ChristiTutionalist Politics | Christian Perspectives on Constitutional Issues

CTP (S3EJanSpecial4) From Therapy To The Page; Healing And Horses

• Joseph M. Lenard | Christian Activist & Author in Politics • Season 3

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CTP (S3EJanSpecial4) From Therapy To The Page; Healing And Horses
Exploring more of the fascinating intersection of Activism, Community Engagement, Faith / Religion, Human Nature, Politics, Social Issues, and beyond  
We trace Laura’s path from therapist to writer and strategist, then dig into equine-assisted healing and the realities of domestic violence without visible bruises. Precision in words, purpose in strategy, and compassion in practice tie it all together with candid faith and practical takeaways.
• schedule update and quick merch plug
• therapist-to-writer pivot and early mentorship
• AI as grammar partner not ghostwriter
• copywriting connected to strategy and outcomes
• rebuilding a business after a women’s shelter
• discovering equine-assisted work for trauma
• science of co-regulation with horses
• telling hard stories in service to others
• domestic violence without physical marks
• systems, boundaries, and digital harassment
• faith, responsibility, and civic context
• links and contact for LauraNicholls.com  

https://tinyurl.com/SubscribeToCTP  
CTP Audios: https://tinyurl.com/CTPonBuzzsprout 
CTP Videos: https://tinyurl.com/JLDonBITCHUTE 
https://tinyurl.com/CTPgear  

A Short Story: A Lasting Legacy? book Trailer

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SPEAKER_01:

Hello, welcome to another episode of Institutionalist Podcast. I am your host, Joseph M. Leiner. That's L-E-N-A-R-D at the French. It's not without an O. Thank you for tuning in. As Brandon used to say on his show, let's get on with the show. I just wanted to let you know this brief intro. I'm gonna double up two a week for the rest of January. They get caught up on a few interviews I've recorded lately. They're kind of piling up. They're going a little too far in the future. I don't want to keep people waiting that long. So for the rest of January, I'll do two during the week rather than one midweek drop on Wednesday. So Tuesday and Thursday, the rest of January. Joining me today will be Lori Nichols. And I have to take a closer look because I set my mug down. And before I welcome Lori on, I'm gonna show off honest warning podcast trick. Right for the behind the scenes video, you will see my new mug. I pledge to God and country. Nice and fresh water in there only, but uh yeah. CTP gear now available. Tiny URL.com slash CTP gear. So pardon the blatant, willful, malice aforethought promotion. Welcome, Lori Nichols. How are you?

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you. I'm well. It's Laura with an A on the end.

SPEAKER_01:

Yep, see my mug. I was gonna say that's where you put the mug was laid down directly over where your name is. So I I struggled to read it properly, and I did.

SPEAKER_00:

That's okay.

SPEAKER_01:

All right, so say that again.

SPEAKER_00:

You are Laura Nichols.

SPEAKER_01:

Laura Nichols. Okay, for us really old folk, we could think back to the old uh general hospital days, right? Luke and Laura.

SPEAKER_02:

I know about that.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh yeah. I know all about that. My sister and my mother used to be R.I.P. Ma. Uh my sister's still with us. Used to be big General Hospital fans, but nowadays she's into days of our lives. I was like, oh my. Well, Days of Our Lives are actually moved over to Peacock streaming now, so it's not even on the regular general over-the-air that anybody could put up an antenna and grab to watch anymore. But at any rate, we're already way off the rails here. Laura Nichols, writer, former therapist, strategist, horsewoman, which caught my eye. We'll get into that. Domestic violence survivor. So I think we got a lot of ground to cover. And I try to keep my show short, but hey, as I joked before I hit record, we flow with the go here. We we hit record and we go to we're done. So no definitive timetable has to be met or fed in fit that fed into is that a word for that? Did I close enough? Well, I'm a writer.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I make records all the time. So we we can have it.

SPEAKER_01:

Me too, yeah, yeah. In my uh the book of Kennedy Project Carpe Diem. I've used this term for decades, but I finally put it into one of my books, mass holes. The masses of asses out there, right? We all know them. Miserable people who only are happy if they make others miserable too, right?

SPEAKER_00:

They are out there, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_01:

So again, I'm wasting time. Tell us.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. How did I end up being a writer? Well, I was a therapist. I worked with kids in treatment for 14 years, and my very first clinical supervisor was a forensic psychologist, meaning she would do a lot of court stuff. And I always loved writing when I was a kid. I'd write a lot of stories and set it my my grandma's typewriter. I can still see the weird color back.

