Hello, welcome to Healing the World Together. Today I'm here with Angela Foster. She is a nutritionist health and performance coach and host of the top rated podcast, High Performance Health. And she used to be a former partner of a large law firm. And she healed herself after a serious illness in 2014 using integrative health practices, biohacking to rebuild her physical and mental health. And now she's a speaker, a coach, and the founder of her company, and also founder of the Female Biohacker Collective. And her mission is to educate and inspire women to become the CEO of their health and optimize their mind, body, and spirit by embracing their femininity. So welcome, Angela. Thank you, David, it's lovely to be here. Yeah. So you have an amazing story of healing and transformation. So I wanna hear about that. Yeah, sure. As you were saying there when you were reading my bio, I used to be a corporate lawyer for many years and I was just working hard, moving up the ladder, moving towards partnership. And then when I was eight months pregnant, I was my partner and everything was going pretty well. And then when I had my children, I unexpectedly suffered with postnatal depression. And it got worse with each child, with each sort of pregnancy. Until finally after my third child, I was really struggling with bipolar episodes. And I was having these sort of suicidal thoughts a lot of the time and I'd created this prison in my own mind because I was so deeply connected and loved my children and my husband, but I just couldn't control my mind. And I basically just wanted to turn the thoughts off in my head. So I just felt imprisoned in my mind but I was thinking, how can I thought life would be better for them without me, which was where I was in terms of my thinking. As crazy as that seems now, but then I also couldn't imagine leaving them without a mother. And so I just had this thing where I was like, just someone please turn it off. And that's when I then developed pneumonia and I became very sick and my lymph glands were really swollen. They were treating me for the pneumonia but it wasn't getting any better and I kept having antibiotics. And then they did an x-ray and they found some things on the x-ray and called me to the hospital. And then they did a CT scan, suspecting lung cancer. But actually it was just that I had this kind of round glass opacity where the pneumonia had spread to both lungs and it was viral and bacterial pneumonia. I was neutropenic. And I was just admitted straight into hospital. I couldn't go and pick my kids up from school. I couldn't say goodbye. And that was when I, it's a moment I looked back on and I'm grateful for because I was in hospital with myself with nowhere to run. I was out running these days to try and run away from myself. And finally I couldn't go anywhere. And I felt this really profound moment of peace. I think that there was a sort of lucidity with the fevers that I was experiencing and just being there, I really deeply connected with my kids, my family and my love for them, but also just the fact that I was okay. Somehow I felt at peace and okay being me. And that sparked in me a mission to really get well. It was a bumpy road at first.  It took a lot of work to get myself physically and mentally optimized, but also to really dive deep into the spiritual form and connect with myself on that level because it's something I had ignored for many years. I was always into physical fitness, but I hadn't really got my mindset and my spirituality on track. And I believe it's a fully holistic approach. And so now today I've retrained and my mission now is really to inspire and empower women. Tell me more about what was going on in your mind that made that shift, basically that point in your life when everything changed. It was a crossroads because I had wanted a way out and when you have bacterial and viral pneumonia, you know, the antibiotics are gonna take you so far, that the virus can't be treated in that way. And I was aware of that and I was neutropenic and I realized that my immune system was gonna have to do some work if I was gonna get out of the hospital. And I think that I felt, I guess it was just a moment of peace. I hadn't felt okay with myself at all. I had so much self-loathing as part of the depression, but somehow I felt overcome with just feeling okay. And just this idea that I would take it one step at a time and almost giving up the, giving it up to the universe. You know, if I could get well, then I wanted to get well and equally it could have been taken from me. And I was very fortunate because that did spark in me journey back to health. And I think the doctors were surprised when they retested my bloods just within 48 hours how much they were changing. And it all began with that decision. So explain what happened because it sounds like that something happened miraculously to change your whole makeup of what's going on in your body. Can you explain more about how you got to that point? I think I've been functioning and just carrying on but not really feeling for so long. And when I was at the hospital and I couldn't leave, I couldn't go home because they were really worried about how quickly I was gonna deteriorate and how I was breathing. And so I couldn't go and pick my kids up. I couldn't say goodbye to them. I couldn't even say to them, mommy's gotta go into hospital, she'll be home soon. And that really, really broke my heart because I realized that I felt like I was letting them down and that there was a real chance that they wouldn't have me in their lives. And so I realized that it was bigger than me, right? I was, if they were gonna grow up without a mother and my husband was gonna not have his wife there. We'd been close and we'd met at uni with best friends then that was gonna profoundly change their lives forever. And I think it was from a true place of love for them. I was looking at photos on my phone. They came in to see me that I just wanted to get better for them. And it was just that sense of bigger purpose, bigger than myself. And is this common? Like after you, did you talk to the doctors afterwards or how you recovered? Have they ever seen something like that happen before that quickly? They were surprised when they rescanned my lungs because they were expecting more permanent damage. And I did have, they were expecting to intubate me. They didn't need to, so that I was lucky but they were expecting more damage on the lungs. And so I did have to have a repeat CT scan to see what had gone on. And initially that was delayed because it's almost like, I suppose that heroes journey isn't that you fall down again before you get up and I got another chest infection. But I managed to get better and get back on track. And I had some damage to the kind of alveoli at the base of the lungs. So it's, there was some inflammation leftover and I had infection-induced asthma. But to be honest, by all accounts, I got off very lightly. So this experience, how do you think it has changed the way you see the world