Podcasts about These People

It seems like everyone is wondering how to find real estate deals in today's supply-constrained market. With housing inventory still hovering around historical lows, finding a cash-flowing, appreciating rental property isn't as easy as before. But maybe that's just because most people don't know where to look for these properties. In reality, there are steals and deals all around us, and if our hosts can take down home-run real estate deals in this housing market, what's stopping you from doing it, too? So today, David Greene and Dave Meyer are giving you three ways to find your next real estate deal using both on AND off-market investing tactics. The majority of Americans ignore these tactics, and only serious or savvy investors will follow through on them. Once you know where to find these deals, the deal flow doesn't stop. If you can master any of these three tactics, you'll have a source of profitable investment properties streaming to you for years to come. First, we'll show you how to find off-market deals and a few strategies you can use to locate and engage with motivated sellers. Next, we're sharing the exact networking play to get real estate deals sent straight to you. And if you think on-market (MLS) deals are dead, you couldn't be more wrong. David shares how he picked up an on-market luxury vacation rental for a surprisingly low price, all because he knew where to look! Looking for cash-flowing short and medium-term rental properties in the best investing markets in America? Visit Rent to Retirement or text “REI” to 33777! In This Episode We Cover: The three “buckets” for finding your first or next real estate deal in 2024 “Off-market real estate” explained and why most people get it wrong How Dave was able to find off-market deals just by…riding his bike? The people you MUST connect with if you want real estate deals sent to you consistently The overlooked on-market properties that ANY investor can find with huge price-cut potential And So Much More! Links from the Show Find an Agent Find a Lender BiggerPockets Youtube Channel BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Pro Membership BiggerPockets Bookstore BiggerPockets Bootcamps BiggerPockets Podcast BiggerPockets Merch Join BiggerPockets for FREE Learn About Real Estate, The Housing Market, and Money Management with The BiggerPockets Podcasts Get More Deals Done with The BiggerPockets Investing Tools Find a BiggerPockets Real Estate Meetup in Your Area Expand Your Investing Knowledge With the BiggerPockets Books Be a Guest on the BiggerPockets Podcast Ask David Your Real Estate Investing Question Dave's BiggerPockets Profile Dave's Instagram David' BiggerPockets David's Instagram How to Find a Deal When Inventory Is Low 30 Ways Find Good Real Estate Deals In 2024 (00:00) Intro (01:25) 1. Discounted Off-Market Deals (09:56) 2. Talk to These People  (16:43) 3. Overlooked MLS Properties  (25:50) Find Your Next Deal! Check out more resources from this show on BiggerPockets.com and  https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-944 Interested in learning more about today's sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email advertise@biggerpockets.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tom Hohman was the director of immigration and customs under Trump and worked under six presidents in that realm. Listen as Hohman testifies before House Oversight about Biden (Obama) destroying the border on purpose, and the inhumane conditions that have resulted for millions of immigrants. We also listen to Karine Jean Pierre run out of lies, as she and democrat Rep. Dan Goldman struggle to carry the Left's water. THESE PEOPLE are the real dangers to our democracy. PLUS Javier Milei's blistering truthbomb to the elitists in Davos... BRUTAL. Podcast Production: Bob Slone Audio Productions 

Halloween Latin kids! Euro vandal arrested! Tons of calls: Extended "N-word" discussion: Disrespect, dehumanization, and liberal victim mentality! The Hake Report, Thursday, November 2, 2023 AD TIME STAMPS * (0:00:00) ROUGH START (YouTube late start!)* (0:00:37) Topics / yesterday's drama* (0:01:53) Hey, guys! Unapologetic American Patriot tee* (0:04:20) Halloween candy thieves! These PEOPLE!* (0:10:44) Cultural enrichment destroys windshield in Europe* (0:12:49) WILLIAM: Yesterday, not bother. Israel vs BHI* (0:17:55) JOE, AZ: N-word's history* (0:22:42) CJ, TX: Best show in 2 years, pandering* (0:24:42) ART, OH: N-word discussion, liberals* (0:53:07) "Pilgrimage" - Om (2007, Pilgrimage)* (0:57:37) Hake tries to talk during music* (0:59:35) Supers (during music)* (1:07:54) ZEUS, FL: Respect, Punk Crishaun the Don* (1:32:06) TJ, UK: Love Art, a historical reference* (1:35:12) JEFF, LA: Dear Abby show, feminine spirit, callers* (1:38:10) MARK, CA: Crishaun co-host! BHI vs Palestinians* (1:45:03) BRIAN, NC: Blaming others, "disrespect"* (1:48:34) FREDERICK: Fired for saying "N-word"?* (1:51:14) Thanks, all! Call tmrw! Last supers / Tmrw!* (1:51:37) "C-Corp Takedown" - Calibretto (2001, …from the secret files of the danger brigade)BLOG https://www.thehakereport.com/blog/2023/11/2/the-hake-report-thu-11-2-23 PODCAST by HAKE SubstackLive M-F 9-11 AM PT (11-1 CT / 12-2 ET) Call-in 1-888-775-3773 – thehakereport.com  VIDEO  YouTube  |  Rumble*  |  Facebook  |  X  |  BitChute  |  Odysee*  PODCAST  Apple  |  Spotify  |  Castbox  |  Substack  (RSS)  *SUPER CHAT on asterisked above, or  BuyMeACoffee  |  Streamlabs  |  Ko-fi  SUPPORT HAKE  Substack  |  SubscribeStar  |  Locals  ||  SHOP  Teespring  ALSO SEE  Hake News on The JLP Show  |  Appearances (other shows, etc.)  JLP Network:  JLP  |  Church  |  TFS  |  Hake  |  Nick  |  Joel   Get full access to HAKE at thehakereport.substack.com/subscribe

Hey Friends! This episode gets crazy, we've got three stories of faltering relationships. These People are going through it, and so were we just reading them! We also get a little philosophical at the end wondering how it can get so bad. AITA for not putting my wife's name on the house deed? 9:12 AITAH for telling my (23F) husband (23M) that I don't want to have the same gender roles in our marriage as his parents (48F, 67M)? 34:05 My F23 and bf M22 got into a huge fight and he's given me two days to “come clean” 54:19 Join the Discord!! https://discord.gg/VvGD3prGt

(LISTEN TO PART 1 FIRST) This is the end of And Just Like That (Season 2 Ep 4 ALIVE!) reaction episode with Bingy Bestie Agueda Ramirez. They pick things up with a story about "These People" and then they get into Season 2 Ep 5 Trick or Treat. Nouns of the Week and a story about Dangilo fleeing the home of a lover.Tickets for O'So SUCIA at The Rail San Diego with DJ Alex Ramos (Friday, Aug 18, 2023) https://linktr.ee/ososuciaFind Dangilo on Instagram and twitter @dangilogogoConnect with Dangilo https://linktr.ee/baldandbingeableFollow Águeda Ramírez on twitter and IG @viaagueda (especially if you want to buy or rent a house or apartment in NYC or the surrounding area)

David Waldman presents another episode in KITM's popular What the Hell is Wrong with These People? ™ series as we travel throughout the Midwest asking, “What the Hell is wrong with these people?” This being Friday, there is a small but increasing chance that this KITM will feature an AI generated “David Waldman” with intonation and mannerisms scraped from audio samples, however chatbot “Scott Anderson” would have said something by now, wouldn't he? Off we go, back to Tennessee, where Republicans rolled a 1 on their d20 on the Tennessee Three expulsion and have just gone downhill from there. Of course, they did earn some of their bad luck. Rep. Scotty Campbell sexually harassed interns before his expulsion vote. It's just that Campbell would have gotten away with all that before those news crews started to hang around. On the same day the Tennessee House voted to expel The Three, they voted to eliminate oversight on the police for their two biggest cities. That sort of thing gets noticed now. Over to Minnesota, where State Senator/ 80's Sportscaster Eric Lucero battles necromancy and whatever spells Liberals cast to conjure wokeness. And finally, to Michigan and Ace KITM Correspondent Rosalyn MacGregor. US mass killings happen at least every week, gun owners taking a bead on each other in fear that someone will get the drop on them first. Some Michiganders have noted the danger and are setting up sanctuaries to create safe spaces for guns. If only the Michigan Republican Party had thought of drunken 2A solutions in that Clare, Michigan hotel bar...

A new MP3 sermon from Truth For Life - Alistair Begg is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: Who Are "These People"? Subtitle: Messages from Truth For Life Speaker: Alistair Begg Broadcaster: Truth For Life - Alistair Begg Event: Sunday - AM Date: 4/3/2023 Bible: Jude 8-10 Length: 38 min.

Slav returns to the show to talk about Taxes, the power of reading, and finally, a great discussion on Adderall. Don't miss our premium episode "Time" on our substack feed https://rarecandy.substack.com/p/time#details Listen to Slav's podcast with COH "These People are Sick" https://open.spotify.com/show/6B7kWveIGcFK7xHB0Xrw7M For all things Rare Candy https://linktr.ee/RareCandy

Who Voted for These People?             Today: Vermont Senator Becky White thinks it's perfectly OK to have a 6' 2” boy playing center for a high school girls basketball team.  She gets this week's prestigious award.  Then, Jake Denton with the Tech Policy Center at the Heritage Foundation talks about congressional hearings and possible banning of TikTok.  Later, Scott Shepard with the National Center for Public Policy Research discusses Starbucks' stockholders' suit over damage caused by woke policies.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello friends! Long Beach, NY based artist, T.J. Penzone, who plays under the name, These People is my guest for episode 1240! His latest release, the shoegaze/prog EP, "In Place Of Time" is available now wherever you stream or download music. They're about to head out on tour with Our Lady Peace starting Feb 7th. Go to thesepeople.org for tour dates, music, videos and more. TJ and I have a great conversation about his old band, Men, Women and Children (Warner Bros.), finding his voice as a songwriter and producer, growing up in Long Island, making "In Place Of Time", playing live, getting ghosted by his therapist and much more. I had a great time getting to know TJ. I'm sure you will too. Let's get down! Get the best, full-spectrum CBD products from True Hemp Science and enter code HDIGH for a special offer from How Did I Get Here?  

In this episode of The Balcony Show, we are proud to feature the incredibly talented singer/songwriter/producer Shane Alexander! Walter lee joins Mike Roi in this week's Mike's Music Box with his single “These People”, and Donna Gallucci has the brand new single “No More” from The Honest Heart Collective! All this and more! Other music from Water Street and Neil and Adam!#catchingrisingstars #thebalconyshowrocks #shanealexander #wellbelisteningwillyou Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

https://linktr.ee/_red_river_podcast The return of my buddy TJ. We dive into his bands new ep "In Place Of Time" released on Green Witch Recordings / Parallel Division. We also get into some Faith No More and song writing talk. Check it out and follow These People : https://linktr.ee/thesepeopleband

These People shared their Scariest Experience r/AskReddit Reddit Stories

These People shared their Scariest Experience r/AskReddit Reddit Stories

JCPA Defenders Say Media Cartel Bill Will Help Suppress ‘Misinformation': Lobbyists for big media companies are working overtime to get Republican lawmakers on board with the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), promising it will somehow protect conservative media. Yet those same lobbyists are telling Democrats the bill will help curtail “misinformation” online — a buzzword for censoring conservatives. https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2022/09/07/jcpa-defenders-say-media-cartel-bill-will-help-suppress-misinformation/ Three in ten Americans did not receive any vaccine for the Chinese coronavirus, despite the government's coercive efforts and attempts at enforcing mandates and restrictions, a poll from The Economist/YouGov found. https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/09/05/three-ten-americans-did-not-get-coronavirus-vaccine/ Embalmers Have Been Finding Numerous Long, Fibrous Clots That Lack Post-Mortem Characteristics: https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/embalmers-have-been-finding-numerous-long-fibrous-clots-that-lack-post-mortem-characteristics_4696015.html MSNBC Guest on Trump Voters: “We Are at War with These People; These Folks Are Evil.” MSNBC's Tiffany Cross along with her hate-filled guests on Saturday doubled down on Joe Biden's attacks on millions of Trump supporters. https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/09/msnbc-guest-trump-voters-war-people-folks-evil-video/ Awesome response to Biden speech: https://truthsocial.com/@CitizenFreePress/posts/108928734658979170 Project Veritas exposes Krystle Matthews from South Carolina: U.S. Senate Candidate @kmforsenate [D-SC]: "Treat them[white people] like sh*t” https://t.co/bWFNo8hzxD New York City Assistant Principal Exposed For Discriminatory Hiring Practices Against Conservatives. NYC Assistant Principal Todd Soper, Becomes Second School Official to Reveal Discriminatory Hiring Practices, Child Indoctrination Strategy … If Candidates Answer ‘Diversity-Equity-Inclusion Question' Incorrectly ‘They Are Just an Automatic Not Hire' https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=DBKG6tt56Ko&t=1s

Hour 1 * Guest: Richard Mack Founder and President of CSPOA – A partnership between citizens and local law enforcement, especially sheriffs. Mack encourages those not in law enforcement to stand with their sheriffs. – CSPOA.org * Today is the Maryland 2022 Primary – We are praying for the success of Michael Peroutka, Republican candidate for MD Attorney General! * Indiana shopping mall shooter shot dead by armed ‘good Samaritan – Greenwood Chief James Ison said “a good Samaritan 22-year-old Elisjsha Dicken with a handgun” at the scene killed the shooter. * Guest: Tina Peters, Shedding A Light on Elections – TinaPetersForColorado.com * One brave public official has finally stepped forward to blow the whistle on the lack of transparency and security in our elections—and the Left is determined to take her down. * “People have been asking me to run for Secretary of State long before I announced my run for Clerk and Recorder – they're tired of things not being transparent, knowing there's something wrong here.” – Tina Peters. * Sadly They have a Slash and Burn Scorched-earth Policy when it comes to Tina! Hour 2 * CSPOA Video – Election Integrity! * These People are being Selected Not Elected! * Get CSPOA SMS Text Updates! Simply text the letters CSPOA to 53445. * Archives of the Simulcast of the Sheriff Mack show and Liberty RoundTable Live can be found in Video at BrightEON.tv and Audio at LibertyRoundTable.com --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/loving-liberty/support

* CSPOA Video - Election Integrity! * These People are being Selected Not Elected! * Get CSPOA SMS Text Updates! Simply text the letters CSPOA to 53445. * Archives of the Simulcast of the Sheriff Mack show and Liberty RoundTable Live can be found in Video at BrightEON.tv and Audio at LibertyRoundTable.com

GROW Greatness Reached over Oppression through Wisdom They Supreme?These People up there Laughing at us cause they can tell us how to live our livesYet, People are still being killed by Guns, Year after Year, kids can't even go to School, all  a child wants to do is GROWHere is Wisdom Meanwhile, Nigeria

Title: The Prophecy of HAGGAI: CONSIDER YOUR WAYS (Part 1) – “This Time? These People?” Speaker: Pastor Yuri Hooker – with a reading of Holy Scripture and prayer by Kate Craton Scripture Reference: Haggai 1 View Text: New International VersionView Text: English Standard Version Length: 40:42 min.MP3 File Size: 27.9 MB Listen to Sermon: Download/Play […]

Subscribe to The Locher Room: https://bit.ly/TheLocherRoomEmmy Award-winning actress, author and animal advocate Carolyn Hennesy joined me in The Locher Room to reminisce about her incredible career dazzling audiences with her various daytime, primetime and film roles. On television, she played the deliciously vicious “Penelope Ellis” on ABC's critically acclaimed series Revenge. She also joined the cast for the fifth season of the sleek vampires-meet-world saga, True Blood, and fast became a fan favorite as Rosalyn, the ageless vamp with a Texas twang. Prior to Revenge and True Blood, Hennesy was best known for her memorable work as “Barb” on ABC's Cougar Town and for her (twice) Emmy nominated work as “Diane Miller” on ABC's General Hospital. She has also guest starred on a long list of prime time favorites including Champions, NCIS, The Cool Kids, The Mindy Project, MOM, and Liza on Demand. Kids across America know her as the hilariously haughty Mrs. Chesterfield on Disney Channel's Jessie. On the big screen, Hennesy's credits include Click, Legally Blonde 2, Terminator 3 as well as starring in the horror film, St. Agatha (directed by SAW's Darren Bousman,) the recently released comedy Swing of Things and the soon to be released Relentless for Lifetime…but the biggest recent large screen news is her role in J.J. Abrams Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker as fighter pilot Demine Lithe. Online, she's starred in the independent series' Take it from the Top and These People, Business Doing Pleasure for TBS, Two Sentence Horror Stories for Time/Warner, and The Bay for Amazon Prime in the role of Karen Blackwell...for which she received her Emmy Award and the 2016 Indie Series Award. Most recently, she starred as Gloria in Sean Kanen's series, Studio City for which she received Emmy nominations two consecutive years. Hennesy received her training at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Her razor sharp comedic timing was honed as a member of The Groundling's Sunday Company and in ACME Theatre's main company. Hennesy has appeared in over a hundred stage productions worldwide, most recently and to great acclaim as Maria Callas in Terrence McNally's Master Class at the Garry Marshall Theatre for which she received the LA Stage Alliance Ovation Award for “Best Actress In A Play” for the entirety of Los Angeles, 2017-18. Among other accolades, the LA Drama Critics Circle has distinguished her with the Natalie Schafer Award and the LA Stage Alliance honored her with her first Ovation for THE FAN MAROO. For the last three years, Hennesy hosted the red carpet reception for the Daytime Emmy Awards for NATAS, FB, and nearly all social media platforms. Hennesy's creative endeavors also include a successful career as a writer; she created the wildly popular “Pandora” (Bloomsbury USA) children's book series and penned the New York Times Bestseller “The Secret Life of Damian Spinelli” (Hyperion). When not on set, Hennesy is privileged to lend her time to a number of causes but she focuses on veteran affairs and particularly animal rescue, preservation, conservation and advocacy as an ambassador for American Humane and her own Los Angeles Zoo. She hosts her advocacy podcast “Animal Magnetism” back episodes of which may be found on YouTube. On January 2nd. 2017, Hennesy crossed something off of her bucket list: she rode on a float (Lucy Pet Foundation) in the Tournament of Roses Parade. Now she simply has to go into space (difficult) and fly over Disneyland as Tinkerbell to set off the fireworks (impossible). She lives in her native Los Angeles with four dogs and one cat, rescues all, and…in what spare time is left…she flies trapeze. Seriously!Original Airdate: 8/18/2021

