it might be a Black Death and we're fucked, right? But, most of the time, when there's like...Like I still...Like, even as I was skimming there was some like, "new superbug" in such-and-such place and I'm like, "I'm not worried," right? Like, it's either...It's either gonna be real bad or it's not. But, there's a new one of those to worry about every fucking month. And, so, that makes sense about government shutdown being that it could be real fucking bad, but it usually isn't. Yeah. **Brooke ** 39:19 The worst that it's ever been still wasn't really that bad. I think things got really fucked up for, you know, about a month after they got back online. And then there were some other things that had delays, you know, applications and shit that they didn't process and then had like a backlog of and whatever. But, the biggest thing that could be an impact, that could, even if it's a short one, could be air travel, because the TSA doesn't get paid. And the last time they had a long one, the TSA agents were like, "No, we're not gonna stay here and work for free." And, they fucked off and went and drove Uber. And whatever. **Margaret ** 39:53 Yeah, I mean, there was a whole constitutional amendment about how you can't make people work without giving them money unless they're in prison. **Brooke ** 39:53 The government begged them and they're like, "Please, please. We know you'll...We'll figure it out. Please do it for free? You'll get back pay!"  **Margaret ** 40:08 And they're like "Nah, we fought a war over this." **Brooke ** 40:09 People are like, "I don't need back pay. I need money now." **Margaret ** 40:11 Yeah, if the economy wasn't trashed it wouldn't be a big deal. Everyone's paycheck-to-paycheck, even the fucking middle class, so what the fuck are you gonna do? **Inmn ** 40:22 Yeah. Which is...This is a whole thing. But, um, did you know that billionaires are putting a huge amount of energy and time into trying to figure out how to keep security forces loyal to them when money doesn't exist anymore? **Margaret ** 40:38 I think we've talked about this, haven't we?  **Inmn ** 40:39 I think a little bit. We've touched on it.  **Margaret ** 40:41 Maybe I just talk about it all the time. It just comes up at every dinner. **Inmn ** 40:47 Yeah, yeah. It's wild. It is a huge thing on billionaires minds right now is not getting killed by everyone when the...when civilization collapses. **Margaret ** 40:59 Yeah, specifically, how to get to their security...Yeah, how to get their security guards to like...In their doomsday shelter where they're like, "How will I still be in charge of my doomsday shelter when there's no outside world?" Like, well, you won't. You'll be dead and everyone will be glad. **Brooke ** 41:14 This is why I say "Start early and eat the rich." I've got a solution for India. **Margaret ** 41:21 Also, it's vegan to eat the rich because...Because veganism is a relationship to power, right? And so it's not actually...It's like you can't be speciesist against humans, right? So, you are not oppressing oppressed animals if you eat billionaires. **Brooke ** 41:41 Thank you. I feel even better about that. **Margaret ** 41:45 It might not be vegetarian, but it is vegan. [everyone laughing] **Inmn ** 41:50 Brooke, do you have any other things to tell us? [Nervously laughing] **Margaret ** 41:56 Before it goes over to me? [Laughing] **Brooke ** 41:58 My one other thing to say to you is "Don't talk to cops." Okay, go on. **Margaret ** 42:02 Okay, let's see. I got some bad stuff, some good stuff. Well, in good news, it was the hottest August on record all across the world.  So, get your bathing suits ready, including in the other hemisphere where it was supposed to have been Winter, but it wasn't. Everyone's like, "Oh, yeah, hottest August. I mean, it's fucking August." Like, no, you motherfucker, it's Winter somewhere when it's August.  **Brooke ** 42:28 Margaret, do you know it's September though? Like just checking. **Margaret ** 42:34 I'll take your word for it. The leaves are turning where I live. Okay, so there's like, we had the hottest August, we had the hottest July, and we had the hottest June. We also had five months in a row of the hottest global surface sea temperatures, like each month it hits a new record that is hotter than the one previously. Overall, our August was 2.25 degrees Fahrenheit, like 1.25 Celsius, I think, over the 20th century average.  **Brooke ** 43:03 We did it!  **Margaret ** 43:04 Yeah, exactly. But, don't worry, all of this rising sea temperature actually will make tropical storms, and sparkling storms, rarer. This surprised me. It'll make them rarer. But, it'll make them more powerful. So hurricanes, more common. But, tropical storms and sparkling storms, less common because a higher percentage of them will destroy things in their wake. **Brooke ** 43:33 Okay, but on net because there's less of the other kind, we should just average out to be fine, right? That's what I hear you saying, one's worse, ones...not. **Margaret ** 43:37 Yes, absolutely. It's a good time to get a yacht. And I know who has yachts. They are people who you can eat, ethically. And, if you want to get to the ocean to get some yachts, you can go down the Mississippi River. Except, did y'all hear that? It's not in the fucking national news at all. Did you hear that New Orleans is having a water crisis?  **Brooke ** 43:40 No, I didn't hear about that.  **Margaret ** 43:44 They're gonna have to be shipping in millions of gallons of water to New Orleans for people to drink. Because--and this is not certain. This is looming. This is today's news, like past couple days news. All of the drought that has been happening this year has the Mississippi so fucking low that there's basically backwash from the sea coming up into it. And, so all of the saltwater is going to fuck up southern Louisiana's plumbing, right? And, also fuck up--and you can't, you can't boil advisory saltwater. Off the top of my head, if you are stuck with saltwater, your best bet for desalination is building a solar still or some other kinds of still. Be very careful. If you purchase a still. You can buy them on Amazon. Most of the things you can do with stills are incredibly illegal and will get the ATF paying attention to you. However, I don't know, if I was in New Orleans right now, I'd probably buy a fucking still. Just in case. Because, you can distill water and then the brackish water stays in the bottle. Whatever. Anyway, people can fucking do their own research about that or listen to us talking about this on this very show. So, New Orleans is trying to head this off. And, one of the things that's worth understanding is that there are people who try to stop this stuff and they are worth celebrating, even if they're like the federal government or whatever, right? Like, the US Army Corps of Engineers just built a 25 foot underwater levee to try and stop the backwash of saltwater into the Mississippi. It is not enough. Right? As of this morning's news anyway, it's not enough.  **Brooke ** 43:44 Wait, how much of a levy [misheard levee as levy] was it? Did you say in price or volume?  **Margaret ** 45:45 25 Feet. **Brooke ** 45:46 Oh, feet. **Margaret ** 45:48 The height of it. Yeah, it's 25 feet from the river bottom up levee.  **Brooke ** 45:55 And that's not enough?  **Margaret ** 45:57 No. Yeah. And, okay, so that happened. And that's one of the ones that like...Yeah, I've been struggling to find anything about it besides hearing from people in New Orleans. But, it's a big fucking deal. Because, we also within the United States have these places where people don't pay attention. One of the other places that people don't pay attention to is the border. We sometimes pay attention to the border because we care and we're aware of this monstrous humanitarian crisis caused by the United States government and its policies that's happening at the border, you know? And all of this cruelty and racism that's happening. But, one of the things I want to talk about--because no episode could be complete without some micro rant. And don't worry, my weird thing about theology is not going to be my micro rant for this week. Although, this one's actually probably shorter than my one about fucking theology. I've had a weird month of research. So, all of this bad shit's happening at the border. We are still in a border crisis. There's a lot of families that are trapped between two walls at the southern border. And, these are people who are trying to come as refugees, trying to do the thing that right wingers are like, "Well, if they just came properly like my great grandparents, who totally came before there was even fucking immigration policies, then it would be totally fine." Because, P.S., if you're white, there's a very good chance that your ancestors came before there was any kind of immigration. They probably literally just got off a boat. Anyway. So, there's all these people and there's all these people fucking trying to...not trying to. There's all these people feeding and clothing and providing phone charging services and shit for these people. And, what's kind of cool, is I'm aware of three groups that are doing this outside of San Diego right now. And, they kind of run the gamut, right? You've got the Free Shit Collective, whose logo has 1312 in it. And then you have the American Friends Service Committee, the Quakers. And then, in the middle, you have Border Kindness, who are another group. And so, whatever your flavor of mutual aid is, you fucking go support it. I say support all of them. And let's continue to build good interconnectedness between all of the people who are trying to do good right now. Because, much how even though Gondor did not come to Rohan's aid, it was still very important for the Riders of Rohan to show up to support Gondor when Mordor was attacking them. And, even the Ents, who also had been not treated well by the humans, and the dwarves, and the elves, you know, all come together, right, to fight against the United States government, which is Mordor. And... **Inmn ** 48:49 I'm so excited to transcribe this. **Margaret ** 48:54 You're the only transcript person who will be able to spell any of these things. And so, to that, I want to say, okay, because I was thinking about how we're always like, "Oh, God, we're gonna go talk about a bunch of bad shit." And I know people who listen to our show but don't listen to this episode every month, right? And because it's a series of bad things. And, the thing that I've been thinking about that is that I'm like, but there's all these good things that happen. But, most good things that happen aren't like, "And then there was 100 years of peace and everyone had happy, idyllic lives," right? That is a rare, random thing that some people are lucky enough to live lives of peace, you know? But, that is not what the average human experiences. And I refuse to believe that the average human experience is negative because bad things are always happening. And what makes our lives good, is how we choose to act against that bad. May we view ourselves as lucky that we are born in these times. May we view ourselves as lucky that we can join in the Rider of Rohan and, "A red day, a blood day. Death, death, death!" Although, that's actually...that's actually...I hate when the movie gets things better than the books, but that's a fucking sick speech andonly parts of it are from the books. And, also Tolkien totally cribbed this way older Norse poem about like, "Shields will be splintered..." Whatever. Anyway. "Wolf Time?" I...Fuck, I can't remember the name of it. Anyway, bad things are always happening, **Brooke ** 50:33 Margaret, can I just say that I love you. **Margaret ** 50:34 Aw, I love y'all too. Bad shit's always happening. But, look at these three different groups that are working together to fight this. And what can be more beautiful than that, right? And, they support each other and they talk about each other as all doing good things together. I'm sure that there's some fucking beef between them. And I don't know about it because I'm not there. And that's what you should do with beef, is people should know about it locally, but it's no one's business at the wider world. So, you should support these people, is what I'm trying to say. It's the Free Shit Collective, it is Border Kindness, and it is the American Friends Service Committee. However, if you go to support the American Friends Service Committee, you need to look specifically for their San Diego chapter and for the group of them that is working on border stuff, rather than it just going to the Quakers at large, who are perfectly fine even though they invented the penitentiary, but it's only sort of their fault. Okay, the other thing, the actual just like straight up good news that I have is that the Writers Guild has reached a tentative agreement after 150 days of strike. By the time you all are hearing this, maybe the agreement will probably have either been accepted or not accepted, right? So, either the strike will be over or the strike will be back and everyone's more bitter. But, this is a really beautiful strike and it captured the nation's attention partly because these people know how to write. And, they're also the people who produce the stuff that entertains us, right? And so we're very aware of it. But, that does not make it a less...it actually makes it a more impactful strike because it allows all the rest of us to know that we can strike too. And, absolutely, on the other side, the bosses were out for blood. They were constantly saying like, "We are going to do this until the writers are homeless. We don't care," you know? And, they can say that all they want, but it's a little early to say and you all will either be like "What a naive summer child, saying that." But, it looks like we might win. And when I say, "we," I mean the working class, which is the people who work for a living. It's not about the actual income you make. Middle-class people are often working class. It just depends on whether your money comes from being a fucking landlord or whether it comes from fucking working. Did you all know that "summer child" is also a science fiction reference, or a fantasy reference. Did you know this?  **Inmn ** 53:00 Oh, sort of.  **Margaret ** 53:02 It comes from "Game of Thrones." Everyone thinks that it is an old timey southern saying.  **Brooke ** 53:09 It's not?  **Margaret ** 53:10 It's not. It's from fucking :Game of Thrones.: It doesn't exist before like the mid or late 90s or whatever the fuck that book came out. Because it means... **Inmn ** 53:21 Sorry, this is maybe dashing a thing, but this has literally happened throughout history, like literature inventing funny phrases. I don't think you're saying something negative about it, but Shakespeare is credited with like...It's some horrifying number of words that are in common use right now that didn't exist before. **Margaret ** 53:47 Yeah. And all the sayings and shit all come from him. Or, they come from his like social circle and he's the one who wrote them down... **Inmn ** 53:52 Totally.  **Margaret ** 53:52 ...you know, which also rules. Okay, and then to wrap up news stuff. Okay. There's also, you know how fracking sucks, where people try to get the last little bits of fossil fuels out so that we can turn the Earth into a furnace instead of living decent lives?  **Brooke ** 54:10 Yeah. Defs.  **Margaret ** 54:12 Well, have you all heard of monster fracking? It's not where they use Monster energy drinks. It should be, because that's the only good use for it. **Brooke ** 54:19 Okay, no, I haven't heard of it. **Inmn ** 54:24 Is it releasing monsters from the ground through fracking? **Margaret ** 54:28 Oh, that would be good too. That would actually...I'm entirely in favor of...I mean, Godzilla was originally an anti-nuclear movie. **Brooke ** 54:35 Do they use monsters to do the fracking? **Margaret ** 54:38 No, it's just monstrously large. It's this like mega fracking. It's just where they go and dig wells in order to get enough water. They drain entire aquifers in order to get the last little bits of fucking gas out of the ground. And, this is how it happened. And so, water usage in fracking has gone up seven times since 2011. Since 2011, fracking has used 1.5 trillion gallons of water, which is a lot. It's not...It's a fucking lot. That's what all of Texas uses as tap water for an entire year.  **Brooke ** 55:22 Aquifers? Or the amount of water used?  **Margaret ** 55:25 The amount of water used. And, overall, Americans are using up their aquifers very quickly. But, again, it's this kind of like, "Oh, so don't drink as much water." Like, no, it's monster fracking that is the problem. It is growing the wrong food in the fucking desert that is the problem. **Brooke ** 55:45 But, aquifers are unlimited? [said sarcastically] **Margaret ** 55:47 I mean, it's funny because I live on a well and that's kind of how I feel. Like, it's not true. And, the water drilling, like water drilling, is actually not federally regulated. It's state-by-state. And, a lot of states literally are like, "You're just allowed to do it until there's no more water." You are allowed to frack with water during moderate and severe droughts, anything but extreme is before they start putting any limitations on fracking. So, you are well past the part where you can't water your lawn--which is ,you know, whatever, fucking lawn--but well past the point where you can't water a lawn or wash your car, they're allowed to frack completely unimpeded. And, in Utah, California, and Texas, there have been buckled roads, cracked foundations, and fissures into the earth because of depleted groundwater. And let's see, one oil region in Texas has seen their aquifer falling at 58 feet a year. Last year was the lowest groundwater in US history. And, this affects everything, right? Kansas' corn yields last year were fucked up because its aquifer wasn't...for the first time, it wasn't enough for the agriculture of its region. So, I think they had to import water but also just didn't get to use enough water, so their corn yields were down. And as we've hinted...we've talked about a lot in the show, we overproduce like cereal grains. Not over produce. We produce a fuck ton of cereal grains in this country. So, we actually haven't seen--we've seen prices go up--but we haven't really seen a ton of shortages and stuff yet. This continues to be a threat. I feel a little bit like the girl cries wolf about this where I'm like, "Oh, like, you know, Kansas' corn yields are down," but you can still like go to the store and buy corn tortillas, right? Here. You know, other parts of the world are not so lucky. Anyway, that's what I got. **Brooke ** 57:49 Okay, let me roll up my sleeves and go on my indigenous rant about water protection and sacredness. Now we're out of time. I'm going to do next time. I'm going to open with that next time.  **Inmn ** 58:00 Do it. Do it anyway! **Brooke ** 58:03 Water is sacred. Water is life, motherfuckers. Okay, that's my rant. **Margaret ** 58:08 That's a good rant. **Inmn ** 58:09 Solid. I have some little bitty headlines. Does anyone else have a little bitty headlines? **Margaret ** 58:17 I think I threw most of mine in what I just did. **Inmn ** 58:19 Cool. Before we wrap up, I have a couple little bitty headlines, a handful of which are good. **Margaret ** 58:26 Oh, I have two good ones at the end. **Inmn ** 58:28 Wonderful. So, the first one is a bad one, which is, as Margaret brings up the US-Mexico border...This one actually shocked me. Not because I am unaware of how bad it is, but because I don't know, I think I maybe thought there were places that were worse. I don't know. But, the UN declared that the US-Mexico border is the deadliest land migration route in the world recently.  **Margaret ** 58:55 Jesus. You're right. That's exactly it. Your response is exactly what I thought. **Inmn ** 59:01 Yeah. With...And this is last year, so 2022, with 686 people or migrants died in the desert last year on the US-Mexico border. And, it's a number that like...it's a number that is vastly under reported on. Like having done a lot of humanitarian aid work along the US-Mexico border, that is a horribly underreported number. But, in a kind of cool thing, a federal judge ordered that the death buoys in the Rio Grande be removed, which is...that's cool. [Brooke yays] **Margaret ** 59:44 Haven't they not done it yet? They like ordered it removed, but they still are kind of kicking their heels or there was some other....  **Inmn ** 59:52 I don't know.  **Margaret ** 59:53 Nevermind. I only know the headline level. **Inmn ** 59:56 Me too. A gay couple in Kentucky was recently awarded $100,000 in a settlement over a county clerk's refusal to issue them a marriage license. **Margaret ** 1:00:08 Hell yeah. Fuck that clerk. **Inmn ** 1:00:10 Yeah, pretty cool. **Brooke ** 1:00:11 Gonna be a nice wedding now. **Margaret ** 1:00:14 I hope it's at the house that that guy no longer lives at. I hope they just gave them his house. **Inmn ** 1:00:21 There were five cops indicted over the Tyre Nichols murder in September, which is, you know, also pretty cool.  **Brooke ** 1:00:37 Is eating cops vegan? **Margaret ** 1:00:42 Probably. I mean, you could make an argument that eating any human is vegan because of the speciesism line, but it's certain with billionaires. Cops, like, you know, I mean, I eat honey, so who am I to like really police the lines of veganism? It's like cops are probably like the equivalent of honey, you know? Or, like those sea animals that don't have central nervous systems that can't feel pain. I don't think cops can feel pain. So, I don't think that it's immoral to hurt or eat...This is the sketchiest thing I've ever said on the show. **Brooke ** 1:01:16 So, I can still make a BLT then. Ethically sourced bacon. **Inmn ** 1:01:24 Speaking of cops, I have one last headline on cops, which I realized that we track a lot of...we track a lot of death. And, a lot of those deaths are in our communities or in communities that our communities are either in community with or would be in community with, and I thought it might be interesting to start tracking the number of cops that die every month. **Brooke ** 1:01:52 Oh, that's a joyous headline. **Inmn ** 1:01:55 And, it was only seven in September, mostly from vehicle related accidents.  **Margaret ** 1:02:03 That doesn't surprise me.  **Inmn ** 1:02:04 Yeah, it doesn't surprise me. And, there were 86 this year.  **Margaret ** 1:02:11 86 cops... **Inmn ** 1:02:11 Yeah, 86 cops. [Not getting that it's a joke] **Margaret ** 1:02:14 Eh, eh? Like, when there's no more in the kitchen and we gotta stop serving them...Anyway. **Inmn ** 1:02:21 And one of them was from a train. That's my headline. Is this sketchy to say? I don't know. **Margaret ** 1:02:33 I don't know, I mean, whatever. They...It's still safer than almost every job in America. Well, there's a list of the most dangerous jobs and they're like...they're not at the bottom of the list, but they are nowhere near the top of the list. Okay, the two headlines I got...Call me a future-believer person. In July...Okay, last December there was the fusion test where they actually successfully, I believe for the first time ever, got more power out of a fusion test than they put into it. For anyone who's...like nuclear bombs and shit is fission power, right? And it's one interesting way to make electricity that has a lot of side effects. Fusion power is what the sun does. And seeking cold fusion has been like the holy grail of science for a very long time, because that's when you can have gay space communism. Or, knowing our society, slightly gay capitalism in space or whatever the fuck horrible thing they come up with. But, they've been trying since December to repeat that. And, in July, they got even more power out of a fusion experiment. They, I think they more than doubled what they put into it or...I remember exactly. They got a fuck ton of power out. They've also failed numerous times since then. But, this is still incredibly promising from my point of view. I personally believe that deindustrialization and things like that are essential, but I'm not...I think having some electricity around is quite grand. And, if there's a way we can do it ethically, and environmentally sound, and it doesn't explode the entire world...Like, who knows what fusion will do? Maybe people will just explode the whole world? And I'll be like, "Oops, sorry," but, I won't because I'll be dead. And, whatever, that's how we all end up anyway. And then the other one is that--and actually just speaking of sort of vaguely green but not green ecotech news--there have been a bunch of studies about electric cars. Because, everyone's very aware of how shitty lithium mining and all that stuff is, all of the minerals that are used in the batteries, right? And, it started reaching the point where actually, it's actually been stopping the electric car adoption in some ways is because people are like, "Well, it's so fucking bad that I'm just gonna go back to my, you know, my fossil fuels car." And, so they tested it and it is still, in terms of embedded greenhouse gases and like impact on the environment, driving electric cars, even though all of the mining practices are fucked up, is still less fucked up for the earth than driving a fossil fuel car. Obviously, I think that we should be moving towards mass transit models and more local stuff and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But, electric cars are better than gas cars is my take and the take of some recent science, at least in terms of the impact on the climate. Kind of wish that wasn't the note I was ending on, but... **Inmn ** 1:05:36 Wait, I have a cool note. I forgot one. I feel like this is a mixed bag of a thing, but I...Whatever, reform is complicated. But, if there are things that impact people's lives on a material level now like that's cool. Illinois just became the first state to abolish cash bail. [Cheers] Which, I think, is more complicated than a lot of people think. Like, it could have...it could have bad side effects, which is there being...Like, specifically, there's violent and nonviolent...It splits it into violent and nonviolent crimes. And, if you have a nonviolent crime, you basically won't go to jail until you're convicted of a crime that requires you to go to jail, But, for violent crimes you are stuck in jail. And, it's in that, which is how the State defines violence, which makes it complicated. So, you know, for instance, like buddies...like, you know, folks down in Cop City who have been booked on domestic terrorism charges, those people, if a similar thing existed in Georgia, would be stuck in jail throughout their trial without the option of bail. So, this is the kind of complication of no cash bail. But, a really cool thing is that it will get a lot of people out of...Anyone who's in awaiting trial can now petition to be released. **Brooke ** 1:07:22  Oh, wow. **Inmn ** 1:07:23 Which is the really cool part about. Yeah, so that's my ending note. Thanks y'all for being here.  **Margaret ** 1:07:37 Yep.  **Inmn ** 1:07:42 And if you enjoyed this podcast, go join the Riders of Rohan, not just for Gondor but for all of the free peoples of Middle Earth. But, if you want...Also, if you liked this podcast, you should, you know, like, and review, and rate, and I don't know what any of these things actually are. I'm just saying words. But, tell people about the podcast. And you can also support this podcast by supporting its publisher Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. Strangers is a media publishing collective. We put out books, zines, and other podcasts like Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, a monthly podcast of anarchistic literature or the Anarcho Geek Power Hour, which is a great show for people who love movies and hate cops. And, you can find our Patreon at patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. And, we would like to shout out a few wonderful people in particular. Thank you, Eric, Perceval, Buck, Jacob, Catgut, Marm, Carson, Lord Harken, Trixter, Miranda, BenBen, Anonymous, Funder, Janice & O'dell, Aly, Paparouna, Milica, Boise Mutual Aid, theo, Hunter, S.J., Paige, Nicole, David, Dana, Chelsea, Staro, Jenipher, Kirk, Chris, Michaiah, and the eternal Hoss the Dog. We hope everyone's doing as well as they can and we'll see you next time. Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co