or changed your behavior or changed your purpose in your life? So initially when I began on that journey to get well it was inspired by my children. My love for my children. So I was like, how can I get well? And I wanted to understand it and I wanted to understand what happened there like that spiritual connection. And so that's when I began reading because I'd been brought up in a kind of very strict Catholic background which had a confession and guilt and things like this associated with it. So I'd kind of departed from that. And as part of that, I've lost touch with my sense of spirituality. So I decided to approach it and knew I'd had this experience. So I was open to finding out more things. So I was really busy reading books by the Dalai Lama, reading Dr. Joe Dispenza's work, that his book, Breaking the Habit of Your Being Yourself really inspired me to change. And I literally had to rebuild my mental and physical health on every level. And so I slowly embarked on that journey. And it was about putting the pieces together, restoring my immune system, my gut microbiome. I'd lost a ton of weight. I'd lost a lot of bacteria from the heavy kind of dose antibiotics that were being put through my system. And then it was about building that immune system up but building myself up mentally. And one of the things that I discovered was just the lack of compassion that I'd had for myself throughout that whole process and relearning self-compassion. I don't wanna say fall in love with yourself, right? But how to respect and honor myself and put myself first to be in a position to help others. And that was, and then eventually as the years went by and I was becoming more and more optimized, got my energy back on track, I'd restored a lot of the adrenal dysfunction that I think was the background behind everything. I actually think that's where it began through those years in my 20s of just pushing with no sleep or miters or weekends. It was then about really getting my mindset really clear and doing a lot of like cognitive behavioral therapy on top to finally come off medication. I was advised not to stop taking medication because I'd had these bipolar episodes where the lows would be preceded by these incredible hearts. And I think that felt like that was probably one of the coolest things because the deepest lows were preceded by these days where I would just feel so well, I would feel on top of everything almost like super low. But then I learned over time that these were leading to a crash. And so it's like, how could I stabilize that? And then eventually make that transition off medication which I wouldn't advise anyone to do without a doctor and it may be that people listening, you need to stay on medication. But it was part of my journey that I wanted to come off because I'd got myself to a point where they weren't just resetting me now as becoming numb and I couldn't feel and I wanted to feel again. And so that was really, that was the last piece to pull together. So through your experience and through your journey, what's the one thing that you think is like the guiding light for you? If you had one rule or one guiding principle, what would it be? I think it was to connect in the present moment. It was to bring two presence because when you suffer with depression, you experience anxiety and they're like the flip sides of the same coin. And so often with anxiety, you're looking forward but you're not necessarily seeing a compelling future. And when you, and it was a fear-based and the anxiety didn't really, I didn't struggle with because I've never been that anxious. That was just on the edges, but the depression really got me. And so it was like learning not to ruminate on thoughts, understanding the sort of observer effect and that I was not my thoughts and I could separate from them. And the only real way to do that was to bring myself fully into the present moment. And so I would practice and practice. Every time thoughts came up, I would question the authenticity of those thoughts and whether they were really me and try to replace them with a different thought, a more empowering thought. And sometimes that wasn't even possible. Sometimes it was literally about being mindful. I really respect John Kabat-Zinn's work and I've read a lot of that to help me but just bringing myself into the moment of whatever I was doing. If I was driving, just really focusing on the car and everything I was doing. If I was doing something domestic, like washing up, I would be focusing on the sounds of the soap bubbles or the movement of water through my fingers and just bringing true presence. I would say it was the number one thing that was able to guide me out. That's great. Staying in presence is very important. People are living in the past or living in the future, not really in the present, right? What's one effective technique that you use that anybody can learn on how to stay present? I would say the first thing is to connect with your breath because it's the one way that we know how to really rebalance your nervous system and to engage that parasympathetic system and address any of that anxiety. It took me a while to get the hang of that but breathing in through your nose and helping with that release of nitric oxide and then slowly exhaling can bring you into balance quite quickly. Even if you wanna get in touch with resonance and your resonance frequency, then it's somewhere around. It's different for everyone but somewhere around that four breaths in, six breaths out. And so I would practice doing that to really just become centered and then I would focus on something I was grateful for. And luckily for me, I think some mums when they suffer with postnatal depression which it started off, they can feel disconnected to their children or disconnected from. And I think I felt very fortunate that was never the case. Like I truly adored my kids. And so just spending time with them and that release of oxytocin and being with them would help me tremendously and support from my husband. So what made you make the decision to leave the corporate world and start something different? It was very difficult to combine it and to look after my health, combine it with young children and actually see them. And I realized quite quickly that I wasn't gonna be able to see my kids and spend time with them because I was gonna be home when they were asleep and I was leaving the house when they were just getting up. And it was really important to me to be a part of their lives. So initially it began as a corroborate and interesting that the time was exploring becoming a judge because I've practiced enough years. That was an option. But then as I really got into my health optimization and my journey, I realized just how many women struggle with that balance and struggle with their mental health and their physical health. And so I wanted to try to and help to empower them. And that's when I started to retrain and make it my focus. So it wasn't then just about myself and my family. It was about how can I