Podcasts about Stranger in a Strange Land

Dr. Dennis Alan travels to Haiti to research a drug that appears to be "zombifying" locals.The Serpent and the Rainbow is the last movie of Wes Craven May and a movie we love to rewatch. Flying under the radar of some of Craven's other movies, this film stars Bill Pullman as a convincing anthropologist working to uncover strange occurrences in Haiti regarding a drug that is pausing vital signs. This film explores the "stranger in a strange land" concept very well, adding in cultural elements, Voodoo practices, as well as touching on the political strife, all playing a role in the film. The film is loosely based on the Wade Davis book "The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist's Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombies, and Magic". Watch the movie and catch our review.Subscribe to our YouTube channel @thefinalpodcast  Join the Discord | https://discord.gg/UFtVP243Follow us on Facebook The Final Podcast Follow us on Instagram @thefinalpodcastFollow us on X @thefinalpodeverMusic Credit: Karl Casey @ White Bat Audiohttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_6h...What should we review next? Toss us a vibe and send over a recommendation!

OH GOOD, it's the "Jack's Tattoos" episode! Join your hosts David, Cara, and Robert as they continue their LOST 20-year retrospective discussion with episode 3x07 ("Not in Portland,") 3x08 ("Flashes Before Your Eyes,") and (ugh) 3x09 ("Stranger in a Strange Land."You can check out some of our older episodes on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-dpEKWvhcZoQ4PLu1HfUg-KXfWwrtnklYou can also check out more of Long Walk Productions' original content here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVrMG74aomWR_WQs7yYT6_g

This week's episode will have you feeling like a stranger in a strange land when you listen to the best podcast about John Coltrane and the 232nd greatest album of all time, Giant Steps.   Before we get to the music, we'll help you get hella full with some pancake preparation tips straight from a random grocery store clerk. We also enjoy some record store zen featuring new and used albums. Then we provide some travel tips for all of you heading to Ireland and Costa Rica...passport, pants, and electrolytes....you may want to write that down.    Then, at (55:00), we turn this taco truck into a Ferrari and become the best jazz podcast by breaking down John Coltrane's seminal jazz album. We discuss Coltrane's devotion to jazz music, chord changes, and the fastest songs of all time.    Next week's episode is certain to include many previous things when we become the best Tori Amos podcast and cover her debut studio album, Little Earthquakes.

As Elon recently explained at the unveiling of Grok 3.0, the word Grok was coined by Robert Heinlein in his book A Stranger in a Strange Land. Grok means to profoundly understand a concept beyond mere recitation of facts, it is to absorb the context of the idea's existence, to embody it so physical and emotional sensations are connected to the deeper meaning of that concept.These are all things that humans perform quite well. There is irony to naimg an AI Syste Grok, essentially a human trait.  It is an inversion.This episode of the Severed Conscience Podcast is a reading of a recently published article titled "Elon, That's a Grok of ... Understanding the Grok, ChatGPT and Tech Lord AI Hype Cycles" in Curtural Courage.  You can find the article here:https://culturalcourage.substack.com/p/elon-thats-a-grok-of-understandingWe have been manipulated. Severed Conscience is a prison of the mind.To access our documentary, join our community on https://severedconscience.com. We have released our first book titled Severed Conscience as a companion to our documentary.  You can find our book on Amazon.  Severed Conscience on Amazon.comWant solutions for Severed Conscience and return to life where you derive values from living offline while giving tech and social media a rest?  We invite you to sign up at https://culturalcourage.substack.com

Les intelligences artificielles d'aujourd'hui portent des noms soigneusement choisis, souvent riches de sens et d'histoire. Voici l'origine de quelques-unes des plus célèbres.Grok : une référence à la science-fictionDéveloppé par xAI, la société d'Elon Musk, Grok est un terme issu du roman Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) de Robert A. Heinlein. Dans ce livre de science-fiction, « grok » signifie comprendre quelque chose de manière profonde et intuitive, au-delà des mots. Le choix de ce nom reflète donc l'ambition de créer une IA capable de saisir le sens profond des interactions humaines.Claude : un hommage à Claude ShannonAnthropic, l'entreprise derrière Claude, a choisi ce nom en hommage à Claude Shannon, mathématicien et ingénieur américain souvent considéré comme le père de la théorie de l'information. Son travail a jeté les bases du traitement numérique des données, élément clé du fonctionnement des IA modernes. En nommant son IA ainsi, Anthropic met en avant son approche centrée sur la rigueur scientifique et la compréhension du langage.Mistral : entre nature et puissance technologiqueLa startup française Mistral AI a choisi un nom qui évoque à la fois un vent puissant du sud de la France et un certain souffle d'innovation dans le domaine de l'intelligence artificielle. Le choix de ce nom court et percutant renforce l'image d'une IA rapide, efficace et ancrée dans une culture européenne de la technologie.Gemini : une dualité intelligence humaine-machineDéveloppé par Google DeepMind, Gemini fait référence au programme spatial Gemini de la NASA dans les années 1960, qui a préparé les missions Apollo. Mais le nom évoque aussi les « Gémeaux », symbole de dualité, reflétant l'objectif de Google de créer une IA hybride, combinant les atouts du texte et des images pour un raisonnement plus avancé.ChatGPT : un nom descriptif et techniqueLe nom ChatGPT, développé par OpenAI, est plus technique. « Chat » indique sa fonction principale (dialoguer avec l'utilisateur), tandis que GPT signifie Generative Pre-trained Transformer, une référence à l'architecture d'apprentissage profond utilisée pour générer du texte.Ces choix de noms illustrent les ambitions et les inspirations des entreprises derrière ces IA, oscillant entre références scientifiques, culturelles et symboliques. Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

“To be a Jew is to know that because of who we are, because of our historical experience, we care for the other. This is really one of the great tensions of our moment. Of how to be eyes wide open to Israel's need for self-defense, and at the same time recognize the real suffering that's going on in Gaza and to know that we need to find a way to hold both of those together.” Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, spiritual leader of Park Avenue Synagogue in New York, explores the complexities of Jewish identity in a post-October 7th world in his new book, For Such a Time As This: On Being Jewish Today. In this conversation, he unpacks the tension between Israel's need for self-defense and the suffering experienced by Gazans and Israelis and the challenge of balancing empathy with vigilance. He also shares his personal journey to the rabbinate and what it means to live as a Jew in this pivotal moment. *The views and opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect the views or position of AJC.  Sign up for AJC Global Forum: Register at AJC.org/GlobalForum2025 for the premier global Jewish advocacy conference of the year, in New York City, April 27-29 2025 Listen – AJC Podcasts: The Forgotten Exodus: with Hen Mazzig, Einat Admony, and more. People of the Pod:  The Oldest Holocaust Survivor Siblings: A Tale of Family, Survival, and Hope Israeli Hostages Freed: Inside the Emotional Reunions, High-Stakes Negotiations, and What's Next Bring Them Home: Understanding the Israel-Hamas Hostage Deal and Its Impact Pack One Bag: Stanley Tucci and David Modigliani Uncover His Jewish Family's Escape from Fascism and Antisemitism in 1930s Italy Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod You can reach us at: peopleofthepod@ajc.org If you've appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. __ Transcript of Conversation with Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove:  Josh Kramer: AJC Global Forum is returning to New York City, April 27 to 29th 2025. I'm Josh Kramer. AJC New York Regional Director, and I hope to see you there. You won't want to miss this opportunity to join with more than 2000 other activists and engage in thought provoking discussions on the future of the Jewish people, Israel, America, and the world.  Our program will feature large plenary sessions with headline speakers, smaller breakout sessions designed to explore the key political, strategic and social concerns affecting the global Jewish community, and exclusive opportunities to engage with diplomats, decision makers, interfaith partners, community leaders and more.  Will you be in the room? Register today at AJC.org/GlobalForum2025 to take part in the premier global Jewish advocacy conference of the year. Now is the time to join AJC in shaping a new future. Head to AJC.org/GlobalForum2025. Manya Brachear Pashman:   I've done quite a bit of soul searching in the 15 months since October 7. How do I grapple with the tragedy in Israel and Gaza and the hatred Jews face on American soil without scaring my children away from Judaism?  Then came our Temple's Purim spiel last spring. That story of Queen Esther's bravery, in some ways, helped. It was about that same time that Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, the spiritual leader at Park Avenue Synagogue in New York, picked up his pen and began to write his latest book, named for a line in Queen Esther's tale – For Such a Time As This: On Being Jewish Today. Rabbi Cosgrove is with us now. Rabbi, welcome to People of the Pod. Elliot Cosgrove:   Thank you. It's great to be here.  Manya Brachear Pashman:   So I have to tell you, rehearsals began for this year's Purim spiel as I was reading this book, which made it all the more powerful. What inspired you to write this? Elliot Cosgrove:   Well, for me, I draw wisdom from text, and I was trying to think of what would be an analogous moment for what we were going through as American Jews from the ancient text.  And for me, as you say, this is now on the cusp of Purim 2025, it was the story of Esther that we read. And in many of our synagogues, we have Purim spiels, where we act out the story, which is basically the story of a Jewish community of ancient Shushan who believed themselves to have it good, that they were comfortable in the diaspora. And the wicked decree of Haman came down and Esther, whose name actually means to hide, she hid herself, her Jewish identity in the king's palace, and believed that she was comfortable there.  When the decree came down, Mordechai, her uncle, by way of an emissary, sent a message to her. “Don't think yourself to be safe from Haman's decree. Who knows, if it was not for such a time as this that you've arrived at your station.” And I saw this as really the calling card of our moment that we all felt ourselves in the wake of October 7, Esther-like called to action. The trauma of October 7, but also the call to action, to step up to the moment, the needs of our people. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Tell us about your writing process. Elliot Cosgrove:   I buried myself in my writing from before dawn until mid-morning, and then I would hit a wall. And I didn't take a sabbatical. I actually went into my day job as a congregational rabbi. It was a very intense writing process and then in the course of about three to four months sent the manuscript off to the publisher. Manya, the thing about the book is it was very disorienting to write as the events were playing out, both in Israel and in the States. And one of the worries that I had that I spoke to the publisher about was, well, what if this becomes dated? You know, it was not journalism, but I was writing as the news was happening, and the good news and the bad news is that the themes that I pick up on: the trauma of Israel, the blurred line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, how we balance empathy and vigilance, the question of the hostages, of thinking about a day after for Israel and the Palestinians, these questions are not only still relevant, but they're actually more pressing than ever. So unfortunately, the themes that I hit on in the book, very much present right now. Manya Brachear Pashman:   How did that writing process help you personally process what you were witnessing and experiencing as a Jew in America? Elliot Cosgrove:   I'll say this, that as a rabbi, I often see my job–someone calls, they've just gotten bad news in the hospital, a loved one has passed away. Or a happy thing, that their child has just gotten engaged, or they themselves have just become new parents. And people turn to clergy to get the first line of constructing the narrative of what it is they are experiencing.  And for me, there is something deeply personal and deeply pastoral about this book, because I feel like it's seeking, hopefully, to give the language to American Jews as to how to construct this new reality of a post October 7 existence, the jumble of emotions, of trauma, but also the emergence of Jewish identity, the likes of which we've never seen before, the argument for continued defense of Israel's right to self determination, as well as an assurance that the traumas of October 7 never happen again. And in the same breath to think actively about what does the day after look like. I think we're all searching for language for these and other tensions of our moment, and I'm hoping that the book is sort of a vocabulary builder for our time. Manya Brachear Pashman:   One word that you used many times in the book, and it stuck with me, just because maybe it's one of my favorite words, and that is empathy. And you used it in different chapters, different contexts. And I'm curious if you could share with the audience the role of empathy and how it is a guiding force, how it has been a guiding force since October 7. Elliot Cosgrove:   Empathy, both its presence and its absence, has been a subplot of this moment, because I think empathy is ingrained into the Jewish DNA. You open up the Passover Haggadah, and on the one hand, we know that we are vigilant against every generation a pharaoh arises to destroy us. We are guards up. We are a people who knows the importance of ancient hatreds, of being vigilant against them, and also the ring of fire that Israel sits in by way of Iran and its proxies.  I mean, Israel's in a very tight spot, and American Jewry is in a very tight spot. And at the same time, empathy is who we are. You were once a stranger in a strange land. Therefore you should know the heart of a stranger. To be a Jew is to know that because of who we are, because of our historical experience, we care for the other. And I think that this is really one of the great tensions of our moment of how to, you know, be eyes wide open to Israel's need to self defense, and at the same time recognize the real suffering that's going on in Gaza and and to know that we need to find a way to hold both of those together. That Israel needs to fight this war as if there's no tomorrow, and Israel has to fight this war with an eye to tomorrow, with the same ferocity that it prosecutes this war, it has to pursue a day after plan. And I think that somewhere along the way, it's the voices on the extremes who are speaking with the loudest megaphones. And the goal of this moment is to realize that we need to find a way to embrace both.  I think it was Fitzgerald who said the test of a great mind is the ability to hold two opposing ideas and retain the ability to function. I think the test of the Jewish community right now is the ability to hold both vigilance and empathy at the same time and retain the ability to move forward with hope. Manya Brachear Pashman:   And how can empathy help here on American soil, where we're facing protesters, we're facing all kinds of opposition and questions and hatred because of what's happening overseas. How do we use empathy here on American soil? Elliot Cosgrove:   First of all, it's hard. It's hard. When you are under attack, the last thing anyone wants to do is feel someone else's pain. When someone is calling me a colonialist oppressor, when someone is calling for the destruction of the Jewish state, something which is part and parcel to my identity, core to my very being – my initial instinct is not to inquire into how they feel and have empathy. My initial instinct is to have shields of self-defense, prioritize the needs of my people over anyone else's. I think that's a human thing to do.  And as long as the hostages are hostages, as long as Israel stands in a vulnerable position, I think we need to be eyes wide open to that, and then we need to breathe, and we need to remember what it means to be a Jew.  And we need to remember that it takes two to tango, and that if we are going to create a future whereby Jews and Palestinians can live side by side in safety and self determination, then we need to realize that there are two peoples worthy of realizing that dream, and that requires empathy, Manya. Manya Brachear Pashman:   You were not always that religious or observant of your religious tradition. Can you tell our audience how you became a rabbi? Elliot Cosgrove:   How long do we have? This is a big question, but, look as with any way we construct our realities and tell our origin stories, there are a million ways to tell it. The truth of the matter is, I am the grandson of a congregational rabbi, an orthodox rabbi. So to say that I had somehow strayed from the path is a little bit of an overstatement. But I will say that I grew up in a traditional Jewish background. I'm very proud of the home I grew up in, but when I went off to college, it was very much something I did, Judaism was something I did at home. And I can't say that my first few years at my alma mater at University of Michigan were known by way of my religious affiliations and commitments. And then I got a phone call my junior year of college, that a figure from my youth, a grandfather figure I never really knew. My grandparents had passed away, and he was a guy who used to sit next to us in synagogue and slip me up peppermint candy as the rabbi was about to start the sermon or come over for Passover Seders or Shabbat dinner, Mr. Gendun, and he had passed away. And I got the phone call. I said, What would Mr. Gendun want me to do? And I thought, maybe I'll say Kaddish.  So I called one of my Jewishy friends. I had never been inside the Hillel building up until that moment. And I called up one of my Jewishy friends and I said, What's, where's the Hillel? And they said, you're an idiot, Elliot. It's this huge building right on campus at Michigan. And I went in and I said my Kaddish, and I was getting up like it was the end of an airplane ride just to run back out to whatever my evening plans were.  And a man stood between me and the door, boxing me out, and I was trying to shimmy one way and the other. And he said, I notice you've never been here before. And he said, Well, I'm wondering if you'd like to come to Shabbat dinner. And I lied, truth be told, because I figure he didn't want to know about dollar pitcher night. And I said, I already have Shabbat plans. And he said, Well, do you have Shabbat plans next week? And I was caught in my tracks, and I said, No, and before I could say another word, he said, Good, then you'll come over for Shabbat dinner.  And that man was Michael Brooks, who was the Hillel Director of the Michigan Hillel. I went over to Shabbat dinner. I got involved in the Israel group. I was an editor of the student journal. I sat on the Hillel governing board. One thing led to the other, and I became a rabbi. But important [as] that story is obviously in my own religious formation and choice of vocation, is how it informs my own life and my own rabbinate. It's that ability to look around the room when you're in a class, a Jewish event, a service, and who's the person who looks a little out of place like they might have been there for the very first time, and just do that small human act of reaching out to them, and whether you're going to invite them to Shabbat dinner or not, but just to acknowledge their humanity, that has been the north star of my rabbinate ever since. We're all just human beings looking for a place to hang our hats. Manya Brachear Pashman:   You talk about empathy. I think empathy caught my attention every time you mentioned it in the book, because I think it's so key to journalism. It's such an important component of it. And then I think hospitality is such an important component to Judaism and to congregational life, Elliot Cosgrove:   Absolutely. Hospitality is something that is key to our text at the beginning of the Passover Seder. But hospitality is also a spiritual demeanor that we welcome people into our souls, into our presence, into our life. Hachnasat Orchim in Hebrew, this idea that there's always space within our souls, within our hearts.  Manya Brachear Pashman:   Having had such an important turning point on a university campus, how did you interact with, council, university students during this time, as they were facing such pressures and such opposition, crushing opposition during this past year and a half? Elliot Cosgrove:   So there's a chapter about that in the book. It's really the part of the book that I think has struck a nerve, and appropriately so, because I'm the father of four college age or thereabouts children.  And that story I tell about Maya, and Maya is a young woman who, I joke, shares half a brain with my own college age daughter. She's grown up in my household, and she is what you or I might identify as a non Zionist Gen zer, and she approached me and perhaps reproached me for having a Israeli flag on the pulpit, for doing the prayer for the State of Israel in the midst of the service, and said, you know, and she grew up in the Jewish Day School. She grew up going to Jewish summer camp. She did gap year programs in Israel.  Not a small amount of money has been invested in the Mayas of the world, and she herself is asking whether or not her liberal, American Jewish self can be simpatico with the policies of this or that Israeli government, because they don't speak for her sensibility. And to this question of empathy, I think the first move one makes in any such situation is to try to understand where the other person is coming from.  And I think a 21, 22, 23 year old is coming of age in a moment of time where the only Prime Minister they know of is Bibi Netanyahu, who either is or is beholden to the most right-wing elements of Israeli society. The only policies they know of the Israeli government are an expansionist policy in the West Bank, which has precluded the possibility of a two state solution. The only paradigm they have is an Israel which is a Goliath to the Palestinian David, this is their reality.  You can't blame someone for the time into which they are born. I can pick apart and engage in a dialog on what's true and what's not true. But to tell someone that their reality is not, their reality is is not, you know, a move that one can make. And by the way, if they're during the time of the judicial reform, and to this day, there are 1000s of Israelis marching on the streets on a Saturday night protesting the Israeli government as an expression of their love of country.  To tell the Mayas of the world, a college age student today, that they are treif, they are beyond the bounds of Jewish discourse, for doing the exact same thing is just an argument that doesn't hold water anymore. And so the the the goal here, Manya, is to engage with their questions, to listen intently, to prompt that young mind to come up with their own answers for the defense and the well being of the Jewish people, given the harsh realities that Israel faces, and also to make room for their very real question. So I look long on the Maya generation. It's actually a controversial moment within the organized Jewish community –do we write them off, do we not write them off? I think they're our future, and I think we do terrible damage to ourselves if we write them off. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Because it is such a time as this. We have to pay attention to the context, right, and to where we are in history, without losing sight of history. Elliot Cosgrove:   Look, it's very easy to take pot shots from the left and from the right. You know where this brave space is. The brave space is standing in the middle and dignifying the claims and counterclaims of both sides, and knowing that real leadership is trying to keep our people together. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Your book does such a beautiful job of inspiring that sense, sparking those, those right emotions in my head. So thank you so much for writing it. And I encourage all of our listeners to pick up a copy of Rabbi Cosgrove's book–For Such a Time as This: On Being Jewish Today. It is full of challenges, and I think that the challenge is worth facing and taking on. Thank you. Elliot Cosgrove:   Thank you so much, Manya.

