Podcast appearances and mentions of mark as

Remember, we welcome comments, questions, and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com ----more---- Mark: Welcome back to The Wonder, Science-Based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark. Yucca: And I'm Yucca. Mark: And today we are talking about golden ages of the past and as well as turning to look at golden visions of the future. Yucca: Yeah. I think this is going to be a fun one. We were saying right before we hit record, it's it's a right for tangents as well. Mark: yes, yeah, I imagine we're gonna, we're gonna fall down some rabbit holes on this for sure. Where this originally came from was a conversation that we had in one of the atheopagan community Zoom mixers that happens on Thursday nights, and, or and Michael, who is a member of the Atheopagan Society Council, raised this as a topic and he pasted into the chat a sort of semi facetious myth That many in the mainstream pagan community seem to embrace, which is this idea that once upon a time way back before before the Bronze Age, sometime in the late Either the Copper Age or the Late Stone Age, that there were people living in Asia Minor and in Europe who lived peacefully and in an egalitarian society where that were not characterized by patriarchy and where things were very groovy. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: That patriarchy came along with these bronze sword wielding invaders and the result was militarism and class stratification and eventually the snowball that led us to capitalism and to where we are today.  Yucca: Very familiar with the story and the narrative. It pops up in a lot of different forms. Mark: It certainly does. And it's a compelling narrative, right? Because part of what it tells us is it's not inherent in humans to be the way we are now, Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: you know, that having a male dominated society is not just a human thing, that it's A cultural thing that took over Yucca: Mm Mark: from something that preceded it. And so it's understandable why that's appealing, because it offers hope, right? It says, well, we could get out from what we're in now. We could move in another direction. So, there's a lot of this backward looking, kind of nostalgic glow in these sort of root myths that inform much of modern paganism. Would you agree with that? Yucca: I think so. And I think that there's also the more recent ideas of the unbroken line of Grandmothers practicing this witchy tradition that was secret, but it survived through, you know, all of the Christian takeover and, and all of this and that, that connects in a little bit with an idea that we have that something that's old is automatically good. Or, automatically has more authority because it's an older idea. Mark: Right, that it's valid, because it's persistent, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: right, because it's lasted for a long time, it must have some kind of validity. Yeah, that's a really good point, and it's definitely something that crops up a lot in arguments about religion generally, not just about paganism or witchcraft. Yucca: Right. Mark: Of course, that was Gerald Gardner's story. Right, Gerald Gardner, the creator of Wicca although he claimed that he wasn't the creator of Wicca, he claimed that he was initiated into a lineage of, an unbroken lineage extending back into the mists of time of this tradition of witchcraft. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: maybe he believed that, maybe he didn't, but it's been pretty well established that it's not true. Yucca: Right. Mark: there's a, there's a book by the, the, pagan and witchcraft scholar Ronald Hutton, called The Triumph of the Moon, which very thoroughly and meticulously goes over all the different threads of this and establishes there's not really much there there. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: Great book, great book, highly recommend it. So, so that's another of these, you know, these stories about antiquity. Holding a different way of being that we, that we need to grab onto and try to work our way back to, right? Yucca: Right. Mark: And I was thinking about the Norse traditions, the, the heathen traditions as well. And in that case, what seems to be lionized most is Vikings, right? There's just a whole lot about Vikings. Yucca: Mm hmm. Which I get! Very, very, like, appealing visuals, and Feelings and aesthetics, and yeah, Mark: adventurous, and there's all these sort of macho, warlike values of honor and courage and strength and duty and all that kind of stuff that are all, you know, I mean, they're very macho, but they're, but they're, they're good Yucca: I get the appeal. Yeah, Mark: Yeah, I totally do, too, Yucca: I think that those are, that those can be, can be really good values, right? I don't think we should throw the baby out with bathwater with that, but you know, there's potential with anything for abuse, but you know, those are some pretty, those have their place, Mark: Yeah, yeah. But once again, it's rose colored glasses, right? It ignores the fact that people who went Viking, which was a verb, not a noun you know, you went Viking they were farmers most of the year. I mean, they were just working the soil like everybody else and, you know, getting food. And, you know, they were farmers and they were traders and, you know, all that good kind of stuff. Which is, you know, a much less heroic kind of myth than, you know, paddling an open boat across the North Sea to, you know, to, to strike into foreign lands and, you know, take stuff. And I can understand why that part of the story doesn't really get included so much but here we are, we're on a tangent, right? But still, it's about golden pasts. Yucca: Right. Mark: So, Michael's host, Michael's, you know, quote that he put in the chat was very thought provoking because as we learn more, it becomes pretty clear that none of these golden era of the past myths is likely to be very true. There are kernels of truth Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: them. I mean, have, have there been women that were herbalists and knew natural cures for things in an unbroken line since the time of Arwen? Antiquity? Certainly. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Yeah, of course there have. Now, were they practicing a particular kind of religious framework around that? Probably not.  Yucca: Probably changed with the time as the society around them changed, and their view of the world changed, and, right? Yeah. Mark: I mean, you know, it's like, did it make that much of a difference whether you invoked some goddess when you tied on a poultice or whether you invoked some saint? It, you know, it may, it may have been exactly the same thing. So, There's all this past stuff and that, that led to a very thought provoking conversation about kind of the nature of nostalgia Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: and this, this very human quality that we have of looking back on times in the past and seeing them fondly, even if they were terrible. Yucca: Right. Even if we lived through them, or, but especially the ones that we didn't. I saw a short video recently of she looked like You know, maybe 16, 17 year old talking about how she was born in the wrong era, that she should have been from the 80s, right? And I remember, you know, being a teenager and, and the kids around me going like, Oh, we should have been hippies. We were meant to be hippies from the 60s. And it's, I think people just do that. Yeah. Even if it's, of course, in the 90s, the 60s seemed like forever ago. Right. Mark: Yeah it's, it's very funny. I, I mean, I was born in the early 60s, so I have, and my father was in a PhD program on the UCLA campus, so I have Other than memories of events, which I have pretty vividly, like the assassinations and Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: body counts announced on Tuesdays and Thursdays on the news, and, you know, the riots and, you know, a lot of stuff like that, but I remember going to my father's lab And all of the students that were around him, and they were all hippies, they were all, they were all dressed in that particular way because they were college students in the late 19, in the, you know, mid to late 1960s. And there, there is, a flavor of that era that I can remember and that feels, I don't necessarily feel drawn to it, but I feel almost like it's something lost that I wish I could recapture somehow. the same thing is true of the 70s and the 80s. It gets muddy towards the 90s and later than that, and I'm not sure whether that's because we tend to have more nostalgia for times when we're younger, or whether It's because the internet came along and culture got a lot blurrier. Suddenly, I mean, it used to be like, you can recognize music from the 70s and 80s. By the 90s, I mean, there was a swing music movement, and there was all, there was the world music movement, and there was all this, you know, sort of backward looking. Yucca: I, I'm not sure I agree with that, because I think if I hear a 90s pop song on the radio, it instantly is, I can instantly place 90s or 2000s so that I would, I would guess that it is more of a 90s pop song. the age and how old we were when we were engaging with that, rather than becoming less distinctive. Mark: That may very well be the case. I may simply have not been paying as much attention. Yucca: right. Mark: You Yucca: Well, and just being in a, Mark: career by that point. Yucca: yeah, different life stage, and at least my memory of the way time has worked is, it just keeps speeding up. Right? When I was four, that a year was an eternity. A week was so long, and now I'm like, oh yeah, a year, like, you know, and I'm told it keeps getting worse. It just keeps going faster and faster. Mark: does, and I'm not sure whether it's a function of A year being a smaller and smaller proportion of your overall life and memory, or whether it's that we get into routines that cause months to fly by at a time. I'm really not sure what that's about, but it's a little frightening how quickly the years just start to go. And that's one of the reasons why, yeah, probably so, but that's one of the reasons why I feel it's really important to have a ritual practice to create sort of sublime moments. Either by myself or with other people, of shared observation and celebration of life. So that those, those moments stick out. I don't look at the last year and see nothing but just going to work and doing the tasks and stuff. There are special days that, that I remember. Yucca: I think novelty slows us down a little bit, and makes us pay a little more attention. Mark: Yeah, yeah. That's why traveling is so wonderful, right? Yucca: mm hmm. Mark: everything is new. You're in a place that's unfamiliar. And you point yourself towards experiences that are going to be novel, like experiencing museums and cultural events and architecture and art and, you know, being, being in cafes and hearing foreign language around you and, you know, all the various things. And so we tend to have much more detailed memory of times when we travel than we do when we're at home.  So, it seems kind of natural that these sorts of narratives would, would appeal to people. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: And I think that they may have been part of the appeal of paganism for some people. I mean, some people get into it for a vision of a better world. Some people get into it for a desire for magical power. Some people get into it for a desire for connection with and reverence of the natural world, like us. And I think all of those are compelling reasons why people are attracted to modern paganism. And I'm Yucca: combination of those things, too. Mark: absolutely, for Yucca: Yeah. Mark: for sure. Yucca: I think, also, being There's also, for some people, an attraction to being different, right, wanting something that is a little counter cultural, regardless of what the specific values are, but just something different, because whatever it was that they were doing, was not working. And so they're looking for anything that is different than whatever that was. Mark: Yes, and, and paganism specifically works very well for those folks because they tend to be folks that don't fit in very well. And paganism is very, inclusive, by and large. It's very accommodating to people who may be neurodivergent or may be strange or may just be very unique people, right? And what I saw when I first came into paganism was that there was this celebration of the uniqueness of individuals, which is something that I have worked to carry forward in my own pagan work because I think Everybody's amazing, and they all need the opportunity to show their amazingness and to have that affirmed and lifted up. Yucca: Yeah. Well, that's a good lead in to, to thinking about the now, and I guess the golden future, right? We're talking about the golden past. So, what about our visions for the future? Mark: Yeah and, and I should say that I do think that a lot of these golden past narratives, whatever their factuality, I think they're a distraction. Yucca: Hmm. Mark: if they were true, I don't think that matters very much. Because we're not then, and we're never going back then. We're only going to be here, and we're going to go forward into the future. Time doesn't work in a backwards manner, it only goes forward. So, my focus, oh go ahead, Yucca: I, I do think though that there is some value in examining those for looking at what do we value and what do we want to bring forward. So, do we, if we're thinking about, so yes, recognizing that it's probably pretty much a myth about our, our pre Bronze Age egalitarian societies in which, War was not a thing, and there weren't skirmishes and conflict between groups. But seeing that there is a recognizing our longing for that, I think is valuable. I think it's important to, to also recognize that that may not be factual, but that there is value in that. Mmhmm. Mark: certainly, of that we would like to have a world in which there was peace, in which there was inclusiveness, in which there was a better human relationship with the natural world. Yucca: Right. Mark: And, Yucca: hmm. Mm Mark: and one of the things about those myths is that they tell us that it's possible because it happened in the past. Yucca: hmm. Mark: I just choose to believe that it's possible because I think it's, it has to be possible. Yucca: Because we can choose to make it that way. Mm Mark: Yes. And we have chosen as humans to go far afield of that. Even, even in some of the ways that we have really excelled and succeeded as humans, like through science. You know, the newest science is generally applied first to creating weapons. Yucca: hmm. Mark: It's usually applied for figuring out ways to kill people. And that is a very, very sad commentary on the divorce between values and reason. That we have become very effective at applying our reason In problem solving and to understand the nature of the universe, but the concept of ethical constraints around that is, it's very tenuous. I mean, there is a field of scientific ethics, but I haven't seen much example of that actually applying except in the experimental sense. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: It's like, you know, no, we're sorry, you, you can't test this weird dangerous thing on live people, Yucca: Right. Yeah, we've got our review boards that we've got to get past to be able to do human or vertebrate subjects, but that's where it pretty much ends. Mark: yeah  Yucca: you want to do anything with an invertebrate or anything that isn't an animal, and it's, you know, there's, there's no red tape. Mark: yeah. Yeah. So, you know, re rethinking these things in a really deep sense is important. It's really important. And immediately that makes you subject to some accusations of being very unrealistic because you're, you're thinking far beyond the bounds of what the currently constructed society can do. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mm Mark: And and of course also being accused of being radical, right? Because To make those changes would be a radical shift in the way humanity works. Don't think either of those accusations is very persuasive, myself. Yucca: hmm. Mark: I think people are so adaptable, and we have so many examples of cultures that have not been colonized by, or have only been partially colonized by, the Western mindset that has taken over virtually everything. in the world that operate differently, that I believe we do have choices about the way that we go forward. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mm Mark: And it starts with values. It starts with making decisions about what we consider to be sacred and what we consider to be worthy. And where we draw ethical lines around not doing things that we can do, but we really shouldn't. Yucca: hmm. Yeah, agreed. Mark: Because there's an awful lot of stuff that we do that we really just shouldn't do. Yucca: Yeah. Can and should. Those are two different things. Yeah. Mark: And there is a terrible tendency, and I mean, we see this in children. Given the opportunity to make something go boom, Yucca: Oh, not just children. Mark: Yeah, I know, everybody likes to make something go boom. It's it can be really fun. But when the implications are, you know, environmental devastation and, and loss of lives we really need to resist that urge to make things go boom. Yucca: Yeah, we need to maybe get that out of our systems when it's, you know, little pop cans with and vinegar and baking soda and things like that and not do it with, you know, People and buildings and mountains. Mark: And cities, and yeah, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So that's what I think. I think that this vision of the future starts with ideas that are around values, rather than structures. But in order to get those values really to propagate in a mass sense, it is going to take some major structural overhaul of the way humanity operates. And fundamental to that is we have to find an alternative to capitalism that works better for the planet. I think one thing that would help a lot, Would be if there were something, and I am, I'm just sort of spinning and talking while I'm thinking here, so maybe I'll end up in something really stupid, but I think international shipping is a big problem. For one thing, it causes a tremendous amount of of carbon into the atmosphere, just astronomical amounts of pollution. Yucca: Right. And so many other things. I mean, our, I think that decentralizing a lot of that would be really, really helpful. Mark: I agree. Yucca: you know, just the supply chain things that have happened over the last few years is just the tip of the iceberg with that. But if we could, return a lot of our means for survival to be in our own hands, in a more local setting, I think that that would be incredibly powerful because on so many different levels, one, just the practical, if something happens, then so many people are without a paddle, right? But also, it's really easy to control people when you control their ability to survive. you Other means to survive, right? Yeah. Mark: the exploitation of cheap labor facilitated by international shipping because producers can go shopping for the most destitute people they can find, pay them as little as they possibly can in order to produce consumer goods that then get shipped back to rich countries where people pay for them. And I mean, That's, that's not just a horror story, that is the standard operating procedure of manufacturing in the world. That's, that's, that's the way it is. Yucca: That's the origins of most of the objects around you right now. For most people, I don't know, some of you might be actually out you know, sitting in a tree with just your phone and some earbuds in. If so, that sounds awesome. But I'm guessing most people listening right now are probably in a constructed environment. In your car, in your house, you know, in a bus, something like that. Mark: Yeah, yeah. Yucca: So Mark: And there's nothing wrong with that, and I want to be very clear, I'm not shaming people Yucca: we're in the same boat, Mark: Yeah, I mean, we all have to live, you know, we're talking on computers here I've got headphones on that I am absolutely certain were made in China by someone who was not paid nearly enough for the service of having created this product. Myself, as, you know, similarly a wage slave in capitalism If that person was actually paid a reasonable wage, I might not have been able to afford these headphones, right? So the whole system reinforces itself, and no one is innocent, and no one other than the decision makers on this are really guilty. Yucca: Mm hmm. I'm Mark: You know, we, we all, we're all doing the best we can, given the system that we have, but that system needs to shift, unless we just decide we're gonna eat up the world and go extinct. Yucca: not so fond of that, Mark: I'm not either, I, that's just, you know, as, as golden futures go, that's really not one for me. Yucca: this is a topic that we did do several years back at this point. We did talk about misanthropy and I do see a a strong tendency of that in our culture today. Which is, I find, very saddening. But I, other than I don't agree with that from a value perspective it's very, it's very counterproductive. It really doesn't help us solve any of these problems, to be really down on, well, we should go extinct, it would be better for the, for everybody, or for the rest of the world, or, you know, all of that. It just, I don't think that, I don't buy that. I think it's not a very strong argument. It's kind of a, it's a cop out. Mark: Yeah, I was gonna say I agree with you, I, I don't have much truck with that either, and I think it's intellectually lazy. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: I think it's just, oh, there's a huge complicated problem, I don't want to think about it, maybe let's just go extinct. and, and it's a very uncompassionate, non empathetic way of looking at humanity and at, you know, The crises that we confront and I hope to do better than that and I think that we collectively can do better. Yucca: I think so. And I think it relates to our ability to choose what we are going to focus and pay attention to. And I think that's some of what we were talking about before about the nostalgia. When we're in that, we're focusing on just specific aspects of the past. Right? That nostalgia for the 60s in the hippie era. Well, there was a lot of things that really sucked about that, right? But when we're longing for it, we're not longing for the war and the turmoil and all of that. We're longing for the parts that were really positive about it. And so we, we have the ability to really shape the way That we behave in the world based on what we focus on. Not that we shouldn't pay attention to that, we certainly should pay attention to the negative things, but do we focus on solutions to those things? Or do we focus on the misery of how bad it sucks to be human? Yeah, enduring those things. Mark: Right. Right. Yeah, that's exactly right. And one of the things that I find increasingly frustrating is, is that tendency to simply say, well, we're screwed. And so let's stop trying. Yucca: hmm. Mark: Now, trying is going to involve some dislocation because capitalism gives us lots of goodies. It's totally unsustainable, but it gives us goodies that if we were to move into a sustainable modality, we probably wouldn't have nearly as many of. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: But the odds are good that we would actually be significantly happier because Instead of filling our desire for happiness and for satisfactions with the purchase of things, we would have stuff like culture and community and relationships and, and, and celebration like Pagan celebrations around the year, that kind of stuff. Spirituality art. All of those things that really are shunted to the side by the capitalistic frame, which is that all of those things, because they can't be monetized very well, aren't very important. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. And so the challenge is moving out of that structure in a way that doesn't cause harm as we do it. Mark: Or the, the, the so called soft landing. You know, there are so many indicators that point towards some kind of collapse or crash coming not very long from now between climate change and and various economic indicators and so forth. You know, it is likely that there is going to be some real privation in our future, but Yucca: And there is. There is. Mark: he will, and there already Yucca: future. I think that there's a lot of places that we can point to in this moment and go, right here, here, here, here. Mark: Right, yeah, I mean, any Appalachian town that had the top of its mountains shaved off by a coal mining company, and then, which then marched off to, you know, do its next project in Brazil and left all those people with no work in a destroyed environment, I mean, that's a microcosm right there of exactly what capitalism does. And we need to have a more For want of a better word, holistic understanding about economic development. Economic development needs to be something that benefits people in the ways that most matter, and it is sustainable over time, rather than this endless boom bust thing that we see so often through capitalism. Yucca: Well, I think remembering the root of that word is helpful in this. The echo is home. That's what the word means, is home. So it remembering that everything that we're doing, we are doing, To our home, Mark: Mm hmm. Yucca: so, Mark: Mm hmm. Yucca: which we are part of, Mark: Right. Yucca: right? A home isn't just a house. A home is the people and the culture in that house. Right. It's all of the structures that the people depend on, that they're part of. Mark: And a part of the way that we can start pointing in this direction, I think, is through media. Because people need You know, we're so disconnected now. I mean, let me speak for myself and what I see around me in American society, right? People are very disconnected. They're often disconnected from their own families. Because of the nature of the job market under capitalism, families are atomized to the far corners of the world. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: As people seek jobs and go and work it becomes very hard for people to build communities because they're moving around looking for economic opportunities. Yucca: Right. Mark: And they're working themselves to death so they don't have a lot of time to build community and relationships and culture and all that kind of stuff. So I do feel that getting some of those warm, fuzzy, kind, empathetic values out into media is a way to kind of start the process. Mean, I can think of a couple of examples that just sort of reminded me of. Oh yeah, people can be kind to one another, people can, people can love one another, people can accept one another for who they are. And one of them is the Australian slash adults animated series, Bluey. Yucca: Absolutely. Mark: Yeah, I mean, as a mom, you, you know about Bluey, Yucca: Oh, I absolutely do. The parents in our household will be watching it, and the kids have left the room. It's a great, yeah, it really hits home. Very sweet. Mark: It's very kind and very thoughtful, and It's the kind of thing that, that moves the sorts of emotions that I think we need to be fostering more. You know, there's so much stuff out there that's all sort of, you know, post apocalyptic, war like, you know, blockbuster drama, and superhero vigilantes, and all that kind of stuff, and I just think people need to be reminded of how good it feels to be kind. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: the other one that I was thinking of is sensate. Did you ever see sensate? Yucca: No, I'm not familiar with this one. Mark: It's the word sense and then the, the letter, the, the numeral eight. Yucca: Okay. Mark: And you have to trust it because you won't understand what's going on until about three episodes into the series. It has Daryl Hannah in it and a bunch of people that I didn't know. But it's beautifully done. It's super queer, so it's very inclusive in that kind of way. And wonderful. It's done by the By Lana and the people who did The Matrix, Warszawski's, I, I, it's a, it's a long, seemingly Polish or Czech name that I, that I believe begins with a W. And both of those sisters are trans. When they made The Matrix they hadn't transitioned yet. So, interesting storytelling, interesting world perspective, just really worth checking out. Yucca: hmm. I've written that one down. I'm guessing that's not something you can watch with a five year old in the room. Mark: Probably not, no, there's, there's some sex in there, and, Yucca: wait for after bed. Mark: yeah and when they announced that it was cancelled, there was such an outpouring of, of rage that they made a movie to wrap it up, so that, there, the, I think it's two seasons and then the movie. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: It's either two or three seasons and then the movie, but anyway, yeah, worth, worth checking out because once again, it's like, oh, cool, interesting, unusual people being happy with each other. This is great. And, and it's a, it's a dramatic story. It's got tension. It's got conflict. It's got, you know, intrigue and all that good kind of stuff. It's not just people standing around being happy with one another, which unfortunately is not entertaining. Yucca: Yes. Although I wish that there maybe was some of that out there. Because sometimes that's what I, that's what I need to watch, Mark: yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. It's yeah, it's a funny thing. It's like, media can be like a companion in some ways, but what it reflects back to us can be really impactful on our worldview and on our feelings. And so getting, you know, getting a lot of the cruelty and, coldness out of what we consume. And building a market for that more kind, inclusive, warm human kind of way of being, I think is one of the things that we can do to start to shift things in the world. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: And then of course there's activism. I mean, you need to, you need to just advocate that people not be exploited. That the planet not be exploited. And, Yucca: And of course, our, our everyday, just the way that we move through the world, right, working on ourselves about the kindness that we bring to the world, or don't bring to the world with us, Mark: Yes, yes. And that's particularly hard right now, actually, with the cultural divide in the United States, at least, where the rhetoric is so vitriolic. And Yucca: both sides, Mark: both sides, it really is. Yucca: demonization that happens, it's hard to breathe sometimes with Mark: It is. Well, and, you know, a lot of that is inspired by leader figures. I mean, there's, there's a lot that can be laid at the feet of Donald Trump simply for how abusive he's willing to be to other people. And people see that and say, Oh, well, then I can do that too. Yucca: right? Mark: It's, it's just Yucca: And I don't think it's a conscious process, for the most part. I don't think people actually say those words in their mind, to themselves, but that that is the takeaway, again, across the board, right? Not pointing to one aisle or the other, that that's, you That's a, it's something that's grown, at least my awareness of it has grown in the last few years. I think that it's something that's not just my awareness, I think that's a trend that has really really spread. Mark: Yes  Yucca: and I think some of that is enabled by the systems that we have. Especially with format that social media has right now. And I think social media can, can take different forms, but the form that it has right now is very, is about creating the us versus them mentality, because that's what gets the clicks and that's what gets the advertising dollars. Mark: Yes. Yes, and to be honest, if it were not for the fact that the atheopagan community spaces are online social media spaces, mostly. I wouldn't be on them at all. I, I know that Facebook does bad things to me. I, I can tell that Facebook is doing bad things to me, and I can tell by the way the algorithm curates my feed that it's trying to rile me up, it's trying to get me mad. I get this endless stream of, like, right wing Christian stuff. Yucca: Well, because you look at it. Mark: Well, even if I don't interact with it, it's Yucca: but it sees how long you are, even if you don't click on it, it sees how long you stay over that page. So the, if you just keep scrolling past it, don't look at it at all, it won't give it to you as much. But it sees that you linger for that half a second on it, and then it'll give you more the next time, because it worked. Right? And that, that is a content that, it doesn't actually look at what the content is, it looks at whether you engage with the content or not. Mark: This is why I love groups, because there are no ads in groups. Yucca: You can just go right in. Yeah. Mark: in and you see the posts that people have made in the groups, and that's it. The, the curated feed is something that I try to avoid as much as possible. And, I mean, I used to use Twitter for rapid news, but now that's turned into a cesspool. I'm not, not gonna Yucca: Oh, I would say that it always has been. It's had some rough times recently, but it's It's definitely a model for all of that. Yeah. And of course, I mean, it's, each of the platforms have their, their issues. But, well, this has actually been a huge tangent. We we left the golden golden age topic half an hour ago, right? Mark: Well, what would that golden age look like? To me, the balancing act there, the place where I won't go is the so called dark green resistance. direction. There's a book called Dark Green Resistance and it's, it's very problematic in a number of ways, one of which is that it's extremely ableist. It basically declares that industrialization is, and, and the products of industrialization are things that we're going to have to give up in order to get into sustainability. And so basically everybody who's disabled and needs that support or needs, you know, prescriptions or whatever that is, they Yucca: So the, the folks who rely on insulin or other things like that, too bad. Mark: They can just, too bad. They're, they're, they're washed out. And so I find that very offensive and, and unproductive. I think, and unrealistic, to be honest, because the fact is that people, Yucca: We're not going to do that, Mark: no. People do, they, you know, these are family members, they're people that we love. We're not going to do that, and we're not going to let it be done to ourselves, either. Yucca: Yeah, Mark: So Me Yucca: I, I really dislike the framing of the nature versus humanity, Mark: too. Yucca: right? That's just so unproductive because we are, we're part of, we're part of all of it and we have to take care of us to be able to take care of the whole system. Because, Mark: And, and I have another tangent, which is that our, that that conceptualization of the separation between nature and humanity actually informs some of the early environmental laws that we have in this country, like the Wilderness Act that was approved in 1964. Which discusses in its preamble the idea of lands untrammeled by man, which, Yucca: except that we've been here for 30, 000 years. Thank you very much.  Mark: In a completely racist way erases the presence of native people here for that entire time. Yucca: who have been actively managing that there isn't any news. Maybe some areas in Antarctica. But other than that, there's, there's no land on Earth that we haven't actively been managing for thousands of years. Mark: That's right. Yucca: That's not, yeah. Mark: Yeah, that's right. And there is still a divide within the environmental community between those who. are apoplectic that the National Park Service might allow these little tiny anchors to be pinned into rock so people can climb, because it's, it's inserting human technology into nature. And people who are much more reasonable, who understand, climbers are some of the best environmentalists there are. They love the outdoors, they love the wild, they love the wildlife, they, they, they donate, they, they volunteer, they vote, they do all the things that we need to do for our environment. And you're gonna, you're gonna tell them to get lost because they because you're upset about a totally invisible thing way up high on a rock face? I just, it's, it's, it ain't right. Yucca: Right. And there's a lot of other examples, you know, we can choose different fields for that. But that's definitely one of the ones that's like, really? That's, that's, that's, that's, That's the, okay, Mark: yeah, that's, that's the hill you're gonna die on. Yucca: what you're going to fight with? Okay. Yeah, because it's, okay, full disclosure, I am a climber, so, but but that's not even like arguing about roads, which you could have the argument of if they're improper, if they're not put in right, then you get erosion and trickle down effects from, like, problems with that. But yeah, Mark: there's a lot to be said for roadless areas. When the roadless area policy was implemented under Bill Clinton, it did some very good things for some large, unsegmented Yucca: absolutely, Mark: of wildlife habitat. Yucca: yeah. So, I see a lot of problems that have been created by roads. As a restoration ecologist, when I go in, that's one of the first things that we see is, oh, I haven't even walked up that way yet, but I know that there's a road that way. Right, so it's, it's something that, I just brought that up as something that I could see why people would be arguing against a road, but why somebody's going to argue against the little piece of metal in the, the rock all the way up there, Mark: makes no sense whatsoever. Yucca: most of the time you don't even know is there unless the person is actively climbing, right? Yeah. Mark: Yeah, exactly so. And, I mean, there, as you say, there are other examples of this as well. I mean, the, the terrible wildfires that ran through the Giant Sequoia National Park. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: killed 20 percent of the giant Sequoia trees. And the reason that that happened was because fire suppression practices for a century had built up fuels such that when fire finally went through there, the temperatures were so high that these giant trees were killed. So the Yucca: catastrophic fires. Yeah. Mark: because there wasn't beneficial fire, which is a natural part of the landscape and has been used by Native people to manage land for thousands of years. But that's what happened. Big catastrophic fire, a lot of the trees died. National Park Service decided, okay, well in order to help offset this, We need to plant some giant sequoias. We, you know, we need to propagate and then plant some giant sequoias. The same gang that I'm talking about, organizations like Wilderness Watch, went ballistic. No. You have to leave it alone. Wilderness is, is just that. You, you must, you can't touch it. You can't do anything to it. It must just be left to do whatever it's going to do, which on rangelands means you're going to end up with a whole bunch of invasive non natives, Yucca: You starve, you starve it. That's how you turn a range into a desert, is by fencing it off, because our grazers are gone, Mark: mm hmm. Yucca: right? And if you fence that off, and we don't have any grazers, it can't, you have just disrupted resource cycling. Right? You can't get nutrients into the soil. You're gonna get, you're gonna kill all your grasses, and yeah, you just end up with invasives. And then, you end up with bare, you end up with dirt. Mark: With bare dirt, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, this is, and I'm sure we can come up with myriad examples of this, but these are a couple of examples that have come up in the course of my work. And it's very frustrating because everybody involved in these conflicts wants to be doing the right thing, but some of them have some very strange criteria for what that is. And, Yucca: Well, and Mark: you know, I go back to, let's go with the science, let's go with what's practical, let's go with, let's, and, and particularly, to my mind, when we are still, especially in the West, having ongoing conflicts over whether nature is to be rendered into marketable resources. or allowed to flourish as nature. Surely we need to do something so that the people that care about that will continue to care about it, right? There's, there's a very human component to all of this.  Yucca: That, those of us who are, embedded into these ecosystems as part of them and rely on them for our survival, that we are, that we're not left out of that, right? Because one of the problems that happens in my state a lot is that there's a real disconnect between the urban and rural, Communities, and the urban communities will have louder voices often, and will make choices for how, what they think is good for the land, forgetting that, like, yeah, but then we have no, like, then we're going to freeze to death this winter. If you, if you say that we can't cut any firewood, we're going to freeze. Like, you can't survive in this climate if you don't heat your homes, and great, you've got propane. You don't have to even think about it because you've got natural gas and propane and all that in your city, but, you know, we still need to cut down a couple of trees each year. Mark: Yeah. Yeah  Yucca: so it's a, it's, it gets very, very complex. Emotions get high with that stuff. Mark: for sure. Yeah, so as I said, this is a big, long tangent, and I knew that it was gonna be, but it's, it's important. It's an important topic, and one that, that conservationists, We struggle with, you know, we struggle with one another about it. We sue on opposite sides of, you know, of these issues. And I don't have any, you know, quick simple answer for that, but it goes to this idea about what is the golden future. If the idea of the golden future is that, Nature is a park with fences around it. That's, you know, with, you know, all the abundant wildlife and sparkling springs and all that kind of stuff. That's not a realistic future vision. not how those things work, Yucca: and then we all live in that Wall City Mark: right? Yucca: But yeah. I think that whatever the future ends up looking like, that critical examination and reflection is, is really, I think that that's, that's key. That we not only be able to look at ourselves, but be able to look at our society and look at what, and examine what is it that we want, and how do we work towards that, instead of just sort of, just hitting the ground running and just going with whatever's happening, right? Mark: and especially what produces quarterly profitable returns. Yucca: Right? Because that, I mean, that doesn't take very much thought to realize some of the problems with that. Yeah, Mark: And there are things that we could do, there are policy things that we could do, that would make a huge difference in this. If, if legally you could not sell a stock for two years after you bought it, the economy would utterly transform. Because suddenly, The health of the, of the operation itself, and then of course you layer on environmental responsibility, social responsibility, governance responsibility, the so called ESG that the right wing is freaking out about if, if you put it that way. Corporate behavior in a frame like that, and make sure that people who invest are actually investing long enough that it, that they actually care about the performance of the company, you will have enterprises that actually succeed instead of simply cranking out something and then, you know, people can dump the stock, Yucca: mm hmm. Mark: and they will behave in a much more responsible fashion. So, there's, there are a lot of things we could do, there are a lot of things we could do. And we're not doing them, yet. Yucca: The fact that they're there is something that I find very hopeful, Mark: Mm hmm. Yucca: right, that there are things that, that's just one solution, right? And if there's one solution, how many others are there, right? So, Mark: Yeah, and far smarter people than me are, are, they're working on this stuff. They're, they're trying to figure out what kind of a, a system we could have. One of the challenges that I have in reading some of that stuff is that it's often very academic and, and Disconnected from the realities of the world because I'm a politics guy, right? I'm a, I'm a, I'm an implementation guy. I, I want to see how does your idea, how does that get traction and move forward in our society? Yucca: mm hmm. Mark: But those are answerable questions in many cases. I think that golden future can happen, and it won't be golden all the time. That's, Yucca: just like everyday life, Mark: yeah, Yucca: right? Yeah, Mark: but we can certainly build a world that is much kinder. Much more inclusive, much more sustainable, and where people are a lot happier than they are under capitalism, because capitalism makes misery. Yucca: For most people. Mark: Except for a very tiny elite. Yucca: Even then, those folks don't look very happy. Mark: They don't. Yucca: They look terrified, and you can see them going crazy. So, it doesn't, it really doesn't, what we've got going on now, and I don't know if maybe there are some elements of capitalism that are things that, there's some positive elements that we could move forward with and other things we don't want to, but what we've got going on isn't working for most people. Mark: That's right. Yucca: So, I think we need to look, to really look at what do we want to move towards instead, and how to build that. And I don't think that we're, personally, I don't like the tearing everything down, because I think a lot of people get hurt in that process. I think it's something that we need to work towards in a, to transform. not to try and destroy and rise out of the ashes because that rarely ever works. There's quite a few countries to take a look at where that, in recent history, where that's been disastrous. That's not how it, you know, people Mark: Usually what it gets you is some kind of strong armed dictator who, It promises people that they'll be safe. Yucca: So, how do we make these changes in a way that supports and nurtures as many people along the way as possible? Mark: That is the problem before us. It is. Yucca: And it's worthwhile. It's I'm grateful that that's something that we get to think about. Mm Mark: you know, I really am too. And we're, we're at a moment in human history where I don't believe it's too late, but we're definitely talking about the big picture now. we're going to make decisions that are going to impact the big picture in a significant way. And it's kind of meaningful to be alive at this time and to have a role in advocating for the kinds of values and, and ethics and behavior that we want to see. Yucca: Yeah, and getting to, to choose that, right? Mm hmm. I Mark: I mean, there are a lot of people that don't have a lot of choice about the circumstances of their lives and they aren't good circumstances, but they don't have a lot of choice about that. And they just have to keep repeating the same thing over and over and over in order to barely eke out an existence. It's a privilege to be able to work at a different level than that where you can hopefully have some traction on the future. So you were right. We had a lot of tangents. Yucca: was gonna say, I loved it. This is great. Lots to think about. So, thanks for a great discussion, Mark, Mark: Yeah, thank you. Really enjoyed it. Let us know what you think, folks. The Wonder Podcast, queues at gmail. com. That's The Wonder Podcast, all one word, and then the letter Q and the letter S. Yucca: and we'll see you next week.   

Patrick touches on the sensitive topic of marriage, discussing the possibility of restoration and the need for penance in the face of broken relationships. We also address the importance of forgiveness, both for ourselves and for others, discussing real-life examples such as women who've had abortions and the guilt they may face. Later, we dive into the controversial issue of public schools and how parents can take charge of their child's education. And finally, we delve into a thought-provoking conversation about objective morality and the importance of rigorous ethical evaluation.  Patrick comments on Jane's call from yesterday. She is a teacher dealing with the trans agenda in her school and she is not allowed to tell the parents about what is happening with the students. Lori - John 17:11. Did God have mercy on Judas? It seems like he was just used as a tool. Mark - As a public school teacher, I think that if we push back in meetings and with emails it will make a difference. Don - When should I start the annulment process? I've recently come back into the Church but I don't know if I should try to be forgiving or if it would be better for the kids to divorce. Thomas - What would you say to the argument that same sex marriage is fine because no one is getting hurt in it?

