Podcasts about i'm sam

Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Margaret talks with Sam and Amadeo about their experiences shepherding in the Swiss Alps. They talk about the problems that shepherds are facing in Switzerland with wolves, climate change, city mentalities, and right-wing propaganda. Host Info Margaret (she/they) can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Live Like the World is Dying: Sam and Amadeo on Sheep, Wolves, and Climate Change **Margaret ** 00:16 Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the times. I'm your host today, Margaret Killjoy and this is an episode about sheep...and sheep farming. Shepherding, I believe we might want to call it, in the Alps. I'm really excited about it. We've been planning this episode for a while, because we are going to be talking to two sheep farmers in the Alps about climate change and about the return of wolves and about ecology and about why the right-wing picks all the wrong talking points and a bunch of other stuff. But first, we are a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on the network.  **Margaret ** 01:52 Okay, we're back. So if y'all could introduce yourselves with your name...your names, your pronouns, and I guess just a little bit about your background with shepherding. **Sam ** 02:05 All right, Hi, I'm Sam, my pronouns she/her and we are in Vienna right now. And yeah, I'm an artist and also a bit of a writer, filmmaker. I do a lot of that kind of stuff. Lately I have been working a lot with metal and smithing And yeah, I went with Amadeo on a sheep farm and Alps in Valais in Switzerland. And we want to tell you a bit about our experience. **Amadeo ** 02:38 Yeah, my name is Amadeo. He/him. I'm 38. Actually, I started to work as a teacher now. I teach biology and some other stuff, politics, and so on. And yeah, This was my third year...third summer, not third year, third season to work as a shepherd but the first time with sheep, actually. Before that I worked with cows and milking and so on. Yeah, and for me it was also the first time with sheep and the first time in this area of Switzerland. I'm Austrian. But the payment in Austria is really bad so we went to Switzerland. So we are also the working migrants. Or what do you call it in English? **Margaret ** 03:31 Migrant workers, I guess.  **Amadeo ** 03:34 Yes.  **Margaret ** 03:36 Okay, so what brought you all to sheep farming or to farming in general as like the thing to go do with your summers for work?  **Amadeo ** 03:47 Should I?  **Sam ** 03:48 Yeah, you can. **Amadeo ** 03:50 So, I had this experience in 2020 and 21, I think, and I really liked it in a way. It was very hard work back then, but I learned a lot. And we met after that, actually, and decided we would like to go together. And then we just hit up the internet and looked for work and places to go and then we found this place that sounded pretty ideal for us because it was sheep farming and no milking, which is nice. I didn't want to do the milking job and do cheesemaking and so on again, I wanted to stay outside mostly, like the whole day under the sky and not in the staple. And yeah, we found this place where you don't need your own dogs, which is nice. We were working with blacknose sheep, they're called. It's like a breed that is only bred in this area. Or not only but traditionally there. And yeah, we tried to get the job and we got it. **Sam ** 05:08 I guess we also got in because Amadeo also already had a lot of experience. And yeah, they were looking for two people there and without dogs. And yeah, I also got...I was really lucky that I was with Amadeo because, you know, like some very daily stuff, he already was prepared for this job. Like, you need a lot of some equipment and know what to take. And yeah, I was really.... **Amadeo ** 05:36 The thing was that, of course, the owners of the sheep, they want someone who has some experience because it happens often that you think, "Oh, it's nice. It's in the mountains. It's beautiful." And then people after two weeks, three weeks, they say, "No way. I can't work here. It's way too hard." I mean, it's like pretty hard work. It's outside all day. With rain, with snow sometimes. And you work from sunup to sundown every day, seven days a week. And many people underestimate it because there's like, I don't know, this idea drawn of what it's like to work in the mountains and it's always beautiful. And it is. But it's also very hard work, actually. **Margaret ** 06:22 It seems really hard. It wouldn't immediately occur to me that I could just go run out and become a shepherd like tomorrow. But I have two questions. And they're related. And one is, what does an average day look like for a shepherd in an Alpine Valley? And the second question that's related is, do you get a shepherd's crook? **Sam ** 06:42 Yeah, well, the day starts with sunrise. Around five was when the summer started. We got there in mid of June. I stayed till mid of September. Amadeo had to leave a bit earlier. And the day ends with sunset. And yeah, you bring the sheep back into the night pen. You say, "pen," huh? Like a space where there is electricity on. Pen? [Said with air of not being sure if it's the correct word] **Amadeo ** 07:15 Do you know what that is? Or, did we get the right word?  **Margaret ** 07:17 Like an animal pen? Or is it a barn? **Amadeo ** 07:19 Yeah, it's like it has no roof. It's not a barn. It has no roof. It's just a fence. An area fenced. A fenced in area with strong electricity because of the wolves. **Margaret ** 07:35 Oh, yeah. Okay, it has an electric fence. Yeah, **Sam ** 07:37 yeah, exactly. And yeah, we would move every two weeks to a new pasture with the sheep. And there were 12 farmers or sheepherders. They're not all farmers. They also have another life. Most of them have another job. They work as bus drivers in heavy industry. And yeah, they also are doing a lot of work. So they're working with us there. We were there most of the time alone, but they come on weekends. They bring us food. They set up the pastures, lines, the fences too. Yeah. And so then we stay out with the sheep all day, any weather. And yeah, also, when we moved the pasture, they came for help because it's hard to change the pasture. You sometimes have to cross a river. And.... **Margaret ** 08:29 Wait, how do you cross the river? Do you just like drive them through the river? **Amadeo ** 08:33 Yes.  **Margaret ** 08:35 Like , "Go swim!"  **Amadeo ** 08:38 It was not such. It was more like a stream than the river. A river sounds bigger than it was.  **Sam ** 08:48 It was like this, like we always make a plan in the evening. Even a drawing. We were five people planning this. And then it always ends up in pretty much chaos and completely different. And in the end they were screaming, "Sam! Go! Go!" And I was like, I even had shoes on and the first sheep I was pulling, just one sheep, with all my strength through the river. And then all the sheep follow. **Margaret ** 09:14 Okay, okay. I have friends who keep sheep but in the city. And they just keep like six of them or something. And it's just a very different thing than like a free ranging sheep. And so it's hard for me to conceptualize.  **Amadeo ** 09:30 We had 400. **Margaret ** 09:32 Yeah, that's more than six. I'm good at numbers. That's amazing. Okay, cool. **Sam ** 09:38 So part of the daily routine is also to do the basic medical care. So we were introduced to that. Sometimes they have claw problems. [Claws are sheep toes] **Amadeo ** 09:38 Problems with the claws.  **Sam ** 09:39 Problems with claws. So this was a regular thing. And sometimes using antibiotics against.... **Amadeo ** 09:58 Yeah, and we had to clean the pen every day, which was like three to four hours of work for one of us. Like shoveling shit. **Margaret ** 10:09 Yeah, okay. But you didn't answer the second question. Did you have a shepherd's crook? Do you know what that is? [Laughing] **Amadeo ** 10:17 Not a real one. We had like umbrellas. Big ones that were very useful against the sun. And so preparedness thing number one, if you stay in the high alpine areas, the altitude of the higher pastures were 2500 meters [8,200ft], you need something to cover you against the sun and against the rain. So big umbrellas were pretty handy. **Sam ** 10:46 And also the sheep have horns so it's easier to catch them. You have to learn this also, but you throw yourself on the sheep and then you tackle them down. I got really good at this. And also the blacknose sheep in the valleys, they have very long hair. And, I mean, it's breeding, right? They do it for breeding, the sheepherders. So the wool, it doesn't get any money. It's nothing. It's not worth anything anymore. But for the beauty contests that the sheep go to it's really important. It's a tradition. And they let it grow.... **Amadeo ** 11:26 They have very long face hair so some of them are basically blind. Most of them have like, how do you say something that rings? What is it? A bell? Yes.  **Sam ** 11:39 Yeah, but they get lost because they don't see anything and our job was also to make them hair ties and to tie the hair. And also the sheepherders would come to do this because we could not do this for 400 sheep. Yeah, so that was also part of the job, Yeah, it adds up. There are some different tasks. And yeah, since we would move with the sheep, maybe also that.  So also the moving is part of. You're always packing your stuff. You need to think, okay, how much food we need to...how much will we eat and how much do we need to take to the next hut. So organizing this is part of it. And then we had a small hut that was flied in with a helicopter. It was... **Amadeo ** 12:12 Flown in. Flown with the helicopters for the most remote places where we would stay with the sheep because otherwise you would have to walk a long way, like 45 minutes to the cabin every day. So they brought in a tiny hut for one person, actually.  **Margaret ** 12:47 For you all?  **Amadeo ** 12:49 Yeah, yeah. Flown with the helicopter so we could stay next to the sheep.  **Sam ** 12:55 But it was so small. Like one was sleeping on the floor, the other on this little bed. And also you always need to organize this hut when you come with very wet clothes. You have no space in there. We had a little solar panel. So this was doing.... We had a fridge at least. Very high tech. I guess 20 years before, we would not have a fridge. And some light even in the cabin and a stove. A wood stove. It got crazy hot because it's so small and yeah. So organizing this hut was also not so easy. And we were lucky because there was a lot of water in this valley. Like it's full of water. And so we would get water from the... **Amadeo ** 13:43 From the springs around.  Wells? How you say? **Margaret ** 13:48 Well, I mean, a well is a hole dug in the ground and then a spring is usually a natural spring or it's like a pipe stuck in the side of a hill that the water comes out of. **Amadeo ** 13:57 Yeah, it was a natural spring. No pipe, though. Just some moss and it was nice. **Margaret ** 14:04 And so you can just go straight from that or do you have to filter it? **Amadeo ** 14:08 It depends. We had, at some points, we could just drink it from there. We didn't filter it. At the cabins we had covered springs, wells. Or springs? So we could...it was okay. But the open ones, we had to take care of where the sheep were. If the sheep can go around then it's not so good. It was better if it was higher up where they wouldn't go. **Sam ** 14:42 Yeah also good that there were a lot of springs so the sheep would get water. They need to drink. And sometimes there were pastures where they could only drink one time in the day, so they also learn when they have to drink in the morning because we had really hot days also where these blacknose sheep with all the wool, they really get hot. And yeah, then also we learned how the sheep walk in every pasture. They have the same kind of routine that follows the sun also. And you kind of learn their ways. And also maybe when it's time to act to get the sheep back, I mean, without a dog. Yeah, you need to learn this also, I guess, when it's time. **Amadeo ** 15:33 I always said, if you want to move against their will, you are the dog, you have to run around like crazy. They have their rhythm and they have their ways, you know? **Margaret ** 15:46 So, did you all use dogs? Like also? Or is it sometimes dogs, sometimes no dogs? **Amadeo ** 15:54 No, we had none. The thing is that this kind of race [breed of sheep] is very used to people and they're not moving that far. So you can walk with them. It's okay. It's just the problem is you can have two kinds of dogs, right? You can have dogs to protect against wolves, for example. Then they live with the sheep. They're inside of the flock all the time. But it's a problem with hikers and so on. Because they attack everyone that comes near, right? **Margaret ** 16:33 This explains a little bit about my dog.  **Amadeo ** 16:36 Yeah, and so you can really have them there because it's also like a recreational area. This area, like a lot of people go hiking there and so on. So you can't have dangerous dogs. And the other thing would be like dogs that help you move the flock.  **Margaret ** 17:01 Herding dogs?  **Amadeo ** 17:02 We didn't really need it, right? Because we would have not.... I mean, it was big areas but still we would stay in one area for two weeks and then we would move on to the next area. So you didn't really need dogs to guard them the whole day. **Sam ** 17:23 But it's really a calm.... The blacknose sheep are really really calm sheep. We learned this also because like certain sheep breeds, you say, right, they run way more. They run all day. And you really need dogs there. Yeah, so we.... **Amadeo ** 17:40 But with the blacknose, no, they are kind of calm. Yes. And they have a long...during the day they have a long break time.  **Sam ** 17:48 Resting time.   **Amadeo ** 17:49 Yeah, because if it's getting hot up there, the sun is very strong. It can be like, I don't know.... Like I mean the degrees don't get up that much like in the flat areas but the sun, how you say...the sun rays are really strong. **Margaret ** 18:11 Yeah, because when you're at a higher altitude there's less atmosphere to protect you, right? I know what I mean. But I don't know the words for it. **Amadeo ** 18:22 Yeah, the sheep have some...if it's a hot day, they rest for four hours during midday. They try to find, you know, shady spots and just rest. And so at that time, you can also rest. If it's rainy, you can't rest because then they are moving too. Yeah. **Margaret ** 18:48 It makes me...the no dog thing, I'm like.... My dog was bred to have a million different jobs. My dog is just a complete mutt of a lot of different working breeds. And so Rintrah, my dog, is never quite sure whether he's supposed to be herding, or chasing, or retrieving things. He just wants to do all of it all the time. And one of the proudest things I've ever had, my proudest dog mom moment, was staying with my friend who has goats and sheep and one of the baby goats just got out of the pen and was running around the yard. And so Rintrah just herded it into a corner and then like calmly barked to inform us that he had trapped the goat. And I was just like, no one taught you how to do that. He wasn't a year old. He just was like , "This is what I do." And so like, I imagine how happy my dog would be as a sheepdog, a herding dog, which isn't necessarily true because he has adhd. This is a complete tangent. I just like talking about my dog. But you all, one of the reasons I want to talk to you, you talked about how a lot of this ties into preparedness and how it feels you've learned a lot about preparedness that you're like taking into the rest of your life by having done this work. I was wondering if you wanted to talk more about that. As a complete, look how expertly I tangented...pivoted from one topic to another. **Sam ** 20:11 Yeah, yeah, actually your podcast was really a bit with us in this time. It was cool, the topic of preparedness. And yeah, for me in this way, thinking about preparedness, what's also weighed in with this work was to get somehow familiar again with the conditions of doing this work, of ways of living in this open environment, of existing there with the sheep and in this non-human environment. And also, maybe, in this threatened environment that somehow you would.... And also the organization structures, how this work is possible, that it needs a lot of people and it needs a lot of people who do this. I mean, there's the farmers or sheepherders, they do this because they love this work. Because they have done this all the time. It's tradition. And yeah, that they somehow save something. **Amadeo ** 21:17 I mean, to talk about the practical side, if you stay outside the whole day, every day, seven days a week, you learn a lot of what you really need and what you don't need. I think that was big. Yeah, it was like very valuable to me to see what I really need. And I remember listening to your podcast, and you talk a lot about being prepared in a way, like having podcasts on your phone, for example. Because if you have to stay with sheep for 10 hours a day, you need to...you had a lot of time to think. And I loved having a good book because I could read and then think for hours about it and have like, I think, yeah, more time than in the city where you are distracted from one topic to another. So this really is good to have more, I don't know, space in my head. This was a good thing. And yeah, I think looking at, how you say, like, being outside in nature everyday and witnessing all these little changes from day-to-day. This was very, very, very special. And I think I learned so much about life and also about survival because all the animals and the plants there, they are...like, they have to survive in a very harsh environment with very short growing period, for example. I mean, lots of snow during.... Winter lasts, I don't know, for 10 months, or like, let's see, nine maybe? You know what I mean? Like when we came mid June, there was still snow. And in August before we...the end was the 16th, I think, of September, but we had to leave the higher pastures at the end of August because it was starting to snow heavily. And yeah, it's like very different too.  **Sam ** 23:30 But still to also learn about the fears and the sheepherder have. And also, yeah, it's an environment that's threatened and that will change through climate change for sure. Like it is changing. And I thought also on some days that it gets hotter and hotter every summer. And also last year, the grass was really dry. So the sheep would get this disease called, in German, Lipinkin [cannot translate], which is little bit like herpes. Yeah. And yeah, they had to be treated, every sheep, and give some.... **Amadeo ** 24:05 Some cream. But do that for 400 sheep, man. **Margaret ** 24:11 Yeah, that sounds like it would take a while.  **Sam ** 24:14 Medication for 400 sheep. So yeah, they have struggles they face. And then the wolf, of course, is a new topic. And yeah, they have to deal with a lot of stuff. Yeah. **Margaret ** 24:27 Well, let's talk about wolves. Let's talk about--you all mentioned beforehand when we were getting ready to talk about how wolves have maybe either been reintroduced or are coming back in that area to a certain degree and how that threatens this way of life but like not as much as climate change does and how it all ties into the right-wing and I kinda wanna to hear about it. **Amadeo ** 24:51 Yeah, since a few years, since I was like.... 2020 was really when I was first introduced to this life, to these people in Switzerland. First of all, I came from the city and I didn't know that it's such a big topic already. Because in Austria, we have a few wolves. But not to mention, you know, maybe a dozen. But I learned that in Switzerland since the last, I don't know, 20 years, from a dozen they now have, I think, 250. Around 250. And, like, I don't know, 25 packs or something, or something like this. Which doesn't sound so much, but it's like...it's not such a big country. And they are a lot in these areas. For example, in Valais where we stayed, we knew that the nearest wolves are just two kilometers away. And they have offspring. So for them, they need meat and so on. And I mean, the sheep are puffy, you know. It's like, go get them. **Sam ** 26:01 Also, on the other side of the mountain, actually, there was another shepherd with a, I think, also around 400.... Fuck, I don't know exactly how many sheep. And there the wolf came. And he killed, I think, seven sheeps. And also one of his dogs was attacked. So it was really close. And also the fear that we might face an attack was also really with us. And also there was a guy who takes care of the area.  **Amadeo ** 26:34 A ranger.  **Sam ** 26:35 Yeah, and he came and told us, "Hey, you really have to watch out. They're really close." So yeah.  **Amadeo ** 26:42 But the thing is, the crazy thing for me is that, of course, this threatens, in a way, people that are used to putting their cattle, putting their sheep just in a meadow and leaving them, you know. Have a look once a week or something. Of course now with the wolves, it's not possible because a wolf would kill many. They start to, you know, get into like.... If they can they kill 10 and then just take one, you know. They just.... If they [sheep] don't run away and they don't run far, you know, 100 years of, I don't know, living with humans and being petted and so on, they don't have--you know what I mean? They don't have it in them anymore to really run. Because normally, if a wolf attacks a  deer, for example, the pack can't find any deer for another week or something because they're all alert. They're alert as soon as there is an encounter. With the sheep, it's not so much. So now it's a problem, of course, but there would be solutions. You just, you need to adjust. You need to change the way it works. Yeah, you need protection. You need people to look after the sheep and so on. And for many areas, this is really hard. Because if you have an alpine pasture that is very remote, steep hills everywhere, you know, it's so hard to really fence it off or something. It's not possible. So I can understand it for the farmers. It's hard. And when we talked with them about it, they were always like, "We have to kill the wolf," you know? And it's now protected. It's under national protection. You cannot just shoot them. Even if they kill some of your sheep, you can't. And there was a big--in Switzerland you have more, how you say, basic democracy. So many of the laws are decided by a vote of everyone. So there was a big vote about if the protection status of the wolves should be loosened in a way. Not that you can just hunt them but loosen in a way that you can, I don't know, shoot some if they're attacking cattle or.... **Margaret ** 29:11 Can you shoot them if they attack you? **Amadeo ** 29:13 No, we had no gun. I mean, they won't attack  humans but... **Margaret ** 29:20 I'm an American, so I'm like....Okay, so like, I think about this a lot. Okay. I'm really...the wolf thing is so interesting to me for a thousand reasons. And one is that the destruction of wolves is such a emblem of civilization. It is such an emblem of the conquest of nature, right? And you have, for example, the no wolves in Ireland thing. You know? And that the British were very into killing all the wolves in Ireland and part of that even.... Like, so you even have the Irish rebels who would be to a certain degree, would be like, "Oh, we are the wolves. Like we are the people that they're trying to conquer," because it's like they are the unconquered, you know, wild folk, or whatever fucking bullshit colonial thing that gets thrown at them, you know? But at the same time, it's like.... So I'm kind of rooting for the wolves here with what you're describing, right? I like sheep. I don't specifically want the sheep to die. And where I live, we have coyotes, right. And we don't really have wolves where I live, but we have coyotes. And they kill, you know, they kill livestock. And they also kill dogs, right? And I have a dog. And I very actively want my dog to not be killed by coyotes. And apparently coyotes will do this thing where they'll befriend a dog, and be like, "yeah, totally, come hang out with us," and then kill and eat that dog, right? And so I have a neighbor who oversees about 400 acres. And he's from France. And he carries around a handgun. And he's so confused by this. He's like, "I came to America and now I have to carry around a handgun." But he carries around a handgun in case he's attacked by coyotes. Right? And it's like, interesting to me because it's like.... The urge to be like, "Oh, we should kill all the wolves so we can happily raise our sheep in peace," like fuck that, right? That, to me, is like the example of a negative form of peace, where you have conquered and like flattened everything. Sorry, it's a little bit of a rant, but I'm going somewhere with it. I promise. And then, but at the same time, there's this balance, right? Like, I'm not going to let a coyote kill my dog. Or if I was around wolves, I wouldn't let the wolves kill me, right? I mean, whatever I...as much as I can control that, you know? The coyotes are kind of on the other side of the hill. So I don't carry a gun around my property. But that would be a thing that I would need to consider in certain circumstances. So, it's just really interesting to me that, like, I get why the sheep farmers are like, "Oh, we got to get rid of all these wolves." But I'm also like, "Whatever. Fuck you. Let the wolves be." But then I'm also like, it's complicated. And I get why you have to defend the sheep. But I don't know. Anyway, that's where I'm going with it. I guess I wasn't going anywhere with it after all. **Sam ** 32:15 Yeah, no, I think it's a really complex situation. Yeah, there is not an easy answer to like kill the wolf or.... Yeah, I'm also pro Wolf. And there needs to be a different solution. And yeah, like to see what the sheepherders really face, what kind of struggles they face with this was really interesting. And also, I think the problem is that it's super instrumentalized [wonders if that's the right word]...instrumentalized by right-wing people politically.  **Margaret ** 32:55 Weaponized? [Offering a different word] **Amadeo ** 32:58 Yeah. In a way. I mean, the thing is, it also turned in Switzerland, for example, into a city versus countryside. Because at the vote, most people from the cities would vote for the wolf for what keeps the protection. But many people in the countryside, with also more like conservative political beliefs--and the conservative parties--said, "No, no, no, we have to change that because it threatens our way of living around in the remote areas in the countryside. And so this is somehow so stupid because.... **Sam ** 33:37 Yeah, that's also covering certain other threats, right, like climate change. They don't talk about climate change. The only thing they speak about is the wolf and the wolves. And yeah, that's really.... So it's somehow a weird thing that it's so taken over by this discourse, which is, yeah.... **Amadeo ** 33:57 Yeah, you can shoot climate change. That's the thing. It's easy to say, "Oh, it's all the wolf. We have to kill the wolf. And then we get rid of this problem." But on the other hand, climate change.... [interrupted] **Margaret ** 34:11 I can think of some ways to solve climate change with guns, but.... Anyway.... **Amadeo ** 34:16 I mean, I got so sad up there because it's so special. I mean, this area was a natural reserve too. And it has golden eagles. It has vultures, it has marmots, it has like.... **Sam ** 34:35 A lot of marmots. Everywhere. [Laughing] **Amadeo ** 34:38 And some protected bogs, some plants that are really like really rare, like at the brink of extinction. And I know, I stood there and I saw this, I don't know, this beauty and I know in 50 years from now it will be gone. Probably. It's very, very likely. Because.... I mean, some species can move.... Like, seen on a global level, they move north because it's getting warm. But on the on fucking mountain, there is an end. There is no moving more up. Because at 4000 meters or something, it's....stops, you know? Like there's nothing there. And all the farmers there, for example, if you ask them, they see these changes. They witness it. They say, "Yes, it's so much different than it was when I was a kid." And the glaciers, for example, in Switzerland--I read about it--there were since the 70s, 800 glaciers are gone. And there is still 1400 glaciers in Switzerland. And they say 2100 [year], they will be probably most of them, like 95%, will be gone. And it's so sad. But still, if you say something like, "Climate change," even those farmers there, that witness it every fucking day, they say like, "Well, you know, I don't know if you can call it that." It's ridiculous. And it's because the discourse, the political discourse, is framed by conservatives mostly. And they say, "Your problem is the wolf. We can shoot the wolf." So.... [Margaret starts talking and apologizes] No, no, it's, I'm, I'm done with ranting. **Margaret ** 36:40 No, this is so interesting for a thousand reasons. And one of them is that we always.... It goes back hundreds of years that leftists will be like, "Oh, the countryside are all right-wing. Fuck them." And this is not true, right? This is like.... The most interesting leftist revolutions have generally involved also the rural folks, right? I mean, like, famously, the fucking Russian Revolution was all rural people. And to be fair, Marx was.... I think he owned up to getting that wrong, because he was one of the people who started this myth that "The peasant is not the revolutionary subject, only the proletarian worker in the city is," right? "And the peasants are always reactionary." And I think he owned up to, when he looked at Russia, he was like, "Oh, I got that one wrong. Okay, cool." You know. It's true if we let it be true, because you have this thing where.... I think it is actually a flaw that we have to be careful with in democracy--and majority rule in general--is if people in the cities make the rules for the people in the countryside, and they don't understand the people in the countryside and they don't understand their way of life. And so it's like, really easy--even though I'm still on the wolf's side--I see it as complicated. Whereas it's like really easy to live in a city and be like, "Whatever. Fuck it," you know, because it's not their livelihood, or dog that is being threatened, right? And so I feel like, to me, it's this thing where we can't cede that ground to the right-wing, you know? And I really, I think it's cool that you all.... And that's one reason I want to talk to you about it is that there's like all of these.... It doesn't have to be this inherently conservative space to be in the countryside, to be in a rural area. And then the other thing that I was thinking about with what you're talking about, about mountains and how things retreat, is that mountains are so interesting to me because they're always where people run to, right? And you look at.... I mean, you look at Switzerland as a country and as the history of the country is people fleeing there in order to--well, I don't know enough about how Switzerland was formed--but in World War II, every time I'm like reading about Dutch revolutionaries, or whatever, they're like, "Fuck!" and they all run over to Switzerland and climb up the glaciers with their bare hands, or whatever the fuck. I don't know. I clearly know what I'm talking about. And in the United States, you have. where I live in Appalachia, that is the place that people would retreat to. That is the place where people losing wars against the conquest of the United States would go to. And it is. It's that weird thing where you're always free in the mountains, but there's only so far you can run. And that's just so heartbreaking to think about, you know? There's only so far up the mountain that these plants can migrate. On the other hand, I have a feeling that's what we're all going to be living. We're all gonna be in Antarctica. Antarctica bloomed this year, I think. I think we're being on Antarctica and on the mountains. So...  **Sam ** 39:39 Yeah, but it's interesting how it's idolized and romanticized. I mean, we had like...and how extreme, actually, the weather really changes. I really didn't know. I had never lived for three months so high up. And yeah, but also, they're so romanticized. There's this huge hype around survivalist shows, at the moment on TV, which is also really interesting and comes with this. And on the opposite for me the...Yeah, the question was how does being there in the Alps, what does this really change with me and what does it do to experience this? And yeah....  **Amadeo ** 40:20 Yeah, what does it do?  **Margaret ** 40:23 We're asking.   **Sam ** 40:23 It's still settling in. And it's about reconnecting and really realizing what it takes to do this work. And I have a lot of respect.... Also, to be in a very patriarchal space where the shepherds were only older men. Yeah, they have their ways of acting. They have their ways of being. And for me, this was really difficult. Yeah. And still, somehow to not say, "Hey, I won't enter this space," but to go there and.... Yeah, also see what community they have, you know. Yeah, to also go beyond this, I think, that they have their tradition and they have to face this, but yeah, it was also.... [Interrupted] **Amadeo ** 41:11 Maybe you can maybe explain a little bit this, I don't know, this group of people we worked for, because it was actually pretty interesting because it's a conservative area, but they were very working class and very, very nice to us. I think. They treated us really respectfully. And I know, in my other place where I worked as a shepherd, it wasn't like that. I was treated, actually, a little bad. And that's...I don't know. **Sam ** 41:45 Yeah. And to see how they are with the animals. I mean, for them, that's...they are their life. And it's this encounter.  **Amadeo ** 41:50 They love them. **Sam ** 41:51 And for us, to get to know every sheep personally, it's really interesting what connection you get. You watch them all the time. You learn, hey, they are totally different. They have totally different characters.  **Margaret ** 42:09 Yeah. Okay, my question to you is how do you, when you're working with people who are seeing this climate change happen, how do you--but but can't acknowledge it--do you have any insight or thoughts about how to connect with people about that, about how to talk to people, you know, who want to focus on the wolf instead of the bigger wolf, the climate wolf? What's the name of that wolf that's gonna eat the sun and Germanic paganism? Wow, how do I not remember that.  Anyway, whatever, at the start of Ragnarok. Someone's gonna get really mad at me for not knowing this. Fenrir! **Amadeo ** 42:51 I think we had some very good discussions at times. Right? With the guys.... Sorry? [Margaret interrupting] **Margaret ** 43:01 No, no, no, I was just...I remembered the name of the wolf that eats the sun and starts Ragnarok. It's Fenrir. Anyway, or Fenris? Oh, God, no people gonna get mad at me. Anyway, please continue. Tell you something.  **Amadeo ** 43:13 I think also, even though some of them were a little bit panicky about wolves, and so on, I think the system with the night pens and with having shepherds like us, since a few years, to look after the sheep, day and night, basically, it works pretty well. I mean, they told us they have one to five, maybe, sheep per year that are getting killed by the wolf. But that's okay. I mean, they're realistic about it, right? And when we talked about climate change, of course, it was--I mean, for me, it's not much different--I mean, they acknowledged that things are changing. They didn't use the, I don't know, scientific vocabulary or whatever. And they acknowledged in a way--or some of them at least--that there are new problems that we have to face. For example, it's too dry, and so on. Water issues.  Dying out of certain plants, animals in certain areas, and so on. They all see this. More avalanches in the winter. All of this. But, I mean, they were a little helpless. And I mean, we are also often a little helpless, because it's getting individualized. How should you react? Not drive a car? Great. I mean, we have to, you know, rise up and change all of the economy, you know, and this is hard to do. **Sam ** 44:53 But I guess, I mean, I also came there with my artistic background and as an artist and I also was filming a lot--more some of the sheeps but also us--and I think for me to show as someone coming there with a city background, but also with our backgrounds as biologists and artists, and showing how this encounter happens maybe from us as city people with also another perspective in encountering this world. I think I find this really interesting. Also showing some part of this being not exactly in this. I think that's an interesting perspective, also, for other people to see. And yeah, I'm probably cutting a bit of a movie out of this. And I think it can.... Yeah, it's good to go to this place and to show our perspective.  **Amadeo ** 45:53 I mean, I'm so grateful for what these people taught us, right, and that we were accepted and we did this job. And I think we did a good job. But also they trust us, right? **Sam ** 46:06 And what the sheep teach us.  **Amadeo ** 46:08 Yeah, the human and non-human individuals that trusted us. And it was, I think.... I'm very, very grateful. But on the other hand, also, for them, I think it was kind of interesting to have unorthodox people there, people who didn't grow up around the corner with animals, and sheep, and so on. Because for them, they all grew up with this. They inherited this from their parents and grandparents. And we came.... Actually it was a meeting of different worlds, right? We came....  **Sam ** 46:45 And I want to show this, also, this discrepancy that there is some dialog or some encounter that needs to happen. And I mean, many people are so disconnected to this world and don't know. They have lived in Switzerland all their life and they don't have so much connection to this work. Yeah. And it's cool to....  **Amadeo ** 47:05 I think, yeah, it was really...like we came from 1000 kilometers away. But even what made more of a difference was that we live in a city of 2 million people and they live in tiny mountain villages. But we came. We had a good time together, right? They were like helping us. We were helping them. It worked out. And I mean a lot of prejudicism, I had also, as a young radical from the city, dogmatic, and so on, about people back in the days. I mean, it changed over the years, but more and more when I encountered these, I don't know, social places, I have to say, yeah, they were very social with us and very helpful and very, I don't know, cool. Very cool also. Even though they have like strange habits like drinking coffee that isn't coffee but.... [Laughing] **Margaret ** 48:04 Wait, what do they drink that isn't coffee? **Amadeo ** 48:07 It's called Lupinion. It's made out of Lupin, I think. I don't know the English word, like some grain. And it has no caffeine at all. And they always say, "Let's have a coffee and then they drink this." **Sam ** 48:21 But with a lot of schnapps.  **Margaret ** 48:24 I don't drink caffeine. So I'm like, I want to drink that shit. That sounds great. **Sam ** 48:28 That would be the place for you to go.  **Amadeo ** 48:32 They put Apple booze inside like apple schnapps instead.  **Margaret ** 48:38 Okay, well, are there any last things that we didn't cover that you wish we had? Or things that you're really excited to say about sheep and climate change? Oh, does it make you want sheep? That's my...that was like the question. Like, are y'all gonna get sheep? Do you have a yard? I don't know where you live. **Amadeo ** 49:00 We live in the city. But we are planning to move in the coming years. And actually, I would love to have some sheep.  **Sam ** 49:10 Maybe not 400. **Amadeo ** 49:16 Some 20 or something? 15. **Sam ** 49:18 Or we will continue doing this work. It's cool to also work with them and then for a long time be with them. I guess we're.... And then also say, "Hey, gratz [congratulations], that was the summer." . And give them back. **Amadeo ** 49:35 Yeah, like sometimes it's nice to play with kids but having your own kids it's kind of a different cup of tea. **Sam ** 49:42 Like co-parenting. [Laughing] **Amadeo ** 49:45 Maybe some sheep co-parenting? Yeah. Right. **Margaret ** 49:51 Alright, well, is there anything that you want to plug, that you want to direct people towards, either your work or something else that's going on that you want to draw attention to.  **Amadeo ** 50:01 I wanted to say, because I always said while I was there, that it needs more people to help the little farmers deal with the wolves, because if we don't help them then they will always tend to the parties that say, "Oh, let's just get rid of the wolves." And I found out that there are some NGOs to do that, that come from an environmental side. There's one group called Au Pair. I think they're in the French speaking part of the country, mostly. And they actually sent volunteers to alpine pastures where there are wolves nearby, to help, to guard, and also monitor the wolf activities. So it's for research and also to help the farmers. And if I can't go next year to work as a shepherd, I will volunteer there. And I think it's a great, great thing and somehow a solution for how ordinary people can get in touch with the small farmers and help with maintaining the alpine pastures that are also so important for biodiversity. Yeah. And to help save the wolf from people. **Margaret ** 51:22 Yeah. No, that's so good. Because instead of just abandoning people to being like, "Whatever, the wolf is good and you suck," just being like, "Hey, what will it actually take? Like what resources do you actually need in order to be able to continue to do your work in a world full of wolves?" That's cool. **Amadeo ** 51:40 Yeah, I think it needs a lot of growing together, the countryside and the cities, in understanding and talking and like supporting each other. **Sam ** 51:51 Hey, thanks for having us, Margaret.  **Margaret ** 51:54 Yeah, thanks so much. And good luck next year with the sheep season. And I'll talk to y'all at some point soon I hope. Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, go try to convince sheep and wolves to be friends. No, that's not going to work. Hang out with sheep and then separately hang out with wolves. Actually, you probably just shouldn't even hang out with the wolves. You should probably leave them alone. That's pretty much what we want. But that's what you can do. You can also support this podcast. You can support this podcast happening by helping us pay our transcribers and our audio editors. I say this is if there's a plural of each, but there's actually one of each. And thanks to those editors. And thanks to everyone who helps us do that. And the way we do that is through Patreon. This podcast is published by Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. We have several other podcasts, including one called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, as well as one called Anarcho Geek Power Hour. And if you support us on Patreon, we'll send you a monthly feature that we put out. We'll send it anywhere in the world. And if you pay us $20 a month, I'll read your name out right now. In particular, I'd like to thank Eric, Perceval, Buck, Julia, Catgut, Marm, Carson, Lord Harken, Trixter, Princess Miranda, BenBen, Anonymous, Funder, Janice & O'dell, Aly, paparouna, Milaca, Boise Mutual Aid, theo, Hunter, S.J., Paige, Nicole, David, Dana Chelsea, Staro, Jenipher, Kirk, Chris, Machaiah, and of course, Hoss the Dog. I hope everyone is doing as well as you can and don't let the people divide us along cultural lines because we just shouldn't let that happen. Talk to you all soon.

