Podcasts about yeah i'm

Updates about what's been going on in my DJ Career, the importance of mental health, Shaderoom BULLSHIT, and Weekly Motivation... For "Ask Relle" segment please email: relletalkpod@gmail.com Weekly Bangers Playlist On Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/weekly-bangers/pl.u-aZb0k26uVR3ZPb Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/RELLEDOTDOM --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/relletalk/support

Clones, Warren Buffet, Moose, Anthropology, Sea Turtles, and a World where Animals Could Talk. Unrelated to each other; for the most part. If you're an Anthropologist or just know more about human history than we do, email us at rahulandjake@gmail.com! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

George's cousin Vinnie has spent the past month road-tripping across the country, working remotely in their tech job, and stopped by to tell us all about it. We are here to share our entire intersectional experience with anyone who finds it beneficial, but we want to know what you connect with the most. You can let us know by clicking to a one-question anonymous survey at vote.pollcode.com/32371374. If you have a request/suggestion that isn't listed, comment! We can be found online at TransPanTastic.net, you can email us at TransPanTastic@gmail.com, and "TransPanTastic" is searchable on most social networks. We would love to hear from you, so let us know what you think or what you want to hear about!

My random thoughts about everything going on the world today. https://anchor.fm/reggie-lewis/message --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/reggie-lewis/support

There's a pit and you are stuck in and you have chosen to believe the lie that you will never get out of it so you might as well just accept it as who you are.

I discuss how I really, truly have Bipolar I, PTSD, and likely have sleep apnea.  And how I feel accomplished getting out of bed each day despite those.

I lost my mind...I'm not looking  --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/4amshowshow/support

This week, we have Baltimore's best hugger, the amazing Hazel Deréon on to talk about everything from their drag family, her own racial imposter syndrome, and dealing with extreme fat phobia on TikTok. We are also joined by a special friend, Hazel's smoke detector! Those things are too fuckin high up. We hope you enjoy the episode! Tithes and Offerings: This week we once again supporting the INCREDIBLE cast of the We The Kingz: Black Excellence show on February 23rd at 8pm EDT on twitch.tv/kinggrickyyrosee! Hosted by Ricky Rosé and Blaq Dinamyte! They are at $400 of the $2000 goal so lets get them there! @rickyyrosee on Venmo $rickyyrosee on Cashapp or PayPal.me/RosalynnM, support this Amazing upcoming show!  

In this episode, I talk about James Harden's first few games with the Brooklyn Nets, why Kevin Durant is atop my MVP ladder, how poorly the Cavaliers are handling Kevin Porter Jr. and even a little bit about the NFL playoffs. Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/zjcronin Follow me on Instagram: https://instagram.com/zach.cronin Follow me on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@zach.cronin Follow the show on Twitter & IG: @hedgingscreens If you enjoyed the episode, like it, subscribe, leave a rating or a review! Many thanks and much love

In this week's episode: Scott and Matt catch up on movies they've seen since the last episode, discuss the WB/HBO Max deal and review the Riz Ahmed film, the Sound of Metal.

My fears for our country. And what I found in Ephesians that seems so fitting for the time I'm currently in.

In Episode 98, we continue our conversation with Chris Cherico of Guardian Tax Solutions. Chris talks about why it is a good idea to take a picture of receipts because they fade over time, the number one mistake small business owners make and why it is not a good idea to self prepare. Chris does a diagnostic profile for his clients to understand their entire picture. TIPS ON DEALING WITH PPP 1) Talk to your bank about forgiveness 2) Make your tax pro aware of how much PPP money you received and how you spent it. THANKS FOR LISTENING Thank you so much for listening to our podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and think others can benefit from it, please share it with them. Do you have any feedback or questions about the episode? Please share with us at info@wired2change.com SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST If you would like to get automatic updates of new Wired2Change episodes, you can subscribe to the ITunes, Stitcher or the podcast app on your mobile device. ABOUT WIRED2CHANGE #Wired2Change formed in early 2019 by two people who had nothing in common except the passion to help people. Trinity is from Michigan and got married in 2019. Mike is from Raleigh and is a very happy grandfather, husband and father of two sons. We work with small business owners to put #systems and #processes in place to help their business become more profitable so they can enjoy the life of a small business owner. CONTACT WIRED2CHANGE www.wired2change.com https://www.facebook.com/wired2change/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/wired-2-change --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wired-2-change/message

Tonight, we party like it's 1999! [Boo! Hiss!] I know, but these descriptions don't just write themselves. It's not that we are lazy, it's that we just don't care. But seriously, we hit 1999 and cover the best and some of the worst. We have some notable sequels, a couple of classics, one of the weirdest movies you will ever see, and we cover the teen-age-ification of some of literature's classics, which was a staple of 1999. Listen! Send us cash!

This one's for the boys, as we talk about 2005's Pride & Prejudice. Yeah, you saw that right. On Twitter @moistboyspod Instagram @moistboyspodcast Support us at Patreon.com/moistboyspodcast Eight Days A Weeb: https://anchor.fm/eight-days-a-weeb Zenigata’s Casebook: https://anchor.fm/zenigatascasebook His Dork Materials: https://anchor.fm/hisdorkmaterials Shop merch: http://tee.pub/lic/mwAtwpH6_FM All our links here: Linktr.ee/moistboyspodcast

I talk about couple conspiracies - mask wearing, and Wayfair Child Trafficking and set my record straight. Intro: Saliva - Click Click Boom

We are recording on July 4th because Cooper is headed to camp for three weeks. This episode was a little less structured, but don't worry, we still talked about Taco Bell. We talked about Pop Smoke's new album, (sort of) the king of hot dogs Joey Chestnut, Kanye, being a simp, and preferred torture methods? Not sure how it got to that. The episode ends with an original lofi beat produced by Cooper. There is an album of lofi beats that I made on SoundCloud but you will have to try to find them yourself. Cheers

When we last left our roam-tripping team, they were in need of some auto parts. Let’s find out if that works out for them or if there’s more fire and swords in store!Pledge/donate on Patreon: www.patreon.com/thatdndpodcastSend feedback to: ThatDnDPodcast@Gmail.comVisit our website: http://www.thatdndpodcast.comAmazon Link: http://www.amazon.com/?rw_useCurrentProtocol=1&tag=thdnpo07-20

Tom Ahern returns to the podcast for our annual-ish chat. It doesn't disappoint We talk through - Tommy's books - fatherhood - self identity - dealing with overwhelm - Tools for managing our mental state - Dogs - Finding wonder in the world - self development - learning - and getting uncomfortable

Are you afraid of being judged by others? We are so concerned with what other people will think that it prevents us from moving forward in midlife. Listen in so you can live a judgment free life! Join my Facebook Group! 

What scars do you have? Some people see a scar as an imperfection on your skin, but there could be an amazing story behind that. Trophies come in a variety of forms. And they can be anything from medals and status to scars on your body. So, what trophies do you have that you have a story around? ----- Automated Transcript Below Dean Soto 0:00:00 Hey, this is Dean Soto, founder of FreedomInFiveMinutes.com and ProSulum.com P R O S U L U M .com and we're here again with another Freedom In Five Minutes podcast episode. Today's topic is this: Trophies Come in Many Forms When You Work Hard for Them. That and more coming up.   Dean Soto 0:00:35 Good morning. Daylight Savings Time. At least as of recording. So this might actually be a little while because I pretty much record every day —+ just about every day and my guys are amazing and they do a lot of actual content around these podcasts. Often, they are delayed quite a bit so if you're wondering, “Why the heck is he talking about daylight savings and it's closer to Easter.” Don't worry about it. Just go with it.   Dean Soto 0:01:06 It's more about the story anyway, right? It's more about the story. All right. So, it is a beautiful morning today. It is still having all these amazing yellow wildflowers and everything is blooming. We have our lupines. If you’ve ever seen lupines, they’re like lavender — I don't even know if it might even be the same thing as lavender. I'm not sure. But it's just a beautiful purple flower all over the place and I see the new lupine bushes like that have been planted that are kind of wild and all over the place popping up and everything absolutely amazing — even got a small little manzanita doing its thing that'll have some berries later on yeah it's just absolutely amazing so so yeah   Dean Soto 0:02:00 Oh before I get into this why don't you go to Google. Type in Freedom In Five Minutes podcast and subscribe via Apple iTunes. Won't you go do that? Do it. Do it. You can subscribe to iHeartRadio. You can subscribe to Spotify. If you go to Spotify and you type in Freedom In Five Minutes, you'll find the Freedom In Five Minutes podcast. It'll be up there, alright. So, it's not the five minutes to freedom album or whatever yeah.   Dean Soto 0:02:36 I actually was like oh man I'm not gonna actually name this podcast freedom — I can't name it five minutes of freedom because somebody else already made an album. It keeps on popping up and everything. But it's Freedom In Five Minutes. Complete opposite. Five Minutes comes later. I was recently on a podcast where the podcaster kept saying five minutes to freedom and I'm like...god alright   Dean Soto 0:03:10 So. Jiu-Jitsu. Let's talk about this a little bit. I started Jiu-Jitsu about a year ago. I've talked about this in another episode. I started in February of 2019. The whole idea was I needed a 90-day target. I was part of the Wake Up Warrior community. We were in the Kings’ 90-Day Challenge. It's the way that they do things in the Wake Up Warrior. Every 90 days you create a target for your body, for your spirituality, for your business, as well as your family. Something that you're gonna do with your family and something that I still do today.   Dean Soto 0:04:08 I do it off and on. I need to be much much better about it but something that I still do to this very day and during that time I knew that you're not supposed to create targets that are like, “I want to get to a hundred and eighty pounds.” because weight is not really something that you can truly be accountable.   Dean Soto 0:04:36 If you sign up for an Ironman or for a Jiu-Jitsu tournament or something where you've paid money, you've gone into it. you have to actually do it. It becomes much much harder to say, “Yeah I'm good. I don't need to do it.”   Dean Soto 0:04:50 Especially when it's something that you really truly want to do. So that was my body goal for that time and it was interesting because I had always wanted to do Jiu-Jitsu. But there were two things stopping me. One I wasn’t sure about rolling with the opposite sex which I think I talked about in previous episodes. I always just felt uncomfortable. I don't know, it was just something that was kind of odd to me. I definitely got over that. It's cool because my Warrior Brothers were really helping especially with Jiu-Jitsu. it's a great equalizer of martial arts. You're helping them if they were ever in a really bad situation. To be able to at least have some sort of self-defense.   Dean Soto 0:05:49 So, that was cool. The other thing was I just actually didn't believe that I would be that good at it — that I would be able to even compete. I was relatively out of shape. I just was not in the greatest shape at that time. I was about 215 pounds going on 220. It didn't seem like it was gonna be in the cards. The cool thing was —  the really interesting thing was that I did it anyway. I did my first tournament about two months later.   Dean Soto 0:06:33 I called the gym — I was looking at all these different gyms and it was kind of a good thing because there were all these gyms that were only open in the evenings. I got into Google. Being an entrepreneur, I can go anytime. I don't want to go in the evenings. I want to be able to go whenever I want. So I go on Google and I see one.   Dean Soto 0:06:58 Jim says that they open at 8 o'clock in the morning well they do open at 8 o'clock in the morning but I'm guessing Google got it wrong they only opened on 8 o'clock in the mornings on Saturday so anyway I call this guy I think they had a ClickFunnels little funnel I put in my name and everything like that and then   Dean Soto 0:07:22 Rudy calls me back. It's Fresno Ultimate Martial Arts. Rudy calls me back and I'm like, “Yeah. You know I really want to do a Jiu-Jitsu tournament.”    Dean Soto 0:07:35 It was part of my business things. In about two months. And he's like, “Oh, Whoa. Yeah. I think we'd get you ready by then. That'll be really tough but you're gonna have to really work at it.”   Dean Soto 0:07:48 I was like yeah I have to. I'll just keep calling around to anybody who will take me and help me to do that.   Dean Soto 0:08:07 He's like, “Yeah. No problem. We'll try and make it happen.”   Dean Soto 0:08:11 So I went over there, signed up, and then realized that it was Tuesdays and Thursdays in the evening. And I'm like, “What?!”   Dean Soto 0:08:20 And then on Saturdays, you can roll at around 7:30 in the morning but it ended up being a really really cool thing because the community and the instructor were just so welcoming and so awesome.   Dean Soto 0:08:36 Everyone's so positive and in fact, it was neat because I went to my first Jiu-Jitsu tournament in April or May of 2019 and ended up getting third place in No-Gi and got a little trophy — that was my first trophy in Jiu-Jitsu.   Dean Soto 0:09:01 I was like wow that's really really cool and for a while, nobody was doing much in the way of tournaments and the next tournament that came up with it was a few months later after that and because of that, the whole tournament thing of me doing that, we ended up having five or six people do a tournament. Out of those five or six people, I want to say five of them ended up placing and actually getting medals which was awesome. The pictures that came from it and everything was just really really cool.   Dean Soto 0:09:42 To see that it went from nobody competing to one person competing to five people competing and now in April I'll be doing another tournament and we'll have multiple people doing the tournament over here in central California. I might even do one down in Southern California a few weeks after that.   Dean Soto 0:10:13 That was trophy number one. Trophy number two was not exactly a trophy I expected and wanted. Trophy number two is on my right ear. If you were me, at least. But if you were looking at me it would be my left ear. It is becoming a cauliflower ear.    Dean Soto 0:10:41 I went for a full year doing jiu-jitsu and nothing like that happened at all. Nothing like that happened at all. All of a sudden, I actually don't even know when it happened or how it happened or whatever. But my ear started to swell up and it's been this way for about two weeks now.   Dean Soto 0:11:06 I get a lot of people saying, “Hey are you gonna drain it? Are you gonna do this, you're gonna do that?”   Dean Soto 0:11:10 It's annoying and it's kind of slowed my roll which I think I needed to do anyway. I think I was doing a little bit too much.    Dean Soto 0:11:24 There is someone shooting right now. We’re living in the country so people shoot quite often.   Dean Soto 0:11:39 All that being said — it sounded like an AR15. Anyway, all that being said I have people who say “don't worry about it” as people say “drain it”    Dean Soto 0:11:57 People are like, “Oh my gosh that looks so bad.”   Dean Soto 0:11:59 All in all, I'm like, “I like it.” It's definitely not aesthetically pleasing but it is a trophy. It took me a year to get that thing. It's something that wouldn't have been there had it not been for me doing Jiu-Jitsu and you might be thinking, “Well that's really dumb. Why would you want to have that as a trophy or whatever.”    Dean Soto 0:12:41 Well, I don't know why quite either. But I have this thought that this type of stuff doesn't happen quite often. As I said, it took a year to get this. It took a lot of hard work. It took a tournament and it took a lot of learning. It took a lot of different things. It took a lot of things that people could say, “Oh well, you should drain it because you're gonna be stuck with it for life or whatever.”   Dean Soto 0:13:26 it took a lot of hard work. It took a whole bunch of different things. And to me, if it stays, it stays. If it goes, it goes. I have a scar! I have scars all over my body from different things throughout my life and each scar has a story and those are physical scars and even emotional scars. Things that I do without even knowing that also have a whole reason. And a whole story behind them.   Dean Soto 0:14:00.929,0:14:07.619 I don't want to let those go because those give me power and this gives me power as well. This gives me a powerful story that I want to be able to share with other people. I want my kids to look at my ear and say, “Hey, Dad! How did you get that ear?” and be able to tell them the whole story of how hard I worked to get this thing.   Dean Soto 0:14:34 Trophies come in a variety. They come in a variety of different types. What's the whole purpose of this? Why is this so important? Well, it's important because you have things in your life, you have things in your business, you have things in your family. You have scars. You have things that you work for. Trophies that you worked for, have a huge story around them. It's conventional wisdom — it's the conventional type of people who say “Whitewash it over.” “Don't forget about it.” Yet you get rid of that scar because it looks ugly.   Dean Soto 0:15:32 A scar is a blemish on your body. A scar is a blemish on your soul. That scar is a blemish on your character as scores of lemon. But there are things in that scar that are priceless. There are things in that trophy that are priceless that nobody except you and God knows.   Dean Soto 0:15:52 Nobody except you and God knows. There's a thing in the Bible where it says — I believe it's in Revelation — that God will give you a stone and on that stone is written something that only you and God know. Out of all the billions of people and quadrillions of angels and whatever else is out there. Only you and God know. And guess what? That's the same thing as the trophies that you have won. The trophies that you have earned whether it's a scar. Whether it's a literal trophy. Whether it is a congratulation. Whether it's your marriage and your wife giving you a love note or your husband giving you a love note or whatever it is that is a trophy of hard work that only you know the value of truly know the value of.   Dean Soto 0:17:15 You can communicate that to the other person but only you know the true value of that trophy. So what scars do you have? What trophies do you have that you have a story around? I challenge you this week to at least document or share a story just like this with somebody.    Dean Soto 0:17:44 I never used to be good at stories and I'm still getting better at stories. In fact, it was only about two years ago that I learned a really good structure for telling stories. That's really helped me to be able to do podcasts like this. To be able to share in a way that's cohesive. That structure goes: What, Why, Lesson, & Apply. I learned this from Garrett J White from Wake Up Warrior.   Dean Soto 0:18:18 What, Why, Lesson, & Apply. So, what do you want to talk about? So, like today, it was on trophies and the story behind my cauliflower ear and how that's a trophy.   Dean Soto 0:18:31 Why is that important? Why is that important to me? Why is it important to you? What are the lesson that you're going to get from it and the lesson that this story is trying to explain? And then, how do you apply it in your life? Hence, the challenge to actually document or share that trophy this week. All right. What, Why, Lesson, & Apply. It's very powerful.   Dean Soto 0:19:02 Okay. So what trophy are you going to share? What scars are you gonna share that only you know and only you have learned? Because these scars that I have are what brought Pro Sulum to where it is right now P R O S U L U M .com   Dean Soto 0:19:23 It's why I can work five minutes and have a process be created and boom it's done. It's why I'm able to have a wonderful staff that has an amazing culture who write this content when you look at the blog who are just absolutely amazing people. It came from a lot of this work.   Dean Soto 0:19:56 What, Why, Lesson, Apply. What, Why, Lesson, Apply. Go and do that. What is your scar? What's your trophy? Go check out ProSulum.com P R O S U L U M .com as well as Freedom In Five Minutes. It got me all sentimental...   Dean Soto 0:20:16 I will see you in the next Freedom In Five Minutes podcast episode

We enter the 1st day of May. That's great. It's about to get a little warmer over here in NYC. I know people want to go outside but the experts are saying to be a little more patient and careful. The battle with the virus is not over yet. R.I.P to all who have fallen victim to the virus. Salute to all the heroes who sacrifice their lives to save other lives. Everybody in our prayers and thoughts no matter who you are. While the battle continues, we can still enjoy the good things in life because we will lose our minds if we don't. Let's take it to the reggaeton stage and rock out this weekend with this super mix. Bop ya head, party in the backyard and turn the music up loud. Yeah I'm down for that. Let's go!! 00:00 - Bazarro intro 01:45 - El Tiempo Se Lo Llevo - Flex 05:36 - Yo Te Conozco - Spigga 10:36 - Adictiva - Daddy Yankee & Anuel AA 14:02 - Deseo - Wisin & Yandel ft. Zion & Lennox 17:59 - Que Tengo Que Hacer - Mj ft. De La Ghetto, Randy, Tony Tone 22:40 - Bazarro Mic Break 23:50 - Enamorado De Ti - Los Rakas 26:54 - Nada Mejor - Fuego 29:42 - 3 Generaciones - Wisin ft. Don Chezina & Jon Z 33:16 - 100ml - D.Ozi 36:19 - Por La Paz - Chyno Nyno ft. De La Ghetto 40:46 - Bazarro Mic Break 41:55 - Mojada - Fuego 44:25 - Agnus Dei - Mala Rodriguez 47:17 - Categoria - Cosculluela 54:52 - Rehen - Arcangel ft. Ozuna 57:43 - Cuidao Con El Vino - Villanosam 60:49 - Bazarro Mic Break 62:17 - Finish

We enter the 1st day of May. That's great. It's about to get a little warmer over here in NYC. I know people want to go outside but the experts are saying to be a little more patient and careful. The battle with the virus is not over yet. R.I.P to all who have fallen victim to the virus. Salute to all the heroes who sacrifice their lives to save other lives. Everybody in our prayers and thoughts no matter who you are. While the battle continues, we can still enjoy the good things in life because we will lose our minds if we don't. Let's take it to the reggaeton stage and rock out this weekend with this super mix. Bop ya head, party in the backyard and turn the music up loud. Yeah I'm down for that. Let's go!! 00:00 - Bazarro intro 01:45 - El Tiempo Se Lo Llevo - Flex 05:36 - Yo Te Conozco - Spigga 10:36 - Adictiva - Daddy Yankee & Anuel AA 14:02 - Deseo - Wisin & Yandel ft. Zion & Lennox 17:59 - Que Tengo Que Hacer - Mj ft. De La Ghetto, Randy, Tony Tone 22:40 - Bazarro Mic Break 23:50 - Enamorado De Ti - Los Rakas 26:54 - Nada Mejor - Fuego 29:42 - 3 Generaciones - Wisin ft. Don Chezina & Jon Z 33:16 - 100ml - D.Ozi 36:19 - Por La Paz - Chyno Nyno ft. De La Ghetto 40:46 - Bazarro Mic Break 41:55 - Mojada - Fuego 44:25 - Agnus Dei - Mala Rodriguez 47:17 - Categoria - Cosculluela 54:52 - Rehen - Arcangel ft. Ozuna 57:43 - Cuidao Con El Vino - Villanosam 60:49 - Bazarro Mic Break 62:17 - Finish