India Policy Watch: Crypto And Samvidhaan Insights on burning policy issues in India— RSJWhen you write a weekly newsletter you view every news item as possible content for the next edition. You shoehorn some framework or stretch things to draw a historical parallel with that event. Trust me, it can be tiring - speaking for me, not for Pranay who has frameworks for his breakfast with poha. But as I sometimes like to say, there are weeks when content presents itself on a platter with a side of masala papad. This is one of those weeks.First, there was news that the government plans to table the Cryptocurrency and Regulation of Official Digital Currency Bill, 2021, in the winter session of the Parliament. It is likely the government will impose strict regulations that might fall short of an outright ban on them. Separately, there are indications that the bill will have a framework for creating a digital Rupee to be issued by RBI, the equivalent of a central bank digital currency (CBDC). We have written about crypto and CBDC in previous editions (here and here) through the lens of public policy and economics. As Satoshi wrote in his essay:“The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts.” That digital currencies will reduce transaction costs, be more efficient as a payment method, and can have all kinds of interesting decentralisation use cases, is all good. But as the past year in India has shown, nobody thinks of cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange. It has turned into a speculative asset with customers being promised outrageous returns in ads that are everywhere. This has meant hordes of unsuspecting investors flocking to crypto exchanges with estimates of crypto owners in India ranging from 10 to 100 million. The number of cryptocurrencies globally has shot up too and it’s a bit difficult to make out what’s a meme and what’s real anymore in this world. Consumer protection is a real issue now. The decentralised and anonymous nature of transactions is a further worry for the RBI and government. There are concerns around the use of crypto to fund criminal activities or for money laundering. But most importantly, for central banks and governments, letting private cryptocurrencies go unchecked and unregulated will gradually take away their power to influence monetary policy. This is a difficult thing to let go because a fundamental principle on which the modern economy rests is that the governments (or central banks) know what to do about the supply of money in general interest. Of course, the votaries of crypto and decentralisation believe this isn’t true. They would go back to the argument Hayek had made in his book Denationalization of Money:“A single monopolistic governmental agency can neither possess the information that should govern the supply of money nor would it, if it knew what it ought to do in the general interest, usually be in a position to act in that manner. Indeed, if, as I am convinced, the main advantage of the market order is that prices will convey to the acting individuals the relevant information, only the constant observation of the course of current prices of particular commodities can provide information on the direction in which more or less money ought to be spent. Money is not a tool of policy that can achieve particular foreseeable results by control of its quantity. But it should be part of the self-steering mechanism by which individuals are constantly induced to adjust their activities to circumstances on which they have information only through the abstract signals of prices. It should be a serviceable link in the process that communicates the effects of events never wholly known to anybody and that is required to maintain an order in which the plans of participating persons match.”This battle between the centralisation instincts on which the edifice of the state rests and the promise of decentralisation and individual control that Web3 or Metaverse, or whatever else they are calling it now, offers, is going to define this century.Second, I noticed there were some enthusiastic celebrations for Constitution Day on Nov 26 across India. Except at the Central Hall of the parliament. About 15 parties boycotted the function organized by the Lok Sabha Speaker because they felt the government was disrespecting the Constitution and undermining democracy. Not sure how staying away from an event that celebrates the Constitution helps. Anyway, the PM responded to the boycott by claiming dynastic parties are the biggest threat to the health of Indian democracy. Indeed! The LS Speaker compared the Constitution to the Bhagwad Geeta to mix things up further. The usual Twitter wars broke out on who had subverted democracy more over the years while others pulled out the original text of Constituent Assembly debates to show how far we have fallen in our discourse. All in a day in the life of India.The Centre Cannot Hold But…As I was reading through these, cryptocurrency and Constitution, and wondering if there was a way to bring them together for this edition of the newsletter, providence struck. The next news item was - ConstitutionDAO’s bold crypto bid for US Constitution falls short. Yes, Constitution and crypto in a single line. Someone up there must be looking out for me. Here’s more:“There are 13 surviving copies of the original print of the U.S. Constitution. Today, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) announced it lost its bid to buy one from art dealer Sotheby’s after a high-stakes bidding war that captured the internet’s attention. Still, the bold ascendance of the DAO, a group of people who met on the internet, is a unique case study into the art of on-ramping swaths of people into crypto, one meme and auction at a time.Austin Cain and Graham Novak, two 25-year-old Atlanta residents working in finance, first started a Discord chat to launch the effort, which now has more than 8,000 members. Within a week of launching, the DAO raised over $40 million worth of ETH on Juicebox, an early stage DAO platform.The effort, largely spun up through Twitter and a ballooning Discord server, is a window into what a community effort could look and feel like in a Web3 universe, where shared ownership and transparency are guiding principles. The opportunities presented by the DAO structure are sparking widespread interest — the value governed by DAO treasuries is now at over $6 billion, per some estimates.”So, a few people created a DAO to buy an original print of the US Constitution that was up for auction. ConstitutionDAO, as they called it. About 17,500 people raised about $50 million worth of ether (ETH), the native cryptocurrency of Ethereum using Juicebox, a platform that gets you started on setting up a DAO. But the process was a bit more complicated. Sotheby’s doesn’t accept cryptocurrency, nor does it recognise a DAO; it needs bids to be made by an individual or an organization in fiat currency (in this case Dollars). So, ConstitutionDAO set up a non-profit entity that could bid on its behalf. The next challenge was how to make sure all 17,500 members could claim to own a piece of the original print. This kind of fractionalised ownership is difficult to administer. So, the DAO arrived at a workaround. They would issue a ‘governance token’ called PEOPLE for donations made by contributors at the rate of 1 million PEOPLE per 1ETH donated. These PEOPLE tokens represented the voting rights of the members in the DAO for any decision to be taken. In this case, the voting right was restricted to what the DAO would do with the original imprint of the Constitution once they won the auction - where to display it and what to do with the proceeds etc. The whole thing sounded like the future had arrived. A decentralised group of “we, the people” on Discord decide to bid for the original copy of the US Constitution and beat the usual gaggle of billionaires who show up at auctions. People’s document would then be at the hands of people.This is how it worked. A donor would buy ETH on a crypto exchange by paying dollars. The ETH would then be parked in a crypto wallet which would then pay Juicebox for redeeming PEOPLE token. Throughout this process, at every step, you would have to pay transaction fees for using the platforms. These are called ‘gas’ fees in the crypto world and they are fixed in nature regardless of the size of the transaction. As many articles have pointed out, the ‘gas’ fees for small value transactions could be as high as 30-40 per cent. Anyway, the ConstitutionDAO raised about $50 million in little under a week. Such was the buzz around PEOPLE token that a secondary market for trading of the token opened up. All was going well till the DAO lost at the auction. It was outbid by billionaire Ken Griffin, founder of hedge fund Citadel, who is a known crypto sceptic. I mean if you publicly announce the total corpus you have raised for an auction and then let everyone know you’re going to underbid, your odds of winning will be quite low. I guess strategy isn’t a strength of DAOs. Of course, Griffin wasn’t impressed with this DAO business. As Bloomberg reported:“I wish all this passion and energy that went to crypto was directed toward making the United States stronger,” Griffin told Bloomberg’s Erik Schatzker at the Economic Club of Chicago on Oct. 4. “Let’s face it — it’s a Jihadist call that we don’t believe in the dollar. I mean, what a crazy concept that is.”Doubts Over DAOAnyway, the lost bid raises all kinds of questions.  What do you do with a DAO that has no objective any longer? Disband it or choose another objective? Who decides? Or how if, like in this case, there are no governance tokens issued yet? Or, if they had, is it fine then to have those with more tokens having more votes than others? Should you return the money and let donors incur the ‘gas’ fees one more time? Is this a prototype for next generation ‘wire frauds’? If as simple a use case for DAO like this fails and raises so many questions, what about other ambitious plans? How difficult they might turn out to be?The charitable view might be this shows it is possible to do something like this. That a group of people driven by a single purpose could come together in a short time and raise a large amount of capital. I’m sure that’s some achievement but I guess people raised more than $100 million back in 1985 for LiveAid to help out famine afflicted Sub Saharan Africa. Radically Networked Societies (RNS) because of their non-hierarchical structure can mobilise really quickly. But is speed so important a feature that it trumps everything else? Over the past few months, I have sat through multiple podcasts and read long-form articles that feature decentralisation evangelists like Balaji Srinivasan, Vitalik Buterin, or Naval Ravikant talking at length about the future of human civilisation. It is all about networked states, starting a country from scratch using your laptop, and using blockchain to make your lassi. My reactions to these discussions have ranged from ‘what!’ to ‘Lolwut’. There’s some kind of ‘This is John Galt speaking’ vibe when I listen to them. That book, Atlas Shrugged, had pages and pages of soliloquies by characters declaiming about some kind of an ideal future. As an impressionable young man, I read them with great passion. Over the years I realised there’s no ideal future that can be built by upending the current. Human progress is incremental and gradual. We have an imagination of ourselves, our community and of our nation. It is tied to real and tangible artefacts, like our constitution, our books, our languages, our affiliations and an understanding of our civilisational story. Technology was always seen as an enabler for a comfortable life for us. It has delivered value to us beyond our wildest imagination in the past two centuries. Maybe for the first time in history, it is positioned to take control of our lives. And those leading it are keen to establish its benefits to hold the reins of humanity. I don’t know if it is a good idea. Regulating technology is the key policy challenge for the foreseeable future. It needs a more enlightened view of our civilisation than what the tech bros have to offer.   If you find the content here useful, consider taking a deep dive into the world of public policy. Takshashila’s PGP — a 48-week certificate course will allow you to learn public policy analysis from the best practitioners, academics, and teachers. And that too, while you continue to work. In other words, the opportunity costs are low and the benefits are life-changing. Do check out.Matsyanyaaya: Pegging China’s Tech PowerBig fish eating small fish = Foreign Policy in action— Pranay KotasthaneIf one were to judge the technological prowess of a nation-state on the basis of daily news, China comes across as heads and shoulders above the rest. Hardly any day passes by without reports reminding us that China is well on its path to creating a self-reliant technology industry. While China’s technological progress is quite real, I want to list three caveats to make you recalibrate exponential growth projections and over-optimistic predictions about China’s tech ecosystem.1. CCP’s self-preservation imperative Across many critical sectors such as defence and technology, the CCP exaggerates its capabilities. This strategy is not meant to be just an information operation aimed at other nation-states. It is also a domestic imperative for the CCP, to create a perception that it has things under control at all times.Projecting control requires demonstrating success. For this reason, CCP propaganda projects promising initiatives by individual companies as world-beating solutions. What we forget is that such reportage is prone to survivorship bias — it overlooks the many companies and initiatives that have failed. Take the example of Tsinghua Unigroup — which made a lot of news in 2015 for its bid to buy the American memory chipmaker Micron. Once touted as China’s leading chip design house, it has since then failed to make any major breakthroughs. As of now, it is reeling under debt and the government is coordinating its buyout to another player. Similarly, companies such as the Wuhan Hongxin Semiconductor Project (HSMC), once projected to unleash China’s first seven-nanometer foundry went bust last year. But you’ll hardly see reports about the costs and consequences of such failures.2. US’ Need to Align Domestic VectorsThe second reason why we should be wary of tall claims is that it is in the interest of the US military-industrial complex to overplay China’s technology capabilities. There are few things that can fire national imagination like a well-equipped, seemingly more advanced adversary. Just as the Sputnik moment aligned the domestic constituencies in the US and resulted in path-breaking institutions such as the DARPA, overplaying China’s technological advances creates room for prioritising expenditure on key technologies and their governance structures. It’s not surprising then that the first National Strategy for Critical & Emerging Technologies (C&ET) put out by the Trump administration explicitly cautions against China’s pursuit to become a global leader in Science & Technology. As an example, consider the debate over semiconductor policy in the US. China’s shadow over East Asia has allowed the US semiconductor industry to make a persuasive case for higher incentives and government support. 3. Opportunity Cost NeglectA lot of China’s technological success is being financed by governments at the city, provincial, and central levels. While the benefits and successes of these initiatives make news, the costs do not. And as a student of public policy, the first question that comes to my mind is: what is the opportunity cost of China’s governments pouring money, attention, and time into this quest for all-around self-reliance? Predicting a linear growth path based on current trends misses asking the opportunity cost question completely. In my view, the odds of getting anywhere near the US’ technological capabilities are stacked against China for three reasons. One, China’s per capita GDP is one-eighth of the US GDP per capita. Simply put, every dollar used in pursuit of one technology goal in China is eight times as costly as a dollar used for the same purpose in the US. With limited resources available, China might well be able to take a lead in a few areas but the opportunity costs are likely to catch up much before it reaches anywhere near self-reliance.Two, until now, the opportunity costs were partially being borne by other countries, particularly the US. FDI from the US and uninhibited access for its citizens to the technology ecosystems of other countries allowed China to make rapid progress in key technology domains. That party is now over. The US is now acutely aware of the asymmetric advantage that China enjoyed in the old-world globalisation period. The US has already started putting in place restrictions on the movement of knowledge and capital to China. Under this changed geopolitical scenario, China’s technological superiority is far from inevitable. Take the example of the recent Alibaba announcement of Yitian 710 - a cutting-edge server chip. The Taiwanese foundry TSMC is the only company that can mass-produce this chip. And there are already murmurs in the US to restrict TSMC from accepting orders from Alibaba on the grounds that this chip can potentially have military applications. And three, the US still remains a vibrant destination attracting the best tech talent from across the world. Chinese governments can throw money but is unlikely to attract top global talent in the same manner. And in the high-tech domain, skilled labour holds the key. And so, the next time you come across another technological breakthrough in China, take a deep breath and consider if any of the three factors outlined in this note modulates the hype. India Policy Watch #2: Health Data Aayo ReInsights on burning policy issues in India— Pranay KotasthaneThe National Family Health Survey-5 results have been published. And you know what’s the best part? It’s that the National Family Health Survey-5 results have been published. No, really. The foundation of evidence-based public policy is reliable, high-frequency, population-scale information. In its absence, we have to settle for policy-based evidence making. The NFHS-1 conducted in 1992-93 was funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The latest avatar was spread in two phases over two years due to the pandemic. Most importantly, it began three years after the NFHS-4 of 2015-16. Given that earlier versions had gaps of six, seven, and ten years between them, it is encouraging that this critical information is being collected at a higher frequency. I hope an NFHS every three years becomes a norm. The timely release of this data will prepare the ground for voters to judge their representatives, amongst other things, on public health outcomes. Such a feedback loop is completely missing in our current electoral cycle.Now, to the results. In edition #133, I presented a list of phrases that should fall into disuse from our policy discourse. One of them was ‘population explosion/bomb’. The NFHS-5 results confirm, yet again, that India’s population is reducing across regions, religions, and income groups. In fact, the fertility rate is already below the replacement rate; India’s population has stabilised. This means we should stop letting our governments escape responsibility in the name of overpopulation. Also, government schemes to deny people services and rights on the basis of the number of children should be summarily rejected.Next, the sex ratio at birth has improved from 919 to 929 since 2015-16. This number is still lower than what nature would dictate. Though the preference for sons in Indian society still remains strong, this data suggests a gradual shift away from this mindset.The attention should now shift from overpopulation to real issues such as the increase in the prevalence of anaemia and obesity. The NFHS-5 results help in framing India’s health challenge accurately. Thanks for reading Anticipating The Unintended. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work.HomeWorkReading and listening recommendations on public policy matters[Article] Balaji Srinivasan: “A network state is a social network with a clear leader, an integrated cryptocurrency, a definite purpose, a sense of national consciousness, and a plan to crowdfund territory.” Go Figure.[Article] Ashwini Deshpande has an excellent take on the NFHS-5 results.[Book] Montek Singh Ahluwalia’s Backstage is a book filled with interesting nuggets about the pre-1991 economy. Enjoyable read. Subscribe at publicpolicy.substack.com

I'm Thankful for These People! They Make Me a Better Person! GREAT NEWS!!! The John Maxwell Team through LeaderPass has authorized another full run showing of the Live2Lead event, and you can purchase tickets by clicking on the following link. This pass is to watch the virtual replay of the entire event, AND you get instant access to previous speakers and lessons AND 3 days to on-demand after the event to watch the replays. CLICK HERE: https://leaderpass.com/pass/live2lead/host/?ref=RWZCLU5Y You can also still book your own “private event” where I can show your entire team at once either online OR in-person at your organization. The private event offers lots of time for teambuilding exercises and discussions. Email me at Paul@CLCTeam.com for more info. To get our FREE Guide and video that tells you the NUMBER ONE Hiring Question you should be asking in order to Hire the Right Person for the job Without Fear of getting a bad hire, click the following link: https://www.currentleadershipcoaching.com/hiringquestion Our Current Online Community for Leaders is currently open! The monthly price is $37 a month (special discounted price for Podcast Listeners and YouTube viewers); this includes one weekly zoom call, full access to our leadership library of video courses, and a private community to connect with other leaders! To find out more and/or to join, please visit https://www.currentleadershipcoaching.com/offers/PrEXKKFu        For more information on the Current Mastermind Group, click on the following link: https://www.currentleadershipcoaching.com/currentmm To get your FREE One-Page Goals Worksheet, visit https://www.currentleadershipcoaching.com/goals   Contact Paul Grau Jr. at paul@clcteam.com , or Jennifer Grau at JenG@CLCTeam.com Please “Like” the CLC Team Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/RunToYourChallenges   Join our brand new Facebook Group (Current Leadership Group): https://www.facebook.com/groups/currentleadership    For fitness goals encouragement join the Facebook Group “Run To Your 500-Mile Challenge” at https://www.facebook.com/groups/848658552257806   Thanks for Listening and Have a Blessed Day!