widen this? And it just has evolved over time. I guess it's positively addictive, right? It's the more you can dive in deeper and help people and inspire them, the more you want to because it's that ripple effects that's created in the world. Can you give us some examples of some success stories that have arisen from the people that you helped? Yeah, so I work, I think the biggest thing I think is giving people the self-belief that they can achieve their goals and get watching them go on, not just to reverse things like autoimmune issues, but actually completely rebalance their energy and launch businesses and themselves. So many women I've worked with have ended up having the courage to leave the corporate world and to create something in their own work that actually combines with their family life while still being able to focus on their health and their energy levels. And that's just so inspiring and just brings me so much joy. So you talk about balance and what do you think is the always trying to summarize everything? What do you think would be the one thing that would help somebody balance their life, especially if they're a woman in the corporate world or women in the, even specifically the legal world? I think getting enough recovery is key. So I think for women, particularly for very driven women, type A personalities like myself, there's a temptation to always push and feel like you should do more or you can do more. And just because you can doesn't mean, I think sometimes we need to slow down to smooth things out and actually go faster. And I think that it doesn't have to be extreme, right? You don't have to go, if yoga is not your thing, you don't have to spend an hour or more a week doing yoga. It could be going for a walk in nature. It could be just stepping outside in the sunshine for five minutes or like skipping the subway or the tube and actually walking across the bridge in London to get to work so that you experience some time outside with nothing on or no mobile phones. Just to bring yourself into the present moment at various points in the day, I think is so key. If you're starting to feel really stressed or you're feeling really frazzled, just to take a few deep breaths to send to yourself back again. I think working out has its place and it's something that I love, but I think it's just being, having an awareness that the more that you push, you're gonna have to bring in some recovery alongside if you don't want to eventually lower your energy. Right, a lot of people are concerned about burnout because of the pushing, right? Everybody in the corporate world is focused on meeting targets, pushing, going as hard as you can, working out as hard as you can, working, negotiating, basically pushing as hard as humanly possible in order to get ahead because it's so competitive. If you go into the ancient principles of yin and yang, it's all about balance, like you said. How do you balance the aggressive, yang masculine energy with the, I wouldn't say passive, but more on how to explain, more like the gentle rejuvenating, like the more subtle energy, feminine energy. So I think it's not about how hard you push, it's about also how hard you relax too. I agree. I think it's, I think, yeah, I think you make a really good point. I think it's different for different people because I think for some people who find it hard to set stuff right, they don't, they're really in that doing mode, then what can be helpful is to make that, that doing part of the relaxation. So that could be a walk in nature. That could be some cold exposure, right? That can calm you down and activate that nervous, that vagus nerve. It could be that it's yoga because yoga really is mindfulness, but you're physically challenging the body still. And I think it's about understanding, sometimes you need to use the body to condition the mind and sometimes you need to use the mind to condition the body. And just becoming like in tune with yourself and understanding what is the best tool at this point in time, but also acknowledging that these practices are going to help to make you more efficient. Now, I do is because I work with high performers is to increase performance. And even McKinsey have done a huge amount of research in relation to accessing a flow state and how senior executives feel five more time, five times more productive when they're in flow, but flow in and of itself where time falls away and you're just so engrossed in that moment and what you're doing is actually also very depleting on the brain. And it's Stephen Kotler's done a lot of research on this. It is preceded by a period of struggle often of actually being able to get down to it. And so I think sometimes just acknowledging what these cycles are and how they work and not beating yourself up and leaning in, you can actually make yourself a lot more efficient. I think good quality nutrition makes a huge difference, good quality sleep. I'm not necessarily sleeping longer but looking at your sleep metrics and understanding them and actually really dialing in the quality of that sleep. I think looking at your heart rate variability and understanding when it's dropping that actually you might be, if we look at the model with athletes, we can see that there's a concept of overreaching and over-training. If we're overreaching a bit, then we are making ourselves more resilient. So we're introducing a stress that's actually making us stronger. But if overreaching goes too far and we move into what's called over-training, it's much harder to come back from. And so it's about just understanding. It's like that, as you say, the yin and the yang and it's walking the tightrope and understanding that friction point where you are performing, but you're not sacrificing health. You're not sacrificing longevity or metabolism as a result of that performance. And that is really what gives it the endurance and it's the endurance that you need to succeed long-term. Sometimes you have to slow down to speed up. Exactly. So tell us more about what you offer with your female biohacker collective and what that's about. The female biohacker collective is a community that I started as a membership really for women who want to optimize every aspect of their physical, mental, and spiritual health. And what we do is it's a wonderful community of women so that they're not going alone. You have the support of other members and we basically each month will pick an area of health optimization or an area of performance. Sometimes it will be centered around like goal setting or stepping into your most empowered future self. Other times we'll be looking at metabolism or blood glucose control or different biohacking technologies or recovery and stress and resiliency. And each month there is a theme and then we have weekly calls, live calls with a master class. And then we have this, one of the favorite thing I think around members is we have a live challenge for one week where everything you've learned you put into practice so that you can start creating your transformation