Podcasts about Kami

In this conversation, Justin Neagle and Will Foret speak with Kami Farahmandpour and Chris Kottra from Building Technology Consultants, Inc. (BTC) about their experiences in the engineering industry, the founding of BTC, and the importance of company culture, leadership transitions, and quality in their work. They discuss the challenges of hiring in a niche market, the significance of training for autonomy, and the role of litigation in honing expertise. The conversation also touches on reflections and advice for future leaders in the industry.

For those who haven't heard the announcement I posted, songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a two-episode look at the song “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” by Fairport Convention, and the intertwining careers of Joe Boyd, Sandy Denny, and Richard Thompson. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-one-minute bonus episode available, on Judy Collins’ version of this song. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, 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/ Erratum For about an hour this was uploaded with the wrong Elton John clip in place of “Saturday Sun”. This has now been fixed. Resources Because of the increasing problems with Mixcloud’s restrictions, I have decided to start sharing streaming playlists of the songs used in episodes instead of Mixcloud ones. This Tunemymusic link will let you listen to the playlist I created on your streaming platform of choice — however please note that not all the songs excerpted are currently available on streaming. The songs missing from the Tidal version are “Shanten Bells” by the Ian Campbell Folk Group, “Tom’s Gone to Hilo” by A.L. Lloyd, two by Paul McNeill and Linda Peters, three by Elton John & Linda Peters, “What Will I Do With Tomorrow” by Sandy Denny and “You Never Know” by Charlie Drake, but the other fifty-nine are there. Other songs may be missing from other services. The main books I used on Fairport Convention as a whole were Patrick Humphries' Meet On The Ledge, Clinton Heylin's What We Did Instead of Holidays, and Kevan Furbank's Fairport Convention on Track. Rob Young's Electric Eden is the most important book on the British folk-rock movement. Information on Richard Thompson comes from Patrick Humphries' Richard Thompson: Strange Affair and Thompson's own autobiography Beeswing.  Information on Sandy Denny comes from Clinton Heylin's No More Sad Refrains and Mick Houghton's I've Always Kept a Unicorn. I also used Joe Boyd's autobiography White Bicycles and Chris Blackwell's The Islander.  And this three-CD set is the best introduction to Fairport's music currently in print. Transcript Before we begin, this episode contains reference to alcohol and cocaine abuse and medical neglect leading to death. It also starts with some discussion of the fatal car accident that ended last episode. There’s also some mention of child neglect and spousal violence. If that’s likely to upset you, you might want to skip this episode or read the transcript. One of the inspirations for this podcast when I started it back in 2018 was a project by Richard Thompson, which appears (like many things in Thompson’s life) to have started out of sheer bloody-mindedness. In 1999 Playboy magazine asked various people to list their “songs of the Millennium”, and most of them, understanding the brief, chose a handful of songs from the latter half of the twentieth century. But Thompson determined that he was going to list his favourite songs *of the millennium*. He didn’t quite manage that, but he did cover seven hundred and forty years, and when Playboy chose not to publish it, he decided to turn it into a touring show, in which he covered all his favourite songs from “Sumer Is Icumen In” from 1260: [Excerpt: Richard Thompson, “Sumer is Icumen In”] Through numerous traditional folk songs, union songs like “Blackleg Miner”, pieces by early-modern composers, Victorian and Edwardian music hall songs, and songs by the Beatles, the Ink Spots, the Kinks, and the Who, all the way to “Oops! I Did It Again”: [Excerpt: Richard Thompson, “Oops! I Did it Again”] And to finish the show, and to show how all this music actually ties together, he would play what he described as a “medieval tune from Brittany”, “Marry, Ageyn Hic Hev Donne Yt”: [Excerpt: Richard Thompson, “Marry, Ageyn Hic Hev Donne Yt”] We have said many times in this podcast that there is no first anything, but there’s a reason that Liege and Lief, Fairport Convention’s third album of 1969, and the album other than Unhalfbricking on which their reputation largely rests, was advertised with the slogan “The first (literally) British folk rock album ever”. Folk-rock, as the term had come to be known, and as it is still usually used today, had very little to do with traditional folk music. Rather, the records of bands like The Byrds or Simon and Garfunkel were essentially taking the sounds of British beat groups of the early sixties, particularly the Searchers, and applying those sounds to material by contemporary singer-songwriters. People like Paul Simon and Bob Dylan had come up through folk clubs, and their songs were called folk music because of that, but they weren’t what folk music had meant up to that point — songs that had been collected after being handed down through the folk process, changed by each individual singer, with no single identifiable author. They were authored songs by very idiosyncratic writers. But over their last few albums, Fairport Convention had done one or two tracks per album that weren’t like that, that were instead recordings of traditional folk songs, but arranged with rock instrumentation. They were not necessarily the first band to try traditional folk music with electric instruments — around the same time that Fairport started experimenting with the idea, so did an Irish band named Sweeney’s Men, who brought in a young electric guitarist named Henry McCullough briefly. But they do seem to have been the first to have fully embraced the idea. They had done so to an extent with “A Sailor’s Life” on Unhalfbricking, but now they were going to go much further: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Matty Groves” (from about 4:30)] There had been some doubt as to whether Fairport Convention would even continue to exist — by the time Unhalfbricking, their second album of the year, was released, they had been through the terrible car accident that had killed Martin Lamble, the band’s drummer, and Jeannie Franklyn, Richard Thompson’s girlfriend. Most of the rest of the band had been seriously injured, and they had made a conscious decision not to discuss the future of the band until they were all out of hospital. Ashley Hutchings was hospitalised the longest, and Simon Nicol, Richard Thompson, and Sandy Denny, the other three surviving members of the band, flew over to LA with their producer and manager, Joe Boyd, to recuperate there and get to know the American music scene. When they came back, the group all met up in the flat belonging to Denny’s boyfriend Trevor Lucas, and decided that they were going to continue the band. They made a few decisions then — they needed a new drummer, and as well as a drummer they wanted to get in Dave Swarbrick. Swarbrick had played violin on several tracks on Unhalfbricking as a session player, and they had all been thrilled to work with him. Swarbrick was one of the most experienced musicians on the British folk circuit. He had started out in the fifties playing guitar with Beryl Marriott’s Ceilidh Band before switching to fiddle, and in 1963, long before Fairport had formed, he had already appeared on TV with the Ian Campbell Folk Group, led by Ian Campbell, the father of Ali and Robin Campbell, later of UB40: [Excerpt: The Ian Campbell Folk Group, “Shanten Bells (medley on Hullaballoo!)”] He’d sung with Ewan MacColl and A.L. Lloyd: [Excerpt: A.L. Lloyd, “Tom’s Gone to Hilo” ] And he’d formed his hugely successful duo with Martin Carthy, releasing records like “Byker Hill” which are often considered among the best British folk music of all time: [Excerpt: Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick, “Byker Hill”] By the time Fairport had invited him to play on Unhalfbricking, Swarbrick had already performed on twenty albums as a core band member, plus dozens more EPs, singles, and odd tracks on compilations. They had no reason to think they could actually get him to join their band. But they had three advantages. The first was that Swarbrick was sick of the traditional folk scene at the time, saying later “I didn’t like seven-eighths of the people involved in it, and it was extremely opportune to leave. I was suddenly presented with the possibilities of exploring the dramatic content of the songs to the full.” The second was that he was hugely excited to be playing with Richard Thompson, who was one of the most innovative guitarists of his generation, and Martin Carthy remembers him raving about Thompson after their initial sessions. (Carthy himself was and is no slouch on the guitar of course, and there was even talk of getting him to join the band at this point, though they decided against it — much to the relief of rhythm guitarist Simon Nicol, who is a perfectly fine player himself but didn’t want to be outclassed by *two* of the best guitarists in Britain at the same time). And the third was that Joe Boyd told him that Fairport were doing so well — they had a single just about to hit the charts with “Si Tu Dois Partir” — that he would only have to play a dozen gigs with Fairport in order to retire. As it turned out, Swarbrick would play with the group for a decade, and would never retire — I saw him on his last tour in 2015, only eight months before he died. The drummer the group picked was also a far more experienced musician than any of the rest, though in a very different genre. Dave Mattacks had no knowledge at all of the kind of music they played, having previously been a player in dance bands. When asked by Hutchings if he wanted to join the band, Mattacks’ response was “I don’t know anything about the music. I don’t understand it… I can’t tell one tune from another, they all sound the same… but if you want me to join the group, fine, because I really like it. I’m enjoying myself musically.” Mattacks brought a new level of professionalism to the band, thanks to his different background. Nicol said of him later “He was dilligent, clean, used to taking three white shirts to a gig… The application he could bring to his playing was amazing. With us, you only played well when you were feeling well.” This distinction applied to his playing as well. Nicol would later describe the difference between Mattacks’ drumming and Lamble’s by saying “Martin’s strength was as an imaginative drummer. DM came in with a strongly developed sense of rhythm, through keeping a big band of drunken saxophone players in order. A great time-keeper.” With this new line-up and a new sense of purpose, the group did as many of their contemporaries were doing and “got their heads together in the country”. Joe Boyd rented the group a mansion, Farley House, in Farley Chamberlayne, Hampshire, and they stayed there together for three months. At the start, the group seem to have thought that they were going to make another record like Unhalfbricking, with some originals, some songs by American songwriters, and a few traditional songs. Even after their stay in Farley Chamberlayne, in fact, they recorded a few of the American songs they’d rehearsed at the start of the process, Richard Farina’s “Quiet Joys of Brotherhood” and Bob Dylan and Roger McGuinn’s “Ballad of Easy Rider”: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Ballad of Easy Rider”] Indeed, the whole idea of “getting our heads together in the country” (as the cliche quickly became in the late sixties as half of the bands in Britain went through much the same kind of process as Fairport were doing — but usually for reasons more to do with drug burnout or trend following than recovering from serious life-changing trauma) seems to have been inspired by Bob Dylan and the Band getting together in Big Pink. But very quickly they decided to follow the lead of Ashley Hutchings, who had had something of a Damascene conversion to the cause of traditional English folk music. They were listening mostly to Music From Big Pink by the Band, and to the first album by Sweeney’s Men: [Excerpt: Sweeney’s Men, “The Handsome Cabin Boy”] And they decided that they were going to make something that was as English as those records were North American and Irish (though in the event there were also a few Scottish songs included on the record). Hutchings in particular was becoming something of a scholar of traditional music, regularly visiting Cecil Sharp House and having long conversations with A.L. Lloyd, discovering versions of different traditional songs he’d never encountered before. This was both amusing and bemusing Sandy Denny, who had joined a rock group in part to get away from traditional music; but she was comfortable singing the material, and knew a lot of it and could make a lot of suggestions herself. Swarbrick obviously knew the repertoire intimately, and Nicol was amenable, while Mattacks was utterly clueless about the folk tradition at this point but knew this was the music he wanted to make. Thompson knew very little about traditional music, and of all the band members except Denny he was the one who has shown the least interest in the genre in his subsequent career — but as we heard at the beginning, showing the least interest in the genre is a relative thing, and while Thompson was not hugely familiar with the genre, he *was* able to work with it, and was also more than capable of writing songs that fit in with the genre. Of the eleven songs on the album, which was titled Liege and Lief (which means, roughly, Lord and Loyalty), there were no cover versions of singer-songwriters. Eight were traditional songs, and three were originals, all written in the style of traditional songs. The album opened with “Come All Ye”, an introduction written by Denny and Hutchings (the only time the two would ever write together): [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Come All Ye”] The other two originals were songs where Thompson had written new lyrics to traditional melodies. On “Crazy Man Michael”, Swarbrick had said to Thompson that the tune to which he had set his new words was weaker than the lyrics, to which Thompson had replied that if Swarbrick felt that way he should feel free to write a new melody. He did, and it became the first of the small number of Thompson/Swarbrick collaborations: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Crazy Man Michael”] Thompson and Swarbrick would become a brief songwriting team, but as much as anything else it was down to proximity — the two respected each other as musicians, but never got on very well. In 1981 Swarbrick would say “Richard and I never got on in the early days of FC… we thought we did, but we never did. We composed some bloody good songs together, but it was purely on a basis of “you write that and I’ll write this, and we’ll put it together.” But we never sat down and had real good chats.” The third original on the album, and by far the most affecting, is another song where Thompson put lyrics to a traditional tune. In this case he thought he was putting the lyrics to the tune of “Willie O'Winsbury”, but he was basing it on a recording by Sweeney’s Men. The problem was that Sweeney’s Men had accidentally sung the lyrics of “Willie O'Winsbury'” to the tune of a totally different song, “Fause Foodrage”: [Excerpt: Sweeney’s Men, “Willie O’Winsbury”] Thompson took that melody, and set to it lyrics about loss and separation. Thompson has never been one to discuss the meanings of his lyrics in any great detail, and in the case of this one has said “I really don't know what it means. This song came out of a dream, and I pretty much wrote it as I dreamt it (it was the sixties), and didn't spend very long analyzing it. So interpret as you wish – or replace with your own lines.” But in the context of the traffic accident that had killed his tailor girlfriend and a bandmate, and injured most of his other bandmates, the lyrics about lonely travellers, the winding road, bruised and beaten sons, saying goodbye, and never cutting cloth, seem fairly self-explanatory: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Farewell, Farewell”] The rest of the album, though, was taken up by traditional tunes. There was a long medley of four different fiddle reels; a version of “Reynardine” (a song about a seductive man — or is he a fox? Or perhaps both — which had been recorded by Swarbrick and Carthy on their most recent album); a 19th century song about a deserter saved from the firing squad by Prince Albert; and a long take on “Tam Lin”, one of the most famous pieces in the Scottish folk music canon, a song that has been adapted in different ways by everyone from the experimental noise band Current 93 to the dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah to the comics writer Grant Morrison: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Tam Lin”] And “Matty Groves”, a song about a man killing his cheating wife and her lover, which actually has a surprisingly similar story to that of “1921” from another great concept album from that year, the Who’s Tommy. “Matty Groves” became an excuse for long solos and shows of instrumental virtuosity: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Matty Groves”] The album was recorded in September 1969, after their return from their break in the country and a triumphal performance at the Royal Festival Hall, headlining over fellow Witchseason artists John and Beverly Martyn and Nick Drake. It became a classic of the traditional folk genre — arguably *the* classic of the traditional folk genre. In 2007 BBC Radio 2’s Folk Music Awards gave it an award for most influential folk album of all time, and while such things are hard to measure, I doubt there’s anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of British folk and folk-rock music who would not at least consider that a reasonable claim. But once again, by the time the album came out in November, the band had changed lineups yet again. There was a fundamental split in the band – on one side were Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson, whose stance was, roughly, that Liege and Lief was a great experiment and a fun thing to do once, but really the band had two first-rate songwriters in themselves, and that they should be concentrating on their own new material, not doing these old songs, good as they were. They wanted to take the form of the traditional songs and use that form for new material — they wanted to make British folk-rock, but with the emphasis on the rock side of things. Hutchings, on the other hand, was equally sure that he wanted to make traditional music and go further down the rabbit hole of antiquity. With the zeal of the convert he had gone in a couple of years from being the leader of a band who were labelled “the British Jefferson Airplane” to becoming a serious scholar of traditional folk music. Denny was tired of touring, as well — she wanted to spend more time at home with Trevor Lucas, who was sleeping with other women when she was away and making her insecure. When the time came for the group to go on a tour of Denmark, Denny decided she couldn’t make it, and Hutchings was jubilant — he decided he was going to get A.L. Lloyd into the band in her place and become a *real* folk group. Then Denny reconsidered, and Hutchings was crushed. He realised that while he had always been the leader, he wasn’t going to be able to lead the band any further in the traditionalist direction, and quit the group — but not before he was delegated by the other band members to fire Denny. Until the publication of Richard Thompson’s autobiography in 2022, every book on the group or its members said that Denny quit the band again, which was presumably a polite fiction that the band agreed, but according to Thompson “Before we flew home, we decided to fire Sandy. I don't remember who asked her to leave – it was probably Ashley, who usually did the dirty work. She was reportedly shocked that we would take that step. She may have been fragile beneath the confident facade, but she still knew her worth.” Thompson goes on to explain that the reasons for kicking her out were that “I suppose we felt that in her mind she had already left” and that “We were probably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, though there wasn't a name for it back then.” They had considered inviting Trevor Lucas to join the band to make Denny more comfortable, but came to the (probably correct) conclusion that while he was someone they got on well with personally, he would be another big ego in a band that already had several, and