“Often people that really know what's going on are the ones that say, ‘Who knows?' Something my dad's not saying is that, he's had he's had 15 kids.”In this episode of the Sovereign Man Podcast, we dive into a powerful father and son relationship with Cameron and Brunson Smith. Cameron drops some dad-level wisdom, reflecting on his own fatherhood journey and why showing up, dishing out life advice, and sticking to timeless principles is the ultimate dad trifecta. Meanwhile, Brunson takes us behind the scenes of growing up as one of 15 siblings (yes, 15!)—explaining why his dad deserves a medal. Together, they prove that masculinity isn't just a buzzword—it's an art form in action.Guest Bios: Cameron Smith: A father of 15 and a man of wisdom, Cameron embodies dedication, resilience, and a passion for teaching life's lessons through actions and analogies. Brunson Smith: The second oldest of 15 siblings, Brunson brings perspective on navigating life as part of a large family and shares insights from his father's influence and his own journey.Books and Links Mentioned:1. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey:https://www.amazon.ca/Habits-Highly-Effective-People-Anniversary/dp/B086D4R6ZD2. The Book of Mormon:https://www.amazon.ca/Book-Mormon-Another-Testament-Christ/dp/038551316X3. Loving What Is by Byron Katie:https://www.amazon.ca/Loving-What-Four-Questions-Change/dp/14000453714. The Last Law of Attraction Book You'll Ever Need by Andrew Kap:https://www.amazon.ca/Last-Law-Attraction-Book-Youll/dp/19483360825. The 3% Man by Corey Wayne:https://www.amazon.ca/How-Be-3-Man-Winning/dp/06925526696. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein:https://www.amazon.ca/Stranger-Strange-Land-Robert-Heinlein/dp/04417903487. The Great Patriot Buycott Book by Wayne Allyn Root and Nicky Billou:https://www.amazon.ca/Great-Patriot-Buycott-Book-Companies/dp/195210699XYou're invited to come to a Sovereign Circle meeting to experience it for yourself. To learn more, go to https://www.sovereignman.ca/. While you're there, check out the Battle Ready program and check out the store for Sovereign Man t-shirts, hats, and books.

What if unlocking a deeper connection with yourself and your partner was a skill you could cultivate?    In this episode, we explore the intricate world of Tantra with the knowledgeable Shiva J, a certified Tantra Educator and transformative empowerment coach. With a diverse background encompassing Kundalini Yoga, somatic bodywork, life coaching, and more, Shiva J guides us through the misconceptions and stereotypes surrounding Tantra. Delving into its roots, we discuss the multifaceted aspects of Tantra and explore how it can be a powerful tool for healing and transformation.   Shiva J sheds light on the different forms of Tantra, exploring how it can enhance intimacy in relationships, along with providing a glimpse into a new dating experience known as Tantra speed dating. You will also discover a brief guided Tantric breath exercise that you can begin using today. Tune in for an exploration into the world of Tantra where ancient wisdom meets modern understanding.   “Tantra is the art and ritual of falling in love with yourself” - Shiva J You're going to leave this episode with…   What tantra is and what it isn't   Ways in which Shiva J has used tantra to help transform his clients lives   How tantra can build more intimacy with your partner   Is tantra just sex?   The danger of tantra   What trauma is and different ways people experience it   How Tantra will allow you to love yourself more   Examples of every day people who would use tantra   The difference between white tantra and red tantra   How teaching men and women differs in tantra and which sex Shiva J finds harder to work with   What tantra speed dating is and how it compares to modern online dating   The Manhood Experiment of the week that will leave you with a Tantric breath exercise you can do right now   ---   Leave a Review: 
 If you enjoyed the show, please leave us an encouraging review and tell us why you loved the show. Remember to click ‘subscribe' so you get all of our latest episodes. 
 https://ratethispodcast.com/man

   What is the Manhood Experiment? 
 It's a weekly podcast where we give you one experiment to level up your mind, career, business, health, relationships and more!   For more tips and behind the scenes, follow us on:
 Instagram @ManhoodExperiment Tiktok @ManhoodExperiment Threads @ManhoodExperiment

 Submit your questions @ www.manhoodexperiment.com 
 Resources Mentioned:   Shiva J - https://shivaj.com/   Resource List:   1. "Kularnava Tantra" translated by Satyananda Saraswati 2. "The Yoga of Power: Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way" by Julius Evola 3. "Introduction to Tantra: The Transformation of Desire" by Lama Yeshe 4. "Hevajra Tantra: A Critical Study" by David Snellgrove 5. "Tantra Illuminated" by Christopher D. Wallis (focused on Kashmir Shaivism) 6. "Tantra: The Path of Ecstasy" by Georg Feuerstein 7. "The Roots of Tantra" by Katherine Anne Harper and Robert L. Brown 8. "Tantra in Practice" edited by David Gordon White 9. "Tantra Unveiled" by Pandit Rajmani Tigunait 10. "The Roots of Tantra" by Sir John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon) 11. "The Yoga Tradition: Its History, Literature, Philosophy, and Practice" by Georg Feuerstein 12. "The Serpent Power: The Secrets of Tantric and Shaktic Yoga" by Arthur Avalon (Sir John Woodroffe) 13. "The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You" (1971) by Dorothy Bryant "The Red Book" (1914-1930) by Carl Jung 14.  "My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies" by Resmaa Menakem  15. "The Art of Sexual Ecstasy" (1989) by Margot Anand "Sex Matters" (1969) by Osho "Siddhartha" (1922) by Herman Hesse  16. "Tantric Quest: An Encounter with Absolute Love" (1997) by Daniel Odier  17. "From Sex to Superconsciousness" (2006) by Osho  18. "Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing" (2002) by Jed McKenna  19. "I Am That" (1973) by Nisargadatta Maharaj  20. "The Book of Secrets: 112 Meditations to Discover the Mystery Within" (2010) by Osho 21. "Stranger in a Strange Land" (1961) by Robert A. Heinlein  22. "Women of Light: The New Sacred Prostitute" (1994) by Kenneth Ray Stubbs  23. "In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness" (2017) by Peter Levine  24. "Mysteries of the Dark Moon" (1992) by Demetra George  25. "Spinning Straw into Gold" (2006) by Joan Gould  26. "The Recognition Sutras" (2017) by Christopher Wallis  

In this episode, Craig dives into J. Robbins' latest release, Basilisk, exploring the enduring legacy of the post-hardcore icon. Craig reflects on Robbins' influential career, from his work with bands like Jawbox and Burning Airlines to his production work and continued evolution as a solo artist. He delves into how Basilisk captures Robbins' signature blend of intricate melodies, emotional depth, and dynamic energy, showcasing why he remains a revered figure in the indie and punk scenes.Shawn turns the spotlight to a recent purchase, Iron Maiden's Somewhere in Time, sharing his surprise and newfound appreciation upon revisiting this 1986 classic. He examines the album's innovative use of synthesizers, its futuristic themes, and iconic tracks like “Wasted Years” and “Stranger in a Strange Land.” Shawn & Craig both also reflect on Iron Maiden's monumental impact on heavy metal, discussing how the band's ability to evolve and experiment has kept their music relevant across decades.Join Craig and Shawn as they celebrate the artistry and influence of J. Robbins and Iron Maiden, offering insights into two very different but equally impactful musical legacies. Whether you're a fan of intricate indie rock or epic metal anthems, this episode dives deep into what makes these artists timeless.And if you're interested in hearing Craig's band's debut album, click the link below for various streaming & purchasing options. Venice Lights - Uploading Into The Clouds

In the summer of 1987, the music scene was shifting: the larger-than-life sounds of glam rock and heavy metal were at their peak, and the neon-drenched days of the MTV era were in full swing. Hair metal dominated, with bands like Def Leppard, Whitesnake, and Bon Jovi ruling the charts and radio. Rock fans were riding high on guitar solos, power ballads, and the theatrical spectacle of live shows. Amidst this, a familiar name from a different era, Ace Frehley, the original “Spaceman” of Kiss, reemerged with Frehley's Comet—a solo album that would go on to become a cult favorite, bridging his past as a member of Kiss with his fresh start as a solo artist.The Road to Frehley's CometFrehley's Comet, released in April 1987, was Ace's first attempt to break out independently since his 1978 solo album with Kiss. This time, however, it wasn't just a side project—it was an opportunity for Ace to stand alone. After a rocky exit from Kiss, characterized by struggles with addiction and brushes with death (including a notorious car accident in his DeLorean that he references in the track “Rock Soldiers”), Ace had a point to prove. With support from Eddie Trunk, who helped secure him a spot on the Megaforce label, Ace was back in the game, determined to reclaim his legacy in rock.A Blend of Grit and MelodyAs the Dig Me Out hosts delved into Frehley's Comet, they highlighted its unique blend of Ace's signature gritty style mixed with melodic, almost pop-rock elements that made it different from a typical heavy metal album. Tracks like “Rock Soldiers” served as a rallying cry, a self-reflective anthem about overcoming personal demons, while “Into the Night,” a mid-tempo stomp, showcased Ace's ability to craft a compelling hook that stuck with listeners long after the song ended. The hosts also noted how “Stranger in a Strange Land” exemplified Ace's unmistakable style: raw yet melodic guitar riffs combined with a vocal delivery that was uniquely his own, both rough and endearing.The Todd Howarth FactorWhat made Frehley's Comet stand out wasn't just Ace's return. The album also benefited from the contributions of Todd Howarth, whose more polished, AOR-style vocals and songwriting contrasted with Ace's grittier approach. Tracks like “Calling to You” and “Something Moved” reflected this dynamic, adding a surprising level of variety to the album. This blending of styles made Frehley's Comet feel like more than just a solo project—it felt like a band effort, and the result was a sound that was both nostalgic and refreshingly modern for its time.Embracing the Strange and the NostalgicDespite its strengths, Frehley's Comet isn't without its quirks. Some tracks, like “Dolls,” with its odd, almost creepy lyrics about mannequins or inanimate “dolls,” veered into strange territory. And while songs like “We Got Your Rock” aimed to pump up the listener, the lyrics felt somewhat clichéd even for the '80s, as the hosts pointed out with humor. Yet, these moments only added to the album's charm, capturing a time when rock didn't take itself too seriously, embracing both the raw and the ridiculous in equal measure.Legacy of a Comeback AlbumLooking back, Frehley's Comet isn't just a product of its era but a testament to Ace Frehley's resilience and talent. The album succeeded in reminding fans why they fell in love with the “Spaceman” in the first place while introducing him to a new generation eager for guitar heroes. While Ace may have never reached the commercial heights of Kiss in his solo career, Frehley's Comet endures as a cult classic, cherished by fans who appreciate its rough edges, varied styles, and unapologetic rock ethos. For Ace, it was more than just an album—it was a comeback, a declaration that, indeed, the Ace was back.Songs in this Episode* Intro - We Got Your Rock * 21:55 - Stranger in a Strange Land * 25:14 - Breakout * 32:17 - Rock Soliders * 37:28 - Into the Night * 42:05 - Dolls * Outro - Calling to YouMake Your Metal Voice Heard!In our quest to explore the depths of 80s metal, we rely on you, our listeners. Your suggestions drive our show – be it an underrated classic or a forgotten gem. By joining our DMO Union on Patreon, you help us stay independent and ad-free and gain the power to vote on and choose the albums we dive into each year. Let's unearth the treasures of 80s Metal, one listener-powered episode at a time.Suggest an Album → | Support the Mission →Dig Me Out is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit digmeout.substack.com/subscribe

Seriah is joined by Tillie Treadwell. Topics include Tillie's contributions to a new anthology “Weird Time: Exploring the Mysteries of Space and Time”, a personal set of experiences with disappearing/reappearing objects, a cat emerging from pavement, alternate timelines, the Mandella Effect, Jane Roberts's Seth material, dual (different) memories, “The Invisible Gorilla” book, a study revealing inaccurate memories of 9/11, the dangers of tribalism, non-human people, objectivity vs bias, conflict generated for profit, life on Earth as a learning experience, Nikola Tesla and his ideas, Scott Westerfeld and his “Uglies” book series, planned obsolescence, the power of wealth, the story of a virtuous restaurant owner, “Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert Heinlein and a portion explaining human nature, the TV series “Counterpart”, “The Pretzel Logic of Time” by Tillie, the Men in Black movie franchise, the ”Andromeda” TV series, probabilities and alternate timelines, the questions of free will, various concepts of time, the relativity of the perception of time, a youthful senior citizen, attitude and aging, the “suspiciousobservers” youtube channel, the butterfly effect, the importance of minor events, quantum entanglement, a video game analogy for reincarnations, the danger of viewing people as NPCs, “The Weird Walk Home” youtube videos by Tillie, sentience of animals (including bees and fish), plant consciousness, Reddit, a vision of a car crash that prevented it from happening, Seriah's changes in driving and a seemingly fateful incident, the process of moving between possible realities, “maqic”, and much more! Tillie is a rapid-fire, fascinating guest!

Seriah is joined by Tillie Treadwell. Topics include Tillie's contributions to a new anthology “Weird Time: Exploring the Mysteries of Space and Time”, a personal set of experiences with disappearing/reappearing objects, a cat emerging from pavement, alternate timelines, the Mandella Effect, Jane Roberts's Seth material, dual (different) memories, “The Invisible Gorilla” book, a study revealing inaccurate memories of 9/11, the dangers of tribalism, non-human people, objectivity vs bias, conflict generated for profit, life on Earth as a learning experience, Nikola Tesla and his ideas, Scott Westerfeld and his “Uglies” book series, planned obsolescence, the power of wealth, the story of a virtuous restaurant owner, “Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert Heinlein and a portion explaining human nature, the TV series “Counterpart”, “The Pretzel Logic of Time” by Tillie, the Men in Black movie franchise, the ”Andromeda” TV series, probabilities and alternate timelines, the questions of free will, various concepts of time, the relativity of the perception of time, a youthful senior citizen, attitude and aging, the “suspiciousobservers” youtube channel, the butterfly effect, the importance of minor events, quantum entanglement, a video game analogy for reincarnations, the danger of viewing people as NPCs, “The Weird Walk Home” youtube videos by Tillie, sentience of animals (including bees and fish), plant consciousness, Reddit, a vision of a car crash that prevented it from happening, Seriah's changes in driving and a seemingly fateful incident, the process of moving between possible realities, “maqic”, and much more! Tillie is a rapid-fire, fascinating guest! - Recap by Vincent Treewell of The Weird Part PodcastOutro Music is Ghazm with Big Star Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week on America's Podcast, get ready for a wild ride with just us three! We're diving into the classic album "Thunder Seven" by Triumph - will this album leave us spellbound or are we just killing time? No spoilers here, but it's a must-listen for Triumph fans! Our tracks of the week include Mooger "Rainier Fog" by Alice In Chains, Jerry "Angel" by Aerosmith, and a cruise with Marc "Drive Time" by Rik Emmet. And remember, until next week, don't be a stranger in a strange land - fill that Time Cannon with weed and enjoy the journey! #triumph #thunderseven #prog #80s

A stranger in a strange land, in a strange room, with strange customs. And maybe some strange dancing. Eventually it becomes too much and he nopes outta there. The end.19th studio album - Roots to BranchesGet your Talk Tull To Me merch here!Talk Tull To Me Patreon & schedule.Art credit: Burton SilvermanMusic credits: “Bourée” - Jethro Tull"Thrift Shop" - Macklemore & Ryan Lewis"Dangerous Veils" - Jethro Tull"The Navigators" - Jethro Tull"Fylingdale Flyer" - Jethro Tull"Englishman in New York" - Sting Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Deceived Ones is a tale of displacement, a stranger in a strange land, music, and a tale most familiar to fans of a certain bard. In her debut novel, Judith Krummeck brings real places, war, music, and identity to life.  Vira is a talented, but introverted Ukrainian woman who is forced to flee her homeland as Russia invades. She lands in Baltimore with help from the Uniting for Ukraine program, carrying the clothes on her back and her viola da gamba. An assault and the loss of her passport drive Vira to assume the identity of her twin brother Sevastyan, who fights to avoid conscription and follow Vira to the US. Meanwhile, Orson is commissioned to write an opera for the Twelfth Night Festival, but cannot compose; his muse, the equally brilliant soprano Isabella refuses to sing again, for him or anyone else. Vira's musical talents come Orson's way, as she tries to remake herself and navigate a path to a new life.  Based on Twelfth Night, Judith Krummeck discusses The Deceived Ones on the Brown Posey Press Show. A native of South Africa, Krummeck is an essayist, author, and playwright. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts from the University of Baltimore. She is the author of "Beyond the Baobab," an autobiographical series of essays, and "Old New Worlds," a work of historical non-fiction. Her writings have appeared in The Rumpus, Baltimore Fishbowl, and Past Ten. Judith is also the evening drive presenter on classical music radio station WBJC in Baltimore, where she lives with her husband. You can find more about Judith on her website.

Andrew falls from being a ‘stranger in a strange land', to a ‘hunters becoming the hunted' scenario, on today's episode. Game: “Fluxfall Horizon“ Oracle: “GameMaster's Apprentice – Base Deck“ Music: “Celebration” by Alexander Nakarada (www.serpentsoundstudios.com) Licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Subscribe to the podcast here!