Remember, we welcome comments, questions, and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com. S4E25 TRANSCRIPT: ----more----   Mark: Welcome back to The Wonder, Science Based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark, Yucca: and I'm Yucca. Mark: and today we are celebrating Atheopagan Day, which is the anniversary of when our community first started.  Yucca: Online community. Mark: yes the the founding of our Facebook group, which is where most of our engages online was on August 5th, 2012. So as we're recording this, it's the 11th anniversary of the founding of that community. And so we're going to talk a little bit about the history and how things have changed, what we're doing now and what we're looking towards in the future. Yucca: that's right, and it's been a lot, Mark: Yeah, it really has. It's it's, it's been, and it's been such a beautiful ride. I mean, obviously there have been setbacks and frustrations and all the rest of that, but. Mostly, it's just been so heartening to see and feel this community come together in all the wonderful ways that it is. Yucca: Yeah, and it's 11 years is really hard to believe. That's, that's a lot. So, Mark: I was saying before we started recording, in neopagan years, that's even more. It's like dog years or Yucca: yeah, Mark: Because the culture evolves really quickly you know, in, in the time that I've been involved in, in Neopagan Circles which started in 1987, we've had at least three distinct phases Thank you. of development within the community in terms of changes in perspective and paradigm just really transformational things that have happened from the sort of loosey goosey still, you know, not very clueful about things like consent late 60s all the way up to today. Yucca: Right  Mark: pretty, pretty cool. 11 years, a lot can change. Yucca: yeah. And I think a lot, really, in the last four years, five years, at least, that I've been witnessing it seems like there's been such a shift in a lot of, not just within kind of our smaller subset of the pagan community, but the larger pagan community, and also a little bit of the, the general cultural attitude towards something like paganism. There's definitely been a big shift since, you know, since I was a kid, you know, thinking back on, it's just, it's a normal, in a lot of ways, it's a very normal thing now. I know there's a lot, definitely areas of the country that that's not the case, but on kind of a big scale, it's, it really has the, Level of acceptance has grown. Mark: Yeah, and I think there are, I mean, there are certainly entities and figures that that are not us, that we, that contributed heavily to that. I mean, like the Lady Liberty League, for example, which pressed The U. S. military to recognize Wicca as one of the symbols you could put on a gravestone in a military cemetery. Getting them to recognize any pagan religion was really like pulling teeth, and they pushed on it for about 20 years before they finally got it. Yucca: Yeah, right, Mark: And more representation in mainstream media, all that kind of stuff has really helped. Yucca: yeah. So I think it's fascinating to see, or to really reflect on, the changes within our community and how those are influenced from outside sources and, you know, the influence that we've had as well and all of that is, I mean, somebody should do their somebody should do their dissertation on that. I think that would make a fascinating one. Mark: yeah, me too, me too. Yeah, there's just, there's so much to say about it, but why don't we go back to the beginning, Yucca: Right. Mark: And start there, and just kind of, you know, work our way forward. So, atheopaganism started out as an idea that I had for myself. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: I had had, I'd been involved with the local pagan community for a very long time, had some really off putting experiences in the late 90s, early 2000s that reinforced to me how much capital B belief had become important Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: in the pagan culture, and which had not been true when I first joined. Yucca: hmm. Mark: And as an atheist pagan, I was feeling really oppressed by this and then it got to the point where I was offended by it because there were a couple of circumstances that I saw where the will of the gods was used as an excuse for some really horrible behavior. Yucca: Right. Mark: And I left. Yucca: Mm Mark: But within six months, I mean, I was depressed. I, I missed my rituals, and I missed my altar, and I missed my friends, and, you know, I missed celebrating the seasons, all that kind of stuff. So I started thinking, well, what is a religion really, and what do they do for us, and how can I get that stuff without having to subscribe to a bunch of supernaturalism? Yucca: hmm. Mark: And I started working on an essay, and this was in 2005. And the essay was done in 2009, and that was what eventually became my book that came out in 2019, Yucca: Mm Mark: about, first of all, about kind of my journey through this and the science You know, the neuroscience and the confirmation bias, the various fallacies, apophenia, and, you know, all those phenomena that tend to make us fooled by our senses. Yucca: hmm. Mark: And then the second part of the book was laying out, okay, well, taking as a given that the value that, for me, is going to be about revering the Earth. How can I practice a pagan practice around the wheel of the year that doesn't involve anything supernatural or culturally appropriated? Yucca: hmm. Mm hmm. Mm Mark: And so I wrote all that up, and it was a 40 page essay, and and I was ready to happily go trotting forward, you know, using my little model for myself. Yucca: hmm. Mark: But I had conversations with friends, Yucca: So the essay had been just more of a way of you to, to clarify your thoughts, right? And work through those ideas and you just, just the writing of it was how you worked through these ideas. Mark: That's right. I mean, I'm a writer and that is the way that it's like having an internal narrative, you know, as I explored these ideas on paper or in bits Yucca: as you explored in Mark: in, in, in writing new ideas would occur to me, new connections would occur to me. And so that's just the modality that I use in, in kind of framing my, my thinking about things. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: And so, as I said, I was ready to go trotting forward with my, my little practice that was for me, but when I had conversations, and so I re engaged the local pagan community. Understanding that I was going to be myself, and not to be rude about it, you know, if I go to somebody else's ritual and they're invoking gods, I'm not going to say anything about it. Yucca: Sure. Yeah. Mark: But the rituals that I conduct, that I invite people to, were going to be, you know, godless, non supernaturalist kinds of rituals. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: And in the course of these conversations, I started having people say, well, don't tell anybody, but actually, that's really kind of what I believe, too. Yucca: Yeah, Mark: and you really ought to put this essay up on the internet and, you know, have, get some comments on it, have, get some discussion started around it. And in 2009, I did that. I put it up on Scribd.  Yucca: Remember that. Mark: remember that? It still exists. But there was a time when Scribd was a place that you went for papers and documents and Yucca: Yep. It was the place for a while. Yeah. Okay. Mark: And started getting some feedback and stuff. You know, having more of these conversations where people were confiding in me that, you know, a non theist or non literal theist way of orienting to paganism was, was theirs. And this particularly skewed towards people who were scientists, who were educators, who were engineers. You know, a lot of folks that had that grounding in the scientific method and critical thinking, they were the ones that were not subscribing to supernaturalist myths so much, interestingly enough. So, what happened was there, there ended up being enough of these people that I started realizing, you know, there's, this thing has legs. It's not just for me. It's resonating for other people, and they should have access to it too. And I need to stop here and say, I had a major research failing during the time when I was researching all the stuff for this essay, because I am not the first Nons, supernaturalist, pagan. There are other people that were doing that and that were on the internet, and I just didn't find them. Yucca: mm Mark: So I kind of reinvented the wheel. And that's an interesting thing about non Theus paganism is that it seems like that happens quite a bit. People sort of come to this conclusion on their own.  Yucca: That was the family, that was what I was raised with, right? But it had never, there was no like, there was no word or identity to distinguish, that was just what we were, Mark: Yeah. Yucca: And it had never occurred to me to, to search that up, something like that, until a little bit later on, which we haven't quite gotten to that the story yet, but, but encountering. That the belief part where, you know, later on I'd be publishing things you know, making YouTube videos or things and having people just, just furious with me that like, how dare you call yourself a pagan if you don't believe in Mark: yeah. Yucca: the gods, literally, and just being completely perplexed because that was not the paganism that I had grown up with. Right, I was just like, what are you talking about? I have no, like, what? Mark: right? Yeah. Yucca: Wait, you're, you're taking this literal? Are you sure? Okay. Right, that was where I was coming from with that because I hadn't, you know, I, I mean, I'm interrupting you a little bit with this, but you talked about like the three different phases or like the epochs that you've seen. And I think that one of them was this influx of a lot of new people into paganism, bringing with them. These expectations from some of the more mainstream religions in which faith is a major component. I think that Christian faith idea was brought in. Mark: Absolutely. Absolutely. And that came in the late 90s, up until around 2000, and that really, really changed how paganism was practiced and conceptualized within the community, at least as I experienced it. Mm hmm. Yucca: And I, and the atheopaganism was... I mean, it was still happening on the internet a lot, and when the group was founded, that was still culture of paganism as a whole, like on the big scale, there's lots of people being really into the literal belief, but I think we're moving out of that to a certain extent. But that's, there's still areas that believe that, there's still... Like, traditions in that way, but that the larger community overall is less worried about that. Mark: Yeah, I think so, and I certainly hope so. I mean, one of the things about paganism is that it tends to be very inclusive and tolerant and pluralistic. And so there are lots of different kinds of practices and perspectives that fall under the pagan umbrella, Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: And I think that increasingly, especially over the last four or five years, The idea of non theist paganism has become yet another one of those identities that's just accepted as being part of the bigger Yucca: know. Mark: Yeah, Yucca: I mean, there's still people who get very, very upset about it and want to do their gatekeeping, but it, it I definitely saw a shift in the last few years that I was that the Pagan Perspective channel was running. Like, in the first few years, it would, I would get a lot of... of real, like, really upset commenters about it, and then in the later years, more people being like, Oh yeah, that's, I do that too. Yeah, yeah, me too, me too. Mark: huh. Yeah. Yeah, I really think that's so, and, I mean, of the core questions, I mean, maybe we can do an episode at some point about validity and the nature of realness, because this is often the argument that's made, well, it's not real paganism, or it's not a real religion. And to me, those are meaningless questions. Yucca: It just comes down to how you're defining it, like, you're just gonna choose to make it real the way that you, like, Your way of pagan is the real way, right? I remember having disagreements with people going, well, if we go back to, you know, Rome, and this is where, you know, the history of the word pagan, well, the people who were the, the pagans, they believed in, in multiple gods, and, but my argument would be, okay, but why are you making that? Your criteria. Why aren't you making the criteria that they lived in the countryside and spoke, like, Latin? Like, how about, why is that the criteria? I mean, because we've had so many different criteria for what makes somebody a pagan over the years, like, you're just selecting that one specific thing to say that that's what makes somebody pagan. Why isn't something else also valid? Mark: right. Yucca: Well, I mean, the answer is because then they don't get to gatekeep it and feel special, Mark: right, Yucca: you know. Mark: right. And particularly this goes to the The sense on people's part that old traditions are somehow more valuable or more valid or more real, right? Yucca: hmm, Mark: And that's just a principle that I reject. I think humans have been evolving culture and ideas and technology and skills for our entire existence. And there are things that we can gain from modernity that we don't find in ancient cultures that are of value. Thank you. Yucca: right. Yeah, that Mark: So, Yucca: Value isn't inherent in whether it is old or new or whichever, right? Is it relevant to, to us now? Right? Mark: which is one of the reasons why I reject the Bronze Age, you know, Christianity models is that I don't think they fit very well in a modern society, Yucca: yeah. Mark: And the more people try to shoehorn modern society into it, the more oppressed we get, so, you know. So, anyway. This was starting to be a thing. It had legs. And it seemed like the next natural thing would be to find a convening place where people could come and be together and discuss this stuff. Facebook was the natural choice at that time. Yucca: Right. That was the main, there weren't as many of the other platforms as there are now. Right, that was basically the social media platform for being able to have conversation. Other than perhaps Reddit, maybe, but Reddit has its own kind of interesting culture. Mark: it does. It does. And the thing about Facebook was that you could create a closed group, a private group, so that you could have some control over what kinds of folks came in, so you knew that they were actually people who shared your values and were there for a legitimate exploration of, you know, what this practice is, what this philosophy is, all that stuff. Yucca: So you weren't getting trolls as much, or Mark: No, Yucca: coming in from different religions that wanted to prove a point, or something like that. Mark: in the 11 years since the Facebook group was founded, we have had precisely two people who have slipped in and started proselytizing Christianity, and they have been quietly removed, and that's been it. Yucca: Okay, I've never noticed them. Mark: Yeah, they didn't last long because we have moderators and the moderators, you know, our philosophy is to use a light hand and to be encouraging and guiding rather than oppressive. But nonetheless, when somebody comes in and starts proselytizing, that is a hard no in our rules. And off you go. Yucca: Also, just to chuckle it, I've always thought the strategy of let me quote from a book that you don't believe in at you to try to convince you. Mark: As evidence. Yeah. Yucca: Like, okay, cool. Mark: It's so circular and they don't see it. They just don't see it. Well, no, no, this is God's word. No, it's not. Yucca: But if I don't accept your premise of there being a god to begin with, and that this is his word, like, why would that hold any weight for me? Mark: That's right. That's right. So, so, August 5th, 2012, the the Facebook group is created, and I invited a handful of people that I thought would be philosophically aligned out of my friends within the pagan community, and then we started to get knocks on the door of people who wanted to join. And we had application questions that we could review, you know, we asked them why they wanted to be a part of the community, we stipulated what our value set was and said, do you affirm these values, you know, we're pro feminist, pro environment, anti racism, anti fascist, pro environment, you know, those kinds of things that we've listed. And, you know, we make them sign, yes, I, I will affirm these values. I think that's probably kept a lot of right wing trolls out of our group because they aren't willing to sign on to that. Yucca: hmm. Mark: We, it's not infrequent that we get applicants who will answer the first and third question, but not, not the one about values, and they don't get admitted. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mark: That's just how it goes. Yucca: I have to admit, I don't remember filling any of that out when I joined, but I clearly had to have. I think I joined in, like, maybe 16, 20 16 or sometime around there, and I just don't remember. I'm sure I did. I just have no memory of it, like being a, like, I must have just been like, oh, of course, of course. Yes, yes. Because I don't remember it being a thing. Mark: Facebook questions, I think they only allowed one Facebook question for a long time, one admission question, and it's expanded to three now, so there may only have been one. But I'll, Yucca: through it and went like, of course. Great. I'm so excited. This is, this group exists, so Mark: And I knew who you were, so I admitted you right away. Yucca: yeah. Mark: So that, you know, that helped. So, the group began to grow, and it became 100 people, and it became 200 people, and it became 500 people, and it became 1, 000 people, and now it's close to 5, 000 people who are interested in this path, and we have very high participation. In a given month, usually 2, 500 to 3, 000 of those members will do something in the way of reacting or commenting or posting. And of course you've got your lurkers, but it's very common for somebody to jump in and say, Hey, I've been a lurker for three years, but, you know, now I have a thing to say. And it's just a lovely environment. It's safe. People support one another. There's kindness. There's very thoughtful discussion. People post really interesting stuff. It's just, it's worked out really well, and now, of course, we've spun off into having a Discord server as well while growing the movement in a bunch of ways, like this podcast. Yucca: Right which we started talking about together at the end of 2019. We didn't, we didn't get it going Mark: we waited, we waited for the pandemic and then got started. Yucca: We had like a few, we had a few episodes and then it was Two or three or something, but it was, it was Mark: It wasn't many, yeah, it happened really fast. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: And, ironically, the pandemic actually forced us to do some good things in the community. We started doing Zoom mixers, first once a week, and now twice a week, and there are other gatherings as well. Yucca: That's when a lot of growth of people coming into the community happened, too, because people were searching online for that connection, because they didn't have the in person things. And then, wow, here was this community, and that's, so much happened during the pandemic. Mark: Yeah, yeah, the population really mushroomed. And, of course at the same time, at that point, I had been working on atheopagan stuff from the beginnings of the... of the essay. And then in 2019, late 2019, my book was published, which was an expanded version of the essay with more Yucca: is when our... Friendship had kind of started, because we'd met before, but do you remember I helped you with the formatting on that? Mark: I do, Yucca: Because I took it out of, they weren't accepting whatever format it was that you had, so you had it in Word and I put it in InDesign and reformatted Mark: yeah, Yucca: it and exported it. Mark: right, yeah, which I Yucca: why we got the connection to then when we started talking about doing a podcast, it was like, oh yeah, yeah, this is a good connection, let's try this. Mark: Yeah, yeah. So the book happened, Then the podcast happened, and by that time it had been almost 15 years of working on this in one way or another for me. Yucca: Mm hmm, Mark: And I was looking at this community that was now thousands of people, and thinking, well, okay, clearly this is something that has some real resonance, and it needs to not be about me. It needs to be... You know, a self governing, self evolving thing, Yucca: hmm. Mark: and so we created the Atheopagan Society, the non profit organization of which both Yucca and I are council members and Yucca: of 2020 was our first meeting, Mark: yes, early July of 2020, and You know, that was approving bylaws and articles of incorporation and blah blah blah. There's a lot of technical stuff that has to be done to create a group like that. But we got recognized by the federal government as a religious organization. Donations are tax deductible. Yucca: Mm hmm. We did all that stuff of so much paperwork and figuring out bank accounts and Mark: Yeah, getting a bank account open turned out to be really kind of a nightmare. Yucca: ridiculous amount of like weird information that they needed. Mark: I think it's Patriot Act stuff. I think they're concerned about non profits fostering terrorism. Yucca: And therefore they needed your social and income and Mark: Yeah. Yucca: All kinds of, you know, Mark: Yeah. Yucca: yeah, it was intense. Mark: just weird. But we did it. We got it done. And the council started doing stuff. There, you know, there were various initiatives. The the library initiative online that Robin did, for example, to create a library of resources for Ethiopia Pagans that they can download and, and look at, and or, you know, lists. Yucca: package as well, Mark: all the, all the clerical and guidance as Yucca: great. Mark: And the system for ordaining. clerics online because we believe that everybody should have the right to conduct marriages and so forth. And so we had an automated system on the website for people to be ordained, which is currently broken because MailChimp changed its system. But if you want to be ordained, you can use the contact form on the Atheopagan Society website, which is VAPSociety. org. Send a, send a message through the contact system, and I will get back to you and get you ordained. Yucca: Yeah, and eventually we're going to have that back up and running as an automated system, but there's just a lot of things that are getting juggled at the moment. Mark: there are. There Yucca: There's a, yeah and just also want to clarify the, this is all volunteer, right? You know, people are, are doing this out of a sense of a desire to, So, we're really trying to, really help in whatever ways we can, and and we'll talk about this in a little bit. I mean, the, the getting everything set up for being able to have more volunteers is one of our major focuses. Mark: Mm hmm. Yucca: But just trying to figure out what, what each person's strengths are and how we can best. How we can help the community and how we can best serve the community has been a big focus of what we've been trying to do over the past few years, so. Mark: Yeah. Yeah because it's all about, you know, supporting the people that are within the umbrella of this, this community in being as fulfilled as they can be, as happy as they can be, as self actualized as they can be, as effective as they can be, which is what atheopaganism is really about. It's about being happy, being effective in your life. You know, we don't believe in an afterlife or any of that. Nobody's keeping score. It's, it's all about just joy and joy and service, right? And so, you know, with that spirit, there's a real joyfulness in the work as well. I mean, when we work together, there's a sort of, oh, we're doing a great thing here Yucca: Yeah, I mean every single, so the council meetings are quarterly, and every single time it's just like, wow, it, y'all are amazing, this is awesome. Thank you so much. Oh, I'm so lucky to know such cool people. I can't believe we're doing this like every, you know. Time after time after time and it's just, it never gets old, it's just amazing each time. Mark: Yeah. And when we held the Suntree retreat, the in person retreat in 2022, and there were 50 of us there, that was the same experience. It was like, wow, every one of these people is super cool. I would like to be friends with every one of them. Yucca: yeah, my oldest who came with me to that was like, why isn't it a week long? Why isn't it two weeks long? Can we just live here? I'm like, aw. Mark: So, things have evolved over that 11 years. I've written another book that's coming out next year. I've written in my will that the rights to my atheopaganism book are going to go to the Atheopagan Society, so that it will always have access to that material for future people that want to practice atheopaganism so there'll never be any argument about, you know, who has the rights to any of this stuff You know, we've just, we've done a lot of, we, we launched the the YouTube, Yucca: So we've got the media team working on this, yeah. Mark: right? Yucca: And I want to say the, the story, so you've told your, your thread of the story, Mark: Yes. Yucca: But this is a, this is a community of thousands of people now, and we each have our own thread of this story that's weaving together, right? And together we're making this larger thing. And I really value that, the, the wisdom in going, okay, let's make sure that this isn't just about one particular personality. This is All of ours, right? And again, that's one of the things that the council's trying to figure out how to do is how do we make this something that is sustained, that keeps going, that lives past just any of individuals of us? Mark: hmm. Yes, yes. And, and it's very egalitarian, Yucca: yeah, Mark: where we, we're not going to have, you know, different degrees or levels or priesthood or any of that kind of stuff. When people choose to be ordained and become what's called an atheopagan cleric, that's a service role. That means I've committed to provide particular kinds of service in my community. It doesn't mean I'm a muckety muck now and I get to tell other people what to do. We don't have that, Yucca: right. And same thing with the council, right? Again, the council is just, it really is a service position, just because somebody's on the council and someone else isn't on the council, the person on the council, they're... They're not more important than anyone else, they're just in a position of that volunteer. Mark: right? We don't. Right. So, you know, we've built so much over this time. Oh, and I want to mention, because we have two wonderful volunteers that are doing it, Instagram as well. We've you know, that are part of the media team. We've got a couple of folks that are doing wonderful Instagram stuff as well. And someone created an atheopaganism Reddit, subreddit, Yucca: Oh, nice. Mark: the blue a person who I didn't know. And that was kind of miraculous to stumble across. Yucca: That's great. Mark: Yeah, sort of propagating itself out into the world.  Yucca: And we don't have an official TikTok, but there are some folks from the community who are on on TikTok, and you can find, you know, you can search through the hashtag of Atheopagan, you'll come up with, you know, Robin's channel, and a couple of other folks who have that conversation. Mark: We do have an account, Yucca: we, yes, Mark: but we never post anything. Yucca: and if that's somebody's passion, hey, talk to us on the media team, we'd love, you know, each of the different platforms kind of have their own system and culture and all of that. So yes, thank you for pointing out, we really, we have one, we just don't, aren't doing it on a regular basis at this point Mark: So, Yucca: we have to do is figure out that we are, in fact, human, and have a limited amount of time and space and spoons as they say, and where do we use them. Mark: right. Yeah. And that's actually a perfect opportunity for me to thank you, Yucca, for your three years of service as the chair of the Atheopagan Society Council. You did a tremendous amount of work and modeled a tone and a can do kind of, attitude and a level headedness that I think just really served us so well. And I totally understand that it was time for you to step down and John has stepped up and that's all great. A, a, Yucca: honor, so thank you. Yeah, it's really, and I, and I look forward to continue to serve in different ways in the coming years, so. Mark: Yeah, yeah. So, all these things have happened, all these incredible things over the last 11 years, and now we look to the future. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: The Atheopagan Society is creating its first strategic plan, Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: And a strategic plan is basically just narrowing our focus down to a few goals. That we're going to pursue over, that we're going to seek to accomplish over the next couple of years. And that's where we're going to invest our time and our energy and our money in order to accomplish those things. Our money, vast. Yucca: yes, our vast resources. Mark: yes, I think we have 5, 000 right now. I think that's something like Yucca: don't think we quite have, that's what we did last time, but I think we've, we've had quite a few expenses Mark: that's true. You're right. Yeah, we have had expenses. So yeah, it's probably more like 4, 500. But it's enough because we, you know, we operate. We operate with volunteers. Yucca: yeah, and donations. And so Mark: Yes, Yucca: who donate on a regular basis and that, that makes doing those things possible, right? So we really, really value that. Mark: Because we do have regular expenses. We have to pay for things like Zoom and MailChimp and, you know, all that Yucca: Hosting for, you know, all of that. Yeah. Mark: for the blog. Yeah. So, the strategic plan is going to be finalized at our Autumnal Equinox meeting coming up. After September 21st, I think it's October 5th, I think is the next meeting. Yucca: We'd have to look at, yeah, it's somewhere around Mark: yeah, somewhere around there. Yucca: Do you want to mention the three? We're finalizing it, but we've got the idea of what our goals are. Mark: we've, we've narrowed the goals down to three things. And they are, first of all, Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. We want to make sure that we're doing everything we can to make our spaces feel safe and inclusive and welcoming to everyone. As long as they share our values. If they're Nazis, we don't want them to feel welcome. We want them to go somewhere else. But... You know, certainly for people in marginalized communities, we want to make sure that we're really uplifting those voices and making sure that people feel safe and welcome in those spaces. Yucca: And just being really really conscious about that. And really clear about that, yeah. Mark: So that's the first. And the second is what is the second? Yucca: Well, the steady engagement and growth, yeah. Mark: right. The fostering of engagement between Ethiopia Pagans. So more more in the way of online opportunities like the conference, the vi virtual conference that we held this past spring in person opportunities like the the sun retreat that we're gonna do another one of in 2024. Yucca: which is a little less than a year away. 'cause it's in September this year. Right. Mark: Yes. So it's a little more than a year. It's a little more Yucca: Just a, you know. Mark: Yeah. But Yucca: On another full moon, I believe. Didn't we end up getting another full Mark: We did. So we're going to start working on that, you know, right after Labor Day. The, the issue there is really, and also I didn't mention this, but we have a program of affinity groups now. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: some of which are geographically based, so they can get together in person. Because they, they all come from a particular region. Some of them are interest based, like there's an LGBTQ group, there's a BIPOC group, there's a gardening group, there's a crafting group, things like that, right? So creating opportunities and providing resources to help like Affinity Groups to get together in person, build interpersonal relationships, because, you know, community is a big thing that religion is about. And as wonderful as online community is, in person is better. And we, we'd like for people to have opportunities for that if they want them. Yucca: Right. Yeah, so for both, right? And there being a steady component and we'll talk about this in the next goal as well, but we don't want to kind of explode and spread too quickly and then collapse. Right? So we're really working on how to do this in a way that is sustainable. Mark: Yes. And that's the third big area, which is creating infrastructure and support for volunteers, so that we don't have burnout. We're always, you know, drawing in new leadership and new voices and new participation, so that nobody has to sit in the same position for 10 years and get real tired of it. And, I mean, that's just good for us in all kinds of ways, because You know, having a variety of different perspectives, it just helps our approach to be that much more nuanced, that much more considerate. It's just good for us, all the way around. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So those are the three big areas, and you'll notice that none of them involves some big, huge growth initiative. We have never been a proselytizing spiritual community, and we're not. My philosophy around this is I would like people to be aware of this as an opportunity that they can take if they want to. I would never tell them you should be an atheopagan. Yucca: Right. Mark: I would never say that to any. Yucca: Yeah. Because it's, I think it's a wonderful option, but it's not the only thing out there. Lots of things work for lots of different people and I'm just grateful that we've got a community of incredible people who really love and care for each other and work together and can, you know, share these values and use a similar framework. And yet, as we've talked about in so many other podcasts are also so very different in so many delightful ways. Mark: Right, and we encourage that diversity, right? Like, you know, there isn't this mandated wheel of the year where, you know, the symbols are all the same and the rituals are all the same. No, you create for yourself what's meaningful for you and relates to what nature is doing at a given time of year where you are. So there's, there's a tremendous amount of freedom. Within atheopaganism, it's meant to be facilitative and supportive and kind of informing rather than directive. Yucca: hmm. Yeah. Mark: So that's where we're going. That's, that's the idea there.  Yucca: And it's a fun process. Mark: it is. It is. And fun people to do it with. So that's, that's all to the good as well. I mean, having not had any comprehension of Arriving here 11 years ago, I have no idea where we might be 10, 11 years from now. It's just, it's hard to, hard to imagine what that could be like. Yucca: Oh, we'll be an ancient group in neo pagan years at that Mark: that's, oh, that's true. Yeah, we'll be almost Bronze Age. Yucca: Yes. I guess then we'll be, then we'll be legitimate, right? Because Mark: Right, well, yeah, we'll, we'll be Silicon Age, and by that time it'll all be, you know, molecular computing or or quantum computing, and then we can look back nostalgically at our silicon chips and and yes, we'll, we'll be the old established Version. Yucca: That's quite funny to think of. Mark: It is. It is. Yucca: but yeah. . Alright. Mark: So, yeah I'd like to thank everyone that has played a part in or participated in or joined, you know, for however long, because some people have decided that it wasn't for them and gone off to do something else. All those people who have played a role in where we've arrived and what we've been able to achieve in serving people, in, in really working to help people be happier and help the world be a better place. Yucca: Yeah. Thank you. Mark: Yeah, so thank you to all you listeners, that counts. Yucca: Absolutely. We are so grateful that you are all here and Yeah. Mark: Yeah, it's Yucca: Spending this time with us. Mark: yeah, it's a real honor and we know that Of all the things that people can donate to a movement or a cause, time is the most precious. You know, the number of people that will contribute to an organization, for example, is always much higher than the number that will volunteer for the organization. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: So, you know, when you give us 30, 40 minutes a week out of your day that's a very meaningful thing and we, we recognize it and we appreciate it. Yucca: right. Mark: So, with that, here's to the next 11 years! Yucca: And we'll see you next week.    

Online summits have been a proven vehicle to grow your email list, connect with influencers, build your authority, and generate revenue! Personally, I've been involved in a number of summits, including the first ever summit on Cannabis back in 2017 - where we enrolled more than 250,000 registrations and generated over 3 million dollars in about a month. Yet virtual summits can work just as well on a much smaller scale, and that's what I invited Dr. Mark T Wade on the podcast – to share what health practitioners need to consider when it comes to one-day summits. For those that don't know Dr. Mark, he's the founder of Virtual Summits Software and the visionary behind the evolution of summits over the last decade - having created six, seven and multi-seven figure companies using virtual summits.  Listen in to learn: The basic structure of online summits, and some of the success stories from health practitioners Why a smaller, more engaged list can be more profitable than a larger, less engaged one – and how this principle applies to virtual summits How the One-Day Summit Formula helps health practitioners attract engaged and quality leads into their community The importance of alignment in solving a singular problem throughout the customer journey, with specific examples of one-day summits How the role of virtual summits is likely evolving in the future, especially considering the rapid changes in the digital landscape Quotes “You don't need tens of thousands of people to be successful- whether it's financially or with impact and service. You need qualified and engaged people.” (09:05 | 09:15 Mark) “As healthcare professionals, referrals are very important. Why not reach out to the person who's best suited to send you referrals ongoing because you are giving them an opportunity to be on your summit as well as an opportunity to get to know you.” (15:46 | 16:10 Mark) “There are really no bad topics. The only mistake you can make is doing a topic that doesn't align with your product, program, or services.” (21:26 | 21:33 Mark) “When you get specific on your problem, you can get specific on the topic, which is gonna be specific with the information, which is gonna show the people who are listening that you're the expert and you know what you're talking about.” (24:07 | 24:18 Mark) “The goal is relationship-building because now that we have the relationship, we can move to the next step, which is monetization.” (27:38 | 27:45 Mark)   Connect with Dr. Mark Wade: Website Podcast Facebook Facebook Instagram Twitter YouTube   ====    Thank You For Listening! If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review! Your positive review helps others find this podcast and increase its visibility. Getting to YES boils down to two things: Saying the right things and saying those things consistently… so if you want to go deeper, check out Uli's one-page “Getting to YES” blueprint and training with the essential 9 persuasion prompts you need to leverage: https://uliiserloh.com/blueprint    Connect With Uli Website: https://uliiserloh.com Facebook: https://facebook.com/uliiserloh   Instagram: https://instagram.com/uliiserloh Youtube: https://youtube.com/uliiserloh  Tiktok: https://tiktok.com/@uliiserloh  Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/uliiserloh/ If you'd like to learn more about Uli's marketing agency and available services, visit https://bigboost.marketing

For a fascinating, inside look at the criminal justice system and the work of one of America's most prominent trial attorneys, check out this interview with ames J. Brosnahan, a veteran of more than 50 years of experience in both civil and criminal trial work.During his notable career, Brosnahan regularly undertook complex cases that were about to go to trial. He has tried, to conclusion, 150 cases that have ranged from anti-trust to wire fraud and from patent litigation to white collar crime and murder. Some of those cases made national headlines, including those that helped provide important First Amendment free speech protections.Brosnahan is named among the top 30 trial lawyers in the United States, according to the Legal 500 US. A lion of the trial bar, Brosnahan is one of the most respected and recognized trial lawyers in the United States. Recently, he completed a book on notable trials from his career, "Justice at Trial: Courtroom Battles and Groundbreaking Cases," now available at Amazon and other booksellers.The interview was conducted by Bob Gatty, host of Lean to the Left and co-host of the Justice Counts podcast, and Justice Counts host, legal thriller author Mark M. Bello. The episode also will stream on Justice Counts June 5.Here are some questions we discussed with Brosnahan:MARK: Welcome Jim—it's an honor to have you on the podcast. Before we talk about your writing, I'd like to talk about Professor Chemerinsky's forward. High praise for your memoir from the famous law professor. There is a lot packed into those two pages, but I was struck by two comments he makes. I'd like your reaction to them: 1. Practicing law requires hard work and attention to detail-many lawyers work hard. But it also requires creativity-Chemerinsky considers you and your team very “clever,” the term he uses. How much of your success is related to hard work and how much to creativity? For young lawyers out there, after learning what they need to know to pass the bar, how do they develop these creative skills the professor talks about? 2. Professor Chemerinsky talks about a topic near and dear to my heart. At that is, essentially, the bad rap lawyers get. He points to you as an example of how an ethical lawyer and decent guy, (you) can also be highly successful. That being a successful lawyer requires “bad behavior” which is patently false. We can chew gum and walk—can you please talk about being successful and ethical at the same time? BOB: The book reveals that you were diagnosed with rheumatic fever and a possible heart problem at age 3, confined to bed until you were six. Your connection to the outside world was a radio with Jack Benny and a window that looked out onto a driveway where you could see kids playing. Do you remember those days, and do you think they played a role in shaping the adult you became? MARK: Like Chemerinsky, my favorite legal quote is “Justice, Justice, Shalt Thou Pursue.” Having read your book, alongside might be: “Sometimes, doing your best is your only reward.” I love that lesson for young lawyers.BOB: Tell our listeners about the Secody Murder Trial-you had only been a lawyer for 18 months and you have this major murder trial involving the native American community. Tough case for a young guy. MARK: As a side note, I was struck by your voir dire in that case and want to hear more. How does a trial lawyer get a potential juror to admit bias on voir dire?BOB: In the book, you indicate that you were influenced by Cecil Poole, Melvin Beli, and other prominent trial lawyers. You worked under Poole, who was the first African American US Attorney in the United States. Obviously, mentoring was important in your career. Is it still? BOB: In 1966, you switch sides after how long as a prosecutor? Tell us about the transition from prosecutor to criminal defense and civil plaintiff attorney?MARK: One of those cases involved representing two young black activists in the Oakland California poverty movement. Tell us about the case. What were they accused of? Why were they prosecuted? And what was the outcome?BOB: I'm an old newspaper guy. In 1968, at the age of 34, you handled a 1st Amendment case that literally would decide the fate of daily papers in America. Or, was it really an anti-trust case? There was a similar issue in Detroit when the News and the Free Press entered into a joint operating agreement. Tell us about your case and the outcome.MARK: In 1978, you take another 1st Amendment case, this one centering around the movie Born Innocent, starring Linda Blair of “The Exorcist” fame. Interesting issue in that case. The plaintiff attorney argued “People who see movies are inspired to act out what they see,” and argued for censorship. Lots of publicity in this one. Tell the story of an attempt to prove what you refer to in the book as “negligent imitation.” BOB: You were a prosecutor—prosecutors have a lot of power in making decision about whether to prosecute or not prosecute, what you call in the book “The Power to Ruin Lives.” How did you deal with the power and what do you recommend to young prosecutors just starting out?MARK: I've often said that if the government really wants to go after and get someone, they can and will. One of the most interesting cases in the book for me was Steve Psinakis case. Ronald Reagan is often cited as an example of a so-called “good” Republican president. While he may have been an effective president, he was far from a good guy. My favorite quote in the chapter? “President Reagan wanted a conviction of a US citizen as a favor to a corrupt, foreign dictator.” The year is 1986, I believe. Tell our listeners the story, please?MARK: Lots of great quotes in the book. I can't seem to get away from them. “Specialization, so prevalent today, can limit a lawyer unnecessarily.” But isn't that advice in conflict with “Jack of all trades, master of none?” What do you tell a young lawyer today about specialization?BOB: Another quote from the book: “Preparation for trial requires a complete immersion into other people's lives while at the same time trying to preserve an objective view of the case.” How does a trial lawyer do that?MARK: Another quote I like in the book is “Trial lawyers are essential to enrich democratic reforms and social progress.” Why do you believe that? Many people would say “get over yourself.” What do you say?BOB: Last quote: You say: “I have always thought of the United States Supreme Court as the legal conscience of our society.” Do you still feel that way with today's court?MARK: At the request of Lawrence Walsh, the special prosecutor investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, you agreed to handle the prosecution of Caspar Weinberger, the US Secretary of Defense under Reagan and Bush one. Before you could try the case, President Bush pardoned Weinberger, an event with caused you “post-pardon depression.” So, how did you really feel?BOB: Were you able to strike a healthy work-life balance? What did that look like? What would you recommend to young lawyers today? MARK: How would you compare civility among lawyers today compared to during your early years of practice?BOB: If you could travel back in time and give your 25-year-old self some advice about career and life, what would it be? Any regrets?MARK: Let's talk about judges. The judge is against you. The rulings aren't going your way, and you are feeling a hostile vibe from the bench. What do you do?MARK: The USA PATRIOT Act, mass surveillance of Americans by the federal government, and the transformation of the FBI into an counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and cybersecurity agency are all things that happened in the last 21 years or so. As a lawyer and an American who cares about civil liberties, do you think these changes have brought some harm as well as enhanced security?BOB: We hope your memoir will be a bestseller. Where can people find it and what's next on the horizon for James Brosnahan?Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-lean-to-the-left-podcast--4719048/support.

For a fascinating, inside look at the criminal justice system and the work of one of America's most prominent trial attorneys, check out this interview with ames J. Brosnahan, a veteran of more than 50 years of experience in both civil and criminal trial work.During his notable career, Brosnahan regularly undertook complex cases that were about to go to trial. He has tried, to conclusion, 150 cases that have ranged from anti-trust to wire fraud and from patent litigation to white collar crime and murder. Some of those cases made national headlines, including those that helped provide important First Amendment free speech protections.Brosnahan is named among the top 30 trial lawyers in the United States, according to the Legal 500 US. A lion of the trial bar, Brosnahan is one of the most respected and recognized trial lawyers in the United States. Recently, he completed a book on notable trials from his career, "Justice at Trial: Courtroom Battles and Groundbreaking Cases," now available at Amazon and other booksellers.The interview was conducted by Bob Gatty, host of Lean to the Left and co-host of the Justice Counts podcast, and Justice Counts host, legal thriller author Mark M. Bello. The episode also will stream on Justice Counts June 5.Here are some questions we discussed with Brosnahan:MARK: Welcome Jim—it's an honor to have you on the podcast. Before we talk about your writing, I'd like to talk about Professor Chemerinsky's forward. High praise for your memoir from the famous law professor. There is a lot packed into those two pages, but I was struck by two comments he makes. I'd like your reaction to them: 1. Practicing law requires hard work and attention to detail-many lawyers work hard. But it also requires creativity-Chemerinsky considers you and your team very “clever,” the term he uses. How much of your success is related to hard work and how much to creativity? For young lawyers out there, after learning what they need to know to pass the bar, how do they develop these creative skills the professor talks about? 2. Professor Chemerinsky talks about a topic near and dear to my heart. At that is, essentially, the bad rap lawyers get. He points to you as an example of how an ethical lawyer and decent guy, (you) can also be highly successful. That being a successful lawyer requires “bad behavior” which is patently false. We can chew gum and walk—can you please talk about being successful and ethical at the same time? BOB: The book reveals that you were diagnosed with rheumatic fever and a possible heart problem at age 3, confined to bed until you were six. Your connection to the outside world was a radio with Jack Benny and a window that looked out onto a driveway where you could see kids playing. Do you remember those days, and do you think they played a role in shaping the adult you became? MARK: Like Chemerinsky, my favorite legal quote is “Justice, Justice, Shalt Thou Pursue.” Having read your book, alongside might be: “Sometimes, doing your best is your only reward.” I love that lesson for young lawyers.BOB: Tell our listeners about the Secody Murder Trial-you had only been a lawyer for 18 months and you have this major murder trial involving the native American community. Tough case for a young guy. MARK: As a side note, I was struck by your voir dire in that case and want to hear more. How does a trial lawyer get a potential juror to admit bias on voir dire?BOB: In the book, you indicate that you were influenced by Cecil Poole, Melvin Beli, and other prominent trial lawyers. You worked under Poole, who was the first African American US Attorney in the United States. Obviously, mentoring was important in your career. Is it still? BOB: In 1966, you switch sides after how long as a prosecutor? Tell us about the transition from prosecutor to criminal defense and civil plaintiff attorney?MARK: One of those cases involved representing two young black activists in the Oakland California poverty movement. Tell us about the case. What were they accused of? Why were they prosecuted? And what was the outcome?BOB: I'm an old newspaper guy. In 1968, at the age of 34, you handled a 1st Amendment case that literally would decide the fate of daily papers in America. Or, was it really an anti-trust case? There was a similar issue in Detroit when the News and the Free Press entered into a joint operating agreement. Tell us about your case and the outcome.MARK: In 1978, you take another 1st Amendment case, this one centering around the movie Born Innocent, starring Linda Blair of “The Exorcist” fame. Interesting issue in that case. The plaintiff attorney argued “People who see movies are inspired to act out what they see,” and argued for censorship. Lots of publicity in this one. Tell the story of an attempt to prove what you refer to in the book as “negligent imitation.” BOB: You were a prosecutor—prosecutors have a lot of power in making decision about whether to prosecute or not prosecute, what you call in the book “The Power to Ruin Lives.” How did you deal with the power and what do you recommend to young prosecutors just starting out?MARK: I've often said that if the government really wants to go after and get someone, they can and will. One of the most interesting cases in the book for me was Steve Psinakis case. Ronald Reagan is often cited as an example of a so-called “good” Republican president. While he may have been an effective president, he was far from a good guy. My favorite quote in the chapter? “President Reagan wanted a conviction of a US citizen as a favor to a corrupt, foreign dictator.” The year is 1986, I believe. Tell our listeners the story, please?MARK: Lots of great quotes in the book. I can't seem to get away from them. “Specialization, so prevalent today, can limit a lawyer unnecessarily.” But isn't that advice in conflict with “Jack of all trades, master of none?” What do you tell a young lawyer today about specialization?BOB: Another quote from the book: “Preparation for trial requires a complete immersion into other people's lives while at the same time trying to preserve an objective view of the case.” How does a trial lawyer do that?MARK: Another quote I like in the book is “Trial lawyers are essential to enrich democratic reforms and social progress.” Why do you believe that? Many people would say “get over yourself.” What do you say?BOB: Last quote: You say: “I have always thought of the United States Supreme Court as the legal conscience of our society.” Do you still feel that way with today's court?MARK: At the request of Lawrence Walsh, the special prosecutor investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, you agreed to handle the prosecution of Caspar Weinberger, the US Secretary of Defense under Reagan and Bush one. Before you could try the case, President Bush pardoned Weinberger, an event with caused you “post-pardon depression.” So, how did you really feel?BOB: Were you able to strike a healthy work-life balance? What did that look like? What would you recommend to young lawyers today? MARK: How would you compare civility among lawyers today compared to during your early years of practice?BOB: If you could travel back in time and give your 25-year-old self some advice about career and life, what would it be? Any regrets?MARK: Let's talk about judges. The judge is against you. The rulings aren't going your way, and you are feeling a hostile vibe from the bench. What do you do?MARK: The USA PATRIOT Act, mass surveillance of Americans by the federal government, and the transformation of the FBI into an counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and cybersecurity agency are all things that happened in the last 21 years or so. As a lawyer and an American who cares about civil liberties, do you think these changes have brought some harm as well as enhanced security?BOB: We hope your memoir will be a bestseller. Where can people find it and what's next on the horizon for James Brosnahan?This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/4719048/advertisement

