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2 episodes with most western
2 episodes with most western
Scottsdale residents voted in a new mayor and new City Council in the 2024 election. Almost immediately, the new faces at City Hall started kicking up dust in a city that calls itself “The West's Most Western town.” Eliminating DEI measures against residents' wishes, a controversy over a parking garage, an ethics complaint about the new mayor and more have Scottsdale City Council feeling more like reality television than C-SPAN. This week on The Gaggle, a politics podcast by The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com, hosts Ron Hansen and Mary Jo Pitzl are joined by city watchdog reporter Taylor Seely. She covers Phoenix in addition to Scottsdale and has been reporting on the antics of Scottsdale's City Council. Taylor joins The Gaggle to give an update on what is going on in Scottsdale and how the drama is resonating with those in charge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
【欢迎订阅】每天早上5:30，准时更新。【阅读原文】标题：China's AI firms are cleverly innovating around chip bansTweaks to software blunt the shortage of powerful hardware正文：Today's top artificial-intelligence (AI) models rely on large numbers of cutting-edge processors known as graphics processing units (GPUs). Most Western companies have no trouble acquiring them. Llama 3, the newest model from Meta, a social-media giant, was trained on 16,000 H100 GPUs from Nvidia, an American chipmaker. Meta plans to stockpile 600,000 more before year's end. XAI, a startup backed by Elon Musk, has built a data centre in Memphis powered by 100,000 H100s. And though OpenAI, the other big model-maker, is tight-lipped about its GPU stash, it had its latest processors hand-delivered by Jensen Huang, Nvidia's boss, in April.知识点：cutting-edge adj./ˌkʌtɪŋ ˈedʒ/Cutting-edge techniques or equipment are the most advanced that there are in a particular field. 尖端的• What we are planning is cutting-edge technology never seen before. 我们正在筹划的是前所未见的尖端技术。获取外刊的完整原文以及精讲笔记，请关注微信公众号「早安英文」，回复“外刊”即可。更多有意思的英语干货等着你！【节目介绍】《早安英文-每日外刊精读》，带你精读最新外刊，了解国际最热事件：分析语法结构，拆解长难句，最接地气的翻译，还有重点词汇讲解。所有选题均来自于《经济学人》《纽约时报》《华尔街日报》《华盛顿邮报》《大西洋月刊》《科学杂志》《国家地理》等国际一线外刊。【适合谁听】1、关注时事热点新闻，想要学习最新最潮流英文表达的英文学习者2、任何想通过地道英文提高听、说、读、写能力的英文学习者3、想快速掌握表达，有出国学习和旅游计划的英语爱好者4、参加各类英语考试的应试者（如大学英语四六级、托福雅思、考研等）【你将获得】1、超过1000篇外刊精读课程，拓展丰富语言表达和文化背景2、逐词、逐句精确讲解，系统掌握英语词汇、听力、阅读和语法3、每期内附学习笔记，包含全文注释、长难句解析、疑难语法点等，帮助扫除阅读障碍。
The side that's pushing for contraception, the contraceptive pill (Diane?), birth control would never tell you that overpopulation is really not a problem, especially here in the Philippines. Most Western countries' problem now is underpopulation or the demographic winter. But the mainstream media will not tell you that, right? This is our topic with guest, chastity speaker, Jason Evert. Watch until the end to hear what contraceptive's side effect caused a Kenyan village. For my full conversation with Jason Evert, click this: https://spoti.fi/3p5d3kW - - - Today's Sponsor: Hallow - Try Hallow's premium contents for FREE: https://hallow.com/jayaruga - - - The Sentinel Ph: Follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheSentinelPh - - - You can help SUPPORT THIS PODCAST thru: Shopee – Arugaan Online Shop: Fight this toxic culture in style! Order your THE JAY ARUGA SHOW podcast T-shirt now: https://shopee.ph/product/274489164/24822983311/ Buying me a coffee thru: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/thejayarugashow - - - Socials: Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jagaruga Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jay.aruga Follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheJayArugaShow Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JayAruga?sub_confirmation=1
This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Nov. 14. It dropped for free subscribers on Nov. 21. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoJim Vick, General Manager of Lutsen Mountains, MinnesotaRecorded onOctober 30, 2023About Lutsen MountainsClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Midwest Family Ski ResortsLocated in: Lutsen, MinnesotaYear founded: 1948Pass affiliations:* Legendary Gold Pass – unlimited access, no blackouts* Legendary Silver Pass – unlimited with 12 holiday and peak Saturday blackouts* Legendary Bronze Pass – unlimited weekdays with three Christmas week blackouts* Indy Pass – 2 days with 24 holiday and Saturday blackouts* Indy Plus Pass – 2 days with no blackoutsClosest neighboring ski areas: Chester Bowl (1:44), Loch Lomond (1:48), Spirit Mountain (1:54), Giants Ridge (1:57), Mt. Baldy (2:11)Base elevation: 800 feetSummit elevation: 1,688 feetVertical drop: 1,088 feet (825 feet lift-served)Skiable Acres: 1,000Average annual snowfall: 120 inchesTrail count: 95 (10% expert, 25% most difficult, 47% more difficult, 18% easiest)Lift count: 7 (1 eight-passenger gondola, 2 high-speed six-packs, 3 double chairs, 1 carpet)View historic Lutsen Mountains trailmaps on skimap.org.Why I interviewed himI often claim that Vail and Alterra have failed to appreciate Midwest skiing. I realize that this can be confusing. Vail Resorts owns 10 ski areas from Missouri to Ohio. Alterra's Ikon Pass includes a small but meaningful presence in Northern Michigan. What the hell am I talking about here?Lutsen, while a regional standout and outlier, illuminates each company's blind spots. In 2018, the newly formed Alterra Mountain Company looted the motley M.A.X. Pass roster for its best specimens, adding them to its Ikon Pass. Formed partly from the ashes of Intrawest, Alterra kept all of their own mountains and cherry-picked the best of Boyne and Powdr, leaving off Boyne's Michigan mountains, Brighton, Summit at Snoqualmie, and Cypress (which Ikon later added); and Powdr's Boreal, Lee Canyon, Pico, and Bachelor (Pico and Bachelor eventually made the team). Alterra also added Solitude and Crystal after purchasing them later in 2018, and, over time, Windham and Alyeska. Vail bought Triple Peaks (Crested Butte, Okemo, Sunapee), later that year, and added Resorts of the Canadian Rockies to its Epic Pass. But that left quite a few orphans, including Lutsen and sister mountain Granite Peak, which eventually joined the Indy Pass (which didn't debut until 2019).All of which is technocratic background to set up this question: what the hell was Alterra thinking? In Lutsen and Granite Peak, Alterra had, ready to snatch, two of the largest, most well-cared-for, most built-up resorts between Vermont and Colorado. Midwest Family Ski Resorts CEO Charles Skinner is one of the most aggressive and capable ski area operators anywhere. These mountains, with their 700-plus-foot vertical drops, high-speed lifts, endless glade networks, and varied terrain deliver a big-mountain experience that has more in common with a mid-sized New England ski area than anything within several hundred miles in any direction. It's like someone in a Colorado boardroom and a stack of spreadsheets didn't bother looking past the ZIP Codes when deciding what to keep and what to discard.This is one of the great miscalculations in the story of skiing's shift to multimountain pass hegemony. By overlooking Lutsen Mountains and Granite Peak in its earliest days, Alterra missed an opportunity to snatch enormous volumes of Ikon Pass sales across the Upper Midwest. Any Twin Cities skier (and there are a lot of them), would easily be able to calculate the value of an Ikon Pass that could deliver 10 or 14 days between Skinner's two resorts, and additional days on that mid-winter western run. By dismissing the region, Alterra also enabled the rise of the Indy Pass, now the only viable national multi-mountain pass product for the Midwestern skier outside of Michigan's Lower Peninsula. These sorts of regional destinations, while not as “iconic” as, say, Revelstoke, move passes; the sort of resort-hopping skier who is attracted to a multi-mountain pass is going to want to ski near home as much as they want to fly across the country.Which is a formula Vail Resorts, to its credit, figured out a long time ago. Which brings us back to those 10 Midwestern ski areas hanging off the Epic Pass attendance sheet. Vail has, indeed, grasped the utility of the Midwestern, city-adjacent day-ski area, and all 10 of its resorts fit neatly into that template: 75 chairlifts on 75 vertical feet with four trees seated within 10 miles of a city center. But here's what they missed: outside of school groups; Park Brahs who like to Park Out, Brah; and little kids, these ski areas hold little appeal even to Midwesterners. That they are busy beyond comprehension at all times underscores, rather than refutes, that point – something simulating a big-mountain experience, rather than a street riot, is what the frequent Midwest skier seeks.For that, you have to flee the cities. Go north, find something in the 400- to 600-foot vertical range, something with glades and nooks and natural snow. Places like Caberfae, Crystal Mountain, Nub's Nob, and Shanty Creek in Michigan; Cascade, Devil's Head, and Whitecap, Wisconsin; Giants Ridge and Spirit Mountain, Minnesota. Lutsen is the best of all of these, a sprawler with every kind of terrain flung across its hundreds of acres. A major ski area. A true resort. A Midwestern dream.Vick and I discuss the Ikon snub in the podcast. It's weird. And while Alterra, five years later, is clearly doing just fine, its early decision to deliberately exclude itself from one of the world's great ski regions is as mystifying a strategic choice as I've seen any ski company make. Vail, perhaps, understands the Midwest resort's true potential, but never found one it could close on – there aren't that many of them, and they aren't often for sale. Perhaps they dropped a blank check on Skinner's desk, and he promptly deposited it into the nearest trashcan.All of which is a long way of saying this: Lutsen is the best conventional ski area in the Midwest (monster ungroomed Mount Bohemia is going to hold more appeal for a certain sort of expert skier), and one of the most consistently excellent ski operations in America. Its existence ought to legitimize the region to national operators too bent on dismissing it. Someday, they will understand that. And after listening to this podcast, I hope that you will, too.What we talked aboutWhy Lutsen never makes snow in October; Minnesota as early-season operator; the new Raptor Express six-pack; why the Bridge double is intact but retiring from winter operations; why Lutsen removed the 10th Mountain triple; why so many Riblet chairs are still operating; why Moose Return trail will be closed indefinitely; potential new lower-mountain trails on Eagle Mountain; an updated season-opening plan; how lake-effect snow impacts the west side of Lake Superior; how the Raptor lift may impact potential May operations; fire destroys Papa Charlie's; how it could have been worse; rebuilding the restaurant; Lutsen's long evolution from backwater to regional leader and legit western alternative; the Skinner family's aggressive operating philosophy; the history of Lutsen's gondola, the only such machine in Midwest skiing; Lutsen's ambitious but stalled masterplan; potential Ullr and Mystery mountain chairlift upgrades; “the list of what skiers want is long”; why Lutsen switched to a multi-mountain season pass with Granite Peak and Snowriver; and “if we would have been invited into the Ikon at the start, we would have jumped on that.”Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewFor all my gushing above, Lutsen isn't perfect. While Granite Peak has planted three high-speed lifts on the bump in the past 20 years, Lutsen has still largely been reliant on a fleet of antique Riblets, plus a sixer that landed a decade ago and the Midwest's only gondola, a glimmering eight-passenger Doppelmayr machine installed in 2015. While a fixed-grip foundation isn't particularly abnormal for the Midwest, which is home to probably the largest collection of antique chairlifts on the planet, it's off-brand for burnished Midwest Family Ski Resorts.Enter, this year, Lutsen's second six-pack, Raptor Express, which replaces both the 10th Mountain triple (removed), and the Bridge double (demoted to summer-only use). This new lift, running approximately 600 vertical feet parallel to Bridge, will (sort of; more below), smooth out the janky connection from Moose back to Eagle. And while the loss of 10th Mountain will mean 300 vertical feet of rambling below the steep upper-mountain shots, Raptor is a welcome upgrade that will help Lutsen keep up with the Boynes.However, even as this summer moved the mountain ahead with the Raptor installation, a storm demolished a skier bridge over the river on Moose Return, carving a several-hundred-foot-wide, unbridgeable (at least in the short term), gap across the trail. Which means that skiers will have to connect back to Eagle via gondola, somewhat dampening Raptor's expected impact. That's too bad, and Vick and I talk extensively about what that means for skiers this coming winter.The final big timely piece of this interview is the abrupt cancellation of Lutsen's massive proposed terrain expansion, which would have more than doubled the ski area's size with new terrain on Moose and Eagle mountains. Here's what they were hoping to do with Moose:And Eagle:Over the summer, Lutsen withdrew the plan, and Superior National Forest Supervisor Thomas Hall recommended a “no action” alternative, citing “irreversible damage” to mature white cedar and sugar maple stands, displacement of backcountry skiers, negative impacts to the 300-mile-long Superior hiking trail, objections from Native American communities, and water-quality concerns. Lutsen had until Oct. 10 to file an objection to the decision, and they did. What happens now? we discuss that.Questions I wish I'd askedIt may have been worth getting into the difference between Lutsen's stated lift-served vertical (825 feet), and overall vertical (1,088 feet). But it wasn't really necessary, as I asked the same question of Midwest Family Ski Resorts CEO Charles Skinner two years ago. He explains the disparity at the 25:39 mark:What I got wrongI said that Boyne Mountain runs the Hemlock double chair instead of the Mountain Express six-pack for summer operations. That is not entirely true, as Mountain Express sometimes runs, as does the new Disciples 8 chair on the far side of the mountain's Sky Bridge.I referred to Midwest Family Ski Resorts CEO Charles Skinner as “Charles Skinner Jr.” He is in fact Charles Skinner IV.Why you should ski Lutsen MountainsOne of the most unexpected recurring messages I receive from Storm readers floats out of the West. Dedicated skiers of the big-mountain, big-snow kingdoms of the Rockies, they'd never thought much about skiing east of the Continental Divide. But now they're curious. All these profiles of New England girth and history, Midwest backwater bumps, and Great Lakes snowtrains have them angling for a quirky adventure, for novelty and, perhaps, a less-stressful version of skiing. These folks are a minority. Most Western skiers wear their big-mountain chauvinism as a badge of stupid pride. Which I understand. But they are missing a version of skiing that is heartier, grittier, and more human than the version that swarms from the western skies.So, to those few who peek east over the fortress walls and consider the great rolling beyond, I tell you this: go to Lutsen. If you're only going to ski the Midwest once, and only in a limited way, this is one of the few must-experience stops. Lutsen and Bohemia. Mix and match the rest. But these two are truly singular.To the rest of you, well: Midwest Family's stated goal is to beef up its resorts so that they're an acceptable substitute for a western vacation. Lutsen's website even hosts a page comparing the cost of a five-day trip there and to Breckenridge:Sure, that's slightly exaggerated, and yes, Breck crushes Lutsen in every on-mountain statistical category, from skiable acreage to vertical drop to average annual snowfall. But 800 vertical feet is about what an average skier can manage in one go anyway. And Lutsen really does give you a bigger-mountain feel than anything for a thousand miles in either direction (except, as always, the Bohemia exception). And when you board that gondy and swing up the cliffs toward Moose Mountain, you're going to wonder where, exactly, you've been transported to. Because it sure as hell doesn't look like Minnesota.Podcast NotesOn Midwest Family Ski ResortsMidwest Family Ski Resorts now owns four ski areas (Snowriver, Michigan is one resort with two side-by-side ski areas). Here's an overview:On the loss of Moose ReturnA small but significant change will disrupt skiing at Lutsen Mountains this winter: the destruction of the skier bridge at the bottom of the Moose Return trail that crosses the Poplar River, providing direct ski access from Moose to Eagle mountains. Vick details why this presents an unfixable obstacle in the podcast, but you can see that Lutsen removed the trail from its updated 2023-24 map:On the Stowe gondola I referencedI briefly referenced Stowe's gondola as a potential model for traversing the newly re-gapped Moose Return run. The resort is home to two gondolas – the 2,100-vertical-foot, 7,664-foot-long, eight-passenger Mansfield Gondola; and the 1,454-foot-long, six-passenger Over Easy Gondola, which moves between the Mansfield and Spruce bases. It is the latter that I'm referring to in the podcast: On Mt. FrontenacVick mentions that his first job was at Mt. Frontenac, a now-lost 420-vertical-foot ski area in Minnesota. Here was a circa 2000 trailmap:Apparently a local group purchased the ski area and converted it into a golf course. Boo.On the evolution of LutsenThe Skinners have been involved with Lutsen since the early 1980s. Here's a circa 1982 trailmap, which underscores the mountain's massive evolution over the decades:On the evolution of Granite PeakWhen Charles Skinner purchased Granite Peak, then known as Rib Mountain, it was a nubby little backwater, with neglected infrastructure and a miniscule footprint:And here it is today, a mile-wide broadside running three high-speed chairlifts:An absolutely stunning transformation.On Charles Skinner IIISkinner's 2021 Star Tribune obituary summarized his contributions to Lutsen and to skiing:Charles Mather Skinner III passed away on June 17th at the age of 87 in his new home in Red Wing, MN. …Charles was born in St. Louis, MO on August 30, 1933, to Eleanor Whiting Skinner and Charles Mather Skinner II. He grew up near Lake Harriet in Minneapolis where he loved racing sailboats during the summer and snow sliding adventures in the winter.At the age of 17, he joined the United States Navy and fought in the Korean War as a navigator aboard dive bombers. After his service, he returned home to Minnesota where he graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School, served on the law review, and began practicing law in Grand Rapids, MN.In 1962, he led the formation of Sugar Hills Ski and purchased Sugar Lake (Otis) Resort in Grand Rapids, MN. For 20 years, Charles pioneer-ed snowmaking inventions, collaborated with other Midwest ski area owners to build a golden age for Midwest ski areas, and advised ski areas across the U.S. including Aspen on snowmaking.In the 1970s, Scott Paper Company recruited Charles to manage recreational lands across New England, and later promoted him to become President of Sugarloaf Mountain ski area in Maine. In 1980, he bought, and significantly expanded, Lutsen Mountains in Lutsen, MN, which is now owned and operated by his children.He and his wife spent many happy years on North Captiva Island, Florida, where they owned and operated Barnacle Phil's Restaurant. An entrepreneur and risk-taker at heart, he never wanted to retire and was always looking for new business ventures.His work at Sugar Hills, Lutsen Mountains and North Captive Island helped local economics expand and thrive.He was a much-respected leader and inspiration to thousands of people over the years. Charles was incredibly intellectually curious and an avid reader, with a tremendous memory for facts and history.Unstoppable and unforgettable, he had a wonderful sense of humor and gave wise counsel to many. …On the number of ski areas on Forest Service landA huge number of U.S. ski areas operate on Forest Service land, with the majority seated in the West. A handful also sit in the Midwest and New England (Lutsen once sat partially on Forest Service land, but currently does not):On additional Midwest podcastsAs a native Midwesterner, I've made it a point to regularly feature the leaders of Midwest ski areas on the podcast. Dig into the archive:MICHIGANWISCONSINOHIOINDIANASOUTH DAKOTAThe Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 98/100 in 2023, and number 484 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe
This time on the Being in the Way Podcast, Alan Watts delves into questions of identity, purpose and buying into the ‘Myth of Myself'.Today's podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Click to receive 10% off your first month with your own licensed professional therapist: betterhelp.com/alanIn this episode, Alan Watts explores:The question of our own identity and our place in the worldMyths of the self handed down through historyViewing ourselves and the world with a “floodlight consciousness” – rather than the narrow “spotlight consciousness” we are taught to see the world throughHow we are not born into this world, but grow out of it – “In the same way an apple tree apples, the Earth peoples.”“The most fascinating problem in the world is who am I? What do you feel when you say the word I? I myself?This problem has fascinated me for many years. Most Western people locate their ego inside their heads. This is the ordinary average conception of what is oneself.” – Alan WattsThis series is brought to you by the Alan Watts Organization and Ram Dass' Love Serve Remember Foundation. Visit https://Alanwatts.org for full talks from Alan Watts.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Most Western historians claim that World War I came about because of aggression from Germany and Austria-Hungary. However, Great Britain and its ANZAC allies were not innocent bystanders. Original Article: "How Australia and New Zealand Helped Provoke and Escalate the First World War" This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Most Western historians claim that World War I came about because of aggression from Germany and Austria-Hungary. However, Great Britain and its ANZAC allies were not innocent bystanders. Original Article: "How Australia and New Zealand Helped Provoke and Escalate the First World War" This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "White Light/White Heat" and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Why Don't You Smile Now?" by the Downliners Sect. 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 I say the Velvet Underground didn't play New York for the rest of the sixties after 1966. They played at least one gig there in 1967, but did generally avoid the city. Also, I refer to Cale and Conrad as the other surviving members of the Theater of Eternal Music. Sadly Conrad died in 2016. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Velvet Underground, and some of the avant-garde pieces excerpted run to six hours or more. I used a lot of resources for this one. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga is the best book on the group as a group. I also used Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico. Bockris also wrote one of the two biographies of Reed I referred to, Transformer. The other was Lou Reed by Anthony DeCurtis. Information on Cale mostly came from Sedition and Alchemy by Tim Mitchell. Information on Nico came from Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts. I used Draw a Straight Line and Follow it by Jeremy Grimshaw as my main source for La Monte Young, The Roaring Silence by David Revill for John Cage, and Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik for Warhol. I also referred to the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of the 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground. The definitive collection of the Velvet Underground's music is the sadly out-of-print box set Peel Slowly and See, which contains the four albums the group made with Reed in full, plus demos, outtakes, and live recordings. Note that the digital version of the album as sold by Amazon for some reason doesn't include the last disc -- if you want the full box set you have to buy a physical copy. All four studio albums have also been released and rereleased many times over in different configurations with different numbers of CDs at different price points -- I have used the "45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe" versions for this episode, but for most people the standard CD versions will be fine. Sadly there are no good shorter compilation overviews of the group -- they tend to emphasise either the group's "pop" mode or its "avant-garde" mode to the exclusion of the other. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I begin this episode, there are a few things to say. This introductory section is going to be longer than normal because, as you will hear, this episode is also going to be longer than normal. Firstly, I try to warn people about potentially upsetting material in these episodes. But this is the first episode for 1968, and as you will see there is a *profound* increase in the amount of upsetting and disturbing material covered as we go through 1968 and 1969. The story is going to be in a much darker place for the next twenty or thirty episodes. And this episode is no exception. As always, I try to deal with everything as sensitively as possible, but you should be aware that the list of warnings for this one is so long I am very likely to have missed some. Among the topics touched on in this episode are mental illness, drug addiction, gun violence, racism, societal and medical homophobia, medical mistreatment of mental illness, domestic abuse, rape, and more. If you find discussion of any of those subjects upsetting, you might want to read the transcript. Also, I use the term "queer" freely in this episode. In the past I have received some pushback for this, because of a belief among some that "queer" is a slur. The following explanation will seem redundant to many of my listeners, but as with many of the things I discuss in the podcast I am dealing with multiple different audiences with different levels of awareness and understanding of issues, so I'd like to beg those people's indulgence a moment. The term "queer" has certainly been used as a slur in the past, but so have terms like "lesbian", "gay", "homosexual" and others. In all those cases, the term has gone from a term used as a self-identifier, to a slur, to a reclaimed slur, and back again many times. The reason for using that word, specifically, here is because the vast majority of people in this story have sexualities or genders that don't match the societal norms of their times, but used labels for themselves that have shifted in meaning over the years. There are at least two men in the story, for example, who are now dead and referred to themselves as "homosexual", but were in multiple long-term sexually-active relationships with women. Would those men now refer to themselves as "bisexual" or "pansexual" -- terms not in widespread use at the time -- or would they, in the relatively more tolerant society we live in now, only have been in same-gender relationships? We can't know. But in our current context using the word "homosexual" for those men would lead to incorrect assumptions about their behaviour. The labels people use change over time, and the definitions of them blur and shift. I have discussed this issue with many, many, friends who fall under the queer umbrella, and while not all of them are comfortable with "queer" as a personal label because of how it's been used against them in the past, there is near-unanimity from them that it's the correct word to use in this situation. Anyway, now that that rather lengthy set of disclaimers is over, let's get into the story proper, as we look at "White Light, White Heat" by the Velvet Underground: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light, White Heat"] And that look will start with... a disclaimer about length. This episode is going to be a long one. Not as long as episode one hundred and fifty, but almost certainly the longest episode I'll do this year, by some way. And there's a reason for that. One of the questions I've been asked repeatedly over the years about the podcast is why almost all the acts I've covered have been extremely commercially successful ones. "Where are the underground bands? The alternative bands? The little niche acts?" The answer to that is simple. Until the mid-sixties, the idea of an underground or alternative band made no sense at all in rock, pop, rock and roll, R&B, or soul. The idea would have been completely counterintuitive to the vast majority of the people we've discussed in the podcast. Those musics were commercial musics, made by people who wanted to make money and to get the largest audiences possible. That doesn't mean that they had no artistic merit, or that there was no artistic intent behind them, but the artists making that music were *commercial* artists. They knew if they wanted to make another record, they had to sell enough copies of the last record for the record company to make another, and that if they wanted to keep eating, they had to draw enough of an audience to their gigs for promoters to keep booking them. There was no space in this worldview for what we might think of as cult success. If your record only sold a thousand copies, then you had failed in your goal, even if the thousand people who bought your record really loved it. Even less commercially successful artists we've covered to this point, like the Mothers of Invention or Love, were *trying* for commercial success, even if they made the decision not to compromise as much as others do. This started to change a tiny bit in the mid-sixties as the influence of jazz and folk in the US, and the British blues scene, started to be felt in rock music. But this influence, at first, was a one-way thing -- people who had been in the folk and jazz worlds deciding to modify their music to be more commercial. And that was followed by already massively commercial musicians, like the Beatles, taking on some of those influences and bringing their audience with them. But that started to change around the time that "rock" started to differentiate itself from "rock and roll" and "pop", in mid 1967. So in this episode and the next, we're going to look at two bands who in different ways provided a model for how to be an alternative band. Both of them still *wanted* commercial success, but neither achieved it, at least not at first and not in the conventional way. And both, when they started out, went by the name The Warlocks. But we have to take a rather circuitous route to get to this week's band, because we're now properly introducing a strand of music that has been there in the background for a while -- avant-garde art music. So before we go any further, let's have a listen to a thirty-second clip of the most famous piece of avant-garde music ever, and I'll be performing it myself: [Excerpt, Andrew Hickey "4'33 (Cage)"] Obviously that won't give the full effect, you have to listen to the whole piece to get that. That is of course a section of "4'33" by John Cage, a piece of music that is often incorrectly described as being four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. As I've mentioned before, though, in the episode on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", it isn't that at all. The whole point of the piece is that there is no such thing as silence, and it's intended to make the listener appreciate all the normal ambient sounds as music, every bit as much as any piece by Bach or Beethoven. John Cage, the composer of "4'33", is possibly the single most influential avant-garde artist of the mid twentieth century, so as we're properly introducing the ideas of avant-garde music into the story here, we need to talk about him a little. Cage was, from an early age, torn between three great vocations, all of which in some fashion would shape his work for decades to come. One of these was architecture, and for a time he intended to become an architect. Another was the religious ministry, and he very seriously considered becoming a minister as a young man, and religion -- though not the religious faith of his youth -- was to be a massive factor in his work as he grew older. He started studying music from an early age, though he never had any facility as a performer -- though he did, when he discovered the work of Grieg, think that might change. He later said “For a while I played nothing else. I even imagined devoting my life to the performance of his works alone, for they did not seem to me to be too difficult, and I loved them.” [Excerpt: Grieg piano concerto in A minor] But he soon realised that he didn't have some of the basic skills that would be required to be a performer -- he never actually thought of himself as very musical -- and so he decided to move into composition, and he later talked about putting his musical limits to good use in being more inventive. From his very first pieces, Cage was trying to expand the definition of what a performance of a piece of music actually was. One of his friends, Harry Hay, who took part in the first documented performance of a piece by Cage, described how Cage's father, an inventor, had "devised a fluorescent light source over which Sample" -- Don Sample, Cage's boyfriend at the time -- "laid a piece of vellum painted with designs in oils. The blankets I was wearing were white, and a sort of lampshade shone coloured patterns onto me. It looked very good. The thing got so hot the designs began to run, but that only made it better.” Apparently the audience for this light show -- one that predated the light shows used by rock bands by a good thirty years -- were not impressed, though that may be more because the Santa Monica Women's Club in the early 1930s was not the vanguard of the avant-garde. Or maybe it was. Certainly the housewives of Santa Monica seemed more willing than one might expect to sign up for another of Cage's ideas. In 1933 he went door to door asking women if they would be interested in signing up to a lecture course from him on modern art and music. He told them that if they signed up for $2.50, he would give them ten lectures, and somewhere between twenty and forty of them signed up, even though, as he said later, “I explained to the housewives that I didn't know anything about either subject but that I was enthusiastic about both of them. I promised to learn faithfully enough about each subject so as to be able to give a talk an hour long each week.” And he did just that, going to the library every day and spending all week preparing an hour-long talk for them. History does not relate whether he ended these lectures by telling the housewives to tell just one friend about them. He said later “I came out of these lectures, with a devotion to the painting of Mondrian, on the one hand, and the music of Schoenberg on the other.” [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte"] Schoenberg was one of the two most widely-respected composers in the world at that point, the other being Stravinsky, but the two had very different attitudes to composition. Schoenberg's great innovation was the creation and popularisation of the twelve-tone technique, and I should probably explain that a little before I go any further. Most Western music is based on an eight-note scale -- do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do -- with the eighth note being an octave up from the first. So in the key of C major that would be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C: [demonstrates] And when you hear notes from that scale, if your ears are accustomed to basically any Western music written before about 1920, or any Western popular music written since then, you expect the melody to lead back to C, and you know to expect that because it only uses those notes -- there are differing intervals between them, some having a tone between them and some having a semitone, and you recognise the pattern. But of course there are other notes between the notes of that scale. There are actually an infinite number of these, but in conventional Western music we only look at a few more -- C# (or D flat), D# (or E flat), F# (or G flat), G# (or A flat) and A# (or B flat). If you add in all those notes you get this: [demonstrates] There's no clear beginning or end, no do for it to come back to. And Schoenberg's great innovation, which he was only starting to promote widely around this time, was to insist that all twelve notes should be equal -- his melodies would use all twelve of the notes the exact same number of times, and so if he used say a B flat, he would have to use all eleven other notes before he used B flat again in the piece. This was a radical new idea, but Schoenberg had only started advancing it after first winning great acclaim for earlier pieces, like his "Three Pieces for Piano", a work which wasn't properly twelve-tone, but did try to do without the idea of having any one note be more important than any other: [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Three Pieces for Piano"] At this point, that work had only been performed in the US by one performer, Richard Buhlig, and hadn't been released as a recording yet. Cage was so eager to hear it that he'd found Buhlig's phone number and called him, asking him to play the piece, but Buhlig put the phone down on him. Now he was doing these lectures, though, he had to do one on Schoenberg, and he wasn't a competent enough pianist to play Schoenberg's pieces himself, and there were still no recordings of them. Cage hitch-hiked from Santa Monica to LA, where Buhlig lived, to try to get him to come and visit his class and play some of Schoenberg's pieces for them. Buhlig wasn't in, and Cage hung around in his garden hoping for him to come back -- he pulled the leaves off a bough from one of Buhlig's trees, going "He'll come back, he won't come back, he'll come back..." and the leaves said he'd be back. Buhlig arrived back at midnight, and quite understandably told the strange twenty-one-year-old who'd spent twelve hours in his garden pulling the leaves off his trees that no, he would not come to Santa Monica and give a free performance. But he did agree that if Cage brought some of his own compositions he'd give them a look over. Buhlig started giving Cage some proper lessons in composition, although he stressed that he was a