This week on Breaking Battlegrounds, we have guest host Michelle Ugenti-Rita filling in for Chuck Warren, along with co-host Sam Stone. Join us as we welcome our first guest, Abe Hamadeh, who's running to represent Arizona's 8th Congressional District. A former U.S. Army Reserve Captain and Intelligence Officer, Abe is a staunch America-first fighter, and he'll share his vision for securing the southern border and holding the government accountable. Our second guest, Mike Coté, founder of Rational Policy and a writer at the National Review, offers a historical perspective on policy, international affairs, and politics. Tune in for engaging discussions and expert insights into the political landscape.-Connect with us:www.breakingbattlegrounds.voteTwitter: www.twitter.com/Breaking_BattleFacebook: www.facebook.com/breakingbattlegroundsInstagram: www.instagram.com/breakingbattlegroundsLinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/breakingbattlegrounds-About our guestsAbe Hamadeh is a former U.S. Army Reserve Captain & Intelligence Officer, Maricopa county prosecutor and an America first fighter. Abe is the son of immigrants; his family fled places like Syria and Venezuela. He knows all too well that if America falls, the flame of freedom may be extinguished forever. Abe is running to represent Arizona's 8th Congressional District where he grew up, having gone to Happy Valley School, Stetson Hills, and Terramar. He is honored to be the voice of the district back in Washington.Mike Coté is a writer for the National Review and historian focusing on great-power rivalry and geopolitics. He blogs at rationalpolicy.com and hosts the Rational Policy podcast.-Transcription Sam Stone: Welcome to another episode of Breaking Battlegrounds. I'm your host, Sam Stone. The international man of mystery. Chuck Warren is out of the studio again this week, but we are graced by the lovely presence Michelle Ugenti-Rita, former state senator here. She's running for office herself. Yeah, yeah.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: Glutton for punishment.Sam Stone: Yeah. No, seriously. Having done that once now and having no interest, I have all these people keep coming up to me and they're like, hey, Sam, you should run again. I'm like.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: Why are you kidding you? You value your yourself too much to do that again.Sam Stone: It's painful.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: It's tough. It's tough. I like it though. I mean, I don't know how many races have I done. 6 or 7. And you know, the vast majority of one lost one, one six. I like it. You have to like it to do it.Sam Stone: See, I like working on campaigns. Yeah.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: So you like it? Just a different component, a.Sam Stone: Different component of it. I actually I just found out that when I was doing it, I found out I don't like being the candidate.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: Right. That's a that's a different kind of person, the person who likes to be a candidate. But there can be a lot of people that like to be in the political sphere, working behind the scenes, working on policy, working on campaign strategy. But the candidate, it's it takes a lot.Sam Stone: It's different. I mean, for one thing, the thing that that frankly got me and folks, we have some very good guests coming up today on our second segment, we're going to have Abraham Hamadeh. He was the candidate for attorney general, general election candidate in Arizona, lost by I think by the end it was like 270 votes. I think it was down to like 123 by the time it was all okay, whatever. And as we discussed briefly or will discuss briefly with Abe there, there's really no doubt in anyone's mind here that he got hosed out of that election by Maricopa County. And what happened on Election day and uncounted ballots.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: Their incompetency.Sam Stone: Their incompetency and all this kind of thing. I have not met one serious person who doesn't think that he should be the AG right now in a fairly run election. Yeah, and that's even a lot of those people are people who disagree with Kari Lake and disagree with Donald Trump and don't take that position, but they look at what happened here on Election Day with malfunctioning machines and 63% of the precincts, all this stuff and they say, look, 100 and something votes that absolutely cost that. So he's announcing a run for Congressional District eight here in Arizona.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: So that's going to be that's going to be a really interesting congressional race. You mentioned we we talked to Abe about this.Sam Stone: But folks, in all fairness, before we stumble over this anymore, we actually already did our interview with Abe. We pre-recorded it before we began the show here. I'm just going to be honest about this. Like, folks, you know, we're not live. We pre-record this on Friday. You're going to you're going to hear this on Saturday. So it is what it is. Instead of assembling it over to Michelle, we'll just tease this interview that's coming up and then folks make sure yeah, make sure you stay tuned afterwards because we're going to do a nice podcast segment following on this as well. And then for segments three and four today we have Mike Cote, writer for National Review and historian, focusing on great power, rivalry and geopolitics, which obviously isn't relevant at all to the moment in time we're in. Yeah, yeah. Um, but so we were teasing the lead in with Abe in that race from last time when Debbie Lesko became the congresswoman. I think if I remember, I mean, it was a huge field, like 15 to 18 people in that field.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: I think so too. I mean, everyone and their mom comes out and puts their hat or puts their name in the hat to run. And but that is honestly the nature of an open seat. You see that quite frequently in an open seat. It is exasperated by fact that it's a congressional open seat. And on our side, the Republican side.Sam Stone: Whoever wins the primary.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: Yeah, it will. The general.Sam Stone: The general. I mean, I think when Debbie ran, her Democrat opponent in the general was.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: Tipirneni.Sam Stone: Was it Hiram Tipirneni or was it? I think it was Brian nee. Brianna Westbrook. I don't know. Either way. It was terrible.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: Candidates or something. Yeah. It's terrible.Sam Stone: Well, yeah. No. So the Democrats here in Arizona don't have a great bench.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: No, no, they don't have a good bench at all. It's not deep. Just the fact that we have Katie Hobbs as our governor I think is evident of that. But it does tell you, though, that if we aren't smart about how we're campaigning, if we don't have strategy, if we don't stick to our talking points, if we veer off of, you know, issues that matter to people, it's not a given. We're going to win. I mean, right, you know, just because the other side is that bad does not mean you're going to win. You know, you really have to make sure that you get your message out and you, frankly, stay on message. Stay. On message. I hope that's what happens in in CD eight is they stay on message. There's so much going on. Abe talked about that. And people want results. Yes. You know, deliver something for the good people of that district, please.Sam Stone: Well, you know one thing, and I know Debbie Lesko a little bit. You probably know her a lot better than I.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: Served with her.Sam Stone: Um, but one of the things I was a little disappointed with her over the few years she's been in office versus Paul Gosar, for instance, is that Paul ran around and turned out voters in his bright red district in general elections. Yeah. And Debbie did not do that in hers. And folks, that makes a big difference. You need a candidate. Yeah. They've won the thing in the primary. It's over basically. But you need them to go out and turn out those votes.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: You do have to energize the base, right? This is a numbers game. The person with the most numbers, you know, the highest number, excuse me, wins. And it's about keeping majorities or getting majorities if we don't have them. And that doesn't happen unless let's get out to vote. Like your point.Sam Stone: Let's take a Debbie Lesko and let's call it five of our brightest red state legislative districts. Right. What what how much of a change is there if each one of if Debbie turns out an extra 1000 votes and all of those turn out an extra hundred.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: And especially since races are becoming more and more competitive, they're closer and closer. So, you know, a lot of people have this mindset of like, oh, it doesn't matter or I'm just one. But when when, you know, the race we had the superintendent race, there was another legislative district race. This was just last general election, right. They they triggered recount my recount bill, by the way, that the counties opposed vehemently because they don't like to recount.Sam Stone: That's one of the things most people don't maybe don't know, because people don't follow the legislature in any state.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: They should, but they should.Sam Stone: I always laugh because, like the Florida legislature has done so much right, and everyone, all everyone talks about is governor DeSantis. Now, I love governor DeSantis too, but let's be honest, 80% of what he gets credit for.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: They they served up to for him.Sam Stone: They're teeing him up. And, you know, we we haven't always done a good enough job here. But had we turned out those extra 1500 Republicans, we're not talking about Abraham Hamadeh running for CD eight. We're talking about AG Abraham Hamadeh right I mean that's a big difference. And this is nationwide folks. Think about all these the presidential election, everything how close that was.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: And it's only going to be I think that you're going to see more and more competitive races. And what I mean by that, the differential between the top two candidates become narrower, more narrow and narrow. So they're going to be razor close. So every vote actually does count. And I think in 2016 it was Congressman Andy Biggs that won his race by I want to say 27 votes.Sam Stone: Yeah it was really tight really really tight tight. Yeah. And so these things make a big difference.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: So if you're extended family's not voting and you lose that race I mean you can't go to any family function ever again.Sam Stone: Well no you can. You just you stand at the door and you're like, you're allowed in. Let's see. Did you vote? Pull up the voter rolls. Did you cast a ballot? Oh no no, no potato salad for you today.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: Exactly.Sam Stone: Um, there's a lot going on in the world, and obviously we're going to be focusing on a lot of the the great power situation and all of this with Mike Cote. When Cote, I'm hoping I'm probably mispronouncing this two different ways. That's what I do, folks. Um, but I want to touch on something else that came up today. It's kind of icky, but I'm throwing I'm throwing this into this thing. It's Friday. There's the news out today that about a week ago you had a reporter in Philadelphia, 39 year old reporter who was murdered in his home. And everyone was like, you know, what's going on, blah, blah, blah. Well, today they arrested a 19 year old homeless kid that he was having a air quote, I'm putting up the air quotes here, folks. Relationship with. This comes about two weeks after we saw a activist stabbed on the streets of New York.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: That was horrific.Sam Stone: Video for basically the same underlying reason that he had been in a relationship with this crazy young homeless person who then stabbed him to death. Democrats have a pedophile problem.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: You are going bold.Sam Stone: I am going bold there. But you know what they do. Look at the thing. So there was a little bit of controversy here about Turning Point USA. One of their activists chasing and asking questions of an ASU professor, who then shoved the cameraman and physically made a poor decision of who to assault because he just got tossed to the ground by a much stronger person as a result. Now that that was the result of his actions, this this act, this activist professor. But I looked into why they were asking him these questions. This guy is a professor at our university and he's basically promoting pedophilia. I mean. What are we? What do we have to do?Michelle Ugenti- Rita: Why isn't why isn't there an outcry about that?Sam Stone: You know, I saw a little clip from Joe Rogan this morning, and I actually, I like Rogan. I think he's a great interviewer. It's not his insights I actually find the most interesting. UsuallyMichelle Ugenti- Rita:  He's good at teasing it out of his guests.Sam Stone: Yeah, he's a great interviewer. He asks brilliant questions, but this was a kind of a clip of him talking with one of his guests, guest hosts or co co producers or whatever, and he was saying, you know, you have this thing where it's just Ghislaine Maxwell has been jailed, convicted, right, of selling kids for sex. And yet there's no one anywhere in any documentation who bought. That sex. Now obviously that happened. I'm not saying it didn't write. But why aren't they being charged? All of those people who were flying to Epstein Island.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: Who are they and.Sam Stone: Who are they? Where's the list?Michelle Ugenti- Rita: Where's right? It happened. Where's the list? Who are they? Why can't we identify them?Sam Stone: Yeah.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: And bring them to justice.Sam Stone: And forget trying to hold them accountable? We're not even being told who we.Michelle Ugenti- Rita:  You don't even. Know who it is.Sam Stone: Who should be held accountable.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: Very powerful.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: Forces.Sam Stone: And this is this is something totally different. Like I always was. You know, you grew up in a country where it's like, hey, one side wants lower tax rates and the other one side wants to spend more money. And like, okay, that's a discussion we can all have.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: And be on.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: Either side of the issue on. Right. But why, why are why why is this one divided. Right. Or at least feels like it? Shouldn't we all be on the same side on this one?Sam Stone: I'm sorry.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: You have a different perspective when it comes to pedophilia.Sam Stone: Or. Yeah.Sam Stone: I mean, like they go so far as to call it minor attracted persons. Now they're trying to do this name swap thing again.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: Hopefully Huckabee has banned that term.Sam Stone: Everyone should ban that term. If your governor hasn't banned that term you need to talk to your governor. I don't care which side of the aisle they're on. Okay, folks, we're going to break. We're going to be coming back for more. Make sure you tune in for our podcast segment, because I want to follow up on some of this. It's, you know, there's some weird stuff going on these days, folks. We'll catch you on the next episode here. We're going to be talking to Abe Hamadeh and then moving on with my coat or coat writer for the National Review in just a moment.Advertisement: At Overstock. We know home is a pretty important place, and that's why we believe everyone deserves a home that makes them happy. Whether you're furnishing a new house or apartment or simply looking to update and refresh a few rooms. Overstock has every day free shipping and amazing deals on the beautiful, high quality furniture and decor you need to transform any home into the home of your dreams. Overstock. Making dream homes come true.Sam Stone: All right. Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your host, Michelle Ugenti-rita. And I'm Sam Stone. Coming up next, a guest who just announced a run for Congressional District eight here in Arizona. He is also the man. I really believe that you can if you're a Democrat or you're an independent, you want to quibble about what happened to Kari Lake? You can, but I don't believe you can quibble about what happened to this guy in Maricopa County in this last election, where he theoretically lost by a couple hundred votes when they had huge problems with the machine problems. I have not talked to anybody in Arizona, anybody who's reasonable, who doesn't think the election was stolen from Abe Hamadeh. So, Abe, thank you for taking the time this morning. I know you've got a busy schedule because you just launched this run for Congress. Tell us how you're doing and what's going on.Abe Hamadeh: Thank you. Sam, good to be with you, Michel. It's been, you know, it was Groundhog Day for a whole year, just about since last November. Right. Focusing on our election lawsuit, which, you know, as you said, I think everybody recognizes what happened. And, you know, with the government withholding all of the evidence, all these 9000 uncounted ballots. But when this opportunity arose, you know, I decided, hey, you know, I don't trust I don't trust the court system right now. Sam, you know, it's really unfortunate that we've been met with roadblocks. So I plan to serve in in Washington alongside Kari Lake and alongside Donald Trump. And I think that's where the focus is now. But we're still fighting the election lawsuit, of course, because we need to expose what happened. But, you know, right out the gate, we had so many endorsements, Sam, and we got endorsed by Kash Patel, who's a huge fighter. We have Ric Grenell and director of National intelligence. We had Robert O'Brien, the national security adviser. We even had Adam Laxalt, who ran for Senate in Nevada, the former AG up there. So I think we built this really broad coalition and a type of unity to kind of ticket right now, because I'm just trying to I want the grassroots, the grassroots right now need a victory.Abe Hamadeh: You know, they need a fighter who's willing to say the things that need to be said and do the things that need to be done. And when I go to Washington, DC, everybody knows my fighting spirit, right? I mean, the establishment wanted me to go cower and hide and, you know, beg for forgiveness. And instead I stood tall to them. I stood tall to them, the the media and the political class. And I think I've come out stronger than ever. And the polling suggests that certainly right now. So we're in a very good spot. And I'd be honored to go back to my eighth congressional district, where I actually grew up from. I lived in North Peoria. I went to school at three different schools out there. So it feels it feels really nice and especially that area for so long. You know, it's really MAGA country, very supportive of President Trump. And who can't be, especially with the world on fire right now. Sam. So I think my skill set, you know, being the an Army captain serving overseas, being a former prosecutor, I think it's going to be it's going to be really good transition in Congress.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: Yeah. So I think the audience we kind of need to set up this race. This is this is we had an incumbent who is not running for re-election, Debbie Lesko. So we have an open seat in a.Sam Stone: Very red district.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: A very.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: Red district. So this is going to stay Republican. It's just what flavor Republican are we going to get. And we need to get a conservative. The race is shaping up. Talk to us about what that looks like right now. How many candidates are in the race. How do you see it ultimately kind of solidifying as as people look at.Sam Stone: As I told someone the other day, I think Abe has a pretty good chance of winning a 19 way primary.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: Well, you know what?Michelle Ugenti- Rita: These open seats, right? I mean, that's around how many candidates enter the races.Sam Stone: I think last time it was like 18 or 19 for this seat when it kicked off.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: So it's really going to be about your base. And in that niche what do we what does it look like right now.Abe Hamadeh: So I think you guys are exactly right. And, you know, I entered the race as the clear underdog with 0% name ID and, you know, that was probably the most contentious primaries in terms of how many legitimate candidates there were. And, you know, we defeated all of them because, you know, the voters are smart. They really sense authenticity. They know who's genuine. They know who's a fighter. Right now, I know my one of my opponents, Blake Masters, just entered the race. He's coming in all the way from Tucson, no ties to the district. And, you know, actually did the worst out of any of the Trump endorsed candidates. He he only won that district by 7%, which is kind of scary. I won the district by 12%. So but, you know, I'm focused on my race. I don't really need to focus on anybody else. But people know they're the electorate nowadays is a lot smarter than people give them credit for. They know they're really in tune with so much of what's happening. So, you know, the more the merrier that come in and, you know, we'll, we'll we'll just run our race just like we ran the ag race. And I have no problem running against people who are older than me, who are more established than me, but I.Abe Hamadeh: People at this at this time. They know our country is collapsing. I mean, we have to be very honest about the assessment of our country. It's in a dire state. And it's the same reason why I ran for AG and the same fighting spirit I'm going to take to Congress with me is I know what's at stake. My family left Syria, know I was born in the United States, but my family immigrated from Syria and my family from Venezuela. And I've seen what Marxist revolutions do to countries. And once they activate them, it happens very quickly. And as I were seeing all of our institutions under attack right now, but I look forward to a spirited primary and, you know, we're going to we're going to go off to the races. But I feel very confident we're going to have a lot of support. I'm honored that Kari Lake endorsed me right off the bat, too. She was actually on the phone with me telling me to get in the race. So I feel really good about the way of the race. Right now.Sam Stone: We have just about two three minutes left before we get to the end of this segment here, and I want to give some time for you at the end to be able to share your website and all your information so people can help support you. But one of the things I noted from the campaign last time for Attorney general and for folks outside of Arizona, you wouldn't have seen any of this. Obviously, no one's paying attention outside of the state. It was, like you said, a big primary. One of the things I thought differentiated you from the other campaigns was you were focused on campaigning, on things you were going to do in office. A lot of them spent a lot of time attacking you. I didn't see that from your camp. You really ran a issue based. YeahMichelle Ugenti- Rita: Right.Abe Hamadeh: Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, there are so many, so many people want to get into politics because they want to be a politician. I'm getting into it because I'm desperately worried about our country. And I've seen it firsthand. Right. When when you had everybody coming after me, you know, with this election that happened last November, you know, one of the things I want to go into Congress is get election integrity at the federal level. And so I think just that type of fighting spirit the voters recognize, they know that I'm so focused on terrorism. You know, I've served overseas in Saudi Arabia vetting, you know, trying to prevent terrorists from coming into the United States. And, you know, you see our wide open border, which I think, unfortunately, we've had 167 encounters with people on the terror watch list. I mean, there's so much, so many things that are happening in our country where it's a multi-dimensional war and we have to fight it on all fronts. And having somebody with that conviction and who can withstand the pressure is so important right now at this dire time, and especially with and look at this time last year, Sam, Michelle, we didn't president Trump wasn't under indictment. Now he's had to withstand four indictments. And I think people need to be really concerned about the direction of our country right now, where we're starting to jail political opponents. I mean, this is not something that we've seen in the United States of America before. This is more reminiscent of banana republics, third world countries. And I think I can speak to it most better than most people right now.Sam Stone: We have just a minute left. Oh, real quick, give us your top three issues and then tell folks how they can support your campaign.Abe Hamadeh: My top three issues are, of course, the border. I mean, the border is completely open because of the disaster of the Biden administration, which I do believe is intentional. And I think we need to impeach Secretary Mayorkas as soon as possible. Election integrity is my other focus, and I've been tried and tested in that battlefront, and we're going to do some good things at the at the federal level with that. And thirdly, you know, national security and military, you know, somebody who served, you know, I know what veterans go through. And I also know that a foreign policy that doesn't put America first is a is a disaster. But I feel really blessed to be to represent this district. And if anybody wants to learn more about the campaign, I'm honored to have their support. They can go to my website at for Azcom. Abe. Perfect.Sam Stone: Thank you so much, Abe. We're coming back in just a moment. All right. Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your host, Michelle Ugenti-rita. I'm Sam Stone. We're going to be continuing on with our interviews here in just a moment. But folks, you've been hearing me talk about why Refy for a year now? It's actually been a year since they started sponsoring this program. And, you know, after a few months, I went and did some research on my own and really got to know the folks in that company. And I got to tell you, you are missing a fantastic opportunity. If you don't go to their website and see about the incredible rates of return, you can get there. It's not linked to the stock market. You can earn up to a 10.25% fixed rate of return. That is just an incredible opportunity in today's market. So check them out. Invest y refy.com that's invest the letter Y then refy.com. Or give them a call at 888 y refy 24 and tell them Chuck and Sam sent you. All right. Continuing on today, folks, we have Mike Coté. He is a writer for the National Review and historian, focusing on great power, rivalry and geopolitics, blogs at Rational policy.com and host the Rational Rational Policy podcast. Mike, thank you so much for joining us. And welcome to the program.Mike Coté: Great. Thanks so much for having me.Sam Stone: So nothing to talk about at all these days in the areas of great power, rivalry and geopolitics. Um, you know, one of the one of your recent articles is that titled the Sky Isn't Falling for those who decry Western support for Ukraine, everything a precursor to World War three? This couldn't be further from the truth. Tell us a little bit about that, because I thought that was an interesting take and kind of an important one to inject into the discussion at this moment.Mike Coté: Yeah, great. Thanks so much. So the piece basically I'm trying to talk about we have people online, especially even going up to people in Congress as well as the president of the United States that are basically thinking that any sort of change in our posture in Ukraine, whether that's giving them more weapons, assisting them with intelligence, things like that, pretty much are forcing us into a third world war. You'll see people talking about World War Three, things like that all the time online. And that was something that really bothered me. As someone who studied both world wars, they're basically mistaking the way that escalation dynamics worked, both in the current war as well as in both the First and Second World War. So unfortunately.Sam Stone: What are what are some of the primary differences in that?Mike Coté: Sure. So with World War One, that's something I study a lot, and I feel like it's unfortunately not really well understood as much here in the US, but people usually think about it as, you know, war that happened for nothing. A lot of people died for really no reason. It kind of burst out of nowhere with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in summer of 1914, but this was something that was brewing for a very, very long time beforehand. The big geopolitical rivalries between Britain and Germany and France and Russia with Germany as well, were really simmering for decades, if not longer. And this was something that really kind of ramped up over time. And I see the Ukraine war right now as much more as one of those smaller wars that were kind of earlier, a couple of decades earlier, as a precursor to the First World War. It's a proxy war essentially. Right now, the US is not directly involved, neither is any other NATO country. And you have Russia basically trying to take over their smaller neighbor. So there are various conflicts that were like this before World War One.Mike Coté: None of them blew up into the big one. Obviously that eventually happened, but there was a lot more build up to it than there is right now with Ukraine and with respect to World War II specifically, I think the lesson that people are taking away from that is kind of the opposite. We saw those smaller conflicts happening before World War II as well. Hitler was trying to gobble up different parts of Europe. Japan was trying to take over China since 1937, and essentially us in the West. We did very little about that. You famously have Neville Chamberlain with the peace in our time, getting a piece of paper at Munich, basically saying, oh, Hitler is not going to do any more besides take this part of Czechoslovakia. And we all know how well that worked out. So I think the lesson coming from World War II is that if we meet with force, these sorts of revanchist aims by a country like Russia and Ukraine, then we may be able to avoid a much bigger conflagration later on.Sam Stone: And, you know, I think that makes sense. It's a view that you don't hear expressed that clearly very often. And I think one of the issues that I see with the public on this is that coverage of the war tends to be either rah rah or no, no, the war in Ukraine, there isn't much room for nuance, it seems, in the national discussion right now.Mike Coté: Yeah, yeah. And I think that's a big problem with it. I mean, I wish the president would go out and make a speech that really kind of explained the stakes, why it matters to the US to aid Ukraine in this war against Moscow and kind of help them protect their own territory. You know, one of the things that I think people don't talk nearly enough about is the world system. We live in now that the US is really the hegemon of. That's something that's very fragile. And these things that are chopping away at the edges of it, like the war in Ukraine, really do undermine our security here at home.Sam Stone: Yeah, absolutely. We're going to be going to break here in a moment, but we're coming back with more from Mike Kott, writer from National Review and historian focusing on great power, rivalry and geopolitics, blogs at Rational policy.com. And he's the host of the Rational Policy podcast. We also want to get into, obviously, what's going on with the Israel-hamas conflict and how history can help us understand that conflict a little bit better. And in general, I think it's valuable just to hear from people who aren't looking at these things as black and white and very straightforward. They are complex issues that will affect this world for decades to come. So stay tuned, folks. We're coming back with more in just a moment.Advertisement: At Overstock. We know home is a pretty important place, and that's why we believe everyone deserves a home that makes them happy. Whether you're furnishing a new house or apartment or simply looking to update and refresh a few rooms, Overstock has every day free shipping and amazing deals on the beautiful, high quality furniture and decor you need to transform any home into the home of your dreams. Overstock. Making dream homes come true.Sam Stone: Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your host, Michelle Ugenti-rita. I'm Sam Stone on the line with us. Mike Cote, writer for the National Review. Mike, when we went to the break, we were talking obviously a little bit about the Ukraine conflict with Russia. I do want to touch one thing real quick on that, and then I want to get on to what's going on in Israel and Hamas. And another piece you've written that I think is very interesting. But talking about containing Vladimir Putin. How much do leaders around the world and intelligence agencies see Ukraine as a line where if we allow that, that domino to fall, that it's almost certain Russia will take additional steps, and perhaps China and other potential aggressors will see that as the green light to go in, you know, expand their territorial ambitions.Mike Coté: Yeah. And I think that's that's very true. I think one thing with Ukraine specifically is we've kind of seen this happening over the past decade or so. In 2008, you had the invasion of Georgia by Russia, which we didn't really do much about, that. Georgia was not in NATO is not in NATO at this point. Basically, Russia carved off a significant portion of Georgia and has kind of kept that country on the sidelines in terms of an American or a NATO alliance. We saw that as well in Ukraine in 2014, when Russia invaded, took Crimea and started a long, prolonged conflict in the eastern part of the country. Obviously, this year they've expanded that, trying to take out pretty much all of Ukraine. Their initial advance was really on Kiev, which was the capital. And obviously trying to do that is not something you do if you're just trying to take small, different parts of the territory. I think one thing that Vladimir Putin is banking on is that Ukraine is not in NATO. I think that really is where he's trying to push at first to see how NATO responds when it's not a NATO ally that's directly affected. But we have seen NATO allies directly affected as well, especially in the Baltic countries. Over the past 5 or 6 years. We've seen various incursions there, especially with cyber attacks.Mike Coté: And that's something that I think we're going to see more of going forward, that asymmetric sort of warfare, trying to test NATO's tripwires and see where we'll really get a stronger response and where they may not. And as you said, with other countries, especially with China, in Taiwan, I think, as you said, with respect to Israel, we've seen Iran becoming more belligerent with respect to the way that it's attacking Israel and trying to carry out its own aims. You know, we've responded pretty strongly in Ukraine. I think one of the problems is we haven't been getting them the material they need fast enough. The Biden administration has basically slow walked a lot of these things saying, oh, you know, Israel doesn't need it, sorry, Ukraine doesn't need it. And then a few months later, okay, well, Ukraine can get it in a couple of months from now. And by the end of that cycle, it's 8 to 9 months, if not a year down the line, that Ukraine is actually getting these sorts of weapons on the battlefield. And that sort of delay is something that I think really does incentivize our enemies to try to make these big moves, especially like China on Taiwan, and try to get that done before we even really have the opportunity to react.Sam Stone: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Moving on and switching up subjects a little bit here, talking about what's going on in Israel with the Hamas attacks. Israel's response. You had a great piece accusing Israel of genocide as a moral outrage, but also based on your historical background and knowledge. How can people I mean, again, this is a narrative, Michel, that I think has been massively oversimplified in public discussion here and around the globe. There's a lot of history that goes into this. And people, you know, people talking about apartheid or talking about occupation don't seem to understand that history very much at all. So, Mike, give us a little bit of that background and what is informing the decisions that are being made on both sides.Mike Coté: Sure. So I mean, you can go back even to before the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948. And see, there was very interesting back and forth between Israel, Jews in the area that would become Israel, and the Arabs in the area that would have become Palestine had they accepted the creation of a state either in 1948 or later on. And basically, we're seeing a battle over something that's been really fought about for for centuries. The Holy Land has always been somewhere that you've had competing claims Muslim, Jewish, Christian, obviously, the Crusades going back over a millennia at this point. But with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it really goes back to 1948, where you have Israel being partitioned, the land that was Mandate Palestine. The UN basically split it into what would have become a Jewish state and what would have become an Arab state. And that was something that was accepted by Jewish leaders at the time, including David Ben-Gurion, who became the first prime minister of the country. Unfortunately, the Arabs did not accept this and had basically launched a genocidal invasion at the time to wipe out all the Jews of Israel. And this is something that you can see pretty clearly from the historical record. Various Arab and Palestinian leaders essentially are saying that we need to wipe out the Jews here. We need to make sure that this is purely a muslim land. And at that time, you had a significant number of Arabs living in what would become Israel. Many of them fled. There was a lot of fighting that was really back and forth, civil war, sort of fighting. A lot of civilian casualties on both sides. And the Arab armies that were coming in essentially said, hey, get out of our way.Mike Coté: Let us come in here to do what we need to do to destroy what would be the state of Israel. And then you can go back to your homes afterward. And so a lot of people did listen to that. Most of the population, the Arab population of the area fled. I think there were about 750,000 refugees. Palestinians today call that the Nakba, the catastrophe. So basically, the catastrophe for them was the very existence of Israel in the first place. And you see a lot of this happening at the time, you know, various partitions of states, India and Pakistan being split up, which caused about 15 million refugees, a much, much larger population. And those people were eventually absorbed into those two states. Obviously, there's still conflict between India and Pakistan, but you don't have as much of that internal conflict, whereas you have Palestinian refugees that have been refugees in camps for 75 years now. And I lay a lot of that blame at the feet of the Arab states around which have kept the Palestinians essentially completely outside of the political process in these countries. Whereas you had Arabs who remained and became citizens of the state of Israel who have participated in politics in Israel. You even had in the last government, an Arab party was part of the government for the first time in Israeli history. So it's really been a very long term conflict here. You've always had Palestinian Arabs, especially in the leadership, basically advocating a genocidal aim towards the Jews of Israel. And that's something that is very, very hard to make peace with, as we have seen.Sam Stone: Obviously, the underlying issue, I mean, really break it down, is that one side would accept peace and one side will not. And the accusations of genocide are completely reversed from the reality. Yeah.Mike Coté: No, totally. I mean, it's one of those things again and again, you'll hear even people who have been very pro the peace process. Bill Clinton, for example, in 2000, essentially was trying to broker a deal at Camp David between Yasser Arafat and the Israeli government, and they gave Arafat essentially everything that he could ask for in terms of territorial splits, in terms of having a relatively contiguous Palestinian state. And he turned it down, and they launched the Second Intifada, which killed several hundred Jews in terrorist attacks across Israel. And it's really one of those things where, again, you can offer so much, but if it's not accepted, what are you going to do? Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, pulled out Israeli settlers at gunpoint and relocated them into the state of Israel. And yet you had the people of Gaza essentially electing Hamas as their government, who only had one election. They've held a power in Gaza the rest of the time, and they've been using all of the aid money we give them, essentially, to impoverish their own people and build terrorist infrastructure to try to destroy Israel. So it's very hard to make peace with a group of people who are led essentially by terrorists, who have no interest in actually having a state, even when they have the chance.Sam Stone: One of the one of the charges you hear all the time is that Israeli settlements are encroaching upon Palestinian land. But but as you point out, since 2005, that has not been the case. As far as I can tell. Those complaints are actually based on well, Israel's population is growing, so they're building more houses in Israel.Mike Coté: Yeah, yeah, that's a lot of it. And you do have some settlements in the West Bank, which have been very controversial, but that has nothing to do with the conflict with Hamas in Gaza. Like I said, there have been no Jews living in Gaza essentially since 2005. And if you look at Palestinian governed territories or generally the Middle East overall, it used to be various vibrant Jewish communities across the Middle East, whether that was from in Morocco, in Baghdad, which had a centuries old Jewish community. They were all evicted essentially after 1948, causing about 850,000 refugees, which were indeed accepted by Israel and integrated into the population.Sam Stone: So a fair swap at that time, I mean, if we're just talking fair, would have been, okay. All you Arab states, you take the 750,000. That are.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: Refugees.Sam Stone: That are that left to get out of the way of your armies. You take those refugees and we're taking the 750,000 Jews. But but this, this sort of genocide, if you want to talk about genocide or apartheid has continued very programmatically into very recent years in a lot of these Arab countries where even just 10 or 20 years ago, there were still hundreds of thousands of Jews living there. And now there are basically none.Mike Coté: Yeah, yeah, you've seen that happen constantly across the years. And thankfully there is a state of Israel for these people to go to that would be able to protect them. And I think that's one of the biggest things that we see is that obviously there is the atrocities of October 7th, and that was one thing that was obviously a very big security failure for Israel that they'll be dealing with over time. But that's somewhere where you have an Israeli army that is meant to protect Jews in Israel. And having that place for them to go to is something that really is very different than what the Arab countries. Obviously, there are plenty of Arab countries. Jordan has a very large Palestinian population, and yet they have refused to essentially integrate these people into their societies, which has indeed actually caused many more problems. Know, if these Arab countries aren't integrating Palestinian refugees, that breeds more resentment. And instead of directing that resentment towards the Arab countries, they're directing it towards the one Jewish state in the region.Sam Stone: Mike, before we wrap up, we have just about three minutes left here today. Really appreciate you joining us on the program, folks. You can follow his work at Rational policy.com. Also at National Review. Mike Cote, I want to thank you so much for joining us. But before you go, I want to jump onto one last topic. You recently wrote a piece, The Multi-headed Hydra Menacing America, talking about increasing cooperation between China, Russia and Iran. Why should that concern the average American?Mike Coté: So basically, I think it comes down to their goal, which is really what unites them. They all wish to essentially destroy the world order that we live in and have lived in since the end of World War two. Basically, at that point in time, the transition from Britain, you know, running the world is really not the right word. But controlling the world system, making the rules, trying to establish fairness for various countries that really that responsibility came on to the United States. And what we've seen over the past 75 years is an explosion in prosperity, not only within the US, but around the world. Whether that's been the protection of trade by the American Navy, the fact that we have rule of law generally have international bodies which have arbitrated disputes between states. Obviously, there have been wars since World War two, but nothing to the extent of that war. And I think part of that is really because of the Western led world order and these countries China, Russia and Iran, as well as some of their proxies, Venezuela and North Korea, etcetera. They want to overturn that. They want to return to a world that's much more like the 19th century, where you'd have hard spheres of influence with the great powers basically running their near abroad and controlling that. And that's been something that has not been the case for the past 75 years, where we've had small states be able to have their own interests and have their own security without having to worry about their bigger neighbors gobbling them up. And so these nations really want to go back to that older world where they can have a stronger influence around the countries around them, whether that's economic or military. And one of the ways they're trying to dismantle our world order is through secondary economic institutions. They try to avoid US sanctions. They try to build their own banking systems, things like that, to really separate themselves from the American led order. And that poses a danger to us here at home, because it really cuts at the core of our prosperity and our security.Sam Stone: Fantastic. Mike, thank you so much for joining us today, folks. Mike Kotei, writer for the National Review. Mike, how do folks follow you and your work and stay in touch? And obviously, we're going to look forward to having you back on to continue some of these discussions. I think it's critical for the future. Yeah, sure.Mike Coté: Well, thanks so much. They can check out my website at Rational policy.com. I write there a good bit. Obviously I have writing at National Review, Providence Magazine, and The Federalist, and you can check me out on Twitter or whatever they're calling it now at RATL Policy.Sam Stone: Fantastic, folks. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Breaking battlegrounds. We'll be back on the air next week, but make sure you download our podcast segment. Also got some juicy stuff in there this week from Michelle and I. Breaking battlegrounds back next week.Advertisement: The 2022 political field was intense, so don't get left behind in 2024. If you're running for political office, the first thing on your to do list needs to be securing your name on the web with a Your name web domain from GoDaddy.com. Get yours now.Sam Stone: All right, welcome to the exclusive podcast segment of Breaking Battlegrounds with your host today, Michelle Ugenti-rita. Thank you so much for joining us in studio I love coming. You know, we were talking a bit in the first segment, and I want to kind of build off of that about the Democrats really appear to have a problem with pedophilia, and they have a problem calling it out, and they're not willing to just be like, this is wrong.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: Well.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: You know. Do they see a constituency there?Sam Stone: Apparently they must. I mean, but but so I was thinking about that in light of everything going on with Hamas and Israel. Right. I don't know how you cannot anybody everybody cannot unambiguously say that people. Raping women and children, taking hostages, killing civilians, 1400 dead civilians. How? You cannot say that. That is an unalloyed wrong. There is no justification for such an act ever. And yet you see Democrats in this country, they cannot say that.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: Right. There's something there's something that they're unwilling to admit.Sam Stone: The moral, the moral equivalencies they're creating. Are just. I mean.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: But remember.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: These are the same people that can't even say what a woman is.Sam Stone: Yeah, it all ties together, though, to me, Michel, because, like, you can't say that a woman's a woman. No, you can't call a pedophile a pedophile, and you can't call a terrorist a terrorist.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: So it's bigger than those examples. It's it's really this war on facts and the truth. And they seem to want you to believe that there's subjectivity in facts and the truth and there's not. It just is factual and it just is the truth, whether you believe it or not, doesn't take it away. The truth doesn't need you to support it. It survives and exists outside of of whether you agree with it or not. But they don't want it seems like they don't want you to believe that. They want you to believe. Whatever they say is the truth, or that you have some ability to create your own set of facts and truth.Sam Stone: You know.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: How do you have. A society if there aren't rules?Sam Stone: Well, so this is actually the point I was I was going to get to with all this discussion. How do you have a society without some sort of moral values? Right? I mean, the entire Western world has been built on essentially the Judeo-Christian set of values, right? We all agreed on those things. And I think one of the things that's going on is Democrats. It's all about power and control. And a moral. People do not require a lot of government oversight.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: No, but.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: You're right on power and control. That's exactly what you saw with Covid. That was all about power and control. That's what all of. And that's really this. The trans gender issue is about power and control, making you feel that you can't even speak out loud what you know to be true, what is true, what is factual because you are so in fear of being either ridiculed, fired, you know, drawn and quartered in your community. And that's a power and control thing. They don't want you to feel like you have freedom. They want you to get permission.Sam Stone: And and you just brought up a really good point. So for like you and me, you know, I say things whether here on the radio or on Twitter, which I now call Twix, right? I say things all the time that if I were working for almost any company, any fortune 500 company in this country, I would be fired that day.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: There'd be some video.Sam Stone: Oh no. Yeah, I mean, they they would never tolerate someone like me. They would never hire someone like me if they went back and looked at those things.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: So, you know, I, you know, this really actually brings up an interesting area which is corporations and what they're doing, what they have done. To allow this and give this kind of this, this power grab steam. I mean, look how they market. Look what they do. Look at the choices they make, look at how they set up their corporate boardrooms and the diversity training and what, you know, cancelling Christmas parties because God forbid, you celebrate anything and, you know, they're part of it.Sam Stone: It's corporate cowardice, I think is the root of this. And I don't think they're just part of it. I think they are the engine now behind it, because I think the I think the left realised that without the power of corporations behind these ideas, that these ideas would never extend past the dark recesses of academia.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: That's right.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: They would implode upon any reasonable person, you know, thinking about it or looking at it. It couldn't survive. It's that nonsensical. So you use corporate the corporate world to.Sam Stone: Yeah, you infiltrate HR.Sam Stone: You take HR and turn it into something it was never intended to be. Hr was never intended to be the Hall monitor in a business. It was simply intended to be the person who managed like your health plan and your benefits. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, oversaw the paperwork for now.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: You know, looking in your office and seeing what posters you've put up or, you know.Sam Stone: They're following all your socials, you know, they're they're tracking everything you say and do.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: These ideas don't sell like you were saying. So people have to be.Sam Stone: They have to be.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: Coerced and coerced into acquiescing. So that's why you can never acquiesce. Don't put that mask on. Don't social distance.Sam Stone: Amen. You know, I know absolutely.Sam Stone: Absolutely. You're hearing it from a Jewish guy now.Sam Stone: Amen, sister.Sam Stone: There's no question that is exactly right. The only answer is to have no tolerance at all for their version of this societal great change that they're trying to bring in, which is built on the most amoral and and unsustainable foundation.Michelle Ugenti- Rita: Well, no. Yes. It's collectivism. Right? Everybody does the same thing. Nobody stands out. That is not how we are built, particularly in America. It's exceptionalism that motivates us. Individuality. It's funny that these are the same people that pretend to care about individuality when they want everyone to be the same, marched to the same tune. Do not deviate. Everyone has to act the same, be the same, think the same, look the same. It's that's really how they behave.Sam Stone: It's an amazing.Sam Stone: Point. It's. It is. You're telling these people, oh, you're an individual warrior, and yet you don't allow them to step out of line one bit. They're ants marching, right?Michelle Ugenti- Rita: That's exactly right, sheeple. Going right off the cliff.Sam Stone: Well, and speaking of off the cliff, folks, we are going off this cliff and off the air. But thank you so much for tuning in and joining us today. We really, really appreciate having you. And make sure if you're not subscribed, subscribe. Send this to a friend. We really count on those things to show the support to the Salem Network and to our folks here, so we can expand and help reach more people each week. Again, thank you for tuning in for Michelle. I'm Sam. We'll see you next week. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit breakingbattlegrounds.substack.com

