Podcasts about holly you

Planning ahead for elder care is a crucial aspect of financial planning that often gets overlooked. Kick off your journey towards securing your financial future with this latest episode - a conversation with seasoned Financial Advisor, Holly Carroccio, CFP.  In this discussion, we explored the intricacies of elder care and long-term financial planning. Holly, with over 34 years of experience, divulged invaluable insights into the significance of long-term care insurance, estate planning, and being prepared for life's unexpected twists. Discover how to navigate the challenges of balancing financial responsibilities, caregiving, and planning for your own future. Learn from Holly's wealth of knowledge as we unravel the complexities of insurance, retirement planning, and caring for aging parents. If you find yourself in the midst of deciphering these financial intricacies, this episode is a must-listen. Holly's expertise and practical advice will empower you to make informed decisions and take proactive steps towards securing your financial future. Tune in to gain the insights needed to make wise choices and navigate the path toward a financially stable and fulfilling second season of life. Take charge of your sleep after 40 with my FREE E-BOOK! Learn "The Exact Steps it Takes to Restore Sleep" and start making real changes now! https://bit.ly/4cblYcT TRANSCRIPT Links to articles and documents referenced appear at the end of the interview text. Betty Murray: All right, Holly. So I, as I said in my introduction, you know, Holly, and I had this conversation and I was like, this is something we have to talk about. So, for anybody that has not listened to menopause mastery before. My mom went through a heart attack and stroke last year, and you know, one of the most valuable things is she made it to 88 going on 89 And that was her first time to be in the hospital, but it was a catastrophic heart attack and stroke and she went from basically living on her own doing everything to basically not being able to do activities of daily living. So, to say I was thrown into and immersed in this world of elder care would be putting it mildly. And to be honest, my parents did a lot to plan for it, but the amount of disruption in my life and what it would take as far as managing it was and still is overwhelming. And Holly has so much to give here, as a woman in this world, and I was like we have to have this conversation. You know, the other thing, Holly, I can tell you that after 20 years in practice, every woman I see is either doing it or will be doing it or has done it, period, end of sentence. We will spend our life taking care of others. And this is a big part of it. So, this is an important conversation. I'm so happy to have you. Holly: Thank you glad to be here. Absolutely. I think it's a great topic and so important. Betty: Yeah, so Holly I know you're a Certified Financial Planner and you obviously love working with individuals and especially business owners. How did how did you pick that as like this is what I'm going to do what did you always want to be in this world? Holly: You know, I get asked that question a lot. And I think the start of it was when I was in college, my dad went through a major financial setback right in the middle of college because there was a recession in the eighties in real estate. And he notified me that hey, you're on your own financially. From now on, and I was like, “Oh my gosh”, what am I going to do? How, how will I pay tuition, et cetera. And it just made me realize how things can come out of nowhere in life and how important it is to plan and so that became a very laser focus for me, and I was a finance major already. And I just thought, you know, I really want to help people that are struggling making financial decisions and I work a lot with entrepreneurs to who put all their money back into their company and I think that's okay. And it is until it isn't. And so, I really like helping business owners and just people in general prepare for their future. Betty: Yeah, yeah, I think it's, I have a lot of friends that are like, you know, I'll just stick my head in the sand and I'm just going to you know, pretend it's not there. I am like, it's really important. Holly: Yeah, it's coming, someday your future will come. Betty: It's kind of like menopause. You don't get a pass on menopause. You don't get a pass on the future. Let's dive in. Because like I said, this is this is such an important topic. So, what are some of the things that a woman that may be in this time period of life, maybe she hasn't done a lot of planning? Or, you know, the other thing that I find too, is often if their partner they sort of let the partner do the planning, and they're not necessarily involved, which is equally as frightening to me. But what are some of the things women in this time period of life really need to start thinking about? Because we're a little bit probably behind the eight ball if we haven't done anything. Holly: That's true. That's true. So, of course, retirement planning is important and if people are working with a financial professional, that's probably one of the main things that they're focused on. Where I see a lot of gap is in the risk management area, and in estate planning. And so, a lot of financial professionals focus in more on the wealth management and investing. But risk management is important because it doesn't matter if you're worth $500,000 or $5 million. If you have a risk come out of nowhere. It can really destroy your financial plan. And so, one of those risks is that we live a long time and longevity is great. You know, especially if they do all the things that you recommend and stay healthy. But you know, the double-edged sword of that is if you live long time, you may end up being frail and need help or you may have some morbidity issue late in life where you need care. And care is extremely expensive. It can run anywhere from 6005 to 21,000 a month1, depending on where you need it. How much you need it. Who's doing it, etc. And so, if we don't prepare for it, a lot of people assume, “Oh, Medicare covers that, or my health insurance covers that”. Or if I don't have any money, Medicaid will cover it. And so, and I can explain a little bit more some of those things. But, you know, and not only our care, but if you're young enough to think about your parents and have those open conversations with your parents. That's really important too because that risk can also fall on us. If our parents haven't prepared. Betty: Absolutely. I mean, it's the average woman will spend 18 years caring for elderly individuals, statistically, and at least one of those I'm sure there's a bunch of different variables, but if your family hasn't prepared, you know, could be a leading cause of loss of work for the woman taking care of them or you know, loss of income or loss of their own health. Yeah, I'd like for you to explain because I think people do you said like, oh, Medicare will pick it up or my secondary health insurance will pick it up or if I don't have enough then Medicaid will kick in. And that's absolutely not true. And I think it's important to kind of share where those caveats are, so people understand. Holly: So, the basics are, Medicare will cover the first up to 100 days of skilled care2. After a hospital stay. And my mom is a perfect example of that. She fell backwards last year and broke several ribs. And after she was in the hospital for a few days, about actually a couple of weeks. They moved her to skilled nursing rehab, and she was there for about two months and Medicare took care of that. And then she also had a Medicare Supplement. So, the Medicare Supplement picked up where the where Medicare left off. Where it started to cost money is when we got home, and I thought we would have the full 100 days. But we didn't. They basically said no, we've done all we can do for you. It's time for you to go home. And she still wasn't able to live independently at that point. And so, we had to hire a home caregiver at that point. Some other scenarios are, you know, Medicaid, which kicks in really once most of your financial resources are gone. And my mom's case with would not have helped her my mom doesn't have any net worth at all. So, you know, technically she, in certain circumstances she could qualify for Medicaid. The problem is Medicaid. Doesn't pay for home care. It also doesn't pay for assisted living. So, someone has to be really needing pretty severe levels of care before Medicaid is going to help them. And so, you know, having something to bridge that gap is extremely important. Betty: Oh my gosh, it is it is extremely important. And I don't know if your experience was like mine, but you know, my mom was in skilled living same thing, you know, had a stroke last function on the right side couldn't do any activities of daily living, and they and you would get a call like that day and they're like, your mom's going to be checked out tomorrow. Exactly. They don't get you noticed. No, they like, like, the social workers are like we're going to handle this. No, you don't. I was I was in Florida at a conference. The first time I left for just a few days because I had to do this professionally. Fighting with people on the phone. I was like, “you can't kick her out. I am not there.” I was like, at that point. I'm like, “I'll pay; I don't care. You can't kick her out. I'm not home”. So, it's not a good experience to have now. I think Medicare isn't going to help you in any way. Holly: Exactly. Well, the other thing that happened was I thought my mom based on the picture they painted in the beginning, I thought she was going to be really pretty functional by the time she got out. And the physical therapy was pretty lame. And this was in a very high-quality facility. Very highly renowned, expensive etc. And she wasn't even close to being back to where she was when she left. So, we were very ill prepared. Betty: Yeah, I would, I would agree. My mom was at one of the best facilities and they were like, “Oh, we're going to get her up and walking” and I was like, “yeah, she's ‘Yeah, I can't do anything'.” After two and a half months there, it was just “Yeah, it was it's not all rainbows and you can't believe those statistics and how that how that's going to look”. So, let's so let's get into the planning part. So, I think we painted a scary picture. So, what are some strategies that women can really employ to balance the financial responsibilities of caregiving and their own retirement and elder care planning? Like let's kind of throw some things out on the table, because most of us don't really know what we need to do. Holly: One of the first things to consider is insurance. Because the whole idea of insurance is you're transferring that risk from yourself to the insurance company. And let's face it, nobody likes insurance. It's often an expense where you don't know if it's worth spending that money or not. And we buy car insurance and home insurance because we're required to, but we often don't answer some of the bigger risks in life, whether it's life insurance or disability, which is a potential loss of income when you have an accident or illness. And disability insurance is very important. But once you're beyond the working heirs, you can have long term care insurance as well. But it's one of those things that you have to plan way ahead because number one, you have to be healthy enough to qualify for it. And the longer you wait to buy it, the more expensive it is. Because as you get older it's more expensive because you're closer to the potential risk. So, the analogy I always give people is it's kind of like if you were trying to insure your house, but the garage is on fire. Probably going to be difficult. Right? So, you can actually think about buying long term care as early as 40. But I would say you know, there are plenty of people that wait until their 60s and it's not necessarily too late. It just gets a lot more expensive. So, if people are not insurable, then there's some other strategies, you know such as insurance with riders, you can sometimes be insurable for a life insurance policy, even if you're not insurable for long term care, because the criteria for getting those two types of insurance is different. So, you might qualify for a life insurance policy even if you don't qualify for long term care. So that's a secondary option. And then thirdly, there are some annuities out there that will supplement the cost of long-term care if you're not insurable at all. So, you know, those are those are some basic things just to try to offset the cost. And then there's also some legal things that you can do as well3. That, for example, having things set up where people can do things for you like having a durable power of attorney, where people can sign things for you. And obviously, you want a very, very trusted individual. You don't want somebody that might take advantage of you. And unfortunately, children sometimes do take advantage of their parents and family members do take advantage of their parents. So, you got to be really realistic about you know, what is the character of this person, what is their financial acumen? You know, just really thinking through the maturity of the person and then also having a medical power of attorney so that in physicians directives so that you can actually work with the medical team, get the information you need to help them make decisions, and, and also the authority to make decisions on their behalf. Betty: Yeah, I think, you know, as somebody I mean, I'm thankful I'm in the medical field and so I have an incredible command of what's happening in a hospital you know, way more than the average person and you know, I'm thankful my parents were actually heavy duty planners, to the extent that I was always like, can we stop talking about your death? Your Will, your long term care, like every day, they'd be like, you're going to…what is it, what is it? But I will say, even being highly prepared, it is a lot because not only are you probably having to all of a sudden make financial decisions and find out whether you have the financial capacity to do the things that you need to do. But you have to be an advocate in the healthcare system that is not really constructed to be positive for anybody in that experience. The most scary thing is to go to the hospital with somebody in a critical environment, because I just feel like our western medicine system conventionally is kind of broken. So, if you don't have somebody there, that's like hardcore advocate that is going to demand there's just a lot that can go wrong. And now you're having to do both. And I think that's what's really hard is especially as women we're going to be like, all of a sudden, we're the fiduciary financial planner, all this other stuff. We're taking care of the house, we're taking care of the bills, taking care of everything else. And oh, by the way, we're now Doogie Howser doctor. Got to figure this out because we have to also be their healthcare advocate. And it is it is a lot. Holly: Yeah, advocacy is so important. And I knew that in the back of my mind, but actually living it was a whole different thing and years ago, I knew my mom was not on a good financial trajectory and so I bought a long term care policy and a life insurance policy for her almost 20 years ago. And I know that's unusual. Most people don't do that. But I can't tell you how much it has helped saved my life in the last couple of months. Because I've got two kids in college, and I was coming out of pocket to pay for my mom's care. And I could have… I don't know what I would have done. I mean, I would have just had to eat into my retirement funds in order to pay for her care whether she was in assisted living or home or whatever. And so at least we have the financial part covered. But I have been beyond shocked at how hard you have to push the medical community to not act dismissive. And just feel like, and they don't say it, but it just feels like they think “oh, well, they're old”. You know, they're, they don't have that much time left. They're sick. So, they just minimize everything. And I feel like they were probably constantly rolling their eyes at me. Because I was pushing for, you know, please have Mom do this and please connect this dot and just the amount of coordination between all the care providers. And you know, for example, I went over there on Sunday because we had a new caregiver, and I needed to give her an orientation to the diet that my mom is on and their supplements and you know where everything is, and I was over there for two hours on Sunday. So, there's just there's a lot of advocacy and organization like you said. Betty: Yeah, I mean, I think it really is there's a whole need out there, so anybody out there that wants to do an entrepreneurial venture, find a way to create a company that can be medical advocates with families in the medical system particularly in an acute care situation because it if you are unaware or I just there's too many there's too many passing of the batons in the emergency rooms and you know intensive care units where if somebody's not there, I really wonder if somebody… if your family member will work it out. We had an incredible cardiologist. He was actually a cardiologist that cared for my dad 10 years ago.  When he walked in the room. I remembered him and I was like, “Oh my God, thank God you're here,” you know, but I can tell you one of the neurologists I was like, “You will not see my mother again. I don't care who's on this floor. You're done.” I mean, I just could - she was she because she was very dismissive. She's a young 89. She's decompensating you need to go get your DNR and I was like “you don't even know my mother or that she was actually fit and actually healthier than you yesterday.” And you know, and it was just very dismissive. And I think especially somebody that's already traumatized by what's going on. To walk into that environment is just frightening. And then to make these decisions, so all of a sudden, you and I are put in this position where we've got to all of a sudden take care of an entire another household, an entire another human being. And I was lucky I also my mom had a long term care policy. But you know, there's a financial thing that happens even if you have that you have a 90-day period at a minimum that you have to cover everything. Yeah, until it kicks in and I don't know about you but mine was six months because there was a whole lot of paperwork. Holly: Yes, fortunately, I'd seen previously how long it takes and all the paperwork involved. And so, I started it almost day one, gathering all that information. And so, it did start paying pretty quickly after the 90 days, but it made me aware as a financial planner, how important it is for people to have probably six months set aside for that timeframe because I think for most people, it will take probably a good six months, like you said, and you'll get the money if a claim goes through. You'll get the money back for the 90 days that were missed. But you know, that second 90 days, I'm sure you experienced that but you know, still you're coming out of pocket or you're you know, trying to get to your parents assets to cover it. And what if they're incapacitated and one of them uh, you know, then all the things to help you have that authority to do that for them.   Betty Murray: Absolutely, yeah. Because yeah, so basically the end game there is you're going to have to front load the costs, so you're going to have to pony up the money and then eventually get back. After that 90 days, whatever else you came out of pocket, and it still doesn't cover everything. So even if you have long term care, there are certain things it does and does not cover so it's not like all of a sudden you're in a zero sum game, where I think that's important too.   Holly: Yeah, we have we have supplemental services. that are going on like, you know, an exercise trainer, where I hired an extra person to do not really physical therapy, but you know, just exercise… extra exercise.  And sometimes the caregivers can't transport them because their car's not working. So, if I need somebody to take her to a doctor's appointment, I need somebody else to do that. And maybe I'm not available because I'm working. So, I'm paying another caregiver, that's really a friend that does professional services like that, you know, to transport to appointments, or come over and get ready in the morning before the other caregiver gets there. So yeah, I mean, there's all kinds of other things that you can end up spending money on, that are over and above what a policy would cover.   Betty Murray: Absolutely So, so we kind of alluded to this but I think let's kind of wrap up like the taking care of parents like so what are the things if we were to give like a laundry list? What are the things somebody in our age group would need to think? About to check in on your parents and make sure that they do so, you know, just open that door because a lot of families don't like talking about this stuff, but it's like super important.   Holly: Well, one of the first things is deciding the type of care they need. Because there's really three main types of care…you have home care, which works really well if you have a family member that lives with them like a spouse who is still functional. Or you if you have an adult child nearby, or a niece or nephew or an advocate, just somebody that's near who can check in with those caregivers and kind of do surprise visits, things like that. Assisted Living is okay if they qualify to move to a facility and pare down all of their things to a smaller living space, and where they maybe need more consistent care like in a 24-hour period, and also meal preparation and transportation and so forth. So assisted living is for a little bit more advanced care, or if you don't have that advocate. And then nursing home is when somebody has memory issues or dementia or if they've got physical problems where they need more skilled medical care. So, figuring out what type of care they need, and there's consultants that help with that that are third parties. Those are wonderful. They'll really help you assess, and they'll help you figure out where's a good quality place based on what their needs are and a quality agency that will provide that homecare who can also take them to appointments. Somebody's got to get them to their checkups and their follow ups and all of that. Somebody needs to be able to fill out paperwork for them. Somebody needs to if they are at home, do meal planning, grocery shopping, medical supply delivery. Also, there's the paperwork for the long term care policy if they have one, and just other medical paperwork. For example, you know, my mom has an appointment this week, and her cardiologist needed to sign off on it. They were faxing it to the doctor. The doctor wasn't responding. So, they're reaching out to me saying hey, we didn't get this form. We can't do the procedure unless we get this form. There's a lot of dot-connecting, that goes along with paying their bills and getting all connected in to all their finances. I've got another parent that is 94 years old, and I'm helping him manage all the financial issues. I've got a sibling that's handling all the medical and all the physical things and I'm doing the financial. And so, you know, I've gotten connected with his financial professionals, his attorney, and his CPA and just helping coordinate all of those things. So yeah, I mean, that's a good basic list.   Betty Murray: it's a lot you know, it's so it's a good even this far out like, you know, eight, probably nine months out, it's still a good 10 to 20 hours a week of work, just to manage stuff to keep your fingers on it. You know, to know what's going on and I was I mean, I will say I was thankful that I was ready because my mom and dad had a will had a durable power of attorney medical power of attorney, all those things. And so I was already on the paperwork, but I had already started going to appointments like I was on all the bank paperwork I was on, you know, I knew their investor, support certified financial planner. I was like I need I needed to be involved and I'm so thankful because it wasn't like I was just having my first conversation with them. And sometimes families are nervous because I sort of hold that stuff close to the chest. Oh, yeah. What you're doing is doing yourself and your family a disservice if they are unaware of that and don't have a relationship already.   Holly: Yeah, I think that old school thinking of my kids will find out what I have at the reading of the will. That doesn't really work anymore. Because people do live longer and sometimes, they can be ill for a number of years before they do pass; and they need their kids involved helping them or they need family, or they need advocacy.   Betty Murray: Absolutely. So, let's talk about us. What so we've we're talking about caring for parents, so obviously people are probably now like, “Oh no, I've got to hope I don't have to do that”. Well, you probably will. But at least you now know kind of some things to think about. Let's talk about the top things that somebody in our age group really needs to like make sure they get done now if they don't have it.   Holly: I would say figuring out what the cost of a long term care policy would be and finding a way to include that in the budget. And there's a lot of different types of policies. There's the traditional policy where it just is more like health insurance where if you have an expense that will reimburse you but if you never have the expense, it's use it or lose it. There's a handful of companies that still offer that. The problem is that that type of insurance has gotten more and more expensive over the years. So, a lot of people are reluctant to pay for it because they feel like they're wasting money if they never need care. There are other Hybrid Type policies that are combinations of life insurance and long term care or an annuity and long term care. So that's where I'm seeing most people go nowadays. So, I would just say, you know, meet with a financial professional, talk to them about how this this part of your life is going to be impacted and get them to help you or refer you to somebody if they don't do insurance. Get them to help you find somebody that specializes in that. So that you can look at it and figure out if that's something that you can cover and if your health will permit it. I'd say that'd be the number one thing. Also just get your estate plan in order. My understanding is that 60% of people don't have wills4, or estate planning documents. And it's something that can be done relatively inexpensively with online type resources, or you can go to a board-certified estate planning attorney. Those are things that don't take that long to get done. And it doesn't necessarily have to be super expensive. And just make sure that you've done that loving thing for your partner or your spouse, and your family. You know in the event, if and when something happens to you. Those are probably two of the main things and then you know just preparing for retirement in general; we are everyday getting closer to retirement age. And I think sometimes people build up guilt and shame over maybe not having done some things earlier in life. But just start where you are where or whatever, you know wherever you are and start there and something is better than zero planning. So those three things: insurance for long term care, estate planning and then planning for your retirement.   