The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 500, titled:
500th Episode Retrospective
With Chris Brennan
Episode originally released on July 29, 2025
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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 Teresa “Peri” Lardo
Transcription released August 4th, 2025
Copyright © 2025 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey. My name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. This is it! This is the 500th episode of The Astrology Podcast. So I wanted to get on today to do a little recording; this is gonna be kind of casual, just sort of looking back and reflecting. One of the things I wanna do is talk about the first episode of The Astrology Podcast and the ambitious outline that I had for it and just how much of that ambitious outline I’ve actually been able to accomplish in the past 500 episodes. Then I also wanted to review a little bit some of the things that I’ve learned over the course of the past hundred episodes, especially from a technical standpoint. But otherwise, this is just gonna be a lot of casual, not very well prepared reflecting and like, thinking about the fact that I did 500 episodes of the podcast, and I wanted to mark the occasion.
All right. So let me give the data. So today is Saturday, July 27th, 2025 – or sorry, July 26th, 2025 – starting, it looks like I started at 12:45 PM here in Denver, Colorado, with Libra rising. And yeah, 500 episodes. So the year – it’s mid-2025, and I started the podcast way back in late June of 2012. So that was a lot of years ago at this point. And yeah, so let’s reflect a little bit on the history of it and how I got here and how it started.
So I went back today and I actually listened to the very first episode of The Astrology Podcast, which is only available on The Astrology Podcast website at TheAstrologyPodcast.com. And actually, there’s a whole catalog of like, two or three hundred episodes that are only available in audio versions on the podcast website. So a lot of people don’t know that, especially people that have only, you know, started following the podcast since let’s say 2017 is when I really started doing video versions of the podcast. There was already a whole catalog of at least a hundred in some instances really important episodes that I only did audio versions of because video podcasting hadn’t fully taken off yet. But once I published my book in early 2017, one of the things that I did is I immediately started to pivot to doing video because I had been wanting to do it for a while, but I wanted to wait until the book was finished because I knew it would be a big learning curve to get that going.
Yeah, so the first episode of The Astrology Podcast is available on the podcast website as well as all those other audio versions in the back catalog. Just go to TheAstrologyPodcast.com and click the Episodes page, and then you’ll see a full list of all the episodes that I’ve done. So let me pull that up now, actually, for those that are watching the video version of this. So go to TheAstrologyPodcast.com and click on the Episodes page, and then you’ll have a full list of numbered episodes of all 500 episodes of The Astrology Podcast that I’ve ever done. And like I said, a bunch of these are not available on YouTube, although I have occasionally re-released some of the more important ones. And some of them aren’t even available in the audio feed for like, podcast feeds, because my podcast program can only put out the most like, 300 most recent episodes. So I think even if you’re subscribing through like, Spotify or iTunes or something like that, you’re only getting like, episodes 200 through 500 and you’re missing out on like, 200 other episodes that are just available on the podcast website.
So here’s a list of all of the episodes that I’ve done. When I put it in front of me, it’s a lot. Since 2017, I’ve been doing about 50 episodes a year is basically what it comes out to. Prior to that time, it was much more sporadic.
So here’s the first episode of The Astrology Podcast. June 29th, 2012. And I wanna look at the outline, but maybe I should talk about that and talk about the history a little bit, because I was just looking at the charts today to refresh myself, and it was kind of funny, because the story is that I started The Astrology Podcast in 2012 partially by a fluke because somebody else who had bought the domain name – TheAstrologyPodcast.com – and had had it for years wasn’t doing anything with it and they dropped it. And I just happened to see that for some reason and bought the domain and then decided to start a podcast with it, and I contacted the old owner who I knew who’s an astrologer named Jeffrey Kirshner, and he said that was fine. He wasn’t gonna use it, and just to go for it. And I’d already been doing another podcast that I’d inherited from somebody else for a couple of years that was called Traditional Astrology Radio. And I actually took that over from my friend from Kepler, Jacqui Menkes, on my birthday I believe on November 1st, I think 2010 was the date of that. So I did that show sporadically; I think I did less than a dozen episodes – maybe 10 episodes or less. And then The Astrology Podcast – which gave me some experience, and I was just focusing on traditional and ancient astrology and I had like, you know, interviews with Demetra George or Ben Dykes or I think there was one with Alan White. I think maybe the Zoller interview may have been there as well; I’m not really sure. But by 2012 when that domain opened up, I decided to go for it and launch a more general purpose podcast, because even though my specialty and a large part of my interest and focus was on ancient astrology and traditional astrology in general and I was writing a book on Hellenistic astrology and already teaching courses on it, my interests were much broader than that because I had a general interest in many different traditions of astrology. Just studying and seeing the different perspectives that astrologers have, and I’ve always had this philosophy of wanting to look at things from the perspective of different astrologers and to see what the best parts of their system are and to know that you can get something from looking at those different points of view, and that sometimes you can take different things that are useful or that you find the most compelling from different systems and put them sort of together into your own approach. And that’s kind of what every astrologer does naturally. For me, I always enjoyed studying different traditions and talking about them and also incorporating some things from modern astrology – like the use of the outer planets, for example, which I still used in my work even though I put them on top of the foundation of what was largely a Hellenistic approach to astrology with using the seven traditional planets as rulers and using whole sign houses and different things like that.
So I felt kind of constrained only doing a show on traditional astrology, and when TheAstrologyPodcast.com opened up, I realized like, that was my opportunity to do something more broad. And I jumped on it and released the first episode in June of 2012. So some of the charts for that, though, are kind of interesting, because part of what was happening in 2012 is there was a Venus retrograde in Gemini conjunct Jupiter. And that’s one of the signatures, then, for the podcast. So something I should say, though, when we’re gonna look at some of the charts here for like, the founding of the podcast was that even though I’ve kept actually very good records of when I release each episode of the podcast, and often also when I record each episode of the podcast over the past several hundred episodes, I didn’t for some reason keep really good records and save the time for when I released the first episode of The Astrology Podcast. So I have a pretty good idea of what the rising sign is, but it’s a little bit of a not rectified chart, but it’s a little bit of an inferred chart since I didn’t save the exact data. But there’s some cool stuff. So let’s take a look at it.
So here’s the first chart. So this is when I first acquired the domain name, TheAstrologyPodcast.com. I had put in an order for it a month or two earlier in May – May 17th of 2012 – but this is when I actually acquired the domain, and this is a timed chart. It’s for June 19th, 2012 at 1:07 PM in Denver, Colorado, with Libra rising and Venus ruling the Ascendant and it’s retrograde in Gemini. And it’s retrograding back and is only a week away from stationing direct conjunct Jupiter. So that’s an interesting signature, that Venus retrograde conjunct Jupiter, because that would come up again one other time in the podcast at an important turning point, which was in 2015. That summer, there was a Venus retrograde in Leo conjunct Jupiter, and that was the summer that I first was told about Patreon and I launched my Patreon, which supercharged the podcast because then I started crowdfunding doing the episodes and committed to doing four episodes a month for the public and two episodes a month for patrons. And I’ve kind of been on that schedule ever since, and that’s what’s fueled the podcast and allowed me to do all of the work that I’ve done, basically, is I got lucky and I found a weird like, life hack where I’m able to put out huge amounts of content for free that would otherwise I would teach in courses and put behind a paywall. But I’m able to put that out for free and still have the community essentially crowdfund that work and be supported financially while doing it, which has been a really great setup. But that came about, and I launched that during the summer of 2015 under, again, a Venus retrograde conjunct Jupiter, but that time in Leo. And that summer was also when I started doing the forecast episodes for the first time with my friends Kelly Surtees and Austin Coppock. And initially, that wasn’t a part of the podcast; it was just something we started that summer. But that then became a cornerstone of the podcast and something I’ve done consistently every month over the past 10 years.