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com Death and dying workbook: https://atheopaganism.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/death-and-dying-workbook-blank1.docx Freewill.com   S3E35 TRANSCRIPT:----more----   Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts, Mark, Yucca: And I'm the other one. Yucca Mark: and today we are going to talk about death. Yucca: death. Yep. It's, well, it's October. Although it's a topic which is relevant every day, every moment. Right. Mark: That's right. But particularly we're going to talk about the naturalistic, pagan perspective on death and approaches to death. And talk about some things that we can do to prepare for our own mortality and just about the perspective that it gives us generally. Because death is. Arguably the fact of our lives more than anything else. It's, it's the thing that's hanging out there, setting the context for everything else that we do or, or that we contemplate doing. Yucca: Right? And it happens to us. Mark: Mm-hmm. Yucca: Right. There's no, Doesn't matter what religion you are, what gender, where you live, what kind of living thing. If you are living, then eventually you stop. Right? Mark: right. And that's why it's been called The Great Equalizer because it doesn't matter how wealthy you are, eventually you are going to kick it. And there's, you know, you can do all kinds of medical things to try to extend yourself probably with a great deal of suffering associated in most cases. But eventually it's going to end. And so at this time of year this is the time of year when pagans often contemplate their mortality and their their relationship with the fact of their death. And so we are dedicating this show this episode to to that, to talking about exactly that. We'll have other episodes later on in the month about sort of other facets. Yucca: Like ancestors and decomposition and you know, that kind of stuff. Mark: right. All those kinds of great, halloweeny wonderful topics. But this, this one is just about the blunt fact that we're gonna die and so are you. And we all have to come to terms with that in whatever manner we can. Yucca: Right now, I wanna emphasize though, that this isn't all a doom and gloom, you know, sad, negative kind of thing. Certainly many of us are quite uncomfortable with the idea that one day we will not exist, right? But as we're gonna talk about, there's actually. Some real upsides to that. Right. And there's some really, I think that there's a tremendous amount of, of beauty in that. But a good place to start actually is how naturalistic paganism differs from some of the other branches of Paganism when it comes to our views on death, or at least on what's after. Mark: Right, right. As naturalists, we use the scientific method and critical thinking to assess what is most likely to be true. And given, given that the evidence is that there is no afterlife, that when we stop, we stop our brains stop maintaining the, the neural net of information that constitutes our personality and memory and all those things. And that heat radiates away from our body that that energy radiates away from our body as heat Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: and the body cools and we're gone. Yucca: And the, the pieces that were us, they break apart and become part of other things. Right. Mark: Right? And that's the decomposition story, which is. You know, stay tuned for that cuz it's actually so exciting. Yucca: a Mark: It's so exciting. Yucca: yeah, and it's, and that's the, that's the death that's happening always. Right. There's, there's the death at the end, right? Where like you just stop completely. But the, but the, the little, the little hundred deaths every day are more than hundreds. That just is part of being life is is this a really cool one to talk about? But yeah, we don't, we don't see the body as not us. Mark: Right. This is an important distinction. I'm, I'm glad you brought that up, because the idea of dualism what's sometimes called Cartesian dualism after Renee Decar, who first postulated it in a. In a philosophical kind of way, the idea that there is this spirit or ghost or soul within us that is separate from the body and that persists after the body dies. There really isn't any evidence to support that, that I'm aware of. And. Yucca: But the idea is, is embedded very, very deeply into our culture, into our language and it's, it's, it's all around us. Mark: It is. It is. It's, it's, When we talked about dualism in an earlier episode, we discovered that we don't even really have good language for talking about the understanding of the self as a unified hole. It is the body, You know, we say my body as if it was something different than, My mind. It's, it's all the same thing, but we, the, the way that our language is set up makes it very difficult even to articulate that concept. Yucca: Right Mark: So the body stops working for whatever reason. Maybe a disease, maybe an injury maybe just the accumulation of a a thousand tiny Yes. Or, or a thousand, just tiny errors in cellular copy copying over time. So you know, you're 105 years old and things just finally give up. They just stop and then we cease existing in our, in our opinion, in our estimation, we cease to exist. And that can be a very terrifying prospect for some people. But I don't find it that scary myself because I realized that for 13.7 billion years, I didn't exist either. And it didn't bother me in the least. I wasn't there to be bothered. It was okay. And we were talking about this before we recorded. We've also had some experiences where we've been put under general anesthesia. And that part disappears too. I mean, that's just time chopped out of your life where your body was still there, but your consciousness was suppressed because your body was, you know, under the influence of these chemicals that were introduced to it. And there wasn't any suffering during any of that either. I just was absent. Yucca: Not that I recall. Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Yucca: And, and that's what, not what was described to me by those who were conscious at the time. Right. But yeah, that, at least for me, those are times that are just like, it's just gone. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: Right. Look at the clock. And it's different than when it was when I last remembered looking at it. And that's not quite the same as as sleeping, because with the sleeping, there's a, sometimes there's a missing chunk there, but it's a very different, there still is some sort of awareness there, a very different awareness. But it, it's, it has felt like a very different experience. Mark: Yeah, I've often thought of, of during sleep the, the sort of dreaming process as being kind of like the brain running a screensaver. You know, you get all these images. You, you know, you have these sort of very, you know, strange and magical kinds of na narratives and stories and snips of scenes and things like that. And there's definitely something going on while you're sleeping most of the time. It's not the same as just winking out the way you do under general anesthetic. Yucca: Well, this is maybe a topic we should come back to at another point, because I don't think we've ever talked about lucid dreaming. Mark: Oh, we haven't. You're right. We Yucca: that's something that, that I do. And I don't know if that's something you do, but that would be a really, really interesting topic. So let's write that down. Mark: good. Yucca: maybe that's a good mid-winter topic that kind of, I associate, you know, mid-winter with the dreaming and the dark and, and all of that. So, Mark: a good one. Yucca: yeah. But with death it's, at least it seems like it's, that's it, right? Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Yucca: So what's that mean for us now? Right. We're not dead yet. We will. Mark: right, Yucca: this moment we're not. Mark: right. I would like to say one more thing Yucca: Oh, yeah. Mark: the, the way that other. Other religious traditions and particularly other pagan traditions, do approach the fact of death. Many of those are dualistic. In the Buddhist idea, for example, the idea is that we are on this wheel of karma that we're trying to get off of. And so when we achieve enlightenment, then we leave the wheel of karma and there's no more suffering and so forth. Which. So my mind has always been a very dark way of framing reality. It's the, you know, that the world is endless suffering. Well, the world is endless joy too. How, how come, How come we're paying all the attention to the suffering So that's, that's just been Yucca: does it, does it have the same connotation, the the word suffering when said in a Buddhist sense as it does. In a kind of conventional sense. Mark: That's a good question. I believe it does, but I can only speak from my experience having been married to a Zen Buddhist for 10 years. Yucca: Hmm. Mark: I, I can't, I, I have not done a ton of reading in the Buddhist arena and I don't know that much about. But I do know that it is once again, built on that dualistic idea that the body dies. But there is something else that persists that goes forward. And it may not be exactly you as a personality, but it's some intrinsic Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: quality of you that's in the process of being polished up in order to, you know, attain this, this enlightenment. Of course the, the mainstream monotheisms, they've all got. Sort of punishment or reward afterlife idea. And that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me either for lots of reasons that we don't need to go into. But it's a pretty cruel framework in my opinion. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: You know, it's, it's extortionary and it, it threatens people and it terrifies little children. It's a, you know, telling children about people going to hell is a horrible. Yucca: Right. Mark: But in the pagan sphere, what we see very often is a more generalized idea of reincarnation. It's very codified in Buddhism where like, okay, you know, if you've done these particular things, maybe you'll come back as a cockroach. Yucca: There's particular, yeah, there's particular levels and yeah. Mark: right. In, in the Pagan sphere, it does not appear to be as well defined in that sense, but there is a broad a broad credulity in the idea that you do come back in some manner. I've been told by people that people that are in their family where once related to them in other ways, in a past life, those sorts of things I don't know where they get that information, but they believe it. So, you know, those are, those are other approaches to the fact of mortality that I feel really sort of skip the important bits of what mortality can give us. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: Knowing that we're going to die is actually a tremendous gift Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: approach it that. It, it contextualizes our lives. You know, it's this thing that's hanging out there. We know we've got a limited amount of time, and that means that our time is very precious. We need to be careful with it. We need to make judicious decisions about what we're going to do with our time and what source of goals we're going to pursue. Yucca: Yeah. And really think about what matters. Really What, Because if I've, I have a limited number of days. You have a limited, We each have a limited number of days, Mark: Yes. Yucca: and on top of that, We don't know the number of days either. Mark: Right, Yucca: Right? We hope that there will be many, but this could be the last one, Mark: right, Yucca: or it could be in thousands, right? Mark: right. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Yeah. And knowing that, knowing that they're wheeled on a day when you're not in it really does give it, It gives you pause, it gives you it, it gives you an opportunity anyway, to think very carefully about what matters to you. About what your values are, about what you would like to be left behind in the wake of your life, in the way of legacy. And of course, that's one of the Ethiopia Pagan principles, right? Legacy. The idea that we are responsible to subsequent generations, not only of humans, but of the fabric of life on earth in general. And so. I mean, I very deliberately have made my career around environmentally and publicly beneficial work. That's, that is the, the work that I've chosen. And there have been costs associated with that. A lot of them financial because working in the nonprofit sector, especially for smaller organizations, just doesn't pay as well as a lot of other things. I have never been able to get my mind around doing some of the things that some people do for money, knowing that all that, that's all that's going on. There's just money making happening there. And I, I can't apply my time to something that seems so meaningless to me. I, I. I need to do something that's more substantial and fulfilling than that with my time. And I'm not criticizing anybody else's decisions. You know, they're, they're, well, you know, they're sovereign beings. They get to make their own decisions about what they consider important to do in their life. But for my life the, the environmental work that I've done, the, the social services work that I've done and the spiritual community work that I've done are all really important pieces to me that I hope have persisting impact after I'm gone. Yucca: Right. Yeah. And of course there's sometimes things that we need to do that we would really rather not be spending our time doing, but that That that are things that have to, that have to happen, whether that's dealing with, you know, illnesses or taxes or just, you know, having enough to, to be able to, to feed your family or things like that. But I think that, that the recognition and the, the memory that the, of our death that's coming can help us to. Put all of that in context, right? And think about how we're going to choose to live as we do those things that we don't want to be doing. Right. So we can on, on the big scale, really work towards the things that, that are meaningful to us. But know that every moment, even the moment when you are, you know, scrubbing the toilet, that that's, that's one of your moments, right? Mark: Right. Yucca: And how are you gonna live that, So, Mark: So finding ways to be joyful and finding ways. To take deep satisfaction in living becomes in the context of a, of a life without an afterlife, it becomes essential, Yucca: mm-hmm. Mark: right? This is all that we've got. So we must then find ways to, to derive happiness out of it, to derive as much joy as we possibly. In a, in a conscientious way. Obviously not at the expense of others. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: Which honestly, I have a hard time imagining how you can have much joy if it's at the expense of others, but Yucca: Right. Mark: maybe, maybe someone can. Yucca: Well, if you are aware of it, Mark: Right, Yucca: right, as long as there's that awareness piece, Mark: right. That's like the the Ursula Ursula Gwen story. The people who leave Oma. Yucca: I'm not Mark: you know that Yucca: that one. Mark: It's a, it's a utopia. Oma is a city and everyone is happy, and everything is beautiful, and it's all magnificent except once a year, every citizen, they're all paraded through this dungeon under the city where there is a poor, neglected, starving child. Yucca: Mm. Mark: Whose suffering is necessary in order for all the happiness above the surface to happen. And there are a certain number of people every year who leave the city. They go because they won't make that deal. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So I like to think that I would be one of those. Yucca: Dr. Hub borrowed that concept for one of their episodes. There was a space whale. Mark: Hmm. Yucca: City of London, I think was based on that, was suffering. So that, so the, the plot there sounds pretty much the, the same, Mark: hmm. Yucca: one of the new ones, not one of the old ones, Mark: Okay. Yeah. Okay. That was your tangent for this week, folks. Yucca: Well, at least number one, we'll see. I don't know, that's all. Maybe we've sort of done a few already. We went into dreams, so, Mark: that's true. Yucca: Yeah. Okay. Mark: okay, we're, we're gonna die and we're going to live well as a result of this knowledge. That's, that's where we've gotten to so far. But there are some things that we can do to prepare for our deaths that are great. Kindness is to those who survive us. Yucca: Mm-hmm. and for us in the process, depending on what kind of death you have, , Right. Some deaths. You don't know that they're happening and some you do. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: So, yeah. Mark: So those include things like advanced health directives, instructing decision makers about how they. What your wishes are in terms of do you want to be kept alive on machines in a vegetative state? Do you not want that? If it's unlikely that you will ever recover to a point where you're able to care for yourself? Do you want the machines to be turned off? All those kinds of questions. Knowing that medicine is a for profit enterprise and that end of life is the most profitable part of that enterprise in the United States. They will keep you alive on machines if you don't tell them not to. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: And it's important to do that if that's not the way you want to go. Yucca: Right? Mark: There are other financial things a will or a trust or you know, some sort of arrangement for what's supposed to happen to your money and your stuff. Yucca: Mm-hmm. And your dependence, if you have. Mark: Yes. Including, you know, what goes to which dependence and, and all that kind of, and, and your dependence. If, if you, if both you and your partner or partners Yucca: If you have, if you Mark: are suddenly killed if you, if you have them. Are suddenly killed, then the question of where your dependence go becomes really important. And that needs to be written down and enshrined somewhere, not just something in your head. Yucca: And this may not just be your human dependence, but if you don't have children and you have pets, that's something to think about as well, so that they, they don't just end up at the shelter. Right? Mark: right. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: There are other Sorts of things that are very helpful for people when there is a death that can just ease the process a lot. I mean, all of us that have been in grief know the kind of brain fog that descends when there is a painful death. It's hard to concentrate and feelings keep welling up all the time and to be asked at the same time to go digging through someone's desk to find a life insurance policy is, It's an almost insurmountable demand Yucca: Right, And to be on the phone and being told that, No, we can't give it to you because you're not the person and you're going, Yeah, but they're dead. But you know, all. Mark: And then you have to go and get a death certificate and provide that to them. And I mean, there's just so much adminis trivia that goes into the processing of a death. having all of that information together in one place in what I call a death packet Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: is a tremendous gift to those who survive you. Passwords, passwords to social media accounts, to your online banking to your, your 401k or whatever, you know, retirement accounts you might have. All of that stuff is essential in modern times to be able to do the things that you want to do. A list of people who should be notified with their contact information. Yucca: right. Mark: There's, there's a lot of different things that go into this. But the good news is we have a workbook Yucca: Yes. Link in the in the show notes. Yeah. Mark: Yes, you can download a blank of the workbook and fill it out. And it, it has everything in it. It's got a, a section for filling out all the information that would be necessary to write an obituary, for example. You can make your preferences known about what you'd like done with your body. What kind of services, if any, you would like to have happen. To recognize your death. And it, it may sound scary and creepy to do this, but as I always like to say, just like talking with people about sex doesn't make them pregnant, working on the fact of your mortality doesn't make it any more likely to happen soon. Yucca: Yeah. It just means that when it does, it's gonna be an easier process for the, For your loved ones. Yeah. And this is, this is a great time of year to be going through and doing this because we're thinking about death. And it's seasonally and we're seeing it around us, and and it's nice to, to have it on the calendar to be able to go back and review that, right? Mark: Yeah. One of the elements of my death packet is a farewell letter, Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: and I revisit that every year at this time of year just to make sure that, you know, everybody that I want acknowledged, want to be acknowledged is acknowledged. And that Yucca: If things have changed in terms of what you wanna say or not. Mark: all, all those kinds of things. Yes. So it's. And it, it's a great opportunity just to pull the thing out and review all the information. It's like I noticed the last time I went through it, I had moved and I hadn't changed my address. Yucca: Mmm. Mark: So that was necessary. I had to make those changes. Once again I can already think of some things that I'm gonna need to change for this year as well. Yucca: Right. Mark: so, but once you've done the big task once. Then it's just a matter of updating little bits of information here and there as you go along, and it's not very hard to do. The important thing is that loved ones know where to find your death packet. If you have like, a filing cabinet with legal papers and Yucca: fire safe chest that you have and you Mark: That's, that's a good place for it to live, maybe in especially colored folder so that people know, you know, they can go directly to that folder and pull it out. What I do is I keep a paper copy, a printed copy in my desk, and then I keep the soft copy, The Microsoft Word file on the desktop of my computer. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: So it, and it's labeled My Death, that's the name of it. So, with a cute little skull icon that I put on Yucca: Yeah, is your paper one you could put in a little folder, you know, this time of year you can find like the Halloween themed folders and stuff in the school section. Mark: Uhhuh. Yeah. It's a good idea. Yucca: little dancing skeletons or something like Mark: Mm-hmm. , I like it. Yeah, so. I strongly encourage our listeners to, to take on this work. It's it can be a little intimidating you know, to sort of take a deep breath and go, Okay, I'm gonna die. What do I want done with my body? What do I, you know, what? Yucca: Yeah. Mark: What, what, what are the answers to all these questions? There is a tool that's available for download online. It's something called the Five Questions that you can look for and that, that walks you through some similar kinds of planning questions about how to organize your, your death planning. But the workbook that you can download from the link in the show notes is really very thorough and it, it contains spaces for all of the different kinds of information that you're likely to need. Yucca: Right, and, and you could make a little thing of it when you do it. You could make it a little. Self party for the afternoon, right? Pick out, get your favorite drink, get your favorite treat, and carve yourself a pumpkin and sit down at the table with it. And there might be things that you won't be able to do right away, like gathering certain pieces of information, but you could start working through it and starting that process. Or you could do some of it in ritual, you know, make it. Make it an enjoyable thing that is maybe a little bit less intimidating to approach just so that you, that you do it. Because any piece that you do will be better than having not done it at all. Mark: right. Yucca: Right. And so maybe, I mean, I encourage everyone to, to go through the whole packet and do everything, but maybe you just wanna start with, Okay, I'm just gonna. I'm just gonna get a will in place. Right. And I'm not, you know, I, I don't have the, the mental space right now to write a letter to everybody, but I can get the, the will in place, or I can make sure that I have beneficiaries on my bank accounts or whatever it is that you need to do. Right. Just starting with so, Mark: I want to tell people about another resource that's available online for free, and it's a, it's a resource called free will.com, and literally that's what it is. It's a wizard that walks you through the steps to create a will for free, and then you can download the. Documents and print them and have them signed and it's legally valid Will Yucca: Do you put in what your state or country is in Mark: you do? Yucca: laws are different about how many witnesses you need or that sort of thing? Okay. Mark: It's only for the US and Canada, unfortunately. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: But. Yucca: I would suspect there's probably similar resources though for different countries. Mark: many other countries. I would agree. I would agree. But it's a, it's a pretty nifty little thing. I, I went through it and I thought, you know what, what came out the other end was, it had a lot of legalese in it, but it definitely included everything that I wanted to, to be included in my will. Yucca: Mm-hmm. , right? So that's a great, a great place to start.  Mark: They also do advanced health directives. There's, there's a wizard for that as well. Yucca: Okay. Right, Because again, many of us probably aren't at the traditional places in our lives where that's something that we would be starting to think about. But as we've said, we don't know. We don't know how many days we have, Mark: Nope. Nope. The odds, the odds may be low that you are going to die soon. But they aren't zero. They're never zero. Yucca: Right. Mark: As long as we're alive, we are subject to death. So we have to be prepared to as great a degree as possible, both for our loved ones but also for ourselves. I don't want to be in a semi-conscious state on a ventilator Yucca: Mm. Mark: for. Days, weeks, years. I, I, I really, really am opposed to that. There's pretty good evidence that there is some brain activity in a lot of the people that are in that condition, and that just sounds like hell to me. I don't want it. And I'm very, very clear in my directives that I do not want that. I, I want you to pull the plug, if that's the state that I. Yucca: Right. or for me, I wouldn't want to be in my last moments worrying who's gonna take care of my kids. Mark: Right, Yucca: Right? Mark: right. Yucca: Oh, how, you know, being, having to be stressed about these things that I don't wanna leave undone Mark: Mm-hmm. Yucca: for, for others. Mark: Yeah. Yeah. So I, I'd kind of like to leave this on a, on an upward note. I feel like one of the things that is very hard about death in, certainly in American culture, but I think this is true in the West generally, is that we're so phobic about the subject that we don't talk about it and get ourselves comfortable with it at all. We don't even try to do. And there is a movement the, the so-called death positivity movement that is happening now that's working to overcome that, that's working. You know, we conduct death salons in various places for people to talk about their feelings, about their mortality, their fears, their their concerns, what they'd like done with their bodies, all those kinds of things. And. I just feel that that's a very important movement. To some degree the denial of death is the denial of life Yucca: Yeah, and that's one we'll definitely come back on when we talk about death on a kind of larger concept. Mark: Right, right. And to me, embracing what this is that we are. Here on Earth is necessary in order for us to honor it, as sacred as it is. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: And so I really encourage you to look at this as a great opportunity. You know, when you, when you really sit down, you know, across the table from your death maybe, maybe you have some life priorities that you want to change. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: Maybe, maybe there are certain things that you absolutely have have been dedicated to the idea that you're going to do someday, and maybe you need to move up the schedule on those to make sure that they happen, Yucca: Right. Mark: right? Um Yucca: Well, and to think about how you are living today, because how you live today is how you, that is your life, Mark: mm-hmm. Yucca: right? That is your life that you live. And I find it very helpful In my morning ritual, I remind myself, I say out loud that I remember I will die, and that actually is so uplifting and motivating because it goes today matters. This, my experience, this tiny, I get to be this tiny sliver of the universe for this short period, which I hope will be in the triple digits. That's my goal, but that's still tiny compared to the billions of billions of years of the universe. And here we are and we get this moment. And because we die, it is so precious and so special every. Mark: Absolutely. I like that I may steal it. I, my morning ritual does not include something like that at the moment, although it does include a death acknowledgement in the evening. The Yucca: I stole it from the stoic . They have a whole thing about it. Mark: So yeah, look at, honestly, look at this as an opportunity. Folks. Being in denial about our death isn't gonna stave it off. It isn't gonna change when it happens. One second. So, taking a clear look at, taking a clear look at everything generally is a good idea, but particularly Yucca: of this podcast, Mark: it kind of is. Yeah. It kind of is. Let's, you know, let's, let's not gussy things up with, with fantasy. Let's, let's do what we can to know what's true. To look at that very clearly and then make our decisions based on that. That's kind of what we're about. So, especially in this month of October, which is, you know, the, the, the spooky witchy month really encourage you to take that step if you haven't already, or also like to congratulate those of you who have done a lot of that planning. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Good for you because it's, it's generally good for all of us. When people do that, among other things, what tends not to happen is that people tend not to get gouged for thousands of dollars by funeral homes because, you know, people will put much more modest wishes in their, in their declarations, in their death packet. and that's good for all of us because that industry really needs to be reigned in. It's very destructive and it, it, it needs to change. Yucca: Well, and, and whatever your particular wishes are you. You can assure those, or at least you can make it more likely that that's what's going to happen, right? By, by voicing it. So whatever, whatever your particular desires and approaches and, and all of that and if it's something that, that you honestly don't care, let let your loved ones know that, right? Let them know, I seriously, I'm dead. I don't want the casket. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: I don't care. Save the money. Right? If that's your approach or if, hey, it is actually really important to me that there be this coming together of the, of the people in my life and this moment. And you know, you know, you can say that and you can think about that and, and I think that you can learn a lot about yourself too in having that honest conversation with yourself, that exploration. Mark: right. As you explore what the options are, you may find that some things that people assume are true are not. For example, you are not required to have your body involved. And it's a terrible, toxic thing that we do to the Earth that I really don't want any part of. But I mean, you can, if you want to, that's fine, but you are not required. Some states require that an un embalmed body be buried within three days after the death, Yucca: Yeah, there's so different states are gonna have different regulations you're gonna wanna know. Yeah. But that's one of the things that you can do in your October. Death visiting. I don't know what we could call it.  Mark: I like that. Yucca: yeah, and if you mo, if you move states or, you know, you just check up on, okay, so what's, you know, what is it like here in Montana versus Connecticut, or, you know, whatever it is. Yeah. Mark: right? Yeah. So there's a, there's a body of knowledge and there's kind of a world to explore there of how to, how to get exactly what you want out of this, or at least to tell your loved ones what you want. And of course after you're dead, it won't matter to you. So Yucca: Yeah. Mark: they, if they don't do what you want Yucca: You won't know. Mark: you won't know, and the worst thing that will happen is that somebody will probably say, This is not what they would've wanted. Yucca: Yeah, so well, this has been good. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: it's inspiring to, to come back to this each year and think about it and, and just again, remembering this is our little sliver. This is our little moment. Mark: Right. So do what you can to have a good death and as smoother transition as possible for those around you who survive and and live well. Live well and happily. Yucca: Yep. All right. Well thank you everyone, and we'll, we'll see you next week. Mark: See you then.  

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com   S3E31 TRANSCRIPT:----more---- Mark: Welcome back to the wonder science based paganism. I'm your host mark. Yucca: And I'm Yucca. Mark: And today we are celebrating the autumnal Equinox, which goes by various other names. I like to call it harvest myself. And the. The holiday is one of the roughly equivalent length of the day and the night around the 20th of September. And so it's a time when we celebrate many metaphorical meanings of that. And we also observe a lot of what's going on in our natural environment. At this time, as in the Northern hemisphere, we moved from summer into. Into the autumn. So we're gonna be talking about that today and celebrating the holiday, Yucca: Right. And as always, it's just amazing that we're here already. Mark: right. Yucca: is just, just flown by. So, Mark: It really has. It's. Well, it's extraordinary. I mean, a as you know, Yucca, I've been unemployed now for almost 14 months. Yucca: wow. Mark: And I mean, on the one hand, it seems like all the time in the world, but on the other hand, it's like, well, that's kind of flown by in a way it's involved a lot of struggle, but it's. leading to some good things. Now that I'll talk about later on. So I'm, I'm feeling like this is the harvesting season. It's the time when I'm, you know, reaping the benefits of stuff that I've had in the ground for a long time and have really been working to tend. Yucca: Hmm. That's exciting. Yeah. So for us, and we should mention being in the Northern hemisphere, this is the autumn for us. Although we do see that there are quite a few of you listening from the Southern hemisphere. So for everybody in the Southern hemisphere, it's the other side of the wheel, Mark: Happy Yucca: So happy spring. But for us to September. We're talking about how fast the year goes, but September seems to just really fly by for, with us starting September. It's still summer by the end of September, it's we're full in autumn. It's winter's right at our doorstep, right? It's a, we get a very kind of short autumn and it's says, Nope, here we are. It's fall. And this is actually one of my very favorite times of the. And I know a lot of people really, really love this time, but let's actually start with what is this holiday often represent in the broader pagan community. And then we can get into our individual practices and, and observances around it. Mark: Sure. That sounds great. Well, traditionally, this is viewed as the second harvest of the three harvest festivals. The first being the holiday at the beginning of August which is. The grain harvest and so beer and bread and all those kinds of things. Well, this is the second harvest and it it's often conceptualized as the overflowing corn utopia of vegetables, right? The vegetable gardens are pouring out all of the winter squash and the tomatoes are still really going. And there's all these Yucca: zucchini. So many zucchini Mark: so many zucchini, same numbers of zucchinis. You've got, you know, people door ditching zucchini to everyone else. And so it's a time of a great abundance of food. Much of which is perishable and is not really gonna last into the winter. And so traditionally it was a time when you ate a lot, right? You, you, you put as much, you stored as much of that stuff as you could, like the winter squashes and so forth, but what you couldn't, you ate, you put on your body as, as much as you could in order to kind of fatten up for the winter. Yucca: Right. This is also the, the time of year where they're the most babies born. So you would think that it would be pretty evenly distributed throughout the year, but we actually see in the August, September, right in this area, right before we're going into the, the season is really switching into that cold time when we see a lot more births. Mark: that kind of makes sense. Because if this is the time of year, more than any other this in the ne into the next couple of months, when food is really abundant, right? So it makes sense that the time when you would be having births would be the time when mothers could be as nourished as possible. And there would be as good a shot as possible for the babies to survive into the next year. Yucca: Right. And when you count backwards to the time when you're feeling horrible and having terrible morning sickness, it's the time of the year when there's the least food. Anyways. so you're okay. Right.  Mark: Never thought of that, but Yucca: the, yeah, it's, it's how it works. It's so, you know, we, we can forget sometimes in our modern world, how part of. The rest of nature, we really are. Right. We really are seasonal creatures that have figured out some clever things in the last hundred years or so to, to help us kind of forget that. But, but this time of year is, is, is lovely because it is a reminder that no, this, whether we like it or not, the season is changing and might as well like it and embrace it because it's happen. And it's it just feels like this tipping point time period. Mark: It, it does. It feels, I was saying before we started recording, it feels kind of like the hinge of the year. There's a lot of preparation that has to happen before winter starts in earnest. For, and for me, This time of year is always a time for sort of taking stock of the last year's cycle. You know, what were my dreams? You know, of my, my dreams from UL, my plans from From brightening at the beginning of February, you know, how did I implement those and how are they going? And is there something to harvest from those now? This year I'm, I'm hopeful. I, I believe I have a job I will know in about a week. but I believe I have landed a job, which was, will be a wonderful position. And I'm happy to talk more about it. Presuming that it happens. I'm also. Most of the way done with writing the second book, the second athe paganism book and Yucca: which is a publish. Mark: which as a publisher, yes, loyal and worldwide is publishing it. And I have to deliver a manuscript at the end of November, and I'm still figuring out what the last 10,000 words are going to be. But Yucca: But you've done a huge, I mean, you've done all the other words, so you've done a huge chunk of Mark: I'm at 45,000 words now. So that's, that's a lot, there's a whole lot there. And it's involved a lot of days of sitting at a desk with a laptop, just tapping away and researching and pulling things in from other sources and synthesizing ideas. In, you know, as, as I see them. So it feels like this fall will be a, a real time of. Of accomplishment. And the, the completion of some, some long held dreams which kind of goes along with my other conceptualization of this holiday. We've talked about this before, how I map the arc of a human life onto the wheel of the year. Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: Uh, this holiday is the holiday of being elder. so it's sort of the moment of reflection about, okay, well, I'm kind of at the end of this, but What has, what has life been like? What, you know, what have I learned? What have I experienced sort of running your fingers through all those amazing moments of your life. And so I don't think of myself as elderly quite yet, but I still see that process happening for me this year with the, the things that I'm harvesting. So I, I find that exciting. Yucca: Hmm, that's Mark: How about you? How do you celebrate this time of year? Yucca: Well, this season terms of how, how we see the wheel of the year this is the celebration of the decomposers. This is the, the fun guy and the microbes. And of course there are microbes involved in. All parts of the cycle. Right. But, but the, the, the little ones who are just breaking things down and, and getting the, the compost ready and that, again, that shift that we're talking about, and it's really the, the entering into fall or autumn and getting now is time to be getting things. Right. That's a big getting things ready for the winter and it's just, you know, winter's coming, winter's coming. We can feel it in the air now. It's still hot during the days. And the monsoon season is just finishing up, but you can feel that chill and it's okay. Well, do we have enough firewood? Let's start stacking that and. Our, our solar panels, we switch them. Cuz this is there's no, there's no grid out here. Right. We're way too far away for that. And so, you know, we've gotta switch the, the panels, the angle now it's like, oh, okay, let's start. You know, we've had 'em down since the sun has been so high in the sky that, but now it's starting to, we can tell it's it's moving down on the horizon. We gotta move those panels up to be able to catch that light. And. BA all that buttoning up. Right. Okay. Are there cracks that need to be sealed? And what do we have to worry about for this? Not gonna survive the cold? What do we need to bring in all of that kind of stuff? And it's just a, a lovely, it's a lovely time of just shifting and transitioning and, and there's a nice anticipation, but there's kind of a calmness to it. Mark: Mm-hmm yeah, there's a Yucca: Satisfaction like what's done is done. Mark: and there's sort of a stillness, especially to early autumn. In my experience, we don't get very much wind here at this time of year. In the evenings when the heat finally dies down the it's just sort of very mild and there's. There's this kind of it's something in the air. There's. Sort of presence in the air that I feel at this time of year. I'm reminded of it by our wind chimes. There's just something about the wind chimes, faintly tinkling in the little bit of air movement that's going on. That reminds me that it's fall. The other thing that I hear a lot at this time of year is. Single crickets instead of a huge chorus like you have in the summertime, there will be one or two crickets outside kind of doing their thing. And it's in the, the warm late, late, late summer night. And it, it really reminds me of this time of year going back all through my life. Yucca: Yeah. Yeah. You say that and I go, yeah. We have that too here.  Right? It's the, and there's a, there's a different quality to their, to their song. Mark: Yeah. Well, almost all their fellows have been eaten by now. Yucca: yeah. So if they're there Mark: Yeah, if they're there although if they still haven't made it, then that, that's why they're, that's why they're doing their, their noise. Trying to find somebody to hook up with at the very last minute. But I mean that deafening chorus of crickets that you get in the, you know, at the peak of summer is long gone by now. And it's just a few holdovers that are, you know, kind of holding down the Fort there every night. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Yeah, I have such a fondness for this time of year. I just, even though we don't. Changing of leaves very much until later in the year, because it's gonna stay warm for us until October. know, we'll have, we'll have days in the high eighties and early, you know, low nineties even into October. But we may get a rainstorm or two between now and say November, Yucca: And when is your, when's your first frost? I mean, not till later, Mark: January. Yucca: Okay. Yeah. So you, you really don't get much in terms of frost Mark: Well, we've got that huge buffering Pacific ocean right near us. So that keeps it warmer. The air has to get very, very cold coming in from the east, from, from landward and, and the north in order to drop us down into those frost temperatures. And really it's mostly at the bottom of valleys most of the time, unless we get an Arctic storm. Yucca: yeah. Mark: The Arctic storms will put a little snow on top of the Hills sometimes. And, that can be pretty yeah, but this time of year is once again it's, as you say, it's an anticipatory time. This is the time when everybody cleans their gutters because they don't, when, when the rains finally come, they don't want them to be jammed up and overflowing and doing damage to their houses. Yucca: right. Mark: All of the vegetation has started to slow down. So, there's much less in the way of mowing and so forth, which I'm thankful for. Not because I do mowing, but because I have to listen to it and Yucca: Yeah. Mark: I, I'm not, I'm, I'm such a non of lawns and all that they represent.  Yucca: We don't have lawns here, but when I have visited them, I quite liked the smell of the cut grass. Mark: it's Yucca: That's a lovely, yeah. Mark: That's the smell of spring to Yucca: Mm. Mark: having grown up in suburbia. When, when the when the lawns are no longer swamps, Yucca: Okay. Mark: And, and can actually be mowed Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: um, long about March or so. That's when you can start start mowing the lawns and it's a wonderful, you know, spring smell to me. So yeah it's a little early for me to focus on decomposition. I do that later in the year around halls and then kind of going into, I, I think of decomposition and recomposition in new form as kind of taking place between halls and But I'm in a very different climb than you are. I mean, we're just, we're not gonna freeze for a long time and when we do, it's not very much, Yucca: Yeah, by the time we get to hollows are we've already been freezing for several weeks at that point. So we, I mean that still, it still has that decomposition theme, but now it's, it's, it likes to get started when it's still warm. Mark: Mm-hmm. Yucca: enough, you know, you've got enough of your mixes of the greens and Browns and, and also for us, we're coming out of, we don't get a lot of moisture. We get maybe 12 inches in a good year, but we haven't done that in the past two decades since we're in this, you know, mega drought. But with, after the monsoons is when we do get the mushroom. And so we'll get the popup of the mushrooms or you'll turn over a log and you see the MyUM and and you know, we get the warnings every year because we have several mushrooms that you definitely do not want to eat. Just a reminder of know what you're doing, everybody, because we've got a few here that, Mark: As Yucca: really don't want to try. You won't make it to the nearest hospital. That's two hours away. Mark: As the late great Terry Chet once said all mushrooms are edible. Some mushrooms are only edible once Yucca: Right. Yeah. But of course, most, I mean the vast majority are, are, you know, not a problem. They're just, there's a few that are, but you know, they're, they're popping up and they're just doing, and all of that is just getting ready to do its thing because we have the moisture, we're getting the chill nights. It's not baking and, and throughout the winter, It'll slowly, it'll slow down, but that decomposition is happening down there in the soil. It's happening underneath the pine needles, you know, it's, it's working away. So Mark: Yeah. Oh, there was something else. What was it I was gonna touch on. Oh this is a big time of year for feasting. Yucca: yes. Mark: Because of all that, all that garden production and all that perishable food that you, you gotta get into yourself and share with your neighbors before it goes bad.  Yucca: Get put up if you're doing drawing or canning Mark: do any of those Yucca: do. Yeah. Mark: preservation processes, this is the time and around here where I am. You know, people are canning apples and, and making apple sauce and apple butter and all that kind of stuff from our apple crop and the the, what we call the crush, which is the grape harvest has started. It's always, you know, right around this time of year, starts in late. August and extends into early October. So that's a very seasonal thing as well. If you drive around the rural roads in the west county, they all smell like, like wine. They smell like rotting grapes, right? So, so it's a good time to have a feast, you know, invite your friends you know, focus on local produce and, you know, local, local food stuffs. I was I was mentioning when, before we started to record that this is when the salmon run. One of the, one of the salmon runs comes up the Russian river in our local area. And so we will have fresh local salmon here available, which is delicious. And sustainably farmed or sustainably caught wild caught. It is part of an industry that is doing a lot to conserve and improve riparian habitat and breeding grounds around here. So I, I feel that's an important thing to support. Yucca: Yeah, that's really important. Mark: Yeah. I mean the salmon runs of north America and they still are in Alaska, but the salmon runs of the California and Oregon and Washington coasts used to be millions and millions of fish. There are reports of tributaries to the Russian river during spawning season where you could walk across the tributary without getting. Feet wet because there were so many spawning salmon in these creeks and of course development and deforestation, tation, and climate change, and all those things have had a huge impact, but they're still living runs. And so this it's something that we like to appreciate this time of year. Yucca: Yeah. Oh, that sounds wonderful. Mark: Yeah, it is. Yucca: Hmm. Mark: So, We wish all of you the, the best of the season really invite you to go out and find out what's growing locally, you know, find out, you know, what does your neighbor's garden have in it?  Yucca: Yeah.  Mark: See what, what stuff is coming up, check out the farmer's markets they're overflowing right now. It's a great time.  Yucca: This is also a time where, where folks are often cutting back herd numbers. So that's another one can get as well. Yeah. Mark: right. Yeah. Traditionally that's sort of more associated with, with Hallows, with the October holiday as the, the so-called flesh harvest, but realistically speaking, I think you're right. I think it's probably earlier in the year uh, Yucca: it really? Yeah. Well, and this is when you get, you know, if you, you. Talk to the rancher and you kind of figure out there, this is when they're figuring out, okay, what do we, you know, taking account? What, what do we have? What are, what are we gonna need to get through the winter? Mark: How many, how many of these animals can we get through the winter? Yucca: mm-hmm Mark: if we try to get them all through, they're all gonna starve. So, you know, hard decisions have to be made, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: And. You know, cycle of life. So it goes. Yucca: And that's, you know, each point in the wheel of the year there. There's something going on. Right. And oftentimes there's an overlap, right? We talk about the, in the spring, we're often talking about these, this planning and this anticipation. And yet here we are in the autumn thinking about the anticipation. And yet we're planning for winter, right? In the spring. We're planning for summer and the fall. We're planning for winter and then the winter's for the next year. And it's just all overlapping and continuing and continuing. Here we get to be our little moment getting to be part of it with everybody else. Right. Mark: Right. And that's one of the things that I really appreciate about this time of year is that because I think of it as a reflective time, you know, the, the, the time of culminations of harvests it, it does give me a chance to sort of sit back and, you know, look at where I've, where was I? Where was I? 12 months ago. And how has that changed? And, you know, how do I feel about how I spent that time? What did I learn? You know, what would I, what do I wish I had done differently? What am I really glad I D I did that. I didn't think I was going to like all those things, right. A a life reflected on is a life well lived. Yucca: Well, we'd also love to hear from all of you, if there's special traditions that you have this time of year or anything that you wanna share with us, we always love getting your getting your emails and feedback. So Mark: And you know where to find us the wonder podcast cues at. Yucca: Gmail. Mark: Yes. Yucca: And that's QS. Mark: QS, gmail.com. And we would love to hear from you. Thank you so much for your comments and your, your questions and your topic suggestions. We appreciate all of them. Yucca: Happy autumn, everyone. Mark: Happy sol-Equinox! Sorry.

