Podcasts about western american

This week's episode features not one but two conversations—with Aron and Strauss—which, while it may sound like a jazz-age songwriting duo, is in fact a pairing of two distinguished historians: Stephen Aron and Barry Strauss. They join our ongoing series of interviews exploring historians' early love of the past and the essential role of intellectual humility in historical thinking. First up is Stephen Aron, Professor Emeritus of History at UCLA and President and CEO of the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles. The Autry is one of the nation's foremost museums dedicated to the art, history, and cultures of the American West. It weaves together scholarship, public exhibitions, and community engagement to tell stories that cross boundaries—geographic, temporal, and cultural. Aron is a pioneering historian of frontiers, borderlands, and Western American history. In Episode 289, we spoke about all three—while also discussing his long effort to bridge the gap between academic and public history. As both a professor and a museum leader, Aron has spent decades bringing historical thinking into the public square. My second guest this week is Barry Strauss, the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies at Cornell University. A scholar of ancient Greece and Rome, Strauss is well known for combining academic rigor with public engagement, writing widely read books on classical antiquity, military history, and leadership. Strauss is no stranger to Historically Thinking—he's appeared on the podcast several times before, in Episodes 11, 45, and 256, where we've discussed the death of Caesar, the intellectual achievement of Thucydides, and the war that made the Roman Empire. He is also a recipient of the 2024 Bradley Prize, awarded by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to American intellectual and civic life. The prize honors leaders whose work—whether in education, history, law, or public policy—strengthens the foundations of a free society.  

The Time Is Late (2) (audio) David Eells 5/18/25   The Warnings Have Ended Michael Boldea Jr. - 08/14/2006 (David's notes in red) Rom.13:11-12 And this, knowing the season, that already it is time for you to awake out of sleep: for now is salvation nearer to us than when we first believed. 12 The night is far spent, and the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light. My heart is heavy, my soul is burdened, and as so many who have been called, anointed, and charged to preach a message of warning and repentance to this nation, I am a weary man. Though the time is upon us, though undeniable events continue to come to pass, still most of Christendom suffers from a severe case of abject indifference. I often feel as though I am a man standing outside a building engulfed in flames, screaming at the top of my lungs for those inside to come out, to save themselves, to escape the fire, while all the while, those inside stand by the windows and wave merrily, coffee in one hand, donut in the other, unaware of the tragedy that is about the befall them. Seeing that they will not heed the warning, the only option left is to run into the burning building and drag as many out, by force if need be, and lead them to safety. This is the mindset that I have adopted over the years. Since early youth, when I served as my grandfather's translator, I realized that some would hear and heed, but most would not. There is no doubt God has been merciful to this nation, first having raised up men from within your own borders to speak a heavy but needed truth, men who were promptly dismissed or ridiculed as being instigators, those who would enjoy stirring up provocation, simply for the sake of being provocative. Though the message fell, in large part, on deaf ears, they labored, and wept, and labored some more, for it was their calling, their mission, their sovereign duty toward an omnipotent God, one they could not as readily dismiss, as the message itself had been by the masses. Then, in His infinite mercy, God called on faithful servants from half a world away, and placed the same message in their hearts, in some cases almost identical, and sent them in the hope that perhaps the nation might heed the message if spoken from new lips. These too, were promptly rejected, either for being too harsh, not having the right credentials, or not having graduated from a proper theological seminary. We have found a reason, and an excuse to reject every messenger that has come, that has spoken, and that has warned. In their hearts, some consider, that surely God is merciful enough to send yet another messenger, to give yet another warning, as though they were waiting for a bus, they think to themselves, “I'll catch the next one, I'll believe next one”, but I say to you this day, the warnings have ended. (Certainly, after this warning was given many lost their lives to foolishness that scripture surely corrected. Since history repeats when men take no heed this revelation is still true today.) To be clear in what I am trying to relay, for this is the core reason I write this article today, I will repeat myself: the warnings have ended. No new messengers are waiting in the wings, no new warnings are coming, but merely the visions and forewarnings of the specific judgments that are about to unfold. These words are not my own, and I write them with a heavy heart, but on three separate occasions while in prayer, I heard the same phrase repeated, over and over again: “The warnings have ended, the warnings have ended.” The time has come for the true servants of God to weep between the porch and the altar, to lament and cry out, to stand in the gap and be fearless for righteousness' sake. If you must stand alone, dear brother, then so stand, for you will be in good company, counted among such giants of the faith as Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. They too stood alone in the face of overwhelming odds, with only the truth of God's Word on their side, but the truth proved to be more than enough. So I say this day, to you whom God has been urging to step up, to take up the charge, to be on the front lines of the battle that is raging, be fearless in unmasking deception, and propagating righteousness, for you are on the side of right. If our desire were to spread a false gospel, to deceive the sheep, to bring division to the house of God, then there would be reason for fear, for God Himself would be set against us, but since He stands with you, since He is the one urging you into battle, be bold, and brave and confident in Him and you will always be the majority. Recently I was rereading Foxe's Book of Martyrs, and weeping, and I thought to myself, where have all the valiant defenders of truth gone, those that even in the face of death would proclaim the name of Christ, and pour out their lives to their final breath for His sake, with a smile on their lips? Is their time past? Surely it cannot be, for this is the greatest time in the history of the Church, the time in which God needs warriors, faithful and true, fearless and uncompromising, to do battle against the forces of darkness. No, the time for the valiant, faithful soldier has not passed, but rather, many of those who have been called to this service are quick to bow out, finding either excuse or justification for their unwillingness to do battle. The time has come to blow the trumpet, while time still remains, for it is quickly running out, and the sheep that slumber are too many to number. It is incumbent upon all servants of righteousness to proclaim truth and defend it, if need be, with their very lives. Jude 20-23 But you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life. And on some have compassion, making a distinction; but others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire, hating even the garment defiled by the flesh.     Removing Stumbling Blocks to the Kingdom Deborah Horton - 08/06/2013 (David's notes in red) In a dream, a small group of people, maybe 30-50, including myself, were walking up a mountain (seeking the Kingdom of God; Mount Zion). Some were ahead of the main group and about the same number were trailing at the rear. It was a stretched-out grouping. Now even though we were walking up a mountain, somehow the road was perfectly level (because straightened the way that leads to life), but the effort needed to walk was as if we were climbing. (We climb against the gravity and magnetism of the world and our flesh.) The road was also completely straight. David wasn't in the group but was encouraging us onward. He was also the only one who could (or was allowed to) go both up and down the entire mountain, which He did with ease many times. In a vision within the dream itself, I saw that sometimes he was with us and sometimes he was at the top of the mountain or possibly below us. (As we have seen in other revelations, the Davids will be on top of Zion in the presence of the Lord and they will be with the righteous on their journey up the mountain of God's Kingdom. They will do those things that they have seen of the Father.) Next, I was in an enclosed space of some kind off to the side of the road, but I can't call it a room. The lighting was subdued. David and a handful of other people were there. A Siamese cat was limping on its left front leg, as it was facing me, making this its right front leg, and I asked David if that was alright because I was concerned. He said, “Yes, it's supposed to be like that”. (Siamese cats seem to be some of the meanest cats out there. They represent rebellion and self-will. We know who this person is, but also this represents many. Their limping is by the hand of God. “Yes, it's supposed to be like that”. The limping right leg represents their inability to walk with God.) Then David somehow, I can't remember if he just lifted it up or there was a ladder or whatever, but it was a project for him to put the cat on the back of a horse, which is what David was there to do, allowing us to keep on walking up the mountain. (“It's supposed to be” that rebels are turned over to the strength of their own rebellious, beastly, flesh so that the rest may see this and continue to enter the Kingdom. There's an old saying that “Getting on a high horse” means being very prideful and arrogant, lifting yourself up in your own strength to be a stumbling block to others. One of the greatest signs that we are in the end times is that Jesus said to let the tares and the wheat grow together until the harvest, and He has been and continues to separate them by turning them over to demons. Mat.13:37 And he answered and said, He that soweth the good seed is the Son of man; 38 and the field is the world; and the good seed, these are the sons of the kingdom; and the tares are the sons of the evil [one]; 39 and the enemy that sowed them is the devil: and the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are angels. 40 As therefore the tares are gathered up and burned with fire; so shall it be in the end of the world. 41 The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that cause stumbling, and them that do iniquity, 42 and shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be the weeping and the gnashing of teeth. 43 Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He that hath ears, let him hear. (As to those who are stumbling blocks to others trying to enter the Kingdom, we hear of Jesus: Luk.11:52 Woe unto you lawyers! for ye took away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered. 13:24 Strive to enter in by the narrow door: for many, I say unto you, shall seek to enter in, and shall not be able. 18:17 Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall in no wise enter therein.) End of dream. Siamese cats were specially bred in Tibet (Far East; the sun rises in the East) to be guardians of the temple treasures. They were cross-eyed (probably due to bad breeding or the product of a bad seed but they say it is) to scare off demons. They were big, too, and weighed approximately 25 pounds and had blue eyes. The monks (demon-possessed, foreign to the kingdom, religious leaders) trained them so that they would attack anyone who touched the gold, etc., that was in the temple. (In the natural, these people cannot be trusted with the temple gold, for they are thieves and take possession of what is not theirs, like Judas. On the spiritual side, anyone who possesses the spiritual attribute of gold in the temple of Jesus Christ will be attacked by the rebels and Pharisees.) Visitors could walk through and look at all the stuff, but if they touched anything, the cats would jump on their heads and blind them. (The rebels are out to blind anyone who goes for the spiritual gold.) I asked for a verse for the dream and received Act.2:36 Let all the house of Israel therefore know assuredly, that God hath made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom ye crucified. (They crucified the Man-child, who then ruled over them, just as it will be.)   Harvest Awaits While Laborers Play Debbi Rennier - 07/23/2006 (David's notes in red) Mat.9:36 But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion for them, because they were distressed and scattered, as sheep not having a shepherd. 37 Then saith he unto his disciples, The harvest indeed is plenteous, but the laborers are few. 38 Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he send forth laborers into his harvest. Over the last three nights, the Lord has given me the following dream: I saw the most beautiful, golden wheat field gently rippling in the breeze. This field was of gigantic proportions, as large as California and Texas combined. I seemed to be floating just above the field, and as I gazed downwards, I saw hands reaching up out of the wheat field. The hands were of all sizes and colors. They seemed to be trying to reach or grasp for something or someone. I then saw a few people, perhaps a half a dozen or so, go into the field and start to help those whose hands I saw grasping. Those whom they helped in the field also began helping others. This scene was really heartbreaking as there were so many who reached up and so few to help. Many more were missed and overlooked than were saved. I then looked at the edges of the enormous field and saw much frantic activity. Construction workers were busily building large churches and big houses. I saw businesspeople rushing to work and car dealerships selling expensive cars. They were all totally oblivious to the tragic scene in the wheat field. They rushed about as if nothing was wrong. I then woke up. The Lord led me to the 10th chapter of Hosea. Then HE spoke: “People keep building and laying up treasures here on earth. They will be destroyed. Seek that which is lost. Do not waste your time on the foolish things that will perish...”   Liquidate Luxuries S.L. - 02/27/2015 (David's notes in red) In this dream, I am driving a horse and carriage. (Representing the old scriptural ways.) The kind that you would see in New York Central Park. I see many people. I am driving around this narrow course that they have cordoned off. As I go, I'm stopping and picking up people and they ride for a while, and then they get off, and more people get on. (Many have ‘gotten off' “the narrow course” because of disobedience to the Scriptures, or falling into faction, and others have come to take their place.) Sometimes there are obstacles in the way that I have to avoid. But I can't veer off. I have to be very careful to stay on this path. The whole area is like a very large and busy city block. (Temptations to get off the narrow road.) Then the scene changes, and I am in a very large restaurant. It is very crowded and there are many tables with people eating and drinking. (I asked about the restaurant and at random got Psa.49:6 They that trust in their wealth, And boast themselves in the multitude of their riches.) (Large ministry serving unspiritual food.) I am sitting at a small table with a few friends, and a sister in Christ. Then I got up in search of a restroom. When I found the ladies' restroom, I noticed that it was very crowded. (Getting rid of waste from lives.) All of the women crowding around it are very financially wealthy, wearing richly made dresses and hats, and the restroom itself looks to be made of marble. It is too crowded to get in. (Many are getting rid of the luxuries of life, which is a weight and distraction.) My sister and I both had the same idea that we needed to find another restroom, so we left there and found one a few blocks away. This restroom is much humbler and one that not many people know about. (Some have already cast out the luxuries that slow our progress.) So, we are moving down the street pretty quickly. (Meaning, able to progress quickly without the distractions. We must get light and ready to move into the wilderness through liquidation.) I noticed that our pace had increased and we are both taking long strides. We come to what looks like the outskirts of town. I see a hill (a higher place in God) with several red brick apartment buildings on top. (Apartments are congregations of God's people built together into a holy temple in the Lord.) Closer towards us, I see there is an area that is being graded by a bulldozer. (What comes to mind is “earth mover”.) They are preparing the area for more buildings. (Dirt or flesh must be conformed in order to build the Kingdom.) I looked over just opposite this hill, and there's another hill, and on top of it, I saw white horses and white chariots. The horses have riders. They are milling about and exercising the horses. (This is Jesus in the Man-child ministries who are ready to begin the tribulation.) Next, my attention is drawn back to the bulldozer. It suddenly whirls around and moves out of the area very fast! I mean, like someone punched the fast-forward button. (The foundation is prepared; people must get out of the way for the building to start. This means the people who make up the buildings are coming.) We both follow him, going very fast. Now, keep in mind we are still on foot, but now it's like we are in racecars. We are going around curves, and I am trying to slow down. I hear the other sister who's with me say, “This is very scary”. Finally, we managed to slow down and stop. (There is much business that does not promote spirituality) Then I woke up. While meditating on this dream, the Lord brought this scripture to mind: Mat.24:37 And as were the days of Noah, so shall be the coming of the Son of man. 38 For as in those days which were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark, 39 and they knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall be the coming of the Son of man. 40 Then shall two men be in the field; one is taken, and one is left: 41 two women shall be grinding at the mill; one is taken, and one is left. 42 Watch therefore: for ye know not on what day your Lord cometh. 43 But know this, that if the master of the house had known in what watch the thief was coming, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken through. 44 Therefore be ye also ready; for in an hour that ye think not the Son of man cometh. I also asked the Lord for another word concerning this dream, at random, and my finger came down on Amo.4:4 Come to Beth-el, and transgress; to Gilgal, and multiply transgression; and bring your sacrifices every morning, and your tithes every three days; 5 and offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving of that which is leavened, and proclaim freewill-offerings and publish them: for this pleaseth you, O ye children of Israel, saith the Lord Jehovah. 6 And I also have given you cleanness of teeth in all your cities, and want of bread in all your places; yet have ye not returned unto me, saith Jehovah. 7 And I also have withholden the rain from you, when there were yet three months to the harvest; and I caused it to rain upon one city, and caused it not to rain upon another city: one piece was rained upon, and the piece whereupon it rained not withered. 8 So two or three cities wandered unto one city to drink water, and were not satisfied: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith Jehovah. 9 I have smitten you with blasting and mildew: the multitude of your gardens and your vineyards and your fig-trees and your olive-trees hath the palmer-worm devoured (A curse on the distractions): yet have ye not returned unto me, saith Jehovah. 10 I have sent among you the pestilence after the manner of Egypt: your young men have I slain with the sword, and have carried away your horses; and I have made the stench of your camp to come up even into your nostrils: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith Jehovah. 11 I have overthrown cities among you, as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and ye were as a brand plucked out of the burning: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith Jehovah. (Stop, repent, seek God) 12 Therefore thus will I do unto thee, O Israel; and because I will do this unto thee, prepare to meet thy God, O Israel.     Wait for the Director K.H.- 10/23/2011 (David's notes in red) The dream began with me walking to my seat in a band hall. As soon as I reached my seat, I was asked by a girl to bring some papers up front to the band director's desk, so that's what I did. As I turned around, I saw a couple of young girls come through the back door of the hall, giggling and sitting in the back row of chairs. Then, I went back to my seat. I began to warm up playing the flute, and after I was done warming up, I sat looking around the room. A few minutes later, more than half of the people began to play their instruments. The sound was deafening! There was so much discord because they were playing without the band director. (Instead of being in “one accord”, the whole group was in discord. Rom.15:5 Now the God of patience and of comfort grant you to be of the same mind one with another according to Christ Jesus: 6 that with one accord ye may with one mouth glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.)(The discord in Christianity because of denominationalism weakens us.) A small group of us, including me, remained ready to play but waiting for direction. (Listening and waiting on direction from God is the key to walking as He walked. Isa.30:21 thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it; when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left.) I then realized that the band director wasn't there yet, and I was perplexed at why there were so many doing their own thing and not realizing that the band director was not there. A young man stood up and said, “Wait!” A few more people stopped playing and began to wait. (Some Christians are easily distracted and do things without waiting on the Lord.) I was grieved that some were still playing with complete disregard for what the man said. (Many Christians are not paying attention to what is going on around them and what the Lord is speaking to them.) Then, I woke up. (Saul did not wait for Samuel to sacrifice and bring the Word of the Lord and it cost him his kingdom. David waited for the sign in the mulberry trees and conquered his enemies.) The Lord impressed in my heart how important it is to seek His face, His direction, His truth, and walk in the steps He has ordered for me. Listening to the voice of the Lord is so important, especially in the days ahead. The world is getting darker and darker; the only way to be able to see clearly is through the Lord's eyes. Psa.27:14 Wait for Jehovah: Be strong, And let thy heart take courage; Yea, wait thou for Jehovah. Lam.3:26 It is good that a man should hope and quietly wait for the salvation of Jehovah. Mic.7:7 But as for me, I will look unto Jehovah; I will wait for the God of my salvation: my God will hear me. Then I thought of Php.2:1-4 If there is therefore any exhortation in Christ, if any consolation of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any tender mercies and compassions, 2 make full my joy, that ye be of the same mind, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind; 3 doing nothing through faction or through vainglory, but in lowliness of mind each counting other better than himself; 4 not looking each of you to his own things, but each of you also to the things of others. The majority of the body of Christ is in much discord right now. The Lord reminded me of this passage in 1 Corinthians 12:12-26 about the body and how we all need one another. 1Co 12:12 For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of the body, being many, are one body; so also is Christ. 13 For in one Spirit were we all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether bond or free; and were all made to drink of one Spirit. 14 For the body is not one member, but many. 15 If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; it is not therefore not of the body. 16 And if the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; it is not therefore not of the body. 17 If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling? 18 But now hath God set the members each one of them in the body, even as it pleased him. 19 And if they were all one member, where were the body? 20 But now they are many members, but one body. 21 And the eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of thee: or again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. 22 Nay, much rather, those members of the body which seem to be more feeble are necessary: 23 and those parts of the body, which we think to be less honorable, upon these we bestow more abundant honor; and our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness; 24 whereas our comely parts have no need: but God tempered the body together, giving more abundant honor to that part which lacked; 25 that there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another. 26 And whether one member suffereth, all the members suffer with it; or one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it.   Covert Attack on Christians and Jews B.A. - 04/20/2015 (David's notes in red) I dreamed that I was in the Spirit and I was in a secret meeting room in the basement of the White House. There was a group of people sitting around a table, and each of them had an outline of a plan they were discussing concerning Christians and Jews. The only thing I was allowed to remember was that when a particular part of this plan/agenda is revealed, it will create a great uproar with apostate Christianity. (The recent leftist administrations raised up ISIS who rampaged through the middle east to kill Christians and Jews. Since the conservatives were behind President Trump to execute the lawless leftists, they are looking for their chance to strike back. The new age in their seances are talking to aliens who are masquerading demons that hate Christians. You see we have the perfect foundation to bring the mark of the beast to exterminate Christians who will break that law. Jesus said we would be hated of all nations for His name sake. As a result, many apostates will give in to their flesh and fight against the Beast and will lose, in a repetition of history. Dumitru Duduman received of the Lord that the communists in this country would start a civil war.) I asked the Lord for a verse concerning this dream and I received: Psa.112:7 He shall not be afraid of evil tidings; His heart is fixed, trusting in the Lord. Pro.1:7 The fear of Jehovah is the beginning of knowledge; But the foolish despise wisdom and instruction. According to the Lord, history always repeats: Ecc.1:9 That which hath been is that which shall be; and that which hath been done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. 10 Is there a thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been long ago, in the ages which were before us. Whenever God's people have turned from His Word to their own religious, self-seeking ways, He has always sent conquerors to bring them to their cross. From the lesser kingdoms around Israel to the world-ruling kingdoms of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Media-Persia, Greece, Rome and the coming Dragon kingdom made up of the seed of all of the above seven heads, they all conquered God's people when they went astray from the Word. To a large extent, Christianity has become a harlot that must be crucified of evil and evil people. God has ordained and raised up Governmental Administrations to do this necessary work of returning His people to the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom. When I read this dream, this verse was spoken to me concerning it: Eze.21:31 And I will pour out mine indignation upon thee; I will blow upon thee with the fire of my wrath; and I will deliver thee into the hand of brutish men, skilful to destroy. This scripture is in the midst of many pages of judgment spoken against God's apostate people. God departs from all of this for a moment to address Ammon here, warning that brutish men would destroy them. It appears that this text is out of context until you see that Ammon means “My people”. They are sons of Lot through Ben-Ammi, which means “Son of My people”. Lot was called a righteous man, but his children became enemies of God's people, just like there are enemies among Christians who claim to be Christian today. In like manner, Abraham had seed who became enemies of God's people. The Harlot is that enemy in our midst who claims Christianity but does not follow God's Word, which is His only true seed. Lot had two daughters who represented God's people. On one level, the older daughter represents His Old Covenant people, whose offspring were called Moab, and the younger daughter represents His New Covenant people, whose offspring were called Ammon. These two daughters had what in the letter would be called an incestuous relationship with their father, Lot, although he knew it not. However, in the spirit of the Word, a different story is told. The relationship of these two daughters to their father was exactly like the relationship of Israel and the Church to their Father. Her Father was also her Husband. The Lord's Bride is also His children. Mother and child were born of the same Father. If you question Jesus being a spiritual Father, remember Isa.9:6 For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given (Jesus); and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. “Everlasting Father” can also be translated as “Father of eternity”. 7 Of the increase of his government and of peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to establish it, and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from henceforth even for ever. The zeal of Jehovah of hosts will perform this. Jesus was the Sower who sowed His seed in our hearts, which brings forth His fruit in us. He is the Father of our eternal lives. Paul also called himself a father because he sowed the seed of the Word, which is Jesus' seed in the parable of the Sower in Matthew 13. 1Co.4:15 For though ye have ten thousand tutors in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers; for in Christ Jesus I begat you through the gospel. In two parables Jesus is our husband and our spiritual Father and we are all sons of The Father. Brutish men will bring the apostate Church to the cross but even then, some will not repent and will die in their sins, denying their Lord.   Hidden Manna: Urgent Call to the Apostate Church Deborah Horton - 10/07/2007 (Jan Albayalde | David ) In the dream, the first image I remember is several people coming to greet other people. Of two ladies who were coming my way, the one whom I thought I was supposed to greet stopped in front of someone else and they hugged, so the other lady came toward me and I thought, “Were we supposed to hug?” because it didn't seem like what we were supposed to do and she wasn't the person I thought was supposed to be for me to “greet” (or receive). This young woman was very elegantly and understatedly dressed. (In God's eyes, there are only two women -- the True Church and the Laodicean or harlot Church of Babylon.) (Jan went on to speak of all the scandals in the Church that turned people off.) I remember being surprised by that, too. All I remember was that she had on a very expensive beigey-colored sweater with darker minkish-colored cuffs, and it was stunning. But as I looked at the sweater, my eyes were drawn to a button (like a political button) that was on her left front side. It was white and in solid, thick black writing, there was the number “11”. As I focused on the button, it ended. (You were impressed by her beauty and wealth. The “11” on the woman could represent the coming destruction or persecution of the rich Laodicean church.) (Also the prosperity movement is clearly seen by the beast as a fleecing of the ignorant sheep. Also the political button could be speaking of the apostates being overly political rather than representing the Lord to ALL men.) Then I found myself reading the outside of a very thick, hardbound book. Apparently, I'd been reading for a while because I was coming to the end of a long, single-spaced list on the right-hand side of the cover. Each item in the list was just a short phrase (no more than four words) of some sort. They all must have been mundane, normal stuff, because none of them were outstanding. Then I got to the end, and I was stopped cold. The last three items in the list were “survival”, “hunger” and “fear”. Anything I remembered up to that point from the list was knocked out of my mind by those three words. Then I woke up. I almost never ever dream about anything with numbers. (I had the same thought as you -- that this is Hidden Manna that you have “been reading for a while.” You have read it so many times it's become “mundane” and that is why you were brought up cold, taken by surprise, by the last three words because the Lord was impressing you that this is His survival guide to the Laodicean Church; a call to overcome because hunger and fear are truly at the door. What is Hidden Manna? A guide to survive the coming persecution of the apostate church. If this is a dream from the Lord, maybe the Lord is saying the hour is late, persecution, the number “11” is coming to the apostate church and the Lord is encouraging the progression of the book into people's hands; hunger and fear are at the door, and they certainly are. You were to greet (receive) the wealthy, beautiful woman because she is the one who needs the survival manual -- you've been thinking Hidden Manna is for the True Church, those already right with God, hence your surprise.) It is then time to impart this labor of love (or a hug) to the apostate church to prepare them for “survival”, “hunger” and “fear”. The number 11 could indeed be a political button. The apostate church has been pushing politically as never before to press retaliation for the 9/11 loss of life issue. There could also be another “9/11” attack by the DS.   Plundering Egypt Jacob Patek - 09/01/2012 (David's notes in red) The dream has two parts. It started with a group of UBM brothers and I all walking together across a university campus (Which the Lord is giving us.) at what I would say was 12 noon, as the sun was directly overhead (noon being the time of day when the sun is at its highest and casting no shadow -- Jesus directly above our heads). (High noon was a 1952 Western American film: the time for a showdown with the enemy when victory was won back from them.) We were walking into what seemed like a bank and our thoughts were, we are going to take back all that the enemy has taken from us. (NESARA/GESARA is doing this in the natural realm. Also, Satan has plundered the people of God of their rightful and legal heritage. God has already put in our account every need, according to His riches. Phi.4:19 And my God shall supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.) As we walked in, there were two women sitting at the front desk. We simply told them we were here for all of our money. It ended up amounting to five million dollars. (5 is the number of grace, which has met all of our needs.) (When I first woke up, I thought we had robbed the bank, but as I meditated on the dream and the Word, I felt the money was already deposited into our accounts and we were making a withdrawal. [Our money will be in our QFS account]) As we withdrew the money, one of the secretaries sitting at the front desk called someone. (The Lord will provide all of our financial needs to build His Kingdom. The DS is being plundered and President Trump/Cyrus has recovered all the gold. We all have a QFS account and the money will be there, and the NESARA/GESARA is about to go into effect.) At this point in my dream, I could see she was talking to a man whose head was shaven (meaning he had no submission to God). He was very irate and filthy, and from the looks of it, a very strong man. (Jesus has plundered the strong man of his goods in this world and given them to us and we are to divide the spoils of the god of this world. Luk.11:20 But if I by the finger of God cast out demons, then is the kingdom of God come upon you. 21 When the strong [man] fully armed guardeth his own court, his goods are in peace: 22 but when a stronger than he shall come upon him, and overcome him (as Jesus did), he taketh from him his whole armor wherein he trusted, and divideth his spoils. 23 He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth. If you are not chasing demons, you are running from them. Claim what is yours as sons of the living God. Plunder Egypt with your faith! Didn't He say in Mar.11:24 Therefore I say unto you, All things whatsoever ye pray and ask for, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.???) The strong man said, “Don't they know who I am, and why don't they respect my authority? I am the leader of the most powerful gang”. (No, we don't respect his authority because it is no longer his; it is ours: Luk.10:19 Behold, I have given you authority to tread upon serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall in any wise hurt you. Let us plunder his world.) This is when we all walked out of the bank and back across the campus. (This is the first of three university campuses the Lord is giving to the Man-child ministries to teach in.) Next, we stopped at a deli shop and ordered only a loaf of bread and sat down to eat (possibly meaning that we are partaking of the body of Christ and having fellowship one with another in the Spirit). End of the first part of this dream. The second part of my dream had only me and two other brothers in it. It started with two of us walking to the gas station. As we were walking, I was telling him that this was the gas station I used to walk to when I was a child. (In my dream, I told him of a story involving this gas station that actually happened when I was a child around the age of seven). I proceeded to tell him that when I was younger, I walked to this gas station with some of the neighborhood kids, and while we were getting our soft drinks, one of the kids stole a package of baseball cards. I asked him why he did that and if he knew that was wrong. His reply was, “It's only a pack of baseball cards”. (With the desperate economic situation about to hit our world, the immature in Christ will be tempted to steal and justify it in their minds. But God has a better answer in this dream. Live by faith!) As we approached the gas station, we saw an elderly woman restocking a newspaper stand. The brother wanted to buy the day's newspaper and was holding some money to pay for it. He asked the woman how much it was, and she replied, “I don't know”. We started searching for some sort of price tag and found a couple, but the prices were outrageous, somewhere in the range of $90. Then he said, “It's usually $3.49, but it used to be only 50 cents”. (In the natural and in the tribulation, inflation will to go through the roof and we will need to know the principles of our supernatural provision above to escape this.) We ended up not getting the newspaper. (Filling our minds with the bad news is costly to our lives. Better to refuse it and accept the Good News in the first part of the dream.) End of dream.   Antichrist School System Diana McIlroy - 11/21/2009 (Rex Veron's notes in red) Mat.19:14 But Jesus said, Suffer the little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for to such belongeth the kingdom of heaven. Joh.12:23 And Jesus answereth them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified. 24 Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit. 1st Dream: Shane came home from school with a seed to plant. (Coming home with the seed [teaching] to plant in the midst of the home. Seeds bear fruit of a specific kind; error cannot birth truth, nor truth produce error. A mixture is still error. When Achan took the spoils of the people from Ai, he took that which he was commanded not to take. Not only did he take it but he hid it in the midst of his tent [his heart] among his family [Joshua 7]. We are commanded to “touch not the unclean thing” (Isa.52:11). What better way to propagate error than to start with the children in school? This is also true of the spiritual school, the Church.) We planted it outside and when it grew, it grew all over the farm property -- garden, fields, pastures. (A little leaven leavens the whole lump. 1Cor.5:6 Your glorying is not good. Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump? Satan can use the school system to take over the world with his leaven.) It wasn't a bad plant to look at, but it was useless. We couldn't eat it and the animals couldn't eat it either, but it overgrew the existing crops that we could've eaten. What appeared good had no power to give life. 2Tim.3:5 holding a form of godliness, but having denied the power thereof: from these also turn away. Joh.6:63 It is the spirit that giveth life; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, are life. Mat.5:13 Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out and trodden under foot of men. The goal is obvious to look like the church and to talk like the church but to be full of antichrist. Antichrist is not necessarily recognizable; deception is the plan. The plant looked harmless. 2nd Dream: I went to class with Claire. The class was being taught by Oprah Winfrey. (A type of the New Age teaching through the Jezebel spirit that is invading the schools -- physical and spiritual. 2Pet.2:1 But there arose false prophets also among the people, as among you also there shall be false teachers, who shall privily bring in destructive heresies, denying even the Master that bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction. 2 And many shall follow their lascivious doings; by reason of whom the way of the truth shall be evil spoken of. 3 And in covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you: whose sentence now from of old lingereth not, and their destruction slumbereth not.) She proceeds to say, “Now we will watch the video.” The video showed a big animal that you could see through. Behind the bones of the rib cage, there were two children (so basically they were trapped in the belly of the beast). (Nothing is ever mentioned about the children being in “fear”. They are lulled into acceptance of the world beast's methods and belief systems.) Next in the video, they are saying to the kids that they shouldn't listen to their mother. (Antichrist schools are going far beyond their traditional educational role to impose their politics and spiritual understanding on the young minds. This is the seed that invades the house to bring division between the parents. And we have seen this escalate in these days, how they've let in LGBTQ+ and their sick sexual perversion, with transgenders teaching in the schools, purposefully confusing children about their sexuality and telling them to keep their “transgender identity” secret from their parents, and many other lies. The Trump administration has been making many changes to the U.S. Department of Education and cleaning it up.) Luk 12:52-53 for there shall be from henceforth five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. 53 They shall be divided, father against son, and son against father; mother against daughter, and daughter against her mother; mother in law against her daughter in law, and daughter in law against her mother in law. The DS has thrived on division because of their factious spirit. Father also is dividing His called from among this world. 2Pet 2:15 forsaking the right way, they went astray, having followed the way of Balaam the son of Beor, who loved the hire of wrong-doing; 16 but he was rebuked for his own transgression: a dumb ass spake with man's voice and stayed the madness of the prophet. 17 These are springs without water, and mists driven by a storm; for whom the blackness of darkness hath been reserved. 18 For, uttering great swelling words of vanity, they entice in the lusts of the flesh, by lasciviousness, those who are just escaping from them that live in error; (the children) 19 promising them liberty, while they themselves are bondservants of corruption; for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he also brought into bondage.) In the video, the two kids inside start reaching through the bones and beating their mother with a stick. 2Ti.3:1-4 But know this, that in the last days grievous times shall come. 2 For men shall be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, haughty, railers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, 3 without natural affection, implacable, slanderers, without self-control, fierce, no lovers of good, 4 traitors, headstrong, puffed up, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. Then the video says, “especially if she is a believer” -- then the two kids start stabbing her. So, then I get up and say, “That's it, we're out of here!” They would let me leave, but not allow my children to come with me. It seemed pretty clear that God was saying to get them out of the traditional school system. So we did. (This is true of the literal and spiritual school systems. This is a warning of that which is already here, regarding the apostate church and leadership. Children generally idolize their teachers. The use of Oprah is a type because of the idolization of such TV personalities, as well as sports figures. This also points children to the “get rich if you believe it my way” teachings. Like the “give to get”, “God doesn't want you poor and you can have everything you want” leadership in most churches of today. The entertainment industry is also a trap for child trafficking and prostitution.)   Jesus Rebukes Worldly, Patriotic Idolatry G.C.- 5/01/07 (David's notes in red) I dreamt I was walking around in a building. I kept seeing paintings and pictures of Jesus of all kinds. In every room there seemed to be a painting or wall mural of Him. This was upsetting because I do not like all the paintings of Jesus, because I know they are idols and pagan images. Then I walked into a classroom with about 30 other American Christians. I recall that most of them were women. They were in long dresses, wearing bonnets and/or veils. Jesus was in the front of the class by the teacher's desk. His face was fuzzy, and I could not make out his facial features. He was standing there talking to the people, and He was very angry with them. He was so upset with what these people had been doing. He was telling them to repent. One of the things I heard Him say was that He was upset that they were actually embracing George W. Bush as a Christian and exalting him as a good man. He was really upset that they could not discern that he was a wicked man. (We should not idolize any person in government or judge them as a ‘Christian' because we don't see as God does. We should not exalt Donald Trump, as well as many in his administration who proclaim Christianity. Christians want to make America a “Christian” nation, which, as we will see, it is not.) This really bothered Him and He was very wroth because of it. You should have seen the room. The women were weeping and wailing, crying out and begging for mercy. Most of them were on their knees and completely terrified and broken. I remember some other things the Lord said. He threatened a plague on them as well for their evils. I don't know if He was merely threatening them with it or if He said that it was absolute. I'm reminded of these scriptures in Eze 8:7-18 And he brought me to the door of the court; and when I looked, behold, a hole in the wall. 8 Then said he unto me, Son of man, dig now in the wall: and when I had digged in the wall, behold, a door. 9 And he said unto me, Go in, and see the wicked abominations that they do here. 10 So I went in and saw; and behold, every form of creeping things, and abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel, portrayed upon the wall round about. 11 And there stood before them seventy men of the elders of the house of Israel; and in the midst of them stood Jaazaniah the son of Shaphan, every man with his censer in his hand; and the odor of the cloud of incense went up. 12 Then said he unto me, Son of man, hast thou seen what the elders of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in his chambers of imagery? for they say, Jehovah seeth us not; Jehovah hath forsaken the land. 13 He said also unto me, Thou shalt again see yet other great abominations which they do. 14 Then he brought me to the door of the gate of Jehovah's house which was toward the north; and behold, there sat the women weeping for Tammuz. (The false virgin birthed son of God at Babel) 15 Then said he unto me, Hast thou seen this, O son of man? thou shalt again see yet greater abominations than these. 16 And he brought me into the inner court of Jehovah's house; and behold, at the door of the temple of Jehovah, between the porch and the altar, were about five and twenty men, with their backs toward the temple of Jehovah, and their faces toward the east; and they were worshipping the sun (Baal, the false god) toward the east. 17 Then he said unto me, Hast thou seen this, O son of man? Is it a light thing to the house of Judah that they commit the abominations which they commit here? for they have filled the land with violence, and have turned again to provoke me to anger: and, lo, they put the branch to their nose. (To please the sun god, Nimrod, Baal, false father of Tammuz from Babel, mothered by Semiramis the false virgin.) 18 Therefore will I also deal in wrath; mine eye shall not spare, neither will I have pity; and though they cry in mine ears with a loud voice, yet will I not hear them. The building is the church and the rooms are the different sects. The different images of Jesus represent the different ways they view Jesus -- Who He is and what He does and what He believes, etc.; they are idols and not the true Jesus. They are “another Jesus”, which Paul warned of. The women are the different sects of Christianity who bow down to these idols. Jesus' angry rebuke is a reflection of their need to turn back to the Word and away from their idolatrous religious sects. They are in bed with the beast by confusing the kingdom with worldly government. Their worldly patriotism has caused them to worship one like themselves, a professor but not a possessor of the life and nature of Christ. An honest person only has to read the Sermon on the Mount once to know this. The coming plague represents the coming tribulation, just as the judgments on Egypt were all called plagues. Their grief at Jesus' rebuke for their ignorance of Him and their lack of fruit is similar to these verses in Isaiah: Isa.32:9 Rise up, ye women that are at ease, [and] hear my voice; ye careless daughters, give ear unto my speech. 10 For days beyond a year shall ye be troubled, ye careless women; for the vintage shall fail, the ingathering shall not come. 11 Tremble, ye women that are at ease; be troubled, ye careless ones; strip you, and make you bare, and gird [sackcloth] upon your loins. 12 They shall smite upon the breasts for the pleasant fields, for the fruitful vine. 13 Upon the land of my people shall come up thorns and briers; yea, upon all the houses of joy in the joyous city. 14 For the palace shall be forsaken; the populous city shall be deserted; the hill and the watch-tower shall be for dens for ever, a joy of wild asses, a pasture of flocks; 15 until the Spirit be poured upon us from on high, and the wilderness become a fruitful field, and the fruitful field be esteemed as a forest. 16 Then justice shall dwell in the wilderness; and righteousness shall abide in the fruitful field.   Your House Is Left... Desolate Jarred Smith - 04/04/2008 (David's notes in red) In a dream, I saw a house. There did not appear to be any houses around it and it also seemed that it was elevated on a hill. (The original house of the Lord, His body, the temple.) I was standing, looking at it from a distance of about 30 feet away, so all of the detail of the front of the house was shown. It was beautiful, like a brand-new house that was built. Shiny windows, beautiful doors, new shingles, one-story, no garage and an open dining room with a nice-looking table you could see from the outside. (The Book of Acts Christianity, feeding on the pure unleavened bread of the Word.) THE walkway to the house was new, and the grass was so green you would think they were made of emeralds. (New Life born from above, God's Jewels walking in the WAY of life.) What really set off the grass was the clear and sunny sky above. (There was an open heaven; the SON was not obscured.) There was a sign out front. It was white (holy), newly painted with the words, “WELCOME ALL YE BROTHERS AND SISTERS IN CHRIST”. (There were no denominational divisions, which Paul said was a work of the flesh; for “all ye are brethren”, as Jesus said: Matthew 23:1-12) In the next scene I was looking into the dining room at the nice table. It was a long table, longer than it was wide; it accommodated many people. These were people in everyday casual clothes. I could not overhear the conversation, but it was joyous with laughing and merrymaking. I could pick up on that they were talking about the things of God, possibly Jesus and all of them shared openly, without any form of a leader there or anyone who was running the show. (This is a beautiful picture of the early church gathering to eat the “Bread of Life” which was given for the sins of the whole world. 1Jn.2:2 and he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the whole world. Much room to accommodate others. They are dressed casually, not in “church” attire, not in formal clergy outfits or fancy suits. They are joyful with the fruit of the Holy Spirit, and Christ is the Head; no man is running the show as with the Nicolaitan clergy of our day, for the five-fold ministry was used as God's vessel.) I saw this and was about to ask someone there a question about what they were talking about, but all of a sudden, the scene changed again. In the final scene, I was looking at the house from the original point of origin, as in the first scene. This time the house was a total wreck. It seems as if I was transported many years later, and no one was there to take care of the house. There was something different about the house this time. Other than the faded brownish-green yard, the scuffed-up ruined walkway, (the walkway is marred by the “walk” of unclean people) the broken windows, (eyes that cannot see), the dining room table (that was once so beautiful) now a wreck, warped, broken; (Their table is unfit to eat from. Psa.69:22 Let their table before them become a snare; And when they are in peace, [let it become] a trap. 23 Let their eyes be darkened, so that they cannot see; And make their loins continually to shake. 24 Pour out thine indignation upon them, And let the fierceness of thine anger overtake them. 25 Let their habitation be desolate; Let none dwell in their tents. 26 For they persecute him whom thou hast smitten; And they tell of the sorrow of those whom thou hast wounded. 27 Add iniquity unto their iniquity; And let them not come into thy righteousness. 28 Let them be blotted out of the book of life, And not be written with the righteous. Their table is the typical apostate church-service format: a few songs, announcements, offering, sermon; week after week.) the shingles were flapping in the wind and missing here and there; there was the sign out front. I looked at it, and nearly all of the white paint was gone and all that was there was bare wood. (Holiness and purity are gone; bare wood: 2Ti.2:20 Now in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth; and some unto honor, and some unto dishonor.) Instead of reading, “WELCOME ALL YE BROTHERS AND SISTERS IN CHRIST,” it read “WELCOME ALL YE CLERGY AND LAITY”. (The kingdom of God usurped by the NICO-“LAITAN” clergy system of hired professional preachers that God says He hates (Rev. 2:7,15). This is a priestly order between the people (laity) and God that Catholicism and later protestants adopted from the Pharisees.) As soon as I read this, my eyes were opened. This house once belonged to one group of people, and that group of people abandoned the house. (Because it was corrupted.) Now the house belonged to another group of people. (The sheep have left the folds of men, the apostate leaders usurped the house just as they did in Jesus' day.) I was thinking all of this in my head when I heard someone say, “This is the house they, (the first church), met in”. (Falsely proclaiming themselves to be the inheritors of the original faith.) I looked up and saw no one, but instead I saw many other signs around the house to try and cover up the broken windows. (Denominationalism dividing up the house, causing more blindness.) Some repair was made to the shingles, but the grass and the walkway remained the same. Also, it seemed as if the sky, once sunny and clear, was now darkened slightly by overcast clouds. (The church world attempts to substitute its patches of programs, money, entertainment, erroneous teachings like the pre-trib rapture, legalistic tithing, “once saved, always saved”, etc., and so the SON was obscured.) A person came up to me from behind and had a sketch pad and a pencil in his hand. He had asked me to sketch out what the original house looked like when I was there. For some strange reason, an artistic ability came over me and I was able to sketch out the house with precise detail, using just a regular pencil. (In these days God is sending reformers who are giving the revelation of what the original house looked like to the modern church. Ezekiel was a type of the Man-child who was caught up to the throne of God. He was commanded to show the original house to the house. Eze 43:10 Thou, son of man, show the house to the house of Israel, that they may be ashamed of their iniquities; and let them measure the pattern. 11 And if they be ashamed of all that they have done, make known unto them the form of the house, and the fashion thereof, and the egresses thereof (What is leaving the house), and the entrances (What it is to enter the house) thereof, and all the forms thereof, and all the ordinances thereof, and all the forms thereof, and all the laws thereof; and write it in their sight; that they may keep the whole form thereof, and all the ordinances thereof, and do them. 12 This is the law of the house: upon the top of the mountain  (Mount Zion, the Bride) the whole limit (limits of conformity to the Bride) thereof round about shall be most holy. Behold, this is the law of the house. When it came to sketching the sign, I had come to leave it blank. (It is the individual's responsibility to put his name there, to make the original church their church. Jude 3 Beloved, while I was giving all diligence to write unto you of our common salvation, I was constrained to write unto you exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints. ... Isa.30:20 And though The Lord give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet shall not thy teachers be hidden anymore, but thine eyes shall see thy teachers; 21 and thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it; when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left.) Why, I don't know, but I then began to sketch out a little girl standing next to and leaning on the sign. (Reformers are giving the revelation of the innocent, young, primitive Church to the modern church.) Once I was done, I was going to go back to the sign and fill in the letters “WELCOME ALL YE BROTHERS AND SISTERS IN CHRIST”. My pencil broke, and something compelled me to put it down and look at the sign once more. I lowered the sketch pad, lifted my eyes and behold, the old house was in worse shape than ever before. (Jesus gave the revelation of the true house and they killed Him for they were unregenerate. All will not be welcome in the original house, only those who come out from among them. Rev.18:2 And he cried with a mighty voice, saying, Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, and is become a habitation of demons, and a hold of every unclean spirit, and a hold of every unclean and hateful bird. 3 For by the wine of the wrath of her fornication all the nations are fallen; and the kings of the earth committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth waxed rich by the power of her wantonness. This time, the sky was almost dark, and a haunting feeling rushed over me as if this were a haunted house. (The great falling away in tribulation of the demon-haunted house of death. Fallen, fallen is Babylon…) There was a mighty wind blowing that seemed to knock me off my feet (tribulation). This time, the house was showing some of the walls busted out, with the studs showing in some places. The grass was no longer there. There was nothing but dirt. (The house of fleshly corruption.) The walkway was torn to bits. There was hardly any trace of it. (“The Way” has been corrupted.) The signs in the windows that the second group had put up were all busted, revealing once again the broken windows. (The denominations joining together as the one-world harlot) The dining room had no table this time for it had deteriorated due to termites or something. (Table of corrupt spiritual food.) The roof was caved in on one side. Overall, the house had been deserted for some time, even after the second group left. I looked at the sign out front. This time the words “WELCOME ALL YE CLERGY AND LAITY” were scratched out to the point you could not even read them. Underneath this was written in big bold letters, in what looked like human blood dripping from them: “TOO LATE”. (Rev.18:24 And in her was found the blood of prophets and of saints, and of all that have been slain upon the earth.) Those who do not forsake the corrupt house will be ruled by the wolves and will be reprobated and condemned to be destroyed by the beast of the world. Rev.17:15 And he saith unto me, The waters which thou sawest, where the harlot sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues. 16 And the ten horns which thou sawest, and the beast, these shall hate the harlot, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and shall burn her utterly with fire. 17 For God did put in their hearts to do his mind, and to come to one mind, and to give their kingdom unto the beast, until the words of God should be accomplished.) I looked at my sketch to see what was going on. The sketch looked like the house I was looking at right now; something had caused my original sketch of the original house to change to what my eyes were seeing before me now. (Given the truth, they turned it into a lie.) I saw the little girl standing next to the sign. The sign read “TOO LATE” in the sketch as well. The little girl's eyes had been darkened out. They were so dark. (Instead of the innocent girl of the primitive Church, there's an immature girl full of hate. 1Jn.2:11 But he that hateth his brother is in the darkness, and walketh in the darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because the darkness hath blinded his eyes.) I looked into those eyes and then heard a beastly, deep roar coming from in the midst. I looked up to see what it was and then I woke up... (The source of her hatred is the Satan-ruled beast that has invaded her. Mat.23:38 Behold, your house is left unto you desolate. But the saints shall say, “Look up, for your redemption draweth nigh”.)