So those Venus retrogrades conjunct Jupiter, I think because that was in the initial base chart, you know, put a signature for that being important when it happens again in the future.
All right, so that was the chart… Oh yeah, one of the things that’s actually interesting about that chart and I thought was weird is there’s a couple recurrences today. So like, one of them is Mars is at 23 oh-four Virgo in that chart, and if you look at the chart for now, for today, Mars is in an exact recurrence right now, because it just passed over 23 oh-four Virgo in the past couple of hours, and it’s at 23 oh-six Virgo right now as I’m recording this in Denver. So there’s some interesting recurrences happening today. There’s other ones, of course, but that was one I wanted to point out.
So as for the release of the first episode, though, which is probably truly the chart for the podcast itself, it’s gonna be this chart. All right, so this is the release of the first episode of The Astrology Podcast which definitely occurred on June 29th, 2012. I think it occurred with Libra rising. I think I probably used Libra rising that day. And like I said, I didn’t record the time for some very bizarre reason. But I’m pretty sure that this would have been the rising sign that I would have used that day is Libra rising.
So what’s interesting about that then is Venus has just stationed direct; it’s two days post stationing direct. The ruler of the Ascendant is in the 9th house, which is associated with astrology. It’s conjoining Jupiter in Gemini. Mercury is just barely separating from a sextile with Jupiter and applying to a sextile with Venus. So Mercury’s actually enclosed by the two benefics; it’s the ruler of the 9th house of astrology and it’s in the 11th house of friends and groups and alliances, which has very much been a large part of what this podcast has been about because I’ve been interviewing and working with lots of friends in relation to my explorations of astrology.
So there’s different things about the chart that we can get into, but I think that’s probably sufficient just in terms of this is probably roughly the chart for the first episode of The Astrology Podcast. And at first I didn’t save as many of the chart data as I should have, but I started sometimes like, early on, even though I was doing electional astrology at that point, sometimes I wouldn’t elect always the release or the recording of different episodes. And then I had different experiences where I could see very clearly that the episodes that I was electing were being received better or the recording was going better versus the ones where I wasn’t putting much effort into picking a good election. You know, there would be some stray comment that would be taken weirdly or something would go awry. So I actually at this point and for years now, I both tried to use a decent electional chart when I record every episode, and then I also try to use a decent electional chart when I release every episode. So that makes things pretty complicated, as you might imagine. And obviously I don’t wait forever, because I also have pressure to produce each month at this point, which is those four episodes approximately that I release each month to the public and then two episodes that are just released for patrons, which is the electional astrology podcast that I do each month with Leisa Schaim and I’ve been doing for almost a decade now if not longer, and then The Secret Astrology Podcast which is an exclusive series that’s just available to some of the higher tier patrons. And both of those have over a hundred episodes each in their catalogs at this point.
Anyway, so I try to elect things within reason, although of course sometimes you’ve just gotta use the best – make the best out of whatever configurations are available and go from there.
All right, so let’s take a glance really quickly at the outline for the first episode of The Astrology Podcast. Okay. So here we go – first episode’s just titled “The First Episode of The Astrology Podcast,” and what I thought was really interesting as I went back and glanced at this was just how much of an outline I already had about the things that I wanted to cover and how ambitious it was. So it’s like, the first section that I said I wanted to cover is things pertaining to the philosophy of astrology, like what is the definition of astrology, how does it work, what are the implications for fate and free will, and so on and so forth. And I’ve done a bunch of episodes covering many different aspects of that like, pretty thoroughly at this point.
Elsewhere, the second category is astrological techniques and concepts. So you know, both ancient and modern. And of course, that’s been a major part of the podcast is covering different technical approaches to astrology as well as doing deep dives into specific techniques.
Section three is I talked about ethical issues, and that was something I wanted to cover, and that’s something I’ve done a bunch of episodes on.
Section four, the history of astrology – where does astrology come from, how were certain techniques developed. Shows on notable astrologers from the past. Historical debates that are occurring in the community today, which is something I’ve gotten into.
And then five, interviews with other astrologers, bringing on other professional astrologers for interviews. Ask them serious questions about their work and their views on astrology, which I’ve done with tons and tons of people at this point.
And then the last one was an astrology news segment, where originally I wanted to document things that were going on in the astrological community itself, which I have done, although interestingly that portion of things kind of morphed into the news section of the forecast episodes that I started doing in 2015 where I came up with this idea of instead of just doing predictions each month for the month ahead, that we would also spend some time reviewing how our predictions turned out that we made the previous month as well as what news and events happened that coincided with some of the different astrological alignments that we talked about. And that was kind of like, an innovative thing at the time, but it’s become really fruitful because now there’s this very large database recently that I’ve been drawing on where sometimes if we’re wondering like, you know, what does a Mars-Uranus conjunction mean, you can go back and search the podcast website and the transcripts, and you’ll find a bunch of instances of us talking about what was happening at different points under different Mars-Uranus conjunctions. And it’s actually very useful and illustrative in terms of that becoming kind of a database that astrologers can use in the future.
So I don’t have all of the forecast episodes, transcripts of all of them because I wasn’t doing transcripts at first, and then when transcripts were done, we focused on the important technical episodes first as we were going backwards. But I am in the process of finishing going back and making transcripts for all of the old forecast episodes, and hopefully that’ll be done before too long.
Yeah, so I guess my point with the initial thing was that I had an incredibly ambitious approach that I wanted to take of doing something really broad and all-encompassing. And in retrospect, it’s interesting to look back and see how much of that I’ve actually accomplished at this point and looking back on now 500 episodes into it, I definitely feel a great sense of accomplishment that I’ve done what I set out to do. And I’m sort of happy with that. I have like, a sense of peace about that that feels really cool. And even just in the past like, hundred episodes, I’ve actually been able to finish and complete some long-standing things and topics that I’ve always wanted to do. In particular over the past year or two years, I’ve done a lot of trying to make a point to do more deliberate coverage of some of the different traditions. So for example, I did an episode on Mesoamerican astrology. I did an episode on Chinese astrology. I did a really important episode on Mesopotamian astrology just very recently. So I’ve finally gone back and gotten to some of the traditions that I always meant to provide some coverage of, and even though a lot of my focus has also been on a particular approach to astrology and outlining the particular approach to astrology that I advocate, I am happy with the extent to which I’ve been able to expose people to different approaches and different ways of looking at and thinking about astrology as well as different eras in the history of astrology at the same time.
