Podcasts about in george

This week George Goncalves, MUFG Head of U.S. Macro Strategy, discusses the market implications heading into and out of the recent US presidential election. In George's view there are a couple schools of thoughts forming on how markets participants are looking to further position for a 2nd Trump administration, one that also has Republicans in power in the Congress as well. In one camp, and the one that has worked thus far, has been the playbook from the 2016 Trump 1.0 election, where financials and the dollar rallied but rates sold off. George suggests that there is more than one path potentially ahead and that it will pay to remain open minded on what may happen to the economy, markets and overall policy.  In George's views starting points matter and a lot of the Trump 1.0 trade playbook could be priced-in already. Overall, the fear of higher fiscal deficits and a resurgence in inflation could be misplaced if there is an honest effort to seek government efficiency and reduce spending. Lastly, George reminds us that “macro still matters” and that the economy remains very bifurcated and sensitive to financial conditions. The next administration is inheriting a stock market with stretched valuations and an economy that has benefited from government spending. Meanwhile, labor markets have been weakening in the private sector for quarters and that may not change until we get further clarity on how companies react to the changes in government and fiscal policies ahead.

On the back of a recently published FOMC preview report, this week George Goncalves, MUFG Head of U.S. Macro Strategy, walks us through what to expect at the September FOMC meeting and the rationale for why our house view is calling for the first cut to be 50bps. George also explores how this easing cycle may progress. In George's view, this is a historical event because this easing cycle is being launched as a preemptive move to avoid further cooling in the labor market and economy. In the last few easing cycles, the Fed has lowered rates in reaction to a specific event or catalyst (i.e. dot.com bust, GFC and the pandemic) that shocks and quickly weakens the economy (forcing the Fed into action). This time the Fed has seen the macro environment turn and is being cautious because recent data is likely overstating how healthy the economy truly is. Therefore, the Fed is trying to modulate rates with the goal of avoiding a hard landing due to macro reasons (driven by the impact of higher rates on consumer spending, small business activity and government finances). In our view, and as covered in the podcast and our FOMC preview report, there are plenty of reasons to start off with a 50bp cut. From a risk management perspective, there are two points to make. If the Fed is behind the curve (we think they are, they should have eased this past summer), they should cut rates quicker at the start and then attenuate the speed later in the easing cycle.   Although many surveys and forecasters are calling for 25bp cut, the market has priced in 50bps and to disappoint market pricing (which is embedded in all asset classes) runs the risk of acutely tightening financial conditions at the start of the easing cycle. That would be counterproductive and against the reason to cut in the first place. Further down the road, as the Fed has a few cuts under its belt, at that stage is where we think there could be more push back from the Fed without triggering adverse market reactions. Lastly, we think the market has a lot of the potential cuts already priced-in for the overall cycle. Where one cannot definitively spell out at this point what is the right pace and final resting place for the Fed Funds rate. The election may have an impact during the early days of 2025 (as fiscal policy adjusts) too. We have been arguing the sooner the Fed starts, the less they may need to do. Its possible that we get pitstops along the way towards a neutral rate or it comes in a flash. Bottom-line: We think 50bp is the best option in September. Post the first cut, the next moves from the Fed will come down to the outlook for the economy and markets.  

This Series is Sponsored by BMO In the second episode of the “Foodservice Gamechangers” series, special guest host and Food Institute advisor Pat Mulhern welcomed Dot Foods president George Eversman to talk about his career journey and leadership style. Additionally, the pair discuss workforce management strategies and supply chain logistics for the foodservice distribution industry. More about George Eversman: George Eversman is President of Dot Foods. He came up through the business in both Sales & Business Development. In George's 30 year career with Dot he has spent time in managing various aspects of Dot's retail and foodservice businesses. George has a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Iowa, and an MBA from Arizona State University. George's family consists of wife Michelle, and 4 children ranging in age from 26 to 15 years old. His two older children now reside in Austin and Dallas Texas respectively, while his two younger daughters are still at home in Quincy, Illinois. More about Dot Foods: Robert and Dorothy Tracy founded our company in 1960, with big dreams of starting a family business and streamlining the food supply chain. Sixty years later, we make more products more accessible to more people than ever before. We do this by purchasing large quantities of product from the supplier and storing it in our 13 distribution centers across the country. Our distributor and food processor customers then order our food and non-food items in less-than-truckload (LTL) quantities, which we deliver in as little as two to four days. Our business model, the talents of more than 4,000 employees, and the Tracy family's ownership have helped our company become the largest food industry redistributor in North America. But even more importantly, the dream that took shape all those years ago is still driving our partners' businesses forward. Learn more at: https://www.dotfoods.com/. Thanks to Our Sponsor: BMO Whether you're a producer, processor, retailer or distributor every company throughout the food continuum needs a financial partner that understands the factors that impact their business. From emerging consumer trends and industry consolidation, to commodity fluctuations and economic cyclicality, BMO's Food, Consumer, and Agribusiness Group understands the issues affecting your company and are dedicated to serving the entire food industry – from farm to consumer. To learn more about how they can help, visit commercial.bmo.com/food.

This week George Goncalves, MUFG Head of U.S. Macro Strategy, recaps what he has learned from the various trips he has been on while visiting investors and how it compares to our house view. He also goes over his short-term views on inflation ahead of the all-important CPI report. In George's view, just like the last NFP report captured some of the concerns that have been forming for quarters now (and something we have been flagging), what if shelter cost declines show up now and actually start driving CPI lower, just in time for a Fed that needs greater confidence before thinking about when to ease rates ahead.

This week George Goncalves, MUFG Head of U.S. Macro Strategy, discusses the price action since the hawkish FOMC, stronger than expected NFP, hawkish chair Powell 60 minutes interview, and lastly, a higher than expected inflation report. In George's view the macro and market conditions pre-CPI release were looking too good to be true. George believes that markets were priced for perfection and overdue some level setting after months of nonstop rallying. In the end, the higher CPI sends the Goldilocks crowd a rude reminder that this year will not be a linear progression to a soft-landing outcome, there will be bumps along the way, in our view. This will result in episodic vol.

This week George Goncalves, MUFG Head of U.S. Macro Strategy, discusses our Macro thesis around the economy and Fed policy. With unemployment low, inflation declining, and spending solid (helped by fiscal policy mid-year), all this resulted in stronger than expected GDP in 2023. The markets also embraced the soft landing narrative in the last two months of 2023. In George's view, this makes for a hard comparison at the start of 2024. In our view, the long and variable lags from one of the fastest Fed hiking cycle catches up in 2024. This will put the riskier side of the credit spectrum in scope for further adjustment. Net, we are not calling for a hard landing recession but instead something more like a bumpy landing which is short-lived. In fact, a recession altogether could be avoided if the Fed meets or beats what is priced-in for cuts and bank lending rebounds. Yet, due to lags in the recession dating process, we won't know we're in one until after the fact. In the end, we stick by our view that the Fed will be starting an easing cycle soon (our base-case is for a 25bp March cut) where they will attempt to soften the decline in economic activity as the year progresses.

How you are as a dad is impacted by your past. You either raise your kids the same way your parents raised you, or you intentionally change your approach, aiming to avoid the pain that you personally went through.In George's case, he thought he had a good childhood. It wasn't until later on that he realized how dysfunctional his family was. All the trauma led him to become an angry young man who didn't mature emotionally and developed a lot of insecurities.When he became a father, he realized that he needed to carve his own path as a father. He also discovered other men like him — struggling with impostor syndrome and struggling to ask for help. That's why he started surrounding himself with the right people and became more intentional about spending his time and energy making himself a better man.In this episode, George shares his mission of helping other men who struggle to be vulnerable. Learn about the pitfalls of isolation and the role that connecting with the right people can play in helping men heal from their past. “When we let down our guards in the right areas and just be real about anything, healing and restoration is accelerated.” - George HayworthIn This Episode:George talks about growing up in a strict householdGeorge shares some of the family issues he grew up with and how it impacted himLearn more about the effect of missing out on the usual rites of passage that dads have with their sonsFind out how joining the Army taught George life lessons he missed out on as a young manFind out more about why impostor syndrome is common among menLearn the importance of asking for helpDiscover the power of discovering your own blind spots...and more!Resource Mentioned:Tender Warrior: Every Man's Purpose, Every Woman's Dream, Every Child's Hope by Stu Weber Connect with George Hayworth:Linktree Instagram Apple Podcasts YouTubeSpotify Connect with Cam Hall:WebsiteDads Making A Difference Connection CallFacebookInstagramTwitterLinkedInYouTubeEmail - cam@dmdpodcast.comWant to join a holistic...

