Why Stories Can Change Your Past: Jungian Psychology and Soviet Survival Tales

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:00:00] Saying all this practice, that it's different and meditating is different than, I don't know, playing basketball or practicing some kind of physical activity. I, I was just thinking that it is maybe not so different because in a way, at least what I do, maybe for other people, it's different. It's, it's like my mind wonders and then I bring it back and it's kind of like you are practicing your throw. Howdy. I'm Hannah Newenschwander, a production lead at a soybean seed facility in central Illinois, and you're listening to Vance Crow podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:32] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we interview a Vja Ulfa vest guard. Evie and I have worked together back when I was at the World Bank, and I did quite an introduction to her in the beginning, so I won't repeat it, but you should just know that this is an extraordinary and special woman and a person in my life that made a major difference. I was so excited to talk with her about JGI in psychology, about how you can know oneself, the search for truth. And she also tells some stories about her father who was charged with working on Soviet farms during the Soviet Union and the breakup of the Soviet Union. This is a really interesting interview and deeply personal, so I'm so glad that you can be here. During the interview, we end up talking about Legacy Interviews. These are where I sit down with one of your loved ones and talk with them about their values, their family stories, things that are important to them. People have been hiring me to do this, and it is one of the great joys in my life to help people record these stories so that they can pass them on to future generations. If you've been thinking about doing this, I recommend going to store Articulate Ventures where you can hire me to do it, either over Zoom or if you're in St. Louis, you can come to the studio and we can do it in person. So you can have one of these private interviews to pass on to your family. I hope you'll check it out. And now onto an interview with my good friend, Evvy Evvy. Vfa vest guard. Welcome to the podcast.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:02:04] Hi, Vance. Thank you. This is exciting.

Vance Crowe [00:02:07] I am so excited to talk with you. You are one of the most courageous people I've ever met in my life for longtime listeners of the podcast. They know that I went to work at the World Bank and this was a major dream of mine. This was something that was like finally reaching some mountaintop. And when I got there, I ended up working in a situation that was really bad for me, and I was scared of trying to move anything because I knew there was a lot of political power. There was a lot of people that could influence your career. And I ran into you and we built up a relationship and you were like, oh, well, I'll just go speak to that person on your behalf. And you walked in there, said what you had to say, walked out, and the world changed because of you, and my life became dramatically better. And then I worked under you at the World Bank, and it was one of the most formative experiences of my life. And then as we're working together, you out of nowhere say, you know what? I think I'm gonna make a radical life change. I'm going to go study this guy named Carl Jung. And I'm, I'm really interested in dragons and the history of Latvia where I came from. And so I'm gonna radically change my life. And I remember being shocked, and then we parted ways, and now because of the podcast, we're coming back together and so much more of what you're doing makes sense. So I'm really excited to, to chat with you today. And so to begin with, let's pick up where the story left off. Why in the world did you choose to make your radical career change from the World Bank to getting a PhD in Jung in psychology?

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:03:44] Wow, that's, that's sort of, to me, for me, it's not the beginning. It's kind of somewhere in the middle. And that is so hard to say what exactly happened there. I think it's all, everything that I've been doing, it's sort of in the pursuit of knowledge, in the pursuit of knowing what is, I have always had this question, what is the truth? There's something that we do know and things that we do do, and you know, we just keep going through life. And I always had this question, but what is the truth? What is the reality? And of course, when we start out, then we, you know, we pursue some career. We decide on one profession or the other. And I remember having this conversation with you because you were also talking about this, you know, you have the many options and all the options are like doors. And if you go through one door, you obviously are not going through the all the other doors. And in a way you are sort of closing those doors. Right? And, and I think that even though we have maybe a kind of a trajectory, we want to pursue something that is driving us. And for me, it has been just to know what is, what's the reality, what's truth, but then how we go about it can change. So in a way, you could say that, yeah, you can go through one door, but in reality doesn't mean that all the other doors have closed. You can continue moving because you're not going into a dead end because you went through a door, you go through one door.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:05:22] And that's just another space. In that space. There are other doors, obviously not the ones that were at the previous room, but there is, you know, the next option, then the next option. And as you travel through all these rooms, you accumulate the knowledge. And at one point, after having worked first as the teacher in Latvia, I was English teacher, then I moved to the US and then I studied human development and ended up in the World Bank and the technology came in. And then I worked in the, this mix of it and education, which is, you know, you could say knowledge management, that's what it is, right? And then I thought nanos psychology is extremely important aspect that's sort of left out if we are pursuing the knowledge that's out there, because the psychology is in a way, the truth that we constantly create. It's not that there is some kind of reality out there, but we can't know it. We only know what we interpret of what is. So moving into psychology was, now, when I look back, of course at that time I didn't know, but it was a very logical way to expand my, my search for knowledge, my search for knowing what is, what the truth is. Not that I discovered what the truth is after all these years of studying and getting my PhD in psychology. But it was just a another way of looking for what is,

Vance Crowe [00:06:55] You know, I never really thought about psychology as an approach for truth, right? When I think of psychology, it had always been, Hey, this is, you know, the deeper in your workings, and this is how your brain kind of goes on. But you're right, every reality that you see out in the world, everything from your, your proprioception, your like, where do I fit in the world to, how do I feel about the things I'm seeing? To even, what do you notice about what's around, you all does come down to psychology, but I had literally before this moment never considered psychology as a pursuit for, for truth in some way.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:07:31] Well, it's, it's in a way, it's understanding why we perceive the world, why we react in certain ways. Because it's all this feeling, yeah, right? It's this our own interpretation or as annual says, says in his latest book, it's a hallucination. We're hallucinating. We're constantly con hallucinating. And if we understand that that's what we do, we are already better off because that puts us closer to the reality, to to truth. Well, I don't know if we ever get gonna get there, but at least then I can get further away from fooling myself and believing that that's true.

Vance Crowe [00:08:13] So let's talk about, you know, psychology A is is such a vast field, and it, because there's such a squishy nature to it, right? You can, oh, how does your mind work and how does my mind work? Maybe they're all different. How did you go about deciding which path you would go towards, which door you would go through, or which prism you would see the world through, and that ultimately led you to Jung and psychology?

