text: The Astrology Podcast
  Transcript of Episode 434, titled:
  With Chris Brennan and Austin Coppock
  Episode originally released on January 27, 2024
  Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: email@example.com
  Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo
  Transcription released February 15th, 2024
  Copyright © 2024 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
  CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Joining me today is astrologer Austin Coppock, and we’re gonna be looking at the astrological forecast for the entire month of February of 2024. Hey Austin – thanks for joining me.
  AUSTIN COPPOCK: Hey Chris. Nice to be here.
  CB: We are back again. We’re gonna do a little bit lower of a expectation than we did last time, last month where we forecasted the entire year ahead. This month, we’re just gonna look at the next four weeks, which seems almost sort of pitiful in comparison, but still nice to get back to something a little bit more manageable.
  AC: Yeah. Right? Well, it’s sort of the same project but just looking at that one twelfth with greater magnification – with, you know, one more month of data.
  CB: Exactly. And we’ve got some exciting stuff to go through. So we’re gonna spend the first hour catching up on some, like, news and events that have happened from an astrological standpoint in the past month since we did our last forecast in mid-December and then the second half of this episode, we’re gonna look ahead at february and focus on the astrology of next month and doing a deep dive into that over the course over the second half of the episode. So as always, there’s gonna be timestamps on the podcast website or in the description below this video on YouTube for those watching the video version. So if you wanna jump ahead to the forecast section, then go ahead and use those timestamps. All right. Let me jump into this and give a quick overview of February first before we get into the news section.
  All right. Here’s the planetary alignments calendar for February, and right at the top of the month the first thing that happens is that Mercury ingresses into Aquarius or moves into Aquarius on February 5th and then immediately forms a conjunction with Pluto, which has just recently moved into Aquarius in late January. Then we have a New Moon in the sign of Aquarius on the 9th of February, which is square Uranus. The following week, Mars moves into Aqaruius on the 13th, and then immediately conjoins Pluto in the first degree of that sign on the 14th, in February, so we’ve got a interesting looking Valentine’s Day there with Mars conjunct Pluto. Two days later, Venus moves into Aqaruius on the 16th, conjoins Pluto on the 17th, then the Sun moves into Pisces on the 18th. Mars and Venus conjoin in the sign of Aquarius on the 22nd. Mercury moves into Pisces on the 23rd. Then we get our second lunation of the month, which is a Full Moon in the sign of Virgo, on the 24th. Then Mars squares Jupiter on the 27th, and then we get a triple conjunction of the Sun, Mercury, and Saturn all in Pisces on the 28th of February. And that is the sort of quick overview of the astrology that we’re gonna be talking about in this episode for February.
  All right. How are you doing? How’s 2024 treating you so far?
  AC: Busy. Busy. The Mars in Capricorn, that Mars-Jupiter trine between Mars in Capricorn and Jupiter in Taurus – it’s just seen a lot of projects. I’ve been working a lot of things, getting a lot done, but there’s a lot to do. There’s a remodel happening in part of the house; there’s a new kitten; there’s – you know, work, work, work. It’s very martial. It’s all going well. But, you know, I’m reminded that even when Mars is in, you know, a pretty bonafide positioned where it’s trine Jupiter and it’s, you know, in a sign that it exalts, it’s still a pain in the ass, it’s still loud, it’s still tiring. It just means that the things that you intend to get done actually get done.
  CB: Yeah, for sure. It’s been interesting seeing the Mars in Capricorn energy lately as well as the Jupiter sextiling Saturn has been interesting as well – some of the balance from that between growth and expansion. And then of course just Pluto going into Aquarius – there’s been this explosion of tech stories. So in the news section here, the majority of my news stories are like, tech stories, but a lot of that’s just reflective of this huge shift that we’re going into here with Pluto going into Aquarius for the next 20 years and some of the changes in the world and in society that are gonna be associated with that. So why don’t we jump into talking about that?
  First story in the news – flying cars. Like, we’re finally in the flying car era of history now that we’ve hit 2024. It’s a little bit late. Like, I was told by Hollywood and by like, Back to the Future that we’d have like, flying skateboards by now, so I’ve been a little bit disappointed until this point. But some of the news stories happening this month is that this is apparently gonna be the year where a bunch of companies are launching EVTOL vehicles, which are electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, which are essentially like, large, electronic drones, except they’re ones that people can ride in. And there’s gonna be a major launch later this year by a company called Volocopter that’s aiming for about the time of the Paris Olympics this summer, and they’re hoping to transport tourists on five different routes with speeds up to 70 miles per hour or 110 kilometers per hour. So this is amazing, not just because of Pluto in Aquarius, but also because Jupiter’s going into Gemini this year, which is something we talked about being associated with like, travel and like, different forms of travel and just like, getting around locally. But here, what we have is an advancement in that in terms of technology, a really tangible one, where people are gonna be getting around their city faster than they used to before. Because the purpose of these vehicles apparently is to get around short distances, like, cities quicker, than like, a car or a bus would, and I thought that was really fascinating.
  AC: Yeah, it’s right on the nose. You know, having snuck a peak and contributed to our list of stories, a lot of this Pluto in Aquarius stuff that’s happening just as Pluto re-entered is – how do I put this? – deeply uncreative in the sense that it’s not surprising. It’s like, kind of exactly what we’ve been talking about since we’ve been talking about Pluto in Aquarius, and we are good astrologers but this was not a hard assignment in the sense that it’s almost like, cliche, let’s try all the science fiction things, but for real. And so yeah, flying cars are not a surprise, right? What it is that – they’re EVTOLs, right? And we’ve had VTOL – VTOL’s been a designation for vehicles for some time, but these are electronic and they’re consumer rather than military-facing, or civilian rather than military-facing. And they look very different. They look like – they have the design of drones. Well, a lot of the drones – some drones look like planes, but these are the ones that look like cute little multi-rotor helicopters.
