How To Tickle Yourself

We’ve got a special one for you today, folks. About a year ago, Duff started hounding his old friend, filmmaker and documentarian Andy Keen to sit for an interview for How to Tickle Yourself.  Andy is currently at work on a timely documentary series of monumental importance. It’s called Back to the Fire: In Search of Lost Values That Could Change Our World, and he’s making it with our other guest today, Chief Gibby Jacob, the leader of Canada’s Squamish Nation for over 30 years.  We want to let these two describe what they’re working on themselves, but suffice it to say that their mission is something we share here at How to Tickle Yourself: They are trying to help us get back to first principles, to those few things that matter more than all the other things.

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In 2020, Duff told Joey that he wanted to start a newsletter called The Kombucha Times. Alas, someone already had that idea. His name is Ian Griffin, and he is the founder and publisher of Booch News, the premier source for independent news and statistics about the kombucha industry.

A former marketer and speechwriter who was blogging and podcasting when both were still new things, Griffin wrote a blog about professional speaking for more than a decade. After he retired, he was on a trip with his wife to his native UK and couldn’t find enough kombucha. Seeing an opportunity to mix his two loves – blogging and kombucha – he landed on the ideas of a couple of reports about the industry, and Booch News was born.

So this interview is going to be a bit of a mash-up. We’re going to talk to Ian about all things kombucha as well as speechwriting. He thinks AI has changed the speechwriting game forever.

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We cannot believe our senses over here at How to Tickle Yourself, because we got to interview a singer/songwriter who literally lights our souls on fire. 

His name is Andrew Combs. Andrew released an EP in 2010, and his first album, Worried Man in 2012. It was an auspicious start. Since then, he has graced us with four more: All These Dreams in 2015, Canyons of My Mind in 2017, Ideal Man in 2019, and Sundays in 2022.

Texas born and Nashville-based, Andrew writes about love as beautifully as any songwriter we have ever heard. But also about the nature of existence. He’s got “searching” lyrics - it sounds as if he’s trying to find something, the secret of it all. He also sings like an angel, with a timeless voice.

In any event, he’s been on quite the artistic journey, from straightforward country/folk to orchestral accompaniment to indie singer-songwriter, to rock n roll impressionist to outright songwriting experimentalism with his latest, Sundays, during which he entered the studio with a producer and musician friend every Sunday to record a song he’d written that week, entirely in mono.

He’s also quite the painter. Check out his site, AndrewCombsMusic.com, for a sample.

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We are so excited to introduce you to today’s guest, woodworker Uli Kirchler. We first came across Uli’s work on the website ThisIsColossal in late 2019. A Portland, Oregon-based artist of Italian heritage, Kirchler is the maker of one of our favorite things, ever.

Using unique pieces of wood with varying textural surfaces and colors, he carves multi-story towers – hidden castles, landscape castles, pop-up cities – that telescope in and out of the wood with a flick of the wrist. Uli, quite literally, sees castles inside pieces of wood and then spends countless hours bringing them out of that wood. He is an artist of a most ticklish sort.

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This week’s guest is a repeat offender: Chris Wink, the co-founder of Blue Man Group, one of the most legendary performance art creations of our time. But one huge triumph wasn’t enough for Chris. More recently, he created Wink World: Portals into the Infinite, which he describes as a psychedelic art house meets carnival fun house. Located in Area 15 in Las Vegas, Wink World consists of six infinity mirror rooms, each containing a distinct combination of light, color, sound and motion. It’s quite the trip, literally. And so is Chris, who is one of the most inspiring and energetic people walking on this earth.
He’s currently working on a second Wink World at Mall of America, with the help of his longtime partner in crime, Alex Aliume. We will talk to him about that, but also some other things: How to stay inspired, how to reconnect to the source, to cultivate a sense of wonder and joy, to appreciate the mystery, etc. You know, all the important stuff.

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Our guest this week is a man of multiple dimensions. First off, Ron Brent is a friend of Duff and Joey. He lives just down the road in Woodstock. But let’s back up about fifty years. In the 1970s, Ron was living in California, surfing, doing yoga, and meditating. The next thing he knew, he was in Ganeshpuri India, where, for 12 years, 1982-1994, he managed one of the country’s largest yoga and meditation training facilities. During that time, he helped establish the PRASAD project, a rural development program bringing literacy, safe drinking water, economic development, and eye camps for cataract surgery to villagers living in the vicinity of Ganeshpuri. After returning to the US, he spent nine years on the global board of directors of PRASAD. He’s currently on the Board of Directors for PRASAD’s Children’s Dental Health Program. But that’s not all. Ron was co-founder of Asia Arts and Culture, a former company dedicated to bridging the cultural divide between China and the West. Wapner and Brent Books, the publishing arm of Asia Arts & Culture, recently published Laozi’s Dao De Jing, translated by Yang Peng, a visiting scholar at Harvard. Ron served as Yang Peng’s editor. He has produced documentary films shot in India, Nepal, Tibet, Turkey, and Egypt. Among his current projects: the development of the Shaolin Zen Center of New York, a retreat site for the teaching of Shaolin Culture (meditation and Kung Fu) as well as the production of a documentary film on the development and spread of Chan Buddhism.