performer, not a composer. Around this time Cage wrote his Sonata for Clarinet: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Sonata For Clarinet"] Buhlig suggested that Cage send that to Henry Cowell, the composer we heard about in the episode on "Good Vibrations" who was friends with Lev Termen and who created music by playing the strings inside a piano: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell offered to take Cage on as an assistant, in return for which Cowell would teach him for a semester, as would Adolph Weiss, a pupil of Schoenberg's. But the goal, which Cowell suggested, was always to have Cage study with Schoenberg himself. Schoenberg at first refused, saying that Cage couldn't afford his price, but eventually took Cage on as a student having been assured that he would devote his entire life to music -- a promise Cage kept. Cage started writing pieces for percussion, something that had been very rare up to that point -- only a handful of composers, most notably Edgard Varese, had written pieces for percussion alone, but Cage was: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Trio"] This is often portrayed as a break from the ideals of his teacher Schoenberg, but in fact there's a clear continuity there, once you see what Cage was taking from Schoenberg. Schoenberg's work is, in some senses, about equality, about all notes being equal. Or to put it another way, it's about fairness. About erasing arbitrary distinctions. What Cage was doing was erasing the arbitrary distinction between the more and less prominent instruments. Why should there be pieces for solo violin or string quartet, but not for multiple percussion players? That said, Schoenberg was not exactly the most encouraging of teachers. When Cage invited Schoenberg to go to a concert of Cage's percussion work, Schoenberg told him he was busy that night. When Cage offered to arrange another concert for a date Schoenberg wasn't busy, the reply came "No, I will not be free at any time". Despite this, Cage later said “Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles,” and said "I literally worshipped him" -- a strong statement from someone who took religious matters as seriously as Cage. Cage was so devoted to Schoenberg's music that when a concert of music by Stravinsky was promoted as "music of the world's greatest living composer", Cage stormed into the promoter's office angrily, confronting the promoter and making it very clear that such things should not be said in the city where Schoenberg lived. Schoenberg clearly didn't think much of Cage's attempts at composition, thinking -- correctly -- that Cage had no ear for harmony. And his reportedly aggressive and confrontational teaching style didn't sit well with Cage -- though it seems very similar to a lot of the teaching techniques of the Zen masters he would later go on to respect. The two eventually parted ways, although Cage always spoke highly of Schoenberg. Schoenberg later gave Cage a compliment of sorts, when asked if any of his students had gone on to do anything interesting. At first he replied that none had, but then he mentioned Cage and said “Of course he's not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” Cage was at this point very worried if there was any point to being a composer at all. He said later “I'd read Cowell's New Musical Resources and . . . The Theory of Rhythm. I had also read Chavez's Towards a New Music. Both works gave me the feeling that everything that was possible in music had already happened. So I thought I could never compose socially important music. Only if I could invent something new, then would I be useful to society. But that seemed unlikely then.” [Excerpt: John Cage, "Totem Ancestor"] Part of the solution came when he was asked to compose music for an abstract animation by the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, and also to work as Fischinger's assistant when making the film. He was fascinated by the stop-motion process, and by the results of the film, which he described as "a beautiful film in which these squares, triangles and circles and other things moved and changed colour.” But more than that he was overwhelmed by a comment by Fischinger, who told him “Everything in the world has its own spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by setting it into vibration.” Cage later said “That set me on fire. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped—of hitting and stretching and scraping and rubbing everything.” Cage now took his ideas further. His compositions for percussion had been about, if you like, giving the underdog a chance -- percussion was always in the background, why should it not be in the spotlight? Now he realised that there were other things getting excluded in conventional music -- the sounds that we characterise as noise. Why should composers work to exclude those sounds, but work to *include* other sounds? Surely that was... well, a little unfair? Eventually this would lead to pieces like his 1952 piece "Water Music", later expanded and retitled "Water Walk", which can be heard here in his 1959 appearance on the TV show "I've Got a Secret". It's a piece for, amongst other things, a flowerpot full of flowers, a bathtub, a watering can, a pipe, a duck call, a blender full of ice cubes, and five unplugged radios: [Excerpt: John Cage "Water Walk"] As he was now avoiding pitch and harmony as organising principles for his music, he turned to time. But note -- not to rhythm. He said “There's none of this boom, boom, boom, business in my music . . . a measure is taken as a strict measure of time—not a one two three four—which I fill with various sounds.” He came up with a system he referred to as “micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure,” what we would now call fractals, though that word hadn't yet been invented, where the structure of the whole piece was reflected in the smallest part of it. For a time he started moving away from the term music, preferring to refer to the "art of noise" or to "organised sound" -- though he later received a telegram from Edgard Varese, one of his musical heroes and one of the few other people writing works purely for percussion, asking him not to use that phrase, which Varese used for his own work. After meeting with Varese and his wife, he later became convinced that it was Varese's wife who had initiated the telegram, as she explained to Cage's wife "we didn't want your husband's work confused with my husband's work, any more than you'd want some . . . any artist's work confused with that of a cartoonist.” While there is a humour to Cage's work, I don't really hear much qualitative difference between a Cage piece like the one we just heard and a Varese piece like Ionisation: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] But it was in 1952, the year of "Water Music" that John Cage made his two biggest impacts on the cultural world, though the full force of those impacts wasn't felt for some years. To understand Cage's 1952 work, you first have to understand that he had become heavily influenced by Zen, which at that time was very little known in the Western world. Indeed he had studied with Daisetsu Suzuki, who is credited with introducing Zen to the West, and said later “I didn't study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg, I didn't study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I've always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.” Cage's whole worldview was profoundly affected by Zen, but he was also naturally sympathetic to it, and his work after learning about Zen is mostly a continuation of trends we can already see. In particular, he became convinced that the point of music isn't to communicate anything between two people, rather its point is merely to be experienced. I'm far from an expert on Buddhism, but one way of thinking about its central lessons is that one should experience things as they are, experiencing the thing itself rather than one's thoughts or preconceptions about it. And so at Black Mountain college came Theatre Piece Number 1: [Excerpt: Edith Piaf, "La Vie En Rose" ] In this piece, Cage had set the audience on all sides, so they'd be facing each other. He stood on a stepladder, as colleagues danced in and around the audience, another colleague played the piano, two more took turns to stand on another stepladder to recite poetry, different films and slides were projected, seemingly at random, onto the walls, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg played scratchy Edith Piaf records on a wind-up gramophone. The audience were included in the performance, and it was meant to be experienced as a gestalt, as a whole, to be what we would now call an immersive experience. One of Cage's students around this time was the artist Allan Kaprow, and he would be inspired by Theatre Piece Number 1 to put on several similar events in the late fifties. Those events he called "happenings", because the point of them was that you were meant to experience an event as it was happening rather than bring preconceptions of form and structure to them. Those happenings were the inspiration for events like The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, and the term "happening" became such an integral part of the counterculture that by 1967 there were comedy films being released about them, including one just called The Happening with a title track by the Supremes that made number one: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "The Happening"] Theatre Piece Number 1 was retrospectively considered the first happening, and as such its influence is incalculable. But one part I didn't mention about Theatre Piece Number 1 is that as well as Rauschenberg playing Edith Piaf's records, he also displayed some of his paintings. These paintings were totally white -- at a glance, they looked like blank canvases, but as one inspected them more clearly, it became apparent that Rauschenberg had painted them with white paint, with visible brushstrokes. These paintings, along with a visit to an anechoic chamber in which Cage discovered that even in total silence one can still hear one's own blood and nervous system, so will never experience total silence, were the final key to something Cage had been working towards -- if music had minimised percussion, and excluded noise, how much more had it excluded silence? As Cage said in 1958 “Curiously enough, the twelve-tone system has no zero in it.” And so came 4'33, the piece that we heard an excerpt of near the start of this episode. That piece was the something new he'd been looking for that could be useful to society. It took the sounds the audience could already hear, and without changing them even slightly gave them a new context and made the audience hear them as they were. Simply by saying "this is music", it caused the ambient noise to be perceived as music. This idea, of recontextualising existing material, was one that had already been done in the art world -- Marcel Duchamp, in 1917, had exhibited a urinal as a sculpture titled "Fountain" -- but even Duchamp had talked about his work as "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice". The artist was *raising* the object to art. What Cage was saying was "the object is already art". This was all massively influential to a young painter who had seen Cage give lectures many times, and while at art school had with friends prepared a piano in the same way Cage did for his own experimental compositions, dampening the strings with different objects. [Excerpt: Dana Gillespie, "Andy Warhol (live)"] Duchamp and Rauschenberg were both big influences on Andy Warhol, but he would say in the early sixties "John Cage is really so responsible for so much that's going on," and would for the rest of his life cite Cage as one of the two or three prime influences of his career. Warhol is a difficult figure to discuss, because his work is very intellectual but he was not very articulate -- which is one reason I've led up to him by discussing Cage in such detail, because Cage was always eager to talk at great length about the theoretical basis of his work, while Warhol would say very few words about anything at all. Probably the person who knew him best was his business partner and collaborator Paul Morrissey, and Morrissey's descriptions of Warhol have shaped my own view of his life, but it's very worth noting that Morrissey is an extremely right-wing moralist who wishes to see a Catholic theocracy imposed to do away with the scourges of sexual immorality, drug use, hedonism, and liberalism, so his view of Warhol, a queer drug using progressive whose worldview seems to have been totally opposed to Morrissey's in every way, might be a little distorted. Warhol came from an impoverished background, and so, as many people who grew up poor do, he was, throughout his life, very eager to make money. He studied art at university, and got decent but not exceptional grades -- he was a competent draughtsman, but not a great one, and most importantly as far as success in the art world goes he didn't have what is known as his own "line" -- with most successful artists, you can look at a handful of lines they've drawn and see something of their own personality in it. You couldn't with Warhol. His drawings looked like mediocre imitations of other people's work. Perfectly competent, but nothing that stood out. So Warhol came up with a technique to make his drawings stand out -- blotting. He would do a normal drawing, then go over it with a lot of wet ink. He'd lower a piece of paper on to the wet drawing, and the new paper would soak up the ink, and that second piece of paper would become the finished work. The lines would be fractured and smeared, broken in places where the ink didn't get picked up, and thick in others where it had pooled. With this mechanical process, Warhol had managed to create an individual style, and he became an extremely successful commercial artist. In the early 1950s photography was still seen as a somewhat low-class way of advertising things. If you wanted to sell to a rich audience, you needed to use drawings or paintings. By 1955 Warhol was making about twelve thousand dollars a year -- somewhere close to a hundred and thirty thousand a year in today's money -- drawing shoes for advertisements. He also had a sideline in doing record covers for people like Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Seventh Avenue Express"] For most of the 1950s he also tried to put on shows of his more serious artistic work -- often with homoerotic themes -- but to little success. The dominant art style of the time was the abstract expressionism of people like Jackson Pollock, whose art was visceral, emotional, and macho. The term "action paintings" which was coined for the work of people like Pollock, sums it up. This was manly art for manly men having manly emotions and expressing them loudly. It was very male and very straight, and even the gay artists who were prominent at the time tended to be very conformist and look down on anything they considered flamboyant or effeminate. Warhol was a rather effeminate, very reserved man, who strongly disliked showing his emotions, and whose tastes ran firmly to the camp. Camp as an aesthetic of finding joy in the flamboyant or trashy, as opposed to merely a descriptive term for men who behaved in a way considered effeminate, was only just starting to be codified at this time -- it wouldn't really become a fully-formed recognisable thing until Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 -- but of course just because something hasn't been recognised doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and Warhol's aesthetic was always very camp, and in the 1950s in the US that was frowned upon even in gay culture, where the mainstream opinion was that the best way to acceptance was through assimilation. Abstract expressionism was all about expressing the self, and that was something Warhol never wanted to do -- in fact he made some pronouncements at times which suggested he didn't think of himself as *having* a self in the conventional sense. The combination of not wanting to express himself and of wanting to work more efficiently as a commercial artist led to some interesting results. For example, he was commissioned in 1957 to do a cover for an album by Moondog, the blind street musician whose name Alan Freed had once stolen: [Excerpt: Moondog, "Gloving It"] For that cover, Warhol got his mother, Julia Warhola, to just write out the liner notes for the album in her rather ornamental cursive script, and that became the front cover, leading to an award for graphic design going that year to "Andy Warhol's mother". (Incidentally, my copy of the current CD issue of that album, complete with Julia Warhola's cover, is put out by Pickwick Records...) But towards the end of the fifties, the work for commercial artists started to dry up. If you wanted to advertise shoes, now, you just took a photo of the shoes rather than get Andy Warhol to draw a picture of them. The money started to disappear, and Warhol started to panic. If there was no room for him in graphic design any more, he had to make his living in the fine arts, which he'd been totally unsuccessful in. But luckily for Warhol, there was a new movement that was starting to form -- Pop Art. Pop Art started in England, and had originally been intended, at least in part, as a critique of American consumerist capitalism. Pieces like "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton (who went on to design the Beatles' White Album cover) are collages of found images, almost all from American sources, recontextualised and juxtaposed in interesting ways, so a bodybuilder poses in a room that's taken from an advert in Ladies' Home Journal, while on the wall, instead of a painting, hangs a blown-up cover of a Jack Kirby romance comic. Pop Art changed slightly when it got taken up in America, and there it became something rather different, something closer to Duchamp, taking those found images and displaying them as art with no juxtaposition. Where Richard Hamilton created collage art which *showed* a comic cover by Jack Kirby as a painting in the background, Roy Lichtenstein would take a panel of comic art by Kirby, or Russ Heath or Irv Novick or a dozen other comic artists, and redraw it at the size of a normal painting. So Warhol took Cage's idea that the object is already art, and brought that into painting, starting by doing paintings of Campbell's soup cans, in which he tried as far as possible to make the cans look exactly like actual soup cans. The paintings were controversial, inciting fury in some and laughter in others and causing almost everyone to question whether they were art. Warhol would embrace an aesthetic in which things considered unimportant or trash or pop culture detritus were the greatest art of all. For example pretty much every profile of him written in the mid sixties talks about him obsessively playing "Sally Go Round the Roses", a girl-group single by the one-hit wonders the Jaynettes: [Excerpt: The Jaynettes, "Sally Go Round the Roses"] After his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and some rather controversial but less commercially successful paintings of photographs of horrors and catastrophes taken from newspapers, Warhol abandoned painting in the conventional sense altogether, instead creating brightly coloured screen prints -- a form of