The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 200, titled:
The Astrology Podcast 200th Episode Retrospective
With Chris Brennan and guest Leisa Schaim
Episode originally released on April 17, 2019
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Andrea Johnson
Transcription released August 4, 2022
Copyright © 2022 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. This is Episode 200 of the podcast, and today is Sunday, April 14, 2019, starting at 1:25 PM in Denver, Colorado. Joining me today is Leisa Schaim. Hey, Leisa.
LEISA SCHAIM: Hey, Chris.
CB: And we’re gonna be doing a retrospective episode to talk about the fact that this is the 200th episode—I’ve been doing the podcast for nearly seven years now—and we’re gonna talk about some episode highlights, we’re gonna talk about the history of the podcast. This is also our first day in the new recording studio since we just moved and now have a dedicated recording studio for the podcast.
So we’re gonna mess with and talk about some different technical stuff that we have with different cameras for the video version, and also answer some listener questions that were submitted over the past few days—sort of like meta questions about the podcast itself and its production and some of the highlights over the years. So it’s gonna be long sort of discussion episode where we’re gonna sort of ramble a bit, but it should be a good time.
LS: Mm-hmm. Sounds good.
CB: All right, so, where should we get started?
LS: Well, maybe with how the podcast got started.
CB: Yeah, so how the podcast got started. Yeah, so it’s been seven years now almost. I started it in June of 2012 and it’s now April of 2019.
LS: Right. Yeah, it’s been kind of wild to see the evolution of it since the beginning, since I was kind of around for all of that.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah.
CB: And you are not an auditory learner.
LS: No.
CB: So you actually haven’t listened to a ton of the episodes.
LS: Right.
CB: But you’ve heard me talk about almost pretty much every single one.
LS: Yeah, I hear basically the backstory of every episode.
CB: You do the behind-the-scenes stuff.
LS: Yeah. Exactly.
CB: And that’s a little bit of what we’re gonna get into today. I’ve also got a new camera setup—since we’ve got a new studio—that I’ve been building for the past few months for when we finally did get a dedicated podcast recording studio that I’m going to be messing with a little bit today. We have our first camera, which is the two-shot that we’re looking into for both of us, and then we can switch over to Guest 1’s camera—which is the ‘Leisa-cam’, zooming in on Leisa—and then another camera for when I’m talking. Zooming in for me.
So that’s gonna be a lot of fun. I’m really excited about doing that with some interviews, and I’m gonna try to focus more on in-person interviews starting this week actually. I mean, starting with this one, but especially later this month. I have a bunch of astrologers coming in. So I’m gonna be getting the hang of that, but I’m gonna try to learn a little bit of it as we’re going through this episode.
LS: Yeah, we’re kind of experimenting. Because we literally moved, you know, what, two weeks ago?
CB: Yeah. This is both like, you know, an epoch in terms of the podcast itself hitting Episode 200 and we’re gonna be doing a retrospective, but also looking forward and literally opening up the next chapter of the podcast today…
LS: Right.
CB: …as we’re recording this in the new studio. So also looking forward a little.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: All right, so let’s go back to the beginning. So the podcast started in 2012. I mean, if you listen to some of the back catalog of the podcast at this point—especially some of the early episodes—you’ll hear me telling a bit of the story, especially the very first episode of the podcast where (Episode 1 in June 2012) I outlined a sort of vision for what I wanted to do with the podcast and what I wanted to accomplish. And I went back and listened to that again recently, and it was actually funny how much of what I outlined way back in 2012 I’ve actually accomplished since that time.
LS: Yeah. Definitely. Yeah, I mean, you had some pretty high aspirations for what you wanted to do with it, to kind of do high-quality, both technically and educationally.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, I wanted to do a broad, general podcast addressing the history, the philosophy, and the techniques of astrology, as well as dipping into other issues, like ethics and the social world of astrologers and other things like that…
LS: Right.
CB: …to get a pretty broad, cross-spectrum of the practice of astrology both today, as well as in ancient times.
LS: Right. Yeah, and I just heard you replay the clip earlier, and it’s also interesting to hear, you know, almost seven years later how much more comfortable you are talking on the air as well, because it sounded a little bit stilted, the beginning of the first episode.
CB: Yeah, 200 episodes will do a lot for you. And somebody asked—I think one of our very first questions that came in was from Maren Altman, and she asked, “Do you ever edit out cussing or mistakes in dialogue? Everything sounds put together and natural, so I’m skeptical.”
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Which is actually a good question because what’s funny—if you go back and listen to the early episodes—I was doing all my own editing for a long time, and one of the biggest things that I had to edit out was breaths, especially in solo shows.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Because if you’re just talking to yourself, you’ll have a tendency to take a lot of deep breaths, and especially if you do long, run-on sentences like I do. I would talk and then take a deep breath and that would be really loud when you’re breathing into a microphone.
LS: Right. Yeah, and that was more of an issue early on ‘cause you were doing more solo shows.
CB: Yeah.
LS: Yeah.
CB: And the other thing is you’ll hear silence in between my sentences. You won’t hear breaths because I was actually overdoing it. I would just remove all the sound in between…
LS: Yeah.
CB: …sentences, so it actually sounds kind of funny and almost even more stilted in the early episodes. Yeah, so doing anything enough times you eventually get a little bit better, and I’m still working on it. So there’s still things that I do or even some funny habits that I probably picked up along the way over the years that I need to get rid of at some point. But I’ve, in the process, lost others a little bit, I think.
LS: Yeah, I mean, and you’ve definitely gotten more comfortable and—not loose, but, you know, a little bit more relaxed.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So going back to the history, this wasn’t my first podcast. There was actually a podcast some people know about that came before this one that was called Traditional Astrology Radio. And that was originally started by David Hernandez in June of 2009; he’s a traditional astrologer that does Medieval astrology primarily. And he started it on a website called BlogTalkRadio, where you can go and set up an account and it would give you a space, almost like a little website or a page for doing a podcast. But most people that were using that, you would call in on the telephone so the audio quality was really terrible.
He started it and he only did for a few months, between June and September of 2009, and then he handed it over in September of 2009 to a friend of mine named Jacqui Menkes who I knew from Kepler College. She was a Kepler graduate and I had gone to Kepler around the same time that she did. So she took over that show, Traditional Astrology Radio, in September of 2009 and did actually a ton of episodes from then until November of 2010. But then she decided that she wanted to go back to school, and she was gonna study at Nick Campion’s program to get a Master’s degree in studies sort of broadly related to the history of astrology.
So she asked me. I had been a guest on the show before with her in the past, and she asked me if I wanted to take over. And I had become known as, you know, one of the people that was doing Hellenistic astrology and everything at that point and was already teaching my courses and lecturing around the world on the subject at that point. So we actually recorded an episode together on my birthday—on November 1, 2010—where she handed the podcast over to me. And, you know, it was kind of interesting and notable at the time, but it was also kind of like a blow-off thing.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: I mean, I was honored to take it over from her, and I had some plans with it and I did maybe half a dozen episodes or something with it over the next year or two. She had actually done a ton of interviews and interviewed a bunch of different astrologers and didn’t really keep it restricted to traditional astrology at all.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: When I took it over, I felt like I needed to keep it restricted to traditional astrology, and I did interviews with like Robert Zoller, Alan White, Ben Dykes, and other people like that. But I also felt it a little bit constrained since I study many different types of astrology and I incorporate pieces from both the modern and the ancient astrological traditions. So I was kind of doing it sporadically for a couple of years, and I think I only did like half a dozen episodes. You can still find a bunch of them posted on TraditionalAstrologyRadio.com, I believe.
So eventually what happened is around June of 2012, I don’t know how I got it but I got some notification that the domain, TheAstrologyPodcast.com, was open or that it had just been dropped by somebody else who owned it. I think I was just doing a random search one night on a domain name site.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So I bought it ‘cause I immediately recognized that was like a great domain to have and it would make it easier to get seen if you could brand a podcast like that using that name.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So I went ahead, and very quickly, I did end up checking in with the previous owner, and I found out that it was an astrologer I knew named Jeffrey Kirshner, who runs Sasstrology.com.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So I actually messaged him, and he said, “Yeah, I’ve had it for years, but I don’t have any plans on doing anything with it, so go nuts,” or something to that effect. So I did, and I launched the first episode of The Astrology Podcast pretty quickly, and the first episode was released on June 29, 2012.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I remember you getting excited about that domain being open. It’s funny, I mean, back then you had bought a bunch of domains. But I do remember very specific moments where you were like, “Hey, Leisa, this domain is open. I’m gonna buy it.”
CB: Yeah.
LS: I then you never know at that point whether it’s gonna turn into something bigger or not. And you didn’t know either. But, you know, just looking back it’s interesting.
CB: Well, what’s funny about that timeframe is that was, at the time, one of the least important things that was happening.
LS: Right.
CB: Like the previous month, the United Astrology Conference just took place in New Orleans in May of 2012. And that was like a huge conference for me.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: That conference only happens occasionally. The previous one before that was four years earlier in 2008…
LS: Right.
CB: …and it had over 1,500 astrologers attending. I ended up giving four talks, I think, at that conference, including the commencement speech at Kepler—the very last graduation of Kepler College while they still had their degree program.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Ben Dykes and I had just discovered the rationale for the planetary joys the month before in April. And so, I quickly worked that into a lecture of mine and announced, for example, that we had found the rationale for how the four classical elements of earth, air, fire, and water had been first assigned to the signs of the zodiac. We literally discovered it that month and then I announced it in May of 2012 at UAC.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Patrick Watson and I were running the website PoliticalAstrologyBlog.com at the time, which I’ve since shut down, but we were doing heavy, heavy coverage of the 2012 Presidential Election pretty much the entire race. And at the time I actually—in May of 2012—ended up on Fox News to do an interview on Fox & Friends because we had made a prediction that Hillary Clinton would definitely run in 2016, and was interviewed about that, as well as other things related to the upcoming election.
LS: Right.
CB: So it was a pretty big time where there was a lot of stuff going on. And then somewhere in the midst of that I just stumbled across this domain, TheAstrologyPodcast.com, and decided to launch another podcast.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And part of the reason I decided to that was because, like I said, I felt constrained by just doing traditional astrology. And the opportunity I saw with having TheAstrologyPodcast.com is being able to have a much broader discussion and showcase many different types of astrology and applications of astrology and ways of thinking about it, which is something I got a really good background in when I went to Kepler College, starting, I think, when I was still in my late teens, right out of high school.
LS: Yeah. Yeah, I remember you early on trying to think of topics for the traditional astrology podcast and that that was much more constraining.
CB: Yeah, and if you look at that I did some interesting stuff. Like I did a really good talk—the sound quality is terrible ‘cause I was literally calling it in on a telephone.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And I did a great episode there on house division at the time that really stands up well still today. I did an interview with Robert Zoller. I got an interview with Alan White before he passed away, who was one of the big promoters of Hellenistic astrology in the late ‘90s and 2000s.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And also did episodes with Demetra and Ben.
LS: Right. And the BlogTalkRadio, I remember you also getting annoyed with the ads.
CB: Yeah, and that’s what caused me to move at the end. They started splicing ads into the audio files, and it was for like really weird stuff—like I don’t even know—like Viagra and stuff like that at the beginning of the show.
LS: Right.
CB: And that really put me off, in addition to the terrible sound quality. So yeah, I decided to set it up on Traditional Astrology Radio on my own website. And then with The Astrology Podcast, I tried to think everything out ahead of time. I tried to plan it out as a little spur of the moment, but I also tried to be deliberate about what I was doing. And one of the things that I did right at the beginning of The Astrology Podcast is I invested and bought what to me at the time was a super expensive microphone. It was like a $200 Rode podcaster microphone, which is a USB microphone. But it’s like the best USB microphone you can get and that was a great investment from the start. And I tried to be really conscious about not just sound quality, but the quality of the podcast in general and always pushing to improve it.
LS: Yeah. Yeah, you’ve definitely kind of reinvested money into the podcast continually from the beginning. And I remember that. You know, back then, as you said, that was kind of a more expensive commitment. I was like, “Are you sure?”
CB: Yeah, ‘cause I had been studying astrology since 1999-2000, since I was about 14- or 15-years-old. I studied it really intensely on my own for a few years, and then I found out about Kepler College and was luckily able—through the help of my Mom and my family, my Mom and my sister—to go to Kepler College and study pretty much straight out of high school there. And the first year was entirely just studying the history of astrology, then in the second year I was exposed to the study of Hellenistic and Indian astrology at the same time of course with Demetra George and Dennis Harness.
And I continued some of my classes at Kepler, but at one point I moved from Denver, where I’m from, to Seattle to study and be closer to Kepler and to access this great library that they had there at the time, and also to cut down on travel costs. Because at Kepler at the time there were three semesters a year, and every semester, right in the middle, everybody would fly to Seattle for a week of intensive lectures and stuff.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And so, I moved to Seattle for a year in order to cut down on some of those costs. During the middle of that I ended up taking a class in Hellenistic astrology with Demetra and in love with that approach and then moved from there to Maryland to study a Project Hindsight for two years, where they were translating some of the ancient astrological texts. And I ended up living with Robert Schmidt and his wife, Ellen Black. My friend, Nick Dagan Best, was up the street, as well as my friend, Meredith Garston. Curtis Manwaring was there, as well as Bill Johnston and Alan White. Demetra came to visit occasionally, and we also held a couple of conferences there. And I started writing my book during that time on Hellenistic astrology by 2006.
So eventually I moved back to Denver in 2007, after my sister passed away, and I came back to support my Mom and my family and then started going about sort of launching things here in Denver. I launched the Denver Astrology Group in May of 2008, which holds monthly meetings here in Denver on the second Saturday of each month at the Mercury Cafe. The United Astrology Conference that year was in Denver…
LS: Right.
CB: …coincidentally in May of 2008. And we started talking around that time when you came to the first meeting of the Denver Astrology Group.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And then your first conference was that UAC in May.
LS: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Did you win a scholarship or something like that, or what?
LS: Mm, you know, I can’t remember at this point. I must have, you know, because it was so early on, but I knew it took a few different pieces of things like that to get there. Yeah, I must have. Oh, I volunteered. Yeah, that’s what it was.
CB: Okay.
LS: Yeah, so I volunteered at registration that year.
CB: Got it.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, and so I started doing that group. I was working on my book at that point and I started lecturing. I spoke at my first conference, I think, in 2006, which was at NORWAC. I attended my first conference in Seattle in 2005 while I was living there, the Northwest Astrology Conference, then I started speaking there in 2006 and 2007. And then I was kind of on the astrology lecture circuit, and I was also volunteering with different organizations and I became, first, the president of the Association for Young Astrologers and then eventually the research director of the National Council for Geocosmic Research, the NCGR.
Yeah, so I started like flying around and doing stuff, but at one point when I moved back to Denver—and especially to downtown Denver in 2009—I still needed to have a day job just to pay rent. ‘cause of my consultation—my business doing consultations. Otherwise, you know, I didn’t have a book out. I was doing some blogging and stuff like that but that hadn’t really fully taken off yet.
LS: Right.
CB: So I had a day job just as a barista at Starbucks.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: But then in 2010, I was a research director of the NCGR and I organized this day-long, pre-conference workshop that was called—what was it called? It was called From Ancient to Post-Modern Astrology—no.
LS: I can’t remember the exact title. It was like Looking Forward—something like that.
CB: Something about post-modern astrology now. There’s been a revival of all of these ancient traditions and all of these different traditions of astrology—like where do we go from here? And in order to figure that out, my idea was to have leading astrologers representing each of the major astrological traditions over the past 2,000 years, and approaches, give a brief talk of like 30 minutes or something—or 40 minutes—describing what their tradition is and defining it, talking about in what ways it was innovative or different or unique, and then what parts of that tradition has to contribute to some future synthesis that should be included above anything else.
LS: Right.
CB: And I had Rob Hand and Ben Dykes and Demetra George and just a ton of great speakers—Rick Tarnas—giving talks in that day-long workshop in February of 2010 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And then I got back from it and I had to go back to my crappy day job making coffee, and it was like a really stark contrast.
LS: Yeah.
CB: And I—one day very shortly after that—was just like I need to quit. I need to make it as an astrologer at this point, otherwise, or fail miserably.
LS: Mm-hmm. Right. Yes, I recall.
CB: Yeah, you received a call that day.
LS: Yeah, and you called me on a break and was like, “I’ve decided to quit my day job.” And I was a little surprised, but I was like, “Okay.” Had we decided to move in at that point? It was around then.
CB: It was around then. Either I quit before and then we decided to move in together, or vice versa—one of the two.
LS: Yeah, they were really close together.
CB: Yeah, so we also ended up getting a place together then in like April or May of 2009.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: We found a place in Denver, like literally across the street from where I was living currently at the time.
LS: Yeah, 2010.
CB: 2010, okay. So in early 2010, I literally had just quit my day job and was trying to make it as an astrologer. And like that summer when we first moved in together—the first couple of years were pretty lean years, but that summer especially was pretty rough…
LS: Right.
CB: …‘cause we were both pretty broke.
LS: Yeah. Definitely.
CB: Yeah, so I had just quit my day job, and I was trying to get by doing consultations. I had my Hellenistic course, which I was selling, but it was sort of touch-and-go in terms of, you know, sign-ups during any given month varying. And that’s something, especially when you’re early as an astrologer, you have to get used—it’s not constant. You can have one month where a lot of people are inquiring about consultations and one month where there’s like not that many. Or if you’re doing classes, you can have one month where there’s a lot of sign-ups and another where there’s not.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So over that summer we were breaking down expenses basically.
LS: Yeah. Definitely. Like the spaghetti noodles versus the sauce.
CB: Yeah, we would go to the grocery store and divide up you would pay for the spaghetti noodles and I would pay for the sauce, and that was like a big discussion about breaking down those sorts of expenses. So that’s the context. And during all of that I’m also trying to write this book on Hellenistic astrology. I’m occasionally going on trips to give talks at different places around the US, as well as around the world. I ended up, I think, in Australia speaking in Melbourne in 2010. And then somehow in the midst of that, at the end of the year, I take over doing that little podcast from Jacqui in November of 2010, starting exactly on my birthday that year.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So that was the context by starting that podcast. But as a result of that, partially, episodes of that podcast were really sporadic and spread out. Like every few months I might do one or I would have a cluster of them, but in two years I only ended up doing like half a dozen or maybe a few more episodes. So eventually, by June of 2012, I launched The Astrology Podcast, tried to be deliberate about it, had a vision for it. You can go back and listen to that and here how pretty much everything I’ve tried to accomplish or I wanted to accomplish I’ve since more or less accomplished in the past seven years.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: But even then in terms of the history of the podcast it developed pretty slowly. So some people have asked me about the chart for the podcast. Ironically, the launch wasn’t really elected and there’s like two or three different possible electional charts for the start of the podcast.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: The main one that I saved and that I put in a blog post on the website—which is the very first post you’ll see on The Astrology Podcast website if you go all the way back—is actually for when I first discovered and registered the domain TheAstrologyPodcast.com.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Do you have the data for that?
LS: Yeah, it looks like it was June 23, 2012 at 5:14 PM.
CB: So that’s not a particularly amazing chart. Should I put that up?
LS: Sure.
CB: Okay, what is it again?
LS: So June 23, 2012 at 5:14 PM.
CB: Let me do that for the video version. Here it is. All right, 2012. June, what?
LS: June 23.
CB: What time?
LS: 5:14 PM.
CB: Are you sure?
LS: Pretty sure.
CB: I think the chart we had had Virgo rising for the post that’s on the blog.
LS: Hmm. I’ll pull it up real quick and make sure.
CB: Okay. Not Virgo. It had Libra rising. So I’ll pull it up right now…
LS: Okay.
CB: …on the podcast website. So on TheAstrologyPodcast.com, the initial post, it just says, “The Astrology Podcast launch.” And whatever I was calling the launch chart at the time—I think I had a few different electional charts and I just put this as an initial, seminal moment—was June 23, 2012 at 5…
LS: 14 PM.
CB: 14 PM. Oh, that’s weird. But then that’s really not the image right there.
LS: No, it’s not.
CB: That’s hilarious. Okay, so there seems to be a discrepancy between what I wrote there versus the chart image that I posted. I’m pretty sure the chart image that I posted—if you can figure out what day this was—has Libra rising and the Moon in Cancer. Anyway, so there were a few different ones that were possible launches. ‘Cause during any event you’ll end up having a series of different important turning points and moments, and sometimes there’s a question of, you know, what was the most important starting point or the most symbolically significant moment, as we talked about on our episode on electional astrology a few months ago.
LS: Right. So there’s buying the domain. There’s launching the website for it. There’s recording the first podcast. There’s posting the first podcast.
CB: Yeah, and we’ve got charts for all of those, and I’ll see if I can make that data available.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: I did find one today that I’m pretty sure was the data for recording the first episode of The Astrology Podcast and then releasing it.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Do you have that?
LS: Yeah, June 29, 2012. And you thought it was 8:52 AM for the start of the recording.
CB: Yeah, so what sucks about this is that, hilariously, in the very first episode of The Astrology Podcast, if you go back and listen to it, I did say the date but I didn’t say the time that I started recording it.
LS: Right.
CB: Which is ironic ‘cause in probably most of the last 200 episodes—almost every single one—I’ve said the exact time.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And the reason for that is because I usually try to elect both when we start the recording of the episode, as well as when I later launch or release the episode publicly.
LS: Right.
CB: Those are the two electional charts. Sometimes I can get really good ones, but I can’t always. But when I can, I at least try to adjust it a little bit as a short-term election just to maximize the potential even within a limited timeframe.
LS: Right. Yeah.
CB: Yeah, so what was the data for that again? June 29.
LS: So June 29, 2012 at 8:52 AM.
CB: I didn’t have this saved but what we figured out was that we have a release date. I think I released the first episode publicly around 12:30 PM, on June 29, 2012.
LS: Right.
CB: But then in the recording it says that I’m recording it on June 29, which means I must have recorded it early that morning.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: But then the thing with all the early episodes is I would go back through and I would edit them and clean it up a little bit and both remove the breaths in between the sentences, but I would also remove excessive use of the word ‘um’ and things like that…
LS: Yeah.
CB: …to make it sound a little bit more polished.
LS: Right.
CB: So we think that this is actually the chart though that I elected for the start of recording that first episode. And I actually like this chart quite a bit. So it has probably about 17° of Leo rising, which is the degree of my Descendant.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: The ruler of the Descendant is the Sun in the 12th at 8° of Cancer, but I would have been mitigating it by putting the Midheaven at about 8° of Taurus. There’s a nice Venus-Jupiter conjunction at 7.3° of Gemini in the 11th whole sign house.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And Mercury is at 3° of Leo—3° and 56 minutes—and it’s applying just barely to 3° and 58 minutes of Gemini, where Jupiter’s located.
LS: Yeah, and I could see you definitely doing that because that would put the ruler of the 11th in the 1st, and then applying to Jupiter in 11th in Gemini.
CB: Yeah, and I think I specifically remember trying to get that election and that potentially being one of my elected charts for that month. Because one of the things I was doing was picking out electional charts. At some point I started writing a column for The Mountain Astrologer Magazine where I was doing electional charts.
LS: Right.
CB: I think it might have been later that year. Anyway, so that’s probably the recording of the first episode, which, to me, is pretty symbolically significant.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: The Moon’s in Scorpio at 11°, not far off of my natal Sun at 9°. And then the launch of the first episode was later that day. The timestamp on that episode on the server says that it was 11:30, but I think that might be off by an hour due to Daylight Savings Time. And I think I remember releasing it with Libra rising. So it was probably like 12:30 with 0 Libra rising. The ruler of the Ascendant is Venus in Gemini in the 9th whole sign house, with Jupiter in Gemini. And Mercury’s over in the 11th house in Leo.