  CB: Yeah, exactly. So it’s like, that company’s launching one. Hyundai just unveiled their air taxi at a recent consumer trade expo as well, and there’s another company that’s also launching like, a self-piloted sort of short distance vehicle as well where apparently you don’t need a pilot’s license as long as you’re flying over a rural area. So they say – like, I was reading a article on The Economist, and they say that this is estimated or projected to be a market that’s gonna be worth over a trillion dollars by 2040, and I thought the timing on that was interesting because of course, that’s when we’ll be getting towards of the end of this 20-year Pluto in Aquarius period. So this is one of the major areas that we can expect some transformation of society and culture in some ways through technology that’s gonna be different by the time we leave this Pluto in Aquarius period compared to when we went into it. And I’m sure that’s just gonna get accelerated like crazy once Uranus goes into Gemini here next year.
  AC: Yeah, yeah, certainly. This particular set of technologies begs the same question that – or asks the same question that so many emerging applications do, which is, okay, so that – we can build a thing that does that, but how is that going to work at scale? Right? And what role will it eventually end up having? Right? Because we can imagine a near-future city skyline buzzing with these little air taxis and this and that, because we’ve seen in literally a hundred times in movies. But is that how it actually fits into the world? And that’s a question that all this stuff keeps asking to me is like, okay, that can be done, but how does it fit into the world? You know, it’s not whether – the question is not, “Can that be done?” But “How is that actually going to fit into the world?”
  AC: So yeah. And how – you know, this is the Saturnian part of Aqaruius – what new, in order to fit into the world, what kind of rules or regulations are going to have to be in place? Because right now, yeah, there’s the one that you can fly without a license. If there’s widespread adoption, like, that’s not gonna be the case.
  CB: Yeah, that’s gonna be a disaster. Well, that’s part of it is that right now, one of the companies – Volocopter’s goal was to have, their goal is to have pilotless, self-flying vehicles, so there you’re talking about basically like, AI being used to like, fly people around the city automatically without human input. But right now, due to current regulations as well as due to like, the state of AI still being very early on, the government’s like, “No, you can’t do that.” So there has to be like, a pilot piloting these things. But I think that’s one of the Pluto in Aquarius themes that we’ll see in the long term is just as AI gets better and better with self-driving cars and such, like with – you know, Tesla’s doing, that’s gonna be transplanted to air travel as well, apparently, as well.
  AC: Well, yeah. And I mean, even commercial flights for a long time have had the computer take over for most of the time between takeoff and landing.
  CB: Right. For sure.
  AC: You know, we’ll see more of that. But like, some of this that’s presented as completely revolutionary is actually just – well, what if we could do that other 20 percent with a computer?
  CB: Yeah. Well, and I guess I forgot to mention that in the Pluto in Aquarius episode that I did this month, because I took your suggestion so that we didn’t spend like, five hours talking about Pluto in Aquarius in the last episode and I did that as a separate episode with Nick Dagan Best where we went through Pluto in Aquarius in history. A point that I forgot to make in that episode towards the end is often times when there was like, a new technology introduced, sometimes it involved just the complete decimation of like, a previous technology that had been used up to that point or a previous method of doing work or doing things. So like, you know, when paper was eventually developed by China and was imported into the West, it ended up completely supplanting the preexisting use of papyrus, which had been used in Egypt as like, the primary writing method for millenia. So we’re seeing a similar thing here with AI where a lot of these new technologies have the potential to just like, not just displace and decimate previous technologies, but in some instances also like, different work forces. There’s already a lot of people that just are concerned or just know that their jobs are potentially on the line when some of these technologies are fully matured and developed and sort of unleashed.
  AC: Yeah, definitely.
  CB: Yeah. All right. So that’s one major area that we’re gonna be paying attention to this year because I think that’s gonna be one of our main keywords by the end of this year is the electric vertical takeoff and landing sort of vehicles. In other Pluto in Aquarius news, Google – an internal memo was leaked from Google recently saying that their primary goal in 2024 is to deliver quote – to quote unquote “deliver the world’s most advanced, safe, and responsible AI,” and they’re expected to release a new state-of-the-art version of their Gemini AI some time very soon. So that’s something I’m gonna be paying attention to, and —
  AC: Like when Jupiter goes into Gemini?
  CB: I mean, you know, that’s probably – you know, we wouldn’t be surprised. It might be sooner than that, but certainly by the time Jupiter goes into Gemini, I think that’s gonna be the main thing, because I’ve been using the sort of early version of that recently, and I really like it a lot more than the other AI that people have been using, which is ChatGPT.
  So tied in with that, on January 22nd, I thought this was really interesting, just like, right after, just days after Pluto went into Aquarius on the 20th, a company called Berkeley Artificial Intelligence, their researchers showed off a video of their general purpose humanoid robot that was just like, walking around San Francisco. And for me, this was like, one of the most surreal things to see that I was paying attention to and noticed in the news right after Pluto went into Aquarius is – you just have this little robot. He’s just strolling around town, just walking around. He’s a happy robot. I appreciate that his like, steps, or his gait is kind of short, because I feel like I could outrun that robot. That’s one of the things that makes it less intimidating. But I just thought this was a really surreal image at the very – because remember, we’re at the very beginning of this 20 year period of Pluto in Aquarius, and sometimes – like with BitCoin, when Pluto first went into Capricorn and BitCoin was first developed, sometimes technologies you see just starting to emerge at the beginning of a period like that, by the end, you see them becoming much more common and much more all over the place. So that’s one thing that caught my eye.