stencilling -- based on photographs of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe. That way he could produce images which could be mass-produced, without his active involvement, and which supposedly had none of his personality in them, though of course his personality pervades the work anyway. He put on exhibitions of wooden boxes, silk-screen printed to look exactly like shipping cartons of Brillo pads. Images we see everywhere -- in newspapers, in supermarkets -- were art. And Warhol even briefly formed a band. The Druds were a garage band formed to play at a show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the opening night of an exhibition that featured a silkscreen by Warhol of 210 identical bottles of Coca-Cola, as well as paintings by Rauschenberg and others. That opening night featured a happening by Claes Oldenburg, and a performance by Cage -- Cage gave a live lecture while three recordings of his own voice also played. The Druds were also meant to perform, but they fell apart after only a few rehearsals. Some recordings apparently exist, but they don't seem to circulate, but they'd be fascinating to hear as almost the entire band were non-musician artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, and the sculptor Walter de Maria. Warhol said of the group “It didn't go too well, but if we had just stayed on it it would have been great.” On the other hand, the one actual musician in the group said “It was kind of ridiculous, so I quit after the second rehearsal". That musician was La Monte Young: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] That's an excerpt from what is generally considered Young's masterwork, "The Well-Tuned Piano". It's six and a half hours long. If Warhol is a difficult figure to write about, Young is almost impossible. He's a musician with a career stretching sixty years, who is arguably the most influential musician from the classical tradition in that time period. He's generally considered the father of minimalism, and he's also been called by Brian Eno "the daddy of us all" -- without Young you simply *do not* get art rock at all. Without Young there is no Velvet Underground, no David Bowie, no Eno, no New York punk scene, no Yoko Ono. Anywhere that the fine arts or conceptual art have intersected with popular music in the last fifty or more years has been influenced in one way or another by Young's work. BUT... he only rarely publishes his scores. He very, very rarely allows recordings of his work to be released -- there are four recordings on his bandcamp, plus a handful of recordings of his older, published, pieces, and very little else. He doesn't allow his music to be performed live without his supervision. There *are* bootleg recordings of his music, but even those are not easily obtainable -- Young is vigorous in enforcing his copyrights and issues takedown notices against anywhere that hosts them. So other than that handful of legitimately available recordings -- plus a recording by Young's Theater of Eternal Music, the legality of which is still disputed, and an off-air recording of a 1971 radio programme I've managed to track down, the only way to experience Young's music unless you're willing to travel to one of his rare live performances or installations is second-hand, by reading about it. Except that the one book that deals solely with Young and his music is not only a dense and difficult book to read, it's also one that Young vehemently disagreed with and considered extremely inaccurate, to the point he refused to allow permissions to quote his work in the book. Young did apparently prepare a list of corrections for the book, but he wouldn't tell the author what they were without payment. So please assume that anything I say about Young is wrong, but also accept that the short section of this episode about Young has required more work to *try* to get it right than pretty much anything else this year. Young's musical career actually started out in a relatively straightforward manner. He didn't grow up in the most loving of homes -- he's talked about his father beating him as a child because he had been told that young La Monte was clever -- but his father did buy him a saxophone and teach him the rudiments of the instrument, and as a child he was most influenced by the music of the big band saxophone player Jimmy Dorsey: [Excerpt: Jimmy Dorsey, “It's the Dreamer in Me”] The family, who were Mormon farmers, relocated several times in Young's childhood, from Idaho first to California and then to Utah, but everywhere they went La Monte seemed to find musical inspiration, whether from an uncle who had been part of the Kansas City jazz scene, a classmate who was a musical prodigy who had played with Perez Prado in his early teens, or a teacher who took the class to see a performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra: [Excerpt: Bartok, "Concerto for Orchestra"] After leaving high school, Young went to Los Angeles City College to study music under Leonard Stein, who had been Schoenberg's assistant when Schoenberg had taught at UCLA, and there he became part of the thriving jazz scene based around Central Avenue, studying and performing with musicians like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Eric Dolphy -- Young once beat Dolphy in an audition for a place in the City College dance band, and the two would apparently substitute for each other on their regular gigs when one couldn't make it. During this time, Young's musical tastes became much more adventurous. He was a particular fan of the work of John Coltrane, and also got inspired by City of Glass, an album by Stan Kenton that attempted to combine jazz and modern classical music: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton's Innovations Orchestra, "City of Glass: The Structures"] His other major musical discovery in the mid-fifties was one we've talked about on several previous occasions -- the album Music of India, Morning and Evening Ragas by Ali Akhbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akhbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] Young's music at this point was becoming increasingly modal, and equally influenced by the blues and Indian music. But he was also becoming interested in serialism. Serialism is an extension and generalisation of twelve-tone music, inspired by mathematical set theory. In serialism, you choose a set of musical elements -- in twelve-tone music that's the twelve notes in the twelve-tone scale, but it can also be a set of tonal relations, a chord, or any other set of elements. You then define all the possible ways you can permute those elements, a defined set of operations you can perform on them -- so you could play a scale forwards, play it backwards, play all the notes in the scale simultaneously, and so on. You then go through all the possible permutations, exactly once, and that's your piece of music. Young was particularly influenced by the works of Anton Webern, one of the earliest serialists: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Cantata number 1 for Soprano, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra"] That piece we just heard, Webern's "Cantata number 1", was the subject of some of the earliest theoretical discussion of serialism, and in particular led to some discussion of the next step on from serialism. If serialism was all about going through every single permutation of a set, what if you *didn't* permute every element? There was a lot of discussion in the late fifties in music-theoretical circles about the idea of invariance. Normally in music, the interesting thing is what gets changed. To use a very simple example, you might change a melody from a major key to a minor one to make it sound sadder. What theorists at this point were starting to discuss is what happens if you leave something the same, but change the surrounding context, so the thing you *don't* vary sounds different because of the changed context. And going further, what if you don't change the context at all, and merely *imply* a changed context? These ideas were some of those which inspired Young's first major work, his Trio For Strings from 1958, a complex, palindromic, serial piece which is now credited as the first work of minimalism, because the notes in it change so infrequently: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Trio for Strings"] Though I should point out that Young never considers his works truly finished, and constantly rewrites them, and what we just heard is an excerpt from the only recording of the trio ever officially released, which is of the 2015 version. So I can't state for certain how close what we just heard is to the piece he wrote in 1958, except that it sounds very like the written descriptions of it I've read. After writing the Trio For Strings, Young moved to Germany to study with the modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. While studying with Stockhausen, he became interested in the work of John Cage, and started up a correspondence with Cage. On his return to New York he studied with Cage and started writing pieces inspired by Cage, of which the most musical is probably Composition 1960 #7: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Composition 1960 #7"] The score for that piece is a stave on which is drawn a treble clef, the notes B and F#, and the words "To be held for a long Time". Other of his compositions from 1960 -- which are among the few of his compositions which have been published -- include composition 1960 #10 ("To Bob Morris"), the score for which is just the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it.", and Piano Piece for David Tudor #1, the score for which reads "Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to". Most of these compositions were performed as part of a loose New York art collective called Fluxus, all of whom were influenced by Cage and the Dadaists. This collective, led by George Maciunas, sometimes involved Cage himself, but also involved people like Henry Flynt, the inventor of conceptual art, who later became a campaigner against art itself, and who also much to Young's bemusement abandoned abstract music in the mid-sixties to form a garage band with Walter de Maria (who had played drums with the Druds): [Excerpt: Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, "I Don't Wanna"] Much of Young's work was performed at Fluxus concerts given in a New York loft belonging to another member of the collective, Yoko Ono, who co-curated the concerts with Young. One of Ono's mid-sixties pieces, her "Four Pieces for Orchestra" is dedicated to Young, and consists of such instructions as "Count all the stars of that night by heart. The piece ends when all the orchestra members finish counting the stars, or when it dawns. This can be done with windows instead of stars." But while these conceptual ideas remained a huge part of Young's thinking, he soon became interested in two other ideas. The first was the idea of just intonation -- tuning instruments and voices to perfect harmonics, rather than using the subtly-off tuning that is used in Western music. I'm sure I've explained that before in a previous episode, but to put it simply when you're tuning an instrument with fixed pitches like a piano, you have a choice -- you can either tune it so that the notes in one key are perfectly in tune with each other, but then when you change key things go very out of tune, or you can choose to make *everything* a tiny bit, almost unnoticeably, out of tune, but equally so. For the last several hundred years, musicians as a community have chosen the latter course, which was among other things promoted by Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of compositions which shows how the different keys work together: [Excerpt: Bach (Glenn Gould), "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: Fugue in F-sharp minor, BWV 883"] Young, by contrast, has his own esoteric tuning system, which he uses in his own work The Well-Tuned Piano: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] The other idea that Young took on was from Indian music, the idea of the drone. One of the four recordings of Young's music that is available from his Bandcamp, a 1982 recording titled The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath, consists of one hour, thirteen minutes, and fifty-eight seconds of this: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath"] Yes, I have listened to the whole piece. No, nothing else happens. The minimalist composer Terry Riley describes the recording as "a singularly rare contribution that far outshines any other attempts to capture this instrument in recorded media". In 1962, Young started writing pieces based on what he called the "dream chord", a chord consisting of a root, fourth, sharpened fourth, and fifth: [dream chord] That chord had already appeared in his Trio for Strings, but now it would become the focus of much of his work, in pieces like his 1962 piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, heard here in a 1982 revision: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer"] That was part of a series of works titled The Four Dreams of China, and Young began to plan an installation work titled Dream House, which would eventually be created, and which currently exists in Tribeca, New York, where it's been in continuous "performance" for thirty years -- and which consists of thirty-two different pure sine wave tones all played continuously, plus purple lighting by Young's wife Marian Zazeela. But as an initial step towards creating this, Young formed a collective called Theatre of Eternal Music, which some of the members -- though never Young himself -- always claim also went by the alternative name The Dream Syndicate. According to John Cale, a member of the group, that name came about because the group tuned their instruments to the 60hz hum of the fridge in Young's apartment, which Cale called "the key of Western civilisation". According to Cale, that meant the fundamental of the chords they played was 10hz, the frequency of alpha waves when dreaming -- hence the name. The group initially consisted of Young, Zazeela, the photographer Billy Name, and percussionist Angus MacLise, but by this recording in 1964 the lineup was Young, Zazeela, MacLise, Tony Conrad and John Cale: [Excerpt: "Cale, Conrad, Maclise, Young, Zazeela - The Dream Syndicate 2 IV 64-4"] That recording, like any others that have leaked by the 1960s version of the Theatre of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate, is of disputed legality, because Young and Zazeela claim to this day that what the group performed were La Monte Young's compositions, while the other two surviving members, Cale and Conrad, claim that their performances were improvisational collaborations and should be equally credited to all the members, and so there have been lawsuits and countersuits any time anyone has released the recordings. John Cale, the youngest member of the group, was also the only one who wasn't American. He'd been born in Wales in 1942, and had had the kind of childhood that, in retrospect, seems guaranteed to lead to eccentricity. He was the product of a mixed-language marriage -- his father, William, was an English speaker while his mother, Margaret, spoke Welsh, but the couple had moved in on their marriage with Margaret's mother, who insisted that only Welsh could be spoken in her house. William didn't speak Welsh, and while he eventually picked up the basics from spending all his life surrounded by Welsh-speakers, he refused on principle to capitulate to his mother-in-law, and so remained silent in the house. John, meanwhile, grew up a monolingual Welsh speaker, and didn't start to learn English until he went to school when he was seven, and so couldn't speak to his father until then even though they lived together. Young John was extremely unwell for most of his childhood, both physically -- he had bronchial problems for which he had to take a cough mixture that was largely opium to help him sleep at night -- and mentally. He was hospitalised when he was sixteen with what was at first thought to be meningitis, but turned out to be a psychosomatic condition, the result of what he has described as a nervous breakdown. That breakdown is probably connected to the fact that during his teenage years he was sexually assaulted by two adults in positions of authority -- a vicar and a music teacher -- and felt unable to talk to anyone about this. He was, though, a child prodigy and was playing viola with the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from the age of thirteen, and listening to music by Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. He was so talented a multi-instrumentalist that at school he was the only person other than one of the music teachers and the headmaster who was allowed to use the piano -- which led to a prank on his very last day at school. The headmaster would, on the last day, hit a low G on the piano to cue the assembly to stand up, and Cale had placed a comb on the string, muting it and stopping the note from sounding -- in much the same way that his near-namesake John Cage was "preparing" pianos for his own compositions in the USA. Cale went on to Goldsmith's College to study music and composition, under Humphrey Searle, one of Britain's greatest proponents of serialism who had himself studied under Webern. Cale's main instrument was the viola, but he insisted on also playing pieces written for the violin, because they required more technical skill. For his final exam he chose to play Hindemith's notoriously difficult Viola Sonata: [Excerpt: Hindemith Viola Sonata] While at Goldsmith's, Cale became friendly with Cornelius Cardew, a composer and cellist who had studied with Stockhausen and at the time was a great admirer of and advocate for the works of Cage and Young (though by the mid-seventies Cardew rejected their work as counter-revolutionary bourgeois imperialism). Through Cardew, Cale started to correspond with Cage, and with George Maciunas and other members of Fluxus. In July 1963, just after he'd finished his studies at Goldsmith's, Cale presented a festival there consisting of an afternoon and an evening show. These shows included the first British performances of several works including Cardew's Autumn '60 for Orchestra -- a piece in which the musicians were given blank staves on which to write whatever part they wanted to play, but a separate set of instructions in *how* to play the parts they'd written. Another piece Cale presented in its British premiere at that show was Cage's "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra": [Excerpt: John Cage, "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra"] In the evening show, they performed Two Pieces For String Quartet by George Brecht (in which the musicians polish their instruments with dusters, making scraping sounds as they clean them), and two new pieces by Cale, one of which involved a plant being put on the stage, and then the performer, Robin Page, screaming from the balcony at the plant that it would die, then running down, through the audience, and onto the stage, screaming abuse and threats at the plant. The final piece in the show was a performance by Cale (the first one in Britain) of La Monte Young's "X For Henry Flynt". For this piece, Cale put his hands together and then smashed both his arms onto the keyboard as hard as he could, over and over. After