When your website appears on Google search results, Google search shows a snippet or a title and short description. As the first interaction between your website and potential customers, the snippet is the primary piece of information used to decide which result to click on, so it's important to take the time to add relevant titles and descriptions. What's a good title? Page titles should concisely describe what you have to offer. A good title describes what you offer, like sporty kids' clothes for an online kids' clothing boutique. A good description should provide a one or two-sentence summary of the content on the page, like browse through a variety of clothing for all your kids' activities for our catalog page that showcases all of your site's sporty kids' clothing. You'll want to avoid vague terms like using home for your homepage and excessively long titles as they may be truncated in search results.  This doesn't help users and could look spammy to Google and to potential users. Using different titles for different pages is important, as it helps inform the user of where they are on your site. If you must use the same title, consider using different snippets for each page to help distinguish them from one another on search results. Many content management systems allow you to update the title of a page to better reflect its actual content. Now let's talk about description or snippets. Snippets are automatically created by Google to emphasize the content on a page that best relates to a user's specific search. This means that a page might show different snippets for different searches. Note that Google will try to pick a relevant helpful title and description. As a website owner, you have two main ways of influencing your snippet content. Rich results and meta-description tags. Note that Google will try to pick a relevant helpful title. Even if you give all your pages a title and description, Google might choose alternatives depending on the query the user entered. This video will continue to focus on meta-tag descriptions. If you'd like to learn about rich snippets, click the video link in the description below.  Think of them as a pitch to convince a potential customer to visit your website. There is no limit to how long a meta-description can be, but the search results snippet are truncated as needed. The meta-description doesn't need to be in sentence format. For example, product pages may display product details, price, or manufacturer. News or blog postings may list the author or date of publication. Similar to titles, every page on your website should have a meta-description that is distinctive and relevant to that page. If you don't have time to create a unique description for every single page, try to prioritize your content. At the very least, create a description for the homepage and popular pages. If you use a content management system, you may also be able to generate descriptions dynamically and automatically from your page content. You can check what Google displays for your website by entering a query and the name of your website in search. Note that the title and snippet shown can vary for different queries, depending on what method you used to create your website. You can adjust the titles and meta-descriptions. In most content management systems, you can give each page a short meta-description and a title. When in doubt, contact your platform with any questions you may have. If your website was built from scratch without the use of any content management system or other platforms, you can change the title and meta-description in the HTML source itself, or within the scripts that generate the pages. Look for areas where you can change the title text between the appropriate HTML title tags, open title, and closed title, within the head element of the page. To edit the description, edit the text inside the content field of the meta-description tag, like this. If your HTML does not have open title and closed title tags, or meta-named description tags already, you can add them in between the head and closed head tags.  Remember, the person who understands your business and marketing strategy best should be the one providing the title and description. Thank you for watching, and look out for the last episode in the Search for Beginners series about adding and changing your information to Google My Business.


ads heard during the podcast that are not in my voice are placed by third-party agencies outside of my control and should not imply an endorsement by Weird Darkness or myself. Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. Welcome Weirdos, I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. Coming up in this episode. The Anatomy Act of 1832 allowed doctors, anatomy lecturers and medical students greater access to cadavers and allowed for the legal donation of bodies to medical science, but the act would never have come to be had it not been for a series of murders committed in order to sell corpses. After being confronted with his crimes, Wesley Alan Dodd claimed that death was the only way to make sure he never committed those crimes again. Pauline Picard's family thought that their missing daughter had come back home, but then a body was discovered. You might not believe in fairies, but you might if one kept calling your name. On April 22, 1920, seven members of the Wolf family were buried. Their murders were the start of a bizarre and bloody series of events that still reverberate in the Turtle Lake North Dakota area today. October is a spooky month already thanks to our celebration of Halloween, but even outside of October 31st, the month has had some horrifying events take place and we'll look at just a few of them. An eight-year-old hears whispers in the dark, but then it becomes even more terrifying. You may be average in every way, average in height, income, attractiveness, but something must be special about you if you are continually being abducted by aliens. We'll begin with that story. Plus, I have many other stories in this episode. If you're new here, welcome to the show. While you're listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com for merchandise, my newsletter, to enter contests, to connect with me on social media. Plus, you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you're struggling with depression or dark thoughts. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com.  It sure has a funny way of telling us there is still a lot we don't know about the world around us. The Old Man of the Lake is a mysterious tree trunk that has defied the laws of physics for 120 years. Floating in Crater Lake, the deepest lake in the United States, one can say the 30-foot-long tree trunk is not very eye-catching at first sight, but it has sparked the imagination of many people nevertheless. It was discovered in 1896 by Joseph Diller, a geologist and explorer who extensively studied Crater Lake at the time. Diller was fascinated by the Old Man of the Lake and described it as a spectacle curious enough to excite the imagination. The first written account of the Old Man appeared in 1902, the year Crater Lake was named a national park. The Old Man's curious behavior resulted in several scientific studies. The tree trunk can travel miles in a single day. One day it can be close to the shore and the next day it is in the middle of the lake. In the 1930s, the government commissioned a study of his movements. In their log of the log, Rangers observed the Old Man move more than 60 miles in less than three months. This was not a very good idea though. In the 1980s, Mark Buktencia, an aquatic ecologist for the National Park in Southern Oregon, was part of a submarine exploration of Crater Lake. To avoid running into the Old Man out in the water, they tied him up on the shore. Bad idea. It wasn't long after he was tied up that a storm blew in. Buktencia recalled, and the surface of the lake got too rough for us to deploy and recover the submarine. When it started to snow in August, superstition got the best of the scientists. Our senior scientists went out quietly one evening and released the Old Man from his bondage, he said. And wouldn't you know it, the weather cleared up right afterwards. What is truly intriguing about the Old Man of the lake is that the tree trunk has been floating upright ever since, standing about 1.2 meters or 4 feet tall above the surface. You would think that the 4 foot above the water would act as a little sail, but sometimes they'll move all the way across the lake against the wind, Buktencia said. Though the Old Man in the lake has been floating in Southern Oregon's Crater Lake National Park for at least the past 120 years, carbon dating suggests that it is at least 450 years old. Crater Lake has been the subject of Native American legends and several spooky stories. A Native American legend tells that an epic battle occurred one night in Southern Oregon 7,700 years ago. Standing atop Mount Mazama, spurned by the daughter of a local chief, Lao, god of the underworld, spit magma and shot superheated steam miles into the sky. Skell, god of the world above, fought back by pitching pyroclastic fireballs from California's Mount Shasta, blowing the massive summit of Mount Mazama to bits. By dawn, Lao was driven back underground. Skell honored the victory by filling the massive caldera with water, creating Oregon's Crater Lake. Since then, streamed stories have hovered above the area like a chilly northwest fog. People have spotted ghostly campfires on uninhabited Wizard Island, and visitors to Crater Lake Lodge still tell stories of eerie occurrences in the night. Crater Lake is some 592 meters or 1,943 feet deep, making it the deepest in the United States and the ninth deepest lake in the world. What makes Crater Lake different is the fact how relatively empty it is. According to the U.S. National Park Service, fish are not native to the lake, and the species that exist there now were introduced between 1888 and 1941. Six species were originally introduced, but only two have survived, Rainbow Trout and Cocony Salmon. Crater Lake's clean, cold water is responsible for preserving the tree trunk in such good condition. But why does it defy the laws of physics? Scientists think the higher density of the submerged part is keeping it balanced. Basic physics states that a floating object of uniform density will always have its center of mass as being higher than its center of buoyancy. That means a long log will float with its axis in a horizontal orientation and a short log will float vertically. The old man is 9 meters long, 30 feet, with a diameter of about 61 centimeters or 2 feet. This suggests it should be floating horizontally, but it doesn't. Instead, it floats vertically. Why this is the case remains unknown. There are some theories. One possibility is that when the tree slid into the lake more than a century ago, rocks had become tangled