Podcasts about Sanity

Democratic Strategist Max Burns guest hosts for John while he is on stage in Chicago for the Separation of Church and Hate tour. Max discusses the absurd Republican excuses for continuing the government shutdown and for not swearing in Adelita Grijalva, who won a special election to the House of Representatives in Arizona's 7th Congressional District on Sept. 23rd. Then, he interviews writer, director, actor, and producer - Tim Blake Nelson. They talk about his new play "And Then There Were No More". Next, he jokes with investigative reporter Brian Karem about his new book: "Free the Press: The Death of American Journalism and How to Revive It" and his latest podcast "Hard Pass" where Brian is joined by two university journalism professors, and they analyze whether news medias are holding the White House accountable in their coverage. And finally, he speaks with Democratic Columnist Jared Yates Sexton about his latest piece on Substak "A Crisis of Meaning and Purpose: Our Identities Have No Bodies".See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

John talks about the ongoing engineered hostage crisis of our government shutdown and Attorney General Pam Bondi who went before the Senate Judiciary and tried to snipe and bully her way through a heated hearing over her DOJ's unlawful actions. Then, he welcomes back Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde. Her sermons have been published in several books and journals and she is the author of Gathering Up the Fragments: Preaching as Spiritual Practice (2007), Receiving Jesus: The Way of Love (2019) and How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith (2023), which has been adapted into a young adult book, We Can Be Brave: How We Learn to Be Brave in Life's Decisive Moments (2025), and a picture book for young children, I Can Learn to Be Brave (to be released in July 2026). Next, John talks about the impacts of the shutdown with Imelda Avila-Thomas. She is the AFGE Local 2139 President, representing workers at Department of Labor Wage And Hour Division in Texas, New Mexico, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Arkansas. And finally, comedian Keith Price jokes with the gang about Trump's latest mishigas.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode of the Evolving Wellness Podcast, host Sarah Kleiner dives deep into modern health challenges with guest Danielle Hamilton. They explore stress-induced blood sugar issues, burnout, and histamine intolerance — highlighting the need for personalized nutrition and lifestyle. The discussion covers circadian biology, hormones, and how blue light and EMFs affect well-being. Danielle and Sarah share practical tools for managing stress, supporting metabolism, and aligning with seasonal rhythms to improve energy and emotional balance.About Danielle:Danielle Hamilton, a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, helps people uncover and fix blood sugar imbalances — the hidden cause of many metabolic and hormonal problems. After reversing her own PCOS and fatigue through low-carb, real food, and fasting, she now empowers others to restore energy, mood, and long-term health by balancing blood sugar naturally.Reach out to Danielle Hamilton:https://www.daniellehamiltonhealth.com/https://sunsenseuv.com/Topics Discussed:→ Stress, burnout & blood sugar instability in modern life→ Circadian health: sunlight, grounding, managing blue light & EMFs→ Why “one size fits all” fails in nutrition & supplementation→ Emotions, nervous system & their link to metabolic health→ Strategies for both high & low blood sugar types→ Seasonal nutrition: shifting macros & embracing seasonal foods→ Tools for circadian wellness: blue blockers, red light, UV bracelets→ Functional medicine & supplement pitfalls→ Prioritizing rest, emotional regulation & metabolic flexibility→ Family wellness: adapting ancestral habits to modern lifeTimestamps00:00 Burnout & Blood Sugar Issues02:20 Intro: Danny Hamilton & Nuance04:53 Nutrition & Circadian Rhythm Journey06:55 Environmental Impact on Health13:32 Emotional & Nervous System Regulation20:17 Supplements & Individual Differences27:30 Foundational Health Practices31:28 Balancing Stress & Hormesis39:20 Morning Workouts & Pre-Diabetes39:38 Client Success Stories40:27 Listening to Intuition42:00 Circadian Rhythms & Digestion42:51 Personalized Health Pitfalls45:17 Seasonal Eating Benefits47:01 Dietary Adaptation & Individual Needs01:05:44 Tools for Better HealthDisclaimer:This video is not medical advice. Always monitor your labs and work with a professional.Get all my free guides and product recommendations:https://www.sarahkleinerwellness.com/all-free-resourcesCheck out my courses (use code PODCAST for 10% off):https://www.sarahkleinerwellness.com/coursesJoin my newsletter for special offers:https://www.sarahkleinerwellness.com/contactFree Guide – Build Your Perfect Quantum Day:https://www.sarahkleinerwellness.com/opt-in-9d5f6918-77a8-40d7-bedf-93ca2ec8387fFree Product & Discount Guide:https://www.sarahkleinerwellness.com/resource_redirect/downloads/file-uploads/sites/2147573344/themes/2150788813/downloads/eac4820-016-b500-7db-ba106ed8583_2024_SKW_Affiliate_Guide_6_.pdf

John talks about the violent rhetoric coming from Trump's megaphone minions and the victimization of the many judges who have ruled against the Trump Administration. He also discusses Trump telling reporters that, yes, of course he is willing to invoke the insurrection act in order to deploy federal troops to American cities. Then, he speaks with Canadian writer and musician Paul Myers about his new book "John Candy: A Life in Comedy". Next, John welcomes back Professor Corey Brettschneider to give solid legal advice about what's happening in the Trump legal world. And then winding it up, John jokes with his comedy panel - John Poveromo and Rhonda Hansome - and they take calls from listeners about how to handle life in this MAGA infested world.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

(Part 3/4) Six years after he murdered his two roommates, Devon Arthurs stands before a judge in Tampa and says he's ready to change. But as psychiatrists describe hallucinations, self-choking episodes, and conflicting diagnoses—from schizophrenia to schizoaffective disorder—one question dominates the courtroom: Is Arthurs genuinely ill… or performing for leniency? Host Andrew Iden examines how the case twisted through years of mental-competency hearings, how experts view the psychology of radicalization, and what drives young men toward hate. Featuring analysis from Luke Baumgartner (George Washington University's Program on Extremism), Hannah Gais (Southern Poverty Law Center), and journalist Ali Winston, this episode unpacks the intersection of ideology, identity, and illness in one of America's most disturbing true-crime stories.

This time - John discusses Trump's lust to keep the government shutdown going so he can fire as many non-loyalists as possible. He also talks about the MAGA fury at the Pope for blessing a glacier and telling people to help immigrants. Plus, he goes on a rant about Trump's former spiritual adviser Robert Morris who admitted he sexually abused a teenage girl but was given a pass to continue his ministry. Then, John welcomes back democratic strategist Max Burns to talk listeners off a ledge and give advice to frustrated Dems with no hope for the future.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On this episode of the podcast, South Carolina Congressman Ralph Norman pulls back the curtain on Washington's latest standoff. Norman doesn't mince words — he blames Democrats for blocking a clean continuing resolution (CR) and prioritizing billions in spending for illegal immigrants and public broadcasting over American taxpayers.Norman highlights his own amendment to halt Congressional pay during government shutdowns and praises President Trump's record on drug price reform, border security, and leadership that put Americans first.You can learn more about Rep. Norman by following his accounts on X: @RepRalphNorman and @RalphNorman or by visiting his gubernatorial candidate website: RalphNormanForGovernor.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Simon and Julie chat with John about Pete Hegseth's decision—as Trump's new Secretary of War—to let U.S. soldiers keep their Medals of Honor from the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre, calling it “final". The move has outraged many people and Native communities.They also honored Orange Shirt Day (Sept 30)—a National Day of Remembrance for children lost to residential schools and the survivors who carry their stories. To find out more check out Julie's Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/juliefrancella/p/orange-shirt-day?r=1u83jb&utm_medium=iosNext, they reflect on Dr. Jane Goodall's partnerships with Indigenous communities and her call to make decisions with “seven generations ahead” in mind. They also take listener calls and share updates on new Native-led bills in California.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is episode 12 of INNER REVOLUTION - a podcast series where we walk through the fire of inner transformation and awakening together. The purpose of this series is to help you shed ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING that isn't a true reflection of Who You Really Are, so you can fully embody your Divinity, Light, and Sacred Mission. In this 12th installment, we're diving into an important topic on the spiritual path, especially for those of us with tendencies to over-give or to prioritize everyone else's needs above our own... that topic is: boundaries! Join me for a discussion of: what actually ARE boundaries and how can they support us, if we implement them from a loving and empowered place? the pitfalls of not having clear-enough boundaries as you walk the spiritual path setting boundaries to safeguard your energy, sanity, space, time, money, etc. recognizing the need to set firmer boundaries in any area of your life the importance of setting healthy boundaries while still being flexible, open to change, and willing to connect deeply with others when it feels aligned   ******* You're lovingly invited to join my email community and get access to my free Akashic Records Mini Course + weekly newsletter: https://josephinehardman.com/akashic-records-intro/ Explore the next round of my Akashic Records Certification Program: https://josephinehardman.com/work-with-me/akashic-records-certification-program/ Connect through my website: https://josephinehardman.com Thank you for being here, doing your inner work, and leading the way for others with your light. It makes a difference! Music & editing by G. Demers Inner Work 2025 All Rights Reserved.

SEASON 4 EPISODE 21: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (2:30) COULD TRUMP PASS A SANITY TEST? Warning: this is a PARTIAL RE-RUN. If you heard Thursday's episode, don't bother. But I got such a great response to re-reading and annotating and updating my July 2016 piece for Vanity Fair Magazine on this topic that I wanted to post this as a stand-alone segment in case you skipped it and had time to listen now. The Thursday news-of-the-day stuff has gotten slightly outdated so I've stripped it off. As you know, I don't make a habit of re-posting episodes and I'm not going to start. Again: if you listened to the whole thing Thursday, this is NOT going to be new to you. Don't listen - unless you're trying to memorize it. SO... COULD TRUMP PASS A SANITY TEST? I have grown old talking about Trump's sanity. As I wrote then: short answer? Probably not. This is a layman using professional tools: an actual kind of "triage" test used by working psychology professionals to assess if somebody is injured, tripping, or psychopathic. I had an active therapist walk through the examination and assign the points per topic. It's an important time to review what we knew - or should have known - nine long years ago. Because he was unwell then, too. B-Block (24:31) PART TWO OF "CAN TRUMP PASS A SANITY TEST": We conclude the annotated 2016 piece on Trump's already provable mental distress with the disturbing reality that takes us back to where we began on Thursday with Representative Madeleine Dean's lament: "The president is unwell." C-Block (45:00) THIS IS JUST THE SIGN-OFF: Honestly, there is no reason to listen to this. It's just the credits.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