and working on that. And then we have a Q and A call and a book club. And so it's really for people who just wanna dive a bit deeper and we've done the research for you. So you're not looking here there in everywhere to try and find the information but it's assimilated and put in one place and then myself and my team support women to become the best self. And what would you say your vision is for this group and for yourself? My vision is to impact women across the world. So we have members from all different countries. My podcast is now in 120 different countries and if I can make a difference to women's lives to men and to women but specifically I tend to focus in my programs more for women really so that it can create that ripple effect. They can then not just better their own lives but those of their families and their friends as well. Thank you, Angela. I think your story is very inspiring to many people and they can definitely learn a lot from you especially it's about balancing and about peak performance. So thanks for your time. It's been amazing and look forward to doing more with you. Thank you so much, David, me too. Have a good day.


Joining us is the founder and treasurer of the Blue America PAC, which raises money for progressive candidates around the country. He also writes the Down with Tyranny blog, Howie Klein. Howie, Trump fatigue. There's no time for Trump fatigue because these are the angriest people in the world. They are violent. They are not getting what they want because Trump is not keeping any promises. They can't admit they're wrong for voting for Trump, so they resort to violence. They are going to lash out at the other side and we're seeing evidence of this already. Well, we saw evidence in the run-up to Trump being installed. Tell me about Kim Weaver. She dropped out of her campaign for Iowa's fourth congressional district. She said that she had financials insecurity, but there were other reasons. Why did she drop out? She dropped out basically because she was getting death threats. So she's running against Steve King and I think some of the listeners know that Steve King is one of the most right-wing, racist members of Congress.  He represents the largest part of Iowa, which is basically a rural area. There are almost no real cities there. It's just a lot of very small towns and miles and counties full of farms. It's a pretty backward area and it's the reddest part of the state. He's represented that forever. Kim ran against him last time and she didn't get any support at all from the Democratic Party, from the DCCC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, but she decided to run again. Blue America endorsed her. We've been raising money for her. She's raised a lot of money, about a quarter of a million dollars. She was ready to go up against him and she's been getting death threats. And that's what mostly the media knows, but there's a little bit more to it than that. I wrote a post about it last night and people can find it on my blog at downwardtyourney.com. And what it says is that Republican officials have targeted the agency that she works for and she was told specifically they were doing that because she works there. So they've cut the budget of the agency and she's freaked out because some of her fellow workers are going to be fired now. So she's very, very upset about that and she decided it's just not worth it between the death threats. And it's not just an email in this case. Someone put something up on her lawn and she just felt it was getting a little bit too close for comfort. Trump, as you just were saying, has encouraged violence among his supporters and they're taking it very literally. And when he said, if you get into trouble and he said this at one of his rallies, I'll pay the legal bills. And these kind of knit-width, half-width, opioid-addicted imbeciles hear this stuff and they take it very seriously. And of course Trump isn't going to pay their legal bills at all or do anything to help them, but they don't know that. And there was going to violence. So people might say, well, you know, Steve King, for example, said this isn't true. He said she's making it up. She wasn't really threatened. She's just afraid of him. He said he wants her to run because she's a weak candidate. So he said this stuff publicly. But interestingly enough, just in the last couple of days, so literally this all happened in the last, let's say three days, Kim Weaver drops out in Iowa, then we have a guy who's running a liberal Democrat who's running for mayor of Binghamton, New York, upstate New York, and he started getting threats. He went on the radio, talked about his campaigns when he answered Republican incumbent, and he starts getting death threats. And then they started coming to his wife and to his children as well. They're getting emails of death threats.  He sort of, it was Waterwolf adducts back. He didn't care that much. He was a little concerned about his wife getting them, of course, and his kids. But that's how it goes. Then it's about eight o'clock at night, and he went to pick up his three-year-old daughter at a babysitter, and he's coming back in the house, and there's a strange pickup truck parked across the street from his house. And suddenly the guy starts screaming, you know, horrible words that we don't want to say on the radio, although liberal and then excellent of deleted, and throws a can at him, a can which, as it turned out, was full of soda, so a full can, and that could do a lot of damage. And he went to shield his daughter, of course, and then the can hit him, and then he decided to drop out.  So, bad enough, we have those two things. And then down in Louisiana, in, you know, a really, really right-wing district in Louisiana where Hillary got, you know, 20-something percent only. So you can imagine what that district is like. They elected a, you know, down there, they have the jungle primary, just like we do in California, where everybody runs in the primary together, and although in California we tend to have two Democrats who win and then they face off in the general election, in Louisiana it's the opposite. They'll have two Republicans who win, and they'll face off in the general election. And in this guy's election there was a mainstream conservative, Scott Angeli, who's very well-known statewide. He's a famous Republican, and he's not a moderate in any way, but he's kind of a mainstream conservative. He's held statewide office, he's very famous, and who is he running against? He's running against a guy named Captain Clay Higgins. Captain Clay Higgins, who's a professional vigilante. That's what this guy is. He's not paid by law enforcement.  