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:08:38] Well, I think that what I really attracted me to Yung was that Yung does not deny mystery. And mystery is very, very important because this world is so unknown, and the world outside is unknown and mysterious, and the world inside is unknown. It's unknown. It's, it's so strange, it's so mysterious. And I needed to have the psychology that would accept that it is mysterious, that there are these strange powers, strange things happening, things like synchronicities. And one of the synchronicities actually happened to me yesterday is suddenly I have the thought, oh, I need to contact this friend. I haven't contacted her for the longest time, and I am gonna go to Laia for Christmas. I want to get together with her. And I'm thinking, I want to bring her a bottle of wine from Spain, and all these thoughts are happening to me in an hour where I don't have access to my phone. And then hour later, I leave the meeting, I start my phone, and she has tried to call me. And these kind of things, they happen in reality, it is the reality, which we don't know why it is, when I decided to study psychology, I needed to go in the route, that route that would potentially give me some answers that would include that reality. And Carl Jung is the one that allows for that, entertains that, not that he has the answers, but it, the Jungian psychology accepts that reality.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:10:18] It exists. It is,

Vance Crowe [00:10:21] Yeah. And this is in stark contrast to the, to the very powerful rationalist movement that that exists right now, which says there are no coincidences. Everything is just your perception of coincidences. And it just so happened that these two things collided at the same time. But we can find a tangible answer. And if we don't have a tangible answer, it's just because we haven't found it yet. And, and I'm, I'm with you, right? Like, something about that feels reassuring because it, it like feels like, ah, if we could know all things, if we could just figure out what the starting position of is, of everything is, and kind of what angle it's headed at, we could basically predict the future. But when you really get down to it, as you grow older and older, you start saying like, this feels really wrong. There's, there's something just very incomplete about saying, there is no mystery to the world. There is no interconnection, because we can feel it so, so deeply in the, in the, in our own existence, in our own minds.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:11:19] You know what, I would put it the other way. I I put it different. I would say maybe that's not mystery. It's just mystery. Because we don't know, we don't understand. All we understand are the five senses, you know, we understand the smell, the, the vision, the hearing, the touch and so on. But we don't understand it. And maybe it's not mysterious, it's just that we don't understand it's a reality. It's, it's a mystery because we don't know it. But it is the same reel as the sense of smell, the sense of vision, the, the ability to see, the ability to touch. It's just a different way of interacting with the objective reality that exists.

Vance Crowe [00:12:02] When you were first describing Jung in psychology, to me, we were in my 480 square foot apartment in, you know, that looked out on a brown brick wall. And I remember you talking about dragons and having this be this like totally bizarre thing to me. Like, you know, l looking at my wife and saying like, well, Evie knows there aren't dragons out there, right? But then fast forward,

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:12:24] I did not, I did not know that that's what you were thinking then.

Vance Crowe [00:12:27] Oh, I mean, like, I think that it, that, I mean, I, I certainly wouldn't have hidden my, my thoughts from you, but I was, is definitely surprised. But then fast forward 10 years, and people like Jordan Peterson have taken an explanation and, and have said like, Hey, there are dragons, the things that you fear, and this is the, the things that you have to confront and so much more popularized. But when you were going towards this direction, no, almost no one that in my world had ever would even come close to Jgi in psychology, let alone talking openly about dragons. How did you get to this point that you were interested in this and open to this way of thinking?

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:13:07] Well, we always talking stories, right? We, our minds are full of images, and whenever we want to communicate, we make a story. And then if you look at the entire groups of people or cultures, then you see that these groups or cultures that come with stories and la have stories. They are called theological legends. And that's the way folklore call them. And they have to do with dragons. And I was just so curious. So what do these dragons mean psychologically? What is the meaning of people's stories when they say, when they tell these stories and as actual events, it really happened. So this is not a fairy tale. It's not just something that they make up for entertainment or, you know, to scare their kids, or, so they actually said, tell it as a real story. It really happened. And in these stories, there are dragons that they meet. So I was very interested as a psychologist, what is going on in the lives of people who meet dragons. That was my question. And that's how I started just trying to figure it out. And what I came to conclude was that it's typically we have these mysterious experiences when we are faced with something that is challenging to us. And then these things appear, they just come out of nowhere, nowhere as either helpers or someone who get in the way.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:14:49] And many stories tell about helpers, animals are helpers, or some mysterious beings, or, you know, neighbors, human beings, devil God. All those beings are helpers or someone who gets in the way of our pursuit. So Latvians for some reason, similarly to Asian cultures, which is very interesting because Latvia is on the verge between western and eastern world, right? So Latvian dragons are more like Chinese dragons. They are helpers, they are the bringers of riches. While western dragons are the ones that the hero has to go out to kill, to conquer. That's kind of this animal world that the hero has to master, grow beyond and return with sort of the, the winner in Laan world doesn't work like that. It's the, it's kind of this mysterious power that exists in nature, which is very important. The sense of the connection with the nature is something that I find extremely strong still in Latvia, which is lost in many places in the US I felt very much lost. The sense of being one was the nature. And when we start thinking that way, so the nature can be a very helpful force or a destructive force, and that's just true, right? Natural phenomena can be very helpful to growing your corn, your potatoes, your grains or nature can very be very destructive force and take all your crops out with floods and winds and all kinds of things.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:16:33] So similarly, this sort of, this idea that there can be powerful natural forces out there, but also inside of me as an individual that can help me achieve something or get in the way.

Vance Crowe [00:16:50] And when you think about this and you're describing nature, tell me more. How, how do you define nature? Is there a clear line between what is nature and what is not? Nature

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:17:03] Is there? No, I think everything is nature. Everything is nature. There isn't a line. There is nature as natural world, the world that is made of elements that the nature builds itself. And then there is a human way made, human made world where the human beings have taken something that they have sort of mastered, taken outta the nature and built the human world. But ultimately everything is nature. Everything comes from nature.

Vance Crowe [00:17:41] And so as you started to go down and you're in this path, you're looking up your family, well, not family, your, your cultural heritage. Do stories come to mind now that are, that are easy for you to retell so that that way we could have a frame of reference for, you know, dragon stories of Latvia?