that being around Denny and Lucas’ volatile relationship would, in Thompson’s phrasing, “have not always given one a feeling of peace and stability.” Hutchings originally decided he was going to join Sweeney’s Men, but that group were falling apart, and their first rehearsal with Hutchings would also be their last as a group, with only Hutchings and guitarist and mandolin player Terry Woods left in the band. They added Woods’ wife Gay, and another couple, Tim Hart and Maddy Prior, and formed a group called Steeleye Span, a name given them by Martin Carthy. That group, like Fairport, went to “get their heads together in the country” for three months and recorded an album of electric versions of traditional songs, Hark the Village Wait, on which Mattacks and another drummer, Gerry Conway, guested as Steeleye Span didn’t at the time have their own drummer: [Excerpt: Steeleye Span, “Blackleg Miner”] Steeleye Span would go on to have a moderately successful chart career in the seventies, but by that time most of the original lineup, including Hutchings, had left — Hutchings stayed with them for a few albums, then went on to form the first of a series of bands, all called the Albion Band or variations on that name, which continue to this day. And this is something that needs to be pointed out at this point — it is impossible to follow every single individual in this narrative as they move between bands. There is enough material in the history of the British folk-rock scene that someone could do a 500 Songs-style podcast just on that, and every time someone left Fairport, or Steeleye Span, or the Albion Band, or Matthews’ Southern Comfort, or any of the other bands we have mentioned or will mention, they would go off and form another band which would then fission, and some of its members would often join one of those other bands. There was a point in the mid-1970s where the Albion Band had two original members of Fairport Convention while Fairport Convention had none. So just in order to keep the narrative anything like wieldy, I’m going to keep the narrative concentrated on the two figures from Fairport — Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson — whose work outside the group has had the most influence on the wider world of rock music more broadly, and only deal with the other members when, as they often did, their careers intersected with those two. That doesn’t mean the other members are not themselves hugely important musicians, just that their importance has been primarily to the folk side of the folk-rock genre, and so somewhat outside the scope of this podcast. While Hutchings decided to form a band that would allow him to go deeper and deeper into traditional folk music, Sandy Denny’s next venture was rather different. For a long time she had been writing far more songs than she had ever played for her bandmates, like “Nothing More”, a song that many have suggested is about Thompson: [Excerpt: Fotheringay, “Nothing More”] When Joe Boyd heard that Denny was leaving Fairport Convention, he was at first elated. Fairport’s records were being distributed by A&M in the US at that point, but Island Records was in the process of opening up a new US subsidiary which would then release all future Fairport product — *but*, as far as A&M were concerned, Sandy Denny *was* Fairport Convention. They were only interested in her. Boyd, on the other hand, loved Denny’s work intensely, but from his point of view *Richard Thompson* was Fairport Convention. If he could get Denny signed directly to A&M as a solo artist before Island started its US operations, Witchseason could get a huge advance on her first solo record, while Fairport could continue making records for Island — he’d have two lucrative acts, on different labels. Boyd went over and spoke to A&M and got an agreement in principle that they would give Denny a forty-thousand-dollar advance on her first solo album — twice what they were paying for Fairport albums. The problem was that Denny didn’t want to be a solo act. She wanted to be the lead singer of a band. She gave many reasons for this — the one she gave to many journalists was that she had seen a Judy Collins show and been impressed, but noticed that Collins’ band were definitely a “backing group”, and as she put it “But that's all they were – a backing group. I suddenly thought, If you're playing together on a stage you might as well be TOGETHER.” Most other people in her life, though, say that the main reason for her wanting to be in a band was her desire to be with her boyfriend, Trevor Lucas. Partly this was due to a genuine desire to spend more time with someone with whom she was very much in love, partly it was a fear that he would cheat on her if she was away from him for long periods of time, and part of it seems to have been Lucas’ dislike of being *too* overshadowed by his talented girlfriend — he didn’t mind acknowledging that she was a major talent, but he wanted to be thought of as at least a minor one. So instead of going solo, Denny formed Fotheringay, named after the song she had written for Fairport. This new band consisted at first of Denny on vocals and occasional piano, Lucas on vocals and rhythm guitar, and Lucas’ old Eclection bandmate Gerry Conway on drums. For a lead guitarist, they asked Richard Thompson who the best guitarist in Britain was, and he told them Albert Lee. Lee in turn brought in bass player Pat Donaldson, but this lineup of the band barely survived a fortnight. Lee *was* arguably the best guitarist in Britain, certainly a reasonable candidate if you could ever have a singular best (as indeed was Thompson himself), but he was the best *country* guitarist in Britain, and his style simply didn’t fit with Fotheringay’s folk-influenced songs. He was replaced by American guitarist Jerry Donahue, who was not anything like as proficient as Lee, but who was still very good, and fit the band’s style much better. The new group rehearsed together for a few weeks, did a quick tour, and then went into the recording studio to record their debut, self-titled, album. Joe Boyd produced the album, but admitted himself that he only paid attention to those songs he considered worthwhile — the album contained one song by Lucas, “The Ballad of Ned Kelly”, and two cover versions of American singer-songwriter material with Lucas singing lead. But everyone knew that the songs that actually *mattered* were Sandy Denny’s, and Boyd was far more interested in them, particularly the songs “The Sea” and “The Pond and the Stream”: [Excerpt: Fotheringay, “The Pond and the Stream”] Fotheringay almost immediately hit financial problems, though. While other Witchseason acts were used to touring on the cheap, all packed together in the back of a Transit van with inexpensive equipment, Trevor Lucas had ambitions of being a rock star and wanted to put together a touring production to match, with expensive transport and equipment, including a speaker system that got nicknamed “Stonehenge” — but at the same time, Denny was unhappy being on the road, and didn’t play many gigs. As well as the band itself, the Fotheringay album also featured backing vocals from a couple of other people, including Denny’s friend Linda Peters. Peters was another singer from the folk clubs, and a good one, though less well-known than Denny — at this point she had only released a couple of singles, and those singles seemed to have been as much as anything else released as a novelty. The first of those, a version of Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” had been released as by “Paul McNeill and Linda Peters”: [Excerpt: Paul McNeill and Linda Peters, “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”] But their second single, a version of John D. Loudermilk’s “You’re Taking My Bag”, was released on the tiny Page One label, owned by Larry Page, and was released under the name “Paul and Linda”, clearly with the intent of confusing particularly gullible members of the record-buying public into thinking this was the McCartneys: [Excerpt: Paul and Linda, “You’re Taking My Bag”] Peters was though more financially successful than almost anyone else in this story, as she was making a great deal of money as a session singer. She actually did another session involving most of Fotheringay around this time. Witchseason had a number of excellent songwriters on its roster, and had had some success getting covers by people like Judy Collins, but Joe Boyd thought that they might possibly do better at getting cover versions if they were performed in less idiosyncratic arrangements. Donahue, Donaldson, and Conway went into the studio to record backing tracks, and vocals were added by Peters and another session singer, who according to some sources also provided piano. They cut songs by Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band: [Excerpt: Linda Peters, “You Get Brighter”] Ed Carter, formerly of The New Nadir but by this time firmly ensconced in the Beach Boys’ touring band where he would remain for the next quarter-century: [Excerpt: Linda Peters, “I Don’t Mind”] John and Beverly Martyn, and Nick Drake: [Excerpt: Elton John, “Saturday Sun”] There are different lineups of musicians credited for those sessions in different sources, but I tend to believe that it’s mostly Fotheringay for the simple reason that Donahue says it was him, Donaldson and Conway who talked Lucas and Denny into the mistake that destroyed Fotheringay because of these sessions. Fotheringay were in financial trouble already, spending far more money than they were bringing in, but their album made the top twenty and they were getting respect both from critics and from the public — in September, Sandy Denny was voted best British female singer by the readers of Melody Maker in their annual poll, which led to shocked headlines in the tabloids about how this “unknown” could have beaten such big names as Dusty Springfield and Cilla Black. Only a couple of weeks after that, they were due to headline at the Albert Hall. It should have been a triumph. But Donahue, Donaldson, and Conway had asked that singing pianist to be their support act. As Donahue said later “That was a terrible miscast. It was our fault. He asked if [he] could do it. Actually Pat, Gerry and I had to talk Sandy and Trevor into [it]… We'd done these demos and the way he was playing – he was a wonderful piano player – he was sensitive enough. We knew very little about his stage-show. We thought he'd be a really good opener for us.” Unfortunately, Elton John was rather *too* good. As Donahue continued “we had no idea what he had in mind, that he was going to do the most incredible rock & roll show ever. He pretty much blew us off the stage before we even got on the stage.” To make matters worse, Fotheringay’s set, which was mostly comprised of new material, was underrehearsed and sloppy, and from that point on no matter what they did people were counting the hours until the band split up. They struggled along for a while though, and started working on a second record, with Boyd again producing, though as Boyd later said “I probably shouldn't have been producing the record. My lack of respect for the group was clear, and couldn't have helped the atmosphere. We'd put out a record that had sold disappointingly, A&M was unhappy. Sandy's tracks on the first record are among the best things she ever did – the rest of it, who cares? And the artwork, Trevor's sister, was terrible. It would have been one thing if I'd been unhappy with it and it sold, and the group was working all the time, making money, but that wasn't the case … I knew what Sandy was capable of, and it was very upsetting to me.” The record would not be released for thirty-eight years: [Excerpt: Fotheringay, “Wild Mountain Thyme”] Witchseason was going badly into debt. Given all the fissioning of bands that we’ve already been talking about, Boyd had been stretched thin — he produced sixteen albums in 1970, and almost all of them lost money for the company. And he was getting more and more disillusioned with the people he was producing. He loved Beverly Martyn’s work, but had little time for her abusive husband John, who was dominating her recording and life more and more and would soon become a solo artist while making her stay at home (and stealing her ideas without giving her songwriting credit). The Incredible String Band were great, but they had recently converted to Scientology, which Boyd found annoying, and while he was working with all sorts of exciting artists like Vashti Bunyan and Nico, he was finding himself less and less important to the artists he mentored. Fairport Convention were a good example of this. After Denny and Hutchings had left the group, they’d decided to carry on as an electric folk group, performing an equal mix of originals by the Swarbrick and Thompson songwriting team and arrangements of traditional songs. The group were now far enough away from the “British Jefferson Airplane” label that they decided they didn’t need a female vocalist — and more realistically, while they’d been able to replace Judy Dyble, nobody was going to replace Sandy Denny. Though it’s rather surprising when one considers Thompson’s subsequent career that nobody seems to have thought of bringing in Denny’s friend Linda Peters, who was dating Joe Boyd at the time (as Denny had been before she met Lucas) as Denny’s replacement. Instead, they decided that Swarbrick and Thompson were going to share the vocals between them. They did, though, need a bass player to replace Hutchings. Swarbrick wanted to bring in Dave Pegg, with whom he had played in the Ian Campbell Folk Group, but the other band members initially thought the idea was a bad one. At the time, while they respected Swarbrick as a musician, they didn’t think he fully understood rock and roll yet, and they thought the idea of getting in a folkie who had played double bass rather than an electric rock bassist ridiculous. But they auditioned him to mollify Swarbrick, and found that he was exactly what they needed. As Joe Boyd later said “All those bass lines were great, Ashley invented them all, but he never could play them that well. He thought of them, but he was technically not a terrific bass player. He was a very inventive, melodic, bass player, but not a very powerful one technically. But having had the part explained to him once, Pegg was playing it better than Ashley had ever played it… In some rock bands, I think, ultimately, the bands that sound great, you can generally trace it to the bass player… it was at that point they became a great band, when they had Pegg.” The new lineup of Fairport decided to move in together, and found a former pub called the Angel, into which all the band members moved, along with their partners and children (Thompson was the only one who was single at this point) and their roadies. The group lived together quite happily, and one gets the impression that this was the period when they were most comfortable with each other, even though by this point they were a disparate group with disparate tastes, in music as in everything else. Several people have said that the only music all the band members could agree they liked at this point was the first two albums by The Band. With the departure of Hutchings from the band, Swarbrick and Thompson, as the strongest personalities and soloists, became in effect the joint leaders of the group, and they became collaborators as songwriters, trying to write new songs that were inspired by traditional music. Thompson described the process as “let’s take one line of this reel and slow it down and move it up a minor third and see what that does to it; let’s take one line of this ballad and make a whole song out of it. Chopping up the tradition to find new things to do… like a collage.” Generally speaking, Swarbrick and Thompson would sit by the fire and Swarbrick would play a melody he’d been working on, the two would work on it for a while, and Thompson would then go away and write the lyrics. This is how the two came up with songs like the nine-minute “Sloth”, a highlight of the next album, Full House, and one that would remain in Fairport’s live set for much of their career: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Sloth”] “Sloth” was titled that way because Thompson and Swarbrick were working on two tunes, a slow one and a fast one, and they jokingly named them “Sloth” and “Fasth”, but the latter got renamed to “Walk Awhile”, while “Sloth” kept its working title. But by this point, Boyd and Thompson were having a lot of conflict in the studio. Boyd was never the most technical of producers — he was one of those producers whose job is to gently guide the artists in the studio and create a space for the music to flourish, rather than the Joe Meek type with an intimate technical knowledge of the studio — and as the artists he was working with gained confidence in their own work they felt they had less and less need of him. During the making of the Full House album, Thompson and Boyd, according to Boyd, clashed on everything — every time Boyd thought Thompson had done a good solo, Thompson would say to erase it and let him have another go, while every time Boyd thought Thompson could do better, Thompson would say that was the take to keep. One of their biggest clashes was over Thompson’s song “Poor Will and the Jolly Hangman”, which was originally intended for release on the album, and is included in current reissues of it: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Poor Will and the Jolly Hangman”] Thompson had written that song inspired by what he thought was the unjust treatment of Alex Bramham, the driver in Fairport’s fatal car crash, by the courts — Bramham had been given a prison sentence of a few months for dangerous driving, while the group members thought he had not been at fault. Boyd thought it was one of the best things recorded for the album, but Thompson wasn’t happy with his vocal — there was one note at the top of the melody that he couldn’t quite hit — and insisted it be kept off the record, even though that meant it would be a shorter album than normal. He did this at such a late stage that early copies of the album actually had the title printed on the sleeve, but then blacked out. He now says in his autobiography “I could have persevered, double-tracked the voice, warmed up for longer – anything. It was a good track, and the record was lacking without it. When the album was re-released, the track was restored with a more confident vocal, and it has stayed there ever since.” During the sessions for Full House the group also recorded one non-album single, Thompson and Swarbrick’s “Now Be Thankful”: [Excerpt, Fairport Convention, “Now Be Thankful”] The B-side to that was a medley of two traditional tunes plus a Swarbrick original, but was given the deliberately ridiculous title “Sir B. McKenzie’s Daughter’s Lament For The 77th Mounted Lancers Retreat From The Straits Of Loch Knombe, In The Year Of Our Lord 1727, On The Occasion Of The Announcement Of Her Marriage To The Laird Of Kinleakie”: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Sir B. McKenzie’s Daughter’s Lament For The 77th Mounted Lancers Retreat From The Straits Of Loch Knombe, In The Year Of Our Lord 1727, On The Occasion Of The Announcement Of Her Marriage To The Laird Of Kinleakie”] The B. McKenzie in the title was a reference to the comic-strip character Barry McKenzie, a stereotype drunk Australian created for Private Eye magazine by the comedian Barry Humphries (later to become better known for his Dame Edna Everage character) but the title was chosen for one reason only — to get into the Guinness Book of Records for the song with the longest title. Which they did, though they were later displaced by the industrial band Test Dept, and their song “Long Live British Democracy Which Flourishes and Is Constantly Perfected Under the Immaculate Guidance of the Great, Honourable, Generous and Correct Margaret Hilda Thatcher. She Is the Blue Sky in the Hearts of All Nations. Our People Pay Homage and Bow in Deep Respect and Gratitude to Her. The Milk of Human Kindness”. Full House got excellent reviews in the music press, with Rolling Stone saying “The music shows that England has finally gotten her own equivalent to The Band… By calling Fairport an English equivalent of the Band, I meant that they have soaked up enough of the tradition of their countryfolk that it begins to show all over, while they maintain their roots in rock.” Off the back of this, the group went on their first US tour, culminating in a series of shows at the Troubadour in LA, on the same bill as Rick Nelson, which were recorded and later released as a live album: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Sloth (live)”] The Troubadour was one of the hippest venues at the time, and over their residency there the group got seen by many celebrities, some of whom joined them on stage. The first was Linda Ronstadt, who