This week on the show, you'll hear our conversation with Mwalimu Shakur, a politicized, New Afrikan revolutionary prison organizer incarcerated at Corcoran prison in California. Mwalimu has been involved in organizing, including the cessations of hostilities among gangs and participation in the California and then wider hunger strikes against unending solitary confinement when he was at Pelican Bay Prison in 2013, helping to found the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, or IWOC, Liberation Schools of self-education and continues mentoring younger prisoners. He was in solitary confinement, including in the SHU, for 13 of the last 16 years of his incarceration. For the hour, Mwalimu talks a bit about his politicization and organizing behind bars, his philosophy, Black August, the hunger strikes of 2013, the importance of organizing in our neighborhoods through the prison bars. You can contact Mwalimu via JayPay by searching for his state name, Terrence White and the ID number AG8738, or write him letters, addressing the inside to Mwalimu Shakur and the envelope to: Terrence White #AG8738 CSP Corcoran PO Box 3461 Corcoran, CA 93212 Mwalimu's sites: https://wireofhope.com/prison-penpal-terrance-white/ https://ajamuwatu.wixsite.com/ajamuwatu To hear an interview from way back in 2013 that William did former political prisoner and editor of CA Prison Focus, Ed Mead (before & after the strikes). Other Groups Mwalimu Suggests: Initiate Justice: https://www.initiatejustice.org/ Critical Resistance: http://criticalresistance.org/ California Prison Focus: http://newest.prisons.org/ Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC): https://incarceratedworkers.org/ Malcolm X Grassroots Movement: https://freethelandmxgm.org/ Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party: https://www.facebook.com/RIBPP Jailhouse Lawyers Speak: https://jailhouselawyerspeak.wordpress.com/ San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper: https://sfbayview.com/ True Leap Press: https://trueleappress.com/ Announcements Shut ‘Em Down 2021 This year marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Jonathan Jackson at the Marin County Courthouse, the assassination of his brother George at San Quentin in California and the subsequent uprising and State massacre at Attica State Prison in New York. Black August has been celebrated at least since 1979 to mark these dates with study, exercise, community building, sharing and reflection by revolutionaries on both sides of the bars. In the last decade across Turtle Island, you've seen strikes and protests and educational events take place around this time of the year as we flex our muscles. This year, as you've heard us mention, Jailhouse Lawyers Speak is calling for weeks of action for Abolitionism under the name “Shut ‘Em Down 2021”. You can find out more at JailhouseLawyersSpeak.Wordpress.Com and follow them on twitter and instagram, linked in our show notes, alongside links relating to this weeks chat. You can hear our interview with a member of JLS from earlier this year about the “Shut ‘Em Down” initiative, or read the interview, at our site and in these show notes. Also, check out our interview with the remaining member of the Marin Courthouse Uprising, possibly the oldest living political prisoner in the US, Ruchell Cinque Magee. Shaka Shakur Hunger Strike New Afrikan prison rebel, co-founder of the New Afrikan Liberation Collective and IDOCWatch organizer, Shaka Shakur has been interstate transferred hundreds of miles away from his support network to Buckingham Correctional Center in Virginia (recognize that name?). There was a call-in campaign this week focused on VA Governor Northam, director of VADOC Harold Clark, VADOC central regional director Henry Ponton and Warden Woodson at BKCC. This was in support of Shakur's hunger strike in protest of the transfer, his time in solitary prior in Indiana for having his prescription medication, being moved into solitary at BKCC with minimal hygiene and no personal materials. As noted in the transcript about his hunger strike at IDOCWatch's website, the transfer interrupts civil and criminal litigation Shaka Shakur had pending in Indiana and has caused him to be halfway across the country after his own surgeries, the loss of his family matriarch and another aunt, the hospitalization of mother and other health hardships. You can find ways to support via VA Prison Abolition twitter and fakebook IDOCWatch twitter and instagram New Afrikan Liberation Collective twitter and fakebook . ... . .. Featured Tracks: Blues For Brother George Jackson by Archie Shepp from Attica Blues George Jackson by Dicks from These People

https://linktr.ee/_red_river_podcast This week we had our buddy TJ back in to talk about his new endeavor. A record label and production company, Parallel Division. As well as some new These People music coming out. We feature a new song "Levels" in the beginning of the podcast. Follow the new label here https://instagram.com/paralleldivisionrecords?utm_medium=copy_link Follow These People on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/artist/11KnRQPanMl2DiudXWTQsf?si=TQds-mx0T5GydODNg6Xr8g Follow Dark Satellite Media https://www.instagram.com/darksatellitemedia/?hl=en

In our first episode about the X-Men and other mutants, we discuss LGBTQ+ representation in the comics, including allegory for real-world history and issues. This episode is part one of two about the X-Men as queer allegory. . Resources: Miller, P. (2003) "Mutants, Metaphor, and Marginalism: What X-actly Do the X-Men Stand For?" Lund, M. (2015) "The Mutant Problem: X-Men, Confirmation Bias, and the Methodology of Comics and Identity." Century, S. (2019) “X-Men as a Queer Metaphor.” Adkins, J. (2016) "'These People are Scared to Death': Congressional Investigations and the Lavender Scare." Ayres, J. (2016) "The X-Men and the Legacy of AIDS." Music: "Dance Robot ACTIVATE" by Loyalty Freak Music. [All views expressed are our own and do not represent the opinions of any entity with which we are affiliated.]

“It's going to take a very long time to deradicalize these people.”Those are the words, a very quote from Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, the infamous AOC, and THESE PEOPLE are:         WE THE PEOPLE!Also known as the DEPLORABLES, thanks to the also infamous Hillary Clinton.The radicals that need to be deradicalized are those who dared to vote for Trump, and other Republicans, and other conservatives whether federal, state or local. They, more than 75,000,000 of these people, are wrong, radical, hateful, of course hateful, so many of whom are PEOPLE OF FAITH including Christian, Jew and Muslim among others and they – we need to be reprogrammed, deradicalized, subservient to them, our new radical – progressive – democratic rulers and just flat out get out of the way or get out, of America. THESE PEOPLE are also affectionately referred to by these new radical – socialists, many of whom are Marxist as Nazis. Anyone who disagrees with them is like Hitler and his ilk, so they think and say. THESE PEOPLE, so many of them you and me, are also white supremacists. We are all lumped together, more than one hundred million conservative Americans, the clear majority whether they vote or not, as HATING people of color, any person not white. We the people, the loyal Americans, the constitutional and law–abiding Americans are also labeled as domestic terrorists, witness they say the mob attack on the Capitol buildings in early January 2021. By implication, all of us were behind that or at least approved of such violent action. And of course, if you in any way supported or voted for President Donald John Trump in November 2020, you and I were the worst of the worst. Trump for them was the chief radical, domestic terrorist, Nazi, white supremacist, the baddest of the bad. These radical, progressive Democrats hated Trump, hated him with a passion and by extension, all who supported, believed in or voted for him. If, my fellow Americans, you are conservative so called, or an American traditionalist which means a strong belief in the Constitution and the rule of law, and you respect American history, education, and the judicial system and our democratic way of life, and most importantly, our INALIENABLE RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS, you (and I) are the enemy. We are to be deradicalized or we are to be eliminated from the political arena. They, these radical, progressive, anti–American socialists and even Marxists are determined to:         RULE US.The Crawford Stand began in 1992. Many said then and do now – today that such political commentary had no place on Christian radio stations. Obviously, we the Crawford Broadcasting Company disagreed. There was perhaps a time in America when there may have been a healthy separation between politics and religion. But not today. Morality, especially in a Christian sense, is challenged more than ever. First Amendment freedoms, especially freedom of religion, is under attack daily. Abortion, the killing of babies, has never been more widespread. The radical gay agenda attacks everywhere it possibly can. Euthanasia spreads. Respect for law and order and with it the Judeo – Christian ten commandments disappears or is ignored. Churches are closed. Governors wreak havoc. The Congress of the United States becomes more impotent by the day. Education is deprogramed and radicalized. The media is fully biased and totally corrupt. Hollywood and sports have morphed into public relations machines for radical and anti–conservatives. So that, there is now no separation between the political and the spiritual, NONE WHATSOEVER. We therefore have no choice, NO CHOICE but to:         FIGHT THE FIGHT OF FAITH.Not with weapons and violence. But with dialogue, stand up, resisting evil and the devil wherever we can, and doing everything peacefully possible to preserve, protect and defend our freedoms and inalienable rights, and especially our right to worship and testify. And that we will do, and that THIS STAND will always do. WOKE is the four–letter word of the day. It really doesn't mean a new enlightenment, but rather the intellectual, political, cultural and social extinguishing of the old and dear. It is a radical reconstruction of America by any means necessary. It aims for nothing less than complete control of our great country and the end of any political power for the deplorables, the conservatives, the Trump–ites. It is a constitutional disease which spreads like Covid and the freedoms we enjoy are only one generation away from being extinguished, and this generation is upon us. No matter the criticism, and there is more of it than ever, this company, the Crawford Broadcasting Company will stand firm for what our beloved America should be and we will never back down for anyone, no matter the penalty or cost. If you, if we the people, if we the true Americans don't stand up now, our freedoms will be lost, and lost forever. This company, the Crawford Broadcasting Company will fight that fight now and forevermore. Then comes the mouth of Katie Couric. Listen to her very words:“The question is how are we going to deprogram these people who have signed up for the cult of Trump?”THESE PEOPLE, you and me, conservatives, voting for Trump because of what he did and believed and not because of who he was, must be deprogramed. That sounds like Hitler, who was determined to deprogram Germany, or Stalin, who was determined to deprogram Russia. Does Couric mean that, and when, if these radicals gain complete control, will we who resist be deprogramed that way? That is one scary thought but there it is on the table, out in the open, an unbelievable threat to our freedoms. Think about it the next time you see or hear Couric, a radical, progressive Democrat. Then there is Eugene Robinson, he of the Washington Post. He said the following:“There are millions of Americans, almost all white (really?), almost all Republicans, who somehow need to be deprogramed!”There it is again. We the people, THESE PEOPLE need to be deprogramed so that we can be made to think, believe, act and live like them. Never, NEVER in my lifetime and for me, and I pray the same for you.And something even more radical. Here the words of Michael Beller, former attorney for PBS, the Public Broadcasting System:“We go for all the Republican voters, and Homeland Security will take their children away. And will put them in reeducation camps!”Some would say of course that this is simply an isolated radical comment and doesn't represent the main, progressive, democratic stream. But it does, IT DOES! They are the enemy of America and its constitution, they are on the attack, THESE PEOPLE are and you and I, if you are conservative, are the targets. If you believe otherwise, you are naïve and deceived. And that is why we boldly STAND UP, and our stand hits hard for we are in the middle of a cultural war to the finish. We have no choice but to fight the fight of faith, to fight back unless we take the way of compromise and as Ronald Reagan well said:“There is only one guaranteed way you can have peace, and you can have it in the next second: SURRENDER!”I and mine will never surrender. Our all is on the alter and we will fight the fight of faith for America, for our constitutional rights and freedoms, for biblical values and morality now and always no matter the cost. And again, I pray that you will do the same. You must do the same. If you want to live in a true democracy, with constitutional protections, with the rights and freedoms which so many of us take for granted, the lifestyle we have come to love and enjoy, and tragically take for granted, you have no choice but to:         STAND UPand fight the fight of faith for God and Country. Do it, DO IT NOW OR IT WILL BE TOO LATE. And please, do remember my fellow Americans, and especially my fellow Christians and people of faith that:         FREEDOMS ONCE LOST ARE LOST FOREVER! 

07/17/2020 Episode 341 Claire Downs and I talked about comedy and writing and sketch and her web series These People! Check out Going Downs and stay informed on current events! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/yamatat/support

“This election was rigged and we can’t let that happen. We can’t let it happen for our country. And this election has to be turned around because we won Pennsylvania by a lot and we won all these swing states by a lot,” President Trump said. Sidney Powell’s Election Lawsuits | Votes for President Donald Trump were placed during the recount into vote piles for Trump’s opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. The allegation is based on multiple observer testimonies, as well as an undercover video produced by Project Veritas, an undercover journalism nonprofit; states the lawsuit filed by Sidney Powell. The suit calls out foreign actors: By using servers and employees connected with rogue actors and hostile foreign influences combined with numerous easily discoverable leaked credentials, Dominion neglectfully allowed foreign adversaries to access data and intentionally provided access to their infrastructure in order to monitor and manipulate elections. President Trump Pardons General Michael Flynn | Deputy National Security Advisor under Michael Flynn, K.T. McFarland may have said it best: The irony is that Flynn should not have needed pardoning at all, because he never should have been investigated or charged with any crime. It’s important to understand that the persecution of Flynn, me, and others was never about any of us. It was always about getting to Trump and crippling his presidency.  Sidney Powell, attorney, and former federal prosecutor, counsel to General Michael Flynn. Author of the bestseller, Licensed to Lie. Here is the link to assist with legal expenses: Legal Defense Fund for the American Republic Viewpoint This Sunday reports on the stories with the goal of offering a unique perspective that challenges conventional thinking. Welcome to the Premier News Magazine as we celebrate our 4 Year Anniversary here at America Out Loud. Join WE THE PEOPLE to fight back against FAKE NEWS. Rate the show, leave a quick review, and subscribe to Viewpoint on Apple Podcasts by clicking here. Your voice for the fight forward – Malcolm. The Truth Behind Covid-19 Treatment and the Safety and Efficacy of Vaccines | More than 13 million Americans have now been infected with the virus — and it shows no signs of slowing down. Hospitals, already at the brink, are bracing for a new surge after 6.5 million people flew this holiday week, reports CBS News. With hospitalizations on the rise, vaccines ready to flood the market, is early home treatment the answer to keeping people safe? Dr. Peter McCullough is an academic internist and cardiologist from Dallas TX. He has been a leader in the pandemic response to the COVID-19 disaster and has published the first guidance for the medical treatment of ambulatory patients. The Mighty American Strike Force working door to door are uncovering major widespread fraud. Stories of organized groups changing ballots from Trump to Biden, stealing ballots from mailboxes by the thousands; signed affidavits and people outraged are now coming forward. President Trump calls on supporters to stand tall: "Don’t Be Intimidated by These People." Tim Aalders is known as Mr. Constitution, a former talk show host who has been working with Trump attorneys directly and on the ground, door to door with the Mighty American Strike Force.  Join us for Hour 2 with a new episode of Viewpoint Presents with Malcolm and Michael Johns. Evidence of Electoral Fraud is Mounting, Americans Must Rise to Oppose It - A broader and indisputable recognition of the credibility of election fraud allegations is gaining wider appreciation, bolstered by the lawsuits filed in Georgia and Michigan and other appellate cases, some of which appear destined ultimately for the U.S. Supreme Court. November 29th, 10 AM EST Encore Presentation AT 6 PM Available on Podcast Networks After 2 PM

“This election was rigged and we can’t let that happen. We can’t let it happen for our country. And this election has to be turned around because we won Pennsylvania by a lot and we won all these swing states by a lot,” President Trump said. Sidney Powell’s Election Lawsuits | Votes for President Donald Trump were placed during the recount into vote piles for Trump’s opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. The allegation is based on multiple observer testimonies, as well as an undercover video produced by Project Veritas, an undercover journalism nonprofit; states the lawsuit filed by Sidney Powell. The suit calls out foreign actors: By using servers and employees connected with rogue actors and hostile foreign influences combined with numerous easily discoverable leaked credentials, Dominion neglectfully allowed foreign adversaries to access data and intentionally provided access to their infrastructure in order to monitor and manipulate elections. President Trump Pardons General Michael Flynn | Deputy National Security Advisor under Michael Flynn, K.T. McFarland may have said it best: The irony is that Flynn should not have needed pardoning at all, because he never should have been investigated or charged with any crime. It’s important to understand that the persecution of Flynn, me, and others was never about any of us. It was always about getting to Trump and crippling his presidency.  Sidney Powell, attorney, and former federal prosecutor, counsel to General Michael Flynn. Author of the bestseller, Licensed to Lie. Here is the link to assist with legal expenses: Legal Defense Fund for the American Republic Viewpoint This Sunday reports on the stories with the goal of offering a unique perspective that challenges conventional thinking. Welcome to the Premier News Magazine as we celebrate our 4 Year Anniversary here at America Out Loud. Join WE THE PEOPLE to fight back against FAKE NEWS. Rate the show, leave a quick review, and subscribe to Viewpoint on Apple Podcasts by clicking here. Your voice for the fight forward – Malcolm. The Truth Behind Covid-19 Treatment and the Safety and Efficacy of Vaccines | More than 13 million Americans have now been infected with the virus — and it shows no signs of slowing down. Hospitals, already at the brink, are bracing for a new surge after 6.5 million people flew this holiday week, reports CBS News. With hospitalizations on the rise, vaccines ready to flood the market, is early home treatment the answer to keeping people safe? Dr. Peter McCullough is an academic internist and cardiologist from Dallas TX. He has been a leader in the pandemic response to the COVID-19 disaster and has published the first guidance for the medical treatment of ambulatory patients. The Mighty American Strike Force working door to door are uncovering major widespread fraud. Stories of organized groups changing ballots from Trump to Biden, stealing ballots from mailboxes by the thousands; signed affidavits and people outraged are now coming forward. President Trump calls on supporters to stand tall: "Don’t Be Intimidated by These People." Tim Aalders is known as Mr. Constitution, a former talk show host who has been working with Trump attorneys directly and on the ground, door to door with the Mighty American Strike Force.  Join us for Hour 2 with a new episode of Viewpoint Presents with Malcolm and Michael Johns. Evidence of Electoral Fraud is Mounting, Americans Must Rise to Oppose It - A broader and indisputable recognition of the credibility of election fraud allegations is gaining wider appreciation, bolstered by the lawsuits filed in Georgia and Michigan and other appellate cases, some of which appear destined ultimately for the U.S. Supreme Court. November 29th, 10 AM EST Encore Presentation AT 6 PM Available on Podcast Networks After 2 PM