This SHINE podcast episode is on how by facing and preparing for death, we are able to live more meaningful and purposeful lives. We all are born and we all will die. In this interview, we speak about how to talk about death as a way to foster deeper connection, healing, and growth at work, in our communities, and at home. We address the importance of bringing awareness and meditation practices to grieve effectively. Lastly, we talk about how bringing generations together over dinner can support us to solve some of the larger problems at work and in the world. This inspiring episode will support you to live a more meaningful life with less regrets. Episode Links: Compassion & Choices Death over Dinner What happens when death is what is for dinner? Ted Talk Reef Grief Article & coping resources Is this how you feel? Website formed to name and witness grief in community Book of Regrets SHINE Links: Thank you for listening. Want to build a high trust, innovative, and inclusive culture at work? Sign up for our newsletter and get the free handout and be alerted to more inspiring Shine episodes Building Trust Free Gift Carley Links: LinkedIn Consultation Call with Carley Book Carley for Speaking Leading from Wholeness Learning & Development Carley's Book Executive Coaching with Carley Well Being Resources: Inner Game Meditations Inner Game Leadership Assessment Social: LinkedIn IG Website Shine Podcast Page Imperfect Shownotes Hi, welcome to the shine podcast. My name is Carley Hauck. I'm your host, this is the fifth season of the shine podcast. I started the shine podcast as a way of doing research for my book on conscious leadership in business. And you will find interviews with scientists, researchers and business leaders on the intersection of conscious inclusive leadership, the recipe for high performing teams and awareness practices. My book debuted in 2021 Shine ignite your inner game of conscious leadership and was voted one of the best books to read in 2022. By mindful magazine, I facilitate two episodes a month of the shine podcast. And before I tell you about the topic for today, please go over to Apple podcasts or your favorite podcast carrier and hit the subscribe button so you don't miss any future episodes. The focus of this season is on the essentials for wellbeing. And that encompasses the intersection of our personal well being the collective well being of our workplace, and how that fosters and nurtures the planet's well being they are all connected. I focus on well being this season, because I really want to crack the code and inspire folks to prioritize their individual well being and therefore that will transcend into the collective and the planet's well being. And I have developed a inner game leadership assessment that I gave out to 100 different leaders last year. And the leadership assessment is based on the framework of the inner game, which is what we're cultivating on the inside to be conscious leaders. And it shows up on the outside when we cultivated the certain qualities. And two of the nine leadership competencies that were lowest from the sample of 100 leaders were psychological and physical well being. Therefore, that is why we are focusing on well being and if you're curious about where your strengths and gaps are around the qualities to become a conscious leader, you can take the assessment and find out your score for free. I recently opened to the assessment tool to the public, and the link will be in the show notes. Now onto our episode. Hello shine podcast listeners. I am here with my new friend Michael Michael HEB, who is the founder of death over dinner, drugs over dinner, and generations over dinner. He currently serves as a board advisor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts, and is the primary editor of COVID paper. His second book, let's talk about death was published by Hashem in the US, UK and Australia in October of 2018. and Russia, China, Taiwan, Indonesian, Poland and Romania in the fall of 2019, and will soon be published in Finland. Wow. That's incredible. Michael, so happy to have you here. Oh, my goodness, this conversation is going to be amazing. Can't wait. Thanks for being here. Of course, credit. Thanks for having me. So to start off in the deep end, which I know you and I swimmin. Often, I'd love if you could share some of your childhood story of losing your father to dementia, and how that experience inspired a movement to support millions in gathering and holding space as we prepare for death. Yeah, well, when I was in second grade, I didn't know that it would inspire valiance. For one, I was very much you know, just a regular seven year old, seven year old, eight year old and my father was quite a bit older than most fathers. He was born in 1904 in the Yukon Gold Rush in a minor shed and Dawson during the the like epicenter of the Yukon Gold Rush. And so he was 72 years old when I was born, which is becoming less and less unique. I think we just found out Al Pacino is going to have another child, but at at something, but back then this was quite a surprising thing. And I think it's a kind of an amazing thing in a challenging thing to be sold and to have a child because you don't know how long you're going to be around for them. But I was a bit of a surprise. And in second grade, my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, full blown Alzheimer's, it wasn't early onset, his symptoms were severe at that point, and then was put into a, a nursing home. And those were really rough years, my mother was not resourced to know how to manage our lives. Very few would be, and we lived in a great deal of chaos. And he died when I was 13. On on Halloween, actually. And our family didn't know how to talk about his illness, didn't know how to talk about his inevitable death, didn't know how to talk about our grief. And so we started really avoiding each other, which in many way was was the healthiest thing we could do. Because when you have a secret or a traumatic centerpiece to your family relationship, every time you're around those family members, there's cortisol and all kinds of things flooding your system. And so we really grew apart pretty quickly. And it had a lot of impact on the family structure where you know, much later and we'll talk about death over dinner, it served as the inspiration for inspiring people to talk about death, mortality, life limiting illness, dementia, because I didn't want anybody else to have to go through what I experienced the type of alienation, isolation, depression, confusion, anger, and the whole rainbow of emotion that I had to go through, basically alone until many mentors started to show up in my life. But the the death itself on Halloween was, was a seismic event in my life, and not for the reasons you might think. The grief wasn't overwhelming immediately, there was a kind of void that I felt when I woke up the morning and Halloween, and I knew that he died even though there was no one telling me so there's just a known sense, I'd actually had the previous night woken up at 3:43am, the exact moment that his heart stopped without knowing why. And then when I woke up again, later on that day, I was very clear, like, my dad's died, and I ended up going to school, because I wasn't going to just hang out with my mom and my brother. That didn't seem like a good place to go, or to be. And so I went to school on Halloween and Halloween when you're 13 is a big deal. And I ended up going out with friends that night, I didn't tell a single person that day that my father had died. And looking back on it, I think that was a pretty smart strategy. The realization that I had either consciously or just knew in my bones, at that time was my friend group didn't have the ability to deal with the weight of that kind of information. Kids are much more emotionally intelligent these days than they were 30 some years ago. And so I went out with my friends on Halloween night and did the type of things that 13 year olds do. I think we TPT some houses and eggs, some cars and drink some and essentially were assholes. And this thing happened to me because I was holding this whole new reality that my my dad had died, which no one I knew could relate to. And looking around my friends and what we were involved in the way we related to each other, and really just the world. I had this sense of being separate from it and watching it almost film nicly seeing these things from a from a removed space and questioning. If we act like this, why do we relate to each other? Why is there conversation about meaning? Shit, I hope I can swear on your ad snapped to, I can totally be yourself. Yeah,apparently it's a sign of intelligence, I just read a recent report. But nonetheless, I felt separate from my social group. And in in that separation, I started to ask really big questions. And that is really where my spirituality took shape was in those questions, and their questions about what are we doing here? Is there something more than this? Is there a right way to live? Have people known about living connected to something larger than the cell in the past, and took a great deal of interest in poetry and Eastern spirituality and mysticism? Gnosticism a long list of question askers. And that really set me on a completely different course than I would have been happily skipping down. So really, really a big change for not not exactly the reasons you would expect, when you use the term seismic, you know, change? And I would say yes, for sure. And, you know, before this conversation, I did a lot of research and trying to get to know you, and different interviews and things that you have recorded. And I learned about your early meditation practice, and part of how that came to be. And I was touched, because we both started meditating, and really having these deeper questions and interest around the same time, even though I, I imagine we're probably a similar age. And I also grew up in a family where, and still have a family where I'm keenly sensitive to emotions of myself and others, and the planet, and my, you know, nuclear family is not. And in some ways, I felt like an alien. And really kind of stuffed those for a long time, but had to find other ways and other tools to really understand myself and similar to you, like, understand, why am I here? And you know, what is the reason that I am being called to be here at this time. And, you know, when we, when we think about meditation and Buddhism, Siddhartha had a very similar journey, right? He was he was living in this, you know, Castle, not no suffering, really, except that is that his mother passed at an early age. But then he went outside of the palace walls one day and saw the four heavenly messengers, you probably familiar of this, of this table, or fable, rather, one was a sick person, an old man, a corpse, and aesthetic. And so he went on, you know, the aesthetic path to try to understand why these things happen. But we all know that we're gonna die, like every single one of us is going to die. And we don't know when that is going to happen. And so I wanted to bring you on because of a lot of his own inquiry around death for myself, but also, how do we use death, knowing it's coming, knowing that in some ways, humanity is facing very grave ecological death, which we'll go into a little bit later, to live the most meaningful life that we can right now? Yeah, well, I mean, in many ways, we can unlock what our life's meaning is, without that kind of rupture, without facing our mortality. And for most people, it happens in the middle of their life. This is you know, what Richard Rohr calls the second half of life and talks about and falling upward. And that that is just kind of naturally an age where people that are meaningful to us start dying. Right, some of us are, you know, gifted or cursed with a meaningful death. early in life, if you don't embrace it, or let it embrace you or if you repress it, or run away from it, then it can be a curse. But if you do the hard work of facing, whether that's when you're 13, or 30, or 40, or 50, or 60, or 70. The gifts that you get are really the answers to why I'm here. It's it's in many ways, the strongest medicine there is and there's a lot of talk these days and a lot of experience around psychedelic medicine, for instance, many of your users or, or listeners are experienced or curious. almost everybody's read Michael Pollan's book, how to change your mind, it seems. And we talk about the strength of that medicine, right, because it allows us to connect to something larger than ourselves connect to our, our history, our traumas, some of these big questions we find in a lot of psychedelic plant medicines, experiences that are held in the right container. Death, it's arguably more powerful, a medicine, and it's sitting right here. Yeah, right beside us, whether we acknowledge it or not. And, and it's a little bit easier to integrate, quite frankly, and then a psychedelic experience. And, you know, a lot of those medicines, actually kind of the core thinking around those medicines is they give us the ability to die before we die, so that we don't have to die when we die. And this is the this was the reason that people went to Eleusis, the mysteries in in, in Greece for 2000 years, 30,000 people a year, would go to a Lusas, to drink BurgerTime beer, to have an experience where a part of themselves would die. So that they realized that life, what was important about life, what the meaning was, what they were doing there. And you know that that experience is available to all of us by turning and facing or grief or any number of things. I agree. And I you know, just to circle back to meditation. Gosh, there's so many, there's so many ways that we could go because I love to have the plant medicine discussion with you as well. And I, I believe you're very right. I think a lot of people in some ways are actually just using the medicine to escape again. And they're not actually integrating. I mean, you're finding this altered state of consciousness, which, frankly, you can find meditating. And I've done both. And there's not a lot of difference for me personally. And only the medicine just brings me to that point faster. But I've done years and years and years of silent meditation. And one of the things that I'm so grateful about meditation is that Vipassana, which is coming from the Tera Vaada. And Buddhist tradition, actually learned this several years ago, on a silent retreat at Spirit Rock meditation center, it means to grieve effectively, because every moment is passing this moment right now, between you and I will never happen again, quite like this, ever. And so I'm present to it. And there's a loss and that, here it goes. Yeah, letting it go. Yeah, sometimes we have to be well, I think we do have to build be able to face the big D, yes, the two really come to terms with the small D's that we face all of the time, and not grasp on to that which is constantly changing, right? Because that's what people's primarily, their primary complaints are really around the small days, you know, anxiety, depression, all of these things have that we suffer from on a regular basis have so much to do with dealing with the fact that things are constantly changing. Right? Right. Yeah. Yeah. And how do we how do we practice getting, you know, little and, and to be in flow with a world that is constantly changing? Right? And so that's why I told tell people and teach people that, you know, death is this really powerful medicine because one, you, you do want to drink from that cup, you, you will be facing the big D at some point. And you want to be present to that. And you want to be able to learn from the experience as the aperture of your life gets smaller and smaller. There's a lot of great richness in that I've seen people complete a whole hero's journey in their last hour on this planet and change things generationally, and do healing for people who, you know, their future ancestors, they'll never meet on death's door. Right? But not if we're grasping. Not if we haven't surrendered, not if we're not present to it. And in the present moment, same thing. We're not going to be able to have an access to the beauty of the moment, or whatever it is. It's not just beauty, the is of the moment if grasping, flailing, reacting struggling in fight or flight or freeze, unless we have some sort of practice round. I mean, some of my good friends started the flow Institute's flow Institute, Steven Kotler, and Jamie Weil. And there's a lot of talk about flow these days and to be in flow. And I give those guys a hard time. It's like you're teaching people all of these great techniques, but the most important technique you could be teaching it was to deal with death and go, yeah, and they've incorporated some of that. And we actually hosted the first flow Institute, gathering together years before their other best seller. So there's just a lot there. And it's scary for people. This isn't, I'm not saying this with the idea that you shouldn't have apprehension or that it's easy. But there have been a lot of people who looked at our impermanence, looked at death, looked at grief, and have lit those canyons, and lit those dark forests for us. So you're, you're not alone. And you will get immediate vitality, from the work that people do around this. And I know you work with leaders and, you know, one of one of the kind of most ironic slash funniest uses of death over dinner, which is a initiative I started to get people to talk about end of life and, you know, millions of people have taken part in this. I was gonna ask you about that. Yeah. If we'll come back to continue. Yeah, I'll give. I'll let you lead me into some framing but Deloitte, Europe, one of the leading firms, when it comes to giving advice and creating strategy for the biggest brands in the world, most people know Deloitte. Yes, started using Deloitte, Europe started using depth over dinner at the beginning of their, their corporate retreats for their big clients. And yeah, and found and people were able to have conversations about what do they want to be remembered for? What do they want to have happen to their body? You know, song would be one at their funeral. If they had 30 days left to live, what would they do with it? How would they feel that that unlocks so much connection between the people that were there and humanity, way below the watermark of their strategy, or with you know, their brand, and it also unlocked a tremendous amount of creativity? Right? People feel free to try out new ideas and to play with each other's ideas. So, you know, there's there's a lot, there's a lot there in this space that has big No Trespassing signs all over it for us. Thank you. Well, there's a couple of questions that I have that are bubbling. I mean, first, I'd love to hear well, and even before I, I asked you a question, just my responses, you know, in my experience, working with lots of different, you know, senior people, leaders and stakeholders and various companies, business is only as good as the relationships that people are forming. If there isn't psychological safety, trust, the ability to believe that this person has my back, and we are connected and we are connected towards something of greater purpose, people will not stay, they will not perform, they will not feel they belong, and they will not bring their best to work or that workplace. That has been my experience. And so, I think what we are craving most, and especially since the pandemic is connection, is meaning is purpose, and how do we build that together and then align, you know, in powerful actions together. And I just think that is that is what is happening in the workplace. There is a death of the old workplace that was profit above everything else, thank goodness, but it's slow. It's slow. There's there's still a certain you know, group of leaders that are holding on to that. Lynne twist has been a huge mentor to me and wrote the foreword of my book and I remember when I first heard her speak years ago, she said we are hospice sing out. You know, these Oh, have systems and structures that will not support the new world. Because we have to embrace that, or we don't have a path forward. And so I, I'm excited for the death let it die. But let's hospice it out, right? Because then we can let go more effectively. Yeah, well, I mean, the pandemic, arguably, threw a wrench in some of that, at least from the human connection side. It gave us something that we have in common to connect around, it made grief public, that made mental health public, it made that those topics went from being taboo, which we can talk about the word taboo if we want, because it's a completely misunderstood word. But from things that were not appropriate conversations, to being very appropriate, very common conversation, especially in the millennial communities, some of us that are a little bit older, catching up with millennials and that ability to talk about things openly. But it also just, it did separate us. And it's hard to create deep connections in the workplace, when this is how we're connecting when it's just over zoom, or maybe not even zoom, it's just over email. I hope Len is right below her very much. If you're listening, Man, I miss you. Let's talk soon. And I do I do really have hope that that is the direction that we're going. Right now, this seems like we're going a lot of different directions. So where it's hard to know,it's a little chaotic, for sure. Well, I want to hear more about the process of death over dinner, so you can share with our listeners of how they can engage in that, I also wanted to speak to you about how you have understood the difference between for example, sadness, and grief. Because it's a felt experience. And, you know, there's, there's a lot of numbing, there's a lot of avoiding that. And I just think that in order to really be more comfortable in talking about our own death, we have to be willing to feel the grief. So So start with that, the movement of death over dinner, the process, I'm gonna leave links in the show notes. And I have gone through the process a couple times, a couple dinners, and also have a guess, some insights that are not around that, but just even just some of the my own practices around death that I might insert in in our conversation if we have time. I love it. Well, death over dinner came out of the well, at this point. It's over 20 years of convening people to talk about difficult topics at the dinner table. I realized pretty early on in my career as an architect my backgrounds actually in architecture, that I didn't need to build any new structures, I was building places for people to gather and connect. As an architect. That was the focus of my young career. And then I realized that the dinner table does that, with me needing to file a building permit or raise millions of dollars for said structure. We just forgotten how to use the dinner table. And needed to remember, we've remembered how, to some extent to garden and farm and put great food on the table thanks to Alice Waters in the slow food movement, all this incredible work that's been done on the front side. But very little has been done around what happens when they actually sit down with that beautiful food or have that famous chef cook for us. And so we don't have a virtuous cycle. Back to the table. We have it as a kind of fetishized entertainment, almost like a Martha Stewart shot something not a oh, I want to be there having that experience. How do I get back there that richness comes from people being vulnerable, sharing stories around their lives. And now we just talked about succession when we get to a dinner table or whatever people are watching on TV. Probably 75% of the dinner conversation is happening over tables and or we're not paying attention to the Food, you know, or being even mindful of our consumption. I started off in the corporate space, engaging people in meditation through mindful eating of chocolate. I did not do the raisin that was not going to get their attention. But I've I've always really loved just bringing people's attention. Yes to, to food to connection to our connection to food, and therefore the greater the greater world. Yeah, which is great work. But then we also have to connect with the people at the table. And that was the kind of soft architecture that I got really interested in, what is the history of it? What is the history of the Athenian symposium that brought together you know, Plato and Aristotle was the history of the Jewish Seder. What's the history of the Bloomsbury group? Gertrude Stein's tables, so the Black Panthers Sunday brunches, like, what what has been this role how people use this space, the dinner table, because we're drawn to it naturally. It's like the watering hole on the savanna, all different types. For food, we, we come and we get saved, save it, and then we go back to her our lives. If we were eating together, a lot of people don't eat together. But so I started doing dinners with incredible folks and Presidents and Nobel Prize winners and people that are living on the streets and people that are struggling with mental illness, and you name it, dinner after dinner after dinner in every country, or every continent, and so many places, so many just wild settings. It's hard to even think about, and I've had to forget many of them, because there's been too many, and having hard conversations like how do we end genocide? How do we enhance closeness? How do we end the gender gap? Then I realized that I wasn't going to be able to reach the number of people that I wanted to reach. And I also didn't want to just be working with leaders. I don't believe in a trickle down model. I believe in a grassroots model, I really even think change actually happens from the ground up. And so wanted to create a social ritual that people could enact, all over the world could scale and was free very much like the Jewish Seder, actually, the ER a Shabbat dinner, but with a little bit more of a program, a theme. And so death over dinner was our answer to that. I was working with some great designers and graduate students, I was teaching at the University of Washington, in the Graduate School of Communications and decided to teach a course entirely based around building a platform called death over dinner. And we did and now it's become this global phenomenon. And what it is, is, it's an invitation. First and foremost, we're talking about facing mortality, or death, grief and people Oh, that's great. And you say that there's ways into this, but how well, here's one. Like, we're gonna give people an invitation that isn't a thick book, it is a dinner party, and you liked dinner parties. And so here's the invitation, come to dinner and talk about death. And it can be because you're grieving, because you have a loved one who has a terminal diagnosis, it could be because you have early onset Alzheimer's, you don't know how to talk to your family about it, but it's gonna be more and more of us. And so we built this beautiful website and its limitation and then created scripts for people. So your intention, why you want to have the dinner, or the conversation, you select on the website, and then it auto generates the scripts and allows you to pick some homework based upon that intention. So very different scripts for somebody who's grieving versus somebody who's interested for spiritual or religious reasons in a conversation. And then people sit down, and they have this experience where they don't have to think about what are the questions, it's all laid out. And there's a ritual in the beginning and a ritual in the end, and it works. Good, give people some good food and some structure and have someone you know, kind of hold the space for it, lead it, you know, who is whoever is inviting the conversation? Yeah, it's, it's beautiful. And then I've only done three, you know, personally, and I, I actually invited my parents, maybe like two months ago, and they they turned me down. They said, No, we don't want to talk about this, because we have a lot of friends that are dying right now. And it was it was too much, but I am not giving up. Because I I just think it's so important to talk about. Yeah, I'll just leave it at Yeah. Well, I mean, let's talk about that. Because if If you are lining up and saying like, Oh, I want to do I want to have that conversation, if someone's listening to this podcast and be like, I'm interested in that, or if there's any like, no, no, no, you know, putting their fingers in their ears. We can talk to both of those people right now. So if you are excited about it, and you're saying, I want to have this conversation with my parents, my spouse, my best friends, my co workers, my kids, you are gonna get nose? Yep. You if you're excited about it, you are more excited about it than many of the people in your life, I promise you. And so here's the thing. The people in your life do want to talk about it. Yeah. But inviting them is tricky. can be tricky. It's not tricky. Some people are just gonna be like, hell yes. And I'm gonna bring all my friends too. And some people will be like, Hell, no, I'm never gonna have this conversation. But here's the thing. If we acted like, most people act, or at the end of life conversation, the death conversation, if we acted that way, like we do around love and work, we would never find love, and we would never have a job. So your parents said, No. But you know, how did you ask them? And you tried one way. And there are many different ways. And I think of it more of as a courtship. Right? Well, and and just just to share a little more, I sent that to them over email, as an initial conversation. I actually, at that time, was living in Costa Rica. And we hadn't had a deeper discussion, I had no idea that my father had a law school friend that was like literally going to be dying a week from that moment. So it was really bad timing on my end. And I went through a very deep process at the end of last year, where I spent five days in a very powerful workshop, really facing my death every single day. So it started on a Monday, anyone Friday was dying, like it was happening. And over the course of five days, I was being told you have four days to live, you have three days to live, you have two days to live, you have one day to live, you have 30 seconds to live, what are you going to do and I was buried, literally buried, I did write my eulogy. And I have been wearing a bracelet around my wrist, it's just a black thread. That reminds me, I'm gonna die. And it's been so powerful and so potent. And so you know, some of that experience I've been sharing with my parents. That's the courting I suppose. And I spent my birthday with them intentionally this year. But I haven't done in many, many