Since we’re all stuck at home, here's some cooking advice to help you through. Chef Mark Allison has three boys.. one of whom was diagnosed with type 1 as a baby. He has tips and tricks for us.. starting with: just get started. Mark teaches healthy cooking but isn’t above eating smores with his three sons. Check out Stacey's new book: The World's Worst Diabetes Mom! Mark currently works with the Cabarrus County Health Alliance teaching needed home cooking skills. He’s been the Director of Culinary Nutrition for the Dole Nutrition Institute and he spent many years teaching classical chefs at the Dean of Culinary Arts Education at Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte. Join the Diabetes Connections Facebook Group! Mark has a new book out Let's Be Smart About Diabetes: A cookbook to help control blood sugar while getting the family back around the kitchen table In Tell Me Something Good – a lot of mac and cheese and a lot of help for someone who has always been giving it. Talk about paying it forward… and back. Sign up for our newsletter here ----- Use this link to get one free download and one free month of Audible, available to Diabetes Connections listeners! ----- Get the App and listen to Diabetes Connections wherever you go! Click here for iPhone      Click here for Android Episode Transcript (Rough transcription, has not been edited) Stacey Simms  0:00 Diabetes Connections is brought to you by one drop created for people with diabetes by people who have diabetes by real good foods, real food you feel good about eating and by dexcom take control of your diabetes and live life to the fullest with dexcom.   Unknown Speaker  0:20 This is diabetes connections with Stacey Sims.   Stacey Simms  0:26 This week, how are you eating these days? Some kitchen and cooking advice to help us through Chef Mark Allison knows his way around the kitchen with a family he has three boys one of whom was diagnosed with type one as a baby. As a professional chef teacher. He says just get started   Chef Mark Allison  0:45 getting in that kitchen and making something over the next 30 or 40 minutes and then sitting down eating the food but actually having a conversation instead of everybody upstairs playing Xbox or some kind of games. You're actually in one room. Communicate it and you make them so think that hopefully everybody's going to enjoy.   Stacey Simms  1:03 You'll hear Mark's unique story. He and his wife moved to Alaska for an international program back in 1999. And their 14 month old son was diagnosed shortly after that in Tell me something good. A little bit of help for someone who's been giving a lot of it, talk about paying it forward and back, and a lot of mac and cheese. This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider. Welcome to another week of diabetes connections we aim to educate and inspire by sharing stories of connection and in this time, it is so important to stay connected. On this week's show. We are not going to be talking specifically about the corona virus. Rather, this is a show that will maybe inspire you or help you to get in the kitchen at this time when we are all first in our house and I don't know about you, but I've been Looking more than ever, but maybe to look at things a little bit differently, get your kids involved, try something new. I was so excited to talk to Mark Ellis. And we've known each other for a long time. And I've been trying to get him on the show. And it's just one of those. You know, the beauty is in the timing sometimes, because maybe this episode will kind of give you a fun day and some fun ideas to try at a time when boy, we do need a little bit of fun, and a little bit of inspiration. So there will be more information about Mark's cookbook. Let's be smart about diabetes a little bit later on. And I would urge you if you're not already in the Facebook group to please join that it is diabetes connections, the group because I'm going to be putting some of the recipes and notes that he gave me into the Facebook group, I cannot put them in the show notes. It's just a format thing. So I apologize for that. They will not be on the episode homepage, but they will be in posts in the Facebook group. So head on over there to that. And just another quick note before we get started. Thank you to everybody who continues to buy my book, the world's First diabetes mom, if you need a laugh in these times, maybe it's there for you. I've heard from people who are really enjoying it right now who have the audio book to who maybe didn't have time to listen before, although I mostly listen to audiobooks in my car. So my audio book and podcasts consumption, frankly, is way down right now. Because I'm at home, I'm not commuting. I'm not driving anywhere. But I do listen when I clean and do laundry and stuff like that. So maybe that's it. But thanks again, the world's worst diabetes mom is available at Amazon. It is in paperback, Kindle and audiobook. You could also buy it over at diabetes, connections calm but frankly, Amazon's probably the easiest right now. And I was so happy to be involved in the children with diabetes virtual conference that happened recently. I bet you can still find that online. I was able to take my world's worst diabetes mom presentation for them. Of course, as you know, like many of you, I was planning to go to lots of diabetes conferences in the last month and this spring and it's all on hold right now. So a little bit of online goodness. For you, I will also link up the children with diabetes conference which had tons of presentations in it. I think it's going to be a real resource going forward for a lot of people so I'm thrilled that they did that. All right Mark Ellison coming up in just a moment but first diabetes Connections is brought to you by real good foods. We got a sample of the real good foods ice cream. They sent it to us a Benny and I did a Facebook Live. I think it's almost three weeks ago now. Wow. About what we thought our reactions and I gotta tell you, I have been enjoying the real good ice cream since then. It is so delicious. It is a lower sugar ice cream that tastes like ice cream. You have probably had ice creams that are lower carb that tastes kind of chunky and chalky. And there isn't none of that I sat down. I shouldn't say this. I ate almost the entire pint of the mint chocolate chip. I stopped myself but it was going there. So check them out. You can find out more at really good foods calm. They ship. Yes, they're the grocery store for you. Right now I know a lot of you and us included group looking at home delivery, and you can find all of their stuff online. They'll deliver it for you some great shipping deals as well. Just go to diabetes, connections comm and click on the real good foods logo.   My guest this week is a terrific chef, who as you know here teaches healthy cooking, but isn't above eating s'mores with his three sons. Mark Allison works with the cabarrus County Health Alliance, a local county to me here in North Carolina teaching needed home cooking skills. He has been the director of culinary nutrition for the dole nutrition Institute, and he spent many years teaching classical chefs as the Dean of culinary arts education at Johnson and Wales University here in Charlotte. Yes, Johnson Wales does have a campus here in Charlotte. One of Mark's sons was diagnosed with type one as a baby and his wife was diagnosed with stage four cancer in 2008. Now she did pass away But as you'll hear it His wife was able to live longer than anybody expected her to, which he says really made him a believer in the power of a plant based diet to fight disease and prolong life. Mark has a new book out called Let's be smart about diabetes, a cookbook to help control blood sugar while getting the family back around the kitchen table. We are putting recipes in the Facebook group, as I said, and of course links in the show notes. Here's my talk with Chef Mark. Allison. Mark, thank you so much for making some time for me. I know you've got all your boys home. And while we're not, I guess we're not doing much these days. It still seems like the time is filling up. But thanks for being here. I appreciate it.   Chef Mark Allison  6:40 They see You're very welcome. And it's a pleasure to be on your show. Thank you very much.   Stacey Simms  6:43 I'm excited to talk to you. We've known each other for a long time. I was thinking I think we met possibly the Johnson and Wales cooking competition of some kind where I was an extremely unqualified judge.   Chef Mark Allison  6:59 The good old days here In the good old days, Yes, I remember you there and you were totally qualified for the position to be church exceptionally well because I enjoy eating.   Stacey Simms  7:11 So there you go   Chef Mark Allison  7:12 to nature, you know, in my opinion chef is fitted very nicely into my lifestyle, because I love to eat. I love it.   Stacey Simms  7:19 Well, you know, I want to pick your brain as long as we have you to talk about how to try to eat well, as long as you know, we're all stuck at home. But let's talk about let's talk about diabetes. First, let's get your story out because I know everyone already hearing you knows that you are your native to North Carolina. That's a beautiful Southern accent that you   Chef Mark Allison  7:37 see I was born in Charleston, South Carolina. People get that mixed up all the time. I'm actually from a little town called at Newcastle upon Tyne which is in the northeast of England. And I grew up there and the place where the usually state calls from Newcastle on Newcastle brown ale on Newcastle soccer club whether the three things that people read knowing you're comfortable, but that's where I was born. I moved to South Wales and lived in South Wales for 10 years, traveled all over Europe and in 2004 landed in Charleston, South Carolina, lived there for yet then moved up to Charlotte and I've been in Charlotte now 15 years and absolutely love living in Charles. That's great.   Stacey Simms  8:20 All right, so but your your diabetes story your son's really starts in Alaska. Can you tell us that   Chef Mark Allison  8:26 I was one of 30 people fit by the Fulbright teachers Experience Program, which is a program that started after world war two to get the world together through education. And teachers apply and they are asked to go to different countries around the world. And I was asked to go to America and I thought Yes, this is going to be fabulous. being brought up in the 70s in the 80s. On Starsky and Hutch and streets of San Francisco. I naturally thought I was going to California, but I would have 500 teachers that apply to come to Europe, there was only one chef and he did not live in California. He actually lived in Anchorage, Alaska. And we actually turned down the position first because my wife said we are not taking a two year old and an eight month to Alaska. So we turned it down. And then Glen, the teacher rang me over to him and said, Look, can you do me a favor? This is the fourth year I have applied. And my daughter has won a four year scholarship at Oxford University and this is her last year. Can you please take the position so we can be with her for the last year that is in the UK. So we decided to move over that and we actually had an absolute fabulous year. But while we were living there, Matthew, my youngest son at the time, who was it month when we arrived, when you go to the age of 14 months, he became ill, and we took him to the doctors and the doctor said he just had a bad case of the flu, he'd be okay. And about a week later, he had lost a tremendous amount of weight. He was drinking a lot of fluids and just happened to be Tom My brother on the forum that weekend who is a type one diabetic and has been since the age of 15 years old. And he said, I think he may be a type one take him back to the doctor's. So we took Matthew back. And we had a young doctor, she was lovely lady. But she said, there's no way as a type one diabetic it normally it's going to be about seven or eight years old. He's only 14 months. And she just said, No, I'm not testing as blood. So of course, my wife who was there, like any mother has said, well, we're not leaving your office until you actually test his blood. So there was a bit of a standoff for about 30 minutes. And then she tested this blood and within 30 minutes, Matthew is in intensive care and he was there for the next seven years. And his blood sugar's were so far through the roof that we were told that we had left her office and went to him more than likely would have been in a coma that night. So we were exceptionally lucky. And the doctor from that stage could not do enough for us as he was at his bedside every day. And as you know, Life changes. So we decided to look at food as sort of medicine and changed all our eating habits for Matthew. So from the age of 14 month, Matthew has been on a really healthy diet, you know, just turned 22 in December, and he's in great shape, but he's at college at the minute, and he's doing exceptionally well. But that's where it all started back in 1999.   Stacey Simms  11:24 And I think it's worth repeating for people who are you who have children who are newer diagnosed or maybe have been newer diagnosed themselves. There really was this thinking because the same thing happened to us, Ben, he wasn't yet two years old. And they said, Yeah, under the age of two, it's Yeah, it'd be type one. There was this thinking and I don't know if it's just that they're getting better at it or there are more cases and infants and babies, but it has changed a lot thanks to people like you push an educated Oh my goodness.   Chef Mark Allison  11:51 You know, it is frightening. Because you've got your doctor and you just think they've got all the answers. And but something like Type One Diabetes is you know, in Now it's becoming more and more people become more and more aware. I remember when my brother was diagnosed that he was in hospital for six months because they were unsure of actually what it was. And the unfortunate thing for my brother, he was 15 at the time, so he was nearly an adult in England. And he was actually on a cancer Ward for six months, and was frightening with him was he was watching people that were dying around him. And unfortunately, that marked him for life. He is now nearly 60 and he's in good shape and he's healthy. But he still remembers them times where people were actually dying around them because they thought he didn't have diabetes for 30 years cancer at the time, but times have changed and I think it's a lot more easy to diagnose now. And we've got great doctors, people like that more fonder. Well, it's just amazing. I think now we can rely on the medical professionals to diagnose a lot quicker than what was said 20 years ago.   Stacey Simms  12:58 And when you're Your son and your brother must have had some interesting conversations about not only the difference of diagnosis, but the difference of treatments. I mean, I'm so your brother is doing well, because I can't imagine.   Chef Mark Allison  13:11 Well, my I can remember my mother have sterilized his syringe and needles every night. Because the other days, whether we're like the one inch long needles, and you could reuse them, and the syringe was reused, and he was getting injected twice a day, now he's on the pen. So you've worked a lot better for him, but I can remember those days and the previous thing, and testing was blurred and then cleaning the syringe and countless cops. It was a difficult time for my mother. I know that.   Stacey Simms  13:44 I feel you never want to say we're lucky with diabetes because it still stinks. Yeah, but also to make me grateful for insulin pumps and pens. My good.   Chef Mark Allison  13:54 Yeah, my back muscles just changed over to a new pump. The Omni pod and you know, he He's been on the pump for at least the last 12 years and what a difference others made. You know, we as parents, I'm sure you have the same feel a lot easier that he's on something that basically regulates everything. And as long as he tests his blood, he knows when he's either going to go low, go high. And these instruments these days are just amazing.   Stacey Simms  14:21 It really is. I feel really grateful. Yeah, let's jump in and let's talk about food. Because not only are you a renowned chef and a you know, an educator of other chefs, but now you work to educate the public which I just think is absolutely amazing because we need all the help we can get mark, as you well know. First of all, let me let you explain what it is that you do you work for the Harris County Health Alliance, which is a nearby you know, county to mine here in the Charlotte, North Carolina area. What do you do right now in terms of teaching the public   right back to mark answering Question, but first getting diabetes supplies is a pain. Not only the ordering and the picking up but also the arguing with insurance over what they say you need and what you really need. Make it easy with one drop. They offer personalized tester plants. Plus you get a Bluetooth glucose meter test strips lancets and your very own certified diabetes coach. Subscribe today to get test strips for less than $20 a month delivered right to your door. No prescriptions or co pays required. One less thing to worry about. not that surprising when you learn that the founder of one drop lubes with type one, they get it one drop, gorgeous gear supplies delivered to your door 24 seven access to your certified diabetes coach learn more go to diabetes connections comm and click on the one drop logo. Now back to mark and he is answering my question about teaching people the very basics.   Chef Mark Allison  15:55 I have a wonderful job and it's funny how I started the shop at 16 and I printed with French cuisine, and lots of thoughts, sugar and salt, and nobody counted calories or anything. And now I've went closer to being a healthy chef. And I tried to teach people how to improve their diets. So I work for the cabarrus Health Alliance, which is based in kannapolis. And my job is a fascinating job. And the fact that I go out to the general public, I go to schools and hospitals and churches, and I also do cooking classes at the cabarrus Health Alliance, and I try to teach people how to cook because if you think about it, Stacy, cooking is a life skill, but nobody knows how to cook these days. What I noticed just last week, when the food stores were out of canned goods and frozen goods, actually the produce section was still full. And my advice to anybody, especially at this time with the corona virus is eat healthy by eating as many fruits and vegetables as you possibly can because they're just packed full of vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals. So my job at the Cabal ourselves Lyons is basically trying to teach people how to cook and choose better food choices, and not so much processed food, not so much food that is packed with fat, sugar, salt, and try to get a healthy balance. You know, it doesn't all have to be healthy. But if you do choose healthy options, you'll feel better. Your health will improve and it'll fight off viruses.   Stacey Simms  17:23 So when we're all stuck at home and we have this mentality, which is this is very unique, obviously. Yeah, I mean unprecedented. But now that we're stuck at home, what would your advice be? Because I did the same thing I'll be honest with you when I went to the grocery store a couple of days ago, I picked up you know, some apples some oranges, but I wasn't I was thinking hunker down. Yeah, I bypassed a lot of the fresh fruits and vegetables now that it seems and again we're as we're recording this, it seems like the grocery stores are gonna be fine. There's no problem with supply. What What would you suggest we do next time we go to the store,   Chef Mark Allison  17:54 I would look at the air fresh produce and you know, start by Picking the fruits and vegetables that you like to eat. And then why not try something different? Something that you've seen before. But though you know what, I wonder what that tastes like, give it a try. You'll be amazed, I normally teach this in class where we'll have like a surprise ingredient. And part of the classes, everybody's going to try everything I make. And I might have a fresh fruit or vegetable and I chop it up and I pass it around. And it's amazing that nine times out of 10 everybody likes it. We've got these preconceived notions that we'll look at something think No, I don't think I like that for actually when you put it in your mouth and try it more than likely you're going to try something new and it's going to be interesting, then you're going to enjoy the test. So I would go around the fresh produce section and try something new, try something different. And I found the best way so especially with having three boys, if I wouldn't try something new with them. I normally just make a smoothie or soup because you can easily add something new and disguise it and they don't even know that they're in and then we told them that believe in something new. See, you know what, that wasn't too bad. Let's try it again. So I think it's all about experiment. And we've got the ideal time that you've just said, There. See, we're all cooped up at home. Why not get in the kitchen with the boys or girls, or family members and make something delicious to eat tonight? I've got to be honest, people tell me when they asked what I do for a living, I say, well, I've never worked a day in my life because I love what I do, which is I love food, and I love to cook. But our sound, it's the best way to make new friends. It's the best way to keep the family together, getting in that kitchen and making something over the next 30 or 40 minutes and then sitting down eating the food but actually having a conversation. Instead of everybody upstairs playing Xbox or some kind of games. You actually in one room communicate and you're making something that hopefully everybody's going to enjoy.   Stacey Simms  19:50 Alright, a lot of people listening are gonna say, Well, sure that sounds great. But I never learned to cook. I'm afraid to cook. My Stuff always comes out. Terrible. How can you start adults who really did not learn the skill?   Chef Mark Allison  20:05 You know what I was very lucky because when all my friends chose to do woodwork and metalwork, I was doing home economics. And as you can imagine, back in the 70s and 80s, that didn't go down too well with a lot of the guys, but you know what my thinking was, they see one instead of being locked up in a room with 19, sweaty guys, I was in an air conditioned room with 19 girls. And it worked out pretty good, because I found out very quickly two things. Everybody likes people who can cook and it's the best way to make friends. So I understand that a lot of people don't know how to cook. But actually, you can go online now and on YouTube, and you can learn practically any technique that you need. And I'll tell people all you really need to start with is a chopping board and a knife, and then find a recipe that you've always wanted to try. And you can easily download any recipe now from online or watch a YouTube video and cooking There's one of the simplest things you can ever learn. It's all about temperature control. It's either gonna be hot or cold. And if you can control the temperature you can make and eat anything you like. Wow.   Stacey Simms  21:11 Do you remember I'll put you on the spot here. Do you remember what you first taught your boys to make when they were little I pictured them standing on stools in the kitchen, you know, learning from dad,   Chef Mark Allison  21:21 and properly. And this isn't exactly healthy. And actually, we did this last night, we were sitting in the backyard having a fire pit and we all had smalls. So I'm guessing probably smalls are probably one of the very first recipes. I taught my boys. But I also taught them something very important. It's all about moderation. Whatever you make, have it in moderation. But my three boys all know how to cook, obviously, because they've been brought up by a chef. I tell people when I'm at work, I'll text my boys and be the dishwasher, prepare the vegetables, set the kitchen table, and then when I get home, all that's done, and then we get in the kitchen together and we cook dinner That night, but if I forget the text one day, believe it or not today, see, I get home and nothing has been done because boys are boys.   Stacey Simms  22:08 Oh, yeah, I've been there with both of my kids boys and girls. Yeah. Oh yeah, but you didn't send the text that's funny but I'm you know, it's good to know you're human. I think it's always more fun to know with the s'mores, right that you know, yeah. And food and it's fun to learn. And then you can use those skills. I don't know what quite what skills are making but you have to control the temperature.   Chef Mark Allison  22:33 Don't right. Yeah, that was our main skill. I think   Stacey Simms  22:36 that's an important one in the kitchen.   Chef Mark Allison  22:38 people. People ask me all the time, how do you make a healthy dessert mock and I'll say there's no such thing as a healthy dessert. So just enjoy whatever you're going to eat but have a smaller portion.   Stacey Simms  22:50 You're not free and substitutes and things like that.   Chef Mark Allison  22:53 I don't use any sugar free ingredients if I'm going to make something and add sugar and the sugar because normally Even if you make an a cake and asks for half a cup of sugar, when you consider that cake is going to divide a divided into eight or 10 portions, that half cup of sugar comes down to practically nothing. So I'd rather use the ingredients that are meant to be in a certain food items, then start trying to guess, well, if I put sugar free, I mean, it's going to work out the same because I'd rather just enjoy it the way it's meant to be, then try to mess around with it. That's the same with all these gluten free products and low in sugar products. You know, you're taking out one thing, but you're adding something else processed. And to me, you're far better off eating ingredients that you know, are ingredients that are more healthy than something that is a preservative or an additive or colorant.   Unknown Speaker  23:49 So tell us about your cookbook that you have out right   Chef Mark Allison  23:52 now. I brought out let's be smart about diabetes a few months ago and that actually started 2008 but that was the same year my wife was diagnosed with stage four cancer. So the book was shelved. And then when my wife passed away in 2015, I was approached by the American diabetic association to publish the book. And so they, they bought the rights to the book, but then they held on to it for two years. And then unfortunately, they laid off most of their editorial stuff, and said they were only going to publish well known authors, which I was not one of them. So they give me the full rights back. And so I just published that about six months ago. And it's all family recipes that we've used over the last 20 years with Matthew, all the recipes, believe makes a car very easy to use. You know, most of them take between 10 and 20 minutes, and the all healthiest there's nothing outrageous. I'm not asking anybody to buy superfoods. I don't believe in superfoods. I believe in it, eat an apple, that's probably the best food you can eat or a banana or if you had broccoli or cabbage. They don't have to be super foods. They're just packed Anyway with healthy vitamins and minerals and phytochemicals. So it's all based on practicality and what you can actually buy in your local store. And so this is packed full of soups and breakfast ideas, snacks, lunches, and meals for the kids and sort of healthy desserts.   Stacey Simms  25:17 I'd love to ask you and I, we didn't discuss this in advance, but would it be possible to grab a recipe or two from the book that you think might help people who are you know, stuck at home right now? Maybe dollar level or something that would keep and we could post that for the podcast audience?   Chef Mark Allison  25:32 Yeah, please do. Just choose whatever recipe you think is suitable. There's over 150 recipes in the book to choose from, and like I said, very easy to put together. And this could be the ideal time to grab a cookbook and try some of the recipes.   Stacey Simms  25:45 No doubt. All right. How do you stand on we've talked about you know, going to the produce section trying to buy fresh whenever possible. Where do you stand on canned and frozen ingredients?   Chef Mark Allison  25:55 Yeah, I'm a firm believer in fresh wood. If if you've got no option, then throw would be my next choice and then can't but if you're going to buy canned fruits or vegetables, make sure that they haven't got any added sugar.   Unknown Speaker  26:07 Yeah, you know what I saw in the supermarket recently forget added sugar. They were packed in Splenda, their sugar substitute in the quote for juice.   Chef Mark Allison  26:16 Yeah. Well, you know what people have got to make their own minds up on if they're going to use artificial sweeteners or not. I personally don't so you know, it's a choice you've got to make. But to tell the truth, if I've got the opportunity I always buy fresh because fresh normally isn't seasonal. So if you can buy seasonal fruits and vegetables, then they've got the best nutrient dense properties within them. They haven't been touched. Make sure that you wash your fruits and vegetables when you get them home and either eat them raw or add them to some kind of soup or lunch or dinner item. And to me that's the best way to keep yourself healthy. I'm a firm believer and my boys follow this practice as well. If you have half your plate, fruits and veggies But then you know, it's going to go too far wrong from being healthy and the idea with that's great advice.   Stacey Simms  27:05 Yeah, back to the the canned fruit though I gotta be honest with you and you don't have to you don't have to take a stand. But I was appalled to see canned fruit with Splenda added because the big packaging was like, you know, low in sugar, and I thought, Oh, good. Water or something. And I turned it over to look at the label. I was like Splenda, how much processing you have to go through to add that and I was like, uh, so I put that back. But in these, I know, people are worried right now, and many people may have purchased more canned and frozen goods than you ever really do. Looking at me. So we're all looking to try to do the best we can.   Chef Mark Allison  27:38 Yeah. And it's baby steps. It's baby steps. You know, you can kind of just turn your diet upside down because it's not gonna work. And I tell most people start with breakfast and just eat something healthier at breakfast and that's the ideal time to have a smoothie, you know, and you can Pocket full of vegetables, you know, cut back on the fruit so much, but ask or kale to smoothie out blueberries, but look at your your breakfast first and just change your breakfast for about a month, and then work on your lunch. And then finally work on your dinner. So, you know, if you just start slow, then your body becomes adjusted to it and you'll feel a lot more healthier.   Stacey Simms  28:17 What's your favorite movie?   Chef Mark Allison  28:18 Actually, when I used to be the director of culinary nutrition for the dog food company, I came up with a smoothie that obviously included bananas. It had almond milk, bananas and coffee. And that was a coffee fix up and the number of people that complimented that smoothie was unbelievable. But my favorite smoothies as always got blueberries and because blueberries are one of the best fruits you can eat for your memory as you get older and talk about with blueberries and spinach I use gave a banana and I use almond milk and a handful of almonds. And that saves me all the way through to lunch.   Stacey Simms  28:55 I liked spinach, mango and Domino.   Chef Mark Allison  28:58 That's Like mangoes my favorite fruit. Ah,   Stacey Simms  29:02 I'll tell you what, I use the frozen mango because it keeps it cold and gives it that exactly feel. But I was a big I was very reluctant to put anything green in a smoothie. I thought it was disgusting. I really did. I really did. And finally my husband convinced me and it's delicious. I'm shocked shocked. Yeah,   Chef Mark Allison  29:25 you can get your best and fishy and all that as spinach has got more protein than the average piece of meat weird for weird. So if you put four ounces of spinach in your smoothie, then that's got actually more protein than four ounces of beef. So probably I hit it right yeah. Spinach and spinach is one of the best foods in the world you can eat that as well as kale.   Stacey Simms  29:47 Yeah I'm still I'm not around to kale but maybe I'll try it all if I could. Finish I can try to   Chef Mark Allison  29:55 kill you can get away with in smoothie and solid j the like it are you doing   Stacey Simms  30:00 Exactly. All right, well, that's a great idea. Um, and then I know you said start with breakfast, move on to, and then ultimately do your dinners. But I have to ask for people who are listening who have younger kids, easy suggestions for dinners that the kids can help with? Is there anything that comes to mind that you did with your boys,   Chef Mark Allison  30:17 you know, you can always make your own chicken nuggets, that easy to make. In fact, there's a recipe in the book for that. But start with things that they actually like. And then just all the some of the ingredients to more healthy ingredients. Because most of the things you can buy in fast food outlets, or and most restaurants, you can replicate at home and make them a lot more healthier. It's just like anything. If you want to learn something, you'll take the time to learn. And to me, the good thing about coupon is it's a social event that actually gets people together. And it's a great way when my wife passed away five years ago, that was one of the things I insisted with my boys that every night we went in the kitchen now five years on We do exactly the same thing they were, they can't wait to get in the kitchen, see what we're going to eat that night. And usually they choose one of the evening meals during the week. And then we'll all muck in together all your sleeves up, we'll all cook together. And then again, I said, we actually sit down at the kitchen table and spend the next 30 to 90 minutes just having a conversation, which is fabulous. It's the highlight of my day.   Stacey Simms  31:22 I'll tell you what, it really is an amazing thing when you can get everybody away from their electronics sitting at the table. You know, we set we did that too. We set the table every night. Yeah. Even if we're bringing in, we do bring in occasionally, you know, it goes on the table, it comes out of the takeout.   Chef Mark Allison  31:39 What is social experience food is this food is one of the one things that will bring people together. And even if it doesn't turn out great. You can all have a laugh about it. And just try it again the next day. You know, nobody's gonna have a fight over a burnt pancake. You know, they you're just gonna laugh about it and say, You know what, I'm gonna cry better tomorrow.   Stacey Simms  31:58 You know, I'm glad to hear you say that because I I've been there many times. Before I let you go, you know, your life has been so interesting to be touched by type one diabetes in your family. And then of course, you've had that unbelievable experience with cancer and losing your wife and I'm so sorry, Mark, but now working with people who are honestly dependent on you to teach them better ways to manage health, whether it is diabetes, or trying to avoid complications from other illnesses. And I'm curious, you know, when you do meet with these people having, as you said, you started with, you know, French cuisine, fancy restaurants fancy chefs, now you're meeting with people who may not even understand how to fry an egg. You What was   Chef Mark Allison  32:39 that been like? Interesting.   Before, before I took this job, I was a culinary instructor for 20 years, so I could have dealt with a lot of people and different learning needs. And it all always comes back to the basics. If you can pick up the basics of anything that You'll be successful. So when you consider, I'm now working for the health department and I didn't realize these stocks until I actually started working for the health department. But 85% of all chronic diseases such as heart disease, type two diabetes, obviously not type one, and cancer are food related. And we live in an epidemic at the minute with the rise of type two diabetes, and the continuing rise of heart disease and cancer. And if people just realize that food is so important to prevent heart disease and cancer and type two diabetes, but also it's so important once you've got one of these diseases, to actually improve your immune system by eating healthy food, and the healthiest foods on the planet are fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds, beans, seeds, and lean proteins and lean dairies. You've got to look at your food supply, try not to eat so much processed food because that's where all the additives are. That's where they put in the colorings the preservatives. You can't buy a loaf of bread that was moldy in a day. And now, you know that loaf of bread will stand there without gathering more for a week to two weeks. Now that isn't good. You know, actually, I just had fresh bread last night. I couldn't get any bread at the store yesterday. So I decided to get the flour out and I had some dry yeast. And making bread is so easy, it took less than five minutes. But just look at the food that you generally eat. And just try to you know, when you consider the rising costs of health insurance, every year, it goes up and up. And you will know because I know with Matthew's insulin and equipment for his pump, it just gets more and more expensive for free and, but if you're healthy, then look at that as being a lifesaver for you, as far as money is concerned, because if you can stay healthy and off prescription medication, you're gonna literally save thousands of dollars every year, and your life is gonna live longer, and you're going to enjoy life more. So A lot of it's all about prevention. But if you do have an illness, then really look at your diet, because the food, it's food is not medicine, but it can help in a way that will make you feel good about yourself and make you lose weight. And it'll keep you alive a lot longer if you pick the right food choices. And the right food choices are eat more fruits and vegetable.   Stacey Simms  35:22 Well, I really appreciate you spending some time with us. It's just always wonderful to talk with you. I'm glad your boys are doing well. Everybody's home now.   Chef Mark Allison  35:29 Everybody, so yeah, everybody. So James got led over school for the next two weeks, possibly more, who knows? Matthews at college, but he's at home at the minute and he's just doing everything online. And then unfortunately, my son who works in a restaurant, he just got laid off yesterday. But you know what, things could be a lot worse. We've just got to knuckle down and stay healthy and hopefully this virus hopefully will be gone in two or three weeks in the golf fleet. The nation can get back to normal. Yes, I hope so, too.   Stacey Simms  35:59 Mark, thank you so much for joining me, we will link up all the information about the book, we'll see how I can go about posting a recipe or two. And I'm just wishing you and your boys All the best. Thank you so much for talking with me.   Chef Mark Allison  36:10 Thank you for having me on the show and you and your family stay safe and stay healthy. And hopefully we'll catch you up with another diabetic conference.   Stacey Simms  36:19 Yeah, hopefully down the road and everything is rescheduled. I think the best thing is gonna be it's gonna be a very busy fall, I think.   Chef Mark Allison  36:25 I think   Unknown Speaker  36:32 you're listening to diabetes connections with Stacey Sims.   Stacey Simms  36:38 Lots more information at the episode homepage. And of course, as I mentioned, we'll put some of the recipes and other information Mark was very generous and giving me an excerpt from the book. I will put that in the Facebook group, diabetes connections, the group, I don't care what he says I am not trying to kill smoothie. I've been there done that. But for somebody like me, having a green smoothie is a big step. I do eat a lot of vegetables. But I never thought I'd like smoothie. But like I said, the spinach smoothie was great. So he just like he said, one new thing, one new thing. Try it, see if you like it. You know, I've tried to teach my kids, although my husband is a really good cook, and he's done a much better job of teaching the kids actual cooking skills, but I try to teach them that mistakes are okay, which is coming out of my mouth. I just realized that just sounds like everything else I say with diabetes. But I mean, it's my philosophy of cooking too, because I make a ton of mistakes and everything somehow tastes good. I mean, sure, I've burned things. The first book I wrote was, I can't cook but I know someone who can. Actually Mark has a recipe. That book is a wonderful recipe. The conceit of that book is that I can't cook so I went and asked all of my restaurant and Chef friends for recipes. And it was a big book for charity for jdrf. And it was a lot of fun, but I did write a whole bunch of kitchen disaster stories into that book. Yeah, I think my life philosophy is make all the mistakes. Hey, it's working out so far. Up next, tell me something good. But first diabetes Connections is brought to you by dexcom. We have been Using the dexcom g six since it came out almost two years ago is that possible? It is just amazing. The dexcom g six is FDA permitted for no finger sticks for calibration and diabetes treatment decisions. You do that to our warm up and then the number just pops up if you like us have used x come for a long time before that. It's really wild to see the number just kind of self populate. You just have to do a lot more finger sticks for calibration. We've been using the dexcom for a long time. It was six years this past December and it just keeps getting better. The G six has longer sensor were 10 days and the new sensor applicator is so much easier to use. And of course the alerts and alarms we can set them how we want if your glucose alerts and readings from the G six do not match symptoms or expectations. Use a blood glucose meter to make diabetes treatment decisions. To learn more, go to diabetes connections comm and click on that dexcom logo   and tell me something good this week. If you saw this post on social media you might have thought Stacy, you're telling me something good backgrounds are usually blue. Why was this one orange? Well, that's because my friends It featured mac and cheese. So let me tell you about Ty Gibbs. Ty is a swimmer at Henderson State University in Arkansas. He was diagnosed in 2017. It was actually very serious. He was being rushed to the hospital at the time. He was in intensive care. He spent time in the ICU, but his mom Cheryl says as he was rushed into the ICU, he was just starving. And he kept asking for mac and cheese over and over again every year since we celebrate with a ton of mac and cheese. So this tells me something good on social media the photo if you saw it was his teammates and friends celebrating his diversity with seven pounds of mac and cheese and a cake. You want to talk about a carb explosion? No, of course the celebration took place weeks ago. I believe this has And very early in March or maybe it was even in late February when they actually celebrated it before the social distancing was taking effect. But I really appreciate Cheryl sharing this story. I love the idea of celebrating with a mac and cheese. That would be something for my daughter more so than my son. When the kids are left to lane. They were asked to empty their dorm rooms of food. They weren't ordered to it was a food drive for people in New Orleans. And a lot of these kids like my daughter, most kids into lane are from far away. So a lot of them were jumping on planes or getting out of there and going long distances and didn't want to pack up everything in their dorm room. So the school organized a big food drive. And I tell you all this because my daughter donated her mac and cheese. I know she had other junk in her room that she didn't share with me but oh my gosh, she's definitely the mac and cheese lover in the family. So thanks, Ty and congratulations on your dire versary hopefully next year we can celebrate again we'll send you some mac and cheese to our other Tell me something good comes from Laura Bilodeau. A familiar name to many of you. She is the powerhouse, behind the friends for life conferences and so much more with children with diabetes. But recently, Laura found herself in the unusual situation of asking for help. She has connected thousands of people over the years. It's no exaggeration, the friends for life conference is 20 years old. And the children with diabetes organization is older than that. And I'm telling you, they have connected so many people to each other, for help for education for inspiration for friendships, including me, I've made so many friends there. But her son actually needed to help her adult son doesn't live with them, but with everything that was going on, came back home to Michigan a couple of weeks ago, and they were having trouble with diabetes supplies. They had been I'm not going to go through all the details. But like many of us, you know, they had insurance issues, somebody wasn't following through. The supply wasn't coming when it was supposed to come. And so they turn to the diabetes community for help. And as we always do, People reached out and so she posted a great picture about two weeks ago now almost that Mike Hoskins who's also been on the show is a great writer over a diabetes mine and his wife Susie. They met for coffee although they met you can see the picture. They're six feet apart each Zingerman's coffee roastery which was still open for takeout and this picture looks great. I bet that's a terrific coffee place. I'd love to check it out if I'm ever in town there but of course the big deal was that Michael was able to help her with the supplies that she needed. Is your community doing that we're having a lot of that here in the Charlotte area where people are just reaching out I already no surprise gave insulin to a friend of mine who's got an adult son who does not have insurance and is really struggling right now. So we were able to donate to them. I've got friends who had you know my Omni pod PDM knocked out and you know, they're going to get us a new one but does anybody have one in the meantime? Anybody spare sensor, little things like that goes such a long way. You know, I mean, they say little things. They They're really not when you come to rely on this stuff day to day could we go without except for the insulin? Of course, we would do finger pokes, we would use shots. But you know, you don't want to be without this technology once you have it. So way to go. Mike Hoskins way to go Laura Bilodeau, because it's tough to ask for help, especially when you've always been in the position of providing it. I'm so glad everybody got what they needed. All right, tell me something good. It's the best segment of the show each week. Tell me what you got. You can send it in Stacy at diabetes connections calm posted in the Facebook group. Or if I see it like I did, Laura, I'll just get your permission to share your story. But I really love when you send them in. So keep them coming and tell me something good.   Not too much to say here before I let you go. I do apologize for sort of the weirdness of the schedule. I always pride myself on every week the consistency of getting the show out there on Tuesdays and then those mini episodes I was doing on Thursdays foot, gosh, I feel I bet you feel the same. It's almost like time has been Meaning right now. Right? what day of the week? Is it? am I eating breakfast? Am I having cocktails? You know, it's just a crazy time right now. So I am giving myself the grace to put out episodes when they make sense. I am listening to podcasts right now when I am listening, that are entertaining and distract me. I'm listening to a lot of my Game of Thrones podcasts, a lot of my history podcasts, a lot of podcasts that make me laugh. So I'm not that concerned about getting my news up to date from podcasts. I hope an episode like this, you know, gave you 40 minutes or 50 minutes. I honestly don't know where that's going to come out to yet of distraction entertainment, something good to think about and a feeling that you're not alone. As we go forward in these weeks, I'm not sure just like everything else. I'm not sure what the podcast production schedule is gonna look like. Of course, I have my sponsors and I will do what is responsible and we'll get those episodes out. But I really liked connecting on zoom calls, Facebook Live, other things like that. So as with everything else after this is over We'll see what the podcast landscape looks like, right? I mean, who knows? I hope to keep doing this, but we shall see. We'll see where you all are. It's gonna be a long, long time before things go back to quote normal. And I don't know what that's going to look like. I do hope and expect that we will be in it together as we have been as the diabetes community always is. So please let me hear from you. Tell me what's on your mind. And I really appreciate you tuning in. As always, thank you to my editor john Pugh kennis of audio editing solutions. JOHN, I hope you're staying safe in Philadelphia and doing well and that your kids are alright as well. And thank you, as always for listening. Stay safe. I'll see you soon and more now than ever before. Be kind to yourself.   Unknown Speaker  45:50 Diabetes Connections is a production of Stacey Sims media. All rights reserved. All rounds avenged.   Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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After several months away, Aaron is back to give his takes on the College Football National Champion LSU Tigers, and how they measure up against the 2008 Florida Gators, the Houston Astros' cheating scandal, and his picks for NFL Championship weekend!