All right. So the next thing I wanted to look at is just I wanted to talk about a little bit I think is the past hundred episodes and some of the things that I’ve learned, especially from a technical standpoint, because I’ve been increasingly taking the opportunity that I have with the podcast and the fact that I need to produce content each month. I’ve been taking the opportunity sometimes to research different things and to make that my focal point where I’ll spend like, a week or two or sometimes like, three weeks or more really intensely researching something in order to put together an episode on it. And in doing so, I’m often furthering my own understanding of astrology in different ways and I’m learning things myself, but then also sharing them with the audience. Or in some instances, maybe there’s something that I already know from practicing astrology and just using it so much over the years, but sometimes you can develop a stronger understanding of it by actively trying to find additional examples to show people in order to demonstrate the principle. And then that knowledge becomes a little bit more firm.
So I wanted to quickly glance at like, the last hundred episodes and just point out some important like, developments and things that have taken place and that’ll also be kind of like, a useful guide for some episodes that were I don’t wanna say my favorite necessarily, but good ones that you might wanna check out that I consider like, some standout episodes over the past – what would it have been, like, two years, basically, if I’m doing about 50 episodes a year.
All right, so these are all 500 episodes. You know, for episode… I haven’t been doing a good job of doing like, looking back episodes. Because like, episode 200, Leisa and I did a retrospective, I remember, way back a while ago. But for episode like, 300 for example, it was like, a supercut of some of the highlights of some of our forecast episodes from the past year in 2020. And ironically now in retrospect, episode 400 just ended up being the episode I did with Nick Dagan Best on the emergence of artificial intelligence and how that was tied in with astrology and what we were seeing in terms of the astrology, especially with the Pluto ingress that was in the process of happening at that point. And then obviously what a big thing that’s become over the past several years. So what’s the date on this episode? Let me check. So that’s May 11th, 2023. Okay, so two years ago is when I got into the 400s. And just before that in episode 398, I had done a very important episode on ancient Egyptian astrology that I would recommend checking out; it was a really important historical episode. The Firmicus episode was great when Ben finally completed his translation of Firmicus Maternus. This Heliodora episode was very important that I did with Demetra, because this was based on a new paper that was published that identified the earliest woman astrologer that we know of by name in the Hellenistic tradition, in the western tradition, who lived sometime around the 3rd century in Greco-Roman Egypt. So this is a really cool piece that Demetra and I did that definitely more people should check out, because we ended up using it as an opportunity to talk more broadly about the early history of like, women in astrology in general.
All right, so episode 405 – the “Venus Retrograde in Astrology Explained” episode I did with Nick and Patrick where we were gearing up for the Venus retrograde in Leo that was happening that summer. And I feel like that sumer and that particular Venus retrograde was particularly loud in terms of things that I was following in the news, especially that was the one where Venus stationed retrograde and like, that day or within like, 48 hours, the Barbie movie was released. And I saw how that was connected back through the eight year repetitions of Venus to when Barbie was first released and became popular, and that summer Venus also went retrograde in the same eight-year cycle. So I did several episodes on Venus retrograde during the course of that summer which were important and which really started to develop my understanding of Venus retrogrades much more. And you can kind of see during the course of some of those episodes how my understanding of Venus retrograde was advancing as I was going back and doing more both technical and historical research on it over the course of that summer. And of course, that’s come full circle now two years later when we had the next Venus retrograde and I decided to take some of what I’d learned from 2023 and really apply it and study this particular Venus retrograde much more deeply – the one that just occurred in the first half of 2025 in Aries and Pisces. And then that also ended up becoming an incredibly fruitful period of research where I’ve been able to demonstrate a number of very important things about how Venus retrogrades work. Two of the more important things, though, are one, the eight-year repetitions of Venus and how there can be these repetitions of events and themes and circumstances that can go back for more than a century if you just track how one Venus retrograde will repeat every eight years. Because it’ll happen in roughly the same sign of the zodiac. So that’s been huge; that’s something I’ve really cracked open especially this year, but we can already see the seeds of that in some of the episodes that I did around this timeframe back in the summer of 2023.
Oh yeah, the other thing with Venus retrograde that I established this year and I guess I’ll return to is something that I was picking up on during that summer but has become even more confirmed this year, which is that when Venus retrograde doesn’t just take place in one sign but it takes place across two signs, that oftentimes it will link together the topics of the two whole sign houses that it’s moving across in a person’s birth chart. And in fact, that principle that I’ve been developing over the past couple of years also through the Mars retrograde that we just had across Leo and Cancer, I’ve been able to see that that principle applies to other planets including Mars, Mercury, and actually potentially even Uranus because in looking back and reflecting on some of the Uranus stuff lately, I’ve been realizing that it also happens when even an outer planet starts moving back and forth between two signs as it’s in the process of leaving one sign and moving into another. If it has a period – which they don’t always have – where the outer planet moves into the new sign but then retrogrades back into the previous one and then moves back into the next sign, you’ll sometimes see the house topics of both of those whole sign houses in the person’s birth chart not just being activated, but being actively intertwined in some way.
So one of the interesting ways that actually ties in with the history of the podcast that’s worth stating here is, you know, Uranus went into Aries around 2010. And at that point, Aries is my 3rd whole sign house – the house that’s associated for example primarily with communication. And that entire period from about 2010 is when I first started podcasting until 2018 was really about me learning all of these new technologies and being very forward thinking in terms of getting into podcasting and realizing that that would be the next big thing and leveraging these different technologies in order to communicate and share my voice and my thoughts with the world. And that started with Uranus going into Aries in the early 2010s, which is the early phases of first doing Traditional Astrology Radio starting around November of 2010, and then eventually starting The Astrology Podcast in 2012. And then what’s interesting – and this is the point that I wanted to make about this – is later on in that transit of Uranus going through Aries, once it started getting towards the end of my 3rd house, Uranus started moving into my 4th house of home and living situation. So but it went back and forth for like, a couple of years where Uranus’s first ingress into Taurus was in like, May of 2018, and then it retrograded back into Aries. And then it finally went back into Taurus for good in 2019. And around that time, like I said, in 2017, I first started doing video versions of the podcast, which was like, the next step in terms of leveraging different technologies. But what’s funny is that Uranus was moving back and forth between my 3rd house of communication, my 4th house of home and living situation, and around that time, I had a couple of experiences where there was a guest who came out – I think one of them was like, Priscilla Costello when I did the Shakespeare and astrology episode – and I really wanted to interview her about her new book about Shakespeare and his use of astrology. But I didn’t have like, a studio at home or a place where I could record, and I was actually living in kind of a crappy basement apartment for years. And so I tried to like, I had started to do video episodes, so I wanted to try to shoot like, a video episode. So I ended up like, going to her hotel and we shot it there, and I set up like, microphones and like, a camcorder to try to record the video. But just like, the audio quality was not good, and the video quality was terrible. So I don’t think I even ended up releasing the video recording because it was so bad; I just released the audio. And so I had that experience, and then very quickly after that, I also had a couple experiences where a couple of astrologers came through from out of town and I wanted to interview them but I just didn’t have a good way to or a good place to do in-person interviews, which are a lot different from a technical standpoint than doing a distance interview over Zoom where it’s just like, two people are on computers and they have microphones, and it’s a relatively controlled setting. So what I started to do is I started to set up essentially a recording studio in my living room in my basement apartment, and I started – once I did that – to record interviews in person.