What could the prehistoric artists of North America have in common with the graffiti artists of today? Picked into the rocks of southwestern Arizona, a couple hour drive from Tucson, are marks of the Patayan and Hohokam traditions. The petroglyphs are an insight into these civilisations, their religions and their lives.Aaron Wright is a Preservation Archaeologist whose research is currently focused on the Hohokam and Patayan traditions. He joined Don to explore what this rock art has in common with sites across North America, and what makes it different.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Siobhan Dale. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribeYou can take part in our listener survey here.

In this episode, Tanisha and I decided to meet up at “A” Mountain aka Sentinal Peak in Tucson to have a conversation about desert wild foods and climate change. Even though it was windy up top we found a comfortable spot alongside the mountain facing south Tucson. It was a good place to reflect and imagine what the land once was like when it was just our ancestors the Huhugam (Hohokam). We delve into the topic of how we gather and what we eat from desert plants and how every year we depend on the seasonal changes that produce the wild foods we harvest, some years the plants flower early or they produce late. As a wild food harvester, I've taken notice of some unpredictable weather patterns we've experienced throughout the Tohono O'odham Nation. I talk about a few examples such as the wildfire that took over I'iolgam Duag (kitt peak), over-saturated soil that caused flooding, and how in recent years we got snow throughout southern Arizona more than once in one-winter season. Tanisha, who is also a desert food harvester, shares her view about the effects of climate change and how it affects the seasonal foraging of various desert plants. We also bring attention to the thought of looking at desert wild foods as food security in a time of rapid worldwide climate change. We hope you enjoy our conversation!For more episodes check out our website!https://www.toyoungvoices.com/Recorded May 2023

I'm excited to chat with Eva Jannotta on this episode of the Seven Figure Consultant Podcast! Eva and I discuss Thought Leadership. Eva believes in the art of Thought Leadership and will explain what it is and how to achieve it. We will explore if this is a title you can claim for yourself or if there are steps involved in qualifying you to be a Thought Leader. Eva also shares how to monetize your body of work! This episode is one of my favorites, and I can't wait for you to listen to the Seven Figure Consultant Podcast today. In this episode: [00:47] Eva talks about her professional background and the pivotal moments that led her to her current position. [04:52] Eva defines what a thought leader is and how to monetize your work, thoughts, and ideas. [11:26] What is the curse of knowledge? [15:33] Eva discusses having a team to help you execute on distributing your thought leadership. [18:37] Eva shares her pet peeve about people offering advice and that it is ok to follow your intuition. Your body will lead you. [27:22] Consistency will get you on the road to being a thought leader and take you to the next level. Key Takeaways: You can be a thought leader by being active in either speaking or writing. Repetition of your ideas is a good thing. In truth, repetition and consistency are vital to being a thought leader.   Our capacity for delivery is not infinite.  It pays to have a team behind you, so there is still reserve to do your best work. Quotes: “A constant bombardment of ‘you should do this, and you have to do that' can alienate women entrepreneurs because the advice lands on us, and it may not feel good to me, or it doesn't align with my energy, my integrity, or my vision.” - Eva Jannotta. “An internal reaction is valuable data about a course, advice, ideas, strategy, and tactics, whether they are a good fit for you.  Most of us don't trust that internal response. We have trained ourselves to override it right out of the gate. It's a disservice to feeling good about our work and creating results we are satisfied with.” - Eva Jannotta. Guest Bio: Eva Jannotta helps women defy the status quo, amplify our influence, and expand our wealth and power with thought leader ecosystems. Eva and the Medusa Media Group team train and advise authors, speakers, coaches and consultants to generate strong leads and grow engaged audiences by publishing their best thinking. Eva lives on O'odham Jeweḍ, Akimel O'odham, and Hohokam ancestral land in Phoenix, Arizona, in the southwest United States. Useful Links Don't miss out on Eva's FREE email course: 5magneticpillars.com Connect with Eva on LinkedIn and Instagram Get in touch with Jessica to discuss your consulting business Jessica's LinkedIn

Eva Jannotta and the Medusa Media Group are on a mission to achieve gender parity in cultural, economic and social authority by amplifying the voices of women and other historically underestimated identities.Eva maintains that "there's a lot of opportunity to do good things and to be a really effective and loving leader, even when something 'bad' is happening that you have to address."In this conversation, we talk about the idea of permacrisis (Collins' 2022 Word of the Year), some examples of resonant leadership, magnetic thought leadership, and a powerful mindset tip.I hope you find this one as fun and thoughtful as I did. And, that it leaves you with more to consider and explore.-----Resources mentioned...Permacrisishttps://theconversation.com/permacrisis-what-it-means-and-why-its-word-of-the-year-for-2022-194306Charlene Li's thought leadership on transformation being constant: Are You Prepared for What's After Digital Transformation?https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/you-prepared-whats-after-digital-transformation-charlene-li/Eva's thought leadership on vulnerability: Is “vulnerability” your permission slip? https://mailchi.mp/16ffd825c4d3/medusa-media-11820380Can you be TOO Authentic in your Marketing and Thought Leadership?https://medusamediagroup.com/marketing/can-you-be-too-authentic-in-your-marketing-and-thought-leadership/CEO Patrick Collison's email to Stripe employeeshttps://stripe.com/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons-email-to-stripe-employees-----Eva Jannotta (she/her) is on a mission to see women leaders and culture shapers take more than half of the seats as bestselling authors, top-rated podcast hosts, and highest-paid speakers. Eva and the Medusa Media Group team train and advise authors, speakers, coaches and consultants to build authority and influence by publishing their best thought leadership. Eva lives on O'odham Jeweḍ, Akimel O'odham, and Hohokam ancestral land in Phoenix, AZ.

We always go Meta on the podcast, but my guest Eva Jannotta and I really doubled down as we learned more about her thought leadership as a coach to women entrepreneurs on thought leadership. Eva has some truly progressive approaches to her own business and her work with clients, which she generously shared with us. In this podcast, you will hear about· How business owners can use their profits to do good works downstream or bake good works into their business model through things like equity pricing· The ingredients to the secret sauce that makes for Magnetic Thought Leadership· A case study on turning ideas into IP, looking at Eva's Women Leaders Round Tables· Bonus: Some tough, meaningful talk about B2B Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and BelongingI felt like I learned so much from our conversation and was inspired to learn how much she's done with her business since she formed it eight years ago. If you think your IP is ready to be transformed into a scalable product, contact me to discuss your options.Eva Jannotta (she/her) helps women defy the status quo, amplify our influence, and expand our wealth and power with thought leadership. Eva and the Medusa Media Group team train and advise authors, speakers, coaches and consultants to generate strong leads and grow engaged audiences by publishing their best thinking. She works with women in her programs "Micro Marketing Method" and "Exponential Audience", and privately. Eva lives on O'odham Jeweḍ, Akimel O'odham, and Hohokam ancestral land in Phoenix, AZ.Connect with Eva:https://medusamediagroup.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/evajannotta/Free email course: 5 Pillars of Magnetic Thought Leadership (https://5magneticpillars.com/)We would love it if you would consider supporting Eva's charity of choice: https://www.iwrising.org/Connect with Erin and find the resources mentioned in this episode at hourlytoexit.com/podcast.Erin's LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erinaustin/Think Beyond IP YouTube Page: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVztXnDYnZ83oIb-EGX9IGA/videosMusic credit: Yes She Can by Tiny MusicA Podcast Launch Bestie production