Hi everyone, and thank you for tuning in to another episode of the We Make Books Podcast - A podcast about writing, publishing, and everything in between!   This week we were lucky enough to sit down with Michael R. Underwood, author the upcoming novel "Annihilation Aria" from Parvus Press.  Full disclosure: Kaelyn was Mike's editor on the book and so we got have an extra in-depth and behind the scenes discussion about the craft of writing and how characters, plots, and worlds can change and adapt as the story is written.  Mike was a fountain of information and knowledge and we both left the conversation with some amazing insight into the process behind creating a book with such rich world building and dynamic characters.  We had a great time talking with Mike and hope that you enjoy the conversation as much as we did.   We Make Books is hosted by Rekka Jay and Kaelyn Considine; Rekka is a published author and Kaelyn is an editor and together they are going to take you through what goes into getting a book out of your head, on to paper, in to the hands of a publisher, and finally on to book store shelves. We Make Books is a podcast for writers and publishers, by writers and publishers and we want to hear from our listeners! Hit us up on our social media, linked below, and send us your questions, comments, concerns, and if you've read Annihilation Aria, let us know what you think!   You can (and should) check out Mike on social media at:   Twitter: @MikeRUnderwood Website: www.michaelrunderwood.com   Annhiliation Aria is available everywhere awesome books are sold on July 21, 2020!   www.books2read.com/annihilation-aria   We hope you enjoy We Make Books!   Twitter: @WMBCast  |  @KindofKaelyn  |  @BittyBittyZap Instagram: @WMBCast  Patreon.com/WMBCast   Episode 39: Annihilation Aria with Michael R. Underwood transcribed by Sara Rose (@saraeleanorrose)   [0:00]   R: Welcome back to We Make Books, a podcast about writing, publishing, and everything in between! I’m Rekka, I write science fiction and fantasy as R.J. Theodore.   K: And I’m Kaelyn Considine, I’m the acquisitions editor for Parvus Press.    R: And today, we have to make another full disclosure-confession. We have another Parvus author on today. You recently heard us talk to Scott Warren of the Union Earth Privateers book—book series, I should say. And today we have another author of another amazing Parvus book, Michael R. Underwood of Annihilation Aria fame, or about to be fame. I hope it’s fame because this book deserves it.   K: Yeah, Annihilation Aria’s coming out a week from when this will be released, so this is July 14th, coming out July 21st. It’s a fantastic book, space opera. When I first got the manuscript and was kind of giving a it a rundown to my publisher and the other people on my team, I described it as the gender-swapped Mummy in space.   R: Yeah. With magic. Well, I guess The Mummy does have magic, too.   K: Yeah, yeah but with giant space turtles, and therefore better.   R: Yeah, yes.   K: So Mike was kind enough to take the time and sit and talk with us about the evolution of story writing and character development. This book had been something that he was working on for years. It, well, the core parts of it didn’t change too much. The book certainly underwent a lot of evolution over the years. And MIke is so smart, so talented, has a lot of really great insight and advice to offer when it comes to, you know, being about to take a look back at your own work and figuring out how it needs to change in order to serve the story. So, we had a great time talking with Mike. Hopefully you have a great time listening to him, and you should, you still have time right now to pre-order Annihilation Aria, book one of The Space Operas. Absolutely check it out. Not only because I’m the one that edited it, but because it is an excellent book.   R: I totally agree. I got the chance to read it when I was recovering in the hospital and it was a delight. It was absolutely everything that Kaelyn and Mike promised it would be.    K: So, anyway, take a listen and we hope you enjoy!   [intro music plays]    R: Of course we just used up all our small talk, we don’t recall any of it. So, I guess we’re gonna have to go straight into it.   K: Dive right into talking to Mike Underwood today!   M: Hi! I’m sorry! This is the thing about being on a podcast that I’ve listened to. I have to actively keep my brain dial on the Talk to These People mode, instead of the Listen to These People mode.   R: I mean we can just talk about you, but it seems a little rude considering you’re in the recording with us.   K: Especially because none of us are in the same space right now. Usually Rekka and I are at least sitting across from each other.   R: I have the blanket that Kaelyn usually has today.   K: Ahh, my blanket! I miss that blanket. It sheds all over me, but it’s worth it.   R: Yeah, well, stuff has to shed in my shed…   K, disappointed: Oh, Rekka.   R, unashamed: It works with the name, but it’s also because it makes me feel less lonely for my pets that are in the house because we don’t want them shedding in the shed.    K: Alright, I’m derailing this conversation now. This just goes down a road of puns that there’s no recovery from, and then we have to start over again and it’s just… it’s gonna be a thing. So, Mike, do you wanna save us here and introduce yourself?   [K and R laugh]   M: Sure. I’m Mike Underwood, I write as Michael R. Underwood. I mostly do action adventure meta-genre kinds of stuff. I like found families, I like trope-twisting, and my next book is Annihilation Aria which is coming out with Parvus Press, so I’ve had the fortune of getting to work with both of you in a professional capacity and I’m very excited to talk about the book with your audience.   K: We’re really excited to have you on here, because this book has a long and storied history. This was not a, simply, Wrote Something, Submitted It, Got It Accepted and Published. There was, even before it came to Parvus, before I started working on it, you were, what? three-ish years into this book at that point?   M: Yeah, so. This book basically starts in the movie theater as I’m watching Guardians of the Galaxy.   K: Okay.   M: And like really enjoying a lot of what it did with tone and, kind of, bold visual style with all of the high technicolor space opera bits, plus some retro nostalgia aspects. And so that informed a conversation I had with an editor, who I shall let remain nameless, that I was talking with at a world fantasy convention. In that conversation, I mentioned that I really would love to write something that would make people feel the same type of joy and smile-so-much-your-cheeks-hurt kind of vibe, that I got while watching so much of Guardians of the Galaxy. And it’s not a perfect film because there are very few perfect films, but I loved that mode of space opera that it had. Where it’s a bit more irreverent, it still has some of the found family vibes that you see in something like Firefly or Killyjoys. But it’s on the more adventure-y, epicfantasy but-make-it-space and pewpew versus space opera that’s a lot more, that leans more towards hard science like something like The Expanse. I’ve always been more of a Dune- and Star Wars-end of space opera kid versus that kind of overlap between space opera and military SF or the [radio voice] This Is What Thing Will Be Like Seven Hundred Years In the Future When We Have An Alcubierre Drive or whatever. That’s not my thing.   [K and R laugh]   M: And so what I brought to it was, you know, a lifetime of loving Star Wars, but also various roleplaying games and wanting to find in a project, a place to say what I was interested in and investigate the things I loved about space opera. So I took a play from Annie Balay, who has talked about making up a wishlist of tropes that she loves about urban fantasy, and she put those into a series. So I just kind of sketched out fun, weird things. Like, “What if giant spaceturtles?” and space magic bullshit and—   R: Perfect.   M: And finding a way to just kitchen sink a novel, in terms of things that I liked. And it kind of started to build up momentum there. But because I wrote it as a back-burner project over years and years and years, where it started and what it has become now, there’s a big gap there and there’s a lot to unpack from what the characters were really about to how the world feels to, then, into the editorial process with Kaelyn kind of repeatedly inviting me to unpack things or slow down and give a deeper view into characters.   K: It’s very generous of you to use the word “invited you to”.   R: Yeah, I was gonna say. I know Kaelyn, that’s a very interesting verb choice.   K, laughing: “Mike, I’d like to hear more about this.” “Oh, okay, here’s a sentence.” “No, Mike, I know where you live, Mike!”   That was something that I, just for clarification I’m the editor of Parvus that worked with Mike on this in case that hasn’t become apparent. One of the things that really drew me to this book and that I was wanting Mike to slow down and unpack was the characters. For all the setting and the fantastical elements of this, the characters are such a huge driving force, I think, for the story. I would absolutely read anything that is just set in this universe. As long as the characters are as engaging, compelling, and fun as the ones that you’re written in Annihilation Aria. But you had kind of  a few things that you wanted to accomplish with the characters, as well.    M: Yeah, so. I’ve been in the same relationship since 2010, I’m happily married. My wife and I get along very well, and in science fiction, fantasy, adventure fiction especially there’s just not a lot of instances of happily committed couples. Let alone happily committed married couples. And I think there’s a lot of cultural reasons that go into this, that are probably several podcasts-worth of their own and would be best had in conversation with capital R, Romance writers.    But the short version was that I wanted to write the kind of story that really argues that Happily Ever After can also be really exciting. So that was one of the nexuses around which the story was built. Like, okay, well what if I do this but I have a couple that’s already together and happy at the beginning of the book. And not that they don’t face challenges and one at the start of their relationship was: these people who both have a quest that they’re trying to fulfill, if either of them gets what they want, theoretically the couple breaks up.   R: Yeah.   M: But that, when they meet, they’re like, “Oh, you can help me with my thing and I’ll help you with your thing,” except that along the way they fell in love. They’re still on this trajectory that theoretically means—that could mean the dissolution of the relationship, but they don’t really have anything else as a way of being in the world, because they can’t just be together and be happy. They have their own drives and they exist in a pretty oppressive system that requires that they have a lot of money because they both have exterior debts and things like that. The same kind of Firefly vibe.    So that tension between their attraction to each other and their individual quests that might pull them apart was one of the big engines that made the story move. So that when they run into this ancient kingdom, techno, biotech tomb that they run into early in the story, that gets a McGuffin in their hands that then becomes a big deal. And they’re each engaging with it and the things around them because they have these, sometimes competing, usually overlapping, drives that are motivating them.    And that, almost like a perpetual motion machine of character interaction, was really fascinating and I wanted to keep on working with, while trying to balance, respecting the fiction. There really is this chance that things could fall apart for them, while knowing that I wanted them to not break-up because that was part of the whole thing.   R: One thing that was notable for me, as I was reading the book, was that at no point do they not want the other one to succeed. They are so supportive of each other that even though it means that it would break them up, they exist on different planes. Yes, this fact is over here that if I got what I wanted, I would be across the galaxy from this other person.    But at the same time, same plane, they also really want the other person to be happy and to succeed at their personal character arc quest and it’s really, like you said, it builds tension but it’s just really nice to see people who support each other and, even though there’s this big divide between what’s best for their relationship versus what’s best for the individual.   K: Yeah, and along those lines—and this maybe might be a transition into talking about some of the more mechanical aspects of writing this—is that these two characters are Max and Lahra and they are two of the main POV characters, but when you started writing this, they were the only POV characters, correct? [12:46]    M: I think there were a very small number of POV chapters for Wheel, who is the pilot of the two main characters, and then Arek, who is kind of their primary antagonist. So he’s an agent of this galactic empire that controls the space that they live in. I had a little bit from each of them as counterpoint or context, but it was still very much Max and Lahra’s story and the other ones were just there to give a little bit of context and color.    And only over years of doing other projects and writing and growing as a creator, did I make the moves to promote Wheel and Arek as POV characters and to treat them with more depth and groundedness, as I engaged with them. Especially into the revision process, I saw and was convinced that there was more for the novel to do and it could be richer for digging more into the emotional lives of all four of those POV characters.   R: And you really did. Especially with Arek. He’s not the prototypical space-fiction villain. He’s got a lot of complexity to him. He is still definitely a villain, but he’s the least worst villain personality? And they’re definitely—again, you’ve given each character a drive and something that they’re aiming for which might be at odds with what the organizations that they work with are aiming for.  So, how did you make those decisions, as you’re developing? Especially a villain character, but also Wheel.    It’s really interesting that Wheel might have had a very tiny part just in the sense that Wheel is the owner of the ship that everyone lives on, I assume, and maybe Wheel has to help rescue at some point. Or Wheel has to support with something Wheel can witness that the other characters can’t, or something like that. I mean, I have obviously done the same thing with POVs where somebody was there because it was convenient to have another POV and then that person had to become a fully-rounded character of their own. But when you built Arek, you didn’t have to go that far. You still could have sold this book without going as far with Arek as you did. But, so why—how did you start to see Arek and how much sympathy do you, personally, have for him?    K: Well, and I’ll jump into just to add that you gave all of these characters a life outside of this story. Every single person, if they were not taking part in this story happening to them, would be doing something else. And we, the reader, are in a position where  we can kind of see or imagine what they’re doing because even though you don’t have to spend a lot of time on it, but it gives us a very good sense of them.    M: Yeah, I think a lot of how I approach characterization and writing is probably informed by growing up playing table-top roleplaying games. So, table-top roleplaying was one of the main ways that I learned to tell stories and to think about what I wanted from stories. Alongside reading and watching TV and movies and reading comics and things like that. So in a lot of roleplaying, you have the characters as they are and then you’re engaging with a game master who says, “Here’s a plot!” and then you engage with the plot. And that’s one style of game mastering, and more recent roleplaying games, a lot of them are more player-driven in terms of character agenda and shared narrative authority and things like that. And the Apocalypse World tradition from that game by Vincent and Meguey Baker and all the games that come from it.   So I brought kind of one version of acting experience to writing. In terms of: okay, here’s a character and they are my character and I wanna be able to inhabit them at least a little bit to get a sense of who they are, so that when I, then, also as the writer, can throw things at them. I’m able to jump between those registers in terms of inhabiting a character and kind of providing the antagonism or the context and/or all the other stuff that goes around a character. I think it was because I was familiar with that style—so much of what my writing comes out of is that if I’m gonna be in the POV of a character, it’s hard to not spend some time with them and to linger with them and to think about their agency and their—what they want from the world.    And as much as I grew up loving Star Wars and Darth Vader, and Darth Vader is a great antagonist but he’s not a great character in a rounded fashion because he’s so much of a cypher. He is the iron fist that punches at the protagonists. You get into the prequels and you see some of the backstory and—but that’s not what I grew up with. I was sixteen or so when Episode I came out and we really start to get that backstory for him. I think I moved toward this point where, at least some of the time, I want villains or, at least the personification of villainy or the person that the team is engaging with, to feel enough like a person that they are not just a moustache-twirling for. Because I’ve written more straight-up moustache-twirling villains in other books. Like in Shield and Crocus, which is very superhero-y, the villains kind of run the gamut. Some of them are just like, “I Am Really Terrible! HAHA! Oppression!”   [K laughs quietly]   M: In Arek, I think he started out as more of Lieutenant Bad Guy and he probably grew that roundedness when I thought about like, “Why is he the one who’s out here in the Boondocks?”   R: Mhm.   K: Yeah.   M: Who is the person within this species-supremacist empire that ends up on this bad duty? And, okay, I know that, from what I know about militaries and governments, okay you get a crap duty because you piss somebody off or because you’re out of favor. Well what is it like to be out of favor in this species of supersoldier, galactic tyrants? Why would that be a thing? So I started thinking a little bit about class and caste within a species. Or is it that he has some relationship to the dominant ideology of the species? So he ended up as being more humane than most of the members of his civilization.    Because of that, he was marginalized within this very domineering, fascist civilization. It’s a little bit of getting to talk about the way that oppressive civilizations oppress even the people that have power or that not everybody is equal, even within an oligarchy. Because the lines of oppression and pressures are not all along one axis. Everything is very multiaxial in terms of where people occupy more privileged or less privileged positions or are taking actions that put them more or less in line with a dominant paradigm.   Thinking about worldbuilding in that fashion is also really important to me. So when I take a character and put them through that bouncy castle of all these different things of worldbuilding, they tend to accrete a bit more personhood.   K: So, piggybacking off of that, and we kind of touched on this a little bit before, was that you wrote this over a lengthy period of time and there were characters that evolved, obviously, and became more prominent points for, well, viewpoints in the story. How much of that, do you think, was really getting comfortable with and learning about this world you were creating and wanting to build upon, and how much was that, we’re all adults here but, three years, you grow and change and you look back at things that you did before that and go, “Oh, well I don’t like that anymore.” How much of it was organic story-building and evolution and how much of it was going back and evaluating what you’d already written?   [21:35]   M: I think it was definitely both, and in a really integrated circuit kind of way. That life experience and working as a writer were very intertwined. I would fold life experiences into writing or I would develop my understanding of storytelling in a more nuanced fashion because I had time. And because I had time, I could let things remain and mull and simmer over time. Well, what if not just this layer of how Lahra’s civilization operates, but what if there’s this other thing that builds on what’s already there. There’s a multi-caste system and you’ve got the nobility atop and you’ve got soldiers and the soldiers serve the nobility and, well, in a civilization you can’t just have soldiers and nobility. You’re gonna have farmers, you’re gonna have technicians, you’re gonna have all these things.   Okay, so there’s these other parts of society and I had the title Annihilation Aria way before the Genae had music magic.    K: Mhm.   M: Because the title, Annihilation Aria, was like, “Oh, that’s cool because space opera,” and I’m riffing on that, but it’s its own thing. And, you know, world killers are a big thing in space opera. How can I take these things and make them my own? And then I realized, looking back, as I was picking away at the project over years, that I’d already set a foundation upon which I could build something that would give Lahra’s civilization and, therefore her backstory, more meat to it. As I was writing parts of the story where the Genae really matter, I was able to layer on these extra things.    Having more time to layer texture and history onto the story was really valuable and because a lot of the other ways that I’ve written—I wrote my debut and I got an offer to sell it very early in the revision process because of wacky circumstances for which I’m very fortunate. From there, I had several years of, “Okay, cool. So you have a contract, write a book. Turn it in. Production. Publication.” And so I wrote books that were much more condensed in their timeline. So it’s write a book over nine months, revise it over six months, it comes out, or sometimes a little bit more. Sometimes even a little bit less.    With this one, because I didn’t sell it on spec, and I was going in a different direction, it had this opportunity to accrete depth and texture over time. But I don’t want to have a writing career where it takes five years to do every book.   R: I was just about to say, is that something you recommend?    K: Real quick, Mike, if you wouldn’t mind backtracking to kind of go on a little side tangent here. You said “write a book on spec.” For our listeners that maybe do not have as much experience in the professional writing world as you do, what are you saying here? What is writing a book on spec versus what you did with Aria?   M: Sure. So, I sold my debut having written the whole book. And then: cool, we wanna publish this and a sequel. Great. So I did that and then I went back to the same editor and I said, “I wanna write something else from these Ree Reyes books. And so I created pitches and I sold them. I sold those books without having written the whole book, which is one version of—   K: You’re selling based on the pitch that you’re giving.   M: Yeah, and that’s one degree of selling on spec. There are people who say, “Cool! I wanna write a book!” and the publisher’s like, “We love you! Please sell us this book!” That is really selling a book on spec, you know. And that’ll show up in Publisher’s Weekly or Locus as: Famous Author’s Next Book to Editor at Publisher. And it can be very vague. It takes a while for most authors to get to the point where they can just say, “I wanna write a book for you!” and the publisher says, “Yes! Here’s some money.”   K: Most authors will not get to a point where that happens in their career. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s just that, typically—and correct me if I’m wrong—these are going to be household names either within the general populous or within genres.   M: Yeah.   K: You will know the people that are able to sell books on spec.   M: Yeah, or it’s like—I have friends who sell a book that’s already written, but it’s a standalone so they get a two book deal and the second book is: it’ll be a book.   K: Yes! Yeah.   M: That’s probably more common than, “Here’s a one book deal. I don’t know what the book is yet, but I have the track record that you just wanna buy it.” So I had tried to sell a couple of books on partials because I said, “Well, okay, I have this track record and I have this background in the professional side of publishing.” But those didn’t happen. So I just went back to writing new novels and trying to sell things and, at this point, I’d been wanting to do enough different things with my writing where it’s like, “Cool.I’ve got these adventure books and I wanna write some other stuff that’s a bit more sociological or political and try to balance all these things that I wanna do as a creator.”    But I don’t wanna spend five years for each book because, economically, it’s just not viable to be able to support the costs of a writing career in terms of conventions and things like that off of one book every five years unless I’m getting just a lot more money. And very few people get so much money from science fiction, fantasy that they can spend five years on a book. So Aria is this weird book that may be pretty singular in my career, in terms of how long it has taken to become the thing that will be published in, as of this recording, in a couple of months.    So I try to revel in that distinctiveness because it will probably be pretty singular and hope to apply the lessons that I’ve learned while writing it much more efficiently moving forward. To think about things with texture and depth from an earlier part, an earlier stage of the process and then to embrace the opportunity to make a book more rich and texture in the revision process. To try to do several years’ worth of work in maybe a year, year and a half, in strong collaboration with an agent or an editor or something like that.     R: So you’ve spent the last, you know, hand-crafting the tools themselves that you now can put in your toolbox and reach for, hopefully, and use them without having to remake them every time, going forward?   M: I sure hope so.   R: Well that would be a very efficient use of your time, I think.   M: Yeah. I just finished the rough draft for a new novel that is very different from Aria, but I think it would have been very hard for me to write it, if I had not already been through that process of pulling this book together over the course of several years while working on other things as my main deal.Like, developing and doing all the work for Born to the Blade and self-publishing stuff from Genrenauts and things like that. So I’m hoping that the messiness I can clean up a bit while still being able to reapply those tools, as you say.   K: Now, Mike, when you went back from this and I just know from our conversations and working together that, at various points, you spent a lot of time working on this. You picked it up, you put it down again. You came back and forth to it. Were there any points, when you were going through and revising this, that you knew there were changes you had to make that you weren’t happy about making? That you were reluctant to really do anything with?   R: Tell us how Kaelyn hurt you.   M: Um…   K, laughing: No, no we’re talking pre-editor.   R: Oh, okay. If you say so.   K: Well, what I’m trying to get at here is, and Rekka and I back in May, we will have released an episode about making hard decisions about your manuscript and changing things on recommendation, but then also doing it yourself and having that awareness of, “Hey, maybe this isn’t as strong as I want it to be,” or “Maybe this no longer serves this story.” And the reason I’m asking is because you did write this over such a long period of time, it gives you the time and perspective to go back and consider these things.   M: Yeah, so probably the biggest, hardest change was—In the first draft, the novel opens much later in the story compared to the novel as published. And, at that point, I was going for a kind of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark-style opening because that’s another touchstone for this work, as well as something like the 1999 Brendan Fraser-Rachel Weisz The Mummy movies.   [31:09]   K: It’s funny because I remember when I got this manuscript and I was talking to our publisher, Colin, he said, “What do you think?” I said, “It’s The Mummy set in space with elements of Guardians of the Galaxy,” but mostly I said it’s The Mummy in space. If that doesn’t sell a book, I don’t know what will.   M: Yeah, and that Rick and Evy relationship, especially in the second Mummy movie was another big touchstone in terms of, like, they have their own things, they are committed to each other, they’re on adventures—   R: But they have their own styles. Yeah.   