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:17:58] Hmm. I am thinking which one would be a good story here. The, maybe the one where dragons come in different forms, and sometimes they appear as snakes and sometimes they appear as cats or dogs. They typically sit on top of the bin of grains or some other maybe potatoes and carrots and apples. So they typically live in barns, and they can also fly out from the barn, from the, you know, from the little window on top of the barn roof. And then they fly out. And when they fly out, they appear as snakes. And when they leave the barn, they're usually blue and very skinny. And when they return, they are bright and red and they're fat. And that's how they bring the riches, riches to the owners. And the good owners are those who take good care of these dragons. And if they don't take good care of the dragons, what do the dragons do? They burn their house, they make the owner poor. So it's, it's all about psychology. The, you can hear it, it's the psychological meaning of protect, take care of what you harvest, what you bring in from your field, but also take care of the knowledge of your riches that you accumulate.

Vance Crowe [00:19:42] I mean, I think that this is very clear to you, but had, had you not brought that up, I wouldn't, I, no, I mean, my, my thought is resting at, what do you mean to take care of a dragon? How, how can one care for a dragon?

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:19:55] Oh, you have to respect the dragon and, but something that you hear very often psychologically, you have to respect your true nature. You have to be truthful to yourself. You have to go after your dreams. You cannot do what you are not meant to do. So that's being respectful to your powerful dragon, to the dragon that can go out there and bring you riches. And also the fact that you have to go out somewhere. You can't be just sitting at home and, I don't know, play computer games, and I don't never leave the house. You have to go out there, you have to fly out. And when you leave the house, you are skinny and you are empty and you know, you're hardly visible. But when you come back from the world where you have gathered the richest, now you are bright and red and you know, fat impressive. I don't mean fat as you know, you have gained weight, but you are impressive bright individual. And it works also, let's say, if you just think about us farmers would be thinking the a hundred years or 200, 300 years ago, it's maybe it's about the actual produce. They actually went and they gathered the grains and the potatoes and the cabbage and whatever else they were growing in their fields and in their orchards. And that was kind of the richest, that's what made these people to be doing well, to be able to survive. But it also then crosses that boundary and it goes into a different kind of wealth, which has to do with the wealth that lives in your mind, you know, which the wealth that exists in your, in your brain, in your soul, in your heart, that also makes you a rich person.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:21:41] So there, these dragons can be different. They don't all have to guard the corn.

Vance Crowe [00:21:47] And when you think about the telling of these stories, why is it that you think it was told in the form of stories as opposed to just, you know, hey, you have to go out and live in the world. You have to get riches by experiencing things and coming home, home. Why? In the, in the, in the storytelling mechanism.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:22:06] Oh, that's the best way, isn't it? You know, I don't know why humans are like that, but that's just how humans are. We like stories. We tell stories because they just sort of grab the attention, they grab your attention, they grab their attention of another human being. It's just the way we are, why we are like that. Hmm. That's a good question.

Vance Crowe [00:22:27] And speaking of stories, for anybody that's watching this, you can see Evie's bookshelf behind her. And before we got started, she was pointing out, or I was asking her, what, what are those books? And the whole top first shelf is Carl Young or books about him or written by him. When you started down this rabbit hole, did you know you were going to read that much? And what kept you going further and further into his writing?

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:22:52] Yeah, no, I, I really didn't have too, I really didn't have too much of an idea where I was going. But I think that's, that's the mystery, that's the, this mysterious part of the world, which again, as I was saying, you know, I, I've just found that you was the one that was accepting it, and it was the part of the reality, and it was the part of the psychology. Because I myself have these experiences. I see dreams, and these dreams sort of become reality later, maybe five years later, I see a dream and then something becomes reality five years later. And that psychology allows for it, it, it brings it in, it integrates, it doesn't dismiss it. And I, I think the Jung is brilliant. He was brilliant because now when I'm listening to podcasts by very famous neuroscientists, let's say like Andrew Huberman, I know if you're familiar with with him yet there's Huberman lab and you listen what he's saying about dreams, you know, it's, it's acknowledged, it's a nature is given therapy. It's a natural phenomenon to dream, to integrate information, to integrate information about the life, your own life, your inner life, your external life. It's a part of who we are. It's not some sort of a woo woo, you know, a strange thing. Never talk about dreams. 'cause you're nuts if you talk about dreams. Yung said it early on, he did not have the language of neurosciences now to, to talk about the neurotransmitters or the way our brains work, or how our body and mind is integrated.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:24:28] You know, he was saying it's, it all has to do with archetypes and, and these divine beings, you know, almost like a, a framework of psychological framework that exists out there. And we inherited, that was his way of interpreting his way of understanding. But what is very, very important that that is truth. That is the reality. It is this natural way we humans function. And I found it fascinating that there was a psychologist that recognized it, and I needed to study something like that

Vance Crowe [00:25:02] When I, what is it called? The unconscious mind, the, that when I started reading that book, and he was talking about the depth of, of things like dreams, all of a sudden I started realizing like I have been ignoring several hours of my own consciousness just, just thinking like, ah, that's not even worth, not only is it not worth talking about, because that's weird, but it's not even really worth like examining or, or being excited to be like, oh, I wanna make sure I capture this memory. But once you have this idea that dreams have some sort of salience that, that they're a conversation between you and some parts of the, you know, the cathedral or the, the giant castle that is your own soul and psyche. Now all of a sudden you, you think like, what can I do to be able to make more dreams happen? I started setting bed times, I quit drinking alcohol because I figured out that when I drank, I, I didn't get dreams. And I, I recently quit caffeine, and this has been like, I, I did not realize how much caffeine was suffocating my ability to have dreams. But once you have it, all of a sudden you're like, oh my gosh, I, I, I, it's all, it's, it's like adding a percentage of your life back into your life in some way.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:26:20] Yeah, that is true. That is true. And I'm so glad to hear that you also have found these things like not drinking alcohol, at least not after lunch. You know, I, I really like that. What's the name of the sleep scientist? Matthew, what's his name? Okay, the sleep scientist from NIH. He's talking about if you don't drink, but if you do drink, then only for breakfast, but then of course that's a joke, right? You,

Vance Crowe [00:26:49] You know,

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:26:50] You should just not drink. I'm trying to remember his last name, Matthew. Ah, okay. Maybe it's gonna come back to me. And yeah, it's, it's one thing. And then the coffee, of course is another thing that just gets in the way, it gets in the way of this natural therapy that we all have. And you know, there's another thing that I find is the dreams not only help you understand your inner life or your inner world, you could say your whatever happens inside your own body. But I think it also, the dreams can help you connect to the information that exists out there in the environment that you are in. And I'm gonna tell you one dream. Is that okay?