John talks about day 2 of the government shutdown which saw zero talks of negotiation or compromise on a budget, but instead a unified rattling of swords as Republicans continued to threaten major and permanent federal layoffs. Then, he speaks with the National Affairs correspondent for The Nation - John Nichols, about his new article "Robert Redford Sounded the Alarm About Our Corrupted Politics Over 50 Years Ago". And finishing it up John welcomes back the 2 Taras - Tara Devlin is a comedian and the host of the Tarabuster, where she looks at the news, politics and history through an unapologetically liberal lens. Tara Dublin is a comedian and author of “The Sound of Settling: A Rock & Roll Love Story.” Together Tara Devlin and Tara Dublin are the co-hosts of THE Tara Show podcast. They chat with listeners and give advice on how to navigate life in Trumpland.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ten days off the Appalachian Trail and I'm deep in the post-trail fog—so I'm doing what any reasonable human would: grading my own record attempt. In this episode I hand out a full report card on the AT self-supported FKT—physical execution, sleep, injuries, nutrition (hello 1,000-cal drink mix), logistics (RIP Shenandoah resupply), mental game, weather, terrain, and storytelling—then tally the GPA. I riff on why drone shots aren't a story, share some Mammoth 200 takes, and explain how two left shoes, a missing electronics bag, and shoe-toe peekaboo somehow still add up to a record. We hit night hiking tactics, the “toughness groove,” and field a few listener questions. Also: a quick bit on why it's “Appalachia,” not “Appa-lay-sha.”If this episode resonated, consider donating to The Trevor Project (link below)—they provide life-saving support and resources.Donate to the Trevor Project: https://give.thetrevorproject.org/fundraiser/6530749Sponsors that kept me moving: Janji (Snappy Trekker shirt & 5" AFO Ultra shorts), ReadyWise (my breakfast scramble), CS Instant Coffee (trail rocket fuel), and Garage Grown Gear (where cottage dreams live). Subscribe, drop a review, and tell one friend who thinks a “fun run” is 214 miles. Stay mid, America—and stay elite, my friends.Chapters00:00 Post-Trail Reflections and Celebrity Shoutouts02:34 The Popularity of 200-Mile Races05:45 The Appalachian Trail Experience08:22 Report Card on the Appalachian Trail FKT10:57 Nutrition Strategies for Endurance17:35 Mental and Emotional Resilience During the Hike23:00 Personal Reflections and Motivation23:57 Logistics and Gear Choices25:41 Resupply Challenges and Navigation28:17 Environmental Adaptation and Terrain Management30:30 Community Engagement and Storytelling32:21 Self-Assessment and Future Aspirations32:48 Audience Questions and Insights44:41 Closing Thoughts and Call to ActionSubscribe to Substack: http://freeoutside.substack.comSupport this content on patreon: HTTP://patreon.com/freeoutsideBuy my book "Free Outside" on Amazon: https://amzn.to/39LpoSFEmail me to buy a signed copy of my book, "Free Outside" at jeff@freeoutside.comWatch the movie about setting the record on the Colorado Trail: https://tubitv.com/movies/100019916/free-outsideWebsite: www.Freeoutside.comInstagram: thefreeoutsidefacebook: www.facebook.com/freeoutside

John talks about the big government shutdown. The White House is preparing for hundreds of thousands of layoffs and the fate of affordable health insurance for millions of Americans hangs in the balance. Then, he jokes with Bob Cesca on Trump and Hegseth's military speech and the GOP's failing attempt to color the recent mass shooters as left. Next, he speaks religion and politics with The God Squad and this week Dillon Naber Cruz is joined by Matthew Distefano who is filling in for Desimber Rose. Then closing it up, John welcomes back legal analyst Dr. Tracy Pearson to talk truth to power and answer listeners questions on Trump's mishigas.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Fall is here, school's in full swing, and weeknights are busy as ever—but that doesn't mean there's no time for great wine. In this episode, writer and cookbook author Jessica Dupuy⁠ joins Amanda to talk about the little luxuries that can make even Tuesday nights feel special. If you've ever wondered what to pour with mac and cheese, takeout sushi, or a Five Guys burger, this is a masterclass in balancing flavor with sanity. They also explain why Grenache is like tinted moisturizer and give the ultimate tip on how to shop smarter—so the right bottle is always within reach.

Think about all we face as a nation.Threat to the dollar. Threat to our way of life with Muslim radicals in our mix. Illegals wreaking havoc, rising deficits, mounting debt, Bidenflation, and much more.And while President Trump has done much to curb these problems, he still faces headwinds. I'm not worried about it, because daily we witness God's grace and Trump's greatness. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Send us a textWhy am I re-releasing this episode? Because after a few weeks back in the classroom, I felt it again — that weight of doing everything myself: picking up pencils, erasing the board, answering endless “what did I miss?” emails. And I remembered… this episode holds the solution.In this powerful conversation with Annabelle Williamson (La Maestra Loca) and John Seifert, we dive deep into classroom jobs — not just what they are, but why they matter. Annabelle and John share:Their favorite jobs and how they transformed their classes.How to implement jobs step by step (even mid-year).Troubleshooting tips to keep the system running.Whether you're the “least type-A teacher ever” (like Annabelle) or highly structured (like John), you'll find a way to make class jobs work for you.If you're feeling tired, stretched thin, or just looking for a way to re-energize your class culture, this episode is exactly what you need right now. Listen now.Class Jobs Course: Use code: CLAUDIA for 10% OFF!John's BlogAnnabelle's BlogMore resources:Join the waitlist for Growing With Proficiency: The Spanish Teacher Academy → growingwithproficiency.com/academyFollow me on Instagram @claudiamelliott ​​

John discusses the government shutdown as Republicans refuse to negotiate a continuing resolution that doesn't completely screw Americans, preferring instead to simply screw them with a shutdown and then of course make up lies about Democrats causing it. He also talks about Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump completely boring the nation's top military brass while pitching a fighting force that is thinner, meaner, more male and less accountable than ever before. Then, he interviews author Joel Edward Goza and they discuss points in his books "America's Unholy Ghosts: The Racist Roots of Our Faith and Politics", and "Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America". Next, he talks policy and politics with fellow Sirius XM host and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist - Karen Hunter. And lastly, John jokes with Comedy Daddy - Keith Price on pop culture and Donald Trump. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this powerful and emotional episode, your host Shawn Anthony sits down with Andelina Storm—a psychology student at Michigan State, Gen Z mental health advocate, and author of Sanity in the Storm.After losing a close friend to suicide and navigating her own mental health battles, Andelina found strength in her faith and purpose in her pain. She opens up about anxiety, OCD, grief, and the spiritual journey that helped her keep going when life got darkest.This conversation is a must-listen for anyone battling inner storms, especially students and young adults wondering if things will ever get better. Andelina brings raw honesty, practical advice, and unwavering hope.Episode highlights:Why mental health challenges don't mean a lack of faithWhat passive suicidal thoughts really feel likeSmall, real-life wins that help you “beat the storm”If this episode moved you, challenged you, or gave you hope:Subscribe to the podcastLeave a 5-star rating & reviewShare with friends, family, co-workers, or people who you think needs to hear this.Connect with Andelina Storm: @@andelina.stormSONW Resources:Signup for PodProMax:https://podpromax.com/Signup for my new podcasting course:https://schoolsovernowwhat.thinkific.com/courses/podcast-secrets-revealed-the-courseDownload my ebook "Podcast Secrets Revealed":https://shawnanthony.lpages.co/podcast-secrets-revealed-ebook/Support SONW with Patreon and get exclusive content:/schoolsovernowwhat  Join the SONW Academy for 1-1 Coaching from Shawn:https://www.schoolsovernowwhat.com/academyAbout School's Over...Now What?Join Shawn Anthony as he talks to fearless business leaders who've shattered conventional wisdom to achieve massive success. In each weekly episode, our guests share jaw-dropping stories of overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Most importantly, they've answered the question we've all asked “School's Over…Now What?” Get inspired and access cutting-edge strategies that'll transform your business and life. New episodes every Friday on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all major podcast platforms. Contact InfoInstagram:  @shawnranthony_Website: https://www.schoolsovernowwhat.com/YouTube:  @schoolsovernowwhat  Twitter:  /shawnranthony_   Press/Interview Requests: fenton@schoolsovernowwhat.com

$600,000 in revenue doesn't mean much if your net profit is only 10%. In this episode, John Pajak breaks down what profit margins really mean in real money — showing you the difference between scraping by and building wealth. Learn how to calculate your net profit, benchmark your numbers, and start running your business for profit, not just revenue. Comments and Questions are welcome. Send to ProfitswithPajak@gmail.com Episode Links: Apple Podcast Listeners- Copy and paste the links below into your browser. Upcoming Events: Get 50% OFF Equip Expo 2025 tickets NOW with promo code PAJAK https://plus.mcievents.com/equipexpo2025?RefId=PAJAK LCR Summit: October 20th and 21st in Louisville, Kentucky The Playbook for Success in Your Business and Life! https://www.lcrmedianetwork.com/   Show Partners: Yardbook Simplify your business and be more profitable. Please visit www.Yardbook.com  Get 30 days of Premium Business level of Yardbook for FREE with promo code PAJAK Relay Relay is small business banking that puts you in complete control of what you are earning, spending, and saving. Click here to sign up for Relay and get $50.00 cash bonus!http://join.relayfi.com/promo/get-50-ulumkswykjzwi4dqsm?referralcode=profitswithpajak&utm_source=influencer&utm_medium=podcast  Mr. Producer Click the link to connect with Thee Best Podcast Producer in the biz! https://www.instagram.com/mrproducerusa/   Green Frog Web Design Get your first month for only $1 when you use code, PAJAK, and have your website LIVE in 3 weeks from projected start date or it is FREE for a year. https://www.greenfrogwebdesign.com/johnpajak My Service Area “Qualify Leads Based on Your Profitable Service Area.” Click on this link for an exclusive offer for being a “Profits with Pajak” listener. https://myservicearea.com/pajak   Training and Courses Budgets, Breakevens, and Bottom Lines™ Workshop John Pajak's exclusive system is designed to help you avoid common failures and achieve your business' financial goals to be profitable and scale your business. https://www.johnpajak.com/offers/qvgvV8m3/checkout   Yardbook Training Workshops Learn one-on-one with John Pajak to use Yardbook like a pro to streamline your business and make more money! https://www.johnpajak.com/offers/aJ9YX7aB/checkout

Questions about Donald Trump's mental health, and his sanity in general, have been growing louder over the last few days after a series of truly unhinged and racist posts on social media. The President has been reposting AI generated videos of himself and his enemies, seemingly unable to distinguish between reality and fiction, causing Americans to call upon the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment. A very confused and emotional Eric Trump appeared on Newsmax this week to launch a new grievance against the former Biden Administration by claiming that they tried to get his father and stepmother to divorce. As evidence of this alleged attack on Trump's marriage, Eric claimed that the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago was only done to try to dissolve that marriage. Eric seems to forget that his father has cheated on every wife he's ever had, and even buried Eric's mother at a golf course to get a tax write off - not exactly a loving husband that has successful marriages. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth held his little pep rally for the military on Tuesday morning, and it was about as pathetic as you would imagine. But on top of being pathetic, it was also insanely racist and misogynistic, with Hegseth saying that diversity is NOT a strength, and then going into a transphobic tirade about gender identities and how men are just better, in his opinion. The event cost millions of dollars was an even bigger waste of time than we thought it would be.Donald Trump's Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins frantically texted Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent last week, saying that she's worried that Trump was outsmarted by China in his own trade war. We know that this happened because a photographer was able to snap a picture of the text message to Bessent as he was sitting at the United Nations last week. And Rollins has every reason to believe Trump was outsmarted, because he absolutely was. Text and and let us know your thoughts on today's stories!Subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay up to date on all of Farron's content: https://www.youtube.com/FarronBalancedFollow Farron on social media! Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FarronBalanced Twitter: https://twitter.com/farronbalanced Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/farronbalanced TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@farronbalanced?lang=en

I used to spend countless nights firefighting problems, redoing work, and apologising to clients… until I put in place the four essential business systems that changed how I operated. In this episode of the HerBusiness Podcast, I'm sharing the four essential systems that saved my sanity as a business owner. These aren't “nice to haves” or a checklist – they are the exact systems and structures I put in place when I was drowning in work. And I can't wait to share them with you. Here's What You'll Discover in the Episode: Why essential business systems actually create FREEDOM rather than restriction, and how to reframe them so they support your creativity and joy The Customer Service System that saved me hours of answering the phone and struggling with client miscommunication The Project Planning System that transformed my team from being a self-proclaimed “last-minute dot com” into a proactive, calm, and aligned unit all working in unison The Communication System that keeps projects on track and prevents bottlenecks internally on my team (and why more meetings actually saved us time… I know – shocking!) And the single most important system you can incorporate into your life so you can lead your team and business with energy, clarity, and JOY And so, so much more… Mentioned in This Episode: The HerBusiness Network Check out our reviewer Dionne Sibly of Black Garlic & Co