LS: Right.
CB: And it’s enclosed between the rays of Venus and Jupiter.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and that’s great—the ruler of the 9th in the 11th.
CB: Yeah.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So I think that’s the release of the first episode. So there’s a bit of a debate—there’s when I first registered the domain. I have another chart for when I first uploaded files to that domain or part of the domain on the server.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: There’s when I recorded the first episode, and there was when I launched the first episode, so take your pick.
LS: Right.
CB: It is interesting, this Venus-Jupiter conjunction though. Because there was another important turning point a few years later in the podcast when I launched Patreon, and that was the turning point when I started getting funding for the podcast, but also doing four episodes a month. And that was also around the time that we did the first forecast episode with me and Austin and Kelly, and it also had a Venus-Jupiter conjunction, but this time in Leo. And that was a super important turning point.
LS: Hmm, that’s an interesting repetition. I mean, something I noticed also looking back at those charts for that first week—in between when you got the domain and recorded and released the first podcast—is that Venus was stationing direct that week. So it was right in between those dates. It was like around June 26-27, I think.
CB: Right.
LS: And Venus was your profected lord of the year, it turns out.
CB: What was I in?
LS: You were in a 4th house year.
CB: Okay.
LS: But, you know, it activates anything touching Venus, as each of us has talked about with annual profections. And your Venus happens to be in the 11th natally, ruling the 9th.
CB: Right. And conjunct also the degree of the Midheaven.
LS: Yeah, so Venus stationing direct would have been an important activation that week.
CB: Yeah, and I literally—what did we say? What day did we say that I bought the domain?
LS: 23rd.
CB: Okay. So that week I literally just stumbled across this domain. And that’s what’s so weird is sometimes something so random like that can just change everything in your life…
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: …and you can’t fully anticipate that.
LS: Right. It wasn’t clear at all, I would say, the first few years at least that this was gonna become such a big thing.
CB: No—and that’s what’s funny. So now we can talk about the actual history of the podcast, which this has been a long preamble to get there as usual. But if you go to TheAstrologyPodcast.com, and you go to the Episodes page, you’ll see the full list of 199—and about to be—200 episodes at this point. And if you look at the dates on those episodes, they’re all really spaced out for like quite a while.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: The first episode was just a solo show where I talked about my background and explained my ambitious outline for what I wanted to accomplish with the podcast. So I had a very detailed outline. My first guest on Episode 2 was Ben Dykes, which is really funny and great since he’s been one of my main recurring guests because of course he’s one of my closest friends. But he’s also somebody who is doing some of the most important work, I think, in the astrological community today in terms of just the dozens of translations that he’s done of ancient astrological texts.
LS: Right.
CB: So it’s funny that he was actually my first guest on the show. He had just released his book on electional astrology, which was titled Choices and Inceptions: Traditional Electional Astrology, and at that was a compilation of different translations of Medieval texts of different Medieval authors on electional astrology.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So Ben was the first guest and that was July 19, 2012. And all of the early episodes are just either me doing solo shows or me having guests on who were just close friends of mine at the time.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Nick Dagan Best appeared in August—August 25, 2012—in Episode 3 to talk about how we define an astrologer and who counts as an astrologer. We also touched on the ‘astrologist’ word in that episode, which is funny ‘cause I’ve thought about doing another episode on that as a follow-up at some point. That’s in August. So that’s like a month, a month-and-a-half later. Then on Episode 4, Patrick Watson, my other close friend, appears in September 2012 to do Episode 4, which was on “The Astrology of the 2012 Presidential Election.” And they’re all just kind of spaced out. The fifth episode of The Astrology Podcast is just called “The Fifth Episode of the Astrology Podcast.”
LS: Right. That made me laugh in retrospect.
CB: Right.
LS: Because there were topics in there. I don’t know. Yeah.
CB: And it’s just a sort of random assortment of a bunch of different stuff. So I didn’t know what name to give the title of that episode and was still getting the hang of it. That was with Patrick again. And I think there’s this long gap—because that fifth episode’s in January of 2013—and then the next episode (Episode 6) is titled, “NORWAC Recap with Kelly Surtees.” And this is Kelly’s first appearance on the show, and the date is June 3, 2013, so we jumped forward a bunch of months.
I’m just trying to get by doing consultations as much as I can, teaching my classes, occasionally having to travel for work and prepare those lectures, preparing new lectures for my courses. I was trying to write articles for The Mountain Astrologer and other things like that and just wearing the 20 different hats that you have to wear as a professional, self-employed astrologer, if that’s your full-time vocation.
LS: Right.
CB: So the podcast was very much just this blow-off thing that I would do occasionally when I had something interesting to talk about…
LS: Right.
CB: …as well as somebody to talk about it with. But this was interesting ‘cause this is the first time I talked to Kelly. And what’s funny, the first time I had her on the podcast, she appeared in Episode 6 and then the next three episodes. Episode 7 on Mercury retrograde was with Kelly, and then we did an episode on house division with Kelly. So as soon as I got together with Kelly, we just started doing a ton of episodes. Because I had only actually just met her finally in person at UAC in 2012 the year before, around the time I was starting the podcast. But then it was definitely a year later, when I hung out with her at NORWAC, that we became really good friends.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So as soon as we got back from that we just started doing podcasts together, which was a lot of fun making a new friend like that and being able to connect with somebody else who had gone through the same stuff as me in terms of trying to make it as a professional astrologer, and being roughly the same age range.
LS: Mm-hmm. Right, ‘cause she also started quite young.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, well, and Kelly had always tried to connect with us, like when I was with AYA, but she was in Australia and we never met in person. And so, she had tried to reach out, but I had never talked with her that much until she really just came up and introduced herself at UAC in 2012, and then, again, seeing her at NORWAC. And that really, you know, sparked something. So I really always encourage people to try to make that first move to reach out to people if you’re interested in connecting with them because sometimes that’s all it takes, and then it can start, you know, a lifelong friendship.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Yeah, so Kelly and I did a few episodes. I had Kenneth Johnson on to talk about the relationship Hellenistic and Indian astrology. I started to branch out beyond just my basic friend group at that point a little bit…
LS: Right.
CB: …although Kenneth Johnson was a friend. Austin makes his first appearance on Episode 10, titled, “The Future of Astrology,” when he was still the president of the Association for Young Astrologers, which I handed off to him…
LS: Right.
CB: …‘cause I was trying to get rid of it
LS: Yeah.
CB: I had been the president for like a long time, but then there was nobody to take over. And finally, I found Austin and handed it off to him. And this was part of our—it wasn’t really our transition, but we were definitely trying to promote AYA at the time and some of what he was doing.
LS: Mm-hmm. Right.
CB: So that’s funny, Austin appears the first time in August of 2013. Nick Dagan Best comes back for Episode 11 when he was just publishing his book on Uranus and the United States chart.
LS: Right.
CB: Rob Hand was my first big guest that was not like a super close friend, but we were certainly friendly and had hung out and talked at conferences and stuff, and he’d always been super supportive. He appeared on Episode 12, which came out December 9, 2013, titled, “Robert Hand on Reconciling Modern and Traditional Astrology.” And that was definitely my first big, you know, guest, I believe.
LS: Right. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, and I know you’ve been trying to get him back since, right?
CB: Yeah, I mean, Rob has appeared on one or two other episodes of the podcast early on. We did another one on sect at some point later on and like the early history. Somebody asked me, “What guest have you wanted to have?” or something.
LS: Right. There were a couple of people who asked that, like who have you always wanted to have on.
CB: So Melissa Stargazer on Facebook asks, “Is there someone you really want on the podcast you haven’t been able to get on yet? What’s your goal for the future of the podcast?” She’ll answer it later. And then Kent Bye asks, “Who do you most want to interview?” And one of the interviews I still really want to do, and I hope I get it at some point, is I want to have Rob back on to do a bio episode to talk about his life.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: I don’t think there’s enough documentation about his life and his history, and I know a fair bit about it, but there’s parts that I don’t know that are more details about it, especially things like the formation of Project Hindsight. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to piece together that translation project and the revival of traditional astrology and his role in it and other people’s roles. But he’s been doing less speaking engagements over the past few years and hasn’t been in the community as much. There’s a lot of astrologers like that that are in the Pluto in Leo generation that we’re starting to see be a little bit less active, or in some instances, we’ve lost certain astrologers. One interview that I always wished I could have gotten was James Holden, while James Holden was still alive.
LS: Right.
CB: His book, A History of Horoscopic Astrology, is still my favorite book on the history of astrology, and he did a lot of really important work in that area. I’m glad that Nina Gryphon actually did get an interview with him—that was like a written interview at one point on her blog—and I think that’s still around, but I always wished that I’d gotten an audio interview with him.
LS: Right. Yeah.
CB: So having Rob Hand back on at some point to do a bio episode is one of my big ones that I really hope that I can get. I was disappointed I couldn’t get Liz Greene on for that episode where we talked about her new book about Jung’s studies of astrology.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: That was one that I had hoped I’d get. Yeah, those are two that come to mind.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, so that takes us back to the outline. So where are we at?
LS: Let’s see.
CB: I mean, basically, I’m just doing this sporadically and these are all very spread out at that point…
LS: Right.
CB: …and there’s sometimes long gaps. A lot of the early shows, you’ll more commonly see me doing solo shows, but I got a lot of complaints early on that people didn’t like it. There were really mixed reviews where some people really did not like the solo shows and they really preferred dialogues because they thought it was easier to follow or more engaging to listen to two people talk rather than one person just monologue.
LS: Right. And you got some positive feedback too, but I know that you were concerned about, you know, the negative.
CB: Yeah, it was really tricky because one of the ones that I always got the most positive feedback about was Episode 17, which is titled, “The Rationale for the Significations of the Houses.” I put together a series of lectures for my Hellenistic course on the original conceptualization and usage of the 12 houses in Western astrology, and that was also something I was working on for my book and researching that. And that was a great episode and it was a really good discussion. And sometimes some of the best discussions can be in those solo episodes because then I’m just free to talk about something I’ve been researching intensely and can just present my own views on that. But I understand that sometimes it can be harder to listen to, especially for new listeners or people who don’t have a background in that topic.
LS: Right. Yeah.
CB: So as a result of that I’ve gravitated towards always doing a show with another person, even when in some instances I’m presenting something that’s my own original research or something that I want to get out there.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And I noticed in recent months that that’s actually been a misconception that some people have. Some people have criticized me for talking more than my guest in some instances on some of those episodes, not realizing that I’m actually the primary one that’s presenting something, and I just have somebody else there to help me have more of a dialogue and to bounce ideas off of.
LS: Right.
CB: But I’m talking more because I’ve written the outline and I’ve done everything for that.
LS: Yeah. Yeah, and it’s tricky because people don’t see behind the scenes. But sometimes it is set up like that where you want to talk about a topic and you’re trying to do a dialogue about it, but it’s primarily your interest or something you’ve researched a lot. Whereas some of the other ones, you’ve interviewed other people and you might be knowledgeable about those as well, but it is more of a back-and-forth.
CB: Yeah, and it’s also tricky ‘cause I’m also preparing before each episode. I try to prepare a lot by writing a detailed outline. ‘Cause one of the things I noticed a long time ago is that a lot of people in the astrological community don’t have a lot of experience giving lectures, or there are some lectures that don’t go terribly well in the astrological community because sometimes the speaker has a difficult time anticipating what their audience needs to hear or how they have to have the concept explained to them in order to get it at that time. Or they’ll be lecturing and they’ll be like an obvious question that needs elucidation, but without somebody from the audience raising their hand and interjecting at that point, that doesn’t necessarily get addressed.
LS: Right.
CB: And so, I’ve sometimes seen that as my role. Almost all of the interviews, especially the big interviews, I’ll write a really detailed outline, and then we’re more or less following that outline as we’re going through.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And sometimes you’ll see it ‘cause I’ll post the outline or at least large portions of it in the show notes, but we’re usually following that outline in order to elucidate and make sure we hit all of the key points about what’s important and what the key things are that need to be presented in terms of that person’s view of whatever we’re talking about.
LS: Yeah. Definitely. Yeah, so sometimes there’s like a misconception that you’re just sort of a ‘pure’ interviewer, and you’re just completely separate from this expert that is talking about something that they know a lot about and you don’t know almost anything about, and that’s actually not the case at all.
CB: Yeah, and most of the time the way I’m approaching it is as more of a team-teaching model. Because what this has actually turned into is we’re doing lectures and basically workshops, especially on the technical topics and the specific astrological techniques.
LS: Right.
CB: Like these are full workshops. And that’s one of the things—people are sometimes wanting shorter, bite-sized podcasts of 30 minutes or 45 minutes or what have you and can find The Astrology Podcast episodes to be excessively long or what have you. But what we’re doing here is actually we’re doing lectures and workshops as if this was a local astrology group and we were giving a presentation or a weekend-long workshop.
LS: Right.
CB: And usually the format is not actually me interviewing somebody. Most of the time, it’s me teaming up with somebody to try to teach a concept and trying to find somebody that does have some background or specialty in that concept, but it’s often something that I’ve also studied myself.
LS: Right.
CB: ‘Cause at some point in the podcast, once it did get popular, I started becoming self-conscious about realizing how many people were learning astrology—how many new people were coming into astrology and finding the podcast and learning it from scratch here through the podcast as their primary source of learning about astrology.
LS: Right.
CB: And so, I’ve started to have this tension about wanting to make sure I’m presenting things in the best way possible and in a way that I also agree with, while at the same time showcasing different types of astrology that I may or may not necessarily practice.
LS: Right. Yeah, and I know that that was a tension that you’ve kind of consciously grappled with, especially maybe like about halfway through or so. I know that you started talking about that more—the tension between wanting it to be more of a variety and wanting to present lots of different people and lots of different approaches—but also realizing that to some extent people were taking it as endorsements…
CB: Right.
LS: …of what you thought was good astrology, and so, you know, sometimes that being an easy overlap and sometimes not as much.
CB: Yeah. Definitely. Certainly by like halfway through I started struggling with that. ‘Cause what happened is I was just doing it sporadically as kind of this blow-off thing through 2014, sometimes with really long gaps in between episodes, and I was only up to like Episode 20—around the 20s or something like that. And then somewhere around the winter of late 2014/early 2015 I realized at one point that a lot of my clients and a lot of the people that were signing up to be students of my courses were, in their referral form, they would say that they first found me on the podcast.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And suddenly I realized a lot more people were listening to the podcast than I realized. I’ve always said this, that we’d record it and usually it’s just me and one other person, and usually it’s through Skype or something, or now Zoom. And you record it, you edit it, and then you release it, but you have very little conceptualization of how many people have listened to it, especially the audio version, because the analytics on tracking audio downloads in the way that I was doing it was never very good.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Like you’ll occasionally see comments and stuff like on Facebook or other sites, but the amount of people that comment on anything online is always some very small percentage. Like 1% or like 5% of the people that listen will ever comment or show any actual interest in having expressed that they viewed that.
LS: Right.
CB: So you don’t really have a good idea of how many people are listening.
LS: Yeah.
CB: But I started seeing through those referrals that a lot of people were finding me through the podcast. And so, by early 2015, you can see the episodes increase and I started getting more serious about doing it more regularly.
LS: Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah, and I remember that ramp-up. I don’t remember the exact moment, but I know you did a lot more in 2015, and I know that you enlisted me for a few of them early on when you decided to start doing them more regularly. Because early on, you were kind of like, “Okay, well, what topics am I gonna do?” or “What guests am I gonna have?” And it was a switch from just doing it like once in a while when something really popped out.
CB: Yeah, and as I’ve talked about more recently—because I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can—but I had to be extremely careful, especially in the beginning, where I didn’t want to give away techniques that I taught as part of my courses too much.
LS: Right.
CB: Because if I did that then people would have no reason to sign up for the courses.
LS: Yeah.
CB: And if they didn’t do that then I wouldn’t be able to pay bills or rent each month if nobody was signing up for courses. So it was this delicate balance between wanting to present and teach different techniques and talk about astrology, but at the same time needing to continue to develop and hold some things back.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And that’s only something that’s become a little different in recent years. One, because my courses have grown and expanded so much and become so huge, that there’s just a ton of material in them in and of itself. And then, also, through Patreon and through other means where this has become something that’s become my primary income, that’s allowed me to feel more comfortable putting other techniques out there that I otherwise might have held back.
LS: Right.
CB: Instead of, you know, being forced to monetize them.
LS: Yeah. Exactly.
CB: Somebody said—I was talking to an Indian astrologer recently. Maybe it was on the episode with—what’s his name.
LS: Braha? James Braha?
CB: Yeah, James Braha, where he made the point that in India, for example, that astrologers—it’s their knowledge and it’s their experience that is their currency because that’s literally their skill or their trade.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And so, you know, sometimes they will have to keep things private or keep things secret because those are like trade secrets in some way in learning or teaching those things. And the exchange between astrologer and student or astrologer and client is, you know, something important, and you can have broader metaphysical or spiritual beliefs or associations with that and the importance and sort of sacredness of that. But then, also, the astrologer—if that’s gonna be the primary thing that they dedicate themselves to studying all the time, full time, and not doing other things to get by then it’s like they have to be compensated for that stuff to some extent, otherwise, they can’t live.
LS: Definitely. Well, and I’m a big proponent of that in general, even though you’ve been able to have a bit of an exception lately. Because there is so much of a trend of people expecting things for free, but, you know, people study this and practice for years, so I agree with that in general. But yeah, the podcast and Patreon, in particular, has really changed your ability to talk more freely.
CB: Yeah, and that was the turning point in 2015. It’s not just that I started realizing that a lot of my clients and students were coming from there and then I started getting more serious. You can see in the first half of 2015 I did a lot of episodes, including our first—it wasn’t your first time on the podcast, was it?
LS: I think it actually might have been. Number 24.
CB: Okay. I mean, that would be really funny if it was, but it was this really great discussion. The audio is probably not super amazing. Because I remember when we did that you came over one day, and we just set up like a voice recorder between us.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And we recorded this really great discussion on Saturn returns and how to interpret Saturns and how to interpret Saturn returns. Because we had been doing a blog, I think, for a little bit up to that point called Saturn Return Stories.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So yeah, I’m pretty sure that actually was my first regular episode.
CB: So that’s Episode 24, which was released February 8, 2015, titled, “Understanding Your Saturn Return.” And that’s a really good episode that I would recommend listening to. So yeah, I started doing stuff more regularly at that point. And then that May, I attended a Northwest Astrology Conference in Seattle, and there I talked to my friend, Kent Bye. He had done the Esoteric Voices Podcast, where he’d gone around to conferences and interviewed a number of astrologers in person over the years, and currently he’s most well-known for doing the Voices of VR Podcast, which is a podcast on virtual reality and related things. He’s a tech guy and he told me about Patreon, which was just starting at that time, and I immediately recognized that as a great idea and something that could really be useful for me and the podcast…
LS: Right.
CB: …even though it was just starting and was like a brand new thing. So I went home. I think I had to do other trips that month, but as soon as I was able to get home and work on it, I immediately set up a page on Patreon and I launched it at the end of June. And what’s funny about that is, again, it’s one of those instances where it wasn’t just like one thing that changed but a bunch of other things started changing around that time.
At that NORWAC I hung out with and talked to Kelly again a lot and that always generates a lot of fun and excitement and a lot of ideas. And so, Kelly and I for Episode 32, we did a forecast for June of 2015, which was released on June 2. And if you go back and look at that episode, I’m pitching it as ‘this is an experiment’ because I was not at all used to doing forecasts. Kelly had been writing forecasts and horoscope columns and things like that for years. I had always avoided doing that stuff and that was probably one of the ways that I made it harder for myself as an astrologer, as I always tended to be an astrologer’s ‘astrologer’
LS: Right.
CB: Other astrologers would come to me for consultations because I really focused on the more advanced and the more arcane techniques, like zodiacal releasing and Hellenistic astrology, and wrote blog articles that tended to be more advanced for the most part, or gave lectures on, you know, time-lord techniques and other things like that. But I never did like horoscopes and forecasts and stuff like that, but Kelly had, so we got together and we decided to do a forecast episode at the beginning of June.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And then a few weeks later, two things happened. Austin was out at the end of June, visiting Denver for a tarot conference that was being hosted in Denver by my friend, our friend, Joy Vernon…
LS: Right.
CB: …and Austin, and his partner, Kaitlin, were out. And I was getting ready to record the next forecast episode in my bedroom through Skype with Kelly and Austin was there. I don’t know if they were staying with us or what, but they may have been staying in a hotel. But they were over, hanging out that day while they were in town, and I just randomly asked Austin if he wanted to join us. And then he went in the other room and got on Skype and joined us for what was only the second forecast episode, which was the forecast for July of 2015, which was released on June 26.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So Kelly—we had only done one before. But I asked Kelly if it was okay if Austin joined us, and Kelly graciously said it was okay, and that was our first time doing the forecast together.
LS: Right.
CB: And right around the same time, that same week, I used an election—it was like a Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Leo—to launch the Patreon.
LS: Yeah, wasn’t that the one late at night or something? There were like three of us there, and we were all launching something in the middle of the night for some election.
CB: Yeah, ‘cause it was like that Venus retrograde or something in Leo and it was conjunct Jupiter. And it was the same configuration—that conjunction of Venus-Jupiter in Leo—where the Supreme Court in the US also legalized same-sex marriage basically at the same time.
LS: Yeah.
CB: And that was one of the major mundane things that we noticed correlated with that conjunction, but I also happen to be going out of my way to use it to launch the Patreon
LS: Right.
CB: And then Austin just happened to be in town, so he joined us for the forecast episode.
LS: Right.
CB: So until this week, I always thought I did bring in Austin kind of randomly and it was fascinating how that happened because then of course after that we did the forecast every month since then, since 2015. So that’s almost four years now, the three of us, and it’s become one of the most popular episodes each month as a recurring segment…
LS: Right.
CB: …but I always thought it was that I started that with Kelly and then Austin joined a month later. But what’s interesting is when I was going through the episode outline, I actually noticed for the first time today something I forgot, which is that Austin actually had joined me in Episode 22 to do a yearly forecast. And that episode, Episode 22, was titled, “The Astrology of 2015,” and that was released January 7.
LS: Okay.
CB: So there was already some inkling of maybe trying to do some more ‘forecast-y’-type episodes a little earlier when Austin joined me for that experiment. ‘Cause of course Austin had been writing an almanac for years. He had been writing other blog posts and horoscope columns for years and had a lot of experience with that.
LS: Right.
CB: And so, did Kelly. The main thing I was bringing to the table was presenting some electional charts for the month, which at the time, I think I may have presented a few.
LS: Mm, okay.
CB: I had been doing a written column for The Mountain Astrologer Magazine, where I presented at least four electional charts, I think, each month…
LS: Right.
CB: …for a few years up to that point, since 2012 or 2013. And so, that was supposed to be my main contribution to the forecast episodes because I was very not used to talking in generalities about the monthly forecast.
LS: Right.
CB: I was mainly used to talking about it in terms of how that would relate to your natal chart as a transit. But when you take the natal chart out of that and you aren’t looking at it relative to a natal, and you’re just talking about the general astrological alignments and the general feel of that, that was kind of like uncommon territory for me.
LS: Yeah, I definitely remember that and you being interested in doing it, but having some trepidation about getting out of your element, talking in more general terms about the transits.
CB: Yeah, and I think somebody mentioned that in one of the comments that we got.