Charles C. Mann is the author of three of my favorite history books: 1491. 1493, and The Wizard and the Prophet. We discuss:why Native American civilizations collapsed and why they failed to make more technological progresswhy he disagrees with Will MacAskill about longtermismwhy there aren't any successful slave revoltshow geoengineering can help us solve climate changewhy Bitcoin is like the Chinese Silver Tradeand much much more!Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Some really cool guests coming up, subscribe to find out about future episodes!Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.If you enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy my interviews of Will MacAskill (about longtermism), Steve Hsu (about intelligence and embryo selection), and David Deutsch (about AI and the problems with America's constitution).If you end up enjoying this episode, I would be super grateful if you shared it. Post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group-chats, and throw it up on any relevant subreddits & forums you follow. Can't exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.Timestamps(0:00:00) -Epidemically Alternate Realities(0:00:25) -Weak Points in Empires(0:03:28) -Slave Revolts(0:08:43) -Slavery Ban(0:12:46) - Contingency & The Pyramids(0:18:13) - Teotihuacan(0:20:02) - New Book Thesis(0:25:20) - Gender Ratios and Silicon Valley(0:31:15) - Technological Stupidity in the New World(0:41:24) - Religious Demoralization(0:44:00) - Critiques of Civilization Collapse Theories(0:49:05) - Virginia Company + Hubris(0:53:30) - China's Silver Trade(1:03:03) - Wizards vs. Prophets(1:07:55) - In Defense of Regulatory Delays(0:12:26) -Geoengineering(0:16:51) -Finding New Wizards(0:18:46) -Agroforestry is Underrated(1:18:46) -Longtermism & Free MarketsTranscriptDwarkesh Patel   Okay! Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Charles Mann, who is the author of three of my favorite books, including 1491: New Revelations of America before Columbus. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, and The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World. Charles, welcome to the Lunar Society.Charles C. Mann   It's a pleasure to be here.Epidemically Alternate RealitiesDwarkesh Patel   My first question is: How much of the New World was basically baked into the cake? So at some point, people from Eurasia were going to travel to the New World, bringing their diseases. Considering disparities and where they would survive, if the Acemoglu theory that you cited is correct, then some of these places were bound to have good institutions and some of them were bound to have bad institutions. Plus, because of malaria, there were going to be shortages in labor that people would try to fix with African slaves. So how much of all this was just bound to happen? If Columbus hadn't done it, then maybe 50 years down the line, would someone from Italy have done it? What is the contingency here?Charles C. Mann   Well, I think that some of it was baked into the cake. It was pretty clear that at some point, people from Eurasia and the Western Hemisphere were going to come into contact with each other. I mean, how could that not happen, right? There was a huge epidemiological disparity between the two hemispheres––largely because by a quirk of evolutionary history, there were many more domesticable animals in Eurasia and the Eastern hemisphere. This leads almost inevitably to the creation of zoonotic diseases: diseases that start off in animals and jump the species barrier and become human diseases. Most of the great killers in human history are zoonotic diseases. When people from Eurasia and the Western Hemisphere meet, there are going to be those kinds of diseases. But if you wanted to, it's possible to imagine alternative histories. There's a wonderful book by Laurent Binet called Civilizations that, in fact, does just that. It's a great alternative history book. He imagines that some of the Vikings came and extended further into North America, bringing all these diseases, and by the time of Columbus and so forth, the epidemiological balance was different. So when Columbus and those guys came, these societies killed him, grabbed his boats, and went and conquered Europe. It's far-fetched, but it does say that this encounter would've happened and that the diseases would've happened, but it didn't have to happen in exactly the way that it did. It's also perfectly possible to imagine that Europeans didn't engage in wholesale slavery. There was a huge debate when this began about whether or not slavery was a good idea. There were a lot of reservations, particularly among the Catholic monarchy asking the Pope “Is it okay that we do this?” You could imagine the penny dropping in a slightly different way. So, I think some of it was bound to happen, but how exactly it happened was really up to chance, contingency, and human agency,Weak Points in EmpiresDwarkesh Patel   When the Spanish first arrived in the 15th and 16th centuries, were the Incas and the Aztecs at a particularly weak point or particularly decadent? Or was this just how well you should have expected this civilization to be functioning at any given time period?Charles C. Mann   Well, typically, empires are much more jumbly and fragile entities than we imagine. There's always fighting at the top. What Hernán Cortés was able to do, for instance, with the Aztecs––who are better called The Triple Alliance (the term “Aztec” is an invention from the 19th century). The Triple Alliance was comprised of three groups of people in central Mexico, the largest of which were the Mexica, who had the great city of Tenochtitlan. The other two guys really resented them and so what Cortes was able to do was foment a civil war within the Aztec empire: taking some enemies of the Aztec, some members of the Aztec empire, and creating an entirely new order. There's a fascinating set of history that hasn't really emerged into the popular consciousness. I didn't include it in 1491 or 1493 because it was so new that I didn't know anything about it; everything was largely from Spanish and Mexican scholars about the conquest within the conquest. The allies of the Spaniards actually sent armies out and conquered big swaths of northern and southern Mexico and Central America. So there's a far more complex picture than we realized even 15 or 20 years ago when I first published 1491. However, the conquest wasn't as complete as we think. I talk a bit about this in 1493 but what happens is Cortes moves in and he marries his lieutenants to these indigenous people, creating this hybrid nobility that then extended on to the Incas. The Incas were a very powerful but unstable empire and Pizarro had the luck to walk in right after a civil war. When he did that right after a civil war and massive epidemic, he got them at a very vulnerable point. Without that, it all would have been impossible. Pizarro cleverly allied with the losing side (or the apparently losing side in this in the Civil War), and was able to create a new rallying point and then attack the winning side. So yes, they came in at weak points, but empires typically have these weak points because of fratricidal stuff going on in the leadership.Dwarkesh Patel   It does also remind me of the East India Trading Company.Charles C. Mann   And the Mughal empire, yeah. Some of those guys in Bengal invited Clive and his people in. In fact, I was struck by this. I had just been reading this book, maybe you've heard of it: The Anarchy by William Dalrymple.Dwarkesh Patel   I've started reading it, yeah but I haven't made much progress.Charles C. Mann   It's an amazing book! It's so oddly similar to what happened. There was this fratricidal stuff going on in the Mughal empire, and one side thought, “Oh, we'll get these foreigners to come in, and we'll use them.” That turned out to be a big mistake.Dwarkesh Patel   Yes. What's also interestingly similar is the efficiency of the bureaucracy. Niall Ferguson has a good book on the British Empire and one thing he points out is that in India, the ratio between an actual English civil servant and the Indian population was about 1: 3,000,000 at the peak of the ratio. Which obviously is only possible if you have the cooperation of at least the elites, right? So it sounds similar to what you were saying about Cortes marrying his underlings to the nobility. Charles C. Mann   Something that isn't stressed enough in history is how often the elites recognize each other. They join up in arrangements that increase both of their power and exploit the poor schmucks down below. It's exactly what happened with the East India Company, and it's exactly what happened with Spain. It's not so much that there was this amazing efficiency, but rather, it was a mutually beneficial arrangement for Xcalack, which is now a Mexican state. It had its rights, and the people kept their integrity, but they weren't really a part of the Spanish Empire. They also weren't really wasn't part of Mexico until around 1857. It was a good deal for them. The same thing was true for the Bengalis, especially the elites who made out like bandits from the British Empire.Slave Revolts Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, that's super interesting. Why was there only one successful slave revolt in the new world in Haiti? In many of these cases, the ratios between slaves and the owners are just huge. So why weren't more of them successful?Charles C. Mann   Well, you would first have to define ‘successful'. Haiti wasn't successful if you meant ‘creating a prosperous state that would last for a long time.' Haiti was and is (to no small extent because of the incredible blockade that was put on it by all the other nations) in terrible shape. Whereas in the case of Paul Maurice, you had people who were self-governing for more than 100 years.. Eventually, they were incorporated into the larger project of Brazil. There's a great Brazilian classic that's equivalent to what Moby Dick or Huck Finn is to us called Os Sertões by a guy named Cunha. And it's good! It's been translated into this amazing translation in English called ​​Rebellion in the Backlands. It's set in the 1880s, and it's about the creation of a hybrid state of runaway slaves, and so forth, and how they had essentially kept their independence and lack of supervision informally, from the time of colonialism. Now the new Brazilian state is trying to take control, and they fight them to the last person. So you have these effectively independent areas in de facto, if not de jure, that existed in the Americas for a very long time. There are some in the US, too, in the great dismal swamp, and you hear about those marooned communities in North Carolina, in Mexico, where everybody just agreed “these places aren't actually under our control, but we're not going to say anything.”  If they don't mess with us too much, we won't mess with them too much. Is that successful or not? I don't know.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, but it seems like these are temporary successes..Charles C. Mann   I mean, how long did nations last? Like Genghis Khan! How long did the Khan age last? But basically, they had overwhelming odds against them. There's an entire colonial system that was threatened by their existence. Similar to the reasons that rebellions in South Asia were suppressed with incredible brutality–– these were seen as so profoundly threatening to this entire colonial order that people exerted a lot more force against them than you would think would be worthwhile.Dwarkesh Patel   Right. It reminds me of James Scott's Against the Grain. He pointed out that if you look at the history of agriculture, there're many examples where people choose to run away as foragers in the forest, and then the state tries to bring them back into the fold.Charles C. Mann   Right. And so this is exactly part of that dynamic. I mean, who wants to be a slave, right? So as many people as possible ended up leaving. It's easier in some places than others.. it's very easy in Brazil. There are 20 million people in the Brazilian Amazon and the great bulk of them are the descendants of people who left slavery. They're still Brazilians and so forth, but, you know, they ended up not being slaves.Slavery BanDwarkesh Patel   Yeah, that's super fascinating. What is the explanation for why slavery went from being historically ever-present to ending at a particular time when it was at its peak in terms of value and usefulness? What's the explanation for why, when Britain banned the slave trade, within 100 or 200 years, there ended up being basically no legal sanction for slavery anywhere in the world?Charles C. Mann   This is a really good question and the real answer is that historians have been arguing about this forever. I mean, not forever, but you know, for decades, and there's a bunch of different explanations. I think the reason it's so hard to pin down is… kind of amazing. I mean, if you think about it, in 1800, if you were to have a black and white map of the world and put red in countries in which slavery was illegal and socially accepted, there would be no red anywhere on the planet. It's the most ancient human institution that there is. The Code of Hammurabi is still the oldest complete legal code that we have, and about a third of it is about rules for when you can buy slaves, when you can sell slaves, how you can mistreat them, and how you can't–– all that stuff. About a third of it is about buying, selling, and working other human beings. So this has been going on for a very, very long time. And then in a century and a half, it suddenly changes. So there's some explanation, and it's that machinery gets better. But the reason to have people is that you have these intelligent autonomous workers, who are like the world's best robots. From the point of view of the owner, they're fantastically good, except they're incredibly obstreperous and when they're caught, you're constantly afraid they're going to kill you. So if you have a chance to replace them with machinery, or to create a wage where you can run wage people, pay wage workers who are kept in bad conditions but somewhat have more legal rights, then maybe that's a better deal for you. Another one is that industrialization produced different kinds of commodities that became more and more valuable, and slavery was typically associated with the agricultural laborer. So as agriculture diminished as a part of the economy, slavery become less and less important and it became easier to get rid of them. Another one has to do with the beginning of the collapse of the colonial order. Part of it has to do with.. (at least in the West, I don't know enough about the East) the rise of a serious abolition movement with people like Wilberforce and various Darwins and so forth. And they're incredibly influential, so to some extent, I think people started saying, “Wow, this is really bad.”  I suspect that if you looked at South Asia and Africa, you might see similar things having to do with a social moment, but I just don't know enough about that. I know there's an anti-slavery movement and anti-caste movement in which we're all tangled up in South Asia, but I just don't know enough about it to say anything intelligent.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, the social aspect of it is really interesting. The things you mentioned about automation, industrialization, and ending slavery… Obviously, with time, that might have actually been why it expanded, but its original inception in Britain happened before the Industrial Revolution took off. So that was purely them just taking a huge loss because this movement took hold. Charles C. Mann   And the same thing is true for Bartolome de Las Casas. I mean, Las Casas, you know, in the 1540s just comes out of nowhere and starts saying, “Hey! This is bad.” He is the predecessor of the modern human rights movement. He's an absolutely extraordinary figure, and he has huge amounts of influence. He causes Spain's king in the 1540s to pass what they call The New Laws which says no more slavery, which is a devastating blow enacted to the colonial economy in Spain because they depended on having slaves to work in the silver mines in the northern half of Mexico and in Bolivia, which was the most important part of not only the Spanish colonial economy but the entire Spanish empire. It was all slave labor. And they actually tried to ban it. Now, you can say they came to their senses and found a workaround in which it wasn't banned. But it's still… this actually happened in the 1540s. Largely because people like Las Casas said, “This is bad! you're going to hell doing this.”Contingency & The Pyramids Dwarkesh Patel   Right. I'm super interested in getting into The Wizard and the Prophet section with you. Discussing how movements like environmentalism, for example, have been hugely effective. Again, even though it probably goes against the naked self-interest of many countries. So I'm very interested in discussing that point about why these movements have been so influential!But let me continue asking you about globalization in the world. I'm really interested in how you think about contingency in history, especially given that you have these two groups of people that have been independently evolving and separated for tens of thousands of years. What things turn out to be contingent? What I find really interesting from the book was how both of them developed pyramids––  who would have thought that structure would be within our extended phenotype or something?Charles C. Mann    It's also geometry! I mean, there's only a certain limited number of ways you can pile up stone blocks in a stable way. And pyramids are certainly one of them. It's harder to have a very long-lasting monument that's a cylinder. Pyramids are also easier to build: if you get a cylinder, you have to have scaffolding around it and it gets harder and harder.With pyramids, you can use each lower step to put the next one, on and on, and so forth. So pyramids seem kind of natural to me. Now the material you make them up of is going to be partly determined by what there is. In Cahokia and in the Mississippi Valley, there isn't a lot of stone. So people are going to make these earthen pyramids and if you want them to stay on for a long time, there's going to be certain things you have to do for the structure which people figured out. For some pyramids, you had all this marble around them so you could make these giant slabs of marble, which seems, from today's perspective, incredibly wasteful. So you're going to have some things that are universal like that, along with the apparently universal, or near-universal idea that people who are really powerful like to identify themselves as supernatural and therefore want to be commemorated. Dwarkesh Patel   Yes, I visited Mexico City recently.Charles C. Mann Beautiful city!TeotihuacanDwarkesh Patel Yeah, the pyramids there… I think I was reading your book at the time or already had read your book. What struck me was that if I remember correctly, they didn't have the wheel and they didn't have domesticated animals. So if you really think about it, that's a really huge amount of human misery and toil it must have taken to put this thing together as basically a vanity project. It's like a huge negative connotation if you think about what it took to construct it.Charles C. Mann   Sure, but there are lots of really interesting things about Teotihuacan. This is just one of those things where you can only say so much in one book. If I was writing the two-thousand-page version of 1491, I would have included this. So Tehuácan pretty much starts out as a standard Imperial project, and they build all these huge castles and temples and so forth. There's no reason to suppose it was anything other than an awful experience (like building the pyramids), but then something happened to Teotihuacan that we don't understand. All these new buildings started springing up during the next couple of 100 years, and they're all very very similar. They're like apartment blocks and there doesn't seem to be a great separation between rich and poor. It's really quite striking how egalitarian the architecture is because that's usually thought to be a reflection of social status. So based on the way it looks, could there have been a political revolution of some sort? Where they created something much more egalitarian, probably with a bunch of good guy kings who weren't interested in elevating themselves so much? There's a whole chapter in the book by David Wingrove and David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything about this, and they make this argument that Tehuácan is an example that we can look at as an ancient society that was much more socially egalitarian than we think. Now, in my view, they go a little overboard–– it was also an aggressive imperial power and it was conquering much of the Maya world at the same time. But it is absolutely true that something that started out one way can start looking very differently quite quickly. You see this lots of times in the Americas in the Southwest–– I don't know if you've ever been to Chaco Canyon or any of those places, but you should absolutely go! Unfortunately, it's hard to get there because of the roads terrible but overall, it's totally worth it. It's an amazing place. Mesa Verde right north of it is incredible, it's just really a fantastic thing to see. There are these enormous structures in Chaco Canyon, that we would call castles if they were anywhere else because they're huge. The biggest one, Pueblo Bonito, is like 800 rooms or some insane number like that. And it's clearly an imperial venture, we know that because it's in this canyon and one side is getting all the good light and good sun–– a whole line of these huge castles. And then on the other side is where the peons lived. We also know that starting around 1100, everybody just left! And then their descendants start the Puebla, who are these sort of intensely socially egalitarian type of people. It looks like a political revolution took place. In fact, in the book I'm now writing, I'm arguing (in a sort of tongue-in-cheek manner but also seriously) that this is the first American Revolution! They got rid of these “kings” and created these very different and much more egalitarian societies in which ordinary people had a much larger voice about what went on.Dwarkesh Patel   Interesting. I think I got a chance to see the Teotihuacan apartments when I was there, but I wonder if we're just looking at the buildings that survived. Maybe the buildings that survived were better constructed because they were for the elites? The way everybody else lived might have just washed away over the years.Charles C. Mann   So what's happened in the last 20 years is basically much more sophisticated surveys of what is there. I mean, what you're saying is absolutely the right question to ask. Are the rich guys the only people with things that survived while the ordinary people didn't? You can never be absolutely sure, but what they did is they had these ground penetrating radar surveys, and it looks like this egalitarian construction extends for a huge distance. So it's possible that there are more really, really poor people. But at least you'd see an aggressively large “middle class” getting there, which is very, very different from the picture you have of the ancient world where there's the sun priest and then all the peasants around them.New Book ThesisDwarkesh Patel   Yeah. By the way, is the thesis of the new book something you're willing to disclose at this point? It's okay if you're not––Charles C. Mann   Sure sure, it's okay! This is a sort of weird thing, it's like a sequel or offshoot of 1491. That book, I'm embarrassed to say, was supposed to end with another chapter. The chapter was going to be about the American West, which is where I grew up, and I'm very fond of it. And apparently, I had a lot to say because when I outlined the chapter; the outline was way longer than the actual completed chapters of the rest of the book. So I sort of tried to chop it up and so forth, and it just was awful. So I just cut it. If you carefully look at 1491, it doesn't really have an ending. At the end, the author sort of goes, “Hey! I'm ending, look at how great this is!” So this has been bothering me for 15 years. During the pandemic, when I was stuck at home like so many other people, I held out what I had since I've been saving string and tossing articles that I came across into a folder, and I thought, “Okay, I'm gonna write this out more seriously now.” 15 or 20 years later. And then it was pretty long so I thought “Maybe this could be an e-book.” then I showed it to my editor. And he said, “That is not an e-book. That's an actual book.” So I take a chapter and hope I haven't just padded it, and it's about the North American West. My kids like the West, and at various times, they've questioned what it would be like to move out there because I'm in Massachusetts, where they grew up. So I started thinking “What is the West going to be like, tomorrow? When I'm not around 30 or 50 years from now?”It seems to be that you won't know who's president or who's governor or anything, but there are some things we can know. It'd be hotter and drier than it is now or has been in the recent past, like that wouldn't really be a surprise. So I think we can say that it's very likely to be like that. All the projections are that something like 40% of the people in the area between the Mississippi and the Pacific will be of Latino descent–– from the south, so to speak. And there's a whole lot of people from Asia along the Pacific coast, so it's going to be a real ethnic mixing ground. There's going to be an epicenter of energy, sort of no matter what happens. Whether it's solar, whether it's wind, whether it's petroleum, or hydroelectric, the West is going to be economically extremely powerful, because energy is a fundamental industry.And the last thing is (and this is the iffiest of the whole thing), but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the ongoing recuperation of sovereignty by the 294 federally recognized Native nations in the West is going to continue. That's been going in this very jagged way, but definitely for the last 50 or 60 years, as long as I've been around, the overall trend is in a very clear direction. So then you think, okay, this West is going to be wildly ethnically diverse, full of competing sovereignties and overlapping sovereignties. Nature is also going to really be in kind of a terminal. Well, that actually sounds like the 1200s! And the conventional history starts with Lewis and Clark and so forth. There's this breakpoint in history when people who looked like me came in and sort of rolled in from the East and kind of took over everything. And the West disappears! That separate entity, the native people disappear, and nature is tamed. That's pretty much what was in the textbooks when I was a kid. Do you know who Frederick Jackson Turner is? Dwarkesh Patel  No.Charles C. Mann So he's like one of these guys where nobody knows who he is. But he was incredibly influential in setting intellectual ideas. He wrote this article in 1893, called The Significance of the Frontier. It was what established this idea that there's this frontier moving from East to West and on this side was savagery and barbarism, and on this other side of civilization was team nature and wilderness and all that. Then it goes to the Pacific, and that's the end of the West. That's still in the textbooks but in a different form: we don't call native people “lurking savages” as he did. But it's in my kids' textbooks. If you have kids, it'll very likely be in their textbook because it's such a bedrock. What I'm saying is that's actually not a useful way to look at it, given what's coming up. A wonderful Texas writer, Bruce Sterling, says, “To know the past, you first have to understand the future.”It's funny, right? But what he means is that all of us have an idea of where the trajectory of history is going. A whole lot of history is about asking, “How did we get here? How do we get there?” To get that, you have to have an idea of what the “there” is. So I'm saying, I'm writing a history of the West with that West that I talked about in mind. Which gives you a very different picture: a lot more about indigenous fire management, the way the Hohokam survived the drought of the 1200s, and a little bit less about Billy the Kid. Gender Ratios and Silicon Valley Dwarkesh Patel   I love that quote hahaha. Speaking of the frontier, maybe it's a mistaken concept, but I remember that in a chapter of 1493, you talk about these rowdy adventurer men who outnumber the women in the silver mines and the kind of trouble that they cause. I wonder if there's some sort of distant analogy to the technology world or Silicon Valley, where you have the same kind of gender ratio and you have the same kind of frontier spirit? Maybe not the same physical violence––– more sociologically. Is there any similarity there?Charles C. Mann   I think it's funny, I hadn't thought about it. But it's certainly funny to think about. So let me do this off the top of my head. I like the idea that at the end of it, I can say, “wait, wait, that's ridiculous.“ Both of them would attract people who either didn't have much to lose, or were oblivious about what they had to lose, and had a resilience towards failure. I mean, it's amazing, the number of people in Silicon Valley who have completely failed at numbers of things! They just get up and keep‌ trying and have a kind of real obliviousness to social norms. It's pretty clear they are very much interested in making a mark and making their fortunes themselves. So there's at least a sort of shallow comparison, there are some certain similarities. I don't think this is entirely flattering to either group. It's absolutely true that those silver miners in Bolivia, and in northern‌ Mexico, created to a large extent, the modern world. But it's also true that they created these cesspools of violence and exploitation that had consequences we're still living with today. So you have to kind of take the bitter with the sweet. And I think that's true of Silicon Valley and its products *chuckles* I use them every day, and I curse them every day.Dwarkesh Patel   Right.Charles C. Mann   I want to give you an example. The internet has made it possible for me to do something like write a Twitter thread, get millions of people to read it, and have a discussion that's really amazing at the same time. Yet today, The Washington Post has an article about how every book in Texas (it's one of the states) a child checks out of the school library goes into a central state databank. They can see and look for patterns of people taking out “bad books” and this sort of stuff. And I think “whoa, that's really bad! That's not so good.” It's really the same technology that brings this dissemination and collection of vast amounts of information with relative ease. So with all these things, you take the bitter with the sweet. Technological Stupidity in the New WorldDwarkesh Patel   I want to ask you again about contingency because there are so many other examples where things you thought would be universal actually don't turn out to be. I think you talked about how the natives had different forms of metallurgy, with gold and copper, but then they didn't do iron or steel. You would think that given their “warring nature”, iron would be such a huge help. There's a clear incentive to build it. Millions of people living there could have built or developed this technology. Same with the steel, same with the wheel. What's the explanation for why these things you think anybody would have come up with didn't happen?Charles C. Mann   I know. It's just amazing to me! I don't know. This is one of those things I think about all the time. A few weeks ago, it rained, and I went out to walk the dog. I'm always amazed that there are literal glistening drops of water on the crabgrass and when you pick it up, sometimes there are little holes eaten by insects in the crabgrass. Every now and then, if you look carefully, you'll see a drop of water in one of those holes and it forms a lens. And you can look through it! You can see that it's not a very powerful lens by any means, but you can see that things are magnified. So you think “How long has there been crabgrass? Or leaves? And water?”  Just forever! We've had glass forever! So how is it that we had to wait for whoever it was to create lenses? I just don't get it. In book 1491, I mentioned the moldboard plow, which is the one with a curving blade that allows you to go through the soil much more easily. It was invented in China thousands of years ago, but not around in Europe until the 1400s. Like, come on, guys! What was it? And so, you know, there's this mysterious sort of mass stupidity. One of the wonderful things about globalization and trade and contact is that maybe not everybody is as blind as you and you can learn from them. I mean, that's the most wonderful thing about trade. So in the case of the wheel, the more amazing thing is that in Mesoamerica, they had the wheel on child's toys. Why didn't they develop it? The best explanation I can get is they didn't have domestic animals. A cart then would have to be pulled by people. That would imply that to make the cart work, you'd have to cut a really good road. Whereas they had these travois, which are these things that you hold and they have these skids that are shaped kind of like an upside-down V. You can drag them across rough ground, you don't need a road for them. That's what people used in the Great Plains and so forth. So you look at this, and you think “maybe this was the ultimate way to save labor. I mean, this was good enough. And you didn't have to build and maintain these roads to make this work”  so maybe it was rational or just maybe they're just blinkered. I don't know. As for assembly with steel, I think there's some values involved in that. I don't know if you've ever seen one of those things they had in Mesoamerica called Macuahuitl. They're wooden clubs with obsidian blades on them and they are sharp as hell. You don't run your finger along the edge because they just slice it open. An obsidian blade is pretty much sharper than any iron or steel blade and it doesn't rust. Nice. But it's much more brittle. So okay, they're there, and the Spaniards were really afraid of them. Because a single blow from these heavy sharp blades could kill a horse. They saw people whack off the head of a horse carrying a big strong guy with a single blow! So they're really dangerous, but they're not long-lasting. Part of the deal was that the values around conflict were different in the sense that conflict in Mesoamerica wasn't a matter of sending out foot soldiers in grunts, it was a chance for soldiers to get individual glory and prestige. This was associated with having these very elaborately beautiful weapons that you killed people with. So maybe not having steel worked better for their values and what they were trying to do at war. That would've lasted for years and I mean, that's just a guess. But you can imagine a scenario where they're not just blinkered but instead expressive on the basis of their different values. This is hugely speculative. There's a wonderful book by Ross Hassig about old Aztec warfare. It's an amazing book which is about the military history of The Aztecs and it's really quite interesting. He talks about this a little bit but he finally just says we don't know why they didn't develop all these technologies, but this worked for them.Dwarkesh Patel   Interesting. Yeah, it's kind of similar to China not developing gunpowder into an actual ballistic material––Charles C. Mann   Or Japan giving up the gun! They actually banned guns during the Edo period. The Portuguese introduced guns and the Japanese used them, and they said “Ahhh nope! Don't want them.” and they banned them. This turned out to be a terrible idea when Perry came in the 1860s. But for a long time, supposedly under the Edo period, Japan had the longest period of any nation ever without a foreign war. Dwarkesh Patel   Hmm. Interesting. Yeah, it's concerning when you think the lack of war might make you vulnerable in certain ways. Charles C. Mann   Yeah, that's a depressing thought.Religious DemoralizationDwarkesh Patel   Right. In Fukuyama's The End of History, he's obviously arguing that liberal democracy will be the final form of government everywhere. But there's this point he makes at the end where he's like, “Yeah, but maybe we need a small war every 50 years or so just to make sure people remember how bad it can get and how to deal with it.” Anyway, when the epidemic started in the New World, surely the Indians must have had some story or superstitious explanation–– some way of explaining what was happening. What was it?Charles C. Mann   You have to remember, the germ theory of disease didn't exist at the time. So neither the Spaniards, or the English, or the native people, had a clear idea of what was going on. In fact, both of them thought of it as essentially a spiritual event, a religious event. You went into areas that were bad, and the air was bad. That was malaria, right? That was an example. To them, it was God that was in control of the whole business. There's a line from my distant ancestor––the Governor Bradford of Plymouth Colony, who's my umpteenth, umpteenth grandfather, that's how waspy I am, he's actually my ancestor––about how God saw fit to clear the natives for us. So they see all of this in really religious terms, and more or less native people did too! So they thought over and over again that “we must have done something bad for this to have happened.” And that's a very powerful demoralizing thing. Your God either punished you or failed you. And this was it. This is one of the reasons that Christianity was able to make inroads. People thought “Their god is coming in and they seem to be less harmed by these diseases than people with our God.” Now, both of them are completely misinterpreting what's going on! But if you have that kind of spiritual explanation, it makes sense for you to say, “Well, maybe I should hit up their God.”Critiques of Civilization Collapse TheoriesDwarkesh Patel   Yeah, super fascinating. There's been a lot of books written in the last few decades about why civilizations collapse. There's Joseph Tainter's book, there's Jared Diamond's book. Do you feel like any of them actually do a good job of explaining how these different Indian societies collapsed over time?Charles C. Mann   No. Well not the ones that I've read. And there are two reasons for that. One is that it's not really a mystery. If you have a society that's epidemiologically naive, and smallpox sweeps in and kills 30% of you, measles kills 10% of you, and this all happens in a short period of time, that's really tough! I mean COVID killed one million people in the United States. That's 1/330th of the population. And it wasn't even particularly the most economically vital part of the population. It wasn't kids, it was elderly people like my aunt–– I hope I'm not sounding callous when I'm describing it like a demographer. Because I don't mean it that way. But it caused enormous economic damage and social conflict and so forth. Now, imagine something that's 30 or 40 times worse than that, and you have no explanation for it at all. It's kind of not a surprise to me that this is a super challenge. What's actually amazing is the number of nations that survived and came up with ways to deal with this incredible loss.That relates to the second issue, which is that it's sort of weird to talk about collapse in the ways that they sometimes do. Like both of them talk about the Mayan collapse. But there are 30 million Mayan people still there. They were never really conquered by the Spaniards. The Spaniards were still waging giant wars in Yucatan in the 1590s. In the early 21st century, I went with my son to Chiapas, which is the southernmost exit province. And that is where the Commandante Cero and the rebellions were going on. We were looking at some Mayan ruins, and they were too beautiful, and I stayed too long, and we were driving back through the night on these terrible roads. And we got stopped by some of these guys with guns. I was like, “Oh God, not only have I got myself into this, I got my son into this.” And the guy comes and looks at us and says, “Who are you?” And I say that we're American tourists. And he just gets this disgusted look, and he says, “Go on.” And you know, the journalist in me takes over and I ask, “What do you mean, just go on?” And he says, “We're hunting for Mexicans.” And as I'm driving I'm like “Wait a minute, I'm in Mexico.” And that those were Mayans. All those guys were Maya people still fighting against the Spaniards. So it's kind of funny to say that their society collapsed when there are Mayan radio stations, there are Maya schools, and they're speaking Mayan in their home. It's true, they don't have giant castles anymore. But, it's odd to think of that as collapse. They seem like highly successful people who have dealt pretty well with a lot of foreign incursions. So there's this whole aspect of “What do you mean collapse?” And you see that in Against the Grain, the James Scott book, where you think, “What do you mean barbarians?” If you're an average Maya person, working as a farmer under the purview of these elites in the big cities probably wasn't all that great. So after the collapse, you're probably better off. So all of that I feel is important in this discussion of collapse. I think it's hard to point to collapses that either have very clear exterior causes or are really collapses of the environment. Particularly the environmental sort that are pictured in books like Diamond has, where he talks about Easter Island. The striking thing about that is we know pretty much what happened to all those trees. Easter Island is this little speck of land, in the middle of the ocean, and Dutch guys come there and it's the only wood around for forever, so they cut down all the trees to use it for boat repair, ship repair, and they enslave most of the people who are living there. And we know pretty much what happened. There's no mystery about it.Virginia Company + HubrisDwarkesh Patel   Why did the British government and the king keep subsidizing and giving sanctions to the Virginia Company, even after it was clear that this is not especially profitable and half the people that go die? Why didn't they just stop?Charles C. Mann   That's a really good question. It's a super good question. I don't really know if we have a satisfactory answer, because it was so stupid for them to keep doing that. It was such a loss for so long. So you have to say, they were thinking, not purely economically. Part of it is that the backers of the Virginia Company, in sort of classic VC style, when things were going bad, they lied about it. They're burning through their cash, they did these rosy presentations, and they said, “It's gonna be great! We just need this extra money.” Kind of the way that Uber did. There's this tremendous burn rate and now the company says you're in tremendous trouble because it turns out that it's really expensive to provide all these calves and do all this stuff. The cheaper prices that made people like me really happy about it are vanishing. So, you know, I think future business studies will look at those rosy presentations and see that they have a kind of analogy to the ones that were done with the Virginia Company. A second thing is that there was this dog-headed belief kind of based on the inability to understand longitude and so forth, that the Americas were far narrower than they actually are. I reproduced this in 1493. There were all kinds of maps in Britain at the time showing these little skinny Philippines-like islands. So there's the thought that you just go up the Chesapeake, go a couple 100 miles, and you're gonna get to the Pacific into China. So there's this constant searching for a passage to China through this thought to be very narrow path. Sir Francis Drake and some other people had shown that there was a West Coast so they thought the whole thing was this narrow, Panama-like landform. So there's this geographical confusion. Finally, there's the fact that the Spaniards had found all this gold and silver, which is an ideal commodity, because it's not perishable: it's small, you can put it on your ship and bring it back, and it's just great in every way. It's money, essentially. Basically, you dig up money in the hills and there's this long-standing belief that there's got to be more of that in the Americas, we just need to find out where. So there's always that hope. Lastly, there's the Imperial bragging rights. You know, we can't be the only guys with a colony. You see that later in the 19th century when Germany became a nation and one of the first things the Dutch said was “Let's look for pieces of Africa that the rest of Europe hasn't claimed,” and they set up their own mini colonial empire. So there's this kind of “Keeping Up with the Joneses” aspect, it just seems to be sort of deep in the European ruling class. So then you got to have an empire that in this weird way, seems very culturally part of it. I guess it's the same for many other places. As soon as you feel like you have a state together, you want to index other things. You see that over and over again, all over the world. So that's part of it. All those things, I think, contributed to this. Outright lying, this delusion, other various delusions, plus hubris.Dwarkesh Patel   It seems that colonial envy has today probably spread to China. I don't know too much about it, but I hear that the Silk Road stuff they're doing is not especially economically wise. Is this kind of like when you have the impulse where if you're a nation trying to rise, you have that “I gotta go here, I gotta go over there––Charles C. Mann   Yeah and “Show what a big guy I am. Yeah,––China's Silver TradeDwarkesh Patel   Exactly. So speaking of China, I want to ask you about the silver trade. Excuse another tortured analogy, but when I was reading that chapter where you're describing how the Spanish silver was ending up with China and how the Ming Dynasty caused too much inflation. They needed more reliable mediums of exchange, so they had to give up real goods from China, just in order to get silver, which is just a medium of exchange––but it's not creating more apples, right? I was thinking about how this sounds a bit like Bitcoin today, (obviously to a much smaller magnitude) but in the sense that you're using up goods. It's a small amount of electricity, all things considered, but you're having to use up real energy in order to construct this medium of exchange. Maybe somebody can claim that this is necessary because of inflation or some other policy mistake and you can compare it to the Ming Dynasty. But what do you think about this analogy? Is there a similar situation where real goods are being exchanged for just a medium of exchange?Charles C. Mann   That's really interesting. I mean, on some level, that's the way money works, right? I go into a store, like a Starbucks and I buy a coffee, then I hand them a piece of paper with some drawings on it, and they hand me an actual coffee in return for a piece of paper. So the mysteriousness of money is kind of amazing. History is of course replete with examples of things that people took very seriously as money. Things that to us seem very silly like the cowry shell or in the island of Yap where they had giant stones! Those were money and nobody ever carried them around. You transferred the ownership of the stone from one person to another person to buy something. I would get some coconuts or gourds or whatever, and now you own that stone on the hill. So there's a tremendous sort of mysteriousness about the human willingness to assign value to arbitrary things such as (in Bitcoin's case) strings of zeros and ones. That part of it makes sense to me. What's extraordinary is when the effort to create a medium of exchange ends up costing you significantly–– which is what you're talking about in China where people had a medium of exchange, but they had to work hugely to get that money. I don't have to work hugely to get a $1 bill, right? It's not like I'm cutting down a tree and smashing the papers to pulp and printing. But you're right, that's what they're kind of doing in China. And that's, to a lesser extent, what you're doing in Bitcoin. So I hadn't thought about this, but Bitcoin in this case is using computer cycles and energy. To me, it's absolutely extraordinary the degree to which people who are Bitcoin miners are willing to upend their lives to get cheap energy. A guy I know is talking about setting up small nuclear plants as part of his idea for climate change and he wants to set them up in really weird remote areas. And I was asking “Well who would be your customers?” and he says Bitcoin people would move to these nowhere places so they could have these pocket nukes to privately supply their Bitcoin habits. And that's really crazy! To completely upend your life to create something that you hope is a medium of exchange that will allow you to buy the things that you're giving up. So there's a kind of funny aspect to this. That was partly what was happening in China. Unfortunately, China's very large, so they were able to send off all this stuff to Mexico so that they could get the silver to pay their taxes, but it definitely weakened the country.Wizards vs. ProphetsDwarkesh Patel   Yeah, and that story you were talking about, El Salvador actually tried it. They were trying to set up a Bitcoin city next to this volcano and use the geothermal energy from the volcano to incentivize people to come there and mine cheap Bitcoin. Staying on the theme of China, do you think the prophets were more correct, or the wizards were more correct for that given time period? Because we have the introduction of potato, corn, maize, sweet potatoes, and this drastically increases the population until it reaches a carrying capacity. Obviously, what follows is the other kinds of ecological problems this causes and you describe these in the book. Is this evidence of the wizard worldview that potatoes appear and populations balloon? Or are the prophets like “No, no, carrying capacity will catch up to us eventually.”Charles C. Mann   Okay, so let me interject here. For those members of your audience who don't know what we're talking about. I wrote this book, The Wizard and the Prophet. And it's about these two camps that have been around for a long time who have differing views regarding how we think about energy resources, the environment, and all those issues. The wizards, that's my name for them––Stuart Brand called them druids and, in fact, originally, the title was going to involve the word druid but my editor said, “Nobody knows what a Druid is” so I changed it into wizards–– and anyway the wizards would say that science and technology properly applied can allow you to produce your way out of these environmental dilemmas. You turn on the science machine, essentially, and then we can escape these kinds of dilemmas. The prophets say “No. Natural systems are governed by laws and there's an inherent carrying capacity or limit or planetary boundary.” there are a bunch of different names for them that say you can't do more than so much.So what happened in China is that European crops came over. One of China's basic geographical conditions is that it's 20% of the Earth's habitable surface area, or it has 20% of the world's population, but only has seven or 8% of the world's above-ground freshwater. There are no big giant lakes like we have in the Great Lakes. And there are only a couple of big rivers, the Yangtze and the Yellow River. The main staple crop in China has to be grown in swimming pools, and that's you know, rice. So there's this paradox, which is “How do you keep people fed with rice in a country that has very little water?” If you want a shorthand history of China, that's it. So prophets believe that there are these planetary boundaries. In history, these are typically called Malthusian Limits after Malthus and the question is: With the available technology at a certain time, how many people can you feed before there's misery?The great thing about history is it provides evidence for both sides. Because in the short run, what happened when American crops came in is that the potato, sweet potato, and maize corn were the first staple crops that were dryland crops that could be grown in the western half of China, which is very, very dry and hot and mountainous with very little water. Population soars immediately afterward, but so does social unrest, misery, and so forth. In the long run, that becomes adaptable when China becomes a wealthy and powerful nation. In the short run, which is not so short (it's a couple of centuries), it really causes tremendous chaos and suffering. So, this provides evidence for both sides. One increases human capacity, and the second unquestionably increases human numbers and that leads to tremendous erosion, land degradation, and human suffering.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, that's a thick coin with two sides. By the way, I realized I haven't gotten to all the Wizard and Prophet questions, and there are a lot of them. So I––Charles C. Mann   I certainly have time! I'm enjoying the conversation. One of the weird things about podcasts is that, as far as I can tell, the average podcast interviewer is far more knowledgeable and thoughtful than the average sort of mainstream journalist interviewer and I just find that amazing. I don't understand it. So I think you guys should be hired. You know, they should make you switch roles or something.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, maybe. Charles C. Mann   It's a pleasure to be asked these interesting questions about subjects I find fascinating.Dwarkesh Patel   Oh, it's my pleasure to get to talk to you and to get to ask these questions. So let me ask about the Wizard and the Prophet. I just interviewed WIll McCaskill, and we were talking about what ends up mattering most in history. I asked him about Norman Borlaug and said that he's saved a billion lives. But then McCaskill pointed out, “Well, that's an exceptional result” and he doesn't think the technology is that contingent. So if Borlaug hadn't existed, somebody else would have discovered what he discovered about short wheat stalks anyways. So counterfactually, in a world where Ebola doesn't exist, it's not like a billion people die, maybe a couple million more die until the next guy comes around. That was his view. Do you agree? What is your response?Charles C. Mann   To some extent, I agree. It's very likely that in the absence of one scientist, some other scientist would have discovered this, and I mentioned in the book, in fact, that there's a guy named Swaminathan, a remarkable Indian scientist, who's a step behind him and did much of the same work. At the same time, the individual qualities of Borlaug are really quite remarkable. The insane amount of work and dedication that he did.. it's really hard to imagine. The fact is that he was going against many of the breeding plant breeding dogmas of his day, that all matters! His insistence on feeding the poor… he did remarkable things. Yes, I think some of those same things would have been discovered but it would have been a huge deal if it had taken 20 years later. I mean, that would have been a lot of people who would have been hurt in the interim! Because at the same time, things like the end of colonialism, the discovery of antibiotics, and so forth, were leading to a real population rise, and the amount of human misery that would have occurred, it's really frightening to think about. So, in some sense, I think he's (Will McCaskill) right. But I wouldn't be so glib about those couple of million people.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah. And another thing you might be concerned about is that given the hostile attitude that people had towards the green revolution right after, if the actual implementation of these different strains of biochar sent in India, if that hadn't been delayed, it's not that weird to imagine a scenario where the governments there are just totally won over by the prophets and they decide to not implant this technology at all. If you think about what happened to nuclear power in the 70s, in many different countries, maybe something similar could have happened to the Green Revolution. So it's important to beat the Prophet. Maybe that's not the correct way to say it. But one way you could put it is: It's important to beat the prophets before the policies are passed. You have to get a good bit of technology in there.Charles C. Mann   This is just my personal opinion, but you want to listen to the prophets about what the problems are. They're incredible at diagnosing problems, and very frequently, they're right about those things. The social issues about the Green Revolution… they were dead right, they were completely right. I don't know if you then adopt their solutions. It's a little bit like how I feel about my editors–– my editors will often point out problems and I almost never agree with their solutions. The fact is that Borlaug did develop this wheat that came into India, but it probably wouldn't have been nearly as successful if Swaminathan hadn't changed that wheat to make it more acceptable to the culture of India. That was one of the most important parts for me in this book. When I went to Tamil Nadu, I listened to this and I thought, “Oh! I never heard about this part where they took Mexican wheat, and they made it into Indian wheat.” You know, I don't even know if Borlaug ever knew or really grasped that they really had done that! By the way, a person for you to interview is Marci Baranski–– she's got a forthcoming book about the history of the Green Revolution and she sounds great. I'm really looking forward to reading it. So here's a plug for her.In Defense of Regulatory DelaysDwarkesh Patel   So if we applied that particular story to today, let's say that we had regulatory agencies like the FDA back then that were as powerful back then as they are now. Do you think it's possible that these new advances would have just dithered in some approval process that took years or decades to complete? If you just backtest our current process for implementing technological solutions, are you concerned that something like the green revolution could not have happened or that it would have taken way too long or something?Charles C. Mann   It's possible. Bureaucracies can always go rogue, and the government is faced with this kind of impossible problem. There's a current big political argument about whether former President Trump should have taken these top-secret documents to his house in Florida and done whatever he wanted to? Just for the moment, let's accept the argument that these were like super secret toxic documents and should not have been in a basement. Let's just say that's true. Whatever the President says is declassified is declassified. Let us say that's true.  Obviously, that would be bad. You would not want to have that kind of informal process because you can imagine all kinds of things–– you wouldn't want to have that kind of informal process in place. But nobody has ever imagined that you would do that because it's sort of nutty in that scenario.Now say you write a law and you create a bureaucracy for declassification and immediately add more delay, you make things harder, you add in the problems of the bureaucrats getting too much power, you know–– all the things that you do. So you have this problem with the government, which is that people occasionally do things that you would never imagine. It's completely screwy. So you put in regulatory mechanisms to stop them from doing that and that impedes everybody else. In the case of the FDA, it was founded in the 30 when some person produced this thing called elixir sulfonamides. They killed hundreds of people! It was a flat-out poison! And, you know, hundreds of people died. You think like who would do that? But somebody did that. So they created this entire review mechanism to make sure it never happened again, which introduced delay, and then something was solidified. Which they did start here because the people who invented that didn't even do the most cursory kind of check. So you have this constant problem. I'm sympathetic to the dilemma faced by the government here in which you either let through really bad things done by occasional people, or you screw up everything for everybody else. I was tracing it crudely, but I think you see the trade-off. So the question is, how well can you manage this trade-off? I would argue that sometimes it's well managed. It's kind of remarkable that we got vaccines produced by an entirely new mechanism, in record time, and they passed pretty rigorous safety reviews and were given to millions and millions and millions of people with very, very few negative effects. I mean, that's a real regulatory triumph there, right?So that would be the counter-example: you have this new thing that you can feed people and so forth. They let it through very quickly. On the other hand, you have things like genetically modified salmon and trees, which as far as I can tell, especially for the chestnuts, they've made extraordinary efforts to test. I'm sure that those are going to be in regulatory hell for years to come. *chuckles* You know, I just feel that there's this great problem. These flaws that you identified, I would like to back off and say that this is a problem sort of inherent to government. They're always protecting us against the edge case. The edge case sets the rules, and that ends up, unless you're very careful, making it very difficult for everybody else.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah. And the vaccines are an interesting example here. Because one of the things you talked about in the book–– one of the possible solutions to climate change is that you can have some kind of geoengineering. Right? I think you mentioned in the book that as long as even one country tries this, then they can effectively (for relatively modest amounts of money), change the atmosphere. But then I look at the failure of every government to approve human challenge trials. This is something that seems like an obvious thing to do and we would have potentially saved hundreds of thousands of lives during COVID by speeding up the vaccine approval. So I wonder, maybe the international collaboration is strong enough that something like geoengineering actually couldn't happen because something like human challenge trials didn't happen.Geoengineering Charles C. Mann   So let me give a plug here for a fun novel by my friend, Neal Stephenson, called Termination Shock. Which is about some rich person just doing it. Just doing geoengineering. The fact is that it's actually not actually against the law to fire off rockets into the stratosphere. In his case, it's a giant gun that shoots shells full of sulfur into the upper atmosphere. So I guess the question is, what timescale do you think is appropriate for all this? I feel quite confident that there will be geoengineering trials within the next 10 years. Is that fast enough? That's a real judgment call. I think people like David Keith and the other advocates for geoengineering would have said it should have happened already and that it's way, way too slow. People who are super anxious about moral hazard and precautionary principles say that that's way, way too fast. So you have these different constituencies. It's hard for me to think off the top of my head of an example where these regulatory agencies have actually totally throttled something in a long-lasting way as opposed to delaying it for 10 years. I don't mean to imply that 10 years is nothing. But it's really killing off something. Is there an example you can think of?Dwarkesh Patel   Well, it's very dependent on where you think it would have been otherwise, like people say maybe it was just bound to be the state. Charles C. Mann   I think that was a very successful case of regulatory capture, in which the proponents of the technology successfully created this crazy…. One of the weird things I really wanted to explain about nuclear stuff is not actually in the book.