Lisa Yaszek, John Kessel, and Robby Soave join us to discuss Robert Heinlein's classic novel Stranger in a Strange Land, about a human being raised by Martians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I suspect I'm not alone when I say that weather extremes in recent growing seasons have made me feel a bit like a stranger in a strange land in my own garden—wondering what will bloom when, and when to do... Read More ›

I suspect I'm not alone when I say that weather extremes in recent growing seasons have made me feel a bit like a stranger in a strange land in my own garden—wondering what will bloom when, and when to do... Read More ›

As of this writing, the world is watching and waiting for Iran, one of the sworn enemies of Israel, to attack the Jewish nation in their ongoing multi-generational hostilities. From its inception, Israel has always been surrounded by enemies as a ‘peculiar people' and a ‘stranger in a strange land'. Being regathered back in 1948 did nothing to end the world's distaste of the Jews, and they have been at war for the past 76 years. Even in Israel now, the Jews feel no peace and security, they on constantly on edge due to their enemies. But as you shall see, this is nothing new for them. On this episode of Rightly Dividing, we are looking at the enemies of the Jews and Israel in the distant past, in the hyper-present of 2024, and in the time of Jacob's trouble which is to come. It will not be until the Millennial Reign of King Jesus, sitting on the throne of David in Jerusalem, that the Jews will finally know what it's like to live in peace. In fact, Zechariah tells us they will be back on top globally. Since there is a fairly good chance that war between Iran and Israel could break out during this live radio Bible study, we will bring you all the breaking news if and when it does. What's that you say? ‘Wars and rumours of wars'? You better believe it, Christian in the end times, so buckle up.

Join Luke, AJ, and Tyler on this exciting episode of Old School Noobs as they dive into a packed agenda of gaming and pop culture discussions! This week, the trio explores the new EA College Football 25, sharing their firsthand experiences and insights from their time playing together. AJ and Tyler also update us on their epic Baldur's Gate 3 campaign, as they near the end of the game. But that's not all! Luke and Tyler talk Age of Empires IV and Fallout 76. Luke wraps up his detailed review of Stranger in a Strange Land, providing his final thoughts on this iconic novel. The episode also features a lively discussion on the latest Marvel and DC movie news. Tune in for an action-packed episode filled with in-depth gaming talk, literary reviews, and the latest in movie news. Don't miss out—hit play and join the conversation with the Old School Noobs!

Join Luke, AJ, and Tyler in Episode 60 of Old School Noobs as they dive into the highly anticipated EA Sports College Football game announcement. They share their gaming experiences with Baldur's Gate 3 and Super Mutant Football League, offering gameplay highlights. The podcast also features lively Minnesota sports banter and a confusing review by Luke of Robert A. Heinlein's classic novel, A Stranger in A Strange Land. Tune in for this eclectic mix of gaming, sports, and literature on Old School Noobs!

We explore the new Apple Intelligence A.I. symbolism which shows us the Apocalypse! The symbolism tells us what occultists like Aleister Crowley have long pursued: the end of the world as we know it. We'll look at symbolism of Apple's use of the symbol of Babalon and her connections to Chaos, Nuit, Hadit and Elon Musk's Grok which connects us into the Luciferian tale of Stranger in a Strange Land. Apple's AI will be the perfected digital consciousness for man becoming enslaved in the matrix. Ray Kurzweil's Singularity mashes up with Crowley's Aeon of Horus and even Isaac Newton's predictions for the end of humanity and here's how we get there:Apple's Lucifeiran logoApple's AI Babalon logoCrowley's Scarlet WomenChaos or Hadit789 symbolismElon Musk's AI WarningsGrok AI- Stranger in a Strange LandBringing it all together- BaphometSPECIAL EVENT: Isaac, Jay Dyer & Jamie Hanshaw Lecture Meet & Greet in Las Vegas June 22nd- Get your tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/jamie-kennedy-jay-jamie-isaac-hollywood-conspiracy-comedy-live-tickets-882418596777?aff=oddtdtcreatorLinks:RELATED EPISODES:9/11 Conspiracy Theories Part 2: Occult Symbolism & Numerology of 9 11 and the Twin Pillars! https://www.illuminatiwatcher.com/9-11-conspiracy-theories-part-2-occult-symbolism-numerology-of-9-11-and-the-twin-pillarsDr Diana Pasulka ENCOUNTERS: Birth of the UFO Religion, A.I. Aliens, Evolution of Man & Sacred Place UFO Debris! https://illuminatiwatcher.com/dr-diana-pasulka-encounters-birth-of-the-ufo-religion-a-i-aliens-evolution-of-man-sacred-place-ufo-debris/*HOT COUPON OFFER- Get into VIP Section at cost! Get 80% off your first month of Tier 1 (or Tier 2) monthly plans! For $1 you can try it out! Use coupon code "badboy" (Limited to first 100 signups and expires last day of June 2024). For more details go here: https://illuminatiwatcher.com/coupon-code-for-80-off-vip-section-limited-to-first-100-people-expires-july-1st-2024/ Wow BOB Wow!  Show sponsors- Get discounts while you support the show and do a little self improvement!*CopyMyCrypto.com/Isaac is where you can copy James McMahon's crypto holdings- listeners get access for just $1WANT MORE?... Check out my UNCENSORED show with my wife, Breaking Social Norms: https://breakingsocialnorms.com/GRIFTER ALLEY- get bonus content AND go commercial free + other perks:*PATREON.com/IlluminatiWatcher : ad free, HUNDREDS of bonus shows, early access AND TWO OF MY BOOKS! (The Dark Path and Kubrick's Code); you can join the conversations with hundreds of other show supporters here: Patreon.com/IlluminatiWatcher (*Patreon is also NOW enabled to connect with Spotify! https://rb.gy/hcq13)*VIP SECTION: Due to the threat of censorship, I set up a Patreon-type system through MY OWN website! IIt's even setup the same: FREE ebooks, Kubrick's Code video! Sign up at: https://illuminatiwatcher.com/members-section/*APPLE PREMIUM: If you're on the Apple Podcasts app- just click the Premium button and you're in! NO more ads, Early Access, EVERY BONUS EPISODE More from Isaac- links and special offers:*BREAKING SOCIAL NORMS podcast, Index of EVERY episode (back to 2014), Signed paperbacks, shirts, & other merch, Substack, YouTube links & more: https://allmylinks.com/isaacw *STATEMENT: This show is full of Isaac's useless opinions and presented for entertainment purposes. Audio clips used in Fair Use and taken from YouTube videos. 

The Constitution Study with Host Paul Engel – Reflecting on Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land," I ponder if one must be raised by aliens to feel like a stranger at home. A 96-year-old D-Day veteran recently expressed feeling like a foreigner in his own country. Do you ever feel this way, as if the America you knew has vanished, replaced by something unfamiliar and foreign?

The Constitution Study with Host Paul Engel – Reflecting on Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land," I ponder if one must be raised by aliens to feel like a stranger at home. A 96-year-old D-Day veteran recently expressed feeling like a foreigner in his own country. Do you ever feel this way, as if the America you knew has vanished, replaced by something unfamiliar and foreign?

Stranger in a strange land. Victor Lams, Lisa Jones, and Jeff Haecker discuss Teal'c's new civilian life; the complex portrayal of love interest and ingénue Krista; plus the several subplots involving the Trust and the Sam and Pete relationship. The post Affinity (SG1) appeared first on StarQuest Media.

On this episode of the Shining Wizards the boys are joined by Lord Crewe, fresh off of his trip to All Japan Pro Wrestling. We talk about debuting at the Champion Carnival, the food, being a stranger in a strange land, Skyline Chill & much more. Matt won't let Slick vs Miss Elizabeth go, so he brings that up, & drops some knowledge about Madusa & her name, which is met with a lot of questions he can't answer. This somehow gets us to Hulk Hogan Japanese Commercials. After a quick break we talk NXT BattleGround, the good, bad & ugly, plus our picks. Handsome Kevin is annoyed with the way people are reacting to Ricochet leaving the WWE & the boys chat it up about him before heading into the land of AEW. Matt is annoyed with the TV this week, especially Dynamite & he doesn't particularly care about Forbidden Door. It's the 28th Anniversary of Kevin Nash debuting on Nitro & with all the free agency talk, Matt ponders, could an impact of Hall & Nash level happen today? We wrap with some chat about the Death of WCW Be Sure to follow Lord Crewe on Social Media https://twitter.com/LordCreweKills Follow the Shining Wizards https://t.co/JxBwhzKl9E --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-shining-wizards/support

On this episode of the Shining Wizards the boys are joined by Lord Crewe, fresh off of his trip to All Japan Pro Wrestling. We talk about debuting at the Champion Carnival, the food, being a stranger in a strange land, Skyline Chill & much more. Matt won't let Slick vs Miss Elizabeth go, so he brings that up, & drops some knowledge about Madusa & her name, which is... The post The Shining Wizards 693: Checking Bags appeared first on Shining Wizards Network.

Sorry for the delay in uploads. ANOTHER COUNTRY and work has been keeping me busier than I thought. But here is the conclusion to my review of STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND by Robert A. Heinlein. One thing I never really talked much about in the review is cannibalism, but that is just a symptom of how much this book has to talk about. 

In this episode I look at the middle third of Robert A. Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. We take a closer look at the word "grok" and its in-world meaning.

In this episode I begin my look at Robert A. Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. We will have a lot to talk about over these three episodes as this is a thematically rich book. The first third of the book is doing a lot of set up and drags at times, but nevertheless this one is worth attempting.

Setti once again joins TENE pod to grok Robert A. Heinlein's novels, Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and their disturbing prescriptions for an unwelcome future. Check out Settembrini's podcast Zock Bock Radio! pesa-nexus (dot) de/category/zock-bock-radio Music: "World of Automatans", "Light Years", and "Midnight Crawlers" by Eric Matyas : www.soundimage.org "in Honor", "Airlock", and "Space Conspiracy" by fesliyanstudios.com Subscribe to patreon.org/tenepod and twitter.com/tenepod.

I am a bit backed up in producing episodes because I am wrangling with two larger novels (STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND and ANOTHER COUNTRY). Hopefully those episodes will be ready next week. For now, we can look at Heinlein's short story "All You Zombies", a time travel story with a trans twist.

Have you ever stumbled upon a melody that catapulted you straight back to your first concert, the lights dimming, heart racing with anticipation? That's the magnetic pull of Tony Smith's music. Celebrating a special three-year anniversary mini-season, we sit down with the extraordinary Tony Smith of Tonyboyy, Teem and Sleeper Agent fame. Savor the infectious "Counting Sheep" from his debut album "Doll Me Up," and join us as we traverse Tony's musical landscape—from the vitality of his live performances to his excursion into corporate design. We'll wax nostalgic about fandom origins, relive the vibrancy of live concerts, and tease the exciting potential of a Sleeper Agent revival.Remember the days when a friend's mixtape could redefine your music taste? Our chat with Tony Smith is a journey back to those formative years, examining how the music of Pixies, the storytelling of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," and the authenticity of "Freaks and Geeks" infused into his own creative ethos. We share candid tales of musical peer pressure, the struggle of conforming to pals' playlists, and the evolution from staunch genre fidelity to embracing the colorful tapestry of all music genres. Stick with us as we unravel the threads of social dynamics that weave into our personal soundtracks and celebrate the liberation that comes with musical omnivorism.Ever considered how a song or movie might influence your life's direction? Diving into profound art and literature, Tony opens up about the spontaneous bursts of creativity that fuel his songwriting process and how pop culture milestones have profoundly shaped his career trajectory. From dissecting the philosophical richness of "Stranger in a Strange Land" to connecting with the teenage angst of "Freaks and Geeks," this episode is a heartfelt exploration of the ties between our favorite media and our very identities. Plus, discover how YouTube's endless well of content has transformed learning and creativity, as we reminisce about the golden age of MTV and the pivotal role of physical media in our lives. Join us for an auditory celebration of the passion, resilience, and shared human experiences that music and art bring into our lives.Buy "Doll Me Up" on Vinyl LP or CD noirincolorcreative.comTony Smith Social Links: IG: @tonyboyy_Twitter/X: @iamtonyboyyTikTok: @iamtonyboyyFB: Tonyboyy Facebook

Have you ever felt like a stranger in a strange land? In this BeWild Files episode of Bewildered, Martha and Ro dive into a question from listener Alia about feeling like an alien when you're among the people you're “supposed to” feel at home with. Tune in to learn how the spirit of community is different from the simple grouping together of people, and how sometimes differences can be a good thing because they enhance the wisdom of the crowd. It's a thought-provoking conversation you won't want to miss! CONNECT WITH US Follow Martha on Instagram The Bewildered Show Notes Follow Ro on Instagram Follow Bewildered on Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SHOW NOTES Well, Hey Framily! Welcome to Coffee & Kathy, this is Stef from the Grief 2 Great Day Podcast.  You are listening to our weekly devotional episode. Grief is the hardest thing you'll ever face, don't ever let anyone diminish that – but let's also not diminish the power of God's Word and the transformational healing He will do in your life. I am a living testimony of going from pitiful (heartbroken, years of tears, angry at God & the world, overwhelmed and confused) to powerful (at peace, joyful and strong in my trust, hope and faith in God).   You are not alone and your today does not have to be your forever!  Oh, I'm so glad you're here today!  What you need to do now is be still and just listen.   Memorable Quote: But I often forget. I forget that this world is not my home. I forget that I am a stranger in a strange land. I forget that I am not living for the here and now but for eternity. I forget to “seek first the Kingdom of God and HIS righteousness”. I forget that many, many of the people around me do not have a personal relationship with God. They have not been forgiven because they have not asked. They have not seen prayers answered because they do not believe. I forget that I have one purpose and one purpose only – to glorify God. This life is not about me. My comfort. My happiness. My successes. Or my failures. My struggles. My needs. This life is not about me. It is a short, temporary journey leading to an eternal home. And that is not just true about me – it is true about every person I meet. Their lives, like mine, are “flowers quickly fading”. And their lives, like mine, are short, temporary journeys that will end in an eternal destination – life with God forever or life separated from Him. My sole purpose in life is to be a gigantic, glowing, flashing sign that says, “God loves you. He wants to be your friend. I know because He says so in His Word, and because He is my friend – let me point the way to Him.”   Grief 2 Great Day Website - Connect with Me Click Here to take Action Now - “The First Year of Grief. How to Survive with Hope and Heal.”    Join The Grief Group for Christian Women on Facebook Read about Monica's entire Journey, Dying to Be Healed - Book - Grief2GreatDay   The Holidays are Over but the Struggle is Not!  Hear healing testimonies from Those Who Have Walked Your Journey!  Holiday Grief Relief Summit (replay recording)   Visit my Church –Opendoor Church | Home  

When Abraham got to the promised land, you'd think he would have built himself a nice, big house to settle down in. But he lived in tents, like a stranger in a strange land, his entire life. Why? He was looking forward to heaven. The promises of God were more real to him than the earth around him. By faith, let's live as strangers in this world. Soon we'll go home and see Jesus.

Visit our website BeautifulIllusions.org for a complete set of show notes and links to almost everything discussed in this episodeSelected References:2:26 - See “Something Went Terribly Wrong With Online Ads” (The Atlantic, 2024) and “Uber's Ad Network Continues To Grow” (Marketing Brew, 2023)4:00 - Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom4:15 - See “The Western Canon” Wikipedia entry12:10 - See “Shakespeare Contra Nietzsche” (Marginalia, 2016)16:41 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 29 - Vacation Part 2: It's A Process from October 202322:35 - See the Great American Novel Wikipedia entry and list22:54 - In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust22:25 - The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein25:30 - Sean M. Carroll25:40 - Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen26:10 - Babel and The Poppy War Trilogy by R.F. Kuang27:55 - Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein31:48 - The Shining novel by Stephen King and The Shining movie directed by Stanley Kubrick33:20 - One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest novel by Ken Kesey and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest movie36:15 - The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub42:40 - The Scream painting by Edvard Munch43:40 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 15 - The Mind of Gatsby: A Look Through the Cognitive Lens from June 202147:25 - Shark Heart by Emily Habeck55:36 - Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction directed by Quentin Tarrantino58:49 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 31 - Life, Art, & Experience: A Conversation, recorded in November 2023 and released in January 2024

Pod Crashing Episode 304 With Aaron Mahnke From Consumed When budding journalist Sarah Simmons finds herself stranded in a small idyllic New England town for a weekend, her unexpected vacation turns into a nightmare she'll never forget. Steeped in history and with whispers of the legends and lore surrounding the woods near the centuries old cemetery, the residents of West Danville, New Hampshire, soon learn that the past is not always meant to be forgotten. Their quiet and tranquil lives will be forever changed and the hope of a future without terror rests on the shoulders of stranger in a strange land who may hold the keys to the past. This is CONSUMED.   Episodes here:   https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-consumed-140402973/ 

Pod Crashing Episode 304 With Aaron Mahnke From Consumed When budding journalist Sarah Simmons finds herself stranded in a small idyllic New England town for a weekend, her unexpected vacation turns into a nightmare she'll never forget. Steeped in history and with whispers of the legends and lore surrounding the woods near the centuries old cemetery, the residents of West Danville, New Hampshire, soon learn that the past is not always meant to be forgotten. Their quiet and tranquil lives will be forever changed and the hope of a future without terror rests on the shoulders of stranger in a strange land who may hold the keys to the past. This is CONSUMED.   Episodes here:   https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-consumed-140402973/ Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/arroe-collins-unplugged-totally-uncut--994165/support.

For this very special 11th anniversary episode, Seriah is joined by Joshua Cutchin and Timothy Renner. They focus on answering questions submitted by patreons. Topics include early history of WDTRG, paranormal origin stories, Coast to Coast AM, Kenneth Ring, UFOs and NDEs, Charles Fort and the process of time, the underground music scene, progress in understanding of the phenomenon, the status of repeat experiencers, the cross-over between Bigfoot/UFO/poltergeist/etc. experiences, Paul Kimbal, high strangeness, dream logic, a bizarre “alien” encounter from Peru in the 1950's, predictions for the future of Fortean research, “Where the Footprints End”, weird experiences surrounding Bigfoot sightings, Stan Gordon, Loren Coleman, Cryptomundo, wilderness poltergeist phenomenon, W.T. Watson, Gettysburg battlefield, places that seem to attract violence and tragedy, Devil's Den, self-generation in paranormal phenomena, the Other's resistance to rules and being pinned down, psycho-kinetic energy, Louis Proud, spontaneous human combustion, expectations and experiences, geography and energy, Paul Devereux, a personal experience for Josh, Site 7, anomalous rock throwing, vocalizations and responses to requests, Minerva Monster, Enfield poltergeist, “Alice Isn't Dead” podcast, encounters in Delaware, Fae disclosure, possibilities of UFO disclosure, government psyops and cover-ups, the ontology of the UFO, an undiscovered bear in India, Robert A. Heinlein's concept of “grokking” , spiritual psychosis, avoiding obsessions, synchronicities, moderation in paranormal research, Jeff Ritzmann, Terence McKenna, Guillermo del Toro, Jeremy Vaeni, the paranormal as a shamanic path, the limits of language, the book “Stranger in a Strange Land”, future projects going into the new year, and much more! This conversation is every bit as fascinating as anyone would expect!

