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PODCAST

the rohn report

dissertations on almost anything about being human / contemporary and humorous observations / bulletins and notifications / tips and quips / sermons rohn.substack.com

All Episodes

13:00

Blade Runner and what is human?

the rohn report ·

2022/12/22

Ok, maybe it’s not a Christmas movie but it does have an elf in it (Sebastian) and a Santa Claus of sorts (Tyrell) and an angel (Pris). It also has a bad boy, Roy, who all he wants for Christmas is ‘more life f#ø*!r’. Ok bad word but he gets his point across. He’s having a conversation with Tyrell, his maker (Roy is a replicant - not ‘human’). “More human than human is our motto” Tyrell informs Roy who has come back to Earth from the off world colonies were he has been doing the dangerous and

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8:24

kids

the rohn report ·

2022/12/15

I can’t stop watching kids. I’m at the Pearl and there are kids in strollers, kids in their parent’s arms, kids tugging on their parents from down below or walking hand in hand along the broad way. One child is lifted out of her stroller and set down on the ground, she seems stunned as if she were just born that very moment. Utterly fascinating. What are they seeing? What are they perceiving in their nubile, relatively unprogrammed curious minds? That’s what I’m trying to imagine.There’s

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14:53

elation 2

the rohn report ·

2022/12/09

I learned how to run the mile back in high school. Four laps around the track. I remember the feeling. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes exhilarating.For training we used to run the ‘big block’: six miles out in the country, past the apple and peach orchards of southwestern Michigan and back into town. Sometimes we’d run the ‘little block’. That was out around Bettis Hill and back. Just depended on the coach, whatever he thought we needed.But the point is, out there running through the countryside I

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14:53

elation

the rohn report ·

2022/12/08

I learned how to run the mile back in high school. Four laps around the track. I remember the feeling. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes exhilarating.For training we used to run the ‘big block’: six miles out in the country, past the apple and peach orchards of southwestern Michigan and back into town. Sometimes we’d run the ‘little block’. That was out around Bettis Hill and back. Just depended on the coach, whatever he thought we needed.But the point is, out there running through the

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13:46

bikes and jazz

the rohn report ·

2022/12/01

Two of my favorite things. This is Avram Fefer: Bedouin Dream. Wow. Avram Fefer on the big sax with bassist Eric Revis, Marc Ribot on guitar and Chad Taylor drums. From the album Juba Lee recorded in 2022. Dig it. Jazz. It’s been around since the end of the 19th century rising up out of the Blues and the Spirituals of the deep South, the African dance rhythms, the call and response traditions. When you mix all that up on the streets of New Orleans - that’s jazz.This is the first bicycle. It

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13:27

vs. vs. vs.

the rohn report ·

2022/11/24

So it’s like all this geo-political strife in the world. Russia vs. Ukraine. Russia vs. Nato. Hey Nato is an alliance formed for collective security. Why doesn’t everybody just join Nato?Why is it somebody vs. somebody all the time? We’re all somebody. Just make the group bigger. Russia and Chiba and North Korea. We could call it All Nations Oh. AlNato.Anyways that’s my thought upon waking up this morning. Must have been percolation in my brain. Yeah, it seems so wasteful. And we accept

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11:32

The Writing Life

the rohn report ·

2022/11/17

Annie Dillard is a Pulitzer Prize winning author. Among her triumphs are Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood and The Writing Life. I have all three in a compiled volume.“For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. If you were a Zulu warrior banging on your shield with your spear for a couple of hours along with a hundred other Zulu warriors, you might be able to prepare yourself to write. If you were an Aztec maiden

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17:26

this little light of mine

the rohn report ·

2022/11/10

The singer is Odetta, AKA the voice of the Civil Rights Movement. She’s been singing folk songs and popular ballads since way back in the sixties and even before that. She was a mentor to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and Janis Joplin and a favorite of Martin Luther King Jr. The song takes me back to the Sunday School days of my youth when we used to sing it sitting in a circle in our little chairs. It was a lot of fun. We weren’t quite as good as Odetta but we would sing it with enthusiasm. I ran

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14:24

a great big giant fireball in the sky

the rohn report ·

2022/11/01

At 7:15 AM on November 1, 1952 the United States conducted the very first full blown test of a hydrogen bomb on the tiny island of Elugelab in the South Pacific atoll of Enewetak. Elugelab was vaporized leaving a crater 6,000 feet wide and 160 feet deep.The fireball that rose up after the detonation was 4 miles wide and the mushroom cloud (which was all that was left of Elugelab) rose 27 miles into the sky, spreading out like a giant cauliflower 100 miles wide.If you’re wondering how powerful that

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5:55

start all over

the rohn report ·

2022/10/27

I’m imagining that I just arrived here. I just dropped into this body, into this world. I have no personal history. Nothing came before.The only orientation is my breath, coming and going. An inhalation. Followed by an exhalation. It’s sweet. It’s comforting, which I’m mostly in need of. Comfort and annihilation. Some kind of restart because I know there is no do over. If I could just focus on each sweet breath . . . Kybo comes into the office. I try to get a picture of her but the camera