years. And as part of my birthday dinner, I said, you don't know how I want to die. And I don't know how you want to die. And we have not talked about Advanced Directives. And I really want to know, so that I can honor your wishes. And my parents are probably going to hate that. I'm going to say this out loud. But they said we haven't even talked about it. We don't know. So at least I have started that inquiry. And I said, Well, I would like to be cremated. And this is where and I should probably put this in writing. Because I don't know when that is going to happen. And I want you to know. Yeah. So that's, that's, that's part of I think, what I have been dealing with it all. I'll just share one other piece of that. I want to bring it back to you, Michael. But I wasn't planning on sharing this. But it's so interesting. Yesterday, I was flying back to California from Florida from visiting my my family, my parents, and we were approaching Albuquerque. And they were crazy winds like the plane is rattling and it was just like it was it was crazy. And I'm like, Oh, my gosh, I have not reviewed the emergency protocol. Okay, the 510. Net didn't actually go through it at the beginning. Sometimes they do sometimes they don't. And I thought okay, what, what if you were to die right now? You know what that feels like? You have gone through the experience. And I just allowed myself to feel it. I was actually buried in the sand. I was I was in the sand. They left me there for an hour. And when they came to get me during this five days, I didn't want to come out Michael. I felt so at peace. I felt so held by the Earth just the weight of her on me. And so many people had very different experiences. They couldn't wait to get out. It scared the hell out of them. But I reminded myself of that embodied acts experience if if this were to happen, this is what you know, in your body that death is and it was, it was wonderful. I didn't have I didn't have fear and I was able to transport myself back in that place on the plane yesterday as it's rattling and shaking and Okay. Okay. And well, let's imagine your parents, yeah, that would have had very different experiences being buried for one, they wouldn't have gone to Costa Rica to die off and five days. But they have maybe like an anxious attachment relationship to it. Or an avoidant perhaps. And, you know, there are these, you know, we can take, we can use attachment styles for debt too. And going straight up to somebody who is so avoidant. And, you know, putting your finger right on the nose of it is going to be, you know, can can be a thing that has them seize up, right, of course, of course, you know, and this isn't just to you this is to people are listening, because you're not, you're no, I love, you're using this as a teachable moment. And frankly, I have not shared what I just shared with you, I think with only three people. But now here we go. Like, yes, it's been buried. But yes, there there is a there is avoidance, there is anxiety. And it's unknown, of course. Yeah. But there's a way in. So, you know, similarly with courtship, and with a job that you really want, you get creative. And you think about that person. Right? What what are they interested in? Does your mom love Tuesdays with maurey? Perhaps? No, didn't love the movie? Does you know, do they watch dramas that haven't includes our true crime? Or, you know, like, there's, there are ways in and a legacy legacy might be away? And what do you want to be remembered for? Let's get way out, you know, and what stories from your life, we want to make sure that your grandchildren know that that is a death conversation. There's a lot of things that yes, I agree, don't present as much as like, your advanced care directives, and what happens to your body when you die. Right there, there are things that are a little bit more adjacent, where people can open up and before you know it, you're gonna get all of their wishes. It's an unfurling. Because they've been, you know, we're in a society that denies it. And, and is obsessed with it. So we have an unnatural, we have this very unhealthy relationship to it, we're obsessed with that. Death is central to all the top TV shows, books, clickbait it's everywhere. But but our own is, is a real challenge for some people. And the other thing is we can experience it. Right? So it's one of those human experiences that we'll never have, why? Until we have it. And so, it's not something that we can imagine ourselves in. And we also think we're gonna have that other bias in our brain that has it that we're an exception to the rule. We all think we're an exception to the rule. Not gonna happen to me. Yeah. You know, that's just baked in. And so there's a lot but I love that you're trying, and I'm confident that you're gonna find I am pretty persistent. But yes, it's about right timing. And so I appreciate that you used my example as a teachable moment, but I there's so many different places we could go. I'd love to, you know, end on on two questions. One is, how have you maybe found the distinction within yourself but also happen to be in conversation with with folks around the difference between sadness and grief? Well, the thing is, grief is is not one thing. You know, sadness, it has a certain tonality to it. Grief is all of all of the colors all of the sounds of the emotions so you can be a grieving and being laughing. You can be ecstatic and grieving you can be grieving and be horny you can be grieving and be devastatingly depressed. You can be grieving and be inconsolable. You can And all of this is included in grief, grief is is not singular in that way. And, you know, sadness, I'm not an expert on sadness. I mean, then I'm Sam a little bit more expert on grief. And one of the things that I know to be true about grief is one, it's not linear. There, there are no stages. So many people think that Elisabeth Kubler Ross determined the five stages of grief, what Elisabeth Kubler Ross did was create the five stages that happen when we come to terms with our own death. That's what that is. That's what the stages of grief, as we call them, were originally written as she suggested that it might work for grief. And then she retracted it. Some people have taken her suggestion and made careers on it. And the culture has had a bonanza around this idea of grief, having five stages, it doesn't, it's for ever, grief doesn't go away doesn't mean that it's always awful. But the fact that the person is gone, and that whole, that shape of that person will always be in your heart. But the the way to heal that, if that's even the right word, or the way to orient around that is not to try to get back to normal. Or to forget about it or reintegrate into society. It's to honor them. It's called continuing bonds theory. And it's actually the healthy way of grieving. And a lot of countries do this very well, Mexico, India, Japan, where they elevate their relationship to the loved one as opposed to repress it. Right? This, this is going to be with you forever. Turn the beautiful part on and some of the sadness, sadness can be beautiful, poignant, leads to some amazing things inspires us to get in motion sometimes, but elevate that person in your life, build an altar, have some remembrance, turn their body, you know, their cremated remains into things like parting stone or a diamond or have some way where they live in your everyday life is the is the way forward with grief, even though we talk about it in such unhelpful ways. Thank you. Well, and I and my experience with any feeling, you know, the more that we witnessed it, and we witnessed it in community or even with one other person, and in some ways, we're shining the light on it. And it has that opportunity to heal and transform. And that's I think some of what you're doing with this conversation is we're taking it out of the ground, so to speak. We're giving it life and a chance for people to talk about it and therefore grieve together and heal together. Right. And you know, this idea of the word taboo, we'll just talk briefly because I think you have one last question. But taboo is not doesn't mean forbidden. What it actually it's a comes from a Polynesian term, taboo, Tipu. And what that that was referred to places that were sacred places that you have to like, we know for some reason, we know that a burial ground and you know, an Indian or Native American or indigenous burial ground, that we know, for some reason is taboo. Why do we know that? Because that's actually true. It's a sacred place. That's one of the things that was identified as taboo or taboo is a holy place, a sacred place where we actually have to cleanse ourselves or prepare ourselves or being a different state of mind, to go into that space. And that's a rich and meaningful space. Taboo is actually an invitation. It's an invitation and but it's not the regular Friday, your regular Tuesday, it is, I'm going to do I'm going to prepare myself when people go into a mosque, they cleanse themselves. You know, there is there's something about this, that we've forgotten that, yes, we can talk about the hardest things we can talk about trauma. We can talk about sex, we can talk about, you know, history of abuse, we can talk about anything gender, politics, we you name it, if we prepare ourselves properly, and create the right container. There's nothing that's off limits. It's when we don't take the care to do that, that we run into difficulty I agree. Thank you. So in the topic of death and grief, and this is something that has taken a lot of my heart and mind space and continues to. And I think I'm not alone in this, you know, what's happening with our planet, and the extinction of species, and all of the reports that have been coming in for a long time around what is happening with the warming of our planet, and especially the most recent reports, there is an ecological death that is happening. And I think that it is overwhelming for many people to even really look at and feel, feel the grief around the species that are gone for good, and that will be gone. But also, I don't feel like we're prepared with the skills and the resources to navigate what is coming with the fires, with the migration that is going to be happening across our world of people of beings. And I just feel curious, does ecological death or grief come up at all, in these death over dinner conversations? And how can we inspire people to start talking about it, and prepare, skillfully to talk about it? Because we need to talk about it? Because we can't avoid it? It's here. Yeah, and, you know, I think one of the things that we do is weaponize our own grief around this our own urgency as opposed to create space for people to that's inviting to be able to have their own experience of grief around the natural world. Right? A lot of us have had that experience. And we've been we can't believe that others haven't, you know, has woken up to it. Right? Wake up and notice. Wake up and notice is not how I want to be woken up. That doesn't work. I try I have a 14 year old if I come in and shake her or throw water on her or tell her all of the things that she hasn't done or shouldn't be doing. No, that's not how we want to wake somebody up to this. You know, a good morning, I love you. You know, can I? Can I get your coffee? Would you want toast? Or do you want a croissant? Do you want fruit for breakfast? Right? Like, this morning, I gave her some of those choices. She was so touched, she was like, I would love a coffee. She didn't even drink it. But justit's through love. Of course, you're loving, it's tender. And a gentle is about creating space. If you do want people to start to see the world in some way that resembles your way of seeing. Right? One you don't know if they're gonna have the same experience and come to the same conclusions. But until you invite somebody in to look at it themselves and feel it. You've already told them that they're not allowed unless they have a certain set of experiences generally are a certain kind of fire under them to make change is the only way you can be a ticket holder into this conversation. Right this. So you know, there's an incredible book called The Persuaders that just came out. And now Anons going to destroy his last name that is about the right and the left, and how we need more on ramps into these these movements. And I highly recommend that to anybody. But I would also put a little little plug that in my book, I have also created some practices for how to navigate the deep grief and feelings around this. And also, you know, I started experimenting with this practice many years ago when I was teaching at Stanford and I'd, I'd bring the students out into the grass. And I'd ask them to tell me what they loved most about nature, and what they really got from nature. And from that love. What are we willing to fight for? Right? What just like anything, you know, like our family, our friends, if we love something enough, we care for it. We want to protect it and I think that that is I believe the most palpable way into the conversation and to feel the heartbreak around what's happening and you know, a lot of it we have caused, and then we have a choice of what actions we're going to take because pa I couldn't believe we can we can reverse it right? There's there's 100 ways to reverse this. But it requires a certain level of activation of all of us. Yeah. And then, you know, we did create a dinner model called Earth to dinner, which was in partnership with the Paris accord. And the earth in Paris movement in the UN was one of our partners, and we got 1000s of people to have conversations about climate change. But I'll leave you with one story. Because it's, it hasn't asked Yeah, what what evolved from that? Yes. But feel free to feel free to leave the story as well.Yeah, I mean, that. That was, it was incredibly powerful. And I got to work with Jack Black, which was fun. And one of those famous like internet famous cats, I can't remember his name. But nonetheless, the, the story I'll leave you with around it, because I still think it should happen. And I was in Iceland, and got inspired by the glacial melt in Iceland. And, you know, the fact that we are, we're very action oriented, when it comes to those people that are working on climate change, action is really the currency. And I realized that there's a step before action, which is great that we're missing. And so started working on a project to build a table out of the glacier and got, like, the leading ice sculptor in Iceland, to we went out into tests and took, can we cut a table out of the glacier. And then we have the arc at angles, one of the leading sustainable architects in the world cetera to design the table. So the arc angles, gonna design the table, and then how we were started to form this dinner around it. And Bjork said yes, and Sigur Ros was coming. And the president of Iceland was involved. And all of this was happening. And the idea was, okay, we're going to build this table out of ice, and we're going to have a dinner on it that we're going to film and then leave it for people to come visit it while it melts. But the dinner itself was called the goodbye glacier dinner. And the idea very simply was, you know, let's read this together. Let's talk about a world without ice and how that makes us feel. Let's talk a world of burial without glacier. Let's talk about the sixth extinction, that we're in the middle of let's have these conversations from what are we going to miss? How is that going to feel? Which is something that's not politicized? Alright, that's just like, how's it gonna feel? No, full stop. Not now, I want you to make sure you recycle. And you can't wear those, you know, you can't wear fur, or you can't do this, or you can't eat this, or there's no need for you know, let's just grieve. And so and then unfortunately, the idea was so popular that a friend of mine decided to build a whole festival around this and a thought leadership festival. And it got way too big and fancy. And then the whole thing exploded. But the the reason we were doing it in the first place was the goodbye glacier dinner, and the goodbye glacier table. And so it still hasn't happened. And maybe somebody is listening. Maybe someone will listen and they'll say, let's start. Yeah, I love it. Okay, if you want to do it, I'm up for it. Michael's up for reach out. That was your story. Beautiful. Well, I know you have as I shared at the beginning of introducing you, you have a couple other movements, generations over dinner, and that feels like a wonderful opportunity for people of all different ages to come together towards talking about some of these big conversations that were hospice sing out to create something new. Yeah. So yeah, generations over dinner, I'll just be briefly partnership with Chip Conley, Chip Conley, the founder of modern elder Academy, and I'm sure he's been talked about maybe he's been on this podcast he has and chip has a new book, and he's going to be on it again. So I am very inspired by Chip and his work at modern elder Academy and the emphasis on intergenerational wisdom sharing. Yes, this idea that a modern elder is as as curious as they are wise. And that it is about sharing, as as well as being you know, just that curiosity, that desire to learn. And that's the hallmark of what we need an elders right now. We're also age, we have an age apartheid, if you will. Don't know if we can Bandy around the term apartheid. So I apologize if that's offensive. But we have a divisiveness and separation around age we do not know, people of different ages, generally speaking, we are not age diverse, in our country are really very much around the world is one of those American ideas that has been exported, to really just spend your time around people same age and not live with people of different ages, etc. And so we decided to create another social ritual that is generations over dinner. And that's a challenge to see how many generations you can get at a dinner table. And these dinners are happening all over the world as well, there have been already to seven generation dinners, not of the same family, but the generations like boomers, greatest silent millennia, we've gotten all seven living at tables, or people have I haven't even done it, people got inspired by it. And they're like, we'll do it. And two of those dinners, one in Australia, one in the US have happened. And they're these dinners happening of work, mentioned that there were a lot of enterprise or workplace has the most intergenerational opportunity, for sure. Right. And, in many ways, the most generational division. So Chevron, Uber and LinkedIn are three companies that have taken on generation over dinner and are using it at scale. But the project that I'm most excited about you, we talk to you most excited about, and it's like, I get pretty excited about death, obviously. But this work with generations that we're doing in senior living, uh huh. The most the thing I'm most excited about. So there's, I don't know the percentage, there's a lot of us that are in senior living, and a lot of people that we love. And I had this realization one day that senior living, whether that's assisted care, independent living, etc, represents the largest and most concentrated reservoir of wisdom on the planet. And it's just sitting there and we are not tapping it. And we are not in conversation with it. And, you know, my mom, neighbor, and her senior living establishment is former governor Barbara Roberts, the first female governor of Oregon, who's unbelievable human being, no one goes to see her her family does, but she should, she would mentor people all day. And so we started working with senior living and was like, Sure if if we bring you generations over dinner, and also bring you the young people or you just open your doors to young young folks or people in the middle age one, you'll get more people who want to live in or work in senior living. But the loneliness epidemic that's happening at the oldest and the youngest, can be cured. And so now we're in like, 1000, Senior Living. Oh, I love hearing that. Well, my parents live and Valencia lakes, which is in Sun City, Florida, which is a quite a large 55 and older retirement village. And I was just spending a lengthy visit with them. And one of the things and I'm, I've always been an old soul, I have always had people in their 60s. In my life, I'm I'm in my early 40s. But I would go to the fitness center, this is just kind of a fun story. And I'd have lots of folks that I would just interact with, and they would just want to come up and give me wisdom. I saw a little lady, you know, like, like this, this man that was 90, which I wouldn't have known. He's like, don't stop moving. Like, okay, I'm not planning on it. And then this, this other man who was 66. But I want to respect their desire to share and it was it's beautiful, but you can't really get a workout in. But I love that. I love that, Michael, this conversation has been so meaningful. I just really appreciate how you have just started the conversation literally in so many important areas and your service. And I hope that we will be able to continue to converse, and I'm just very passionate about helping you amplify all these incredible movements. So thank you know, thanks for having me. And to those listening out there. It's all available. It's all free. Kind of never charged for any of these initiatives. So grab them, enjoy if death isn't the topic or psychedelic drugs had the topic that you're interested in generations over dinner is kind of for everybody. It is and all these links will be in the show. My notes, and Michael is also on LinkedIn. And he's got a website. And he's got a fabulous TED Talk. So all these all these links will be in the show notes, Michael, thank you again. Thanks so much talk soon. Hey, folks, thanks so much for listening to this wonderful conversation with Michael and I are on the intersection of grief and death. And therefore, how we want to fully live our lives. I wanted to share a few more thoughts and prompts, and resources, so that you could engage in this deeper inquiry around life and death for yourself when you're ready. And I'll start off with this, there is always a cycle of birth and death, and all things it's part of life. And nothing endures but change. And accepting this reality has the potential to transform the dread of dying into joyful living. I started working with cancer patients in my early 20s. And it informed me at an early age on the preciousness of life, I'd also had a meditation practice for probably a couple years before that journey of working with cancer patients. So I was already informed on how important being here for the present moment is. And I saw a lot of the patients that I was serving go through incredible changes when they knew they were about to die. I also saw some people that didn't have a chance to really pivot and had regrets on their deathbed. And last year, I knew that I needed a deeper reset for myself. And I took about 10 weeks sabbatical in Costa Rica, which is a place I've been going to for about 10 years. And I spent the first month in silence. And I have spent a lot of my life in the last 1314 years in silence. So I'd been getting myself ready to take a month, in some ways, because I had taken two to three weeks a year for many years. And it was incredibly nourishing for myself. And after I came out of silence, I prepared to die. Essentially, I had already decided to do a workshop with a teacher and a guide that I respected. And I shared a little bit about my experience with Michael, in the interview that you just listened to. But I had five days to live and die. And there were lots of very potent exercises that I did in preparation. And it was a real embodied experience. So much so that at the very end of the week, I was buried. And it gave me a lot to think about on how I wanted to live my life and what had the most urgency right now. And what came through were some really life changing insights. And I have as much as I can really try to orient my life around those insights into actions. And so one of the biggest aha was for me, when I knew I was about to die was I needed to invest in home, I needed to have a place to die. That was a place I felt safe, where I had loved ones where I had community where I deep roots. And I didn't have that. And I am cultivating that now I lived in the Bay Area for a lot of my adult life and because of how expensive it is, and because of some of what I chose to do during those many years, I couldn't invest in a property. And I frankly put the work of helping clients and companies above my own well being and my own happiness. And I wrote a book for almost four years. So there was a way that I was sacrificing my self in support of a purpose that I believed was more important. And that has really shifted I am no longer willing to make those same types of sacrifices for for the rest of my life. Because life is short, isn't it? And I think many people have been going through those same kinds of changes and acknowledgments over the past couple of years with the pandemic. And so as a result of facing my own death, I put some actions in place So that might be inspiring for you to hear. So I chose to spend three weeks with my parents in May, to nurture more connection really have meaningful time with them in these years where they're still healthy and able, and a lot of my life I have lived in California, and my family's in Florida, and it was incredibly sweet and tender. And I'm so grateful for it. And I hope that we will all have more time like that to connect, and get to know one another. There are ways that I know my parents now that I didn't know when I was a teenager, or even in my early 20s. And I think there are ways that they're getting to know me, as well. I have also recently moved to a community where I am really excited to invest more time and energy, in community in play in friendship, and belonging. And I'm holding greater boundaries around what is my right work, and what do I need that supports me to do that right work in a way that is balanced. So these are just some of some of the things that I have been putting into play. And frankly, one of the things that is also driving this greater motivation is that based on the warming that is occurring in the planet, and not knowing what is going to happen with our planet, and not really knowing how humanity is going to show up in this time, I know it's going to be hot, how hot it's going to be is up to us. And based on that there will be more adaptations, there will be more floods and fires and smoke and scarcity of water and resources. And therefore, in order to really enjoy my life, in addition to the My deeper purpose, to help solve some of these big problems we have created. I don't want to miss out on the beauty that is here. Speaking of the intersection of grief, and ecological death, I wanted to share with you some practices that I wrote about in my book that I think will be really helpful for you, if you like me, are also looking for those tools and resources to help you navigate what is here, what is coming. And so in chapter nine of my book, there is a practice. There's a couple practices actually one of them is turning emotional upset into inspired action. And I do believe that by having greater emotional resilience, we will have greater climate resilience. So allow yourself to just listen in to this excerpt from my book. I presented at Planet home in 2019, which is a gathering of changemakers scientists, Hollywood activists and musicians who are bringing greater awareness to climate problems as well as their solutions. During planet home, I led the participants of my workshop through a hike in nature in the Presidio of San Francisco. I invited those on the hike to notice what they love about Nietzsche, and based on that love what feelings arose when they thought about the Amazon burning, the glaciers melting, and the massive amounts of species dying every day. People shared deep grief, anger, fear, uncertainty and hope. Embracing the discomfort allows us to inform ourselves about how we want to act in service of the earth. So hearing that, I invite you to go out in nature once a week, and walk barefoot on the ground. Listen to the earth. Allow yourself to feel the nourishment from your connection to nature. And notice your love and appreciation of your surroundings. Let yourself feel all the feelings that arise about the destruction of our planet. And if the feelings are too much to bear, drop down to the earth with your hands and knees and let the earth hold some of your fear grief and rage. Yell if you have to let the emotions release from your body. You don't need to hold them in. From a deep place of feeling. Ask yourself how do I want to show up in service of To the earth, and then whatever answer arises, follow it. This will help you to stand in your commitment to be a good steward of this planet. And a couple of prompts for you, in addition to that practice before we end. When we think about using death as a catalyst to live a more meaningful life, there is another book that could also be helpful for you. There's so many, but this one came to mind. So Daniel Pink, an author that I respect, wrote a book about regrets. And he spoke about the five most common regrets that people had in life. So here they are, one, I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me to. I wish I hadn't worked so hard. Three, I wish I had the courage to express my feelings. For I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends, five, I wish that I had allowed myself to be happier. So in thinking about this conversation, what you've heard for me from Michael, if you're curious how you will start your journey to use death as a way to live a more meaningful and purposeful life. If you enjoyed this episode, please give me a five star review helps so much and then other folks can find the shine podcast, share with friends, family colleagues on LinkedIn, we are all in this together and sharing is caring. Are you seeking a catalyst to increase trust in your team upskill your leadership create a flourishing culture. I am your person. These are my areas of genius. And I love solving problems creating strategy, enrolling stakeholders related to these topics. And I've had incredible results with amazing companies. Reach out to me on LinkedIn, and book a consultation. I would love to help. I have some incredible interviews coming in the rest of this podcast season so make sure you subscribe to the shine podcast. Additionally, there's a lot of resources in the show notes around some of the pieces that Michael and I spoke about. Thanks so much for listening. And until we meet again, be the light and shine the light

