Podcast appearances and mentions of Mark One

Mark1 is a public benefit corporation focused on accelerating the commercialization of emerging industrial technologies and climate solutions. Spun out of Deep Science Ventures and the Rocky Mountain Institute, Mark1 offers early-stage project development support, front-end planning, and catalytic capital for innovative companies. By bridging the gap between technology development and project deployment, they help startups navigate the complexities of project financing, off-take agreements, and regulatory processes. Julian Ryba-White, Co-Founder and CEO of Mark1, was previously a Principal at Nokomis Energy, Senior Director at TenK Solar, and Manager at SolarCity. Here are five takeaways. Bridging the commercialization gap: Julian explains the unique challenges companies face when transitioning from technology development to project deployment and how Mark One supports this process through expertise and resources. Adoption readiness levels: Mark One introduces the concept of "adoption readiness levels" from the DOE to measure project viability and prepare companies for scaling. Catalytic capital: Julian details their funding approach, offering $300,000 to $500,000 tied to project milestones to de-risk development and align incentives. Holistic project development: Mark One's bespoke program identifies gaps in technology, finance, and equity, providing tailored support through a co-development agreement. Career advice for emerging professionals: Julian emphasizes the importance of patience, family time, and human connection in balancing personal and professional growth.

Guest: Anthony Housefather, Liberal MP for Mont-Royal and the Federal Government's Special Advisor on Antisemitism

As Israel provokes a wider regional war, global protests on October 5th are marking one year of genocide, and one year of resistance. And part one of a broadcast from an historic gathering at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, celebrating solidarity between Latin America, the African diaspora and Palestine. Plus headlines on Palestine, Lebanon and Iran, the VP presidential debate, and Julian Assange's first public remarks.  Voices: Gerald Horne, Manolo de los Santos, Lamess Mehanna, and Naheda Dahleh. The show is made possible only by our volunteer energy, our resolve to keep the people's voices on the air, and by support from our listeners. In this new era of fake corporate news, we have to be and support our own media! Please click here or click on the Support-Donate tab on this website to subscribe for as little as $3 a month. We are so grateful for this small but growing amount of monthly crowdsource funding on Patreon. PATREON NOW HAS A ONE-TIME, ANNUAL DONATION FUNCTION! You can also give a one-time or recurring donation on PayPal. Thank you!

From the BBC World Service: A year after the catastrophic earthquakes that killed more than 50,000, aid agencies are warning that major rebuilding still needs to be done. In the worst hit parts of southern Turkey and northern Syria, businesses are making some progress with some help from the U.S. government. However, Save the Children says one-third of those displaced by the disaster are still homeless.

From the BBC World Service: A year after the catastrophic earthquakes that killed more than 50,000, aid agencies are warning that major rebuilding still needs to be done. In the worst hit parts of southern Turkey and northern Syria, businesses are making some progress with some help from the U.S. government. However, Save the Children says one-third of those displaced by the disaster are still homeless.

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com Suntree Retreat 2024: https://theapsocietyorg.wordpress.com/news-and-events/suntree-retreat-2024/ Season 5 - Episode 3 ----more----   Yucca: Welcome back to The Wonder Science Based Paganism. I'm your host Yucca, Mark: And I'm Mark. Yucca: and we are back in another year. To talk about that February holiday and the Wheel of the Year, Mark: Yeah because this is the first holiday after a spate of activity that is reflected in mainstream holidays like Halloween and Christmas and Hanukkah and those sorts of things. And this one, you know, this one we fly solo as pagans, right? Yucca: right? I mean, there is an associated Catholic celebration at the time, but, you know, that's that's not the whole mainstream culture, Mark: right, it hasn't been secularized the way so many other, you know, holidays have been, that have been turned into sort of generic practices that nearly everybody does. Yeah and here in the Northern Hemisphere, there is noticeably more light now. I was noticing yesterday there was still light in the sky at quarter of six. Yucca: Oh. Mark: that was pretty cool, because, you know, at the solstice, the sun goes down at about 425, Yucca: hmm. Mark: so there was, that's, that's a big change, and it's, it's still wet and cold here because this tends to be the coldest time of the year, really, Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: But, you At least the days aren't so incredibly short and those long, long, long, long nights that we get in the deep of winter. Yucca: Yeah, well, it's so different in different places, what's going on, right? We've talked about this before, but you know, for some people, for me, this is the most bitter time of the year. January, the beginning of February it's actually quite funny, last night, my kids really wanted to do a campfire. And We've been talking about it all week and we had finally rusted out our campfire bowl. So we have a, because we have to be very, even in the winter like this, we have to be really careful about fire safety. So what we have is we have this Like a, a ring of stones with gravel, and then we have one of those fire bowls that's lifted up that you can put a lid on. But we had finally rusted out the bottom of the one that we had had for years, so we had to get a new one and wait for it to come. And, you know, they wanted to do the, the, the first fire and the new bowl and all of that. And it was a full work day for me, so I get out of work and we go outside. And it starts snowing. Mark: Ha ha ha Yucca: And so we're out there trying to get this fire to start in the snow, and the way we ended up finally doing it was putting a hat of foil on top of the fire to get it to go. So because once the fire started, as the snow would come close to it, it would heat up and melt and evaporate and would be fine. But when you're trying to start a wet fire, it was, it was quite, quite a an event to do so. But I was thinking about how, for us, this is the, we will quickly move into spring in a few months, but this is the coldest, most bitter, you know, we had over the past few weeks, we had single digits in Fahrenheit. So, you know, we're, and for those who do Celsius, we're talking about, you know, negative 15 degrees Celsius, and those sorts of temperatures, the ground is frozen. But for other people, This is a holiday in which they're celebrating, oh look, the little flowers are starting to peek through the snow, and spring is here, and everything is brightening up, and I'm like, it's cold. That's what it is here. It's cold. So, and of course, folks who are in, you know, Florida, it's a completely different experience for them, or Southern California, or Anywhere even closer to the equator is just radically different. Mark: One of our community members was talking about how right around now is when it's most tolerable in Florida because it gets so hot and muggy in the summertime and so this, which, you know, would generally be the coldest time of the year, is actually quite pleasant, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: That's the time when you go outside, so it really depends on where you are. Where I am, it's been raining long enough that the hills have all greened up, and so the, and the first wildflowers are coming up. Of course, because of climate change, we've been watching this happen progressively earlier. You know, with the years and Narcissus and daffodils are up. They're they're not fully blooming yet, but they are up. And it's and they're wildflowers like milkmaids and paintbrush and a couple of other of the early ones.  Yucca: Our daffodils won't be till April or May. Mark: yeah, yeah, exactly. So, um, so yeah, I mean, this, this brings to mind, you know, how, how in, in atheopaganism we talk about crafting your own wheel of the year, right? Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: Because there is, unlike in a situation like Wicca, where you're kind of celebrating the climate of the Yucca: hmm. Mark: in the 1940s. Because all of that's changed as well. This is more where you craft something that is that reflects what you see around you. And so it's more about connecting with the cycles of nature that are happening where you are. I really like the name that was created by a member of our community for this holiday which is brightening, because that's a little more universal. Yes it may be freezing, but the days are longer. So, there is at least that. Yucca: Yes. Yeah. I think that this holiday really lends itself To that crafting your own wheel of the year, much more than some of the other ones like solstice or hollows might because there isn't the same tie in to mainstream secular culture, where there isn't anything, I mean the closest thing I guess, Valentine's Day? Right? But that really doesn't, that's, that's a few weeks later, that feels really different, I don't know, maybe some people do connect those two things, for me they've been, they've Never had anything to do with each other. That's a totally separate holiday. But there's just nothing else, really, this time of year to, to draw on. So it really is, draw from what's going on in your environment. And, you know, maybe the Wicca influence, which works again for some people who live in a similar climate, but my climate is Very, very different Mark: Right. Yucca: that part of the world, so, Mark: And mine is too, because I'm in a, in a Mediterranean, a quasi Mediterranean climate, more reflective of what like the South, you know, Southern Italy or something like that would be like, Yucca: mm hmm, mm Mark: because of the coastal influence here in Northern California. Yeah, so One of the things that I find about this sort of create your own adventure approach to the Wheel of the Year is that I can take elements that I like from the, the kind of traditional pagan Wiccan model of like the Irish Brigid holiday, You know, at the beginning of February you know, I can adopt some, some metaphorical ideas around that. Like, you know, as we've talked about so many times, one of the things that I do in my Wheel of the Year is to map the course of a human life over the cycle of the Wheel of the Year. And so this holiday is infancy and it becomes associated with with dairy, with milk products. And with sort of nurturing and, and, you know, planning for the future, not that, not that dreaming, imagining, visionary kind of thing that you have at the at the solstice in the deep dark of night, but more like, um, this is like, you know, the dawn waking up early in the morning and going, okay, here's what my day is going to be like. I've got, I've got tools to sharpen and I've got lists to make and I've got seeds to buy and all that kind of stuff. Yucca: So much more concrete planning, can't get your, you can't really get any of those tools actually in the ground yet. Mark: Nope. Yucca: But you can think about, do you have the right ones? What are you going to need? Mark: Right. Right. Yucca: And of course, we're using the metaphor of, you know, planting and all of that, which some you might be doing, but for a lot of people, it's really metaphor about what's going on in the rest of our lives. Mark: yes. And your thoughts about what your aspirations are for this coming cycle, Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: Those, those ideas that we talked about at the beginning of the month, at the beginning of January you know, those, those themes For the new year well now you're starting to move towards concretizing those, right? And so you pull your tools together and maybe your tools need some maintenance, so you take care of that. And You know, you know you want to plant a garden and the ground is solid, but you can still peruse the seed catalogs and order your stuff and start seedlings indoors if you want to for things that take a long time to grow, like onions and so forth. Yucca: Mm Mark: Um, so, and I've been hearing that from, from gardeners in the community and in our mixers and stuff, we've been talking about, you know, people being very excited about their seed catalogs. Um, so, yeah, I, I think it's just, it, and then there's that other aspect of just celebrating the infants and small children in the, in the community, you know, doing, you know, doing stuff that's very nurturing and very kind. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: to, to them and to that part of ourselves. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. It's beautiful. Mark: Yeah, it can be I do have a little bit of dissonance around some of the things that I, that I still maintain from when we used to celebrate. I was celebrating with the broader pagan community around this holiday for example, I have a little anvil and sledge that I love the ringing, the repetitive motion and the ringing of the hammer on the sledge and associate it with this time of year. We used to do rituals because, you know, Brigid was a goddess of the forge among many other things, poetry and, you know, a lot of stuff. But we would. Take a length of chain and have one open link. And at the proper time in the ritual, each person by turn would go to the anvil and pound that link shut, creating a loop of chain that would be sort of a symbol of the magic that they were doing for this year, and they could take that home with them. We usually had ribbons threaded through them as well, so they were colorful and pretty. And I still like doing something with that anvil, even though I'm not quite sure what it means metaphorically. Yucca: hmm. Mark: Um, I just like it, and I associate it with this time of year, so I keep it. Yucca: And things like that might change over time, right? So what does that metaphor mean to you? You know, maybe when you do it, or how you do it, can adapt depending on what, where you are in your life, in terms of what life stage you're in, but also where you are in the world, because people, some people stay in the same part of the world their whole lives, and other people move from very, very different climates and change where they are, and so life changes a lot, and all of those symbols and those things change when you go from You know, Miami to Buffalo, or wherever you're talking about. Mark: Presuming your body survives the shock. Yeah, Yucca: move during the summer. Mark: yeah, exactly. I was just thinking, yeah, if you, if you move from Miami to Buffalo in January, you're really asking for trouble. Yucca: But people do it, right? And so when that does, you know, what does that mean to you? And things will shift and you're still trying to figure out you carry with you what you had from before. And you don't necessarily have to just throw that all out because you're suddenly in a different climate. It's going to take time to adjust. Mark: Absolutely. Of course it will. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: and Yucca: Mm Mark: this is a good time to kind of celebrate that transition, too. You know, this is one of those light at the end of the tunnel sabbaths, where it's like, yes, it's cold, yes, the days are still really short, but they're not as short as they were, and it is going to warm up. You know, by, by the time of the next holiday, the, the spring equinox, it will be noticeably warmer than it is now. So, and that's pretty universal, I think. So It's a, it's an opportunity to sort of contemplate persistence and the repeating of cycles, you know, because one of the things about the winter solstice, of course is that idea of making it through the longest night, you know, huddling together and, and, you know, persisting. Well, this is the point at which you kind of start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. And, and so you can celebrate that persistence as well and be kind to yourself as, as a result. Um, you know, a lot of us, we were just talking about this before we started recording, a lot of us have been going through a lot this January. been, it's been very, it's been hard, it's certainly been hard for me, and I know it's been a lot harder for other people in our community. And The idea of a holiday where we, where we sort of look around and say, Hey, we, you know, it looks like we're going to make it. We, it was, it was touch there for a while, but we, we think we're going to make it and, and, you know, persist through another cycle. I think there's a value in that too. Yeah. Yucca: And another perspective on that is This is the time, this is the time that we were preparing for, for all of that other stuff, right? At least in my climate, for us, when we're in the solstice season, we've only really just gone into winter. For many people, it's mid winter, but for us, no, we really, you know, we jumped really quickly from fall into winter. We still have A full stock of, of wood, right? We've got all our fire, we haven't been going through it yet, you know, we still have all of our stores of food, you know, both physical and, and metaphorical. And this is when things aren't quite producing yet. This is when the animals are about to calf. But they haven't quite yet, right? And just knowing that this is the, so this is a time for us when we focus on the things that we depend on. That we are very much part of. You know, we're very bovine based, so we're thinking about the dairy, and the meat from the cows, and the fur, and all of those things that, that we depend on, that are part of the system, of, that without, we couldn't be, right? We need those things. And so recognizing our connection to those, and how important that is, and that, once again, another year. We've been carried through, right? And we can, and we're going to do it again, but there is a place of, of kind of vulnerability and, and surrender to that this time of year. Which, there's something kind of somewhat reassuring about that. I know you wouldn't put the words vulnerable and dependency with reassuring together, but there is sort of, they just actually really do go together nicely. Mark: Yeah. I, I, yeah, I, I really resonate with what you're saying. Yeah, because January, February. Up until the cows and sheep started to give milk are, those are the fasting times. I mean, all, all the stuff that was perishable that you got to gorge on at the solstice, that's all gone. And now what you've got is, you know, root vegetables that are You know, covered with eyes and stuff and stuff like that. All the goodies have been eaten now and now it's just a matter of really kind of toughing it out until nature starts to produce some food in your area again. It's not a surprise that eggs are associated with the spring equinox because, you know, birds are laying then and you could eat them. Yucca: Yeah. The light starts to come back and, I mean, if you keep chickens, that, yeah, depending, your hen might produce a little, lay a little bit during the winter. And unless you're putting artificial lights in there, she's not going to. She's gonna wait till the spring comes back. Or she'll do a few here and there, but really you just don't get, and then all of a sudden there's enough light and it's like, you know, then you hear them making their calls. Mark: Yeah.  Yucca: Egg announcement! Everybody know! So, and same thing with the, with the, the wild birds as well. So, oh, and I love the colors. Look forward to that with spring, the flashy colors that they have. Mark: all the mating plumage and stuff. It's so cool. Yeah and that actually reminds me, this is, this is the time when I do my spring fast. My birthday is January 3rd and I take the, and so from the day after my birthday until the spring equinox, I give up something. and it's not a penance thing, it's more of a what is it like to live without Yucca: hmm. Mm Mark: Um, because I think that's That has valuable lessons in it. And I've done various things in various years, but I usually do alcohol, and that's what I'm doing this year. So, it's just, I mean, it's, it's a healthy thing, for one thing, it's good for your liver to stop drinking for a while. And more than that It's kind of a reminder. It resets any habits you might have had. If, if it's like, okay, work is over, it's six o'clock, work is over, time for a beer. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: That sort of pattern that kind of gets locked in where it's like, some days, maybe I don't really need a beer, but I still crack one, right? So it interrupts that pattern and gives you a chance to reset and then be more conscientious about whether or not you want that beer. Yucca: Right. Mark: So that's a Yucca: is the thing that works for you, but, you know, for other people, it might be something completely different, Mark: Oh, sure. Yeah I did sugar one year. God, that was hard. Um, uh, Yucca: I've quit a lot of things in my life, and I have to say sugar is by far the hardest. Mark: yeah, yeah. Oh, man. Yucca: yeah. You know, and some people might do some things like some, some actual, Like, fasting, as well. There's a lot of tradition, many different religions from all over the world have incorporated that, and there's a lot of really powerful potential with that, Mark: Yes. Yucca: you know, done in a mindful, safe way, of course, Mark: Yes. Yeah. Mind, mind your health. Stay hydrated. You know, you don't have to be fanatical about it. But, Yucca: just do your research on what you're doing beforehand. There's a lot of resources but it doesn't have to be, I know there's a lot of focus these days about it as like a weight loss technique or something like that but it can also be just Really wonderful for the mental clarity and the reminder that you get to choose these things and practicing that I choose right now, this is what I'm doing I'm not having that beer, or no, I'm not eating until noon every day, or whatever it is or if you decide to do a five day or whatever, you know, there's just Yeah, Mark: yeah, I mean, I think it's empowering to be able to make those kinds of decisions. And and there are, let me just say right now, the odds are very good, if you're listening to this, that you don't need to lose weight. There are some people who, you know, may actually have health impediments and, and losing weight might be beneficial for that. But the overall obsession with losing weight is a pernicious lie. And you're fine how you are. So fasting is not dieting. It's not recommending that you, that you deprive yourself in order to get smaller. That's not the point. The point is to understand that you do have choices, as you say, Yucca. And that you are in the driver's seat when it comes to things like what you put into your body. Yucca: yeah. Mark: So why don't we talk a little bit about how we observe this season. If you don't want to listen to this part, you can listen to last year's, or the year before, or the year before, or the year before. We just counted, this'll be our fifth. Oh no, it's fourth. Yucca: So it's our fifth year, but we started right after so I think we were, I was looking back and we started right at the beginning of March. So I think we had just, we recorded, we had this wonderful idea when we started the podcast that we would get together once or twice a month and record multiple podcasts and then go about our business. But that didn't end up working out. I think part of it is that it was just so nice to get together weekly Mark: Yeah, Yucca: and just be like, Mark: enjoy it. Yucca: let's just get together and talk and upload, you know, record it a day or two ahead of time and then upload it. But I think that we had tried to record. A few episodes before we launched, so that's why we were thinking that maybe it had been really, literally the week of, so, but yeah, five years. Mark: yeah, man, Yucca: eventful, very, very eventful years, Mark: very eventful years. I'm, time for a tangent, tangent warning. There are a couple of eventful things that I want people to know about that are happening in the atheopagan community. The first one is, if you go to the Atheopagan Society website, Which is TheAPSociety. org. There's a banner right there at the top you can click on to register for the Sun Tree Retreat. Yucca: Really coming up soon. Mark: it's, it's, it's on Labor Day weekend, it's at the end of the summer, so it's not so far away. The, we're working on the program now. Our colleague Michael is putting a lot of work in on that and people have submitted presentations and workshops and rituals that they want to do that we're going to fold into that program. But just be aware, registration is open, please go, you know, if you can't pay the whole amount now, put down a deposit just so that we know that you're coming and we can reserve a space for you. So that's one announcement and the other one is that at the last At the Atheopagan Society Council meeting, we agreed that we are going to start a scouting program for families and children. Yucca: Mm Mark: Um, this will be through the Spiral Scouts program, which is a pagan based scouting program, but it has a lot of the same kinds of badges for outdoor activities and camping, and Crafts and disciplines and all that kind of stuff we will be able to create our own badges, like we could create a critical thinking badge, Yucca: hmm, mm hmm, mm Mark: um, and families will be able to do these activities together and then we'll get together by Zoom so families can interact and kids can interact with one another as well, or if you live close enough to other People, you can be involved and we're going to open this to people that are not atheopagans so that people can do activities with, with their friends nearby. So that's really exciting and there's a survey open right now that we'll put in the show notes. To to gain information about people's interest in participation, how many kids they have that they would like to be involved, all that good kind of stuff, but it's exciting. I'm, I'm really thrilled that we're doing this and shout out to Robin our colleague on formerly on the Atheopagan Society Council, but who's really active in the community, who has done the heavy lifting on researching this and figuring out how it could work, so. Yucca: yeah. Mark: you. So those are my two tangents.  Yucca: Those are good tangents. Mark: yeah. Exciting. Yucca: are very excited about both, especially the badges. Mark: Yeah, yeah. We get badges? Well, you have to do stuff to earn them, Yucca: Well, that, that is, well, that makes it more special. There actually really is something about, you know, that, that, the effort and the, the earning it part. Like, yeah, I did it. Mm. Mark: Yeah, it's interesting to me that Spiral Scouts designed itself where they don't have rank. Yucca: Mm Mark: don't elevate in rank the way that, like, the Boy Scouts do, where you're a Tenderfoot and then you're something else and something else and then eventually you're an Eagle Scout. There's no rank in Spiral Scouts. There are categories of age groups. I believe we're gonna start and this is still under discussion, but I believe we're gonna start the Sun Tree Circle, which is what the atheopagan scouting program will be called. I believe we're gonna start that at six years old, because it's pretty hard to gain attention, you know, to have younger than six be able to pay attention on Zoom. Yucca: hmm. Mark: But we're, Yucca: I would imagine that there would be an exception for the, you know, the five year old who really is able to do that, right? That it's more about what is the The expectations of the individual's abilities more so than what's the calendar Mark: Right. Right. Absolutely. Yucca: if you're, you know, five year old and eight months is, you know, they're not left out because of, because they're not quite there yet in Mark: Right. And it's really the parent's call, you know, you know your kids better than anybody else. So it's a matter of you deciding, do you think they've got the capacity to focus, to be able to do these kinds of things? And if they do, well, bring them along. So, As I was saying, there are no ranks in Spiral Scouts. Everybody is equal. It's very egalitarian, which we really like in atheopaganism. But you can earn these badges and do activities together so that you all earn a badge at once. Then you can put that on a sash. Or they also have this cool, like, cowl thing. Yucca: mm Mark: it's called a crepuscular or something. I don't remember what it's called. But it's, it's like a, it's like a hood with a sort of a layer of cloth that hang, that's cut in an oval that hangs kind of over, down over your chest. And you can put badges on that too. Yucca: okay, Mark: So it's, it's just a matter of, you know, which uniform piece you choose to, to do it with. Um, I mean, honestly, I've looked over this stuff and a lot of them are like, well, I want to do that, it sounds really fun. Yucca: hmm, Mark: So, Yucca: right. Mark: what do we do for, for this Sabbath? Oh, what do we call it? We didn't talk about what we call it. Yucca: All right  Mark: Go ahead. Yucca: so, second winter, Nosquilváir for us those are usually, I mean, Bridget's Day or Imblic when speaking to people in the broader pagan community, usually second winter. Mark: Mm hmm. I have called this holiday river rain my personal wheel of the year because it really is the holiday of water. This is when all the water in the world is falling from the sky at least in so called normal years because of course we've had drought in the west a lot. In the last 15 years or so because climate is changing. But this year it seems to be pretty good. We've had quite a lot of rain and last year of course was record rain and snow. It was, it was tremendous. So the creeks are all babbling and the hills are green and we get these big tides at the ocean and it's just It's just the time of water, and so I do a lot of celebrating of, of water in, at River Rain. But I also like that term brightening because of its universality. In, in my books, I'm using brightening, and, and then dimming in August which is when we're coming off the summer solstice and it, the days are starting to get noticeably shorter. Yucca: Right. Which is another one of those that I think really lends itself to being really customized and specialized to your environment. Because again, it's one that doesn't have that strong pre existing secular association. Mark: right? Right. Yeah, and climatically it can be so different for people. I mean, where I am you can't see this because we're recording over Zoom, but my background today is the Golden Gate Bridge. In San Francisco, and San Francisco, of course, is very famous for being completely socked in with fog all summer long. And I'm 60 miles north of that along the coast, and we are very, very frequently socked in with fog in the summertime. So, you know, the idea of the blazing sun, you know, of llamas, and it's like, well, where is it? Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So it's just, it's different for everybody and you really have to, once again, choose your own adventure. So are there particular ritual things that you do, Yucca, at this time of year? Yucca: Well, we do take all the furs that we have and brush them out and care for them that way because if you're, you know, sleeping up against it or being up against the furs throughout the year, they start to kind of mat and tangle and so it's just a time to take care of the things that we have. Mark: Mm hmm. Yucca: so that's one. And for the last few years, we've done painting of pine cones, which has been really lovely. Yeah. So where we are, we have two different kinds of pine cones. We have the, the big ones that you would picture when you think of a pine cone from the Ponderosa pines. And those are, you know, those are big, like the size of your fist. And then we have little Pinyon pines, and they make little pine cones that are about golf ball sized, that look like little flowers when they open up. And so we'll go around and collect those and we're starting to make some of the, we'll focus on this a little bit more as we get closer to the equinox, but we'll make little bird feeders with them Or, you know, you dip it in the whatever your fat is, the lard or whatever, and coat it with the seeds. But when you paint the pine cones, it actually takes a much longer time than you would think, because you have to do each of the little nubs, right? And then you string them together and you get these just really beautiful looking decorations that you can hang about. And it doesn't feel Christmassy. Maybe it's because we're not doing like red and green we're doing more like whites and blues and, and things like that. Of course, sometimes the kids want to do different, you know, every single bit has to be a different color so they've got their rainbow ones or Mark: Huh. Nice. Yucca: those are some of the more craft things that we do. Mm Mark: Cool. Very cool. I have, on my focus, my altar, I have a chalice that I, that is my ritual chalice. I use it for various things, pouring libations. All that kind of stuff. It's, it's blue and white with sort of a grapevine design around the outside. And it sits on my focus, and it's always full of rainwater. Because water is life, right? You know, gotta have it there. But since last year, it has also had a coin in the bottom. Yucca: hmm. Mark: Because I got this idea about, you know, water and hopes and wishes and all that kind of stuff to do a wishing well for ritual for this time of year. And so I was we, the group that were doing it, we were, you know, pitching special coins into a, a cauldron. Yucca: hmm. Mark: Full of water, special water, a little bit of water from Glastonbury Tor, and from Bath, and then rainwater, that kind of stuff. And so I took my coin out and I put it in the bottom of that chalice and it's been there ever since. So that's, that's another kind of ritual thing that I like to do at this time of year is create the wishing well. Yucca: Do you fill it up throughout the year? Or are you so, okay. I Mark: just Yucca: be shocked if you were going to be humid enough that that wouldn't evaporate Mark: No, no, no, no. It, it evaporates all the time. And every once in a while I have to clean, you know, scrub it to take, all of the salts accumulated from evaporation off of the chalice. But it's pretty, and it's, it's there, and I use special coins, I've got a it's a French five franc coin from before the Euros, and it's, so it's, it's silver or nickel or something around the, the out part, and then the inner part is bronze or copper or, you know, something with more gold in Yucca: colors. Wow, nice. Oh, Mark: I have two of these that have an amazing backstory that I won't go into, but I have Algerian coins, are octagonal, and have this amazing Arabic script all over the front of them and they just, to me they look like Dungeons and Dragons coins. You know, they look like exotic loot from some ancient time that you would find in a chest somewhere. So, I use one of those two coins when I do this wishing well ritual. Yucca: that sounds fun. Mark: Yeah. it is. Yucca: Do you get together with your circle for this holiday? Or more the big four. Mark: Used to, but we don't anymore. We engage with one another more than we used to because we do a Zoom call every Friday evening. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: So we see one another and check in and stuff on a weekly basis. But as we've gotten older, the distance travel just becomes harder and harder. And so we get together at Hallows and at Yule and and that's, and then usually one other time. Maybe around May Day and, but the, the Live Oak Circle, our Northern California Atheopagan Affinity Group, is getting together more frequently, and we're going to do one of these rituals next Sunday, no, not next Sunday, the Sunday after, the 11th of February, so that'll be fun. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: this, folks. Yucca: Yeah. And they're closer, easier to get to. Mark: Well, it's still a 60 mile drive for me. And it's a little further than that for the folks from Sacramento, but then we've got people from San Jose who are in the south of the South Bay, so the East Bay is a good convening point, and it's only every six or seven weeks, so it's It's not, it's not too bad, and I drive an electric car, so you can feel okay about it. Yucca: Nice and quiet, right? Mark: Yes, it, it, it sings. My car sings. It goes, oh, so great.  Yucca: Mine goes so so so so so so so so. I go over dirt washboard. Mark: yeah, yeah, I Yucca: I think even electric car would go so so so so Mark: I, I think so, and probably worse, Yucca: I would not be very happy. Mark: because they're very heavy. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: batteries are super heavy, so. Even though they have a lot of get up and go, that's just because the torque on an electric motor is so much higher than on an internal combustion engine. Yucca: Mm. Mm Mark: Um, yeah, it's a funny thing, I, I mean, I don't really care much about fast cars, but I do get irritated by rude drivers, and, and they seem disproportionately to be drivers of BMWs and Mercedes and Teslas. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: So, what I like to do is to, when the light goes green, I like to leap across the intersection far faster than your incredibly expensive car, sir. Just to kind of make the point that, you know, my car's quite a bit cheaper, but it'll go. Yucca: Mm. Very mature, but Mark: It's satisfying and completely immature. Absolutely immature. Um, you know, there you have it. None of us is perfect. So this has been great, Yucca. Thank you so much. This has been a great conversation. I wish you the best of the season. Yucca: Likewise. And to all of you, thank you. So, here's to another year! Mark: another year. Here we go. Off we go. All right, everybody. We'll, we'll see you next week.   

