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Rounding Up Season 2 | Episode 9 – Instructional & Assessment Practices Guest: Dr. Kim Morrow-Leong Mike Wallus: What are the habits of mind that educators can adopt to be more responsive to our students' thinking? And how can we turn these habits of mind into practical steps that we can take on a regular basis? Dr. Kim Morrow-Leong has some thoughts on this topic. Today, Kim joins the podcast, and we'll talk with her about three mental shifts that can profoundly impact educators instructional and assessment practices.  Mike: Kim Morrow-Leong, welcome to the podcast. We're excited to have you. Kim Morrow-Leong: Thank you, Mike. It's nice to be here. Mike: I'm really excited to talk about the shifts educators can make to foster responsive interpretations of student thinking. This is an idea that for me has been near and dear for a long time, and it's fun to be able to have this conversation with you because I think there are some things we're going to get into that are shifts in how people think. But they're also practical. You introduced the shift that you proposed with a series of questions that you suggested that teachers might ask themselves or ask their colleagues, and the first question that you posed was, “What is right?” And I'm wondering what do you mean when you suggest that teachers might ask themselves or their colleagues this question when they're interpreting student thinking? Kim: So, I'm going to rephrase your question a little bit and change the emphasis to say, “What is right?” And the reason I want to change the emphasis of that is because we often talk about what is wrong, and so rather than talking about what is wrong, let's talk about what's right. When we look at student work, it's a picture. It's a snapshot of where they are at that particular moment. And the greater honesty that we can bring to that situation to understand what their thinking is, the better off we're going to be. So, there's a lot of talk lately about asset-based instruction, asset-based assessment, and I think it's a great initiative and it really gets us thinking about how we can think about what students are good at and what they bring to the table or what they bring to the classroom culture. But we don't often talk a lot about how we do that, how we break the mold. Because many of our metaphors and our language about learning are linear, and they indicate that students are moving from somewhere to achieve a goal somewhere down the path, somewhere down the line. Kim: How do you switch that around? Well, rather than looking at what they're missing and what part of the path they haven't achieved yet, we can look at where they are at the moment because that reflects everything they've learned up to that moment. So, one of the ways we can do this is to unpack our standards a little more carefully, and I think a lot of people are very good at looking at what the skills are and what our students need to be able to do by the end of the year. But a lot of what's behind a standard are concepts. What are some big ideas that must be in place for students to be successful with the skills? So, I'm going to give a very specific example. This one happens to be about a fourth-grade question that we've asked before in a district I used to work at. The task is to sketch as many rectangles as you can that are 48 square units. Kim: There's some skills behind this, but understanding what the concepts are is going to give us a little more insight into student thinking. So, one of the skills is to understand that there are many ways to make 48: to take two factors and multiply them together and only two factors, and to make a product of 48 or to get the area. But a concept behind that is that 48 is the product of two numbers. It's what happens when you multiply one dimension by the other dimension. It's not the measure of one of the dimensions. That's a huge conceptual idea for students to sort out what area is and what perimeter is, and we want to look for evidence of what they understand about the differences between what the answer to an area problem is and what the answer to, for example, a perimeter problem is. Another concept is that area indicates that a space is covered by squares. Kim: The other big concept here is that this particular question is going to have more than one answer. You're going to have 48 as a product, but you could have six times eight and four times 12 and many others. So that's a lot of things going into this one, admittedly very rich, task for students to take in. One of the things I've been thinking a lot about lately is this idea of a listening stance. So, a listening stance describes what you're listening for. It describes how you're listening. Are you listening for the right answer? Are you listening to understand students' thinking? Are you listening to respond or are you listening to hear more—and asking for more information from your student or really from any listener? So, one of the ways we could think about that, and perhaps this sounds familiar to you, is you could have what we call an evaluative listening stance. Kim: An evaluative listening stance is listening for the right answer. As you listen to what students say, you're listening for the student who gives you the answer that you're looking for. So, here's an example of something you might see. Perhaps a student covers their space and has dimensions for the rectangle of seven times six, and they tell you that this is a space that has an area of 48 square units. There's something right about that. They are really close. Because you can look at their paper and you can see squares on their paper and they're arranged in an array and you can see the dimensions on this side and the dimensions on that side, and you can see that there's almost 48 square units. I know we all can see what's wrong about that answer, but that's not what we're thinking about right now. We're thinking about what's right. And what's right is they covered that space with an area that is something by six. This is a great place to start with this student to figure out where they got that answer. If you're listening evaluatively, that's a wrong answer and there's nowhere else to go. So, when we look at what is right in student work, we're looking for the starting point. We're looking for what they know so that we can begin there and make a plan to move forward with them. You can't change where students are unless you meet them where they are and help them move forward. Mike: So, the second question that you posed was, “Can you cite evidence for what you're saying?” So again, talk us through what you're asking, when you ask teachers to pose this question to themselves or to their colleagues. Kim: Think about ways that you might be listening to a student's answer and very quickly say, “Oh, they got it,” and you move on. And you grab the next student's paper or the next student comes up to your desk and you take their work and you say, “Tell me what you're thinking.” And they tell you something. You say, “That's good,” and you move to the next one. Sometimes you can take the time to linger and listen and ask for more and ask for more and ask for more information. Teachers are very good at gathering information, at a glance. We can look at a stack of papers and in 30 seconds get a good snapshot of what's happening in that classroom. But in that efficiency we lose some details. We lose information about specifics, about what students understand, that we can only get by digging in and asking more questions. Kim: Someone once told me that every time a student gives an answer, you should follow it with, “How do you know?” And somebody raised their hand and said, “Well, what if it's the right answer?” And the presenter said, “Oh, you still ask it. As a matter of fact, that's the best one to ask. When you ask, ‘How do you know?' you don't know what you're going to hear, you have no idea what's going to happen.” And sometimes those are the most delightful surprises, is to hear some fantastical creative way to solve a problem that you never would've thought about. Unless you ask, you won't hear these wonderful things. Sometimes you find out that a correct answer has some flawed reasoning behind it. Maybe it's reasoning that only works for that particular problem, but it won't work for something else in the future. You definitely want to know that information so that you can help that student rethink their reasoning so that the next time it always works. Kim: Sometimes you find out the wrong answers are accidents. They're just a wrong computation. Everything was perfect up until the last moment and they said three times two is five, and then they have a wrong answer. If you don't ask more either in writing or verbally, you have incorrect information about that student's progress, their understandings, their conceptual development and even their skills. That kind of thing happens to everyone because we're human. By asking for more information, you're really getting at what is important in terms of student errors and what is not important, what is just easily fixable. I worked with a group of teachers once to create some open-ended tasks that require extended answers, and we sat down one time to create rubrics. And we did this with student work, so we laid them all out and someone held up a paper and said, “This is it!” Kim: “This student gets it.” And so, we all took a copy of this work and we looked at it. And we were trying to figure out what exactly does this answer communicate that makes sense to us? That seems to be an exemplar. And so, what we did was we focused on exactly what the students said. We focused on the evidence in front of us. This one was placing decimal numbers on a number line. We noted that the representation was accurate, that the position of the point on the number line was correct. We noticed that the label on the point matched the numbers in the problem, so that made sense. But then all of a sudden somebody said, “Well, wait a minute. There's an answer here, but I don't know how this answer got here.” Something happened, and there's no evidence on the page that this student added this or subtracted this, but magically the right answer was there. And it really drove home for this group—and for me, it really stuck with me—the idea that you can see a correct answer but not know the thinking behind it. Kim: And so, we learned from that point on to always focus on the evidence in front of us and to make declarative statements about what we saw, what we observed, and to hold off on making inferences. We saved our inferences for the end. After I had this experience with the rubric grading and with this group of teachers and coaches, I read something about over attribution and under attribution. And it really resonated with me. Over attribution is when you make the claim that a student understands something when there really isn't enough evidence to make that statement. It doesn't mean that's true or not true, it means that you don't have enough information in front of you. You don't have enough evidence to make that statement. You over attribute what it is they understand based on what's in front of you. Similarly, you get under attribution. You have a student who brings to you a drawing or a sketch or a representation of some sort that you don't understand because you've never seen anybody solve a problem this way before. Kim: You might come to the assumption that this student doesn't understand the math task at hand. That could be under attribution. It could be that you have never seen this before and you have not yet made sense of it. And so, focusing on evidence really gets us to stop short of making broad, general claims about what students understand, making broad inferences about what we see. It asks us to cite evidence to be grounded in what the student actually put on the paper. For some students, this is challenging because they mechanically have difficulties putting things on paper. But we call a student up to our desk and say, “Can you tell me more about what you've done here? I'm not following your logic.” And that's really the solution is to ask more questions. I know, you can't do this all the time. But you can do it once in a while, and you can check yourself if you are assigning too much credit for understanding to a student without evidence. And you can also check yourself and say, “Hmm, am I not asking enough questions of this student? Is there something here that I don't understand that I need to ask more about?” Mike: This is really an interesting point because what I'm finding myself thinking about is my own practice. What I feel like you're offering is this caution, which says, “You may have a set of cumulative experiences with children that have led you to a set of beliefs about their understanding or how they come to understanding. But if we're not careful—and even sometimes even if we are careful—we can bring that in a way that's actually less helpful, less productive,” right? It's important to look at things and actually say, “What's the evidence?” Rather than, “What's the body of my memory of this child's previous work?” It's not to say that that might not have value, but at this particular point in time, “What's the evidence that I see in front of me?” Kim: That's a good point, and it reminds me of a practice that we used to have when we got together and assessed these open-ended tasks. The first thing we would do is we put them all in the middle of the table and we would not look at our own students' work. That's a good strategy if you work with a team of people, to use these extended assessments or extended tasks to understand student thinking, is to share the load. You put them all out there. And the other thing we would do is we would take the papers, turn them over and put a Post-it note on the back. And we would take our own notes on what we saw, the evidence that we saw. We put them on a Post-it note, turn them over and then stick the Post-it note to the back of the work. There are benefits to looking at work fresh without any preconceived notions that you bring to this work. There are other times when you want all that background knowledge. My suggestion is that you try it differently, that you look at students' work for students you don't know and that you not share what you're seeing with your colleagues immediately, is that you hold your opinions on a Post-it to yourself, and then you can share it afterwards. You can bring the whole conversation to the whole table and look at the data in front of you and discuss it as a team afterwards. But to take your initial look as an individual with an unknown student. Mike: Hmm. I'm going to jump to the third shift that you suggest, which is less of a question and more of a challenge. You talk about the idea of moving from anticipating to targeting a learning trajectory, and I'm wondering if you could talk about what that means and why you think it's important. Kim: Earlier we talked about how important it is to understand and unpack our standards that we're teaching so that we know what to look for. And I think the thing that's often missed, particularly in standards in the older grades, is that there are a lot of developmental steps between, for example, a third-grade standard and a fourth-grade standard. There are skills and concepts that need to grow and develop, but we don't talk about those as much as perhaps we should. Each one of those conceptual ideas we talked about with the area problem we discussed may come at different times. It may not come during the unit where you are teaching area versus perimeter versus multiplication. That student may not come to all of those conceptual understandings or acquire all of the skills they need at the same time, even though we are diligently teaching it at the same time. Kim: So, it helps to look at third grade to understand, what are these pieces that make up this particular skill? What are the pieces that make up the standard that you're trying to unpack and to understand? So, the third shift in our thinking is to let go of the standard as our goal, but to break apart the standard into manageable pieces that are trackable because really our standards mean by the end of the year. They don't mean by December, they mean by the end of the year. So that gives you the opportunity to make choices. What are you going to do with the information you gather? You've asked what is right about student work. You've gathered evidence about what they understand. What are you going to do with that information? That perhaps is the hardest part. There's something out there called a learning trajectory that you've mentioned. Kim: A learning trajectory comes out of people who really dig in and understand student thinking on a fine-grain level, how students will learn … developmentally, what are some ideas they will develop before they develop other ideas? That's the nature of a learning trajectory. And sometimes those are reflected in our standards. The way that kindergartners are asked to rote count before they're asked to really understand one-to-one correspondence. We only expect one-to-one correspondence up to 20 in kindergarten, but we expect counting up to a hundred because we acknowledge that that doesn't come at the same time. So, a learning trajectory to some degree is built into your standards. But as we talked about earlier, there are pieces and parts that aren't outlined in your standards. One of the things we know about students and their interactions with grids and arrays is that a student might be able to recognize an array that is six by eight, but they may not yet be able to draw it. Kim: The spatial structuring that's required to create a certain number of lines going vertically and a certain number of lines going horizontally may not be in place. At the same time, they are reading a arrays and understanding what they mean. So, the skill of structuring the space around you takes time. The task where we ask them to draw these arrays is asking something that some kids may not yet be able to do, to draw these grids out. If we know that we can give them practice making arrays, we can give them tools to make arrays, we can give them blocks to make arrays, and we can scaffold this and help them move forward. What we don't want to assume is that a student who cannot yet make a six by eight array can't do any of it because that's not true. There's parts they can do. So, our job as teachers is to look at what they do, look carefully at the evidence of what they do, and then make a plan. Use all of that skill and experience that's on our teams. Even if you're a new teacher, all those people on your teams know a lot more than they're letting on, and then you can make a plan to move forward and help that student make these smaller steps so they can reach the standard. Mike: When we talked earlier, one of the things that you really shifted for me was some of the language that I found myself using. So, I know I have been in the habit of using the word “misconception” when we're talking about student work. And the part of the conversation that we had that really has never left me is this idea of, what do we actually mean when we say “misconception”? Because I found that the more I reflected on it, I used that language to describe a whole array of things that kids were doing, and not all of them were what I think a misconception actually is. Can you just talk about this language of misconception and how we use it and perhaps what we might use instead to be a little bit more precise? Kim: I have stopped using the word misconception myself. Students understand what they understand. It's our job to figure out what they do understand. And if it's not at that mature level we need it to be for them to understand the concept, what disequilibrium do I need to introduce to them? I'm borrowing from Piaget there. You have to introduce some sort of challenge so that they have the opportunity to restructure what it is they understand. They need to take their current conception, change it with new learning to become a new conception. That's our teaching opportunity right there. That's where I have to start. Mike: Before we close, I have to say one of the big takeaways from this conversation is the extent to which the language that I use, and I mean literally what I say to myself internally or what I say to my colleagues when we're interpreting student work or student thinking, that that language has major implications for my instruction and that the language that surrounds my assessing, my interpreting and my planning habits really matters. Kim: It does. You are what you practice. You are what you put forth into the world. And to see a truly student-centered point of view requires a degree of empathy that we have to learn. Mike: So, before you go, Kim, I'm wondering, can you share two or three resources that have really shaped your thinking on the interpretation of student learning? Kim: Yes, I could. And one of them is the book, “Children's Mathematics.” There's a lot of information in this book, and if you've ever engaged with the work of cognitively guided instruction, you're familiar with the work in this book. There's plenty of content knowledge, there's plenty of pedagogical content knowledge in this book. But the message that I think is the most important is that everything they learn, they learn by listening. They listen to what students were saying. And the second piece is called “Warning Signs!” And this one is one of my favorites. And in this book, they give three warning signs that you as a teacher are taking over students' learning. And one example that comes to mind for me is you take the pencil from the student. It's such a simple thing that we would just take it into quickly get something out, but to them, they expressed that that's a warning sign that you're about to take over their thinking. So, I highly recommend that one. And there's another one that I always recommend. It was published in Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School. It's called “Never Say Anything a Kid Can Say!” That's a classic. I highly recommend it if you've never read it. Mike: Kim Morrow-Leong, thank you for joining us. It's really been a pleasure. Kim: Mike, thank you for having me. This has been delightful. Mike: This podcast is brought to you by The Math Learning Center and the Maier Math Foundation, dedicated to inspiring and enabling individuals to discover and develop their mathematical confidence and ability. © 2024 The Math Learning Center | www.mathlearningcenter.org

INTRODUCTION: Kim Sorrelle is the director of a humanitarian organization, popular speaker, and the author of two books. Her first book, Cry Until You Laugh, is about her and her husband's battle with cancer after being diagnosed just four months a part. Her second book, Love Is, chronicles her year long quest to figure out the true meaning of love, a sometimes funny, sometimes scary, always enlightening journey that led to life-changing discoveries found mostly on the streets of Haiti.   INCLUDED IN THIS EPISODE (But not limited to): ·      Stop Being Judgmental  ·      Read The Bible To Improve Yourself, Not Others·      Deep Insight Into Life In Haiti·      Deep Insight Into VooDoo – HooDoo – Witchcraft ·      Catholic Shade·      Church Codependency ·      Fucking Nuns!!!·      Physical Abuse Just Ain't Right!!!·      Overcoming Government Hurdles ·      My Personal Story Of Being A Victim Of Witchcraft  CONNECT WITH KIM: Website & Books: https://www.KimSorrelle.comYouTube: https://bit.ly/3vRFWXfFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/loveisbykim/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kimsorrelle/?hl=enTwitter: https://twitter.com/Kim_SorrelleLinkedIn: https://bit.ly/3tEzK24Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/ksorrelle/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@livelove_outloud  KIM'S RECOMMENDATIONS: ·      All You Need Is Love (The Beatles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7xMfIp-irg  CONNECT WITH DE'VANNON: Website: https://www.SexDrugsAndJesus.comYouTube: https://bit.ly/3daTqCMFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/SexDrugsAndJesus/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sexdrugsandjesuspodcast/Twitter: https://twitter.com/TabooTopixLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/devannonEmail: DeVannon@SexDrugsAndJesus.com  DE'VANNON'S RECOMMENDATIONS: ·      Pray Away Documentary (NETFLIX)o  https://www.netflix.com/title/81040370o  TRAILER: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk_CqGVfxEs ·      Upwork: https://www.upwork.com·      FreeUp: https://freeup.net·      Disabled American Veterans (DAV): https://www.dav.org·      American Legion: https://www.legion.org ·      Black Licorice (consult your doctor): https://www.webmd.com/diet/black-licorice-health-benefits#1 ·      VooDoo Explained: https://bit.ly/36SBA83 ·      What The World Needs Now (Dionne Warwick): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfHAs9cdTqg  INTERESTED IN PODCASTING OR BEING A GUEST?: ·      PodMatch is awesome! This application streamlines the process of finding guests for your show and also helps you find shows to be a guest on. The PodMatch Community is a part of this and that is where you can ask questions and get help from an entire network of people so that you save both money and time on your podcasting journey.https://podmatch.com/signup/devannon  TRANSCRIPT: [00:00:00]You're listening to the sex drugs and Jesus podcast, where we discuss whatever the fuck we want to! And yes, we can put sex and drugs and Jesus all in the same bed and still be all right at the end of the day. My name is De'Vannon and I'll be interviewing guests from every corner of this world as we dig into topics that are too risqué for the morning show, as we strive to help you understand what's really going on in your life.There is nothing off the table and we've got a lot to talk about. So let's dive right into this episode.De'Vannon: Hey, Hey. Hey, all my lovely peoples out there. Thank you so much for tuning into the sex drugs and Jesus podcast. Again, one more week. I appreciate you very fucking much. Now, today I'm delighted to be talking to my sister, Kim, surreal, who is the author of love is, and also another book called cry and tell you why.Now, this is our second interview. And in this episode, we're continuing our [00:01:00] conversation about Hoodoo and voodoo and witchcraft. I'm going to give you my personal story of how I was a victim of a witchcraft, and then we're throwing shade at judgmental, Christians in churches, because for some unknown reason, they don't seem to get the point that the whole reason to read the Bible is to improve yourself.Not other people take a listen to this episode.Hi, is this the girl, how you doing today? Kim: I'm doing great. How are you? My brother,De'Vannon: I am marvelous and I am so goddamn. Happy to have you back with me today. I felt like it was divine Providence. It was meant to be and everything like that. The last time that we did an interview, when it was over, I felt like I just didn't want to let you go. And I [00:02:00] feel like that God has bonded us and infused our souls together.And I have a feeling that we're going to be seeing a lot more of each other in the days to come.Kim: I think exactly the same way. I am so happy about it. I have to say, because I feel like we are, we are meant to know each other. We are meant to be friends. We are meant to be in each other's lives and I love.De'Vannon: Absolutely. Absolutely. And so on the last show, we covered stuff like the, about you went, you, you, you and your husband went through with cancer, how it is being a widow and everything like that. Since the husband that we were speaking about as, as you put it in your book, love is, was the gifted with the was gifted with a ticket to have, and it was either love is or cry until you laugh.One of those books that, that, that one liner was in there. And it stood out to me. And we talked about how you received your cancer medical diagnosis on a voicemail and talked about how I got my HIV diagnosed on a voicemail. [00:03:00] And that was a whole thing because doctors shouldn't do that. Kim: Ever ever, never, ever.De'Vannon: And then we happily hopped down the rabbit hole and talked about the health benefits of black licorice for quite a while. Kim: Yeah. So it was good. How we stay just in one direction, kept on just one topic the whole time.De'Vannon: Right. Kim: Yeah.De'Vannon: So Kim's arousal to the author. She's an entrepreneur and speaker cancer survivor, and a lover of black licorice. As we were just talking about. Now, you got two books one's called love is one's called cry until you laugh. Your website is Kim surreal that calm, of course, that will be in the show notes as I always put it, but I would just spell it.It's K I M S O R R E L L e.com. So I want you for both of those books. Why didn't you [00:04:00] title love is love is and why did you title cry until you laugh, cry until you laugh? Kim: Well, Brian too, you laugh is the journey of being diagnosed with cancer. And four months later, my husband being diagnosed with cancer and then losing him six weeks later. And so I wrote for a bit over a year. And when, when you go through stuff like that, you cry and it's good to cry. You know, it, you're going to grieve it and grief can be healthy.You know, you need to recognize it and breathe it. And so, but there has to be a moment. When you allow yourself to laugh again, when you don't feel guilty thinking that you're somehow dishonoring the one who was left or their life or wallowing in self-pity or self-doubt or whatever, then you can release that and laugh again.You, you [00:05:00] have to be able to do that. So that is the cry until you laugh. And then love is, is because it's a book about what love really is. And I used a 2000 year old poem. Love is patient love is kind, does not envy does not boast. They has 14 love ISS and love isn't in it. So love is, was