At times we can view our gifts, talents, or even our experiences as nothing. We end up discounting something in our life only to realize later it had much more value than we believed. During the “Yeah, I’m Scrappy” talk, Oneka McClellan reassures us nothing is wasted in God’s hands. What we may see as a scrappy life, God can make whole. Throughout the Bible we see how God uses what seems insignificant for his glory. Each of us are special. God has created us each beautifully and uniquely. Regardless of what we may feel and no matter our circumstance, we were all created with purpose. Whatever our scraps may be, as long as we turn them over to him, God’s power will redeem and restore them. Nothing is wasted, God is faithful to transform scraps to success.

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Today we're in for a real treat, Mason chats to Dr Molly Maloof. Dr. Molly is a physician, technologist and entrepreneur. Dr Molly aims to cultivate a global wellness consciousness and promote a preventive, predictive, participatory and personalised field of medicine. One that creates health, increases quality of life, and enhances human resilience. Dr Molly is a passionate speaker and an abundant source of information in her area's of expertise. Tune in for the download.  Molly and Mason discuss: The medicinal use of psychedelics. Spirituality and meditation. Grounded "enlightenment". Clinical medicine. The importance of "Jing" herbs and "adaptogens" in our modern society. Holistic entrepreneurship and life satisfaction. The practices essential for bone health. Food preparation and sourcing. Sovereign health.   Who is Dr. Molly Maloof? Dr. Molly Maloof’s goal is to maximise human potential by dramatically extending human health span through medical technology, scientific wellness, and educational media. Her fascination with innovation has transformed her private medical practice, which is focused on providing health optimisation and personalised medicine to San Francisco & Silicon Valley investors, executives, and entrepreneurs. Molly's iterative programs take the quantified self to the extreme through comprehensive testing of clinical chemistry, metabolomics, microbiome, biometrics, and genomic markers.    Resources:  Molly's Website Molly's Facebook Molly's Instagram Molly's Linkedin Molly's Twitter   Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast? A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We’d also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or  check us out on Stitcher :)! Plus  we're on Spotify! We got you covered on all bases ;P   Check Out The Transcript Here: Mason:  All right everybody, joined by Molly Maloof, my new mate, who I met in Arizona earlier this year. Thanks for coming on the pod. Molly:  Thank you for inviting me. Mason:  Absolute pleasure. I really, really enjoyed your talk. There were a lot of interesting talks at that weekend event at Revitalize. I think the trippiest and weirdest, that left me just like, "Huh," and I got it in a good way from a couple of them. But the Whole Foods CEO, founder guy. Molly:  I loved his talk. Mason:  Yeah, that was a very interesting one. He's a, yeah, interesting guy. I kind of was a little put off by his, like how when Whole Foods saw Amazon it was love at first sight and they were swept off their feet. I was like, "What?" Molly:  And the funniest thing about the technology and the tech scene is just how many parallels there are to modern dating. And the best VC firms really court that 1% of startups that they really, really care about, but they ignore everyone else. There's literally so many parallels to how you date and how companies are founded and formed. It's like everything in life's relationships at the end of the day, you know? Mason:  I'm just trying to get my head around that, because I just didn't grow up in that world. Even when I was doing my international business degree, I just didn't listen and studied herbalism. I'm not... SuperFeast ... I'm just never, SuperFeast just isn't going to date anyone. It might have relationships. I might have a couple of little flings here and there, but because I'm not in that world it was so interesting. Mason:  Anyway, your talk was really cool. You guys, like you were on that panel talking about psychedelics. Molly:  Oh man. I mean I'm fully out of the psychedelic closet by now, and what's cool is that I was just at Burning Man and I saw some amazing, amazing talks by founders of MAPS. Rick Doblin spoke about being after this movement for 40 years. He has been working for 40 years to get psychedelics approved, and we are really close. Well, you know, mushrooms have been decriminalized in Oakland, and people don't know this, but they're selling mushroom chocolates in Oakland. Dispensaries are selling mushrooms. I think that's actually positive as long as people are safe with their dosing. But we're going to see I think the same kind of movement around the medicalization of these, as well as the- Mason:  Recreational. Molly:  Recreational use of these happening in America. I think both are needed and both are valuable experiences, but the important thing is safety. That's one thing I really wanted to get across on stage at the conference, was whether or not these are legal or not legal right now, whether or not you use them in ceremony or recreationally. Whether or not they are used for medicinal purposes or spiritual purposes, the whole goal of this is that no one gets hurt. Molly:  They can be dangerous drugs. If you're not prepared, if you're not in the right situation, right environment, right headspace, right part of your life span, they can be really damaging. So I was really happy that there was a place to talk about them with some pretty forward thinking people and some people who've also suffered from addiction. So it was important to have the balanced perspective, but at the end of the day I think the end conclusion was that there's definitely a place for these in wellness. Mason:  Where are you using them? Like is it clinical, is it just waving the flag? I feel like there's a because, because recreational came up, and I like your take. I think a lot of people keep it very clinical when they have these conversations, and of course it's not because we need to be having many types of conversations. We don't want them institutionalized as well, but almost you can start looking at the perceived social value and then the need somewhat of a structure. I mean you have the complete kind of somewhat like, say, left view that it's just open doors and it's just like whatever. Everyone goes nuts. Then there's that right view, which is a little bit more of that like, "Create a full solid structure and get the pharmaceuticals involved." Mason:  Then there's that middle ground, and a lot of the time, especially if you're going to be in a clinical setting, I can see how some things might be standardized and it can become under those regulatory bodies. But then almost it's the outside of that, when you go more recreational, it's like having the maturity as a society to create that somewhat of structure, for lack of a better word, rules that keeps everyone healthy and keeps everyone understanding it and not just separating it within society. So yeah, where are you falling with it? Why are you talking about it? Molly:  I mean I talk about it because I use them for spiritual purposes. I use them for social purposes, and I use them for medicinal purposes. I do refer people to healers who administer them ceremoniously in an environment of safety and security and careful dosing. It's not legal for me to currently administer them myself as a doctor, so I just make referrals to people. I just connect people and say, "Hey. This person I trust. You can trust them. They're good people. They're not going to harm you in any way." But it sucks, because they aren't legal yet I can't fully prescribe them, but I have prescribed ketamine for medicinal purposes. You can do that in America legally right now. They are psychedelic. It is the only legal psychedelic right now. Mason:  Is the research of ketamine around PTSD mostly, or what's going- Molly:  Actually it's depression and suicidality, which are frankly killing a lot of people right now. America is suffering from a lot of despair deaths is what they're calling them, which is deaths due to homicide, suicide, or self harm. That could be addiction or other means. So for me, I see a lot of that in Silicon Valley. There's a lot of misery, and it sucks because it's a place of so much abundance. You're like, "Geez, if this is the future, we're not heading into a good direction right now." But also a lot of panic. Molly:  People are definitely panicking in a lot of ways in America, for good reason. I mean there's like a mass shooting every week. A lot of people don't feel safe going into public spaces. A lot of people don't feel safe walking around San Francisco. A lot of people suffer from anxiety disorders, so people are turning to these medicines for panic and to feel ... For the tryptamine, they want to feel held and loved. For the ketamine, they want to feel like they can disassociate from reality because it's too much for them to handle at the moment. Molly:  So that's not necessarily a good thing. I mean it's not necessarily a good thing that we have an environment and society that's suffering so badly that people have to disassociate from it in order to maintain their sanity. But it's definitely a better option than taking opioids and dying from an overdose, which are killing a ton of people. Purdue Pharma basically said that they were going to be paying out something around the number of like $11 billion to 2,000 people for this class action lawsuit against them for especially misleading people about the addictive nature of Oxycontin and other Purdue Pharma opioids. Molly:  So shit's hitting the fan in America, and things are not good. So what I'm really interested in and fascinated by, and I just did a tour of New York, LA, and San Francisco, I live here, is just the number of people that are coming together in community and experiencing psychedelics in a space of ceremony. Which is really the traditional format of psychedelic use, in most indigenous communities and societies, is using them in the context of connecting with community. Frankly I think that's really a healthy and safe way, as long as the Shaman that's administering these knows what they're doing. Molly:  It could be transformative, but it could be problematic if people don't have a resource for integration or if they take the wrong dose in this environment. Which I recently saw happen, and I know a person who experienced a psychotic breakdown. So I think it's always important when we talk about these medicines to recognize the benefits and the risks, because they definitely go both ways. At the same time, I would say that largely what I'm seeing is 99% of people who are using these that I know personally, are using them in positive and healthy, fruitful ways. About 1% of times you're seeing casualties and you're seeing damage and you're seeing problems. Molly:  So I think they're largely carefully dosed and administered very safe, but if they're not, they can be really damaging. So it's important to mention that 1%, because that's what everyone sees in the news. But I just read a great article in Vice about how if everybody were to take psychedelics and think about the environment, we wouldn't be in this huge problem we're in right now, which is people not thinking about the effects of their actions on the environment. What's happening in Brazil is a great example of a lack of awakening in a large population of people. Mason:  Yeah. I think it's really important to remember just how low impact and low risk these psychedelics are, but that's in comparison to the gnarliness of the pharmaceutical industry of course. I think that's pretty evident at this point. It's not paranoid. I mean there was, just released in a journal was a study just on Paracetamol here in Australia for the 10 years, I think ending in like 2017. I'll have to look it up and see if I can find it, but I don't know exactly what the numbers were, but it was in that ballpark of like 400% up in heavy liver damage and deaths massively on the rise, and that was studying hospital administered levels. So that's happening here in Australia. Mason:  I think that kind of stuff hitting the news a little bit more is great, but then if we start looking at upgrading towards the use of psychedelics in many fabrics of society, I think the duty of care, I like that you mentioned that 1% because the medicine is in the dose and the medicine is in the efficacy, in the style of dosing. Whether it's going to be in a hospital setting hopefully eventually, but then outside when we're looking to psychologically center ourselves, most of the time people in a proper dosage and a proper environment are going to be able to find that. But I quite regularly ... It's been awhile since I've been in that world, since I've been in the Amazon experiencing [inaudible 00:10:48] up in the hills of the Andes and so on, so forth. Mason:  I've heavily integrated them, but I just think ... I don't know whether I've just got that, people have the memory of me doing that, but I still quite regularly get people writing to me who have gone way too far down the rabbit hole and essentially end themselves disassociating from reality. Which I definitely felt, I wasn't excessive, but I definitely felt myself having a disassociation from reality and just essentially flying with the condor most of the time. Molly:  Right, but you can see the same thing in meditation and- Mason:  Oh, for sure. Molly:  Any type of spiritual pursuit- Mason:  Dude, when you mentioned it on stage, I don't know if you heard, I was the one that cheered. [crosstalk 00:11:36] Molly:  Oh my God, I [inaudible 00:11:37] that was you. Mason:  We know people that have got into vipassana... Molly:  I'm in this whole place right now where I'm really on this spiritual path and I'm experiencing some really profound spiritual experiences, but I'm also aware that I need to keep one foot in reality. I've got a life to live, I've got patients to cover. I've got a book to write. I've got goals to achieve. So I think the real dance of this modern sort of enlightenment movement is figuring out how to be in the state of enlightenment and an effective person in real life. I'm like, "That's my goal," is I'm having these breakthroughs and I'm also getting back into my email and I'm getting back into my life. I have all this work to do, and it's like I want the work that I do in my spiritual life to benefit my actual life, and I want them to be integrated. Molly:  This word integration keeps coming up a lot, and I think it's this concept of psychological and spiritual balance, with what's happening internally and what's happening externally. That's the way that I would describe it, and I just made that up on the spot. But there's definitely a desire for spiritual pursuits in a world that's feeling really uncertain. Frankly, everyone's turning to astrology apps because they're all so confused about religion and who to trust and which institutions to talk to and what- Mason:  Yeah. What should I do with my life, there's an app for that. Molly:  Yeah. Exactly. And should we even reproduce in a world that doesn't seem like it's going to be around in 20 to 50 years. There's a lot of real serious scary questions happening right now in reality, and I think there's a desire for ... There's kind of two types of people. There's people who are going to seek answers, and there's people who are going to be like, "Whatever. I don't know if I'm ever going to find them. I'm just going to try to live my life as it is." Whatever way is fine for you to live. Molly:  I dated a guy who was the latter, and I'm more of the former. I think former's first and latter's second, right? Mason:  Yeah. I mean that's something interesting as well because I'm really, again, I don't know why I found myself doing that 1% as you are, trying to do that duty of care without trying to come across as a stickler. So I love the ability to seek, but then this is where I think people enter into that spiritual world, and I'm going to be very general here, I do love both of these realms where you're seeking spiritual growth and possibly heading into that psychedelic space. Again, the medicine is in the dose. How much seeking you're doing verse how much are you ... Even outside of hardcore, gnarly, long term mindfulness meditation camps, outside psychedelic world, how much are you doing your chop wood, carry water every day. Mason:  This has been something I kind of have struggled with is having my practice somewhat daily, that solid space where I'm consistently learning to come back to my center. What is my center, coming back to a state where I can possibly be parasympathetic when I'm activated, yet my muscles are calm. This is something I'm personally working on at the moment with my friend who mentors me in movement and everything that comes with it, and really expanding that capacity to not be permeated by all these external opinions and really find a place that's tangible and palpable you can sink your teeth into making those decisions. Mason:  Will I have another child, you know, and feel comfortable with those decisions. Because that incessive seeking, you know going to the app, going to astrology, what everyone is doing is just trying to scrape off the top without going right down to the source. Where is this, what the fuck is this philosophy? What does it mean? Molly:  Right, yeah. Right. They've got to take a lot more work to do that. Mason:  A lot of work, and it's not Instagram-able a lot of the time if you're going that deep, and there lies the problem. Molly:  I mean I'm going on a meditation retreat in two weeks, and I'm basically going to meditate for five hours a day. I'm not going to have a phone or a journal, and I'm going to have to deal with all of the desires that I have to write and to think and to produce and to integrate and to analyze, and all the things that drive me on a daily basis. I have to confront those and basically be like, "Molly, you just can't. You're just going to have to sit here. This is what you're supposed to do. This is a challenge, and it's going to be probably one of the hardest challenges." Molly:  I'm not fully prepared for it, but I'm also the kind of person who just likes to do things that she's not fully prepared for, see what happens. Mason:  Yes. Oh I love it. I'm like, "Can't wait to hear about it." Before we- Molly:  Hopefully I don't lose my mind, but I'm pretty sure I won't have one. Mason:  Maybe lose it just for a little bit. That's okay. Molly:  Usually what happens is I end up in a blissed out state and I'm just like ... Everyone's struggling and I'm like, "Ah." But I think this might be harder. I think this might be really hard, so we'll see. Mason:  I do love it. I like the integrated approach, to use the I word. Again, I'll just quickly leave, because since we talked about that psychedelic community, I absolutely love, don't get me wrong, I feel ... I don't know, I can speak for myself anyway when I was deep in it. There is somewhat maybe a subtle that, you know, we found the superior healing method. So whatever you seek, we will seek it in this world with the medicines that we drink. The plants will heal us. I guess you can sometimes maybe see a bit of disdain for any other healing modality kind of come up, that it might be supplementary but it won't be the biggest thing. Mason:  I think something as simple as therapy can be ... In meditative work, yogic work where you start really un-rustling everything, your plant medicine work, and if it really comes up, this work where I think it's going to take time to integrate that. I think for a lot of people, I think finding a nice level therapist or some other modalities to really bring you back off that arm of development that is the beautiful teachings of the plants and come back to your center. Molly:  Yeah. Mason:  Anyway, just wanted to kind of touch on that because I feel ... Yeah, I've had increasingly recently a lot of people are honestly on a soul retrieval journey after going down the rabbit hole. Molly:  Yeah. Mason:  So this kind of is all coming into a wider breadth of work that you do. Molly:  Sure, yeah. Mason:  You're an MD. I was talking to you about how your style of work ... Well, you mentioned it's really old school. Molly:  Yeah. Mason:  It's an old school kind of doctor. So you have a select amount of patients. You have a few patients as well you said who you've taken on special cases. Molly:  Yeah. I mean I basically have two types of patients. I have the personalized medical research on one end. These are like the weird cases that I just get paid to figure them out and figure out why they're sick and why they haven't been fixed yet by the healthcare system. Usually it's complex chronic disease, so it's got its roots usually in a severe health breakdown that was proceeded by usually some psychological stress that really damaged their immune system. Molly:  Usually when someone's under a significant amount of stress and physical threat or psychological threat, if it gets to a certain level, your mitochondria get damaged to a point where they can't defend you anymore. So your immune system is downstream over your mitochondrial function. It essentially just throws off your energy production systems. It throws off your immunity, and infections get in. Then they can further damage your body. Molly:  So usually it's always this horrible stress, massive infection, and then they were never the same after. So now you have to sort of reverse engineer their bodies to get back into a state of balance and health. It's a lot of work, but it's like the most satisfying work to do, because you're dealing with somebody who may have been sick for years. You're like, "Okay. I'm going to fix this." Or somebody who's got something that no one's figured out. You're like, "All right, we're going to figure this out together and we're going to get you better." Molly:  So I love those cases, but then I also have cases of people who ... Frankly, everyone in America wants more energy, okay? So I figured ... Funnily enough I was trying to study health over the last 10 years, like what is health, how do you define it, how do you measure it. In the process of studying health, I discovered that health is about capacity, and capacity is about capacitives. Capacitives is literally making and storing a charge in your cellular membranes, in your mitochondria, that is an electrochemical gradient generated by the food you eat and the way that you live your life. Molly:  It literally charges your cells with energy. That capacity enables you to do work, to run your genetic functions, to express your genes, to produce proteins, to do anything else that your body needs to do, like make hormones. So I've kind of just been going back and back and back and back ... First principles, like what is health, what is energy, what is capacity, and how does that relate to our daily life and our daily function. What are the things that damage that function? Molly:  So that's really where my research has come into play and why I started teaching at Stanford, because they were like, "Hey, our students are some of the most talented in the world, but they're also the most stressed out. So how can we give them a course that could actually help them produce more capacity to do greater and better work?" So I had a class of about 23 people, and it ended up being 20 hours of lectures. I read in I think the last two years I read about 1200 papers. So I've been digging deep into understanding how is energy made, how is it used, how are your energy systems destroyed, and really trying to marry this Eastern ancient philosophy of Chinese medicine and Qi, and then marry that with Western science and come up with my own beliefs around what I call and what's known in the literature as health span. Molly:  Which is how do you extend life as long as possible without disease. To me, it's all about understanding what are the major causes of disease, what are you most likely to get, and what are the things that you can do in your daily life now to avoid these things from happening. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I test everything on myself first. So I've learned about what it means to make a lot of energy, which is essentially making money in your body, but I've also learned how to spend a lot of energy and burn yourself out. Molly:  So I have had multiple rounds of burnout in my life. I had a pretty close call this summer where I was really overdoing it, and I had to take a step back and say, "Oh shit. I'm not living the example right now. I'm really doing too much." Funnily enough, the biggest signal to me this summer was actually the people I was working with were not feeding my energy, they were draining my energy. The thing that people mostly don't realise about health and life is that the quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life. So if your relationships suck, then your life is going to suck and you're going to die young. If your relationships are healthy, you're actually going to live a longer life. Molly:  So it's so fundamental to aging well, is like surrounding yourself with people that nourish you and doing work that makes you come alive, you know? Mason:  So yeah, hell yeah first of all. Molly:  Yeah, thanks. Mason:  I'm keen to dive a little bit into it. You know, well health span I like. I like that you bring that up. I mean that's something that everyone just looks at life in a block term. I don't know when I started hearing that term, maybe in the tellomere books, when that was getting really trendy. It was at the end of that term of life for the [inaudible 00:23:48] when you no longer can reproduce cells a lot of the time, along with other degenerative diseases, you enter into the death span. That's for the last however many decades of your life that the medical system can keep you alive. You're in the death span. So I like that, that's a very tangible goal, to keep yourself in that health span. So we'll get into those principles, but in terms of your work, I mean you work for like year long blocks, like a lot of- Molly:  Six months to a year minimum usually. It's because you need that amount of time to change someone's life. You need that amount of time to take someone around the corner, because behavior change is hard. Mason:  And you go to their homes and work, right? Molly:  Yeah. I go to them. I go to their offices. I email them every week. I talk to the client that is sickest on the phone every week. I just literally created a nine page report on the fly for a client who had like 10 questions for me. She's fairly healthy, but she just wanted some answers and she wanted to understand Ayurvedic doshas, and she wanted to understand ... I was like, "Well here, let's talk about why Ayurvedas might be useful. Let's talk about why it may not apply to a Western body, and why there's some major issues in some of the nutritional recommendations that they have. Also let's talk about how, no offense to India, but they're not doing so well in health." So if this worldview is so effective, why do I see so many sick Indians? I'm just not convinced that tons of grains and tons of dairy is the answer to health. Mason:  Well especially like it's not going to be raw dairy, right? It's not going to be raw fermented dairy. Molly:  No. We're not getting raw fermented dairy. We're not getting non GMO grains anymore. We're getting all this garbage food, so you can't always apply these ancient technologies to modern life unless you can actually have ancient traditional food preparation. And you need to soak and sprout those grains too, and people aren't doing that. So I should've mentioned that in that report, but yeah. It takes a lot of work to do. I'm not against it, and I actually think that the doshas are really valuable for fitness recommendations, because the endomorph, ectomorph, mesomorph is very similar to the ... The ectomorph is very similar to the ... I have to- Mason:  Kapha, Pitta, Alpha. Molly:  Yeah, exactly. So you can actually look at these types and you can- Mason:  Is it, no, not alpha, vata. Kapha, Pitta, Vata. Molly:  Yeah, Pitta is more like mesomorph. Kapha I believe is more like ectomorph, and endomorph is like the last one. Point is that there's body types, and there's those skinny people who have these amazing metabolisms who could literally just crush carbs and they're fine. Then there's the people who are like they even look at a carb, they gain weight, right? Those people legitimately have slower metabolisms than the person who's got the faster metabolism. Then there's people like me who are in the middle, where if I eat carbs I gain weight, if I cut the carbs I lose weight like that. So it's literally I'm lucky. If I lift weights, I get muscular. If I don't lift weights, I get lean. If I do cardio, I get lean. Molly:  So it's all about this balancing of your energy and your metabolism with these patterns that we're seeing with people, that can change by the way, depending on your genetics and your location where you're living in and what you're eating. But anyway, so yeah. So there you go. Mason:  Well I like that you're working ... So you're obviously working, because you've got executives and tech people and kind of high flying CEO kind of clients as well, so it's a nice balance. But obviously they're going to be dealing some of the time with something debilitating. But as well, like if they're not going to- Molly:  Oh yeah, sometimes they just want to be really healthy. So I was writing this book called The Hour Between the Dog and Wolf. It's about the biology of trading, and I am working with a hedge fund founder who is kind of like a character off of Billions, except for a lot nicer. So he was having a bad year, and when you lose, you have high cortisol levels and you're in a fear based state and your testosterone levels tank. Molly:  When you win, your testosterone levels go up and it's like, "Boom." So there's this effect on your body and your biology that can literally change your performance, and your performance can change your biology. So I was trying to get this guy back into a state of high testosterone. So I was like, "Look. Your testosterone sucks. You've had a bad year. We want to get you back into a place where you're winning again." Molly:  So I got him to start weight lifting. I got him on a different type of dietary style. I got him to start doing certain things with his supplements, and low and behold, his testosterone doubled and he's in a much better place right now. So it's cool when you can teach a person about what's going on inside their body, give them certain behaviors to do, have them implement those behaviors, see the labs change, and then the person's like, "Oh my God. This is fucking awesome." Now this [inaudible 00:28:45] Mason:  So with the initial testing, because I think it's like a lot of people ... As we talked about before, I like that you're offering somewhat of a bridge, but a legitimate bridge. Not just like a, "I'm a health coach," bridge- Molly:  I'm a data driven ... I mean I am looking at the body as a very complex machine that needs multiple ways of attacking different problems and balancing different energies. Some of the energies by the way are not always physical. Sometimes this stuff is spiritual, and I have a questionnaire to identify where in your health do you have the biggest problems. Sometimes a person's health is actually, it's a spiritual problem. They really have had some sort of awful life event that has just set them on a course of really bad luck and bad experiences, and they need to focus on that and not on biology. But a lot of what I do and what my bread and butter is is biological health optimization. Molly:  So looking at the body from a molecular perspective and saying, "Okay. This is your lipid panel. This is what your LDL particle numbers look like. This is what your diet looks like and this is why your diet has changed these numbers. This is what your carbohydrate metabolism looks like. This is what your amino acid metabolism looks like. This is why you have an imbalance in amino acids. This is why you need this one specifically versus that one. This is why your cortisol levels are off and you're completely exhausted and you need some Jing herbs to revitalize yourself because you're literally burned out." Molly:  Or maybe a person needs detoxification because