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com   S3E28 TRANSCRIPT:----more---- Yucca: Welcome back to the wonder science based paganism. I'm your host Yucca. Mark: and I'm mark. Yucca: And this week we have a really interesting topic. We're gonna be talking about. Religion in general, what is religion? What purpose does it have? And also looking at how naturalistic paganism differs from the, the big three in Western society. Mark: Yeah, I'm really looking forward to this conversation because these are questions that I've spent a lot of time researching and thinking about parti. When I was first pulling the threads together, that would become Ethiopia paganism. Obviously when you think about, well, why do people have religion, then you have to start asking yourself what is a religion, right. And everything sort of tumbles downhill from there. It's very interesting. Yucca: Yeah. And you'll certainly get different opinions on what a religion is. We were talking about before this, how there are some folks who will say that they'll define religion in such a narrow way that really only Christianity, Judaism and Islam fit into the category. And they'll kind of ignore the rest of the many, many different possibilities that humans have, you know, just today, not even thinking about what we've had in the past and may have in the future. But we're gonna be taking a little bit more of a, a broader perspective on that. Mark: Right. Yeah. I mean, for those religious scholars and anthropologists of religion who focus down on a very narrow, definition of religion that only slots to those. Kind of major movements throughout the world. To me, that's begging the question. I, I think what we ought to be looking for is what are the human needs that are being met and by what kinds of mechanisms and how can we generalize about that into a definition of all of those kinds of behaviors and needs. And crystallize that down into a definition for what a religion is that that's been my approach. Yucca: Right. Mark: So let's get into it. Yucca: Yeah, we should say before though, that we will be comparing a lot to those big three that we've been talking about and that's, you know, it's not to be picking on them or singling them out or anything. It's just that the societies that both mark and I come from are very steeped in these. These are the Christianity has really influenced and shaped so much of our cultures in ways that we're aware of it in ways that. often, you know, unaware of as well. Mark: Right because we are so. Inured to them. They're so normal to us that it doesn't even occur to us that it's possible to live any other way or to think any other way about the world. Particularly we're going to be talking a lot about Christianity because that's what the really dominant religion in the United States where both of us live, but. A lot of what we're saying could also be applied in areas that are dominated, say by Islam or by conservative brands of Judaism or other faiths that share these kind of general characteristics. So it's not to pick on Christianity particularly. It's it's more to say this is what we're most familiar with and what we see. Creating the subtext for the over culture of where we live. Yucca: Mm-hmm right. Mark: So let's get into it. Where, where should we start? Yucca: Well, I think with, you know, what a religion is and the purpose of a religion, right. And those two are kind of blurred together. Right? Mark: Right, right. And of course, depending on what religion you are, you'll have very different answers for that. Because if you ask a Christian, what the purpose of their religion is, it's salvation, right? You're, you're supposed to follow these rules and. Cate yourself to this God, and that will get you a ticket to heaven with various terms and conditions applying depending on what the faith specifics are. Yucca: The particular sect within there. Yeah. Mark: Right. But when we look at a, in a broader sense not religious specifically, worldwide. And over time we can see that what religion has done is provide certain things for populations of people. It's given them a sense of shared values. Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: It's given them a sense of community and connection with one another. It's given them a way of making sense of the calendar in terms of celebrating a, a set of seasonal holidays around the course of the year. And it's answered big questions that That people ask, like, you know, why am I here? What am I here for? What's the purpose of living? What is, what is the nature of the universe even, Yucca: I mean, it's, it's creating the context, right? It's how do we understand our context, us, our relationship to community and the world. Mark: right, right. And. As we look throughout the world, we can see that people's spiritual expression. Does those things for them, no matter what kind of spiritual expression it is, even in monastic communities, their communities, right. Yucca: mm-hmm Mark: Um, very, very rare to find people who are so monastic that they, you know, essentially go to a cave and do their thing by themselves. Because humans are social creatures and mostly we like to feel connected with each other in some sort of shared. Enterprise, right. Some way of organizing our society so that we can eat and we can be safe and we can be happy as best we can. So. When I was studying all this stuff and, and I really went down the rabbit hole into brain structures and how the brain evolved that I won't really get into now, but the appetites of the various systems of the brain map, pretty, pretty well onto the things that religion provides. Right. And. considering all this stuff. My conclusion is that a religion is basically a combination of three things. The first is a description of the universe or a cosmology, and that can be heaven and hell in purgatory and the, the, the world in between, or it can be a wheel of karma that you're trying to get off, or it can be. The, the narrative described by science, which is the one that we subscribe to the, the description Yucca: shifting and changing. Mark: yes, Yucca: Yeah. But we've got several standard models that we're working with at the moment. Right. And those get challenged and they change slightly. And. Mark: right. But there's. There's a fundamental belief underneath that, which is that science, that the universe is a material set of processes, which are governed by laws and that those laws are consistent throughout the universe. And that we can understand them. and learn to be predictive of what's going to happen in a given situation, based on our understanding of how those material processes work. That's a very, very different understanding than a, you know, super mystical Christian view where, you know, the mind of God is unknowable and we, we just never know what's gonna happen because anything is possible. Yucca: mm-hmm Mark: Yeah. So. Cosmology is the first piece. The second is the set of values. Every religious movement. Every spirituality, coalesces around a set of things that things that they think are right and wrong, things that they think are sacred and to be protected and revered and things that they, that they think are profane or or worthy of disrespect, not necessarily the last one, but definitely the first one. And that's important because part of the way that you build community is by having people of like mind, right? I mean, we talk about a pagan community and you know, you're not gonna find any group that's really much more diverse than that. But the one thing that we do have in common is that most of us share a set of values around. Independence around personal sovereignty, around consent, around equality around inclusiveness. And of course there are exceptions to these rules, but they are not the rule. They are the exception. Yucca: Right. Well, and, and those particular qualities or properties when there's exceptions. It's usually there's one or two exceptions, but then the others are held, right. Mark: Right. Yucca: Kind of like a metal in chemistry. Right. You have all these properties, you remember in chemistry class that made you memorize, like, oh, it's conductive and it's ductile and all the, you know, there's but there's a few exceptions, right? Mercury is liquid at room temperature, but it's still a metal, but most of the others they're, they're solid at room temperature. Right. So it's like that. Mark: Yeah, exactly, exactly that. So you've got your cosmology, you've got your set of values. And then the last is a set of practices. And this is where a religion differs from a philosophy, in my opinion, UN under my definition, because a philosophy can have a set of values and a cosmology, and you can talk about 'em all day long, but that's not the same thing as a a. As a religion, which has holidays rituals, observances modes of dress dietary restrictions, in some cases, all these kind of strictures around behavior and, and prescriptions of behavior. That go into a, a ritual practice. And so when I was creating atheopagan, this is the model that I used. The cosmology was the easy part because all I had to do was point to science and say, listen to them. The values part, I spent a lot of time on thinking about what the definition of the sacred is. And I came up with the four sacred pillars and then the 13 principles, which are ethical principles for. Best to live our lives. Yucca: Which we have episodes on. We should revisit that soon. Actually. I Mark: We should. Yucca: We really should it's but because I think that would've, we were still the beginning of 20, 21, or we might've still been in 2020 when we did those, but the, yeah. Mark: It's it's been a while. So the idea there, and this, this is something that was a little radical for the pagan world because the pagan world, people tend not to wanna be told what to do. They're very, very. know, reactive to the idea of anybody controlling them. So there's very little in the way of developed ethics in most of paganism at least modern Neo paganism. Yucca: Right. Mark: And I feel like lets us off the hook for having to be ethical people. We do have responsibilities to the earth. We have responsibilities to one another. We have responsibilities to future generations and we need to conduct ourselves in a manner that's consistent with that. And then there are also principles that just have to do with how to be a happy and a good person like Humor and perspective, for example, you know, being able to find the humor in things and being able to laugh at yourself are ways to stay humble and there are ways to enjoy your life and to be able to deal with hardship in a way that that lightens it to some Yucca: Mm. Mm. Mark: So that was the value system, the four pillars and the 13 principles. And then came practices and that's where the paganism part really came in with the wheel of the year holidays daily practices, observances of the cycles of the moon rituals, just for whatever purposes we need them for like a job search or. Recovering from grief or Rite of passage to become, you know, to go from being a teenager, to being an adult, for example. And the pagan community really what's the word I'm looking for? Excels really excels at that aspect of religiosity because we're encouraged to create our own rituals and we learn to be really creative and effective at transforming consciousness through the use of ritual technologies. Yucca: Right. Mark: So. Yucca: We're often described as the religion of doing right. It's about what we do. And there, of course is the belief component. But the, the, one of the things that unites pagans often is what we do. Not necessarily what we believe. Mark: right. What they call an ortho religion as opposed to an oxic religion. Right. Yucca: yeah  Mark: this is very different than many of the. The predominant Christian sex that exist around us because they have prescribed rituals. I mean, the sermon may be different every week, but the ritual itself, the mass, all that kind of stuff. It's the same all the time. And it it's very carefully stipulated. Exactly. You need to do at a given time of year and the priesthood don't have a lot of flexibility in that. Whereas in paganism you may not have priesthood at all, which we don't in atheopagan. Yucca: Right. Well, I mean, anyone can become a cleric if they, if they wanna go to the website and sign up so that you can, you know, perform marriages legally and that sort of thing. But, but we don't have anything where. Anybody is in a higher position or any sort of hierarchy, Mark: That's right. Yeah. The idea there is everybody should have the. To marry other people or conduct funerals or whatever, if that's what they want to do and provide that service to the community. But being an atheopagan cleric is a service commitment. It's not an elevation in status. Yucca: Right. Well, you're not from a different cast. Mark: No. And you're, and you're not a gatekeeper of secret knowledge or, you know, special rights that only you can do or any of that stuff. We don't have that. Some pagan traditions. Yucca: mm-hmm. Mark: and that's, that's what they do, but it's not what we do. So that's what I think of when I think of a religion. And what I'm always looking for is can you think of any religious traditions or spiritual traditions that don't include those three things? Yucca: No. I mean, I can think of. The one thing that I can think of that isn't, that doesn't usually get listed as a religion, but has, well, no, some of the, some of the philosophies kind of start to. Blur into that with particular practices. Right. But then they don't come along with Cosmo. I'm thinking of stoicism for instance, but stoicism doesn't come along with a, with a cosmology, but it comes a you've got values and practices, not necessarily holidays. So, but in terms of something that is seen really as a religion all of the ones that I have exposure to. Seem like they've got something there. Now many of them don't have, there was something that you didn't say, and that was God's right now that may be included in some people's cosmology, but we don't think that you have to believe in a God or a deity to be, or the supernatural at all, for it to be a religion. That's just one particular flavor of cosmology. Mark: right. And it's the kind that has ended up dominating the religious spiritual space for thousands of years. But that doesn't mean that it's the only way to have a spirituality, which I mean, some people try to debate with, but we've got thousands of people that are practicing this thing. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: tell us that it's not spirituality or not religion? Yucca: Or it's just spirituality at a certain point. Like I, for me, it becomes like a, okay. Fine. You can say we're not a religion, but I mean, we are like, you could say that we're not, but we are in, you know, we have legal status to say so as well, Mark: That's true. Yes. We, we have been recognized by the internal revenue service as meeting the characteristics for a religious nonprofit organization. So,  Yucca: paperwork. Mark: there, there is that. Yeah. I think one of the things. Religion and spirituality that it's always important to bear in mind when we talk about this stuff is that there are no universally accepted definitions for either of those terms. Yucca: right. Mark: And very learned people with lots of letters after their names, who specialize in these things, disagree, vehemently about what they need. So it's. It's not really our job to try to resolve all that. All I know is that of all of the spiritual or religious traditions that I have been able to learn about worldwide. They've all had a cosmology, a set of values and a set of practices. Yucca: Yeah, Mark: And in many cases that cosmology is populated by one or more gods or spirits or sacred powers of one kind or another. I'm thinking about the African diasporic religion with the law and I, I know very little about this, but those, I don't know whether those are considered gods or whether they're considered to be, you know, powerful spirits that we, we create arrangements with through our own ritual behavior and offerings. But all of those are. Stories that we tell ourselves about the nature of the world. Right? And that's what a cosmology is. Science tells a story about the nature of the world. Just like all those other ones do. The difference is that science uses evidence and analysis and critical thinking to, to support the claims that it makes. Yucca: Mm-hmm well, and one thing about the cosmology is that it seems to often reflect the political and social structures that the people. And I dunno if this is a chicken or egg sort of situation, but that the people are in, right. So if we are looking at Christianity and we're looking at the development of it and what parts of the world it came from and what the political structures were at those time periods. Well, you know, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, the words even have, have carried over, right. People refer to God as the Lord. Right. And this would've, this is coming from a time period where people, you know, we had very defined. Cast system where we had the peasants and the Lord and you know, different names depending on what culture. And I think that that's probably one of the reasons that it has one of the many reasons that that particular religion has been falling out of fashion the recent time is because our political structures are moving from. That there's the, the nobility and the peasantry. I mean, on some levels we have this extreme gap that's happening as well, but we just don't, but there isn't the loyalty to it. Right. We're not loyal to our one percenters. We have very different feeling towards them. But that in the, in the past, there was, there was a reason to try and keep your, the, your peasants or country people. Having a sense of obligation and loyalty to the nobility. Mark: Right. And I think it bears saying that that's not a coincidence. I mean, the religious systems that have been chosen by ruling classes in order to maintain the the. Their power is not an accident. Constantine chose to convert the Roman empire to Christianity. And in the process, he redefined so much of Christianity into an authoritarian religion that you were supposed to submit to. Yucca: Right. Mark: The and at its root. Almost all flavors of Christianity are still that ENT. They, they poit a ENT relationship with the divine or the sacred that we're supposed to bow down. And there's something wrong with us that has to be cleansed. And we have to seek salvation in order to get this stain off of us. All of that works very well if you're the king. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Right. That works really well. If you get to decide who gets the thing that washes off the stain and who doesn't and if you're collecting the taxes, right? Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: So a symbiotic relationship between between religion and political power has existed in almost all places at almost all times. I mean, I would say the same thing about Buddhism. Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: Because in the case of Buddhism, the entire belief is life is suffering. Learn these mental techniques so that you can suffer less. Yucca: mm-hmm Mark: That's great. If you live in a completely authoritarian, totalitarian state, it it's not, you know, stand up and fight. Instead, it's sit quietly and learn these techniques that will help you not to suffer under this, you know, deeply unfair and oppressive system. Now in modern times many Buddhist, especially in the west have adopted strongly political positions and they advocate that out of their values of things like loving kindness. And that's great. But when we look at the history of where it came from, I think it's fair to say that once again, it was a choice that worked really well for the ruling class. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Paganism is very different than that. Paganism is religion with agency. We don't see ourselves as. Sinful or inherently damaged. We don't see ourselves as needing absolution of some kind of sin. Yucca: Right. Mark: We see ourselves as beautiful and luminous and flawed and problematic, and everybody has their trauma and damage that they work to recover from. And we all work to lift one another up as best we can. In order to achieve the, the actualization of ourselves as individuals and as a community. Yucca: right. And we see ourselves as natural and part of this world. Mark: Yes. And this world, is it for us, not an afterlife that you're trying to qualify for, or that you're afraid of. You know, there's, there's none of that extortionary model going on there. Some pagans do believe in some kind of an afterlife, but not to the extent that they're willing to you know, Have a miserable life in this life so that they can go to VHA that that's that's. Yucca: Right. Mark: That's just not the way that we approach these things. And I, I have to say just as a caveat, I'm generalizing about pagans. Now. It's very hard to generalize about pagans. There's probably somebody out there who's suffering for Valhalla, just, just to make me wrong. But generally speaking, what I'm saying here in my experience is what's true. Yucca: That reflects my experience as well. Yeah. So we're making some big, big generalizations. That's it seems to be the general case. Mark: So we really need to talk about this sin thing. It is profound. How impactful and damaging it is to people who live in societies that are dominated by the idea that people need some kind of spiritual washing in order to be okay. Can be I mean, And it permeates so much of our society. I mean, I, I think about Jewish mother jokes. Right. And they're all around guilt and you know, sense of, you know, I'll just sit here in the dark. Well, and then I'm gonna feel guilty because I wasn't sufficiently kind to my mother. Right. Idea that we should be living with guilt and shame and that our bodies are dirty and that sex is dirty. And all of those things, we are just so awash in that, that we can't even imagine a society that where it isn't. So even for those of us that are living our lives, Explicitly not to be that way. We are still inside ourselves, struggling with some of that same shame, some of that same body consciousness, because we were steeped in it, growing up in this culture. Yucca: Right. Yeah. Even, even coming from families that were pagan families or were atheists, right. It's just all around us. Right. Mark: right. Yucca: I mean, I can tell you as a child, how many times I heard someone go, Ew, that's so wrong. Right. That's just wrong. Right. Just about normal, you know, human things, right. Or, you know, you showed your shoulder. Oh, no Mark: Oh no. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Oh God. Yeah. And just because of, I mean, I was raised in an atheist household but. An extremely Sort of sexually phobic household, Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: shameful. I mean, I never even got the talk, right. A, a book appeared on the coffee table for a week and then disappeared. And apparently that was supposed to tell me about sex, but I never read the book, so I kinda missed out on all that. I had to figure it out later. But yeah, you know, lots of shame, lots of just the usual kind of Protestant stuff. So that's one way that the pagan approach and particularly the non theist pagan approach really differs from these predominant religious movements that dominate. Our society. Yucca: Right. Is that we're choosing to not use that framework. Right. Although it's something that we have to be conscious about because we're surrounded by it. We are, you know, we, we, it's part of the history that so much, so many of us come from that we can often fall back on it without even realizing that that's what we're doing. Mark: right. And there can be added dangers because if you're sex positive, for example, but you haven't really got your mind around consent. Yucca: mm-hmm, Mark: And you still haven't figured out that you're still steeped in patriarchy. Well, then you become an abuser, right? You become someone who's who assaults people. So it's really important for us to internalize all of these things as a package, you know, recognizing the ways that things are distorted and rendered unfair and iJust. In our culture so that we can be conscious about how we conduct ourselves, even in the context of being sex positive. Yucca: Right. Mark: This I think is, can be said to be. The big failing of the sort of sex free for all of the late sixties, early seventies. It was still very male dominated and the whole idea of consent culture hadn't really rolled around yet. Yucca: Right. Mark: So there were a lot of women who ended up having experiences that they did not want to have. And Hopefully, at least we in the pagan community have learned since then. I've been encouraged to see so much emphasis on consent and and integrity around relation relationships and sexuality in the pagan community. Yucca: Yeah. You know, that was something that I was so delighted to see at the sun tree retreat where consent, and I'm not even talking about sexual consent. I don't know. Maybe people were doing that. I didn't wasn't involved in any of that, but, but it just feel like may people, it was just so normalized where people, you know, asked permission to give a hug. Right. And I had my, my. My oldest child with me there, and nobody touched her without her permission. I watched over and over again, and that's not something that happens in our normal culture. People just think that they can touch a kid without the kid's permission. They might ask me as the parent for my permission, which is somewhat bizarre to me that. I mean, I appreciate asking the parent, but it's actually the kid who it's their body. Right. Whether you can, you know, pick them up or hug them or hold their hand, or, you know, you ask the kid. And that was something that, that just was so normalized at the sun tree retreat was just delightful to be around like, oh, I just feel so safe with all of these people. Like everybody is really respectful of that. And it was just, and it wasn't awkward, right. Because the first time we try and start making changes in a culture, it feels weird and awkward, Mark: It does. Yucca: right. To be like to stop and ask before you touch somebody, if it's okay to do so. But, but we've made that not awkward. Mark: Yeah. Yeah, that was lovely. I, I really appreciated that too. You, you touch on a subject that I think is another major difference between the mainstream religious traditions and. Hours, which is the possessory model Yucca: Right. Mark: because in UN under patriarchal religion, children are possessions and women are possessions of men. Yucca: yeah. Mark: And I mean, that's just all very awful, but in my opinion, but that's. The way it rolls and that possessory model extends to the entire rest of the world where life becomes something where of wealth or goods or particular desired things becomes the purpose of living and. And worst of all, in my opinion, land ownership, Yucca: Hm. Mark: I, I have a real problem with the idea of land ownership. Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: I, I don't think a human should own anything that outlives that that's, that's going to be around for billions of years after they're gone. And I know that that's the model that we have and, you know, that's how capitalism works. Everything is a possession. Everything is a commodity to be bought, but in my own experience if land is in the commons and we're all responsible for taking care of it, and we have an, an internalized reciprocal relationship with the earth, I think we just end up in a much better. World, Yucca: Hmm. Mark: but of course that's just a thought experiment on my part. They were, they were doing it here in the Americas before settlers got here. But Yucca: It depends on which group, but yeah, right there was, there were, there were and are many, many different tribes. Yeah, I mean, that's a, that's a whole nother topic. That'd be interesting. There'd be a lot to, to sort out with that.  Mark: I mean, it's, it's tough because you have well-intentioned land stewards. Right. And you, you want them to be able to be the people that are managing lands because they're doing it well. Right. Or at least they're trying to be doing it well, like the national park service which sometimes does it well, and sometimes does it not so well, but it's Yucca: we're private folks. Right? Right. Like I work with a lot. I mean, myself, I'm a landowner and I have a lot of, and I work with other landowners and in working on restoring our ecosystems and, you know,  Mark: Yeah. Yucca: there's also, there's a. There's also a, a risk when things are sometimes what everybody is doing, may not always be the wisest thing to be. Mark: Yeah, fair enough. Yucca: There's, you know, there's certainly certain, you know, health or so-called health and political movements that are happening right now in certain places and not in others. And some that I look at and I go, whew, I. I think you're off. I think you're really off. I don't think that that's what the sciences is that there really isn't good evidence for that. I think the science is being misrepresented and yet things are being forced in one way or another. The part of the world that I'm from. We, we have had traditions here for hundreds of years and had people come in with very strong ideas about what we should be doing with public lands and not, and, you know, killed very old traditions. Right. You've got people coming in and thinking that that you shouldn't be that cattle on the land is bad. Just universally, no nuance there. Right. And then peop and then the people who've been doing it for hundreds of years, can't do it anymore. And their, you know, their livelihoods and their culture and their traditions have just been taken away because people came in and who were outsiders? Frankly, right. They come in from Northern California and from all these other places and go, you're doing our way now. And then they split anyways, they're gone. Most of the people who made those who made those rules, aren't even here and leave the, the destruction in, in their wake. So I, I hear on the one hand what you're saying that I think that it's a, that it's a very tricky matter, Mark: Well, I agree. I agree. And it's always. Once again, you know, the, the other big aspect of the over culture, other than the religious overlay and all the sort of value pieces is capitalism. Yucca: mm-hmm Mark: And it's very hard for us to imagine any other system than capitalism because we're steeped in that too. And it's a fair question. Well, if you're not gonna have capitalism, what are you gonna have instead? Yucca: and how are you gonna transition there Mark: Right. And how are you gonna get there? And that's, it's a legitimate question and I don't claim to have all the answers to that. What I know is that, you know, especially here, you know, watching what happens here in California, where we're so populated, you know, every, every. Get rich, quick developer wants to grab parcels on the edge of cities so that they can throw up some kind of quick, make a buck project and then head out of town. They're not gonna own it. They're just gonna throw it up and sell it. And, you know, we lose a lot of farmland that way. We have whole huge sprawling cities built on top of some of the finest farmland in the world. Yucca: Right. Mark: So. I don't know. Yeah. Yucca: a pretty impressive fault line too. Mark: Yes. Yucca: I might not be the, just putting that out there might might be maybe someplace that you might wanna reevaluate where you're putting large population centers. That's another question looking at well then where, where do you put large populations that Mark: Well, you D well, you don't put 'em somewhere where you don't have any water. That's that is where I would start. Yucca: that's a, and that's gonna be a problem in the area. We are look at it with the developments going up here and going, but there isn't you're you literally will not have water in 15 years. Like, what are you doing? Right. Mark: Yeah. Yucca: So, Mark: Yeah. We're gonna see suburban ghost towns. I'm sure. In places that just simply can no longer serve water to the, the people that they're under contract to. Okay. But we're, we're a. Yucca: off the field. Yeah. And, and I should say, I did mention, you know, I. I actually do level folks in Northern California, but that was, that is one of the specific areas where we've had issues, where people come from a very different cultural area, very different attitudes, access to resource and money. And then, you know, come here, make a bunch of changes and then split to the next new, cool place to be in. And. Know, those of us who were just kinda left behind, like, oh, thanks. that? Okay. You just you know, tripled our property taxes and priced out of our own town and destroyed our livelihood stake. So yeah. Mark: Let's go back to religion. Yucca: Religion. But the, the attitude, some of those attitudes, I think. They come out of our, what we've been talking about with the religious cosmology and the political systems, which informed those cosmologies Mark: Yes. Yes. I really think that's so, the, the very concept of democracy struck right at the heart of the domination by Christianity of the west. Yucca: mm-hmm Mark: Um, the, because of course the. The core principle of political rulership in Europe anyway, was the divine right of Kings, which was a declaration that was made by first the Catholic church. And then, you know, church of England and whoever that the Yucca: Jesus said give onto Caesar. Is that where they were getting it from? Mark: I have no idea, honestly, I don't, I don't know where it comes from, but there was some kind of I rationalization and that, that if your king is cuz God wants you to be king and therefore the structure of our society unfair and oppressive as it may be is God's will. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: And the idea of democracy really strikes. The, the foundations of that. And as problematic as the founders of the United States were in so many ways and as Yucca: Even for their own time period at many boy. Mark: yes. In, in some cases, even for their own time period nonetheless. What they chose to do in setting up the United States was really very radical at the time. Now it it's not radical anymore. It needs a refurbish, but at the time and of course it was an inspiration for the French revolution. Yucca: mm-hmm. Mark: Which was also seeking to overthrow specifically the domination of not only the royalty, but of the clergy class the, they, they very much called out the churches as being culpable in the oppression of the people. Yucca: Yeah, it's a really interesting time, period. Mark: Very. Yucca: I mean, I think most time periods are interesting, but there's, there was so much change. Happening in the Western world at that point. Mark: Yes. Yes. And unfortunately what ended up happening was that they ended up with a dictator, but eventually they became a democracy and now Francis in reasonably good shape overall in terms of actually having a functioning democracy, of course, they've got a weird fascist part of their country that wants to vote. Marine Lappen. But other than that, but I, I digress. I digress, Yucca: gone on one tangent already. Mark: right. Let's okay. Let's leave it there. So when we talk about paganism, really what we're talking about is a, a radically different way of understanding ourselves, our relationship to the world, our relationship to our society around us and how. We envision an ideal world, all of those things. And it took me a lot of years to kind of soak up all of those things because you know, a lot of it, it's not like there's a book, there's no secret text in paganism. That'll just tell you, well, you know, here it is, this is, this is how we understand the world. And that's part of the reason why. You know, it's good for us to do a podcast like this to sort of spell out, you know, this is how we have come to understand living as pagans in the United States confronted with the issues that all of us confront. Yucca: Right. Well, and we should, at this point, say we do not speak for all naturalistic pagans. We don't speak for all athe pagans. We're, you know, We can talk about general themes that we see in most people or most atheopagan. But, but again, we're two people, right? And that's a, that's another big difference is, you know, we're mark. You're not the, you're not the Pope of, of atheopagan. Right. Mark: I'm the Nope of atheism  Yucca: And, you know, there is a, there is a atheopagan society council. And, but again, we don't have the that's that's like you were saying, those are positions of service, right? That's that's, those are jobs that we're doing to try and help the community. Not because we're bossing and making decisions for everybody else. Mark: And that's a part of the core values of paganism is that we value diversity. And in valuing diversity, that means that we have to acknowledge that we're not all going to get into lockstep in March. Now hopefully we can agree about some common ideas and you know, proceed from there in order to help improve our world and to have good lives. But we also have to acknowledge that there are gonna be people on the fringes that disagree with us about core stuff. And they're still pagans. Yucca: Yep. Mark: They're still, you know, they're still doing rituals and maybe they're worshiping gods or, you know, observing the wheel of the year, whatever it is. You know, we're not, we're not trying to gate keep people who don't fit our model. Yucca: Yeah, well, and there's, there's a good cautionary tale about being in lockstep. There's a bridge in R. Which is a city in Southern Spain, and it has a very famous, beautiful bridge. And it's the stone bridge. It's amazing. It goes across this huge Gorge, but it's the second bridge that was built because the first bridge that was built, they went across, there was a procession. I think it was Simon. And they, the bridge collapsed because everybody was in step when they went across the bridge Mark: So they hit the residence frequency of the bridge Yucca: it collapsed. Yeah. Mark: it to death. Yucca: Yeah. And so when they rebuilt the bridge, they built the most overdone, its beautiful stone bridge. It's huge. Really look it up. It's just amazing. But Mark: It's gorgeous. Yucca: okay. Yeah, I lived there for a year. So walked across that bridge, you know, every day just stunning, but yeah, the first bridge came down and that's not, you know, there's warnings about other bridges. They tell you don't do that. When you go across, you know, you have to, don't be in step. Mark: The Romans learned this they, they had outstanding orders that their legions had to break step to cross bridges. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: and it's still a military thing today. You know, if you're gonna cross a bridge, you do not March across because you never know if you're gonna hit the wrong frequency and knock your bridge down. Yucca: So, bring that back as a metaphor of, you know, I think it's probably a pretty good thing that we aren't all in step with each other because we could, you know, we could hit that wrong frequency. So Mark: Yep. Yep. So what else did we have on our, on our Yucca: You know, Mark: of things to talk about? Yucca: we had to put as a category to talk about specifically how we differ from Christianity. But I think we've really been covering that. We kind of woven that in. Is there anything else that you wanted to mention specifically about that? Mark: Not, not that I can think of except insofar as acknowledging religious trauma. Yucca: Hmm. Mark: A lot of people arrive in both atheist spaces and in pagan spaces, having really been wounded by their experience with mainstream religions. Because they've been told that they're valueless and that they're tarnished and that they're That, that their only value is as a servant of God and that they're sinful and all those things. And in many cases, and particularly people that are marginalized you know, who, who can suffer greatly at the hands of mainstream religion. And I just feel like. It's important for us in the pagan community to acknowledge that this is happening and to do what we can to provide resources for people so that they can heal. When I've attended atheist conferences, what I've seen is a lot of angry people who just wanna argue against religion Yucca: Right, Mark: and, you know, having never been. A Christian or, you know, a member of any of those religions. I don't have that injury. And so my question is always, okay, well, so we're atheist now. What, Yucca: right. Mark: how do we live? How do we be happy? What's important. What, you know, what do we do? Yucca: Right. Mark: So, I really encourage our listeners. If you feel like that woundedness describes your situation, there are organizations and we can put a link in the show notes for people who are recovering from religion to get help and you know, really welcome you to our communities, if you choose to be in them. And Hope that you will find yourself feeling better about that stuff soon and able to move on into a better part of your life. Yucca: Right. Well, and that's also something to emphasize that we don't believe. What we do is necessarily the best fit for everybody, right? We're not worried about converting anyone. You know, we wanna be welcome welcoming and inclusive and invite, but certainly we have no interest in trying to go and. Make you believe the way we do or change your opinion on this or any, you know, this is, you know, this is by, this is a at will thing that we're doing, right. You're invited to join us and we'll love if you do, but if you don't, that's fine. Right? Mark: As, as, as people have sometimes said, if you don't like it, you can't have any Yucca: And so, well, This has been a good conversation. Mark: Yeah, I think so too. Thank you, Yucca. I really enjoyed kicking this around with you and I imagine we'll get some interesting feedback as always you can reach us@thewonderpodcastcuesatgmail.com and thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next week. Yucca: By everyone.    .

Mark -- As a disciple of Christ you will be rejected and face persecution and even death, but you can do so because Christ also knew rejection, persecution, and death.

Mark -- As a disciple of Christ you will be rejected and face persecution and even death, but you can do so because Christ also knew rejection, persecution, and death.

There are some important terms you're going to come across as you prepare for retirement. Having a basic understanding of these will help you achieve financial success, so we'll cover what they mean and what you should know on today's episode. And don't worry. We won't go quite so far down the rabbit hole where we expect you to be able to explain how a company's P/E ratio meshes with it's Alpha and Beta ratings to determine how much stock you should buy. Helpful Information: PFG Website: https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/ Contact: 813-286-7776 Email: info@pfgprivatewealth.com Disclaimer: PFG Private Wealth Management, LLC is a registered investment adviser. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice. Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investment involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed. Information expressed does not take into account your specific situation or objectives and is not intended as recommendations appropriate for any individual. Listeners are encouraged to seek advice from a qualified tax, legal, or investment adviser to determine whether any information presented may be suitable for their specific situation. Past performance is not indicative of future performance. Transcript of Today's Show: For a full transcript of today's show, visit the blog related to this episode at https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/podcast/ ----more---- Mark: Hey everybody welcome into the podcast. Thanks for hanging out with John and Nick and I, as we talk about Retirement Planning Redefined here on the podcast. As always, don't forget to subscribe to us on whatever platform you like to use. Find all the information you need at pfgprivatewealth.com. That's the guys website pfgprivatewealth.com. Lot of good tools, tips, and resources to be found there. We're going to have another conversation today about some financial jargon. This is more kind of investment terms you might want to know or have heard and maybe you want to get a better understanding on, especially if you're sitting down and you're shopping for a professional or something like that. You want to kind of understand some of these things that you're talking about. Now we're not going to go super deep. We're not going to get into PE ratios and alphas and betas and all that kind of stuff, but we're going to keep it kind of high level. So we'll jump into that this week on the podcast, Nick, what's going on, buddy? How you doing?   Nick: Pretty good. Pretty good. Staying busy. We're recording this, just kind of closing up tax season. So happy that that is over for-   Mark: I bet.   Nick: Everybody that is at least not filing an extension.   Mark: Yeah.   Nick: But yeah, it's obviously a lot going on in the world. So it's been keeping us pretty busy.   Mark: Yeah that's true. Very true. John, what about you buddy? You glad tax season's over?   John: Yeah. Yeah. It's a fun kind of hump to get over.   Mark: I like that little pause. It's fun. Yeah.   John: Yeah. So, no, it's good. It's kind of a mark that people have on their calendar, so that's over with, and really we start to kind of get busy afterwards.   Mark: Yeah.   John: Because a lot of people kind of delay meetings until after tax season, so excited to get back at it. And then also excited that NBA playoffs started. So Boston Celtics are playing the Nets right now.   Mark: Alright now, there you go.   John: Gearing up for that, so-   Mark: There you go. Very good. Well we probably should have done a show really on tax planning versus tax preps right after tax season because really tax planning is something you should be doing all year long with your retirement professional anyway, but we're not going to do that this week. Maybe we'll do that here in the next couple of weeks, we'll come up and do something.   Mark: But for now let's talk about some terms that people hear and probably should know. Maybe you know, maybe you have that kind of cursory high level view, whatever the case might be. Maybe you don't. So let's talk about a few of these. Let's kind of start with fiduciary guys. And this is a term that I think people should know. They should know what it is. I kind of wish, and I was thinking about this before we started that our politicians had to do what fiduciaries have to do, right? They have that legal, moral, ethical responsibility to do what's right for their client AKA us as American citizens. I wish our politicians had to be fiduciaries, but either way explain what it is and maybe a little bit of the difference between that and like suitability.   John: Yeah. So fiduciary, especially in our world's investment advisor, it's where the fiduciary is obligated to put the client's best interests ahead of their own. So really looking to do what's best for the client, regardless of any other factors. And what you mentioned there with as far as, how does that compare to suitability, where kind of like a broker has to recommend something that's suitable for the client, so there's a big difference when you start to kind of analyze that is something might be suitable for you, but it might not be the best thing for your situation.   Mark: Right.   John: Or maybe there's other things out there that are better. So fiduciary has the due diligence and say, "Hey, I'm making this recommendation. And based on my expertise, my knowledge, everything I've compared it to this is what I believe is the best for you." And also if there's any conflict of interests for the advisor as a fiduciary, they must disclose that to you upfront.   Mark: Yeah.   John: So one thing, what people really need to do when they're interviewing advisors or kind of taking that step to try to find someone to work with, it's really one of the first questions should be asking. I'd say the good thing is the industry is really going in this direction-   Mark: Mm-hmm (affirmative).   John: Over the last, decade or so. It's really been kind of going, fiduciary, fiduciary, so that's.   Mark: Making that the standard, making it more the standard?   John: Yeah. Yeah, no, I think that's a great point. So if I'm getting this right, then maybe to kind of break this down for people, and Nick feel free to chime in, but so if there's three options available, suitability would say, "Hey, any of these three technically work for my client, but this one actually pays me better or there's a reward of a trip or something like that attached to it." You're not doing the wrong thing by picking that. It's still suitable. Whereas a fiduciary has to go with the absolute best thing for the client period. Is that a fair way to break that down in layman's terms?   Nick: Yeah, I think that's a pretty fair way to kind of break it down and it can get tricky because when you really get into the nitty gritty in theory, people can argue about what's better now versus what might be better down the road and that sort of thing.   Mark: Right.   Nick: But if anything, I think what's important for people to understand is the conflicts of interests, the potential conflicts of interest and where they come from. So, if you're working with an advisor that is tied in with a parent company that has proprietary products, then they're probably not able to function as a fiduciary. So-   Mark: Gotcha.   Nick: Understanding that there's a conflict of interest, a potential conflict of interest, there is just something that people should ask about so that they understand it. It can be from experience just kind of chatting with people. It can get a little overwhelming for people to kind of really drill down understanding the difference between fiduciary and standard versus a suitability standard. But people oftentimes understand conflict of interest. And just to kind of piggyback a little bit on your short little rant earlier about politicians, many people would be shocked to know that many politicians are able to invest in companies even though there may be conflicts of interests.   Mark: Yeah.   Nick: And the fact that's able to happen. And there's some websites that track those sort of things, but oftentimes they're privy to information that will impact a company in the marketplace and they're able to take advantage of it even though, the rest of the country can't do that, so-   Mark: Yeah, I was just even talking financially. In just their basic decision making when they pass laws.   Nick: For sure. For sure. But that's a good example of them not passing laws that-   Mark: True.   Nick: Aren't good for everybody.   Mark: Well and to John's point, so there's nothing wrong with asking, right? When you go in and sit down with someone, you just say, "Hey, are, are you a fiduciary?" Right? That's a fair question, and there's nothing wrong with asking that.   Nick: Agreed.   Mark: Yeah. Okay. All right. So let's move on to the other big term right now that everybody's getting hit over the head with, on a regular basis, and that's inflation. At the time we're doing this podcast guys, the CPI numbers came out a couple of weeks ago for March, pretty ugly. Gross is a term that has been thrown around quite a bit some of these numbers, 8.5% on the inflation, we're talking what 48% on gas, 35% up on used cars, food 13 to 17% up. So inflation break it down a little bit.   Nick: Yeah. So inflation has to do with spending power of money. And so one of the easiest ways for people to kind of think about it is, you mentioned food for example, one of the things that we kind of joke around with people is they were able to a couple years ago, do you remember when you could walk out of Publix and get everything you needed for 70, 80 bucks versus it now costing 100, $120 for the same amount of stuff. And the tricky thing with inflation is that it's there on a consistent basis year to year, but every 10 to 15 years, it kind of creeps up on us. And then we realize, Hey, this is kind of annoying.   Nick: And then obviously we have times we're in right now where there's some hyper inflation and kind of pocket books are getting hit. The one thing that I would say just to kind of pour some water on it is that although there are some real substantial issues that people are dealing with, there are some kind of, I guess, what we would almost call acute factors that are having an impact on it, that we would hope subside to a certain extent within the next year or two. But also there are going to be ramifications that we're already starting to see where the FED is doing things to try to combat inflation, like increasing interest rates, which we're kind of already on the docket, but has been getting pushed down. The cans been getting kicked down the road for a while.   Nick: And so things like mortgages, mortgage rates are now I think mid fives I read, whereas a year ago, closer to three. And I was just having a conversation with somebody to kind of put that in real world numbers. A half a million dollar mortgage at rates a year ago, a half a million dollar financed amount is from a monthly payment standpoint is equivalent to around 370,000 now, or if you look at it inverse half a million dollar mortgage at current rates is going to cost you around $700 a month more than it was a year ago. So that's going to have a real impact on housing prices and a lot of other things as well. So those are some real world examples of how inflation kind of impacts our life.   Mark: All right. So yeah, obviously we're hyper aware, we've talked about it before a little bit, but inflation we always kind of think of, at least I do it anyway, like calories, right? We know it exists and we don't often put a lot of thought into it until it's slapping us in the face, so to speak. And it's definitely doing that right now, so a lot people very concerned about that. So when we are talking about that, what happens is you start thinking, well maybe I should take a little more risk or whatever the case is with my portfolio to try to outpace inflation or keep up with it or whatever the case is, especially in these crazy times. So that leads us into risk tolerance guys. So what is your risk tolerance? And is that a wise move to try to take on more risk to combat something? Usually it's not.   John: No, it's not. And this is one of the most probably important things in building a portfolio that someone should really take a look at, and it's often overlooked. So risk tolerance is, to kind of bring it down to the simplest form is how much loss is an investor willing to take in their portfolio? How much volatility can they tolerate? So one of the things that we do when we are building a portfolio for our clients, the first thing actually is we have them go through a risk tolerance questionnaire to determine, are they conservative, moderate, aggressive? And from there we really help us design the portfolio so that way we can kind of match up the expected volatility of the portfolio with kind of what they could bear.   John: Because one of the worst things you could do investing is jumping around. And I hate to say it seeing a little bit right now I've already kind of feel a few phone calls I'm like, hey what should we do with the market? And if this volatility's already got you nervous and it hasn't really, it's been a pullback but it hasn't been anything too significant.   Mark: Right.   John: You really need to take a look at am I invested correctly because as we all know, as you shift to conservative or to cash, and then the next week the market just rally up and all of a sudden you just lost all. You realized your losses and didn't get to recover from it.   Mark: Yeah, knee jerk reaction is not the best right now. Right?   Nick: Yeah. And I would even jump in with that too going along with what John said where I think we have hit that point where people have forgotten what it's like to have bad markets, or even a normal market cycle of having a negative year. Even during COVID when the markets pulled back, 35, 40%, they bounced back by the end of the year. So it was never really realized. There was a short period of panic, but the recovery was quick, but.   Mark: Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Nick: There's a lot of people that don't remember that hey, there are going to be years where the market is down 10% for the year, the whole year. 12 whole months, so that's something that's interesting that's happening right now that we're seeing. Plus, historically where people would shift would be to fixed income or bonds. And that's not necessarily a safe place right now, either. So we're kind of in this, almost unicorn phase that only comes along every 50 or 60 years where there's not a lot of opportunities in many places. And so there's going to definitely have to be some patience involved-   Mark: I like that.   Nick: In the next 12 to 18 months.   Mark: Yeah. I like the unicorn phase. That's a good way of putting it. It's definitely been interesting, that's for sure. So do you guys kind of with the risk tolerance, is it kind of that number kind of system? Do you guys do that risk tolerance kind of thing where you kind of give someone almost like sleep number, if you will. If you're 100 or if you're a 20, how does that work?   John: Yeah. So how we do it and I've used actually some programs that do that. They give you a risk number based on how you answer questions. We have a set of some pretty good questions that give us an idea of what that person can kind of stomach.   Mark: Okay.   John: And what their expected return is. It's really, when you start to break it down, it's a lot of the same questions just asked differently to really kind of understand how the person ticks.   Mark: Yeah.   John: So we do a real good job of figuring that out. And then as advisors, part of our job is to make sure we put them in the appropriate portfolio based on how they answer.   Mark: Yeah. Because it's pretty easy to say conservative, and you go, what does that even mean? Right? Or I'm moderate.   John: Yeah.   Mark: Well what does that mean? That's probably a wide window, right?   John: It is.   Nick: Yeah. And then I would say one of the things that without it sounding like a commercial for ourselves, one of the things that we do that's a little bit different than some places that we do have what's called like a tactical tilt to how we manage money, where if we do have significant concerns, we will tamp down the risk. So maybe if somebody's normally in a portfolio that's a 50/50 mix stock to bond and what we would consider a moderate portfolio, if we have significant concerns in the market, we may drop them down to 30% on the stock side of things in certain cycles where we have high concerns. So sometimes what we found is that helps allay some fears for some people that there's some proactive potential changes, where if we really feel like it's going to hit the fan, we will make that change.   Mark: Right. Okay. So risk tolerance, another big one then definitely making sure that you're having that proper risk tolerance for yourself, especially in these inflationary times. When it becomes, it's hard to not feel, I think as humans, we feel like if we don't do something, we're doing something wrong or we have to take action or therefore we've made a mistake. And sometimes doing nothing can be a smart move. Especially in volatile times when it comes to a financial standpoint, if you don't know the correct answer, making no move might be a good place to start at least. That way you're not having that knee jerk reaction. And then of course, talk with a professional. Get some advice, and get a good strategy in place so that you know the right moves to make at the right time. Let's do another one here, guys, another technical one, dollar cost averaging, what is that?   Nick: So dollar cost averaging is the easiest example that most people have exposure to on a regular basis. And they don't probably realize that they're doing it is when people are contributing to their 401k. So every two weeks, a certain amount of your paycheck goes into your 401k and you have a set allocation and you are buying in to that allocation at whatever price it's at that point in time. So the thought process with dollar cost averaging is that you are balancing, you're investing over a period of time. Where sometimes you'll be buying at a premium, sometimes you'll be buying at a discount, but the objective is to continually invest and make sure that you are not trying to time the market.   John: And part of that is also what we're finding with the current market where it's at, with people with money on the sidelines, it could be a good way to kind of take some of the risk of putting all your money into the market and all of a sudden it dropping. So there's a strategy to basically say every, if I have 100,000 I want to put into the market every month or so, I'm going to be putting in 10 grand into it. That way, if it does dip down immediately, I only have $10,000 at risk. So dollar cost averaging, as Nick mentioned, most people are doing the 401k, not knowing it, but if you have money on the sideline in a volatile market, or if you're nervous, it is a good way to kind of get money that was on the sideline into the market.   Mark: Okay. All right. Well let's do one more guys and we'll wrap it up this week. Asset allocation, another big term we hear. We probably get that tossed around a little bit. Give us the kind of high level view of what that is. And because often I think people wind up feeling like they have a whole bunch of one thing and they're diversified because they've, I don't know, for example, I've got a whole bunch of mutual funds, so therefore I'm good. So explain what asset allocation is and is that correct? What I just said, is that really diversified or not?   John: Yeah. So asset allocation's kind of taken diversification to a different level. You could have seven different mutual funds, but if it's all the same type of funds, for example, like a large cap growth fund, they're going to do the same thing in reality when the market goes up or down. So when you do asset allocation, you're spreading your money, your portfolio within different asset classes, such as large cap stocks, small stocks that Nick mentioned, fixed income earlier, cash, some alternatives.   John: So what you do there is when you're building a portfolio and again, starting with your risk tolerance and your goals, you determine, hey my risk tolerance is X, here's my goals. I should be in a, let's just call it in income in growth portfolio. Well, what's the right mix of asset classes to make that work and to kind of bring it down to layman's terms here? Imagine kind of cooking, you're making recipe for a pie. The pie has certain ingredients to make it work and make it taste good. And that's basically what you're doing in your investments. It could be 20% large cap, 5% small cap, 20% fixed income, and our job as advisors and wealth management is we build that portfolio for the client if they hire us to do so.   Mark: Gotcha. Okay. All right. That's a good way of breaking that down. You just think about like a pie. So, and who doesn't love pie? So there you go. All right guys, thanks so much for the conversation this week. Good stuff talking about these technical terms, some jargon here. Hopefully we kept that pretty high level and it helped out with some of the things that you might be thinking or hearing. And if you've got questions, definitely reach out to the guys.   Mark: As always, before you take any action sit down. If you're already working with them, maybe share this podcast with someone who might benefit from it. If not, if you've been listening for a while, just reach out to them, have a conversation, and chat with them for yourself. You can find all of it at pfgprivatewealth.com. That's their website pfgprivatewealth.com. They're financial advisors at PFG Private Wealth, which makes a lot of sense. So make sure you subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify, all that good kind of stuff. That way you can catch past episodes as well as future episodes. For John and Nick I'm your host, Mark. We'll catch you next time here on Retirement Planning Redefined.