a pretty natural title for that.De'Vannon: I love how you describe that, that.Hebrew scripture, the 2000 Euro poem. I think That's very beautiful, Kim: what it is. Yeah.De'Vannon: cause he's just, he's talking about an excerpt from the belief first Corinthians 12 or 13. I think it's very scrutiny in the 13 and. And it's, and it's a law from a letter that the apostle Paul had written to the church at Corrine. And and she's describing it as a poem. And so I think that that's very cool to point [00:06:00] out because the Bible is, you know, a collection of writings and it can be looked at in a thousand different ways.And so I think that that's a, a beautiful perspective to have on it. Kim: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think if you look at the Bible that way and you read that Bible, that way, that it's a collection of poems and stories and life events, you know, just it's, it's just a beautiful book that has all these different elements put together written by different people during different times.And and if you look at it that way, it's it's not so intimidating, right. It's just a beautiful script.De'Vannon: Well, I think that the Bible's ever meant to be intimidating. You know, it's a, it's a collection of people's thoughts and. And their wisdom and their mind for the set of knowledge that they had at the time. [00:07:00] And so I look at it from, okay, this is someone else's life that I'm looking at. What can I learn from it?You know, what can I, what what's gonna serve me here. And I really wish more people would look at the Bible from like a self-improvement aspect, as opposed to, how can I go into this Bible and find out what's wrong with everybody else? Kim: Yeah, so true. So true. And there is so much to learn. I mean, there's so much to learn every time I read something that I've read before I see something different in it. It's, it's so unique that way that it's constantly giving. If you let it.De'Vannon: Right. And so, and I want to issue that warning to people who are starting spiritual paths and spiritual journeys and stuff like that, to let the focus always be you it's so easy to get caught up in self-righteousness and judging other people. When you get going, walking with God or being a Christian specifically, [00:08:00] I cannot say that I have had this experience with people I've interacted with, from other faiths the whole judging people thing.That from my experience so far in my almost 40 years of logging this earth, that almost seems to be exclusively Christian, just, just from my take on it. Somebody who I no longer affiliate with he was telling me, he was, when I first met him, he was like agnostic. He didn't believe in anything, whatever.And he had some sort of come to Jesus moment and now he was going to somewhere. Cherish or some sort of religious group or whatever. And I asked him whenever somebody tells me that the first thing I asked them. Okay, well, what do you think about the LGBTQ plus community? Because I'm in that community.And I need to know that I'm talking to somebody who thinks that there's something wrong with me, because if that's the case, we can no longer continue to associate, but I'm not going to abuse myself like that. And so and so then he got into the whole, well, you know, I'm just saying what the Bible says.If, if, if the answer to that question is [00:09:00] anything other than no, you all a perfectly fine. That means you think something's wrong with us. No matter how you try it. No matter how you try to wrap. Hey, you know, and I cannot tell you how many times I've asked people who try to come on. My show are people who in various ways, I meet them where they stand on this and they've got some sort of Vegas just thought of, well, it's all sins bad.No, no, no, no, no. There's only two right answers to that question. You could be like neutral and just not give a fuck one way or the other. If you had the awakening to understand that you don't actually have to have an opinion about everything, but that takes a different level of growth. And most people haven't made it there yet.Or the other one is just to be like, you know what? I don't know. I, I read the Bible for me. I'm not concerned about other people and there's nothing wrong with y'all. So before I dismissed him, I let him know. You know, when you read through the Bible, since you're a new Christian, you ain't been trying [00:10:00] this renewed even a year yet, and you have all these opinions about my lifestyle. You know, I said, just remember that the book that you're reading is an American, it.did not come from from white conservative people, even though they'd been in charge of the interpretations of it. It's not their book. And it does not an American book. It is from the middle east, and it was written in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic at, until you go back and read those original languages and learn to decipher them for yourself, then you are judging me off of someone else's opinion on someone else's book.Yes. Kim: But that is such a great way to put it. And that is absolutely so true. And so many things, so many things have been misinterpreted that bad being one of them. And I don't understand why churches Call themselves church, right? Christianity is supposed to be about love and peace and joy. And the opposite of judging yes.That it's preached from the pulpit, from the pulpit. I have never [00:11:00] understood that. Why, why anybody would be judged a combatant first of all. But secondly, the way it's interpreted as absolutely wrong God created you to be who you are. God created me to be who I am and the best thing we can do is let each other live.The way that God created them to be the minute we start saying, no, if you are a part of that community, you're destined to have for help, you know, that's bad, it's a sentence it's wrong. Then you're slapping God in the face. And you're saying, God, what you created is wrong. How can you say that? How can you say that you believe in God, you believe in a higher power that created us all and loves us all, but made a big mistake.And a lot of people's lives, how the two just do not go together and there's, it's so misunderstood. It's, it's such a hard [00:12:00] thing for me to wrap my head around why anybody would ever want to condemn anything that God created and say that it's bad or that it's wrong, or that it's sin when God created it.It doesn't make sense to me.De'Vannon: The inner it didn't never will make sense because it's nonsense cool. Kim: Right. Right. True.De'Vannon: But the inner working thing, there is arrogance because, and it's, and it's, and it's a, it is a very arrogant and high minded and condescending thing to go in, to text into to treat people that way. Because inherently what you're saying is my life is so great and your life is so not. Let's see, let's see the devil has deceived them as they think they're doing God's work, but they're not, but we've seen this in the Bible before many, many times like Paul, the apostle is the greatest example because and I think this is one of the bigger [00:13:00] reasons why God put the store in the Bible.I remember the Bible is only a snapshot of what happened so much more happened than what's in west recorded. These were just what God felt like should make the final. So fall before you turned it into Nepal is just like Republicans today. And all these conservative people who've have these high and mighty opinions on what other people should be doing.And he just cannot have it. He's insulted at the way they're living. We can't have none of this. And so he goes and gets the same. Hedron Sanhedrin is like the, the religious people who were the, the law of the land. So basically he's going to get government approval to persecute people like Texans, persecuting, women who want to get abortions and the people who help them it's the same damn thing.And so when he's doing it in the name of righteousness, just like the Republicans, they're supposedly doing it in the name of rights and on his way to Damascus to go and persecute more people. So he can force them to live the way he believes they should live. According to his interpretation of scripture.Jesus like, no [00:14:00] bitch, stop you doing too much. Kim: I'll blind defer a minute as a matter of fact, and really get your attention, right? De'Vannon: right? So. So this has all been written before that. So my message and my ministry is not to try to talk to idiots like that who are to cause there is no K nothing, but God and knock sense into people like that as has been demonstrated. But what I can do is help people to stop receiving negative messages from people like that and then hurting themselves because of it because we, until we enlightened and we ascend to the point that we do not let what other people say affect us, we let other, what other people say affect us.That requires growth and maturity and people are going to listen to other people, be the on social media, in pool pits, whatever kind of platform people give ear to people. And then people let what people say, change them until they grow enough to stop doing that. And so my job and my task is to[00:15:00] help the weakest among us, the people who feel the smallest among us to become independent spiritually, mentally.And so. Kim: Yeah, that's a big task and it's a beautiful one because there's not many people doing what you're doing and people need to hear. That, who they are as good and wonderful. And they've been beautifully and wonderfully made and to stop letting other people interfere with that.De'Vannon: That's a big task and I don't feel overwhelmed by it because as the Hebrew Bible says, power belongs to God. And that no matter how much we may plant water, you know, only gone can give the. So I don't have stress on me. Like how preachers do when they feel bad. If nobody receives the Lord in service on, on Sunday, they feel, they make a whole big deal of nobody stands up to receive Christ during the [00:16:00] benediction on Sunday, because they feel like it's a personal blow to their ego, that their message couldn't move one person to accept the Lord, but you don't really know what changes happen in people.You see that's about the preacher's ego. So I have enough sense. Thank God at this point in my 40 years to to just do what I do and sit back and see what God's going to do with the pressure isn't on me. Kim: Right, right. Yeah. That's good. And by the way, your 40 years are like somebody else's 80 years, you know, you have lived and not only have you lived, but you live to tell about it, you know, that your story helps other people and the things that, you know, and the way, you know, the things that, you know, affect people and help so many people, like, I just can't even imagine how many lives you've touched.De'Vannon: Well meet there. I haven't the foggiest, but I didn't know. It be like more, more, more, more. [00:17:00] So let's talk about Haiti. So in your book, love is you get into Haiti. You have an interesting. Kind of like love and hate emotional tango with Haiti's like you, you love it, but you hate it. You say once you've been there, it has a way of pulling you back in the book you state, I'm going to read a little excerpt real quick.It says flying over Haiti, like flying over Jurassic park. You see the lush mountains slowly rolling out until the gorgeous green Plains. And finally the Sandy friend of the turquoise CATA Cattabean, but you don't see the carnivorous monsters waiting to devour, whoever there's the land. What would tell me about the carnivorous monsters? Kim: It's tough. There it is. It is hard there. I it is like two steps forward, three steps back. Like anything that you, you try to do or anything you want to do. There are [00:18:00] roadblocks with every turn and and it's not so much saying like something that I don't like, you know, that, that I'm American, so I know better.And I've, you just listened to me. Your life could be so much better. It's not that it's that that the government is really not for the people. And so it's really against the people. There are people that make money on poverty, so they don't want to see a change. They don't want to see people elevate their lives.People live a healthier, better life, eating everyday, having a place to lay their head at night education. You know, the simple things in life that we all take for granted that don't exist for a whole lot of millions of people. It just in, in Haiti alone. And there are just these monsters that, that live to [00:19:00] devour anything good that is happening and step in the way of it.So that progress can be made. It's a tough place to work, a tough place to live.De'Vannon: I think It's interesting the way you worked, you know, tough stories like that. And the one about the Catholic non-health that I hope we have time to get to later into this book about love is because you basically took that scripture in first Corinthians 13 and broke it down and you took a, year of your life and you, and you tried it all out.Love is patient love is kind and, you know, you know, one would think hearing that is going to be a nice, you know, flowery book, all about just good love and good Skittles and fucking gummy bears like that, you know, but, but actually shit got real, you know, intermittently throughout the read. And so so Haiti, so when people think about Haiti, [00:20:00] a lot of people think about voodoo. Witchcraft Hutu and all of that, a very ignorant ass family member of mine. When he kicked you in Haiti had their, it was a recent earthquake, gone bless them. He said some stupid shit. And to which I shut him down immediately. As soon as he heard about the earthquake or whenever it was around him, he said, oh, well, let's tell of all of that voodoo. They have down there as if to say it is the people of Haiti's fault for receiving the earthquake. And I tell him after I flipped my, my imaginary blonde hair out of the way, you know, as you do what you, when you were about to open the library on a motherfucker.And I was like okay, you haven't been to Haiti, never. I know you haven't taken the time to pray for them ever. How dare you say something so negative and so presumptuous about these people and you're supposed to be this church going [00:21:00] person God-fearing and that's the best you can do.Kim: It's a, it's an ignorance. There's no doubt about it. You know, really, as you're saying that, I'm thinking, so does the same person if they're sitting next to somebody in church and that person receives a cancer diagnosis, are they saying well, it's because it's because of the sin in your life. It's because of that, you know, is that what they're doing?Because basically it's the same, right? They're condemning a whole nation, but it's the same thing as saying that if anything bad happens to anybody it's because, because of that, they brought it on themselves, is completely ignorant.De'Vannon: Well, this is anything about those of us in the two S LGBTQ plus community. We get HIV. They go, well, that's what you get for being gay, you know, but you know, the jokes is going to be on them because, you know, the Lord [00:22:00] said, you know, God said that that God is not mocked whatsoever, man. So that also will he read it?He said, if you, if you give. Receive mercy. But if you dish out judgment without mercy, that he said, you're going to get judgment without mercy. And so all of this being mean to people and stuff like that, it might make, make, make a person feel powerful on this plane of existence. But when you die, there is no currency.Like you cannot buy your way, angels and demons. Don't give a fuck about money or about titles or about buildings or about the things that we chase after in this earth. You know? And so the, the, the, we, we are a fool. If we put more stock into what we can gain in this earth, be it power or power over people, as opposed to being nice to people and showing love.You know, there's so many examples of that from the parable about the rich young ruler to the way the Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness and tried [00:23:00] to offer him all the kingdom of the world, you know, this is a vice of the devil to try to deceive us, you know, and it's, it's so like plain, but you know, the Lord doesn't open someone's eyes.They're not going to see it. So, so, so, so, so this ignorant.family member, he knows enough about Haiti, even in passing to know that, that there is a strong concentration of like a voodoo and Hoodoo there. So in your book, you write that nearly every Haitian practices and believes in God, and there is cultural, voodoo and good reasons for the ongoing existence of the religion. I want to read an article, a small article. This is. Reading tirade. I'm going to go on this interview because there's Hoodoo, there's a voodoo, there's the, there's a food Dawn, which I want to let you talk more about that. Cause, and then there's like witchcraft, there, there are [00:24:00] differences. And I had to really look this up to find this out.And even in the research of it, different websites, that slightly different things is almost feels like it's something that if you weren't like raised in it, you may not know exactly what the fuck it is you're talking about or unless you knew someone really close. So I'm going to read this and I'm interested how this compares with your personal experience living in Haiti.Now tell us how long, how much time total you think you've spent in Haiti. Kim: Oh, gosh. Probably all together. It would be in the years. Cause that for years I spent a portion of every month and 80 and then other times in 80. So I dunno, but a lot of spent a lot of time.De'Vannon: Okay, so, okay. So that was just bear with me for a second y'all and, you know, I love to read, so reading is fundamental as mama RuPaul would tell us. [00:25:00] Okay. And so in this I pulled, and this is going to go in the show notes. This is from a website called www dot difference between that net. And so All right here.Here we go. So who to invite, who may sound the same, but the terms of related opposites, both who do and vote or widely practice and share a similar elements and roots in Africa, particularly west Africa seem to come up in my research. Both are also products of mixed beliefs that include pagan traditions, ancient worship, and elements of European.However, the main difference between who doing the vote. It is that the ladder is actually an existing religion, practiced by people while the former is considered folk magic. Lulu as a religion is an organized institution with established practices like religious representatives or leaders, teachings, and religious services or rituals.Who do as folk magic lacks, this foundation organization, Vudu invokes the power of the low loss in the African gods and [00:26:00] DDS. However, who do practitioners invoke the low loss by using Catholic saints? Voodoo is practiced by non Roman Catholics while hoodoos practitioners are often Roman Catholics who use both the African concept of gods and the religious saints of Catholicism who do practitioners are also followers of spiritualism.The specific term ascribed to a voodoo practitioner is a food who songs well, who do practitioners are often referred to as a root doctors or healers? The Huda practitioner often sees who do as a sort of personal. That can help them or other people through their knowledge of herbs, minerals, animal parts, bodily fluids, and possessions.The magic can be used based on one's inclinations desires, interests, and habits who do, and its practitioners empower themselves by accessing the gods and other supernatural forces in order to bring improvement or declined to a person's life. With this variety of knowledge and power, a practitioner [00:27:00] can help a person, all aspects of life, including love, love, evil, and restraining enemies.Voodoo is the original religion while who is the result of religious persecution and suppression who do develop by adopting and blending some foreign beliefs and religion to hide. It's our African roots African origins, which were considered pagan and unacceptable in the society, largely dominated by Christians, aside from being a religion.Also a culture in a way of life who do often specialize only in magic powers and the benefits that the magic can bring, who can be practiced as a hobby and even an economic income or a charity act. There is also a difference in the places of influence of both voodoo and Hoodoo. Luda is popular and thrives in the former French colonies like Mississippi and Louisiana, while who is more popular in the Southern part of America.Additionally, who do it, who do was brought to the new world by African slaves and who to arrive through Haiti, a [00:28:00] former French colony voodoo though pure and more ancient is often compared to Hoodoo. Voodoo encompasses a variety of fields and societies such as culture, philosophy, art and music, heritage, language, medicine, justice, spirituality, and power who do on the other hand is just a fraction of all of this.And it's also more focused on the power and spiritual side than anything else. What do you think. Kim: Wow. I just learned a lot have to say, yeah it's it's such an interesting. 'cause I think, you know, earlier you were talking about Christianity and you're talking about how people sending in pews, so love Jesus yet they can down other Christians or condemn people's lives, condemn what God made people to be, you know, or, or, you know, just look for fault, look for fault.Look, look for ways to judge. Right. And so there's, but there's [00:29:00] this good side of them that loves you. And and hopefully we'll learn how to be better and better and better at, at being Jesus to other people and really understanding that. And so then here, you're talking about Hoodoo and voodoo that have elements of that as well.Right? Like there's, there's good. Or cultural there. It's not all just animal sacrifice and zombies it's there's, there's parts of it that are intertwined in culture and in the richness of of countries and origins. And I dunno, it kind of makes people who they are, but at the same time they can love Jesus in the midst of it.De'Vannon: Did you know anyone who practice either of these parts? Kim: Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. Voodoo. Yeah. Right. I do. I, I have had both [00:30:00] positive and negative experiences with Buddha. The positive things that I've seen have more to do with culture have more to do with, with when you are raised in this culture of voodoo. There are so many things like on, like I've got this really good friend Dr. Who is this incredible Haitian doctor who has explained a lot of it to me. And, and we walked by this tree one day and it's, I don't remember what they call the tree, but basically if two people are fighting against each other, you know, one believes they're right. The other one believes they are right.Then they both are supposed to go to this tree and, and state their, you know, how their rights states. Their message, whatever it happens to be. And that the roots of the tree will come around the feet of the one who's wrong. And that for some will not get out of there will not be able to leave the tree.So it's, you [00:31:00] know, their depth basically. So people don't want that. People believe that that will happen. But with this particular tree, this particular kind of tree, and they don't want that. So they're more apt to say, you know what? I was wrong, you know what I did make that story up. I don't want to die, you know?So, so they're, they're not going. Fight as much for their cause when they know that it's not true and it might take them to the tree. Well, you know, there's something to be said for that. Right. And so there's, there's a lot of that kind of thing that happens. And then at the same time one night I was sleeping outside, that's in my book. I was sleeping outside with the tarantula and the snakes and the Chupacabra is at the, whatever is lurking in 80. And heard the sound that will never get out of my head. And even though I didn't see it, I knew exactly what it was. Buddha drums were going in the [00:32:00] distance. And then I heard this, I heard a dog cry, not how will not bark that screech not, but a dog cry.And it was. Horrific. It was all a horrible sound to hear the dog you knew was in so much pain and so miserable. And I've never had heard that sound before. And what it was is they were getting a dog alive and that dog was crying. Well, I don't care if you're an animal activist or not, or if you kill flies or not, nobody should skin an animal alive ever.And and for that to be part of a religious practice is pretty counterintuitive. When you should love all of what God has created [00:33:00] and that to take an animal and make them suffer that way was horrible to hear horrible, to know that it was even happening.De'Vannon: Yeah, I I concur with how horrible that sounds. I wonder what was the purpose of the ritual? What were they trying to achieve?Kim: I don't know. I don't really know. I know that that rituals like that are not that common in Haiti. It's like, it's sort of like religious extremists. So for the most part patients the, the part of Buddha that comes into the life is more the cultural Ludo, the different beliefs, the, you know, where we have walking under a ladder is bad luck or breaking a mirror is seven years of bad luck or whatever.A black cat crossing your path. They have things like don't pick up a child from behind, or the child will never grow. Don't tell a mom what that baby's [00:34:00] beautiful. Cause then the baby was going to grow up ugly or, you know, or the tree is gonna go around your feet, you know, whatever. So it's more the cultural things that are the beliefs in Haiti most patients are not out in the middle of the night beating drums and skinning dogs alive.And I think a lot of times when there are things like that, it has to do with. And people putting curses on other people. And that's another thing that I witnessed in Haiti is, is whether there is truly a demonic curse on somebody or it is you believe that there's a denim demonic curse on you. It is as real as real can be.And I've known people who have died because there was a curse on them. And I'll never that, you know, whether it was Satan doing work or it was just because in their mind they believe so strongly in this curse that they [00:35:00] knew they were going to die. So they did, I don't know the answer to that for sure.But but that kind of stuff happens as well. So, you know, the voodoo dolls, the whatever, right? I mean, you have something against somebody, you go to a a voodoo priest and put a hex on him and put a curse on them and. They're for real it's scary stuff, right? Not good.De'Vannon: Very good.Kim: No.De'Vannon: So what was the you said you had positive and negative. What was the positive experience you had with. see.Kim: Are, there are a lot of beliefs that bind people together. They have people watch out for other people that you know, how we can be influenced by, by things that were taught or things that we believe. And, but it can be it can either be positive or negative [00:36:00] and positive influence, you know, it, it can be like when you're a kid and your dad says you do that to your sister, and I'm going to give you a weapon.You don't do it out of fear. Well, there's, there's, there are things like that. They happen that that they don't hurt out of fear of because of, you know, cultural beliefs things that would have happened to them if they were to do something. So that's not all bad. If it's born out of something That we don't understand, or maybe negative or maybe whatever, if with the ad result being a positive thing, it's, you know, kind of hard to weigh it out in your mind and think, well then is it okay?And I think that some of it is okay. Because I think then you grow to, and hopefully grow into a new understanding, but meanwhile or alerting [00:37:00] as you go, if that makes any sense whatsoever,De'Vannon: Absolutely. So the negative aspect of it for you, was it what you described or did someone put a rude or some sort of judging on you? Kim: I've never had the Appen. I can't wait to hear your personal story with voodoo. I have to say I, a resident, you told me you had one, I've been anxious to hear about it from Europe. Lips. So, yeah. Yeah, but as far as I know, nobody's ever put a curse on me,De'Vannon: I think, I think it's interesting how this has like, ties like the Catholic church and everything like that. So it's not the first time in reading this article that I've heard that a voodoo can be used for good and that people who do it also believe in God, certain people have access, you know, like into the spiritual [00:38:00] realm in order to be able to receive a, shall I say this to affect change in the physical plane?Communication with spirits. Now, whether that's your clairvoyant people, your profits, your prophetess, this, you know, different sorts of people have different sorts of spiritual inclinations access to the other realm and stuff like that. And it comes out in different ways. Be it some sort of spiritual reading or some sort of, you know, for those of us like me, who dream, you know, in different things like that, the angelic handwriting people do where their hand moves on its own or under the guidance of the holy ghost or an angel, whatever you choose to believe and what it looks like scribble to everyone else.But that person can read what it's saying and it's, and it's, and it's like the true, true fairs on adulterated. So it's just for all the mystique that revolves around the Catholic church, You know, they don't often, well, actually they never mentioned their potential [00:39:00] ties to voodoo, you know, you know, different things that I, but you know, when you, when I think about, you know, all the all the campus in the world, like the burn candles, all the time to all of these different things, then people and stuff like that.I think that it's true. You know, like with like the, like the, probably