So he's a mainstream conservative running against a fascist, and the fascist wins. So this guy, Clay Higgins, is now a member of Congress. So on Sunday he decided that he's going to take it on himself to write a Facebook post urging his followers to hunt down suspects. He used the word suspects. People they suspect of being Muslim terrorists. And when you read it, you know you might like miss out on the terrorist part. So if you suspect someone that might be a Muslim, he says kill them. He doesn't say go to the police, report them. He says kill them. That's what he said. That's a congressman. So today I'm waiting to hear maybe another Republican congressman saying that that doesn't say anything about our party and that we disown him and we disavow what he's saying. Nothing. Nobody says a word. Maybe Paul Ryan should say something to him. The whip of the Republican party is a guy named Steve Scalise who's supposed to be somewhat sane, although I've never seen any of that. Is he from Louisiana? Is he from Louisiana? Does he say anything? No, nothing. None of them say a thing. Are they afraid of these people? I think that they are sympathetic with these people. Maybe they're afraid of some of them. I don't know. They certainly are cowardly, that's for sure. And you know, when you called a little while ago, I was on the phone with Alan Grayson. And one of the things that we were talking about was Walter Jones. Walter Jones is a Republican from North Carolina. And Walter Jones just came out saying that Congress should not fund the war in Afghanistan. And if Trump tries to put more troops in there, they should flap him down and not let him do it and not give him the money to do it. No more troops, no more war in Afghanistan. And the reason that Grayson and I were talking about that is because he is a truly courageous guy.  They run candidates against him. Ryan has made sure to pull this guy off his committee and not let him rise in the ranks of he should be the chairman of the committee he's on now because it's based on seniority and they don't let him do that. They don't let him even be the second in command. And they do everything to target him. They gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to some right-wing nut who was running against him in the Republican primary last time. He beat the guy, you know, the guy only got 20 percent. But that's what they do. That's how they try to stifle independent thought. So when you say, are they afraid of these people? These Republicans are afraid of their own shadows. They have reason to be as well.  It's out of the Putin playbook. You know, he surrounds himself with paramilitary organizations. Bikers and Trump surrounds himself with bikers because they can't rely on the police to do their dirty work. It's from, you know, who's playbook from 75 years ago. The people who are violent, let's call them the brown shirts who support Trump, who are doing these violent things to this guy running for mayor. Did you say Binghamton? Binghamton, New York, which where Harper is, the University of New York. There is no difference between the people who threaten these candidates like Kim Weaver and George Zimmerman. If you want to understand the mind of a right-wing Trump supporter who wants to clock a liberal, think of George Zimmerman. They don't believe in anything other than violence. They believe that they were put on this world, put on this earth to remove what they consider weak or nefarious. Is that a fair statement? There's no ideology behind these people, right? Well, there is some ideology. The violent people. The violent people is true. They get off easily from left to right without a problem, though. So what you're saying is absolutely true, but while they're doing it, they have some kind of ideologically underpinning the next day they could be converted to something else. I'm sure they don't think they have strong ideological feelings.  So there's a guy named David Woodward. He's a political consultant. He's helped people like Lindsey Graham, Trey Gowdy. I think Trey Gowdy becomes head of the House Oversight Committee to replace Chafetz and Jeff Dunn. And Woodward told McClatchy earlier this week, the McClatchy News Service, that they are literally going to fight the media, that they're going to run against the media in the midterms. They can no longer run against Washington, D.C. Now they're going to run against the mainstream media. And you have people like Ben's at mainstream media. Yeah. And you have people in the media like Laura Ingram who praised Gianforte, the new congressman from Montana for beating up the reporter from The Guardian. It's getting more violent. And it's going to get a lot worse. Gianforte was rewarded for his behavior by bringing in $100,000 that day from donations, some of which were very specifically made by people saying congratulations for punching out that liberal jerk in much worse ways of saying it. Yes, the Trump kind of people, that's their mentality. They like that. They think, you know, what was Limbaugh said? He was virile or masculine or something. Right. Donald Trump right now is so unpopular. More Americans, according to a new poll, favor impeaching Trump over Trump himself. There are more people who want to put him on trial than approve of him. But below Trump is the media. The media is even less popular than Donald Trump. This is so, in a way, it's a race to the bottom, but he's winning. No. I don't think so. I think that people see Trump as a real existential threat to our country now. And I don't think some might think of the media that way. But I think that everyone likes to use the media as a punching bag. And there are times that I'm screaming at the TV or I'm angry at Rachel Maddow. But it's very different from how you might feel about Trump. And there's a daily tracking poll that Gallup puts out. And the one that came out today has him at the lowest number he has ever been at, which was 36 points something. I don't remember what the point was. 36.4, I think. And that is lower than Nixon's rating that they found during the Watergate hearings when he was about to be impeached. Trump is already at that level. And thinking, I mean the momentum is all downward. It's not like it goes up and down and up and down. It's going down. They're not going to get rid of him unless they lose the house. Right? Right.  