In this instalment of The G Word, our guests engage in a compelling discussion centred around a recently published paper that supports the integration of whole genome sequencing into standard cancer care.  Our guests shed light on the transformative potential of combining health data with whole genome data. Discover how this innovative approach empowers doctors to deliver more personalised and effective care. Our guests delve into the findings of a landmark national study, unravelling the significance of identifying inherited cancers for patients and their families. The episode explores not only the scientific advancements but also the real-world impact on individuals facing a cancer diagnosis.  Our host Naimah Callachand is joined by Dr Nirupa Murugaesu, a Consultant in medical oncology at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, and the Principal Clinician for Cancer Genomics and Clinical Studies at Genomics England.  And by Professor Sir Mark Caulfield, a Professor of Clinical Pharmacology at Queen Mary University of London, and who previously served as Chief Scientist for Genomics England and was instrumental in the delivery of the 100,000 Genomes Project.    "In cancer we were sequencing sections of the tumour and comparing them to DNA inherited from your mum and dad, and that comparison allows us to work out what is driving the cancer, what may be affecting its potential for treatment and how we might choose treatments for patients.  So this is a real opportunity to create precision cancer care."     You can read the transcript below or download it here: https://files.genomicsengland.co.uk/documents/Podcast-transcripts/Whole-genome-sequencing-in-cancer-care.docx   Naimah: Welcome to the G Word.  What does it mean if we can test for inherited genes?    Nirupa: It can influence how their cancer is treated.  So it means that there may be certain types of therapy that are available if they have a specific inherited cancer gene, number one.  It also can impact in terms of preventing further or other cancers related to those genes, and it may impact the type of surgery they have, and also the type of overall cancer treatment.  And then finally, if they have got an inherited cancer, then, as I mentioned before, it may impact in terms of testing and screening for their family members.  Naimah: I'm your host Naimah: Callachand.  Today, I'm delighted to be joined by Dr Nirupa Murugaesu, who's a consultant in medical oncology at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, and the principal clinician for cancer genomics and clinical studies here at Genomics England.  And Professor Sir Mark Caufield, who's a Professor of Clinical Pharmacology at Queen Mary University of London, and who previously served as chief scientist for Genomics England and was instrumental in the delivery of the 100,000 genomes project.  Today, Mark and Nirupa are going to discuss key findings from a recent paper that's just been published in Nature.  If you enjoy today's podcast, we'd really love your support.  Please like, share and rate us on wherever you listen to your podcasts.  Now, let's get into the interview.  So first of all, Mark, I wondered if you could give me a bit of background on the 100,000 genomes project?  Mark: So the 100,000 genomes project started in July 2013 following an announcement by the then prime minister, David Cameron, that the UK would be the first health system in the world to sequence 100,000 whole genomes, which is as much as you and I can read of the genetic code.  In the case of cancer, which we focused on here, in cancer we were sequencing sections of the tumour and comparing them to DNA inherited from your mum and dad, and that comparison allows us to work out what is driving the cancer, what may be affecting its potential for treatment and how we might choose treatments for patients.  So this is a real opportunity to create precision cancer care.  Naimah: And Nirupa, can you tell me what the 100,000 genomes project meant for these patients with cancer?   Nirupa: I think, firstly, we're very grateful for all of the participants in the programme, because what it's allowed us to do is to look at the data as a whole, and having all of that sequencing data alongside clinical information has been incredibly valuable, it has also developed the infrastructure for testing.  And really I think for patients with cancer, they participated in this programme as a research project, and unusually for a research project these results were returned back to treating clinicians to clinical teams, if there may have been a result that would impact or change their management.  But I think, importantly, what it enabled is the implementation of standardised cancer testing in the NHS, and really enabling that for a wider range of patients, not just those that participated in the project.  And because of patients participating, this then allowed all of the data to be stored in a single place, and this has been incredibly valuable for clinical academics and researchers.    Naimah: And can I ask what specific types of cancer that were looked at in 100,000 genomes project?   Nirupa: Again, the project was set up such that we allowed a number of different types of cancers to be sequenced and, therefore, very permissible, because we also wanted to ensure that some of the less common and rarer cancers were also sequenced and, as you would expect, more of the common cancers as well.  In addition, I think the opportunity to sequence paediatric cancers, as well as haematological malignancies, or blood cancers, was also key as part of the cancer programme.  Here, we focus on the solid cancers, but obviously there was a much wider range of cancers that were sequenced.    Naimah: And next, can we move on to talk about the findings of the study?  Nirupa: I think, firstly, by undertaking sort of a pan-cancer analysis, it really gave us an overview of the number of target and genes that were found to be actionable.  And what I mean by that is that they have a, well, clinically relevant, and we can see that in certain cancer types, such as in brain cancers, in colon cancers, lung cancers, there were within the genome sequence more than 50% of these cancers had something that was what we would call actionable.  So there was a mutation in a gene for which this would influence treatment.  And as we started to look more across the entire cohort of patients, you can really get an idea of the fact that the more that we sequence, and the more comprehensive the testing is, the number of different types of mutations that we were able to discover.     Naimah: And when you mentioned that these findings were actionable, what does that mean?  Nirupa: So what that means is that has an impact in how the patient will be managed and treated.  It may influence, firstly, the type of surgery they have, it may influence the type of cancer treatment that they receive.  And all of this, I suppose, comes back to the point that Mark mentioned, of precision oncology, so we more precisely treat patients based on their individual cancers.     Naimah: And could you give me some examples of maybe some of these genes that were found in the study that were actionable?  Nirupa: Yes, so the types of genes also matter, or the type of mutations.  So some of them were in known cancer genes, and if you have, for example, a mutation in lung cancer, in a gene called the EGFR gene, we know that there are cancer therapies that can be provided that target specifically this mutation.  So that's one example, and this is quite well characterised and understood in oncology care.  But what we were also able to do with whole genome sequencing, is identify different types of mutations that are harder to characterise routinely.  And these are often included things that we call pan-genomic markers, where we can see what the mutational landscape is of the cancer, the different patterns of mutations can be gleaned from this, and often this can then give you an idea of the underlying biology of the cancer.  But importantly, in certain types of cancers, such as high grade serious ovarian cancer, it highlights which patients may have a particular marker that means they may or may not benefit from a particular type of therapy.  So in this particular case, the class of therapy is called PARP inhibitors.  Naimah: And how did the study compare to other similar stuff studies in the genomics area?  Nirupa: That's a really good question, and I think we looked at this from other large sequencing endeavours, such as the ICGC, TCGA, so these are big studies where have been whole genomes sequencing.  Also within the Hartwig Institute in the Netherlands, they've also undertaken whole genome sequencing for cancer patients.  And what we were able to identify is that the patterns of mutations were as expected, we found, you know, a lot of similarities.  I think the difference, the main difference is not just identifying the type of mutations across the different cancers.  But the fact that we were then able to look at the longitudinal outcome, and correlate some of these genomic markers with outcomes related to both therapies, as well as survival impact of having certain mutations in terms of prognosis.    Naimah: Mark, do you have something you'd like to add there as well?  Mark: Yeah.  So one of the things that we did in the 100,000 genomes project, was to evaluate the best way of measuring the whole of your or my genetic code.  And we discovered that very early on that if you expose the tumour to a preservative, which is called formalin which keeps the tumour preserved, that actually you could get quite a number of misleading findings.  And so to address that, the distinctiveness from former programmes, such as Nirupa mentioned, like the Cancer Genome Atlas, is that all of the tumours that we studied in this paper were actually produced under fresh tissue conditions, and have not been exposed to a preservative.  And that means that what we have is a really accurate reflection of the variation within the tumours.  And the other thing about this particular resource is it's the biggest resource.  We were able to look at 13,000 people with solid tumours, but we also had blood cancers and other cancers which also feature of this paper.    And a further remarkable thing about this is early on, Nirupa and the team and I decided that we would longitudinally life-course follow the patients and by accruing data from multiple sources in the health system.  So, every attendance at the hospital, what chemotherapy was had, we've been able in this paper to recapitulate signatures that clearly show that certain mutations are harmful.  And many of the findings that we've made are absolutely, if you look at the survival of patients particularly, you can see almost identical patterns to those in clinical trials.  What this means is that by the really rich data set which is now many billions of clinical data points on these patients, we can actually look for long-term signals of benefit and harm that perhaps would not be detected by a clinical trial that might last for six months or a year.  So this is a really valuable resource, and the really great thing is we can use what's called real-world data, which is where we take routine health data, and we can recapitulate the findings from tightly controlled clinical trials.  And I think that's quite an important finding.    Naimah: That kind of brings me onto the next question, Mark, where I want to talk about the value and benefit of genomics sequencing for cancer patients.  I wondered if you could expand?  Mark: Well, what we know from one of the genomics medicine centres which were regional hubs, is that they use the information that we return, that Nirupa outlined earlier in a report, for 25% of their patients.  Which means that they concluded having evaluated that as the clinical team locally, that there was something the patients could benefit from.  Now, what we think is this makes the case for certain cancers being part of the national genomics test directory whole genome sequencing, but it's still the case that the majority of testing for cancer is now very large focused panels that are focused on specific gene features.  But in some measure, this work is also able to reassure us that those gene features are the right ones to focus on, so this work has been very useful in that respect, even where the NHS today cannot make the financial or clinical case for using whole genomes in specific cancers.  So I think the programme's made a massive difference.    The biggest thing it's done for patients, which Nirupa was very actively involved in, is it's allowed us to create a national genomics test directory.  So when we started this, cancer genomic testing was completely random and would vary from one postcode to another, one hospital to another.  And what Nirupa and the cancer team created is a national cancer genomic test directory, which now means that standard of care, that's the basis for reimbursement, and it's available across the landscape of 56 million people.  And given that one in two of us will have cancer, this is a massive advance.    Naimah: Yeah, you've really highlighted the impact of having access to such a large database.  And I just wanted to ask as well, what are the challenges associated with implementing routine whole genome sequencing into clinical care?  Nirupa: I think as with all of these things when implementing something new within a healthcare system, it requires a level of education, upskilling and also, as Mark has touched on, how we handle the tumour tissue, so that it's handled in a genomic-friendly way to enable the best results if you like, because we want to ensure that their DNA is not damaged so that we can get accurate read-outs on the results.  So there are challenges and there is also cost implications in weighing up the pros and cons.  And I think what we were able to show, and by undertaking this sort of pan-cancer analysis, is where there are those cancer type where there is a real need for whole genome sequencing, or where it can be justified, because there are a number of different types of mutations both within the tumour.  And also from a blood sample that is also taken, so this is your constitutional DNA, so this is if there is a risk of an inherited cancer.  So we are able to pull together all of this information, and obviously that's important, not just for the patient, and their management, but also for family members.  So I think really what this shows is that where you have to identify many of these different types of mutations, whole genome sequencing enables that through a single test.   Naimah: Mark, would you like to add something else there?  Mark: One thing I think which Nirupa's very much part of, is the distinctiveness of the Genomics England approach has been to involve the NHS at every stage.  Now, what that means is we estimate that at the peak of the 100,000 genomes project, 5,000 frontline NHS staff touched the project at some point in their working week.  What that does mean is that Nirupa and the cancer team could realign the cancer tissue handling pathways.  But it also meant that we were able to upskill the frontline workforce, such that at the end of the programme, when we produced a genomic test directory, they were really up for it because they did not want all the hard work they'd put in to stop.  And so what we've done is produce the national test directory within five years of starting, that wasn't a deliverable for the project, but it was nonetheless obvious to all of us working in it, including NHS England, that there needed to be service transformation, and we've managed to effect it.    Now, if you look at other settings where perhaps Nirupa and I might have a research team, we might do it some distance from the health system, it would be in the health system, but not with the health system, then it takes between nine and 16 years to get these things into clinical practice.  And that was achieved here in five years.  So there is a lesson from this, the cancer programme particularly, because the cancer programme testing was very limited when we started, but you can take an entire workforce on a journey and leave them with the legacy of an entirely transformed system for patients.  And thankfully because we got, Nirupa and I, the NHS to agree to reimburse for the testing directory being used, we have eliminated a lot of randomness that was in the system previously.  So it's quite an important advance in that respect, and it really does show in the beautiful work that Nirupa was describing exactly how you can use this information to change an entire system.  And the NHS is not the easiest system to change in the world.  Naimah: Nirupa, you mentioned the findings show that there was potentially inherited genes.  Can you tell me what does that really mean for patients, if we're able to diagnose these inherited genes sooner in life?  Nirupa: It can influence how their cancer is treated, so it means that there may be certain types of therapy that are available if they have a specific inherited cancer gene, number one.  It also, can impact in terms of preventing further or other cancers related to those genes, and it may impact the type of surgery they have, and also the type of overall cancer treatment.  And then, finally, if they have got an inherited cancer, then, as I mentioned before, it may impact in terms of testing and screening for their family members.  And that's really key as well, because this means that their cancer can be diagnosed, if they do develop a cancer, because they're being monitored, because it's much more targeted, their approach in terms of screening for a particular type of cancer, they can potentially have their cancer treated much earlier.  Or even better, before it becomes what we call an invasive cancer but at the pre-cancerous stage.  So this has huge implications, and what we're finding actually with more and more testing – and this is not just... our study was consistent with other studies that have been published – is that when you undertake more routine testing, then you are able to identify this.  It is not common amongst the population, but in those patients where it is relevant, it really can impact their care.  Naimah: Mark, do you have something to add there?  Mark: Well, I think Nirupa's just highlighted a really important point.  So to bring that into a little bit more ways of which people listening to this can relate to it, we have a family where there was a women who had no family history of breast cancer, she developed breast cancer, and in the tumour we found that she had a BRCA 2 mutation.  We also found that she'd probably acquired that or inherited it, we don't know.  That for her meant that she could enter the Olympia trial, which was running at the time, which Nirupa alluded to earlier, was a study of PARP inhibitors.  But without that genetic makeup she'd never have got into that trial, and she probably wouldn't have been tested for BRCA at that time in the NHS because she had no family history, I think that's probably right, Nirupa.    And then there was a family-wide consequence for that, because she had a brother and son, and she also had a daughter, and the daughter was under 30 at the time and underwent BRCA testing and was BRCA 2 positive.  But she has the opportunity now to enter intensive breast screening from the age of 30, and that's what's happened.  And her brother, and this is the lady who had the breast cancer, her brother and her son may be at risk of prostate cancer, so they can consider testing.  So Nirupa makes a really important point, that when people have inherited a previous disposition to cancer, that can have a family-wide impact.  And one test in one family member can open the doors to opportunity for others to understand their risk and to be screened more actively and intensively, hopefully with meaning that if they do develop cancer it will be detected very early, or maybe we can just prevent it altogether.     Naimah: Thanks, Mark, a really good example of the impact that this testing has had.  I just wanted to touch back on your point, Mark, that you'd made about real-world data.  And I wondered actually, Nirupa, if you could kind of explain to me why it's important to link real-world data to the genomic data?  Nirupa: Yeah.  So I think the work we've done here really does emphasise this, because when we refer to real-world data, we're talking about different types of healthcare data across the population.  And we had the opportunity to link the genomic data to a number of key data sets that are curated by the cancer registry, the national cancer registry database.  And this includes things like all of the population base systemic anti-cancer therapy, so we know that for each of the participants the type of cancer therapy they receive, and also, as Mark has mentioned previously, the hospital episode.  So when patients needed to be... we can see their data in terms of admissions, investigations, and so on.  And these are really valuable data points, because you get an indication of when patients may have had to then have further testing, or if there is a risk of recurrence and importantly survival data, because a lot of this has been, in terms of a lot of the cancer genes have been well characterised and tested.    But what we were able to do here at a pan-cancer level on a large cohort of patients over a period of time, is to look at if you had a particular mutation, what is the impact of that in terms of outcome for a particular cancer type, and even more broadly, on a pan-cancer level?  And actually, as this type of data accumulates, I think the real value, and if you've got a larger number, you know, what is the value for patients who've participated in this programme going forwards, is that as that data accumulates and the numbers go up, we are able to then ask more detailed questions.  What is the impact of a particular type of mutation, or a particular type of variant within a gene?  And, importantly, what happens when you get a different sequence or a combination of genes?  And how does that impact?  And this, I feel, is the way that we are going to move more towards precision oncology, because we are beginning to understand the cancer in more detail, how it is going to behave, and then try and tailor therapies accordingly.   Naimah: And Nirupa, I wondered if you could tell me as well if the findings from this study have benefited directly those patients that were involved in the 100,000 genome project?  Nirupa: It has benefited some of the patients because, as Mark has mentioned, there are findings that we weren't expecting in terms of potentially inherited cancers and, therefore, this has had implications.  The way that the project was set up from the outset, is that we were obtaining tumour samples from patients who had not received any previous cancer therapy.  And what this meant is that this was predominantly in patients, so they were treatment naïve with early stage disease that were having surgery to treat their cancers.  And as such, what we know is that fortunately most of those patients did not require further therapy, because their cancers were treated successfully with surgery.  But what it did tell us, and what it's really highlighted, is the number of important genes that were identified.  And so whilst it may not have impacted patients directly, it's enabled us to study the biology of the different types of cancers, how they behave, along with the longitudinal clinical data.    But what it is doing now, is through the national test directory through the genomic medicine service, is enabling testing for patients that unfortunately now have more advanced cancers, but where these genomic findings are more likely to impact directly in terms of therapy.  So, for instance, as we've mentioned, the ability to have whole genome sequencing for patients with high grade serious ovarian cancers, means that this will impact the type of treatment they have.  And this also was the tumour type where we found the highest number of patients with BRCA mutations, so we have a potential inherited risk of a cancer as well.  So now what we have learnt and the infrastructure that we have developed has enabled this to have a real impact, not just for patients in the project now, but wider within the NHS.  Naimah: Mark, would you like to add something else there?  Mark: I think Nirupa's encapsulated it very well.  There were a range of benefits, so I mentioned earlier that in one centre 25% we have evidence got a benefit for their treatment for their cancer in some way shape or form.  So an example to what there might be is that some people got a medicine they wouldn't have received from routine care, and that might have been licensed for the treatment of that tumour, but it wouldn't have been the first line treatment choice.  Some people got medicines that they wouldn't have got because we don't normally associate using that medicine with that cancer, but they had a signature that showed that they were very likely to benefit.  Quite high numbers got an opportunity to get into a clinical trial, which is really important because if you look, over 50% of global oncology trials now have some kind of biomarker or diagnostic, or something like this alongside, what better than to have a comprehensive inventory of the variants and the cancer, and to be able over time to use that library to understand better the treatment course of that patient.  And that's what I think a whole genome adds, rather than the single, look at a single part of the genetic makeup.   And then finally, some had lots of mutations, really high rates of mutations, and maybe they should receive specific advance therapies, like immunotherapies.  Or alternatively, they had a feature in their genetic makeup which it looks like they inherited, as Nirupa absolutely correctly said earlier, these people need to be followed-up and they need more intensive screening, because this is how you detect cancer at an earlier stage.  And the final way people benefited is we could detect genetic changes in  their DNA that meant that if they were exposed to certain medicines, they were likely to suffer harm. And there's a particular, two medicines, 5-fluorouracil capecitabine, where possibly about 5% of people will need either a reduced dose or a completely different medicine, because it will be very harmful.  And so this is about getting the right medicine to the right patient first time, and getting the right outcome for that patient downstream.    And I think, you know, Nirupa's encapsulated it perfectly, there's a whole range of benefits that the patients can accrue from this.  And I think we should probably, Nirupa, say that people were quite cynical when we started, about what it would be that you would get over and above, for example, the cancer genome map that's at the international cancer genome consortium.  And, you know, I'd had leading cancer scientists in Britain say, "Oh well, we've discovered it all, there's nothing to find here."  And I think what this paper shows is that's not entirely true.    Nirupa: I would agree with that Mark, but I would also probably add that it highlights the value of having a large data set alongside that clinical information.  And what we were also able to do,  is whilst we very much talked about what were the gene targets that had a direct impact or genomic markers that impact care now, for which there is an approved therapy.  What we've also been able to do through this analysis, is actually highlight the number of mutations that have been identified for which there is a licence therapy in another cancer type, but not in that particular cancer type.  And what that means, is that specially now, as we have more and more biomarker-driven therapies, I mean, if we look at that compared to when the project started and now, that has increased dramatically.  And what that means is then there are sort of licensed medications that actually can be used in non-licensed indications via a clinical trial, via these very, you know, these basket studies which are across cancer types and are actually based on different types of molecular markers.  And really, we're able to show this at a pan-cancer level across the 13,000 tumours through the results from whole genome sequencing.  Naimah: You've both kind of touched on this throughout and, you know, we've talked about the development of personalised medicine.  And where do you see the future of cancer treatment in the next five years?  Maybe, Nirupa, we can go to you first?  Nirupa: That's a very good question.  I think and what I hope is that with more comprehensive and equitable and standardised testing for patients, especially within the NHS, that this will enable more personalised and targeted therapy alongside, you know, systemic chemotherapy.  And as well as that, better selection of patients that are likely to benefit from the newer immunotherapies.  And also where sequencing is very exciting, is that once we begin to understand more about the individual tumours, you know, going forwards there are a number of cancer vaccine trials, and the aim of those are to have specific vaccines that are going to target an individual's tumour.  So I think in the next five years, this is I think a very exciting space, I hope so, because we need to keep doing more in the space for our patients to try and improve therapy and precision oncology for them.  Naimah: And Mark, do you have anything to add to that point?  Mark: I think Nirupa's right, that there are new therapy extractions coming on, vaccination's one way.  But I think that what will become clear is whether we can use any molecular mechanisms for early detection of cancer.  The battleground here is that we all too often detect cancer late, when it's already outside of the organ it originated in and may be spread in other parts of the body.  It's very hard to effect a cure, almost impossible in that setting.  But what if we could detect cancer earlier?  And then what if we could place a whole genome or detailed molecular characterisation alongside that?  And then, as Nirupa suggested, give someone a vaccine tailored to their tumour that would eliminate it.  The real problem is all too often we detect cancer late, so maybe some of these new molecular diagnostics, such as cell-free tumour DNA will usher in an era of early detection.    And one of the things, and particularly before we did this project but also up until the beginning of the last decade, there were very few good biomarkers of cancer that were usable in the health system.  So we have for the first time opened the vista of having early detection, if we combine early detection with detailed molecular characterisation, possibly a whole genome, possibly another test, then I think we really can usher in the era of precision medicine.  And so I think Nirupa's absolutely right, there will be new treatments, there always will be, but what we have to do is to get detection at an earlier stage.  Naimah: We'll wrap up there.  Thank you to our guests, Dr Nirupa Murugaesu and Professor Sir Mark Caulfield for joining me today.  If you'd like to hear more about this, please subscribe to the G Word on your favourite podcast app.  Thank you for listening.   

Comprehensive coverage of the day's news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. Israelis mark one month anniversary of deadly Hamas attack as war in Gaza rages on. Supreme Court appears set to uphold ban on domestic abusers owning guns. Elections take place around the country, governors races and abortion rights are on the ballot in some states. House votes to go ahead with formal censure vote of Democrat Rashida Tlaib for controversial Israel statements. Special counsel in Hunter Biden investigation meets in private with Congressional investigators. Native American statue replaces one of Juniperro Serra, founder of California's racist Mission system, at state capitol. We Work to close dozens of offices amid financial trouble. The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – November 7, 2023 Israelis mark one month anniversary of deadly Hamas attack as war in Gaza rages on. appeared first on KPFA.

Comprehensive coverage of the day's news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice. (AP Photo/Fatima Shbair) Israelis mark one month anniversary of deadly Hamas attack as war in Gaza rages on. Supreme Court appears set to uphold ban on domestic abusers owning guns. Elections take place around the country, governors races and abortion rights are on the ballot in some states. House votes to go ahead with formal censure vote of Democrat Rashida Tlaib for controversial Israel statements. Special counsel in Hunter Biden investigation meets in private with Congressional investigators. We Work to close dozens of offices amid financial trouble. The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – November 7, 2023 Israelis mark one month anniversary of deadly Hamas attack as war in Gaza rages on. appeared first on KPFA.