Betty Murray: Yeah, and I think I want to kind of reiterate this the idea of having a will or a trust or something like that, because I think people don't really realize they hear the word probate, and they think it's this weird thing over here. That's kind of a legal thing, but no one has to worry about it. But what that means is, your money is tied up until the courts go through all of it. And I don't know how long it lasts in Texas, but I think it's a long time. So, you may not have access to resources even though you might be a spouse of somebody or a child of somebody, literally you can't do anything with the assets to help manage the person that's unwell. Is that correct? Holly: That is correct. So, if people have wills, they're relying on that court system to give them authority if they're the executor of the will. And then number two, give them access. And you've got to hire an attorney that will represent you in probate court. So, and then it can like you said it can take a long time. So, we used to say probate in Texas was inexpensive and quick, but I hear that's no longer true. And so, avoiding probate is good and you can do that through having things titled where they have beneficiary designations, like retirement accounts, insurance, annuities, you know, those all have designated beneficiaries, and then should go straight to that person and avoid probate. People also often will set up a trust where the trust will own an asset if it doesn't have a beneficiary designation, then that enables them to pre appoint someone that will be the secondary authorized person, so they don't have to go to court to make that happen. In setting up a trust, they might pay a little bit more ahead of time to get a trust in place, but it can save them time and money in the long run and make it a lot easier for their heirs, if they prepare in advance5.   Betty Murray: Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, that's not… that's like that's a lot of legal stuff. And that's not your forte or cup of tea. But I think it's, it's important because it's not something that we get taught in like we need to, we need a financial ownership, maturity class, in college in high school to actually understand this stuff because if you don't seek it out, you're not going to get that information.   Holly: Yeah, I don't know why they don't teach personal finance in high school, and college. It should be a required course. Because these are basic practical things that people need to know. And you're right unless you seek it out. We don't learn it. Just you know, there's no automatic course out there that we get enrolled in to help us with these things.   Betty Murray: Yeah, no, it's absolutely right. So, you bring me to another question because we've kind of talked about this idea of your heirs or somebody that's automatically going to be there to help you when your time comes to need right all of us wants to want to have this really long lifespan and I you know, I joke about it, I was like, “No, I want to wake up dead one day, like, nothing happens. I'm totally healthy” but that's not statistically what's going to happen. Right, and my mom being a perfect example of that literally the first time she'd ever spent time in hospital at 88 years old, right so that's what you want but she didn't get a choice on where the endpoint happened yet you know, because she would have probably chosen differently, honestly. But, you know, my reality is I have no children. By choice. That was my choice. I don't have children. And some people may not even have siblings or nieces, nephews, and so that leaves like a bigger open, you know, thing, right? Because you might have a spouse or a partner, but they may go before you what, what do you do when you're me? Right? And there's a high probability that I'm going to be the last one standing, and I don't have anybody to take care of me or I might have kids and they won't. Holly: Yeah, that last comment is very relevant because sometimes people are estranged from their children. Or, you know, they just don't have a great relationship. And so just because we have children, doesn't mean we can count on them. Of course, I'm grooming My children now. “Be sure and take care of your mom!”  You know, later in life. See, I'm taking care of your grandmother. So, I'm trying to train them now, ha-ha. But um, but in all seriousness, to me, it just says how important it is to plan ahead and be proactive, and to come up with the pieces ahead of time. And I've run across some really good resources. One of them is that there are companies out there, for example, there's one called Accountable Aging, and they're here in the Dallas area, and also in Austin. And they provide a variety of services including transportation appointments and bill paying and things like that and, they're bonded and set up as fiduciaries. There are professional advocacy services, and professional services for the estate plan. If you don't have somebody to name is an executor or trustee. You can hire professionals for that. I also met a wonderful lady named Carol Marak, who wrote a book called Solo and Smart and she wrote this book out of necessity, because she cared for one of her parents. And then she started thinking, “oh my gosh, I'm single. I don't have any children. I don't have any siblings. What will I do? Who will take care of me? And who will be MY advocate?” such as all of the things that she did for her parents. So, she wrote a book about it. She's been a national speaker. She's been on TV, so she's got some really good recommendations in there about how you set all that up ahead of time to make sure that you've got a system in place. And so, I think there's a lot of resources out there. You just got to think ahead.   Betty Murray: Yeah, yeah. I think I think even if somebody has children and things like that, it's probably a good idea just to also kind of look into these resources. Because, again, you there's no guarantees that something won't happen to your child or that they're going to they won't become estranged or whatever that might be. I think, you know, culturally, you and I were talking a little bit about this before we got on the call on the recording. But culturally in the United States, we don't do multi-generational living where if you go to a lot of European countries and Mexico and they just they have a embracing of multiple, multiple generations, and we don't really have that, right, if we're the most host of reasons, right for a host of reasons. And so, there's a likelihood that somebody's going to need outside assistance.   Holly: Yeah, I think because of our culture, like, even though my husband I talked about what if my mom came to live with us, and it would be an enormous strain on our marriage to do that. And so, you know, and I think that's, that's a very common situation, and I love my mom, but I just can't live with her since I was 18.  We've just got to have other systems in place to address that.   Betty Murray: Yeah, I think I think that's an important part. I grew up with my grandmother living with us as a as a child. And I think like most families, there's always some family dynamic. That's a little like sketchy. But as you know, I was as a teenager tween, you know, you'd walk in the room and you're like, Okay, everybody, can we call the elephant out? Right? Because my dad and my mother and his mother-in-law didn't really get along very well. And a lot of it was really my mother-in-law. I mean, she was born in 1894. Right?  She just missed that, you know, this is 80s. Right? So, she was very old and very kind of set in her ways. And she just was opinionated and didn't know when to keep it to herself, right. So, it was difficult, but even as a kid, it was like, I feel like I had a loss like eight years of my life because it was just, I just didn't want to be in the home. I'm like, I don't want to be here. So, when we started, we moved into the house we're in. It has an area on the other side of the kitchen, which happens to be my office that was like a bedroom, a bathroom and what could have been a living room and my husband and I are kind of chatting about in case my other mom My mom ever had to move in and I know full well from get go I'm like never going to happen. Never going to happen. My mom and I get along because we understand our boundaries with each other. And we're very different individuals and I love her, but I would my husband and I would never have made it through that. Just it's just the reality. So, I think that's the other thing is we have to really be honest about being prepared in planning. And also, what does it do to our family if we are unprepared because it is disruptive, and some people have great families and you can do multi-generational living, I was not one of them. And I think that also is really important because it's going to fall back on you, chances are, especially as a female and it's that if you're the female sibling or whatever child it all falls back on, somebody, it may very well damage your own relationship with the people you care about, too.   Holly: Even if you don't have them live with you, there's some potential for damage as well. You know, because I'm spending a lot of my spare time with parents. And you know, so my husband is paying the price for that. You know, because I've given up some evenings and weekend time with him to do the things I need to do for her or catch up on work because I'm doing stuff during the day, and I need to work at night. So, and I would say that also speaks to the need for self-care. You've got to not forget about your relationship and do things to take care of yourself, de-stress. Because it's so easy to put exercise and different things that we do to be healthy to let all that go because all of a sudden, we don't have as much time.   Betty Murray: Yeah, no, that's true every night. I mean, every night I see my mom, you know, I had somebody we were talking the other day, and she was like, you know, I have to go home and work at night and I'm like, I do that too. And then I see my mother. And then I hopefully see my husband if he happens to not be at work because he works 24 hours on and then 48 off. And I said and then if I get a chance, I might be able to do something for me. I was like because it's because it is even if they're in your home, you probably still will need a home care support person because you can't be there 24/7 Like all this stuff that compounds and then we still must take care of ourselves in the process. So, thank you for saying that. That's important.   Holly: Yeah, I've found I've not been exercising as much as I did before. So, I'm still struggling with that one.   Betty Murray: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, getting it fit in is a little as a little more. I'm doing more high intensity interval work, which means shorter duration, so it's easier for me to fit in. So absolutely. So, it's slow. So, let's do some like a parting laundry list. So, we did the parting laundry list for like if you're taking care of an elderly parent so give my listeners just like the 1-2-3-4 Here's what you need to do right now if you have not to make sure you're preparing for your later years or for you and your partner. Holly: I would say find a financial professional talk to them about your goals:  retirement, Long Term Care and estate planning. Get those key pieces covered. Have a conversation with your parents about what they've done for themselves. So, you're brought in the loop, and you understand what organization they have and what to do if there's an emergency. And if you don't have people in your family that could potentially provide care, do some research on self-advocacy. And you know, finding people and systems and getting that planned out proactively. And, you know, just make sure you take care of yourself in the process.   Betty Murray:  Yeah Yeah, because it's all about the health span in all reality it's like we don't want to live a long time if we're if we're incapacitated in some way so we got to do all the other things that we talk about every week on you know, Menopause Mastery, but, but this this is important because this is one of the leading causes to you know, poor health in our 40s 50s and 60s and on as women because we often are kind of stuck playing this sandwich role. Sure. Thank you, Holly, for being on and sharing, sharing this much needed message. I know, some people are going to be like, “Where was the science?” I'm like, well, this is actually really important.   Holly: Well, and I appreciate you inviting me it's something that I've always been passionate about this topic because I had grandmothers and grandparents that this had happened to, but this is the first time I've been directly involved in the frontlines of it. And so, it's just taking my passion level up to a ten. And so, I'm just I'm very grateful to have an opportunity to really share with you and the women in your audience.   Betty Murray: Yes, yes. Thank you, Holly. And thank you, everybody for listening to Menopause Mastery. If you found this episode to be an impressive episode, please share it with a friend. Hit subscribe and leave me some stars so that we can get more listeners and help more women. Thank you, Holly.   NOTES: 1               Cost of care expense range referenced is based on recent, personal searches. Cost varies widely based on geography. US Median average cost per month for a private room is $9,034 per Money magazine. https://money.com/nursing-home-costs/ 2               Medicare & Medicaid: https://www.cms.gov/regulations-and-guidance/guidance/manuals/internet-only-manuals-ioms-items/cms012673 3               To confirm all legal options and implications, consult with an attorney. 4               Per AARP 2017 article https://www.aarp.org/money/investing/info-2017/half-of-adults-do-not-have-wills.html#:~:text=Survey:%2060%25%20of%20Americans%20lack%20will%20or%20estate%20planning 5               Work with an attorney to establish any trust. This information is for educational purposes only.  It is not a recommendation for any specific product or services.  The views and opinions expressed are those of the Holly Carroccio and her views are not necessarily those of MML Investors Services, LLC.   Holly Carroccio is a registered representative of and offers securities and investment advisory services through MML Investors Services, LLC. Member SIPC. Nexus Advisors is not a subsidiary or affiliate of MML Investors Services, LLC, or its affiliated companies. 14241 Dallas Parkway, Suite 1200, Dallas, TX 75254. (972)348-6300. AR Insurance License No. 1126134                           CRN202703-6005687 Links Mentioned: FREE Quiz: https://quiz.hormoneshelp.com/ FREE E-Book: https://ed.hormoneshelp.com/     Connect with Holly Carroccio, CFP: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hollycarroccio/     Connect with Betty Murray: Living Well Dallas Website: https://www.livingwelldallas.com/ Hormone Reset Website: https://hormonereset.net/ Betty Murray Website: https://www.bettymurray.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BettyAMurrayCN/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bettymurray_phd/     References: Working Sandwich Generation Women Utilize Strategies within and between Roles to Achieve Role Balance - PMC - NCBI: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4909236/ The Sandwich Generation | Pew Research Center: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/01/30/the-sandwich-generation/ The Sandwich Generation: A Review of the Literature - UNF Digital Commons: https://digitalcommons.unf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1142&context=fphr Sandwich Generation Caregivers: Ethical Legacies Throughout Generations - USF Scholarship Repository - University of San Francisco: https://repository.usfca.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1047&context=diss  

Table of contentsNote: links take you to the corresponding section below; links to the original episode can be found there.* Laura Duffy solves housing, ethics, and more [00:01:16]* Arjun Panickssery solves books, hobbies, and blogging, but fails to solve the Sleeping Beauty problem because he's wrong on that one [00:10:47]* Nathan Barnard on how financial regulation can inform AI regulation [00:17:16]* Winston Oswald-Drummond on the tractability of reducing s-risk, ethics, and more [00:27:48]* Nathan Barnard (again!) on why general intelligence is basically fake [00:34:10]* Daniel Filan on why I'm wrong about ethics (+ Oppenheimer and what names mean in like a hardcore phil of language sense) [00:56:54]* Holly Elmore on AI pause, wild animal welfare, and some cool biology things I couldn't fully follow but maybe you can [01:04:00]* Max Alexander and I solve ethics, philosophy of mind, and cancel culture once and for all [01:24:43]* Sarah Woodhouse on discovering AI x-risk, Twitter, and more [01:30:56] * Pigeon Hour x Consistently Candid pod-crossover: I debate moral realism with Max Alexander and Sarah Hastings-Woodhouse [01:41:08]Intro [00:00:00]To wrap up the year of Pigeon Hour, the podcast, I put together some clips from each episode to create a best-of compilation. This was inspired by 80,000 Hours, a podcast that did the same with their episodes, and I thought it was pretty cool and tractable enough.It's important to note that the clips I chose range in length significantly. This does not represent the quality or amount of interesting content in the episode. Sometimes there was a natural place to break the episode into a five-minute chunk, and other times it wouldn't have made sense to take a five-minute chunk out of what really needed to be a 20-minute segment. I promise I'm not just saying that.So without further ado, please enjoy.#1: Laura Duffy solves housing, ethics, and more [00:01:16]In this first segment, Laura, Duffy, and I discuss the significance and interpretation of Aristotle's philosophical works in relation to modern ethics and virtue theory.AARON: Econ is like more interesting. I don't know. I don't even remember of all the things. I don't know, it seems like kind of cool. Philosophy. Probably would have majored in philosophy if signaling wasn't an issue. Actually, maybe I'm not sure if that's true. Okay. I didn't want to do the old stuff though, so I'm actually not sure. But if I could aristotle it's all wrong. Didn't you say you got a lot out of Nicomachi or however you pronounce that?LAURA: Nicomachian ethics guide to how you should live your life. About ethics as applied to your life because you can't be perfect. Utilitarians. There's no way to be that.AARON: But he wasn't even responding to utilitarianism. I'm sure it was a good work given the time, but like, there's like no other discipline in which we care. So people care so much about like, what people thought 2000 years ago because like the presumption, I think the justified presumption is that things have iterated and improved since then. And I think that's true. It's like not just a presumption.LAURA: Humans are still rather the same and what our needs are for living amongst each other in political society are kind of the same. I think America's founding is very influenced by what people thought 2000 years ago.AARON: Yeah, descriptively that's probably true. But I don't know, it seems like all the whole body of philosophers have they've already done the work of, like, compressing the good stuff. Like the entire academy since like, 1400 or whatever has like, compressed the good stuff and like, gotten rid of the bad stuff. Not in like a high fidelity way, but like a better than chance way. And so the stuff that remains if you just take the state of I don't know if you read the Oxford Handbook of whatever it is, like ethics or something, the takeaways you're going to get from that are just better than the takeaways you're going to get from a summary of the state of the knowledge in any prior year. At least. Unless something weird happened. And I don't know. I don't know if that makes sense.LAURA: I think we're talking about two different things, though. Okay. In terms of knowledge about logic or something or, I don't know, argumentation about trying to derive the correct moral theory or something, versus how should we think about our own lives. I don't see any reason as to why the framework of virtue theory is incorrect and just because it's old. There's many virtue theorists now who are like, oh yeah, they were really on to something and we need to adapt it for the times in which we live and the kind of societies we live in now. But it's still like there was a huge kernel of truth in at least the way of thinking that Aristotle put forth in terms of balancing the different virtues that you care about and trying to find. I think this is true. Right? Like take one virtue of his humor. You don't want to be on one extreme where you're just basically a meme your entire life. Everybody thinks you're funny, but that's just not very serious. But you don't want to be a boar and so you want to find somewhere in the middle where it's like you have a good sense of humor, but you can still function and be respected by other people.AARON: Yeah. Once again, I agree. Well, I don't agree with everything. I agree with a lot of what you just said. I think there was like two main points of either confusion or disagreement. And like, the first one is that I definitely think, no, Aristotle shouldn't be discounted or like his ideas or virtue ethics or anything like that shouldn't be discounted because they were canonical texts or something were written a long time ago. I guess it's just like a presumption that I have a pretty strong presumption that conditional on them being good, they would also be written about today. And so you don't actually need to go back to the founding texts and then in fact, you probably shouldn't because the good stuff will be explained better and not in weird it looks like weird terms. The terms are used differently and they're like translations from Aramaic or whatever. Probably not Aramaic, probably something else. And yeah, I'm not sure if you.LAURA: Agree with this because we have certain assumptions about what words like purpose mean now that we're probably a bit richer in the old conception of them like telos or happiness. Right. Udaimnia is much better concept and to read the original text and see how those different concepts work together is actually quite enriching compared to how do people use these words now. And it would take like I don't know, I think there just is a lot of value of looking at how these were originally conceived because popularizers of the works now or people who are seriously doing philosophy using these concepts. You just don't have the background knowledge that's necessary to understand them fully if you don't read the canonical text.AARON: Yeah, I think that would be true. If you are a native speaker. Do you know Greek? If you know Greek, this is like dumb because then you're just right.LAURA: I did take a quarter of it.AARON: Oh God. Oh my God. I don't know if that counts, but that's like more than anybody should ever take. No, I'm just kidding. That's very cool. No, because I was going to say if you're a native speaker of Greek and you have the connotations of the word eudaimonia and you were like living in the temper shuttle, I would say. Yeah, that's true actually. That's a lot of nuanced, connotation and context that definitely gets lost with translation. But once you take the jump of reading English translations of the texts, not you may as well but there's nothing super special. You're not getting any privileged knowledge from saying the word eudaimonia as opposed to just saying some other term as a reference to that concept or something. You're absorbing the connotation in the context via English, I guess, via the mind of literally the translators who have like.LAURA: Yeah, well see, I tried to learn virtue theory by any other route than reading Aristotle.AARON: Oh God.LAURA: I took a course specifically on Plato and Aristotle.AARON: Sorry, I'm not laughing at you. I'm just like the opposite type of philosophy person.LAURA: But keep going. Fair. But she had us read his physics before we read Nicomachi.AARON: Think he was wrong about all that.LAURA: Stuff, but it made you understand what he meant by his teleology theory so much better in a way that I could not get if I was reading some modern thing.AARON: I don't know, I feel like you probably could. No, sorry, that's not true. I don't think you could get what Aristotle the man truly believed as well via a modern text. But is that what you? Depends. If you're trying to be a scholar of Aristotle, maybe that's important. If you're trying to find the best or truest ethics and learn the lessons of how to live, that's like a different type of task. I don't think Aristotle the man should be all that privileged in that.LAURA: If all of the modern people who are talking about virtue theory are basically Aristotle, then I don't see the difference.AARON: Oh, yeah, I guess. Fair enough. And then I would say, like, oh, well, they should probably start. Is that in fact the state of the things in virtue theory? I don't even know.LAURA: I don't know either.