So what I’m trying to say and then eventually I ended up moving in order to get a new place, because my basement apartment would flood periodically, which was very bad for books as well as for like, increasingly expensive equipment for like, recording and cameras and stuff like that. So I got a new place specifically especially for the purpose of having a room that I could convert to be like, a dedicated room for doing interviews. So that’s a long story to make the point that what I find really interesting is around that time, Uranus was moving back and forth between my 3rd house of communication and my 4th house of home and living situation, and I ended up essentially setting up a recording studio in my home and using technology and leveraging technology in order to communicate with people in person. So that’s a really interesting principle to me, and it’s something that I feel I’ve been developing over the past couple of years. But at this point later in 2025 or in mid-2025, I’m very excited about because that feels like a unique contribution that I don’t think other people have pointed out before as a principle. But it seems to be acting very reliably for me, not just with Venus retrogrades but also with Mercury retrogrades and Mars retrogrades and potentially Uranus as well as other planets. So the seeds of that started in the summer of 2023.
All right. So I did the Venus retrograde episode was 405. I did a “Sharing Venus retrograde Stories,” which was 410. 412 was a very important episode that I did with Demetra on the ancient myth of Innana and how this was like, a story that was tied in with Venus retrograde and how weirdly this story showed up in the Barbie movie, either accidentally or deliberately; we don’t really know. But that was a very core and very pivotal Venus retrograde episode that I would suggest everyone should check out.
All right, moving through – episode 419 was the Mayan and Mesoamerican astrology episode I did with Kenneth Johnson, which was a really great episode. And he talked about he has some family background in Native American or First Peoples family background, and he was like, studying astrology on a reservation when he was acting as the librarian for this reservation, and he started studying these traditions and then eventually he was invited to go there to be initiated into some of these traditions. And I’d always wanted to cover that, and that ended up being tied in with… Because part of his point in that episode and part of the reason I did that episode at that time, in addition to covering that area which I’d always wanted to cover, is because the Mayans had been aware of these eight-year Venus cycles and these long-term Venus cycles, and it had been integrated into their calendar to some extent and into their astrology. So that was another way of like, covering the Venus retrograde, and it’s another example of how I really got excited about and started discovering a lot of really cool things about Venus retrogrades in the summer of 2023.
Okay, yeah. So the eclipses… So there was a really important turning point that happened here in episode 423 where I did this episode titled, “Eclipses That Aligned with Pivotal Moments in History” with my friend Nick Dagan Best. And what was happening is there was a lot of really important and pivotal and crazy world events that started happening in late 2023, and I wanted to try to provide some meaning to those events, because obviously a bunch of them were occurring – were coinciding with eclipses, basically. And so I was looking up and I assumed that somebody had already did this, so I sort of like, did some basic google searches of just like, what times have eclipses occurred in history that coincided with major historical events. And there was actually surprisingly few thorough treatments of this where people had gone through and actually collected all of these instances.
So what Nick and I did is we decided to go through and look through history and see if we could identify some important events in history that coincided with eclipses. And we ended up finding just a ton of really stunning examples. And this ended up being the starting point for what I feel like is a major level up in my understanding of eclipses, starting in late 2023 and continuing into now into 2025 where I feel like I’ve just grown in leaps and bounds in terms of my study and understanding of eclipses. And I’d already had like, a pretty good, pretty solid understanding of eclipses up to that point, especially as they are transits and as they relate to people’s natal charts. And I’d done a number of episodes and a couple of earlier workshops where I demonstrated how one of the primary ways that I’ve always understood eclipses is that it opens up a window where for about a year and a half or two years, the eclipses will bounce back and forth between two houses in a person’s birth chart, two whole sign houses, and it will activate the topics of those houses and set off a series of events that mark a number of great beginnings and great endings in the person’s life, especially with respect to the topics of the houses that the eclipses are falling in for that year and a half or two year period.
So that was always my understanding and my keyword for eclipses is great beginnings and great endings. But when I started doing this historical research, it really opened up a new world to me that made the eclipses come alive in a much different way, especially in the context of mundane astrology. And one of the things that we established in that episode, as well as the follow up episode we did – because we did at least one followup episode. Like, the first one is episode 423, titled “Eclipses That Aligned with Pivotal Moments in History,” and then the second episode – the follow up – was episode 425 that was titled, “Eclipses That Shaped History: Part Two,” or at least that’s what it’s titled on the podcast website. One of the things I established in that is that there’s at the very minimum, there’s a window of time that begins about seven days before an eclipse, before the first eclipse takes place, and then it continues to be operative for two weeks until the second eclipse takes place. And then there’s about a seven-day window in which they’re both still operative until about seven days after the second eclipse takes place.
So what that means is one of the things that we did and that I established and I feel really solid about at this point is that astrologers in like, pop culture over the past let’s say decade have started referring to “eclipse season.” And there’s this notion that like, whenever eclipses start happening, that’s eclipse season, and there was kind of like, an undefined notion that that’s like, a broad period of time where important things start happening. But one of the things I was able to do, especially with these two episodes, is to really narrow down and define exactly what that timeframe is. And functionally it ends up being about a month-long timeframe that happens starting seven days before the first eclipse, peaking in between two eclipses that are always exactly two weeks apart, and then ending seven days after the second eclipse. So that’s basically eclipse season, and that gives the range of what to look for if you’re going back, both in terms of looking at historical events to see what historical events coincided with eclipses, but also if you’re studying them in your personal life in terms of transits and things like that, then that’s gonna be the operative window to look for essentially. So I feel really good about that. We also found a lot of just like, really stunning things like, that like, three kings in the UK all died within close to eclipses in the 20th century. And this kind of confirmed like, some of the ancient reports about, you know, that sometimes kings and rulers could die under eclipses. And it really started giving me a deeper understanding of how some of the ancient lore and wisdom surrounding eclipses really was still relevant today in different ways in terms of mundane astrology. And yeah, so that’s been something that started in that period in late 2023 but that has continued. And then we’ve been able to use some of those insights, for example, in order to make predictions on the forecast episodes over the course of the past couple of years about ongoing things that are happening with for example the recent episode I did with Iran and things happening in the Middle East with respect to that being connected in these six-month increments by eclipses and having different escalations of some of those situations happen every six months when the next installment or series of eclipses take place. So lots of good work on eclipses over the past hundred episodes, but it started with that series in late 2023.
There’s always like, lots of good episodes; I’m not gonna talk about all of them, but I’m obviously gonna skip some even though they were also good. Another one that was really important, and this was part of a kind of a series that I started doing again with my friend Nick Dagan Best who I’d done so much work with over the course of the past hundred episodes. Nick was both on one of the first episodes – I think he was on the second episode of The Astrology Podcast and has to be one of the most recurring figures. But especially I’ve done a lot of historical work with Nick over the past hundred episodes, and it kind of started, I think, with that eclipses episode in history, but then it continued with other episodes. So one of them was episode 432, which was titled, “Pluto in Aquarius in History,” where, you know, Pluto was going into Aquarius and we wanted to know what that was gonna be about. And we wanted to really ground that not just in interpreting symbolically, which is what astrologers usually do trying to like, blend the symbolism of Pluto and Aquarius. But to take it back through history and see what happened going back 2,000 years every time Pluto went through Aquarius and to try to see what the commonality was in some instances between those periods. And that was something that we did in the eclipses episode; it’s something we did in this episode with Pluto in Aquarius, and I think it really set a nice foundation where we would repeat that sort of like, empirical approach to trying to understand planetary transits by going back and looking at the history. And that’s been really, really fruitful over the past few years.
