Ep185 Summer Podcast Club Kickoff

The Besties kick off a summer “podcast book club” and explain why they’re committed to intentional joy that includes facing fear instead of pretending it doesn’t exist. Leslie and Angella also share a hilarious listening mistake before announcing their first pick, Into the Depths - Podcast,  a powerful series about Black scuba divers searching for slave trade shipwrecks and the history they hold.

Your Homework Assignment:

Listen to Into The Depths episodes 1 & 2 and join us for the discussion next week:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/podcasts/into-the-depths

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We’re Too Old for This! The Inquisitive Older Woman’s Guide to Joy http://joystrategy.co/ebook

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Transcript

Friendly Cold Open

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hey Panama Ange. Uh Kibba's calling me Panamange. Panamanch. Panamange. I like that. Hey Les, how's it going? It's going well. Good, good, very good. All right. Let's get into this.

Joy As A Daily Practice

SPEAKER_00 0:20

I'm excited.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Welcome to another episode of Black Boomer Besties from Brooklyn.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Hey guys, I'm Angela, and that's Leslie, my best friend of almost 50 years. We are two free-thinking, 60-something-year-old black women, and we have decided to be really intentional about joy, about doing the hard work of getting to a joyful place, getting to a place where we feel fulfilled and satisfied. And Leslie right now is showing off, is showing off her Brooklyn Tech cup. I don't know where mine is. Okay. I did help design that logo, by the way, but um not the logo, the design of the cup. The logo is our school logo. But anyway, um, it's in one of one of the bins that remains to be unpacked here. Um, I've been here a couple of weeks. And um so yeah, we we talk about things that um surround joy, but joy in a very different way. It's not happy, it's the things that help us to break through our ways of thinking, are things that hold us back, things that make us um so fearful that we get paralyzed. Um, we do believe in fear. We believe fear is real. We're not trying to be fearless, we're not trying to be fearless. Let's make that clear. We are recognizing fear and using it as um uh a way to evaluate. Should we push through and do it anyway?

SPEAKER_01 1:52

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

Or should we, you know, take caution and all of those things. So fearless is what is the lesson in the fear that we're feeling? Right, exactly. Right.

SPEAKER_01 2:00

That's a good way of looking at it, pal.

SPEAKER_00 2:02

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Les. So

The Summer Listening Assignment

SPEAKER_00 2:05

um, for the summer, we're doing something a little different. Okay, or okay.

SPEAKER_01 2:11

I have a good way of introducing it.

SPEAKER_00 2:13

Okay, go.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

So, you know, when you were in grade school.

SPEAKER_00 2:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

I don't remember. In June, they give you a reading list, the summer reading list that you don't start until September 3rd, like the day before Labor Day. You pick up the books. So we're gonna do an adult type reading list. We're giving you. It's this is called the Black Boomer Besties from Brooklyn Assignment. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 2:43

Hit it. Listen, Leslie is the consummate teacher. The rest of us, we we don't remember all of this stuff like you do. You just kind of um just pull this out of nowhere. No, I'm I'm not, I don't remember the reading list. Anyway, um, yeah, so we are not only podcast um co-hosts, but we also enjoy listening to podcasts. Typically, our podcasts that we like, there they tend to be audio only. And, you know, obviously we have a video and an audio uh podcast here. So there are some podcasts that we really enjoy. And so we thought we would bring some of those to you over the summer. Um, some of them are kind of mini-series, just a few episodes that tell a whole story. Some of them are longer single episodes, but we'll break it up into two, maybe, and that and we'll give you the information in advance so that when we are talking about it, you'll have already listened to it and be able to um to um be a part of the conversation with us. Maybe we'll even do it live. I don't know. We're kind of just trying something new. Would love to hear your comments on that. Anything else you wanted to add to this, Les? This is just a little intro.

SPEAKER_01 4:04

Go. All right, no, wait. I gotta tell you guys what's been happening so

The Wrong Podcast Disaster

SPEAKER_01 4:08

far. All right, I'm gonna spill the tea right now. So Ange and I have been exploring different podcasts to see which ones we're going to introduce to you all and talk about. And I don't know if you know, we've been pals for almost 50 years, but we're different. We have different tastes, we have different likes and what have you. So Ange is telling me about this podcast, right? And I think the name of it was Betrayal, right? Where people's or um people are partnered with people who betrayed them, like uh a husband betrayed this wife or whatever. And I'm like, oh, okay, I'm gonna listen to that, betrayed. And I said to Ange, I showed her the title of the podcast, and I said, Is this it? She she wrote back, I'm sleeping, but I'll let you know. So she never let me know. So I started listening to the podcast series Betrayed. So here I am at 5:30 in the morning in the park. I'm doing my little run, right? And I'm listening to it. I'm listening to stories of a poor woman that was like kidnapped, abducted at knife point, and this and the grueling, and I'm like, this is horrible. You should have known I wouldn't have chosen this. And I'm like, but I'm sticking to the process. You know me. I'm I'm a woman of my word, right? So even though I'm like, uh, I guess I can talk about how I it didn't appeal to me, it was horrific. It was scary. I'm running in the park by myself and I'm like looking around, listening about this terrible serial killer. And I'm like, why the hell? I said, Ange, this gave me like nightmares. I was thinking about it. Turns out it was the wrong podcast. She never even, it was. I listened to Betrayed, and it was betrayal that she wanted me to. I'm like, you know what? We gotta get this straight. So we this it was so bad. And I'm like, first of all, this is not something that I even want to put into my consciousness, let alone in my earbuds, close in my head, and I'm like walking and looking around. Like, like, why would she want me to listen to this? No. Turns out. It turns out I did not. You did not. So we promise we're gonna send you the correct links. The first one we're going to start with. Shall we tell them now? I mean, I guess we have to, right? Yeah, we have to tell them. So, all right.