#2 Arjun Panickssery solves books, hobbies, and blogging, but fails to solve the Sleeping Beauty problem because he's wrong on that one [00:10:47]All right, next, Arjun Panixery and I explore the effectiveness of reading books in retaining and incorporating knowledge, discussing the value of long form content and the impact of great literary works on understanding and shaping personal worldviews.ARJUN: Oh, you were in the book chat, though. The book rant group chat, right?AARON: Yeah, I think I might have just not read any of it. So do you want to fill me in on what I should have read?ARJUN: Yeah, it's group chat of a bunch of people where we were arguing about a bunch of claims related to books. One of them is that most people don't remember pretty much anything from books that they read, right? They read a book and then, like, a few months later, if you ask them about it, they'll just say one page's worth of information or maybe like, a few paragraphs. The other is that what is it exactly? It's that if you read a lot of books, it could be that you just incorporate the information that's important into your existing models and then just forget the information. So it's actually fine. Isn't this what you wrote in your blog post or whatever? I think that's why I added you to that.AARON: Oh, thank you. I'm sorry I'm such a bad group chat participant. Yeah, honestly, I wrote that a while ago. I don't fully remember exactly what it says, but at least one of the things that it said was and that I still basically stand by, is that it's basically just like it's increasing the salience of a set of ideas more so than just filling your brain with more facts. And I think this is probably true insofar as the facts support a set of common themes or ideas that are kind of like the intellectual core of it. It would be really hard. Okay, so this is not a book, but okay. I've talked about how much I love an 80,000 hours podcast, and I've listened to, I don't think every episode, but at least 100 of the episodes. And no, you're just, like, not going to definitely I've forgotten most of the actual almost all of the actual propositional pieces of information said, but you're just not going to convince me that it's completely not affecting either model of the world or stuff that I know or whatever. I mean, there are facts that I could list. I think maybe I should try.ARJUN: Sure.AARON: Yeah. So what's your take on book other long form?ARJUN: Oh, I don't know. I'm still quite confused or I think the impetus for the group chat's creation was actually Hanania's post where he wrote the case against most books or most was in parentheses or something. I mean, there's a lot of things going on in that post. He just goes off against a bunch of different categories of books that are sort of not closely related. Like, he goes off against great. I mean, this is not the exact take he gives, but it's something like the books that are considered great are considered great literature for some sort of contingent reason, not because they're the best at getting you information that you want.AARON: This is, like, another topic. But I'm, like, anti great books. In fact, I'm anti great usually just means old and famous. So insofar as that's what we mean by I'm like, I think this is a bad thing, or, like, I don't know, aristotle is basically wrong about everything and stuff like that.ARJUN: Right, yeah. Wait, we could return to this. I guess this could also be divided into its component categories. He spends more time, though, I think, attacking a certain kind of nonfiction book that he describes as the kind of book that somebody pitches to a publisher and basically expands a single essay's worth of content into with a bunch of anecdotes and stuff. He's like, most of these books are just not very useful to read, I guess. I agree with that.AARON: Yeah. Is there one that comes to mind as, like, an? Mean, I think of Malcolm Gladwell as, like, the kind of I haven't actually read any of his stuff in a while, but I did, I think, when I started reading nonfiction or with any sort of intent, I read. A bunch of his stuff or whatever and vaguely remember that this is basically what he like for better or.ARJUN: Um yeah, I guess so. But he's almost, like, trying to do it on purpose. This is the experience that you're getting by reading a Malcolm Gladwell book. It's like talib. Right? It's just him just ranting. I'm thinking, I guess, of books that are about something. So, like, if you have a book that's know negotiation or something, it'll be filled with a bunch of anecdotes that are of dubious usefulness. Or if you get a book that's just about some sort of topic, there'll be historical trivia that's irrelevant. Maybe I can think of an example.AARON: Yeah. So the last thing I tried to read, maybe I am but haven't in a couple of weeks or whatever, is like, the Derek Parfit biography. And part of this is motivated because I don't even like biographies in general for some reason, I don't know. But I don't know. He's, like, an important guy. Some of the anecdotes that I heard were shockingly close to home for me, or not close to home, but close to my brain or something. So I was like, okay, maybe I'll see if this guy's like the smarter version of Aaron Bergman. And it's not totally true.ARJUN: Sure, I haven't read the book, but I saw tweet threads about it, as one does, and I saw things that are obviously false. Right. It's the claims that he read, like, a certain number of pages while brushing his teeth. That's, like, anatomically impossible or whatever. Did you get to that part? Or I assumed no, I also saw.AARON: That tweet and this is not something that I do, but I don't know if it's anatomically impossible. Yeah, it takes a little bit of effort to figure out how to do that, I guess. I don't think that's necessarily false or whatever, but this is probably not the most important.ARJUN: Maybe it takes long time to brush his teeth.#3: Nathan Barnard on how financial regulation can inform AI regulation [00:17:16]In this next segment, Nathan Barnard and I dive into the complexities of AI regulation, including potential challenges and outcomes of governing AI in relation to economic growth and existential security. And we compare it to banking regulation as well.AARON: Yeah, I don't know. I just get gloomy for, I think justified reasons when people talk about, oh yeah, here's the nine step process that has to take place and then maybe there's like a 20% chance that we'll be able to regulate AI effectively. I'm being facetious or exaggerating, something like that, but not by a gigantic amount.NATHAN: I think this is pretty radically different to my mainline expectation.AARON: What's your mainline expectation?NATHAN: I suppose I expect like AI to come with an increasing importance past economy and to come up to really like a very large fraction of the economy before really crazy stuff starts happening and this world is going very anonymous. Anonymous, anonymous, anonymous. I know the word is it'd be very unusual if this extremely large sector economy which was impacted like a very large number of people's lives remains like broadly unregulated.AARON: It'll be regulated, but just maybe in a stupid way.NATHAN: Sure, yes, maybe in a stupid way. I suppose critically, do you expect the stupid way to be like too conservative or too like the specific question of AI accenture it's basically too conservative or too lenient or I just won't be able to interact with this.AARON: I guess generally too lenient, but also mostly on a different axis where just like I don't actually know enough. I don't feel like I've read learned about various governance proposals to have a good object level take on this. But my broad prior is that there are just a lot of ways to for anything. There's a lot of ways to regulate something poorly. And the reason insofar as anything isn't regulated poorly it's because of a lot of trial and error.NATHAN: Maybe.AARON: I mean, there's probably exceptions, right? I don't know. Tax Americana is like maybe we didn't just kept winning wars starting with World War II. I guess just like maybe like a counterexample or something like that.NATHAN: Yeah, I think I still mostly disagree with this. Oh, cool. Yeah. I suppose I see a much like broader spectrum between bad regulation and good regulation. I agree it's like very small amount. The space of optimal regulation is very small. But I think we have to hit that space for regulation to be helpful. Especially in this especially if you consider that if you sort of buy the AI extension safety risk then the downsides of it's not this quite fine balancing act between too much whether consumer protection and siphoning competition and cycling innovation too much. It's like trying to end this quite specific, very bad outcome which is maybe much worse than going somewhat slowering economic growth, at least somewhat particularly if we think we're going to get something. This is very explosive rates for economic growth really quite soon. And the cost of slowing down economic growth by weather even by quite a large percentage, very small compared to the cost of sort of an accidental catastrophe. I sort of think of Sony iconic growth as the main cost of main way regulation goes wrong currently.AARON: I think in an actual sense that is correct. There's the question of like okay, Congress in the states like it's better than nothing. I'm glad it's not anarchy in terms of like I'm glad we have a legislature.NATHAN: I'm also glad the United States.AARON: How reasons responsive is Congress? I don't think reasons responsive enough to make it so that the first big law that gets passed insofar as there is one or if there is one is on the pareto frontier trading off between economic growth and existential security. It's going to be way inside of that production frontier or whatever. It's going to suck on every action, maybe not every act but at least like some relevant actions.NATHAN: Yeah that doesn't seem like obviously true to me. I think Dodge Frank was quite a good law.AARON: That came after 2008, right?NATHAN: Yeah correct. Yeah there you go. No, I agree. I'm not especially confident about doing regulation before there's some quite bad before there's a quite bad warning shot and yes, if we're in world where we have no warning shots and we're just like blindsided by everyone getting turned into everyone getting stripped their Athens within 3 seconds, this is not good. Both in law we do have one of those shots and I think Glass Seagull is good law. Not good law is a technical term. I think Glass Steagall was a good piece of legislation. I think DoD Frank was a good piece of legislation. I think the 2008 Seamless Bill was good piece of legislation. I think the Troubled Assets Relief Program is a good piece of piece of legislation.AARON: I recognize these terms and I know some of them and others I do not know the contents of.NATHAN: Yeah so Glass Eagle was the financial regulation passed in 1933 after Great Depression. The Tropical Asset Relief Program was passed in I think 2008, moved 2009 to help recapitalize banks. Dodge Frank was the sort of landmark post financial cris piece of legislation passed in 2011. I think these are all good pieces of legislation now. I think like financial regulation is probably unusually good amongst US legislation. This is like a quite weak take, I guess. It's unusually.AARON: So. I don't actually know the pre depression financial history at all but I feel like the more relevant comparison to the 21st century era is what was the regulatory regime in 1925 or something? I just don't know.NATHAN: Yeah, I know a bit. I haven't read this stuff especially deeply and so I don't want to don't want to be so overcompensant here but sort of the core pieces which were sort of important for the sort of the Great Depression going very badly was yeah, no distinction between commercial banks and investment banks. Yes, such a bank could take much riskier. Much riskier. Things with like custom deposits than they could from 1933 until the Peel Glass Eagle. And combine that with no deposit insurance and if you sort of have the combination of banks being able to do quite risky things with depositors money and no deposit insurance, this is quite dangerously known. And glassy repeal.AARON: I'm an expert in the sense that I have the Wikipedia page up. Well, yeah, there was a bunch of things. Basically. There's the first bank of the United States. There's the second bank of the United States. There's the free banking era. There was the era of national banks. Yada, yada, yada. It looks like 19. Seven was there was some panic. I vaguely remember this from like, AP US history, like seven years ago or.NATHAN: Yes, I suppose in short, I sort of agree that the record of sort of non post Cris legislation is like, not very good, but I think record of post Cris legislation really, at least in the financial sector, really is quite good. I'm sure lots of people disagree with this, but this is my take.#4 Winston Oswald-Drummond on the tractability of reducing s-risk, ethics, and more [00:27:48]Up next, Winston Oswald Drummond and I talk about the effectiveness and impact of donating to various research organizations, such as suffering-focused S-risk organizations. We discuss tractability, expected value, and essentially where we should give our money.AARON: Okay, nice. Yeah. Where to go from here? I feel like largely we're on the same page, I feel like.WINSTON: Yeah. Is your disagreement mostly tractability? Then? Maybe we should get into the disagreement.AARON: Yeah. I don't even know if I've specified, but insofar as I have one, yes, it's trapped ability. This is the reason why I haven't donated very much to anywhere for money reasons. But insofar as I have, I have not donated to Clrcrs because I don't see a theory of change that connects the research currently being done to actually reducing s risks. And I feel like there must be something because there's a lot of extremely smart people at both of these orgs or whatever, and clearly they thought about this and maybe the answer is it's very general and the outcome is just so big in magnitude that anything kind.WINSTON: Of that is part of it, I think. Yeah, part of it is like an expected value thing and also it's just very neglected. So it's like you want some people working on this, I think, at least. Even if it's unlikely to work. Yeah, even that might be underselling it, though. I mean, I do think there's people at CRS and Clr, like talking to people at AI labs and some people in politics and these types of things. And hopefully the research is a way to know what to try to get done at these places. You want to have some concrete recommendations and I think obviously people have to also be willing to listen to you, but I think there is some work being done on that and research is partially just like a community building thing as well. It's a credible signal that you were smart and have thought about this, and so it gives people reason to listen to you and maybe that mostly pays off later on in the future.AARON: Yeah, that all sounds like reasonable. And I guess one thing is that I just don't there's definitely things I mean, first of all, I haven't really stayed up to date on what's going on, so I haven't even done I've done zero research for this podcast episode, for example. Very responsible and insofar as I've know things about these. Orgs. It's just based on what's on their website at some given time. So insofar as there's outreach going on, not like behind the scenes, but just not in a super public way, or I guess you could call that behind the scenes. I just don't have reason to, I guess, know about that. And I guess, yeah, I'm pretty comfortable. I don't even know if this is considered biting a bullet for the crowd that will be listening to this, if that's anybody but with just like yeah, saying a very small change for a very large magnitude, just, like, checks out. You can just do expected value reasoning and that's basically correct, like a correct way of thinking about ethics. But even I don't know how much you know specifically or, like, how much you're allowed want to reveal, but if there was a particular alignment agenda that I guess you in a broad sense, like the suffering focused research community thought was particularly promising and relative to other tractable, I guess, generic alignment recommendations. And you were doing research on that and trying to push that into the alignment mainstream, which is not very mainstream. And then with the hope that that jumps into the AI mainstream. Even if that's kind of a long chain of events. I think I would be a lot more enthusiastic about I don't know that type of agenda, because it feels like there's like a particular story you're telling where it cashes out in the end. You know what I mean?WINSTON: Yeah, I'm not the expert on this stuff, but I do think you just mean I think there's some things about influencing alignment and powerful AI for sure. Maybe not like a full on, like, this is our alignment proposal and it also handles Sris. But some things we could ask AI labs that are already building, like AGI, we could say, can you also implement these sort of, like, safeguards so if you failed alignment, you fail sort of gracefully and don't cause lots of suffering.AARON: Right?WINSTON: Yeah. Or maybe there are other things too, which also seem potentially more tractable. Even if you solve alignment in some sense, like aligning with whatever the human operator tells the AI to do, then you can also get the issue that malevolent actors can take control of the AI and then what they want also causes lots of suffering that type of alignment wouldn't. Yeah, and I guess I tend to be somewhat skeptical of coherent extrapolated volition and things like this, where the idea is sort of like it'll just figure out our values and do the right thing. So, yeah, there's some ways to push on this without having a full alignment plan, but I'm not sure if that counts as what you were saying.AARON: No, I guess it does. Yeah, it sounds like it does. And it could be that I'm just kind of mistaken about the degree to which that type of research and outreach is going on. That sounds like it's at least partially true.#5: Nathan Barnard (again!) on why general intelligence is basically fake [00:34:10]Up next, Nathan Barnard is back for his second episode. And we talked about the nature of general intelligence, its relationship with language and the implications of specialized brain functions on the understanding of human cognitive abilities.NATHAN: Yes. This like symbolic like symbolic, symbolic reasoning stuff. Yeah. So I think if I was, like, making the if I was, like, making the case for general intelligence being real, I wouldn't have symbolic reasoning, but I would have language stuff. I'd have this hierarchical structure thing, which.AARON: I would probably so I think of at least most uses of language and central examples as a type of symbolic reasoning because words mean things. They're like yeah. Pointers to objects or something like that.NATHAN: Yeah, I think it's like, pretty confidence isn't where this isn't a good enough description of general intelligence. So, for instance so if you bit in your brain called, I'm using a checklist, I don't fuck this up vernacular, I'm not making this cool. Lots of connects to use words like pointers as these arbitrary signs happens mostly in this area of the brain called Berkeley's area. But very famously, you can have Berkeley's epaxics who lose the ability to do language comprehension and use the ability to consistently use words as pointers, as signs to point to things, but still have perfect good spatial reasoning abilities. And so, conversely, people with brokers of fascia who fuck up, who have the broker's reason their brain fucks up will not be able to form fluent sentences and have some problems like unsigned syntax, and they'll still be able to have very good spatial reasoning. It could still, for instance, be like, good engineers. Would you like many problems which, like, cost engineering?AARON: Yeah, I totally buy that. I don't think language is the central thing. I think it's like an outgrowth of, like I don't know, there's like a simplified model I could make, which is like it's like an outgrowth of whatever general intelligence really is. But whatever the best spatial or graphical model is, I don't think language is cognition.NATHAN: Yes, this is a really big debate in psycholinguistics as to whether language is like an outgrowth of other abilities like the brain has, whether language whether there's very specialized language modules. Yeah, this is just like a very live debate in psycholinguistics moments. I actually do lean towards the reason I've been talking about this actually just going to explain this hierarchical structure thing? Yeah, I keep talking about it. So one theory for how you can comprehend new sentences, like, the dominant theory in linguistics, how you can comprehend new sentences, um, is you break them up into, like you break them up into, like, chunks, and you form these chunks together in this, like, tree structure. So something like, if you hear, like, a totally novel sentence like the pit bull mastiff flopped around deliciously or something, you can comprehend what the sentence means despite the fact you've never heard it. Theory behind this is you saw yes, this can be broken up into this tree structure, where the different, like, ah, like like bits of the sentence. So, like like the mastiff would be like, one bit, and then you have, like, another bit, which is like, the mastiff I can't remember I said rolled around, so that'd be like, another bit, and then you'd have connectors to our heart.AARON: Okay.NATHAN: So the massive rolling around one theory of one of the sort of distinctive things that humans have disabilities is like, this quite general ability to break things up into these these tree structures. This is controversial within psycholinguistics, but it's broadly an area which I broadly buy it because we do see harms to other areas of intelligence. You get much worse at, like, Ravens Progressive Matrices, for instance, when you have, like, an injury to brokers area, but, like, not worse at, like, tests like tests of space, of, like, spatial reasoning, for instance.AARON: So what is like, is there, like, a main alternative to, like, how humans.NATHAN: Understand language as far as this specificity of how we pass completely novel sentences, as far as where this is just like this is just like the the academic consensus. Okay.AARON: I mean, it sounds totally like right? I don't know.NATHAN: Yeah. But yeah, I suppose going back to saying, how far is language like an outgrowth of general intelligence? An outgrowth like general intelligence versus having much more specialized language modules? Yeah, I lean towards the latter, despite yeah, I still don't want to give too strong of a personal opinion here because I'm not a linguistic this is a podcast.AARON: You're allowed to give takes. No one's going to say this is like the academic we want takes.NATHAN: We want takes. Well, gone to my head is.AARON: I.NATHAN: Think language is not growth of other abilities. I think the main justification for this, I think, is that the loss of other abilities we see when you have damage to broker's area and verca's area.AARON: Okay, cool. So I think we basically agree on that. And also, I guess one thing to highlight is I think outgrowth can mean a couple of different things. I definitely think it's plausible. I haven't read about this. I think I did at some point, but not in a while. But outgrowth could mean temporarily or whatever. I think I'm kind of inclined to think it's not that straightforward. You could have coevolution where language per se encourages both its own development and the development of some general underlying trait or something.NATHAN: Yeah. Which seems likely.AARON: Okay, cool. So why don't humans have general intelligence?NATHAN: Right. Yeah. As I was sort of talking about previously.AARON: Okay.NATHAN: I think I think I'd like to use go back to like a high level like a high level argument is there appears to be very surprised, like, much higher levels of functional specialization in brains than you expect. You can lose much more specific abilities than you expect to be able to lose. You can lose specifically the ability a famous example is like facebindness, actually. You probably lose the ability to specifically recognize things which you're, like, an expert in.AARON: Who does it or who loses this ability.NATHAN: If you've damaged your fuse inform area, you'll lose the ability to recognize faces, but nothing else.AARON: Okay.NATHAN: And there's this general pattern that your brain is much more you can lose much more specific abilities than you expect. So, for instance, if you sort of have damage to your ventral, medial, prefrontal cortex, you can say the reasoning for why you shouldn't compulsively gamble but still compulsively gamble.AARON: For instance okay, I understand this not gambling per se, but like executive function stuff at a visceral level. Okay, keep going.NATHAN: Yeah. Some other nice examples of this. I think memory is quite intuitive. So there's like, a very famous patient called patient HM who had his hippocampus removed and so as a result, lost all declarative memory. So all memory of specific facts and things which happened in his life. He just couldn't remember any of these things, but still perfectly functioning otherwise. I think at a really high level, I think this functional specialization is probably the strongest piece of evidence against the general intelligence hypothesis. I think fundamentally, general intelligence hypothesis implies that, like, if you, like yeah, if you was, like, harm a piece of your brain, if you have some brain injury, you might like generically get worse at tasks you like, generically get worse at, like at like all task groups use general intelligence. But I think suggesting people, including general intelligence, like the ability to write, the ability to speak, maybe not speak, the ability to do math, you do have.AARON: This it's just not as easy to analyze in a Cogsy paper which IQ or whatever. So there is something where if somebody has a particular cubic centimeter of their brain taken out, that's really excellent evidence about what that cubic centimeter does or whatever, but that non spatial modification is just harder to study and analyze. I guess we'll give people drugs, right? Suppose that set aside the psychometric stuff. But suppose that general intelligence is mostly a thing or whatever and you actually can ratchet it up and down. This is probably just true, right? You can probably give somebody different doses of, like, various drugs. I don't know, like laughing gas, like like, yeah, like probably, probably weed. Like I don't know.NATHAN: So I think this just probably isn't true. Your working memory corrects quite strongly with G and having better working memory generic can make you much better at lots of tasks if you have like.AARON: Yeah.NATHAN: Sorry, but this is just like a specific ability. It's like just specifically your working memory, which is improved if you go memory to a drugs. Improved working memory. I think it's like a few things like memory attention, maybe something like decision making, which are all like extremely useful abilities and improve how well other cognitive abilities work. But they're all separate things. If you improved your attention abilities, your working memory, but you sort of had some brain injury, which sort of meant you sort of had lost ability to pass syntax, you would not get better at passing syntax. And you can also use things separately. You can also improve attention and improve working memory separately, which just it's not just this one dial which you can turn up.AARON: There's good reason to expect that we can't turn it up because evolution is already sort of like maximizing, given the relevant constraints. Right. So you would need to be looking just like injuries. Maybe there are studies where they try to increase people's, they try to add a cubic centimeter to someone's brain, but normally it's like the opposite. You start from some high baseline and then see what faculties you lose. Just to clarify, I guess.NATHAN: Yeah, sorry, I think I've lost the you still think there probably is some general intelligence ability to turn up?AARON: Honestly, I think I haven't thought about this nearly as much as you. I kind of don't know what I think at some level. If I could just write down all of the different components and there are like 74 of them and what I think of a general intelligence consists of does that make it I guess in some sense, yeah, that does make it less of an ontologically legit thing or something. I think I think the thing I want to get the motivating thing here is that with humans yet you can like we know humans range in IQ, and there's, like, setting aside a very tiny subset of people with severe brain injuries or development disorders or whatever. Almost everybody has some sort of symbolic reasoning that they can do to some degree. Whereas the smartest maybe I'm wrong about this, but as far as I know, the smartest squirrel is not going to be able to have something semantically represent something else. And that's what I intuitively want to appeal to, you know what I mean?NATHAN: Yeah, I know what you're guessing at. So I think there's like two interesting things here. So I think one is, could a squirrel do this? I'm guessing a squirrel couldn't do this, but a dog can, or like a dog probably can. A chimpanzee definitely can.AARON: Do what?NATHAN: Chimpanzees can definitely learn to associate arbitrary signs, things in the world with arbitrary signs.AARON: Yes, but maybe I'm just adding on epicentercles here, but I feel like correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that maybe I'm just wrong about this, but I would assume that Chicken Tees cannot use that sign in a domain that is qualitatively different from the ones they've been in. Right. So, like, a dog will know that a certain sign means sit or whatever, but maybe that's not a good I.NATHAN: Don'T know think this is basically not true.AARON: Okay.NATHAN: And we sort of know this from teaching.AARON: Teaching.NATHAN: There's like a famously cocoa de guerrilla. Also a bonobo whose name I can't remember were taught sign language. And the thing they were consistently bad at was, like, putting together sentences they could learn quite large vocabularies learning to associate by large, I mean in the hundreds of words, in the low hundreds of words which they could consistently use consistently use correctly.AARON: What do you mean by, like, in what sense? What is bonobo using?NATHAN: A very famous and quite controversial example is like, coco gorilla was like, saw a swan outside and signed water bird. That's like, a controversial example. But other things, I think, which are controversial here is like, the syntax part of putting water and bird together is the controversial part, but it's not the controversial part that she could see a swan and call that a bird.AARON: Yeah, I mean, this is kind of just making me think, okay, maybe the threshold for D is just like at the chimp level or something. We are like or whatever the most like that. Sure. If a species really can generate from a prefix and a suffix or whatever, a concept that they hadn't learned before.NATHAN: Yeah, this is a controversial this is like a controversial example of that the addition to is the controversial part. Yeah, I suppose maybe brings back to why I think this matters is will there be this threshold which AIS cross such that their reasoning after this is qualitatively different to their reasoning previously? And this is like two things. One, like a much faster increase in AI capabilities and two, alignment techniques which worked on systems which didn't have g will no longer work. Systems which do have g. Brings back to why I think this actually matters. But I think if we're sort of accepting it, I think elephants probably also if you think that if we're saying, like, g is like a level of chimpanzees, chimpanzees just, like, don't don't look like quantitatively different to, like, don't look like that qualitatively different to, like, other animals. Now, lots of other animals live in similar complex social groups. Lots of other animals use tools.AARON: Yeah, sure. For one thing, I don't think there's not going to be a discontinuity in the same way that there wasn't a discontinuity at any point between humans evolution from the first prokaryotic cells or whatever are eukaryotic one of those two or both, I guess. My train of thought. Yes, I know it's controversial, but let's just suppose that the sign language thing was legit with the waterbird and that's not like a random one off fluke or something. Then maybe this is just some sort of weird vestigial evolutionary accident that actually isn't very beneficial for chimpanzees and they just stumbled their way into and then it just enabled them to it enables evolution to bootstrap Shimp genomes into human genomes. Because at some the smartest or whatever actually, I don't know. Honestly, I don't have a great grasp of evolutionary biology or evolution at all. But, yeah, it could just be not that helpful for chimps and helpful for an extremely smart chimp that looks kind of different or something like that.NATHAN: Yeah. So I suppose just like the other thing she's going on here, I don't want to keep banging on about this, but you can lose the language. You can lose linguistic ability. And it's just, like, happens this happens in stroke victims, for instance. It's not that rare. Just, like, lose linguistic ability, but still have all the other abilities which we sort of think of as like, general intelligence, which I think would be including the general intelligence, like, hypothesis.AARON: I agree that's, like, evidence against it. I just don't think it's very strong evidence, partially because I think there is a real school of thought that says that language is fundamental. Like, language drives thought. Language is, like, primary to thought or something. And I don't buy that. If you did buy that, I think this would be, like, more damning evidence.