SANDI AULT—Reporting from the WILD

Mark your calendar and plan to join us on Substack !LIVE! on Friday, March 6 @2PM MT!

Bad Bunny's history-making feast of music, dance, imagery, and elation felt a little like resistance, but more like insistence...a euphoric refusal to accept all the darkness, the divisiveness, the hate, and the oppression, and a persistent assertion of the power of love and goodness.And, because I spent part of my childhood in Puerto Rico, I realized that my early experiences there are part of why I am who I am today.

This podcast features two of my original songs: RIVER OF LIFE ©2026, and OH, WE WILL ALL BE THERE ©2025 by Sandi Ault

Lamenting the murder of Alex Pretti, and championing the brave patriots in Minneapolis, after what we’ve all been through, none of us are okay.

A lively conversation with my friend Chris Armitage and several hundred of our closest friends across the country and even around the world.

Chris is a great political strategist, and he has powerful ideas about how we can work from the ground up to resist and to create real democracy by building new and rebuilding what works.

As I told the audience, I work from how it feels on the ground to awaken and inform, and hopefully inspire people. I bring a lifetime of experience in the WILD to this work: outdoor action-adventure stories paired with powerful political insights in each essay and companion audio podcast. I’m an award winning mystery author, filmmaker, producer, and musician.

Oh—and I live with a wolf.

Join us for the next post and its follow-up podcast: WILD writing about the dangers affecting us all right now. And in the pod: an audio version with original music, sound effects, voices from the community, and more.

SANDI AULT and CHRIS ARMITAGE will be going !LIVE! on Friday, January 30 at 2PM

Put it on your calendar NOW! Join with this link:

CLICK FRIDAY 2PM TO JOIN

https://open.substack.com/live-stream/106096?r=4xvtpf&utm_medium=ios

See you then!

Women have a few things to say about the murder of a bright spark of joy by an ICE agent.

#BeGood #IceOut #ReneeGood

I really love doing these podcasts because I get to wear a lot of hats: writer, storyteller, producer, musician, and composer. I'm always delighted to include my own original music, as well as voices from the community.

The voices joining mine in celebration of the spark of wild joy that was Renee Good come from some of the strongest and best women I know: Channie Peters, Jenna Preston, Stephanie Courington, and our own Purple Weather Lady. I thank them for lending their spark to this show. I also want to thank my team members Theresa Daus-Weber and Eric Brody for their astute editing of the script, and Brian Reid for the wonderful album cover art for this podcast.

Welcome to the Democracy Disaster Diner

This podcast is Episode 32, and we are celebrating our anniversary at SANDI AULT—Reporting from the WILD. Our first publication was right around one year ago today, and we are grateful to all our listeners, followers, and subscribers. And watch this space for an anniversary sale on subscriptions.

About the podcast versions of our essays: I really love doing these podcasts because I get to wear a lot of hats: writer, storyteller, producer, musician, and composer. I’m always delighted to include my own original music as well as voices from the community. We usually curate the script for the podcast from the essay, and try to make it entertaining and hopefully thought provoking.

I was blessed with a prodigious amount of voiceover talent for this complex podcast script, beginning with the talented actor Kevin Mayr, who was kind enough to interpret the lines from the film NUREMBERG as well as be the voice of Aristotle; and the fabulous podcaster, Channie Peters; the great voiceover artist Michael Clarkson, and three talented voices from our team: our Purple Weather Lady, Rock Castle, and Sheila Allred.

I want to thank Theresa Daus-Weber for her steadfast assistance in the development of this script, and—along with our cohort Eric Brody, many thanks for the great editing these two always provide.

We have been in such a long night these past months...such a dark, cold, cruel, devastating, unholy night.

Here comes the sun.

Sleepless in the Rockies, I worry...and I hope. You up?

Notes:

Big kudos to the members of my community who provided voiceovers for this pod: Purple Weather Lady, John Miller, George Jackson, Jr., Ron Schukar, T Kerns, and Tim Courington, and to two members from my team who always make my work better with their edits—Theresa Daus Weber and Eric Brody.

All the original music in this podcast is ©Sandi Ault 2025, except for: I hummed around with a couple of bars from the song that this podcast title comes from:

Curt Smith & Roland Orzabal, Everybody Wants To Rule the World, song by Tears for Fears ©1985

Heather Cox Richardson: Notes From An American, Substack 2025-11-30

Anand Giridharadas, How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails, (New York Times, 11-23-2025) https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/opinion/meaning-epstein-emails.html

Peter Coyote, Missing the Forest For the Trees, (https://substack.com/@petercoyote1/note/c-185310495)

Jet Heer, The Powell Memo Helped Create Project 2025, (The Nation 09-06-2024), https://www.thenation.com/article/society/powell-memo-project-2025-plutocracy/

https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-memo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/

Robert Reich, Today Is the Anniversary of the Worst Memo In History, (Substack: Robert Reich Aug 23, 2025) https://robertreich.substack.com/p/today-is-the-anniversary-of-the-worst

Rachel Maddow, The Rachel Maddow Show, MS NOW, 12-08-2025

This audio podcast was created and produced by me, Sandi Ault. I really hope you liked it.