they've gotten super high mercury levels from eating way too much sushi, which was me last year in Japan. Then sometimes I'm looking at the microbiome and saying, "Okay, we need to get you on some personalized probiotics because your microbiome is totally imbalanced and we need to get you back to a better state. If you don't get into a better state, you're gonna develop inflammatory bowel disease because you have early markers of that." So it's a lot about prediction. Molly:  This concept of P4 medicine, which I really like, that Leroy Hood coined, and it's personalized- Mason:  What's this called? P- Molly:  P4. Personalized, predictive, preventive, and participatory. I really like it because it's a framework of thinking about medicine before things become full blown disease. Full blown disease is hard to reverse. I mean you are dealing with pathology on a molecular level that is like a broken building. It's a lot harder to fix that than a building that's got a water main leak that you're like, "Oh shit. We got to fix that water main leak, but if we fix it it's not going to completely collapse." Or like a building that has, like you're in the kitchen and there's a grease fire. You got to put that out now, because if you don't that's going to set this whole thing on fire. Molly:  It's really about ... Or maybe the building just has some ice and you're like, "Okay look, this building needs some upkeep. It needs some better cleaning." Just go fast, fast more often. Clean out the garbage and you won't have all this crap growing that shouldn't be growing. So I really look at the body as architecture, and I look at the architecture as like are you building your body out of marble and really good quality steel or crappy materials that are going to break down once a big storm hits. It's about looking at the parallels between nature and your own physiology, because you are a microcosm. You are in yourself a living, breathing organism that is basically changing constantly. Molly:  If you're not doing regular tuneups, you're not going to know when things are not working out well. So I did my own labs this summer because it'd been about six months since I'd done them. I was like, "Ah shit, my microbiome has been definitely affected by my stress levels and my diet. I need to increase my protein. I need to decrease my saturated fat. I need to change my probiotic regimen and I need to detox." So I started doing that about a month ago, and I'm already feeling like holy shit, so much better in one month. It's astonishing how just knowing what to fix and going after those areas is so much more effective than throwing darts at a wall and hoping something sticks. Mason:  Well I like that you're providing that service that's that bridge between you taking it on yourself and understanding the patterns of your body and being able to affect it, and basically get on top of little symptomatic responses and grease fires that come up. But the other side of that is where most people are trying to bridge between, is like the practitioner office, whether it's a naturopathic office or even possibly with a GP. Is MD just like, or is it GP? I don't know if you have GPs. Molly:  General practitioner. I'm a general practitioner. Mason:  Oh you are? Okay. Molly:  I'm the most general of practitioners, because I literally do so many things. I'm super broad. Mason:  Yeah. I think GP is that 15 minute stint in the office [crosstalk 00:33:44] Molly:  A primary doctor for the most part, but also anybody who's not board certified in one area is a GP for the most part. So I'm not a primary doctor. I'm not the doctor you call when you've got the flu. I am the doctor that you deal with when you want to improve your health or dig real deep into why you are so sick. Mason:  Well that is something I think a lot of people, yeah, you're providing that ... The amount of data that you go into, that bridge to go, "Right, you don't want to end up in any of these clinics or offices. You want to be taking complete understanding and responsibility for the patterns of your health." So you take people essentially through that program, and then when they come out the other side, from the sounds of it, they're incredibly informed about the way their body works. So I think- Molly:  Yeah. It's a lot of education. Mason:  Yeah. So you're using a lot of testing, which I really like. I think perhaps people listening ... I think it's something that is quite available. I think DNA testing, microbiome, and you're doing hormone panels, is that right? Molly:  Mm-hmm (affirmative). Hormone panels, microbiome testing, nutritional testing is probably the most valuable thing I do is literally just testing the body for vitamins and minerals and neurotransmitters and carbohydrate metabolism, fat metabolism, markers of dysbiosis, markers of oxidative stress. Like looking under the hood. Then just basic labs, like organ system function, anemia, hormones via blood and urine, and the whole hormone cascade. Then looking at certain specialty labs if necessary, like immune system function. What else am I doing? Molly:  I do some panels of infectious agents, just because viral infections are pretty common and yet overlooked by a lot of doctors. They just did not teach us to test for viruses when we were in medical school, even though they're super common. Mason:  Well I think that body of work is coming up in the literature. It's like there's been a lot on stealth infections recently. Molly:  Oh yeah. Mason:  The amount of times that it is going to be a stealth viral infection- Molly:  Oh yeah, or intracellular bacteria. Like syphilis, Lyme Disease, mycoplasma, those are nasty. Mason:  Well and I think what's happening a lot of the time for people who ... I was speaking to a practitioner over here, and she kind of solidified the idea that you start getting better on one front and you start feeling fantastic because you've gone after perhaps the spirochetes involved in Lyme, but then you've had a viral infection that's been sitting there dormant waiting for the health of a cell to get to a particular point that it can use it to reproduce its agenda. Then all of a sudden you start going down again. So that's for a lot of- Molly:  These things are nasty. You got to get their whole life cycle. You've got to look at the life cycle and be like, "Okay, how can I interrupt this? How can I interrupt this?" That's why antivirals concurrently with Lymes treatments are really important, because as your body starts activating and your genes start getting expressed, those viruses get into your genes. They get into your own genetic code, those assholes. Mason:  Yeah. Yeah, they are. They're opportunistic. Molly:  They're so smart. Mason:  That's why I think even with Lyme, it's like Astragalus, Japanese knotweed, Cat's Claw, that's why they're constantly being thrown out there. They have that cross section where they can be such effective antivirals. Even just having- Molly:  That's amazing. Mason:  It's just like even having that in your lifestyle, speaking of getting to understanding symptoms and understanding- Molly:  What are those called? Which ones did you mention? Mason:  Astragalus or astragalus. Molly:  Yeah, astragalus and- Mason:  And Cat's Claw. Molly:  Cat's Claw. I didn't realise Cat's Claw was an antiviral, but I think that makes sense. Mason:  Yeah, big time. I mean you can think like especially in the Amazon, if you're going to need an antifungal in your diet because you're going to have fungus bringing you down. So that's the Pau D'Arco. Then you combine that with the amount of viral activity that's going on there within that sopping wet jungle, that's where the Cat's Claw is probably ... It's one of the primary medicines if you get in there, especially one of the primary clinical medicines, but also for me it's one of the primary preventative medicines that I just kind of keep on rotation. Molly:  Amazing. Mason:  It's like I had to take it off SuperFeast, and this was- Molly:  Why? Mason:  It's just really hard to get a good source at the moment. Yeah, the quality's just getting a bit crap. I've now found someone that's working with some small tribes who are basically doing Cat's Claw in that Di Tao style. That's how we source herbs, Di Tao. It just means getting it from their spiritual homeland and crafting it in a way that leaves the environment better than when you found it, and also just like- Molly:  How do you pronounce that? What is that thing you said? Mason:  D-I, Di. Molly:  D-I. Mason:  And then Tao is T-A-O. Molly:  Tao. Mason:  Yeah, Di Tao. Molly:  Oh wow. That is the greatest thing. Mason:  Well I mean it's just a sourcing philosophy, I mean just being able to get the wild thing and procure it yourself, that's like if you're doing that yourself then that's essentially the most ... That's Di Tao to the absolute extreme. You don't need to label it Di Tao, that's just you getting your herbs. But in trying to describe to people how, like say we're sourcing Chinese tonic herbs, Di Tao it's kind of more of this living and breathing sourcing philosophy that's ever moving. It's not like organic is static. You tick boxes and then you can put a stamp on. Mason:  Di Tao, you're in constantly trying to get the growing or sourcing, whether it's foraging wild or growing it in a farm, closer to its original state. You're ensuring that you're not using irrigation, definitely not using anything like a pesticide or external soils or anything like that. But has a lot to do with making sure that you're in regions, whether they're mountainous or valleys or whatever it is, to atmospherically just make sure, and temperature wise to make sure that you're going to get a herb that has the most punch. Basically ensure that the herb has the Jing, Qi, or Shen within it. Then you constantly go down to make sure that you have the full spectrum extraction of the herb that just keeps it all together. Molly:  Amazing. Mason:  That's kind of like Di Tao. So yeah, hopefully we'll have a Cat's Claw soon, because we found someone basically doing it in that style over in Ecuador, which is like [crosstalk 00:40:29] Molly:  I mean, so I just got into Chinese herbs a couple years ago because I went to Erewhon Market in LA, and I was having a really exhausted week. I was just so tired, and I saw these elixirs. They were selling them for like $16.00, and I was like, "All right, well I'm in town. It's a fun thing to buy, an elixir from Erewhon, so we're just going to- Mason:  It's the funnest way to break the bank when you're in LA. Molly:  It's so great. You just drop $100 easy, like no problem. All the prepared stuff they make, that's the best by the way. They bake the best kale chips in the world. But the point is I had this elixir, and I remember just being revived, like totally revived. I was just like, "This is absolutely astonishing how good I feel right now." So I ended up buying all the separate ingredients of this elixir because I was just like, "I'm just going to have to make this regularly to get my Jing back." It was all about Jing herbs. I remember just feeling like, "This is the answer." Like as somebody who has the tendency to ... When I make energy, I just want to go and spend it. I mean my sister said, "Molly, if you're not working, you're partying." I don't party that hard anymore, but I have had a tendency to just burn the candle on both ends because I really enjoy life and I really want to feel alive. Molly:  I try to simmer down a little bit, but then I end up going back and doing stuff. But man these Jing herbs, it just revived me. I remember thinking, "This is so incredible that I just discovered this whole new world of medicine." There's apparently 50 Chinese herbs that are like the traditional- Mason:  The tonics. Molly:  Yeah. Mason:  A few more but there's like [crosstalk 00:42:09] It depends. There's a few official stories and things people have picked up and run with. Tonic herbalism and superior herbalism, it's wider than just like, "These are the top 50." It's a system. There are herbs which are considered superior that are there to basically ... That's about nourishing life, but some of them aren't the absolute top. Some of them are just somewhat supporting and bolstering to those and make it possible in that tonic herbal system. But basically, yeah. [crosstalk 00:42:41] Yeah, coming from that world of like Truth Calkins put together that Erewhon tonic bar. He worked with Ron Teeguarden. So yeah, that's like I definitely know that well. Molly:  Yeah. But I mean the hard part was, is actually I couldn't get ... For this tonic I couldn't get deer antler velvet. I was just like ... This is how I found out about your company, as I was like, "I can't get any deer antler velvet. There's literally no one in the world that I can get this from." Then I was like, "SuperFeast." I remember when a friend of mine from Byron Bay told me about your company. So I went online and I bought it and had it shipped. I was just like, "What is this magic?" I don't know the shelf life of it. Do you know the shelf life of it? Is it pretty decent? Mason:  Two years. Molly:  Okay, cool. I can still use it then. But yeah, it was this magical ingredient that I wanted to find. Then I saw you guys at the conference and I was just like, "Oh my God. His mushrooms are here for free. There was this whole room of free swag." I was just like, "Mason's Mushrooms are free? Like how come he is giving these away. This is so valuable. This is the most valuable thing in this room." I took like three bottles. Mason:  Yeah, good. I was hoping you would. I'm glad you got the deer antler. Molly:  I have a story for you. Mason:  Oh yeah? Molly:  I had a girlfriend who had not had her period in like a year because her husband is dealing with cancer and she was in a really serious stress state. She started taking your mushrooms and she got her period in a month. Mason:  So good. I love those stories. It almost brings a tear to your eye. Molly:  I know. Mason:  Because when you understand the repercussions of that that actually means- Molly:  Yeah. I was just like, "She needs adaptogens. She's in way too much stress. She's not in a state where her body can reproduce and she needs to get into a state of calm again." Honestly I saw her in a few weeks after she started the supplements I gave her, and she was like a totally different looking person. It was amazing. People don't realise that the stressed state, the body will always prioritize survival over reproduction. So there's a lot of women complaining of not being able to reproduce and having all sorts of hormonal dysfunctions, and you ask them about their lives and they're like, "Well I'm not stressed." It's like everyone is so complicit with the level of stress that we have that no one believes they're stressed anymore. Mason:  Yeah, that's it. Molly:  It's like, "I'm super high stress." Even I was in the state of denial even six months ago. Because I was doing a startup, I was working as a doctor and I was teaching at Stanford, and I was just like, "Yeah I'm not going to lower my stress anytime soon because this is what I do. I'm a top performer." There was a point where the world, the universe, my body was just like, "Oh just wait. Just wait. Give yourself a couple more months of this." I got around to the summer and I remember looking in the mirror being like, "You have exhausted yourself. You look exhausted, and it's time for you to take a step back and start recalibrating this stuff you're doing because you just performed a lot, but you just ran a marathon. You need to chill." Mason:  Yeah. You can never stop recalibrating and reading those patterns man. Molly:  You have to keep listening and listening. Mason:  There's so much clinically about stealth infections, stealth inflammation. Stealth stress isn't something, and you exactly said it, and I kind of sometimes just ... There's so much going on and I'll just run at a million miles an hour, and I know I have had the capacity to do that in the past, and especially when I've had my practices in place that I've been able to maintain that level, and at the moment ... I'm really reevaluating at the moment, especially I'm at the back of three weeks just with Aiya while Tahns is over studying in the States. Just with that, little things just get lost within the personal practice, and yet I don't take ... I just allow them to be eliminated and just, as you did as well, just a million miles an hour and all your projects and everything, and bit by bit that stealth stress starts to creep in. You go, "You know what? I'm okay. I'm actually not that bad." Mason:  Then the accumulation that starts to occur within your nervous system, within the endocrine system, and then if you have a high standard, which is what I like about your work in teaching this, understanding that optimal general high standard that you have for yourself, and that reading these subtle symptoms and then knowing that you have the ability to utterly change the flow of your lifestyle, that's where it lies in the begining. Molly:  This is the power of, and this is really the whole aim, is recognizing that there is no magical day where you're going to be optimally healthy. There's this constant rhythm of life which is always changing, and there's going to be times where you're going to be pushing it hard, and there's going to be times where you have to recover. If you don't, it's like athletes. I told everyone, "Look everyone, I'm on an off season right now." My off season involves writing a book proposal, traveling, speaking abroad, running my practice, but frankly, and I'm going to incorporate a company and get it started, but I'm not going to be overextending myself during this two month period. Molly:  This is about restoration. This is about recalibration. This is about reconnection with my community and my family, but it's not about always being go, go, go, go, go. It's about recognizing everybody can take a break. You can take a week long vacation once a quarter. You can take a day off once a week. You have to give yourself time to recover. That is the natural style of life. Life is not constantly always stormy. There's times of calm and there's times of stress, and if you don't follow those patterns and you're always in the storm, then how are you ever going to recover? Molly:  You're going to use up all your resources. This is really the core of health. It's about recognizing that you're going to build capacity and you're going to spend it. You're going to build it and you're going to spend it. It's like having money in the bank. But your major goal should always be, "How am I making compounding interest decisions that lead to better and bigger capacity so I can handle more and so I can actually do more without breaking?" This is how you level up in your life. It's like you don't push yourself and waste your energy completely, you reserve some of it in the back and you invest that energy in things that are going to build you up. Those adaptogens, the food ... They're not cheap, but they're worth investing in. Molly:  The food you eat, like I spend double what most people spend on food, and I also fast more often than most people do, so I probably spend about the same. But I'm doing these practices to build my capacity, and I'm doing these things that I know are going to lead to better health long term. So that's really the main message of what I'm trying to teach people. It's really about what is the minimum number of healthy things you can do to optimize your health so that you have this constant state of, "I'm still in the process of moving in the right direction of health," even though you're not always going to be at the highest performance state. Mason:  I completely agree. I always, again, whenever I talk about this ... It's absolutely true, and it doesn't matter how many times people hear this simple message, and I feel like you've put it quite a bit differently. But I always, I hear within myself the not possible-ness. I've worked with a lot of mums especially over the years, and you're feeling that's like ... If anyone's feeling that, it's not just mums of course, it's everyone, but that bogged down. For me it was a young man wanting to not grow a business but go and create the best educational resource. Mason:  I realised for me what was making it not possible, which was I feel like most people needed to kind of have on the side as an acknowledgement, when they hear this ability that you need to be able to maybe take a day off, do these kinds of things to keep you at optimal, is that you really need to go in and do some work to see where your societal or family programming has really put in some values that aren't actually yours. Because that's where, like the moment me and Tahns really realised that just, or for myself as well, I was just set to maximum velocity. Just in the business for example, I'm just like, "It's not possible to just slow down." It's just like there's so many things to do. It's just like, "Well how about we just don't do them as fast." Mason:  It's like with expanding to America, this is ... Tahns is like the GM of the company. She's copping that burden essentially if we go really quick, and for us to get to the point with a bunch of other decisions, we've over the last years realised, "Why are we trying to go so fast? We're not compromising our sourcing or anything like that, but why don't we just slow the fuck down? Why don't we just learn the real why of why we actually want to do these things?" I immediately just realised that that programming from the current entrepreneurial scene that I'd decided to take on myself, and it's- Molly:  Totally. It is. And everyone's miserable and they act like, "Oh look at me on my Instagram how fucking awesome my life is." Everyone's so unhappy underneath it all. You're like, "Actually the people I want to spend my time with are those entrepreneurs that are content, those entrepreneurs that are saying 'I do this because I love the work,' those entrepreneurs who basically inspire me to continue to grow in every direction and not be ..." The thing that really sucks about the entrepreneurship sort of mentality is that there's a lot of people who are just dopamine and novelty driven. So there's a sense of like it's never enough, and if you let that permeate your life of it's never enough, then you'll never be happy with your partner. You'll never be happy with any company you've built. You'll never be happy with your cofounder, and you'll always find a reason to find something wrong with your reality. Molly:  Frankly, no matter how big of a success you can have, you'll never be happy with that level of success either. So like when I finished teaching at Stanford this year, I thought, "Okay. The next obvious thing I should do is just found a tech company, because that's what you do in the Valley. You just found tech companies." I immediately- Mason:  That's so wild to me. Molly:  Oh totally, right? I was like, "Okay universe, I need this type of cofounder. Give it to me. I need literally someone to do this and this for me," and the next couple days I found these guys. They actually contacted me and they were like, "Hey we're looking for a doctor like you to work with." I'm like, "Well funny, I'm looking for co founders like you." You've got to be really careful with how you ask for things, because you may get them, and then when you get them you may not actually like them. You can end up ... I just think that there's this super fast mentality of everything has to go so fast, everything has to be so so quickly found. A lot of things in life take slow and tender caring and nurturing to build. Molly:  There is this desire I have of building something slowly and methodically, carefully, and not being chained to venture capital money, which I think is part of the reason why everything is so ... People think that they have to grow so fast, and they're so unhappy. There's frankly an unhappy relationship with venture capital. But at the same time, I think there's never been a better time to be an entrepreneur, so I'm not telling people not to do it, but I think the thing that I've learned from watching people is seeing who's doing it right and then who's maybe not doing it so right. Maybe who's doing it in a way that just isn't actually bringing them life satisfaction, you know? Mason:  Yeah. I like to think of it like who's doing it unique, because of course everyone's going to be [inaudible 00:54:48] Molly:  I love that, because I mean there's definitely enough people doing it in a way that's like, "Drain your energy. Drain your capacity. You'll deal with it when you exit." There's a lot of that. Mason:  I love it. Hey, since I've got a bunch of other things I want to talk about, but I know we're probably like- Molly:  Part two? Mason:  Yeah, maybe like ... We'll do a part two for sure. I've never done like this before, but how about like a fire found? Is that what they're called? Molly:  Oh yeah, sure. Mason:  All right. So everyone just know that these are huge topics and probably maybe on another podcast we'll get a little bit further into it, but I just want to get fire round recommendations and takes on first bone and teeth health. Molly:  Oh yeah, okay. Your bone and teeth health has everything to do with your diet, so if your diet is high in sugar, you're going to decay your mouth because you're going to grow the wrong bacteria in your oral microbiome and they're going to produce acid. That acid's going to break down the enamel, and that's how you're going to get cavities. So cut the sugar out of your diet. If someone hasn't told you to stop drinking soda by now, give me a fucking break. I'm sorry for cussing, but soda does not belong in the American diet or the Australian diet or any diet of human anywhere in the world, period, end of story. Okay, off that rant. Molly:  Minerals are really important. You get them from usually high quality sources of water. You get them from fruits and vegetables. You get them from meats. You get them from healthy foods. You need minerals. Shilajit's a cool source of minerals that I started taking, just be careful with the dose because if you have too much Shilajit you will get way too energized. [crosstalk 00:56:23] Mason:  Yeah, I mean it's a weird industry as well. It's getting pretty unsustainable that one as well. There's a couple of good ones, I think like Omica. But yeah. Molly:  Does Shilajit go bad, because I feel like it looks like it never goes bad like honey. Mason:  Yeah. I mean it's kind of like that. If you have the tar, then it's got like a long shelf life. Molly:  I don't think it goes bad. I feel like it's got to have years. Okay, other teeth things. People don't floss. Flossing is the key to good teeth. If you don't floss your teeth, you're going to have basically a large amount of surface area that's never been touched. So that's like not brushing your teeth. That's gross, so gross. I love oral health. I could talk about it for hours, but the quality of your diet will determine the quality of your teeth. Mason:  I love it. I saw on your Instagram that you're just making up a nice juicy broth for yourself, always going to help as well. Molly:  Yeah. Broth is so good because you need those minerals from the bones. Mason:  Well let's look really quickly, let's just like ... I wanted to talk about this a little bit more, but one of the things I really love about your, especially your Instagram, is your focus on food preparation. I assume it's something that you focus a lot in the work that you do. Molly:  Yeah. Food is everything, food prep. I mean sourcing, I source like a chef because chefs know where good food is made and sourced. So people don't understand that there's markets everywhere. Go to the market, get your best food, and then keep your plants alive. Plants want to live. Certain plants want to live outside the fridge, certain plants want to live in the fridge. Most plants that have stalks want to be in water, so you should put them into water and then put them in the fridge, because they want to stay alive. Molly:  Other plants like leaves want to be in like a greenhouse, so you put them in a bag with a piece of paper towel, and it'll keep them alive in a way that won't let them die. Make some sprouts. Sprout your own sprouts. They're super easy to do. Ferment your own foods. Mason:  Just get in there, yeah. Molly:  Just get into your community and get into local eating. Local produce is the highest quality nutrient value for your buck, and eat organic. Frankly it's just better for you. It doesn't have as many pesticides. But if you can't eat organic, still eat fruits and vegetables because it's still better for you than not. Just avoid the dirty dozen in America. Then with meat it's all about the sourcing. It's all about the quality. Grass fed, pasture raised, grass finished. Do not eat grain finished meat. Wild fish, know your fishmonger. Talk about where the fish comes from. Molly:  Choose sustainable fishes and don't over consume. We can all fast more. We don't need to eat every day, turns out. Humans don't have to eat every day. You can cut your grocery bill just by not eating as much. Nuts and seeds generally like to be soaked and sprouted, just be aware that you're going to get a lot of anti-nutrients. I overdo the nuts and seeds. This is a known problem. If somebody out there wants to give me advice on how to stop doing this, I don't know how ... I don't have the answer because it's my biggest issue right now and I still consume lots of nuts and seeds, and my Omega 6s are too high because of that, so that's a problem. Mason:  A lot of almonds in there? Molly:  Too many almonds. Mason:  Almonds, I think it's a thousand to one ratio of Omega 6s to 3s. Molly:  All right, I'm just going to cut out almonds. I'm going to cut out the almonds. That's the key is the almonds. Mason:  Yeah, just try the almonds and then see how you go. I love it. I mean I hit that message every time. Here everyone's integrating, like listening to the SuperFeast podcast, a lot of people are integrating tonic herbs into their kitchen. But what I like is for them to ... It needs somewhere to land within the kitchen. It needs a real culture. Just on, like crossing over to even psychedelics and Michael Pollan. His later book kind of rocked the world to change your mind, but he's a food journalist. I think we spoke about him. Are you a fan of his work? Molly:  I know him. Yeah, he's awesome. Mason:  You know him? Molly:  Yeah. Mason:  He's the legend, right? He's such a- Molly:  He's a legend. Mason:  After everything that he's researched, his whole thing comes down to just prepare your own food and know where it comes from. Molly:  And eat mostly plants and a little bit of meat if you want some meat. Mason:  But yeah, eat real food. Not too much, mostly plants. Right? I think that's it, unless ... Yeah, I mean I know there's a lot of contention in the diet scene no matter what, but that personal food preparation you can never come away from it. Molly:  The key is learning these basic techniques, like basic techniques. Get a blender, blending ... Everyone likes baby food, I don't care what you say. Purees make everything delicious. Broth plus vegetables equals magic. Just make baby food, just make it. You'll love it, I promise you. Just make purees. Mason:  I got to use my blender for something but hot chocolates one of these days. Molly:  Right? Make your own cacao. Make your own ... I don't know, just make your own stuff. It's not hard to make. Just learn to use a blender, learn to boil water, learn to roast, learn to saute. These are basic techniques. Mason:  Learn to slow cook. Molly:  Slow cooker. Oh yeah, slow cooker's got to be the easiest thing in the world. Mason:  Got to be the easiest thing. Molly:  Honestly just follow a recipe. Once a week learn a new recipe. Just teach yourself. Then make salads. Salads are dumb, I mean you just got to chop shit and make a dressing. Mason:  I love it. Look, final question before we bring this home. If people are going to start getting to understanding the patterns of their body, the symptoms of their body, I know you work with a lot beyond that. You look at emotional reactivity. There's a lot here for people when taking sovereign control of their own health to get on top of. Molly:  Yes, sovereign control of your health. Mason:  We've talked about the testing which people can go and find a practitioner. I know I'm kind of like back ... Need to kind of get on top of that, it's been a while since- Molly:  Try to find Genova Diagnostics. They're my favorite company. They're a global company. They're easier to find in England.