All right. Moving on. Episode 433 was “The Lot of Spirit and Fortune in Astrology” that I did with Kira, and that was a great episode – Kira Ryberg – and that was one where I really wanted to push myself to dig deeper to understand the meaning of the lots, especially the Lot of Fortune and the Lot of Spirit, because it was something I have done a lot of work with over the years, especially in the context of zodiacal releasing. But I wanted to develop a deeper understanding and to not just develop that understanding, but to demonstrate it with a bunch of chart examples. And we got to some really important insights about the nature of fortune and how that concept is actually unique and important in astrology.
And I did that episode, and then I also did one bonus episode that I think I released with a bunch of additional examples as part of The Secret Astrology Podcast or I may have put that in my Hellenistic astrology course, because that’s, you know, been a little part of my tension over the past 10 years is needing to generate content constantly and putting these things out for free that largely don’t have like, a lot of residuals once it’s released, versus keeping some content back just for patrons, especially in The Secret Astrology Podcast, or in other instances, you know, I have my private courses which I continue to expand and do workshops for there every month basically as well. And I’m constantly adding new content to those, especially my Hellenistic astrology course.
So it’s always been an interesting tension, though, in terms of like, what to release to the public versus what to put in my courses. And I’m actually surprised at the amount of stuff that I have just like, put out for free at this point where people could learn basically a pretty comprehensive overview of astrology through just the podcast, especially in some of the solo lectures that I’ve put out on different topics. But that I’ve still been able to sort of maintain and still develop my private courses in a way that students when they sign up for the course get access to like, a ton of material that’s not available on the podcast that’s unique and worthwhile and will accelerate your astrological studies. But it’s been interesting, that tension on the podcast over the years. And over the past couple of years, that’s been one of the things that I’ve been doing or trying to do more, which is instead of putting everything… You know, because I like to research these episodes and I have fun doing this research and diving as deeply and like, picking a topic that I’m really interested in at the time and diving as deeply into it as I can, and then essentially like, sharing as much of what I found – especially the most compelling pieces – with the audience when I put together the episode. And I always have this idea that this is gonna be the one time I ever cover this topic on the podcast, or in some instances potentially in my life, so I’m gonna present the most comprehensive treatment of that topic that I possibly can. And sometimes that’s really long; it can make for a really long – essentially what I’m doing is not just like, a podcast episode. I’m essentially putting out a full-fledged weekend workshop, essentially, on a given topic. And if this was 20 or 30 years ago, these would be like, workshops that a person who have to like, fly out in person for and like, attend with me at like, a conference or a retreat or something like that. But instead I’m putting it out there for free as a comprehensive workshop and in some instances something that could be a book-length treatment of that topic. But increasingly, I’ve been trying to do a better job of just like, putting out some public version of that of some of the highlights and the best parts, but then also occasionally record like, a follow up and release that to either just the patrons for The Secret Astrology Podcast or put it as an additional piece of bonus content in the Hellenistic course.
So for example, I did that with this Lots episode where there was a follow up on that, and I did that recently with the Mesopotamian astrology episode where that was a really good solid three-hour discussion that I released on the podcast where it was more of an interview. But then I had a bunch of stuff that we didn’t have time to get into basically in that three hours that I recorded as a separate solo discussion on my own. So I think that’s gonna be something as I’m like, looking forward to the future of the podcast in the next few years that I’m gonna increasingly try to do is tone it down in terms of not making overly long episodes that people don’t necessarily watch, but instead focusing on getting some of the best parts into the public episode that I release, even if that’s still long. Like, still like, you know, two or three or four hours long. But then being okay with recording like, a separate follow up that’s released elsewhere, or in some instances breaking an episode up and doing it as one episode and then doing a part two or what have you. Although I think I’m still gonna continue to prefer…
Yeah, I really still like the idea of doing the singular comprehensive episodes on individual things. That’s something, you know, I’m struggling with a little bit right now in terms of the houses series, because last year when I started that series, I set the bar really high with what I started doing with those episodes. Because again, I wanted to really dive deep into this and research this deeply and collect a lot of great examples, but also really formalize my own thinking about each of the houses and their relationships and say something definitive about that topic. Because that’s another sort of side thing about the podcast now looking back at 500 episodes is just pretty early on when I started going to conferences in the first like, hundred episodes probably, even when I was doing it more sporadically and it was more spread out, I really surprised at how many people would like, come up to me and say that they listened to that episode that I did like, a year or two ago and that it was really impactful on them. And I started getting the sense pretty early on that the podcast was impacting people and more people were listening to it than I realized, because only a very small percentage of people comment, and there’s like, studies about this on YouTube and stuff that it’s something really small – like, one percent or two percent of people that watch a piece of content will ever even leave a comment on it. But I realized that the podcast was being listened to far more people than I realized and was really impacting people and people were internalizing things far more than I realized relatively early on. And as the years have gone on and the podcast has grown in terms of its like, stature and influence in the community, it’s become something that I’ve taken more seriously about being very careful about what I put out there then, because I know it has the potential of influencing people or it could have the potential of being around and influencing the entire tradition and like, trajectory of the tradition for like, a hundred years or something like that if people are listening to specific things that I’m putting out there and then internalizing them and then making that part of their own astrological approach, which is what everybody does across every tradition in terms of learning from your teachers and creating your own approach that’s usually a hybrid of the different sources or teachers that you’re drawing on.
Anyway, so long story short, there’s been a pressure to be careful and to try to do the best job that I possibly can with different episodes, especially where I am, you know, outlining something that’s gonna be particularly influential. But to make a long story short, I kind of set the bar really high last year with the first four episodes on the houses series where initially I was doing it like, what, like, an introduction to the house and then I was doing the ruler of the Ascendant in the house, and then the ruler of that house in each of the 12 houses. And then I was doing all of the planets in that house. And that was really comprehensive and long. But it was also really good. But I think it set the bar a little bit too high, because then it’s a little hard continuing that. And some kind of like, life events came up, and my focus shifted to other things. I have most of the 5th house episode ready, and it’s actually been largely researched since late last year, but I’ve been trying to decide how comprehensive I wanna make it. And I wanna wait until I’m ready and in a good place to give it the best shot and the best job that I can possibly do before recording that and sort of like, committing it to, you know, the tradition for however long that ends up being around. But anyway, so that’s a long story to say that I’m going to resume the houses series at some point, and that’s something that I’m in the middle of with the 5th house series. But that I wanna do a good job when I put it out there because of the influence that these things can have in different ways.