up in its roots. But there are no rocks there now, so it seems the theory does not explain the old man's behavior. All across the world, there are a number of natural formations that defy physics. Another example is an intriguing structure that can be found in India. Known as Krishna's Butterball or the mysterious Stone of Sky God, this 250 ton rock stands on less than a 4 foot base. How is it possible? Maybe Albert Einstein was right when he said the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. One night when I was 12 years old, I had left my bedroom window open all night as our house didn't have any kind of air conditioning and it was very warm. At around 2 in the morning, I heard a very loud husky voice speak to me. I looked out of the window but saw absolutely nobody out there. I remember thinking that I was just dreaming. The next day I woke up very late in the afternoon and in the hospital. My parents said they found me unconscious outside on the lawn at 4 in the morning after hearing a loud bang. The bang they had heard was me jumping off the shed. The funny thing is that there is no way to get on the roof of the shed without a ladder and we did not have one. I told them what I had heard but they didn't believe me and said that I was making up a story to cover the fact that I had tried to kill myself. I was allowed home about a week later and was put on medication. That night I woke up unable to breathe. My little brother who was 6 at the time came to my room because he had heard noises. He walked in and screamed intruder. My parents then rushed in but whatever my brother had seen was gone. My parents were again angry thinking that I was staging something. Two nights later I heard that low inaudible voice again. It was like in a movie when a bomb explodes next to a person and they are partly deaf. My parents got up and came to my room with my brother all covering their ears. They all heard it too.  They sat down on my bed and my door slammed shut. The voice stopped and everything was eerily quiet. My dad opened the door and almost everything in the house had moved. We moved out of the house a few days later. I haven't had anything happen since. I used to live in a bed-sit that a friend had lived in a couple of years earlier. She had moved to another city. She was really into her music, dancing and playing guitar. One night I brought a guy I had just met back to the bed-sit. In the morning he told me he had woken up and seen a woman dancing through the room. He said she had long blonde hair but with one side of her head shaved. He told me that she had gone next door. This described my friend perfectly and since her best friend used to live next door it also fit that she would be heading next door. I rang her to make sure that she was okay. She was fine but just a little freaked to hear that her ghost haunted my bed-sit. Many years ago when I still lived with my parents in Ohio I worked a 20 minute or so bus ride away in a neighboring town. Coming home one evening on a really miserable, cold and raining winter night the bus gradually emptied as the passengers got off at each stop. Although my stop certainly wasn't at the end of the line, by the time I pressed the bell and got up and stood by the driver I noticed the bus was completely empty. Nobody hiding or lying down in the seats I had passed them all as I came down the bus. I stood swaying holding on to the pole and looking back down the empty bus chatting to the driver. I was the last one to get off. The bus came to a stop outside our house and I climbed off but for some reason I again looked back before leaving and the bus was still empty.  I watched the bus pull away and I still don't know how he got there. He looked as real as anyone else. My mother and I were home alone one day and in different rooms of the house. She was in her bedroom in the attic and I was on the second floor in my room. All of a sudden my cell phone started to ring and it said, Mom. I picked it up and said, Hey, what's up? Do you need something? I waited for a response but there was nothing but dead air. A few seconds went by and then I heard a very eerie whisper but I couldn't make out what she was saying. So I said, What? Mom, are you okay? Again there was no response until a few seconds later. I heard a woman whisper, The attic in a really creepy voice. Then there was static and the phone hang up. It gave me chills. I then went upstairs to check on Mom. When I got to the top of the steps I looked to my right and saw that my mother was on her bed sweating like crazy and gasping for air. She couldn't breathe. She has asthma and she was having an asthma attack at that very moment. I looked through her drawers to find her pump and when I found it I gave it to her. After a few minutes she was able to breathe normally again and I asked her if she had just called me before I came upstairs. She said no and gave me a weird look and said how could I have called you if I couldn't breathe? Besides my cell phone battery is dead so it's been off for a few hours. Once again I got the chills. Who could that have been on the phone telling me to go to the attic and how could they have known my mother was having an asthma attack at that moment? That same day when I told her about the phone call she was pretty scared and told me to help her move her furniture and other things to the empty bedroom on the second floor. A time for pumpkin patches, autumn celebrations and of course Halloween. But it's not all fun and games this time of year. From a horrific fire to a tidal wave of beer here are seven October events that created ghosts. On October 2, 1942 the RMS Queen Mary accidentally rammed and sank her escort ship the HMS of Curicoa as she carried over 10,000 troops to Europe. More than 200 men died in the collision and now Queen Mary staff and visitors reportedly hear strange sounds coming from the ship's bow. The eerie noises include rushing water, tearing metal and anguished screams. On October 7, 1849 renowned author Edgar Allen Poe died four days after he was discovered deliriously wandering the streets of Baltimore. No one knows how Poe got into that condition or what caused his unexpected death. Though Poe might be gone, some people believe the author still lurks around his former home at 203 North Amity Street. Several people have reportedly felt taps on the shoulder but saw no one when they turned around. One guest was spooked when a window sash appeared to fly across the room and land at his feet. On October 8, 1871 the deadliest wildfire in recorded history swept through Pestigo, Wisconsin. Strong winds stoked what was initially a controlled burn, creating a firestorm with superheated flames reaching 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Many people fled to a nearby river but died of hypothermia in the frigid waters. Those left behind burned alive. All in all, between 1,500 and 2,000 perished in the flames. Legend has it they haunt the area today. Locals tell stories of shadowy figures that drift across streets and roam across the lands that once made up Pestigo. Other tales speak of glowing red lights in the cemetery where many charred victims were buried. At times, a thick, blue fog also blankets the area. Paranormal investigation teams have collected several EVPs near the old cemetery. In one, an anguished voice seems to scream, it burns. After a two-day trial, French Queen Marie Antoinette was convicted of high treason and guillotined on October 16, 1793. Legend has it the infamous Antoinette now haunts the palace of Versailles. In 1901, two sisters visiting Versailles claimed to have wandered away from their tour group and traveled back in time. One woman reportedly saw Antoinette sketching in a garden and a woman's time-travelling tale soon became known as the Mobilejordain Incident. However, Marie didn't just appear to the sisters. Several other visitors have claimed to see the Queen's Ghost in the palace gardens. Strangely, the erstwhile monarch has also been spotted at a home in Maine. On October 17, 1814, enormous vats ruptured at London's Moe & Company Brewery and sent nearly 1.5 million litres of beer gushing into the city streets and nearby homes. The wave of beer killed at least eight people, and rumor has it one of them still lurks around the area today. In January 2012, a photo surfaced on the internet. The couple took the photo at Dominion Theatre, which now stands on the site of the old brewery. The two speculate that the pale woman behind them is the ghost of Eleanor Cooper, a young barmaid who drowned in the beer flood. On October 20, 1977, a plane carrying rock band Leonard Skinnerd crashed in a remote forest near Gilsburg, Mississippi. The accident killed three band members, including lead singer Ronnie Van Zant. But is Ronnie really gone? Legend has it, Van Zant haunts Free Bird Live, a bar and live music venue owned by his widow. According to an article in the Florida Times Union, a staff member left a full bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey on the counter one night, but returned the next morning to find it empty. Jack Daniels was one of the musicians' favorite drinks. Kristen and other employees believe Ronnie drank the liquor to show them he was still around. King Henry VIII's third wife, Jane Seymour, gave birth to a much-longed-for son on October 12, 1537. Sadly, she died just 12 days later on October 24, 1537. Now the former queen reportedly haunts Hampton Court Palace, searching for the infant she left behind. Jane's former apartments aren't open to the public today. However, some visitors and staff say they've seen the queen's ghost ascending a set of stairs on the anniversary of Edward's birth. During these annual appearances, Jane reportedly wears white and clutches a candle as she climbs the stairs. The ghostly queen doesn't interact with the living or seem aware of their presence in any way. She simply walks up the stairs and disappears. Coming up, a woman finds that her pregnancy tends to attract the paranormal. A boy visits a friend's house for the summer and is confronted by the hat man. You might not believe in fairies, but you might if one kept calling your name. And after being confronted with his crimes, Wesley Allen Dodd claimed that execution was the only way to make sure he never committed those crimes again. Plus, you may be average in every way. Average in height, income, attractiveness, but something must be special about you if you are continually being abducted by aliens. That story and more when Weird Darkness returns. In the film, a man takes $20 from his employer to go on a date, planning to replace the money the next day. But he falls increasingly into more disastrous circumstances and further in need of more money, and it spirals out of control. Join us Friday, February 9th for Quicksand. It's free to watch online and you can chat along with the rest of us weirdos as we watch the