M: Yeah, but I have this opening for the book. And one, the first draft came out pretty short because often will draft short and a book will grow in revision because my earlier drafts tend to be a lot more, “Okay, cool. Action, action. World, World. Action, action, action.” And then I go back and unpack things. And, moving forward, I’m hoping that my first drafts will have a little bit more character and breadth and space in them and that in revision I’ll just build on that, as opposed to having to do quite so much work to unpack it.   So there’s—In several different cultures across the world, there’s a mythology that the Universe started as two lovers embraced and that that’s the whole of physical space and that then something or some people push them apart to create the gap between the Earth and the sky. And so I’m trying to make it so that my novels are not that process so much, and that they start out with a bit more room to breathe, so that both the characters can breathe and that the reader can have the space to feel all those emotions as powerfully because they’ve taken the time to ruminate on them, versus just, “Here’s a flashy scene! And here’s some people! And they have distinctive characteristics and now they’re gonna be action figures through a space!”   I want to do more and dwell more with those characters. And part of that’s inspired by reading a lot more romance novels. Where, in romance, the best writers will do a great job of unpacking emotional reactions. So, I have this one start of the novel and I knew that I needed to set things up better, and I wanted a kind of broader story, so that involved moving the clock back within this timeline which also then gave me the opportunity to ground the characters more in their home away from home, in this colony ship that turned city in space called The Wreck. So what if you took a colony ship with a dozen species and they all loaded up this big ship and they had all of their hopes and dreams and they set off and then something goes really wrong and it crashes into some asteroid somewhere. And they absolutely cannot get going again.    I really liked that setting, I just kind of played through it in the original draft. So, in the revision, I was able to say, “Okay, here are the things I like about this, and now I wanna do more with them.” And that was also when I was able to kind of graduate Wheel into more of an equal POV character, in the way that she is tied to this place. And that they, the three of them, Max, Lahra, and Wheel are caught up in this net of relationships and factions. So it was a lot of forcing myself to kind of put my money where my mouth was about: here are things I like in writing, here are things I like in storytelling. I’m gonna push myself to dig deeper, to put the world on display more, to put my characters under pressure along several different axes that then makes it more realistic within the narrative. That they make the choices that they’re making as the story unfolds, so that at any given moment, they’re stuck between some bad options and they try to make the best opportunity for themselves.   Whereas, previously, the reason why they went and did the things that they did, in the earlier drafts, were a little bit more because it’s what I wanted from them, and less because it was the only thing that made sense for who they were as characters and what their relationships were at the time. So it was a lot of raising the stakes, but not in a grimdark fashion. Stakes and the degree to which the characters were enmeshed in the world and were both affected by it and agents effecting it.    R: I want to call attention to what you said, though, about as you expand your draft, you are not adding density to all the spots that you’re expanding, just for the sake of making it longer. But that you actually are going to this with such intent that you are actually creating space, not creating more. You didn’t double the action and then double the tension. You created a space that gave all the characters more room to become alive. So I just thought I’d draw attention to that because so often we talk about, “Oh, yes, in revision my book doubles in length,” but we don’t often say what that content is.   K: Well you can double in length and more than double in substance.    R: Oh yeah, yeah.   K: I think that’s a trap a lot of writers fall into where: I just need to add and add and add, and then at some point someone is gonna tell me, “Yes, you have enough here.” And it’s less about it being enough and more about it being efficient and effective.    M: Right, yeah, because there’s nothing about Storytelling that says, “Ah, sorry, this is only 70,000 words, it’s not a story yet.”   K: Yeah, and if somebody’s telling you that, don’t listen to that person. That’s not—   M: Yeah, and it’s—We’re in a position now, in the industry, where you can publish shorter work and there’s still a chance to find an audience. And any given publisher has their own model that they’re operating within. If you’re selling paper books, there’s kind of a minimum word count that will give you a spine that you can put text on. Those physical realities inform book publishing to a certain degree, but I was already playing within the novel space that was like, “Oh, well if I do more and I’m thoughtful—” It’s not that the book is 30 percent better because it’s 30 percent longer, that’s not the equation that we’re talking about.    There is more space for the character relationships, for those relationships to inform the action, for there to be an arc of how these people relate to each other and the ways that they are or are not invested in different things. So that, then, when I’m doing the big space opera finale, the reader feels like they’ve gone through the flow and the rise and fall of these characters, that the decisions they make there are both believable and kind of a natural catharsis for what the characters have gone through before. So that you get the reader, like, punch-the-fist-in-the-air experience when the character does the big thing.   R: So it’s not just about getting to 100,000 words and stopping.   M: Yeah.   R: Yeah.   K: I will say that, at Parvus, we have, for submissions, a 60,000 word minimum, but that’s because we publish novels and, sure, you can make an argument for some novels that are a little bit below there, but, as Mike said, there’s a certain point where you say, “I need this many words in order for this to be a book that I can have a spine and put the title on.” That said, there’s no reason to restrict yourself to a word count. If you have a great story and it’s 40,000 words, there are places that are looking for great stories that are 40,000 words.   R: Yeah. The only question is what category of the awards do you have your dreams set on, you know? But yeah, tell the story at the length that the story wants to be told. And if you want to explore more ideas, then the story gets a little longer. So, Mike, while you were expanding the story, how much of the relationship between Max and Lahra changed? I mean, you already said that you wanted them to have an established, committed relationship, but how fraught with tension did you want that to be? Like you said one of your inspirations was Guardians of the Galaxy, but Max is as far from Peter Quill as you can get, so what’s—how did that develop?   M: Yeah, I think Max as a character much more emerged from—the idea that I had was, what if you had the couple from The Mummy but you flipped the genders?   R: Mhm.   K: Yup.   M: So you have the fighty, square-jawed character is the wife and the, kind of, not-so-useful in a fight, academic who’s not as used to jumping around in the world, is the husband. And that’s really where it starts because they diverge pretty far from just those two because I wanted to figure out how to have the fish-out-of-water character work. Like, Max is from Earth and this is Very Far from Earth.    [K laughs] And drawing on that tradition of John Carter or of Farscape. There was a lot. It’s portal fantasy, but science fiction. Ultimately.   R: Yeah.   [41:05]   M: And how much it is portal fantasy can depend on how much being from Earth matters. The amount that being from Earth mattered, for Max, kind of increased over time, especially as I was really doubling-down on who Max was. Because Max is a Black guy from Baltimore so he grew up in a specific economic and political and cultural context, but then he’s the one who gets flung into a distant galaxy. Whereas racism doesn’t work the same way there and that’s not the main thing because that’s not my story to tell, as a white writer, but I was committed to respecting who Max is, as a person, and so I was able to build some things around him.    So what that became is that Max was already used to code switching between different cultural registers, and then here we have this multicultural civilization that is multicultural and multispecies and that, as an archaeologist and linguist, that was his superpower is being able to pick up language and study and understand culture. So, already, he’s really far from Peter Quill, who’s much more like a John Carter type of character, who is almost more in the Western tradition.   R: He just shoulders his way through every situation.   K: I was gonna say like a bull in a china shop. Just, you know, dropped in and is going to behave and do the same thing no matter where they are and who’s around them.   R: Yeah, definitely no code switching from Peter Quill.    M: Yeah, and then in thinking about who each Max and Lahra were, I had to be smarter and more thorough about who the other were because I needed to have a sense of how they interacted with each other. Like, what does Lahra do when Max is at his workstation for hours and hours and hours poring through manuscripts and trying to translate things? Like, does she just leave him to do his own thing? Does she hang out with him? What would make sense? Because she’s a bodyguard, she grew up in this cultural paradigm from her mother that was very much about a dyadic relationship, but between charge and guardian. Well, how does that inform who she is as a partner in a relationship? She’s more likely to be the kind of partner who would hang out with you while you’re doing your thing to make it clear to you that she’s supporting what you’re doing, but she’s not like—   R: Invading it.   M: She’s not invading it, she’s not making it a thing that has to be about both of them. Okay, well, then how does Max react when Lahra is really upset about something? He’s more likely to be the person who wants to talk it out, but they’ve been together for long enough that he realizes that some of the things that he wants to do are not actually what Lahra needs, as a person. Because I’m writing this relationship between people who are adults and they’ve lived enough life and they’ve spent enough time with each other that they’ve come to understand one another’s rhythms. Writing that part of the relationship was really rewarding because I got to show the way that I can write in Max’s POV and characterize Lahra, while characterizing Max. Because then I can write in Lahra’s POV about Max, through her own POV and the places where how they see each other don’t exactly line up.    Then tell the reader that these are both unreliable narratives because this is tight third person, which has enough overlap with first person that you’re gonna get some of that unreliability. And you understand more of what that relationship needs by getting both of the two, each of their buy-in. In terms of where they see themselves, where they see their partner, where they have doubts and fears, and how that manifests in the way that they act and how it does and doesn’t manifest in how the other person sees them.   Because I don’t write the same scene from both POVs, but I do frequently write the sequel to a scene in the other partner’s POV. So that they’re reacting to the same stuff.   K: But, beyond even just Max and Lahra, then, we have Wheel. Who is, I won’t call her a third-party observer because that’s not the case, but is an outside perspective on a relationship and, inm any cases, the only outside perspective on a relationship.   M: Yeah, and she doesn’t have access to their interiority. Every relationship is different on the inside, even if you’re living with somebody else. You know, because maybe you overhear conversations, but you’re not having that same emotional experience. And so that was a little bit more of a place where I got to comment on the relationship from the outside, but also think about times where I have been the third wheel friend to a couple when they’re going through something. And Wheel is also very fun to write because she has a firmly developed self-image that is, to a certain degree, a protection against the way that things are. So she’s more of the curmudgeon character who makes a show of keeping people at arm’s length, but she could have kicked them out of the ship years ago and be doing something else. But she didn’t. Why is that? And she’s tied into other factions in the story and that tie also came later, because Wheel started out as more just, like, the Driver will get you from A to B.   Then it’s like, how does this technology work? Well, we’ve got these cyborgs and if they used to be an empire, why aren’t they in charge? Well, how are they still around? If you get overthrown, the people who overthrow you are going to try to keep you out of power as much as possible.   K, punny: Annihilate you, if you will.   [R giggles]   M: Yeah, so all of those worldbuilding questions, then, informed who the Atlan, Wheel’s people, who those people were. The cybernetics gives them the ability to engage with the warp drives, which is a little bit like how the Spice works in Dune, it’s a little bit like this, it’s a little bit like that. And that every time I went back into Wheel to either talk about how she’s seeing something else, or her position in this setting, engaging with factions on the Wreck or her own history as an even older, mature adult who’s been places and had relationships, every time I tried to fold in or think about some other topic, she grew more rounded as a person. That gave her even more different ways of engaging with Max and Lahra as characters.   K: Was there any evolution to Max and Lahra’s relationship? Did anything change as the story grew? Or did you always see them as two characters who love each other and are very happily married, but also have separate lives and separate goals that they’re working towards, and they’re going to help each other do this no matter what, but the more they help each other, the more they’re driving themselves apart?   M: I think the only time when I really had doubts about Max and Lahra was while I was writing the first draft because I had this premise and, following the fiction, I wanted to honor it enough to let there be the opportunity for maybe things to go bad for them. I, as a creator, had a specific type of outcome that I was shooting for, but I didn’t want to put my thumb on the scale so hard that I’m like, “Oh well! It doesn’t matter that these things happened, actually it’s gonna be Happily Ever After no matter what. Haha, I win.” Because that wouldn’t be, it wouldn’t be as strong of a work. It would feel like there was a cop-out.    So, because I had an outcome in mind, it was more about what in the world has to be different from where things were, maybe, at the middle of my first draft so that it made sense. That the choices that they made led them to where they were at the end of the book. Probably the biggest changes there happened when the group goes to someplace that’s really important to Lahra and her heritage. I’ll stay vague for readers so that they go and buy the book and read it! Because it’s great!   K: It’s a fantastic book. Everyone should go buy it and read it.   M: And then, basically, since I believe very firmly that people are informed by their circumstances, but not always 100 percent limited by them—there’s places where agency is limited in society and so on—   K: Mhm, yep.   M: But that, because people are informed by their circumstances, if I want a different character output, I can change the circumstances to put different pressures on them and to give them different experiences that let them reflect differently on what they feel about things. So it was kind of a feedback loop between who these characters are as I’m expressing it in the writing, trying to respect who they are as people, as I understand them, and then also applying different pressures and adjusting the pressures on them so that the story stays within the trajectory that I’m thinking. Because probably the first core of the story was them and their relationship, and other things kind of grew around that. And then the thematics emerged from how they, as characters, reacted with one another and then, looking backward, how all those things operate. So that any thematic clarity that a reader gets from Aria is not something that was on page one of my notes.   [51:07]    M: It’s because the process of creating it as the book people will read was development rehearsal practice, re-rehearsal, changing the arrangement, practicing again, changing the blocking. I’m using music metaphors here because I’ve done music and theater. Not only is the story entertaining, but it’s also, as much as possible, saying the things that I would like to say, or inviting the reader to reflect on the same themes and ideas that were what I was hoping for them to do. Because, and this is something I’ve talked about with Kaelyn pretty early on in the process was, this could have been several different books.   K: It’s, and it’s something—I always joke that when I’m reading through books I can tell what sections of it were written at the same time. Authors, you guys aren’t always as slick as you think you are. You leave fingerprints on a lot of things. That was something coming into this, that I could tell what chunks of this book had kind of been written at the start, what parts had been revised very heavily, but we spent a lot of time in the beginning talking about the thematic elements of this. But also, as you said, this book could have gone a lot of different directions. I think it went, I will go so far as to say, the correct direction. The, one of the best possible directions it could have gone.    But I can see that in reading this, especially reading some of the earlier drafts that I got. There were a lot of different things that could have happened in this story and happened to these characters. I think that speaks very highly of your worldbuilding and your ability to create and develop believable characters, is that I can see them dropped into different scenarios and just acting on their own accord. They’re an object in motion at that point, rather than something that you’re directing to do certain things. And that’s amazing. That’s a fantastic thing to be able to do as a writer.    M: Yeah, another way of thinking about it—and this is definitely informed by a video I was watching recently, a conversation between a couple of game designers—is that some of it is just down to tone.   K: Yes.   M: Two musicians can take the same song and go—one musician says, “Okay, cool, I’m going for the same tone but I’m gonna move the key.” Just moving the key actually changes more than you expect. It’s the moody, emo down-tempo version of a pop song?   R: Yup.   K: I was just gonna say, actually, I just discovered a cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Tori Amos which is—actually I discovered it because it was on one of Rekka’s playlists that she sent me and it’s fantastic. But it completely changes what you would maybe think the underlying context of the song would be. So yeah, I think, as I said when we started all of this, I would read anything that you set in this world. Especially if the characters are as engaging and compelling and dynamic as the ones that you’ve created for Aria because I see them as their own people rather than chess pieces being moved around on a board. They’re there to carry out actions that it doesn’t always feel like you, the author, are dictating to them. They’ve taken on a will of their own at this point.    M: And that is for the best because if they’re—on a list of writing traps that I know I can fall into, having something that feels a little bit more like action figures and choreography is definitely on that list. And so I have to respect the characters and go back and make sure that all of the circumstances and the worldbuilding acoustics, maybe?—to extend the music metaphor—that those line up so that things end up the way that I would like them to be.   K: So, along those lines, and we’re getting to the end here to start wrapping up, we like to ask our guests for advice or introspective or something you wish you could go back and tell Mike five years ago, when he was starting this whole process.        M: I’ve been working as a writer, now, long enough that 5 years ago is not the start of my career. Because it used to be, people would ask me, “What would you tell a younger self?” and it used to be about revision and what I learned about revision from the late, great Graham Joyce and Clarion West. But that was a lesson I learned 13 years ago now. So I think the lesson for 5 years ago Mike would be: start reading romance, you’re gonna really like it and it’s gonna teach you a lot about character relationships and getting drama and emotional investment for the reader out of just the very core relationships between people.    In a romance, people are also emergent from their circumstances and there’s lots of things you can do there, but that emotional action flywheel of Person A does a thing, you’re in Person B’s POV, so Person B first has a visceral, embodied reaction to what, to the emotionally-charged thing that was said, and then we’re in their perspective and their mind is racing and reflecting on something and, maybe, they’re going through an emotional journey about what’s going on. Maybe it makes them think about something, but not so long that you can’t then go back into scene and write about what they’re doing in reaction so that you’re able to kind of create this cycle of action and reaction, where it’s not just talking heads but we’re also getting all of this beat-by-beat dramatization of the emotional arc, the emotional rollercoaster of your POV character along the way.   And that approach was a lot of what I had to bring to Aria in successive drafts, especially as Kaelyn kept on poking me and saying like, “No! Unpack this more! Slow down!” Either to give the emotional rollercoaster or to paint with a finer brush the world around the characters. And that that process and that urging to slow down and unpack has been really great, it’s been fun to do. So it’s not like I’m being told I have to eat my vegetables, it’s—give yourself the situation and the platform on which you can then do these things that you really like doing, and you’re gonna be happier with the results.   K: I think, in my experience dealing with authors, there’s what I’ll call an overcorrection that writers tend to incorporate into their work, which is: I don’t wanna be the long-winded person here. I don’t wanna be the one that spends a paragraph describing the exact emotion that this character is feeling for 150 words. And there is certainly something to be said for being aware of that, but at the same time, I conversely always point out: you know how they’re feeling, you know what they’re thinking. You need to make sure that’s coming across to the reader. The reader doesn’t get access to your brain for this, they get access to the pieces of it that you’re putting in this book.   So, yeah. And part of it was very selfish. Part of this was: Well, hang on, I wanna know what’s going on here! Mike! Tell me! So it’s a—I really liked learning more about these characters as the book developed and I think you did an outstanding job.   M: That’s a very kind sentiment and I’m very grateful that you had that experience. Because that makes me feel very good as a writer.   R: What I also love about it is that you have put in all this work for character-building and worldbuilding, but the book reads as fast as any omnomnommable sci-fi book out there. It does not get burdened with—as much work as you put into it, it doesn’t show. You have seamless story going on. Even though Kaelyn can tell which spots you rewrote, no one who picks up this book—   K: I’ll never tell!   R: That’s Kaelyn’s superpower, that’s not indicative of what you’re going to feel as you read it. But it’s very fast-paced and, as you said, you worked very hard on the tension and it shows. It pulls the reader straight from the beginning to the end and it definitely leaves you wanting more, so I hope that the space opera series is going to continue for quite some time because whether it’s Max and Lahra and Wheel or, you know, Kruji getting their own book. I’d read them all.   K: Kruji absolutely needs their own book. The entire story of Annihilation Aria from the perspective of Kruji.   M: Well, I’ll write some books. And then twelve years after the series ends, I’ll come back and do the Kruji book. Because I’ve started a number of different series and the heartbreaking thing about publishing is it’s—   K, laughing: There’s only one!   M: It’s hard to justify writing something when I don’t see a market for it.   K: Yeah.   M: And so there are things that I would love to go back to, but right now the economic reality says, “Why would you do that? That’s a terrible idea!” So what I’m hoping for, with any given new series, is I hope that this finds enough of an audience that there is the demand to create the economic circumstances that will let me pursue that interest more. Because only now in the novel I just wrote, have I written something that I think actually could stay a stand alone. Everything else, I’m writing a world that I think I could do a lot more things in. I could do more things in this just finished novel’s world, but I want that novel to be able to stand on its own.   For the space operas, I would love to write more, and I will write more if the circumstances permit.   K: Yeah, it’s a very difficult thing for, not just writers but creators in general, to say: I am making this and it is a finite project that is done now.    R: Well you spend all that time living in that world!   K: Exactly, yeah.   R: And so you see all the corners where you’re like, “Oh! There’s someone down there. I gotta go follow that after I’m done with this.”   M: Yeah.   K: For instance, Kruji, who I feel like has a lot of very important stories to tell. Some perspectives and insights to offer the reader that is really going to enrich the story of the Kettle. So, uh, that’s—   M: Smart readers will be able to pick up some of the places where that could go in some chunks of the novel. And if you figure it out, email me on my website.   K: So, yes! Speaking of, Annihilation Aria is out a week from today! You still have time to pre-order the book and the audiobook, as well, is available for purchase. Mike, where can people find you online?   M: Sure, so my website is michaelrunderwood.com, that has kind of basic updates. I have a Patreon that you can find at Patreon.com/michaelrunderwood—    K: And it comes with a lot of pictures of a cute dog. Very cute dog. Highly recommend.   M: My dog, Oreo, is really the star of my Patreon and that’s fine. I know how the internet works.   [K laughs]   R, laughing: Yeah. Give the people what they want.   M: And if you’re listening to this, you like podcasts so I am an occasional guest-co-host on the Skiffy and Fanty show which is a general fannish podcast about books and movies and TV and so on. And I am a co-host on Speculate which is an actual play podcast starring science fiction-fantasy professionals. As of this recording, we’ve started a Blades in the Dark miniseries, I’m gonna start a Star Wars miniseries using the Scum and Villainy system and, sometime in the future, there may be some roleplaying in a world that listeners of this episode will now be familiar with. But more will come on that later on.   R: Hm.   K: That’s a nice teaser there. Okay. Well, Mike, thanks so much for talking to us. This was great! I mean, for as much as I’ve already gotten to hear about this, I never get tired of talking about this book and the characters and the process to get it to where it was.   M: Yeah, thank you very much. Because it’s written over such a long time, I am still processing all of the lessons and things. Like, “Oh! That really did take this thing!” or “This is where that actually comes from!” So that process, just by itself, is really rewarding for me and it’s fun to get to—to participate in this show that I have enjoyed as a listener.   R: Well thank you for that.   K: Thank you! Alright, well thanks again, Mike, and everyone for listening. We’ll talk to you in two weeks!   [outro music plays]   R: Thanks everyone for joining us for another episode of We Make Books. If you have any questions that you want answered in future episodes, or just have questions in general, remember you can find us on Twitter @wmbcast, same for Instagram. Or wmbcast.com!   If you find value in the content that we provide, we would really appreciate your support at Patreon.com/wmbcast. If you can’t provide financial support, we totally understand. And what you could really do to help us is spread the word about this podcast. You can do that by sharing a particular episode with a friend who can find it useful or if you leave a rating and review at iTunes, it will feed that algorithm and help other people find out podcast, too. Of course, you can always retweet our episodes on Twitter.   Thank you so much for listening and we will talk to you soon!      