Sorry for my French. All right. And they will start the impeachment process. Now they won't be able to find him guilty because the Senate is going to either be, you know, barely in the hands of the Democrats. I don't think it will be. It will be a Republican Senate. And they have to, they have to, they need 60 votes in the Senate to be able to find him guilty. But he will be impeached. Be impeached. And then the Democrats will, you know, in the House will impeach him and then the Senate will find him not guilty. On the local level in the state governments, we're finding hope for the Democrats. Montana and Kansas, the Democrats did not do well in special congressional elections. Well, they, they, no, they did do well. They didn't win, but they, they, their, their numbers were way higher than they had been previously. So yes, they did well, not well enough. We're seeing, however, an increase in state and local elections for Democrats in primarily red districts, correct? We are. You know, what we're seeing is across the board a, a rise in pro-democratic votes between five and 10%. So if you need to make up 20%, it's not going to do you any good, like in Kansas and Montana. If you only need to, to, to come up by 10% and the vote turns to the Democrats by 10%, you win. And that's what happens. That's what's been happening in, in New Hampshire, for example, a couple of weeks ago. They won the Democrat there, won a seat that had never in history gone to a Democrat. It's been a Republican seat since it existed. And it's now, it was won by a Democrat. That was a seat, of course, a Trump one. There is, there was a seat in, in, on Long Island, where it's, it's, it's in Peter, Peter King has a big chunk of the South Shore of Long Island from Nassau County into Suffolk. And the, the reddest part of his district is this particular assembly district. So, so his district is, is, is a purple district. But with this one part of the district is the reddest part by far without this part of his congressional district, he's got, he's in a blue seat and he wouldn't have to stand a chance. This particular part had an assembly race and the Democrat won. And it was shocked everyone. No one expected it. It was, and it was a Bernie delegate who ran and, and she won. And, you know, that should send a message to Peter King that he's in trouble because if he can't win in that part of his district, he might not even run again. You're in a boat. It's sinking.  There's one life vest left. You grab your life vest. There's only one left. Peter King and Steve King are in the boat with you. You have to give the vest to one of them. You're going to give it to Steve King over Peter King, I would assume, right? Well, it depends if there's a shock in the water or not. Steve King is worse than Peter King, right? Yes. But not by a lot. Both terrible. Yeah. Hillary Clinton is speaking and I don't think she's doing herself any favors. I don't think she should be complaining about the Russians and the DNC. I think it's a little, I don't know.   I don't care what she says. And she has the right to speak and say and give her opinion. I don't think that she represents in any way the Democratic Party. I think some Democrats are not happy that she's speaking out like this and saying silly things and or bringing attention to herself.  I don't really feel that way. I'm not a big fan of hers, but she has the right to speak. Okay, let me ask you a question about her because the Hillary supporters say that Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was the chairman of the DNC, the Bernie supporters say that Debbie Wasserman Schultz conspired with Hillary to make Bernie weak so that Hillary can get the nomination. The defenders of Hillary say that the chairman of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, has no power. That the DNC is a shell organization. It's just a container for somebody to seize power within and then take it over. But it's really the individual politician who gets the nomination, who runs the DNC. So that if Bernie had won, then he would be the DNC, Hillary won, so she became the DNC. That's the argument. Right, so that argument is true except what about before there's a nominee? That's where Debbie Wasserman Schultz was doing her damage to Bernie was before Hillary was the winner. Once Hillary won, then there wasn't a problem anymore. But before Hillary won or got the nomination, that's when Debbie Wasserman Schultz was doing damage to Bernie in every way she could. Did Hillary undercut that argument, the pro-Clinton argument, by complaining about the computer software that the DNC had when she got the nomination? She says, I inherited this mess that the DNC was... No, she did not undercut the argument because she did inherit a mess. The reason she inherited a mess was because Debbie Wasserman Schultz, aside from being the most corrupt DNC chairman ever, wasn't in it for anything except herself. So all she was trying to do was build up a gigantic personal mailing list of donors. So she didn't care about the DNC, she wasn't doing a very good job at it. She was just getting her own list together, stealing from the DNC. But on the other hand, she would be doing things... For example, there are many, many things she did to harm Bernie, including bad scheduling of debates, fewer debates than should have happened, debates scheduled on odd times when people wouldn't be able to tune in for one reason or another. And then, at one point, she shut down his access to his own lists, which the DNC has the capability of doing. I was going to say, they don't have the right to do it, but they have the capability of doing it. She did it. She cut him off from his own list so he couldn't do any kind of fundraising from the people who were his supporters. So she did a lot of things to harm him, some small, some big, and always persistent. She never did anything to help him. She always did things to harm him. That's Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Before we get to Dr. Keyanga Yamunata Taylor, she's an assistant professor of African American Studies at Princeton. She spoke at commencement address. I didn't hear the speech, but you write about it on Down with Tyranny. I write about it and I have an embedded copy of the speech itself. So you or anyone else who would like to listen to it can go to my blog and there's a YouTube of it. It's fantastic. It is so inspirational and so powerful. And this is an amazing woman. I'm going to guess that since we were talking about threats, that you're bringing this up because she was also threatened to the point where she had to cancel previously scheduled engagements. She speaks. She's an inspiring speaker.  And she's now canceled both of them. She said it's too dangerous for her and her family and she's not going to do it. So why did that happen? That's because of Fox News. They took one very incendiary part of the speech, played it on Fox News where she's saying some negative things about Trump.  She's not cursing him. She's not saying cut his head off or anything like that. Does anyone think he's not a bigot or does anyone think he's not a misogynist? I mean he certainly is. And Fox played it and riled up their audience and she was deluged with death threats. Now she's an African-American woman. So you can well imagine what those threats were like. She says that almost every single threat had either the N-word or the C-word or both of those words. And this is an incredible, incredible woman who was invited by the students at Hampshire College to come there and speak. The students themselves get to pick who their commencement speaker is going to be and they picked her. Her speech is really incredible and very, very much worth listening to. And like I said, I have it embedded on my blog. Or you can find it on YouTube and she's just a pretty amazing woman. People should go to Down with Tyranny to read your blog because what you wrote about her will enhance the viewing pleasure you also embedded a YouTube video to see the speech. A great speech was delivered last week by Michelangelo, the mayor of New Orleans, about a ceremony taking down three statues of Confederate leaders. Did you happen by any chance to read that speech? No. I didn't read the whole speech but I've heard a lot about it. So I know it was a very, very inspiring speech as well and people said that it was just, you know, it put him on a whole other plane of hero of the resistance. I think that speech, well it's unfair to talk to you about it because you haven't read it but I think that speech will go down in history as one of the great speeches about. Not alone. A lot of people are saying that now. I need to get my hands on that and either watch it or read it. Is he a good guy? He's part of a machine, that family. I don't know. I've never talked to him. He's from like a political family. His father was a big time Louisiana politician.  