Even for all the problems that it brings forward, it also brings forward possibilities and promise. - Stephen Aron Discover the American West's alternative history. In this What's Your Why? podcast we discover some of the little-known stories of peace and friendship amidst the frontier's violence. Join us as we unravel the perspectives and role of government in Western expansion. Get ready for a more nuanced understanding of the American West's complex past. But what if everything you thought you knew about the Wild West was just one side of the coin? Stay tuned to hear the untold tales that challenge conventional narratives and give a new perspective about the American West. For example, the Spanish influence in the American West is often overlooked in traditional history. That's the joy of history, there's always a different perspective to learn and imagine. My special guest is Stephen Aron Stephen Aron, President and CEO of the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, California, is not just an author, but a storyteller who unravels the complexities of the American West. His latest book, “Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American Frontier”, challenges conventional narratives by spotlighting lesser-known currents that diverge from the mainstream of Western American history. With a background in colonial American history, Aron's journey into the history of the American West led him to explore the moments and places where peace and unexpected friendships between former foes emerged, offering an alternative perspective to the often-violent history taught in schools. Aron's work presents a fresh and thought-provoking take on the American West, emphasizing the importance of understanding the realities of historical events.   In this episode, you will be able to: Explore alternative perspectives of American West history that challenge traditional narratives, offering a fresh understanding of the era.  Uncover the profound impact of colonialism on Native Americans, shedding light on a crucial but often overlooked aspect of Western history.  Examine the pivotal role of government in the expansion of the Western frontier, providing insight into the complex dynamics of power and influence.  Learn about Daniel Boone's interactions with the Shawnee Indians, revealing the complexities of cross-cultural encounters during this period.  Discover the remarkable resilience and survival strategies of Native American cultures in the face of immense challenges, offering a deeper appreciation of their enduring heritage.  Alternative Perspectives on Western American History  In exploring the history of the American West, Stephen Aron offers a fresh perspective by highlighting moments of peace and friendship amidst the conflict-ridden narratives typically associated with the region. His book, “Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American Frontier”, challenges traditional views by showcasing instances of cooperation and connection between different cultural groups. By shedding light on these lesser-known aspects, Aron encourages a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of Western expansion. The resources mentioned in this episode are:  Autry Museum of the American West - Learn more about the Autry Museum of the American West and explore their exhibits, events, and resources by visiting their official website at theautry.org.  Peace and Friendship:  an Alternative History of the American West - Discover Stephen Aron's latest book, which delves into the lesser-known currents of the American West's history. Find the book on major online bookstores or at local book retailers.   Reclaiming El Camino Exhibit - Explore the Reclaiming El Camino: Native Resistance in the Missions and Beyond exhibit at the Autry Museum, focusing on the genocidal destruction, resistance, and resilience of Native American communities in California.  Wyoming Humanities - To learn more about Wyoming Humanities and their initiatives, including the What's Your Why podcast, visit thinkwy.org.  Worlds Together, Worlds Apart - Explore Stephen Aron's co-authored world history textbook, provides a comprehensive understanding of global historical contexts.  Follow Us On These Channels: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emydigrappa/ www.ThinkWY.org https://www.facebook.com/storiesaboutwhy https://www.instagram.com/storiesaboutwhy Listen on all your favorite platforms and subscribe! As always leave a review if you enjoyed these stories and follow us on Instagram or visit the webpage of the Wyoming Humanities!

We're back after our first ever unscheduled week off. Did you miss us? Don't freak out, we're not breaking up. Never. On this week's episode, we compare an Asian Kitchen versus a standard Western American kitchen. Oh boy did we have a good time recording this LOL. Ben upsets his dad with bad soda. Lingjie wants his niece to turn off the radio. Come listen to The Worst Asian Podcast! https://baisuncandleco.com/products/steamed-white-rice-scented-candle ------------------------------------------- FOLLOW US EVERYWHERE @WorstAsianPod ► WEBSITE: www.worstasianpod.com ► INSTAGRAM: www.instagram.com/worstasianpod ► FACEBOOK: www.facebook.com/worstasianpod ► TWITTER: www.twitter.com/worstasianpod ► TIKTOK: www.tiktok.com/@worstasianpod ► YOUTUBE: https://bit.ly/3Agv8Aj ► EMAIL: WorstAsianPodcast@Gmail.com ------------------------------------------- SUPPORT US ► SUBSCRIPTION: On the Apple Podcast App or Spotify App This subscription gives you exclusive access to monthly bonus full episodes & shows general support for the podcast. These bonus eps will be more personal & include misc fun ideas that we've had but wouldn't work as regular eps. - Subscribe on Apple Podcast app: Click the "subscribe" box on the main page of this podcast - Subscribe on Spotify app: Click the "want to hear more from this" box on the main page of this podcast.  But the app is buggy so if that box doesn't show up than go to www.anchor.fm/worstasian/subscribe ► DONATION: www.buymeacoffee.com/worstasian We're doing it listeners, we're begging for money. Ben and Lingjie will continue to pump out that free content weekly but in case you feel inclined, we are accepting donations to help cover the costs of running the podcast. You get absolutely nothing extra out of this donation. No zoom chats, no bonus material, nada, zilch, zero. Just our gratitude. Please leave your social handle so we can thank you personally. Love you and thanks for listening! 감사합니다 & 谢谢你. PS: If you're a baller and donate $100 or more, we'll bring you on a future episode to join us for a segment of Ranting and Raving. Not joking, this is a real offer. Get your rant game ready :). ------------------------------------------- #asianamerican #asian #asians #podcast #asiancomedy #asianmillennials #proudtobeasian #asianpride #asiancommunity #representationmatters #asianrepresentation #asianculture #asianlife #aapi #funny #comedy #flushing #asianmemes #yappie #asianmen #asianboy #asianguy #asiannews #asianstyle #millennials #stopasianhate #Asianqualifiers #veryasian #asianpopculture #asianexcellence #japan #japanese #korea #korean #kpop #china #chinese #chinatown #koreatown #ktown #ctown

Every year, humanity's footprint casts a deadly shadow over our skies and landscapes, claiming the lives of billions of birds and other wildlife. What is road ecology? How are our roads driving certain species towards extinction? And what can we do about it?Ben Goldfarb is a conservation journalist. He is the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet, named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times, and Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.“The creation of roads is this process that's sort of innate to all beings. You know, we're all sort of inclined to create and follow trails. We just do it at a much vaster and more permanent and destructive scale. I think we need to reconceive how we think about roads in some ways, right? I mean, we think about roads, certainly here in the U. S., as these symbols of movement and mobility and freedom, right? There's so much about the romance of the open road and so much of our popular culture going back to the mid-20th century when the interstate highway systems were built and writers like Jack Kerouac were singing the praises of the open highway. And certainly, roads play that role. I like driving. The iconic Western American road trip is kind of this wonderful experience, but you know, I think the purpose of this book is to say: Yes, roads are a source of human mobility and freedom, but they're doing precisely the opposite for basically all other forms of life, right? They're curtailing animal movement and mobility and freedom, both by killing them directly in the form of roadkill, but also by creating these kinds of impenetrable walls of traffic that prevent animals from moving around the landscape and accessing big swaths of their habitat. Right? So, that's kind of the mental reconfiguration we have to go through, which is to recognize that, hey, roads aren't just forms of mobility and freedom for us. They're also preventing that mobility in basically all other life forms.”www.bengoldfarb.comhttps://wwnorton.com/books/9781324005896www.chelseagreen.com/product/eager-paperbackwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“The creation of roads is this process that's sort of innate to all beings. You know, we're all sort of inclined to create and follow trails. We just do it at a much vaster and more permanent and destructive scale. I think we need to reconceive how we think about roads in some ways, right? I mean, we think about roads, certainly here in the U. S., as these symbols of movement and mobility and freedom, right? There's so much about the romance of the open road and so much of our popular culture going back to the mid-20th century when the interstate highway systems were built and writers like Jack Kerouac were singing the praises of the open highway. And certainly, roads play that role. I like driving. The iconic Western American road trip is kind of this wonderful experience, but you know, I think the purpose of this book is to say: Yes, roads are a source of human mobility and freedom, but they're doing precisely the opposite for basically all other forms of life, right? They're curtailing animal movement and mobility and freedom, both by killing them directly in the form of roadkill, but also by creating these kinds of impenetrable walls of traffic that prevent animals from moving around the landscape and accessing big swaths of their habitat. Right? So, that's kind of the mental reconfiguration we have to go through, which is to recognize that, hey, roads aren't just forms of mobility and freedom for us. They're also preventing that mobility in basically all other life forms.”Ben Goldfarb is a conservation journalist. He is the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet, named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times, and Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.www.bengoldfarb.comhttps://wwnorton.com/books/9781324005896www.chelseagreen.com/product/eager-paperbackwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

What is road ecology? How are our roads driving certain species towards extinction? And what can we do about it?Ben Goldfarb is a conservation journalist. He is the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet, named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times, and Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.“The creation of roads is this process that's sort of innate to all beings. You know, we're all sort of inclined to create and follow trails. We just do it at a much vaster and more permanent and destructive scale. I think we need to reconceive how we think about roads in some ways, right? I mean, we think about roads, certainly here in the U. S., as these symbols of movement and mobility and freedom, right? There's so much about the romance of the open road and so much of our popular culture going back to the mid-20th century when the interstate highway systems were built and writers like Jack Kerouac were singing the praises of the open highway. And certainly, roads play that role. I like driving. The iconic Western American road trip is kind of this wonderful experience, but you know, I think the purpose of this book is to say: Yes, roads are a source of human mobility and freedom, but they're doing precisely the opposite for basically all other forms of life, right? They're curtailing animal movement and mobility and freedom, both by killing them directly in the form of roadkill, but also by creating these kinds of impenetrable walls of traffic that prevent animals from moving around the landscape and accessing big swaths of their habitat. Right? So, that's kind of the mental reconfiguration we have to go through, which is to recognize that, hey, roads aren't just forms of mobility and freedom for us. They're also preventing that mobility in basically all other life forms.”www.bengoldfarb.comhttps://wwnorton.com/books/9781324005896www.chelseagreen.com/product/eager-paperbackwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“The creation of roads is this process that's sort of innate to all beings. You know, we're all sort of inclined to create and follow trails. We just do it at a much vaster and more permanent and destructive scale. I think we need to reconceive how we think about roads in some ways, right? I mean, we think about roads, certainly here in the U. S., as these symbols of movement and mobility and freedom, right? There's so much about the romance of the open road and so much of our popular culture going back to the mid-20th century when the interstate highway systems were built and writers like Jack Kerouac were singing the praises of the open highway. And certainly, roads play that role. I like driving. The iconic Western American road trip is kind of this wonderful experience, but you know, I think the purpose of this book is to say: Yes, roads are a source of human mobility and freedom, but they're doing precisely the opposite for basically all other forms of life, right? They're curtailing animal movement and mobility and freedom, both by killing them directly in the form of roadkill, but also by creating these kinds of impenetrable walls of traffic that prevent animals from moving around the landscape and accessing big swaths of their habitat. Right? So, that's kind of the mental reconfiguration we have to go through, which is to recognize that, hey, roads aren't just forms of mobility and freedom for us. They're also preventing that mobility in basically all other life forms.”Ben Goldfarb is a conservation journalist. He is the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet, named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times, and Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.www.bengoldfarb.comhttps://wwnorton.com/books/9781324005896www.chelseagreen.com/product/eager-paperbackwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

What is road ecology? How are our roads driving certain species towards extinction? And what can we do about it?Ben Goldfarb is a conservation journalist. He is the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet, named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times, and Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.“The creation of roads is this process that's sort of innate to all beings. You know, we're all sort of inclined to create and follow trails. We just do it at a much vaster and more permanent and destructive scale. I think we need to reconceive how we think about roads in some ways, right? I mean, we think about roads, certainly here in the U. S., as these symbols of movement and mobility and freedom, right? There's so much about the romance of the open road and so much of our popular culture going back to the mid-20th century when the interstate highway systems were built and writers like Jack Kerouac were singing the praises of the open highway. And certainly, roads play that role. I like driving. The iconic Western American road trip is kind of this wonderful experience, but you know, I think the purpose of this book is to say: Yes, roads are a source of human mobility and freedom, but they're doing precisely the opposite for basically all other forms of life, right? They're curtailing animal movement and mobility and freedom, both by killing them directly in the form of roadkill, but also by creating these kinds of impenetrable walls of traffic that prevent animals from moving around the landscape and accessing big swaths of their habitat. Right? So, that's kind of the mental reconfiguration we have to go through, which is to recognize that, hey, roads aren't just forms of mobility and freedom for us. They're also preventing that mobility in basically all other life forms.”www.bengoldfarb.comhttps://wwnorton.com/books/9781324005896www.chelseagreen.com/product/eager-paperbackwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“The creation of roads is this process that's sort of innate to all beings. You know, we're all sort of inclined to create and follow trails. We just do it at a much vaster and more permanent and destructive scale. I think we need to reconceive how we think about roads in some ways, right? I mean, we think about roads, certainly here in the U. S., as these symbols of movement and mobility and freedom, right? There's so much about the romance of the open road and so much of our popular culture going back to the mid-20th century when the interstate highway systems were built and writers like Jack Kerouac were singing the praises of the open highway. And certainly, roads play that role. I like driving. The iconic Western American road trip is kind of this wonderful experience, but you know, I think the purpose of this book is to say: Yes, roads are a source of human mobility and freedom, but they're doing precisely the opposite for basically all other forms of life, right? They're curtailing animal movement and mobility and freedom, both by killing them directly in the form of roadkill, but also by creating these kinds of impenetrable walls of traffic that prevent animals from moving around the landscape and accessing big swaths of their habitat. Right? So, that's kind of the mental reconfiguration we have to go through, which is to recognize that, hey, roads aren't just forms of mobility and freedom for us. They're also preventing that mobility in basically all other life forms.”Ben Goldfarb is a conservation journalist. He is the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet, named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times, and Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.www.bengoldfarb.comhttps://wwnorton.com/books/9781324005896www.chelseagreen.com/product/eager-paperbackwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“The creation of roads is this process that's sort of innate to all beings. You know, we're all sort of inclined to create and follow trails. We just do it at a much vaster and more permanent and destructive scale. I think we need to reconceive how we think about roads in some ways, right? I mean, we think about roads, certainly here in the U. S., as these symbols of movement and mobility and freedom, right? There's so much about the romance of the open road and so much of our popular culture going back to the mid-20th century when the interstate highway systems were built and writers like Jack Kerouac were singing the praises of the open highway. And certainly, roads play that role. I like driving. The iconic Western American road trip is kind of this wonderful experience, but you know, I think the purpose of this book is to say: Yes, roads are a source of human mobility and freedom, but they're doing precisely the opposite for basically all other forms of life, right? They're curtailing animal movement and mobility and freedom, both by killing them directly in the form of roadkill, but also by creating these kinds of impenetrable walls of traffic that prevent animals from moving around the landscape and accessing big swaths of their habitat. Right? So, that's kind of the mental reconfiguration we have to go through, which is to recognize that, hey, roads aren't just forms of mobility and freedom for us. They're also preventing that mobility in basically all other life forms.”Ben Goldfarb is a conservation journalist. He is the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet, named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times, and Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.www.bengoldfarb.comhttps://wwnorton.com/books/9781324005896www.chelseagreen.com/product/eager-paperbackwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“The creation of roads is this process that's sort of innate to all beings. You know, we're all sort of inclined to create and follow trails. We just do it at a much vaster and more permanent and destructive scale. I think we need to reconceive how we think about roads in some ways, right? I mean, we think about roads, certainly here in the U. S., as these symbols of movement and mobility and freedom, right? There's so much about the romance of the open road and so much of our popular culture going back to the mid-20th century when the interstate highway systems were built and writers like Jack Kerouac were singing the praises of the open highway. And certainly, roads play that role. I like driving. The iconic Western American road trip is kind of this wonderful experience, but you know, I think the purpose of this book is to say: Yes, roads are a source of human mobility and freedom, but they're doing precisely the opposite for basically all other forms of life, right? They're curtailing animal movement and mobility and freedom, both by killing them directly in the form of roadkill, but also by creating these kinds of impenetrable walls of traffic that prevent animals from moving around the landscape and accessing big swaths of their habitat. Right? So, that's kind of the mental reconfiguration we have to go through, which is to recognize that, hey, roads aren't just forms of mobility and freedom for us. They're also preventing that mobility in basically all other life forms.”Ben Goldfarb is a conservation journalist. He is the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet, named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times, and Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.www.bengoldfarb.comhttps://wwnorton.com/books/9781324005896www.chelseagreen.com/product/eager-paperbackwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

What is road ecology? How are our roads driving certain species towards extinction? And what can we do about it?Ben Goldfarb is a conservation journalist. He is the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet, named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times, and Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.“The creation of roads is this process that's sort of innate to all beings. You know, we're all sort of inclined to create and follow trails. We just do it at a much vaster and more permanent and destructive scale. I think we need to reconceive how we think about roads in some ways, right? I mean, we think about roads, certainly here in the U. S., as these symbols of movement and mobility and freedom, right? There's so much about the romance of the open road and so much of our popular culture going back to the mid-20th century when the interstate highway systems were built and writers like Jack Kerouac were singing the praises of the open highway. And certainly, roads play that role. I like driving. The iconic Western American road trip is kind of this wonderful experience, but you know, I think the purpose of this book is to say: Yes, roads are a source of human mobility and freedom, but they're doing precisely the opposite for basically all other forms of life, right? They're curtailing animal movement and mobility and freedom, both by killing them directly in the form of roadkill, but also by creating these kinds of impenetrable walls of traffic that prevent animals from moving around the landscape and accessing big swaths of their habitat. Right? So, that's kind of the mental reconfiguration we have to go through, which is to recognize that, hey, roads aren't just forms of mobility and freedom for us. They're also preventing that mobility in basically all other life forms.”www.bengoldfarb.comhttps://wwnorton.com/books/9781324005896www.chelseagreen.com/product/eager-paperbackwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“The creation of roads is this process that's sort of innate to all beings. You know, we're all sort of inclined to create and follow trails. We just do it at a much vaster and more permanent and destructive scale. I think we need to reconceive how we think about roads in some ways, right? I mean, we think about roads, certainly here in the U. S., as these symbols of movement and mobility and freedom, right? There's so much about the romance of the open road and so much of our popular culture going back to the mid-20th century when the interstate highway systems were built and writers like Jack Kerouac were singing the praises of the open highway. And certainly, roads play that role. I like driving. The iconic Western American road trip is kind of this wonderful experience, but you know, I think the purpose of this book is to say: Yes, roads are a source of human mobility and freedom, but they're doing precisely the opposite for basically all other forms of life, right? They're curtailing animal movement and mobility and freedom, both by killing them directly in the form of roadkill, but also by creating these kinds of impenetrable walls of traffic that prevent animals from moving around the landscape and accessing big swaths of their habitat. Right? So, that's kind of the mental reconfiguration we have to go through, which is to recognize that, hey, roads aren't just forms of mobility and freedom for us. They're also preventing that mobility in basically all other life forms.”Ben Goldfarb is a conservation journalist. He is the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet, named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times, and Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.www.bengoldfarb.comhttps://wwnorton.com/books/9781324005896www.chelseagreen.com/product/eager-paperbackwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

What is road ecology? How are our roads driving certain species towards extinction? And what can we do about it?Ben Goldfarb is a conservation journalist. He is the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet, named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times, and Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.“The creation of roads is this process that's sort of innate to all beings. You know, we're all sort of inclined to create and follow trails. We just do it at a much vaster and more permanent and destructive scale. I think we need to reconceive how we think about roads in some ways, right? I mean, we think about roads, certainly here in the U. S., as these symbols of movement and mobility and freedom, right? There's so much about the romance of the open road and so much of our popular culture going back to the mid-20th century when the interstate highway systems were built and writers like Jack Kerouac were singing the praises of the open highway. And certainly, roads play that role. I like driving. The iconic Western American road trip is kind of this wonderful experience, but you know, I think the purpose of this book is to say: Yes, roads are a source of human mobility and freedom, but they're doing precisely the opposite for basically all other forms of life, right? They're curtailing animal movement and mobility and freedom, both by killing them directly in the form of roadkill, but also by creating these kinds of impenetrable walls of traffic that prevent animals from moving around the landscape and accessing big swaths of their habitat. Right? So, that's kind of the mental reconfiguration we have to go through, which is to recognize that, hey, roads aren't just forms of mobility and freedom for us. They're also preventing that mobility in basically all other life forms.”www.bengoldfarb.comhttps://wwnorton.com/books/9781324005896www.chelseagreen.com/product/eager-paperbackwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

It's not an exhaustive list, but there seem to be three predominant groups in the evangelical Western American church: prize fighters, secret agents, and ambassadors. Peter's letter helps us see how we might reflect and respond to the group we see ourselves in while considering persecution as followers of Jesus.