initially demurred, saying she didn’t know any of their songs. On being told they knew all of hers, she joined in with a rendition of “Silver Threads and Golden Needles”. Thompson was later asked to join Ronstadt’s backing band, who would go on to become the Eagles, but he said later of this offer “I would have hated it. I’d have hated being on the road with four or five miserable Americans — they always seem miserable. And if you see them now, they still look miserable on stage — like they don’t want to be there and they don’t like each other.” The group were also joined on stage at the Troubadour on one memorable night by some former bandmates of Pegg’s. Before joining the Ian Campbell Folk Group, Pegg had played around the Birmingham beat scene, and had been in bands with John Bonham and Robert Plant, who turned up to the Troubadour with their Led Zeppelin bandmate Jimmy Page (reports differ on whether the fourth member of Zeppelin, John Paul Jones, also came along). They all got up on stage together and jammed on songs like “Hey Joe”, “Louie Louie”, and various old Elvis tunes. The show was recorded, and the tapes are apparently still in the possession of Joe Boyd, who has said he refuses to release them in case he is murdered by the ghost of Peter Grant. According to Thompson, that night ended in a three-way drinking contest between Pegg, Bonham, and Janis Joplin, and it’s testament to how strong the drinking culture is around Fairport and the British folk scene in general that Pegg outdrank both of them. According to Thompson, Bonham was found naked by a swimming pool two days later, having missed two gigs. For all their hard rock image, Led Zeppelin were admirers of a lot of the British folk and folk-rock scene, and a few months later Sandy Denny would become the only outside vocalist ever to appear on a Led Zeppelin record when she duetted with Plant on “The Battle of Evermore” on the group’s fourth album: [Excerpt: Led Zeppelin, “The Battle of Evermore”] Denny would never actually get paid for her appearance on one of the best-selling albums of all time. That was, incidentally, not the only session that Denny was involved in around this time — she also sang on the soundtrack to a soft porn film titled Swedish Fly Girls, whose soundtrack was produced by Manfred Mann: [Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “What Will I Do With Tomorrow?”] Shortly after Fairport’s trip to America, Joe Boyd decided he was giving up on Witchseason. The company was now losing money, and he was finding himself having to produce work for more and more acts as the various bands fissioned. The only ones he really cared about were Richard Thompson, who he was finding it more and more difficult to work with, Nick Drake, who wanted to do his next album with just an acoustic guitar anyway, Sandy Denny, who he felt was wasting her talents in Fotheringay, and Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band, who was more distant since his conversion to Scientology. Boyd did make some attempts to keep the company going. On a trip to Sweden, he negotiated an agreement with the manager and publisher of a Swedish band whose songs he’d found intriguing, the Hep Stars. Boyd was going to publish their songs in the UK, and in return that publisher, Stig Anderson, would get the rights to Witchseason’s catalogue in Scandinavia — a straight swap, with no money changing hands. But before Boyd could get round to signing the paperwork, he got a better offer from Mo Ostin of Warners — Ostin wanted Boyd to come over to LA and head up Warners’ new film music department. Boyd sold Witchseason to Island Records and moved to LA with his fiancee Linda Peters, spending the next few years working on music for films like Deliverance and A Clockwork Orange, as well as making his own documentary about Jimi Hendrix, and thus missed out on getting the UK publishing rights for ABBA, and all the income that would have brought him, for no money. And it was that decision that led to the breakup of Fotheringay. Just before Christmas 1970, Fotheringay were having a difficult session, recording the track “John the Gun”: [Excerpt: Fotheringay, “John the Gun”] Boyd got frustrated and kicked everyone out of the session, and went for a meal and several drinks with Denny. He kept insisting that she should dump the band and just go solo, and then something happened that the two of them would always describe differently. She asked him if he would continue to produce her records if she went solo, and he said he would. According to Boyd’s recollection of the events, he meant that he would fly back from California at some point to produce her records. According to Denny, he told her that if she went solo he would stay in Britain and not take the job in LA. This miscommunication was only discovered after Denny told the rest of Fotheringay after the Christmas break that she was splitting the band. Jerry Donahue has described that as the worst moment of his life, and Denny felt very guilty about breaking up a band with some of her closest friends in — and then when Boyd went over to the US anyway she felt a profound betrayal. Two days before Fotheringay’s final concert, in January 1971, Sandy Denny signed a solo deal with Island records, but her first solo album would not end up produced by Joe Boyd. Instead, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens was co-produced by Denny, John Wood — the engineer who had worked with Boyd on pretty much everything he’d produced, and Richard Thompson, who had just quit Fairport Convention, though he continued living with them at the Angel, at least until a truck crashed into the building in February 1971, destroying its entire front wall and forcing them to relocate. The songs chosen for The North Star Grassman and the Ravens reflected the kind of choices Denny would make on her future albums, and her eclectic taste in music. There was, of course, the obligatory Dylan cover, and the traditional folk ballad “Blackwaterside”, but there was also a cover version of Brenda Lee’s “Let’s Jump the Broomstick”: [Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Let’s Jump the Broomstick”] Most of the album, though, was made up of originals about various people in Denny’s life, like “Next Time Around”, about her ex-boyfriend Jackson C Frank: [Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Next Time Around”] The album made the top forty in the UK — Denny’s only solo album to do so — and led to her once again winning the “best female singer” award in Melody Maker’s readers’ poll that year — the male singer award was won by Rod Stewart. Both Stewart and Denny appeared the next year on the London Symphony Orchestra’s all-star version of The Who’s Tommy, which had originally been intended as a vehicle for Stewart before Roger Daltrey got involved. Stewart’s role was reduced to a single song, “Pinball Wizard”, while Denny sang on “It’s a Boy”: [Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “It’s a Boy”] While Fotheringay had split up, all the band members play on The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. Guitarists Donahue and Lucas only play on a couple of the tracks, with Richard Thompson playing most of the guitar on the record. But Fotheringay’s rhythm section of Pat Donaldson and Gerry Conway play on almost every track. Another musician on the album, Ian Whiteman, would possibly have a profound effect on the future direction of Richard Thompson’s career and life. Whiteman was the former keyboard player for the mod band The Action, having joined them just before they became the blues-rock band Mighty Baby. But Mighty Baby had split up when all of the band except the lead singer had converted to Islam. Richard Thompson was on his own spiritual journey at this point, and became a Sufi – the same branch of Islam as Whiteman – soon after the session, though Thompson has said that his conversion was independent of Whiteman’s. The two did become very close and work together a lot in the mid-seventies though. Thompson had supposedly left Fairport because he was writing material that wasn’t suited to the band, but he spent more than a year after quitting the group working on sessions rather than doing anything with his own material, and these sessions tended to involve the same core group of musicians. One of the more unusual was a folk-rock supergroup called The Bunch, put together by Trevor Lucas. Richard Branson had recently bought a recording studio, and wanted a band to test it out before opening it up for commercial customers, so with this free studio time Lucas decided to record a set of fifties rock and roll covers. He gathered together Thompson, Denny, Whiteman, Ashley Hutchings, Dave Mattacks, Pat Donaldson, Gerry Conway, pianist Tony Cox, the horn section that would later form the core of the Average White Band, and Linda Peters, who had now split up with Joe Boyd and returned to the UK, and who had started dating Thompson. They recorded an album of covers of songs by Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, Johnny Otis and others: [Excerpt: The Bunch, “Willie and the Hand Jive”] The early seventies was a hugely productive time for this group of musicians, as they all continued playing on each other’s projects. One notable album was No Roses by Shirley Collins, which featured Thompson, Mattacks, Whiteman, Simon Nicol, Lal and Mike Waterson, and Ashley Hutchings, who was at that point married to Collins, as well as some more unusual musicians like the free jazz saxophonist Lol Coxhill: [Excerpt: Shirley Collins and the Albion Country Band, “Claudy Banks”] Collins was at the time the most respected female singer in British traditional music, and already had a substantial career including a series of important records made with her sister Dolly, work with guitarists like Davey Graham, and time spent in the 1950s collecting folk songs in the Southern US with her then partner Alan Lomax – according to Collins she did much of the actual work, but Lomax only mentioned her in a single sentence in his book on this work. Some of the same group of musicians went on to work on an album of traditional Morris dancing tunes, titled Morris On, credited to “Ashley Hutchings, Richard Thompson, Dave Mattacks, John Kirkpatrick and Barry Dransfield”, with Collins singing lead on two tracks: [Excerpt: Ashley Hutchings, Richard Thompson, Dave Mattacks, John Kirkpatrick and Barry Dransfield with Shirley Collins, “The Willow Tree”] Thompson thought that that album was the best of the various side projects he was involved in at the time, comparing it favourably to Rock On, which he thought was rather slight, saying later “Conceptually, Fairport, Ashley and myself and Sandy were developing a more fragile style of music that nobody else was particularly interested in, a British Folk Rock idea that had a logical development to it, although we all presented it our own way. Morris On was rather more true to what we were doing. Rock On was rather a retro step. I'm not sure it was lasting enough as a record but Sandy did sing really well on the Buddy Holly songs.” Hutchings used the musicians on No Roses and Morris On as the basis for his band the Albion Band, which continues to this day. Simon Nicol and Dave Mattacks both quit Fairport to join the Albion Band, though Mattacks soon returned. Nicol would not return to Fairport for several years, though, and for a long period in the mid-seventies Fairport Convention had no original members. Unfortunately, while Collins was involved in the Albion Band early on, she and Hutchings ended up divorcing, and the stress from the divorce led to Collins developing spasmodic dysphonia, a stress-related illness which makes it impossible for the sufferer to sing. She did eventually regain her vocal ability, but between 1978 and 2016 she was unable to perform at all, and lost decades of her career. Richard Thompson occasionally performed with the Albion Band early on, but he was getting stretched a little thin with all these sessions. Linda Peters said later of him “When I came back from America, he was working in Sandy’s band, and doing sessions by the score. Always with Pat Donaldson and Dave Mattacks. Richard would turn up with his guitar, one day he went along to do a session with one of those folkie lady singers — and there were Pat and DM. They all cracked. Richard smashed his amp and said “Right! No more sessions!” In 1972 he got round to releasing his first solo album, Henry the Human Fly, which featured guest appearances by Linda Peters and Sandy Denny among others: [Excerpt: Richard Thompson, “The Angels Took My Racehorse Away”] Unfortunately, while that album has later become regarded as one of the classics of its genre, at the time it was absolutely slated by the music press. The review in Melody Maker, for example, read in part “Some of Richard Thompson’s ideas sound great – which is really the saving grace of this album, because most of the music doesn’t. The tragedy is that Thompson’s “British rock music” is such an unconvincing concoction… Even the songs that do integrate rock and traditional styles of electric guitar rhythms and accordion and fiddle decoration – and also include explicit, meaningful lyrics are marred by bottle-up vocals, uninspiring guitar phrases and a general lack of conviction in performance.” Henry the Human Fly was released in the US by Warners, who had a reciprocal licensing deal with Island (and for whom Joe Boyd was working at the time, which may have had something to do with that) but according to Thompson it became the lowest-selling record that Warners ever put out (though I’ve also seen that claim made about Van Dyke Parks’ Song Cycle, another album that has later been rediscovered). Thompson was hugely depressed by this reaction, and blamed his own singing. Happily, though, by this point he and Linda had become a couple — they would marry in 1972 — and they started playing folk clubs as a duo, or sometimes in a trio with Simon Nicol. Thompson was also playing with Sandy Denny’s backing band at this point, and played on every track on her second solo album, Sandy. This album was meant to be her big commercial breakthrough, with a glamorous cover photo by David Bailey, and with a more American sound, including steel guitar by Sneaky Pete Kleinow of the Flying Burrito Brothers (whose overdubs were supervised in LA by Joe Boyd): [Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Tomorrow is a Long Time”] The album was given a big marketing push by Island, and “Listen, Listen” was made single of the week on the Radio 1 Breakfast show: [Excerpt: Sandy Denny, “Listen, Listen”] But it did even worse than the previous album, sending her into something of a depression. Linda Thompson (as the former Linda Peters now was) said of this period “After the Sandy album, it got her down that her popularity didn't suddenly increase in leaps and bounds, and that was the start of her really fretting about the way her career was going. Things only escalated after that. People like me or Martin Carthy or Norma Waterson would think, ‘What are you on about? This is folk music.'” After Sandy’s release, Denny realised she could no longer afford to tour with a band, and so went back to performing just acoustically or on piano. The only new music to be released by either of these ex-members of Fairport Convention in 1973 was, oddly, on an album by the band they were no longer members of. After Thompson had left Fairport, the group had managed to release two whole albums with the same lineup — Swarbrick, Nicol, Pegg, and Mattacks. But then Nicol and Mattacks had both quit the band to join the Albion Band with their former bandmate Ashley Hutchings, leading to a situation where the Albion Band had two original members of Fairport plus their longtime drummer while Fairport Convention itself had no original members and was down to just Swarbrick and Pegg. Needing to fulfil their contracts, they then recruited three former members of Fotheringay — Lucas on vocals and rhythm guitar, Donahue on lead guitar, and Conway on drums. Conway was only a session player at the time, and Mattacks soon returned to the band, but Lucas and Donahue became full-time members. This new lineup of Fairport Convention released two albums in 1973, widely regarded as the group’s most inconsistent records, and on the title track of the first, “Rosie”, Richard Thompson guested on guitar, with Sandy Denny and Linda Thompson on backing vocals: [Excerpt: Fairport Convention, “Rosie”] Neither Sandy Denny nor Richard Thompson released a record themselves in 1973, but in neither case was this through the artists’ choice. The record industry was changing in the early 1970s, as we’ll see in later episodes, and was less inclined to throw good money after bad in the pursuit of art. Island Records prided itself on being a home for great artists, but it was still a business, and needed to make money. We’ll talk about the OPEC oil crisis and its effect on the music industry much more when the podcast gets to 1973, but in brief, the production of oil by the US peaked in 1970 and started to decrease, leading to them importing more and more oil from the Middle East. As a result of this, oil prices rose slowly between 1971 and 1973, then very quickly towards the end of 1973 as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict that year. As vinyl is made of oil, suddenly producing records became much more expensive, and in this period a lot of labels decided not to release already-completed albums, until what they hoped would be a brief period of shortages passed. Both Denny and Thompson recorded albums at this point that got put to one side by Island. In the case of Thompson, it was the first album by Richard and Linda as a duo, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight: [Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight”] Today, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight is widely regarded as one of the greatest albums of all time, and as one of the two masterpieces that bookended Richard and Linda’s career as a duo and their marriage. But when they recorded the album, full of Richard’s dark songs, it was the opposite of commercial. Even a song that’s more or less a boy-girl song, like “Has He Got a Friend for Me?” has lyrics like “He wouldn’t notice me passing by/I could be in the gutter, or dangling down from a tree” [Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “Has He got a Friend For Me?”] While something like “The Calvary Cross” is oblique and haunted, and seems to cast a pall over the entire album: [Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “The Calvary Cross”] The album itself had been cheap to make — it had been recorded in only a week, with Thompson bringing in musicians he knew well and had worked with a lot previously to cut the tracks as-live in only a handful of takes — but Island didn’t think it was worth releasing. The record stayed on the shelf for nearly a year after recording, until Island got a new head of A&R, Richard Williams. Williams said of the album’s release “Muff Winwood had been doing A&R, but he was more interested in production… I had a conversation with Muff as soon as I got there, and he said there are a few hangovers, some outstanding problems. And one of them was Richard Thompson. He said there’s this album we gave him the money to make — which was I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight — and nobody’s very interested in it. Henry the Human Fly had been a bit of a commercial disappointment, and although Island was altruistic and independent and known for only recording good stuff, success was important… Either a record had to do well or somebody had to believe in it a lot. And it seemed as if neither of those things were true at that point of Richard.” Williams, though, was hugely impressed when he listened to the album. He compared Richard Thompson’s guitar playing to John Coltrane’s sax, and called Thompson “the folk poet of the rainy streets”, but also said “Linda brightened it, made it more commercial. and I thought that “Bright Lights” itself seemed a really commercial song.” The rest of the management at Island got caught up in Williams’ enthusiasm, and even decided to release the title track as a single: [Excerpt: Richard and Linda Thompson, “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight”] Neither single nor album charted — indeed it would not be until 1991 that Richard Thompson would make a record that made the top forty in the UK — but the album got enough critical respect that Richard and Linda released two albums the year after. The first of these, Hokey Pokey, is a much more upbeat record than their previous one — Richard Thompson has called it “quite a music-hall influenced record” and cited the influence of George Formby and Harry Lauder. For once, the claim of music hall influence is audible in the music. Usually when a British musician is claimed to have a music ha