Revolutionary Witchcraft- Sarah Lyons  Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit Emergence Magazine podcast  https://www.ejnet.org/ej/principles.pdf   S4E32 TRANSCRIPT:----more----   Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science Paganism. I'm your host, Yucca. Mark: and I'm Mark. Yucca: And today we are honored to have another guest. So Lauren, who is a new member of the Atheopagan Society Council. So, welcome, Lauren. Lauren: Thanks. I'm so glad to be here. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: We're really excited to have you, so thank you for taking the time to come on the show. Lauren: Yeah, no, my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me. I'm so tickled to be here. Yucca: Yeah. So, Lauren, will you tell us a little bit about you and your, I guess, so we were saying atheopagan origin story? Lauren: Sure. And you know, I think like a lot of these stories, it's a little long, so forgive me if I get kind of long-winded here, but I hope that, you Yucca: so much fun. We love to listen to it, so. Lauren: I'm glad. Yeah, I'm sort of hopeful that some of what I talk about could just help someone else. So I figured I would lay it all out there. So yeah, I'm I'm from New York, I'm from New York City, and I grew up in a, I would say, fairly Catholic family. We went to Mass regularly outside of just like Christmas and Easter. I was an altar girl I had my first communion, sort of like the whole, all the steps that you do as a child in the Catholic Church. And I really loved it, like I loved being an altar girl, I loved, being part of rituals and ceremonies and made me feel important and special, and I really loved the community that we had in the church as a kid. But as I got a little bit older when I was sort of like in early adolescence, my mom came out as a lesbian. And, as you can imagine, this was like the early 2000s being part of the LGBTQ plus community, and the Catholic Church didn't really mix, so, we left that community. And at the same time, again, early 2000s, there was a lot of just like witch stuff happening in pop culture, like the Harry Potter books were like exploding, all this stuff was going on. And I expressed an interest in that. And an adult in my life was like, Oh, hey, you like it. Thank you. Witchy things, like let me bring you to this New Age bookstore. So, I went to this New Age bookstore and I bought a couple of books on Wicca, and it was just like a complete revelation for me. I was so enamored with, with Wicca, with Learning about this whole religious practice that was, it, it felt magical and empowering and, you know, feminist and accepting and all of these things, and I was just still a really deeply faithful person like, you Completely believed in God, and I remember reading a passage in one of the books that I got that was like, you can imagine God as a diamond, and in Christianity, you're just looking at one facet of the diamond, and this was a way to like, look at all of these other facets, and I just loved that. So throughout my, my whole teenage era, I had this like fairly serious solitary practice. I never tried to build any sort of real life community. I think the stigma was just like too high for me to ever even try, but I would like read stuff online and, and I would do ritual by myself. When I was in my, I guess, around 20 years old late teens to, to 20, sort of two things happened that kind of pushed me to a different place. So, unfortunately I had this tragic experience where my best friend from childhood passed away. And that triggered like a classic crisis of faith where it's, you know, why does God let bad things happen to good people? And I couldn't find a satisfying answer to that question. And I also met the person who would become my, my life partner and now spouse. who just moved at that time from the UK to the U. S. and I think sort of found himself in this place of like, wow, like, everything is really Christian here in this way that I feel really uncomfortable with. And he was sort of one of the first, like, loud atheists that I'd ever encountered. So for the rest of sort of my early 20s, I just I was in this process of deconstructing, and I remember being about 25, and I, I totered around like those same books I bought from that New Age shop, like to all these different apartments, all these different moments in my life, and I recycled them because I couldn't reconcile the idea of hanging on to that stuff with just not believing in God anymore. And I cried, like it was a really painful moment, but it just sort of felt like this is what I have to do to be. to not have that cognitive dissonance in my mind. So that's where like this other big thread of, I guess, my origin story picks up, which is like the environmental activism piece. So I've, I've always been involved in social justice movements of various kinds, like basically from childhood. I'd always done environmental and sustainability work through like high school and college. And then I was living in New York City when Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012. And for people who aren't particular, aren't familiar with that particular climate disaster, it was really devastating. So after that, I, I was trying to figure out how to make climate action my job and how to like make a, a career fighting for a livable planet. So, eventually, it took me a couple years, but that led me to law school, and I decided to try to become an environmental lawyer. I started law school in the fall of 2016 in Washington, D. C. And people listening from the U. S. probably remember that we had a liberal election that year, and Donald Trump was elected basically right as I started law school. So... I spent those three years that I was in law school just like completely burning the candle at both ends, 110 percent in on like all of the things. So during the day I was like interning at environmental law organizations and taking classes. And evenings and weekends I was like, if you can think of a way to take like civic action, like I did it. I attended protests. I organized at least one. I called Congress. I worked in Congress. Like, I just did all of those things. It was a really crazy three years, but I think a lot of us who were in law school, in particular at that time in DC, felt like we had this huge responsibility being physically there to, like, do everything we could both on the democracy front and on the climate front. So, I was, I was glad to be there and glad to do it. So after I graduated, I spent a year working for a judge in New York. We were trying to come back to New York and we were able to do that. It's this thing called clerking, where you spend a year working for a judge. And when you're clerking, you're not allowed to do any political activity at all. And You could do a whole separate podcast about why that's like unfair and a little bit silly, but it is what it is. So it was this strange sort of pause in my life where I couldn't do all of the things that I had been doing, you know, basically for the previous decade. And then in the spring of my clerkship year, COVID happened. So it was like a doubling down where it felt like You know, I think maybe in some ways, particularly where we were, right in the heart of it for many months, everything was falling apart and I felt like I could do nothing about it. And that was really hard. I was, I think, tired and scared and I remember saying to my partner, like, I, I need to pull on something that is not myself. And I don't know if that makes sense outside of my own head, but... It was this moment where I think I was really longing to like turn to prayer like I would have when I was a person of faith and I just like couldn't do that. So it just tugged me back towards paganism and thinking like, is there, is there any way that I could work this back into my life in a way that feels authentic? The other thing that was sort of happening that year too was we had just gotten married and we were thinking seriously about starting a family. And that raises all sorts of questions too about like, well, how, how are we going to raise this kid? And we're two people who don't believe in God, but we want community around our kid and thinking hard about those questions and the sort of life that we wanted to build in that way. So I just started poking around on the internet and I think, you know, many Googles in, I found the sass Reddit page and On some, some post, I saw a comment that mentioned atheopaganism, and I like, found the community from there. So, I guess I've only really been in the community, I think it's been like, less than a year, but I've just been, you know, it was such a wonderful moment when I found it, because it's like, oh my gosh, not only are there other people who like, believe how I believe, but... They've like built a community and a whole thing and just the more I read the more excited I got. So, I've just been really thrilled to be here even though, you know, it took me a long time to find it. I'm really glad that I'm here now. Yeah, so that's my origin story. Yucca: That's wonderful,  Mark: that is, that's a great story, wow. Myself, I got bitten by a radioactive spider, but that's, we'll, we'll talk about that another time. Yucca: For those who aren't familiar, Stas. Lauren: Oh yeah, I think it's something called, it's something like skeptical atheist and science seeking witches. So it's folks who are into sort of, Rituals and practices to help them develop themselves, but they don't believe in what I would call like Harry Potter style magic. It's sort of the magic of working with your own psyche. So that, that really resonated with me. And I think there's a fair amount of crossover, like folks who are in that community and folks who are in this one. Yeah. Mark: yeah, yeah. Yucca: And what were some of the things that when you found the atheopagan community that really stood out to you, that you were like, Oh, this is, this part is what I'm connecting with. Lauren: Yeah. You know, I think just sort of the basic framework that we are all folks who are here because we think the earth is sacred. Yeah. And we want to find ways to celebrate that and celebrate life and community and, and just a rejection of things that aren't verifiably real in a way that didn't feel, I guess, demeaning or, or like there was any ridicule. And that mattered a lot to me because like some of the most important people in my life are people of like deep faith and I've, I've never been super comfortable with the sort of like, let's all just like make fun of. Christian sort of tact. And I didn't feel like I saw that here a lot. And I was also really struck, like, when I joined the Facebook group, there are those three screening questions that basically, I think, are designed to, like, weed out folks who, you know, are not ready to say, Black Lives Matter, or to, you know, be willing to live their values. So the fact that those were right up front, I think, immediately put me at ease. Yeah, it's, you know, probably not obvious to listeners, but I'm a Black and Latina person, and I think, you know, the pagan world, as I've encountered it, it's like a fairly white space, so there's a little bit of guarding that I have coming into any sort of Pagan community. So there were signals right off the bat that like, this was a place where it was going to feel comfortable. And I think once I kind of got past the screening questions, all of that, that held true. Mark: I'm, I'm really delighted to hear you say that, because it's a really important priority for us. You know, we're, we just had our quarterly meeting of the Atheopagan Society Council, so you had your first meeting there, and we're working on our strategic plan, and our number one goal of the three goals we've identified for our upcoming couple of years is a focus on belonging, equity. Diversity, inclusion, justice. The, the activism element of atheopaganism is something that that's really important to me, the idea that we're not just doing this to be the best people we can, but also to make the best world we can. You know, to redress wrongs and to live in sustainable harmony as best we can with, with the ecosystem the biosphere. Lauren: yeah. Mark: I'm really excited, you know, to hear you articulate, you know, all that political passion, because I have a ton of it myself, and it's, it's just, it's just so important at this time. Yucca: Hm. Lauren: Yeah, I think so too. And I think something that has been so wonderful for me coming into this community I think I didn't know it, but I was really looking for some way to both soothe my own eco anxiety and, and climate anxiety, and, and sort of elevate the work that I do, like during the day and sort of the organizing I still do in the evenings, as something sacred and something that, you know, wasn't just an intellectual exercise. Mark: Yeah. Lauren: I was always... During like the Trump D. C. era of my life, when I would go to actions that were led by, you know, like progressive Christian groups or, or sometimes indigenous folks, and they would bring that element of a spiritual connection, I think there was Like a longing on my part that I felt those things too, but I had no, I felt like I couldn't lay claim to those feelings in any way, and being part of the atheopagan community I think is a way to sort of, like, say loud and proud, the earth is sacred, and we all believe that, and we're here for that, and Thank you. Thank you. And you can do that without appropriating anyone's culture or sort of claiming things that aren't yours to claim, but by, I think, acknowledging what's, what belongs to all of us as human beings it's a framework to access that, and I really appreciate that about this community. Yucca: Hm. Mark: Ah, yeah, it's wonderful to hear you say that. I just kind of like to sit with it for a while, it's the because we're living in quite a time, you know? It's gotten very late on, on a number of fronts, and and it's been far too long on other fronts, and it's just, A lot of things are coming to a boil now at the same time, and so being active participants in that is just so essential. I've been really encouraged to see how much interest there is in, in the community, in, you know, standing up for those principles, standing up for for, for inclusion and for environmentalism and for feminism and for the LGBTQ community and the BIPOC community and, you know, really saying, you know, drawing a line in the sand and saying, this is where we stand. Lauren: yeah, it's really great and really special. And I think one thing that I would love to bring to the community as in part of my role, I guess, on the council is just helping people. Find their voice if they're having trouble doing that, or otherwise facilitate or provide opportunities to act on our principles. I don't know, I don't know if I said this at any point, but, you know, in my day job now I am an environmental attorney. I bring, thank you, it's, it's pretty awesome, I'm not gonna lie. I do a lot of legal work to try to protect communities facing environmental racism or to try to protect ecosystems and I think that As an attorney, part of my job is to make sure that people who aren't attorneys know that the attorneys can't do everything, right? And not that I'm accusing anyone in the community of having those sentiments, but sometimes I, I worry a little bit, but it's like, ah, someone will just sue and it'll be fine. Like, no, it won't. And there are a million ways that everybody has to stand up for, for things they care about and places they care about. And those places aren't just like the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls or whatever. They're like that polluted block down your street or, you know, the water coming out of your tap. I mean, there is, there is something to protect and fight for wherever you live. You know, I don't exactly know yet how I can be that sort of resource in the community, but that's, that's my intention, I guess, just starting out now. Yucca: And you've also been active in the affinity groups, right? Lauren: Yeah, so, I noticed that we had these things called affinity groups when I first joined, and that there wasn't a BIPOC group, so I, I guess I started that. You know, I think that in predominantly white spaces, often, At least, you know, speaking purely for myself, there's this sort of impulse to be like, Alright, where are the people of color? How do I find them? You know, because it's, it's sort of a, it's another layer of like, signal that like, this is an okay place to be if there are already other people there who look like you. So, I didn't really know how to do that without an affinity group, so I just made one. And it's been really great. It's, it's a, it's a great community of folks. We're reading a book together now, which is, is fun. And we're hoping to do sort of a book club type meeting soon. I will say like, you know, speaking particularly as a Black person, I think that atheopaganism has this particular appeal as like an explicitly modern creation. And. think, you know, again, speaking from a distance, I've never been in a community like this before, but I see a lot of hints of sort of pagans meticulously recreating their own genealogy to, like, figure out what gods they should worship or what practices they should have or whatever trying to reconstruct these, like, ancient practices. And if you're a Black person in America, odds are that's not even an option for you, right? There's only so far back you can go. So I think that there's a, there's a little psychic relief that I found and like, oh, well, I don't even have to worry about my ability to know, you know, exactly what corner of what place my ancestors came from to like use these tools. I can just focus on the now and focus on the land that I'm on. And I'll say too, now I'm just sort of riffing, but Mark: hmm. Lauren: you know, I would really love to just serve as an example that, That this space isn't just for, like, crunchy white people, and I think that that is a stereotype of paganism that I've encountered in the Black community, personally, that, like, you know, it's, it's just a stereotype that's out there. Like, we have just as much need and, and right to access these practices as anyone else. So, I think there's maybe some unlearning that I had to do and, and some unlearning that lots of us have to do to be Anything we want to be and not just what society says we should be or should stay away from. So, I like to, I would like to think that I can help just make explicit that this is a path that is open to everyone no matter what your origin, no matter what your skin color. Mark: Absolutely. And I was so grateful when you created the BIPOC Affinity Group, because I really wanted there to be one. Obviously I couldn't have anything to do with the creation of that. And other people in the community were just too busy they, they, you know, they weren't going to make the lift in order to make that happen, but it was so important that it be there. I will say a thing about what you were riffing on, which is that when I first created atheopaganism, it was just for myself. As, you know, an American who doesn't have any, like, family legacy of English or Irish or Scottish things, just kind of a person plunked here on Turtle Island with a relationship with land, but no inheritance of culture other than capitalism, and so I, you know, I crafted it with the idea that it would be modern and informed by modern values. But there are people in the community for whom, you know, like Indigenous people, for example, you know, for whom drawing back on those cultural threads is really important. And so, it's not... It's not that you can't do that, it's that you don't have to. You can still have a powerful practice that's very meaningful to you, starting from modernity and your own life and your own experience. Lauren: Yeah, Mark: yeah. Lauren: yeah, I completely 1000 percent agree. And I should say, like, the, you know, some of the folks in the BIPOC group are like reading a book about hoodoo, which is a magical practice developed by people who came to America through enslavement. And, yeah, I definitely see value in looking back and drawing on, on traditions and, you know, white, white American culture in the last 400 years, that's a culture too. And there's, there's stuff to draw from everywhere. I think that, sorry, I'm losing my train of thought here. No, there, there's something to draw from. And, and there, in every culture, right, there are magical traditions in your, in your family tree, right? And often for people of color, I think they're a little bit overlooked. One great little fact that I read in trying to educate myself more about these traditions in the African American community was that when folks were escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad, they would carry magical totems with them to give them bravery. And I just love the idea that You know, sure, there, maybe there's no quote unquote real magic there, but the bravery is real and the political action it led to is real, so, yeah, I absolutely don't mean to say, like, working, looking backwards isn't, isn't good or isn't worth it or anything, but I, I really appreciate the, the emphasis on modernity and, and that you can make this what you want, whether or not you have access to looking back in your own ancestry. Mark: Mm hmm. Yucca: And we've been using the term BIPOC, I think that might be a little bit new for some people. Some people are familiar with it, but can you define that for our listeners who haven't come across this term before, or have only seen it written? Lauren: Absolutely. Thanks for that flag. Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, BIPOC. That's what that stands for. And I should say too, you know, our community, the BIPOC group is, is small, it's still developing, as it should, and I think that we aren't necessarily committed to using that term forever. There are Interesting debates happening within various cultural groups in, you know, I can only speak about, I think, the U. S., but within the U. S. about what umbrella term we should use to refer to ourselves and, and those things are in flux. So that name isn't chiseled in stone, but it's a handy shorthand, I think, for racialized groups in the United States to, to come together in this moment for the purposes of this community. Yeah. Mark: Yeah, that's great. Thank you. You know, I, I was just in DC a few weeks ago on a lobby trip. And I had the good fortune of getting a reservation to go to the National Museum of African American Culture and History. I've I mean, honestly, I think every American should be marched through there the, it was profound and infuriating and tragic and inspiring and just an extraordinary experience and I really recommend it to anyone who doesn't feel that they have a grounding in, in what that experience is, at least to the degree that I can get my mind around it as not being that kind of person  Lauren: got the chance to go before we left DC and it's, it's an amazing museum. Hard recommend. Yeah. Mark: So, you're now on the Atheopagan Society Council and you've talked a little about, you know, some of your, some of the roles that you kind of see yourself as playing within the community. Where, where do you see us going? What I mean, we're, we're relatively recent. We I, I published the essay that became the book in 2009 which is now starting to be some years ago but time is slow that way Yucca: council's been around four years at this point. Mark: right, right, the, we only just got our non profit Thank you. You know, status a couple of years ago and but that was an important step to say this is more than about individuals that are working within this community now. We want to create a container and a vehicle for these ideas, you know, to be sustained into the future. So, you've, I know you've been to one meeting, but do you have  Yucca: a member of the community for quite a while now as well, Lauren: Yeah, yeah, a year ish or so. Yeah. Man, I, I guess my hopes are really simple, that it just keeps growing, and it stays inclusive, and that it We become a place where folks from all walks of life feel comfortable. I should say I'm also part of the parents affinity group. I have a young child and we've been talking about some really cool stuff, like maybe a scouting program. And... I think that there are so many people who are in a similar boat to me, where like they're, they're parenting, they didn't necessarily grow up with a pagan, much less an atheopagan, orientation towards things, and they're trying to figure out how to raise kids with these values, so I hope that that space in particular continues to grow. I think I've, I've heard you, Mark, maybe on another episode talk about a book of rituals that you're coming out with. I think it would be wonderful if... We start seeing folks sharing examples of how they celebrate the seasons and, and life transitions, and I know that like some of that is out there already, but I think for, for lots of people, including myself, there's both. There's like a path paving there that can be really helpful to see examples of how you actually like do atheopaganism. And. And also a sense of community when you know, you know, of course, like, you know, a ritual for me here in New York City probably wouldn't relate with the land and in the same way that it would for either of you in different parts of the world, but it's nice to think about some commonality, because I think You know, Mark: mm hmm, Lauren: when you're in Catholic Mass and you know that this Mass is really similar to a Mass happening hundreds of miles away, that, that builds that sense, so, finding common threads if we can, I think, would be a nice way to keep the community cohesive, even as it continues to grow and, and spread and, and morph based on the geography of, of the particular atheopagan or atheopagan family. Yeah. Mark: Yeah, now that you mention it the idea comes to mind, I mean, my book is coming out in April, and it's much more of a how to book than the first Atheopaganism book, which was, the first half of which is theory, really and then the second is about the principles and, you know, doing rituals and the holidays and all that kind of stuff. But maybe another project would be editing a crowdsourced ritual book. Yucca: like an anthology, Mark: Yeah, so, you  Yucca: out to the community and getting Mark: yeah, Yucca: not everybody, but whoever wants to share their insights and sharing that, that could be really, that could be amazing, I Mark: That could be really good. Yeah, I mean, the other thought that I had that I floated a while ago, and it just seems that nobody has the spoons for it, is a parenting book that I would edit. But I can't write because I'm not a parent. Yucca: Well, I am really interested in that one. It just needs to, gotta get the timing to work on that if other people are interested as well. Mark: I really  Yucca: I can't do the whole book, but I think that there's some sections that I'd be able to do. Mark: great, yeah, and I mean, I, I think the, one of the things that we are presented with now as an opportunity is the whole question about families and kids and how we engage families and, you know, basically build Culture within family units, right? Which I just think is so exciting. And I know John Cleveland Host, who's currently the chair of the Atheopagan Society, I mean, his, he kind of stumbled into all of this because of wanting to have culture for his children. So, yeah, it's that really presents a, a great opportunity, I think. Yucca: And we're getting folks now with different ages. I mean, his kids, his oldest are probably going to be off to college soon, right? And a lot of, I know there's a lot of us with real little ones, but there's a good range of... of ages as well. Mark: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah oh, I'm just, I, I can see the book sitting on a shelf right now, and it's not, it's not very thin either. There's a, there's a lot in it. Yucca: Well, and even just within the, the umbrella of paganism in general, there aren't a lot of parent books. I mean, there's Circle Round, there's, Lauren, can you think of any others that Lauren: I mean, when I was pregnant, I looked and I have Circle Round sitting on my bookshelf. Mark: too. Lauren: I think there's I'm, I'm blanking on the title, but there was another book with sort of like things for, you know, stories for kids. Of course, I think there's all sorts of. of material for kids to engage with the seasons, but in terms of actual parenting tips or, or guides, no, family practices, no, no. I don't think there's, if there's stuff out there that I haven't found it, so I would be really grateful for some sort of anthology coming out of the community. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Gotta happen. Yucca: And then, of course, I don't think there's anything specifically from an atheist point of view. Right, there's plenty of like you were saying, the seasonal kind of secular stuff that's like, yes, it's fall and the leaves are changing, but not really something that is, that's coming at it from that angle. Mark: right. Lauren: Yeah. And I know that Like I know some folks who are involved in like Unitarian Universalist congregations, and I think they might have some curriculums and things for kids, but, so there, and I think the Humanist Society, I don't know, they might have some stuff. So there's probably like things out there that we could draw from, but nothing that weaves together all of the pieces that make the atheopagan community special. So I think it would be neat if we could make a contribution like that. Yucca: And I like books, I like to have a book in my, like I appreciate podcasts and blogs and all of that, but there's something very different in terms of the experience of turning a page and sitting on the You know, sitting cuddled under the blankets with the kitty cat next to you as you, like, turn the pages and sip your warm drink. It's just a very different experience. Yeah, Mark: Yeah, Lauren: yeah. And I will say I think Mark mentioned the John Cleland Host and Pagan Families episode, and Arwen, I think you were on that one too, right? Yucca: it was, Lauren: I bookmarked it and listened to it several times because, like, oh, there's so much in here! Yeah, I think that there's, there's endless wisdom that folks who have been parenting in the atheopagan community could pass on to folks like me who are just starting out and it would be wonderful to have it as a book that you could cuddle up with for sure. Yucca: How old's your little one, by the way? Lauren: He's one and a half. Yucca: and a half. Oh, Mark: tiny.  Yucca: That is a Lauren: little.  Yucca: so fun, though, right? Everything is opening up now. Lauren: yeah, tons and tons of fun. Yeah, we're, we've been really happy as parents and Yeah, I just hope that we're able to raise him with a sense of community and I think we have that in lots of ways, but I would love for him to feel a connection to this community if that feels right to him and to you. To give him the good parts of being raised with religion that I received without any of the baggage would be, would be great if we can figure out how to do that. Mark: One of the things that I'm really excited about when I think about atheopagan parenting is giving kids the skills to do rituals themselves so that they can work with their psychology. We don't really give kids very many tools in terms of emotional regulation and, you know, kind of changing your mental state, your emotional frame, all that kind of stuff. We just, we don't see that modeled. And, you know, I just... I'm really excited at the prospect of a 12 year old who decides, okay, I'm going to light a candle, and I'm going to contemplate that candle, and it's going to calm me down, and I'm going to be okay about what Marianne said at school, you know, that kind of thing. So, Lauren: Yeah, like you, you know, as your brain is developing in those teenage years, that's when you need those tools the most in some ways and I think that's why I was so drawn to it as a teenage girl myself and You know, I have read a fair few, I guess, gentle parenting type books that, that, talk about introducing things like breathing techniques to your kids. So I am hopeful that some of that stuff that we might call rituals and other people might call, you know, just mindfulness practices, Mark: mm hmm. Lauren: are making their way into parenting culture with folks who are becoming parents now. There's, there's so much more that could be explored and could be articulated for kids and I would love that for my own child for sure. Mark: Yeah, because the world of ritual, it feels so good, and it can be so... Enlightening with a lowercase e in terms of understanding yourself, seeing what your proclivities are and what your core beliefs are, and kind of understanding what your lens is on the world, and maybe seeing some of the limitations of that, and being able to better understand how other people see the world. There's just so much in it, and, you know, I've been a pagan since 1987. And Yucca, of course, you know, you were raised pagan and I still feel like I'm only kind of nibbling at the edges of all of the things that it can do for me. Yucca: Yeah  Mark: and the richness that it brings to my life. Yeah, I think so too, Yucca: we're really, you know, sorting through that. Mark: yeah. Lauren: Yeah, Mark: That was one thing, you know, when I thought about, okay, you know, how we're going to merge atheism with paganism, how is that going to work it occurred to me that the big piece that comes with the paganism is 50 or 60 years of experience accumulated in how to do effective rituals. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: Because the atheist side didn't have that. We, we have lots of folks that come into our community and they're like how do I get started? What do I do first? I, I, I get it with all the values and the worldview, but how do I do this practice? Yucca: Yeah. Lauren: yeah. Yucca: One of the things that I really value about that from the parent perspective is that one of the things that we're doing for our kids is helping them to develop skills. And then when they grow up, they're going to go in the direction that they went, right? How many people do most of our community were raised in different religions than their parents, right? And that's okay, right? People make different choices. But I want my kids to have whatever religion they end up being. Whether they stay in the pagan community or not, I want them to have those tools to be able to calm themselves down, to look at themselves, all those things that you were just talking about, Mark, and have the, those ritual skills, even if, you know, I would, doesn't fit me, but if they decide they want to become theists and they believe in a god, then, then great, they have these skills that they can use within that context that's going to help them live a happier, more fulfilled life. Lauren: Yeah, Yucca: it's really beautiful that we're trying to do that as, as, you know, atheopagan parents. Lauren: I think that's beautiful, too. And, you know, while we're on this topic and we're talking a little bit about practice, it just occurs to me to name that I, I really found the, the tools that I had available to me through my practice to be so helpful in getting through like pregnancy and the newborn stage and, and birth. And I had a really tough childbirth experience and it took me a long time to sort of bounce back from it. I found the newborn stage really hard and like, man, if there's ever a time when, like, you've got to lean into your, your meditative or your, your safe place exercises, it's like those first couple weeks postpartum, right? It's just, it's really tough stuff. And If there, if there's anyone who's out there who's, who's pregnant and thinking about making space for this in their life, like I, I could not give enough of a thumb. Obviously, you know, postpartum, also do all the things that you need to do for your mental health, the therapy, or whatever other support systems you need, but I think that this is, Yucca: too, Lauren: and the physical stuff, absolutely, like this is, you know, I'm, I'm not trying to say anything that discounts, like, Traditional Western medicine or, or psychotherapy or anything like that, but just having another set of tools, I think, really helped me in early parenthood and the sort of the transition between pregnancy and birth and parenting. I'll also say that I think You know, for folks who are trying to figure out ritual practices and maybe are also parents of young kids, like, it doesn't have to be an hour. It doesn't have to be like, I don't have an hour. It's a lot of my practices are just extremely short. You know, Yucca: 45 seconds with the bathroom door locked? Lauren: Exactly, you know, or picking up a, I do a lot of sort of like, I guess I'd call them like totems, you know, I have particular little objects that help put me in a particular mindset, you know, it could just be as simple as picking up that particular ring and putting it on your finger, you know, and, and that's enough to shift your mindset. So I think talking about ritual in an abstract way can be a little bit intimidating, but it can be as simple, as simple or as elaborate as you want it to be. Mark: Yeah, I find that the things that I have on my focus are all, they're things that have stories associated with them in my mind. So they have an associative meaning, right? It's not just a seashell. It's a seashell that I found when I was 11 on the Costa del Sol in Spain. You know, it's, it's got a, that was stirred up by a huge storm that Brought all these shells up onto the beach. So, the charging of items... Which obviously isn't really a physical process. It's a psychological process. It's building a strong association between a thing and a state of mind, right? That's a very, very powerful practice and it's one that anybody can do and it's, and it's a way to do a quickie ritual, right? Yeah, you pick up the ring, you put it on, okay, now I've got my bravery ring. Lauren: Yeah, exactly. And I guess it occurs to me, I don't know if totem is like a word I'm accidentally appropriating from some group, maybe I should say talisman, but yeah, the idea of having an object that just has that story. I think that can be really powerful and it's really short and simple but isn't enough to sometimes turn your day around or give you that extra boost and I think a lot of my practice has been, you know, especially sort of before I had a kid. It was all stuff to just, like, make me work harder or make me braver in, in political action, and I'm trying to have a more open mind these days about what I can use it for, that it, it isn't just a thing I should use to help me churn out another couple pages on a legal brief. It's like something that I can use to just, like, expand myself or, or heal myself or just have fun or, or whatever it is it, I think I'm trying to broaden my mind and, and encourage other people to have a broad mind about what it can do for you. Mark: yeah, one of the pieces that we That we often, it doesn't get talked about in the pagan community very much is how pleasurable ritual can be. It just feels good. And that, in and of itself, is a perfectly fine outcome. That's a great outcome, right? You know, you're in a bad mood, so you go and you do a thing, and then you're not in a bad mood. Well, that's wonderful!  Yucca: Or you're not even in a bad mood to start with. Mark: No, you're just Yucca: You're just, yeah, it Mark: messing around with candles and incense and cool objects, and it just feels really cool, and you feel sort of wizard y, and it's all fun. Lauren: Yeah, it's inherently fun, often. Yeah.  Mark: It's play. It's a form of play. Lauren: Yeah. Mark: Well, Lauren... Yucca: there resources that you, you'd mentioned that you had some resources and things you wanted to share with the Lauren: Yeah I do, I have a couple of things. So the first takes like a little bit of explanation, but I don't know if listeners are familiar with the concept of environmental justice or environmental racism, but Environmental racism is the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on people of color. It's a term used at least in the U. S. and I think also internationally. And environmental justice is the idea that basically in short you're going to stop poisoning people, period, all people. Yucca: Sounds like a great idea. Lauren: it does, doesn't it? Nice and simple. And that definition is from a website called ejnet. org. And there... On that website, and I can share the link for the show notes, there's a list of principles of environmental justice that I find really inspiring, and it was written by a group of people of color, environmentalists, environmental activists in 1991 at a convening. And the very first principle of the, I think it's, yeah, 17. Yucca: And is that environmental justice action? Is that what Lauren: This is ejnet. org is the website, ejnet, yeah, I can, I can send a link, but, the first principle in that document reads, environmental justice affirms the sacredness of Mother Earth, ecological unity, and the interdependence of all species, and the right to be free from ecological destruction. So I just think it's really, really special that In my mind, part of what atheopaganism is doing is affirming that sacredness of Mother Earth and opening up a path for all people to do that, that really aligns with this foundational document of environmental justice. So I just think that's cool. Yucca: Hmm. Lauren: Yeah, Mark: up a little bit. Lauren: it's really beautiful.  Mark: it is. It's Lauren: yeah, it is. And I encourage everybody to, yeah, check out those principles and, and to get involved in environmental justice wherever you are. Yeah, just a couple of books that I feel like have sort of helped me in this intersection between action, political action, and pagan stuff. There's a great book called Revolutionary Witchcraft by Sarah Lyons. Mark: Yeah, Lauren: A short book. I can't remember if there's theism in there, so sorry if there is, but it's really great. It's short. Everyone should read it. There's another great book called Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hershey that I just read, and it was one of those real aha books. It just talks about... Ways to honor yourself, honor your body, and kind of break free of what she calls grind culture. So this idea that you have to be productive all the time, that's a product of like capitalism and colonialism, and it's something that I really struggle to resist. So I thought that that was great. Two more things. There's this book called Hope in the Dark Solnit, I think is how you say it. Really short book that just sort of emphasizes Don't give up hope that we can make the world a better place. The world is really complicated and Things can and do get better even when they seem really bleak. And then the last resource I'll share is this wonderful podcast from Emergence Magazine, and I think that's actually the name of the podcast. And it has episodes on all different topics that explore the connections between culture, spirituality, and ecology. And they've had like Robin Wall Kilmer on all sorts of, of authors exploring this intersection. And again, some of it might be sort of more like a little bit more woo than some of the folks who listen to this podcast like, but there's a lot of really great stuff there. Listening to each episode is just like a gift, so I recommend that as well and I can, I can share like links and, and all of those, those names and authors in case people want to look them up. And then the last thing I would just say if you'll indulge me in this like quote this quote I really love I'm not a teacher, only a fellow traveler of whom you asked away. I pointed ahead, ahead of myself as well as you, so please, like, I offer everything I've said with humility. I'm working all of this out myself, and I'm really happy to be working it out with other folks in this community. Mark: that's really beautiful. Thank you. You know, fun fact. The first pagan ritual I ever went to, when I was invited by a friend back in 1987, was to a coven which included Rebecca Solnit's brother. Lauren: Wow. Small world. Mark: Yep, very small world. Lauren: Well, I guess that's another example of these connections between the activist world and the pagan world run, run deeper and are everywhere. Mark: Yep, they are. Well, Lauren,  Yucca: so much. They're saying the same thing, but no, really, this is so exciting to have you here with us and part of the community and just everything you're saying is just, just yes. So wonderful. So thank you so much. Mark: and thank you for your work. Yucca: Yeah, Mark: You know, those of us that are in the environmental field can feel really beat up a lot of the time, and the organizations we work for, even the big ones, are under resourced relative to the industries that they're up against. and the headwinds politically that they're up against. And so, thank you for all the effort it took to get the credentials that you needed to be able to do the work you're doing and for the work that you're doing in the world. Thank you. Lauren: That's very kind and it's, it's my pleasure to do it and I'm really grateful for the opportunity to just come on here and, and riff on all these things and You know, thank, thank you both for creating this community that's been such a source of, and for everyone really who's involved, who, who are co creating this community that's been such a wonderful space. It's, you know, after a hard day of doing hard stuff and thinking about pollution on long timelines, it's such a wonderful treat to just like listen to an episode of this podcast or check out the Facebook group. It's been a tremendous source of, of solace for me, and I hope that it is for everyone. for other activists who might find their way into this space. So yeah, really, really grateful all around. Mark: Well, thank you so much. And with that, I think that's a good place for us to stop. Gratitude is always a good place to land on. So, thanks once again. Thanks to all our listeners. And we'll be back next week with another episode of The Wonder of Science Based Paganism.    

Remember, we welcome comments, questions, and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com. An Atheopagan Declaration of Policy Values (2022): https://theapsocietyorg.files.wordpress.com/2022/03/an-atheopagan-declaration-of-policy-values-2022.final_.pdf S4E30 TRANSCRIPT:   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 religion and politics. Mark: Yes, but don't turn it off. Yucca: Yes, we were saying, what should we call this? What should we call this? But no, this is, this is important. This is what we're going to talk about. And there's a lot to say here. But today it was inspired because, Mark, you just got back from a trip, which you got to do some pretty cool politicking. Mark: Yes I went to Washington, D. C. as a part of a fly in delegation by the Conservation Alliance, and I'll tell some of those stories later advocating for protections for public lands, including the designation of some new national monuments. So, I, as I said, I'll, I'll talk about that stuff later but yeah, just got back from a lobby trip, Yucca: Yeah. So one of the things that... It is very common to hear in pagan circles, and I think probably not just pagan circles, but a lot of new age things and kind of, mini counterculture sorts of groups, is, you know, don't bring politics. into this, right? Don't, don't bring politics into my religion. Don't, you know, we, we aren't going to talk about that. We're not going to be this is separate, right? Let's be, let's be off in our realm or our magical experience and leave that other stuff out. Mark: right? And there is so much to be said about that. I mean, it has a nexus with toxic positivity. This idea that, you know, we should only talk about happy, shiny stuff, and that, you know, we're going to have this nice, warm, glowy, serotonin oxytocin experience by doing our, our spirituality, and we're just not going to engage with anything that doesn't stimulate that. It has to do with the toxicity that we see in the societies around us where the mainstream religions are engaging with public policy and they're doing it for really destructive and antisocial reasons. And so that becomes sort of the poster child for why you wouldn't want you to have politics in your spiritual space. But a lot of it, in my opinion, is simply... We don't want to think about any of those issues because they might bring us down. Yucca: hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. But, and there's just so much to say because there's, it's going to depend on every different kind of situation but I think that if we think about the values that We often claim to have that we value the earth, that we think the earth is sacred. You know, we may have different interpretations on, you know, whether divinity is involved with that or not, but hey, we're agreeing, we think that the earth is important, we're agreeing about believing that love and freedom and all of these things are important, then I think that... If we really believe that, then we have a responsibility to those things. Mark: Yes, yes, we it's because they won't happen by themselves. You know, there are interests which are destructive interests and are not filled with love and are not about advancing liberty and are not about supporting the biosphere in a manner which is consistent with biodiversity and with the sustaining of humanity. And they're out there advocating for their stuff every day. And if we absent ourselves from the process because we think that it is too negative or too gross or too demoralizing, then we are leaving the field to those who would do us harm. And it's just not, there is no logic to it that makes sense to me, other than at the most sort of Self indulgent, I just want to feel good for me kind of place, where it makes sense to say, I'm not going to vote, I'm not going to advocate for what I care about, I'm not going to be interested in any kind of activism. I mean, everybody's circumstances Yucca: become informed about it, Mark: right. Yucca: right? Mark: Everybody's circumstances are different, and not everybody can be a big activist, right? You know, if you're, you know, you're raising kids, or, and you're, you know, scraping by, and, you know, there's a lot of different, I mean, poverty is a social control strategy. Yucca: Yeah, Mark: So, it is, it is one way that people who have the common good at heart are kept limited in the amount of power that they have. So let's, let's not mince words about that. But even with the limitations that we have, I have always felt that it was my responsibility to do what I can to try to advance the values that matter to me. And I'm pleased to say that the community that's grown up around atheopaganism is very much the same way. We're gonna, we're gonna put a Link in the show notes to the Atheopagan Declaration of Policy Values, which came out last year and was developed by the community with tons of community input and editing and all that kind of stuff. Yucca: There was a lot of back and forth and lots and lots of people participating and, you know, wording things just for, it was quite inspiring, actually. Mm hmm, Mark: the level, level of collaboration with the minimal amount of argument was very inspiring to me. And so now we have this document, and it can be downloaded from the Atheopagan Society website. So we're going to put the link in the, in the show notes so you can download that. But that's an example of the community speaking out on issues that really matter to us, and saying, this is where we stand. This is what our activism is going to be built around. This is, you know, we... We embrace LGBTQ people. We do. And it's not just, it's not just You know, so called virtue signaling, we genuinely do, we want those folks, we want people of color, we want indigenous people in our community, you know, we want them to be safe, we want them to be seen, we want them to be heard as, as an example. And similarly, along the environmental axis, along the axis of personal liberty and autonomy, bodily autonomy, all of those you know, the importance of critical thinking and science all of those pieces are a part of what our movement is about. And so, when we talk with the public, That is, that is core to what we express. Yes, we're here for happiness. We're here for people to feel good. We're all for that. But as one of the atheopagan principles says, you know, responsibility, social responsibility is one of our principles. Yucca: right. Mark: It is an obligation that we have. Yucca: And so those values, they're not just about talking about them, they're about, those are what inform the choices that we're making. Mark: Mm hmm. Yucca: Right? And being able to reflect on what those are, right? is really important. Have conversations about that, because we're not, there's going to be nuance, right? We're not always going to see eye to eye on things, and being able to, as individuals, talk about that with each other, and as a community, be able to, to talk about that and, and, you know, have that conversation is really important. Mark: Absolutely. Absolutely. And we learn from one another, right? I mean, that's a really important piece because As strongly as I feel on a value level about supporting people of color in the LBGTQI plus community I'm not one of either of those groups. And so I have to listen a lot in order to understand, well, what is an appropriate statement to make in support, right? How do I show up as an ally and as and as an advocate? Or a supporter for their advocacy, you know. So, you know, it's not as simple as just having a laundry list of policy positions. And it has to also recognize that we live in a world of subtle differences. Right? Subtle gradations of change throughout the whole natural world, and that includes humanity. So, I get really kind of bent sideways when I hear the lesser of two evils, or I'm not going to vote for that person because of this one little position, when the alternative is so much worse on every position. The best analogy that I've heard is that voting isn't dating, it's selecting, it's selecting the best possible option off of the available menu. And the available menu only includes people that actually have a chance of getting elected. It's not just some fringe outlier who tells you what you want to hear. Yucca: mhm, Mark: that can actually get into a position to make change in a positive direction. Yucca: mhm, mhm, mhm. Mark: So, we had a bunch of stuff on the outline for this podcast. What else have you got? Yucca: Well, certainly the, the issue of privilege is definitely Mark: Oh, yeah  Yucca: and this is something that I think comes up where people will be unaware of the place of privilege that they may be coming from to be able to say, I don't want to deal with this. I don't want this coming into, you know, my religion or my, anything about that, because that, that isn't the position that most people are going to be in that situation, right? Yeah. Mm Mark: Yeah the, I think the clearest way to express that is that if you have the luxury of saying, Oh, I don't want to vote that just encourages them, or I'm not going to consider any of those issues because I just want to be on my, you know, spiritual path of lightness and joy thing. Is that people that are marginalized and endangered by the way our society operates, they don't have the luxury to do that. If you look at voting rates, for example, African American women vote astronomically in high proportions in the United States. And the reason for that is that the interests of the community that they are in are, are, are stark. The, you know, the threats that certain people like a Donald Trump and the people that he brings with him present to that community are so real. They're not, they're not theoretical. It's not just something where, where as a white person, you look at it and go, Oh, gee, that's too bad. This is life and death for them. And they turn out to vote. They're organized. They're knowledgeable. You know, these are people who are, are leveraging the power that they have absolutely as much as they can. And when I hear people say, you know, oh, well, I'm not going to vote because blah, blah, blah. What I, what I really hear is, I am so cushioned from the impacts of the policies that get made by people that I don't... Agree with in theory that I can just skate on this and ride on, on the, the, the privilege that I enjoy in the society in order to avoid having to deal with something that I might find icky. Yucca: yeah, I'm being served by the system, fundamentally. Yeah. Mark: So, you know, I'll give an example. It's like, an argument can be made that the certain proportion of people who in, in key states who supported Bernie Sanders, And then refused to vote for Hillary Clinton may have given us Donald Trump. It's not that they had to agree with everything that Hillary Clinton said because they didn't, I didn't. But the appointees that she was going to make, the appointees to the Supreme Court, the appointees to the, the cabinet positions, the appointees to federal judgeships. All of those things were going to be head and shoulders above any of the things that Trump ended up doing. And it's painful to say, but those people needed to look at the big picture and go and vote for Hillary Clinton. And they didn't. And it's that, it's that, that sense of privilege, that sense of it not mattering that much that I really think needs to be interrogated on the left. And I am on the left, right, but I'm on the left that seeks to achieve progress because I'm a progressive, and progress happens in incremental steps most of the time. Progress isn't a home run. Progress is a base hit, and electing Hillary Clinton would have been a base hit on the way towards achieving better policies. And instead, we have what we have. So, you know, and I realize that there are going to be people that are going to be fuming when they hear me say this but seriously, look at the playing board, and look at what we got, and You know, think about, well, what does this mean for the next election? Where, where should I be putting my support? Yucca: Hmm, yeah definitely was not expecting that, I was not prepared for that direction of the conversation. That's something that I would have to really think a lot on. I understand some of the sentiment behind it, but I would want to look more at some of the numbers. And some of the assumptions about who is entitled to what vote, and whether those, I think that there's a lot to that situation, and I don't feel comfortable, I mean, you certainly have the opinion that you want, but necessarily agreeing and and um humming without really looking at that particular situation. I think that there's a lot that was going on there. But I've certainly heard that argument a lot, and one of the things that I have been uncomfortable with is, and I'm not saying that you're saying this, but this is something that I have heard often, is the sense of entitlement of those people's votes. That, you know, somehow this party was entitled to people's votes. What about... So, you know, do the numbers actually work out of how many Democrats voted Republican in that situation versus how many Independents voted one direction or the other? I think that there's a lot to really look into there. Mark: Sure, sure. And I have looked into it some. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: I should be clear, I'm not saying that Hillary Clinton deserved anybody's vote, or was entitled to everybody's, to anybody's vote. I'm saying she deserved them from a strategic standpoint. Yucca: hmm. Mark: That when you look at the playing field, And what was the right next move, that that was the right next move. And in certain states like Wisconsin there were, there were enough votes that dropped off. That the argument can be made, but, but let's, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: let's make the whole thing abstract, okay? Rather than talking about that, that election in specific, let's talk about elections generally. When you have a situation where somebody who you agree with 50 percent is running against somebody who is agreeing with you 10%, And then there's somebody out there who agrees with you 100%, but they have no ability to be elected. And it's clear Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: You know, I need to go for the 50 percent because, again, I'm a progressive. So I want to see things advance, even if they're going to go a lot slower than I want them to go. Yucca: Right, well I think in some of that case it's going to depend on what are the particular changes that, and what are the things that you are placing at highest priority, right? And if one of the things that you're placing at high priority is trying to do something about the monopoly, then that the two parties have, I can see the logic of making a different choice there. But I think that the point, I think the point where we probably agree is that when you're voting, it's something to be very strategic about. It's to look at what is the situation where you are and what are the possible outcomes and thinking about You know, what are the values that you are, that you are fighting for in that case, right? What are they, right? Mark: and the key takeaway that I would, that I would leave this particular rabbit hole with is that not to vote is to vote. If you don't vote, you are Yucca: is voting, yeah. Mark: It is voting. So it is you know, you, you don't get away with your hands clean just because you don't vote, right? You, you bear a responsibility for election outcomes just like everybody else does. And that's a really important thing for people in democracies to understand. And I'll talk a little bit later on about democracy and the degree to which we have it and all that good kind of stuff. Yucca: And This is just one area, right? This is an area that we happen to be talking about because this is an area where, where this is something that there's some strong opinions on, and this is an area where people do have influence, but of course there's a lot of other things. As well, in terms of you know, commercial choices and lifestyle choices and all of that kind of stuff that we can but one thing I really want to highlight, and you touched on this a little bit before, but I think it really deserves its own section of the podcast as well, is that being able to spend large amounts of time on these issues is a form of privilege itself too, right? And this is not something that everyone has. And you don't have to be guilty and beat yourself up and you're not a bad pagan because you've got to do a 9 to 5 plus your two side jobs to even be able to Barely make rent, right? That's not, so we're not sitting here saying, oh, shame on, you're failing because you're not fighting oil rigs in the, you know, gulf and how come you're out there? Like, that's not what we're saying at all. And I think that it's really, really important to think about and balance in our lives the self care component. And, that sometimes, yes, it's, sometimes it is okay to just have your celebration and to not necessarily be talking about, you know, let's raise money for this, this particular candidate at this time, or something like that, but know that it does, that this stuff does have a place in the community, it is important, but it isn't, The, you don't have to be doing it all the time, if that's not what your, what your mental health needs. Mark: No, no, definitely not. And it's important for those of us that have the privilege to be able to engage the system in that way, either from the outside or the inside, that we recognize that privilege and use it. Right? You know, those of us that have the bandwidth, those of us who have You know, the thick enough skin and that have the energy and sometimes the money even just to travel, to go somewhere. I mean, the trip that I just took, I didn't pay for because otherwise I wouldn't have gone, right? But but it's, it's, that kind of privilege is very visible. It's like, The D. C. is a very, very African American town. It's a very Black town. Lots and lots of Black folks, and, until you get into the Congressional buildings, and there it whitens up considerably Yucca: Mm Mark: with the lobbyists and the, you know, the constituents that are going not, not universally, of course but noticeably, and it is incumbent upon those of us who have been there. The privilege to be able to engage, to do what we can to improve justice, and to speak for the things that we care about so that they can advance. Yucca: hmm. Mark: So, I could talk about my trip. Yucca: Yeah. Yeah, you were just talking about D. C., so, Mark: Okay, well. So, I got sent on a fly in with the Conservation Alliance, which is a consortium of businesses which was originally founded by REI, the North Face Peak Design, and Patagonia. And they came together to create a unified voice for speaking up for the outdoors, for for wild lands and outdoor recreation. That was a long time ago, and now they have 270 businesses from a variety of different sectors, and what they do every couple of years is they gather a bunch of the leaders of those businesses along with, and they make grants, right? They pool their money and they make grants to organizations that are doing organizing and advocacy for the issues that they care about, and the organization I work for, Cal Wild, is one of those. Yucca: mm hmm. So that's how you were able to go on this trip? Mark: Yes, CalWild was invited to send a representative, and I was selected to go, and so I went. This is not the first time that I've been to Washington to lobby, but the last time was in the 90s. So it's been a while. And everything has changed, of course. I mean, technology has changed everything, and 9 11 has changed all the security. So, it's, it's just a completely different experience. So, so I went and I was going to speak on to, as a grantee, to speak as a content expert about the positions that we're trying to advance. My organization right now is working very hard. for the creation of three new national monuments in California. My organization is limited to California, so that's why, you know, that. But we're also advocating for some policy changes at the administration level, which would affect the whole of the United States. And I should say, you know, we're talking a lot about kind of American politics in this podcast, but if you have a representative democracy of any kind, the things that we're talking about are really applicable to you too. Yucca: Right. Yeah, we're just talking about our experience with our Mark: the stuff we know about. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, the idea here is not to get everybody all plugged into American politics. It's to use that as an example of what citizen participation or resident participation looks like and why it's important. I go on this trip and I go to Washington and I meet with the team and we have a training briefing and all that kind of thing, and my take, we, on the first day, I had two meetings with administration offices with the Department of the Interior and the Council on Environmental Quality of the White House now when we're meeting with staff, we're not meeting with the people that are in charge in those agencies, we probably would have met with the Secretary of the Interior, but it's Climate Week in North Northern New York, so she was away at Climate Week, Yucca: Mm Mark: Um, so, and there was something going on with the Department of Environmental Quality such that we had the staffer that we had. But these are sharp, smart, influential people that we're talking to, and the sense that I got, and then the second day we had meetings with California delegation members both to the Senate and to the House of Representatives, including my congressman which I had a very interesting experience with talking to my congressman's office in Washington, so I'll get to that in a minute. Yucca: hmm. Mm Mark: The main takeaway that I got from, especially from meeting with the administration, was that they want to do what we want them to do. Their, their hearts are in the right place. And they are delighted that we are coming to Washington and talking to people, and organizing on the ground in local communities, because they need the political cover to be able to do what we want them to do. Yucca: hmm. Mark: And in that Yucca: like that's charging them up, right? They want to do it, but they need to be charged with the power of the people. Mark: yes, Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Exactly so. And... It gives them something to point to when opponents say, we don't want that, Yucca: Mm Mark: right, they can, you know, they can point to the organizing that my organization is doing and say, well, the people in the community who live right next door want it, you know, the elected officials of the county where the expansion of the National Monument is proposed, they want it. So, You know, those are their representatives and they elected them to office to make those decisions, so why shouldn't we do this? So it's really important to be doing that kind of community organizing and talking to other people about the things that you care about in a, you know, in a focused way. So that was really gratifying to me because, of course, American democracy has taken a beating over the last 20 years, but it's still functioning. Thank you. The elections are kind of messed up, and we could certainly do without gerrymandering and and all the dark money, and I could go on, but as well as the occasional insurrection, which I really, really think we could do without. I walked Yucca: that's not an, let's have that be a singular thing, please. Mark: yes. I walked several times, because the house office buildings and the senatorial office buildings are on opposite sides of the capitol. I walked back and forth in front of where the insurrection took place a bunch of times. And there it is, you know, large is life. And, you know, there are the windows they broke, that's how they got in, you know, there's where they hung their banners, you know, all that. So, that said it was encouraging to see that at least under this administration, There was a commitment to listening to constituents and to hearing, you know, they were very appreciative of the businesses that were represented there, you know, in, you know, speaking up on behalf of protecting public lands so that their ecological values last forever, their recreational opportunities there, all that kind of stuff. Yucca: Actually, is that something you can, I know that we're talking kind of more process here, but for a moment, you were, talking about trying to get more national monuments. Why are those important? Mark: Oh, good. Very, very good question. My organization focuses on conservation of wild lands on public lands. And a lot of Yucca: you keep going, can you define conservation? Because that is a term that has a lot of different baggage attached to it. So what do you mean when you say conservation? Mark: man protection of the land so that it will not be developed in certain ways. And management of the land for the resource, for the benefit of the resources that are there, of the ecological resources, cultural resources in some cases historical resources, and recreational opportunities for people to go camping or hiking or whatever that might be. So, one... One misapprehension that many Americans have is the idea that public land is protected land. And it is not. Most public land in the United States is owned by the Bureau of Land Management or by the U. S. Forest Service. And those have been managed primarily for extractive purposes like logging and mining and Yucca: Oil is big Mark: and oil exploration. Yucca: yeah. Mark: Yeah, very big. So we're advocating for chunks. of undeveloped land to be protected in perpetuity and managed for the benefit of those values. Yucca: Mm hmm. Mark: That's what a national monument does. Or a National Wilderness Area, which is declared by Congress. We're not asking for a National Wilderness Area in the areas we're focusing on because Congress is broken, and there's no way to get anything through it. the President can use the National Antiquities Act to declare a national monument. He can do that on his own. Yucca: So, by taking , these areas, you're setting aside, you're allowing ecosystems to stay intact, right? So that you can have the populations of these animals and plants or whatever. Particular kind of species you're looking at, they have a place to be, they can continue to play the roles that they would play in a hopefully healthy system and to help manage for that, Mark: Right, and that helps us to accomplish a couple of important things, one of which is, you know, we have a biodiversity crash problem, you know, the, the biodiversity of the earth is the, which is the number of different species and the number of individuals of those species are both on a steep decline. Having habitat is necessary in order for, you know, organization, organisms to live. And but not only that, this is a very interesting one. One of the things that we're advocating for is the expansion of Joshua Tree National Park. Yucca: hmm. Mm hmm. Mark: And the reason for that is that because of climate change, Joshua trees are migrating out of Joshua Tree National Park. Yucca: Interesting. Mark: Over time, they're moving north because it's too hot Yucca: Because it's warm. Yeah. Okay. Mark: Yeah. So, it... Protecting these areas also enables the natural systems of the earth to do what they do in terms of adaptation, right? So, there's a place for the Joshua trees to go as the southernmost of them die because of excessive heat, and conditions become better for them outside of the park to the north. So that's just one example.  Yucca: And may I add that we of course want to protect these for simply the innate value of that being , has any right, as much right to be there as we do. But they also, the functioning system performs ecosystem functions, which is like cleaning the water and the air that we all breathe. So it's, it's not just that, oh, we like there being lots of animals and plants and fungi. It's that there needs to be. these plants and fungi and animals for life as we understand it to continue to function, Mark: right, exactly. And that requires, because everything is so fragmented now, it requires some level of active management in order to protect from invasions by invasive species, for example, which will wipe out all the biodiversity. Yucca: right? Or in my area of the world where we're missing keystone species, so we're missing whole ecological roles, there used to be these animals that aren't there anymore, and if you just take your hands off and you don't touch it, you fence that area off, that area will starve, quite literally, right? If you don't, if humans don't try, because it's kind of like the voting. No management is management. Mark: yes. Yucca: Right? It is a choice that we're making as well. And so we have to really be thoughtful about and understand the systems that we're dealing with. Mark: right. And there is so much science. I'm not saying we know everything, because we don't. There's an awful lot that we don't know, but there is a tremendous body of science about how to manage lands in order to improve biodiversity at this point. Yucca: And we're getting better at it. Mark: One of the things that we who work in the conservation sector, in the environmental sector, actually need to fight against within our own ranks is the group of people who still advocate for putting a fence around things and leaving it alone. Yucca: That's why I asked you a little bit about how you are using the term, because where I am, the term has been kind of changing a little bit, where we have kind of two different camps, which are the restorationists and the conservationists. And the conservationists are the people who, who are, you know, an anti gras, who are like, don't touch anything. Don't just fence it off. Don't know people know nothing. And then you've got the people who are going, well, let's look at the way the whole system works and maybe we do need to, you know, one, let's not keep kick the people off. 'cause you know, It's been here for 20, 000 years. But also, like, what, you know, what about the animals? What do we do for the, you know? So that's why I was kind of asking a little bit about that terminology there. Mark: here's a great example in California. There were devastating wildfires. that ran through Sequoia National Park. And in Sequoia National Park are the giant sequoia trees, these, you know, huge, vast, amazing, amazing Yucca: Amazing. Mark: awe inspiring. Well, because humans had been suppressing fire in those forests for a hundred years, when that wildfire ripped through, it burned much, much hotter than it ever would have otherwise, and killed a lot of those trees. Now, there's a big debate. The Park Service wants to replant seedlings of giant sequoias. in the burned area. And there are environmental organizations, self styled, that are saying, no, you can't do that. You just have to let nature take its course because that's the right thing. But we have been suppressing fire for a hundred years. We have been doing the most invasive, destructive thing that can be done to that ecosystem for a hundred years, and now you say we're supposed to leave it alone? That's ridiculous. You know, reseeding giant sequoias in that area is absolutely the right thing to do in order to keep the species from going extinct. And, I, I don't know, I mean, obviously this is what I believe. Yucca: I'm smiling as you're saying that because I used to work in stand management in the Jemez, and we had very, very similar, like, I can hear the two sides right now and it's, People get, have very, it's very emotional, right, and one of the things that happens, I think, is that people have very strong emotional connections without having some of the background to understand what is happening. And that goes back to what we were talking about before with some of our responsibility, I think, is that we have a responsibility to become informed about these Issues and learn about them and and be able to, if you're going to be involved in making choices about how these If this land is going to be managed, you need to understand the ecosystems that you're dealing with. Because our system, our ponderosa pine systems are very similar in terms of the fire ecology. You know, people become very, people are very concerned about thinning and controlled burns and things like that, and I think that they're coming from a good place. Their hearts in a good place in it, but are very, very misinformed about what the results of their actions will be if we do that. Mark: And there are two big pieces there that I think really are takeaways from all of this. The first one is that they are coming from a good place, but it's a romantic place. And we need to recognize in ourselves when we are romanticizing something rather than basing our decisions on facts. Yucca: Mm Mark: The second is... We have seen a terrible onslaught on the appreciation for expertise over the course of the last 40 years or so. And we need to respect the people who have letters after their names and understand deeply how things work. We need to listen to them. And they don't all agree with one another, that's fine. But in generally, in most cases, there is a scientific consensus. To some degree about what is the right course for these sorts of decisions. And we need to be listening to people that have devoted their lives to understanding these questions, rather than just thinking that because we like trees or we like nature, that we are in a position to make those kinds of decisions. Yucca: hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. Mark: I'm speaking to you and you're in the process of getting letters after your name. Yucca: I have plenty of letters. I'm getting some more letters, but yes. Yeah. . Well, I had cut you off when you, in your story, to ask you to explain a little bit about the monuments, of why that was such an important issue for you to go across the entire continent. to talk about. Mark: That was a really important question. And as you mentioned this, yeah, it's true. I mean, there are a few reasons that I would put myself into an airplane at this point because of the impact on the atmosphere, but this is one that feels like on balance.  Yucca: Potentially for your lungs, too. Mark: yes, yes, that's true boy, although I came back here and oh my god, the smoke, we're, we're really, we're really buried in, in wildfire smoke right now. So, Going to, and, and, you don't have to go to D. C. in order to advocate for things you care about. First of all, a lot of decisions are local, and you can go and talk with local officials, or organize a contingent to go and talk with local officials. But also, your congressional representative has an office in your area. You can go and talk with them and let them know what you feel about things. Yucca: Well, and state level as well, Mark: state level, absolutely. Yucca: right? And it, you know, it's going to depend a lot on your state. The experience in a smaller, population smaller state it may be A lot easier, like in my state in New Mexico, going down to the roundhouses is super easy you just walk in and there's everybody and you just go up and talk to them. I would imagine in a more populated state, it's a little bit trickier, but it's still possible, right? Mark: The culture contrast between, you know, California, of course, is the most populous state, almost 40 million people and the culture in Sac, yes, between Sacramento, our state capital, and D. C. is really stark. When you go to lobby in Sacramento, If you're a Democrat, you almost never wear a tie. I mean, registered lobbyists will probably wear a tie. But if you just go as a constituent or as an advocate for, you know, one of our groovy left enviro positions, You can wear an open shirt and a sport coat, a pair of slacks, I mean, and, you know, you don't have to hide your tattoos and your piercings and all that kind of stuff, it's great. You go to Washington, it's a suit for a man. You wear a suit, you wear a tie. I left my earring in, but that was my one sort of concession. And and you're right, it's very organized and very regimented in Sacramento, just because of the sheer volume of people that are, that are traipsing through there. Yucca: hmm. Mark: But I, I really, I want to come back to this idea that elected officials are there in a democracy to represent you, and they may not know what you think, Yucca: hmm. Mark: so go tell them. You know, get informed on an issue and, you know, go tell them what you think, what you, what you would like them to do. It's more powerful when you've organized more people to be a part of that voice. And that's why the Conservation Alliance exists. And that's Yucca: many other organizations too, Mark: yes, yes. That's why that's why community organizers exist. To gather the voices of... Individuals into a collective voice that's able to make change happen and that's true in any representative democracy, so it's, it's well worth, you know, you know, sticking a hand in, and the people you're talking to are just people. They don't bite. At worst, they will frown. That's, that's Yucca: wrinkle their brow at you. Mark: Yeah, that's, that's about the worst of it. I didn't have any Republican visits this time, so, we were very welcomed and just very encouraged, and I think there are going to be some declarations coming up here in the next few months that will make us very happy. So it's bringing all this back around politics is How we as a collective society make decisions about what's important, what's not, and what's going to happen. And if you care about your world, and as atheopagans and naturalistic pagans, I believe our listeners do care about their world and about their fellow humans then it's incumbent on us to say so, and do things that make things better. Yucca: I keep having the image of Mary and Pippin sitting on Treebeard's shoulder and shouting, but you're part of this world too! Mark: Yeah, yeah, there's, because there are things in this world that are worth fighting for. Right? Yucca: Yep. Well, we could certainly go on for a long time, but I think this is a little bit of a longer episode, so we should probably finish up here. And we are going into October, and we have some fun, and some spooky, and some great episodes coming up. And Stinky, and all of those great things that we love to celebrate, and recognize, and all of those things, and this great Time of year. And happy autumn, everybody. Mark: Happy autumn! Yeah, Yucca: So, thanks, Mark. Mark: yeah, thank you so much, Yucca. It's a pleasure talking with you, and I'm still obviously really kind of jazzed about this trip, so thanks for welcoming a conversation about that into the podcast. Yucca: See y'all next week. Mark: All right, take care.