Episode 133 of Look At My Records! features an interview with Marc LeFebvre of the New York City-based label Green Witch Recordings! The label has been active in 2020 despite the pandemic, releasing two compilations, the excellent debut EP from Teen Idle, an EP from Marc’s project Mothra Stewart, and more. In addition, Green Witch has several more releases scheduled for later this year from Lauren Lakis, Monroe Moon, and more! Tune in to hear Marc dish on his background playing music in bands like Chill Russell in Austin, TX, his experiences working in the music industry, and the story behind the formation of Green Witch Recordings. Plus, you’ll hear tunes from a slew of great artists from the label, including Teen Idle, Lauren Lakis, Mothra Stewart, Holsky, These People, and Chill Russell. This episode features records from Soccer Mommy, The Beach Boys, Mac Demarco, King Crimson, and Japandroids.Check out the Green Witch website to order and/or pre-order releases from their catalog. Like them on Facebook and follow them on Instagram.

What's going on people, today's journal topic: These People at THIS Job... Slink talks about how the people what you work with can have an affect on your attitude. Don't forget to write in your journals daily, not just weekly. Until Next Time, Be Safe! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/hazedazepodcast/support

Got a chance to catch up with These People frontman and Za Pizzeria owner, TJ Penzone. From our love of Howard Stern and John Carpenter. To his old band Men Women And Children. What it was like to be on Warner Brothers and whats new with his current band. At the very end TJ tells me about the 5 movies he can watch any time. Good dude and super talented. LIsten and share it! heres These People link https://open.spotify.com/artist/11KnRQPanMl2DiudXWTQsf?si=DRbz3btIRpyuS0UIl8L6Vg

  These People keep losing their keys! Maybe they should put them in a bowl by the front door or one of those fake rocks. On this week’s show: The Ghosts of the Stratosphere cover the first trade of the Locke & Key series by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez […]

Brother Will Washington teaches a lesson on this thought, "Who Will Cry for These People?"

“The Unpolled Society” is a special podcast that features a diverse community of Americans, who have shared their opinions about what is critical to them, as we end this decade. These People of Color provide an introspective on economic, political, educational and social issues that effect their lives and their community.

On The Rampage w/ Don Lichterman talks about the The Constitution, "I'm The One. Meaning it was Me...That captured These People...Me...Not Obama...Me, King Bay Plowshares 7, Rams play The Bengals at Wembley this Week, Oysterhead & TAB (Trey Anastasio Band) headline 420 Fest next year, Bernie Sanders rally draws 26K people in NYC along with others (AOC, etc.) that back him, Terps TV, Sunset Daily News & Democracy Now, Kapital A is the Sunset Artist of the Week and a major outside Democratic group is outspending President Trump on Facebook ads in the crucial battleground states of Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Lowell Ponte, The left’s plan to abolish prisons, 6 % of Human are Criminal Predators, Biochemical Genetic Evil Lurchs in These People!, Crazy SQUAD, Ilhan Omar, Absent a Cortex, Brainless Hell Clown, Demon-Rats, End of Civil Armerican Society, No Defense No Guns, Crazies on Loose All Over Nation, Dr Bill Deagle MD AAEM ACAM A4M, NutriMedical Report Show, www.NutriMedical.com, www.ClayandIRON.com, www.Deagle-Network.com,https://www.nutrimedical.com/product-category/epigenetic-song-of-dna-therapy/, The left’s plan to abolish prisonsLowell Ponte takes aim at AOC over desire to free criminals WND, October 10, 2019 URL: https://www.wnd.com/2019/10/lefts-plan-abolish-prisons/“Mass incarceration is our American reality,” declared socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., days ago via Twitter. “It is a system whose logic evolved from the same lineage as Jim Crow, American apartheid & slavery. That means we need to have a real conversation about decarceration & prison abolition in this country.”Ocasio-Cortez is a utopian believer in the state’s power to re-engineer human minds and hearts. She believes that “the U.S. incarcerates more than anywhere in the world” – nearly 2.3 million, just over two-thirds of 1% of our population – because we use our jails and prisons “as de facto mental hospitals, homeless shelters, & detox centers instead of … investing in … mental health, housing, edu, & rehab.”Her “prison abolition” views were echoed this month by the radicalized Student Government Assembly at New York University, which issued a statement opposing Marxocrat New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to replace the Rikers Island Prison with new, more “humane” jails.The student statement declared that “jails do not make us safe” and instead “serve only to further harm black and brown families, individuals, and communities and to perpetuate a racist and violent criminal legal system.”The statement, writes American Thinker pundit Eric Utter, also “endorsed a plan by a group called ‘No New Jails NYC’ that would mandate the $11 billion de Blasio was to invest in new jails instead be used to fund ‘housing for all,’ and other (woker) public programs.”No New Jails NYC is “committed to totally abolishing the city’s jail system by ‘disrupting every level of power’ and demands that de Blasio ‘responsibly release’ the 1,000 or so prisoners at Rikers.”Last July, under the bipartisan, idealistic “First Step Act,” the federal government released the first 2,243 of what is supposed to become a flood tide of non-violent inmates back into society. Skeptics had doubts, especially when Democrats blocked an amendment requiring those released to have only a non-violent criminal record. In fact, in this first group set free were 496 imprisoned for weapons/explosives-related crimes, 239 for sex offenses, 106 for robbery and 59 found guilty of homicide or aggravated assault.One of those released earlier this year after passage of the First Step Act was 41-year-old Joel Francisco, who had been serving a three-strikes-you’re-out life sentence for trafficking crack and powder cocaine. He had also been leader of a violent criminal gang, the Almighty Latin Kings, in Providence, Rhode Island. He reportedly was convicted in 1997 for assault with intent to murder. A warrant has just been issued for “non-violent” Francisco, who allegedly stabbed a man to death.Progressives believe that society makes people go bad and that leftist benevolence can make the most hardened recidivist criminal good. Leftist reformers renamed jails “penitentiaries,” places where criminals did “penance” and “repented.” For decades famed crime sociologist James Q. Wilson shared this idealistic people-are-inherently-good dogma.But one day Wilson awoke to reality: 3-6% of criminals are irredeemably evil. These predators see themselves as wolves and the rest of us as sheep to be sheared and preyed upon. They see parole boards as a game to lie to and con others into setting them loose again into civilized society.“Professor Wilson is not optimistic about changing the nature of man,” a fellow criminologist wrote, “and he clearly rejects the rehabilitative model as a historical failure and a hypocritical philosophy because of its inefficacy.”Repeat predatory criminals are incurable, Wilson realized. The only thing a sane society can do is lock them up and throw away the key. If jails are abolished, these freed wolves will devour us. In the left’s current heaven on Earth – socialist Venezuela – government confiscated the firearms of the law-abiding, then freed criminals and gave them these confiscated guns.In the United States, George Soros-manipulated liberal cities make it ever-easier for recidivist criminals to rob and intimidate without fearing jail time. Crime pays. The fearful law-abiding now look out through bars installed for safety over their home windows.Abolishing prisons should be a topic at the Oct. 15 Democratic presidential debate. Making his first appearance there will be egomaniacal billionaire Tom Steyer, who bought his place on stage. Ironically, Steyer made his billions by selling coal mines and a large investment in Corrections Corp. of America, a private company that operates for-profit prisons.In today’s America, the greediest and most vicious criminals have become the politically correct leftist politicians who rule and enslave us. As Mark Twain wrote: “There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” For information regarding your data privacy, visit Acast.com/privacy See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, we get to know Benny Ausmus and his journey getting to starting his company, Big Change Agency. We discuss the differences and affects on leadership to going on a complaining detox to give yourself and the world a chance to level you up. Resources: LinkedIn - https://linkedin.com/in/bennyausmus Big Change Agency - https://www.bigchangeagency.com/ The Bold Type - Mentioned Show from Hulu Fyre Festival Documentary Trailer Hulu - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljkaq_he-BU Fyre Festival Documentary Trailer Netflix - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ0KNVU2fV0 Posh Incredible Transformations - https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/posh-incredible-transformations/id1377517663?mt=2 Youtube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyrz1fZpMDHSfGm7t29ieOA/featured Website - Poshinc.com Email - tifany@poshinc.com   Episode Notes: * Intro - 0:00 * Clearing Up a Moment in the Show - 0:35 * Who is Benny Ausmus? - 3:18 * Big Change Agency - 3:48 * My Day to Day - 4:18 * My Interests - 4:30 * How Did You Get Into This Work? - 4:50 * Similar Stories and Variety - 9:00 * Needing Variety and Adventure - 9:58 * Did You Find Some Books Repetitive? - 10:27 * Did You Start Seeing Consistencies In What You Learned? - 11:22 * What is Leadership Awareness? - 12:45 * My Definition of Leadership - 14:09 * People Centric Leadership - 16:15 * Power In It’s Simplest Definition - 17:25 * Examples of People Centric Leadership - 18:20 * Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz - 19:15 * Triggering a Transformation - 21:41 * Leaders Affecting to a Change - 24:19 * What Makes a Difference in These People - 25:31 * A Belief That Every Leader Has the Answer - 28:54 * An Example: Fyre Festival - 31:44 * What Would a Leader ‘A’ Do vs. Leader ‘B’? - 36:10 * The Paradox on Personality Traits - 39:50 * Influence and the Ego Drive - 41:01 * The Biggest Problem With Self Awareness - 42:37 * Do Unaware Leaders Attract Unaware Employees - 43:40 * Will Leader ’B’ Attract and Train More ’B’ Typer Leaders - 45:11 * There’s No Going Backwards - 45:55 * How Would You Able to Look for a Leader ’A’? - 49:45 * The Issue with Self-Awareness and a Leader - 53:00 * How to Move Towards Empathetic, Courageous, Responsible and Resourceful - 55:10 * Closing - 58:12

Don't Pray for These People; The Law is for Grace Please enjoy this series on the essential New Testament book, Hebrews! Please visit our webpage: http://www.cornerfringe.com

