Hello, and welcome to the Donahue Group. We're delighted that you can join us for another half hour of fun-filled and sightful, intelligent conversation about issues of the day. Joining me today, Ken Risto, who's always good. Fun, intelligent, sightful, most of her three. So here's the fun person, Ken Risto. Tom Paneski, I forgot what you were, but you are currently Professor of Mathematics at UW-Shabuigan. Highly intelligent, Cal Potter, former state senator. I'm a lawyer in town. My name is Mary Lynn Donahue, and we're here today to talk about some local issues of most interest, I think, and relatively recent in the past are the primary election results. Overall results statewide. Turnout statewide for the primary. Any guesses? If you know the actual answer, don't tell me. No, I don't know. I don't know. 18%. 18%. I would say even less. Yeah, I would say even less. You want to say 10? I'll go 20, and I'm optimistic. 7%. 7%? No. 7%? Really? According to the Wisconsin Journal Sentinel, or excuse me, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. That's why I buffed it up a little. That could be a new record low. That could be. A new one. A high new low. In any event, before we get over-involved in that, the local results were quite interesting. I was, as you know, I watched the votes come in for the League of Women Voters every election, so I'm down at the administration building and calling the results to various TV stations and so forth. And always an interesting process. It was certainly much quieter with such a low turnout. But we did have some interesting, first of all, good news that there were lots and lots of primaries. Statewide, or I'm sorry, in the Milwaukee area, about 66% of all positions not only didn't have primaries, people are completely unimposed. So Sherboygan, again, does not fit that bill. In the first district, I predicted, I don't think we did predictions, did we? No, we didn't. Oh, too bad.  Jim Gisha and Bruce Christensen were the clear winners in the first all-demand district where there was a big turnout. 284 for Gisha, 249 for Christensen, and then Neil Altman, Tim Lorenz, and Job Jose came in last with 16 votes. Both, I think pretty, these of course are non-partisan elections, but I think both Jim Gisha and Bruce Christensen would be considered conservative. That would be correct. Yeah. It's a conservative ward, goes, usually Republican in the elections. And I think the characterization of the campaigns in the paper from what I read was that those who went door to door did it and the rest of them didn't seem to put forth the effort. And I think if you showed up at somebody's doorstep, when it was about 10 degrees out, I think you probably got sympathy. Or either that or just a question as to your good sense. See, you never had to run in a quote, spring election. And if you're driving around, that was the only two signs you saw was Christensen and Gisha. I didn't see any other signs like Lorenz or Jose or... Tim Lorenz, you'll remember, ran against Joe Liebham in his very first race for the assembly back X number of years ago and got beat then. Neil Altman is a labor guy. Fun, I like Neil. But, and then of course, Joe Posey with only 16 votes, I think, I'm wondering if his... Whom does the bell toll, he tolls through the... You love to run though. Yeah, love to run. It's the oldest smile that you send out returns to, I don't know. But it'll be, I have no predictions on... My sense is Gisha wins, but I'm not sure. I think it's pretty gold earned close. Any... No, we'll wait, I'll wait until they have a little... The forums will get now a little more crisp because you only have just the two candidates. And I think there'll be some differences between the two. And then people will decide, I think, on the differences. Any other... Do you have any sense of what kind of differences they'd have? I heard one that Christians... Bruce said that the ambulance belongs in the fire department. And I don't know that Gisha believes that. I'm not sure, but if he does, I don't know who I'm going to vote for then. It seemed in the first forum, and I want to be sure, when I was listening and watching on television, that Jim was a little more open to looking at the reserve monies and possibly using some, whereas Bruce was pretty much saying, we have people that we hire to give us expert advice. And those experts are saying, we should probably be real careful about going in there. So I sense there was maybe some difference there, but other than that, of course, when you got five candidates and you got the stream of people coming in with some of them asking questions and some of them giving speeches with maybe a question to act at the end, it was kind of hard to tell. But you're right, I think the forums know with only two of them. But the two will be a little more crisp when they find what they think a little bit. And hang on to the Vehicle Maintenance Fund because I think that is a very interesting issue and it's an issue the county has as well with noisy answers as far as I can see, but we'll get to that hopefully. I'm just gonna put in for Gisha, we'll see. I'm thinking Jim too, although I know Bruce and I've worked with Bruce for years at South High School. He's, a lot of people know him, because you know, thousands of students have streamed through South and know him. Gisha, the true is the Republican activist having been, I think, on the official and the Republican Party, and that's a Republican ward. But like you said, Christensen's very well known in the community. I think Jim is a little more used to the public forums and speaking. I mean, Bruce really represents his positions fine, but Jim is pretty slick. I mean, he's pretty comfortable on his feet. And if you're watching on TV, I think he's gonna come across being, for lack of a better word, a little more eloquent. And that might make a little bit of a difference. I don't know. We'll see. There's one other thing, but just working through the list and I don't know, I do know these guys did a lot of doors. You'll remember Anthony Bonet ran for Alderperson in the first district. Two elections ago, I think. I can't remember, but my brother lives in the first district and he said, you know, Anthony Bonet has been to my door three times. And he said, it was great talking to him the first time. You know, I really enjoyed the conversation. The second time we didn't have that much to talk about, third time I didn't wanna see him anymore. So I think, is there, you know, there's a point of no return where you just can't knock on the door one more time. Well, when there's only a 7% turnout, that's why they end up coming so many times. There aren't too many voters to knock on the door. Yeah, it takes a while, you know, you're walking, it takes a while. I do think the turnout in Schwoigen was higher than 7%, that was statewide. But the third Aldermanic district, again, a very interesting race. Danver-Hasselt, Dimple Adams and Scott Lewandowski. Danver-Hasselt is the incumbent, but appointed, if I'm not mistaken. And so this is his first race. Dimple Adams, of course, a great supporter of Sheridan Park is a good location for the police station. Good, you know, a strong supporter of the police department, I think. And then Scott Lewandowski, formerly a big supporter of Mayor Perez, but actively involved in the recall from what I understand. Was Dimple involved in the recall effort as well? Sure, she was the treasurer, or was she the president of the group? That's what I thought. Yeah, I know Barbara Tyshinski was one of the main spokespeople, but I thought Dimple Adams was a... Yep, I thought so too, but I just wanted to make sure my memory was serving me correctly. So, it's close, though. For the longest time, I didn't know who Dimple Adams was.  All I gotta do is listen to WHBL, because she virtually was an open Michael host for a while. Yeah, but I missed all of that, so when I saw the sign Dimple Adams, I was like, who is that? That's a cute name. That's a cute name. It's hard sometimes to run with a cute name, but she did very well. She came from the south, came to Sheboygan in the 1970s, I think. Well, mind you, though, the difference here was small. 237 votes for Vahassel 218 for Adams. That's pretty, pretty small. And then Scott Lewandowski was a distant, with 80 votes. Scott, of course, has some life because he's running for the school board. Now, with those numbers, he's not. Oh. Sorry. I don't know. Well, we can talk about that. Now, with those numbers, he's not. If you can, I'm sorry, I mean, I'll be the contrary in voice here today, but if you can get only 80 in an aldermanic when you go to a city-wide race for school board, you're done. That depends on who the opposition is. But in any event, it will be interesting because we have the first-mong person actually running for election. I'm sorry. Myshua Vang did run last year in a one-year term, so she came in fourth, but she was elected. Fong Li is running against Scott Lewandowski, and an interesting fellow. I had the chance to meet him quite bright, and of course, we all know Scott. Well, we had a chance to talk about that as we get closer. Right. Yes. Move along, come on. All right. You're just excited because the district is fairly dramatic. Joe Heidemann really, as we say in my firm, really schvetsing Jim Graf. 243 to 141, and Dan Berg had 29 votes. That's interesting, yeah. I think Jim Graf has, he's just been in the paper too much for the wrong things. I don't know. That will see. Well, again, it's hard to tell. If I were Jim, I'd be very, very nervous because you're the incumbent and you lose in the primary. I mean, there's a lot of time to get your people out there to vote yet, but I know that Joe was really working doors again. I don't know how much Jim was, but I know Joe was at our door. I wasn't home, but he spoke to my wife, and I don't believe, unless again, Jim was not going to be there. I'm not sure how energetic Jim is working out of his district. And didn't Joe run last time? Yes, he did. No, that wasn't against Graf. That was against... That was Berg. When Berg was up for reelection. He didn't make the cut on the primary. He didn't make the cut on the primary, yeah. But this time, Joe's got some signs out, and they're all pretty strategically placed in high traffic areas, Lakeshore Drive on the south side of town, Lakeshore Drive, it's 12th Street, 8th Street, you know, and he looks like he's putting a much more serious effort this time around. Well, there's nothing like running one bad race to learn all the mistakes that you've made and then figure out how you change and... And I didn't get a chance to get to the forum, but I saw it on TV again, and I think Joe did very well in that setting. It was, I wouldn't say a hostile audience for Jim Graf, but there were a couple of police officers in the crowd asking pointed questions. One had to make, which I thought was a low blow, and I thought it was pretty shabby, but one made a comment about a secret John Doe investigation, and I think Jim, I think Jim is one of these persons who understands that city issues are a little complex and sometimes it's tough to explain that to an audience. And there was just a lot of vague accusations and then the question came at the end, so it wasn't a very friendly forum. I don't know how many of those people who were actually at the forum were actually people who vote in that aldermanic district. It seems like you have the same cast of people, the same carnival, kind of moving around. That's a good choice of words. Well, I mean, I watched a lot of them and you're hearing pretty much the same sort of harangues and then at the end, it's the moderator has to say, is there a question in there somewhere or the candidates look at each other and they don't even know what to say. Well, there you go. Moving right along before we completely fall through the ice. The six aldermanic district. Bill Wongerman. Wasn't that fun? It was great fun, I wanna thank you. I'd like to ask the insightful and intelligent people on the panel here, as opposed to the fun person. It's all yours, guys. Okay. Let me know if you want me to talk again. I'm happy to do that. Bill Wongerman handily beat Jeff Radke. I do think I predicted that. Bill, of course, is a very well-known name in town and Radke has only, this is his second race. He won the first time and who did he beat? I am trying to remember. I don't know. Wongerman ran before and won, saw his action and then he stepped down and decided not to run again. I mean, he already has won once. He was in the police department, so he knows people. He has an article on the paper every week practically. So it's very well-known. Very well-known. He's the city historian, right? Yeah, so I think Jeff probably has his work cut out for him. There's no advantage to the incumbency there. No, I don't think so, I don't think so. And I think the last two years on the city council have frankly been fairly rough and that I think people who have participated in that council rightly or wrongly may be viewed as part of a pretty dysfunctional group. And so I think that that is potentially kind of a tough spot. The Plymouth School