Ep 38. What Ancestry, Culture, Stories, Elders, & Marketing Might Teach Us About Being More Human (w/ Tad Hargrave)

It’s been a while since I’ve had a guest around the fire for a host of reasons but today, for this new moon, I’m joined by Tad Hargrave of Marketing for Hippies (among other culture-making endeavors).

I got to meet Tad back in October in Edinburgh where we were both in town for the Scottish International Storytelling Festival and enjoyed our post-story session conversations around mutual interests of culture, myths, ancestral wisdom, and being human and humane. 

I’m delighted to be able to invite you into conversation with him, too.

Tad currently lives in Duncan, BC, though he hails from Edmonton, AB (traditionally known, in the local indigenous language of the Cree, as Amiskwaciy (Beaver Hill) and later Amiskwaciwaskihegan (Beaver Hill House) and his ancestors come primarily from Scotland with some from the Ukraine as well.

His bio page on his website has several different versions and is a testament to what I would name as the meeting point of wandering, wondering curiosity and depth of connection. At the core, it seems Tad has always been interested in stories, craft, music, leadership, building community around positive change, and creating events for people to come together to make good things happen. He’s also an accomplished sleight of hand magician and speaks Scottish Gaelic with conversational fluency!

So what will you hear in this conversation? 

Join us for our musings around:

• moving beyond the individual to a reverent acknowledgement of the line we came from;
• ancestral wisdom, preserved with us in mind, and encoded in stories and other folklore;
• why stories had to be changed to survive and how we can flesh the bones back out again to find the deeper meaning;
• the difference between stories and spells;
• the cultural wealth still present in Europe in spite of rupture and colonization;
• what it might mean to be more human, especially as our ancestors might have conceived of it;
• what the function of culture is and how it’s created;
• the difference between how empire views evolution and how nature seems to view it;
• how ethical marketing ties in with it all…

and more.

There’s a lot packed into this conversation - with some wisdom, curiosity, grief, and gratitude.

And, to paraphrase the Martín Prechtel quote Tad shares towards the end of the conversation, an attempt to be beautiful on the way to some answers.  

What does being more human mean to you? We'd love to hear.

You’re welcome here with us around the fire.

May we fall in love with the world around us and let ourselves be moved by that love into beautiful action.

You can find Tad:

Website – https://marketingforhippies.com/

Substack - https://tadhargrave.substack.com/

And if you've come for Tad, I hope you'll stick around for more conversations to access, repair, inspire, and evolve our humanity and serve the wild, tender aliveness of our personal and collective hearts.

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