Music, like water, is the lifeblood of civilization. In this episode, host Will Dailey guides you on a trip through space and time, taking you behind the scenes of the city's most vibrant venues — all while tracing the stories of iconic rockers like Meat Puppets and Jimmy Eat World back through desert wanderers like Waylon Jennings and Lee Hazelwood, on back to the Hohokam, original settlers of the Valley of the Sun.  To hear the artists mentioned in this episode, check Will's playlist at soundofourtownpod.com Want to chat about the music in your city? Hit us up on:  Instagram: @DoubleElvis @WillDaileyOfficial Twitter: @DoubleElvisFm @WillDailey Sound of Our Town is a production of Double Elvis and iHeartRadio. Executive Produced by Jake Brennan, Brady Sadler, and Carly Carioli for Double Elvis. Production assistance by Matt Beaudoin. Created, written, hosted and scored by Will Dailey.  Additional writing on this episode by Patrick Coman. Music for this episode composed and performed by Will Dailey. Check out Will's music: Spotify Apple Music Bandcamp    SOURCES for this episode include: All Excess Occupation, by Danny Zalisko Stuck Outside of Phoenix, by Art Edwards Waylon: An Autobiography, by Waylon Jennings Arizona Music Hall of Fame Arizona Natural History Museum Legendary Tempe Venues Now & Then (Phoenix New Times) Best of 2021: Our Favorite Music Venues (Phoenix New Times) Requiem for an Outlaw (Phoenix New Times) Downtown Phoenix Journal Remembering the Mill Avenue music scene of the '90s (AZCentral) 10 Greatest Record Stores in America (SPIN)   SOME PLACES YOU'LL WANT TO VISIT AFTER LISTENING TO THIS EPISODE: Crescent Ballroom + Cocina 10 The Trunk Space The Lost Leaf The Van Buren Rebel Lounge Gold Rush Music Festival M3F Fest Musical Instrument Museum Grand Avenue Records Yucca Tap Room  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Arizona - Fort Verde is an almost forgotten military fortification east of the town of Cape Verde in Yavapai County. Fort Verde's heyday was in the 1870s, when it was used as a primary base for cavalry units under General George Cook. Despite its age, many of its stone structures still stand today. Montezuma's Castle can also be found in Yavapai County, near the town of Rimrock just off I-17. Montezuma's Castle is one of the most intact relics of the past from Native American civilization in the Southwest USA. Its defining features are the prominent houses carved into the sheer cliff during the 13th century. This site is also surrounded by a number of other places of archeological interest. Canyon de Chelly, near Chinle, Apache County, comprises hundreds of dwellings similar to those that could be found at Montezuma's Castle. These dwellings were carved at the base of steep red sandstone cliffs, and are said to have been built by the Pueblo Indians between the 8th and 14th centuries AD. In the 1700s, a community of Navajos conquered and settled the dwellings. These Navajos would harass colonizers for much of the next few centuries. A particularly bloody example occurred in 1805, when a troop of Spanish soldiers engaged a band of Navajos who ambushed them at a place called Massacre Cave. Another engagement was recorded in 1864, when a man named Kit Carson routed a large force of Navajos in the Canyon. Other ruins built by the Pueblo Indians lie nearby, at places named Canyon del Muerte, Monument Canyon, and Black Rock. Casa Grande Monument is located around two miles to the north of the town of Coolidge in Pinal County, near State Route 87. The Casa Grande is a spectacular tower made up of packed walls stacked four stories high. It is believed to have been constructed by the Hohokam people for ceremonial purposes. The Hohokam first arrived in the area around 400 BC and would leave in the middle of the 15th century. The monument stands in the middle of nearly 90 mud buildings. Tonto National Monument can be found approximately 28 miles off SR 88, due northwest of the town of Globe in Gila County. This landmark is also dominated by cliff dwellings. Over 100 of these homes were carved out of the cliff by the Salado Indians during the 14th century, and would be abandoned roughly a century later. The Salados were proficient at mining gold and silver in the area, and thus many artifacts made from these precious metals have been found here. The Mission of San Xavier del Bac stands about 9 miles south of Tucson, just by Mission Road. First built by Jesuit missionaries in 1692 amidst a village of Pima natives, it would fall under siege when the natives revolted in 1751. It was said to house a considerable collection of treasure, which the missionaries were said to have successfully hidden before they were all massacred. San Xavier del Bac was burnt to the ground, but was rebuilt in 1767 by a group of Franciscan missionaries, and still stands. The Tubac Presidio Ruins lie 45 miles to the south of Tucson in Santa Cruz County. Tubac Presidio was a military outpost made up of over 50 brick fortifications, built by the Spanish in the 1750s, and abandoned in 1776. Some time after this, Mexican forces would occupy and rebuild the post in order to protect their miners, who had found plentiful deposits of silver in the area. In the early 1850s, Mormons who were traveling to California used the outpost as a stopover shelter. In 1856, a group of Texan miners used it as a base of operations.. The Fort Yuma Ruins are the remains of an old fortified town built on the banks of the Colorado River, near the modern town of Yuma in Yuma County. Fort Yuma began as a Spanish mission in 1700, until its destruction at the hands of belligerent natives. The catalyst for what would ultimately become Fort Yuma was the beginning of the Gold Rush in California. In 1850, the fortified town was built and became a crucial focal point, and later it became a --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/treasure-revealed/support