Episode 171 looks at "Hey Jude", the White Album, and the career of the Beatles from August 1967 through November 1968. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifty-seven-minute bonus episode available, on "I Love You" by People!. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata Not really an error, but at one point I refer to Ornette Coleman as a saxophonist. While he was, he plays trumpet on the track that is excerpted after that. Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. This time I also used Steve Turner's The Beatles: The Stories Behind the Songs 1967-1970. I referred to Philip Norman's biographies of John Lennon, George Harrison, and Paul McCartney, to Graeme Thomson's biography of George Harrison, Take a Sad Song by James Campion, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life by Donald Brackett, Those Were the Days 2.0 by Stephan Granados, and Sound Pictures by Kenneth Womack. Sadly the only way to get the single mix of “Hey Jude” is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but a remixed stereo mix is easily available on the new reissue of the 1967-70 compilation. The original mixes of the White Album are also, shockingly, out of print, but this 2018 remix is available for the moment. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, a quick note -- this episode deals, among other topics, with child abandonment, spousal neglect, suicide attempts, miscarriage, rape accusations, and heroin addiction. If any of those topics are likely to upset you, you might want to check the transcript rather than listening to this episode. It also, for once, contains a short excerpt of an expletive, but given that that expletive in that context has been regularly played on daytime radio without complaint for over fifty years, I suspect it can be excused. The use of mantra meditation is something that exists across religions, and which appears to have been independently invented multiple times, in multiple cultures. In the Western culture to which most of my listeners belong, it is now best known as an aspect of what is known as "mindfulness", a secularised version of Buddhism which aims to provide adherents with the benefits of the teachings of the Buddha but without the cosmology to which they are attached. But it turns up in almost every religious tradition I know of in one form or another. The idea of mantra meditation is a very simple one, and one that even has some basis in science. There is a mathematical principle in neurology and information science called the free energy principle which says our brains are wired to try to minimise how surprised we are --  our brain is constantly making predictions about the world, and then looking at the results from our senses to see if they match. If they do, that's great, and the brain will happily move on to its next prediction. If they don't, the brain has to update its model of the world to match the new information, make new predictions, and see if those new predictions are a better match. Every person has a different mental model of the world, and none of them match reality, but every brain tries to get as close as possible. This updating of the model to match the new information is called "thinking", and it uses up energy, and our bodies and brains have evolved to conserve energy as much as possible. This means that for many people, most of the time, thinking is unpleasant, and indeed much of the time that people have spent thinking, they've been thinking about how to stop themselves having to do it at all, and when they have managed to stop thinking, however briefly, they've experienced great bliss. Many more or less effective technologies have been created to bring about a more minimal-energy state, including alcohol, heroin, and barbituates, but many of these have unwanted side-effects, such as death, which people also tend to want to avoid, and so people have often turned to another technology. It turns out that for many people, they can avoid thinking by simply thinking about something that is utterly predictable. If they minimise the amount of sensory input, and concentrate on something that they can predict exactly, eventually they can turn off their mind, relax, and float downstream, without dying. One easy way to do this is to close your eyes, so you can't see anything, make your breath as regular as possible, and then concentrate on a sound that repeats over and over.  If you repeat a single phrase or word a few hundred times, that regular repetition eventually causes your mind to stop having to keep track of the world, and experience a peace that is, by all accounts, unlike any other experience. What word or phrase that is can depend very much on the tradition. In Transcendental Meditation, each person has their own individual phrase. In the Catholicism in which George Harrison and Paul McCartney were raised, popular phrases for this are "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner" or "Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you; blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen." In some branches of Buddhism, a popular mantra is "_NAMU MYŌHŌ RENGE KYŌ_". In the Hinduism to which George Harrison later converted, you can use "Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare", "Om Namo Bhagavate Vāsudevāya" or "Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha". Those last two start with the syllable "Om", and indeed some people prefer to just use that syllable, repeating a single syllable over and over again until they reach a state of transcendence. [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Jude" ("na na na na na na na")] We don't know much about how the Beatles first discovered Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, except that it was thanks to Pattie Boyd, George Harrison's then-wife. Unfortunately, her memory of how she first became involved in the Maharishi's Spiritual Regeneration Movement, as described in her autobiography, doesn't fully line up with other known facts. She talks about reading about the Maharishi in the paper with her friend Marie-Lise while George was away on tour, but she also places the date that this happened in February 1967, several months after the Beatles had stopped touring forever. We'll be seeing a lot more of these timing discrepancies as this story progresses, and people's memories increasingly don't match the events that happened to them. Either way, it's clear that Pattie became involved in the Spiritual Regeneration Movement a good length of time before her husband did. She got him to go along with her to one of the Maharishi's lectures, after she had already been converted to the practice of Transcendental Meditation, and they brought along John, Paul, and their partners (Ringo's wife Maureen had just given birth, so they didn't come). As we heard back in episode one hundred and fifty, that lecture was impressive enough that the group, plus their wives and girlfriends (with the exception of Maureen Starkey) and Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, all went on a meditation retreat with the Maharishi at a holiday camp in Bangor, and it was there that they learned that Brian Epstein had been found dead. The death of the man who had guided the group's career could not have come at a worse time for the band's stability.  The group had only recorded one song in the preceding two months -- Paul's "Your Mother Should Know" -- and had basically been running on fumes since completing recording of Sgt Pepper many months earlier. John's drug intake had increased to the point that he was barely functional -- although with the enthusiasm of the newly converted he had decided to swear off LSD at the Maharishi's urging -- and his marriage was falling apart. Similarly, Paul McCartney's relationship with Jane Asher was in a bad state, though both men were trying to repair their damaged relationships, while both George and Ringo were having doubts about the band that had made them famous. In George's case, he was feeling marginalised by John and Paul, his songs ignored or paid cursory attention, and there was less for him to do on the records as the group moved away from making guitar-based rock and roll music into the stranger areas of psychedelia. And Ringo, whose main memory of the recording of Sgt Pepper was of learning to play chess while the others went through the extensive overdubs that characterised that album, was starting to feel like his playing was deteriorating, and that as the only non-writer in the band he was on the outside to an extent. On top of that, the group were in the middle of a major plan to restructure their business. As part of their contract renegotiations with EMI at the beginning of 1967, it had been agreed that they would receive two million pounds -- roughly fifteen million pounds in today's money -- in unpaid royalties as a lump sum. If that had been paid to them as individuals, or through the company they owned, the Beatles Ltd, they would have had to pay the full top rate of tax on it, which as George had complained the previous year was over ninety-five percent. (In fact, he'd been slightly exaggerating the generosity of the UK tax system to the rich, as at that point the top rate of income tax was somewhere around ninety-seven and a half percent). But happily for them, a couple of years earlier the UK had restructured its tax laws and introduced a corporation tax, which meant that the profits of corporations were no longer taxed at the same high rate as income. So a new company had been set up, The Beatles & Co, and all the group's non-songwriting income was paid into the company. Each Beatle owned five percent of the company, and the other eighty percent was owned by a new partnership, a corporation that was soon renamed Apple Corps -- a name inspired by a painting that McCartney had liked by the artist Rene Magritte. In the early stages of Apple, it was very entangled with Nems, the company that was owned by Brian and Clive Epstein, and which was in the process of being sold to Robert Stigwood, though that sale fell through after Brian's death. The first part of Apple, Apple Publishing, had been set up in the summer of 1967, and was run by Terry Doran, a friend of Epstein's who ran a motor dealership -- most of the Apple divisions would be run by friends of the group rather than by people with experience in the industries in question. As Apple was set up during the point that Stigwood was getting involved with NEMS, Apple Publishing's initial offices were in the same building with, and shared staff with, two publishing companies that Stigwood owned, Dratleaf Music, who published Cream's songs, and Abigail Music, the Bee Gees' publishers. And indeed the first two songs published by Apple were copyrights that were gifted to the company by Stigwood -- "Listen to the Sky", a B-side by an obscure band called Sands: [Excerpt: Sands, "Listen to the Sky"] And "Outside Woman Blues", an arrangement by Eric Clapton of an old blues song by Blind Joe Reynolds, which Cream had copyrighted separately and released on Disraeli Gears: [Excerpt: Cream, "Outside Woman Blues"] But Apple soon started signing outside songwriters -- once Mike Berry, a member of Apple Publishing's staff, had sat McCartney down and explained to him what music publishing actually was, something he had never actually understood even though he'd been a songwriter for five years. Those songwriters, given that this was 1967, were often also performers, and as Apple Records had not yet been set up, Apple would try to arrange recording contracts for them with other labels. They started with a group called Focal Point, who got signed by badgering Paul McCartney to listen to their songs until he gave them Doran's phone number to shut them up: [Excerpt: Focal Point, "Sycamore Sid"] But the big early hope for Apple Publishing was a songwriter called George Alexander. Alexander's birth name had been Alexander Young, and he was the brother of George Young, who was a member of the Australian beat group The Easybeats, who'd had a hit with "Friday on My Mind": [Excerpt: The Easybeats, "Friday on My Mind"] His younger brothers Malcolm and Angus would go on to have a few hits themselves, but AC/DC wouldn't be formed for another five years. Terry Doran thought that Alexander should be a member of a band, because bands were more popular than solo artists at the time, and so he was placed with three former members of Tony Rivers and the Castaways, a Beach Boys soundalike group that had had some minor success. John Lennon suggested that the group be named Grapefruit, after a book he was reading by a conceptual artist of his acquaintance named Yoko Ono, and as Doran was making arrangements with Terry Melcher for a reciprocal publishing deal by which Melcher's American company would publish Apple songs in the US while Apple published songs from Melcher's company in the UK, it made sense for Melcher to also produce Grapefruit's first single, "Dear Delilah": [Excerpt: Grapefruit, "Dear Delilah"] That made number twenty-one in the UK when it came out in early 1968, on the back of publicity about Grapefruit's connection with the Beatles, but future singles by the band were much less successful, and like several other acts involved with Apple, they found that they were more hampered by the Beatles connection than helped. A few other people were signed to Apple Publishing early on, of whom the most notable was Jackie Lomax. Lomax had been a member of a minor Merseybeat group, the Undertakers, and after they had split up, he'd been signed by Brian Epstein with a new group, the Lomax Alliance, who had released one single, "Try as You May": [Excerpt: The Lomax Alliance, "Try As You May"] After Epstein's death, Lomax had plans to join another band, being formed by another Merseybeat musician, Chris Curtis, the former drummer of the Searchers. But after going to the Beatles to talk with them about them helping the new group financially, Lomax was persuaded by John Lennon to go solo instead. He may later have regretted that decision, as by early 1968 the people that Curtis had recruited for his new band had ditched him and were making a name for themselves as Deep Purple. Lomax recorded one solo single with funding from Stigwood, a cover version of a song by an obscure singer-songwriter, Jake Holmes, "Genuine Imitation Life": [Excerpt: Jackie Lomax, "Genuine Imitation Life"] But he was also signed to Apple Publishing as a songwriter. The Beatles had only just started laying out plans for Apple when Epstein died, and other than the publishing company one of the few things they'd agreed on was that they were going to have a film company, which was to be run by Denis O'Dell, who had been an associate producer on A Hard Day's Night and on How I Won The War, the Richard Lester film Lennon had recently starred in. A few days after Epstein's death, they had a meeting, in which they agreed that the band needed to move forward quickly if they were going to recover from Epstein's death. They had originally been planning on going to India with the Maharishi to study meditation, but they decided to put that off until the new year, and to press forward with a film project Paul had been talking about, to be titled Magical Mystery Tour. And so, on the fifth of September 1967, they went back into the recording studio and started work on a song of John's that was earmarked for the film, "I am the Walrus": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] Magical Mystery Tour, the film, has a mixed reputation which we will talk about shortly, but one defence that Paul McCartney has always made of it is that it's the only place where you can see the Beatles performing "I am the Walrus". While the song was eventually relegated to a B-side, it's possibly the finest B-side of the Beatles' career, and one of the best tracks the group ever made. As with many of Lennon's songs from this period, the song was a collage of many different elements pulled from his environment and surroundings, and turned into something that was rather more than the sum of its parts. For its musical inspiration, Lennon pulled from, of all things, a police siren going past his house. (For those who are unfamiliar with what old British police sirens sounded like, as opposed to the ones in use for most of my lifetime or in other countries, here's a recording of one): [Excerpt: British police siren ca 1968] That inspired Lennon to write a snatch of lyric to go with the sound of the siren, starting "Mister city policeman sitting pretty". He had two other song fragments, one about sitting in the garden, and one about sitting on a cornflake, and he told Hunter Davies, who was doing interviews for his authorised biography of the group, “I don't know how it will all end up. Perhaps they'll turn out to be different parts of the same song.” But the final element that made these three disparate sections into a song was a letter that came from Stephen Bayley, a pupil at Lennon's old school Quarry Bank, who told him that the teachers at the school -- who Lennon always thought of as having suppressed his creativity -- were now analysing Beatles lyrics in their lessons. Lennon decided to come up with some nonsense that they couldn't analyse -- though as nonsensical as the finished song is, there's an underlying anger to a lot of it that possibly comes from Lennon thinking of his school experiences. And so Lennon asked his old schoolfriend Pete Shotton to remind him of a disgusting playground chant that kids used to sing in schools in the North West of England (and which they still sang with very minor variations at my own school decades later -- childhood folklore has a remarkably long life). That rhyme went: Yellow matter custard, green snot pie All mixed up with a dead dog's eye Slap it on a butty, nice and thick, And drink it down with a cup of cold sick Lennon combined some parts of this with half-remembered fragments of Lewis Carrol's The Walrus and the Carpenter, and with some punning references to things that were going on in his own life and those of his friends -- though it's difficult to know exactly which of the stories attached to some of the more incomprehensible bits of the lyrics are accurate. The story that the line "I am the eggman" is about a sexual proclivity of Eric Burdon of the Animals seems plausible, while the contention by some that the phrase "semolina pilchard" is a reference to Sgt Pilcher, the corrupt policeman who had arrested three of the Rolling Stones, and would later arrest Lennon, on drugs charges, seems less likely. The track is a masterpiece of production, but the release of the basic take on Anthology 2 in 1996 showed that the underlying performance, before George Martin worked his magic with the overdubs, is still a remarkable piece of work: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus (Anthology 2 version)"] But Martin's arrangement and production turned the track from a merely very good track into a masterpiece. The string arrangement, very much in the same mould as that for "Strawberry Fields Forever" but giving a very different effect with its harsh cello glissandi, is the kind of thing one expects from Martin, but there's also the chanting of the Mike Sammes Singers, who were more normally booked for sessions like Englebert Humperdinck's "The Last Waltz": [Excerpt: Engelbert Humperdinck, "The Last Waltz"] But here were instead asked to imitate the sound of the strings, make grunting noises, and generally go very far out of their normal comfort zone: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] But the most fascinating piece of production in the entire track is an idea that seems to have been inspired by people like John Cage -- a live feed of a radio being tuned was played into the mono mix from about the halfway point, and whatever was on the radio at the time was captured: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] This is also why for many decades it was impossible to have a true stereo mix of the track -- the radio part was mixed directly into the mono mix, and it wasn't until the 1990s that someone thought to track down a copy of the original radio broadcasts and recreate the process. In one of those bits of synchronicity that happen more often than you would think when you're creating aleatory art, and which are why that kind of process can be so appealing, one bit of dialogue from the broadcast of King Lear that was on the radio as the mixing was happening was *perfectly* timed: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] After completing work on the basic track for "I am the Walrus", the group worked on two more songs for the film, George's "Blue Jay Way" and a group-composed twelve-bar blues instrumental called "Flying", before starting production. Magical Mystery Tour, as an idea, was inspired in equal parts by Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, the collective of people we talked about in the episode on the Grateful Dead who travelled across the US extolling the virtues of psychedelic drugs, and by mystery tours, a British working-class tradition that has rather fallen out of fashion in the intervening decades. A mystery tour would generally be put on by a coach-hire company, and would be a day trip to an unannounced