SPEAKER_01:

Back to the typewriter days. Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And um, you know, that first I consider her a mentor. And this is way back like when 9-11 was happening. It was like my first year of doing therapy. So it's been a while. But she would um she would just push my writing back and push my writing back because we were doing a lot of like court documenting, and she would say to me, envision your words on a court, like 10 feet high on a courtroom wall. Um, so you know, there's one layer of that. The other layer is that those words are going to impact these kids' lives and their families. They go somewhere, and so it's it has to have the like highest level of integrity. And I'm so grateful for that experience. Um, I went on in my career as a therapist to have writing be like a forte of mine, and I, you know, audit other people's writing, and it just was an innate skill that somebody helps me turn into more of a hard skill, if you will. And then, you know, flash forward several years later when I was not doing that work anymore.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, editor. So you're a grammar Nazi?

SPEAKER_00:

No, not really. I mean, I people ask me about AI, and I use it as a thought partner, and a lot most of the time it's for grammar because I didn't I like I don't even remember all those rules. I know some things. I am a copywriter also, so I do a lot of marketing copy. Um, you would think so, but I I'd prefer to just let it flow and then if you really need help cleaning it up, then I do, or if it's gonna be a glaring mistake. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm writing my fourth book in my life and living series, and in the acknowledgments and introduction, I've already reworked that a little to say, Welcome to the 21st century. I love Shakespeare, Hemingway, you know uh Dickens, but these aren't those times. We're in the internet age, the age of social media, and acronyms galore and grammar hacks, if we will, right? So writing like Shakespeare is great if you're trying to tell a story like Shakespeare. Otherwise, it's really kind of silly because uh younger people, while they may have been forced to read it, and they're not really anymore, our education system is so bad, you know, in English classes who get it and that should go back, uh their expectations of verbiage and how things are presented are far different than before. Oh, yeah. So, you know, welcome to the 21st century.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, talk to text, right? I was kind of taking that away. Uh like my nine-year-old knows how to use talk to text, and that's disturbing. It's the climate we live in.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, there's a big difference between write uh speaking, how we vocalize things, and how you would write something normally, like in my nonfiction books. I have taken a few of my shows, had them transcribed, and then when putting them in the book though, I changed some of it because generally you don't want to cut you write differently to bring something across than how you may vocalize something, yes?

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. I mean, when I create book content for people, I interview them and I create the content from that. But you're exactly right. For them, the the plus is that they get to just talk it through with somebody who can ask the questions and guide them down the path they want to go down. Um, but you're right. You know, when I then take that content and I'm turning it into the written word, it's it's it's a different animal for sure. Um, but I was gonna just touch on how I got into writing as a career, flash forward you know, several years after I had been out of the mental health world, um, I'd had dabbled in entrepreneurialism, and then uh, you know, found myself with a six-month-old baby and coming out of women's shelter and starting from rock bottom, um, just took inventory of my skill set. And I really was you know sporty when I had my child. So I was very committed, um, especially after the journey we'd been on to being with her. And so that's how I decided to cultivate a business.

SPEAKER_01:

Um I'm hearing the domestic violence survivor part in there, and we'll we'll get more into that later. We'll touch on that later. Umpartmentalize it. Yes, I mean, all these interrelate, you already interrelated the writing and the therapist parts together. Strategist.

SPEAKER_00:

Strategist is from having work. So, you know, eight years ago when I started my business, I I like I mentioned I had like dabbled in entrepreneurial entrepreneurialism. That's a mouthful. Um and I, you know, having this child, I was also living on a 40-acre horse ranch at the time, taking care of horses in exchange for rent. Uh, I was doing some other odd jobs just to kind of put it back together. I knew that I didn't have the bandwidth at the time to really go big with a business, but I knew enough to support other people. Um, so while I started off as a freelance writer, I also got into um, I called myself like an executive assistant and working with a lot of different kinds of businesses. And so in that process, I I just got to I work with amazing people. They all were people who had like started their businesses themselves and had done it all by, you know, on their own from the ground up. And it was just a really great opportunity um to learn the inner workings, especially in the online business world and the marketing side and all the other things. And so that's just a natural evolution of my journey, right? Is going from freelance writer to okay, now I'm this serving as kind of this like right-hand woman, if you will, to these business owners. Um, and then carrying that forward into serving other business owners with what I knew, you know, like like I said, it's been eight years put in, so I like I know some stuff. Um and so that's where the strategy piece came came in because with the writing, you know, I do both two, I most of my career has been mostly copywriting, and then I've really books have kind of come in and out of that, and it's probably been the last year and a half that I really focused in more on books. They're two different writing muscles, um, they definitely support one another. But with the copywriting, it's rare that someone ever just needs words on the page. They need to know like, how does this serve the bigger picture of their business? Like, what is it they're trying to accomplish? So that's where the strategy piece comes in. Um, it's not, you know, we're not just like sending words out to the ether, like they serve a purpose and they fall somewhere into the path of where you want your ideal person, whoever you're trying to serve, to do a thing. Um, ideally, with the people I work with in an authentic, you know, um way with lots of integrity um and meaning. So yeah, that's where the strategy side comes in. Being thoughtful and being intentional.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And books are the same way. It's rare that I meet somebody that just like they want to write a book and just let it sit on a shelf. They want it to like do something in their life. So there's strategy there. That's why I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_01:

And why I wrote another blatant plug, how to write a book and get it published. There you go.

SPEAKER_00:

You know all about that. Yeah, yeah, you know all about that then.

SPEAKER_01:

Shameless plug, shameless plug. That's right. And you already touched on, you mentioned horsewoman, which is close to my heart. Really caught my eye in your profile because my sister rode horses for a while, you know, show horses, blue ribbons and all that to show for it. So uh so that caught my eye. Yeah. Give us a little more on what got you into horses.

SPEAKER_00:

You betcha. Well, so I had been a therapist working with the so the kids I worked with were pretty intense. They would go in and out of psychiatric settings into residential care, like they were pretty acute, you'd say. So I've been doing that work for I want to say 10 or 11 years, and the agency I worked for was like, hey, we're gonna start this, just taking the kids to this horse program, and um, we want the therapist to go. And in my mind, I just thought, oh, cool, we're gonna get to go play with horses, you know, once a week. And we were at that first session, and these are like hard, these are hard kids, you know, they're city kids, they've been through a lot. Um, they are as a therapist.

SPEAKER_01:

Horses are big, some of them might be a bit standoff of it versus this. That's a great get them out of a comfort zone kind of environment. And if they you can get them to interact with the horses well, you can get them to interact with each other better, yes? Um, yeah, that's certainly a part of it.

SPEAKER_00:

What I what I was gonna to finish that thought was uh, you know, we were probably about half an hour into that first session. I call these puzzle piece moments in time. It's when something just clicks for you and you're like, this is it, this is what I want to do. It was so having sat in office with these kids, or a lot, you know, I'd walk with them, or I'd take them, you know, it was a lot of like side-by-side quote unquote therapy and not just like sitting on the couch. Having said that, though, seeing what was happening with these kids and these horses in just such a short amount of time was so profound for me. And it was just this moment of complete clarity that this is the work I want to do. Um, so yeah, I just started hanging around people who do that and supporting them. And I mentioned, you know, in my journey, I landed on a horse ranch with my baby and lived there for about six years. That's you know, a nonprofit program that also served kids, and so I still support that program. And I'm now I, you know, I moved to an area where there's a real need for that kind of work. There's not much for the kids here. Um, so I'm in the process of it's I've also had on my heart since I was probably like 11 or 12 years old that I wanted to work with people and animals and horses. I saw this movie, something another puzzle piece moment in time where I was like, that's the thing I want to do. So I'm 50 years old and I'm like, all right, it's time to do that thing. So I'm back in doing my um trauma-informed equine uh certification work. It'll take me a couple years. Um I'm a few months into that. Um, and just um working here locally with some people and done some volunteering with programs. So yeah, it's um a fabric of my narrative, my story that I am committed to going in the direction of. I don't personally have my own horses right now. I don't have space to do the work. I'm really not worried about that. It's gonna come about. I'm moving in that direction. So, but I do get to hang out with horses. I have like a few different places around, and I take my daughter and she gets to ride. So horses are still very much a part of our life. Yeah. Not show world. We're a little different, but yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