Friend of the show, Mandy Wilson Rosen is back to co-host with me this week! Welcome back, Mandy! At a recent artist meet up on Clubhouse, we learned that many many artists cite "The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985" ed. Maurice Tuchman/LACMA as their most prized book on their studio bookshelf. Neither of us had heard of the book before, so we set about to find out what all the fuss was about. The book is a TOME (heavy as a brick, dense as a neutron star and 430 pages) and out of print, but available used on Ebay and Amazon...and at other used book sellers. Mandy and I collected our thought forms, focused our internal eyes, and ascended to a higher plane ...and dove in. Artists mentioned in this episode were: Paul Gauguin, Paul Serusier, Paul Ranson, Émile Schuffenecker, Édouard Vuillard, The Nabis, Le Lotus Bleu (periodical), Odilon Redon, Hilma Af Klint, Edvard Munch, Wassily Kandinsky, Johannes Itten, Umberto Boccioni, Ralph Waldo Emerson (poet), Henry David Thoreau (poet), Walt Whitman (poet), William Blake, Arthur Dove, Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Jackson Pollock, Navajo Sand Painters, Hohokam pottery showing Kokopelli, Eskimo/Inuit shaman masks, Agnes Pelton, Raymond Johnson, Nikolei Roerich, Kazimir Malevich, The Suprematists, Mikhail Matyushin, Vladimir Tatlin, Vasilisk Gnedov (poet), Pavel Filonov, Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, De Stijl movement, Max Weber Also, have a look at the fascinating "Thought-Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation" by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater free online at Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16269/16269-h/16269-h.htm Also, also, see Mandy's new number series here: https://mandolynwilsonrosen.com/section/501297-painting-collage.html Please check out the @peptalksforartists instagram in a special "stories highlight" because this episode is chock-a-block with references to specific paintings that we'd love for you to see. I've made a special IG story collection for this episode because there were too many to fit in a post! Thanks! Support the Peps by making a Donation, reviewing us on Apple Podcasts or following us on Instagram to see more images illustrating this episode: @peptalksforartists. All licensed music is from Soundstripe. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/peptalksforartistspod/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/peptalksforartistspod/support

The Hohokam peoples occupied a wide area of south-central Arizona from roughly Flagstaff south to the Mexican border. They are thought to have originally migrated north out of Mexico around 300 BC to become the most skillful irrigation farmers the Southwest ever knew. The irrigation system they were able to create in the Hot dry desert, has been used in modern interventions to water irrigations. Enjoy our podcast and want to support us in a more fashionable way, head on over to NewAgeCinematics.com for fantastic Clothing designs created by our team, that directly supports this show! How to help Inspirational Support Inspirational Thoughts: Individuals that donate to Inspirational Thoughts, ensure that we are able to continue sharing stories that inform and inspire audiences. Donations of any size help advance this essential public service. https://anchor.fm/inspirationalthoughts/support The Beginning of Inspirational Thoughts: We began around 2015 by the creator of Inspirational Thoughts, named Seth H. The creator was a Former paramedic, Detention/Probation Officer, Volunteer Fire Fighter, A degree in philosophy, psychology, Criminology & Behaviorism. With plenty of amazing stories and Life events he saw and experienced, he wanted to be able to share his experiences, and teach in amazing details on important topics he felt were great knowledge that could benefit anyone understanding different views on life. Along with speaking of controversial topics, he felt were being avoided at the time to not offend people, some may say he was ahead of his time? However, he knew that in order for human kind to became better and expand there mind, you must first accept the things that you may not find appealing to hear, that could help us grow as individuals and help build better relationships with our friends and family. He began doing live streams as an early start of what we know today as Inspirational Thoughts, with each live stream would become a different episode and topic of his experience. Today, those episodes that started it all, have been brought as the first episodes that went public on what we now know ourselves as Inspirational Thoughts! We have grown so much since then, and we are so Honored to be able to bring you these amazing stories and knowledge directly to you at full capacity! Thank you for your support, Inspirational Thoughts Fans! Enjoy our podcast and want to support us in a more fashionable way, head on over to NewAgeCinematics.com for fantastic Clothing designs created by our team, that directly supports this show! Support Inspirational Thoughts: Individuals that donate to Inspirational Thoughts, ensure that we are able to continue sharing stories that inform and inspire audiences. Donations of any size help advance this essential public service. https://anchor.fm/inspirationalthoughts/support --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/nomanslandbynac/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nomanslandbynac/support

A thousand years ago, a Sun priest might have watched a hillside on the outskirts of present-day Tucson. In particular, he would have been looking for a dagger of sunlight to pass across a spiral carved into the rocks — an indication that autumn was arriving. Researchers at LSU studied a site known as Picture Rocks. It contains hundreds of petroglyphs — pictures carved into the rocks. Most of them show people or animals. The pictures probably were created by the Hohokam culture, around a thousand years ago. One of the glyphs is a spiral. A tall triangle of light, known as a Sun dagger, slices across it around the equinoxes, with another around the summer solstice. The daggers are formed by sunlight passing through notches carved in the rocks near the spiral. That indicates that the light show is intentional, and not a chance alignment. The researchers say the alignments probably weren't designed to mark specific dates. Instead, they marked important periods of the year. Priests would have watched a dagger cross the spiral, perhaps chanting prayers and making offerings. Sun daggers are found all across the Southwest. Most of them probably served similar purposes — helping native cultures mark the changing seasons. And the season is changing today. It's the autumnal equinox. The Sun crosses the equator from north to south, beginning a season that will last until the solstice, in December. More about the equinox tomorrow.  Script by Damond Benningfield Support McDonald Observatory

Beth J and Beth Z share about their personal experiences with religious deconstruction, specifically leaving the modern American Christian church of their upbringing. Beth J has found herself in a new phase in which her religious deconstruction is no longer occupying much space in her brain. It's a welcome new freedom, and has given her the opportunity to discover and enjoy new interests and pursuits. Together, the Beths explore what this means, including what moral standards they use now, how they grapple with the pain and regret that come from having invested so much time in an endeavor they no longer pursue, and how they explain their current religious and philosophical views to others. Grab a free 1-on-1 coaching session with Beth Z, and connect on Instagram. Read Through the Kaleidoscope, by Elizabeth Jeffries Recording Date: February 16, 2021 Location: ZOOM! Beth J on Shawandasse Tula/Shawnee land (now Pittsburgh, PA) & Beth Z on Hohokam land (now Waddell, AZ) Theme Song by DiLisio --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/walking-in-the-wilderness/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/walking-in-the-wilderness/support