Wild Arms may not seem like it would work on paper (fusing a JRPG with a Western American setting), but if you ask any millennial nerd about one of their favorite PS1/2 JRPG series, it usually lauded for it's incredible setting and world building. Grab your cowboy hats and your six shooters because today  @davidvinc  and  @GamingBroductions  are joining the discussion on this incredible series.

In August, 2023 I had the opportunity to meet through LinkedIn Iris Yuning Ye. Iris spent the first 20 years of her life growing up in Northern China. She came to the U.S. to spend her junior college year at the University of California at Berkley. She also spent her senior year here and interned to help make that happen.   After returning to China for a bit she came back to the States to work toward her Master's degree at the University of Michigan.   This episode was especially fun for me and I hope it will be the same for you because of Iris' fervent attitude about being curious and always wanting to learn. Her reoccurring theme through our time on this episode is that people should work to be more curious and understanding of others. Iris will tell you about how she became involved with the Prisoners Literature Project and how that has opened her mind to so many things she never thought about before.   Iris is quite engaging, and her words are very thought provoking. I hope you enjoy this episode. Please let me know what you think. Also, feel free to reach out to Iris.   About the Guest:   Iris Yuning Ye advocates for education inequity for marginalized communities. She had been actively led and involved in marginalized communities education, ranging from post-release inmates data science bootcamp instructor to adaptive and inclusive strength training. Born and raised in the northern part of China, she experienced the life-changing impact education brought to her. With a pure passion and curiosity of exploring different education systems, she moved from Beijing to Berkeley in college, where she started to be involved in Prisoners Literature Project and Defy Ventures. It was through those years Iris was affirmed with the passion in helping others to achieve more through education. She is now pursuing her Master degree at University of Michigan, focusing on Human-Computer Interaction and pursuing Graduate Teaching Certificate.   As a Project Leader at Prisoners Literature Project and Community Instructor at Defy Ventures, she was fortunate and privileged to have worked with amazing inmates who had much passion in learning new knowledge. She founded data bootcamp that focuses on equipping post-release inmates with data skills that can secure rewarding and recognizing jobs for them. In 2020, she also developed a family education program for Child & Family Services of Northwestern Michigan that engaged 50+ families during Covid. She expanded education horizon to college during graduate school, and she is now a Graduate Student Instructor at University of Michigan. In the Enriching Scholarship 2023 Conference, she was invited as a speaker talking about “bridging the gap between college and career”. Iris also believes in the power of physical education. She is an NSCA (National Strength and Conditioning Association) Certified Personal Trainer. AdaptX-Certified Inclusive and Adaptive coach.   ** ** Ways to connect with Iris:   LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/irisyn-ye/        About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/   https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening!   Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast   If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app.   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review   Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.     Transcription Notes: Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:20 Time once again for unstoppable mindset where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. What a great way to start a podcast. I'd like to thank you all for listening. I'm Michael Hingson, your host. Today our guest is Iris Yuning Ye who started out life in China and then came to the United States went to Berkeley, which which we can't complain about since I live in California. But now she's at the University of Michigan. So we can have a great discussion about football teams, I suppose. But we'll see. Yeah, but Iris, I want to welcome you to unstoppable mindset. Thank you for taking the time to be here with us.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 02:01 Thank you so much. Well, Ohio State and we'll be super happy if you discuss football with us. Right?   Michael Hingson ** 02:07 Well, that's fine. Let them suffer. That's okay. My wife was did her master's work at USC. So oh, we have all sorts of different diverging challenges with football, don't we? Right.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 02:22 Yeah. We had all of the his enemies are coming together. Yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 02:28 makes life fun. Well, yeah. USC has been doing pretty well this year. So far. And Michigan has been doing pretty well.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 02:36 We we now know that you're following up on a news. Happy to hear that.   Michael Hingson ** 02:43 Well, that is great. Well, tell us a little bit about you growing up and, and all of that and how you ended up over in the US and such love to hear about your growing up in China and all that.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 02:56 Sure. Well, I spent 20 years of my life in China. So basically all of my education previously, I started my I live I'm from the northern part of China, which is a city next to Beijing is called tanjun. So I grew up there and I did all of my education there from kindergarten all the way to college. And then in junior year, I got the chance to come to UC Berkeley to study abroad. So I take that I took that I came to UC Berkeley during my junior year. And then after one year in Berkeley, I was fortunate I found a internship which I wanted to figure out if I was the one to stay in my finance major, which is what I did when I was a college. So I stayed at one more year after that study abroad year for a year of internship in the area. And then several, I went back to my home country, I worked there for two years. And then now here I am, I'm currently a graduate student at U mish so this is the whole journey of me in a nutshell. And   Michael Hingson ** 04:05 what was your major on your undergraduate major?   Iris Yuning Ye ** 04:08 In undergrad I did a pure business pure finance now I'm currently in information science, so user research and software related.   Michael Hingson ** 04:19 Ah, that's quite a quite a change, it seems to be going from from one to the other.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 04:29 That was and in last a whole story of how the changes came. The finance major was was popular, you know, back into that and 17 and everybody thinks, Oh, if you go to Finance if you go business, you will make a lot of money you will have a well up life. So that was why I chose it. And then from sophomore year, I tried to figure out is that the right thing for me? It turned out to be not really I'm not too happy doing the financial analysis work I did. So I got involved in a startup system in Berkeley utilize that. And then I pivoted to the product software field. And there was what I felt more comfortable than previously. So that was the journey in Oslo in a really short form, you're   Michael Hingson ** 05:22 sure you have a really good command of English? Did you learn that in China? Do they emphasize that at all? Or how does that work? Well,   Iris Yuning Ye ** 05:32 yeah, I, I would say, I'm personally pretty lucky that I grew up in a city and grew up in a system that is not too demanding of the study the amount of homework you have to do, it was still pretty demanding. But it was a great combination of you explore your interest versus what you have to do to complete in school. So the English classes I took, I took all of the local education system, so I did not go to international school, I did not go to any international such as bootcamp, the local classes of English is basically teacher teaching you what is from textbook, but I try to learn by myself more outside of class. So I try to listen to some materials, ABC News, CNN news, that helped me a lot in getting a foundation of speaking, or just communication, English and mindset in English. I think this is part partially helpful for me, to me, the other part has been beneficial for me is definitely coming to us and to talk to people here and to pick up the dragons or pick up the colloquial expressions, right?   Michael Hingson ** 06:53 Well, clearly, overall, you value education very highly. How would you describe your opinion of education? And why do you value it so highly?   Iris Yuning Ye ** 07:05 Well, I'm really thankful that you asked this question. I think education as I already introduced my experience a little bit. That means opportunity to me, because of the education and because of the choices I had from a local education system, in where I grew up in China, all the way to Berkeley, and I came back and then come back. So the back and forth is opening a lot of doors for me to explore such as, is finance a great thing for me, is product a great thing for me, and how can I navigate through each of the education stage. And also, I started as a student, and I got the chance to kind of do a graduate student instructor position right now in my school. So from the two aspects coming, it's both is a lifelong learning experience, because it's all stoppable that was what we're discussing right now. And on the other hand, as an instructor, I feel opportunity is asked the unstoppable for those who are benefiting from the education that we can give to them.   Michael Hingson ** 08:19 So unstoppable is definitely a term that you would use to describe education and the need for education. Well,   Iris Yuning Ye ** 08:29 I totally feel that, and especially when I saw your podcast, the theme as the unstoppable I was like, this is the this is the key word for education, therefore opportunity for students and instructors. Yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 08:50 Well, I, I think that the person who stops learning was just not going to go anywhere, we should always try to learn and continue to learn and explore new things and be adventurous. Life's adventure. And all too often, we don't ever view it that way. And we should. It   Iris Yuning Ye ** 09:10 is, and education if we, if I personally will think about it really broadly. It's not only about what I learned from class, but what I learned from my graduate school. It's from all aspects of life, such as I'm learning by listening to your podcasts or by talking with you and learning how you can figure it out, such as text reading screen, and I learned by talking to my parents of some life tricks, how you can do your luggage in a faster way. All of those are learnings to me.   Michael Hingson ** 09:48 Oh my god, it's an adventure. How? How do you? Well see how do I want to ask this? How would you view education in China as opposed to and the beliefs about education And then China as opposed to what we see in the United States, does that something that's easy to compare or talk about?   Iris Yuning Ye ** 10:09 Yeah, I think I can probably talk about it for the whole day. But just pick several pointers currently on the top of my mind. Because I took the first 20 years, almost 20 years of my education in China, I felt I had a wonderful foundation of science and also logical thinking, both from school and both from my family. What probably what we heard from the media and what what we heard from the publication The the education system in Asia is quite demanding, that has a lot of assignments, homework, you have to finish. But on the other side, when I'm looking back to the education on the math methodology, it helped me to building up the repetitive matters and practice a lot. So I still have clear and crystal clear memory of such as what is how to calculate the area of a square. Though all of those math foundation, I can still do it really well. So I think this is really helpful for me, for me in the long term of my, my career or for my science field. And for the American education. I definitely cannot summarize in one or two sentences, but encouraged more in asking questions. This is the first observation I had when it came. asking question is everywhere in the class, when you're sitting there, the teacher will instructor will encourage you to ask questions, they will always check back with the students. Do you have any questions? And what are the what are your thoughts right now? So the encouragement of asking question is also stimulating a sense of discussion in class, which is also unique in the American education system, which I definitely did not try any other countries. But just comparing these two, I think this is unique.   Michael Hingson ** 12:17 Interesting, do you think that the educational system in general is more demanding in China than in the US in terms of learning and the work that needs to be done, or that is done?   Iris Yuning Ye ** 12:29 It is demanding in different ways. The American education system is also really demanding. I think the China education system is demanding in the repetitive this, you have to work on assignments and is pretty long hours work is after you get back from school such as 5pm you get from school, back from school, you have three to four hours of assignments, you probably need to spend the time on it, because it's due tomorrow. So that is the demanding aspect of the China's education system, versus the US education system is also really demanding. I did have Depression period when I was in junior year, when I was at UC Berkeley, because I was not able to deal well of my classes and the credits. It was demanding because it was hard, it was progressing fast. And it was more independent, you have to figure out all of the questions by yourself, even though the instructor is their office hours there. You need to find your own way to study and to make it through. So it's also super easy to do Monday.   Michael Hingson ** 13:46 So it's more structured in a sense in China. But here, what I'm hearing you say is that the demand was that you had to to figure out more things rather than it being in a structured way given to you.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 14:02 I agree, this is a great summary and a great, a great summary of the differences. If we take a step back, when I what I what we what I see what I observe in Asia or in China in general, is there's always a expectation on you. After you graduate from college, you have to have a white collar job. This is the expectation that is already a default setting versus in the US is more freestyle. If you go to some career tracks that is not perceived as white collar or just high end is okay. Nobody will judge you. So I think if we take a step back is to is true for the different system and societal expectations.   Michael Hingson ** 14:58 Yeah, and I'm not at all saying If one is better or worse than the other, they're different. Same,   Iris Yuning Ye ** 15:02 they're just different in different and a society.   Michael Hingson ** 15:07 And that's okay.   Michael Hingson ** 15:10 Ultimately, the final thing that we need to do is to learn and hopefully people do that.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 15:17 Yeah. And what I tried to do and what I realized during my college was that instead of being a student, I can probably be a teacher to some extent. So that was a, that was a moment, a silver lining shining on me that I realized that instead of being a being in the education system, on the side of students, I can also be on the side of teacher. So in junior year, I decided to volunteer in the local community to be an instructor of a inmates reentry bootcamp. That was also a different aspect that I was able to learn from my experience.   Michael Hingson ** 16:06 Tell me more about that. That's fascinating. And inmates boot camp, our introductory boot camp. Tell me more about that, if you would,   Iris Yuning Ye ** 16:15 for sure. Oh, in my junior year, when I was at Berkeley, I heard there was a organization that was called prisoners literature project, where they in that project, the volunteers tried to gather the books and send back to the balloon mates in the prison based on what they're requesting, so such as some inmates will write letters to us say, I would love to read some fiction books, I will love to read novels. And we will pick the book from our database and from our donation and mail it back to them. So that was how I started to get involved in this community. I also saw several prisoners after they get get out of prison, they came back to our PLP prisoners literature project to help us to do the volunteer. So at that moment, I was thinking, okay, what are the ways can I get involved in this, and I, at that moment, I only need data analysis. So I started a data analysis class for them. And there were about 11 Ma's coming in and learn it, it was super rewarding at the end, because at the beginning, I did not realize the minimum wage issue in the whole image system, the because of the lack of skill sets, and because of the societal pressure on reentry inmates. In 2020, I remember the data, about 60% of them don't even have a job where the employment or in employment rate of us was about 15%. So that was a huge contrast. And because of the program, we started for the re entry and for the data analysis, education, eight out of them were able to get the job in a really decent environment run really decent job setting. So that was when I started in the instructor row on the other side of education. That was the very beginning of my journey.   Michael Hingson ** 18:29 Why is the unemployment rates so high? And what do we do to bring it down?   Iris Yuning Ye ** 18:35 That's such a great question. I hope that I can be a precedent sometime which is have their problem. Lost Long story short, just several several things I personally observed is first of all, the school says, after prison happened that after the prisoners and inmates have been in prison for some of them 15 years, some of them five years, the world is changing too fast for people to catch up. Even though I'm not in the prison. I'm currently in outside I'm able to access to information, I still feel lagging behind, left behind 1000s of times a day, people talking about how have you used check GPT people talk about have you used any other AI tool before, it's just changing too fast for people to catch up. So the skill sets that are in demand right now are not caught up by the image. So this is the first reason and the second reason is still the stigma and a stereotype on inmates who the employer is my thing. They're not safe to employ or feel they're not a reliable to employ. So they're filtered out from a lot of opportunities. And lastly, is as soon as they're out of the prison or as As they're out of and facing with reentry, it's so overwhelming. Just imagine that you're out, you need to deal with your utilities you need to deal with your family needs to deal with your housing. Everything comes together, a job seeking is not even the priority at the moment. And they need the help to review their lives. So these are the three reasons I personally can see from the data.   Michael Hingson ** 20:26 And there aren't really a culturalization classes in the prisons to help it and great people back into society or there just is too much to learn that they just don't have time to do at all.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 20:41 What I see in, in California, when I was volunteering in the five ventures and volunteering in the PLP, first of all, is prison in, in a sense of preserving their safety and security. They're still trying to cut down a lot of connections, prisoners through what the outside world, such as they are only when I was mailing back the books, there were certain books not not allowed. So certain genres are not allowed by certain prisons depends on the region and depends on the city, the prison or facility is in. And also they are not allowed to have such as pens in certain prisons, because it's considered as a Yeah, sharp instrument, a weapon potential weapon. Well, that was only a small fraction of all of the restrictions from their life there. So we can only imagine how many other restrictions they have, that is limiting the connections with the world. And also, just as the defy ventures I volunteer for or the PLP, there were nonprofits working on that. It's not scalable, just imagining that we only have six volunteers there. And we can just cover as much as 30 reentry people. Imagine how many people are coming out every single day. The scalability requires more, a second thought or just a reimagining of the current system. How can you   Michael Hingson ** 22:30 teach those of us on the outside about all of this and help us become more sensitized to trying to help?   Iris Yuning Ye ** 22:40 This is what I've been thinking a lot about these days. So several things I can do right now. So first of all, is there was another nonprofit I got involved with these days, or in the last year it was called impartial, so impartial what we did was, we collected the art work from the previous prison prisoners or inmates, and we sell it to others. So we try to utilize this way to help them to make money. And a lot of the inmates post release inmates, they lie dry, they like writing, they have a lot of creativity, that is not known by others. So utilize this and also it transform their labor or transform their creativity into something profitable is a great way, as far as I see a great way to give them back for their labor for their devotion into the society and also into this world. And the other way I think can be helpful is just voice out as, as for me, I have been an instructor there, I have been an activist there, I can talk with you and that the more audience listening to this podcast will know this issue. And the whenever they see people from the background, they're willing to help are willing to get involved in more instructions, and a more education program that will be wonderful.   Michael Hingson ** 24:18 We get so locked into prejudices and so locked into specific ideas that we really don't take it further. I've said for a long time, for example, about people with disabilities that we're not brought into or involved in the conversation, but I can see where what you're talking about with people in the prisons and so on is very much the same way. We we don't really involve them or we don't really choose to have conversations about all that, which limits our knowledge all the more.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 24:53 Yeah, I'm also curious about in your community. So what kind of limitations Did you see in the disabled community are able in different ways community that the limitations of how you can voice out and the conversations that you were not able to participate in? Well,   Michael Hingson ** 25:13 first of all, I would would reject the concept of Abel in different ways. Ability is ability, we may use different tools or different techniques to accomplish the task. But our abilities are the same, our knowledge is the same. So it's, it's when people talk about different abilities, or differently abled, I think that's such a misnomer and an inappropriate, inappropriate thing, because it isn't true. As I said, it's different techniques, perhaps in different tools than you use. And for you, your disability has been covered up pretty well. That is to say, your light dependent, which I love to talk to people about, every person on this planet has a disability and the disability for most people is that they're light dependent, you don't do well, if suddenly, the power goes out, and you're left in the dark. But with Thomas Edison invented the electric light bulb, and we spending so much time to make sure that people have access to light, pretty much all the time your disability is covered up. But make no mistake, that disability is still there. Does that make you differently abled than than I am? Who is light independent? I think the answer is no. It says that you have different techniques that you use to have access to information like monitors, and light that allows you to see what's going on where I get the information in other ways. But we don't tend to have conversations about a lot of these things. And the prisons and prisoners are in the same situation. Because we fear and we we get very uncomfortable about things that are different than people who are different than we are. And sometimes we build up images that aren't true. And sometimes we just create these fears that we we can't deal with them, because they're not the same as us. And we are better than they are.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 27:13 Well, this is the new education I just had today, right? That concept of disabled versus able and with different abilities. This is these are the two ways I heard about people describing this community before. But now it makes totally sense about how we are disability disabled in different ways. I last week, when I was walking in dark, I was not able even able to get my key and my door lock. I was there for five minutes cannot touch it cannot be alone. How can I hit survivor like this?   Michael Hingson ** 27:51 Exactly. And the reality is that it's a matter of learning the techniques. And it's a matter of learning how to do it. So you could learn how to find the appropriate place to put your key in the lock. And you could learn to do that by touch. But it's a it's a process. And since that's not normally the way you do it, it becomes a little bit different situation for you.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 28:20 Do you feel that we are just educated we just we are just educated or we require different learnings in our life. So such as the prisoners, they might learn a rig require a type of learning every entry, which is currently what I don't need to our what you don't need to such as you need to learn about how to navigate through dark environments from way earlier than I do. So we are just navigating through different learnings and education. And we're Riley moments of our lives.   Michael Hingson ** 28:55 I think our learning is something that comes based on our experiences and our environments. So as a blind person, I don't tend to learn how to do things, using light as the main vehicle to give me access to information. I do it in other ways. Now, at the same time, I think it's important that I understand what eyesight is to you and why it's important. And I have no problem with that. Where I think the breakdown comes is when most people have eyesight and they believe that unless you can see, you're less than we are. That's where I think the problem comes. Because most people think that eyesight is the only game in town and if you don't have eyesight, you can't possibly be as good as we are. And And likewise, if you're a person who There's been a prisoner, then clearly there's something wrong with you otherwise, you'd never have been a prisoner. And it, it doesn't make sense to it necessarily have to be that way.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 30:11 It connects back to the questions we talked about earlier, that how can we? How can we encourage more people to get involved in this initiative, such as reentry for inmates, helping them to learn the life skills coming back to society? The everybody has a blind spot in their life, such as my blind spot is probably I if I don't talk with you before, I have never got a chance to talk with you, I will never learn that. What is the difference visibility's and the learnings versus people with eyesight versus not. So that was I don't have the empathy for that. And it's the same idea for an education and a prisoners scenario, because people don't try to understand what is the life scenario of the inmates who are currently in the reentry process. So they don't have the empathy and they don't have the ability to comprehend their situation?   Michael Hingson ** 31:15 Well, you're right. I would say, though, that the difference is, say between you and any number of other people is, you're open to learning and gaining that empathy. And although you may start out with a particular belief, you are willing to explore alternatives. Whereas there are so many people who aren't. And that's where the challenge comes. I have I've been in situations where someone where a child has come up to me and wanting to talk to me, and the parents have just grabbed the child and take and said, No, don't talk to them. And he might not like it, or, you know, they come up with all sorts of excuses. Or, I'm walking with my guide dog, I remember one time I was in a hotel, and I was walking from the desk, I had to turn down a long corridor, and then go up a little ways and then make another left turn to get to my room. And there were people who are behind me and and they kept saying, how does that dog know where he wants to go? Because the presumption is, I can't possibly know it, since I can't see it. The reality is, the last thing I want is the dog to know, I have to give the dog commands, the dogs job is to make sure that we walk safely. And you know, they said well, how does the dog know when to turn. And here I am giving hand signals and saying left, left Left. And they don't even acknowledge that error. They ignore it. Because that doesn't fit their image of what a blind person is. So the answer is, it's all about more education. It's more discussions, which is why I chose 22 years ago after September 11. To travel around and speak and talk about blindness and talk about lessons we should learn about September 11, and other such things. So that people will learn that we are all on the same planet. And we need to all learn to be a little bit more accepting of those who are different than we are.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 33:21 Right, and education. The key one of the keys for education I see is curiosity. As we talked about EuroCity comes in, when there's some contradictory information coming in, how can you piece together? And when there's something against you what you're believing in? Can you be open minded? The Curiosity is taking people a long way. Learning learning is not only about what we are taught right now in class, but also such as I learned that from you that you get your guide dog, a hen hen sign up at turning labs are turning right, well and verbal commands as well. Right, yeah, so all of the commands coming together.   Michael Hingson ** 34:09 But the but the issue is that a lot of people don't notice that. They just think it's amazing what this dog does to lead this blind man around. Dogs don't leave a guide. Because it's not the dog's job. The dog's job is to make sure that we walk safe. It's my job to give direction. And there are so many different kinds of situations like that, where we just lock ourselves into one point of view. And don't argue with the facts or don't don't confuse me with the facts. That's not what what I'm used to. And so I'm not going to accept that. And it's it's so unfortunate when that happens, because there's so many people who operate in so many different ways that we just tend not to want to pay attention to that. And that's where getting back into the conversation. So things like this podcast, hopefully people learn something from it in so many different things that you do and so on up, I think we're all teachers. And I know you said earlier, you never thought of yourself being really a teacher, but clearly you are. And you're very much involved in the education field in so many ways. The fact is, I think all of us can and ought to, in some ways, view ourselves as teachers, and that's a good thing.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 35:32 I can relate a lot to your September 11th. So after that, you decided to the realization that we are on the same planet, and that we need to learn from each other more. I think that was the same point for me the moment of my life, that because of prisoners literature project, and because of the first ever instructional experience I had, I decided to get involved more of the education field, because I see the opportunity. And I see the unstoppable side from the students learning and also from the teachers aspect. The this will be a much better place if we share the knowledge and the other side is willing to take in.   Michael Hingson ** 36:22 How do you think   Michael Hingson ** 36:25 most people in the United States would view the educational system and the whole world of China?   Iris Yuning Ye ** 36:35 I cannot speak to anyone else. But last time I watched a YouTube video, I saw the comments. I read through the comments there. The comments were i There is pathetic. It's they are losing their childhood, they will be a robot after they get off school. I think everything is depends on how you take it and how you utilize it. So yes, it is pathetic in some way. Because we have to put in longer hours in the study in this single item of life. But on the other hand, the perseverance comes up. And the foundation of science and the foundation of math knowledge comes up. So highly depends on how we take it. So I would say based on what I see from the YouTube comments is more empathetic? Is that the right word to put a from American society?   Michael Hingson ** 37:36 very empathetic. Yeah. And that's the point is that, once again, I think there is a lot of evidence to show that maybe things aren't quite that way. But it gets back to we've got to somehow deal with the politics and the government situations because the government's cause a whole lot more problems for all of us on all sides then, than anything else. And the way it really is, as opposed to the way the government says it is or wants it to be or not the same at all.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 38:13 And if we bring the whole US education system in into any developing country, it will totally not work. I'm not saying any education system is great, but it's just not gonna work. If you bring this whole free style and also free choice education system to a rural place in a developing country, the student don't know what to choose, they need a foundation of education, of how to survive in life, because their parents are gone. Their parents are in big city. They're living by themselves since very young, they're living with their grandparents, and they're living on the minimum wage such as a year, they only earn several $50 a year. This is their whole income the whole year. How can you just say you should think about your life in a better way, rather than studying only they don't have the privilege to think about that. This is also some some minor factors. I would encourage people to look into the system before creating critiquing them. Yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 39:25 I had a conversation some time ago on this podcast with someone who came out of the era of communism in in your well in Eastern Europe and so on. And one of the things that they said was that the the difficulty for most people when communism ended in their country, was that they didn't know how to move forward the communism, the communist regime made all your decisions for you. And in a sense, that's that's kind of what I hear you saying, in some senses about education in China, but not necessarily in the same negative way. But what they said is that the communist regime made all decisions for you. And now, the communist regime has gone. And people have to learn to make decisions for themselves. And it's a whole new experience, and they didn't know how to do it. This   Iris Yuning Ye ** 40:27 is really true or in, in the culture, and both in the culture and both in the regime, because it has been there for hundreds of years, is hard to overturn it overnight. If you're asking the students from their cultural background to ask questions in class right now, they're so uncomfortable doing it, and they feel they're doing something wrong, for asking questions or challenging authority is nothing wrong or nothing right is just not fit in the system cannot fit in the system right now. It might take several years, several decades to do it. So this is what I see the difference, and also, why certain system can offer it and you can or you can not always use the Western American way to try to put into the other system work.   Michael Hingson ** 41:23 Right? It isn't the same. I am sure that there are parts of the American system that would be of benefit in other environments. But I'm sure also that there are probably parts of other environments that would be invaluable in the American system.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 41:43 Yeah, it's all a as our critical thinking process, there's no right or wrong Aza is not black and white is a spectrum that all of us when we gather more information, such as if I have the privilege of knowing that both of the system, I can compare them and see the difference, and you have the knowledge to compare them. And you can also tell the difference. And we exchanged information, which can be a more unbiased and probably a more well, well put way, rather than you only look into one side of opinions rather than the other.   Michael Hingson ** 42:24 You could advise young students in any country or in any environment, about education, and so on, what would you what would you advise them to do?   Iris Yuning Ye ** 42:39 Curiosity is so important to say that, which   Michael Hingson ** 42:44 is why asked.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 42:46 Yeah, we already touched base on that. Just several questions ago. I'm always thinking about that these days. Well, one thing I personally really enjoy, is it just one side note outside the question that we were talking about? I what I enjoy, is I reflecting on what I had so far, what I don't have what I enjoy what I don't enjoy. So curiosity has been so important for me that because of curiosity, I want to learn other places, even though I have no correlation or connection with them. I want to know what is happening in your life. If you're from from Bangladesh, what is the culture there? I never been there. I want to learn from you. Because of curiosity, I got to talk to such as students from business school, what is your job? Why do you come? The curiosity leads to inflammation, and inflammation leads to a more well rounded opinion, because you have more unbiased and abundant information. Only abandoned information can lead to unbiased opinion, this is just my take on education. So curiosity is so important is the key. And the second is self reflection. Then what do you enjoy? What do you don't enjoy? The one thing I struggle a lot when I was a student in college was I failed, I did not fail, but I did so bad in my statistics class, and I thought my life was going to end here. I'm losing my GPA, and I'm losing my ranking in the major. But then I realized why do I need to stay in the stat field? If I'm not good at it? I can work on the aspects Am I good at I am good at says it is logical thinking such as strategy. So if I'm able, I ever get a chance to talk about the skill sets and talk about education. I would say curiosity and self reflection are in two key points that I have in mind.   Michael Hingson ** 44:55 And I think that goes beyond education. I think that it's Something that we all should do. I, I think one of the greatest things that I've experienced in my life, especially since sometime in the 1990s was the internet because it gave me such access to information as a as a blind person that I didn't have access to before because everything was in print, and print. Although the technology had begun to be available to reprint through things like the original Kurzweil Reading Machine that evolved to better Omni font, Character Recognition over the years, it still was a relatively small way to get access to information, whereas the Internet has just opened so many doors. And since I've always viewed life as an adventure anyway, it just seems to me the internet really helps to allow us to explore things and we need to do it. And we need to keep an open mind. But in our country today, we're just seeing so many people who are locked into opinions. Like with the whole political situation, there's no discussing. There's no room for conversation, which is so scary.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 46:18 Right. And technology, as you said, internet started booming in 1990s. And then all the way here. Every single one of us almost in the world is on it. And there are new technologies coming up. One thing I one discussion I heard a lot, both in the media and also in the school is is technology good for education? I think they highly depends on how users still there's no right or wrong, wrong answer is Chad GPT. Great for education. If you use it just for copy pasting, you never learn is a bad education. But if you use it to help you understand difficult concepts, and you have a personalized interpretation of the answer it gives to you is such a great way to study, you don't need too much access to a instructor all the time, you still need the instructor to explain ideas to you. But you can do a lot of self learning through that. So when I heard you talking about Internet that, though, was I resonated a lot in the sense of internet is also connecting us. But if you don't use it right, is wasting your time. Sure. Sure,   Michael Hingson ** 47:36 well, and take chat GPT and other large language models and so on that that are now coming out in the hole, what we've been calling artificial intelligence. Not sure it's totally artificial, but but the fact is that, that in reality, it creates challenges somewhat. But I do believe that technology is good for education, I think the chat GPT if used correctly, and I agree with you. But if used correctly can be extremely helpful. I've used it to help write articles. And blog posts what I've done with it, though, I love to to do this with Chet GPT, I'll ask it a question or I'll tell it I want an article about one thing or another. And it provides an answer and I'm not sure I like that one, give it to me again, I've I've done like eight or nine different runs at something. And then I'll take them all. And I will take whatever and choose whatever elements from each one that I want to go in the article, and then add my own spin to it because I know that it has to be my article. And you're right. They don't they don't teach you. They give you things that you can use, but we still have to be the ones to put it together.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 49:01 Right and the way I interact with chat, TBD. That was also one way I interact. And the other way is sometimes my writing is really broken. It's not my native language. So there are certain words that I'm not sure what is the better one to the alternative choices. So I ask it, can you please rephrase it for me? A lot.   Michael Hingson ** 49:24 And there's nothing wrong with that. Right? Still? Still you do. Right?   Iris Yuning Ye ** 49:31 It's still you doing it and you still have to be the one to do it. Somebody was telling me, I think it was actually near Christmas time last year about chat GPT and how students were using it to just write papers and do exams and so on. And one of the things that I said is what's going to happen with all of this or in part what's going to happen is that yes, possibly, you can develop ways for teachers to detect that something was written by chat GPT as opposed to a student, but ultimately isn't really about seeing if people truly have gained the knowledge and what's going to have to happen is that teachers are going to have to start asking more questions of students directly. Or even if they turn a paper in with chat GPT and that that did the work. Make the student defend the paper orally, without reading it without looking at it, defend the paper, you can find out in so many ways whether a student is just cheated and not really done the work or not.   Michael Hingson ** 50:40 And we're because of the technology and the education or the whole higher education system and our the college education is revert revolutionising the way they define plagiarism and cheating. And define how to define how to comprehend how the students can comprehend. Instead of just submitting the paper or submitting the assignment, there is hope a whole bunch of the back end changes. I I'm excited about it, and also, I think is super helpful in the higher education system.   Michael Hingson ** 51:20 Yeah. And,   Michael Hingson ** 51:23 like with anything, we're only at the beginning. Right?   Iris Yuning Ye ** 51:28 Just imagine that when the Industrial Revolution was to two centuries ago, we already back then British thought it was the end of the labor efficiency improvement. But that was just the beginning. fastball, were 200 years ago, here we are in zoom.   Michael Hingson ** 51:50 One of my favorite examples about people thoughts limiting their imagination, is the story of a gentleman named Roger Bannister. Have you heard of him? Not really. So Roger Bannister always wanted to be the person who would run a mile in less than four minutes. And he was told by everyone, it couldn't be done physically, it couldn't be done, you would die if you went over or ran a mile in under four minutes. And everyone in the in the athletic world just said, this is not something that can be done. Then one day he did it. And I think 1956 56 or 5756 I think he's, he's from from Britain. And he did it. And then what happened? Everyone started to be running the mile. In less than four minutes. We we we talk ourselves into things. Course, I love to tell people that you still haven't convinced me that the world isn't flat, you know? They say, Well, you can look at it from space. And you can say, well, that doesn't help me a bit. So how do you I know that the world isn't? There's an organization called the Flat Earth Society that has many arguments to prove that the world is still flat? Well, you know, fine. All I know is that gravity is keeping me here. And that's a good thing.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 53:18 Flat Earther. And there was a funny video, it was flat earther and scientist having a conversation of if Earth is flat, it was really funny. So they say arguing with each other and Flat Earthers failed, scientists are stupid. As scientists were so offended by the stupid word falling on them. We published hundreds of papers, and you say we were stupid.   Michael Hingson ** 53:50 Well, publishing doesn't, doesn't solve anything by itself.   53:57 Right? So I don't know. I   Michael Hingson ** 54:00 don't know all the arguments from the Flat Earthers as to why they say that the world is flat. I really should spend more time researching that just to see what they say. But whatever. I think I think generally we accept that the earth is spherical. It isn't really rounded, spherical, but that's okay.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 54:21 Yeah, it has is the curb there.   Michael Hingson ** 54:23 Well, that's what they say. That's, that's what some of you say. Anyway.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 54:30 Well, gosh, so much. Yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 54:32 Oh, it's fun. People, people come up with all sorts of arguments to do everything. So clearly, you value education. And I would say that you would say it changes your life and it's changed your life. Right?   Iris Yuning Ye ** 54:49 Definitely. Just my my my life because of the education because of the curiosity and because it was how I came to the other side and part of spending in education, a change and the direction has been never been predictable up to now, which is exciting and which is also exhilarating.   Michael Hingson ** 55:15 So what do you want for you to be a great educator?   Iris Yuning Ye ** 55:21 Good question. What I see I'm lacking right now, the empathy of, well, I'm biased because the way I learned I tried to use it to teach others. And I think this is the common problem for a lot of people. So the way I am always reminding myself that I try to learn how other people learn. And instead of just using my way to teach the students teach my target audience. So the other one I have in mind is, I always believe the foundation of education. So such as kindergarten and elementary school, the teacher there is actually doing a much harder job than college students college educator, because in kindergarten, just imagine how can you explain one plus one equals two, it is not an easy job. So what I see a better education a better educator, if I can be at some point is I can explain the foundation of the knowledge in a more articulated way. Rather than just take it as a default setting and take it as a for granted that people already know.   Michael Hingson ** 56:40 I find it interesting that you talk about the fact that what would make you a great educator is to deal with the things that you lack still, that you're only going to be a great educator when you when you learn more, which is an interesting, and absolutely, it seems to me very appropriate philosophy.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 57:02 Right? The more we, the more I learned, the more I realize how much I don't know that that is the the encouragement for me to keep in this field and learn as much as I can. And I think it applies to most of the settings in life that the more you know, you realize, I only know a fraction of this world. What   Michael Hingson ** 57:29 do you where do you? Where do you think you will be in five years? What do you see yourself doing? Or how do you see yourself progressing? And and of course, that also leads to more of a discussion about the whole issue of education inequity, to which I know we've talked a lot about in one way or another. But so where do you see yourself in five years,   Iris Yuning Ye ** 57:53 I still want to stay in the software product view, which I have been most comfortable with, since I graduated from college. And I think I can I can devote a lot more in the such as education, product ad tech, and I want to be a lecturer of our time, I still haven't figured that out. But this is something I want to do so such as teach a class in college or teach a class in the local community. And also want to keep up with a volunteer in the prisoners community and see what I can still help. Not only help, but also spread the word to   58:29 others. I   Michael Hingson ** 58:30 gather from what you're saying you see yourself continuing to do that here in the US.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 58:37 Yeah, heard of hands on opportunity. So such as how much i i get paid, right? So how how well, the product fits in my personal interest.   Michael Hingson ** 58:50 Well, maybe you can take a rocket to Mars and start teaching people up there.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 58:55 We can definitely do it.   Michael Hingson ** 58:58 You have to learn Martian.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 59:01 And I have to learn how to do math, how to teach and how to talk through them.   Michael Hingson ** 59:09 Well see another adventure. But you know, I think that that all that you're saying is so great, because it's it still comes back to curiosity and it still comes back to learning. And it's something that we always all should be doing. We should find ways to learn and not just reject things out of hand. Just because we don't believe it.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 59:34 This is the theme for today's podcast is curiosity is learn from others. Get rid of what you have so far.   Michael Hingson ** 59:43 Yeah. It's the only way to do it. Well, I want to thank you for being here with us. This has been fun. Can people reach out to you and interact with you in any way? How would they do that? They're   Iris Yuning Ye ** 59:56 my I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. If you're you think a user, you can find my search my name, you'll find me.   Michael Hingson ** 1:00:04 Why don't you spell that for me?   Iris Yuning Ye ** 1:00:08 I r i s space? Y u n i n g space Y e. I'm probably the only one you can find. So, yes, you use the search. Um, the other way is I my, my email is iye@umich.edu. So i  ye at U M. I C H.edu.   Michael Hingson ** 1:00:31 Yeah, better better Michigan than Ohio State you would say right. Go   Iris Yuning Ye ** 1:00:36 Go Michigan and go Walgreens.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 1:00:43 I have a friend colored there. I   Michael Hingson ** 1:00:45 have a friend who just retired from the government a couple of years ago, but he got his advanced degrees in economics from the University of Michigan. We both were at UC Irvine at the same time. But then he went to University of Michigan, he loved to talk about the ongoing rivalry between Michigan and Ohio State during football season, which is always a series of fun stories to hear. This   Iris Yuning Ye ** 1:01:09 is what I picked up from the American culture, you should be proud of your football team that if not, you're kicked out.   Michael Hingson ** 1:01:18 And I like college football a lot more than professional football. Even though there's more and more money getting into college football, college football is still the sport that people can talk about. And you can can have fun with it from all sides and, and college kids still have a lot of fun with it. Right.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 1:01:38 And we are still we're still here. staying strong. You mentioned staying strong. That's it.   Michael Hingson ** 1:01:45 Or as we say a UFC fight on. But you know, it's a it's an important thing. Well, Iris young and III, I want to thank you for being here with us. This has been fun. We met on LinkedIn and and I'm glad that we did. And you're going to have to come back in the future and tell us how things are going with you and talk about things you've learned and so on. So let's not let this be the only time you are on unstoppable mindset.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 1:02:12 And I wait for it. And I'm so thankful for LinkedIn to connect us together and talk through this podcast and talk through what our value is and talk through the experience for both of us. So thank you so much, Michael. Well,   Michael Hingson ** 1:02:27 thank you. This has been fun. And now you get to go have dinner and I want to thank you for listening to us out there. Would love to hear your thoughts. And I'm sure Iris would as well. So we'd love to hear from you. You can email me at Michael m i c h a e l h i at accessiBe A c c e s s i b e.com. You can also go to our podcast page www dot Michael hingson.com and hingson is h i n g s o n  so Michael hingson.com/podcast. Wherever you're listening, please give us a five star rating. We value it very highly. I hope people are enjoying all these conversations in these discussions. I know I am and I'm learning a lot. And I can't complain about that one bit because I think Iris just told us it's all about being curious. And it's all about desiring to learn and gain more knowledge. And so I think it's important to do that. Please give us a five star rating. Wherever you're listening to us, we value that. And once more Iris, I want to thank you for being here. And this has been fun and don't be a stranger.   Iris Yuning Ye ** 1:03:32  Thank you Michael.   Michael Hingson ** 1:03:38   You have been listening to the Unstoppable Mindset podcast. Thanks for dropping by. I hope that you'll join us again next week, and in future weeks for upcoming episodes. To subscribe to our podcast and to learn about upcoming episodes, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com slash podcast. Michael Hingson is spelled m i c h a e l h i n g s o n. While you're on the site., please use the form there to recommend people who we ought to interview in upcoming editions of the show. And also, we ask you and urge you to invite your friends to join us in the future. If you know of any one or any organization needing a speaker for an event, please email me at speaker at Michael hingson.com. I appreciate it very much. To learn more about the concept of blinded by fear, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com forward slash blinded by fear and while you're there, feel free to pick up a copy of my free eBook entitled blinded by fear. The unstoppable mindset podcast is provided by access cast an initiative of accessiBe and is sponsored by accessiBe. Please visit www.accessibe.com . AccessiBe is spelled a c c e s s i b e. There you can learn all about how you can make your website inclusive for all persons with disabilities and how you can help make the internet fully inclusive by 2025. Thanks again for Listening. Please come back and visit us again next week.