Simone and Shanice discuss the way black women are viewed as strong but it is almost used against us. Have you had an experience where you were near a breaking point but didn't have the support you needed?

Subscribe at http://patreon.com/strugglesession and http://strugglesession.substack.com to hear bonus episodes and our podcast mini-series Watching the Watchmen. On today's episode Jack and Leslie are joined by Jaya Sundaresh (Current Affairs) to discuss Bernie's return to the debate stage, the media's ongoing dismissal of his campaign, Warren's inability to defend Medicare for All, and whether CAP made Pete Buttigieg in a lab. Note: This episode's release was delayed a bit due to a technical issue. Tune: Makthaverskan - Witness [https://makthaverskan.bandcamp.com/]

Well, I think I'm back. I have returned to the podcast airwaves with this let's-see-how-things-go episode. I start off rambling about Giuliani's aides getting arrested, all the Trump bullshit, Matt Lauer raping colleagues and Joshua Brown. My guest is old friend and returning champion Sean Burns, and we basically go off on MCU stans hating on Scorsese, Joker, the upcoming Oscar season and just getting old.  As for music, I play tunes by Bobby Caldwell, Mac Ayres and Little Brother. This episode is sponsored by WoodRocket.com.

...So I fire back: You're always on my mind. Love, the World-Eater ---------------- News! See episode description for this week's rundown, but some news about what's to come for MiM is as follows: This last episode we recorded some time ago. Starting next drop, we'll brbringing you fresh content, taking questions, and keeping a rad schedule with lots of bonus content. What KIND of bonus content? Here's a hint: Stephanie's psychic and it's the spookiest month of the year. We have transcripts being migrated to the homepage. In a weird move, we're going to post this weeks at the very bottom of the notes to see what happens.  Buckle up and subscribe so you don't miss a thing! On with the show... This week, the Miracles in Manhattan Podcast talks about the weird things you've been thinking and what the rest of the world thinks about you, We also get into what it means to be single, and, in the offing, Lesson 11 of A Course in Miracles. Things get wavy. Talking points: Your hosts set up a mental chessboard. And then call it a day. Marco is at a loss for any real expertise. And the word, “oxytocin” Are you single, coupled, partnered, avaible or a quantum field? Tell us in an email! What are you REALLY doing at Trader Joe's? Lots of talk about Zen…An  A for effort is awarded  Spoiler Alert! [The world is not meaningless] We’re taking life-questions. Email us! miraclesinmanhattan@gmail.com Find more content at miraclesinmanhattan.com  @Wildmanhattan (t) | #Podernfamily Themes: Advice, ACIM, A Course in Miracles, True Crimes, Comedy, Pain, Politics, The Present, Love, Dating, Race, BDSM, The body, Spirit, Self-help, Spirituality, Zen, http://twitter.com/WildManhattan ---------- Transcript   ARE YOU SINGLE? OR, SPOILER ALERT: THE WORLD ISN’T REALLY MEANINGLESS   The Miracles in Manhattan Podcast  (A Course In Miracles (ACIM), Lesson 11)   Marco Maisto [00:00:00] That's right. But oh we should also tell people hey guys and gals we have an email address now. Yes we do. And why do we have an e-mail address Steph?   Stephanie Wild [00:00:11]So that you can e-mail us questions with questions.   Marco Maisto [00:00:13] We're taking questions.   Marco Maisto [00:00:16] We are going to answer your questions in as apt a fashion as we answer one another's here on these yes miracles in Manhattan.   Stephanie Wild [00:00:25]Gmail dot com. Easy to remember. Yeah. All you have to do is remember the name of the podcast and then Gee Mary popular. Who called Product miracles in Manhattan at G.M. dot com so just remember that. Well we'll point you in the right direction.   [00:00:40] Yeah and yeah Friels do to please e-mail questions and don't feel like they need to be totally pertinent to the episode you just listened to. No no no I need any any of you any lesson yet.   [00:00:58] My meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world.   [00:01:23] Welcome to today's edition of miracles in Manhattan the only show in which two spiritual delinquents start over.   [00:01:32] Welcome to miracles in Manhattan where two spiritual delinquents lead you through a Course in Miracles trying to wake up in the city that never sleeps.   [00:01:44] I am Reverend Stephanie Wilde and I am Marco. Mr. poet single guy.   [00:01:55] Sorry you'd have to listen to him another time. Yes. No I'm not.   [00:02:00] I don't know if I'm single I'm Venables With the death. I think it's like well I'm seeing I'm dating. The Lenny Kravitz guy you right. Right. But I'm also. No I think that's means that single. Yeah. Hey I'm not hooked up with a partnership.   [00:02:16] Let's let's you know how we can find out the end to that if you know the answer to this question. Email us at miracles and man and G.M. dot com because we are taking questions and airing them in and talking about them on the air and we would really love to hear from you. But yeah you know if you're single and seeing another person is also seeing other people are you single or are you What did you see available available.   [00:02:41] OK. Yeah. I mean you know maybe you know you could you know what. I think you could be married. That's not single but also available because you got a partnership with someone but you're also available whereas I don't have a partnership. You know I don't have a life right entwined. I would feel kind of easy asking a woman if she's available. That sound kind of easy. I mean you just have to assume she's available if she's on a date. Yes this is the word.   [00:03:10] Yeah. I saw an ad moving English moving and they used the word free. You know you free.   [00:03:17] Boy. That's yeah. There's a lot of confusion what happened. Well it had to be in context just like you walking around saying Are you free. Yeah yeah. But it was you know it was if you were sort of I'll try that next time at Whole Foods get you free. Are you free. I had to pay for the tomatoes and now expensive. And yes I said tomatoes. All right.   [00:03:39] So lesson eleven goes like this my meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world.   [00:03:45] Now this is interesting lesson because it's on page 18 of the workbook for students and on at the end of the first paragraph it says the key to forgiveness lies in it.   [00:04:00] So this is the first time. If I'm not mistaken that the course talks about forgiveness.   [00:04:10] And so you don't have to say that you're the author of a book called The Art of forgiveness which is quite good thinking forgive the process of forgiveness is the miracle that A Course in Miracles talks about it's dissolving illusion.   [00:04:26] So this is this is a this is a big this is a big lesson today because it's it really it starts to get to the heart of the matter.   [00:04:34] So this is how we do lesson eleven the exercise of lesson eleven for maximum benefit. The eyes should Wait no let me go back. We need to. With our eyes closed first repeat the idea slowly to ourselves. My meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world. Then open your eyes and look around from one thing to another fairly rapidly without lingering on anything in particular.   [00:05:14] It should just be done as casually as possible.   [00:05:20] That's it. And you keep repeating the idea.   [00:05:25] And it says he had three practice periods will be sufficient for the day. But you can do as many as five. But more than this is not recommended.   [00:05:35] So it's a pretty straightforward exercise compared to Lesson 10 which had like a few was almost like a little set of mantras. But lesson 11 is just close your eyes my meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world.   [00:05:49] Open your eyes move you move your eyes let them rest on this that and the other but nothing in particular in casual unhurried leisurely way and then repeat repeat the idea once more my meaningless thoughts are showing the meaningless world.   [00:06:07] It says here that this contains the foundation for the peace relaxation and freedom from worry that we are trying to achieve.   [00:06:18] Right. Okay so this extends as men correct me please if I'm wrong. This is how I understand it. This extends on less than 10 which establishes that my thoughts are meaningless. Correct. This goes on to say that so is the world around correct me because we've already been introduced to the idea that our thoughts have determined the world.   [00:06:45] Right. Right. Thought from the past we're projecting our thoughts perceptions wishes expectations on the world. But if my thoughts are meaningless then the world that I'm seeing is meaningless.   [00:06:57] Yeah in a way this is saying by practicing less than 10. You're not just pretending you're not just pretending that that things around you have no meaning they don't correct.   [00:07:07] Absolutely correct that's absolutely correct. Absolutely correct. And you know more will be revealed.   [00:07:15] Like spoiler the world's not really meaningless. But at this point in our cause. Yeah. My thoughts are meaningless. So the world that I'm perceiving is meaningless. But we just don't want to get ahead of ourselves. We just practice each step like a brick in the foundation.   [00:07:40] That was actually the first time that I put two and two together I think some of these were at least two lessons really mutually reinforcing to make sense that ten is more complicated than 11 11 is basically saying you're not out of your fucking mind.   [00:07:57] Yeah you've just been mis perceiving things you've been believing is meaning outside of yourself and there's not it's just your thoughts giving you meaning.   [00:08:08] I'm going to bullet point this book did look at hand look look at me.   [00:08:12] I understand. Hey.   [00:08:15] So no this the question I have that maybe people who were listening might also and this probably explained in the texts. Forgive me if it's repetitive but no no. It's what we hear. Yeah. So lesson 10. Every lesson tells you to do exercises of some kind. Yeah. Nothing hard. Nothing. No. Just a few minutes a day. My question is this is it that on Monday I do the things you talked about in less than 10 and move on leave those behind me. And on Tuesday I I I go on to lesson eleven or two I stick with one lesson and continually practice that before I move on.   [00:08:58] No no you just do it one after the other after the other.   [00:09:01] Yeah. Really. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. One a day. Okay. Mm hmm. Cool. Yeah.   [00:09:09] I mean I suppose you could do it for a couple of days. But but but no more. It's definitely not a week or a month or anything like.   [00:09:18] Graduating from one to the other sort of thing you should do them in order. No no no no that's not what I mean by country. You shouldn't feel as if you have to have mastered one to move.   [00:09:29] No I know you just practicing saying things in a in a different way but I mean if you get rusty or you have a big break or something yeah then you might want to go back then. But I know it's not supposed to be arduous at all right. For the perfectionist in the audience. Yeah. No.   [00:09:44] No. OK. Let's get the three. Wow. That makes cool. Yeah.   [00:09:51] OK so what the hell. Into my hair meanings thoughts meaningless world.   [00:10:01] I mean I'll jump right. So yeah the first thing that comes to mind is you know kind of meaningless when you hear. No it's it's happening is semiotics is.   [00:10:15] Is that you know there is not a natural connection between things and the words that we have for them. Oh. However when I look around this room a lot of the time not all of the time I look at an object and the word for that object dimly pops into the back of my head. Sure. Right. And so that is something seems to me this lesson is trying to nudge you away from doing maybe I don't know or or at least maybe nudge you away from any sort of emotional and experience all attachments that you might have. Yes.   [00:10:53] Which is why I don't feel like my you know like.   [00:10:58] Yeah yeah yeah. And yes that's right. And I think you pointing out that what I think you really pointed out is that the word does not equal the object.   [00:11:07] I mean it's just a tag we put on it and that's what's so cool about letting you know the language you see how the tags for things relate to what one another differently. So it's not that there's an absolute. Meaning for each object we just given them tags.   [00:11:26] Yeah and but and in tags can also be even more sort of complicated and all logically or emotionally whereas if I have four photographs on my wall in a row I might look at them and say photograph photograph photograph photograph. But if one of them is of my God forbid dead Mom. That third one is going to stumble on that one not just it's not just going to be a photo. It's going to be my mom. Yeah. So are we asking people in this lesson to to not have feelings about that third photograph.   [00:12:06] No that's not what we're asking. We're asking people to realize that our thoughts are giving meaning to the photograph.   [00:12:16] Q Yeah you're giving me this look that you sometimes do where you are.   [00:12:22] To me it communicates. Are you challenging me. Is that rhetorical.   [00:12:27] When I ask snow I will question your projecting that you will thinking that but I'm not thinking that I'm thinking I'm I'm.   [00:12:38] My eyes are resting on you but I'm thinking about my words carefully so I don't get it wrong. I did it. It's like chess cool.   [00:12:51] Well said all right. Yeah. The last time we spoke I asked you what.   [00:13:03] Sort of change. Not necessarily benefit but what change one might expect or even look for after practicing a lesson like this. I don't know if that's a useful question to ask. And so we can have a why not. I mean but a lawyer. What are your thoughts on that.   [00:13:19] Well this lesson I think is really getting us to. To the point where we can really separate the like entity that our thoughts create from the reality of the world.   [00:13:42] Now we haven't seen the reality of the world yet according to A Course in Miracles. But my meaningless thought showing me a meaningless world. The thoughts make a world and none of that is real. So I think if we can sort of conceptualize the thoughts and the world they make is like a bowl and we can just set that aside.   [00:14:01] We used to think that was reality and it meant everything. But at this point we should be I think at the point where we can say oh yeah that's just ephemeral all these thoughts created this world created this experience created my whole life.   [00:14:16] Let me just set that aside and see what's really there.   [00:14:22] All right.   [00:14:29] This makes sense does make sense. And again you know once again it feels like a one to one correspondence. Don't meet with a lot of Zen that I've been exposed to. You'd hear this kind of spoken about in terms of falseness versus form and tell us more about just that. That that boy I'm going to get this really well.   [00:14:50] But that's okay. You know if we get it wrong because we're just people trying to get happy and so I'm also a person trying to remember.   [00:14:58] But yes and get happy in doing that. But that that that that that that that that objects or things are really no more than forms and in form is itself formless ness so that there is there isn't again no inherent meaning in any thing. Now that doesn't mean that like as a Buddhist I have no respect for something in life you know quite the opposite. Yes. In fact diametrically the opposite. But mental formations I have thoughts or blocks and things like that. These are not external externally provided from the universe to me or settlement. I'm not beset by them right. They're products of an untested mind. Yep. Yeah. I think a lot of misconception that I had and I know a lot of people have about you know meditation in the world that Zen is that you are you. You're sitting hard and concentrating hard on not having any thoughts. And if you think about it. That act is itself. A thought form. And so.   [00:16:18] Yeah. No that's not. We can't not have thoughts but we just recognize them for what they are.   [00:16:23] Right. Yeah right. That that procession of objects moving by as it's very very very lustrous.   [00:16:29] It's kind of cool it's not just a parade of like stuff going back end.   [00:16:35] Yeah yeah. I told you about this analogy this guy is Zen guy told me about with a mirror. Yeah. Yeah. Another mentioned I guess I'll say it again. But you know you can sort of in terms. Right. So this this has to do with me. So in Zen this might have to do a lot with detachment or unattached on attaching oneself from things. So imagining a mirror passing by on a conveyor belt even like by your face. There's a moment where your face disappears because the mirror has passed you you have a choice at that moment to follow the mirror and keep seeing yourself or let it go and you have that choice with every thought my mental formation that happens and emotionally to you.   [00:17:19] Absolutely and the way I talk about it with this client is. Detaching our our happiness from things that happened detaching our happiness from thoughts you know. So that we're not. Our happiness is not being controlled by external things. Okay. How. So where does happiness come from if it comes from source. God if you want to call it that infinite intelligence the true love which is the stuff of the universe it comes from a higher power. It's spirit.   [00:17:50] Spiritual. Okay.   [00:17:54] Let let's be nitty gritty for a minute. Oh yeah that's Yeah. So. Is that to say in the world of course in miracles. Is that to say that. Me thinking of somebody and as a result feeling happy is an illusory and sort of dangerous thing.   [00:18:20] I don't think it's dangerous at all. It's a mystery. If if you're not if you're not aware that you're in control of it.   [00:18:31] Because I can think of someone and feel in love and being in love is a state of consciousness and I and I'm in love with two people right now and I can think of either one of them and just so much fun it's lovely. But but I know that it's a state of consciousness and it's not anything that I can't control. You know it's not. I'm not beholden. My happiness is not dependent on them. It's not dependent on what they do right. But I can enjoy that feeling I can enjoy those thoughts but not be controlled by it.   [00:19:13] Does it does it. Do you feel that it sort of cheapens that feeling. No no no absolutely not the way that sometimes when you hear you know kind of like you know really watered down like neurobiologist about love it's chemicals and shit like that you know the sort of stuff that you hear.   [00:19:36] No I mean it's I think it's chemicals plus consciousness right.   [00:19:42] Yeah I'm saying what I guess what I'm saying is when I hear that sort of stuff and I know yes I get it I get it you know there are chemicals that make you feel good. Yeah. But somebody is saying that in order to sort of again like cheapen or cheapen might not be the right word but to sort of dissociate the experience from from the experience that I want it to be or or believe it to be.   [00:20:09] Yeah. No I understand that.   [00:20:12] That can engender fear and anger because underneath anger is fear because I think you know where we are at less than a living because all of a sudden everything seems meaningless. Right. It's not you know.   [00:20:25] Right but but it doesn't mean that I'm going to treat the other person as disposable. I'm going to treat them as as a child of God. I'm going to treat them as as equal and as valuable as I am and with a great deal of respect.   [00:20:42] Right. Right. Do you have to see them as a child of God.   [00:20:49] In order to what.   [00:20:52] Do that do you. Yeah I think so. Okay. I think so. And that's why spiritualism appealed to me because that's how I was seeing people and when I found the religion that's what they said we are each a spirit in a body we're absolutely equal right. We're absolutely as valuable as each other and we are like drops of water in the ocean we're part of this consciousness we're part of infinite intelligence we're part of source quantum field if you want whatever you want.   [00:21:18] Now China this why this is kind of the perfect body cast because at this point this is like a point where this sort of sub dialogue that you and I have about like comparing this to the Zen stuff parts ways a little parts ways I think because they're there is because I'm not even going to try to speak and articulate you know like a Zen Buddhist view of deity after life soul of spirit anything. But it's it's definitely much more downplayed. Yes that all realize that. But in in a way that that I've experienced very positively. And I have to come back in future episodes with more thinking on that but I don't mean to say it parts ways completely but I will say that our atheist listeners should stick with this podcast.   [00:22:11] Yeah well I mean and that's why no one path is better than the other. I mean there are as many paths to happiness peace enlightenment or whatever you want to call it as there are people and you find the one that is best for your personality you find the one that's best for you as you are right now on Earth and they all lead to the same place so that you catch you catch him.   [00:22:39] Yeah all right.   [00:22:41] Okay well no I think any sort of summary or in any kind of parting thoughts on lesson eleven from you Steph. No no. I think we did well here I think I'm good. It's good. Yeah I think we did well it feels like a very functional and reinforcing and not a maintenance can step at a step that yeah that you need because you can't have ten without this. Yeah. Who are your your little maybe two something like that. Yeah.   [00:23:10] Listen I stick with it because again. Yeah. Spoiler alert the world is not meaningless.   [00:23:16] Spoiler alert I'm looking at Stephanie's copy of this book which lives at my house for her convenience.   [00:23:26] It's highly marked up there are posted at the end so that tells me so. And then should you as well. Yeah.   [00:23:38] All right so we'll see next time. Oh yeah. In the meantime miracles in Manhattan at G.M. dot com.   [00:23:43] Yeah. And I'm just saying that now we know where we're a little young in this podcast.   [00:23:47] Still this is this will be the 11th of 12 episode that you will be listening to and we're figuring out if this is going to be a weekly or bi weekly drop and soon we'll find out. So just yeah levitation if you can with us as we work that out because we have to do over 350 so. Okay. But my God we're gonna be happy at the end of it we'll be different.   [00:24:18] Beautiful people. Thank you so much for listening. Have a good week or two days.   [00:24:24] Bye bye.    