Welcome. Tervetuloa. My name is Mirka Koro, I come from ASU, and I go by she and hers. I would like to acknowledge the land on which I am standing here in Phoenix and the original Hohokam caretakers of this land. I would also like to thank the Egon Guba awards committee and QRSIG chair Jessica VanCleave and her executive committee for this amazing honor and opportunity to share my thoughts with you all. Despite my indefinitely youthful appearance and my love of Apocalyptica, I have a somewhat lengthy past with qualitative inquiry. Aaron, Juha, who are my stimulating discussants, Egon Guba, and I are entangled in our past and hopefully our experimental and philosophical qualitative inquiries will keep forming and shaping new relationalities among us and others in the future. I think it was 1998 when I attended my first AERA, heard amazing talks, and met Egon and Yvonna. At that time, I also attended my first QRSIG business meeting and thought to myself how excited I was about qualitative inquiry, stimulating scholarly exchanges, thinking, doing, theories, and paradigms. Egon’s Paradigm dialogue and Yvonna and Norman’s leadership with QI and ICQI were very inspiring for a beginning scholar. Since early 2000s Aaron’s work on methodology, Foucault, philosophy, ethics, and responsibility has been intellectually engaging and provocative for me. My entanglements with Juha, in turn, extends even further in linear time. I met Juha during my master’s studies and he introduced me to the world and practice of qualitative inquiry. I remember vividly attending Juha’s lectures and methodological seminars describing his exciting field work. His critical scholarship, philosophical knowledge, work with Freire’s legacy, and intersecting lines of methodology are truly inspiring. Mahtavaa etta olet taalla tanaan Juha videon valityksella! Entangled narratives, shared professional and personal histories, paradigm dialogues, multiple matter of and within factory and working-class town of Tampere Finland, meetings rooms of SQUICK in Athens GA, endless sunlight and scented orange blossoms of Phoenix AZ come together today. I have multiple titles for this presentation yet all of them are quite inaccurate. Title 1: Restless methodologies and speculative wonderings multiplied Title 2: What does the light have to do with this? Title 3: Lived scholarly possibilities of (methodological) multiplicity Title 4: If we take speculation seriously…we need to multiply- also methodologically Title 5: Lost in the words but still alive-- many methodological lives of qualitative matter As you can tell, I deliver this talk with much speculation and hesitation. My methodological wonderings will not have core components or clear argumentative logic. The talk might not even offer anything new especially if one considers the relational nature of knowing and situatedness of being as simultaneously historical, already already here, and always multiple. Light encounters, in turn, have everything and nothing to do with my presentation today. This talk is designed to be light in its effects- dizzy, requesting little effort, having little weight, move away from inner light and truth, something that informs, to ignite and spark. I hope this talk may offer some provocations in the form of thoughts, wild ideas, images, light effects, and conceptual and theoretical movements and more. Maybe something I will say or do will enable you to enter the difference, feel affect, sense and live the methodological light/lightness and darkness differently, and access alternative spaces through unthought connections and different ways to work through and live realities of inquiry, methodologies, and qualitative relations. Still designs fail and continue with their hesitation. Provocation 1: Close your eyes and see. What methodologies become possible? I will wonder about the potential and possibility embedded in speculation and speculative practices in a methodological world where many worlds fit. Some of my thoughts today are prompted by the way I live and experience qualitative inquiry as a contemporary reflection, mirror, and actor in our complex and political global world. Many qualitative scholars are excited about opportunities related to experimentation, theoretical connections, onto-epistemological freedom, justice and ethical orientations research can offer. We have been inspired by the post, (new, feminist) materialisms, and more-than-human movements. We showed that qualitative research is needed, driven by practice, and can create different knowledges and knowledges differently. Recently, the field has also experienced ontological and relational turns paying more attention to ecologies of life and inquiry. However, some of my excitement has been tamed by artificial theoretical boundaries, conceptual regulations, standardized citation practices, overly descriptive guidelines, and other political ways to manage learning of qualitative inquiry and monitor experimentation processes. Occasionally I find myself mourning for more liberatory practices, worlds within worlds that stay open and welcoming in infinitum. Sometimes I feel saddened by the epistemological and ontological violence that we might have practiced against our community members, sisters, and brothers. It is also possible that I am late to the game, delayed in my reflections, dwelled in the past and we have already lived methodological pluriversity quite productively and practiced responsible collectivity for some time. However, I am truly inspired by visible and hidden potential, more inclusive vision and unthinkable hope for qualitative inquiry as a methodologically pluriverse community. This talk includes interrelated flows of relationality including speculative, experimentative, methodological, and plural flows. Speculation offers opportunities for creative imagination, hesitation, reflective questioning, and thinking with unthinkable futures. Experimentation reminds us that much of qualitative research is crafted in shifting practice, in artistic relations (Hannula et.al., 2014), and within different and internally creative and active time-space-matterings (Barad, 2007). Responsible methodologies and methodologists (see Kuntz, 2015) are needed while current methodological practices are radically re-visioned. Pluriversity and pluralism, in turn, are thoughtful choices toward more collective equity and ecological diversity. Finally, all of these relational flows ask for open-endedness and creative potentiality embedded in our ecological and relational onto-epistemological systems and practices. The flows come and go, relating and connecting logical and illogical ways while always creating alternative time-spaces. About experimentation Some years ago, I wrote about methodologies without methodologies, about methodological spaces without faces, names, and predetermined categories. I was interested in methodologies with inaccuracies and defects, abnormalities. At that time, my problem was the insufficiency of language, methodological non-imagination and inflexibility and my focus was on theoretical and methodological difference in infinitum. Now my breakdowns are more relational and material. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018) reminds us about a scary and lonely world without others, specter of difference, and the cruel and toxic identitarian politics. Now I see more clearly the vitality in pluralism, caring and sharing communities, and perceive the endless becoming of many. Worlds within worlds, methodologies within methodologies, researchers within researchers – in other words the multiplicity and methodological pluriverse are the worlds I want to talk about today. I also argue that for us to live the plural and many (also plural and many methodologies) we have to imagine. Qualitative inquiry is not a world without a difference and since its first visionaries and documented imaginations qualitative inquiries have been conceptualized as the other, multiple, and diversified. However, somewhere during the journey we may have lost our vision of this kind of relationality and collectivity. The paradigm and dialogue of difference can also be problematic since it is often guided by dualism and hierarchization leading toward methodological barricades, partition, ontological erasure, and epistemological colonialization. Furthermore, from the perspective/paradigm of difference one can also more easily locate and narrow down the ‘toxic methodological other’ simultaneously forming master subjects and methodological narratives. I think it is important to remember that perceived methodological differences are not natural but constructed. Provocation 2: Turn off the lights and sense the material you are sitting on. What methodologies become possible? If your momentary relationality to matter could speak, what might it say? In addition, I want to remind us about qualitative dreams, dreams of qualitative researchers, and the power of the unexpected. How might us, qualitative scholars, live our inquiries and allow more and infinite spaces for adventures of ideas and concepts created and crafted by scholars, surrounding materiality and all citizens of the entire world- not just the citizens of global North. For Whitehead (1967) adventures (of ideas) illustrate slow drifts of mankind toward betterment and civilization; a historical movement and adventures of framing the explanations influencing history. Not only the western history but the history of all humans (and non-humans). Adventures include a wide variety of mental experiences shaping human lives and their histories in diverse global contexts. Ideas also experience their own local histories. How do ideas arise and are infused, how ideas and concepts related and blend? How do ideas multiply in the infinite pluriverse? Furthermore, it is interesting to think with Whitehead also in the context of methodology. Methodological language has rarely been ‘correct’ and accurate and more importantly methodology has rarely been independent from other processes. Rather, I imagined methodologies outside the fixed, pre-determined and premeditated steps. Methodologies function as spaces for experimentation and as experiential experiences themselves. These processes have always had drifts, movements, and own collective histories potentially without causal and individual history and necessary linear logic. These kinds of methodologies still excite me. More specifically, speculative methodologies and experimental plurality seduce. Thinking with thought pragmatically—guided by transformation, application, and practice—has produced a series of experiments in my work including experiments with text, language, discourse, concepts such as data, slowness, seduction, academic conference machine, (methodological) darkness, methodological landscapes of desert, write-scapes, matter such as writing-feeling flamingos, ghost, shadows, monsters… and more. I practice methodologies while simultaneously recreating, reshaping, and reformulating the world we collectively live with and within. Methods do not order or predict the world, but they create an emerging sense of worldly events. Erin Manning (2016) noted that “Thought must not be mapped onto practice: it is an emergent, incipient tendency to be discovered in the field of activation of practices co-composing. To map thought in advance of its speculative propositions would diminish the force of study and reduce the operation to the status of the creation of false problems and badly stated questions.” (p.41). Experimental and plural methodological history does not start or end. Slowly and gradually, one may become interested in open-ended inquiry, problematization, and been drawn toward multiple simultaneous and conceptual shifts. Theoretical and pragmatic ruptures lead to inquiry and seductive forces of matter and images. For example, some years ago I was drawn to Baudrillard. Baudrillard’s work prompted me to consider how the signs of reality create a duplication, a virtuality, hyperreal, which made it impossible to separate true and false, real and imaginary data, matter, and concepts. Baudrillard helped me to see that objects and data can have their escapes, strategies, and resistance. “The more object is persecuted by experimental procedures, the more it invents strategies of counterfeit, evasion, disguise, disappearance” (Baudrillard, 2000, p. 79). During my qualitative research methods courses students produced virtual and hyperreal data, they ate their interview transcripts and documented the possibilities and impossibilities outside Cartesian dualism. Collectively with my peers I sensed methodologies and processes in dark rainy forests, words formed 3-dimensional cartographies, and sounds moved me toward more than human and beyond singular and humanistic dialogues. My scholarly body grew tired of linear logic, clear argumentation structures, and valid research processes. Academic conference machine took over my international collaborations and our ‘crazy gang’ willingly allowed tables, dolls, gorillas, pacifiers to take over and participate in our becoming and knowing. Materiality produced us slowly but steadily, relationality heavily guided our collective thinking-doing and enabled us to sense the world around us and thinking in action. The AcademicConferenceMachine and its striated spaces and regulatory intellectual organization created disturbing effects and we saw this machine as a reliable, regulatory, structured organizational space, a space of (non)repetition — which runs the risk of becoming so regulating, normalizing and standardizing. We had to conference otherwise and desire to craft alternative spacetimes collective grew upon us. Later, our sensing outside sensibilities and exploring text outside textual practices were guided by Poly-experimentalism, a multifaceted experimentation addressing multiplicity and plurality in their various forms. Following the practices of Delamont and colleagues (2010) who encouraged scholars to make the familiar strange, listening Norman Denzin’s (1970) proposal that sociological imagination should shape methodological thinking and practices, and more recently being inspired by imagination and performance philosophies that have emerged through representational innovations such as interactional theaters where “scientific” research is performed. Furthermore, methodological experimentation acknowledges the diverse processual, intellectual, and methodologic examining and forays that take place when scholars extend discourses and habits of thought as well as extend on common routines that seem to become habitual practice in research projects. Drawing from my work with Linda Knight we argue that methodological experimentation is difficult to pin down with a singular author, text, meaning, practice, discipline, tradition, discourse, or even example because it can vary in scale and impact as experimentations are diversifying practices. Instead of focusing on conceptual singularity and practical linearity of the methodological past, seemingly fragmented thoughts and acts are united through the concept of “poly” and multiplicity of methodologies across different flows. In my recent work on navel gazing my collaborators and I started thinking about research assumptions and practices that we keep hidden. This led us to think about ‘navel-gazing’ as one practice of excessive focus on the ‘self’ through aggrandizement, ornate reflection, or even self-plagiarism and self-citation. We laughed at the idea of looking at one’s navel--the image is a silly one--but we decided to try it. One by one, we tried gazing at our own navels and then discussed the experience, theoretical and methodological insights, and silly recordings of our philosophical conversations. The proximity of navel created an interesting paradox. One’s navel (including one’s scholarship, knowledge, reality, truth, practices and so on) became intimately connected to the physical body of the researcher while at the same time it was acknowledged that navel is rarely seen, closely inspected, and infrequently deep-cleaned. Yet (researchers’) navels form intimate connection to internal organs, trace baby’s connections to their mother, bridge the external with the internal, and also offer ultimately useless space and unused place of human cavity and relationality. According to Whitehead (1967) experimental inquiry avoids routines which force intellect to vanish and conditioned reflexes to take over. “The very essence of real actuality… is process. Thus each actual thing is only to be understood in terms of its becoming and perishing” (p.274). “A learned orthodoxy suppresses adventure” (p.277). Experimental work forms a fertile ground for troubling our learned orthodoxies and problematizing simplicity in its’ various forms. Wonderings about many possibilities of theory shaping inquiries, thinking beyond the thinkable methodological practices and countering existing practices can be generative. Methodological experimentation also offers endless possibilities to reinvent inquiries and re-conceptualize qualitative research approaches especially when experimentation functions as a vehicle and strategy to live our lives as inquirers. Whitehead (1959) distances speculative Reason from its (scientific and traditional) methods. Speculative reason’s “function is to pierce into the general reasons…to understand all methods as coordinated in a nature of things... the speculative Reason turns east and west, to the source and to the end, alike hidden below the rim of the world” (p.65). Speculative reason questions the methods not allowing them to rest. Whitehead explains how Greek thinkers advanced speculation by being curious, probing, questioning and trying to understand - everything. About speculative speculation Next, I will discuss some speculations of speculation. Speculation offers multiple strategies to think beyond the known, recognizable, and predictable. Speculation slows one down and forces us to think about alternative scenarios and differences. It does not take anything for granted and it is fueled by adventure. Created knowledges can travel from one location to another. Since 2007 speculative scholarship has taken many turns. Meillassoux’s speculative materialism, Harman’s object oriented philosophy, Grant’s neovitalism, Brassier’s radical nihilism, Bennet’s vital materiality, Barad’s agential realism, Whitehead’s process philosophy to name a few. In many ways speculation offers a response to the slow, hesitant, complex and uncertain world of methodological multiplicity and diversity that many of us live in and hope to acknowledge as a reality found and reflected in our scholarship. Speculative scholarship is tentative and thus rather impossible to repeat, teach, and even describe partially because language always fails. Speculative experimentation is less concerned about how materiality and research matter might talk back or have human agency and more interested in acknowledging that research matter’s dialogue and agency is possible and likely beyond human understanding, language, and consciousness. Like any theory, speculative theories are meaningless if they do not enable scholar to experiment and figure out things in the world. According to Weisman and Gandorfer (2021) “theory inhabits the gap between sensing and sense making. It is a sketch, a set of speculations of how to ethically and politically understand what we experience” (p.401). Weisman and Gandorfer exemplify speculation through forensic architecture which builds on a split of a second as a durational and lethal concept. Duration and spatial coordinates of a split of the second are in the continuous flux of matter, actions, and meanings. The indeterminate nature of split of the second makes this time-space lethal and extremely dangerous since it reveals the larger picture which unfolds within this molecular scale of time. A split of the second also functions as a zone of endless exceptions. In addition, Weisman and Gandorfer offers us matterphorical concepts as concepts that express the entanglements of matter and meaning within specific time-space frames. One might ask who benefits from speculation and why I propose that speculation is potentially needed and necessary in today’s Academia, scholarly climate, and field of qualitative inquiry. Our world is rapidly changing and we can no longer predict the most suitable methodological futures. Speculations may form infinite ways of life beyond academic capitalism, rigid citation indexes, and tenure clocks. Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) referred to caring as a speculative mode promoting interventions to become. Methodologies that speculate also wonder yet they don’t verify, offer fixed solutions, or pretend to understand the other and different. Instead, they care, connect and create educated guesses and various scenarios of possibility building on the exploratory, imaginative, and visionary powers of speculation (see also, Somekh, 2007). In some ways, speculation is about choosing and deciding without predictability and foreseeable future. Speculation also raises many questions without answers. For example, does speculation carry with itself an immanent critique of stability, norm, and of the anthropocentric? What critiques and collective discursive practices become possible within flat ontologies? Kaljonen et al (2019) described speculative approach to experimentation building from the philosophy of science, being open, hesitant, and involving participatory events. In this kind of experimentation, ‘participants’ can imagine and create new practices and framings. In speculative pragmatism qualities and knowledge are not mental building-blocks of real but practices ontologically emergent within nature. They are pre-objective and pre-personal functioning in shifting time frames. According to Manning (2016) “speculative pragmatism means taking the work’s affirmation, its urge of appetition, at face value, asking what though-feeling does in this instance, and how it does it. It means inquiring into the modes of existence generated by the act of “hypothetical sympathy”, honoring the minor gestures produced at this interstice, and seeing what these open up, in a transversal maneuvering (p.39-40)”. What might speculation do to a thought, to a thinking in action? Speculative inquiries, hesitant and slow scholarly projects are choices and these choices often come with bodily and material consequences. For example, speculative inquiry might emerge from collective subjects, immanent concepts, and relational objects urgently functioning as a crisis, pause, hesitation, horror, and revolt. New non-linear logic of speculative experimentation could function as non-consistent forces and dispersive matter. Can speculative projects forget their material and affective pasts? one might ask. How might spontaneous/restless/lightless inquiry feel? What might methodological hospitality look like? What degrees of freedom could today’s methodologies afford? How might speculation and speculative practices function in responsible ways? How might qualitative scholars think in knots and by tying themselves into knots in relation to spacetime and place? How could methodology as a matter of persuasion appeal to the experience of the other? Finally, “speculative philosophy has an irreducibly aesthetic dimension; it requires new, bold inventions rather than pacifying resolutions” (Shaviro, 2014, p.43). Shaviro writes that aesthetics includes feelings an object for its own sake beyond its legitimacy, usefulness, and interpretation. Aesthetics of methods offer affective potentialities through their relations and senses. More things are felt and sensed than known. Methods are a matter of degree and the world of methods is the world of experiencing relational differences. What happens to methods when the observer, individualism, and capitalisms are being removed? Maybe Alien phenomenology (Bogost, 2012) could offer some examples. Bogost draws attention to strange relational life of non-humans which could be analyzed through units, lists, excessive betweenness, configurations, and non-linear patterns. For example, when we can eliminate likeness-in-human-terms (within our scholarship), we may be able to attain the innerness of things of un-nameable units. What it is for the bat itself? Caring is creating and scholars could be moving from the problem of access to the problem of being with. Shaviro also proposes that “Knowledge is just one particular sort of relation- and not even an especially important one at that. Most of the time, entities affect other entities blindly, without knowledge playing a part at all” (p.105). Thus, Shaviro encourages us to speculate about things and experiences that we cannot access directly. Touch can be felt but not necessarily known. Every instance of beauty is something new. About (speculative) pluriverse Stengers (2018) in her book Another science is possible emphasizes the power of curiosity to bring things together, collectively and slowly change our world. [Slowing down science] “should involve an active taking into account of the plurality of the sciences, in dialogue with a plural, negotiated and pragmatic (that is, evaluated on its effects) definition of the modes of evaluation and valorisation relevant to different types of research” (p.52). After all sciences and inquiries are collective and value of individual and individualization is measured as a part of collective dynamics. According to Stengers speed also creates insensitivity. “Slowing down means becoming capable of learning again, becoming acquainted with things again, reweaving the bounds of interdependency. It means thinking and imagining, and in the process creating relationships with others that are not those of capture… the kind of relation… what a life worth living demands, and the knowledges that are worth being cultivated” (p.81-82). Could we imagine and experiment with methodologies which do not belong to ontological hierarchy? “All entities, of all sizes and scales, have the same degree of reality. They all interact with each other in the same way, and they all exhibit the same sorts of properties…Ontological equality comes from contact and mutual implication…They all become what they are by prehending other entities” (Shaviro, 2014, p. 29). The flattening of ontological hierarchies such as form and ground, past and future, foreground and distance could serve as productive provocations. Within this logic all methods are also embedded in other methods. Methods interact with each other also without human involvement. Methodological entities are distinct from each other only due to hesitant decision and spontaneous selection while still functioning within shared methodological and relational ecologies. Novelty arises from the act of positive decision and the act of decision is spontaneous and it cannot be predicted. A decision about methods needs to be done but it cannot be predicted or determined in advance. However, the creation of enabling constrains may assist scholars with these decisions and guide the processes of choosing, adding, subtracting, relating, juxtaposing, tweaking, and recombining and more. Provocation 3: Travel with a light beam in your home office/current workspace. Where does it take you? What methodologies could be added and subtracted? I conclude by advocating for methodological multiplicity in a worldly and experiential way (see Reiter, 2018). The world of multiple worlds, Pluriversity, is not an ontological project but a project of praxis. Escobar’s (2020) vision of pluriverse, following the Zapatistas concept “a world in which many worlds might fit” (p. 26) oscillates “between a politics of the real and a politics of the possible – between pragmatism and utopianism” (p. 226). Cultural, ecological, and methodological transitions characterize methodological movement within the pluriverse. In addition, this kind of methodological pluriverse takes into account biophysical, human, and spiritual elements. Diverse zones of contact beyond anthropocentricism become increasingly important. A methodological pluriverse of justices, matter(ings), and forms of critical qualitative inquiry offer new and alternative imaginaries. Mignold (2018) proposed that “pluriversity is not cultural relativism, but the entanglement of several cosmologies connected today in a power differential” (p.x). In methodological pluriversity methods and methodologies do not function as independent units but they are entangled through and by networks. One schema for methodological organization and design is no longer sufficient and different methodological approaches lay next to each other as pieces of mosaic. Mosaic methodologies search for alternative, limited, and contextual methodologies which potential is endless. Any form of knowledge is always in relation to other knowledges and methodologies. When methodologies are recognized as many physical, material, spiritual sites they are also brought closer to human and non-human lives and many materialities of these entangled spaces. Life maintaining and communal methodologies of the South and consuming and possessively individualistic methodologies of the North come together various hesitant but important ways. We desperately need more qualitative methodological sites outside the North America and qualitative research practice needs geographical decentering. As we further consider critical qualitative research that focuses on the complexities of justice matters(ings), the politics of research cannot be denied. Escobar (2018) provides a vantage point from which research can be approached as a political practice. He envisions a relational future which entails “the steady decentering and displacement of the capitalist economy…decentering of representative democracy and settling into the place of direct, autonomous, and communal forms of democracy; and the establishment of mechanisms of epistemic and cultural pluralism (interculturality) among various ontologies and cultural worlds” (p.76). In this kind of methodological world, methodological development is no longer the organizing principle but, rather, a variety of experiences and strategies are considered valid. Methodological processes are always under construction and criticality of our worlds and scholarship is a relational task and imperative. More specifically, this alternative world, a pluriverse, would carry forward epistemic decolonization, alternatives to methodological development, transitions to post extractivism, notions of civilization crisis, and communal logics. In addition, pluriversal methodologies build networks, assemblages, naturecultures, socionatures and strengthen distributed agency (Bennett, 2010) and and. Maybe it is a time for negomethodologies drawing from Shaw’s (2014) African feminism beyond individual methodological ecos and a move toward expanded ecological methodologies. It is clear that qualitative scholars are faced with modern methodological problems which do not have modern methodological solutions. The current methodological crisis has to do with specific kinds of world-making practices and fundamental methodological dualisms (theory-practice, mind-body, researcher-participants, reason-emotion, insider-outsider etc). More so, dualism itself is not the problem but hierarchies established around the binaries and hierarchical classification of difference shape our practices in problematic ways. Enacting non-binary and flat methodologies could be seen as a requirement for transformation and radical change. Healing of our fragmented methodological past and ontological practices by acknowledging hurt feelings and emotions could serve as one point of relationality. Massei (2004) encourages us, also qualitative researchers, to engage in the geographies of responsibility. It is good to remember that by designing methods/studies we design beings. Methodological design is as much ontological as relational task. About (methodological) futuring Escobar encourages us to think of the act, process, and design of futures; futuring- in this context methodological futuring. Methodological futurings can redesign themselves and work through breakdowns. It could be argued that the field of qualitative inquiry does not have methodological problems but methodological breakdowns. Methodological breakdowns bring to the forefront our current practices and tools. Some of these breakdowns might be anticipated and the insufficiency of current methodological tools offers opportunities for creation, experimentation, and invention. The shift from problems to breakdowns also positions knowing as relating and highlights connections rather than taking distance from the problems. How might methodologically sustainable futurings and productive breakdowns function? I agree with Ziai (2018) who problematizes progress and development especially since methodological progress and development does not always lead to democracy but potentially to various forms of violence and oppression. “There is no objectivity that can determine other people’s position and what they need. Socialization and economic planning are not necessarily the keys to a better world” (Ziai, 2018, p.124). A vision of different methodological world could include multiple scenarios. For example, existing ‘methodological rules’ could be changed at any time, all scholars could modify ‘rules’ based on comparable consequences, scholars would be able to leave methodological communities without exploitation and exclusion, dependency on specific kind of scholarly connections and citations would need to be eliminated so methodological dependency does not limit alternatives and make it impossible to leave the field and move across subdisciplines. Focus would be shifted from politics of discipline toward the politics of relationships. These kinds of scenarios might also mean that we need to unlearn various forms of hierarchical cooperation and expand our theories of free methodological connectivity and relationality. What if, …theories of systems and ecologies could help us to understand challenging problems. …objects and materiality could provoke thinking-doing without being themselves thought. …we could create diverse methodologies that protect and restore ecologies. …everyday life would serve as a context for methodological experiments. …we could support more place-based and globally networked methodologies. …we might utilize emergent encounters and participatory solutions and processes. …qualitative inquiry would build on continuously changing and diverse transdisciplinary knowledges and minor practices. …there are no more of the same but scholar go more frequently for the impossible. … the field of qualitative inquiry rotates methodological obligations and responsibilities. …the field of qualitative inquiry could create communities of radical methodologies. If light makes vision possible, I would like to end with one additional alternative title: “Other methodologies are possible and new methodological sensibilities on their way. It is time to dim our lights and see (the invisible)”. Thank you. Jessica: Thank you so much Mirka for your inspiring and thought provoking talk as always. You always leave me with a lot to process. So, we are lucky that we have two fabulous respondents this evening to help us process and think through some of what you presented us with. So, our first discussing is Aaron Kuntz. Dr Kuntz: Thank you. Oh geez you turn on the zoom video and I feel like I'm staring at my driver's license photo which isn't a great thing so my apologies in advance. Well thanks so much for the paper and for inviting me to respond. I'd like to thank, of course Mirka for this provocative paper. My mother always told me that I don't listen well and she's right so it was a delight to have the paper and material form as engaged with the ideas and to see I was privileged enough to see some drafts, as it went through so it's really neat to see how things are processed. So there's much to engage within this paper and Mirka's work more generally. So, for the sake of time. I think I'll focus in on notions of experimentation, plurality and ethical engagement in somewhat entangled order and offer a sense of inquiry, as an experimental way of making the just imbued with an ethical force for change. I'll begin my offering to overarching questions that this talk, provoked for me. Question one, what are the problems, to which speculative experimentation, respond or engage, or question to what problems are made possible through speculative experimentation. What breakdowns are enabled. So these questions arise because problems and practices and strategies are productively entangled, as do lose in glossary note, all concepts are connected to problems, without which they would have no meaning. And so I wonder about how the very notion of speculative experimentation are connected to problems and particular context, one potential issue might have to deal with the anxiety inducing problem of chaos anxiety for me anyways, that if we have no definitive future, nor defined present, then we live in a chaotic world, and speculative and experimental practices only amplify that multiplicity. Importantly, Elizabeth Grosz notes that chaos need not be understood as absolute or complete disorder, but in her words, rather as a plethora of orders forms with forces that cannot be distinguished or differentiated from each other. It's, it's for me it's the blurring of definition that manifest chaos. the overabundance of order, not its absence. So perhaps this is part of the effect of sadness or worry that permeates some work today, and creates I think into Marcus words that we have too much order, we have too much form too much will the excess of which overwhelmed and chaos ensues. As there was a braid it notes. This in her terms, too much this is one of the sources of exhaustion, which mass marks, so much of our current predicament, and ultimately brings about a shrinkage of our ability to take in and on the world that we are in, simply because it hurts too much to take in, and on. So, we perhaps turn to experimental engagements with this too much this this xxs that exhausts, which brings its own problems, of course, and that's a good thing. So on experimentation. I'm not creative, never claimed to be at least not in the conventional sense of the term, I can't sing, or I can but my singing does not mean even the most progressive claims of aesthetic worth. I'm also not a visual artist as such things such as experimental inquiry approaches, often simultaneously astound me scare me move me and closed me off from engagement, a multiplicity of effects, indeed, if I am creative I suppose it is through a sense of conceptual creativity, but I have manifest through an ongoing engagement with philosophy. Again I turned to Elizabeth gross who considers philosophy, the way would wayward sibling of art, a kinship as both enactments emphasize the degree of experimentalism as a means to create new relations, new problems, a few future not yet created as gross so eloquently writes, I love this phrasing she has twin wraps over chaos philosophy and art, along with their more serious sibling, the sciences in frame chaos. Each in its own way, in order to extend something consistent composed eminent, which it uses for its own ordering and also the ranging resources. There's a double mess here, right, of course that calls forth the productive potential and reduction of philosophy art and science, in one sense speech allows for a means to encounter chaos in meaningful ways. And another sense such processes of ordering might well lead to attaining of difference, a closing off of potential in order to allow for things to, Well make sense. And so as we engage with Marcus provocations, wondering what methodology is become possible when we dim the lights. I wonder about what might orient us how we might enact and eminent positioning that is not dependent on the prolific ordering have a past yet does not transcribe pure relativism through derangements either. This is a question I think of ethics. And I wonder about the potential for inquiry work to think the just as Michel Foucault termed it or more deliberately inquiry as a means to make the just because for co thinking that just requires an overt political stance that begins with an ethical positioning, a determination that normalized governing processes are untenable. Further, thinking as deludes notes, means to experiment and to problem that's thinking that just begins with an act of experimental refusal no longer abiding by the claims of convention and entails an imminent, making thinking that just dust becomes making the adjust and making the just might articulate as a process of entangling an ethical determination to produce a difference with an orienting belief in another future potential that we might become differently, through different relations animated by different forces within a materially generative world. I'm interested in in inquiry is making the just because I sense within Marcus work and ethical commitment, one that emphasizes and affirmative ethical engagement with potential, and a determination to experiment with that potential to speculate on what might yet become so hers would seem to be more than a neutral stance and what is to be done. This is important to note and contemporary work that engages with flattened hierarchies, how does one and unethical engagement with the world admits such flattening indeed a flattened hierarchical perspective is often critiqued for its political naivete and refusal to acknowledge histories of asymmetrical relations of power that is some would argue that flattening traditional hierarchies conveniently erase historical context that disproportionately govern some groups and privilege others, such a perspective may conveniently overlook a legacy of exploitative relations that are only extended through a dismissal of material hierarchy. In short, it is quite possible that the rush to lay claim to rise a medic expressions of flattened hierarchies extends from a privilege of not experiencing a legacy of power claims on one's person. As such, this theoretical embrace of a dispersed system stems from privileges gained from conventional hierarchies and systems of power. Such context situated, even the most well intentioned critique as reformist in order. Born from and transcribing the very exploited to relations they claim to disrupt. As an alternative, a materialist critique might complicate the smoothing of conventional hierarchies, for what Thomas nail terms, a twisted ontology in which different regions of matter are unevenly developed and circulated this twisted ontology remains vital to considerations of exploitation and material inequity that seemed to have fallen out of theoretical favor of late, our contemporary moment is rife with uneven material agencies, and that unevenness matters. Further our inquiry work certainly has a generative role in twisting ontology locating some ways of living as important for recognition, even critique and excluding others. As a consequence that remains important to locate those uneven exploitative relations map their intersections, even exclusions and consider their effect on ontological levels. As a practice of transgression inquiry martyred articulate as a type of challenge from within one and habits a limit in order to manifest a transgression. Because limits, always hold the material for transgressive potential experimental inquiry uses the condition of limits to manifest the rupture, and acting a future yet unknown. Recognizing the symbiotically productive relations of limits and transgressions shifts the intention and work of the inquiry. It's not simply enough to strive to break and limit, one must use the material of the limit to generate something else. This is a creative or experimental experimental relation to limit, one that manufacturers difference, were once there was only repetition such it is that inquiry must be decided the materialists in order to generate transgressions through governing limits, one must discern and intervene within the material conditions that make our governance possible. And this word begins from a place of ethical determination that are present exploitative relations are untenable. We cannot bear them anymore transgressive change extends from the very sensation of living then through the material world. 00:43:18.000 --> 00:43:36.000 In her provocative book entitled, what comes after entanglement ever Gerard advocates for an ethical engagement with exclusion, recognizing in her words the entities practices and ways of being that are for closed when other entangled realities are materialized. This perspective aligns with the notion of twisted ontology as I spoke of earlier is one locates those become things that are short circuited by the layered build up that occurs when some ontological formations are twisted together governed into relation, and others are necessarily excluded the landscape of twisted ontology is is one of uneven development and exclusion some relations are deemed to matter more than others and the processes of such mattering requires ethical deliberation and an emergent sense of responsibility as Gerard goes on to right attention also needs to be paid to the frictions foreclosures and exclusions that play a constituent a role in the composition of lives reality centralizing and politicizing these exclusions is vital and carving out space for intervention, examining rational exclusions is constitutive of our contemporary moment is an ethical act of inquiry for Gerard when that generates the conditions necessary for intervention. And for Gerard those constitutive fictions frictions foreclosures and exclusions serve as an important and often theoretically overlooked entry point for material analysis, more than the density of the entanglements themselves, it is their limits, those spaces were identified relations fade into necessary exclusions that provide opportunities for ethical engagement deliberation and contingent action. Let's it is that experimental inquiry necessary necessarily an X, X of difficult recognition, we are bound by and responsible for these tragic circumstances belief, we might be otherwise, and virtue, we must become differently. Experimental inquiry is in short and ethically laden making a means of generating the Justin circumstances that overwhelm through perpetuating injustice. This might bring us to a series of provocative, I think questions that call and Krugman asks, and I think extend from Marcus work. Here are the questions, what are the problems we cannot be, what are the problems we cannot but feel the force of over what and why are we constantly anxious and inevitably distraught. What are the problems with which we wrap and work our lives in burning intensities. In many ways I remain emboldened through Brady's notion that we practice a pragmatic engagement with the present in order to collectively construct conditions that transform and empower our capacity to act ethically and produce social horizons of hope, or sustainable futures for me inquiry is part and parcel of such resistive and productive practice. This is inquiry as an ontological way of living, motivated by ethical force, a way of reading the future into the present to borrow the phrasing of JK get some grand and work is work reminds us, this can be joyful experimentation, an exuberant experimental engagement with the not yet. And similarly, as for co admonished. Do not think that one has to be said in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable through inquiry we engage with the president as a delusion and music witness blurring the governing processes and practices of fascism, such that they lose their precise purpose, creating relational conditions through which specific forms of resistive potential become a new through inquiry we might engage the present to break its violent hold on our very being utilizing the circumstances that enforce our exhaustion such that we might become otherwise through inquiry we stand vigil look out for potential change, refusing the governing limitations of the status quo and using the material of our contemporary moment to generate a transformative difference. My thanks to Mirka's paper for helping to provide provoke these thoughts, and to all of you for listening. Thank you. Jessica: Thank you so much, Aaron such an exciting response I'm like all jazzed up now after here in New York I'm hearing you. I'm really looking forward to this being on the podcast so that we can revisit and re listen and continue to learn. So our next. Our next response is from Juha and I am going to do my best to share a YouTube video, and play. Perfect. Juha: Thank you miracle for your mind provoking talk, and for inviting me to comment on it. It's been my great pleasure to follow your career and success over the years. And here are my comments. Just let you put it in your speech global anti capitalist perspective is necessary. If we are to survive as a species. During the past year, a virus known as covert 19 halted the world. It's a biological fact that we can't wish away, but it has had tremendous social and political consequences worldwide. We cannot change the mechanisms, the wireless works and mutates, but like navigators who sense the strength of the wind, and its direction. We can take those laws into account in our actions. Neglecting them can result in a fatal multi organism disease. Like a mistake in a vacation can cause a shipwreck. Therefore, I must say all the sheep and take the storm caused by the wires into account in at least two ways. First, I may reason that life is dangerous. In any case, continue to meet people and ignore possible consequences for my health. Second, I can think that health is wider and therefore, I want to follow safety measures, wash my hands. Keep social distance and wear a mask. As I cannot escape the fact of covert 19. I still have the freedom to choose what effects. I allow it to have on me and my actions. Besides, by following the necessary safety measures. I take care of myself and my fellow beings. And by doing so, carry my collective responsibility. Indeed, many have had to consider how to live, not to become infected, or infect others, the recommendations of health experts have been clear. But humans are not machines. They take the official messages in their judgment and relate them to the totality of the individual lives. The weighing of these options on human decision and meaning making interests me as a qualitative researcher and a social scientist. The options can be seen in a continuum where at the other end of the other end. People lot live their lives as useful. And at the other follow safety measures, quite literally. The rationales and logics for these options vary. Perhaps the most exciting answers come from the unresponsive and individualistic risk takers. Who otter. Yes, of course, there is a risk of infection. And it makes me think. But even then, the philosopher gh fun rate has presented a general model of action, in which he distinguishes the result and consequence of an act. On the one hand, the result of the act of opening a window. Is that a certain window is open these consequences. A state of affairs, which by virtue of course or necessity, come about. When the Act has been done. On the other hand, a consequence of the act of opening a window, may be the temperature in the room goes down, or as the famous poet bent this article ski writes about a possible consequence. The bird could fly in. What makes makes the logic of human action and decision making, related to the covert 19, so special is the collective nature. My individual decisions are associated with a type global network of others choices. The post pandemic time will finally tell if the window has been open or closed. And how many black Corbett 19 ravens have flown in We managed to transform our teaching online early on, even during the pandemic my workplace down but a university succeeded to produce or produce enough degrees to fulfill its promise to the Ministry of Education and Culture, The largest funder of the universities in Finland. We have proven to be good academic workers, perhaps too good for the success came at a price, the temporary University's campus plan approved by the University Board in Fall 2020 states that, and I quote, the experience gained through the covert 19 pandemic highlights the need for flexible learning and working solutions. In particular, where digital and physical environments merge to support that user's data lives, and well being. Quote ends. In addition, the plan includes the promise and I quote, dumper the university's goal is to be carbon neutral by 2030. As part of the target, its office and teaching spaces, will be reduced by 25%, quote, and I guess no one sees anything wrong with the carbon neutrality. but many made the math and calculated. One plus one equaling that the university would eliminate our faculty building. In fact, carbon neutrality may be mayor smoke and mirrors the true reason being cost savings. under the neoliberal regime. The canvas planned. You know University is another example of the new management University managerial capitalist University. To add insult to injury. Due to the COVID 19 restrictions on the campus. The university managers could launch the plan without fearing that we teachers and students occupy the University, University building, as we did a few years ago, consequence. Consequently, it's possible that we lose our office spaces seminar rooms lecture halls, and more importantly, our sense of community, and perhaps turn into digital nomads without any other social existence than our digital presence. Many might feel betrayed. Maybe we managed to do our job too well and won the race to the bottom, the capitalist neoliberal University. As the world doesn't seem to follow the Broadway. The harder you work, the luckier you get, but quite reverse. Perhaps tomorrow we don't say that. We do killed the radio star. But that digital shift at our office space In the future, we might not teach in the shadow of the Corbett 19 anymore, or under the mango tree as Paulo Ferreira in Finland it's too cold for that. But carry on our solitary talk only in the Digital's fair. Okay, I do know the world though there is much, much crazier and uglier than this, and the ills of the world are last. But God is in detail. We cannot take our position as educational and social scientists for granted anymore. For it's not only the managerial University. That is after the critical scholar, but also the news media. Believe it or not, we have only one national newspaper in Finland Helsingin Sanomat plus few other regionals. A couple of days ago Helsingin Sanomat published but an editorial in which one of the editors in chief stated as follows, and I quote, the father, one goes from the core of science to the social humanistic and ultimately artistic research, the less empirical evidence, there is in academic competition. And the more ideological the reshoots becomes the editor then shared the editorial on Twitter and wrote. It seems that this editorial has raised diverse debate, the speculative assumption in the text was that academic competition would seem to have a greater tendency to become idealized. When there are no clear criteria in the field to compare theories, Ideally, just to become ideal a choice. Yes. When there are no clear criteria in the field or to compare theories. Quote ends, a sociologist, then asked, and I quote, I continue your speculation by asking what is in your view, the clear criteria to compare those theories in science lacking in social sciences, which prevents the power of ideologies. The editor replies Scientific Method. Then the philosopher of science intervenes. Would you like to tell us what is that what is the scientific method that we philosophers of science, despite many attempts, haven't been able to find one. This was also a quote. It seems to me that the powerful national media outlets mighty editor has aligned with the populist right, the conservative right, the racist right and the matches. And we have had a wake up call in so many places in the biological, psychological, social and political spheres. We cannot stay in our coupon compartments any longer. We need, what miracle was talking about poor diversity. We need to join forces as miracle and Fred, poor thing. Put it in a few years back, and I quote, this quote ends my comments. Scholars need to stop engaging in research activities for research sake, only research needs to serve the public citizens, students, parents, teachers and so on. Social Science Research should be a collaborative effort, and a form of public science. It's time to consider how to increase methodological attentiveness and the potential of collaborative inquiry that builds on collective yet contradictory stories extract and material life experiences. Thank you so much and congratulations Mirka.