LS: Yeah, towards the end—if you had just become more comfortable with talking about those things over time.
CB: Yeah. Do you know who asked that? I want to make sure we give them a name.
LS: Sure.
CB: I’ll let you look through that.
LS: I’ll look.
CB: Oh, here it is. It’s from Juliette Pinkham. I hope that’s how you pronounce her name. I apologize if it’s not. She says, “I’ve noticed that you add more of your own interpretations of transits than you used to a couple of years ago. Are you feeling more confident in that way now, or are you simply allowing your guests to speak more instead?”
LS: Well, and I didn’t know if she was thinking specifically about the forecast episodes because of the ‘transits’ part, or also more generally, which is what we were speaking to earlier. The issue of, you know, over time, especially in more recent years, you inserting more of what you think rather than simply interviewing people.
CB: I don’t know. It really depends on the episode.
LS: Yeah.
CB: But definitely the forecasts I was leaning a lot more heavily on Austin and Kelly earlier on.
LS: Right.
CB: And I still do to some extent because they still do more work each month. Each of them is still doing their own forecast stuff aside from the podcast and outside of that. Whereas for me usually it’s not until we do the forecast episode that I’m like looking at this stuff for the first time in real-time, so I’m kind of learning that as I go. But I’ve definitely become more aware of it and better about talking about it—being more comfortable talking about the transits outside of a natal chart.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: That’s become something I’m more comfortable with in the past few years.
LS: Right. Well, and something I had noticed too, transit-wise, is this whole time period—basically a lot of 2015, from spring through fall—when you started that format for the forecast episode with Kelly and Austin (and also when you started the Patreon), Saturn had stationed quite near your Midheaven in Sagittarius early in 2015 and then it also had dipped into late Scorpio a little bit later. So you were both having this Saturn station near your Midheaven in the 11th whole sign house and then also having the end of your Saturn return that year.
CB: Yeah, I was finishing up my Saturn return in Scorpio in 2015 over that summer.
LS: Right.
CB: And I was also, yeah, having that transit you noticed this morning—around that time with the Patreon and getting together with Austin and Kelly—that Saturn stationed in my 11th whole sign house of friends, but the degree of my Meridian Midheaven is there at 5° of Sag. And Saturn stationed…
LS: At like 4.
CB: …at 4 that June.
LS: Was it June?
CB: That’s what I’m asking.
LS: No, I think it was in the spring, but it was basically like around that time period when all of these important things happened.
CB: Yeah, when I’m getting more serious about doing the podcast, when I discover Patreon, when I start doing the forecast episodes.
LS: Right.
CB: And then from that point forward, when I launched the Patreon in June, that committed me. One of the commitments I made at the time to listeners was if you support this, if you volunteer to donate a dollar or two dollars or three dollars or five or ten dollars an episode—those are the different tiers on Patreon—then I will start producing the show more regularly, and you’ll get more of what you want to listen to because I’ll have the freedom to do it more frequently than I would otherwise.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
CB: So I committed to doing instead of one episode every six months—which I had been doing up to that point or whatever random, erratic release schedule I had—I started releasing four episodes a month.
LS: Right. Yeah, and that was a really big game-changer, both in terms of it becoming a known, regular thing in the community, as well as you needing to, you know, find topics and guests very regularly.
CB: Yeah, ‘cause at that point, by June, I’m only in like the 20s at that point in terms of episodes. So that first forecast episode with Kelly was Episode 32, and then it’s after that month things really get crazy and I start doing four episodes a month and then the podcast just takes off.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So then part of the challenge with that became finding good, compelling topics and episodes to do and discussions to do, as well as guests four times a month.
LS: Yeah, which is like a huge explosion compared to what you were doing before that…
CB: Yeah.
LS: …which was just whenever something occurred or something really good happened.
CB: Yeah, whenever there was something interesting or I had something I was researching or whatever, I would do it; otherwise, I would go months focusing on other things.
LS: Right. And then this became much more of a proactive need to find good topics and guests.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So that was June. And then things just go crazy from there and I start doing four episodes a month. And that doesn’t sound like a lot, but it adds up really quickly in terms of going from that in mid-2015 to eventually Episode 100, you know, which is the halfway point from where we are now. It looks like we released that on March 13, 2017. So just under two years later.
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah, and then March 13, 2017 and it’s now April of 2019. So two years later from there I’ve done another hundred episodes.
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah, so that gives you some idea about the major shift in terms of the timing.
LS: Right. I mean, that was great, and then you really shifted your focus because you had to, you know, in terms of focusing much more on the podcast. You were already, you know, teaching courses and taking clients and things like that, but the podcast became a regular focus of yours.
CB: Yeah, it became a regular focus. And then I started branching out and doing interviews that I had always wanted to do, and you’ll see just a ton of episodes happening between mid-2015 and late 2015. But then one of the things that’s funny is that by the end of that year, I was gearing up to do my book.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So that caused actually another brief interruption in the podcast. Because what happened is I had saved up some money—and I had been working on this book for almost 10 years—and I realized if I was ever gonna get it out, I needed to take [time out]. What at the time was funny—I just remembered this, this morning—I thought it was only gonna take like three months.
LS: Yeah.
CB: I’m like I’ll save up enough money to stop seeing clients and not do any consultations and probably stop doing the podcast for three months and I’ll finish the book.
LS: Yeah, famous last words.
CB: Yeah, and it didn’t take three months. It took a year.
LS: Yeah.
CB: And you and I recorded an episode when I was just launching that, which was titled—do you remember the title of that?
LS: Mm-mm. Which one?
CB: It was the one where it was like misconceptions about older forms—oh, yeah, it’s Episode 59, “Misconceptions About Older Forms of Astrology,” recorded or at least released December 20, 2015. That’s me and you talking, and me announcing I’m gonna take some time off to write the book. I announced a discount on the Hellenistic course at the time. Actually I announced I was gonna be raising the price on the course ‘cause I was charging something really minimal for it still at that point—like a hundred or $200.
And so, a bunch of people signed up for that, which then gave me the money I needed to stop seeing clients for a few months and work on the book, as well as to get some of the final research materials that I needed—some other books I’d been needing to get for a long time but couldn’t afford for research purposes for the book. And then I was announcing that I was either gonna stop doing the podcast for a while, or I was only gonna do it sporadically.
LS: Right.
CB: And you can kind of see after that point that’s kind of what I did, where episodes from that point forward become a little sporadic, and I started just doing topics that were related to things that I was actually writing about in different chapters of the book at that point.
LS: Right.
CB: So Episode 60 on the tropical versus sidereal zodiac happened because I was working on the part of my book where I was dealing with the origins of the zodiac and the precession issue. Episode 61 was with Maria Mateus on “The Debate Over the Origins of Hellenistic Astrology,” ‘cause that’s a huge portion of the history chapter of the book.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: “The Lives and the Works of the Hellenistic Astrologers” was me finishing writing the chapter of the book on the Hellenistic astrologers and then just doing like a three-hour solo show talking about all their lives.
LS: Right.
CB: And so on and so forth. “The Significations of the Seven Traditional Planets,” which is a classic episode with Austin and Kelly, it’s a great beginner episode. That happened while I was writing the chapter on the planets of course.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: But then something happened by late February. You get to Episode 65, and that’s on “The Professional Astrologer Book” interview where OPA—the Organization for Professional Astrologers—released their book. And I had contributed an interview or a chapter or something to it, and you contributed a chapter to it.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So I interviewed Maurice to help promote that, but somewhere around there I basically started running out of money to write the book.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So I realized that I needed to go back and start doing the podcast again because I had enough patrons at that point. The way I set up the Patreon is there’s two options. You can either do it so when a person signs up as a patron, they agree to give you a set amount each month—like a monthly amount—where just every month they’ll blanket donate a certain amount to you, and then you keep doing whatever you were gonna do with whatever you’re creating: like a podcast or a YouTube channel or what have you. So you can do that and that’s what some other podcasters do, or you can do this other option where it’s per creation, so that each time you release a podcast episode then they agree to donate a certain amount to you.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And that’s what I did because I saw that as more flexible because I knew when I was writing the book that I might have to take some months off and not do four episodes of the podcast, so that people would only be charged when I released an episode.
LS: Right. Yeah, and I remember you being concerned about that because you didn’t want, you know, people to be paying when you were putting out fewer episodes or things like that. Even though that would be helpful for you to what you were doing, you wanted people to feel like they were getting the value for what they were paying for.
CB: Yeah. Exactly. And I wanted to have that flexibility and that freedom myself.
LS: Mm-hmm. Right.
CB: But the downside is that I started running out of money and it didn’t take me three months to finish the book. I had been working on it for almost a decade at that point, and my writing style and my voice—my ‘writing’ voice—had changed multiple times during the course of that 10 years as I gained different experience doing research or different experience blogging—as well as doing the podcast altered things a little bit as well—so I decided in that last year to rewrite the book from scratch. And I was still able to draw on all of the previous drafts, but I wanted to rewrite the chapters from start-to-finish so that I could adopt a consistent tone in the book.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And I think that was actually a really good idea ultimately because then the book is much more consistent than it would be otherwise. And even some of the dense history chapters—I just got an email like a few days ago from somebody who said they came into the book with a lot of trepidation ‘cause they don’t like history and they don’t follow it very well, but they found that they were able to follow the history much more than they expected. And they were surprised that they were able to follow it because, you know, I wrote it sort of as simply as I could.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah, I remember you were in the midst of deciding that. But it took longer because of that decision to rewrite it from scratch.
CB: Yeah, to rewrite it basically.
LS: Yeah.
CB: And then it turned into like a 700-page book. So while I’m writing the book for the entirety of 2016, basically after just a few months I started doing the podcast again, and then at that point it goes kind of crazy. So Episode 67, I did with Kay Taylor, and that was on “The Outer Planets and Relationships.” And part of the reason I did that episode is that was a follow-up to Episode 64 on “The Significations of the Seven Traditional Planets” that I did with Austin and Kelly, because I was trying to do, first, one on the traditional planets and their meanings and then I wanted to do one on the outer planets. And I had seen Kay give a talk at the OPA retreat—that was really good—on the outer planets and I thought that would be a great way of accessing the basic meanings of the outer planets by contextualizing them in the context of relationships.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So that’s actually supposed to be my ‘intro’ to the outer planets episode, so it should be listened to along with Episode 64 on the significations of the traditional planets. But after that point some of the stuff gets kind of random, like I did the Joan Quigley interview episode, on Episode 68. And Nick Dagan Best actually joined me for that, but that was one that was primarily my own research, where Nick was helping me to like flesh-out something I had spent a lot of time researching in the past.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: What else? We did “The Astrology of Mars Retrograde Periods” in Episode 70, and that was primarily Nick’s research topic.
LS: Right.
CB: “Medical Astrology with Lee Lehman” in Episode 71. I did the bio episode of Demetra in Episode 73, and so on and so forth. And at that point it kind of picks up and I start doing a lot at a certain point.
LS: Yeah. Yeah, it’s kind of funny looking back. I don’t really know how you did all of those, in retrospect, while writing the book.
CB: Yeah, I don’t really know as well. ‘Cause it actually takes a lot of time to do the podcast because I spend a lot of time researching and preparing the outline for each episode typically.
LS: Yeah. Yeah, and I remember you having, you know, some amount of angst trying to switch gears constantly, back and forth, between, you know, continuing to write the book that year and having to put out episodes as well.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, but also I wanted to do a good job with them.
LS: Yeah.
CB: There were some topics that I was excited to finally do that I’d been wanting to do for a long time—like the Joan Quigley episode—or ones that were really delicate and that I knew I wanted to address and that I’d always wanted to address but needed to be done carefully. Like Episode 79 with Christopher Renstrom on “Sexual Orientation and Astrology” and talking about the debate over whether astrology can speak to sexual orientation at all, or if that’s something that’s outside of astrology that you can’t tell through a birth chart, and there’s people that argue both sides of that.
LS: Right.
CB: Because one of the things I always wanted to be able to do with the podcast is not shy away from difficult debates and topics in the astrological community, but instead, try to present the pros and cons of both sides of the debate and then let people make up their mind, but do the best job I could at highlighting what the good sides of the arguments are for both sides.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and you’ve done that with a few different astrological topics, as well as occasionally issues in the community.
CB: Yeah, so there’s like sexual orientation and astrology. There’s the issue of ethics and certification and whether certification is something that’s necessary or not.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: There’s technical debates like the house division issue of course, the zodiac controversy in sidereal versus tropical, and other various things like that.
LS: Right.
CB: Modern versus traditional astrology was an early debate that I did that was an interesting format.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Yeah, so trying to get into the heart of some of those debates, but not stack it so that it’s like weaker somehow on both sides, but that you’re doing a reasonable job presenting the best case that you can for both. And then the listener can kind of make up their mind from there is always the goal, at least. I, also that summer, was able to do ones that I’d wanted to do for a long time, like “Richard Tarnas on Cosmos and Psyche.” That was a big episode where I re-read large parts of his book and then read the whole outline for walking through that. And I think I did the Geoffrey Cornelius episode later that year and everything else.
LS: Yeah, you had a few things going on in 2016.
CB: Yeah, I did do, I think, a solo show on Episode 86 where I talked about Saturn as possibly a feminine planet, as well as who the earliest female astrologer was. And that was, again, just stuff coming from as I was writing the book.
LS: Mm-hmm. Right. And also, some of the episodes you’ve kind of jumped off of discussions in the community about a certain topic or about a certain astrological, you know, concept.
CB: Yeah. Like if you go back to The Horoscopic Astrology Blog—which was my original blog at HoroscopicAstrologyBlog.com—it’s still there. I hardly post on it anymore and I haven’t in years ‘cause I started doing the podcast. But you can see me trying to do like an all-purpose, general blog as if you’re a blogger, but you’re in the astrological community and you’re trying to cover the latest news and events, as well as historical articles and technical articles and other stuff like that.
And I’ve always kind of wanted the podcast to be like that as well, so that if there was some big discussion happening in the astrological community we could kind of cover it, and especially people in the future could look back and listen to it and hear about the types of things that were being discussed in the astrological community at that point in time. It would take like a snapshot or capture something about the essence of that moment and some of the debates that were happening.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So talking about what happened when supposedly a bunch of blogs in 2016 started saying that NASA had changed the zodiac signs, we did an episode on that in Episode 88.
LS: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
CB: When the History Channel did an episode on astrology, you and I did an episode on that.
LS: Right. Like commentary on what was good and not good about it.
CB: Right, which is basically just us complaining about that episode.
LS: I mean, it wasn’t very good coverage in terms of astrology.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, and different things like that. Of course the 2016 presidential election was a whole thing towards the end of that year. And that was tricky because I was writing the book, and I had spent a lot of time trying to find Hillary Clinton’s birth time for like a decade at that point. And in Episode 91, you hear my full saga sort of connected with all of the different things related to that, as well as the post-2016 reflection and that was an important turning point. I mean, that whole thing was tricky. I shut down the Political Astrology Blog after the 2012 election because I decided that things were getting too tense, and I thought it was a bad idea for astrologers to be getting involved in politics.
And I could kind of see where things were going and that it wasn’t gonna get better, and if astrologers were meddling in politics, it could cause blowback that could be negative for astrology—because historically that’s happened a few times in the past. And I gave a lecture at the ISAR conference, in what, like 2013 or 2014 basically saying that—summarizing what I had learned from doing political astrology up to that point, especially from the 2012 election—and then explaining why I wouldn’t be doing it again in the future.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: But then they asked me to join a panel for the 2016 election, and I was originally gonna hand it over to Patrick and then I didn’t. And then I ended up going on at the last minute and doing it, but that was a whole kind of mess, which you see me document over the course of a few episodes around that time.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And some of the outcome of that we’re still waiting to hear about this summer, in terms of some of the final things that were still on the table—implications of some of the things we were looking at, at that time.
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah. All right, so the book eventually came out. My book came out in early 2017, and I talk about that in Episode 97, which I always kind of regretted a little bit because I spent a lot of the time in that episode just talking about some of the hassles in the publishing process. And I spent less time pitching the book and explaining why everybody should read it than I did documenting having just come out of an extreme, several month period of like indexing, the first print run having typos in it, and then you reading it very quickly in the last week or two and just finding dozens of typos and fixing them before it finally went to press and all of that stuff. I spent less time talking about the book itself than I probably should have.
LS: Right. Yeah, I know that was one of your regrets later. Understandable though when you’re self-publishing.
CB: Yeah, but that’s all right. And then from that point forward, once the book comes out, I hit Episode 100 by March 13 of 2017—so just like a month after the book comes out. And then things kind of go crazy at that point ‘cause then I have more time to devote to the podcast, and I get back to doing a full, four episodes a month.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And I had been seeing at that point for a few years that some astrologers were doing really well with YouTube and that YouTube was really taking off—there were astrologers that were getting upwards at that point of like a hundred thousand followers on that platform—and the potential that had. And I had wanted to get more into doing video, but realized that it was gonna be this whole thing. Doing video production is a lot different than audio and is a lot more involved.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So I had put that off for a number of years until the book came out. And then as soon as the book came out, I started putting everything into researching and investing in starting to do more with video.
LS: Right. Yeah, I remember that being a fairly sudden switch once the book was kind of off your plate. ‘Cause you had been working on that so steadily for 10 years in an overall sense, but a year up to that point—the active writing of it in 2016. And then pretty soon after that you’re like, “I wanna do video,” and you started buying video equipment and things like that.
CB: Yeah, I was like buying video equipment and experimenting with different cameras and different lenses. And I didn’t know anything about working with DSLRs and having to learn about white balance and lighting and trying different lighting things and skin tones and different problems with that.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Different problems with us living in a basement apartment for several years at that point and not having any natural lighting, so needing to rely entirely on artificial lighting.
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah, so it was a whole learning curve. And then I started doing individual videos on my YouTube channel that were just little videos and tried to build that up more. And it’s funny, you see the progression pretty rapidly. But just the podcast—some of those early videos are pretty rough and then improving, you know, with each video. I knew at the time that that’s what was gonna happen, and I just needed to start doing it. ‘Cause so often it’s important not to wait until you have things perfect, and people can sometimes wait way too long in life when doing that. But instead, you just need to start doing it and learning as you go.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So that’s what I did with video. And then sometime, about a year after that, I started doing video versions of the podcast.
LS: Right.
CB: I’m not positive about this, but I think Vic DiCara and my first episode with him may have been one the first episodes. Because Vic was a YouTuber, I knew that he had a good microphone and a good webcam. ‘Cause that was one of the big struggles that I had throughout doing the podcast, and honestly, in a lot of the early episodes that’s one of the reasons why I stuck mainly with doing it just with my friends, because I would do it with people where I knew that they had a good microphone.
LS: Right.
CB: ‘Cause I encountered audio issues really early on, where a lot of people just had the microphone built into their laptop. But when you just use that, in the background you can hear their fan, or you can hear them typing or just a lot of ambient noises, and it just sounds really terrible.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I remember you starting to invest in sending off eventually a microphone to a guest and then having them send it back or send it to the next guest just so everyone would have really good audio quality for the discussions.
CB: Yeah, I mean, that actually happened while I was writing the book.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: I launched that plan in May of 2016. I did some episode—I think it might have been the Maggie Nalbandian episode, where it was this really important episode. And what would always happen is to the guest I’ll say, “Do you have a good microphone?” And they’ll always say, “Yeah.”
LS: Right.
CB: But what that means is just that they have a microphone and it’s worked well enough for them up to that point, especially on Skype. Because if you’re just talking on Skype live to one other person, and it’s not for a recording or something, you can get by with doing almost anything. And Skype will do some magic on the fly in order to increase volumes of voices and decrease background noise to some extent. But if you’re doing that in a recording, and you’re just speaking into like a built-in microphone on a laptop, or if you’re using a really crappy microphone on a webcam, in an actual recording it’ll often sound really terrible.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So I realized I had to stop relying. And I did an episode where the guest said, “Yeah, I’ve got a fine microphone, you don’t need to worry about that.” And then we did it and the microphone was just terrible, and the episode was almost not listenable on their end because of the microphone. And it was such an important and a good episode that I felt terrible that the content wouldn’t be received as well as it could be because people would just have a hard time listening to it.
LS: Right.
CB: So I launched a plan at that point with patrons where in May of 2016 I announced I need to raise funds and I want to start shipping a microphone to guests ahead of each episode in order to ensure that each guest has the best audio possible.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And I started shipping people a microphone called a Blue Yeti microphone, which I realized was the type of microphone where if you watch enough YouTube videos was a really popular microphone during that point in time that a lot of YouTubers were using, ‘cause it’s just a USB microphone that you plug right into the laptop or the computer and then it works pretty well.
LS: Mm-hmm. And I think that plan has worked out well. I mean, I think that, you know, you’ve always cared about trying to make the technical portion of the podcast as good as possible, in addition to the content so that people are really excited about it. And I remember being a little bit dubious in the beginning when you were like, “I’m ship microphones around the country.” I was like, “Okay, is that really necessary?” but I think it has worked out.
CB: Yeah, one of the things I did with the podcast early on—and I did going back to my blog, and I learned during the time of doing The Horoscopic Astrology Blog—is just reinvesting money back into your business in order to improve the quality, and sometimes that can help you to stand out just by doing quality things. Which is different sometimes ‘cause most of the time, most people just try to do anything, and just doing anything can be hard enough.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Putting the extra effort into doing the best possible version of whatever that specific thing is is sometimes more than people can handle. But if you go that extra mile, sometimes it can really set you apart just to attempt to do the best version of whatever it is you’re doing. Not just attempting to do it, but actually taking the time to research the different options to figure out what is the best option for this.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And even if you can’t aim for that best option, even if that best option is out of your reach—figuring out what the next best option is that’s like a step-down from that and what the option is below that—then go for whatever the achievable one is that you can reach for at that time. And then, eventually, once you get comfortable with that try to go to the next step, and then the next step. And keep working your way forward progressively until eventually you can get to whatever that best ideal version is, even if you can’t do it immediately.
LS: Right. Yeah, and that kind of one of the earlier ways that having patrons support the podcast allowed you to make it even better.
CB: Yeah, that was a really tangible turning point from May of 2016 forward. Because from that point forward, pretty much every guest interview I would ship not just in the US, but also internationally.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Like I shipped a microphone to Bernadette Brady, for example, in the UK, or to Nick Campion in the UK, and other astrologers around the country or around the world, and yeah, that just immediately improved the sound quality. That obviously increased, you know, expenses, as well as prep time ‘cause it meant I had to time it correctly to get the microphone to them. Then we had to do a sound check to test it and set it up. And we had to make sure that even if I sent them a great microphone that they didn’t have a fan on right next to their computer that was blowing loudly into it because then that would mess up everything.
LS: Right.
CB: You know, we had one episode not that long ago actually where the astrologer ended up having the microphone backwards. So even though I sent the microphone, it was facing away from them basically so the audio still wasn’t good. So we still run into occasional problems from time to time.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Especially with some of what I consider to be historically important episodes, like interviewing Richard Tarnas on the 10th anniversary of Cosmos and Psyche and talking about that book, or when I interviewed Geoffrey Cornelius about The Moment of Astrology, I want to make sure that the quality of those episodes is good enough that it can be, you know, still useful almost for like archival or historical purposes—that somebody 10 or 20 years from now can listen to it and still think it sounds relatively decent.
LS: Right.
CB: All things considered, given the restrictions of the technology at the time.
LS: Yeah. Definitely. And I know that’s one of the reasons you also let some episodes go long because it’s kind of like a historical, one-time deal.