We almost named this episode 44.5 cause we don’t f with 45 (cough cough Trump) in any capacity! But welcome to Season 4 with your favorite ladies tune in as we discuss having a crazy side and the things that lead us to acting crazy. Find out whose pulling up on their dude, who be lurking and our love for toxic masculinity! Grab your cups this is an episode you don't want to miss. Don’t forget to vote for us daily for our COSIGN Magazine nomination for Dallas podcast of the year! Vote now at http://cosignmag.com/cosignawards2019. XoXo, Petty Party Listen Rate & Review! Instagram: @Pettyparty.podcast Twitter: Pettypartypod Facebook: Petty Party Podcast

Hi everyone, and thank you for tuning in to another episode of the We Make Books Podcast - A podcast about writing, publishing, and everything in between! This is the final week of Submissions September, for real this time!  We’re rounding out the month with a short episode of questions, concerns, and follow ups.  We got a few inquires and responses over the course of the month and thought it would be a good idea to wrap up with an episode where we answer them.  Thank you so much to everyone that got in touch and we hope that this month-long walk through of the submissions process was helpful.  If there is anything you’d like to hear about that we didn’t cover, let us know!  We’re always looking for topics for future episodes! In case you’re just joining us, this month is Submissions September on the We Make Books Podcast, we’re doing seven (7!) episodes this month all about the process of submitting your novel.  We have a lot of awesome discussions lined up and even some special guests.  Here’s what will be coming your way for the month: Week 1 (9/3/2019): Is This Ready For Other People to See?- Submitting Your Manuscript Week 2 (9/10/2019): My Entire Novel in Three Hundred Words - The Dreaded Query Letter Week 3 (9/17/2019): Agents of Literature, Part 1: An Interview with Literary Agent Caitlin McDonald               (9/18/2019): Agents of Literature, Part 2: Interviews with Agented Authors               (9/19/2019): Agents of Literature Part 3: Interviews with Agented Authors Week 4 (9/24/2019): What is Going On Over There? - The Other Side of the Submissions Process Week 5 (9/30/2019): Now I’m Even More Confused – Submissions September Q&A Episode We Make Books is hosted by Rekka Jay and Kaelyn Considine; Rekka is a published author and Kaelyn is an editor and together they are going to take you through what goes into getting a book out of your head, on to paper, in to the hands of a publisher, and finally on to book store shelves. We Make Books is a podcast for writer and publishers, by writers and publishers and we want to hear from our listeners! Hit us up on our social media, linked below, and send us your questions, comments, concerns, and here’s the thing, Kaelyn’s a long-suffering New York Giants fan and she’s been doing this funny-football-comments-in-the-show-notes bit for the entire month and is curious if anyone has read her weekly rants.  So, the first three people to DM her the score of Sunday’s game (9/29/2019) against Washington get a free Parvus ebook of their choice.  We hope you enjoy We Make Books! Twitter: @WMBCast  |  @KindofKaelyn  |  @BittyBittyZap Instagram: @WMBCast  Patreon.com/WMBCast 00:00 Kaelyn Considine (KC): Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the We Make Books podcast, a show about writing, editing, and everything in between. I'm Kaelyn Considine and I am the Acquisitions Editor for Parvus Press. 00:11 Rekka / R J Theodore (RJT): And I'm Rekka, I write Science Fiction and Fantasy as R J Theodore. 00:13 KC: And uh, this isn't really an episode episode. 00:18 RJ: It's a minisode. 00:20  KC: Yeah. It's the questions wrap-up. We did get some questions for Submissions September that we wanted to try to provide answers for. 00:27  RJT: Yep, these came in through Twitter and email and conversations we had in person with people so, it is a great little set of specific questions and we ran through them in, not necessarily the order they came in, but the order they would apply to the process. 00:44 KC: Yeah. 00:44 RJT: So it worked out really nicely as a little set of like quick summary... I mean, you obviously won't get everything you would get by listening to the other six episodes of the month but you know it's a good overview and maybe I dunno like a little refresher before the pop quiz next week. 01:02 KC: Absolutely. And no, it seemed like a good way to kind of round out the month. We kept it short, like we intended to. 01:08 RJT: Yeah, so this one, our "short" episode is the length we always think the episodes are going to be. 01:13 KC: But, well, we had a lot of fun doing Submissions September. We won't be doing anything similar to this any time soon. 01:21 RJT: This was a big, big project. 01:22 KC: This was a lot. 01:22 RJT: I think this encompassed three different recording visits. 01:27 KC: I think so. 01:27 RJT: You know, Kaelyn comes in to visit for the weekend and this weekend, in order to finish them all, she had to stay an extra night, and we are done now. 01:33 KC: It's okay cause I got brunch and mini golf out of it. 01:35 RJT: Okay, yes. So we aren't all work, no play. 01:39 KC: So it all worked out in the end and you know, your cats like me now so that's very exciting to me. 01:45 RJT: Yes. 01:45 KC: Anyway, so thank you so much for joining us for this whole month and we hope you enjoy this last episode of just the rounding out of Submissions September. 02:01 MUSIC 02:14 RJT: Well it's been a month, everybody. 02:17 KC: It has been a month. 02:17 RJT: We said this was gonna be a bi-weekly podcast. 02:24 KC: And then we said we were gonna take a month where we do an episode an every week, so it was gonna be four. 02:31 RJT: Yup, and then we said, "hey look we have a lot of interviews, this is too many for one episode."  02:36 KC: And then we had some questions. 02:39 RJT: So we're back with one bonus, final, "hey while it's still September"  02:43 KC: Yeah. 02:43 RJT: Hol' Up A Minute. 02:45 KC: Yeah, welcome. It's Monday, you have to listen to us. Yeah, we ended up with seven episodes. 02:49 RJT: Yeah, let's not do that again. 02:49 KC: No, G-d no. Please. 02:49 RJT: Cause, at this point of time when we are speaking to you in this recording studio, we haven't edited them yet. So we're not even done.  03:04 KC: Very true, but we did have some questions come up over the course of this. If there are things you're still wondering, things we didn't talk about, you know you can still send us questions, maybe we'll do something else like this. 03:16 RJT: These were all sent to us Direct Message and folks didn't say whether they wanted their names used so we're just going to err on the side of privacy. 03:21 KC: Yeah, just you know. Um, if you do wnat us to say it was your name then 03:26 RJT: Let us know. 03:26 KC: Tweet at us. 03:30 RJT: We'll assign credit where credit was due. And some of these were from a couple different directions. 03:32 KC: Yeah, so. Um, so first question: How perfect does my manuscript have to be before I submit it? 03:38 RJT: Yeah. I mean, ostensibly the agent, if you work with an agent, is probably going to do a couple passes with you. We spoke to Caitlin McDonald a couple weeks ago and she said she's gonna do two passes and that sounds pretty common. 03:55 KC: Yeah, that sounds pretty standard. 03:55 RJT: And then they're going to sub it and send to a publisher and the publisher is definitely not going to leave it alone either. So, knowing your manuscript is going to change, how perfect does it have to be? 04:05 KC: As perfect as you can get it. 04:08 RJT: I mean, should I be worried about copyedits or should I just try to catch what I can on my own? 04:13 KC: I know, from my perspective as the acquisitions editor: I do not expect a copyedited document. That said, I do expect a final document. I do expect you've put time and effort into this. 04:25 RJT: So it looks like the final that you would send to a copyeditor and it's just that you might have an opinion on stuff you think could be better. 04:35 KC: And I think it is a little frustrating, some people think like, "Well why do I need bother with that much of if because they're just going to change everything anyway?" And the answer is: You're trying to make a good impression. Also, it's showing me your work ethic. It's showing me the attention to detail and time you put into things and that this is important to you. It is funny because I get manuscripts submitted to us sometimes that I'm like, "I really feel like this is just a working draft, still, somehow." And that's not good, don't do that. 05:10 RJT: And what about manuscripts you get where like the first fifty pages are super tight, super clean, they've clearly been workshopped a couple times but it doesn't carry through the entire thing? 05:20 KC: I appreciate, to an extent, that they knew that I really need to nail the first fifty pages. And the other thing is I don't expect this to be copyedited. Copyeditors are expensive. I don't expect you to do that especially since we're gonna go in and do work on it anyway so we're just gonna get another copyeditor to work on it. 05:40 RJT: So the plot should hold up but you don't have to get all your commas in the right place or a typo or a repeated word. 05:46 KC: Avoid typos, that's.. 05:50 RJT: But I mean, those happen. 05:51 KC: Yeah. I mean, you know, as we always say: Your first couple pages especially, pay very close attention to those. 05:56 RJT: Right, but I'm talking about a three hundred page novel. 05:59 KC: Yeah, if there's A typo in it, it's not the end of the world. There are published novels with typos in them. Not that that's good but it does happen. 06:04 RJT: Right, that's what I'm saying. One person looking at this over and over again is not going to catch everything. 06:11 KC: Exactly. So next question we kinda got, feeding into that... 06:14 RJT: This is sorta into a query letter here. 06:16 KC: Yeah, we're moving into query letter section. What if I don't have any previous publishing credits? Is that a big deal? I mean, no. 06:24 RJT: Every author was a first time author once. 06:24 KC: Yeah. most people don't. A lot of the times when you're querying agents and submitting to open calls of course you don't have any publishing credits. If you did, you'd... I mean, people do leave their agents. 06:40 RJT: Or transition from one to another. 06:40 KC: Or transition and get new ones but I mean, a lot of times you don't have publishing credits, that's why you're looking for an agent. 06:46 RJT: Right, right. And so just to keep in mind you can introduce yourself without you know, puffing this up This isn't like a fake resume or anything like that. If you have an interest or skill related to your manuscript you can mention that but, for the most part, you don't... they don't expect you to say the most impressive thing about yourself. This isn't that party where you have to be that guy. You can just say, like, you know, if there's a gardening aspect in your space opera, just say like, "And I like to garden on the weekends." And you know that's cute. But if the gardening doesn't tie into your manuscript it's not necessary. You can just say..  This would be..you know like, "I am an unpublished author—" 07:35 KC: "I would like to become a published one." 07:37 RJT: Yeah. You're overthinking it, even at this point. Just say, you know, "This is me." 07:42 KC: Yeah, and don't be ashamed of that by any stretch of the imagination. I think there's this intimidation factor where people who are especially trying to submit novels for publication hear about like, people say, "I had this short story published and I had this and this." There are plenty of people who come straight out of the gate to a novel. 08:01 RJT: Right. I did. I'm working stories through submissions process nw, but I had a novel first. 08:11 KC: There's no set linear way to do this. It's. you know, you come into where you come into. There's... it's not... you're not ticking off boxes and then you get to query an agent or submit a manuscript. 08:24 RJT: And I didn't have anything that I could speak to. I was a graphic designer which is cool but it's not pertinent. So I really had very little to say about myself in my query letter, which I read to you during the query week anyway.  08:36 KC: Yes. 08:41 RJT: So go back and listen to it if you're worried about it. But I don't have an MFA and an MFA is not a prerequisite to getting a novel purchased. 08:46 KC: No, G-d no. 08:46 RJT: I don't... I didn't major in English. I took one essay writing class at art school.  KC: Okay, then. RJT: It was pretty much just to spare the art history teachers a couple of classes of having to go over this every semester. Yeah. Don't stress it. You wrote a book, you know, so be proud of that and you know, like I said, you don't have to inflate it. You don't have to be extra humble. Just, you know, write your query letter. 09:18 So, you've sent in this query, however it needed to be written, and you have checked the publisher's submissions guidelines and you know that thay're gong to tell you to expect a response after such and such number of days they might even invite you to reach out and check on it if it's been this long. Or you see on Twitter, "hey we've gone through our entire submissions pile so you should have heard from us." 09:44 KC: "Thanks for submitting." 09:44 RJT: So, what do you do if you have't heard back at that point, in either case? 09:52 KC: Well I mean, if they say you know... like at Parvus we say ninety days for you know follow up the query with us. Here's the thing, if you haven't heard back from me in 90 days there's a good chance I just haven't gotten through the pile yet. It's funny, we say 90 days because that's just a good amount of time but like we get hundreds and hundreds of these when we open for submissions so depending on what's going I may not start reading them immediately. As they're coming in. I try to stay on top of it but that's just not always possible. 10:28 RJT: I know I've heard that some agents for example, will read the query letters and then divert some of those to like hey check this out soon. So they go through the query letters and get through the rejections just based on the query and then they'll go through like the next round of consideration is to open the document and check it out but that may not happen as fast as they read the letter. 10:53 KC: Yeah, I mean, sometimes I can get through these pretty quickly. Sometimes I can't. If you haven't heard back and they say, "feel free to reach out to us," feel free to reach out to them. The response you're probably going to get back is "Yeah I'm still working through everything." 11:06 RJT: Yeah. 11:08 KC: Don't be rude. Don't... 11:12 RJT: Cause you are still technically submitting. This is still part of your interview. 11:16 KC: Well, Don't be demanding, I guess. 11:19 RJT: That's what I mean, like, be decent, be polite, be professional. 11:19 KC: Be just like, "They I'm just following up." 11:22 RJT: This is an extension of the first submission you sent. It's an extension of the impression you're making upon them. So acting as though you're tapping your foot and crossing your arms and raising one eyebrow? Is not gonna d you any favors in terms of how your query is going to be judged. Because frankly we're all human and you can't separate that from the experience of reading. 11:43 KC: No, And you know, I understand there is a little bit of a power dynamic here that maybe isn't necessarily fair but at the end of the day you are... you're applying to something. You are asking someone to give you their time and consideration and, I don't wanna say they don't owe it to you because it's not that. If you submit  12:04 RJT: If they invited you to submit, especially. 12:06 KC: They do owe you that but it's not... you don't get to demand that they pay attention to you right that second. And along those lines, if you get a rejection back don't write back and ask for notes cause that's another demanding of someone's time. 12:26 RJT: And thats a level. There are times you might get notes and that generally is pretty promising. It means you might have needed less work that other people in the pile. 12:37 KC: It also means that maybe you were under, you were considered. It was you know "we're happy you sent this to us. It had some things that we thought needed attention." 12:49 RJT: And this is one of those cases where it's an investment of your time as a publisher to finish this book and if this book needs more work than you budgeted for... 12:55 KC: Than you're willing to put into it.  12:57 RJT: Yeah, so. so you send back notes and that person is, at least got that feedback for the net time they submitted this manuscript They can consider it. Now, if you give them notes, and I know this is probably case-by-case, what about Revise & Re-query or Revise & Resubmit. 13:20 KC: Generally I will say like listen, you know, here's some notes. I always... I don't...  I always feel a little uncomfortable sending notes because it's like, especially if they're unsolicited but generally I think they're appreciated. But I usually send a note that's like, you know, "we really liked this. There are these problems. If you wanna take the suggestion or maybe if you want to work with another editor, please feel free to resubmit with us in the future." And a lot of the times, I'll even say, "Please feel free to resubmit, you can send it right.. directly back to me." 13:55 RJT: Rather than needing to go through the digital system. 13:56 KC: Yeah, the usual process. Because sometimes I'm just like, "Yeah, I'm curious to see what they do with this." And I like it flagged that it's like.. cause, again, I get hundreds of these. And even though a lot of times it is something I'll remember, especially if it's something I sent notes back. You know, you never know. If it gets.. 14:18 RJT: If it's three years later or whatever. 14:18 KC: Yeah, if it goes through the regular submissions manager it can absolutely get lost in the shuffle. So yeah I would say just do not be demanding and do not be impatient and you know if you get invited to revise and resubmit absolutely do that.  14:35 RJT: If you get notes back, though, and no invitation to resubmit? 14:36 KC: Do it anyway. I mean. There are some manuscripts that we've had open calls for and every time I get the same manuscript back. 14:45 RJT: Okay.  14:44 KC: That's not necessarily a good thing but you know there's no ... I don't think I've ever read submissions guidelines that are like, "(If you already submitted to us once don't ever do it again."  15:01 RJT: Okay. 15:01 KC: Have you? 15:01 RJT: Well I know magazine you know like they are pretty strict. It's pretty much expected, I don't even know that they come right out and say it, but some of them do, is like, "you have one shot with this story unless we invite you to resubmit." 15:15 KC: Yeah, okay. That's... novels are maybe a little.. 15:20 RJT: Maybe a little different. So I can understand when someone's getting hundreds and hundreds of submissions that you don't want to open it up and go, "Oh, this one again?" 15:25 KC: Yeah you don't want the same thing over and over. Um, I mean, that said, I'm sure people do it. Just do it is creating the work of having to reject it. There isn't really a way to blacklist people from an open submission. Um, if you get invited to resubmit you absolutely should resubmit because that means they probably 15:47 RJT: Were very interested. 15:47 KC: Were very interested just did not have, for whatever reason, could not take it. 15:52 RJT: It needs more work on your side, basically, before a publisher's gonna take it on and do the work on their side.  15:57 KC: Yeah. 15:57 RJT: Okay, so what if you do get accepted in an open submissions? You've got an offer from a publisher. Can you take that offer and find an agent with it? 16:08 KC: A lot of publishing houses are going to want you to do that. 16:11 RJT: Okay. 16:14 KC: So if you go back and listen to the second episode of Week Three which was the first of the author interview episodes. 16:18 RJT: That's Episode 15. 16:18 KC: Episode 15. Tyler Hayes is in it and he talks about how he actually got accepted, his manuscript got accepted, and then he had to go find an agent. If you go listen to our Nebulas interview, we talked to Mark Tompkins who is the author of Last Days of Magic and he talks about the same thing that he got a manuscript accepted and they were like, "Okay cool well where's your agent?" and he's like, "I don't have one." They were like, "Here, call this person. Tell them you need an agent." So a lot of publishing houses want you to have an agent. The answer is they don't always want to deal with authors direct one-on-one. Because when you have an agent you have someone that... 17:01 RJT: Knows how this works.   17:03 KC: Yeah, and they know the contracts and they know.. They're also... agents are also very useful for their connections and what they're gonna help with. So yeah, absolutely if you have an offer and you can find an agent that you can talk to quickly about that might be willing to take you on that's absolutely something good to do.  17:27 RJT: Do you need to have a contract? Or is a phone call where they're saying, "Okay, we're gonna send you a contract in a few days" enough? 17:34 KC: I think it really depends. You have to feel that out. You know if the publisher has said "yes we want to move forward with thus." 17:44 RJT: Okay. 17:45 KC: If you already have a contract definitely.. 17:46 RJT: Get on that. 17:46 KC: Get on it. If they're sending you a contract, same thing, just query 17:54 RJT: And when you query the agent make sure you say, "This has a pending contract." 17:56 KC: Yeah this.. 17:56 RJT: This is easy money for you. 17:58 KC: Yeah. "I have a pending offer." And you know, the agent is going to come in and will, of course want to look at the contract. If you've already signed the contract, that's a whole other... 18:06 RJT: Yeah, the agent's not going to be able to do anything for you and they're not going to be interested because there's nothing for them to do 18:11 KC: Yeah, they can't really... 18:11 RJT: That's... Their portion of income is dependent on what they can do for you in your contract. So if you already signed the contract, they would not be representing you for that book and then therefor this would be okay, the promise of another book? Do you have that book ready? Like what...? 18:31 KC: Yeah the contract... 18:31 RJT: Don't sign the contract first. 18:31 KC: The contract is gonna say in it where to send payment and if it's an agent, what it'll say is, "Rekka Jay, care of" and the agent and the agency. So you know, if you go back and listen to our Money episode [Episode 9] we talk about how if you have an agent, you're not getting a check from the publisher. Your agent is getting the check from the publisher and then the agent is writing you a check. 18:56 RJT: Unless you managed to work out a very special exclusion to that. 18:58 KC: Yeah. So that's not uncommon, that kind of stuff does happen. Like I Said, a lot of publishing houses would rather deal with an agent cause... 19:12 RJT: They're professionals. 19:12 KC: Exactly. 19:11 RJT: And you don't know what the author doesn't know but you have a pretty good idea of what the agent does know. 19:21 KC: Exactly. So yeah, don't be afraid to do that. 19:22 RJT: So if you get a publisher that would retract the offer because you went out to try and protect yourself by getting representation... 19:29 KC: Yeah you probably didn't want to work with that person to begin with. 19:31 RJT: ...You're better off. And I have heard of publishers doing that. Retracting offers based on that. 19:37 KC: Yeah I mean the one scenario in which I would say, "Okay I understand where they're coming from" maybe is if you get, I don't want to say the wrong agent, but an agent who's gonna come in, tear up the tentative deal that you had already, and start asking and demanding a lot more stuff. And then the publisher's gonna go, "This is not worth it for us." 19:59 RJT: Right. 19:59 KC: You know maybe it's a smaller publishing house like Parvus and you've worked out an advance that both sides are comfortable with, you worked out royalty rates, and then the author said, "You know I signed with an agent, I want them to look at it," and they come in and then go, "No, no, no, no, no! You deserve..!" And on the publisher's side we're going, "Look. You know, we're not Random House. We're not Penguin." And maybe your book would not be getting picked up by Random House or Penguin. So we're working on the same level here. So yes there might be some areas where a publishing house retracts an offer but  20:40 RJT: Not usually based on the fact that you went to find an agent in the first place. This is going to be your agent is trying to bowl them over.  20:47 KC: Yeah it might be that or it's because you went and got an agent and then the agent's asking questions like, "hey what about this contract," and they're like, "Nope. Forget it." Then you probably didn't want to work with that publishing house. 20:57 RJT: Yeah. yeah. Because that's why you want an agent is to help you with these legal documents and they know what's reasonable for you to ask for, and a shady publishing house may be hoping that, by going straight to the author, they can grab more rights or something than they would have been able to. 21:15 KC: Exactly.  21:18 RJT: Or write in some nasty clauses about your future works. 21:18 KC: Exactly. So I think that's all of our questions. 21:24 RJT: Yeah, that was it! It was hopefully a nice reprieve at the end of the month. 21:28 KC: It was actually short this time. We always say we're going to keep it short and then we never do. 21:31 RJT: Yeah this one actually did. But I think those questions were pretty straight forward but they were good questions. 21:35 KC: Yeah, good questions.  21:35 RJT: And I know that at least we didn't cover them directly throughout the rest of the month. So, if you have more questions like this please send them on over. You can find us @wmbcast on twitter and instagram. You can find us at Patreon.com/wmbcast and like we said, if you want credit for your questions, say so, because if you sent it to us directly, privately, and not just tweeting at us. 22:01 KC: We assume anonymity. 22:04 RJT: And you know, when you're talking about querying, you feel a little shy about it and like you might get it wrong so you don't wanna leave your name out there for someone to say, "Ha, they didn't know." But no most people don't know when they're getting started so these are good questions. 22:15 KC: So that's officially the end of Submissions September. 22:19 RJT: For real this time. 22:19 KC: Yeah, thanks for sticking with us, everyone. This was fun. I mean.. 22:24 RJT Let us know what you got out of it. Let us know what surprises you heard this month. And hopefully this has you excited for this step of the process if you haven't made it there yet. 22:33 KC: We won't be doing seven episodes in a month again any time soon. 22:37 RJT: Ever. Like, ever. I will walk out of this shed. 22:37 KC: So hope you enjoyed this while it lasted. 22:44 RJT: Yeah we're a little tired but I think it was worth it. This was something that, from the very conception of this podcast, Kaelyn was excited to do, so hopefully Kaelyn is satisfied with our... 22:58 KC: I am.  22:59 RJT: Good. 23:00 KC: Are you? 23:00 RJT: I'm satisfied. 23:00 KC: Alright well thanks everyone so much for listening. We're back to our regular schedule after this. There will be an October 8th episode, and then it's back to every two weeks. 23:13 RJT: Yep. 23:15 KC: So thanks again for listening. 23:15 RJT: We'll talk to you then!

Ep. 105 - 13 Reasons Why? - S3 EP1 - Yeah. I'm the New Girl- The Coupon Queen Pin and I are recapping 13 Reasons Why, we will be focusing on the Storyline and the how the characters developed and evolve. What do you think Ani ? Why is she so consume in everyone's business? - What do you think of this first episode? DISCLAIMER: We are not discussing the social issues or previous events that has happen in the show. Again we are only talking about the storyline and the characters developed and evolve. Coupon Queen Pin Information: https://Gadgitgyrl001.wixsites.com/couponqueenpin Instagram @gadgitprincess001 Twitter: CouponQueenPin Email shondy001@couponqueenpin.com www.Anchor.fm/cqpmoments Coupon Queen Pin anchor.fm/cqpmoments Facebook: @alittlebitofeverythingwithme Instagram: @alittlebitofeverythingwithme Tumblr: everythingwithange Website: www.angevg.wix.com/angelica Podcast: anchor.fm/everythingwithange Youtube: A Little Bit Of Everything With Me! Podcast Leave a voice Message: https://anchor.fm/everythingwithange/message Intro: KC from Chef Salty Pork Song: MBB - Feel Good (Vlog No Copyright Music) Music provided by Vlog No Copyright Music. Video Link: https://youtu.be/wIDKJeLXO5Q --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/everythingwithange/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/everythingwithange/support

Nickolias Mage and Alkaline this week first look over last weeks Poll question then we look at the news and the nerf batt hits warrior again.  Then the main topic "Bad Players go face. Good players trade. Great players go face." A quote from the lightforge we take it and apply it to standard in aggro and midrange decks and look at what it means to us. 

I'm back friends and followers. It was a busy summer, and life got in the way, but I am back and prepared. Enjoy Season 2!!!

TKO #87 - YEAH, I'M UNI CRON   TKO Episode #87 - 08-29-19 - Jason Morgan aka Patriot Prime Reviews Intros/WTF Did You Get This Week! News Poors rejoice! They now have until October 6th to not buy Haslab Unicron! New Studio Series and Generations Select Reveals Black Ant Bruticus BLUE Lobster BL-01 Frank - “MPScaled” Autobot Spike (Autobot X)https://youtu.be/h0bu3QbYkug Rising Force Motormaster refuses to diehttps://www.facebook.com/DaimChocReports/posts/977927305891030https://www.facebook.com/DaimChocReports/posts/977200985963662 MMC Ocular Max PS-16 Volatus (Blast Off)https://www.facebook.com/DaimChocReports/posts/977307455953015 CUSTOM SPOTLIGHT!Jailhouse Racers! Via Adam Urban - Built by his associate Homer Heathhttps://www.facebook.com/groups/1815039612083253/permalink/2300222670231609/ KO KORNER!YM-03G YM03G MP11 Masterpiece Starscream Gold Chromehttp://sirtoys.com/toys.php?c=23&p=5113&t=YM_03G_YM03G_MP11_Masterpiece_Starscream_Gold_Chrome.html ASSHOLE OF THE WEEK!Summer’s over DA’S SHIT DEAL! Hasbro will be increasing the price of your toys, derrrr! The 13 Questions - Jason Morgan aka Patriot Prime Reviews What's your preferred name/handle?Year born?What's your favorite sammich?Favorite music?What got you (back) into collecting?What scale do you collect?Focus collection or any Non-TF collections?To KO or not to KO?What movie makes you cry?Have you done anything untoward for your toy addiction?Tits, ass, legs, face, other?What’s a weird thing about you? idiosyncrasies, phobias, etc.Go to sex position? TKO GIRLS! 21 DERP SALUTE! Shat Outs Girls who make bad decisions with their bodies and the father’s and/or uncles that made them that way. Alcohol, Marijuana and Coffee - The lifeblood of this show. #TKO Totally Knocked Off Podcasthttps://www.facebook.com/TotallyKnockedOff/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChHOF_mLwd1zqsO2TPxdNmw https://tkothepodcast.podbean.com/ TF & WTF-Ever - The greatest Transformers and What-The-Fuck-Ever Facebook group EVER!!!https://www.facebook.com/groups/1815039612083253/ LNOW CUSTOMS - An International consortium of Transformers Customizers and Creators.https://www.facebook.com/LNOWcustoms Metal Planet Collection Displayshttps://www.facebook.com/metalplanetdisplays/@metalplanetdisplays       3rd Party TF Crashershttps://www.facebook.com/3PTFCrashers/ Hail Hasbro Reviews: By Deluxehttps://www.youtube.com/user/transfan32 SCU - Shattered Cast Uncuthttps://www.youtube.com/user/shatteredcastuncut/feed Blackout & Shouthttps://www.facebook.com/groups/1511286755568977/ Skullface Reviewshttps://www.youtube.com/user/MythsAndHeroes Nerd Rage Radiohttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGKF1ibRkX8KIWw28ZSMcDA Oscarnjboyhttps://www.youtube.com/user/oscarnjboy Derivitiv Filmshttps://www.youtube.com/user/DerivitivKahnEQ2 The Audio Knights Theatrehttps://www.youtube.com/user/AudioKnightsTheatre Stasis Lockhttps://www.facebook.com/beastwars/ Kuma Stylehttp://kumastyledesigns.com/ All Queued Up Podcasthttps://allqueuedup.podbean.com/ SLB Vloghttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOxUdI7t7AeVlSoA2NbAypA Building Up To Ithttp://www.realmofcollectors.com/building-up-to-it/ Bawdy Shaminghttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmvkWJeVB4RwhObwLTZgxTw Kingbotz Customshttps://www.facebook.com/KingbotzCustoms/?ref=br_rs The Transformers Passporthttps://www.facebook.com/groups/562046654140444/?ref=bookmarks Collecticon Toyshttps://www.facebook.com/collecticontoys/ Transformers, Knock Off Toys, Collecting, Hot Chicks, Assholes, TKO, Totally Knocked Off,Customizing, Shattered Cast Uncut, The Walking Dead, MMA, Puppies, Kittens, sex,Bobby Skullface, Toy Reviews, abortion, Rage, snowballing, vaping, alcohol, drugs, Realm of Collectors, Voltron, legalize marijuana, Audio Knights Theatre, U.S. Army, Kuma Style, Beast Wars, Douchebag, bagged milk, Kevin Hart, All Queued Up, Kingbotz Customs, Dairycon, Metal Planet Collection Displays

It's Tracy's first time seeing "John Wick," and we talk about why she was so reluctant to see it before now. We also talk action movies, the Keanussaince, Tracy's abiding love for Ian McShane, and why this movie wouldn't exist without "The Matrix." Plus, we learn Daniel's childhood nickname. Grab a dog and listen now! 