#6 Daniel Filan on why I'm wrong about ethics (+ Oppenheimer and what names mean in like a hardcore phil of language sense) [00:56:54][Note: I forgot to record an intro segment here. Sorry!]AARON: Yeah. Yes. I'm also anti scam. Right, thank you. Okay, so I think that thing that we were talking about last time we talked, which is like the thing I think we actually both know stuff about instead of just like, repeating New York Times articles is my nuanced ethics takes and why you think about talk about that and then we can just also branch off from there.DANIEL: Yeah, we can talk about that.AARON: Maybe see where that did. I luckily I have a split screen up, so I can pull up things. Maybe this is kind of like egotistical or something to center my particular view, but you've definitely given me some of the better pushback or whatever that I haven't gotten that much feedback of any kind, I guess, but it's still interesting to hear your take. So basically my ethical position or the thing that I think is true is that which I think is not the default view. I think most people think this is wrong is that total utilitarianism does not imply that for some amount of suffering that could be created there exists some other extremely large arbitrarily, large amount of happiness that could also be created which would morally justify the former. Basically.DANIEL: So you think that even under total utilitarianism there can be big amounts of suffering such that there's no way to morally tip the calculus. However much pleasure you can create, it's just not going to outweigh the fact that you inflicted that much suffering on some people.AARON: Yeah, and I'd highlight the word inflicted if something's already there and you can't do anything about it, that's kind of neither here nor there as it pertains to your actions or something. So it's really about you increasing, you creating suffering that wouldn't have otherwise been created. Yeah. It's also been a couple of months since I've thought about this in extreme detail, although I thought about it quite a bit. Yeah.DANIEL: Maybe I should say my contrary view, I guess, when you say that, I don't know, does total utilitarianism imply something or not? I'm like, well, presumably it depends on what we mean by total utilitarianism. Right. So setting that aside, I think that thesis is probably false. I think that yeah. You can offset great amounts of suffering with great amounts of pleasure, even for arbitrary amounts of suffering.AARON: Okay. I do think that position is like the much more common and even, I'd say default view. Do you agree with that? It's sort of like the implicit position of people who are of self described total utilitarians who haven't thought a ton about this particular question.DANIEL: Yeah, I think it's probably the implicit default. I think it's the implicit default in ethical theory or something. I think that in practice, when you're being a utilitarian, I don't know, normally, if you're trying to be a utilitarian and you see yourself inflicting a large amount of suffering, I don't know. I do think there's some instinct to be like, is there any way we can get around this?AARON: Yeah, for sure. And to be clear, I don't think this would look like a thought experiment. I think what it looks like in practice and also I will throw in caveats as I see necessary, but I think what it looks like in practice is like, spreading either wild animals or humans or even sentient digital life through the universe. That's in a non as risky way, but that's still just maybe like, say, making the earth, making multiple copies of humanity or something like that. That would be an example that's probably not like an example of what an example of creating suffering would be. For example, just creating another duplicate of earth. Okay.DANIEL: Anything that would be like so much suffering that we shouldn't even the pleasures of earth outweighs.AARON: Not necessarily, which is kind of a cop out. But my inclination is that if you include wild animals, the answer is yes, that creating another earth especially. Yeah, but I'm much more committed to some amount. It's like some amount than this particular time and place in human industry is like that or whatever.DANIEL: Okay, can I get a feel of some other concrete cases to see?AARON: Yeah.DANIEL: So one example that's on my mind is, like, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, right? So the standard case for this is, like, yeah, what? A hundred OD thousand people died? Like, quite terrible, quite awful. And a lot of them died, I guess a lot of them were sort of some people were sort of instantly vaporized, but a lot of people died in extremely painful ways. But the countercase is like, well, the alternative to that would have been like, an incredibly grueling land invasion of Japan, where many more people would have died or know regardless of what the actual alternatives were. If you think about the atomic bombings, do you think that's like the kind of infliction of suffering where there's just not an offsetting amount of pleasure that could make that okay?AARON: My intuition is no, that it is offsettable, but I would also emphasize that given the actual historical contingencies, the alternative, the implicit case for the bombing includes reducing suffering elsewhere rather than merely creating happiness. There can definitely be two bad choices that you have to make or something. And my claim doesn't really pertain to that, at least not directly.#7: Holly Elmore on AI pause, wild animal welfare, and some cool biology things I couldn't fully follow but maybe you can [01:04:00]Up next, Holly Elmore and I discuss the complexities and implications of AI development and open sourcing. We talk about protests and ethical considerations around her, um, uh, campaign to pause the development of frontier AI systems until, until we can tell that they're safe.AARON: So what's the plan? Do you have a plan? You don't have to have a plan. I don't have plans very much.HOLLY: Well, right now I'm hopeful about the UK AI summit. Pause AI and I have planned a multi city protest on the 21 October to encourage the UK AI Safety Summit to focus on safety first and to have as a topic arranging a pause or that of negotiation. There's a lot of a little bit upsetting advertising for that thing that's like, we need to keep up capabilities too. And I just think that's really a secondary objective. And that's how I wanted to be focused on safety. So I'm hopeful about the level of global coordination that we're already seeing. It's going so much faster than we thought. Already the UN Secretary General has been talking about this and there have been meetings about this. It's happened so much faster at the beginning of this year. Nobody thought we could talk about nobody was thinking we'd be talking about this as a mainstream topic. And then actually governments have been very receptive anyway. So right now I'm focused on other than just influencing opinion, the targets I'm focused on, or things like encouraging these international like, I have a protest on Friday, my first protest that I'm leading and kind of nervous that's against Meta. It's at the Meta building in San Francisco about their sharing of model weights. They call it open source. It's like not exactly open source, but I'm probably not going to repeat that message because it's pretty complicated to explain. I really love the pause message because it's just so hard to misinterpret and it conveys pretty clearly what we want very quickly. And you don't have a lot of bandwidth and advocacy. You write a lot of materials for a protest, but mostly what people see is the title.AARON: That's interesting because I sort of have the opposite sense. I agree that in terms of how many informational bits you're conveying in a particular phrase, pause AI is simpler, but in some sense it's not nearly as obvious. At least maybe I'm more of a tech brain person or whatever. But why that is good, as opposed to don't give extremely powerful thing to the worst people in the world. That's like a longer everyone.HOLLY: Maybe I'm just weird. I've gotten the feedback from open source ML people is the number one thing is like, it's too late, there's already super powerful models. There's nothing you can do to stop us, which sounds so villainous, I don't know if that's what they mean. Well, actually the number one message is you're stupid, you're not an ML engineer. Which like, okay, number two is like, it's too late, there's nothing you can do. There's all of these other and Meta is not even the most powerful generator of models that it share of open source models. I was like, okay, fine. And I don't know, I don't think that protesting too much is really the best in these situations. I just mostly kind of let that lie. I could give my theory of change on this and why I'm focusing on Meta. Meta is a large company I'm hoping to have influence on. There is a Meta building in San Francisco near where yeah, Meta is the biggest company that is doing this and I think there should be a norm against model weight sharing. I was hoping it would be something that other employees of other labs would be comfortable attending and that is a policy that is not shared across the labs. Obviously the biggest labs don't do it. So OpenAI is called OpenAI but very quickly decided not to do that. Yeah, I kind of wanted to start in a way that made it more clear than pause AI. Does that anybody's welcome something? I thought a one off issue like this that a lot of people could agree and form a coalition around would be good. A lot of people think that this is like a lot of the open source ML people think know this is like a secret. What I'm saying is secretly an argument for tyranny. I just want centralization of power. I just think that there are elites that are better qualified to run everything. It was even suggested I didn't mention China. It even suggested that I was racist because I didn't think that foreign people could make better AIS than Meta.AARON: I'm grimacing here. The intellectual disagreeableness, if that's an appropriate term or something like that. Good on you for standing up to some pretty bad arguments.HOLLY: Yeah, it's not like that worth it. I'm lucky that I truly am curious about what people think about stuff like that. I just find it really interesting. I spent way too much time understanding the alt. Right. For instance, I'm kind of like sure I'm on list somewhere because of the forums I was on just because I was interested and it is something that serves me well with my adversaries. I've enjoyed some conversations with people where I kind of like because my position on all this is that look, I need to be convinced and the public needs to be convinced that this is safe before we go ahead. So I kind of like not having to be the smart person making the arguments. I kind of like being like, can you explain like I'm five. I still don't get it. How does this work?AARON: Yeah, no, I was thinking actually not long ago about open source. Like the phrase has such a positive connotation and in a lot of contexts it really is good. I don't know. I'm glad that random tech I don't know, things from 2004 or whatever, like the reddit source code is like all right, seems cool that it's open source. I don't actually know if that was how that right. But yeah, I feel like maybe even just breaking down what the positive connotation comes from and why it's in people's self. This is really what I was thinking about, is like, why is it in people's self interest to open source things that they made and that might break apart the allure or sort of ethical halo that it has around it? And I was thinking it probably has something to do with, oh, this is like how if you're a tech person who makes some cool product, you could try to put a gate around it by keeping it closed source and maybe trying to get intellectual property or something. But probably you're extremely talented already, or pretty wealthy. Definitely can be hired in the future. And if you're not wealthy yet I don't mean to put things in just materialist terms, but basically it could easily be just like in a yeah, I think I'll probably take that bit out because I didn't mean to put it in strictly like monetary terms, but basically it just seems like pretty plausibly in an arbitrary tech person's self interest, broadly construed to, in fact, open source their thing, which is totally fine and normal.HOLLY: I think that's like 99 it's like a way of showing magnanimity showing, but.AARON: I don't make this sound so like, I think 99.9% of human behavior is like this. I'm not saying it's like, oh, it's some secret, terrible self interested thing, but just making it more mechanistic. Okay, it's like it's like a status thing. It's like an advertising thing. It's like, okay, you're not really in need of direct economic rewards, or sort of makes sense to play the long game in some sense, and this is totally normal and fine, but at the end of the day, there's reasons why it makes sense, why it's in people's self interest to open source.HOLLY: Literally, the culture of open source has been able to bully people into, like, oh, it's immoral to keep it for yourself. You have to release those. So it's just, like, set the norms in a lot of ways, I'm not the bully. Sounds bad, but I mean, it's just like there is a lot of pressure. It looks bad if something is closed source.AARON: Yeah, it's kind of weird that Meta I don't know, does Meta really think it's in their I don't know. Most economic take on this would be like, oh, they somehow think it's in their shareholders interest to open source.HOLLY: There are a lot of speculations on why they're doing this. One is that? Yeah, their models aren't as good as the top labs, but if it's open source, then open source quote, unquote then people will integrate it llama Two into their apps. Or People Will Use It And Become I don't know, it's a little weird because I don't know why using llama Two commits you to using llama Three or something, but it just ways for their models to get in in places where if you just had to pay for their models too, people would go for better ones. That's one thing. Another is, yeah, I guess these are too speculative. I don't want to be seen repeating them since I'm about to do this purchase. But there's speculation that it's in best interests in various ways to do this. I think it's possible also that just like so what happened with the release of Llama One is they were going to allow approved people to download the weights, but then within four days somebody had leaked Llama One on four chan and then they just were like, well, whatever, we'll just release the weights. And then they released Llama Two with the weights from the beginning. And it's not like 100% clear that they intended to do full open source or what they call Open source. And I keep saying it's not open source because this is like a little bit of a tricky point to make. So I'm not emphasizing it too much. So they say that they're open source, but they're not. The algorithms are not open source. There are open source ML models that have everything open sourced and I don't think that that's good. I think that's worse. So I don't want to criticize them for that. But they're saying it's open source because there's all this goodwill associated with open source. But actually what they're doing is releasing the product for free or like trade secrets even you could say like things that should be trade secrets. And yeah, they're telling people how to make it themselves. So it's like a little bit of a they're intentionally using this label that has a lot of positive connotations but probably according to Open Source Initiative, which makes the open Source license, it should be called something else or there should just be like a new category for LLMs being but I don't want things to be more open. It could easily sound like a rebuke that it should be more open to make that point. But I also don't want to call it Open source because I think Open source software should probably does deserve a lot of its positive connotation, but they're not releasing the part, that the software part because that would cut into their business. I think it would be much worse. I think they shouldn't do it. But I also am not clear on this because the Open Source ML critics say that everyone does have access to the same data set as Llama Two. But I don't know. Llama Two had 7 billion tokens and that's more than GPT Four. And I don't understand all of the details here. It's possible that the tokenization process was different or something and that's why there were more. But Meta didn't say what was in the longitude data set and usually there's some description given of what's in the data set that led some people to speculate that maybe they're using private data. They do have access to a lot of private data that shouldn't be. It's not just like the common crawl backup of the Internet. Everybody's basing their training on that and then maybe some works of literature they're not supposed to. There's like a data set there that is in question, but metas is bigger than bigger than I think well, sorry, I don't have a list in front of me. I'm not going to get stuff wrong, but it's bigger than kind of similar models and I thought that they have access to extra stuff that's not public. And it seems like people are asking if maybe that's part of the training set. But yeah, the ML people would have or the open source ML people that I've been talking to would have believed that anybody who's decent can just access all of the training sets that they've all used.AARON: Aside, I tried to download in case I'm guessing, I don't know, it depends how many people listen to this. But in one sense, for a competent ML engineer, I'm sure open source really does mean that. But then there's people like me. I don't know. I knew a little bit of R, I think. I feel like I caught on the very last boat where I could know just barely enough programming to try to learn more, I guess. Coming out of college, I don't know, a couple of months ago, I tried to do the thing where you download Llama too, but I tried it all and now I just have like it didn't work. I have like a bunch of empty folders and I forget got some error message or whatever. Then I tried to train my own tried to train my own model on my MacBook. It just printed. That's like the only thing that a language model would do because that was like the most common token in the training set. So anyway, I'm just like, sorry, this is not important whatsoever.HOLLY: Yeah, I feel like torn about this because I used to be a genomicist and I used to do computational biology and it was not machine learning, but I used a highly parallel GPU cluster. And so I know some stuff about it and part of me wants to mess around with it, but part of me feels like I shouldn't get seduced by this. I am kind of worried that this has happened in the AI safety community. It's always been people who are interested in from the beginning, it was people who are interested in singularity and then realized there was this problem. And so it's always been like people really interested in tech and wanting to be close to it. And I think we've been really influenced by our direction, has been really influenced by wanting to be where the action is with AI development. And I don't know that that was right.AARON: Not personal, but I guess individual level I'm not super worried about people like you and me losing the plot by learning more about ML on their personal.HOLLY: You know what I mean? But it does just feel sort of like I guess, yeah, this is maybe more of like a confession than, like a point. But it does feel a little bit like it's hard for me to enjoy in good conscience, like, the cool stuff.AARON: Okay. Yeah.HOLLY: I just see people be so attached to this as their identity. They really don't want to go in a direction of not pursuing tech because this is kind of their whole thing. And what would they do if we weren't working toward AI? This is a big fear that people express to me with they don't say it in so many words usually, but they say things like, well, I don't want AI to never get built about a pause. Which, by the way, just to clear up, my assumption is that a pause would be unless society ends for some other reason, that a pause would eventually be lifted. It couldn't be forever. But some people are worried that if you stop the momentum now, people are just so luddite in their insides that we would just never pick it up again. Or something like that. And, yeah, there's some identity stuff that's been expressed. Again, not in so many words to me about who will we be if we're just sort of like activists instead of working on.AARON: Maybe one thing that we might actually disagree on. It's kind of important is whether so I think we both agree that Aipause is better than the status quo, at least broadly, whatever. I know that can mean different things, but yeah, maybe I'm not super convinced, actually, that if I could just, like what am I trying to say? Maybe at least right now, if I could just imagine the world where open eye and Anthropic had a couple more years to do stuff and nobody else did, that would be better. I kind of think that they are reasonably responsible actors. And so I don't k

Today's interview about HA is fascinating. Find out why getting your period is only the start of the journey for women with HA! You can find out more about Dani and Holly (including their full bios) in these recent podcast episodes: [FAMM Practitioner Series] FFP 396 | Overcoming Hypothalamic Amenorrhea | Having a Baby During Covid Times | Dani Sheriff [FAMM Practitioner Series] FFP 441 | Overcoming Hypothalamic Amenorrhea | Holly Leever, L.Ac Today's episode is sponsored by the Fertility Awareness Mastery Charting Workbook. The first fully customizable paper charting workbook of its kind, available in both Fahrenheit and Celsius editions. Click here to grab your copy today! Today's episode is also sponsored by the Fertility Awareness Mastery Mentorship program, class of 2024!  Use this link to join the waiting list for next year's program! Topics discussed in today's episode: Dani's personal history with HA and what she does  Holly's personal history with HA and what she focuses on for work Conventional ways that HA is addressed How to recover your relationship with food after you get your period back How do we set up women to come into a sustainable pattern  Importance on focusing on both pictures even if women are trying to get their period back just to get pregnant Strategies on how to get your period back in a healthy way What approach makes sense to Holly due to her personal experience  Connect with Dani: You can connect with Dani on her website, email, Facebook and Instagram. Connect with Holly: You can connect with Holly on her website, Facebook, Instagram and Podcast. Resources mentioned: The Fifth Vital Sign: Master Your Cycles & Optimize Your Fertility (Book) | Lisa Hendrickson-Jack Fertility Awareness Mastery Charting Workbook Fertility Awareness Mastery Online Self-Study Program Related podcasts & blog posts: FFP 429 | Overcoming Hypothalamic Amenorrhea | PCOS/HA Replay Series | Dr. Nicola Rinaldi, PhD FFP 425 | PCOS or HA? | What Is The Difference? | Lisa | Fertility Friday FFP 371 | Hypothalamic Amenorrhea & The Menstrual Cycle | Cynthia Donovan FFP 353 | Myths & Facts About Hypothalamic Amenorrhea | Dani Sheriff Join the community! Follow Fertility Friday on Instagram! Subscribe to the Fertility Friday Podcast in Apple Podcasts! Music Credit: Intro/Outro music Produced by J-Gantic A Special Thank You to Our Show Sponsors: Fertility Friday | Fertility Awareness Programs This episode is sponsored by my Fertility Awareness Programs! Master Fertility Awareness and take a deep dive into your cycles and how they relate to your overall health! Click here to apply now! Fertility Awareness Mastery Mentorship Program (FAMM) This episode is sponsored by FAMM! Are you a women's health practitioner looking for a solid way to incorporate comprehensive fertility awareness chart analysis into your practice? If yes, FAMM is the program you've been waiting for. Click here to apply now!