Vance Crowe [00:27:33] Yes, of course. Yeah.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:27:35] So I had this dream in 2012, I believe, 2012. I have this dream. I am walking in the apartment building where I live, and this is in Copenhagen. I lived in Copenhagen, and I'm walking in the apartment building. As I step on the stairs, each stair is sort of sinking under me, underneath me. And I'm thinking there's one word that comes to my mind and it's swamp. And in Danish, there is words swamping. And what it means is this mildew, you know, the black stuff that builds in the house, if there's too much moisture, and you know what, guess what, what happens? This is 10 years, almost later, it happened last year. So how many years later, more than five years later, the whole roof of this entire, entire apartment building is being removed because they find this mildew in the roof and they have to replace the membranes and they have to rebuild the entire room. And what I think is really going on is that we have the abilities to sense, which we simply cannot explain. We don't know. There isn't the scientific way of explaining, but in reality, I perceive it that there is this problem, it exists, it hasn't been acknowledged yet, but my dream in a way, tries to tell me a story. It even says exactly the word, it's in Danish, right? You are gonna have this problem with swamping, it's gonna be there.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:29:08] But because we don't have a good technique to understand these kind of messages, so it's like, okay, something strange is going on, you know? And I don't know what to do with that dream. And what I sometimes, what I also find is very useful then to combine the dream interpretation with meditation. Because what I have found in my experience is when I meditate, it allows me to be consciously present. Because when I'm dreaming, I'm unconscious. But when I'm meditating, I'm consciously present and it allows me to better understand those messages. So I like to combine the dreaming with meditation.

Vance Crowe [00:29:54] Describe for people, when you say meditation, what that means to you? What does it mean to meditate?

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:30:01] What I do in the mornings, I exercise, so I warm up my body and then I breathe, I do breathing exercises, and then I quiet my mind, I sit, I literally just sit on the floor, put some pillow under, so it, I feel a little bit more supported and I close my eyes and I think into, it's almost like I look into a point in my forehead just to concentrate. So my mind is not running around. My mind likes to do that. I think many people's minds like to do that. And I just look through this one point and concentrate. And as I do that, it's almost like there are clarity and messages that come through that I was not aware before.

Vance Crowe [00:30:53] I, I agree. Meditation is one of those things that it takes practice, but not in, not in the same way that running takes practice or, or, you know, shooting a basket takes practice. It's practice in, in the sense of when you find yourself off the trail, you know, at first when you're like, you're meditating and then you find your're kind of getting caught in some kind of a thought or thinking about your to-do list, you know, your immediate reaction is to be like, no bad, what am I doing? Oh, I'm doing this wrong. And then you get kind of caught in this loop. But once I realized that capturing yourself, wandering off the path is actually being present in and of itself, it's like, oh, hey, I just discovered something. This, this is great. Okay, now I'm back in the center again. And there there's a level of like playfulness or kindness or something that doesn't exist in the regular world that we live in. Where, where you, you're, you're in the world of scarce resources in the world of your mind, there are no scarce resources. It's just, you know, being able to find that patient place with yourself. And I am, I am, I agree that you spot things that you only peripherally understood before, and you can place them in front of you in, in a, in a way that allows you to see them, maybe because you're reflecting on them from with a different set of light.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:32:14] You know, when you were saying about this practice that it's different and meditating is different than, I don't know, playing basketball or practicing some kind of physical activity. I, I was just thinking that it is maybe not so different because in a way, at least what I do, maybe for other people, it's different. It's, it's like my mind wonders and then I bring it back and it's kind of like you are practicing your throw. You just keep practicing until you can sort of get there and stay there, but it goes straight into this basket instead of somewhere else. So in a way, this practice of just returning, just returning, not getting upset with myself, I'm just returning. And that that is the practice

Vance Crowe [00:33:01] That's very insightful. Yeah.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:33:03] I, I think that's, that's, you know, that's already fantastic. And then if you happen to have some insight, oh, that's, that's exceptional. You know.

Vance Crowe [00:33:14] So you mentioned with Carl the archetypes and you know, the dream interpretation. There's so much to Carl Jung. If you were going to describe him to someone that had never heard of this way of thinking or this, this kind of school of thought, how would you succinctly do that?

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:33:34] I would say that young psychology respects subjective experiences and the subjective experiences that it respects are of any kind. It doesn't dismiss any kind of imagery that comes up when you are describing your inner world or the world that you live in. It takes it all seriously. And then it allows for a conversation about those experiences. It doesn't say, you know, that's strange. You know, you, for example, there is a woman who dreams about living on the moon. Carl Jung doesn't dismiss and doesn't say, he didn't say to the woman, no, you can't live on the moon, nobody lives on the moon, blah, blah, blah. Oh, you live on the moon. So that's your real, what is happening on the moon? There is this respect for your subjective experience because that experience happens for a reason. There's something that makes this experience real for you, and it's important for the psychological healing. And psychological healing is really the healing in the body. It's, it's a healing inside your body, inside your mind. It's one thing, something that I think where now with the jungians later after calling where we're expanding the psychology is also in the external world, something that maybe was not as much recognized early on was the connection that we have with the place, with the place where you live ecologically was the place where you live culturally.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:35:18] If you are born in the place where there are wars, if you are born in the rich or the poor family, if you are born on the farm, if you are born in New York City, that environment really matters as well. So, and I think that's, this is something that is now being brought much, much closer, much in with the respect for the subjective experiences, which are not just the psyche and the body, but also the environment in which you're,

