[00:00:08] Speaker A: From the natural state. This is Public Facing the Podcast with Joe Holman.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: And good day to you.
I want to pose a few questions today.
What are the biggest stories of today?
You know, the ones that are shaping your life right now.
What if they aren't actually the ones dominating your feed, but instead they're the ones quietly shifting the ground beneath everything, everywhere?
Today on Public Facing the Podcast, we'll break it all down.
In this episode, we'll touch on the most important US developments from the last 48 hours.
What's real, what matters, and what's next.
Then we go global because what happens overseas doesn't stay overseas anymore.
And later, we shift gears. We step away from the static and business and we ask a deeper question.
What actually drives your happiness?
You know, your whys and your why nots and how those shapes the life you're building right now.
Plus, a segment including some inspirational stories happening across America that remind us there is still hope in humanity and progress is still alive.
Thanks for joining us. I'm Joe Holman and this is Public Facing the Podcast.
Top US Developments. Let's start today off right right here at home.
The last 48 hours have been busy and more importantly, revealing.
Firstly, economic signals.
Those continue to gain attention on matters of inflation trends and interest rate positioning.
And policymakers are walking a tightrope right now trying to slow inflation without slowing everyday Americans too much.
With a deepening recession on the horizon, some experts are now predicting a critical supply chain collapse and shortage of goods, not just here in the US but having a global impact due largely to the war in the Middle east and not just at some point, possibly within the next 10 days.
So what does that mean for you?
A shortage of critical everyday food, materials and services.
Borrowing will stay expensive and credit cards, mortgages and even auto loans, they're not easing just yet.
And this may take some time to reset and move towards normalcy again.
Secondly, the the labor market signals still strong overall, but cracks are forming in specific sectors.
Tech layoffs are stabilizing, but hiring is not bouncing back quickly and the logistics and retail slight cooling. Surprisingly, the US economy added 178,000 jobs in March of 2026, significantly exceeding the expected 59,000 jobs.
And while unemployment declined to 4.3%, slightly below the 4.4 forecast.
Now this, this is what economists call a selective slowdown.
It's not a crash, but it's not full speed either.
And thirdly, let's talk about weather and infrastructure.
Extreme weather across multiple regions are continuing to expose weak points in infrastructure roads, power grids, even emergency response systems.
And we know this because the most recent supercell outbreak, which has spawned multiple tornadoes from Kansas, Oklahoma and on eastward through the Midwest to the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and yes, Ohio, all with some of the hardest hit areas.
And here's the bigger takeaway.
See, we're not dealing with isolated incidents anymore.
This is becoming an all too frequent of patterns.
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Let's keep going, because policy and politics are starting to reflect these pressures as well.
The the climate is changing politically, momentum is building, midterm elections are coming, messaging is shifting towards economic security, affordability, and even stability.
But without a clear plan or the support needed to boost one candidate past the others, there's a drop in efficiency and the results needed to cross the finish line.
You'll hear a lot of phrases like working families, cost of living, economic resilience.
It's not accidental.
A strategy.
Because right now, the biggest issue for most Americans isn't abstract policy.
No, it's daily life.
Groceries, rent, gas.
And political narratives are starting to align with that reality.
So what does this mean for you? Okay, let's translate all of this into real life expectations and actionable steps.
You can expect continued pressure on your monthly expenses, job markets, while they may feel stable, but they're less flexible now, and big purchases.
I still suggest that that requires a good bit of caution, because here's the nuance.
This isn't instability, no, it's it's recalibration.
A point of validity, authenticity to ensure your location and surroundings for further preparation, navigation, and for some, peace of mind.
So now, on to global developments.
Let's zoom out.
Because the global stage has been just as active.
Diplomatic tensions remain highly sensitive, yet fluid across multiple regions, with ongoing negotiations shaping future alliances.
The US has taken full control of the straight of Hormuz by way of blockades. Maritime traffic currently is open to all except Iranian ships. Now those ships are being turned around forcibly as needed.
Economic shifts are happening fast, especially in energy and technology sectors.
Countries are competing not just for power, but for influence.
And here's the reality.
Global competition is no longer just about territory.
It's about technology.
Computers, phones, televisions, radios, smart appliances, automobile components, medical devices, and the software that goes into them and more.
As far as data is concerned, every connected device, passively or otherwise, is producing data. Now, that data is stored generally inside those devices, such as by voice or keystrokes, history, text, GPS and more.
And when it comes to energy control, well, the devices that warm you up the cool you down, they light up a room or they bring darkness at the end of the day.
So how does all that come back to you?
Let's connect the dots, folks.
This is a global impact on your daily life.
Everything we just talked about affects you directly. Know it or not, it affects you directly.
Conditions of supply chains, they affect prices and availability of goods.
Energy policy that is affected.
Energy policy that affects fuel costs. Have you ever looked at your light bill and you saw the fuel adjustment cost and it's always different.
They can put any amount they want on your bill and there's not a way for you to bypass it. And there's not a way for you to change. Change how much that is, that is just a number that the energy company, whether that's your, your, you know, your gas or however even your lights and water are, are included into whatever that that fuel adjustment cost is.