Ep. 16 – Sam, Age 13: Joining a new group of friends | Understanding the difference between fitting in and belongingSam wants to know how he can tell if he's become friends with a new group. Like the podcast? Check out my books and webinars at EileenKennedyMoore.com. Subscribe to my NEWSLETTER, DrFriendtastic.substack.com, to get episodes sent to your email plus Q&A posts for parents. Scroll down for discussion questions and a transcript.SUBMIT A QUESTION TO DR. FRIENDTASTICAdults, please use your smartphone's memo function or an audio app to record your child's question. Hold the phone close to your child's mouth to make sure the recording is clear. Have your child state:1) their FIRST NAME (or another name),2) their AGE, and3) a BRIEF QUESTION or concern about friendship. (Please do not include any friends' names.)Submit the question at DrFriendtastic.com/podcast or email it to DrF@EileenKennedyMoore.com. (Obviously, this is not psychotherapy, and it's not for emergency situations.)THINK ABOUT IT QUESTIONS to discuss with your childWhat are some ways that friendship groups can be more complicated than individual friendships?Have you ever tried to change friendship groups? Why did you want to make the change? How did it go?Why does Dr. Friendtastic recommend belonging to more than one friendship group?Why do you think kids sometimes try to hide or change something about themselves to fit in? How is that different from belonging?TRANSCRIPTHi, there! I'm Dr. Eileen Kennedy-Moore, also known as Dr. Friendtastic. I'm an author and clinical psychologist based in Princeton, NJ.Let's listen to today's question:Hi, Dr. Fantastic. I'm Sam, and I'm 13 years old I've been hanging around a new group of people, and I was just wondering how I know if I became their friend?Hi, Sam! Thanks for sending in your question! First I want to say, good for you for being brave enough to reach out to a new group of people! That's an important way to build friendships.Being part of a friend group can multiply our fun! But groups can be more complicated than individual friendships. You're probably not going to feel equally close to every single person in a group. And that's okay! You can have fun with people even if they're not close friends. Groups can also change as people move in or out for various reasons. A group might also divide or combine with other groups.Sometimes kids belong to more than one group. In fact, I recommend that! You can think of different groups as reflecting different aspects of who you are. Maybe you have a lunch table group, and a swim team group, and a family friends group… Being part of different groups also gives you more social options. So, back to your question, how do you know if you're friends with a new group? Well, one important clue is how they act toward you. Do they seem happy to see you? Do they often include you when they make plans? Remember it takes time and effort to build friendships. So especially if you're joining a group that already existed, be patient. You probably won't be instantly in the thick of the group. But deepening your friendships, showing people you like them, and getting to know more people in the group by doing fun things with them could help you become closer to the group.There's another important issue with friendship groups that I want you to think about: Brene Brown points out the difference between “fitting in” and “belonging.” When we're focused on fitting in, we feel like we have to change ourselves in order to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand, is about feeling known and valued for who we really are. Understanding this difference between fitting in and belonging can help you make wise choices about who you spend your time with.Here are some questions that can help you figure out whether a group is a good fit for you:- How do you feel when you're with them?- If you were upset about something, how would they react?- Can you relax around them, or do you feel like you have to be careful of what you say or do?- Do you like who you are when you're with them?Finding a good friendship group takes time, effort, and courage, but gaining a sense of genuine belonging is worth it.This has been Kids Ask Dr. Friendtastic. If you have a question about making and keeping friends that you'd like me to answer, go to DrFriendtastic.com, and click on the podcast tab to see how to submit your question. Get full access to Dr. Friendtastic for Parents at drfriendtastic.substack.com/subscribe