Vance Crowe [00:35:45] This strikes me as v very important. And you know, I think many of today's kind of psychology or, or kind of thinking puts human emotion and their subjective experience as like a byproduct of consciousness. Like, oh, okay, well humans, we reach some certain level of being able to think through things, our intellect, and somehow somewhere along the line, we got this added thing in their emotion and feelings and these other things that we would love to do without, but we can't in order to have the human experience. So they're just kind of like added on at the end. And I was listening to a psychologist talking like, no, it's actually the, this, these feelings, this sensations that you have are right at the very core of, of when we were developed, not not just as human beings, not just when we separated off from chimpanzees, but much, much further back that these, these intuitions and these kind of sensations that you have, that we now label as these various emotions are actually like your body trying to tell you things that, that that can't be intellectualized. They, they can't be put into words because even if you did intellectualize them, you're just transferring one image for another. The feelings that you have is, is he's not using image in terms of pictures. He's using images as in terms of like a, a, a complete thought or, or some, not even a complete thought, like a, a, a burst of an idea. I mean, it's, it's so difficult to explain, but they're not differentiated from the, the visual and auditory languages that we have.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:37:23] Yeah, it's, I think it's one, it's sort of a set of different experiences, and the way we then articulate them is using words and there are images that we describe. That's just the way we are trying to make sense of whatever happens inside of us and some of the things we can visualize and articulate, and there are millions of things we cannot, we don't even know that they're going on there. We maybe start paying attention. Let's say, if I tell you not right now, oh, what do you feel in your big toe on your left foot? You know, then you start paying attention, then you can start telling me about it right before I told you that you didn't, you know, you didn't even care or didn't pay any attention, didn't matter. And then of course, there are some parts to your body that you can never access that way. And then there, of course, there are parts of the body that you can access, like you can control your access, your, your breathing, and you can control what you consume and things like that. And then you can change your life through those mechanisms, right? So it's, it's a one, it's one, one big thing. And it's not also not just your body, your body, it's where your body is. We would have a very different conversation if we were now sitting out in the windy field compared to these nice warm rooms.

Vance Crowe [00:38:47] There's no doubt. I mean, like the, just the experience two people can have. Like, this is wonderful that we have the technology, you and I can see each other and we can hear each other. But if we were in the same room, right, the, the, the very experience between the two people is just very, very different.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:39:04] Yeah, that's true. That is true. We would have a very different kind of communication.

Vance Crowe [00:39:10] So one of the things that I picked up when I was listening to Jung's lectures, whereas, you know, he talked about basically the professionalization of, of psychology has made it so the psychologist is supposed to be divorced and completely objective about their subject. But from his point of view, a psychologist is actually when they're, when they're getting into things like dreams and they're, and they are exploring the unconscious mind, there is an actual relationship between the, the psychologist, you know, the, the person sitting in the chair and the person listening to the person in the chair. And I, I found this to be profound and really hard for a western mind to think of, right? When we think of the psychologist, they're supposed to be like an objective outsider. What are your thoughts on this? I mean, you live in a modern world where a where the psychologist having such a deep relationship with their patient would be considered deeply wrong in the western world.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:40:11] Well, I think that one thing I want to say that I don't think that there is any more, this big division that where the scientists would say, you know, you have to be objective, you have to measure it objectively. There is so much more recognition now that you can't do that. That the measure, the one who measures, is going to affect the measurement. And it does go, it goes for all sciences. It doesn't just apply to psychology. What I find is maybe different in Western world than in other parts of the world. There is a big fear for psychologists in the west to relate to the people to get too close, you know, for all kinds of reasons not to get too involved with their, with their patients. And, and they, of course there are bad things that have ca happened in the history. And that's the reason where psychologists are trying to be uninvolved. And you know, you just sit in my room and you are five meters away from me, you know, so we don't get too close. And I find that that is artificial because you can only help someone if you can truly understand that person. If you can be compassionate and how can you be not involved and be compassionate? It just doesn't work. It, it becomes very artificial. Of course, you have to maintain certain boundaries, you know, that's understandable. You can't be doing certain things, but you just have to allow something that I really, really like living in Spain now, all the hugs that you see people on the street giving each other, you know, now with the, of course with the mo it's different, but this kissing and hugging and men and women, it's just beautiful.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:41:56] There is nothing wrong with that. So we don't have to go towards this westernized, you know, let's stay away from each other, guard our own boundaries, because I really truly believe that we are one and we need to recognize that we are one and we need to recognize how we influence each other. And instead of being scared of it and stepping away from each other, step words, try to understand how it works, respected. And that's a different kind of closeness.

Vance Crowe [00:42:31] I totally agree. And it, the longer I've gone into my adulthood, the more you realize, like the touch of other people, the the hugs that you get from your friends and the connection to not have that, you know, you can go a while without it, but it, it is closer to oxygen than I think we appreciate, right? The, the touch of another person, whether it's like the loving embrace of a spouse or the hug of a friend is deeply, deeply important. And no matter how much you want to get rid of those things, so that, that way you don't have liability and you don't have, you know, the, the dangers that come with it, it comes at a very, very steep price.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:43:11] Yeah, there is definitely a price.

Vance Crowe [00:43:14] You, you used the word help before if you wanna help someone. If in that position, from the Jungian psychologist standpoint, what can a psychologist do for a patient?

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:43:26] Hmm. Yeah. I think it goes back to the story. We, each and every one of us, we have stories about ourselves, where we come from, our history, our family, our environment, our, you know, what we do, what we don't do. And what psychologists can do is help you make a healthier story. And what's interesting then about the story is that your story today can change your past. And that's something that I love about Jung and psychology too, is this idea that there isn't really the past and the present and the future. It's all one thing. And the way you change your past is by changing your story today. And that's what psychology can do. That's what psychology does for you.