movie together. The show begins at 8 p.m. Eastern, 7 p.m. Central, 6 p.m. Mountain, and 5 p.m. Pacific. You can watch a trailer for the film and watch horror hosts and schlocky B-movies anytime, day or night, on the Weirdo Watch Party page at WeirdDarkness.com. 1950s Quicksand, starring Mickey Rooney and Peter Laurie. Friday, February 9th on the Weirdo Watch Party page. This story takes place a few years ago. I was 8 years old and I was scared of the dark. I always told my parents that I could hear voices in the dark. I would scream until they left the light on all night. The voices were not necessarily evil, but they did scare me. Even with the light on in the middle of the night, I would wake up and hear whispers as I would call them when telling my mom. She figured they were just my overactive imagination. One morning around Christmas, I awoke and felt the need to use the bathroom. I walked out from the door and distinctly heard a voice say, Look! I saw a red light almost like a spotlight flashing at the bottom of the stairs. There was no explainable source for the light. Being a little kid, I began walking down the stairs to see what it was. That's when I heard him. A very strong voice which was totally different from the first. Not at all like my dad's. It said, Stop right now! Go back up those stairs. After reaching the top of the stairs, I heard a very loud bang that sent me running back to my mother's bed where I jumped straight under the covers and stayed there the whole night. When we awoke the next morning, the lights my mother had put on the railing down the stairs were pulled straight down to the bottom of the stairs, some broken and laying in a single pile. My mother could not explain it. There was nothing missing, nobody had broken in. There did not seem to be any reason this had happened. I still think about this occurrence quite often, but I do not hear the voices anymore. Was I being protected from beyond the grave? I would like to think so. This past summer, my husband and I were tending a baby shower for our new baby to be. We were staying at my parents' house. There are three entities that reside in my parents' house. This incident took place with an older male spirit who is rarely seen but often felt. The feeling you get from him is one of fear. Even as a child, I remember being afraid of this spirit. We were sleeping in the spare room that is in my parents' basement, and I could feel him staring at us from the corner of the room while we were sleeping. I had to lay facing towards the wall because I could not turn my back on him. We got little sleep while we were there. I would just lay in bed and stare into the corner. I was so scared. I thought that after that first night he would leave us alone and go back to his place in the other room, but he did not. We were there for a total of three nights, and he was in the corner each night, just watching us. I am not sure if it was just me in my pregnancy or what about this visit was different from others, but he definitely made himself known. Has anyone else had more experiences while being pregnant? In 1998, I was 14 and was spending the summer with a friend and her family in Idaho. At first, everything was perfect and I was very happy sleeping alone in my own room on the third floor. Five nights into my stay, though, I started to wake up every night. Standing in front of me at the foot of my bed stood a man looking down at me. I couldn't really see anything. All I saw was a bright white outline and it looked like he had a hat on his head. He would just stand there and stare at me. I would just turn around and stare at the wall and hope he would disappear. I never turned around to see if he had gone away. Eventually, I told the father of my friend, who was a pastor about it, and he prayed for me and told me I should open my Bible at night, so I did. The first morning I woke up to find my Bible was closed, which was very weird. Then the second night I took four heavy things and put them on the corners of my Bible. But the next morning, the Bible was closed and had been knocked to the ground. The next night I did it again with bigger and heavier things. But the next morning I woke up and the Bible was torn on the outside. I just left it where it was and moved out of the room. It never happened again. This chilling story happened when I was around 15 years old. My grandmother would spend a lot of time in my room trying to keep it tidy. She was a clean freak. One day I came home and found her staring into my closet. She wasn't moving at all. It was like she was suspended in the middle of cleaning the closet. I asked her if she was okay, but she totally ignored me. My 85-year-old grandmother just continued to stare into the closet. Suddenly she turned her head slowly toward me and gave me the coldest of stares.  A chill ran up and down my spine. Those were not my grandma's eyes, I thought. Then she looked away from me and walked into my closet, closing the door behind her. But when I went to my closet, she wasn't there. She had literally disappeared into thin air, completely gone. I froze for a few seconds. Then I yelled for her and heard her say, I'm down here in the kitchen. Dinner's almost ready. I ran to the kitchen to find her standing there cooking away. Then I asked her if she was here the whole time. Of course I was, dear. Dinner's not going to make itself, she laughed. I mean, she had no idea what had gone on upstairs. What did I find in my bedroom that day? I still have no idea. It was the fall of 1978. I was driving in the northern part of Virginia and I was in a very remote area where the hills rolled gently and there were no homes, barns, fences, riding trails, or another motorist. I was really enjoying the scenery when I drove around a curve and there on the left side of the road, about half a mile ahead, was a horse with a rider. As I drove closer to the horse and rider, I noticed what the man was wearing, a full Confederate uniform with sleeve markings indicating a high rank officer. His uniform consisted of the gray and color pants, jacket, and full belt dressing with sword, a sidearm, black hat, riding gloves, and riding boots. As I drove past slowly, I waved and he tilted his hat. I will never forget the expression on his face. It was one of confusion and interest. Being a Civil War historian, I was actually very surprised and enjoyed the experience. This person and his horse seemed as real as I would to you. I could not understand why someone would be dressed in this fashion in the middle of nowhere. He happened to be dirty enough for me to notice from several feet away. His beard looked wild and his hair was longer than the hat would cover. That is when I decided it must be a ghost. This is the only thing that made sense to me. Once I found a place to make a turn, I drove back and there was no trace of the person. In November 2011, I took my brother Greg to the ER. I was directed to the waiting room while they took an initial look at him. It was very early in the morning, around two or so, and unsurprisingly no one else was in the waiting room, so I had a seat to wait on until I could go back. I had been sitting for a while when a young woman came in and sat down near me. We smiled at each other and I started talking. After a while, a nurse came by, looked over at us, and stopped. Looking at me, the nurse asked if there was something wrong. I answered, No, we are just talking. The nurse looked at me as if I was crazy. Then she said, There's no one in here but you and me. I looked over at the young woman who was still sitting there smiling sadly to see her just slowly vanish. When Leah recounted her alien abduction story in 1993, Leah lived in Prince George's County, Maryland, worked at a bank, and was engaged to be married. She was thin with blue eyes. She was, in her words, average looking and average in every way. Knowing that most people react with scorn and ridicule at the mention of UFOs and extraterrestrial life, she asked that her last name not appear with her story. I used to think I belonged in a mental institution to be honest with you, she says. But I don't think any more than I am crazy. I go to school, I work full time, I pay my bills like anybody else. I think other people think I'm crazy. The subject of abductions by other worldly beings is so far out, so utterly fantastic, that most people even today cannot begin to fathom it. Many will not take it seriously. It is unbelievable, unthinkable. Imagine how Leah felt in 1993. What's really happening? No one knows for sure, but one thing is clear. Something has shattered Leah's and others calm, secure existence on planet earth. Whether the rest of us accept or reject their stories is irrelevant. We cannot assuage their fear. It is palpable. The torment is real. Leah's torment began when she was in the fourth grade. She remembers clearly. She was outside her apartment in Prince George's County, playing with her sisters and other children. It was dusk. They heard a hum or a buzz like a swarm of bees. They saw a disk-like object, wingless, silver-gray, a row of lights along the edge creeped at treetop level over the apartment complex. It hovered above a parking lot between buildings and then drifted away. Leah and her sister ran inside to tell their parents. The girls even drew pictures. My father wanted to call somebody, Leah says, but my mother said, no, we had made it up. But all of us saw it. We talked about it for days at school. Shortly after that, Leah says the recurring nightmare began. She dreamed it on and off for a decade from when she was 10 until about 20. Dreams are only part of her story. When she was 12 or 13, she and her sister, who is two years younger, were staying at their grandparents house in St. Mary's County. They were in separate beds in the same room when a ball of lightning, as Leah describes it, passed through a window and curtain into the room. About the size of a tennis ball, it glided between the beds, bounced off a door, and vanished. A couple seconds later, another lightning ball did the same thing. And then another. Leah says there might have been 20 in all. For a long time afterward, Leah feared she was losing her mind. But then, five years ago, she and a friend were at a mall outside a bookstore. Leah spotted a display of books, the covers of which featured a drawing of a grotesque creature with big, black, almond-shaped eyes. The book was Communion, a true story. The writer, Whitley Stryber's account of his abductions by aliens. Leah pointed at the drawing and screamed, Oh my God! Oh my God! That's them! That's them! They were the creatures in her nightmare. That's when it registered, Leah says. That's when I said, Wait a minute, something's going on here. It was the first she had heard of abductions by space creatures. She read the book, and then a couple of others on the subject. She became convinced that the terrifying events, the nightmares, the night of the lights, perhaps other unexplained events as well, had been abductions. As we are aware, Leah was not alone. Over the past few decades, hundreds of credible abductees have come forward and detailed their ordeals. The phenomena occurs in various forms and intervals, as Leah was about to find out. Strange things continued to happen to her. While visiting friends in the West Virginia mountains, she was floated out of the house, taken aboard a spaceship and handed a baby.  