Samantha "Sam" VanAlstyne is a children's author hailing from our region. Her debut book “Hi, I'm Sam” is meant to raise awareness for and promote inclusion for children with cerebral palsy. Sam herself is diagnosed with cerebral palsy and she has a clear message: Take the time to understand what CP is, and talk to kids about disabilities.

I'm Sam, Owner/Operator of LUNA Skin + Brow. I've been in the beauty industry for 13 years, I established LUNA in 2019, after working predominantly in the spa industry for most of my career. My business values align with exceptional customer service and customer experience. LUNA is based in Brunswick East, Melbourne- And we are about to open our second location in Torquay, Great Ocean Road. It's been one hell of a ride, starting a business pre pandemic and undoubtedly some of the toughest yet most fabulous years of my life both personally and professionally. I'm looking very much forward to starting a family with my fiancé and getting married later on in the year- And I'm sure family life will be the biggest and most rewarding challenge yet!

EPISODE 44 - Dr. Sam Goldman - for children with sensory issues, eating is hard When your child struggles to eat a variety of food, it can be frustrating and overwhelming. You might feel like you've tried it all, and just don't know what else to do. Maybe, you've even been told it's your fault because you don't “force them” to eat.  Can I ease your mind a bit? The truth is, that for children with “sensory issues,” eating is hard. And even though your child may want to eat to make you happy, something in their body just feels icky. You're not a bad parent, and you're not alone.  You just need the right tools so you can confidently help your child learn to explore and try new foods.  And I have the tools you need. My online course teaches you the secrets you need to help your child explore and try new foods. Hi! I'm Sam (or as my client's know me “Dr. Sam) and this is my rescue dog Wolfie. I'm on a mission to bring the magic back into mealtime by teaching parents how to help their children with feeding difficulties explore and try new foods without the mealtime battles.  I've spent the last 8 years working as an occupational therapist in the hospital system helping families improve their child's development and eating. Throughout my time as an occupational therapist I've worked with countless families in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), pediatric care unit (PICU), and cardiac intensive care unit (CICU), as well as in outpatient clinics.  The more I worked with the children, the more I began to notice that parents weren't getting the education they needed. While the children were doing great in therapy sessions, parents struggled to carryover the techniques at home – because they didn't really understand what they were doing and why.  I know how frustrating it can be to worry that you're not doing the right thing for your child. So I've taken what I've learned about feeding difficulties and the sensory system and packaged it into an online educational course for parents, to empower you with the tools you need to overcome mealtime battles. https://www.drsamgoldman.com/ https://dadspace.ca/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/dad-space-podcast/message

Hello wonderful listeners, I chatted with Sam Sager who I connected with on Twitter not long ago all about his philosophy and approach to fitness. I really resonate and agree with his vision for fitness to make it sustainable and enjoyable for life. We chat about discipline in exercise, some of our own experiences and what we should aim for in life with our fitness. I'm going to pop all his info below for you otherwise I hope you enjoy! Sam's Course Page Link - https://www.intuitivefitness.co/course. Sam's Substack - https://intuitivefitness.substack.com/ Sam's Twitter for messages/DM's - @sc_sager Here's Sam's bio - Hi, I'm Sam and I'm the coach of Intuitive Fitness. As a kid, I was obsessed with sports and eventually played baseball in college. Yet, when I stopped playing I discovered how hard it was to maintain the habit while working a corporate job. My journey to recapture my love of exercise led me to become a personal trainer to help others embrace fitness. Here I discovered that the traditional approach is rigid, forcing fitness into scheduled blocks and often creating dependency. So I shifted to a virtual coaching model where I could focus on helping others develop the ability and confidence to carve their own paths

Did you know, there's only a 0.1 percent chance of having triplets? Meeting triplet girls who are also billionaires and having them fight over you? I can't even begin to compute what the odds are of that ever happening. But that's what happened to me. I'm Sam. And my story's about how these insanely rich girls competed for my attention.