Vance Crowe [00:44:14] I I love that. I mean, I, and I think, I mean, I think in stories, I talk in stories, I go give talks in stories, and it has been profound for me because I've started doing these things. I call them Legacy Interviews. So people come on and we do a private interview. It's just going to be for either just them or to pass on after they, after they die or maybe to give to their grandchildren. But you hear how these stories are actually the wealth that is created through their life, right? It's, it's certainly they have, you know, goods and, and money and resources that they want to pass on, but it's the stories that people have been so hungry to be able to tell people like, this is where I came from. This is where we started. This is how I knew that, you know, your grandmother was the right woman for me. This is why I knew it was the marriage I was in before I met your mother was, this is how I knew it wasn't right for me or, or any number of things. This is the way my father taught me how to do hard work. Those genuinely are the wealth that people are handing on. And, and frankly, after people sit down and tell me these stories, they write me these letters of, of gratitude. And what you come to realize is so few people get a chance to be able to tell their own stories. That it's, it's, it's shocking, right? It's, it's that they don't, we have so few outlets for people to be able to express the very thing that was the accumulation of their life, which is their stories.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:45:43] Yeah. And you know, if we look in the history, something big that happened in South Africa, I, I was lucky to live there for two years, you know, truth and reconciliation, the process where people told the story, and that was the way to change the history, where those who had killed someone, they were able to step forward and say, I did it. Please forgive me. And the one whose relative was killed, father, mother, son, daughter, they heard it and they felt being heard in the process of storytelling. So that's, that's very important to tell the story historically. That's one example. Another thing that I find is very, very important, and that has to do with the bubble that we live in. We each live in our own bubble and we keep telling the same story to ourselves. And we surround with the p ourselves, with the people who tell similar story because, you know, we, this is kind of how we are, we feel better, right? We recognize the people who tell the stories similar to ours, but by becoming open to stories that we have never heard about, accepting to listen to the stories that are so strange to us, it's, in a way, it's learning, it's bursting the bubble, it's healing, it's changing the history. So stories are extremely powerful as long as we are willing to not just listen to the stories that are appealing to us.

Vance Crowe [00:47:18] Yeah, I mean, you are describing, I mean the, the act of doing these Legacy Interviews, I, I could maybe do one a day at, at the most because they are so intense. I, I go up and tell my my wife about it afterwards. Like, you, I'm, I'm physically exhausted from hearing these stories because they're always so far out of my frame. And you think, well, these are Midwesterners or these are, you know, Americans, they're speaking the same language, but just the very foundation of the stories. What, why were we doing what we were doing? What, what was important about this? What was the lesson we pulled out of this? And since I'm not trying to influence the story, all I'm trying to do is record it. You hear people tell it to you in this very raw way, and it bounces around in my head for days. It's, it's, what you're describing is very true. And I think it's hard to find stories that are so far away from your own, from your own life because you're in this bubble like you're describing.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:48:16] And then there are dangerous stories. I grew up in Soviet Union and it was very dangerous to tell certain things that happened to you. Let's say my father was sent to Siberia when he was three years old, together with the other five sisters and brothers and parents. And when he came back, and when I was born already many years later, he could not tell these stories because if I were to know these stories, it was dangerous for me. It was dangerous for him. He could be sent back to Siberia or I could accidentally tell something to someone and that would endanger my life. So there are also dangerous stories, and then many stories die because the person who knows that story cannot tell it. And then it's gone.

Vance Crowe [00:49:05] You know, it's interesting that you bring that story up because I remember when we were first becoming friends, I was working for you, and you had told me about your father living in the, in the Soviet Union and, and being forced to work at the farms. And I had no sense of historical context for the life that you were talking about with your father. But now I realize like, whoa, what, what a what a what a catastrophic time to be alive. Would you tell a little bit about your father and, and his, the, the role that he was forced to play in the Soviet Union?

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:49:42] Yeah, but before I start, I want to say we worked together. It didn't work for me. We worked together.

Vance Crowe [00:49:48] I you were a great person to work together with. I agree with that. You were

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:49:52] T you too, you too. I think we were great, you know, great team. We did fantastic things together about my father. You know, as I was saying, there are many things I don't know about my father because he died very young. He was 42 years old. I was 14 at the time when he died. He died from brain cancer. And I think, but this is again, this is just, maybe I'm making up the story. When he was three years old, he was together with his mother and father, and he had sisters and brothers. There were six of them. They were all put on a train on a cattle, one of the cattle wagons. And they were deported out from, at the time they lived in, lived inia. They owned a big farm. They were well to do farmers in Lithuania. And they were all just taken out to Siberia. Luckily they survived by how they survived. What did they do? They grew their own produce. They somehow, I don't know how, but they knew how to plant potatoes. They knew how to plant their whatever, carrots and cabbages. That's how they were getting through the winters. But one of the things that he did as a young child, and this is before he's even 15, right? This is that age, he would go to the forest and they were tell or holding the trees and one of the trees hit him. And I think maybe that's just the story I'm making, but he hit was hit on his head and he later developed brain cancer.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:51:26] And I think that's why he died so young. He had a brain cancer. And at that time when he was 30 and 40, there were no techniques to heal his kind of brain cancer. So I lost my father, and I don't know too many of his stories, but one of the things that I do know about him was that he was a very smart man, lots of energy, someone who really wanted to change the world by working in agriculture. And he was an agronomist. So think about it, he's 15 years old. He alone escapes from Siberia. He comes back and he moves to Latvia, he goes to Latvia. I don't know why he goes to Latvia, not to Lithuania, but I know that he's latia. Maybe that was the reason. So he's 15 years old. Somehow he returns back to Latvia and somehow he gets education. He gets something to what would be similar to master's degree in agronomy. And at that time people would not get such high degrees. So he was highly educated. But because he has this history of living, having been sent to Siberia, he cannot choose what he is going to do and how he's going to work. He's recognized as a very smart young man, and he's assigned to be as agronomist as a chief agronomist of one on one of the Soviet farms. So he starts working as a chief agronomist, and I guess he's really excelling at what he does.

Vance Crowe [00:52:54] And what is the Soviet farm?

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:52:56] Okay, what is the Soviet farm? So in the Soviet Union, the land is owned by the government. Everything is, yeah, everything is, what's it called? Nationalized?

Vance Crowe [00:53:08] Collectivist.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:53:10] Yeah. Everything belongs to the government.