Competition is fierce these days.  The solution, according to marketing experts, is to create a ‘brand story' for your company or your product.Sounds simple.  Until you actually try to do it.And then, well, suddenly you feel like a stranger in a strange land.Staring at blank piece of paper or screen  - or brainstorming with colleagues only to come up with something that by anyone's assessment is pretty generic.  Not exactly what you were hoping for.Today we're talking with Deevo Tindall, a holistic branding strategist and founder of Fusion Creative, which he launched after 15 years of working in a corporate career.In this podcast Deevo will be discussing:- What is ‘holistic branding' and how it can help differentiate your business.- How companies can begin to create their own brand story.- What companies are getting wrong about content creation.- How to stand out in a very ‘noisy' market.USEFUL LINKS:Asianet Consultants:  asianetconsultants.comHow to Land Guest Spots on Podcasts:   seat.fm/podcastcourseConnect with Deevo Tindall:  www.fusioncreativebranding.comFollow Deevo on Social Media:  @FusionPhotogVisit A Seat at The Table's website at https://seat.fm

For this very special 11th anniversary episode, Seriah is joined by Joshua Cutchin and Timothy Renner. They focus on answering questions submitted by patreons. Topics include early history of WDTRG, paranormal origin stories, Coast to Coast AM, Kenneth Ring, UFOs and NDEs, Charles Fort and the process of time, the underground music scene, progress in understanding of the phenomenon, the status of repeat experiencers, the cross-over between Bigfoot/UFO/poltergeist/etc. experiences, Paul Kimbal, high strangeness, dream logic, a bizarre “alien” encounter from Peru in the 1950's, predictions for the future of Fortean research, “Where the Footprints End”, weird experiences surrounding Bigfoot sightings, Stan Gordon, Loren Coleman, Cryptomundo, wilderness poltergeist phenomenon, W.T. Watson, Gettysburg battlefield, places that seem to attract violence and tragedy, Devil's Den, self-generation in paranormal phenomena, the Other's resistance to rules and being pinned down, psycho-kinetic energy, Louis Proud, spontaneous human combustion, expectations and experiences, geography and energy, Paul Devereux, a personal experience for Josh, Site 7, anomalous rock throwing, vocalizations and responses to requests, Minerva Monster, Enfield poltergeist, “Alice Isn't Dead” podcast, encounters in Delaware, Fae disclosure, possibilities of UFO disclosure, government psyops and cover-ups, the ontology of the UFO, an undiscovered bear in India, Robert A. Heinlein's concept of “grokking” , spiritual psychosis, avoiding obsessions, synchronicities, moderation in paranormal research, Jeff Ritzmann, Terence McKenna, Guillermo del Toro, Jeremy Vaeni, the paranormal as a shamanic path, the limits of language, the book “Stranger in a Strange Land”, future projects going into the new year, and much more! This conversation is every bit as fascinating as anyone would expect! - Recap by Vincent Treewell of The Weird Part Podcast Outro Music is Whirring World from Psyche Corporation Download

For those who haven't heard the announcement I just posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a multi-episode look at the Byrds in 1966-69 and the birth of country rock. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode on "My World Fell Down" by Sagittarius. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud at this time as there are too many Byrds songs in this chunk, but I will try to put together a multi-part Mixcloud when all the episodes for this song are up. My main source for the Byrds is Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, I also used Chris Hillman's autobiography, the 331/3 books on The Notorious Byrd Brothers and The Gilded Palace of Sin, For future parts of this multi-episode story I used Barney Hoskyns' Hotel California and John Einarson's Desperadoes as general background on Californian country-rock, Calling Me Hone, Gram Parsons and the Roots of Country Rock by Bob Kealing for information on Parsons, and Requiem For The Timeless Vol 2 by Johnny Rogan for information about the post-Byrds careers of many members. Information on Gary Usher comes from The California Sound by Stephen McParland. And this three-CD set is a reasonable way of getting most of the Byrds' important recordings. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When we left the Byrds at the end of the episode on "Eight Miles High", they had just released that single, which combined folk-rock with their new influences from John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar, and which was a group composition but mostly written by the group's lead singer, Gene Clark. And also, as we mentioned right at the end of the episode, Clark had left the group. There had been many, many factors leading to Clark's departure. Clark was writing *far* more material than the other band members, of whom only Roger McGuinn had been a writer when the group started, and as a result was making far more money than them, especially with songs like "She Don't Care About Time", which had been the B-side to their number one single "Turn! Turn! Turn!" [Excerpt: The Byrds, "She Don't Care About Time"] Clark's extra income was making the rest of the group jealous, and they also didn't think his songs were particularly good, though many of his songs on the early Byrds albums are now considered classics. Jim Dickson, the group's co-manager, said "Gene would write fifteen to twenty songs a week and you had to find a good one whenever it came along because there were lots of them that you couldn't make head or tail of.  They didn't mean anything. We all knew that. Gene would write a good one at a rate of just about one per girlfriend." Chris Hillman meanwhile later said more simply "Gene didn't really add that much." That is, frankly, hard to square with the facts. There are ten original songs on the group's first two albums, plus one original non-album B-side. Of those eleven songs, Clark wrote seven on his own and co-wrote two with McGuinn. But as the other band members were starting to realise that they had the possibility of extra royalties -- and at least to some extent were starting to get artistic ambitions as far as writing goes -- they were starting to disparage Clark's work as a result, calling it immature. Clark had, of course, been the principal writer for "Eight Miles High", the group's most experimental record to date: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"] But there he'd shared co-writing credit with David Crosby and Roger McGuinn, in part because that was the only way he could be sure they would agree to release it as a single. There were also internal rivalries within the band unrelated to songwriting -- as we've touched on, Crosby had already essentially bullied Clark off the guitar and into just playing tambourine (and McGuinn would be dismissive even of Clark's tambourine abilities). Crosby's inability to get on with any other member of any band he was in would later become legendary, but at this point Clark was the major victim of his bullying. According to Dickson "David understood when Gene left that ninety-five percent of why Gene left could be brought back to him." The other five percent, though, came from Clark's fear of flying. Clark had apparently witnessed a plane crash in his youth and been traumatised by it, and he had a general terror of flying and planes -- something McGuinn would mock him for a little, as McGuinn was an aviation buff. Eventually, Clark had a near-breakdown boarding a plane from California to New York for a promotional appearance with Murray the K, and ended up getting off the plane. McGuinn and Michael Clarke almost did the same, but in the end they decided to stay on, and the other four Byrds did the press conference without Gene. When asked where Gene was, they said he'd "broken a wing". He was also increasingly having mental health and substance abuse problems, which were exacerbated by his fear, and in the end he decided he just couldn't be a Byrd any more. Oddly, of all the band members, it was David Crosby who was most concerned about Clark's departure, and who did the most to try to persuade him to stay, but he still didn't do much, and the group decided to carry on as a four-piece and not even make a proper announcement of Clark's departure -- they just started putting out photos with four people instead of five. The main change as far as the group were concerned was that Hillman was now covering Clark's old vocal parts, and so Crosby moved to Clark's old centre mic while Hillman moved from his position at the back of the stage with Michael Clarke to take over Crosby's mic. The group now had three singer-instrumentalists in front, two of whom, Crosby and McGuinn, now thought of themselves as songwriters. So despite the loss of their singer/songwriter/frontman, they moved on to their new single, the guaranteed hit follow-up to "Eight Miles High": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "5D (Fifth Dimension)"] "5D" was written by McGuinn, inspired by a book of cartoons called 1-2-3-4 More More More More by Don Landis, which I haven't been able to track down a copy of, but which seems to have been an attempt to explain the mathematical concept of higher dimensions in cartoon form. McGuinn was inspired by this and by Einstein's theory of relativity -- or at least by his understanding of relativity, which does not seem to have been the most informed take on the topic. McGuinn has said in the past that the single should really have come with a copy of Landis' booklet, so people could understand it. Sadly, without the benefit of the booklet we only have the lyrics plus McGuinn's interviews to go on to try to figure out what he means. As far as I'm able to understand, McGuinn believed -- completely erroneously -- that Einstein had proved that along with the four dimensions of spacetime there is also a fifth dimension which McGuinn refers to as a "mesh", and that "the reason for the speed of light being what it is is because of that mesh." McGuinn then went on to identify this mesh with his own conception of God, influenced by his belief in Subud, and with a Bergsonian idea of a life force. He would talk about how most people are stuck in a materialist scientific paradigm which only admits to  the existence of three dimensions, and how there are people out there advocating for a five-dimensional view of the world. To go along with this mystic view of the universe, McGuinn wanted some music inspired by the greatest composer of sacred music, and he asked Van Dyke Parks, who was brought in to add keyboards on the session, to play something influenced by Bach -- and Parks obliged, having been thinking along the same lines himself: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "5D (Fifth Dimension)"] Unfortunately for the group, McGuinn's lyrical intention wasn't clear enough and the song was assumed to be about drugs, and was banned by many radio stations. That plus the track's basically uncommercial nature meant that it reached no higher than number forty-four in the charts. Jim Dickson, the group's co-manager, pointed to a simpler factor in the record's failure, saying that if the organ outro to the track had instead been the intro, to set a mood for the track rather than starting with a cold vocal open, it would have had more success. The single was followed by an album, called Fifth Dimension, which was not particularly successful. Of the album's eleven songs, two were traditional folk songs, one was an instrumental -- a jam called "Captain Soul" which was a version of Lee Dorsey's "Get Out My Life Woman" credited to the four remaining Byrds, though Gene Clark is very audible on it playing harmonica -- and one more was a jam whose only lyrics were "gonna ride a Lear jet, baby", repeated over and over. There was also "Eight Miles High" and the group's inept and slightly-too-late take on "Hey Joe". It also included a third single, a country track titled "Mr. Spaceman": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Spaceman"] McGuinn and, particularly, Hillman, had some country music background, and both were starting to think about incorporating country sounds into the group's style, as after Clark's departure from the group they were moving away from the style that had characterised their first two albums. But the interest in "Mr. Spaceman" was less about the musical style than about the lyrics. McGuinn had written the song in the hopes of contacting extraterrestrial life -- sending them a message in his lyrics so that any aliens listening to Earth radio would come and visit, though he was later disappointed to realise that the inverse-square law means that the signals would be too faint to make out after a relatively short distance: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Spaceman"] "Mr. Spaceman" did better on the charts than its predecessor, scraping the lower reaches of the top forty, but it hardly set the world alight, and neither did the album -- a typical review was the one by Jon Landau, which said in part "This album then cannot be considered up to the standards set by the Byrds' first two and basically demonstrates that they should be thinking in terms of replacing Gene Clark, instead of just carrying on without him." Fifth Dimension would be the only album that Allen Stanton would produce for the Byrds, and his replacement had actually just produced an album that was a Byrds record by any other name: [Excerpt: Gene Clark, "So You Say You've Lost Your Baby"] We've looked at Gary Usher before, but not for some time, and not in much detail. Usher was one of several people who were involved in the scene loosely centred on the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean, though he never had much time for Jan Berry and he had got his own start in the music business slightly before the Beach Boys. As a songwriter, his first big successes had come with his collaborations with Brian Wilson -- he had co-written "409" for the Beach Boys, and had also collaborated with Wilson on some of his earliest more introspective songs, like "The Lonely Sea" and "In My Room", for which Usher had written the lyrics: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "In My Room"] Usher had built a career as a producer and writer for hire, often in collaboration with Roger Christian, who also wrote with Brian Wilson and Jan Berry. Usher, usually with Christian, and very occasionally Wilson wrote the songs for several of American International Pictures' Beach Party films: [Excerpt: Donna Loren, "Muscle Bustle"] And Usher and Christian had also had bit parts in some of the films, like Bikini Beach, and Usher had produced records for Annette Funicello, the star of the films, often with the Honeys (a group consisting of Brian Wilson's future wife Marilyn plus her sister and cousin) on backing vocals. He had also produced records for the Surfaris, as well as a whole host of studio-only groups like the Four Speeds, the Super Stocks, and Mr. Gasser and the Weirdoes, most of whom were Usher and the same small group of vocalist friends along with various selections of Wrecking Crew musicians making quick themed albums. One of these studio groups, the Hondells, went on to be a real group of sorts, after Usher and the Beach Boys worked together on a film, The Girls on the Beach. Usher liked a song that Wilson and Mike Love had written for the Beach Boys to perform in the film, "Little Honda", and after discovering that the Beach Boys weren't going to release their version as a single, he put together a group to record a soundalike version: [Excerpt: The Hondells, "Little Honda"] "Little Honda" made the top ten, and Usher produced two albums for the Hondells, who had one other minor hit with a cover version of the Lovin' Spoonful's "Younger Girl". Oddly, Usher's friend Terry Melcher, who would shortly produce the Byrds' first few hits, had also latched on to "Little Honda", and produced his own version of the track, sung by Pat Boone of all people, with future Beach Boy Bruce Johnston on backing vocals: [Excerpt: Pat Boone, "Little Honda"] But when Usher had got his version out first, Boone's was relegated to a B-side. When the Byrds had hit, and folk-rock had started to take over from surf rock, Usher had gone with the flow and produced records like the Surfaris' album It Ain't Me Babe, with Usher and his usual gang of backing vocalists augmenting the Surfaris as they covered hits by Dylan, the Turtles, the Beach Boys and the Byrds: [Excerpt: The Surfaris, "All I Really Want to Do"] Usher was also responsible for the Surfaris being the first group to release a version of "Hey Joe" on a major label, as we heard in the episode on that song: [Excerpt: The Surfaris, "Hey Joe"] After moving between Capitol, Mercury, and Decca Records, Usher had left Decca after a round of corporate restructuring and been recommended for a job at Columbia by his friend Melcher, who at that point was producing Paul Revere and the Raiders and the Rip Chords and had just finished his time as the Byrds' producer. Usher's first work at Columbia was actually to prepare new stereo mixes of some Byrds tracks that had up to that point only been issued in mono, but his first interaction with the Byrds themselves came via Gene Clark: [Excerpt: Gene Clark, "So You Say You've Lost Your Baby"] On leaving the Byrds, Clark had briefly tried to make a success of himself as a songwriter-for-hire in much the same mould as Usher, attempting to write and produce a single for two Byrds fans using the group name The Cookie Fairies, while spending much of his time romancing Michelle Phillips, as we talked about in the episode on "San Francisco". When the Cookie Fairies single didn't get picked up by a label, Clark had put together a group with Bill Rinehart from the Leaves, Chip Douglas of the Modern Folk Quartet, and Joel Larson of the Grass Roots. Just called Gene Clark & The Group, they'd played around the clubs in LA and cut about half an album's worth of demos produced by Jim Dickson and Ed Tickner, the Byrds' management team, before Clark had fired first Douglas and then the rest of the group. Clark's association with Douglas did go on to benefit him though -- Douglas went on, as we've seen in other episodes, to produce hits for the Turtles and the Monkees, and he later remembered an old song by Clark and McGuinn that the Byrds had demoed but never released, "You Showed Me", and produced a top ten hit version of it for the Turtles: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "You Showed Me"] Clark had instead started working with two country singers, Vern and Rex Gosdin, who had previously been with Chris Hillman in the country band The Hillmen. When that band had split up, the Gosdin Brothers had started to perform together as a duo, and in 1967 they would have a major country hit with "Hangin' On": [Excerpt: The Gosdin Brothers, "Hangin' On"] At this point though, they were just Gene Clark's backing vocalists, on an album that had been started with producer Larry Marks, who left Columbia half way through the sessions, at which point Usher took over. The album, titled Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers, featured a mix of musicians from different backgrounds. There were Larson and Rinehart from Gene Clark and the Group, there were country musicians -- a guitarist named Clarence White and the banjo player Doug Dillard. Hillman and Michael Clarke, the Byrds' rhythm section, played on much of the album as a way of keeping a united front, Glen Campbell, Jerry Cole, Leon Russell and Jim Gordon of the Wrecking Crew contributed, and Van Dyke Parks played most of the keyboards. The lead-off single for Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers, "Echoes", is one of the tracks produced by Marks, but in truth the real producer of that track is Leon Russell, who wrote the orchestral arrangement that turned Clark's rough demo into a baroque pop masterpiece: [Excerpt: Gene Clark, "Echoes"] Despite Clark having quit the band, relations between him and the rest were still good enough that in September 1966 he temporarily rejoined the band after Crosby lost his voice, though he was gone again as soon as Crosby was well. But that didn't stop the next Byrds album, which Usher went on to produce straight after finishing work on Clark's record, coming out almost simultaneously with Clark's and, according to Clark, killing its commercial potential. Upon starting to work with the group, Usher quickly came to the conclusion that Chris Hillman was in many ways the most important member of the band. According to Usher "There was also quite a divisive element within the band at that stage which often prevented them working well together. Sometimes everything would go smoothly, but other times it was a hard road. McGuinn and Hillman were often more together on musical ideas. This left Crosby to fend for himself, which I might add he did very well." Usher also said "I quickly came to understand that Hillman was a good stabilising force within the Byrds (when he wanted to be). It was around the time that I began working with them that Chris also became more involved in the songwriting. I think part of that was the fact that he realised how much more money was involved if you actually wrote the songs yourself. And he was a good songwriter." The first single to be released from the new sessions was one that was largely Hillman's work. Hillman and Crosby had been invited by the great South African jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela to play on some demos for another South African jazzer, singer Letta Mbulu. Details are sparse, but one presumes this was for what became her 1967 album Letta Mbulu Sings, produced by David Axelrod: [Excerpt: Letta Mbulu, "Zola (MRA)"] According to Hillman, that session was an epiphany for him, and he went home and started writing his own songs for the first time. He took one of the riffs he came up with to McGuinn, who came up with a bridge inspired by a song by yet another South African musician, Miriam Makeba, who at the time was married to Masekela, and the two wrote a lyric inspired by what they saw as the cynical manipulation of the music industry in creating manufactured bands like the Monkees -- though they have both been very eager to say that they were criticising the industry, not the Monkees themselves, with whom they were friendly. As Hillman says in his autobiography, "Some people interpreted it as a jab at The Monkees. In reality, we had immense respect for all of them as singers and musicians. We weren't skewering the members of the Monkees, but we were taking a shot at the cynical nature of the entertainment business that will try to manufacture a group like The Monkees as a marketing strategy. For us, it was all about the music, and we were commenting on the pitfalls of the industry rather than on any of our fellow musicians." [Excerpt: The Byrds, "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?"] The track continued the experimentation with sound effects that they had started with the Lear jet song on the previous album. That had featured recordings of a Lear jet, and "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?" featured recordings of audience screams. Those screams were, according to most sources, recorded by Derek Taylor at a Byrds gig in Bournemouth in 1965, but given reports of the tepid response the group got on that tour, that doesn't seem to make sense. Other sources say they're recordings of a *Beatles* audience in Bournemouth in *1963*, the shows that had been shown in the first US broadcast of Beatles footage, and the author of a book on links between the Beatles and Bournemouth says on his blog "In the course of researching Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth I spoke to two people who saw The Byrds at the Gaumont that August and neither recalled any screaming at all, let alone the wall of noise that can be heard on So You Want To Be A Rock 'n' Roll Star." So it seems likely that screaming isn't for the Byrds, but of course Taylor had also worked for the Beatles. According to Usher "The crowd sound effects were from a live concert that Derek Taylor had taped with a little tape recorder in London. It was some outrageous crowd, something like 20,000 to 30,000 people. He brought the tape in, ran it off onto a big tape, re- EQ'd it, echoed it, cleaned it up and looped it." So my guess is that the audience screams in the Byrds song about the Monkees are for the Beatles, but we'll probably never know for sure: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?"] The track also featured an appearance by Hugh Masekela, the jazz trumpeter whose invitation to take part in a session had inspired the song: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?"] While Hillman was starting to lean more towards folk and country music -- he had always been the member of the band least interested in rock music -- and McGuinn was most interested in exploring electronic sounds, Crosby was still pushing the band more in the direction of the jazz experimentation they'd tried on "Eight Miles High", and one of the tracks they started working on soon after "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?" was inspired by another jazz trumpet great. Miles Davis had been partly responsible for getting the Byrds signed to Columbia, as we talked about in the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man", and so the group wanted to pay him tribute, and they started working on a version of his classic instrumental "Milestones": [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Milestones"] Sadly, while the group worked on their version for several days -- spurred on primarily by Crosby -- they eventually chose to drop the track, and it has never seen release or even been bootlegged, though there is a tiny clip of it that was used in a contemporaneous documentary, with a commentator talking over it: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Milestones (TV)"] It was apparently Crosby who decided to stop work on the track, just as working on it was also apparently his idea. Indeed, while the biggest change on the album that would become Younger Than Yesterday was that for the first time Chris Hillman was writing songs and taking lead vocals, Crosby was also writing more than before. Hillman wrote four of the songs on the album, plus his co-write with McGuinn on "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?", but Crosby also supplied two new solo compositions, plus a cowrite with McGuinn, and Crosby and McGuinn's "Why?", the B-side to "Eight Miles High", was also dug up and rerecorded for the album. Indeed, Gary Usher would later say "The album was probably 60% Crosby. McGuinn was not that involved, nor was Chris; at least as far as performing was concerned." McGuinn's only composition on the album other than the co-writes with Crosby and Hillman was another song about contacting aliens, "CTA-102", a song about a quasar which at the time some people were speculating might have been evidence of alien life. That song sounds to my ears like it's had some influence from Joe Meek's similar records, though I've never seen McGuinn mention Meek as an influence: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "CTA-102"] Crosby's growing dominance in the studio was starting to rankle with the other members. In particular two tracks were the cause of conflict. One was Crosby's song "Mind Gardens", an example of his increasing experimentation, a freeform song that ignores conventional song structure, and which he insisted on including on the album despite the rest of the group's objections: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mind Gardens"] The other was the track that directly followed "Mind Gardens" on the album. "My Back Pages" was a song from Dylan's album Another Side of Bob Dylan, a song many have seen as Dylan announcing his break with the folk-song and protest movements he'd been associated with up to that point, and his intention to move on in a new direction: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "My Back Pages"] Jim Dickson, the Byrds' co-manager, was no longer on speaking terms with the band and wasn't involved in their day-to-day recording as he had been, but he'd encountered McGuinn on the street and rolled down his car window and suggested that the group do the song. Crosby was aghast. They'd already recorded several songs from Another Side of Bob Dylan, and Fifth Dimension had been their first album not to include any Dylan covers. Doing a jangly cover of a Dylan song with a McGuinn lead vocal was something they'd moved on from, and he didn't want to go back to 1964 at the end of 1966. He was overruled, and the group recorded their version, a track that signified something very different for the Byrds than the original had for Dylan: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "My Back Pages"] It was released as the second single from the album, and made number thirty. It was the last Byrds single to make the top forty. While he was working with the Byrds, Usher continued his work in the pop field, though as chart pop moved on so did Usher, who was now making records in a psychedelic sunshine pop style with acts like the Peanut Butter Conspiracy: [Excerpt: The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, "It's a Happening Thing"] and he produced Chad and Jeremy's massive concept album Of Cabbages and Kings, which included a five-song "Progress Suite" illustrating history from the start of creation until the end of the world: [Excerpt: Chad and Jeremy, "Editorial"] But one of the oddest projects he was involved in was indirectly inspired by Roger McGuinn. According to Usher "McGuinn and I had a lot in common. Roger would always say that he was "out of his head," which he thought was good, because he felt you had to go out of your head before you could really find your head! That sums up McGuinn perfectly! He was also one of the first people to introduce me to metaphysics, and from that point on I started reading everything I could get my hands on. His viewpoints on metaphysics were interesting, and, at the time, useful. He was also into Marshall McLuhan; very much into the effects of electronics and the electronic transformation. He was into certain metaphysical concepts before I was, but I was able to turn him onto some abstract concepts as well" These metaphysical discussions led to Usher producing an album titled The Astrology Album, with discussions of the meaning of different star signs over musical backing: [Excerpt: Gary Usher, "Leo"] And with interviews with various of the artists he was working with talking about astrology. He apparently interviewed Art Garfunkel -- Usher was doing some uncredited production work on Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends album at the time -- but Garfunkel declined permission for the interview to be used. But he did get both Chad and Jeremy to talk, along with John Merrill of the Peanut Butter Conspiracy -- and David Crosby: [Excerpt: Gary Usher, "Leo"] One of the tracks from that album, "Libra", became the B-side of a single by a group of studio musicians Usher put together, with Glen Campbell on lead vocals and featuring Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys prominently on backing vocals. "My World Fell Down" was credited to Sagittarius, again a sign of Usher's current interest in astrology, and featured some experimental sound effects that are very similar to the things that McGuinn had been doing on recent Byrds albums: [Excerpt: Sagittarius, "My World Fell Down"] While Usher was continuing with his studio experimentation, the Byrds were back playing live -- and they were not going down well at all. They did a UK tour where they refused to play most of their old hits and went down as poorly as on their previous tour, and they were no longer the kings of LA. In large part this was down to David Crosby, whose ego was by this point known to *everybody*, and who was becoming hugely unpopular on the LA scene even as he was starting to dominate the band. Crosby was now the de facto lead vocalist on stage, with McGuinn being relegated to one or two songs per set, and he was the one who would insist that they not play their older hit singles live. He was dominating the stage, leading to sarcastic comments from the normally placid Hillman like "Ladies and gentlemen, the David Crosby show!", and he was known to do things like start playing a song then stop part way through a verse to spend five minutes tuning up before restarting. After a residency at the Whisky A-Go-Go where the group were blown off the stage by their support act, the Doors, their publicist Derek Taylor quit, and he was soon followed by the group's co-managers Jim Dickson and Eddie Tickner, who were replaced by Crosby's friend Larry Spector, who had no experience in rock management but did represent Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, two young film stars Crosby was hanging round with. The group were particularly annoyed by Crosby when they played the Monterey Pop Festival. Crosby took most lead vocals in that set, and the group didn't go down well, though instrumentally the worst performer was Michael Clarke, who unlike the rest of the band had never become particularly proficient on his instrument: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star (live at Monterey)"] But Crosby also insisted on making announcements from the stage advocating LSD use and describing conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination: [Excerpt: David Crosby on the Warren Commission, from the end of "Hey Joe" Monterey] But even though Crosby was trying to be the Byrds' leader on stage, he was also starting to think that they maybe didn't deserve to have him as their leader. He'd recently been spending a lot of time hanging out with Stephen Stills of the Buffalo Springfield, and McGuinn talks about one occasion where Crosby and Stills were jamming together, Stills played a blues lick and said to McGuinn "Can you play that?" and when McGuinn, who was not a blues musician, said he couldn't, Stills looked at him with contempt. McGuinn was sure that Stills was trying to poach Crosby, and Crosby apparently wanted to be poached. The group had rehearsed intensely for Monterey, aware that they'd been performing poorly and not wanting to show themselves up in front of the new San Francisco bands, but Crosby had told them during rehearsals that they weren't good enough to play with him. McGuinn's suspicions about Stills wanting to poach Crosby seemed to be confirmed during Monterey when Crosby joined Buffalo Springfield on stage, filling in for Neil Young during the period when Young had temporarily quit the group, and performing a song he'd helped Stills write about Grace Slick: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Rock 'n' Roll Woman (live at Monterey)"] Crosby was getting tired not only of the Byrds but of the LA scene in general. He saw the new San Francisco bands as being infinitely cooler than the Hollywood plastic scene that was LA -- even though Crosby was possibly the single most Hollywood person on that scene, being the son of an Oscar-winning cinematographer and someone who hung out with film stars. At Monterey, the group had debuted their next single, the first one with an A-side written by Crosby, "Lady Friend": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Lady Friend"] Crosby had thought of that as a masterpiece, but when it was released as a single, it flopped badly, and the rest of the group weren't even keen on the track being included on the next album. To add insult to injury as far as Crosby was concerned, at the same time as the single was released, a new album came out -- the Byrds' Greatest Hits, full of all those singles he was refusing to play live, and it made the top ten, becoming far and away the group's most successful album. But despite all this, the biggest conflict between band members when they came to start sessions for their next album wasn't over Crosby, but over Michael Clarke. Clarke had never been a particularly good drummer, and while that had been OK at the start of the Byrds' career, when none of them had been very proficient on their instruments, he was barely any better at a time when both McGuinn and Hillman were being regarded as unique stylists, while Crosby was writing metrically and harmonically interesting material. Many Byrds fans appreciate Clarke's drumming nonetheless, saying he was an inventive and distinctive player in much the same way as the similarly unskilled Micky Dolenz, but on any measure of technical ability he was far behind his bandmates. Clarke didn't like the new material and wasn't capable of playing it the way his bandmates wanted. He was popular with the rest of the band as a person, but simply wasn't playing well, and it led to a massive row in the first session: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Universal Mind Decoder (alternate backing track)"] At one point they joke that they'll bring in Hal Blaine instead -- a reference to the recording of "Mr. Tambourine Man", when Clarke and Hillman had been replaced by Blaine and Larry Knechtel -- and Clarke says "Do it. I don't mind, I really don't." And so that ended up happening. Clarke was still a member of the band -- and he would end up playing on half the album's tracks -- but for the next few sessions the group brought in session drummers Hal Blaine and Jim Gordon to play the parts they actually wanted. But that wasn't going to stop the bigger problem in the group, and that problem was David Crosby's relationship with the rest of the band. Crosby was still at this point thinking of himself as having a future in the group, even as he was increasingly convinced that the group themselves were bad, and embarrassed by their live sound. He even, in a show of unity, decided to ask McGuinn and Hillman to collaborate on a couple of songs with him so they would share the royalties equally. But there were two flash-points in the studio. The first was Crosby's song "Triad", a song about what we would now call polyamory, partly inspired by Robert Heinlein's counterculture science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. The song was meant to portray a progressive, utopian, view of free love, but has dated very badly -- the idea that the *only* reason a woman might be unhappy with her partner sleeping with another woman is because of her mother's disapproval possibly reveals more about the mindset of hippie idealists than was intended. The group recorded Crosby's song, but refused to allow it to be released, and Crosby instead gave it to his friends Jefferson Airplane, whose version, by having Grace Slick sing it, at least reverses the dynamics of the relationship: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Triad"] The other was a song that Gary Usher had brought to the group and suggested they record, a Goffin and King song released the previous year by Dusty Springfield: [Excerpt: Dusty Springfield, "Goin' Back"] Crosby was incandescent. The group wanted to do this Brill Building pap?! Hell, Gary Usher had originally thought that *Chad and Jeremy* should do it, before deciding to get the Byrds to do it instead. Did they really want to be doing Chad and Jeremy cast-offs when they could be doing his brilliant science-fiction inspired songs about alternative relationship structures? *Really*? They did, and after a first session, where Crosby reluctantly joined in, when they came to recut the track Crosby flat-out refused to take part, leading to a furious row with McGuinn. Since they were already replacing Michael Clarke with session drummers, that meant the only Byrds on "Goin' Back", the group's next single, were McGuinn and Hillman: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Goin' Back"] That came out in late October 1967, and shortly before it came out, McGuinn and Hillman had driven to Crosby's home. They told him they'd had enough. He was out of the band. They were buying him out of his contract. Despite everything, Crosby was astonished. They were a *group*. They fought, but only the way brothers fight. But McGuinn and Hillman were adamant. Crosby ended up begging them, saying "We could make great music together." Their response was just "And we can make great music without you." We'll find out whether they could or not in two weeks' time.

Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, we have a short story about prepping called "Blood, Soil, & Frozen TV Dinners" by Matthew Dougal. It's a parody about two right-wing preppers who are faced with a collapse in society. After the story, there's an interview with the author about prepping mentalities and writing. This episode was reposted from the Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness podcast. The story can be read at tangledwilderness.org. Host Info Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery Reader The Reader is Bea Flowers. If you would like to hear Bea narrate other things, or would like to get them to read things for you check them out at https://voicebea.wixsite.com/website Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Theme music The theme song was written and performed by Margaret Killjoy. You can find her at http://birdsbeforethestorm.net or on twitter @magpiekilljoy Transcript Live Like the World is Dying: “Blood, Soil, & Frozen TV Dinners” with Matthew Dougal **Inmn ** 00:16  Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today, Inmn Neruin, and today we have something a little different. I host another podcast called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness where every month we take a zine that Strangers puts out and turn it into an audio feature and do an interview with the author. We had a two-part feature called Blood, Soil, and Frozen TV Dinners by Matthew Dougal, and it is a short story about prepping from a very strange perspective, that of two right-wing preppers facing a mysterious collapse of society. This short story is a parody and I promise that the two main pov characters are not the heroes of the tale. It's a fun story and I do an interview with Matthew afterward about prepping mentalities, fiction, and other neat stuff. If you like this episode, check out my other podcast that this is featured from. I did not re-record the outro, so you'll get a little taste of Margaret playing the piano, because she wrote the theme music for the Strangers podcast. You'll also get to hear our wonderful reader, Bea Flowers narrate the story. Follow along with the transcript or at Tangledwilderness.org where you can read all of our featured zines for free. But before all of that, we are a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts and here's a jingle from another show on that network.  [sings a simple melody] **Bea ** 02:49 “Blood, Soil, & Frozen TV Dinners” by Matthew Dougal. Read by Bea Flowers. Published by Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness.  Katie sat, wide-eyed, beneath the kitchen table and hugged her knees to her chest. She was shaking, vibrating visibly. Tanner put his finger to his lips and prayed that her silent tears would remain just that. There was no time to stop and calm her down. Not again. He moved slowly around the kitchen, fumbling through cupboards and pulling out pre-wrapped packages of food. Always be prepared. Tanner had practiced this before things went dark, but it was different doing it for real. His hands hadn't been so shaky, back then.  A noise, on the porch. His body froze before his mind registered the sound. Tanner dropped into a crouch and crossed the room to the window, willing every cell in his body to radiate confidence toward his baby girl. His hand found the Glock 17 at his belt and he brought it up in front of him, the familiar feel of the grip reassuring. He took a breath, steadied himself, and raised his eyes to the level of the windowsill. The muscles in his thighs steeled and he remained, unblinking, utterly still, staring out into the darkness.  After thirty or forty nerve-twanging seconds, Tanner drew breath and relaxed. His quads were burning, and they thanked him as he straightened. He could hear the specter of his ex-wife in his head, telling him to lose some weight, exercise more… Well she'd left, and that was 135 pounds gone right there. She'd probably say that was a good start.   An unbearably loud ringing pierced the silence and sent him diving to the floor, landing awkwardly on his gun and sounding a crash through the kitchen. A keening whine came from under the table, Katie shaken from her silence.  The doorbell.  Feeling foolish, Tanner twisted over his shoulder and hissed at his daughter to be quiet. Still prone, he crawled toward the hallway in the most reassuring manner he could manage and pointed his Glock at the front door.  Footsteps outside, then a shadow appeared at the window. Tanner's heart pounded in his ears—more violent pulses of silence than sound—and his vision blurred as panic flooded his body. He'd heard the early reports of armed groups in the streets, some sort of fighting downtown, but he hadn't really believed they would come here. His legs were weak, and he silently thanked God that he was already on the floor. The shape at the window didn't move, frozen in the gloom, silhouetted by flickering light coming from the street. As Tanner's head cleared he tried to take stock of what was happening.  The apparition was vaguely man-shaped but shorter and slighter, an ethereal grace evident even in its stillness. A voice called out, muffled through the door, the guttural singsong completely at odds with the sleek form at the window. Tanner couldn't understand everything, but he thought he caught the words “little girl.” A second shape mounted the porch alongside the first, similarly short but squat and stocky, and grunted something to its companion in an alien tongue. Fluorescent light flooded the yard and the voices momentarily disappeared beneath the growl of an angry engine. Tanner's breath caught. His trembling finger hovered over the trigger and he willed the barrel to still its swaying dance. Two shots exploded outside—loud shots, from a much bigger gun than his. The creatures spun to face this new threat, their chatter rising in pitch and speed. They sounded panicked.  “yalla! hawula' alnaas majnoon.” Tanner sensed his opportunity. He was forgotten. All those hours of training kicked in and muscle memory took over as he rose to one knee, took a two-handed grip, and unleashed a furious hail of fire at his front door.  “Keep your filthy hands off my daughter!” He fired until he felt the Glock stop kicking, the magazine spent. As the cacophony faded he realized he was screaming.  “Tanner! It's me, Blake. Stop shooting goddammit, they're gone.”  “Blake?” Tanner mechanically reloaded his gun. “Why…” His throat was raw, his voice barely audible even to him. He swallowed, fighting to control his breath, and cleared his throat. “What are you doing here?”  “Come to see if you were okay. Figured you and the kid might need a hand.”  A stocky, heavily muscled figure wearing fatigues and a plate carrier stepped up to the porch, visible through the splintered ruins that had been the front door. A halogen glow lanced through the holes, like the brilliant aura of some kind of avenging eagle.  “When this shit spread across the river from the city we locked down. It was touch-and-go for a while, but things quieted down eventually. When they did, I came straight over. Good thing I got here when I did. The quick little fuckers ran for it, but I think you hit one of ‘em.”  The figure stopped, pulled down the red, white and blue bandana covering its mouth, and spat. Tanner had never been more relieved to see his buddy's foul-mouthed face. Or his M1A SOCOM 16 rifle.  “We're alright.” Tanner's voice was exhausted, his body shivering as the adrenaline fled. “Thank God I was prepared. Still, it's good to see you.”  “Prepared, shit.” His buddy grinned. “I been telling you for years to get something heavy duty.” Blake kicked the splintered remains of the door and his grin faded. “You can't stay here. Those things'll be back. Grab your girl and jump in the truck. Let's head to mine, she'll be safe there.” The grin returned.“Prepared, shit.”  An hour later they were sitting in “the Hole,” as Blake affectionately called it. The Hole was both name and description, although it perhaps undersold the amount of effort that had gone into its construction. Attached to the garage by a short, downward-sloping corridor, The Hole was a full-blown bunker that spread underneath almost the entirety of Blake's backyard. Tanner was sitting in the main chamber eating Top Ramen, chicken flavor.  They had made the half-mile journey in silence—lights down on the Tacoma, Tanner jumpy, Blake grim, Katie in a state of shock. The streets had looked completely foreign, the usual calming glow of LEDs replaced by the orange flicker of scattered flames. The familiar hum of traffic had been gone. Instead, gunfire had cracked in the distance.  Blake's wife Lauren had buzzed them inside after Blake confirmed his identity via video feed—three times: at the gate, the door, and the entrance to the Hole. The security was impressive. Lauren had ushered them inside, AR-15 at the ready. “This is prepared,” Blake was saying, as Katie stared blankly at her untouched ramen. “Old owners, they had this backyard full of fruit trees, vegetables, fuckin' kale and kohlrabi. What good is that gonna do, I said, you gonna hide in the pumpkin patch with a slingshot? Idiots.  “Anyhow me and Lauren, we wanted to be ready, so I been building this the last two years. Ain't no one knows about it, not even the contractors…” Blake sliced a finger across his throat, then laughed, “I'm joking, but they were from one of them Mexican countries. Had no idea what they were building. Good workers, though, came here the right way. And I did the security all myself.”  Tanner laughed too, but at what he didn't quite know. “You took this all real serious.”  “Yessir. You never really believed, but we did. Earl Swanson was right, this here's been a long time coming. It's just like he said, and we listened. And here we are, while you was laying on the floor waving round that little waterpistol of yours.”  Tanner had listened too, but apparently not well enough. There was only so much time he could watch an angry man on TV shouting about the state of the nation, no matter how prophetic he was turning out to be. Tanner tried to put up a strong front and flex his knowledge. He had listened, dammit.  “Is this it, then? The invasion? Earl said they've been preparing it for years, brainwashing people. Recruiting sympathizers and traitors…”  “It's worse than that. The invasion started way back, we just didn't notice. Well, most of us didn't. Earl did. He tried to warn us, that the aliens'd started infiltrating, landing in remote parts of the country, blending in, looking just like us…” Blake spat. “Well, not quite like us. But close e-fucking-nough, hiding out and biding their time.” “And now it's out in the open…” Tanner looked from his friend's face to his daughter's, scared and staring, and trailed off. He may have been listening, but he sure as hell didn't understand.  “What's happening?” Tanner asked. “We've been laying low at home, locked down and trying to wait out whatever this is. We haven't heard a thing since the power cut out three days back.”  He could feel a surge of emotion building, pent-up adrenaline and stress and fear and loneliness rolling over him in a wave as they were released. His stoicism wobbled.  “We're… Katie's scared and confused, and tired and sick of hiding and we're all alone! What is all this? What's happening?” Tanner realized he was shouting and stopped, taking a deep breath and lowering his voice. “Blake, man, what the hell is going on?” Blake never flinched, just ran his tongue over his teeth in thought while he watched Tanner's outburst through hooded eyes. “Naw, we don't know nothing for sure. Swanson's been off-air for two days, since just after shit started going down. Said he was right, that it sure as shit seemed like those aliens he'd been warning us about were making a move, and the whole fuckin' lot of us did nothing. Well, seems like it blew up in our face. Last thing he said was he's heading somewhere safe to keep broadcasting, and he'd let us know when he found out more,” Blake paused, sucked his teeth, “We've had the TV and radio on non-stop since then, since we fired the generator up. Nothing.”  Lauren lent forward. “There was something, couple days back…”  “Nothing useful,” Blake cut in. He spat. “Same old fuckin' commie stations, same old crap. They took over the channels, emergency broadcasting. Said there was a ‘protest.' Stay inside, all under control, daddy government's here, blah blah,” he laughed “Hell of a protest. More like an insurrection. Doublespeak bullshit.”  “So what's the plan? We hide out? Lay low? Wait for the military?”  “The troops ain't coming, chief.” Blake grimaced, “Alien tentacles go deep. Probably strolling around in general's stars by now, the politicians just handing over the keys. This President'll have us kissing their feet before dinner.  “Nah, if we wanna fight back we can't rely on that fuckin' bunch of secretaries and scribes. We hole up here, wait for instructions.” He laughed again, “Huh, hole up in the Hole. That's funny.”  That grin was starting to get on Tanner's nerves. “Instructions from who? How long is that gonna take? Who's gonna fight back against… this?” “I know some people, from back in the old days. Good people. There's still patriots out there who won't give up this country without a fight.”   Tanner still bristled with questions, but he was starting to feel relieved. There were people in charge, and they had a plan. That was something he could work with. “What if it takes weeks? Months? Do we have food for that long?” Blake settled further into his chair, grinned that cocky grin. “I do, don't know about you.” Before the words were even out of his mouth he was already raising his palms, “Chill out, I'm joking. I'll put it on your tab. You're a lawyer, I know you're good for it. Show him, babe.”  Lauren got up and went over to a large yellow flag hanging on the concrete wall, pulling it aside to reveal a long, narrow room that ended abruptly at a large steel door. She flicked on the light.  “Dry storage,” she said, gesturing at the shelves lining both walls. Packets of ramen, boxes of cereal, rows of whiskey, and gleaming stacks of cans stared down at Tanner. “And cold storage,” Lauren continued as she stepped over to the door, kicking aside two enormous tubs of supplements and pulling it open to reveal a walk-in freezer. Tanner followed her inside as she happily chatted away, showing everything off like a house-proud hen.  “We've got everything we need. Steaks, hotdogs, chili, hamburgers, mac and cheese, chicken parmesan, mashed potatoes--whatever you want. There's a well, too, over the other side, we had that dug last summer. Tastes a bit funny, but it won't hurt you.” Tanner was hardly listening. He had never seen anything like it, never imagined anything on this scale. Blake really had taken preparing for the end of the world seriously. The freezer room was filled, wall to wall, with a treasure trove of gourmet excess; thousands upon thousands of frozen TV dinners.  Tanner stared at his microwaved salmon filet, fries drooping from his fork. Out of habit he was eating in front of the TV with Katie, though the display hadn't changed in… however many days it had been. Just the red, white and blue logo, a tile flipping between ads for pillows, brain pills, and frozen food, and the same scrolling red banner:  Breaking: The United States of America is under attack. Stand by for updates.  Katie was poking at her food silently, barely eating. Still no appetite. Tanner had told her they were safe, told her he wasn't going to let anyone hurt her, told her a hundred times in different ways that she was his precious little girl and he would make sure she was okay. It had made no difference. She had just looked up at him with big, frightened eyes that pulled at Tanner's heart. The only time she had spoken in the past 24 hours was to ask why he had tried to shoot people. Of course she didn't understand. Maybe he should ask Lauren to talk to her.  The TV display glitched, blipped, flicked to static and then to black. Tanner shoveled the fries into his mouth and rubbed his eyes. He'd been staring at a blank TV for too long. He chewed and stretched, squeezing his eyes shut and trying to straighten out his aching back.  Earl Swanson was on TV. Tanner blinked a few times to make sure he was seeing straight. Swanson's shirt was wrinkled, his hair a mess and his signature bowtie slightly crooked, but his face wore that familiar expression of righteously indignant bewilderment. It was him.  “Blake. Blake, get in here!”  Swanson was in what looked like a large living room rather than his usual studio. Bookshelves and a TV cabinet were visible behind him. There were shadows under his eyes and his wrinkles were clearly visible without his usual TV makeup, but his eyes were as sharp as ever. There was a strength to them, piercing the screen, full of faith and fire. It felt like he was in the room. He looked like he'd been in a fight, and won. He was back.  “Good evening America, and welcome to Earl Swanson Tonight.” “Blake!” Blake stuck his head through the door.  “What? I'm working out, give me a…. No shit.” Blake stepped into the room. He was topless, breathing heavily. His stomach was shiny with sweat, pooling and running down the chiseled channels between his well-defined muscles before disappearing behind the low-riding waistband of his camo pants. Tanner realized he was staring and felt his cheeks flush as he snapped his eyes back to his friend's.  “Blake, it's--” “Shut up, I'm trying to listen.” The rebuke slapped Tanner back to the present and back to the TV. He surreptitiously sat a little straighter and sucked in his gut, trying to ignore the heat rising in his face. “...cities up and down the west coast. From Seattle to San Diego, the alien invaders and the traitors from among our own citizens have taken control, sowing chaos and destruction. Order has broken down, and anarchy rules in the streets. Yet we hear nothing but silence from the White House. The elites in Washington won't do anything about this -- they encouraged it. They caused it! “No, it is up to patriotic Americans to stop this existential threat. It is up to us, to you and me and the other patriots out there. If you value the American way of life, if you respect the principles that built the greatest nation ever imagined, if you care about your family and the future of your children, then the time has come to stand up. Your country needs you.  “I have been warning about this day on this very program for years. If you have been listening, you will be prepared for this betrayal. You know what to do. Find other true Americans who are ready to fight for our civilization and our culture. Defend our Western values against this attack by anarchists and aliens who wish to destroy us. They tried to take our guns from us, to disarm us, and failed -- now is the time to use them. Seek out the prepared, the militias, the heroes. Fight back. Show them that we will not allow it. “I will be moving to an undisclosed safe location so I can keep you informed. You know your job. I am doing my part, will you do yours?” Swanson sat erect and defiant, no less commanding for his disheveled appearance. His willpower flowed from the screen in waves, washing over the watchers. It was compelling. It was urgent. It was the only option.  The screen went black.  Swanson's gaze bored into Tanner long after the TV went dark, burning with righteous fire, lip curling with fury. The heat in Tanner's cheeks sharpened, focused, began to spread into his chest and throughout his body. There was only one thought in his mind. “We gotta go.” It took him a second to realize that Blake had spoken the words out loud.  “We do. But where? I don't know anyone like that.” “You know me, and I know people. Don't worry about that. We gotta go to Baker City. I talked to one of my buddies from the marines this morning, he's headed to join one of the militias out east. They might not be big, but they're hard. They're something.” Tanner looked at Blake blankly, unable to quite comprehend what he was being told. Days of no news, no action, now everything all at once.  “But what's in Baker City? Don't you know anyone here? This is where we live, where we have the Hole, where we have a safe base.”  Blake was clearly agitated, shifting from foot to foot.  “It's not safe. Weren't you listening? It's fallen. The military ain't doing jack, like I fuckin' told you they wouldn't.” Blake stopped bouncing and steadied himself. “But my buddy said the boys in Baker held out. It was bloody, but they held strong. If we can get there in a hurry, we can join a caravan heading for Boise.”  “Baker… Boise? What the… Boise?! Surely it's safer in Texas, or… or…”  “Texas? And how far away is that? Look, I don't know nothing about nothing, but I know I ain't looking for safer. All I know is I got buddies in Baker, and they say Boise, and they are the fuckin' resistance. We got our orders, soldier. “The west had been invaded. Destroyed. Gone. You heard Swanson, same as me. Grids are down, water's down, TV's down--mostly, anyway. Sky's half full of fire and smoke, gangs roaming the streets, traitors and aliens taking or breaking whatever they can get their thieving hands on.” Tears came to Blake's eyes.  “It's a fucking mess out there, buddy. Anarchy. They've burned the lot.” It was a lot to chew on. Tanner put a piece of salmon in his mouth.  “I'm not gonna let some filthy aliens take my home, fuck my wife, invade my country, and steal the god damn US of A! The fight is right there, and I'm gonna fight it. Are you?”  Tanner's brain was spinning, but his blood was still hot from Swanson's speech. Blake's fire, delivered standing there half-naked like a Steven Seagal action figure, was rousing something inside him. His country needed him, and he felt the call in his bones. He put down his fork. He swallowed. He rose.  “Of course I'll fight. I'll put a bullet in every alien who steps foot on American soil. I'll put every collaborator in the dirt.” He saw himself, next to Blake, riding shotgun as they made a fighting escape through the streets. He saw a heroic journey to Baker City, filled with danger and righteous violence. He saw a triumphant return, at the head of an army, cleansing his city with purifying flame. And he saw Katie, small and fragile and beautiful. Perfect, and terrified. The flame wavered.  “But I'm fighting for her,” Tanner gestured, “I got my little girl, and I'm not so red-hot on riding out guns blazing to meet these savages with her hanging off my arm. She's the future of this country, and that's a future we have to protect.”  To Tanner's surprise, Blake took a half step back.  “Shit. I know, man. Katie and Lauren, the innocent and the pure. I'm thinking of them, too.” He dropped his shoulders, but held Tanner's gaze. “But it's not safe for them here neither. We're on our own, and all hell has broken loose up top. We fight for them, and they are the reason we have to fight.” Tanner paused, then nodded. He reached out and placed his hand on his friend's shoulder, fingers gripping the sweaty skin.  “Let's go pack the truck.”  As the sun set and twilight brought a low fog creeping across the city, they piled into the Tacoma with as many frozen dinners as they could carry.  Tanner rode in back. Lauren was up front, AR at the ready, while Blake drove, M1A by his side and his Glock taped to the dash. Katie was at Tanner's side, curled up below the window and hidden from view, and Tanner watched over her with his own Glock and a borrowed Remington 870. They were all a little jumpy. He and Lauren had wanted to maintain a shoot-on-sight policy. Blake had been more cautious. According to Swanson, there would be plenty of people collaborating with the aliens. Lights out, engine low, and hopefully they could slip right on by.  No one knew what to expect—Tanner suspected they were all terrified. He certainly was. Even Blake had swapped out his flag bandana for a more understated camo print. He had stashed the red, white and blue fabric in the bed of the truck with the rest of their gear.     They pulled out into streets Tanner knew, but didn't. He had driven them every day, on the way to work, to Katie's school, to church, to the mall. The streets were as familiar as a cold Coke, yet now, in some important way, they were… different. As they left the Hole and drove through the suburb he couldn't quite put his finger on it, but once Blake reached the main street and turned past the bars and shops and take-out joints, it hit him.  The streets were dead. The cars were gone. The steady flow of traffic, of people living their lives, had stopped. The parking lot in front of the drug store was empty; so was the one behind the bar. The convenience store, normally ticking over with a steady stream of customers buying cigarettes and beer, was dark behind its windows. Unintelligible graffiti in some alien script covered the ads for energy drinks, an expression of mindless violence across someone's hard work.  A light rain had started, misting around them and adding to the dreariness. A billboard loomed overhead, the lights that illuminated the Colgate-bright smiles of the models now permanently dark. Tanner was glad—the gloom obscured the flame-scarred destruction streaking the toothpaste company's perfect white message. “Disgusting,” Blake spat. He looked like he wanted to say more but pulled up short, shocked at the sudden sound of his own voice. His eyes focused back on the road and he fell into uneasy silence. The truck continued its crawl down the deserted street, barely clocking 20 miles an hour. Even at that speed, the low growl of the engine seemed unbearably loud as it reverberated among the carcasses of commerce and ricocheted down abandoned side streets.  They kept driving, and nothing kept happening. It was torturous. Every minute of unbroken inactivity twisted the crank on the tension in the car, until the unceasing hum of the engine began to seep into Tanner's brain. Every muscle in his arms and legs, primed and waiting and ready to spring, began to tremble, and his eyes focused and unfocused on nothing at all.  His frantic heartbeat messed with his breathing, a powerful panicked thud that matched the rumble of the pistons.  Overall, he was relieved when the road curved and they entered a strip of restaurants to see signs of life among the debris littered across the street in the distance.  It wasn't immediately clear through the gloom what was happening. Blake slowed the truck, now rolling along at barely more than walking pace, and they crept closer. The scene was illuminated by the flickering light of small fires and backlit by a pair of enormous floodlights, creating a glowing aura in the surrounding mist. Images began to resolve, ghostly figures flitting in and out of view and the harsh geometric shapes—not of debris, but of hastily manufactured barricades—throwing long shadows that lanced through the air around them as they approached.  All eyes were fixed on the barricades as they pulled within shouting distance, and Tanner nearly pissed himself when someone knocked on his window. He yelped, Blake swore, and Lauren's weapon x-rayed Tanner's head and pointed at the intruder. Tanner followed her lead and jerked his gun up to aim in the general direction of the window and for ten, twenty heartbeats nothing moved. Then another knock, and Blake hissed at them: “Put those things away you idiots, we're the good guys here. Whatever side that guy is on, so are we.”  Tanner slowly lowered the gun, then the window.  “Hey folks, no cars through here.” The man was clad head to toe in black—black jeans, black hoodie, black gloves, black bandana covering his face, black curly hair running with rainwater. No wonder they hadn't seen him. The stranger spotted their guns.  “Oh, nothing like that,” he added, catching the nervous energy in the truck, “You're a bit late to the party. No trouble ‘round here, this area's been cleaned out for days.” He chuckled, sending a shiver through Tanner.  “Some folks messed up the cop shop a while back, it was a bit of a fight. Streets were all blocked up anyway, so we set up a little kitchen here. Been feeding some folks. Symbolic, like, new world in the ruin of the old and all that.” The smile fell from his face as he took in the scene in the truck.  “Everything alright? Is she okay?”  He gestured at Katie, curled up and quivering silently beside Tanner. Tanner opened his mouth to respond, but Blake was quicker. “Sure, probably just spooked by that fucking mask. Look, we don't mean to bother you people. Just heading east, trying to cross the river. We'll go around you and your little kitchen.”  If the man took issue with Blake's tone, it didn't show.  “Bridge is a no-go, I'm afraid. Pigs blew the cables as they pulled out, some of it collapsed. It's way too unstable to cross.” He scratched at his temple. “What d'you want out that way, anyway? There's dangerous people out there, not exactly safe for… families.”  “We're heading for, uh, Hood River,” Tanner spoke up, “Taking supplies out to the girl's grandparents.”  “Indians,” Blake chimed in, “they need the help.” He winked at Tanner.  The stranger turned to Blake and met his eyes, holding his gaze for an unnerving moment. Then he seemed to resolve some internal discussion, relaxing his shoulders. “Well, you might be able to get across up St. Johns, last I heard the bridge was still intact. There's some folks in the park up there, you can ask them.”  “St. Johns? That's the wrong fucking way!”  “A bridge is a bridge. It's that or swim, champ.” “Can you at least call the, uh, your boss? Tell him you checked us out, ask if we can get across?”  The man smiled, but something hardened behind his eyes.  “My boss? Sure, sure. Look, I think it's time you moved on. Head on up there and tell ‘em what you told me, they'll let you out. There's a bunch of poor Indians waiting for their dinner.”  There was something strange about the way the man said “Indians,” but he patted the hood of the truck and turned away, waving them down a side street away from the barricade. As Blake slowly drove off, Tanner collapsed back into his seat and quickly rolled up the window. His underarms were cold with sweat, and he relaxed muscles he hadn't known were clenched.  Blake took the turn the stranger indicated, muttering that if he heard anyone say “folks” again he would hit them. Tanner stared out the window at the “little kitchen” as they passed. There must have been a couple hundred people, milling around a dozen or so small fires. They were all loosely centered around a large tent directly in front of the scorched skeleton of the precinct. Laughter and music drifted through the open window, and Tanner closed it. He didn't think he could see any aliens, but it was difficult to tell in the dark.  “Collaborators. Must be a ration station or something,” he muttered, mostly to himself.  Lauren heard him. “No, this has been going on much longer than that, it just wasn't so out in the open. Swanson warned us about it. He said they lure hungry people in with food.”  “Yeah,” cut in Blake, “this is how they recruit ‘em. Set up a kitchen, give ‘em food, homeless and crackheads and queers, mostly. Drugs too, probably, and spewing their propaganda. That guy was probably one of the junkies. Sure as shit looked like it, you see the way he stared at me?”  Tanner shuddered. A junkie. He had an overwhelming urge to wash his hands. He remembered the way the man had talked about the police station, his manic laugh in the face of such violence, and glanced back at the quickly fading light. And saw a small figure, tottering at the edge of the firelight. A child.  “Disgusting,” he said out loud.  “Yeah, disgusting. It's like Earl said,” Blake continued, “they been feeding people right under our fucking noses.”  They drove on toward the bridge. The streets were more cluttered here, both with people and the remnants of the riots, and they could only manage a slow pace as they picked their way through the destruction. Blake had to swerve to the wrong side of the road to avoid a group of people carrying trash bags, picking through the rubble.  “Looking for something to eat,” he grunted, and locked the doors.  Signs of violence were everywhere. Tanner's chest tightened as they drove past the law firm where he had started his career—the job that had brought him to the city after he finished college, working for his father's best friend and learning his profession. Inside the shattered windows it was nothing but a shell, the desks overturned and the computers gone. No one would be working there any more.  The destruction was completely random. Violence for its own sake. Beside the firm was a pawn shop, covered in graffiti and looted. Next to that, a Vietnamese restaurant, completely unharmed except for ‘Delicious, 5 stars' sprayed on the pavement outside. Across the road was an untouched convenience store and a bookshop with its doors wide open, light flooding out and people crowding the entrance. A donut shop and an Apple store destroyed, a mechanic and a bar looking like they had simply closed for the night. There was absolutely no pattern or reason to it.  They saw a Fred Meyers with every window broken, the front door jammed open with a twisted shopping cart. A movement caught Tanner's eye and he saw someone leaving from a side door, carrying a huge bag of stolen food. He hoped Blake didn't see—he might do something stupid, and Tanner didn't want to stop. It wasn't safe.  They made it a few more blocks when Lauren gasped and grabbed Blake's arm, making him brake. She gestured across the intersection to a KFC. Half the building had collapsed in what must have been an enormous fire; the half that still stood had been savagely attacked. She pointed to the entrance with a shaking finger. Someone—or something—had toppled the giant bucket sign and sent it crashing through the ceiling of the kitchen. Above the door, someone had scrawled a message in red spray paint:  FUCK YOU SANDERS OUR SECRET SPICES NOW There were more barricades set up near the bridge. Where the others had been makeshift, marking a boundary, these were more serious. They were to stop people getting through. Blake slowed before they got too close to the blockade, which they could now see was lined by shapes that very much suggested people. On both sides of the road the land fell away into darkness, sloping down to become a park that ran beneath the bridge.  The park itself, a rare green space normally dotted with dog walkers and children, was transformed. The once-quiet lawns were a mass of tents and makeshift structures, stages and bars and sound systems, the proud trees now decked out with effigies and lights. Fires burned everywhere, and the distant space was carpeted with a swarming mass of humanity, undulating to a throbbing cacophony of noise.  “This doesn't look good,” said Blake. He pulled over, a hundred yards or so short of the bridge.  “That guy said they would let us through,” said Tanner, “if we stick to our story.”  “He was a junkie,” scoffed Lauren.  “But he thought we were working with them,” said Tanner, “he had no reason to lie to us.”  “I guess it's worth a try. Anyway, they ain't gonna try anything against this much firepower.” Blake grunted. “Too late to change our minds now. They've seen us.”  He nodded at the barricade, where two shapes had detached from the mass. They moved toward the Tacoma, and Blake responded by flicking the lights to high beam and heading to meet them. As Blake swung back out into the road the beams cut through the darkness to illuminate the figures, throwing wild shadows from the two shapes until the truck steadied course and they coalesced into recognisable forms. One was a large man, white, with a nose ring and a loosely-tied blond ponytail. He was wearing a plaid shirt and carrying a large rifle. The other—Tanner's throat caught—the other looked like one of the aliens.  “Shit,” said Blake, as the headlights picked out at least half a dozen more shapes along the barricade, several with big guns visible. “Fuck.” He stopped the truck and rolled down the window, then cursed again and threw open the door.  “I'll be fucked if I'm gonna sit here and be pulled over like some criminal. Tanner, you're with me—let's go meet them man to man.” Tanner scrabbled for the door handle and chased after Blake, half-skipping to catch up. They pulled up a few paces before colliding with the approaching party. The blond man stepped forward.  “How's it going, dude?” he said.  “We need to get to Hood River,” said Blake, “we're trying—” “Yeah, we heard.” The man cut him off. “Bridge is closed to traffic, unfortunately. You wanna cross, you'll have to walk.”  Blake bristled. “Are you joking? We need to bring all this stuff. It's… important,” he objected. “You can't just keep people here!”  “We could,” said the blond man, calmly. He sounded confident in his assertion. Looking at the line of men—and women, Tanner realized—standing along the barricade, he agreed.  “But we're not,” the man continued. “You can go wherever you want. Take your shit, cross the bridge. Some folks have organized buses up the river, they'll take you. But the truck stays.”  “But that's my fucking truck!” Blake squealed. The man's eyebrows shot up and Tanner laid a hand on Blake's shoulder, squeezing it and hoping he got the message. The stranger paused, then sighed.  “Look, I'm sorry dude. I love my truck, too. But there was an attack at another camp last night by these so-called freedom fighters,” he grimaced. “Militia wackjobs, really. Word is they are gathering across the river, and we can't risk weapons and vehicles falling into the wrong hands. Especially not an arsenal like you folks got here.”  The alien stepped forward and, much to Tanner's surprise, spoke in perfect American English.  “Don't worry, it'll be here when you get back. We'll take real good care of it for you. They will appreciate the help guarding the buses and I'm sure they'll be more than happy to help you move these… important supplies.”  They signaled to the group at the barricade and two more figures made their way into the light of the truck's high beams. The first was a slim Black man in fatigues, wearing a red beret at a jaunty angle and carrying a AR-style rifle in one hand. The other was a woman, tall and imposing. She wore a leather jacket over a long black dress, which was slit to the thigh to reveal hints of slim, bare legs that stretched from the pavement to the heavens. Tanner blinked rapidly and swallowed. He had always had a soft spot for long legs in thigh-slit dresses.  As they came closer the man nodded at Tanner and Blake, but he was not what held their attention. The woman with the legs from God was also rocking a luxurious mustache that would have put Teddy Roosevelt to shame. As Tanner's eyes bulged, she caught his gaze and winked.  “Hello, boys. I'm Sunshine, they/them. I'll be with you on the bus.”  Tanner didn't know how to react. A fuzzy memory bounced around in the back of his head. “An investigation on college campuses found that increasing numbers of American citizens are using pronouns.” Earl's bewildered face frowned, then puckered. “These ‘theys' and ‘thems' are making a mockery of the American tradition, seeking to spread their insidious ideology among good, hard-working citizens, brainwashing young Americans into adopting these ‘pronouns.' What's next, people identifying a different age? A different race? We need to speak out against this perverse trend and most importantly, keep them away from our children.” _ That was it. These were the pronouns Swanson had warned them about. He gripped his gun and glanced at Blake, trying to get his mental footing.  Blake looked shocked, too, but quickly pulled himself together. He threw Tanner a sly look, one that hinted at an idea. “Give us a minute,” he snapped, and pulled away from Tanner, back to the truck. When they were both inside he turned on the occupants with a spark in his eyes.  “They must be talking about my boys, alive and kicking,” the old grin was back, his excitement barely contained. “Must have set up in the woods. We'll head over and find ‘em. Maybe they got word from Earl. If they're here, and they're fighting, maybe we don't have to go all the way to Boise after all.” “What's going on?” Lauren looked confused.  “We're leaving the truck. Grab the shit, cross the bridge, hijack their fucking commie-wagon and strike out east. Either we find them in Baker, or our boys find us first.”  Tanner was still coming to grips with the situation. “What about… them?” he said.  “Who?” “They… them. In the dress, with the pronouns!”  “And what are they going to do, stop us? You ever tried to fight wearing something like that? No. The four of us, across the bridge, grab the bus, easy.” “Katie's not hijacking any bus. She's eight, for God's sake. Maybe she and Lauren should stay here…”  “You stay here with Katie,” Lauren snapped, cutting Tanner off. “If you think it's safer, if you're looking for safer, you take her for a nice walk in the park down there. I'll be with my husband, taking my country back from these freaks.”  “I know you want to keep Katie safe,” Blake added, almost apologetically, “but you saw what it's like out there. You heard Swanson's warnings. These aren't people, they're animals, aliens. She's your baby fuckin' girl, man. You do what you're at peace with, but my wife sure as shit ain't staying here to get felt up by some dick in a dress.”  Tanner looked at Lauren. “But she's just a kid! What if she gets hurt.”  “What if she gets hurt _here? So you look after her. Be a man,” Lauren spat back.    Blake clapped Tanner on the shoulder and held his gaze. “It's do or die time, soldier. Let's get the fuck outta here, hook up with the resistance, then bring back the fury of God and freedom and the USA to take back this city and liberate my God damn truck!” Tanner looked at Katie, curled up in the footwell, and wanted to object. He wanted to take her somewhere safe, back to the Hole, where it was warm and they could hide from the aliens and the bad people and they had all the food they could need and they could wait for this all to be over.  But the fire in his belly wouldn't let him. He knew Blake was right, he knew that he should be ashamed of his moments of weakness. He saw Lauren gripping her rifle and staring at Blake with faith and devotion in her eyes and he knew that was the kind of man he wanted to be. Tanner breathed a silent promise to keep Katie safe, no matter the cost.  “Let's do it.” Blake pulled the truck up to the group of guards and they all piled out, Tanner standing straight and feeling tall, Blake's words ringing in his ears. It's do or die time. _ Two of the barricade guards came over to help them unload while the others stood around and watched, their mustachioed escort who made Tanner's skin crawl and the large blond man. Traitor. They stripped off the tray covering and began shifting gear, Blake and blondie up above handing packages down to everyone else. Tanner heard the guards muttering to each other.  “Holy shit, that's a lot of firepower.” The blond man snorted. “And a lot of nasty-ass TV dinners. Important supplies, my ass.”  Sunshine shrugged. “Folks eat what they eat. Not everyone lives in a Whole Foods and learned to make Tom Yum on their gap year,” they rebuked him. The man grimaced and scratched his jaw. “Yeah, right. That was unfair of me. Well, Thai cooking workshop tomorrow and I'll make a big pot, so at least folks here don't have to eat that frozen stuff… unless they want to.” They busied themselves unloading, bundling food and weapons into bags or tying them together for ease of carrying. Tanner was tying the straps of his backpack and settling it on his back when he heard a curse from the back of the truck. He glanced up, and, frozen in time, watched the next few seconds helplessly.  The blond man had pulled out one of the last few satchels, the one containing all their spare clothes. He was standing upright, arms held out, nose ring quivering in silent outrage. In his left hand he had Blake's flag bandana; in his right, Blake's spare jacket, rebel flag patch sitting proudly on the shoulder.  Blake reacted fastest. He dropped the food he was holding, raised his Glock, and with a vengeful crack the blond ponytail exploded in a spray of red.  The man in the beret raised his rifle and fired two shots into Blake's chest, sending him flying from the tray. A scream burst from Lauren as she reached for her gun, but the alien matched the sound and met her with a powerful tackle, sending both of them crashing into a pile of frozen hamburgers. Sunshine reached out and grabbed Tanner's arm. Time snapped back into motion for Tanner. He instinctively pulled away and shook his arm free of the grasping fingers. Stepping back, he spun and swung his fist in a wild roundhouse. It connected with Sunshine's jaw as they overbalanced toward him. Tanner watched them collapse in a heap. His gaze danced over the chaos unfolding around him, frantically searching for Katie. _There. Tanner picked her up and ran.  They plunged off the road and into the darkness. There was only one thought in his mind: get Katie across that bridge. She was sobbing, shaking in his grasp, and Tanner made what he hoped were comforting shushing noises as he ran. He knew this park—there was a staircase inside one of the support towers that rose from the park to the bridge overhead. That was his way out. Holding Katie tightly, breath ragged, he ran toward the orgy of light and noise pulsating below.  The two escapees burst into the mass of people. Tanner looked around, eyes darting, taking in the madness and trying to get his bearings. The sensory assault was overwhelming, but he slowly made out patterns in the polyrhythmic press. What had looked from above like a continuous swell of humanity was actually a hundred, a thousand separate groups and camps and parties. People flowed freely between them, groups forming and merging and coming apart in a chaotic, everchanging anarchy. A makeshift stage to his left throbbed with bass, colliding with the bone-jarring screams and guitars of a group of punks. Tanner found himself surrounded by ecstatic dancers, while a group almost under his feet sat staring into a campfire, oblivious to the rest of the world. He crashed through their doped-out reverie and bounced off two men, locked in a hungry embrace.  Tanner recoiled and turned away, shielding Katie with his body, searching desperately for the tower that would lead him out of this nightmare. Lights flashed, blinding, creating a sort of slideshow of horror as Tanner scanned the crowd. There. He found it. His escape from this festival of the damned. He soldiered on, caught up in a whirl of half-naked dancers, men, women, and everyone else, mindless of the frigid air as they span and writhed in rapture.  Tanner spotted an exit, an island of calm, and dove for it. He exploded from the throng, gasping for air, and breathed in the relative silence. Collecting himself, he was faced with rows of bodies, still, staring at something unseen up ahead, the very air trembling with collective anticipation.  A voice shattered his uneasy reprieve, loud and bombastic and dripping with drama.  “And now, my darlings, it is time for these fuckers to do what I do best—go down!” Tanner dashed through the crowd as they roared and surged into motion, and caught a glimpse of the scene ahead: two lines of people, straining on thick ropes, as a woman in lingerie and feathers pranced like a princess of hell before them. The ropes led upwards, where they were tied around the necks of two enormous metal figures. Lewis and Clark.  Tanner broke into a full sprint, shouldering bodies aside. He was almost there. Up ahead, rising from the chaos, was his stairway to the heavens. His legs trembled and his breath came in ragged sobs, but he couldn't slow down. Not when he was so close. He tore out of the crowd and into the comforting darkness of the spaces in between. His hysterical panic began to subside. One foot in front of the other. Keep running. They were going to make it. As he neared the tower a figure came into view at the base, looming from the shadows of the doorway, staring into the blackness beyond. A stocky, muscled figure wearing fatigues and a plate carrier. It couldn't be… “Blake! Blake, thank God.” Tears welled in Tanner's eyes as he reached his friend. Lauren was nowhere to be seen, but right now Tanner couldn't think about her. He had survived, and he had brought Katie through. His heartbeat was still frantic, but from exertion rather than fear. They were here. He, Katie, and Blake. Emotionally exhausted, physically spent, battered and terrified, but alive. They were going to be okay. He reached out to his friend. Blake turned—No, not Blake. A thick black beard engulfed the shadowy face, momentarily lit by the glowing ember of a huge cigar. The eyes were deep-set and dark, the skin weathered, wrinkled, brown. The face of an illegal alien.  Tanner's throat betrayed him. He squeaked, and nothing more would come out. His knees wobbled and threatened to give way, his feet froze in place. He wavered. He whimpered.  Puffing on the cigar, the alien took in his terrified face and the little girl slung over his shoulder. He gestured toward the doorway and blew out an enormous plume of smoke.  “Go, gringo.”  It was well past midnight when Katie ran into the side of a tent, fell on her bottom, and started crying. They had crossed the bridge, left the highway, and headed for the safety of the forest. Since then they had been wandering among the trees for hours, directionless, driven by fear, then by hope, then exhausted aimlessness. Tanner wasn't going anywhere except away from that park. He had briefly entertained the image of finding a group of militia, sitting around a fire, eating and laughing and, maybe, swapping stories with their old friend Blake. That was hours ago. Visions were fleeting in the fever dream of the forest. Since then, they had walked because they didn't know what else to do. Tanner stumbled over to Katie and collapsed beside her, holding her close and hushing her. He felt like crying too.  A flashlight clicked on inside the tent and a dreadlocked head poked out of the flap.  “Hey, there's someone here!” Rustling erupted from all around and more faces appeared. “Wasn't someone keeping watch?” “I thought you were.” “Doesn't matter, doesn't matter. Someone's crying.” “You folks okay?” Tanner and Katie were soon surrounded by a small group of people. He looked up at them. “Are you the militia?” “No, don't worry. You're safe here. We're friends.” “Although I guess we are a militia if you think about it. Sort of.”  “Shh, don't confuse the poor people. They're terrified.”  “Sorry. No, no militia. Someone get them a blanket and something to drink.” Minutes later, Tanner and Katie were wrapped in sleeping bags, sipping on hot cocoa. It was scalding and familiar and Tanner felt the tension of the past day fading, leaving bone-deep exhaustion in its place.  “Are you okay? What happened?” “Thank you. We were… we just need to sleep.”  “And you? What's your name? Are you alright?” Katie looked at her dad, then stared up from her tin mug. “I'm Katie. I'm scared.” “You're safe now. We'll help you. Look, we'll get you somewhere to sleep.” The first face they had seen rummaged around in a tent and brought out a bag. “Lucky we have a spare tent. I'll just put it up, won't be a second.” The tent was almost up by the time Tanner and Katie finished their drinks, and they got up and walked over, sleeping bags over their shoulders, holding hands. “Hey, thanks,” Tanner said. “I would have helped but I don't really know how. Never had much call for camping. I am, uh, was a lawyer,” he glanced around, “not criminal, uh… intellectual property. Copyright.”  “No problem, of course. Here, it's not hard. I'm just clipping the…” “This isn't the time for camping lessons, Jacob. Anyway, you'll scare the man, sharing information for free like that. They've been through enough already.”  “Sorry, yeah. Look, slide in. Take these sleeping mats. It'll do for tonight, I'll teach you tomorrow.”  Tanner and Katie squeezed into the tent, sleeping bags huddled together on the cold, hard ground, and slept. THE END **Inmn ** 1:03:01 Hello, and welcome to the show. Thank you so much for coming on today. Could you introduce yourself with your name, pronouns, and just a little bit about what you do in the world? **Matt ** 1:03:15 Yeah, hi, I'm Matt. He/him pronouns. And I'm a student again, after a really long time, actually, which is why I've just moved to where I'm living now. But I like to write, you know, mostly for me, and this is the first first thing I've published but I enjoy it. And yeah, I'm really grateful that you've taken an interest in it. **Inmn ** 1:03:37 Yeah, totally. I love the story. So we just listened to the second half of your story, Blood, Soil and Frozen TV Dinners and even though listeners just heard...just heard the whole story, I'm wondering if you could just kind of like walk us through the story in your--you know, from the mouth of the author--what is this story about? **Matt ** 1:04:01 So the story, for me, was about, to some extent, seeing yourself in some ways or, you know, people like you, through the eyes of...through the eyes of someone else, I guess, someone who's very different and might see things in a different way. So I always find it interesting to play with different perspectives or different characters instead of telling the story from a heroic perspective or something. And I wondered what a pathway to a better world might look like from someone who didn't necessarily want that to happen. So we have these, you know, preppers who--call them you want, right-wing conservatives, something like this--and what they might think, given the knowledge that they receive about the world, what they might think is happening when something happens that a lot of the rest of us might want. **Inmn ** 1:05:00 Yeah, totally. I really like how you put that. What was it, like, "a better world that they don't necessarily want?" [both laugh] Okay, well, how did this, how did this story kind of...like how did it come to be? What inspiration did you kind of draw from to craft this situation or these like personalities from Tanner and Blake or Earl Swanson? 1:05:35 Yeah, the story itself, there was a discussion last Halloween, I believe it was, on Coffee With Comrades, there was a interview with Pearson and Margaret Killjoy, talking about the discussion of the monster in literature, which is where I first took the idea that they were talking about seeing yourself as the monster in this idea and sometimes reveling in that or perhaps enjoying it. And that was where the first idea came from. And then the most specific layout of the story or main theme, I guess, was, I was doing something on the US Tax Office website. And there's this whole section for aliens, right, if you're an alien in the U.S., these are the tax rules you need to follow. And I just thought it was a funny word. You know, I'd seen it on Fox News or something before but it just struck me as really weird in such an official position. Yeah, and I just was playing with the ideas of this and, you know, I like thinking about utopias and things. And this is where the like the main shape of the story had come from, just the idea of seeing the monster, seeing the alien from there. And then specific characters, I mean, some of them are just kind of people that I've met, you know, Tanner and Blake, specifically, and I think Earl Swanson's character, I mean--I don't know it's possibly libelous--but we can probably figure out who that's meant to be, right? I think it's reasonably obvious. **Inmn ** 1:07:09 Totally, totally. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's super interesting. Yeah, it's funny, I was rereading the story today to prepare for this interview and I realized that the first time that I was reading it, because of this perspective of the.... I'm like, okay, I know, these are some, you know, at least center-right, far-right preppers and they're using the word "alien" and I don't actually know what they mean by this, which was, you know, maybe a purposeful being vague about it, but I was like, I don't know if they think that it's, you know, illegal aliens or undocumented  migrants or whatever or if they mean, like, literal from outer space aliens. And, yeah, I was like, I don't know what they mean by what they're talking about. And maybe they don't either.   1:08:20 This was part of the conceit, right, was setting it up like it's a pretend big reveal, I think, that it's a twist in the story that at some point gets revealed, but that's not really the point. It's not really meant to be a big trick or something like this, you know? I think in discussions in the editing, we talked about in the first page or so when they speaking Arabic, and it's reasonably obvious to anyone that knows Arabic who these people are, you know, it's not hidden, but this was the idea, that they may have meant illegal alien all along, was, you know, the way they we're using the term, but that they weren't necessarily drawing so much of a distinction between the two uses of the word alien, that in their minds a, sort of, invasion by one was the same as the invasion by the other to some extent. **Inmn ** 1:09:10 Yeah, which, you know, I actually really love that from the perspective of.... It's like maybe an interesting twist. I didn't listen to that interview with Pearson and Margaret, so I'm not sure what they talked about, but there's this kind of idea in a lot of spaces that I've been part of,you know, when people talk about things like assimilation or something, especially in queer spaces, of like, "We have to seem harmless to them. We have to seem innocent. We have to seem like we just want to be part of the group," you know, and then this other side that's like, "No, we want to be unknowable. We are claiming the monstrosity that they are putting on us," and I'm like, yeah, we're fucking.... I don't know, anarchists are kind of aliens, like, in an entirely other way of thinking, you know? 1:10:09 Yeah, and just considering some social norms is completely irrelevant or harmful or repressive and other things that other people would consider, perhaps, violent or something seem completely okay to other people. There is a complete sort of alienation of perspective from broader society, I think. And yeah, it is, there's a tension between sometimes wanting to go unnoticed, or, as you say, like assimilate, and even, for me, walking around, you know, sometimes you want to look like an anarchist and sometimes you don't. It's an interesting dynamic, I guess, that you can switch sometimes day-to-day. **Inmn ** 1:10:54 Yeah, yeah. Have you read much of--you know, love talking about this person on the show--have you read much of Ursula Le Guin's Hainish Cycle? 1:11:08 I've read only "The Dispossessed" and "The Left Hand of Darkness".  **Inmn ** 1:11:16 Great examples. I think "The Left Hand of Darkness," kind of brings out this idea of where the reader is going to maybe most identify with the alien, or whatever, in "The Left Hand of Darkness" being not the not the Gethens--or I don't remember what they're called. But then it's like, the more that we're reading the book... or there's some times where I'm this alien or, you know, our perspective person just doesn't understand this culture. And that's really painful. And then there are other times when I'm like, I don't know, maybe the alien's perspectives on the world are far more dissimilar to what a normal person on like our planet Earth would think, because they're advocating for a better world that is very alien to people on this planet. Does that make sense? **Matt ** 1:12:24 Yeah, I mean, in "The Dispossessed," I think it's the same dynamic with Shevak coming back to Earth and presenting the perspective, both ways that it seems incredibly alien to him and then the other way around to everyone else that's there, to the general culture there. Yeah. I think it's an interesting literary device to present the outsider point of view, I think, which I mean, is quite the opposite of what I did in this story, I presented the more mainstream point of view, I guess, but from the circles that we're in, it's funny to see from the outside what that looks like. **Inmn ** 1:13:02 Yeah, yeah, I had this very silly idea once for...I don't know if it was gonna be a short story or what but kind of, using that "alien" trope or like "Stranger in a Strange Land" trope as a way to talk to my parents about anarchism or about radical queer spheres. **Matt ** 1:13:27 Yeah, I mean, that's about as alien as it can get for a lot of people's parents, right. **Inmn ** 1:13:31 Totally. But just as some funny little zine that's like an introduction to the punk house, you know? **Matt ** 1:13:44 Yeah, viewed as some sort of interesting zoo creatures. **Inmn ** 1:13:46 Yeah. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the kind of political renderings of Tanner and Blake or ,rather, their differences in how they perceive or interact with either preparedness or this new world that they're encountering? **Matt ** 1:14:14 Yeah, I think that Blake's character is a lot.... He knows what he's doing, right? It's a lot more intentional and more--I guess educated is maybe not quite the right word--but a lot more of an actually constructed ideology, whereas for Tanner it's very much received. He's not so keen, not so entirely sold on the idea or doesn't necessarily know the idea. It feels like it's like lost and failing a lot of the time and I think that's why I found him a much more interesting character because that's how I feel a lot of people that I know and talk to and family members and friends and things or friends of people I know get pulled into a lot of these, you know, reactionary ideologies is kind of by accident a lot of the time, right? Because it's what's presented and what they're drawn into by someone who has a lot more investment in it than they do. And they just kind of bumble into it almost by accident. Yeah. **Inmn ** 1:15:20 Because it's what they're seeing on TV. People who are deeper into that philosophy are like.... It's like the people that they're around who are their own little echo chambers of, "Oh, okay, there's this thing happening. Not sure how I feel about it. But I'm being like, fed this perspective on it." **Matt ** 1:15:46 Yeah, and a lot of the social or interpersonal issues that draw people in as well, I think. I tried to make it seem relatively obvious that Tanner is envious of Blake in a lot of ways, right? He is, you know, hotter than him and he is cooler than him and he knows more than him and he's always trying to, like, live up to this ideal that he has just completely interpersonally with no politics or anything in it. And he just wants to live up to what he thinks Blake wants him to be, which it turns out, is a bad thing. I mean, I'm not trying to excuse Tanner's character too much here. But yeah, I think this is what's really dangerous a lot of the time actually, for people who don't necessarily have a fully formed belief in all of these philosophical systems or something that then puts them on the wrong side not by...not necessarily out of evil intention. **Inmn ** 1:16:54 Yeah. No, that's very true. And it's interesting talking about not excusing Tanner's character too much, but as I was reading the story I found myself like, not necessarily rooting for Tanner and Bl