We continue our month-long journey into the spooky and the sublime by reviewing a movie we've never seen… Dan Aykroyd's 1991 horror/comedy Nothing But Trouble… and boy is it a scary.  As in, scary how bad it is!How does a movie with Chevy Chase, Demi Moore and John Candy, written and directed by the King of the Ghostbusters, fail so spectacularly?  At Less Than 2000, we strive to go deeper than to simply say “it sucks,” so we put on our film student and filmmaker hats to get into the nitty gritty of WHY it sucked so hard.  Chad doesn't think it's that bad and even his wife got into it.  Adam hates it with every fiber of his being but knows why it has some marginal appeal.  If nothing else, at least it had Digital Underground and gave us Tupac's feature film debut!< '00 | an Art House Empire Production | a proud member of the HyperX podcast Network | #LessThan2000Living RichardsonHi, I'm Sam, and I talk a lot. Listen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifySupport the show

Today Nate talks about one of the worst platforms ever and how it is exploiting our kids.  Only Fans sucks. https://endsexualexploitation.org/onlyfans/ Make sure to check us out on instagram!@savethekidsinc@bulliesbe.goneIf you want a speaker in your school, email liz@savethekids.org and we will get you hooked up! OR fill out the form below.https://savethekids.wufoo.com/forms/z14ppj991ad9jfq/If you want to support STK, use on of the affiliate links bellow for GABB and Pinwheel phones (STK approved and safe for kids)https://www.pinwheel.com/?via=lizhttps://gabbwireless.com/ - code STK Living RichardsonHi, I'm Sam, and I talk a lot. Listen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifySupport the show

We recorded this before the buff to Theotar was announced, but trust us, we'll talk about it next week for sure! Living RichardsonHi, I'm Sam, and I talk a lot. Listen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifySupport the show

Is the old saying, "buy once cry once" really true in the tool-buying world?  Let's discuss this at 7:00 p.m. CST on the live stream! Amazon and other affiliate links are used in this description and help support this channel.Nashville Meet and Greet Sign up (only sign up if you're for sure coming) https://forms.gle/FkJTgUpzFTRoP8ce9  *Videos To Watch Next*Top 10 Amazon October Prime Sale Tool Deals https://youtu.be/buaoQexITnELiving RichardsonHi, I'm Sam, and I talk a lot. Listen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifySupport the show

We all know that Instagram can be REALLY frustrating, however, it is still one of the most powerful (and free) platforms for marketing our business. This week my guest is Jenn Herman from Jen's Trends and she is sharing her best Instagram strategies to help us make the most of our time on Instagram. Jenn Herman is a social media consultant, speaker, and globally recognized Instagram expert. She is the forefront blogger on Instagram marketing and her blog, Jenn's Trends, has won the title of a Top 10 Social Media Blog over multiple years. She is a sought-after and international speaker providing tips, resources, and training for organizations of all sizes that need to structure their social media strategies.Instagram: https://instagram.com/jenns_trends YouTube:   https://www.youtube.com/jenns_trends Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/jennstrendsonline Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1914407545476748 Become a Media MavenIf you're tired of seeing your competition in places you would love to be mentioned or...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify Living RichardsonHi, I'm Sam, and I talk a lot. Listen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifyThe Inbox Insider program is everything you need to launch and grow your email marketing program. Get more info and sign up at www.girlmeansbusiness.com/inbox

Callie and Chuck talk to Delegate Danielle Walker, a fierce advocate for West Virginia and a powerful change agent who inspires hope in us for what West Virginia (and all of Appalachia) could and should be.  Delegate Walker is the people's delegate who stands up to bigoted politicians and corporate interests, and  FOR the people of her state. Learn more about Danielle's campaign: https://www.daniellewalkerwv.com/CHECK OUT OUR NEW MERCH! https://www.teepublic.com/stores/appodlachiaVanishing Postcards: https://www.vanishingpostcards.com/Help support Kendra and Read Appalachiahttps://www.readappalachia.com/support-us-----------------------------------------------HELP SUPPORT APPODLACHIA!Join our Patreon, for as little as $1/month, and access live events, weekly exclusives, bonus series, and more http://www.patreon.com/appodlachia-----------------------------------------------Timestamps02:00 - Intro - Herschel "Abortion Rebate" Walker08:21- Weekly List: The Worst Presidents from Appalachia (and adjacent)27:00 - Interview with Del. Danielle Walker-----------------------------------------------Transition Music: "Leave it to Me" by Corduroy Brownhttps://corduroy-brown.com/-----------------------------------------------Check out our fantastic sponsors!CBD and THC gummies & more: (use code "APPODLACHIA" for 25% off) http://www.cornbreadhemp.com/Our website is great, and it's because Starry Eyes Media built it.  Yours can be too! https://www.starryeyes.media/None of the views expressed on this show represent the views of either Chuck or Callie's employersLiving RichardsonHi, I'm Sam, and I talk a lot. Listen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifySupport the show

S3E22 | From freaky deer to talented otters and singing dogs, today we're taking a walk on the wild side with zookeeper, Bailey Nichols. Check out our current contest, CEMETERY CRAWL 2022! Thank you for listening, StewHeads! Follow Remnant Stew, discuss the episodes and answer the Trivia Challenge on our social media FaceBook and InstagramIf you like listening you can do us a huge favor by giving us a review on Apple PodcastsEpisode researched, written, and hosted by Leah Lamp and Dr. Steven Meeker with copious amounts of support and help by Judy Meeker. Audio produced by Philip Sinquefield, music is by Kevin MacLeod with voiceover by Morgan HughesPlease remember…BE KIND, STAY CURIOUS!Living RichardsonHi, I'm Sam, and I talk a lot. Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Our D&D character build this week is the best Two Weapon Fighter who doesn't actually use Two Weapon Fighting™. Also, they get to be both Wolverine *and* Psylocke.Check out Claymore Minis here! https://claymore-miniatures.co/I'd appreciate it if you'd consider supporting the channel by becoming a member!https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9jQ2IsZj_CAS0bZgA6O2pA/joinMerch Store! https://www.etsy.com/shop/d4DnDDeepDiveAlso: if you'd like to purchase D&D content through my Amazon affiliate link, it would be another way to help support the channel :) - https://www.amazon.com/shop/d4dddeepdive?listId=MFEYK9W51D9K&ref=idea_share_infFollow us here:https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDoptimized/https://www.facebook.com/dnddeepdivehttps://twitter.com/ColbyPoulsonCheck out Randall Hampton here:Twitter: https://twitter.com/Randall_HamptonInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/randallhampton/Website: https://www.randallhamptonart.com/Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/randall_hamptonIntro/Character Concept:(0:00)Claymore Minis (sponsor):(8:29)Level 1:(10:46)Levels 2-6:(19:13)Levels 7-9:(30:27)Levels 10-13:(38:30)Levels 14-17:(41:52)Final Thoughts:(47:03)Outtakes:(51:02)Math/Graph for this episode: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jg2Y-XZjTq5vp96GS3so_6-kmdpYrDpF_7-olUXyQh8/edit?usp=sharingSustained DPR Comparisons (5 Tabs): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HPMg7cDqOC-0-vNFgEV9E5WQLDdCOdI64Vbnu60pC78/edit?usp=sharingThanks to LudicSavant for the amazing DPR calculator! https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?582779-Comprehensive-DPR-Calculator-(v2-0))Music Credits:Achaidh Cheide - Celtic by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100340Artist: http://incompetech.com/Angevin 120 loop by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1200111Artist: http://incompetech.com/Celtic Impulse - Celtic by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100297Artist: http://incompetech.com/Fiddles McGinty by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1400051Artist: http://iThe Heroes Tried Their BestA bi-weekly Canadian based comedic Tabletop campaign with supernatural and steampunk...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify Queens On A RollThis podcast was created to educate & inspire people about the ably different...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify Living RichardsonHi, I'm Sam, and I talk a lot. Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

This person's name is enough to make you want to listen to this episode of 2 Shots on a Barrel -- FRED FREAKING NOE!  Can you tell we are a little excited about this one?  Seriously, 2 Shots on a Barrel has been going at it for a little over two years now, and this may be the most enjoyable episode of 2 Shots yet!  Fred Noe is as genuine a fella as there is!  Like his father before him, Fred tells you like it is... no time for BS when you're talking with Fred Noe.  The stories he jampacks into this episode of 2 Shots make this one a must listen!  Sit back... grab some Jim Beam and listen to a legendary episode of 2 Shots on a Barrel!  #JimBeam #BookerNoe #LittleBook #FreddieNoe #PassTheTorch #KentuckyBourbonFestival #EducatedConsumers #ElmerTLee #ParkerBeam #JimmyRussell #WildTurkey #GetPeopleOnTheBourbon #MashBill #HowManyHandlesYouGonnaDrink #LuckySpermClub #MontgomeryGentry #TroyGentry #EddieMontgomery #PaulChilders #IndependentStaveCompany #AndrewWiehebrinkLiving RichardsonHi, I'm Sam, and I talk a lot. Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Father Knows Best starring Robert Young, originally broadcast May 1, 1952, 70 years ago, My Name is Sam. Kathy decides that boys have it better than girls, so she decides she's going to be a boy.

Hey! I'm Sam, better known as witchwithtics on social media. I'm a 26 year old mama, who is extremely spiritual and always expanding my souls knowledge. I live in Alberta, Canada and struggle daily with something called Tourette Syndrome. Among other neurological and mental disorders, my Tourette Syndrome prevents me from many things and provides challenges in many areas.  One of my aims is to spread awareness on my condition, as well as alleviate any stigma regarding how taking care of your health may negatively impact your spiritual development - it is the reverse that is true!   Follow Sam on her social media IG-@witchwithtics TikTok- Witchwithtics  

Thank you so much for watching the Sam Martin Burr Show! I'm an ISFJ-A personality type (I is for Introvert). How about you? https://www.16personalities.com/ "I'm Sam and I believe in making Arabic texts accessible from day one for everyone" Patreon - for bonus resources and much more! https://www.patreon.com/SamMartinBurr TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sammartinburr Instagram: https://instagram.com/sammartinburr Podcast: https://anchor.fm/SamMartinBurr LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samburreducation/ Website: https://www.sammartinburr.com/ Email: SamMartinBurr@gmail.com

Thank you so much for watching the Sam Martin Burr Show! "I'm Sam and I believe in making Arabic texts accessible from day one for everyone" It would mean the world to me if you would Like the video, share with someone you want to help and hit Subscribe and notifications to keep in touch! Patreon - for bonus resources and much more! https://www.patreon.com/SamMartinBurr TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sammartinburr Instagram: https://instagram.com/sammartinburr Podcast: https://anchor.fm/SamMartinBurr LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samburreducation/ Website: https://www.sammartinburr.com/ Email: SamMartinBurr@gmail.com

Thank you so much for watching the Sam Martin Burr Show! "I'm Sam and I believe in making Arabic texts accessible from day one for everyone" It would mean the world to me if you would Like the video, share with someone you want to help and hit Subscribe and notifications to keep in touch! Patreon - for bonus resources and much more! https://www.patreon.com/SamMartinBurr TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sammartinburr Instagram: https://instagram.com/sammartinburr Podcast: https://anchor.fm/SamMartinBurr LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samburreducation/ Website: https://www.sammartinburr.com/ Email: SamMartinBurr@gmail.com

Thank you so much for watching the Sam Martin Burr Show! "I'm Sam and I believe in making Arabic texts accessible from day one for everyone" It would mean the world to me if you would Like the video, share with someone you want to help and hit Subscribe and notifications to keep in touch! Patreon - for bonus resources and much more! https://www.patreon.com/SamMartinBurr Links TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sammartinburr Instagram: https://instagram.com/sammartinburr Podcast: https://anchor.fm/SamMartinBurr LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samburreducation/ Website: https://www.sammartinburr.com/ Email: SamMartinBurr@gmail.com Time Stamps 00:00 - Intro 00:47 - Today's question: "How can I learn Arabic for FREE?". 06:36 - "What if I really don't have any money at all?". Free resources I've found for you! Free Audio Downloads of the Colloquial Arabic series (Egyptian, Gulf and Levantine) https://routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/colloquial/language/arab.php Wikipedia's Arabic language page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic Omniglot's Arabic language page https://omniglot.com/writing/arabic.htm You can get "The Best of Stories" and "The Arabic Script Bundle" here: https://arabicin60steps.mykajabi.com/TheBestOfStories

Thank you so much for watching the Sam Martin Burr Show! "I'm Sam and I believe in making Arabic texts accessible from day one for everyone" It would mean the world to me if you would Like the video, share with someone you want to help and hit Subscribe and notifications to keep in touch! Patreon - for bonus resources and much more! https://www.patreon.com/SamMartinBurr TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sammartinburr Instagram: https://instagram.com/sammartinburr Podcast: https://anchor.fm/SamMartinBurr LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samburreducation/ Website: https://www.sammartinburr.com/ Email: SamMartinBurr@gmail.com

Thank you so much for watching the first episode of the Sam Martin Burr Show! "I'm Sam and I believe in making Arabic texts accessible from day one for everyone" Patreon - for bonus resources and much more! https://www.patreon.com/SamMartinBurr TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sammartinburr Instagram: https://instagram.com/sammartinburr YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SamMartinBurr LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samburreducation/ Website: https://www.sammartinburr.com/ Email: SamMartinBurr@gmail.com Time Stamps 00:40 - This week's Question "How to learn Arabic". 1:32 - 1) Decide what for. 4:43 - 2) Realistic expectations 6:40 - 3) Don't shoot yourself in the foot. 10:21 - 4) Structure around a goal. 11:40 - 5) little and often. 12:50 - 6) Tie into a current routine. 14:08 - 7) Run through the hurdles. 16:13 - 8) Get a good vocab routine. 19:49 - 9) Don't take yourself too seriously. 22:06 - Final thoughts and next episode

  On episode 257 of Disability After Dark, I sit down with disabled children's author Sam Van Alstyne.  She tells us all about why she wanted to write her children's book, “Hi, I'm Sam” for the children in her family AND she even gives us a live reading of the book itself!  She talks about her relationship with her mom, we talk about our relationships to caregivers, living in a group home and so much more.       You can follow Sam and also buy her book here: https://samvanalstyne.com/  Apply now to be on Disability After Dark by e-mailing disabilityafterdarkpod@gmail.com or going to  this link:   https://calendly.com/disabilityafterdarkpod/disabilityafterdark  You can buy DISABILITY AFTER DARK themed MERCH HERE.    You can sign up for my first class Pro Crip Tips: How Ableism Makes Disabled People Really Feel on Sept 10th here Also, support Disability After Dark by pledging to the patreon. www.patreon.com/disabilityafterdark

Welcome! Wanted to kick this off by introducing myself. I'm Sam (she/they) founder of Shrimp Teeth. I can't wait to share more sex, queer, and relationship education with y'all.• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •You can find us at www.shrimpteeth.com or instagram.com/shrimpteethUse code: ShrimpTeethPod for 10% off Peer Support Sessions. Book on our website.You can support us and access bonus episodes, daily erotica, and our community Discord server on Patreon.com/shrimpteeth

Sam Mudick graduated with Web Development Evening Cohort 13. Hi, I'm Sam! I love software development, because it combines three of my favorite things: solving problems, building stuff, and learning new things

Hey, what's your sign? Virgo here! In this Mom Bomb Monday episode, we're talking about self care for your astrological sign and the moon phases with Self Care Astrologer, Soul Care Guide, and Writer Sarah McCormick! Sarah is also a mother, and we chat about ways to incorporate self care while you're caring for tiny humans. Listen to Sarah school us about the moon phases and using them as frame work to guide on what types of self care may support us the most through that phase. Looking for some inspiration to build a personalized self care practice?! Jump in here! Find Sarah McCormick online here: https://www.instagram.com/belladelunaastrology/ https://www.belladeluna.com I'm Sam, the host of Self Care Is My Job. I'm a yoga instructor and a Self Care Mentor for moms. I'm offering a 3-part workshop Self Care For Moms | From Overwhelmed to Fulfilled starting May 20th. This workshop will include guided meditation, what is self care and why is it important, discussion of struggles to prioritizing yourself as a mom, solutions to navigating the obstacles blocking you from your own wellness and fulfillment, building a self care toolbox and more. All within two 1-hr plus virtual live learning sessions and one group coaching session (which will be recorded if you can't make it), plus office hours over the 3 days to ask me anything, a workbook, Journal prompts, and a facebook group for continued support. Listeners of Self Care Is My Job are extended a special price. Get $20 off using code MOMS. Huge value for $68 with the deal! Please feel free to reach out with any questions at selfcarewithsam@gmail.com. I can't wait to support you in this transformation! Register here: Www.Alignedheart.net/events-1 Samantha Long is a yoga instructor, self care mentor, motivational speaker, and the host of the Self Care Is My Job podcast. You can find her online here: www.alignedheart.net If you would like more information about working with Sam to prioritize your self care and enact changes in your life, or for speaking engagements, please reach out at selfcarewithsam@gmail.com. *This Content is for personal development purposes and not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions* #selfcare #moonmagic #astrology #selfcareformoms

It's May and it's the Month of Mom on Self Care Is My Job! In this episode, Psychotherapist & Leadership and Empowerment Coach Lisa Drew and I discuss how balance in motherhood is a farce! Let's face it - it's very rare that we actually acquire balance for more than a moment before it's gone again. Especially in motherhood, when every part of our lives as mothers is effected by the needs of our kids, balance is fleeting. But that's OK! Lisa suggests that we throw out the term Balance, and replace it with Integration. Balance suggests everything is perfectly 50/50 but to integrate is to combine (one thing) with another so that they become a whole. We can accept that everything together as whole is exactly as it should be. Find Lisa Drew here online: https://www.instagram.com/findingmidlifemagic/ I'm Sam, the host of Self Care Is My Job. I'm a yoga instructor and a Self Care Mentor for moms. I'm offering a 3-part workshop Self Care For Moms | From Overwhelmed to Fulfilled starting May 20th. This workshop will include guided meditation, what is self care and why is it important, discussion of struggles to prioritizing yourself as a mom, solutions to navigating the obstacles blocking you from your own wellness and fulfillment, building a self care toolbox and more. All within two 1-hr plus virtual live learning sessions and one group coaching session (which will be recorded if you can't make it), plus office hours over the 3 days to ask me anything, a workbook, Journal prompts, and a facebook group for continued support. Listeners of Self Care Is My Job are extended a special price. Get $20 off using code MOMS. Huge value for $68 with the deal! Please feel free to reach out with any questions at selfcarewithsam@gmail.com. I can't wait to support you in this transformation! Register here: Www.Alignedheart.net/events-1 Samantha Long is a yoga instructor, self care mentor, motivational speaker, and the host of the Self Care Is My Job podcast. You can find her online here: www.alignedheart.net If you would like more information about working with Sam to prioritize your self care and enact changes in your life, or for speaking engagements, please reach out at selfcarewithsam@gmail.com. *This Content is for personal development purposes and not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions* #selfcare #motherhood #monthofmom #selfcareformoms

In this episode I invite you to join me at a destination spot I hold dear to me. I'm Sam and I'd like to take us on the journey of exploring my sit spot and all it has to offer. In this episode I walk through my processes of capturing the thrill of the swimming holes called The Inkwells. I examine it during two different seasons and dive into the importance it carries within its natural ecology.From swimming holes to spawning creeks, let's observe the relationships between humans and the environment. Music: Grahams Jam by Graham Davis Soundscapes: Rain Fall Through Trees by acollier123 Birdsong and crows in fog.aiff by andymanister CafeAmbience.WAV by nickrave Gravel path countryside ambience.mp3 by watercool People talking loud in the distance at late night - Outside Ambience by clawbase Lagunita Creek Flow Lagunitas,CA By Samantha Carreno Rainfall Lagunitas,CA By Samantha Carreno Inkwells intro audio By Samantha Carreno

First off I'm(Sam) sorry. I don't know why we let it go this far. The only way I could describe the summary of this episode to Walter was "mostly garbage but the funny parts are top notch.", so take that as you will. I won't even describe this episode's content because we don't really talk about subjects instead speaking mostly in rambles. Again my apologies, and please try to enjoy. Also this was recorded in late January. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/blipblopblip/support

Call me quirky, different, unique, spunky.... I'm all of the above. Find out what makes me- me.  From my likes to my true love, Jim, and how losing him of course destroyed me but ultimately resulted in Griefhab™.   Samantha is a Transformational Psychologist, Best Selling Author, Speaker, Coach and Founder of  Griefhab™, a 24/7 support community for anyone who has experienced a loss. Sam helps people around the world turn their pain into their power by guiding them to be their true selves not who they think they need to be, by embracing their differences, and by living life on their own terms.   Her mission is to change the way the world views mental health, so people can openly speak about whatever issues they have and get the help they not only need but deserve without fear of judgment, labels, and repercussions.  In her free time, you can find Sam and her pups, Sassy and Dallas, on one of their outdoor adventures. They love living in Colorado and never miss an opportunity to explore their beautiful surroundings. Music fuels Sam's soul, family means everything to her, and honoring her late husband, Jim, and making him proud gives her life daily purpose.      Contact Sam to learn how to work with her individually or to learn how to have her as a keynote speaker at your event or organization at sam@samantharuth.com   “Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass...It's about learning to dance in the rain.”   Website:  www.samantharuth.com   Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/griefhab7/   Instagram:   https://www.instagram.com/samanthamruth/   LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/samanthamruth/   Linktree: https://linktr.ee/samantharuth  

Sam: Welcome to The Sound of Science on WNIJ. I'm Sam from NIU STEM Outreach. And with me is Jeremy. Today we're going to venture into the Uncanny Valley.

Sam: Welcome to the Sound of Science on WNIJ, I'm Sam from NIU STEM Outreach

Sam: Welcome to the Sound of Science. I'm Sam from NIU STEM Outreach

Sam: Welcome to The Sound of Science. I'm Sam from STEM Outreach.

Sam: Welcome to The Sound of Science. I'm Sam from STEM Outreach.

Sam: Welcome to the Sound of Science. I'm Sam from STEM Outreach.

Sam: Welcome to the Sound of Science on WNIJ. I'm Sam from NIU STEM Outreach.

Sam: Welcome to the Sound of Science on WNIJ. I'm Sam from NIU STEM Outreach.