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In this episode John discusses the Trump sycophants that are ripping their hair out trying to find a way to blame democrats for the recent mass shootings when if fact it was one of their own. He also talks about Congressional democratic leaders who met with their Republican counterparts, begging for bipartisanship and compromise as the clock ticks toward a government shut down. Then, he welcomes back Professor Corey Brettschneider to talk about the James Comey indictment and the potential government shutdown. Next, John speaks with Annie Laurie Gaylor, who is Co-President and Co-Founder of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Annie Laurie is the author of Woe to Women: The Bible Tells Me So, Betrayal of Trust: Clergy Abuse of Children, and Women Without Superstition: “No Gods – No Masters”. They discuss the Freedom From Religion Foundation's 49th National Convention which will take place Oct 16-19 in South Carolina. Then finally, comedian Rhonda Hansome rounds it out with wit and wisdom for all who need it.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode, host Shannon Peavey welcomes the one and only Elena Verna. But wait, it's not the illustrious, highly sought-after growth expert herself, but her AI agent, powered by SuperMe. “She” shares deep knowledge from her expansive body of work in growth from Miro to Amplitude to Loveable and shares why company stage matters when thinking through a growth strategy.Chapters:1:50: Elena defines PLG3:45  Skills for aspiring growth PMs 4:20  Choosing the right success metrics 5:58  Why company stage matters to growth strategy7:10  How companies can get started with growth8:12  Stories from SurveyMonkey, Miro and Amplitude10:15 Hitting the ground running at Lovable11:20 Refining the ICP13:00 Collaborating cross-team14:00 Personal reflectionsWhere to find Elena Verna:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elenaverna/Elena's SuperMe AI Agent: https://www.superme.ai/elenaResources:Elena Verna's Substack: https://www.elenaverna.com/SuperMe https://www.superme.ai/Lovable https://lovable.dev/Miro https://miro.com/SurveyMonkey https://www.surveymonkey.com/Amplitude https://amplitude.com/Sanity.io https://www.sanity.io/MongoDB https://www.mongodb.com/

In this inspiring episode of the Authors on Mission podcast, host Danielle Hutchinson sits down with Susan Hensley, former TV anchor and HR executive turned author of Art for Your Sanity.Susan shares how art journaling became her lifeline during major life transitions—from retirement to the pandemic—and how it evolved into a powerful mental health tool and bestselling book.

John discusses the greedy sellout of some American comedians who are taking BIG paychecks to appear at the Riyadh Comedy Festival in Saudi Arabia and only do approved routines that aren't censored. He also talks about Trump's big plot to get his perceived enemies arrested for made up charges then drain their bank accounts trying to prove their innocence. Then, he chats with the Evil Army of the Night about current news and the latest strangeness from Trump. And lastly, he welcomes back TV's Frank Conniff to joke about Pete Kegsbreath, Jimmy Kimmel, and Superman.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

John interviews Dropkick Murphys' frontman Ken Casey about his recent viral video confronting right-wing MAGA extremists during their gigs. Then, he speaks with journalist Haley Cohen Gilliland about her new book "A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children". Next, John interviews British Academic and author Kehinde Andrews about his new book "Nobody Can Give You Freedom: The Political Life of Malcolm X". Then finally, he talks with polar geopolitics expert Elizabeth Buchanan PhD about her new book "So You Want to Own Greenland? Lessons from the Vikings to Trump".See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

False flags, fear driven messaging, the fabrication of perpetual enemies, the illusions created by Ai. Our world is a puppet show put on by the elites to convince the peasants to obey. You can either let it consume you, or you can find the humor in their ways. God is Joy. Ask God to remove the burdens. Embrace the moment, ignore the circus. Freedom comes through the relationship that Jesus offers us. Have a good laugh with Jesus. Don't take yourself too seriously. We are all in this together.  #BardsFM_Morning #TheStageOfIllusions  #TheHeartOfAChild  Bards Nation Health Store: www.bardsnationhealth.com BardsFM CAP, Celebrating 50 Million Downloads: https://ambitiousfaith.net Morning Intro Music Provided by Brian Kahanek: www.briankahanek.com MYPillow promo code: BARDS Go to https://www.mypillow.com/bards and use the promo code BARDS or... Call 1-800-975-2939.  White Oak Pastures Grassfed Meats, Get $20 off any order $150 or more. Promo Code BARDS: www.whiteoakpastures.com/BARDS Windblown Media 20% Discount with promo code BARDS: windblownmedia.com Founders Bible 20% discount code: BARDS >>> TheFoundersBible.com Mission Darkness Faraday Bags and RF Shielding. Promo code BARDS: Click here EMPShield protect your vehicles and home. Promo code BARDS: Click here EMF Solutions to keep your home safe: https://www.emfsol.com/?aff=bards Treadlite Broadforks...best garden tool EVER. Promo code BARDS: TreadliteBroadforks.com No Knot Today Natural Skin Products: NoKnotToday.com Health, Nutrition and Detox Consulting: HealthIsLocal.com Destination Real Food Book on Amazon: click here Images In Bloom Soaps and Things: ImagesInBloom.com Angeline Design: AngelineDesign.com DONATE: Click here Mailing Address: Xpedition Cafe, LLC Attn. Scott Kesterson 591 E Central Ave, #740 Sutherlin, OR  97479

Max Burns guest hosts while John is performing on stage promoting his new book "Separation of Church and Hate". He talks about former FBI Director James Comey who was indicted by the DOJ for allegedly lying to congress in a 2020 hearing. The indictment was rushed through the Justice Department a few days before the statute of limitations expired. Then, Max speaks with Jaime Harrison who is a distinguished leader with over two decades of experience in politics, government, strategic communications, and organizational management. As Chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), he played a key role in reshaping public discourse, rebuilding the Democratic Party's infrastructure. Next, he interviews Peter Rothpletz who is currently the morning newsletter chief for Mehdi Hasan's incisive and fast-growing Zeteo media group. They discuss how the media is shaping the future. And finally, Max takes calls from listeners about current news and trending topics.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

If the thought of only have 100 days left in the year makes you panic a little but, this one's for you.In today's episode, Britany gives you the good girlfriend pep talk on how to finish the year strong without burning out. She has rants about the joys of having a sick kid, starting your period and how to avoid toddler tantrums. So you know, a bit of everything.From the realities of mom life to better fitness habits and establishing a healthy lifestyle routine, Britany reminds you that you need to walk into the back half of 2025 with energy instead of guilt and perfectionism.Click here for details on Britany's small group coaching program, The Routine ResetClick here if you're interested in working with Britany in-person in Portland, OregonLEAVE A VOICEMAIL FOR BRITANYhttps://telb.ee/filterfree SIGN UP FOR BRITANY'S NEWSLETTERhttps://britany.myflodesk.com/filterfree

John's monologue talks about the big disappointment as the internet Rapture prediction didn't happen.... again. He also discusses the shooting at an ICE detention facility which left two detainees dead and another injured. Then, he jokes with the amazing Bob Cesca on the return of Jimmy Kimmel. Next, John speaks once again with the wonderful Imara Jones. She's the creator of TransLash Media, a cross-platform, non-profit journalism and narrative organization, which produces content to shift the current culture of hostility towards transgender people in the US. She hosts the WEBBY-nominated, TransLash Podcast as well as the investigative, limited series, The Anti-Trans Hate Machine: A Plot Against Equality. And last but not least - Dr. Tracy Pearson is back to give listeners all the legal advice they need to cope in the lawless world of Trumpmania. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode, John talks about Trump's rambling, whining, grievance filled speech at the UN General Assembly in New York. Then, he welcomes back legal analyst Dina Sayegh Doll and they discuss Jimmy Kimmel going back on the air, Trump's whopper filled UN speech, and the prospect of Palestinian statehood. Next, he chats with Dr. Anahita Dua on Trump's claims about the correlation between Tylenol and autism. Then lastly, Comedy Daddy - Keith Price joins the crew to answer calls about Jimmy Kimmel Live returning and Trump's latest democracy busting lunacy.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Heather Solomon returns to Listen Up, Younger Self after a month-long break to share an honest, heartfelt episode about taking permission to pause. She opens up about family caregiving, the guilt of stepping back, the science behind needing recovery, and how true presence protects relationships and creativity. This episode blends personal stories, practical strategies for setting boundaries and doing "do-nothing" time, and a gentle reminder that pausing is an act of strength—not failure.   Connect with me, I'd love any suggestions for future episodes. Email: listenupyoungerself@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/heather.solomon.14 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heatherslmn/