the ties there, I think where the people know it or not, because in the practices alluded to it and who do it in witchcraft, there were, they a lot of candle burning that happens. They shitload of candle burning that happens. And so. It could be that when somebody lights a candle to St.Jude or whoever, you know, you know, you're all Catholic and stuff would maybe do a little bit low due to.Kim: know, that's interesting. I've never really thought about that. I was raised Catholic and [00:40:00]actually have a deep what's that I actually have a deep appreciation for the Catholic church. I think clumping everybody together can be hard. Right. And putting everybody in, in a clump and, and really whether you're Catholic Baptist Lutheran, Jewish, Hindu, you're an individual.And it's your individual walk with it. That makes the difference. And I know. Many many, many incredible Catholics and mother Teresa for one, not that I know where cause she's passed on, but she was an incredible, wonderful woman who did incredible things. And so when we clump people together, I think we have to be a little bit careful just because there are wonderful people and there are [00:41:00] difficult people in, in everything.De'Vannon: Yeah, I don't, I don't mind the people in the Catholic church. I'd I'd mind the institution that is the Catholic church. So like, I look at it as a way that can, that tends to damage people. I, to give a shit, if someone's a Catholic or not, like, and it's just like, it's just like how I'm not trying to say.Hard-headed hateful people. My, my, my ministry. So the people they heard, I'm not trying to change the Catholic church or argue with them. My ministry is to help undo the negative mental constructs that people leave the Catholic church with. And so, so when I say, I don't care where the Catholic church, I mean, I don't care for the Catholic church, not its parishioners and not as people, you know, they don't know no better, you know, or, you know, they're setting, they're being abused by them.Well, if some shit, sometimes literally if you an alter boy, [00:42:00]Kim: Right.De'Vannon: you know, then, you know, you know, and otherwise mental and emotional, you know, so, so yeah, I don't have any problem with the people, but the, the institutions. So yeah. Let me clarify that. If anybody, if I ever say like, fuck this religion or that religion on my show, I just mean the religion itself.The people who administer it, but not the attendees and stuff like that. You know, that's, that's a whole other different thing. And my main complaint against the Catholic church is how they insist upon having like a person. In between God and, and whoever the parishioner or the congregant, the church goer is I don't believe in confessing sentence to a human.I don't believe in kissing the Pope's ring. I don't believe in setting anybody else up on that pedestal because that was the whole point and purpose of Jesus coming here to remove a man from the equation. And I feel like Catholicism puts man. [00:43:00] In the equation and that does doesn't make sense to me. And I've preached spiritual independence. I want people to go to God for themselves when you need forgiveness, get it right now. Not once you make it.to a fucking confessional booth. When you need, if you want to do community, you can give it to yourself at home. God is accessible to us. These as near as the air, we breathe, we have access to him around the clock, 24 7 setting, right up in our living room with us.We do not need a church. We do not need people. Now, if you just feel like you need to have that great, wonderful, and many people will start out that way, but there is an overdependence on, on, on institution, religion and people that cripples people's spiritual growth. Kim: Oh, my gosh. I wish I had, well, this is being recorded. That's a good thing. Cause I love the way you just put that. Thank you for that. Cause it's, it's so true that, you know, it's the institutions that hurt us [00:44:00] and like what the Catholic church did with the altar boys is just a crime above crimes and continue.And unfortunately, and, and is for any institution to allow things like that to continue is unfathomable. Like, Y I it's, it's really sad, so I totally get what you're saying. And I totally agree with you. You're right on going back to your 80 years of wisdom.De'Vannon: Right. And so I don't make allowances for organizations like that anymore. I used to be. When I tend to churches, I would see some shit to make me raise an eyebrow and I'd go, well, no, one's perfect or not perfect, but no, I don't. They preach too bold of a message. Be it Catholic churches, Lakewood church, like who I used to be a part of it before I got kicked out of there or wherever like you, like, you exist on the financial backings of the people who you heard, [00:45:00]know, and so hell to the, no, like these in congruency, you can not be fucking the shit out of all of these altar boys and the priest who gets caught and his ability.You just move him to another Paris where he can fuck more Altuve boys. Like that, that tells me that the institution is rotten to its core, it's corrupted and that the parishioners are. So they just believe they need to have it so much that they just keep going and supporting it anyway. But I believe any source of abuse must because.There's no way in hell. If I was married to a man, I would let him abuse my child and just be like, okay, well you're pretty much good. So I'll stay with, Kim: Right, right. You're 80% good. Just 20% bad. So therefore, right. Yeah. No, you're you're right. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.De'Vannon: that's a whole other interview about why we allow ourselves to be subjugated. They're subjected to religious abuse from churches and institutions, [00:46:00] because we feel like we need to stay there. I'm speaking now to not just people who stay in Catholic churches or other abusive religions, but people who are not straight, who attend churches that have a doctrine against their lifestyle.I know gay people who do this. I'm like, they're going to church. And they're like, well, I'm just not going to page two. That sermon that's telling me, I'm going to go to hell, but that's having an impact on your subconscious mind and everything like that. It's hurting your spirit. When somebody tells you something's wrong with you, why would you support that church and still go there because your parents went there.You're afraid. If you stop going, you're going to burn up and go to hell. You know what? Again, if somebody was abusing you verbally, you wouldn't stay in a relationship with them. Why are you going to this church and letting them talk down? You like this. Kim: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't make sense. But I think that a lot of people are raised in a family where we're churches that important that, that if you don't go on Sunday, something's wrong. You [00:47:00] know, if you don't go Sunday morning, Sunday night was the night, you know, whatever something's wrong. And and your relationship with God should have nothing to do with what building you're in.De'Vannon: Preach it to a sitter, Kim: Yeah.De'Vannon: but since we're talking about the church bullshit, I'm going to go ahead and talk about the Catholic non now is going to save this for last, but in your book, you wrote nuns are scary ruler on knuckles, kind of scary. The kind of scary that makes you sit up straight, turning all your homework and not talk during class three critical things to know in a non-classroom or chewing gum is like a checkout.You, it gets cut. A messy desk is the devil's playground. And if a sister, meaning a nun tells you to jump, you don't ask how high without raising your hand first. Kim: Yeah.De'Vannon: And so. Girl I read through when I was reading that just emotions of fear, you know, prevailed, you know, came upon me and I'm looking at, okay, they're instilling [00:48:00] fear into people in order to dominate them, even when you were in school as we halfway in.But, but, but the Hebrew Bible says that God has not given us a spirit of fear. And so the same reason, you know, the same reason why I left the, the, like the alcoholism crystal method, like the whole anonymous drug movement is because I realized it was a fear based program. And that is in congruent with the word of God, because he told us not to be afraid.And so when I read this, I'm like, okay, these people, these kids are in school. These nones are like fucking Hitler or Vladimir Putin, whichever, whichever dictator you prefer. And they're like afraid that they'll like move or breathe. That's not good for anybody, especially not in those young developmental ages, but what do you think about this?Who you are now looking back on this and would you let a kid that you would have be in the same situation? Kim: Yeah. I mean, I think [00:49:00] back in the day it was considered respect maybe, but, but it's not respect, you know, there is a fear it's different. It was for me, my life experience completely different having a non stand in front of a classroom than having just a woman stand in front of a classroom. And and yeah, we were all afraid of the nuns.I know that that's such a generalization because I'm sure that many people have had great experiences with, of. Nuns. And so, you know, I don't want to put it out there. The all nuns, I was scary and bad, but my personal experience is I was scared to death of sister, Mary Lewis. And everybody, everybody was like it was definitely a fear for her.De'Vannon: And if you, and, and if you were to have a kid at that age, would you allow them to be in this sort of situation? Kim: I would [00:50:00] not, I would not, no, I would not. I screwed my kids up enough. That would just events go on about even more so. Yeah. No, I don't think it's necessary. I think there are ways to learn English without it being fear-based De'Vannon: I think it really hit you on the knuckles Kim: They would not me because I was too afraid to ever get in trouble, so I never got hit on the knuckles, but yet yeah, they, they would, yes.De'Vannon: physically abused the students. Kim: There was capital or corporal punishment, whatever it's called spanking spanking was definitely a a thing for sure. And with a paddle and fortunately I never went down that road either, because again, I was too afraid to do anything wrong to have that happen. So, but yeah, definitely physical, physical things definitely happened. But you know it was just common back then, [00:51:00] you know, I, there was a even in the public schools, they used to spank kids, which how demeaning and demoralizing. Right. So fortunately that's gone on, but but yeah, no, there was definitely a fear. You, you did what they told you to do for you.De'Vannon: Yeah, they'd be, they'd be people in my school and growing up in the hood, you.know, I would get beat at home with belts and stuff like that. You know, nobody should be hitting anybody period, period to the T at the end, it's not justified. Kim: Right. Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. You know, I think it's one thing when there's a three-year-old, that's just kind of being rebellious and doing what they're not told to do to just kinda, you know, not spank them, but maybe just let them know whatever you need to do to let them know what they're doing is wrong.And that, you know, won't be tolerated. [00:52:00] Like, you know, you have to be able to discipline your children, but yeah. Yeah. It's it's not good. I agree. Not good. Never in school. Never, never, never. De'Vannon: Never, never, ever. And so let me circle back. So I had mentioned witchcraft, I'm gonna read a definition of witchcraft. So witchcraft is magic spelled with a K and not religious. Anyone can be a witch, but not all of them are Wiccan, dualism, polytheistic, and monotheistic, meaning you a worship. Many gods are just one God being a, which is not about religion.It's about the craft of magic. And so I feel like some, the Vudu who do witchcraft have some sort of intersectionality at some. But at the same time, they have their own unique characteristics. Now witchcraft seems to be the most extreme of them all because it's not tied to like a belief in a higher power, which crowds is all about what [00:53:00] you can do.And so what I think happened to me when I was a teenager, Was was, was, was more on the realm of witchcraft. So what happened was this guy, I was 15. I was the alter boy and not at a Catholic church. I was at a Pentecostal church and that was just the title. Cause I sat on the alter, probably the only alter born Pentecostal church history.My pastor was just unique and I was her assistant and I was called the alter boy. And this guy was the choir director. He was like 21, 22 or something like that in that, in that age range. And so he had a fixation on me. You know, he approached me, we ended up like kissing and establishing a sort of relationship.So yes, totally inappropriate. But I'm 15. I don't know. All I know is this guy is hot and he's paying me attention. So what do I need to do to get more of this attention? And so at some point he manages to obtain the. A windbreaker from me, which he [00:54:00] didn't want to give back. And I later on realized why, because he was going to use it in his ceremony or his ritual.And I started having us at first, I started smelling like this cologne that he would wear his, his spirit would come around me. It would manifest itself as is in the frame where the fist cologne people have said, this sort of thing happens, say when their grandmother or relative dies, sometimes I would just be setting down and they'll just catch a whiff of a fragrance that they associate with them out of nowhere, seemingly.Okay. I think that's happened enough for most people to agree that that's a thing. And so, but this person was still alive. And so, and I'm just sitting at my house. He's never. around me that I'm smelling his cologne. Now I started having dreams about him every night. Not some nights every night. Every night and sometimes they're good dreams.Sometimes they're terrible, chaotic nightmares. I felt my bed shaking and stuff [00:55:00] like that. Like extra says shit. We go on a trip to Mexico and he's with the church and everything like that. And he's trying to have sex with me and I'm like on the fence about it, it didn't happen. He gets mad and he like totally changes in terms of this whole monster. At this point I get like more confused than anything. We get back the whole thing. It's a whole thing. The pastor, my pastor of the church, the head pastor, not his wife, but the pastor of the church of course preaches a sermon against homosexuality the first Sunday after this happens as they do.And so. He also called us into his office and, you know, read us for filled and was telling us we can't be doing, you know, this gay shit and everything like that. And so on and so forth. And so after this my dreams with him got even worse. Oh. And then he also had a female. I think she was female [00:56:00] fiance in California who moved to church that I didn't know about during the months that he was dating me and courting me and stuff like that.So I go to a counseling session with my female pastor who was also a prophetess high clairvoyant. She has like all the gifts and everything like that. And so she starts digging into what's going on and she's explaining to me like, you know, he's burning candles and stuff like that. And I think he used the candle call that in tranquil, which I didn't learn about this until years ago when I started to delve more into this, the in tranquil camp.Since it goes and it finds a wandering spirit. That's able to cross it between the worlds and it's in an enlist, the services of this, of the spirit to go in vex, the person who is the object of your affection and the spirit will take all piece from them until that person comes and BS with you. And so I was miserable for about like six months after the whole Mexico incident.Whenever I was awake, I smelled [00:57:00] his odor whenever, while I was asleep, I dreamt of him. I couldn't escape him no matter where I went. And and my pastor was telling me, well, he's got you under a spell and what he was trying to do. And he was successful at it. He wanted to do you want to have me all to himself?And so he took my soul and he basically ran off with it. And then when we got into the argument in Mexico and we had a break, if I could get. It tore us apart, but since he had my soul and I was trying to get away from him, which she said, was it like it tore my soul in my heart felt like it felt like a burning in my chest.Like if someone took an Exacto knife and just went all Edward Scissorhands slash on it, and it felt like a searing, like molten lava was like pouring out of like this chest cavity. It was like the worst pain I've ever felt in my life. I still feel it. Like, if I think about it, I can still feel, it was just like searing.The, my veins was telling me, I couldn't understand how a person could have access to somebody else without that [00:58:00] person's permission, you know, I'm 15, I'm sure she's weighing, what can I explain to him? You know, with a 15 year old brain, you know, and stuff like that, I'm thinking the whole thing was my fault and everything like that.If he's like, no, you know, he out here, you know, the whole relationship wasn't supposed to happen. So. The, the whole trying to possess me and everything. And so he wanted me all to himself and everything like that. And it took about it took six months of torture was so fucking miserable. Like my grades suffered everything.I was just in hell. They innovate out. This was going into my 10th grade year. It was the summer that princess Diana died because he died and we were in Mexico. I remember that because it was on the news. And then one Sunday morning I was sitting at my kitchen table doing like homework, math problems or whatever.And I felt like the weight and the burden of this whole [00:59:00] spell. He had me under lift off of me. It was like, it was like such a relief that I had to get up and like go for a walk, like a walk that I hadn't been able to take in over six months. And my grandmother was just hanging out at the end of the driveway.I just, I just walked down there and just looked at her and I just, I knew that everything had changed. And I don't know if my evangelists, you know, my pastor's wife who was my counselor, was somewhere at the church, praying for me, that was Sunday. And we weren't at church of what she had told me that she would work to break the spell from off of me because she had that kind of power.But she said that it would take time. And I was like, you know, I want it to be quick. You know why we can't just do it now. And she was just explained to me, you know, some things take time, some stuff God does quickly. Some stuff takes time. It's just the way it works. And so the deliverance that not come overnight or quickly, [01:00:00] like I wanted it to because I was miserable.I just really wanted to just, I just couldn't find happiness anywhere. And so, but from that Sunday morning on, I never smelled as fragrance. Again, I never had a dream about him again in this. The spell was broken. I was able to get my jacket back from him, eventually reluctantly argument, really? And when I did, I couldn't wash his odor out of it, no matter how much I tried and ended up having to put in trash anyway.And he was using that as I was, it was, it was explained to me by vandals Nelson to feel close to me. And I'm sure it strengthened his spell. He never allowed me into his house or anything like that. You know, that I was able to peek Intuit one time. I was with somebody who went to go over and visit him for like a moment.And I could see like an alter candles thing going on, but I was never permitted in there. And so. [01:01:00]Kim: Wow. Wow. I, you know it had to be. So much deeper than, you know, like a broken leg might dig six months to heal, you know, like an injury that gives you pain might take a while to heal, but this wasn't just a part of your body. This was your soul. This was your whole being it. I can't even imagine the feeling at of course your grades would suffer.I would think your relationships with other people's suffering friendships, you know, whatever. I would think anything that you did would suffer when, when it's so all encompassing.De'Vannon: Yeah. It was like a, just being in the middle of a tornado. Just couldn't go anywhere. There's no, there's no escaping it. But you know, the God be the glory for his [01:02:00] mighty hand and his outstretched arm, because when he got ready, just like the children of Israel, they didn't come out and they wanted to, they had to wait until the appointed day, the appointed time.And when that time came, there was nothing that could, that could stop my delivery. Now this man, he was pure evil. He died a few years later. I thought it was cancer at the time, but because plus schools and shit broke out all over him and he was bent over on a cane a young fit, athletic, no body fat, you know, six pack, all of that, but he struggled up and died.I think he was buried at the age of 24 and I found out, you know, that he had aids and he was running around trying to intentionally spread it to as many people as he could so he could kill them. Kim: oh my wow. What a, what a legacy, goodness. Oh yeah. That. But sad. I feel bad for him. You know, it was evil, obviously what he was doing, but [01:03:00] what happens in a person's life that makes you like that?De'Vannon: Well for that?and understand from what my evangelists, evangelists, Nelson Jesus, she was my, my pastor and I was her assistant, my spiritual counselor, the prophetess, the clairvoyant, when she was explaining to me with web, when people would come to her who have gotten the HIV, she said they either have a very angry.Sometimes they have an angry reaction and they blame everyone else and they get really pissed off about it. You know, when I got HIV, I caved in and blamed myself and then I became recluse and withdrew from people. Some people go the opposite direction and they're all like, you know, fuck everyone. I'm gonna take everyone down with me.Damn it. You know? It evokes a response from people. And so when people are like, oh, you can just take the medication forward and fix it true. But you got to get over the mental health hurdle first that comes with having your body invaded with something that, you know, you can't get rid of rid of Kim: Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty [01:04:00] heavy. It's pretty big stuff, right?De'Vannon: it still to this day. And then everybody makes it over that mental health comes first, you know, that has to be addressed first, but we get to the medication. And so, so that's what happened. I go into detail even further about that in my, in my memoir, which I just, I emailed you a copy of it. It's finished.Finally. I'd have sent you a copy just a few minutes ago. Kim: Oh, thank you. Thank you.De'Vannon: And and so and so, and so, yeah, so let's, let's talk, go back to Haiti for just a second. I wanted to know. Tell me about your rays of hope international, your nonprofit. I need you.to, I need you to plug that. Kim: Sure. Yeah, it's a, it's a partnering organization. So we work with people in their own country, but I have a passion, a vision and mission to do something, to help people in their own country. So they understand the culture, they understand the language, they understand the need and they [01:05:00] just need somebody to walk alongside, not telling them what to do, but seeing what support they need.So sometimes it's a business plan. Sometimes it's you know, some startup funding, it can be equipment or supplies that they need a building they need build whatever happens to be, to get going, and then always with a plan for self-sustainability. So they're not always chasing dollars and they're able to continue the work that they feel that they're led to do.That's right.De'Vannon: I'm glad that you were able to find a way to be a permanent presence, you know, not just in Haiti, but in other countries too, and that you were able to overcome the governmental obstacles. Kim: Right, right. I mean, and every country you have to do that. I mean, there's governmental obstacles everywhere and some much tougher than others. And so you just kind of try to fly under the radar and get the work done. Cause [01:06:00] governments are hard to fight sometimes.De'Vannon: True. True, true, true, true. I know what I want to say. I wanted to say something else about the witchcraft thing. So I wanted to be transparent about that story because sometimes people have strange things happen to them. They think they're going crazy and difficult to go to like a mental health provider and be like, thinks of one has a food dog with my face on it.And they're fucking with me, you know? Cause you don't know if you're going to get admitted to the psychiatric, depending on who, who the mental health person is. And so, so then cause other people besides that guy does this, like I was at a store in new Orleans and you know, voodoo and witchcraft are big in new Orleans, you got booboo shops and shit.And I was getting candles and stuff like that to protect myself. So you can burn like say white candles. You can use like white bars of soap, olive oil soap to, to shield yourself from spells and different things. Like. [01:07:00] And I was asking her like what she does for work, which is a question I do not ask people anymore because I realized what a shallow and superficial question it is.And no one cares. They're just going to judge you by your occupation. Or it's just pointless banner. I ask people other questions when I meet them. But at this point I hadn't evolved to that level. And I asked this girl, oh, what does she do for work? And she was like, oh, you know, you know, general destruction spells started to break people up and stuff like that.She thought I was asking her like, what sort of witchcraft work that she do, because it's referred to like that, you know, like what kind of work, you know, you're going to work on somebody, you know, try to kill them, get them to lose a job or to make the move. And it's called working on people or And so, so she just said it as casually as the sky is a blue, she just, he just runs around breaking up relationships and shit, because there's, there's certain like candles and stuff, destructions that are designed to break up, to control a dominate.So you have you know, different aspects of it. And so it happens more regularly than you might think. You don't have to be in Haiti or in west Africa [01:08:00] or new Orleans or none of that. You could be anywhere in this earth. This shit is common. And then the people who make these witchcraft products ship them globally.So. So be careful who you run off with. I'm not saying run around afraid and peeping around the corners and everything like that, but you do need to know your friends and your associates and shit like that because people have practices that you might not think that they're doing when you're not around them.And so, but if strange things started happening, it would manifest like, say confusion coming out of nowhere in your relationship. Maybe you're great with your partner one day and one day you're not, it could be that somebody don't want you all to be together. Sometimes people, you might have confused and come up on your job and shit like that and stuff like that, you know, you know, so just to just, and how do you protect yoursel

In this episode, Dr. Lee chats with fellow coach Kim Pendleton about her experience in bringing intimacy and vulnerability to their daily self care practices and their work with clients. Lee and Kim discuss the reactions of clients, family members, colleagues, and students to their vulnerability and the creation of safe spaces to be fully themselves. The creation of vulnerable moments creates permission for others to be more alive and whole, with better relationships and better versions of themselves as a result. Dr. Lee and Kim invite their listeners to get vulnerable and start the process of moving towards a more authentic and pleasurable life.Notable Moments“Was it going to be too much to have this part of myself out for the world to see?... It was a huge tension in me for so long... My definition of vulnerability had a lot to do with courage… Vulnerability is the amount of myself that I am going to be brave enough to share.” - Kim“There is something about feeling it all really deeply but not letting the deep feelings pull us under anymore that is really the hallmark of doing our deep vulnerability work. It honestly makes real intimacy possible because you are able to be under the surface without being worried that it's going to drown you.” - Kim---------Kimberly Rose Pendleton, PhD is a high performance intimacy and leadership coach for entrepreneurs.Her work flows from the understanding that "healing our intimacy wounds unleashes new levels of success, connection and courage."Her expertise comes from her PhD at George Washington University and her Masters degree from Yale. Kimberly is a certified coach and published researcher. More deeply, though, Pendleton's expertise comes from leading hundreds of clients through this work to find freedom, financial success and deep love as they heal their wounds and emerge, bravely, on the other side. You can learn more and sign up at www.kimberlyrosependleton.com/intimacy or connect with her on Instagram at @xokimberlyroseDisclaimer: Dr Lee is expressing her own views and is not offering professional or medical advice.---------Want to learn more about what Dr Lee does, get early access to all her amazing offers, and get free training? Join her facebook group, The Pleasure of Business: Fall In Love With Your Body, Brain & Bank Account.And check out Lee's incredible membership for women who want to feel good getting more -- Pleasure Rebelle. SIGN UP HERE! Because a pleasure-focused life is the greatest act of rebellion.