I I'm lucky. I I'm in Windot, Michigan, southern suburb of Detroit. Uh, but yeah, not far from me is still pretty open country area, uh lots of horse farms or farms with horses, uh stables. If I'm ever feeling too city-ish, another made-up word, right? I I could hop in the car and 20 minutes away, I'm out in nature and around horses and sheep and chickens and and all that stuff. And it it's very therapeutic. And unfortunately, a lot of city people who are like my, I mean, in Detroit proper or whatever, or Atlanta or LA or whatever, I mean, to find that is quite a drive for them. And they need field trips to do that, they need to understand and experience that.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, there's something to be said about you know your nervous system regulation, especially in the pace of a city. It's been a long time since I've been in LA, but I've been in in all those cities you just mentioned. And um, yeah, you know, there's the horses, we all have a field, an energetic field around ourselves and our heart. And um we do know, like science, you know, there's like anecdotal, like, oh, it just feels good to be around horses, but now science is telling us that we do regulate and we co-regulate with them our nervous system, our breathing, our heart rate, all the good things. So even us just on a physiological level, and I could probably talk to you for like two hours about why horses are good for you. I won't do that, but um that that is one that I really love because it's science-based and it's something tangible people can grab onto. Like, oh, that makes sense to me. Horses' brains also are naturally formed like a traumatized human brain, um, just because they're prey animals and the way that they function in nature. And so for people who have been through trauma, um, there is a lot of work that can happen between a horse and a person with helping them, helping the horse connect out of choice, not compliance, um, helping get them to think. And in doing that, it kind of takes it like one step out of the person, meaning like you're not sitting there like, help me, let's try process your trauma, like tell me all about it. You're now connecting with this animal that is kind of wired in a similar way that your traumatized brain is. Um, and by doing that connective work, uh it's it's so fun to see just how that washes over people because it's really the it's their work. It ends up being their work in a very safe, um, powerful way when you're communing with a thousand-pound animal in that way. It's it's really, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, maybe I'll have you back another time for just a Laura Nichols horse whisperer episode.

SPEAKER_00:

Thanks. Yeah. Like I said, I could talk about it for a long time, but it's it's exciting. It's really a beautiful work. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Uh-huh. Yeah. Uh and people who've been cooped up in the cities just it would be potentially difficult for them to get their brain wrapped around until they get to have such an experience. Like uh, near me is Apple Charlie's uh uh apple cider, you know, apple orchards, and you know, during Thanksgiving and Halloween time, obviously they're very busy. But they you know, they too have a not necessarily petting zoo, but uh some of the animals can be petted. And but there's a you know, a stable and a mini zoo area, so that indeed, you know, that's probably 40 minutes out of Detroit, but that that's still a reasonable field trip for a school to do, and I would love to see for me to pull up there and see school buses parked in a bunch of kids running around looking at the animals, knowing the good it does for my soul and that it will do for their soul too. Lastly, I mentioned at the top domestic violence. Survivor. Now, I I'm not happy or to talk about my being a suicide attempt survivor, but I feel it's important to do that. Right? I'm sure you probably I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I'm if I were a betting man, and I am, I usually only bet a dime at a time on like the Red Wings or the Lions. Yeah. Can't win big betting a dime, but hey, I can't afford to lose big either. Uh if I were a betting man, I would bet you probably feel the same about the domestic violence situation. It certainly doesn't bring up good memories, not happy to talk about, but something important to talk about.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I appreciate you framing it that way because you're exact you're you're exactly right. Um sometimes I I sometimes I get asked, you know, because I help people understand their own narratives. It's what's I'm saying about the shoemakers' kids never have shoes. Like I do that, I've been doing that for other people for eight, you know, eight plus years now. Um and uh sometimes I get asked, like, well, do I need to have a big traumatic story? And you don't. And I also get asked, what is, you know, how do I know what of my story to tell and what not to? And for me, what it comes down to is sure, in full transparency, there is a quote unquote therapeutic piece in understanding your own narrative and being able to talk about it. But for me, I think it's healthy to acknowledge that, but also in the bigger sense, how does it serve who I'm telling it to? And that's kind of always what I come back to. Um, I will also say that, you know, it's for me, it's been nine plus years that I've been out of my situation, and I've talked about it very vaguely. I've I have written, you know, in the uh nurture content, if you will, for other people's brands, even just as myself, um, how you know I came out of a women's shelter, for example. That's a very broad thing that doesn't really fill in a lot of information. So I, you know, it's just really in the last like year, it's part of why I'm here. It's just wrapping my brain around I'm ready to talk about that in service to other people. I had some really profound experiences that having been a therapist and having been on the other side of the desk, it was a really interesting experience to realize, wow, now it's me on the other side of the desk. Um, and the people doing that work. And it just it left me with a uh a real mark on my heart in a good way that there's something that I need to do with that. Um that you know, in service to others, right? That's for me, that's a real motivating factor.