Join me on today's podcast as we delve into insightful quotes from St. Anthony the Great and the witty George Carlin.  We navigate through diverse topics such as politics, local communities, and the impact of social media, with a special focus on the notorious "Communist China owned and operated Tik Tok."  In the midst of a community dispute about Trump and Biden, we raise thought-provoking questions:  What do we truly understand? What remains unclear to us? Are we open to admitting our lack of understanding? Does any of this chaos hold significance, and why? We explore the willingness to acknowledge when we're wrong and unravel a simple photo that encapsulates my "hot take" on Western/American politics in the 20th and 21st centuries.  This photo sparks a quote and a clip from the iconic George Carlin.The conversation extends to addressing questions, comments, and topics from Kyriaki via Patreon, leading us to unpack the profound quote by St. Anthony the Great: “Which is older — the mind or the book?  And which is the source of the other?  So, to the man whose mind is sound, there is no need for books to attain wisdom.” Tune in to discover my political compass, anchored in God and a life inspired by the teachings of Christ. The exploration becomes clearer as we delve into the life story of St. Anthony the Great and connect it to the landscape of modern American politics.  ~Like & Follow on Social Media or connect via email!Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/allaroundgrowthInstagram:  https://www.instagram.com/allaroundgrowthEmail:  allaroundgrowth@gmail.comTelegram Group Chat: https://t.me/allaroundgrowthTwitter:  https://twitter.com/allaroundgrowthFacebook Community:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/allaroundgrowth~Discussion Links:Anthony the Great - OrthodoxWikiVenerable and God-bearing Father Anthony the GreatA Daily Calendar of Saints: A Synaxarion for Today's North American Church“When you're born into this world, you're given a ticket to the freak show. If you're born in America you get a front row seat.” ― George CarlinPoliticians, Monopoly Man, & Screaming Chimps - photo George Carlin - It's A BIG Club & You Ain't In It!Become a Patreon of the Show! ➡️ patreon.com/allaroundgrowth

Join Alex and returning guest host Dr. Molly Metz as they jump into the pink land that is Barbie (2023)! There's so much in this episode that they crammed in, and they didn't even get to everything. Alex and Molly explore gender expression, gender identity, masculinity, femininity, queerness, relationships, and of course, the role Barbie has had in Western/American culture since her debut in the 1950s. There are lot of great nuggets of info and a lot of laughs, and that's just in the podcast — imagine what's in the movie! Check out these links if you want to know more about Barbie, the film, and gender studies: BinaryThis, Fortune, The Mercury News, and AutoStraddle Please leave your feedback on this post, the main site (cinemapsychpod.swanpsych.com), on Facebook (@CinPsyPod), or Twitter (@CinPsyPod). We'd love to hear from you! Don't forget to check out our Paypal link to contribute to this podcast and keep the lights on! Don't forget to check out our MERCH STORE for some great merch with our logo! Legal stuff: 1. All film clips are used under Section 107 of Title 17 U.S.C. (fair use; no copyright infringement is intended). 2. Intro and outro music by half.cool ("Gemini"). Used under license. 3. Film reel sound effect by bone666138. Used under license CC BY 3.0.