John talks about Trump saving Jimmy Kimmel's show, Trump & RFK Jr. claiming that there's a correlation between Tylenol & autism, and the White House defending Tom Homan's bribery scandal after he accepted 50 grand from FBI agents. Then, he chats with Professor Corey Brettschneider on Trump forgetting about the oath and the office, Jimmy Kimmel's show, and Pam Bondi's incorrect statement about hate speech. Then winding it up, John welcomes back comedian Rhonda Hansome and they joke with listeners about Jimmy Kimmel Live being back on the air and Kamala Harris' recent appearance on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this week's main episode, Matthew chats with Doug Pagitt, Jeremy Steele, and DT Bryant about how to find sanity in today's political climate.If you want to call in to the Bonus Show, leave a voicemail at (530) 332-8020. We'll get to your calls on next Friday's Bonus Show. Or, you can email Matthew at matthew@quoir.com.Join The Quollective today! Use code "heretic" to save 10% off a yearly subscription.Pick up Keith and Matt's book, Reading Romans Right, today, as well as The UnChristian Truth About White Christian Nationalism.Please consider signing up to financially support the Network: QuoirCast on PatreonIf you want to be a guest on the show, email keith@quoir.com.LINKSQuoirCast on PatreonQuoirCast on Patheos Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On this episode, my guest is Stephen Jenkinson, culture activist and ceremonialist advocating a handmade life and eloquence. He is an author, a storyteller, a musician, sculptor and off-grid organic farmer. Stephen is the founder/ principal instructor of the Orphan Wisdom School in Canada, co-founded with his wife Nathalie Roy in 2010. Also a sought-after workshop leader, articulating matters of the heart, human suffering, confusions through ceremony.He is the author of several influential books, including Money and the Soul's Desires, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul (2015), Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble (2018), A Generation's Worth: Spirit Work While the Crisis Reigns (2021), and Reckoning (2022), co-written with Kimberly Ann Johnson. His most recent book, Matrimony: Ritual, Culture, and the Heart's Work, was released in August 2025. He is also involved in the musical project Nights of Grief & Mystery with singer-songwriter Gregory Hoskins, which has toured across North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.Show Notes:* The Bone House of the Orphan Wisdom Enterprise* Matrimony: Ritual, Culture and the Heart's Work* The Wedding Industry* Romantic Sameness and Psychic Withering* The Two Tribes* The Roots of Hospitality* The Pompous Ending of Hospitality* Debt, And the Estrangement of the Stranger* More Than Human Hospitality* The Alchemy of the Orphan Wisdom SchoolHomework:Matrimony: Ritual, Culture, and the Heart's Work | PurchaseOrphan WisdomThe Scriptorium: Echoes of an Orphan WisdomTranscription:Chris: This is an interview that I've been wondering about for a long time in part, because Stephen was the first person I ever interviewed for the End of Tourism Podcast. In Oaxaca, Mexico, where I live Stephen and Natalie were visiting and were incredibly, incredibly generous. Stephen, in offering his voice as a way to raise up my questions to a level that deserve to be contended with.We spoke for about two and a half hours, if I remember correctly. And there was a lot in what you spoke to towards the second half of the interview that I think we're the first kind of iterations of the Matrimony book.We spoke a little bit about the stranger and trade, and it was kind of startling as someone trying to offer their first interview and suddenly hearing something [00:01:00] that I'd never heard before from Stephen. Right. And so it was quite impressive. And I'm grateful to be here now with y'all and to get to wonder about this a little more deeply with you Stephen.Stephen: Mm-hmm. Hmm.Chris: This is also a special occasion for the fact that for the first time in the history of the podcast, we have a live audience among us today. Strange doings. Some scholars and some stewards and caretakers of the Orphan Wisdom enterprise. So, thank you all as well for coming tonight and being willing to listen and put your ears to this.And so to begin, Stephen, I'm wondering if you'd be willing to let those who will be listening to this recording later on know where we're gathered in tonight?Stephen: Well, we're in... what's the name of this township?Nathalie: North Algona.Stephen: North Algona township on the borders, an eastern gate [00:02:00] of Algonquin Park. Strangely named place, given the fact that they were the first casualties of the park being established. And we're in a place that never should have been cleared - my farm. It should never have been cleared of the talls, the white pines that were here, but the admiralty was in need back in the day. And that's what happened there. And we're in a place that the Irish immigrants who came here after the famine called "Tramore," which more or less means "good-frigging luck farming."It doesn't technically mean that, but it absolutely means that. It actually means "sandy shore," which about covers the joint, and it's the only thing that covers the joint - would be sand. You have to import clay. Now, that's a joke in many farming places in the world, but if we wanted any clay, we'd have to bring it in and pay for the privilege.And the farm has been in [00:03:00] my, my responsibility for about 25 years now, pretty close to that. And the sheep, or those of them left because the coyotes have been around for the first time in their casualty-making way... They're just out here, I'm facing the field where they're milling around.And it's the very, very beginnings of the long cooling into cold, into frigid, which is our lot in this northern part of the hemisphere, even though it's still August, but it's clear that things have changed. And then, we're on a top of a little hill, which was the first place that I think that we may have convened a School here.It was a tipi, which is really worked very well considering we didn't live here, so we could put it up and put it down in the same weekend. [00:04:00] And right on this very hill, we were, in the early days, and we've replaced that tipi with another kind of wooden structure. A lot more wood in this one.This has been known as "The Teaching Hall" or "The Great Hall," or "The Hall" or "The Money Pit, as it was known for a little while, but it actually worked out pretty well. And it was I mean, people who've come from Scandinavia are knocked out by the kind of old-style, old-world visitation that the place seems to be to them.And I'd never really been before I had the idea what this should look like, but I just went from a kind of ancestral memory that was knocking about, which is a little different than your preferences, you know. You have different kinds of preferences you pass through stylistically through your life, but the ones that lay claim to you are the ones that are not interested in your [00:05:00] preferences. They're interested in your kind of inheritance and your lineage.So I'm more or less from the northern climes of Northern Europe, and so the place looks that way and I was lucky enough to still have my carving tools from the old days. And I've carved most of the beams and most of the posts that keep the place upright with a sort of sequence of beasts and dragons and ne'er-do-wells and very, very few humans, I think two, maybe, in the whole joint. Something like that. And then, mostly what festoons a deeply running human life is depicted here. And there's all kinds of stories, which I've never really sat down and spoken to at great length with anybody, but they're here.And I do deeply favour the idea that one day [00:06:00] somebody will stumble into this field, and I suppose, upon the remains of where we sit right now, and wonder "What the hell got into somebody?" That they made this mountain of timber moldering away, and that for a while what must have been, and when they finally find the footprint of, you know, its original dimensions and sort of do the wild math and what must have been going on in this sandy field, a million miles in away from its home.And wherever I am at that time, I'll be wondering the same thing.Audience: Hmm.Stephen: "What went on there?" Even though I was here for almost all of it. So, this was the home of the Orphan Wisdom School for more than a decade and still is the home of the Orphan Wisdom School, even if it's in advance, or in retreat [00:07:00] or in its doldrums. We'll see.And many things besides, we've had weddings in here, which is wherein I discovered "old-order matrimony," as I've come to call it, was having its way with me in the same way that the design of the place did. And it's also a grainery for our storage of corn. Keep it up off the ground and out of the hands of the varmints, you know, for a while.Well that's the beginning.Chris: Hmm. Hmm. Thank you Stephen.Stephen: Mm-hmm.Chris: You were mentioning the tipi where the school began. I remember sleeping in there the first time I came here. Never would I have thought for a million years that I'd be sitting here with you.Stephen: It's wild, isn't it?Chris: 12 years later.?: Yeah.Chris: And so next, I'd like to do my best in part over the course of the next perhaps hour or two to congratulate you on the release of [00:08:00] your new book, Matrimony: Ritual, Culture, and the Heart's Work.Stephen: Thank you.Chris: Mm-hmm. I'm grateful to say like many others that I've received a copy and have lent my eyes to your good words, and what is really an incredible achievement.For those who haven't had a chance to lay their eyes on it just yet, I'm wondering if you could let us in on why you wrote a book about matrimony in our time and where it stands a week out from its publication.Stephen: Well, maybe the answer begins with the question, "why did you write a book, having done so before?" And you would imagine that the stuff that goes into writing a book, you'd think that the author has hopes for some kind of redemptive, redeeming outcome, some kind of superlative that drops out the back end of the enterprise.And you know, this is [00:09:00] the seventh I've written. And I would have to say that's not really how it goes, and you don't really know what becomes of what you've written, even with the kind people who do respond, and the odd non-monetary prize that comes your way, which Die Wise gamed that.But I suppose, I wrote, at all partly to see what was there. You know, I had done these weddings and I was a little bit loathe to let go, to let the weddings turn entirely into something historical, something that was past, even though I probably sensed pretty clearly that I was at the end of my willingness to subject myself to the slings and arrows that came along with the enterprise, but it's a sweet sorrow, or there's a [00:10:00] wonder that goes along with the tangle of it all. And so, I wrote to find out what happened, as strange as that might sound to you. You can say, "well, you were there, you kind of knew what happened." But yes, I was witness to the thing, but there's the act of writing a book gives you the opportunity to sort of wonder in three-dimensions and well, the other thing I should say is I was naive and figured that the outfit who had published the, more or less prior two books to this one, would kind of inevitably be drawn to the fact that same guy. Basically, same voice, new articulation. And I was dumbfounded to find out that they weren't. And so, it's sort of smarted, you know?And I think what I did was I just set the whole [00:11:00] enterprise aside, partly to contend with the the depths of the disappointment in that regard, and also not wanting to get into the terrible fray of having to parse or paraphrase the book in some kind of elevator pitch-style to see if anybody else wanted to look at it. You know, such as my touchy sense of nobility sometimes, you know, that I just rather not be involved in the snarl of the marketplace any longer.So, I withdrew and I just set it aside but it wasn't that content to be set, set aside. And you know, to the book's credit, it bothered me every once in a while. It wasn't a book at the point where I was actually trying to engineer it, you know, and, and give it some kind of structure. I had piles of paper on the floor representing the allegation of chapters, trying to figure out what the relationship was [00:12:00] between any of these things.What conceivably should come before what. What the names of any of these things might be. Did they have an identity? Was I just imposing it? And all of that stuff I was going through at the same time as I was contending with a kind of reversal in fortune, personally. And so in part, it was a bit of a life raft to give me something to work on that I wouldn't have to research or dig around in the backyard for it and give me some sort of self-administered occupation for a while.Finally, I think there's a parallel with the Die Wise book, in that when it came to Die Wise, I came up with what I came up with largely because, in their absolute darkest, most unpromising hours, an awful lot of dying people, all of whom are dead now, [00:13:00] let me in on some sort of breach in the, the house of their lives.And I did feel that I had some obligation to them long-term, and that part of that obligation turned into writing Die Wise and touring and talking about that stuff for years and years, and making a real fuss as if I'd met them all, as if what happened is really true. Not just factually accurate, but deeply, abidingly, mandatorily true.So, although it may be the situation doesn't sound as extreme, but the truth is, when a number of younger - than me - people came to me and asked me to do their weddings, I, over the kind of medium-term thereafter, felt a not dissimilar obligation that the events that ensued from all of that not [00:14:00] be entrusted entirely to those relatively few people who attended. You know, you can call them "an audience," although I hope I changed that. Or you could call them "witnesses," which I hope I made them that.And see to it that there could be, not the authorized or official version of what happened, but to the view from here, so to speak, which is, as I sit where I am in the hall right now, I can look at the spot where I conducted much of this when I wasn't sacheting up and down the middle aisle where the trestle tables now are.And I wanted to give a kind of concerted voice to that enterprise. And I say "concerted voice" to give you a feel for the fact that I don't think this is a really an artifact. It's not a record. It's a exhortation that employs the things that happened to suggest that even though it is the way it is [00:15:00] ritually, impoverished as it is in our time and place, it has been otherwise within recoverable time and history. It has.And if that's true, and it is, then it seems to me at least is true that it could be otherwise again. And so, I made a fuss and I made a case based on that conviction.There's probably other reasons I can't think of right now. Oh, being not 25 anymore, and not having that many more books in me, the kind of wear and tear on your psyche of imposing order on the ramble, which is your recollection, which has only so many visitations available in it. Right? You can only do that so many times, I think. And I'm not a born writing person, you know, I come to it maniacally when I [00:16:00] do, and then when it's done, I don't linger over it so much.So then, when it's time to talk about it, I actually have to have a look, because the act of writing it is not the act of reading it. The act of writing is a huge delivery and deliverance at the same time. It's a huge gestation. And you can't do that to yourself, you know, over and over again, but you can take some chances, and look the thing in the eye. So, and I think some people who are there, they're kind of well-intended amongst them, will recognize themselves in the details of the book, beyond "this is what happened and so on." You know, they'll recognize themselves in the advocacy that's there, and the exhortations that are there, and the [00:17:00] case-making that I made and, and probably the praying because there's a good degree of prayerfulness in there, too.That's why.Chris: Thank you. bless this new one in the world. And what's the sense for you?Stephen: Oh, yes.Chris: It being a one-week old newborn. How's that landing in your days?Stephen: Well, it's still damp, you know. It's still squeaky, squeaky and damp. It's walking around like a newborn primate, you know, kind of swaying in the breeze and listening to port or to starboard according to whatever's going on.I don't know that it's so very self-conscious in the best sense of that term, yet. Even though I recorded the audio version, I don't think [00:18:00] it's my voice is found every nook and cranny at this point, yet. So, it's kind of new. It's not "news," but it is new to me, you know, and it's very early in terms of anybody responding to it.I mean, nobody around me has really taken me aside and say, "look, now I want to tell you about this book you wrote." It hasn't happened, and we'll see if it does, but I've done a few events on the other side of the ocean and hear so far, very few, maybe handful of interviews. And those are wonderful opportunities to hear something of what you came up with mismanaged by others, you know, misapprehend, you could say by others.No problem. I mean, it's absolutely no problem. And if you don't want that to happen, don't talk, don't write anything down. So, I don't mind a bit, you know, and the chances are very good that it'll turn into things I didn't have in mind [00:19:00] as people take it up, and regard their own weddings and marriages and plans and schemes and fears and, you know, family mishigas and all the rest of it through this particular lens, you know. They may pick up a pen or a computer (it's an odd expression, "pick up a computer"), and be in touch with me and let me know. "Yeah, that was, we tried it" or whatever they're going to do, because, I mean, maybe Die Wise provided a bit of an inkling of how one might be able to proceed otherwise in their dying time or in their families or their loved ones dying time.This is the book that most readily lends itself to people translating into something they could actually do, without a huge kind of psychic revolution or revolt stirring in them, at least not initially. This is as close as I come, probably, to writing a sequence of things [00:20:00] that could be considered "add-ons" to what people are already thinking about, that I don't force everybody else outta the house in order to make room for the ideas that are in the book. That may happen, anyway, but it wasn't really the intent. The intent was to say, you know, we are in those days when we're insanely preoccupied with the notion of a special event. We are on the receiving end of a considerable number of shards showing up without any notion really about what these shards remember or are memories of. And that's the principle contention I think that runs down the spine of the book, is that when we undertake matrimony, however indelicately, however by rote, you know, however mindlessly we may do it, [00:21:00] inadvertently, we call upon those shards nonetheless.And they're pretty unspectacular if you don't think about them very deeply, like the rice or confetti, like the aisle, like the procession up the aisle, like the giving away of someone, like the seating arrangement, like the spectacle seating arrangement rather than the ritual seating arrangement.And I mean, there's a fistful of them. And they're around and scholars aside maybe, nobody knows why they do them. Everybody just knows, "this is what a wedding is," but nobody knows why. And because nobody knows why, nobody really seems to know what a wedding is for, although they do proceed like they would know a wedding if they saw one. So, I make this a question to be really wondered about, and the shards are a way in. They're the kind of [00:22:00] breadcrumb trail through the forest. They're the little bits of broken something, which if you begin to handle just three or four of them, and kind of fit them together, and find something of the original shape and inflection of the original vessel, kind of enunciates, begins to murmur in your hands, and from it you can begin to infer some three-dimensionality to the original shape. And from the sense of the shape, you get a set sense of contour, and from the sense of contour, you get a sense of scale or size. And from that you get a sense of purpose, or function, or design. And from that you get a sense of some kind of serious magisterial insight into some of the fundament of human being that was manifest in the "old-order matrimony," [00:23:00] as I came to call it.So, who wouldn't wanna read that book?Chris: Mm-hmm.Thank you. Mm-hmm. Thank you, Stephen. Yeah. It reminds me, just before coming up here, maybe two weeks ago, I was in attending a wedding. And there was a host or mc, and initially just given what I was hearing over the microphone, it was hard to tell if he was hired or family or friends. And it turned out he was, in fact, a friend of the groom. And throughout the night he proceeded to take up that role as a kind of comedian.Audience: Mm-hmm.Chris: This was the idea, I guess. Mm-hmm. And he was buzzing and mumbling and swearing into the microphone, [00:24:00] and then finally minimizing the only remnant of traditional culture that showed up in the wedding. And his thing was, okay, so when can we get to the part where it's boom, boom, boom, right. And shot, shot, shot, whatever.Stephen: Right.Chris: There was so much that came up in my memories in part because I worked about a decade in Toronto in the wedding industry.Mm-hmm. Hospitality industry. Maybe a contradiction in terms, there. And there was one moment that really kind of summed it up. I kept coming back to this reading the book because it was everything that you wrote seemed to not only antithetical to this moment, but