location -- though the location would in fact be very predictable, and would be a seaside town within a couple of hours' drive of its starting point. In the case of the ones the Beatles remembered from their own childhoods, this would be to a coastal town in Lancashire or Wales, like Blackpool, Rhyl, or Prestatyn. A coachload of people would pay to be driven to this random location, get very drunk and have a singsong on the bus, and spend a day wherever they were taken. McCartney's plan was simple -- they would gather a group of passengers and replicate this experience over the course of several days, and film whatever went on, but intersperse that with more planned out sketches and musical numbers. For this reason, along with the Beatles and their associates, the cast included some actors found through Spotlight and some of the group's favourite performers, like the comedian Nat Jackley (whose comedy sequence directed by John was cut from the final film) and the surrealist poet/singer/comedian Ivor Cutler: [Excerpt: Ivor Cutler, "I'm Going in a Field"] The film also featured an appearance by a new band who would go on to have great success over the next year, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. They had recorded their first single in Abbey Road at the same time as the Beatles were recording Revolver, but rather than being progressive psychedelic rock, it had been a remake of a 1920s novelty song: [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, "My Brother Makes the Noises For the Talkies"] Their performance in Magical Mystery Tour was very different though -- they played a fifties rock pastiche written by band leaders Vivian Stanshall and Neil Innes while a stripper took off her clothes. While several other musical sequences were recorded for the film, including one by the band Traffic and one by Cutler, other than the Beatles tracks only the Bonzos' song made it into the finished film: [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, "Death Cab for Cutie"] That song, thirty years later, would give its name to a prominent American alternative rock band. Incidentally the same night that Magical Mystery Tour was first broadcast was also the night that the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band first appeared on a TV show, Do Not Adjust Your Set, which featured three future members of the Monty Python troupe -- Eric Idle, Michael Palin, and Terry Jones. Over the years the careers of the Bonzos, the Pythons, and the Beatles would become increasingly intertwined, with George Harrison in particular striking up strong friendships and working relationships with Bonzos Neil Innes and "Legs" Larry Smith. The filming of Magical Mystery Tour went about as well as one might expect from a film made by four directors, none of whom had any previous filmmaking experience, and none of whom had any business knowledge. The Beatles were used to just turning up and having things magically done for them by other people, and had no real idea of the infrastructure challenges that making a film, even a low-budget one, actually presents, and ended up causing a great deal of stress to almost everyone involved. The completed film was shown on TV on Boxing Day 1967 to general confusion and bemusement. It didn't help that it was originally broadcast in black and white, and so for example the scene showing shifting landscapes (outtake footage from Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, tinted various psychedelic colours) over the "Flying" music, just looked like grey fuzz. But also, it just wasn't what people were expecting from a Beatles film. This was a ramshackle, plotless, thing more inspired by Andy Warhol's underground films than by the kind of thing the group had previously appeared in, and it was being presented as Christmas entertainment for all the family. And to be honest, it's not even a particularly good example of underground filmmaking -- though it looks like a masterpiece when placed next to something like the Bee Gees' similar effort, Cucumber Castle. But there are enough interesting sequences in there for the project not to be a complete failure -- and the deleted scenes on the DVD release, including the performances by Cutler and Traffic, and the fact that the film was edited down from ten hours to fifty-two minutes, makes one wonder if there's a better film that could be constructed from the original footage. Either way, the reaction to the film was so bad that McCartney actually appeared on David Frost's TV show the next day to defend it and, essentially, apologise. While they were editing the film, the group were also continuing to work in the studio, including on two new McCartney songs, "The Fool on the Hill", which was included in Magical Mystery Tour, and "Hello Goodbye", which wasn't included on the film's soundtrack but was released as the next single, with "I Am the Walrus" as the B-side: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hello Goodbye"] Incidentally, in the UK the soundtrack to Magical Mystery Tour was released as a double-EP rather than as an album (in the US, the group's recent singles and B-sides were added to turn it into a full-length album, which is how it's now generally available). "I Am the Walrus" was on the double-EP as well as being on the single's B-side, and the double-EP got to number two on the singles charts, meaning "I am the Walrus" was on the records at number one and number two at the same time. Before it became obvious that the film, if not the soundtrack, was a disaster, the group held a launch party on the twenty-first of December, 1967. The band members went along in fancy dress, as did many of the cast and crew -- the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band performed at the party. Mike Love and Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys also turned up at the party, and apparently at one point jammed with the Bonzos, and according to some, but not all, reports, a couple of the Beatles joined in as well. Love and Johnston had both just met the Maharishi for the first time a couple of days earlier, and Love had been as impressed as the Beatles were, and it may have been at this party that the group mentioned to Love that they would soon be going on a retreat in India with the guru -- a retreat that was normally meant for training TM instructors, but this time seemed to be more about getting celebrities involved. Love would also end up going with them. That party was also the first time that Cynthia Lennon had an inkling that John might not be as faithful to her as she previously supposed. John had always "joked" about being attracted to George Harrison's wife, Patti, but this time he got a little more blatant about his attraction than he ever had previously, to the point that he made Cynthia cry, and Cynthia's friend, the pop star Lulu, decided to give Lennon a very public dressing-down for his cruelty to his wife, a dressing-down that must have been a sight to behold, as Lennon was dressed as a Teddy boy while Lulu was in a Shirley Temple costume. It's a sign of how bad the Lennons' marriage was at this point that this was the second time in a two-month period where Cynthia had ended up crying because of John at a film launch party and been comforted by a female pop star. In October, Cilla Black had held a party to celebrate the belated release of John's film How I Won the War, and during the party Georgie Fame had come up to Black and said, confused, "Cynthia Lennon is hiding in your wardrobe". Black went and had a look, and Cynthia explained to her “I'm waiting to see how long it is before John misses me and comes looking for me.” Black's response had been “You'd better face it, kid—he's never gonna come.” Also at the Magical Mystery Tour party was Lennon's father, now known as Freddie Lennon, and his new nineteen-year-old fiancee. While Hunter Davis had been researching the Beatles' biography, he'd come across some evidence that the version of Freddie's attitude towards John that his mother's side of the family had always told him -- that Freddie had been a cruel and uncaring husband who had not actually wanted to be around his son -- might not be the whole of the truth, and that the mother who he had thought of as saintly might also have had some part to play in their marriage breaking down and Freddie not seeing his son for twenty years. The two had made some tentative attempts at reconciliation, and indeed Freddie would even come and live with John for a while, though within a couple of years the younger Lennon's heart would fully harden against his father again. Of course, the things that John always resented his father for were pretty much exactly the kind of things that Lennon himself was about to do. It was around this time as well that Derek Taylor gave the Beatles copies of the debut album by a young singer/songwriter named Harry Nilsson. Nilsson will be getting his own episode down the line, but not for a couple of years at my current rates, so it's worth bringing that up here, because that album became a favourite of all the Beatles, and would have a huge influence on their songwriting for the next couple of years, and because one song on the album, "1941", must have resonated particularly deeply with Lennon right at this moment -- an autobiographical song by Nilsson about how his father had left him and his mother when he was a small boy, and about his own fear that, as his first marriage broke down, he was repeating the pattern with his stepson Scott: [Excerpt: Nilsson, "1941"] The other major event of December 1967, rather overshadowed by the Magical Mystery Tour disaster the next day, was that on Christmas Day Paul McCartney and Jane Asher announced their engagement. A few days later, George Harrison flew to India. After John and Paul had had their outside film projects -- John starring in How I Won The War and Paul doing the soundtrack for The Family Way -- the other two Beatles more or less simultaneously did their own side project films, and again one acted while the other did a soundtrack. Both of these projects were in the rather odd subgenre of psychedelic shambolic comedy film that sprang up in the mid sixties, a subgenre that produced a lot of fascinating films, though rather fewer good ones. Indeed, both of them were in the subsubgenre of shambolic psychedelic *sex* comedies. In Ringo's case, he had a small role in the film Candy, which was based on the novel we mentioned in the last episode, co-written by Terry Southern, which was in itself a loose modern rewriting of Voltaire's Candide. Unfortunately, like such other classics of this subgenre as Anthony Newley's Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?, Candy has dated *extremely* badly, and unless you find repeated scenes of sexual assault and rape, ethnic stereotypes, and jokes about deformity and disfigurement to be an absolute laugh riot, it's not a film that's worth seeking out, and Starr's part in it is not a major one. Harrison's film was of the same basic genre -- a film called Wonderwall about a mad scientist who discovers a way to see through the walls of his apartment, and gets to see a photographer taking sexy photographs of a young woman named Penny Lane, played by Jane Birkin: [Excerpt: Some Wonderwall film dialogue ripped from the Blu-Ray] Wonderwall would, of course, later inspire the title of a song by Oasis, and that's what the film is now best known for, but it's a less-unwatchable film than Candy, and while still problematic it's less so. Which is something. Harrison had been the Beatle with least involvement in Magical Mystery Tour -- McCartney had been the de facto director, Starr had been the lead character and the only one with much in the way of any acting to do, and Lennon had written the film's standout scene and its best song, and had done a little voiceover narration. Harrison, by contrast, barely has anything to do in the film apart from the one song he contributed, "Blue Jay Way", and he said of the project “I had no idea what was happening and maybe I didn't pay enough attention because my problem, basically, was that I was in another world, I didn't really belong; I was just an appendage.” He'd expressed his discomfort to his friend Joe Massot, who was about to make his first feature film. Massot had got to know Harrison during the making of his previous film, Reflections on Love, a mostly-silent short which had starred Harrison's sister-in-law Jenny Boyd, and which had been photographed by Robert Freeman, who had been the photographer for the Beatles' album covers from With the Beatles through Rubber Soul, and who had taken most of the photos that Klaus Voorman incorporated into the cover of Revolver (and whose professional association with the Beatles seemed to come to an end around the same time he discovered that Lennon had been having an affair with his wife). Massot asked Harrison to write the music for the film, and told Harrison he would have complete free rein to make whatever music he wanted, so long as it fit the timing of the film, and so Harrison decided to create a mixture of Western rock music and the Indian music he loved. Harrison started recording the music at the tail end of 1967, with sessions with several London-based Indian musicians and John Barham, an orchestrator who had worked with Ravi Shankar on Shankar's collaborations with Western musicians, including the Alice in Wonderland soundtrack we talked about in the "All You Need is Love" episode. For the Western music, he used the Remo Four, a Merseybeat group who had been on the scene even before the Beatles, and which contained a couple of classmates of Paul McCartney, but who had mostly acted as backing musicians for other artists. They'd backed Johnny Sandon, the former singer with the Searchers, on a couple of singles, before becoming the backing band for Tommy Quickly, a NEMS artist who was unsuccessful despite starting his career with a Lennon/McCartney song, "Tip of My Tongue": [Excerpt: Tommy Quickly, "Tip of My Tongue"] The Remo Four would later, after a lineup change, become Ashton, Gardner and Dyke, who would become one-hit wonders in the seventies, and during the Wonderwall sessions they recorded a song that went unreleased at the time, and which would later go on to be rerecorded by Ashton, Gardner, and Dyke. "In the First Place" also features Harrison on backing vocals and possibly guitar, and was not submitted for the film because Harrison didn't believe that Massot wanted any vocal tracks, but the recording was later discovered and used in a revised director's cut of the film in the nineties: [Excerpt: The Remo Four, "In the First Place"] But for the most part the Remo Four were performing instrumentals written by Harrison. They weren't the only Western musicians performing on the sessions though -- Peter Tork of the Monkees dropped by these sessions and recorded several short banjo solos, which were used in the film soundtrack but not in the soundtrack album (presumably because Tork was contracted to another label): [Excerpt: Peter Tork, "Wonderwall banjo solo"] Another musician who was under contract to another label was Eric Clapton, who at the time was playing with The Cream, and who vaguely knew Harrison and so joined in for the track "Ski-ing", playing lead guitar under the cunning, impenetrable, pseudonym "Eddie Clayton", with Harrison on sitar, Starr on drums, and session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan on bass: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "Ski-ing"] But the bulk of the album was recorded in EMI's studios in the city that is now known as Mumbai but at the time was called Bombay. The studio facilities in India had up to that point only had a mono tape recorder, and Bhaskar Menon, one of the top executives at EMI's Indian division and later the head of EMI music worldwide, personally brought the first stereo tape recorder to the studio to aid in Harrison's recording. The music was all composed by Harrison and performed by the Indian musicians, and while Harrison was composing in an Indian mode, the musicians were apparently fascinated by how Western it sounded to them: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "Microbes"] While he was there, Harrison also got the instrumentalists to record another instrumental track, which wasn't to be used for the film: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "The Inner Light (instrumental)"] That track would, instead, become part of what was to be Harrison's first composition to make a side of a Beatles single. After John and George had appeared on the David Frost show talking about the Maharishi, in September 1967, George had met a lecturer in Sanskrit named Juan Mascaró, who wrote to Harrison enclosing a book he'd compiled of translations of religious texts, telling him he'd admired "Within You Without You" and thought it would be interesting if Harrison set something from the Tao Te Ching to music. He suggested a text that, in his translation, read: "Without going out of my door I can know all things on Earth Without looking out of my window I can know the ways of heaven For the farther one travels, the less one knows The sage, therefore Arrives without travelling Sees all without looking Does all without doing" Harrison took that text almost verbatim, though he created a second verse by repeating the first few lines with "you" replacing "I" -- concerned that listeners might think he was just talking about himself, and wouldn't realise it was a more general statement -- and he removed the "the sage, therefore" and turned the last few lines into imperative commands rather than declarative statements: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "The Inner Light"] The song has come in for some criticism over the years as being a little Orientalist, because in critics' eyes it combines Chinese philosophy with Indian music, as if all these things are equally "Eastern" and so all the same really. On the other hand there's a good argument that an English songwriter taking a piece of writing written in Chinese and translated into English by a Spanish man and setting it to music inspired by Indian musical modes is a wonderful example of cultural cross-pollination. As someone who's neither Chinese nor Indian I wouldn't want to take a stance on it, but clearly the other Beatles were impressed by it -- they put it out as the B-side to their next single, even though the only Beatles on it are Harrison and McCartney, with the latter adding a small amount of harmony vocal: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "The Inner Light"] And it wasn't because the group were out of material. They were planning on going to Rishikesh to study with the Maharishi, and wanted to get a single out for release while they were away, and so in one week they completed the vocal overdubs on "The Inner Light" and recorded three other songs, two by John and one by Paul. All three of the group's songwriters brought in songs that were among their best. John's first contribution was a song whose lyrics he later described as possibly the best he ever wrote, "Across the Universe". He said the lyrics were “purely inspirational and were given to me as boom! I don't own it, you know; it came through like that … Such an extraordinary meter and I can never repeat it! It's not a matter of craftsmanship, it wrote itself. It drove me out of bed. I didn't want to write it … It's like being possessed, like a psychic or a medium.” But while Lennon liked the song, he was never happy with the recording of it. They tried all sorts of things to get the sound he heard in his head, including bringing in some fans who were hanging around outside to sing backing vocals. He said of the track "I was singing out of tune and instead of getting a decent choir, we got fans from outside, Apple Scruffs or whatever you call them. They came in and were singing all off-key. Nobody was interested in doing the tune originally.” [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] The "jai guru deva" chorus there is the first reference to the teachings of the Maharishi in one of the Beatles' records -- Guru Dev was the Maharishi's teacher, and the phrase "Jai guru dev" is a Sanskrit one which I've seen variously translated as "victory to the great teacher", and "hail to the greatness within you". Lennon would say shortly before his death “The Beatles didn't make a good record out of it. I think subconsciously sometimes we – I say ‘we' though I think Paul did it more than the rest of us – Paul would sort of subconsciously try and destroy a great song … Usually we'd spend hours doing little detailed cleaning-ups of Paul's songs, when it came to mine, especially if it was a great song like ‘Strawberry Fields' or ‘Across The Universe', somehow this atmosphere of looseness and casualness and experimentation would creep in … It was a _lousy_ track of a great song and I was so disappointed by it …The guitars are out of tune and I'm singing out of tune because I'm psychologically destroyed and nobody's supporting me or helping me with it, and the song was never done properly.” Of course, this is only Lennon's perception, and it's one that the other participants would disagree with. George Martin, in particular, was always rather hurt by the implication