EPISODE 143 SEASON 4 | As homeschoolers, the idea of cramming for a test may be slightly foreign but as your student grows and contemplates college or a form of higher education you want them to have the strongest skill set available to help them succeed. Part of that skill set needs to be studying. But how to study without cramming? How can you help your student best retain all the information your student needs without stressing about their grade? Find out some tips and techniques your student can use to create positive study habits on this episode of Homeschool Your Way. Listen in as Janna is joined by Mark Pruitt, creator of Making the Grade as they discuss all things related to studying and being successful academically. Till Oct. 15th, 2023 you can save $30 on the college prep, use code JANNA at checkout. ABOUT OUR GUEST | Mark Pruitt (aka: Captain College) is Assoc. Director of Admissions for Harding University and has been on a college campus for over twenty years. Mark developed a study strategy that helped him earn 95% or higher in every college class! Being super successful in school does not have to be hard, so let Mark - the author and producer of the college prep curriculum Making the Grade - help you become a student of Excellence so you can master the material quickly and effectively, have a ton of fun, and enjoy the best years of your life!  LISTENER COUPON CODE ★Request your coupon code to use on any purchase at bookshark.com. QUOTABLES |  Janna: What is making the grade and why did you decide to create it? (0:00) Mark: Developed the making the grade college prep course. Homeschooling and cramming Mark: We all have different strengths, different interests, different personalities, and different learning styles. This course takes all of those aspects into consideration and helps students learn to a deeper level. Super smart students may think they don't need this, but college is an amazing experience. The importance of having the right mindset for success. (11:40) Mark: At the college level, you need to be setting aside probably three or four hours a day. Janna:  Doing anything guilt-free is so much more pleasurable. Mark: Anxiety levels are through the roof, and there are more people seeing counselors and mental health professionals now than ever before. The stress of high school and college. (18:31) Mark: The material is still applicable if the student goes to college, trade school, or the military. Mark: One of the neatest tips for reading textbook material is to read it at least twice, the first time is the hardest. Janna: Set the time limit to 30 minutes, then walk away and come back to do another 30 minutes if you can. (25:38) How to get in touch with Mark. (28:44) Thanks to show sponsor BookShark. Request a homeschool curriculum catalog or download samples at bookshark.com. If you'd like to share an aha moment, an inspirational quote, a homeschool hack, a book you're loving, or a suggested podcast topic/guest, leave a comment at bookshark.com/podcast. We'd love to feature your reflection on a future episode.

Myke asks Tom and Dan about how the Keen campaign is going so far, and about the feedback they have received. They also discuss how they came up with the name “Keen.” Then the three lads chat about the St. Jude fundraiser, and give details on the Thoroughly Considered raffle for a special Mark One pen.

Myke asks Tom and Dan about how the Keen campaign is going so far, and about the feedback they have received. They also discuss how they came up with the name “Keen.” Then the three lads chat about the St. Jude fundraiser, and give details on the Thoroughly Considered raffle for a special Mark One pen.

The next Olympic Games in Paris are still a year away, but some of this country's top athletes are already marking the event. A celebration has been under way at the Auckland Waterfront this morning, with the Sky Tower lit up in red, white and blue, and a French breakfast of croissants served. Chef de mission of the New Zealand team for 2024 Nigel Avrey spoke to Ingrid Hipkiss.

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

The Allen Premium Outlet Mall has announced it will reopen on Wednesday, May 31st.

For this episode of the eCom Logistics Podcast, we welcome Mark Delaney, Vice President of Global Industry Strategy at FourKites. Making sure that customers' expectations are met every time they come to your store is much harder than it sounds. Mark talks about the overall value of visibility not only for customer experience but for more efficient processes on the business side.  ABOUT MARKMark Delaney is currently VP Industry Strategy at FourKites. In this role, he engages with retailers' C-level leaders and their teams to understand and address industry-specific workflows and use cases. He serves as an SME to help drive the product roadmap and support our global sales teams. He keeps a strong pulse on industry trends and frequently solicits customer and partner's feedback on the technology investments that they are making to help inform and advance FourKite's innovation with a customer-first mindset. He represents FourKites at industry events and briefings. Prior to FourKites, Mark was a Retail Industry Principal at Zebra Technologies where he led customer briefings, met with the press and analysts and worked with their Ventures organization evaluating potential investments. Mark has more than 20 years of experience in the retail industry and has worked with most large retailers globally. Before joining Zebra, Mark held leadership roles at Nielsen and General Mills and owned his own retail technology and analytics consulting firm. Mark holds a BS in Marketing from SUNY Oswego and serves on several boards in his community. He is also the mayor of a village on the north shore of Long Island where he and his family live. HIGHLIGHTS01:40 Mark's 20-year journey in the logistics space.04:16 Is same-day or two-day delivery really necessary?10:09 Driving value and achieving the experience that customers demand.17:16 There's a lot more willingness to share data now.21:46 Employee satisfaction is now top of mind for many.26:25 What's happening in the robotics space?31:31 The role of labor market push in bringing in automation QUOTES13:41 Visibility and transparency help you make sure consumer expectations are met - Mark: "You need to have that level of accuracy at the store because otherwise, you have a consumer who now jumped in their car, drove 10 minutes away, walked in the store, now you've given them a terrible experience. Now because that loyalty's been shattered, there's a very good chance they're going to go across the street to your competitor." 21:56 The importance of listening to consumers and customers - Mark: "One other area that's top of mind with our customers these days is employee satisfaction. Because it's very expensive to lose a good employee, especially someone who's been there for a period of time and you've invested in all that training. For them to be mired down by spreadsheets and phone calls and all that, if you can give them that visibility and confidence that they're communicating something that's accurate, they feel better as associates."  Find out more about Mark in the links below:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markjdelaney001/Website: https://www.fourkites.com/

The anniversary brings promises of more weapons and further sanctions against Moscow.

Ukrainians in New York Mark One Year of the War by Uptown Radio

“Conflict, climate change, COVID and other diseases are what contributes to humanitarian suffering. And so you have to address the causes of those problems if you want to see the number of people suffering for as well as providing immediate help to the people to get them through until the causes can be addressed,” explains Mark Lowcock, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator from May 2017 through June 2021. Prior to his appointment in the UN, he served as the permanent secretary for the United Kingdom's Department of International Development. Mark has spent 35 years leading responses to humanitarian crises across the globe. He was twice awarded medals by Queen Elizabeth II for services to international development and public service, including reaching Knighthood in 2017. Recently, Mark authored a book titled Relief Chief: A Manifesto for Saving Lives in Dire Times. Today, he joins host Tiffany Zehara to talk about how humanitarian crises are handled and how ordinary everyday people can get involved. The humanitarian crises afflicting the global population today are mostly caused by conflict, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic. There are so many wonderful agencies helping to provide resources to those most negatively impacted by these crises, however, due to the sheer quantity of agencies they often are in competition with one another for resources. Most of the issues overlap and so it is important for agencies to determine how they can collaborate in order to effectively tackle these humanitarian crises. No one agency can fix everything on its own. Another issue comes from the fact that these organizations largely treat the symptoms rather than getting to the root cause. An example would be feeding someone who is starving without addressing the reason why they are unable to access or afford food. Situations can only improve if and when the root causes are addressed, yet the bulk of efforts are typically put into short term rescue solutions.  There are many ways to get involved in making an impact on humanitarian crises across the globe. Aside from getting involved with the many pre-existing organizations providing aid, there is also the option to get involved at the government level by talking to your representatives. Tune into today's episode of Humanitarian Entrepreneur Podcast for a talk with special guest Mark Lowcock about how to save lives in dire times.  Quotes  “The way this system has been created is that there are lots and lots of agencies, lots of UN agencies, the Red Cross family, 1000s of NGOs, and to some degree, they are both collaborating with each other. But they're also competing with each other for resources and donors in particular, and to some degree, they have overlapping mandates.” (7:21-7:44 | Mark) “A good outcome is not that one agency gets all the money, because no one agency can fix the problem. A good outcome is where there's enough money for everybody to spread in the fair way as possible.” (9:19-9:30 | Mark) “Conflict, climate change, COVID and other diseases are what contributes to humanitarian suffering. And so you have to address the causes of those problems if you want to see the number of people suffering for as well as providing immediate help to the people to get them through until the causes can be addressed.” (12:13-12:31 | Mark) “If you just address symptoms and not causes, don't be surprised if things keep getting worse.” (21:17-21:22 | Mark)  “One of the ways in which people caught up in humanitarian crises are stripped of their humanity is by losing their ability to control and determine things in their own lives. And if you can give people cash that gives them some of that dignity and freedom and humanity back.” (23:40-23:56 | Mark) “Empathy grows, actually curiously, when our own challenges grow.” (30:07-30:13 | Mark)   Connect with Mark Lowcock: Book: https://bookshop.org/a/54969/9781944691097 A Japanese program discussing famine: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/directtalk/20220930/2058949/ To connect with Tiffany to solve problems or affect the kind of change you want: https://calendly.com/humanitarianentrepreneur/discovery-call Website:  https://humanitarian-entrepreneur.com  Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Speaker: Pastor Matthew Walker Series: The Gospel of Mark   One of the most important spiritual principles is you reap what you sow. It's a farming allusion — the farmer expects to reap a crop from the seed he sowed earlier in the year. The apostle Paul explained clearly that if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap spiritual life. Paul borrowed this idea from Jesus who frequently taught this principle. As our Thanksgiving holiday comes to an end, let's consider A Sermon for Harvest (Mark 4:24-25).

Shane McElhatton, Series Editor for the Decade of Commemorations, is joined by historians John Dorney and Liz Gillis at Kilmainham, to discuss the first executions of the Civil War which were 100 years ago this week.

A walk through of the Book of Mark - chapter 14:1-36 Apologetics, Debate, Bible Discussions, Evangelism, and much more Our Website - https://christiancoffeetime.ca/