Happy New Year! We are kicking off 2023 with a podcast filled with doulas. Meagan is joined by one of our VBAC Link-trained doulas, Sarah, to welcome our guest, Holly. Holly is a wife, mama, RN, doula, and placenta encapsulator. Holly's first birth was a planned Cesarean due to breech presentation. Her second birth was a hospital VBAC with a long labor. Her most recent birth was a redemptive, quick, and dreamy HBAC (almost in her toilet)!Holly shares her tips on keeping a positive mindset through weeks of prodromal labor and how she was able to fight doubts and fears to achieve her beautiful HBAC. Additional LinksHolly's Doula WebsiteHow to VBAC: The Ultimate Prep Course for ParentsFull Transcript under Episode DetailsFull TranscriptMeagan: Hello and happy 2023. I cannot believe we are starting a new year off, but I can't wait to see where this year takes us. Today, we have Sarah. She is back today. She actually was on a little bit ago, but we had some time craziness so we are having her back on for a full episode. So welcome, Sarah. Sarah: Hello, glad to be back. Meagan: So happy to have you back. So fun to be cohosting with our VBAC doulas. If you guys did not know, we have a VBAC doula certification for VBAC and we are going to start hearing from some of our VBAC doulas because I'm going to have them on here and there as cohosts. I'm so excited to have them on, share where they're at, and of course, have them be a part of this amazing community too. Sharing these stories and hearing these stories on the podcast seriously lights my day up. So on those days where I'm like, “Okay, we've got 4 hours of podcasts.” A lot of people might dread 4 hours of work, but I don't see it as 4 hours of work. I see it as 4 hours of inspiration and motivation for me to keep going on The VBAC Link and to share these stories with you. Review of the WeekWe have our friend Holly today and she's going to share her VBAC story but I'm going to have Sarah read a Review of the Week before we do. Sarah: Okay. This review is from Apple Podcasts and I hope I'm saying this username correctly, but it's Kyeiwaaglover. Meagan: Yeah. When I saw that I was like, “Kyoa?”Sarah: Kyeiwaaglover, I believe, and it says, “As a doula, I'm grateful for platforms like this to refer to clients and for me to learn as well. “Meagan: I love that. It's kind of fun. Today, we've got me, Sarah, Holly, and then Kyeiwaaglover– I don't even know how to say it. Sarah: Kyeiwaaglover. That's what I'm going with. Meagan: Yes. We are all doulas. A fun background story about Holly is she is actually a registered nurse by trade but after her VBAC, she found the passion like a lot of us and has since become a doula and a placenta encapsulator. I think it's fun how we're sharing a VBAC story, but together, even with the review, I didn't even make that connection until you just said that, but we're all doulas today so yay for doulas. I'm so excited to get into Holly's story. Holly's StoriesMeagan: Okay everybody. Holly, thank you so much for taking the time today to share your story. I know you've got your little one in a wrap strapped to your chest. So stinking adorable. How old is your baby? Holly: He is 7 weeks today. Meagan: 7 weeks!Holly: So we're going on 2 months. Meagan: Just really little and he was trying to turn into the camera. Holly: I know. Meagan: Well, we would love to turn the time over to you to share your VBAC story. And of course, your C-section story too if you would like. Holly: Absolutely. I have a bit of a journey with my birth stories. My first daughter is 4.5 now, so I was pregnant a little over 5 years ago with her. I was finishing up nursing school. I was really into the medical model of care at that point just being in nursing school and getting all of that information. During my pregnancy, it was my last semester, and I was with a midwife at a clinic. I overall had a great pregnancy and great care. I finished nursing school, took my MCLETS, finished everything, and so we were in the last few weeks of pregnancy and I got to about 41 weeks with her and we had those tests at the end so you can check to see their growth. Meagan: It's like a third-trimester ultrasound where they go through everything. Holly: You go overdue and they're like, “Let's make sure everything's okay.” Blah blah blah. A bunch of time went by and they can't tell you anything in the ultrasounds, and then my midwife had called me later that evening and she's like, “You know, your baby is actually breech and these are my recommendations,” and so on. At that point, I still had prepared myself for a natural birth. I didn't want to do an epidural. I wanted as few interventions as possible. I didn't even think of that as a thing that could happen, so it just tore my heart out. At 41 weeks, you're so emotional and so full of hormones so it took a long time for me to process it. I went and had a consult with an OB at the local hospital and they were like, “Well, we could try turning the baby, but at this point, you're 41 weeks. There's a lot of risk to it.” They're like, “Basically, your only option is a C-section.” I'm like, “Okay.”I didn't have all of the education and resources that I have now, so at that point, I had to put a lot of trust into the medical system and took their word for it and we had a planned C-section with her. But I was 41.5 weeks by the time we actually scheduled it, so it wasn't an emergency. They were like, “If you go into labor, it's an emergency, but we'll still schedule it for 3 or 4 days from now.”Overall, my C-section went really well. I was able to have my baby skin-to-skin right away. She never left me. We stayed together which was awesome. I had a really good recovery from that, thank God. There weren't huge traumas with it but once I got pregnant with my second, I realized how actually traumatic emotionally it was for me, so it took a lot of healing and processing to be able to give myself that second chance and to go for my first VBAC. About a year and a half later, I got pregnant with my second daughter. She is now 2.5 years old. At that point, I really had gotten into more– I was still working as a nurse and I had really gotten into more of natural living and natural solutions and just a holistic view of health. I had hired a doula. At that point, I was interviewing providers at the hospital and I hired a doula who was going through midwifery school. She was just a wealth of knowledge. I had a doula with my first baby, but it wasn't what I had expected out of a doula, unfortunately. But, my doula with my second baby was absolutely incredible. She just provided me with so much information and was there for me to support me, to help me through all of my emotions with my first birth. So talking with her about the providers I had interviewed and told her, “I still don't feel comfortable choosing one.” She was like, “Well, have you given home birth a thought or hiring a midwife?” I'm like, “Well, there are no midwives at the hospital that will take me because they can't take VBACs at the hospital.”And in Minnesota, home midwives are allowed to take on VBACs at home. They don't have huge restrictions there on the home birth midwives so I'm like, “Okay, well maybe. I don't know. There are these risks that I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with that right now.” She's like, “Well, either way, you can always just interview one and get the information so you have both sides so you know which way you want to choose and you are fully informed.” I said, “Yeah. You're right.” So my husband and I interviewed a couple of midwives. One of them was a little iffy with taking us on. She didn't seem very comfortable with VBAC which was fine and another one was pretty good. She was more medically minded and then I interviewed a third midwife. She had a lot of experience with VBACs and was just overall matched really well with us. We ended up choosing to home birth with my second baby. That whole prenatal care with our home birth midwife was incredible. The prenatal care alone was just so different from a clinical setting. I was about 40 weeks at that point and we were going for our home birth. You get to that 40-week mark and you're just like, “Okay. When is this going to happen? I'm so ready to have this baby,” but also trying to trust your body and knowing when that time is right. So I was a couple of days away from 42 weeks and labor happened spontaneously. I labored at home with my doula and then my midwife came later on. My husband was there and my mom was there. I labored for a total of 24 hours and we ended up suspecting after checking my cervix and checking baby's position that she was stuck. Her head was flexed, so her chin was up instead of tucked down to her chest, so she was stuck on my pelvic bone for quite a while. After assessing the risks and everything, we ultimately decided to transfer to the hospital. The hospital was 5 minutes from us so it was one of those things where it was comforting knowing that it was so close, but also, in this pregnancy and in this experience with my second, I really had a hard time letting go of control and really trusting my body fully 100%. I think that also kind of affected the way I labored and my thought process. We transferred to the hospital and had a really great resident doctor. She was incredible. She was like, “You know, do your thing. Do what you need to do. Just let us know what you need.” The OB that was there was a different story, but I ended up laboring there for about 8 more hours and that included about an hour and a half of pushing. I had my first VBAC at the hospital and she came out just screaming and crying, eyes wide open. I just remember crying and saying, “We did it. We did it.” I couldn't believe it. I was just in shock and it was very healing. But later on, I found that there were still parts of it that were a little traumatic for me and I had things to heal from with that birth too even though I had successfully had a VBAC, it was different and not fully what I expected. So that leads me to my third and final baby here. We again decided to plan for a home birth. My daughter was a little less than 2 and my other daughter a little less than 4 when we got pregnant with him. Again, we decided to home-birth and my husband was like, “Are you sure? Last time we ended up going to the hospital. Do you think that's just going to be easier if we just plan for that this time?”I said, “No. Absolutely not. We're having this baby at home.” My mindset was so different. I started as a doula after my second daughter was born and I had really gotten into that natural birth and trusting your body and just knowing that our bodies were designed for this. Our bodies were perfectly designed for birth. Yes, there are times when medical intervention is needed, but really, I just was so in this mindset of, “I can do this. This is it. This is my redemption. I know I can do this.” I didn't even have to interview any midwives. I actually hired my doula from my second birth. She had become a midwife and was practicing and I just instantly knew her philosophy and her beliefs surrounding birth were exactly what I needed in my prenatal care and my birth, everything. We started seeing her from about 16 weeks onward and so we had all of our prenatal care at home. It was incredible. She really put everything into my hands which was what I wanted. I wanted control of the tests that we did and that we didn't do, everything. We weren't going to have an ultrasound to find out the sex but ultimately, my husband and I agreed to have a 20-week ultrasound at 23 weeks. We found out the sex and we were just so surprised and so happy because we were having a boy and if we were having a girl too, of course, we would have been just as happy, but at that point, I could get rid of all my girl clothes and start organizing and getting ready. It was just one of those things that my heart needed. So with my midwife that we had, like I said, she really put the control in my hands. I felt so much respect from her and I felt like in every decision I made, I was fully informed. I understood everything. I made the decisions that were best for me and my baby and our family. Leading up to my birth, those few weeks before, we talked about fears and if there was anything I needed to process before my labor. This time I was like, “No. Really, I feel good. I don't have any fears.” There was a part of me that was like, “What if we do transfer to the hospital?” but the other part of me was like, “Don't worry about that. Put that out. You've done it before. You know what to do,” so I put that part out of my head too. I was like, “Nope. We're having this baby at home.” We actually were planning to move cross country down to South Carolina in September so my midwife was like, “Do you feel okay about this timeline you're on?” I'm like, “Oh yeah. I'll go to 42 weeks and I'll still have 3 weeks before we have to move. It'll be fine.” She was just like, “I can't believe you're fine with that.” I'm like, “Yeah. I feel totally good about it. I have so much support.” My husband's family was coming right after the baby was born. The amount of support we had was exactly what we needed and I'm so thankful for that. Near the end of my pregnancy with our son, there were a couple of points where we actually thought he was breech, and those brought back a lot of feelings. I kept telling my midwife throughout my pregnancy, “This pregnancy feels a lot like my first just my cravings and everything.” She was like, “Okay.” We ended up thinking he was breech and I'm like, “Oh great. Here we go.” But at that point, I was like, “It doesn't matter what position he's in, I'm still letting myself go into labor. If he was breech, I was still going to birth him vaginally and everything.” It didn't matter to me but it was also like, “Okay, I have to prepare for this if this is a change of plans.” Another midwife locally has a little ultrasound that you can plug into your phone, so we checked quickly to see where his head was just so we could confirm and prepare if needed and she was like, “Yeah, I think he is breech. I think this is his head up here.” She was like, “Let me check a little bit lower,” so we checked a little bit lower, but it turns out that his head was super, super deep in my pelvis. I'm sure I probably was dilated too to maybe 2 or 3 with him because he was just so low in my pelvis that they were feeling his shoulders when they would palpate. I threw that out of the window. He was head down. We were good to go. The next few weeks, I was about 39 weeks, maybe a little before that, and I started having prodromal labor. I kept referring to it as that and I'd have contractions all day long, all day long, and then I'd go to sleep at night and they'd go away. Nothing would happen. They were fine. They weren't contractions where I'm like, “Oh man,” trying to breathe through or anything, but they were uncomfortable and they had changed from Braxton Hicks because I had Braxton Hicks throughout my pregnancy too. So they had changed. They were stronger and lower. It was just one of those things which messes with your head. You're like, “Okay. Could this be it? No, probably not. I'm just going to go to sleep,” and when you wake up in the morning, it's like, “Okay. No baby.” Weeks of that and it was just physically exhausting, mentally exhausting and then you get family who are like, “When's the baby coming?” You're like, “I don't know.” You want to tune everyone out, but at the same time, you can still hear them and you get in your own head. That's why now, with my own clients, I'm like, “Don't tell anyone your due date. Just don't. Tell them your birth month. Sometime in August. That is it,” because people mean well and they don't necessarily mean to be pushy with it, but–Meagan: I know. Holly: –-it's just one of those things where it doesn't help. It really doesn't. And then there was one weekend, I got up and I was 41 and 2 or 3 days. That weekend, I just told my husband, “We just need to go. I need to get out of the house. I need to go out and do things all day long. I don't want to be here contracting.” He's like, “Okay. All right. That's fine.” So we took the girls and we went to my sister's camper and we were there all day swimming and hanging out. I started having contractions like, “Oh man,” like twinging pains in my cervix. I'm like, “Okay. This is different. Maybe something's happening. I'm going to be patient and keep myself busy.” I went to the bathroom later on around dinnertime. I had actually brought my daughter to the bathroom and I'm like, “Okay, I'll go too.” I wiped and I'm like, “Oh my god, there's some mucus plug on my toilet paper. Yes. Things are happening. Okay. Back to trusting my body and knowing that everything is happening at the right time.” I went out, of course, and told my husband. He was like, “Okay. Do we need to go?” I'm like, “No. We're fine. We're going to stay here. We're going to finish our day then go home.” We went home and there were more contractions. It felt like there were more. Actually, a week before this– I forgot to mention this– my midwife was like, “Stop referring to it as prodromal labor. Think of it as early labor.” I'm like, “Okay. I've been in early labor for 2 weeks now. That's not helping, but okay.” Meagan: Well, I will say this though. Sometimes when we tell our clients, “Oh, it looks like it's prodromal labor,” they're like, “So you're telling me that I'm not laboring?” So maybe if we change it to early labor, it's just– I don't know. Like you said, it's just a really long early labor. Holly: Yeah. I know. And it kind of helps. It's all a process. It's all doing something. It's not for nothing. My body was doing– I don't know. Maybe he wasn't in the right position where my body wanted to birth him, but he wasn't finding the right position. Meagan: That's a lot of the time the reason why prodromal labor happens because our uterus is brilliant and it's trying to work and get our baby into the right spot before labor begins. Holly: Yes. Yes, yes, yes. So much yes. So the next morning came around, I'm like, “Okay. I slept all night. That's great, but nothing happened. Okay. What are we going to do today?” So we drove 45 minutes north to my dad's house and my husband was like, “Do you think this is too far?” I'm like, “No, this is fine.” I thought this was going to be our last time at my dad's house before we had a baby and then move. I'm like, “This is what I need.” So we spent the day on the lake swimming and just hanging out. I still had those contractions and twinging. I'm like, “Okay. This is good. We're just having a nice time,” and then we went home and had dinner and went on a walk with our girls. I think it was that night, we had a couple of friends over. They were fixing something in my husband's car. I went back inside and got my girls to sleep. I went to the bathroom and I noticed even more mucus plug that night. I was like, “Okay. Awesome. We're on the right path still.” I went to sleep that night. Actually, early, early Monday– because that was a Sunday night– so early Monday morning at 3:00 AM, I was waking up to these stronger contractions and I was sleeping, but I was breathing through them. I could tell that it was more than what it was before. That morning comes and I told my husband. He actually had an interview for a new job that day virtually. He was like, “Well, I have to be at this interview.” I'm like, “Okay. It's fine. We're not going to have a baby yet.” I went throughout that day and I had these contractions where I was breathing through them. I was stopping what I was doing and shushing my girls and being like, “I need this moment to get through this, and then we're good.” My midwives came over to check on me and my contractions stopped. They went away. I was like, “Okay. This is obviously my body telling me that I need alone time.” They left and my contractions started coming back again. My girls were around. They are 4 and 2. They were just nuts at this point. It's kind of like my body knew to pull back for a while and then I actually went to Target with my mom Monday afternoon. We bought a rocking chair. I'm like, “I need a chair. This is going to happen soon. “ I wasn't going to get one because we were moving and then I'm like, “Nope. We're just going to do it.” We were walking around Target and I'm just having these contractions and stopping and she goes, “Are you sure we're okay to be here?” I'm like, “It's fine. Everything's fine. It's not happening yet.” I'm just in denial. We get home and we do our nightly walks with the girls and I'm curb walking and just trying to get things to keep going and get stronger. I texted my midwife. I'm like, “Yeah, they're like 10 minutes apart. Definitely stronger and lower and more painful, so yeah. We'll see what happens later.” She's like, “Okay. Whatever.”That night, we were outside and my daughter Hannah is my two-year-old. She's like, “I'm ready to go to bed.” I'm like, “Okay. Let's go.” We get her inside and my husband and my other daughter were outside playing still. I got her to bed and we just cuddled in her bed and got all of that oxytocin flowing. Then after that, my contractions were really starting to pick up and started to get a little closer together. They were about 8 minutes at this point. I started texting my husband. I'm like, “Where are you? Where's Callie? You need to get her to bed.” I called my husband's parents and I'm like, “Can you pray for me? I want you to pray over me now. I feel like something's going to happen here soon and maybe tonight's the night.” So just having that prayer really helped me calm down and really settle down. Then after that, my husband comes in with my daughter. She's not wanting to go to sleep and keeps coming out of her room. I