Board, not of great interest to our listeners, but we just have to say that finally the Usberg school district referendum of $9.85 million won. And not by a huge vote. It was 1,282 to 1,055. That's a lot of votes. It is. That is a lot of votes. And since they only lost by six votes the last time, I thought that was pretty interesting. I think Brian did a good job in getting the community behind this vote. Brian Haynes. It's a successful, right? Who used to be in the Sheboygan system, was he not? Right, yes. You know, the Sheboygan example of getting the community behind a major expenditure of money helps it get through and that's what they did. They got church groups and others involved and that was very positive for him. Well, you think of the brilliant job the school district did with its last enormous referendum which passed overwhelmingly. And that was really very much, I think, a community effort and to sell $32 million, $36 million in a referendum was pretty impressive. So good for Usberg and I'm glad that that worked out for them. We're just gonna touch base on the town of Wilson simply because they've had their controversies with the fire department and volunteer fire departments can often be an interesting source of politics but the incumbent chair, Keith Satchel, came in second to Roger G. Miller who was pretty much the decisive winner and Brian Hoffman who had previously been on the town board is out and then the two incumbent supervisors, both, were they running for two positions or just one? There's the town chair, which is one position and then there are two. So when the people were voting, they were voting for two and they were, so there was a prime. Right, there were four people, five people running for four spots. Oh, okay. Five people running for two spots. Two spots. And so the two incumbents were the top vote getters and then there are two other folks who will run against the two supervisors but then the town chair, there was just the one spot there. So it'll be Miller versus Satchel so that'll be interesting to see. So overall, I think it was an interesting primary and I will say we'll get into this in our state episode a little, in a different episode but Annette Ziegler won handily, handily in Sheboygan County. She got 68% of the vote in Sheboygan County and Joe Summers was just a few votes behind Linda Clifford and Summer, of course, is the candidate, a lawyer from Madison who at least is currently under investigation by the Supreme Court for alleged unethical conduct. So not a good night for Linda Clifford in Sheboygan County. I'll tell you that. Well, statewide Ziegler did very well. Yeah, more than 50% statewide. Yeah, but a small turnout again. Yeah, but there were a lot of, there were major independent expenditures in that race which is a new on scene, I think, for the court system. I mean, it used to be that the courts were the last vestige of using public financing. Yeah, not anymore. Not anymore, no. We'll get into that. I'd make a pitch for public financing. Just as an aside, when I went to vote there, I had a choice between the ballot or the screen. I chose to do the ballot, but did anybody choose to do the screen? I reject the screen. Well, I don't trust him. You don't trust him. I did the usual ballot. The ballot too? Yeah, yeah. I want a paper trail. Well, I think there is a paper trail on our machines. That's a good question. I'll find out the answer to that and let you know next time. On the touch screen? Mm-hmm. I'm kind of curious how many people actually use the touch screen. Well, I did poll watching in the 2006, November 2006 election. And there were a number of people who tried it. It's a little, if you're in a hurry, I mean, I was in a rush moving in and out because I almost forgot to vote. And so I'm rushing in to vote and the screen takes more time in my experience, just having watched people go through it and so forth. But I think it's interesting, but I will check to see if there is a paper trail. Most states, they aren't and they're having major revamping of the voting machines in many states because they're no paper trail. Right, exactly. Exactly. There's, how can you do a recount without a paper trail? I mean, it takes away the whole concept of a recount, I think, so, but it's called, the machine is called the EDGE. The EDGE? Yes, that's what the... Living on the EDGE, yes. Living on the EDGE. Well, it's fun if you're in the administration building and you watch people, all the clerks bringing in ballots from all over the county and I enjoy doing that and you just hear what's going on. So that's what you were seeing, they were bringing a print out from the... No, no, I mean, everything was in boxes. Okay. But I did not ask if there's a paper trail. I had just assumed there was, but... Well, I think it's just a computer. All you have to do is press the button and probably print it out, but I guess you always have to have faith and the magnetic disk goes from the, you know, the information from the disk to the paper correctly or not. I still miss the little lovers. Sure. When you used to pull the, you'd pull the big handle and the curtain would close and then you didn't have to, well, in any event. So we're going on to the general election, but just some interesting, interesting other issues. Big source of controversy and Tom, I'd be interested in your perspective as a former alder person about the vehicle fund, which has been discovered, $8 million used for purchase of police and other... Maintenance. City cars, maintenance. I'm not sure what it's used. It's used for replacement. And now is it just public works vehicles or is it police department vehicles? I'd have to check it out. I thought it was just police department, but that doesn't make any sense. No, it's more than just police. It's because they're big trucks in the public works department and those wear out and they need replacement. And they're not cheap. And they're not cheap. They're not cheap. So I thought, what would I do if I... Generally, I don't like to raid funds when I was on the council. They're there for a purpose. The Industrial Park Fund was there for a purpose. This would be there for a purpose, but maybe there's better equipment nowadays and the fund is a little too high. So you'd have to really, before you made up your mind whether to take any, maybe look at the record, see how much over the last four or five years the vehicle fund was used. Well, it seems to me that is something that the finance department could make a logical explanation of what's needed, what should be there, what shouldn't be there. And... Sometimes you just say, okay, every year we're gonna put this much in the fund and maybe you don't monitor that very well. And it just grows and grows and grows. And then you say, oh, I didn't have to put that much in the fund. I could have gone by with less. 8 million seems high, but I don't know. It would really depend. And of course, the county has always had a substantial surplus.  Governments and nonprofits, typically you like to have them save some money for the rainy day fund. And I know the county has done that, but Pat Whedon, long time county board supervisor, really was a strong pusher to get the county surplus spent out, which was considerably more. And of course we don't know what all the city surplus funds are. Yeah, and I'm sure the fund was around when they had the incinerator and all the vehicles that worked in the incinerator, you had to replace those. Now, they may have cut back on the fund at that point, may not have it, maybe just so. What do you think of Mike Warner's idea to, if there's this big fund, to use part of that for the police station, but then borrow more money and actually spend more on the police station? Well, all the police aren't happy with their garage situation. And I don't know whether, this is something that ought to be addressed. Now is the time to do it. If that garage maintenance issue is so dysfunctional, you ought to address it. Well, it sounds typical politics though. You find money, spend it. I mean, if I found money, spend it. Why spend it? But the characterization in the paper was that how much time officers are spending, taking cars to maintenance and coming back with them.  If there's a legitimate time wasting here, somebody ought to look at that. Well, then you got, that goes down to, there was a police maintenance group and then there was the public works maintenance group. And so should a city just have one maintenance area? So in validation and services? It would seem to make sense, but who knows? Who knows? Yeah, because the police maintenance, was right next to the city hall. That building, yeah. Well, what it was characterized in the paper is that you simply move the folks that fix police cars down to the city municipal garage and they're sort of being put in a corner over there to work and there's really no pooling. No pooling? I didn't get that from the, I don't know. But I didn't get that from the article in the paper. It was criticism that there wasn't enough savings to warrant that move. I don't know. That's gonna be the hard thing. He's trying to figure out, is this just one of those things where it's inconvenient and we'd really, I mean, I would like to have a nicer faculty lounge at South High School. And I'd like to carpet it and I'd like some new furniture and there's lots of things I would like, but I know that if I have to put up with it, I'll put up with it. Or if it's as Cal suggested something, that where it really is in the long run, you're a, you've saved a penny but it's gonna cost you a pound. And it's really hard to sort that all out because I haven't seen a really, what I would consider a informative discussion on that issue yet. Well, the police aren't really happy with the garage. It's gonna be built at the police station either. Maybe those two can be lumped together and say, let's do this right. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. It's such an intense situation though sometimes. It's gonna be hard to kind of separate the politics out to Tom, like I think you said. But I would sense with Renee Susha going off the council that if it comes out that there's a reasonable case to be made to spend more money to do it right this time around, even if it means dipping into some of that money and borrowing perhaps a little bit, I think there's gonna be, I think the council will go along with that. Depends on how many of those officers are running to get elected too. Well, the last episode, we were assured that none of these guys have a common agenda. Okay. So I'm hearing from the informed side of the room as opposed to the cynical side of the room that perhaps this may not be the case. Well, let's just- Well, they're pro-police. Let's put it that way. Let's continue on. And that's where it should be. Good news is 9.3% increase in tourism tax dollars. A correlation being made between the city taking tourism in-house and the additional tax money. I did not read the article, so I'm not up on it, but- It went from something like 340,000 to 415 or something. I don't have the exact numbers and that was a 9% increase. And I don't know what was going on. This was 206 over 205. So it's a two-year period of time? 205, they measured, so it was the increase over 205. Oh, I see. So it was the money that was brought in in 2006? Yeah, it was the money brought in in 2006. Which would have been the year that the tourism bureau was in place. Yeah, and pretty much in full swing. So I think that's interesting. I think, you know, I'm on an email list, so I'm getting emails about interesting things happening around the city and so forth from the tourism department, but it seems to be a pretty lively group. And the materials they're putting out are good. The art festival down at Blue Harbor was fun. But Sheboygan is, yeah, is becoming a destination so more people will come because, you know, at the golfing and the road America and just other events, it's nationally becoming a destination. And so maybe the tourism bureau helps it, but I don't know that it would be, I wouldn't give it the full credit. No causation, just correlation. Correlation, yeah. We will note that it looks like the county board is coming up for a vote. Going to be selling Sunny Ridge, kind of an end of an era. And we only have a minute left. And I just want to say that we've had the passing of two local, wonderful people, one Dwayne Nye, formerly of WHBL and- News director for many years. News director for many years and a kind and gentle guy. And Leo Brie, rather, an icon in Sheboygan labor politics and a dear fellow, as I remember. And so we wish them well on their next journeys. And of course, nationally, my favorite columnist, Molly Ivins, passed away a couple of weeks ago. She was a giant of a woman in more than one way. I met her in Milwaukee in pre-chemotherapy. She was over six feet tall and had red hair that just kind of swam out. And one of the funniest and most insightful and courageous columnists, I think, that I had ever read. Never feared a president, that's for sure. That's it. Got all three of us in there, funny and insightful and smart. And we'll be back. All three combined.