What's up to my darling dandy Dalmatians and cryptic kooky capybaras!Welcome back to another dazzling edition of the BNP y'all! This week's episode is a throwback for all you OG BNP heads out there - a solo kaleidoscope of vignettes covering such diverse topics as the inscrutability of depression and anxiety, the pantheon of the Hohokam and Pueblo peoples, a deconstruction of the corporate media's breathless praise of the Biden admin, to the nature of the cosmos and Universe itself. So strap in, spark up and lean back for this one. We travel far and wide. I can haz five stars? Please rate, review and subscribe to the BNP wherever you listen to podcasts!I can haz more audience? Spread the word and tell a friend! I can haz financial suppprt? Throw the BNP a couple bucks a months and gain not only bonus content but also hella good karma and for a limited time, a free complimentary cargo container packed to the gills with health live newts! Act now, supplies of newt-filled cargo containers are moving fast. I can haz followers? Check me out on IG @conantannerUntil next week everyone, take care of yourselvesand each other.One Love,ConanTRACK LIST FOR THIS EPISODE Bach - Orchestral Suite in D Major #3Dykotomi - Corvid CrunkHome Town Jazzy Lo Fi MixPopulous feat. Ela Minus - Azul OroRavyn Lenae - Moon Shoes The Supremes - You Can't Hurry Love Woodie Guthrie - I Ain't Got No Home In This WorldJhene Aiko - Eternal SunshineNas - Made You Look (Drezo Remix)Jazzy Town Lo Fi Hip Hop MixPopulous - Flores del Mar feat. EmmanuelleKY TO - Japanese Lo Fi Hip Hop MixJanelle Monae feat. Jidenna - Yoga LINKS TO SOURCES:Hohokam MythsBody of a Woman by Pablo NerudaSupport the show (http://www.patreon.com/noetics)