Like everything, skiing is going to look a little different this year. This week on the podcast, Kim and Tamara talk about what to expect if you are planning a day trip or ski vacation this winter. Be prepared to make reservations, limited capacity, longer lift lines, and new lodge and shuttle procedures. Get the scoop! What to Expect at a Ski Resort in 2020-2021 Due to Covid, most resorts will ask you to book reservations in advance, which will make going for a last minute weekend trips harder. Priority for reservations has been given to season or EPIC pass holders. You are really going to have to do your research for the resorts you will want to go and find out what the rules and regulations are for booking your trip. You will also need to look into how you are going to get there. If you are going into a different state for your ski vacation you will also need to look into what that state's rules are for coming and going. Many ski resorts will not be running parking shuttles and/or mountain shuttles. If they are running, it will be at lower capacity and the wait times might be longer. A lot of Ski lodge eateries are going to require reservations. So you will need to plan out your runs more so that you don’t miss your reservation. Some places will also have a time limit that you will even be able to spend at your table. So no relaxing with a drink while you wait for your family to be done with a lesson or run. It will be easiest to stay in a ski in/ski out condo where you can make your own meals. If you or your child are going to need lessons, you will need to make reservations in advance. There likely will not be any full day ski programs for kids. Social distancing is a challenge in ski rental shops. It may be easier to arrange for ski rentals from a local ski shop and bring them with you. Alternatively, you can rent from someone that will deliver to your accommodations. You should look at your local state park websites and see if they offer any other winter activities like snowshoeing, sledding or even just playing in the snow. Mentioned on the Podcast Ski.com Episode 117 - Ski Resorts in the US for Family Travel Episode 37 - Planning a Family Ski Trip Read the Full Transcript [00:00:00.090] - Kim What to know before hitting the slopes this winter. [00:00:15.130] - Announcer Welcome to Vacation Mavens. A family travel podcast with ideas for your next vacation and tips to get you out the door. Here are your hosts, Kim from Stuffed Suitcase and Tamara from We3Travel. [00:00:30.340] - Tamara So Kim, winter is here and we are starting to think about what we're going to do outside since we know there's not a lot to do inside besides stay in our home. And I think you guys have really started to enjoy skiing a lot. Do you have plans to go skiing this winter? [00:00:47.160] - Kim Yeah, so we well, we had originally been thinking of going to Jackson Hole and that trip has been canceled, obviously. And so we are definitely sticking close to home. Thankfully, we have a local ski resort that's only about an hour and 15 minutes away that we like to go to. And it is an Epic Pass resort. [00:01:06.090] - Kim So we every year we kind of buy a four pack of passes for this resort and we go, you know, about once a month, sometimes twice. And so, yeah, we're planning on doing that again. It was a little different this year than what we've done in the past. So that was kind of the biggest change for us. But we're still planning on, you know, going skiing. We just know because of the changes, we're not able to just go, hey, do you guys want to go skiing this weekend? [00:01:30.360] - Kim Because, and that's what I'll go into I guess, is we bought our Epic Pass, which we normally end up buying them in October, that is when they start going on sale for the cheapest prices. [00:01:40.620] - Kim So it's kind of weird to be thinking that far ahead. But they start promoting and telling you to like buy in I think even August and September, they start selling the passes and by October they're giving you like, OK, it's the final day. You know, you need to get this purchased right away. And you can buy an Epic Pass that covers like a whole bunch of the Vail Resorts across the West Coast and even a lot of resorts in the East Coast also. [00:02:04.020] - Kim Or we buy just a four pack to our local resort that's close by and it's a little bit cheaper because it's a smaller resort. So we did that this year and got that purchase in advance. But then we got a notice that we had to make reservations for what days we want to go skiing this year, which is the big change, I think, that people might not be prepared for. [00:02:24.570] - Tamara Yeah, I've noticed that too. I've seen you know, I've kind of been tracking what's going on, even though I don't think we're going to be going skiing because there is actually one ski hill in Rhode Island, which is where you go to learn to ski, you know, initially. [00:02:39.510] - Tamara And I think Hannah did the black diamond after like six lessons, you know, so it's it's not much of a of a ski experience unless you're a little tiny kid learning to ski. [00:02:50.610] - Tamara But I've been listening to what's going on. And definitely it seems like many of the mountains are moving to this reservation system. I listened to a whole session from Ski Vermont, with all the different ski resorts kind of talking about their changes for this year. And it seems like some of the smaller mountains are not requiring reservations, but definitely all the bigger ones are. [00:03:14.930] - Tamara Not only that, but they're giving priority to reservations for pass holders. I think some of them are opening up for reservations on like December 8th. But the pass holders have already made all their reservations. So you're basically left with the leftovers at that point. [00:03:32.550] - Kim Yeah, that's been the biggest thing that the emails were suggesting and that I've seen is that pass holders have priority. So people who have like Epic Pass and Icon Pass and stuff like that. [00:03:41.820] - Kim And even, you know, if you have a season pass for that ski resort, they're giving those pass holders first option to book their their days. [00:03:52.050] - Kim So if you're planning on just buying a, you know, regular ski pass, you might have some trouble on the weekends getting a date. So it's definitely something you need to look into and be prepared for. [00:04:03.630] - Tamara Yeah, I know that in the past we've mostly done ski weekends when we go to Maine or Vermont and those you book in advance anyway because of your accommodations and you kind of hope for the best weather. But for more local things, sometimes I've been tempted to like go on Lifttopia and buy some passes in advance. [00:04:21.510] - Tamara But then I'm like, well, suppose like the weather isn't great, you know, because it varies so much and I've always like held off and now it's like, well, you're really locked in, especially, you know, it's one thing if you're making it like a weekend and it's if you if it isn't a great ski day, maybe the resort has like other things to do. [00:04:39.180] - Tamara But for you guys, where it's just like, OK, we're driving an hour and 15 minutes, we're going to ski this day, you know what? If the snow is terrible, what if it rains? There's like a lot more risk involved. [00:04:54.210] - Kim There's definitely a lot more risk because we've had those days where it's like, oh, it's you know, especially later in the spring here, out here by us, we they have something called Cascade Concrete. And as it gets towards, you know, February, March, the snow gets really wet and the way it falls really heavy and fast and wet, it's it's just like you get locked into place, like you can't even move. One time in March, our in-laws are visiting and they actually know where they had to carry like Lizzie and Mia down the hill because they couldn't even ski or move. [00:05:26.940] - Kim And their body weight isn't enough to break through the the thickness of the snow. So, yeah, I mean, if you pick a day and it's snowing heavy like that and you've got that really wet snow, you're kind of just wasted your pass day and you don't have as much freedom to go, oh, let's not go today because, you know, it's a lot of wet snow. So that's kind of a bummer. [00:05:45.740] - Tamara Yeah, we have that issue a little bit differently, but we get a lot of, ice and,  things like that or, sometimes like last winter, there wasn't a lot of snow,  so you could get up there and it's only the snow that they've made and that might be really icy. And I don't I don't really like skiing when it's only the snow that they've made because it's bare next to where your are skiing. [00:06:07.730] - Tamara And I know one time we were up in Okemo in Vermont, like one of the first weekends that they were open and they had such a base built up on the trails. But if you went off the edge of the trail, it was like you were just dropping down a few feet onto the ground. And it was also a weekend. It was like the first weekend ski racing was open and they were one of the first ones open in the state. [00:06:31.050] - Tamara So like all the ski racers in the in the whole state were there on the slopes, meanwhile, we're not confident skiers. And you got ski racers, zooming by you and. Yeah, this drop off the edge. We're like, oh, this is not an ideal experience. We're used to going in January, February like that. Not early in the season. [00:06:50.000] - Tamara Yeah. So I think that that's definitely an issue and it's but there's no way around it, you know, unless you are going to one of the smaller ski mountains, that doesn't require a reservation. [00:06:58.280] - Tamara I think really as with everything when it comes to covid and travel right now, it's doing your research during your research, not being a last minute planner and making sure that you're really reading through the website and the protocols and you're planning in advance and which, again, planning in advance a little bit difficult these days when you're like, I don't know what travel restrictions will change or will I be healthy and, you know, all those kind of things. [00:07:25.880] - Tamara So it's definitely it's a challenge. But hopefully, when people are out there, you'll feel like normal and you can enjoy the outdoors, the views, the exercise. [00:07:38.450] - Kim I think skiing would be the perfect kind of vacation getaway for 2020 or even, you know, winter 2021. Seems like it would be perfect. So we'll see. I think, though, if you're a first time skier and or if you're not really confident or if you're not into stresses and stuff like that, I probably would say this might be the winter to hold off and, you know, plan for that next ski vacation next winter, because I think there are going to be a lot of a lot of extra hiccups and things to think through. [00:08:13.310] - Kim So just now we've talked about the reservations and getting on the hill. But just getting to the hill is going to be another consideration people have to take into account. I've heard that some places are reserving parking lot reservations to be able to actually drive and park and other resorts are not running the mountain shuttles that normally would pick up in the town and drive you up to the mountain. [00:08:37.340] - Kim I think that some of those shuttles are either not being run at all or if they are, they're being run at a very low capacity, which is going to affect wait times and things. [00:08:45.830] - Tamara And there's nothing I hate more than having to schlep all my stuff and standing around and waiting for a shuttle. It's so irritating and frustrating. My biggest recommendation for this year would be splurge for the ski in, ski out like condo or hotel. [00:09:06.800] - Tamara I remember one year we were up at Mount Snow and Hannah had a fever, which, you know, thinking back like that would been a whole different thing now. [00:09:16.040] - Tamara But  she really wanted to try to ski and we didn't realize how sick she was. So we were on the lift and her head whent down an clunked against the bar and I was like, oh my God, she is going to pass out on the lift. So I got her down and we went and we had to wait for a shuttle to get back to our condo. And I'm holding both of our stuff because she's too sick and I'm like propping her up and trying to get us on. [00:09:45.410] - Tamara I think our listeners might know that one of my favorite places to ski is Sun River in Maine. And there we usually do a ski in ski out condo. But there have been times where we might be staying off property and Glenn might drop us off at the front and then he would go park. [00:10:03.380] - Tamara And of course unless you're there really early, you have to park pretty far away and hope that there's a shuttle, but you can always walk it. In a lot of places, it's just too far to walk. Also at Sunday River and a lot of mountains, there are multiple mountains on the resort. So you can ski, take one lift up and you're skiing around and you kind of ski down  another side. And then to get back to your original lodge, you have to take a shuttle if you don't want to go back up another trail. [00:10:34.820] - Tamara I definitely think, like every step of the experience, you have to think about what that's going to look like. If you are there for the day, a lot of times you just shove your bag either in a locker or just in the lodge somewhere and hope nobody takes it and you just leave there and you go back whenever you need to get it, that's going to look different this year. [00:10:53.620] - Kim Yeah, definitely. Everything you're saying is exactly what I think some of the things are that people have to consider. And I know that the other thing we should talk about is renting gear as its going to be another huge factor because people are cannot be crammed in a line and at the rental store waiting for their gear, it's going to have to be spread out. [00:11:17.230] - Kim And there's really going to be longer waits because they're not going to be able to cram in. I'm sure you've had this. I don't know how often you've rented, but there's like ten people on a bench and you're all getting fitted with your boots and all that stuff. [00:11:28.480] - Tamara We almost always rent because Hannah had some when she was younger, but she doesn't anymore. And Glenn has boots but not skis. So, yeah, we're always renting something. I think rentals are going to look totally different. Yeah. What we've done a lot of times is rent locally at a local ski shop and then bring it up with us. [00:11:47.380] - Kim Yeah, I agree. We have all of our own gear and so when we go locally we just take our gear, of course. And but when we've gone on trips we've always rented. But I do know something that people will want to look into is a lot of rentals will actually deliver your rentals if you're staying on property. And so if you have that option, if you are going somewhere, you're going to need rent. Try and find an outfitter that will deliver to your condo or whatever, because I think that's going to be that's always better anyways, because you waiting in those lines on their first morning is brutal. [00:12:21.310] - Tamara oh, I hate that. I always try if we can get in like the night before, before it closes,  to pick up then. But sometimes you have only a certain number of hours or days. When I was booking travel for people I used ski.com and they did a lot of total packages where it was the accommodations, the lift tickets, and the rentals that were delivered to your accommodations. And that was a really nice one stop shop, so it might be something that people would look into. [00:12:52.960] - Kim Yeah, I think that's a good thing. So we've talked about reservations. We've talked about rentals. We've talked about shuttles and parking. What else do you think we should talk about? Probably eating. I think that's going to be another big thing. And the lodges. [00:13:05.860] - Tamara Yeah, definitely. I've looked at a couple of the mountains that we've typically gone to, and  they're all doing reduced capacity when it comes to how many people can be in either a restaurant or even the kind of the more self serve type of things. So that's good. And that, to me, is always such a pain, my preference, and I think you're this way, too, is to ski as long as I can. And go inside after the main lunch crowd has eaten. And then I'm basically done for the day. Once I warm up and I loosen my boots and all of that and I've had my my beer I'm about done. [00:13:48.850] - Tamara But right now it looks like a lot of them are going to require a reservation for any of the sit down dining. And that impacts where you are on the mountain, how many more runs are you going to do, to get there in time for this reservation. [00:14:07.210] - Tamara You can't always plan it out quite so perfectly, not like when you are in the lodge and walking down to the restaurant. And then also they're going to have a cap of the time that you spend there. So my whole thing of like, oh, let's have my ramen soup and my beer and just hang out until Hannah's done her lesson, maybe can't do that anymore. [00:14:28.960] - Tamara I definitely think the ski in ski out would be so much easier. You can just go back to the condo and have your lunch there whenever you need to. [00:14:40.360] - Kim I think this is the year to, like you said, splurge for the ski and ski out condo and do your grocery shopping and all that. Because I know we stayed. Was it last year? Was that two years ago now? Now I can't even remember at Keystone. And it was an amazing time. We loved that. And we stayed in there in Riverrun Village and it was a condo and we were in walking distance. [00:15:02.170] - Kim I mean, it was a little bit of a walk, so you had to carry your gear and a lot of people had little wagons they would just pull behind them and carry their skis and boots and all that. But I think that it's definitely the year to do that because otherwise, your options are to packing lunch and snacks and all of that in the car. [00:15:27.460] - Kim And so then when everybody's ready for lunch, we'll be coming back to the parking lot, sitting in the car, eating our lunch and stuff, and then gearing back up and going back to finish out the day skiing. Normally in our family, the girls get lunch in the lodge and they eat macaroni and cheese or whatever they want, and then head back out on the mountain and then on their way home, they grab an early dinner. And normally, I know this sounds crazy about McDonald's, but that's kind of their tradition. [00:16:06.610] - Kim But I think your car is going to be your home base if you do not have a ski in ski out situation. I think that's what people should count on. And like I don't know how bathrooms are going to be handled because they're always so crazy and dirty. [00:16:22.960] - Tamara  I was just thinking about that. I wonder if they will put in porta potties. Can you imagine trying to go in a porta potty in a snowstorm? Oh my goodness. [00:16:37.930] - Kim You know, this would be the year to make sure you have the pants and not the bibs with the suspenders because they're going to be hanging down on who knows what. [00:16:45.670] - Tamara Yes. It's so funny because obviously we're middle aged women and our listeners know bathrooms are something we think about. [00:16:54.220] - Tamara  I was listening to this ski Vermont call and they were talking about lessons and, so we'll talk about lessons in a second. But one of the thing with lessons with little kids is some of them need some help, like you said, with all that gear, going to the bathroom. And so they were saying,  we're not going to be able to do that. So you can only have a lesson if your child can, you know, go to the bathroom ourselves and all that. [00:17:18.530] - Tamara For lessons I used to sign her up for a full day lesson and they would all go and eat lunch together in their own little space. But that's not going to be allowed anymore. [00:17:28.660] - Tamara Obviously the size of lessons is going to be reduced. I think it's only going to be a half day or shorter lessons and then you can have a family lunch in between or something. [00:17:40.630] - Kim There's going to be a lot of differences and reservations, of course. [00:17:43.630] - Tamara Yeah. That's the one thing I've seen is that if you do want ski lessons, you need to make a reservation in advance. I'm curious how they'll do it. I don't know. I wonder if pricing will be higher because it's going to be semiprivate versus, you know, a big group of kids. So I don't know what that's going to look like because normally it's two kind of instructors and then like a class of like ten to twelve kids. [00:18:22.690] - Tamara I know some of the resorts were debating whether or not they should even open because even just hiring, I'm thinking in Vermont, a lot of resorts might hire from out of state and you can't do that now. [00:18:33.640] - Kim And so, yeah, I guess that they're living there. [00:18:36.490] - Tamara You can, but you don't know like what capacity you're actually going to have. [00:18:43.600] - Kim It's just really a huge task. And I really feel for the ski resorts trying to do their best. But there's so many contact points, you know, there's so many things to to think through for sure. And we didn't even talk about the lifts. [00:18:59.230] - Tamara Oh, yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's going to be that's going to be interesting because obviously you can't travel up with someone that is not in your party. So lift lines might move a little slower. And I know in the past well, because I love the part of the mountain that's, you know, not the blacks. So I go I tend to ski near where the ski school is. And so often the kids will be coming up and they'll be like, can you take one? Can you take one? Which always stressed me out anyway. Like, I don't want to be responsible for my own. [00:19:32.450] - Tamara I think I've talked about this before, but when you're already not a fully confident skier, especially, a few years ago before I had the experience that I do now, I was worried about getting myself off the lift, I didn't want to worry about a little kid. [00:19:46.510] - Tamara And then the few times we brought up a little kid, they're fearless and they're just kicking their feet and they're leaning down. They're sliding down. I'm like, oh, my God, they're going to go under. [00:19:54.540] - Kim Yeah. Yeah, exactly. [00:19:57.540] - Tamara And sometimes I would just be like, I'm really sorry, but I'm not comfortable because I don't want my kid with somebody that's not like fully comfortable. [00:20:06.960] - Tamara Yeah. So it'll definitely be a little bit slower on the lines. And then I have a feeling though, more people, more resorts might be moving to the scanners or the RFID where you don't have to get close to scan somebody. So maybe that can go like a little faster. [00:20:37.360] - Kim I think that it's going to be interesting also because I mean I'm thinking in those lines, like even when we talked to Rob with the Disneyland. Or I mean, Disney World and Universal, and he was talking about the switchbacks are skipped even, and I hadn't even considered that, like I was only thinking of the people, like in front of you being six feet apart. [00:20:55.810] - Tamara But, yeah, when you have, like, a normal like a snake line formation where you're backtracking back and forth and zigzagging you, I mean, you got to skip six feet there, too. [00:21:06.760] - Kim And so I don't know how the lines will work. I mean, I think in some ways it seems like it's going to be better because they're limiting the amount of people they're going to give passes to each day. But when you think of the limitations of, you know, only your party can go on the up the chairlift and things like that, it's going to look very different. And then I was even thinking like Keystone, they have a big tubing hill that's really fun and awesome. [00:21:33.340] - Kim And I'm thinking of that because when we were there, you know, everyone's just grabbing their tube and rushing over to get back up the because you get to be there for like an hour. [00:21:41.730] - Kim So the faster you are, getting off the hill and up back up the little conveyor belt that takes you up the mountain, the more rides you can get in. But that's just packed person to person to person. And so even that's going to be have to be spread out. So that's going to be a lot slower. And then you're not going to be waiting back to back with these people to go for your turn to go down the hill. [00:22:04.240] - Kim So that's going to all just look very different. So I don't know what what's going to happen with some of those extracurricular things, too. But, yeah, I think the the lines on the chairlifts are going to be are going to move slower and they're probably going to be a lot more spread out than you're used to. [00:22:18.760] - Tamara Yeah, because I'm thinking of different ones that I'm familiar with. And it's not necessarily the zigzag, but there might be three lines, coming in and then you alternate, when you get up to the front. [00:22:40.480] - Tamara One thing that we haven't talked about yet, too, is just,  travel restrictions. Yeah. I know that, you know, we we've been dealing with travel restrictions here for many months, but places like California and even Washington, you know, like you, you guys have started to implement at least recommendations or some restrictions. And, I think about Vermont was saying that they are usually so busy with people from New York and New Jersey that come up because they're one of the closest resorts for that. [00:23:09.160] - Tamara And they don't anticipate that that would happen this year because they have a 14 day quarantine requirement or can do like seven days plus a test. [00:23:20.020] - Tamara But you're certainly not going to have weekend people that are coming up. And I did ask because everyone's like, well, are they really checking? I asked a couple of the different major resorts and hotels and they actually said that they reach out to everyone that they see from out of state with an out-of-state reservation. [00:23:38.620] - Tamara So this wouldn't probably be the same for some rentals, you know, but for at least hotels, if