Vance Crowe [00:53:13] Yeah. Nationalized. Yep,

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:53:15] Nationalized. Yes. And so the pieces of land are sort of assigned. This is going to be a farm. And in this farm there is going to be an agronomist, a director, and there are gonna be workers, and there are gonna be tractors, and there are gonna be some buildings for farm animal. And that becomes a Soviet farm. There was also something called collective farm. And the difference was that in collective farm, officially some part of this, of the farm was owned by people who worked on the, on the farm, but there would be very, very few collective farms versus Soviet farms. So he was always working in Soviet farm. And first he starts out as a chief agronomist and one of the Soviet farms. And then he is, as I was saying, he's recognized that he's really, really good. So he gets sent to the really bad farms where he constantly has to build them up to help them become better these farms. So he sent from one farm to the other, and at one point point he gets to be a director of the farm. And he's just a workaholic. He just loves to work, he just loves waking up early in the morning. And as my mother was complaining, he would never eat even breakfast, you know, he would just drink his water and get out in the, in the, the, this kind of like a jeep. We call it Jeep, but of course it wasn't Jeep at that time. It's this open vehicle. And he would drive around on the farm and ex explain, check out all the fields and do whatever he needed to do.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:54:53] And an interesting thing is he actually has terrible eyesight. He's not allowed to drive the, he's not even doesn't have a driver's license because he's legally blind, but he just drives around the farm. Of course, there's no police. And even if there would be police, then they would know his director. So he would be allowed to continue driving around and inspecting the farms and the, the fields and the capital and all that. If he wanted to go to the city, to the capitol, then he had the driver because he was not allowed to legally be behind the wheel. And my father is a, is a workaholic, you know? And so it's, it makes the life with him, for my mom, very, very hard. But at the same time, he's, you know, working day and night. And then one of the things again, sort of is a progression for his, for his work. He becomes the chief agronomist at the selection station, where they look for the best tomatoes to grow. And they are as kids, one of the things that I remember, we had to do one summer, and this is now I'm 11 or 12 years old, we had to cut these huge tomatoes in half. And then we use using our little fingers, we'd pick out the seeds and we had to submit these seeds for the testing, for the selection of the next tomatoes. But we were allowed to eat the rest of the tomatoes. So we just ate tomatoes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Yeah. But, and yeah, one of the things, I guess I was telling you this, this story to me seems such a fascinating and interesting story, and also tells me how my father was also a very courageous person during the time of k, k was one of the leaders of the communist party and also the head of the government.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:56:42] The K goes to the US and he learns about corn. Now he goes back to Soviet Union and he says, everybody must grow corn because corn is the best thing ever. But, you know, corn doesn't grow equally well everywhere, and it doesn't grow well at all in Latvia, the soils, you know, it's northern soil and it doesn't, whatever, just doesn't grow there. And my father knows that it doesn't grow, but he has to grow because if he will not do that, he will be sent to Siberia or something like that. So what he does is he plants the corn around the fields and then puts the grain in the middle so that when the inspectors come by, they see the corn. But in reality, there is grain growing there.

Vance Crowe [00:57:28] That is wild. And that is wild. And then how long did that ruse go on for?

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:57:33] You know, I don't really know because remember, I'm a child, right? I'm just sort of hearing some of these things and many things of course I'm not supposed to know because kids don't know what they are supposed to tell or not. And they could be, you know, telling something to someone and putting the whole family dangers. So it's,

Vance Crowe [00:57:53] It's quite the family story for you, right? Like the, that, that in and of itself like is a metaphor of, of making sure that you give the government what they need in order to not be sent away, but also to be able to grow the things that people need on the inside. Like it's, there's definitely family values embedded into that story.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:58:13] Yeah, definitely. I think there was so much more really going on. I wish I could somehow talk to my father, you know, that would be, that would be such a, such a fantastic conversation to know what happened to him in ber what were they growing in Xavier? How they found the first potatoes, whatever they were growing. I had no idea. That would be fantastic to know.

Vance Crowe [00:58:35] So how old were you when the Soviet Union broke up?

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:58:40] So it's, I'm born in 67 and Soviet Union started falling apart in 89, 90, 91 when? Early twenties.

Vance Crowe [00:58:51] And so what was it like for you? What was your life like at the time when the Soviet Union starts breaking up? Where were you and what was going on?

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [00:58:58] I was in Latan, and first it was extremely exciting. It's sort of the chance of being free, the chance of finally living real life. And at the same time also very scary because there were Changs falling in and people being killed. There wasn't huge war. Laan in general are very sort of mild people, not very feisty people. At the time when the Russian tanks were being rolled in, in the center of Frito, which is the capital, there only five people who got killed in, in those sort of clashes. And it's, it was very, very peaceful. And at the same time, scary, exciting people would go on barricades. And at that time where many men and women would go and stand on barricades, I had a small child at home. And so I wouldn't go because, you know, I had to take care of my child. I was making sandwiches and making soups and then sending the food to the people on barricades. It was very, we just felt being a part of something truly big. And really it was also something truly, truly big. And then things opening up and foreigners started coming. We had never seen foreigners. I never, you know, knew anybody else except for people who lived in Soviet Union. And suddenly there were people speaking English and coming in. And I was extremely, extremely lucky for some reason, maybe being a little bit rebellious, where at the time when I started university, only nine people were allowed to study English in my country in one year annually, nine people.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [01:00:42] So I was one of those people one year. And so there are very few people who could speak English, and suddenly foreigners are coming in. They needed to communicate with the people who worked in all kinds of jobs, you know, agriculture and hazardous waste and all kinds of experts coming in. So I was doing a lot of translating and, and working with the different companies and helping get the knowledge, the external knowledge just was never accessible to us. This knowledge was coming in and somebody needed to translate, so this knowledge could come in and be used. It's super exciting.

Vance Crowe [01:01:22] And so you somehow went from being a Latvian woman that only knew other, you know, people from the Soviet Union to living this very cosmopolitan life. How did your life transform from, how did you leave Latvia and where did you go?

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [01:01:39] Well, what, what happened was I was translating one meeting where there was a hazardous waste company in Latvia trying to find out how to clean up the mess of a military installation in Latvia. There was a Danish company coming in, and one of the Danes was now is my husband. At that time I was doing the translation. And then from then we started working together. We created youth exchange camps between Denmark and Lefty. And then some years later, my now husband said to me, are you interested? I would like to marry you. And so from there, you know, my life suddenly changed. I went from a little kid in Lavia who knew English, which was a super, super skilled to possess it and went from this, you know, kid with one pair of boots for no boots for winter, suddenly moving to the us. I had never seen credit card in my life. I did not know what checkbook was. And I was able, because last year became free, I was able to move to the us. I got my second master's degree in the US human Development. And then I got my job at the World Bank, and I started working at the World Bank.