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com   S3E5 TRANSCRIPT: ----more---- Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts, Yucca.  Mark: And I'm the other one, Mark.  Yucca: And today we're talking about imagination, fantasy and Richard. Mark: Right?  Yucca: And we thought this was a, a lovely time to talk about it because for many people we're just coming out of are still really in a season of that, that we associate with new beginnings, with planning, with with planting those seeds for the, for the year to come. Mark: Right. Because in many places like yours, Yucca the ground is frozen and there's not a whole lot that you can be doing towards making something new, grow for the rest for the coming year, other than to think about it and imagine the future.  Yucca: And play on it and. Mark: And plan, you know, based on your imagined picture of that future, then you can plan the steps to get there. Right. And that is really the human special trick of all of all. I mean, we talk about our thumbs and they're great. Of all the things that humans are particularly capable of and adept at it's our ability to envision the imagined. And that includes the imagined future. and. what that means is that we have become creatures who are built around storytelling. There was an anthropologist, I don't remember his name, who, who actually called us homo something. I don't remember what it was, which meant the storytelling ape. Yeah.  Yucca: Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. 'cause that's what we do. Whatever, whatever culture you look at, wherever in the world, we're all telling stories. And we start that at a very, very young age, even before we're, we've really figured out the grammar of our mother language. We're telling stories we're playing. And that's, you know, when you look at at mammals mammals, And they play at whatever it is that they need to learn to succeed and survive as an adult. So you look at the low line Cubs and they're wrestling with each other and chasing each other and grabbing each other's tails. Well, humans, yeah, we run around and rough and tumble, but we play make-believe. From very, very early on, you know, we're picking up the sock and, you know, the feather and their characters in our minds, and they have incredible stories and personalities and interactions and, and all of that. And, and so that's what we really do. And that's, that's what that's part of what makes us successful. As a species and as individuals in our species is our ability to tell those stories, imagine, and to share those stories. Mark: Yes, exactly. And what this tells us of course is because this is happening at such an early age, is that this really is baked into us. This is, you know, something that comes in at a very low level of our development. And it's essential to us, you know, our ability to understand the idea of causality of action and consequence is, you know, and that things happen along a timeline, right? That there are, there are actors and those actors do things and those things have consequences. And so there's a result. And that that's the order that things happen. All of those are things that we have to learn, but we get them really early. And one of the things about our capacity for imagination is that our brains are not really built to distinguish the imagined from the. And this is the great paradox with memory, of course, because memories get edited all the time. You know, they, they, every time we retell a story to ourselves things get a little fuzzy around the edges and we just touch them up.  Yucca: Just fill that in.  Mark: Yeah. Just, you know, because we want the memory to be complete. It is not a volitional activity. There's nothing wrong with it. It's not about being dishonest. It's the way our brains work.  Yucca: Yeah. And it's, it's not really a conscious thing that we're doing. That's it's not like you're choosing, usually you're usually not choosing to modify that memory, but. And you're just filling in the details then  Mark: Right, right.  Yucca: it's like with our vision, you, you can actually see this. If you take your finger out, put it all the way to the edge of your vision, your peripheral vision, and slowly move your finger into the, in the front of your vision. You're going to find that you've got some blind spots. But we don't notice those blind spots. Our brain just fills it in for us, unless you're really, really looking for that blind spot. Mark: Right. Yeah. And that of course is caused by the place where the optic nerve connects with the retina. It doesn't have any light sensing cells over it. There's an actual hole in our vision, in our brains. Well, they do two things they fill in that hole to start with. And then they flip the whole thing upside down because our eyes actually project the lens in our eyes projects, an upside down image onto the retina at the back of the eye.  Yucca: Right. Just like a telescope, right? It works the same way. Is there a refractor? Yeah. Mark: Yeah. So. You know, our brains are doing a lot of stuff to massage our experience. Right. And this is something that we talk about a lot in non theists, paganism in terms of understanding supposedly supernatural experiences. Right. Because in every case with every experience we have, there is the, the perception. And then there's the story we developed to explain the perception  Yucca: Right. Mark: and the story. We actually have some choices about the perception. Our brain just does what it does and frequently it's trying to fill in very poor data. So we hear things that. That sound didn't actually come into our ears to create, or we see things that aren't created. My favorite example, I've used this before is when you're driving on the highway and there's a sign for an exit far, far down the road, and you could read it barely. You can see, you know, what road it is that that is the exit for, and as you get about halfway closer, those letters all rearrange themselves into what it actually said. Because your brain was trying to make sense out of the sign and it gave you one determination and the truth is it was something else.  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So the, our, our minds are incredibly powerful in how they can develop imagination in order to fill in the holes of what we perceive.  Yucca: Right. Another example is when you, somebody says something to you and you didn't really quite catch it and you hear something that's completely different than what they said. And you know, you have to say, wait, what did you say? Because what I heard.  Mark: Okay.  Yucca: Definitely was not what you said, and then they say it again and he couldn't. Oh, then it makes sense. Right. But we just fill it in. We hear something that's not really there.  Mark: Right. And that, in my opinion is where a lot of experiences of the supernatural come from. It's a. Femoral data that the brain fills in, and then it develops a story that this isn't a supernatural experience. Other people have different opinions about that, but it seems to me given what we know about the brain and about the universe, it's a lot more likely than the supernatural explanations that are often presented by people.  Yucca: Okay. That's what I suspect as well. Yeah.  Mark: So  Yucca: this is, oh.  Mark: Oh, go ahead.  Yucca: I was going to say, this is a little bit about the, so some of the why's we have this powerful imagination. But once we, we know and acknowledge that about ourselves, we can do so much with it and it can be a really empowering and just fun and delightful thing. Mark: Right. Which is why we love to read fiction. It's why we love to watch movies and television presentations and all  Yucca: Play games and yeah. Mark: yeah, we love our stories and we, we love, you know, Waiting to find out what happens at the end because we know that something will happen at the end and we're, we're, we're interested in what that is. So yes, playing with our imaginations become something that we do from a very, very early age. And the only reason. The only real bucket that we have in our minds that helps us to see what is likely not likely to be a fantasy rather than an a reality is that category of things that we see as happening in the future,  Yucca: Hm. Mark: because we know we're not there yet. We know that we can't see the future. Right. Most of us know that we can't see the future. So, There are those imagined outcomes. And then we can plan for those or plan against them depending on what we're imagining.  Yucca: Although, I'm just going to say, when you're driving on the road, And you see something on the side of the road and you don't want to hit it. Don't keep focusing on it because you will drive into it.  Mark: yes.  Yucca: So focus on what he, where you want to go instead of where you don't. And with my experience, you can apply that to planning as well. Instead of trying to plan against something it's often much more effective to plan towards something. Mark: Yes. Yes. When I was first learning to drive the guy who was teaching me said, okay, now look where you want to go and go there.  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: That was, it was very simple instruction and it taught me to steer.  Yucca: Yeah.  Mark: Look where you want to go and go there.  Yucca: Yep.  Do not look at the pedestrian to not look at the pedestrian. Yes. Mark: Yeah. So we have this powerful imagination and it's so powerful that it can blur the distinction between what our real experiences are, which as we've said, can be heavily massaged and, and changed by our brains. Right.  Yucca: And just filling in that lack of lack of data. Mark: even, even that is somewhat questionable, which is why the scientific method is so powerful because it works to take that subjectivity out of our conclusions about what's real. And then we have the imagined experiences and those can be super vivid and wonderful. And that's why we, once again, like movies and, you know, reading and all that great kind of stuff. We can use this and we're going to talk about this later on. We can use this in our pig and practice in our ritual practice because a ritual can be informed by a story. Right. I'm going to do this and that symbolizes this and I'm going to do that. And it symbolizes that, and then this transformation will take place and it will lead to this result at the end. And either I will be changed or the world will be changed depending on what you believe. And. You can even create rituals that are built around mythological stories, right. I'm going to do the fool's journey I'm going to do per Stephanie's descent or, or a non as descent. Right. And I've, I've been to some rituals that are like that and they can be incredibly powerful. The problem that we get into is where I talked about how we can blur the imagined and the real. Yucca: Right. Mark: And that can lead to lots of problems. I mean, I believe that that's the fundamental issue with theism.  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: It involves the, the blurring of reality with imagination in a way that draws erroneous conclusions. That's what I think.  Yucca: Yeah, well, and there's so many different directions to go with this, but one of the places where it can be really harmful as we start to create these narratives about groups, about my group and that group, and you know, everything there. You know, your escape group, scapegoat group where, you know, where you can start demonizing people just through the stories and imagination, you come up with whatever the group is, right? It's the other political party, or it's the, you know, whatever religion or the opposite of your particular food dogma group or that, you know, and you start to, to. Blur between, you know, what, what maybe is real. And what's kind of imagined and, and what may have some seeds of truth that have been been exaggerated. And, and and it's hard for us to know. To peel that back and try and distinguish between them, especially when we start wrapping our own identity and our stories about ourselves and our own worth and to all of that. Mark: right, exactly. So, and that brings us to the wonderful term confirmation bias. Because all of us have a prejudice in favor of our own stories. We, whether they're imaginary or whether they're based in some pretty solid factual information, we still, as we look out into the world, we will look for pieces of data that will reinforce what we already want to believe. And that is. Another piece of fee ism. I believe once you've decided that you're an atheist and you have this idea, you know, I'm a Christian, I'm a Muslim, I'm a, I'm a follower of Zeus. Then you, you start filtering your experience of the world in order to be consistent with what that tells you with what that. is supposed to look like. Right. And it's very tricky. It's subtle stuff because. So much of what happens with our sensorium happens underneath the surface. It's the processing that the mind does And, then shows you something on the screen. Yucca: Right. Mark: Very challenging.  Yucca: and we need to be really clear that this is, this is a human thing, right? This is something that we all do, and we can become more aware of. And be able to make choices about it, but it's, it's completely natural. This is just part of how we work, how we're wired. Mark: Right, right. This, this. What's this concretion of different evolved systems. That is our brain. You know, it wasn't engineered from the bottom up. It's a, it's a series of evolutionary steps that are all glommed onto one another. And this is part of the result is that, you know, we, we are really not very good at subjective. As a single individual person detecting what's likely to be true and what's likely not to be true. We teach ourselves critical thinking in order to try to do a better job of that. But the best system that we've found so far for determining what really is likely to be true is the scientific method with peer review and Ockham's razor Yucca: Yeah. Mark: and oh, go ahead.  Yucca: I was gonna say, I'm, you know, I'm not someone who thinks that we really should be dictating, you know, what peoples, what classes people should take. But you know, if I had one that I could say everybody has to take it would be logic, right? I think that it would make sense. It would help people so much. As long as the. You know, it was a good instructor and understood it just to be aware of the different kinds of fallacies there are. And how do you actually think through, and, and challenge your own beliefs and also how to argue, how to argue on a position that's not yours.  Mark: yeah. Yes. Well, that's why the, the first atheopagan principle is skepticism and critical thinking.  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: It's, you know, you start from there that, that, that will help you to understand the world as Well, as a person can. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So we have this imagination. And we have this perceptual system, which gets monkeyed with, by the brain a lot and may not be telling you exactly the truth. And then what you base. Then you base a story on the experience that this brain process delivers you. So, so it's possible for things that are completely imagined to seem very, very real. Whether it's just that you're watching a movie and you're, you know, you're suspended, you're, you're completely submerged into the world of the film. Or it can be something like  Yucca: Your anxiety at two in the morning. Mark: Yes about terrible things that are likely to happen or a memory that I have of flying naked over the golden gate bridge. It was a perfect day. It was sunset. Beautiful. And for some reason, I had no clothes on and I was standing at the bus stop at the golden gate bridge and then rose into the air and flew over the towers, did kind of a back flip. The air was perfectly warm. It was so comfortable. It was a beautiful experience. And it was a lucid dream that I had. But I remember it as absolutely clearly as if it was a real experience. And I have no, there's no context within that. Memory, except for the fact that impossible things happened to tell me that I didn't really have that experience.  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So we have this. And that leads me to some of the ways that the pagan community has developed in relation to imagination and fantasy starting really from Gerald Gardner, know, from the 1930s. Because Gardner posited a fantasy story. And the fantasy story was that the witchcraft that he was presenting in his books was part of an unbroken lineage of lore handed down from time and Memorial, at least from the middle ages. And this created a sort of conflation of paganism, middle ages, middle ages, paganism. And in the late 1960s, at least in the United States, what ended up happening was that Renaissance fairs got invented. And a lot of people that were performers and participants in Renaissance fairs were also pagans. And so this sort of aesthetic, and this idea of this golden old age began to arise.  Yucca: Right. And the, the John era of fantasy was really taking off as well.  Mark: we, we have to name, check Lord of the  Yucca: out. Yep. I'm a huge fan here,  Mark: Me too.  Yucca: named from it even, you know, but and, and other, you know, many, many other names and it, it really became. I think not just within the pagan community, but just in the, in the larger community, really a cultural force. Mark: Yes. Very much. So in certainly from an aesthetic standpoint, it took, it really took over in many ways, certainly in the eighties and nineties pigging, where was medieval flash Renaissance, where,  Yucca: yeah, Mark: you know, what, what people wore were, you know, flowing velvets and  Yucca: the long sleeves.  Mark: the, with the long, you know, bill like sleeves  Yucca: And the open V shirts with the little ties across them. And yeah,  Mark: Yeah, exactly. So, and,  Yucca: I adore all of this, you  Mark: well, I do  Yucca: yeah, this is not, don't take this as us being like, oh, this is all terrible. No, we're just talking about it though and saying, you know, where's this from? Yeah. Mark: And so this, this aesthetic of ye all the England D became something that  Yucca: don't mention all the other places, sorry. Mark: Right. Yeah, That's another topic that we could talk about, which is paganism outside of the sphere of England and English speaking countries. Right. Because of. You know, not, not everything is going to be practiced in a Wiccan kind of way.  Yucca: yeah.  Mark: but  Yucca: Anyways, that's another Mark: it's a, it's another topic. either that, or it's going to be the mother of all tangents and we're going to spend the rest of our time on it. So this, this, you know, jolly old England kind of. Idea, which has so much overlap with talking for example, except that talking mixed in habits and elves and dwarves and wizards and all that kind of stuff became very, very popular. And to my mind, unfortunately, what some of what that has done is it has turned, it has turned the imagination into what people want to make re. their paganism, they want to be wizards. They, they want to be elves. In some cases they and you know, aspiration towards a fantasy of something that's imaginary is inherently dissociated from the real world. And what are. Naturalistic paganism is about is the real world. You know, one. of the quibbles that I've always had with the sort of mainstream pagan community in the United States, at least where I'm familiar with it is that it's got this weird kind of dual loyalty. It's like we Revere the earth and then we have these gods  Yucca: Yes, but these higher beings, you know, higher than what you're talking about higher than the earth, you know, they're not. Mark: the gods come from the earth? No. Did the gods create the earth? Maybe? There are all kinds of different stories, which I believe are imagined stories, but the, the question of exactly where does the earth fit into all of that is a real one. I think I'm glad that people are saying that they Revere the earth, whatever that means to them. To me, the earth is central. There's nothing more central because we are it. We are the earth standing up on legs and talking to itself.  Yucca: Right.  Really? I mean, think about that for a moment. We are little pieces of earth that your whole body think about. Where's the carbon in your hands, the oxygen, the nitrogen. Where's all of that from, and where's it going back? Mark: Right. And it's not like there's some amazing border where it's like, you, you know, the carbon presents its passport and says, I'm going to be human. Now it's just carbon. It's just carbon, like any other carbon on earth, right. At least of that ice.  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So. This is something that I think is, is problematic in the pagan community. And it's interesting because some different there've been a series of sort of aesthetic layers that have gone along with the pagan community. I saw the, the golf sort of BDSM aesthetic enter the community in the mid nineties. And it's kind of gotten folded into all. well,  Yucca: Yeah. The boundaries between them really blurred between, you know, what is, and even if you go to like a Ren fair that it's all there too,  Mark: right.  Yucca: Even within folks that, that are into that, that aren't pagan, you know, that there's a lot of mixing there. Mark: Yes. And yes, there's a lot of the, the dress-up is still. Reminiscent of some other age. Right. And so, you know, I, I think this is problematic because it pulls us away from earth. I love playing dress up and I'm, I'm happy to play dress up and I have done it in many, I mean, literally dozens of different kinds of ways, because we used to do all these theme parties and blah, blah, blah. And I was a performer at Renaissance fairs for many years as well, and Dickens fairs as well. So I don't have any problem with, you know, playing let's pretend the challenge, I think is when we lose track of the fact that we're playing, let's pretend.  Yucca: Right because there are, I think there are ways that we'll talk about this too, to do it in a way that it is inspiring. It speaks to us in this very you know, deep level, the Indian symbols. But what you're talking about is the, is the losing sight of is this really, really. This is what's really happening versus what are we imagining? And we can, I think that we can definitely w one of the purposes of imagination is that can work towards making that a reality. So we can, some of our imagined things can, can become reality, but there's also a difference between imagining things about other people and about. Past stories, you know, as much as we want. We could, we referenced sort of the rings. So as much as, as Gollum wants to believe that it was his birthday present it, he can believe that. And imagine that as long as he wants, it's not, that's not what happened.  Mark: Right.  Yucca: Right. And. With the old ways, as much as we want to imagine, and really want to believe that there's some unbroken path there. That's very unlikely that that's what happened. And you know, we probably aren't star children put here from aliens and,  Mark: Right.  Yucca: the TAF ELLs and all of that stuff. Mark: Right. And the w where was I going to go with this?  Yucca: The connection between what is real and what is not, and the earth being central. That's where you were at before. Mark: Well, yeah, this is a little different it's about suspension of disbelief. And one of the things that adults learn to do when their brains are developed enough is to try to make a differentiation between the imagined and the. Right. And some people think that's a tragedy, right. That they lose their childish sense of playfulness and imagination and everything can be just super magical. Right. I don't feel that way. I, I think that our brains develop in the way they do for a reason. And when we start having to imagine futures that we need to plan for being able to distinguish between the imaginary that we suspend our disbelief for and the real that we're working towards, even in the ineffectual way that we do because of the way our brains work. It's very important. Yucca: Right. Mark: That way we don't set a goal of becoming an elf,  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: right. Because that's not possible.  Yucca: Yeah.  Now we could think about what are the characteristics that, that embodies that we value and how can we work towards, you know, that sort of thing. But, but you're not actually going to be right.  Mark: right. Or You maybe maybe more, a better example is you're not going to be a wizard. Right. Because in the, in the fantasy sense, what a wizard is, is something that doesn't exist on planet earth. Now You can be buried in the aesthetics of wizardry. You can con you know, Yucca: can be an incredible scholar, right? They're often, you know, very learned individuals and. Mark: And you can make yourself look like a wizard and make all of your environs look like what you imagine a wizard's environs would look like, but you're still not going to snap your fingers and have flame appear, you know? And. To kid ourselves that those kinds of outcomes, the sort of Harry Potter magic, right. That that those outcomes are actually possible in some way is to become further away from engagement with the world. The actual world that we're in here and the kind of paganism that Yucca and I talk about here is really about immersion in this world. Getting to know it better and better, you know, becoming familiar with what our local ecosystems are and really being in love with it because there's so much there to love. Giving getting sidetracked on fantasies. It eats up bandwidth that could be applied to the love for the world. and. that I think is. Critique that I have of a lot of mainstream paganism in the United States is that, and maybe in England too, I don't know. But certainly, or, you know, in other English speaking countries, but certainly in north America Canada and Mexico in the us that's, that seems to be what I'm seeing.  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So let's talk a second about. About using our imagination to create those story arcs where we begin as naturalist pagans is with a healthy suspension of disbelief. Right.  Yucca: And with a, with an awareness that that's what word.  Mark: Right,  Yucca: Right, because what you're talking about about the difference between what the children and adult brain and people talking about, oh, the, the what a, a shame it is. I think that some of what they might be talking about is the ability to let go the way kids can let go. Right. And I think that's something that we don't need to leave. Is being able to let go and go into that playful place, but we also have the ability to step back and be very critical and, and see the differences. But when we want to, we can suspend that belief  Mark: Right,  Yucca: disbelief, right? Mark: that's very well said. Because the. The playfulness that you're describing that that is something that our over culture really stomps on for adults. We've got all this conformity expectation around how we dress around how we behave. That's why I love flashmob. I love. I love, you know, people suddenly behave me behaving in really unexpected ways that are delightful and creative and artistic. They're just super fun. Ritual is a way for adults to play well or children to children can be involved in rituals, but but adults, unless it's some formal sport or game. They don't get permission much to just go and play, you know, you take the afternoon off, go and play.  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: And and rituals enable us to do that around fee Matic storylines, you know, whether it's. Whether it's something from, from a myth, whether it's a story that, or, or simply a story of, I am powerful. Now I am, I am, I am filled with my power. I have created a space where magic can occur and I'm going to go and do this thing. And it's going to help me to be much more effective at X, whatever X.  Yucca: Yeah, well, and even our our, our stories and narratives of the season. Right. That that is a story as well. And we understand it in with the narrative structure. Mark: Yes, it's true because the reality is every year.  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Yeah. every year is different. The weather on any given day is not the same as it was last year. Weather is a chaotic system and it's never going to be predictable. And all we can talk about is broad stroke generalizations about what is likely to happen in the month of February, as opposed to the month of August. And we understand some of the drivers of that in terms of the axial tilt and. Climate change and all of those things, but that doesn't make it predictable. So we have a story, a narrative about it instead that kind of guides us through well it's may, so we should be doing this. Yucca: Yeah.  Mark: Yeah.  Yucca: And that's, again, as we were talking about in the beginning, that's just sort of how our, our, our minds are built is to understand things as story as, as a narrative. And then the imagination piece is, well, we get to build that story.  Mark: Right.  Yucca: So in our ritual, we're building those stories and, and it's very convenient in ritual that we do have the blur between what our, what our minds understand as true and not. Mark: Right Because we can invoke an imagined scenario and effect real profound change in ourselves as people. I  Yucca: believe it. And it's okay that we know that we made it up and we're believing it, but then it really makes that change. Mark: I did a ritual at Penn FIA con God, it's gotta be eight years ago now, something like that. And it was, it was specifically in atheopagan ritual that happened after a presentation about atheopagan ism and. What the whole point of this, we, you know, we invoked a circle and we we called qualities that we wanted to be with us of openness and a willingness to change and kindness and compassion. And the, the whole working of the root of the ritual was simply, I had a little. Vial of oil. And I went from person to person anointing their forehead. But what I told them before I did that was now, what I want you to do is to call up that most cringe-worthy a shame, shame, filling moment of your life. You know what it is. We all know  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: right? You, you don't have to say anything about it, but we know what it is. The thing that you really wish you had never done. Right. And hold that forward in your mind. And so all I did was I went from person to person and said, it's forgotten it's over. It's gone  With each person. And people cried  Yucca: right. Yeah.  Mark: story that they had been telling themselves about the bad thing that they done, or the embarrassing thing that they'd done or whatever it was, the story had a new ending, right? The story was given a new ending that absolves them of the feelings of shame or embarrassment or whatever it was. And I mean, I, I didn't realize it was going to be as powerful as it was. But I wanted, I wanted to do something that was very personal work to really illustrate the power of doing ritual like that without invoking God's, without believing in magic. right. And. That's the kind of thing that we can do with rituals and story narratives. People, people are filled with stories. They're filled with stories about themselves and about the world and about humanity and about their families and all that kind of stuff. And we can change those stories in ways that empower people and help them to be happier and help them to be kinder in the world. That's what I'm in this for. Yucca: Yeah  Mark: and so imagination becomes, you know, the primary tool, the, the cloth that you lay down before setting out anything for a focus or an alter imagination is the foundation.  Yucca: I like that even rhymes. Yeah. And again, just to really, really be very clear on this, neither of us are being down on the fantasy genre or B we're both huge fans and bring a D and D nerds and all of that stuff. But we're, we're talking about the, the ways that, you know, what's the purpose of each and where the. Where we can use imagination in a really constructive way and where it's maybe more harmful, right? Mark: Right or just where we may be stuck.  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: And you know, people do get stuck. That's in cultures get stuck. I think it's a lot easier for a culture that's based in a holy text to get stuck than it is for kind of a fluid subculture, like a pagan. Is to get stuck. But there's nothing shameful about that, except that if you become aware of it, then you can start to evolve again.  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: And I think that, you know, moving away from the good old days, a lineage of ancient ways. Kind of model and, and sort of Renaissance see sort of aesthetic of paganism. We'll do a couple of things that would be good for the pagan community. One of them is that I think it would make it less of a challenge to bridge the gap to other people that are not pagans because it won't seem quite so fantasied. Right. It, it won't seem. Quite so, frivolous in that way.  Yucca: Well, and, and also more welcoming to the people who don't particularly connect with that aesthetic,  Mark: right, right?  Yucca: Where the, the ideas are interesting, but the aesthetic is is just difficult to get past, right. Mark: For sure. So that's a good thing. And then the other way that I think that it can really benefit the pagan community is that it, it enables it, it would create kind of a vacuum that would enable new stuff to arise. There, and, and I think that some of this is happening because you know, the, the sixties and seventies, generation of pagans is leaving us. Most of, most of them came to it in adulthood. And so by now they're, they're getting elderly. And there there's enough conversation and enough pagan thought happening now that I think that people are starting to reconsider some of those. Good old days, unbroken lineage kind of models. Certainly with Ronald Hutton's book, the triumph of the moon, he pretty well-documented that modern paganism was a modern creation. I think it would be a wonderful thing for modern paganism to stand up and say, yes, we're a modern creation. were informed by modern values, which means we don't have. Holy book that's full of slavery and abuse and misogyny. We, we stand for, for the good stuff that humans have learned about how the dignity of the individual and the ecosystem. And we think that those are value and that good enough,  Yucca: Yeah. And we don't need some, some distant past authority to make it valid. Right. Mark: As as Tim mentioned said I don't believe that just because I ideas are tenacious that they're worthy.  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So going back to talking about rituals again one thing that can be helpful when you're planning a ritual is to write out the story. Right. you know, or, or at least speak it out loud, we're going to do this and this and this and this and this, and the result is going to be that. Because what that does is it creates expectation in people's minds. In your own mind if you're working alone or in the group's mind. Oh, okay. Well that's, what's going to happen. And then it's going to result in that cool, magical new thing. That's going to transform us. Great. Sign me up. I'm I'm I'm here  Yucca: can follow that path and follow that. And there you go.  Mark: Yeah.  Yucca: Yeah. So I think this is a, I mean, like so many things that we talk about on this podcast, it, it takes a little bit of awareness, but takes some reflection and just paying attention to. How things work, how you work, how you respond and, and going from there, going, okay, well, how do I get, how do I make this work for me? What's the story that I want. What's the story that I want to live. What's the story that I can tell and imagination is that's what connects the pieces. Mark: Yes. Yes. So I think, I don't know. I could go on and on, but I think, I think we should stop here.  Yucca: I think this is a wonderful  Mark: I think it's a good place to stop.  Yucca: assist the app and to just invite some dreams for the future. Right.  Mark: Right. And this is, as you say, a great time of year to be doing that you know, as, as spring either, you know, is happening with the light, but not with the weather or or maybe it is happening starting to happen as it is where I live. Then you know, imagine a little, imagine. Who do I want to be? What's, what's my highest vision for myself.  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: some of that can be circumstantial. Like, you know, what kind of work I want to be doing, or, you know, whatever that is. But some of it is, well, what kind of person do I want to be?  Yucca: Yeah.  Mark: You know? Am I impatient? Well, can I work on that? Am I irritable? Can I work on that? Yucca: And that's ultimately the stuff that you really do have control over. Right? The, what. You know what job you have or what kind of world you want to live in. Those are all wonderful things, but ultimately you don't actually have control over that. Right. But you do have control over what kind of person you're going to be and how you're going to respond when certain types of things happen. Mark: Right. Not to say that activism isn't important  Yucca: Right. Exactly. You can definitely.  Mark: You can definitely. advocate and work to bring about improvements to the world that we live in. And it's essential. That is many of us as possible. Do that. So not, not to say that your highest vision of yourself should Trump your vision for the world. But.  Yucca: But you aren't a personal failure. If you aren't the chosen one from the stories that saves the world from global warming and on all of that, you can, you can be part of that solution, but don't, but don't beat yourself up that like, That are that real life doesn't work the same way. Fantasy novelists work. Yeah.  Mark: Yeah. I mean, one of the things, one of the most pernicious things, I think about the children's stories that we tell people is, and they lived happily ever after. I mean, that's a terrible thing to tell people, because the expectation then is okay, you get married and then you lived happily ever after until you have a knock-down, drag-out fight over something super trivial that neither one of you is willing to get off of until a day later, when you finally got all the quarters all out of your system, and you're ready to start actually having a conversation. This is the way the world really works.  Yucca: Yes. Oh, on the poor. Yeah. And when, and when you've been raised on those stories and think that that's how it works, then you suddenly, is this not true? Love  Mark: Right.  Yucca: This is not meant to be. Relationships take work anyways. Now we're going on a tangent.  Mark: we are. Yes.  Yucca: That's a, well, maybe that'll be something to talk about as we get closer to Valentines. Mark: Yeah, That's a good idea of, although we actually have. Next week we have Sarah Lindsay coming. We're going to do an interview with the YouTuber known as the, the skeptical, which and if you haven't seen her channel, I really encourage you to take a look at some of her stuff. She's a PhD candidate in religious studies, and she's very, very interesting to talk with and listen to. So we're going to be doing that interview Next week. I am too. It's going to be great. So. In the meantime, we hope you all have a wonderful week, enjoy the season and be sure to contact us at the email address. We always tell you thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com. If you have comments or suggested topics or any of that. Thanks So much, everybody.  Yucca: Thanks everyone. 

【Mark大人物】 瓜地馬拉駐台大使「葛梅斯」 　As one of Central America's most iconic nations, Guatemala is also one of Taiwan's closest full diplomatic allies. In the form of Ambassador Willy Gomez, the nation has as its representative in Taipei a charismatic and very interesting gent with interests ranging from his nation's renowned coffee growing regions to football in Europe. 　He even told us about one Guatemalan pro set to make his mark with Datong FC in Taiwan's Permier League this season. 　Listen in for our full chat. 主持訪談： Mark Buckton ｜《THE TAIWAN TIMES》總編輯 特別來賓：Willy Alberto Gómez Tirado｜ 瓜地馬拉駐台大使 企劃宣傳：戴慈殷 後製剪接：陳奕璋 感謝您的收聽，如果喜歡我們，您可以透過以下三個方式給我們鼓勵 1. 按下「訂閱」或「追蹤」，並給予我們五星評論！ 2. 關注Instagram獲得更多國際消息 https://www.instagram.com/thetaiwantimes_tw/?hl=zh-tw 3. 請我們喝杯咖啡 https://paypal.me/thetaiwantimes 我們將繼續努力，推動台灣人與國際時事的接軌，感謝您的支持❤️ 本集音樂來源： https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjuCLLqlGcs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLUXMupjws Powered by Firstory Hosting