they see you're coming from a state that would require a quarantine, which is pretty much everyone, they reach out to you and they ask you like, what's your plan? And you have to submit something that says I'm quarantined at home or this is where I'm quarantining before I arrive. [00:23:56.630] - Tamara So they are being proactive with it. So it's not like I'll just ignore that guideline. [00:24:03.730] - Kim Yeah, I think that's one of the big reasons Washington and I think California is a recommended as well. I can't remember California, but they're not able to enforce it. And I think it's because you get to a certain level of people and they just can't follow up with every reservation in person. But that's good that it's being I mean, it's kind of like, again, going back to that idea of the theme parks you can have rules, but enforcing them is what's going to actually provide the the feeling of safety. [00:24:33.700] - Tamara So definitely and honestly, I mean, we should just talk about the elephant that's in the room, which is we all know that right now there's not many places where cases aren't on the rise. [00:24:44.770] - Tamara You know, things aren't looking good. So I think what you are planning is is good, right? You're local. You're just going to drive there and follow the protocols and enjoy your day. But in terms of, like ski travel, I think people really need to think about what that really would entail and whether or not that is something that they should really be taking part of right now. [00:25:09.850] - Kim Well, I know this is kind of getting a little macabre, but even looking at if something does happen to you on a ski hill and you have a catastrophic accident or whatever, like, you know, ICU room beds and hospitals near some of these ski resorts and what are their what are their abilities to take care of you at that point? [00:25:38.380] - Kim I know that Idaho is very popular ski resort, but I know last month they were asking Washington State whether they could take some patients and staff possible, they're trying to set up things to possibly take some patients because of the covid numbers on the rise there and the hospitals being full. [00:25:56.660] - Kim So that's definitely another aspect, like you said, to keep in mind and whether people should be traveling or feel comfortable traveling right now and doing something that is kind of a, you know, not high risk sport, but it is a sport that comes with possible consequences. [00:26:11.800] - Tamara It does. I know a number of people that have broken things. You know, I mean, it doesn't have to be completely catastrophic, but even that is exactly not ideal for sure. I mean, even here in Rhode Island, they opened field hospitals yesterday. [00:26:31.360] - Kim So I think that's just something for everyone to keep in mind. We're not trying to be a Debbie Downer, but definitely something to consider. And and all of this information hopefully won't even be a problem. And if you just think, you know, try and maybe stay close to home and then look ahead to next winter might be a fabulous time. And you can really relax and enjoy it. [00:26:55.480] - Tamara And for the people that don't live near a ski resort, it's definitely a good time to start thinking about next year. If you wanted to go back and listen to a couple of our previous episodes, I know we did Episode 117, which was 2019. We did an episode on the best ski resorts for families. And so that would give people a lot of ideas. [00:27:17.680] - Tamara We tried to cover both the East Coast, West Coast, Colorado, Utah area. So we've got a lot that we covered in that one that would be good to go back and listen to. And then we did a previous episode. I can't remember the number of that one, but it was just kind of about planning your first ski trip for a family and things to keep in mind. So some good episodes to go back to two really good ones. [00:27:39.190] - Kim I think skiing is a fun sport. It's expensive also. And I think that's another thing for people to just keep in mind is the the cost of lift tickets and everything, make sure you're looking into that in advance and rentals and getting that all figured out, you know, so you're not surprised by anything. [00:27:54.730] - Tamara Yeah. And in the meantime, I think that there's also other ways to get outside this winter. I know that snowshoeing is going to be really popular as well as Nordic skiing, because there you don't have to deal with some of the same issues in terms of the lines and things like that. And and many times, if a resort offers Nordic or snowshoeing, many times it's out of a separate lodge or soopers facility, you know, so you're not always dealing with the the main crowd. [00:28:23.770] - Tamara It's funny, there have been so many different things where I've predicted like, oh, there's going to be a run on that. I'm like there's going to be a run on snow shoes by that. It's funny though because I forget we were watching, but it was like a commercial or something. And they're like, this is hard to find. And Hannah looked at me and she was like, you just said, that was going to be hard to find like a month ago. And I'm like, I should go play the lottery. [00:28:46.570] - Kim Yeah, exactly. You should be in marketing. So that makes sense. [00:28:53.050] - Kim Well, and that was what I was going to say, is I actually and I feel kind of stupid for not realizing this, but I actually recently looked up because I was trying to figure out if I could find snow anywhere near as that has like an easy parking lot for like from some photos I wanted to get. And I realized that in our state if  youlook up your state park system, so for me, Washington state parks, and you can find that they actually have snow parks. And these are parks that are specifically designed for people to just go play in the snow. So you can do you can park at a trailhead and you can go snowshoeing or you can, you know, build a snowman or you can go sledding and things like that. And some have there's also some winter recreation parks specifically for like snowmobiles. [00:29:35.950] - Kim And then they'll have like non motorized that are specifically, again, for people to be able to go snowshoeing and play in the snow and sledding. So if you're curious and you want to get out and enjoy the winter, look up your state park system and see what they have listed for like winter recreation, because you might be surprised and find that there's some, you know, parks specifically for snow play and or trails specifically for, you know, like you said, snowshoeing and Nordic skiing. [00:30:00.310] - Kim So don't be scared to look on your local state park website. [00:30:04.420] - Tamara That's a great recommendation. Definitely not something that I think I have here. But, you know, many places that would have larger state park systems or more opportunity for snow probably would. So it's great. [00:30:16.690] - Kim Yeah, well, you just go in your backyard, right? [00:30:18.970] - Tamara Well, hopefully not too much. I mean, we did have that one snow in October, but last year we didn't get very much. I really enjoy snowshoeing. You know, I've done it a couple of times. I've always surprised by what hard work it is, you know. But I would like to get snow shoes. But they're  a little pricey. I mean, you can get them for like one hundred and fifty or so. [00:30:42.580] Yeah. Good ones. Because if you're going to buy some, you want to splurge a little because you want the lightweight ones, because it is hard work and lifting your feet up and stuff, you definitely want the you want the titanium ones, not the stainless steel or whatever. [00:30:57.440] - Tamara And then I'm like, do I really want to get them now when I don't really want to spend money and who knows if it'll snow or not. And you know, it's one of those things. [00:31:13.590] - Kim  Yeah, well, it might be a time to look also on your local Craigslist or Facebook marketplace, because people might be upgrading their snowshoes this year and getting rid of older ones. [00:31:23.490] - Tamara You know, you never know. It's funny. Right before the pandemic, I've had my basement for years. Hannah's old skis and and ski boots, like from when she was really little that I have never bothered to bring to a place to sell. [00:31:35.280] - Tamara And I keep thinking, should I donate it or should I sell it? So I had that for a while. And then I had a chest freezer that we just hadn't used in years. And before the pandemic, I sold both of them. But I sold both of them. And I'm like, well, that was bad timing. Like, I could have gotten so much more. So much more. And it's funny, I guess I'm good with some timing and bad with others. [00:32:04.110] But hopefully we'll all find some ways to get outdoors this winter because we'll need we'll need it. We'll need the fresh air. We'll need the change of scenery. I know there used to be so many places that we would go in the winter to, you know, be entertained even when it's freezing out. And those are not places that I feel comfortable going right now. [00:32:24.120] - Kim Well, most of them are not open anyway. Yeah, I was going to say I feel like for us, it's  cruising is always a very popular thing for people to go down to the Caribbean and take a cruise. And I don't know where people are going to escape to this winter. [00:32:36.960] - Tamara Well, I know that we will be inside a bit more this winter and not really going to many places. But do you have any holiday plans? Do you have any special traditions or things that you're going to put in place for the girls to try to make it as festive as you can? [00:32:52.900] - Kim I think it's probably going to be a pretty standard holiday for us. We already if some people follow me on Instagram, they already maybe saw that one of our biggest traditions because we live in Washington state is that we we go and pick out our Christmas tree at a local Christmas tree farm in advance. [00:33:08.830] - Kim And so we you know, at the beginning of November, we go and you walk around their farm and you pick the tree you want and you wrap it up and you take off a little tag and they write it down that this is your tree. And so then we went the weekend of Thanksgiving and we actually cut down our tree and brought it home and then we'll decorate it and everything. So that's kind of one of our big holiday traditions. And it is interesting, though, is that girls have gotten older. [00:33:32.620] - Kim They're less like into it, as we used to be, which is kind of sad. But so we're we're sticking with that. And then we'll just have our standard, you know, holiday. My mom is our she's lives out here and she's alone. And so she part of kind of our bubble unit. And so we'll have her over for Christmas. And that's that's about it. It'll be a pretty easy at home. We had planned to go to Canada like we try and add in Canada a couple every few years. [00:33:59.500] - Kim And we were this was supposed to be a Canada Christmas year. So for us, we are not going to Canada for Christmas, but we will still have a wonderful time at home and just relax. And I know that Paul has a bunch of vacation time, so he's going to be taking off. I think he gets like the two weeks, the last two weeks of the year off. So that'll be a nice little thing to have just some family time at home. [00:34:21.580] - Tamara That's good. Hopefully he can do some skiing. [00:34:24.400] - Kim Yeah, exactly. We've got a couple a few days. We've got four days booked, so. Yeah. So what about you guys? Do you have any holiday plans this month and in the year? [00:34:33.610] - Tamara This will be definitely very different for us because we're never home on Christmas. You know, we always go down to my mom's house and we see my whole family for Christmas and she lives in New Jersey. And it's if we put our whole like my immediate family, my brothers, my sisters, their kids, now, they're kids, kids together. I think we're like twenty six people. So that is not happening. So it'll be sad. [00:34:57.490] - Tamara I'll be the first time ever that we've been home for Christmas. And as you guys know, like we have a Jewish home, so we don't have a Christmas tree and all that kind of stuff. And I've never really thought about it because we're just not here. I don't want to miss the specialness of it, but I don't know quite what to do to create it. You know, it's only it's just the three of us. [00:35:26.080] - Tamara It's always just the three of us, you know, like we don't have anybody nearby. So I'm not sure. But I think what I will enjoy is the fact that this month is going to be quieter. You know, usually it feels like such a rush and so busy and so I don't feel like making Christmas cookies because I always go down to New Jersey and my sister makes like twenty six kinds of cookies and my brother makes like twenty kinds. [00:35:52.630] - Tamara My mom makes like twenty kinds and they all give us like these big tins of cookies and we come back and we have cookies for like months. So I was like OK Hannah like let's make some cookies, like let's pick which ones we want to make. We're going to make cookies and we'll deliver them to like her friends and, you know, we'll deliver them to people. So that'll make us feel like we're doing something special. And then a lot of times, like for Hanukkah, it is like on top of Christmas or it's like too early. [00:36:18.700] - Tamara It's you know, it's like it's never a great time. And we like I like to make potato pancakes and applesauce. [00:36:29.380] - Tamara And when I do it, I make like pounds and pounds of potatoes. So it's like a whole day affair, like I'm frying for hours and then my entire house smells. The kitchen is like coated in grease. So it's basically like my time to deep clean the kitchen. I cook all day and then I clean it all spraying down the cabinets and everything like it, everything really clean, you know. [00:36:53.740] - Tamara  But I don't always have time to do that. So some years I'm like, oh, I'm just not like making them this year because it's not worth the effort to just make a few. It's like you want to make a lot. So I think this year, like that weekend, that Hanukkah falls over, like I'll just make a bunch of latkes and maybe do the same, like give them out to some people and, you know, make it festive. [00:37:14.680] - Tamara We are going to do like a drive through holiday lights thing. [00:37:22.390] - Tamara But you know what to figure out as we go. I mean it in a way it's like nice to not have to travel, but our Christmas is like this Christmas spectacular of you know, we drive down to New Jersey and Christmas Eve is at my brother's house and he has done for thirty years, I think, like where he does appetizers and we look forward to certain appetizers that he does. [00:37:43.120] - Tamara And then Christmas Day, we used to always go to my sister's house and now we go to my nephew's house. And then the day after Christmas, my mom does a whole big dinner and we. Are all at her house, you know, and then we drive home the next day and sometimes we stop at New York, in New York on the way home and we see some family there, or we visit the, you know, the Christmas decorations in New York City, you know, do something like that. [00:38:04.900] - Tamara So it's it's always been like a big thing. So it's going to be like definitely really different. And if anybody wants to send me a little holiday cheer message, I'm sure that I will appreciate it at that time because I'm going to be just, like, bored. [00:38:21.260] - Kim Do you guys do light a menorah? [00:38:23.530] - Tamara We do at home. So, yeah, we'll be at least you'll be home for more of the and we'll all be here, which a lot of years like, you know, Glenn is traveling or something. [00:38:31.870] - Tamara So like I'll do the candles with Hannah, but then we don't always do like I used to always get her eight gifts and she would open one a day. This year she needed a new computer. So she's not getting gifts. [00:38:43.840] - Kim So you're like, here's a monitor, here's a mouse. Here's your cell, you know? [00:38:49.870] - Tamara Yeah, it'll it'll be different. In the New Year's Eve, we always the last quite a few number of years have done with our neighbors that live up the street. And they also love food the way that we do. And so Glenn and Greg just cook this amazing, like multi course, like gourmet food. We have caviar, we have oysters. Like, it's amazing. It's this it's actually my favorite day of the entire year. [00:39:16.090] - Tamara And I don't you know, I don't know if there'll be a way to do that safely or not. I was like, well, maybe we can deliver courses to each other and cook, like, over a face time. I don't know, we have to figure out if there's a way,  we'll be quarantined. [00:39:27.670] - Tamara So if you guys are willing to quarantine ahead of time because we don't we won't be seeing anyone, then we'd be good. But I think they would do it, but I'm not so sure their sons would be willing to do that. [00:39:39.610] - Kim Teenagers make things a little tricky. Well, and we have right now that with Lizzie has a job now outside the home. So that's she's kind of our biggest risk for our family because the rest of us are at home all the time. So yeah, it's definitely gets interesting. It's really hard to find someone that you can, you know, pod up with that. [00:40:23.050] - Kim Yeah, well, hopefully it'll work out and that you guys will have some new memories and discover some fun ways, you know, fun activities together and stuff. I hope it works out. And for all of our listeners, this is going to be our last episode for the year. So we are wrapping up 2020. It was definitely a different year than other years for Vacation Mavens. And hopefully you guys have enjoyed what we've still shared. And we really appreciate you guys coming along during these crazy times. [00:40:50.950] - Kim And, you know, joining us every other week to listen to what we ramble on about. [00:40:57.010] - Tamara Yeah, we definitely really, really appreciate it, especially sticking with us when, you know, we all know we're not traveling as much as possible. And we always love those kind of encouraging messages that listeners send about different episodes or just when when we realize that someone that follows us on Instagram is also a listener, you know, things like that. It's just it's very heartwarming. And we definitely appreciate it. [00:41:21.430] - Kim And we hope that you all have a very safe and wonderful holiday season. We will be back, you know, next year, probably going to stick to our every other week schedule for a while until at least until travel should pick up more. And we actually enjoy having a little extra time in our schedules, too. So definitely. Anyway, wishing everyone a very happy holiday. Yeah. Happy holidays, everyone. Thanks again by.

We are continuing our Enneagram Series with Beth McCord talking about How to Have A Thriving Relationship with an Enneagram 5. For the next several weeks Beth will be breaking down some real, practical tips for being married to each Enneagram number.    If you are married to a 5 this is YOUR episode. But even if you aren’t married to a 5, we know you will find this episode helpful in learning more about your 5 friends. Part of loving people is knowing people. So use this series as a tool to know your people better, understand them deeper, and love them better.    Beth McCord founded ‘Your Enneagram Coach’ and has been an Enneagram speaker, coach and teacher for over 17 years. She is seriously the best of the best so we are so blessed to have her share her time and expertise with us.    Having been trained by the best Enneagram experts and pouring hundreds of hours into advanced certifications, Beth is leading the industry in simplifying the deep truths of the Enneagram from a Biblical perspective. Beth does one-on-one coaching, in-person events and workshops and online courses. She also offers training and support for those interested in becoming an Enneagram coach. So make sure you give her a follow on Instagram @yourennegramcoach and check out her website yourennegramcoach.com for more great info.    We pray you enjoy learning more about 5s in this episode!  Subscribe to Podcast Email to make sure you never miss an episode and get noteworthy quotes, resources, and more delivered straight to your inbox!  *Music for this podcast is created by Noah Copeland. Check him out here!    NOTEWORTHY QUOTES “The enneagram is a helpful tool but it’s just a tool. The Gospel is what drives the transformational process in our lives.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s see the world as an overwhelming and intrusive place.” - Beth McCord “A Type 5s core fear is of being annihilated, invaded, and being thought of as incapable or ignorant.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s desire to have knowledge, insights, to be capable, and to be confident.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s core weakness is avarice; holding onto their mental resources and avoiding draining themselves from too much contact with others.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s wake up with about 25% of interactive energy (energy needed to interact with people) for the whole day; they need to ration out this energy throughout the day.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s usually don’t enjoy surprises and intrusions.” - Beth McCord “You can come alongside a Type 5 as a spouse by helping them plan out how they use the interactive energy they have.” - Beth McCord “It’s so important for us to view life through the lens of our spouse so we can have compassion, grace, and empathy towards them.” - Beth McCord “A lot of people misunderstand Type 5s because they think they’re being cold and detached but they’re probably acting that way because they’re feeling overwhelmed.” - Beth McCord “When a Type 5 is doing well they’re going to be very respectful, non-intrusive, very curious and observant; Type 5s are the best observers on the Enneagram.” - Beth McCord “When a Type 5 is not doing well they communicate very briefly, and come off as cold and arrogant.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s like to know a lot about specialized areas.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s want straight forward conversation. They’re not usually looking for long, drawn out, emotional dialogue.” -  Beth McCord “The longer you talk with a Type 5 the more you’re draining their interactive energy resources; it’s helpful to find out how much energy your Type 5 has and spread out conversations so you’re not draining all of their energy in one long conversation.” - Beth McCord “Give your Type 5 a warning if you want to talk about something so they have time to process.” - Beth McCord “If a Type 5 doesn’t feel like they have enough knowledge about something, they’re probably going to be silent as they process and think internally.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s like to go deep in a conversation, they do not enjoy small talk.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s are one of the most misunderstood on the enneagram because they are more secretive and private than the other types.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s are very sensitive and emotional people, they just don’t always bring it to the forefront and show that to outwardly.” - Beth McCord “It can be helpful to go on a walk with a Type 5 because they tend to process and think better when doing a physical activity.” - Beth McCord “God gave us marriages as one of the main ways that we can grow in this life.” - Dr. Kim “There is no perfect enneagram type combination in a marriage; all are beautiful.” - Beth McCord “It can be helpful to plan with your Type 5 what time each day they will have to be on their own and uninterrupted to recharge.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s can compartmentalize their lives and only share certain parts of their lives with certain people.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s love to mentally take things apart and innovatively put them back together in a new way.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s can stay focused on one subject for a long amount of time.” - Beth McCord   SPONSORS   Thank you to Honoring Intimates for sponsoring this podcast episode! Honoring Intimates is a safe place for believers to learn about marital sex and shop for the highest quality lubricant, lotions, and lingerie items at reasonable prices. There are no inappropriate images on the site and the company uses mannequins to display their lingerie. Use the code “AWESOMEMARRIAGE” to receive 20% off your entire order.    RESOURCES Find everything you need at becomingus.com! Including the course for YOUR marriage’s Enneagram combination. Beth & Jeff have a ‘Becoming Us Course’ for each couple type combination. That is 45 courses customized for each couple type combination. They go deeper into the “dance” (relational dynamics) and give you practical resources and insights to help transform your marriage.  Buy ‘Becoming Us’ today!  Not sure what your Enneagram Type is? You can take the free assessment here! Also be sure to take the FREE MARRIAGE ASSESSMENT here.  Learn more about each type with this FREE SUMMARY!  Check out more great insights by Beth on her blog.  Discover your Enneagram number with the Discovering You course. Already know your Enneagram Type? Then it’s time to take a deeper dive with the Explore You course.  You can get some one-on-one coaching with Your Enneagram Coach here.  Want to talk about sex?! Take our Love Making Survey to open up the way for you and your spouse to work towards better sex and intimacy in marriage! This month’s resource is our Love Making Survey and it is designed to help you have a safe, genuine conversation about your sex life with your spouse. This survey is a nonthreatening way to evaluate your sex together. The questions are designed to get you thinking about all aspects of your love making and to shed light on ways your sex could be more satisfying. Become a Marriage Changer and receive some sweet exclusive benefits. Learn more here! Sign up to get Dr. Kim’s One Thing To Grow Your Marriage Each Day via email, text, or podcast here!   