It had huge eyes, she says, but they weren't cold black like those of the adult aliens. They were blue. I don't know why, and I know this sounds strange, Leah says in a voice trembling with emotion, but as soon as I held him in my arms, I knew he was mine. I felt like I was his mother. She rocked him and talked quietly to him, she says, as several aliens watched. Leah hesitates and says almost apologetically, I know this doesn't make any sense. Even though she had trouble sleeping and often felt as if she was being watched, she says she has kind of gotten used to the idea of being abducted. I don't like it, but there's nothing I can do about it as far as I can see, she says. If they were going to hurt me, I think they would have done it a long time ago. She knows what the skeptics say, but she says they don't give people enough credit for knowing the difference between what's actually happened to them and what they might have imagined. Leah says she was never abused as a child. She says she has no reason to make up a story so crazy and bizarre. Why does she think the aliens chose her? I have no idea, she says. I don't know who they are, where they come from, what they're doing, nothing. I just want people to understand that this is real, this is happening, it's out there and you're going to have to accept it sooner or later. And Leah's ordeal continues. I can preface this a little, by saying my home province of Newfoundland has lots of stories about fairies. This took place when I was about 15 or 16 years old. My friends and I wanted to build a place in the woods where we could go smoke cigarettes and drink beer without having to worry about getting caught. It wasn't going to be anything fancy, just somewhere to sit and maybe not get wet. The work was going well. We'd used materials that weren't needed, found and stolen, but my friends ran out of nails. I still had a pocket full. My friends told me that they were going to leave to look for more, leaving me behind alone and trying to get a little more work done. I was by myself for maybe a half hour and I started to feel like I was being watched. I stopped working and looked around. I didn't see anything and all I could hear was the rolling of the waves against the shore. I went back to work and I heard someone, something, call my name. I yelled out for my friends to see if they were on their way back. I got no answer. I sat down to get a drink and I heard someone call my name again. By now, I was starting to feel pretty anxious. I tentatively called out to my friends again and again and I got no answer. Then I heard my name again as if someone was beckoning me to follow. I had heard plenty of stories of Ben getting lost in the woods because they heard a voice calling their name. Being sufficiently creeped out, I decided that I was going to leave to find my friends. Just as I threw my backpack on my shoulder, my friends showed up. I cursed them out for trying to scare me, but they swore they had no idea what I was talking about. And then, all of a sudden, there was a deafening blood-curdling scream. I looked at my friends and saw that they had heard it too. We grabbed our backpacks and ran out of the woods, leaving the tools and materials we gathered behind. We never went back to that spot. And I still shiver at the thought of the scream we heard. One afternoon in 1989, Wesley Allen Dodd walked into the bathroom of a movie theater in Camus, Washington. There, he spotted a five-year-old boy. A few moments later, Dodd grabbed him and started moving towards the door. As Dodd walked out of the theater with the boy in his arms, the child started crying. The theater employees immediately became suspicious when the boy started fighting to get out of Dodd's grasp. When the boy began screaming for help, they knew that they were witnessing an abduction and ran after Dodd. Realizing that he was not going to get away with the abduction, Dodd released the boy just outside the theater and ran to his car. Meanwhile, the employees told the child's mother and her boyfriend, William Graves, that her son had almost been abducted. Graves immediately asked for a description of Dodd's car and took off on foot after him. Luckily, he found the car had broken down just a few blocks from the theater. Pretending to offer help, Graves approached Dodd and put him in a head luck. Graves then physically hauled Dodd back to the theater where other witnesses bound Dodd's arms with a belt as they waited for the police to arrive. Once in police custody, Dodd started to talk. The incident in the movie theater wasn't the first abduction. There had been many others, and not all the victims had been as lucky as the boy in the movie theater. After three days of questioning, Dodd confessed to having murdered three children. Armed with a search warrant, police searched Dodd's room in the town of Vancouver, Washington. Inside, they found photographs of one of the murdered children, Lee Isley and the boy's underwear. Nearby was a homemade torture rack and a diary containing a meticulous record of the murder. With this evidence, the detectives could close the book on at least three murders, but the question remained, who was Wesley Allen Dodd? Wesley Allen Dodd grew up in Washington in a somewhat troubled home. Dodd was a shy child, but he also seemed to have a dark sexual compulsion to expose himself to other children, something he began doing at just 13 years old. But exposing himself wasn't enough, and Dodd began molesting his younger cousins and neighborhood kids. At 15, Dodd was arrested for one of those molestations. Due to his youth, though, the police declined to pursue charges and recommended he get counseling instead. Dodd continued molesting children for the next several years. In 1981, he joined the Navy. He was discharged after his superiors discovered he was molesting children on the base. This time, he served only 19 days in jail and was ordered to undergo counseling again. The counseling had no effect on Dodd's compulsion to harm children, and he fell into a routine of molesting children, being caught and being released with a slap on the wrist. But his sexual desires continued to grow darker over the years. Dodd wrote in his diary about a desire to not just molest children, but to murder them. Darker still, he began writing about the possibility of performing medical experiments on his victims to turn them into zombies he could victimize or will. In September 1989, Dodd lured Cole and William near 11 and 10 respectively to a wooded area. There, he forced them to undress and tied the boys to a tree. He then began molesting them. When he finished, he stabbed the boys repeatedly and fled the area. Both boys died of their wounds soon after. A month later, Dodd lured four-year-old Lee Isley to his apartment. He kept Isley overnight molesting him while taking photographs. He wanted to wait to kill Isley so that the body would be fresh enough to perform experiments on. In the morning, Dodd strangled Isley and hung his body in the closet before leaving for work. When he returned, he took the body down and disposed of it in trash bags, keeping the boys' underwear. The body was soon discovered, sparking a manhunt for the killer. Dodd, meanwhile, stayed in his apartment, making plans for future murders and constructing a rack on which to torture his next victim. This was the planned fate of the boy at the movie theater two weeks later. Fortunately, he was apprehended before he could claim another life. In court, Wesley Allen Dodd refused to speak in his own defense, claiming it was pointless. He requested, instead, that he be executed by hanging the same way his last victim died. He stated that he hoped that it would bring peace to his victims' families. Dodd seems to have understood that the system had failed to stop him too many times before. He was confident that if he were to be released, he would kill again. It is hard to say how sincere Dodd's remorse was, but he clearly wanted to be executed. Dodd actively resisted any attempt to appeal his execution. I must be executed before I have an opportunity to escape or kill someone else, he said.  In the end, Dodd got his wish. He was executed by hanging in 1993, the first judicial hanging in the US since 1965. The technique was now so unfamiliar that the executioners had to use an army manual from the 1880s as a guide. Dodd's last words were a statement that he had found God, and other child molesters could change by doing the same. Wesley Allen Dodd stated a desire to help stop people like him from offending. And in a way, he did. Shortly after Dodd's crimes came to light, Washington passed some of the toughest laws in the nation against sex offenders. One can only hope that in some way, the tragic fate of Dodd's victims helped save the lives of other children. When Weird Darkness returns, the Anatomy Act of 1832 allowed doctors, anatomy lecturers and medical students greater access to cadavers and allowed for the legal donation of bodies to medical science. But the act would never have come to be had it not been for a series of murders committed in order to sell the corpses. And on April 22, 1920, seven members of the Wolf family were buried. Their murders were the start of a bizarre and bloody series of events that still reverberate in the Turtle Lake, North Dakota area today. But first, Pauline Picard's family thought their missing daughter had come back home. But then, a body was discovered. That story is up next. The song White Christmas used to be one of my favorite holiday tunes, until the year of the ice storm. One December, Robin and I heard a loud crash outside. Not only did the ice cause a large tree to fall onto our house, but it ripped out the power lines. We were suddenly in sub-freezing temperatures with Jack Frost nipping at our noses thanks to zero heat or electricity. Talk about baby, it's cold outside. If this happened today, I'd be hooking up my Patriot power generator 2000X. This solar-powered monster can power your lights, TV, medical equipment like my CPAP machine, even keep your refrigerator running, and possibly root all snows, although I can't vouch for that last one. Plus, it's expandable and comes with a free solar panel, so you can begin using it immediately. And because it's solar and portable, you can use it indoors, without having to worry about deadly carbon monoxide fumes, and you don't have to spend money on gasoline to