Robert Jefferson is an American broadcast news anchor and Air Force veteran, professor of journalism and has had the majority of his career working in Japan.Jefferson shares an overview of his career and biography, while offering his views on the decline of journalism and the West. He offers advice for those considering life abroad and emphasizes the importance of staying curious, questioning authority, and learning history to navigate the current media landscape. Jefferson also shares his personal health journey and the benefits of gardening and maintaining a healthy lifestyle in this insightful interview.Connect with The Kamakura GardenerSupport The Kamakura Gardener : patreon.com/TheKamakuraGardenerSubject Time Stamps:* (01:26) The Mid-Atlantic Broadcast Accent and Biography* (03:25) The Dark Side of Paradise* (07:25) Relationship to Social Media* (09:25) Work at NHK World TV…* (15:58) An Interest in the Foreign* (20:24) Moving to Japan* (27:19) A Decline in Japanese Media * (34:48) Being a Free Man in Japan* (45:07) The Kamakura Gardener / Catharsis * (57:05) Teaching at Temple University* (1:02) Critique of being labeled a conspiracy theorist and the importance of seeking truth* (1:09) Finding Opportunities Abroad * (1:15) Closure and Where to ConnectLeafbox:Today I had the pleasure of speaking and learning from Robert Jefferson. Robert is an American 47 year broadcast news anchor, and Air Force veteran. He's a professor of journalism and has had the majority of his career working in Japan. Aside from his broadcast duties, he has a smaller, intimate project known as the Kamakura Gardener. Today we explore his biography, his disenchantment with corporate media, truth finding and sense-making, and his eventual catharsis in finding local content, connecting community to the gardens and surroundings of Kamakura Japan. He shares his experience finding freedom in Japan and offers an analysis of the decline of journalism and of the West. We talk about his brief stint in Hawaii and the mainland, and offer an option for those considering life abroad and paths for finding opportunity. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoy. That's one of my first questions. I think my mom, she introduced me to your videos and I think she fell in love with your voice. You definitely have a beautiful broadcaster voice. Where did you actually grow up in the States?Robert Jefferson:I was born in Philadelphia, but I grew up in Montgomery County, which is about an hour north of Philadelphia. And I have what's called a Mid-Atlantic Broadcast accent. I was in broadcasting in the military. That was my job information broadcast specialist. I was a TV news announcer in the Air Force. I was lucky. I insisted. I had an FCC license when I joined. I had been studying up to that point, actually. They tried to make me an inventory management specialist, and I said, hell no. Hell no. And I prevailed, and it didn't take long, just a week or so, and I was sent to a technical school, the Defense Information School of Journalism Public Affairs. I know Honolulu well, I knew Honolulu very well back in the mid eighties for KHVH News Radio 99 and KGU Talk Radio 76. The voice of "Hawaii".Leafbox:Well, you actually had the perfect Hawaii accent there. That was pretty well done.Robert Jefferson:Yeah, most people have no clue what the W is a “V” sound.Leafbox:It's not America and it's not Japan. It's in between both. But here in Hawaii, I think we have, there's a strong sense of Aina, of place, of localism, of culture, of being connected to each other. People haveRobert Jefferson:The benefit of true diversity. You have the Japanese, the Chinese, the Portuguese, and the Polynesians, and then all of the other imports from around the world. So yeah, it's truly diverse. And that's not some just trite word. It truly is. Yeah. And then the local traditions, the first time I was ever called nigger was in Hawaii, in Honolulu. I was walking home one night from a club or somewhere. I was living in Lower Manoa, and I was walking up the hill from Honolulu. And these young, they were Asian kids, they were drunk or something, and they lean out the window, Hey nigger. That was the first and only time. I never felt any racial discrimination or antipathy or anything like that while I was there. And I was like, well, what the hell was that all about?Leafbox:What year was this in?Robert Jefferson:85, 86. But yeah, that was the only time. And so I would never let that taint my view or my experience in Hawaii. I mean, I was, it's this young, skinny black kid basically who got hired at two of the best radio stations in town. And then ABC News hired me to come back to, I left Japan to go to Hawaii, and then ABC News hired me to come back. So I'm not sure what that was all about, but that was the only time most people were very kind and gracious.Leafbox:So how long were you in Hawaii for?Robert Jefferson:About two years. And I meant to do this. I had to go back. When you get older, you kind of forget certain things, especially when it was four decades ago, a year and a half to two years that I was there. And I was able to, actually, I think I may have it, if you give me just a quick second here. There was a recreation of a voyage, a Polynesian voyage, the Hokulea, and I was there when they arrived at the beach, sort of like a spiritual leader, Sam Ka'ai. He was there, and yeah, I'll never forget that. They were blowing a co shell and they were doing all kinds of Hawaiian prayers and whatnot. It was absolutely beautiful.Leafbox:I didn't know anything about this. And your biographies kind of limited online a lot about yourRobert Jefferson:Yeah, I used to be on LinkedIn and all that. I erased it all. I got rid of it all. I don't trust LinkedIn, and I don't mind people knowing about me. But yeah, I would just prefer to have control over it.Leafbox:I apologize about these people in, butRobert Jefferson:Oh, no, no, no, no. You don't have to apologize at all. You have to apologize.Leafbox:Well, I mean, the good thing is you saw some of the darkness in Paradise as well, that there's very complex class issues.Robert Jefferson:When I was in Lower Manoa, I lived at, it was a house share, actually an old converted garage share. I was sharing with two other guys. One was Filipino American and the other one was from Detroit, a black American. And the owners were Chinese, and they were really sweet, very nice. The old lady, she used to get, she realized how poor we were. So she used to give us our lunches or dinner boxes, whatever. And she would always say "Sek Fan" , she couldn't speak much English. Sek Fan" is Cantonese for Have you Eaten? Which means How are you? But basically, it literally means have you eaten Shan Shan? And yeah, she's very sweet. Her sons were very nice, very nice. So yeah, I mean, I never had any racial issues except for that one night. Luckily it was just that one night. Yeah, you're right. It's good that I did experience a little darkness in paradiseLeafbox:Talking about darkness. I just was wondering what your concern a few times in the interview with the Black Experience guy, you talked about how you removed your Facebook account and how you just said that you deleted your LinkedInRobert Jefferson:Pretty much at the same time. Yeah, that was like 2016. I had just gotten fed up with big media.Leafbox:Well, that's one of my first questions is that you were in big media. Yeah. What shifted that media disenchantment or disgust?Robert Jefferson:Well, it was what Facebook and Zuckerberg were doing, prying into people's private affairs, restricting people from doing this, that and the other. I could see it coming, what we have now, the blacklisting, the shadow banning the outright banning of people. I could see that coming. And I said, I don't want to be any part of this. That's why I did sign up for Twitter years ago. I tried to use it a couple of times, and I was like, what the hell is this for? I couldn't really see the purpose. And it turns out it's just a place for people to go and show off or b***h and complain about each other. I don't want to be a part of that. It's something that Americans don't learn in school, and that is Jacobinism, bolshevism, Communism, Marxism. It is exactly what's happening in the United States now.It's being taken over. You go back and look at the French Revolution, the Jacobins, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, how they destroyed Russia, what happened in Germany during World War ii, the Nazism and all that. And they're doing it here now. Well, here, they're doing it in the United States now, and most people aren't taught about this stuff. They have no clue. They have no clue what's happening, and you can see it. For example, what's his name? The former FBI Director McCabe back in the seventies when he was in college and just getting out of college, he was identified Marxist, a communist. He was a member of the Communist Party, Brenner, the former CIA director, communist.And the media won't say anything about them. You try to bring it up and they'll deny it. But I mean, their quotes are out there. They don't deny the quotes. And now these people are running government. I mean, the whole Congress just pisses me off. I mean, how do you have somebody making 170,000 between $170,000 and $200,000 a year owning million dollar mansions? What's Maxine Waters in California? She owns a four and a half million dollar house on a $170,000 salary. That's impossible. Nancy Pelosi is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Her husband is worth more.Leafbox:Robert, why don't we go back one second, and just for people who don't know about your career and who you are, just a one minute biography for people.Robert Jefferson:Currently, I am a broadcast journalist. I work for Japan's public Broadcaster, NHK, at which I am a news writer and an announcer. I worked for two sections of NHK , NHK World tv, and I also work for the domestic service channel one as an announcer. We have what's called here, bilingual news. And the evening news is translated by a huge staff of translators and simultaneous interpreters, and I'm one of the on-Air English language announcers. So on a sub-channel, sub audio channel, how you can tune into either Japanese or English or both. You can split the channels. NHK world TV is internet based. It's for a foreign audience. It's not allowed to be broadcast in Japan, sort of like Voice of America used to be banned from broadcasting in the United States until Barack Obama came along. It was illegal for the United States government to propagandize its citizens, and the Voice of America is considered to be propaganda.And Barack Obama changed that to allow them to broadcast propaganda to American citizens. But anyway, I digress. So yeah, I've been in broadcasting as a professional. It'd be 50 years in 2026, actually started learning broadcasting in 1974. So next year will be my 50th anniversary as a novice, at least. I started in Philadelphia. I started, I heard it at W-D-A-S-A-M at FM in Philadelphia, if you can see that. I think it says 1977. I actually started in 1976, and I also worked at WRTI in Philadelphia, Temple University's radio station. And that was back in the late mid seventies. And then in 2003, when I went back to the States, I worked at WRTI, Temple University's radio station for a short while, while I was still in Philadelphia. Sorry to be jumping around like this, but right now, yes, I work for NHK right now. I was in high school.I started studying television production in high school in 1974 as a freshman. And then in 1976, I went to work as an intern, a production assistant at WDAS AM and FM in Philadelphia. People may remember Ed Bradley. He was with 60 Minutes. He got his start at, I don't know, maybe not his start, but he did work at WDAS in Philadelphia for a short time. And I went on and joined. I was enrolled at Temple University after high school in 1978, and I only spent one semester there because I was just sick and tired of sitting in classrooms after having spent 12 years in grade school and already had experience. I even had a federal communications commission's license, a third class radio telephone operators permit, which I still have somewhere around here, the certificate be in the business. I wanted to be, my dream was to be a foreign correspondent, which came true later.I'll get to that. And I wanted to be a war correspondent, but there were no wars at the time because the Vietnam War had ended, had it continued, I probably would've been drafted, but it ended in 75, and I came of age, well military age in 77. So I decided to join the Air Force. A friend of mine was thinking of joining the Air Force, and he wanted me to come along and basically sit with him and hold his hand while he talked to an Air Force recruiter. And so I went along and listened to him, and after he finished his spiel with my friend Tony, he turned to me and said, well, what about you? And I said, I'm fine. I'm enrolled at Temple University. And yeah, I've been a pursue a broadcasting career. And he said, well, don't you realize that the United States military has the largest network at the time in the world?And I said, really? Never heard of that? And he said, yeah, I'll come back and I'll bring some pamphlets and show you what we have. So he did, did come back, and there was the promise of being stationed overseas. I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. And so here I had an opportunity to travel the world and be paid for doing something in the United States military, at least that I wanted to do. And it was so enticing that I said, sure, I'll do it. I said, get away from the college classes. That would just totally boring. And to continue doing what I had already been doing for the past couple of years, four years at least. So yeah, I signed up and went to the Defense Information School of Journalism and Public Affairs. Overall, it was about a two year course and my first assignment, I was never stationed stateside. All of my assignments were overseas. My first assignment was in Southern Turkey at Interlink Air Base, just outside the southern Turkish city of Adana, just off the Mediterranean coast, just above Greece and Cyprus, close to the border with Syria and not too far from Lebanon.Leafbox:Where did this interest for the foreign come from? Was your family also military family, or where did you have Philadelphia? Why were you concerned with the rest of the world?Robert Jefferson:My family wasn't, we weren't traveling military. All of my grandfather was a jet engine mechanic in World War ii. My father was in the Korean War, but he was stationed in Germany. His younger brothers were also in the Korean War. They wanted to take advantage of the GI Bill, which they did. My father went on to study architecture at Drexel University in Philadelphia, but from a very young age, I was very curious about news. My first recollection, well, what I remember most about my childhood, the earliest recollection that I have of my childhood was November 22nd, 1963. I was three years old when John F. Kennedy was shot. And I was wondering, why are all of these adults staring at the television and crying, and why is the TV on all the time? All day long, we had this black and white TV sitting in the living room. We lived in Philadelphia at the time, and I was just fascinated.I could still remember the cortage of Kennedy's horse-drawn coffin on top of a horse-drawn carriage going down. I guess it was Pennsylvania Avenue towards the White House or wherever. I'm pretty sure it was the White House. And ever since that, I was just curious. I would sit when my mother would have her little cocktail parties or whatever, I would sit in the other room and eavesdrop. I was just curious about what they were talking about. I was always curious about news. Back in the sixties, you had the African liberation movements and the assassinations of African leaders. The Vietnam War was in full swing. Well, after Kennedy was assassinated and Johnson came in. Then there was the moon, the space race, how the Soviets were winning the space race, the first country to put a satellite in space, the first country to put an animal in space, the first country to put a man in space, the first country to put a woman in space, the first country to put a person of African descent in space in Americas was being shown up. See, we don't learn this stuff in school, but you could fact check me. Yeah, we had had newspapers galore. We had the Philadelphia Daily Bulletin in the morning and afternoon. We had the Philadelphia Enquirer. They had two papers a day. Of course, there was no internet back then, but people actually read the newspaper and actually talked about it. It was okay to talk about things. The civil rights movement was in full swing. It was quite a heady time to be young and impressionable.Leafbox:Robert, did your sister share this interest in media and international, your twin sister, you have?Robert Jefferson:No, not at all. Not at all. And I've, she recently joined Telegram, and I sent her a little welcome message, and then I tried to send her something newsworthy and she didn't want to hear it. She even said, I don't want to be seeing things like this. I forget exactly what it was. And so I deleted it. And I've never said anything like that. I have an older brother. I have two older sisters who are also twins, and then an older brother, and we used to send each other articles and we used to talk about things. But there's been a huge divide I found in America. A lot of people have joined a team, a tribe, and they don't want to hear anything else, whether it's the cult Covidian or the staunch Democrats or the staunch Republicans, the MAGA country people or whatever, people, a lot of people just don't want to talk anymore. But back in the sixties and seventies, people talked. They argued and they went out and had a barbecue together. There wasn't this vitriol in this division. Now, and this is done on purpose to divide and rule people. This is all being done on purpose. But back to your point, yeah, my sister, she was interested in sports. I wasn't. I became the house announcer at basketball games. I did play in junior high school. I did play football, but that was about it. I never played basketball, never learned the rules, never learned the positions. It just didn't interest me. I saw brothers fighting over basketball games and whatnot, destroying each other's bicycles over, and these were brothers how they went home and solved it, I don't know. ButLeafbox:Just moving forward a bit in time to Japan, you do the Air Force, they train you to be a journalist or announcer, and then how do you get to Japan?Robert Jefferson:Not only that announcer, a writer, a camera operator, a technical operator pressing all the buttons in the control room, ENG, electronic news gathering, the little mini cam on the shoulder thing, everything they taught.Leafbox:I mean, this might be a direct question, but you talked about propandandizing the population, being educated as a journalist or person in the Air Force seems, I'm curious how that educational experience is different than maybe how you're teaching a Temple and what the goals of that information management is.Robert Jefferson:Well, it is interesting. I dunno if you've seen the movie, Good Morning, Vietnam. Remember the two twins who were censors, the identical twins who were censoring, they would stand in the other room just beyond the glass, staring at the DJ or whatever, making sure they don't say anything wrong or if they're reading the news or something. That's Hollywood. There was never any such censor. We had no one censoring us. We had host nation sensitivities. Here I am in Southern Turkey during the Iran hostage crisis. No one stood over my shoulder censoring me. When I put together a newscast, it was my responsibility, and nobody told me what I couldn't say or what I couldn't say. It was just be respectful. We are in a predominantly Muslim country, Turkey, and so be respectful. And I was actually studying Islam at the time, and so I was one of the few people who could pronounce the names of the people in the news back then, the Iranian Foreign Minister or the Iranian president, the Iranian Foreign Minister.. , and the president's name was..., and I was one of the only people who could even pronounce these names.And the Saudi Arabian, who was the OPEC oil chief, Ahmed Zaki Yamani. I was studying Arabic at the time. I was studying Turkish and Arabic, and so I could pronounce these names, but we didn't have censorship. We used the wire services, United Press International, UPI and Associated Press AP. And they had some really good broadcast wires and far different than today. They were real journalists. Then.There may have been some slants pro this or pro that pro Europe, pro-Israel or whatever, but it wasn't as blatant as it is today. I think we were far more objective and neutral back then than what I hear today, especially on the corporate networks, the big American networks, the cable networks and whatnot. We were far more objective and neutral than what people are listening to today. And this was in the Air Force. So the news that I was broadcasting was basically pretty much the same as people heard on the radio while driving to work in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, although I was in Southern Turkey, we tried to recreate the American media atmosphere there as either as DJs or news announcers, because we had all of the same inputs that you would have at a radio and television station back in the state. The obvious slants that you see today, that CNN, for example.Leafbox:What about Japan? That's one of my main critiques or questions I have about how the Japanese media is managed and your analysis as an American of how that media consensus is created in Japan. If you have any opinion on that.Robert Jefferson:Well, it seems to me, I've noticed, I've worked in Japanese media now for 40 years. It seems to me that now there's been a huge change. Japanese media used to be more curious than they are now. They seem to follow, how should I put it, the status quo, the western status quo. Don't, for example, the war in Ukraine between Russia and Ukraine, they're calling it an unprovoked attack on Ukraine. It was not unprovoked. Hello? There was a coup d'etat instigated by the United States during the aba, the Barack Obama administration, the overthrew, a democratically elected, the first democratically elected president of Ukraine, was overthrown by a US backed coup led by the state department's, Victoria Neuland and John McCain was there, John Kerry was there, Neuland. She was there handing out cookies in Maidan Square, and now they called it an unprovoked invasion. The Ukrainians were killing their own people.They happened to be ethnic Russians, but they were killing their own people. 14,000 of them were dying in Eastern Ukraine. The Donetsk Lugansk don't question that. To answer your question, the Japanese don't question. They just go along with whatever Reuters is saying, whatever the AP is saying, whatever the Western American corporate TV networks or cable news are saying, it is just blindly following the status quo. And years ago, they didn't do that. They're taking sides because Japan and Russia have some territorial disputes, some four northern islands that Russia invaded and took over in the closing days of World War ii. And Japan and Russia have yet to sign a peace treaty. They have diplomatic relations, but they've yet to sign a peace treaty because the Japanese were upset that the Russians won't vacate those adds and give them back. But there's a lot of untruths being told in Japanese media about what's going on, that the Ukrainians are winning when they're obviously losing, that the Russians committing atrocities. And it's been proven that the Ukrainians military has committed far more atrocities than the Russians have, and on and on.Leafbox:Do you think that change in journalistic culture, where does that come from? Is that from just external pressure, the lack of, why do you think? Is that because of the decline of Japan economically, the independence that it's had? I'm just curious where you think thatRobert Jefferson:There's a lot of them. Yeah, it is the economic decline. It's wanting to feel as though there's a feeling, in my opinion anyway. I sense that there's a feeling among the Japanese leadership that they want to be accepted. They have been accepted in the Western Bloc. That's a full fledged member of the Western Bloc, and they don't want to lose that position. But they sense it's obvious that economically Japan has fallen very far, and basically it's suicide. We had trade representatives, and I still remember some of the names, Charlene Barshefsky, the US Trade representative coming to Japan, forcing Japan to stop being successful economically, forcing their automobile companies and other industries to stop being so goddamn successful. How dare, how dare you produce such wonderful cars that everyone wants to buy, especially from the 1970s when they produced cars with great, great mileage, gasoline mileage.And here we are watching Japan. It's already slipped from number two to number three behind China, United States. And United States is not the number one economic power anymore. And Western media, American media won't admit that, but America may have more in the way of money or wealth. But when it comes to purchasing power, there's an index called PPP, purchasing Power Parity, and then there's also manufacturing China, far outstrips the United States in manufacturing capacity and purchasing power of parity. So China is number one economically. The United States is number two. Japan is number three, but it's about to lose that spot to Germany, but then Germany is going to lose it to whoever. I mean, Germany economy has been screwed. Again, it's another example of the German economy is another example of how a company is committing suicide. All the EU is basically committing suicide, allowing the United States to blow up the Nord Stream pipeline, and it's like, whoa, we don't know who did it? Who did that? Who did? Okay, well knock it off. Joe Biden ordered that pipeline being destroyed, and we have him on tape saying that if the Russians do this, that pipeline is dead. We have Victoria Neuland saying basically the same thing. We have a Twitter message from someone in the US State Department to, I think it was the Polish leader. The job is done, and she got fired soon after that. I mean, it's all a sick game, a deadly game being played here.Leafbox:As a journalist and as a thinker about media information management, how do you think you are seeing through it? How are you seeing through the untruths? Why does writers at the New York Times differ? Is it because you're a foreigner in Japan that you think you have that, or where do you get that independent spark from?Robert Jefferson:I've got nearly 50 years of experience in news in international news as a foreign correspondent with ABC news here in Japan. I was also the Tokyo correspondent for the West German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle Radio at the same time that I was working with ABC. And at that time, I was also an announcer at Tokyo Broadcasting System. It was a weekend anchor at Japan able television. I did some radio programs and entertainment program music programs here in Japan. I've been around the world, not all everywhere. I haven't been to Africa, I haven't been to South America, but Europe and Asia and Pacific I've been to and covered stories. I can see how the news coverage has changed. It's very obvious to me. I can see right through it. I stopped watching television. I've got a television here. I've got one downstairs, big TVs. I don't even watch them anymore. I may hook them up to my computer and watch something online on my TVs, but I don't watch CNN. I don't watch Fox News. I'll watch little snippets of it online.And one of my heroes was Peter Jennings, someone I really looked up to. He was with ABC. He started at ABC back in the sixties when he was 26 years old. He was an anchor for ABC's World News tonight. It may not have been called World News tonight then, but ABC's Evening News, whatever it was called back then. His father was a Canadian. He's Canadian. Well, he naturalized as an American citizen eventually, but his father was a news executive in Canada and Peter Jennings, I mean, he was a high school dropout. He never went to college, but he was absolutely brilliant. He was an autodidact. And yeah, I think he was quite brilliant. He didn't need such diplomas and degrees and things, but he felt that he needed to leave the anchor role and go and hone his skills as a journalist, which he did.And he stayed with ABC, and he became the chief international correspondent based in London. And back in the early eighties, there was a tripartite anchor team, Frank Reynolds in Washington, max Robinson, the first black network news anchor in the United States. He was based in Chicago, and Peter Jennings was based in London. They had a wonderful, wonderful, and the ABC Evening News back then was absolutely wonderful. They actually told you what was going on around the world, but you could learn the names of countries and cities and leaders and places and people, and now you've got people on these networks now who can't even pronounce names correctly. Even people who are foreign correspondents can't even find places on maps. It's just, it's sad to see how low journalism has fallen and trust in journalism has really fallen. I mean, it's in the single digits now, which is sad.So yeah, I can see through, I mean, the whole situation that erupted in February of 2022 in Ukraine, people like unprovoked attack by Russia. Russia wants to take over Europe. No, they don't. They simply want to be left alone. The United States under Bill Clinton tried to rob Russia, tried to go in there and steal Russian industry, the Soviet industry, basically to use the oligarchs who basically swooped in and scooped up all of these industries and made billions of dollars who were trying to persuade born Yeltsin who was suffering from alcoholism to basically sell out his country. He wasn't stupid, but he did have an alcohol problem, and he turned to Vladimir Putin and told him basically, dude, you got to help save Russia. A lot of Americans don't know the history between Russia and the United States, that Russia supported the American Revolution, that Russia parked some of its armada, naval armada off the coast of New York Harbor and told the French and off the coast of I think the Carolinas, and told the British and the French, don't you dare interfere in the American Civil War. The French and the British were trying to help the South and against the north, and the Russians, the Russian empires said, no, no, don't you dare.Leafbox:In one of the interviews you had with the, I forget the host of the name, but you said that you feel free in Japan. I forget the exact quote. You said, maybe like I'm a free black man in Japan.Robert Jefferson:Yeah.Leafbox:How does that connotate to how you analyze the world? I mean, do you think if you had been 40 year career in the States, you'd have this lens?Robert Jefferson:I have been back to the States once the first time to Hawaii for two years, and then when I was in 2000, I was turning, I think by the time I went back, yeah, well, that year, 2000, I turned 40. So I have been back to the states, and I had no desire to work for corporate media. I went back and went to work for WHYY in Philadelphia, which is an NPR and PBS affiliate, and I actually was an NPR correspondent. I was their Philadelphia correspondent. While I was there covering expressly presidential visits, whenever a George Bush would come to town, president Bush would come to town, I would join the White House press pool at the airport and ride in the presidential motorcade into the city and follow the president around. I was a pool reporter, and then I left WHYY and went out west.I wanted to challenge myself and do more. So I went into media management and worked at a community radio station in Portland, Oregon. And then I went to another community radio station owned by Bellevue Community College, just outside of Seattle, Washington, and went into a management there as assistant general manager and program director at a radio station there. And it was wonderful to work at a nonprofit media organization teaching people how to do news. And when I was there, Portland, Oregon was voted year after year as the most livable city in America. Look at it now, a shithole, a shithole of left-wing people who've just destroyed the city. And I'd always consider myself left. But at 63 years old, now I'm conservative, not a Republican conservative. No, I'm just conservative of hopefully someone who's got a little bit of wisdom and who would like to conserve decency and morality and people's right to practice whatever religion they want to and to say what they want to look at, how free speech is being eroded in the United States.Now, some of the things, I'm talking to you now, I'd be criticized or banished from saying, and this is by people on the left. We never heard anybody on the right saying banished them. And I remember when I was in Hawaii at KHVH News Radio, rush Limbaugh was getting his start. He was on KHVH. Larry King was on KHVH, and we allowed people to say what they wanted to say, Limbaugh. He would take the word liberal and say liberal. He would just vomit it out. But you had another voice on there, Larry King and other voices, left, right, center, whatever. And now look at how polarized and divided America is today. It is sad. It's very sad. But yeah, it is not like I'm here in Japan in a bubble. I can see everything. You see, I don't watch television, so I'm not watching KION or what, I forget what the other stations are. I wouldn't watch them. But if something is newsworthy, I can go online and see what's happening in Lahaina or Lana, as most of the journalists these days call it. They don't even do your research, learn the pronunciation, and they even put up a transliteration on the screen, L-A-H-H-A-Y-nah. It's not Laina, it's Lahaina.It's just laziness. A lot of journalism today is just laziness going along to get along, being part of the team. And this is what I didn't like about sports growing up, just seeing brothers fighting over a goddamn ball game. And here we have that now, this sports mentality, this tribal mentality of wearing colors and painting your face colors of your team, and it's bled into our politics. Now. I remember the house speaker Tip O'Neill, he would say something, oh, my friend across the aisle, now it's that terrorist across the aisle or that oph file across the aisle or something. America has really devolved, and as someone who grew up at a time when in the sixties, up until the early to mid seventies, we didn't lock our doors. There were no home invasions. What happened in Lewiston, Maine yesterday, 22 people being shot. We didn't have kids going into school, shooting up each other. We had kids walking down the street with a shotgun over their shoulder. They were going to hunt some squirrels or deer hunting or something, and they did it right. They registered their guns, they wore the orange stuff, and what the hell happened? What happened to families? What happened to mother and father? Now you've got single women raising kids, fathers, making babies, and walking away, what the hell happened to America? And it's going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.Leafbox:Going back to Japan, I'm just curious, Japan has a history of political violence and disagreement.Robert Jefferson:Last year we had the assassination of a former Prime minister.Leafbox:Correct. So I thinkRobert Jefferson:The attempt assassination this year of another one, it's successor.Leafbox:So I'm just curious how you contrast that to the us or if you do, or I always feel like information in Japan is actually more freeIf you look for it.Robert Jefferson:YouTube channel, well, not used, but websites aren't banned here in Japan as they are in the eu. They don't have these draconian measures like the EU does. And the United States would love to impose information flows freely here in Japan, if you know where to look for it. If you want it, you can look for it. You can get a VPN and disguise your location and find out more information. But yeah, political violence, there's a long history of it here. I mean, going back thousands of years, I mean, Kamakura, the city I live in here, there's a monument and the graveside of a guy named Hino who had his head lopped off because he disobeyed a Shogun. And just this morning I walked past his little, this little graveside. It is like, wow. And I looked into the history of it. He got beheaded because he disagreed or the win against a local warlord or Shogun, the leader of, well, Japan wasn't unified then, but it was becoming unified.But yeah, Japan was extremely fascistic at the turn of the last century, the 20th century, prime ministers were assassinated. The military took over, got Japan involved in World War ii. Yeah, yeah. But it's been very peaceful here, post World War ii, there are lots of heinous crimes that are committed every day, seemingly ordinary people. People you wouldn't expect to fathers against sons, sons against fathers or against mothers. It happens here. Japan is not a paradise here, but it is. I do lock my doors here, but no one has ever bothered me here at my home. No one's bothered my car. People are very decent. There's decency here that is disappearing fast, disappearing in the United States. Neighbors who won't talk to you in the United States, I know my neighbors here. One reason I moved out of Tokyo is because neighbors, you lived in an apartment building. You get on an elevator, you're like, well, who are you? I wanted to know who you are.I'm Robert. I live on the sixth floor. Who are you? I demanded people to know who people were. But here, people are curious. They want to know, well, who's this black guy who moved here when I moved here 17 years ago, and now everybody knows me. The police know who I am. They come by and check on me. They have a registration that you fill out so that they know who's who. But yeah, I've never bothered by the police. I don't fear going to the police station. I laugh and joke with him. One policeman came on his motorbike years ago when I first moved here a few years after I moved here. And he was just doing his patrols. And he slipped and fell, and he had some mud on his boots and up his pant leg. And so I helped him wash it off and whatnot. And we had a good laugh about that. Yeah, I mean, it is, I don't have to put up with foolishness, and I'll look at things on Twitter or X as it's called now, of black, especially youth running amuck in the states, going into convenience stores or department stores and just going crazy, acting crazy in fast food joints, tearing the place up, throwing chairs and tables and stuff. It's like, what the hell? I never experienced that when I lived in the United States. And everybody thinks it's normal now.That happens. Something terrible is going on in the United States, as you say. It's happened in Venezuelas, it's happened in Colombia, it's happened in Mexico, it's happening in Europe. Now. The chickens are coming home to roost. I don't know, but something is afoot, and I'm simply saying, not today, Satan. Not here, not with me.Leafbox:So maybe we can go to your gardening project, Robert, because that sounds like a, to me, it feels like a counter to all that negative energy. You have this personal space, and you have such a wonderful voice and broadcast history, but now you're producing this content that offers an alternative. So I'd love to know where that comes from and why you're doing it.Robert Jefferson:It's catharsis, it's healing. Nearly 50 years of covering wars and murder and mayhem and thievery, and just, I'll admit it, it's still exciting when news happens. It's exciting to see. When I was a kid, I always wanted to be the first to know and the first to tell. I wasn't a snitch. No. But that's what attracted me to journalism was being the first to know and the first to spread the word for me. Now, after all these years, five, six decades of reporting the news, I'm tired. Some or so that I gave up drinking three years ago. I gave up alcohol, completely, cold Turkey in one day, April 30th, May 1st next day, Mayday, mayday, mayday. I was alcohol free. And I had been since then, desire, I even had still a few bottles left in the fridge and here and there, and I gave them away.I had no desire to drink anymore. So my gardening, I've been doing that pretty much all of my life with some breaks in between. I grew up gardening, helping a neighbor, particularly with her garden. And then as a teenager, when I was also working at the radio station, and on weekends, during the week, especially in the summertime, during summer break, I worked for a landscaper, a guy in my town. He had a landscaping business. And I love working with plants, either cutting them down or helping them grow. Yeah, it is just beautiful for me. This is very cathartic, the gardening. And then something said, well, I've been doing this for years and I'm not, I thought about YouTube years ago, and it's like, nah, it is the alcohol that made me so lazy. I didn't even want to do it. And then finally, oh, about 2016 or so, 2016 I think it was, I made one video, and if you go back and you can see my very first video, it's featured my two dogs at the time, my band spunky and just showing my garden.And then three years ago when I quit drinking, I needed something to do with my time because I'm an independent contractor, so I don't have a set schedule, schedule changes, and sometimes I'm busy and sometimes I'm not back. Three years ago, I was not very busy at all, and now I'm extremely busy and I love it. But yeah, it was a chance to channel my energies into something productive and to give something back to the world. Instead of talking about how many people got murdered in Lewiston, Maine yesterday, how to take this little seed, sprout it, grow it into a tree that's taller than me now, and to give something back. A lot of my subscribers and viewers, as you say, they mentioned how calming my videos are. And I think now that you've heard me talk for a while, you can see why I do what I do.I've got a lot in me that's just screaming to get out, and it's not all negative, but there's a lot of negativity out there. And instead of joining that bandwagon, I decide to put this energy into something that can hopefully, even if people don't want to get into gardening or they can't because they live in an apartment. Someone just sent me a message the other day saying, I mentioned growing stuff. If you have a balcony, and they said, no, I live in an apartment. I don't have a balcony. Then I thought about, yeah, there's a lot of people who don't even have balconies, but if they can't do gardening, at least I can bring them some sort of enjoyment or peace of mind for the 15 or 20 minutes that they're watching my channel.Leafbox:Well, that's why I enjoy it. I think you're offering kind of like, yeah, just a counter to that negative informational, and also being in Japan, you're creating, as an American, you're offering this alternative Look, you can live in this calm way. You can go to the gardening store and be polite. You don't have to rob the store. You don't have to get in a fight. You can share this space. And you met this British guy, and he's doing the natural farming. Another form,Robert Jefferson:Actually, he's Dutch.Leafbox:Oh, Dutch, sorry.Robert Jefferson:He studied in Britain. He went to Oxford. And yeah.Leafbox:Anyway, it's just nice to see you building this community. I mean, you have the community of foreign correspondents and Japanese broadcasters, so it's nice to see you go very local, but now you're sort to, you can feel the layers building you're building.Robert Jefferson:Yeah, you're absolutely right. This is one reason why I wanted to come back to Japan. I went back to the States, and I was there for five years. Even though the people here is a majority Japanese country, it's not as homogeneous as you think it is because the foreign communities are growing here, especially other Asians, Vietnamese and Chinese and Koreans. The article in the newspaper just yesterday that I saw that the numbers are increasing quite a bit, but it's a place to come and meet people from all over the world. Hendrick, my neighbor here, I walked past this house every morning and I'm like, this is Hendrick. This is interesting. And then one afternoon I walked past and I see, oh, this is your place. And he looked at me like, who are you? Like, well, who are you? Why are you half naked out here in somebody's front yard and it's his front yard?And I said, dude, we sat and talked for an hour and a half, and then I came back with the camera. I said, if you don't mind, I'd like you to give me a garden tour and whatnot. He just sent me an email this morning. He's going back to Shizuoka, which is south of here. He's got some land there. Him and his son are going down for the weekend to do some work on the land they just bought. They don't have a structure on the land yet, but they're just working the land. Yeah, it's a chance to meet people from all over the world. And I found that when I was in the States, there's this closed mindedness, this closed mentality. You in Honolulu, you've got a lot more, as we were saying earlier, there's a lot more diversity, cultural diversity, ethnic diversity, and that makes a living in Hawaii so nice is that diversity.It's not just all the same types of people or people. They had their enclaves here and there, but there's more of in the United States, I mean even in places like New York or even the larger cities, people are separated in different enclaves. Here, there's a lot more melding in, well, it wouldn't make sense for all Americans to live in this section or all the Chinese to live in that section. But I mean, you do like an ost, there's a preponderance. There's a lot more people of Korean descent than in other cities. And in Yokohama, a lot more people of Chinese descent. But you don't have these ghettos that you see, these ethnic ghettos that you see in the States. So here, it's, it's a place to be, place to be yourself, to be oneself, to be who you are. A lot of people, especially when they're young, they come here and they do this.If, I dunno if you remember that song, turning Japanese, I forget who, a Divo or somebody turning Japanese. Oh, yes, I'm turning Japanese. Oh, yes, I think so. I forget who did the song. And people play that little thing. Everybody goes through that. We're in kimono and going to the Matsui, the festivals and stuff. Everybody goes through that. Then you've kind of had enough of that. But it's a place to, because I don't care. Even if you get Japanese citizenship, you're never going to be Japanese. So it's a chance to come and find out who you are. I don't have to speak like a brother from the hood, and I really can't do it anyway, so I better not even try. I don't have to act black. You may see in some of my speech patterns and mannerisms and whatnot, but I can just be me. We were talking, you were trying to figure out my accent. Earlier. When I was in high school and junior high school, I used to be ridiculed by other black kids. Bobby talked like he white because, well, if you notice, most children speak very clearly. They don't have black accents or this accent or that they speak very clearly. It's not until they get into puberty and beyond that, they start adopting these speech mannerisms of black or Asian or whatever.Leafbox:Do you think Japanese have the same freedom when they come to the US or when they leave Japan?Robert Jefferson:Yes. Yes. Because Japanese are under extraordinary pressures to fit in, to join a company, to fit into society, to not break the rules. It's a very rules-based society. And that's why you see such rebellion. And a lot of it, it may be superficial. A young Japanese kid with dreadlocks or now since the nineties, the big fat is to bleach blonde your hair, bleach your hair blonde. It's such a, and they're trying. Even still, there's a debate going on for high schoolers about the length of hair. They have to keep their hair at a certain length. The girls can't perm their hair. In many of the schools, the boys, if they have curly hair, they have to straighten it. And now you've got kids of mixed heritage. And there was a kid who's part black and part Japanese, and he was trying to wear cornrows at his graduation ceremony and couldn't attend. They banned it from attending and things like that. But see, I didn't grow up that way. I didn't grow up here for one. But yeah, there's a huge pressure. There's a lot of pressure, tremendous pressure for Japanese to conform, and they leave a lot of 'em still. There's a huge desire, oh, I want to go to the States, because they can finally explore who they are, who they want to become.And I had many students when I was teaching at Temple for 13 years, they said, yeah, next semester I'll be going to the main campus. And my advice was, be careful, make good friends and be very careful. But I said, go and explore. I mean, you're going to meet some wonderful people there, and you'll meet some horrible people. Some of them will be white, some of them will be black, some of them will be fellow Asians. You're going to have good times and bad times, but just take care. Be careful. Watch your back.Leafbox:Robert, talking about your classes at Temple, I think you were teaching ethics. What were you teaching? Ethics. I taught Journalism. I taught journalism. I started teaching media management and organization. That was my first course. Then I taught writing courses. And then at the end, I was teaching, the last four years or so, five years maybe. I was teaching ethics in journalism and the history of journalism. They were separate courses. So I taught history one semester, ethics, the next history, the ethics, the next, or over the summer I teach one or the other. So the history of journalism and ethical issues in journalism. Yeah.Well, I was just curious about what topics you were particularly interested in the ethics of journalism.Robert Jefferson:A lot of it dealt with hypocrisy in the media and using clips from media showing the hypocrisy and the outright lies, showing how, for example, CNN, there's a CNN correspondent in London, staging a demonstration. They went and got a group of people from a particular group. They were Muslims, and I forget exactly what they were protesting against, but they were actually telling people where to stand and how to stand. And the cameraman only framed these people in the shot to make it look like it was a huge crowd, but it was only about 10 or 12 people. I don't know why they recorded the whole thing, but I showed them the clip of the correspondent and the producers telling people what to do, when to hold up their signs. And then suddenly, oh, we're live now in London and it's all fake. And I played a lot of them. Have you seen the clip of the news catches like a montage of clips of newscasters all across the United States. We're concerned about our democracy. And they're all saying the same thing.Leafbox:Yes, it's troubling. I playedRobert Jefferson:That years ago, three, four years ago to my classes. And that was from Sinclair Broadcasting. They had all of their affiliates around the country read the same script, and somebody got ahold of all of them and put them all together in this montage. And that was three years ago. And look what we have now, people being canceled for saying the wrong thing. And these news organizations claiming to want to protect democracy. No, no, no. This is what communists do. And in America, we don't learn about the communist Ong. In China, the cultural revolution back in the 1970s, it wasn't that long ago, just 50 years ago, of students going after their professors, putting paint on their faces, making them wear dunk caps and stuff. And what's the guy's name? Weinstein in Oregon, who was raked over the coals by his student.Leafbox:Oh, Brett Weinstein. Yes. Weinstein. That was before CovidRobert Jefferson:Out of his university. Him and his wife. Yeah. Yeah. And I was being, they didn't have the balls. My core supervisor, temple University didn't have the balls to confront me. He wouldn't even have, we never once sat down and have a conversation. How about anything? He's one of these probably Marxists. I mean, they were marching up and down the streets supporting George Floyd, who just recently this news came out when he died, that he was not killed by the police officer. And this is what I was trying to tell my students. He died of a fentanyl and not fentanyl. It's fentanyl. Look at how the word spell you idiots. NYL is nil. Tylenol, fentanyl. And you got broadcasters who don't even know the difference, can't even pronounce the word correctly. But he died of a drug overdose. Fentanyl was in his system. Alcohol was in his system, cocaine was in his system. And what was he doing when he got arrested? He was trying to steal from a shop owner by passing counterfeit bills. And he and the police officer were bouncers at a nightclub. They knew each other, they knew each other. But that was hushed. This whole thing was hushed and cities burned. Milwaukee burned. Five police officers in Dallas were killed. Shot in their cars or on the street or wherever. Five of 'em just murdered by B bbl, M and Antifa.Leafbox:And what was your relationship with the Temple professor? You were saying?Robert Jefferson:He was my core supervisor and he was talking behind my back, calling me a conspiracy theorist. Journalist should be conspiracy theorists. That's why we had, I have Stone and Jack Anderson and Seymour Hirsch, who's still alive. And Glenn Greenwald. All journalists should be conspiracy theorists. We have to theorize about conspiracies because our government carries them out. The Nord streaming bombing was a conspiracy to tell Germany and the rest of Europe stay in line. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, it was a conspiracy to get America more involved. The Vietnam War, the bombing of Pearl Harbor was a conspiracy not only of the Japanese, but Theodore Roosevelt, not Theodore Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt, FDR, to get America involved in World War ii, and he blamed it on Commanders of the Pacific fleets. There we should always be conspiracy. And this is what I was trying to teach my students to always ask questions. When I was a news director at the radio station at Portland, I was news and public affairs director, and I would put little reminders on the wall. Stay curious. Always stay here when somebody crossed out the C and put an F. Stay furious.And yeah, this is what I was trying to teach my students to question authority. Our job as journalists is to give voice to the voiceless and to question those in power. Not to just power what they say. I mean, this whole Covid thing, especially Black people who were complaining about systemic racism, they ran out to get the man's poison injected into them multiple times. And now we're learning just how dangerous that s**t is. People dying of myocarditis, sports, people first and now just regular people, children, they injected the s**t into children. My own twin sister, she got injected and now she doesn't want to talk much about her medical problems. I mean, this is what the media has done to the United States in particular. It's happened here too.Leafbox:Robert, do you know what post-truth is, meaning the sense that we're moving into a media empire state, that it's almost impossible to know what's real or what's true AI like you're talking about the CNN,Robert Jefferson:It's OrwellianLeafbox:Generating narratives. What are some tools?Robert Jefferson:We have AI news announcers now. Yeah,Leafbox:I know, but how do you try to stay sane in a world where it's like a Philip k Dick universe in the sense that everything is unreal and unreal at the same time? So how do you navigate this post-truth? Reality?Robert Jefferson:You have to have a good knowledge base. You have to have lifelong learning. When you see that link in something online or whatever, click that link. Go deeper. When you see that word you don't know, click on it and look up that word. Broaden your knowledge base, read history. Go onto YouTube and look at some of the historical documentaries. And one, some of it, it's b******t, but the more knowledge you have read books. Who's reading books anymore? Not many people, whether it's an audio book, but you can listen to it, or if it's an ebook. Read study history. That's why I was telling you about the history between Russia and the United States. Most of us Americans have no freaking clue that Russia and the United States were once so very close. That's why Russia sold us Alaska for pennies on the dollar, and it was so far away. They hadn't even explored much of their far east. But yeah, and most people don't know that Russia and the United States, that Soviet Union were allies in World War ii. It was that Russia did most of the heavy killing in World War II to defeat the Germans. We're not taught that.The whole thing with a Russiagate, you remember that? It was totally bogus. I was trying to tell my students then that this is b******t. It was all b******t, and I was proven right. I'm not there anymore. I tell the truth, but I was right. And those students will hopefully realize that their professor was trying to tell them the truth, and my superiors were trying to undermine me, and it is just sickening to see that whole Hillary Clinton cooked up that whole Russiagate thing and the FBI went along the FBI should be disbanded. The CIA was involved in overthrowing a duly elected president. And if it happens to Trump, I don't care what you think about Trump, I'm not. Are you a Trump supporter? No, I'm not a Trump supporter. I'm a truth supporter, and I would say this in class. I'd be the honest, do you support Trump?No, I don't support, I didn't support Barack Obama either. Here's this obscure, skinny Black dude from Chicago who's elevated to the presidency, first to the Senate, and then the presidency. This is all b******t. It's all b******t. He's fake. I'm sorry, but yeah, the key is, is to become an autodidact, mean someone who learns on their own. Yeah. See, and a lot, Al Robert, you're just a conspirator theorist. It's like grow up. I've had enough, I tried to warn people about the Covid injections. It is totally bogus, and most people don't realize that the whole thing was a Department of Defense project. Most Americans had no clue. That was all DOD working with the Chinese. Anthony Fauci sent millions of dollars because of gain of function. It has been banned in the United States, but they did it anyway, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. So they farmed it out to the Chinese and then blamed it on them. Isn't that some nasty s**t?Leafbox:I mean, that's one theory. There's also the Chinese theory, so there's so many theories and alternative theories, and that's why I,Robert Jefferson:Yeah, the Chinese theory is like, okay, okay, we're not stupid, so we're going to weaponize this thing against you. The art of war. That's another thing people need to study. People like Sun Tzu, study Confucius.Leafbox:One of my last questions, Robert. I have a lot of friends in America who are concerned about collapse in the US and the West, and they're all dreaming about either moving to Japan or moving to Alaska or doing the homesteading kind of thing. I lived in South America and we had a hyperinflation situation when I was young, so I've seen it firsthand.Robert Jefferson:Where were you?Leafbox:In Brazil when I was like 13. We had hyperinflation. Yeah. And so I'm just curious how you feel being in Japan. Are you going to retire? I mean, do you plan on staying the rest of your life in Japan, or what's your, do you want to return to the states or who knows what the so is?Robert Jefferson:I have no desire to return to the States. I did twice. And when I went back, was it 23 years ago, middle age, I could see then the downward spiral of American society. America's a beautiful country. I drove from Pennsylvania all the way across the country to the West coast, to Oregon, three and a half days. It took me, it's a beautiful country. They're beautiful people in America. I'm not anti-America. There's beautiful people there. Our governments, local, state, national, are basically ripping us off America's in debt. They've been talking about 33 trillion in debt. No, no, no. It's more than that. We're talking about quadrillions. If you can imagine trillions of quadrillions of dollars in debt, the pension plans are broke. There's no money there. Social security. There's no money there either. Remember Al Gore talking back in the 2000 election about the social security lockbox? People, Social security is gone. They'd spent all that money, and this is why they had to take us to war. To war. And there's going to be, I'm watching. I'm hearing a number of different voices. We're going to war on a global scale, world War iii. It's going to happen. They have to because most governments are broke. America's broke. Japan is broke. The European Union is broke, but Japan has been around for thousands of years. It still has cohesion.They seem to be committing suicide. Young people don't want to have children. Businesses, when I first came to Japan, there were clear societal roles, familial roles. The father went out to work and he worked hard, and he worked for his company for a lifetime, whatever, and that's all gone now. Young people can't even find jobs or they're getting part-time jobs or whatever.Everybody should first of all know where their food comes from. Where's the chicken come from? The supermarket not done. People should know where their food comes from. They should know how to grow food. They should start growing little things like herbs and tomatoes and potatoes. They're the easiest thing to grow. Go to the supermarket, buy some potatoes, wash them really good, and then put 'em in a brown paper bag. When they start sprouting, put 'em outside. Or if you have some old potatoes that start sprouting, put'em outside in a bag, I use grow bags, buckets will work.Just have some drainage in them. People need to grow, need to know where their food comes from, and they need to start learning how to grow their own food and just like their ancestors did. Not that many generations ago when I was growing up in the sixties, I had friends whose parents could barely speak English. They're from Germany, they're from Italy. They were from Hungary or Ukraine. They left their countries for a better life. Americans of today may have to lead the United States for a better life. Don't just sit in the same place going through the same. I tried to tell my elder brother, how about Mexico? Oh, man, Mexico is dangerous. Dangerous. There are some wonderful places in Mexico, Probably. He's five years older than me. He's 68. He could live very well on social security there. People don't want to take the chance.I always get on an airplane. Boom, I'm gone. I couldn't wait to get on an airplane, go somewhere else. Will I stay here in Japan? Yeah, I'll probably, but I'm keeping, I've got the corner of my eye on a side escape route. I'm not sure where. But like I just said, I can live on a retirement very cheaply somewhere. It could be, I don't know, Cambodia. It could be Vietnam. There's no major wars going on there right now. And the people there still, they still know how to smile. I do get asked this quite often, keep your eyes wide open, Japan. Not unless there's a major war. And it seems as though the leadership here, the political leadership, are just itching to get into a fight with someone and Japan's military, and they do have, it's called the Self-Defense Forces, but it's a military, but they have no practical experience fighting.They'll get massacred. They don't understand guerrilla warfare. They don't understand urban warfare. Japan should just stay pacifist. I'd be glad to see American military bases. It leaves Japan. I mean, it's how I got here is through the military, but there's no need. Japan can defend itself, and actually it shouldn't be any need. Japan, Korea needs to stop fighting over some dumb s**t that happened a long time ago. So much of their culture has come from China and India and elsewhere through Buddhist connections and contacts. But yeah, Japan should stop trying to ape the west. Stop trying to imitate the West and be Japanese. Be Asian for once. Yeah, I mean, Japan and Korea should not be arguing the way they still are and China as well. But then these are global forces trying to divide and rule to keep the Korean peninsula separated. That's ridiculous that the Korean peninsula is still separated.The same people still quarreling over some dumb s*

Are borders real? This is the question at the center of Both Sides Now: Writing the Edges of the North American West (Texas A&M UP, 2022) by Lethbridge University history professor Sheila McManus. As a close examination of borderlands historiography, McManus shows how studying regions where no one nationality, tribe, empire, or culture, held hegemonic sway can decenter the nation state from historical narratives. Both Sides Now functions as both a historiographical state of the field of borderland studies, and a primer on some of the best examples of borderlands histories in the North American West. By comparing the Canadian- and Mexican-American borderlands, McManus also points the way forward for the field, asking what happens when borderlands go global, from Western American to West Africa, or Southeast Asia. Borderlands studies, McManus stresses, can be a radical form of history; if national borders primarily exists on maps and in people's minds, what else that seems solid might vanish into air under close scrutiny? Sheila McManus is professor of history at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-west

Ray - I am Native American in Western American tribe. People need to know that we have our own government and if someone is drilling here than our government permitted it and it's okay. Patrick is fascinated by Ray being a Catholic Native American and asks him about sweat lodges, dream catchers, and about other aspects of the Native American culture John - Can you baptize a baby if the Catholic parents are not good Catholics and don't want to have anything to do with baptism? Patricia - We are going to the Guadalupe festival and my 8-year-old daughter is wondering how we can prepare for the pilgrimage? Kathy - A priest gave others communion on the tongue but when I came up he said I had to receive on the hand. That confused me. What should I do? Kimberly - If someone baptized another person without pouring the water over the head, is it valid? Eileen - Do the plenary indulgences work when praying along with the Family Rosary Across America? Shirley - I was baptized as a baby without knowing it and later came into the Church. I am grateful for it.

The Church accidentally cash app 'd you $10k, you sending it it back?Eliminate Two FOREVER:TacosFriesBeerBurgersJuicePizzaCakeFavorite talkshow of all time?Ricki LakeMontel WilliamsJenny JonesJerry Springer (RIP)Maury -Step Dad was spending about $2k a month on his step daughter's OnlyFans page. Do you tell your mom or stay quiet to keep the income? -Apple bans employees from using CHATGPT. -4 essentials for Summertime cookout?A Moment in Love:-How long is too long to wait? Say you asked a girl out on a date in March and she is still not available…-If you marry a woman with kids, is it disrespectful for the kids to address the man by his name? Say is the provider and has stepped in, in all aspects of a father figure. (CLIP in IG)-Thoughts on Passport Bros? Men that leave the country to marry foreign women, because they tired of Western (American) women. These men move to these other countries and marry women and post it all online to show how great these women are. 

Ecologists with a burning desire to protect forests have grim news for the western United States. Read the blog post: https://botany.one/2023/03/ecologists-spark-hope-of-protecting-western-american-forests-from-the-worst-of-wildfires/ Read the original research: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2208120120

Welcome back to Season 4, episode 14 of the FASD Family Life Podcast. This is the only show about FASD hosted by an FASD Specialist and parent with 30 years lived experience.  I am Robbie Seale, your host and mom to five incredible people; including three teens diagnosed with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. As an FASD Specialist it is my passion to help families thrive.  To learn more about me and my work check out my website,  https://fasdfamilylife.ca/I started this podcast to be the friend I wished I had when my kids were young and to bring hope to weary parents. I wanted to share what I have learned working in residential treatment and raising my own children impacted by trauma and prenatal alcohol exposure. I pour my heart and soul and hundreds of unpaid hours every month into the production of the FASD Family Life podcast. All that heard work is paying off! Since 2021 the podcast has grown to over 43,000 downloads worldwide. I need your help to keep going and growing. Consider becoming a monthly sponsor. Your gift of $20 per month (or $5 per week)  would enable me to keep sharing HOPE and teach the SKILLS needed to reduce stress and improve lives for people with FASD and the families who love them.  Click here to Support the showThis week we are back with my friend Dr Jerrod Brown to continue our series: Threats to Emotional Health. Today Jerrod will dive into the fascinating topic of Sugar as a threat to Emotional Health. Did you know that the typical Western (American) diet is low in fruits and vegetables, and high in fat and sodium. This diet consists of large portions, high calories, and excess sugar. This excess sugar accounts for more than 13% of the daily caloric intake with beverages constituting 47% of these added sugars. My friends you will want to grab your notebook and your favourite pen for this informative episode with Dr. Jerrod Brown.Jerrod Brown, Ph.D., M.A., M.S., M.S., M.S. is a professor, trainer, researcher and consultant with multiple years of experience teaching collegiate courses. Jerrod is also the founder and CEO of the American Institute for the Advancement of Forensic Studies (AIAFS) and the Editor-in-Chief of Forensic Scholars Today (FST). HTTPS://www.aiafs.com/Jerrod-Brown-aspBe sure to join me for an upcoming episode of the FASD Family Life Podcast when I continue my World Tour and I take you Down Under to meet Holly Ann Martin to discuss the importance of safe guarding our children in the online world. Click the SUBSCRIBE button now so you never miss another episode. While you are there, leave a comment and rate the show because that helps other people find the podcast too.Do you want more? Register for my LIVE online FASD parent training course FASD Brain Domain starting January 23. This course will explain the Ten Brain Domains and how they are damaged by prenatal alcohol exposure. You will also gain the knowledge and practical skills you need  to transform your family life from the very first class! Presented by FASD Specialist Robbie Seale and Maryellen McPhail, Executive Director of Oshay's Brain Domain, in Scotland.Join our community of support! Together we will deepen our understanding of FASD & build a community of support with parents who understand.  The FASD Family Life Community Support Group meets on the third Tuesday of every month at 6:00 pm MST. I hope to meet you there!  Subscribe today, for only $10 / month or $100 for an annual subscription.  https://fasdfamilylife.ca/Support the show

Welcome to the What's Next! podcast with Tiffani Bova.  Scheduling between the time zones, I found the time to sit down with Brian A. Wong this week to share his experience working for Alibaba, the powerhouse Chinese e-commerce giant. His insight draws on both his American education and industry experience working for billionaire business investor Jack Ma as one of the early employees at Alibaba, which he documents the experience in his newest book “The Tao of Alibaba: Inside the Chinese Digital Giant that Is Changing the World” released in November 2022.    Brian A. Wong is a Chinese American entrepreneur and investor. He was the first American and only the 52nd employee to join Alibaba Group, where he contributed to the company's early globalization efforts and served as Jack Ma's special assistant for international affairs. During his 16-year tenure, Wong established the Alibaba Global Initiatives (AGI) division and was the founder and executive director of the Alibaba Global Leadership Academy. Wong remains an adviser to the AGI team and regularly teaches courses on China's digital economy and the Tao of Alibaba management principles. Wong founded RADII, a digital media platform dedicated to bridging understanding between East and West. Wong earned his bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College, a master's certificate from the Johns Hopkins University (SAIS)–Nanjing University Center for US and China Studies, and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. He was selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2015, is a China Fellow with the Aspen Institute and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network, and is a member of the Committee of 100. He is based in Shanghai, China.   THIS EPISODE IS PERFECT FOR…  people who are looking to redefine their leadership style and explore the pathway of balance and harmony in management principles, workplace habits, and business perspectives.   TODAY'S MAIN MESSAGE… There's a dual philosophy that guides the business operations of Alibaba – Eastern principles of Chinese Daoist philosophy combined with Western American management systems lay at the foundation of the success story. In Brian's view, it's about finding balance between the need to change while remaining firm and consistent in your brand identity. Finding the synergy between market, societal, and universal forces will ultimately guide your business on a path to victory.      WHAT  I  LOVE  MOST… Brian went on a journey to find his own North Star, and while expanding his “comfort zone” after seeking advice from his mentor, he reaffirmed his life mission to enable marginalized groups and communities.     Running time: 32:52 Subscribe on iTunes     Find Tiffani on social: Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Instagram   Find Brian on social: Website LinkedIn   Brian's Book: The Tao of Alibaba

This week we highlight lavender & motherwort!Lavandula angustifolia (and many other Lavandula species), a well-known scent to everyone, recognizable and soothing. Lavender relaxes and releases tension. It has a warmth to it, which is more noticeable the more you take or the longer you take it. The flowers are the part that are most popular and available, but we also love to work with lavender leaf! It's more astringent and less “floral” than the flowers are, and makes a lovely tea.Leonurus cardiaca is a lion-hearted plant with strong protection for its “babies”, the seeds. Motherwort soothes the human heart and releases tension, draining excess heat. It can also relax the pelvic organs, and because of this, help bring on menstrual flow that is restricted by tension. Despite warnings you may see, motherwort is quite safe even for a pregnant human, at the common dose strengths of Western/American herbal practice.Lavender & motherwort both feature prominently in our Neurological & Emotional Health course. This course is a user's guide to your nerves & your emotions – including the difficult and dark ones. We discuss holistic herbalism strategies for addressing both neurological & psychological health issues. It includes a lengthy discussion of herbal pain management strategies, too! In addition, you receive everything that comes with enrollment in our courses, including: lifetime access to current & future course material, twice-weekly live Q&A sessions with us, open discussion threads integrated in each lesson, an active student community, study guides, quizzes & capstone assignments, and more!If you have a moment, it would help us a lot if you could subscribe, rate, & review our podcast wherever you listen. This helps others find us more easily. Thank you!!Our theme music is “Wings” by Nicolai Heidlas.Support the showYou can find all of our online herbalism courses at online.commonwealthherbs.com!