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This week’s guest, Dr. Sona Bhatnagar, has quite the story for you. On the surface, it does not seem ticklish in the slightest. Twelve years ago, her husband was killed in a motorcycle accident. Ten months later, her son died of bone cancer. Not surprisingly, she fell into a pit of despair. Time, willpower, self-reflection, and a conscious acceptance of what had happened to her brought her back from the edge. She wrote about it in a book called Grief Healed: A Physician’s Guide to Dealing with Grief and Thriving. She’s got a blog and website called GriefHealed.com. We all know people who have lost loved ones. So we invited Sona onto the program to talk about what happens when the tickle seems all but gone, and how to get it back.

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We have a repeat guest for you this week, one of our favorite people in the whole wide world. Her name is Linda Lalita Winnick, and she is the founder of Woodstock’s Shakti Yoga. Go to enough yoga studios, and you will find that the quality of teaching can be all over the place. Not so at Shakti. Linda’s understanding of both hatha yoga - the various yoga poses, and flows – as well as the deeper philosophical aspects of yoga runs so deep that her teaching is not rote; it is spontaneous, in the best sense of the word. She does not teach from memory; she teaches from the heart. We all hear a lot of talk about presence and how to find it. It is always in ample supply during one of her classes at Shakti.

Of course, much of yoga, as taught in the U.S., is more like an exercise class than an exploration of anything deeper. That is not the case at Shakti. A certified yoga teacher, with an M.A. in Ayurvedic Medicine and Yoga Philosophy, Linda’s teaching of yoga integrates her over three decades of experience as a yoga practitioner and teacher with the principles of exercise physiology and the energetics of Ayurveda, the Science of Life and Longevity. True to the spirit of yoga, Linda continues to study with a number of teachers, including Dr Robert Svoboda (for Ayurveda and Tantra), Dr Parla Jayagopal (for Ayurveda), and Shubraji (Vedanta), and others. Not that long ago, she invited me and Marguerite to an afternoon talk by Shubraji on the lessons of the Bhagavad Gita. So Shakti isn’t just a place to fine-tune your body. It’s also a place to fine-tune your soul.

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My, oh, my, we are excited about today’s guest, a remarkable musician and guitarist who is about to bless the world with an unbelievably joyful album next week. It’s coming out July 14, and it’s called Wild & Precious Life. The man of the moment is Duane Betts, and the album is packed with soulful melodies, intricate guitar work, and a raw, heartfelt energy that will take you to the place that great music is supposed to take you. Dare we say, it will tickle you.

Son of the legendary Allman Brothers guitarist Dickey Betts, Duane is his own force to be reckoned with in the guitar-based rock and blues scene. After cutting his teeth with the bands Backbone69 and Whitestarr, he spent a decade playing guitar alongside his father as a member of Dickey Betts and Great Southern. He then traveled the world as a touring member of Dawes. But in the last five years, he’s been on a tear: He released an EP in 2018 and co-founded The Allman Betts Band, releasing two records in 2019 and 2020. And then, it was finally time for a solo album. Which brings us to Wild & Precious Life, which is being released by our friends at Royal Potato Family.

A native of Sarasota, Duane says he wanted to capture “that old school Florida vibe” with this record. Well, he did that and more. Along with a powerhouse of a band - Johnny Stachela on guitar, Berry Duane Oakley on bass, John Ginty on keyboards – all three members of The Allman Betts Band, along with Tyler Greenwell on drums and special guests Marcus King, Nicki Bluhm, and Derek Trucks, Betts has gifted us with 10 scintillating tracks cut live at Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks Swamp Raga Studio in Jacksonville, Florida in 2022.

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This week, on How to Tickle Yourself,  we speak with Virginia Schenck, a vocal artist and jazz performer who goes by the stage name VA.  She’s a social activist. She conducts soul-inspiring Singing Journey Retreats, where she takes singers to places like the middle of Time Square to improvise amidst chaos or the Ghost Ranch in New Mexico to “sing our bones alive.” She is also a board-certified music therapist. She believes in the power of music, as do we.

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