SPEAKER_01:

Um as as uh what really what my books are in this show, too, uh trying to portray and provide and deliver my experiences, other experiences such as yours to others. Uh as you said, therapeutic for us to talk about those things, but there are others who need to hear it, maybe going through not the exact same thing, but something similar can benefit from it.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm a I'm a really big believer, you know, getting back to the storytelling piece to kind of like meta view this a little bit, is that, you know, in my experience, people are more, yes, the transformation and where you ended up and all the good things on this side are very inspiring and helpful to people. What they connect with more, what's more important to them is all the pain points along the way. And that's that story, right? Because they find whether, you know, as you just said, whether they that's their story exactly or not, they see themselves in that. They may have insights that you can provide that they haven't come to yet. They may find some hope that they haven't come to yet. Um in my case, you know, I'm I'm not running around like, hey, I need to tell my story and talk about this thing. I I layer it in as it's appropriate. Um, I think what's come to the surface for me the most, though, is that my particular situation was what I'd call an unusual type of domestic violence, meaning that uh no hands were put on me, but um really frightening, like pulling a gun on me, threatening to take my child before I had while I was still pregnant, um, raging, um, doing really dangerous things in the car while I was pregnant.

SPEAKER_01:

A lot of mental abuse. Uh, and the mental abuse is as scarring as the physical. Actually, the the mental scars remain. Uh the physical scars sometimes can heal and vanish, but the mental scars are the almost harder to get over. And and I like to say that too. You kind of alluded with with my suicide attempt survivor story. My story isn't someone else's, right? Everybody's story is different, but as you suggested, alluded, there are threads that people can connect with and understand. Like I went from suicide attempt survivor when I'm on other shows telling my story to number one bestseller. Well, even though I have how to write a book to try to help others tell whatever story is in them, that may not be in the cards for them. And that's not what's important. Little things all lives matter, all life has value, all life has meaning, and little things you may not see when you're looking in your mirror in the morning, thinking, has my life had any value or purpose? Little things you've long forgotten, didn't think about, have mattered in other people's lives, and you won't have like it's a wonderful life. Clarence come down to show you those things, right? Doesn't mean they didn't happen.

SPEAKER_00:

Sure. Absolutely. Yeah, no, you're right. Um, and I, you know, when I say that, like uh it's a kind of an unusual in my my case, like it is and it isn't. I can't tell you how many women I've talked to between now and then who have I think I don't know if I don't know if there's something happening in our society where that's becoming more prevalent or if we're just talking about it more. Um, but it is interesting. I found more support from the quote unquote system than I thought I would, meaning that when I went into the sheriff's office, uh because when you're with somebody who's unstable and crazy and acting crazy, you become a kind of unstable and a little crazy. And I I just needed to hear someone say that's that's not okay. And yes, you can call the police. Uh you know what I was really like question like, well, I nobody's actually hit me.

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, pulling a gun on somebody's pretty scary and saying they're gonna shoot you and your child is pretty crazy, but it's it's still an assault, it's still a threat, an assault of kind under the law. And indeed, uh something else had popped in my head, but now I've forgotten what it was. But uh so oh well, maybe it'll come back to me.

SPEAKER_00:

It'll come back. Yeah, it'll come back. Um, yeah, I guess my point was just that I feel like it needs to be it needs to be talked about a little bit more and nor like normalized that it's not normal. Yeah, you know what I mean? I've where do you draw the line? Oh, go ahead. Sorry, I'm just gonna lose it.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, statistically speaking, maybe that number is about the same percentage-wise of the amount of domestic abuse, but when you're talking just a few hundred years ago, the number of people on the planet versus eight billion quickly rising to nine billion soon on the planet, the numbers the percentage doesn't have to change for that number to get all that much more huge, plus social media, more self-publishing, more people publishing books on it. So, indeed, as you're saying, uh it is out there more because there's more media available for those stories to get out. That's the thought that I lost.