five minutes some of the audience stormed the stage and tried to drag the piano away from him. Cale followed the piano on his knees, continuing to bang the keys, and eventually the audience gave up in defeat and Cale the performer won. After this Cale moved to the USA, to further study composition, this time with Iannis Xenakis, the modernist composer who had also taught Mickey Baker orchestration after Baker left Mickey and Sylvia, and who composed such works as "Orient Occident": [Excerpt: Iannis Xenakis, "Orient Occident"] Cale had been recommended to Xenakis as a student by Aaron Copland, who thought the young man was probably a genius. But Cale's musical ambitions were rather too great for Tanglewood, Massachusetts -- he discovered that the institute had eighty-eight pianos, the same number as there are keys on a piano keyboard, and thought it would be great if for a piece he could take all eighty-eight pianos, put them all on different boats, sail the boats out onto a lake, and have eighty-eight different musicians each play one note on each piano, while the boats sank with the pianos on board. For some reason, Cale wasn't allowed to perform this composition, and instead had to make do with one where he pulled an axe out of a single piano and slammed it down on a table. Hardly the same, I'm sure you'll agree. From Tanglewood, Cale moved on to New York, where he soon became part of the artistic circles surrounding John Cage and La Monte Young. It was at this time that he joined Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and also took part in a performance with Cage that would get Cale his first television exposure: [Excerpt: John Cale playing Erik Satie's "Vexations" on "I've Got a Secret"] That's Cale playing through "Vexations", a piece by Erik Satie that wasn't published until after Satie's death, and that remained in obscurity until Cage popularised -- if that's the word -- the piece. The piece, which Cage had found while studying Satie's notes, seems to be written as an exercise and has the inscription (in French) "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Cage interpreted that, possibly correctly, as an instruction that the piece should be played eight hundred and forty times straight through, and so he put together a performance of the piece, the first one ever, by a group he called the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, which included Cage himself, Cale, Joshua Rifkin, and several other notable musical figures, who took it in turns playing the piece. For that performance, which ended up lasting eighteen hours, there was an entry fee of five dollars, and there was a time-clock in the lobby. Audience members punched in and punched out, and got a refund of five cents for every twenty minutes they'd spent listening to the music. Supposedly, at the end, one audience member yelled "Encore!" A week later, Cale appeared on "I've Got a Secret", a popular game-show in which celebrities tried to guess people's secrets (and which is where that performance of Cage's "Water Walk" we heard earlier comes from): [Excerpt: John Cale on I've Got a Secret] For a while, Cale lived with a friend of La Monte Young's, Terry Jennings, before moving in to a flat with Tony Conrad, one of the other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Angus MacLise lived in another flat in the same building. As there was not much money to be made in avant-garde music, Cale also worked in a bookshop -- a job Cage had found him -- and had a sideline in dealing drugs. But rents were so cheap at this time that Cale and Conrad only had to work part-time, and could spend much of their time working on the music they were making with Young. Both were string players -- Conrad violin, Cale viola -- and they soon modified their instruments. Conrad merely attached pickups to his so it could be amplified, but Cale went much further. He filed down the viola's bridge so he could play three strings at once, and he replaced the normal viola strings with thicker, heavier, guitar and mandolin strings. This created a sound so loud that it sounded like a distorted electric guitar -- though in late 1963 and early 1964 there were very few people who even knew what a distorted guitar sounded like. Cale and Conrad were also starting to become interested in rock and roll music, to which neither of them had previously paid much attention, because John Cage's music had taught them to listen for music in sounds they previously dismissed. In particular, Cale became fascinated with the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, hearing in them the same just intonation that Young advocated for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do is Dream"] And it was with this newfound interest in rock and roll that Cale and Conrad suddenly found themselves members of a manufactured pop band. The two men had been invited to a party on the Lower East Side, and there they'd been introduced to Terry Phillips of Pickwick Records. Phillips had seen their long hair and asked if they were musicians, so they'd answered "yes". He asked if they were in a band, and they said yes. He asked if that band had a drummer, and again they said yes. By this point they realised that he had assumed they were rock guitarists, rather than experimental avant-garde string players, but they decided to play along and see where this was going. Phillips told them that if they brought along their drummer to Pickwick's studios the next day, he had a job for them. The two of them went along with Walter de Maria, who did play the drums a little in between his conceptual art work, and there they were played a record: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] It was explained to them that Pickwick made knock-off records -- soundalikes of big hits, and their own records in the style of those hits, all played by a bunch of session musicians and put out under different band names. This one, by "the Primitives", they thought had a shot at being an actual hit, even though it was a dance-craze song about a dance where one partner lays on the floor and the other stamps on their head. But if it was going to be a hit, they needed an actual band to go out and perform it, backing the singer. How would Cale, Conrad, and de Maria like to be three quarters of the Primitives? It sounded fun, but of course they weren't actually guitarists. But as it turned out, that wasn't going to be a problem. They were told that the guitars on the track had all been tuned to one note -- not even to an open chord, like we talked about Steve Cropper doing last episode, but all the strings to one note. Cale and Conrad were astonished -- that was exactly the kind of thing they'd been doing in their drone experiments with La Monte Young. Who was this person who was independently inventing the most advanced ideas in experimental music but applying them to pop songs? And that was how they met Lou Reed: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] Where Cale and Conrad were avant-gardeists who had only just started paying attention to rock and roll music, rock and roll was in Lou Reed's blood, but there were a few striking similarities between him and Cale, even though at a glance their backgrounds could not have seemed more different. Reed had been brought up in a comfortably middle-class home in Long Island, but despised the suburban conformity that surrounded him from a very early age, and by his teens was starting to rebel against it very strongly. According to one classmate “Lou was always more advanced than the rest of us. The drinking age was eighteen back then, so we all started drinking at around sixteen. We were drinking quarts of beer, but Lou was smoking joints. He didn't do that in front of many people, but I knew he was doing it. While we were looking at girls in Playboy, Lou was reading Story of O. He was reading the Marquis de Sade, stuff that I wouldn't even have thought about or known how to find.” But one way in which Reed was a typical teenager of the period was his love for rock and roll, especially doo-wop. He'd got himself a guitar, but only had one lesson -- according to the story he would tell on numerous occasions, he turned up with a copy of "Blue Suede Shoes" and told the teacher he only wanted to know how to play the chords for that, and he'd work out the rest himself. Reed and two schoolfriends, Alan Walters and Phil Harris, put together a doo-wop trio they called The Shades, because they wore sunglasses, and a neighbour introduced them to Bob Shad, who had been an A&R man for Mercury Records and was starting his own new label. He renamed them the Jades and took them into the studio with some of the best New York session players, and at fourteen years old Lou Reed was writing songs and singing them backed by Mickey Baker and King Curtis: [Excerpt: The Jades, "Leave Her For Me"] Sadly the Jades' single was a flop -- the closest it came to success was being played on Murray the K's radio show, but on a day when Murray the K was off ill and someone else was filling in for him, much to Reed's disappointment. Phil Harris, the lead singer of the group, got to record some solo sessions after that, but the Jades split up and it would be several years before Reed made any more records. Partly this was because of Reed's mental health, and here's where things get disputed and rather messy. What we know is that in his late teens, just after he'd gone off to New
When you think about families, do you think about a nest? Or do you think about a multi-generational family that you're contributing to a legacy? Most Western families think about a nest and they think about getting the kids out of the nest. My guest today, Jeremy Pryor, who runs familyteams.com really flips that on its head and instead talks about a multi-generational family and how we should view families differently, and how the western view of family has really messed up so many fundamental things in how we raise our kids, how we talk about family, and how we create multi-generational families that love each other and actually inves Where To Find Jeremy Jeremy on Facebook Jeremy on Twitter Jeremy on LinkedIn Family Teams Website iTunes podcast
EPISODE 63 - Hi, I'm Chelsie! I'll never forget when I was about ten years old and my grandmother looked at me one day and said, “child, you get everything that comes down this family line.” What was she talking about?Blood sugar issues, inability to pay attention, gas, bloating, constipation, and nausea after meals. My doctors labeled these symptoms as IBS, hypoglycemia, and ADD. The older I got, the more diagnoses I received. In college, it was anxiety, depression, hypothyroidism, and then came the dreaded perimenopause at age 27. This list kept growing year after year with no end in sight. My cry for help was LOUD! I tried everything I knew. I met with doctors and specialists and even hired functional medicine doctors to help. I filled my sack full of prescriptions each month, but I wasn't getting well. As a nurse, I realized that I was just like my patients – being told that medication and surgery was the way out. I was told I would have to live with it. That's not an answer I was willing to accept. One day it clicked. I thought, “what if there's a better way?” I began to study how food is medicine and how our bodies were created to heal themselves. I realized that when we give the body what it needs, it will give us what we want in return. I needed a strategic plan to help me heal, using what God provided. It was challenging to find someone who would look at me as a whole person, from a mind-body-spirit approach. I don't think I even realized that's what I needed at the time. So I went on a mission to study everything I could to address these health challenges myself. I was already a nurse with a degree in psychology. So I went on to study health from a natural perspective and was certified in functional medicine and functional diagnostic nutrition. I also studied the spiritual and emotional components through energy medicine and was ordained as a healing minister, using the power of prayer. This all-encompassing approach was life-changing for me personally. I felt so much joy and energy some days that I could hardly contain myself. I had never had that in my 30 years prior.I remember thinking, “this is how we all should feel all the time.” How could this simple approach to health be hiding from so many people? It is my mission to make sure you gain an understanding of how to heal naturally, no matter how hopeless the situation may feel right now. I use the same approach I used in my own healing journey to guide people like you so you can experience this same joy for life. I'm here to support others because I needlessly suffered for most of my life. I don't want that for you. I understand you because I was once like you. I know you want your life back, and I want you to realize how simple it can be. Take action today to make your health a priority by completing my short application process to see if we're a good fit. You were created to make a huge impact in this world, and you can't do that if you don't feel like it. The Book: Healed His WayGod created your body with an amazing capacity to heal itself when you give it what it needs. Most Western medicine is focused on alleviating symptoms without addressing the root cause.By cooperating with our body's systems, providing proper nutrition and supplements, along with exercise and common sense, we can experience optimal health and wellness.https://chelsieward.com/___https://livingthenextchapter.com/podcast produced Join us and connect with guests and with listeners!See you there!The Next Chapter Community: A Place for our Guests and Listeners
The Restless boys were pulled away from their beloved Restless summer when TGC shared a long pull quote on Instagram. The Quote read, Every culture and nation must find common consent in public ethics, specifically on what is prohibited, permitted, and promoted for the common good. True toleration must include living peaceably with deep differences. Most Western nations have extended marital status to arrangements other than heterosexual monogamy. The wise Christian will affirm the legal right of consenting adults to order their lives without fear; yet that right doesn't entail affirming the goodness of these arrangements. Believers can be good neighbors to all while diverging on some moral issues. Is this language cause for concern? Could it help Christians in difficult situation in the post-christian west? And who was the very real person who wrote it? All this and more in today's Restless... We continue the conversation in our very good bonus Patreon Episode. Check out the Restless website for the store and related Restless stuff. You can follow this podcast all over the internet. twitter, instagram. or facebook Or email us at restlesspodcasting@gmail.com
Within all forms of Western Classic music there are regional variations. Most Western composers can differentiate Viennese and Italian composers, and in the Middle East, Oriental composition has the same diversity. Kurdish music has a long history of appropriating and being appropriated from Turkish, Iranian, Iraqi and Levantine classic compositions. Boran Zaza is one of the most prominent and gifted Kurdish music performers in the world that understands these intricacies. With both a background in musicology and growing up in a musical family, she has navigated her own journey through performing Kurdish music as a pianist, with her love of music taking her from Syria to Canada, where she continues to explore her own identity as a pianist and a Kurdish musician living abroad. Link to Boran's Website: https://boranzaza.com/ Link to Boran's performance of "Newroz": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WHFflbdnrw&ab_channel=BoranZaza For questions and comments, contact us at: info@kurdistanin.netSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
From Chelsie Ward.....We are misinformed. We don't have to expect illness as we age. It's simply a choice when we know what to do. The problem is, how do we learn these techniques if they aren't being taught?I never intended to share this story. I did it because I saw so many others who desperately longed for the answers I had. As I looked around, I saw the energy depleted faces that I once knew so well. I knew I had to share this information with others. It was my gift back to a world of hurting people. It wasn't fair to keep this knowledge to myself. I wrote my story in a book called Healed His Way and filled it with as many resources as possible. To my surprise, it hit the Amazon Bestseller List! My next steps became clear – I had to create a program to help others get their life back. It is my mission to make sure you gain an understanding of how to heal naturally, no matter how hopeless the situation may feel right now.Healed His WayBY CHELSIE WARDGod created your body with an amazing capacity to heal itself when you give it what it needs. Most Western medicine is focused on alleviating symptoms without addressing the root cause. Chelsie's approach to health and healing takes into account spirit, soul, and body. By cooperating with our body's systems, providing proper nutrition and supplements, along with exercise and common sense, we can experience optimal health and wellness.Order Chelsie's Book Here:https://cy677.infusionsoft.app/app/orderForms/5e66c878-dae6-4a7e-8641-c51fa76de94fYour hosts: Colton Cockerell & Trisha StetzelClick for more about your hosts:Colton CockerellTrisha StetzelMore fun and interviews on our FB page!https://www.facebook.com/bridgethegapinterviews
Daves not here man ... Classic This episode peels back the lid on the very popular conspiracy theory involving the use of fluoride in municipal drinking water. The common conspiracy theories get pretty crazy and talk about Communist plots and argue that Nazis used sodium fluoride to keep prisoners of war and concentration camp victims docile. We talk about those theories and whether they have been debunked or not, but we also look at more credible historical and scientific facts. One fact is that fluoride is a byproduct of enriching uranium and making aluminum, and it is a highly corrosive and toxic substance in concentration. Evidence obviously indicates that in very, very small amounts it helps prevent tooth decay. But in moderate to large amounts, it is a poison. (So much so that just after 9/11 the NSA expressed concern about terrorists hijacking unprotected fluoride trucks and using them to poison entire towns). How much is too much fluoride? How much is in the water you drink? How can you filter it out of your water, and what bottled water can you buy to avoid it? Is it even a big deal? Good questions. We answer those and cover everything from calcified pineal glands to mind control on this one, while we did deep into the concerns about fluoride. Most Western nations refuse to use it in their water supply for fear of over-saturation, and even the EPA in the US has recently lowered the levels it allows in drinking water due to nationwide cases of dental fluorosis. Do we only drink it because nobody has a means to dispose of this potentially toxic chemical? Do the health benefits outweigh the risks? Does it even really help our teeth when we drink it? We cover all this ground and much more. This one will make you want to wear a tinfoil hat and also realize that fluoride is a byproduct of your tin foil hat!
