We start our conversation with another anonymous guest on the topic of days we should “never forget” but already have, and workouts to commemorate them. This leads to a discussion of so-called Hero WODs and whether they honor appropriately, are simply self-aggrandizing or virtue-signaling, or actually offer the opportunity to sit with pain for an hour or two and remember that others have, and are hurting even more. We conclude by recognizing that, if every politician had to do a heinous workout for every service member who died, well, we might stop sending boys to war.

Then we move on to the geopolitical segment of our podcast to discuss how little we know or understand about the dispute between Russia and the West or the topic of security and, of course, Ukraine. We fully understand that we live in an era where one's world view may only be based on headlines, never on the details, examination or nuance. Michael does a nice job of tying group, political behavior to human nature, and even manages to overlay that on what he thinks Putin may be trying to accomplish.

With the warm-up concluded we explore the difference between whether people — citizens and their political representatives — actually want individuals to have choice or do they want to be told what to do? And who gets to do the telling? The hubris in the tone of the tellers, the certainty of their diktats contradicts nature. They think they are aware but mostly they (and we) aren’t, and considering this, it is tough to allow anyone to tell me what to do — or declare the correct thing to do — when they can’t explain why heart stem cells (or heart cells derived from IPSC stem cells) develop a beat in vitro ... just sayin'.

Learning to live a life of independent choice has much to do with awareness and the quality of the questions one asks, which influence your understanding of what you might or should do. Once you can ask appropriate questions you move from, “this happened to me and I have no agency” to “what can I do with this?” The answer(s), when you are able to hear them and willing to act upon them lead towards independence, away from dependence. That said, sometimes, perhaps more often than we realize, the cumulative effect of many choices made in the past prevent the choices we might make now from altering the course of your life — in the context of exposure to a pathogen, and otherwise. Watch, take care.