CB: Yeah, like this isn’t some blow-off thing that I’m doing so that somebody can be entertained for like 45 minutes on their commute. And I know that some feedback that I got early on was that they listen to the podcast during the commute and they wished the episodes were more bite-sized, so they can be more easily consumable for, you know, doing stuff like that, or like vacuuming. You know, honestly, when I listen to podcasts sometimes it can just be when I’m doing other mundane tasks and I need something to listen to—like vacuuming or cleaning the house or something like that—so I understand why people want that.
But my goal with the podcast typically is, most of the time, if I’m doing an episode, I’m doing it very deliberately and it’s very planned out. And I’m hoping that this is something that’s gonna teach new students and be interesting to intermediate and advanced students still and raise important discussion, topics, and questions, and might even be historically relevant in the long term if somebody’s listening to this at some point in the future and getting a sense of what astrologers were doing in the early 21st century.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So I’m trying to think of things more broadly, as well as think of them more like, as we said, workshops or team-teaching things where we’re really doing in-depth dives into astrology.
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah. So where were we?
LS: Adding sending the mics out. And I think we started doing the electional episodes soon after that, like early 2017 or something.
CB: Yeah. ‘Cause when I was writing my book in 2016, I had been writing the electional column for The Mountain Astrologer Magazine for a few years at that point, but I kind of handed it off to you.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: By 2016, you started writing the electional column for TMA.
LS: Right.
CB: And then, eventually, we were highlighting those from the first episodes of the forecast episodes.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So on the forecast episodes and then we started doing the Auspicious Elections Podcast together at some point.
LS: Right. I think probably right around when the TMA column ended.
CB: Yeah, I don’t remember when that was, though. Do you?
LS: No, I have it somewhere, but it was the outgrowth from that basically. You know, I had started writing the column, but you were, you know, looking it over and maybe altering some things. We were kind of like doing that together already for a while and then that turned into the electional episodes for the podcast because we just kept doing the same thing, you know, in recording form.
CB: Yeah, well, I mean, what happened honestly is TMA didn’t want to keep running the column at some point and so we lost that. And I didn’t really care at that point ‘cause I was tired of writing it, and we were already repurposing what we were doing in TMA for the podcast.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: But it ended up being a benefit actually that they wanted to start doing something else. And they asked me if I wanted to do a different astrology column, like a Q&A or something like that, ‘cause they just weren’t sure if their readers—they weren’t getting a lot of feedback, I think, and they weren’t sure how they were reacting to the electional column. And they were probably rightly not sure if people even knew how to use the election, ‘cause we still get that question today on our podcast.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So they asked me if I wanted to do a different column, and I don’t think I ended up doing that. So we stopped doing it there, but then as a result of that you and I decided to move it to its own podcast. ‘Cause once I launched the Patreon, one of the challenges that was sort of semi-constant was figuring out how to generate other bonus content and other benefits for patrons and for subscribers that was worth, you know, signing up for a dollar or three dollars or five dollars or ten dollars.
LS: Right.
CB: So we launched the Auspicious Elections Podcast at some point in there as a benefit for patrons on the five dollar tier.
LS: Right. Yeah, five dollars and above. So I think it’s been going for a little over two years maybe, give or take.
CB: Yeah, and we’re up to Episode 28.
LS: Okay. Yeah, so over two years.
CB: And we do one a month.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, so we started doing that. And then I also launched the The Casual Astrology Podcast, which is like a private podcast where I do sometimes updates about my life or about the podcast, the behind-the-scenes looks, or I just take other content and other private interviews and discussions that I don’t want to release on the main podcast. I release them there on The Casual Astrology Podcast as a benefit for patrons on the ten dollar tier.
LS: Right.
CB: It looks like our first episode of the Auspicious Elections Podcast was released December 31, 2016, and it was the elections for January of 2017.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: If I have this correct.
LS: Yeah, that sounds about right.
CB: Yeah, so we’ve been doing that for a couple of years now.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Okay, and that’s been great. That’s been a great benefit for patrons. And I know a lot of the patrons sign up specifically to get access to those four electional charts each month.
LS: Yeah. And it’s been exciting to hear more feedback over time, you know, hearing that people really do listen to them and, you know, use the elections regularly every month.
CB: Yeah, I mean, I know that’s been surprising for you. You’ve had people email you or come up to you at conferences and stuff and say that they listen to the elections a lot.
LS: Right. Yeah, and that’s been nice. ‘Cause of course, you know, you’ve had that sort of surprise reaction to people recognizing you in public or, you know, talking to you about what they heard you say on the podcast, but you do them four times a month. So yeah, it’s been an interesting outgrowth the last couple of years.
CB: Yeah, and, I mean, that brings up another thing where I stopped doing consultations in 2016 to write the book and I never went back to that. And I’ve just been referring all of my clients to you.
LS: Right.
CB: Because we’ve been together for 10 years now, you have the approach to astrology that’s closest to my own out of anybody I know. The next after that is Patrick Watson, who is another person I refer clients to, and then of course, Austin and Kelly, who also have very similar consultation styles.
LS: Right. Yeah, and I remember you after taking a year off from consultations to write your book being at this kind of pivot point of like, “Do I start doing consultations again?” or “Do I keep putting more of my energy into the podcast even though the book writing is finished?”
CB: Yeah, and I really didn’t know. And you can hear me talking about that a lot back then as I was trying to make that decision, and I just had my hands full doing the podcast. At this point, the production schedule of the podcast is that there has to be a minimum of four episodes a month of the main podcast, and one of those is the forecast. So that’s regular and that’s good ‘cause that covers one episode at the end of each month—usually that’s the fourth episode—but then there’s three other episodes that I have to do each month.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So that’s the four main episodes and then there’s the two bonus episodes for patrons. One of them is the 45-minute Auspicious Elections Podcast, which I do with you, and then the other is The Casual Astrology Podcast, which is kind of random, just depending on who I talk to or what sort of bonus content I have that month.
LS: Mm-hmm. Right.
CB: Sometimes I release stuff from my courses that I’ve recorded. Other times you and I will do something. Adam Elenbaas interviewed me and we did a bio episode once about me. It sort of varies.
LS: Right.
CB: But that’s six, basically, episodes I do each month of the podcast.
LS: Right. And then, plus, editing time. So when did you start working with Stephen on editing?
CB: I don’t know the exact timeframe, but we’ve definitely been doing it for a couple of years now, I think.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: At some point, Austin referred me to his brother, Stephen Coppock, who was editing the audio and stuff for Austin’s courses, and I started working with Stephen at some point. ‘Cause there was a period where I used to record—I’m trying to remember how I recorded the episodes, but whatever it was it wasn’t very good in terms of doing the guest recordings. ‘Cause the tricky thing is I was always recording it on my end, the audio on my end. So my audio would always sound really good on my end because I was basically recording it directly from my mic. But by the time I was getting their audio, it was going through Skype or something, so the quality was already degraded to some extent.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So at some point, I think around the time that I started doing the ‘mic’ thing—so probably by 2016 or so, a good two or three years ago—I started using different programs where we record the audio locally on each side of the conversation. So it was like I would record my microphone—that would be just my microphone—and then we would record the guest’s audio on their computer, directly from their microphone as like a .WAV file, and then we would patch them together in post-production afterwards.
LS: Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah, and so, that’s been really great in terms of, you know, continuing to increase the quality—you know, the audio quality of the episodes—but has also increased production time and planning requirements.
CB: Yeah, in addition to picking up the pace once I launched the Patreon and doing four to six episodes a month, I also, doing that many, just lost the ability to go through and edit them all myself. And then adding that other layer of having to mix two separate, you know, audio files from at least two different people—and that’s if there’s only two. There could also be like three or four or whatever people and then it gets really crazy.
And so, that was beyond my technical capability, and so I started working more with Stephen Coppock and he started editing the audio of each episode like two or three years ago. And that, you know, immediately raised the production quality of the episodes as well. So now it wasn’t just that I was sending good microphones to people, but we were also having a professional editor edit each episode.
LS: Right.
CB: And that of course then also raised the production costs. But luckily, as I continued to get more patrons, I was able to set aside money each month for a production budget.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: ‘Cause I’m shipping people microphones. I’m paying for professional editing.
LS: Right.
CB: I’m also paying for using Zoom to record the audio and using a separate program called ZenCast as like a backup recording. We did have an issue at one point when I did the episode on Dane Rudhyar with Chet Zdrowski where we did the entire two-hour episode—or three-hour episode, or something extremely long and detailed—and it was a great recording. And then we got to the end and we found out that only the first 30 minutes of his audio had been recorded.
LS: That’s terrible.
CB: So we just lost like the entire episode and had to literally just do it over again a few days later, like a week later. Luckily, he was super cool and we were friends. And we’d been wanting to do that episode for a while, so we were willing to do it again.
LS: Yeah.
CB: But that was a huge blow. And from that point forward, I now have several backup recordings just to have some sort of redundancy just in case and to avoid that hopefully ever happening again.
LS: Right. Yeah.
CB: Yeah, and then, additionally, not too long ago, I think with the Vic DiCara episode, it was one of the first ones—do you know what number that is?
LS: The Vic DiCara one?
CB: Yeah, like I’m trying to figure out what episode that was because I think that was one of the first because he was a YouTuber. And I had discovered him, and I had discovered this whole group of tropical Vedic astrologers that were all doing really well on YouTube ‘cause they were putting a lot of emphasis on just doing video.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I found it. It’s July 2017, “The Tropical Zodiac in Indian Astrology.”
CB: Yeah, that makes sense. So that’s almost two years ago now, but that was one of the first ones I did where—because I knew he had a good camera setup—I said, “Let’s record the video as well as the audio.”
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And that was one of the first ones where I was getting my YouTube channel going at that point, but I also decided to release that full, hour-and-a-half discussion as a video podcast as well as an audio podcast. And from that point forward, I slowly eventually started trying to do video versions of each episode—starting with the forecast episodes—and then eventually branching out. So that, again, raised the production hassles to some extent in various ways ‘cause then I sometimes had to send not just a microphone, but also a good webcam to guests. And thankfully Stephen has a background in video editing, so he started not just editing the audio, but also he edits the video at this point.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Then in addition to posting the audio through our website—which then goes out to the audio feed, and goes out to iTunes and other podcast devices—now I have to post the video on YouTube and write a description and get that all ready. So it definitely increased the whole hassle and the production costs and everything else. I don’t know if I can say it’s doubled, but it certainly brought in a lot more viewers now that are just watching the video version.
LS: Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah, I mean, I know that every time you release a podcast it’s at least a, what, a half-day, if not more enterprise doing all of the different pieces of that?
CB: Yeah, I mean, especially the forecast episodes. Maybe we should talk about the production and break it down. So a typical podcast episode, there is the scheduling. So finding a topic, coming up with a topic, scheduling it with the person and negotiating the guest’s schedule.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And part of the negotiation of the schedule is sometimes just what do they have available and what dates do I have available, as well as what times.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: But then I’m also trying to pay attention to the electional chart.
LS: Right.
CB: And I’ll often steer us more towards one date or one time that’s available between the two of us versus another.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And if we’re lucky, you know, we’ll make it, and we’ll get the best electional chart that I was shooting for. But sometimes there will be a delay and we’ll end up with a different rising sign than what I had hoped for.
LS: Right.
CB: Which is always unfortunate.
LS: Yeah, I remember a memorable one like that with me and you and Patrick.
CB: What was that?
LS: I think there was some issue where we ended up either starting or like stopping and then restarting with Saturn in a night chart. It was either angular or in the 1st. And I remember having qualms about that—should we, you know, keep going or do this some other time.
CB: Right.
LS: And then there were like major issues.
CB: Yeah.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, that happens. That’s a thing.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, so I’ll try to negotiate that. I’ll try to get a good electional chart for recording. Then there will be the research phase of preparing the outline and writing at least a page, or a two-page set of one-line bullet points is what I shoot for, for each 75-90-minute episode. If it’s a major episode—like the Cosmos and Psyche or The Moment of Astrology episode with Geoffrey Cornelius—I’ll have to reread that entire book and then write an outline based on that, which I’m much more careful and conscientious about. Then we record the episode, we have the discussion.
We send, at this point, the file off to Stephen, and Stephen will then edit the audio and the video primarily just to make the sound levels good and to open it at the right time and then to close it at the right time. Maren asked previously—and we answered this partially already—if I edit it. But honestly, ever since I’ve had Stephen do it, for the most part, we don’t really edit stuff out of the audio.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: He will mitigate the breaths and stuff, especially for me, but I used to do much more of a job going through and removing ‘ums’ and like cleaning up sentences when I was just doing it myself—when I was agonizing about the release of every episode and able to micromanage it and putting the hours into doing that—whereas, nowadays, we’re primarily just trying to get the audio clean. And sometimes if there is a major interruption or something, we’ll edit that out, and there will be a jump in the audio. But because we’re doing both video and audio, if we were removing a lot of stuff, you would see a lot more jumps in the video.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So that kind of almost restricts us from cleaning some stuff up as much as we might if it was just audio.
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah, so we record it, we send it to Stephen, and there’s usually like a few-day editing process before I get that back. In the meantime, I’ll usually release a rough cut of the episode of at least the audio—and sometimes the video—for early access to patrons who are on the two dollar or higher tiers.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: They’ll get early access to an upcoming episode. Or if the episode is not scheduled to be released for like a week or two or three sometimes—there’s been some that I’ve recorded like a month earlier—I’ll send them to patrons. I’ll send the final edited version to them as a private link that they’ll get to watch ahead of time. But otherwise, it usually takes a few days of editing. Or sometimes Stephen will do a rush job if we’re getting close to the end of the month and we’ve got to release an episode. Sometimes he’ll turn it around in 24 hours.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And once I get the files back I need to upload them to my servers or upload the video to YouTube. I have to write the description page on the podcast website, which usually takes a while. I have to pick an image for the podcast.
LS: Which sometimes takes a while.
CB: Yeah, which is hilarious how long that takes sometimes. Especially when I was doing them back in like 2015-2016, I’m always trying to pick a really fitting image. And sometimes I’ll agonize over that for like way too long and Kelly used to joke about that.
LS: Yeah.
CB: I have gotten some help, and I have to thank my other friend, Paula Belluomini, who did of course the illustration for my book cover. And I’ve worked with her doing the posters the past couple of years, for the astrology posters and the calendars.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: She’s also helped me over the past two or three years since we’ve been working together to do some of the podcast art, like the artwork for some months.
LS: Right. Yeah, and she’s done the graphics for we’ve done the horoscope months—like done all of those graphics.
CB: Yeah, she did the illustration for the Auspicious Elections Podcast and some of the forecast episodes and different things like that.
LS: Right.
CB: As well as Ben Dykes—a lot of the really nice illustrations with Ben’s book. And then the Arabic text in the background was all her. So she’s done a lot of really helpful stuff in the past few years and has taken some of the weight off of me agonizing for like hours over what image to use to promote certain episodes.
LS: Right.
CB: So I’ve got to put that description page together, I’ve got to put the description on YouTube together with all the keywords, then I have to release those. And I usually try to pick a good election for releasing them to successfully promote it since that’s kind of like the birth of that episode really.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: You’ve got the conception chart, which is like the recording of the episode, and then you have the birth chart in some sense, symbolically, which is the release of the episode. And then I have to promote it across like five different social media pages. There’s like my Twitter account. There’s the podcast Twitter account. There’s the podcast Instagram account that I just launched in the past year. There’s the podcast Facebook page. There’s my Facebook page. There’s the private discussion forum for patrons that’s accessible only to patrons where I post it. I usually try to post it on Reddit. There’s also a mailing list. I also send out a detailed announcement to all patrons that the episode is out, and usually I write some behind-the-scenes information about that episode, as well as some news about what’s coming up in the near future as like a little benefit for patrons.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So that’s why when we say it’s like an all-day thing, it really is like an all-day thing. It really is like an all-day thing just releasing the episode.
LS: Right.
CB: And that’s separate from the recording or the planning stages.
LS: Yeah. Yeah, it really has become a huge enterprise.
CB: Yeah, so that’s a whole thing. Yeah, that’s kind of the production process at that point, the three-stage process—three-or-four-stage process of scheduling, writing the outline and planning, recording the episode, and then editing and releasing the episode.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Yeah, so that kind of brings us up to where we are today more or less, right? Are there any other little production things like that that we haven’t touched on?
LS: No, I mean, I think that’s pretty current. Trying to make sure we didn’t miss something major. Yeah, I mean, basically just what your plans are for, you know, the near future and what you’d like to further develop with the podcast.
CB: Yeah, and in terms of the production today, you know, last fall at some point Uranus dipped into Taurus for like a few months from like May of last year until, what, September or October?
LS: I think the beginning of November, if I’m remembering right.
CB: Okay. And that was my 4th house—4th whole sign house—and I suddenly got the urge to move out. We had been living in this basement apartment since 2010, which when we got it was really amazing in terms of being able to afford it and being centrally located in an interesting part of Denver. But we had major sound issues where the ceiling above us was super thin.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So we could hear the neighbors even walking, or they had dogs that would bark all the time…
LS: Yeah.
CB: …and it would just constantly interrupt the podcast. And you can hear sometimes major episodes of the podcast that were interrupted by major sound issues.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: There was also other weird living stuff there, so I started getting the urge to move last fall, in the fall of 2018. But after looking at things for a little bit, I realized that I couldn’t, and we still had a lease for another six months…
LS: Yeah.
CB: …and I needed to just like hang out for a while and forget about that. So I started instead putting everything into building a studio, and I started building what is essentially this studio in our living room at the time, which you were super excited about donating or giving up our living room to the podcast studio.
LS: Yeah, I remember you sort of tentatively being like, “So would you mind terribly if I did this in the living room?” And I was like, “How about half the living room.”
CB: Right.
LS: I mean, it essentially ended up being most of the living room just because of logistics. Yeah, so that was a thing for a while. It was basically just the podcast studio.
CB: Yeah—under the premise that it would only be temporary…
LS: Yeah. Definitely.
CB: …which it did end up working out. But the idea was I would put everything towards getting together all of the equipment and building a studio in our living room, so that when we actually could move and get a dedicated room for the podcast recording studio then I would already have all the equipment.
LS: Right.
CB: And then it would just be a matter of moving it in there once we had the space. And somehow that actually worked out. Then I forgot about that basically, the studio, and then I started doing interviews, starting last November. I think the one with our friend on Chinese astrology was the first one.
LS: Yes. Mm-hmm. Yeah, Jeffrey.
CB: What episode was that?
LS: Let’s see.
CB: So I’m always trying to remember the exact episode numbers. And you can see all the episodes at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/episodes. That’s the primary page where you can get an overview of everything.
LS: Yeah, so that was “The Transmission of Horoscopic Astrology to China & Japan,” which was Episode 181.
CB: Okay. Yeah, and that was with Dr. Jeffrey Kotyk. And that was the first interview that I did in the new studio, in our living room, and I’ve since after that done other episodes. We did the zodiacal releasing episode in there.
LS: Mm-hmm. The electional astrology one.
CB: Oh, yeah, that was earlier this year.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
CB: ‘Cause it was the rectification episode that was with Patrick last fall.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Okay. Yeah, and so, getting the hang of that studio and learning different things and just figuring out how to make that work. Like I had to build a new separate computer that could handle the cameras for this, and setting up and learning the cameras, the different setup. Getting the TV in order to display charts and stuff.
LS: Right.
CB: Figuring out how to switch back and forth between the chart display versus the camera and other things like that and working out the kinks.
LS: Right.
CB: So that’s what I was doing for like six months, from like last fall until early this year, as Uranus slipped back into Aries—back into what is my 3rd house.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Which we realized in retrospect that entire transit of Uranus through Aries and through my 3rd house pretty much perfectly bookended me starting to do podcasting, and then me finally reaching this point today basically.
LS: Yeah. Exactly. ‘Cause it started in 2010 in Aries, I think. And wasn’t that when you said the original Traditional Astrology Podcast started?
CB: Yeah, November 2010.
LS: Okay. Yeah, and so, that entire Uranus transit through your 3rd has been beginning the podcast.
CB: Yeah, and just basically using…
LS: Using more technology, too.
CB: Using technology and leveraging technology, and as a result of using technology, the way that I communicate and get my voice out—and actually getting my voice out in the world—being really amplified as a result of that.
LS: Mm-hmm. Definitely.
CB: I think that’s a good summary and delineation of that.
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah, so then, as I’ve talked about in the recent forecast episodes, a month ago, after a local astrology group meeting, I was pretty excited after we did the Uranus through the houses episode.
LS: Ironically.
CB: Yeah, that went so well. And yeah, ironically, ‘cause I’m sure we probably did a delineation for Uranus going through the 4th house—changing your home and living situation…
LS: Right.
CB: …but was not speaking in terms of my own Aquarius rising chart at the time.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: But then like a day or so later, I started getting the urge basically to move again and realizing that our lease was up that month, and if I wanted to I needed to make a decision within a matter of days.
LS: Right.
CB: And that month I happened to look and find that there was a place pretty close to us that was like this ideal place we had always wanted to move into, but thought we would never be able to.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and there was suddenly an opening, and our landlord sent a lease for renewal quite late. And so, we hadn’t actually gotten it yet, even though it was coming up, you know, in just a few weeks. So we decided to go and check it out and everything happened really quickly from there in the last few weeks.
CB: Yeah, and basically over the course of the month we changed everything and moved into a new place, and then we spent the past two or three weeks getting set up here.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And then we recorded the first episode, which just happens to be Episode 200, in the new recording studio, which is like a room that we’ve dedicated to the podcast.
LS: Yeah, we just set that up a few days ago. I’m sure some other things will change over time. This is just kind of the first setup. But yeah, it’s exciting.
CB: Yeah, but it’s nice. It’s like we’ve got the bookshelves in this room around us. You’ve still got the same ones there behind you from the previous one. I had this white wall and the inability—because of a ledge—to put bookshelves behind me in the past, but now I’ve got them there and everything else. Otherwise, technically, we’ve still got the same tables and microphones and everything else.
LS: Right.
CB: Although we do have some different cameras now set up for doing different shots.
LS: Yeah, different cameras. The close observer of the podcast videos will see there’s a blue wall back there, which is much nicer than our crumbling white wall from last time.
CB: Right, that would leak, and that was actually the big thing in that place. We had Kenneth Miller come over and visit once—and I don’t think we recorded a podcast at the time—but he gave a lecture for our local astrology group. And then we came back home that day and it rained really hard, and when we came home there was water shooting through the walls.
LS: Yeah, like comically, like straight through the wall.
CB: Yeah, and it ruined…
LS: The carpet.
CB: …the carpet, but also dozens…
LS: A lot of books.
CB: I had some of my modern astrology books lined up on a ledge below one of the windows, which had never leaked before, and then suddenly they all got crazy, water-damaged.
LS: Yeah. Yeah, a lot of those. Yeah, and that’s what we were really nervous about, you know, in the last month. Do we make this leap and make this major change in our home? But that was the thing that worried me the most in terms of like maybe this is a good idea, in addition to being a positive move—you know, just having so much additional electronic equipment in our home compared to even a few years ago and that being in the living room, and that being where it would leak again.
CB: Yeah.
LS: Yeah.
CB: During the fall, I had set up a whole podcast recording studio in the very living room where the leaks had happened in previous years.
LS: Yeah, and it definitely could happen again, and I was really nervous about that combination.
CB: Yeah, so the rainy season is just about to start. It’s like April. So we ended up getting out of there, and lucking out and finding a place, and it’s largely due to the patrons that we were able to afford it.
LS: Yeah. Definitely.