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com http://atheopaganism.org The Critic Episode: https://thewonderpodcast.podbean.com/e/the-inner-critic-1612153312/   S2E08 TRANSCRIPT:   ----more---- Yucca: Welcome back to The Wonder: Science-Based Paganism. I'm your host, Yucca. Mark: I'm Mark. Yucca: And today we are returning to the important topic of ritual. So we're going to talk what, why, how and why we've come back to this topic. Mark: Yes. And I think we should probably start with that last one. First obviously rituals are really central to pagan practice. They are a really essential part of what makes us pagans and what makes our practices into a religion. We did the second ever episode, of the wonder about rituals more than a year ago. And we just have more to say about it. We'll probably repeat some of it cause neither of us have heard the episode in a year. But that's fine. One of the things about paganism is that it's iterative. You come back around to the same time of year, every year. And so you repeat themes and we're going to repeat themes here on this podcast as well. Yucca: That's right. And it's the sort of thing we've touched on in so many of our episodes. There's very few. I think that we haven't mentioned ritual in because it is just so central. Mark: Right, right. I mean, in, in many ways being a pagan is I mean, it's certainly far less about what you believe than it is about your value set and what you do. And there's the sort of passive ritual behavior of observing the world around you and stopping for the sunsets and the flowers and paying attention. And then there's the active rituals, which are the more formal symbolic behaviors that we do in order to put ourselves into a ritual state of kind of trancy hyper presence which is a state in which we can reprogram our brains. We can heal our wounds, we can focus our intention. We can make things easier for ourselves as we go forward into our lives. Yucca: So we're going to be focusing a little bit more on that second type of ritual that you were just talking about. Yeah. The daily, small rituals, the habits, those are also incredibly powerful. And I think those deserve their own episode, frankly. Mark: Yes. I agree. Yucca: but let's go ahead and start with really what is ritual? Mark: I have a definition. Do you have a definition? Yucca: Well, your definition is probably going to be a little bit more succinct than mine. So let's hear yours. Mark: I believe that ritual is symbolic behavior rather than practical behavior for purposes of spiritual expression. And there's a lot of words in there that are very fuzzy. Spiritual is a very fuzzy word. Expression is a very broad term, but generally speaking the difference between brushing your teeth every day and going to your altar and lighting a candle every day is that you do one of them for these spiritual purposes. And the other one is strictly a matter of practical maintenance. Yucca: So for me, ritual has an element of intention without there you're intending to do something, not necessarily your trying, that it's an intention of, you're trying to cast a spell or do something like that, but you don't go into ritual, you don't go into that space without a reason. And that reason is often an emotional reason, often a quality of life reason, or a reason where you're trying to figure something out or contemplate. There's a purpose to it. It's intentional are choosing to do it. It's not something that is happening to you. It's you doing it? Mark: Right. One of the things that is often said about pagan ritual is that there are no spectators. Everyone is a participant. And that if you have people that are in the circle who are being spectators, your ritual has a problem. Because it hasn't engaged them in a way that makes them participants. So I really, and I really feel that's true. Part of what makes group ritual really amazing is that everyone is engaging kind of in their highest self in co-creating this amazing moment in time. Yucca: Yeah. And that, that brings it to a very different experience than it would be otherwise. Just amazing. Mark: Yes. I mean, there, there are varying degrees of the amount of satisfaction that one gets out of performing a ritual. I have daily rituals and it's just sort of a little bump of dopamine, right? It's just a little feeling of satisfaction and reward that I've done my daily rituals again, and there are the candles burning on my focus and isn't that jolly. It looks very pretty, very witchy and cool. And I have a good feeling about it. Then there are other things which are more elaborate where I might set up a special altar just for that day and have activities planned that are supposed to be a part of the ritual. And that's all. You know, because it's a special day, it's a holiday, right. Rather than, or either that, or I have some very specific need that I need to address either in my in my mental health or in my life and my capacity to grapple with the issues that are in front of me. So those are the. So there's this big spectrum of sort of small commonplace rituals, all the way up to sort of grand opera, amazing costumes and music and incense and stained glass and, you know, whatever it is. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So why don't we talk a little bit about you know, we were talking about the, what about what a ritual is? Why don't we go more into examples of the why? Because I've done rituals for a lot of different purposes over the years, and I'm sure you have too. And it would be interesting. It'd be good. I think, to sort of compare notes on that, about the different kinds of things that we've done. Yucca: Sure. Yeah. There's such a huge range. There's the kind that you were just talking about with that those daily rituals. And those can be the ones that are really your quality of life rituals. Those are the ones that are how you enact, what you decide you want your life to be like and where you want your focus to be, because where that focus is determined so much about what you experienced and how you feel. And we spoke about this recently in the episode on manifestation. Right. That what you are aware of and where you are, what patterns you are enacting and feeding is what's going to determine so much of your experience. Mark: Right. Exactly. I think, for example, about house-warming rituals the sort of house cleansing slash blessing rituals that people will do, and they're all different kinds of them, but they tend to have certain shared characteristics like going into every room in the house and doing some kind of activity that helps demark the space as having been cleansed of whoever else was there before. And now marked as yours belonging to your family. And you know, now being your space and the, I mean, th the reality is that there's no physical change happening there. Right. But how you feel about the place can be radically different. You can go from, you know, Oh, I'm moving into a stranger's house too. Oh, this is mine. And that's where I want to put the furniture and, you know, here's where I want to keep the canned goods and A much more comfortable kind of way of being Yucca: Yeah. And then there's also those rituals which are for the big rites of passage. Mark: Yes. Yucca: So the weddings and deaths and births and separations and coming of ages and all of that, that are those moments that there's only a few of them in your entire life, whatever your particular path is that you're going on with that? Mark: Right. And honestly, I mean, I feel sort of cheated that I missed a couple of them. You know, I've done. I didn't ever get a passage into adulthood. I didn't ever get you know, that kind of recognition. I've done. Marriage ceremonies, I've done a dissolution ceremony. I've and now I'm kind of pressing onward toward elderhood. And I'm definitely going to do something for that. That one is very problematic in our culture because nobody wants to admit that they're old. You know, we've got this incredible culture of youth going on, but Yucca: Yeah. How do you decide that? Mark: you have to pick an age and I was thinking it was going to be 60, but I'm going to be 60 next year. And I'm thinking maybe 70. Maybe more like 70, because 60 just doesn't seem that old anymore. It used to when I was a kid people died in their mid sixties typically, but life expectancy has jumped so much that it's just, you know, 60 is the new 40. Yucca: Well, and that's not where I am with my life, but there's just from people I know. They can be at so different places, at least from the outside, because some people who are 60, not only physically, but just seem to be much older than some people who are the same age. Mark: Yes. Yes. Yucca: And that happens to a certain extent with younger folks when they're coming into adulthood. But the window is a little bit more narrow for that. Mark: Right. Right. And they have greater plasticity too. I think, you know, people become less flexible as they get older. And so even if someone is, seems very kind of, you know, bitter and world weary at the age of 22, they can get out of that again. Whereas if you're bitter and world weary at the age of 60, you're probably stuck there unless you have a really radical transformation. Which is possible and ritual can be a big part of that, honestly. But it takes a more a less organic process and more of a a deliberate intervention in order to make a shift like that. Yucca: Yeah. And so with something like that, there might be a big ritual. The one that has all the bells and whistles and cloaks and candles and all of that, which is then supported by many smaller ones Mark: Yes. Yes. In my experience the most transformational rituals that I have been associated with have involved homework. It's not only the big grand dramatic thing that, you know, kind of blows your emotional socks off afterwards. If there's a thing you gotta do every day or every week or whatever it is you have to keep up the momentum of what has been started and that's the way that you reaffirm to yourself again and again, that the meaning of the ritual is true and that it's happening. Yucca: So we jumped into this very quickly, but why don't we talk a little bit about what's going on? Brain-wise with ritual. Mark: I love this stuff. Yucca: Because there, there really is a lot, and there's a lot that is. That can be understood from a perspective of modern science and our understanding around that. So, yeah. Is that something you want to start with? Mark: One of the big mysteries, I think. In looking at humanity is what's up with this religion stuff. There are certain things that people do that on the face of them appear to be just baffling as to why we should, music is one of them. Dancing is one of them. Art generally is sort of baffling as to why we're inspired to do that. And religion is another one. Why does every culture documented on the earth have a religious tradition? Now some of them have secularized over time, but they started out with religious traditions. Yucca: And just to jump in there, the idea that religion has to have a deity, and if it doesn't, it's not a religion is a very Eurocentric not very representative of the rest of the world. Mark: Right. And we're here living examples that it's simply not true. You know, we are living spiritual paths, which by any reasonable definition are religious in nature and we don't have deities, so, you know, there it is. So when I started researching this stuff, because the whole question of. When I left and community, after being there for about 25 years, 27 years, I think I left because I had experience of very unethical behavior that was excused as the will of the gods was like, Nope, I'm not going to be part of a community that, that believes that, that accepts that you can do these shitty things and excuse it as being the will of some invisible, probably imaginary beings. So I left, but within six months I really missed it. I, my altar was all dusty and I wasn't doing my seasonal observances and I missed the community and it, my life was just impoverished relative to where it had been before. So I started exploring this question, you know, what's, what's up with this religiosity thing. And how does that map to the brain? Because if all cultures have this, there must be some hunger within us that is fed by these religious activities and practices. Right. And what that led me to was the triune brain model, which was first published in 1958. And it posits essentially that there are three that of the conscious parts of the brain, not the cerebellum that runs the machinery of the body and so forth, but of the conscious parts of the brain. They come in three sort of bursts of evolutionary activity, mounted a top one another. The first is what's called the R complex, which the R stands for reptile. So it's the fish brain essentially. I like to say that the the fish brain is about the five F's, which are flee, freeze, fight, food, and mating. And that's all that the, our complex cares about that's all that it cares about. It wants to be safe. It wants to reproduce and get its genes into the next generation. And that is all that is concerned with. But as we became mammals, this new system grew over the top of theR complex. It didn't replace it. Bare in mind, that's, it's still very much in play. But in addition to that, we now have what is called the limbic system or the mammalian brain. And the limbic system is about feelings, connection, relationships sense of right and wrong of whether we are in harmony or disharmony with those around us. And that is what enabled mammals to nurture their young, developing social groups so forth. And then there is the third portion, which is the frontal cortex of the brain, the prefrontal neocortex, and just the cortex generally there that's the thinky part of the brain. It has language, it looks for patterns. It asks about meaning it once answers to questions. And it's, it has all of those intellectual aspects. Now I believe that the both the most intriguing thing about the human condition and maybe the most tragic is that we have all three of these brains operating at once and they can get into conflict with one another. They frequently get into conflict with one another and when it becomes severe enough, we call it mental illness. PTSD, for example, is where the art complex is going crazy with fear. Just crazy with fear and all that it can do is flee, fight, freeze, flee, freight flight freeze, over and over again in response to stimuli that may be kind of animal really, and it's a tragic circumstance when that happens. So there are these three parts of the brain and religiosity happens to really scratch the itch of all three of them. The R complex loves that it builds community so that you're safe in numbers. It loves that it, that in some cases it tells you that there's an afterlife, so you're not going to die. It loves that. By being in a community, you have more access to food and security and all that kind of stuff. Right. It tells you that you're safer in the mammalian case. It's, you know, community and love and all that, you know, wonderful connect the stuff that we are so fond of as mammals. And then the thinking part gets answers to big questions. Like why should I be living? How should I behave? What's important in the universe? What does it mean that I'm alive? And because it's a pattern recognizing it can create metaphors where a symbol comes to represent something else. And that is the rich playground that we work in when we create rituals. You know, when I. When I do my Hallows ritual and I walk around the circle with my human femur to draw the circle. It's not just about a human femur. It's about the presence of human death. Right. And that, that visceral powerful sense that we are in the presence of that all inspiring force, that is such a presence in our lives. I've been talking a lot, but obviously I'm really kind of hyped about Yucca: Oh, this is great. Mark: But I think I am going to stop now for a little bit and let you go. The I truly believe that non-fee is paganism is an answer, maybe not the only answer, but an answer to the conundrum of how science and religion co-exist in a meaningful and truthful way. Yucca: Yeah, so wonderful. So it, it sounded like if I was hearing what you were saying, you gave a great explanation about the way that the human brain works. Or at least some of the parts of the brain and why that has led to ritual. Which works in the symbols, why it's led to that and why it can be really powerful, a, another direction to take with that, which has really connected. We're really talking about the same thing in a lot of places is the idea of neuro-plasticity where like plastic, meaning it can change. It can move. It can adapt. And there is a myth that we stop learning after a certain age. That's not true. Organisms continue to learn and learning happens on so many different levels, but one of the primary purposes of learning is to take care of us, to, to protect us and make sure we can do those survival things, make sure that we can get the food that we need, that we are safe, that we are all of these things. And so learning often happens when there is something novel when there's something new in the environment and your brain has to really pay attention and it may not necessarily be the part of you that is explaining it with words logically, but you're still really paying attention. And so in ritual, you can create the environment in which you are learning. You are relearning, you're learning new pathways, you are creating that new place. So that a new pattern can come out of that and, or it's enforcing, reinforcing a pattern that you have been creating because you've got to travel that same path over and over again, because the most travel path is the one that you're going to go down when you're not thinking about it. Mark: Right. Right. So ritual in some ways can be said to be the creation of a novel experience. That's freighted with meaning, So, I mean, it's no surprise that the stuff that people use for their rituals is all really cool stuff. It's bones and pine cones and seashells and chalices and, you know, knives and just, you know, cool stuff, right. Staffs and they wear cloaks and robes and it's just all really interesting stuff that draws the attention. Yucca: And really works for the individual. Mark: Yes. Yeah. There's no standard set of ritual tools. People use whatever works for them, right? So you're creating this moment of attention to some sort of transformative event that has a metaphorical meaning to it. I'm thinking of, I don't know whether I've ever told this story. My my ex had a terrible nightmare and was, she was having a really hard time in her life and had a nightmare in which a teacher of hers a Zen teacher was dead and buried in his hand was still extending from the grave. Did I ever tell this story? Yucca: I am familiar with the story. I don't know if he told it to me or if you told it on the recording, but I think he probably told it on the recording, but go ahead, because we have a lot of new listeners who may have not heard it before. Mark: Okay. Well, Yucca: So the hand was coming up from the grave. Mark: Right. And it was a little alive, but not very much. And she was just in this terrible state of grief and upset and real loss in her life at that time. And without letting her know about it, the members of her circle of the Dark Sun Circle that I'm a member of, we dug a grave. And filled it in again with loose dirt, with various things, items in the dirt for her to find. And I had a hand, a rubber hand from a Halloween store that I set in the grave kind of sticking out and. The transformation of course, was that she had to physically dig through this grave and find these items, find the gifts in the grief, right. Find the transformative elements that could help her to move on. And of course it involves kind of large muscle motion and the smell of wet earth and, you know, the candles that were flickering around the grave and, you know, all of these, you know, very potent symbolic States. But I mean, when she came around the corner and first saw it, she burst into tears. And and was crying during most of the digging until she got near the bottom of the grave and found one item and I don't even remember what it was. And then she started to laugh and said, that's great. That's just so great. So that's an example of how you can craft a ritual with these symbolic items. That puts someone through a transformational experience so that they are changed by the end of it. And that really is the point of a ritual. It's not just to have a, an experience it's that the person would be changed even if just a little. Yucca: And that person could be you, right? Mark: Yeah. So yeah. Yucca: right? You're sharing a story from a group ritual, but these are the things that we can do individually in private as well. Mark: Yes. I mean, when I stand in front of my focus, my altar every morning, I I draw that one tarot card and I know that it's random, but I still take it as kind of a lens to view the day through. And I lean it up where it can be seen on the focus. And I take a moment. And I just sort of drink in the symbology of all of those things that are there. And I am changed. I am grounded in the richness of my life through that process and it helps me it helps me to be happier. Yucca: So we've been jumping around a lot, kind of dancing around. Are there other types of rituals before we transitioned into some of the hows? Right. We talked about the daily ones. We talked about the big events in life. Mark: Well, they're the holidays. Of course. Yucca: Oh! Yeah.. Mark: The holidays of the Wheel of the Year. And those can be big rituals as well, or they can be small ones depending on how many people are involved and just how elaborate you want things to get. But the, just as a Rite of passage celebrates a person's transformation into a particular phase of life, the wheel of the year celebrations acknowledge the transformation of the year into a particular stage in its life. Okay. Yucca: Yeah, Mark: And, you know, as I said, some of them are really big people. Do, you know, 14 foot maypoles with ribbons and people dancing around and it's all very cool. And others are very quiet. Yucca: And that depends on the person and the community. And. If there's a global pandemic on and all of those details. Mark: Speaking of, I got my first jab on Friday. I am delighted to announce, Yucca: Oh, congratulations. That's good. Yeah. We're on the list here. But we probably won't be getting it until May most likely cause we're but that's okay because there's other people who need It. Before us. Because we're not really public facing, so, and not in any high risk groups, but our parents have gotten it. So we're super grateful for that. Mark: That's good. I'm glad to hear that. Yeah, but it's, I mean, it's starting to happen. You know, it's not just a dream on the horizon anymore. It's that the shots are getting into people's arms and that is really going to change the dynamic of this disease. And the numbers are way down. The COVID numbers are already way, way down, which is just such a relief. Yucca: Yeah, it's been really encouraging. So yeah, Mark: It's amazing. What a little leadership will do. Yucca: So I let's. Let's start talking about some of the how, and knowing that what we're going to do from our perspective and what has worked for us and what we've been exposed to. But we are by no means the end all be all on this. There are thousands or probably millions of other pagans out there each with their own way of doing ritual and things that have worked and haven't. But why don't we talk about the. At least for you, Mark. What is the basic structure? Is there a normal structure in your ritual? Mark: There is. And I think it's kind of a generic structure and I'm always very careful to caution that this is a structure that works. It's not the structure that works. It's just one that works. And it's a five part five, stage system of structuring the ritual. The first phase is called arrival. And that is where you create a safe, secure space where you declare that this transformational work is going to be happening. You ground yourself in the moment. So you become very present. This is the moment where you invoke that ritual state of brain, right? You're not worrying about the past or about the future. You're in the moment now. And what that does is it makes you very open. So you're more psychologically influenceable by the events of the ritual. The next phase is called qualities. And this can be done lots of different ways, but essentially it's invoking the qualities that you want associated with this ritual, like courage and perseverance or sensitivity and love and compassion, or you know, any of those. Any of those qualities, it's sort of like invoking deities in a theistic ritual, except instead of invoking the deities that stand for particular qualities, you just go straight to the qualities. And that can be done with people calling out these different things, or it can be done. Very formally with people having, you know, individual speeches that they short speeches that they make about each quality that we want involved. It just, it varies. The third phase is the hardest to describe because it's most varied and that's working. Which is the process of doing the transformational thing in the ritual, whether that's digging out that grave or tying knots into a cord with a particular focus, as we tie the knots in the cord, or adding things to a cauldron to boil to make, you know, like a magical soup, which can then be shared amongst the participants to get the benefit of the ritual. It can be any sort of creative, crafty thing. It can be dancing, it can be singing and it can be multiples of those things. It doesn't have to be just one. The next phase is gratitude because I find that incorporating gratitude into all of my rituals just makes the more effective. It helps me however down I might be, it helps me have perspective about all the ways that I really enjoy that I enjoy privilege that I enjoy wealth. Even though I'm not in the context of. This country wealthy by any means, you know, I have enough to eat. I have a roof over my head. I have a meaningful job for me. You know, I have a community of people who love me. There's so much to be grateful for. And and so I express that and then the last phase is called benediction, which literally means a good word. And what it is the declaration that the ritual is now ending. And that we are all to go forth in the world and be happy and make it a better place. Thank you. How about you? How about the way that you structure rituals? Yucca: Yeah, very similar pattern. I think a lot of the similar things happening. It's a little bit more simplified. It's the sandwich. There's a the core structure and I might make it a little bit more fancy depending on the time, but there is an entering phase. Which is a stepping out of normal awareness into this special awareness, into this different state. And that is definitely a practice. So there's. Because it's something I've been doing a long time. It's something that just sort of happens that I have to really stop and think about what are all the steps that are actually going on. But there's a there's grounding that happens. Okay. Let's be present in the moment. There's the breath of it. And then something that is symbolic of changing into this new space. And sometimes that may be the doing a small circle casting, which for me is really usually just taking a moment facing each of the cardinal directions and taking a deep breath and then also acknowledging the center space. And then there's the, the meat of it, which is where the, whatever the the ritual is. And then the reverse of the entering, which is the stepping out back into the normal awareness into our regular awareness. So there's always an entrance and an exit, and the main work. And that can be taken in a lot of different directions. There's this very simple moment. That is those moments throughout the day. The thing that I do when I first wake up, you know, it's the greeting the Sun and the stars, and, or more complex with a seasonal celebration or a Rite of passage or something like that. But the structure is always. Enter, the work as you called it or the play, and then the exit. Mark: Yes. Yes. I like that a lot. And one thing that you pointed out that is really true is that these things get better with practice. They become easier. When you've been doing ritual for a long time, you can just sort of click into that ritual state as long as you feel safe and in a reasonably good place. It's pretty easy to just sort of downshift into that very present state without a lot of that, a lot of work, other people who are just starting, they might need more of a methodical grounding process, mindfulness and breathing in order to bring them into that present state. But as they say, practice makes practice. Yucca: Okay. I felt like that version better practice makes practiced. Yes. Yeah. So it bark at it. I was wondering as you described the stages that you go through, is that something that you do in your daily rituals as well? Or is that something reserved for the more formal or larger rituals. Mark: it's really reserved for the more formal rituals by my daily rituals are very brief. And they're just dropping into that space. So there's the arrival piece and then drawing the card, lighting the candle whatever the little piece of work is to be done. But part of the reason that those rituals are powerful for me is because of their consistency. You know, when we talk about ritual, another word for ritual is repetition, right? Repetitive. And one thing that's wonderful about pagan religions is that in most cases, not all, but in most cases, You can be very creative about the kinds of rituals that you can create. And so there's always this sort of a liveliness and newness and surprise, but there's also something to be said for doing the same thing every year or every day. There's a comfort in it and a feeling of momentum that has accumulated over the long time that you've been doing this ritual. I recommend some of both. Yucca: It's that shoe that's been worn in just the right way that it fits your foot perfectly? Mark: Right. Exactly right. Yucca: So why don't we get it to some of the things that folks could play with a little bit with their ritual. And before we do want to remind folks about the episode that we did on the Critic Voice. Because this is one of those times where the critic, we talked about ritual a lot in that episode, that the credit really raises its its head to, to tell you everything that it thinks and it's all bad, so don't worry about it. Mark: I would encourage people that are new to ritual to listen to that episode before before embarking on a ritual practice, because I think it'll help give you more permission and a little more freedom from that Critic Voice, and also kind of give you all the warnings about the sorts of tricks that it might try to spring on you. Yucca: Yeah. So given that Let's talk about some of the things that folks can try. So both from people who are just starting a practice and maybe people who want to experiment and add new things into their already existing practice. Mark: Well, it all starts with intent, right? The only unsuccessful rituals that I have ever been associated with have been, I mean, fully unsuccessful. I've been to some rituals that were pretty unsuccessful, but the only ones that I've ever been to that were fully unsuccessful were ritual simply for the point of doing a ritual, they didn't have any intention behind them. Not even as simple an intention as to. Back up a little bit. There was a friend who would have parties and there was always a ritual at the party. Everyone dreaded it. And these rituals were never really much of anything other than that, they were rituals. And I always wondered why she didn't at least focus on having those rituals be about bringing together the people that were at the party. You know, some, something that, that was doable within the context of those humans. So intention is very important, I think, you know, and if you're new to ritual work, maybe you don't bite off, you know, dealing with your childhood abuse, like Yucca: Right away. Mark: As a first thing, you know, the ritual is very psychologically powerful, but that cuts both ways. If you open that stuff up, it can really knock you over. If you're, if you are not prepared. And and you know, ready. So you determine what it is that you want to do. Is it, I want to feel more magical. I want to feel more of a sense of magic in my life. That alone is enough to start a daily practice. And if you build an altar and have a daily practice, it will add to the sense that your life is this sort of magical journey. That's cool. So why not do it? We've talked about this before, but I'll go back to it again. We are pro pleasure here. We say, if you're not hurting anybody, things that feel good are good. There is no guilt to be had. Yucca: So something with that, you could start with that intention, build a focus or an altar. And maybe just play with, entering into that ritual like space, find a, you create one yourself or try out a structure that has been used before, like the circle casting or something like that. And then experiment with what you can do in that. In that ritual space. Are there symbols that, that mean the magical life to you? Right? Is there something that you could bring into that space, which is a physical object. The thing is you don't need to use physical objects, but sometimes they can be really powerful having the thing to hold smell, touch, taste. Taste is big. Mark: And you can see it around, you know, if you have a physical object that you've put on an altar, you can see that. And it will remind you once again, of all of the meaning that you have loaded it with. So it's. I mean, my experience of the first few times that I had ritual by myself was that I was basically playing with the toys. I had, I had a bunch of sort of cool witchy things like chalices and incense burners and candle sticks and knives and all these sorts of things and lots of cool things from nature. And basically I just lit incense lit candles and just sort of moved stuff around and it felt really cool. You know, it felt like I was casting spells, even though of course I wasn't doing anything out there in the world. It was doing a lot to me. And it was bringing a lot of joy to a very childlike part of me. So, you know, don't. Undersell the value of just that kind of work of, you know, becoming accustomed to the idea of going into a ritual space to do play because ritual is really kind of an elaborate meaning freighted aspect of human play. Yucca: And when you were just starting out, when you came back to those same tools later, was your relationship different with them having then played with them in ritual space? Mark: Sure. Yeah. They came to have particular meanings and and over time, of course my altar accumulated, fossils that I had found on trips or, you know, bottles of water from high in the mountains, in the grand Tetons and, you know, various sorts of just sort of special things that I'm able to now use in conducting rituals. I mean, I used some of that water from high in the grand Tetons, which is now more than 20 years old. Just recently because I wanted I wanted something that was about purity and. That water is incredibly clean. It, you know, it comes from 12,000 feet up and it's really super, super clean and snowmelt so, anyway, you know, I wanted something that symbolized purity, and so I, you know, put a little dollop of this water in and then sealed my bottle and put it away. There are just so many cool things that you can do that have meaning you'll find that you start collecting cool containers. I have incense in all these marvelous jars and boxes and, you know, carved wood boxes and, you know, things like that. And, you know, all that sort of wizards, laboratory stuff. It it has a particular feeling to it. That's really cool. You know, it's really, it's fun to play with and it's okay to be an adult and play with things. That's fine. Yucca: I think it's more than fine. I think it's, I think it's really important. It really feeds a part of us. It releases so much of that judgment intention that we have that, that often really isn't serving us. But play so often does really serve us and improve, just improve what it feels like to be us. Mark: Yes. Yucca: And we really don't have a lot of time. So enjoy it while you got it. Mark: Right, right. Yeah. I mean, as we get older we're taught various things about dignity and shame and I mean, there's a time for, to be dignified in a time to, you know, be upright and responsible and all that kind of stuff. Of course. But if you can't let go of it to pursue joy, then that's something to work on. You know if honestly, if that is who you are, you probably want to get free of that to have a better life, Yucca: And ritual, as we've been talking about can be a great place to do that in. I may have shared this before, but one of the things I do when I'm start to catch myself and you know, that feeling at least, so I feel as too serious and uptight and all of that, I just stick my tongue out and, you know, blow through my tongue and make farty weird sounds with my tongue and that just loosens my face up. And I'm not going to do it into the mic here cause I don't want it. That doesn't sound great. And Mike, for the anyone who's got headphones in. So out of respect for you, I'm not going to, but you know the sound I'm talking about, just the, let it out, let it all out and just you know, get your face moving. Mark: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. It reminds me a little of the spring rituals that we've done at the spring Equinox, the Vernal Equinox that are all about kids and playfulness and, you know, coloring eggs and playing childhood games and playing tag and things like that. It's it is amazing. You have not seen competitive tag playing until you've seen a bunch of adults playing tag. They will. I mean, they're having fun, but they will take it very serious. Yucca: I'm a huge fan of capture the flag Mark: Uh, uh Huh. Yucca: Yeah. Those are great. Mark: Yeah. I've never done paintball. I don't know about that, but. Yucca: Have to not mind the sting. And Mark: of course. Right. Yucca: but yeah. Mark: So, I would encourage people to go to atheopaganism.org and look for some of the ritual outlines that are there. If you look in the tag cloud there's a tag for rituals and so you can look over some of the rituals that are there and get some ideas, but it's a pretty blank slate. There's. You can do almost anything as a ritual, as long as it's meaningful to you and transformative. Yucca: And Mark, speaking of the blog, congratulations on 500 posts. Mark: Oh, thank you very much. Yeah. When I saw that was coming up, I was really sort of amazed. That's a lot of posts. Yucca: That's a lot of posts. Yeah. Mark: Thank you. Yucca: Yeah. Oh, one other shout out is to the folks who successfully landed Perseverance. That was amazing. And the other missions that are there as well. So going, gonna be. Seems like this is going to be a great year for the space sciences. We've got three Mars missions. Hopefully we'll have James Webb launching and all the stuff Parker probe's doing. So this is just a fantastic time for exploration right now. Mark: it is I'm concerned about the militarization. I mean, it certainly seems that the Chinese and there, and then Trump really wanted to militarize space and I'm hoping that can be avoided, but we'll see. Yucca: Yeah. There's a lot. There's a lot there. But yeah, we'll see how that goes. But in terms of the Planetary exploration and the solar exploration, it's just you know, wonderfully exciting for what we're going to learn. Mark: It is, it really is. I can't wait to see the James Webb Yucca: Oh my goodness. Mark: going to be, it's just going to be outrageous. We thought Hubble was good, but this is just going to be an order of magnitude better. It's just so exciting. Yucca: Literally that's not an exaggeration in terms of yet. So yeah. Well, anyways, that's something to be looking forward to and we should come back and do an episode about the night and astronomy and all of that stuff pretty soon. Mark: Sure. Yeah. Pig and stand to have a lot of affinity with the night. We we like to go out in the night under the trees and light fires and, or not light fires and just be there in the dark, under the trees. It's nice. Yucca: For those of us in the Northern hemisphere, we're going to be going back into the warm weather where you won't freeze your butt off while you're out there watching. So. Mark: Right. It's such a trade-off because the winter sky is so much clear, Yucca: Goodness. Yeah. Mark: So clear, but it's cold. Yes. Yucca: Some of my favorite stars this time of year, but we had negative five Fahrenheit last week, which is pretty unusual for us, but we got hit by that that storm that, you know, have the continent got hit by. So not much star watching last week, maybe next week. Well, Mark, thank you so much. Mark: Thank you. Thank you. Yucca I really enjoyed talking with you as always have a great week.

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com   S2E03 TRANSCRIPT:   ----more---- Yucca: Welcome back to The Wonder: Science-Based Paganism. I am your host Yucca. Mark: And I'm Mark. Yucca: And this week we've got a bit of an interesting one. This is a year anniversary for us working on this project and there's a lot going on in the world right now. So we'll be talking a little bit about that and also about hope about its role, about the things to be hopeful for and our duty to be hopeful, Mark: Right? Yeah. I'm excited for this show for a lot of reasons. It's, we're recording on the 10th, so it's a few days after the riot at the Capitol and things are very much up in the air. This won't actually go live until the 18th. So who knows what will happen over the next eight days? But we do want to acknowledge how people have been feeling about this and somehow in there to carve out a little moment for some celebration, because this has been a really fun interesting project to work on with you Yucca. I feel that having pulled it off for a year is an amazing milestone. Yucca: It is. Yeah, it's been great. It really has become truly one of the highlights of my week and something that I look forward to every time and just to have these conversations and also to see the response. All of your listenership is just beyond what, at least on my part, far beyond what I was even imagining or dreaming even daydreaming about. So it's amazing. I'm so very grateful for all of this. Mark: Me too. And and particularly I'm grateful for the listeners who have discovered non theist paganism, or, have discovered a community of non theist pagans through the gateway of this podcast. There've been a number of people who have joined the Atheopagan Facebook group. Who have said, yeah, I was listening to this podcast the wonder, and they mentioned this and I thought that I'd come by, and boy, this really seems like my kind of people. And that's just really exciting to me. I like building community in that way. People of common mind and values. So that's, that is really a cool thing. Yucca: It really is. Yeah. And I should note that we are saying that it's a, for us, this is our, we started recording before we released the podcasts. We had this grand vision that we would be three or four episodes ahead before we published, which of course is not what ends up happening. We're usually recording the podcast the night before it goes live, or this week we're quite ahead a whole week ahead. But we started working on it a little bit beforehand to see what are we doing? What is this podcasting thing? And then we didn't actually go live until the very beginning of March. But this was a year ago was probably about the second time Mark that we'd actually been talking. Face to face. Mark: That's right. We hadn't actually met one another other than through. Messaging and that kind of stuff. And so the first time that we got together to talk about the idea of this podcast before, long before we were even considering recording was really the first time we met one another face to face. And so it's been a relationship building process as well as a creative podcast creation project. Yeah. And and I'm just so delighted. I'm really pleased. Yucca: Yeah. I'd like to say that a year in, you're one of my dearest friends. Mark: I really feel that too. I do. And And it's remarkable to be able to say that when we've never been, I've been in the same room together. Yucca: but different lives Mark: Yeah. This technology really allows us to reach across not only miles, but all different kinds of divides and to meet one another. So that's really a great thing. Yeah. So we're excited. We our initial goal, I think was seven weeks. Yeah, the, I, the idea was that Yucca had read somewhere that that if you make seven weeks you're actually up and running as a podcast. And so that was our initial goal. But here we are a year in. Yucca: We were looking at some of the topics before hitting the record button and seeing that we've gone through a lot of different topics. Mark: We really have. Yeah. And of course that always there's this push pull with the calendar because when you're a pagan and you're the kind of pagan who celebrates the wheel of the year. There's always another holiday coming up. And so there's a theme for a show there and there's ideas for rituals and practices and themes and all that kind of stuff. But then there's all the other stuff. They're all the other topics that don't fall neatly into those calendar buckets. And we've really explored quite a number of those Which doesn't mean that we can't go back to some of them. I'm knowing me, I probably have more to say. Yucca: I think everyone does. Yeah. But it's definitely been interesting with fitting in the, those evergreen topics and balancing between things that are going to be welcoming to people who are newer to. Paganism. And then also being interesting to people who have been part of the community for years or their whole life. So we, of course, always really welcomed suggestions. If there's something that you want to hear about that you want us to dive into a little bit deeper, we've always welcomed those suggestions. Mark: Yes. It's very helpful to us to get feedback from the folks that listen to the podcast, what are the things that you like about it? What are the things that you would do differently? What are the subjects that you'd like to hear about? We we really encourage you to email us at TheWonderPodcastQs@gmail.com and let us know what you think. Having celebrated a little bit and I'm sure that we can come back to that throughout the show. What else have we got in our grab bag of topics today? Yucca: I did want to say looking at the list, so wrote out the list. Our fourth topic was” Love and the Time of Corona Virus.” That has been a, that's been huge for everyone over the past year. It's been... I don't know anyone who has not been deeply impacted. And it's been the background for a lot of our conversations. Mark: Yes. This obviously was not a normal year. By any stretch for anyone, in my case, it was more of a normal year then than for many others, because I've continued going to work as an essential worker. But for so many, locked in place at home only going out to get food and prescriptions and things like that. Life has in many ways, ground to a halt or at least turned inward. And so that's the context within which this whole this whole podcasts so far has been produced. It'll be interesting to see what happens as the vaccines take hold, and we're able to come back out and do things together. I know that I'm very excited to get back together with my ritual circle and do things with them and hug my friends and just all the simple human things that we love to do. Yucca: Yeah, I know my kids are just waiting to get to see other children just to be around other people. Mark: That's really hard too, because a year is so long in developmental time for little kids. It's just, really profound space of time. They're just very different people at the end of that year than they were previously. Yucca: And for adolescents too, it's a time is different for them, but so is a big chunk of the development in terms of sense of self that many of the teenagers are going through right now. And the young adults who are just not that there's any sort of competition between generations, but as millennials, we thought it tough coming of age during the Great Recession. Imagine just having come out of college and you're looking for your first job and then everything's shut down. At least you have an excuse for a big blank spot on the resume at that point. Mark: Yes. I don't think anybody is frowning on people who are still living with mom and dad in 2020 and 2021. That's going to be pretty ordinary, I think. So you know, that, that's one thing that we really do need to call out is that Corona virus has loomed large in all of our conversations over the course of the last year. And I just, I imagine that there will be this whole new fertile landscape of things for us to talk about as the pandemic fades and we're able to return to in-person activities and in-person gatherings. Yucca: While bringing some of the positives that have come out of this experience Oh, absolutely. To that, right? This is, this was our composting time and a lot of ways I'd like to think of it. Mark: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. It's very interesting to me. I don't know. I could go off about this for a while, but I don't think it's entirely coincidental that the so called roaring twenties followed the 1918 pandemic and World War One. There was a kind of devil may care quality to the culture then. And I think that some of it is because the culture had seen so much death, that there was this sense that you better get your living in now because you don't know how long it's going to last. And I wonder whether we're going to see something similar. I really don't know. Obviously we're in the era of modern medicine now. There was never a vaccine for the so called Spanish flu. So it's a really different kind of situation, but I'm really curious to see what happens with culture worldwide over the course of the next 10 years or so. Yucca: Yeah. I'd be amazing to watch and be part of an experience. Mark: Yes. And we'll be talking about that later on in the show. So let's talk about the elephant in the room for a moment. There was a violent seditious riot at the United States Capitol this week. And that has never happened before. And it was encouraged by many elected officials, including the president of the United States. And so people all over the world are feeling uncertain concerned, confused, worried. And we just felt that we needed to address that a little bit, because it is what's going on internationally right now. Even if you're not in the United States it's the largest economy in the world and the biggest military power in the world. So if it goes crazy, there are serious repercussions. And I just hope that those of us that are sane and kind hearted and generous and have good values, don't feel that we need to pull into our shells in the face of this blast of hatred and hostility that has come out from the radical right. I feel that the time is now more than ever for us to be living our values and doing it visibly and standing for equality and standing for justice and standing for a reverence for the earth and for critical thinking and for the things in, for science and for all of those core understandings that drive a considered in conscientious and heartfelt love. Yucca: Yes. Mark: If you who are like me really thrown by this, Wednesday, the sixth was a crazy day. The The Georgia senatorial elections gave control of the Senate to the Democrats, which means that Mitch McConnell will no longer be standing in the way of all things. Good. And just, and then came this riot Yucca: Just a few hours later after that news. Mark: Yeah. Yes. So it was a whiplash event. It was entirely impossible for me, at least as somebody who follows and cares about the public affairs of my country and of the world. I just felt pulled all over the place and I couldn't sleep well and felt very unsettled. And it's still not all calmed down and I am under no illusions that there isn't going to be more of this before the 20th, when Joe Biden is inaugurated. Yucca: Yeah. It's a, I feel almost like in this limbo place right now of just waiting. Waiting for the other shoe to drop what's going on. By the time our listeners are listening to this, maybe things have maybe more things have changed. Maybe they haven't, maybe we're still in this what's happening place. And that feels that's characterizing right now in a huge way. But I think that's happening on a larger scale as well, not just these particular events that are happening with the country, but just how is the world? Where's the world going, how is it going to respond to these many challenges from so many directions? Mark: Yes. Yes. And even though I don't agree with them at all, and I have no patience or tolerance for the kind of hatred and bigotry that characterizes the Trumpist. I do have some compassion for people who are so overwhelmed by modernity that they just retreat into this sort of knee jerk opposition to it. Because let's face it, there are vectors of good happening in the world. Now, despite all efforts to the contrary tolerance. And inclusion and equality as values are on the rise. They've got a long way to go. But they are on the rise and there is increasing recognition of all the ways in which people who are disadvantaged are held down and especially the younger generation doesn't approve of that does not feel like that is a way for a society to conduct itself. This is part of why the white supremacists particularly have come unglued because they can see that the societies that they live in are becoming increasingly multicultural and that there's nothing they can do about it. It's demographics and it's the mobility of humans around the globe. Both of which are impossible to stop. Having said that, having said I'm. I'm sympathetic when the world that you grew up in is gone and there's something new coming. But to my mind, we, as curious people, as interested people, as people who are thoughtful and analytical, We can welcome the new, we're able to to open ourselves to the new possibilities of the changes that are happening in our societies. And all of that is to the good I look at those trends that That white supremacists are upset about. And I cheer because I just think it's fantastic. I am not in the least bit invested in white supremacy or in the idea that there are only two genders or in heteronormativity or any of those things. I say, bring it on. Yucca: I think it makes it a much more interesting place to be, frankly. Mark: It does. And it's not only that it makes it interesting to be because there's just more different kinds of people. It's that people as individuals can live in the fullness of themselves and for many people in this world, historically, they've never been able to do that. They've always had to pretend to be straight or pretend to be male or female or pretend, or, suffer under the boot of bigotry, Yucca: Or not get to do the, not get to pursue whatever their particular passion or genius was in. Mark: Yes, exactly. And that, that has to end, it has to end in the cultural direction, slow and halting and stuttering as it is. Is in the direction of improved conditions that way. I really believe that. And I know that there's a long way to go, but I do believe that there are movements in the direction of people being more mutually tolerant and inclusive. And to me, that matters a lot. Yucca: One of the themes that we are talking about today is the theme of hope. And to me, it's incredibly hopeful that these struggles and issues are being talked about. So it's an intense period. There's a lot happening when we talk about things like racial justice and the environmental issues, but the fact that they are on the public's mind that it's something that we can have a cultural wide discussion about means that we can actually admit that it's happening because these things are happening. Whether we admit it or not. But now that we admit that they're happening, we can start to do something. Yes. Where so many of these challenges we were just talking about have been under, have been pushed down and hidden and you couldn't talk about them, but now at least we can start that process. Mark: Right. And it may seem very daunting when you look at. The huge body of work that has to be done in order to make things just in order to make them equitable and in order to make them sustainable. And it's easy to look at that and just say, Oh it's impossible. Or things will never change. But we look at history and things have changed. Things have changed a lot. The whole idea of the value of the individual really only arose in the enlightenment, which was in the 18th century. That's 300 years ago. It's very little time. Honestly. It's only nine generations. And we've seen such transformation along so many axes. We know now that the petrochemical industry deliberately suppressed information about climate change for more than 20 years, but the cat's out of the bag, most people understand and know that human caused carbon emissions are causing climate change. And that is having a seriously harmful effect. On the planet. The first, it's been said many times the first step in solving any problem is admitting that you have one. And we're now at the point where most of us, maybe not the squeakiest wheels of us, but most of us are aware that we have a problem and that it's something that we're going to need to work to solve. So all of that gives me hope. I see people working hard. I see people putting their lives on the line in movements like Black Lives Matter. And to me, that kind of heroism. Bodes, I think most decent minded people want fairness. They want to believe that they live in a society. that's fair. And as it becomes more and more visible to them that they're not in a society, that's fair. I believe most of them will move in a direction of wanting to correct that. And that gives me hope. Yucca: Me too. Mark: So I go back to the 13 principles of Atheopaganism, which is the particular path that I practice. And I look at some of those principles and they are about social responsibility and about curiosity and about critical thinking and about reverence for the Earth. All of those, are not only for me in my own personal conduct. They're also about my agenda for societal transformation. They're about, what I hope to see in the world as history unfolds. And I believe that non theist paganism has a lot to offer people who want to see that happen. The kinds of work that we do with our psychologies, through ritual, with our relationship with life on Earth, through celebration of holidays. All of those things that we do, they help to strengthen us to go through these hard times and to remain diligent about pursuing that vision of a better world. So if you're just starting to listen to the podcast, I really welcome you to look into what non theist paganism has to offer you and what it really means to carry that as your identity or your sets, your sense of values. Yucca: Yeah. And I think this as many times throughout the year, but particularly as we stand in this really uncertain time and place in history, that self-reflection is so important and going in and saying, okay, what are my values and why? And are these things that I am, are they values to the point where I am really willing to work for these in the world? Mark: Yes. Yes. And also bear in mind that this is a group effort. It can be really overwhelming to look at all of the problems and think I must do something about all of them. You may need to pick your battles. You may need to work on a particular thing that you feel very strongly about. I feel very strongly, for example. Well, I feel strongly about a lot of things in terms of my activities. I'm involved with a diversity equity and inclusion initiative at work. That's one piece of what I really care about and I do work about, and I do a lot to reduce my carbon footprint. In fact, I am now driving an electric car that we least no. Good. Yes. I'm excited about that. That happened over the holidays. Yucca: Oh, congratulations. Yeah. Mark: Thank you. Yucca: That's wonderful. Mark: It is, it's a great car actually. It's it's plugged into my garage right now. Yucca: Wonderful. Yeah. But coming back, none of us are superhuman. None of us are. So choosing something that, or a group of things that you can really focus on, for us, it's that relationship with land and food production. That for us is the one that we've really focused in on and going, okay. Do we see this as something that all these other issues play into and connect with our fundamental relationship with the rest of Earth. So that's where we're focusing, but we also know to be gentle sometimes with ourselves, right? We value these things. We work on them. But sometimes we need to step back and rest and not beat ourselves up when we aren't perfect. And recognizing that we are part of a society and a team. And that, that just because we do this thing is not going to solve the whole problem for everybody. And I don't say that in a discouraging way, but in a way of releasing some of that responsibility in the sense of that one person has this responsibility, that none of us are the chosen person, the chosen one from the story who's going to solve everything. It's the community, it's everybody. And we have a part to play. Which is empowering, but it's also empowering that we don't have the only part to play. Mark: Yes. Yeah. Yes. And one of the things that is true, one of the larger. Larger forces that is beyond any one individual that is weighing in on this is that we are at a demographic tipping point. The the average age of a Trump supporting white supremacist type person is in their sixties and they're on their way out. And The next generation is not in that same place. You can't say that universally. Of course Yucca: there are individuals, but as a large group. Mark: As a large group. That kind of mentality is on its way out. And that is part, I think, of the why they are so desperate right now to try to remake the world in the image that they see in their minds as being a value. So yes. Yucca: that's another one of the things that gives me hope. Just looking at those general trends, not to say that we should not pay attention to the bad things that are happening and that we shouldn't respond to them. We very much should I believe and there's, that should word, but that's my belief that we really have a responsibility and a duty to to stand up for the values that we have and to really try and guide the world in that direction. Because if we don't, then what's the point of having those values? Mark: Exactly. They aren't meaningful if they're just theoretical. Yeah. The only thing that I see as a downside of. That generation fading away to a more tolerant and inclusive one is that I'm going to go with them which is disappointing. But so it goes we'll see. Yucca: Well, hang in there for a while, how about? Mark: That's my plan. Yeah, my, my plan, I just entered my 60th year. I don't know if I mentioned this on the podcast before, but I turned 59, so I'm now in my 60th year and I honestly can't believe it. I just don't know where all the time went. I can remember lots and lots of events, but how did it ever happen? That I'm 59. I, last time I turned around, I was 30. Yucca: Happy birthday. Thank you. Mark: Thank you. I feel like one thing that we might want to talk about a little bit more is self care. In times like this, we actually did a whole episode on self care, especially in the context of the disasters of the pandemic and the disasters of 2020 generally a while back, but I do feel that now is a time when, while you're feeling the urgency to do something about these terrible things in the world, you also need to make sure that there's fuel in the tank. And that means you need to rest. You need to eat, you need to just lie around and do nothing of any particular importance, you need to have social interactions, however that's possible for you, that feed your sense of self and your joy in living. You need to have creative time to do those things that feel expressive for you. Because the, to, to use a terrible analogy because I don't like war analogies, but what you don't want to be as cannon fodder, what you want to be as a leader who can repeatedly make efforts in the direction of your values rather than just burning out and getting discouraged and then dropping out, because then there's one less voice for those positive values. So really folks I'm feeling it too. We are we're right there with you. Take care of yourselves right now. Make sure you're getting enough sleep. Make sure you're drinking enough water. If you have, if any, your Yucca: And let your self set boundaries too. Yes. It's important to know what's going on, but doom scrolling is not good for your health. No. It's okay to say. No to, to being asked for things that you don't have the energy to give at the moment. Mark: Yes. And this is something that we are not taught in English, speaking cultures, at least we're just not taught to take care of ourselves very well. In fact, we're taught that certain kinds of not very productive or healthy. Practices are what constitutes self-care like drinking, for example. Okay. I'm under a lot of stress. I'm going to have a drink. On the one hand, that can work on the other hand, if that's your go-to strategy, not so much, Yucca: it stops working after a certain point. If you take the melatonin every night, then it's not going to work for you. Mark: Yes, right? Yes. Yucca: Yeah. And then we also have certain things that we've glorified that are very harmful. Like never sleeping the, Oh, I'm too busy to sleep, I'm, the workaholic aspect and for women we're particularly taught to not take care of ourselves and that establishing some of those boundaries makes you a bad, makes you a bad wife or a bad mom, or a bad whatever you are. And I just don't think that's very helpful. Mark: No. And that gets to the larger question of the ridiculous bar that women are expected to get over in terms of having a full life, which is this. Monstrous combination of career and family and creative outlets. And and you're expected to do all of these at this super high level that demands all this time. Yucca: But if you do you get criticized because you're not doing the other things, you're being selfish. For what, whatever you're doing is selfish. And speaking of tough this year has been particularly tough on women. When you look at the numbers of the having to leave the workforce and the inequalities within the home, and yes, it's been there's, it's been a rough one, really hopes that it, that a light is being shined on these areas because of this year. Mark: I certainly hope so. Yeah. Yeah. That's really what I wanted to say to folks. There is there's reason for hope and you can be a part of it, and I hope you will. You need to take care of yourself in the meantime, too. In order to be effective at that. And in order to have your life feel good, which, this is the life that you get. If you're waiting around for your life to feel good until something else changes, it's time to make those changes now. And also finally, thank you. Thank you for listening to us over the course of the last year. Yes, it's. It's really an honor to know that we're, in people's cars, on their commute to work and in their headphones when they're going for walks and doing dishes and all that kind of stuff. And I hope that we have that we continue to fulfill what you hope for from us. And once again, really we encourage you to provide us with feedback about what subjects you'd like us to talk about, how how you'd like the podcast to proceed all that. We really welcome it. And that once again, is that thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com. Yucca: Thank you everyone. Mark: Thank you. Be well.