  AC: Yeah, that’s part of the like, near-future, sci-fi/cyberpunk dystopia checklist that Pluto in Aquarius is doing a really good job of filling out, right? Like, flying cars —
  AC: — drones, yeah, humanoid robots —
  CB: We’re in the flying cars and robots-walking-around-San-Francisco era of history. I appreciate that.
  AC: I’ll let you know whether I appreciate it or not. I’m certainly intrigued.
  CB: Certainly intrigued. All right.
  AC: Again, I would like – where’s my power armor?
  AC: That’s part of the cyberpunk expansion pack, the DLC for our current civilization that I’d like to see happen.
  CB: Yeah. Where is your like, mech suit? That’s what you’re looking for.
  AC: Yeah. Well, no, just like, powered armor – it can be human – like, a powered exoskeleton.
  CB: Okay. I like that. Well, I mean, honestly, like I’m not – nothing is off the table at this point. So we’re joking about that, but you know, we’ll see how it goes in the next few years.
  AC: Oh, I’m half-joking about it. I mean, it’s been in development for well over a decade – or several companies and militaries have been working on for well over a decade. They just haven’t worked it out yet.
  CB: Yeah. All right. So other things that happened – CES, which is the Consumer Technology Association Trade Show, happened in Vegas this past month in the middle of January. One of the most interesting things I saw astrologically was one company unveiled the world’s first transparent glass panel that also contained a micro-LED screen. So it was really wild, because it was like, a transparent like, wall, a glass panel, but images could be viewed on it like a television so that you can both see through it but also see images projected onto it at the same time. And I thought that was like, very Saturn conjunct Neptune, because it’s like, a wall with an ambiguous boundary that you can see illusory stuff in.
  AC: Yeah, that’s perfect. That’s Project Samsara.
  CB: Yeah. So that’s gonna be a major Saturn conjunct Neptune theme, and that’s something that we had talked about. Here’s a – let me see if I can actually show that actually really quick for the sake of those watching the video version. Here it is. So it’s just like, a piece of glass, but then all of a sudden you’re like, watching stuff projected onto it while still being able to see through it. So again, we’re at the very beginning of this, so just imagine once this technology starts becoming, having greater societal like, penetration, it’s kind of like, all over the place, then you’re again getting into other sort of like, cyberpunk sort of futuristic type things that we used to see in like, movies and things, but this is like, actually happening.
  Yeah, so that was really interesting. On a similar Saturn conjunct Neptune note, Apple has finally released their virtual reality headset called Vision Pro. It’s coming out February 2nd, but they’ve been releasing to the media and doing a huge media blitz over the past week or two ever since Pluto went into Aquarius. And they’re pushing really hard to call it “spatial computing,” which I thought was interesting in terms of the Saturn conjunct Neptune theme that we’re talking about this year and that’s relevant for this, and they’re actually avoiding calling it the more standard designations of augmented reality, virtual reality or mixed reality even though that’s what it is and what category it falls into. And they’re calling it spatial computing and a spatial operating system because part of the thing is they have different apps that you’re supposed to use that you can put this on and then have like, 10 screens in front of you in different places if you wanted to in order to increase productivity. But —
  AC: That does not sound particularly —
  AC: Does having 30 windows open on your computer increase productivity?
  CB: I mean, I do have a lot of tabs open, I have to say. But having them all in front of me at once may be a little bit distracting. You’ve got a point there. But it is interesting that it has this dial where you can dial up the virtual reality or you can dial it back into like, seeing your surroundings in front of you, and I think that’s gonna be —
  AC: That’s really interesting.
  CB: — one of our keywords, I think, for this year in retrospect is gonna be like, with Saturn conjunct Neptune, is like, you know, turning up or down the tuning in and out of like, this world and being connected with reality versus being in some other place where suddenly you’re not in reality.
  AC: That’s really interesting, both as an actual technology but also just metaphorically. Like, being able to find that knob and adjust how much of an overlay you’re getting – that’s really interesting.
  CB: Exactly. I think we’re all, by the end of this year, gonna wish we had one of those knobs just for everything in terms of just all the crazy events happening this year, especially like, politics and other stuff that’s gonna ramp up and wanting to tune out of that and that might be also just part of the general theme as well in a more, I don’t’ know, philosophical or almost like, spiritual sense in terms of that.
  AC: Yeah. That’s funny. It’s like, your gnostic adjuster.
  CB: Right. So the last thing about that is just the killer app to me that’s part of this Vision Pro that I think could be a bigger thing in the long term is it has the ability to use your iPhone to take a panoramic picture, like a still image that’s panoramic, or to record a full 3D vision using your iPhone. But then you can use this Vision Pro headset to watch it later as if you were there, and it will give you the sense of like, being there in person and being able to like, look around in a full 360 view of what you were able to see at that time when you were present there. And I think that’s really interesting because it seems to represent like, a evolution in terms of originally we had, you know, pictures, like still images, like a single image that you can just see a frame of what could be seen in the frame of that picture. Then eventually we had video, which is like, still restricted to the frame of what you could see, but it’s like a moving picture. But now this next new version is like having that, capturing a moment in time in a set of images or video, but being able to move your head and like, look around at what was in the vicinity at that time as well. So I think that’s something else that’s emerging in terms of both the Saturn-Neptune conjunction as well as some of the Pluto in Aquarius like, technology things.
  AC: And you can see that having a lot of entertainment applications. It seems like it’d be really good for real estate, for you know, the buying and selling of real estate. Yeah, that’s really interesting. Maybe engineering? Who knows.