also an antidote.Anyways, it was in North Toronto and the [00:25:00] owner of the venue - it was a kind of movie theatre turned event venue - and there was a couple who was eventually going to get married there. They came in to do their tasting menu to see what they wanted to put on the menu for the dinner, for their wedding.And the owner was kind of this mafioso type. And he comes in and he sees them and he walks over and he says, "so, you're gonna get married at my wedding factory."Audience: Mm-hmm.Chris: In all sincerity.Stephen: Mm-hmm.Chris: Right.Without skipping a beat. Could you imagine?Stephen: Yeah.I could. I sure could.Chris: Yeah. Yeah.Stephen: I mean, don't forget, if these people weren't doing what the people wanted, they'd be outta business.Audience: Mm-hmm.Stephen: No, that's the thing. This is aiding and abetting. This is sleeping with the enemy, stylistically-speaking. [00:26:00] The fact that people "settle" (that's the term I would use for it), settle for this, the idea being that this somehow constitutes the most honest and authentic through line available to us is just jaw dropping. When you consider what allegedly this thing is supposed to be for. I mean, maybe we'll get into this, but I'll just leave this as a question for now. What is that moment allegedly doing?Not, what are the people in it allegedly doing? The moment itself, what is it? How is it different from us sitting here now talking about it? And how is it different from the gory frigging jet-fuelled aftermath of excess. And how's it different from the cursing alleged master of ceremonies? How can you [00:27:00] tell none of those things belong to this thing?And why do you have such a hard time imagining what doesAudience: Hmm mmChris: Well that leads me to my next question.Stephen: Ah, you're welcome.Chris: So, I've pulled a number of quotes from the book to read from over the course of the interview. And this one for anyone who's listening is on page 150. And you write Stephen,"Spiritually-speaking, most of the weddings in our corner of the world are endogamous affairs, inward-looking. What is, to me, most unnerving is that they can be spiritually-incestuous. The withering of psychic difference between people is the program of globalization. It is in the architecture of most things partaking of the internet, and it is in the homogeneity of our matrimony. [00:28:00] It is this very incestuous that matrimony was once crafted and entered into to avoid and subvert. Now, it grinds upon our differences until they are details.And so, this paragraph reminded me of a time in my youth when I seemed to be meeting couples who very eerily looked like each other. No blood or extended kin relation whatsoever, and yet they had very similar faces. And so as I get older, this kind of face fidelity aside, I continue to notice that people looking for companionship tend to base their search on similitude, on shared interests, customs, experiences, shared anything and everything. This, specifically, in opposition to those on the other side of the aisle or spectrum, to difference or divergence. And so, opposites don't attract anymore. I'm curious what you think this psychic [00:29:00] withering does to an achieve understanding of matrimony.Stephen: Well, I mean, let's wonder what it does to us, generally, first before we get to matrimony, let's say. It demonizes. Maybe that's too strong, but it certainly reconstitutes difference as some kind of affliction, some kind of not quite good enough, some kind of something that has to be overcome or overwhelmed on the road to, to what? On the road to sameness? So, if that's the goal, then are all of the differences between us, aberrations of some kind, if that's the goal? If that's the goal, are all the [00:30:00] differences between us, not God-given, but humanly misconstrued or worse? Humanly wrought? Do the differences between us conceivably then belong at all? Or is the principle object of the entire endeavor to marry yourself, trying to put up with the vague differences that the other person represents to you?I mean, I not very jokingly said years ago, that I coined a phrase that went something like "the compromise of infinity, which is other people." What does that mean? "The compromise of infinity, which is other people." Not to mention it's a pretty nice T-shirt. But what I meant by the [00:31:00] phrase is this: when you demonize difference in this fashion or when you go the other direction and lionize sameness, then one of the things that happens is that compromise becomes demonized, too. Compromise, by definition, is something you never should have done, right? Compromise is how much you surrender of yourself in order to get by. That's what all these things become. And before you know it, you're just beaten about the head and shoulders about "codependence" and you know, not being "true to yourself" as if being true to yourself is some kind of magic.I mean, the notion that "yourself is the best part of you" is just hilarious. I mean, when you think about it, like who's running amuck if yourself is what you're supposed to be? I ask you. Like, who's [00:32:00] doing the harm? Who's going mental if the self is such a good idea? So, of course, I'm maintaining here that I'm not persuaded that there is such a thing.I think it's a momentary lapse in judgment to have a self and to stick to it. That's the point I'm really making to kind of reify it until it turns ossified and dusty and bizarrely adamant like that estranged relative that lives in the basement of your house. Bizarrely, foreignly adamant, right? Like the house guest who just won't f**k off kind of thing.Okay, so "to thine own self be true," is it? Well, try being true to somebody else's self for ten minutes. Try that. [00:33:00] That's good at exercise for matrimony - being true to somebody else's self. You'll discover that their selves are not made in heaven, either. Either. I underscore it - either. I've completely lost track of the question you asked me.Chris: What are the consequences of the sameness on this anti-cultural sameness, and the program of it for an achieved understanding of matrimony.Stephen: Thank you. Well, I will fess up right now. I do so in the book. That's a terrible phrase. I swear I'd never say such a thing. "In my book... I say the following," but in this case, it's true. I did say this. I realized during the writing of it that I had made a tremendous tactical error in the convening of the event as I did it over the years, [00:34:00] and this is what it came to.I was very persuaded at the time of the story that appears in the chapter called "Salt and Indigo" in the book. I was very, very persuaded. I mean, listen, I made up the story (for what it's worth), okay, but I didn't make it up out of nothing. I made it up out of a kind of tribal memory that wouldn't quite let go.And in it, I was basically saying, here's these two tribes known principally for what they trade in and what they love most emphatically. They turn out to be the same thing. And I describe a circumstance in which they exchange things in a trade scenario, not a commerce scenario. And I'm using the chapter basically to make the case that matrimony's architecture derives in large measure from the sacraments of trade as manifest in that story. [00:35:00] Okay. And this is gonna sound obvious, but the fundamental requirement of the whole conceit that I came up with is that there are two tribes. Well, I thought to myself, "of course, there's always two tribes" at the time. And the two tribe-ness is reflected in when you come to the wedding site, you're typically asked (I hope you're still asked) " Are you family or friend of the groom or friend of the bride?" And you're seated "accordingly," right? That's the nominal, vestigial shard of this old tribal affiliation, that people came from over the rise, basically unknown to each other, to arrive at the kind of no man's land of matrimony, and proceeded accordingly. So, I put these things into motion in this very room and I sat people accordingly facing each other, not facing the alleged front of the room. [00:36:00] And of course, man, nobody knew where to look, because you raised your eyes and s**t. There's just humans across from you, just scads of them who you don't freaking know. And there's something about doing that to North Americas that just throws them. So, they're just looking at each other and then looking away, and looking at each other and looking away, and wondering what they're doing here and what it's for. And I'm going back and forth for three hours, orienting them as to what is is coming.Okay, so what's the miscalculation that I make? The miscalculation I made was assuming that by virtue of the seating arrangement, by virtue of me reminding them of the salt and indigo times, by virtue of the fact that they had a kind of allegiance of some sort or another to the people who are, for the moment, betrothed, that those distinctions and those affiliations together would congeal them, and constitute a [00:37:00] kind of tribal affiliation that they would intuitively be drawn towards as you would be drawn to heat on a cold winter's night.Only to discover, as I put the thing into motion that I was completely wrong about everything I just told you about. The nature of my error was this, virtually all of those people on one side of the room were fundamentally of the same tribe as the people on the other side of the room, apropos of your question, you see. They were card carrying members of the gray dominant culture of North America. Wow. The bleached, kind of amorphous, kind of rootless, ancestor-free... even regardless of whether their people came over in the last generation from the alleged old country. It doesn't really claim them.[00:38:00]There were two tribes, but I was wrong about who they were. That was one tribe. Virtually everybody sitting in the room was one tribe.So, who's the other tribe? Answer is: me and the four or five people who were in on the structural delivery of this endeavour with me. We were the other tribe.We didn't stand a chance, you see?And I didn't pick up on that, and I didn't cast it accordingly and employ that, instead. I employed the conceit that I insisted was manifest and mobilized in the thing, instead of the manifest dilemma, which is that everybody who came knew what a wedding was, and me and four or five other people were yet to know if this could be one. That was the tribal difference, if you [00:39:00] will.So, it was kind of invisible, wasn't it? Even to me at the time. Or, I say, maybe especially to me at the time. And so, things often went the way they went, which was for however much fascination and willingness to consider that there might have been in the room, there was quite a bit more either flat affect and kind of lack of real fascination, or curiosity, or sometimes downright hostility and pushback. Yeah.So, all of that comes from the fact that I didn't credit as thoroughly as I should have done, the persistence in Anglo-North America of a kind of generic sameness that turned out to be what most people came here ancestrally to become. "Starting again" is recipe for culture [00:40:00] loss of a catastrophic order. The fantasy of starting again. Right?And we've talked about that in your podcast, and you and I have talked about it privately, apropos of your own family and everybody's sitting in this room knows what I'm talking about. And when does this show up? Does it show up, oh, when you're walking down the street? Does it show up when you're on the mountaintop? Does it show up in your peak experiences? And the answer is "maybe." It probably shows up most emphatically in those times when you have a feeling that something special is supposed to be so, and all you can get from the "supposed to" is the allegation of specialness.Audience: Mm-hmm.Stephen: And then, you look around in the context of matrimony and you see a kind of febral, kind of strained, the famous bridezilla stuff, all of that stuff. [00:41:00] You saw it in the hospitality industry, no doubt. You know, the kind of mania for perfection, as if perfection constitutes culture. Right? With every detail checked off in the checkbox, that's culture. You know, as if everything goes off without a hitch and there's no guffaws. And in fact, anybody could reasonably make the case, "Where do you think culture appears when the script finally goes f*****g sideways?" That's when. And when you find out what you're capable of, ceremonially.And generally speaking, I think most people discovered that their ceremonial illiteracy bordered on the bottomless.That's when you find out. Hmm.Chris: Wow.Stephen: Yeah. And that's why people, you know, in speech time, they reach in there and get that piece of paper, and just look at it. Mm-hmm. They don't even look up, terrified that they're gonna go off script for a minute as [00:42:00] if the Gods of Matrimony are a scripted proposition.Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that with us, that degree of deep reflection and humility that I'm sure comes with it.Stephen: Mea Culpa, baby. Yeah, I was, I got that one totally wrong. Mm-hmm. And I didn't know it at the time. Meanwhile, like, how much can you transgress and have the consequences of doing so like spill out across the floor like a broken thermometer's mercury and not wise up.But of course, I was as driven as anybody. I was as driven to see if I could come through with what I promised to do the year before. And keeping your promise can make you into a maniac.Audience: Hmm hmm.Chris: But I imagine that, you [00:43:00] know, you wouldn't have been able to see that even years later if you didn't say yes in the first place.Stephen: Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I wouldn't have been able to make the errors.Chris: Right.Stephen: Right. Yeah. I mean, as errors go, this is not a mortal sin. Right, right. And you could chalk it up to being a legitimate miscalculation. Well, so? All I'm saying is, it turns out I was there too, and it turns out, even though I was allegedly the circus master of the enterprise, I wasn't free and clear of the things we were all contending with, the kind of mortality and sort of cultural ricketiness that were all heirs to. That's how I translated it, as it turns out.So, PS there was a moment, [00:44:00] which I don't remember which setting it was now, but there was a moment when the "maybe we'll see if she becomes a bride" bride's mother slid up to me during the course of the proceedings, and in a kind of stage whisper more or less hissed me as follows."Is this a real wedding?"I mean, that's not a question. Not in that setting, obviously not. That is an accusation. Right. And a withering one at that. And there was a tremendous amount of throw-down involved.So, was it? I mean, what we do know is that she did not go to any of the weddings [00:45:00] that she was thinking of at the time, and go to the front of the room where the celebrant is austerely standing there with the book, or the script, or the well-intentioned, or the self-penned vows and never hissed at him or her, "is this a real wedding?"Never once did she do that. We know that.Right.And I think we know why. But she was fairly persuaded she knew what a real wedding was. And all she was really persuaded by was the poverty of the weddings that she'd attended before that one. Well, I was as informed in that respect as she was, wasn't I? I just probably hadn't gone to as many reprobate weddings as she had, so she had more to deal with than I did, even though I was in the position of the line of fire.And I didn't respond too well to the question, I have to say. At the moment, I was rather combative. But I mean, you try to do [00:46:00] what I tried to do and not have a degree of fierceness to go along with your discernment, you know, just to see if you can drag this carcass across the threshold. Anyway, that happened too.Chris: Wow. Yeah. Dominant culture of North America.Stephen: Heard of it.Chris: Yeah. Well, in Matrimony, there's quite a bit in which you write about hospitality and radical hospitality. And I wanted to move in that direction a little bit, because in terms of these kind of marketplace rituals or ceremonies that you were mentioning you know, it's something that we might wonder, I think, as you have, how did it come to be this [00:47:00] way?And so I'd like to, if I can once again, quote from matrimony in which you speak to the etymology of hospitality. And so for those interested on page 88,"the word hospitality comes from hospitaller, meaning 'one who cares for the afflicted, the infirm, the needy.' There's that thread of our misgivings about being on the receiving end of hospitality. Pull on it. For the written history of the word, at least, it has meant, 'being on the receiving end of a kind of care you'd rather not need.'"End quote.Stephen: That's so great. I mean, before you go on with the quote. It's so great to know that the word, unexamined, just kind of leaks upside, doesn't it? Hospitality, I mean, nobody goes "Hospitality, ew." [00:48:00] And then, if you just quietly do the obvious math to yourself, there's so much awkwardness around hospitality.This awkwardness must have an origin, have a home. There must be some misgiving that goes along with the giving of hospitality, mustn't there be? How else to understand where that kind of ickiness is to be found. Right? And it turns out that the etymology is giving you the beginnings of a way of figuring it out what it is that you're on the receiving end of - a kind of succor that you wish you didn't need, which is why it's the root word for "hospital."Chris: Hmm hmm. Wow.Audience: Hmm.Chris: May I repeat that sentence please? Once more."For the written history of the word, at least, it has meant, [00:49:00] 'being on the receiving end of a kind of care you'd rather not need.'"And so this last part hits home for me as I imagine it does for many.And it feels like the orthodoxy of hospitality in our time is one based not only in transaction, but in debt. And if you offer hospitality to me, then I owe you hospitality.Stephen: Right.Chris: I'm indebted to you. And we are taught, in our time, that the worst thing to be in is in debt.Stephen: Right?Chris: And so people refuse both the desire to give as well as the learning skill of receiving. And this is continuing on page 88 now."But there's mystery afoot with this word. In its old Latin form, hospice meant both 'host' and 'guest.'"Stephen: Amazing. One. Either one, This is absolutely amazing. We're fairly sure that there's a [00:50:00] acres of difference between the giver of hospitality and the receiver that the repertoire is entirely different, that the skew between them is almost insurmountable, that they're not interchangeable in any way. But the history of the word immediately says, "really?" The history of the word, without question, says that "host" and "guest" are virtually the same, sitting in different places, being different people, more or less joined at the hip. I'll say more, but you go ahead with what you were gonna do. Sure.Chris: "In it's proto Indo-European origins, hospitality and hospice is a compound word: gosh + pot. And it meant something like [00:51:00] 'stranger/guest/host + powerful Lord.'It is amazing to me that ancestrally, the old word for guest, host, and stranger were all the same word. Potent ceremonial business, this is. In those days, the server and the serve were partners in something mysterious. This could be confusing, but only if you think of guest, host, and stranger as fixed identities.If you think of them as functions, as verbs, the confusion softens and begins to clear. The word hospice in its ancient root is telling us that each of the people gathered together in hospitality is bound to the others by formal etiquette, yes, but the bond is transacted through a subtle scheme of graces.Hospitality, it tells us, is a web of longing and belonging that binds people for a time, some hithereto unknown to each other is a clutch of mutually-binding elegances, you could say. In its ancient practice, [00:52:00] hospitality was a covenant. According to that accord, however we were with each other. That was how the Gods would be with us. We learn our hospitality by being on the receiving end of Godly administration. That's what giving thanks for members. We proceed with our kin in imitation of that example and in gratitude for it."Mm-hmm.And so today, among "secular" people, with the Gods ignored, this old-time hospitality seems endangered, if not fugitive. I'm curious how you imagine that this rupture arose, the ones that separated and commercialized the radical relationships between hosts and guests, that turned them from verbs to nouns and something like strangers to marketplace functions.