Cut out anything that doesn't support your dream. Lock down and keep your attention on that thing you want to achieve. ㅤ ... ㅤ Edited by: @benlionelscott Spoken by: Andy Frisella, Jocko Willink, Brendon Burchard Footage by: Filmpac, Cave Bear Films, María Victoria De Narváez, Lester Platt Music: Mitchell Broom - Event Horizon ㅤ ... ㅤ When you start anything, the first step, you're excited. You're like, "Yeah I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna kick ass." And then you take another step, and another step. And you're like, "F*ck, this is pretty f*cking hard man." The enthusiasm from the beginning starts to fade out. You lost sight of the long term goal, and it faded. It faded from memory, and the passion dried up, so we stopped the daily tasks that will allow us to achieve our goals. And you begin to rationalize. "Maybe I can't. Maybe I don't really want to. Maybe this goal isn't for me." And so you give up. You let it go. And you settle. You settle for the status quo, you settle for the easy road, you settle for "Oh well." No. Don't do that. If I don't finally get my focus in check, if I keep wandering around distracted, if I keep looking at every new thing that pops up, if I keep trying every single new opportunity, if I keep saying yes to everything, if I keep listening to everybody's complaints, if I keep doing whatever they ask me to do, at some point you'll lose your life. Embed that long term goal in your mind, burn it into your soul. Think about it, write about it, talk about it, hang it up on your wall, but most important, do something about it everyday. I want that long-term goal to be so embedded in my mind that I never lose sight of it. Ever. And the little tasks, and projects, and short-term goals that you tackle need to lead towards strategic victory, winning the long war. Start working a plan to get there, and minimizing everything else. Getting very clear on the mission. Very clear on the mission. And working the plan. Everything else, guess what it gets? A no. When you do things, do them intentional. Do the things that are gonna move you forward. There's no getting around it, there's no shortcuts, there's no cutting corners, it just takes time. Focus on what you do, become the best at it, put in the time, pay the f*cking dues, and eventually great things are gonna start happening. Everyday do something that moves you toward that goal, that keeps that goal alive and insight, and in focus. However small or insignificant that step might seem, take it. Do it, make it happen. Because that goal isn't going to achieve itself. It's is all on you.

"Eventually you'll realize, everything that you went through had a purpose." ㅤ ... ㅤ Edited by: @benlionelscott Spoken by: Trent Shelton Footage by: Nocturnal Animals, Coming on Strong, Iron Man, Avengers: Endgame, Prisoners Music: Zack Hemsey - Fade Away ㅤ ... ㅤ Don't let the world make you think that there's something wrong with you because of what you're going through. Everybody has their struggles. And going through what you're going through doesn't make you weak, it doesn't make you less, it makes you human. And I know it's hard when the pain chooses you. I know it's hard when you been hoping for a breakthrough, but nothing seems to come through. I know it's hard when you been working so hard for those dreams, and those dreams don't come true. I know it's hard to battle a silent battle. But I want you to know this, There's more to your life. There's more to your life than what you're going through, what you went through, and what you're going to go through. Don't let this chapter make you end your story. It's time for you to dig up all those seeds of doubt, and at this moment, replace those seeds with seeds of faith. You tell yourself, "Yeah I'm going through this, but at least I'm not dead. I'm still alive." You're still here. You're stronger than what you think. So I want you to keep fighting. You find any reason to survive right now. You find any reason to make it to see tomorrow. Because when you get free from it, what you're going through, you're gonna be one of the strongest people that your friends, that your family knows. Because you survived something. There's better days ahead, I promise you. No storm lasts forever. Just because you have some bad chapters, just because this chapter is bad, doesn't mean your story can't end well. So you keep living, you keep fighting, and you keep the faith. You make up in your mind right now that you're gonna fight with faith tonight. You make up in your mind right now that you're gonna survive tonight. Whatever it takes. Despite everything that you're going through, the storms that you're going through, the flood in your life with pain right now, find the strength inside of your weakest moment right now, that lets you know that everything is gonna be okay. Eventually you'll realize, everything that you went through had a purpose.

I am talking to you, Mom. I am talking to you, Dad. And I am talking to all of you girls and women who have not felt supported in doing something you love. THIS EPISODE IS FOR ALL OF YOU! Women and parents turn up the sound and sit down with me and Julia as we discuss this family’s inspiring story of how they overcame the heart-breaking and frustrating messages of society that almost broke her daughter’s free spirit. Julia takes us through the journey of how she was told that it was wrong for her four-year-old daughter, Juliana, to do the things she loves because she is a girl and how Juliana internalized those messages. Learn what Julia and her husband do to cultivate their daughter’s love for tinkering and battle society’s narrow-minded messages around what it means to be a girl.

Personal trainer, good friend, and handsome man Jake Schwind joins Jack and David to bring his brand of infectious positivity to Underemployed! They talk about getting started in fitness, misconceptions women may have about weightlifting, helping a client lose 90 lbs, adjusting his exercise routine to include stretching, starting steps to helping lose weight, and a whole lot more about the world of exercise. Jake also talks about meeting his wife, Val, their wedding, and their dog Kodiak provides his insights of occasional barking and wagging his tail into the table! Plus Jack talks about being freaked out by the discovery of his vocal doppelgänger from a Billie Eilish video. Call 'em C+C Music Factory, because they're gonna make you sweat! For more information on Jake's training services, visit schwindfitness.com, and follow him on Instagram @schwindfitness!

Hi everyone, and thank you for listening to Introductory Episode of the We Make Books Podcast - A podcast about writing, publishing, and everything in between! We Make Books is hosted by Rekka Jay and Kaelyn Considine; Rekka is a published author and Kaelyn is an editor and together they are going to take you through what goes into getting a book out of your head, on to paper, in to the hands of a publisher, and finally on to book store shelves. In this kick off episode, Rekka and Kaelyn take a few minutes to introduce themselves, talk about their vision for the podcast, and tell the story of how each of them ended up here. We Make Books is a podcast for writer and publishers, by writers and publishers and we want to hear from our listeners! Hit us up on our social media, linked below, and send us your questions, comments, concerns, and any theories you may have about “The Rise of Skywalker”. Thank you for taking the time to listen to this introduction, the first batch of new episodes drops on May 14th, so be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it. A transcription of this episode can be found below. We hope you enjoy We Make Books! Twitter: @WMBCast  |  @KindofKaelyn  |  @BittyBittyZap Instagram: @WMBCast  Patreon.com/WMBCast === Transcript === Music: 00:07 [Music] Rekka: 00:07 Yeah I'm ready are you ready? Kaelyn: 00:07 No, but let's do it anyway. Rekka: 00:07 Fist bump, we can do anything. Rekka: 00:16 All right. Inauguraguh-gull [stumbles and laughs] Kaelyn: 00:23 God, we publish books. [laughter] Rekka: 00:25 We don't read them out loud though, that's not our job. Kaelyn: 00:27 That's a good point. Yeah. Inaugural episode. Rekka: 00:31 I'm gonna leave that to you to say. Kaelyn: 00:32 Okay. It's not actually the inaugural though. Rekka: 00:37 Mine doesn't count. I was alone. Kaelyn: 00:39 No but I mean it's the intro. Rekka: 00:41 Oh, fair. Kaelyn: 00:41 So, all right, let's just get started and we'll, we'll see how Rekka: 00:46 We'll see how it goes and whether this ends up the episode nobody ever hears. Kaelyn: 00:51 The black file, we're going to have to start one of those. Rekka: 00:54 Exactly. That's what Patreon's for. Kaelyn: 00:55 Yeah. Yeah. Are you already recording this? Rekka: 00:59 Mm-hmm. Kaelyn: 00:59 Okay. Rekka: 00:59 I have been. Of course I have, this was, this was the deal. [laughter] Kaelyn: 01:02 [laughter] Okay. So, hello everyone listening and welcome to the introductory episode of the We Make Books podcast. My name's Kaelyn Considine-- Rekka: 01:15 And I'm Rekka Jay. Kaelyn: 01:16 --and we both make books. Um, I work for Parvus Press, which is an independent publishing company, as their acquisitions editor and also editor of various books that we publish and... Rekka: 01:31 ...and Rekka Jay writes science fiction as R. J. Theodore and I happen to also be published through Parvus Press. A little bit of nepotism here. That's fine. Kaelyn: 01:42 No, it's just, we're just lucky that we got to publish some of your amazing books. One out, another two coming. Rekka: 01:48 Yes that's true. Kaelyn: 01:48 We know it. We definitely know how lucky we are. Um, so Rekka, why don't you go ahead and get us started with what we're doing here? Rekka: 02:00 Well, I mean we, are we starting into the backstory? Is this the origin story of We Make Books? Kaelyn: 02:05 No, we'll save that for once we've got them hooked, I think. Rekka: 02:08 Okay. Kaelyn: 02:09 Yeah. Rekka: 02:09 We want them to already think they found something of value. Kaelyn: 02:11 Yeah, no, we're gonna--we're gonna save that for after we [laughter] Rekka: 02:16 So, We Make Books as a concept is something that, I mean really, it should already exist. Kaelyn: 02:24 It should. I was, we were actually both very surprised that it didn't Rekka: 02:29 and we were looking, we didn't we weren't taking this lightly Kaelyn: 02:32 --we looked, yeah, we--we spent quite an amount of time looking Rekka: 02:34 We were looking for a reason to say, oh never mind, someone's already got it covered, we don't need to do this. Kaelyn: 02:38 So what we wanted to do here is I work on the publishing side. Rekka works on the writing side of making books, but both of us are crucial and essential to the process of making a book. Um, however, there is not much out there that discusses not just the writing process but also what goes into actually creating and publishing books. So as you said, we really looked, we found a couple of things that weren't quite ... Rekka: 03:08 Tried to approach it Kaelyn: 03:09 yeah, and weren't quite what we thought we wanted to do. So our goal here is we want to talk about the writing, publishing process from both sides of it. Um... Rekka: 03:25 as a creative, I am someone who comes up with a story and I'm so involved in the story that when I come up for air, I finished my draft, I could be completely lost then. I have this, I have this chunk of paper that I printed at staples. Like what do I do with it? Kaelyn: 03:42 And I on the other hand, am the one that gets the chunk of paper that has been printed at Staples, although, okay. I mean– Rekka: 03:47 yeah, we're dating ourselves. There's no paper involved at all. Kaelyn: 03:50 Well, I'm still shocked that you actually print these things out. Rekka: 03:54 That's another episode. Kaelyn: 03:55 Yeah, that's another episode. But um, no, I get electronic submissions, thank God, because I couldn't even imagine. Um, what we're looking to do here is to kind of walk people through that. And our mission statement, if you will, with this was we want to be accessible. We want to not be, you know, kind of ratchet down the intimidation factor that goes into this. And we want this to be fun and we want it to be engaging and interactive and we want to hear from the people listening to it. Because as we were talking about this podcast and what it was going to be about, we realized, you know, both of us from when we started doing this, like you're hearing words you never heard before or like words used in completely not the context that you're used to hearing them. And it's like, what is that? And in some cases you're like embarrassed to ask– Rekka: 04:41 right, cause you think you're the only one in the room who doesn't know. Kaelyn: 04:43 Like, "Oh my God, I don't know what that is." Um, when the first time I kept hearing the word 'ARC,' I was like, well, what, what is an ARC? And like I already knew what advanced reader copy was. I just had never heard it abbreviated to the word Rekka: 04:55 And then spoken out loud. Kaelyn: 04:56 Yeah. To the word ARC. So, um, yeah. And then you're like, you're afraid to ask because you're like, "Oh God, should I already know this? Like everyone's gonna think I'm an idiot." Rekka: 05:04 Right. Kaelyn: 05:04 Um, so two facets. One of course, you know, kind of pull back the curtain a little bit, see what's going on, but then also open everything up to 'here's what is happening, here's how a book gets made. And here are the people that are involved in making it.' Um, you know, we're going to go through the whole process, not linearly. We're going to jump around a bit. Rekka: 05:28 Right. Kaelyn: 05:29 we'll have some guests on where appropriate. Um, and we're really looking forward to interacting and engaging with everyone Rekka: 05:35 Yeah. Yeah. And that's part of this, like we want to talk to each other. We also want to talk to the people who are listening and who have questions because unfortunately there's no way to rewind and remember what I didn't know at the time. So there's– Kaelyn: 05:51 I've got a list actually. [laughter] Rekka: 05:54 You've got a list of what I didn't know at the time? [laughter] Kaelyn: 05:56 No! Well you you too. But now I've got a list of like, every now and then I'll hear a word and it's like I'll have a flashback to like the panic attack I had when I was like, Oh God, what's that? Rekka: 06:03 Sure. There's, there's some things that we very vividly remember not knowing– Kaelyn: 06:07 [laughter] Yes. Rekka: 06:07 –And being worried about, but you know, sometimes it's like you learn these things as you go and you learn them in an organic sense. There's not a book that's going to teach you. Kaelyn: 06:17 Well, there isn't a resource. Rekka: 06:19 Right. Kaelyn: 06:19 And that was even something that I was looking up online and I think in, I mean, you can speak more to this than I can, but like how did you figure, you know, Rekka: 06:28 Did I figure it out? Kaelyn: 06:30 Going online and digging around different websites that say things is not necessarily the most cohesive or really in some cases helpful way. Rekka: 06:41 I mean, the, the advice is not to diagnose yourself using Web MD. And I mean, that applies to everything. It's just a little bit more critical when it comes to whether or not you have cancer. [Laughter] But, um, by the way, when MD says you do Kaelyn: 06:53 You always have cancer. Rekka: 06:55 It's always cancer. Um, so when people go to the Internet to find information, sometimes they stop with the first source. Sometimes they stop when they find the source that tells them what they wanted to hear. Other times they never find the answer and they give up and go home frustrated. And some of it's just like, there's a term for that and you don't know it yet. That's okay. We're happy to explain it to you. It's not a forbidden knowledge, but it's like you have to know the right search term. Kaelyn: 07:23 Yeah. Um, so you know, when we kind of sat down and wrote out, you know what we're going to go over in this introductory episode is what this podcast is, which I think we just kind of talked about a little bit. You know, this is conversations between both quote-unquote sides of the publishing world, which I'm going to try not to make it sound like it's sides because I really, something I really want to emphasize here is everyone's a team. They're just doing different things. Um– Rekka: 07:50 It really is a symbiosis. Kaelyn: 07:51 It is. It is. And we're gonna talk a lot about that. Um, because I think that is one of the major misconceptions a lot of people coming into this have, is the sort of like, and you know, I'm coming from the publishing side, so I will say there is this, like "it's me and the publishers." Rekka: 08:09 It's, you know, "me, the writer and how do I protect my book against what the publisher's going to try to do to it by default." Kaelyn: 08:15 Yes. Yeah. And I'd really like to kind of work a little towards dispelling that because that's, that should not be what's, what's happening here. But at the same time, we also want to kind of quickly say what this is not going to be. Rekka: 08:28 It's not all the answers. Kaelyn: 08:29 It's not all the answers. Rekka: 08:32 We don't have them. Kaelyn: 08:33 We have some, some answers, but it's also, it's not a roadmap. This is not, "do all of these things in your book will get published" because as we're going to talk about, there's so many factors that go into whether or not a book gets picked up by someone and that's a later episode, believe me, we will have a lot to say about that. But ... Rekka: 08:53 I mean we are coming at this from two individual human consciousnesses, in two individual bodies and so we can't say this is what a publisher at XYZ Publishing House is going to agree with, but there's an insight that we can give you from having been through it and knowing what has worked or not worked from the process. And then of course, as we said, we'll bring in guests if we don't know the answer to a question that has come up on our outline for our topics or um, you know, listener questions, which we hope you'll engage with us– Kaelyn: 09:34 We're really, we're really counting on that. And we're very much looking forward to that. We really want to hear about people who are either dipping their toe in the water or people who are well into it and you know, please feel free to send us anything or even a like, "I wish I had known." Rekka: 09:49 Yes. Kaelyn: 09:49 Um, those are, those are great. So anyway, that's, um, that's what this is. That's, that's where this is going and we're really excited to do this. Again, we were shocked– Rekka: 10:01 Yeah. Kaelyn: 10:01 Shocked that that didn't already exist Rekka: 10:03 And the closest things that came to it sort of existed for like 10 or 15 episodes and then went away or were college projects and stuff. Kaelyn: 10:12 Or it was a very specific thing that it was doing. And it wasn't like a broad appeal to a lot of a lot of people. Rekka: 10:20 And again, we're genre fiction. Kaelyn: 10:22 Yes. Rekka: 10:22 One of the ones we found was all very nonfiction focused. Kaelyn: 10:25 Yeah. So that's another qualifier. This is most, this is genre. This is fiction. It's, um, but you know, some of this advice, no matter what is going to apply across the board. Rekka: 10:36 Mm-hmm Kaelyn: 10:36 But that's, you know, that's where we're coming from. But I think it'll be entertaining and educational regardless. Rekka: 10:43 Yes. Kaelyn: 10:43 Even if it's just one of those, "Oh I always wanted to write a book." Rekka: 10:47 Or if you're at the other end of this and you're going, you know, just commiserating like, "oh yeah, I remember when I learned that one." Kaelyn: 10:53 I mean, yeah. So, so that's, that's what we're aiming to do here. Um, I mean how, how are we on time right now? Do we want to hear the story? Rekka: 11:01 I mean we might as well tell the story. Kaelyn: 11:03 We'll tell the story. Okay, cause this is, this is the story of how all of this started. Um, I was out one night with some friends and one of them brought a new boyfriend around and um, you know, he was, he was good. He was trying to talk to everyone and trying to be friendly and we were just talking and you know, of course, as soon as I tell people, "oh yeah, I work in publishing and I publish books, I'm an editor" without fail, the first thing I always get is "I've always wanted to write a book." Rekka: 11:31 You kind of say what you are and then you go to your happy place for a moment. Kaelyn: 11:34 No, you know, it's fine, you know what, honestly, because whenever people always say, 'Oh, I've always wanted to write a book', my response is, 'So do it'. Rekka: 11:40 Yup. Kaelyn: 11:40 Give it a shot. Maybe don't, you don't have to finish. Just, you know, see how it goes. Um, but he didn't say that. He said, "you know, I always think if I wrote a book, I wouldn't even know where to start with it." Rekka: 11:53 Mmm Kaelyn: 11:53 And I said, "writing the book?" And he said, "no, like, assume I wrote it. I don't know what to do then." And he asked, "so what do I do?" And I was like, "well, there's this," there's, you know, and I'm bullet pointing all of these steps. And then I'm going back and going, like, I will qualify, we were at a bar and I'd had a couple of beers at this point and I'm– and he was like, "wow, that's, how do you like figure this out?" And I'm like, "you know, I don't know." Rekka: 12:17 [laughter] Kaelyn: 12:17 Um, you know, so we were just kind of sitting at the bar and like I just had my phone out, I punched, you know, 'book publishing steps' or something into Google and um, there was nothing. And he was like, well, "how'd you figure all this out?" I was like, "I learned along the way, that's how you do this." So I went home that night and I had this like reeling through my head and I sat down and I got a piece of paper out and I, I won't say drunkenly but– Rekka: 12:47 It was legible. I saw the papers. Kaelyn: 12:48 It was legible. Yeah, slightly intoxicated-ly wrote down all of this stuff of just like, okay, so there's the submissions process and then a bunch of steps about that. Then there's acquisitions, a bunch of stuff about that. Talking about things like royalties, what are they and how do they work, you know, rights, like things like that. And then the next morning I woke up and I was like, you know, this is actually kind of useful. Like this isn't like my usual woke up in the morning and find something that I did. [laughter] "What if birds had balloons attached to them so they don't get tired?" Rekka: 13:22 Aw, see you're helpful. Kaelyn: 13:23 Yeah. Rekka: 13:24 You just really want to help everybody. Kaelyn: 13:25 Yeah. But then I was thinking like the balloons pop, it's going to choke the bird Rekka: 13:29 And the sea turtles. Kaelyn: 13:31 And the sea turtles. Rekka: 13:31 The turtles are going to start choking on balloons. Kaelyn: 13:33 Yeah. Rekka: 13:34 And birds. We don't like this future. Kaelyn: 13:35 So I was like, well this one's actually kind of useful. So I went to some of my colleagues at my publishing company and I talked about, you know, what if we did like a limited series podcast about this? And for a lot of reasons, mostly having to do with time, this just wasn't going to work. But then I was talking to Rekka about it. Rekka: 13:51 Well you put the bug in the ear of someone at your publishing house. Kaelyn: 13:54 Yes. Rekka: 13:55 Who knew that I had recently found myself without a cohost. Kaelyn: 14:01 Well wait, maybe, maybe you should backtrack and explain a little of like your history with podcasting and where you're coming from. Rekka: 14:07 Um, well I got into, I was working on a book and I knew that I am an impatient person. Kaelyn: 14:17 No, see "impatient" has negative connotations. Rekka: 14:19 But, these are negative connotations that I'm speaking of. Kaelyn: 14:23 No, you're like, enthusiastic, excited, and you get shit done. Rekka: 14:26 Fair. I accept. Thank you. Kaelyn: 14:29 [Laughter] Rekka: 14:29 So for those reasons, those very wonderful reasons, um, I knew that I was not interested in entering whatever my draft became into the grinder of 10 years of submitting it to agents and 10 more years of submitting it to publishers because you know, there, there was this impression of how you get a book published is by basically waiting and crying a lot. And that's something we're going to talk about. Kaelyn: 14:57 We are, yeah. That's going to be the title of the episode, "waiting and crying." Rekka: 15:03 [Laughter] And so I um, and now it's not going to be because you declared it. Kaelyn: 15:07 No, no, no. I know or will we throw them for a loop and it is? Always play with their minds. Rekka: 15:15 The thing is, the listener already knows, but we don't know, cause the listener's from the future-- Kaelyn: 15:20 That's a good point. Rekka: 15:21 --where we've already titled and released the episode [sings: "A paradox, a paradox..."] Okay. So I started listening to self publishing podcasts because I said, "Okay, well I'm just going to self publish this." When I started writing my story, self publishing wasn't even a thing. Vanity press was barely a thing. Kaelyn: 15:36 Okay. Rekka: 15:36 There was no kindle. Kaelyn: 15:38 Yeah. Rekka: 15:39 That, that makes a big difference. Kaelyn: 15:40 Yeah, 10 years ago. Yeah, that's... Rekka: 15:44 Um, well, HA! I appreciate that. Thanks. 14 years ago. Kaelyn: 15:48 Okay. [Laughter] Rekka: 15:48 Uh, actually, um, the original incarnation of my book, um, was begun in 2003. It was a graphic novel. Kaelyn: 15:58 For those who are listening right now, Rekka has taken a book off the shelf and is showing it to me, it is some impressive artwork. Rekka: 16:05 And it's a lot. And I got 90 pages into it before I nearly destroyed my wrist. So, um, so at one point I said, "I need to take a break". And then at that point I, I, I knew it needed structural changes and then I was like, "Well, what else can I do to it?" And so, um, apparently the answer to that was eventually write it as a novel instead of drawing it because writing doesn't hurt so bad. So, um– Kaelyn: 16:27 Little did you know! Rekka: 16:28 Little did I—well, no, it hurts in new ways, but my wrist is fine. And, um, so I started listening to self publishing podcasts to learn how you go about doing that thing when the draft is done. Because like we said, you figure it out. And I knew that I would have to figure it out and I knew that if I started collecting knowledge in the moments, you know, while I was driving and I couldn't be writing that I was, you know, getting ahead a little bit. So that was sort of my introduction into publishing. And um, there's a, I don't know if you're aware of this: self publishing folk have a bit of a bias against publishers. Kaelyn: 17:03 Yes, I know that. Um. [Laughter] Rekka: 17:04 Okay. So when I, when I finally decided that I was going to submit this, it felt like a morality choice Kaelyn: 17:14 [Laughter] God. Rekka: 17:14 You know, we talked about we don't want to talk about sides. It felt like I was saying a line like, Kaelyn: 17:19 Do I go over to the dark side? Rekka: 17:22 You know, do I want to be the scab that goes and takes all the knowledge that she learned about self publishing and takes it to the traditional like, skeleton-basically-gasping-for-breath-side because of the impression I had. Um, and around the same time I was listening to podcasts and interviews and I had a friend who was also into writing though, not at a pace that matched mine, but we were having a conversation and we listened to the same podcasts. So while we were listening to one podcast about how podcasting might help with grow your audience as a writer, I got a text and it said, "so when are you going to start a podcast?" And I said, "I don't know, when do you want to do it?" Kaelyn: 18:04 [Laughter] Rekka: 18:04 So that's how I got into my first podcast and hybrid author podcast. And I started with a cohost and we recorded for a year and change before that, uh, cohost started a new job and lost all the free time that he had. So then I was on my own, Kaelyn: 18:20 [Sympathetic noise] Lost to the, to the waste of productivity. Rekka: 18:23 Yes. And so there I was by myself and I was not really sure how to continue the podcast. And Colin from Parvus, the publisher at Parvus, uh, called me up and said, "You know, this is the same thing you're doing on Youtube." And I'm like, "Yeah, it is." He's like, "You need a cohost." And I was like, "Yeah, I know." He's like, "So what you do is–" and I'm like, "Thanks, Colin. Thank you for the unsolicited advice, you are a dear person. Kaelyn: 18:47 I was gonna say did he call you up just to tell you this? Or I'm assuming there was another purpose to the conversation. Rekka: 18:51 I think did some kind of title layout. Um, there's always a pretense for the phone call and then we get into something, Kaelyn: 18:57 Well, you know. Rekka: 18:59 So, uh, he mentioned offhand that the editor at Parvus that I knew from, um, a couple of author conferences and other events– Kaelyn: 19:10 Various things. Rekka: 19:11 –we'd interacted on a light level, you know, um, that you wanted to start a podcast. Kaelyn: 19:16 Let me rephrase that. I kept threatening that our publishing company should do a podcast. Here's the thing, I didn't necessarily want to be on it that much. Um, Rekka: 19:27 [Cackle] You do know when you share the idea, you own the idea. Unless it's a really good idea, then it's someone else's idea. Kaelyn: 19:32 Yeah, yeah. Then it's someone else's idea. Rekka: 19:33 So knowing this was a bad idea, they said, "All right, Kaelyn, go for it." Kaelyn: 19:36 Yeah, no, I mean we're pretty good at Parvus that it's like, "all right, you know, are you, are you interested in that? You want to, you want to tackle that? Go for it. We'll give you whatever help and support, you know, from your fellow Parvus people as, uh, as–" Rekka: 19:48 They'll come on and appears guests and such. Kaelyn: 19:51 Um, yeah, so I didn't really necessarily want to do the podcast. I just thought it was a good idea. Rekka: 19:57 You wanted to produce or write or suggest. Kaelyn: 20:01 Yeah. Do something. Rekka: 20:02 You just wanted to see this baby birthed into the world? Kaelyn: 20:04 I'd be like the quiet, you know, like I'd sit in the corner and doing, you know, the whatever needs to be done over there and occasionally jump in. Rekka: 20:11 Well, too bad, you're sucked in now. So eventually I said, "Okay, so Kaelyn, uh, Colin tells me you want to start a podcast." And um, I think a week later we, we pretty much confirmed that we were going to do this. Kaelyn: 20:22 Well, we were texting because you were coming into the city the next day. So we were meeting up and then you were like, Rekka: 20:27 We were like, "We should have a conversation." Kaelyn: 20:28 Yeah. So let's, let's, let's talk about it. And um... Rekka: 20:32 We didn't really, it was a very nice social visit, but we didn't really get too much. Kaelyn: 20:36 Yeah. Most of our work was via texts of like "and this" "and this" and "also this other thing." Rekka: 20:42 Yes. We have lots of ideas. Kaelyn: 20:45 Yeah, and so, you know, I'm, I'm a little like more cautious with things. I would go so far as to call it nervous. So I'm like, "Okay, well maybe, and okay, well let's come up with a plan. And Rekka's like, "No, I already got the website, got the pointer things set up, we're doing this." And I was like, "Okay, I guess we're doing this." Rekka: 21:03 Yep. Kaelyn: 21:03 So here we are now. Rekka: 21:04 Yeah. Kaelyn: 21:04 And we're really excited to do this. Um, we're really hoping that it's going to be exciting for people to listen to and engage with. Rekka: 21:12 Mm-hmm. And give you hope. Kaelyn: 21:12 And give you hope. And we're really also hoping that this can become a resource for people that are interested in getting into this. Or maybe you're already in it and you're feeling a little lost or maybe you've done it and you just want to relive it. Rekka: 21:26 We already had someone pointed out to us that there's not a lot of advice even after you've already been in the publishing industry for a while as either side. Like what do you do when you are an author with a series to write? Or um, or you end up leaving your relationship with a publisher or an agent and then you need to seek a new relationship. Like how do you, how do you do that now that you have credits to your name and what changes and stuff like that. So, um, I think there are plenty more topics than we even have planned. Kaelyn: 22:01 We've got quite a bit planned already. Rekka: 22:02 And if listeners chime in then we'll have even more. So, um, do follow us on Twitter @WMBcast and you can direct message us they are if you have questions that you want to be anonymous or feel free to shout out loud on the internets and tell us what you'd like to hear us talk about or like, you know, what resonates with you as we're speaking. Kaelyn: 22:20 Yeah, definitely. If anything is kind of like, "oh, I'd love to hear more about that." Let us know. We're really hoping for feedback. Rekka: 22:28 Yeah. We want to know that this is helping. We want to know how it could help more and uh, we want to know what your experiences are and if you create a, sort of like that, that echo back then other people will see that they are not alone in needing this information. And when we realize we're not alone in this whole process gets a lot easier. Kaelyn: 22:48 Yeah. It's, I mean, once you just have even like the first friend and that you can kind of use as a sounding board or talk to about this stuff, it's such a weight off your shoulders. Rekka: 22:58 It changes the feeling of the entire process. It really does. Kaelyn: 23:01 Yeah, it's really a significant step in the process. So, um, I guess, I think we're gonna wrap up there. Rekka: 23:08 Yeah, we should probably just plug the Patreon. Kaelyn: 23:11 Plug the Patreon. Rekka: 23:11 Uh, so we have a Patreon account—of course we do cause we're a podcast— Kaelyn: 23:16 [Laughter] Rekka: 23:16 But we would appreciate your support if you find this valuable. If this is something that shows promise to you or that you are already like, "Yes, absolutely. 100%. I need this; or I know someone who needs this," please head over to patreon.com/wmbcast (that's w-m-b-c-a-s-t). And if you support the podcast, you will have access to some bonus episodes when we–were not going to talk so much about like secret publishing stuff. Cause this is all about not having secret publishing. Kaelyn: 23:43 Shhh! Rekka: 23:43 We'll just talk about like stories, probably a movies and, and uh, the kinds of media that it's easier for everyone to be consuming so everyone's on the same page with us. But um, we'll have episodes like that. We might have other content for the most part with, oh, we're just asking you to chip in and help us pay for the hosting. And, um, the audio production, we'd like to bring in a professional producer, uh, transcripts, which are so important for accessibility and also so that other people can find us when they're searching for the kind of terms that come up in our conversations. So please, if you love what we are promising or, um, if you're listening and you've already heard a few episodes cause you're coming in a little bit later, patreon.com/wmbcast to support the podcast and we really appreciate it if you could. And if you could leave a rating and review at iTunes, that will also help other people find us. Kaelyn: 24:30 That's always, uh, that's always fantastic. And you can find us on Twitter. Rekka: 24:34 Absolutely. Kaelyn: 24:34 As well. I'm @KindOfKaelyn. That's my name is k-a-e-l-y-n. Rekka: 24:39 And I'm @BittyBittyZap. And if you go to @WMBcast on Twitter, our profiles are linked in the bio for that. (Cause I know that Kaelyn has made everything complicated by spelling her name that way.) Kaelyn: 24:49 I, yeah, I did this purpose. [laughter] This was my decision. Um, so I think that's, that's what we've got for now. Rekka: 24:58 Yep. So we are launching the podcast because this is our preview episode. Kaelyn: 25:01 Actually, yeah. We do have one more thing. Rekka: 25:01 We should mention that. Kaelyn: 25:02 Yes. Rekka: 25:03 So we are launching the podcast on May 14th. So that's coming up soon and we will have a few episodes loaded in. Kaelyn: 25:09 Yeah. So for instance, if you're heading to the Nebulas– Rekka: 25:13 mm-hmm! Kaelyn: 25:13 –and you want something to listen to on the way there, you can listen to us talk. Rekka: 25:19 Yep, as you fly in–we will have those episodes up Tuesday of that same week–so you can listen on the plane, you can listen in the car, you can listen in a boat if you somehow manage to take a boat to LA. Kaelyn: 25:28 I wonder if Mareth's taking a boat to LA? Rekka: 25:30 Mareth may take a boat to LA. Kaelyn: 25:30 Mareth might take a boat to LA. Rekka: 25:30 So Mareth, if you're listening– Kaelyn: 25:35 and you're taking a boat, let us send us a picture. Rekka: 25:37 Oh yes, absolutely. Mareth's photos are always amazing. So, um, so there will be episodes at, uh, available the week of the Nebulas. And if you were at the Nebulas, come find us. Kaelyn: 25:48 Yeah. Rekka: 25:49 Maybe we have a conversation because we are bringing our microphones. Kaelyn: 25:51 We are bringing everything. Rekka: 25:52 So, uh, we want to have a couple people to pull aside and, um, get some of these opinions that people need or experiences to share. Kaelyn: 25:59 Yep. Rekka: 26:00 So that is something else to look forward to. And, uh, once our podcast launches, we will begin airing new episodes every two weeks. Kaelyn: 26:08 Every two weeks. Kaelyn and Rekka coming through your headphones or stereo or– Rekka: 26:12 Whether you like it or not. Kaelyn: 26:13 Yep, we're there. Rekka: 26:14 All right, folks, we'll talk to you next time. Have a great– Kaelyn: 26:17 Thank you so much for listening. Rekka: 26:18 –Experience in writing. Kaelyn: 26:19 Thank you. Bye. Music: 26:19 [Music]