  CB: Yeah. And it’s like, obviously the downsides are gonna be there as well because we already have increasingly like, you see those pictures at concerts and like, if you see an audience at a concert, there’s just like, hundreds of people holding up phones in that way being somewhat like, disconnected from the moment or being more disconnected from it, but then in another sense capturing the moment and preserving it in some ways. So there’s an interesting tension between those two that we’ll have to pay attention to as a continuing theme of both immersion in a moment or virtual immersion in a moment, but also a stepping back or a disconnection from the moment at the same time.
  AC: Yeah, and so again, this brings up the same question that all of these do, which is sort of both how does it work in practice when it’s deployed, and then the second part of that is how do people act around it? Right, because —
  AC: — you know, you can see a cultural reaction where people become more disconnected from, you know, normal reality, or you can, you know, sometimes when things move too far in one direction, then that finally provokes a rejection culturally. You know, the – yeah, it’s all really interesting and it all begs these questions, right, like what – so this can be done, and then what happens when we do it? Right? And that – you know, the reason – so this keeps getting brought up to me, and this also speaks to a very core part of Aquarius, which is the power of the experiment.
  AC: You know, this is, you know, when I teach Aquarius in Astrology one-oh-one, one of the sort of paradigms I always try to get people to bring to it is it’s experimental, and you know, you want Saturnian data. Like, you have to see whether it works, how it works, whether there are unforeseen consequences, whether there are benefits you didn’t even imagine, but there’s always a certain risk in experiment. In a sense, every experiment always works because you always get data. Right? You always move from the unknown to the known. But there, you know, there’s a reason why an empirical component is necessary to any would-be scientific method. But you have to see what actually happens, and part of that is cultural as well as practical, economic, and physics-based and all of that.
  CB: Yeah. And I love that because Aquarius more than any other sign loves to experiment for the sake of experimentation and the sake of like, knowledge, and just like seeing what works and like, seeing what would happen if I did this or like, combined these two things, and just a fascination for technology. But sometimes it sort of like, stops there or that’s the extent of it where it’s like, there’s other signs where you start thinking about or dealing with, “But what are the implications of that, or what’s the implications for society?”
  AC: Yeah. And I would say as a Venus in Aquarius, the joy of discovery is one of Aqaruius’s principle pleasures, right? The joy of discovering something that’s real, that’s part of the real, that you had no idea about. Right? And it’s like, you know, that’s its own irreplaceable flavor of pleasure or joy. It’s one of the 31 flavors.
  CB: Right. And then the last thing is with Pluto, though, moving into sign, one of the things with Pluto transits is like, Pluto stuff – it just tells you, it’s like, “This is happening one way or another.” Like, this is happening, and this isn’t something you can change. And I think that’s the state that we’re gonna find ourselves in increasingly with some of these technologies like AI is like, all this stuff is happening, and it’s not something that you can put the brakes on and bring to a full stop because so many different people – there’s so much momentum and so many people are trying to develop different things that it becomes a thing that to some extent with some of these technologies you end up having to go with – I don’t wanna say because you don’t have a choice, but just that with Pluto, there’s often a sense of like, compulsion —
  CB: — there, if that makes sense.
  AC: The experiment is happening, right? There’s no opting out of all this stuff getting deployed and then being part of the dataset for what happens.
  CB: Yeah. Well, and I saw somebody say like, recently in a discussion about AI stuff, that AI stuff is happening one way or another and he said it’s a race – it will be a race to both the quote-unquote “good guys and bad guys” will be developing AI, and so the good guys just need to have better AI than the bad guys is the only way that that race is gonna be won. And I thought it was interesting that some people were framing it in that way or that was their mindset at least.
  AC: Yeah. I think that’s probably not enough dimensions.
  CB: Right, yeah.
  AC: That would be my suspicion. I would say —
  AC: — there’s also the incompetent and the competent, and the incompetent but well-intended may do more damage than any other faction.
  CB: Yeah. All right. So, related though, going back to the VR thing, you actually had noticed a story that was relevant to that, right?
  AC: Yeah, in my class forum, somebody put up a link to – right after Pluto went in Aquarius – to a Japanese high school that is going to do an experiment with a completely virtual high school where all the students will attend via their computers and they will have anime avatars, and we’ll see what happens.
  CB: Wow, that’s wild. I mean, yeah, I guess that’s an inevitability and like, makes sense, but it’s interesting that we’re already there at this point.
  AC: It’s all so on the nose, right?
  AC: So looking at my cyberpunk dystopia checklist, the only thing I’m not seeing in our rundown is bio augments, which I know are being worked on, but like —
  AC: — brain-computer interfaces and limb or organ replacements, which we probably just didn’t look hard enough, but that’s —
  AC: — another essential part of that, of what was imagined then. And let me just say something – like, it sounds like I’m kind of joking and I am kind of joking, but what’s interesting about all of these like, near-future visions, which I’m abbreviating as cyberpunk dystopia, is that that genre and those visions really all happen during Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto in Libra, right after the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in the early ‘80s. And what’s interesting about that is from a 200-year long cycle, Jupiter-Saturn cycle perspective, that was a jump ahead into the 200 years of air before we were actually done with earth. And so that was – and it just so happened that Pluto was in the same sign, air sign, as that little bit too early Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Libra. But we got all of these quite prophetic fictional landscapes from that period about now. And a lot of them are dated from like, now – a lot of them, they start like, late ‘20s and then they run, you know, into mid-century. But that was the perfect time for a fictionalized early vision of this phase to come through; it’s really interesting.
  CB: That’s really – and I love that, yeah, because you have that conjunction in 1980, but then you have the back – it went back to earth signs in 2000, but then in 2020 we’re back permanently to air signs.