Vance Crowe [01:03:01] And now looking back on your time at the World Bank, as somebody that came from Latvia, what, what do you, what do you think of that? What do you tell people about the World Bank now that you're retired from it?

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [01:03:11] What do I tell about World Bank? You know what, I don't really tell too much about the World Bank. I think that now and then people say, oh, you work for the bank Bank. And I have to explain what World Bank is compared to other banks. You know, it's not the bank where you go and put in your money. It's the bank that helps the development program project around the world. I have to explain that. I think, yeah, people are kind of not quite sure what do you do as a psychologist in the bank, but it was also sort of my previous life. I wasn't a psychologist at that time, but I find that, I think it's what's very interesting. It's what's very bad, bad, what's very val? Okay, now, I can't say anymore. What's very interesting and very valuable about the World Bank is that, at least for me, it meant that I could meet all the people from different countries, from different walks of life. And these people were so bloody intelligent and smart and fantastic and, you know, hardworking people. I think it's, I could not have had a better time. I mean, there are problems everywhere. It's not, I'm, I'm not saying that there was some kind of a paradise, but I'm just saying this place where you could meet all these brilliant people like yourself, Ben, you know, there's no other place like that. At least I don't know of another place like that. So I'm very, very grateful and thankful for that time at the World Bank. And I'm also very thankful for what it has given to me, the way I can live my life now.

Vance Crowe [01:04:49] Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. Like, I went to that, to the World Bank and for all of the, the very difficult things. And you know, the, the fact that it's, you know, so much power and money concentrated in one place, but for my own personal experience, it was like going to somewhere in Star Wars or something. I mean, you were, you were dropped in this place where a, as soon as your key card would let you into that building, you were around people from over 140 different countries and they spoke different languages and the food was all different. And the experience of being around people that came from conflict zones and incredible wealth and absolute destitute poverty was something that I was beyond my wildest dreams and I've never seen anything like it since then.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [01:05:37] Yeah. And I think that if you were, you, you would have come in, in the World Bank at a different kind of time of your life, maybe at a different place. I think you could have changed so much in the bank. Maybe you didn't come in at the right place at the right time because you had so many talents, which you simply couldn't use because it was just the wrong place, the wrong sort of set of people that you happened to meet. But I'm glad that you left and that you went somewhere else and you did something really huge. And I still think you are gonna do even bigger, bigger things. You definitely have a lot of talent.

Vance Crowe [01:06:14] So, Evvy, what are you doing with your time now? You, I see you scuba diving and things, but you've taken all this time to learn about psychology and, and the ability to discover truth. How do you spend your days now?

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [01:06:27] One of the big things that I do, do now is I am at the Jungian Society for Scholarly Studies. I'm a vice president of this society. And what this society does, it brings together people who are interested in Jungian psychology, but who work outside the therapy rooms and also inside therapy rooms. So people who are interested in cultural changes in the way groups and cultures function psychologically on a group level. People, there are a lot of artists who work through their art and they research the world through art and using union psychology framework, they're able to communicate what it is they are creating in their art and how it's relevant for the society, for the culture, for politics, for to change the world in reality. And so I'm in this Society of Union studies and we do conferences. That's one of the big things that I do. We organize yearly conferences, annual conferences, and there is also a journal. And I'm so much looking forward to the next year, 22, when we finally, again, can get together because this time of COVID has been bad because people have been staying away, not meeting face-to-face. We had to do that. And of course, it's great that we can do many things electronically, but I believe that if there is, so, it's so important for people to get together, to come together, meet each other, exchange their ideas, talk to each other.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [01:08:03] So that's, that's one of the big things that I do. I also work with some people who tell me about their dreams. And we talk through them and we talk about what it means to the different people. And I work with typically creative people. Creative people are having fantastic insights into the, their own world and the world around. And they need to be able to talk about that. 'cause one human being is never an island. You always, it's all connected. And somehow if you have a conversation with another person, and that's my education, then it helps that creative person to come in touch with something that's going on with themselves and with the world around. And that's very, very important. So that's another big thing that I do. And then my hobbies, you know, as you said, scuba diving, just love scuba diving.

Vance Crowe [01:09:00] Well, Evie, my, my heart just sings talking with you again. I'm so excited to have reconnected with you. I'm so glad that you pursued this when it was something that I, at least I for one, didn't understand. I'm sure a lot of people didn't, but I think you are in exactly the right place. And I'm glad to hear you're seeing creatives. I think you would be a marvelous, marvelous person to bounce ideas off of. If people wanted to learn more about the society or you know more about your work, would you direct them anywhere?

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [01:09:32] If the people wanted to know more about Jung Society for Scholarly Studies, then union society.org is the place to go. That's a website. And if they wanted to know what I do, then e.com is my website.

Vance Crowe [01:09:52] I will put a, a link to that in the show notes. And my goodness, thank you so, so much for coming on the podcast. This has been absolutely wonderful.

Evija Volfa Vestergaard [01:10:01] Thank you, Vince. I really, really enjoy talking to you. And I know that what you do is so important and I hope that you will continue doing what you're doing and you are gonna change the world.

Vance Crowe [01:10:14] Thanks for listening to this podcast. I absolutely adore and love Evie and everything about this conversation filled my heart with Joy. You can see me and feel the energy that's there. I know now that this episode is published that we will be talking about it in the Articulate Ventures network. If you've never joined it, you would know that there is a rich and robust community of people that get together because they love the podcast. But it isn't just the podcast that we talk about in the network. We get to together and we have Circular Firing Squad where we de discuss controversial issues in a really respectful way and talk about things in a format that allows us to discover new ways of thinking. Sometimes we do speaking gym, of course we have a movie night and a book club. And it is just a great digital community where people can rely on one another and work on making themselves the best versions of themselves They can be. I know right now I'm working with my accountability buddy to get back into running before January hits and I start another big goal. And that's just one of the many benefits of being a member of the community. So if you'd like to join, check out Network dot Articulate Ventures to learn more. Thanks so much and we'll be back next week with another interview.