that Lennon's songs had less attention paid to them, and he would always say that the problem was that Lennon in the studio would always say "yes, that's great", and only later complain that it hadn't been what he wanted. No doubt McCartney did put in more effort on his own songs than on Lennon's -- everyone has a bias towards their own work, and McCartney's only human -- but personally I suspect that a lot of the problem comes down to the two men having very different personalities. McCartney had very strong ideas about his own work and would drive the others insane with his nitpicky attention to detail. Lennon had similarly strong ideas, but didn't have the attention span to put the time and effort in to force his vision on others, and didn't have the technical knowledge to express his ideas in words they'd understand. He expected Martin and the other Beatles to work miracles, and they did -- but not the miracles he would have worked. That track was, rather than being chosen for the next single, given to Spike Milligan, who happened to be visiting the studio and was putting together an album for the environmental charity the World Wildlife Fund. The album was titled "No One's Gonna Change Our World": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] That track is historic in another way -- it would be the last time that George Harrison would play sitar on a Beatles record, and it effectively marks the end of the period of psychedelia and Indian influence that had started with "Norwegian Wood" three years earlier, and which many fans consider their most creative period. Indeed, shortly after the recording, Harrison would give up the sitar altogether and stop playing it. He loved sitar music as much as he ever had, and he still thought that Indian classical music spoke to him in ways he couldn't express, and he continued to be friends with Ravi Shankar for the rest of his life, and would only become more interested in Indian religious thought. But as he spent time with Shankar he realised he would never be as good on the sitar as he hoped. He said later "I thought, 'Well, maybe I'm better off being a pop singer-guitar-player-songwriter – whatever-I'm-supposed-to-be' because I've seen a thousand sitar-players in India who are twice as better as I'll ever be. And only one of them Ravi thought was going to be a good player." We don't have a precise date for when it happened -- I suspect it was in June 1968, so a few months after the "Across the Universe" recording -- but Shankar told Harrison that rather than try to become a master of a music that he hadn't encountered until his twenties, perhaps he should be making the music that was his own background. And as Harrison put it "I realised that was riding my bike down a street in Liverpool and hearing 'Heartbreak Hotel' coming out of someone's house.": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Heartbreak Hotel"] In early 1968 a lot of people seemed to be thinking along the same lines, as if Christmas 1967 had been the flick of a switch and instead of whimsy and ornamentation, the thing to do was to make music that was influenced by early rock and roll. In the US the Band and Bob Dylan were making music that was consciously shorn of all studio experimentation, while in the UK there was a revival of fifties rock and roll. In April 1968 both "Peggy Sue" and "Rock Around the Clock" reentered the top forty in the UK, and the Who were regularly including "Summertime Blues" in their sets. Fifties nostalgia, which would make occasional comebacks for at least the next forty years, was in its first height, and so it's not surprising that Paul McCartney's song, "Lady Madonna", which became the A-side of the next single, has more than a little of the fifties about it. Of course, the track isn't *completely* fifties in its origins -- one of the inspirations for the track seems to have been the Rolling Stones' then-recent hit "Let's Spend The Night Together": [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Let's Spend the Night Together"] But the main source for the song's music -- and for the sound of the finished record -- seems to have been Johnny Parker's piano part on Humphrey Lyttleton's "Bad Penny Blues", a hit single engineered by Joe Meek in the fifties: [Excerpt: Humphrey Lyttleton, "Bad Penny Blues"] That song seems to have been on the group's mind for a while, as a working title for "With a Little Help From My Friends" had at one point been "Bad Finger Blues" -- a title that would later give the name to a band on Apple. McCartney took Parker's piano part as his inspiration, and as he later put it “‘Lady Madonna' was me sitting down at the piano trying to write a bluesy boogie-woogie thing. I got my left hand doing an arpeggio thing with the chord, an ascending boogie-woogie left hand, then a descending right hand. I always liked that, the  juxtaposition of a line going down meeting a line going up." [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Lady Madonna"] That idea, incidentally, is an interesting reversal of what McCartney had done on "Hello, Goodbye", where the bass line goes down while the guitar moves up -- the two lines moving away from each other: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hello Goodbye"] Though that isn't to say there's no descending bass in "Lady Madonna" -- the bridge has a wonderful sequence where the bass just *keeps* *descending*: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Lady Madonna"] Lyrically, McCartney was inspired by a photo in National Geographic of a woman in Malaysia, captioned “Mountain Madonna: with one child at her breast and another laughing into her face, sees her quality of life threatened.” But as he put it “The people I was brought up amongst were often Catholic; there are lots of Catholics in Liverpool because of the Irish connection and they are often religious. When they have a baby I think they see a big connection between themselves and the Virgin Mary with her baby. So the original concept was the Virgin Mary but it quickly became symbolic of every woman; the Madonna image but as applied to ordinary working class woman. It's really a tribute to the mother figure, it's a tribute to women.” Musically though, the song was more a tribute to the fifties -- while the inspiration had been a skiffle hit by Humphrey Lyttleton, as soon as McCartney started playing it he'd thought of Fats Domino, and the lyric reflects that to an extent -- just as Domino's "Blue Monday" details the days of the week for a weary working man who only gets to enjoy himself on Saturday night, "Lady Madonna"'s lyrics similarly look at the work a mother has to do every day -- though as McCartney later noted  "I was writing the words out to learn it for an American TV show and I realised I missed out Saturday ... So I figured it must have been a real night out." The vocal was very much McCartney doing a Domino impression -- something that wasn't lost on Fats, who cut his own version of the track later that year: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Lady Madonna"] The group were so productive at this point, right before the journey to India, that they actually cut another song *while they were making a video for "Lady Madonna"*. They were booked into Abbey Road to film themselves performing the song so it could be played on Top of the Pops while they were away, but instead they decided to use the time to cut a new song -- John had a partially-written song, "Hey Bullfrog", which was roughly the same tempo as "Lady Madonna", so they could finish that up and then re-edit the footage to match the record. The song was quickly finished and became "Hey Bulldog": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Bulldog"] One of Lennon's best songs from this period, "Hey Bulldog" was oddly chosen only to go on the soundtrack of Yellow Submarine. Either the band didn't think much of it because it had come so easily, or it was just assigned to the film because they were planning on being away for several months and didn't have any other projects they were working on. The extent of the group's contribution to the film was minimal – they were not very hands-on, and the film, which was mostly done as an attempt to provide a third feature film for their United Artists contract without them having to do any work, was made by the team that had done the Beatles cartoon on American TV. There's some evidence that they had a small amount of input in the early story stages, but in general they saw the cartoon as an irrelevance to them -- the only things they contributed were the four songs "All Together Now", "It's All Too Much", "Hey Bulldog" and "Only a Northern Song", and a brief filmed appearance for the very end of the film, recorded in January: [Excerpt: Yellow Submarine film end] McCartney also took part in yet another session in early February 1968, one produced by Peter Asher, his fiancee's brother, and former singer with Peter and Gordon. Asher had given up on being a pop star and was trying to get into the business side of music, and he was starting out as a producer, producing a single by Paul Jones, the former lead singer of Manfred Mann. The A-side of the single, "And the Sun Will Shine", was written by the Bee Gees, the band that Robert Stigwood was managing: [Excerpt: Paul Jones, "And the Sun Will Shine"] While the B-side was an original by Jones, "The Dog Presides": [Excerpt: Paul Jones, "The Dog Presides"] Those tracks featured two former members of the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck and Paul Samwell-Smith, on guitar and bass, and Nicky Hopkins on piano. Asher asked McCartney to play drums on both sides of the single, saying later "I always thought he was a great, underrated drummer." McCartney was impressed by Asher's production, and asked him to get involved with the new Apple Records label that would be set up when the group returned from India. Asher eventually became head of A&R for the label. And even before "Lady Madonna" was mixed, the Beatles were off to India. Mal Evans, their roadie, went ahead with all their luggage on the fourteenth of February, so he could sort out transport for them on the other end, and then John and George followed on the fifteenth, with their wives Pattie and Cynthia and Pattie's sister Jenny (John and Cynthia's son Julian had been left with his grandmother while they went -- normally Cynthia wouldn't abandon Julian for an extended period of time, but she saw the trip as a way to repair their strained marriage). Paul and Ringo followed four days later, with Ringo's wife Maureen and Paul's fiancee Jane Asher. The retreat in Rishikesh was to become something of a celebrity affair. Along with the Beatles came their friend the singer-songwriter Donovan, and Donovan's friend and songwriting partner, whose name I'm not going to say here because it's a slur for Romani people, but will be known to any Donovan fans. Donovan at this point was also going through changes. Like the Beatles, he was largely turning away from drug use and towards meditation, and had recently written his hit single "There is a Mountain" based around a saying from Zen Buddhism: [Excerpt: Donovan, "There is a Mountain"] That was from his double-album A Gift From a Flower to a Garden, which had come out in December 1967. But also like John and Paul he was in the middle of the breakdown of a long-term relationship, and while he would remain with his then-partner until 1970, and even have another child with her, he was secretly in love with another woman. In fact he was secretly in love with two other women. One of them, Brian Jones' ex-girlfriend Linda, had moved to LA, become the partner of the singer Gram Parsons, and had appeared in the documentary You Are What You Eat with the Band and Tiny Tim. She had fallen out of touch with Donovan, though she would later become his wife. Incidentally, she had a son to Brian Jones who had been abandoned by his rock-star father -- the son's name is Julian. The other woman with whom Donovan was in love was Jenny Boyd, the sister of George Harrison's wife Pattie.  Jenny at the time was in a relationship with Alexis Mardas, a TV repairman and huckster who presented himself as an electronics genius to the Beatles, who nicknamed him Magic Alex, and so she was unavailable, but Donovan had written a song about her, released as a single just before they all went to Rishikesh: [Excerpt: Donovan, "Jennifer Juniper"] Donovan considered himself and George Harrison to be on similar spiritual paths and called Harrison his "spirit-brother", though Donovan was more interested in Buddhism, which Harrison considered a corruption of the more ancient Hinduism, and Harrison encouraged Donovan to read Autobiography of a Yogi. It's perhaps worth noting that Donovan's father had a different take on the subject though, saying "You're not going to study meditation in India, son, you're following that wee lassie Jenny" Donovan and his friend weren't the only other celebrities to come to Rishikesh. The actor Mia Farrow, who had just been through a painful divorce from Frank Sinatra, and had just made Rosemary's Baby, a horror film directed by Roman Polanski with exteriors shot at the Dakota building in New York, arrived with her sister Prudence. Also on the trip was Paul Horn, a jazz saxophonist who had played with many of the greats of jazz, not least of them Duke Ellington, whose Sweet Thursday Horn had played alto sax on: [Excerpt: Duke Ellington, "Zweet Zursday"] Horn was another musician who had been inspired to investigate Indian spirituality and music simultaneously, and the previous year he had recorded an album, "In India," of adaptations of ragas, with Ravi Shankar and Alauddin Khan: [Excerpt: Paul Horn, "Raga Vibhas"] Horn would go on to become one of the pioneers of what would later be termed "New Age" music, combining jazz with music from various non-Western traditions. Horn had also worked as a session musician, and one of the tracks he'd played on was "I Know There's an Answer" from the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Know There's an Answer"] Mike Love, who co-wrote that track and is one of the lead singers on it, was also in Rishikesh. While as we'll see not all of the celebrities on the trip would remain practitioners of Transcendental Meditation, Love would be profoundly affected by the trip, and remains a vocal proponent of TM to this day. Indeed, his whole band at the time were heavily into TM. While Love was in India, the other Beach Boys were working on the Friends album without him -- Love only appears on four tracks on that album -- and one of the tracks they recorded in his absence was titled "Transcendental Meditation": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Transcendental Meditation"] But the trip would affect Love's songwriting, as it would affect all of the musicians there. One of the few songs on the Friends album on which Love appears is "Anna Lee, the Healer", a song which is lyrically inspired by the trip in the most literal sense, as it's about a masseuse Love met in Rishikesh: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Anna Lee, the Healer"] The musicians in the group all influenced and inspired each other as is likely to happen in such circumstances. Sometimes, it would be a matter of trivial joking, as when the Beatles decided to perform an off-the-cuff song about Guru Dev, and did it in the Beach Boys style: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Spiritual Regeneration"] And that turned partway through into a celebration of Love for his birthday: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Spiritual Regeneration"] Decades later, Love would return the favour, writing a song about Harrison and their time together in Rishikesh. Like Donovan, Love seems to have considered Harrison his "spiritual brother", and he titled the song "Pisces Brothers": [Excerpt: Mike Love, "Pisces Brothers"] The musicians on the trip were also often making suggestions to each other about songs that would become famous for them. The musicians had all brought acoustic guitars, apart obviously from Ringo, who got a set of tabla drums when George ordered some Indian instruments to be delivered. George got a sitar, as at this point he hadn't quite given up on the instrument, and he gave Donovan a tamboura. Donovan started playing a melody on the tamboura, which is normally a drone instrument, inspired by the Scottish folk music he had grown up with, and that became his "Hurdy-Gurdy Man": [Excerpt: Donovan, "Hurdy Gurdy Man"] Harrison actually helped him with the song, writing a final verse inspired by the Maharishi's teachings, but in the studio Donovan's producer Mickie Most told him to cut the verse because the song was overlong, which apparently annoyed Harrison. Donovan includes that verse in his live performances of the song though -- usually while doing a fairly terrible impersonation of Harrison: [Excerpt: Donovan, "Hurdy Gurdy Man (live)"] And similarly, while McCartney was working on a song pastiching Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys, but singing about the USSR rather than the USA, Love suggested to him that for a middle-eight he might want to sing about the girls in the various Soviet regions: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Back in the USSR"] As all the guitarists on the retreat only had acoustic instruments, they were very keen to improve their acoustic playing, and they turned to Donovan, who unlike the rest of them was primarily an acoustic player, and one from a folk background. Donovan taught them the rudiments of Travis picking, the guitar style we talked about way back in the episodes on the Everly Brothers, as well as some of the tunings that had been introduced to British folk music by Davey Graham, giving them a basic grounding in the principles of English folk-baroque guitar, a style that had developed over the previous few years. Donovan has said in his autobiography that Lennon picked the technique up quickly (and that Harrison had already learned Travis picking from Chet Atkins records) but that McCartney didn't have the application to learn the style, though he picked up bits. That seems very unlike anything else I've read anywhere about Lennon and McCartney -- no-one has ever accused Lennon of having a surfeit of application -- and reading Donovan's book he seems to dislike McCartney and like Lennon and Harrison, so possibly that enters into it. But also, it may just be that Lennon was more receptive to Donovan's style at the time. According to McCartney, even before going to Rishikesh Lennon had been in a vaguely folk-music and country mode, and the small number of tapes he'd brought with him to Rishikesh included Buddy Holly, Dylan, and the progressive folk band The Incredible String Band, whose music would be a big influence on both Lennon and McCartney for the next year: [Excerpt: The Incredible String Band, "First Girl I Loved"] According to McCartney Lennon also brought "a tape the singer Jake Thackray had done for him... He was one of the people we bumped into at Abbey Road. John liked his stuff, which he'd heard on television. Lots of wordplay and very suggestive, so very much up John's alley. I was fascinated by his unusual guitar style. John did ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun' as a Jake Thackray thing at one point, as I recall.” Thackray was a British chansonnier, who sang sweetly poignant but also often filthy songs about Yorkshire life, and his humour in particular will have appealed to Lennon. There's a story of Lennon meeting Thackray in Abbey Road and singing the whole of Thackray's song "The Statues", about two drunk men fighting a male statue to defend the honour of a female statue, to him: [Excerpt: Jake Thackray, "The Statues"] Given this was the music that Lennon was listening to, it's unsurprising that he was more receptive to Donovan's lessons, and the new guitar style he learned allowed him to expand his songwriting, at precisely the same time he was largely clean of drugs for the first time in several years, and he started writing some of the best songs he would ever write, often using these new styles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Julia"] That song is about Lennon's dead mother -- the first time he ever addressed her directly in a song, though  it would be far from the last -- but it's also about someone else. That phrase "Ocean child" is a direct translation of the Japanese name "Yoko". We've talked about Yoko Ono a bit in recent episodes, and even briefly in a previous Beatles episode, but it's here that she really enters the story of the Beatles. Unfortunately, exactly *how* her relationship with John Lennon, which was to become one of the great legendary love stories in rock and roll history, actually started is the subject of some debate. Both of them were married when they first got together, and there have also been suggestions that Ono was more interested in McCartney than in Lennon at first -- suggestions which everyone involved has denied, and those denials have the ring of truth about them, but if that was the case it would also explain some of Lennon's more perplexing behaviour over the next year. By all accounts there was a certain amount of finessing of the story th