In this bold and revealing episode, Jamie Shae welcomes interior designer and truth-teller Kami Gray, founder of The Psychologie of Home Design School. Together, they dive deep into what our homes reveal about our beliefs—and how women can stop second-guessing themselves and start designing the lives they're worthy of. From the unspoken rules that keep women playing small to the ways men are socially conditioned to leap without hesitation, this conversation unpacks the confidence gap that keeps women lingering in doubt, fear, and perfectionism. Kami shares how claiming beauty, power, and space in your environment can shift your identity at the root level. This isn't just about wallpaper or throw pillows—it's about worth, truth, bravery, and building a life that feels as good as it looks. If you've ever wondered why it feels easier for men to chase their dreams—and what it takes for women to finally go all in—this one's for you.

In this conversation, Kami Pyvand shares his unique journey from being a restaurant manager to a successful realtor in Atlanta. He discusses the importance of communication, networking, and adaptability in the real estate market, as well as the foundational principles that have guided his success over the years. Kami emphasizes the need for realtors to stay connected with clients and to continuously improve their skills through education and coaching. The conversation also touches on the challenges faced during market fluctuations and the strategies that can help realtors thrive in any environment.   Professional Real Estate Investors - How we can help you: Investor Fuel Mastermind:  Learn more about the Investor Fuel Mastermind, including 100% deal financing, massive discounts from vendors and sponsors you're already using, our world class community of over 150 members, and SO much more here: http://www.investorfuel.com/apply   Investor Machine Marketing Partnership:  Are you looking for consistent, high quality lead generation? Investor Machine is America's #1 lead generation service professional investors. Investor Machine provides true ‘white glove' support to help you build the perfect marketing plan, then we'll execute it for you…talking and working together on an ongoing basis to help you hit YOUR goals! Learn more here: http://www.investormachine.com   Coaching with Mike Hambright:  Interested in 1 on 1 coaching with Mike Hambright? Mike coaches entrepreneurs looking to level up, build coaching or service based businesses (Mike runs multiple 7 and 8 figure a year businesses), building a coaching program and more. Learn more here: https://investorfuel.com/coachingwithmike   Attend a Vacation/Mastermind Retreat with Mike Hambright: Interested in joining a “mini-mastermind” with Mike and his private clients on an upcoming “Retreat”, either at locations like Cabo San Lucas, Napa, Park City ski trip, Yellowstone, or even at Mike's East Texas “Big H Ranch”? Learn more here: http://www.investorfuel.com/retreat   Property Insurance: Join the largest and most investor friendly property insurance provider in 2 minutes. Free to join, and insure all your flips and rentals within minutes! There is NO easier insurance provider on the planet (turn insurance on or off in 1 minute without talking to anyone!), and there's no 15-30% agent mark up through this platform!  Register here: https://myinvestorinsurance.com/   New Real Estate Investors - How we can work together: Investor Fuel Club (Coaching and Deal Partner Community): Looking to kickstart your real estate investing career? Join our one of a kind Coaching Community, Investor Fuel Club, where you'll get trained by some of the best real estate investors in America, and partner with them on deals! You don't need $ for deals…we'll partner with you and hold your hand along the way! Learn More here: http://www.investorfuel.com/club   —--------------------

Selamat datang di episode terbaru kami, di mana kita akan membahas sebuah metodologi yang mengubah cara kita berinovasi: Gamestorming. Di era pengetahuan saat ini, metode kerja tradisional yang diwariskan dari zaman industri seringkali gagal memicu kreativitas dan terobosan yang kita butuhkan. Proses yang kaku dan terprediksi justru menghambat penemuan. Gamestorming hadir sebagai "buku pedoman untuk para inovator," menawarkan kerangka kerja sistematis untuk menavigasi ambiguitas dan memecahkan masalah kompleks melalui permainan yang terstruktur. Dalam episode ini, kita akan mengupas tuntas apa itu Gamestorming dan mengapa pendekatan ini menjadi sistem operasi yang sangat dibutuhkan untuk inovasi di dunia bisnis modern. Lalu, apa yang membedakan 'permainan' dalam Gamestorming dari sekadar 'bermain'? Kita akan mendalami anatomi sebuah permainan—mulai dari ruang permainan yang aman, batasan yang jelas, aturan interaksi, hingga artefak fisik seperti sticky notes yang mengubah ide abstrak menjadi objek nyata. Struktur inilah yang menciptakan keamanan psikologis bagi tim untuk bereksperimen, mengambil risiko, dan bahkan gagal tanpa konsekuensi di dunia nyata. Pendekatan ini sangat efektif untuk menghadapi "tujuan samar" (fuzzy goals), di mana tujuan akhir tidak sepenuhnya jelas, memungkinkan penemuan tak terduga yang seringkali menjadi cikal bakal inovasi sejati.   Terakhir, kami akan memberikan panduan praktis tentang bagaimana Anda bisa mulai menerapkan Gamestorming. Kami akan membahas struktur tiga babak yang fundamental dalam setiap sesi—Membuka, Menjelajahi, dan Menutup—sebuah ritme yang mengelola energi kelompok dan mengoptimalkan hasil dari pemikiran divergen hingga konvergen. Kami juga akan menyoroti keterampilan inti yang dibutuhkan, mulai dari seni mengajukan pertanyaan yang tepat hingga kekuatan bahasa visual dan improvisasi. Dengarkan episode ini untuk mendapatkan wawasan dan alat yang dapat ditindaklanjuti untuk mengubah rapat Anda dari diskusi yang membosankan menjadi sesi inovasi yang dinamis dan produktif.  

Selamat datang di episode kali ini, di mana kita akan membahas sebuah isu krusial dalam reformasi birokrasi: bagaimana kita mengubah unit pengembangan SDM dari sekadar pelaksana administratif menjadi arsitek talenta yang strategis? Di tengah tantangan tata kelola lingkungan dan kehutanan yang semakin kompleks, Kementerian Kehutanan (Kemenhut) memerlukan birokrat yang unggul. Fokus kita adalah pada Badan Penyuluhan dan Pengembangan SDM (BP2SDM) Kementerian Kehutanan, sebuah unit dengan potensi besar yang perannya perlu dioptimalkan agar menjadi motor penggerak utama dalam meningkatkan kinerja kementerian. Dalam diskusi ini, kita akan mengupas kerangka kerja transformasi BP2SDM yang berlandaskan pada dua pilar utama: meritokrasi dan manajemen talenta. Meritokrasi menjadi fondasi untuk memastikan setiap keputusan terkait karier ASN didasarkan pada kompetensi dan kinerja secara adil. Sementara itu, manajemen talenta menjadi strategi proaktif untuk menemukan, mengembangkan, dan mempertahankan individu-individu terbaik. Kami akan membedah langkah-langkah konkretnya, mulai dari mengubah pelatihan generik menjadi pengembangan individu yang terpersonalisasi hingga membentuk talent review board di tingkat pimpinan. Pada akhirnya, penguatan peran BP2SDM bukanlah sekadar perbaikan prosedur kepegawaian, melainkan sebuah investasi strategis untuk masa depan tata kelola lingkungan Indonesia. Dengan menempatkan talenta terbaik di posisi yang tepat melalui proses yang transparan, Kemenhut akan lebih siap menghadapi tantangan zaman. Lebih dari itu, model transformasi ini bisa menjadi cetak biru bagi kementerian dan lembaga lain dalam mewujudkan cita-cita birokrasi berkelas dunia. Mari simak pembahasannya lebih lanjut.

Selamat datang di episode di mana kita membongkar aturan permainan pemasaran dan hubungan masyarakat di era digital. Pernahkah Anda merasa bahwa strategi pemasaran tradisional—iklan massal yang menginterupsi dan rilis pers yang hanya ditujukan untuk media—tidak lagi efektif? Anda tidak sendirian. Lanskap telah berubah secara fundamental, beralih dari monolog korporat ke dialog komunitas. Dalam episode ini, kita akan menjelajahi "Aturan Baru Pemasaran & PR," sebuah paradigma yang diperkenalkan oleh David Meerman Scott, yang menggeser fokus dari interupsi satu arah ke komunikasi langsung, konten yang berharga, dan keaslian yang mutlak. Kita akan membahas mengapa "membeli" perhatian melalui iklan mahal atau "memohon" liputan media kini menjadi usang di dunia di mana Anda dapat menjangkau audiens Anda secara langsung.       Inti dari revolusi ini adalah dua pergeseran fundamental: dari produk ke persona, dan dari iklan ke penerbitan. Kami akan menguraikan mengapa langkah paling krusial dalam setiap strategi modern adalah pengembangan "persona pembeli"—memahami audiens Anda secara mendalam, termasuk tujuan, tantangan, dan motivasi mereka. Setelah Anda benar-benar mengenal audiens Anda, prinsip selanjutnya adalah "Anda adalah apa yang Anda publikasikan." Kami akan membahas bagaimana organisasi yang sukses saat ini berpikir seperti perusahaan media, menciptakan konten yang berharga seperti blog, video, dan e-book yang mendidik dan menginformasikan, bukan hanya menjual. Dari membangun komunitas yang otentik di media sosial hingga memanfaatkan kekuatan video bentuk pendek di platform seperti TikTok, kami akan menunjukkan bagaimana prinsip-prinsip ini diterapkan dalam praktik.           Bergabunglah dengan kami saat kami menganalisis bagaimana fondasi ini tetap relevan di tengah gelombang teknologi baru. Kami akan membahas bagaimana Kecerdasan Buatan (AI) mempercepat personalisasi dalam skala besar, bagaimana Ekonomi Kreator telah mengubah pemasaran influencer menjadi kemitraan strategis, dan bagaimana peraturan privasi data seperti GDPR telah menjadikan kepercayaan sebagai metrik pemasaran yang terukur. Episode ini akan memberi Anda kerangka kerja untuk tidak hanya menavigasi lanskap digital saat ini tetapi juga untuk berkembang di dalamnya, mengubah cara Anda berkomunikasi dan terhubung dengan audiens Anda selamanya. Dengarkan sekarang untuk mempelajari cara menerapkan Aturan Baru dan memenangkan hati dan pikiran di era digital.  

Mengapa kita terus-menerus menciptakan hasil yang tidak kita inginkan, baik dalam organisasi maupun masyarakat luas? Jawabannya mungkin tidak terletak pada strategi yang lebih baik atau teknologi yang lebih canggih, melainkan pada sesuatu yang tak kasat mata: kualitas "tanah sosial" kita. Dalam episode kali ini, kita akan menjelajahi gagasan revolusioner bahwa kepemimpinan sejati bukanlah tentang mengelola hasil akhir, melainkan tentang menjadi "pekebun" yang dengan sabar mengolah kualitas kesadaran, kepercayaan, dan hubungan—fondasi tak terlihat tempat semua pencapaian besar bertumbuh. Kami akan memandu Anda melalui tujuh laku inti dari Kepemimpinan Ekosistem, sebuah kerangka kerja transformatif yang dimulai dari dalam diri. Perjalanan ini membawa kita dari seni Mendengarkan secara mendalam dan melakukan Dialog yang menyembuhkan, menuju heningnya Presencing untuk terhubung dengan masa depan. Dari sana, kita bangkit untuk mewujudkan visi bersama melalui Ko-Imajinasi dan Ko-Kreasi, hingga akhirnya membangun sistem baru yang mendukung kehidupan melalui Tata Kelola Ekosistem. Ini bukan sekadar teori, melainkan panggilan untuk bertindak bagi siapa pun yang ingin melihat perubahan nyata di sekitarnya. Temukan bagaimana Anda bisa mulai mengolah ladang sosial di lingkungan Anda, mengubah perpecahan menjadi kolaborasi, dan keputusasaan menjadi harapan yang bertumbuh. Siapkan diri Anda untuk melihat kepemimpinan dari sudut pandang yang sama sekali baru. Dengarkan episode lengkapnya sekarang!

Di tengah lautan informasi dan berita yang tak ada habisnya, pernahkah Anda merasa kesulitan membedakan mana yang benar dan mana yang hoaks? Selamat datang di era di mana kemampuan untuk berpikir jernih bukan lagi sebuah pilihan, melainkan sebuah keharusan. Dalam episode podcast kali ini, kita akan mengasah senjata paling ampuh yang kita miliki: pikiran kita sendiri. Kita akan menjelajahi apa itu berpikir kritis, bukan sebagai konsep akademis yang rumit, tetapi sebagai keahlian praktis seorang "detektif pikiran". Ini adalah seni untuk berhenti sejenak, bertanya, menganalisis, dan mengevaluasi informasi sebelum kita menerimanya sebagai kebenaran—sebuah keterampilan yang akan mengubah cara Anda mengambil keputusan dalam hidup, karier, dan sebagai warga negara. Kami akan membekali Anda dengan perangkat praktis untuk menjadi pemikir yang lebih tajam. Mulai dari membiasakan diri bertanya "5W1H" (What, Why, Who, Where, When, How), belajar mengenali jebakan bias kognitif yang sering menipu kita, hingga membedakan mana fakta yang bisa diverifikasi dan mana opini yang subjektif. Kami akan membahas studi kasus nyata, seperti hoaks "File APK Data Pemilu" yang viral di Indonesia, untuk menunjukkan bagaimana seorang pemikir kritis dapat membongkar penipuan dengan beberapa langkah sederhana, sementara yang lain mudah terjebak karena dorongan emosi dan kurangnya verifikasi. Tentu saja, menjadi seorang pemikir kritis memiliki tantangannya sendiri. Rasa malas, tekanan sosial untuk setuju, dan pengaruh emosi sering kali menghalangi kita untuk berpikir objektif. Namun, kabar baiknya adalah berpikir kritis adalah sebuah keterampilan yang bisa dilatih dan diasah oleh siapa saja. Anggaplah ini sebagai superpower Anda dalam menghadapi dunia modern yang kompleks. Dengarkan episode ini untuk mulai membangun kekuatan super Anda, mengambil kendali atas pikiran Anda, dan menavigasi dunia dengan lebih bijak dan percaya diri.

Pernahkah Anda merasa frustrasi melihat program sosial yang hebat namun gagal mencapai skala yang luas? Di dunia yang penuh dengan niat baik dan sumber daya yang terbatas, banyak organisasi nirlaba dan sosial terjebak dalam siklus "perencanaan-pelaksanaan" yang kaku, yang sering kali menghabiskan dana besar hanya untuk menyadari bahwa solusi mereka tidak berkelanjutan atau tidak benar-benar menjawab kebutuhan komunitas. Episode kali ini membongkar mengapa pendekatan tradisional sering kali gagal dan mengapa semangat saja tidak cukup untuk menciptakan perubahan yang langgeng. Di sinilah "Lean Impact" mengubah permainan. Dengan meminjam prinsip-prinsip inovasi dari dunia startup teknologi—seperti siklus Build-Measure-Learn (Bangun-Ukur-Pelajari), Minimum Viable Product (MVP), dan keberanian untuk melakukan pivot—Ann Mei Chang menawarkan sebuah peta jalan yang radikal. Kami akan membahas tiga pilar utamanya: Berpikir Besar untuk menetapkan tujuan yang ambisius, Memulai dari yang Kecil untuk menguji asumsi dengan cepat dan murah, serta Terus-Menerus Mengejar Dampak sebagai satu-satunya metrik keberhasilan sejati. Pendekatan ini bukan tentang gagal cepat, tetapi tentang belajar cepat. Baik Anda seorang pemimpin nirlaba, filantropis, atau pegiat sosial, episode ini akan memberikan Anda alat dan kerangka berpikir praktis untuk memaksimalkan dampak dari setiap sumber daya yang Anda miliki. Dengarkan sekarang untuk menemukan bagaimana organisasi seperti VisionSpring dan Proximity Designs berhasil menerapkan prinsip Lean Impactuntuk mengubah kehidupan jutaan orang. Siapkan diri Anda untuk berhenti mendanai proyek dan mulai mendanai hasil.

Selamat datang di episode kami, di mana kita akan menggali lebih dalam tentang apa yang membuat sebuah kolaborasi tim benar-benar berhasil. Berdasarkan buku "The Art & Science of Facilitation" oleh Marsha Acker, kita akan mengupas bagaimana fasilitasi yang efektif bukan hanya tentang mengikuti serangkaian aturan, tetapi juga tentang merangkul intuisi dan kesadaran diri. Episode ini akan membahas dualitas krusial ini: "sains" dari fasilitasi yang mencakup model dan proses terstruktur, serta "seni" yang menuntut kehadiran, keberanian, dan kemampuan untuk menavigasi dinamika manusia yang kompleks. Dalam diskusi ini, kita akan membedah lima prinsip utama yang menjadi fondasi seorang fasilitator andal. Prinsip-prinsip ini—mulai dari menjaga netralitas hingga kemampuan untuk "berdiri di tengah badai" saat konflik muncul—adalah jembatan antara teori dan praktik. Anda akan belajar mengapa memegang agenda kelompok dan menghargai kearifan kolektif mereka adalah kunci untuk membuka potensi sejati sebuah tim, mengubah pertemuan biasa menjadi sesi yang penuh terobosan dan inovasi. Baik Anda seorang Scrum Master, manajer proyek, atau pemimpin tim, episode ini menawarkan wawasan praktis untuk meningkatkan kemampuan Anda. Kami tidak hanya membahas "apa yang harus dilakukan," tetapi juga "bagaimana cara menjadi" fasilitator yang mampu menciptakan ruang aman bagi setiap suara untuk didengar. Bergabunglah bersama kami untuk menemukan bagaimana mengintegrasikan seni dan sains ini dapat secara fundamental mengubah cara tim Anda berkolaborasi dan mencapai hasil yang luar biasa.