  AC: Yeah, and so there was this sort of this preview or this sizzle reel of the future. I just wanna add one more thing about that – one of the sort of principal architects of that vision or a number of sort of seminal cyberpunk authors, William Gibson, when asked about – when people started seeing his stuff come true with the internet launching and being widely adopted like, I don’t know, 15 years after his books got popular, they were like, “Oh, how do you think so well about technology? You know, how are you making these predictions?” And he said he doesn’t think about technology; he thinks about and observes how people act around technology. And that was his principal focus.
  CB: That’s a brilliant insight, yeah, because people dynamics are often very similar. That’s one of the things I was surprised about and it’s fascinated me about studying ancient astrology is we think about ancient people, ancient life being so different, but in fact that’s the reason why Western astrology and the system that was created 2,000 years ago still works, because a lot of the fundamental dynamics of life are still very similar.
  AC: Yeah. I mean, there’s the – right, there’s a new technology which gives an advantage in this field, how do people act around it? Right?
  AC: You know, whether it’s agriculture or warfare or you know, whatever.
  CB: Yeah, for sure. So you had noticed a story I had missed about that is a nice preview of some of the things we talked about in the year ahead forecast that I was bringing up a lot about potential use of some of these technologies, especially the Saturn-Neptune stuff, to deceive people when it comes to like, politics and some of the election stuff that’ll probably happen, which we saw last time there was a Saturn-Neptune alignment in 2016. But it seemed like you had noticed like, a little early preview of what we were kind of anticipating there.
  AC: Yeah, just this week there was a story that was run about the New Hampshire primaries. Apparently, there was a robo-call that was going out to registered Democrats that had a faked version of Biden’s voice who was telling them that – this fake Biden was telling them that their votes were so important that they shouldn’t use them up in the primary by voting for him. They should instead “save their vote” for the main election, which is of course not how voting works. But you know, it was, you know, “This is a message from your president,” et cetera, et cetera, and it wasn’t. And so that part of the – not the cool, cyberpunk checklist, but the 2024 checklist that, you know, how do people act around technology? They will leverage technology to win political power or to prevent people from obtaining political power. So it was nice to see that that’s already started.
  CB: Yeah. Big quotes, air quotes —
  CB: — yeah, it was astrologer good “nice” when you see something terrible happening but you’re so impressed that the astrology’s lining up well that you’re almost not even mad, except we’re gonna see a lot more of that this year. On a more – I don’t know – positive note but a similar vein, I saw there was some photos like, going viral, and they were these AI-generated photos that looked lifelike of like, Trump and Biden hanging out together and they were like, baking cookies and just like, being best pals, and that was a similar sort of thing in terms of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction this year in just the use of AI to generate photos and to try to influence things politically by creating misinformation basically is gonna be so prevalent this year. Because it’s not just happening with photo, but it’s also increasingly happening with video, and I think people are gonna be shocked by the end of the year at how fast the AI-generated video component of things develops and how lifelike it starts to end up looking.
  AC: Yeah, we’re gonna have to – excuse me – we’re going to have to get a lot sharper quickly, which probably won’t happen —
  AC: — you know, at least statistically. I saw a mildly convincing AI-generated version of Biden and Trump and George Bush, Jr. And Obama playing Dungeons & Dragons.
  AC: On YouTube. It’s pretty good.
  CB: Yeah. That’s pretty entertaining I feel like at least. All right.
  AC: I think Obama was DMing. Anyway.
  CB: Yeah. Maybe in an alternative world – I mean, I kind of like that use of it to create like, alternative, happier timelines when politicians are, I don’t know, friendlier to each other or not as jerks to each other.
  AC: That’s what’s actually happening behind the scenes in the secret societies is they’re just playing D&D.
  CB: Okay. That’s what happens at like, the – what’s the one in California? Like, the grove place?
  AC: Oh, Bohemian Grove, right.
  CB: Yeah, Bohemian Grove.
  AC: I mean, Bohemian Grove seems pretty LARP-y.
  CB: Yeah. From what I hear. All right, so moving on to other Saturn conjunct Neptune things. There was another major thing in the news that was really evocative of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, which is that over the past month, global sea trade has slowed down dramatically due to the Houthis in Yemen attacking cargo ships in the Red Sea, and this is now forcing ships instead of going through the Red Sea with cargo to instead go all the way around Africa and all the way around the Cape of Good Hope in order to carry goods and other stuff. So something like 12 percent of all global trade then has been disrupted. And it’s really interesting how that fits the symbolism, that you literally have like, a slowing down, which is Saturn, of sea trade and things like that, which is Neptune.
  AC: Yeah, and of course it’s Saturn, so it’s targeting a choke point or a narrowing. So do you know what the name of the entry point into the Red Sea, the southern entry point not the Suez Canal, do you know what that entry point is called? It’s pertinent.
  AC: It’s the Gate of Tears, which is —
  CB: Oh wow.
  AC: — such a Saturn in Pisces thing.
  AC: And so yeah, that – so that started, that got going while Mars was in Sagittarius squaring Saturn in Pisces, and recently with Mars’s movement into Capricorn and sextiling Saturn in Pisces, we’ve seen retaliatory action from the US military and you know, as I was telling you, as I’ve been watching this, it just makes – it feels like it’s just leading towards whatever happens during the Mars-Saturn conjunction in Pisces, which is late March. It’s perfect in mid-April, but it starts late March. Because that Saturn in Pisces screams restriction of trade by waterways, and then with the configuration of Mars, right, conflict around that. And so the square gave us the increased attacks, the sextile gave us retaliatory action, and then where will we be, right? In a few months when we have the Mars-Saturn conjunction in Pisces, which is course – because it’s a conjunction – sets the stage for another two years of Mars-Saturn action being sort of like a New Moon for difficult things. And then —
  CB: Yeah. Which we talked about being related to the ocean because we’d seen an early preview of that in like, June, when Saturn first stationed in Pisces and we saw the explosion of that story about the submarine that sank as well as other disasters that were happening in the ocean at the time. So it was one of the things we like, talked about on the year ahead forecast just last month, and it was interesting seeing just such a literal version of that here.