Good morning, good morning, good morning everybody. Welcome back to my channel. It is such an exciting video I have to share with you today. So there are about all my videos but today is especially exciting. As you all know I am doing a five-day fast this week and you may be thinking what on earth possessed you to do a five-day fast voluntarily. I know there's actually so many benefits to fasting and I've been recently researching into fasting a lot more. I don't know. A lot of the videos I watch are by Jason Fung. I think it's Jason Fung. He wrote the book on The Beginner's Guide to Fasting which I'll link in the description below for you guys if you want to read it. It's so interesting and basically fasting one of the biggest benefits it has is obviously weight loss because one thing nothing's going in so your body starts to use the fat stores on your body and start to eat that for energy which is great. That's what your body has it for therefore. One of the biggest things that Jason Fung talks about is how it helps with insulin in the blood so it helps with two people with type 2 diabetes or who are obese. It can help with reducing the amount of insulin in the blood because you're not eating anything so therefore there's no excess sugar. Insulin in the blood which then reduces inflammation as well which is super beneficial. He says for people who are lean he recommends you only need to do the 12-hour fasting so it's three meals a day as regular so from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and then from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. you have that 12-hour fast which the term breakfast comes from because you're breaking the fast and all you could do intermittent fasting which is that 16 hours of fasting in that eight-hour eating window so you can do that as well. That's for people who are lean he says for people who maybe are more obese or overweight you can think about doing a bit longer. People go up to 36 hours five days even 20 to 30 days so up to a month which is crazy however I would recommend as a disclaimer talking to a medical professional or your doctor because I'm no medical professional myself. This is just research that I've read into and have found by no means am I recommending everyone go fasting for five days or anything like that I'm just showing you guys my experience of doing it and how that goes for me but definitely if you're looking to fasting or changing up your diet or lifestyle at all definitely talk to a medical professional beforehand to make sure that you do it right and do it in a good way. Yes but that's basically my disclaimer done so Jason Fung really does a 24-hour fast say you just miss breakfast you miss lunch and just have dinner that means you would have had the 24 24 hours of fasting that's his way of doing it he does that about three times a week now I was more curious into the five-day fast because I actually heard that after four days of fasting it can actually help to reset your immune system I thought that is really cool so I wanted to try that out just to give my body a bit of a reset but the thing is some people do talk about how you can lose muscle during fasting naturally as your body switches over from glucose as its main source of energy it starts to take some of the muscle tissues from the body as energy but after 36 hours that process then switches over to fat so if you've done the ketogenic diet in the past your body may switch over a little bit faster because it's naturally used to using fat in the body as its source but if you don't do keto and you're just doing fasting it may take that little bit longer so you can see maybe a reduction in muscle but that will come back again once you start eating so that's fine also people have noticed that they may drop a heap of weight but then half of it may come back again that's because that other half is water weight so that wouldn't actually come back I'm more curious about the I guess the other benefits rather than just weight loss because I'm quite lucky I'm quite clean already so weight loss isn't a big thing for me mine's more like the whole body reset sort of thing I've also heard that because you fast it gives your body time to go around and clean itself a little bit better because it doesn't have anything digesting in its system which takes up a lot of energy so it can use that energy to go around and sort of clean up the body so my fasting is basically to help improve my health so it's like to optimize my health in a way rather than sort of weight loss and things like that one of the things I really loved about the idea of fasting again is coming back to the whole insulin in the blood so insulin is produced by the pancreas in the body and it helps with regulating your blood sugar levels so when you eat something that's really curry or carby and that in turn produces glucose which is sugar and that is needed as energy by the body insulin is produced to take that sugar to cells in the body and to basically deposit them for the cells to use as energy now because our western diet is so rich in sugar and carbs which then return to glucose which is sugar it's more common nowadays that people are actually developing an insulin desensitivity and insulin resistance which is not great because that can in turn lead to type 2 diabetes and other health problems basically because we're getting so much sugar in the body the depository sites on the cells are becoming less sensitive to insulin and sugar because they basically explained it in a way that say you've seen an old friend for the first time in years you open the door with open arms welcome them in that's what sugar is to the cells at first but think of it over time that if your friend is coming to your door knocking on the door several times a day you start to get less welcoming and like more like no thank you stay out there and that's what's happening to ourselves they're becoming less I guess welcoming of the sugar so they're leaving more of it in the blood which then circulates around and causes inflammation and inflammation is a big underlying cause of many chronic illnesses that we see today so the benefit of not having so much insulin in the blood means that you have less inflammation overall and in turn your body can start to heal and get back into its homeostasis in balanced state now people may be thinking why on earth would you fast like you end up starving yourself that is a good point to bring up but apparently the body can last up to one month without food which is amazing and I think up to one week without water but I'll be drinking plenty of water and plenty of tea on this fast but basically the body's naturally designed to use fat stores that's why it's there it's not there for looks the fat isn't just a positive there for no reason although we may think sometimes like why does it have to be there but it's there for a reason the body uses that in case it goes through a fasting period a famine so the body is naturally geared to know what to do when you don't eat so the fat is then used by the body as fuel as energy and this is really good because it can help again with weight loss it can help in reducing insulin because it's now using fat not glucose sugar as fuel which is great and it can help because a lot of our fat tissues actually store toxins that's where it can be stored in the body so using that fat can actually cause a bit of a detox in the body as well that's why drinking plenty of water is important as well so there's many benefits to fasting I believe in my opinion anyway I know people will be thinking this is actually crazy to voluntarily not eat I think it's pretty cool actually a pretty cool challenge I'm actually hoping to do this once every month but you can do it in so many different ways like intermittent fasting 24 hour fasting 36 hour fasting so many different ways of doing it so really the art interest I do definitely look into it it's a really interesting sort of area of health that you guys can delve into a lot more I thought I'd just try it out and see how it goes for me now I have heard that after the third day you're supposed to not feel really hungry anymore food is sort of like but my auntie and my sister have actually done a five day fast before and they said that did not happen they were hungry the whole way through so I'm like fingers crossed that hopefully by the third day I'm not feeling super like starved and just wanting food but we'll see we'll find out so I'm actually going to be doing it before and after of my fasting so I actually did another little weigh-in on my scales now the body fat percentage scales not just a regular scales because I wanted to see how much body fat was used up during that time while I'm fasting I imagine there will be a bit of a loss in muscle as well so I'm quite aware of that as well but I'm sure it'll come back again once I start eating normally and exercising now if I do feel a bit faint or lightheaded which can may happen I'm not sure this is the first time I'm trying I will turn back on the amount of exercise I'm doing and you know make sure that I'm still keeping my body in tip top shape not overdoing it so I'm just going to see how each day goes and see how I adjust my routine to that but for now I'll share with you guys the results so I am 65.1 kilos in weight overall and my body fat is 30.8 percent so that's I'm very happy with that so that is the results to begin with so we'll see what they are at the end and hopefully there will be a drop in body fat which would be great so I thought I'd share with you how I'm feeling this morning seeing as this kick started at the moment I'm feeling fine I don't usually eat till 11 30 12 anyway because I usually do intermittent fasting as my regular thing so at the moment it's 10 46 so I don't think I'll feel hungry anyway till about one or two and then that's when it'll start to become a challenge but for now I'm like oh just like freezing through the morning like I feel great like this fasting thing is so easy but we'll just we'll just wait um yeah I feel fine at the moment feeling quite good not hungry at all I did actually stock up a bit last night I was like oh just eat a lot so that this morning I won't be hungry at all and it's worked really well but we'll see how that goes as the day goes on I'll let you guys know how I feel tonight at the end as my main sort of fuel for the week I will be having lots of water and some herbal tea now I have heard that people do tend to have bone broth or bulletproof coffee which is like a high fat coffee as like something to eat during fasting for like longer periods as well I'm just going to stick to my playing water and herbal tea like green tea and peppermint tea and things like that and hopefully that will be quite enough and that will do me but we'll see by the end after five days of how this goes but yeah I'm going to go on with the rest of my day and I'll be back with you guys tonight to let you know how day one of the five day fast went all right so it's 7 p.m now so it's sort of winding down on for the evening I must say today has been like really challenging and I thought it would be too one of the biggest things I've noticed today has that my mind automatically goes to like my meals so like say I've done a task or say it gets to around a certain time in the day my mind automatically wanders onto what I'm going to be making that day or for lunch or for dinner like as I was sitting in the car driving to some of the places I was going today my mind was automatically thinking when I get home what will I make what's in the fridge what am I going to have like it's become an automatic sort of thought pattern for me to think and plan my next meals for the day so that was really strange and I had to keep running myself like oh wait I'm not actually eating today I will this extra time and also oh I was like I'll be bummed I really do find that food is a big enjoyment for me during the day so when I don't have it I'm like what do I do now I have been super hungry though especially towards the end of the night and I've been trying to drink a lot more because