We are continuing our Enneagram Series with Beth McCord talking about How to Have A Thriving Relationship with an Enneagram 5. For the next several weeks Beth will be breaking down some real, practical tips for being married to each Enneagram number.    If you are married to a 5 this is YOUR episode. But even if you aren't married to a 5, we know you will find this episode helpful in learning more about your 5 friends. Part of loving people is knowing people. So use this series as a tool to know your people better, understand them deeper, and love them better.    Beth McCord founded ‘Your Enneagram Coach' and has been an Enneagram speaker, coach and teacher for over 17 years. She is seriously the best of the best so we are so blessed to have her share her time and expertise with us.    Having been trained by the best Enneagram experts and pouring hundreds of hours into advanced certifications, Beth is leading the industry in simplifying the deep truths of the Enneagram from a Biblical perspective. Beth does one-on-one coaching, in-person events and workshops and online courses. She also offers training and support for those interested in becoming an Enneagram coach. So make sure you give her a follow on Instagram @yourennegramcoach and check out her website yourennegramcoach.com for more great info.    We pray you enjoy learning more about 5s in this episode!  Subscribe to Podcast Email to make sure you never miss an episode and get noteworthy quotes, resources, and more delivered straight to your inbox!  *Music for this podcast is created by Noah Copeland. Check him out here!    NOTEWORTHY QUOTES “The enneagram is a helpful tool but it's just a tool. The Gospel is what drives the transformational process in our lives.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s see the world as an overwhelming and intrusive place.” - Beth McCord “A Type 5s core fear is of being annihilated, invaded, and being thought of as incapable or ignorant.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s desire to have knowledge, insights, to be capable, and to be confident.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s core weakness is avarice; holding onto their mental resources and avoiding draining themselves from too much contact with others.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s wake up with about 25% of interactive energy (energy needed to interact with people) for the whole day; they need to ration out this energy throughout the day.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s usually don't enjoy surprises and intrusions.” - Beth McCord “You can come alongside a Type 5 as a spouse by helping them plan out how they use the interactive energy they have.” - Beth McCord “It's so important for us to view life through the lens of our spouse so we can have compassion, grace, and empathy towards them.” - Beth McCord “A lot of people misunderstand Type 5s because they think they're being cold and detached but they're probably acting that way because they're feeling overwhelmed.” - Beth McCord “When a Type 5 is doing well they're going to be very respectful, non-intrusive, very curious and observant; Type 5s are the best observers on the Enneagram.” - Beth McCord “When a Type 5 is not doing well they communicate very briefly, and come off as cold and arrogant.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s like to know a lot about specialized areas.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s want straight forward conversation. They're not usually looking for long, drawn out, emotional dialogue.” -  Beth McCord “The longer you talk with a Type 5 the more you're draining their interactive energy resources; it's helpful to find out how much energy your Type 5 has and spread out conversations so you're not draining all of their energy in one long conversation.” - Beth McCord “Give your Type 5 a warning if you want to talk about something so they have time to process.” - Beth McCord “If a Type 5 doesn't feel like they have enough knowledge about something, they're probably going to be silent as they process and think internally.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s like to go deep in a conversation, they do not enjoy small talk.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s are one of the most misunderstood on the enneagram because they are more secretive and private than the other types.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s are very sensitive and emotional people, they just don't always bring it to the forefront and show that to outwardly.” - Beth McCord “It can be helpful to go on a walk with a Type 5 because they tend to process and think better when doing a physical activity.” - Beth McCord “God gave us marriages as one of the main ways that we can grow in this life.” - Dr. Kim “There is no perfect enneagram type combination in a marriage; all are beautiful.” - Beth McCord “It can be helpful to plan with your Type 5 what time each day they will have to be on their own and uninterrupted to recharge.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s can compartmentalize their lives and only share certain parts of their lives with certain people.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s love to mentally take things apart and innovatively put them back together in a new way.” - Beth McCord “Type 5s can stay focused on one subject for a long amount of time.” - Beth McCord   SPONSORS   Thank you to Honoring Intimates for sponsoring this podcast episode! Honoring Intimates is a safe place for believers to learn about marital sex and shop for the highest quality lubricant, lotions, and lingerie items at reasonable prices. There are no inappropriate images on the site and the company uses mannequins to display their lingerie. Use the code “AWESOMEMARRIAGE” to receive 20% off your entire order.    RESOURCES Find everything you need at becomingus.com! Including the course for YOUR marriage's Enneagram combination. Beth & Jeff have a ‘Becoming Us Course' for each couple type combination. That is 45 courses customized for each couple type combination. They go deeper into the “dance” (relational dynamics) and give you practical resources and insights to help transform your marriage.  Buy ‘Becoming Us' today!  Not sure what your Enneagram Type is? You can take the free assessment here! Also be sure to take the FREE MARRIAGE ASSESSMENT here.  Learn more about each type with this FREE SUMMARY!  Check out more great insights by Beth on her blog.  Discover your Enneagram number with the Discovering You course. Already know your Enneagram Type? Then it's time to take a deeper dive with the Explore You course.  You can get some one-on-one coaching with Your Enneagram Coach here.  Want to talk about sex?! Take our Love Making Survey to open up the way for you and your spouse to work towards better sex and intimacy in marriage! This month's resource is our Love Making Survey and it is designed to help you have a safe, genuine conversation about your sex life with your spouse. This survey is a nonthreatening way to evaluate your sex together. The questions are designed to get you thinking about all aspects of your love making and to shed light on ways your sex could be more satisfying. Become a Marriage Changer and receive some sweet exclusive benefits. Learn more here! Sign up to get Dr. Kim's One Thing To Grow Your Marriage Each Day via email, text, or podcast here!   

We are doing a series on the Top 8 Marriage Issues in 2019. These 8 issues are the top 8 issues that Dr. Kim has seen this year with marriages. We will be breaking them down starting with #8 and working our way towards the #1 marriage issue.  In this episode Dr. Kim and Christina talk about the 4th biggest issue in marriages this year which is: life stages We all go through different life stages. One thing is for sure, life does not stay the same. But will we adjust as life goes on? Or will we not adjust?  Our marriage needs to grow and adjust in every new life stage.  In this episode Dr. Kim and Christina share about how to adjust to life stages and keep your marriage strong over the test of time and life’s changes.  NOTEWORTHY QUOTES “The things you do to connect and have a good marriage will change throughout your marriage.” - Dr. Kim “There’s value to being and living in the present.” - Christina “What does it look like to be fruitful where you are right now in life?” - Christina “As long as you’re on this earth God has a plan and a purpose for you and for your marriage.” - Dr. Kim “If you talk about it with your spouse then you can plan for it.” - Christina “If your marriage isn’t growing in each stage of life, that should be a red flag that you need to do something different.” - Dr. Kim “Don’t let your stage of life define you, you are more than where you are currently at in life.” - Christina “If your spouse is struggling with adjusting to a new phase of life, come alongside them and let them grieve the loss of the previous season if they need to.” - Dr. Kim “Find a mentor couple who is ahead of you in life to learn from.” - Christina “You’ll need to learn to say no to different things in different life stages.” - Dr. Kim   SPONSORS Thank you to Honoring Intimates for sponsoring this podcast episode! Honoring Intimates is a safe place for believers to learn about marital sex and shop for the highest quality lubricant, lotions, and lingerie items at reasonable prices. There are no inappropriate images on the site and the company uses mannequins to display their lingerie. Use the code “AWESOMEMARRIAGE” to receive 20% off your entire order.  RESOURCES Plan to spend some quality time with your sweetie by grabbing our FALLing For You Date Design here! Become a Marriage Changer and receive some sweet exclusive benefits. Learn more here! Sign up to get Dr. Kim’s One Thing To Grow Your Marriage Each Day via email, text, or podcast here! 

We are doing a series on the Top 8 Marriage Issues in 2019. These 8 issues are the top 8 issues that Dr. Kim has seen this year with marriages. We will be breaking them down starting with #8 and working our way towards the #1 marriage issue.  In this episode Dr. Kim and Christina talk about the 4th biggest issue in marriages this year which is: life stages We all go through different life stages. One thing is for sure, life does not stay the same. But will we adjust as life goes on? Or will we not adjust?  Our marriage needs to grow and adjust in every new life stage.  In this episode Dr. Kim and Christina share about how to adjust to life stages and keep your marriage strong over the test of time and life's changes.  NOTEWORTHY QUOTES “The things you do to connect and have a good marriage will change throughout your marriage.” - Dr. Kim “There's value to being and living in the present.” - Christina “What does it look like to be fruitful where you are right now in life?” - Christina “As long as you're on this earth God has a plan and a purpose for you and for your marriage.” - Dr. Kim “If you talk about it with your spouse then you can plan for it.” - Christina “If your marriage isn't growing in each stage of life, that should be a red flag that you need to do something different.” - Dr. Kim “Don't let your stage of life define you, you are more than where you are currently at in life.” - Christina “If your spouse is struggling with adjusting to a new phase of life, come alongside them and let them grieve the loss of the previous season if they need to.” - Dr. Kim “Find a mentor couple who is ahead of you in life to learn from.” - Christina “You'll need to learn to say no to different things in different life stages.” - Dr. Kim   SPONSORS Thank you to Honoring Intimates for sponsoring this podcast episode! Honoring Intimates is a safe place for believers to learn about marital sex and shop for the highest quality lubricant, lotions, and lingerie items at reasonable prices. There are no inappropriate images on the site and the company uses mannequins to display their lingerie. Use the code “AWESOMEMARRIAGE” to receive 20% off your entire order.  RESOURCES Plan to spend some quality time with your sweetie by grabbing our FALLing For You Date Design here! Become a Marriage Changer and receive some sweet exclusive benefits. Learn more here! Sign up to get Dr. Kim's One Thing To Grow Your Marriage Each Day via email, text, or podcast here! 

Everyone has the same amount of time - 24 hours in a day. But so many of us struggle to manage this time well. Some of us say yes to way too many things and then that leaves us burnt out and miserable. Others of us don’t use our time wisely enough and don’t steward their time well to get done what they need to get done.  In the fast paced, hustle glorified, culture that we live in where everyone has access to you all the time it can be really hard to set limits on our time. But if we don’t plan well, our time will just pass us by. But if we do plan well and set up healthy boundaries, we can have healthier relationships, a better marriage, and get off the "hustle til you’re burnt out" game that way too many of us are playing.  In this episode, Dr. Kim and Christina share about the importance of setting up time boundaries and how to implement them.  NOTEWORTHY QUOTES “You have to be an example for your kids of what it looks like to prioritize your spouse.” - Dr. Kim “You have to manage your time to plan for the future.” - Christina “Make sure your schedule reflects your priorities.” - Dr. Kim “Make a habit of doing the things that are important to you.” - Dr. Kim “When we feel like we’re constantly busy we often don’t take the time to do things that are going to have long-term benefits on our marriage.” - Dr. Kim “There’s no shortcut to having time with your spouse; you have to make quality time with them happen.” - Dr. Kim “We had to learn to say no, even to good things, if they would get in the way of us spending quality time together and investing in our marriage.” - Dr. Kim “Decide as a couple where you want you want to prioritize your time and then build the rest of the things you do in life around that.” - Dr. Kim “It’s a red flag that you’re not doing a good job of prioritizing your marriage if you haven’t talked to your wife in so long that you forgot what her name is.” - Dr. Kim “Take the time to address red flags in your marriage as soon as you see them; it will save you so much time in the long run.” - Dr. Kim SPONSORS Thank you to Plant Package for sponsoring this podcast episode! With Plant Package, the prep work of gardening is done for you. Plant Package is delivered straight to your door with easy instructions on how to plant your fun new plant that even someone with a black thumb could execute! Plant Package selects durable seasonal plants, an appropriate and stylish container, sends just the right amount of soil and plant food, and includes instructions for assembly and plant care. The Plants can thrive indoors or outdoors – the choice is yours! Use the code “awesome” to receive a FREE Starter Kit with your order. Starter kits include gardening gloves, a gardening shovel, and farm hand’s soap. Simply select “ADD STARTER KIT” and enter the code AWESOME on the payment checkout page.  RESOURCES Need help building unity in your marriage? Snag our brand new resource Diary of An Awesome Marriage: The Couple’s Unity Building Journal today! This resource is a 23 page PDF, with 9 sections on common areas that marriages. Each section has questions for you to reflect on, pray about, answer, and then discuss with your spouse. Get closer by getting more unified on the things that matter! Become a Marriage Changer and receive some sweet exclusive benefits. Learn more here! Sign up to get Dr. Kim’s One Thing To Grow Your Marriage Each Day via email, text, or podcast here!  Dr. Kim’s new book, 14 Keys to Lasting Love, came out earlier this year. If you haven’t ordered your copy yet, what are you waiting for? Order here now.   

Everyone has the same amount of time - 24 hours in a day. But so many of us struggle to manage this time well. Some of us say yes to way too many things and then that leaves us burnt out and miserable. Others of us don't use our time wisely enough and don't steward their time well to get done what they need to get done.  In the fast paced, hustle glorified, culture that we live in where everyone has access to you all the time it can be really hard to set limits on our time. But if we don't plan well, our time will just pass us by. But if we do plan well and set up healthy boundaries, we can have healthier relationships, a better marriage, and get off the "hustle til you're burnt out" game that way too many of us are playing.  In this episode, Dr. Kim and Christina share about the importance of setting up time boundaries and how to implement them.  NOTEWORTHY QUOTES “You have to be an example for your kids of what it looks like to prioritize your spouse.” - Dr. Kim “You have to manage your time to plan for the future.” - Christina “Make sure your schedule reflects your priorities.” - Dr. Kim “Make a habit of doing the things that are important to you.” - Dr. Kim “When we feel like we're constantly busy we often don't take the time to do things that are going to have long-term benefits on our marriage.” - Dr. Kim “There's no shortcut to having time with your spouse; you have to make quality time with them happen.” - Dr. Kim “We had to learn to say no, even to good things, if they would get in the way of us spending quality time together and investing in our marriage.” - Dr. Kim “Decide as a couple where you want you want to prioritize your time and then build the rest of the things you do in life around that.” - Dr. Kim “It's a red flag that you're not doing a good job of prioritizing your marriage if you haven't talked to your wife in so long that you forgot what her name is.” - Dr. Kim “Take the time to address red flags in your marriage as soon as you see them; it will save you so much time in the long run.” - Dr. Kim SPONSORS Thank you to Plant Package for sponsoring this podcast episode! With Plant Package, the prep work of gardening is done for you. Plant Package is delivered straight to your door with easy instructions on how to plant your fun new plant that even someone with a black thumb could execute! Plant Package selects durable seasonal plants, an appropriate and stylish container, sends just the right amount of soil and plant food, and includes instructions for assembly and plant care. The Plants can thrive indoors or outdoors – the choice is yours! Use the code “awesome” to receive a FREE Starter Kit with your order. Starter kits include gardening gloves, a gardening shovel, and farm hand's soap. Simply select “ADD STARTER KIT” and enter the code AWESOME on the payment checkout page.  RESOURCES Need help building unity in your marriage? Snag our brand new resource Diary of An Awesome Marriage: The Couple's Unity Building Journal today! This resource is a 23 page PDF, with 9 sections on common areas that marriages. Each section has questions for you to reflect on, pray about, answer, and then discuss with your spouse. Get closer by getting more unified on the things that matter! Become a Marriage Changer and receive some sweet exclusive benefits. Learn more here! Sign up to get Dr. Kim's One Thing To Grow Your Marriage Each Day via email, text, or podcast here!  Dr. Kim's new book, 14 Keys to Lasting Love, came out earlier this year. If you haven't ordered your copy yet, what are you waiting for? Order here now.   