Selamat datang di episode terbaru kami, di mana kita akan mengupas tuntas sebuah pergeseran fundamental dalam dunia evaluasi. Pernahkah Anda berpikir bahwa peran seorang evaluator lebih dari sekadar pengumpul data dan penulis laporan? Kini, evaluator bertransformasi menjadi seorang fasilitator perubahan, seorang pemandu yang menavigasi kompleksitas pemangku kepentingan untuk mencapai pemahaman bersama dan mendorong penggunaan temuan yang bermakna. Kita akan membahas bagaimana evaluasi tidak lagi hanya menjadi produk akhir, melainkan sebuah proses kolaboratif yang dipandu dengan ahli untuk membuka jalan bagi perubahan yang nyata dan berkelanjutan. Dalam episode ini, kami akan menyajikan berbagai teknik dan pendekatan praktis yang menjadi inti dari evaluasi fasilitatif. Anda akan mengenal "Data Placemats," sebuah metode inovatif untuk mengajak para pemangku kepentingan berdialog langsung dengan data, mengubah sesi interpretasi yang membosankan menjadi lokakarya yang dinamis dan penuh wawasan. Tidak hanya itu, kita juga akan menjelajahi pendekatan "MĀRAMATANGA" dari Selandia Baru yang mengintegrasikan kearifan lokal, musik, dan seni visual untuk menciptakan proses evaluasi yang relevan secara budaya dan memberdayakan komunitas. Ini adalah bukti bahwa evaluasi bisa menjadi lebih kreatif, inklusif, dan menyentuh hati. Pada akhirnya, apa arti pergeseran ini bagi masa depan profesi evaluasi? Bergabunglah bersama kami saat kami mendiskusikan implikasi penting dari integrasi evaluasi dan fasilitasi. Kami akan mengupas tuntas mengapa kompetensi interpersonal dan kemampuan memfasilitasi kini menjadi sama pentingnya dengan keahlian teknis dan metodologis. Episode ini adalah panduan esensial bagi para praktisi, akademisi, dan siapa pun yang tertarik untuk memahami bagaimana evaluasi dapat menjadi katalisator yang lebih kuat untuk perubahan sosial. Dengarkan selengkapnya untuk menemukan bagaimana Anda dapat menerapkan prinsip-prinsip ini dalam pekerjaan Anda.

Banyak yang menganggap organisasi pemberi hibah (grantmaker) sekadar 'ATM' atau mitra diam di balik layar yang menyalurkan dana. Namun, di era transparansi dan tuntutan dampak yang semakin tinggi, pendekatan itu tidak lagi cukup. Bagaimana jika cara Anda berkomunikasi justru menjadi penentu utama dalam keberhasilan misi filantropi Anda? Dalam episode podcast kali ini, kita akan membongkar mengapa strategi komunikasi bukan lagi sekadar pelengkap (nice-to-have), melainkan sebuah keharusan strategis bagi yayasan dan organisasi filantropi modern. Kami akan membedah langkah-langkah praktis untuk Anda, mulai dari cara memetakan pemangku kepentingan—dari mitra penerima hibah (grantees) hingga dewan direksi dan donatur—hingga merancang pesan kunci yang berbeda untuk masing-masing pihak. Dengarkan bagaimana komunikasi yang efektif dapat menarik proposal yang lebih berkualitas, menunjukkan akuntabilitas, menceritakan kisah dampak yang sesungguhnya, dan bahkan memengaruhi kebijakan publik. Kami juga akan membahas studi kasus dari yayasan ternama yang berhasil mengubah narasi mereka melalui aksi komunikasi yang terukur. Episode ini dirancang khusus bagi Anda para pemimpin yayasan, manajer program, profesional komunikasi di sektor nirlaba, dan siapa pun yang percaya bahwa filantropi memiliki kekuatan untuk mendorong perubahan sistemik. Apakah Anda siap mengubah cara organisasi Anda berkomunikasi dari sekadar melaporkan angka menjadi menginspirasi gerakan dan memaksimalkan dampak setiap rupiah yang disalurkan? Tekan tombol putar dan mari kita mulai percakapan penting ini.

Dalam dunia perubahan sosial, kita telah lama terobsesi dengan "pertumbuhan"—berpikir bahwa dampak yang lebih besar hanya bisa datang dari program yang lebih besar dan jangkauan yang lebih luas. Paradigma 'scaling up' (memengaruhi kebijakan) dan 'scaling out' (menyebarkan model) telah mendominasi, tetapi kita mulai melihat batasannya. Pendekatan yang berfokus pada kecepatan dan kuantitas ini sering kali mengabaikan "kebenaran yang berantakan" (messy truths) dari masalah-masalah kompleks, dan terkadang, urgensi kita untuk "memperbaiki" justru menjadi bagian dari masalah itu sendiri. Episode ini mengeksplorasi sebuah alternatif yang kuat dan semakin diakui: 'Scaling Deep', sebuah pendekatan yang berpendapat bahwa perubahan sistem yang paling tahan lama tidak dimulai dari luar, tetapi dari dalam.   'Scaling Deep' adalah pekerjaan transformasional yang sering kali tidak terlihat, yang beroperasi pada tiga pilar yang saling berhubungan. Pertama adalah transformasi batin, yaitu pekerjaan pribadi untuk menyembuhkan fragmentasi dan menghadapi bias kita sendiri. Kedua adalah kekuatan relasional, yang memprioritaskan pembangunan kepercayaan dan hubungan yang tulus melintasi perbedaan, menciptakan ekosistem yang sehat tempat kolaborasi dapat berkembang.Terakhir adalah kekuatan naratif, yaitu upaya sadar untuk mengubah cerita, pola pikir, dan keyakinan budaya yang menopang sistem yang tidak adil. Pilar-pilar ini bukanlah langkah-langkah linier, melainkan siklus yang saling menguatkan yang menumbuhkan fondasi untuk perubahan yang sejati dan berkelanjutan.   Bergabunglah bersama kami saat kami membahas bagaimana 'Scaling Deep' beralih dari konsep marginal menjadi landasan inovasi sosial modern. Kami akan mengupas bagaimana pendekatan ini didukung oleh evolusi dalam kepemimpinan sistemik, filantropi berbasis kepercayaan, dan model-model baru untuk mengukur dampak yang benar-benar penting. Ini bukan lagi tentang memilih antara "dalam" atau "luas", tetapi tentang memahami bagaimana pekerjaan yang dalam dan transformatif menciptakan kondisi agar semua bentuk perubahan lainnya dapat berhasil. Dengarkan untuk menemukan bagaimana paradigma yang muncul ini membentuk kembali masa depan perubahan sosial yang adil dan tahan lama.  

Selamat datang di episode di mana kita membongkar "jiwa" dari perubahan organisasi. Pernahkah Anda bertanya-tanya apa yang membedakan transformasi yang berhasil dari sekadar program "perbaikan" yang gagal? Kali ini, kita akan menyelami dunia Organization Development (OD) atau Pengembangan Organisasi. Ini bukan tentang bagan dan proses yang kaku, melainkan tentang percakapan mendalam mengenai nilai-nilai yang menggerakkan sebuah sistem. Kita akan menjelajahi ketegangan abadi antara nilai-nilai humanistik yang memanusiakan tempat kerja dan tuntutan pragmatis bisnis, serta mencari tahu siapa sebenarnya yang harus kita layani: individu, organisasi, atau tujuan yang lebih besar? Dalam episode ini, kami mengurai prinsip-prinsip yang dihidupkan oleh para praktisi ahli. Dengarkan kisah inspiratif dan terkadang menyakitkan dari lapangan, seperti "Pelajaran dari Kadal Mati," yang mengajarkan kita bahaya dari asumsi yang bermaksud baik. Temukan mengapa instrumen terbesar seorang praktisi OD bukanlah alat atau model, melainkan penggunaan diri mereka sendiri—kemampuan untuk membawa kehadiran yang otentik, mendengarkan secara mendalam, dan memfasilitasi dialog yang jujur. Kami akan menunjukkan bagaimana model-model OD yang terkenal sebenarnya berfungsi sebagai kerangka untuk mengajukan pertanyaan yang tepat, bukan sebagai resep yang kaku. Terakhir, kita akan melihat ke masa depan. Seiring dengan globalisasi, bagaimana OD beradaptasi di berbagai budaya yang memiliki nilai sangat berbeda? Apakah OD akan kembali ke akarnya sebagai gerakan humanis, atau akan melebur menjadi disiplin manajemen perubahan yang lebih luas? Bergabunglah bersama kami untuk merenungkan pertanyaan-pertanyaan ini dan dapatkan wawasan tentang bagaimana kita dapat membangun organisasi yang tidak hanya efektif, tetapi juga bijaksana, berbelas kasih, dan siap menghadapi tantangan masa depan.

Merasa lelah karena selalu mengatakan "ya" untuk setiap permintaan? Anda tidak sendirian. Dalam episode podcast kali ini, kita akan membahas sebuah "keahlian super" yang sering terabaikan: kekuatan mengatakan "tidak". Kita akan mengupas mengapa menolak permintaan terasa begitu sulit, mulai dari rasa takut merusak hubungan hingga kekhawatiran akan reputasi. Temukan bagaimana "ya" yang terpaksa justru dapat membawa kita pada kelelahan, stres, dan kehilangan kendali atas hidup kita sendiri. Mari kita jelajahi konsep Empowered Refusal atau Penolakan yang Memberdayakan, sebuah cara revolusioner untuk merebut kembali waktu dan energi Anda. Penolakan yang Memberdayakan bukanlah tentang menjadi egois, melainkan tentang menjadi otentik. Alih-alih menolak dengan alasan eksternal seperti "Saya tidak bisa," seni ini mengajarkan kita untuk menolak dari dalam diri dengan berkata, "Saya tidak melakukan itu." Pendekatan ini mengubah penolakan dari sebuah keputusan sesaat menjadi sebuah cerminan dari prinsip dan kebijakan pribadi Anda. Dengan begitu, "tidak" yang Anda ucapkan terasa lebih final, tidak dapat dinegosiasikan, dan yang terpenting, tidak merusak hubungan karena penolakan itu adalah tentang diri Anda, bukan tentang menolak orang lain. Lalu, bagaimana cara mempraktikkannya? Kami akan membedah kerangka kerja A.R.T. yang sederhana namun kuat: Awareness (Kesadaran Diri), Rules (Membuat Aturan), dan Totality of Self (Totalitas Diri). Pelajari cara membangun kesadaran akan nilai-nilai Anda, menciptakan kebijakan pribadi yang melindungi prioritas Anda, dan mengomunikasikan penolakan dengan bahasa tubuh yang percaya diri. Dengarkan episode ini untuk mulai mengubah cara Anda berinteraksi dengan dunia dan menjadi arsitek sejati bagi kehidupan Anda.

Pernahkah Anda merasa bersemangat tentang suatu isu sosial tetapi bingung bagaimana cara membuat perubahan yang nyata? Dalam ringkasan audio buku "The New Science of Social Change" karya Lisa Mueller ini, kita akan menjelajahi mengapa semangat saja tidak cukup. Mueller berargumen bahwa gerakan sosial yang paling sukses adalah yang memadukan semangat dengan strategi berbasis bukti. Audio ini menyajikan temuan-temuan kunci dari ilmu sosial yang dapat mengubah cara kita berpikir tentang aktivisme, dari sekadar aksi spontan menjadi gerakan yang terukur dan berdampak. Dengarkan ringkasan ini untuk menemukan berbagai strategi praktis yang telah terbukti secara ilmiah. Pelajari mengapa protes tanpa kekerasan secara statistik lebih mungkin berhasil, bagaimana membangun koalisi yang kuat dengan pesan yang kohesif dan terfokus, serta mengapa slacktivism (aktivisme daring) sebenarnya bisa menjadi gerbang penting untuk keterlibatan yang lebih dalam. Kami juga akan membahas psikologi di balik penggalangan dana yang efektif, seperti "efek kemartiran" yang menunjukkan mengapa pengorbanan kecil dapat menginspirasi donasi yang lebih besar. Baik Anda seorang aktivis berpengalaman maupun seseorang yang baru ingin memulai, podcast  ini adalah panduan modern Anda untuk membuat perubahan. Ini adalah kesempatan untuk melengkapi niat baik dengan pengetahuan, mengubah idealisme menjadi aksi yang efektif, dan memastikan bahwa setiap upaya yang kita lakukan tidak hanya terdengar heroik, tetapi juga benar-benar membawa hasil. Mari kita belajar bersama bagaimana menjadi changemaker yang lebih cerdas dan strategis.

Kami bersama sama merungkai apa sebenarnya pengertian peribadi kami tentang Aidil Adha. Korban.... apa itu korban???

Sztuczna inteligencja szturmem wkroczyła do mainstreamu, a Google i SGH postanowiły wykorzystać ten moment, by realnie pomóc polskiemu sektorowi MŚP. W niniejszym odcinku specjalnym TechCast Podcast “#LIVE14 - Umiejętności Jutra AI - jak Google wraz z SGH przygotowuje nas na rewolucję AI?” rozmawiam z Łukaszem Pietrzakiem z Google oraz prof. Bogumiłem Kamińskim z SGH o kursie Umiejętności Jutra AI – jego kulisach, celach, efektach i feedbacku z rynku. Mówimy o tym, jak AI wpływa na codzienną pracę, co naprawdę daje użytkownikom i co jeszcze musi się zmienić.W materiale:✅ kulisy współpracy Google i SGH✅ jak wyglądały przygotowania✅ ilu uczestników wzięło udział✅ jakie są efekty 5-tygodniowego szkolenia✅ jakie są dalsze planyGoście podcastu:

Buntis ba si Lovi Poe?"Galit ba kayo sa BIBI?" Yung totoo??Michelle Dee, anyare?

Cukrářka Jana Novotná klade velký důraz na výběr ingrediencí. Týká se to nejen drobných zákusků, ale i tradičních kynutých buchet a koláčů. „Miluju práci s kynutým těstem. Má terapeutické účinky.“Všechny díly podcastu Radioporadna můžete pohodlně poslouchat v mobilní aplikaci mujRozhlas pro Android a iOS nebo na webu mujRozhlas.cz.

Piłkarska reprezentacja Polski ma za sobą towarzyski mecz z Mołdawią i pożegnanie Kamila Grosickiego na Stadionie Śląskim w Chorzowie. Teraz przed Biało-Czerwonymi gra o punkty. We wtorek w Helsinkach zespół prowadzony przez Michała Probierza zagra z Finlandią. "Myślę, że wy, dziennikarze, ale my również zdajemy sobie z tego sprawę, że to będzie arcyważny mecz w kontekście całych tych eliminacji" - przyznaje w rozmowie z RMF FM Jakub Kamiński. O meczu z Finlandią, ostatnich występach w kadrze, ale też o sezonie w Bundeslidze i klubowej przyszłości z reprezentantem Polski i graczem Wolfsburga rozmawiał Wojciech Marczyk z redakcji sportowej RMF FM.

Hosť: Kristína Rusnáková - milovníčka mačiek V tejto epizóde sme sa porozprávali s Kikou – milovníčkou mačiek, ktorá s nimi zdieľa každodenný život a dobre pozná ich vrtochy aj čaro. Prezradila nám, čím sú tieto elegantné tvory také výnimočné, prečo je život s nimi jedinečný a čo všetko im treba zabezpečiť, aby boli spokojné (a aby vám nezničili závesy ☺). Ako sa o mačky správne starať? Na čo si dať pozor, keď máte doma malého lovca? A je vôbec možné mať v byte mačky aj kvety, alebo sa musíte rozlúčiť s izbovou džungľou? Zistíte, že život s mačkami je síce trochu nevyspytateľný, ale o to krajší – a že aj tie najväčšie mačacie osobnosti si vedia nájsť cestu k nášmu srdcu. Ktorá bylina v spreji podnecuje mačku k hravosti? Poznáte správnu odpoveď? Pošlite ju na https://www.starajmesa.sk/sutaz kde nájdete súťažný formulár. Zo všetkých správnych odpovedí vyžrebujeme troch výhercov, ktorí získajú 20€ poukážku na nákup v Super zoo! Súťaž pre tento diel končí 19.6.2025, tak sa poponáhľajte a zapojte sa! V podcaste Starajme sa vám spolu s hosťami prinesieme zaujímavé témy zo sveta chovateľstva. Na svoje si prídu naozaj všetci, od psičkárov až po akvaristov. Všetky časti a kopu ďalších informácií o zvieratkách nájdete na https://www.starajmesa.sk/​​​    

"Si Jane De Leon, ang OA!"SB19, may mensahe kami sa inyo...Split na ba sina Heaven at Marco Gallo?

The Everywhere Fellowship #9, Kami Burns Reed, Globalscope's First Quarter by

Jimmy and Producer Joe celebrate their 20th anniversary with a special live recording with guests Michael Emerson, Greg Pak and Cynthia Von Buhler. While a bit last minute due to schedules & other glitches, it all came together nicely! As usual, Jimmy wrote some silly parody songs and sang them along with the CNI Chorus consisting of Sara Garfinkel, Kami Graves and Amy Wolk. Always funnier since we didn't really rehearse it much. We also get a very special news segment with Sara and Kami though make sure you check their sources. Thanks to the friends who came and even brought friends! It was a different set up as well because Producer Joe had to stay in the tech booth for most of the show. But it all turned out to be the usual fun times had by all!  Also, get a hold of us! Thanks for listening!