In this episode, we chat with Alan Clegg, who has a wealth of experience in all aspects of the Metals & Minerals Value Chain from Exploration to operations and through to Mine Closure, including financing, project management, construction & execution. As a competent person for Independent Engineers & Technical Reporting Alan presents regularly at conferences. He is here today to talk about Key Elements of an energy and environment-focused economic future. This episode is packed full of information and key challenges the industry should be thinking about as we continue to move in 2022 and beyond. KEY TAKEAWAYS Many base metals will soon be in deficit, so their values will soar. Examples are provided in the podcast. There is a lot of liquidity, but environmental concerns mean that not enough of that cash is reaching the mining industry. At the same time, the world is desperate for the metals needed for green energy infrastructure. Demand for uranium is likely to boom. Calls for nuclear energy are growing. Africa is perfectly placed for this. Renewables will continue to grow, but people are now questioning how viable and green they really are. Africa has great potential for mining. But large swathes of it have been mortgaged to the Chinese. Investors with fewer ESG concerns than Western investors are moving fast and are picking up vital assets in Africa. African brownfield exploration is uncovering large deposits. Africa still has huge thermal coal reserves. They will use it to produce power and global demand means this is a growth area. Clean coal technology makes it far greener than most people realise. Some of the world´s most important mines are in countries with resource, political unrest, and war issues. Most Western infrastructure is 100+ years old and needs replacing. So, demand for iron ore should increase. BEST MOMENTS ‘There´s a lot of questions around renewables that one has to be awake to. ´ ‘Platinum and palladium are repositioning themselves very strongly as energy metals.' ‘There´s a huge reset coming, in my view, and the mining and energy sector values will go ballistic.' ‘Almost every base metal commodity will be in serious deficit by next year.' EPISODE RESOURCES LinkedIn: https://za.linkedin.com/in/alan-m-clegg-pr-eng-00227a9 VALUABLE RESOURCES Email: rob@mining-international.org Website: https://www.mining-international.org/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-tyson/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/MiningRobTyson Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DigDeepTheMiningPodcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theminingpodcast/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/DigDeepTheMiningPodcast/videos ABOUT THE HOST Rob Tyson is an established recruiter in the mining and quarrying sector and decided to produce the “Dig Deep” The Mining Podcast to provide valuable and informative content around the mining industry. He has a passion and desire to promote the industry and the podcast aims to offer the mining community insight into people's experiences and careers covering any mining discipline, giving the listeners helpful advice and guidance on industry topics. Rob is the Founder and Director of Mining International Ltd, a leading global recruitment and headhunting consultancy based in the UK specializing in all areas of mining across the globe from the first world to third world countries from Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia. We source, headhunt, and discover new and top talent through a targeted approach and search methodology and have a proven track record in sourcing and positioning exceptional candidates into our client's organizations in any mining discipline or level. Mining International provides a transparent, informative, and trusted consultancy service to our candidates and clients to help them develop their careers and business goals and objectives in this ever-changing marketplace. Podcast Description Rob Tyson is an established recruiter in the mining and quarrying sector and decided to produce the “Dig Deep” The Mining Podcast to provide valuable and informative content around the mining industry. He has a passion and desire to promote the industry and the podcast aims to offer the mining community an insight into people's experiences and careers covering any mining discipline, giving the listeners helpful advice and guidance on industry topics. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Inflammatory diseases are on the rise in the US and across the world. Most Western illnesses, including autoimmune disease, neurodegenerative disorders, and cardiovascular disease are linked to chronic inflammation. While the statistics regarding inflammatory diseases are staggering, the good news is that one key factor in bringing down our rates of inflammation is in our control: the health of our microbiome. On this episode of The Model Health Show, award-winning gastroenterologist and bestselling author, Dr. Will Bulsiewicz is sharing the fascinating role our gut health plays in all aspects of our lives. You're going to hear how our microbiome can impact your weight, your susceptibility to chronic inflammatory diseases, and even your relationships. You're going to hear the latest cutting-edge science on fiber consumption, microbiome health, additives in our food supply, and a whole lot more. Most importantly, Dr. Bulsiewicz is sharing some key dietary changes we can employ to improve the health and diversity of our microbiomes. Enjoy! In this episode you'll discover: How our medical system hinders well-meaning doctors from truly helping folks. Why weight loss is much more complex than the model of calories in, calories out. The role that our microbiome plays in our metabolism. How our microbiome controls the release of satiety hormones. The link between insulin resistance and a damaged microbiome. What endotoxemia is. The importance of short-chain fatty acids for metabolic health. What percentage of the American diet is comprised of refined, ultra-processed foods. Why fiber is critical for the health of our gut microbes. The problem with food additives in the US food system. What you should know about pesticides and herbicides like glyphosate. The importance of choosing organic foods, when possible. A distinction between Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. Why environmental factors are a large contributor to inflammatory diseases. How trauma and disordered eating can manifest as inflammatory bowel diseases. The link between relationship quality and microbiome health. Items mentioned in this episode include: PaleoValley.com/model -- Use code MODEL for 15% off! Organifi.com/Model -- Use the coupon code MODEL for 20% off! Preorder The Fiber Fueled Cookbook by Dr. Will Bulsiewicz Fiber Fueled by Dr. Will Bulsiewicz Our Misguided Battle Against Microbes with Dr. Will Bulsiewicz – Episode 440 Connect with Dr. Will Bulsiewicz Website / Instagram / Facebook Join TMHS Facebook community - Model Nation Be sure you are subscribed to this podcast to automatically receive your episodes: Apple Podcasts Stitcher Spotify Soundcloud *Download Transcript
[00:30] Lockdowns: A Year On (17 minutes) Most Western countries are approaching the one-year anniversary of the start of lockdowns. How did a couple weeks to slow the spread turn into an entire year? Fake President Joe Biden in America says it will be at least another year before America returns to normal! You’d think the first, second and third waves of COVID would have taught our leaders one thing: Lockdowns do not work. [18:00] Occupation (20 minutes) Joe Biden is running the White House as you’d expect any illegitimate government to run a nation. Rules are created by fiat, rather than through a legislature. Biden, after 40 days, has yet to hold a press conference. The official White House schedule hasn’t been published once. Comments are disabled on official channels. There’s zero transparency. And to top it all off, Washington, D.C., is shut off to the public by razor-wire fencing. Imagine the media’s shock and horror if this had happened under President Donald Trump. [39:00] Bible Study: Friendship (15 minutes) In these trying times, it’s critical to build strong friendships that revolve around God’s work. In this segment, I talk about the importance of spiritual family and how God’s people endure tests and trials together.
The Chinese mobile market is expected to reach 21 billion Dollars in 2020 growing a staggering 17% year-over-year. In addition to having this massive - and from the Western perspective nearly impenetrable - home market, Chinese publishers have been having ever more success in the West. Deconstructor of Fun podcast is joined by Daniel Ahmad, Yang Liu, and Eric Kress to discuss the characteristics of the Chinese mobile games market and how Western developers could better compete against their Chinese counterparts. The topics covered are: Why are Chinese games are succeeding in the West when hit titles from Korea and Japan are struggling? Most Western hits haven’t become big in China. Why is that? Is there a moat that Western publishers can build against Chinese rivals in the West? What policies can be made to even out the competition? What is the market going to look like in 3 - 5 years? --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/deconstructoroffun/support
Most Western democracies lowered the voting age to eighteen in the 1970s. Some have even lowered it to sixteen. But a few still retain a minimum voting age of twenty-one. Center for Civic Education
It was December 2018 and I had just walked into an office building. I escaped from the hot, sweaty outdoors into the cool air conditioning inside. I took the elevator to the eleventh floor and soon found myself in a conference room sitting across the table from the CEO of an artificial intelligence (AI) startup. But I wasn’t in San Francisco or New York or London. I was in Karachi, Pakistan. The founder/CEO of this startup had received his master’s degree in AI from Stanford University and was blowing my mind describing his company’s product. A few minutes into our meeting, his COO walked into the room and apologised for being late. This COO had received his MBA from the University of Michigan.Both the CEO and the COO were born and raised in Pakistan, and went to the US for school. After years of academic and professional achievement at the highest levels in America, they decided to come back to Pakistan.Their stories are indicative of a broader trend in the country’s development. In 2005, the city of Karachi was a lot more dangerous. The country of Pakistan was in a lot more turmoil. If you were a young, ambitious high school student with the means to afford it, your likely choice was to get a one-way ticket to a university in the West.And when you went to school in a Western country, your goal was to stay in that country after you graduate, get a job, and eventually walk the path to citizenship.While that’s still a common path, the tides are slowly shifting. Part of that is because Pakistan provides better opportunities now vs. fifteen years ago.I asked the two startup founders sitting in front of me, “Why did you decide to come back to Pakistan?” They replied telling me that the Pakistan they grew up in is completely different from the Pakistan of today. The country is now safer and more stable. The opportunities are bigger and more untapped. And considering their Western pedigree, they would have a huge competitive advantage in Pakistani business. And part of them really wanted to help contribute to improving their home country. Twenty years ago, that romantic notion of helping your country would be considered a lot more foolish and futile for Pakistanis. In 2020, it’s becoming more common for the younger generation. But the altruism is combined with a very rational assessment of Pakistan’s commercial opportunities.Pakistan is a country of 212 Million people, the fifth most populous in the world. 65% of Pakistan’s population is under the age of 30. Pakistan is one of the fastest growing emerging markets.You can see the obvious billion dollar opportunities - in e-commerce, fintech/digital banking, edtech, and much more. Whether it’s next year, in five years or in ten years, we’re going to start seeing more Pakistani tech unicorns, startups with a valuation over $1 Billion. Currently, there are none.It’s playbook that you can see play out as countries become wealthier. The biggest e-commerce and fintech companies in Southeast Asia are worth billions of dollars and are continuing to ride the Asian wave of growth over the last decades.As much as you feel love for America as an international student (which I personally experienced), you always have some sort of connection with your family, friends, and the identity of your home country. If your home country is struggling, then you’re less likely to want to go back after you graduate. What we see today is that when emerging markets are growing, people from those emerging markets are more likely to go back after university. My previous interview guest Rashi said the same thing about Indian international students in the West increasingly returning to India for job opportunities. She said, “Another misunderstanding is that people just assume all Indians aspire to come to the West. That may have been true twenty years ago but not now, when opportunities are more attractive in India. I don’t think all people in India look to the US and say ‘that’s where I want to be’ or ‘that place is miles ahead.’”The story of growth, optimism, and hope I heard from these two Pakistani founders is something I would like to see in every country around the world.After our meeting, I walked out of the building with a smile. Pakistan is a great country with huge opportunities and good people.That AI startup in Karachi, founded by two Western-educated Pakistanis, is the kind of company I’m interested in hearing about. Most Western tech reporters won’t bother covering them. But that’s one of the reasons why I have created East West Hurricane, to share stories like this.And these two founders I met in Pakistan are the tip of the iceberg. There are going to be many more people from Asia who get educated in the West, and return to Asia to start their entrepreneurial journey. There’s already a phrase for this in China = ‘Sea Turtles.’ This is the term given to young Chinese who may have studied and worked overseas, but have now come back to China to pursue their career and startup companies. And it’s not just China. Here are some notable examples from around Asia:Colin Huang - Founder of Pinduoduo, China’s largest social commerce company currently worth $89 Billion; masters degree from University of Wisconsin.Nadiem Makarim - Founded Indonesian tech startup Gojek in 2010, now valued at $10 Billion; undergrad at Brown University and MBA from Harvard Business School.Chatri Sityodtong - Founded One Championship in 2011, Asia’s biggest MMA promotion; undergrad at Tufts University and MBA from Harvard Business School.Whether it’s Chinese Sea Turtles or Pakistani Sea Turtles or Indonesian Sea Turtles, more people are swimming back to Asia. Because they can see that Asia’s future is brighter than its past. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eastwesthurricane.substack.com
In most Western economies, a colleague's farewell is no big deal, just a part of the tapestry of business. Managers applying a typical Western business approach to departures in Japan however, may skip the need to communicate with those left behind. Most Western enterprises are “Dry” rather than “Wet” ecosystems. Dry meaning logical, ordered, efficient, unemotional, competitive and oriented around the survival of the fittest. Wet on the other hand is more emotional, nuanced, interdependent, harmonious, inefficient and more forgiving of human frailties. Japan much prefers Wet to Dry work environments. The unexpected announcement of the coming disappearance of a workmate can cause a degree of consternation amongst the troops, that is probably not anticipated or even sensed by Western trained managers. Ambushing the quickly gathered Japanese staff one morning and announcing the existing boss is being demoted and introducing the new boss, a total outsider shuffled in from abroad the night before, is the Dry approach. The Finance industry is notorious for rapidly relieving staff of their building access cards, providing a thin plastic garbage bin liner for their personal paraphernalia and a phalanx of buffed security types to shunt them out the door. Voluntary departures should not be ignored as chances to direct the communication amongst the team. Just because staff departures are no big deal to you, the Japanese staff don't necessarily share your Dry view of the working world. Don't let the rumour mill crank up and the information vacuum be filled by negative messaging. If the departure is voluntary, don't assume there is no assurance needed for those who remain to know that everything is still stable, safe and predictable. Always advertise the fact you are “expanding”, to prevent any type of negative scuttlebutt. Explaining to each person what is going on is the leader's job. The team want the assurance that they are not also going to be shown the door. They may wonder that the departing colleagues are bailing out early, because they know something the others don't. Assure them that there are still oodles of opportunity to advance in their careers or your might see good staff leave. If there has been a poor performance issue that is driving the team member's departure, those staying need to hear the survivors are valued and why the person's departure is the best thing for the organization. In Japan, the group not the individual, is key. Leaders, have an important role to play. They need to explain the Why of what is going on. Three factors determine employee engagement levels in companies – our relationship with our immediate supervisor; our belief in the direction being taken by senior management and our pride in the organization. Departures, when not properly handled, negatively impact all three. The key emotional trigger to getting higher levels of engagement is feeling valued. Those who are left behind need that conversation with their boss that they are valued. Bone Dry leaders won't get it or won't bother. They will subsequently wonder why the levels of engagement, commitment, innovation and motivation are so low in their team. To successfully lead in Japan and beat the competition, you need a more highly engaged team. Action Steps Stop the rumour mill by having a strategy in place for when there is turnover Coach leaders on the need to communicate the WHY with team members when there are departures Assure those left behind they are valued
On today’s show we’re talking about Freedom of Speech and what it means to be neutral. The year was 1889 and Almon Strowger was the local undertaker in Kansas City Missouri. Clients would call the operator and ask to be connected with the undertaker. The operator was called Mabel. They were all called Mabel. In those days, the operator would patch you through by pulling a wire out of the console and connecting the call manually to the destination. The problem is that one of the operators was married to the other competing undertaker in town and Almon Strowger was losing business to his competition because, in his opinion, the operator was giving calls intended for him to the competition, her husband. So Almon Strowger invented the first mechanical electrical phone switching system that would allow users of the phone system to dial the number of the destination and the connection would be made with no human intervention and no bias. The machine was truly neutral and would connect the parties following the commands of the person dialing the number. The Stronger Step By Step Exchange was eventually sold all over the world and became the dominant phone system around the world for close to 70 years. The system was eventually replaced by a digital exchange invented at Bell Laboratories and at Bell Northern Research. These systems maintained the neutrality inherent in the initial system devised by Almon Strowger. If you called Fedex, you were sure that you would be connected with Fedex and not UPS or DHL. So that’s the concept of neutrality, and the phone network solved that about 130 years ago Now let’s talk about freedom of speech and we’ll come back to talking about Strowger later on. So exactly what does Freedom of Speech mean? Most Western democracies have some form of Freedom of Speech enshrined in the constitution. That’s true in the US, Canada, the UK, most of Europe and so on. So what exactly does that mean? It means that you can’t be persecuted for what you think or what you say. There are limits on those freedoms. You’re not free to harm others through your speech. For example, you can’t frivolously yell “Fire” in the middle of a crowded movie theatre. You can’t make defamatory statements which aim to damage the reputation of another person or company. You literally have the right to stand on a soap box in a public place and make a speech. In the good old days, that might have been on the Boston Commons, or perhaps in Central Park in NYC, or on the Mall in Washington DC. Today, that means on the Internet, perhaps on social media, or who knows, a podcast. The makers of social media platforms are the modern day manufacturers of the soap box. The manufacturer of the soap box clearly can’t be held responsible for what someone standing on the soap box says. They merely cut some wood and screwed it together to form a box. Arguably, social media is private property, not public. The use agreement between users of the platform and the owners of the platform is between a company and the user. This is clearly a legal gray zone. Something said on social media is not truly public, but in many ways it is public. There are so many messages being put out on social media. How is a piece of software supposed to figure out what’s a legitimate use of the platform and what is in violation of the use standards. The amount of fake news is astounding. This week, the CEO’s of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google appeared before congress to answer questions about the amount of power and influence they wield to shape public opinion. They are the modern day Mabel. By curating what’s displayed on the platform, they’re filtering out what you get to see. When that happens, then free speech gets suppressed, neutrality is gone and Mabel is back in control of how calls get routed to the undertaker, and how propaganda gets presented to the voting population.