power it, because solar power is free. That's something even Ebenezer Scrooge could smile at. WarPatriots.com has a ton of great gift ideas, and they're always offering special deals, and we've set up a special page for weirdos just for that purpose. Visit WarPatriots.com slash weird. That's the number for Patriots.com slash weird. Just like the holidays, though, these deals never last long, so you'll want to check this daily to see what the latest special deals are. That's WarPatriots.com slash weird. The terror of a parent whose child has vanished is hard to imagine. Is it possible that parents in that situation could convince themselves of anything to avoid the horror of the truth? That may be the only explanation for the strange disappearance of Pauline Picard. Pauline was only two years old when she disappeared from her family's farmhouse near the rocky end of Brittany in France in 1922. Volunteers scoured the countryside to no avail. Then two weeks later, when hope was nearly lost, word came from the town of Cherbourg 250 miles away that a little girl had been found wandering alone. The Picards raced to Cherbourg. They recognized their daughter immediately and embraced her. But oddly, the little girl did not seem to recognize her parents. What's more, she did not respond when spoken to in Breton, the regional dialect spoken by the Picards at home. And there was no explanation of how a toddler had managed to travel 250 miles. But neighbors back in Brittany accepted the girl as Pauline, as did the police officer who accompanied her from Cherbourg. Her strange behavior was put down to trauma. Questions were pushed aside and life returned to normal. But then there was a gruesome discovery. The badly decomposed body of a little girl was found not far from the Picard farm. The area had been thoroughly searched, so it appeared someone had put it there recently. The body was naked and the head was severed. The girl's clothes were folded neatly near the body. They were the clothes Pauline had been wearing when she disappeared. Newspapers from around the world wrote about the dark twist, including the New York Times. Adding to the mystery, local reports claimed the skull discovered with the body was not that of a little girl at all, but a grown man. The Picards accepted the grisly discovery as proof that their biological daughter was dead. A month later, the little girl who had lived with them was sent to an orphanage. The Picards never learned what happened to their daughter, the police never found her killer, and the fate of the mysterious little girl found wandering in Cherbourg is lost to history. In contrast to the increase in numbers of executions in the wake of the bloody code, the Judgment of Death Act 1823 saw the number of crimes punishable by death in Britain drop dramatically. Good news in theory, but since medical and anatomical schools were only legally allowed to dissect the bodies or cadavers of those who had been condemned to death, this led to an extreme shortage of dead bodies available. However, the financial compensation offered by medical schools meant that some unscrupulous types soon found a way around this shortage of bodies, leading to a rash of grave robbing by those known as resurrectionists. Instances of grave robbing became so commonplace that relatives were known to watch over the recently dug graves of their dearly departed and watchtowers were installed in cemeteries across the land. The fresher the body, the more money it was worth. Thus, it didn't take long before grave robbing graduated to anatomy of murder, murder committed with the sole intention of providing the remains for medical research and attracting a monetary reward. The most infamous were the Burke and Hare Murders in Edinburgh, which occurred between 1827 and 1828. William Burke and William Hare both originated from the province of Ulster in the north of Ireland and moved to Scotland to work on the Union Canal. Burke having abandoned a wife and two children back in Ireland. The pair met and became close friends when Burke moved with his mistress Helen McDougal to lodgings in Tanners Close in the west port area of Edinburgh. Hare lived on the same street and was running a boarding house there with Margaret Laird, a widower with whom he lived as man and wife and who was also known as Margaret Hare, even though they were not legally married. The pair's first foray into the world of medical science happened in December 1827, when one of Hare's tenants, an elderly army pensioner by the name of Old Donald, died of natural causes whilst still owing £4 in rent. To cover the man's outstanding debt, the pair weighed his coffin down with tanning bark prior to his funeral and took his body to the medical school at Edinburgh University where they were swiftly pointed in the direction of Professor Robert Knox, a popular anatomy lecturer. Knox paid the duo £7 and £10 shillings for Donald's body. Encouraged by the ease with which they had made this money, the pair struck again in early 1828 when another tenant named Joseph became ill.  This became their favourite method of execution as it left the body unmarked and undamaged for the students who were later to dissect the cadavers. In the aftermath of their killing spree, the practice became known as Birking. In the absence of any further ill tenants, the pair decided to entice victims to the lodging house, preying on Edinburgh's poorest communities who were less likely to be missed or recognized. In total, Burke and Hare are said to have murdered at least 16 people for between £7-10 apiece, although the real total is likely to be a lot higher. A local prostitute, Janet Brown, was lucky to escape with her life when she and a friend, Mary Patterson, were invited to stay by Burke. Having excused herself earlier in the evening, Janet returned to find her friend missing and was told Mary and Burke had stepped out. Having waited for her friend to return, Janet eventually decided to leave, having no idea that Mary was actually lying dead in the next room, ready to be taken to Knox and that she herself was the next likely victim. Burke and Hare soon became greedy and no one was safe. An elderly grandmother was killed with an overdose of painkillers and Hare murdered her blind young grandson by breaking the boy's back across his knee. Even a relative of Helens and MacDougall was unhesitatingly dispatched. However, with greed came carelessness. A number of Knox's students were said to have recognized Mary and two other prostitutes murdered by the pair, Elizabeth Halden and her daughter who made the unfortunate mistake of calling at the lodging house to inquire after her missing mother. The gossip was exacerbated when the pair brought in a handicapped children's entertainer by the name of James Wilson, who was well known in the city as Daft Jamie. Knox was said to strongly deny the identity of the body, but swiftly removed his head and deformed foot during the dissection. Following an argument between Burke and Hare, which was caused by Burke's suspicion that Hare and Margaret were cutting himself and Helen out of deals with Knox, Burke and Helen began to take in their own lodgers. On Halloween 1828, Burke and Hare's last victim, Marjorie Campbell Dosharty, was invited to stay with Burke and Helen on the pretense that she was a distant relation of Burke's mother. Burke's other lodgers, a couple called James and Anne Gray, were invited to stay temporarily at Hare's boarding house that evening so the murder could take place. On their return to Burke's lodging the following day, the Grays were told that Marjorie had been asked to leave because she had been flirtatious with Burke. The couple became suspicious when they were not allowed to enter the spare room where they had left their belongings and when left alone they discovered Marjorie's dead body hidden under the bed. The couple challenged Helen over their discovery and she offered them a bribe of $10 a week if they would keep the discovery to themselves. The Grays refused and reported the murder to the police. However, in the meantime, word must have reached Burke and Hare as by the time the police arrived at the premises Marjorie's body had been removed and taken to Knox. Burke and Helen and later Hare and Margaret were all arrested and gave conflicting accounts of what had taken place with Burke and Hare each blaming each other. The police investigation soon led them to Knox and James Gray identified the body found in his lecture hall as Marjorie. Having read about the murder in a local newspaper, Janet Brown later identified clothes found at Hare's lodging house as belonging to her missing friend, Mary Patterson. However, the police had little hard evidence to prove the crimes had been committed and eventually the Lord advocate Sir William Ray offered Hare immunity in return for testifying against Burke and Helen, which he was more than happy to do. The trial began on Christmas Eve, 1828 and early the following day Burke and Helen were both charged with Marjorie Dosharty's murder. Burke was also charged with the murder of Mary Patterson and James Wilson. While Helen's complicity in Marjorie's murder was deemed not proven under Scottish law and she was set free, Burke was sentenced to death by hanging. William Burke was hanged at Lawn Market in front of a boisterous cheering crowd of over 25,000 on January 28, 1829 and fittingly perhaps, after being put on public display, his body was donated to medical science. A number of anatomy students took ghoulish souvenirs of his skin, even using it to bind books and card holders. Burke's skeleton is still on display at Surgeon's Hall in Edinburgh next to his death mask and the life mask of Hare's face. Despite his obvious involvement in the murders, his accomplice, Hare, was released in February 1829 and escaped across the border in New England. No one knows definitively what happened to Hare, but it has been rumored that he was thrown into a lime quarry by an angry mob and lived out his days as a blind beggar on the streets of London. Both Helen and Margaret also fled Edinburgh with Helen said to have emigrated to Australia and Margaret to Ireland. And despite mass public outrage, Knox was also cleared of his involvement in the murders, as Burke claimed he had no idea where the bodies had come from. His reputation and ruins, Knox moved to London to try and salvage a career in medicine. The Burke and Hare murders, followed swiftly afterwards by the 1831 murders, committed by the London Burkeers and Bethnal Green, led to the Anatomy Act 1832, which allowed doctors, anatomy lecturers and medical students greater access to cadavers and allowed for the legal donation of bodies to medical science, effectively calling an end to the illegal body snatcher trade. On April 22, 1920, seven members of the Wolf family were buried. Their murders were the start of a bizarre and bloody series of events that still reverberate in the Turtle Lake, North Dakota area today. That story when Weird Darkness returns. Nothing goes better with chocolate than vanilla, and nothing goes better with the darkness than vampires, so we have combined all of them into a new blend of weird dark roast coffee called Very Vampilla.  