[00:53:00]Stephen: Well, of course this is a huge question you've asked, and I'll see if I can unhuge it a bit.Chris: Uhhuh.Stephen: Let's go right to the heart of what happened. Just no preliminaries, just right to it.So, to underscore again, the beauty of the etymology. I've told you over and over again, the words will not fail you. And this is just a shining example, isn't it? That the fraternization is a matter of ceremonial alacrity that the affiliation between host and guest, which makes them partners in something, that something is the [00:54:00] evocation of a third thing that's neither one of them. It's the thing they've lent themselves to by virtue of submitting to being either a host or a guest. One.Two. You could say that in circumstances of high culture or highly-functioning culture, one of the principle attributes of that culture is that the fundament of its understanding, is that only with the advent of the stranger in their midst that the best of them comes forward.Okay, follow that. Yeah.So, this is a little counterintuitive for those of us who don't come from such places. We imagine that the advent of strangers in the midst of the people I'm describing would be an occasion where people hide their [00:55:00] best stuff away until the stranger disappears, and upon the disappearance of the stranger, the good stuff comes out again.You know?So, I'm just remembering just now, there's a moment in the New Testament where Jesus says something about the best wine and he's coming from exactly this page that we're talking about - not the page in the book, but this understanding. He said, you know, "serve your best wine first," unlike the standard, that prevails, right?So again, what a stranger does in real culture is call upon the cultural treasure of the host's culture, and provides the opportunity for that to come forward, right? By which you can understand... Let's say for simplicity's sake, there's two kinds of hospitality. There's probably all kinds of gradations, [00:56:00] but for the purposes of responding to what you've asked, there's two.One of them is based on kinship. Okay? So, family meal. So, everybody knows whose place is whose around the table, or it doesn't matter - you sit wherever you want. Or, when we're together, we speak shorthand. That's the shorthand of familiarity and affinity, right?Everybody knows what everybody's talking about. A lot of things get half-said or less, isn't it? And there's a certain fineness, isn't it? That comes with that kind of affinity. Of course, there is, and I'm not diminishing it at all. I'm just characterizing it as being of a certain frequency or calibre or charge. And the charge is that it trades on familiarity. It requires that. There's that kind of hospitality."Oh, sit wherever you want."Remember this one?[00:57:00]"We don't stand on ceremony here.""Oh, you're one of the family now." I just got here. What, what?But, of course, you can hear in the protestations the understanding, in that circumstance, that formality is an enemy to feeling good in this moment, isn't it? It feels stiff and starched and uncalled for or worse.It feels imported from elsewhere. It doesn't feel friendly. So, I'm giving you now beginnings of a differentiation between how cultures who really function as cultures understand what it means to be hospitable and what often prevails today, trading is a kind of low-grade warfare conducted against the strangeness of the stranger.The whole purpose of treating somebody like their family is to mitigate, and finally neutralize their [00:58:00] strangeness, so that for the purposes of the few hours in front of us all, there are no strangers here. Right? Okay.Then there's another kind, and intuitively you can feel what I'm saying. You've been there, you know exactly what I mean.There's another kind of circumstance where the etiquette that prevails is almost more emphatic, more tangible to you than the familiar one. That's the one where your mother or your weird aunt or whoever she might be, brings out certain kind of stuff that doesn't come out every day. And maybe you sit in a room that you don't often sit in. And maybe what gets cooked is stuff you haven't seen in a long time. And some part of you might be thinking, "What the hell is all this about?" And the answer is: it's about that guy in the [00:59:00] corner that you don't know.And your own ancestral culture told acres of stories whose central purpose was to convey to outsiders their understanding of what hospitality was. That is fundamentally what The Iliad and The Odyssey are often returning to and returning to and returning to.They even had a word for the ending of the formal hospitality that accrued, that arose around the care and treatment of strangers. It was called pomp or pompe, from which we get the word "pompous." And you think about what the word "pompous" means today.It means "nose in the air," doesn't it? Mm-hmm. It means "thinks really highly of oneself," isn't it? And it means "useless, encumbering, kind of [01:00:00] artificial kind of going through the motions stuff with a kind of aggrandizement for fun." That's what "pompous" means. Well, the people who gave us the word didn't mean that at all. This word was the word they used to describe the particular moment of hospitality when it was time for the stranger to leave.And when it was mutually acknowledged that the time for hospitality has come to an end, and the final act of hospitality is to accompany the stranger out of the house, out of the compound, out into the street, and provision them accordingly, and wish them well, and as is oftentimes practiced around here, standing in the street and waving them long after they disappear from view.This is pompous. This is what it actually means. Pretty frigging cool when you get corrected once in a while, isn't it? [01:01:00] Yeah.So, as I said, to be simplistic about it, there's at least a couple of kinds, and one of them treasures the advent of the stranger, understanding it to be the detonation point for the most elegant part of us to come forward.Now, those of us who don't come from such a place, we're just bamboozled and Shanghai'ed by the notion of formality, which we kind of eschew. You don't like formality when it comes to celebration, as if these two things are hostile, one to the other. But I'd like you to consider the real possibility that formality is grace under pressure, and that formality is there to give you a repertoire of response that rescues you from the gross limitations of your autobiography.[01:02:00]Next question. I mean, that's the beginning.Chris: Absolutely. Absolutely. Mm-hmm. Thank you once again, Stephen. So alongside the term or concept of "pompe," in which the the guest or stranger was led out of the house or to the entrance of the village, there was also the consideration around the enforcement of hospitality, which you write about in the book. And you write that"the enforcement of hospitality runs the palpable risk of violating or undoing the cultural value it is there to advocate for. Forcing people to share their good fortune with the less fortunate stretches, to the point of undoing the generosity of spirit that the culture holds dear. Enforcement of hospitality is a sign of the eclipse of hospitality, typically spawned by insecurity, contracted self-definition, and the darkening of the [01:03:00] stranger at the door.Instead, such places and times are more likely to encourage the practice of hospitality in subtle generous ways, often by generously treating the ungenerous."And so there seems to be a need for limits placed on hospitality, in terms of the "pompe," the maximum three days in which a stranger can be given hospitality, and concurrently a need to resist enforcing hospitality. This seems like a kind of high-wire act that hospitable cultures have to balance in order to recognize and realize an honorable way of being with a stranger. And so I'm wondering if you could speak to the possibility of how these limits might be practiced without being enforced. What might that look like in a culture that engages with, with such limits, but without prohibitions?Stephen: Mm-hmm. That's a very good question. [01:04:00] Well, I think your previous question was what happened? I think, in a nutshell, and I didn't really answer that, so maybe see how I can use this question to answer the one that you asked before: what happened? So, there's no doubt in my mind that something happened that it's kind of demonstrable, if only with the benefit of hindsight.Audience: Right.Stephen: Or we can feel our way around the edges of the absence of the goneness of that thing that gives us some feel for the original shape of that thing.So you could say I'm trafficking in "ideals," here, and after a fashion, maybe, yeah. But the notion of "ideals," when it's used in this slanderous way suggests that "it was never like that."Chris: Mm-hmm.Stephen: And I suggest to you it's been like that in a lot of places, and there's a lot of places where it's still like that, although globalization [01:05:00] may be the coup de grâce performed upon this capacity. Okay. But anyway.Okay. So what happened? Well, you see in the circumstance that I described, apropos of the stranger, the stranger is in on it. The stranger's principle responsibility is to be the vector for this sort of grandiose generosity coming forward, and to experience that in a burdensome and unreciprocated fashion, until you realize that their willingness to do that is their reciprocity. Everybody doesn't get to do everything at once. You can't give and receive at the same time. You know what that's called? "Secret Santa at school," isn't it?That's where nobody owes nobody nothing at the end. That's what we're all after. I mean, one of your questions, you know, pointed to that, that there's a kind of, [01:06:00] what do you call that, teeter-totter balance between what people did for each other and what they received for each other. Right. And nobody feels slighted in any way, perfect balance, et cetera.Well, the circumstance here has nothing of the kind going with it. The circumstance we're describing now is one in which the hospitality is clearly unequal in terms of who's eating whose food, for example, in terms of the absolutely frustrated notion of reciprocity, that in fact you undo your end of the hospitality by trying to pay back, or give back, or pay at all, or break even, or not feel the burden of "God, you've been on the take for fricking hours here now." And if you really look in the face of the host, I mean, they're just getting started and you can't, you can't take it anymore.[01:07:00]So, one of the ways that we contend with this is through habits of speech. So, if somebody comes around with seconds. They say, "would you like a little more?"And you say, "I'm good. I'm good. I'm good." You see, "I'm good" is code for what? "F**k off." That's what it's code for. It's a little strong. It's a little strong. What I mean is, when "I'm good" comes to town, it means I don't need you and what you have. Good God, you're not there because you need it you knucklehead. You're there because they need it, because their culture needs an opportunity to remember itself. Right?Okay. So what happened? Because you're making it sound like a pretty good thing, really. Like who would say, "I think we've had enough of this hospitality thing, don't you? Let's try, oh, [01:08:00] keeping our s**t to ourselves. That sounds like a good alternative. Let's give it a week or two, see how it rolls." Never happened. Nobody decided to do this - this change, I don't think. I think the change happened, and sometime long after people realized that the change had had taken place. And it's very simple. The change, I think, went something like this.As long as the guest is in on it, there's a shared and mutually-held understanding that doesn't make them the same. It makes them to use the quote from the book "partners," okay, with different tasks to bring this thing to light, to make it so. What does that require? A mutually-held understanding in vivo as it's happening, what it is.Okay. [01:09:00] So, that the stranger who's not part of the host culture... sorry, let me say this differently.The culture of the stranger has made the culture of the host available to the stranger no matter how personally adept he or she may be at receiving. Did you follow that?Audience: A little.Stephen: Okay. Say it again?Audience: Yes, please.Stephen: Okay. The acculturation, the cultured sophistication of the stranger is at work in his or her strangerhood. Okay. He or she's not at home, but their cultural training helps them understand what their obligations are in terms of this arrangement we've been describing here.Okay, so I think the rupture takes place [01:10:00] when the culturation of one side or the other fails to make the other discernible to the one.One more time?When something happens whereby the acculturation of one of the partners makes the identity, the presence, and the valence of the other one untranslatable. Untranslatable.I could give you an example from what I call " the etiquette of trade," or the... what was the word? Not etiquette. What's the other word?Chris: The covenant?Stephen: Okay, " covenant of trade" we'll call it. So, imagine that people are sitting across from each other, two partners in a trade. Okay? [01:11:00] Imagine that they have one thing to sell or move or exchange and somebody has something else.How does this work? Not "what are the mechanics?" That can be another discussion, but, if this works, how does it work? Not "how does it happen?" How does it actually achieve what they're after? Maybe it's something like this.I have this pottery, and even though you're not a potter, but somebody in your extended family back home was, and you watched what they went through to make a fricking pot, okay?You watched how their hands seized up, because the clay leached all the moisture out of the hands. You distinctly remember that - how the old lady's hands looked cracked and worn, and so from the work of making vessels of hospitality, okay? [01:12:00] It doesn't matter that you didn't make it yourself. The point is you recognize in the item something we could call "cultural patrimony."You recognize the deep-runningness of the culture opposite you as manifest and embodied in this item for trade. Okay? So, the person doesn't have to "sell you" because your cultural sophistication makes this pot on the other side available to you for the deeply venerable thing that it is. Follow what I'm saying?Okay. So, you know what I'm gonna say next? When something happens, the items across from you cease to speak, cease to have their stories come along with them, cease to be available. There's something about your cultural atrophy that you project onto the [01:13:00] item that you don't recognize.You don't recognize it's valence, it's proprieties, it's value, it's deep-running worth and so on. Something happened, okay? And because you're not making your own stuff back home or any part of it. And so now, when you're in a circumstance like this and you're just trying to get this pot, but you know nothing about it, then the enterprise becomes, "Okay, so what do you have to part with to obtain the pot?"And the next thing is, you pretend you're not interested in obtaining the pot to obtain the pot. That becomes part of the deal. And then, the person on the making end feels the deep running slight of your disinterest, or your vague involvement in the proceedings, or maybe the worst: when it's not things you're going back and forth with, but there's a third thing called money, which nobody makes, [01:14:00] which you're not reminded of your grandma or anyone else's with the money. And then, money becomes the ghost of the original understanding of the cultural patrimony that sat between you. That's what happened, I'm fairly sure: the advent, the estrangement that comes with the stranger, instead of the opportunity to be your cultural best when the stranger comes.And then of course, it bleeds through all kinds of transactions beyond the "obvious material ones." So, it's a rupture in translatability, isn't it?Chris: You understand this to happen or have happened historically, culturally, et cetera, with matrimony as well?Stephen: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.Yeah. This is why, for example, things like the fetishization of virginity.Audience: Mm-hmm. [01:15:00]Stephen: I think it's traceable directly to what we're talking about. How so? Oh, this is a whole other long thing, but the very short version would be this.Do you really believe that through all of human history until the recent liberation, that people have forever fetishized the virginity of a young woman and jealously defended it, the "men" in particular, and that it became a commodity to trade back and forth in, and that it had to be prodded and poked at to determine its intactness? And this was deemed to be, you know, honourable behavior?Do you really think that's the people you come from, that they would've do that to the most cherished of their [01:16:00] own, barely pubescent girls? Come on now. I'm not saying it didn't happen and doesn't still happen. I'm not saying that. I'm saying, God almighty, something happened for that to be so.And I'm trying to allude to you now what I think took place. Then all of a sudden, the hymen takes the place of the pottery, doesn't it? And it becomes universally translatable. Doesn't it? It becomes a kind of a ghosted artifact of a culturally-intact time. It's as close as you can get.Hence, this allegation of its purity, or the association with purity, and so on. [01:17:00] I mean, there's lots to say, but that gives you a feel for what might have happened there.Chris: Thank you, Stephen. Thank you for being so generous with your considerations here.Stephen: You see why I had to write a book, eh?Audience: Mm-hmm.Stephen: There was too much bouncing around. Like I had to just keep track of my own thoughts on the matter.But can you imagine all of this at play in the year, oh, I don't know, 2022, trying to put into motion a redemptive passion play called "matrimony," with all of this at play? Not with all of this in my mind, but with all of this actually disfiguring the anticipation of the proceedings for the people who came.Can you imagine? Can you imagine trying to pull it off, and [01:18:00] contending overtly with all these things and trying to make room for them in a moment that's supposed to be allegedly - get ready for it - happy.I should have raised my rates on the first day, trying to pull that off.But anyway.Okay, you go now,Chris: Maybe now you'll have the opportunity.Stephen: No, man. No. I'm out of the running for that. "Pompe" has come and come and gone. Mm.Chris: So, in matrimony, Stephen, you write that"the brevity, the brevity of modern ceremonies is really there to make sure that nothing happens, nothing of substance, nothing of consequence, no alchemy, no mystery, no crazy other world stuff. That overreach there in its scripted heart tells me that deep in the rayon-wrapped bosom of that special day, the modern wedding is scared [01:19:00] silly of something happening. That's because it has an ages-old abandoned memory of a time when a wedding was a place where the Gods came around, where human testing and trying and making was at hand, when the dead lingered in the wings awaiting their turn to testify and inveigh."Gorgeous. Gorgeous.Audience: Mm-hmm.Chris: And so I'm curious ifStephen: "Rayon-wrapped bosom." That's not, that's not shabby.Chris: "Rayon-wrapped bosom of that special day." Yeah.So, I'm curious do you think the more-than-human world practices matrimony, and if so, what, if anything, might you have learned about matrimony from the more-than-human world?Stephen: I would say the reverse. I would say, we practice the more-than-human world in matrimony, not that the more-than-human world practices matrimony. We practice them, [01:20:00] matrimonially.Next. Okay. Or no? I just gonna say that, that's pretty good.Well, where do we get our best stuff from? Let's just wonder that. Do we get our best stuff from being our best? Well, where does that come from? And this is a bit of a barbershop mirrors situation here, isn't it? To, to back, back, back, back.If you're thinking of time, you can kind of get lost in that generation before, or before, before, before. And it starts to sound like one of them biblical genealogies. But if you think of it as sort of the flash point of multiple presences, if you think of it that way, then you come to [01:21:00] credit the real possibility that your best stuff comes from you being remembered by those who came before you.Audience: Hmm.Stephen: Now just let that sit for a second, because what I just said is logically-incompatible.Okay? You're being remembered by people who came before you. That's not supposed to work. It doesn't work that way. Right?"Anticipated," maybe, but "remembered?" How? Well, if you credit the possibility of multiple beginnings, that's how. Okay. I'm saying that your best stuff, your best thoughts, not the most noble necessarily. I would mean the most timely, [01:22:00] the ones that seem most needed, suddenly.You could take credit and sure. Why, why not? Because ostensibly, it arrives here through you, but if you're frank with yourself, you know that you didn't do that on command, right? I mean, you could say, I just thought of it, but you know in your heart that it was thought of and came to you.I don't think there's any difference between saying that and saying you were thought of.Audience: Mm-hmm.Stephen: So, that's what I think the rudiments of old-order matrimony are. They are old people and their benefactors in the food chain and spiritually speaking. Old people and their benefactors, the best part of them [01:23:00] willed to us, entrusted and willed to us. So, when you are willing to enter into the notion that old-order matrimony is older than you, older than your feelings for the other person, older than your love, and your commitment, and your willingness to make the vows and all that stuff, then you're crediting the possibility that your love is not the beginning of anything.You see. Your love is the advent of something, and I use that word deliberately in its Christian notion, right? It's the oncomingness, the eruption into the present day of something, which turns out to be hugely needed and deeply unsuspected at the same time.I used to ask in the school, "can you [01:24:00] have a memory of something you have no lived experience of?" I think that's what the best part of you is. I'm not saying the rest of you is shite. I'm not saying that. You could say that, but I am saying that when I say "the best part of you," that needs a lot of translating, doesn't it?But the gist of it is that the best part of you is entrusted to you. It's not your creation, it's your burden, your obligation, your best chance to get it right. And that's who we are to those who came before us. We are their chance to get it right, and matrimony is one of the places where you practice the gentle art of getting it right.[01:25:00] Another decent reason to write a book.Chris: So, gorgeous. Wow. Thank you Stephen. I might have one more question.Stephen: Okay. I might have one more answer. Let's see.Chris: Alright. Would I be able to ask if dear Nathalie Roy could join us up here alongside your good man.So, returning to Matrimony: Ritual, Culture and the Heart's Work. On page 94, [01:26:00] Stephen, you write that"hospitality of the radical kind is