What God has been showing me and teaching me over the last year, has led to this podcast episode. There are conversations being had about the direction God's church (His people) is moving, and it's completely new territory. God is preparing to pour out new wine, and He is getting His bride ready for this spiritual upgrade. He is sewing His people together to create a new wineskin because as His children, we must be ready to hold His new wine. We must be ready to hold the spiritual outpouring of a move of God. The shaking, shifting and aligning over the last few years has brought us to this place where the veil is being lifted for many and God is calling us to press forward in faith and the Lord is ordering our steps. This process however, while it is being built on a wave of reformation and revival, is not an easy transition. The old wineskin must be left behind, and God is radically redefining what the structure of church and the structure of leadership will look like moving forward. There is no training manual, no class in seminary school and no amount of pastoral experience that can guide us into what God is doing. We are the pioneers of this reformation, and God is using the thread of His Holy Spirit to bring reconciliation and unity like never before.There is a lack and a gap in the Western/American church today, and I want you to know that while this episode will bring exposure, it is also meant to bring restoration and reconciliation. These are not easy conversations to have, but we must identify the issues in the body of Christ in order to fix them. There is grace to be found in the gap and the restructuring, but we must also be willing to embrace what God is doing in this season, because He is most certainly doing something new. Jeremiah 1:10// "See, I have appointed you today over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and demolish, to build and plant." For more information, visit: www.promise-perspective.comContact me: stephanie@promise-perspective.com Support the show

In part inspired by behavior we've seen on social media, April and Tracie discuss the importance of recognizing and holding multiple truths, even when some truths are less-than-savory. Western/American society pushes either/or dynamics in many facets of life, including in understanding oppression: we've been taught you can be oppressor or oppressed, not both. In truth, nearly all of us are both to different degrees, depending on context, power dynamics, and other factors. Sadly, ignoring this both/and can lead to causing more harm. Check out our offerings and join one of our programs! https://joyousjustice.com/coursesFind April's TikTok videos here: https://www.tiktok.com/@aprilavivabaskin Follow us on Instagram (@joyous.justice), Twitter, (@JoyousJustice), or Facebook (www.facebook.com/joyousjustice365)Find April and Tracie's full bios and submit topic suggestions for the show at www.JewsTalkRacialJustice.comLearn more about Joyous Justice and join our mailing list: https://joyousjustice.com/Support the work our Jewish Black & Cherokee woman-led vision for collective liberation here: https://joyousjustice.com/support-our-work

How we are socialized about nudity norms. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Patricia (Patty) Nelson Limerick is a historian, author, lecturer, and teacher. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in American Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She also completed her Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale University, where she also taught as a graduate teaching assistant. She served as an assistant professor at Harvard University from 1980 until she joined the University of Colorado in 1984, where she currently serves as a professor of history. One of the leading historians of the American West, Patty was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995 and, in 2016, was appointed as the Colorado State Historian and to the National Council on the Humanities. Patty joins me today to discuss the role of historians in solving contemporary issues. You'll hear her recount her memories as a student at UCSC. You'll learn about how she became the official “Fool” of the University of Colorado and her journey to becoming a historian. She also describes her efforts to help young historians reach a wider audience and underscores how the issues of the 19th century are still present in the modern world. “Western history runs continuously. The issues that had stirred the 19th century are still with us.” - Patricia Nelson Limerick This week on Kathy Sullivan Explores: The conception of Patricia's Limerick Pedestrian Diet piece Her life growing up in Banning, California Patty's fondest memories of the University of California, Santa Cruz The Pass/Fail system at UCSC and the professors who influenced Patty Her journey to becoming a historian and the “Official Fool” of the University of Colorado The meaning and importance of the Shakespearean fool How Patty became one of the pioneering authors of the New American West Her road to teaching a Western American course at Harvard How she overcame her writer's block while doing her dissertation Writing a book on the continuity of Western American history The three Cs of The Legacy of Conquest Founding the Center for the American West at the University of Colorado Applying history to contemporary issues How Patty is helping young historians reach a wider audience Our Favorite Quotes: “The United States had chosen a different form of understanding its history: that it was a frontier of expanding opportunity and democracy.” - Patricia Nelson Limerick “History could be fully engaged as part of figuring out how we got into our conflicts and dilemmas and thinking better about them.” - Patricia Nelson Limerick Connect with Patricia Nelson Limerick: Book: The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West Book: Desert Passages: Encounters with the American Deserts Email: patricia.limerick@colorado.edu Spaceship Not Required  I'm Kathy Sullivan, the only person to have walked in space and gone to the deepest point in the ocean. I'm an explorer, and that doesn't always have to involve going to some remote or exotic place. It simply requires a commitment to put curiosity into action. In this podcast, you can explore, reflecting on lessons learned from life so far and from my brilliant and ever-inquisitive guests. We explore together in this very moment from right where you are--spaceship not required. Welcome to Kathy Sullivan Explores. Visit my website at kathysullivanexplores.com to sign up for seven astronaut tips to improving your life on earth and be the first to discover future episodes and learn about more exciting adventures ahead! Don't forget to leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts! Spotify I Stitcher I Apple Podcasts I iHeart Radio I TuneIn I Google I Amazon Music.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Anttoni Aniebonam is the Co-Founder and CEO of Veri,  a food intelligence company that helps people understand their optimal diet to improve the state of their metabolic health. Numbers wise, Veri raised $4 million in funding to start shipping its glucose sensor, and has over 50,000 people on its waitlist. Anttoni Aniebonam was also the Board Member and Co-Founder of Kiuas for nearly 5 years, as well as the Graphic Web Designer of Meru Health. In this episode we discuss: Anttoni's journey into the world of Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGM) and how his personal story impacted his desire to help others to be empowered to obtain health from an earlier age.  How he believes we can prevent chronic health issues with lifestyle change, perhaps moreso than through medical intervention How our Western / American diet promotes obesity and disease  The importance of living in a state of balanced blood glucose What a CGM is and how it can provide valuable information to determine the state of metabolic health in a specific time frame How a CGM can help a person know which foods / lifestyle habits are more beneficial for their bodies than others and how the data will present within their user-friendly app How to interpret “Stability Scores” and what they mean for the user in producing realistic and, most importantly balanced, outcomes  The “Metabolic Score” Veri provides to help motivate an individual to make better choices and create better habits over time (as the data provides specific individual information on how their specific microbiomes react to foods) How everyone can benefit from knowing the individualized information Veri can provide, since there is an overwhelming incidence of metabolic dysfunction in our modern society, even if the user is not diagnosed with diabetes How they at Veri are trying to reach the more at-risk and lower-access individuals to prevent disease  How Veri provides direction via online community and peer support Why measuring blood glucose vs insulin data is used, and how they have honed in their metrics to provide the most valuable information Recommendations on usage frequency for optimal results   Check out the full episode at: https://erinskinner.com/empowerednutrition/AnttoniAniebonam Visit Anttoni's website at https://www.veristable.com/ Get a 25% discount on Veri products by entering  code: v3319  at https://veri.co/ref?code=ANTTONI-4UTC3 Please review the Empowered Nutrition Podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen! Then, send me a screenshot of your positive review to erin@erinskinner.com as a DM on Instagram (erinskinner_rd) .  Include a brief description of what you're working on with your health and/or nutrition and I'll send you a free custom meal plan!  Also, I'm accepting new clients for functional nutrition!  Book a free chemistry call to discuss your story and see if we're a good fit HERE. Follow me on Facebook | Instagram | Pinterest

Is Western democracy and the values it tom-toms just a toll for creating new hegemonies. Has Russia called the Western/American bluff in Ukraine conflict. With China also flexing its muscles, are we at the threshold of a fundamental change in the international order? Is India alive to the kinetic forces taking shape? Ruchir Sharma and Vibhuti Jha join Sanjay Dixit to discuss the burning issue.

Wildfires aren't just in the wilderness anymore. We discuss resilience, retrofit and the urgent need for new regulations as fires threaten Western American cities. Natasha Stavros and Erica Fischer join Meghna Chakrabarti.

This episode is for older kids 4th grade and above. There are descriptions of real dangers that early explorers and settlers faced including death. The story is exciting and fun to listen to but not for young children. Join the Story Ship's Wagon Train for journey out to Western American in the year 1846. Kids from Camden Elementary wrote and recorded this adventure story in 2008. Westward expansion was a major part of the growth of America. Many students in 4th and 5th grades across the United States study the cause and effect of this great movement. Hold on to your cowboy hats for this exciting adventure. Please visit us online to find out how you can get your school or organization on, "The Story Ship Podcast." You can also see information about our workshops teaching teachers and students how to write their own stories and setup podcasts for their school. Visit our website to find out about The Story Ship's incredible school assembly shows. Call 912-663-6320 for more information. Thanks for taking a trip on The Story Ship Captain Sean    

Rabbi Yishai returns home to the Holy Land and is joined by Rav Mike Feuer to hash out Israel's relationships with empires - especially today's Western-American tilt. Is Israel meant to compete with Rome, or is meant to buttress the current paradigm?

Rabbi Yishai returns home to the Holy Land and is joined by Rav Mike Feuer to hash out Israel's relationships with empires - especially today's Western-American tilt. Is Israel meant to compete with Rome, or is meant to buttress the current paradigm?

Here's a selection of -Round-Up- news stories Jim featured on this National Day of Prayer-----North Korea responded to remarks made by President Biden last week when he indicated that the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran present serious threats to the security of America and the world. ---U.S. military forces in Iraq were recently targeted for the first time by Iranian drones.---China is ramping up efforts to arrange trade deals with Middle East nations in order to peacefully collapse Western-American dominance in the region.--Crosstalk listeners joined in with their comments to wrap up the broadcast.

Here's a selection of -Round-Up- news stories Jim featured on this National Day of Prayer-----North Korea responded to remarks made by President Biden last week when he indicated that the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran present serious threats to the security of America and the world. ---U.S. military forces in Iraq were recently targeted for the first time by Iranian drones.---China is ramping up efforts to arrange trade deals with Middle East nations in order to peacefully collapse Western-American dominance in the region.--Crosstalk listeners joined in with their comments to wrap up the broadcast.

01:17 - Tamsin’s Superpower: Recognizing Songs Within Seconds 05:08 - Outside the Charmed Circle (https://www.amazon.com/Outside-Charmed-Circle-Exploring-Sexuality/dp/073876132X) (Tamsin’s book about gender, sexuality, and spirituality) * The Pagan Community (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Paganism) * “Necessarily Brief” 09:09 - Consent in the Mentor/Mentee Relationship (Master/Apprentice) * The Universal Attribution Fallacy * Access * Power Dynamics * Conflicts of Interest * The Word “Politics” - how we negotiate power between groups of greater than one 16:57 - Using Certain Phrases (i.e. “Identity Politics,” “Cancel Culture”) and Divisiveness * Obfuscation * We Hate You Now: The Hardest Problem of The Aftertimes (https://medium.com/surviving-covid-19/we-hate-you-now-d0fca14e3b82) * Social Contracts 23:46 - What Is A Person? Individuality & Personhood * Plato (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato) & Aristotle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle) * Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind by George Lakoff (https://www.amazon.com/Women-Fire-Dangerous-Things-Categories/dp/0226468046) * Hegemonic Norms, Privilege & Power 30:01 - “Fringe Communities”; Subcultures and Intersection * How Buildings Learn (https://www.amazon.com/How-Buildings-Learn-Happens-Theyre/dp/0140139966): Edge Cities * The Queer Community * Using the Word “Queer” * Gatekeeping * Fear of Powerlessness * The Relationship Between Radicals and Reactionaries * “Outside The Charmed Circle” * Gayle S. Rubin: Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality (https://sites.middlebury.edu/sexandsociety/files/2015/01/Rubin-Thinking-Sex.pdf) 44:30 - Individual Experiences Are Not Universally Applicable * Getting People to Care About Other People * Teaching Empathy * Less Hubris, Gatekeeping, and Self-Reinforcing Superiority Reflections: Jamey: Conceptualizing that other people are having a different experience than you. Rein: What are the interactions in a community that empathy leads to and how can we promote those? Helping. Helping by Edgar H. Schein (https://www.amazon.com/Helping-Offer-Give-Receive-Help/dp/1605098566) Tamsin: The dynamics at the heart of any subculture you care to name really aren’t that dissimilar from one group to another. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: JAMEY: Hello and welcome to Episode 232 of Greater Than Code. I’m one of your hosts, Jamey Hampton, and I’m here with my friend, Rein Henrichs. REIN: Thanks, Jamey. That is a lot of episodes. I’m here with our guest, Tamsin Davis-Langley who is a white, queer, nonbinary trans femme from a multiethnic family who grew up poor. They spent most of their adult work life as the tech-savvy person in a non-technical office, and are now pursuing a career in digital communications. Their academic path began in liberal arts, detoured through computer science, and ended with a degree in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Washington. Their work explores the ways subcultural communities intersect with non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality. They've written about how the problems of abuse and predation in subcultures are linked to the power dynamics inherent in those groups. Under their nom de plume, Misha Magdalene, they're the author of Outside the Charmed Circle, a book about gender, sexuality, and spirituality. Tamsin, welcome to the show. TAMSIN: Thank you so much! It’s a delight to be here. REIN: So you know what we’re going to ask you. [laughter] What is your superpower and how did you acquire it? TAMSIN: My superpower is that I can, with a relatively high degree of accuracy, listen to the radio and identify the song that's playing within 5 seconds, or so if it was recorded within a specific window of time and basically falls under the very broad umbrella of Western pop music. This happened because I was bitten by a radioactive record store employee back in the 80s and since then, I've been able to go, “Oh yeah, that's Won't Get Fooled Again by The Who. It's on Who's Next released 1972. Produced by Glen's Johns,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and this is a delightful party trick for getting people to suddenly realize they want to talk to someone else at the party. JAMEY: I was about to ask – [overtalk] REIN: How do you remember all of that? TAMSIN: How do I remember all of that? I have no idea. I literally could not tell you what I had for dinner last night and I'm in the midst of training sessions for a position that I'm pursuing in digital communications and half the time I'm going, “What was the command to do the things so that I can function?” But I can literally tell you the brand of bass guitar that Paul McCartney played in The Beatles, or the kind of keyboard that Kate Bush used when she was recording her albums in the late 70s and early 80s was a Hohner, a violin-shaped bass, and a Fairlight synthesizer, respectively. [chuckles] JAMEY: I can relate to this because I often think about how many other things I could know if I freed up all of the space in my brain where I kept the names of all the Pokémon. TAMSIN: Right, right. I want to defrag my own brain and just throw out huge chunks of permanent storage, but no. JAMEY: Do you use your superpower for good, or for evil? TAMSIN: In finest, strong, bad tradition, I try to use my powers only for good, or for awesome. I have actually used it to further my career. I did work for a little while at a Musicland, back when those existed, and later at a Tower Records, back when those existed. For younger listeners, those were both brick and mortar stores where you could go in and buy music on physical media and occasionally, accessories that were associated with bands, or musicians that you liked and people would walk in and say things like, “I'm trying to find a CD by this band and I don't know the name of the band, or the name of the song, or any of the lyrics, but it's got this bit in it that goes “Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh” and I went, “Bad to the Bone, George Thurogood & the Delaware Destroyers. Here's their Best Of. Thank you.” So that's the extent to which my superpower operates for good, or for awesome. REIN: That reminds me, there was a librarian who worked at The London Library, which has about a million books, for 40 years and could do a very similar thing where they knew what book someone was looking for better than that person did. TAMSIN: Yeah. That kind of talent always delights me when I find it out in the wild where I'm like, “Yeah, I was looking for this book. It kind of was about this thing and I remember it had sort of a teal cover. Oh, here you go.” Yeah, it's kind of an amazing and wonderful thing to see, but then I do it and I feel really self-conscious, so. [laughs] REIN: So, speaking of books, graceful segue. TAMSIN: Yes. Speaking of books. REIN: Tell us a little bit about the book that you wrote. TAMSIN: I can, yes. So when I was finishing up my degree at the University of Washington in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to apply the concepts and the tools that I was learning in my degree program to my actual day-to-day life. It's all well and good when you're in the ivory tower of academia to talk about intersectionality and hegemonic norms of sexuality, or gender, but how does that actually play out in your work life, or in your family dynamic? Or if you are a person who practices some form of spirituality, how does that play out in your spiritual communities, or really, in any subcultural communities that you're a part of? As it happens, one of the subcultural communities that I'm part of is what's generally referred to as “the pagan community,” I'm going to throw a lot of quotes around that because pagan is not a commonly agreed upon term and we could get into a great argument about how much of a community it is. But all of that to the side, one day I was sitting there probably having coffee at the coffee shop on campus and I thought, “Hmm, I wonder what would happen if you took this intersectional feminist lens and turned it on the pagan community?” I thought about it a moment and then I think I literally said, “Oh no,” out loud because I realized that was a book and 2 and a half years later, 3 years later, it was published by Llewellyn worldwide as Outside the Charmed Circle. It's a book about how gender and sexuality are expressed, explored, repressed denied, or whatever other ways engaged within the subculture of modern pagan polytheist, or magical “practice.” It's a book I had a lot of fun writing, which is really strange to hear myself say out loud because there were moments when I absolutely wanted to bang my head on the keyboard, or just fold the laptop up and smack myself in the face with it like the monks in Monty Python. But it's a book that I really enjoyed writing because I got to spend long hours researching and talking about a bunch of my favorite stuff: gender, sexuality, embodiment, philosophy, Van Halen and their impact on Western culture and I say that, and people are like, “Oh, that's really funny,” and I'm like, “No, no, I'm being really serious.” As far as the question that just came up in the chat here: is there something I cut from the book that I wish I could have put in? One of the things that I said in the very last chapter is that the book I wrote is necessarily brief. Each chapter in that book could have been its own book. There's a chapter on embodiment. A chapter on gender and theory – I believe the chapter is actually called Gender and Theory in Practice. There's a chapter, or a couple of chapters on consent and how consent works in these communities. There's so much more that can be said about these topics. There's so much more that I could have said about any of these topics. But 300 pages, I felt like I'd run on quite long enough. Consent in the mentor-mentee relationship also just came up in chat. That's actually a topic that I touch on in the book and it's something I have really strong feelings about. Especially in the pagan and polytheists communities, there's often a lot of stress on the teacher-student relationship, sort of master-apprentice, if you want to get all scythe about it and well, there's a lot of unspoken disagreement about what the appropriate dynamic between those two parties should be. There are people who will cheerfully say, “Oh, well, teachers and students should always have this kind of relationship and should never have that kind of relationship.” Yeah, and by that kind of relationship, we're usually talking about a sexual and/or romantic relationship. And then there are people who are perfectly happy to say, “Well, that's true in most cases, but this situation is different,” and often what they mean is, “my situation is different.” So when I was writing the book, I had the less than enviable of saying, “Dear sweet summer child, no, your situation isn't different. It's not any different. It is never any different. Teachers and students just shouldn't have those kinds of relationships while they are ensconced in that power dynamic of teacher-student, or mentor-mentee.” REIN: Of course, thinking that your own situation is different is quite common. Common enough that we have a name for it and that is the universal attribution fallacy. TAMSIN: Yeah. Not to be super political, but it goes back to the phenomenon that you see quite often in modern sociopolitical discourse where people will say, “X is always immoral and wrong, except when I do it,” and X could be getting an abortion, being in a same-sex relationship, any number of things. “Well, that's always bad and wrong, but my circumstances are different.” JAMEY: One thing I think is interesting about what you're talking about with teachers and students is that the concept of a teacher-student relationship is nebulous in a lot of ways. Like, how would you draw the line here between this is an actual teacher and student relationship and therefore, inappropriate as opposed to “I have this relationship with someone and I'm learning something from them,” which I learn from all people all the time, including my partner and other people? Where is the line between “This is a great person in my life that I'm learning” from versus “I'm in this hierarchical relationship with them”? TAMSIN: The short answer would be access—access to knowledge, access, to experience, access to opportunity. If you are a teacher and I am coming to you saying, “I want to learn this thing,” and your response is not “Okay, sure, I can take you on as a student and teach you this thing,” but instead, “I can take you on and teach you this thing if X, Y, or Z,” that becomes a really sketchy kind of dynamic where if I want whatever it is that you have the ability to give me the knowledge, the opportunity, the access, I am essentially being required to behave in ways that I might not otherwise. REIN: It seems like there are maybe two important things here. One is power dynamics—which always exist; they never don't exist—and the other is more narrowly conflicts of interest. TAMSIN: Right, and one of the things that I ran into, with talking modern practitioners of pagan and polytheistic spirituality, is that a lot of people want to talk about power, very few people are comfortable talking about power dynamics. In part, because in my experience, a lot of people don't want to see themselves as being people who have power to impact others in a negative way. Will they, or nil they? There becomes this attitude of deniability where it's like, “Well, I can't possibly be in an oppressive position. I can't possibly be an abuser because I'm coming to this from just as much a place of powerlessness as the next person,” and that's not always true, of course. REIN: I think sometimes talking about groups in that way is vulnerable to that counterargument and I try to talk about the dynamics as being every relationship between two people has an element of power. TAMSIN: Absolutely, and one of the arguments I often get into with people is about the word politics because people, especially in our current social climate, tend to think that politics means a turf war between these two groups, or parties. My response is that politics is just the word to describe how we negotiate power between groups of greater than one. Politics is how we talk about the policies. There's the whole word police meaning city, politics, policy. It's a thing. Politics is how we arrange policies and laws and agreements so that we can all basically move forward doing the same kind of thing. Yes, from the chat: “framing politics between two groups is very American.” It really is. So I have often been criticized for bringing politics into spirituality and I'm going, “We're sitting around talking about power all day long, pretending that politics isn't a part of that is a way of getting out of having to be accountable for the politics that's actually going on.” That maneuver is as present in any subculture you care to name as it is in the pagan community. I mean, that's certainly not unique to witches, Druids, modern polytheists, and whomever. JAMEY: Yeah. Everything we've been talking about in the pagan has made me think of the tech community, too. My question earlier about mentorship, I was thinking that and when you were talking about “Don't bring politics into” – such a common thing that we talk about in tech, also. TAMSIN: Oh yeah. Why do you have to bring politics into this? Why do you have to bring identity politics, or diversity politics into this argument? We work in tech; this is a meritocracy and the sound of a thousand palms slapping into a thousand foreheads echoes across the land. JAMEY: I know you said it to illustrate that point, the phrase, identity politics, I just have such a visceral physical reaction to. [laughs] TAMSIN: Oh, it's great. Isn't it? It's like, there are certain phrases that in modern discourse have become so completely alienated from their original context that they're almost devoid of meaning. Identity politics is one. Cancel, or cancellation, or – [overtalk] JAMEY: Cancel culture. I just saw a whole conversation about this today because Andrew Cuomo said it in his press conference. It was a whole thing. TAMSIN: Oh God. [laughter] JAMEY: I’m sorry for bringing up Andrew Cuomo. I take it back. [laughs] TAMSIN: Verbal equivalent of keyboard smash right now. [laughter] Yeah, I feel like when people start throwing terms like that around, this is all an attempt at obfuscation. It's an attempt at getting away from having to talk about what's actually going on and, in many cases, what's actually going on is that somebody, or somebodies are doing some shady things that they don't necessarily want to be held accountable for. REIN: People say, “Keep politics out of X.” That statement is incomplete and what they really mean is “Keep politics that don't matter to me out of X.” TAMSIN: Right. “Keep politics that I don't have to think about.” REIN: “Things that don't impact me in any way, I don’t care about those.” TAMSIN: Exactly. Yeah. But if politics suddenly means that I can't get the right chip for the motherboard to run the gaming machine that I really want to set up, suddenly politics is real important. That's the point where I start getting that glassy-eyed thousand-yard stare at somebody and going, “So politics and power dynamics matters when it's something that impacts you personally. Is that what you're saying?” Maybe from there, we could, I don't know, extrapolate that other people who, and this is a galaxy brain moment here, actually exists, have the same relationships [chuckles] to the things that matter to them. Like, I don't know, housing, or healthcare, or to be a little dark, I guess, not being hatecrimed to death. REIN: This is the one of my favorite tweets: “I don't know how to convince you to care about other people writ large.” TAMSIN: Yeah, exactly. We talk a lot lately about how divisive things are and how divided the country is. There's a Medium article that I read recently with the delightfully bracing title of, “We hate you now.” It was an article about the potential going forward into a post-COVID-19 world where all of the people who've been wearing masks when they have to go outside, washing their hands, staying home unless absolutely necessary and who've, essentially, felt that they've been held captive in their own homes for over a year now are looking at the people who've been going to weddings, pool parties, restaurants, barbecues, and two weeks later, half of the attendees are sick, or dead and having, what I would say, are some pretty justifiable feelings of “We were doing all the right things and you selfish, entitled fill in your profanity of choice, have been doing exactly all the wrong things that have perpetuated this situation, such that we're still in lockdown and still in lockdown. We kind of hate you now and there's a real possibility of that we're always going to hate you.” To me, that's the divide I'm seeing in our culture going forward. Things like that. Then again, I am speaking as someone who shares custody of my daughter with my ex who lives in California and what that means, operationally, is that I have not seen my daughter in-person since March 8th of 2020 and so, I'm a little head up under the collar. Wow, that just kind of went off into a really dark place. [laughs] REIN: No, this is good stuff. Very normal for us. This is why I don't have an issue going on record as saying that ethical systems based on naive individualism are bankrupt. TAMSIN: Absolutely. One of the things that came out of my degree program with—and I will point out that I did go to a state university in the notoriously liberal state of Washington. But one of the things that I came out of my degree program with was a healthy and deeply ingrained respect for the concept of the social contract and for social contract theory as a venue of study, especially when you're looking at power dynamics in groups. What I found is that explaining the social contract to people is really easy if they actually want to understand it and utterly impossible, if they're opposed, because if they're opposed, what's really going on isn't that they don't understand. They get it perfectly; they just don't want to agree. I can say the social contract is that you don't punch me, I don't shoot you; we maintain a basic air of non-violence and go on about our day. That's a contract. You don't hurt me. I don't hurt you. We move on. It's as simple as that, or as complicated as, “Hey, look, we have a civilization.” That is a marvelous quote in the chat: “No, thank you. I'd rather pretend I invent the entire universe every time I make an Apple pie.” REIN: This gets all the way like the turtles go all the way down to what does it mean to be a person and what is the person to relationship to society? TAMSIN: And if we are going to dive that deep into philosophy, I'm going to need some whiskey at least. [chuckles] I'm kidding. But as far as what is a person, philosophers have been trying to work that one out for quite literally thousands of years, at this point. When I was writing Outside the Charmed Circle, I wound up necessarily having to go back and read some amounts of Plato and Aristotle because they are, in many ways, part of the groundwork of Western philosophy and as well, part of the groundwork for Western notions of spirituality and magical practice. As you know, pagans are polytheists, or magicians. One of the things that I was horrified to discover and shouldn't have been really—I should have expected this—was that Plato and Aristotle didn't think too highly of women. There are these marvelous quotes that I included in the book and by marvelous, I mean tragic, frankly referring to the distinction between men, and women and other animals. That was text I saw on my screen and looked at and went, blink, blink, blink, What?” REIN: This reminds me of George Lakoff's book, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, so titled because there is a language with a category that includes those things in the same category. TAMSIN: Wow. That's great. That's neat. REIN: I think I can respect women being in the same category as dangerous things, to be fair. TAMSIN: I think depending on how we're defining dangerous, anybody of any gender can be dangerous, but I have to admire the hustle of putting that as your title, that's pretty great. But the question of who counts as a person? What is a person? If you look at some of the classical Greek philosophers—Aristotle, Plato—they would say a person is a human male individual who fulfills these criteria and anyone who doesn't fulfill those criteria isn't really fully a person. REIN: The human male citizen. TAMSIN: Right. REIN: Which is also how the US defined it. TAMSIN: Shocking. Yeah, and then if you look at these philosophers as laying the groundwork for how Western culture defines, or describes personhood individuality, the next big cultural movements come along was of course, Christianity. I'm not here to bash on Christianity, but I will note that if you look at Christian philosophy around identity and individuality, especially if you're looking at gendered identities, a lot of that would be drawn from the work of Paul who wrote most of the epistles in the last two thirds of what's called the New Testament, the Christian Bible. Paul had some less than awesome views about women and they're pretty much in a direct line of descent from Plato and Aristotle. You look at the things Paul was saying and it's like, oh, okay so he's basically just importing Greek philosophical misogyny into this new religion, which made a lot of sense because at that point in time, Greek philosophy was, I've called it the groundwork for Western philosophy and the Greeks were considered the de facto mainstream philosophers of that era, and everyone was rolling around speaking Greek, even the Romans. So this notion of individuality and of personhood being something that we specifically define by how you match an established hegemonic norm and by hegemonic, I mean a norm that is imposed by a power above you and it's this established hierarchy. When I was learning about hegemonic norms in my degree program, someone in the class asked, “Okay, so hegemonic norm, how does that apply to us in modern Western American 21st century culture?” It's like, well, it's real easy. Who has the privilege? Who has the power? If you're white, you have privilege and power that you don't have if you're Black, or Brown, or Asian, or what have you. If you are a cisgender person, you have privilege and power that you don't have if you're trans or non-binary. If you are a cis male, you have privilege and power that you don't have if you are a non-cis male, and so on. That's hegemonic power, that's hegemony in action and a lot of those hegemonic norms come directly down from the classical Greeks through the norms established by Christianity. I spend a lot of time talking about this in a book which is at least extensively about witchcraft, paganism, and magic because they're hobby horses that are really important to me and they seemed to tie in. So I was like, “Yeah, let's do this. Let's just throw it all in there.” REIN: So you have these fringe communities and fringe only relative to the dominant normative culture, right? TAMSIN: Right. REIN: But then they start to intersect on the edges of that hegemonic, cultural conglomeration, whatever you want to call it. It reminds me of – so this is an analogy that I'm going to see if it lands so let me know. There's a book called How Buildings Learn and, in that book, one of the things that he talks about is what are called edge cities, where historically cities have been built around a port, or railroad, or some other thing. But what's happening in modern cities, there's a lot of the action is happening at the edges of the city where the highways intersect and so on. There's also a lot more possibility to build out there because the city center has been made pretty rigid by the buildings are large and they're probably not going anywhere, the codes, the building and zoning codes are very rigid, and so on. So actually, a lot of the most vital growth that happened in modern studies is happening at the edges. I wonder if it's like that as well in these fringe communities and if that term has baggage that you want me to avoid, let me know. TAMSIN: Oh no, I'm fine with the term. I think there's a lot of traction there. One of the hobby horses that I drag out and bang on a regular basis is the notion that subcultural communities reiterate and reinforce a lot of the same core assumptions as the over culture in which they are ensconced. There is this attitude of, “Well, we're different from outsiders. We're smarter, we're better, we're more spiritual. We're more accepting. We're more,” whatever the virtue, or the value that they want to see themselves as having is. But they frequently don't stop to realize that, in many ways, they are just reenacting a lot of the same attitudes that the mainstream culture, of which they are a subculture, is enacting all over the place. I think when you look at the fringes of subcultures, the places where they start to rub up against other cultures, or other subcultures, where they start to intersect and get some new ideas and some new, interesting stuff going on that can be really valid, valuable, and healthy for the community as a whole. I also think that that is a place where there can be a lot of tension and a lot of fear. I've seen that in the pagan community, where there are a lot of people who I think would position themselves very much at the center of the little circle of pagan community and they look at someone like, for instance, me, who's kind of out on this fringe edge here, rubbing up against the queer community, or the trans community, or whatever other communities that I'm part of. They may see this idea, or that idea and go, Well, that's not how we do things. That's not us. That's like some of your weird queer trans stuff,” and I'm going, “No, but wait. It's really cool and it informs what we do over here in this really useful way. And why are you walking away? Come back.” And then occasionally, it's like, “Oh, you were walking away to get a torch and a pitchfork. No, no, no, don't come back.” [chuckles] JAMEY: When you were talking about that with the fringe communities, I was thinking about the queer community as well, even before you brought it up, because I think that what Rein was saying about exciting things happening in that space is definitely true. But I also think that you have a problem in the community sometimes like, people who are younger, or more newly out and don't know as much about queer history trying to roll things back. That's why we have this argument about why younger people, who think that the word “queer” is not okay for anyone to use, coming in and saying, “Oh, we can't do this,” and older people saying, “There has been a lot of discourse, progress, and things that have happened over the course of history that you need to know about before you can have an informed opinion on it. [laughs] TAMSIN: You need to scroll back up in the chat before you start talking. [laughter] JAMEY: Yeah. You need to scroll back up like a bunch of years in the chat. [laughs] TAMSIN: Right. Yes. That is a huge issue in the queer community and it's one that – I'm 47 years old and I have found myself in conversations with people who are 19, 20 who wants to tell me, “Oh, well, you shouldn't use the word queer because queer is a slur,” and I'm going, “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, red flag, hold on. Queer has been used as a slur, absolutely yes. But in the 80s and 90s, there was an awful lot of work done to reclaim that word. I know, I was there.” And today, now the primary driver behind the notion that queer is a slur is trans-exclusionary radical feminism. It's transphobes who are like, ‘Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no. Queer gives too much leeway for all of these trans people to sneak into this community. So uh oh, we can't be having with that.” So I find myself basically having to strike the compromise of okay, I'm never going to tell you that you have to call yourself queer, but you don't get to tell all of us queers out here that that's not our word and if that means you don't want to come sit at our table, or come to our parties, that's okay, too. The problem of gatekeeping in the queer community, as in every subcultural community, is real and it's real bad. The extent to which some quorum within a community wants to enforce little boundaries inside the larger community. So it's like I have my little walled garden in the queer community, and you can come in if you perform gender, or sexuality, or identity in these specific ways that I am dictating. It's too much headache. It's funny how I talk about these problems in the queer community, or in the trans community, or in the pagan community and I have friends who work in the tech world and they're going, “Huh, this all sounds eerily familiar.” JAMEY: It's almost as if people act the same, TAMSIN: No matter where you go. [chuckles] Yeah, it is. These are not problems unique to any one subcultural community. They are human problems and I'm often tempted to say that the solution is to stop dealing with people, but I like people and I like doing things with people. One of the reasons I'm so mad about this stupid pandemic is that I miss people, hanging out with people in-person and being able to drink coffee with them. But I think that a lot of these problems of gatekeeping, these enforcement of boundaries, these power dynamic issues that we have all fundamentally come back to, at least in many of the cases I've seen, issues around power and the fear of powerlessness, the fear of being disenfranchised, or of losing what you see as power, or opportunity, or access, or privilege that you're entitled to. I mean, that's certainly what seems to be one of the things that's at the core of these ridiculous ideas like white genocide. White people are being crowded out and we're being outbred by all of these other people of color and white people have to band together and blah, blah, blah! All of this garbage is all rooted in fear and under that ignorance. Much wiser and more experienced minds than mine have written at great length about those issues and how best to combat them. I have a lot of hope in that regard, but at the same time, I look at the news app on my phone every morning and that hope dies a little. So it's kind of a tidal thing; it rises and falls. REIN: The relationship between radicals and action areas, I think where it's a relationship to a particular preferred state of affairs and whether you think you need to go forwards, or backwards to get there. REIN: Right. We used to call that the difference between a liberal and a conservative view, but those words have been so battered and worked out of utility that you can't even bring them up anymore. But it, again, goes back to that idea of you have the circle that is the community and the people at the center, who are perhaps most emblematic of its baseline core ideas and ideals, and then the people out on the fringes of things, who are bringing in new information and new ideas, or sending their ideas out to other communities and sharing with them. I think that can all be really healthy and part of a wholesome ecosystem of subcultural engagement and interaction. I also think that when people get scared, they start doing things that are really not in their best interest. They start making really bad choices and that way lies dissent, dissension, and conflict. But a lot of that is why I titled the book I wrote Outside the Charmed Circle because it comes from an essay by a cultural theorist named Gayle Rubin. This is an essay that she wrote called “Thinking Sex” and in this essay, she posited that you can look at ideas like sexuality and if you picture it as two circles, one inside the other divided up like a dark board, pie wedged shapes. The inner circle, the charmed circle is the stuff that society basically all approves of: heterosexuality, monogamy, sex for the purposes of procreation, and so on and so forth. And then outside the charm circle are what Gayle Rubin called the outer limits. Those are the things which society doesn't approve so non-monogamy, having sex for reasons other than procreation, because it's fun, or to make money, or whatever reasons. Each of the things in the term circle has its counterpart in the outer limits, its counterpart outside the charmed circle. Ah, see what I did there? So things like homosexuality, or bisexuality, or asexuality, or demisexuality, or, or, or—these are all outside the term circle because they are fundamentally alien to the hegemonic norms of culture and I just realized I'm throwing a lot of this jargon around, wow. REIN: I think it is interesting as a metaphor here because it implies both, at the periphery and also, a sparseness, or lack of structure. TAMSIN: Yeah. I think that there's value to be found both, at the core and on the edges, on the fringe. [laughs] REIN: What’s [inaudible] is that some of these groups on the edges seem to be reproducing structures that are found in the core. TAMSIN: Oh yeah, absolutely. The structures that you find at the core of a group are really comfortable. They're really comforting if they're built for you. To pick one, for example, the structure of being cisgender is really comfortable. You’re cis if you were born and you were assigned a gender at birth and you grew up and you're like, “Yeah, that's me. That fits me like a glove because it's tailored to who I am. I don't have any objections to this.” But if you take that same glove and put it on someone else, it's going to be too big, too small, it fits in the wrong ways, it's no, this is wrong. These structures of being cisgender don't fit for someone like say, me. That's not to say being cisgender is wrong. It's perfectly fine and that's okay. Just not for me. JAMEY: This is certainly coming back to what you were saying earlier about “Oh, I care about these issues that affect me,” and we have to extrapolate that they affect other people because you'll see people are like, “Oh, but this is so comfortable. Why wouldn't you want this great comfortable thing?” And I can't extrapolate that other people are having a different experience. TAMSIN: One of the real problems that we as human beings have is not understanding that our individual experiences are not universally applicable. It's like handing someone a strawberry ice cream cone and they taste it and they're like, “Oh, thanks. Not for me,” and you're like, “Well, what's wrong with it? It's delicious. It's a strawberry ice cream cone,” and they're like, “I don't like strawberry ice cream.” Like, “Well, how can you not? I like strawberry ice cream.” “Yeah, but I don't taste this strawberry ice cream with your tongue. Your taste buds. Mine are wired differently.” That's just a random example pulled out of the air; I actually like strawberry ice cream fine. Not my favorite, but it's fine. But individual experience isn't universally applicable and to come back to that question of how do we define the individual person as against a larger culture, or community? I think past a certain point of defining an individual, or a person as a self-aware consciousness, I really don't want to try and define personhood at all. If I can acknowledge that someone is sapient and sentient, that's good enough for me and if at some point down the road, we get to a place of developing actual artificial intelligence, like Turing capable AI. If it tells me it's sentient and sapient, I am more than happy to sit down and have a coffee with it and I think that's as much as I want to get into well, how do we define a person? Because once you go any further than that, inevitably it winds up with oppression, slavery, and genocide. Again, pretty grim. [laughs] JAMEY: No, it’s good. REIN: Again, how do we get people to care about other people? TAMSIN: Oh, if I had the answer to that, I could write another book. It would be a bestseller and I would never have to try and get another job. I think that the answer, and I am totally cribbing from my partner here—who is an amazing human being and a developer at a local software company up here. My partner would probably suggest that the answer is you teach empathy and you start teaching empathy by going back to you have this relationship to this issue, or this thing that happened. It made you feel a certain way. How do you think that issue impacted that person? Experiences aren't universal, but the condition of experiencing things is universal. So I'm not going to have the same experience that someone else has with any given issue, but I can acknowledge that they are having an experience and that their experience is as meaningful to them and their lives as mine is to me and my life. Once you've done that, you started the building blocks of developing empathy, which leads to compassion, which leads to, “Oh, maybe we should get kids out of those cages on the border, maybe we should find a way to feed people, and restore the power grid in Texas so elderly people aren't literally freezing to death in their homes in the 21st century in America.” REIN: I think there's a Swedish word for the realization that everyone on this street that you're walking down has just as rich, deep, and complex an inner mental life as you do and I think we need more of that. TAMSIN: Yeah, we do. We do. Now I totally want to go and look up that Swedish word, but that acknowledgement that everyone around us is actually a person. They have an interior life, they have hopes and dreams of their own, and their hopes and dreams don't have to be relevant to me. One of the things that I think those of us who are ensconced in subcultures sometimes struggle with is – well, it's the inverse of another problem so let me, let me try and rephrase this. Those of us who are in subcultural communities—whether it's the tech community, or the queer community, or the trans community, or the pagan community, or what have you—we all struggle with these feelings of our interests and our passions being incomprehensible to people who aren't part of our communities. I am not a developer. I am not even really much of a coder, but I know enough about coding from having been in a CS program for a hot minute to be able to grasp what's cool about really elegant code, what's really cool about this thing that my partner comes to me and she's like, “Oh, I did this thing and we blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” and I'm like, “I understood about one word in three, but it was barely enough to hang on with my fingernails,” and that is really cool and awesome. But that's not a conversation that she could have with, for instance, my Mom. My mother, who is a brilliant woman and has a degree in nursing and is a medical professional and does all these things, my Mom would do just glaze over a little and go, “Okay, cool. I'm glad that the good thing happened for you,” but it does reinforce this idea that these things we're into are relatively esoteric. So it in turn reinforces this seclusion of our little subcultural communities into their enclaves and we become this little technocratic priesthood, but that can turn into another problem, which is not only are we weird and different, but we're better. The taking of pride in the cool, awesome thing that we understand and love can turn into, “If you don't understand the cool, awesome thing we're into what's wrong with you?” Oh, well, pfft users. I've heard that exact sentiment expressed by people in the software industry and it always baffles me because I'm like, “You realize that you are making tools for people to use, right?” The people that you're going “Pfft users” about are literally the reason you have a job because otherwise, all of the tippy-tappy you do with the keyboard is an intellectual exercise. Great, you created this incredibly elegant piece of software that no one is going to use. At that point, you may as well just be building a matchstick cathedral in your backyard and then lighting it on fire. What I would really like to see from all of our communities is a little less hubris and a lot less gatekeeping and a substantial amount less of a self-reinforcing sense of superiority about people who aren't inside our particular charmed circle. What I want to see is our subcultural communities, having pride in who we are and what we do, and the cool things that we make, or the cool things that we do, or the cool lives that we lead, or whatever it is that is part of our community without turning that into, “And that's why we're so much better than the normies, the mundanes, the muggles—to use Voldemort's word. That's why we're better than people who don't do this cool stuff that we do.” Because I feel like that need to be better than the people who make us feel kind of weird and like we don't belong is again, just reiterating the same power structures that got us into this problem in the first place. The over culture thinks it's better than these weird freaky fringe communities because they're nerdy, or they're awkward, or they're cringy and the fringe communities in return think they're better than the basic, boring, mundane, mainstream, normie culture and nobody gets to have any fun. I would much rather have a mainstream culture that respects and appreciates the awesome things that fringe communities bring to the table, the innovations that they provide, the new ways of thinking and approaching problems and have subcultural communities that understand that they are ensconced in an over culture, which is the reason that they can exist and that's how I'm going to solve world peace. JAMEY: So we’re coming up to the part of our show where we like to let everyone give a reflection about what we've talked about for the past hour, or so. This is something that is going to be on your mind, or a call-to-action, or just something that stuck out for you. I'm going to go first. What's something that stuck out for me was the conversation that we had actually a couple of times about conceptualizing that other people are having a different experience than you and how that's so hard for people. Because I think that you see this, even on a microlevel within these subcultures, and I think that suggests to me that it's such a natural human thing to do and I think that I get that because it does feel good to have things in common with other people and to celebrate the things that we have in common. I guess, I'm thinking about this specifically in the trans community where they're like, “It feels great to be able to be like, ‘We have this thing in common and I feel so good about that,’” but there are still a lot of different kinds of people in the trans community and this is how you end up with people saying, “Oh, the universal trans experience is loving being a girl when you take your estrogen,” and I'm like, “That's definitely not.” [laughs] You could probably keep making that thing that you're saying smaller until it's true for everyone in your little group that it's true for. But we have this desire to categorize ourselves in that way and I think that the reason I'm talking about this and saying this is, I think that it's really good to keep in mind the ways that all of us probably also do this on smaller levels. So I guess, my call-to-action is I'm going to try and think about catching myself if I'm doing this. REIN: Well, I'm going to attempt to stay in my lane here with my reflection. I was thinking about one of the first things that came up, which is mentor-mentee relationships, and I was thinking about what you said about empathy. One of the things that – I’ve changed a little bit, even in the last few years in terms of how I think about empathy, which is, I think empathy is good, but I don't think it's very actionable because empathy is an internal thing that happens in individual people's heads. No one else has access to it. What Russell Ackoff says is that systems are not the sum of their components, they're the product of their interactions. So what I started to think about was what are the interactions in a community that empathy leads to and how can we promote those? What I've started to focus on is the interaction called helping. Edgar Schein wrote a book called Helping and it's a study of the social process, or phenomenon where people help each other. How does it happen? Why does it happen? One of the things he noticed that that was pretty interesting is that helping is mostly notable when it doesn't happen and there's an expectation that it should have. So you think here are things like that's not helpful and what I think that we should try to do is focus more on positive affirmations when it does happen. So that's why when I do retrospectives with teams, we leave that with appreciations. I want to make helping remarkable. I want people to talk about helping and get better at it as practice. I guess, that's my solution to how do you get people to care about each other? It's how do you build empathy and I think it's by the practice of helping. TAMSIN: I like that a lot. That's really good. One of the thoughts that has recurred over the course of this conversation for me is that the dynamics at the heart of any subculture you care to name really aren't that dissimilar from one group to another, whatever their special interest happens to be. That was the thing I didn't understand growing up. It was a thing I certainly didn't understand through much of my adult life and now, crawling into my late 40s, I'm finally starting to wrap my head around this concept, that in a lot of ways, these groups are really all the same. That's because well, as we've alluded earlier, they're all made up of people and people all tend to be kind of the same in terms of the patterns that they enact, the approaches that they take, the things that they fundamentally want. Again, not universal experiences, but we all have the shared commonality of having these experiences. We all have the shared feature of wanting things and wanting to be understood. Wanting empathy, or compassion, even if we are ourselves not terribly good at giving it. That's certainly something that's been true with me. Even within the course of this conversation, I brought up the Medium article about the pandemic and how it's really easy to want to be furious with the people who are, in a very real way, responsible for the fact that I haven't seen my daughter in over a year. At the same time, at least some of those people were acting in ways that I don't have to think are rational or correct, but they had some reason they did the things they did and if I can understand why they act the way they do and I want to spend the effort and the energy to meet them where they are, perhaps I can find ways to work with them to be different, to be what I would consider better. More in line with a social contract that means that we don't have 600,000 people dead by the summer, but that is work that's on me to do, because I can't ask somebody, who's already living in a state of fear, to suddenly magically have cool, calm rationality descend upon them. REIN: The last thing I'll mention for folks who are listening, who are on software development teams and so on, is that a team is literally definitionally a group of people who help each other. TAMSIN: Yes, yes, it is. JAMEY: This was really great. Thank you so much. TAMSIN: Thank you. I had a wonderful time. This was a blast. JAMEY: And I should say that anyone who wants to have further conversations like this with us, we have a Slack community and we're all there, all of our guests are there, and lots of other really interesting people. You can join our Slack community if you back us on Patreon, patreon.com/greaterthancode, even like a dollar. REIN: These episodes are successful because we co-create them with our guests. We're helping each other make cool episodes. So thank you for helping us to make a cool episode. TAMSIN: It has genuinely been my pleasure. It’s been a delight. Thank you so much for having me. Special Guest: Tamsin Davis-Langley.