SPEAKER_00:

Sure. I think that yeah, and I think uh there's also in our, you know, if we look at like the the narrative arc of social media and the internet, I think there's also some really cagey um ways to terrorize people that didn't used to exist. And I I wonder too if that kind of is like an underlying stall, contributor to the optic. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I still I still to this day, not today, but I mean I I'm still pursued in that way. I have court orders, I have stay away orders, but the internet is a it's a really um yeah, it's an easy place to hide out and do weird things when you have too much time on your hands, I guess. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01:

And unfortunately, out of the 8 billion people, it seems there are far too many people with too much time on their hands. And just the way my OCD brain works now, now I'm gonna have that stick song in my too much time on my hands. Well, at any rate, thank you, Laura, not Lori, Laura Nichols, for your time today. I appreciate it was an important discussion, I believe.

SPEAKER_00:

I appreciate that. I have a quick question for you. Sure. So the name uh the name of your podcast, how did you arrive at that?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, Christitutionalist? Well, pretty simply, I started thinking Ronald Reagan used to say, don't come to me with left or right Democrat-Republican paradigm. Come to me with up or down. Does it lift up we the people or and tear down government controls or lift up government and tear down our freedoms? Dennis Prager also uh says there's a difference between a classical liberal who has things in common at times with conservatives, and an ultra-leftist ideologue. Uh, he he likes to make that important distinction. So I thought to myself, well, are you a Christian or are you not? Are you a real Christian or a Matthew 23 Christian who just picks and chooses pieces of the Bible and warp it out of context? So I thought, hey, there needs to be discussion on that, and then hence the term constitutionalist, because the Bible does deal in politics if when you look at it properly in its full context.

SPEAKER_00:

I feel like that's a whole another conversation. Like I feel like we could have a whole talk about that. I I'm a Christian and I went to seminary and I did all the things and I read the Bible every day. It's something I don't talk about a lot. Um, but that theme of being what I consider lukewarm, right? Which is um what will be spit out of the Lord's mouth on the day of reckoning, um, is is yeah, very prevalent. So I think that I don't want to get us off track in the last few minutes here, but yeah, I I think that's uh that's an interesting. I appreciate your perspective on answering that question.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah. And it it's a third rail to a lot of people, but also again, if I try to avoid the Democrat-Republican left-right paradigms. Are you really a Christian or not? How steeped in your Bible are you really or not? And that scares a lot of people to not want to go down that road because they may realize they're in the or not category, and that scares us. No one wants to ever admit they're wrong on things, and that's where biblical humility needs to come in, right? And the sin of hubris, it isn't pride. We should be proud of little Johnny hitting a walk-off home run at Little Run at Little League, proud of Sally bringing home a blue ribbon riding the ponies that you know she has at a local uh uh fair or whatever. That's different than Pride Fall, which is Hugh Briss, which is the real sin. Yeah, you know, big difference there. And Jesus said the poor will always be among you. That scares a lot of people to talk about. That wasn't an economics or governance statement, that was a human nature statement people also take out of context. There will always be some who do the bare minimum to try to coast by, and especially if there are people constantly willing to bend over backwards to give them things they don't earn. It doesn't say God helps those who help themselves, right? It does not actually in the Bible, but it is kind of implied between the lines a little, as well as those who don't work don't eat. That is in there. That doesn't mean you starve someone who cannot work. There's a distinction between the unable to work and the unwilling to work, but again, that is a whole other off-the-rail set of radicals there.

SPEAKER_00:

I think we did pretty good though for fitting that into two minutes. So well, Joseph, it's been so lovely to meet you, and um, I appreciate the opportunity.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, I'm glad you came by. Now, the last usual close question do you have a website for people to reach out to you?

SPEAKER_00:

I sure do. It's really easy. It's LauraNichols.com. I try to keep things as simple as possible in my life. So yeah, just my full name.com. And um, yeah, that's my my writing.

SPEAKER_01:

And Laura is normal l-a-u-ra-a, nothing fancy about it there. And nichols is N-I-C-H-O-L-S-S.

SPEAKER_00:

Two L's. Two L's, that's important. Oh, oh, is your coffee mug got in the way again?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, oh, yeah, oh, there that would have been a problem. So I'm glad I went there and we cleared that up. I'd have probably put it in the notes wrong, too, then. No, we didn't get back to it.

SPEAKER_00:

It is unusual to have two L's.

SPEAKER_01:

So yeah, I was gonna joke spelled the same as Michelle Nichols from Star Trek. But no, it's not. Curveball. Anyway, thank you, Laura Nichols with two L's for coming on. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you, Joseph.

SPEAKER_01:

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Joseph M Lenard

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