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com   S3E33 TRANSCRIPT: ----more----   Mark: Welcome back to The Wonder: Science-Based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark. Yucca: And I'm the other one, Yucca. Mark: And today we are going to talk about cults. Yucca: right. Mark: Of the things that when people choose an alternative spiritual path, one of the things that their friends and family will sometimes start to get really worried about is, oh dear, have they entered some kind of a cult? So we're gonna talk about what cults are and about what naturalistic paganism generally is. And atheopaganism specifically, and then talk about why, what we're doing does not really meet those, those criteria for what a cult is. Yucca: right. Mark: This, we, we were talking about this before the recording. If you have a family member that is really concerned that you've gone off the deep end into some terrible culty situation, you could consider having them listen to this episode. Yucca: Right. Yeah. And at the end, we're also gonna talk a little bit about recovering from some of those kind of religious traumas that, that can come along with having been in a cult situation or things that have happened in, in mainstream religions that we wouldn't necessarily think of as a cult, but still might have some of those really abusive behaviors. Mark: That's right. One thing that you'll notice when we go over the indicators that a group of any kind has attributes of a cult is that many of them apply squarely to various denominations of mainstream religions. So you know, the word cult gets Bandi about to U be used for little splinter groups or for new religious movements, but that's not really fair. The kinds of. The kinds of problematic behaviors and factors that go into Colt behavior really also include some very large institutions that have been around for a very long time. Yucca: Right. And these are things that can come along with groups that aren't necessarily just religious groups. Right? These are any time that you have. A structure in which you can have somebody who has power over dominating over somebody else. A lot of these, these risks come up. So, Mark: There are PTA associations that are dominated by, you know, one or a handful of people who cannot be questioned and run the show. And they're cult-like. Yucca: Yeah. Well, we're gonna get ahead of ourselves a little bit. Why don't we start off with, so, you know, what do we do? What is this? Atheopagan what's naturalistic, paganism or paganism in general, Mark: Sure. Sure. Well, naturalistic paganism is the big category, right? And athe paganism is a single denomination within that big category. So if you think about it, like there's Christianity, which is a whole big, huge thing. And then down underneath that there's Catholicism and Mormonism and all the various Protestant religions and so forth. So that's kind of a similar sort of, you know, taxonomic relationship between naturalistic, paganism and Ethiopia paganism. So that leads us to ask the question. All right, then. Well, what is naturalism? What is naturalistic paganism? So we'll start with naturalism. Naturalism is a philosophical position. It is the position that all things in the universe are made of matter and energy and that they follow physical laws. And there is nothing supernatural. Yucca: right. Everything is natural. Mark: Yes, Yucca: This is all nature, Mark: all nature. And it all follows physical laws and nobody gets to break the physical laws. Now we may. Yucca: of it. Mark: That's right. We may not understand all of the physical laws right now, but to our knowledge, nothing out there is able to break physical laws. And what that does is it excludes certain kinds of supernatural beliefs like beliefs in gods and ghosts, souls, and spirits, those kinds of things. They just really don't hold up in an evidential based evidentiary based critically thinking way of looking at the world, which is what naturalism is. Yucca: Right. Mark: So you were going to say, Yucca: Oh, I was gonna say, well, then we have the pagan side of that. Right. And the pagan side that, that Contras up a lot of different kinds of images. And for some people it brings up the idea of the, you know, gods and deities and you know, all of that. That isn't not all pagans are going to be doing that. And we're not in that group of pagans that believes in God's and deities, because that's not fitting with the naturalist part. Mark: Right. But what we do that is that we have in common with other pagan groups is we have a lot in common in the way that we practice our Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: Um, we celebrate the solstice and equinoxes and the points between them, for example. So a solar cycle of Of holidays. We tend to celebrate our rituals in a circle rather than in kind of an audience and performer format. We Revere the natural world. We hold that out as, as sacred. And so, the primary players in arranging for our creation and survival, like the sun and the earth and the moon become very sacred for us. Right. And this is true of Pagan's largely universally. The, the truth is that paganism is so diverse and such a catchall term that the only thing that every single pagan has in common is that they self identify as pagans. Yucca: Yes, Mark: That's that's the only Yucca: that, that we call ourselves that. Yeah. But there are themes. Like you're talking about that we, we tend to be earth based. We tend to do ritual and celebrate the, the cycle of the seasons and things like that. Mark: Right. Right. And we understand ritual practices as being at the very minimum, personally, beneficial. Some pagans believe many pagans believe that rituals can actually enact magical forces in the world to change the course of events or you know, what's happening in, in the world. We don't believe that because naturalism doesn't really allow for spooky action at a distance. If new evidence comes along, we may change that opinion because part of the nature of being a naturalist is that you have to be open to new evidence all the time. So 100% certainty is not a thing in naturalistic worldview. We could be 99.9% sure that the sun is going to rise tomorrow morning, but. There's always the possibility that for some reason it doesn't. And then we have to reconsider all of our thinking about the nature of the world. Yucca: Right. Okay. So that's the umbrella naturalistic paganism. And then we also have atheopagan, which is one form of naturalistic paganism. Mark: Right. Think of atheopagan as kind of like Methodism in relation to Christianity, right? Christianity is the big umbrella. Methodism is a particular movement that was created by particular people with particular values and practices and principles atheopagan is a, a path that I created. In the early two thousands, which is built around some basic presets and naturalism is one of them, but also naturalism and critical thinking are among them, but also reverence for the earth and a set of four sacred pillars and 13 principles, which we've recorded about before, which are ethical principles for how to conduct our lives and not all pagans subscribe to those, not all naturalistic pagans, subscribe to those, but those that are, that are, are practicing athe paganism do follow those. Yucca: right. And something very important to say right up front is that, although mark, you created. The atheopagan you are a founder, you're not the leader. Right. We have a large community of people who each person makes decisions for themselves. We also have the atheopagan society council, which deals with things like putting together events and the nonprofit side of everything. And you are very much involved in the community, but just because mark says something doesn't mean that that's the law. Mark: right. Yucca: And plenty of times people disagree. And one of the things that I really value about the community is that overall people are very respectful about those disagreements, right? Mark: yeah, I mean, fundamentally. It is not really consistent with Ethiopianism to tell other people what to do. The principles are guidelines for how to live a life that is kind and conscientious and a life of integrity and a life that will help you to be happy. Yucca: Right. Mark: If you don't want to be kind and conscientious or happy, you can make other choices, but you, you know, you probably aren't practicing athe paganism at that point, you're doing something else. Yucca: Yeah. Which is fine. Right. We're you know, we, aren't out here to say join, you know, join us and we're not out there, you know, evangelizing or anything like that. Mark: right. We're we're not proselytizing people come to us cuz they want to join. And. We're very clear that everybody has their own spiritual path and they need to define that for themselves. And that's why we encourage people for example, to create their own meanings around the wheel of the year celebrations, because people live in different climates and different things, maybe happening in nature. I, you know, Yucca, you and I have talked many times about how we live in different climbs. And so our understanding of when spring starts, for example, is radically Yucca: This many months different. And then what spring actually is for each of us is quite different. Right. Mark: Yes, exactly. Yucca: And, and also just to say that many of the people who listen to this podcast, we know many of you do consider yourself a pagans and many of you don't right. And that's again, that's also fine, right? Yeah. Mark: absolutely great. And that's why, you know, we've been very careful over time to talk about athe paganism and naturalistic paganism, you know, not to assume that everybody that's listening to this is necessarily practicing atheopagan as a path. Yucca: right. Mark: But, Yucca: real quick say what the, what the pillars and principles are? Mark: Sure. But I'm going to have to pull them up. The, the, the pillars, the pillars, I know by heart, the pillars are love Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: beauty truth and life. Yucca: right, Mark: are the things that we hold sacred. And by beauty, we don't mean individual sort of cultural definitions of a person's beauty. We mean the beauty of nature, Yucca: right. Mark: right? The, the, the way that the natural world can move us Yucca: that? Wow. That wonder, Mark: Yes the wonder. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So those are the four pillars. And I should say, you know, we can find lots of you can find lots of additional information about this at both the atheopagan society website and at the and at the atheopagan blog, which is atheopagan.org. Yucca: Mm-hmm . And also in this podcast, if you just go back through our archives E we've gone, we've done an episode on each one of these topics and we've been doing it a few years. So there's, we've covered some of these multiple times as well. Yeah. Mark: Yeah. There's. Yucca: back through, Mark: There's a lot out there. So the 13 principles and it was kind of an accident that there were 13, but I was tickled by that because there are 13 cycles of the moon in the year. And for many pagans, 13 is a really special number. Yucca: it's just a fun number. Mark: a, a sacred number. Yeah. And of course it's prime and all that. So the 13 principles are number one, and these are not in a priority order, I should say. So they're think of them as bullet points rather than as a numbered list. Yucca: Mm-hmm, sort of like the seasons, right? You don't there isn't really a first season. They just come after the, and before the other ones. Mark: Right. So skepticism and critical thinking. , which is the ability to tell the difference between the literal and the metaphorical, because we work with both in our pagan practices, right. You know, we work with symbolic enactments of things, many times in our rituals, but we understand at the same time that to some degree we're playing, let's pretend we're not, you know, literally talking to an invisible being there or whatever. You know, when we, when we throw our, when we throw our, our fears into the fire, we understand that's a metaphorical behavior. That's not a literal behavior. Yucca: but it still is empowering. Right? It's play, but play is meaningful, right? You can still, you can read a book or watch a show and still be moved to tears in the same way, our ritual. We can still feel those feelings and have that impact us. Mark: Sure. Very psychologically impactful rituals. So the second is reverence for the earth. We are a living part of the earth and and reverence for that source and kin that the fabric of life is to us is really important. Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: The third is gratitude for the amazing gifts of life. The fourth is humility, understanding that all humans are fundamentally equal and that nobody, you know, is entitled to Lord and above anybody else, perspective and humor, having kind of a big picture understanding of the world and being able to laugh at ourselves laugh at our religion, laugh at even the tragedies in the world, you know, just in order to stay sane and to maintain perspective you know, it's It's amazing what humor people will find in really terrible, terrible situations. The sixth is practice, which is in enacting regular ritual as a part of the practice of Ethiopia paganism. So a paganism, isn't just a philosophy where it's got a worldview and a set of values. It's also got a practice and that makes it a religion. The seventh is inclusiveness, celebrating diversity and being respectful of difference and and embracing the, the vast diversity of humanity. The eighth is legacy recognizing and embracing our responsibility to future generations, both of humans and of non-humans. Yucca: mm-hmm Mark: The ninth is social responsibility, recognizing that our rights are balanced by responsibilities. And this is something that much of the pagan community is often not very good at. People are really amped about their, their personal sovereignty, but they're not so much into their personal accountability. Yucca: Right. Mark: We are very clear that all of the rights that we enjoy are balanced by responsibilities to one another. And that goes into issues like consent. It goes into all kinds of respectfulness requirements on us, including our requirement to participate in our local societies in all ways, from voting to activism, to contributing to the dialogue of the world in a, in a positive way. Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: Uh, the 10th is responsible con responsible sensuality and pleasure positivity. We think pleasure's good for you. We believe pleasure's a good thing. It's nothing to be ashamed of. It's good. Obviously that has to be with people who are consenting. If you're getting pleasure from something you're doing with someone else it has to be with consent. But that consent is there, we say, knock yourself out. We, we don't care what kind of sex you're having. We don't care. You know, what kind of food you're eating, it's entirely up to you. What, what brings you joy? We, we are a, a projo religion which not all religions are honestly many are about shame and original sin and guilt and all that stuff. And that's just not us. Yucca: And the physical isn't bad or dirty or less than below any of those sort. We, we just don't do that. That's Mark: no. In fact, the most sacred thing to us is under our feet. So we, so we don't, you know, we don't have to look up, even though the cosmos is amazing. We don't have to look up to the higher, more spiritual stuff. The higher, more spiritual stuff is right under our feet. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: The 11th is curiosity, understanding that there is always more to be learned and keeping an open mind to learn more about other people, about the nature of the world about our society, about culture, just keeping a lively mind. The 12th is integrity. You know, being true to your word, being, being fulfilling your, your responsibilities and being a trustworthy person Yucca: and honest with yourself too. It not just with others, but with yourself. Mark: absolutely. And then finally the 13th is kindness and compassion. And the little note underneath it says, I practice kindness and compassion with myself and others understanding that I will not always meet the standards of these principles. You know, we all get mad, we all, we all blow it. We all, you know, fail to clear the bar once in a while, you have to be compassionate with yourself, learn from it. So you won't do it again. But we are, we are not believers in constantly flogging yourself for something shameful you did 20 years ago. It's just that doesn't do you or anyone else? Any good? Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So those are the 13 principles of atheopagan. Most of 'em are pretty common sensical. But of course I would think that cuz I developed them. It seems like a lot of other people find them common sensical as well. They're like, oh, you know, this isn't painful. These aren't, you know, these aren't terrible strictures that are gonna require me to jump through all kinds of hoops in order to be a, a good atheopagan pagan. Yucca: Yeah. yeah, no, it's, it's great to have them, you know, written down and spelled out and be like, oh yeah, yeah. I agree with that. Mark: I. Yucca: makes sense. Mark: I think most of them are, can be characterized as generally pagan values. The pleasure positivity the reverence for the earth the social responsibility, the inclusivity, you know, all of those are very common in the pagan community. I wouldn't say universal, but they're very common in the pagan community. And so all that I've done is write 'em down and codify 'em Yucca: Yeah. Mark: you know, Yucca: So this is us, right? This is we talking about what we are. Is there anything you wanna say on that before we go into what a cult is? Mark: No, let's talk about cults. Yucca: Yeah. so we actually have a little bit of a list for this one as well. Some behaviors or things to look out for that really characterize a cult that any one of these would be, would be a real major red flag. Mark: Right. Right. And bear in mind, you know, as we were saying before, with new religious movements or with small splinter groups, people are often very concerned about the idea that these groups are a cult, but very old, very large institutions can also be, can also have these characteristics that are very cult-like. You know, we're gonna talk in a bit about the, the recovery the, the deconstruction of reli of, especially like sort of conservative authoritarian, religion that people experience when they leave those religions to become atheist or agnostic, or to become Ethiopia, pagans, or other naturalistic kinds of folks. Yucca: Right Mark: And many of the people that have those experiences are not coming out of little tiny sects, they're coming out of large institutions. Yes, very wealthy, very powerful institutions. Yucca: Yeah. So let's start the, our first one. Which is one that you definitely see in like the movies and shows and things about this. Is there being usually one or more like a small group of really charismatic leaders who cannot be questioned or challenged, right. That their authority is ultimate, right? Mark: And you see this in a lot of sort of charismatic Christian sex. You see this in in Hindu guru sex, but when you think about it, I mean, the head of the church of latter day saints is considered to be speaking for God and cannot be challenged or questioned. The Pope charismatic leader who cannot be challenged or questioned, same kind of deal. Right. One of the, and, and I put that at the top of the list because I think it's, it it's arguably the most important one, but of course these, you know, there are many others that are, are really important as well. I may be the founder of Ethiopia paganism because I wrote first an essay and then a book kind of laying out the thinking of how I arrived at this position and my ideas for implementation of a path of naturalistic paganism. But I, and you, you can debate about my charisma, but I certainly Yucca: got a pretty high Christmas score, frankly. If, if we were in D and D I think you'd be a bar. Mark: okay. Thank you. That's that's very kind. I like it. But I certainly am not someone who cannot be challenged or questioned within our community. That that is not the case at all. And sometimes I'm wrong. And hopefully when I, you know, when I calm down I admit that I'm wrong. And then, you know, and I apologize and try to make amends and we move forward from there. The, when we created the atheopagan society, the nonprofit organization to help support atheopagan worldwide and help provide resources and networking and events and education for atheopagan. It was important to me that the board of directors, which is called the atheopagan society council not have me as an officer. It was really important to me that, I mean, I'm on the council, but I'm not an officer of the council. I'm not one of the ranking people in the council. And I feel that that's important. There are other people who can make decisions without me, Yucca: Right. Mark: and I think that's great, Yucca: Yeah. And, and I think it's important to distinguish in this, that we're not saying that if, if an organization has a leader or has leaders that that makes it culty, the, the problem is the not being able to be challenged, not being able to be questioned that it's that power over everybody else. That's the, the real issue at hand, right? Mark: Yeah. Awful lot of the rest of this. Is really a function of hierarchy. Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: And in atheopagan we strive very much not to be built around hierarchy, to have a very, very flat power structure. Even our ordained clergy who are called clerics that's a, a service role to the community. It's not a status elevation and anybody. Yucca: with the council as well. It's, you know, people volunteer to do a whole bunch of work, basically. That's what it means to be on the council. Is, are you gonna do all this work for free Mark: yeah, exactly. Yucca: yeah, none of, and, and with, within the society, we don't have any paid positions. This is all people doing it because, because we see it as, as service and something we want to be involved in and that we really value. Mark: That's right. That's right now. I wanna say two things about that. The first one is that as fair disclosure, I, as an individual do have a Patreon. And so I have people that make a monthly contribution to me to support my work in Ethiopia, paganism, like the book that I'm writing now. The blog posts that I make, the resources that I create, Yucca: you do get royalties on your, your book sales Mark: I, yes, I do. Yes, I do. So, so I mean, there is some money that changes hands, but it's not the atheopagan so society is an entirely volunteer organization. Yucca: yeah. Mark: The other thing that I wanna say is that and we've mentioned this before. If you want to be an atheopagan cleric, if you can embrace those 13 principles, then you can go to the atheopagan society website, which is the AP society.org. And you can register as a cleric online. And that is a legally binding ordination. You can perform marriages and funerals and other rights of passage, all that kind of stuff. You can do hospice counseling and all that kind of stuff. And you can do that for free. So, we, you know, we really do believe everybody should be the. The director of their own spiritual path. And if they want to perform those services, they should be empowered to do so. Yucca: right. And if we can help, then, you know, we can provide resources and community spaces and things like that. And that's, that's kind of the role that the society's doing. Mark: right. So there's a lot of, you know, there's an introductory guidebook. You can download, you know, that talks about abuse, reporting requirements, how to organize different kinds of rituals. Working with the dying, working with the family of the dying you know, stuff like that, that will be helpful to you. As a cleric. So let's get back to our list. If you've, you've got these charismatic leaders who cannot be challenged or questioned, that's definitely a problem. The next one is deceptive recruitment tactics, Yucca: Right. Mark: and boy, the church of Scientology really specializes in those. I don't know if you've ever been in the situation where someone on a bicycle wheels up to you and asks you the time. But asking you the time to start a conversation is something that was chronic in my hometown. And it was always about trying to get you to come on down to the church of Scientology and sign up for their classes. Yucca: right. And this'll come in a little bit later, but especially kind of going after people in vulnerable positions, Mark: Yes. Yes. It bears saying that prosperity gospel is one of those deceptive recruitment tactics saying if you pray with us at our church and you contribute a bunch of money to our fabulously wealthy charismatic leader, you too will then be blessed with lots of money is a deceptive recruitment tactic. Yucca: Right. Yeah. Mark: The next on the list is exclusivity members are not allowed to belong to other groups or faiths. This is not true of Ethiopia, paganism. You can belong to whatever other faiths you want. Although if, if you belong to other faiths that believe in literal gods as being out there in the world, how you figure that out with your Ethiopia, paganism is a mystery to me, but if you can do it more power to you, if that works for you as a, as a path, Yucca: right. Mark: The, the whole idea of and we'll talk about this later on as well. The whole idea of trying to, to keep you away from people who don't believe the same thing as the group is very problematic. It's a real red flag. Yucca: Yeah. And so in atheopagan, and, and I think most forms of naturalistic paganism in general, you don't belong to anybody. You aren't owned by the group. Right. You're your own. And nobody gets to tell you what you get to believe or not believe or who you get to associate with or any of that that's, that's nobody's business, but yours. So Mark: Many religious traditions put a big value on submission. Yucca: mm-hmm. Mark: Paganism generally. And atheopagan specifically does not, we, we do not believe that submitting or humbling ourselves before some higher power, any of we yeah. You know, fearing the, the supernatural beings. We don't believe any of that. And what that means is that our path is one of spirituality with personal agency, Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: rather than out of submission or fear or domination. Yucca: right. Well, and that leads us to our next one, which is the use of intimidation, fear, shame, isolation that are used to punish somebody for not conforming, not going along. That's, that's something that is. a really classic sign of, of cult behavior, Mark: Yes. Yes. And we in atheopagan we encourage nonconformity in the form of individually tailored holidays and ritual practices. So it's quite the opposite, you know, we, we don't do what I do, do what you do, cuz that makes you feel good. That's that's how we would prefer it to work. Yucca: and we're not telling you that if you don't do it our way that you're gonna be unhappy and go to hell or any of that, it, we're not worried about that. It's okay. You know, you just do you. That's awesome. It works for you. Fantastic. Mark: Yes, exactly. And at that at, at this point, it's probably a good thing to point out that in naturalistic, paganism, generally speaking, we don't believe in an afterlife. So there's this idea of the world as approving ground for some sort of future judgment just doesn't exist. Our life is about this life. It's about how we conduct ourselves in this life. And it's about how much joy we can both celebrate and create in, in the world around us. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So, so it becomes really important that people's practices are individually tailored because the point is for it to work for them, the point is not for it to work for an institution. Yucca: Right. Mark: So the next point is religious dogma. That must be followed and. You know, we all know about those that, you know, they can be, they can be dietary requirements, they can be requirements to go to religious rituals or services a certain number of times a, a day, a week, a year. Yes, dress codes, various kinds of sort of shaming behavior to get people, to, to follow what the expectations of the religion are. And, and a lot of beliefs that you have to subscribe to generally, I mean, in various kinds of fundamentalist Christianity, you are required to literally believe the stories of the Bible. Even though they kind of fly in the face of, of critical thinking. You're expected to believe them literally. And if you don't, then you get intimidation, fear, shame, and isolation from your community. Yucca: right. So another really kind of problematic indicator and in any situation which is sexual abuse or manipulation So, especially when there is that charismatic leader and those leaders are sexually involved with lower status members. And that is expected as some sort of cha like as an exchange or for elevation in the group or you know, to be able to stay part of the group, you're gonna have to do these things. Mark: Right. Right. And and of course we see that kind of abuse in religious traditions all over the world. It is rife. In all cases where you see it, the hierarchy is the issue, the power imbalance, because I, you know, in atheopagan we don't care if two members of our group who are Yucca: or more, Mark: or, or more have sex yeah. Have sex with each other. We don't care about that at all. But we don't have any like insider knowledge or special status or initiation into an inner sanctum. We don't have any of that stuff in our religion. So there's no way to hold those things out as kind of allure to try to get people to have sex with you, non consensually. Yucca: right. Mark: There are there, has there have been problems with sexual abuse in pagan communities? You know, we need to, we need to say that. And they have generally been pagan communities where there are charismatic leaders who cannot be challenged or questioned and it's, and there's a hierarchical power dynamic and people get abused and it's not right. Yucca: And I wanna say this is something that happens outside of religious communities as well. You know, there's been over the last few years, quite a lot of talk about that in Hollywood and in different, you know, businesses and moving up and, and, you know, corporate structures, all of that. So wherever you've got that, that hierarchy of the, the power over, there's a, a risk for that. And it's something that we have to be really careful about. And so the, the way that we structure our communities helps avoid that in the first place. Mark: Right, right. And so far so good. As far as we know we have had, you know, no, to my knowledge, we have had no incidences of, of problems with this.  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So that's good. But we are new, of course the, the atheopagan community just celebrated a 10 year anniversary. So we're relatively new and we're far flung. So much of our interaction is online, but We do have, we have had in person gatherings and do have in person gatherings. And so far, those seem to have been respectful and conscientious and we have not had any reports of any kind of, of abuse. Yucca: Right. Mark: So the next, oh, go ahead. Yucca: I was gonna say, and I, and I'm, I'm very confident that if we did have something that we did have conflict like that come up, that I've been very impressed by the, the people involved and think that overall people would really try and do their best to resolve the issue in a very respectful and, you know, With lots of integrity and, and really just be very present with that because that's built into our values. Mark: I agree. I agree. Yeah. Yeah, I, I think I'll leave it there. It One of the things that has been so gratifying to me with a Theo paganism, because I did originally develop it just for myself, is that the people that have gravitated towards it have just been these really remarkable, very grown up, very creative. I mean, everybody's working with their wounds. Right. You know, we, we're all, we're all working on our stuff. It's the nature of things. But just a lot of kindness, lot of open-heartedness just really fine, fine people I've been, I've been just delighted. Yucca: yeah. Mark: So, let's talk about the next point, which is that in a cult or a cult-like institution, there is emphasis placed on recruiting, vulnerable people. Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: So like people that have recently experienced a loss, like a death or a divorce people who are struggling with survival, like maybe homeless people or unhoused people, I should say homeless is not really liked anymore. And you know, or who have health issues, there's, there's a, an emphasis on trying to find people who are in need and then plugging the religious path into whatever need they have in order to claim that it's some kind of an answer. Yucca: right. Mark: And not only is that very cult-like, but I would say it's really shitty. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: That is just truly awful behavior it's predatory. And I just can't imagine. Being a part of anything like that. Yucca: Right now that isn't to say not trying to help people who are vulnerable, but trying to sell them the religion as taking advantage of their situation to try and recruit them into this, whatever your thing is. Mark: Right. I, I think of soup kitchens where people are required to pray for their fed, you know, that's just awful. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: who does that? Well, I, we can name some names, Yucca: that happens. Yeah. Mark: yeah, Yucca: that? You know, the, the example works because that it's so widespread. So yeah. oh, go ahead. Mark: no, go ahead. Yucca: Well, I was gonna say the next one would be kind of this isolating, right? The really encouraging members to only engage with each other. Um right. Even sometimes to the point of excluding and not disowned family members or previous friends just saying, and that no, we've gotta be really insular. Right. It's us. Don't go to an I outside, you know, don't go to a therapist, don't go to anyone else. You know, don't have other friends, so that they're really just wrapped up in this one world view without any outside perspectives. Mark: Right, right. Yeah. That kind of insularity is very widespread in Christianity. I, I would imagine it probably is in Islam and Judaism as well. And I know it is in Scientology as well. But I mean, particularly in conservative branches of Christianity, like, latter day saints, or, you know, some of the evangelical churches, it's like, if you don't belong to our church, we don't want anything to do with you, Yucca: right. Mark: or we're telling you, you shouldn't have anything to do with people that are not a part of our church. And that's just harmful for a lot of reasons, for one things, because it's turning spiritual practitioners into prisoners, Yucca: Mm-hmm. Mark: which is kind of scary. But for another thing, being exposed to the diversity of humanity is a good thing. Yucca: Right. Mark: One of the reasons why we see such incredible narrow mind and bigotry among evangelical Christians, at least in the United States is because they're not hanging out with anybody other than people like themselves. And it's very easy for them to decide that people that are not like themselves are somehow less or subhuman and that their needs concerns and welfare can safely be ignored. And that's just a dangerous, dangerous path to go down. Yucca: right. Well, and, and when they're isolated, it's harder for someone to challenge that unable leader. Right to know that some of these behaviors are not normal behaviors and that they're not healthy behaviors, that that's not just how it is everywhere. Mark: Right. And it creates a tremendous social cost to leaving. Yucca: right. Mark: If you decide this is not okay, and I've gotta go. And what that means is that your entire social circle disappears and, or your family disowns you Yucca: maybe your survival, right. Not just at an emotional level, but the, that that may be you're survival net. Mark: that's right, Yucca: How are you going to feed yourself? How are you going? What are you gonna do when you know, you've gotta go to the hospital and someone needs to take you. And all of those things just evaporate, Mark: right, Yucca: right? Your childhood friend, your dog, your, you know, your kids, all of that stuff. Mark: Yeah, it's some of the stories are just terrible. I mean, it's just as bad where people get ejected because they're gay or they're trans, or they're just different in some way. And they get ejected from the group because the group doesn't approve of who they are and suddenly they have no social resources. It's just terrible. So the next one is pretty obvious, but it needs to be on the list. And that is financial exploitation of members, Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: um, requiring tithing constantly strong arming people to be paying for, you know, the, the church fund or the, whatever it is, you know, constantly, you know, pressing on people to be giving money. It's exploitative. It doesn't take into consideration the varying levels of resources that people have available. And honestly, it doesn't let them make their own decision about where they wanna invest their money. Yucca: Right. Well, and, and you could make the argument, oh, they're choosing to, but when this is in the context of all of this other behavior, it can be really difficult to not do that. Right. And they, you know, the suggestion may not just be a suggestion, Mark: Exactly. Because the word will get around that you did not that you're not tithing. Right. Everybody else is tithing, but you're not tithing. And so judgements begin to be made and decisions get start being made about where you sit in the hierarchy. Yucca: Yeah. And finally, we can say the lack of transparency, right? So in, in an organization like this, the decisions may be made in secret, Mark: Mm-hmm Yucca: People don't even know what the decisions are made especially when it comes to finances, but not just finances, social decisions, all of that sort of stuff that there's not a way to track it. There's not a way to know. And it's just, it just comes down. Right? The decision is made. Mark: Yeah, exactly. And. To me. It's just, it's a part of that whole non-hierarchical approach to things that, I mean, you have it because the way that the laws of the United States are organized, they can't even comprehend the idea of a non-hierarchical organization. So we have to have a board of directors in order to have a non-profit organization. Right. But the idea of that group not aggressively soliciting the input of the broader community and communicating out whatever decisions it makes based on those. Just, it's just appalling the idea, especially that these very wealthy institutions could be doing stuff like that is you know, when, when Joel Ostein needs another private plane, Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: you know, Basically he and his cronies are making that decision on their own without any transparency with the rest of the community. It's just it's wrong. And it's really culty, Yucca: Yeah. Well, and I mean, the, the reason that we're bringing this up is, again, emphasizing this isn't what fits our beliefs and values, right? There's a lot of groups doing activities like this and this particular list, mark, you would put this together out of several different lists, right? And these are the ones that any one of these is a problem where some of the other lists, you found things that are like, eh, kind of iffy, but maybe it's like, okay, but any one of these, these issues is, is really just a huge, huge red flag. Mark: Right when I was doing, oh, go Yucca: I was gonna say, and they usually don't come. Mark: No. Yucca: you've got the unable leader, then you probably also have the dogma and the abuse and the, you know, those things. Usually you're gonna have a lot of them together. Mark: Yeah. When I was researching to, to first write on this the there were some lists that were, you know, if you score four or more, then you, you may have a problem kind of lists. And I, I just, I just took out the, the sort of iffy ones and compiled them, you know, compiled the 10 worst, most egregious concerns into a bullet list. I think it can be said with some confidence that if you don't have any of these things, you're probably not in a cult. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: You know, you're, you're probably in a reasonably health healthy, reasonably open kind of spiritual path. Yucca: right, Mark: So we wanted to talk a little bit about deconstruction and recovery, Yucca: right, Mark: In the atheopagan community. We have an affinity group that meets once a month on zoom of people who are deconstructing from other religions and feel the need for support. You know, people have real horror stories about ways that they've been treated in a religious context. And I really honor those people for their bravery in pursuing a new spirituality, instead of just saying I'm done. I'm, you know, I'm gonna live a life without spirituality because I don't, I just don't trust any of that anymore. Yucca: right. Because the spirituality really can. Can give us so much in our lives. Right. And really can fulfill a very deep instinctual human need that we have. Mark: Yes, and bring so much joy and gratitude and appreciation and such a sense of warm, shared community. I mean the, the danger is that even in very culty kinds of contexts, people still have that sense of community and they will stick around for it. Yucca: Well, that's why they're sticking around. Mark: That's right. Yucca: Right. That's you know an abusive relationship, whether it's abusive relationship with a partner or with. Different family member or larger community or religion, there's still something in there that is feeding you. And that's why it can be one of the reasons it can just be so hard to, to remove yourself from Mark: To let go. Yucca: Right. Because there is that beautiful part. There is that wonderful part. And then there's the not right. Then there is the manipulation and then there's the exploitation and there's all of that. And so, you know, there's, I think that it's, it's really important to have a lot of compassion for people who are in these situations and, and recognize that that it's something that, that we can all relate to on some level or another. Right. Mark: Right. In the, in the development of Ethiopia, paganism as a community and as a, as a. A spiritual tradition rather than just sort of my individual path. One of the things that I remain really cognizant of is that there are people coming into this community who are gonna test because they've been burned before. Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: And so they sort of poke with these questions, right? It's like, well, what about this? You know, what about money? Well, we accept donations to the atheopagan society because we do have some expenses. But you don't have to be a member. We don't have members and you don't have to be a member of it in order to be call yourself an atheopagan and practice the, the, the path. Yucca: and we won't announce if you, you, it's not gonna be an, if you decide to donate, we're not gonna announce and give you special status. And, you know, we'll Mark: We, we will, we will list you on the, on the patrons list. On the website, if you want to be, if you wanna be anonymous, then we won't, Yucca: but you're not gonna get like a badge if you're on the Facebook group that says, you know, I'm, Mark: I'm a donor. Yucca: I'm a donor. Yes. I'm a class, you know, a class supernova donor or something like that, right? Yeah. Mark: that's right. Because people have, you know, at times been you know, very sharp in their interrogation of me, you know, what's your role, you know? Aren't you, the final decision maker of all the things the council does, you know, all, all that kind of stuff and no, I'm, I'm not, and I don't want it that way. What I want is to do this right from the very beginning, my vision has been, what if you did, what if you did an earth based reason based. Spiritual path and you did it, right. You didn't step into any of the pitfalls that have plagued other religious paths. You know, if you are really open and really flat power structure and really transparent open your books to the public so they can see, you know, the money and where the money goes, all that stuff. And that's what we're doing so far. Yucca: Yeah, right. And that's, and you know, that's not just, that's not just Mark's vision, that's the broader vision. Right. And that's, that's part of it. So. Mark: Right. I mean, if you can characterize the atheopagan community At all. It says a group of people who have all kind of come together to say, let's do this really well. Let's do it really well for ourselves and really well for the world. And just, you know, let's do this at a very high level of integrity. Yucca: mm-hmm and just very thoughtful. That's something that just comes up again and again is just how thoughtful people are about all of this. Mark: yeah, I agree. Now there are downsides of that for somebody like me, I'm not making a mint on this. But I'm. I'm so happy with how this is all proceeded. The idea of, you know, having to have this be something that I can leverage for a lot of money, just really doesn't cross my mind. And I, to be honest, I think that if I tried the community would vanish, just, just vanish. Yucca: I don't think they could build this kind of community on that. Right. Certainly communities can be built on those types of principles, but this particular community. I think the reason that we're here, the reason that we, that we're doing all of this is, again, it goes back to what we were talking about before with the principles and the pillars is that we share those things. Right. And those aren't really compatible with the list that we just gave of, of red flags. That's not that isn't compatible with religious dogma and with, you know, deceptive recruitment tactics and things like that. That just doesn't line up with what we're searching for and trying to cultivate and grow. Mark: Right. We don't endorse exploitation. We don't endorse exploitation of the planet. We don't endorse exploitation of one another Yucca: Right. Mark: and a willingness to indulge. Various kinds of exploitation is characteristic of the sorts of organizations that get into trouble with things like that are on this list. You know, people in our community, they're, they're pretty quick to say if they feel like they've been treated unfairly or if they if they don't feel hurt or if their feelings are hurt and we talk about it and To the best degree possible, we make it right. Yucca: Right. Mark: It's just a different approach to things. So there are some resources for people who are deconstructing from religion, who don't necessarily want to be naturalistic pagans or whatever. There is the recovery from religion foundation, Yucca: Mm-hmm Mark: um, which is a great organization and they have online groups and a variety of resources for people who are deconstructing from religion. Encourage you to look into that. And Yucca: Whether you're interested in non theos, paganism or not. Right. Mark: Yes, Yucca: so it could be, it could be useful in both cases. Yeah. Mark: There's also the freedom from religion foundation, which is more of an advocacy organization for separation of church and state. But they do also have resources for people who are leaving abusive religious contexts and are are seeking support. So, encourage you to look into both of those, you know, if that's your situation. And also of course, we invite you to, you know, join our community. If you think that these values are things that are consistent with what you wanna do, and you can be a part of that recovery meeting that happens once a month. I think it's the first Tuesday, maybe first, Monday. I'm not sure I'm in a lot of these meetings. Yucca: Yeah. Well, and also some of the stuff that we, you know, we didn't talk too much about it, but the ritual practice and things like that can really help in healing processes. Right. Whatever it is, whether it was a religious trauma or childhood, or those often go hand in hand actually or whatever it is that, that that you're dealing with, you know, part of what we're trying to do is, is. develop lives and practices that support ourselves and develop the tool sets that help us to be able to do those things in whatever way matches us as individuals. Right? Yeah. Mark: For example I know people that have done full. Funerals and burials literal burial in a hole in the ground of their religion, of their, the religion that they've left. And that sounds like it might be kind of silly, but it's not, it's very serious. And they feel really different after it's been done going through those symbolic activities to, you know, psychologically divest yourself of something that has been hanging over you for a long time can be really psychologically impactful. And those are the kinds of practices that we learn how to do in naturalistic, paganism and that we do for one another and that we share. Yucca: Yeah. Mark: So if, if this is the first episode of the wonder that you've ever heard, because you're being, you're just joining us or you're A family member or friend said, Hey, you should listen to this because I'm doing this atheopagan thing or naturalistic pagan thing. And I know you're worried about it. So here, check this out. Welcome. And there is plenty more information about atheopagan at the Ethiopia pagan society website, which is the AP society.org or, and, or at the Ethiopia paganism blog that I do, which is Ethiopia, paganism.org. And there's a YouTube channel. There's this podcast. There's a Twitter feed. There's the Facebook group. Yes, there's, there's a lot of different places where you can meet others and talk and ask questions and all that kind of stuff. Yucca: And as we mentioned before, we're, we're pretty young, so we're just growing, but there are some affinity, local affinity groups, which are starting to form, so for different areas of the world or the country. So there might be, you know, people in your local area as well for, you know, face to face conversations and not just over the keyboard. Mark: Right, right. Yeah. So, thank you for this conversation. Yucca. This has been a good one. I feel like.  Yucca: There's a lot here today. Yeah. Mark: yeah, and, you know, there are so many just sort of assumptions that we make about how we're going to do our business that we don't really talk about explicitly. And I think bringing all of those out is really important. So people see, you know, the kind of people we are and the kind of thing that we're trying to build. Yucca: and yeah. Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Yucca: yeah. Well thank you for this conversation. So, and next week, we're, we're gonna be in October already and we have a lot of really fun topics coming up Mark: fun topics like death and decomposition. Yucca: Yes, well, and, and cauldrons and ancestors and all of that good stuff. So, yeah. Mark: It's gonna be great. Yucca: All right. Well, thanks everybody.    .

Myke, Tom, and Dan chat about merciless fundraising and a special edition Mark One for St. Jude, and the new Material Docks from Studio Neat. Then the lads look back on an XOXO talk they gave 10 years ago to see if they would change anything about it.

Myke, Tom, and Dan chat about merciless fundraising and a special edition Mark One for St. Jude, and the new Material Docks from Studio Neat. Then the lads look back on an XOXO talk they gave 10 years ago to see if they would change anything about it.

Marks of a Healthy Church Mark One: Expositional Preaching by William Klock We just confessed in the Creed that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.  These are historically known as the “marks” of the Church.  Despite our various differences and schisms, the Church is one.  Whether Anglican or Mennonite or Coptic or Baptist, we're all part of the one Church.  It's holy.  Jesus has called us, set us apart, washed us clean, and filled us with the Spirit.  It's catholic.  It is universal and it is complete in and of itself.  And it's apostolic in that it continues in the teaching, in the gospel, that was given to us by the apostles.  These identifying marks of the Church have served us well since the Fourth Century—and it's not like they were new ideas when they were written into the Nicene Creed back then.  But they are fairly abstract—in the sense that these things describe the Church in the broadest sense.  So how do we identify the church at the local level?  When you look at a local congregation, what sorts of things should define it?  Or we could ask what makes a local church a church as opposed to a social club or a group of do-gooders or even a cult?  Or we might ask what makes for a healthy church?  These issues became of paramount importance at the time of the Protestant Reformation.  If the Church is “broken”—as the Reformers observed—what needs to happen to set it right?  For the Reformers, whether German or Swiss, French or English or Scottish, the identify marks of a true local church, of a church faithful to Jesus and the teaching of the apostles, distilled down to two things: the preaching of God's word and the administration of God's sacraments.  This principle was written, in one way or another, into all of the Protestant confessions of faith, but here's how it comes to us in ours, in Article XIX of our Articles of Religion: The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ's ordinance, in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same. Anglican and Lutherans, Baptists and Presbyterians, we have our differences, but we are united in these two core marks of a church: we preach the word and we administer the sacraments.  Faithfulness to these two things—and whether or not we do these things with deliberate faithfulness to Scripture—is what determines the health of a church.  Not attendance and numbers, not programs, not activities, not vibrant fellowship, but faithfulness to preaching God's word and administering his sacraments.  All those other things can be good—and sometimes they come out of faithfulness to word and sacrament, but it's the word and the sacraments that create this community called the church.  We can build community around all sorts of other things—and churches often do.  We build community around programmes.  We build communities around styles of worship, whether a grand pipe organ and a choir or a rock band and fog machine.  We even build community around celebrity preachers.  But those things should not and do not define a church—let alone a healthy church.  Faithfulness to word and sacrament do.  We visited this topic almost thirteen years ago and it's my plan to revisit it again between now and Advent.  My own views have evolved and refined a bit in the last decade, but I think the key principles I preached back then are still basically the same.  So I want to start these first several weeks with that first mark, faithful preaching of the word.  The first four principles derive from our preaching.  From there we'll move onto the principles that are connected to or derived from our administration of the sacraments. So a faithful church, a healthy church is a word-centred church.  Such church should be characterised by people who take God's word seriously and who understand that it speaks with authority.  We should expect such a church's members to be committed to reading and studying the Bible for themselves.  We should expect that they will probably gather in groups to read and study the Bible together.  But at the centre of all of this should be a pulpit ministry devoted to and centred on the Bible.  Virtually every church includes some kind of sermon in its worship, but not every sermon is Bible-centred.  So we need to be very explicit about this.  The first mark of a faithful and healthy church is not just preaching, but what's usually called expositional or expository preaching.  Now, what is expositional preaching?  Expositional preaching is what I do virtually every Sunday.  Expositional preaching takes a text from the Bible—maybe given by the lectionary or maybe as we work through a book of the Bible verse by verse or chapter by chapter—expositional preaching takes that text, explains what it means, and applies it to the congregation—it tells you what to do about it.  In contrast there's topical preaching.  That's what I almost never do—but I am doing it right now.  In a topical sermon, the preacher preaches not about a Biblical text, but about subject—and hopefully what the Bible has to say about that subject, whether it's prayer or justice or holiness or expositional preaching.  There can be some crossover.  A topical sermon can be expositional as it explains what a certain text has to say about a certain topic.  But a steady diet of topic preaching isn't healthy for a church, because it's not driven by the word.  Topical preaching is driven by the preacher.  And if a congregation only ever hear what their preacher wants to preach about, they'll never grow beyond where their preacher is at.  And he won't grow either, because he's always digging into the Bible to find support for his ideas.  In contrast, expositional preaching is driven by the word.  The Bible's agenda becomes the preacher's agenda—and he's therefore always learning and often surprised by what he finds—and the congregation grows by hearing God's word.  Brother and Sisters, my ideas—no preacher's ideas or pet topics—will not transform you into the people God intends you to be.  Only his word will do that. Expositional preaching also requires and builds a commitment to God's word.  Many of us came from the Anglican Church of Canada.  How did a church go so badly awry, how did it stray so far from orthodoxy, and how did so many people just sit and let it happen?  It happened because the church lost her commitment to the word.  Her pulpit ministry failed.  The great expositional sermons preached in Anglicn pulpits from the Reformation through the 19th Century were replaced by ten or fifteen minute homilies—often topical, but typically paying only lip-service to God's word.  And that created a people with no passion for the word and that, in turn, created a people with little knowledge of the word—people ready to be carried about by every wind of doctrine. Brothers and Sisters, God's word creates God's people.  Many of us have seen what happens when you take it away or water it down.  God's people become lax in faith and lax in discipline.  Instead of conforming to the word, they conform to the culture around them.  And eventually they simply stop being God's people altogether—they apostatise.  And it's not just “liberal” churches.  Evangelicals at large are facing their own crisis, because so many of our churches are failing to preach the word.  Our preachers are preaching pop-psychology or they're preaching topically and preaching their own ideas—and even as they affirm the authority or inerrancy of Scripture, their churches are often looking less and less like the people of God and more like the culture around us.  Dear Friends, our churches must, first and foremost, by centred on God's word and that begins with our pulpit ministry.  If we look at the history of the Church we see a lot of ebb and flow, high points and low points, and one thing we see consistently is that the high points in Church history always align with those times and places where her people and especially her preachers were committed to preaching God's word.  People like to say that the great revivals of history were brought about by prayer.  That's only half the story.  Those periods of great prayer were brought about by periods of great biblical preaching.  Again, God's word creates God's people.  It won't happen any other way. Let's go back to the very beginning of the story.  Genesis 1.  What was God's agent of creation?  “God said…”  He spoke and the cosmos and everything in it came into being.  When Adam and Eve sinned, they were cast from his presence, but the word of the Lord remained.  He spoke, cursing the serpent and giving them hope in a promise of restoration.  When all humanity had lost the knowledge of God, he spoke again, this time calling Abraham out of Ur and leading him to the promised land.  And when the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, the word of the Lord came again to Moses, and through him to the whole people—even to Pharaoh.  By his word he brought down a pagan king and created a people for himself.  At Sinai he spoke again, establishing a covenant with his people and giving his life—the means of life in his presence.  God's word creates and gives life. Over and over the Lord spoke to his people.  That phrase “the word of the Lord came” or something similar occurs more than 3,800 times.  By his word he created a people and by his word he sustained them.  By his word he made himself known.  By his word he created faith amongst them.  I was reading an article this week about literacy in ancient Israel.  Hardly anyone in the ancient world knew how to read and write—just a tiny handful of scribes.  But in ancient Israel and Judah the literacy rate may have been as high as fifteen or twenty per cent.[1]  Why?  Because they were a people of the word, particularly as the ancient oral traditions were recorded and became scripture.  They knew that God's word is life. Think of Ezekiel's vivid vision of the valley of dry bones.  This is one of my favourite passages in all of Scripture because it so often gives me hope as a preacher.  The Lord took Ezekiel to a valley full of dead, dry bones.  The Lord asked him how those bones could live again.  Ezekiel had no idea.  It looked hopeless.  Here's Ezekiel 37:4-6: Then [the Lord] said to me, “Prophesy over these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.  Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.   And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.”   And look at what happened when Ezekiel began preaching God's Word to those bones: So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I prophesied, there was a sound, and behold, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone.  And I looked, and behold, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them. But there was no breath in them.  Then he said to me,  “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live.”  So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army. (Ezekiel 37:7-10) The Lord explains to Ezekiel that the bones are Israel—her hope is gone.  But he will not leave his people dry and hopeless.  He promised in verse 14, “I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live.”  What's the Lord's means of giving life—of imparting his Spirit—to his people?  As in the beginning, his word, this time spoken through the prophet.  It's an amazing thing.  As a preacher it gives me hope.  Israel was dead.  Lots of people had lots of ideas about how to bring her back to life.  The nation certainly wasn't interested in listening to Ezekiel.  But preaching was the Lord's solution.  If he could speak into the pre-creation chaos and bring life, he can certainly speak to a lost, sinful, rebellious, and hopeless people and bring them back to life—giving them faith anew.  Brothers and Sisters, that's why the Church exists: a people created by the word and called to preach that word to the world.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Back to Ezekiel.  The Lord promised to speak to Israel and to give her his Spirit.  Through the prophet he promised, “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you.  And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26) And the Lord did just that.  Think of the opening verses of John's Gospel: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.  In him was life, and the life was the light of men. (John 1:1-4)   The word incarnate.  God's creative power, there in the beginning, now incarnate, one of his own people, that he might bring the dry bones to life.  And what did the word incarnate do?  He preached, of course..  His was the ministry of a prophet, the word of the Lord proclaiming the word of the Lord—announcing judgement, but also calling Israel to repentance so that when he died for the sins of his people and rose from the grave, they would understand this fresh and mighty work of God and believe.  And when it was accomplished, what did he do?  He ordained apostles to proclaim this word to Jerusalem, to Judea, to Samaria, and to the whole world.  We cannot know this God, we cannot know this Saviour, we cannot know this gospel apart from the word and without its proclamation.  It was like this for Israel and it is like this for the Church.  There's a reason, again, why Christianity and Christian missions have promoted high literacy rates—why missionaries spend years learning the languages of pre-literate peoples, developing alphabets and grammars for them, so that they can then translate the Bible—the written word—so that those peoples can have it in their own languages.  There are folks today who think that preaching—a monologue by a single man at the front—is passé, but it has been the norm for both Jews and Christians from the beginning, because we are a people committed to the word of God, knowing that it is the only source of true life. We cannot know God apart from his self-revelation of himself.  We see this in Genesis as things go from bad to worse in those first chapters, as fallen humanity loses all knowledge of God.  They grasped for heaven at Babel, but did so in an act of unbelief.  Humanity was utterly lost.  But then, in his grace, the Lord spoke and called Abraham and faith sparked to life in the darkness of the world—because God spoke, because a man heard the word of the Lord, believed, and obeyed.  As St. Paul writes in Romans 10:17, “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word”—and specifically he adds—“the word of Christ.” There are all sorts of philosophies of church growth today.  People argue for building churches around programmes.  People argue that you've got to find your niche and build it around that.  When I was visiting my parents I saw that someone had started the “Cowboy Church” not far from where they live.  When I was first ordained in the REC a friend gave me a manual for traditional Anglican church planting.  It was all about building contacts with anglophiles by getting involved in clubs and societies centred on all things English.  Other people build churches around a worship experience or a youth programme.  It's not that God can't or won't use some of those things, but Brothers and Sisters, a healthy church will always be built around the proclamation of the word of God, modelled in the pulpit and lived by the people.  Nothing else will last.  Someone once asked Martin Luther about his accomplishments.  He answered saying, “I simply taught, preached, wrote God's Word: otherwise I did nothing….The Word did it all.”[2]  That's the mindset the Church needs. But the word does more than create.  The word also sustains and sanctifies.  It is the water that causes us to grow and we will not grow without it.  When he was tempted by the devil Jesus quoted Deuteronomy 8:3, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”  Or think of the Words of the Psalmist, who wrote, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Psalm 119:105).  Without the word we will lose our way and starve.  We only have to look at Israel to see this.  Go back to King Josiah's day in 2 Chronicles 34.  After years of neglect, Josiah ordered a renovation of the temple and during that renovation the book of the law was found.  The word of the Lord had been lost—buried in a pile somewhere in the temple and forgotten for generations.  Josiah recognised the significance of that find.  He tore his clothes in grief and repentance and then gathered the priests and the elders of the people.  In their presence, he the King, read out the Lord's word and led the people in a covenant renewal ceremony.  God's word sanctifies his people. Jesus prayed this for us in his high priestly prayer in John 17: “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.”  And St. Paul wrote to the Christians in Ephesus, “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word” (Ephesians 5:25b-26).  Brothers and Sisters, without immersing ourselves in God's word we will not hear him.  There are no shortcuts.  Only his word gives life and only his word sanctifies.  This is why topical preaching—where the preacher drives the agenda—cannot be our main diet.  Occasionally a topical sermon it's necessary, but it cannot be our staple food.  This is why regular personal reading and study of the Bible is necessary.  We must be confronted by word to know God and to grow into the people he has called us to be.  And, of course, it goes without saying that we don't hear merely to hear or merely to read, but we immerse ourselves in God's word, we hear him speak, so that we can submit to his will and his ways.  And there's the Spirit at work, renewing our hearts and making fertile soil for the word to take root.  A healthy church not only proclaims God's word, but listens and is daily remade and sanctified by it. Timothy was St. Paul's young protégé.  When Paul wrote to him to give him advice as to how to shepherd the flock, it's worth noting that he gave him none of the advice that is common today.  He didn't advise Timothy to start a new program, to buy a fog machine, to hire a paid choir, to take a poll to find out what people want to hear.  He didn't do any of that.  He wrote to Timothy and said emphatically, “Preach the Word!” (2 Timothy 4:2).  Or think of the early Jerusalem Church.  When the apostles were struggling to keep up with the day-to-day tasks of the church, they ordained deacons to carry on that ministry and declared, “We will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word” (Acts 6:4).  They knew that God's word is life. One day we will see God face to face and know him perfectly, but until that day we live, not by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from his mouth.  As a church named “Living Word” my prayer is that we will be a people known in our community for our commitment to the life-giving and sanctifying word of God.  That we will be a people who value and love God's word, who put it at the centre of our ministry and of our lives, and who not only recognise its authority, but who are also seeking to submit to it and to be transformed.  I pray that we will be a people so full of God's word—this water of life—that as in John's vision of the New Jerusalem, it will overflow from us to carry God's life—the good news about Jesus—to the world around us. Let's pray: Heavenly Father, you have sent your word, incarnate in Jesus, to deliver us from our bondage to sin and death, and you have given your word written through the inspiration of your Spirit.  Remind us always that without your word there is no life.  As we go about the work of your kingdom, let us keep your word at the centre, that we might be always shaped by it and declaring it's life-giving power to the world.  We ask this in the name of Jesus our Lord, the word incarnate.  Amen. [1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/78416/more-people-were-literate-ancient-judah-we-knew [2] Luther's Works (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1959), 51:77.