  AC: Yeah, and you know, it really struck me that the Gate of Tears thing – you know, there are Pisces – we’re prone to melancholy. And so having Saturn a gate – what is the Pisces Saturn gate called? Oh, it’s the Gate of Tears. And just reminding me that Saturn rules gates and choke points, right? It’s not the open ocean so much as it is this like, this fluid corridor where it matters a lot whether things can pass through or not.
  And then it brought up, to me, another Pluto in Aquarius tech point, and so this point again – this point’s relevant to a lot of these concerns, but in this case, it was the economics of expensive and sophisticated weapons systems versus effective weapons systems. So there’s a lot of criticism because in order to shoot down some of the drones which were used to attack shipping vessels, those drones cost about 2,000 dollars, and some of the missiles – the incredibly sophisticated missiles with their great guidance systems – in order to nullify them, you know, they were spending a million dollars a pop for interceptors. Right? So that’s, I don’t know, what? Is that a 50,000 to one? No, 5,000 to one cost differential. And so you know, we’re really seeing a lot of these Pluto in Aquarius technologies at the “This can be done” stage, and there’s the human reaction and there’s, you know, scaling as challenges, but then there’s also the economics. Right? Like, with the robots, it’s like, even if you know, a terrifying and efficacious robots can be made, if they cost 70 million dollars apiece, that’s never going to be part of the real for most people, right? And that’s not an estimate of how much they’re gonna cost; I’m just saying for example, you know, if something incredibly sophisticated and expensive can be nullified extremely cheaply or is in competition with something cheaper, even if something miraculous can be created, then it doesn’t really become part of the world if there’s a vastly cheaper alternative, and that’s part of all of this stuff, all of these new technologies or new applications.
  CB: Yeah, that’s a great theme to pay attention to as an emergent theme during this time. Good point. And you know, of course, part of the scary thing about this is whether this is touching off like, a larger regional war, which seeing an escalation of all of this stuff in that area is a little scary, so we’ll have to pay attention to it and keep an eye on it. Julie in the comments says – a patron in the live audience who’s joining us today – says, “I work in the fishing/US government sector and commercial quota and allocations have been greatly reduced.” So I thought that —
  AC: Oh, Saturn in Pisces.
  CB: Yeah, exactly. So I thought that was great. All right. So moving on to other stories. The last like, major one I saw was like, a social media story but it was one involving like, a timed birth chart, so I thought it was interesting. So there was this story about a woman named Gypsy Rose Blanchard who was recently released from jail, and this was really big a few weeks ago, but it happened after our last forecast, so I thought I would mention it because the astrology was just stunningly striking.
  So here’s a little summary where her – Gypsy’s mother had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, which is a mental illness in which a caregiver fabricates or exaggerates an illness in a dependent person for attention or sympathy. So in this case, the mother convinced the daughter that she had a number of medical conditions, including muscular dystrophy, leukemia, and asthma, and the daughter was subjected to unnecessary medical procedures and surgeries throughout her life, which is this really crazy story, and eventually what happened was the daughter got together with like, a boyfriend online, and they ended up hatching a plot to like, murder the daughter’s mother, which they did, and then both were caught and sent to jail. But I think partially due to the circumstances of what the mother had put the daughter through, she received a lighter sentence of like, a decade in prison, and then eventually was just released after only eight years in prison after being convicted of second degree murder.
  So what’s really interesting is I just happened to glance at it and noticed we had a timed birth chart. And first off, the daughter’s birth chart is just incredible because she was born with Libra rising and the ruler of the Ascendant is Venus, and Venus is at six degrees of Virgo in the 12th whole sign house, very closely conjunct Mars at seven degrees of Virgo in a day chart. So I thought this was amazing symbolism just in and of itself, both because the 12th house represents sometimes like, sickness or illness, but also it can represent like, imprisonment or being imprisoned or captive, and unfortunately for like, a large part of her life, for like the first 20 years, she was pretty much held a prisoner and was made sick, basically, by her mother due to whatever mental issues were going on at that time. And then additionally, Mars is the ruler of the 7th house of relationships, because she has Aries on the 7th house, and so the ruler, Mars, is there in the 12th house conjunct Venus, bringing in that other component where it was the partner who ended up murdering her mother, and he’s actually now in prison for life, whereas she was released after only eight years. So there was some really interesting like, natal indications there, just to start with I think, right?
  AC: Oh yeah. When you have, you know, the ruler of the 1st and the 7th – the person and their partner right there together in the 12th, right? Plotting secretly and then also both imprisoned.
