Welcome to another episode of Lurie Breaks It Down, a podcast where we dig deeply to connect the dots on the issues that shape our world.

I'm Lurie Daniel Favors, author, activist, attorney, and the host of the Lurie Daniel Favors show on Sirius XM's Urban View, Channel 126. If you like what you're about to hear, go ahead and give us five stars and then tell everybody that you know. And if you don't like it, just, child, keep it to yourself and pray our strength. Okay? Thank you so much.

Also, don't forget to check out my YouTube page, Lurie Daniel Favor's Media, where you should subscribe, like, and share, because then you'll get notified when I post videos from my show, which I do just about every single day and when I go live with my YouTube audience. We got a lot to get to today. And of course, we also have a ritual on this show. and the ritual is called a moment of gratitude.

Now, the reason we have a moment of gratitude as a ritual, as the first thing that we really do before we get to the news is because, frankly, Black Talklandia is not the easiest space to sit in. Right? It's not. Like we talk about heavy, heavy, heavy stuff on a regular basis. And so we want to make sure, before we do any of that, that we have done what is necessary to curate the appropriate emotional resonance and the appropriate emotional

positioning before we do the heavy, heavy work. Because otherwise, it's just depressing and sad.

We don't want that. Anybody got time for all that. And so we have this ritual, again, as I've said,

it's called a moment of gratitude. And it is designed to allow us to intentionally curate a set of emotions that we identify as joy, gratitude, and appreciation. And the reason we do that is because when you are rooted in joy, gratitude, and appreciation, you cannot also be trapped by fear, loneliness, and depression. And considering we have a whole lot of work to do to make this world a better place, child, ain't nobody got time to be trapped by fear, loneliness, or depression. I don't mind them as emotions that give us insight into what's happening in our lives, but we ain't got time to be trapped by them. So this ritual is very, very simple. It is so simple, in fact, it goes a little something or like a little in just a minute you're going to hear music. And when you hear that music, it's going to be an invitation to you to join the rest of us,

because when we hear it, we are going to collectively begin taking the slowest, deepest, most lung capacity expanding,

joyful heart, invigorate, and troubled mind cleansing, weary soul, uplifting, the most amazingly juicy breath.

As we kick off our most important segment of every single day.

It is time for our moment of gratitude. Every day, folks, oh, it feels good to be doing that with y'all again. Every single day we got to do it.

And every day it matters. Shout out to the team. Shout out to you and to everybody who's a part of the Urban View family, the Nubians, the YouTubers, the YouTubers, the Instagrammers, the podcast. I mean, everybody, out of community, we have linked a lot of communities here. And I'm really happy about that. Sidebar, more news to come about how we are taking our linkages and connections to an even higher level come next month. Because y'all know February is the anniversary of this show. We will be in our fifth year. We started in 2021. Yes, we'll be in our fifth year. And I'm thrilled about that. and so all the togetherness that we have done up until this point is going to go to an even greater level come february of 2026 i almost said five just keep that in the back of your mind just for later just tuck it away for later i just want to you know drop some breadcrumbs just drop some breadcrumbs but one of the things that happens at this time year, namely because we have all sort of collectively agreed that this is the beginning of the new year, even though I mentioned Shauna Renee's correction of that, and we know that really we only have a new year in January because of the Romans and their need for taxation and whatnot. But one of the things that does happen, because despite the, you know, nefarious history of the Romans manipulations of their calendars, we as a society have sort of participated in this notion that January is the beginning of something. And it is. Every day is a new beginning. It's a new day. And there is this tendency that some of us have to engage in overthinking. To engage in, oh, it's a new year and so-and-so's got this resolution and i saw so-and-so getting up early and going to the gym and so-and-so posted on their instagram stories about how they already at the gym and i was turning over for my next round to sleep when i saw that and you know we begin overthinking things right and then when you hear news like some of the crazy news we're going to talk about in today's show. You hear news about this. Sometimes you get a little worried.

You get a little worried, you get a little anxious, you get a little, eh, it's a little antsy, I don't really know what's going on, and feeling a little awkward and out of sorts. And you begin going down a path of overthinking, not just any overthinking, however, overthinking the negatives. We are really, really good. There's this concept in the legal community known as the parade of horribles. I was introduced to this as a law student, and parades of horribles are basically all the awful, terrible, no good, very bad things that could happen if this contract does not get signed, or all the awful, terrible, no good, very bad things that could happen if this negotiation does not go the way that the awful terrible no good very bad things that could

happen if this negotiation does not go the way that we want and the parade of horribles is something

that americans are really good at we are really really good at thinking about in in secession right

all of the terrible things that could happen from this bad decision. And that is certainly a choice.

Certainly a choice.

However, it's not the only choice that we could make in these moments.

And there is another choice that I would encourage you to consider,

if you're going to be the overthinking type,

I would encourage you to approach it from a slightly different perspective. I want you to

listen to this clip. This is a person who goes by the name of Yang, Y-A-N-G, Munis, M-U-N-U-S, and he has some

...