Hideo and Jenn grew up going to church, Sunday school, and church camp together, but they had wildly different home lives. Hideo talks with Jenn about the pressures, guilt, and strict rules that guarded the childhoods of second generation Moonies.     TRANSCRIPT News Announcer [00:00:02] A decade ago the Reverend Sun Myung Moon was accused of controlling the minds of young people creating so-called Moonies. So called Moonies,  followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, head of the Unification Church who became well-known in the early 80s for his mass wedding ceremonies. Interpreter [00:00:16] Do you pledge to establish an eternal family with which God can be happy. Crowd [00:00:22] Yes! Interpreter [00:00:22] We are talking about absolute fidelity here. If anybody deviates from this God-given principle they are bound to hell. News Announcer [00:00:35] But the church has a different plan for the second generation. 2nd Gen [00:00:38] I felt like we weren't equipped for the world. You know we aren't just like this bubble. 2nd Gen [00:00:42] To me it sounds culty. I know it's what brought our parents to church but it's not what keeps me in the church. 2nd Gen [00:00:48] Then if I'm not doing everything that they want me to do or I don't believe everything that they believe. We still have this like line that connects us. Hideo Higashibaba [00:01:00] My name is Hideo Higashibaba. I grew up in a cult called the Unification Church. You might know them as the Moonies. This is Growing Up Moonie, stories from the childhoods of people born into the church. Like me. Hideo Higashibaba [00:01:24] I was a Moonie until about four years ago. When I left, my life was ripped into chaos and I had a lot of trouble coping without the church. I had to find new ways to make sense of the world. In my journey, I reached out to other people born into the church to ask them about their childhoods what their lives were like. Hideo Higashibaba [00:01:45] One of those people is Jenn. Jenn Is not her real name. She asked to change it for this podcast because people finding out you're a Moonie can make life, well, awkward. More than that it can sometimes make it hard to keep friends or even get a job. Hideo Higashibaba [00:02:03] Yeah. We haven't seen each other in what like Oh it's been a minute. Jenn [00:02:08] Yeah, I don't know maybe like six years or maybe more. Hideo Higashibaba [00:02:13] I saw Jen and her family every week at church in Gloucester, Massachusetts at a place called Morning Garden. It's a retreat center owned by the church. An enormous mansion with a chapel where we held services members weren't allowed in most of the house mostly because it was reserved for the founder. Hideo Higashibaba [00:02:32] Sun Myung Moon and his family. We mostly just use the chapel and the kitchen. Moon bought Morning Garden in the 70s for his fishing ministry, which basically means he bought a whole bunch of boats and got a lot of church members to fish for him. It was the beginning of a global fishing business which Moon used to fund his religious empire. Morning Garden is right on the ocean, so there's a dock where we would swim and an old stone tower down by the water. Hideo Higashibaba [00:03:03] There's another tower on a hill overlooking Gloucester Harbor and several acres of woods which we kids spent hours playing in. Jen and I were in the same Sunday school class and groups at camp and workshops. So we saw each other a lot. I called her to ask how she felt about growing up in the church. Jenn [00:03:22] I said I don't know all my memories of growing up are like really great. I don't really have anything negative to say. For the most part I think like sometimes looking back I can see how some things might have been negative. But honestly like I think personally that we had like a great childhood. Jenn [00:03:39] I just remember like running around at morning garden and we would all hang out and like going to church was like pretty fun. I think when we were younger once I once I became a teenager I was like hated going but I know when I was a kid I actually really liked to go and like going to see everyone and hanging out after church and just like going swimming at Morning Garden or having cookouts or whatever and I think it always felt like a big family. Hideo Higashibaba [00:04:04] That was the idea one family under God. People who joined the church as adults are called First Generation people born into the church like Jenn and I are called second generation or second gen. Another name for us is blessed children or BCs and the second generation, these special children, were the whole reason behind the huge mass weddings Moonies were famous for. To create so-called "true families" free from the sins of the world. Hideo Higashibaba [00:04:36] The idea was that if the Messiah, Moon, blessed the marriages then the children that came from those couples would be free of Original Sin. That's right. According to my parents I don't have original sin. So there. Anyway not having Original Sin is kind of a big deal. And because of that, we Blessed Children were told we were special. That we were destined to continue God's Will to win the world back from Satan. And it was kind of a lot for kids who still have to go to school with a bunch of normal Original Sinner people. Jenn [00:05:14] I feel like we were always kind of made to seem like we were better than other people because we were second gen. Or yeah, just because we throw our lineage and being born without Original Sin or at least like that's what it said I always felt like we were made to look like we were better or supposed to be perfect. Jenn [00:05:34] I think like going to school are like so many of the things I took part in. I've met someone like the best people that, you know, they're not in the church and they're not BCs and like I don't know. To me I never...you can't look at that as like a bad thing or that they are not as good as me or anything like that. So I think that was a big thing for me. Even in high school or anything like that. Hideo Higashibaba [00:05:57]  It seems like for you you were like a part of the public school system like you were really a part of your Gloucester community as well as the church community. So seems like that cross pollination could happen more easily. Jenn [00:06:07] Yeah. No that's right because yeah. Even like me and my siblings we were always like very involved in sports or other stuff like that within our high school. So we always hung out I think we hung out with BCs more than actual BCs. So for us it was kind of like, most people didn't even know we were Moonies or anything like that. Jenn [00:06:25] I still to this day, like they don't know because we were just always with like other kids a lot. So I think it was very different for me. Rather than you I know you like your school is very small and very closed off kind of from other stuff. And I think your parents were a lot more strict than mine with certain things. Hideo Higashibaba [00:06:46] That is definitely true. Because being born into a cult wasn't enough, my parents also put me in Waldorf School, an alternative private education where kids don't learn to read until third grade, and there's a lot of knitting and poems and lamb's wool but that's a different called for a different podcast. My school was really small and I was an awkward, nerdy, poor, hyper-religious kid who got a note exempting me from sex ed. I did not have a lot of friends. I played sports but came home straight after and did my homework. I once asked my mom if I could sleep over at a friend's house and she said, "why?". Jenn on the other hand, went to public school, had non church friends, did sports and went to parties. Her parents wanted her and her siblings to follow the values of the church but they also wanted their kids to have pretty normal lives. Hideo Higashibaba [00:07:47] I was wondering, were you ever afraid that your friends at school would find out your Moonie. Jenn [00:07:51] Yeah I was so afraid. I was terrified of that. Hideo Higashibaba [00:07:55] Well what did you think was going to happen if they found out. Jenn [00:07:59] I don't I think it was, I mean I had even had like no one had ever asked if I was a Moonie but he would ask others kids were Moonies and never really. Yeah. So that I would get nervous and think they were gonna find out about me and it was never like...I guess it was seen kind of negatively but people just more found it weird and it was always this thing where no one really knew much about it they just knew we were supposed to get like arranged marriages and everyone that we like lived in a castle in Morning Garden. Hideo Higashibaba [00:08:29] The city of Gloucester has changed a lot since the Moonies rolled in 40 years ago. Back then people would scream at Moonies in the street telling them to leave and giving them the finger and mooning them. I don't actually know if that's true but I read it somewhere once and I think it's hilarious. Anyway, things have calmed down a lot since then but church members are still cautious like Jenn asking to be anonymous. Moonies didn't live in a castle in Morning Garden and we went to regular school. Still, I know you don't have to be physically confined to be controlled. Second Gen we're told from birth that we were separate from the world, better than the world. So we had to act like it. We were told to strive for perfection for complete control over our bodies through our minds. That meant proper thoughts and proper action at all times. No swearing, no parties, no alcohol, and definitely no dating. We were representatives of God and Moon. Wherever we went and that was a lot to carry around. Jenn [00:09:34] If you're not following every single rule you doing everything you feel very guilty. And I found that with a lot of things like if I was doing any little thing wrong or kind of you know like you think other things or you think you do something with the church might be wrong you start to feel kind of guilty or at least for me to have that way. Hideo Higashibaba [00:09:52] Do you remember like a specific instance of that? Jenn [00:09:56] I think I'm trying to. Even like if people talked like badly about the Church not knowing I was part of a Moonie family I would feel like this guilt of not sticking up for it or you know even if I was at a party where there was alcohol I would feel this like huge events guilt. Hideo Higashibaba [00:10:13] That you wouldn't even drink it and you would fee guilty. Jenn [00:10:17] It was just that I was involved in that type of thing. Or anything, or even if you if I had a crush on a boy I would feel very guilty. Because that wasn't supposed to happen. And stuff like that that's very normal. Like you would I would feel very guilty about just because we were drilled in our heads that it was wrong and you're not supposed to be doing that. And we were supposed to say on this specific path where it's kind of like a crazy path if you think about it like what was expected of us. Hideo Higashibaba [00:10:47] So in your mind what was expected of us. Like what's that path. Jenn [00:10:51] I think it was just that we would like live life just you know, in the church and like just following those rules and growing up and getting matched at like 16. You know, basically being married off so young and like I don't remember it like a couple of people getting matched or Blessed at 16. If you think about like getting married at 16 is insane. You don't know who you are. You don't know what's going on and you don't know what you want to do in life. Jenn [00:11:20] And like looking back thinking, I don't know I always had it in my head like I was to be married, like very young and you know just always be with whoever I was blessed you and you always. I remember even we would talk about it like oh I wonder who we're gonna get married. We talk about who it's going to be. Jenn [00:11:35] Yeah all the time. And it was so I feel like it was so much expected that we'd be married, have children and that was like our life. Like I never really I don't know, I don't even remember ever talking about, you know, going to college or like what type of job I would get or anything like that. More, the more important thing was like getting matched and blessed and having a family. Hideo Higashibaba [00:11:56] Some second gen were matched by the leader like their parents. Some were matched by their parents. The Blessing is the wedding part, and we talked about it constantly as kids. I remember Jenn and me at workshops and church camp imagining who are husbands would be, wondering if they would be from a different country or speak a different language. The reality is that a lot of Second Gen didn't end up getting matched or Blessed. The older blessed children got, the less they went to church, especially once they finished high school. More and more their lives blended into the outside world. Hideo Higashibaba [00:12:32] So would you consider yourself to be in the church. Like do you still go to church? Jenn [00:12:37] No I don't go to church. I wouldn't say I'm like out of it but I wouldn't say I'm necessarily in if that...I don't know that it's possible, but I think what I mostly hold on to is that I definitely believe in God for sure and like the creation and all those things I believe in that. But I do see how some things in the church were working toward bringing peace to the world and bringing people together of different cultures and backgrounds. And I think with the whole Blessing of matching people, I don't know, for the Blessing, the big marriage ceremony, I think certain things about that is right where you're matching people completely different so that the kids turn out for the better. Hideo Higashibaba [00:13:29] Wait, you're saying that is or is not...? Jenn [00:13:32] I think that aspect is interesting and I think I do somewhat agree with it. Where you know if you take two opposites like to make the kids better people. That is a very self sacrificing thing to do. Hideo Higashibaba [00:13:44] The Blessing didn't just cleanse the second generation of Original Sin. It was also the key to world peace. Moon said if people from opposite or even enemy countries or cultures got married and had babies then their families would love the children. The theory was the more different the cultures the more powerful the reconciliation. That's how my dad a Japanese guy and my mom a white American WASP got together you know because of World War II. Jenn and I, all second generation, were born from the Blessing without Original Sin but also with the specific task of making the world a better place to advance God's will for world peace. That's a hard thing to shake even when you learn other things or your opinion changes like Jenn. Jenn [00:14:35] I think looking at a lot of parents that we're blessed and even second gen too I do think I don't agree with that. Just looking how unhappy some people are and how it affected the kids as well. If your parents are always fighting or never speaking or stuff like that and there's really like not I mean I guess there's like some love there but I think in some blessings there is just it's just is not fair. I think for the parents or for the children at all. Yeah, so I don't know if that whole thing I kind of...I don't know, I think I was very lucky to have, like you know, my parents go on for the most part they fight of course which any married couple fights. Hideo Higashibaba [00:15:20] And unmarried couples too. Jenn [00:15:24] Exactly, any couples, but there's going to be fights and there's going to be huge blow outs. But I think a lot of kids were affected by it in a negative way. And I think a lot of people kind of just got Blessed because they thought that's what the Church was saying you have to do. And that's I don't know it's that I can't...I can't fully agree. It is like a big thing that I just think is unfair. Hideo Higashibaba [00:16:01] So for it...it sounds like from what you're saying, you're not going to get matched or Blessed like that's not a plan for you. Jenn [00:16:07] Yeah I don't know, I always like...honestly I would love to be married to a Blessed Child. I think, not one that's like crazy about the church or anything like that but just because because they have that experience and it's very relatable like this is a hard childhood or anything and I think it is a huge part of us of how we grew up. It's hard to explain and it's really hard to relate to. So I think like I would love to be married to a BC but I do not want to get married to someone random like I have always said I want to pick who I'm with, I need to know them, and it's not, I wouldn't that I wouldn't go to the Blessing and just get like a random person. Hideo Higashibaba [00:16:46] So Jenn's relationship with the church is complicated. She's kind of in and kind of out and that's not possible for me. I can't be myself: queer and transgender and brown and to be a part of the church and my family. But Jenn is white, she's straight, she's cisgender, just generally more accepted by the world. Hideo Higashibaba [00:17:11] This division between who we are and how the church treats us is something I've been thinking a lot about. Something we'll explore more throughout this podcast. Second Gen we're told to prepare for whoever God chose for us. It could be someone we knew, but it also could be a total stranger even someone who didn't speak the same language as us. For Moonies commitment to God to Moon and his wife and world peace were more important than anything else. So as kids looking forward to our marriages... Jenn [00:17:50] I kind of always like had hoped that I would end up with them I actually liked. But I think it was you kind of just had to have it in your head of like if you end up with someone horrible or like somebody you don't get along with at all or don't like at all then you're just stuck in it. Yeah I mean I always had hoped for it to be romantic and happy and I'd get along with the person but it was also like if I didn't then that's just who I was with kind of thing. Hideo Higashibaba [00:18:26] There was nothing you could do about it. Jenn [00:18:27] Right. And it's just gonna be like that and like you were supposed to love whoever you ended up with. Hideo Higashibaba [00:18:31] Did did you notice that those expectations changed once you started dating. Like when you were in relationships you were like, Oh that's actually not how it has to be or. Jenn [00:18:39] Yeah. No I think I realized that and also just being around like other like my friends who were dating or like even being in college and where relationships are more serious than like in high school and you can see like that give and take between couples and where. Of course it's not always easy but like the two people love each other and get along well and they have similar interests and that's where I kind of I realized like, oh hey like I'd way rather have this than end up with someone I can't stand. Hideo Higashibaba [00:19:07] Or that you don't speak the same language as. Jenn [00:19:10] Right! Like you share nothing in common. Not even from, not from the same country. Nothing. Hideo Higashibaba [00:19:17] Oh that's so intense. People know it though. Jenn [00:19:21] Yeah I remember it. There was always this thing is like you shouldn't be matched or Blessed to someone that is the same as you. Hideo Higashibaba [00:19:27] Right. It wouldn't be like I don't like this we we equated like being a holy and god like and like you know good with being as different as possible and in, in that, by that metric my parents are like should be the perfect couple for their opposite. I mean they're like Asian and American but also like just personality-wise just nothing. Hideo Higashibaba [00:19:51] In the entire time I lived with them, I never saw my parents enjoy each other's company. Actually, I don't think I have ever seen them show anything but open or passive aggression to each other. There was one time when my dad was in a really bad car accident. When my mom got the news, I remember she looked worried and it took me a moment to realize she was worried for my dad. I'd never seen her show any kind of concern for him. Usually, they just tried to avoid each other even at home. There was a lot of fighting especially when I was younger. I learned to fall asleep with the sound of shouting outside my bedroom door. To Moonies, my parents situation is unfortunate and a bit extreme but not sad or even regrettable. Love and happiness was just not the most important thing in a marriage. And that's what kids like me and Jenn grew up seeing and believing. Hideo Higashibaba [00:20:50] How do you feel like growing up in the church with Blessings and matching things and children and all of these things. How did that affect how you saw love or How do you perceive love or your expectations around love. Jenn [00:21:04] That's a good question. I think I definitely saw love as something very different than I do now. I think I more, I don't know. I don't think I ever really understood like what love was. I think I more I looked at most people's marriages as like or Blessings as you just weren't supposed to break those. I never really saw too much love between a lot of parents. I think like I think there's there is love there. But it's not like...I think it's like a sacrificial love. More than like an actual love. Hideo Higashibaba [00:21:47] Yes! That is exactly what it is it's like martyr love. Jenn [00:21:50] Right. It's like I'm supposed to be here and I'm supposed to be in this Blessing type thing. And I think there is, of course like you know everyone cares about each other but it's not because they didn't choose each other. I think it's...It's a different type of love. I don't know. I don't know how to explain it. But I don't know. It's kind of like a harsher type of love. It's not like an easy love at all. Hideo Higashibaba [00:22:16] On the other side of it I wonder if that can really be considered love at all. Things between my parents cooled as I got older and they fought less but I could still feel the venom between them throughout high school and until I left home. Now Jenn and I are grown. She moved back home after finishing college to save money. She works, dates, goes out with friends, and she wants to open her own business someday. Jenn [00:22:43] I'm in a completely different place than I thought I would be when we were growing up. But yeah I mean I would say I'm very happy and I live like a very normal life. I would say. Hideo Higashibaba [00:22:56] So what what did you where, did you think you would...like if you asked you're like 10 year old self like where you gonna be when you're...are you 24 now? Jenn [00:23:04] Yeah I'm 24. Hideo Higashibaba [00:23:04] Yeah. Like what were you gonna be when you're 24 like what. What do you think. Like what would did you imagine. Jenn [00:23:11] Wow. I Oh oh yeah I definitely thought I would be married by now, for sure. I think I thought I would be living in a different country. Because I think I always wanted to be blessed to someone from like Australia or Ireland. Hideo Higashibaba [00:23:25] Sure. Jenn [00:23:26] Or somewhere in those areas which probably would never have happened but... Hideo Higashibaba [00:23:29] It's far too, those people are white. That's far too sinful. Jenn [00:23:32] There's no way I would definitely be in like Japan but... Hideo Higashibaba [00:23:36] Oh no! Jenn [00:23:38] Yeah. I don't know if I ever really pictured my future too much because it was like so based off of who I was gonna get Blessed to. So there, it was so hard to like pick a lane because it was always like it was going to involve two people's lives not just my own. And I think now I'm more focused on my life and where I'm going. So yeah I don't know if I ever really pictured so much where I was gonna be because it was so up in the air. Who I would end up with. Hideo Higashibaba [00:24:17] Yeah absolutely. I totally get that, like it's so hard to plan when you're planning for somebody else who doesn't even exist yet. Jenn [00:24:23] Right. Exactly. Yeah that's not true you're planning for someone you don't even know who they are. Hideo Higashibaba [00:24:28] Yeah and they don't know who you are and it's like it's so hypothetical. Jenn [00:24:33] Yeah that's so true actually. Hideo Higashibaba [00:24:35] Yeah. Jenn [00:24:36] I never really thought about that. Hideo Higashibaba [00:24:40] It didn't take much for Jenn to stop centering her life on a non-existent husband and family and start to focus on her own interests and career. But now that I've left the church I'm struggling to know what I want to do with my life. I just can't picture my future like I used to. I have trouble knowing what I want. Hideo Higashibaba [00:25:10] Next time on growing up Moonie... Interpreter [00:25:12] Homosexuals lesbians or even those who go after free sex life. If they practice that kind of unprincipled life they are less than animals. Hideo Higashibaba [00:25:23] That's on the next episode of Growing Up Moonie. Hideo Higashibaba [00:25:32] Growing up Moonie was written by me. This episode was edited and produced by Quinn Myers with music by Podington Bear. If you like what you're hearing, please take a moment to leave us some stars or review wherever you listen. It really helps other people find the podcast. My name is Hideo Higashibaba. Thanks for listening.  

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Guilt is a universal feeling though it rears its ugly head in different ways, using different strategies for each person. We must all learn to tackle this beast in our own way and find the strategies that work for us. I have been working hard to be reasonable, rational, and really honest with myself as I attack the ridiculous guilt that creeps up on me. Yes. Ridiculous. Some guilt is just plain ridiculous. Listen or read more at http://www.notbefore7.com/2017/06/21/mom-guilt-over-it/