This week George Goncalves, MUFG Head of U.S. Macro Strategy, walks us through some of his latest special topics in the Macro2Markets Monthly Outlook report. As the title suggests, we first explore the risk-on mood on Wall Street and what is driving it. In George's view, he believes it is a bit premature that some market participants are reading the weaker data and the market-based interest rate declines as a good thing. George wraps up by providing his views on the current developments in bank lending and general credit conditions overall. He also takes us through the big moves that are happening on the U.S. government deficit front and their implications.  

Kritiek oor die regering se plan om die Nasionale Gesondheidsversekeringskema met mediesefonds-belastingkortings te befonds. Die Amerikaanse Minister van Buitelandse Sake, Anthony Blinken, besoek die Midde-Ooste oor die oorlog tussen Israel en Hamas. In George word hommeltuie ingespan om drenkelinge te help.

This week George Goncalves, MUFG Head of U.S. Macro Strategy, takes us around the world and back, discussing the latest changes from the Bank of Japan (BoJ), ahead of October month-end trading and the critical double-header events on November 1, when the Treasury releases its quarterly refunding announcement (Q.R.A.) for its Treasury supply needs. Then in the afternoon, the FOMC meets for its second to last meeting of calendar year 2023. In George's view, so long as term premia stays elevated and 10yr rates do not decline back towards the low 4s, these higher long-term rates are doing the tightening for the Fed, and thus the Fed hiking cycle is likely over (where the July hike may end up being the last hike of this cycle). In addition, what is frightening about October 31, other than the spooky Halloween scenes, is that this means there are only two months left in the year and liquidity probably gets worse for markets from here on out. Lastly, George wraps up by providing his views for Fed day, expecting another “hawkish skip”, the second in a row, and that chair Powell will refrain from saying they are done by keeping December in play.