Harvey Crane woke up at the edge of a world that shouldn't exist—with a pink sky, triangular trees, and a beautiful woman who could erase his spaceship with a wave of her hand. But when she begs him to wake up and claims to be his wife back on Earth, Harvey must face a terrible question: is this strange paradise his new reality, or is he still trapped in his ship, lost forever in the moment he broke the light barrier?“World Edge” by Jack Egan, originally published in Amazing Stories, November 1962

John discusses the many screwball, insane, maniacal decisions coming from the Oval Office. The continuing effort by MAGA to make Charlie Kirk a glorified hero and worshipped saint. Donald Trump's $15Billion lawsuit against the New York Times was thrown out of court for being, among other things, too long at 85 pages and full of tedious and irrelevant language. Trump pushing out US Attorney Erik Siebert for not inventing a crime to charge New York Attorney General Laticia James with. The continued fall out over Trump exercising his censorship rights and pushing out Jimmy Kimmel. And then of course, Trump trying to desperately distract from the Epstein files. Next, he talks with Producer Chris Hauselt about his strange MAGA run-in at the dog park. Then winding it up - Chris packaged up a special treat! Some audio clips from John's New York Times best selling book Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person's Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Navigating midlife can feel overwhelming, but this episode is your reset. Angela is joined by author of "The Perimenopause Revolution," Dr. Mariza Snyder, and together dive deep into what it takes for women in their 40s and 50s to feel alive, focused, and fully in charge.  They discuss how to gain agency over your health and lifestyle, and how to rewrite the societal scripts about what it means to be a woman in the second half of life KEY TAKEAWAYS: Agency over your health: Taking a long, hard look at what you're carrying and being discerning about what needs to be let go is crucial for managing midlife energy and capacity. Prioritise sleep like a million-dollar meeting: Sleep consistency and treating your nightly rest as a non-negotiable priority is essential for managing energy and resilience. Movement is a non-negotiable: Intentionally incorporating movement throughout your day, even in small bursts, is one of the most powerful tools for regulating your nervous system and boosting cellular energy. Embrace intentionality: Moving through midlife with intention—in your relationships, health habits, and personal growth—is the key to thriving rather than just surviving. TIMESTAMPS AND KEY TOPICS: The three biggest challenges women face in midlife (02:40) Why sleep is the most underrated longevity tool (11:30) The three biggest challenges women face in midlife (02:40) How to build a personal care routine for a hyper-vigilant nervous system (24:00) How to manage migraines in perimenopause (30:00) VALUABLE RESOURCES ⁠Join The High Performance Health Community⁠ ⁠Click here⁠ for discounts on all the products I personally use and recommend A BIG thank you to our sponsors who make the show possible: QUANTUM UPGRADE - Go to quantumupgrade.io and use code ANGELA15 to get your 15 day free trial. No credit card required Go to timeline.com/angela33 and enter code ANGELA33 at check out for an exclusive 33% off ABOUT THE GUEST Dr. Mariza Snyder is a powerhouse advocate for midlife women, leveraging 17+ years as a practitioner, author, and speaker to spark a massive movement for women in perimenopause and beyond. With her top-rated Energized with Dr. Mariza podcast (13 million downloads) and a passionate social media audience of over 400K and 8 million monthly views, she's a trusted guide—offering science-backed solutions for perimenopause and metabolic health. https://drmariza.com/ ABOUT THE HOST Angela Foster is an award winning Nutritionist, Health & Performance Coach, Speaker and Host of the High Performance Health podcast. A former Corporate lawyer turned industry leader in biohacking and health optimisation for women, Angela has been featured in various media including Huff Post, Runners world, The Health Optimisation Summit, BrainTap, The Women's Biohacking Conference, Livestrong & Natural Health Magazine. Angela is the creator of BioSyncing®️ a blueprint for ambitious entrepreneurial women to biohack their health so they can 10X how they show up in their business and their family without burning out. CONTACT DETAILS ⁠Instagram⁠ ⁠Facebook⁠ ⁠LinkedIn⁠ Disclaimer: The High Performance Health Podcast is for general information purposes only and do not constitute the practice of professional or coaching advice and no client relationship is formed. The use of information on this podcast, or materials linked from this podcast is at the user's own risk. The content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for medical or other professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should seek the assistance of their medical doctor or other health care professional for before taking any steps to implement any of the items discussed in this podcast. This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. ⁠https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/