Michał "Misiek" Kamiński chce wymienić Tuska. Kaczyński z lekceważeniem o Konfederacji. Bodnar do dymisji? "Mógłbym się czuć winny, gdybym się lenił". Zatrzymani funkcjonariusze CBA. #IPPTVNaŻywo #wybory2025 #Tusk ----------------------------------------------------

Send Us a Message!The sacred tree has fallen, but the wellspring flows on. Could this be nature's message about the future of Reiki?When Christine returned to Mount Kurama in Japan for her second pilgrimage, she wasn't expecting to witness a profound metaphor about energy practices worldwide. Standing at the birthplace of Reiki, Christine observed how a precise typhoon had taken down only the sacred masculine symbol—a centuries-old Kami tree—while leaving the companion feminine symbol—an ever-flowing spring—completely untouched.Christine's insights illuminate a potential evolution in Reiki practice—what she calls "Reiki Fusion"—honoring the traditional structure while embracing intuitive flow. Her journey challenges us to reconsider whether our spiritual practices have overemphasized masculine energy (structure, hierarchy, perfection) while neglecting the feminine (intuition, inner wisdom, natural flow). In today's episode, we cover:The highlights of Christine's Pilgrimage to the birthplace of ReikiHow the Buddhist roots of Reiki transformed Christine's perspectiveExploring spiritual balance between structure and flowComparing this trip to Christine's first pilgrimageContrast between mainland Japan temples and Okinawan forests The stark contrast between masculine and feminine energiesWhy we need to embrace our intuition and inner wisdomPersonal transformation through nature and travelFall of the sacred tree on Mount Kurama as a metaphor for energy shiftsCall to balance tradition with authentic self-expressionReady to discover what happens when we honor both the structure and the flow in our Reiki practice? Listen now!...........Why Did Usui Go to Mount Kurama on June 5th: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/5X-ujPueQQufyjdCwMeoUQReiki Masters Class: https://moonrisinginstitute.circle.so/c/reiki-master-teacher-training/Moon Rising Shamanic Institute Links:Website: https://moonrisinginstitute.com/Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/moonrisinginstituteFacebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/moonrisingmysticsInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/moonrising.instituteYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/@moonrisinginstituteBook a session with Isabel: https://calendly.com/into-the-deep/scheduleBook a FREE 15 minute connect call with Izzy: https://calendly.com/moonrisinginstitute/connect Book a session with Christine: https://calendly.com/christinerenee/90-minutes-intensiveBook a FREE 10 minute connect call with Christine: https://calendly.com/christinerenee/10-minute-connect-call-srpt

Video ringkas ini adalah edukasi tentang bagaimana mengelola portofolio atau rekening saham untuk operasi investasi jangka panjang.Di video ini kami juga membahas studi kasus tiga model portofolio yang kami bahas di Riset Bolasalju. Dua model portofolio riil memakai strategi berbeda untuk mencapai ekspektasi dan tujuan berbeda.Kami juga berbagi bagaimana kinerja kedua model portofolio itu.***Kinerja Bolasalju: https://www.bolasalju.com/kinerja/Riset Bolasalju: https://www.bolasalju.com/paket/

On today's show, Alex Golden is joined by Pacers Fan, Kami, to discuss his trip to Indiana from Atlanta this week, what he thought of the city, his food review on Culver's and Long's Bakery and what the atmosphere was like in Gainbridge for Games 3 + 4 and the Game 5 Watch Party.Shortly after, Kami and Alex discuss what the Pacers need to do in Game 6 to come out successfully with a win, discuss what players have struggled this series and why, how they can overcome their struggles and impact this series and MORE! The guys conclude the show giving their Game 6 predictions and discussing how to stop New York. 

Červený kostel v Hlučíně je o tomto víkendu snad nejvoňavějším a nejpestřejším místem široko daleko. Spolek Iris club totiž připravil svou tradiční květinovou výstavu. Tentokrát zaměřenou na kosatce a pivoňky.Všechny díly podcastu Odpolední interview můžete pohodlně poslouchat v mobilní aplikaci mujRozhlas pro Android a iOS nebo na webu mujRozhlas.cz.

"Walka w tych wyborach toczy się o to, czy w Pałacu Prezydenckim rządzić będą gangsterzy. Chodzi o to, aby Pałac nie był dziuplą. A pan Andrzej Duda zrobił z Pałacu dziuplę, bo przetrzymywał tam Kamińskiego i Wąsika" – mówił w Porannej rozmowie w RMF FM Dariusz Joński, europoseł KO.

Ralph Kamiński i Tomasz Raczek rozmawiają o...

https://www.patreon.com/windahTranskrip: https://www.patreon.com/posts/lagu-indonesia-129264777?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_linkTerjemahan: https://www.patreon.com/posts/eng-lagu-selalu-129265169?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_linkSumber gambar: Missau @Bukankevinn di X (Twitter)Gitar: LuckyKala nanti badai 'kan datang Angin akan buat kau goyah Maafkan, hidup memang Ingin kau lebih kuat Andaikan saat itu datang Kami tak ada menemani Aku ingin kau mendengar Nyanyianku di sini Sedikit demi sedikit Engkau akan berteman pahit Luapkanlah saja bila harus menangis Anakku, ingatlah semua Lelah tak akan tersia Usah kau takut pada keras dunia Akhirnya takkan ada akhir Doaku agar kau selalu Arungi hidup berbalut senyuman di hati Doaku agar kau selalu Ingat bahagia meski kadang hidup tak baik saja Nyanyian ini bukan sekadar nada Aku ingin kau mendengarnya Dengan hatimu bukan telinga Ingatlah ini bukan sekadar kata Maksudnya kelak akan menjadi makna Ungkapan cintaku dari hatiTerima kasih banyak atas dukungannya untuk:SAHABAT WINDAHAkiramJayNyong Jago Bob GenericJohn nyMartin JankovskýWilliam ChenDawid GerstelDRamzan BAlex PepinnsSebastianAlexander ScholtesJrobabuja11 RoboNicholai LidowAliteJack William HusbandsAndre ChampouxDemiAlastair JudsonKatherine WalkerLino ArboledaLeon KwekCameron Edinger-ReeveSam BayleyLivvieIsmail OtchiChrisRussell BarlowMary PopeIga Komar帥志 Shuai Chih LinStefano LuzzattoBjornrappangeHossein KhoshtaghazaAldoSimon HollandParis LuckowskiMatthew O'ConnorRussell OgdenYaszalixAlexTEMAN WINDAHJohn McBride  Kristofer Nivens  P. Clayton D. Causey, CT  Vanessa HackJohn ShumLuis PaezChloe ArianaCraig RedriffMariusCharlotteJonny 5Jose LorenzoJeremyLulunMadeleine MillerAngelo CaonRossi von der BorchSicily FiennesEm McDermottMeredith R NormanTom Simamora ThatcherWill HendersonTim DoolingDevin NailAlissa Sjuryadi-TrowbridgeBillEric EmerAsakoTarquam James McKennaAmanda BlossStephen MSusan & Ben SetiawanJensBen HarrisonNaota YanagiharaHans WagnerPham VyJustin WilsonJayElfin MoningkaZane RubaiiBenjaminDerynAlexH HMatt WintersHong WantingAlec MitchellVinceDanielBertiSugiyamaAtsuko MaenoMosaStephen GrahamHannah RowntreeCallum TrainorColleen Thornton-WardAilise Sweeney-LoweJimmyTan Jing YiYng KenjicnxuFlorian HopfKurt VerschuerenJoakimEdmund TanRyosuke SudaBerberJeroen VellekoopJan NedermeijerMinh Vy Trần NgọcMatthewTakeshi YamafujiNateLauraPatrickMiquelFeeJingle YanMathias朗 桑田Benedikt GanderBen PlayfordLauraKenji YanaguRicky ZhangVacanza TropicaleBill Dalton惠羽 蔡Widianingtyas YuniatiSophie Hoestereyこ ぱるDouglas HerrickTim SomervilleMaxence AKFSF BEddoMarc EberJaime NoriegaJin Kimivy babyPENDENGAR SETIAColumba TierneyLuciano HespanholHH JorgensenChingyu yangAmina AljehaniJannedCamille

Kami thought she could help fix what Josh broke. But as she leaned on faith and tried to guide him back to honesty, she began to realize this wasn't just a crisis of ethics. It was something darker, something unraveling. Click ‘Subscribe' at the top of the Infamous show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices A Campside Media & Sony Music Entertainment production. To connect with Infamous's creative team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at joincampsidemedia.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We welcome Shaman Benton Ryer to the Virtual Alexandria. He will delve into esoteric Shinto (Ko Shinto), an older form of this indigenous Japanese tradition that focuses on purifying energetic bodies. Discover how ritual purification and reverence for Kami address impurities (Tsumi), potentially healing physical pain, emotional distress, and trauma. Explore this unique path towards understanding ourselves and our place in the universe, honoring both tradition and your unique experiences. We'll also cover Reiki, evil spirits, and cognitive dissonance. More on Benton: https://esotericshinto.replit.app/ Stream All Astro Gnosis Conferences for the price of one: https://thegodabovegod.com/replay-sophia/ The Gnostic Tarot: https://www.makeplayingcards.com/sell/synkrasis Homepage: https://thegodabovegod.com/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/aeonbyte AB Prime: https://thegodabovegod.com/members/subscription-levels/ Virtual Alexandria Academy: https://thegodabovegod.com/virtual-alexandria-academy/ Voice Over services: https://thegodabovegod.com/voice-talent/ Support with donation: https://buy.stripe.com/00g16Q8RK8D93mw288 Get The Occult Elvis: https://amzn.to/4jnTjE4

S18E2 : SHUK SAHAR – Dari Kayangan Jatuh Ke Lumpur Kembali Ke Fitrah Orang paling controversial di muka buma Nusantara, Kami bersama Kovac Water, membawa masuk Saudagar Temasek Shuk Sahar. Pernah menjadi host TV no1 Malaysia dengan rating hiburan rancangan paling tinggi, kini beliau hidup humble berniaga di seantero Nusantara termasuk Sabah. Shuk hadir dan membuka cerita terhadap bagaimana tumbangnya dia, jatuhnya dia, dan berdiri nya dia semula serta, kisah rumahtangganya!Beliau kini mengamalkan preskripsi daripada doctor menangani dipresi beliau.Ingin tahu lebih lanjut? Layan episode penuh kami bersama the one and only @shuksahar di Spotify, YouTube dan seluruh podcast platform hari ini. Podcast ini dibawakan khas kepada anda oleh air Minuman  paling pure dan refreshing no 1 di Sabah, Kovac WaterDiperolehi dari Sumber asli yang tulen dan segar, kovac Water adalah pilihan no1 anda. Tempah atau order kovac water untuk majlis anda mahupun hotel, resort, cafe, dan institusi anda diWww.kovacwater.com atau email mereka di kovacofficials@gmail.com Anda juga boleh terus whatsapp mereka di talian 0109000271 #fyp #shuksahar #shuk #saudagartemasek #tungtungsahur #fypppppppppp #viraltiktok #shuksaharicanseeyourvoice #ICSYV #kovacwater #kovacempire #kovac

Meet Kamigirl—a fresh voice from Eastern Europe who's ready to share stories about her music, her roots, and her dislike for me (Cam). From chatting about her latest album Let's Go Tonight to busting some moves in a spontaneous dance-off, this episode is packed with energy and plenty of laughs. Check out Kamigirl's music and follow her journey on Instagram: @kamiindahouse. Follow Sex Talk With My Mom (@sextalkwithmymom), Cam Poter (@camoncam69), and KarenLee Poter (@karenleepoter) on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok! #SexTalkWithMyMom #KamiGirl #CelebrityPodcast #KamiDimitrova #CamPoter #KarenLeePoter #ComedyPodcast #FunnyPodcast #HollywoodStories Chapters 0:00 - Intro 01:30 - Meet Kami Girl: The Bulgarian Pop Star 05:15 - Discussing the New Album 10:42 - Name That Tune: Bulgarian Edition 17:10 - Dance-Off Shenanigans 26:30 - Wrap-up Please support our show and get discounts on our favorite brands by using our sponsors' links at sneakypod.com! ALLOY – Join the 95% of women who tried Alloy and saw relief from menopausal symptoms in the first 2 weeks. Head to MyAlloy.com/SNEAKY and use code SNEAKY. You'll get $20 off your first order today! FLESHLIGHT – Our sponsor, FLESHLIGHT, can help you reach new heights with your self-pleasure. FLESHLIGHT is the #1 selling male sex toy in the world. Looking for your next pocket pal? Save 10% on your next fleshlight with Promo Code: SNEAKY at fleshlight.com. ❣️You can view many of our full episodes in video form by going to our YouTube channel. Join our sparkling new Sneaky Freak chatroom on Discord! Just visit: https://discord.gg/jJZqkUw3dV. To gain exclusive access to all our Discord channels, join us at Patreon.com/sextalkwithmymom. If you've enjoyed the show, please consider leaving us a review at RateThisPodcast.com/Mom. Also, it would mean the world if you'd support us through Patreon.com/sextalkwithmymom – a platform where you can get exclusive STWMM bonus episodes and Zoom chats with us! Grab some Sex Talk w/ My Mom swag at sextalkwithmymom.com. Get close with us on socials at: Text us - 310-356-3920 Facebook/Instagram - @SexTalkWithMyMom Twitter - @SexTalkWMyMom Website - www.SexTalkWithMyMom.com Our podcast's music was crafted by the wildly talented Freddy Avis! Check out his work at http://www.freddyavismusic.com/ Sex Talk With My Mom is a proud member of Pleasure Podcasts, a podcast collective revolutionizing the conversation around sex. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

S17E12 : MALAYSIAN INTERNATIONAL COCOA FAIR 2025 bersama dengan Datuk Dr Ramle Hj KasinEpisode kali ini , Kami sangat berbesar hati kerana dapat bercerita tentang COCOA! Ramai yang mungkin tidak tahu bahawa Sabah mengeluarkan 60% keluaran koko dan terbesar di Malaysia, dan untuk pengetahuan semua, No5 terbesar di dunia.Koko kini mencecah Rm30 ribu setan, fuh….tiada lain yang boleh bercerita tentang koko ini selain daripada Ketua Pengarah Lembaga Koko Malaysia, Ybhg Datuk Dr Ramle Hj Kasin. Kau tanya dia jawab….terbaik Datuk. So siapa cinta chocolate? Cintakan koko? Bah ayuh dengar episode padu dan mantap ini di Spotify juga di YouTube Hari ini. Mari ramai-ramai kita datang ke Malaysian International Cocoa Fair 2025 yang akan berlangsung dari 24 hingga 27 Mei di Sabah International Convention Centre, Kota Kinabalu.Acara ini menghimpunkan peladang, usahawan, dan pakar-pakar industri koko dari seluruh negara. Ini memang satu peluang baik untuk mengenali produk tempatan, teknologi baru, dan rangkaian dengan komuniti dalam industri koko.Untuk makluman lanjut ikuti Malaysian International Cocoa Fair 2025 di Facebook dan Instagram hari ini.Malaysian International Cocoa Fair 2025 — where passion, innovation, and opportunity meet.” #micf2025 #lkm #lembagakokomalaysia #koko #cocoa #sabah #pestakoko #fypkoko #cocoafyp #fypage #fypviral

Infamous: From Conned to Cupid tells the story of Kami Verne, a woman who thought she'd married the man of her dreams—an entrepreneur with a big heart and even bigger personality. But when investors start asking questions about his latest business ventures, Kami comes to realize that their life together might be built on lies. A story about love, betrayal, and starting over. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Na pohřbu papeže Františka se sešly desítky státníků a monarchů, špičky katolické církve, statisíce věřících i lidí, kteří svatého otce uctívali, ač jsou ateisté.

Jan Kamiński, współzałożyciel firmy Momentum (dawniej Uplover), dzieli się fascynującą historią transformacji biznesowej od prawnika do wizjonera technologicznego. W szczerej rozmowie opowiada, jak zbudował firmę z przychodami rzędu 24 milionów złotych i klientami na całym świecie!

Kami dah rasa cheese tayar ni. Memang sedap! Korang boleh try kalau jumpa kedai Farhan Caloy!Instagram Thinker:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/thinker.studios/?hl=en⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Hear us on Spotify:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://open.spotify.com/show/5KXoqorpVXT9sIVq8lYMyK⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Hear us on Syok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bm.syok.my/podcast/show/14181⁠⁠

MALAM SERAM THE HORROR TALK SHOW | BUKAN SEKADAR CERITA SERAM | DAPATKAN TIKET MALAM SERAM TEATER & MUZIKSuka bacaan kisah-kisah seram, sila subscribe ke saluran Malam Seram! Malam Seram LIVE show Isnin hingga Khamis 11 malam dan Jumaat 11.59 malam MALAM SERAM adalah segmen LIVE perkongsian pengalaman seram dan misteri. Anggap ia hanya sekadar perkongsian sahaja. Jangan mudah percaya dan terlalu taksub dengan apa yang anda dengar! MALAM SERAM The Horror Talk Show Bukan Sekadar Cerita Seram.____________________________________________________________________________________________Hello Geng Momok dapatkan tiket untuk MALAM SERAM TEATER DAN MUZIK  Malam Seram Teater dan MuzikSabtu, 24 May 2025, 8 malamDi The Star Theatre (The Star Performing Art Centre)Geng Momok jom dapatkan tiket untuk pementasan pertama Malam Seram.Tiket kategoriMomok Colonel VIP $195Momok Major $145Momok Captain $125Momok Leftenant $95  Lungsuri www.startix.sg untuk dapatkan tiket anda.Malam Seram Teater dan Muzik anjuran Muse+  ____________________________________________________________________________________________Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/malam-seram--3347472/support.