In the seventh podcast episode of Same Shit Different Brain's third series, Rebecca talks to trans speaker and activist, George Evans.George became an in-demand speaker after his Pride Month 2022 LinkedIn post, proudly declaring his trans identity, got millions of views. He's since become a celebrated public speaker, LinkedIn Top Voice and regularly travels around to share his story with different businesses and audiences, educating them on diversity and inclusion for the transgender community.In George's own words: “I'm now using my voice to educate the world on what it truly means to be transgender, sharing the stories of my transition and mental health.”If you like the show, please take a minute to leave a review on Apple podcasts or rate it on Spotify.Email: hello@sameshitdifferentbrain.comFollow Same Shit Different Brain, George Evans and read George's post:https://www.instagram.com/sameshitdifferentbrain/ https://www.facebook.com/SameShitDifferentBrainPodcast/  https://twitter.com/SameSDiffBrainhttps://www.linkedin.com/posts/georgewynevans_lgbtqia-transgenderawareness-transpride-activity-6948243246305185793-YXCK/https://www.instagram.com/gwevs/https://www.tiktok.com/@gwevshttps://linktr.ee/georgewevans

VOBS TECH-TALK #105 We won't leave you out in the wilderness of Home VO Studio misinformation. We'll lead you out of the woods!   Follow us as we delve into the latest Tech. In George's update we took at • What happened with Zoom 5.14? A GTT Video. The secret hidden inside the Earthworks Ethos many-layered pop filters Truly new mic technology on the horizon, the Konos “Everything Microphone” In Dan's Basic Basics -  We talk about kids and parent engineers.   Plus your submitted questions!   Catch the Replay all week on Facebook, Our website VOBS.TV or listen to the podcast.   We love our fans and donors for your continued support. VOBS can't be here without YOU and our other great supporters:   Voiceoveressentials.com,  VOHeroes.com  Sourceelements.com,  VoiceOverXtra.com,  voiceactor.com And World-Voices.org     #danlenard #georgewhittam #voicerecording #homestudiotechnology #voiceover #podcast #voiceoveradvice #voiceover  #votech #vobusiness #voiceovertraining  #voiceoverrecording

George Horta George Horta is the Vice President Information Technology at ACS Industries. He is responsible for managing, leading, and cultivating a team that operates internationally. In George's work, he focuses on the people and the process. The technology comes when those pieces are properly in place. Why George Horta Focuses on People and Process...

As No. 7 Baylor basketball finishes up its regular season, we take a look at how well-positioned they are to make a deep run in the NCAA tournament. Baylor knocked off No. 9 Texas on Saturday and beat Oklahoma State on the road on Monday, both largely without superstar freshman Keyonte George. In George's absence, backup point guard Dale Bonner came through big. We also touch on the Baylor women's basketball team. Specifically, how far do the Lady Bears have to go in the NCAA Tournament to make up for a lackluster, up-and-down regular season, a season where they failed to win the Big 12 regular season title for the first time in 14 years? To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is George's subjective list of the best content currently on Netflix.  Most of the titles are NOT miniseries made up of numerous episodes.  And George feels that the two best videos on Netflix are traditional movies - well-planned stories with characters and situations  the viewer really cares about.Which title on the list is from the BBC?Who is Ryan Murphy?In George's opinion, what is the best episode of Dahmer?What are some of the shows he is associated with?Who is Tick, Tick … Boom about?What is The Queen's Gambit about?What does Poe have in common with the lead character of Where the Crawdads sing?What is anaphora?How did Lincoln use anaphora?How did Poe use anaphora?How did Churchill use anaphora?00:01 Introduction00:42 Apology and explanation02:28 Number five - Dracula04:13 Number four - a tie between, Dahmer, Episode Six, Ratched, and The Boys in the Band07:51 Number three - Tick, Tick, Boom09:50 Number two - The Queen's Gambit12:19 Number one - Where the Crawdads Sing 17:19 Poe's Manual of Conchology20:28 Darkest Hour24:06 Anaphora29:28  Future episode30:26 Sources30:45 Outro

In this GASB Podcast episode, Troy interviews George Liu, founder of Gym Pillars, he's based in Los Angeles, United States of America, but he was born in Japan and raised in China. Then moving to the U.S. at the age of 10. Growing up George had a hard time looking at himself in the mirror, he had issues with his self-esteem. That's what led him to design – Health Marketing Entrepreneurship, his college major. The concept of fitness, self-improvement, and disciple was heavily embedded in George's mind, he bravely started his company bootstrapped; Gym Pillars, empowering gym owners and changing lives through health and fitness. Although he was temporarily hindered by the impact of the pandemic, it didn't stop him. Making a comeback in April of 2022, hitting the $100,000-a-month mark. In George's fast business growth journey, he recommends “double down and build a strong foundation and focus on word of mouth.” Because of the power of word of mouth or in simple words, referrals; It functions with or without you putting effort into it, giving you sales without chasing the new shiny customer, a powerful marketing feature that most small-medium business owners neglect.  This Cast Covers: George's different life experiences that led him to fitness. Starting Gym Pillars and how it makes money. Ikigai, Japanese for a reason of being. Building a strong foundation and focusing on the power of word of mouth. Overcoming the frustration of learning to do something for the first time. Marketing the product is the most important in business. Focusing on one thing and one thing only. Fulfilling your end of the terms when hiring a person. Having a clear understanding of whom you're hiring. The vitality of a leader's self-awareness. Links:  George's Linkedin George's Facebook George's Website Additional Resources: DotCom Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Growing Your Company Online by Russell Brunson     Quotes: “What success means is this … doing what you love, what you're good at, what you can get paid for, and also doing something that you believe the world needs.” — George Liu. “Double down and build a strong foundation and focus on word of mouth.” — George Liu. “Learning how to do something for the first time, …  the frustration that came along with it, it was extremely painful.” — George Liu. “You need to nail down the product you needed to develop. You need to build better results, and you have to show people how much you care.” — George Liu. “The business is a reflection of you, for you to assume ownership and be willing to look in the mirror. That's one of the most effective ways for you to grow your business.” — George Liu.     Music from https://filmmusic.io “Cold Funk” by Kevin MacLeod https://incompetech.com. License: CC by http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

The Wall Street Journal says, “George Lois is the one the only prodigy or fathead, founder of agencies, creator of Legends, George Lewis is a genuine advertising superhero”. George Lois is well known if not famous for designing culture, changing cover images for Esquire magazine, and his “call your cable company and tell them I want my MTV”. That campaign made the music video category and made MTV the Category King. In his life and career, he broke every rule, created legendary categories and brands, and he did it in a brash, bold, exciting way. Sadly, we recently lost this legend at 91 years old. George Lois died just three months after his beloved wife, Rosemary died. And he is one of my heroes, a man that so many of us in marketing owe so much. And yet, most young people in entrepreneurship, marketing and creative endeavors and design. Don't really know of him. But if you've ever done anything in entrepreneurship in category design or marketing, that breaks boundaries, you're following in George's footsteps, and you might not even know it. Today, let's dig into some of George's life's teachings. Because if you want to become legendary, you have to study the legends. Welcome to Lochhead on Marketing. The number one charting marketing podcast for marketers, category designers, and entrepreneurs with a different mind. George Lois and a Damn Good Advice George Lewis was born in June 1931, and he passed in November 2022. And it is said that in the end, we are all remembered for two dates, and a dash. And I'm here to tell you that George made some legendary shit out of his dash. I want to focus on a book of his called Damn Good Advice for People with Talent, How to unleash your creative potential by America's master communicator, George Lois. If you have not read this book yet, I would suggest you do so. What I want to share with you are some of the learnings from this book – not all of them, but some of them that really have spoken to me over the years and made a big difference for me that I think might make a big difference for you. Force a Choice Idea number one is to Force a Choice. At the very beginning of damn good advice, George says this: “There are only four types of person you can be: one, very bright, industrious, [your perfect]. Two, very bright lazy [a damn shame]. Three, stupid lazy, you'll sit on your ass, so you're a wash. And four, stupid industrious [uh oh, you're dangerous]. If you're a number one or a number two, you'll get a lot out of this book, if you're number three, or number four, why you reading this book?” – George Lois So right off the top and this landmark piece of work by George, he's doing what legendary brands do, which is they attract who they are for, and they repel who they are against. Legendary brands force a choice, not a comparison. And best I can tell, that's how George lived his life. You are who you are Big Idea number two: Around here, we would express it as Follow Your Different. In George words, he writes: “Whether you're male, female, black, Hispanic, Native American, Asian, ethnic, or gay, and wherever you work, you are who you are. And that's what you are, and be damn proud of it. Don't change your name. Don't change your accent, don't change your heritage, don't denigrate a humble upbringing. Be true to yourself, and you'll ring true to the world.” – George Lois To learn more about the different teachings of George Lois, download and listen to this episode. Bio George Lois Links Learn more about George Lois Website | Wiki | Books More about George Lois: NYTimes The Atlantic Washington Post We hope you enjoyed this episode of Lochhead on Marketing™! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and subscribe on iTunes!