Guest: Nokukhanya Mntambo - EWN ReporterSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mark Schopmeyer is a Co-Founder and Co-CEO of CaptivateIQ, the new standard for sales commissions, that helps companies set, calculate, and report paying out sales commissions. He talks about the obstacles to combining different sets of commission data and the need to create a solution. He emphasizes that a scalable solution was needed due to the limits of existing software and how more forward-thinking companies see the wisdom in moving away from traditional manual processes into an automated system. Mark also comments on trends he sees on commissions, such as the introduction of spiffs and other incentives.   HIGHLIGHTS Combining data sets must be 100% accurate for commissions CaptivateIQ creates a scalable solution for calculating commissions More modern companies quickly recognize the value of automation Fun incentives can drastically change the behaviors of salespeople Pay on bookings and cash receipts versus commissions QUOTES Different data sets are especially difficult with commissions Mark: "You had to grab this data from these data systems and, mind you, data never comes in the form that you need it in. That's probably true for a lot of people in different roles. Could not be more truer than commissions. You're grabbing these sales transaction data, then you're massaging it. From a data integrity perspective and you're doing things like splitting deals. Salesforce just doesn't split opportunities." Incentivize salespeople with fun and rewarding spiffs: Mark: "Gamification's not the right word but there's almost just like psychological element that you can kind of make the commission plan fun and you're driving even more a rally call or engagement or a sub-drive versus like, oh, if you do this, you'll get that, which kind of becomes boring in itself."  Change and align behavior with incentives Mark: "One of the best forms of incentivizing people is people just like to get paid. Like that is one of the most key ways to change behavior and also align behavior. And so, I think if you can use that correctly, you can unlock a very, very powerful way to influence how people drive their behavior, whether it's to go like 110% to doing something that the company thinks will be very productive."   Find out more about Mark in the links below: LinkedIn (Personal): https://www.linkedin.com/in/mschop/ LinkedIn (Company): https://www.linkedin.com/company/captivateiq/ Website: https://www.captivateiq.com/ More on Andy: Connect on LinkedIn Get Andy's new book "Sell Without Selling Out" on Amazon Learn more at AndyPaul.com Sponsored by: Revenue.io | Unlock exponential growth with an AI-powered RevOps platform | Revenue.io Scratchpad | The fastest way to update Salesforce, take sales notes, and stay on top of to-dos | Scratchpad.com Blueboard | World's leading experiential rewards & recognition platform | Blueboard.com Explore the Revenue.io Podcast Universe: Sales Enablement Podcast RevOps Podcast Selling with Purpose Podcast

Gospel of Mark is a sermon series that will take us through each verse in the book of Mark. This week, we'll look at Mark 10:1-12 to see Jesus' vision for marriage. Follow us on Social Media Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wearesent.church Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wearesent.church Sent Church https://www.wearesent.church #wearesent #churchonline

Oral argument argued before the Eighth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on or about 06/14/2022

Memorial to mark one month after the Tops mass shooting

Before you sell your company, even the odds. This episode features guests Mark Achler and Mert Iseri, authors of the recent book, Exit Right: How to Sell Your Startup, Maximize Your Return and Build Your Legacy. Exit Right demystifies how to conclude the startup journey, a perfect complement to our podcast, which focuses more on the exits of larger middle-market companies. As Brad Feld states in the Foreword, “Mert and Mark set the roadmap for how entrepreneurs and business owners can proactively manage the process of getting to a successful exit along the way”. As Jeff says at the start of the interview: Mark and Mert cover so many great informative topics in the book. There is a wealth of tips to guide business owners through what can be a tumultuous process, getting through the exit. There are also so many topics we align with: relationships matter most, planning for wealth, time kills all deals, and the importance of following a best-practice process.  In this podcast episode, we focus on three topics with a lot of meat to each:  FAIR, Mert and Mark's framework for a successful exit, (3:00)  The“Exit Talk” and how we suggest that all companies adopt this practice with their board (15:00), and Who is involved in the Exit Talk and why? (28:00) What is FAIR? Why does it lead to the best transactions? (3:00) Mert: What we realized as we started to gather stories and experiences from M&A bankers, lawyers, serial entrepreneurs, etc is that the real question isn't, “Let's find out who's going to pay the most.” The real question is, “What's the right home for this business? What's the right home for my people? What's the right home for the vision? Who is going to serve our customers the best?” Our view of an exit went from being a short-term transaction to a long-term partnership. The term “exit” is a poor word choice.  You're not really exiting anything. If anything, it's the beginning of a brand new relationship. So when we ask ourselves, “What makes a great home for a startup?” we focus on these four elements that make exits great. FAIR. Fit, Alignment, Integration, and Rationale.  If you have all four of those, it just so happens that you've also found the person who's willing to pay the most for your business, because they will realize the long-term value and they'll price the deal accordingly. Fit is the cultural fit between the two companies. Amazon and Zappos are a great fit. Time Warner and AOL, are probably not a great fit. It's easily described. Can you sit next to this person for four hours and not want to kill them by the end of the meeting? Can you actually make decisions without written rules? Are cultural values aligned? Are the DNAs sort of similar, cousins to each other between those two companies? Alignment is about being aligned with your co-founders, board, and shareholders in terms of the direction of where you want to go. The acquiring company also must be aligned.  We almost always dismiss the alignment that we need from all sides of the table. This isn't two sides looking at each other. This is two sides looking in the same direction. Integration has to do with the plan for how these two companies will come together. We've seen so many examples of this plan of integration being done as an afterthought. It's not just product and sales integration but people integration, finance integration; many, many layers. And all of these stakeholders have different agendas that need to be individually managed.  Rationale. Can you explain to your grandmother why this acquisition makes sense? How are we going to deliver more value to our customers as a result of this partnership? How is two plus two equal to 100 in this context? Mark: There are profound financial implications to the FAIR framework. Let's take Integration. Integration is the ugly stepchild. People always say, “Oh yeah, we'll deal with integration afterward.”  Turns out that in many transactions, it's not always 100% cash. Sometimes there's an earn-out for future performance. If you're not integrated well (you don't have the resources you need to execute your plan), there are some significant financial implications to the earn-out. Then there are the financial implications to Rationale. Transactions are typically based on looking backward using a multiple. When you create a rationale that says one plus one equals a hundred, if it's a strategic investment, you take your product and we plug it into the larger company's sales force or the larger company's customer base. What could we do inside the larger company? What's the impact of your product on the larger company? The way to maximize value is not looking backward as a multiple, but looking forward using the rationale. Strategically, why is the combination so valuable? If you can get everybody aligned around the rationale and the financial implications of that rationale, that's how you're going to drive a better price for an exit. Mert: No one's going to just sit down and tell you, “This is our rationale.” You uncover it. You unearth it over years. That's why we urge entrepreneurs to put their party dresses on. Talk to many competitors. Talk to strategics. Get out the door. You need to build this trusted relationship over time with fundamental questions. How can I help? How can I help you push your agenda forward? How can I help my customers? This is what great partnerships really look like. We're not saying go share your financials with your competitors or give away all your IP to a larger strategy, but you need to be that trusted partner that advances the mission on all sides and creates a situation where everybody wins. Mark: We wrote the book about exits, but it turns out that the decisions that entrepreneurs make at the beginning of their journey have an outsized impact at the end of the journey. Even though this book is really about the exit, there is really good advice there about the beginning of the journey as well. Jeff: That's exactly right. This book is really about the journey.  All of the steps on the journey influence the end. There's so much wisdom in the book and insights about all the things that you can do to proactively get to the right end. Management meetings are oftentimes the first time that business owners meet their potential acquirers, whether they're competitors or strategics, or investors. But the longer that relationship can be developed, the more that you can uncover in terms of the shared common goal of what can we do together. And the best valuation and the best terms will just naturally evolve. What is an “Exit Talk”? How can founders use it to reach alignment in their boardrooms? (15:00) Jeff: The Exit Talk really struck a chord with me. Let's encourage clients and future clients to have these discussions and this thought process through the FAIR framework to really think ahead. Sometimes we as investment bankers get brought in late in the game. But most of our transactions and our best relationships really span years. We get to know the business, the goals, and importantly the people involved, the operators, the owners, the founders, and the investors. Some of these relationships for us span a decade or more. We give them advice on how to grow their companies. This concept of an exit talk is missing from my perspective. Exit discussions are often secretive or clouded in secrecy. It is a very small universe of folks within a company that knows that a transaction is imminent. It's rarely discussed openly among the senior leadership team until late in the game. What you guys propose is proactive. Through your work and sharing your work with my future clients, I'd like them to embrace this philosophy. I love this quote that you said, “Instead of fueling the awkwardness of the exit topic by staying silent, we are putting forward a new norm that we believe the entire industry should adopt, which is the Exit Talk.” Mark: This is one of our favorite topics. But before we dive into the Exit Talk: We are such big believers in trust. Every deal has its ups and downs. It has its emotional turbulence, it's the journey. Trust is the lubrication that gets deals done through to the conclusion. I just wanted to put a fine point on that topic of trust because it permeates everything we do. The Exit Talk.  It turns out that there's a stigma to talking about exits. CEOs are afraid. They're afraid that if they bring up the topic of an exit that their board and their investors are going to think their heart's not in it. They've lost hope. They've lost faith. In the Venture Capital or Private Equity world, we have a time horizon. When you take our capital, you take our agenda, and you take our time horizon. We're looking for X return over Y timeframe. And if you're in year one of a fund, we've got plenty of time.  Let's go build and grow. If you're in year 10 of a fund, we've got to start returning capital back to our LPs. With the Exit Talk, what we're proposing is that once a year, maybe your first board meeting of the year, you have a regularly scheduled annual talk where the CEO, without fear of being perceived as their heart's not in it, can talk about the exit. The reason it's so incredibly helpful is that you have the luxury of time. If you had 18 months or two years, you have the luxury of saying, “Who's going to be the most likely acquirer? Is it going to be a strategic acquirer? And why? Who is it and why would they want to acquire us? Or is it going to be a financial buyer and what are they looking for? Are they looking for top-line revenue?”  If we're going to sell to somebody who really cares about growth, we may invest a little bit more heavily in sales and marketing. If it's somebody who is more financially oriented and really cares about EBITDA, we might tighten the ship and focus on profitability.  It gives you the luxury of time to get your intellectual property in order, make sure that every single employee has a signed agreement, and make sure that trademarks and patents are filed appropriately. Get your data room pristine. If you have the luxury of time, you can optimize and present your business. And you could take the time to find the best bankers and attorneys who really are going to represent you well. Mert: An outcome of this talk doesn't necessarily have to be “we're ready to sell, or we're not ready to sell”. It can also be an opportunity to start prototyping some of the theories around how you add more value to your customers. This is a great centerpiece for what we believe an exit should be reasoned around. This will help our customers faster/better than what we could do on our own by just raising more money or gathering more capital or resources. For instance, if you are going to have a strategic alignment with a larger company like Google, but you're not ready to sell, it's still an opportunity to start a relationship. Maybe we work on a mutual customer together. Maybe we create some content together where we tell our stories and we share our wisdom with theirs. You want to start charging up that trust battery over time. When you are ready, you are a known entity. The reality is these M&A (Corporate Development) leaders want to buy companies from trusted entities. They don't want an egg on their face either. They want to know the company that they're investing in. They're not viewing this as an acquisition, they're really viewing it as an investment. They want to know they can trust you. They want to know that you can go the distance. It's a really difficult thing to do to create that kind of trust. You're not going to rush through trust. You're going to build it incrementally over years. Even the identification of a strategic partner when you're not ready to sell is extremely valuable because that's an opportunity to generate a relationship. Find out what their priorities are. See if your solution helps move those numbers forward.  Mark: We're big believers in empathy. We have an empathy framework. There are three rules of empathy: 1) It's not about you. It's always about the person sitting across the table from you. 2) Do your homework.  Deeply and truly understand what's important. Mert just said, “Go listen to the quarterly earnings report.” They're going to tell you what they care about. 3) Bring a gift, add value. When I say bring a gift: what can you do? If you're an industry leader, provide some thought leadership about where the market's heading. Share new bits of technology. Not only can you gain knowledge about their strategic direction, you can also share knowledge and be thought of as a trusted thought leader.  If you take those empathy rules and apply them to building relationships over time, that's how you're going to earn trust. Jeff: I love the idea of a trust battery and charging that up over time. You can't do that overnight. You can't do that in one management meeting. You can't do that in a really compressed timeframe. You really need to start early and think about what you can bring to the table. What can you bring as a gift to add value to somebody else so that they can see the value in what you are bringing?  That's really the roadmap that you guys layout in your book: what steps can we take proactively to get to the best outcome. Who is involved in the Exit Talk, and why? (28:00) Mark: Let's separate out the annual exit talk from an actual transaction process. The exit talk is a board of directors-level conversation. Maybe you bring in one or two top lieutenants into that conversation, depending on the relationship between the CEO and maybe one or two C-suite members. But that's a board-level, strategic conversation that's not for the whole company. (For an actual transaction process), there are lots of different ways of handling it. My own personal opinion is that there is a dance that takes place starting as an aperture that broadens over time. One of the challenges with telling any employee about a transaction is human nature. “What's that mean to me? Am I going to have a job? Am I going to get fired? Am I going to become rich? What are my stock options worth?” One of the challenges is that not all deals happen; deals fall apart all the time. So the team has to have their eye on the ball. For the CEO, when they're going through a transaction, it can be all-consuming.  We've seen instances where companies started slowing down, missing their numbers because the CEO was distracted and not focused on running their business.  The way I think about it is starting with the CEO and the board, keeping a really tight circle of information. And then as the conversations start to broaden and deepen in a transaction, then people are going to start the due diligence process.  Make sure your C-suite is involved and your executive team is involved. The people who are going to be part of the due diligence process, obviously you're going to have to inform them. I don't think it's a great thing to just wake up one morning and say to your entire employee base, “Hey, guess what? We just got sold.” There's a middle ground someplace in that continuum. Try to keep it confidential through most of the process. As you start to get to certainty you need to start opening it up so it's not a surprise to everybody. Mert: There's one major stakeholder that hasn't been discussed and I just want to bring that up, and that's your family. Most founders overlook that and think of this transaction as a business event. This is a life event. Your family is a humongous stakeholder. We want to highlight that this is a critical component of whether an exit happens or not. What's happening with your family is just as important as what is happening with your board and other stakeholders. Mark: I couldn't agree with you more. It's not just us, it's our families and our loved ones too that have a stake in this. Jeff: It goes for all key constituents, starting with the family and then moving down to the board members and the C-suite and figuring out what's the right communication style and method and frequency. These things are really critical decisions that most folks don't really spend the time thinking about. Mark: One of the questions we ask CEOs is: when you're done with the transaction, will your employees come back to work for you in the next company you start? Will your investors want to invest in you in the next company you start? Will the biz dev lead of the large company who goes on to the next company, are they going to want to buy your next company? I think what many entrepreneurs fail to understand is that the relationships you build and your legacy live on way past the deal and the transaction.  We're big believers in servant leadership and that the best CEOs don't view life as a zero-sum game. They make sure that they take care of their customers, their employees, and their investors. They try to find the balance of supporting all relationships over time. ABOUT OUR GUESTS While a successful entrepreneur may exit a handful of companies in their lifetime, large buyers close deals all the time. Without decades of experience in mergers and acquisitions, founders don't have the tools they need to get the best results for themselves, their teams, or the new parent company. Through dozens of interviews with M&A leaders at the biggest Silicon Valley acquirers—as well as attorneys, bankers, and founders who have been through the trenches—Exit Right delivers the hard-earned lessons that lead to successful exits. From negotiation to valuation to breaking down a term sheet, managing legal costs, and handling emotional turbulence—this unparalleled guide covers every critical aspect of a technology startup sale. Learn where deals get into trouble, how to create alignment between negotiating parties, and what terms you should care about most. Above all, learn how to win in both the short and the long term, maximizing your price while positioning your company for a legacy you can be proud of. Author Biographies An early employee of Apple and Head of Innovation at Redbox, Mark Achler has been creating and investing in tech startups since 1986. Today, he is a founding partner of MATH Venture Partners, a technology venture capital fund, and an adjunct professor at the Northwestern Kellogg School of Management. Mert Iseri co-founded SwipeSense, a healthcare technology company acquired by SC Johnson in 2020. Prior to that, he co-founded Design for America, a national network of students using design thinking to create social impact, now part of the IBM Watson Foundation. He is currently an Entrepreneur in Residence at MATH Venture Partners. Socials Mark Achler Mert Hilmi Iseri Book About the hosts Gina Cocking serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Colonnade Advisors. Gina began her career in investment banking at Kidder Peabody, was an analyst at Madison Dearborn Partners and an associate at J.P. Morgan & Co. She was the Chief Financial Officer of Cobalt Finance, a specialty finance company. She went on to become the Chief Financial Officer of Healthcare Laundry Systems, a private equity-backed company for which she oversaw the successful sale to a strategic acquirer. Gina served as the Line of Business CFO – Consumer Banking and Lending at Discover Financial Services. Gina serves on the Board of Directors of CIB Marine Bancshares, Inc. Gina received her BA in Economics and an MBA from the University of Chicago. Jeff Guylay is a Managing Director of Colonnade Advisors. Prior to joining Colonnade in 2000, Jeff was an investment banker at J.P. Morgan in the firm's Mergers & Acquisitions and Fixed Income Capital Markets groups in New York. He also spent several years in J.P. Morgan's Chicago office. Jeff has over 20 years of M&A and investment banking experience and has served as lead execution partner on over 25 M&A and financing transactions at Colonnade. Jeff received an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management and a Master of Engineering Management from the University's McCormick School of Engineering. Jeff received a BA from Dartmouth College and a BE from Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering. About the Middle Market Mergers & Acquisitions Podcast Get the insiders' take on mergers and acquisitions. M&A investment bankers Gina Cocking and Jeff Guylay of Colonnade Advisors discuss the technical aspects of and tactics used in middle market deals. This podcast offers actionable advice and strategies for selling your company and is aimed at owners of middle market companies in the financial services and business services sectors. Middle market companies are generally valued between $20 million and $500 million. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and consider leaving us a short review:

Sunday will mark one year since Adam Amoia washout and killed in downtown St. Augustine. We talk today with his brother Lenny, and longtime friend Rosie about how they're coping one year later, and how friends and family can keep Adam's memory alive.

Hotel workers at the Hilton Metrotown in Burnaby are involved in the longest hotel lockout in British Columbia's history. We speak with Stephanie Fung, Communications Organizer for UNITE HERE Local 40, the Union representing the workers. She's also a member of Asian Canadian Labour Alliance.

Mark: one thing you lack sermon by Matthew Shedden.

Myke, Tom, and Dan discuss the orange Mark One, and the new Mac Studio and Studio Display. Then, having triumphantly solved the temperature scale in the previous episode, the trio move to fixing Daylight Saving(s) Time.

Myke, Tom, and Dan discuss the orange Mark One, and the new Mac Studio and Studio Display. Then, having triumphantly solved the temperature scale in the previous episode, the trio move to fixing Daylight Saving(s) Time.