So good, you'll want to sink your fangs into the fresh roasted bag itself. Weird dark roast Very Vampilla, the only thing at stake, sorry, not sorry, bad pun, is your diss satisfaction with your old coffee. Sip it while the sun is down if you're one of the undead, or when the sun is up if you just feel dead and need a bit of a boost. Get your Weird Dark Roast Very Vampilla at WeirdDarkness.com slash coffee. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash coffee. On April 22, 1920, seven members of the Wolf family, along with their stable boy, were buried in a windswept cemetery in Turtle Lake, North Dakota. The entire family, except for its youngest member, an eight-month-old daughter named Emma, had been slaughtered by an unknown assassin. The unlucky stable boy, Jacob Hofer, had been at the wrong place at the wrong time. The murders were the start of a bizarre and bloody series of events that still reverberate in the region today. Three weeks after the murders, a neighbor named Henry Layer confessed to the crime, but questions remain as to whether or not he actually killed the Wolfs. Layer's confession to the police was both bizarre and terrifying. He said that he had gone to the Wolf farm to speak to Jacob Wolf about one of his dogs that was attacked by Layer's cows. Wolf became very hostile, ordered him off the property and loaded his shotgun.  Jacob began to run and Layer, finding the shotgun in his hands and two people dead, shot Jacob in the back and killed him. At the sound of the shots, daughters Maria, nine, and Edna, seven, ran into the barn. Layer followed them there and killed them. He then returned to the house and found the remaining Wolf children, Bertha, twelve, Lydia, five, and Martha, three, hiding in terror. He shot and killed the older girls and then bludgeoned Martha to death with a hatchet. He hid the bodies of the children that he killed in the house by dragging them down to the cellar. The others were stashed away in the barn and sloppily covered with straw and dirt. Then, seemingly without a care in the world, Layer returned to work on his farm. The bodies were discovered two days later. A neighbor noticed that the Wolf's laundry was still hanging on the line to dry and went over to check on the family. He discovered the gruesome scene and found poor baby Emma still alive in her crib, but weak from cold and hunger. The crime would become North Dakota's most horrific mass murder. More than 2,500 people attended the funeral for the family and their stable boy, even though Turtle Lake's population at the time was only 395, minus the eight lost souls. Henry Layer's strange behavior began at the funeral. He opened all eight of the caskets and looked at the faces and confessed to the murders. He claimed the only reason he didn't kill Emma was because he didn't know that she was there. He was sentenced to spend his life in prison and he died behind bars in 1925. But was Layer's confession the truth? Did he really kill the Wolf family as he claimed? Once in prison, Layer's story changed. He now said that he was innocent and that his bizarre behavior was merely caused by the terrible grief that he felt over his neighbor's deaths. The police had coerced his confession, he said, beaten him into signing a statement. He often wept, claiming to be innocent and would cry, Oh my children, my children. Many believed his claims of innocence and questions are still asked about the Wolf murders today, leading a number of historians to believe that the murders were never solved. The Wolf family was buried in the Turtle Lake cemetery. There was one large tombstone on their plot that reads in German, the Murdered Family. Every member of that tragic family is buried beneath that ground except for one. The orphaned Emma was raised by her aunt and uncle and went on to live a long life, dying at the age of 84 in 2003. She never forgot how lucky she had been on that cold day in April 1920 when she was permanently separated from a family that she was never able to know. Thanks for listening! If you like the show, please share it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters or unsolved mysteries like you do. And please, leave a rating and review of the show in the podcast app you listen from. You can email me anytime with your questions or comments at Darren at WeirdDarkness.com. Darren is D-A-R-R-E-N. WeirdDarkness.com is also where you can find all of my social media, listen to audiobooks that I've narrated, shop the Weird Darkness store, sign up for monthly contests, find other podcasts that I host, and find the Hope in the Darkness page if you or someone you know is struggling with depression or dark thoughts. Also on the website, if you have a true paranormal or creepy tale to tell, you can click on Tell Your Story. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find source links to most of the stories in this episode in the show notes. Weird Darkness is a production and trademark of Marlar House Productions, copyright Weird Darkness 2022. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. Luke 6, verse 35. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great and you will be children of the most high because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. And a final thought, it's great to be happy, but it's even better to bring happiness to others. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.


This book really helped me look at aging and dying in a new light. So in that way, I would really, really recommend this for people who, if you're going through a death in the family and it's really shocking you and you're thinking about what is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of death? This is a very good book to help you through that. And also, if you're somebody who's going through your own aging process and it's difficult for you to digest or look at it positively, this book will also help you with that as well. Hi guys, this is Linda from Brain Education TV. If this is your first time, welcome. Make sure you like this video, subscribe to our channel and click the bell for notifications of each new episode. In this video, I'm going to be talking about longevity. Have you thought about living to 120 years old? If you've been following our channel and if you follow the works of Ilchili, the founder of Brain Education, this idea is not new to you. But those of you who are new to this channel have not been really familiar with Ilchili's teachings. Have you ever thought about your life right now living to be 120 years old? Some people that idea might be very exciting, while for other people that thought might be so, so dreadful. So which one of these are you? I know when I first thought about this idea, me living to 120 years old, that sounds like a very, very long time. And I also remember thinking, I don't think that's possible. And then I dug a little deeper and I found out that actually human beings, our bodies were designed to live up to 120 years old, depending on how well we take care of ourselves. So to tackle this idea of longevity, Ilchili published this book, I've decided to live 120 years in 2017. The idea of writing this book came to him when he himself witnessed the process of aging in his own body. And also after witnessing the death of his beloved father, whom he was very close with, he really started to question this idea of aging and also dying. And he thought, aging and death are inevitable components of our life. So if there are things that cannot be avoided, then why not try to age well and die well? So when this book first came out in 2017 and this idea of living to 120 years first came out, it was a radical, radical thought. Something that most people have never even thought of before, including myself. But since its release, this thought-provoking book has been loved by readers around the world and has been an absolute must-read, iconic book about longevity and healthy aging. And to help more people get access to the valuable information in this book, the book has been translated into 11 languages so far and the 12th language is about to be released very soon. You can read the I've Decided to Live 120 Years book by Ilchili in English, Italian, Russian, Lithuanian, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Danish, Spanish, Hindi and Telugu. I would say my favorite part about the 120 book is that it really challenges you to rethink what life really means. Because normal people wouldn't think that we could live up to 120 years, but based on scientific research, we can. And actually now they're finding out there's so much advancement in technology and medicine that human beings can actually live up to 150 years as our maximum potential. And when this book first came out, that idea seemed so radical and crazy, but now it doesn't seem that far-reaching anymore. So in this book, Ilchili details different exercises and ideas that you can do and adapt into your life to create a healthy lifestyle physically, emotionally and mentally to maximize the chance of us living to our fullest and greatest potential. And a big part of living that long-fulfilling life is shifting our value, our core value, from seeking only money and success and material goods and transforming that to seeking a spiritual life that is based on growing your soul, giving back to the community and doing things that enrich you from within. So this book really helped me look at aging and dying in a new light. So in that way, I would really, really recommend this for people who if you're going through a death in the family and it's really shocking you and you're thinking about what is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of death? This is a very good book to help you through that. And also if you're somebody who's going through your own aging process and it's difficult for you to digest or look at it positively, this book will also help you with that as well. So the contents of this book have been so transformational and so great that they've actually been turned into retreat programs and workshops so that people can experience, learn about, and adapt a healthy lifestyle for 120 years. So if you're also very curious and interested about learning the contents about aging and dying well, check out this book on Amazon. I'll drop a link in the description below how you can get your own copy as well. From this book, you can develop new insights and thoughts about how to approach the later half of your life to be more fulfilling, rewarding, healthy, and happy. I hope all of you watching this video have a chance to read this book. I'll see you next time. Bye.