What if unlocking a deeper connection with yourself and your partner was a skill you could cultivate?    In this episode, we explore the intricate world of Tantra with the knowledgeable Shiva J, a certified Tantra Educator and transformative empowerment coach. With a diverse background encompassing Kundalini Yoga, somatic bodywork, life coaching, and more, Shiva J guides us through the misconceptions and stereotypes surrounding Tantra. Delving into its roots, we discuss the multifaceted aspects of Tantra and explore how it can be a powerful tool for healing and transformation.   Shiva J sheds light on the different forms of Tantra, exploring how it can enhance intimacy in relationships, along with providing a glimpse into a new dating experience known as Tantra speed dating. You will also discover a brief guided Tantric breath exercise that you can begin using today. Tune in for an exploration into the world of Tantra where ancient wisdom meets modern understanding.   “Tantra is the art and ritual of falling in love with yourself” - Shiva J   You're going to leave this episode with…   What tantra is and what it isn't   Ways in which Shiva J has used tantra to help transform his clients lives   How tantra can build more intimacy with your partner   Is tantra just sex?   The danger of tantra   What trauma is and different ways people experience it   How Tantra will allow you to love yourself more   Examples of every day people who would use tantra   The difference between white tantra and red tantra   How teaching men and women differs in tantra and which sex Shiva J finds harder to work with   What tantra speed dating is and how it compares to modern online dating   The Manhood Experiment of the week that will leave you with a Tantric breath exercise you can do right now   -----   Leave a Review: If you enjoyed the show, please leave us an encouraging review and tell us why you loved the show. Remember to click ‘subscribe' so you get all of our latest episodes. https://ratethispodcast.com/man   What is the Manhood Experiment? It's a weekly podcast where we give you one experiment to level up your mind, career, business, health, relationships and more!   For more tips and behind the scenes, follow us on:
   Instagram @ManhoodExperiment   Tiktok @ManhoodExperiment   Threads @ManhoodExperiment