UK update with Isabelle Oakeshott Boris Johnson was elected in a landslide to get Brexit finalised. But his mishandling of the Coronavirus crisis has his approval ratings in free fall. Meanwhile, Britain’s exit from Europe has fallen off the front pages and Labour’s new leader is gaining ground. Also, will Putin be president for life? Vladimir Putin recently secured constitutional changes that may allow him to rule for another sixteen years. Most Western analysts see the move as a power grab to offset his falling approval ratings. Mary Dejevsky argues that Putin simply seeks to assure a smooth transition when he leaves office. Also, Genocide denialism A quarter century ago, Bosnian Serbs massacred more than eight thousand Muslims. Survivors say history is being denied and war crimes celebrated.
UK update with Isabelle Oakeshott Boris Johnson was elected in a landslide to get Brexit finalised. But his mishandling of the Coronavirus crisis has his approval ratings in free fall. Meanwhile, Britain’s exit from Europe has fallen off the front pages and Labour’s new leader is gaining ground. Also, will Putin be president for life? Vladimir Putin recently secured constitutional changes that may allow him to rule for another sixteen years. Most Western analysts see the move as a power grab to offset his falling approval ratings. Mary Dejevsky argues that Putin simply seeks to assure a smooth transition when he leaves office. Also, Genocide denialism A quarter century ago, Bosnian Serbs massacred more than eight thousand Muslims. Survivors say history is being denied and war crimes celebrated.
I am often asked what supplements I take, why I take them and if we really need supplements anyway. After all, if you, like me, follow a healthy lifestyle, I'll wager you probably eat plenty of plants, prioritize sleep, hydrate with filtered water (or, dare I say at the risk of revealing my tinfoil hat, structured water) and expose yourself to the sun as much as possible. So why even consider supplementation? Let's begin with this: our modern, post-industrial, polluted, toxin-laden lifestyle demands more nutrients than food can provide. That’s right. The chronic stressors of modern life—ranging from heavy metal and synthetic chemical exposure to sensory overload—have been proven to increase your body’s need for vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants to shuttle toxins through detox pathways and prevent the formation of DNA-damaging free radical. This means that even if you are eating clean, relatively nutrient-dense food, you are likely not getting the full array of nutrients from food that prior generations enjoyed. There are five factors that contribute to poor nutrient availability in most modern food. Nutritionally Depleted Soil Due to modern farming techniques and fertilizers, most soil is depleted of the vitamins, minerals and antioxidants found in conventionally grown crops (4). You may think that eating organic is the ultimate solution. While some research suggests that organically grown food contains more nutrients than non-organic food, other research has concluded that there is no significant difference in nutritional content between the two (5, 6). In addition, for most of human history (and prehistory), our ancestors ate now-nearly-extinct, dense-cell-rich carbohydrates in the form of foods like wild tubers, which provided essential prebiotics so that probiotic bacteria could flourish (in contrast to the refined acellular grains and white rice that comprise modern carbohydrates) (7).In addition, the modern high intake of refined carbohydrates and processed foods creates significant blood sugar swings and glycemic variability that our ancestors did not encounter to as great an extent. A glance at a coffee shop display case or hotel breakfast bar that features bagels, muffins and sugary cereals explains why many people need a snack a couple hours after breakfast to make it through the inevitable mid-morning blood sugar crash. Blood sugar imbalances lead to chronic inflammation and may be responsible for up to 80% of modern diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease (8). This is a rollercoaster you definitely want to hop off. Similarly, the meat, eggs and dairy products commonly found in grocery stores deliver fewer anti-inflammatory nutrients, such as omega-3 fatty acids, than those from wild or pastured animals (9). Most Western diet munchers also consume an imbalanced ratio of omega-6 fatty acids to omega-3 fatty acids, further exacerbating chronic inflammation (10, 11). Age-Related Declines In Nutrient Absorption Your ability to absorb nutrients from food decreases as you age (19). While growing children should absolutely be taking a multivitamin to support healthy tissue and bone formation, supplementation becomes equally important for older generations. Many medications used to treat age-related diseases, such as acid reflux and hypertension, also interfere with proper nutrient absorption, further increasing the need to take supplements (16, 17). Then there are precious fat-soluble vitamins like vitamin D. While the recommendations for sufficient vitamin D levels are controversial, it is safe to say that many Americans, especially aging Americans who spend more and more time indoors, do not get enough vitamin D (18). Even if we do our best to get sun exposure - whether it’s a morning walk or going outside for lunch - it is rare to get as much sunlight and vitamin D as our outdoor-dwelling ancestors did. Poor Food Handling Practices Modern harvesting, shipping, processing and storage techniques degrade the nutrient content of food (12). Plants grown with modern fertilizer can contain only 25% of the micronutrients of plants grown using more traditional farming methods, and nutrient content declines as they are shipped and sit on store shelves. It makes sense that a fresh-picked apple is more nutritious than the apples you buy at the supermarket in winter, which were likely treated with 1-methylcyclopropene and could be up to 10 months old (according to an FDA spokesperson) (13, 14). And the preservatives used to maintain freshness could impede the bioavailability of the food’s nutrients and even increase your body’s need for more nutrients to process these synthetic additives (15). Pesticides, Herbicides & Pollutants Pesticides, herbicides and chemicals found in the modern food supply are combined with low-quality water, environmental contaminants from elements like degraded plastic and airborne pollutants like carbon monoxide, lead and mercury. These synergistic factors vastly increase your need for extra vitamins, minerals and nutrients to combat the formation of free radicals and the attack on your metabolism and immune system. Exercise Are you an athlete or frequent exerciser? The amount of extra oxygen and energy used by active individuals requires far more than the nutritional RDA of the average population. Indeed, consuming only the stated RDA can actually limit your athletic performance. So if you engage in Crossfit WODs, Ironman triathlons, obstacle races or heavy weight-lifting, your nutritional requirements mean you need to take supplements. In addition to these five factors, there are scientifically demonstrated longevity benefits of caloric restriction (a concept you will discover more about in Chapter 25). Given these benefits, it seems silly to argue that you could ignore calories and simply eat more food to obtain nutrients. This is another crucial area where supplements come in - they are a helpful boost for those of us wanting to consume enough nutrients to function well but also wanting to live longer using strategies such as intermittent fasting, alternate-day fasting and caloric restriction. The assumption that previous generations didn’t take supplements is also not true. Ancient supplements include root, stem and leaf teas, medicinal powders ground by mortar and pestle and highly concentrated oil extracts (20, 21, 22). Just because these dietary supplements didn’t look like capsules and ridiculously-oversized tubs of powders doesn’t mean they weren’t supplements. In addition, our ancestors certainly consumed dirt, which we now know contains a wide range of beneficial probiotics (23, 24). Perhaps even more compelling is the fact that animals, ranging from insects to chimps, self-medicate and supplement by consuming specific compounds (25). For example, when some caterpillars get infected by parasitic flies, they’ll eat poisonous plants to kill the invasive larvae. Ants fight off microbes and bacteria by adding spruce resin to their nests. Several animal species consume mud to counteract stomach upset, and animals of all kinds use plant medicine as their own rough approximation of “supplements”. Ultimately, supplementation with vitamins, minerals and even nootropics and psychedelics is a natural, time-honored way to enhance the body and brain. In our modern era, while many would argue that your brain should work fine on its own, operating with flawless precision in the presence of clean food, pure water, sunshine and fresh air, I beg to differ and have benefited highly from a bit of ancestral wisdom combined with better living through science. -Why would you want to take supplements in the first place?...9:48 The post-industrial age creates a greater need for nutrition than previous generations Cell phones, air, water create toxicity for our systems Food that is farmed and produced does not contain the same level of nutrients as before Soil is depleted of minerals, vitamins, antioxidants No significant differences in organic produce in nutrient levels Ancestors ate nearly extinct foods: quinoa, tubers, cellular grains Modern food is acellular grains and white rice Abundance of refined carb and processed foods creates high blood sugar swings Meat, eggs and dairy products contain fewer Omega-3's and other anti-inflammatory nutrients Imbalanced Omega-6 to Omega-3 ratio (as high as 40:1) Modern fertilizers deplete food of nutrients Preservatives have deleterious effects (the age of "fresh" produce is a bit shocking) Decreases bioavailability of nutrients and increases the body's need for nutrients Fat-soluble vitamins (Vitamin D) are deficient in most people Multiple examples of supplementation occurring in ancient generations Root, stem, leaf teas Powders extracted and compounded to aid the body's nutrient absorption Ate dirt, which contains high amounts of probiotics Chimps and monkeys self-medicate by consuming specific plants (sometimes psychedelic compounds) Ben's personal supplementation regimen -Basic daily nutrient and micronutrient repletion...20:16 Key characteristics in a multivitamin: Vitamin D, Vitamin K1 and K2, Natural form of folate, Vitamin B12 Recommend taking it with food Calton Nutrition -Energy...27:18 (or any other creatine that has CreaPure in it) Book: Roger Drummer on tian chi (title unknown) Dr. Daniel Amen book (title not mentioned) Psychedelics: LSC, psilocybin (microdose every few days, not used with TianChi or Qualia Mind) -Fat Loss and blood sugar management...36:21 Use before most carb-rich meal of the day Use with cold thermogenesis -Recovery...38:27 Not to be taken immediately after exercising (wait at least 2 hours) (on recovery) Essential amino acids, not simply branched chain aminos 10-20 g pre- or post-workout Muscle maintenance and recovery Appetite suppression (other good brands are , and ) 8 g per day (with breakfast) 1:1 EPA to DHA ratio Vitamin E Contains Astaxanthin Keep refrigerated -Gut...44:48 for protein digestion for fat digestion for gluten digestion -Sleep...54:51 CBD Scientific Lipocalm -"Experimental Supplements"...59:47 BGF podcast w/ Ian Mitchell Peptides BPC 157 Tesamorelin Summary So that's it! I trust this guide gave you ideas on how to enhance your health, performance, and recovery without needing to pop a dizzying array of pills. I get lots of inquiries about other supplements like greens powders, l-carnitine, high-dose Vitamin B, beta-alanine, sleep supplements and so on. I highly recommend specifically tailoring your supplement protocol to meet your specific goals, and also to use the comments section below to ask me your other specific questions. Ideally, you should choose supplements that address your own genetic results or blood biomarkers, and to learn more about personalizing nutrition and supplements to your genetics, , author of "", or read my article about customizing your diet to you. So what do you think? Which supplements have you found to be personally useful? Do you still think supplements are a waste of time and money? Do you have questions about other supplements folks have recommended to you? Leave your questions, comments, and feedback in the comments section below! Episode sponsors: -: Nature’s “first food” that supports immunity, GI function, athletic recovery, and more. BGF listeners, receive a 10% discount off your entire order at Kion when you use discount code: BGF10 -: Now you can get all your healthy superfoods in one glass...with No Shopping, No Blending, No Juicing, and No Cleanup. Get a 20% discount on your entire order when you use discount code: BENG20 -: You can be sure that I researched all the saunas before I bought mine and Clearlight was the one that stood out from all the rest because of their EMF and ELF Shielding and their Lifetime Warranty. Use discount code: BENGREENFIELD to get $500 off your sauna and a free bonus gift! -: Try the shaving company that’s fixing shaving. Get a $13 value trial set that comes with everything you need for a close, comfortable shave when you go to
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo, Japan
The classic brutalist image of a departure from the firm is from the finance industry. The departee is handed a garbage bag to collect their chattels and are unceremoniously stripped of their entry badges and marched out of the building by security. No one is told anything and no explanations are given. When I was studying Chinese politics at Griffith University, I remember that Chinese Communist Party leaders who have fallen out of favour, were subsequently airbrushed from memory in group photographs. Finance industry departures are a bit like that when people are disappeared. How are people fired at your company? What do you tell the survivors or do you say nothing? Japan is a very group oriented society and disappearing their colleagues is always felt strongly by those left behind. What about when people leave of their own accord, how do you explain that or again are you silent on the matter? Japan has a few requirements you might like to think about. Welcome back to this weekly edition every Tuesday of "THE Cutting Edge Japan Business Show" I am your host Dr. Greg Story, President of Dale Carnegie Training Japan and best selling author of Japan Sales Mastery. We are bringing the show to you from our High Performance Center in Akasaka in Minato-ku, the business center of Tokyo. Why the Cutting Edge? In this show, we are looking at the critical areas for success in business in Japan. We want to help advance everyone's thinking so that we be at the forefront, the Cutting Edge, of how to flourish here in this market. Before we get into this week's topic, here is what caught my attention lately. A hypothetical eruption of Mt Fuji could rain volcanic ash on Tokyo and push the capital into a state of paralysis, according to a government report. My Fuji is an active volcano located only 100 kilometers from Tokyo. If more than ten centimeters of ash fell in Tokyo's twenty three wards, it would render roads useless, stopping the flow of people and goods to the city. Just zero point five centimeters of ash could cause mechanical problems for cars, and adverse health effects, particularly for the eyes and lungs. More than one centimeter of ash could cause power outages, and water filtration systems to fail. The government estimates the damages and losses would total twenty three billion dollars. Mt Fuji has shown no signs of volcanic activity since the nineteen sixties, but there have been ten large scale eruptions since the year seven hundred and eighty one. We get a lot of earthquakes here, but we rarely consider the possibility of a major volcanic eruption. After the 2011 triple nuclear reactor meltdowns, a radioactive cloud swept over Tokyo and we all stopped drinking the water from the taps, until it had been flushed out of the water filtration system. I didn't leave town then, but if we had a major volcanic eruption, then