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Hello and welcome back to Cult Leader. I'm your Cult Leader, Spencer Henry, and this is a little leader where I read the stories that you send to me.

Hey, if you have a story you'd like to share with the cult, send it on over to Spencer at Cult Leader.com.

Can truly be about whatever you want it to be. There's no rules here anymore. Just give it a lifetime movie title and we should be good. How's it going, babe? Happy Friday. I'm very happy with the response to the realism episode that we did on Monday.

Glad you guys are loving it and it turns out that I should be an alien impressionist. Rave Reviews love it. We'll have to do some more alien episodes soon. It has been so cold. Let's talk about the elephant in the room and it's the fact that I'm cold right now. I know you don't want to hear about it. You're like, oh you're going to call a point, yeah, sure. But it's cold for here. For here it has been cold. It's actually that annoying weather where it's kind of warm in the sun. But if you move to the shade, you're freezing. Just give me a break.

Make up your mind whether what's a guy to do. I don't know if I should be wearing a sweatshirt or a jacket out of my afternoon walks with hot dog. It's conflicting, confusing times. The only benefit to the colder weather is that I started getting chai lattes again. Big fan. Well, dirty chai. Here's the thing about chai. So the past two days in the afternoon. I've gotten just regular chai lattes for a little pick me up. But then I was like, you know, it's missing something and that something is espresso.

It needs that coffee flavor to it in my opinion for me. That's what I like. I mean, the coffee shop that I go to, I'm like, okay, I know what chai concentrate you use. It's the same one. I can get at Whole Foods and then you're just mixing it with oatmeal. Click, I could do that. However, I am not capable of making a good dirty chai at home. So if I'm going to pay $9 for this latte, I want it to be, I want it to be dirty babe. So that's what I'm sipping on right now. Big fan.

Enough about the weather and coffee. I don't want to really get into anything, but I do have to acknowledge that I know there's a lot happening in the world right now on the whole situation with Ukraine and Russia. And I'm just going to say my thoughts are with you. I am sending all the good vibes, but I don't have any experience or knowledge or and I don't feel well versed enough to actually talk about it or go into it.

I'm happy to share any resources that you guys want to send over or tag in on the call to your podcast Instagram, but aside from that, I will leave it to the news networks and actual reporters to relay the information of what's going on, but I'm thinking of you on obituary this week. We talked about spontaneous human combustion, which is just always wild to me.

And Madison tells a really good story about the radium girls, which was fascinating. Last night we were recording for next week's episode and Madison was talking about something and I don't want to tell what the subject was, but it ties into one of my first episodes of Cole leader.

And I was like, oh, shit, I talked about that in the beginning of Cole leader, like the early days. And so I searched my computer for the notes just to see if I still had them and sure enough, I did. And it gave me the most nostalgic feeling ever because the way that things are done now and the way I prepare my notes for an episode is so different than it was in the beginning.

And I remember when I started Cole leader just being so nervous and I wrote things in these notes that I'm just like, oh my god, I should just show you guys. But for those of you who are newer or maybe haven't been around since the early days, Cole leader started on Instagram stories.

And then eventually people were like, oh, you know, you should make a podcast. So I did. But those Instagram stories actually started about this time four years ago, which is just crazy to think about. I'm, I miss them.

I'm going to be better about being on Instagram again, but Instagram's also been hiding my shit. And I know this because people will message me and tell me that they never see my posts or stories. And I always thought like the algorithm was just a conspiracy theory that people put out like as to why they were having poor engagement or whatever, but like, no, it's like an actual, an actual thing.

Maybe I should bring back my moita stories on Instagram just for old times sake. And if you want to cringe out at the first episodes of Cole leader, they are exclusively on Patreon. And I think episodes five through 20 or maybe 25 will be moving to Patreon soon as well. So just a heads up if you feel like listening to those again before they move over there. Anyway, thanks for hanging. Thanks for letting me continuously be on my bullshit the past four years and tell stories the way that I want to because guess what?

I'm not fucking conforming. Okay. Now on to business. I've taken up enough of your time. My apologies before we get into emails though, I came across this little weird news thing from Ripley's that I feel like really ties into Monday's episode a little bit. It's a quick. I just wanted to read it to you guys. It says the 17th century plan to trade with aliens on the moon.

Quote Oliver Cromwell is one of the most controversial figures in the history of Britain following the English Civil War and the execution of King Charles I. He established himself as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland. All of this is well recorded and still much debated by historians, but what we really want to hear is the story of how his brother-in-law, who married Cromwell's young sister Robina in 1656, thought he was going to get out to the moon to meet and trade with aliens back in the 1600s.

I love it so much. It says, let's start with the beginning with this one. Cromwell's brother-in-law was John Wilkins, who was a distinguished scholar in Anglican clergyman, who was a founding member of the Royal Society, the world's oldest national scientific society.

He was about as learned as it was possible to be at the time, having attended both Oxford and Cambridge and campaigned to unite scientific advancement and religion.

He also believed that the moon and the surrounding planets were all inhabited and was convinced that he could build a flying machine to reach them. His ambitions were loftier still though. He ploked to establish trade with the residents of the moon or other planets and contribute to the prosperity of Britain.

So this guy is just like, I'm gonna build a flying machine. I'm gonna go to the moon and I'm gonna trade.

Needless to say, 400 years ago, the whole concept of space travel was just a tad out there. This was an incredible period of scientific discovery, and with humanity's knowledge of space as it was at the time, these theories were revolutionary, yet plausible.

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