All right. So moving on. Oh yeah, so in the 430s in early 2024, I kind of got on this trip about philosophy, and I got really back into reading like, ancient philosophy and did a bunch of episodes. It kind of grew out of actually doing the Lot of Spirit episode and the Lot of Fortune episode where I went back to some of the ancient philosophy in order to understand how the concept of fortune was being conceptualized in ancient times. That led me back into some of the different things that were happening with like, Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics. So I did a whole series on ancient philosophy, starting with the episode on Proclus and astrology in Platonism that I did with Jose Manuel Redondo, and then Demetra and I did a very important episode on the origins of the planetary myths in astrology where we talked about how the myths and the names associated with the planets in Greek and Roman times were actually adopted deliberately and patterned after an earlier set of gods and goddesses that were associated with the planets in the Mesopotamian tradition. But one of the important pieces that we showed there is that these assignments seem to have happened very deliberately, but that it may have happened within Plato’s school in Athens in the academy around the time period of his life and just afterwards, because Plato becomes like, one of the first people we know of who calls the planet Mercury “the star of Hermes” and starts associating with the god of Hermes. And then his student, Philip of Opus, is the first Greek and western person that we know of who for the first time associates each of the planets with a specific god or goddess from the Greek pantheon. Like the god Ares of war to Mars, or Aphrodite for Venus and so on and so forth. So there was a few actually really important implications of that from a historical and technical standpoint. One of the more interesting one was that while they did a good job of connecting certain gods with the Mesopotamian equivalents, there were some things that were lost. Like, one of the things in the Mesopotamian tradition, for example, is that Mars was not just a god of war in the Mesopotamian tradition, but it was also the god of the underworld. And in the Greek tradition, in picking the god Ares, they picked up one piece of that, which is Mars is the god of war. But it kind of missed out on another piece about it being the god of the underworld, because that would be a different god in the Greek tradition, which would be like, you know, Hades or Pluto in the Roman tradition. So it was interesting, then, realizing that there were some things about how the myths have been treated in contemporary astrology over the past century and some assumptions that have been made about how those assignments have like, always been there or assumptions that those were always the basis of the astrological delineations, which may not be fully true. And it both confirmed some of the reasons why the myths that are important but also some of their limitations. So that was a super important episode I would recommend checking out. It was episode 436 titled, “The Origins of the Planetary Myths in Astrology.” And I kind of returned to that topic a little bit I think in the episode I did on Mesopotamian astrology recently as well as in the follow up that I did in Mesopotamian astrology part two for The Secret Astrology Podcast, and it was also in my Hellenistic course.
All right. So I did a Saturn return in Aquarius retrospective, which is something I’ve been doing for years every time Saturn completes its trip through a sign – to interview people and talk about different celebrities that had their Saturn return and how that went. The Antikythera Mechanism and astrology episode was incredibly important in terms of establishing that the Antikythera Mechanism was used for astrology. There was some stuff about the planetary order and how important that was in the origins of Hellenistic astrology that I discovered in that that was really crucial.
The rulers of the houses in astrology was a major technical episode that I put out there for free. I have a much more extensive treatment of that in my Hellenistic course, but nonetheless it was an important turning point for me to finally put that out there as just like, a free lecture for people because it’s such a crucial concept in astrology from a technical standpoint. Maybe I should focus more on things that I learned, though, rather than just going through every single episode.
Okay, so then in episode 454, I already started the first house series, which was a huge thing, because I’d already done an earlier series talking about the significations of the houses with Austin and Kelly with just a two episode series that we did years ago. And that’s still a very great solid series, but we didn’t spend a lot of time talking about each house, and we didn’t give any examples. And the purpose of this series especially is to ground the understanding of the house significations and the symbolism in looking at actual example charts to show how the house means what it means and why it means what it means. So that was part of that.
Let’s see, second house… Okay. And then we get to like, early 2025, and then I’ve done this whole series about Venus retrograde starting with Nick Dagan Best in episode 475 where we did the “Venus Retrograde in Aries in History” where we went back to the past century and looked at what happened every time Venus went retrograde in Aries. And we noted a bunch of things in the news, and then what’s wild is that a number of the things that we picked up on that had happened in the past under Venus retrogrades that we mentioned in that episode ended up coming up again in the news a bunch of times in really interesting and surprising and mysterious ways in the subsequent months, because we did that like, right before the Venus retrograde actually began. So one of them was like, we had this whole piece in that episode about how the Oscars was always really important, the one that occurred every eight years with Venus retrograde in Aries going back to the first one. And then we also had this thing where I noticed that like, Conan O’Brien had been announced as the host of The Late Night Show back in 1993 under this Venus retrograde in Aries. But then what happened is that Conan – I don’t think we knew this in the episode, because we didn’t mention it – but Conan ended up hosting the Oscars under this Venus retrograde in Aries, and it ended up being like, a huge success for him and a career highlight. And so it was interesting to see both of those two things come up again in unique ways, but to actually like, cross paths. And I learned a ton about from doing that historical research, and one of the things I learned from it that it’s convinced me of is that any time Venus goes retrograde, what you need to do as an astrologer is you need to draw a list going back in eight-year increments every year in which Venus has gone retrograde in the same sign going back a century. You need to look at what’s happened historically each time that’s happened, because that’s gonna inform repetitions that are gonna come up during the course of the next retrograde. And then you also need to look at those years in people’s personal lives. And some of these Venus retrogrades are incredibly important, especially if a person was born near especially like, during, but sometimes even near – like, in the same year – as a particular Venus retrograde, then whenever that Venus retrograde recurs in eight year increments in the future, that will tend to be a very important turning point in the person’s life. And I just found a huge amount of examples of that this year that’s made me very excited about the power of planetary recurrences and planetary periods. And that when something happens, when an event happens in the world or in a person’s life when there’s a certain planetary alignment, or if a person is born under a certain planetary alignment, when that planetary alignment recurs in the future, that will be an incredibly important turning point with respect to either that person’s life or with respect to a recurrence of similar themes at that time. So that’s true of Venus retrogrades, but it’s also true of other types of configurations, such as for example Saturn-Neptune conjunctions, which was also a very important episode that I did with Nick Dagan Best where we went back and looked at Saturn-Neptune conjunctions in history in episode 483 of The Astrology Podcast. And we found a bunch of similarities between different periods in which Saturn was conjunct Neptune that we tried to summarize, but we also noted that sometimes when people were born under a Saturn-Neptune conjunction that they would come up and either have an important life turning point when that transit recurred, or sometimes even after they’ve passed away when that transit recurred or that alignment recurred, they would come up again in some significant way in terms of their memory or their impact on the world or what have you.
So that’s a whole area that I’m getting very deep into and I’m still in the process of going there. One of the next episodes I’m gonna do with Patrick Watson because it’s been a big development over the past couple of years is an episode on Babylonian goal year periods, which are like, long-term planetary recurrences where, for example, the longest period of Mars is 79 years. And so that’s something I did in a number of episodes earlier this year, not just with Venus but also in order to understand, for example, the Mars retrograde that occurred in Cancer and Leo this year, we did a whole episode – episode 479 – titled, “Mars Retrograde in Cancer in US History” where we went back to study what happened every time Mars went retrograde in Cancer. And it provided a lot of insight into things that are happening now, especially in the United States, but especially those 79-year repetitions were particularly important and potent. So that’s something that I would like to bring together with this episode I’m working on right now with Patrick Watson about these Babylonian goal year periods, because it turns out that the ancient Babylonian astrologers like, 2,000, 3,000 years ago were paying attention to these repetitions of planets. Not just the eight-year repetition of Venus, but also these long-term like, 79-year repetitions of Mars. And they were tracking events in a very similar way that we’re tracking them right now in terms of the diaries – of writing down events that happened under certain alignments in order to build up a database, and then knowing that when the same alignments recur in the future that similar events may repeat themselves again.