This Week, Jay (https://www.instagram.com/who_is_iiwaa/) and I, Imogen Arate (https://www.instagram.com/imogenarate/), discuss our respective poems, "Bridge Poem" and "At Least He Inspires Me to Write," and acknowledging an absence Get Jay's poem at: http://www.aigrayson.com/buysoundest/soundest-zine-5 You can also follow Jay at https://twitter.com/who_is_iiwaa and read his work at: https://www.sorrowcircle.com/ Check out this episode to also hear about virtual poetry events taking place during the week of November 23rd. Links to topics we touched on: 1. The amount of oxygen the Amazon supplies: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/amazon-fire-earth-has-plenty-oxygen/596923/ 2. Hohokam: https://www.arizonamuseumofnaturalhistory.org/plan-a-visit/mesa-grande/the-hohokam and https://www.archaeologysouthwest.org/free-resources/fact-sheets/who-or-what-is-the-hohokam/ 3. Hummingbird facts: https://www.adirondackcouncil.org/page/blog-139/news/10-facts-about-hummingbirds--and-other-interesting-tidbits-1101.html Photo of Jay Mercado by Abrielle Meyer (https://www.instagram.com/abrielle1312/). #Poetrypodcasts #PoetsandMuses #ImogenArate #JayMercado #MultidisciplinedArtist #Piipaash #Quechan #FlagstaffAZ #IAIA #MFAinPoetry #RecordingArtist #Dysphoria #ThunderbirdReadingSeries #COVID #crushpoem #acrosticpoem #poetryasperformanceart #immensegrieve #lettinggo #embracinganewnormal #catharticexperience #BachelorsofMusic #MinorinAnthropology #CasaGrandeAZ #lungsoftheworld #Amazonfire #timecapsule #relationshipwithanotherperson #senseofabsence #acknowledginganabsence #Michaelscraftstore #NewYorkerCartoon #afarewellletter #familiaryetdistantache #captureafeeling #CapitalIIndigenous #globalcommunityofIndigenouspeople #Hohokam #Huhugam #Oodham #hummingbirds #sacrednessofthenatural #mechanicalheart #unrequitedfeelings #StrongholdCoffeeCompany

Phoenix Historian Steve Schumacher discusses Phoenix's 150th Anniversary.  How the founders chose the location out of three areas, the association with the Hohokam culture and how Phoenix got the name.  Dr. Sky talks about Mars and the Halloween moon.  And this week's blog on fasteners.

Junior-college football in Arizona? After all JuCo football programs were removed from the state in 2018, the Hohokam junior college football league was formed and it allows opportunities for players who still want to pursue football as a career or use it to earn educational scholarships at other schools. Sonoran Sidewinders head coach Christian Vitale joined the podcast to discuss the ongoing struggle of building a football program in Tucson especially during a global pandemic, and why his team has value to the Southern Arizona community. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Explore the discomfort of disconnect in identity with James Kim's MOONFACE, a realistic, semi-autobiographical audio drama mini-series about a gay Korean-American man's struggle to come out to his mother using the language they can both understand. Like what you hear? Us too. You can support James Kim on his website. About Radio Drama Revival: Learn more about how to support Radio Drama Revival on our website Support Elena Fernández Collins on Patreon Support Wil Williams and Anne Baird on Patreon Support Eli McIlveen and Sean Howard on Patreon Find Fred Greenhalgh on his website Find David Rheinstrom on Twitter Find Rashika Rao on Twitter You shall not find the elusive Heather Cohen This episode of Radio Drama Revival was recorded on the unceded territories of the Akimel O'odham and Hohokam peoples. If you are seeking ways in which to donate to Native communities, the Aniwa Gathering of Elders and the Boa Foundation are raising community relief funds for six reservations: Oglala Lakota, Hopi, Lenape-Ramapough, Apache, Diné (Navajo) and Tohono O'odham communities. You can donate to their GoFundMe.

This week I’m sharing a conversation I had with a wonderful human that I’m privileged to call my friend.Li’o is a trans, non binary, queer Samoan in diaspora in Turtle Island (known colonially as the US. Occupying O’odham, Akimel O’odham (Upper Pima), & Hohokam lands (known colonially as Arizona)They are first-generation born in the US to a Samoan immigrant mom from Mālie, Samoa and white-American dad from Illinois.After many years of body-image issues from being teased about their weight, Li’o initially set out to move their body as a way to appease others that uphold an unattainable beauty standard.Even throughout their journey in realising they are queer and non binary, they would move their body to try and attain the commonly-represented body type of white AFAB non binary folks.Now, they move for much more ancient, grounded reasons.If you want to get in contact with Li’o or follow them on the socials, you can find them on Instagram and Twitter at the handle @liolemasina.If you have any questions about this episode or would like to learn about how we may be able to support you, you can go to www.fearlessmovement.co and send us a message or jump in and try out our 7 day free trial or join our at home training program.Also feel welcome to pop in and leave a review at Apple Podcast or any other place you may be able to leave a review.You can follow us on facebook at Fearless Movement Collective or on Instagram by following non_gendered_fitness, fearless_movement_co or Bowie as the.no.t.enbie.

Archeologists have discovered evidence that the ancestral Sonoran Desert people who built the Casa Grande also developed wide-scale irrigation farming and extensive trade connections which lasted over a thousand years until about 1450 C.E. Archeologists call a site where there are earthen buildings, red on buff pottery, and extensive canals "Hohokam" but this is not the name of a tribe or a people. Years of misunderstanding have confused the ancestors of the O'Odham, Hopi, and Zuni people with the name Hohokam, which is not a word in any of their languages nor the name of a separate people. Padre Kino, Juan Bautista de Anza, and Stephen Kearney.The Casa Grande was abandoned around 1450 C.E. Since the ancestral Sonoran Desert people who built it left no written language behind, written historic accounts of the Casa Grande begin with the journal entries of Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino when he visited the ruins in 1694. In his description of the large ancient structure before him, he wrote the words "casa grande" (or "great house") which are still used today. More became known about the ruins with the later visits of Lt. Col. Juan Bautista de Anza's expedition in 1775 and Brig. Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny's military detachment in 1846. Subsequent articles written about the Casa Grande increased public interest. During the 1860s through the 1880's, more people began to visit the ruins with the arrival of a railroad line twenty miles to the west and a connecting stagecoach route that ran right by the Casa Grande. The resulting damage from souvenir hunting, graffiti, and outright vandalism raised serious concerns about the preservation of the Casa Grande. (Source) Casa Grande ruins 1902Perhaps nowhere is the blending of modernity and tradition more evident than at the Casa Grande Ruins National Monument. Casa Grande was constructed between AD 1200-1450 by the Native American Hohokam near Phoenix, Arizona. In 1892, President Benjamin Harrison created the Casa Grande Ruin Reservation to protect the one of a kind “Casa Grande”, or Great House, thus becoming the first prehistoric and cultural site to be established in the United States.

Part 2 of Witches and Mysticism in the Prehistoric Southwest US: True Stories from an ArchaeologistSpeaker: Ryan Howell, M.A. ———————————————————— Ryan Howell was an archaeologist for 15 years working primarily in the American Southwest and Northwest Mexico. At this event, he will discuss several archaeological projects, touching on witch burials, ancient mysticism, and the modern beliefs among native tribes in Arizona. Ryan will introduce you to the Hohokam of the Tucson Basin as well as the Homol'ovi that occupied the deserts outside of Winslow, Arizona and who are the ancestors of the modern day Hopi Tribe. The talk will mix stories, history, and photos from the archaeological excavations, and will include time for Q&A. Ryan's stories have appeared on national radio programs such as Tales from the South and he was named the 2015 Best Storyteller in Tulsa. The event is hosted in partnership with Story Club Tulsa. ———————————————————— Think & Drink is like a TED Talk, but enhanced with alcohol. Each month, someone with a deep understanding of a specific STEM field will provide insight into their field, research, or related topic. Presentations are informal and discussion is encouraged. Presented by The STEMcell Science Shop. ADULT CONTENT AND STRONG LANGUAGE USED. Music by Doron Deutsch. www.storyclubtulsa.com ADULT CONTENT AND STRONG LANGUAGE USED. Music by Doron Deutsch. www.storyclubtulsa.com

Part 1 of Witches and Mysticism in the Prehistoric Southwest US: True Stories from an ArchaeologistSpeaker: Ryan Howell, M.A.————————————————————Ryan Howell was an archaeologist for 15 years working primarily in the American Southwest and Northwest Mexico. At this event, he will discuss several archaeological projects, touching on witch burials, ancient mysticism, and the modern beliefs among native tribes in Arizona. Ryan will introduce you to the Hohokam of the Tucson Basin as well as the Homol'ovi that occupied the deserts outside of Winslow, Arizona and who are the ancestors of the modern day Hopi Tribe. The talk will mix stories, history, and photos from the archaeological excavations, and will include time for Q&A. Ryan's stories have appeared on national radio programs such as Tales from the South and he was named the 2015 Best Storyteller in Tulsa. The event is hosted in partnership with Story Club Tulsa.————————————————————Think & Drink is like a TED Talk, but enhanced with alcohol. Each month, someone with a deep understanding of a specific STEM field will provide insight into their field, research, or related topic. Presentations are informal and discussion is encouraged.Presented by The STEMcell Science Shop.ADULT CONTENT AND STRONG LANGUAGE USED. Music by Doron Deutsch. www.storyclubtulsa.com

Phoenix was built on agriculture. Without the efforts of early settlers to revive the Hohokam canal system to grow crops, we wouldn't be here today.  But the abundance of land, good climate and accessible water drew new residents and businesses en mass. The more the population grew, the more land was converted to from agricultural land to residential land.  The result? The west valley lost 31% of its agricultural land between 2000 and 2017. The east valley lost almost 54% of agricultural land during the same time.  How are urban farmers in the Valley surviving? And what does the future of farming look like? If you're looking for more on this subject, read this story from Arizona Republic reporter Joshua Bowling.

Wassup beautiful world! It's just me in the studio today, pontificating on solar power, sun worship, past lives, the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, the Battle of Thermopylae, the Finnish idea of Sisu, a meta-analysis of the podcast medium and more! We finish things off right with a booty-shakin' bass mix by Oakland, CA based DJ/Producer Jodie Arumi. (https://soundcloud.com/aarumi)Support the show (http://www.patreon.com/noetics)

Photo by Mike Portt This week, we're headed to the land of bean trees & cholla buds: the Sonoran Desert. Home to UNESCO's new capital of gastronomy, Tucson, we'll trace the desert's diverse culinary history, from the cornfields of the Hohokam to the mission gardens of the German Jesuits. Why did 18th century missionaries bring fruit trees to Sonora? Could heritage wheat be the solution to sustainable farming in southern Arizona? We'll look at several projects revitalizing the ancient foodways of the desert, including exclusive interviews with Jesús Garcia, co-founder of the Kino Heritage Fruit Trees Project, and Sonya Norman, public programs coordinator at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.  Written & Produced by Laura Carlson Technical Direction by Mike Portt Quotations from Father Pfeffercorn's Sonora: A Description of the Province (Southwest Center Series) (Trans. Theodore E. Treutlein) Click here for show notes, including information about the mission gardens, Sonoran recipes, and more!  Find on iTunes | Find on Stitcher | RSS Link for Other Podcast Apps Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We live on top of the Hohokam—their buildings, ball courts, canals, fields, and bodies—yet most of us know nothing about them. Maybe that shouldn't come as a surprise. Arizona residents are famously transient and even Americans in relatively stable communities are often ignorant of the Indian landscapes underneath them. Sometimes that's because it's easier to ignore Indian history than confront the questions raised by studying the past, other times that's because Indian worlds are so thoroughly erased that they're hard to imagine or narrativize. I am ignorant of the Hohokam world—embarrassingly so, both as a Tucsonense and as someone with Hohokam pottery in his back yard. A few childhood visits to Casa Grande National Monument and half of a class in graduate school left me with some impressions, but little sense of who the Hohokam actually were and what their world looked, tasted, and sounded like. Luckily, the professor who taught the Hohokam portion of my grad school class was Paul Fish, an archaeologist who has been studying the Hohokam for over three decades. Six years later, when I emailed Paul and his wife Suzy (also a Hohokam archaeologist), they agreed to show me around one of their dig sites. This episode is the heavily-edited result of three hours of walking around the Marana Platform Mound site. My hope was to draw a picture of Hohokam life, to animate a subject that is intensely human and yet, so often, frustratingly vague and distant. We spoke about trade and architecture, food and society, but drawing inferences about the past from an incomplete record of material evidence is difficult and imprecise. An intensely emotion-driven narrative would be impossible here, which makes my job as a storyteller especially difficult, but we've got a wealth of intriguing clues and ephemera that will, hopefully, help you look at the landscape (and the agave) with an added layer of richness. I've decided to leave this episode with only a brief mention of the Hohokam collapse/transition/pivot/whatever in the fifteenth century. This isn't because I don't find that moment fascinating, but because I wanted this episode dedicated to the regular Hohokam world. I will return to the dramatic fifteenth century in a future episode which, I suspect, is going to be titled Who are the Hohokam? As the title suggests, I want to trace the Hohokam legacy from their archaeological end to the present day, to understand a bit more about the points of continuity and difference between the Hohokam and current Indian groups, and to explore the story behind why Casa Grande National Monument no longer uses the term "Hohokam."

Highlights of the Film: “More Than Bows And Arrows” This award-winning film has become the most popular film about Native Americans ever produced. It documents many of the invaluable, and often overlooked, contributions the American Indians have given to the United States and the rest of the world. Bows documents the contributions of Native Americans to the development of the United States and Canada, from net fishing on Northwest cliffs to prehistoric mounds, from medicine men to Arizona's ancient Hohokam irrigation canals. Narrated by Dr. N. Scott Momaday, the first Native American to win a Pulitzer Prize. The post Bay Native Circle – February 24, 2010 appeared first on KPFA.

Episode: 564 - Jeopardy: The Cubs May Ditch HoHoKam, A Game of Sell or Buy Takes a Look at the Cubs New Hitting Coach and New Direction, and a Question of Fan Intelligence (October 22) - Cubscast 2009 Season Podcasts - Cubscast.com - Hosted By: Lou, Sheps & Sneetch

Take a video tour of a prehistoric rockpile field near Tumamoc Hill in Tucson, narrated by Dr. Suzanne Fish, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology Curator at the Arizona State Museum. The video was shot in August 2000.