Next to the stage, we'll be hearing from Jed Emerson and Laura Tyson in a fireside chat. Jed, a senior fellow at Impact Assets, a non-profit financial services firm, is an internationally recognized author and thought leader in the field of impact investing. Laura Tyson comes from a different background, an American economist and former chair of the U.S. President's Council of Economic Advisors during the Clinton administration. She also served as director of National Economic Council, and is currently a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. The pair actually came together at Haas in 1998 where Tyson was the dean and hired Emerson to teach students and have since remained in dialogue. Today we get to see them do just that. Both of these folks have been doing the work long enough to see what they say is an optimistic trend towards a more sustainable economy. They recognize that they must start by looking at themselves, their students, and the future we're working to build. They believe this starts with dialogue and are here to do exactly that. Please welcome to the stage Jed Emerson and Laura Tyson. So shall we sit here, here and here? Good morning. Good morning, good morning. We'll try to make this feel like it's close and intimate because it isn't really close and intimate. And I know Jed very much wants to have a dialogue that he feels it's very important for us to actually explore ourselves in terms of the purposes we have for being involved with social capital. So let me just emphasize that Jed is one of the creators of the space we now call social capital. It didn't have that name. It didn't have the name Impact Investing. It started out a little bit. The name I remember is Triple Bottom Line. I met Jed in the late 1990s. There were a large number of students at Berkeley, not surprisingly, interested in business and social responsibility. And I tried to find people who could come in and teach and do research and help those students progress. And I found Jed, and that was one of the great contributions of my time as dean at Haas. So we work together. We have both been part of a dramatic growth in Impact Investing, even the term Impact Investing, which is a relatively new term, as I'm sure all of you know. But we've been together on and off 20 years. 20 years we've seen an explosion of investing for Impact, whether it is through ESG funds or it's through private equity funds or it's through venture capital funds, a lot of different kinds of doing it. So you might say, gee, this is terrifically good news. And you might also say that another piece of good news is whereas when Jed and I started, when Jen started, there was a lot of notion of whether there were trade-offs between financial returns and social returns. There's been a whole bunch of evidence now to suggest that those trade-offs don't exist. And that evidence grows over time. Interestingly enough, investors don't quite necessarily believe that. For example, millennials, something in a recent survey, 60% of millennials are already making investment with an impacted mind. 59% of those investors say, I'm trading off financial returns for social returns. I'm willing to do it. And mostly they're wrong, mostly they're wrong. So I just want to point that out because those are all good news things. But Jed has written a book where he wants us to think hard about the current state of affairs. He expresses concern. He expresses frustration. He expresses disappointment. He said, what's happened to the field that he helped create is that everybody's working on tools and measurements and metrics, and they've gotten away from purpose. So our conversation is going to be largely about the book and about purpose. And I thought I would start with just the particular notion of capital. So capital is something that Jed in the book refers to as resistance. He refers to as redistributive justice. He refers to as a social construct. And I want to start with just help us think through what you mean and how you think about capital. You know what economists think. Capital means of production. There's something called social capital, which is a bunch of norms. There's financial capital. What's your constructive capital? I think that the constructive capital is really grounded in this idea that we decide what capital is and how we want to think about it, how we want to structure it, how we want to deploy it, how we want to understand its performance. And I think part of the challenge and the conversation is that for most of us, we largely accept the definition of capital that's given to us by Wall Street that is framed by traditional economics that basically says capital is driven by these set of econometrics and we can't understand qualitative aspects of capital. Whereas I think that in truth, every generation has moved through its own understanding of the nature of capital, the purpose of capital, the construct of capital, and that that's really what we need to regain a conversation around in our community and not to accept what is given to us as the terms of capital, but rather to say these terms are really the end product of a whole host of conversations and deliberations and discussions that primarily economists and financiers have had and that they're asking us to embrace and adopt and in fact we have the opportunity before us to look at our understanding of capital within the context of history, within the framework of cultural understandings and again that social construct that we can come together and define what for us is capital and how we want to deploy it, how we view its value, how we want to use it to actually create the world that we want to be in today. So we were both listening to the presentation just before and what you've just said right away links me to the discussion of what is the source of capital because again what history or might say is that what happens is we generate something called a surplus. There is the value of what is produced and then there is the surplus beyond what is produced. Somebody because of the structures of the system owns that surplus. They have the right to own that surplus. They save out of that surplus and they create the financial wealth which becomes the capital. So our definition of capital is embedded in the structure. Do you agree? I think broadly speaking that's true but I would also say that how we understand that surplus and how we understand the rights to capital shifts based on the cultural context. So for example when we think about how we used to value publicly traded companies 50 years ago when most of those companies owned factories, made things, had employees versus how we value companies today when intangible assets, intellectual property, contract employees, the whole structure is fundamentally different and we've come to this place by choice and by decision that some people have made that others of us have to basically be responsible for cleaning up after. So I think that the opportunity we have is to really not only look at our understanding of the purpose of capital today but to step back and understand what has brought us to this place. The various traditions, both wisdom traditions and cultural traditions that basically have brought us here because that's how we can really think differently about capital and the purpose of capital. It is not simply that our generation because we're the latest is the smartest, the best, I know we're the best looking but I think that we need to have conversations that are informed by the wisdom of generations that have come before that have grappled with exactly these same issues because I think that the question of purpose and meaning and value is not something that we ourselves are grappling with. This to my mind is the central kind of challenge of humanity and for us to enter into our conversation today with a largely ahistorical perspective of those issues and ideas and notions, I would argue we actually know how to think about this and we could together in dialogue with each other create and discover new possibilities for the purpose of capital that are consistent with the challenges that we're facing today and we're not really doing that. One of my biggest frustrations with the state of conversation with an impact investing is that everybody has moved to positions of pitch. Everybody has a killer app, they've got the killer fund, they have the best answer and we end up in these situations understanding ourselves from each other's answers that we're trying to convince each other of as opposed to saying and really understanding that truth with a capital T, we all have our own kind of small T truth but truth with a capital T is what we discover in our interactions together and that this is how we advance the deeper meaning of purpose and meaning and value is in collaboration with each other and not simply adopting for ourselves a posture that says I have the answer and my job is to convince you of my righteousness because we're just not going to get there and I think this is part of my frustration with the current state of play. So let's think about this. I mentioned millennials so we certainly know and I'm at an educational institution so I feel this in a real way and also I have a son who's a millennial so basically there really is I think the millennial generation at least in the US really thinks very seriously about I want impact, I question the structure in which I am functioning can I make a difference so what happens here so that's a positive I think a lot of them will go out and try to create things to sell their ideas that's what they'll do I'm going to start a sustainable firm so they are out pitching finding apps and doing the other things we're all part of the structure but isn't that that desire while you're in the structure to use the structure to change it don't you have some sense that that's happening? Well I think that's largely what has brought us where we are today a lot of folks, entrepreneurs saw opportunities understood challenges in different ways and have moved to advance them what I think most concerned about is less that process of development within our community than what has happened with the entry of the large financial institutions, the large firms that come into the space and say we're the experts we know finance, we know how to make money, this impact thing we'll just work that out along the way and where they basically view our community and this process of discovery that we've all been a part of for 20 or 30 years as basically a market opportunity an opportunity for their firms to aggregate more capital to charge more fees to come in and as was said earlier not challenge the fundamentals of modern financial capitalism but rather simply use those with a modified kind of impact patina to make us all feel better about doing well and good and part of what I argue in the book is that you to my mind cannot be an impact investor and not have a type of a critique of modern financial capitalism than in fact a part of being an impact investor, the difference between traditional investing and impact investing is you're trying to impact something and what you're trying to impact is not like our pursuit of social justice it's the fact that we operate within an economic order that is founded upon injustice it's founded upon extraction it's founded upon the idea that the asset owner if you believe in that concept at all basically has a right that is dominant to that of stakeholders and so I think what I'm trying to say in this research is basically many many generations of communities have decided to take a different approach to our understanding of meaning and purpose of capital and we can do that too and the fact that we are operating within a set of constructs that have been created in the last two to four hundred years does not mean that the experience of humanity over the last 15,000 years is irrelevant to our current life and situation and all I'm saying I'm not even like the book doesn't talk about solutions it doesn't give you five points to purpose there's no call to action what I'm saying is can we just stop for a minute and listen to the history that we carry into this current conversation and the knowledge and the wisdom and experience that generations before us have developed so I think the call to action is to think and to read and to read history and to read philosophy and to read justice and to read things that are much of the field out there doing this kind of thing they're not reading it I mean they're in the fray basically saying what kind of asset will appeal to my investors now I will say the good news here is maybe if we make sure the investors really know this stuff that they will then put pressure look the black rocks