sometimes your hunger can actually be a manifestation of you being thirsty so I've been drinking lots but I think I am actually just hungry I find I'm like with my family's having dinner I was like I just want to have something one little bite of something but I was like no stick to it so yeah that's been a bit challenging and I thought it would be challenging today honestly I knew it was going to be easy so hopefully fingers crossed I'm not super super hungry tomorrow but I doubt for what might be because I really love food I just want to eat honestly just got to keep reminding myself of all the benefits while I'm doing this all those health benefits that come with fasting while it may not be easy it'll be rewarding in the end and I've heard that after you do the fast when you go back to eating again maybe it's a few days after all just supposed to feel really good like energetic feel really like it's cleansed just feel amazing afterwards so really just focus on that bit the end goal which is just to stick this out and get all those health benefits from this fast so yeah it's pretty much my update for tonight I'm really hungry I've drunk so much water hopefully tomorrow is a good day and I don't notice too much I'll try and keep myself busy to distract myself from wanting to eat hi guys so it's day two and honestly I feel like death oh waking up this morning I was so exhausted naturally because I'm not eating I just felt so sick like nauseous sick and I've just been drinking lots of fluids serving lots of tea water I have been having broth just to help boost some minerals in my body just because I felt so sick like this morning oh I woke up and I was like honestly I could probably just sleep all day and that'd be that'd be it it's not necessarily the hunger feeling like I don't feel hungry I just feel really sick like nauseous sick so I've been trying to drink a lot of water and just helping kind of stop that nauseous feeling like I have a really really light head as well so it's not going so strong today even just sitting here talking to you guys I feel a lot better I think just being up and about like I was lying on the couch like before like oh my gosh I kind of get up but I feel like as the day goes on I'm getting a little bit feeling a little bit better but if you guys do try out fasting it was recommended to me that maybe don't go into a five-day fast first off that's probably thing I've really learned by this maybe start off by doing like a 24-hour fast or maybe a 36-hour fast not go straight into five days I'm kind of regretting it now but yeah do try working up to it from there rather than just doing the cold turkey straight into five days unless you've been specified otherwise but yeah that's pretty much day two so it's day three I have a few updates to share with you guys so this morning I woke up feeling a little bit unwell and I read up as to why that was because I felt a little bit unwell yesterday morning and I thought maybe just because I'm getting dehydrated over the night so when I wake up I feel a bit sick but they said if you feel nauseous or anything it can be because of low blood sugar levels or because of like low electrolytes in your body so I've started adding salt to my water so that when I drink that I get a bit of electrolytes that way and I've had more of my broth so I think I'm not drinking enough broth throughout the day so I've been upping that a little bit so if you guys do feel nauseous that could be one of the reasons also do be careful make sure if you fast monitor your body over the course of the five days or three days or however long even during intermittent fasting because if you are feeling nauseous it might be a good idea to stop it there and just slowly build up your body to the length of time that you want to fast for rather than just going all in for the 16 hours or all in for the five days like I've done so if you do feel nauseous it can be a good idea to stop it because it means that your body is not exactly adjusting too well just switching over to fat burning rather than sugar burning as energy so that can be one of the reasons why but if you are finding that it is an electrolyte problem putting salt in your water just a pinch of salt or even just having more broth or electrolytes throughout the day through other ways that's really really helpful in helping to boost that up and you may find you don't feel so unwell or sick anymore I found that anyway so I think my problem was due to a lack of electrolytes I just wasn't having enough broth or just not getting enough electrolytes so I just put a pinch of salt in my water and I found that really really helped me so I don't actually feel sick anymore I'm just like yes! so having broth and just drinking plenty of fluids plenty of water has been really beneficial on helping with that I'm going to make sure that I drink a lot of water with a pinch of salt in it just before I go to bed so I don't have that when I wake up tomorrow morning but if I do I'll just make sure I'll just drink another glass of salty water again in the morning but if you're feeling sick because of low blood sugar you might need to be monitoring that throughout the course of your fasting because that can get really serious it can actually get fits from having low blood sugar and you can have real bad health consequences if you don't monitor that and make sure that stays relatively stable so for me I think my body took a while to adjust to the fat burning side because I have never done this amount of time of fasting before the longest I've really done has been intermittent fasting so my body's sort of kind of catching up to that so I think I did have a little bit of low blood sugar at one point but it wasn't too serious but yeah just monitor your body throughout the course of fasting so if you do feel like it's getting to a point where you just feel really unwell and it's not getting better it's probably a good idea just to stop it there and just come back to it at another day and just slowly increase it rather than go all in at the one time see that was my morning I feel so much better today actually compared to yesterday the biggest thing I've noticed is I'm not so hungry all day it's been such a blessing because honestly I was on struggle street yesterday with that so that's been something I've been struggling with is the cravings for carby foods especially things that are like salty so chips sweet potato fries basically anything unhealthy I think just because it's so salty but I'm finally over the hump we're finally over the three days so now it's just the last two almost there can see the finish line from here I'm getting really excited but we're on today for tomorrow second last day oh I'm so excited hopefully it's even better than today because I am feeling a lot better today than I was yesterday so fingers crossed it keeps going like that good morning guys we're finally on the second last day I'm just so keen to eat again so one of them is that I don't feel unwell getting up in the morning now I really think what I did to boost my electrolysis really helped overall because I don't feel like nauseous getting up in the morning so this has been the first morning that I actually feel like great and I feel like I could go out and exercise because I haven't been exercising all week just because I felt really low in energy they said that can be a side effect of the ketosis flu like switching over from burning sugar to fat yet like a keto flu we just feel tired while your body's transitioning and I had a bit of that I was just feeling quite tired so I hadn't been exercising all week so that has been a big improvement waking up and feeling good which is such a great change they did say day four is the one you tend to feel best on and I actually must say I feel pretty normal like I was before fasting since the first day I've actually felt really good of all the days today has been my best day so far I haven't even felt hungry waking up in the morning sometimes I go a few hunger pangs usually in the morning or the evening time but I haven't had that this morning which has been awesome one thing I've noticed as well especially at the start of my fast was that I would get quite irritable so I tended to be more short-tempered because I was hungry all the time so if you guys experience that too you're not alone I was also quite irritable especially at the start I think today's probably my best day or I haven't felt hungry at all just felt a little bit hungry the other few days just I'm enough but today's been my best one so far tomorrow marks day five so I'll see you guys then for our final day yay so we're on to day five and the results are in I am so excited to share this with you guys when I saw the results I was literally like this I was like woo I was so happy like honestly with the results of today and to just have stuck through it all and made it to the five days was just an achievement in itself by the end the fourth day was definitely the best day because I actually felt the least hungry but the hunger kings came back for me in the evenings so it was such a struggle trying to make it through to like bedtime without like like going through such intense hunger that was the only thing I found was that the evenings were my most challenging but overall I felt the best on day four and day five today as well I found they were just my top two days and they usually say that tends to happen once you get past the second and third day day four and five are a lot easier but let's get to the results because that's all here for so my starting weight was 65.1 kilos like I said earlier and now it's 61.6 so I lost about three point so I lost about three point five kilos so excited but I know some of that will come back like about half of it anyway because I love its water weight and then once you start eating again you naturally just start to gain weight again but it's still such great results I'm really happy about it I lost some fat as well which I'm just like yes I was 30.8 to start with and now I'm 30.4 so let's 0.4 percent I'm through with that I know it's not a huge margin and some people can lose more but for me I was so happy I am committed to doing fasts every month because five days was just such a challenge for me I think I'll just do three day fasts until I can kind of get used to that and then kind of work up from there do a four day and then a five day fast and so I'll do it that way because five days honestly guys it was real challenging I was like now I didn't mention this before but my muscle mass was 42.8 kilos and it did drop to 40.7 which I did know that was gonna happen so I lost about two kilos in muscle which is quite a lot I understand that so but now we'll come back again once I start eating and going back to the gym normally and doing weight sessions and things and I just a side note my metabolic age you know my past keto video where I shared it was like 30 it started off as 30 for this and it's dropped down to 27 so in the 20s today's huge ginormous massive shout out goes to Divergent Paki thank you so much for commenting on my vegan vegetarian keto diet experience video I'm so glad you enjoyed it if you do try out the keto diet do let me know how it goes for you I so agree having a keto cookbook to follow is so much easier than trying to create recipes on your own thank you to everyone for watching and subscribing liking sharing and even just sharing your love on my videos it means so so much to me to receive so much encouragement support and love from you guys it means the absolute world to me and I'm just so so grateful so thank you so much you guys have done fasting before what was your experience like I'd love to know otherwise I hope you guys enjoyed today's video and I hope fingers crossed to see you guys in future videos alone bye


Hello and welcome to Dare to Dream, this is Debbie Dashinger and today's show features Neil Donald Walsh. And we're going to be discussing his insights, his new book plus his vision for a spiritually connected world. Dare to Dream with Debbie Dashinger has won three talk radio positive awards, won the C.O.V. award for best radio and podcast show, WELP Magazine named Dare to Dream one of the top 20 best podcasts to listen to this year and its high ranking underself improvement in Apple podcasts. Just a couple of months, it'll be 17 years I've been doing this show and I love showing up here every week for me is a masterclass. Thank you guys for all your comments. I truly read them all and I must express how much it means to me to have you on this journey. Couldn't do this alone. This show is sponsored by Dr. Dane here in Access Consciousness. They do energy work out into the world. If you would like to become a facilitator or take a class, go to Dr. Dane here h-e-e-r .com. I'm Debbie Dashinger, I'm a media visibility specialist, specifically I help you with books and with interviews. I am a book writing coach and I take you from the inception of your book to the completion of your book. So independently, I've got a company that takes authors books to a guaranteed international bestselling status and I do all the heavy lifting for the author. And finally, I show you how to be interviewed on radio and podcasts and get massive results since the folks who come to this show are all spiritual messengers with a beautiful message. You came here at this time at this very auspicious time to shine your light and sing your song. Let me show you how to become way more visible. I've got a gift for you, all the how to's and so you can start being interviewed on media right away. It's at Debbie Dashinger.com slash gift. It's D-e-b-b-i-d-a-c-h-i-n-g-e-r.com slash gift. My guest today is Neil Donald Walsh who has written 40 books on contemporary spirituality and its practical application in everyday life, including nine books in the Conversations with God series seven of which made the New York Times bestseller list book one remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 134 weeks. His titles have been translated into 37 languages and have been read by millions of people, including me around the world. Neil's latest book is God Talk, Experiences of Humanities Connections with a Higher Power. If you'd like to learn more about him, go to NeilDonaldWalsh.com. And with that, I welcome Neil to the Dare to Dream show. It's so great to have you. Welcome. Thank you, Debbie. It's lovely to be here with you. I'm shocked to know, however, that you have been doing this program since you were four years old. I know. I started, I was a prodigy, but I started on radio when there was a thing called radio and there was not a thing called podcast. And then a couple of years into doing that, this strange word podcasting came along and I thought, you know, everybody's making fun of that, but I'm going to throw my hat in that ring too. Boy, am I glad I did. So here we are today podcasting my mainstream. Do you know that I did talk radio 25 years ago as well? Yeah. I actually have a question about that, but tell me, tell me, what kind of talk radio did you do? I had a nationally syndicated talk radio show on what was then known as the talk radio network. And I was nationally syndicated.  It was a wide open mic and people would call in and talk about whatever they wanted to talk about. I would, of course, you know, have something to say myself when I opened each show, whatever was politically, you know, alive in those moments or whatever was happening, we'd talk about the news and so forth, but then we'd open the mics and people would just jump on and talk about it. I spent, I started my career, I mean, in the working world in broadcasting when I was 19 years old. So we're talking about many, many years ago, way before podcasts for sure. And I wound up doing radio broadcasting for 30 years. Well, your life is the epitome of a hero's journey, right? I teach book writing and yours is it. We start one place, you have catastrophes occur, you start making some headway backslide, a little bit of headway backslide. So for you, before you even wrote conversations with God, Neil, you worked as a radio station manager, a newspaper managing editor, marketing PR, and then in the early 1990s, you had a series of very difficult blows.   It's like a lot for any human. And then you were alone, you were unemployed, you lived in a tent, and you were collecting and recycling aluminum cans just to eat. So let's start there since you brought up the radio and your beginnings. Tell me about the profundity of that time for you. Well, you know, what was interesting is that I have to admit that life has been very good to me in spite of the difficult moments that you've described. I've never had to do anything in my life that I didn't like to do. I love broadcasting. I love newspaper work. You know, I did a enormous amount of theater and I wanted getting paid to do live dinner theater and earning money doing that. Like acting, singing? Yeah, acting and singing, yes. I did a show called I Do, I Do for three years on stage. Wow. I did Henry Higgins in a traveling production of The Music Man. And so and I did the direction, I did directing as well.  I've simply adored all that I did. And I can't think of a time except maybe maybe one year and a half when I was selling radio time. I'll never do it again. I'll never sell anything again. But for the rest of my life from the beginning, I've just had a wonderful stream of events that people call a career. But I never thought of it as work. None of it was work. It was all joyful. You know, honestly, I have to tell you a story when I first started in radio. I was 19 years old and I was doing I was a disc jockey. In those days, there were actually things called disc jockeys. And we would introduce music and be out of the air, you know. And but I couldn't believe my fortune in getting a job that paid me to do this. And the owner of the station, he would either come out and give everybody their checks once a week and pay day. You know, on Fridays, he'd give everybody their checks. He said to me one week, why do you always turn your back and put your hand behind your back to take your check from me?  It's too much fun.  And you pay me to do this. So he said, son, I like your attitude. You're going to go far. You must have gotten employee of the year after that. I wasn't trying to butter him up. I just really I was really being serious. I just I couldn't believe it. So all of my life, I have received wonderful, wonderful recompense for doing things that I love to do. And it's true, like all people, I read into a series of challenges and difficulties and didn't wind up living on the sidewalk on the street for a year of my life, not for a couple of bad weeks or a tough month or two, but for a solid year, because I had been hit by what I call the triple whammy. And you mentioned some of those things, the loss of my relationship, the loss of my job, the corporation I was working for, that owned a series of radio stations needed to downsize. And I was let go now because I wasn't doing a good job. And my boss loved what I was doing on the air. He said, but I was a recent hire. So I had no seniority last in first out when there was downsizing. So I lost my job. Now, I'm out of a relationship and out of a job in the same 10 day period.  I'm sure I'm going to be hired because I've got all the qualifications. But I get slaughtered in this car accident. An older gentleman made a left turn in front of my car and smashed into the driver's side of the car. So, you know, my car was not this was not of what you'd call a fender bender. This was my car was totaled. And as you said, I broke my neck and it wasn't a hairline fracture. I still remember the wording because it was so dramatic on the report. I had suffered a three quarter inch avulsion fracture of the seven cervical vertebrae posteriorly. That's a break in your neck large enough to put a pencil through. And when I awoke from the anesthesia, of course, they rushed me to the hospital. The doctor was hovering over my table and he said to me. You realize it's your miracle, don't you? He said nine out of 10 people who come in here with a break in their neck like that. Do not survive. If they don't die on the spot because of spinal cord complications. But somehow you managed to not break any of the nerve endings in the spinal cord. He said, not only that, those who do survive, the few who do survive such a terrible accident and injury, wind up paralyzed from the neck down. You have suffered neither consequence. He leaned over the table and looked at my face and he said. So what are you going to do with the rest of your life? Did he really say that? Yes. Oh, my goodness, because I'm sitting here listening to you and thinking when something happens like that and then out of all this, you have this kind of physical miracle. It seems to me that everything is colliding on purpose to stop you, to give you a pause in life so you can. I mean, that's a bottom. It sounds like from what I recall from your earlier books, you hit an even lower bottom at some point. And that's when you just started writing. There was nothing else you knew how to do, but wake up in the middle of the night and just start saying to God, like, what is happening? What kind of life is this? Do you feel like all of those calamities occurred on purpose that somehow your soul agreed to that? No, I don't think that we come here with a freemade plan. I don't believe in predestination conversations. What God told me, there's no such thing as predestination because if there was predestination, then free will would be a contradiction. So there's no predestination. So I don't believe that I had a plan or an idea or a schematic or some kind of a scenario that I was following at the soul level. But I do think that I came here with an agenda. I do I do believe that the soul had an agenda for me, but not an agenda that involved events, an agenda that involved states of being. That is, I believe that each of our souls come here to the physical realm to express and experience certain aspects of divinity so that we might know them experientially and not just from a standpoint of knowledge in the spiritual realm, in my understanding. We can know who we are, but we can't experience who we are because there's nothing else except that all there is in heaven, in the spiritual realm, is pure love, joy, happiness, timelessness, it's always pure love here and now. But if I want to experience myself, I have to place myself into a realm where there is something other than what I am. Otherwise, I can't know what it's like to be what I am. I was in God gave me a very simple example. God said, let's just use a metaphor. Let's just pretend that you that you're the light. This is a metaphor, you know, we're not getting into it, whether it's true or not. But let's say that you're the light. Well, I got to tell you something, you're like a candle in the sun. Everyone, you know, you are the light and the candle is there in the sun and the sun would not be the sun without your candle. Nay, it would be the sun, less one candle and that would not be the sun at all. But you can't experience yourself as the light when you are amidst nothing but the light. Therefore, you will place yourself into an environment where there is darkness. Then you can express yourself as the light. Therefore, Neil, raise not your fist to heaven. And curse the darkness, not.  And that all those whose lives you touch might know who they really are as well. So I don't think that I came here with a plan with regard to certain events, but I do think I came here with an agenda to experience certain aspects of divinity. I believe that all of us are individuations of divinity and that we use lifetime after lifetime after lifetime, multiple endless reincarnations in order to experience all the aspects of who we are. Our compassion, our understanding, our patience, our joy, our happiness, our humor, our wisdom, our clarity, our forgiveness, every aspect of divinity. And we use an entire lifetime to experience those aspects. And how we do that depends on the events that occur that are co-created collaboratively by the lot of us. Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. I'm curious about love in your life because you wrote a lot about love. You asked God a lot of questions about love throughout your books and series. What has love meant? What have you learned or what wisdom have you gained about relationships and love? Well, you know, Debbie, I'm sorry to say that in the earlier part of my life, until I really, until I reached my mid-sixties, I thought love was a transactional experience. You know, transactional. It's a transaction. It's like a trade deal. Like nations have trade deals with other nations. So I entered relationships as a trade. You know, I'll give you this, you give me that. I'll provide you when you feel you need or want or desire from me and you provide me what I feel I need or want or desire from you. It's a transact. But if you stop trading me, what it is I expect to receive from you, the deal is over. And so I came to experience life as an interesting expression of a form of love that I really saw as transactional. And you know what was interesting? I thought that's how God loved us. I thought that God says, you know, I love you if you have to obey, you have to do what I need. You have to worship me. You have to be grateful for me. You have to obey my commands. But if you do all those things, you can receive my love. On the other hand, if you don't do those things, not only will you not receive my love, I will judge you.  So I thought, oh, God's love is transactional, too. And only when I had my experience of conversations with God did my understanding of love, which was the genesis of your question. That's where you began this question, the understanding of love change. I realized that love was not what I thought it was. So I wrote a book just a couple of years ago called The God Solution, which, by the way, I offer free to anybody who writes me an email and asks me to send them an upload. I will upload my author's manuscript of it and at no cost whatsoever. No kind. And in The God Solution, I explained that the world's problems I call the book The God Solution because, to me, it's the solution of the world's problems. The world's problems would be dissolved virtually instantly if we simply redefined our understanding of God. What if we decided that God could be defined? You know what's interesting? There are 4,223 religions on the face of the earth being practiced right now. I didn't make that number up. You can Google that. Just type into the Google search engine how many religions are there on earth and you'll discover that there are more than 4,000 religions on earth, not from the beginning of time, but being practiced right now. But what's interesting is that of those 4,000 religions, very few of them, if any, can agree on a single statement that's true about God. Everybody has their own particular story, their own particular version of God. And we call their version religions. And so we have 4,000 religions and 4,000 versions. And in The God Solution I have said, what if we could come up with a single statement upon which all religions of the world could agree? Can't we even find a way to define God that religions agree on? Universally? Unanimously? So I offer a two-word description of God. Pure love.  You've been listening to you for 20 minutes for you to tell us that your big revelation is that God is love. Everybody knows that. Even the world's religions that have dogmatic differences agree on that, that God is love. Nobody disagrees about that. And I have to say to my friend in the back of the room, wait a minute, relax, I didn't say that, that's not what I said. I said, God is pure love. Now my friend will say, okay, what's the difference? The difference is that pure love needs, expects, requires, and demands nothing in return. Debbie, we can't even love the person on the pillow next to us that way. Much less can we believe in a God who loves us that way. But if we believed that that was true about God, then we would have to abandon our notion that God is judgmental, condemning, and punishing. And that would remove our justification for being judgmental, condemning, and punishing with each other, because our religions teach us to act as the divine acts with us. And so, since we believe that God acts that way with us, hey, what's good enough for God is good enough for us. So we act with each other in the same way. That is, we judge each other, we condemn each other, and we punish each other when the other person does not do what we require, need, or demand. And we're seeing that scenario play out throughout human history and in far too many places in the world on this very day. You will either do what I demand, or I will judge, condemn, and punish you. I may even help you. And you have been in this marriage that you're in now, and with everything you've learned, and it sounds like a major shift came, because if you speak of God as pure love and your understanding that what you used to do that was transactional actually wasn't love, how do you operate now? How is it different? Well, of course, it was love. You say actually it wasn't love, it was love, but it was love of myself. See, if I love you, or if I say that I love you because what I think I can get from you in return, then I'm simply loving myself through you. But you're right, to use your exact words a minute ago, a big shift did occur, and in life as we all know, shift happens. So, we understand that total change of one's point of view about life, about self, about another, and yes, about God, can occur. The shift for me in my present marriage is that I decided to need, require, expect, demand, even hope for nothing in particular in return for the love that I give. When I look at my wife now, we've been together 16 years, when I look at my wife now and I say, I love you sweetheart, I love you with all my heart, she knows there are no strings attached, she knows that I love her when she's good, when she's not so good, when she's there, when she's not there, when she's showing up as I love her to show up, when she's not. She knows that I love her simply because of who she is, not what I can get from her. She knows that because she's told me that. Yeah, I think this is what everybody hungers for. Of course it is, of course it is. Just my being is enough, my breath, the cells that form who I am, however that manifests out into the world, to be accepted, to be enough, enough to be loved, appreciated, all of that, and to be told so through words and actions, I think the world in humanity, if they all received this at the level you're talking about, would be massively healed, massively healed. Changed overnight and again to get back to where we were a minute ago, the beginning of that is to believe in a God who loves us that way, but because we cannot imagine a God who loves us so grandly and so unconditionally, we can't allow ourselves to embrace such a behavior either. But when we decide that God loves us without condition, without a need for anything in return, then we can begin to adopt that as the quintessential behavior, as the way to be divine, and we can bring that into our interpersonal relationships, not just with our significant other, but with all family members, and with all our friends and neighbors, and ultimately with everyone whose life we touch. Yeah, wow, beautiful. Your new book called God Talk Experiences of Humanities Connections with a Higher Power starts out by saying, don't look now, but God is talking to you.  God invites you to be present to life and the experience of your talks with God.  Yes, that is how it is for me, and I want to say that God's communications come to me as they come to everybody. All of us are having conversations with God all the time. You know, when I ask God in my first conversation, why me? Why would you choose me to have this dialogue with? And God said to me, oh, sweetheart, sweetheart, don't go there, don't get bigheaded about it, such as you I'm talking to. I talk to everybody all the time. The question is not to whom does God talk? The question is who listens? And so to answer your question about my daily interaction with the divine, God's communications come to me in a hundred different ways across a thousand moments in all of my lifetimes. It could be words that I hear in my head. It could be the lyrics of the next song I hear on the radio. It could be the chance utterance of a couple that I happen to overhear talking in a coffee shop. It could be any one of a thousand ways, a feeling that simply comes over to me, a vision, an idea, a visualization that just appears to me out of nowhere for no apparent reason or a simple incident, like walking down the street in major city and coming across a man sitting on the sidewalk, leaning up against a building with a basket in front of him and a little cardboard sign that says, anything helps. And we get to decide in that moment as we walk toward that man, who am I in relationship to this experience? Who am I and who do I choose to be? We either walk by and ignore the guy completely or maybe if we're feeling a little bit charitable, we might reach in our pocket and throw a quarter or a couple of half dollars in his basket, some loose change we have in our pocket. Or maybe if we decide that we are a grand person indeed, we open our handbag or open our wallet and pull out a 20 or a 50 or a 100 and drop it into the basket. Say here, pal. Yeah. And we don't do it to impress him. We do it to remind ourselves of who we really are. Yeah. I wait till I feel a nudge to be very honest. I, living in Los Angeles, I experience it a lot. We have a pretty serious homeless situation here. And I will sometimes get this absolutely divine nudge when I see somebody often on the side of a freeway, when you're exiting a freeway to a street. And I just know I need to give enough that it feels right to me that I know I'm going to affect something positive in somebody's life. That feels really important to me. And so I guess I wait for those God nudges, if you will. I love how you expressed, how am I showing up in this moment? Because that can be answered in a flash. That can be this quick. And then you know exactly what to do, what action to take or nonaction. For me, the nudge is that the guy standing there at all. That's the nudge. You pull up to that exit to get off the ramp and get into the city streets. And there he is, standing there with his hand out. And that's the nudge. I make sure that I always have folding money in the little compartment between the two front seats of my car. I always make sure I never leave the house without folding money in that little compartment. And when I approach one of those, drive up to one of those guys at the intersection or at that turnoff, roll that window down, hand him a 10 or a 20. Again, not try to impress anybody. Choosing to demonstrate to myself who I really am, not just with the dispersal of income, but every aspect of divinity that I can access, my compassion, my patience, my understanding, my awareness. You tell a really great story in the book that you just wrote of a time when you were interviewed and you were asked a question about God and you took this pause and then this five-word statement unexpectedly came through. Can you tell us about the situation and how this came about? Yes, I was doing an interview with Matt Lauer on The Today's Show. Matt was kind. He was a good interviewer, but he was a little bit, I don't want to say cynical, but not quite totally good or ready to believe everything that I accept me on face value. So he was a little standoffish. And then at one point in the interview he said, well, Neil, you claim to be talking to God. We have about 30 seconds left before the interview is over. What's God's message to the world? And I thought to myself, you stinker. I've been broadcasting long enough to know. You didn't have to wait until you have 30 seconds left to ask me the most important question of the entire interview. What's God's message to the world? With 30 seconds, pressure. He said, could you put it in a single paragraph? And I thought, okay, what am I going to say to this guy? And then it came to me. I got it. I got the answer. And I said, Matt, I don't need a paragraph. I can put it into five words. So Matt Lauer turns to the camera. I recall the moment vividly, looks into the camera. Ladies and gentlemen, the man who claims to be talking to God now brings us God's message to the world in five words.  