Rate The Majority Villain Villain Podcast on iTunes! https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/majority-villain/id877298705?mt=2 We’ve all heard the reports about North Korea. There’s no shortage of information about the nation most people love to hate. We hear a lot regarding missile tests, prison camps and brainwashing. We know the stories of Kim Jong-un and his late father Kim Jong-il, but not too much about the true patriarch of the nation; Kim Il-sung. Reports and discussions over the behavior of North Korea are abound, while self-reflection of the roots of these resentments and ill-feelings remain silent. Today, on Majority Villain we will consider the questions: Why does North Korea hate America? Or more succinctly put: why does it seem that way? Will we have a WWIII? Can Korea launch a nuclear attack against America? And two far-less talked about questions… What happened during the Korean War? And most importantly… Is there a peaceful solution? So, let’s have at it, shall we? This is Majority Villain. Are we going to have a nuclear war with North Korea? This question gets thrown around. A lot. So much so that I fear we don’t anticipate what it would mean. The levity with which we pose the question seems to traverse beyond varying degrees of caution and concern, instead springing head first into some kind of patriotic excitement on how a full-on war could somehow revitalize the American spirit. The two longest wars in American history raging on right now in Iraq and Afghanistan would suggest otherwise. It seems to me then, we ought to be wary of the words we use to describe such a scenario, lest we not anticipate what would likely be the consequences. Regardless, we continue to ask: Are we going to have a nuclear war with North Korea? Variations of the question include whether or not we should (as if choosing to have a war would place us into some type of scenario where there would be clear advantages. There probably wouldn't be). Other variants include WWIII references (beyond scary), the duty of America to be the peace-enforcer (paternal), how evil or crazy Kim Jong-un is (ironic), and more recently how the United States should use its strong arm over China to wield its powerful influence in bringing North Korea under control (dream weaving). Let’s talk fire power. Occasionally, people scoff at the idea that North Korea could ever successfully attack the United States with a nuclear payload missile, citing a three decade-long program littered with international embarrassments; early on it was only short-range tests, and then later a total overhype of test trajectory, and sometimes tests were flat-out failed launches. It’s not the most solid track record on missile tests in history, and that tends to lead a lot of people to thinking that the United States is safe. On the other hand, North Korea’s weapons program is young (just over 10 years old), they have an unknown number in their arsenal, and most terrifyingly - as recently as November, 2017 have they launched a successful intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) experts say is capable of reaching anywhere within the continental United States. Is North Korea's program riddled with flaws? Yes. Does the United States have a missile defense program designed to shoot these things out of the sky? Yes. But do we know how many the United States would need to shoot down, has that missile defense system been tested, and are we even sure the United States would be the target of that attack? No, no and no. Most experts says that the United States partner-country, South Korea would be on the receiving end of what would certainly be far too many missiles to defend against. By all accounts, South Korea would be decimated in unimaginable ways. That makes Donald Trump’s, and more generally, the United States’ tough guy approach all the more scary — not to Americans — but to South Koreans particularly, because they would take more than their fair share of the bombardment. Unfortunately, it’s much easier to carry a big stick than it is to speak softly. Specifically, to speak about the nuance regarding North Korea, namely, the people. It’s easy to forget that there are a lot of innocent people in North Korea, both imprisoned and free who don’t necessarily agree with the aims and goals of the Kim regime. When we say things like, “North Korea is crazy” we undermine the reality of millions of citizens who are trapped in very real ways. The North Korean propaganda machine is the best in its class, censorship on rogue ideas is strictly forbidden, and dissidents who speak or act out are not given very many second chances — if ever. Most of the country is under an electric blackout and quality food sources are scarce — even among those who are not imprisoned or in labor camps. The bottom line is this: North Korea cannot be abrasively labelled as aggressive without attention to the massive population of people who are oppressed in inconceivable ways. If the United States were to attack North Korea the casualties would be astronomical just as they were the last time US troops were there. Flash back to 1950 as global relations are beginning to take new shape in the aftermath of failed a attempt by Axis Powers led by Germany, Italy and Japan. Korea has been occupied for some three decades by the Japanese and is split up into two dictatorships; One North, one South. One protected by communist Soviet Union and one protected by capitalist America. A North Korean military front, led by Kim Jong-un’s grandfather Kim Il-sung heads into the South to take over the land. The newly formed United Nations responds under immense persuasion by the United States to intercede. What begins as a protection and post-WWII peace enforcement mission in the former Japanese-occupied country pushes back against the North, not only to the original borders, but far beyond, just shy of the Chinese border. By 1953, non-militarized treaty lines between the North and South are established where they still exist on a map today. The casualties are immense. Howard Zinn recalls the words of a BBC journalist as he described the trauma in both Koreas after the 1950 June invasion by the North resulted in a US led campaign of 3 years of bombing, shelling and even napalm in his book, A People’s History of the United States. Sensitive listeners advised as the following description is rather unsettling. “In front of us a curious figure was standing, a little crouched, legs straddled, arms held out from his sides. He had no eyes, and the whole of his body, nearly all of which was visible through tatters of burnt rags, was covered with a hard black crust speckled with yellow pus…. He had to stand because he was no longer covered with a skin, but with a crust-like crackling which broke easily…. I thought of the hundreds of villages reduced to ash which I personally had seen and realized the sort of casualty list which must be mounting up along the Korean front.” (Zinn, People’s History, 1980) Zinn estimated during this time that as many as 2 million Koreans were killed. To try to put that into perspective, it is a figure nearly 9 times higher than the number of deaths accrued during the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombs dropped by the United States just 5 years earlier. Typically, this is the part where somebody argues that neither Kim Jong-un nor Donald Trump are responsible for actions taken 70 years ago. True. But that answer feels wholly insufficient, does it not? While decades-old resentments remain, a closer look at current behaviors is needed. Political linguist Noam Chomsky says that a good start to normalized diplomatic relations (like getting North Korea to freeze its nuclear weapons program) would be ending the threatening military maneuvers facilitated by the United States military right outside North Korea’s borders. And understandably so! Imagine what public opinion would be if Russia had 35,000 troops located in Toronto and were running drills on how to attack New York… you know, just in case. Not a good feeling, right? But Chomsky doesn’t end the argument for understanding North Korea’s fears and frustrations there. Rather, he explains quite clearly the legacy of the root of that hostility. (Audio clip of Chomsky explaining how US troops leveled NK.) Perhaps the irony with North Korea is our leaders are so alike. Here is a short quiz taken by the BBC, with some notable quotes of my own choosing added. I’ll read you a quote, and after a few seconds I will tell you if it was Kim Jong-un or Donald Trump. You can keep score at home. Finally, a game the whole family can enjoy! “The military might of a country represents its national strength. Only when it builds up its military might in every way can it develop into a thriving country.” - Kim "If we push the buttons to annihilate the enemies even right now, all bases of provocations will be reduced to seas in flames and ashes in a moment.” -Kim "They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” -Trump "Sound dialogue is not possible with such a guy bereft of reason and only absolute force can work on him.” - Kim “When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice!” -Trump “We share one heart, one home, and one glorious destiny.” -Trump "Let us bring about a radical turn in the building of an economic giant with the same spirit and mettle as were displayed in conquering space.” -Kim “There can be no prosperity without law and order.” -Trump If you got a perfect score - congratulations! You know your dictators from your dickheads! Missed two? Not too shabby. If you got anything less than that - you really gotta admit it - they’re pretty damn similar, and that should give you cause to reflect on the dangers of unmoving nationalism. International Relations in academia have competing schools of thought when it comes to a state’s behavior. There are ongoing dialogues about the varying degrees between state sovereignty vs world cooperation, military might vs diplomacy, border security vs international investment. Realist schools of thought place a premium on the need to securitize the nation, reign in foreign nationals, and build up a mighty military with the force to destroy at a moments notice if not for the home team’s offense, then for a monumental dissuasion for those with ill intentions from ever even thinking about trying something against us. Never question the home team. It is us vs them. If the two leaders of these two governments are so eager to measure their members, display their plumage, yell the loudest, fire the biggest rockets, and ignore their own advisors, then we shall reap what we sow… (Sound of rocket taking off) Unless… (Ring Ring - News report: North and South Korea open up previously closed direct contact line) (North/South Korea walking together in the Olympics.) What thickens the irony all the more is that Kim, unlike Trump, might be more willing to compromise. Given recent rhetoric by President Donald Trump, even in a diplomatic setting like the United Nations… (Audio of Trump at UN session) North and South Korea have been more eager to communicate today than they have been in at least two years. Does this mean that Donald Trump’s tough guy approach has worked? Or does it imply that the Koreans are finding the United States to be an obstacle to compromise? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I will not be able to answer that question here. The more important question is how we view success as a nation. It is a me-first approach? Is there room to question the home team? Is dissidence simply permitted or is it cherished as a means to problem-solving? Howard Zinn’s take on patriotism was much different: “If patriotism were defined, not as blind obedience to government, not as submissive worship to flags and anthems, but rather as love of one's country, one's fellow citizens (all over the world), as loyalty to the principles of justice and democracy, then patriotism would require us to disobey our government, when it violated those principles.” The United States proudly calls itself a peace-enforcer, but there is no such thing as enforcing peace. A farmer does not enforce the growth of corn. He cultivates it. An architect doesn’t enforce the construction of a new building. She develops it. Likewise, peace cannot be imposed, forced, coerce or even won. It’s unfortunate that our über-macho society masculinity places such a premium on aggression. We see what we want and we go and make it happen. We manifest the desired outcome with elbow grease and a can-do attitude. Of course these cultural traits have their value, but why are they seen as an all-encompassing replacement, overshadowing their counterpart attributes of compassion, listening, patience and empathy. In light of Martin Luther King Jr. Day - I leave you with his own words on the subject of nationalism. “This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls “enemy,” for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.” (Beyond Vietnam) You’ve been listening to the Majority Villain podcast. I’m your host, Gregory Haddock. To redeem your villain points for this episode be sure to visit the website at www.majorityvillain.com and on Facebook and Twitter @majorityvillain. If you liked the show you have three tasks; Tell a friend, Subscribe, and Rate the show on iTunes. A link is at the very top of the show notes are on the device you’re already using. Peace, love and villainy. Status quos are for suckers. Music provided by the Free Music Archive under Creative Commons licensing. Today’s music by Audiobinger, Evil Bear Boris, Ari de Niro and Lee Rosevere. Show image by NASA. Who said it? Kim or Trump? http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-40891219

Like 1:26-38 An invitation (to take a step of faith towards peace) originated from the one that can bring it about ( 26-38) Gods power and wisdom are revealed thru His acts Mary is the most famous mother- no negative comments are made about this 13 year old What kind of plan is this Luke 1:38 - Mary responded, “I am the Lord’s servant. May everything you have said about me come true.” And then the angel left her. Modern women values - feel secure, singularly adored and supported V39 - An invitation is confirmed by the Spirit (39-45) It’s easier to serve together Rich and Erin Tyler and Erinn Nick and Colleen Brian and Kim There’s affirmation In others An invitation includes blessings you’ve likely never considered (46-56) Over 20 nations consider Mary the patron of the nation Mary was the most common name during the 1960’s Summary God wants peace by taking a step of faith. Daily prayer May it be Respond daily with steps of faith Let us also respond to God with praise, even though all of Gods promises are not completely filled

Welcome to Beyond Prisons: a new podcast examining incarceration in America through an abolitionist lens.  In our first episode, hosts Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein introduce the idea behind the podcast, dissect and critique the current conversation around prison reform, and discuss the need for a broader vision for justice that should guide those efforts. What is prison abolition and what would it mean to live in a world without prisons? What's missing from current efforts to reform the criminal justice system? What kind of topics will this podcast cover? We tackle these questions and more in our first episode. Going forward, we will conduct interviews and delve much deeper into the various issues we touch upon in this first episode. So, stay tuned! -- Follow us on Twitter: @Beyond_Prison @phillyprof03 @bsonenstein Music & Production: Jared Ware -- Transcript Brian: Hello everybody and welcome to the first episode of Beyond Prisons. I am one of your hosts Brian Sonenstein and I’m joined by my co-host Kim Wilson. How ya doing, Kim? Kim: I’m doing well. Hi Brian, how’s it going? Brian: It’s going alright. I’m excited to be here. I’m glad we’re getting this off the ground. Kim: Yeah, me too. Brian: So what Kim and I are trying to do is something a little bit different. Oh, my dogs are barking in the background. (laughs) Kim: We’re gonna have dogs, we’re gonna have cats. We might have you know, who knows what else is going to show up so I say let’s just roll with it. Brian: I know, it’s fine. Kim and I decided to start this podcast to talk about the issue of prison reform and mass incarceration, and offer some different perspectives than a lot of the things you hear going on in the news right now. So I thought we could introduce ourselves a little bit. Kim, why don’t you go first? Kim: Ok, well, I’ll tell you a little bit about what my motivations were, and I think that will be a nice segway into my intro. But the motivating factor behind me getting on board with this podcast really stems from a place of frustration. I’m frustrated with the policy choices around mass incarceration, around prison specifically, and I’m seeing so many things that are impacting communities that I care about and that many people that I know live in, and I feel like we could be doing something better and so I’m coming at it from that perspective. That said, on a personal level, I’m the mother of two incarcerated men who are serving life in prison without the possibility of parole or at least that was their sentence. My professional and academic interests in incarceration began long before either of them had any encounter with the criminal justice system and I’m thinking of that in a broad sense particularly when we talk about schools and school to prison pipeline, which I’m sure we’re gonna spend quite a bit of time talking about in later episodes. And then I’m also coming at this as an activist who started out very much on board with prison reform and the prison reform movement if you want to call it that, and quickly evolved from that perspective to one of being strongly committed to prison abolition. So that’s a little bit about me, where I’m coming from, and what I’m hoping that this podcast is going to be about. What about you, Brian? Brian: Well, so I am a journalist. I’ve been writing about incarceration and the criminal justice system for about five years now. My work has primarily been to address these issues from the perspective of the people who are most directly impacted by it and that’s how I actually got to know you Kim. I’m also deeply interested in the issue of prison abolition after having been an activist myself for a number of years on a number of issues from drug policy to whistleblowing. I’ve seen a lot of people have interactions with the system and none of them have been good, including friends of mine. I grew up in sort of a blue collar, very small town in New England and saw a lot of people who fell into drugs and other problems, wind up in the system and it just destroyed not only their lives but the lives of their families and friends, and so I just had a growing interest in this. I’m very interested in the topic of reform, I’m also interested in critiquing reform, which is something we talk a lot about here. And we’re also going to try to break away from sort of this large statistical view of incarceration where we’re focusing on numbers. What we’re gonna try to do is bring perspectives from the people who are involved and use those to sort of guide our arguments about what the criminal justice system should be like. So why don’t we talk about like the major narrative around mass incarceration, you know maybe we can start by just critiquing that there. So I don’t know, when you think about mass incarceration , what are some things that jump out to you, like what are the things you know about it? Kim: You know, coming at this from several different points of view and those things have deeply informed where I am today regarding mass incarceration. I think that’s an important thing to talk about because, again, as someone who was trained as a policy analyst, the policy perspective or that school of thought can really be distilled in terms of cost-benefit analysis and I want, as you pointed out, for us to move beyond statistics and to think about the real issues, to dig down deep into the racialized nature of mass incarceration, which is one of the things that jumps out to me. I mean, I think it’s important to address the numbers and to account for those and also to explain what those numbers mean in the context of people’s lives in the context of communities. How do those numbers translate into problems for the people who are behind the numbers, right? So I think that first and foremost addressing the racialized nature of mass incarceration and more broadly what we refer to as the prison industrial complex. That’s one of the main things that I want to talk about and I don’t feel is actually discussed enough in public policy circles. Now, that said, I think that there are public policy institutions that are doing this kind of research and that are publishing reports and white papers and what have you that do address the racialized nature of mass incarceration. But this doesn’t actually seem to make it into the spaces where policy makers are making decisions and that gap right there really frustrates me and it’s something that has frustrated me for a really long time. We know, for example, that Black people are disproportionately represented in the system and what does that mean?  You know, what does that mean in terms of communities? And I want to talk about that and to explore that. We know, for example, that in terms of placing this in a global context that the U.S. has one of the largest prison populations in the world. So what does that mean you know and what does that look like on the ground and what does that mean in the context of the politics of today? Because I don’t think that we can really launch a podcast in 2017 and not talk about the current (laughs) political situation in this country. Brian: Right. Kim: If that’s not a source of frustration for people, I don’t know what is and it’s certainly a major source of frustration for me. Then there is the gender component of mass incarceration. We tend to talk about men who are incarcerated and particularly black men. To neglect an oversight of talking about women and how those numbers have grown exponentially over the last decade and a half, and I think that’s an important piece that needs to be addressed as well. So there’s a lot of stuff that I’m thinking about when I’m thinking about mass incarceration. I think that that this is a good place to start. I’m also thinking about mass incarceration in broader terms and this goes to the title of our podcast as well, Beyond Prisons. I want us to imagine what that means. What does it mean to see something beyond prisons? Can we imagine a world not only without prisons but what are some of the creative solutions that we can come up with through these conversations that are going to be I would say not only realistic but that are necessary in light of the fact that we have, what, over six million people under correctional supervision in this country with about two million of those incarcerated? So when we think about, when I’m thinking about incarceration in this country, I’m thinking about it in really broad terms. I’m thinking of policing. I’m thinking of surveillance. I’m thinking of all the various ways, the mechanisms that are used to control certain populations in this country particularly marginalized groups in this country. What about you? Brian: Yeah, absolutely, and I think that on a very basic level, one of the things that I want to do is talk about what we as Americans by and large think prisons do, who goes there, what happens there, and this includes even through the lens of the reform movement. But as activists, when we’re thinking about policy that we could be implementing and if we’re thinking about what comes next after prison, I think one of the most important things that we can do is have conversations that could lead to a cultural shift among people that will lay a stronger foundation for these policies, and I think we can get there. As we know, prisons and the system in general are largely out of the public view. Attempts to, I know this as a journalist and you know this as both a scholar and a parent, but any attempts to get more information about the system or to question actions by officials, you get the silent treatment or worse. I think in order to really lay the groundwork for a lot of this policy, we need to have conversations and clear some things out about punishment, and about crime, and about safety and the role of prisons in all of this, right? And I think that there is this idea that people are criminals instead of people that do things that are against the law or maybe have low moments. I think there’s this idea that when you go away to prison,  you deserve harsh treatment and certain things as punishment and there’s no thought that these people are eventually going to get out. They’re going to have to reintegrate into society under even more difficult situations than the average person trying to get a job out there today, when you have this scarlet letter of a conviction hanging over you. What I hope that we can do in addition to all the things that you said that I totally agree with. In addition to getting into the various issues that go on in prison, and at the front end and back end, before people go in and after, I just really want to challenge our assumptions, and I want us to really think about the myriad costs that are associated with decisions that we make with punishment. And even on just a basic and theoretical level, we talk about prison sentences, right. We talk about sentencing reform, but we attach arbitrary years on prison sentences because I mean there really is no science behind a lot of this and it’s just interesting to think a lot of times—I hear people on the left and liberals are always talking about how oh, the Republicans are so anti-science. Well, the truth is that as a society, we have this looming system that is very pseudo-scientific and very anti-scientific in a lot of ways. And so these are the ideas and little things that we want to chip away at. We’re gonna bring guests on to talk about these things and a lot of the things that you and I are going to chat about today. We’re gonna gloss over a lot of things, we’re gonna mention a lot of things, but trust that in coming episodes, we will dig into these issues deeper. So, what else? What else should we talk about here? Kim: Yeah, I mean playing off of those points that you just made about prison, one of the things that I’ve been thinking about as I was preparing for this episode today was something that Angela Davis writes about in ‘Are Prisons Obsolete?’  And she says, ‘stop thinking of prisons as inevitable, ‘ right? We think of the prison as this natural thing, and that we can’t imagine life without it. And I think that our name again captures that, but our approach to what we’re attempting to do with these conversations is to think about what is life without a prison. It’s not some Utopian ideal. It’s not politically naïve to talk about a world without prisons, a society without prisons, and the difficulty that I’ve encountered in my work with people, including a lot of liberals. It’s mostly liberals who I’ve been working with around issues of prison abolition, that any time I say, ‘Ok, imagine a world without prisons? What does that society look like?’ The first thing I hear is, no, no, no, you can’t possibly mean you want to get rid of prisons. And again, this really is super, super frustrating because it’s not even... I’m giving you a magic wand. You can make the world whatever you want it to be, right? It’s like, it’s a theoretical exercise in a lot of ways. And people don’t even want to imagine that world. Brian: Why do you think that is? Like why do you think people—I have my own thoughts on this, obviously, but I’m curious of your thoughts on why people are resistant to the idea of having that radical imagination. Kim: Well I think a lot of people are afraid, right. I think that there’s a lot of fear that they watch these television shows, they see things depicted in the media and presented a certain way, and their fantasy about what someone in prison looks like or is capable of is informed by these things. They don’t necessarily—even if they have an experience with someone who’s been to prison, they tend to have this wall up, like okay, I like the idea of improving conditions for people in prison, but what are you talking about? This is going a little too far. You can’t really be talking about getting rid of prisons. And, I’m like actually I am. So institutions where we put people in cages for long periods of time without any consideration as to what that is doing to someone. It’s a problem. It’s problematic. We need to have, I’m fond of saying, the courage, the backbone, like we need strong backs to be able to say this is wrong, right? And how do we disrupt this system? How do we change this system? How can we make something that is different from what we have now, right? Not just substituting and moving this around or you know they say rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, right? You know, just a couple of days ago, de Blasio, Mayor de Blasio of New York, announced that they’re closing down Rikers and that’s great, and I’m cheering for the fact because Rikers was a really shitty place. It was a horrible place by all accounts and it needed to be closed. However, what he’s proposing is setting up new prisons. So for me, and this is where I have to depart with the reform movement: Substitutes for prison, including other prisons, doesn’t really help the issue. It doesn’t address the social, the economic, the political problems that have created the issues that we have regarding mass incarceration, and I think until we get to that, until we get to that point where we can, I mean, good grief, have a conversation about what a world without prisons could look like. And to move people just a tiny little bit to say ‘ok, what does transforming this society mean? How do we deal with really scary things? Okay, so someone’s committed murder or someone’s being raped. These are horrible things and how do we address the victim’s legitimate concerns here while also addressing what is happening in terms of incarceration that we know doesn’t actually act as a deterrent, right? It doesn’t work, so what do we do about this? We need a better way to approach this and I’m thinking of this podcast and our conversations as a way to explore various approaches to what that landscape would look like. I’m looking at it also in terms of how do we challenge white supremacy as part of this project? I see a lot of talk about prisons and carcerality that want to leave out the race component. And that’s one of the hang-ups I think that we have and that we confront, particularly in the terms of policy making and policy choices that are being made because these policies around prison are meant to appear race neutral, and they’re not. We need to have not only a language but a process by which we can assess, analyze, and understand what racialized carceral system is, and what do we do about that. Brian: I agree. I completely agree. And I think that there is a lot of danger in compartmentalizing reform efforts instead of taking these broader approaches like abolition. My head is spinning. There’s so many things I want to say in response to what you just said. I mean one thing I want to say is that I think that for people who don’t really know what prison abolition is, they’ve never heard of it, or maybe they have somewhat of an idea. I think that one of the helpful ways to think about this too is that there is not going to be a one-size-fits-all solution to prisons, much the same way that much the one-size-fits-all of prisons doesn’t work for the justice system. I think when we’re talking about getting rid of prisons, like you said, we’re not talking about replacing it with a different kind of prison. I really resent a lot of this talk about looking over to Sweden and see how awesome it is to be a prisoner in Sweden. I think that’s totally the wrong way to look at prisons. It’s also a hard conversation, I think, and I wonder if you ever butt up against this, Kim. The needs and the problems are so bad for people who are incarcerated that the needs are very immediate, right? So I’m not sitting here saying we shouldn’t support these reform efforts that look to increase the quality of life of prisoners, because we need to help people right now. But we can’t do that at the expense of a broader vision. I see a lot in these reform efforts of reducing or showing greater leniency toward low level non-violent offenders, but at the same time, we are going to increase penalties and introduce new penalties for violent offenders or for other drug crimes. They talked about introducing a new Fentanyl mandatory minimum sentence in the last criminal justice reform bill. It probably will be added to this one, I assume, with Republicans being in control of legislature. Another thing that I want to say and I’m jumping around a little bit here, but I’m just thinking about your comments, is a lot of times what we see in reform is euphemism, to make it look like things are changing or to modestly or slightly tweak a prisoner’s experience. But the abuse and the fundamental issue of why a certain thing in prison is bad remains the same. So, for example, with solitary confinement, we say that solitary confinement is torture and I think that it is pretty widely accepted now that solitary confinement is torture. And at the same time, the reforms that we get are two extra hours out of your cell per week, and reformers call that a victory. Or only certain groups of people are not allowed to go into solitary confinement, or they opened a new housing unit that is basically solitary confinement in everything but name. So it’s really tricky and that’s another reason why I think it’s important to consider abolition and to take it seriously because a lot of these problems. We are at where we are today because a lot of these politicians have been kicking the can on these issues ever since we had prisons. I mean, Attica, the reform efforts followed Attica. Rebellions have been going on for years and years and years. Things haven’t gotten materially better. I think when we think about abolition, another thing to think about like you were saying, is how do we think about somebody who’s committed an act of murder, an act of rape? How do we think about justice? But it’s also that the prison and the system that we have set up does nothing to sort of head off these things from happening by changing the material conditions and environments, social contexts and racial contexts like you were talking about, that people live in, that limit their options and push them in or silo their paths in life. So it’s not just what can we do differently when someone commits a crime but it’s like how can we invest in communities. All the money we spend on federal, state, and local jails, all that money could be so much better put to use with education, jobs, healthcare in society in ways that would reduce the number of people winding up behind bars. Kim: Absolutely! And I think to your first point regarding reforms and changing things in the immediate and looking to European models of prisons and what not. I think that there is a space for having a comparative analysis as to what other countries are doing that are better than what is happening here in the U.S. and if it improves the conditions of people on the inside, then Ok, great. However, what an abolitionist’s perspective actually does is that it provides a framework for understanding and placing that conditions have to be improved right now, however, the long term goal is not to just sit back and say, yeah, we improved conditions, but how do we not use prisons as an anchor for the problems that are happening in society? How do we or what other things can we use? And you mentioned some of those things: investing in communities, providing healthcare, mental health. Mental health is such a big part of this problem, not criminalizing drugs and seeing that these things don’t actually improve safety or security, but are used as the pretext for increasing the carceral state. I think that one of the things that we’re going to do in upcoming episodes is really delve into what do we mean by prison abolition. Today, I think that we can just give a quick definition of that, a working definition so people have that and to talk a little bit about what we mean when we say prison industrial complex so that we understand the language that’s being used here. Because I think particularly in this day and age, particularly in this political climate that our words matter and our words matter more than they have in the past. So providing clear definitions gives us a place to begin. It may not improve or increase understanding very much, but at least it gives us a place to begin so that we know that we’re talking about this thing over here, and not that thing over there. That said, one of the things I talk about when I talk about prison abolition and again using a lot of Angela Davis’ work, using the work of people from Critical Resistance, as well as Insight, and a number of other groups is to really think about it as a political vision. To think about how prison abolition constitutes a set of long term goals. There are things that we are doing right now, however, the goal is to eliminate and get rid of imprisonment, to get rid of policing and surveillance as the mechanisms that we use to address social problems. I think that’s really the most concrete way of putting it in really simple terms. It sounds easy but once we start unpacking that, I think there is just so much happening in that. So that framework include, for me at least, that framework of abolition is also anti-racist. It is when we talk about gender disparities. We’re including trans’ rights. We’re talking about immigration policy. We’re talking about all of these things that are happening right now and the kinds of policies that are being implemented by this administration that work against an abolitionist framework. I feel a sense of urgency now more than I have I think before. And I think I’ve had a sense of urgency for a long time. I don’t know. What do you think about that? Brian: I totally agree, and I think that we really need to have goals. And I think a lot of what’s happening in the prison reform movement and even just sort of larger on the left, I think you see that it’s a little different when you talk about when you talk about something like single-payer healthcare, for instance. I think we need to have these goals that even if they seem politically unfeasible in this moment, we have to have something to work toward. Like you said, provide a framework for what we’re doing, not only so that we don’t shut off any avenues to fully realize reform or anything like that, but just so that we’re going somewhere with this. This is the work of movements. You know, we might not see this in our lifetime. A lot of people that I talk to about abolition for their first time kind of scoff at you. They’re like, yeah right, there’s no way that would ever happen. The prison is such a fundamental institution in our society that obviously it’s much bigger than any one issue. I think that something that you were touching on or something that it made me think about when you were talking is that if you bring an abolitionist framework to this, it does inform the way you look at other policies and other areas of government and society instead of just sort of being content to fiddle with whatever problems are going on. It makes you want to investigate the root causes more, to question the system more. It also sort of gives you more empathy in a way. I feel like even the worst political foes that I could imagine, I definitely would like to understand more about why they are the way they are. That doesn’t mean I’d excuse their behavior, but just sort of a strategy. I feel so much that political fighting and everything today is like very in the moment and lacks a broader context. So, anyway, I think abolition is something that if there were ever a good time to talk about it, it would be now with things as awful as they are. I feel like we almost have more space to talk about abolition than we might have had a few years ago. Kim: Absolutely! Absolutely! Yeah, I think that one of the things that I wrote down in my notes in my preparation for today had to do with reforms, and one of the things that Angela Davis says is that the idea of reforms doesn’t go beyond the prison. So if all of your solutions begin and end with prisons, then there is really no room for alternatives in that reform model, and that’s the problem that I have as an abolitionist with the reform movement – that all of the solutions maintain these carceral institutions, so whether we’re talking about house arrest or surveillance, parole, probations, what have you, then it’s not really an alternative. You’re trying to give something a different look without doing much about the actual problem and this resonates with people. This is very appealing and again, this is extremely frustrating for me because again, as someone who was trained in policy and public policy research and what have you, the literature really approaches mass incarceration from those perspectives. So when we’re writing policy documents, when they’re doing evaluations of re-entry programs, for example, there are really no alternatives that are being presented that are not carceral alternatives. And that, for me, has been part of the problem for years. That, for me, the ‘Aha’ moment or the lead-up to the ‘Aha’ moment if we can even call it that, came a number of years ago, where it was evident that the further I dug down into re-entry and what was happening in communities was people returning from prison to certain communities. There’s a pattern there and that pattern is repeated over, over and over again across communities in this country. So the policies weren’t working. But it wasn’t enough to just say the policies aren’t working. What is actually happening here? What is informing these policies, and I think that was where I really started to go into the abolitionist literature because the public policy literature doesn’t discuss abolition. It completely neglects it. Abolition is something that, if you’re a political theorist that was talking about abolition from that perspective, and people are writing brilliant things about Foucault and what have you. But that information, that knowledge doesn’t transfer over to the public policy space. So how do we bring these things together? It’s not just political theorists, but philosophers and other people who are doing work on prison abolition, not just theoretical but practical work as well. How do we bring that knowledge to bear on policy choices so that in the choosing because people talk about public policy in sort of a disconnected way in this thing that’s happening somewhere in Washington and in the halls of the State Capitals and what have you, it’s some kind of mysterious process. No. People are making decisions, and those decisions are informed by people’s values, people’s understanding of the problem, etc., etc. And if we’re not attempting to understand that part of it in terms of what’s happening with so many people and disproportionately, black and brown people in this country going to prison, then we’re actually not being honest about trying to address what is happening here. What we’re doing is something else, but it’s not rooted in an honest, intellectual project that is going to give us public policies that improve the conditions for communities and the people that live in those communities. I think that, for me, that’s one of the strengths of an abolitionist’s perspective, and one of the things in my activism and in my scholarship and in my personal life that I have really committed to understanding in a lot of different ways. And I think that it presents a lot of challenges. It’s a difficult task to be an abolitionist. It’s not an easy thing to say that publicly and it’s even more difficult thing if you write about these issues, or facilitating workshops and conversations with people around these things. They always want to talk down to you and tell you that you’re misinformed somehow and that letting people out of prison is just going to run society. I’m like, have you read the paper? I mean, have you looked around? Angela Davis says this all the time: not having any prisons would actually improve things. No alternative would be better than having prisons and that really gets people’s backs up. They can’t handle that. I think to your point earlier about trying to understand where people are coming from with that, I think that’s an important piece of the overall puzzle in conversation here, and I’m looking forward to these conversations as the podcast unfolds and as we get deeper into these things. Brian: Yeah, and I just think one last thing I’ll say on your discussion of policy-making and peoples’, like you were saying, sort of arching their back and a lot of this stuff. I think it speaks to a lot of political incentives that end up shaping reform and that need to change, and hopefully conversations like the ones we’re going to have on this podcast can help change. Because it’s really hard, you have to admit on a certain level that it’s hard for policymakers to go out and maybe put out a reform that would reduce the number of violent offenders in prison because all it takes is one violent offender to make the news to cause a political backlash to that. I think because of that the incentives are so stacked to be harsher, whereas the political gain for showing leniency is so unfortunately low, and I think we need to completely invert that and sort of show politicians and these political figures, including prosecutors. To a certain degree, they’re followers. They’re going to take certain cues from the public in terms of what the public will support and what the public won’t support. So I do see the tide changing a little bit in terms of how people view ‘offenders.’ Obviously, it’s like a very niche group of offenders are given leniency right now, but it’s hopeful in the sense that it could–if we could have these conversations to get people to think differently, we could change those political incentives so that there is less of a risk for a politician to craft a policy or sign on to a policy that would decarcerate and that politicians won’t so strongly overreact to rises in crime and the public doesn’t prioritize the safety of some communities at the expense of others. Kim: Absolutely! And I think that this whole thing about who we let out of prison, and what is an acceptable kind of level of criminality–if we’re aiming for zero crime in society, we’re neglecting the fact that we’re dealing with human beings. So we need to talk about that. We need to address that on the front end and I don’t see where politicians do this very effectively, and I’m sure we’ll certainly critique the politician’s approach to public policy around incarceration and what have you. But we don’t have a world where we will be crime free. That world actually doesn’t exist. So a world without prisons is possible; a world without crime I’m not so sure. So I think that, how would we handle that crime? What constitutes a crime? So we have all sorts of examples currently in the news: defending yourself against a domestic abuser is considered a crime. So that’s a problem. What do we want to do with that? I mean, what we’re really saying to victims of violence is well we don’t care about you if you tried to defend yourself, then you are really the problem. How has that changed anything for that community, for that person, for their family or anything like that? So I think we need to move beyond the surface level analysis that is really popular and talk about the complexities involved with letting people, not just opening the doors and letting people run out of prison. We’re talking about a more thoughtful approach to decarceration, getting rid of cages. We’re talking about, as you mentioned earlier, providing people with healthcare and for me, particularly mental health, and what that would do. We know that there is a large proportion of the incarcerated population that has a documented mental illness. That’s a problem. And if our approach to these issues is basically to just lock them up for some indefinite amount of time, don’t provide them with any kind of counseling or support while they’re incarcerated, that somehow through the isolation and solitary monastic existence that these people are going to have some kind of ‘Aha’ moment, and magically come out being okay. Brian: That’s what I mean. Yeah, when I was saying earlier that I just feel like incarceration is so anti-science. I mean listening to the way you just described it, it sounds ridiculous! And we have at this point mountains of evidence showing how incarceration harms, and I would argue that we have very little evidence suggesting that incarceration as an end in itself works to do anything other than perpetuate misery. So, yeah, sorry I just wanted to chime in here. Kim: No, Absolutely! Brian: Because it always baffles me that we cling to this institution so strongly, but it’s complete pseudo-science the more that you dig into it. Kim:  Uh-huh, Absolutely! Absolutely! And I think that’s a valid point and that we need to talk about that more not just on here, but in the context of public policy choices that are being made. Targeting specific groups of people or to put people in prison who have drug problems makes no sense. It makes absolutely no sense. You don’t actually change the conditions for that individual by putting them in prison. Not just putting them in prison, but putting them in a cage and not giving them any kind of assistance. These things don’t happen, like they don’t just fall out of the sky and all of a sudden they walk out of prison and they’re going to magically never use again. And that seems to be the sort of approach towards carcerality here, why reforms are a huge problem because it relies on this notion that if you lock someone up and you take away everything that is meaningful to them, that is of value to them, their ties to the community no matter how strained those are, their ties to their family no matter how difficult that family might be, those are still ties that we are basically cutting off and say, Ok, we’re going to remove you from society, from everything that is near and dear to you, and now we’re expecting you to be ok. So when you come out, you should be ready to conquer the world. And then we set up this system of obstacles for a person who’s returning from prison and into the community, and we say, well you need to follow all these rules. Okay, so you go to prison from a community where most of the people that you know have also gone to prison, but we have laws in this country that prevent the association of people with a felony conviction from associating, so that can get you back into prison. That’s just so ridiculous! Who else would you know? It’s like if your parent went to prison and you’re their child and you also went to prison, we’re basically saying, well mom, dad, aunt, uncle, cousin, whatever the ties are, you can’t be around each other. So now we’re undermining the support system that would be there by making the association a criminal act. It’s like, God! How is this supposed to work? Brian:  Yeah, and I think one of the things that we all are going to need to talk about, and it’s going to be hard given just American culture in general, are these limits of individual responsibility. I think, as you were talking about earlier, that a lot of the way carcerality bleeds in, and the punitive structure bleeds into post-release and things like that, and you were talking about drug treatment programs and things like that. You know, even in that situation- let’s take drug treatment programs for instance. A lot of these programs are 12-step programs that are built around the individual basically accepting full responsibility for their actions, making no excuses outside of themselves, and supposedly being able to stay sober with that as their backing. And the truth of it is that there are limits to personal responsibility for somebody like that. I mean, if you live in a context in which drugs are always around, or maybe you have a chronic health issue and that’s how you became addicted to opiods. I mean, taking responsibility like that is just another, it’s like another one of these examples of sort of puritanical anti-science approach. It’s like disproved by incredible amounts of evidence. But we’re going to need to really as Americans dial back our desire to pin 100% total responsibility on people who commit crimes. And I just want to…I think this is a good time to talk about in terms of abolition too, Kim and I’m wondering what your thoughts are on this. When we talk about prison abolition and you said this earlier in a way, we’re not just talking about letting people out of prison. We need to… there still will be accountability after prison, right. There still will be justice. And hopefully, it won’t look like this. So, yeah, I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that. Kim: Yeah, I mean we need to talk about and explore new forms of justice. So the whole theatre that’s associated when someone gets sentenced to a long prison term is one of the problems. I obviously experienced that with my sons and this idea that somehow justice was being served within that context felt so…it’s painful and it’s still painful today. To think back on this and part of what that does is it creates further divisions within communities because we’re all in this together. We’re all in this together, and like you said, the American ethos of individual responsibility and resiliency and this kind of ‘you can do it, and I built it myself…and I didn’t need any help, and it’s not my responsibility to take care of you, etc., etc.,’ which is at the core of American society. People really really believe that, uncritically believe that. They don’t examine what they say around resiliency and individual responsibility at all, and we have medical models that are informed by this perspective. A lot of this probation and parole are informed by this perspective. A lot of re-entry programs are based on these perspectives, and the need to rely on personal transformation strategies as the preferred approach to dealing with crime and to dealing with people’s problems. Because I think we conflate that. We make people their problems. We don’t separate the two. We don’t say, Ok this person has a problem…we say, these people are a problem. So drug users are a problem, not wait a minute, let’s think about what is actually happening here. And as you pointed out, we’re living in a really un-scientific time. The lack of critical thinking around these things or the willingness to approach this from a scientifically informed perspective is another huge issue that we’re probably going to talk about in one way or another throughout every conversation that we have because it’s there. It’s part of every single issue, and to lay blame at an individual’s feet is…one of the things that I say quite a bit is that when we individualize, we moralize. It makes it really easy to moralize. We do a lot of finger wagging and we can say, oh you need to get your act together, you need to stop doing drugs, you need to stop doing this, and we’re very much invested in this notion of choice; that an individual chose this path as opposed to this other path. And when we do that, what we’re doing is obscuring the fact that there are conditions and that there is a system in place that perpetuates these conditions that can strain your choices. So if you can’t eat because you don’t have a job and because you can’t go to your mama’s house because of whatever reason or because there are federal policies that prevent you from crashing on her couch because she lives in HUD housing or something ridiculous like that. And you’re back on the street. I mean, what would you do? Because I think about that quite often and I would do whatever I need to do to eat. I would do whatever I needed to do to survive, and I live in L.A. I have been in supermarkets out here where I’ve seen people arrested who are hungry. They’re coming in and they’re stealing a loaf of bread or something small like that, and the police are called because that is the system that we have. Instead of the manager just giving them the damn loaf of bread and keeping it moving, it’s like…No, we have to call the police. Now you have another set of problems there. I think that part of our…part of what I’m hoping we’ll do is to unpack that a little bit more in a more critical way, and bring people on as guests who can discuss these issues in a really well informed way to get us to think about this stuff beyond the superficial, beyond this sort of knee-jerk reaction to petty crime. But, that said, I also feel that we need to talk about violent crime, and that without the conversation or a set of conversations about violent criminals that we would be doing a disservice to what we’re saying we want to do with this podcast. I think that we need to address what happens when the unthinkable happens, and how do we deal with that and how do we address that? How can communities come together and what does a justice model look like that says, ok, well we need to talk about that more… We need to address the fears that people have and discuss ways that someone who has committed a really horrific crime can be held accountable. It doesn’t produce more harm. It doesn’t perpetuate the pain that already exists because I don’t think, in speaking from my own experience…the pain doesn’t go away. The pain when something horrible happens in your family with crime …that pain doesn’t leave. It doesn’t get better with time. It is just as fresh today as it was the day that it happened, and I think that is something that for me, on a personal level, that I want to talk about more and to bring in families that have been impacted in these ways by crime on both sides. I think that’s an important conversation to have, and something that in transformative justice circles and restorative justice circles has been happening for a lot of years, and there are ways to approach those conversations. But we can’t do that until we talk about accountability. But if accountability is happening in very narrow terms of ‘lock them up and throw away the key’, that doesn’t cohere with an abolitionist perspective, and as you can see, there is a lot to talk about. Brian: There is. Kim: There is no shortage of topics here. I think we barely scratched the surface today. I’m excited about what we can do with this podcast. I don’t know. Do you have any additional thoughts? Brian: There’s just one more thing that I wanted to bring up, and I am curious what you think about this, too. I think a lot of times when people bring up these arguments somebody might say to you, Well, Kim, what about the victims? What about the people who the crimes are perpetrated against? Don’t you think that deserve our empathy too? I don’t know what you would say. I would say our system is not designed at all right now to really empower victims in any meaningful way outside of punishment. I think prosecutors by and large aren’t really interested in what a victim would like to do. I wrote about earlier this year that the vast majority of crime victims, including violent crime victims would prefer rehabilitation over incarceration. There’s a lot of myths that, I would also say that maybe people wouldn’t be victims if we didn’t have incarceration and were addressing these root causes. That was really the last thing that I want to bring up. I’m just thinking about some of the things that might come to your mind when you’re thinking about prison abolition for the first time, sort of these ingrained defenses that we have as Americans against imagining a world without prisons. Like you said, a lot of this, we will be digging in very deeply on all these subjects with guests, and I’m very, very excited. So, yeah, we want to know what questions you have. You can email me at brian@shadowproof.com. We would be happy to take tips from people and hear how people react to the show and a lot of ideas that we have. Honestly, I want to hear what sort of problems people have with a lot of these ideas because I think that a lot of these conversations are going to be really uncomfortable for a lot of people. They’re gonna be really difficult. We’re going to be talking about violence, and sexual offenses and things like this that we react to in a certain way. But we need to have these conversations if we’re really going to make a meaningful impact on this issue. What about you, Kim? Do you have any final thoughts? Kim: Yeah, I think that there are a number of victims groups around the country that have been very outspoken against things like the death penalty, and I’ve been working with some groups, some people in Delaware around this as well, whose families have been the victims of violent crimes. And it’s a difficult conversation, but I can tell you that from my own experience, talking with these families, they have been out front of the death penalty abolition movement, and they have said things not in their name, like you can’t kill someone because you lost someone in their name. And this notion of state sanctioned violence as a way to mete out justice is deeply problematic for a lot of people, not just on a moral level because they do think that it’s wrong, but in terms of what this actually does. What does this actually do? It doesn’t feel good, but then again, I think that the people who are best able to talk about this issue are the victims. I don’t want to speak for anyone. If anything, another goal that I have for this podcast is really to amplify and marginalize people’s voices, and to let people speak for themselves rather than talking over them or for them. You’ll hear me say a lot, I’m speaking for myself, because I think that needs to be clear that I’m not talking for other folks here. I think that in general, I look forward to hearing what people have to say. I think that these are courageous conversations that we need to have, that they’re going to require us to have really strong backs to address. We’ll certainly give people trigger warnings around certain issues. There might be a trigger warning around the entire podcast. I mean, I don’t even know. That includes just as much for my own benefit as for anybody else’s because this isn’t easy. I’m on board with this project because it gives me a way to sort of channel this energy that I have and to bring this work to a much bigger audience, and to include a lot more people in this conversation. Before I forget, if people want to contact me, I’m at wilsonk68@gmail.com and I look forward to hearing about what people have to say and if they want to chime in, and if they want to have ideas for future topics. Certainly, I’m open to these things. Hate mail you can send somewhere else. I’m not interested in the hate mail and the abusive nonsense that I’m sure we’re going to get as a result of putting ourselves out there on these issues. It’s been, this has been great. I enjoyed this conversation. I think it was a lot easier than I thought, huh. Brian: Yeah, I know seriously. I’m really glad to be doing this with you Kim so thank you very much and thank you everybody for listening. We will have another episode out soon. You can subscribe to us on Itunes Beyond Prisons and stay tuned for our next episode. Thank you so much.