I think I will be packing up the car and hightailing it north immediately. In other news, the Japanese government is expected this year to ease rules so drone pilots can fly multicopters even without visual tracking. This is a prerequisite for the start of drone deliveries of goods to homes. Last year in the city of Ina in Nagano prefecture, they tested drone delivery. This is considered an effective means to deliver daily necessities to elderly people who have limited mobility. Takashi Ueda senior manager of the postal business planning division at Japan post says, “we are looking into the possibilities of new technologies that can improve efficiency. One candidate is drones”. Japan Post has been running tests in rural areas to see where the potential problems are located for drone delivery. Rakuten has also been testing deliveries. The company said, “People can order what they need now with an app and then a drone will bring it to them immediately. We believe a world like this will come”. The Drone Pilot Association estimates that one hundred and forty thousand drone pilots will be needed by 2020. The number of drone pilot schools jumped from forty three to one hundred and fifty four in nine months, from June last year to March this year. Brave new world here we come. This is episode number #49 and we are talking about How To Keep Staff Departure Damage To A MinimumSoredewa ikimasho, so let's get going.In most Western economies, a colleague's farewell is no big deal, just a part of the general tapestry of business. If there is some turnover and the recently departed are being replaced, then that is considered the natural order of things and life moves on. Managers applying a typical Western business approach to departures in Japan however, may skip the need to communicate with those left behind. Underestimating the emotional component of colleague separations here is a big mistake. Most Western enterprises are “Dry” rather than “Wet” ecosystems. Dry meaning logical, ordered, efficient, unemotional, competitive and oriented around Darwinian survival of the fittest. Wet on the other hand is more emotional, nuanced, interdependent, harmonious, inefficient and more forgiving of human frailties. Japan much prefers Wet to Dry work environments. The unexpected announcement of the coming disappearance of a workmate can cause a degree of consternation amongst the troops, that is probably not anticipated or even sensed by Western trained managers. If there is no boss awareness of the issue, there is no imperative for communication around the departure topic. Voluntary departures should not be ignored as chances to direct the communication amongst the team. Just because staff departures are no big deal to you, the Japanese staff don't necessarily share your Dry view of the working world. Don't let the rumour mill crank up and the information vacuum be filled by negative messaging. If the departure is voluntary, don't assume there is no assurance needed for those who remain to know that everything is still stable, safe and predictable. Find out more when we come back from the break Welcome backExplaining to each person what is going on is the leader's job. The team want the assurance that they are not also going to be shown the door. They may wonder that the departing colleagues are bailing out early, because they know something the others don't. Assure them that there are still oodles of opportunity to advance in their careers or your might see good staff leave. If there has been a poor performance issue that is driving the team member's departure, those staying need to hear that the survivors are valued and why the person's departure is the best thing for them and the organization. In Japan, the group, not the individual, is key. In this type of high density environment, too much individualism is thought to be plain dangerous. The herd feels safety in numbers and in the known. Staff happiness requires as little disruption as possible to the established harmonious order. Leaders need to explain the Why of what is going on. Three factors determine employee engagement levels in companies – our relationship with our immediate supervisor; our belief in the direction being taken by senior management and our pride in the organization. Departures, when not properly handled, negatively impact all three. The key emotional trigger to getting higher levels of engagement is feeling valued. Those who are left behind need that conversation with their boss that they are valued. Bone Dry leaders won't get it or won't bother. They will subsequently wonder why the levels of engagement, commitment, innovation and motivation are so low in their team. To successfully lead in Japan and beat the competition, you need a more highly engaged team. When its sayonara time, get Wet. THE Cutting Edge Japan Business Show is here to help you succeed in Japan. Subscribe on YouTube, share it with your family, friends and colleagues, become a regular. Thank you for watching this episode and remember to hit the subscribe button. Our website details are on screen now, enjapan.dalecarnegie.com, it is awesome value, so check it out. In episode 50 we are talking about How To Deal With Stage Fright. Find out more about that next week. So Yoroshiku Onegai Itashimasu please join me for the next episode of the Cutting Edge Japan Business Show We are here to help you and we have only one direction in mind for you and your business and that is UP!!!
As you age, your cells divide over and over again, leading to minute changes in their genomes. New research reveals that in the lining of the esophagus, mutant cells run rampant, fighting for dominance over normal cells. But they do this without causing any detectable damage or cancer. Host Sarah Crespi talks to Phil Jones, a professor of cancer development at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, about what these genome changes can tell us about aging and cancer, and how some of the mutations might be good for you. Most Western farmers apply their pesticides using drones and machinery, but in less developed countries, organophosphate pesticides are applied by hand, resulting in myriad health issues from direct exposure to these neurotoxic chemicals. Host Meagan Cantwell speaks with Praveen Vemula, a research investigator at the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine in Bengaluru, India, about his latest solution—a cost-effective gel that can be applied to the skin to limit pesticide-related toxicity and mortality. This week's episode was edited by Podigy. Download a transcript of this episode (PDF) Listen to previous podcasts. About the Science Podcast [Image:Navid Folpour/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]
As you age, your cells divide over and over again, leading to minute changes in their genomes. New research reveals that in the lining of the esophagus, mutant cells run rampant, fighting for dominance over normal cells. But they do this without causing any detectable damage or cancer. Host Sarah Crespi talks to Phil Jones, a professor of cancer development at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, about what these genome changes can tell us about aging and cancer, and how some of the mutations might be good for you. Most Western farmers apply their pesticides using drones and machinery, but in less developed countries, organophosphate pesticides are applied by hand, resulting in myriad health issues from direct exposure to these neurotoxic chemicals. Host Meagan Cantwell speaks with Praveen Vemula, a research investigator at the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine in Bengaluru, India, about his latest solution—a cost-effective gel that can be applied to the skin to limit pesticide-related toxicity and mortality. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Download a transcript of this episode (PDF) Listen to previous podcasts. About the Science Podcast [Image:Navid Folpour/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]
This episode is recorded from Boston and the World Congress on Thyroid Cancer, where leading doctors and researchers have gathered to share the latest medical research and trends related to thyroid disease. At the Congress, Dr. Okamoto presented on Thyroid Cancer Guidelines Around the World He helped write the Japanese guidelines on thyroid cancer. He is Professor & Chair of the Department of Surgery at Tokyo Women’s Medical University. Key points from this episode include: Most Western countries carry out total thyroidectomies, whereas in Japan, the approach is more conservative with a fundamental practice of hemithyroidectomy whenever possible. By not doing a total thyroidectomy, this allows the patient to not avoid taking thyroid replacement medication. Complete thyroidectomy is conducted when 80-90% of lymph nodes have metastasis. I-131 treatment is decreasing despite cases of cancer increasing For I-131 treatment, patients wait more than 6 months post surgery. When receving I-131 treatment, patients be admitted to hospital for several days. TSH suppression therapy is common in Western countries, whereas in Japan, measures are taken to avoid TSH suppression by not removing all of the thyroid. Normal TSH in Japan is 4.3 or less. Culturally, Japanese patients are typically conservative compared to Western countries. Even high risk patients opt for no TT. In Japan people are less aggressive and more patient as a culture, and this is reflected in their approach to treating thyroid cancer. For medullary thyroid cancer, treatment management differs in japan. In Westerm countries, they receive TT. But, in Japan, if its not familial it is treated with hemithyrodectmy. Only when familial, is it treated with TT. Calcitonin Follicular diagnosis is difficult, benign and malignant is a big issue. Active surveillance is spreading now, the question is why? We must consider the patient’s view. Research from Japan focuses on the size of tumor, but must consider patient’s view. NOTES Book: Treatment of Thyroid Tumor: Japanese Clinical Guidelines American Thyroid Association RELATED EPISODES 38: Thyroid Surgery? Be Careful, Not All Surgeons Are Equal and Here is Why 35: Rethinking Thyroid Cancer – When Saying No to Surgery Maybe Best for You 6: A Must Listen Episode Before Getting Surgery – Do Not Do It Alone
Why do populist politicians across the West want warmer relations with Russia? Are they just Kremlin agents? Or are they tapping into a growing desire to find common cause with Moscow – and end East-West tension? Tim Whewell travels from Russia to America and across Europe to unravel the many different strands of pro-Moscow thinking, and offer a provocative analysis which challenges conventional thinking about the relationship between Russia and the West. Donald Trump is just one of a new breed of Western politicians who want warmer relations with Vladimir Putin. Most Western experts say that’s dangerous: an aggressive Russia is plotting to divide and weaken the West. But Trump and others seem to have tapped into a popular desire to reduce tension and discover what Moscow and the West have in common. Could Moscow now lead a “Conservative International”, promoting traditional social values and national sovereignty around the world? On the right, some see Russia as a spiritual beacon. Others, both on the right and left, simply think the threat from the East is much exaggerated – and are warming to Russia as a protest against the Western establishment. Maybe it's time for a new way of understanding relations between the old superpowers.
Somebody once told me, “Jason…the closest you’ll ever get to culture, is yoghurt”. Pretty harsh comment really, but I think I deserved it at the time. It comes as a surprise to some people that less than one percent of all bacteria on earth are dangerous to humans. The ones that cause food poisoning are called pathogens; a lot of the other bacteria are quite useful in food production. Imagine a world without beer, wine, cheese, vegemite, penicillin or yoghurt. You’d rather live on the moon – it’s made of cheese you know (excuse the pun). Fermenting and coagulating various types of milk, makes yoghurt. As the milk turns, the natural sugars (lactose) are converted into lactic acid, which in turn produces bacterial change. Large producers of yoghurt add active bacteria such as ‘lactobacillus bulgericus’ or ‘streptococcus thermophilus’. Yoghurt has been produced for many centuries in the Middle East and India, most probably a natural occurrence, before refrigeration was invented. Most Western and European cultures eat yoghurt as a breakfast or a dessert, whereas India and Central Asia would cook with it or use it as a condiment to spicy dished. Labna (Yoghurt Cheese)Labna is made from draining lightly salted yoghurt through a sieve lined with muslin cloth and left overnight. The yoghurt starts to get thicker, and if you leave it drain for a few days it forms a kind of curd cheese that you can mould into a ball. In the Middle East they eat this at the end of a meal, not unlike the French do with a cheese platter. Would be great with a top drop of your favourite wine.
Somebody once told me, “Jason…the closest you’ll ever get to culture, is yoghurt”. Pretty harsh comment really, but I think I deserved it at the time. It comes as a surprise to some people that less than one percent of all bacteria on earth are dangerous to humans. The ones that cause food poisoning are called pathogens; a lot of the other bacteria are quite useful in food production. Imagine a world without beer, wine, cheese, vegemite, penicillin or yoghurt. You’d rather live on the moon – it’s made of cheese you know (excuse the pun). Fermenting and coagulating various types of milk, makes yoghurt. As the milk turns, the natural sugars (lactose) are converted into lactic acid, which in turn produces bacterial change. Large producers of yoghurt add active bacteria such as ‘lactobacillus bulgericus’ or ‘streptococcus thermophilus’. Yoghurt has been produced for many centuries in the Middle East and India, most probably a natural occurrence, before refrigeration was invented. Most Western and European cultures eat yoghurt as a breakfast or a dessert, whereas India and Central Asia would cook with it or use it as a condiment to spicy dished. Labna (Yoghurt Cheese) Labna is made from draining lightly salted yoghurt through a sieve lined with muslin cloth and left overnight. The yoghurt starts to get thicker, and if you leave it drain for a few days it forms a kind of curd cheese that you can mould into a ball. In the Middle East they eat this at the end of a meal, not unlike the French do with a cheese platter. Would be great with a top drop of your favourite wine.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=pat+holliday+is+halloween+paganHALLOWEEN PAGAN This book is basically about the dangers of witchcraft by the celebration of Halloween that is being aimed at children. Halloween is an observance celebrated on the night of October 31; by children dressing in costumes going door-to-door collecting candy or money. It is celebrated the Western world, most common in the United States, Puerto Rico, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Canada, increasing popularity in Australia and New Zealand. Halloween originated in Ireland as the pagan Celtic harvest festival, Samhain. Irish, Scots and other immigrants brought older versions of the tradition to North America in the 19th century. Most Western countries have embraced Halloween as a part of American pop culture in the late 20th century. Martin Luther had many personal encounters with Satan, whose existence was as certain to him as his own. More than once Luther threw the inkstand at Satan. Luther's own doubts, carnal temptations, evil thoughts and external enemies convinced him that he was a marked man, singled out by Satan for destruction. Luther said Satan assumed visible form and appeared to him as a dog, a hog, a goat, or as a flame or star; and sometimes as a man with horns. Luther said, “He is noisy and boisterous and he is at the bottom of all witchcraft and ghost trickery.” Luther also believed the devil has no real power over believers. Satan, hates prayer, sacred music, the Cross and the Word of God. He flees as from a flaming fire. If the Scripture will not expel him, jeering and taunting will, “the devil,will bear anything better than to be despised and laughed at.”
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