told him, I'm like, “Okay.” I don't know what came over me, but I'm like, “You need to get her to bed right now. She cannot be out here anymore. I can't do this.” He goes, “Okay, all right.” Finally, she goes to sleep and stays in her room. He's in there with her until she falls asleep. So I'm like, “Okay. I'm going to make myself some toast and a snack and some tea and relax a little bit. Maybe just go to sleep.” So I'm in my kitchen and all of a sudden, this contraction just comes over my whole entire body. I'm like, “Oh man. This is it. This is the one. This is the start of it.” Finally, I took myself out of denial. I'm like, “Okay. Things are going to happen.” At the top of this contraction, I'm standing at the kitchen sink, and my water breaks. My husband is in my daughter's room. I don't have my phone on me and I'm just like, “Oh my god. Oh my god.”Meagan: Like, “Okay. This isn't going to stop. I don't think this is going to stop.” Holly: I know. I'm like, “This is real now. My water broke. This is actually happening.” It took my water breaking for me to actually believe it at this point. Thankfully, I was actually standing over a rug by my kitchen sink. I'm like, “Okay. This is great. I'm on a rug, but I want to move. I don't want to walk down to my room.” I stand there for a minute and I'm like, “Oh my god. Oh my god. Jason!” My husband's name is Jason. He doesn't hear me of course because he's in my daughter's room and so then I finally waddle all down the hallway down to our room. I get my phone and I text him. I said, “My water broke.” He texts back, “Great!”I don't know what he was thinking. I called my midwife and I was really calm. I was like, “Hey, my water broke and things are happening.” She goes, “Okay, great. How far apart are your contractions?” I'm like, “They're probably 6-8 minutes, 8ish minutes I guess.” She goes, “Okay, well why don't you time them for the next half hour and then text me and let me know how they are?” So I'm like, “Okay, I have some time.” Little did I know, she was actually texting my husband, “I'm on my way. I'll be there as soon as I can.” She's like, “I don't want to miss your birth.” My husband finally comes out of the room. I wasn't panicking but moreso excited and being like, “Okay. It's happening. This is it. This is what we've been preparing for and waiting for.” At this point, I was just emotional every day about wanting to have my baby and not be pregnant anymore. He was like, “Okay, great. What do you need from me?” At this point, I'm already cleaning up our room, and not because we were having our midwives but mostly because I wanted our room to be prepared. I had everything set up like my twinkle lights and my affirmations, everything. So at that point, my contractions were 3-4 minutes apart. So as soon as my water broke, they really got going. I was really starting to labor through them now and breathing and moaning and doing all of the labor things. I found my ideal position of laboring. I was on my knees hunched over my bed because my bed was just on the floor at that point.My husband was telling me, “What can I do? How can I help?” With my first VBAC, I had this weird, sharp, dull pain. It was so hard to describe. It was on my right leg from my butt all the way down to my heel. It was awful. It never went away. I couldn't find anything that made it comfortable, so I'm like, “Can you just massage my legs? I have that same pain this time through every contraction.” I think that was the only fearful thing. I didn't want to have that this time and of course, I did. So I'm like, “Just massage my legs,” so he grabbed some [towels] and he was massaging my leg through every contraction in between and then he was doing counterpressure on my back. At this point, things were really picking up very fast. So my water broke at about 8:40ish and then my midwife and her assistant midwife and then another student got there at about 9:40 because she lived about 45 minutes away. So then they got there and I was really in labor land and just really in the thick of it and I just remember thinking, “Why am I not getting a break? These contractions just keep coming quicker and quicker and I'm not having as much time in between. Why am I not getting a break?”She goes, “Well, things are happening fast.” I'm like, “Okay, all right,” and still not thinking anything of it. I was in the on-my-knees position laboring which felt super great and my husband was doing counterpressure perfectly through every single contraction, bless his heart. At one point, I'm like, “Okay, I've got to get up. I've got to go pee. It's been a while.” They're like, “Okay, you've got to get up. Let's go to the bathroom and sit on the toilet for a little bit. That'll be good for labor, for dilating, for everything.”I'm like, “Okay. I can do that.” It took all my might to stand up because his head was in my pelvis and– I don't know. Some women labor standing up and push and everything. I just cannot even imagine because I stood up and I just waddled. I'm like, “This is the weirdest feeling and so uncomfortable.” I got to the bathroom which is attached to our room thankfully. I got on the toilet and I remember being like, “I can't pee.” In my previous labor, that same thing happened and they actually gave me a catheter and took out a ton of pee which eventually actually helped my baby come down. So this time that happened, I'm like, “Oh no, we're going to have to put a catheter in.” She goes, “I don't know. Just give it some time.” We were on the toilet for maybe 10 minutes and I had a couple of contractions that felt good this time. They didn't hurt. They just felt like my body was– it's so hard to describe and now, looking back, I'm like, “Okay. That was my body pushing.” So this time I really got to experience that my body was actually doing it. I wasn't pushing. I wasn't doing anything. These contractions were just pushing my baby out. She was like, “Why don't you just put your hand down there and just see if you can feel baby?” To my surprise, I'm like, “Oh my god. His head was maybe a knuckle deep.” I'm sorry if that's too much information. But he was so close. He was right there. I'm like, “Oh my god. I'm doing it. My body is doing it. He's doing it. We're so close.” I had another very light contraction that didn't feel like it did anything at all. I'm like, “I don't know what that was, but I'm sure it was my body just getting a little bit of a break.” Still, at that point, I didn't think I was about to birth him, but another contraction came and I put my hand down. This contraction came on so suddenly and my body just was pushing. All of a sudden, I felt my baby's head emerge. My hand was over the top of his head. I was still on the toilet and I was like, “Oh my god. He's coming right now. I need to get off of this toilet. He cannot be born into the toilet. That cannot happen.” My midwife was in front of me beside the toilet and my husband was behind me. He was doing the counterpressure, so I told him, “You have to lift me up.” He was like, “Okay. Here's a stool back here.” I'm like, “No, I can't sit on a stool right now. You just need to hold me. He's coming. He's coming right now.” I told my midwife, “You have to catch him.” Our bathroom is tile. I'm like, “He can't hit the floor.” I mean, this is all coming out super quickly at this point. Things were just happening fast. So then his head was born and then my body stopped, and then it started contracting again and his whole body just came out. My midwife swooped him up and it was very quick. She brought him right up to my chest and he was right there with me. It was just like, “Oh my god.” I couldn't believe how quickly he came out and how my body had done so much work at that point. At first, he wasn't crying. He was actually very pale and floppy. It gives you a little bit of a panic. I'm calling out to him. I'm saying his name like, “Your mom's here. We're here. We love you.” Yeah. And then I saw one of the midwives give the Ambu bag to my midwife because it had been about a minute at that point and he hadn't quite pinked up and cried yet. We were just kind of giving him the time he needed. In my heart, I knew that he would be okay. I knew that he just needed some time and that he just came out so quickly. He was stunned. So just over a minute came and he started crying. They come and they're born and you're like, “Oh my god,” like, yes but then that first cry, and when they make that face and you're like, “Oh my god. Okay. He's here. We did it. Everything's okay.” It was just amazing how most of the time at a hospital if that were to happen– I say most of the time, but not always– they want to help them breathe. They want to suction them. They want to bag them. They want to do all of these things to help them breathe and we really just gave him that time that he needed to come into his body and be there with us. It wasn't traumatic for us at all. I think if someone would have put a bag on him or suctioned him, that would have been more traumatic than this experience. So he came to and he got pink and started crying. We were just holding him and oh my gosh. It was a different feeling than my first VBAC. I truly believed in my body's ability and my baby. We prayed so much about having our baby at home and we just felt so safe. My husband was there behind me. He was crying and I was crying. Everyone was crying at this point. My midwife and I were just so close. She is one of my really good friends too so it just made it that much more special. Meagan: Such an intimate time and everyone was probably feeling all of the things. That's how it was at my birth too. Everyone's watched you work so hard and go through all of this. Now you're here. You just did it so the emotions are high. Holly: Oh yeah. I just remember, they were like, “Do you want to sit down on the floor and get comfortable?” I'm like, “No. I just want to go to my bed.” “Are you sure? You just had a baby.” “I know. I just want to go to my bed. That's where I want to be.” That was a big reason why I wanted to birth at home. I just wanted to be in my bed. So I got in my bed. Another thing that we had actually thought near the end of my pregnancy was that there could have been a hiding twin where you hear with babies that are either really big or maybe there is a twin in there or something. I had a lot of fluid and he took up the space that he really wanted, so I started having these cramps again and she goes, “Do you mind if I actually listen?” No, I don't think she actually listened, but then when she felt it was like, “No, it's the placenta.” The clot behind the placenta was the hard spot we were feeling because my placenta was anterior. She goes, “Okay. I don't think there's another baby.” I'm like, “Oh god. I hope not. I'm not having another baby.” But no. Meagan: That would be a surprise. Holly: I know. I'm like, “No. That's not going to happen.” I don't know if that was intuitively or I just didn't want it to happen, but I'm like, “No.” And so about a half hour went by and then I was able to birth my placenta. I had my midwife assist me with it a little bit just because I hadn't done that with my second and because at the hospital, they managed it which actually wasn't what I wanted either so I didn't have that experience of naturally birthing my placenta yet, so I was just like, “Can I just have your assistance?” and she helped me with that. It came out perfectly and it was really cool because being a placenta encapsulator, I'm like, “I really want to assess and look at my own placenta,” and so I was able to do that. It was perfect. It looked great. My amniotic sac was just huge. I mean, you could just tell I had lots of water in there. He was actually only 7 pounds, 12 ounces so he was my smallest baby. But yeah. My first was 7 pounds, 15 ounces and then my second with my VBAC was 8 pounds, 9 ounces. So not a huge difference, super small, but I'm like, “Wow.” My husband and I had a bet that he would name him if he was under 7 pounds and I would name him if he was over 8 pounds. I'm like, “He's for sure going to be over 8 pounds. I've got this.” No, he won that one but I actually still named him. Sarah: That's an interesting way to choose who gets to pick the name. Holly: I know. And really, I knew that either way it goes, I still want the name that I want and he loved the name that I picked too. I'm like, “Okay, fine.” Since we couldn't agree on it, we made a bet. Meagan: I love that. That's so fun. Holly: Yeah. It was just such a good experience and it healed my first birth. It healed my second birth and it was just the most redemptive, healing birth I could ask for. It was the cherry on top of my birth experiences really. It was just amazing how I went from my C-section and then I went to my home birth transfer to the hospital but still had my VBAC and then had my VBAC at home on my terms and in my own space with the people that I chose to be there. Meagan: Yeah. You've kind of experienced a whole slew of outcomes which is fun and I'm assuming it will help you in your doula career too if you do have a home birth transfer client, you can say, “I get it. I've been here. This is what we're going to do when we get there,” and help them along the way. Holly: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's really shaped me into the person that I am today with my birth work. Meagan: Yes. Well, huge congrats. Holly: Thank you. Sarah: I think the most beautiful part of your story is your ability to really trust your body and I think a lot of moms underestimate that mindset concept. You worked on it. Meagan: It does. Holly: Yeah. It makes a huge difference. With my second, I tried, but there was still a part of me that was holding onto the what-ifs and I think that's partly due to when you have a C-section, you get that doubt put into you and I didn't even labor with my first. We went straight to a C-section, so it was like a first baby all over again and not even knowing what to expect at all even though I had a baby already. Sarah: Yeah. I think that's one of the harder things to really try to separate our births and especially as people that have had Cesareans to really dislocate that experience from our VBACs moving forward. Holly: Yes. Every birth is so different. Even within the same woman, your births can be so, so different. Babies are so different. It's amazing. It can be so much of the same, but so, so different. I went from a 36-hour labor and birth to 2 hours and 10 minutes from start to finish. Well, early labor was weeks, but I don't count that. My water broke and then 2 hours and 10 minutes later, he was born. It was just so fast. It wasn't too fast where I couldn't process it because I'm like, “As long as it's under 12 hours, I'll be happy.” It was just so fast. Meagan: I would love to know if there are any suggestions you would give for our listeners on getting to that place with your mindset. What tips would you suggest for getting into that mindset because it can be really, really hard? Holly: Yes. One aspect of it is you look at social media and if you are following accounts that aren't giving you positive, good information, I think that can be really hard. For me in the beginning, I started unfollowing all of these accounts that were not good for me and just started following accounts that were sharing positive birth stories and videos and all of the good things that I needed to fill my mind with. It made a really big difference for me. I watched birth videos with my daughters every day because at first, I really wanted them there, but they were both sleeping and that's what I needed in the end. But yeah. I think following accounts that give you good information that is positive, watching birth videos that have positive outcomes, and watching things and listening to the things about the birth that you want. I think that just makes a huge difference and helps your mindset. Meagan: I love that. Just jumping right into that space and not allowing any of the other things into that space, yeah. Love it. Holly: Just connecting with other women and that can be huge too. I'm a very faithful person and we prayed a lot during this pregnancy and through our birth. That's something that really helped me and just surrendering that I wanted to be in control of everything but surrendering that control too was huge. Meagan: That's awesome. I love it.  I love it so much. I love your picture. I can't wait for everyone to see it. If you're listening to it today, head over to our Instagram or Facebook and look at this incredible picture of her holding this sweet, little baby. Oh, it's beautiful. It is so beautiful. So thank you so much for sharing. Holly: Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I listen to your guys' podcasts all through my second pregnancy and it made such a big difference to me to hear other women's stories and different stories. It was so helpful to me, so thank you. Meagan: Yes. That's one of my favorite things. We were talking about it in the beginning. We love having people on that have listened through their whole pregnancy. They're like, “All of these stories have changed my life. Now I'm going to share my story to help someone change theirs.” I love it so much. Thank you again. Congrats. Sarah, thank you so much for being with us again. So fun and Happy New Year, everybody. Happy New Year. It's kind of weird to say that right now because it's October as we are recording. Holly: It'll be here sooner than we know. Meagan: It will be here so soon. ClosingWould you like to be a guest on the podcast? Tell us about your experience at thevbaclink.com/share. For more information on all things VBAC including online and in-person VBAC classes, The VBAC Link blog, and Meagan's bio, head over to thevbaclink.com. Congratulations on starting your journey of learning and discovery with The VBAC Link.   Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-vbac-link/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In today's episode Holly shares her journey with HA (hypothalamic amenorrhea), and how using the menstrual cycle as a vital sign has changed her acupuncture practice. Holly Leever, L.Ac., MTOM & Dipl.OM, is the owner of Rosebud Wellness, where she practices women's holistic health as a licensed Acupuncturist, Herbalist, Yoni Steam Therapist, Arvigo Abdominal Massage Therapist & Fertility Awareness Mentor. Holly became interested in working with women's health after learning how much could be revealed about a woman's overall health by looking at the parameters of the menstrual cycle. She has continued to study a variety of techniques in order to offer women at all stages of life, from menarche to menopause, the care they deserve. She is especially passionate about working with women in the perinatal time (prenatal, birth & postpartum). In addition to acupuncture, Holly's training included moxibustion, cupping, auriculotherapy, electro-acupuncture, gua sha and Chinese herbal medicine. She is also qualified to make dietary and lifestyle recommendations based on Chinese medical theory. Holly also hosts a weekly podcast called, Womb Wisdom. The podcast is a combination of information on women's holistic health practices and stories from women on their experience with periods, fertility, pregnancy, birth, postpartum and motherhood. Holly's practice is located in Thousand Oaks, CA and she offers telehealth visits for fertility awareness mentoring & Yoni steaming consults. Join us on Wednesday, November 30th (12:30PM ET) for a live masterclass  on incorporating the menstrual cycle as a vital sign in your professional practice! Click here  to register today and you'll also gain access to the replay! Today's episode is sponsored by the Fertility Awareness Mastery Mentorship program, class of 2023!  Early-bird registration is officially open for next year's class of 2023. Will you be joining us? Click here to register now! [powerpress] Topics discussed in today's episode: How Holly came about starting her practice What led Holly to the Fertility Awareness Method When Holly's journey with hypothalamic amenorrhea began How her eating disorder and over exercising affected her cycle How the challenges of her body image impact her mental state How the FAMM program has impacted Holly and how she assists her clients Connect with Holly: You can connect with Holly on her website, Facebook, Instagram and Podcast. Resources mentioned: Womb Wisdom Podcast The Fifth Vital Sign: Master Your Cycles & Optimize Your Fertility (Book) | Lisa Hendrickson-Jack Fertility Awareness Mastery Charting Workbook Fertility Awareness Mastery Online Self-Study Program Related podcasts & blog posts: FFP 429 | Overcoming Hypothalamic Amenorrhea | PCOS/HA Replay Series | Dr. Nicola Rinaldi, PhD FFP 428 | Hypothalamic Amenorrhea | PCOS/HA Replay Series | Dr. Lara Briden, ND. [FAMM Practitioner Series] FFP 396 | Overcoming Hypothalamic Amenorrhea | Having a Baby During Covid Times | Dani Sheriff FFP 371 | Hypothalamic Amenorrhea & The Menstrual Cycle | Cynthia Donovan   Join the community! Follow Fertility Friday on Instagram! Subscribe to the Fertility Friday Podcast in Apple Podcasts! Music Credit: Intro/Outro music Produced by J-Gantic A Special Thank You to Our Show Sponsors: Fertility Friday | Fertility Awareness Programs This episode is sponsored by my Fertility Awareness Programs! Master Fertility Awareness and take a deep dive into your cycles and how they relate to your overall health! Click here to apply now! Fertility Awareness Mastery Mentorship Program (FAMM) This episode is sponsored by FAMM! Are you a women's health practitioner looking for a solid way to incorporate comprehensive fertility awareness chart analysis into your practice? If yes, FAMM is the program you've been waiting for. Click here to apply now!