CB: So it’s another way that sort of helped, but also putting that back into the podcast and reinvesting it in order to improve and continue to expand the podcast, as I have in different increments over the years. I mean, one of the things that I skipped is in 2017, I upgraded my microphone setup from the original microphone—which is a Rode Podcast, which is a USB mic—and started using XLR microphones. And the microphones we’re using now are Shure SM7B, which is pretty common. It’s like the best podcast-recording microphone that a lot of big podcasts—like YouTube channels and stuff—use.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: But the microphone itself is expensive and it takes a lot of additional equipment to run it and get it to work properly.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And then, eventually, once I built the studio, I had to get another one for you, for the guests. And then, eventually, the next step—and I’m hoping to do that later this month—is finally to be able to do up to four people, or me, plus three guests, to do a four-person podcast, which we might actually do for the first time later this week if it all goes well.
LS: Right. Yeah.
CB: So we’ll see if that happens.
LS: Keep you posted. I mean, the setup, from the outside view looking at this, you can see that there’s, you know, two sides of bookcases now, you can see there’s a blue wall, but the rest may not look terribly different to someone looking from the outside. But this is actually a huge difference for us and also for what can further develop because of having its own room for the podcast studio. So just being able to put all the equipment in here, you know, maybe at some point bringing in someone who can switch the screens instead of you having to do it—like right now, what you’re doing.
CB: Yeah, it’s like on other podcasts—if you watch most of them—they usually have at least one engineer, or sometimes two, either off-screen or off in the background. There’s somebody doing a live switch that’s like switching the video for the closeups of the different people, and then there’s usually another person who’s watching the audio.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So that’s something, yeah, that we might have to get at some point. ‘Cause I’m trying to do it right now, but it’s kind of distracting trying to switch the cameras.
LS: Right, and also, think about what you’re saying.
CB: Right.
LS: You know, so maybe a potential for that, you know, having the three cameras setup for the first time and just other things that we can do now that it has its own space.
CB: Yeah, ‘cause the biggest thing is I want to get away from Zoom and always having to use Zoom as like a Skype alternative that you use to do video calls. And a lot of astrologers have switched to that and switched away from Skype over the past few years ‘cause Zoom has better quality than Skype.
LS: Right.
CB: It is also more expensive, but it’s definitely worth the investment. But the only downside is even though you can get video—and the video’s pretty good—it’s like boxed in. And then you have this letterbox where there’s like black at the top and black below and just these little windows, and everybody’s on webcam. Whereas, here, you can have much more high quality if it’s in person. And if I have the person in the studio then you have much more high quality recordings.
LS: Mm-hmm. Definitely. Yeah, so we’ve been able to move to this. I know that you’re wanting to start other in-person interviews offsite as well, right?
CB: Yeah, now that we have not a crappy basement apartment, I can feel comfortable having somebody like Rob Hand or something over to do an interview—like come over to our place and be here—whereas, previously, that might be a little weird.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And eventually, I mean, that could become part of the production budget in terms of like having people out, or flying people out or what have you. I mean, for a while it’s just gonna be if there’s somebody coming through town then we might attempt to interview them ‘cause I can’t really afford to fly people out.
LS: No, not yet.
CB: Maybe someday.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, so I want to do more in-person interviews and push to do that as often as possible whenever I can because then that’s gonna be the best quality if I can do it in person versus remote.
LS: Right.
CB: I also have always had—and I had forgotten about this until relatively recently—but I had always had the desire since about 2007-2008 to do more documentary-style interviews with astrologers. And part of the genesis of that was for a few years there, around like 2006-2007, Kelly Lee Phipps—an astrologer named Kelly Lee Phipps who passed away, sadly, a few years ago, way too young—was going around to different conferences. And this was right around the time that I started attending and speaking at conferences in the mid-2000s, and I knew Kelly through MySpace and through online and through discussion forums and stuff, And he was going around and he got a bunch of money and he wanted to do a documentary on astrology, and this was sort of a few years after that one big documentary—like New Agey documentary—What the Bleep Do We Know.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And he kind of tried to pattern his a little bit after What the Bleep Do We Know, where he did a bunch of interviews with astrologers to try to talk about astrology and sort of showcase the diversity in the field and get people excited about it, and then he also did some other stuff or integrated other stuff into it. And he ended up releasing that actually. I was the president of AYA, and we did the premiere for that movie at the United Astrology Conference in 2008. It was his first film though. He didn’t have a lot of background in filmmaking and he learned a lot as he went, and a lot of the interviews were good. I mean, there were different things where you could see his technique improving as he did more and more interviews…
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: …dealing with things like audio and lighting. And all the different things that I’ve been learning here doing the podcast that has been very touch-and-go and you just sort of learn by doing it, he did the same process over a few-years span of time shooting this documentary. And it premiered at UAC. It didn’t go very well. Like it wasn’t received very well partially because in trying to follow the What the Bleep Do We Know…
LS: The format.
CB: …format, he integrated some—not narrative—but dramatic elements, where there was like a dramatic storyline but it was all acted. As for the actors, he just used his friends and family members. And none of them were professional actors, so it didn’t necessarily come off that good. And he edited himself and probably needed a professional editor to cut it down ‘cause the final runtime ended up being like three or four hours.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: You made it through the entire premiere, right?
LS: I did, yeah. Yeah, I saw some people leaving, but I figured I was committed. You know, I wanted to see how the whole thing went since I was already there.
CB: Yeah, and there was a large audience of like a thousand people or something that showed up for it that night, but they left. Like during the course of it, a lot of people left, and it was kind of a disappointing event in some respects, or in many respects. I felt like it was too bad because I was excited about the idea of a documentary about astrology that would give people outside of the astrological community some insight into this thing that we’re all interested in, and what professional astrologers actually believe and what they actually do.
LS: Right.
CB: And at the time, back in 2008, I started thinking about doing my own, and I registered the domain AstrologyDocumentary.com. I don’t think I’ll ever use that, but it’s been weird over the past decade how The Astrology Podcast has almost morphed into that. And I’ve been doing biographical interviews and interviews on different topics with different people—it’s almost morphed into doing something like that.
And as I get more and more into doing video, I’ve started thinking more about doing, you know, interviews with individual astrologers either here in the studio or going out and like flying to them to shoot interviews on location. Especially with some older astrologers—to just start capturing some of those stories while we still have the opportunity to since some of them are starting to pass away. We’ve lost some major astrologers over the past few years. We lost Jeff Jawer unexpectedly to cancer, I think.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
CB: A few months ago, Robert Schmidt passed away. He was one of my teachers. Yeah, so there’s been stuff like that where we’re starting to lose some of those astrologers and lose some of that history and some of those stories permanently. And I’d like to capture some of those while there’s still time, both here on the podcast, but also, potentially, in some other direct interviews.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Definitely. And there’s such a huge generation of older astrologers. You know, that Pluto in Leo generation, a lot of the astrologers born in the 1940s and so. And there’s just so many of them. But even the ones who haven’t passed away, some of them are still really prolific, but some have started to slow down because of health issues and things like that. So yeah, it would be really great to be able to talk to as many people as you can.
CB: Yeah. Definitely. So I think as I move into, you know, whatever comes after Episode 200, those are the directions that I want to start moving. More interviews in the studio and potentially more documentary-style interviews with individual astrologers.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So that’s the plan for the next hundred episodes. If anybody wants to support that then the best thing you can do is sign up to become a patron on Patreon and one of the tiers, and that will directly help me to continue to expand my efforts. And if you go back and just look at the past 200 episodes, you’ll see that something that I consistently do is just reinvest money back into the podcast to keep it expanding and improving what I’m doing.
LS: Definitely.
CB: Yeah. All right, so I think that brings up historically in terms of giving a retrospective and an overview of the history of the podcast. That pretty much brings us up to the present time.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So there were some questions that were submitted by listeners and patrons over the past few days, and we’ve kind of integrated and dealt with some of them at this point. I did want to go through and answer a few more before we wrap this up.
LS: Okay.
CB: What do you think? Do you want to take a break?
LS: Yeah, why don’t we take a break.
CB: Okay, so let’s take a brief break.
LS: ‘Kay.
CB: We’ll probably edit this out in post.
LS: Yes.
CB: So this is one of those examples.
LS: Yeah.
CB: I’m trying to get better about doing that actually. ‘Cause some of the episodes in the past, we’ve just gone for like three hours and then we’ve been dying at the end.
LS: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: But scheduling breaks is good since there’s no reason not to.
LS: Definitely.
CB: All right, so we will break and then we’ll be right back.
LS: All right.
CB: Okay.
[break]
CB: All right, we’re back. All right, so yeah, let’s do some of the questions in the Q&A, ‘cause I did want to cover some of these before we wrap up today.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So we already answered a couple of times Maren’s one—that everything sounds so put together. And some of that is just that I’ve become better at speaking—I mean, I’m still not great—over the years, if you’ve listened to the early episodes versus more recent ones…
LS: Yeah.
CB: …and being a little bit more careful or other things. I mean, doing this—doing the podcast—hosting our local astrology group meetings where I would often have to give talks or introduce people. That’s given me a lot of experience speaking and talking in front of groups.
LS: Right.
CB: Getting experience going around and lecturing at different conferences and different astrology groups is also another thing that’s given me experience. Like all of those have kind of fed into each other in different ways.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And for a lot of people, I would really just recommend just putting yourself out there. You’re gonna fail initially. Your initial attempts to do anything—especially giving astrology lectures—it’s not gonna be that good. But you’re gonna learn from every experience, and so just push yourself to do that.
LS: Right.
CB: It’s the same with consultations or seeing clients.
LS: Yeah. Definitely. Just repetition.
CB: Right. That feeds into the next question by Aerin Fogel who says, “I’m curious to know if your approach with clients has changed over the course of the podcast. How did it impact your practice?” And what’s funny about that is actually the answer is that I’ve stopped seeing clients basically in the past couple of years.
LS: Yeah.
CB: The podcast, more than anything else, single-handedly killed my consulting practice.
LS: Whereas it has helped mine quite a bit.
CB: Oh, yeah, it’s expanded yours.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So that’s really good.
LS: Yeah.
CB: And Austin, I know, a year or two ago, expressed—not skepticism—but concern that I would be stunting my growth as an astrologer by not seeing clients. And I definitely miss that and there’s definitely some truth to that, so that I might at some point go back to it just for the sake of experience. But right now, it just doesn’t make sense doing one-off consultations in terms of the time—not just the time I have available, which is little.
But also, just what I would charge or have to charge to make it make sense for me to devote time to just talking to one person would have to be a lot higher. And I’m not sure if that would make sense in terms of the time commitment and the value to me versus doing a podcast versus recording a lecture for a course or something that I would sell to like, you know, a hundred people versus just doing a consultation with one person.
LS: Yeah, you’ve definitely moved more in the direction of teaching and podcast versus one-on-one things, and I think that’s part of how this entire enterprise, you know, and our lives and things like that has worked out.
CB: Yeah, and how I’m able to make it work.
LS: Yeah.
CB: I mean, I still do research, and I still get charts, and I still do electional charts for myself all the time and I’m constantly paying attention to that. And we’re constantly noticing and observing interesting things. We just had a funny thing yesterday where we had a local astrology group meeting, and somebody started interjecting, kind of like…
LS: Like heckling.
CB: …like heckling the speaker.
LS: Yeah.
CB: And you pulled out your phone and pointed that Mars was right on the Midheaven at that time.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And that was funny ‘cause we had actually—in the electional chart for the start of the meeting—were rushing to try to start it early because we wanted to get Leo rising, so that Mars was not in the 10th whole sign house at least. But I think by the time I started introducing the person with Leo rising, by the time he started speaking it had probably switched over to Virgo rising, so Mars was in the 10th whole sign house.
LS: Yeah.
CB: And then of course Mars—once it hit the exact degree of the Midheaven—that’s when the heckling started.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that was fun.
CB: That was fun. And that was a good example of whole sign houses versus quadrant houses.
LS: Right.
CB: But I’m still always learning and paying attention to things. Certainly, I’m not doing individual consultations, and you do learn a lot from that.
LS: Right.
CB: So there’s some things that I’m missing out on, but right now it’s for the greater good or greater purpose of being able to do all these interviews, and sometimes sit down and read a book—you know, like Ben’s recent book on Sahl—and read through that and write my notes and write an outline and then be able to do an interview with him about that. There’s something really rewarding about that to me, or doing the Joan Quigley episode on Reagan’s astrologer and doing all the research for that and then putting it together. Like that’s really fun to me and really great to be able to do that research and make that be like my primary job in some ways.
LS: Right. And you wouldn’t have the time to do a lot of those things if you were still doing primarily one-on-one consultations.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So anyways, we’ll see how it goes in the future.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Actually to cap off part of the history—which we should have mentioned that also happened in the past month—is you, after like a few years of trying to decide if it was time, recently quit your day job to do astrology full time.
LS: Yeah, and that’s been also an outgrowth of the podcast, really, kind of indirectly, just because of, you know, being on some of these episodes over the years and, you know, that gradually increasing, you know, my client consultations. And then you being able to kind of be more stable, you know, in terms of income from just doing astrology by doing these things that are more collective, like, you know, ramping up the teaching and the podcast. So yeah, that was definitely like a big moment in the last month.
CB: Yeah, that’s a big turning point.
LS: It is. Yeah, I realized it was the Saturn opposition when I first started studying astrology as well.
CB: Okay.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Nice.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, so that’s exciting, and both of us are off on this new turning point and this new path.
LS: Yeah, it’s a lot of changes in the last month, especially with the Uranus ingress, I think.
CB: Yeah. Definitely. All right, so to back up, what were we talking about just before that? Questions about consultations. Yeah, there’s a funny, like cheeky answer to that, which is just I’ve stopped doing consultations and that’s how the podcast has helped that.
LS: Right.
CB: But also, there’s different astrologers that do different things. There are research astrologers.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: There are astrologers that do forecasts. There are astrologers that do medical astrology or horary or electional.
LS: Right.
CB: It’s like not every astrologer does everything. Some astrologers specialize in different approaches. Sometimes there’s astrologers, like Nick Campion, that are into historical studies or academic studies of astrology.
LS: Right.
CB: There’s many different ways that somebody can either be an astrologer or work on astrology in their life and in their career, and it doesn’t always fit the specific idea of what we think an astrologer is necessarily professionally.
LS: Right, ‘cause the two usual ideas are either from a more general audience, like, “Oh, you write horoscopes,” or like from people within the field, like, “Oh, you do consultations.” And, you know, yeah, it’s much broader than that when you really get into it.
CB: Yeah, it can be. I mean, it’s true. That being said, doing client consultations, for the vast majority of professional astrologers is probably their primary income.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
CB: Then it’s some combination—at least at this point in the early 21st century—the model that I’ve seen amongst myself and my contemporaries, people like Austin and Kelly, where we’ve all done different variations of the same thing. Some combination of, you know, doing consultations, teaching classes, and having like passive income through selling lectures or workshops or things like that.
LS: Right. Yeah, so it’s usually more than one thing, but still, most people don’t do everything that you could do with astrology.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Okay, so that was a good question. Another question that comes from Serina Arlene—she actually has a whole cluster of a bunch of questions that were really good. One of them, she says, “I’m really nosy. I want to know all of the dirt.” Her first question is, “How much did it cost to get the podcast going?” And I would say the biggest investment at the beginning was just getting that $200 Rode podcaster microphone. It was like $200 for the microphone and like a hundred dollars for the microphone boom arm to keep it steady without doing vibrational noise if I put it on a stand on the desk.
LS: Right.
CB: So it was like a $300 investment for that. There were probably some other minor investments with things like other programs that I was doing. I’d use Adobe Audition, which I’d pay a monthly fee for each month to rent. And now there’s like Zoom fees, but that was the biggest initial startup cost, getting a good microphone…
LS: Right.
CB: …which I’d really recommend if anyone’s gonna start a podcast. Try to get at least a Blue Yeti microphone to start. Once you record the audio, you can’t go back and change it. While you can do some stuff in post-production to like clean up or improve the audio, once you’ve committed it on the file, whatever has gone through your microphone, that’s what you have to work with. And so, if you’re recording it into like a soup can or something like that then it’s not gonna sound that good and there’s very little you can do, whereas at least if you record with a halfway decent microphone from the start, you’ve got a little bit more room for negotiation in post-production.
LS: Mm-hmm. Definitely.
CB: “Yeah, so how long before you start making money with it?” I would say, indirectly, two to three years. It took two to three years before I noticed that a lot of my clients and students were starting to come from having listened to me on the podcast.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: But it took like three to four years before eventually I started making some money directly through Patreon.
LS: Right. Well, and it could have been less than that if Patreon was a thing before. So that’s not necessarily how long it would take everyone to directly make money from it.
CB: Yeah, and if I started over again, it would be different. Although it would still take a while to build up an audience.
LS: Yeah.
CB: And a lot of it’s consistency because I had already had some experience with the blog. And one of the biggest things is you just need to pick a platform for whatever you’re doing, whether it’s blogging or a podcast or YouTube—even social media counts, like Twitter or Instagram—and you just need to do it consistently. And if you do it consistently for long enough—if it’s a semi-popular platform—you will eventually build up somewhat of an audience.
LS: Mm-hmm. Right.
CB: But consistency is like the key thing.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And definitely I wasn’t doing it that consistently for a few years and it did start to gain some attention. But then once I started doing it more consistently with the four episodes a month then it really took off.
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah. She says, “How many hours of work did you put into it at first?” It’s really hard to say. I put in a little bit into recording, where there’s like a few hours into recording. There’s, you know, a few hours into the prep time at least of writing the outline or to have a one-page outline of at least one-line bullet points.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And I always do that as a Google document so I can share it with my guest. And so, they can look over the outline and change it or add or remove things.
LS: There’s also the not-insignificant prep time, like if it’s for someone who’s releasing a book, or even just about the topic that someone wrote a book about—going back or getting the new book and reading it or at least skimming it and things like that.
CB: Yeah, like ordering the book. Ben has sent me sometimes pre-publication versions that I’ve had to read through. Or for the important episodes, like with Geoffrey Cornelius or Richard Tarnas, it’s books that I had read before but I hadn’t read in years. So I have to reread them, write detailed notes and questions and stuff.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And yeah, that takes time.
LS: There’s pretty significant prep time on some of the episodes.
CB: Right. It really varies.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Whereas there’s other episodes have been kind of like blow-off or spur-of-the-moment-type things.
LS: Mm-hmm. But you usually at least try to write a detailed outline.
CB: Yeah, even for the blow-off episodes.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Although some of those, there have been instances where it didn’t go as well as I would have hoped either because I didn’t write a good enough outline or because just the discussion itself didn’t flow as well as I had hoped.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Like there’s some episodes that just went really well, whereas there’s other ones where I wish I could have a do-over.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Yeah, I mean, like “The Debate Over the Origins of Hellenistic Astrology” didn’t go as well as I would have liked. And I don’t remember why that was, but that was one where it didn’t quite hit the mark in terms of what I was shooting for. And the one on “The Origins of Horary Astrology” was a little bit similar, where I think that may have gone over some people’s heads, and I almost should have broken it down a little bit more than we did in order to make it more approachable.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think some of the prep time in terms of the questions—it depends on what you’re trying to do with it. But I know that a lot of what you’ve been trying to do is explicitly educational, and therefore it’s like prepping for teaching, you know.
CB: Right. Well, yeah, I’m preparing lectures.
LS: Yeah.
CB: The format of this is basically as if you are attending a local astrology group. Given the quality of the episodes, I’m shooting for at least as if you were attending a lecture on that topic…
LS: Right.
CB: …or trying to prepare almost as much as if we were preparing a lecture on the topic.
LS: Right.
CB: And that’s also one of the reasons for the length and detail–these are, if not, full lectures—which the time is expanding. ‘Cause if it was just one person then you could do some of it in 75 minutes.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: But then the moment that you add a second person that doubles the talking time to some extent.
LS: To some extent, yeah.
CB: To some extent, just by virtue of having two people. And in some instances, I could have just done single ones as single lectures. But by adding another person—because people seem to want the dialogue format more—that just automatically sort of expands the talking time of it.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Definitely.
CB: “How many hours did you put into it at first?” So a lot in editing. ‘Cause initially it was the recording and the prep, but then I would have to spend a lot of time editing and listening through and removing breaths and ‘ums’ and tightening things up.
LS: Yeah, so however long the episode was then listening through that entire thing again.
CB: Yeah.
LS: Yeah.
CB: “How many hours a week do you put into it now?” I really can’t estimate ‘cause it varies. Like I said, it’s four to six episodes a month, so it’s the greater part of each month at this point.
LS: Yeah, it’s most of what you do.
CB: “What’s your favorite episodes? What’s your least favorite episodes? Any guests just extra weird or mean? What is the natal chart of the podcast?” We touched on that.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: “Composite charts? Who supported you from the beginning?” I mean, you’ve always been very supportive.
LS: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I might have been dubious about the early expenses when we didn’t have much money, but other than that, yeah.
CB: Right, or like the time or something. I don’t know. Not so much?
LS: Not so much.
CB: “Did anyone try to disparage you or take you down? Did you ever want to give up? When?” So I do want to glance though to answer part of that question about the episodes because I had meant to just scroll through the episode list and highlight some of the highlights.
LS: Well, and I know you said it was hard, right, when we were looking through it earlier because there’s 200—or 199 before this. So it’s like really hard to pick out single ones for anything.
CB: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of great episodes, and I almost wanted to do categories ‘cause there’s different clusters of episodes. Like there’s some really great beginner episodes.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Like the one that I did with Kelly really early on is still a great intro to astrology episode, and it’s Episode 31, which is titled, “Tips for Learning Astrology and Becoming an Astrologer.” It’s still a great episode I did with Kelly on that subject, a general introduction of that subject. And since that time, we’ve done other episodes that are great introductions to basic concepts, like the one on the seven traditional planets.
LS: Right.
CB: I’m trying to find…
LS: Where that was?
CB: Yeah, what episode number that was. I mean, there’s Episode 29, “Branches and Traditions of Astrology,” which is kind of wordy and might have been rambling, and I think that was a solo episode.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: But it’s still a good intro to these are the basic branches and traditions of Western astrology.
LS: Right. We did the basics of what the Saturn return is just before that, a few episodes before.
CB: Yeah, I’m trying to find the planets one though because that and the outer planets one were key intro to astrology ones.
LS: Right.
CB: It should be right around this timeframe. Yeah, there it is. Episode 64, “The Significations of the Seven Traditional Planets,” great intro to the meanings of the planets episode.
LS: Right.
CB: And then follow that up with Episode 67 on “The Outer Planets in Relationships.” Because even though it’s presented within the context of relationships, that was actually originally meant to be my outer planets episode.
LS: Right.
CB: And I think it does a good job of summarizing how modern astrologers have come to view the basic significations of the outer planets.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: In recent times, like especially over the past year, we’ve really gone to town with doing some major episodes on some core topics. Like the rectification episode that we did with Patrick is a really important basic episode. So that’s Episode 169, titled, “Rectification: Using Astrology to Find Your Birth Time.”
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: We also did the electional episode at the beginning of this year.
LS: Right.
CB: Which is Episode 190 on electional astrology, which is an introduction to how to find electional charts and how to use them.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: That’s really useful if you’re following the monthly forecast episodes where I present one electional chart. If you want to know how to use that electional chart and how we found it and what it’s good for then watch that episode. More recently, also, I’ve done two time-lord episodes that were really important, first, starting with the episode on annual profections—which I think I did just like a year ago.
LS: Yeah, I’m trying to find it.