   Submit your questions @ www.manhoodexperiment.com   Resources Mentioned:   Website for Shiva J: https://shivaj.com/   Shiva J's Book Resource List: 1. "Kularnava Tantra" translated by Satyananda Saraswati 2. "The Yoga of Power: Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way" by Julius Evola 3. "Introduction to Tantra: The Transformation of Desire" by Lama Yeshe 4. "Hevajra Tantra: A Critical Study" by David Snellgrove 5. "Tantra Illuminated" by Christopher D. Wallis (focused on Kashmir Shaivism) 6. "Tantra: The Path of Ecstasy" by Georg Feuerstein 7. "The Roots of Tantra" by Katherine Anne Harper and Robert L. Brown 8. "Tantra in Practice" edited by David Gordon White 9. "Tantra Unveiled" by Pandit Rajmani Tigunait 10. "The Roots of Tantra" by Sir John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon) 11. "The Yoga Tradition: Its History, Literature, Philosophy, and Practice" by Georg Feuerstein 12. "The Serpent Power: The Secrets of Tantric and Shaktic Yoga" by Arthur Avalon (Sir John Woodroffe) 13. "The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You" (1971) by Dorothy Bryant "The Red Book" (1914-1930) by Carl Jung 14.  "My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies" by Resmaa Menakem  15. "The Art of Sexual Ecstasy" (1989) by Margot Anand "Sex Matters" (1969) by Osho "Siddhartha" (1922) by Herman Hesse  16. "Tantric Quest: An Encounter with Absolute Love" (1997) by Daniel Odier  17. "From Sex to Superconsciousness" (2006) by Osho  18. "Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing" (2002) by Jed McKenna  19. "I Am That" (1973) by Nisargadatta Maharaj  20. "The Book of Secrets: 112 Meditations to Discover the Mystery Within" (2010) by Osho 21. "Stranger in a Strange Land" (1961) by Robert A. Heinlein  22. "Women of Light: The New Sacred Prostitute" (1994) by Kenneth Ray Stubbs  23. "In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness" (2017) by Peter Levine  24. "Mysteries of the Dark Moon" (1992) by Demetra George  25. "Spinning Straw into Gold" (2006) by Joan Gould  26. "The Recognition Sutras" (2017) by Christopher Wallis  