--{ "The World State: Cold, Ruthless Algorithms Dissect Conversation, Punishing, Applauding, Methodically Persuading, In Leer of Our Overseer Hints a Smile Sardonic, No Other Gods Before Him, Whiffs of the Demonic." © Alan Watt }-- Time is Flying - Persinger's Field Theory - Techniques of Control - Bertrand Russell - Trained to Believe We Live in Best Country in the World - Life is Full of Deceptions - Kept Distracted with Data - Adam Curtis, Propaganda, Decency Laws in 1950s Britain - Deviancy Promoted in the Culture - Vulnerable Children - Neuroscientists, Behaviourists - BIT, Behavioural Insights Teams - Movie, The Third Man - Communism - Documentary on The Katyn Massacre of Polish Officers by the Communists; The Soviets Altered Film to Make it Appear the Germans had Slaughtered the Officers - The World is Silent about Communist Atrocities - George Orwell Connected Dots between Communism and Germany's National Socialism - Marxism is a Religion - Forced Migration, Economic Warfare - Not Allowed to Speak Out, Threats, Imprisonment and Then Finally Extermination - Viciousness of Human Nature - Dropping the Atom Bomb - All Through the Soviet Era, Canada and the U.S. Supplied Soviets with Grain - World Bank Loans to Developing Countries Funded by the Taxpayers of First World Countries - Power Group that Runs the World Owns the World Bank, IMF, BIS, United Nations, the Central Banks - Eustace Mullins Wrote a Book about the Creation of the Federal Reserve - Jekyll Island - Special Drawing Rights - Socialism is a Cover for a Very Powerful Group - Carroll Quigley - Elastic Money Backed by Nothing; a Fiction - Gaddafi - Tony Blair; Divvying Up Iraqi Oil Fields Far in Advance of Invasion - Science and Socialism Strip You of Any Kind of Sacredness of Humanity - Polio Vaccines with Simian 40 Virus - Brain Chips - Religious Debates - Belief is Different than Knowing - Tangible Evil - Abortion - Deliberate Destruction of the Family - Total War - Genocide in Rwanda; What was in These People? - Persuasive Design - Psychologists and Behaviourists Hired to Create Products We Want to Use More and More - B.J. Fogg - Book, The Hidden Persuaders - Silicon Valley Technologists very Wary of Letting Their Children have Screen Time - DARPA - Thousands of Swedes getting Microchipped - Technological Fascism - Totalitarianism - Global Compact on Migration - United Nations Parliamentary Assembly - WiFi Field is Not Just for Communication - Technotronics - 3,000 Norwegians Convert to Islam - Movie, Minority Report - Predicting When and Where Crime Will Happen - Peter Hitchens - International Union of Socialist Youth - Please Remember to Order My Books and Discs and Donate. *Title and Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - Nov. 4, 2018 (Exempting Music and Literary Quotes)

UCLA Extension Writers' Program instructor Zac Hug wrote scripts for Drop Dead Diva and Shadowhunters and has written, directed, and starred in episodes of the webseries These People. He also writes Christmas movies for the Hallmark Channel.

With Donald Trump verbally capitulating to Vladimir Putin during the Helsinki summit July 16, the Russia investigation heating up, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigating the NRA for potential money laundering for the benefit of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, Trump is clearly embroiled in a great deal of controversy. But in the face of it, Trump tells the American people to believe him over the facts that are publicly available. Evangelical leaders are also steering their flock toward belief in Trump - elevating their defenses of Trump over the Bible they state is inerrant. Will there come a time where Trump Christians will have a moment of clarity and decide that their deal with the devil is untenable? Citations: Blitzer, Ronn. 2018. “Update: White House Fixes Omission in Trump/Putin Transcript.” July 25. https://lawandcrime.com/legal-analysis/white-house-may-have-broken-federal-law-by-doctoring-trump-putin-video/ Ingraham, Christopher. 2018. “Two Charts Demolish the Notion That Immigrants Here Illegally Commit More Crime.” The Washington Post. June 19. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/19/two-charts-demolish-the-notion-that-immigrants-here-illegally-commit-more-crime/?utm_term=.ede8e5f1e92c “Maria Butina is the ‘Spy' the Trump Administration Asked For: Talker.” 2018. USA Today. July 19. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/07/19/maria-butina-alleged-spy-trump-administration-asked-talker/800507002/ Martin, Michael. 2018. “Send Your Paycheck or Face the Wrath of God, says Trump Pastor.” Metro. January 9. https://www.metro.us/president-trump/send-paycheck-says-trump-pastor-paula-white Mazzetti, Mark, and Katie Benner. 2018. “12 Russian Agents Indicted in Mueller Investigation.” The New York Times. July 13. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/us/politics/mueller-indictment-russian-intelligence-hacking.html Naham, Matt. 2018. “Mueller has Likely had ‘Secret' Access to NRA Docs Revealing Origins or $30 Milion Spent on 2016 Election.” Law & Crime. July 2. https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/mueller-has-likely-had-secret-access-to-nra-docs-revealing-origins-of-30-million-spent-on-2016-election/?utm_source=engageim “National Rifle Association.” 2016. Open Secrets. https://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/recips.php?cycle=2016&cmte=National%20Rifle%20Assn Nowrasteh, Alex. 2018. “Criminal Immigrants in Texas: Illegal Immigrant Conviction and Arrest Rates for Homicide, Sexual Assault, Larceny, and Other Crimes.” CATO Institute. February 26. https://www.cato.org/publications/immigration-research-policy-brief/criminal-immigrants-texas-illegal-immigrant Schwartz, Ian. 2018. “Trump: Don't Believe the Crap You See from These People on Fake News.” Real Clear Politics. July 24. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/07/24/trump_dont_believe_the_crap_you_see_from_these_people_on_fake_news.html Smith, Chris. 2018. “'Coincidence Number 395': The NRA Spent $30 Million to Elect Trump. Was it Russian Money?” Vanity Fair. June 21. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/06/the-nra-spent-dollar30-million-to-elect-trump-was-it-russian-money Swaine, Jon. 2018. “Maria Butina: Ties Emerge Between NRA, Alleged Spy and Russian Billionaire.” The Guardian. July 26. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/26/maria-butina-nra-svetlana-nikolaeva-konstantin-nikolaev Tharoor, Ishaan. 2018. “Trump's Helsinki ‘Disgrace' Caps a Destructive European Trip.” The Washington Post. July 17. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/07/17/trumps-helsinki-disgrace-caps-a-destructive-european-trip/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.03ef347bbd70 “'These Children Are Being Trafficked, We Must Have Stricter Border Laws': Pastor Paula White Tours Migrant Detention Facility.” CBN News. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSSBPrtAAqI Van Dyk, Ted. 2018. “To Beat Trump, Get a Grip.” The Wall Street Journal. July 23. https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-beat-trump-get-a-grip-1532386992 “What Lies Ahead for Donald Trump and the Church.” 2016. Center for Moral Clarity. November 17. http://cmc.rodparsley.com/News.aspx?nid=4982 Twitter: @potstirrercast IG: @potstirrerpodcast Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/potstirrerpodcast/ Website: PotstirrerPodcast.com Flying Machine Network: http://flyingmachine.network Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/flyingmachine Music: Potstirrer Podcast Theme composed by Jon Biegen from Stranger Still http://strangerstillshow.com/ Amazing Grace composed by Audionautix Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Artist: http://audionautix.com/ Autumn Sunset composed by by Audionautix Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Cockpit composed by Silent Partner Night Walker composed by Mitch Music http://youtu.be/WkOLiZ1pLSU

Catch up with this BONUS episode I recorded live from Traverse 18 in Rotterdam where I talked about why you should all start a podcast. It’s a brilliant episode and I reveal some exciting news for What She Said fans!! Happy Season two, and I’ll see y’all in a couple of months time when S3 kicks off :) Find FULL SHOW NOTES HERE REFERENCES Those Conspiracy Guys podcast The Adam Buxton podcast WTF with Marc Maron Penny's podcast These People  What She Said Traverse episode Libsyn podcast hosting Anchor podcast host My #PODMAS series of podcast episodes Sparemin app Where you can find Elle: Her Blog: http://ellecroft.com Twitter = @elle_croft Instagram = @elle_croft Where you can find ME: My Blog:  https://lucylucraft.com Twitter, Pinterest & Instagram = @lucylucraft 