Today's guest artist is from Liverpool, England. A folk, electropop singer, balladeer and songwriter. She's also an actress. She has amassed millions of views of  her content, been named song of the year in 2019 and been published in top magazines like Wonderland. So strap up your seatbelts and let's take a ride to Liverpool, England on this episode of the dHarmic Evolution podcast. As a preview: In this episode, get to learn more about Holly's relationship that inspired her favorite song, Holly's homebird personality, her love for skateboarding and connecting with people physically. Get to learn more about how Holly's career came to be, her upcoming tour and how she got into the Cannes film festival, all here on the dHarmic Evolution podcast. More about Holly Lovelady Find out more about Holly and hear her music through different platforms. All the links are provided below! Check out her website, social media pages and music platforms that you can visit. Quotes: “You're in love with someone and they can make the whole world beautiful. They can change it all just like that.” -Holly “All my music and creativity comes from my grandad who was also a singer.”- Holly “Sometimes inspiration comes by meeting somebody and they tell me a story and I'm inspired to write something but it's very natural. It's usually at  9 a.m.  and I'm half asleep at my piano.” – Holly “I think it's a song that doesn't require music. It's a story and the story is the most important part.”- Holly “You are not really concerned with the genre; it sounds like the music selected you” - James  Time Stamps: 00:54 Opportunity to get featured on the Dharmic Rising Star Playlist 01:27 Guest artist introduction 03:42 Holly's skateboarding experience 06:55 Listen to “Something in the Way” by Holly 10:12 Why Holly wrote “Something in the Way” 11:16 How Holly discovered an interest in Shakespeare plays through her grandad. 12:42 Holly's observation on social media and forming real interactions 14:30 James touches on dating sites and forming real connections 16:22 Holly's interest in performing on Sofar Sounds 19:00 What is the process behind Holly's songwriting 20:22 Holly's upcoming tour in UK and Ireland 21:39 James wonderful advice for Holly's stage appearance 23:50 Listen to Holly's “Dreamer”. 28:30 How Holly came to discover “Dreamer” 30:45 How Holly got into singing as a career path 33:10 How Holly got into the Cannes Film Festival 35:10 How does Holly relax and spend time with family 36:47 Holly's dog Chester makes a show appearance 37:57 Holly and Linktree 40:23 Holly's Aspirations for her Music and Acting career 44:00 Listen to Ride On by James Kevin O'Connor   Spotify Playlist:   Make sure you're not missing out on all our “Rising dHarmic Stars Spotify Playlists”. We already have four (4) playlists where you can find over a hundred songs from our very own dHarmic Evolution alumni .Don't forget to share them with your family and friends as well and let the world support these amazing indie artists! Check out the links here:   dHarmic Rising Stars: Aquila   https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4loDaYF0OuWRjZeMXvEjK4   dHarmic Rising Stars: Orion   https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5CnL9tl0xbU4oDh6jtJBZx   dHarmic Rising Stars: Lyra   https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1ov0OqNMJmPhHrxZjsXthS   dHarmic Rising Stars: Scorpius   https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5oQ4Sc4LAJSexsDgDcixt8   dHarmic Evolution links:   Stay up-to-date with our new releases! You just simply need to go to dharmicevolution.com and subscribe to your favorite podcast platform – there are a lot to choose from! Let me know what you think as well by leaving comments or reviews! And if you're digging this show, please share it with somebody either on social media or just forward it to a friend and let them join the growing community of dHarmic Evolution!   Hey, do you know someone who is suffering from anxiety and depression? Please help them out by suggesting the book “7 Steps to Mental Freedom.” It will be a great read for them. You can easily find it as well on the main page of the website or you can just send them to https://tinyurl.com/25a994tw   Keep yourself updated with what's going on with dHarmic evolution, check out our Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/dharmicevolution and, if you are an artist, an author, or a keynote speaker, who is trying to find a safe place to post your content to, you can check out our own Facebook community page and let the world support you! Check out the link here: dHarmic Evolution Community.       Special Links and Mention   Social Media   Shakespeare   Sofar Sounds   Judy Collins   Cannes Film Festival   Linktree   Christopher Nolan   Ride On   Connect with Holly Lovelady   Website   Facebook   Instagram   YouTube

MusicAll songs available on:The 2021 Wizard Rock Samplerhttps://wizardrock.bandcamp.com/album/wizard-rock-sampler-2021We have also included links to the artists pages when possible.Draco and the Malfoys - Dumbledohttps://dracoandthemalfoys.bandcamp.comHow Airplanes Fly - Hoggy Warty Hogwartshttps://howairplanesfly.bandcamp.comTotally Knuts - Trigender Tournamenthttps://totallyknuts.bandcamp.comKathryn Hoss - Pomonahttps://kathrynhoss.bandcamp.comDream Quaffle feat. TK and Didi - Magic Jukeboxhttps://dreamquaffle.bandcamp.com/Chasitherin - Castle Durmstrang (Radio Edit)https://totallyknuts.bandcamp.com/track/castle-durmstrang-explicit-chasitherinHawthorn & Holly - You're So Vanehttps://hawthornandholly.bandcamp.comDots and Lines - Forbidden ForestThe Hinky Punks - A Night to RememberThe Weirdos Are Out - If Walls Could Talkhttps://theweirdosareout.bandcamp.comHogwarts Therapist - Rite for Freedomhttps://hogwartstherapist.bandcamp.comLuna (Not) Lovegood - Slytherin AnthemMuggle Snuggle - Allez les bleus: Beauxbatons au ciel Ludo Bagman and the Trash - New to Mehttps://ludobagmanandthetrash.bandcamp.comThe Lovegoods - I've Got Friendshttps://thelovegoods.bandcamp.comPotterwatch - The Love You Seek Is All Around Youhttps://potterwatch.bandcamp.comLinks for this week's showThe Pegasus Awardshttp://www.ovff.org/pegasus/Joseph Abbott LiveTuesday 7 pm CDT / midnight UTChttps://www.twitch.tv/faxpaladinBryan Baker LiveSaturday 2pm Centralhttps://twitch.tv/ka_klickEurofilk CircleSeptember 918:00 Central European TimeCheck for updated linkFundraisersAlex Bear https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/alex-bearFilk InformationFilk Streamshttp://filkstreams.org/Friends Of Filkhttps://friendsoffilk.orgWôks Print Cataloghttps://woksprint.com/product-category/musicGeekspin Podcasthttps://geekspinpodcast.castos.com/Filk Questhttps://www.youtube.com/c/vanceamaniaVintage Filk Preservationhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0EXmacvKF3MDrKZbzmux6gHouse Concerts and House FilksMassFilchttps://www.massfilc.org/meetings.shtmlPhoenix Filk Circlehttps://phoenixfilkcircle.wordpress.comLos Angeles Filk Circlehttps://www.conchord.org/lafaad.htmlDes Moines First Friday Filkhttps://www.facebook.com/groups/548389495176195Milwaukee Housefilkhttps://www.facebook.com/groups/533294056830869/Provo Filk Grouphttps://www.facebook.com/Provo-Filk-Group-713192665748714/Minneapolis House 4th Weekend House Filkshttp://freemars.org/mailman/listinfo/housefilk_freemars.orgSouthern California House filkswww.sandiegofilk.com/SouthernCaliforniaHouseFilksMain.htmlNational Suicide Prevention LifelineHours: Available 24 hours. Languages: English, Spanish.800-273-8255Twitter@datm, @@HowAirplanesFly, @TotallyKnuts, @kathrynhoss, @DreamQuaffle, @hawthornholly, @hinkypunx, @weirdosareout, @kat_astrophize, @mugglesnuggles, @ludobagwrock, @thelovegoodzLinks to the Podcasthttp://filkcast.blogspot.comhttp://facebook.com/groups/FilkCasthttps://twitter.com/FilkCasttiedyeeric at filkcast.comIntro Music - Hope Eyrie by Leslie Fish - Julia Ecklar - Guitar - Kristoph Kl

Modern-day Renaissance woman Yolanda Rabun ’90 is joined in conversation with Holly Tente ’23.  Their inspirational conversation covers a lot of ground.  With their shared passion for social justice, they speak about how Holy Cross inspires them to work hard and make change in their own communities. Interview originally recorded on February 24, 2021. Due to the ongoing effects of the pandemic, all interviews in season 2 are recorded remotely. --- Yolanda: ... always pursue excellence in the sense that you are not afraid to try something new and you are not afraid to push the envelope to really be your authentic self and deliver all that you possibly can. Not only for yourself, but also for the school, because now you're helping the community. And that's what this is all about. That's what I think Holy Cross is all about. It's about preparing us to go out in the world to help each other become the best that we can be. Maura: Welcome to Mission-Driven, where we speak with alumni who are leveraging their Holy Cross education to make a meaningful difference in the world around them. I'm your host Maura Sweeney from the class of 2007, director of Alumni Career Development at Holy Cross. I am delighted to welcome you to today's show. In this episode, we hear from Yolanda Rabun from the class of 1990, a modern day Renaissance woman. Yolanda is a person of many talents: lawyer, executive, speaker, wife, mom, actor, recording artist, producer, and many more to come. She currently works as senior corporate counsel for IBM and credits Holy Cross for sparking her interest in computers and coding. She is also an executive sponsor for Black Girls Code, where she works to inspire the future generation of leaders. Maura: She's joined in conversation by Holly Tente from the class of 2023. Their conversation is nothing short of inspirational and offers a good boost to help you get out of bed each morning. They speak about pushing the envelope and pursuing opportunities that will cause you to change and grow into the person that you are meant to become. They share advice for how to hold onto your dreams and persevere during hard times. With their shared passion for social justice, they speak about how Holy Cross inspires them to work hard and make change in their own communities. Yolanda's personal journey offers a wonderful example of the difference that you can make when you don't wait for things to happen to you. Instead, happen upon things. Holly: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Mission-Driven. My name is Holly Tente and I'm joined by Yolanda Rabun. Yolanda, how are you doing? Yolanda: I am fantastic Holly. It's so good to talk to you. Holly: It's great to talk to you too. Oh my gosh. I don't know about you, but this week has been quite the week. It's been incredibly busy and I think that I'm really starting to suffer from not having a spring break soon. My goodness. Have you been finding that too with your work? Yolanda: I have been finding that this week has been a challenge, but I think it might be because we are close to spring, and not far enough away from winter to appreciate either of the two, because they're both great seasons to be in. I think our entire lives are run in seasons and each one has its purpose and we're probably both in the middle trying to get from one to the next and as a result, it just presents challenges. So the good news is we just have to get through them, figure them out. Holly: Exactly. How would you say that you stay motivated as we go through this transition? Yolanda: Part of my motivation is being alive. I think in the times that we live in having such a high number of people who have left this earth you are constantly reminded of the preciousness of life and that's my motivation. It is that I need to take advantage of every single moment that I have been blessed to live and not squander it on wishing for what is completely out of my control. And or hoping for something that is just not mine or ready for me to have. Holly: Yes. I've been trying to live through that as well, especially I'm one of those students that's been remote for a very long time now. And I've found that with the lack of a social life, I've definitely been feeling kind of down at certain points, especially during a dreary month like February. So I really appreciate those words, Yolanda and speaking of Holy Cross, have you found that your motivation and your own mission has been influenced by what Holy Cross taught you? Yolanda: Oh, yes. When I came to Holy Cross, I was 17 years old and I was in a moment of figuring out who Yolanda is, but also extremely excited about who Yolanda could become and extremely excited about just doing something different and new, because I was from Atlanta and I've never been to Massachusetts and I've never been a wealth of snow that was pretty calm or even been in a colder climate. I had never been in an atmosphere where everything was hilly and that you would get your exercise just walking from one side of the campus to the other, all these things were new. And so I think I was intrigued by the newness of what was before me, but also slightly curious and maybe even potentially afraid of what I didn't know. Holly: Right. Well, I definitely can feel that, I'm just a sophomore right now and I very clearly remember what it was like when I did arrive on the hill. Thankfully it was under more normal circumstances, but that experience was definitely a very different one for me, even though I am from a similar climate. There were a lot of new things that I had to take on very quickly and I think... Yolanda: So that is Holy Cross, right? If you think about what is Holy Cross, you have along with your classmates experienced an amazing opportunity to embrace change and it didn't have to do with your age or your culture or your background. It had to do with a life circumstance. And I can't say that in any generation you just can't wait for that big thing to happen. But when it does, what a beautiful time I feel it is for you to be in school where you can learn how people adapt and learn how people do not adapt and figure out new ways to make it work for you. And in a sense it's global, right? Because it is an opportunity not only for Holy Cross to really step up to its mission of teaching and allowing you to learn in the most diverse environment you can learn in. Yolanda: But what an experience it is to be able to almost be in a safe place. And I feel like my experience at Holy Cross was exactly that. I didn't have that monumental life circumstance, maybe the World Series was won in Boston when I was there and that was a pretty big deal. But for all intents and purposes, I just remember being in a space where I was given an opportunity to figure out how to grow up and I felt safe in the sense that Holy Cross gave me an amazing teaching environment and also an amazing group of people that were diverse, that I can learn from and then all these other great things that I can get involved in that. Yolanda: I think that's probably why I got so involved at Holy Cross because I was learning, I came in being a cheerleader because I had been a cheerleader all my life following the purposes. So I knew what that was. And I went in to do what I normally do. And the story is that when I auditioned, I didn't make it. And so that was a huge first life lesson for me to not make that squad, but also to ask the question, why? To learn from that experience to really understand how to be patient in a moment where I knew what I knew and then I didn't. Holly: I remember when you shared the cheerleading story, I was at your event that was hosted by Women in Business recently. And I was just so taken aback because the lesson that you drew from it was that it's important to be kind and patient, but also to respect others and to not become arrogant, I think was what lesson you were trying to have us draw from that. And as someone who I believe is as accomplished as you are Yolanda, I'm sure... Not, I'm sure, but I think that hearing that from you was just really amazing because I think that it's a lesson that we all overlook because we're all working towards something bigger than ourselves. And I think that it's important to stay humble and, yeah. So I really appreciate you sharing that. And I think that we can talk about that lesson as we get into your career a little later, but before we move on, I'd really love to hear about what else you were involved in during your time on the hill. Yolanda: Okay. So when I was at Holy Cross, I was a cheerleader. I was an RA as well as a head RA and I was a senior interviewer. I was in a group called SPUD. I'm not sure if it's there anymore. Holly: SPUD is still very much alive, still very much going. Yolanda: Yeah. I loved SPUD and then I was... I'm going to say this and it may sound crazy, but I was a part of work study. And the reason why I look at it as something being involved in is because my work study job and I had several of them, but the one that I loved the most was, I was a clerk for the audio visual department. And it was there that I actually found my love for computers and my love for coding. And it is eventually what led me to the realization that IBM is where I was supposed to be. So I think I hold that job near and dear to me. And then I am a member of the Honors Program. So I graduated with honors from Holy Cross having been a student in the Honors Program and writing a thesis for my graduation. Holly: Right. And what was that thesis on? I think if I remember correctly, it was quite a unique thesis. Yolanda: So my thesis was on Black women in the 19th century and the politics of race, sex, and class. And my approach in doing the thesis was to come from a political science perspective, that was my major. But also I had the benefit and the joy of having B. E. McCarthy is one of my advisers. And so from an English perspective and also he was in charge of the African-American history program that we had at the time. I kind of had him as one of my advisors. I loved that project because it was really mission-driven to who I became and what my purpose was on the campus. And it was, I felt congruent with Holy Cross's purpose, right? Because Holy Cross said that it was in the pursuit of excellence in teaching and learning and in research. And so part of becoming Yolanda was researching who Yolanda is, and I was and still am an African-American woman. And I wanted to know more about me. Yolanda: I didn't learn a lot in high school from that perspective because I went to a school of the performing arts. And so I was heavily in my arts when I was in high school. So when I came to college, it was a perfect time to find out my own history and to figure out how to insert my history in every single class I could possibly insert it in to understand how I fit in. And so when it came down to doing the thesis or what topic I would pick, I thought there's some Black girl magic before it was even created in the U.S. later. There's some Black girl magic in knowing these women who came before me who studied politics, who had to deal with the issues of race, sex and class. And so I chose that topic. And then with my background in the performing arts, I not only wrote the thesis, but I also wrote a play from the thesis that was presented as a part of my presentation. Holly: Do you remember any of the students that acted in that play? Are you friends with any of them now, still? Who was in it? Yolanda: I do remember some of the folks as a matter of fact, they're dearest friends of mine now, Jacqueline Abercrombie, Lorraine Lane, Tonya Baskin. I had members from the football team who were in my play. And I had friends who were in the audio visual department who helped me because a part of it was a multimedia presentation. Not only was there acting, and I sang throughout it but I also narrated it. I also had film, so we had film going on and so some of my actors were actually recorded as a part of the presentation. I think we introduced multimedia entertainment way ahead of it's time. Holly: You should have trademarked it. It sounds like you were so ahead. I'm from Rhode Island and I've been to shows that the Gamm and Trinity Rep, and they've just started to really make their shows like that and use film and overlay slides and stuff. Wow. And you were doing that in 1990. Yolanda: So three years ago we introduced audio visual. And part of that was the beauty of Holy Cross, because I dreamed that big. And instead of saying to me, no, no, no, we only do it this way, or we've never done it that way. They said, what do you have? And that's probably why I'm near and dear to Holy Cross as I am, because it was at a time when I was growing up, when I was finding myself that I was not given limitations. And I think any institution that has any value to who it is and what its purpose is to any individual in this world, it is to make sure that they don't squander away creativity or prohibit really things to unfold as the universe designed them to unfold. Holly: I think as a current student, I can speak to that and I think Holy Cross has maintained that mission that you just outlined. I'm studying history, obviously it's my major, but I'm doing a CIS minor in film right now. And I've found that even though I'm one of about five people that do the film studies minor every year at the school, there are so many different resources. And if there's something that Holy Cross cannot provide for me directly, there are so many places that they put me in the direction of. And I know I got in touch with Connor who put me in touch with you, and here we are right now. Yolanda: No, really, because we talk all the time and I love that. And you just reminded me that when I was preparing for my thesis, I asked Holy Cross to help me really just find other sources of information outside of what was in the library to understand about Yolanda, Black Yolanda, Black history. And Holy Cross sent me to a retreat that I will never forget for as long as I live, because at that retreat I met Betty Shabazz, who is Malcolm X's wife. I met her in person. I met Sonia Sanchez who is a poet. And that was really important because a part of my poem or presentation was in the form of a poem. Although it was written in script form, it had verse in it. And so Sonia Sanchez being close to her, listening to her speak and her feel moments, I thought I had won the lottery to be honest. Yolanda: And I got the privilege of talking about me and teaching other people about me. And it was because Holy Cross gave me that opportunity. So I always encourage other students of color, especially. And I think I had some influence perhaps on the classes that came behind me to always pursue excellence in the sense that you are not afraid to try something new and you are not afraid to push the envelope to really be your authentic self and deliver all that you possibly can, not only for yourself, but also for the school, because now you're helping the community. And that's what this is all about. That's what I think Holy Cross is all about. It's about preparing us to go out in the world to help each other become the best that we can be. Holly: Well, that was really amazing to hear. And I think that you truly did have an effect on classes to come, especially with building a legacy. And I think even speaking for myself, one of the reasons we got in touch was because Conner class of '92 put me in touch with you, because we were putting together a little event called The Good Trouble Series, which has now kind of taken off at the college. And if you haven't seen The Good Trouble Series, it was an initiative started by myself and another student in the history department and is currently being co-organized by members of SGA and then the two current chairs of the BSU, Jordyn Shubrick and Meah Austin. And we really wanted to have an event which focused around Holy Cross' racial history. And we wanted to do this through as early as the school's history dates back. And that's why we had professor Doughton as our keynote speaker to talk about our native American history, in addition to our racial, Black history specifically. Holly: And then we were able to have Art Martin and Ted Wells come on and talk about forming the BSU. And then we had Yolanda as well, and she was talking about her experience in the late 80s, early 90s. And it was just a really amazing event. And I think that if not for so many strong voices on our campus, we wouldn't have gotten to the place that we are today. And I think that it speaks volumes to Holy Cross, that we're able to come together. And obviously many institutions right now are having conversations about anti-racism and improving climate so that everyone feels welcomed. But I think that we're able to have opportunities on campus where we have those conversations, but we're able to have initiatives that actually accomplish something. And I know I'm incredibly grateful for that. Yolanda: Well, that's what I love about you, Holly. And also the class that you're in, which is why I want to encourage you when you go through a February that appears to be dreary or any other days that are going to come your way, that you stay focused on what the bigger purpose is. And I think when you do that, then you will lend yourself even more freely to social justice, to racial justice, to just justice in general. I know that it was an honor to be a part of that program. And I remember gravitating to you afterwards and saying, I like you, you should stay connected, but you said the same thing. Right? Holly: I did. It was definitely mutual. I've really enjoyed this connection and what we've been able to chat about. And you're a very good friend of mine now. That's what I'll say. So obviously we've talked a lot about Holy Cross and your experience on campus and the lessons you learned. I have a question for you just about IBM and where you are now. So how would you say the principles that you developed at college helps you when you enter the workforce and how you got to where you are now? Yolanda: So, Holy Cross for me was a learning field to understand different personalities, from men, women, northerners, southerners, just every walk of life diversity wise. And I take all of those experiences with me to work every day. And I literally, when I see a person respond a certain way, I'll go, Oh, that was Tom back in the day. I'll put in my brain, really who that personality reminds me of and how I responded at Holy Cross or how someone else responded and notably if I liked their response or not, or what I would do differently. And then I navigate through the issue, or maybe even the joy of the moment. So I feel like Holy Cross gave me an opportunity to study people. And it sounds perhaps a little bit facetious to say so, because obviously you can do that anywhere. But the uniqueness of Holy Cross is the diversity of people that were on the campus. And I always employ new students and anyone who will hear me that as you enter college, take advantage of really what is before you, which is this beautiful microcosm of people that are not necessarily like you. Yolanda: And even if they are like you, find out what's different, find the difference, find the variety and then learn from it. Because when you do that, you not only will take that skillset with you to adjust through college, but you take it with you into life. And if it doesn't apply to you, you may apply to someone you know. So I've often found myself even in the company at IBM seeing a scenario and knowing I had never experienced that personally, but I've seen it. So let me tell you what I've learned from where I've seen that and how you might address that situation. And it doesn't even have to be with race or deal with sex as far as male, female. You could just be a simple someone raising their voice and you don't like how that scenario turned out, but I've seen exactly that somewhere before. Let me tell you what I saw and what you could think about, that's what I learned from Holy Cross. And that's what I take with me from Holy Cross. And I value it. Holly: I definitely understand what you mean on the diversity of just anyone and everyone. I've met all sorts of people in my time at Holy Cross. And perhaps I met people like them even before I was at the college. And it's really interesting when you're moving forward in life and you're chatting with these people in the future. And you're like, Oh, this is someone that I knew from my monster rock class or something. I think it was a different curriculum when you were a freshmen, but it's just, I totally understand what you mean in that sense. And I think with IBM, my next question for you would be about 2021 and what projects you're working on and what you have coming down the line right now. Is there something that you're especially excited for? Yolanda: The project that I'm working on at IBM, I am actually serving as an executive sponsor for Black Girls Code, which is a non-profit organization that was dedicated to advancing opportunities and experiences for young Black women in the area of coding, whether it is in websites or mobile applications and what have you. And right now we're working on a project where we're introducing the opportunity for young girls to go through design thinking exercises, to come up with a problem that might address issues related to climate control and also racial justice issues. And so I'm pretty excited about that, especially because last year in 2020, I got involved in an open source project and actually contributed to an open source project on an application called Five Fifths Voter, that was designed to bring information to anyone who might've been disenfranchised ever, understand better their rights to vote and where to vote and why that vote is so important. Yolanda: So for me, that's a social justice issue that affects not just people of color, but the elderly, the poor. And again, if you think about it, that goes right back to what we are about at Holy Cross, which is helping our society connect to each other so that we are dealing with some of the, I don't know, inhumane conditions that we've created for ourselves that don't necessarily have to exist. So at IBM, as much as I'm involved in the law and quantum computing and artificial intelligence and many transactions with large universities. And I manage a team as a matter of fact, at IBM, who is responsible for all the contracts that come out of our research division. I think what gets me excited is that opportunity to give back to the community and give back through the auspices of the talent we have at IBM and the ability hopefully to train our future bosses in tech to come and join us. Holly: I mean, that's all you can really ask for. And it sounds like the initiative that you're forming, even though it's IBM, it's still sounds grassroots. And it sounds like it has really amazing core values, which I think is all you can ask for when you start a movement like that. And I think what I would wonder, and perhaps people listening are wondering about how perhaps when you don't have a platform where you're running a project, can you get involved with an idea, how do you get started in making change? Yolanda: I think the best way to get started is to apply yourself to the opportunities that you have. And what do I mean by that? I mean, when you come to college, you have an opportunity to pick courses and in different areas that you might want to study in, pick them with some sense of passion, that the subject matter intrigues you and then do the work, do it well, because what happens is when you are focusing on you and doing the work, those opportunities, those ideas, they come to you. Remember I said earlier that it was doing work study, that I started getting introduced to coding and computers, and that got me excited. It was a work study job. And yet this thing that came out of that exposure got me excited. So that over the course of time I have taken that thing that gets me excited and applied it. Yolanda: And the joke in IBM for me is that I have been involved with Black Girls Code for some time now, but it was probably about five years before I was in a position to say, let's do this. And in a sense that not only did I say let's do it, I said, I'll drive. I've been around long enough to know a little bit about that organization to know about IBM. And so how can I help us both meet our goals? I think that's strategic thinking. And I think that strategic thinking comes from my experience at Holy Cross of not only getting the opportunity to study in different areas, but then taking that information, that data and applying it to a larger cause and getting it done that's, I feel something I learned at Holy Cross and I've taken with me in life. Holly: I don't know anyone else listening is feeling this way, but I feel like I'm just getting the best, I don't know, pump up but it's midweek right now when we're filming this but I have just had the most slow, crazy day coming into this. And every time Yolanda and I chat, when we're not being recorded, I guess, I think that I always leave a conversation with Yolanda feeling as though I've learned a valuable lesson. And I truly mean that. And I hope that people listening right now feel the same way, because there's so much in terms of advice. There's so much in terms of just general enthusiastic language that Yolanda is putting out there for everyone right now. And I know personally, when you really do try to tap into your passions, good things happen. Holly: And I know personally, this past semester I was actually doing New York Semester Program, obviously remotely due to COVID, but I was a sophomore during the program. I was the first ever they accepted into the program and I was able to produce a documentary on reconstruction and I met Yolanda right as I was working on the doc. And I don't know, it's just, if you really want to achieve what you desire in the future, and if you really want to better the lives of others, it's possible. And if you have a home sense of justice like Yolanda does. And like, I think I have then you can really achieve anything. Yolanda: I 100% agree with that. And I think that the lesson is when you come into Holy Cross or while you're at Holy Cross, that you never lose sight that you are in a learning environment and that you never, if you can get a sense of entitlement, that someone owes you something, because I don't know that that is true, that the college owes you anything except the environment, the positive environment to learn, the positive environment to teach others about who you are and the positive environment to research and find out more than you've ever known before. Yolanda: If you go with that mindset that you want to grow, that you're not waiting, this is what I always tell people, that you're not waiting for things to happen to you. You're happening on things. When you go with that particular mindset, you're always going to win. I came into Holy Cross looking for Yolanda and I left Holy Cross knowing Yolanda better than I knew before. And I left Holy Cross with a community of Black friends, I had never known before who taught me about Yolanda. And I left with a community of friends that taught me how to navigate the world. And that is priceless. Holly: I think that you're completely right Yolanda. I would love to talk about theater in a moment, but before we move on, what advice would you have specifically for students that are currently attending Holy Cross? So for all students, regardless of class year, I mean, if you have a specific message for seniors versus freshmen versus sophomores or juniors, then definitely go right ahead. But I know at least for myself, it's been really difficult getting through these past couple of weeks and we're tired. And I think that it's starting to show. Yolanda: I think I would say to you to hold on to your dreams and what I mean by that is in the process of your uncertainty, whether it's a new freshmen and you don't know what's ahead of you or a senior, and you don't know what's ahead of you that you remember what sparked you to come to Holy Cross in the first place and what sparked your interest while you were at Holy Cross. So that even if in your now you're not living that dream, that you don't let it go. And rest assured that the seasons will change in life, but your dream will not. If it's a seed that's been planted in your soul, it's not going to leave you. What you must remember to do is to not leave it. And the way you basically do that is hold on to it and make plans on how you could possibly get back to that thing that you love. Yolanda: I left Holy Cross to go to law school because I was going to be a lawyer. And while I was at Holy Cross, I was also extremely active in the performing arts because I had done theater. And as you know, in my thesis we created this entire play with music and dance. And when I left Holy Cross, I went to become a lawyer and said, I shall put those things behind me. I am now going to be the lawyer that I am. And what I learned in my first year of law school is that when I abandoned part of me, when I let go of part of those dreams that were part of who I am, I lost part of me. And that's something I hope for no one. If there's a life lesson that I had it is, always bring your entire self to the table. And if your entire self doesn't fit at the table, ask for another chair, so that you can at least have a place holder for it until it's time for you to use your gifts. Holly: That's so great. And I definitely have had to pull up chairs a couple of times in my life. Yolanda: It's okay. It's actually okay. I think some people feel that the table has been set and that it cannot be changed. And I challenge this generation to believe that you actually can bring the chair to the table. You don't have to ask someone to bring it. You don't have to be upset because the table wasn't set the way you thought it should be set. Go get the chair and make space for your life. You asked the question, what would I want to really impart with a Holy Cross student, no matter where you are in your career at Holy Cross, I would tell you to become a life cheerleader. And what that means I believe is learn how to not only cheer others on to be the best that they can be, but cheer yourself as well. And the cheer to the extent that your life is valuable. Every moment, every mistake, every triumph, your life is valuable and never stop praising, never stop praising about who you are and who you can become. Holly: And that's how I get out of bed tomorrow morning. So thank you Yolanda. Oh my goodness, I don't know if anyone else needed that, but I needed that in that moment. So thank you very much. So obviously I can knock it into every single production that you've done, Yolanda. I know that you've also done some amazing commercials too, but that's for another day. I think I'm going to move on to my closing question, which has to do with musicals and if you need a moment to think about it, that's all right. My final question for you Yolanda is, you've often been described as a modern day Renaissance woman, and it's clear through our conversation and through your life, you've just built so many different legacies that continue to grow and continue to flourish. Holly: So I recently got into Hamilton after not wanting to get into Hamilton, because I didn't know if it would... it was the mainstream hype. I just didn't know if it would be worth it, but I did. And I do think it's great. The song, "Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story" is one that I think about a lot in my own life. And I'd asked you, how would you like people to remember Yolanda Rabun? Yolanda: In all of the thinking, I don't know if I've ever thought about that. What will people say at my funeral? I think I would like for people to know that Yolanda Rabun believed in love and in life and in the idea that anything can happen, if you let it. I think that our opportunity to excel is limitless. And I want people to know if they ever met me, if they ever heard my voice, if they ever even heard of me that they might be inspired to know that they can be anything they put their minds to, they can be anything that they believe that they can be. Yolanda: I believe that we all have a fingerprint that has been given uniquely to us. No one else has it. And that if we truly believe that and lived out our purpose, lived out our calling that this world will be a different world. I read something the other day that said, you don't have to explain to anyone or help them understand your calling because it wasn't a conference call. And that hit me because I feel if people understood that each of us has a purpose and we followed through with that purpose, our world will be a different place, it would be. Holly: And I think that I thought about this question and thank you very much. Obviously you're going to be around for a very long time after this. But that was really wonderful, thank you. Yolanda: No, I didn't feel my demise, that's okay. I didn't feel like, Oh gosh, I'm leaving us. I didn't feel that. But I think I hadn't thought about it because it's one of those things where I'm still in it, but life is just not, life is not promised. Time is not going to stand still because you say so. It's a wheel in constant motion rolling us along, telling us where to be, when to be, why to be. And we have to be episode careful to appreciate that if we manage time and stop letting it manage us, and we take advantage of today and live our lives today, as opposed to allowing other people to live through us or tell us how we're supposed to live or who we're supposed to be. If we stopped doing that. Oh gosh, okay, I get excited because we will be open now when a group of people. Yolanda: And I have to tell you when I was at Holy Cross, I felt that. I felt that moment a number of times when I was in the flow of life and I felt freedom to create, freedom to learn. I remember when I got that first A what it felt like. And I remember saying do that again. That's a freedom. That's a flow of just living life and knowing that what we can accomplish as students at Holy Cross is limitless if we apply ourselves, and we just do the work. Holly: Now for some speed round questions just before we close out. Yolanda, what was your favorite class at Holy Cross? Yolanda: History of sex. Holly: What is your favorite color and why? Yolanda: Purple, because it stands for royalty. And also because it was the school color. Holly: I love purple too. And who was your favorite professor during your time at Holy Cross? Yolanda: E. McCarthy for sure. Holly: What's the best restaurant in Worcester in your opinion? Yolanda: Sole Proprietor Holly: What is your go-to hype up song? Yolanda: Be Optimistic by Sounds of Blackness. Holly: This far in life, what has been your greatest achievement? Yolanda: My children. So I have two boys and I had them both naturally, which meant no drugs and that was huge. That was an achievement. Afterwards I asked myself, what have I done? Not picking the epidural and everything else, but believe it or not, my concept was that my four mothers did it without an epidural, so I will do, and I survived. So that was a huge achievement. Holly: Wow. So second to last question. What were your new year's resolutions or what was your new year's resolution? Yolanda: So I don't do new year's resolutions and that's just because I feel that whatever I'm going to decide for my intention for the year is not going to be subject to frivolity of what everything, the world says we should do. But what I do do, and I did do in 2021 is I designated it as my year of promise. As I have in past years, I allow words to come to me and feed me about how I feel my life is going to flow. And 2021, the word promise came. And as a result of that, much of my focus is around that concept. Holly: Well, wow. And now for the very last question of the chat, what have you learned today from this podcast? Yolanda: I have learned that I love Holy Cross way more than I talk about it. Holly: We'll put it in an ad for the school. Yolanda: No, it really is true. I believe that the pandemic has been a blessing to me because as much as I love Holy Cross and influenced by it, I don't think I've talked about it a lot. And what this allowed me to do is to reconnect and remember, and reflect more on how much of an influence Holy Cross has been in my today. And I love that and I love that I love Holy Cross. Holly: And I mean, so far I'm loving it too. And I think I'll continue to after this, we'll see. It's all good. It's all been really good so far. Well, I think that that is everything I had to ask you tonight. Yolanda, thank you so much for joining me on Mission-Driven. Yolanda: Thank you. Holly: Thank you very much for letting me host as well, Maura. This has been so much fun. Yolanda: Yeah, this has been great. Thank you for having me and take care and I can't wait to finish watching your journey. Holly: And I cannot wait to continue to see how yours unfolds and I can't wait to chat even more about the future. Yolanda: You got it. We're connected. Maura: That's our show. I hope you enjoy hearing about just one of the many ways that Holy Cross alumni have been inspired by the mission to be people for and with others. A special thanks to today's guests and everyone at Holy Cross, who has contributed to making this podcast a reality. If you or someone you know would like to be featured on this podcast, then please send us an email at alumnicareers@holycross.edu. If you like what you hear, then please leave us a review. This podcast is brought to you by the office of Alumni Relations at the College of the Holy Cross. You can subscribe for future episodes wherever you find your podcast. I'm your host Maura Sweeney and this is Mission-Driven. In the words of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, “Now go forth and set the world on fire.” Theme music composed by Scott Holmes, courtesy of freemusicarchive.org.

"Diabetes care is much more than what you eat..."- Holly Paulsen RD, CEDRD-S, LD Resources for Today's Episode (Links, information and support can also be found on Type2andYou.Org):Websites: https://www.intuitiveeating.org/https://amihungry.com https://thecenterformindfuleating.org/Recommended Books:Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse ReschEat What You Love, Love What You Eat With Diabetes by Michelle May and Megrette FletcherHealth at Every Size by Linda BaconBody Respect by Linda BaconAbout Holly:Holly Paulsen RD, CEDRD-S, LD is a registered dietitian specializing in, and working nearly exclusively within, the fields of diabetes and eating disorders for over ten years. She is a graduate of the University of Iowa and completed her dietetic internship at Iowa State University. As a Certified Eating Disorders Registered Dietitian she provides outpatient nutrition therapy for patients at Unity Point St. Luke’s in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In addition she owns a private practice, Holly Paulsen RD, Nutrition Therapist LLC, providing eating disorders nutrition care via an online platform. Holly uses a non-diet, weight neutral approach in guiding clients and, as a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, is committed to helping others make peace with food—especially people with diabetes who may struggle to balance the joy of eating with their health and wellness.She is passionate about educating other health care providers in a weight neutral approach for patient with diabetes, often speaking at conferences and training events on the topics. Connect with Holly:You can find Holly at: www.hollypaulsenrd.com. She's also on Instagram, or Twitter. Take Away of The Day:Holly gives her recommendations on how to turn today's topic into action. Find additional resources and supportive tools on Type2andYou.Org.

We debate, discuss and dissect everything from the sex lives of millennials to whether or not you should confront someone who told you they were having a birthday dinner but then never sent you an invite.  HOW RUDE! Rihanna has come out as a #ShyGirl in a recent interview, which has us wondering whether there’s a difference between shyness and introversion.  And whether one of them is just a cover for laziness. Plus, it’s all over the news that millennials are NOT having less sex and that maybe we’ve been fooled by bad data.  So why are Gen Y fooling around less often? Holly has some passionate words for those who aren’t regularly getting busy between the sheets. And in group therapy we help out a listener who doesn’t know what to do about her close friend not inviting her to her birthday dinner. Subscribe to Mamamia Out Loud here: https://omny.fm/shows/mamamia-out-loud/playlists/podcast RECOMMENDATIONS Mia: Model Co Lash XTend Mascara Mac Studio Fix 24 Hour Smooth Wear Concealer Jessie: Reply All: Permanent Record episode, True Crime Conversations - https://www.mamamia.com.au/podcasts/true-crime-conversations/ Holly: You can listen to the Lady Start Up episode with Canva founder Melanie Perkins here https://www.mamamia.com.au/podcasts/lady-startup/melanie-perkins-billionaire-canva/ END BITS Hosts: Mia Freedman, Jessie Stephens and Holly Wainwright. Producers: Elissa Ratliff and Elise Cooper  COME TALK TO US Join the Out Louders Facebook group GET IN TOUCH: Call the PodPhone on 02 8999 9386. Email the show at outloud@mamamia.com.au Find any book mentioned at apple.co/mamamia Mamamia Out Loud is a podcast by Mamamia. Find more shows here.

Holly is the author of Sweetening the Pill or How we got hooked on hormonal birth control. If you haven’t had a chance to read this book and you’ve ever had any questions about the pill you need to get your hands on a copy ASAP! And if you haven't yet listened to my first interview with Holly you'll want to make sure to listen in! In our previous episode together Holly and I delve into the book and really hash out some of the most common side effects of the pill, and dispel some of the most common myths about the pill! In today's episode, Holly and I talk about her most recent project as an ambassador for Daysy and Lady-Comp. We talk about the implications of using tech for cycle tracking and why most Fertility Awareness Educators, myself included, tend to discourage the use of fertility devices with prediction technology. Topics discussed in today's episode What are Daysy and Lady-Comp and how are they used for Fertility Awareness tracking? How effective are these devices? How do these devices "know" when you are fertile and infertile? Do these devices encourage women to continue relying on external technology instead of learning about their bodies? Why do Fertility Awareness Educators discourage the use of predictive technology for Fertility Awareness? How can these devices bridge the gap between hormonal birth control and the fertility awareness method? Can Daysy and Lady-Comp give women an option when they want to transition off the pill? Do these devices just take us back to the rhythm method and encourage women to count the days of their cycle? The future of birth control technology from IUDs to remote control birth control How do Fertility Apps use our data without our knowledge? The importance of meeting women where they are with their knowledge and comfort with their own bodies The role that devices like Daysy and Lady-Comp can play in helping women transition from hormonal birth control and gain knowledge about their bodies Connect with Holly You can connect with Holly on her website and on Facebook and Twitter! Resources mentioned Sweetening the Pill Website | Holly Grigg-Spall Sweetening the Pill Facebook Page | Holly Grigg-Spall Sweetening the Pill: or How We Got Hooked on Hormonal Birth Control (book) | Holly Grigg-Spall Sweetening The Pill Book Review | Fertility Friday FFP 021 | What Hormonal Contraceptives Really do to Women | Sweetening the Pill | Holly Grigg-Spall Top 10 unexpected effects of coming off the pill | Lisa Fertility Friday Daysy Fertility Monitor Lady-Comp Fertility Computer Join the community! Find us on the Fertility Friday Facebook Fan Page Subscribe to the Fertility Friday Podcast on iTunes! Music Credit: Intro/Outro music Produced by Sirc of (The Nock)

Hitting my Kickstarter goal in 3 days was exhilarating! I want to teach you exactly how I did it and what I learned along the way!   My Kickstarter Page   Two Associated Posts What I Learned from a Successful Kickstarter Campaign The Steps I Took After a Successful Kickstarter Campaign   Book Recommendation Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter Diamandis   Aaron’s Challenge; Spend 30 minutes away from your phone and think about something that you really want. This can be something that you haven’t told anyone because it may seem a little ridiculous. Acknowledge it, and put together a rough draft of a plan for how you would make it happen.   People to Thank Liam Rosen, TopScore & Skyd Magazine Joe Marmerstein, Kenny Chen Alex Galbraith Art & Denise Chau Squirrel Hill Chiropractic Pitt Ultimate Greeno, who has helped me edit a few episodes of the podcast Dan O'Connor, the very first backer Tyler Kunsa StartNow Pittsburgh Jimmy Leppert, UpCall Ultimate Dan Tremblay Larry Gioia Whiskey with Wes James Park, Los Angeles Aviators Kevin Tang Elizabeth Craig Photography Ryan, CB Insights Karly Schwab Michael Wilson Ryan Richardson Adam Pelleg JoJo Paulson Domasky Alex Thorne Mark Fedorenko Dave & Portie Watson Nathan D Hessington VI   A special thank you to my family members who supported me; Aunt Cheryl & Uncle Denny - You guys rock. Thank you, thank you, thank you! Holly - You’re the best! Mom & Dad - Thank you for always believing in me. Ashley - I couldn’t have done any of this without you.