In this episode I talk to Mark Nepo. Mark is a poet, a teacher, and a New York Times bestselling author. In our conversation we approach purpose from a somewhat different angle – we talk about purpose as not so much a question of where we are going, but about who we are becoming on the way there. We also talk about purpose in terms of the unexpected events that happen to us while we are aiming at our dreams, about how oftentimes what turns out to be our most important contributions or learnings are things that we could not have planned for or anticipated. Mark is a wonderful storyteller and throughout our conversation he shares many beautiful stories that illuminate our inquiry. He also shares about his own purpose, about the way that he does his writing and about how these two are interrelated. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope that you will too! “Our dreams and our goals are meant as kindling for the fire of our aliveness. And whilst our dreams often don't come true, sometimes by engaging them, WE come true.” – Mark Nepo More about Mark: As an author, Mark has published 22 books and recorded fifteen audio projects. One of his books, The Exquisite Risk, was listed by Spirituality & Practice as one of the Best Spiritual Books of 2005, calling it "one of the best books we've ever read on what it takes to live an authentic life." He has appeared on Oprah Winfreys Super Soul Sunday program several times. Find out more at marknepo.com. If you are interested in the 3-session webinar in October - “More together than alone – the power and spirit of community”, you can go to live.marknepo.com. Work with Pauli Saari: Pauli Saari is a certified Purpose Guide. If you are interested in working with him you can contact him here: paulisaari.com/contact. Members area: paulisaari.com/member-signup

With many employers looking at changing contracts as a way of avoiding redundancies, we ask Acas advisers Mark Makin and Helen Robinson how to do it well. We explore:- The best way to change employment contracts- Why consulting staff matters- How to do this well remotely- What your rights are as an employeeEpisode Resourceshttps://www.acas.org.uk/changing-an-employment-contractTranscript Sarah GuthrieWelcome to the Acas Podcast. We're talking today about changing an employment contract with Acas advisors, Helen Robinson and Mark Makin, and I'm Sarah Guthrie. This is topical at the moment because lots of employers are looking at changing contracts as an alternative to making people redundant. So employers are asking, how can we do that? And members of staff might be asking us, can my employer do this? So Helen, let's start off with employers. What's the best way of going about changing an employment contract?Helen RobinsonThere's a number of different ways that an employer can can consider changing somebody's contract or varying the terms and conditions. But I think the best way from an Acas perspective would be where possible to do so by agreement. If an employer speaks to a member of staff, and they are able to get their agreement to make a change to their terms and conditions, then ultimately that is going to be the best way for conducive working relationship moving forward.Mark MakinTo echo what Helen said there, taking the workforce with you - informing, explaining consulting, discussing, providing feedback - that sets the tone for the relationship once the change comes into effect, because the trust and the goodwill will need to be there to take the organisation forward afterwards. And if we make changes without agreements, there's a big possibility that that trust and goodwill won't be there, which is going to create problems with itself.Helen Building on that, I mean, what some employers are choosing to do is to see whether they can make these changes on a temporary basis because staff might be more willing or accepting to the changes there. And I've also spoken to an employer recently who has offered an incentives so the change that they were looking at making was a 10% pay cut and that was across the board 10% pay cut for all staff. That was a measure to look at avoiding redundancy. And what the employer said almost as an incentive was that if this didn't work, and if actually they did need to make any redundancies within the next 12 months, their redundancy pay and their notice pay would be calculated at their original wage so that the wage that was slightly higher, and so that that was something that went some way for for stuff agreeing to that change. Sarah Yeah, I can see why that would really help because we've heard stories of people who have agreed to a temporary pay cap with a perception that then they won't be made redundant and get made redundant and then also have their redundancies as calculated on their most recent pay, which is half of what they were being paid. So I guess it, it sounds like thinking through in detail how your staff will respond to the changes you're proposing both in the short term and the long term is really important here. Some people listening to this podcast might be thinking, Well, can employers change a contract? What are my rights? I wondered if you could give us an insight into that.Helen If a member of staff agrees to a change, then absolutely a change can be made to that contract, whether it's on a temporary or a permanent basis. I think it's very, very important when we're looking at agreements and agreeing to a change that an employer is very open and honest about what this change is going to be. How long is it going to last for? Is it going to be permanent? Because employees need to have that information so that they can make an informed decision about whether they are happy to agree. But I also think it's equally if not more important for employers to be open about the reason behind the change. Because if they approach their staff and they speak about Okay - we will use the 10% pay cut as an example - we're looking at giving you a 10% pay cut, if that's all the information that staff have, then it's highly unlikely that they're going to be happy about that or agreed to it. Whereas if an employer approaches staff and says, Okay, look, we're looking at a 10% pay cut and the reasons are because x y z, people still may or may not be happy about it, but they might be more likely to respond to that say, Okay, yeah, I can understand the reasons why. And yes, I will accept that change.Sarah So keeping very clear communication around the reason why and also how long it's likely to be for and what the long term consequences of that might be. And, Mark, what have you seen from employers about good practice in this area?Mark I think it is the communication as early as possible, as open and transparent as possible. And it's two way. Feedback is given. I think that's something that is often missed in this type of process, where the employer may well go into this type of situation. And they will listen to what people have to say, but they don't provide the feedback. And the feedback may be that was a great idea. But we can't do it, because in some cases, it may be that's a great idea we haven't thought about. Let's discuss in some more detail how we might be able to implement that.Helen Just remember that if you are looking at changing the contract of 20 or more people, there are additional consultation requirements on you, and that you would need to collectively consult. So that would mean either involving trade union representatives if you recognise a trade union, or giving staff the opportunity to appoint employee representatives to almost act as a go between and have conversations with employer and staff themselves.Sarah And that two way communication is very different at the moment for most workplaces than what we would have encountered in the past. Do you have any insight into the challenges of doing this remotely and how people have been overcoming them?Helen I think there are I should say that added challenges. And I think sometimes it's very important for employers to remember that actually, people have got other stuff going on at home. At the moment, yes, they may be working from home. But it might be that they need to schedule a specific time to have important conversations such as these when I don't know if they've not got children at home or the partner is able to look after children at that particular point or other caring responsibilities. So being very, very clear about what's going to be spoken about in a specific meeting or specific virtual meeting. But making sure that that person is in the right frame of mind with minimal distractions to have this conversation because it is an important conversation. Just because people are working remotely or we may have people furlough that we need to speak to, there still needs to be a good level of communication. And what I mean by that is not just an email chain, it's a conversation that would usually be had and it should be a conversation, have it as a conversation, whether it's a video call, whether it's a telephone conversation, not just an email to all and saying this is happening or we're proposing this how. Have a conversation.Sarah So you mentioned Mark that one of the things people often miss is the two way feedback and the need for that. What other mistakes have you seen employers making? And why do you think those mistakes are being made? Mark There's sometimes an assumption that I've made this decision for the good of the business. So people will automatically accept that it's the right decision. So one of the mistakes that is often made is that that communication, early communication doesn't take place. A decision has already been made, and the employer presents it to the staff almost as a fait accompli, and then is shocked and surprised when they get objections to that, or when people have concerns about it. Or when there is a long list of questions about well, how will this impact me? What does this mean for me? When is it gonna happen? It's it's almost like the employer sometimes jumps the gun and makes the decisions for good reasons, but misses out that communication stage consultation stage.Sarah One thing that's really struck me about doing this process well is that it can take quite a lot of time. And I wonder what you would say to somebody who's thinking, well, that all sounds great, I don't have time to do this.Mark Ultimately, the decision is the employers. But the conversation that I would have with them would be centred around not just the legal risks that they might face if they get this wrong - so there might be breach of contract claims there might be constructive dismissal claims, there might be claims centred around the failure to consult properly if they are in a collective situation. But I'd also talk about some of the less obvious risks, the impact on your workforce, in terms of morale and motivation, the goodwill and that trust and confidence that needs to exist between the employer and the workforce in order for them to function properly.Sarah And so what rights do you have as a member of staff who's going through this process? Perhaps there's been a proposed change, perhaps your employer has or hasn't handled it well? Could you just talk us through what rights you have?Helen It's not an uncommon question from from an employee to say, Okay, well, you're talking about agreement to change, but actually, I don't want to agree to it for whatever reason, and it may be that an employer has done absolutely everything that Mark and I have spoken about. They've consulted they discussed, they've been very open about the the reason behind this change, but the change doesn't suit the member of staff and that is a real life situation. And I think in all circumstances, there's absolutely no obligation on a member of staff to agree to a change. But I do think it's, it's worth being aware that ultimately, if they don't agree to change, there are other options that are available to their employer. For example, if an employer feels that they've got absolutely no option, but to make this change, and their business may go under otherwise, for example, then they do have the option of actually ending the existing contracts by giving notice. And then re-engaging their staff at the end of that notice period on new contracts. What I would say is that it's not a risk free thing for an employer to do. It is still technically a dismissal, you dismissing somebody from their existing role, from their existing contract. And with that in mind, an individual would have the option, if they chose to, to appeal against the decision. They'd also potentially have the option of actually treating that notice as notice of dismissal. And if they felt it was unfair, and they weren't engaged in the new contract, they could potentially look at making a complaint to an employment tribunal around that. So it's not risk free for an employer. It's an option but it's not not a risk free one.Mark As well as the agreement route to vary a contract, and the dismissal and reengagement route to varying contracts, some employers already have flexibility clauses built in to their contracts, which they can invoke. Just a word of caution around flexibility clauses: they do need to be well written, they need to be quite specific, and they need to be reasonable in order them for them to be to stand up and and be operative. And you usually find them around place of work, job role, job function, hours of work. Even if flexibility clauses already exist in a contract before invoking them, I think it's good practice for the employer to speak to staff and explain the circumstances such that they feel they need to invoke the clause. Here's the reason why I feel a need to involve the clause and here's the fine detail about about when and how and what it might mean for you. But then leave the door open for the staff to come back with questions, concerns and objections of other suggestions and ideas. There is another option, unilateral variation, which involves the employer simply making the change and imposing it on employees. But it is fraught with risk and it should be only used as a very, very last resort. It opens the door to legal challenges, it doesn't go down well with the workforce, it will damage goodwill, it will remove any discretionary behaviour that might have been the previous layer, and it just doesn't make for good employment relations as well as the the big legal risks that come along with imposing changes on your workforce.Helen And I think if I if I just add to that, I did some work with an organisation last year - so we're talking pre COVID pre pandemic. And the employer had done exactly this, they had basically informed all of their workforce that as of next week, they were going from a five day to a four day working week, and the pay cut that that attracted as well. Now as Mark said, they lost a lot of goodwill from their staff with that, but what also happened was they lost within about the following month, four members of staff left and went working for another organisation. But what had actually happened, these four particular members of staff were quite specialist, so they had to be replaced. So there's all these then additional costs that the employers got of losing experienced, knowledgeable members of staff, and then having to go through recruitment again to replace them when they were already struggling with money, which is why this this going to four day working week had come in in the first place.Mark And I can see in a situation like that Helen where, if the employer had spoken to people in advance, early, been open about the need to make the change, staff may well have agreed to that once they understood the full picture. Helen Absolutely, yeah. And I think at the end, the employer in his particular circumstance, had done exactly what we were talking about earlier. He'd fallen into one of those traps where they felt they had consulted because they themselves had thought about all these different measures or different ways and come up with the solution. But they'd done it on their own. They hadn't involve their staff during that thought process.Sarah I'm just thinking of people who are listening to this and thinking my employer is not doing this well. They haven't consulted very well. They haven't listened to that feedback. What would you advise someone in that position about how they can help their whole workplace go through this process more smoothly? Helen I think in the first instance, and this would be true of any concern that any member of staff has within a workplace, we would be advising them to raise that and to raise that internally. I think it's very important for both employers and members of staff to see whether a situation can be resolved internally before they think. Okay, well, is there any sort of external complaints I could make? And part of the reason for that is something that Mark mentioned earlier on, it's about the fact that hopefully, a working relationship is going to continue. And the more that that can be resolved internally, and informally wherever possible, the more likely it is that that working relationship will continue and will continue to be positive. Sarah Thanks. That's been really helpful. I wondered if you could leave us with a key insight that you've had to during your work on this topic. Helen The key thing - and Mark and I have referenced this throughout our conversation today - is to communicate and to communicate as early as possible.Mark And to keep communicating. I've seen situations, certainly in collective situations where there are laid down consultation periods that the employer must observe. But I've seen situations where we get to the end of that 30 days or 45 days, depending on the numbers, and the employer decides that's it job done, when it would have made so much more difference if they just kept that talk in that communication going for a few more days, because they were making progress. Things were developing yet, they'd come to the end of the statutory consultation period, and they felt that's it. That's the green light to move ahead now. So don't be bound by any limits. If things are moving ahead. If progress is being made, keep talking. Helen Absolutely. Yeah. Sarah It's a great thing to remember for all workplace relationships, not just varying a contract, changing your contract. And so thanks very much for your insight today.Helen Thank you. Mark Okay.Sarah You've been listening to the Acas podcast. You can find full details about what you need to know about changing an employment contract on our website at www.acas.org.uk Thanks for listening. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, Brett Dupree talks about his issue with consistency. How being inconsistent has made it so he has never succeeded in a way that he has wanted to. Then he has an amazing interview with a young motivational speaker on how he got started in motivational speaking and how he is taking it to the next level with speech coaching.Who is Mark?As a Tedx/ Youth Motivational speaker, world-class speech coach, and occasional stand-up comedian Mark travels to remind people why they are here. When people commit to their one thing in life. Great progress happens and that is how we make solving the world problems easy. (MARKS VERSION)After graduating from high school the recurring problem that I and other students suffer from is learning aimlessly. All through school we have been taught to learn for grades. But never learn for value, a vision and a purpose. As a speaker, my defining moment is going to see the 1999 world champion of public speaking speak in my hometown and very nervously I walked up to him and said: "I hope to be like you one day." With a big smile, he looked at me and said: "Change your I hope to I am and you are halfway there". Sparking the I am idea. The I am moment is what I travel for, to remind others of their "I am". Are you ready for yours? I know I am:) The VISION"To remind people why they are here so that united we create progress in the world and in our lives" https://markperezofficial.com/ More podcasts at Pod.JoyousExpansion.com

**Start Time For 1st Half: Hottest Sports News of The Week (13:20 Mark) **Start Time For Halftime: Coach Brown’s 2-Minute Drill (28:50 Mark) **Start Time For 2nd Half: 2018 NFL Top 7 Series (Part II): WR’s & TE’s (33:20 Minute Mark) **In Case You Missed It: (1:03:18 Mark) As much as running backs don’t want to hear it, the NFL has become a pass-friendly league over the last couple of years after seeing some of the numbers displayed by some of the game’s top Wide Receivers and Tight Ends. FSP asked our loyal listeners to put together to make a list of who they perceive to be the top 7 WRs and TE’s heading into the 2018 NFL season. **CRITERIA**: This list is strictly related to their 2017-18 stats/ performance and who has the best chance of maintaining their great play heading into next season. Check out Episode #231 as @JaiHov , @JEasley84 , @FSP_Wezzy and Special Guest Host @CoachBrown16 as they discuss the hottest sports news of the past week and continue with Part II of the Top 7 Series , with the Wide Receivers and TIght Ends heading into the 2018-19 season. #FSPStyle

Being busy is often an excuse for not taking care of ourselves, whether that means long days in the office or racking up the airline miles for business travel. As part of our Wellness Podcast Episodes, Mark sits down with Dr. Kathleen Baskett whose area of expertise is bariatric medicine focusing primarily on weight management. They discuss how to make the time to eat well and exercise and why healthy choices can positively affect your professional life. ALPS In Brief, The ALPS Risk Management Podcast, is hosted by ALPS Risk Manager, Mark Bassingthwaighte. Transcript MARK: Hello. This is Mark Bassingthwaighte. I'm the risk manager here at ALPS. Welcome to another episode of ALPS In Brief. We're coming to you from the historic Florence building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. I'm delighted to be able to introduce another guest this afternoon, a Dr. Kathleen Baskett. She's a physician with St. Vincent's Healthcare here in Billings, Montana and runs the weight management clinic. I wanted to take some time to talk with Dr. Baskett today in follow-up, or to continue on with the discussion we've been having on the podcast, which is a very, very hot topic among Bar Associations and within the profession now. It's just attorney well-being. Dr. Baskett, before we get into some more interesting discussion, can you just take a few moments and tell the audience a little bit about yourself DR. BASKETT: For sure. Thank you for having me. It is an honor to be here. I've been practicing medicine for about 30 years. My area of expertise at this point is bariatric medicine, which essentially is weight management, and it is treating people dealing with obesity. Right now in our country, obesity is the first leading cause of preventable death. In my clinic, I'm working with people who want to lose weight in a nonsurgical manner, but also helping to care for people who are preparing for bariatric surgery, and subsequently caring for them after they've had that surgery. MARK: As you're well aware in terms of… we'd had some time to dock and visit a little bit. You do know that I travel. I can share lawyers, whether some lawyers have quite a bit of time on the road and others just have very full days, long days. I mean, they may come home or not come home for supper, but they're back to the office and spend time in the evening and whatnot and just maintaining even just healthy eating, healthy eating habits I think can be a challenge. I'd love to hear your comments on the importance of a healthy diet, and then maybe following up on that, thoughts that you might have in terms of how the busy professional, whether on the road or just spending lots and lots, too much time in the office, how we might to address that so that we can help maintain just a healthy lifestyle as it relates to food. DR. BASKETT: For sure. In medicine today as to many of the issues that we deal with are more chronic diseases versus infectious diseases of years' past, and the chronic diseases are really linked to the lifestyle choices that people make, obesity being the underlying cause of many to include diabetes type II, high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, sleep apnea, even certain types of cancers. Again, the choices that we make with our eating and activity are crucial, and it's very difficult when people are busy, they're working many long hours, when travel is involved because, as we know, there's an abundance of fast and convenient type food that surround us, and it is difficult to eat in a healthier manner when we're out on the road, or even just if you want to eat something quickly. But there is a way to eat in a healthy manner. It can be done. MARK:                                  Well, practical tips. I know one of the things that I've learned over the years is I've learned about protein bars, and I've done a little reading and research on my own, and in conjunction with my own physician, we've started to move away from the high-carb diet. I used to be a guy, I mean, I would love to drop into Starbucks, get my chocolate glaze donuts and a big latte, and just, I'm back in the car, but you don't feel well with that. Now, learning to switch over to ... For instance, one of the things I enjoy are just these protein bars that you can get from Costco. I will tend to do that. Hope on an airplane, I might have a protein bar. If I have a little time in an airport, I might stop and get some eggs or something like that, but I'm just trying to find ways to adjust, think differently, I guess. Do you find that to be a challenge? Do you ... DR. BASKETT: Well, it is a challenge, but you can make these healthier choices. I think some of the restaurants that surround us or that we encounter are beginning to be cognizant of that and offer some healthier choices, and definitely, packing protein bars, protein drinks, healthy nuts, grabbing a yogurt instead of a soda, it's a healthy alternative, and people truly feel better. All of these simple carbohydrates, when after we eat them, they tend to shoot our blood sugars up quite rapidly, whether we have diabetes or not, and then those blood sugars quickly plummet, and then they begin zig-zagging throughout the day, and that really just triggers that hunger and cravings for more carbohydrates, it sets in more fatigue, and then in time, it's a way of just eating poorly and not making healthy choices. MARK: One of the things that I became interested in just, you read now, and again, I'm curious as to, is this something you hear in the media, is there a truth to this, but lots of people, "I know. I'm traveling a lot, and I shouldn't be drinking all these cokes. It's just a lot of sugar and things, so I'll make this switch, and I'll jump into these zero-calorie beverages," but at times I've heard that may not be the best decision. Are those drinks an appropriate alternative? If I'm going to give up Mountain Dew, can I do the zero-calorie, caffeine- DR. BASKETT: Do the diet Mountain Dew. MARK: Diet Mountain Dew. Is that- DR. BASKETT: Well, there has been some research that shows that some of the artificial sweeteners aren't as healthy for us as we'd like to think that they are. Some studies have shown that they will interfere with blood sugar and insulin regulation in the GI tract. Also, some studies have shown that the artificial sweeteners will send messages to the brain to make us want to crave and desire more sweet, more carbohydrate. I really suggest to my patients that water is that best alternative, the fine quality H2O. You can get carbonated water that's flavored because people do like carbonated beverages. You can put slices of lime and orange and cucumber in water. An occasional zero-calorie is great, but it shouldn't be a preponderance of one's beverage intake during the day. MARK: Do you think, again, looking at the busy schedules and travel schedules and these kinds of ... How much do you think that planning plays into this? Is that a way to shift gears a little bit since ... What are your thoughts about that? DR. BASKETT: Oh, very much so, I mean, just as professionals need to plan their schedules, calendars, and timing. Planning goes a long way in helping us to eat in a healthy manner and exercise. If you know you're going to be gone for a week just as you're packing your clothes, gathering the information you will need for your travels, you really can sketch out a little bit what might you do for breakfast or lunch because you know where you will be, and can you throw a box of protein bars, prepackaged nuts into your suitcase, that's something that's pretty easy to do. Likewise, when we're home, meal prepping on weekends, cooking a little bit of extra and freezing makes it easy to have a pretty simple but yet healthy meal during the week. MARK: How about, how does exercise play into all of this in terms of, again, thinking about just healthy eating, healthy diets, overall health and the obesity component. It's ... DR. BASKETT: Again, I think exercise is the key. As I tell my patients, if they really want to lose weight, if they want to keep them off, exercise isn't a luxury. It really becomes a necessity. Sometimes, they encourage them to think about, if they had cancer, would they make the time to have chemo? Everybody typically says of course they would, so if you want to lose weight and become healthier, why not choose to make the time to exercise and to eat well? Several of my patients have told me they actually put on their calendar "time to exercise," but they'll put it under the guise of Wellness Committee, so for anybody else seeing their calendar, they have an appointment at 2:00 in the afternoon. They're on a Wellness Committee, and it might mean that they're leaving the office to go for a 20-minute walk, but it easily ... Well, not easily. It does take work, and it's hard, but it can be planned in. We can make an appointment to exercise just as we make appointments to do many other things. It becomes a commitment to ourselves. MARK: One of the things that I have found and was kind of fun, I don't need this tool anymore, but it kind of started just a change. I got into one of these little Fitbit things. You set these goals, you can track yourself on the Internet, and the further you walk, well, you've walked across New Zealand. They give you all of these things, but I found myself trying to get steps, and even if you have a little time between planes at the airport. Instead of going into one of the Sky Clubs or Frequent Flyer Clubs or sitting down and having a bite, you just walk around a little bit and see what kind of steps you can get in. I really like your comment. I want to underscore this in terms of, I think people tend to look at dieting, exercise, these kinds of things as maybe quick solutions and things, but they have trouble committing to it because we don't seem to view ... Well, getting overweight or getting out of shape, at least right up front, it's not like you're facing a diagnosis of cancer, but you're spot on. I mean, when you look at the long-term health consequences in terms of overall well-being, but then you look at diabetes and these kinds of things, if you have diabetes or you have cancer, you are going to seek treatment and deal with it. It seems to me, I like that perspective as a way to encourage myself. I just think that's a great, great approach. The one other thing I'd like to visit on a little bit, how ... I just use the word diet as an example, and people will go in, and first of the new year, they make these resolutions. But diet really isn't the appropriate way to look at this. I mean, do you have thoughts about the term diet. To me, I've come to learn, I think that becomes a problem. It isn't about diet. Am I correct? DR. BASKETT: Well, I would agree, and I usually don't use the word diet when I'm working with my patients. We talk about eating plan. Many of my patients will reference diet, and I tend to guide them with the different choices of words because the diet is something that people go off of. My goal when working with patients is to help them truly make lifestyle change. It's lifestyle change and making changes and habits that will help someone stay at his or her new weight. It's interesting, the Greek word for diet is diaita, and what that truly means is manner of living. For me, that's what this is all about. MARK: I love that. I love that. We're just about out of time here. I guess I'll give you a moment if you have any final comment or thought to share in terms of people that are just ... Again, busy, busy days, wanting to make the change, thinking about it might be a good thing to do and all that, but it's just getting started. Do you have any final closing thoughts of encouragement or an idea of how to make this kind of a change? DR. BASKETT: Well, what I would say is it doesn't have to be all or nothing. Some people often think, "Gosh, if I don't go to the gym and workout for 60 minutes, why bother," or, "If I don't eat salads three times a day and healthy protein, and then I had a bowl of ice cream, then I have blown my, quote, 'diet.' I'll just forget about it." You just have to start somewhere. Maybe it's a matter of truly taking a five-minute walk when you have that little break in between appointments with clients or you have 10 minutes during your lunch, and it's a beautiful day outside, and you can walk around the block. You had a bad day, and maybe you overate or you had too many sweets. The answer to that would be so? So what could you do differently the next day? It doesn't mean that you give up. You just have to start somewhere, and you build on one habit at a time, little by little. Interestingly, research shows that people don't need to lose all of their excess body weight to improve health. Research shows that if people can lose 5-10% of their initial body weight, they can markedly reduce their health risks. It can be overwhelming for somebody who weighs 300 pounds and that may be ideally should weigh 150 thinking, "Where do I begin?" but if that person could lose 15-30, that's a marked difference and a marked improvement in health. MARK: Yeah. Interesting. I like the old saying, every successful journey starts with that very first step- DR. BASKETT: It's a great saying. It's a great saying. MARK: It's just ... I like keeping the focus on where we're at getting started as opposed to, "I have to do it all right now.” Well, listen, Dr. Baskett, it's indeed been a pleasure. I really appreciate you taking the time to sit down and share a few thoughts with our audience. To those listening, I hope you found something of value in today's discussion, and please feel free to reach out any time if any of you have any thoughts in terms of topics of other folks that you'd like to see if we can have join us on the podcast. Thanks for listening. Oh, and my email address, if you'd like the reach out mbass@alpsnet.com. That's again, mbass@alpsnet.com. Thanks much. Bye-bye. Dr. Kathleen Baskett For Dr. Baskett, medicine is not a job; it's a calling. A firm believer in patient-centered care, she works daily to help each patient reach his or her optimal health and quality of life. She takes the time to get to know each patient, sharing in their joys and sorrows, celebrations and setbacks as they navigate their weight loss journey. Dr. Baskett is board-certified in bariatric medicine. She attended the University of Maryland School of Maryland and completed an internship within the University of Maryland Medical System. When not treating patients, she enjoys exercising, practicing yoga, being outdoors and traveling. She also loves to spend time with her family.

Professor Heidi K.  Brown is a former construction litigator, author and self-described introvert. Mark was able to connect with Heidi, who is based in Brooklyn, New York where she is the Director of the legal writing program at Brooklyn Law School, to discuss the differences between introverts and extroverts in the legal context. Heidi's recent book, The Introverted Lawyer: A Seven Step Journey Toward Authentically Empowered Advocacy, helps the introverted lawyer to best harness their personality and flourish in the legal field without conforming to the stereotypical lawyer as extrovert. Professor Brown will be presenting a CLE webinar entitled The Introverted Lawyer: Authentically Empowered Advocacy, in our New Lawyer Webinar series on May 9, 2018. Register now. ALPS In Brief, The ALPS Risk Management Podcast, is hosted by ALPS Risk Manager, Mark Bassingthwaighte. Transcript MARK: Hello, welcome to another episode of ALPS In Brief, the ALPS Risk Management podcast. We're coming to you from the ALPS home office in the historic Florence Building in beautiful downtown Mozilla, Montana. I'm Mark Bassingthwaighte, the ALPS Risk Manager, and I have the pleasure today of sitting down with Heidi K. Brown, a noted author. We're going to be talking about her book here in just a few minutes and also Professor at Brooklyn Law School. Welcome to the podcast Heidi and if I could have you briefly introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about yourself and we'll get started on a conversation. HEIDI: Thank you so much for having me. Yes, I went to law school at the University of Virginia. I grew up in Virginia. Then I went into construction litigation right out of law school, actually both my summers in law school I worked for a construction litigation firm, a boutique litigation firm and ended up doing that for the bulk of my litigation career and about 15 years into my litigation career I transitioned into teaching legal writing. I've been doing that for about eight years now at three different schools. Most recently joined Brooklyn Law School as the Director of the Legal Writing Program, here in Brooklyn, New York. I love to write and my latest project as you mentioned is this booked called the Introverted Lawyer. MARK: As an aside, I just finished it. I thought it was a very well done book. I also found it interesting in firms of your history. Being an introvert and having this career in construction litigation, I just thought, "Wow, okay, that had to be a challenge." Let's start off just talking about some basics for out listener. Can you describe some of the key difference between introverts and extroverts in terms of the context of the legal profession? HEIDI: Sure, yes. Until I started really studying this in the legal context, I did what most people do and I sort of lumped those labels of quiet individuals together, introverts, shyness, social anxiety. But they're actually very different concepts and different categories of personality traits and preferences. So, first I can sort of distinguish between introversion and extroversion, if that would help, and then distinguish among introversion, shyness and social anxiety. So introverts and extroverts, those terms really just describe the different ways we process stimuli, energy, and information. Introverts process all of those types of things deeply and internally and sort of methodically on the inside. Where as extroverts process stimuli and information and energy externally. So, I kind of like to use the image of Time Square in New York, it's a very highly stimulated environment and an extrovert might thrive on the noise and the action and the number of people and gain energy from that scenario. Where as an introvert can handle that with skill, but in a shorter dosage and will need to sort of retreat to quietude and solitude to regain energy and to process all of that stimuli. In the legal context, well, introverts can be very adept at processing information and complex legal concepts, they need to do it internally. Actually the scientists say that introverts and extroverts use two completely different neurological pathways in the brain to process information. And the introvert's pathway is longer, so that's why is can take us longer to listen to questions, read something, handle a lot of competing voices in a meeting and we process all of that internally and deeply before we're ready to respond aloud. It can seem like an introvert is slower, but actually they're just going very deep into analyzing concepts. Shyness and social anxiety and completely different concepts. You can be an introvert and not be shy at all. Shyness and social anxiety and more of a fear of judgment or a fear of criticism in performance oriented scenarios. And that can stem from sort of things that we remember from growing up, maybe we had a coach or a well-meaning mentor or peers or a care giver who put us in situations where we felt judgment or even shame, sometimes, can drive adult shyness and social anxiety. So they're very different categories. I find it helps, when we start to understand ourselves in the legal context what might be holding us back in certain scenarios. It's helpful to understand, "Is this because I'm an introvert and I process things internally or is this because I'm afraid of the perception of judgment from a judge or opposing counsel or a colleague or a client. MARK: I find it fascinating. There was some real learning out of this and even just what you shared, but I picked up in the book as well. I am an extrovert. I have always sort of viewed introverts as, if you will, a behavioral situation, a behavioral issue. And I don't want to say ... It's just different. But you're talking about this processing, internal brain. I just found that absolutely fascinating. It really sheds some light on an issue for it. I liked that. What prompted you to write the book? HEIDI: Well, throughout my litigation career I always loved the legal research and writing aspects of my job, but I struggled with the performance oriented aspects of my job. As you can imagine, in the construction litigation world, performance matters. It's a tough industry, you have these strong personalities and the cases I was dealing with would take about two years to do to trial from complaint filing all the way to the actual trial. We were dealing with a lot of depositions, a lot of discovery. It was very performance oriented, lots of negotiations. I struggled in those environments because, while I loved the research and writing and figuring out the complex contractual issues and the legal issues that happened in all of our cases, in those moments of performance I felt I had to mirror the other attorney's behavior or the client's behavior and a lot of times, as I mentioned these strong or tough personalities, and I just don't have that personality. For about 15 years of my career path I thought that was a weakness of mine or there was something wrong with me and I was the only nervous one in the room. And as I describe in the book, I have a blushing tendency, I flush, I turn red, my face gets blotchy when I'm nervous. So I have a really bad poker face in negotiations and in court room scenarios. Again, I always thought that was a flaw and what really prompted me to write this book and study this deeply in the legal context what when I transitioned to teaching, while I was litigating, I was working on a big case out in California and I was asked to start teaching a legal writing course at the same time. And I noticed that my strongest legal writers, my most thoughtful, analytical students were also my quiet ones and the most fearful of the performance scenarios, whether it's the Socratic method in the classroom or a mandatory oral argument simulation. And I finally thought, oh my goodness, Instead of giving these amazing students this message that maybe you're not cut out for litigation or, if this is so stressful for you, maybe you should go do something else, which were messages that I heard and absorbed in my career. I thought, no, these are amazing thinkers, they're great listeners, they're hard workers, they're creative problem solvers and we need to find a way to explain why certain performance scenarios are harder for some of us than other. And it doesn't mean we're not able to do it or we can't be fantastic at it, we just need to understand ourselves better. So that's what led me to study introversion and shyness and social anxiety in the legal context because no one had really talked about it in the legal profession. We obviously have the stereotype of lawyers being extroverted and confident and sort of gregarious and that's not actually the case in every scenario. My goal was really to help quiet law students and junior associates who were worried maybe they weren't cut out for our profession and empower them to know that yes they absolutely are and here are some tips for amplifying our voices in an authentic manor. Throughout my career the mantras I always heard was, "Fake it till you make it," or "Just do it," that amazing Nike slogan. But those messages aren't really helpful in the types of scenarios that I struggle with and also that I'm talking about here. MARK: And what I really enjoyed and another take-away, I guess, from the book is you really talk about the introverted lawyer has a different set of strengths or assets, if you will. I thought that was very interesting, can you kind of highlight what value, strengths do introverted lawyers bring to the profession? HEIDI: Yes, what I noticed and gleaned from all the resources that I studied, is that common themes pervade quiet individuals. If you're thinking about introverts or even people who experience that shyness that I mentioned before. The experts on these issues show that these individuals are active listeners, they really can sit in a room, even with competing voices, and they're listening to what these individuals are saying and they're really focused on hearing what someone else is sharing. They're, as I mentioned before, kind of deep thinkers, really methodical, slow, careful, thinkers, they're processing all this information of a deep level. They also have a tendency towards creative problem solving. Because they're listening and absorbing lots of different competing ideas, they're capable of synthesizing those into solutions that maybe some of the individuals speaking are overlook in the moment. And that's why it can also lead to really strong legal writing because when a person can be quiet and reflective and sort of work out a problem through writing, it can really illuminate solutions to legal problems that maybe aren't apparent if we're just debating and talking about them out loud in a verbal valet scenario. Then one thing that really surprised me or stood out to me during my research was that these experts pointed out that quiet individuals also bring empathy to a human interaction. As a former construction litigator you might not think of empathy as being an important legal trait or a skill of an attorney. But I started remembering scenarios in my job where we were trying to resolve a conflict on a massive construction project and just to kind of take a step back for a minute and to have empathy and try and figure out what really is driving this conflict? It's not the firing off of these angry emails that people do on construction jobs sometimes- MARK: Right. HEIDI: ... but it's really this human frustration that, on a random Tuesday on the job site, rain is pouring down and materials are late and everybody's trying to get something done and it's not working and trying to really understand from an empathy standpoint what's really driving the conflict from a human perspective. I was excited to hear all these positive traits that quiet folks bring to the legal profession, that we sometimes don't appreciate as much as, in my opinion, we should. Good lawyers need to be good listeners and not always speaking, we need to actually listen to the client who might be afraid to tell us what's really going on. Then good lawyers need to deeply think about complicated legal concepts, the law is hard and we need people who can sort of take a quiet moment, find that difficult answer in a sea of research, take the time to write and reflect on the problem and write out the problem and come to a solution that might not be as obvious if we're just talking about it. Things like that really stood out to me as amazing traits that quiet folks bring to our profession. MARK: Yeah, and when I think about all this myself, there are certainly the lawyers that we've been talking about, very, very aggressive and these kinds of things. I don't know that that approach really serves our clients best. And I like the focus on taking the time to really go deep and explore and think through and look at the issues. What I hear is we're placing ... we're moving away from the advocacy model toward a, what is really best for the client, problem solving model, both are necessary. But I really value where you're going with all of this, I really do. I'd like to talk a little bit about the process that you describe in your book. You acknowledge that while introverts and otherwise quiet advocates can be pivotal, change agents for the profession. These lawyers still need to be able to jump into the fray and speak with assertiveness at times because it's just called for, it's necessary. And you developed a seven step process for, if you were amplifying the voice. Can you talk a little bit about these steps? HEIDI: Yes, as I mentioned, the messages that I absorbed over my trajectory and my career were always sort of just, "Fake it till you make it," or, "Do these performance events 1000 times and it will get easier." I tried those methods and they absolutely did not work for me, it never got easier and when I started studying this, the book, I realized it wasn't getting easier because I was just hurdling myself into these scenarios without any self-awareness and not really understanding that my approach to the law is maybe different from an extroverted person. In developing the seven step process, it really broke down into a reflective plan and an action plan and really beginning to step into these performance events that we need to do as lawyers- MARK: Right. HEIDI: ... we can't just avoid- MARK: Of course. HEIDI: ... performance or human interaction. But doing it with heightened self-awareness and then a conscience plan for each event. So the seven steps really developed into the first two steps being reflection on mental approached to these types of events and physical approaches. I was really excited when I started realizing how important the physical aspect of anxiety is, like what are we doing physically in an anticipation of these types of events that maybe isn't that helpful to us, it's instinctive what our bodies do physically, but it's not always helpful. So step one is reflecting mentally on what we are hearing in our minds as we are approaching a law related performance event. Some lawyers might sort of resist going that direction and feel like, "Oh, I don't want to get too touchy feely with my emotions." But it's so important to realize and reflect on and listen to what we tell ourselves in anticipation of a negotiation or court room appearance or a difficult conversation with the client, what messages are we hearing in our minds and then trying to pin point, "Wait, where have I heard that before and what's the original source of that message because it absolutely is not the person who's in front of us today."   It really comes from this ingrained or entrenched mental messages that we've been telling ourselves for years and years and years. It's really remarkable when you can realize, "Oh, this is not the law professor that I'm encountering or the judge or the intimidating opposing counsel or the strong personality client, this is a, perhaps well-meaning, mentor or coach or authority figure from high school or college or an earlier event in our professional careers. And it's really tremendous when you can realize, "Oh, okay that message no longer has any relevance in my legal persona today." But it takes us taking the time to listen to it and then we can sort of override it or delete it from our mental soundtrack. Step one is that reflection piece on the mental messages.   Step two is a physical reflection approach. And I mentioned my blushing problem before. To hide the blushing in my legal career, which I felt was a weakness of just this shiny red billboard of my fear, I used to hide it. I used to wear turtlenecks and scarves and try and hide myself, but physically that was just making my physically reactions worse because I was hot, I was feeling constricted. When I started doing step two, which is the physical reflection piece, you realize your body is just going into instinctive protective mode when you feel fear or anxiety. But what we do is we close ourselves off. We cross our legs or hunch our shoulders or constrict our bodies to get small and invisible. But all that's doing is constricting our energy, our adrenaline, it's preventing us from breathing clearly, it's effecting the oxygen levels going to our brain, our blood is not flowing in a productive manor. But we don't realize that's happening to us until we take the time to reflect and monitor sort of minute-by-minute what we do instinctively in anticipation of a stressful moment. Step one and two are really the reflection piece.   Steps three and four are flipping those recognitions or those realizations and having a new plan. Step three is having a new mental action plan. And I kind of like to analogize to the fire fighter mantra of stop, drop, and roll. When we step into a performance event or anticipate one, those old messages are gonna show up they just do, they've been ingrained in us for years. But we hear them and realize, "Oh, wait a minute. I'm gonna stop. I'm not gonna listen to that and instead I'm gonna apply my new approach. I've prepared for this event, I know the case law or the statute of the client facts better than anyone in the room, I've done all this preparation, and I have something to say. I'm gonna do it my way." And just having this new mental action plan for when those old messages creeped in. Same thing when the physical action plan, which is step four. It's knowing that our bodies are instinctively gonna try and close us off from the event and protect us. But having an athlete's approach to the performance event, standing in a balanced stance, either at a podium or even in a seat at a conference table, opening up your channels of breathing oxygen flow, blood flow and giving your excess energy and place to go. It's amazing in a performance moment when you realize, "Oh, I'm crossing my legs again. I need to sort of balance myself out and breathe. And it's really incredible when you realize just by making subtle physical changes, you can breathe better and then your brain works better and everything just kind of flows in a positive direction. And then steps five, six, and seven are really just building on that for the long-term. Step five is about developing, what the experts call, and exposure agenda. When I first read about the term exposure, I thought this sounds dangerously like just do it, just expose yourself to these scary events and everything will be fine. But exposure in the psychology perspective is stepping into these moments with self-awareness and a plan and it's really looking at law related scenarios that might give some of us anxiety, consciously prioritizing them from least anxiety producing to most anxiety producing. And then having a real conscious mental plan and physical plan for each event incrementally. And then stepping into each event with purpose and the plan. And then step six gets even more nitty gritty and tangible with each event and that is designed to have, to use an athlete metaphor, a pregame plan and a game day plan for each of those events, trying to put yourself in the scenario, substantively, mentally, and physically if you can go to the space, go to the room if that's possible, check out the seating arrangements, the podium, is there a microphone, what's lighting like, how many people are gonna be there, and just anticipating different situations that normally might derail us but now we can take more control. And then step seven is just a reflection after each event and figuring out positively what worked great and maybe what you can make some subtle changes to for the next event. MARK: What I liked about ... again, as an extrovert approaching this material, I think there's a lot of value to it for non-introverts as well. I really like this aspect of self-reflection and trying to understand, both emotionally and physically, why we do what we do. I think sometimes people are very aggressive for fears and all kinds of things. You see where I'm going. I love the whole model that you've developed here. HEIDI: Thank you. MARK: Can you talk a little bit about ... the temptation, if you will, is to say, okay. We've talked about some of the strengths are introverted lawyers have. Does that, from your perspective, do you think limits that areas of practice that introverted lawyers can really excel in? Do you see where I'm going with this? HEIDI: Right. Not at all. I don't feel the introverts should limit themselves to the types of areas of legal practice or really any aspects of legal practice. To be honest, those were the kind of messages that I either heard or I misinterpreted that, "Well, why did you do into litigation if you were nervous about taking a deposition?" Or, "Why did you go into construction law if you didn't want to fight like a champion?" And I don't think those are productive messages at all because in my experience and working on myself. I realized introverted and quiet individuals can do any aspect of law, they just need to have better self-awareness or enhanced self-awareness of their strength and also scenarios that might cause them some particular challenges, how to step in to those challenges with force and amplification, but in an authentic manner, not trying to fake extroversion or mirror the behavior of a really boisterous gregarious person, but instead stepping into the scenario as a calm, quieter figure but with power. And it was eye-opening when I realize, a quiet individual can be a very tremendous voice in a negotiation or in the courtroom. We don't all have to be boisterous and gregarious to be effective. That was a huge realization for me. I definitely do not think that introverts should only go into transactional law, for instance, because transactional law requires a lot of performance, so you're really not cutting out those performance scenarios. But I also feel that if we encourage introverts to limit their interest, we're missing out on a tremendous body of voices that have great ideas for any aspect and any area of practice if that law and that's not what we should be doing. We should be including these voices in all aspects of our legal profession. What's been fun and exciting throughout this journey with this book is talking to extroverts who were open to understanding introverts better so they can better manage teams and understand that having both introverts and extroverts on a legal team, whether it's in transactional work or a litigation is an asset because you're bringing these different minds together to solve problems in different ways, and that's really gonna serve the client better. Rather than us all trying to be this one stereotypical lawyer. MARK: Let's follow up on that just a little bit because I will confess that I have been one of these people that will say, or at least out of naivety had this thought, that but do it kind of a thing. You know what I ... what advice do you have for manager partners or supervision attorneys in terms of recruiting and developing a talented pool of introverted lawyers? HEIDI: I've been really excited to hear how open so many managing partners and leaders are in learning more about different personality types and being vulnerable themselves and looking to see if, are they really extroverted or have they just been acting extroverted all these years. I think the more that law office leaders or law firm leaders or legal profession leaders understand that we are not all the same, but getting a little touchy feely I guess with personality traits and understanding the assets that different diverse individuals bring to the profession is a huge first step. Just realizing, okay, we're not all the same and that's a good thing. Then I've also been trying to study and understand how to encourage law firm leaders and law office leaders to acknowledge the presence of fear in lawyering because there are many scenarios that we encounter in the practice of law that are just scary, and they're scarier for some of us than others. It really accomplishes a great deal when a law firm leader can say to junior associates, "Hey, look I realize that some lawyering scenarios are gonna be scarier for some of you than others, that is okay. It doesn't mean you're not cut out for this. But let's talk about that and really figure out what is it about this particular deposition or negotiations or client scenario that's troubling you and let's talk about the tactical aspects of it." Not always the substantive preparation because I think all of us endeavor to work as hard as we can on the substance of the law, that really being honest about the mental aspects of our job, that tactical scenarios that we don't always teach in law school, and we assume that junior attorneys can just figure out in the field. Managing partners and law firm leaders, really sit down openly and talk with junior attorneys about the reality of fear in lawyering and provide helpful advice and mentoring on how to handle those scenarios without judgment, without making it seem like a weakness. I think that will really go to great lengths to help the well-being of our profession and help everybody perform better and serve our clients in a really fantastic way. MARK: I have one final question I'm very curious about. You've come out at the end of an interesting journey, and we have the book here. Knowing what you know now, if you were to go back and do it all over again, in terms of your career, would you do anything different? HEIDI: I would have been so much healthier. If I had known all this then, I would have been able to take the pressure off of myself to prepare for depositions and trial work and client scenarios in a way that made it okay for me to turn red in a deposition and keep going, keep going with my plan, don't let my nerves make me feel weak or like I'm not but out for this. And I so wish I could go back and redo all of those scenarios and just be able to talk myself through those scenarios realizing you are substantively prepared, you know what you're doing, you have a voice, you're entitled to do it your way and not try and mirror the guys across the table, don't worry about if you're blushing, it doesn't matter, you're doing a good substantive job. And I think I would have had a much healthier journey through my twenties and my thirties. But I think all of that experience led me to the place that I am now and I'm very happy in my job, I love teaching legal writing, it's a powerful medium for lawyers to communicate and this book has really taught me how introverts and shy and socially anxious law students can really change our profession if somebody just takes a moment to tell them, "You can do this." And that's been very exciting. MARK: We are at the end of our time here. I'd like to say, Professor Brown, thank you so much. It really has been a pleasure. To our listeners, I hope you found something of value and interest today out of this conversation. And if in future you have any ideas for topic or if you have questions or concerns you'd like to see addressed in one of our podcasts, please don't hesitate to reach out to me at mbass@alpsnet.com. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.  Heidi K. Brown is a graduate of The University of Virginia School of Law, a law professor at Brooklyn Law School, and a former litigator in the construction industry. Having struggled with extreme public speaking anxiety and the perceived pressure to force an extroverted persona throughout law school and nearly two decades of law practice, she finally embraced her introversion and quiet nature as a powerful asset in teaching and practicing law. She is the author of a two-volume legal writing book series entitled The Mindful Legal Writer, won a Global Legal Skills award for her work in helping law students overcome public speaking anxiety in the context of the Socratic Method and oral arguments, and was appointed to the Fulbright Specialist roster to teach English legal writing in international law schools. As the author of The Introverted Lawyer, Heidi champions the power of quiet law students and lawyers to be profoundly impactful advocates, in their authentic voices.