So I looked in the camera and I said, God's message to the world in five words? You've got me all wrong. Matt didn't know where to go with that.  He never expected me to say what I said. He had nowhere to go with it. He said, very interesting. I said, isn't it? And since we have about 23 seconds of those 30 seconds left, let me say that if I'm wrong, if I am wrong about that statement, then there's nothing further to discuss. The conversation is over. But if the statement is true that God is telling humanity you've got me all wrong, Matt, the conversation has just begun and you'd better leave people more than 30 seconds. That's when Matt Lauer realized, oh, okay. Wow, what a position. So riffing off of that, since you have traveled the entire world doing what you do, what have you seen globally with humanity? What is the pattern of what people really hunger for with God and what they could potentially have, all the things they hunger for, if they were to understand what? What don't we understand but we're hungering for? Well, what we don't understand is who we are. Most people never even asked themselves that question in a lifetime. I invite people to write on their bathroom mirror. So it's the first thing they see in the morning. Get a little black felt tip and write in the upper corner of your bathroom mirror the following four questions. Who am I? Where am I? Why am I where I am? What do I intend to do about that? And then answer the questions every morning when you see them on the bathroom mirror. Every time you see yourself in that mirror, ask those four questions. Those are questions that people rarely, if ever, ask themselves in a lifetime. And so the year and four, the year and four is an experience that something inside of them know. They're more than they're being. Most people understand that they are larger than they're experiencing themselves as, but they don't know how to get from where they are to where they want to be, because they're not clear about who they are. Most people think of themselves as this. I'm my body or my mind or maybe both. I'm of my body and my mind. I'm a sentient being in the universe. But what I was told in conversations with God is Neil, that's not who you are. Those are just pieces of equipment. It's just tools that are being used by who you are. Who you are is a spiritual being.  When we use life in that way, when we see that each moment of life brings us an opportunity to demonstrate our true identity, then we suddenly experience that for which we have been yearning from the beginning of our journey. Can you give an example? So if someone were to write those four questions on their bathroom mirror, they wake up and they look at that. Talk us through that. Give us an example of a response to each of those four questions. Question number one, who am I? I'm a spiritual entity. I'm not my body and I'm not my mind. These are just pieces of equipment, as I just said. So who I am. Who am I? I'm a spiritual entity. Question number two, where am I? I'm in the realm of the physical. There are three realms in the kingdom of God, the realm of the physical, the realm of the spiritual, and the realm of pure being, which is a combination of both. I am right now in the realm of the physical, which is the entire cosmos, the universe. And I'm in that place in the universe called earth, and I'm in this particular location, whatever city I'm in, wherever I am. This is where I am right now. Question number three, why am I where I am?  The physical realm is the only place in which a contextual field exists that allows me to experience and to express who I really am, as I explained earlier. There is nothing in their spiritual realm except pure love, always, here and now. But if I want to know myself as pure love, unless something other than pure love exists, I can't experience or express it. So I've created the spiritual experience inside of the physical realm. Why am I where I am so that I can know who I really am and so that I can demonstrate my true identity in the context of that which I am not? What do I intend to do about that? Question number four, watch me. How I move through this day and the moments of this day is my answer to that question. Wow. Throwing down the gauntlet. I like that. That's quite beautiful. Is that what you just described? Is that different than your six step process that you talk about to deepen our conversations, our relationship with God? Well, that process is simply an approach that I have found useful in my own life. And so it's an entirely different piece of information. I use the process to give people a roadmap, how they can get from where they are and where they want to be in their interaction with the divine. The six steps for a briefly are possibility, worthiness, willingness, wakefulness, acceptance, and discernment. We have to agree that it's possible to even have a conversation with God, that there even is a God. We have to be worthy. We have to think that, okay, maybe God does talk to people, but he wouldn't talk to me. Maybe he talks to the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Chief of Le Mans or the Hannah Rabbi, but not me. So unless we embrace our own worthiness, we're not going to have that communication. Then we have to move into willingness. We have to be willing to move in a way that's contrary to the cultural bias. The cultural bias tells us, come on. People don't have conversations with God. Our religions even, even our religions tell us that if you think you're having a conversation with God and that God is talking through you, you're committing blasphemy. You're committing heresy. You're committing apostasy. In certain countries of the world, that level of apostasy can wind up in your own death. So we must be willing to have the courage to say, I'm sorry, I'm experiencing that God is talking directly to me. Then the step number four, wakefulness. Once we are worthy and willing, we have to be awake. We have to be not oblivious to the messages that we're receiving, which could come to us, as I mentioned earlier, in a hundred different ways across a thousand different moments, fragrances in the air, a vision that comes to us out of no place, the chance utterance of a friend that we just happened by non-coincidence to run into on the street. So stay awake. Step number four is wakefulness. Don't fall asleep at the wheel. Step number five, acceptance. Do not reject when you get the message. Do not call it, it's just a sheer coincidence. It's serendipity, or it's my imagination. It's my imagination. Accept the message that you're receiving. Don't disown it and reject it or minimize it and do nothing about it. And finally, step number six, discernment. Learn to discern the difference between messages from the divine and messages that come to us in many different ways, from the internet, from people from books we've read, from movies we're seeing, from television shows we're watching, from many different sources. Don't get into that habit of saying everything that's going on. There are some people who say, it's a message. It's a message. I reached into my pocket the other day to get my car keys out and a $20 bill happened to fall out of my pocket. It's a message. I was supposed to drop $20 bills on the corner everywhere that I go. So discernment, to know the difference between messages from the divine and information that's coming to us in a thousand different ways. And by the way, these days with the internet, we are inundated with more messages than we would have received 20 years ago. But these days, we're just being bombarded with the information. So where's the information that's coming from God? How do we know the difference? God's messages are always, how can I say it, sending us three feelings. Freedom, joy, and love. If the message you're receiving does not feel like freedom, joy, and love, look carefully at where it came from. I love that. Because your book emphasizes that we have to be clear that the only plausible valid messages that God would send us, and this is a quote from your book, is God's messages are always in our best interest, always carry positive loving energy, and would never ask us to harm anyone. That's a true God message. They would never ask us to harm anyone in any way, not just physically, but even verbally, emotionally harm them. And rejection, by the way, is a form of harm. I'm really getting a bit bored with politics in the United States, where we have people who are running for the highest office in the land telling us that those who oppose their point of view are unworthy to even be walking the streets and generating not unity in our midst, but division. I'm right and you're wrong. Everything I say, by the way, everything I say is right, and anyone who disagrees with anything I say is wrong. Look how the person actually believes that. Yeah, it's amazing that we've gotten to this place. There's so little belief in government for people anymore, certainly in this country, I think also in a lot of countries. As you're saying this, I read something recently about forgiveness, and because forgiveness, there are so many platitudes out there that at one point, we're actually very powerful to hear, but then they get repeated and they lose their potency, such as the drinking, the poison situation. But I read something and I thought, wow, this one lands for me. And I'm somebody who I'm incredibly patient and I have just a wide margin for most people, not everybody, but for most people. And then I've got that place where somebody can overstep and do something really crappy. I mean, kind of devastating trauma crappy. And it happens very rarely, but I know once that occurs, especially if there's no ownership of the situation, it becomes difficult for me. So that's something I've been looking at, right, doing some healing around. And so here's what I read and I'd love you to weigh in on this. And it was this quote that said, forgive others, not because they deserve forgiveness, but because you deserve peace. I thought, Mic Drop, that makes sense to me. I do deserve peace around whatever happened. So what is your feeling on forgiveness and how have you been guided to release some of that in your life? Forgiveness is the least enlightened emotional reaction that any person could offer another. God will never forgive us for anything. Why? Because God understands how it could have come to pass that we would think or say or do what we believed, said or did. That doesn't mean that God condones it. It doesn't mean that God approves of it, but it does mean that God understands it. And write this on your bathroom mirror. Understanding replaces forgiveness in the mind of the master. The Pope was driving through Rome a few years ago. He's no longer with us in physical form, but Pope John the 23rd, he was shot six times by an assailant. All six bullets hit him. The guy didn't miss. He was only a few feet away. The Pope miraculously survived a six-shot bullet wound. Of course, they grabbed the guy and threw him in jail for life for attempting to assassinate the Pope. The Pope went to his jail cell after he healed from his injuries. And this is a matter of history, but I'm not making this up. It was covered widely by the media because the Pope doesn't go anywhere where the media follows him. So they were listening through the bars of the cell, and the Pope sat down, said something very interesting to the man who tried to kill him. Do you know what he said? I do not. He said, he'd nobody portrayed a few spiritual sons to a man. He gave the man his people blessing. Then he said to the man, can you help me with something? The guy said, yeah. He said, help me understand why you did what you did. And the guy told him, said, well, I'll be happy to tell you. I think that your institution, the institution that you're the head of, your religion has done more to damage my people on this