Now, international tech, their competition affects jobs and the pricing of products.
The reality of things is you are not separate from global events. No, you are inside the system.
Every one of these matter.
Welcome to the Matrix, folks.
So the key theme is interdependence.
What does that mean? It's a mutually dependent relationship. And no country operates in isolation anymore.
Countries rely on other countries for their food, for their building materials, for their, their clothing, their textiles, all of that.
And when we see that and understand that, that even at a basic level, this gives you an advantage in navigating change.
Growing global interdependencies further muddy the debate, marking it harder to know who we are and what our national interests really are, unquote. Peter H. Shuck There are complex interdependencies among these factors that was pointed out by Victor H. Bennenburg when it comes to financial and entertainment snapshots. Let's see what we see.
Quick hits here.
Financial markets cautious optimism.
Investors are watching inflation closely and preparing for the recession.
Now they're being prepared so you can be prepared.
Consumer behavior, well, that's shifting towards experiences, things like travel, events, shared moments.
And consumers are really showing that they're moving away to a degree from stuff, the tangible items to accumulate. Entertainment streaming platforms continue battling for attention. And folks, your time is the real currency.
Here's a warning.
Some of those are raising prices.
YouTube premium is going up by $2 a month from 1399 to 1599.
And the family and music tiers are also increasing.
Netflix raising its prices again across all subscription tiers.
Paramount plus has gone up as well across all offerings.
I will keep you informed and up to date as changes are implemented. Now here's the part we hope you really like.
This is our feature story.
I want to ask you your whys and your why nots in the quest for happiness.
At some point you stop asking what you should do in life and instead you start asking yourself what actually matters.
No matter what you decide, that's your why.
That is your why.
But here's the twist.
You know your why not?
Well, that's just as powerful.
Why not take the leap of faith?
Why not seize the day?
Why not change direction?
Why not run a hundred miles a minute through life?
And why not walk away from someone or something that no longer fits?
Why not take on debt and risk right here, right now?
Most people don't struggle because they lack opportunity.
In fact, more commonly, they struggle because of too many opportunities. And they're unclear.
And it's that clarity that changes everything.
When your actions match your values, life just feels different.
Not perfect, not necessarily easy, but aligned in alignment, my friend.
Well, that's where real happiness begins.
Let's move on to our US Stories.
We open with Native Americans were making dice and gaming thousands of years before everyone else.
Tribal casinos in the U.S. well, they may seem more of a natural fit after hearing about new research showing that Native Americans were making dice for gaming thousands of years before anyone else in the world.
Evidence revealed that the earliest known dice in human history were made and used by hunter gatherers on the western Great Plains.
That was thousands of years before the earliest known dice from Bronze Age societies in Europe, Africa and Asia, according to scientists.
The new study, published in the journal American Antiquity, indicates that dice and games of chance have been a persistent feature of Native American culture for at least the the last 12,000 years.
The earliest examples were from 12,800 years ago, discovered at archaeological sites from the late Pleistocene Folsom era in Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico.
And these artifacts from predate the earliest known Old World dice by more than 6,000 years.
So the quote Historians had traditionally treated dice and probability as Old World innovations, said the study's author Robert Madden.
And I quote what the archaeological record shows is that ancient Native American groups were deliberately making objects designed to produce random outcomes and using those outcomes in structured games thousands of years earlier than previously recognized.
Unlike modern cubic dice, they were two sided binary lots, carefully crafted small pieces of bone that were flat or slightly rounded, often oval or rectangular in shape, and it was sized to be held in the hand and tossed in groups onto a playing surface.
The two faces of the binary lots were distinguished by applied markings, surface treatments, coloration and other visible modifications, much like heads or tails on a coin with one face designated as the counting side.
When thrown, they reliably landed with one side or the other facing upward, producing a binary or two outcome with result.
Researchers said that sets of dice were also cast together and scores were determined by how many landed with the counting face up.
Quote they're simple, elegant tools, unquote, said Madden, a PhD student at Colorado State University.
But they're also unmistakably purposeful.
These are not casual byproducts of bone working.
They were made to generate random outcomes, unquote.
The study introduced a new test, a checklist of miserable physical features for identifying North American dice are archaeologically and derived from a comparative analysis of 293 sets of such dice documented across the continent by Stuart cullen in his 1907 Bureau of American Ethnology book Games of the North American Indians.
Researchers they applied the test systematically to the published archaeological record, essentially re examining artifacts long labeled as possible gaming pieces and otherwise overlooked to determine whether they meet the new objective criteria for dice.
In most cases, Madden said, the evidence had been in the archaeological record for decades, but without a clear standard for identifying dice, it had never been analyzed as part of a larger pattern.
So what was missing was a clear continent wide standard for recognizing what we were looking at.
And using the new approach, he identified more than 600 diagnostic and probable dice from sites spanning every major period of North American prehistory.
Beginning in the late Pleistocene, they appeared at 57 archaeological sites across 12 state region associated with a variety of different cultures.