Polyamorists tend to be stereotyped and portrayed in the popular media as pretty liberal bunch. However, it turns out that they're actually quite diverse in their political views. This isn't surprising when you start to trace the history of the modern polyamory movement in America, because what we see is that it actually has strong libertarian roots. In today's show, we're going to explore the fascinating (and surprising) intersection between polyamory and politics, including how libertarian science fiction writers in the 1960s helped turbocharge interest in polyamory. I am joined once again by Christopher Gleason, who lectures at Kennesaw State University and is the Director of Academic Programs at the Georgia Coalition for Higher Education in Prisons. He lives in Atlanta and his latest book is titled American Poly: A History. Some of the topics we explore include: Who was Robert Heinlein, and what impact did his sci-fi book Stranger in a Strange Land have on American polyamory? Ayn Rand is an author known for shaping right-wing thought, but her work was influential to polyamorists during the sexual revolution. What's the story there? How did a return to sexual conservatism in the 1980s lead to an organized polyamory movement? Why is there a heated debate in the poly community about whether polyamory is about sex versus connection and spirituality? Are individuals on the political left more likely to embrace polyamory as an identity than those with other political views? To stay connected, you can find Christopher on Instagram @christophermgleason Thank you to our sponsors!  Are you passionate about building a career in sexuality? Check out the Sexual Health Alliance. With SHA, you'll connect with world-class experts and join an engaged community of sexuality professionals from around the world. Visit SexualHealthAlliance.com and start building the sexuality career of your dreams today. Support sex science by becoming a friend of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. Visit kinseyinstitute.org to make a donation to support ongoing research projects on critical topics. You can also show your support by following the Kinsey Institute on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. *** Want to learn more about Sex and Psychology? Click here for previous articles or follow the blog on Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit to receive updates. You can also follow Dr. Lehmiller on YouTube and Instagram. Listen and stream all episodes on Apple, Spotify, Google, or Amazon. Subscribe to automatically receive new episodes and please rate and review the podcast! Credits: Precision Podcasting (Podcast editing) and Shutterstock/Florian (Music). Image created with Canva; photos used with permission of guest.

The Taste Buds start Doom Patrol Season 4 Part 2, plus Peter has a new costume on Spider-Man: The Animated Series, on an all-new Superhero Show Show!The Superhero Show Show #503Doom Patrol Season 4 Part 2Did DP Lose a Step During Its Break?It's finally time for Doom Patrol Season 4 Part 2! It's been almost a year since the fourth season took a little break, and the Taste Buds are trying to remember what happened last time they watched.What happened in Doom Patrol Season 4 Part 2?The gang is still trapped in Orqwith, which means that Vic's best friend is still stuck as a stranger in a strange land. Will they be able to get back home? And if they do, will they be able to get back to a parade? Will Doom Patrol be able to find that focus that so many other shows lose when they hit the home stretch? The Taste Buds answer all of these questions, and more.Luckily, the Taste Buds have some help this week, as Friend of the Show and Doom Patrol superfan Paul from the Waiting for Doom podcast is here to help the gang out with the trivia and analysis. Make sure to check Waiting For Doom out attheir websiteApple podcastsand @WFDpod on XwitterDid you guys talk about anything besides Doom Patrol Season 4 Part 2?Then, it's time for another Shushie! This week, the Taste Buds are handing out the award for Funniest Character of the Year! Last year's funniest show, and Shushie steamroller, Resident Alien, was off in 2023, so that does open the door for some new blood. But Taste Bud Ryan predicted that Harley Quinn was going to be this year's steamroller, and this could be a chance to continue its romp.On the Pull List, the Taste Buds are tackling all of the other shows from this week, including new entries of Loki and Gen V, and the finale of Daryl Dixon!Finally, the Friends head over to STASmania to watch another episode of Spider-Man: The Animated Series! It's part one of The Alien Costume! A little bit of goo has come from the moon to New York City, answering that age old question from the theme song to the movie Arthur! All of that, and so much more, on an all-new, all-different episode of The Superhero Show Show!TV EPISODES AND FILMS DISCUSSED:GEN V #105Watch Gen V on Amazon Prime The gang wakes up later, and nobody remembers what happened except Sam.If you want some more thoughts on Gen V, check out BingetownTV's podcast!LOKI SEASON 2, EPISODE 3Watch Loki on Disney PlusListen to the Lokiverse podcast for more about Loki!SPIDER-MAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES #108

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for September 26, 2023 is: grok • GRAHK • verb To grok something is to understand it both profoundly and intuitively. // She enjoyed the deep discussions in her metaphysics class that helped her grok some of the main themes of Western philosophy. See the entry > Examples: "The thing that marketing teams can't fully grok is that TikTok interest is organic, growing like a mushroom, sending out spores that germinate and thread through existing cultural ephemera." — Chelsea G. Summers, Vulture, 22 Nov. 2022 Did you know? Grok may be the only English word that derives from Martian. Yes, we do mean the language of the planet Mars. No, we're not getting spacey; we've just ventured into the realm of science fiction. Grok was introduced in Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. The book's main character, Valentine Michael Smith, is a Martian-raised human who comes to Earth as an adult, bringing with him words from his native tongue and a unique perspective on the strange ways of earthlings. Grok was quickly adopted by the youth culture of America and has since peppered the vernacular of those who grok it.

Now that your mother-in-law is in hospice, you're worried that your unstable brother-in-law — whose uncomfortable attachment to her makes Norman Bates look like John Boy Walton — is set to go literally ballistic against you and your husband (who has been handling her financial affairs) when she finally passes. Should you skip the funeral, or rent a couple of bulletproof vests and hope for the best? We'll try to find an answer to this and more here on Feedback Friday! And in case you didn't already know it, Jordan Harbinger (@JordanHarbinger) and Gabriel Mizrahi (@GabeMizrahi) banter and take your comments and questions for Feedback Friday right here every week! If you want us to answer your question, register your feedback, or tell your story on one of our upcoming weekly Feedback Friday episodes, drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com. Now let's dive in! Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/781 On This Week's Feedback Friday, We Discuss: Should you skip your mother-in-law's funeral to avoid being shot by the unhinged brother-in-law over financial affairs? You're living abroad with a significant other who cheated on you during the long-distance phase of your relationship, and trust is difficult to regain. You're considering moving out, but you're a stranger in a strange land without a support system. What should you do? As part of a hard-working sales team, it was disheartening to discover your manager's been playing favorites and spoon-feeding the best leads to her crush. How can you right this wrong without jeopardizing your own position? How do you best protect yourself, your child, and your niece against a sister struggling with addiction who makes sure none of your good deeds toward her over the years go unpunished? When talking about medical problems and past trauma makes your friends uncomfortable, is it okay to bury your pain rather than trying to sort the mess out? Have any questions, comments, or stories you'd like to share with us? Drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com! Connect with Jordan on Twitter at @JordanHarbinger and Instagram at @jordanharbinger. Connect with Gabriel on Twitter at @GabeMizrahi. This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!