Networking with Local Nonprofits in Central Virginia Read the Transcript Hugh Ballou: This is a special edition today of The Nonprofit Exchange. I am attending a nonprofit trade show and networking event, Central Virginia Business Coalition. I'm here with Heather Alto. Heather, what's your vision for this event today? Heather Alto: Basically, our vision for this event, we decided to put about a community event focused on nonprofit organizations because they don't really have the avenue to get out and do bigger business expos due to the cost. We wanted to have a one-stop shop where people could come in and learn about the nonprofits in our area. A lot of this is about awareness, but also it's a place where people could bring donations today, whether it's food or coats or household items. Anything like that. This is the place to do it. A one-stop area where you can learn, volunteer, and donate. Hugh: We've just gotten acquainted. I'm going to go around and visit with some of the nonprofits here. Thank you, Heather. Heather: Thank you. Hugh: I'm going to let them tell a little bit about what they do and why they're doing it. Here's Tracy. Tell them who you are and what this organization is that you represent. Tracye Dixon: I'm Tracey Dixon. I'm executive director at Lynchburg Daily Bread. Hugh is my friend from the rotary club. My real job is a soup kitchen in downtown Lynchburg. We are looking for canned sweet potatoes, green beans, and gravy for our Thanksgiving meal. If anybody would like to help with that, we would love and appreciate it. Hugh: Tracey is a legend here. She's very active. We happen to be in the city that's got some of the highest poverty in the commonwealth of Virginia. Tracey: It's true. Hugh: We have a lot of hungry people. She and her team and a whole lot of volunteers are very active all the time. Tracey: Every day. We are open every day of the year. We'll be open on Christmas because people need to eat on Christmas, too. Grateful for your support, Hugh. Thanks for being here. Hugh: Blessings. We have people watching from all over, wondering what's going on here. So we're going to go to another one. Hope for today. Help and Hope. Tell us who you are and what your organization is. This is our first time we've met. What is this organization, and who are you? Sam: This is World Hope. I'm Sam. Sarah Johnson: I'm Sarah. Sam: And we are a humanitarian organization raising money to sponsor kids, get them education, clean water, clothing. We help build churches and schools, bring clean water to villages. Sarah: Our biggest thing that we do is child sponsorship. People can rescue a child out of poverty and get them education, clean food, and water for $35 a month. We have children in over 20 countries. 11,000 children right now. Hugh: How many? Sarah: I think it's between 10 and 11,000 children in our programs around the world. Hugh: Around the world? Sarah: Yes. Hugh: We're in central Virginia. This is Lynchburg. We are reaching out to the world. SynerVision Leadership Foundation supports charities all over the world. We support with the infrastructure of leadership development, board development, funding. I'm going around the trade show and giving you some exposure. This is a show we do every week called The Nonprofit Exchange. Thanks for sharing your ideas. Somebody somewhere will know somebody in one of your areas. Where do they find you? what's the URL? Sarah: WorldHelp.net Hugh: WorldHelp.net. Thank you for sharing. Let's see who else is here and what they're doing. I talked to you all before. These couple charming ladies. Tell me about this charity. It's really special. Claire Parker Foundation. Bethany Egland: I'm Bethany, and I'm the director of programs and family services at the Claire Parker Foundation. We support families that have children with cancer and have partnered hospitals all across the region. We're in 15 different ones from Tennessee to Texas, which is pretty incredible. We have different programs that we provide from the beginning of the diagnosis to the end. A bunch of different programs to keep kids occupied in the hospital and to support families through the journey financially, emotionally, and even to the end, if they end up losing a child, we have support in that areas as well. Hugh: We have wonderful gift kits here for the children and families. Bethany: This is their care box they get right after diagnosis. This is our birthday box to celebrate birthdays. They get a banner, a birthday pillowcase, and a gift card to Amazon. Hugh: Where can they find Claire Parker on the Internet? Bethany: ClaireParkerFoundation.org. We're on Facebook and Instagram. Hugh: I just captured somebody you may know also. Jessica Arrington. What's the organization that you work with? What do you do there? Jessica Arrington: Patrick Henry Family Services. I am the volunteer coordinator. I help with all our program ministries to make sure we have the support we need and our mission and vision stay going.   Hugh: What do you do? Who do you do it for? Jessica: Volunteer coordinator for Patrick Henry Family Services. I work with all the volunteers, with every program ministry. Hugh: Tell us about Patrick Henry. Jessica: We have several program ministries such as Save Family for Children, expanded families, Vision 30, that makes sure every child is in a safe home, in a safe environment wrapped around by the community by 2030. We believe that can happen with your help, partners, agencies, churches, and families. We also have our Hat Creek Camp and our counseling services and so much more. Hugh: Jessica is also a friend from the local rotary. She's been on our show before with the program Power of We. Jessica: Power of We Lynchburg. Hugh: Let's go look at your banner for Patrick Henry. Who's this person? Jessica: This is Nicolette. Nicolette: Nice to meet you, Facebook. Jessica:  She works with our girls' and boys' homes. We have Lisa. Hugh: What does Lisa do? Lisa: I'm the case manager for residential care.   Hugh: And this is Patrick Henry Family Services. They can find you online at PatrickHenry.org. Thank you. Here's Billy. Billy was on The Nonprofit Exchange recently. Billy told the story about the sports outreach. They know your story. Thank you. Here is Humankind. Do you want to share? Tell us who you are and what Humankind is. Tiffany Rodriguez: I am Tiffany Rodriguez. I am in the treatment foster care. Humankind has over 20 different programs. We are community outreach. Our main office is here in Lynchburg, but we also service other areas throughout Virginia. We have anywhere from counseling, treatment, foster care, community outreach. We work with kids who have autism. There is also a daycare. This is one of our new treatment foster care case workers. This is Ashley, and we are very happy to add her to our team. We are excited to be part of this opportunity as well. Thanks so much for having us. Hugh: Where can people find Humankind online? Tiffany: If they go to Humankind.org, then you'll be able to see all of our resources that we have. If you have any specific questions, you can always email us. Hugh: It's a worthy work place. Thank you for sharing with us. Why don't you tell people who you are and what is this organization that you represent? Sandra Bermudez: I'm Sandra Bermudez. I am representing Braley & Thompson Foster Care in central Virginia. We have over nine offices in the state of Virginia. My office is in Lynchburg. We have been in business for over 30 years in Virginia for children and families. We work with children 0-17 and provide foster families. If you are interested in becoming a foster family, you can visit us at BraleyThompson.com.   Hugh: Love it. Thank you for being here today. Here's one called Well of Grace. Who is this back here? Susan. What is this organization, and what does it do? Susan: Well of Grace helps ladies who have had breast surgery. We help with items their insurance may not pay or does not totally cover. That could be a lymphedema sleeve, whatever they need. We help them get those items.   Hugh: This is a lot of good people doing good work here. Where can they find Well of Grace online? Susan: They can find it at WellofGrace.org. They can also go through Absolute Perfection, who are the people who support our nonprofit. Hugh: WellofGrace.org. Thank you, Susan. Amazement Square. I've been to your organization with grandchildren. Tell them who you are. Jamie Shetley: Sure. I'm Jamie Shetley. I am the manager of donor and member relations of Amazement Square. We are here today talking about the 50% of work that we do that people don't know about, which is outside of the museum. We are talking about sponsorships for school programs. We are talking about our new initiative, Amazing Children Smart Beginnings, which is sponsored with a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. We are talking about our new education center. All sorts of things going on. Hugh: Amazement Square is in what used to be a old warehouse. One time, Lynchburg was the second wealthiest city in the country. We had a lot of tobacco and leather warehouses in town, which are now dormant. Now, there's a bunch of new things. One of them is quite amazing. I have been there twice at least with grandchildren, which was an excuse for me to play. It's quite an amazing thing. Sometime, Lynchburg Symphony will do something musical with you. Jamie: Our new education center is open now. It has a huge exhibit space. It can seat over 350 people. We have the space for it. We just want people to know this space is available. Hugh: Where can people find you online? Jamie: AmazementSquare.org. Hugh: Tell us who you are and what do you represent? Susan Campbell: I'm Susan Campbell, the executive director of the Blue Ridge Pregnancy Center. This is Julia and Julie. They're both on staff at BRPC. We are a crisis pregnancy center. We help the woman who is in crisis and in need for options and counseling for unplanned pregnancy. Hugh: A lot of important work. Where can people find you online? Susan: BRPCFriends.org. We are located right next to Lynchburg General Hospital, one street over on Thompson Drive. Hugh: Thank you. There is quite a few amazing people doing amazing stuff. This is Elise. tell them who you are and what the organization is about. Elise Spontarelli: Elise Spontarelli with Vector Space. We are a community maker space. We have 12,000 square feet of tools: woodworking, blacksmithing, metalworking, 3D printers, laser cutters, sewing, all the tools. We do membership for adults so you can use those tools. We do safety training, and then we set you free on the tools. We do workshops to teach the tools. We do STEM education with high schoolers. Some cool projects. Hugh: I only found out recently about maker spaces. Describe what a maker space is. It's quite amazing. Elise: Thank you. It's a space for people to collaborate. A lot of folks have maybe a woodshop at home or some welding equipment or a 3D printer on their desk, but nobody has all of the tools together. Our members are everyone from engineers to fine artists. We have teachers and entrepreneurs and all sorts of folks with different backgrounds and different skills, coming together and learning together and teaching each other. A big part of our membership is member meet-ups and peer learning. Folks are teaching the skills they know and learning from other people new skills. We bring those together in cool ways. And teaching kids how to use these tools, too. Hugh: They're super cool. It's part craft, part art. Where can people find Vector Space online? Elise: Vector-Space.org. We're also on Facebook and Instagram. If they want to come out and see us, the first Friday of every month, we do an open house from 5-8pm. Hugh: We're in Lynchburg, Virginia. Every first Friday, it's a happening place downtown with art galleries and the craft space and maker space is beyond that. Thank you for sharing. Elise: Thanks, Hugh. Hugh: That's quite an amazing entity. Let's find somebody who's free. Hey, there. I've seen you before. But I forgot. Can you stand up and talk? She has healthy options. Everyone has sugar-loaded candy. Tell people who you are and what is it you're doing here? What is this organization? Jane Massey: I am Jane Massey with the Alzheimer's Association in Central and Western Virginia. This is Ginny Simmons. Ginny serves on our walk planning committee. The Alzheimer's Association is a nonprofit that is trying to find a cure for Alzheimer's. That is basically our vision: a world without Alzheimer's Disease. Hugh: Say your vision. Jane: A world without Alzheimer's Disease. Hugh: I was just working on vision statements for my nonprofit. It's really hard. That is a picture: a world without Alzheimer's. Here's a lesson right here. A vision is a picture of what it looks like. You can say that without reading it. Jane: Yes, I can. It's a really important vision statement. The Alzheimer's Association, we are the largest nonprofit organization in the world providing research. We are only #3 behind the Chinese government and the U.S. government in funding research. Our goal is to fight a cure, sustainable ways to live with the disease by 2025. We have an aggressive format going on. Our goal is to do it. We currently provide international research as well as local programs and services. One of our biggest events to raise awareness and funds is our walk to end Alzheimer's. That's where Ginny comes in. Ginny is our logistics chair. Want to share your experience about being on the committee? Ginny Simpson: Sure. I have been on the committee now with the Alzheimer's Association for probably 15+ years or so. I've been very involved. I don't have a personal connection, but I professionally work with those affected with dementia and Alzheimer's. It's been a joy and a pleasure working and serving the community trying to find a cure for this terrible disease. Hugh: There are probably walks all over the country. Ginny: Yes, there are. Hugh: Where can people find out more about Alzheimer's Association? Jane: Alz.org. One of the things I do want to share that a lot of people don't realize is that the Alzheimer's Association not only covers and manages Alzheimer's, which is the most common form of dementia, but we cover all dementias. We have an award-winning website where you can find information about vascular dementia, Parkinson's disease because those are forms of dementia. Hugh: If people don't know if they have something, can they or their family go and find out? Jane: Yes, they can go to the website. One of the things, if somebody is concerned about having some forgetfulness that is affecting your daily life, the first thing we recommend is seeing a doctor. Sometimes, it's not Alzheimer's. It can be something as easy as an infection, or it might be some drug interactions that are not working properly. That can cause memory issues. It's really important to get that checked out. Hugh: Great, thank you. Go to Alz.org. Easy. Thank you for your good work. Who are you? Here is their banner. Tell us who you are. What is this organization about? Andy Cohen: I'm Andy Cohen. I'm the executive director of Harmony Day Support. We have services for adults with disabilities all throughout the day so they can live as autonomously as we do every single day. We're excited about the opportunity to help them grow socially, academically, athletically, spiritually, all over. We have about 9,600 individuals we serve here locally. We are in the process of implementing and adding new services daily. Hugh: Is this a local organization? Andy: Local. Hugh: We're in central Virginia. You might know somebody here. It's HarmonyDaySupport.org. Thank you. Tell us who you are. What is this organization? Why does it exist? Adam Pavao: My name is Adam Pavao. I am the executive director of foster care services at Impact Living Services. We exist to serve youth aging out of foster care and youth in foster care. We're a relatively young nonprofit. Started in 2012 just in Lynchburg, Virginia to work with those kids aging out. Youth aging out of foster care have really bad outcomes. One in four are incarcerated before 21. One in five are homeless within a year. 71% of girls get pregnant before the age of 21. Less than 4% graduate from college. We have apartments and town homes we place them in. We get connected to employment and education and teach them how to be adults. We also have a foster care program where we work with teens in foster care. That population has a hard time getting placed with families. We believe kids should be with families and kids should have connections. We work with those families to train them, to provide support to them to make sure those kids and teens are in the home. We have offices in Lynchburg, Roanoke, Harrisonburg, and Richmond. Hugh: Those are Virginia cities. This is a nice banner they have. A little bit about what they do here. What is the URL for your website? Adam: It is ImpactLivingServices.org. Hugh: Thank you, sir. Allison Zuba: These are some of the best nonprofit leaders in Lynchburg. Hugh: Who are you? Allison: I'm Allison Zuba. Hugh: Who are you? Linda Bright: I'm Linda Bright, the program manager for Bedford Ride. Vicky Craig: I'm Vicky Craig, the public relations coordinator for the Central Virginia Alliance for Community Living, your area agency on aging. Hugh: Whoa, my peer group. Allison: I'm Allison Zuba. I'm the executive director at the Adult Care Center, the best place to spend your day in Lynchburg. Hugh: Adult Care Center. Do you all work together? Or I just happened to catch you together. Allison: We don't get to work together a lot, but we certainly support each other's organizations. Hugh: Tell us about Adult Care Center. Tell us about CVACL. Allison: The Adult Care Center has folks who need a little extra help and still want to live at home, but have a great place to be during the day. Folks come to us Monday through Friday, play games, have great food, and enjoy themselves immensely. Laughter is the key to the day here. Hugh: My wife might be calling you. Tell us about this organization. Linda: Bedford Ride, we are a program of the Central Virginia Alliance for Community Living. We do non-emergency medical training and transportation for Bedford residents who are unable to drive. All of our drivers are carefully vetted volunteers. We have over 90 volunteers, 20 wheelchair accessible vans, and five cars. Hugh: We are in central Virginia. Bedford is the next town over. Look at this. Be a Santa to a Senior. Vicky: Right now, at the Central Virginia Alliance for Community Living, we are doing a Be a Santa to a Senior program. That is when we provide Christmas presents for our clients and others throughout the area. We do need people to come and take our tags. This is how we provide Christmas to seniors who otherwise wouldn't have Christmas. Hugh: Where can they find you online? Vicky: CVACL.org. Hugh: And where can they find Adult Care Center? Allison: AdultCareCenter.org. Linda: And Bedford Ride is BedfordRide-CVACL.org. Hugh: Those are places you can find these ladies. Do you want to talk about Meals on Wheels? People have heard of Meals on Wheels but may not know much about it. Tell people who you are and what you're representing here. Janet Lomax: I'm Janet Lomax. I am representing on Meals on Wheels of greater Lynchburg. Hugh: People may have heard about it, but they don't know what Meals on Wheels is about. Janet: Meals on Wheels delivers hot meals every day, Monday through Friday, to home-bound individuals who cannot prepare a nutritious meal for themselves or who do not have a person who can prepare nutritious meals for them. This Meals on Wheels delivers those meals for them, filling the gap for them. Hugh: We do have a pretty large need. We have a segment under the poverty line in Lynchburg, don't we? Janet: Yes, we do. Hugh: Where can people find you online? Janet: They can to go MealsLynchburg.org. Hugh: Thank you for standing up and telling your story. Let's see who I haven't interviewed yet. Tell people who you are and what's this organization you're representing. Teresa: Thank you so much. I'm Teresa Davis. I'm the communications director at Gleaning for the World. We are located in Concord, Virginia. We focus on disaster relief and humanitarian aid locally here in Central Virginia, and nationally and internationally as well. Hugh: Gleaning for the World. What is it about? What do you do? Teresa: Our mission statement is to share the love of God at home and around the world. That's what we're doing. We're sharing God's love by meeting tangible needs to people in need. Hugh: Like what? Give me an instance. Teresa: For example, right now, we have a truck on the way to California to help the people staying in shelters because of the Kincaid wildfire. This morning, they are back at the warehouse loading a truck headed to Jordan to bring clothes and basic materials to the refugees there. Hugh: Wow. Where can people find you online? Teresa: GFTW.org. Hugh: Thank you for sharing your story. What are you doing here? Connect Networking Group. Who are you, and what is this organization? Elizabeth Snyder: I'm Elizabeth Snyder. I am with the Connect Lynchburg Group. I like to say we are the Angie's List of Lynchburg because we have our businesses that we refer each other out and we do networking. The reason why we're here today is we also do a lot of work in the community. That's part of being a member of Connect. We do community work. Hugh: Love it. Where can people find you online? Elizabeth: We have a website. We're on Facebook. Our web URL is LynchburgConnect.com. Hugh: I think I've made the rounds. Thank you for coming by! Tell others the story of some of these great nonprofits and what they're doing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sam: Welcome to the Sound of Science on WNIJ, I'm Sam from NIU STEM Outreach.

Sam: Welcome to the Sound of Science on WNIJ, I'm Sam from NIU STEM Outreach.

SAM: Welcome to the Sound of Science on WNIJ. I'm Sam from NIU STEM Outreach.

Sam: Welcome to the Sound of Science on WNIJ. I'm Sam from NIU STEM Outreach.

Sam: Welcome to the Sound of Science on WNIJ. I'm Sam from NIU STEM Outreach.

SAM: Welcome to the Sound of Science on WNIJ. I'm Sam from NIU STEM Outreach.

Sam: Welcome to the Sound of Science on WNIJ. I'm Sam from NIU STEM Outreach.

Sam: Welcome to the Sound of Science on WNIJ. I'm Sam from NIU STEM Outreach.

Sam: Welcome to the Sound of Science on WNIJ. I'm Sam from NIU STEM Outreach.

Sam: Welcome to the Sound of Science on WNIJ. I'm Sam from NIU STEAM.

What techniques can help me improve my charisma?Andrew Ferebee, 7-Figure Entrepreneur | High Performance Coach | Podcaster1. Make Perfect Eye ContactEveryone knows that eye contact is important, but few people understand how to do it effectively.Typically, people either make too little eye contact and end up looking scared and anxious.Or they make too much eye contact and look like the sort of person who has to personally introduce themselves (and their misdeeds) to all of their neighbors when they move into a new area.A good rule of thumb is this.If you are speaking, make eye contact 80% of the time.If someone else is speaking to you, make eye contact only 60% of the time.This will increase your perceived social status and ensure that your eye contact makes you seem charismatic instead of creepy.2. Ask More Questions and Speak LessPlain and simple.People are more interested in themselves than anything else on the planet.By asking more questions about their life, dreams, and aspirations and speaking less you will make yourself seem more interesting, make them feel important, and prevent yourself from having to come up with witty remarks and banter during the conversation.If you ever hit a dead end in a conversation, ask a question and then nod, say “Interesting” and then “Tell me more”.Works like a charm.3. Maintain Excellent Posture and Take Up More SpaceCharismatic people have strong posture.Period.Think about the most charismatic person you know.Are they typically hunched over in conversations? Do they shrink up to make themselves appear smaller?Or do they stand tall with their shoulders back, OWNING their space and commanding respect?I think you know the answer.Keep your shoulders out, your back straight, and your posture strong.Own your space and have excellent posture and it will work wonders for your charisma.4. Repeat People's Names Back to them When You First MeetAlthough you don't want to come off like a used car salesman, repeating people's names back to them is a powerful way to build instant rapport, connect with someone, and prevent yourself from forgetting their name.Don't overdo it, but be sure to repeat their name back to them at least twice during the first conversation.For example.Me: Hi, I'm Andrew.You: Andrew?Me: YupYou: Good to meet you Andrew, I'm Sam.That's it.5. Speak Slowly, Clearly, and ThoughtfullyA hallmark of charismatic individuals is that other people listen when they speak.However, you can't expect people to listen when you speak if you are constantly blurting out random crap and speaking faster than a radio ad.When you talk in social settings speak clearly, slowly, and with deep vocal tonality.Think before you speak and make sure that every word coming out of your mouth is meaningful.If you are the type of person who only speaks when they have something important to say, people will naturally shut up and listen when you open your mouth.6. Dress to ImpressWhile the majority of charisma comes from verbal and nonverbal communications, there is a third aspect to charisma that people often overlook.Style.Charismatic people dress to impress and wear clothing that represents their personal status and confidence.This doesn't mean you need to rock a 3 piece suit everywhere you go.But you should make sure that you are well groomed and wearing clothes that fit properly and are stylish.7. Make Appropriate Physical ContactIf you overdo this one it will come off as creepy and weird.If you get it right, you will build rapport with people faster than anyone else and be the most charismatic guy or gal in the room.Tap people lightly on the shoulder to emphasize a point. Maintain a handshake for just 1–2 seconds longer than normal. Pat someone on the back while delivering a compliment.Be appropriate and respectful of other people's space but don't be afraid to break the touch barrier quickly and regularly.8. Smile Genuinely (And Slowly)Most people smile too quickly or disingenuously.Smiling is a powerful tool for building charisma but it needs to be executed properly.When meeting someone, wait to smile until after you've shaken hands and made eye contact.When someone says something funny, slowly let out a radiant smile.When making eye contact, smile softly and genuinely.The more genuine and heartfelt that people believe your smiles are, the more powerful they will be.9. Educate Yourself on Social DynamicsAs with anything in life, if you want to become more charismatic then you must study charisma and learn from the best.Watch TV shows with charismatic main characters and take notes about how they conduct themselves.Read books like Influence and 92 Tricks to Talk to Anyone.Educate yourself massively on social dynamics and charisma and you'll be 10x farther ahead than the majority of the population10. Always Prioritize YourselfTHE most powerful and charismatic individuals in the world prioritize themselves.I don't mean that they talk about themselves all the time or gloat incessantly.But that they value their time and attention and give it away slowly.If you are interrupted in the middle of a conversation, ignore the interrupter and finish your train of thought.If someone tries to get your attention, finish what you are doing before acknowledging them.Give your attention away sparingly and it will seem more valuable.Hope these quick tips help.Stay Grounded, Andrew

7 AM - 1 - "They" is the word of the year because gender is dumb. 2 - More on gender being meaningless. 3 - The News with Marshall Phillips. 4 - More Iowa and Thrump stuff.