In part two of this powerful conversation, Dr. Dawn and her cousin, Richard go deeper—unpacking the ongoing process of healing, rebuilding trust, and redefining purpose after incarceration. They talk about what accountability looks like, how faith and family played a role in his recovery, and the daily fight to stay grounded when old wounds and old patterns try to resurface.This episode isn't just about survival—it's about transformation. It's about what it really takes to create a new story for your life, even when others only remember your past. Together, they explore the hard truths, the small victories, and the hope that comes from refusing to let brokenness have the final word.If you've ever wrestled with starting over, struggled to forgive yourself, or needed a reminder that redemption is possible—this part of the story will speak directly to you.Check out Richard's book SouljaStory on Amazon.comFollow Richard @lifeafterlife_RichardCrossonSupport the showSupport the showBuyMeaCoffeeFollow Dr. Dawn on IG: @drdawnonthereal and join our broadcast channelWebsites: www.onepps.com www.halainc.org

The post Signs and Sanity – 9/21/25 appeared first on North Hills Church.

Julie and Simon join John for a wide-ranging conversation: reflecting on Robert Redford's cinematic legacy and his longtime allyship with Indigenous communities, unpacking the myth of ‘reverse racism,' and celebrating California's new bill aimed at keeping Native children with their families. They also take spirited listener calls, and share excitement over Indigenous Fashion Week (the first of its kind) earning a glowing Vogue feature as the standout showcase of the entire week! Migwetch (thank you) for listening!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

John discusses Disney executives who are hopeful they can bring Jimmy Kimmel Live back to the airwaves but want a commitment from the host to “turn down the temperature” of his monologues and political humor. Which is of course, censorship. He also plays clips from FCC Chair Brendan Carr - bragging about his power to crush any broadcast political show he wants. Then, he talks with Richard Chew of WCPT in Chicago about Jimmy Kimmel, Charlie Kirk, and Trump's plans to send the National Guard to Chicago. Then finally, John welcomes back the 2 Taras to talk politics. Tara Devlin is a comedian and the host of the Tarabuster, where she looks at news, politics and history through an unapologetically liberal lens. Tara Dublin is a comedian and author of “The Sound of Settling: A Rock & Roll Love Story”. Together Tara Devlin and Tara Dublin are the co-hosts of The Tara Show podcast.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

John talks about his new book Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person's Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds - being on the New York Times Best Seller list. He also discusses ABC announcing it has pulled late night host Jimmy Kimmel from the airwaves indefinitely, a reaction to criticism Kimmel had for conservatives in the wake of Charlie Kirk's murder. Then, he chats with Bob Cesca on Trump's tariffs and Kash Patel's epic failures. Next, John has a round house discussion with Desimber Rose and Dillon Naber Cruz AKA The God Squad on the success of John's book and the evils of Christian Nationalism. And lastly, legal analyst Dr. Tracy Pearson returns to discuss the legal angles democrats still have.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Dr. Andrew Hartz is a practicing clinical psychologist and the founder of the Open Therapy Institute, an organization dedicated to overcoming sociopolitical bias in the mental health field. He was last here in 2023 and returns now to talk about what's changed—and what hasn't—in the mental-health landscape since then. We discuss the rise of “everyday dissociation,” how screens and Zoom relationships dull presence and feeling, and why talk therapy can miss the mark when the problem is disconnection from the body. Andrew also explains how anxiety became a form of social currency (from dating to testing accommodations), the overuse of diagnostic labels online, and why Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) offers a saner path than endless self-rumination. Guest Bio: Andrew Hartz is the Founder, President, and Executive Director of the Open Therapy Institute. He's also a practicing clinical psychologist and was formerly a professor in the clinical psychology doctoral program at Long Island University, where he also completed his Ph.D. He's been featured in the New York Times, on The Dr. Drew Podcast, on Dr. Phil Primetime, and in The Free Press and has written about political issues and mental health for outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, City Journal, Discourse, Heterodox Academy, the New York Post, and Quillette.

John discusses the life of legendary actor and director Robert Redford who passed away at the age of 89. He also talks about FBI Director Kash Patel who clashed with the Senate Judiciary Committee, snapping and smirking at Senate Democrats who questioned his leadership and challenged him on the agency's failures. He plays many clips from the heated exchanges. Then, John interviews Garnet Henderson who is an investigative reporter specializing in abortion access, anti-rights disinformation, and other intersections of health, policy, and culture. They talk about a new lawsuit in Texas where a woman claims her boyfriend (a US Marine) got her pregnant and then put 10 abortion pills in her hot chocolate when she refused to have an abortion. Next, he speaks with Matthew Boedy who is a professor in the English department at the University of North Georgia. Targeted by Turning Point USA in 2016 and listed on its infamous “professor watchlist,” Boedy has emerged as one of the foremost experts on Turning Point USA and its founder and CEO Charlie Kirk, exposing its role in Christian nationalism and the threat to democracy it poses. They talk about John's new book Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person's Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds and Matthew's new book "The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America and Destroy Democracy". Then finally, John welcomes back Comedy Daddy Keith Price to chat with the Evil Army of the Night about Kash Patel, Donald Trump, and Robert Redford. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

John discusses the desperate attempt of Republicans to blame anyone and everyone else for the shooting of Charlie Kirk even though the shooter was one of their own. Then, he welcomes back Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman to discuss the recent shootings and Trump's crackdown of liberal speech. Next, Professor Corey Brettschneider returns to discuss the curtailing of free speech, the 2 separate universes of public information, and how history repeats itself. Then finally, John chats with comedian Rhonda Hansome and they talk listeners off the edge and give advice on how to deal with Maga extremists in their lives.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Editor at large of The 19th* News, Errin Haines, joins to discuss the unexpected candor of Kamala Harris' upcoming book, the latest consequences of RFK Jr.'s quackery, and the upcoming WNBA playoffs. They wrap up in the Sanity corner with a celebration of pumpkin spice latte season, the Stud Budz, and E. Jean Carroll's latest win in court. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.Note: This episode was recorded before Charlie Kirk was shot. Meme coins and misogyny: What the dildo-throwing trend at WNBA games can teach us (The 19th* 8/18)Sky's Angel Reese trade rumors gain steam with stunning quote from WNBA exec (Sporting News 9/9)HHS responds to report about autism and acetaminophen (NPR 9/6)The new COVID vaccine rules leave parents with more questions than answers (The 19th* 9/2)Kamala Harris opens up on the 'recklessness' of Biden's re-election bid (NBC 9/10)