Yeah, she was the U.S. Senator, Mary Landrow, as bad as they come. She's now a lobbyist and she's a real bad lobbyist. So can you tar him with that? I don't know. But I know when I hear that name, it gets me thinking, be careful. We're almost out of time. Trump, climate change, it looks like global warming, climate change might have succeeded in doing what the Democrats can't do in terms of gerrymandering. Tell me about Carlos Kerbello. He's a Republican from Florida. And according to Down with Tyranny... I don't know if it's up yet, but I wrote a post about this and I think it is up. It is up. Yeah, so Carlos Kerbello is in a Miami district where that Hillary won by almost 20 points. So this is not a close district. This is a district where he's really in danger of losing. And in Miami, climate change is not a theory. They've got pumps running 24-7 pumping water out of their streets. I mean, if they stop pumping the water out of Miami streets, bye-bye Miami. So Carlos Kerbello is very, very, very well aware. He came right out and said, you know, Trump is incorrect and pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord was a big mistake. And he denounced him in no uncertain terms. The only Republicans that are doing that at this point are Republicans in districts like his that went heavily for Hillary and where they feel that they're jeopardized by association with Trump and certainly in the case of any kind of educated audience who is aware of the reality of climate change that's exacerbated in a very, very big way. So when you talk to, you know, some audience, some bunch of Trump supporters in some backward area where everyone in the county, and there literally exists, there are 25 counties that went heavily for Trump, many of them in Appalachia, so whether we're talking about Tennessee or Kentucky or West Virginia, parts of western Pennsylvania, where the death rate is so high from opioid addiction that that's the Trump heartland. That's these counties, I mean, it just sounds like I'm being an insane person, but I've done the research on this and I've written about it. If you just look at which were the counties that voted for Trump overwhelmingly? I'm talking about like 70%, 80%. These counties, there's also the counties that have the worst opioid addiction in the country. There's no way, I mean, of the 50 counties that have the worst opioid addiction, 49 of the 50 were Trump super counties. One of them wasn't and the one that wasn't was on an Indian reservation. It's the only one that wasn't. Very quickly, Joe Biden, too old to run for president, but he's created a super PAC, an exploration committee to run for president or it could be to support people who he likes. Joe Biden, remember, has, you know, now people think of him as Uncle Joe and he was, you know, he's Obama and he, you know, people like him. But Joe Biden had a very, he had a very, very, very long senate career and that very, very, very long senate career was very, very bad. In terms of, you know, he was fine when it came to women's choice and gay rights and, you know, these social issues, he was fine. He was just a typical good decent democrat. When it came to things that had to do with corporate finance and Wall Street and that kind of thing, bad guy. He was, you know, when you hear about these bad bankruptcy bills, he was the one that would be writing them. He was, he's really, you know, not one of my favorite democrats. Let's put it like that.  There's a lot of bad with him and I certainly, he's gotten better in the last few years, but I wouldn't trust him to be president. I would much more like to support someone like Elizabeth Warren or even Bernie Sanders. Is 70 still the threshold? It was the threshold when Ronald Reagan was elected president. They said you can't go past 70. Bernie is what, 74? Hillary's 70? Biden is 74? I'm rounding these numbers off. So next week, who turns 71? Who turns 71? Yeah, next week. Who does? Senor Trump Pansy. Oh, so could Hillary run again? Could Bernie run again? Bernie said she's not going to run again. She's not going to run again. I think if she, the Democrat, I think the Democratic Party, they're slow to learn, but I think they've learned that she's the wrong candidate. And last question before you go. Walter Jones. He's a Republican. We were just talking about... I know, I have a question. I have a question before you go. Carlos Kerbello, Republican. Why do they stay? What prevents them from throwing their hands up and just walking to the other side of the aisle? Interesting question. So Kerbello has one chance to keep his seat, in my opinion, well, two chances. The more likely chance, actually, is that the Democrat, the DCCC will screw up and they'll pick some terrible candidate, which they may do. In fact, they are talking about picking someone who would be defeated in that district. That district is about, it's close to 70% Hispanic, and they're thinking of running a guy named Patrick Murphy, who was a congressman from another part of Florida, nowhere near there. So they're thinking about running him and he would lose. So if the DCCC does something foolish like that, which they usually do, he could win. Other than that, the only shot he would have to win would be to say, okay, I'm a Democrat now, and switch parties. Howie... Walter Jones, by the way, before we go, he was elected in 1994. In 1992, he ran for Congress for the first time as a Democrat. He was a Democrat. His father was a congressman who was a Democrat. Howie Klein is the founder and treasurer of the Blue America PAC, which raises money for progressive candidates. Read him every day. Over it down with tyranny. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Talk to you soon.