CB: It wasn’t astrological education, or horary. There it is. Episode 153, “Annual Profections: A Basic Time-Lord Technique.” That’s very crucial. That’s just me originally giving a lecture, I think, for Adam Elenbaas’ school, but I also recorded the video and turned it into a podcast.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And then more recently, the more advanced technique, zodiacal releasing in Episode 192, that was something we referred to on the podcast for years. But it was one of those techniques that because it was the final lecture in my course—this 18-hour workshop on zodiacal releasing—I was always nervous about making that redundant by doing a podcast on it. And we ended up sort of making a middle-ground by doing an introductory episode on that technique, and it was still long. It was four-hours-long.
LS: Right.
CB: That was really still just an introduction to that technique and it did not go into as much detail or go into as many example charts as I do in my full course on the topic, where it’s like an 18-hour workshop, plus some other bonus materials.
LS: Right. Yeah, it’s funny because it was viewed as such a long episode, you know, as four-and-a-half in the recording, and I think five with breaks when we actually did it. But we really did just cover pretty in-depth the first beginning blocks of the technique, so it is a middle-ground.
CB: Well, ‘cause it’s one of the most complicated techniques in astrology. It’s one of the most powerful timing techniques we know of, and it’s usually something I would do as an introduction in a daylong workshop, which is about four or five hours. For the OPA retreat, I did like a three- or four-day intensive on it.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So yeah, we really wanted to do a good job of introducing that, and we did it very slowly and deliberately, and I’m pretty happy with how that episode came out.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, when people were sending in their favorite episodes—I mean, I think there were so many because there’s so many episodes, so it was kind of across the board. But there were a number of people that said that zodiacal releasing one was their favorite.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, so it’s like there’s the beginner episodes that are really crucial and that’s a collection of some of them.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: But otherwise, in terms of looking through some of these, Episode 7, Kelly and I did on Mercury retrograde. But that’s one that I’d actually like to redo because we just sort of did that as a blow-off episode and didn’t prepare as much as we could have.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So Patrick and I have been talking about redoing a Mercury retrograde episode at one point.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: The Ben Dykes episode—Episode 13—on Hephaistio was important because that was when I had to revise my views on the origins of horary astrology and acknowledge that horary was in Dorotheus. But it’s important because then I sort of finally understood what the true origins of horary were and how they developed. Partially, it confirmed part of what I thought, which is that they sort of developed out of consultation charts and then it eventually became its own full-fledged branch of astrology by the Medieval period, but it was a slower development that started in the 1st century in Dorotheus and then sort of grew from there.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So that was a good one. Episode 14 on birth data collection is really good. “The Rationale for the Significations of the Houses” is a really important discussion about just understanding the difference between how ancient astrologers originally developed the significations of the houses versus how the houses were developed in modern times, and how their significations were developed using the ‘12-letter alphabet’, and what the difference is and whether it’s possible to reconcile those two.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: The “Modern vs. Traditional Astrology Debate,” Episode 18, was that legendary debate between me and Eric Meyers, and I’ve always wanted to have Eric back on the show. And we’ve been trying to negotiate it at different points over the years, but it hasn’t quite happened. But I’ve always wanted to have him back on for more of a neutral discussion about something mutually-agreeable because that was a tense debate and had different repercussions. But yeah, I’ve always meant to have him back on again and we’re still negotiating that. Let’s see, “Understanding Your Saturn Return,” Episode 24, is actually a pretty great technical episode where you and I outline our approach to using the Saturn return, but also looking at the whole Saturn cycle.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And that’s a really crucial episode that’s good from a technical standpoint because it talks a lot about sect. It talks about mitigation—mitigating conditions.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Your article on that was released on Astro.com, right?
LS: Yeah, just a few days ago. It was really exciting because, you know, Astro.com is just kind of this major website within the astrological community. And so many people, including myself, used it early on, you know, to create free charts ‘cause you can do like a hundred free charts per account and things like that. And so, it was just a crucial learning tool when I was first learning astrology, and it feels like quite the milestone to have an article of my own on there. So it was very exciting.
CB: Yeah. Definitely.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Especially like the first month that you switched to doing astrology full time.
LS: Oh, yeah, that’s true, that is coinciding. So yeah, that’s probably auspicious.
CB: And then I had an episode—or an article on zodiacal releasing that I had written for The Mountain Astrologer that they republished just a month or two ago as well. And they also integrated a zodiacal releasing calculator not long after we did our zodiacal releasing episode partially in response to that.
LS: Right. Yeah, that was amazing.
CB: And I’d been asking them to do that for like 10 years. So the fact that they finally did it was huge, and I think that will help to proliferate the technique a lot more. which is kind of similar to what’s happened over the past decade. At the United Astrology Conference in 2008, the founder of AstroDienst, Alois Treindl, attended my lecture. I gave two lectures on Hellenistic astrology, and after those lectures he said he was finally gonna integrate whole sign houses into Astro.com, and they did.
And I think that’s really helped to encourage the growth and the popularization of that approach—which was just rediscovered in like the 1980s and 1990s as existing at all—and it’s really helped to popularize it over the course of the past decade and it’s been amazing watching that grow and flourish. And I have to think that the podcast has played some role in kind of popularizing that since that’s my primary approach, and Kelly’s approach, and Austin’s approach, and I know a lot of people are probably exposed to it through us. And then being able to calculate it on Astro.com over the past decade has also probably made a major difference.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think it’s been a huge influence directly through the podcast.
CB: Yeah, ‘cause like 10 years ago, it still was not a major thing.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Even though Rob Hand had been promoting it since the mid-‘90s, I was always surprised when I started using it in the mid-2000s how it wasn’t that common. Like I would ask people in the audience how many people know what whole sign houses are—when giving an intro to Hellenistic lecture—almost nobody would raise their hand, whereas nowadays when I do that almost everybody raises their hand.
LS: Yeah. Yeah, it’s been a stark difference.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So yeah, “Understanding Your Saturn Return.” “Mitigating Factors in Traditional Astrology” is an episode I did with Michael Ofek, which is actually really good and super overlooked. It was a really good episode on mitigating factors that I would recommend people check out. “Tips for Learning Astrology and Becoming an Astrologer” of course I’ve already mentioned, but that’s still a really great episode that Kelly and me did. Do you remember any offhand?
LS: Yeah, I’m just looking through here to see which ones stand out to me. Let’s see—there were two about Saturn in Sagittarius, right? We did like one at the beginning and then a retrospective with people’s Saturn returns and things at the end.
CB: Yeah, Episode 45 was basically our predictions and our anticipations when Saturn was first going into Sag and what we thought it would be about.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And then we did a retrospective at one point later on especially talking about things that we had seen actually manifest, which was really cool, and then some Saturn return stories that we had noticed during the process that were interesting manifestations.
LS: Right. Yeah, and the first Saturn in Sagittarius one was very ambitious ‘cause we had four people, right? You had you and Kelly and Austin do the first half, about more general Saturn in Sag things, and then you had me and Patrick and you do Saturn return ones.
CB: Yeah, and I tried to break it up like that.
LS: Yeah, and then it was huge.
CB: Right. And then one of the funny things—like by the time you get to the mid-50s episodes of the podcast, which are happening in the later part of 2015—one of the things that’s funny is by this time I’m doing Patreon and I have the four-episode-a-month quota. And sometimes I’m scrambling, honestly, to come up with episodes to fit that quota, and I’ve been surprised that most of the time usually that tension ends up resulting in a sort of creative push that usually results in something good and something useful coming out of that. Most of the time, you’d almost think that I would end up doing worse as a result of that, but sometimes that sort of tension has caused some of the best developments by forcing me to really dig for what would be a great episode.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: I could just do some random episode on whatever, but I’ll instead try to focus on what’s a really great topic I’ve always meant to do but never been able to, and who could I get for that that would be great to talk to about that topic.
LS: Right.
CB: But sometimes having to meet that quota means I just do certain episodes. So one of the ones that’s funny is Adam Elenbaas in November of 2015 asked me if I would mind giving a talk for his school—Nightlight Astrology School—one whole sign houses, like an introduction to that. And I was like, “Sure. What should I call it to promote it?” And he’s like, “I don’t know. Just give it something over the top.” And I’m like, “Okay, I’ll call it “Whole Sign Houses: [literally] The Best System of House Division,” or something like that. And I gave this talk for his group and recorded it and then decided to post it afterwards as an episode of the podcast to fit my quota.
LS: Right.
CB: And what was funny about it is it was partly obviously tongue-in-cheek in terms of the title, but also partially like these are my reasons why this is the primary form of house division that I choose to use.
LS: Right.
CB: Because it’s important to me that I specify, both technical, as well as conceptual and historical reasons for whatever system I use because so often astrologers don’t have a good reason for using whatever form of house division. It’s just that it’s whatever system they learned when they first started studying, or it’s the system their teacher uses, or it’s the system that was used in whatever texts they’re studying from whatever tradition they’re following.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So part of what I tried to do with that episode was just say I think astrologers should have reasons; these are some reasons why I use it that I find are compelling. And then at the end of that, though, people often overlook the end of it where I said, ultimately, you know, whatever system you want to use is fine with me. I just wanted to say that all of us should have a good reason for using whatever system we use, and ultimately some sort of synthesis of the different systems is desirable.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And that was like a point I made at the end of the episode that we should try to synthesize the quadrant and the whole sign house systems, and I thought there were ways to merge them, and I tried to talk about that a little bit. But ultimately, I wanted to encourage other people—by leading by example—to have good reasons for what system they use and sort of challenge other people to then give a similar talk of ‘these are the reasons why I use’ whatever system. So that, though, of course famously generated some backlash…
LS: I recall.
CB: …and led to, I guess, it was not the following episode. I did Geoffrey Cornelius—which was a huge, landmark episode I’d recommend listening to—that fell right in between those, Episode 53, “Geoffrey Cornelius on The Moment of Astrology.” But then Episode 54 was “The Debate About [the] Ancient Systems of House Division,” where basically Deborah Houlding through Facebook was accusing me of lying about the history of house division and everything else. So I kind of was just like, okay, well, come on the show and let’s talk it and let’s have a debate about it and famously did that debate with her on that that generated a lot of controversy and a lot of discussions and a lot of back-and-forth in the comments and online.
LS: Right. Right. Yeah, I mean, and it’s crazy to see just the trajectory of all of that. I remember when you did the prior one and we were deciding on the title, you know, literally ‘the best house’…
CB: You cautioned me. At the time you were like, “Is that prudent or wise?”
LS: I think I furrowed my brow on it while I looked at the title, and I was like, “I don’t know about that.”
CB: And I was, “Nobody’s gonna care. Obviously, this is somewhat tongue-in-cheek.”
LS: Right. I was like, “Not everyone will see it’s tongue-in-cheek.”
CB: Right. Well, no, some people literally freaked out and were super offended…
LS: Yeah.
CB: …by it and got super up-in-arms by that.
LS: Yeah.
CB: I mean, partially it was good feedback for me to be a little bit more careful and deliberate. ‘Cause sometimes there’s a difference between if you’re having a discussion amongst different people and you’re trying to present different points of view or whatever or do historical studies or what have you versus what people do if you’re writing a blog post and you’re trying to promote something, or if you’re trying to do almost like a click-bait title where you’re trying to draw people in.
LS: Right.
CB: And that’s basically what that was. It was a ‘click-baity’ title, but I always assumed that people would get past the title and they would get through to the end where I’m like and now I’ve presented that, but ultimately, you know, I don’t care what system of house division you use. I just would encourage you to have a good reason for doing it and to outline some reasons like I have, and then ultimately I hope we can all move towards some sort of synthesis in the future.
LS: Right.
CB: That part was overlooked and everybody just focused on the title basically.
LS: Well, it was clear afterwards how many people hadn’t actually listened to the episode and were just going by the title alone and never got to the part—well, never got to the content to see that you did talk about synthesis and that you did talk about, you know, understanding different people, you know, using different systems and things like that.
CB: Yeah. But the important point about that episode that I want people to listen is she did spend the first hour accusing me of lying about James Holden and what James Holden said—who I said originally rediscovered whole sign houses—saying, no, he didn’t say that it was the original form of house division or the primary form of house division, but in fact, he did. And at one point, like the second or third time that she accused me of that I stopped the discussion, and I pulled out a quote from him and read it at like an hour-and-twenty minutes into the episode or something, and I said, “This is exactly what he said, so you’re wrong. And please stop accusing me of lying.”
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So she immediately changed the subject and attempted to move on to something else and then we did the rest of the episode, but people listening to that episode I think missed things like that. And I was always disappointed not just in the quadrant house proponents who tended to hear what they wanted to hear from that, but also from the whole sign house proponents just because people tended to approach that, I noticed, based on what their preferred form of house division was rather than looking at it from more of a historical perspective, which is what that debate ultimately was about to me—what actually happened historically.
LS: Right. Yeah. Yeah, and I mean, I think that, yeah, it turned into more of a partisan thing.
CB: Yeah, but that was too bad. But that was important because it had ultimate longer term ramifications for the history of astrology ‘cause that episode generated not just discussion in the community, but eventually, later, the following year in June of 2016, I was in the middle of writing my book on Hellenistic astrology, and originally I was just gonna do a small, little section on that, on house division, and say whole sign houses was the most popular form of house division. It appeared to be the original form. There were other approaches to house division used, but they tended to be introduced within the context of specific techniques—like the length-of-life technique or sometimes derivative houses or other things like that—and it was just gonna be a few-page section of my book originally.
But then directly in response to that episode of the podcast, Robert Schmidt recorded and released this multi-hour workshop on the issue of house division in ancient astrology in June of 2016. And so, I had to drop everything that I was doing—‘cause I had taken that year off to write the book—and listen to that workshop and see what arguments (and what new arguments) he was making and how he had revised some of his old arguments.
Because one of the things that of course was funny is Houlding was primarily originally reacting for years to the way that Schmidt had presented whole sign houses, because he was the one originally that had been very dogmatic in the 1990s about saying whole sign houses was the main form of house division and virtually the only one that mattered. But he went through different stages in his thinking at different points in his career and revised different things, and that’s part of what he was revising in that final workshop.
So he presented his own interpretation, but one of the things that was problematic about his interpretation is that it was entirely predicated on the assumption that there was a singular inventor of Hellenistic astrology, that there was one guy that invented everything. And so, he was trying to sort of reconstruct what this original, hypothetical person did or created.
LS: Right.
CB: And he tried to find a way to reconcile whole sign houses and equal houses and quadrant houses, which is fine. And that would be interesting in and of itself in modern times if somebody presented what they thought would be a good way to use those three together at the same time, but he was trying to argue that, historically, this is the way that it originally was in the original, hypothetical version of Hellenistic astrology. But the problem is there’s not a lot of evidence of that. It requires a lot of inferring and like reading between the lines of certain texts and things like that.
LS: Mm-hmm. Right.
CB: So there were these three key moments—there was like that debate with Houlding in late 2015—and one of the things that I noticed in retrospect is that that debate occurred during the first Saturn-Neptune square. Remember, Saturn was going through Sag, and Neptune was in Pisces, and that was the first time they exactly squared.
LS: Okay.
CB: Then in June of 2016, there was a second square, and that’s when Schmidt released his workshop where he tried to reconstruct the origins of the house division debate.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: As a result of that, as a result of what Houlding was saying, during the course of the summer, as a response to our debate, I started hearing that Houlding’s students were apparently being told and started spreading this rumor that whole sign houses was an entirely modern invention and that it never actually existed in ancient astrology and it was just invented in the past 20 years by American astrologers basically.
LS: Right.
CB: So I started hearing that rumor being spread, and then I heard Schmidt’s workshop and realized I couldn’t in my book just write like a few pages about house division and just give a very general statement and then move one.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: I had to do a detailed study and treatment. So I spent that summer writing a 50-page analysis where in the first half of it, I counted up all of the surviving horoscopes and showed that not only did whole sign houses exist, but for the vast majority of horoscopes it was the only system of house division that could have been used because most of the horoscopes only recorded the rising sign.
LS: Right.
CB: And if you only have the rising sign that’s the only system of house division that you can use.
LS: Right.
CB: So I sort of addressed that in the first half of that chapter. But then the purpose of that chapter—some of the whole sign house proponents should understand—was not just to promote whole sign houses because in the second half I tried to show where the other forms of house division—the degree-based forms, like equal houses and quadrant houses—did come in.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And I did that in the second half where I showed where they came from and who probably introduced them in these very early texts, and then how those systems of degree-based forms of house division very gradually started being integrated more and more in the Hellenistic tradition until the point where it seems like they were being used together. And that was a goal of especially a lot of the later Hellenistic astrologers until the early Medieval tradition where we see a continuation of that with authors like Sahl and Masha’allah and Abu Ma’shar who are still following the Hellenistic approach of trying to synthesize whole sign houses with quadrant houses.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So I finished that chapter that summer under the final Saturn-Neptune square. And that ended up being like this weird thing that just came out of a podcast episode in originally what was a blow-off episode of the podcast on whole sign houses that generated all this debate, but then ultimately led to a lot of, you know, potential changes and a lot of developments in the community, prompting Schmidt to release that workshop and then eventually me to write that chapter—a pretty significant chapter in the middle of my book on the origins of the house division issue.
LS: Right. Yeah, so it’s probably one of the notable intersections that has happened between the podcast and other things happening in the community, in you changing what you were doing with the book that summer and everything.
CB: Yeah, and then, potentially, feeding back into the astrological tradition in some way by, you know, presenting the evidence, and hopefully, the community being a little bit more aware of what the evidence is for different forms of house division and where that issue came from. There seems like there’s more of a movement now to attempt to synthesize those different approaches to some extent rather than just treating them completely independently.
LS: Right.
CB: Which, you know, had always been my original goal at the end of the original lecture, even though I made the mistake of not making that clear.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Definitely.
CB: Yeah, so that was a big sort of landmark thing in the history of the podcast in terms of episodes that I know people still bring up relatively frequently because that was a super awkward debate that occurred in that episode.
LS: Yeah, I did see multiple comments about that one.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Not necessarily that it was their favorite, but that it was one of the more legendary ones to listen to. And if people do listen to that, read the papers that I attached below it because I attached James…
LS: James Holden.
CB: …James Holden’s paper on house division—his original paper on house division—from the 1980s…
LS: Right.
CB: …and he very clearly makes his case at that point. It was always important to me ‘cause I wanted to recognize James Holden as having made that discovery in the 1980s ‘cause that was a really original piece of research that was overlooked for many years.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and he was doing a lot of that work like well before some of the other people, right?
CB: Yeah, like a decade before Project Hindsight came on the scene. And then what happened is that Schmidt and Hand showed up with Project Hindsight in the mid-‘90s and they also discovered that whole sign houses was the primary form of house division that astrologers like Vettius Valens were using in pretty much all of his example charts. He never uses equal houses in any of his example charts, and he only uses Porphyry houses, I think, once or twice in a couple of his example charts. The rest were all 100 examples of whole sign houses. So Schmidt and Hand see this and they start talking about it and promoting it, and then it does become a more widely-known thing.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: But what’s important is that James Holden had already made some of the same discoveries 10 years earlier and had published his paper. It was just in an obscure AFA journal, so not a lot of people knew about it. And I’m not entirely even sure if Schmidt and Hand knew about Holden’s work at that point, but they’re two independent sets of researchers who had discovered it independently, and that’s one of the things that sometimes gets overlooked. It wasn’t just one group of astrologers promoting this. There were two independent sets of astrologers looking into the history of astrology and then making this discovery.
LS: Mm-hmm. Sure.
CB: Sure. So yeah, that was kind of an important episode because sometimes things that happen in the podcast can leak out into other areas.
LS: Mm-hmm. Definitely. There’s a feedback loop and sometimes vice versa.
CB: Right. So after that, though, of course I start getting much more serious about the podcast and start doing some of the major, major episodes. The Geoffrey Cornelius one, Episode 53, was a huge one. The Star of Bethlehem episode, 58, that I did with Kenneth Miller was major ‘cause that was primarily a research project I had done over a number of years, and I was really happy with how that came out. And Kenneth helped me to really sort of, you know, put that forward as a really well-researched piece that I’m still really happy with in retrospect.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Let’s see, “The Zodiac Debate.” “The Lives and Works of the Hellenistic Astrologers” is a really good overview of many of the ancient astrologers, and it basically is a synopsis of Chapter, I think, of my book where I go into more detail on that.
LS: Right.
CB: “The Significations of the Seven Traditional Planets,” as well as the outer planet one in Episode 67 is really important. Episode 68 on “Joan Quigley and the Reagans’ Use of Astrology” is another major research project for me. So that was one I researched over a number of years about Ronald Reagan’s astrologer and the ways that she contributed to and influenced his presidency.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: But that one was important ‘cause it was like documenting that and documenting what she said, but there was also this interesting conflict between what the official story was.
LS: Right.
CB: ‘Cause when it came out that Reagan was using an astrologer, the administration kind of went into damage control and tried to downplay it.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: One of the ways that they tried to downplay it is by saying that it was all Nancy, and that it was Nancy’s fault because she was fearful after the assassination attempt on his life.
LS: Right.
CB: And so, she went to astrology as like a shortcoming because she was fearful or something like that.
LS: Right. Right.
CB: But in reality, like when we dug back into the history, we could see that they had been consulting with astrologers and they had been friends with astrologers for decades up to that point.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So the official narrative that was put out probably was not, you know, as accurate as you might assume.
LS: Right. Yeah, and I can see why they would do that. But yeah, it’s kind of too bad. They use the familiar trope of the woman is fearful and superstitious and the astrology is all her.
CB: Yeah.
LS: Right.
CB: “Medical Astrology with Lee Lehman” is really the main medical astrology episode that I’ve done up to this point.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: “The Life and Work Demetra George” was really important to me since she’s one of my primary teachers. And yeah, we did a really good job putting together that biographical episode, and I was happy that we were able to do it with her, ‘cause she has such an interesting life story and has made some major contributions to the astrological tradition.
LS: Mm-hmm. Definitely.
CB: “Astrological Training, Certification, and Credentials” that I did with Anne Ortelee in Episode 72, I actually always slightly regretted that episode. There’s always been a debate in the astrological community about astrological certification specifically and whether we should have certification and whether it’s important for individual professional astrologers to get certifications, or how important it is, or what form of certification you should have or what training you should have.
LS: Right.
CB: And Anne is very pro-certification and I tend to be a little bit more skeptical of certification as it currently is in the astrological community and the quality of it.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: But because she was a guest, I think I pushed back less on certain points than I might have. And as a result of that I always worried that I might have come off as a little bit more pro-certification than I intended.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And one of the challenges I sometimes have in the podcast is wanting to have different voices on and different people to present the opposing case, but then the also delicate thing of not wanting to use the position of me being the host and being seen to use that as having an advantage over the person who I’m either having on as a guest, or in some instances, debating.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So that came up, for example, in the early Eric Meyers episode on the debate between modern and traditional astrology.
LS: Right.
CB: And I know that was something where I held back a lot more than I could have because I was not just a participant in the debate, but I was also moderating it.
LS: Right.
CB: And we realized in retrospect that that was a mistake and I should have had a third party moderating it because then I had to hold back more than I would have in terms of making certain points or going after certain things, so as to not be seen as like abusing my position, which I didn’t want to do at all.
LS: Right.
CB: But I know you, for example, you were wishing I had made certain points or jumped on certain things that I didn’t necessarily during the debate.
LS: Yeah, I could tell it just wasn’t a hundred-percent debate because of that. Like maybe, I don’t know what I’d give it. Maybe 70-or-75% of what you could have said. Yeah, ‘cause that originated with our local group meeting and we had the debate onsite there, and then that turned into an episode.
CB: Yeah, I posted the recording afterwards.
LS: Yeah.