This week's episode looks at “Tomorrow Never Knows”, the making of Revolver by the Beatles, and the influence of Timothy Leary on the burgeoning psychedelic movement. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Keep on Running" by the Spencer Davis Group. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata A few things -- I say "Fairfield" at one point when I mean "Fairchild". While Timothy Leary was imprisoned in 1970 he wasn't actually placed in the cell next to Charles Manson until 1973. Sources differ on when Geoff Emerick started at EMI, and he *may* not have worked on "Sun Arise", though I've seen enough reliable sources saying he did that I think it's likely. And I've been told that Maureen Cleave denied having an affair with Lennon -- though note that I said it was "strongly rumoured" rather than something definite. Resources As usual, a mix of all the songs excerpted in this episode is available at Mixcloud.com. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. For information on Timothy Leary I used a variety of sources including The Most Dangerous Man in America by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis; Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In by Robert Forte; The Starseed Signals by Robert Anton Wilson; and especially The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin. I also referred to both The Tibetan Book of the Dead and to The Psychedelic Experience. Leary's much-abridged audiobook version of The Psychedelic Experience can be purchased from Folkways Records. Sadly the first mono mix of "Tomorrow Never Knows" has been out of print since it was first issued. The only way to get the second mono mix is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but the stereo mix is easily available on Revolver. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start this episode, I'd like to note that it deals with a number of subjects some listeners might find upsetting, most notably psychedelic drug use, mental illness, and suicide. I think I've dealt with those subjects fairly respectfully, but you still may want to check the transcript if you have worries about these subjects. Also, we're now entering a period of music history with the start of the psychedelic era where many of the songs we're looking at are influenced by non-mainstream religious traditions, mysticism, and also increasingly by political ideas which may seem strange with nearly sixty years' hindsight. I'd just like to emphasise that when I talk about these ideas, I'm trying as best I can to present the thinking of the people I'm talking about, in an accurate and unbiased way, rather than talking about my own beliefs. We're going to head into some strange places in some of these episodes, and my intention is neither to mock the people I'm talking about nor to endorse their ideas, but to present those ideas to you the listener so you can understand the music, the history, and the mindset of the people involved, Is that clear? Then lets' turn on, tune in, and drop out back to 1955... [Opening excerpt from The Psychedelic Experience] There is a phenomenon in many mystical traditions, which goes by many names, including the dark night of the soul and the abyss. It's an experience that happens to mystics of many types, in which they go through unimaginable pain near the beginning of their journey towards greater spiritual knowledge. That pain usually involves a mixture of internal and external events -- some terrible tragedy happens to them, giving them a new awareness of the world's pain, at the same time they're going through an intellectual crisis about their understanding of the world, and it can last several years. It's very similar to the more common experience of the mid-life crisis, except that rather than buying a sports car and leaving their spouse, mystics going through this are more likely to found a new religion. At least, those who survive the crushing despair intact. Those who come out of the experience the other end often find themselves on a totally new path, almost like they're a different person. In 1955, when Dr. Timothy Leary's dark night of the soul started, he was a respected academic psychologist, a serious scientist who had already made several substantial contributions to his field, and was considered a rising star. By 1970, he would be a confirmed mystic, sentenced to twenty years in prison, in a cell next to Charles Manson, and claiming to different people that he was the reincarnation of Gurdjieff, Aleister Crowley, and Jesus Christ. In the fifties, Leary and his wife had an open relationship, in which they were both allowed to sleep with other people, but weren't allowed to form emotional attachments to them. Unfortunately, Leary *had* formed an emotional attachment to another woman, and had started spending so much time with her that his wife was convinced he was going to leave her. On top of that, Leary was an alcoholic, and was prone to get into drunken rows with his wife. He woke up on the morning of his thirty-fifth birthday, hung over after one of those rows, to find that she had died by suicide while he slept, leaving a note saying that she knew he was going to leave her and that her life would be meaningless without him. This was only months after Leary had realised that the field he was working in, to which he had devoted his academic career, was seriously broken. Along with a colleague, Frank Barron, he published a paper on the results of clinical psychotherapy, "Changes in psychoneurotic patients with and without psychotherapy" which analysed the mental health of a group of people who had been through psychotherapy, and found that a third of them improved, a third stayed the same, and a third got worse. The problem was that there was a control group, of people with the same conditions who were put on a waiting list and told to wait the length of time that the therapy patients were being treated. A third of them improved, a third stayed the same, and a third got worse. In other words, psychotherapy as it was currently practised had no measurable effect at all on patients' health. This devastated Leary, as you might imagine. But more through inertia than anything else, he continued working in the field, and in 1957 he published what was regarded as a masterwork -- his book Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality: A Functional Theory and Methodology for Personality Evaluation. Leary's book was a challenge to the then-dominant idea in psychology, behaviourism, which claimed that it made no sense to talk about anyone's internal thoughts or feelings -- all that mattered was what could be measured, stimuli and responses, and that in a very real sense the unmeasurable thoughts people had didn't exist at all. Behaviourism looked at every human being as a mechanical black box, like a series of levers. Leary, by contrast, analysed human interactions as games, in which people took on usual roles, but were able, if they realised this, to change the role or even the game itself. It was very similar to the work that Eric Berne was doing at the same time, and which would later be popularised in Berne's book Games People Play. Berne's work was so popular that it led to the late-sixties hit record "Games People Play" by Joe South: [Excerpt: Joe South: "Games People Play"] But in 1957, between Leary and Berne, Leary was considered the more important thinker among his peers -- though some thought of him as more of a showman, enthralled by his own ideas about how he was going to change psychology, than a scientist, and some thought that he was unfairly taking credit for the work of lesser-known but better researchers. But by 1958, the effects of the traumas Leary had gone through a couple of years earlier were at their worst. He was starting to become seriously ill -- from the descriptions, probably from something stress-related and psychosomatic -- and he took his kids off to Europe, where he was going to write the great American novel. But he rapidly ran through his money, and hadn't got very far with the novel. He was broke, and ill, and depressed, and desperate, but then in 1959 his old colleague Frank Barron, who was on holiday in the area, showed up, and the two had a conversation that changed Leary's life forever in multiple ways. The first of the conversational topics would have the more profound effect, though that wouldn't be apparent at first. Barron talked to Leary about his previous holiday, when he'd visited Mexico and taken psilocybin mushrooms. These had been used by Mexicans for centuries, but the first publication about them in English had only been in 1955 -- the same year when Leary had had other things on his mind -- and they were hardly known at all outside Mexico. Barron talked about the experience as being the most profound, revelatory, experience of his life. Leary thought his friend sounded like a madman, but he humoured him for the moment. But Barron also mentioned that another colleague was on holiday in the same area. David McClelland, head of the Harvard Center for Personality Research, had mentioned to Barron that he had just read Diagnosis of Personality and thought it a work of genius. McClelland hired Leary to work for him at Harvard, and that was where Leary met Ram Dass. [Excerpt from "The Psychedelic Experience"] Ram Dass was not the name that Dass was going by at the time -- he was going by his birth name, and only changed his name a few years later, after the events we're talking about -- but as always, on this podcast we don't use people's deadnames, though his is particularly easy to find as it's still the name on the cover of his most famous book, which we'll be talking about shortly. Dass was another psychologist at the Centre for Personality Research, and he would be Leary's closest collaborator for the next several years. The two men would become so close that at several points Leary would go travelling and leave his children in Dass' care for extended periods of time. The two were determined to revolutionise academic psychology. The start of that revolution didn't come until summer 1960. While Leary was on holiday in Cuernavaca in Mexico, a linguist and anthropologist he knew, Lothar Knauth, mentioned that one of the old women in the area collected those magic mushrooms that Barron had been talking about. Leary decided that that might be a fun thing to do on his holiday, and took a few psilocybin mushrooms. The effect was extraordinary. Leary called this, which had been intended only as a bit of fun, "the deepest religious experience of my life". [Excerpt from "The Psychedelic Experience"] He returned to Harvard after his summer holiday and started what became the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Leary and various other experimenters took controlled doses of psilocybin and wrote down their experiences, and Leary believed this would end up revolutionising psychology, giving them insights unattainable by other methods. The experimenters included lecturers, grad students, and people like authors Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, and Alan Watts, who popularised Zen Buddhism in the West. Dass didn't join the project until early 1961 -- he'd actually been on the holiday with Leary, but had arrived a few days after the mushroom experiment, and nobody had been able to get hold of the old woman who knew where to find the mushrooms, so he'd just had to deal with Leary telling him about how great it was rather than try it himself. He then spent a semester as a visiting scholar at Berkeley, so he didn't get to try his first trip until February 1961. Dass, on his first trip, first had a revelation about the nature of his own true soul, then decided at three in the morning that he needed to go and see his parents, who lived nearby, and tell them the good news. But there was several feet of snow, and so he decided he must save his parents from the snow, and shovel the path to their house. At three in the morning. Then he saw them looking out the window at him, he waved, and then started dancing around the shovel. He later said “Until that moment I was always trying to be the good boy, looking at myself through other people's eyes. What did the mothers, fathers, teachers, colleagues want me to be? That night, for the first time, I felt good inside. It was OK to be me.” The Harvard Psilocybin Project soon became the Harvard Psychedelic Project. The term "psychedelic", meaning "soul revealing", was coined by the British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond, who had been experimenting with hallucinogens for years, and had guided Aldous Huxley on the mescaline trip described in The Doors of Perception. Osmond and Huxley had agreed that the term "psychotomimetic", in use at the time, which meant "mimicking psychosis", wasn't right -- it was too negative. They started writing letters to each other, suggesting alternative terms. Huxley came up with "phanerothyme", the Greek for "soul revealing", and wrote a little couplet to Osmond: To make this trivial world sublime Take half a gramme of phanerothyme. Osmond countered with the Latin equivalent: To fathom hell or soar angelic Just take a pinch of psychedelic Osmond also inspired Leary's most important experimental work of the early sixties. Osmond had got to know Bill W., the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and had introduced W. to LSD. W. had become sober after experiencing a profound spiritual awakening and a vision of white light while being treated for his alcoholism using the so-called "belladonna cure" -- a mixture of various hallucinogenic and toxic substances that was meant to cure alcoholism. When W. tried LSD, he found it replicated his previous spiritual experience and became very evangelistic about its use by alcoholics, thinking it could give them the same kind of awakening he'd had. Leary became convinced that if LSD could work on alcoholics, it could also be used to help reshape the personalities of habitual criminals and lead them away from reoffending. His idea for how to treat people was based, in part, on the ideas of transactional analysis. There is always a hierarchical relationship between a therapist and their patient, and that hierarchical relationship itself, in Leary's opinion, forced people into particular game roles and made it impossible for them to relate as equals, and thus impossible for the therapist to truly help the patient. So his idea was that there needed to be a shared bonding experience between patient and doctor. So in his prison experiments, he and the other people involved, including Ralph Metzner, one of his grad students, would take psilocybin *with* the patients. In short-term follow-ups the patients who went through this treatment process were less depressed, felt better, and were only half as likely to reoffend as normal prisoners. But critics pointed out that the prisoners had been getting a lot of individual attention and support, and there was no control group getting that support without the psychedelics. [Excerpt: The Psychedelic Experience] As the experiments progressed, though, things were becoming tense within Harvard. There was concern that some of the students who were being given psilocybin were psychologically vulnerable and were being put at real risk. There was also worry about the way that Leary and Dass were emphasising experience over analysis, which was felt to be against the whole of academia. Increasingly it looked like there was a clique forming as well, with those who had taken part in their experiments on the inside and looking down on those outside, and it looked to many people like this was turning into an actual cult. This was simply not what the Harvard psychology department was meant to be doing. And one Harvard student was out to shut them down for good, and his name was Andrew Weil. Weil is now best known as one of the leading lights in alternative health, and has made appearances on Oprah and Larry King Live, but for many years his research interest was in mind-altering chemicals -- his undergraduate thesis was on the use of nutmeg to induce different states of consciousness. At this point Weil was an undergraduate, and he and his friend Ronnie Winston had both tried to get involved in the Harvard Psilocybin Project, but had been turned down -- while they were enthusiastic about it, they were also undergraduates, and Leary and Dass had agreed with the university that they wouldn't be using undergraduates in their project, and that only graduate students, faculty, and outsiders would be involved. So Weil and Winston had started their own series of experiments, using mescaline after they'd been unable to get any psilocybin -- they'd contacted Aldous Huxley, the author of The Doors of Perception and an influence on Leary and Dass' experiments, and asked him where they could get mescaline, and he'd pointed them in the right direction. But then Winston and Dass had become friends, and Dass had given Winston some psilocybin -- not as part of his experiments, so Dass didn't think he was crossing a line, but just socially. Weil saw this as a betrayal by Winston, who stopped hanging round with him once he became close to Dass, and also as a rejection of him by Dass and Leary. If they'd give Winston psilocybin, why wouldn't they give it to him? Weil was a writer for the Harvard Crimson, Harvard's newspaper, and he wrote a series of exposes on Leary and Dass for the Crimson. He went to his former friend Winston's father and told him "Your son is getting drugs from a faculty member. If your son will admit to that charge, we'll cut out your son's name. We won't use it in the article."  Winston did admit to the charge, under pressure from his father, and was brought to tell the Dean, saying to the Dean “Yes, sir, I did, and it was the most educational experience I've had at Harvard.” Weil wrote about this for the Crimson, and the story was picked up by the national media. Weil eventually wrote about Leary and Dass for Look magazine, where he wrote “There were stories of students and others using hallucinogens for seductions, both heterosexual and homosexual.” And this seems actually to have been a big part of Weil's motivation. While Dass and Winston always said that their relationship was purely platonic, Dass was bisexual, and Weil seems to have assumed his friend had been led astray by an evil seducer. This was at a time when homophobia and biphobia were even more prevalent in society than they are now, and part of the reason Leary and Dass fell out in the late sixties is that Leary started to see Dass' sexuality as evil and perverted and something they should be trying to use LSD to cure. The experiments became a national scandal, and one of the reasons that LSD was criminalised a few years later. Dass was sacked for giving drugs to undergraduates; Leary had gone off to Mexico to get away from the stress, leaving his kids with Dass. He would be sacked for going off without permission and leaving his classes untaught. As Leary and Dass were out of Harvard, they had to look for other sources of funding. Luckily, Dass turned William Mellon Hitchcock, the heir to the Mellon oil fortune, on to acid, and he and his brother Tommy and sister Peggy gave them the run of a sixty-four room mansion, named Millbrook. When they started there, they were still trying to be academics, but over the five years they were at Millbrook it became steadily less about research and more of a hippie commune, with regular visitors and long-term residents including Alan Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and the jazz musician Maynard Ferguson, who would later get a small amount of fame with jazz-rock records like his version of "MacArthur Park": [Excerpt: Maynard Ferguson, "MacArthur Park"] It was at Millbrook that Leary, Dass, and Metzner would write the book that became The Psychedelic Experience. This book was inspired by the Bardo Thödol, a book allegedly written by Padmasambhava, the man who introduced Buddhism to Tibet in the eighth century, though no copies of it are known to have existed before the fourteenth century, when it was supposedly discovered by Karma Lingpa. Its title translates as Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State, but it was translated into English under the name The Tibetan Book of the Dead, as Walter Evans-Wentz, who compiled and edited the first English translation was, like many Westerners who studied Buddhism in the early part of the twentieth century, doing so because he was an occultist and a member of the Theosophical Society, which believes the secret occult masters of the world live in Tibet, but which also considered the Egyptian Book of the Dead -- a book which bears little relationship to the Bardo Thödol, and which was written thousands of years earlier on a different continent -- to be a major religious document. So it was through that lens that Evans-Wentz was viewing the Bardo Thödol, and he renamed the book to emphasise what he perceived as its similarities. Part of the Bardo Thödol is a description of what happens to someone between death and rebirth -- the process by which the dead person becomes aware of true reality, and then either transcends it or is dragged back into it by their lesser impulses -- and a series of meditations that can be used to help with that transcendence. In the version published as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, this is accompanied by commentary from Evans-Wentz, who while he was interested in Buddhism didn't actually know that much about Tibetan Buddhism, and was looking at the text through a Theosophical lens, and mostly interpreting it using Hindu concepts. Later editions of Evans-Wentz's version added further commentary by Carl Jung, which looked at Evans-Wentz's version of the book through Jung's own lens, seeing it as a book about psychological states, not about anything more supernatural (although Jung's version of psychology was always a supernaturalist one, of course). His Westernised, psychologised, version of the book's message became part of the third edition. Metzner later said "At the suggestion of Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard we began using the Bardo Thödol ( Tibetan Book of the Dead) as a guide to psychedelic sessions. The Tibetan Buddhists talked about the three phases of experience on the “intermediate planes” ( bardos) between death and rebirth. We translated this to refer to the death and the rebirth of the ego, or ordinary personality. Stripped of the elaborate Tibetan symbolism and transposed into Western concepts, the text provided a remarkable parallel to our findings." Leary, Dass, and Metzner rewrote the book into a form that could be used to guide a reader through a psychedelic trip, through the death of their ego and its rebirth. Later, Leary would record an abridged audiobook version, and it's this that we've been hearing excerpts of during this podcast so far: [Excerpt: The Psychedelic Experience "Turn off your mind, relax, float downstream" about 04:15] When we left the Beatles, they were at the absolute height of their fame, though in retrospect the cracks had already begun to show.  Their second film had been released, and the soundtrack had contained some of their best work, but the title track, "Help!", had been a worrying insight into John Lennon's current mental state. Immediately after making the film and album, of course, they went back out touring, first a European tour, then an American one, which probably counts as the first true stadium tour. There had been other stadium shows before the Beatles 1965 tour -- we talked way back in the first episodes of the series about how Sister Rosetta Tharpe had a *wedding* that was a stadium gig. But of course there are stadiums and stadiums, and the Beatles' 1965 tour had them playing the kind of venues that no other musician, and certainly no other rock band, had ever played. Most famously, of course, there was the opening concert of the tour at Shea Stadium, where they played to an audience of fifty-five thousand people -- the largest audience a rock band had ever played for, and one which would remain a record for many years. Most of those people, of course, couldn't actually hear much of anything -- the band weren't playing through a public address system designed for music, just playing through the loudspeakers that were designed for commentating on baseball games. But even if they had been playing through the kind of modern sound systems used today, it's unlikely that the audience would have heard much due to the overwhelming noise coming from the crowd. Similarly, there were no live video feeds of the show or any of the other things that nowadays make it at least possible for the audience to have some idea what is going on on stage. The difference between this and anything that anyone had experienced before was so great that the group became overwhelmed. There's video footage of the show -- a heavily-edited version, with quite a few overdubs and rerecordings of some tracks was broadcast on TV, and it's also been shown in cinemas more recently as part of promotion for an underwhelming documentary about the Beatles' tours -- and you can see Lennon in particular becoming actually hysterical during the performance of "I'm Down", where he's playing the organ with his elbows. Sadly the audio nature of this podcast doesn't allow me to show Lennon's facial expression, but you can hear something of the exuberance in the performance. This is from what is labelled as a copy of the raw audio of the show -- the version broadcast on TV had a fair bit of additional sweetening work done on it: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm Down (Live at Shea Stadium)"] After their American tour they had almost six weeks off work to write new material before going back into the studio to record their second album of the year, and one which would be a major turning point for the group. The first day of the recording sessions for this new album, Rubber Soul, started with two songs of Lennon's. The first of these was "Run For Your Life", a song Lennon never later had much good to say about, and which is widely regarded as the worst song on the album. That song was written off a line from Elvis Presley's version of "Baby Let's Play House", and while Lennon never stated this, it's likely that it was brought to mind by the Beatles having met with Elvis during their US tour. But the second song was more interesting. Starting with "Help!", Lennon had been trying to write more interesting lyrics. This had been inspired by two conversations with British journalists -- Kenneth Allsop had told Lennon that while he liked Lennon's poetry, the lyrics to his songs were banal in comparison and he found them unlistenable as a result, while Maureen Cleave, a journalist who was a close friend with Lennon, had told him that she hadn't noticed a single word in any of his lyrics with more than two syllables, so he made more of an effort with "Help!", putting in words like "independence" and "insecure". As he said in one of his last interviews, "I was insecure then, and things like that happened more than once. I never considered it before. So after that I put a few words with three syllables in, but she didn't think much of them when I played it for her, anyway.” Cleave may have been an inspiration for "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)". There are very strong rumours that Lennon had an affair with Cleave in the mid-sixties, and if that's true it would definitely fit into a pattern. Lennon had many, many, affairs during his first marriage, both brief one-night stands and deeper emotional attachments, and those emotional attachments were generally with women who were slightly older, intellectual, somewhat exotic looking by the standards of 1960s Britain, and in the arts. Lennon later claimed to have had an affair with Eleanor Bron, the Beatles' co-star in Help!, though she always denied this, and it's fairly widely established that he did have an affair with Alma Cogan, a singer who he'd mocked during her peak of popularity in the fifties, but who would later become one of his closest friends: [Excerpt: Alma Cogan, "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?"] And "Norwegian Wood", the second song recorded for Rubber Soul, started out as a confession to one of these affairs, a way of Lennon admitting it to his wife without really admitting it. The figure in the song is a slightly aloof, distant woman, and the title refers to the taste among Bohemian British people at the time for minimalist decor made of Scandinavian pine -- something that would have been a very obvious class signifier at the time. [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)"] Lennon and McCartney had different stories about who wrote what in the song, and Lennon's own story seems to have changed at various times. What seems to have happened is that Lennon wrote the first couple of verses while on holiday with George Martin, and finished it off later with McCartney's help. McCartney seems to have come up with the middle eight melody -- which is in Dorian mode rather than the Mixolydian mode of the verses -- and to have come up with the twist ending, where the woman refuses to sleep with the protagonist and laughs at him, he goes to sleep in the bath rather than her bed, wakes up alone, and sets fire to the house in revenge. This in some ways makes "Norwegian Wood" the thematic centrepiece of the album that was to result, combining several of the themes its two songwriters came back to throughout the album and the single recorded alongside it. Like Lennon's "Run For Your Life" it has a misogynistic edge to it, and deals with taking revenge against a woman, but like his song "Girl", it deals with a distant, unattainable, woman, who the singer sees as above him but who has a slightly cruel edge -- the kind of girl who puts you down when friends are there,  you feel a fool, is very similar to the woman who tells you to sit down but has no chairs in her minimalist flat. A big teaser who takes you half the way there is likely to laugh at you as you crawl off to sleep in the bath while she goes off to bed alone. Meanwhile, McCartney's two most popular contributions to the album, "Michelle" and "Drive My Car", also feature unattainable women, but are essentially comedy songs -- "Michelle" is a pastiche French song which McCartney used to play as a teenager while pretending to be foreign to impress girls, dug up and finished for the album, while "Drive My Car" is a comedy song with a twist in the punchline, just like "Norwegian Wood", though "Norwegian Wood"s twist is darker. But "Norwegian Wood" is even more famous for its music than for its lyric. The basis of the song is Lennon imitating Dylan's style -- something that Dylan saw, and countered with "Fourth Time Around", a song which people have interpreted multiple ways, but one of those interpretations has always been that it's a fairly vicious parody of "Norwegian Wood": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Fourth Time Around"] Certainly Lennon thought that at first, saying a few years later "I was very paranoid about that. I remember he played it to me when he was in London. He said, what do you think? I said, I don't like it. I didn't like it. I was very paranoid. I just didn't like what I felt I was feeling – I thought it was an out and out skit, you know, but it wasn't. It was great. I mean he wasn't playing any tricks on me. I was just going through the bit." But the aspect of "Norwegian Wood" that has had more comment over the years has been the sitar part, played by George Harrison: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood"] This has often been called the first sitar to be used on a rock record, and that may be the case, but it's difficult to say for sure. Indian music was very much in the air among British groups in September 1965, when the Beatles recorded the track. That spring, two records had almost simultaneously introduced Indian-influenced music into the pop charts. The first had been the Yardbirds' "Heart Full of Soul", released in June and recorded in April. In fact, the Yardbirds had actually used a sitar on their first attempt at recording the song, which if it had been released would have been an earlier example than the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Heart Full of Soul (first version)"] But in the finished recording they had replaced that with Jeff Beck playing a guitar in a way that made it sound vaguely like a sitar, rather than using a real one: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Heart Full of Soul (single)"] Meanwhile, after the Yardbirds had recorded that but before they'd released it, and apparently without any discussion between the two groups, the Kinks had done something similar on their "See My Friends", which came out a few weeks after the Yardbirds record: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "See My Friends"] (Incidentally, that track is sometimes titled "See My Friend" rather than "See My Friends", but that's apparently down to a misprint on initial pressings rather than that being the intended title). As part of this general flowering of interest in Indian music, George Harrison had become fascinated with the sound of the sitar while recording scenes in Help! which featured some Indian musicians. He'd then, as we discussed in the episode on "Eight Miles High" been introduced by David Crosby on the Beatles' summer US tour to the music of Ravi Shankar. "Norwegian Wood" likely reminded Harrison of Shankar's work for a couple of reasons. The first is that the melody is very modal -- as I said before, the verses are in Mixolydian mode, while the middle eights are in Dorian -- and as we saw in the "Eight Miles High" episode Indian music is very modal. The second is that for the most part, the verse is all on one chord -- a D chord as Lennon originally played it, though in the final take it's capoed on the second fret so it sounds in E. The only time the chord changes at all is on the words "once had" in the phrase “she once had me” where for one beat each Lennon plays a C9 and a G (sounding as a D9 and A). Both these chords, in the fingering Lennon is using, feel to a guitarist more like "playing a D chord and lifting some fingers up or putting some down" rather than playing new chords, and this is a fairly common way of thinking about stuff particularly when talking about folk and folk-rock music -- you'll tend to get people talking about the "Needles and Pins" riff as being "an A chord where you twiddle your finger about on the D string" rather than changing between A, Asus2, and Asus4. So while there are chord changes, they're minimal and of a kind that can be thought of as "not really" chord changes, and so that may well have reminded Harrison of the drone that's so fundamental to Indian classical music. Either way, he brought in his sitar, and they used it on the track, both the version they cut on the first day of recording and the remake a week later which became the album track: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)"] At the same time as the group were recording Rubber Soul, they were also working on two tracks that would become their next single -- released as a double A-side because the group couldn't agree which of the two to promote. Both of these songs were actual Lennon/McCartney collaborations, something that was increasingly rare at this point. One, "We Can Work it Out" was initiated by McCartney, and like many of his songs of this period was inspired by tensions in his relationship with his girlfriend Jane Asher -- two of his other songs for Rubber Soul were "I'm Looking Through You" and "You Won't See Me".  The other, "Day Tripper",  was initiated by Lennon, and had other inspirations: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] John Lennon and George Harrison's first acid trip had been in spring of 1965, around the time they were recording Help! The fullest version of how they came to try it I've read was in an interview George Harrison gave to Creem magazine in 1987, which I'll quote a bit of: "I had a dentist who invited me and John and our ex-wives to dinner, and he had this acid he'd got off the guy who ran Playboy in London. And the Playboy guy had gotten it off, you know, the people who had it in America. What's his name, Tim Leary. And this guy had never had it himself, didn't know anything about it, but he thought it was an aphrodisiac and he had this girlfriend with huge breasts. He invited us down there with our blonde wives and I think he thought he was gonna have a scene. And he put it in our coffee without telling us—he didn't take any himself. We didn't know we had it, and we'd made an arrangement earlier—after we had dinner we were gonna go to this nightclub to see some friends of ours who were playing in a band. And I was saying, "OK, let's go, we've got to go," and this guy kept saying, "No, don't go, finish your coffee. Then, 20 minutes later or something, I'm saying, "C'mon John, we'd better go now. We're gonna miss the show." And he says we shouldn't go 'cause we've had LSD." They did leave anyway, and they had an experience they later remembered as being both profound and terrifying -- nobody involved had any idea what the effects of LSD actually were, and they didn't realise it was any different from cannabis or amphetamines. Harrison later described feelings of universal love, but also utter terror -- believing himself to be in hell, and that world war III was starting. As he said later "We'd heard of it, but we never knew what it was about and it was put in our coffee maliciously. So it really wasn't us turning each other or the world or anything—we were the victims of silly people." But both men decided it was an experience they needed to have again, and one they wanted to share with their friends. Their next acid trip was the one that we talked about in the episode on "Eight Miles High", with Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, and Peter Fonda. That time Neil Aspinall and Ringo took part as well, but at this point Paul was still unsure about taking it -- he would later say that he was being told by everyone that it changed your worldview so radically you'd never be the same again, and he was understandably cautious about this. Certainly it had a profound effect on Lennon and Harrison -- Starr has never really talked in detail about his own experiences. Harrison would later talk about how prior to taking acid he had been an atheist, but his experiences on the drug gave him an unshakeable conviction in the existence of God -- something he would spend the rest of his life exploring. Lennon didn't change his opinions that drastically, but he did become very evangelistic about the effects of LSD. And "Day Tripper" started out as a dig at what he later described as weekend hippies, who took acid but didn't change the rest of their lives -- which shows a certain level of ego in a man who had at that point only taken acid twice himself -- though in collaboration with McCartney it turned into another of the rather angry songs about unavailable women they were writing at this point. The line "she's a big teaser, she took me half the way there" apparently started as "she's a prick teaser": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] In the middle of the recording of Rubber Soul, the group took a break to receive their MBEs from the Queen. Officially the group were awarded these because they had contributed so much to British exports. In actual fact, they received them because the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, had a government with a majority of only four MPs and was thinking about calling an election to boost his majority. He represented a Liverpool constituency, and wanted to associate his Government and the Labour Party with the most popular entertainers in the UK. "Day Tripper" and "We Can Work it Out" got their TV premiere on a show recorded for Granada TV,  The Music of Lennon and McCartney, and fans of British TV trivia will be pleased to note that the harmonium Lennon plays while the group mimed "We Can Work it Out" in that show is the same one that was played in Coronation Street by Ena Sharples -- the character we heard last episode being Davy Jones' grandmother. As well as the Beatles themselves, that show included other Brian Epstein artists like Cilla Black and Billy J Kramer singing songs that Lennon and McCartney had given to them, plus Peter Sellers, the Beatles' comedy idol, performing "A Hard Day's Night" in the style of Laurence Olivier as Richard III: [Excerpt: Peter Sellers, "A Hard Day's Night"] Another performance on the show was by Peter and Gordon, performing a hit that Paul had given to them, one of his earliest songs: [Excerpt: Peter and Gordon, "A World Without Love"] Peter Asher, of Peter and Gordon, was the brother of Paul McCartney's girlfriend, the actor Jane Asher. And while the other three Beatles were living married lives in mansions in suburbia, McCartney at this point was living with the Asher family in London, and being introduced by them to a far more Bohemian, artistic, hip crowd of people than he had ever before experienced. They were introducing him to types of art and culture of which he had previously been ignorant, and while McCartney was the only Beatle so far who hadn't taken LSD, this kind of mind expansion was far more appealing to him. He was being introduced to art film, to electronic composers like Stockhausen, and to ideas about philosophy and art that he had never considered. Peter Asher was a friend of John Dunbar, who at the time was Marianne Faithfull's husband, though Faithfull had left him and taken up with Mick Jagger, and of Barry Miles, a writer, and in September 1965 the three men had formed a company, Miles, Asher and Dunbar Limited, or MAD for short, which had opened up a bookshop and art gallery, the Indica Gallery, which was one of the first places in London to sell alternative or hippie books and paraphernalia, and which also hosted art events by people like members of the Fluxus art movement. McCartney was a frequent customer, as you might imagine, and he also encouraged the other Beatles to go along, and the Indica Gallery would play an immense role in the group's history, which we'll look at in a future episode. But the first impact it had on the group was when John and Paul went to the shop in late 1965, just after the recording and release of Rubber Soul and the "Day Tripper"/"We Can Work It Out" single, and John bought a copy of The Psychedelic Experience by Leary, Dass, and Metzner. He read the book on a plane journey while going on holiday -- reportedly while taking his third acid trip -- and was inspired. When he returned, he wrote a song which became the first track to be recorded for the group's next album, Revolver: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows"] The lyrics were inspired by the parts of The Psychedelic Experience which were in turn inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Now, it's important to put it this way because most people who talk about this record have apparently never read the book which inspired it. I've read many, many, books on the Beatles which claim that The Psychedelic Experience simply *is* the Tibetan Book of the Dead, slightly paraphrased. In fact, while the authors use the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a structure on which to base their book, much of the book is detailed descriptions of Leary, Dass, and Metzner's hypotheses about what is actually happening during a psychedelic trip, and their notes on the book -- in particular they provide commentaries to the commentaries, giving their view of what Carl Jung meant when he talked about it, and of Evans-Wentz's opinions, and especially of a commentary by Anagarika Govinda, a Westerner who had taken up Tibetan Buddhism seriously and become a monk and one of its most well-known exponents in the West. By the time it's been filtered through so many different viewpoints and perspectives, each rewriting and reinterpreting it to suit their own preconceived ideas, they could have started with a book on the habitat of the Canada goose and ended with much the same result. Much of this is the kind of mixture between religious syncretism and pseudoscience that will be very familiar to anyone who has encountered New Age culture in any way, statements like "The Vedic sages knew the secret; the Eleusinian Initiates knew it; the Tantrics knew it. In all their esoteric writings they whisper the message: It is possible to cut beyond ego-consciousness, to tune in on neurological processes which flash by at the speed of light, and to become aware of the enormous treasury of ancient racial knowledge welded into the nucleus of every cell in your body". This kind of viewpoint is one that has been around in one form or another since the nineteenth century religious revivals in America that led to Mormonism, Christian Science, and the New Thought. It's found today in books and documentaries like The Secret and the writings of people like Deepak Chopra, and the idea is always the same one -- people thousands of years ago had a lost wisdom that has only now been rediscovered through the miracle of modern science. This always involves a complete misrepresentation of both the lost wisdom and of the modern science. In particular, Leary, Dass, and Metzner's book freely mixes between phrases that sound vaguely scientific, like "There are no longer things and persons but only the direct flow of particles", things that are elements of Tibetan Buddhism, and references to ego games and "game-existence" which come from Leary's particular ideas of psychology as game interactions. All of this is intermingled, and so the claims that some have made that Lennon based the lyrics on the Tibetan Book of the Dead itself are very wrong. Rather the song, which he initially called "The Void", is very much based on Timothy Leary. The song itself was very influenced by Indian music. The melody line consists of only four notes -- E, G, C, and B flat, over a space of an octave: [Demonstrates] This sparse use of notes is very similar to the pentatonic scales in a lot of folk music, but that B-flat makes it the Mixolydian mode, rather than the E minor pentatonic scale our ears at first make it feel like. The B-flat also implies a harmony change -- Lennon originally sang the whole song over one chord, a C, which has the notes C, E, and G in it, but a B-flat note implies instead a chord of C7 -- this is another one of those occasions where you just put one finger down to change the chord while playing, and I suspect that's what Lennon did: [Demonstrates] Lennon's song was inspired by Indian music, but what he wanted was to replicate the psychedelic experience, and this is where McCartney came in. McCartney was, as I said earlier, listening to a lot of electronic composers as part of his general drive to broaden his mind, and in particular he had been listening to quite a bit of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Stockhausen was a composer who had studied with Olivier Messiaen in the 1940s, and had then become attached to the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète along with Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Edgard Varese and others, notably Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. These composers were interested in a specific style of music called musique concrète, a style that had been pioneered by Schaeffer. Musique concrète is music that is created from, or at least using, prerecorded sounds that have been electronically altered, rather than with live instruments. Often this would involve found sound -- music made not by instruments at all, but by combining recorded sounds of objects, like with the first major work of musique concrète, Pierre Schaeffer's Cinq études de bruits: [Excerpt: Pierre Schaeffer, "Etude aux Chemins de faire" (from Cinq études de bruits)] Early on, musique concrète composers worked in much the same way that people use turntables to create dance music today -- they would have multiple record players, playing shellac discs, and a mixing desk, and they would drop the needle on the record players to various points, play the records backwards, and so forth. One technique that Schaeffer had come up with was to create records with a closed groove, so that when the record finished, the groove would go back to the start -- the record would just keep playing the same thing over and over and over. Later, when magnetic tape had come into use, Schaeffer had discovered you could get the same effect much more easily by making an actual loop of tape, and had started making loops of tape whose beginnings were stuck to their ending -- again creating something that could keep going over and over. Stockhausen had taken up the practice of using tape loops, most notably in a piece that McCartney was a big admirer of, Gesang der Jeunglinge: [Excerpt: Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Gesang der Jeunglinge"] McCartney suggested using tape loops on Lennon's new song, and everyone was in agreement. And this is the point where George Martin really starts coming into his own as a producer for the group. Martin had always been a good producer, but his being a good producer had up to this point mostly consisted of doing little bits of tidying up and being rather hands-off. He'd scored the strings on "Yesterday", played piano parts, and made suggestions like speeding up "Please Please Me" or putting the hook of "Can't Buy Me Love" at the beginning. Important contributions, contributions that turned good songs into great records, but nothing that Tony Hatch or Norrie Paramor or whoever couldn't have done. Indeed, his biggest contribution had largely been *not* being a Hatch or Paramor, and not imposing his own songs on the group, letting their own artistic voices flourish. But at this point Martin's unique skillset came into play. Martin had specialised in comedy records before his work with the Beatles, and he had worked with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan of the Goons, making records that required a far odder range of sounds than the normal pop record: [Excerpt: The Goons, "Unchained Melody"] The Goons' radio show had used a lot of sound effects created by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a department of the BBC that specialised in creating musique concrète, and Martin had also had some interactions with the Radiophonic Workshop. In particular, he had worked with Maddalena Fagandini of the Workshop on an experimental single combining looped sounds and live instruments, under the pseudonym "Ray Cathode": [Excerpt: Ray Cathode, "Time Beat"] He had also worked on a record that is if anything even more relevant to "Tomorrow Never Knows". Unfortunately, that record is by someone who has been convicted of very serious sex offences. In this case, Rolf Harris, the man in question, was so well-known in Britain before his arrest, so beloved, and so much a part of many people's childhoods, that it may actually be traumatic for people to hear his voice knowing about his crimes. So while I know that showing the slightest consideration for my listeners' feelings will lead to a barrage of comments from angry old men calling me a "woke snowflake" for daring to not want to retraumatise vulnerable listeners, I'll give a little warning before I play the first of two segments of his recordings in a minute. When I do, if you skip forward approximately ninety seconds, you'll miss that section out. Harris was an Australian all-round entertainer, known in Britain for his novelty records, like the unfortunately racist "Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport" -- which the Beatles later recorded with him in a non-racist version for a BBC session. But he had also, in 1960, recorded and released in Australia a song he'd written based on his understanding of Aboriginal Australian religious beliefs, and backed by Aboriginal musicians on didgeridoo. And we're going to hear that clip now: [Excerpt. Rolf Harris, "Sun Arise" original] EMI, his British label, had not wanted to release that as it was, so he'd got together with George Martin and they'd put together a new version, for British release. That had included a new middle-eight, giving the song a tiny bit of harmonic movement, and Martin had replaced the didgeridoos with eight cellos, playing a drone: [Excerpt: Rolf Harris, "Sun Arise", 1962 version ] OK, we'll just wait a few seconds for anyone who skipped that to catch up... Now, there are some interesting things about that track. That is a track based on a non-Western religious belief, based around a single drone -- the version that Martin produced had a chord change for the middle eight, but the verses were still on the drone -- using the recording studio to make the singer's voice sound different, with a deep, pulsating, drum sound, and using a melody with only a handful of notes, which doesn't start on the tonic but descends to it. Sound familiar? Oh, and a young assistant engineer had worked with George Martin on that session in 1962, in what several sources say was their first session together, and all sources say was one of their first. That young assistant engineer was Geoff Emerick, who had now been promoted to the main engineer role, and was working his first Beatles session in that role on “Tomorrow Never Knows”. Emerick was young and eager to experiment, and he would become a major part of the Beatles' team for the next few years, acting as engineer on all their recordings in 1966 and 67, and returning in 1969 for their last album. To start with, the group recorded a loop of guitar and drums, heavily treated: [Excerpt: "Tomorrow Never Knows", loop] That loop was slowed down to half its speed, and played throughout: [Excerpt: "Tomorrow Never Knows", loop] Onto that the group overdubbed a second set of live drums and Lennon's vocal. Lennon wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama singing from a mountaintop, or like thousands of Tibetan monks. Obviously the group weren't going to fly to Tibet and persuade monks to sing for them, so they wanted some unusual vocal effect. This was quite normal for Lennon, actually. One of the odd things about Lennon is that while he's often regarded as one of the greatest rock vocalists of all time, he always hated his own voice and wanted to change it in the studio. After the Beatles' first album there's barely a dry Lennon solo vocal anywhere on any record he ever made. Either he would be harmonising with someone else, or he'd double-track his vocal, or he'd have it drenched in reverb, or some other effect -- anything to stop it sounding quite so much like him. And Geoff Emerick had the perfect idea. There's a type of speaker called a Leslie speaker, which was originally used to give Hammond organs their swirling sound, but which can be used with other instruments as well. It has two rotating speakers inside it, a bass one and a treble one, and it's the rotation that gives the swirling sound. Ken Townsend, the electrical engineer working on the record, hooked up the speaker from Abbey Road's Hammond organ to Lennon's mic, and Lennon was ecstatic with the sound: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows", take one] At least, he was ecstatic with the sound of his vocal, though he did wonder if it might be more interesting to get the same swirling effect by tying himself to a rope and being swung round the microphone The rest of the track wasn't quite working, though, and they decided to have a second attempt. But Lennon had been impressed enough by Emerick that he decided to have a chat with him about music -- his way of showing that Emerick had been accepted. He asked if Emerick had heard the new Tiny Tim record -- which shows how much attention Lennon was actually paying to music at this point. This was two years before Tim's breakthrough with "Tiptoe Through the Tulips", and his first single (unless you count a release from 1963 that was only released as a 78, in the sixties equivalent of a hipster cassette-only release), a version of "April Showers" backed with "Little Girl" -- the old folk song also known as "In the Pines" or "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?": [Excerpt: Tiny Tim, "Little Girl"] Unfortunately for Emerick, he hadn't heard the record, and rather than just say so he tried bluffing, saying "Yes, they're great". Lennon laughed at his attempt to sound like he knew what he was talking about, before explaining that Tiny Tim was a solo artist, though he did say "Nobody's really sure if it's actually a guy or some drag queen". For the second attempt, they decided to cut the whole backing track live rather than play to a loop. Lennon had had trouble staying in sync with the loop, but they had liked the thunderous sound that had been got from slowing the tape down. As Paul talked with Ringo about his drum part, suggesting a new pattern for him to play, Emerick went down into the studio from the control room and made some adjustments. He first deadened the sound of the bass drum by sticking a sweater in it -- it was actually a promotional sweater with eight arms, made when the film Help! had been provisionally titled Eight Arms to Hold You, which Mal Evans had been using as packing material. He then moved the mics much, much closer to the drums that EMI studio rules allowed -- mics can be damaged by loud noises, and EMI had very strict rules about distance, not allowing them within two feet of the drum kit. Emerick decided to risk his job by moving the mics mere inches from the drums, reasoning that he would probably have Lennon's support if he did this. He then put the drum signal through an overloaded Fairfield limiter, giving it a punchier sound than anything that had been recorded in a British studio up to that point: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows", isolated drums] That wasn't the only thing they did to make the record sound different though.  As well as Emerick's idea for the Leslie speaker, Ken Townsend had his own idea of how to make Lennon's voice sound different. Lennon had often complained about the difficulty of double-tracking his voice, and so Townsend had had an idea -- if you took a normal recording, fed it to another tape machine a few milliseconds out of sync with the first, and then fed it back into the first, you could create a double-tracked effect without having to actually double-track the vocal. Townsend suggested this, and it was used for the first time on the first half of "Tomorrow Never Knows", before the Leslie speaker takes over. The technique is now known as "artificial double-tracking" or ADT, but the session actually gave rise to another term, commonly used for a similar but slightly different tape-manipulation effect that had already been used by Les Paul among others. Lennon asked how they'd got the effect and George Martin started to explain, but then realised Lennon wasn't really interested in the technical details, and said "we take the original image and we split it through a double-bifurcated sploshing flange". From that point on, Lennon referred to ADT as "flanging", and the term spread, though being applied to the other technique. (Just as a quick aside, some people have claimed other origins for the term "flanging", and they may be right, but I think this is the correct story). Over the backing track they added tambourine and organ overdubs -- with the organ changing to a B flat chord when the vocal hits the B-flat note, even though the rest of the band stays on C -- and then a series of tape loops, mostly recorded by McCartney. There's a recording that circulates which has each of these loops isolated, played first forwards and then backwards at the speed they were recorded, and then going through at the speed they were used on the record, so let's go through these. There's what people call the "seagull" sound, which is apparently McCartney laughing, very distorted: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] Then there's an orchestral chord: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] A mellotron on its flute setting: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] And on its string setting: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] And a much longer loop of sitar music supplied by George: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] Each of these loops were played on a different tape machine in a different part of Abbey Road -- they commandeered the entire studio complex, and got engineers to sit with the tapes looped round pencils and wine-glasses, while the Beatles supervised Emerick and Martin in mixing the loops into a single track. They then added a loop of a tamboura drone played by George, and the result was one of the strangest records ever released by a major pop group: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows"] While Paul did add some backwards guitar -- some sources say that this is a cut-up version of his solo from George's song "Taxman", but it's actually a different recording, though very much in the same style -- they decided that they were going to have a tape-loop solo rather than a guitar solo: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows"] And finally, at the end, there's some tack piano playing from McCartney, inspired by the kind of joke piano parts that used to turn up on the Goon Show. This was just McCartney messing about in the studio, but it was caught on tape, and they asked for it to be included at the end of the track. It's only faintly audible on the standard mixes of the track, but there was actually an alternative mono mix which was only released on British pressings of the album pressed on the first day of its release, before George Martin changed his mind about which mix should have been used, and that has a much longer excerpt of the piano on it. I have to say that I personally like that mix more, and the extra piano at the end does a wonderful job of undercutting what could otherwise be an overly-serious track, in much the same way as the laughter at the end of "Within You, Without You", which they recorded the next year. The same goes for the title -- the track was originally called "The Void", and the tape boxes were labelled "Mark One", but Lennon decided to name the track after one of Starr's malapropisms, the same way they had with "A Hard Day's Night", to avoid the track being too pompous. [Excerpt: Beatles interview] A track like that, of course, had to end the album. Now all they needed to do was to record another thirteen tracks to go before it. But that -- and what they did afterwards, is a story for another time. [Excerpt, "Tomorrow Never Knows (alternate mono mix)" piano tag into theme music]

Community health centers are a national network of low-income primary care clinicians who play a key role in national, state, and local responses to the coronavirus pandemic. Health centers generally contribute to response efforts by delivering testing, triaging patients, and decreasing the pressure on hospitals, but they also play a role in meeting demand for behavioral health services and providing ongoing primary care to patients with chronic diseases.In this podcast episode, We welcome Jim Macrae, an associate administrator for primary health care in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Health Resources and Services Administration. Jim will speak about his experience throughout the one-year pandemic while assuring equity in COVID vaccinations.