Why We Chose Into The Depths

SPEAKER_01 6:58

It's called Into the Depths. And we'll send you links. But it's a podcast, I'll just um read a little bit of it. Black scuba divers across the world are searching for buried shipwrecks from the transatlantic slave trade when millions of enslaved Africans were trafficked to the Americas during the 15th to the 19th centuries. So it's a six-part podcast series. Um, it follows the investigation from uh a National Geographic Explorer named Tara Roberts. And she actually becomes a scuba diver and goes down looking at remnants of shipwrecks of actual enslaved people who lost their lives in the uh Middle during the Middle Passage.

SPEAKER_00 7:56

One one point, I think it was 1.8 million enslaved Africans died. That's a heck of a lot of bottom of the ocean. At the bottom of the ocean. Um, because many of the ships um uh became shipwrecked. Um and so yeah, and you know, so so let me say why I picked this one, right? Um I picked this one because and I'm gonna try to um not use some of the analogies that I thought of, or maybe I will. I picked this one because number one, I think that knowing our history is really important, right? As especially as black people. Um and this one told the history of black people from around the world because the the the diving club, um, I think the name of the the club is um called Diving with a Purpose. And these are um these are divers, black divers from across the world, who are involved in this pursuit of artifacts that tell the story of all of these people who were um who died um as they were being moved into these um into bondage, right? They died in bondage, and so I thought that despite the fact that so much of the focus of our history is around trauma, I didn't want that to get in the way of us not learning the history, but I didn't want it to just be another kind of enslavement story, right? I wanted it to be something more, and I wanted it to be um, I was looking for a story that also talked about bravery, that also talked about just some uncommon things that black people are doing. Listen, full transparency, I can't swim. I can't swim, okay? I'm a Jamaican who can't swim. I don't think it's that uncommon, but my mother had some fears because uh someone, when she was a child, a schoolmate of hers, died in the ocean. And so she was always really, really concerned when my father took us out to teach us how to swim. Anyway, and so the idea of these um divers committing their lives to this work, these black divers going down into the depths of the ocean, it brought in so much courage and so much um um kind of connectedness. And then this woman Tara Roberts, who left her job. You know, I'm all for that, who left her gumman job. Her good job. Her good job. Shout out to Kimani would say, as our friend Dr. Kimani Norton Sands would say, left her good job to not only do this work, but she had to become certified as, you know, as a diver too. And so to me, it just brought together all this stuff the the history, the bravery, the um bravery on the part of the divers, bravery on the part of um of Tara Roberts. Um, and she talks about how her journey and just all of it. And I just thought that would, that is the best way to learn about our history. Um, you know, is new new information and then information that tells the truth, but also um not just the ugly truth, also some really beautiful truths as well. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 11:42

Let me mention something that you said when we were just

Curiosity About Life Before America

SPEAKER_01 11:45

discussing this before we pressed record. You said that this might be a good opportunity to learn um a little bit about some of the our history before we actually came to the Americas or in the Caribbean. Because many people may want to know that part of the history, but I'm gonna be honest, the first thing that I thought is that I don't believe that many African Americans really do want to know much about that part of our history. As a person who is a Native um American, that's not something that is taught to us in uh culturally in this country. We are taught that America started in 1776 or whenever um we were um the Boston Tea Party and um took our freedom back from uh England and all of that. But what I am saying is that so much of black American history starts with the slave trade in America, and we are um I would say discouraged or um certainly not encouraged to think about what life and what our people um did and and how they lived before that. So so much of black American history sadly starts in America when we had centuries of history and rich history um with colonization and prior to colonization in the mother country itself. So when you said that, you know, we want to know, I I would venture to say, and I would love to hear comments about it. How much do we really want to know? You know? How much curiosity do we even have about it, you know? So I think this would be a great opportunity to learn something that perhaps we had not even thought about before.

SPEAKER_00 14:00

Yeah, yeah.

Two-Episodes-At-A-Time Plan

SPEAKER_00 14:02

So true, Les. And and we're going to be listening to these episodes, hopefully, when you are, right? So we're not listening to all of the episodes. I think this has six or eight um episodes in in in in the entirety of the series. Um we're gonna listen to it each week and we're going to record and we're going to um just kind of pull out some of the things that we noticed. And so, yeah, so thank you for trying this with us, being on this journey with us. We encourage you to participate, to leave your comments as you listen. We will put links again. Um, it's called Into the Depths by Tara Roberts, and you can find this on all of the kind of major streaming platforms, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and and the like. And um yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:54

Shall we um here's a thought that I had. Shall we listen and um invite listeners to listen to the first two episodes? Oh, because it's eight episodes, you know.

SPEAKER_00 15:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:12

That takes us eight weeks if we listen to one at a time. And it's not very long. So yeah, if we do it.

SPEAKER_00 15:17

They are, they're like 30 minutes.

SPEAKER_01 15:19

Yeah, if we do two at a time, then we do one month, and then we can do something maybe a little lighter. Let's go for both of them. You are not well, we can round out this level with some levity and lightness.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

Okay, we can try that. So we will do two episodes at a time. They are short, they're 30, 35 minutes at the most, each one. Come prepared. I think that's that's a good that's a good idea, Les. Come prepared. We look forward to doing this um with you all and to have some more engagement with you. And yeah, that's it. All right.

SPEAKER_01 16:10

So this has been introduction to the summer book club podcast edition of Black Plummer That's East Brooklyn.

SPEAKER_00 16:19

Brooklyn.