CB: And, I mean, that was also the case to some extent with the Houlding debate where we’re debating something, but then I’m also the host. I’m hosting her, so I’m holding back a little bit…
LS: Yeah.
CB: …and she’s sort of letting me have it. But I’m also trying to be careful not to in any way abuse my position, but ultimately feeling like I probably should have pushed back more than I did at the time just because I didn’t want to, you know, take advantage of anything.
LS: Yeah, and that is the tricky thing we alluded to earlier. Yeah, the balance of like hosting it, but also being a participant and whether you sound like you’re endorsing something—you don’t, you know, actually say everything that you could say in response.
CB: Right. So yeah, that came up in the astrological training episode, 72.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And then sometimes what’s funny is you’ll see me follow up with that in the subsequent forecast episode…
LS: Right.
CB: …which I think I did in Episode 74, which is titled, “Astrology Forecast and Auspicious Dates for May 2016,” which is just the forecast episode with Austin and Kelly. But at the beginning of it, where we always have some general discussion topics, I made the discussion topic astrological training and certification credentials because I wanted to say some of those additional things I meant to say in the other episode, but didn’t feel comfortable because I didn’t want to push too hard against my guest.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
CB: But unfortunately, I feel like as a result of that sometimes those follow-up comments get lost because they’re just in a forecast…
LS: Right.
CB: …which nobody otherwise will listen to once it’s over.
LS: Yeah. Exactly. So if you don’t actually do a follow-up, full episode on the same topic then, yeah, that can kind of trail away.
CB: Yeah, so I have actually returned to that topic. Like the one that I did with Amaya Rourke, which was on astrological education at one point…
LS: Yeah.
CB: …a year or so ago, was actually kind of my follow-up to that where I finally did kind of address it a little bit more. And I would recommend listening to that.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: I think it’s titled, “Astrological Education.” Episode 76, I interviewed Ray Merriman on financial astrology. That’s like the only episode I’ve ever done on financial astrology.
LS: Right.
CB: It’s like there’s some of these topics where I’m trying to hit it and just do one episode on that topic. It’s like if I was only ever gonna do one episode on this topic, I would want it to be this one, and then I don’t often come back to that unless there’s some additional part of it or some really compelling reason to.
LS: Right.
CB: “Sexual Orientation and Astrology” was a pretty good episode with Christopher Renstrom. Although it’s a little bit controversial ‘cause that’s a really delicate debate in the astrological community and we tried to treat the arguments on both sides. It wasn’t as controversial as I thought it would be, even though we did try to treat both sides respectfully, and I think it was partially just ‘cause somehow we pulled off a balance of doing that—of presenting both sides without necessarily endorsing either one.
LS: Right. Yeah, and didn’t that come out of a discussion already being had recently before that, like on social media?
CB: Most episodes that I do, a lot of them are in response to some discussions that are happening online at the time ‘cause then I’ll get the idea of like, “Hey, that would be actually a really great topic for a podcast.” And then I’ll find some participant in the discussions that is already talking about it and obviously have something interesting to say and then we’ll record a discussion on it.
LS: Right. Yeah.
CB: Yeah, there was probably something specific at the time though.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: A lot of the Q&A episodes are all really good. I was listening to some of them again in retrospect, but they’re really hard for me to summarize in the title of the episode.
LS: Yeah. Definitely.
CB: So like Episode 82 is titled, “Q&A Episode: Arabic Parts, House Division, and Mythology” ‘cause we’re touching on a bunch of different topics. And they’re usually really good discussions, but it’s hard for me to summarize what they are, so I try to put that in the description to some extent. But I would really recommend people listen to all the Q&A episodes ‘cause they tend to go through a variety of different topics. And the discussions are usually pretty compelling and a lot more bite-sized and approachable than some of the longer episodes are.
LS: Definitely.
CB: Yeah, so I’d like to do more of those.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: “Richard Tarnas on Cosmos and Psyche,” Episode 84, was a major, crucial episode. Episode 86 was a solo show while I was writing the book, “Saturn as Feminine, and the Earliest Female Astrologer.” This was coming out of some research that Charles Obert had done, seeing that in the text of Dorotheus of Sidon it seems to refer to Saturn as being a feminine planet and the question of whether that was literally like a typo or transmission error. Sometimes there were other parts of Dorotheus where there are simply copyist errors, where the copyist got it wrong because what we have is like an English translation of an Arabic translation or a Persian translation of the original Greek text, which was written in the form of a poem.
LS: Right.
CB: So naturally, some things were changed during the process of going through all those languages over the past literally 2,000 years.
LS: Yeah.
CB: And that was one of the questions: Was that an error? Or was that actually a genuine, variant tradition that would then balance out the gender scheme in terms of the planetary assignments?
LS: Right.
CB: As well as me talking about—as I was writing a section in my book—‘cause most of the ancient and traditional astrologers we know of whose works have survived are all men. And the question naturally is—especially nowadays when so many more astrologers are women—who is the earliest astrologer we know who was a woman.
LS: Right.
CB: And I address it in that episode, and it’s a really good episode to listen to as a result of that for both of those topics that I’m really happy with and I address more in my book, if you want to learn more about that. There’s a whole cluster—episodes like 90, 91, and 93 were all centered around the 2016 Presidential Election, a lot of the craziness surrounding that. Some of the stuff involving like finding Hillary Clinton’s birth time and the drama surrounding that is really funny in retrospect, which is still out. We still have no idea what her birth time is, and if different astrologers are using different times. And I have no idea if the time that I used was correct in that election…
LS: Yeah.
CB: …as well as other related issues I don’t necessarily want to get into.
LS: No.
CB: Episode 97, when I released the book, was okay. But again, I wish I had been able to redo that for the sake of actually pitching the book better. I think some of the subsequent interviews—like the one I did on the Accessible Astrology Podcast with Eugenia—did a better job of actually pitching the book and presenting it.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Adam’s talk—“In Defense of Prediction,” which was partially in response to the 2016 election and some of the discussion happening in the astrological community—was pretty good. Episode 99.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: “Age of Aquarius” was one of those big episodes that was mainly something I put together. But again, Kenneth Miller joined me and really helped me bring that out. It was a great episode, like a core episode that I would recommend that everyone should listen to in terms of knowing about that subject and getting a good, broad overview. Episode 105, “Light, Darkness, and Polarities in Astrology” was one I did with Michael Ofek. And that was actually one of the major episodes that I went into with a lot of trepidation, and I was not at all sure it was gonna be a good episode, but Michael really wanted to do it.
We’d only done one podcast. We’d known each other for years at that point, but we’d only done one podcast together, which was the mitigating conditions episode in traditional astrology, which is an excellent episode. But I really wasn’t sold on the idea, and I didn’t know where he wanted to go with this discussion about light and darkness in astrology. And it didn’t sound like a good episode, but he really wanted to do it, and he was really persistent about following up with me as a friend, and eventually kind of like talked me into it somewhat reluctantly. And it turned out to be a really great episode, and I thought we got a lot of interesting and deep astrological insights that ended up being really persuasive or compelling about the general theory and philosophy of astrology.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So that’s one of those episodes I would definitely recommend people check out. Had you listened to that one?
LS: No, I hadn’t listened to that one. But I know that he also talked about light and dark in one of his lectures at UAC, and he got like rave reviews. Like people were so excited about his UAC talks.
CB: Yeah. Yeah, I’m hoping that he’s able to get a speaking position at ISAR next year.
LS: Yeah.
CB: It would be great to see him again.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, because he then presented that at UAC.
LS: At UAC, yeah.
CB: Yeah, ‘cause that’s a great talk, and he does a really good presentation on that. And that’s basically what we covered in that episode, but that was all him doing that presentation and me talking through it with him. It was one of the few times where that was entirely on him and I was sort of along for the ride.
LS: Yeah. Well, and it’s really nice too because, you know—I know we’ve talked about this recently—sometimes there are astrologers who are really excellent at what they do, but aren’t as well-known if they’re from like outside the US, or outside US and UK or things like that. So I think he definitely falls under that category of, you know, a really good astrologer who’s just not quite as well-known yet because he’s not in one of those main countries.
CB: Yeah. Definitely. But who’s doing really good work in bridging the gap between ancient and modern astrology and has been studying ancient astrology for a long time and has synthesized and integrated that stuff in a really practical way.
LS: Right.
CB: And then has been using it for long enough. ‘Cause that was the gap for a long time—that we had the revival of all of these ancient texts by the mid-2000s, but then it took, you know, another decade of putting a lot of this stuff into practice before some of the details were sorted out.
LS: Right.
CB: And now you have the release of my book in 2017 and then Demetra’s book just in the past few months…
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: …to sort of present some of that in a more digested or synthesized form.
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah, so the Dorotheus of Sidon episode, 107, was a major interview with the release of that book by Ben. That’s basically one of the earliest surviving texts on Western astrology that survives relatively complete, and Ben basically learned Arabic so he could translate it.
LS: Yeah, which is just amazing. I mean, I think most people in the community know—or if you don’t know—Ben has been super prolific and just been cranking out books over the past while, but actually has the language skills to do these things as well. So it’s pretty amazing.
CB: Yeah, and that’s one of the more important ones that he’s translated, so that’s one of the reasons I highlight it.
LS: Uh-huh.
CB: And it’s one of the more consequential ones because Dorotheus influenced so many later Medieval and Renaissance astrologers, and so much of Western astrology is what it is because that text became so popular. And so, having Ben go back and retranslate it again was really important because he was able to clarify some of the translation errors that were done by the only previous translation that was done by David Pingree in the 1970s.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So that was a good episode. I actually really liked the Nina Gryphon episode. I think it’s the only time Nina’s been on the show so far, but it was Episode 108 on Bonatti’s 146 Considerations. It was a good discussion. “Planetary Yogas with Ernst Wilhelm” was good. It’s one of my early Vedic astrology episodes, when we actually started getting into the techniques of Vedic astrology. ‘Cause that’s always something I meant to do more on the show, but I wanted to find an access point for picking out some of the best parts of Vedic astrology that were unique and interesting, but also somewhat approachable for Western astrologers.
LS: Right.
CB: Like I wanted to pick out the pieces that would be like this would be the thing that would get you interested in Vedic astrology and show you why somebody might want to study that and what could be valuable to you as a Western astrologer.
LS: Right, so you did yogas and then you did dashas later.
CB: Yeah, yogas and dashas. And those are two of the ones—that and the Sade Sati episode that I did later—those are the really good ones that I think form a good introduction to Vedic astrology…
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: …to get people interested and excited about that tradition. Some of them were with sort of a newer contingent of Vedic astrologers who are using the tropical zodiac, which is a bit unique. But I hope that doesn’t necessarily—I mean, if anything, I did that partially just because those guys were approachable on YouTube, and I started interacting with them when I started launching my own YouTube channel.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And I had actually interacted with Ernst years ago, but I had hoped that that make it a little bit more approachable for Western astrologers to get into Vedic astrology if they didn’t also have to surmount or get through the sidereal zodiac switch at the same time.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: But ultimately, you know, I’m not trying to keep it restricted to that, even though I had some of those guys on earlier. It was partially because it was easier to interview them when I already knew that they had a good webcam and microphone…
LS: Right.
CB: …‘cause they were also doing YouTube channels.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: But then I’ve also tried to have other Vedic astrologers on that are using the sidereal zodiac, like Kenneth Miller, and more recently, James Braha and other people like that.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I know you were trying to be sensitive at the time to thinking about how that would come off—you know, when you’re highlighting different portions of the astrological tradition or community—to kind of be fair to everyone. And it’s like is this gonna be okay with, you know, Vedic astrologers who use sidereal because that’s the more common form?
CB: Yeah, well, and the thing is I had already done the sidereal/tropical zodiac issue much earlier.
LS: Right.
CB: In Episode 60, I did “The Zodiac Debate: Tropical vs. Sidereal,” and that was January 3, 2016, and I did it with Kenneth Miller and Nick Dagan Best. And we tried to present the history and the different points of view and the different arguments, but then it was more at the end a synthesis-type—not approach—but we tried to be more conciliatory about it rather than combative.
LS: Yeah, for sure.
CB: And so, I had already kind of dealt with that issue I felt way back then. But I had known from the mid-2000s that Ernst Wilhelm had published this paper where he tried to argue that in the Yavanajataka and in some of the earlier Indian texts that they intended to use the tropical or were using that tropical zodiac. And he tried to argue that that was the original zodiac that the Indian astrologers were supposed to use and somehow it had been a mistake to go sidereal after that…
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: …which is a very controversial argument, and I was never sure about that, but he was, as far as I knew, the only person arguing that. And I had met him at a NORWAC in the mid-2000s and had gotten his book, Graha Sutras, I think, in the mid-2000s as well, but didn’t interact with him a lot. And then it was the summer of 2017-ish, I think, that I discovered this group of Vedic astrologers who all had been—as far as I could tell—influenced by Ernst and were using the tropical zodiac in Indian astrology. And that was really fascinating to me because they were all getting a lot of followers and making a big impact on YouTube.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So I did that interview with Vic DiCara because I wanted to interview him about what his arguments were historically and also just sort of document that as a thing that was happening in the astrological community at the time.
LS: Right.
CB: But then, as a result of that, that obviously forced me then to have to get back into the tropical/sidereal zodiac issue and that whole debate.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So Episode 115 was that discussion with Vic DiCara, and some people were annoyed. Some of the sidereal astrologers felt like I didn’t press him enough in that episode or push back enough compared to the follow-up I did a few episodes later, which was the one with Kenneth Bowser, Episode 117, titled, “Western Sidereal Astrology, with Kenneth Bowser.” He’s the opposite. He’s a Western astrologer who uses the sidereal zodiac and argues that that was the one true zodiac.
LS: Right.
CB: And with that episode we had more of a debate. There was more of us focusing on the ancient Western tradition, which I specialize in more. So I had much more room to like push back in some instances or argue and have some back-and-forth because he was talking about an area that I specialize in, ancient Western astrology. Whereas with Vic DiCara, I had less specialty in the Indian tradition, although I did try to push back and make some specific historical arguments that I felt were compelling enough to be sufficient in terms of presenting the other side and being like, well, if it was really supposed to be the tropical zodiac then why did all of these Indian texts go sidereal ultimately.
LS: Right. Yeah.
CB: But those two kind of like an interrelated pair then because what we have in Episode 115 is like a Vedic astrologer who went tropical, and then what we have in 117 is a Western astrologer who went sidereal and the interesting contrast between the types of astrologers who are in a tradition that predominantly goes one way with a certain technique and then them going the other way.
LS: Right.
CB: And the contrast between those was always what I was going for and I thought that was the most interesting.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So it’s good in terms of the zodiac issue. Episode 116 was the main episode I’ve done on horary astrology with Lee Lehman and that was a great episode. Definitely a core one I would recommend people check out. The eclipses episode with Bernadette Brady, in 119, was pretty good. I mean, at this point I start hitting my stride, and I’m just like, you know, getting all of the topics that I’ve always wanted to really address.
LS: Right.
CB: And I have enough leverage and inertia with the podcast to like reach out to bigger guests or to send them microphones, as well as time to devote to researching and doing some of the bigger episodes. So I really started doing that at that point.
LS: Yeah.
CB: And that’s why at this point I just start recommending a lot of them because I was really hitting my stride.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So Episode 119 with Bernadette Brady of course was happening in the midst of the Great American Eclipse of 2017 that everyone saw.
LS: Yes.
CB: The Theophilus of Edessa episode was an important historical episode, 120, ‘cause he’s such a pivotal figure in between the Hellenistic and Medieval traditions. Episode 121, actually I think we have to redo at some point. That was with Brett Joseph—or Gemini Brett—and it’s titled, “The Importance of Astronomy for Astrology,” but it was actually just an excuse for us to talk about the Flat Earth theory and how bizarre and kind of dumb that was.
LS: Yeah.
CB: But we tried to contextualize it within the context of a discussion about the importance of astronomy for astrologers.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: We need to go back and revisit that, though, because we should have just labeled it with what our main topic was at the time. In social media at the time, the Flat Earth theory had suddenly become more well-known or something that summer and people were talking about it, and we were kind of reacting to it.
LS: Right.
CB: But the topic of the importance of astronomy to astrologers is actually a really super important and legitimate topic that Brett does a lot of interesting work on.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And while we deal with that a little bit in that episode, it wasn’t actually the full thrust of that episode, so I hope we can return to that at some point.
LS: Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah, it seems like, you know, most of the episodes do go kind of as planned. But every now and then they go one way or the other, and like you meant to start with something and it turned into something else or vice versa.
CB: Yeah, there was a great Q&A episode with Adam Sommer that was originally supposed to be a Q&A episode. That was Episode 127. That’s a really good episode to listen to actually where we were gonna take like a bunch of questions, but then the very first question we took was on the nodes.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And that spawned such a long, lengthy answer from both of us that we just ended up going with it and turning that into a full, two-hour episode on the nodes.
LS: Right. Yeah, and that’s one of the only times you’ve put that in the title.
CB: Yeah, so Episode 127, “Unexpected Lunar Nodes Discussion with Adam Sommer.”
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Let’s see, “Locational Astrology,” that’s like the one episode I don’t want to say that I’ll ever do on locational or relocational astrology, like relocated charts, but if you’re interested in relocated charts, Episode 123 was a really good treatment of that with Moses Siregar. “Astrological Education: Options for Serious Study,” that was like a unique discussion between me and Amaya Rourke where she was asking me some questions about, you know, getting an education in astrology and where to go with that.
And we had like a Skype call, and I asked her if I could record it to release as a podcast episode and she said that was fine. So it’s an interesting and very candid discussion about learning astrology and also certification. That was my follow-up to the certification episode with Anne Ortelee where I dealt with that more candidly and more openly than I had previously. And I think it’s a very good follow-up to that episode in terms of the other side of the credentials question.
LS: Mm-hmm. Right.
CB: Yeah, so that is Episode 124. “Composite Charts” was an important historical episode. I’m glad I got that interview with John Townley. That’s one I always wanted to do. And I know one early fan of the show and patron—one of my first patrons, Jo Gleason—had asked for it really early on, like two or three years before that. And then I finally got to do it in Episode 128 where I interviewed John Townley who basically invented the composite chart technique.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Yeah, we talked about not just the use of those charts, but also his story of coming up with it.
LS: Right.
CB: He actually said that he kind of first learned the idea talking to another astrologer on the bus, in the episode, and then he went home and researched it and sort of developed the full apparatus of that technique.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: But that’s one of the reasons why the title is a little bit weird. ‘Cause he preferred to refer to himself as like ‘the Originator’.
LS: Mm-hmm. Right.
CB: He was very careful to give acknowledgment to that other astrologer, but still, ultimately, in some ways, was kind of the inventor of the technique for all intents and purposes.
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah. “A Newly Discovered 4th Century Horoscope” is pretty good. It’s not like a landmark episode, but it’s good. There’s our “Saturn Return in Sagittarius Retrospective,” Episode 131.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: That was a really good technique-oriented episode of using example charts and showing how Saturn returns work out in practice with really recent, and what were at the time, fresh examples.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: We’re planning another one of those pretty soon for the Saturn in Capricorn people. ‘Cause we’re already almost halfway through that, and we’ve seen some really good examples of Saturn returns lately with some of the early Saturn in Capricorn people.
LS: Yeah. Definitely.
CB: Yeah, “A Newbie’s Guide to Astrology Conferences” with Jo Gleason and Ryhan Butler is a great episode if you’ve never been to an astrology conference and you want to learn about some of the details behind attending one, and why you should attend one, and why that’s important and crucial in your education as an astrologer. So I would definitely recommend listening to that one.
LS: Mm-hmm. I think a lot of people ended up at conferences pretty much directly from listening to that, right?
CB: There were a lot of people that ended up at UAC as a result of that episode.
LS: Yeah.
CB: And part of the purpose was promoting that conference, but also explaining to people. ‘Cause I knew it was like this once-in-a-decade conference, and I wanted as many people to attend as possible to get that experience and to get some of the learning and the knowledge that they would get there, and really impress on them the reason why you would spend like hundreds going out to some other city and flying there and renting a hotel room and paying for tickets. It’s hard because if you’ve never attended a conference before, you might not have any conceptualization of what you might find there and why it might be important, and so that’s part of what we tried to convey in that episode.
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah.
LS: Yeah, and I’m glad that went well. As one of the organizers of that UAC, I’m glad so many people came after that.
CB: Right. So Episode 135, the Sade Sati episode—which is “Saturn Transiting the Natal Moon” with Ryan Kurczak—was a great episode on, again, a basic technique in Vedic astrology that’s not usually as common in Western astrology, but that’s a good intro-type technique that you’ll find more commonly in Vedic astrology.
LS: Right.
CB: That was a really good discussion. The Elsbeth Ebertin episode was a good historical episode with Jenn Zahrt. We did the two-part series on Carl Jung and those were really good episodes—‘cause a bunch of books came out on Jung in the early 2018—and the first one I did was with Dr. Safron Rossi, Episode 141, titled, “Carl Jung’s Views and Influence on Modern Astrology.” And that was a really important episode and then there were two others that were a follow-up on that. Do you see them on the list?
LS: I’m looking.
CB: I didn’t realize there were so…
LS: 148, “Jung on Synchronicity and the Mechanism for Astrology.”
CB: Yeah, that was a really crucial and important discussion with Kieron Le Grice. We were talking about Jung’s views on the mechanism behind astrology, which changed, but ultimately in doing that, in doing this in-depth overview of Jung’s views, it ended up basically summarizing all of astrologers’ views at different points in history because Jung had studied so much of the history of astrology that he adopted and incorporated pieces from a lot of those different views. So that ended up being probably one of the best episodes talking about the actual mechanism underlying the history of astrology, not just in Jung’s view, but in terms of different views in the history of astrology and in terms of different views that astrologers still adopt today.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So synchronicity versus causality versus, you know, numerology, or other things like that.
LS: Right.
CB: And that was the second Jung episode and then there was a third one that formed and sort of completed the trilogy.
LS: 152.
CB: Yeah, Episode 152, titled, “Discussing Jung’s Studies in Astrology by Liz Greene.” And that was when Liz Greene’s two-volume work on Jung’s Studies in Astrology came out that showed what books he was reading and how astrology influenced his thought. I tried to get her for that episode, but ultimately was not able to. So I ended up doing it with Laura London and Jenn Zahrt, and that was definitely a good discussion.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Let’s see, the secondary progressions episode with Kelly is a major, major technique episode that everybody should listen to. We did it somewhat short term, but it ended up being a really compelling discussion about that technique, which is a great introduction and overview to that technique.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Pretty much all of the Q&A episodes ‘cause at this point we’ve gone through several Q&A episodes, but pretty much all of them are good and worth listening to. “The Origins of Horary Astrology” was decent, but I would like a do-over at some point. The Glenn Perry episode, “The Elephant in the Room,” is not like a key or crucial episode, but it was a debate that happened in the community, and it certainly rounds out and was connected to the series on the tropical and sidereal zodiacs. So if somebody’s going through and listening to all of the zodiac episodes then that would be one you would want to touch on.
LS: Yeah, it was connected to those, and it was one of the more prominent examples of you springboarding from an issue in the community and doing an episode on it directly.
CB: Yeah, ‘cause everybody was talking about it, and it was causing a lot of furor in the community in reaction to this talk that he had given in India at this conference. And my discussion of it was partially in reaction to that and also expressing some of the things that other astrologers were kind of saying but articulating them and recording it for the podcast.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: “Tem Tarriktar on The Mountain Astrologer Magazine,” Episode 149, that didn’t go as well as I had hoped in terms of the outline not working out as well, but it was an important episode. And it’s also one now I’m actually really glad that I have done because Tem’s sick right now, and I hope he does okay and pulls through. But that’s another one of those examples of like wanting to get some of those episodes with people who are really important ‘cause Tem, in Episode 149, he is the founder and the primary editor of The Mountain Astrologer Magazine, which has been such a staple of the astrological community over the past 30 years.