Is there any question that disgraced former President Donald Trump had a big hand in the failure of Republicans to fulfill expectations in last night's midterms? In Pennsylvania Doug Mastriano, a Trump-endorsed MAGA candidate who fully embraced 2020 election conspiracy theories, lost big in the gubernatorial race. In that state's Senate race, Dr. Mehemet Oz lost to John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate who had a stroke and is, by an objective measure, not fit to serve in office. In George, Trump-backed Senate candidate Herschel Walker is currently behind the Democratic candidate, and headed for a runoff, even though the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Brian Kemp, a Trump enemy, won his election handily. In Arizona, Trump-backed Senate candidate Blake Masters lost, and Trump-backed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake appears to be losing a very close race. But perhaps the best example is in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where Republicans chose a Trump-backed candidate, John Gibbs, over the incumbent, Peter Meijer, who had voted to impeach Trump. Now Gibbs has lost that race, allowing a Democrat to hold that seat for the first time in 50 years. On this episode of Plain Talk, Chad Oban and I discuss all of these national election results, and we get very local too. Rick Becker lost big in North Dakota's Senate race. What will he do next? Former Miss America Cara Mund also lost in a landslide to Republican U.S. House incumbent Kelly Armstrong, though she outperformed the Democratic candidates on the ballot by about 10 points. Will she run again? And the North Dakota Democratic-NPL has lost ground in the legislature, again, turning a super-minority in the state assembly into, what, a super-super-minority? Click to listen, and if you'd like to be alerted when new episodes of Plain Talk drop, be sure to subscribe - it's free! - on the podcast service of your choice.

“I aspire to a world where everyone, everywhere lives a life of dignity and young people have a safe space to lead and drive positive change in their communities”. In George's last episode as a Podcast host, he chats with Nhial Deng. Nhial has been a refugee for nearly half of his life. Nhial arrived at Kenya's Kakuma Refugee Camp in 2010, at only 11 years of age. Fleeing his village in Ethiopia after an armed militia attack, he walked hundreds of kilometres for days, alone and without family, to reach Kenya. A large camp in Turkana County in northwestern Kenya, Kakuma is home to around 160,000 people. It was built in 1992 following conflict and unrest in Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Today, Nhial heads the organisation Refugee Youth Peace Ambassadors, which aims to promote peace in Kakuma, and also delivers mentorship and empowerment activities for young people. Nhial also works to shift the narrative on refugee issues by amplifying the voices of other young people in the camp. He seeks to empower youth as the leaders of today that they are to make a difference. George chats to Nhial as he waits in a hotel quarantine, before starting his studies in Journalism and International Studies at Huron University College in Canada. Learn more about Global Changemakers at www.global-changemakers.net. Season 4 is proudly sponsored by Galactic Fed a fully distributed, multinational digital marketing agency filled with growth marketing experts. They partner with companies of all sizes to make their growth goals a reality galacticfed.com Follow us on Instagram and Facebook @GlobalChangemakersand on Twitter @WeAreGCM To support our mission of supporting youth to create a positive change towards more inclusive, fair and sustainable communities, consider donating here. Contact our team at info@global-changemakers.net See you in our next episode!

In George's words: As my heart shattered into a million pieces, I realized I was trapped somewhere between the past and future, watching life drift apart. Mistakes were made. Hearts were broken. Harsh lessons became a story I was called to write. I now believe everything in life is eligible for questioning. Nothing lasts forever, and unexpected life changes provide me with an opportunity to let go of old stories while my words bleed out in the form of new stories that shape everything I see. Like so many people do, I crafted an identity throughout my childhood.  At six years old, I experienced my parent's divorce, and my hopes as a little boy were shot down. As the firstborn son in a Greek family, I cultivated a strong work ethic from my father and a fiery side of life from my mother.  Despite feelings of abandonment and rejection, I was told to grow up and be a man. A phrase so powerful, it fueled my life with shame and the need to continually prove myself worthy in everything I did. But everything changed after the attacks of September 11, 2001. My first few years as a Marine included a lot of personal hurdles I had to clear. I lost my best friend in the Iraq war, and the battle with addictive behaviours and depression began.  As I climbed the ranks and gained valuable life experiences, I got the chance to play America's superhero. From training with the FBI in Quantico, Top Secret clearances, combat deployments, and travelling to over 40 countries, I realized that perhaps each of us does have a unique reason for being here.  I chose to hang up my uniform after ten years of honourable service.                                                                                                 Though I wasn't sure what would come next, one thing was certain, I wasn't ready to face myself, and I didn't know how to sit in the discomfort, so I defaulted to what I always did- run. I took what seemed like the most logical route after one would leave the military. I applied for MBA programs and started a family in hopes of finding something greater. Through years spent transforming hundreds of lives as a personal trainer, I found my passion for helping people unlock their potential and mine.  From endurance races, powerlifting, bodybuilding, and everything in between, I trained hard for hours and used my body like a machine.  But there was a double-edged sword to this life: I had confidence issues within myself, I was in and out of the emergency room for years with a medical condition, and I never saw my family and ran around like a headless human.                         To me, life felt like a checklist. Marriage, fatherhood, and pursuing a big dream felt like those things I needed to do. I had no reason to believe those things, but each day I sank deeper into a dark vault of depression. I felt trapped by the outside world as I watched familiar patterns of my past repeat in my life, and suicidal thoughts became a regular occurrence for me. Meanwhile, I felt the rage of a man with a broken heart. I felt guilty for everything that happened in my life, and the excruciating shame forced me to a place in which I almost took my life.     Several months after everything came crashing down, I got sober, celibate, and started to write about my experiences.  I found retreats, yoga, meditation, coaches, single parenting, and myself.  I connected with my family, joined men's groups, fell in love with nature, and immersed myself in the studies of human behaviour and the school of heart-knocks.  I left my comfort zone behind for a world of uncertainty and truth.  I decided I was no longer a slave to other people's lives or the limitations and stories that held me hostage. Through my pain, I created a new story. One that gave me the courage to open my heart and clear space for whatever needed to move through me.  I turned myself into a writer because I knew my life would become a reflection of my heart and soul in the form of words that would allow others to heal their wounds by sharing my story.  It's not about creating a fairytale, it's about my quest for emotional authenticity because my words will forever speak my truth.  These days I have slowed way down. Taking inventory of my life and my choices revealed so much to me. I'm slowly understanding my patterns, triggers and who I am today. Not yesterday or tomorrow.  This is my life, and I share it not to persuade anyone to change but to give people an example of what happens when you begin to take responsibility for your life rather than run from it.

VOBS Road trip! Dan and George trek to Mojave Microphones in Burbank to see how they make High-end microphones for professionals, like us VO folk! You'll learn a lot! IN George's tech update: FAKE SSD DRIVES on AMAZON, BEWARE!!  Window inserts: Do they “work”? UA Apollo, is anything resolved with Zoom since Console 10?  And Dan Discusses “The Best Mic for VO.” Plus a lightning round of your submitted home VO studio questions! Catch it all week on  Facebook  our homepage, our podcast and The Pro Audio Suite for those of you who love to listen on the go!  We love our fans and donors for your continued support. VOBS can't be here without YOU and our other great supporters: Voiceoveressentials.com,  VOHeroes.com  Sourceelements.com,  VoiceOverXtra.com,  VOICEACTORWEBSITES.com  JMC Demos jmcvoiceover.com/demo-production And World-Voices.org

George Milton is Co-Founder and CEO of Yellowbird Foods, the spunky/spicy, Austin-based hot sauce brand made with real fruit and veggies. On this episode of ITS, George and Ali talk about identifying your core consumer, finding them, and building with them where they are. In George's words, "The most expensive and inefficient way to grow is trying to steal someone else's customer."Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support In The Sauce by becoming a member!In The Sauce is Powered by Simplecast.

My post yesterday on the real lesson of January 6 provoked a great discussion (many thanks to those of you who participated). It also prompted me to rewatch a movie that provides a hint of an answer — Frank Capra's “It's a Wonderful Life,” which was released 75 years ago this month. When I first saw the movie in the late 1960s, I thought it pure hokum. America was coming apart over Vietnam and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and I remember thinking the movie could have been produced by some propaganda bureau of the government that had been told to create a white-washed (and white) version of the United States. But in more recent years I've come around. As America has moved closer to being an oligarchy — with staggering inequalities of income, wealth, and power not seen in over a century — and closer to Trumpian neofascism (the two moves are connected), “It's a Wonderful Life” speaks to what's gone wrong and what must be done to make it right. As you probably know (and if you don't, this weekend would be a good time to watch it), the movie's central conflict is between Mr. Potter (played by Lionel Barrymore) and George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart). Potter is a greedy and cruel banker. George is the generous and honorable head of Bedford Fall's building-and-loan — the one entity standing in the way of Potter's total domination of the town. When George accidentally loses some deposits that fall into the hands of Potter, Potter sees an opportunity to ruin George. This brings George to the bridge where he contemplates suicide, thinking his life has been worthless — before a guardian angel's counsel turns him homeward.It's two radically opposed versions of America. In Potter's social-Darwinist view, people compete with one another for resources. Those who succeed deserve to win because they've outrun everyone else in that competitive race. After the death of George's father, who founded the building-and-loan, Potter moves to dissolve it — claiming George's father “was not a businessman. He was a man of high ideals, so-called, but ideals without common sense can ruin a town.” For Potter, common sense is not coddling the “discontented rabble.” In George's view, Bedford Falls is a community whose members help each other. He tells Potter that the so-called “rabble … do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community.” His father helped them build homes on credit so they could afford a decent life. “People were human beings to him,” George tells Potter, “but to you, they're cattle.”When George contemplates ending it all, his guardian angel shows him how bleak Bedford Falls would be had George never lived — poor, fearful, and dependent on Potter. The movie ends when everyone George has helped (virtually the entire town) pitch in to bail out George and his building-and-loan. It's a cartoon, of course — but a cartoon that's fast becoming a reality in America. Do we join together or let the Potters of America own and run everything? Soon after “It's a Wonderful Life” was released, the FBI considered it evidence of Communist Party infiltration of the film industry. The FBI's Los Angeles field office — using a report by an ad-hoc group that included Fountainhead writer and future Trump pin-up girl Ayn Rand — warned that the movie represented “rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a ‘scrooge-type' so that he would be the most hated man in the picture.” The movie “deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters. This … is a common trick used by Communists.” The FBI report compared “It's a Wonderful Life” to a Soviet film, and alleged that Frank Capra was “associated with left-wing groups” and that screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett were “very close to known Communists.”This was all rubbish, of course — and a prelude to the Red Scare led by Republican Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, who launched a series of highly publicized probes into alleged Communist penetration of Hollywood, the State Department, and even the US Army. The movie was also prelude to modern Republican ideology. Since Ronald Reagan, Republicans have used Potter-like social Darwinism to justify everything tax cuts for the wealthy, union-busting, and cutbacks in social safety nets. Rand herself became a hero to many in the Trump administration. Above all, Reagan Republicans, CEOs, and Trumpers have used the strategy of “divide-and-conquer” to generate division among Americans (a kind of political social-Darwinism). That way, Americans stay angry and suspicious of one another, and don't look upward to see where all the money and power have gone. And won't join together to claim it back. What would Republicans say about “It's a Wonderful Life” if it were released today? They'd probably call it socialist rather than communist, but it would make them squirm all the same — especially given the eery similarity between Lionel Barrymore's Mr. Potter and you know who. Thanks for subscribing to my newsletter on power, politics, and the real economy. If you'd like to support this work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or offering a gift subscription. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Love him or hate him you have to admit that George Soros is one successful fellow. A true rags-to-riches story, George Soros is one of the most iconic investors alive today. Born before the fall of Eastern Europe, he grew up under the thumb of fascism where he learned to ruthlessly go after what he wanted.Subscribe to How To Trade ItGeorge was 13 when the Nazis took over Hungary (1943). The Jewish children like himself were not allowed to attend school, but instead were forced to report to the Nazi authorities. The Nazis wanted the Jewish children to hand out deportation notices, but George, at least, was able to turn the tables. When he showed his father the notices, his father took them, and told his son to tell all the men on the list that they needed to run away and escape before the Nazis tried to deport them.Soros aided his father throughout the War years in rescuing many Jews from the Nazis. George described it as a "happy time" because he got to witness his father's heroism day after day.  In 1945, the family experienced the Siege of Budapest in which Nazis and Russian soldiers fought hand-to-hand and house-by-house throughout the streets of Budapest. He survived the German occupation of Hungary and escaped to freedom in 1947. It was then that George went to the United Kingdom and began his career as an investor.  When asked how he went from being a poor refugee to a billion dollar financier, how he got his start in investing, George replied that he wrote a letter to the head of every investment bank in London, until he got an offer. In 1970, George started The Single Eagle Fund with $100,000.  Three years later, Soros set up the Double Eagle Fund with $4 million dollars, including $250,000 of his own money. That fund is now worth over a billion dollars.  In 2013, the Quantum Fund is reported to have made $5.5 billion in profits.  It was the most successful hedge fund that year.   As of today's date, the Quantum Fund has made well over $40 billion dollars, much of which has been used for philanthropic purposes.  The Man Who Broke The Bank Of EnglandEarly in the 1990s, during the early phases of the present-day European Union, England was having trouble maintaining the value of the pound. The pound was part of the mechanism used to determine exchange rates across Europe and that was compounding another problem. Because the Bank of England was unwilling to raise interest rates to match other European countries, or to float the currency, it was forced to withdraw from the mechanism.In George's view, the rate at which the pound was brought into the mechanism was too high, as was the country's inflation rate.On September 16th, 1992, the British government was forced to remove the pound from the exchange mechanism, and that caused a massive devaluation of the currency. That day is known as Black Wednesday because billions in value were lost almost instantly. George Soros, a savvy trader, with his pulse on the market, took advantage of the same conditions and shorted the pound, well ahead of its crash.George Soros amassed more than 40 billion dollars in his early career as an investor.  Known for his aggressive tactics, he's also well known for his philanthropic activities. At last tally, Soros has given more than $32 billion dollars to a collection of charities under the umbrella of The Open Society Foundation.Subscribe to How To Trade ItSupport the show (https://caseystubbs.com)