So it seems like such a simple and obvious point with astrology that you almost take for granted on some level or would associate with it, and yet, I’m surprised at how underdeveloped this notion is in contemporary astrology and how we’re really in studying these recurrences, we’re really bringing back a very ancient predictive technique that had kind of been lost in some ways.
All right, so I followed up the Venus retrograde in Aries thing with “Venus Retrograde Repetitions in the News,” which became like, a three-part series where I kept checking in about additional Venus retrograde things that were coming up that were repetitions of events from other eight-year increments in the past. The Mesopotamian astrology episode was super crucial to finally do an episode on that tradition. The “Astrology, Fate, and Destiny” episode with Leisa was really important, because I’m moving into a period of discussing the philosophy of astrology a lot more, and especially my views on astrology and its connection with fate, and the extent to which what astrology is describing is fate, and that fate has this tangible quality that can be accessed through astrology and defining what fate is as an ordering and interconnection between a sequence of events that’s playing out in the universe, both in people’s personal lives as well as in the world in general.
All right, so that was it. There was one more episode where I did Venus and Mars retrogrades as the unfolding of a sequence of events, and that was just demonstrating a principle that I’ve long known about, but I wanted to show people, which is that oftentimes the retrogrades of a planet in a sign are not just a singular event, but instead they’re the unfolding of a sequence of events over a long period of time.
All right, so that’s some of the things that I’ve learned and some of the important episodes that I’ve done in the past hundred episodes. And there’s lots more. I’ve skipped over like, a ton, because realistically I’m actually very proud of a ton of the different episodes that I’ve done at different points that I didn’t focus on here. But for the sake of time, I’m not gonna go through all of them. But to start to wrap things up and bring things to a close, one of the things I wanted to say is I’m just incredibly grateful that I’ve been able to do this work and accomplish as much as I have. And a large part of that is from the audience, from listeners, so I wanted to thank all the listeners of the podcast over the years, ever since I started it way back in 2012. I appreciate your comments. I appreciate those who watch and learn from things and apply things, or develop their own unique take on things. I appreciate especially the different patrons of The Astrology Podcast that have supported my work over the years – not just financially, but also in doing some of the different workshop episodes over the past several years. It’s been really fun to connect with people directly and to have it become more of a community thing where through sharing their stories, they’re adding to the podcast and adding to the work that I’m doing here as a sort of collective effort. So thank you to all the patrons of the podcast, and thanks for supporting this work because it’s literally what makes this possible, and it’s the reason why I continue to produce as much as I do, because this has really become my life’s work. And it’s kind of weird realizing that, because it’s been a slow realization over the years. Because if you look back at the podcast in like, the early years, I was doing it much more sporadically. Like, episodes would come out every few months or something like that, and sometimes there were very long gaps in between episodes. But yeah, as I went further and further into it, I realized that I was doing something really important, and it was really impacting people. And then when I was able to find a way to sort of fund that effort and make it so that I could focus on this more and still have it support me financially in 2015 when I launched the Patreon, that was when I really started putting everything into it, and it’s been a really wild ride over the past 10 years now since that time of doing about 50 episodes a year of the public podcast as well as all the other bonus episodes and things that I do.
So yeah. 500 episodes. In some ways, it would have been nice to go through – I thought about a different version of going through and talking about some highlights from the past 500 episodes, but that would be a super long episode, and ironically, I’m trying to bring the length of episodes down lately to some extent, for the most part, within reason. And going forward into the future, one of the things I’m starting to move into a little bit more is doing solo episodes and trying to produce episodes in some instances a little bit more quickly and a little bit more about timely events and sometimes about smaller individual topics. And I’m kind of excited about that as a new direction. One of the reasons why like, I’m able to do that is for a while, I lost the ability to do solo episodes, and there’s an interesting history with that with the podcast, because very early on, I did more solo episodes and some of the first episodes were solo episodes. But I got some feedback earlier on that people preferred listening to a dialogue more than just a solo episode. There was like, one comment that was very annoyed by that early on. So I tried to do more dialogue-type episodes early on. And then especially after I got long covid in 2020, for some reason my voice would go out when I tried to talk on my own for more than a relatively short period of time, more than like, 20 minutes or something like that, and you can see that in some of the episodes I did in late 2020 where I was still trying to push through it – like the episode on sect where I gave a lecture which I’d been giving lectures for years. But my voice by the end just sounded terrible.
So for some reason, for the most part even though my health is not great and has declined in other ways, for some reason I’ve been able to talk longer and to do more solo things lately. So I’ve been moving more in that direction. And it also kind of fits the YouTube format a little bit better as well to do, you know, shorter, more pointed episodes like the recent discussion that I did on, you know, the movie Back to the Future and how it started filming during a Mercury retrograde and they ended up firing the lead actor, and just sharing more sort of quick, interesting, and fun kind of observations and things like that that don’t have to be like, a whole, you know, three to four-hour workshop on like, doing a dissertation on the specific topic or technique. While I’ll still continue to do those occasionally and I’ll still love doing the research episodes, yeah, for myself, I also want to be able to produce content more quickly and easily and regularly. So I’m gonna start experimenting in this new era of The Astrology Podcast potentially with doing more sort of short-form content a little bit, and we’ll see how it goes.
I’m trying to think of what else there is about the future or what else there is about the past or the present that I meant to mention, but maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s getting towards the end of this. Yeah. So let me just reiterate one last time, thank you to everybody that’s listened to or watched the podcast. Thanks to those that have supported it in different ways. Thanks to all the amazing astrologers that have come on the podcast over the years and collaborated with me to create some of the episodes, because you know, so many of these episodes have been collaborations with different astrologers at different points. And there have been some figures in the podcast that have been, you know, far more prominent than others, like my close circle of friends that I just love to work with and talk astrology with and that I have a similar approach in terms of astrology with. You know, people like my friend Austin Coppock who I do the forecast episodes with each month. Leisa Schaim, who I do especially the electional astrology podcast with each month, but who we’ve done a bunch of other important episodes as well, including some like, way back in the early history that are just audio versions that people don’t know about but that are core episodes, like the one Leisa and I did on how to interpret what a Saturn return means in your life. We outlined that system pretty early in like, one of the very first 20 episodes and then have applied that pretty consistently in other follow up workshops on Saturn returns. But it all goes back to that early episode from the very beginning.