What if the church, specifically the Western American church fuly embraced its role? What would society look like? How would it change? We discuss this and more with Pastor Jesse Bradley at Grace Community Church in the Seattle area. He's a former professional soccer goalkeeper (played in Zimbabwe Africa, Aberdeen Scotland, and Minnesota), radio host, author, and speaker. A graduate of Dartmouth College, his curiosity about faith and Jesus began there. In an Introduction to World Religions course, he began to read the Bible for the first time. Jesse graduated with a Master's Degree in Theology from Dallas Theological Seminary. Jesse really enjoys authentic conversations with people of all ages and cultures. After surviving several close calls with death, Jesse is truly grateful for every new day and opportunities to encourage people in their journey and faith. Adoption and God's greater work of unity in the Sound and the nation are close to his heart. Jesse and his wife Laurie have four children and a fun dog named Bella.

On this weekend's agenda: concerts and bands! Mika and Pau relive concert experiences in Korea and the Philippines, compare Korean concerts and Western/American band concerts, and some of the craziest things they did/witnessed at concerts! This episode also came out of a request from one of our listeners -- so if you have suggestions or recommendations, email us at jointheweeklystanup@gmail.com. Check out all their recommended songs from the series on the show's official Spotify playlist.Music Intro Mix by Mika Feel So Fine by Taeyeon

Today on 365 days with mxmtoon, Maia talks about the beginning of a pivotal point in Western American history, the Gold Rush. Then she talks about the YouTube comedy duo Tiny Meat Gang’s big release. Join this episode today and make sure you’re following along with the daily updates @365daysmxmtoon on all platforms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In today's episode, I welcome Mike Huerter! Mike shares his experiences participating in plays and ballets first as an actor, and then being "roped into" taking classical dance classes--and how much that has changed his life! His stories are heartwarming and powerful, and he discusses how much portraying certain roles has changed his perpective on his own life journey. (Fun fact: the cover image is of Mike and his dance partner in VidaDance's production of "Cracked! A Reimagined Kansas City Nutcracker.") Support Artfully Told: www.paypal.me/elevateartArtfully Told links: www.facebook.com/artfullytold | www.artfullytold.podbean.com | elevateartskc@gmail.comGet a free audiobook through Audible!  http://www.audibletrial.com/ArtfullyToldSchedule your interview with Artfully Told! https://calendly.com/artfullytold/podcast-interview Episode 035 - Mike HuerterLindsey Dinneen:  Hello, and welcome to Artfully Told, where we share true stories about meaningful encounters with art.[00:00:07] Krista: I think artists help people have different perspectives on every aspect of life.[00:00:13] Roman: All I can do is put my part out into the world.[00:00:16]Elizabeth:  It doesn't have to be perfect the first time. It doesn't have to be perfect ever really. I mean, as long as you, you're enjoying doing it and you're trying your best, that can be good enough.[00:00:24] Elna: Art is something that you can experience with your senses, and that you just experience as so beautiful.[00:00:32] Lindsey Dinneen: Hello, and welcome back to Artfully Told . My name is Lindsey and I am so excited to have as my guest today, the fantastic Mike Huerter. We actually met through dance , but he has a long and very interesting story of sort of how everything came together. And I am just so thrilled to talk with him today and share his stories with you because he brings a really fun, unique background into his art. And so, Mike, thank you so much for being here today.[00:01:08] Mike Huerter: Thanks for having me, Lindsey.[00:01:10] Lindsey Dinneen: Of course, if you don't mind telling us a little bit about how you kind of got started and I just love this whole story of yours, so I'm excited to share it.[00:01:22] Mike Huerter: Oh gosh. It's been quite a few years back now, actually 21 years ago, back in 2000 I was approached by a female member of our church at the time. And she had a question for me, said, "Hey, would you be interested in performing in a play for us?" And it's like, "Well, sure. I, I can do that. What do you know, what, what kind of play is it?" She said, "Well, it's actually a ballet." It's like, "Oh, wait a minute. I don't wear a tutu. I'm not, you know, I don't dance. I have two left feet, no rhythm." She said, "No, no, just hear me out." She said, "We , there's a place called Dramatic Truth that does a ballet every Christmas called "The Mystery of Christmas" and it's "The Nutcracker" ballet, but it's actually done to the true story of Christmas. And so I, I said, "You know." I kinda thought about it and said, "Yeah, that sounds kind of cool actually." I said, "I wouldn't mind taking a look at that." So did it the very first year and just totally fell in love with it. Fell in love with ballet at that point. Just watching these girls, 13, 14, 17, 18, just giving their all and could barely breathe coming off stage just fascinated me. And I actually got to play the role of Jesus--well I played, do a role of Jesus and Joseph in that play. And that was a very humbling experience in and of itself, actually.[00:02:51] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So I'm curious though, because I'm so impressed with the fact that you were just like, "Sure I'll be in this play." I mean, have you ever, had you ever acted before, or was--so were you comfortable with the concept? Or were you just like"Sure. I'm up for something new."[00:03:08] Mike Huerter: Well, I, I have the quote "look" for, you know, the Western American version of Jesus--long hair, back at times, still at my beard was still brown. It's got quite a bit grayer since then, but I, you know, I had done some, some school plays in grade school and high school and had done kind of a musical at one point in like eighth grade, if I remember right. And it was kind of a fifties hip hop thing. Oh gosh. The soda fountain type music back then. And then I had done some church plays prior to being approached by doing this and playing the role of Jesus and everything . Actually did "The Passion of the Christ," and that, that was, yeah. That's, that's a whole 'nother story.[00:03:48] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Well, I mean, I would love to hear it if you want to share about it.[00:03:52] Mike Huerter: Just the aspect of going and trying to portray Jesus . Halfway through the rehearsal, part of that production, prior to our Easter production, I literally heard the devil say, "Who the hell do you think you are?" And my problem at that point was I started listening to him, and I was close to probably being on the verge of quitting, just because-- excuse me, bear with me-- because I had no right playing that part. Yeah, it's , you know, I don't even come close to being who Jesus is. I mean, I can, I can show Him to the world is how, what I think He should be, but I'm not Him by any means. So I kind of talked to the, the pastor who was producing it and.  She, she of opened me up to really delving in deeper into into my faith at that point. And so I started praying about it and kept going, going to the rehearsals and everything and, and shared with a few people what I was going through.[00:04:59] And then one day at rehearsal, I was , I believe what I heard was God. Because I heard the devil say it again. It's like, once again, "Who do you think you are?" And I heard another Voice said , "This is my beloved son, and he's here because I want him to be here." Yeah. It just kind of set me back and it's like, "Wow!" I mean, "Did I just really hear that?" Did I think it? Didn't, you know, what's going on here and, and then distinctly felt and heard it again saying ," I'm here because God wants me to be here and to fulfill this role." And I can't remember in my mind visualizing, turning back, looking over my shoulder and it's like, "Hey, I'm out of this. If you have a problem with me doing this, you need to talk the Guy in front of me right now."[00:05:41] Lindsey Dinneen: Yes![00:05:43] Mike Huerter: So it was like, "Hey, I'm just doing what I gotta do. And it turned out really well. It was a great production.  And it just, it really deepened my faith just to put myself in that role. And then kind of got, I guess, quote "stereotyped" into doing it from that point forward. I mean, people contact me  to play that part, and I love doing it and I mean, it's great.[00:06:05] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Wow. That is a powerful story. Thank you for sharing that. That's...[00:06:09] Mike Huerter: Ah, you're welcome. You're welcome. It's still hard to talk about it so many years later just, just how real that was for me.[00:06:18] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah. I think you captured it well in the way that you were talking about how it's just such a humbling experience to try to portray a character like that.  Obviously that would, I guess, be kind of your ultimate standard of character, but just in general, trying to portray someone that you respect and look up to and admire, I mean--that alone is huge. So yeah. Good for you for listening to the right Voice, ultimately. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Okay, so then, all right. So fast forward, you got involved in "The Mystery of Christmas" and you obviously were pretty inspired by that, but then what happened after that? Because that kind of changed a little bit of your life from there. And then that kind of inspired you to start doing other things related to ballet. And I don't want to tell your story for you, but can you share a little bit about what ended up happening as a result of all that?[00:07:18] Mike Huerter: Liz Dimmel, who's the Artistic Director over at Dramatic Truth, after years of performing in "Mystery of Christmas "--about five years ago now-- yeah, I was 55 years old. So she in her, I don't want to say "devious," but she's, she has a mischievous twinkle and smile she, she sometimes gives to people, and she kind of looked at me one day, said, "Hey ,  would you be interested in performing another play that we're going to do?" And it's like, "Well, yeah, you know, sure. I'm always up for doing something different like that." And she said, "Well, now wait a minute. Before you answer that fast, you might want to take into consideration that you will actually have to dance in this one." And it's like, "Ooh " once again, you know, proverbial white guy, two left feet, no rhythm. I don't count music and all that kind of stuff. And she said, '"Well, you know, I've got a DVD. I'd like you to go home, you know, kind of take a look at it and see about, you know, if you'd be interested in doing this. You would be playing the role of Jesus again."[00:08:19] And so I took the DVD home and I have watched it, and really interesting piece . I kind of started talking to the girls a little bit about it, you know, and they said, "Well, we haven't done that piece in probably five or six years." And it's the piece is a, it was a production about what we all go through in the spiritual battle. Demons abounded in it, and they were tormenting for particular characters in this, in this production, and Jesus being the role of stepping in and intervening to help them. And really, really enjoyed doing the piece. It was, again, another humbling experience ,  touched a lot of people's lives. I was told afterwards even by some of the young ladies that I was performing with. And so anyhow, that that production was over and, well Liz--I went and talked to her, said, "Hey, thanks for, you know, thinking about me for playing this role." And she kinda looked at me and she said , "Would you be interested in taking a dance class?" And it's like, oh again , "Well, tell me more, you know." So she said, "Well, we, we would really like you to come and do our pas class 'cause a lot of the girls don't understand the dynamics of what a guy goes through and performing lifts and, and working with them. And we could, we could really use the help. So I thought about it and talked again to two of the older girls.  You know, "We , we don't get into it very often because we don't have that many guys here." So I said, "Okay, I'll do it." And I'll call Liz and tell her. And she was ecstatic.[00:09:53] And so I showed up the first night of dance class, and yes, they really did need the help. It was me and eight girls. And it's like, "Am I the only guy?" "Yep." "Oh, great." But I'll tell you what--that, oh my gosh, what a workout. I remember the next morning when the alarm went off to get up for work, I could barely move to get out of bed. My whole body was like, "What did you do?"  But I talked to my youngest son about it and he said, "Dad, that's a phenomenal workout because your body doesn't really know what's coming next. You got different weights sizes, you know? And it's like, that's a great workout." So, and I, once again, fell in love with it and just kept doing it. Unfortunately, you know, this COVID thing has come along and I've had to bow out of it for awhile, but I even at 60 years old, I would welcome to get back into it. And, and they've already told me that they would love to have me back too. So.[00:10:52] Lindsey Dinneen: Of course. Yeah. Well, okay. So first of all, for anyone listening who isn't familiar with the term "pas," it's actually partnering. So it's typically, in classical ballet at least , a man and a woman. And so, yeah, those kinds of classes are, I mean, they're, they're difficult for the girls because they're learning something, a skill that is more advanced and is challenging and can be a little scary sometimes because you're relying on a, another human to catch you and lift you and all those things. But for the guys, it's this tremendous, like you said, workout and responsibility and all those things. So yeah. Thank you for stepping up and bringing brave to help.[00:11:37] Mike Huerter: Well, you're welcome. And the one thing that we'll say is that, at least at Dramatic Truth--and I'm, I'm, I would hopefully most dance studios are this way--but our number one goal and focus as a male dancer working with a woman, is to protect her at all costs. I mean, when you're trying, when you're throwing somebody up in the air, you know, things can happen. You try not to drop them. And thank God, I have not done that yet to this point. And I don't intend to, but you do whatever you have to do to keep them protected and safe.[00:12:12] Lindsey Dinneen: Yes. And we certainly appreciate that. Oh man. I recall...[00:12:17] Mike Huerter: I've worked with you, I don't think I dropped you at all, so.[00:12:21] Lindsey Dinneen: No, I'm still here in one piece. Nope, feel great. Oh, no, but that, it made me chuckle because it reminded me of the first pas that we did together. There was this moment that we incorporated of a shoulder sit, and those things, those things are pretty scary. And I remember just, you know, doing the whole--because the idea is that you run to the--the woman runs to the man. And so you already have momentum going into it, and then you're supposed to jump and turn and he catches you and puts you on his shoulder. That's a lot of things happening at one time. And I just remember practicing it and it was just having this, "Oh, here we go," every time. Like, it's just a hard lift for anyone.[00:13:09]Mike Huerter: But you did.[00:13:11]Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, it was, it was good, it was a good team effort. It was fun times.[00:13:14] Mike Huerter: Those kind of things that make it a lot of fun. I mean, if you can, you know--things don't go well the first time, obviously when you try things and you just have to laugh and practice until you get it right.[00:13:26] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Absolutely. So out of curiosity, since this was kind of an endeavor you undertook a little bit later than most people start--which is fantastic, I have so much admiration for that-- do you, did you have a lot of like funny conversations with people who were like, "You're doing what?"[00:13:47] Mike Huerter: Yeah. I still get that actually. It's like you, you're! Well , let me back up. I will say that anybody who doesn't think God has a sense of humor , if people knew me growing up, then they find out I'm now doing ballet. Yeah. God does have a sense of humor. I would never, in my wildest dreams, thought I would be performing in any kind of ballet. So yeah. I still have some interesting conversations. Like, "Did you say ballet?" You know, obviously people get the ideas, like "You're not wearing a tutu or anything?" and I was like, "No, we don't wear tutus, but you know, I still do ballet."[00:14:25] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah. That's so funny. Oh my gosh. So, okay. So are there any moments, you know, either performing or watching someone perform, or it doesn't even have to be related to dance necessarily, but kind of any moments where you were experiencing art and something really stood out and you kind of tucked it away as a moment to remember?[00:14:47]Mike Huerter: Oh gosh. There's been a couple moments in, in doing "Mystery" at Christmas where playing the role of Joseph right after the baby is born, I, I carry a really alive baby in the performances out to the center of the stage. And there was one particular year, I remember looking down at this , it was, it happened to be a girl . So , but I noticed one little lone tear rolling out of her eye and it struck me at that point that even then Jesus knew what He was going to do for us later on. And I almost fell to my knees on stage, just at the thought of that. And then there was another year I distinctly remember realizing and feeling is of it, playing that Joseph role, again, that at the, at the end of our little dance performance, I always kissed the baby on the forehead. And it struck me at that point that Joseph--I just got this overwhelming feeling of what Joseph must have felt like to realize he was actually the first physical person to kiss the face of God.[00:16:00] Lindsey Dinneen: Wow. Yeah. Those are two really big moments of inspiration. Just getting to think of it in those terms, it kind of brings more realness and, and humanity and, and all those things to this story that's, you know, sometimes feels a little distant. So that's, that's pretty amazing.[00:16:22] Mike Huerter: Yeah. Those two, I think will probably stand out-- at least for now, anyhow--as probably the two most greatest feelings of my life and in performing.[00:16:31] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Wow. Well, and so, you know, once everything kind of gets back to a semblance of normal, whatever that's going to look like , you had mentioned still planning to, you know, get back into it. So you were planning to go back to classes and perform and all that kind of stuff?[00:16:48] Mike Huerter: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's my goal. I will, I would love to . Just it's, it's a good exercise. It's great exercise. It's you know, it keeps people connected , helps keep me young, hanging around with young, younger people. Because there's, there's going to be a day, you know, that I'm not going to be able to do it anymore. And I'm trying to fight that as much as possible.[00:17:11] Lindsey Dinneen: Very good. Very good. Well, I, I always ask my guests the same three questions and I was wondering if I could go ahead and do that with you?[00:17:20] Mike Huerter: Well, absolutely.[00:17:21] Lindsey Dinneen: Very good. Okay. So first of all, how do you personally define art or what is art to you?[00:17:30] Mike Huerter: Well, you know, art takes many forms dance acting, obviously drawing, painting. So I mean, for me, I think I probably gravitate more towards the acting, dancing role of art then, but that doesn't take away anything from any other art form, by any means ,  you know, musicians and all that. My sons and daughters are very musical. I love music. I, I wish I could play it, but I can't. So I'm in total admiration of people who can. I mean, it's such a gift that they can just-- my son's trying to, you know, he was trying to teach us to harmonize some time. They say, "Dad, it's right there in front of you." And it's like, "No, you don't understand. It's not right there in front of me. It might be for you." 'Cause he's got that ability where he can just pick out notes and play them, that kind of thing. So this would be a very sad world that any form of art . I think art-- it saddened me to see you know, some schools, they, it's not very high on their priority list. I think it's a great outlet for people to express their feelings as things that are going on, maybe emotionally in their lives. It's a great outlet for them, for them to, to bring that out without actually, without actually having to sit down and talk to somebody about it. I mean, they can express it in whatever form they want to. And it's, I think art's more for us, you know, the people are performing it than it is for the people that we're actually presenting it to.[00:18:54]Lindsey Dinneen:  Yeah, that's great. Okay. And then what do you think is the most important role of an artist?[00:19:01]Mike Huerter: Probably just be true to yourself. You know, you, you can't fake art. It's, I mean, yeah, I'm portraying a role in something, and I guess people would maybe think that's fake, but for me, I want to do it to the very best of my ability. I want people to--when they, when they look and see me doing something, they don't see me, they see the person or, you know, that I'm trying to portray.[00:19:28]Lindsey Dinneen: I really liked that. Yeah. Okay. And then my final question is, and I'll explain my terms a little bit, but do you think that art should be inclusive or exclusive? And what I mean by that is inclusive referring to an artist who creates something puts it out into the world and provide some context behind it. It doesn't have to be a lot, but you know, even title, program notes, inspiration, whatever to kind of help give the audience, the background info . Versus exclusive referring to an artist who does create their work, puts it out there, but doesn't provide context behind it. So it's kind of completely up to the viewer to interpret it the way that they do.[00:20:13]Mike Huerter: Oh, goodness. That's a hard question because I can actually see both sides of that. You know, I guess I would probably lean more toward the inclusive because if you're using your art form to convey a message--and there are some people out there who have not been exposed to art-- so it would be as the, as the portrayer of the art, you might have a particular message you want delivered. And if there's no background to to go along with that, the message you're trying to portray may not be seen by the person you're trying to convey it to. So I think a little bit of context behind a piece is beneficial.  But then on the other side, you know, on the, if you're a true artist, then we'll let the person see whatever they want to see in it. But I, I'm still leaning more towards the inclusive.[00:21:11] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. I definitely think there's value in both. And it's completely up to the artists too, because they can, you know, make decisions based on what makes sense. You know, I've certainly created works that I haven't--well, I almost always, I have to say, I almost always add some sort of program note--but in theory, you know, art should be able to stand on its own as well, right? And then, you know, it's kind of fun to have the background, but you don't always need it.[00:21:40] Mike Huerter: So yeah, a lot of it just depends on what you're trying to portray. If you, if you just want to do a fun piece to let people think what they will, great. Don't give any context. But if you really, if there's a message in there that you want delivered, I think a little bit of context would help turn the light bulb on, so to speak, for people. It's like, "Oh, I get what they're doing."[00:21:59]Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah. So I'm curious, it's another question kind of popped in my head. So whe--you've talked a lot about what about these really, really deep, impactful moments for you. You know, you've had the opportunity to portray Jesus, which is a huge undertaking. And you know, so I'm, I'm kind of curious: do you find yourself leaning more towards opportunities that give you a chance to share something that's very you know, meaningful to you personally, or do you also enjoy more lighthearted things, or is it kind of like a little bit of both?[00:22:36]Mike Huerter: I, yeah, I think a little bit of both. I mean, I think originally just because that was the only role I was really being used in was the spiritual until, you know, I got some other opportunities. So I, I, I mean, at this point I kind of welcome just about anything really. The, the aspect of a light-hearted is fun, enjoyable. I mean, like that little coffee piece we did, and we talked about before that we need to somehow bring back. That was fun. That was just a fun, you know, no real spiritual message in it at all. It's more of a an everyday person who's getting up to go to work type message. It's like, "Oh, okay." But yeah, so yeah, anything really? I mean, I, I just enjoy being part of it.[00:23:19] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, definitely. I think it's fun to have a little bit of both too. Like, I'm all, I'm all about the joy aspect, but I think that it's, you can get that from, from both sides and it's fun to have, have some of both. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Mike, for being my guest today. I really appreciate it, and sharing your stories. I mean, you brought such depth to this conversation, and I really appreciate you being so honest 'cause I know sometimes those are, it's a little hard to be vulnerable when it's, you know, something that it did mean so much to you. So that's, that's really cool that you shared that. So thank you for that. I really appreciate it.[00:24:01] Mike Huerter: You're very welcome. You're welcome. Anytime.[00:24:03]Lindsey Dinneen:  And thank you also to everyone who has listened to this episode, and if you're feeling as inspired as I am, I would love if you would share this with a friend or two, and we will catch you next time.[00:24:19] If you have a story to share with us, we would love that so much. And I hope your day has been Artfully Told.[00:24:27]Hey, Artfully Told listeners. It's Lindsey here. I want to say, first of all, thank you so very much for your continued support of Artfully Told, for listening to the episodes, and for being a part of bringing art to the world. I really believe that what we're doing is important and matters, and I'm just excited to share art with you on a continual basis. I do want to reach out to you.  I do the whole podcasts myself, from the interviews themselves to the editing, to the transcribing, and then of course posting and all that good stuff. And I absolutely love what I do, but it is both time-consuming and expensive to run a podcast. I have to have the proper equipment. And then of course the proper editing software and hosting platform. And in order to continue to be able to do this on a sustainable basis for the future, I'm asking our listeners, if you guys would consider supporting the podcast, even a very small, monthly donation, like $5 a month, would really go a long way towards me being able to continue to do this in the future. And so I've set up a PayPal account that you can access through the Artfully Told website, which is www.artfullytold.podbean.com. And I would love if you would consider just making a monthly reoccurring donation to support the podcast. We don't have corporate sponsors. So everything that you hear is me doing this from a labor of love. And I love it, but I would ask if you would perhaps consider supporting it too. Thank you so much. Have an amazing day and I'll catch you next time.