  CB: Right, exactly. And so two other things – so I did a whole episode of The Casual Astrology Podcast with Nick Dagan Best on this just a few weeks ago just for patrons through our page on Patreon, and we noticed two other things immediately in her chart that are super striking. So one – Venus is actually slowing down and is just four point eight days from stationing retrograde in this chart. So Venus, actually, when she was born, was stationing retrograde in Venus; it was just days away from stationing retrograde in Virgo. So that’s point one. Point two is the Moon – actually there was just a lunar eclipse in the sign of Aquarius conjunct Saturn the day before she was born. So in addition to that like, interesting 12th house stuff, she was also born on Venus stationing retrograde and she was also born on a lunar eclipse conjunct Saturn. And both of those two themes I think really emphasize and bring up the themes with the mother, since both the Moon as well as Venus are traditionally associated with the mother in a person’s birth chart. And what’s interesting about that is – so get this, this is we found, and Nick saw this after just like, 10 minutes of research – so the daughter was born four days before Venus went retrograde in Virgo, right? Get this. So the mother was born in 1967, which was the same year as Venus went retrograde in Virgo just like, not too long before the mother was born. So the mother was born essentially in the same year as the same Venus retrograde in Virgo, which recurs every eight years. So that’s not all, though. In 2019, there was like, a biopic that was made about this story, and the woman who played – the actress who played the daughter, whose birth chart we just looked at that was born when Venus stationed retrograde in 1991 in Virgo, the actress that played her was born the day that Venus stationed retrograde in Virgo in 1999. So she was born almost exactly 8 years later. On top of that, the murder itself occurred in 2015, just 45 days before Venus went retrograde in Virgo in that year – so another eight-year increment. And then finally, the daughter was released from jail in 2023, just months after Venus had gone retrograde in the same series, in another eight-year increment. So there’s crazy Venus retrograde tied in here, but there’s also crazy eclipse stuff. So the daughter was born the day of a lunar eclipse in Aquarius; it turns out that the mother was born a few days before a solar eclipse in Taurus. Then the actress that played the daughter – whose name is Joey King – she was born two days after a lunar eclipse in Aquarius just like the daughter she was playing. And then finally, the actress Patricia Arquette, who played the mother in the biopic, was born just before a lunar eclipse. So there’s like, crazy Venus retrograde and eclipse stuff happening with all of the people involved, not just in the family itself and the events surrounding it, but also even in the charts of the people playing them.
  AC: It’s totally wild. It really goes to show that the two most interesting things that were happening in the sky when she was born were, oh, Venus is just about to station retrograde and there was just an eclipse. Right? And like, those – and then when you follow like, the movement of those in time – like, follow the eclipses and follow that Venus retrograde cycle, you get the timeline for the most important story in her life.
  AC: Or at least from the outside. Hopefully there are other stories that we can’t see that are more important for her, but.
  CB: Yeah, exactly. Well and it just, it illustrates so much stuff, like you have to then see – because we saw so much of that last summer, like, you know, I saw that with Barbie where Greta Gerwig – we saw Barbie released when Venus was stationing retrograde and then turned out Greta Gerwig was born the day that Venus stationed retrograde in the same cycle, so there’s a repetition of when you see a natal signature in somebody’s chart, you just look for the repetitions of that as coinciding with the key moments in their life. But there’s also just this separate phenomenon that other astrologers have noticed from time to time, which is that sometimes the people that play real-life people, sometimes the actors or actresses they have similar signatures in their own birth chart or some sort of connection between their birth chart and the person that they play. But I’ve never seen an example as striking as this one in terms of that.
  AC: Yeah. That’s a good one.
  CB: Yeah. So I think that would be a great episode to do. So if anybody has any other examples of like, actors that have really impressive charts relative to the people that they’re playing or interesting correlations in terms of that, send them in because I might like to do an episode on that at some point here soon.
  AC: Yeah, for sure.
  CB: Yeah. All right. So that’s actually I believe the end of the news segments, unless you’ve got anything else that you noticed.
  AC: Not in particular. But somebody brought something up in the comments that this illustrates – the number of times you see people playing someone in a biopic with a very similar chart or at least a piece of the chart that is, you know, replicating the original story – it makes me think about being a casting agent. Right? I’d be like, “Well, let me see your chart.” You know? So you’re going to play Theodore Roosevelt or, you know, whoever.
  AC: Like, let’s take a look at the chart. Do you have the right stellium?
  CB: Yeah. You’re like, “Oh, you have the same Sun, Moon, and rising – you have the job.”
  CB: Something like that?
  AC: Well, yeah. It seems like there are two kinds of actors. There are actors, and then there are people who are fun to watch who are just like this thing, and you just wanna see that.
  CB: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. All right. I’m definitely gonna do an episode on that; that’s a fascinating topic and now I’m interested.
  AC: It’d be fun.
  CB: Yeah. All right, I wanted to give a shout out to our sponsor for this episode, which is the CHANI App, which is the number one astrology app for self-discovery, mindfulness, and healing. So the CHANI App is this amazing app that I’ve been using for the past few months since it came out for Android, and it’s also available for iPhone. So it’s designed to make astrology both accessible as well as useful, and the app combines a brilliant blend of ancient as well as modern astrological techniques along with other things like meditation and mindfulness to help you foster your relationship with the sky and support your personal growth. From personalized readings to real-time updates on how the current astrology’s impacting you, it features everything you need to navigate life’s ups and downs. This includes detailed birth chart breakdowns, daily horoscopes, current sky horoscopes, transit readings, intel on the current Moon phase and sign, weekly sign specific audio readings by Chani Nicholas, year ahead forecasts and more. For me personally, as I’ve said the past few months, the things I enjoy about the app the most is one, that blend of modern and traditional astrology, so it makes it actually very close to my personal approach so that if I was to design an app it would probably be similar to this even though it’s way better than anything I could’ve designed myself. But two, it’s one of the only apps that uses whole sign houses by default, which again matches my technical approach here on the podcast. Three, it sends you notifications when the transits in the sky go exact, which is very helpful. And four, I really appreciate that it’s now available for android in addition to iPhone. So the app is free to download on iOS and Android app stores; just search “Chani” – C H A N I – in the app store, and you’ll find it. Or otherwise visit app.chani.com for more information.
  All right. So thanks a lot to Chani for sponsoring this episode.
  All right. So let’s transition into talking about the forecast for February at this point and what the astrology is gonna look like and breaking it down here. So let’s talk about big picture things. What are you excited about, what are you not excited about about Aquarius? What are some of the main signatures that we can look forward to when it comes to this month?