And hearing his story about how he developed it and how the magazine got its start and stuff—this podcast, I definitely try to follow their lead to some extent. What they did in print, I’ve been trying to do with audio, and now more recently in video, but they laid a blueprint for what you aspire to achieve in terms of trying to balance the presentation of so many different forms of astrology and so many different approaches and balance them, but also balancing the difference between sometimes really hardcore scholarship and historical studies or technical studies with also sometimes levity and jokes in their cartoons and stuff like that.
LS: Right. Yeah—excuse me—that’s a really good point that they were doing that kind of mix of things just in print before.
CB: Right.
LS: And still are.
CB: Yeah.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So that’s a good episode for just some history of the astrological community and current history of what’s going on. And part of what people need to be conscious about in some of these episodes that I’m deliberately trying to do is just take a snapshot of the astrological community either at this point in time or to collect some of that recent history about things that were important in shaping the community over the past few decades.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Liz Greene. The profections episode, which I mentioned, 143, is a crucial, basic timing technique…
LS: 153.
CB: …153—that everybody should listen to. Episode [1]55 was a unique and innovative one that we haven’t returned to, but I want to at some point. I did it with Kelly, Episode 155, where we did a livestream on YouTube and we took questions from a live audience about their birth charts and then answered them on the fly, partially in order to demonstrate reading charts.
LS: Right.
CB: And it was very experimental and was not worked out and had a lot of rough edges and wasn’t like a great demonstration, but it was at least interesting and innovative and a format that I’d like to return back to. And to some extent if I ever do return back to doing consultations and reading charts regularly, it might be in some sort of format like that that I’m still trying to figure out.
LS: Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah.
CB: “Essential Dignities,” Episode 156, was a very good discussion with Charles Obert about his book on the essential dignities, but it actually morphed into something broader, like a really good introduction to the basic concept of dignities and what it means for a planet to rule a sign from the perspective a traditional astrologer versus exaltation versus triplicity and what have you.
LS: Right.
CB: So that is a good episode for that. The “Live Podcast Event,” Episode 159, from UAC of course was a major milestone where Austin and Kelly and I did a live recording of a podcast episode in front of a live audience of like 150 or 200 people.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And that went off very well and is actually a good discussion.
LS: Yeah.
CB: We’re getting ready to do the same next month at NORWAC in Seattle. But that was hopefully a blueprint for the future in terms of getting some experience doing more live episodes.
LS: Mm-hmm. And then just a couple later—where was it? 161 was similar. It was live with the ISAR panel at UAC. And that was, again, more of like a community topic springboard.
CB: Yeah, I mean, that was literally, you know, a pre-conference workshop at an astrology conference. Yeah, I mean, that was all right. I mean, it wasn’t amazing, but it was a good snapshot of part of that was happening in reaction to the presidential election and then some of the discussions that happened after the presidential election, and some of the self-reflection that was happening in the astrological community and ISAR, and ISAR’s role in that, which is a whole separate thing. And then the discussion itself and then, yeah, releasing that afterwards as a recording and as a sort of documentation of some of the discussions that were happening in the community at the time.
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah. The synastry episode was really good, with John Green. That was like ‘the’ synastry episode. So now, I’ve covered one on composite charts with Townley and one on synastry with John Green.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: I’d been looking for who would be in the synastry episode, and I had met John at UAC and really liked him. And so, I wanted to do the episode with him and it turned out really well.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: “The Problem of Twins” was a major topic that I wanted to tackle at some point and I’d been meaning to do for years, and I finally did it with Adam Elenbaas. And that was actually a really good episode that I would recommend checking out. What else? Twins. The rectification episode was crucial. Everybody should listen to that ‘cause that should be a part of every natal astrologer’s, you know, toolbox.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And you, me, and Patrick did a pretty good job of outlining that in Episode 169.
LS: Right, and the reasons you would want to know at least a little bit how to do that even if you’re not formally doing rectification.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Definitely. The “Shakespeare and Astrology” episode with Priscilla Costello was actually important because that was the turning point for me where I realized I needed to be able to interview people in person and I needed a podcast recording studio. Because she came to town—she gave a great talk on her book on Shakespeare and astrology at the Tattered Cover Bookstore here in Denver. And then I wanted to interview her for the podcast but really couldn’t have her over ‘cause I didn’t have any recording setup in person. So I went to her hotel one day, and I tried to bring a camera on a stand and some microphones. And I didn’t have lights or anything, so we just tried to shoot it right there in her hotel room.
And the video was terrible. The lighting was terrible and not usable and the audio was really bad because we could hear all sorts of traffic outside the window. So even though that was a relatively good discussion, the quality of it was not good. And it was like at that point—I think that was around Episode 171, in September of 2018. It was after that point that I started building the podcast recording studio.
LS: Mm-hmm. Right. And that was after Uranus dipped into Taurus.
CB: Yeah, that was during Uranus in Taurus.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So that’s bringing us up. The Gauquelin episode was super important and super crucial, Episode 163. Everyone should listen to that ‘cause it’s one of my main…
LS: 173.
CB: …173—astrology and science episodes, titled, “Michel and Francoise Gauquelin and the Mars Effect.” There was like a title issue there because the more and more I researched it. And if you listen to that episode, when I open it, I think I call it “Michel Gauquelin and the Mars Effect,” and that was the original title. But I realized after I finished recording the episode with Kenneth Irving, and pretty much after we finished—and after doing all the research that went into that, which I had done years earlier, and that’s why I had been wanting to do that episode, but I refreshed myself on a lot of it in preparation for that—I realized what a crucial role Francoise Gauquelin had played in that whole research and in the publications and their findings and everything else. By just titling it “Michel Gauquelin” it was like she wasn’t getting the proper, you know, respect and acknowledgment and recognition, so I retitled it after recording the episode to this.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And that raised a lot of broader questions going back to the ‘women becoming more prominent in astrology’ theme that I had touched on briefly in previous episodes, and I wanted to, after that episode, do another episode that was like the top ten, most influential female astrologers of the 20th century or something like that.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Because I had done the episode on ancient astrologers and who was the first woman that we know of in the history of astrology, that we know of by name, but then I felt like I needed to do a follow-up at some point to talk about, you know, the 20th century where everything really changed.
LS: Right.
CB: But I could never get a person for that episode. I tried but was never able to find a good person—a woman to talk to who really specialized ‘cause there’s very few astrologers that specialize in the history of astrology in general…
LS: Right.
CB: …and even less that specialize in all of those 20th century astrologers. So instead, what I’ve been doing is working my way through some of them.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And one of the next ones that I’m gonna do is Evangeline Adams hopefully pretty soon…
LS: Right.
CB: …instead of trying to group all of them together. We had talked about maybe if I tried to do all of that that might be more negative than positive. Because instead of doing individual treatments of each of them and their respective contributions, if I tried to do it all at once, it might short-change some of them.
LS: Yeah, I mean, both the issue that not everyone studies the biographies of all of these people altogether, but also making it a collective. You know, you do individual episodes on some other important astrologers, for instance, but then, you know, making it just one episode list of women in astrology almost diminishes it in some way, potentially, even though it would also be, on the flip side, a great summary altogether.
CB: Yeah, and that would really suck if it did the opposite of what my intention was…
LS: Right
CB: …and somehow diminished them when the point is actually to highlight their importance and highlight this important shift in the history of astrology where suddenly women are not just playing a more significant role, but are almost playing more of a dominant role in shaping the history of astrology at this point and taking leadership roles in the community and writing some of the most popular books, like some of the sun sign books and other things like that.
LS: Right.
CB: So the current plan or tentative plan is to address some of those biographies individually to whatever extent that I can. Yeah, so Michel and Francoise Gauquelin. The two-volume or the series on the signs of zodiac was a crucial episode on basic concepts. So that was Episode 175 and Episode 180 on “The Signs of the Zodiac: Qualities and Meanings,” which was with Austin and Kelly.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So that’s another crucial beginner episode.
LS: And then the first one in the studio that we mentioned earlier, “The Transmission of Horoscopic Astrology to China & Japan,” 181.
CB: Yeah, that was actually a super important episode, and I feel like not as many people paid attention to that because it probably sounds like a historical episode.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: But literally we ended up giving a history of astrology in China with Jeffrey Kotyk. And that was not just crucial for giving a history of Chinese astrology, but also opening up this whole other area where it turned out that the text of Dorotheus had been translated and transmitted to China at some point and ended up going as far as influencing the practice of astrology in Japan. So it ended up showing that there was more interrelatedness between the Chinese and some of the Western astrological traditions than anybody knew previously.
And in addition to that, by studying things, like that transmission, you can also study how they started practicing astrology for centuries, and you can then confirm things or have additional confirmation about things in the Western tradition. Like, for example, Jeffrey pointing out that they used whole sign houses in China and Japan in that tradition of astrology, thus confirming that whole sign houses was being used in the West in texts like Dorotheus.
LS: Right.
CB: So that was good. The “Zodiac Sign Cusps” episode was pretty good with Austin, in Episode 177. And that was, again, reacting to some discussions that were happening in the community and some stuff on social media…
LS: Right.
CB: …but having a broader or deeper discussion about it. There were some other episodes. The release of Demetra’s book, Episode 188, is a major one in talking about some of the differences between her interpretation of some ancient texts versus mine. Her book represents the final step in the revival of Hellenistic astrology, which has been 20 or 30 years in the making, with the release of my book in 2017 and then her book in 2019. And then as her book was coming out of course, you know, there was a lot of interesting history behind the release of that book. ‘Cause we recorded that interview back in November, but then shortly after that Robert Schmidt passed away.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And he was both of our teachers and was the primary translator at Project Hindsight who translated and influenced so much of our work on Hellenistic astrology, so we ended up holding off on the release of her book and the release of that interview. At the same time, you did a lot of work proofreading her book in the process for like a couple of months there in January—or in November and December…
LS: Right. Yeah.
CB: …and did a lot of work on that. And then, eventually, the book came out in January, and then I released that episode in January as well.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that was an interesting several-month period where all of those things were kind of like being interestingly intertwined.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah.
CB: We did what I thought was interesting but turned out to be much more controversial than I was anticipating: “Why Are More Women Interested in Astrology Than Men?”, Episode 189, which I enjoyed with Lisa Ardere. And in some instances, it was my fault that it got some of the flack that it did because we didn’t really prepare for that. We just did a sort of impromptu discussion.
LS: Right.
CB: They were coming through from out of town, and we had a discussion about it. And I mentioned that I was thinking about doing that as a podcast episode, but I wasn’t sure how to approach it. And then they told me some of their thoughts about what they thought about it, and I thought they were good answers to that question. And so, I, the next day, asked if they wanted to do a discussion about it, and we sat down and recorded it really impromptu, but then it got a lot more pushback than I was anticipating.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and it can be harder. Sometimes it’s even more important for episodes or topics that have any potential for controversy to have more outline prepared. So yeah, doing it spontaneously could have produced some of that.
CB: Yeah, and that’s something I guess I’m still learning. Sometimes it’s the desire to get those four episodes in each month, or other times it’s the desire to jump on a discussion topic while it still seems relevant and to capture something. Especially if I’ve just had a conversation with somebody and this would be a really good podcast, sometimes my immediate impulse is to record it.
LS: Right.
CB: But sometimes, you know, it’s better to plan things out a little bit better. And some of my favorite episodes that I’m mentioning here—like the Star of Bethlehem episode or the Joan Quigley episode—are ones where I spent a ton of time preparing and researching. And that’s part of the reason why it’s my favorite. Not just ‘cause it was a good topic or an interesting topic, but also because I felt like I did a compelling job addressing it.
LS: Mm-hmm. Right.
CB: Yeah, so that was I still thought a good discussion, but it was kind of my fault in not giving us as much prep time as we could have in getting that together.
LS: Sure.
CB: And then, finally, we’ve been really knocking out of the park with some other episodes recently. We finally got to do some topics we’ve been meaning to do for a long time, and one of them was Episode 190, “Electional Astrology: How to Find Auspicious Dates and Times.” And that’s basically an intro to electional astrology episode…
LS: Right.
CB: …which is basically like a workshop on electional astrology.
LS: Yeah, and you know, we had been doing these electional monthly things like for a couple of years now, but sometimes people were still asking questions about how to use them or how to conceptualize what the right moment was for the election and things like that. So we decided to do a broader discussion about it.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, so that’s a really important and crucial episode. And especially all beginners or anybody that doesn’t know anything about electional astrology—pretty much everybody should listen to that. The zodiacal releasing episode was crucial, Episode 192, in finally introducing that technique.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And I was pretty happy with how that came out.
LS: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, both of those, you know, there’s been so much more discussion. And I think people are trying to slowly experiment with some of these things after everyone heard them.
CB: Yeah.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Episode 193. Oh, yeah, that was that month where I had this one amazing month.
LS: Yeah.
CB: I was hitting major peak periods, and those three episodes were really crucial and really amazing. So the ZR episode, 192, and then I followed up in Episode 193 with the Vimshottari dasha system because I wanted to contrast zodiacal releasing, an ancient Western timing technique, with the dashas and that system, which is so similar to the time-lord techniques…
LS: Right.
CB: …and show some of the overlap, as well as the differences. And that episode came together really well with Freedom Cole in Episode 193. And then the third episode that month, I finally got Steven Forrest on the show. We had been meaning to do an episode for years, but never quite got it together and never had a good topic. And finally, he was open to it, and we had a date scheduled and I really wanted to do the discussion on reincarnation with him as one of the primary proponents of that as a philosophy underlying astrology.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So that was Episode 194. Our “Uranus Transits Through the Houses” was a great in-person, group discussion episode.
LS: Right.
CB: Episode 197. And then, finally, the last one is the translation of Sahl in Episode 198 with Ben, which was a very important episode on the early Medieval tradition where a lot of interesting stuff came up. So that’s kind of the highlights of some of what I consider personally to be some of the more important episodes, or the different ones that stand out for me in terms of the chronology. That doesn’t mean that other ones don’t stand out ‘cause there were a ton of other episodes, but those are just some of the ones I wanted to mention in response to a lot of people asking in this episode to run through a list and mention some of the highlights of the past 200 episodes.
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah, so if you’re new to the podcast, hopefully, that gives you some idea of which episodes to focus. Or if you’ve been listening for a while but haven’t listened to the entire back catalog, you can sort of go through and prioritize those ones, I think, as well as some of the Q&A episodes to give yo ua good overview of some of the important turning points.
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah.
LS: Yeah, just a few episodes.
CB: A few episodes. All right, so let’s go ahead and start wrapping this up. I do want to mention a few things very briefly. How are you doing?
LS: Okay. It’s going a little long, but we can finish up here.
CB: Okay. Yeah, we’re going a little long.
LS: Yeah.
CB: But just to wrap things up, Arthur Leibonowitz—am I pronouncing his name correctly?
LS: I’m not sure. I’ve only seen it in writing.
CB: I apologize, Arthur. I know people do that to you all the time.
LS: Yeah.
CB: But yeah, my apologies. He says, “What’s the weirdest part of having this podcast?” And for a while, if you listen back a few years ago, the weirdest part was at conferences, like having a lot of people come up to us—starting to come up to us at conferences.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Because as I’ve always said, the point where it becomes really noticeable and real in terms of how many people are actually listening to the podcast is when you have just tons of people coming up at conferences—that you never otherwise interacted with or haven’t met in person—saying they listened to it, and sometimes knowing things about my life…
LS: Right.
CB: …or mentioning some statement I made two or three years ago in an episode that they had listened to and had really internalized that statement.
LS: Right.
CB: So over the past three or four or so years, that, I would say, has been the weirdest thing. More recently, though, it’s starting to become a little bit more bizarre where there’s non-astrologers, and sometimes being recognized by random strangers, including in our home city.
LS: Right.
CB: Like I went to our apothecary a few weeks ago and the woman working there said, “Hey, I recognize you. I just came into my apartment or something the other day and my roommate was watching one of your videos.” And so, that was kind of weird. I know a barista at a coffee shop recently that you ran into, she said she had been watching something.
LS: She was like, “Are you an astrologer?” I was just ordering my drink, and I was just like, “Yeah.” And she was like, “Oh, I think I follow you on Twitter.” I was like, “Oh, great.” So I’m momentarily famous.
CB: Yeah, so that’s not something that’s usual and that’s definitely the weirdest part so far of having this podcast, I would say.
LS: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: You would agree?
LS: Yeah, you get it a lot more, but I have started to get it more with not only being on some of the topical episodes, but also the monthly electional. So people at conferences, I’ve had people say they recognize my voice, which is funny, when I don’t know them. And then several people recently were like, “How’s the move going?” because everyone knows that we moved, you know.
CB: Right.
LS: So, yeah. That’s a funny question. “So you’re using Justin Bieber’s chart in examples?”
CB: I mean, I should explain that that has been a joke, and I’m not otherwise a huge Justin Bieber fan.
LS: Yeah, it’s just kind of a longstanding joke.
CB: Nor am I a hater or anything like that.
LS: Yeah.
CB: It’s just a funny thing really.
LS: That was just one of those things that’s recurred throughout discussion…
CB: Yeah.
LS: …over time.
CB: I think some people have actually mistakenly thought I’m a huge Justin Bieber fan.
LS: Yeah, I think so.
CB: Which is funny.
LS: ‘Cause we’re saying it tongue-in-cheek.
CB: Right.
LS: Yeah.
CB: And I think we’ve answered a lot of the rest of these. Michael Morris actually does ask one that’s kind of interesting. He says, “I’m curious about how the podcast has functioned as a kind of research project for you. You were already such an expert in this field when you started doing the podcast. I’m curious about the things you’ve learned about astrology from doing the podcast, specifically, or the things that you’ve learned that changed your practice.”
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So there’s been a few things. I mean, one of them is the forecast episodes and becoming more comfortable talking in general about upcoming alignments and the general theme of those, which then in some ways individual people are going to experience and live through and have very literal manifestations of in their life depending on how that’s hitting their natal chart. But being able to have that general discussion is a skill that you kind of have to learn that I’ve been learning over the past few years.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Learning more about electional astrology, I’ve learned a ton about electional astrology by paying attention to the different charts for recording an episode and how that recording goes, or releasing an episode and what some of the responses are to it or what the discussions are to it…
LS: Right.
CB: …has definitely been a thing.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Being able to more recently—especially over the past two to three years—spend more time doing some research projects for certain episodes, like the Joan Quigley episode, and being able to like buy, you know, a bunch of different biographies and read through them on Reagan or on Joan Quigley or on Nancy Reagan or different people in order to really get into that, or similarly, for the Star of Bethlehem episode, I have appreciated the ability to do some of that research.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, ‘cause there were some other things you already did know about, but being allowed the time to delve even more deeply.
CB: Yeah. Definitely. And that’s definitely something I want to continue in the future.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: All right, well, I think that’s pretty much all the major questions. There were other questions, but we can’t necessarily get to them. Oh, yeah, there was one last question.
LS: Oh, yeah.
CB: Fire Mind Astrology on Twitter (@fireminda) asks, “Where did the podcast theme music come from? I always kind of wondered.” And it’s actually a track called Urban Cafe from JewelBeat.com. ‘Cause one of the early investments I made besides buying a podcast microphone is I needed to get some theme music for the podcast.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So I went to a site where you can license clips of music and just bought this track…
LS: Right.
CB: …after listening to a bunch of them. Although I think it was supposed to be temporary. It was never supposed to be like the final music.
LS: No?
CB: Well, maybe it was, but it was like I couldn’t find anything better necessarily. That was like the best one I could find at the time.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: But I’ve been meaning to change it for a while because it’s kind of like dead space for like the first 15 seconds. I mean, while it is iconic in some ways and does bookend each episode in a nice, in other podcasts, they’ll have their theme music, but then they’ll start their introduction during the course of it and do a voiceover, which I probably should be doing because you probably do lose some new listeners in that 15 seconds before you really get into saying something.
LS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, it’s not that long. I don’t know, it’s grown on me. ‘Cause I remember when you were playing lots of different clips. I think at the time I didn’t really want to listen, and you were like, “You better listen because you’re gonna be hearing this a lot for a long time.”
CB: Right.
LS: I was like, “Okay.”
CB: You didn’t believe me.
LS: No, I mean, I did.
CB: Like 200 episodes and seven years later.
LS: Yeah. Exactly. No, but that said, I mean, it’s become kind of really associated with the podcast. And so, yeah, I think it is the sound of the podcast at this point.
CB: Okay.
LS: Yeah.
CB: So maybe I should be careful about changing it.
LS: Yeah.
CB: I don’t know.
LS: That is what I’m saying.
CB: If anybody finds anything interesting that I could do a voiceover with, let me know. We’ll see. So we’ll see what happens when we get to Episode 300…
LS: Sure.
CB: …if there’s been any changes by then.
LS: Yes.
CB: All right, I think that is it for this episode. Thanks everybody for watching. Thanks for joining me for this, for this little, brief jaunt through history.
LS: Little afternoon interlude.
CB: Yeah.
LS: Yeah.
CB: As usual, it turned into an overly-long and detailed discussion about everything we could possibly cover in the topic at hand.
LS: Right. But a good summary, especially if you have just started listening recently because there’s been so many at this point. So it’s a good overview.
CB: Yeah, and that was the original title of this episode. And I don’t know what I’m titling it at this point. It’s usually something where I go into the episode wanting to title it first, so I know what our primary target is that I’m trying to hit.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And I can judge as we’re going whether I’m success or unsuccessful in presenting what’s supposed to be the main thesis of the episode.
LS: Right.
CB: But sometimes, I’m not able to figure it out ahead of time, and I end up giving it a different title after than it had going into it.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: So with this episode it was originally tentatively titled, “A Beginner’s Guide to the First 200 Episodes of The Astrology Podcast.”
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And that’s why we were gonna do the historical, like how the podcast started, and then go through a list of highlights of the first 200 episodes. Right now, it’s just titled, “Retrospective.”
LS: “Retrospective and Commentary,” I think.
CB: Yeah, something like that.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Anyways, I’ll come up with some ‘click-bait-y’ title. It’ll be like, “Literally the Best Episode of The Astrology Podcast.”
LS: Right.
CB: Yeah. All right, so I guess that’s it. So thanks a lot for joining me.
LS: Yeah, you’re welcome.
CB: First episode in the new studio. I’m sure we’ll be back again in the future.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: Later this month, I’m gonna start doing some in-person interviews pretty soon. So you’ll see those coming up here before too long.
LS: Mm-hmm.
CB: And hopefully, we’ll be back again with Episode 300 before too long.
LS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right, everyone, thanks everyone for listening. Thanks especially to the patrons for your support. I have to give a shout out to all the patrons just because obviously you’ve made all of this possible. And I would still be doing this very infrequently—basically every few months or every six months or like once a year or something—without that support. So it’s only as a result of having that that we’ve gotten to Episode 200, so I’ve got to thank everybody who’s a current or a past patron.
And if you’d like to see more episodes like this in the future, and if you’d like to support this work then consider becoming a patron through our page on Patreon. You can find out more information at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/subscribe, and then there’s a link to the page on Patreon there where you can learn about the subscriber benefits and other stuff like that. So thanks to all current, past, and future patrons. Thanks to all the listeners who have listened and contributed and shared the episode and everything else over the years. We appreciate you. And I guess that’s it. So thanks everyone for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
LS: See you next time.