Hey everyone, welcome to our monthly recap of all of our closed trades for the month of September. Before we jump into the trades, I just want to make sure that you are aware that tomorrow, October 1st, this is on a Tuesday, at 4 p.m. Central Standard Time, we will be doing our part one of our strategy class all about the iron duck option spread. We are super excited about this, haven't been this excited about a strategy in a long time. Part two is on October 8th and part three is on October 15th. We split this up into three different sections because there's just a lot of information and we wanted to make sure it was broken down and easily digestible. So if you haven't already, make sure you go to navigationtrading.com slash iron duck registration. That's going to take you to this page here and then just click save my spot, put in your email and we'll send you the link to the live class. This is going to be a step-by-step strategy course. We hold nothing back, give you everything step-by-step and here's an idea of some of the other things that you'll learn. How do we structure trades to make money over 90% of the time? These are super, super high probability trades. How to profit when the market goes up, down or sideways. So it works in any kind of market. The one special tweak that we use to eliminate risk to one side of the trade and our favorite setup to maximize profits each week. These are shorter-term trades and so we're getting in and out. We're going to teach you the most profitable symbols to trade and which ones to avoid. We're going to teach you how to make consistent profits without any trade adjustments. So no rolling, no adjusting. You're just going to get in and get out based on the specific criteria that we teach you. We're also going to talk about how to keep a short bias in the market but eliminate risk to the upside. The best way to trade this strategy in a small account. So with this strategy, we've got members who have multi-million seven-figure accounts and we have members who have just several thousand dollars in their account. And with this, I mean you can scale it down to as little as risking just a couple hundred dollars per trade all the way up to as much as you want. So the scalability of this strategy is really a good fit for anybody with any size account. And then lastly, we're going to give you a kind of a step-by-step cheat sheet. You can print this off, put it by your computer so you know exactly when to enter and how to manage the trade. Exactly like we teach in the strategy course. So make sure you check that out. Now if you're watching this after these dates have already passed, you can still go to navigationtrading.com. Click on the big orange button in the in the upper right hand corner or go to the pro trial page. You can do a 14-day trial for just a dollar and check it out to see if it is a good fit for you. The Iron Duck option spread recording will be there for pro members only. So it's not going to be made available to everybody, but if you are a pro member, you'll have it there in your membership area to watch over and over again to perfect your craft. So see you then. Look forward to that. Let's jump into the closed trades for the month of September. Total profit a little over $938. Average profit per trade a little over $67. The average profit per trade and our winning percentage was actually much lower than it typically is. Typically we're in the 80s or 90s or sometimes we hit all 100% winners in a month, but not in this month. We had about a 64% winning percentage. Traded six different strategies including short strangles, short call verticals, long put verticals, long put weekly iron condor and weekly double calendar. If we go to navigationtrading.com and we take a look at the performance page, get an idea of here's where we are accumulative ever since we started posting the alerts back in June of 2017. And so we keep track of this. So this is always updated each month if you just go to navigationtrading.com slash performance. And if you scroll down, you see all the different trades that we made with the ticker symbol, the date, the number of contracts, the strategy and then the profit. You can see we had five different losing trades this month, which is not typical. You know, we might have one or two sometimes or sometimes none, but that's just part of trading. You got to play the probabilities. They don't always work out in the short term, but over the long term over many trade occurrences. It's just a game of math. The other thing to notice is look at the number of contracts between one and four contracts. So we're doing this so somebody can trade in a small account or large account. We have some members who trade, you know, 10 times this number. And so you just multiply that the profit and loss by the number of contracts you trade, but you can really do this in any size account. So that's the kind of the summary. If we jump into the membership area, which by the way, we are doing a complete revamp of our membership area. It's pretty basic right now, but it does give you the information that you're looking for. And if you go in there under the navigation alerts tab, you'll see the live alerts as we send them out. They're posted here. You get a snapshot of our current portfolio, all of our closed trades just as we're going over right now. And then all the different strategy courses. Like I said, the iron duck option spread will be added to this library once the live class has concluded. So getting back to the alerts, if we go back to the beginning of September, just to break these down in a little bit more detail. We had an SPX weekly iron condor booked a nice profit out of the gate of $1305, $1,305 on that trade. Did a short strangle in Ford slash 6B, which is the British pound booked a profit of 250 on that one. On VXX we had a short call vertical on. We're in this trade a little over a month, but booked a profit of 171. I had a loser on one of our weekly double calendars lost 870 on that one. So price kind of ran away from us. So we kind of hit our stop loss point on that. So we got out there on CL, which is oil. We did a short strangle booked a profit of 520. Another SPX weekly double calendar. We ended up getting close to that expiration point and it was just outside of our range. So it took a little loss of 250 on that one. We did another SPX weekly double calendar booked a nice profit of 580 on that one. And went back to the well and oiled with another short strangle booked $500 profit on that trade. In EEM we did a long put. We were trying to get directional on this bearish on EEM. It surged on its ran away. So we took a loss of 729 there on XLF kind of the same story. We were getting bearish and ended up taking a loss on that of 588. SPX going back to another weekly double calendar booked a profit of a couple hundred bucks there. And then on the next one again took a loss of 710 on that one. 6B went back to a short strangle there booked another profit of 243.75. And lastly in EWZ we had to do a couple of adjustments there but ended up booking a nice profit of 316. So those are all the closed trades for the month of September. Again if you want to check this out and get these alerts delivered directly to your inbox just go to any page on navigationtrading.com click on the big orange pro membership trial button there. And don't forget to register for the Iron Duck Web Class navigationtrading.com slash Iron Duck registration. See you all there and we'll see you next month to recap the closed trades in October. See you then.