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17:15

what happens when the sun dies?

the rohn report ·

2022/10/20

It’s probably a little too early to worry about this but the sun is going to burn out one day and turn into a red giant and devour Earth and all the inner planets and that will be that. Toast. Dust to dust. All that humanity has been and all that humanity has accomplished will be lost and forgotten. Who won the 1936 World Series for example (the Yankees over the Giants 4 games to 2) and all the rest of the sports scores, the headline news from all the front pages from all over the world, all

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9:43

Bluey

the rohn report ·

2022/10/13

I first discovered Bluey in a New York Times article entitled ‘A Children’s Show About Everything, Especially Music’. Hmmm, that’s interesting, I thought, sounds kinda like the rohn report so I decided to report on it. laughterThe first thing I have to report about Bluey is the great interaction between the kids and the parents. It’s amazing. Maybe not too realistic but refreshing. They’re always playing and having fun in some goofy way: Bluey turning her dad into a donkey with a magical

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16:33

a thought experiment

the rohn report ·

2022/10/06

* Imagine what it’s like to not be alive. Pretty hard, right, since you wouldn’t have a brain. But imagine not not being alive, I mean that’s when you have a brain and a body and you live on a planet with other people and millions of species all connected in a biosphere.* Now imagine you were not alive but you had a brain and you were trying to imagine what it’s like to be alive. It would be unimaginable, right? And here we are, we’re both alive and in an unimaginable world with a brain. I

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7:33

the notebook

the rohn report ·

2022/09/29

I’m sitting at the Royal Blue Grocery in downtown San Antonio trying to write something. I don’t believe in writer’s block, that usually means I’m just not ready to write yet, but I need to write something for the newsletter. That’s why I’m scribbling in my notebook, trying to generate some momentum, see if I can come up with something.Nope, nothing yet.Maybe If I could just can’t see it. There’s always something happening. Until you’re dead. How to see it? Maybe that’s the question. Or how

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11:53

Do we really have to go through all this again?

the rohn report ·

2022/09/22

I was watching the Ken Burns documentary about the Holocaust a few nights ago on PBS. He covered a lot of history - from the rise of Nazism to the persecution of the Jews to the expansion of Germany into Austria and Czechoslovakia prior to WW II.They make the startling observation that much of what Hitler did in Germany was copied or emulated from America. Our campaign of genocide against the native people who inhabited this land, our expansion from the east coast to the west so we could build a

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27:37

One Man’s Journey in Becoming Nothing and Gaining...

the rohn report ·

2022/09/15

Clayton and I have shared lodging for several months and I asked him if he would do an interview for the rohn report on the eve of his departure for Puerto Rico. He doesn’t necessarily consider his life to be that noteworthy but I disagree. He’s going through major transformations in lifestyle and in how he views the world and I think it’s a compelling story. I love this guy, to be quite honest, and I see the changes he’s going through as part of a trend that many people are going through or may

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10:15

Prem

the rohn report ·

2022/09/01

This was my introduction to Prem Rawat (AKA Maharaji) in 1972. It was a poster stapled to a telephone pole along the sidewalk in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This image resurfaced recently. Someone on Facebook posted it up. Someone in New York commented, “Thank you, Don. I've been looking for this for weeks now. It was used as a hand-held sign/poster back in NYC.” Ha! She couldn’t believe it made it all the way to Michigan.I’m now (8.29.22) prepping for a trip to Australia to see Prem Rawat. That

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10:30

the Royal Blue Grocery on Houston Street and other...

the rohn report ·

2022/08/25

This is how my mornings go here in the urban metropolis of San Antonio. I get up on my bike and roll out before it’s too hot and hit the energy centers. It could be Katie’s Rose Hip Coffee down the street in the parking lot.It could be Press, the only cafe in town with a vaulted ceiling made of glass.Must have been a greenhouse or something. The super friendly baristas are always ready to listen to my jokes. God bless them.Or I might stop at Merit, next to the bike shop. That’s a bonus. I get

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32:17

Rohn, the early years

the rohn report ·

2022/08/18

I stopped by Katie’s Rose Hip Coffee the other morning. There was a bunch of people gathered there, I thought maybe it was somebody’s birthday or something but no it was just a buzzy morning crowd after the brilliant rain storm that had swept thru the neighborhood at 4 am washing everything clean, reviving and renewing humanity after the long hot dry drought of the summer.I met a cafe friend (forgot his name) and we started talking. The conversation turned to haircuts (I had just cut mine) and the

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19:22

book review: The Dawn of Everything

the rohn report ·

2022/08/11

It’s a preposterous title for a preposterous book. The authors basically attempt to re-write the entire history of humanity. Instead of this linear development from monkeys living in the trees millions of years ago (actually the cousins of monkeys) to a creature walking around on the ground, our head held high, inventing things like stone tools and mastering fire and developing tribal societies so we could hunt and gather more efficiently, then evolving a bigger and bigger brain until we finally

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219 results