Yeah, and actually as I think about it more, shoutout to more than anybody, my partner Leisa, because thanks to Leisa, for example, for letting me build a studio in our living room. And you know, not being super sure about it, but supporting me as I wanted to try to create something and to help, you know, get us out of our basement apartment. Shoutout to her for filling in a bunch of times when I desperately needed to do an episode but didn’t have anybody else to talk to. Shoutout to Leisa for the times when I wasn’t desperate but when we really just wanted to collaborate together on something, and we created some of the most legendary episodes in the history of the podcast, like the zodiacal releasing episode, the electional astrology episode, or even more recently some of the houses episodes that we’ve been working on together. Thanks to Leisa for letting me talk to her for endless hours as I was researching different charts, as I was wrestling with different difficulties I was having with the podcast over the years, and even as I was talking about how I felt about each episode after almost every episode that I ever recorded over the past, you know, 15 something years now. While a lot of her contributions have been visible on some of those most important episodes that I’ve ever done, a lot of them have been behind-the-scenes and not visible. So I just wanted to say thank you to her and shoutout to Leisa. Even in some of those episodes where I did jokey titles that she told me not to, but I still went ahead and did it anyways and got in trouble – you know, Leisa was right. So I just wanted to send a shoutout to Leisa and thank her and say that I love and appreciate her deeply.
Shoutout to Kelly who I started doing the forecast episodes with and who I collaborated with a number of great episodes, like the episode on progression.
Shoutout to Diana Rose Harper, who I’ve done forecast episodes with as well as done a number of other episodes like the Saturn episode that Diana was so amazing in, the Capricorn episode.
There’s so many different people. Shoutout to Nick Dagan Best, who I’ve done I wanna say more episodes with in terms of just stand-alone episodes, like, non-forecast episodes than anybody else. And my collaborations with him have been incredible because of his vast knowledge of history, especially history over the past few centuries. And in many ways, his research of planetary cycles and recurrences is years ahead of mine, because he’s known about some of these things like the Venus retrogrades for years he’s been working on stuff like that. And while I’ve had some understanding of those things, especially as it relates to personal astrology, it’s interesting the different ways that I’ve been catching up to him and that I feel like our collaborations together have been creating something new and interesting and valuable. So I wanted to give a shoutout to Nick.
Shoutout to Patrick Watson, of course, who’s been on the podcast a bunch of the times and has been a close collaborator.
I’m nervous because I didn’t prepare a list, and I should have, because my memory’s not very good, so I’m probably leaving out a bunch of people because there have been just so many astrologers in the past, you know, 10, 15 years on the podcast and different people that have played an integral role in different ways, including people behind the scenes. Like, one of them I wanted to give a special shoutout to is Paula Belluomini who has been working with me on doing graphic design for years and designing different graphics for the podcast and helping me design like, the calendars that we use, for example – both the wall posters as well as the ones we put in the forecast episodes each month that shows the different planetary alignments each month. My work with Paula has been incredible over the years, and she’s been a very integral part of the podcast.
More recently, Madeline DeCotes from Honeycomb.co has been designing a bunch of really beautiful graphics for me to demonstrate different things like the Venus retrogrades, the Mars retrogrades, or the Uranus transits recently, and that’s been a super fruitful partnership and collaboration for both of us that I’ve really appreciated.
I’ve also had different editors over the years. I’ve been more recently editing the podcast a lot myself, but I had an amazing editor for a number of years, which was Steven Coppock who’s Austin’s brother. And he really helped me to take the podcast to the next level, especially during that transition where I was going from doing just audio versions to doing video versions, and I definitely wanna give him a shoutout because the podcast wouldn’t be where it is today if I didn’t have that help from him in a technical standpoint to try to like, improve the quality and know and do what it takes to do that.
I’ve also had a number of other editors, including Victoria, who’s been recently the main person I’ve been working with to edit over the past few years. And I wanted to actually give her a special shoutout, because she just released an album, because she’s also an astrologer and a musician. Victoria’s name is Victoria Cheong, and she released an album recently titled A Rock Unsteady with her band New Chance. And you can find that on like, Spotify or anything else, and it has a bunch of cool songs, including some that are inspired by astrology. There’s one about Mercury; there’s another one entitled “Phasis.” So shoutout to Victoria; she’s edited a bunch of episodes for me over the past few years, and I’ve really appreciated that.
I’ve also had a lot of great people doing transcripts on the podcast over the years, in particular Andrea Johnson did a bunch of our transcripts for The Astrology Podcast that are up on the podcast website or that are used as subtitles in the YouTube version. And more recently, Teresa Lardo has been our main transcriptionist, so I wanted to give a shoutout to both of them, because that’s been a really integral part of the podcast over the past several years as well, and it’s also made it easy to go on the podcast website and to be able to search through what was said in different episodes, which has become increasingly useful recently. So thanks and shoutout to them.
Yeah, and who else? There’s probably so many other people that I should or could give a shoutout to, but for now maybe that’s sufficient and just saying that the podcast has been my thing that I’ve focused on and has become my life’s work somewhat unexpectedly. Because you know, prior to the podcast, I was working on writing my book on Hellenistic astrology and teaching my courses and starting to travel around the world to give lectures on astrology at different places at different conferences and workshops and retreats. And the podcast initially was just this thing that I would do occasionally, but it was never supposed to be my primary thing and somehow it became that. And yet, that’s turned out to be something incredibly beautiful and fulfilling and that I’ve gained a lot from and that I feel a great sense of gratitude about to sort of like, stumble into my life’s work in that life and to on the one hand do that somewhat deliberately in that I tried to plan things out, and I tried to make the podcast something where if I was gonna do it, I always wanted to do like, the highest quality version of that that I possibly could, which interestingly has also become my understanding of what planets in their exaltation mean over the past few years. That they just try to do the highest version of something that they can. But it’s been interesting finding that and coming to this and realizing that this has become my life’s work over the past several years. So I feel incredibly grateful for that. And I think I’m gonna wrap up here, because otherwise I’m just gonna keep talking! Because that’s what you do if you start a podcast with a Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Gemini, folks. I am a living testament to that. Astrology works!
All right. So thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast. I’ll be back again; we’ll see if we can do another 500 episodes and we’ll get to a thousand. You know, that would be wild if we get that far, but we’ll see what happens. So thanks for listening, and I’ll see you again next time.
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People often ask me if I’m available for consultations, but unfortunately I’m not right now because the podcast takes up so much of my time. However, I did create a consultations page on The Astrology Podcast website that has a list of astrologers that I recommend for astrological consultations. You can find that at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Consultations.
The astrology software we use here on the podcast is called Solar Fire for Windows, which is astrology software for the PC. You can get a 15% discount by using the promo code ‘AP15’ at the website Alabe.com.
For Mac users, I recommend the software Astro Gold for Mac OS, which is astrology software for the Mac computer made by the creators of Solar Fire for the PC. You can get a 15% discount with the promo code ‘ASTROPODCAST15’ through their website at AstroGold.io.
If you’re really looking to deepen your studies of astrology, then I would recommend signing up for my Hellenistic Astrology course, which is an online course in ancient astrology where I take people from basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There’s over a hundred hours of video lectures, plus monthly webinars and Q&A sessions. And then at the end of the course, you get a certificate of completion saying that you studied with me if you pass the final written test. Find out more information at TheAstrologySchool.com.
Finally, shoutout to our sponsor for this episode, which is the United Astrology Conference, which is happening September 3rd through the 9th, 2026, in Chicago. Find out more information at UACAstrology.com.