Congratulations, Living People, you're listening to Up Is Down. This time around I had the pleasure of getting my mind blown about how to live a life free of chemical interference through a balance of nutrition, hydration and active measures to separate oneself from mega-corporate industry. And you can still enjoy beer and coffee and the other toxic things we've been conditioned to cling to, albeit not as often, and for good reason; leaky gut and rectal bleeding not withstanding....Full disclosure: Tim is the first guest I've had on the show who is actively trying to sell his products, but I would never talk to someone about his business on the show if I didn't actually find the work compelling at a minimum and worth investing in. The truth is that Tim is genuinely attempting to help sick people, which is all of us, whether we acknowledge it or not. Has there ever been a better time to safeguard your body than time like these?Tim offers great 100% whole plant sourced vitamins and supplements at reasonable prices with a 2X money back guarantee, but more importantly he offers insight into the industrial manufacturing of conventional supplements and personal experience of the consequences of the typical Western/American diet. It's disturbing and inspiring to say the least. I hope you listen and learn from Tim James, The Health Hero, and consider investing in your own health and life. I know I am.Listeners of the podcast can enjoy and additional 5% off his low ass prices at checkout with thepromo code UP . You can also try "up". Not sure if it's cap-specific....Visit: chemicalfreebody.comYou can learn more about Tim James at the website and his podcast Health Hero Showhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/health-hero-show-official-chemical-free-body-lifestyle/id1500992074For more background of Tim's story and deeper insight to questions left unanswered in this podcast check out these episodes:Grimerica: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-grimerica-show/id653314424?i=1000492810732Debrah Gets Red Pilled: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/debra-gets-red-pilled/id1529830406#episodeGuid=https%3A%2F%2Fdebratakestheredpill.podomatic.com%2Fentry%2F2020-12-01T20_24_41-08_00Truthzilla: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-truthzilla-podcast/id1517341383#episodeGuid=truthzilla.podbean.com%2F50cfe9aa-ad46-3489-8b17-f86189dfedcdMacroaggressions w/ Charlie Robinson: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/macroaggressions/id1501964274?i=1000494313155Another great appearance on Charlie's show: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/macroaggressions/id1501964274?i=10004853920315% off with PROMO CODE: UP chemicalfreebody.comClosing music is Thin Lizzy "Cowboy Song"((((S U P P O R T THE S H O W)))) https://paypal.me/frankenbones?locale.x=en_USBitCoinCash BCH: qzgwfjeu5vp634h84zzurw8kdah5j3cuxg8daq6qrk. 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I will never accept sponsorships that require me to try and sell you bullshit products you not only don't need, but likely cannot afford anyway. I believe that Value-For-Value is indeed the future of free speech and expression, as anything else has already proved itself to be more than compromised at all levels; you can actually just sit back and watch monetized platforms disintegrate each and every day. That cannot happen with Value-For-Value, because only YOU decide what's valuable and only YOU decide how that is determined and returned. Now that's power!Of course you can always listen (and donate) at:deanreiner.comS U B S C R I B ED O N A T ED O W N L O A DR E P O S TS H A R EC O M M E N TS U P P O R TS U P P O R TS U P P O R TR A T E / R E V I E WE M A I L upisdownpodcast@gmail.comdeanreiner.com for more arthttps://paypal.me/frankenbones?locale.x=en_USThis site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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This episode features an old, Western American town and its relaxing traffic soundscape on a very easy-going afternoon. Enjoy! --- Artist: Sleep & Study Soundscapes --- Listen to ASMR & Chill on your favorite podcast directory: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2RKJerO Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2H4sfMS Google Podcasts: https://bit.ly/2Fkr7lM Stitcher: https://bit.ly/2AECMbY Overcast: https://bit.ly/2QxN6rf Podbean: https://bit.ly/2H4qBe8 Anchor: https://bit.ly/2shxyyd Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/Aoo0 --- Email: Hello@SleepandRelaxASMR.com www.SleepandRelaxASMR.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/asmrandchill/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/asmrandchill/support

In this episode, my guest, Myka Meier and I are discussing modern etiquette, how to create the best first impression, how to become the most loved guest at the party, main points for a first date etiquette, who should pay on a first date, cellphone etiquette, birthday gifts and thank you cards, resume and interview main etiquette points, etiquette for couples, etc. My Guest Myka Meier @mykameier is an American-British entrepreneur, etiquette coach, and author. She is the founder of Beaumont Etiquette and co-founder of the Plaza Hotel's Finishing Program. Meier has authored two books, Modern Etiquette Made Easy: A Five-Step Method to Mastering Etiquette and Business Etiquette Made Easy: The Essential Guide to Professional Success. Myka was trained in part by a former member of The Royal Household of Her Majesty the Queen, and has attended multiple finishing schools in both England and Switzerland. While all courses are based on Western (American, British and European fundamentals) etiquette and taught in English, the programs were created to be exciting, interactive and modern to reflect today’s global society. http://beaumontetiquette.com/plaza-hotel/ Your Host Olyasha Novozhylova - NotBasicBlonde @notbasicblonde_ NotBasicBlonde Podcast @nbbpodcast Olyasha Novozhylova is the founder and creator of Not Basic Blonde, a fashion, and lifestyle blog dedicated to inspiring young women to create an extraordinary style. The Russian model led an impressive 10-year career in fashion and runway in Atlanta and overseas, as well as enjoying several acting roles. Now a leading influencer, Olyasha shares her beauty, wellness, and fashion tips with an audience of over half a million. https://notbasicblonde.com/about/  

For our first episode, we are laying the foundation of what cultural shifts that have happened in Western/American culture that require the church to re-imagine its call and what success looks like. "Joining God, Remaking Church, and Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time" by Alan J. Roxburgh

Cowboys and Western American culture. I bet each of you immediately had an image pop into your head. What if that image was tweaked slightly, and now that rough and tough cowboy was gay. We all remember the wild success of Broke Back Mountain, but there are other voices telling this story. #gaylovestories #gaywriters #selfpublishingsuccess #selfpublishingmarketingstrategiesDon't forget to find me on your favorite social media: https://linktr.ee/angelakayaustin .When an author decides to pen a #book, what are the considerations made? How do they determine their heroes or heroines?My discussion with BA Tortuga is about just that. Why did she choose to #write stories about #gay #cowboys? How did she manage to carve out a successful #self-publishing career that has spanned for years. A career that not only included her own books, but #publishing #books by other #authors.Join us as we discuss why BA Tortuga writes these unique stories about #cowboys.Don't forget visit my #YouTube channel! https://www.youtube.com/AngelaKayAustin

Distancing from some of the Western/American teachings and traditions to follow The Way according to Scripture.

In 2020, cancer is predicted to be diagnosed in 15 million people – with 12 million associated deaths. Lifestyle choices – like our diet, percent total and visceral, abdominal body fat, and exercise history (or lack of it), are potentially tied to 35% of all cancer deaths.According to research - From the Table to the Tumor: The Role of Mediterranean and Western Dietary Patterns in Shifting Microbial-Mediated Signaling to Impact Breast Cancer Risk - which appeared in the November 2019 issue of the online, open access, peer-reviewed journal Nutrients, “diet-associated elevation of cancer risk has been specifically linked to 13 malignancies, and is most closely correlated with prostate, colorectal, gall bladder, pancreatic, endometrial, and breast cancer patient deaths.” Obesity, notes the research, “is associated with 14% of cancer deaths in males and 20% in females, though dietary intake (i.e., red meat intake), regardless of body weight is heavily correlated with cancer risk and prognosis.”Researchers from various departments at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, comment that the correlation between dietary intake and cancer risk is well documented. However, an understanding of the causation mechanisms behind this association is unclear. It’s estimated that more than 12% of US women will be diagnosed with breast cancer during their lifetime. 268,600 new cases were diagnosed in 2019. Breast cancer risk is also associated with health and lifestyle behaviors. It’s estimated that approximately 30% to 50% of all cancer cases could be prevented by practicing healthy lifestyle habits and minimizing exposure to cancer risk factors. The Mediterranean (Med) diet is a good place to start on the cancer prevention path. Consuming a dietary pattern that consists largely of vegetables (including beans and legumes), fruits, and whole grains, while reducing exposure to processed red meats, refined sugars, carbohydrates, fat, and excessive alcohol, is the hallmark of the Med diet.The Wake Forest researchers comment that, “vegetables, fruits, lean protein, and monounsaturated fatty acids contained in olive oil were reported to reduce postprandial glucose variations and pro-inflammatory molecule secretion. The n-3 fatty acids contained in fish, fish oil, and nuts that are also components of the Med have anti-inflammatory effects, and thereby reduce arachidonic-acid-derived eicosanoids.”On the other hand, the Western - American-type - Diet (WeD) - characterized by containing high amounts of refined starches, sugar, red and processed meats, saturated fats, trans fats, and low amounts of fruit, vegetables, and whole grains – has been associated with an elevated breast cancer risk.The researchers reference a study from October 2007–July 2008, “that was conducted to investigate the association between the WeD and MeD and mammographic density. Mammographic density was categorized as (1) less than 10%, (2) 10–25%, (3) 25–50%, and (4) greater than 50%. The researchers reported that women, who had higher adherence to the WeD were more likely to have high mammographic density compared to women with low adherence to the WeD.”This same study determined that, “there was no association between MeD and mammographic density. Elevated mammographic density is associated with increased breast cancer risk,” as noted by the research.Among other determinations, the researchers emphasized that, “epidemiological data supports the critical impact of dietary pattern on breast cancer risk; WeD consumption elevates breast cancer risk, while consumption of a MeD reduces breast cancer risk.”

Ozark Highlands Radio is a weekly radio program that features live music and interviews recorded at Ozark Folk Center State Park’s beautiful 1,000-seat auditorium in Mountain View, Arkansas. In addition to the music, our “Feature Host” segments take listeners through the Ozark hills with historians, authors, and personalities who explore the people, stories, and history of the Ozark region. In this week’s special episode, OHR heads west. The Western United States encompasses a plethora of great musical traditions. We’ve saddled up a superb sampling of Western American music performed by various traditional artists recorded live at Ozark Folk Center State Park in Mountain View, Arkansas. Featured on this episode are The Jason Roberts Band, The Purple Hulls, Don Edwards, The Western Flyers, Dom Flemons, Frank Fairfield & Zac Sokolow, The Quebe Sisters, and Riders in the Sky. Let’s ride! In this week’s “From the Vault” segment, musician, educator, and country music legacy Mark Jones offers a 1976 archival recording of Ozark original and our very own Dave Smith performing the song “The Happy Sunny Side of Life” from the Ozark Folk Center State Park archives. In his segment “Back in the Hills,” writer, professor, and historian Dr. Brooks Blevins investigates historic outlaws of the Ozarks. Many famous outlaws including Bonnie & Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd have hidden out in the Ozarks. Brooks guides us through this cult of criminality, recounting details of some of the nation’s most notorious crooks’ Ozark experiences in part one of this series called “Public Enemy.”

This episode is full of helpful vocabulary break downs. We discuss what mantra is, what sankalpa is (typically called 'intentions' in a Western/ American yoga class), bija, japa, bhava and more. Enjoy this deep dive into Nada yoga, or the yoga of sound, complete with a chant at the end. BONUS: a little 'how to engage' in a kirtan should you ever go to one! Deep gratitude for Nataraj Chaitanya and all his wisdom and teachings!

From the Pages of BlackPast.org: Six African American Women You have Never Heard of Who Changed the West (and the World) In this lecture, Professor Taylor examined six little-known black women whose experiences helped challenge and redefine the basic narrative of the black historical experience. He explored how BlackPast.org changes the narrative of African American history by making available to a global audience significant people, places, and events. The Lucile Berkeley Buchanan Memorial Lecture is a free speaker series celebrating Lucile Berkeley, whose parents were emancipated slaves who settled in Colorado in 1882. Lucile Berkeley Buchanan Jones was a lifelong educator, a visionary who stood up against injustice, a woman of faith, and a firm believer in the electoral process. She graduated with a BA in German from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1918 and taught high school in Arkansas, Kansas, and Illinois. "As a researcher and writer, Quintard Taylor has played a leading role in the revitalization of the field of Western American history," Patty Limerick, Faculty Director of the Center of the American West, said. "And, as a dynamic speaker, he delivers insight with an intensity and energy nearly unmatched among scholars." Quintard Taylor, the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History at the University of Washington, is the author of The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle's Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era and In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990. In 2004, Taylor created BlackPast.org. BlackPast houses over 3,000 pages of information, has links to over 600 other websites, and features contributions by more than 400 scholars. It is now one of the largest reference websites for African American and Global: African history.

The Bible is written from a Middle Eastern Jewish perspective. It naturally challenges our Western American perspective. When we twist the Bible to fit our western perspective we miss out on the Bible’s power to challenge mistaken Western presuppositions about life, love, purpose and family.

Brenden Rensink, BYU historian and assistant director of the Charles Redd Center, talks about how his trail-running hobby influences his scholarship. Brenden W. Rensink (Ph.D., 2010) is the Assistant Director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and an Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. Rensink recently published the monograph book, Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands (https://amzn.to/2llJTxJ) (Connecting the Greater West Series, Texas A&M University Press, 2018), co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, Essays on American Indian and Mormon History (University of Utah Press, 2019), co-editor of Documents Vol. 4, (https://amzn.to/2JZ3v6q) and Documents Vol. 6 (https://amzn.to/2DBhgrB) of the award-winning Joseph Smith Papers (https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/articles/awards) projects (Church Historians Press, 2016, 2017), co-author of the Historical Dictionary of the American Frontier (https://amzn.to/2FjmN83) (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), and author multiple articles, book chapters, and reviews. (http://www.bwrensink.org/scholarship-publications/) Rensink helps manage events, programming, awards, and research at the BYU Redd Center. He also created and directs two ongoing public history initiatives for the Redd Center: serving as the Project Manager and General Editor of the Intermountain Histories (http://www.intermountainhistories.org/) digital public history project and as the Host and Producer of the Writing Westward Podcast. (http://reddcenter.byu.edu/pages/writing-westward-podcast) His current research projects include consulting with the Native American Rights Fund, editing a collection of essays on 21st Century West History, and a writing new cultural and environmental history monograph tracing experience in, perception of, and recreation in Western American wilderness landscapes. Jeff Nichols and Brent Olson co-direct the Institute for Mountain Research (http://mountainresearch.org) and our 2018-2019 Mountain Fellows are Katie Saad and Naomi Shapiro. Our theme song is “Home” by Pixie and the Partygrass Boys. (https://www.pixieandthepartygrassboys.com). As Naomi likes to say, “They are awesome and you should check them out.” Special Guest: Brenden Rensink.

The famous Oscar Wilde saying “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life” holds little truth in Colorado. With the magnificent mountains and bucolic landscapes located across the state, artist and pioneers could not help but replicate the sights before them. From the documentary art of early expeditions, to the celebratory art of the iconic bronco busting cowboy, discover the backstory of 250 years of Western American art.

Coach Sam and Coach Sabastian have a conversation about the cultures they were raised in, how they helped shape who they are today, and how they learned to take the best of their cultures and incorporate them into the raising of their own families. ________________________________________________________ Parable #1: Multi-Cultural Coach Sam hails from three different cultures: the Persian/Middle Eastern culture, the French Canadian culture, and the American culture. The orchestration of these three cultures has only recently been viewed as an asset to him. As a young man, Sam wanted to hide so he would blend in; whereas today, he sees his multi-cultural background as an asset that has weaponized his mind, weaponized the way he speaks and communicates, and has allowed him to see different perspectives. QUESTION What cultures have influenced you?   Parable #2: Individualistic vs Collective The difference between the Eastern and Western cultures is this: One is an individualistic mindset, and the other is a collective culture mindset. In the Western culture mindset, when one is considering marriage, it is based on what the individual wants. In the Eastern culture, the question becomes, “Will my parents like her?” All the questions asked are not individualistic, they are based on a collective culture and your family unit. QUESTION Do you practice the mindsets of your youth? Why or why not?   Parable #3: The Best of Both Worlds Coach Sam freed himself from the demands of the collective culture. On the one side, there is beauty because you’re involving loved ones. On the other side, it’s total slavery to what everyone wants vs what you want. It’s basically an abandonment and total rejection of doing what others want him to do, coupled with an integration of the mindset of doing what he wants that has led him to adopt a system that carries the best of the East while operating in the Western world. QUESTION What have you rejected from your childhood teachings?   Parable #4: Colliding Cultures Coach Sabastian: As our cultures collide, just as we collide in our conversations, it’s not what’s right or wrong, it’s what works in the context find ourselves in. He came to America with a step-father and grew up German Catholic. “I grew up as a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant aka a WASP. ” He later learned he was Vietnamese/Chinese, another sub-category of Vietnamese people. He had to study and learn about his cultures, then reconcile with them. QUESTION What are the roots of your heritage?   Parable #5: Universal Principles As Coach Sam raises his son, it is his role to inject into him the wisdom of the East and allow him to choose. The East doesn’t present choices, they force. Coach Sabastian: I gave my sons the Western American culture which is abundance, and rooted them in the universal principles of love, forgiveness, and trust in God. As an analogy, a kite represents the Western culture of abundant, endless opportunities, which is tied or tethered to fundamental principles.” QUESTION What are your fundamental principles? Parables from the Pit: “We are two men proud and honored to live in the West while carrying seeds of the East.” –Sam Falsafi “The deeper you root your family in this Ethos, the higher your children will be able to fly.” — Sabastian Huynh

This is one of the most true-feeling phrases we’ve come to discover in our experiences following Jesus and trying to put one foot in front of the other in life. Kyle shares about the life-change he’s experienced leaning into the way the Eastern Orthodox church has historically taught people how to pray and approach life, and how that’s different (in a good way) from what a Western American like him is used to.

Tom Szaky is the CEO and founder of TerraCycle, a company that makes consumer products from waste. They recycle everything from cigarette butts, toothbrushes to diapers. The beauty of it? It's all funded by producers! Listen in as Christopher and Tom talk trash about trash and how the economics of recycling benefits producers and consumers alike. "Every 2-seconds, a garbage truckload of trash goes into the ocean." - Tom Szaky 'Diaper Demand' economics is real Diapers make up 3% of our landfills. It's not just kids, 50% of men over 50 wear them.  Waste is something you pay to get rid of. There is a positive supply and massive quantities of it but a negative demand. While you won't buy a dirty diaper from me, you would probably buy it from me at a negative price. It's a huge fucking opportunity that not many see. There's opportunity in trash If you think about the super sexy industries, the ones everyone dreams about being there, they are crowded with amazing people. That makes it really hard to be unique and stand out. Everyone wants to be a rock and roll stars and there are so few spots. You don't get this in an industry that people are repulsed by. The waste industry is that kind of place. But those industries that are repulsing most are the ones to look out for. Waste is the law of death. Everything breaks. It's a predictable path. Disposability is an addiction Floating in each ocean, and there are 5, are massive islands of floating trash, somewhere between 1-3 times the size of TX. BUT, that's only 5% of the waste! The other 95% sinks to the bottom.  Recycling is not the answer to garbage and to stop consuming is not the answer. The answer is to stop buying cheap disposable shit. Instead of buying stuff that lasts one use, we need to buy durable amazing stuff that lasts for a very long time. Think back to the durable products our grandparents, their parents and everyone before that used. Think of it in these terms, 99% of all products become garbage within one year. An average Western American woman buys 67 apparel items a year and uses them on average 5 times before throwing them out. Compare that to the 1920's when the same woman sewed her own clothes and probably had two outfits, total. https://www.terracycle.com/en-US/ https://twitter.com/tszaky https://www.greenbiz.com/article/terracycle-eliminating-idea-waste-recycling-everything https://www.greenbiz.com/article/terracycle-pg-partner-love-hate-relationship-trash https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/308565

As part of it's exhibit Go West! Art of the American Frontier from the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, queer artist and member of the Catawba Tribe DeLesslin George-Warren will lead Indigenous Corps of Discovery tours. The tours will examine more than eighty original artworks by Euro-American and Plains Indian artists as Delessliin strips away the age-old myths and explains that westward expansion was a catastrophe for native Americans and their culture that usually led to genocide. Roo, as DeLesslin is known, joined Managing Editor Glen Warchol on Salt Lake Speaks.

Gospel is bigger than the "plan of Salvation" or bigger than the question of "where am I going to go when I die? Heaven or Hell?" The story of the Bible in big picture is to restore the original “Garden of Eden”, where we were able to walk with God daily, intimately, unashamed. Jesus came to restore that intimacy for all of us. Jesus breaks down tribalism. We look at denominations, and doctrine, and how we tend to leave tension earlier than we should. Check out the Welcoming Prayer, posted on Episode 6 post on www.desirelinepodcast.com/listen.  Contemplative prayer connected to focus, and Philippians 4:6+7. Cultural understanding of individualized culture that we live in in the West, and using Susette's experience with her husbands family in Mexican-American culture in examples of family centered/collectivist culture that's closer to 1st century Judaism. How have we interpreted the idea of salvation through our Western eyes, while trying to live by the Bible, who's authors do not come from a Western American perspective culturally? “Despite its protests to the contrary, modern Christianity has become willy-nilly the religion of the state and the economic status quo. Because it has been so exclusively dedicated to incanting anemic souls into heaven, it has, by a kind of ignorance, been made the tool of much earthly villainy. It has, for the most part, stood silently by, while a predatory economy has ravaged the world, destroyed its natural beauty and health, divided and plundered its human communities and households. It has flown the flag and chanted the slogans of empire. Wendell Berry N.T. Wright Book: The Day the Revolution Began Here's some video/podcast recommendations for N.T. Wright: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UX1GSVR0Tdc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AukgNlAgiI Scot McKnight: What is the Gospel? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HdyhUQ3Krs Podcast: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-n-t-wright-podcast/id447840163?mt=2 If you're interested in connecting with Susette re: online therapy (if you live in California), you can contact her here: www.susettemagana.com/contact www.desirelinepodcast.com/connect

Never miss your #MediaSnack - subscribe for updates every Friday On this week's #MediaSnack we take a look at what it takes to market successfully in China and how the landscape is increasingly dominated by platform giants such as Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu. These three giants are frequently compared to the famous Western (American) platforms like Google, Facebook and Amazon but there lies the challenge. China is a major consideration for most global marketers, not least because it represents still a significant growth opportunity, averaging 7% GDP growth per year and with the total spending power of middle class growing even faster still. Goldman Sachs estimate that China's online retail market will more than double in size by 2020 - to $1.7trn so for western marketers this growth is too good not to take seriously, but for China the same rules of digital marketing do not apply largely because the platforms you need to use are different in China that most Western markets. We consider what's commonly referred to as BAT: Baidu - web services (search engine / video / translations/ mapping) - valued $64.7 billion Alibaba -E-commerce - c2c + b2b + b2c - valued $424 billion Tencent - investment holding corp (social networks/ gaming/ e-commerce/ web portals) - valued $469 billion The 3 Chinese tech giants are broader business than their Western counterparts, notably perhaps because they face less internal competition, largely because the Western brands themselves (particularly Google, Facebook are not active in China). For example, Tencent's business splits out into many other operations including: Social Networks Payment Entertainment Information Utilities Platforms Artificial Intelligence The other main differentiator is their scale, Alibaba dwarfs Amazon in so many metrics: Alibaba, China’s biggest e-commerce group, handles more transactions each year than do eBay and Amazon combined 2016 Prime Day vs. Singles Day = $1 billion rev vs. $17.8 billion Adding revenues from Prime day + Black Friday + Cyber Monday = 43% of Singles' Day revenue Further reading: https://www.warc.com/NewsAndOpinion/News/Alibaba_takes_on_Amazon/39449 https://digiday.com/marketing/chinese-tech-companies-venture-unmanned-convenience-stores/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=digidaydis&utm_source=uk&utm_content=171023 https://www.ft.com/content/d5397a08-4667-11e7-8d27-59b4dd6296b8?mhq5j=e7 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/world/china-watch/technology/new-technology-giants/ http://www.campaignasia.com/article/alibaba-looks-to-cross-border-orders-as-next-avenue-of-singles-day-growth/440730 Good Week: It's a great week for media transparency in the UK - https://gcs.civilservice.gov.uk/news/media-buying-framework-update-draft-framework-agreement-shared/ Bad Week: A bad week for you digital evangelists, prophets or whatever you tiresome echo-chamber dwellers call yourselves now. Watch out you crazy kids, Professor Byron Sharp has you firmly in his sights. In an awesome paper Prof Sharp and friends dispel some of the myths you’ve been spouting on conferences stages and in agency pitches for years. Including ACTUAL FACTS! Read this and hang your well-gelled heads https://www.marketingscience.info/are-big-brands-dying/

Buckle up for today’s info-packed, highly entertaining episode about tourism in the North Caucasus. Today we interview our first ever American guest on the show: Shannon Scarbrough. Shannon is the founder of Elbrus Elevation, a top-notch English-speaking tour operation geared specifically toward Western/American clients, run out of the heart of the North Caucasus. We had … Continue reading "CT6 – Interview with Shannon Scarborough of Elbrus Elevation Mountain Tour Company | Quiz!"

So a stand-up comic, a literary scholar, and a behavioral scientist walk into a lecture hall, and a Western American historian hands them the question, "What’s so funny about pop music?" Join comic Shane Mauss (From Conan, Jimmy Kimmel, Showtime, Comedy Central, Netflix and host of the science podcast “Here We Are”) and CU professors Adam Bradley (author of The Poetry of Pop and director of the Laboratory for Race and Popular Culture, the RAP Lab) and Peter McGraw (co-author of The Humor Code and director of the Humor Research Lab, HuRL) for an evening of learning and laughter. Why do some subjects shock us in speech but amuse us in song? What makes both Bruce Springsteen and Kanye West laugh? Through a blend of stand-up and science, music and comedy we’ll unlock some of the mysteries of two primal urges: shaking our butt and laughing out loud. This event is sponsored by the Center of the American West and its ongoing Humor Initiative, which explores the value of humor as the equivalent of WD-40 in friction-filled times, in collaboration with the RAP Lab and HuRL. The Humor Initiative is made possible by the generosity of Bill and Jane Reynolds.

Dr. Patty Limerick, Faculty Director and Chair of the Board of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado Boulder and professor of environmental studies and history, joins Stephanie Ratte, a student at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, for a conversation about the importance of history for understanding environmental … Continue reading The Significance of the Bureaucrat in Western American History: Hair-Raising Tales from the Department of the Interior →

FrackingSENSE: What We Know, What We Don’t Know, and What We Hope to Learn about Natural Gas Development. The Center of the American West, CU Continuing Education, Boulder County, and the AirWaterGas Research Network invite you to a new lecture series. Beginning on February 26th, on Tuesday nights through May, a speaker with substantial expertise on natural gas development will provide a measured, honest exploration of this controversial topic. Each presenter will be scrupulous about acknowledging areas of uncertainty (“What We Don’t Know”), and emphasizing open questions that require careful deliberation. CU historian Patty Limerick will launch the series with a talk placing natural gas development in the history of Western American extractive industries. Throughout the series, Limerick will act as moderator. Recognizing that many members of the audience will hold strong opinions, we look forward to honest – and civil and respectful – discussions of a crucially important topic.

Rik Sargent, sculptor & Gary Parkins guest hosts will discuss: Sculpture Visions, beyond commissions. What do you create that falls outside public commissions. How do you express your voice. What are the challenges of working 3D? Where do you show your work? Do you feel tethered to the public art realm? What does scale have to do with it? Is bigger better or is is just bigger? How has the process for call for artists, changed with the use of E-mail and digital? With the current school of art, style, and message what is the historic theme? End of the Western American representative school of art. What are your influences? What is your primary message? The foundry world, How much control does an artist have in the production of an art work? Enlargements, computer, hands on, fabricating, your thoughts?.. Rik Sargent, riksargent.com, Gary Parkins, garyparkins.com, Jim Caldwell, ArtWorkNetwork.com, Annette Coleman, annettecolemanartist.com, 8888ArtLook.com Jack Kreutzer, sculpturebykreutzer.com/ Jay Eighmy, j.eighmystudios@g.com Jeannie Mizrah, mizrahiarts.com Anne Shutan, ashutan.com

Beginners.  I took a trip to Seattle last week for an appointment, and to do some shopping. I had arranged for my mother to pick up my kids from school, and stay with them until my husband got home from work. So, I was free for the day. Luckily, we have no snow yet, so the towns and highways are still clear and dry. Driving from here to Seattle takes about three hours, so, there and back, you are on the road for six hours. It sounds crazy to drive six hours for a brief visit. Mind you, Seattle is a beautiful city with everything imaginable available. There are many products and facilities that you just can't get in a small, rural town, so sometimes a trip to the big city is necessary. I don't go there as often as I would like, so I decided to treat myself to a day away. Another good thing about taking that road trip is the scenery. It is breathtaking. Most of the journey between Wenatchee and Seattle is through forest. You must go over one of the mountain passes that take you through the Cascade Mountain Range, and then you drop down towards sea level where you find the city. I am not used to driving in busy Seattle traffic. You have to be alert and keep your eyes peeled. Ironically, in the middle of the busiest traffic, two of my sons called me from their school, "Mum, I forgot to bring my homework to class. Can you bring it in?" and "Mum, we're low on lunch money. Could you come in a bring a check?" Sorry boys, Mum is unavailable, she's taking the day off, she is out of the office! Grammar notes.  Vocabulary: an appointment, to arrange, available, to keep one's eyes peeled. Exs: I have three appointments today, one with the doctor, one with the dentist, and one with a chiropractor. I arranged a get together with some friends. We had lunch and did some flower arrangements. The receptionist told me that the boss is unavailable right now; he's in a meeting. Keep your eyes peeled; if we're lucky, we'll see a deer or two in the field. Advanced.  I had a great time in Seattle. I did some shopping in one of my favorite stores, an international import store that carries typical English foods: baked beans, digestive biscuits, and lots of different chocolates. It makes me feel connected with England when I go there, and when I get home, my children always look curiously in the bag at the products that their mum used to eat as a child. Well, I unfortunately, shopped for too long, and so, was late for my appointment. But the day was perfect for this time of year. Seattle, as you probably know is very, very rainy. But this day was perfectly clear, sunny, and the views of the Olympian mountains was spectacular. My day came quickly to an end and I headed home. I had to go East, back through the Cascades. In a town called Cle-Elum, I decided to stop, stretch my legs, and have a bite to eat. I went to the Cottage Cafe. It is a local favorite. It is a combination of casual restaurant, cafe, and truck stop. It has low ceilings, wood everywhere, and the smell of fresh food and coffee. I ordered a 'chop chop' salad which had a bit of everything in it. Typically, it was huge; I couldn't finish it. But I was satisfied. I warmed myself up with a cup of coffee and chatted a little with the waitress. "It is always really clean in here," I said, remembering the times I had been there before and thought the same thing. "Thankyou, we try our best," she said while wiping down the glass of a pie display. It was a cosy stop for me. The hum of conversation, the wood cabin feel, the cleanliness, and the good food, had all made me feel at home. I noticed two wooded plaques on the wall. One said, "Freshly baked pies," and the other said, "Home cook'n". Yes, this place is definitely a good American road-side restaurant. Grammar notes. Western American slang: Home cook'n, shoot, yep and nope in one word answers, gee's, to talk someone's leg off: Exs: She sure does some good home cook'n. Shoot, I just broke the last light bulb! "Do you like beans?" Answer: "Nope!" "Yep!" Turn the music down! Gee's, I can't hear myself think! I ran into my neighbor at the store, and she talked my leg off for about an hour!

Fencing the Sky (Holt) Western American novelist James Galvin contrasts the eternal values of the natural world of his youth with the rapacity of the "land pimps" who infest the New West.