Today's episode is a LIVE recording of The Data Binge podcast, hosted on LinkedIn, featuring Mike Sarraille, and George Randle. the co-authors of "The Talent War: How Special Operations and Great Organizations Win on Talent". The Talent War is available for pre-order, and scheduled to be made available anywhere you can buy books, on November 10th, 2020, in line with the United States Marine Corps Birthday, hallmarking the same day in 1775, when the Continental Marines were established.Mike Sarraille is a retired US Navy SEAL office, a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, McCombs School of Business, and the CEO and Co-Founder of EF Overwatch, an executive Search Firm and Talent Advisory, specializing in the recruiting, training and placement of U.S special operations forces veterans with organizations seeking top talent, co-founded with Jocko Willink. Mike served 15 years as an officer in the SEAL Teams, and 5 years in the US Marine Corps as an enlisted Recon Marine and Scout-Sniper. Mike served in SEAL Team 3 Task Unit Bruiser, alongside “Extreme Ownership” authors Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, where he led major combat operations that played a pivotal role in the Battle of Ramadi in 2006. Mike assumed duties as the primary leadership instructor for all officers graduating from the SEAL training pipeline, and was then selected for assignment to the Joint Special Operations Command where he completed multiple combat deployments. Mike is a recipient of the Silver Star, six Bronze Stars, two Defense Meritorious Service Medals, and a Purple Heart.George Randle combines 20+ years of Fortune 100 and Fortune 1000 global Human Resources and Talent Acquisition Executive experience enabling individuals, teams and organizations achieve consistent and impactful outcomes. George is Hogan (HPI, HDS and MVPI) Leadership Assessment Certified, and began his professional life by enlisting in the US Army Reserve, where he got his commission as an Active Duty Army Officer through ROTC. George's career assignments included the US Army Berlin Brigade, US CENTCOM and III Corps with deployments to Africa, Central America and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Over the course of his active duty time he was privileged to serve in key leadership assignments – twice as a Platoon Leader, as the Executive Officer for the largest company in Berlin and finally 2 years as a Company Commander at Ft. Hood, Texas. In George's transition to the corporate world, he created the first Junior Military Officer Hiring Program for a Top-5 consulting firm, and went on to create one of the largest and most successful Veteran Hiring Programs for a Global Fortune 50 firm. In both instances, these programs resulted in the employer being ranked as a Top 100 Military Friendly Employer. For the last 20 years, concurrently with his roles as a Talent Acquisition Executive, George has trained and coached 1000's of Veterans on interviewing and career search skills. Today, George is the VP and Head of Global Talent Acquisition at Forcepoint, an industry-leading cyber security firm.Key Takeaways[11:20] The driving forces in George and Mike's lives that prompted them to write their book, “The Talent War”[16:27] The current state rigidity in hiring processes, and the importance of talent[18:03] The “talent” mindset”, vs the growth mindset – what organization must have to be successful[23:32] The Chief Human Resources Office role, the values, principles, and trats of leaders that should step into this role in any organization[31:48] The interview process[42:04] Culture and likeability as critical factors vs non-factors, for candidate selection[52:57] Talent retention and hiring for technical talent – maintaining the philosophy of hiring for character and training for skill, in highly technical roles[01:11:30] What is next for George and Mike after the release of “The Talent War”Memorable Quotes[11:20] “George and I are passionate about leadership and this book really is a subset of leadership. It's a very important aspect of leadership and it's usually the first stage of leadership, it's forming the team and bringing the right people into the organization to take an idea and drive it into something that is tangible.” -Mike[20:39] “Part of the talent mindset is ultimately getting to a point where you're treating your human capital with the same rigor, the same focus, the same level of importance as your financial capital because it's what's driving your finance capital.” -George[33:33] “For a lot of military leaders, leading is just muscle memory. The military is the world's preeminent leadership program without debate.” -Mike[34:21] “When you deviate from a process that is highly successful, that's when you start to make bad hires.” -Mike[43:51] “When people are hiring from likeability, generally, it's because they haven't been trained in how to interview.” – George[62:00] “It's all on you, but it's not about you” – on ego and leadership - GeorgeResources:How to contact Mike & GeorgeMike Sarraille: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelsarraillemba/George Randle: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgelrandle/EF Overwatch: https://www.efoverwatch.com/Forcepoint: https://www.forcepoint.com/Josh Cotton: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshcotton/Full Interview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/LYuJWdqw0PkBooks Mentioned:The Talent War: How Special Operations and Great Organizations Win on Talent by Mike Sarraille and George Randle - https://www.amazon.com/Talent-War-Special-Operations-Organizations-ebook/dp/B08GFG5C53Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy Seals Lead and Win by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin - https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Ownership-U-S-Navy-SEALs/dp/1250067057All that We Can Be: Black Leadership And Racial Integration The Army Way :https://www.amazon.com/All-That-Can-Leadership-Integration/dp/0465001130/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&qid=1603059411&refinements=p_27%3AJohn+Sibley+Butler&s=books&sr=1-3&text=John+Sibley+ButlerThe Attributes: 25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance: https://www.amazon.com/Attributes-Hidden-Drivers-Optimal-Performance/dp/0593133943/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=attributes+book&qid=1603059533&s=books&sr=1-4One Mission: How Leaders Build A Team Of Teams: https://www.amazon.com/One-Mission-Leaders-Build-Teams-ebook/dp/B071LHK5C1/ref=sr_1_12?dchild=1&keywords=chris+fussell&qid=1603059702&s=music&sr=1-12-catcorrThank you for listening!Thank you to the men and women who have served, and who are serving in the United States armed forces.--------------------------------Join the **New Monthly Newsletter** - Data Binge REFRESH: https://www.derekwesleyrussell.com/newsletterInterested in starting your own podcast? Some candid advice here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-start-podcast-3-step-gono-go-beginners-guide-derek-russellLearn more about the Data Binge Podcast at www.thedatabinge.comConnect with Derek:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derekwesleyrussell/Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCN1c5mzapLZ55ciPgngqRMg/featuredInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/drussnetwork/Twitter: https://twitter.com/drussnetworkMedium: https://medium.com/@derekwesleyrussellEmail: derek@thedatabinge.com

As pressure mounts on L&D to get out of its bind on learning analytics and start taking data seriously, John Helmer talks to Dr George Siemens, founder president of the Society for Learning Analytics Research, and the father of connectivist learning theory. In George's view, conditions have never been more favourable for a more data-driven approach in Corporate learning, with the Covid crisis massively accelerating digital transformation across all areas of organisational operations.   Learning analytics are just one area of this internationally renowned author and speaker's work. George is also professor at the University of Texas at Arlington and Director of the Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning at the University of South Australia. This wide-ranging discussion also covers connectivism, MOOCs and the offloading of human cognitive capabilities to AI with its implications for learning.   05:26 Learning analytics 10:16 Could corporates work with academics on analytics? 16:50 Connectivism 21:37 How has connectivism aged? 25:32 AI and learning 35:03 MOOCs 40:52 The road out of Covid   Mentioned in the discussion: [Book] Learning as a Way of Being by Peter B. Vaill (1996) https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Learning_as_a_Way_of_Being.html?id=DzDIwAEACAAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y   Peter Senge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Senge   [Book] Psychology of Learning for Instruction by Marcy P. Driscoll https://www.amazon.co.uk/Psychology-Learning-Instruction-Driscoll-Second/dp/B004BRZPC6   Ronald S Burt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Stuart_Burt   SOLAR Website: https://www.solaresearch.org/   Contact George: http://hacognition.org/ Twitter @gsiemens LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/gsiemens   Download the new white paper from Learning Pool written by John Helmer – 'Experience: Theory, design and supporting technologies for an experience-based learning culture' https://learningpool.com/theory-design-and-supporting-technologies-for-an-experience-based-learning-culture/   Contact John Helmer Twitter: @johnhelmer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnhelmer/ Website: http://johnhelmerconsulting.com/

Adelaide is building a reputation worldwide as the clean, fresh city in a beautiful state, boasting magnificent gourmet food and ease of getting where you want to go. But tonight, we cover two topics that contrast against these claims so that, as Adelaideans, we can reflect on where we want to take South Australia next. The first is the arrival of Krispy Kreme donuts with all the fanfare and plenty of media hype. While we are the last people to turn down a little hedonistic pleasure, Professor Gary Wittert from Adelaide University's discipline of medicine, shines a light on the underbelly of donuts and donut consumption. And then George Inglis (a self-confessed planning pretender and policy wonk) joins us to talk about public transport and share his personal views on what our city could do to run our blind obsession with cars off the road. In George's view, frequency is the magic word, along we a rethink about having every type of public transport do the same thing instead of working together for a better system. Nigel One gives us a great insight into a critical thinking approach when dealing with people who stump you in conversations with opposing views you feel are wrong, we solve the sunset times quandary from last week thanks to Geoscience Australia, and wine rains down from One Tree Hill thanks to the magnificent, Tenafeate Creek Wines. Plus Adelaide landmarks of childhood, two radio veterans enter the South Australia Register and music from Sun Theory to warm your winter. Support the show: https://theadelaideshow.com.au/listen-or-download-the-podcast/adelaide-in-crowd/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.