Would you like to learn more about Japanese character like yōkai, Buddhist deities and Kami gods?  Are you interested in finding out where the original stories come from?  How all of that relates to tattooing?  We got you covered.      In this very informative episode with Joshua Frydman, associate professor of Japanese at the university of Oklahoma, specialized in Japanese ancient myths and literature, we dive into the origins of Japanese mythology and folklore. Shintoism, Buddhism, Chinese influence, philosophical/cultural implications and more. Welcome to the nerd side of tattooing :)     13:43 Overview of Japan's development 16:46 Religious systems in Japan 23:36 Syncretism of Japan 24:16 Kami and Gods 33:10 Seductivity and danger nature 39:40 Oni 42:07 Differences with Western folklore 44:38 Susanoo and Amaterasu 48:40 Not a definite answer 53:39 Godzilla modern myth 55:28 A fluid religion 1:01:05 Reading recommendations 1:04:30 Mythological names to real animals 1:06:21 Kannon's example       Joshua's book: ‘THE JAPANESE MYTHS: A GUIDE TO GODS, HEROES AND SPIRITS'       Stef's Instagram   stefbastian.com        

On today's episode, Alex kicks things off by updating Pacers fans on the crazy Tuesday night in the NBA and where the Pacers are currently in the hunt for homecourt. Then, Facci is joined by Kami to discuss the Pacers narrow victory over the Washington Wizards, who were without half of their key rotation guys.  Haliburton's big 4th quarterWelcome back SiakamUgliest win of the season?Where's Jarace?

Shinto, Japan's indigenous religion, is strongly rooted in animism, with Japanese believing that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence. Shinto does not have a single creator or specific doctrine, and instead exists in a diverse range of local and regional forms emphasising a sacred connection between humans and the natural world.In this episode of the Ikigai Podcast, Nick speaks with Taishi Kato about the deep-rooted significance of Shinto and the ongoing efforts to preserve its rich heritage.Hey it is Nick Kemp here from IkigaiTribe.com, just before we get into this episode I wanted to let you know I am running a Ikigai Workshop Webinar this month. The workshop is 2-hours long and covers the work of pioneering ikigai researcher Mieko Kamiya. We look at her definition of ikigai and her 7 ikigai needs.If you are interested go to https://ikigaitribe.com/ikigai-workshop

In this episode, we crack open Possessed: A Player's Guide—a hauntingly overlooked gem from White Wolf's World of Darkness line. This isn't your usual vampire politics or werewolf rage-fest. We're going deeper, darker, and weirder.What happens when a spirit—Bane, Drone, Wyld-thing, or something much stranger—climbs inside a human being and decides to take the wheel? From the shock troops of the Wyrm to techno-slaves of the Weaver, from nature-fused Gorgons to the enigmatic Kami, this book explores the twisted, tragic, and terrifying reality of being possessed in a world already teetering on the edge.Join us as we discuss:The different spirit types that can take control of a human hostThe unique flavors of each chapter: Fomori, Drones, Gorgons, Kami, and moreWhat makes possession in the World of Darkness more than just a monster-of-the-week tropeHow to use the Possessed in your games—as tragic PCs, terrifying NPCs, or wildcard allies Possession isn't always a choice. But pressing play? That's on you. :)Authors: Chris Campbell, Matthew McFarland and Colin SuleimanSupport the showhttps://linktr.ee/25YearsOfVtM