In the early days of my career, I (Dr. Burns) would have assumed that Mark definitely wanted to change--after all, he'd been in a lot of pain for a long time, and he came to the session because he wanted help. So, following the empathy phase of the session, I would have jumped in with a variety of cognitive therapy techniques to help Mark challenge his Negative Thoughts, such as “I’ve been a failure as a father,” or "my brain is defective." Although this might have been effective, there’s a good chance that it might not have worked. That's because Mark might have “yes-butted” me or insisted that he really was a failure and that I just wasn’t “getting it.” In fact, the attempt to help the patient without first dealing with the patient’s resistance is the cause of nearly all therapeutic failure. But most therapists make this mistake over and over--and don't realize that their well-intentioned efforts to help actually trigger and reinforce the patient's resistance. Instead, TEAM Therapists use a number of Paradoxical Agenda Setting (PAS) techniques designed to bring the patient’s subconscious resistance to conscious awareness. Then we melt the resistance away before attempting to change the way the patient is thinking and feeling. I (DB) have developed 15 or 20 PAS techniques, and Jill and I  used several of them in our session with Mark: The Invitation Step The Miracle Cure Question The Magic Button Positive Reframing The Acid Test The Magic Dial When Jill and I use Positive Reframing, we are hoping that Mark will make an unexpected discovery--that his negative thoughts and feelings, such as his sadness, shame, discouragement, and inadequacy actually reflect his core values and show what a positive, awesome human being he is. In other words, he will discover that his core values are actually the source of his symptoms as well as his resistance to change. This approach represents a radical departure from the way many psychiatrists and psychologists think about psychiatric symptoms as well as resistance.  When I was a psychiatric resident, I (DB) was trained to think about resistance as something negative. For example, we may tell ourselves that resistant patients cling to their feelings of depression and worthlessness because they want attention, because they want to feel sorry for themselves, because they fear change, or because they are afraid will lose their identity if they recover. While there’s some truth in these formulations, they may not be helpful because they tend to cast the patient in a negative light, as if their symptoms and their resistance to change were somehow bad, or childish, or based on some kind of chemical imbalance in their brains. As you will see, the TEAM-CBT approach approaches resistance is radically different manner. We will give you the chance to pause the podcast briefly and try your own hand at Positive Reframing before you hear it live during the session. Specifically, we will ask you to review Mark's Daily Mood Log, and ask yourself these two questions about each of his negative thoughts and feelings: What does this negative thought or feeling show about Mark that is beautiful, positive, and awesome? What are some benefits, or advantages, of this negative thought or feeling? Are there some ways that this thought or feeling is helping Mark? As you so this, make a list of as many Positives as you can on a piece of paper. See what you can come up with. I want to warn you that it may be difficult to come up with your list of Positives at first. If so, this is good, because when you hear the next podcast, you'll have many "ah ha!" moments and it will all become quite obvious to you. Then you will have a new and deeper understanding of resistance--an understanding that can help you greatly if you are a therapist or if you are struggling with your own feelings of depression and anxiety. Jill gives a great overview of why the paradoxical approach is necessary during the Paradoxical Agenda Setting phase of the session. To learn more about Paradoxical Agenda Setting, you can read David’s featured article in the March / April 2017 issue of Psychotherapy Networker entitled "When Helping Doesn’t Help." You will see how he helped a woman struggling with intense depression, anxiety and rage due to decades of horrific domestic rape and violence.

Tim, Mark & Marisol Interview 00:00 Tim: When you rape a child, you lose rights forever. That’s it! You lose rights forever. Somehow we don’t understand this. And again, you can serve your sentence and everything else, but you still have lost rights. One of those rights you lose is you don’t get to travel around the world with anonymity. We are going to talk about where you are. We are going to watch you. Is that so unreasonable? I mean, the argument is that, well if they travel to some place like Iran and we tell the Iranian Government, they might kill him. Well, you know what, that is his choice to travel to Iran after raping children. Don’t rape kids! How about that?! Let’s start with that. 00:36 Mark: If you do it twice, we are sending you to Iran with a big tag on your head, ‘I rape kids’. 00:40 Tim: That should be the punishment, right? That should be the sentence. 00:42 Marisol: We do that for terrorism and we give up their rights that way. It should be no different. Intro 00:50 You are listening to Slave Stealer. 00:54 Tim: It is a world I know and understand better than most people, because you don’t even know how real and how huge it is. There have been laws put in place to protect kids, and one of the laws - surprise, surprise - is that you can’t sell them. If you guys are traffickers, you have come in just like this. This is what happens, this is the core of the problem. Tim: Marisol, thank you for joining us on Slave Stealer podcast. Marisol: Oh, it’s my pleasure. Tim: Marisol Nichols is our friend, and actress, and social activist. She has been on ‘Criminal Minds’, ‘24’, ‘Blind Justice’, ‘NCIS’ - all these cop shows. Does that have anything to do...or is that just a coincidence with your passion to fight crime?   Marisol: I am sure it does. I am sure it does. I did so much resource playing different kinds of cop roles and agent roles and stuff that it just kind of, by default, dealt with me into this world.   Tim: Tell us about your foundation, and we’ll talk about how we met and what we are doing together with you. Marisol: Sure! So I have got involved in trafficking maybe three or four years ago, and the whole reason I started my foundation was... Well, there are a couple of reasons. One was, like, the more I learned, the more I found out about it, the more I was like, "I have to do something." I can not do something. It can’t be something that I can sit back and say, "Those poor people over there, how horrible for them." That’s… I can’t sleep at night unless I do something. And there were many, many, many nights that I wouldn’t sleep because the more I learned, the more, you know, horrific it is. So forming my own foundation - it was sort of a natural thing that came out of meeting with different organizations and legislators - you know, the people that live and work in this field - to see how I could help, what could I do. I have, you know, many, many friends in the business, both in front of the camera and behind the camera, and anyone and everyone I would talk to were like, “What can I do? How can I help?” And because of that is how I started doing these briefings and big events, educating a particular audience about what is happening not only in our world and on our planet, but also in our own backyard. Tim: So, question for you, because I don’t know the answer to this question but it bugs me. I mean, this is the greatest plague on the planet. There is nothing worse than this and yet, we, our presidential candidates, aren’t talking about it. It is kind of still a vague word, you know, people, trafficking… What is going on? Why can’t people see it? Marisol: Two reasons. And I don’t actually even blame people for not seeing - I blame the people that are in charge of our entertainment. I blame...I really do, I truly do, because I think that we have created a world where we can’t get purposely distracted by Kardashians and social media and whatever other things that they want coming down the line as a buzzword of the week. So we don’t pay attention to what is really really going on. And that our news channels are not very forthcoming - some of them are really wonderfully, will do pieces on it and pieces on it, but to me, like you said, is nowhere near fit to what is needed. And I am sure that you have had this strange [inaudbile] that when you do meet people that find out about it, their world is completely rocked and they are completely changed and they want to help. Tim: Yep. Marisol: And I honestly believe that there are, you know, certain forces out there that don’t want to see this end. Mark: Name names. Marisol: Well look, who is profiting? I mean, you can follow money: who makes the most money from this? Whether it is sex slavery or labor bondage or what. Who is making money from this? And you can trace it back and trace it back. And Tim hit it right on the head - why aren’t our presidential candidates talking about this? This is a huge issue; it is bigger than anything. Tim: Yeah. Marisol: He is right. Why isn’t there a giant spotlight on who is profiting from that? Who is benefitting and keeping people enslaved? Tim: It boggles my mind, but I do believe like you believed it - if we can get people to see it and they become converts, our politicians will have to start talking about it if there is a demand for that subject.   Marisol: Exactly. Tim: And we are not yelling loud enough yet. We are trying to yell loud and be a voice for these victims. Now you got to come with us - we took you down to visit some of the victims that we had rescued in Haiti, and then on our way back we stopped in an unnamed city. Marisol actually went undercover with us, and... Tell me, tell me about the whole experience, how you felt seeing those kids. And then, I mean, you kind of got this cool experience where you got to see these victims and, all of a sudden, you are thrown into this - one of the people who travels and abuses these kids, one of the partakers. What was that like?     Marisol: It is haunting because it is one thing to read about the issue, talk about the issue, hear the stories, look at videos; it is another thing to see it firsthand, and particularly meeting the abuser... I mean, this was... You know, you wouldn’t recognize him down the street. You’d think this is your college guy, this is your neighbor, this is your… You know, he looks like an everyday Joe. And the casualness in which he would talk about doing these things to girls was astonishing and also heart-breaking. You realize that these are human beings, right? You realize that you are talking about someone’s sister, someone’s daughter, someone’s mother, one day hopefully...   Tim: Yeah. Marisol: And it was....you know, it was haunting because you go, “Ok, that is the mindset that allows this to occur.” That is the mindset - partyyy, woohoo, or whatever it is. It was haunting; it stayed with me. Tim: And can you tell us...what was the role you were playing? You were awesome, by the way, and it was obviously natural. You know, it’s funny... People think like, you know, like undercover operators... Just because you are a cop, you think you are going to be good in undercover work. It is not true. And when I was in the law enforcement, it was difficult to find good undercover operators because, again, it is not inherent to a police officer. It is more an actor or actresses, and that is where you were being able to pull it up. So, tell us what role you played in that?   Marisol: Yeah. So, I was playing the person who sets up the sex parties basically, who sets up the situation for men to come and abuse these girls. You know, it was very, very like spur of the moment. I think we had, what, half an hour to plan it or something. Tim: Yeah. Marisol: You know, when I saw that the only way I am going to pull this off with this guy is if I pretend to be one of those people that just don’t care. Mark: What did you do? Give me some lines. Marisol: You know, I have... I did things like, “Hey, yeah, you know, it’s all good.” Tim: Yeah, she was sitting like really sexy, like just loosey-goosey. It was perfect. And the guy was like watching her more than anything else, and he understands that she will be able to get girls for us, better than we can get them on our own. Marisol: One of the facts that I was surprised to learn about is that some of the traffickers are girls - they are. And they lower young girls just as men do. Tim: Even better. Mark: Let’s say you get a big role as a trafficker on a film coming out in a couple of years. What do you do to prepare? Marisol: It is interesting because prior to coming into this world, you know that there are evil people out there, but you think, you know, you just don’t have that much reality. And then playing the trafficker or playing someone like this...now I’ve started to play some sort of, you know, one or two bad guys here and there, and I am like, “Oh no, no, no, it is 100% evil with no remorse and no feeling and no nothing.” That is how you would have to be to do this. You have to be one of those people, that ‘there is nothing left’. Tim: You are looking into their eyes when you see these people - I mean there is no soul. I mean, it is like past feeling. It is just unbelievable. Like the woman we have talked about, the trafficker, the beauty queen, who was going and luring these girls at 9, 10 years old, telling them that she will teach them to be famous. She is famous, she is also in music videos, and the families were sending their kids with her. And she is going and selling them to us who she believed were men coming down to violate. And Marisol, you talked about this guy we met and you played your undercover role... I mean, I am literally sitting here, we are late for the podcast, I have twenty dudes sitting here, and they look just like that guy. I mean, I have a couple - I am not kidding you - I have a couple right now who are coming together to abuse who they believe to be a 13, a 12-year-old and a 9-year-old. And they are all excited - they tell me what they are going to do and they both want to do it together. They will be arrested next week when they show up. Marisol: It sound like how can you not do everything you possibly can, and, like, why aren’t there writings on the streets, why aren't we talking about this? It should be on the tip of everyone’s tongue. And I believe that if we did, it really would end it fast.   Tim: Yes. And the problem is this concept that people think, "Well, I have heard of it, but law enforcement is taking care of it. The government can take care of it." And not to slam the government, but it is too big of a problem. There are 30 million plus slaves, depending on what numbers you look at, 2 million at least or more, probably, kids in the sex slave industry. If people knew… And it reminds me of the slavery in the 19th century where it was the same thing. They were not talking about it. It was just like people knew what was happening, but: "Oh, the government will take care of that." It wasn’t until people learned through, like, abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote "Uncle Tom’s Cabin." It wasn’t until the people rose up and it got so loud that the government said, “Oh crap, we better do more, we better do something.” And then you start to stop it. We can do it, we can stop it! Marisol: And it comes down to people demanding that the government do something about it. These are just demands that it will end, and it will end it. But you need multitudes and multitudes of people demanding, showing more, and educating others to really put an end to this. But it can be done. I believe you, 100% it can be done. Mark: I have a question, Marisol. In your dealings with trafficking, who were the good guys? Why don’t we just start shouting out people that are amazing? You may have worked with them directly or not, you have known them or are friends of yours. Marisol: Yeah, ok! Well, first of all, Tim, Tim Ballard, whom I met at Osborne - for sure, 100% top of the list. Tim: Thank you, you are so nice. Marisol: What they do is incredible. And I have mentioned it before, but it is when you first learn about this, you are, “Let’s go get the kids. Can we just go and just get the kids?” And that is what they do. Mark: Yes. Marisol: And I mean that is vital. There is, obviously, a lot more they are doing. There are so many people doing this particular fight. There is Kim Biddle, from an organization called Saving Innocence in Los Angeles, that has dedicated her life. She is this beautiful, brilliant, brilliant girl, gorgeous, and she has dedicated her entire life to saving girls from trafficking and then rehabilitating them and seeing it through, like seeing it all the way through - not put them in a home and walk away, but seeing all the way through until the girl graduate from the home, goes to college and has her entire life back. She is dedicated. Mark: More influencers... Anyone in your world, acting world? Who are the good guys in trafficking? Marisol: There was this one movement that Sean Penn and other celebs got involved in and it was quick, but it really made a difference. It was "Real Men Don't Buy Girls." I don’t know if you remember that, but it was a whole Twitter and hashtag thing, and they got giant celebs to do this. And I thought it was really effective because people look up to actors, musicians, incredible artists as opinion leaders. For these guys to stand up there and say real men don’t buy girls... I thought it setted up a little bit which was really, really good to set a precedent of like, "Hey, who are we looking at that really does this?" and maybe, maybe make someone think twice about it. There needs to be more. I mean, just to be honest, we need more shows focusing on it. We need more episodes of crime shows focusing on it and really telling the stories. On "Law and Order: SVU," they have done a fairly good job on that because that is their ‘Sexual Victims Unit’ - that is the entire title of the show - but I believe we need more.  And recently - I don’t know if you saw "Room," but "Room" did a really good job of taking you through a girl’s experience, what it would be like to be trapped and under the control of someone else who is monitoring your every single move. I don’t know if you know the story, but she was trapped for seven years and had a baby by the trafficker and eventually escaped. And this particular story in this movie did such a good job. But it is based on so many cases of girls being trapped in the exact same way, having children from their traffickers, all of it… And it really... I thought they painted a really great picture of what it is like for the victim, and they do sort of wake up, like, “Wait, this exists. This happened.”       Mark: Are there certain writers or studios or groups that do a better job of talking about trafficking, and are they getting the ratings when they do it? Marisol: That is a really good question. There are definitely episodes that focus on it, but not anyone where I can, “Oh yeah, this particular writer," or, "Fox is dedicating an entire series to this,” or anything like that. It is still not there. And, like anything right now, it is just an episode or two that would be dedicated to it rather than an entire show. Is that make sense? But when they do air, they make just as equal ratings as they would any other crime, because it usually goes on crime shows. What I would like to see is that at the end of those things, "To find out more, go to www..." or statistics. Mark: Yes. Marisol: Or, like, “Hey, this is actually based on a real case,” to get the audience going, “I had no idea.” Because anything that is based on real life events will always get more interest. Mark: Do you feel like we speak about trafficking correctly? In general, how it is messaged? How should it be messaged in your opinion, if you were PR for the movement? Marisol: If I was PR for the movement, I would call it slavery. I would call it modern-day slavery and I would make sure that it was on the forefront of everything. And I would really, really, really validate the people who rescue the kids - not only OUR, but also police officers, FBI agents, sheriffs...because when I would tell people, they would go, “Why isn’t the police doing anything about it?” I am like, “Because the police is the same people who have to respond to a burglary, to a murder, to a cat caught up in the tree, to all of it.”     Mark: Yeah. Marisol: And I think if we started validating more and more the officers and sheriffs and agents that are focusing on this, and on getting results, freeing girls, and, most importantly, putting the traffickers away... I think the more validation you give that, or anything, the more of that we will get. Mark: Yeah. Marisol: You know, there is a fascination with murder. You know, there are a thousand TV shows about murder, about this, and I have been in all of them, so I do know. And I think we need to shift our focus, because, for one, I think you get whatever you validate. So, if you validate that, you are going to get more of it. We can use that to our advantage and validate those guys that are doing this, and not only getting the girls, but arresting those traffickers and making sure it sticks. Because it is not easy. And I know this from law enforcement, I know this from meeting with different legislators, and all of that. It is that trafficking is not an easy thing to prosecute.   Mark: It is not. Marisol: It is crazy to me, and I have certain ideas that I am working with to make it a lot easier and what I think could be done. But we will get to that whenever you are at that point of the program.   Mark: Well no, if you have certain ideas, let those out. Marisol: What is hard, at least in this country, is you have to get a victim to testify against her trafficker and the johns just walk free: "Well, she approached me," or, "I don’t know… answered an ad," blah blah blah… There is an existing law in the book called statutory rape that doesn’t matter if the girl was consensual or not. It doesn’t matter at all. So if you would start prosecuting johns and traffickers with statutory rape, you don’t have to get the girl to go through a whole testimony, and how he forced her, anything. Is she under the age of 17 or not? Tim: Yeah. Marisol: That... It is done. And when you start prosecuting johns and traffickers with rape, that is a different story now. Tim: Yeah. Marisol: And charging traffickers, by the way, with facilitation of late, where you are creating an environment, where a girl can be raped extremely easily, should be under the age of 17, it is done. Tim: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. In fact, a lot of our approaches to this is all about figuring out how to prosecute these cases without needing to put the victim on the stand. These victims are so... They have been so terrorized and so rewired. For their own well-being, you don’t want to put them on the stand to have them have to relive this. Also, they are not the best witnesses because they do not know who they are, they don’t know who to trust. And so, this solution of prosecuting different crimes to get around that is one approach. Something we are doing, especially in foreign countries, is we do these sting operations and film everything. And they don’t really do that, especially in developing nations. We film every part, from the day we meet the trafficker until we buy the kid. And so, at the end of the day, we just give a hard drive to the prosecutor, and it is like they are watching the movie, and they say, “We don’t need to put the kid on the stand because we have the true intent of this trafficker from seventeen different angles."    Marisol: Yeah. And you know, Tim, I have had these conversations with Lieutenant Mark Evans, who is head of all Los Angeles Vice and all of the trafficking in Los Angeles on the Valley side, and he is like, “We would do this if the DA/district attorney would prosecute.” So my next step is to meet with DA and go, “Would you prosecute them?” Because all depends on are they going to prosecute a case like that or not. The cops can actually charge them with anything that they want, so if we just start instilling the mindset... And also johns... Can we just take a moment about the customers? Because if, right now - and I don’t know if this is the case all over, but at least in California, you know - let’s say there is a 12-year-old-girl. Someone answered an ad on Backpage and went to a motel and had sex with the 12-year-old girl. And the guy is 55 years old - he gets a slap on the wrist and he goes to john school and he gets a misdemeanor and gets it wiped from his record, just like traffic school. I don’t understand - how that is ok? Tim: Yeah… It is not ok. Marisol: And if we started prosecuting the johns with statutory rape, and you advertise that, you are going to take away the demand a lot faster. Tim: Absolutely. Marisol: Because people don’t like to be charged with rape by any means. But right now, there is no consequence. Tim: Yeah. Marisol: There is no consequence. They walk free. It doesn’t matter. So there are mindsets and things that can be changed within our already existing laws, at least in this country, that I believe can go a long way towards making a difference. Continuing with the customers... And then, as the johns get arrested and as they do get prosecuted, or even just arrested, why are we protecting them? If you look on the back of a newspaper, or whatever, you can read like who got arrested for what, drunk driving, blah blah blah blah, but you can get arrested for this and it is not there.    Tim: Yeah. Marisol: So I think we should make the johns, particularly the rich white guys, pay for a billboard with their face and their mugshot in their neighborhood. Tim: The Queen of Sweden did this. She did this thing where if you got caught trying to have sex with a child, you got your face plastered on a billboard for everyone to see. And guess what happened? They stopped. They stopped soliciting kids in Sweden. They left. It is exactly what we need to do. Marisol: Exactly. Tim: Unfortunately, there are a lot of groups out here who would stop us from doing that. Trying, worrying about child rapist rights. Marisol: It is insane to me. And I think, I honestly believe, Tim, that if we could get the certain people in the government that are not scared of that, we could push something like that through. But what I have run into in meeting on the local state and federal level is you get guys that are just, "Oh no, we can’t do that. We will be fought,” and they don’t even try. But I believe if you would try hard enough, we could push something like that through just based on the statistics alone that you ended this.      Tim: These politicians answered to the people. If we would get the people loud enough, then they would say, "Of course, I will put their face on a billboard!" Because the people are demanding it, and that is where we need to start this, right. And that is what you are doing - that is what we are doing - is trying to create this grassroots movement - get so loud that these guys have to start doing stuff like this. History tells us that they will do it if we get loud enough. Mark: You mentioned politicians that are scared, and we don’t know what the exact story is on H.R.515 right now, which is before Congress, which is a big cause that we are going to take up.     Marisol: Which one is that? Mark: It is International Megan’s Law. Marisol: Oh great, yes! Ok. Mark: It will allow better communication between governments as bad guys travel abroad and come in. Right now, you cannot really get the information quickly enough to be actionable intelligence. Now, it went through the House, it went through the Senate, the Senate put some amendments on it, threw it back to the House - now it has a 15% passage rate. We have got a brilliant girl from the Podcast Congressional Web that just dissects bills. She is amazing.    Marisol: Who? Who does she work for, do you know? Mark: She is, totally... It is just her, totally independent. Marisol: Oh, ok. Mark: I don’t know what her politics are. I have listened to her shows - I have no idea, which is beautiful to me. She just dissects bills and sees what the [inaudible], sees what the hold-ups are in...what day, I think February 10th, we are going to be on with her and she is going to walk us through the bill and dissect who is holding it up and why. Marisol: Great! Mark: That is going to be awesome, right? Tim: This thing has been in Congress for over a year. It is ridiculous. Now, I actually testified with [inaudible] of Utah. We testified before the House on this bill because we were so frustrated, like, “Why can’t you pass this?!” It is a place that actually creates what is called the Angel Watch Center, a center where non-profit, private groups, government groups all get together and they talk about... They bring intel together, they start communicating better. And like Mark was saying, it is a notification program. If some French child rapist/former convict comes into our country, they are going to tell us, “Hey, this guys is flying into JFK. You might want to either deny him entry or watch him,” you know. We did the same for other countries. And again, what the issue is is their rights, the criminal’s right to travel without being notified. Mark: As we start to find more about H.R.515, maybe we engage you. Marisol: I am looking at it right now and I am kind of seeing where possibly the hold-up is because they are talking about any sex offender, and what I found in the past of certain other laws was that the definition of sex offender also includes, like, the person who was caught urinating in a park drunk, and he is labeled a sex offender for the rest of his life. And they are using those cases to cause an uproar to stop the whole thing, and say it is discriminatory against them. It is a bunch of bureaucratic nonsense, but that is where I am guessing - it is a guess - some of the hold-up is. One of the things that could go a long way is we will prosecute people for aiding and abetting. If they knew about a murder or they knew about a robbery that was taken place - so they were the driver but they didn’t do it... But we don’t do this with [inaudible].     Tim: It is a great point. It is true. Marisol: That would be another angle to getting the johns going, "Hey, you knew about this?” to get prostitution illegal in this country. So, did you really answer an ad for a massage? Do you know what I mean? And cast a wider net when you can actually prosecute people for aiding and abetting, for helping along, for being an accomplice...you know, looking in terms of existent laws that we already have in the books and prosecute differently to make a bigger dent. Tim: Agreed. We could make a list and shout it out to the world: "So, here are the things that need a change," and just be loud. Get the footage, get entertainment industry, get everyone to be so loud - Harriet Beecher Stowe thing, right - and then say, "What do we do?" "Here is the list, call your congressmen, get this stuff changed." Let’s do it, we are going to do it! Alright. Thanks so much, Marisol, we will have you back soon. Marisol: Alright, thanks guys! Thanks for having me! Tim: Alright, thank you! You know, the thing done is at least there are people out there because what this requires to save kids... You have to think outside the box. Just like to get rid of slavery in America, you had to think outside the box. And the model we are proposing is this private public partnership where we need our law enforcement. They have the badges, they have their prosecutors, they have the jail system, they have the judicial system, they can do this. But the problem is, this is such a unique problem and it is so enormous you have to be proactive and creative. Because these…the bad guys are being creative, and most law enforcement agencies don’t have the wherewithal to cover the homicides, the drug dealers and all the things they have been fighting for years and years and are trained to do. And now, you have trafficking problem on top of that. It is relatively new in terms of trying to react to it and most don’t have the tools they need. And that is why I left the government. Because I recognized all the gaps in the agencies that were fighting this problem. Again, not to slam them, but there are gaps everywhere. I got turned down by half the time when I put out request to do an operation. I got shut down because of X,Y, or Z. I always kind of understood the reasons, and I thought, “Alright, I don’t see the government fixing these gaps anytime soon, so I am going to leave - start my own organization that fills those gaps.” So I can go to any agency and say, “I know your problems because I had them, and I am going to solve them for you. We will do this, this, that and the other.” And the law enforcement agencies that want to save their kids are like, “Yes, come on in!” and we go and conquer together in the private-public model.  There are other law enforcement officers who... I will not name them right now, but have them in my head right now, and I am pissed off at them. So close-minded. Mark: What did they say? Give me a conversation. Tim: "You shouldn’t be doing this work. This is just for us. This is for a SWAT law enforcement." "I was a SWAT law enforcement for 12 years, I know how to do this." "Well, you cannot do it. I do not like you doing it." “The parents of the kids, who are being abused - they like that we are doing it. And where we are working, no one is doing it." So there is no answer, no answer to it. It just the partners we work with - they are not this way. If you are this way, we don’t work with you. But you would be surprised how many come back and say that they literally gave up the opportunity to rescue more kids because of pride, because of ego, because if you don’t have a badge, you shouldn’t be consulting or helping or anything like that. They can’t see outside the box. And it is sad because kids are getting hurt. I have had a conversation, actually - and I will not name the people, the agency - but I have literally had a conversation that went like this: "So you are telling me that you or your boss would rather let these kids continue to be raped than work with a private organization that you know together we can solve the problem?" And they said, "Yes." Mark: Wow. Tim: They said yes. It wasn’t them... The person I was talking to said, “I want to do it, but yes that is... My boss has made that deliberate decision.” They don’t want to admit that they need help or that they don’t have a handle on it. It is sick, it is sad. But you know, you have all sorts of people, and the good news is that there are a whole bunch of law enforcement agencies out there and prosecutors all over the place that put the kids above everything else, and that is who we work with. Yep, that is who we work with. And there are so many of them that we don’t run out of work. So, you know, I was talking to some folks at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children who are a wonderful asset - all law enforcement works with them on so many areas to find kids, to find child pornographers - such an amazing organization. And I was talking to them about some of my frustrations and they said, "You know what? We did the same thing." They went through the same thing in the 80’s when they created the organization. There was a major - and I won’t name the agency - a major agency in the United States government that actually put out a policy/memo to their agents, to their law enforcement, saying, "You will not work with this new National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. You will not work with them. We got this. We don’t need help."    Mark: Farm Bureau. Tim: Yeah. That was a farm bureau. You got it.    Mark: Gosh…you know, the pressure was their heyday. Tim: Between that and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, yeah... They just went...yeah, unbelievable. But now, guess what? That agency has agents in their office that work inside the National Center. And so they say, "Just don’t worry. Buck up, little Timmy. Just work with those that will work with you. And success will be built upon success." And so we just have to put the negative aside and put the haters aside and we will work with those who see the vision. And they are the best ones anyway. They are the ones who are getting it done. Mark: Today, more than any other day, in talking to you, I feel momentum. I feel really pumped. And I don’t know what you had for lunch, or what your pre-workout was, but you are on fire, man. You are going to kill it. Tim: You didn’t feel that before? Mark: I did. Tim: You jerk. Mark: I didn’t... I felt like... Tim: ...how to take a compliment and just throw it in the trash. Mark: No, listen. I have felt like you are pushing a boulder uphill before, but now I feel like the boulder is moving. You know what I am saying? Like, we were getting people and we're shedding light on the problem, but really I just feel a new energy and not sure what it is. Tim: Well, what you are feeling probably is... I am in the middle of a case. I am back in my... Mark: You are... Tim: ...I am back in my agent days right now as an employee of this law enforcement agency. It is… I have been given authorization to get back and get my hands dirty back in this. And when I do that, I get very energized. Well, friends, sign us off, Timmy. Buck up, little Timmy. Tim: Thanks for joining us, guys. Looking forward to see you again on Slave Stealer Podcast.

Xiaohua: Hello, welcome to round table’s word of the week. This week, we are going to talk about some wedding-related words and phrases. Mark: That’s right. There are lots of wedding-related words and phrases. And the unique thing about many of them is that you never really hear of them except in the context of a wedding. One of the first ones is a very familiar phrase, is to go down the aisle. This is something we hear a lot. We hear: the bride looks beautiful. There she is with her husband-to-be, just about to go down the aisle. When people say this, they mean the center corridor between the seats inside a church. But this is one of most frequently misused words in the English language. In a church, there are two aisles. These aisles are on the sides of the main room of the church, not down the center. This will surprise many people because we are brought up with this phrase down the aisle. Xiaohua: So what’s the name of center corridor then?Mark: It’s actually called the nave. So the nave is the pathway where the bride walks. So you know, you can walk down the aisle, but if you do that, you will be walking down the side of the main room of the church, not down the center.Xiaohua: That’s interesting: go down the aisle 这个词组表达的就是结婚的时候从教堂中间的那条通道走过去这时候的样子。那中国人可能经常会说走上红毯。但其实Mark指出教堂中间的那条走道叫做nave，教堂两边的走道才叫做aisle。That’s such an interesting misunderstanding.Mark: Let’s have another one now. The people who get married, the happy couple: the bride and the groom. That’s a very interesting thing, isn’t it? Because a groom is also a word that is used to describe somebody who looks after a horse. I don’t know why that should be significant really in a wedding. Xiaohua: Bride and Groom 或者是 bride and bridegroom就是新娘和新郎，但是groom在英文里又有男仆或马夫的意思。I checked it in the dictionary. Actually, in old English, bridegroom was called brydguma, and guma meant man at that time. But gradually this usage of guma being man disappeared. So later, people just somehow replaced guma with groom.Mark: Yes. That’s very interesting. And also, the word bride does itself relate to horses just like groom does. Even now, there’ll be a public footpath in England where people can walk down there. But if it’s a public footpath where horses can also go down there, it’s called a public bridal-way.Xiaohua: Also, something that bewilders me is the name for best man. We know that is the best man. But the equivalent of that for a bride is maid of honor. Now there doesn’t seem to be any resemblances between the two phrases. Mark: No, well if we take a look how long these words have existed, maid of honor comes from American culture and is therefore much more recent. Whereas the idea of best man has been around a lot longer, hundreds and hundreds of years that’s been around. The origin of it is quite interesting. The idea was really that if the new husband wasn’t able to fulfill his duties as a husband to the bride, then the best man would step in. Now remember we’re talking about a time hundreds of years ago when man would be called off to fight and might be killed in a war leaving behind the wife and children. And so this is again where the best man would be expected to come in. Xiaohua: Interesting and slightly scary story for me.Mark: Actually, you know, traditionally it’s the new husband that chooses his best friend as the best man. Really I think the new bride should choose the best man, cause she is the one that theoretically might have to end up living with him and taking him on as her new husband. Xiaohua: Oh my goodness! 所以在英文best man或者是男傧相还有这样一个奇怪的故事。就是在很久很久以前，当丈夫因为什么样的事故死去或者因为生病而不能履行丈夫的职责的时候，就要由男傧相来代替行使丈夫的权利和角色。So I guess then in this way, the best man should be called the second best man, because it’s really that what he is. Mark: True. There is an old joke which is, you know, you must feel sorry for the bride, she never ends up marrying the best man. Xiaohua: Yes. That is interesting.Mark: As well as maid of honor which is sort of the female equivalent of the best man, this is coming from American culture. So has the idea of bridal shower that has been around in British culture for probably the last 10 or 15 years. I think really behind all this is marketing, you know. It’s a way of selling people stuff. So this is where the bride are given lots of presents by her besties, isn’t it?Xiaohua: Yes. Bridal shower这个词我觉得很难翻译，算作婚前的新娘送礼会。Basically, it means you shower the bride with gifts prior to her marriage. Right?Mark: It likes rain shower, but instead of it raining down with water, it’s raining down with gifts, which sounds wonderful, especially for those who sell the gifts. Xiaohua: That’s true, and I think that’s effectively brings us to the end of this edition of Word of the Week.

Xiaohua: Recently, Dali University announces that it will turn some of its dorms into a Youth Hostel during the summer holiday. This triggered heated debate online. The university is located in picturesque Dali Town of Yunnan Province, and has already started receiving reservations for the upcoming summer break. 大理大学摇身一变成‘青旅’。该消息日前一经报道，受到了广泛关注。有网友对大量游客入住校园对校园安全保障提出了质疑。So do you think it is appropriate?Heyang: I think this is a very interesting approach on using the idle resources that could be put into better use during summer vacation when students are not around. Why not just turn the dormitories to hostels and earn a little bit of extra revenue? I think this is what the university has in mind.Mark: This is a superb idea. I think it’s a fantastic idea. I mean it’s already done in other cities. If any of our listeners ever go to London, you’re going to be paying out maybe 1,500 or 2,000 Yuan per night for a hotel in London or stay in the dorm of the London school of Economics (LSE) for 40 quid a night. They’re already doing it.Xiaohua: Really? It’s an option already?Heyang: That is. I agree. My dormitory room was turned into a hotel during the summer vacation.Xiaohua: My main concern here is that are students on board? Heyang you don’t seem to be on board with it. You sound pretty unhappy about it. What do the students of Dali University students think?Heyang: Well, I think there is a difference. Because first of all, are the Dali University students being informed that there are going to be strangers staying in your dormitory during summer vacation? Where would you store all your stuff, and also how are the equipment going to be maintained? And, those questions need to be answered before implementing a plan like this. I think because these very practical, perceivable problems were solved beforehand in LSE, so it was a success.Mark: It’s not just the London School of Economics that does it. I stayed in this kind of accommodation in Edinburgh when I went to the Edinburgh Festival, much cheaper than staying in a hotel. Many people don’t know that you can do it. And also if you’re an alumnus, an old student, you can stay in your own university free, which is very convenient sometimes if you don’t want to spend any money or sometimes maybe you pay a little bit towards the cleaning costs. What you said is very important. What will happen to the student’s possessions, for example. I would imagine that they’re put in a locker, safely stored away for the whole summer. But secondly, to put it bluntly, it’s nothing to do with the students, and their opinion is irrelevant because during the summer they don’t live there. The deal with the university is that the students have the accommodation during term time. What the university does with their own accommodation and their own buildings at times outside term time is entirely up to the university.Heyang: So that’s the thing. I don’t know whether the Dali University has made the deal clear to people. By the sound of it, some students seem to have assumed that they still have the rights of usage of these rooms during vacation, then there is a clash of interest. So, it’s really important to establish clearly what this deal is about, and also make sure that safety and possession issues are being avoided.Mark: What they could do is, at the end of a course when someone’s left and the dorm will be empty for the whole summer because the new students won’t arrive until the following academic semester, then that will be a much easier situation to deal with.Xiaohua: Right. Also, Vivian here says that I think the hostel in college campus is a smart way to make money, but the questions is who gets the money. Will it be used to improve school facilities, or go to a few people’s own pockets? Also, how to make sure the safety of the travellers and those students who choose to stay at school? I think that’s a good question. People are concerned about the safety of, say, students, but safety of travellers is also important too.Mark: The University is responsible for the safety of students, so it equally will be responsible for the safety of other visitors during the summer.Xiaohua: And, make sure that nobody steals anybody else’s property if they live in the same space.Mark: As in, they will make a deposit, and the inventory will be checked I assume when they arrive and when they leave.

Segment 1: Who the hell are *we*, anyway?: The Pedigrees Jeff Interviews Michael: 1) Name, Rank, Serial Number? Which means name, age, what city do you live in, what you do for a living, and what else you do for fun. 2) When did you first know you were a tabletop gamer? 3) When did you first know you were a video gamer? 4) If you were to pick the first work in tabletop RPGs that really influenced you, which would it be? 5) If you were to pick your favorite tabletop RPG, over all you've ever played, which would it be and why? 6) What tabletop RPG would you recommend to anyone to pick up right now? 7) What video game would you recommend to anyone to pick up right now? 8) What trend in tabletop RPGs most excites you? 9) What trend in tabletop RPGs is going the wrong way? 10) What trend in video games most excites you? 11) What trend in video games is going the wrong way? Michael Interviews Mark: Mark Interviews Jeff Same Deal. Segment 2: How are tabletop RPGs and video games meeting in the middle? Jeff, , Mark on second, Michael on third. Paper to video: Dungeons and Dragons (duh) - Gold Box Series - Baldur's Gate - Neverwinter Nights - Dungeons and Dragons MMO Call of Cthulhu - Prisoner of Ice (one of the last gasps of the adventure genre) - Dark Corners of the Earth (neat, WONDERFUL concept - but needed a better goal system - cf Dead Space) Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption (the horrible truth about user-created content) - Bloodlines OMG AWSUMMMM Shadowrun - Shadowrun WTF? How did this lose? Hunter: The Reckoning - Wayward - Redeemer Good idea - why is it not since 2003? GURPS - Um, FALLOUT? Remember, Fallout started as a joint work with SJG, and Fallout 1's SPECIAL system is a descendant of GURPS Video to Paper: **MUCH MORE RECENT TREND** 1994: Street Fighter 2002: Alpha Centauri 2002: Everquest 2005: City of Heroes (unfinished) 2005: WoW 2009: Dragon Age Why is this hard? - Why can't paper go to video? (Fanbase size, talk vs. action, length of campaigns) - Why can't video go to paper? (Action vs. talk, only recent move to co-op vs. clan-based FPS, limited setting in most games) Segment 3: Wins and Fails This segment, the two of us reflect on the past week (or the upcoming week) and relay two good things (Wins) and two bad things (Fails), It's a banter topic to help lighten the mood of the show. Nerdy or not, personal or commercial, doesn't matter Michael's Two Wins -Starcraft 2 -Fallout: New Vegas Michael's Two Fails -Trying to read Shadowrun 1E -The military banning Medal of Honor Mark's Two Wins - - Mark's Two Fails - - Jeff's Two Wins - Finally Starting Harry Dresden - Found My New Favorite FLGS: Fantasy Shop Jeff's Two Fails - Late Hit: Sega for apparently employing Obsidian to hate it - Fail by Krome for Game Room: Letting MS talk them into microtransactions Mark, Michael on second, Jeff on third. Conclusion - Conclusion Segment: Name a movie that's good for an RPGer to watch, with one sentence about it. -- Jeff: Prince of Darkness ("THIS is a great modern horror LARP on film.") -- Michael: Can I say Darkon (an actual LARP documentary)? If not, then probably Kick Ass. --Mark: As yet undecided - How to reach us - Teaser for topics on next show