Now, historians of mathematics widely regard dice games as humanity's earliest structured engagement with randomness, an intellectual precursor to probability theory, statistics and later scientific thinking.
Until now, the origins of such practices were thought to lie exclusively in old world complex societies beginning around 5,500 years ago.
These findings showed they were intentionally creating, observing and relying on random outcomes in repeatable rule based ways that leveraged probabilistic regularities such as the law of large numbers that matters for now and how we understand the global history of probabilistic thinking. But Medden had other theories too.
He says games of chance and gambling created neutral rule governed spaces for ancient Native Americans. They allowed people from different groups to interact, exchange goods and information, form alliances and manage uncertainty.
In that sense, they function as powerful social technologies.
Our next story is on April's Lyrid meteor shower to streak across moonless sky for a perfect stargazing show this from the Good News Network by Clemen Francker with the Earth having welcomed the month of April with a full moon, several celestial events will follow that promise to provide a perfect reason to get out into the shortening spring nights.
Chief among these will be the opportunity to see the Lyrid meteor shower from the light of the Moon. During the peak night of the 22nd and 23rd of April.
From a dark sky area far from city lights, observers can spot up to 15 shooting stars per hour, which manifest to our eyes as streaking fireballs in the night sky.
Far from being stars, they are actually fragments of of the Comet c. 1861 G1 Thatcher.
Every year the Earth passes through the comet's orbit as if it were the wake of a motorboat.
And as the comet hurtles through the solar system, it sheds material like ice and dust which burn up in the Earth's atmosphere.
During that special period we pass through that debris trail.
Now, the Lyrids are one of the most active spring meteor showers, and with the moon setting before midnight, it promises to be particularly showy this year.
Even though they originate with the comet Thatcher, they're called the Lyrids because the point in the sky was where the piers they originate from is found near the constellation Lyra.
To find Lyra, all one need do is find the second brightest star in the northern hemisphere, Vega.
Vega is so bright it was the first star ever photographed with a daguerreotype plate in the year 1850.
Now, a few days before the Lyrids peak, a new moon occurs on April 17th.
That's tomorrow and presents as a the perfect time to drive to a dark sky area and observe the Milky Ways galactic core, which is highly visible during this month's predawn hours.
A truly dark sky, not only lacking a moon, but any kind of significant light pollution from street lighting is needed to see the galactic core.
But the reward for making the drive out to such a rural area will be millions of stars and beautiful bands of white and gray across the sky.
The perfect introduction to a young boy or girl to the true scope of the cosmos in our next story. Also from the Good News Network, Restaurant Owner Shelves Easter Plans to Fulfill Dying Man's Last Wish to to Feed His Hospice Nurses this is by Andy Corbley.
From New York comes the story of a restaurant owner who shelved his Easter plans to fulfill a dying man's last wish.
Jokingly described as looking like a, quote, a bad a big bad biker guy by his brother, 67 year old father of three, Frank Osmec had a last wish as he approached his final hours to repay some of the kindness he had received.
For six weeks, Osmec had been undergoing cancer treatment at Niagara Hospice.
With no success and little time of life left, Frank asked his younger brother Ken for one final favor. He wanted to treat the nursing staff to a meal.
Ken Osmik looked around on the Internet but realized everywhere was closed on Easter.
Eventually, Ken got through to someone, Tommy Malani, owner of Sub Delicious Pizza and Subs in Lockport.
I said absolutely, whatever you need, Ken, melanie told Local News wkbw adding of the hospice nurses, they do an amazing job there. They're all saints.
Now. Melanie put his Easter plans on hold while he whipped up, flipped up and delivered pizzas for the entire nursing staff.
Ken said that he was beyond grateful for Melanie for helping his family at the time of loss.
Quote to me it means the world to see that kindness, that greatness spread, he told wkbw.
And I hope when people see the story that they take it and say why can't we do this and spread joy and kindness to each other.
Enriched by a close relationship with the great outdoors his whole life, Frank Usbeck was also a music lover who liked to attend the annual Niagara Falls Blues Festival. He is survived by his three children and five grandchildren.
Now these stories, they don't always trend, but they matter.
I am the messenger and the storyteller and I bring the stories that many won't.
Let's move on to basically where we're we're here at the segment that I like to call the Final Word.
Now, today, today we moved fast from headlines to humanity, from systems to self.
Here's what stands out.
Everything is changing, but not randomly.
There are patterns, there are signals, there's choices.
The world will keep moving.
A real question is, are you moving with intention?
Because your why?
That's not in the news.
That's in you, my friend. Thanks for listening.
This is Public Facing the Podcast and I'm Joe Holman.
More episodes are available at Public Facing Podcast Stream or you'll find us on
[email protected] publicfacingpod until next time, stay aware, stay curious, stay human, and I'll keep bringing the conversation and that energy, keeping the topics that matter.
Public Facing.
Bye for now.
[00:34:30] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to Public Facing the Podcast with Joe Holman. Visit us online at publicfacingpod Stream and on x@x com PublicFacingPod.