This episode we will discuss various embassies to and from Yamato during the reign of Takara Hime, with a particular focus on the embassy of 659, which occured at a particularly eventful time and happened to be extremely well-recorded fro the period by Iki no Hakatoko, who was apparently on the mission to the Tang court itself. For more, check out our blog post at: https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-123 Rough Transcript Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  My name is Joshua, and this is episode 123: Embassy Interrupted.   Iki no Hakatoko sat in his room, gazing out at the city.   It was truly an amazing place, filled with all kinds of people from around the world.  And yet, still, after 9 months of confinement, the place felt small.  Sure, there he hadwere visits from ranking nobles and dignitaries, but even the most lenient of house arrests was still house arrest. But that didn't mean that he had nothing to do.  There were books and more that he had access to—many that had not yet made it to the archipelago, and some of which he no doubt hoped he could bring back with him.  And of course, there was paper, brush, and ink. And then there were the experiences he and others had acquired on this mission to the Great Tang.  From the very beginning the missionit washad been plagued with disaster when they lost half of their ships and company mission to rogue winds on the open seas.  Now they were trapped because the Emperor himself wouldn't let them return home.  They had experienced and seen so much, and that provided ample material for one to catalogue. As the seasons changed, and rumors arrived that perhaps his situation would also something would change soon, Iki no Hakatoko spread out the paper on the desk in front of him, dipped his brush in the ink, and began to write.  He wrote down notes about his experiences, and what had befallen him and the others.  He had no idea who It is unclear whom he thought might read it, and if he was intending this to be an official or personal record, but he wrote it down anyway. Hakatoko He couldn't have known then that his words would eventually be captured in a much larger work, chronicling the entire history of Yamato from its very creation, nor that his would be one of the oldest such personal accounts records to be handed down.  His Itwords  wwould only survive in fragments—or perhaps his writing was simply that terse—but his words they would be preserved, in a format that was still being read over a thousand years later.     Last episode we finished up the story of Xuanzang and his Journey to the West—which is to say the Western Regions -- , and thence on to India, or Tianzhu, where he walked in the footsteps of the historical Buddha, studied the scriptures at the feet of venerable teachers, such as Silabadhra at the Great Monastery of Nalanda, and eventually wound up bringingbrought back hundreds of manuscripts to Chang'an to , which he and others be translated and disseminated, impacting Buddhist thought across East Asia.  HisXuanzang's travels lasted from around 629 to 645, and he was still teaching in Chang'an in the 650s when various student-monks from Yamato  arrived to study and learn from him, eventually bringing back his teachings to the archipelago as part of the Faxiang, or Hossou, school of Buddhism. Before that we talked about the visitors from “Tukhara” and “Sha'e” recorded in the Chronicles.  As we noted, these peopley were morest likely from the Ryukyuan islands, and the names may have been conflated with distant lands overseas – but regardless, .  Whether or not it was a mistake, this it does seem to indicated that Yamato had at least an inkling of the wider world, introduced through the continental literature that they had been importing, if not the direct interactions with individuals from the Korean peninsula and the Tang court. This episode, we're going to talk about some of the relations between Yamato and the continent, including the various embassies sent back and forth, as well as one especially detailed embassy from Yamato to the Tang Court that found itself in a bit of a pickle.  After all, what did you do, back in those days, when you were and ambassador, and your country suddenly went to war?  We'll talk about that and what happened. To reorient ourselves in time, we're in the reign of Takara Hime, called aka Kyogoku Tennou during her first reign, who had reascended to the throne in 655, following the death of her brother, Prince Karu.  The Chroniclers would dub her Saimei Tennou in her second run on the throne. From the very beginning of her second reign, Takara Hime was entertaining foreign envoys.  In 654, the Three Han of the Korean Peninsula—Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla—all sent ambassadors to express their condolence on the death of her brother, and presumably to witness her ascension.  And in the 8th month of her reign, Kawabe no Maro no Omi, along with others, returned from Chang'an.  He Kawabe no Maro no Omi had been the Chief Ambassador to the Tang on an embassy sent , traveling there in the 2nd month of the previous year.  Originally he had been He was under the command of the controlling envoy, Takamuku no Obito no Kuromaro, but Kuromaro who unfortunately died in Chang'an and so Kawabe no Mari no Omi took over his role. That same year, 655, we know that there were about 100 persons recorded in Yamato from Baekje, along with envoys of Goguryeo and Silla.  These are likely the same ones we mentioned back in episode 117 when 150 Baekje envoys were present at court along with multiple members of the Emishi. Silla, for their part, had sent to Yamato a special hostage , whom we know as something like “Mimu”, along with skilled workmen.  Unfortunately, we are told that Mimu fell ill and died.  The Chronicles are pretty sparse on what this meant, but I can't imagine it was great.  After all, the whole idea of sending a hostage to another nation was as a pledge of good behavior – the idea being that the hostage was the idea that they werewas valuable enough that the sending nation wouldn't do anything too rash.  The flip side of that is if the hostage died, Of course, if they perished, the hosting country lost any leverage—and presumably the sending nation would be none too pleased.  That said, people getting sick and passing away was hardly a hostile action, and likely just considered an unfortunate situation. The following year, in 656, we see that Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla again all sent ambassadords were all sent to offer “tribute”.  The Chronicles mention that dark purple curtains were drawn around the palace site to entertain the ambassadors—likely referring to the new palace site at Asuka no Wokamoto, which probably was not yet fully built out, yet.   We are given the name of the Goguryeo ambassador, Talsa, and associate ambassador, Ilchi,  in the 8th month, Talsa and Ilichi, with 81 total members in the Goguryeo retinueof the embassy.  In seeming response, Yamato sent an embassy was sent to Goguryeo with the likes of Kashiwade no Omi no Hatsumi as the Chief Ambassador and Sakahibe no Muraji no Iwasuki as the Associate Ambassador.  Other names mentioned include We also see the likes of Inugami no Shiromaro, Kawachi no Fumi no Obito—no personal name is given—and Ohokura no Maro.  We also see thea note in the Chronicles that Yamato ambassadors to the quote-unquote “Western Sea”—which seems to refer to the Tang court, but could possibly refer to anything from the Korean Peninsula west—returned in that same year.  The two are named as Saheki no Muraji no Takunaha and Oyamashita no Naniha no Kishi no Kunikatsu.  These are both families that were clearly involved in cross-strait relations , based on how they are frequently referenced in the Chronicles as being associated with various overseas missions.  but  However, we don't seem to have clear evidence of them when these particular individualsy leavingft on this mission.  “Kunikatsu” mightay refer to an earlier ambassador to Baekje, but the names are different, so that is largely just speculation.  In any case, Uupon their return, they are said to have brought with them a parrot.  This wasn't the first parrot the court had seen—that feathery traveler had arrived in 647, or at least that is the first parrotinstance  we have in the written record -- .  Aand that one came from Silla as part of that embassy's gifts. Continuing on, in 657, The following year there was another group of ambassadors returned coming  from the “Western Seas”, in this case coming back from—or through—Baekje.  Thisese wasere Adzumi no Muraji no Tsuratari and Tsu no Omi no Kutsuma.  The presents they brought back were, of all things:  one camel and two donkeys.  And can you imagine bringing a camel back across the sea at this point?  Even if they were using the larger ships based on continental designs, it still must have been something else to put up with a camel and donkeys onboard, animals that are not exactly known for their easy-going and compliant nature. Speaking of boats, we should probably touch on what we *think* they were usinghas been going on here.  I say *think* because we only get glimpses  of the various boats being used in the archipelago, whether from mentions in or around Yamato, archaeology, or artistic depictions, many of which came from later periods., and wSo while it is generally assumed that they the Yamato were using Tang style vessels by the 8th and 9th century, there does not appear to be clear evidence of exactly what kind of boats were being used during the early earlier periods of contact. A quick note on boat technology and navigation: while travel between the Japanese archipelago and the Korean Peninsula, and up the Yellow Sea, wasn't safe, it would have been possible with the vessels of the time.  Japan sits on the continental shelf, meaning that to the east where the shelf gives way to the Pacific Ocean with the Phillippine Sea to the south, the waters are much, much deeper than they are to the west.  In deep waters, waves are not necessarily affected by the ocean floor, meaning they can build up much more energy and require different kinds of technology to sail.  In shallower areas, such as the Sea of Japan, the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea or the Korean Straits to the west of the archipelago, there's more drag that dampens out the wave effect – it's not that these areas are uniformly shallow and calm, but they are calmer and easier to navigate in general.  Our oldest example of boats in the archipelago of any kind are dugout canoes, .  These are logs that are hollowed out  and shaped. , and tThese appear to be what Jomon era populations used to cross to the archipelago and travel between the various islands.  Though they may be considered primitive, without many of the later innovations that would increase stability and seaworthiness—something I'll touch on more a bit later—, they were clearly effective enough to populate the islands of the Ryukyuan chain and even get people and livestock, in the form of pigs, down to the Hachijo islands south of modern Tokyo.    So they weren't ineffective. Deep waters mean that the waves are not necessarily affected by the ocean floor.  Once it hits shallower water, there is more drag that affects larger waves.  This means that there can be more energy in these ocean waves.  That usually means that shallower areas tend to be more calm and easier to navigate—though there are other things that can affect that as well. We probably should note, however, that Japan sits on the edge of the continental shelf.  To the west, the seas are deep, but not nearly as deep as they are to the east, where continental shelf gives way to the Pacific ocean, with the Philippine Sea to the south.  These are much deeper waters than those of the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea, or the Korean Straits.  The Sea of Japan does have some depth to it, but even then it doesn't compare in both size and depth. Deep waters mean that the waves are not necessarily affected by the ocean floor.  Once it hits shallower water, there is more drag that affects larger waves.  This means that there can be more energy in these ocean waves.  That usually means that shallower areas tend to be more calm and easier to navigate—though there are other things that can affect that as well. All this to say that travel between the Japanese archipelago and the Korean Peninsula, and up the Yellow Sea, were all things that were likely much easier to navigate with the vessels available at the time, but that doesn't mean that it was safe. Later, we see a different type of vessel appear: .  This is a built vessel, made of multiple hewn pieces of wood.  The examples that we see show a rather square front and back that rise up, sometimes dramatically, .  There are with various protrusions on either side. We see examples of this shape , and we've seen examples in haniwa from about the 6th century, and we have some corresponding wooden pieces found around the Korean peninsula that pretty closely match the haniwa boat shapesuggest similar boats were in use there as well, .  Nnot surprising given the cultural connections.  These boats do not show examples of sails, and were likely crewed by rowers.  Descriptions of some suggest that they might be adorned with branches, jewels, mirrors, and other such things for formal occasions to identify some boats as special -- , and we even have one record of the rowers in ceremonial garb with deer antlers.  But none of this suggests more than one basic boat typevery different types of boats. In the areas of the Yellow and Yangzi rivers, area of modern China, particularly in the modern PRC, the boats we see are a little different.  They tend to be flat bottomed boats, possible evolved from  which appear to have been designed from rafts or similar .   These vessels would have evolved out of those used to transport goods and people up and down the Yellow and Yangzi rivers and their tributaries.  These boats y had developed sails, but still the boats wwere n'ot necessarily the most stable on the open ocean.  Larger boats could perhaps make their way through some of the waves, and were no doubt used throughout the Yellow Sea and similar regions.  However, for going farther abroad, we are told thatcourt chronicles note that there were other boats that were preferred: . These are sometimes called  the Kun'lun-po, or Boats of the Kunlun, or the Boats of the Dark-skinned people.  A quick dive here into how this name came to be. Originally, “Kunlun” appears to refer to a mythical mountain range, the Kunlun-shan, which may have originated in the Shan-hai-jing, the Classic of Mountains and Seas, and so may not have referred to anything specific terrestrial mountain range, ally.  Italthough the term would later attach be used to describe to the mountain chain that forms the northern edge of the Tibetan plateau, on the southern edge of the Tarim Basin. However, at some point, it seems that “Kunlun” came to refer to people -- .  Sspecifically, it came to refer to people of dark complexion, with curly hair.  There are Tang era depictions of such people, but their origin is not exactly known: it might .  It is thought that it may have have equally referred to dark-skinned individuals of African descent, or possibly referring to some of the dark-skinned people who lived in the southern seas—people like the Andamanese living on the islands west of modern Thailand or some of the people of the Malay peninsula, for example. It is these latter groups that likely were the origin, then, of the “Kun'lun-po”, referring to the ships of the south, such as those of Malay and AsutronesianAustronesian origin.  We know that from the period of at least the Northern and Southern Dynasties, and even into the early Tang, these foreign ships often , which were often plyingied the waters from trade port to trade port, and were the preferred sailing vessels for voyages to the south, where the waters could be more treacherous.  Indeed, the Malay language eventually gives us the term of their vessels as “Djong”, a term that eventually made its way into Portuguese as “Junco” and thus into English as “junk”, though this terms has since been rather broadly applied to different “Asian” style sailing vessels. So that leaves us with three ship types that the Yamato court could have been using to send these embassies back and forth to the continent: .  Were they still using their own style of native boat as seen on haniwa,, or were they adopting continental boats to their needs?   If so, were they using the flat-bottomed boats of the Tang dynasty, or the more seaworthy vessels of the foreign merchants?. Which were they using?  The general thinking is that IMost depictions I have seen of the kentoushi, the Japanese embassies to the Tang court, depict them as t is generally thought that they were probably using the more continental-style flat-bottomed, riverine vessels.  After all, they were copying so much of what the Sui and Tang courts were doing, why would they not consider these ships to likewise be superior to their own?  At least for diplomatic purposes.  I suspect that local fishermen did their own were keeping their own counsel as far as ships are concernedthing, and I also have to wonder about what got used they were using from a military standpoint for military purposes.  Certainly we see the Tang style boats used in later centuries, suggesting that these had been adopted at some earlier point, possibly by the 650s or earlier. Whatever they used, and while long-distance sailing vessels could Sailing vessels could be larger than short-distance riverine craft, this was not a luxury cruise.  , but conditions on board were not necessarily a luxury cruise.  From later accounts we know that they would really pack people into these shipspeople could be packed in.  It should be noted that individual beds and bedrooms were a luxury in much of the world, and many people probably had little more than a mat to sleep on.  Furthermore, people could be packed in tight.   Think of the size of some of these embassies, which are said to be 80 to 150 people in size.  A long, overseas journey likely meant getting quite cozy with your neighbors on the voyage.  So how much more so with a camel and two donkeys on board a vessel that was likely never meant to carry them?  Not exactly the most pleasant experience, I imagine – and this is not really any different than European sailing vessels during the later age of exploration.. So, from the records for just the first few years of Takara-hime's second reign, we see that there are lots of people going back and forth, and we have a sense of how they might be getting to and from the continent and peninsula.  Let's dive into Next, we are going to talk about one of the most heavily documented embassies to the Tang court, which set out in the 7th month of the year 659.  Not only do we get a pretty detailed account of this embassy, but we even know who wrote the account: as in our imagined intro, , as this is one of the accounts by the famous Iki no Muraji no Hakatoko, transcribed by Aston as “Yuki” no Muraji. Iki no Hakatoko's name first appears in an entry for 654, where he is quoted as giving information about the status of some of the previous embassies to the Tang court.  Thereafter, various entries are labeled as “Iki no Muraji no Hakatoko says:”, which   This would seem to indicate that these particular entries came are taken directly from another work written by Iki no Hakatoko and referred to as the “Iki Hakatoko Sho”.  Based on the quoted fragments found in the Nihon Shoki, itthis appears to be one of ourthis oldest Japanese travelogues.  It , and spends considerable time on the mission of 659, of which it would appear that Iki no Hakatoko was himself a member, though not a ranking one.  Later, Iki no Hakatoko would find himself mentioned in the Nihon Shoki directly, and he would even be an ambassador, himself. The embassy of 659 itself, as we shall see, was rather momentous.  Although it started easily enough, the embassy would be caught up in some of the most impactful events that would take place between the Tang, Yamato, and the states of the Korean peninsula. This embassy was formally under the command of Sakahibe no Muraji no Iwashiki and Tsumori no Muraji no Kiza.  It's possible In the first instance it is not clear to me if this isthat he is the same person as the previously mentioned associate envoy, Sakahibe no Iwasuki—but the kanji are different enough, and there is another Sakahibe no Kusuri who shows up between the two in the record.  However, they are both listed as envoys during the reign of Takara Hime, aka Saimei Tennou, and as we've abundantly seen, and it wouldn't be the first time that scribal error crept in. has taken place, especially if the Chroniclers were pulling from different sources. The ambassadors took a retinue with them, including members of the northern Emishi, whom they were bringing along with them to show to the Tang court.  TheThey also  embassy ttook two ships—perhaps because of the size of the retinue, but I suspect that this was also because if anything happened to the one, you still had the other.  A kind of backup plan due to the likelihood something went wrong.  And wouldn't you know it, something did go wrong.  You see, things started out fine, departing Mitsu Bay, in Naniwa, on the 3rd day of the 7th month.  They sailed through the Seto Inland Sea and stopped at Tsukushi, likely for one last resupply and to check in with the Dazai, located near modern Fukuoka, who would have been in charge of overseeing ships coming and going to the archipelago.  They departed from Ohotsu bay in Tsukushi on the 11th day of the 8th month. A quick note: Sspeedboats these were not.  Today, one can cross from Fukuoka to Busan, on the southeast corner of the Korean peninsula, in less than a day.  The envoys, however, were taking their time.  They may have even stopped at the islands of Iki and Tsushima on their way.  By the 13th day of the 9th month—over a month from leaving Kyushu behind -- , the  ships finally came to an island along the southern border of Yamato's ally, Baekje.  Hakatoko does not recall the name of the island, but o On the following morning, around 4 AM, so just before sunrise, the two ships put out to sea together to cross the ocean, heading south, towards the mouth of the Yangzi river.  Unfortunately, the following day, the ship Iwashiki was on met with a contrary wind, and was driven away from the other ship – with nothing known of its fate until some time afterwards.  Meanwhile, the other ship, under the command of Tsumori no Muraji no Kiza, continued on and by midnight on the 16th day, it arrived at Mt. Xuan near Kuaiji Commandary in the Yue district, in modern Zhejiang.  Suddenly a violent northeast wind blew up, and p.  Tthey were saileding another 7 days before they finally arrived at Yuyao.  Today, this is part of the city of Ningbo, at the mouth of the Qiantang river, south of Shanghai and considered a part of the Yangzi Delta Region.  This area has been inhabited since at least 6300 years ago, and it has long been a trade port, especially with the creation of the Grand Canal connecting between the Yangzi and the Yellow River, which would have allowed transshipment of goods to both regions. The now half-size Yamato contingenty  left their ship at Yuyao and disembarked, and made their way to Yuezhou, the capital of the Kuaiji Commandary.  This took them a bit of time—a little over a month.  Presumably this was because of paperwork and logistics: they probably because they had to send word ahead, and I suspect they had to inventory everything they brought and negotiate carts and transportationfigure out transportation., since   Tthey didn't exactly have bags of holding to stuff it all in, so they probably needed to negotiate carts and transportation.  The finally made it to Yuezhou on the first day of the 11th intercalary month.  An “intercalary” month refers to an extra month in a year.  It was determined by various calculations and was added to keep the lunar and solar years in relative synch. From Yuezhou, things went a bit more quickly, as they were placed on post-horses up to the Eastern Capital, or Luoyang, where the Emperor Tang Gaozong was in residence.   The Tang kept a capital at Luoyang and another to the west, in Chang'an.  The trip to Luoyang was long—over 1,000 kilometers, or 1 megameter, as it were.  The trip first took them through the Southern Capital, meaning the area of modern Nanjing, which they entered on the 15th day of the month.  They then continued onwards, reaching Luoyang on the 29th day of the 11th month.  The following day, on the 30th day of the 11th intercalary month of the year 659, the Yamato envoys were granted an audience with Emperor Tang Gaozong.  As was proper, he inquired about the health of their sovereign, Takara Hime, and the envoys reported that she was doing well.  He asked other questions about how the officials were doing and whether there was peace in Yamato.  The envoys all responded affirmatively, assuring him that Yamato was at peace. Tang Gaozong also asked about the Emishi they had brought with them.  We mentioned this event previously, back in Episode XXX117 , how the Emishi had been shown to the Tang Emperor, and how they had described them for him.  This is actually one of the earliest accounts that we have describing the Emishi from the Yamato point of view, rather than just naming them—presumably because everyone in Yamato already knew who they were.  From a diplomatic perspective, of course, this was no doubt Yamato demonstrating how they were, in many ways, an Empire, similar to the Tang, with their own subordinate ethnicities and “barbarians”. After answering all of the emperor's questions, the audience was concluded.  The following day, however, was something of its own. This was the first day of the regular 11th lunar month, and it also was the celebration of the Winter Solstice—so though it was the 11th month, it may have been about 22 December according to our modern western calendars.  The envoys once again met with the emperor, and they were treated as distinguished guests—at least according to their own records of it.  Unfortunately, during the festivities, it seems that a fire broke out, creating some confusion, and .  Tthe matters of the diplomatic mission were put on hold while all of that went on. We don't know exactly what happened in the ensuing month.  Presumably the envoys took in the sites of the city, may have visited various monasteries, and likely got to know the movers and shakers in the court, who likely would have wined and dined them, inviting them to various gatherings, as since they brought their own exotic culture and experiences to the Tang court. Unfortunately, things apparently turned sour.  First off, it seems clear that the members of this embassyy weren't the only Japanese in the court.  There may have been various merchants, of course, but and we definitely know that there were students who had come on other missions and were still there likely still studying, such as those who had been learning from studying with Master Xuanzang, whose journeys we mentioned in the last several episodes.  But Wwe are given a very specific name of a troublemaker, however:  Kawachi no Aya no Ohomaro, and we are told that he was aa servant of Han Chihung, who .  Han Chihung, himself, is thought to have possiblymay have been of mixed ethnicity—both Japanese and ethnic Han, and may .  Hhe may have traveled to the Tang court on or around 653. , based on some of the records, but it isn't entirely clear. For whatever reason, on the 3rd day of the 12th month of the year 659, Kawachi no Aya no Ohomaro slandered the envoys, and although .  Wwe don't know exactly what he said, but the Tang court caught wind of the accusations and found the envoys guilty.  They were condemned to banishment, until the author of our tale, none other than Iki no Hakatoko himself, stepped up, .  He made representation to the Emperor, pleading against the slander.  , and tThe punishment was remitted, .  Sso they were no longer banished.  However, they were also then told that they could no't return home.  You see, the Tang court was in the middle of some sensitive military operations in the lands east of the sea—in other words they were working with Silla to and invadeing the Kingdom of Baekje.  Since Yamato was an ally of Baekje, it would be inconvenient if the envoys were to return home and rally Yamato to Baekje's defense. And so the entire Yamato embassy was moved to the Western Capital, Chang'an, where they were placed under individual house arrest.  They no doubt were treated well, but they were not allowed to leave, and .  Tthey ended up spending the next year in this state. of house arrest. Unfortunately, we don't have a record of just how they passed their time in Chang'an.  They likely studied, and were probably visited by nobles and others.  They weren't allowed to leave, but they weren't exactly thrown in jail, either.  After all, they were foreign emissaries, and though the Tang might be at war with their ally, there was no formal declaration of war with Yamato, as far as I can make out.  And so the embassy just sat there, for about 9 months. Finally, in the 7th month of 660, the records tell us we are told thatthat tThe Tang and Silla forces had been successful: .  Baekje was destroyed..  The Tang and Silla forces had been successful.   News must have reached Chang'an a month later, as Iki Hakatoko writes that this occurred in the 8th month of the year 660.  With the Tang special military operation on the Korean peninsula concluded, they released the envoys and allowed them to return to their own countries.  They envoys began their preparations as of the 12th day of the 9th month, no doubt eager to return home, and left were leaving Chang'an a week later, on the 19th day of the 9th month.  From there, it took them almost a month to reach Luoyang, arriving on the 16th day of the 10th month, and here they were greeted with more good news, for here it was that they met up once again with those members of their delegation who had been blown off course. As you may remember, the ship carrying Iwashiki was blown off-course on the 15th day of the 9th month in the year 659, shortly after setting out from the Korean peninsula.  The two ships had lost contact and Tsumori no Muraji no Kiza and his ship had been the one that had continued on.   Iwashiki and those with him, however, found themselves at the mercy of the contrary winds and eventually came ashore at an island in the Southern Sea, which Aston translates as “Erh-kia-wei”.   There appears to be at least some suggestion that this was an island in the Ryukyuan chain, possibly the island of Kikai.  There, local islanders, none too happy about these foreigners crashing into their beach, destroyed the ship, and presumably attacked the embassy.  Several members, including Yamato no Aya no Wosa no Atahe no Arima (yeah, that *is* a mouthful), Sakahibe no Muraji no Inadzumi (perhaps a relative of Iwashiki) and others all stole a local ship and made their way off the island.  They eventually made landfall at a Kuazhou, southeast of Lishui City in modern Zhejiang province, where they met with local officials of the Tang government, who then sent them under escort to the capital at Luoyang.  Once there, they were probably held in a similar state of house arrest, due to the invasion of Baekje, but they met back up with Kiza and Hakatoko's party. The envoys, now reunited, hung out in Luoyang for a bit longer, and thus .  Thus it was on the first day of the 11th month of 660 that they witnessed war captives being brought to the capital.  This included 13 royal persons of Baekje, from the King on down to the Crown Prince and various nobles, including the PRimiePrime Minister, as well as 37 other persons of lower rank—50 people all told.  TheThese captives y were delivered up to the Tang government and led before the emperor.  Of course, with the war concluded, and Baekje no longer a functioning state, while he could have had them executed, Tang Gaozong instead released them, demonstrating a certain amount of magnanimity.  The Yamato envoys remained in Luoyang for most of the month.  On the 19th, they had another audience with the emperor, who bestowed on them various gifts and presents, and then five days later they departed the Luoyang, and began the trek back to the archipelago in earnest. By the 25th day of the first month of 661, the envoys arrived back at Yuezhou, head of the Kuaiji Commandery.  They stayed there for another couple of months, possibly waiting for the right time, as crossing the sea at in the wrong season could be disastrous.  They finally departed east from Yuezhou on the first day of the fourth month, coming to .  They came to Mt. Cheng-an 6 days later, on the 7th, and set out to sea first thing in the morning on the 8th.  They had a southwest wind initially in their favor, but they lost their way in the open ocean, an all too commonall-too-common problem without modern navigational aids.  Fortunately, the favorable winds had carried them far enough that only a day later they made landfall on the island of Tamna, aka Jeju island. Jeju island was, at this point, its own independent kingdom, situated off the southern coast of the Korean peninsula.  Dr. Alexander Vovin suggested that the name “Tamna” may have been a corruption of a Japonic or proto-Japonic name: Tanimura.  The island was apparently quite strange to the Yamato embassy, and they met with various residents natives of Jeju island.  They, even convincinged Prince Aphaki and eight other men of the island to come with them to be presented at the Yamato court. The rest of their journey took a little over a month.  They finally arrived back in Yamato on the 23rd day of the fifth month of 661.  They had been gone for approximately two years, and a lot had changed, especially with the destruction of Baekje.  The Yamato court had already learned of what had happened and was in the process of drawing up plans for an expedition back to the Korean peninsula to restore the Baekje kingdom, and pPrince Naka no Oe himself was set to lead the troops. The icing on the cake was: Tthe reception that the envoys received upon their return was rather cold.  Apparently they were had been slandered to the Yamato court by another follower of Han Chihung—Yamato no Aya no Atahe no Tarushima—and so they weren't met with any fanfare.  We still don't know what it was that Tarsuhima was saying—possibly he had gotten letters from Chihung or Ohomaro and was simply repeating what they had said. Either way, the envoys were sick of it.  They had traveled all the way to the Tang capitals, they had been placed under house arrest for a year, and now they had returned.  They not only had gifts from the Tang emperor, but they were also bringing the first ever embassy from the Kingdom of Tamna along with them.  The slander would not stand.  And so they did what anyone would do at the time:  They apparently appealed to the Kami.  We are told that their anger reached to the Gods of the High Heaven, which is to say the kami of Takamanohara, who killed Tarushima with a thunderbolt.  Which I guess was one way to shut him up. From what we can tell, the embassy was eventually considered a success.  Iki no Hakatoko's star would rise—and fall—and rise again in the court circles.  As I noted, his account of this embassy is really one of the best and most in depth that we have from this time.  It lets us see the relative route that the envoys were taking—the Chronicles in particular note that they traveled to the Great Tang of Wu, and, sure enough, they had set out along the southern route to the old Wu capital, rather than trying to cross the Bohai Sea and make landfall by the Shandong peninsula or at the mouth of the Yellow River.  From there they traveled through Nanjing—the southern “capital” likely referring, in this instance, to the old Wu capital—and then to Luoyang.  Though they stayed there much longer than they had anticipated, they ended up living there through some of the most impactful events that occurred during this point in Northeast Asia.  they And that is something we will touch on next episode.  Until then, thank you once again for listening and for all of your support. If you like what we are doing, please tell your friends and feel free to rate us wherever you listen to podcasts.  If you feel the need to do more, and want to help us keep this going, we have information about how you can donate on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website,  SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode. Also, feel free to reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page.  You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com.  Thank you, also, to Ellen for their work editing the podcast. And that's all for now.  Thank you again, and I'll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan

My most beloved herbal elder and I talk about our favorite subject- women throughout time using plants for self care, family healing, and community connection. After nearly 4 decades as a practicing herbalist and teacher, and in an age of informational overabundance, Kami has seen what actually works when it comes to truly embodying herbal knowing. Find Kami's freebies & learn more about Handcrafted Healing Herbal Oils (including the peek at what you see when you log in to the course). Two Patreon bonuses for this episode- an extended conversation with Kami where we share our stories of Mothering Without Elders, and two free videos with Kami entitled Garden Herb Walk- meet 9 favorite garden herbs that can calm the nerves, help with digestion, heal the skin, kick a cold, and more! Let's meet beautiful edible and medicinal flowers, weeds, leaves and seeds and find out which ones are used for what. Kami's book The Herbal Kitchen Amber's website MythicMedicine.love  Take our fun Which Healing Herb is Your Spirit Medicine? quiz Amber/Mythic Medicine on Instagram Amber's Nourishing Motherlines Substack Medicine Stories Facebook group Music by Mariee Siou (from her beautiful song Wild Eyes)