planet than any other single institution known to man. And the Pope said, I see. I don't agree with your solution. I can't condone the action you took. And I hope that you and no one else ever repeats anything like it. But I do understand how you could feel that way and how you could have done what you did, given how you feel. The Pope and the man became pen pals, Debbie. They wrote letters back and forth from the jail cell to the Vatican for seven years. At the end of seven years of correspondence, the Pope asked the civil authorities in Rome. I'm not making this up. This is a matter of history. The Pope asked the civil authorities to release the man to grant him a pardon. He was sentenced to life in prison. He was given a full pardon at the request of the Pope, who said he's served seven years. He's paid his due. He's set him free. And the civil authorities granted him his freedom because the Pope was very clear. Understanding replaces forgiveness in the mind of the master. So that's true about ourselves as well. We need not to forgive ourselves because forgiveness is an arrogant statement of spiritual superiority. Understanding is the humble statement of one who clearly sees how a person could do, think, or say what occurred. Absolutely powerful. Thank you for that. It reminds me of a time I was at a workshop and we broke off into groups. And I don't recall what the conversation was, but I know one of the subjects in our little subgroup was about anger. And I had expressed, this is quite some time ago, but I had expressed I'd been through a very difficult breakup of a long-term relationship. And my partner had done some very difficult things during that time to me. And the woman who was leading that subgroup pulled me aside afterwards and said, you know, I work in prisons from time to time. And one of the things we do, if people are amenable to this, we will pull together the prisoner and the person who was, let's say, violated against or their family if they're no longer here. And we will put them together to have a conversation of understanding. So each one is fully heard. And these dialogues create, first of all, for the prisoner who may be living with a lot of guilt and difficulty getting over whatever they perpetrated, they get a tremendous healing by experiencing and hearing the other party. The other party gets to experience the prisoner who they have put a label on and have complete separation with. And sometimes it's not just once, they'll get together several times until there is completion, a real healing on both ends. And she said, you know, Debbie, you can do this yourself. You can get a friend you really trust and sit down and do a dialogue and have this person become your ex-boyfriend. And you get to say everything you needed to say, but never got to say, allow this person to assume the persona of your boyfriend and speak back and keep going. And I had a really great friend at the time who was so kind and said, I volunteer, I will do this with you. And it was such a pivotal moment for me to be able to be heard, to be understood, to say everything that I had been cut off previously to saying, and then to listen to the other side of things. And I couldn't believe how this friend of mine could tap into the energy of my ex to express back to me. It felt so real. And I wish I could tell you it was quick. It wasn't. It was hours that we did this and were committed to this process. And it was a huge turning point for me in moving on with my life, huge in the healing that it gave me. And so I really appreciate what you're talking about and the clarity of no forgiveness, no such thing, that it's truly about us taking the time to understand one another. An amazing story about the Pope. That's about as deep as you can get for something to happen and to still keep your heart open to connecting with and understanding another being. When your two-year-old grandchild spills the milk at the birthday party and destroys the table, it's now all full of milk. And grandpa says to the two-year-old, it's okay sweetheart, grandpa forgives you. No, no grandfather does that. Grandpa understands that forgiveness is not part of the equation. Not only does the grandfather not forgive the child, the grandfather actually comforts the child in the moment of her dismay. Even as God comforts us in the moment of our dismay, we find ourselves doing something, thinking something or saying something that we know is not a true representation of who we really are. Not only does God not forgive us, God comforts us. And at the end of our life, God says, come home, come home, welcome home. I believe I need to hear this. And I thank you for everything you're sharing. Neil, can you tell me about your legacy and your future work, reflecting on how much impact your career has had? What legacy do you hope to leave behind? Well, it's not about me. It's about the messages. I don't have a legacy that I hope to leave behind. But it is my hope that the messages of conversations with God will live forever. And I'm told that they will. The books have been selling now for 30 years. They've sold, not bragging, just saying, multi-millions of copies, many millions of copies, not one or two, but 15 or 20 million copies in 37 languages globally. And that's not going to stop. When I'm long gone, in fact, probably after I die, at least for the first few years after I die, the books will become a hot item because I'm no longer here. I'm not looking for a personal legacy for me. And I tell everyone wherever I go, when I open a talk someplace, I say, hi, my name is Neil. And I'm not my book. Don't confuse the two. What do we need to know about that? How are you different than your book? And who is Neil? How am I different from my book? Live with me for a week and you'll find out. I don't operate or function at the level of clarity, wisdom, or mastery that the book articulates. But I'll give myself this much. Am I doing better now than I was 30 years ago? Yes, I will say that I'm doing better. I found a path. I find the understand of what in the world I'm doing here and how I can make it work better than it did before. So I'm on my way and I've got lifetime after lifetime after lifetime to reach my ultimate destination, which is the full expression of who I really am. Do you still sing? May I ask? Do you still sing, Neil? Sure, I do. What kind of songs? What kind of music? Mostly show music, because I'm from a rich theatrical background. So one of my favorite songs is the song I do, I do from the musical play I do. And I love to do, I've performed in public, the song Trouble in River City. Either you're closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge or you're not aware of the caliber of disaster indicated by the presence of a pool table in your community. We've got a couple of my friends right here I say trouble right here in River City. Don't tap me, I'll do the whole thing.  Whoa, we could go back and forth, especially old Broadway tunes because I came up in the world as an actress and a singer. That's what I did the majority of my life till I got into radio. And so, yes, that still holds a huge place in my heart. Thank you for even that snippet. You know that wonderful lyric line sometimes in the evening when you do not see I study the small things you do constantly. I memorize moments that I'm fond of my cup, run it over with love. I've sung that song to my wife more than once. My cup run it over. Yes, thank you. What are you next, dare to dream, Neil? This is dare to dream. What are your future dreams and goals? I'll be leaving here soon. I'm 80 years old, I could be gone tomorrow. So my dream is that I could use whatever time I have left here in this particular physical body in a way that could more fully demonstrate my understanding of who I really am and my understanding of who you it is all other people really are. That would be my goal. That would be my dream. Thank you so much for being on the show today and all you shared. I really appreciate you. I appreciate you as well. Those are very kind things to say to me. How nice of you to have invited me to share these moments with you. Thank you so much. Everybody, Neil Donald Walsh, you can get his new book. You can also follow up in the work he's doing right now and he's still doing zooms, which go out all over the world. Go to his website for more.  There is another way. There is another way to experience God. There is another way to live life. Your differences do not have to create divisions. Your contrasts do not have to produce conflicts. Thanks for joining us today. Subscribe to this number one transformation conversation, Dare to Dream with Debbie Dashinger. Please leave a comment and share. If you're listening to us on podcast and want to see the animation, both of us go to youtube.com slash Debbie Dashinger or on Spotify. You can also find the video next week on the show will be the amazing John P. Milton. He is a meditation and Qigong instructor, author and environmentalist. And John P. Milton is the founder of Sacred Passage and The Way of Nature, John pioneered vision questing in contemporary western culture in the 1940s. Thank you for joining us today on the show.


UAM Animal Science is a really good program. The agriculture program in general is because we do a lot of hands-on teaching. We want you to have practical knowledge so that you can leave and go into the workforce and be productive. One thing that we've done this year is add sheep to our mix. We want to teach our students how to handle work, handle rays, this species. So we have a Cotodden sheep here, which is a hair sheep. The hair sheep, they produce wool, but they shed their wool naturally in the springtime, which is a benefit that you don't have to share with them. So this is strictly a meat breed in our hot, humid environment. The hair sheep do much better. They have higher parasite resistance as well. They do have a much more of a herding instinct, which is helpful at times when handling them. It also can work against you if you don't handle them well. Sheep can actually be turned and set on the rear end and worked. They'll sit there on the rear end and you can check them for parasites. You can trim their feet. You can't do a goat that way and you can't do a cow that way. You know what I'm saying? UAM has cattle, and we have a great beef cattle operation, and there are benefits to raising sheep with cattle. There's what's called multi-species grazing, where what cows don't like, cows eat what sheep don't like. They benefit each other in their pasture management, also they benefit each other with parasites. Cow eat the sheep worms, sheep eat the cow worms, and they don't develop in the other species, so they actually help with the parasites and intestinal worms. So there was advantages to having sheep on campus for that reason. So we have Axl, Rose, and Slash, which are our dogs. So sheep, like any species, are prone to predation. Now a cow can ward off a coyote pretty well, and a calf grows pretty big pretty quick, so you don't have to worry about it as much. But even the adult sheep, like the ones we have here, are prone to dog attacks or coyote attacks, so they need more protection. So one thing that we do is we have livestock guardian dogs, and there's a few breeds that are pretty adept at that. We have primarily Great Pyrenees, Anatolian Shepherd, Ockbosh, and their job is to protect the sheep. Their job is to bark when the coyote shows up and ward them off, or defend the sheep if the coyote gets in the pen. Here we have developed a course with a lab called Sheep and Goat Production that we will be hands-on with these sheep, and that we'll go through in a semester the basic production practices of sheep and goats, and then the lab will be hands-on with them, and we'll show them how to handle and treat and manage the sheep herd. I hope that this program, it has a lot of potential. There is a vastly underserved community in Southeast Arkansas and really across the South, U.S., in education, and opportunities for those that want to learn more about small, ruminant production, so I hope that we fill a void there.