Welcome to season three of The Wonder!  Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com   S3E1 TRANSCRIPT:----more---- Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-Based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts Yucca.  Mark: And I'm Mark.  Yucca: And this week we are talking about the overculture. So this is a huge topic that we've touched on here and there that we thought really deserved an entire episode of its own and maybe a part two, even. Mark: Yeah, we'll see how far we get with this one. This is a really important set of concepts to be able to wrap your head around. And it's squishy. It's tricky because the overculture is all around us all the time. It can be hard to see. What its messages are, what it's telling us to do, how it's influencing our behavior because it's what we're used to.  Yucca: Right. And so just a note on the word itself, the overculture is the main culture. It's the dominant culture. So the overculture is opposed to a subculture. So it's something that most of us, unless we came here from somewhere else that most of us grew up with. Mark: Right? Right. And in the way of subcultures, what we talk about on this podcast is a pagan subculture in the United States because that's what we're familiar with. but particularly naturalistic pagan culture, which is the culture of non-theist science consistent. But pagan valued practice, observances rituals, and so forth.  Yucca: Right. And so we're going to come back to that worldview to pagan worldviews, and specifically naturalistic pagan world views. But first we want it to start to explore and pull apart this, the overculture. And especially what we're going to be looking at today are some of the aspects that we find very problematic, because certainly as members of the overculture, or at least influenced by it, there are some things that we share. And many of those things, those values we're not even aware of until we start really looking at them. But mark and I both have been doing some brainstorming. And before we started recording, We put together a list and went back and forth about, oh, what is this concept of what's that concept? And so I'm really excited to get into this. Mark: Yeah. me too. Because in many ways in, in the culture building work that we do a lot of what we are seeking to achieve is to transform or transcend many of these more negative aspects of the overculture. And so being able to see them and identify them and understand how our value system is radically different from them in some ways is really important.  Yucca: Right. Mark: So to start with, we should sort of define what goes into our current, overculture. And especially in the English speaking world which is all that I can really speak to. But many of these aspects are present in, you know, many other countries with different languages, basically. Yucca: Europe. Mark: Yeah. Much of Western Europe. particularly. The overculture is capitalistic to start with it's white supremacist, it's patriarchal, it's heteronormative and it's cis-gendered. And in one way of understanding all that is that the capitalism is kind of like the white paint in when you're, when you're mixing up a color and you start with white, the capitalism is the white it's everything touches everything. it's base that  Yucca: it's the base or the primer. Yeah. Mark: Right. The, the white supremacy, the patriarchy, the heteronormativity, the cis-gender, all that stuff is stirred in, in various amounts. Mostly to reinforce capitalistic agendas.  Yucca: Right. And we could start getting into the connection between each of those things. Like I would make the argument that the heteronormative is really a sub category of patriarchy and, and all of that, but we want it to make sure that we were including some of the really big themes. And we're of course going to miss some things, but, but this is, these are some of the big things that are all around us. And as you're saying, it's just mixed into everything.  Mark: Right?  Yucca: Right. Mark: So the first aspect that we identified is as a clear message that comes from the overculture to each of us is don't think obey.  Yucca: Right, Mark: Just perform, do this, you know, perform this list of things that we're telling you is a value that will make you a val- a person of value and the trappings of your having done those things like acquisition of money and possessions will reflect your value.  Yucca: right. Being a productive member of society. Mark: That's right. All of that. And what that does is it sets up an outside authority rather than yourself telling you what you're supposed to be doing and how to do it. Yucca: All Mark: And you're not supposed to think about that.  Yucca: Well, and there's just these roles that you fit into and those particular roles are assigned to you based on. What sex you are in gender and color and all of those things, age, all of those things class. Yeah. And you just fit into that and roll down this track and don't stop. Just keep going, keep going, keep going. Mark: And Don't ask questions,  Yucca: ask questions, right? Mark: Yeah. Why am I doing this is a question that is not encouraged in our society.  Yucca: Yes. Mark: And bear in mind that what this does is it moves the center of decision-making about what the right thing to do is away from yourself and out to an external authority. And that external authority can be the state. It can be God, it can be the law. It can be Your parents, any, any, it can be the school. or the teacher, any institution that has been elevated in power over you. You look to them for the signals about how you're supposed to perform and what constitutes good performance.  Yucca: Right. And this is something we'll come back to in a little bit. But one of the things that non theist pagans often get asked is, well, how do you know what's right? How do you know what's right and wrong? If you don't have a God, and this is connected in with that, is this assumption from whatever religion someone might be within the overculture, because that does have people of many different religions, even though it is based quite strongly in the Abrahamic religions, is this, this authority right? Mark: Right, right? Yeah. There, it paints this picture of people that are godless as the, sort of like the cartoon Tasmanian devil, you know, just sort of this, this destructive machine whirling through the world And taking big bites out of everything.  Yucca: Possibly function that way? Mark: Right. Well, you can't because individuals are able to decide what's right and wrong too. They don't need to be told that. What goes along with externalizing that judging authority. And remember it is a judging authority under the overculture. It is rate, it is ranking you based on your behavior. And in some cases, even based on your thoughts, because you're not supposed to think bad thoughts. Right. And this is very true under conservative Christianity. You can commit a thoughtful thought sin rather than even if you don't behave in any manner, that's consistent with that. Just thinking about it is sinful. Right.  Yucca: Or, or dealing with things like depression or anxiety. Right? Those are, those are deviant ways of being deviant thoughts, you know, don't just fall in line. You're not supposed that. Don't do that.  Mark: Just give  Yucca: Right. things, yeah. Give it to Jesus or, or, you know, something's wrong with you. But again, this is something that we find problematic in overculture and it's, it's fundamental. It's one of the pillars of our overculture. Mark: It is, it is. And the alternative of course, which is what we espouse is that the individual has inherent worth and dignity. It doesn't matter whether they can be productive or not. It doesn't matter whether they can fulfill a preestablished set of roles or not. They're still a person and they still have inherent rights, inherent dignity and inherent worth.  Yucca: Yes. And this ties in as well to our view and relationship with the rest of earth as well. Mark: Yes. And we're going to be talking more about that later on in the podcast, but now let's hop down to. A really big, important set of interpenetrated issues around the overculture, which we call dualism,  Yucca: Yeah. So dualism duality to there being. Two separate opposite opposing things. And that incorporates that that holds everything that is Mark: right? The, the idea that the universe can be separated into or that humanity can be separated into good and bad, or that that  Yucca: male and female. Mark: and female black and white all these, these different polars polar opposites, first of all, without any recognition that there can be any shades of gray along those scales. Which is terribly problematic when you're judging people.  Yucca: Right. Mark: But more than that, the dualism that extent is expressed in the mainstream religions, that, that posits that there is a separate soul from the body. And that is extremely problematic. And the reason that it's problematic is that in all those religions, they end up kind of voting for the soul at the expense of the body and the material, the body, and the material is tainted by original sin. It's it's unable to go to heaven. It's unable to achieve Nirvana, all of those kinds of concepts. So the material is viewed as dirty and contaminated while this imaginary. The essence of a person this, this free standing personality without a body or a brain is considered to be the most important aspect of a person. And that is a terrible, terrible idea.  Yucca: Yeah, and this is something we were talking about quite recently, this is built into our language and in English, just the way that we have to talk about these things enforces reinforces those ideas. We talk about the body and the mind, or we talk about, you know, getting to a higher vibration and things like that. It's just so built in that. We don't really even have words to talk about these things as not separate. Mark: Right. Consider the word dirty, right? Dirt gives us our food. Dirt is the most sacred stuff on the planet, right. But yes, dirt is earth, right? But the very word dirty is. An insulting denigration of whatever it's applied to  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: the, the idea that everyone is tainted with this original sin and need salvation in order to attain some kind of an afterlife is another manifestation of this dualism idea. And what it means is that can trash this planet because that's not really what matters anyway.  Yucca: Right. Mark: I mean, we can see the results of that mentality. Can't we, you know, we're in the midst of the sixth mass extinction event and it's the Anthropocene, it's what we, as humans are causing. it is, it is directly bearing on the human relationship with nature and with the earth that we have this idea of this pristine angelical, special non-corporal soul or spirit or whatever you choose to call it. And we focus our attention on it's it's cleansing through salvation it's redemption from whatever terrible things that may have done All of that. All of that wraps together under this heading of dualism. Yucca: All right. Mark: Whereas as an opposing view, the naturalistic pagan view of this is that we are not a machine and then a ghost within a machine. We are a machine, the machine produces consciousness, the brain produces consciousness, and that is us.  Yucca: Right. Mark: When the brain stops working, we aren't, we don't exist anymore.  Yucca: And that this machine that is us is also made out of pieces of this larger system and that those pieces are continuously coming in and moving out. And the pieces that are us right now eventually will, will disassemble themselves or be disassembled to become part of something else. And that it's part of this larger cycle, but there isn't a self that continues on to the afterlife. Mark: Right. Right. And I would add on top of your very app description of all that Yucca, that, that is a sacred process that it's holy, the fifth, that whole system that we are a part of is not dirty, is not contaminated, is not sinful is not base. I mean, all we have all these words that basically mean of the earth, right. Mundane means of the earth  Yucca: So it, it  is all those things, but those things we choose to view as wonderful, as amazing, as beautiful as awe inspiring yes. Holy Just to play wiwith words, wholy with a and holy with the H.  Mark: yes.  Yucca: So now these are, we're talking about our choice to step away from that, but I want to come back and recognize that. Even though this dualism idea is stemming out of the Abrahamic religions. That even those of us who are not directly part of those religions are still influenced by this idea. Like we're talking about our whole culture, even people who like myself grew up pagan or people who grew up atheist or whatever other religion that this is still, this is in our stories. These are in, these are in the nursery stories, entails that we read to our children that they're watching this isn't Sesame street. I mean, this is everywhere. And it's, it's something that we are making a conscious choice to, to not play along with. Mark: Right, right. And as here's an example of how this, this unthinking obedience to the judging authority outside ourselves gets implemented in sexuality, first of all, sexuality is already really denigrated because it's of the body, right? So it's automatically dirty. It's automatically sinful. Yucca: Animalistic, Mark: Yes. All those  Yucca: dare we actually be animals spoilers. We are. Mark: Yeah. Well, but you'll get an argument about that from a lot of people that subscribed to conservative versions of the Abrahamic religions. So sexuality is heavily impacted and then there are. all these arbitrary rules that are placed on top of it in order to try to control it. But from the outside, from, from an external authority. So pretty much everything about relationships is decreed about what a normal relationship is, is decreed by the overculture. That includes things like you have one partner at a time, right? You only have one partner at a time.  Yucca: oh, and don't have too many, if you're a woman,  Mark: Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, ideally you have one and that's it for your life. right? But certainly you don't have more than one at a time.  Yucca: Okay.  That's considered cheating. Right. And everybody knows what the supposed of rules of relationship is. And if your particular relationship has different rules, people still say you're cheating. Mark: Right because you're breaking the capital T rules, capital R, decreed by the overculture. Another aspect of relationships is that we declare that they're forever. We know for a fact that about half relationships don't last forever. About half of, of married, committed relationships break up after a while. Sometimes it's 20 years. Sometimes it's six months. People can discover that they're incompatible. They, Yucca: change over  Mark: They can change over time. and grow apart from one another. There are a lot of different circumstances under which people might decide to disentangle from one another and move on in the paths of their lives. That's not the story that we tell ourselves, every pop music love song. You listened to every romance, novel, every romantic story. It's always, you know, I love you. I'm going to love you forever. There will never be another yadeedadeda it's indoctrination and we get it from the very earliest time in our lives. Yucca: yeah, your one true love.  Mark: Yeah. the soulmate.  Yucca: Yeah.  Mark: Really pernicious idea that there's, there's 7 billion people on the planet and you're supposed to find this one person. What happens if you don't?  Yucca: Right. Yeah. What if there's somewhere else? What if they're yeah, they just happened to be the person that you had the lived next door or that you happen to meet at the right time, the coffee shop, right?  Mark: Yeah. I get, obviously I think it sounds pretty clear. I get a little exercised on this particular aspect of the overculture, because I think it's truly sick the way people. Decreed what their gender roles are, must be how their relationships must be, whether they're allowed to love who they really love or not. All of these are these arbitrary rules set up by external authorities. And even though we've made a lot of advance from a legal standpoint in our culture, there is still a tremendous voice a loud insistent voice built into the overculture that still says, you know, men should be men and women should be women. And there isn't anything in between and relationships should be forever. And all the things that we've been talking about that's not a formula for happiness.  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: The overculture wasn't built to make you happy the overculture was built to serve elites. It's no surprise that the major religions of the world are all religions that work very well in heavily authoritarian political structures, because if they hadn't been those authoritarian structures wouldn't have adopted.  Yucca: Yeah, Mark: When Constantine made Christianity into the the official religion of the Roman empire, he got tremendous pushback, but he understood what Christianity could do for him as as the authoritarian power of the Roman empire. If everybody was forced to follow it,  Yucca: right. so a lot of these things, when we go back and look at them, the gender roles and sexuality relationships, our relationship to our body, all of those things are to keep us in line in that role that we have that function. And our value is in how well we play that. At least that's the perception. Mark: right. And how will we play that role? And therefore, how will we produce? And by obeying, we keep authorities in their position of authorities. And by producing, we keep the wealthy accumulating wealth  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: because that's where power is. Right. So, I mean, this is All pretty grim. You know, stuff to talk about and I can understand how it can be very dispiriting for, you know, those of us who are listening to, to hear us talking about this stuff. But it is so important that we be talking about it and thinking about it because I believe we are at a hinge point in human history where those authoritarian voices are breaking down and they're freaking out about it and, you know, really doubling down, but they're still breaking down. And what that means is that people are starting to make choices for themselves about how they want to live. That don't necessarily serve the elites and they don't necessarily conform to these, this idea of dualism. And I want to put my hand up and say, I'm one of those. I am, I am Foursquare for the evolution of our. Humanity into a direction that celebrates and serves human, happiness and ecological sustainability over the accumulation of wealth and capital or the obedience to arbitrary rules that have very little relevance to us today anyway.  Yucca: And you know, one of the ironies of this is that it probably be a better life for the elites. Anyways, we didn't have elites, right. That it would just, you know, if we're actually working towards is the point is the joy and happiness and fulfillment for everybody and not just us humans, but everybody. Right. Well then this is this positive feedback loop of it's, you know, it's better for them than it's better for us and on and on. And it could be a much better situation. And that's, that's one of the things that we are actively working towards in the choices that we make and in the, how we choose to view the world and behave in the world as pagans and especially as naturalistic pagans. Mark: Yes. Yes. I wanted to give an example of the, one of the ways that you can tell that the overculture is, does not value your happiness is when it comes to abstract morality. Like so-called victimless crimes like sex work taking drugs things that are, that are associated with. Right. Anything that's associated with somebody getting pleasure in a manner that is not actually serving capital you know, creating productivity, adding to shareholder value. Any of those kinds of things are automatically trashed by the overculture, even if they're not hurting anybody, but we're starting to see some of that change. And that's why once again, I feel like we are at this moment in human history where we can start to have a real conversation about whether this overculture that has dominated us for at least 2000 years is helping  Yucca: Right. I think that's one of the things that the antiwork movement is tapping into. Now there's a lot going on there, but, but the starting to question and go, wait a second. Wait,  Mark: right.  Yucca: Do we, do we really need this? Mark: Yeah. Did we really sign on for this? And you know, am I, am I willing to not actually spend any time with my children until they're in their teens? So that I can  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: buy a cookie cutter house And fill it with cookie cutter furniture all bought with debt, of course pay, pay for a college education that puts me $200,000 in debt and leaves me, you know, completely broken financially before I even get started. There, there is so much about this that is about enslaving people. It's it's literal enslavement of people and it does not serve us as a species we can see in what's happening to the biosphere, how badly it does not serve us because we're trashing the biosphere to make meaningless chotskies that nobody needs no. Yes.  Yucca: exhausted to be able to stop and take a look  Mark: right.  Yucca: right. That's that, you know, just keep doing, just keep doing don't think you can't stop you're so you're on that track and you're getting pushed along and the way it works right now is if you do, then you're in. danger in terms of not having a home, not having food, not having your basic needs met. Mark: right.  Yucca: And I mean, as you're saying that, that sounds like being enslaved to me. Mark: Sure. Sure. Yeah. Not only is that an extortionary form of, you know, leverage over people to get them to continue following the path that they're, that's laid out before them. But as soon as they're no longer useful, then they're discarded again. When they're old, when they're no longer going to be, you know, producing, then once again, there's this general discarding factor. That goes along with our cult of youth and our, you know, all of our cultural celebration of trying to look young forever and, you know, have six pack abs and all the, all the nonsense. Honestly, just the, the simple nonsense that goes along with With that, that endless, never ending message of you're not good enough. You don't have enough. You have to do this. You have to do more of this. You have to change. You have to be different. There's something wrong with you. There's this constant bombardment of there's something wrong with you. It's so something wrong with you because you don't buy this product. There's something wrong with you because you don't spend enough time with your kids. There's something wrong with you because you do spend too much time with your kids. There's something wrong with you. Because I mean, the list just goes on because you because you don't like being bombarded with advertising that tells you that there's something wrong with you.  Yucca: Which literally designed. I mean, the, the, the ads make you feel insecure about something that offer you the solution to it.  Mark: Yep. That's what it's for. That's exactly what it's for. And so we are here to say, it's your life, it's your only life, as far as we know,  Yucca: Yeah.  Mark: to live it for any purpose, other than joy and service missing the boat, it really puts you in danger of a deathbed moment of feeling like, you know, what did I do? Why did I do this? And that doesn't mean that you don't, you know, work to provide for your kids and all that kind of stuff. Everybody, you know, wants to do what's best for their progeny, but. you don't do it on your own terms, the system itself, the overculture is absolutely merciless in how it will exploit you.  Yucca: Yeah. So let's come back to that word. You said, because you said joy and service and the overculture That likes that service bit, but we're talking about the sevice that you choose, right? Who your community not, I mean, I guess it's up to you if you want to serve some billionaire somewhere. Right. But, but like who, what culture, what cultural values, what people, what community, what, you know, bioregion, there's choice involved in that? Mark: Right. Right. And what, what we want to underscore is that you have agency, you know, you, you are a living human being with agency and you get to make decisions about that? Now, many people are in positions where it's very hard to make those decisions. I mean, I'm, I am familiar with poverty and poverty is not a situation where you feel like you have many choices.  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: That said being aware of yourself as someone who's making the choices, rather than just kind of rolling over and saying, well, this is what they're doing to me. So I'm just going to ride down the path. It's just essential. If you ever hope to have a life that reflects the life that you dream of.  Yucca: Yeah. And you deserve it. You deserve that life. You don't, it doesn't even if, and probably you have, because you're a member of this culture too. Even if you've been told your whole life that you don't, that's not true,  Mark: No  Yucca: you are valuable and wonderful and beautiful. And your very existence is. Simply amazing.  Mark: miraculous.  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Yeah. Truly astronomically improbable that you ever arrived here. And, and it doesn't last that long. We're recording today on my 60th birthday. And so I've been I've been contemplating what happened between 60 years before I was born and my birth. And then since my birth. 60 years before I was born was 1902. People were winding up their Gramaphones, the radio hadn't been invented yet, but before I was born, Sputnik was already in the sky. That's how much things change. We don't have that much time. A lot of stuff happens very quickly and it's important for us to seize the day, you know, carpe diem.  Yucca: The night. Mark: and the night and and make, build the life that will feel most worthy to us. And everybody can make their own free choices about what that is. If the most worthy life for you really is, I have this job that I hate, but it pays very well. And I have these kids and I want to give them these opportunities and I'm going to do this. If that really is the life that you choose. Okay. You choose it. That's great. The difference is coasting on through that because you think you don't have any other choices. And the world is full of people who had thriving careers, unquote, and then pulled the plug and said actually I'm going to sail around the world with my family, or we're going to move to a small village and I'm going to open a clinic or whatever it is, whatever it is.  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: One of the things that I think about when I think about the overculture is how violent it is.  Yucca: Oh, Mark: that makes sense. When you consider that it's essentially an extortion airy system, it's a system that threatens you with punishment. If you don't do what it says you have to do. And those punishments are everything from social exclusion to literally being put to death. It depends on where you are in the world and what your particular transgression is. But particularly more than anything else. When I look at the, the geopolitical jockeying around the world, most of what I see is Strategizing and, and tactical moves to get to resources. And those resources are the earth that capital wants to grind up into money, whether we need those products or not. If we can be made to want them, then there's a product to be sold. And I believe that if we transformed this culture from the overculture paradigm, the violence of the system will fall. Doesn't mean it'll be zero. You know, primates can be violent. They, they can. But generally in more of a self-defense kind of mode than anything else. It's, it's pretty rare. There are examples, but it's pretty rare for a one pack of primates to go on a, an attack raid on another one and kill them. Yucca: And even then it usually has to do with resources.  Mark: I'm sure.  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: Yeah.  Yucca: So how is the pagan worldview different? And in some ways, you know, how is it the same? Mark: Right. Well, I think it's, it's probably best if we break that conversation into two pieces, which is paganism characterized generally as sort of an umbrella term for the, the whole constellation of pagan practices happening in, especially the English speaking world. Cause that's what we know about most. And then. More specifically, how is a naturalistic pagan worldview, different? a nonthiest science-based naturalistic pig view. So why don't we take on the first one first? And to be honest, this is, this is a place where I really split with the, I mean, it's, it's sort of an oxymoron to say, but mainstream pagans because of the body and the soul or spirit, they subscribed to that because they believe in an afterlife.  Yucca: Dualism in many pagan traditions is a big theme, right? Yeah. The, the dualism and the theism. I see that theism is the, the authority.  Mark: Yes.  Yucca: But I think Mark: I think to be fair, some pagans view their relationships with gods as less authoritarian and more like these are allied forces that I can work and build relationships with.  Yucca: that's true. And some see, I have certainly talked with the people who see, say the goddess as a metaphor for earth itself and life and nature. Yeah. And so there's certainly, there's, I guess there's a, there's a lot of different approaches there. Although there are some who talk about their faith and their gods and their deities and in a very sort of perinatal patriarchal way, even if it happens to have the, the face of the body of a, of a female.  Mark: Yes, that's true. I've certainly heard that myself. This, this question of the ghost in the machine is the one that really affects me the most. Because if, I mean you're, how do I say this? You're you're not fully embracing the mechanics of planet earth. If you're not acknowledging the part of the process where life gets dismantled and ended, and then reassembled into new things. If, because you can talk about that. I mean, we hear it in pagan chance all the time. The word rebirth shows up all the time. And I, my personal theory is that that's because it happens to rhyme with earth, but there is this idea that spring, for example, is a rebirth of life. Well, it's not what it is, is dormant things waking up and the next generation being born it's, it's not a rebirth of anything that's dead. Once something dies, it's dead. And I just feel like when people talk about reincarnation or they talk about Vall holla or the summer lands, or the isle of apples, or, you know, whatever, whatever the story is, those can be beautiful stories. But they truly discount the implication that that has theologically the, what, what that kind of dualism means. It moves away from the sacredness of the planet and starts being focused on this kind of ecology of spirits, of, of non-core pauriol beings. And in our opinion, based on available evidence that doesn't exist. It's a nice story and stories are cool, but if it distracts you from the very sacred earth that we put our feet down on every day, then it may not be a helpful story. That duelism piece is one that I really feel strongly about. And there are, there are other examples, like, there are some pagan traditions where exhibit exhibiting particular kinds of characteristics qualifies you for an afterlife, like courage and, you know, prowess in battle or whatever that is. Right. What that means then is that you're living for the afterlife you're not living for now. And That once again, pulls away from, from the reality that's directly in front of us. Yucca: That we're part of, Not just. Mark: Yes. The, we are the reality that we have. And this once again, I mean, that sounds weird, but that's because our language is entirely defined by the assumptions that are made about the nature of our existence in the overculture.  Yucca: Right. Mark: So, Yucca do you want to speak to how a naturalistic pagan worldview is different? Yucca: So, I mean, a lot of the things that we identified in the beginning as being problematic, we identified to, because we are naturalistic pagans, and these are, these are places where there are differences between our views and values and the overculture. So I mean, the first we've been talking a lot about the dualism and our part being part of. I think that's really key is the being our relationship to the earth is recognizing that we're part of this system. And that a lot of the systems that we've been talking about, the human systems, they are constructed, they're made up by us. We are cultural animals. And so that's part of what we do instinctually, but that, that isn't necessarily, that's not always truth, right? That there, there are different cultures at different times, and there are different species that have different approaches and that what we sometimes see that is presented to us as the ultimate one truth within the overculture simply is one version of how things can be. And that's not that doesn't serve. What many of us choose and would rather be Mark: Right, right. Where I really see the big difference between the naturalistic pagan worldview and the overculture centers around values. The, I mean, the idea that we are we are subject to this external authority to tell us what's moral is just something that doesn't work for me at all because I don't believe it. I don't believe in those authorities. Even, even democratically elected authorities sometimes they get it right. Sometimes they don't get it right. And I'm, I don't have a great deal of trust in the way that our systems are orient oriented now. So, but when I look at. At that original mix that we talked about, the, the capitalistic paint with the white supremacy and the patriarchy and all that stuff stirred into it. What I most notice is that it is organized around a set of values that are not, they're not sustainable. They're not kind, they're not inclusive. They're not any of the things that I think are really important from a value standpoint. And we've, we've done shows before on the atheopagan four pillars and on the atheopagan principles. And that'll go into details about what I believe is that's really a value, but the, the value of on accumulation of wealth and possessions, the value on Sort of strutting macho domination of women and LGBTQ people by men of value of of domination and humiliation of, of dark skinned people by white people. It's horrific to me. It's not just that I disagree a little bit. It's not just that. I think it's a little dated and maybe we need to update it that entire 10 commandments, all of that stuff. It needs to be tossed and revisited. We, we need a radically different set of values to underpin a successful culture oriented around happiness and kindness And, sustainability. Yucca: Yes. and we need a new way to talk about it too,  Mark: Hmm.  Yucca: these things, many of the things that we really do value the body and pleasure and the sexuality and the animal side, the, you know, the so-called base side of things. Those are all judged as negative, bad things. And yet these are things that we, we believe are as we were talking about before sacred  Mark: Yes. Look at all the psychosis in our, in our media, around food, the, the ridiculous Hawking of terrible food. and then all of these messages about body shape and weight loss, and just, just terrible things to tell people. They're just, they're awful things to tell people you shouldn't be telling people that stuff.  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: In a, in a society that had its head on straight. In my opinion, you know, if you ran a couple of those commercials, people would be up in  Yucca: Yeah. And I think the food one is a really interesting one because that's one of those places where we're demonizing the ancient foods, we're demonizing the ancient and the traditional foods and, and holding up on these pillars, these new super processed industrialized things that that's really served to separate people more and more from, from their own ability to take care of themselves from their own heritage, from their own, from their relationship, with the rest of nature, it's all this packaged, fake beyond whatever stuff that just is just so far removed. Mark: And a lot of that stuff, especially the snack foods are engineered to be addictive.  Yucca: Literally  Mark: They are literally engineered. So that every time you take a bite of that potato chip, you get a little burst of dopamine and you can't stop until you've emptied the package.  Yucca: Yeah. And the greenwashing it, so think that there, you know, you're somehow saving the environment while you're consuming their products too  Mark: Right. Right. The whole  Yucca: plastic, but don't worry. You can recycle it. I said, you go down that no,  Mark: Yeah.  Yucca: it ends up in the ocean, so, Mark: So obviously we have a very dim view of what the overculture provides to us. Maybe there was a time when some of this stuff was useful.  Yucca: Hmm. Mark: But it got calcified many, many centuries ago. And even though we have moved out of feudalism and into, well, we have a different kind of feudalism now we've, you know, now we've got corporatism and modern industrial capitalism and you know what they call post-industrial capitalism with the information economy. But the end goal was always let's make as much surplus as possible and then grab as much of it for ourselves as we possibly can. And that's been going on since Sumeria,  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: It's time for us to revisit these, these values are not serving us. These Mo these ideas are not serving us.  Yucca: Quite the opposite. In fact, they're not, it's just not serving us. They're actively harming us, destroying our planet. Well, the biosphere that, the structure of the rock part's doing just fine, but the living part, you know? Yeah. Mark: And so all of that is very grim, but what I would like to say to our listeners is resist figure you know, think for yourself, what do I want my life to be like, not what do I want my next job to be like, but literally, you know, blank sheet of paper. If I were living the life I really wanted to live, what would it be like?  Yucca: Yeah, what would, and that might be a huge question. So you might break it into some smaller chunks to start thinking about what do you want your daily experience to be like  Mark: right  Yucca: right now, right? Not, and thinking about your 5, 10, 20 year plan, all that. That's great. But right now, what, what do you want every day to be like,  Mark: Yeah.  Yucca: and then how do you get there? Mark: Yeah. How, how do you get to the life that you deserve? Not to say that, you know, you deserve to be fabulously wealthy and have people wait on you hand and foot. But my guess is that very, very few of us would actually choose that as the life that we want to live. Given the option of that big question, what do you want your life to be like?  Yucca: Right. Mark: I think people are much more humble in their aspirations, I think. And I think that what most people want is love and creativity and enough so that they don't feel scared about food shelter, medical care.  Yucca: And often a sense of in, in that coming back to that word that we've used a few times in service. I think most people really, really do want to help.  Mark: Yes. My,  Yucca: deep in us. Mark: my work both in my, in my paying career as a nonprofit professional, working for public interest missions and my work in helping to foster atheopagan ism and support that community and provide resources for it and organize events and all that kind of stuff. I find that tremendously fulfilling it's, you know, it's unthinkable to me that I would. You know, go to work for a financial firm and, and shuffle other people's money around and make a bunch of money myself in the process, because I wouldn't find that meaningful. Now. I'm not saying that others couldn't find that meaningful. And I'm not saying that there's something wrong with that kind of work. just that for me, that doesn't feel like service and being in service to something greater than myself is very meaningful to me.  Yucca: Yeah. And so that's, that's something that. Each person needs to do for themselves. Right. And that's, so that's a place where we're challenging the overculture and saying yes. Do think don't, don't just keep going with everything. Stop. Think that's one of the things that we've talked about with a gift of the darkness is that pausing in the dark, in the quiet and really, really reflecting and exploring, exploring the feelings around that. And the, the thoughts that come up and, and just everything that's there for you. Because as we were talking about before, this is, this is it. This is what we get. This is life that we're not as far as we can tell. We're not going off to some eternal land in the clouds or under the ground or wherever. Right now. Mark: Yeah. It's not practice. This is the real, this is the game. This is the real thing. And what I'd like to put in a word for now is that that kind of reflection is perfectly suited for solo. Very well-suited to do your, your contemplation of yourself in a mirror with candles, maybe select some tarot cards that particularly resonate with you that give you a sense about what aspects you'd like to have in your life. All of those kinds of things can be really great ways of getting underneath your conscious, your conscious mind into your subconscious mind, where you have, you may have more of a deep seated sense about what you find satisfying and what you find unsatisfying. Yucca: And it might also take some, some experimentation, right? Because we've, we're surrounded by these values that are telling us, you know, what we should be valuing and thinking and feeling. And, and we might not have ever let ourselves explore in areas that are outside of that before.  Mark: Right.  Yucca: So I think there's there's room to, for that reflection and for that exploration as well, which is exciting. Mark: It is, it is one of the words that I've liked to associate my life with a lot since I was in my twenties actually is adventure. And I think. Life can feel like an adventure, even, even if you're, you know, getting up and going to work every morning and coming home and, you know, kind of doing the same thing most of the time, you can still have your life feel like an adventure depending on where your growth edges are and what your, what new things you're trying. Right. need to listen to what I just said myself. Now that I'm 60. I need to remind myself that there's still plenty of adventure to be found. So I'll make a note. So I know there is so much more that we could say about this. I think this is a pretty good first bite. I've really enjoyed kicking around these ideas with you Yucca. And I think that it's, I, I, I feel really proud of this episode. I'm glad that we're talking about.  Yucca: Yeah, likewise, there's a lot of.  Mark: Yeah.  Yucca: and, and before we wrap up, I just want to come back and say, you know, we aren't attacking any individuals. Right. And we're not saying judging any of us for being part of this. We're talking about values. We're talking about culture and yes, we're critiquing. We most certainly are critiquing it. But it's not personal.  Mark: right, right, exactly. So um, because all of us go along with the overculture to some degree, the it's it's everywhere and you can't fight on every. It's not possible. You have to kind of pick, all right, here are the ways that I'm going to be divergent, because those are the things that are going to bring me satisfaction and a sense of meaning and purpose. And then on the other stuff, I'm okay. I'll, I'll work a job. That's okay. I'm going to do that. And so yeah. what Yucca says is very true. The, this, this critique is of culture and systems and not of individuals.  Yucca: Yeah. Mark: I imagine there will be a lot of thoughts in response, thoughts, questions, comments, in response to this podcast, we are available to you at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com. That's the wonder podcast, all one word Q s@gmail.com. And we welcome your comments, your topic, suggestions, all that kind of thing, and happy new year.  Yucca: Thanks for hanging out with us.

Mark chapter 1  we dive into The Ministry of Jesus, how he heals many while snatching out the possessed.We need facts, not just scripture, so we need the backstory of God's great work, and I'm here to take you deep into the Holy book as we learn together.Podcast available on all listening platforms: Blessed2bsWebsite: www. Blessed2bs.comInstagram: Blessed2bsFacebook: Blessed2bsYoutube: https://youtu.be/-Qym01HNJQ4Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/blessed2bs)

In this episode we speak with Rosana Privitera Biondo the president and CEO of Mark One Electric Co. Rosie shares her experience on how her leadership style has evolved to help motivate her teams to embrace change, which has led to a tremendous amount of growth for their company. 

Life is filled with ups and downs, triumphs and mistakes. While being a follower of Jesus certainly doesn't eliminate challenges, we can learn priceless lessons through those selfsame challenges. Join us for this second episode of Season 1, as we explore Mark's life and how he overcame failure. As we will see, it is not about who you are, but Who you know. Visit thegreatpodcast.org to enjoy special artwork, custom-created for today's story on Mark. You can also access the script for today's episode at thegreatpodcast.org/s1/ep2

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.