of the world the black stones of the world because there is pressure coming from the investors to the companies to them to behave more sustainably so there's a lot of responsibility of the investors to read your book and then to actually make those messages clear to the firms that are actually trying to figure out ways to satisfy the investors for meaningful impact investments so can I just add one thing so all of that is true and when we do all that and we have our impact portfolios and we're fully deployed and we're monitoring our investments I think what we're finding is people are still looking at each other and saying that's it this is what we're supposed to do and what I'm trying to say is actually in order to be successful as an impact investor we often think about everything in terms of our self relative to the returns that I want the kind of themes I want to be active in how I define impact and in fact there's a whole different way that we could position ourselves relative to the other if you will that could open ourselves to becoming as transformed by impact as those we seek to have an impact upon more of a question of moving from this idea of kind of ignorant impact broad impact to deep and ultimately mutual impact where you become open to the process of transformation and change as much as you're asking others to be involved in that process as well and I think although you would not say it's how to the book has a very nice continuum of impact from what you'd call kind of cheap Pantena impact all the way to broad mutual impact and the broad mutual impact is the investment is changing you as well as the other, whatever the other is so I think that's a nice important part of the book so let me go to the issue of capital as resistance and a form of restorative justice because I think it's important to talk about justice then, what is justice you know there is the observation that justice is in the eyes of the beholder there are different views of justice so a very important book historically speaking by Michael Sandell at Harvard says that there are three kinds of ways of lenses of looking at justice there's utilitarianism justice is justice exists when we serve the largest number of people possible with material well being that's justice justice is a kind of sense of what is virtuous justice kind of as related to moral norms or religious norms or justice is primarily about liberty and by the way it's my asset it's my wealth I'm going to decide what to do with it thank you very much and so I wonder what do you think about justice what do you mean by justice right well in the book we use a term that I think more and more folks are using and looking to actually bring into practice and that is the concept of restorative justice I think that when we talk about justice it doesn't really work if this is the inequity and then you say okay we're going to treat everybody evenly from here out that doesn't really do it you need to basically rebalance and reengage and restorative justice speaks to the idea that the process of restoration cannot be something that I simply do to you but it's something that we together kind of create in advance as we move into this other situation of relationship that we have to challenge and change the relationships of power of hierarchy of ownership the whole concept of ownership needs to be revisited and that it is through that again this is why the concept of dialogue and engagement and connectivity is critical to our ability to be successful much less to have significance because it's out of that process that we restore humanity to each other and that it's out of that process of humanizing each other and getting out of this idea of separation that your success comes somehow at the cost of my success but in fact we together can become more whole and more realized and more healed by engaging in this restorative process of inquiry okay so by that definition you kind of started out with a sense of inequity and so right away what it raises is what is a just distribution because justice is about the distribution that's what it's about and your definition of just may not be the same as mine so I go again to the liberty view of justice if I am truly a libertarian type and there are lots of them down in Silicon Valley who would say look I basically I worked hard for this the company did really well I made hundreds of millions of dollars that is a just outcome and if I feel a little bit bad about people that opportunity maybe I'll invest in helping to create training for them to get that opportunity that might be my response or I might create a universal basic income and give you a little bit of my income but the notion of what is equitable in terms of distribution is key to what you're talking about it seems to me well part of it is the equity around distribution and part of it is also the equity of participation and engagement and when I talk about in part the purpose of capital is to act as a fuel for freedom for the individual to pursue their actualization of self in the context of community and planet and what's missing from the conversations today in terms of can you do well and do good how do we think about this the previous speakers comment that we need to understand how the government and that that will be the solution I think kind of forgets that's kind of how we got here to begin with it's certainly interactive I used to be a community street social worker and part of why I ended up moving into social enterprise and this part of the conversation was out of a frustration with how the governmental system was functioning in the 80s and how we were able to do our goal, our vision the opportunities before us and use capital as a fuel to enable us to do that but we will not be successful if we view again our success as separate from each other that we cannot to be the victor standing on a charred planet because the earth is something somebody else is responsible for is simply not an acceptable outcome that to reach nirvana you have to ensure that all of your colleagues, partners and other sentient beings have reached nirvana and that you cannot be liberated if anybody else is oppressed and so this is kind of where I think we need just to fundamentally reframe our understanding of what this conversation is about and this is why a lot of the book kind of looks at various ideas traditions and understandings that we have together through an impact lens I won't pursue as an economist what I would pursue related to that is somewhere Jed says strongly there is no such thing as an externality now the problem with externality as a concept for what you're talking about is that is definitely between me and the other I'm doing something, I'm affecting the other somebody like the government has to come in and mitigate that effect and you're saying two things, the government isn't doing it and two, that's the wrong way to think about it, I need to always be thinking about my effect on others so how does this work from an economist perspective though because I totally get that and that thinking in the large part is what's kind of brought us to this place where we need to have a different way to understand how to think about economics as you were saying distribution I don't know if it's brought us to this place I think you also said and I agree with this, part of what's happened here when you were a street organizer is that for a considerable period of time after World War II the advanced industrial economies actually moved to actually put in a number of policies, social welfare policies to deal with inequities pro-education, pro-health policies, that wasn't true in the US but things to say we understand their externalities my health affects your health my education affects your education my lack of income and poverty both reflects your lack of income and poverty but also affects your quality of life and my quality of life the government was the way to try to handle this in the absence of stepping back of government from doing that basically we've had more nonprofits, more social enterprises more for-profits social enterprises because we've had to create a civic reaction to an absence of solving that problem that's how I would think about it and so I know you sit on a few boards within the financial services industry as you all are thinking about these opportunities and how to engage and respond to on the one hand customer demand but also set the terms of the new capital if you will are you having these kind of discussions in those contexts and what needs to happen to shift the understanding of purpose at the fiduciary level so gradually what is happening subject to different kinds of fiduciary rules in different societies is more and a growth in the interest of what you might call alternative investments and these oftentimes show up on lists of alternative investments they're not just financially returns investments again what I think is happening and when I'm optimistic about it what I say is it's the investors themselves that are coming to the firms and saying you have to do this okay they're saying to the big corporates of the world you have to pay attention to climate you have to pay attention to gender diversity you have to pay attention to lack of discrimination if you don't we will you will show up in the press or on some ranking is having a really bad ranking and then investors will say I will I won't invest in you so then the firms say to the financial firms that serve them hey we've got to actually have our financial instruments our bonds at our stocks and the other our private equity funds we have to have them focused on what we are trying to do to meet investor demand so I my optimism is investors have to drive this okay they the firms are going to respond and they are responding but it's not going to come from them you know they're so what's happened over the years is that there has been I think the growth of other stakeholder voices so that the voice the primacy of the shareholder has been certainly curtailed by the growth of stakeholder interest so when Larry thinks says basically that you have to have a social purpose as well as financial returns that's a pretty big statement to the companies whose equities he's holding or trading for them right and as example of that in in the US in the late 1800s fiduciaries within the state of New York were not allowed to invest in anything other than bonds issued by the state of New York and it was in fact the fiduciaries who push back on the regulators and said wait a minute we have a broader responsibility we have broader opportunities so they were the ones who shifted and I think what I'm trying to say in the book is that each of us as individuals we are the market and we need to be super clear around this question of purpose and meaning because that is the foundation of the instruments the strategies and the approaches that we then bring to the management of our wealth so the investors have to do some history cultural philosophical Buddhist reading now I'm sorry we're going to run out of time but one really important question us versus the other we versus them I am very concerned right now that the world seem to be moving much more towards a kind of tribalism we heard our president last night say nationalism that you care about your group there's a lot of in-group loyalty but there's a lot of not us so how do you really talk about the importance of connecting at a moment in time when we seem to be moving in the opposite direction on that one so what shall we do about that well I mean I think that the opportunity we have this is a very scary point in time for a lot of us and the opportunity we have as individuals is not to become yet even more isolated and fearful and hurt and angry but rather to rise up and to simultaneously go higher and deeper as we explore the question of meaning and purpose for ourselves and as we place our own experience of that within the broader context of humanity and you really have almost a lifting of a weight off your shoulders when you view it in that context as opposed to self or tribe in opposition to the broader flows and we are going to continue some of this conversation later today at 5.30 in room 5 and the book is actually free you can get free e-book copies because I am less interested in selling books than I am in trying to influence the conversation so I hope you do check that out and participate in these conversations it's fantastic Jan is really again one of the creators of why we're here today and he's saying to us let's go through the next big set of questions and the fact that it's an e-book for free shows that he is living the message so thank you very much thank you so much Laura it's been a pleasure thank you