sermon transcript Introduction In 2010, Tyndale House published a book that took our nation by storm, called The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven: A True Story. It related the story of Alex Malarkey’s experience when he was six years old, after a terrible traffic accident in 2004. According to his own account, Alex and his father Kevin were involved in a terrible car crash on a rural highway in Pennsylvania. Alex said he saw his father fly out of the window of the car only to be caught by an angel and carried to safety. He then related his own experience after he had been life-flighted by a helicopter to a hospital. He states he was carried by an angel through the gates of Heaven, which he described as tall, to be met by Jesus, who appeared out of a hole in Heaven. After he regained consciousness, he told his family this account and his father helped him write down his near death experience. Tyndale House published it, promoting it as “a supernatural encounter that will give you new insights into heaven, angels and hearing the voice of God.” The book sold over a million copies, which shows the intense interest that people have about Heaven. Unfortunately, despite the title, A True Story, it was not true at all. In the year 2012, Alex described his own book as one of the most deceptive books ever published. Alex wrote in a confession of sorts, “I did not die. I did not go to heaven. I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. When I made the claims that I did, I had never read the Bible. People have profited from lies and they continue to profit from lies. They should read the Bible, which is enough. The Bible is the only source of truth. Anything written by man cannot be infallible.” The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven is one of many books in what has become known as the heavenly tourism genre — books by people who claim to have had visions of heaven and can give us information about what we will experience after we die. The 2004 book, 90 Minutes In Heaven by Don Piper spent over five years on the New York Times Best Seller List and sold over 6 million copies. Even more impressive is Todd Burpo’s account of his three-year-old son Colton’s experience. That book, called Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back, sold over 10 million copies and was made into a movie that grossed over $101 million at the box office. That story is particularly engrossing because Colton somehow acquired information about an unborn sister that was miscarried by his mother in 1998 and a great-grandfather who had died 30 years before Colton was born. This seemingly supernatural information gave Colton’s account spiritual authority to many people, which explains the runaway sales of the book and the interest in the movie. Pastor John MacArthur in California is deeply concerned about all of these kinds of stories. He said, “It may be quite fascinating to read these intricately detailed accounts of people who claim to have come back from heaven, but that hobby is as dangerous as it is seductive. Readers not only get a twisted, unbiblical picture of heaven from these tall tales, they also imbibe a subjective, superstitious, shallow brand of spirituality. There is no reason to believe anyone who claims to have gone to heaven and returned. Studying mystical accounts of supposed journeys into the afterlife yields nothing but confusion, contradiction, false hope, bad doctrine, and a host of similar evils.” I take it John MacArthur like any book of that genre. The amazing popularity of these books shows the intense interest we all have in knowing more about Heaven. The controversy that has followed them, however, shows the danger inherent in these accounts and, as Alex said, seeking information about Heaven from any place other than the Bible. That is why the last two chapters of the Bible that we are studying are so powerful. In the book of Revelation, the Apostle John records spiritual visions that God gave him through the power of the Holy Spirit, in which he ascended in the Spirit into the heavenly realms and saw visions of heaven and predictions of the future. Revelation 1:1-2 says, “The revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who testifies to everything he saw — that is, the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ.” A few chapters later in Revelation 4:1-2, John writes, “After this I looked, and there before me was a door standing open in heaven. And the voice that I had first heard speaking to me like a trumpet said, ‘Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.’ At once I was in the Spirit, and there before me was a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it.” Both of these passages say that John was given a revelation from God of the future and of the heavenly realms. Revelation 21 and 22 contain the final visions that God gave to John on the island of Patmos (and the final visions of the Bible), visions of the heavenly world to which Christians are going. God commanded John to write down those visions for us to read. Verse 5 says, “He who was seated on the throne said, ‘I am making everything new!’ Then he said, ‘Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.’” The words committed to the apostle John are trustworthy; they are words on which we can build our lives, the hopes of our souls. They are trustworthy and true — not lies, not deceptions. John was commanded through the Holy Spirit to write them down for the generations, twenty centuries of Christians who would read these accounts. In giving him this responsibility, God dealt differently with John than he did with the Apostle Paul. In 2 Corinthians 12:2-4, Paul said, “I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know — God knows. And I know that this man — whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows — was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell.” Paul says that the things he saw when he was caught up to the third heaven were inexpressible — no words could express them accurately; and were not permitted to be revealed — he was not even allowed to try to put them into words. God had planned to entrust that responsibility to John decades later. Whatever you may think about the heavenly tourism books, whether you agree or disagree with John McArthur, you may enjoy reading them. But this book of Revelation, and specifically the last two chapters, are the only God-approved Spirit-inspired description of the magnificent future world to which we Christians are going, and they are worthy of our careful study because they are trustworthy and true. Verse 4, which I will focus on in depth next week, is magnificent, giving us a look into the world to which we are going, where there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain. We will swim in that concept next week to try to understand what that will mean for us. Review of Last Week God has commanded us to meditate on heaven, to fill our minds and our hearts with things above, things to come. “Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you [Christians] died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” [Colossians 3:1-4] The greater our suffering, the sweeter will be our meditations about heaven. Jesus said in Matthew 5:11-12, “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” Our brothers and sisters in restricted countries are suffering for the gospel, incarcerated for their faith. We are to remember them, according to Hebrews, as if we were in prison with them. We should especially pray for the persecuted church that God would give them robust meditations on their heavenly life, their heavenly rewards, that they would rejoice and be glad to suffer for his name. We noted that our present affluent comfortable life may make our meditations on heaven less sweet and not as urgent. We noted the many benefits of meditating on and yearning strongly for Heaven. It proves that where our treasure is, there our hearts will be also. It develops Christian character — perseverance, boldness, courage, an otherworldly aspect to our lives. It glorifies God — Psalm 73:25 says, “Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire beside you.” It makes all of life God-centered because heaven is God-centered; the more we meditate on that place, the more God-centered we will become, and God will be our treasure and our pleasure. Meditating on and yearning strongly for Heaven helps us to realize how insignificant our life circumstances really are, whether good or bad. Accolades and rewards and treasures of this life or suffering that we endure shrink into insignificance, enabling us to conclude that our suffering is, as Paul said [Romans 8:18, 2 Corinthians 4:17], “not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” and “light and momentary” compared to eternity. Meditating on Heaven results in holiness. Both Paul and John link meditating on Heaven to putting sin to death and purifying ourselves just as He is pure, resulting in yearning for holiness. Meditating on Heaven drives missions and evangelism, helping us to live otherworldly lives, not caring what we have in this life. It enables some to leave behind the comforts of a particular lifestyle to go to places where they will be less comfortable or even actively persecuted because they are living for Heaven. Our hope in heaven is very attractive to people who are without hope and without God in the world. It drives the external journey and enables us to vigorously serve God right to the end because we know that our labour in the Lord is not in vain, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:58. Then we started with Revelation 21:1: “Then I saw ‘a new heaven and a new earth’, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away…” Here, the Bible comes full circle from Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” It ends with this incredibly hopeful statement that completes God’s intention in making a physical universe as a manifestation of his love and glory. He did not need a physical universe, he wanted it. So He created the first heaven and the first earth, which he will remove in the end. The first heaven and the first earth will pass away, and He will bring in a new heaven and a new earth. The use of the same words shows that there will be continuity in the form of a resurrected earth — there will be a link to this present world, but it will be far greater and more glorious. In that physical spiritual world, we will have the delight of exploring, like Lewis and Clark or the explorers who sailed to the new world. At that point, Habakkuk 2:14 says, “…the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” We will study, like scientists and explorers, what God has made in the new heaven and the new earth, to celebrate and delight in it. The first heaven and the first earth will have passed away — we will remember this present world and our personal and collective history, but without any accompanying mourning or pain or sorrow. The first heaven and earth will pass away to be replaced by a resurrected world, similar in concept to our resurrection bodies. In 1 Corinthians 15:42-44, Paul affirms the resurrection body which will require a physical resurrected world in which to live. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. We must have resurrection bodies to live in that perfect world. He described it in this way: “The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.” Imperishable, glorious, powerful, spiritual. That describes the resurrection body and the resurrected world. We will enjoy walking in our resurrection bodies on this resurrected earth, feeling the resurrected soil with our resurrected feet. Randy Alcorn, in his book Heaven, speculates, using his imagination based in Scripture, on what that new world will be like. It will be familiar, like home, like what we have known in this world, only different, better. He cites Revelation 21:10: “… he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.” John is taken to a lofty, glorious mountain and later is shown a river flowing through the center of the city, clear as crystal. Then, Alcorn’s imagination takes flight. It is amazing to imagine what God will do with mountains and rivers in the new earth. He uses the logic of progression — our resurrection bodies will be like our physical bodies, only better, with expanded capabilities: “Everything God tells us suggests we will look back at the present earth and conclude, creatively speaking, God was just warming up and getting started with this present earth.” Consider the natural wonders God has created in this universe. On Mars, the volcano Olympus Mons rises 79,000 feet from the surface of Mars, almost three times taller than Mount Everest, which is 29,000 feet. The base of Olympus Mons is 370 miles across and would cover the entire state of Nebraska. That is a big mountain. The Valles Marineris is a vast canyon on the surface of Mars, stretching one-sixth of the way around the planet, 2800 miles long — about the distance from the Atlantic to the Pacific across the United States — 370 miles wide, 4 1/2 miles deep. Hundreds of our Grand Canyons would fit inside that canyon. Alcorn is pointing to what God has done in this present universe and speculating that the new earth may have far more spectacular features than that. The new waterfalls may dwarf Niagara Falls. We may find rock formations more spectacular than those in Yosemite or the Alps or the Karakoram Mountains or the Himalayas; and forests deeper and richer than the Pacific Northwest or the Amazonian rainforest. There will be no bondage, suffering, or decay that the present nature has, so there will be no natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, mudslides, floods, droughts, or anything that would torment the earth and destroy the beauty, harmony, and peacefulness of the future world. Verse 1 concludes, “No longer will there be any sea.” Whether you are fine with that or not, what will be will be. But whatever God makes will be spectacular, majestic, beautiful and breathtaking. In Verse 2, the new Jerusalem descends from God. “I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.” This is the capital city of God’s eternal empire. There will be both glorious heavenly countryside and a radiant glorious city — rural and urban — in the new heaven and new earth. The city, the new Jerusalem, is the very thing that is promised to Old Testament believers. Hebrews 11:13, 16 says, “All these people were still living by faith when they died… …they were longing for a better country — a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.” The country implies a vast, spacious world to explore, teeming with life, spectacular scenic vistas, lakes, rivers, hills, forests, fields, mountains, vast open spaces. The city, on the other hand, implies a concentration of population, shared experiences, relationship, society and culture, fellowship, creativity, the arts, architecture and music. All these are displays of being created in the image of God. The new Jerusalem will descend from heaven already constructed by God’s hand. He has prepared the bride but she has also prepared herself, so we can imagine that our labors in this world help to make the new Jerusalem glorious and beautiful. In the same way, in the next world our labors will be welcome; we will be working in the new heaven and the new earth. The name of the city, Jerusalem, implies continuity but difference. The word “Jerusalem” was evocative and powerful for the Jews. The old Jerusalem was the city of David, the center of Jewish life, culture, religion and hopes. But it was also corrupted by idolatry and wickedness, so it had to be redeemed by the blood of Christ. This new Jerusalem is perfectly pure, the fulfillment of the Old Testament purpose for God to dwell in glory in the midst of His people. The new Jerusalem is therefore both a city — a place — and the Church, the bride of Christ — a people. We, having resurrection bodies, will have to dwell somewhere. “In My Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, I would I have told you I'm going there to prepare a place for you.” Christ is preparing a physical location for his physical people. The city is “a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.” She is made radiantly beautiful for her wedding day, coming down out of Heaven, gloriously adorned and dressed and ready for her bridegroom. Christ has labored to make her ready for centuries of redemptive history through evangelism, discipleship, pastoral ministry, the ministry of spiritual gifts of teaching the Word of God, administration, prayer and faith. All of those spiritual gifts together make her radiant and beautiful and ready for her wedding day. Paul says to husbands in Ephesians 5:25-27, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the Word, in order that He might present her to Himself as a radiant church without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish.” Holy and blameless, without blemish, stain or wrinkle. In every respect, her adornment — kosmeo in the Greek, from which we get “cosmetic” — is magnificent, glorious and complete. The image of marriage is a powerful Old Testament image. God considered Israel his wife. Jeremiah 2:2-3 says, “I remember the devotion of your youth, how as a bride you loved me and followed me through the wilderness, through a land not sown. Israel was holy to the Lord.” Many of the prophetic images in the Old Testament are negative, as God speaks like a husband to His unfaithful wife. The prophet Hosea was commanded to marry an adulterous wife and have children of unfaithfulness as a picture to Israel, guilty of the vilest adultery in departing from the Lord. We all are, like the hymn Come Thou Fount says, “prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.” Our idolatrous, wandering, defective hearts will be cured and healed from that at last and purified from our wandering ways. That marriage image is perfected between Christ and his Church. The Central Joy of Heaven The Reward of Heaven: God Will Dwell in Glory with His People Revelation 21:3 says, “And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.’” This is the central joy of Heaven. The heavenly tourism books tend to miss this fact, which is one of their big problems. The central joy of Heaven is being present with the Triune God. God has been yearning for this throughout all the years of redemptive history. At last, the dwelling of God is with people. He has been waiting and yearning and working for this moment for thousands and thousands of years. All of His patience and compassion and suffering and labor comes to sweet consummation. It is difficult to number the times God says this in Israel directly or through the prophets: “I will be your God and you will be my people.” Leviticus 26:11-12 says, “I will put my dwelling place among you, and I will not abhor you. I will walk among you and be your God, and you will be my people.” At last we have the fulfillment of the dwelling glory of God. The Greek, skene, is derived from the Hebrew for the word “tabernacle,” Mishkan, so the Hebrew comes over to English in the expression “Shekinah glory,” literally meaning “dwelling glory.” This is the glory that God shows when He is settling in to dwell in the midst of His people. He would use a glory cloud to show that He was with the Israelites in the desert. When the tabernacle was set up, the glory cloud appeared and filled the tabernacle. God’s dwelling glory is the centerpiece of Heaven. Jonathan Edwards, in his sermon on 1 Corinthians 13, Heaven is a World of Love, detailed the future world. Despite the fact that God is omnipresent, He is revealed in Scripture, especially in certain places, relationally. He was more in Israel than in any other nation on Earth. He was more in Jerusalem than any other city in Israel. He was more in the temple than any other building in Jerusalem. He was more in the Holy of Holies than any other part of the temple. He was more in the mercy seat above the Ark of the Covenant than anywhere else in the Holy of Holies. There was a concentration of the revelation of God. That is what we will get in Heaven, where we will be swimming in a sea of God, and so deeply, richly satisfied with that. We will be filled with God — this is the reward of Heaven. He said to Abraham, in Genesis 15:1, “After this, the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision: ‘Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward.’” Abraham would not take the loot, the gold and silver, from the battle with the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah, so God appeared to him in this vision, saying in effect, “Well done. Fear not. I am your very great reward.” Why Does God Want to be with US? The more I learn about God, the more I see how glorious it will be to fully understand why we want to be with God. But why does He want to be with us? We are sinful, weak, insignificant, corrupted. But God does not see it that way. He yearns to have fellowship with us. Jesus, on the night before he was crucified, said to His squabbling apostles who were arguing about which of them was the greatest, said to them in Luke 22:15, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.” It is incomprehensible, but that is the way he is. He wants to be with us; we are his heritage and he is ours. Other Joys of Heaven: No More Death, Mourning, Crying, or Pain Intimate Comfort Other joys of heaven are lesser, but worth discussing. Revelation 21:4 says, “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” This is the intimacy and tenderness of Christ’s own hand wiping our final tears away. All of the grief and suffering and pain that we have gone through will be finished. There are various reasons for tears. Personally, what I most regret is my own sin. It often causes me tears of sorrow. To have Jesus wipe those tears away and say we will not weep or mourn over that anymore will be unimaginably sweet. It is helpful to link it together with an appropriate understanding of Judgment Day. Verse 4 and its beautiful promises do not seem to cover Judgment Day like a canopy. That day will be hard. It will be a day of darkness and sorrow. It will be difficult to give Christ an account for everything done in the body, whether good or bad, and for every careless word ever spoken. Some believe we will not need to face Judgment Day in this way, citing Romans 8:1: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” But giving Jesus an account is not the same as condemnation. Condemnation is the Lake of Fire. He will not command us who are Christians on the basis of any of our sins “Depart from Me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” We will not be condemned, but we will give him an account. 2 Corinthians 5:10 says plainly, “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.” God will test the body of our works to see if they are worthy of reward. 1 Corinthians 3:12-15 says, “If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man's work. If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames.” We will suffer loss from whatever of our works are burned up; that will be difficult. We will have an emotional reaction to giving account on Judgment Day, but not beyond. All of our faithless works and sins of omission and commission — the wood, hay and straw — will be tested and burned, and then the gold, silver, and costly stones — actions done for the glory of God, from a heart of love, by faith, though imperfect — will be purified by fire and we will be rewarded for those. We will cry tears of regret on that day: I did not live like I should have. I wasted opportunities to tell people about Jesus. There were poor people around me, and I lived selfishly. I did not do for them like I should have. I did some things, but not enough. What is so amazing is that Jesus, with his holy and nail-scarred hand, will wipe those tears away and comfort us, and then will bring us into a world where those tears will be shed no more. That is incredible; that is his grace. No More Death, Mourning, Crying or Pain Death is the final enemy. 1 Corinthians 15:26 says, “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” All the destruction and sorrow and fear and anxiety and intense loss and pain caused by death will end, and we will live forever. We will not die. Our relationships will be eternal. We will never say goodbye again. We will not age. We will not reach our prime after 10,000 years, followed by a long, slow, eternal decline. The body will be raised in power and in glory — no decline, no death, no funerals. No more mourning — psychological, emotional, mental anguish — or crying, the physical action that flows from pain. God’s Present Invitation to an Eternal Home God’s Direct Activity in Creating this Coming World Revelation 21:5 says, “And he who was seated on the throne said, ‘Behold, I am making all things new.’ Also he said, 'Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.’” God speaks from His throne with the voice of kingly, powerful authority. He says, “Behold [Look at this!] I am making all things new.” This gives a sense of God’s energetic activity, not a deistic world which God sets it up and then removes Himself from it. He is actively, energetically involved in making all things new. There will be a comprehensive new creation. In this present world, there is no new creation thing except our redeemed souls. The moment we come to Christ, we are made new creations in Christ. 2 Corinthians 5:17 says, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” Everything else continues in the old order. But then, He will make everything new. The Command to WRITE John is commanded to write down what he hears. Our Christian faith is a literary, written faith. We have a book, and this book sets Christianity apart from every other religion in the world. Other religions have holy books — the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, and other writings. But this book is unique. God originally wrote the Ten Commandments with His finger, but then commanded Moses in the wilderness to write down all of His commands that God gave to him. After that, all of the prophets were commanded in a similar way to write down the Word of God. In this final testimony, these words have been written down, and they are trustworthy and true. They are a part of that poor reflection. We see indistinctly, dimly. How do you put Heaven into words? How can you possibly describe in nouns and verbs and adjectives and paragraphs a vision like this? But he said, “Write down what I tell you. The words will be exactly what I want you to say to correspond to this vision.” The words are enough to get us to Heaven, but not as good as being in Heaven. Amen. We will see him face-to-face, and that will be so much better, but in the mean time, we have these words. Psalm 12:6 says, “And the words of the LORD are flawless, like silver refined in a furnace of clay, purified seven times.” God’s Invitation Verse 6 is God’s powerful invitation to this eternal home based on all His words. Revelation 21:6 says, “He said to me: ‘It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To him who is thirsty I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life.’” It is done, or literally, has become. God has brought this magnificent new world into reality; He has made it become real. He points again to that linear history that spread out over a redemptive history. Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. The first world, this present world that will pass away was brought in through Christ. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” [John 1:1-3] And “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” [John 1:14] The Word is Jesus Christ, and through him, the first world came into being. So also through Christ, the eternal world will come into being through the work of the Father. Isaiah 9:7, speaking of Jesus, says, “Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David's throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever. The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this.” His kingdom will continue increasing, and we will see it. The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of Christ’s kingdom, as the waters cover the sea. It will be eternally becoming more radiant and glorious and majestic and beautiful. God wants us there; He is inviting us to enter the Kingdom of God now by faith, and then later, when the time comes, we will enter it with our brothers and sisters. Are You Thirsty? Verse 6 concludes, “To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life.” Think about the thirstiest you have ever been in your life — a hazy, hot, humid day, working outside, you have not had enough to drink and you are parched; or someone crawling through a desert, desperate to find an oasis. Water is life in those cases. Are you thirsty to be in a perfect world like that? I am so thirsty to never sin again and to be around others who never sin again. I hunger and thirst for righteousness. I want to see God — as the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul thirsts for you. Jesus said in John 6, “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” You will come to a place of perfect satisfaction and be so refreshed in Jesus in Heaven. Are you thirsty for the forgiveness of your sins? Do you yearn to have God say to you, “All of your sins are forgiven through faith in Christ”? Are you thirsty to be reconciled to God and be in a right relationship with Him? Are you thirsty to be in the new heaven and new earth, where there will be no more death, mourning, crying or pain? Then come and drink. It is offered freely without cost, as it says in Isaiah 55:1: “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.” The Gift is Given Freely to Those Who Overcome This gift is given to those who overcome. Revelation 21:7 says, “He who overcomes will inherit all this, and I will be his God and he will be my son.” We must conquer to get there. We must overcome something. First and foremost, 1 John 5:4 says, “…everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith.” Faith in Jesus is the victory that overcomes the world. We must overcome all that the world, the flesh and the devil want to do to our souls just for believing in Jesus, to have a saving faith in him. Then, having come to saving faith in Christ, we then must fight the good fight of faith. We must fight indwelling sin by the power of the Holy Spirit. Heaven is given to those who fight that fight. Those who do not are not children of God. Romans 8:13-14 says, “…if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.” You are led by the Spirit into a battle against sin, against the world, the flesh and the devil. That is the road that leads to Heaven. He who overcomes will inherit all this. We are more than conquerors, and those who are born again will overcome. Someday we will see Satan dead at our feet. We will put a foot on his neck. We will see the world system destroyed, and our own lust and sin nature will be purified out of us, and we will be heirs to the Kingdom of God. God’s Terrifying Warning of Who Will Be Excluded Who are These People and What are These Sins? He gives a terrifying warning of those who will be excluded in Revelation 21:8: “But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars-- their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.” The cowardly are those who care more what people think than what God thinks, who know what to do, but do not do it. The cost is too high. The unbelieving are those who will not believe in Jesus. Whether they have heard the Gospel or not, they will not combine what they know with faith, as the author to Hebrews says. The vile are morally repugnant, morally ugly, excluded because in that world, there will be no blemish, no stain, nothing but purity and holiness. In Christ, we are transformed from being vile to being radiantly beautiful, but those who have not received that transformation are vile. Murderers. The sexually immoral — we are in a sexually free, permissive age but God has never changed His standard. The magic arts, the sorcerers — pharmakos — those who use drugs in witchcraft. Idolaters — anyone who places ultimate value on created things rather than the Creator. Liars — Psalm 116:11 says, “Everyone is a liar.” Seeing that on the list, we should realize that we are redeemed by grace, though we deserve to be condemned too. We are all the same, but we are redeemed from lying and all these other sins by the blood of Christ. The end of it for those people is the fiery lake of burning sulfur, the second death; a place of active conscious torment and sorrow, not merely the absence of God. Applications Top Priority: The top priority for any who are outside of Christ is that you come to faith in Christ. That is what this invitation is all about. Believe in Jesus, trust in him. God sent Jesus his only begotten Son into the world to be a human. He is fully God and fully man. He died on the cross in our place as an atoning sacrifice. Put your trust in Him, not in your own works. Trust in Jesus and you will be forgiven of all your sins. Christians If you are already a Christian, meditate on heaven more than you do; fill your soul with meditations of the world to come. Read Revelation 21 and 22, and feed on it. Let it flow out into good works that God has prepared in advance for you to walk in. Ask the Lord how He wants you to serve Him each day. Find someone who is lost and share the Gospel. Find someone in a place of sorrow or misery, and talk about sadness and sorrow in light of what we have learned today, that we are coming to a place where there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain. Ask if they would like to hear more about that. Closing Prayer Close with me in prayer. Father, we thank you for the beauty of the world to which we are going, We know we do not deserve it, and can scarcely imagine it. But I pray, O Lord, that You would fill our minds and our hearts with the truth. Help us to understand that beautiful world. Help us to yearn for it and to be hungry and thirsty for it, and to desire it with all of our hearts. Fill us with your Holy Spirit. Enable us, O Lord, to glorify you by putting sin to death and by witnessing by sharing the gospel. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Ancient of Days Father's Day edition.      CounterCultureWISE Do you feel that common sense is not so common anymore? Do you wish that you could creatively and effectively change your life, improve your prospects, and generally feel better than you do? Join Mélanie Hope, author of Get Over it & Get Started and What's Wrong with These People? and James Moniz, author/actor/Marine for a powerful show full of positive people, crazy news, self-empowerment…and a few humorous rants. Email abigail@counterculturewise for your happiness advice!

Episode 055 - What's All the Personality Type Hype? (PART 1)    In Real Estate, you run into a WHOLE LOTTA personalities. In this episode, we break down the 4 different personality types used in the DISC Personality Test and tell you how to spot them. Learning to communicate with different personalities can improve both your business and your personal lives. That's what we're here for!  We care. Because we're high S's.   SHOW NOTES • Setting the Stage [3:42]  • Our Views on Jewel and When We Fell in Love with Her [4:12]  • 4 Different Personality Types [6:19]  • The DISC - Starting with the “D” [9:32]  • How to Determine if Someone is a “D” [13:44]  • The “I” [15:25]  • The “S” [18:54]  • The “C” [23:35]  • Let's Play Games with These People [26:32] • Our Test for You This Week [28:34]      SHOW LINKS BOOM! Real Estate Podcast Listing Process:  www.boomlistingprocess.com  Learn More About Jewel: http://www.biography.com/people/jewel-224921  Alaska the Last Frontier: http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/alaska-the-last-frontier/  Take your DISC Test: https://www.123test.com/disc-personality-test/  More DISC Testing: https://discpersonalitytesting.com/free-disc-test/  The “D” Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqntSJGu1t0  The “I” Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGxaEdXOSk8  The “S” Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1orYZAoGgoQ  The “C” Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieo0LPYdUfQ    BOOM LINKS Email: info@boomrealestatepodcast.com Web: www.boomrealestatepodcast.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/boomrealestatepodcast 30-Day Jump Start FREE DOWNLOAD: www.boom30.com  

Richard Ashcroft released his album 'These People' earlier this year and it affected us greatly. It's a stunning set of songs, in particular the single 'This Is How It Feels'. Rob Esse discusses his appreciation of that song and Richard's big return to music in 2016. 

Emitido el 26/05/2016 en www.radioutopia.es Con motivo de la próxima visita de Paul McCartney a Madrid (2 de Junio - Vicente Calderón) nos tomamos la licencia de revivir los últimos días de los Beatles como banda y de saborear "RAM", el segundo LP en solitario de McCartney. El hombre que no genera sombra, Richard Ashcroft, acaba de sacar un nuevo trabajo bajo el título "These People", motivo mas que suficiente como para escuchar algunos cortes de este gran trabajo. Contamos con la presencia y ayuda de Javier Rangel, amigo del programa.

Emitido el 26/05/2016 en www.radioutopia.es Con motivo de la próxima visita de Paul McCartney a Madrid (2 de Junio - Vicente Calderón) nos tomamos la licencia de revivir los últimos días de los Beatles como banda y de saborear "RAM", el segundo LP en solitario de McCartney. El hombre que no genera sombra, Richard Ashcroft, acaba de sacar un nuevo trabajo bajo el título "These People", motivo mas que suficiente como para escuchar algunos cortes de este gran trabajo. Contamos con la presencia y ayuda de Javier Rangel, amigo del programa.