  AC: Yeah. So the big thing that stands out is that there’s just a stampede of planets – or a flock of planets? – that coalesces in Aquarius. The month begins with just the Sun, Pluto in Aquarius, but as we move steadily through the month, we get Mercury into Aquarius, which then hits Pluto. By the middle of the month, I believe the 13th, we get Mars into Aquarius, which hits Pluto, and then a few days later, we get Venus into Aquarius, which then hits Pluto, and so there are two sides of this that excite me. Or maybe “excite”’s not the right word – that interest me. One is just that this is a lot of planets in Aquarius, and so whatever the Aquarius sector of a person’s chart is is just getting lit up. It’s the Sun, and then all three swiftly moving planets – of course, we also get a New Moon there, so we’ll also have a New Moon in Aquarius with these planets. And so it’s just a ton of emphasis, and it’s not decidedly positive or negative for most people, right? We have Venus – yay! We have Mars – grr! We have Mercury – buzz! As well as the Sun and Pluto. And so —
  CB: Can you say “grr” more often any time you mention a malefic transit from now on? I would appreciate that.
  AC: Well, that was for Mars, right?
  AC: I don’t think Saturn is “grr.” I’ll have to come up with an appropriate sound effect for Saturn. I mean, icy silence might —
  CB: Right, just death stare.
  AC: If I could make my silence icier, then maybe that would be good for Saturn.
  CB: If I could weaponize my awkward silence, that would be —
  AC: Yeah. Why you gotta be so awkward, bud?
  AC: So there’s that, right? It’s just a lot in Aquarius, which will just light up the Aquarius parts of all these charts. And then there’s the fact that we’re getting – for the first time in, I don’t know, since the late 18th century – Mercury conjunct Pluto in Aquarius, Mars conjunct Pluto in Aquarius, Venus conjunct Pluto in Aquarius. Because even though the Sun and Pluto moved into Aquarius together, their exact conjunction was in the last minutes of Capricorn, right? So they didn’t actually perfect their conjunction. And so from – and this is from like, the “astrologer good” perspective, right? Is “ooh, what does it do?” Right? What does Mercury conjunct Pluto in Aquarius – what does it do in the world? Also, what does it feel like? From my perspective, I have Venus very early in Aquarius, so I wanna know what Pluto going over my Venus is going to do, and so seeing it activated by all of these planets is, you know, gonna give me a much better idea of what to look forward to, what to brace for, what to dread silently, you know, et cetera, et cetera. You know, forewarned is forearmed or whatever. And I’m just interested, you know, that’s part of my relationship to astrology at this point. I think a lot of astrologers’ relationship to astrology – it’s like, okay, I see a thing – it comes in this timeframe, like, let’s get on with it. Let’s see what it is. Right? And so there’s a lot of getting to see like, getting – how should we say – a better look at what Pluto in Aquarius is going to do, right? Because there’s Pluto by itself, but you know, we’re here to understand Pluto being in a place for 20 years. It’s really how does Pluto being there interact with everybody else? Like, we’ve got a new member of the ecosystem. Right? How does the, you know, mad scientist or whatever the Terminator Cyberdyne systems model whatever – like, how does that interact with everything else? Like, that’s the answer we – or that’s the set of answers that we need in order to —
  AC: — think about the future accurately.
  CB: And this is gonna be our first time seeing that because a year ago, Pluto went into Aquarius but it went in in like, March or something, so some of the planets had already passed through Aqaruius and we didn’t get the same set of conjunctions, whereas this year we’re gonna get those conjunction and it’s gonna be a preview of conjunctions we’re gonna be experiencing for the next like, 20 years, especially with these inner planets where once a year the Sun’s always gonna conjoin Pluto and Mercury’s gonna do it and then Venus every, what, year and a half or something, and then Mars every couple of years. This is the first time that we’re gonna see those conjunctions in Aquarius, and it’ll be really insightful as a preview into a lot of energies we’re gonna see expand and unfold over the next 20 years. Because it’s kind of like the first time you hear like, on windchimes, like if you strike a windchime and here just like, one note, but then you imagine over a long enough period of time hearing that same note struck, you know, 20 times over the course of the next 20 years. And by the end of that, you’re really familiar with what that sounds like. But this time, this is our first time like, hearring that note struck, especially in that specific part of our chart in terms of looking at it personally, like what house does Aquarius coincide with and what house are all of these planets gonna be transiting through. But then on a mundane level, you know, what does that sound like in terms of world events the first time that that note is struck?
  AC: Yeah, and you know, during that preview period last year Q2, the only planet that conjoined Pluto while Pluto was in Aquarius was the Moon. It’s all we’ve had. We had no Mercury, no Venus, no Mars, obviously no Jupiter or Saturn, no Sun. Like, we haven’t had – we’ve had one planet do a conjunction. So there’s like – yeah, it’s one note being played, one of the seven notes on the instrument of Pluto in Aquarius or, I don’t know, one of seven players picking it up and toodling on it.
  CB: Yeah. Toodling, that’s a good word. I haven’t heard that – that’s a first time on the podcast, but I like that.
  AC: Well, it’s a wind instrument, obviously. Right? Maybe it’s —
  CB: That’s true.
  AC: — like one of those deep, resonant, like, doom-y horns?
  CB: Yeah. I’d like that, okay. Well, speaking of that, that’s actually really good imagery for basically our very first transit of the month, which is Mercury basically within just the first few days makes that ingress out of Capricorn and goes into Aquarius where it immediately conjoins Pluto. So Mercury is the first of the bunch that’s gonna hit Pluto on the 4th and the 5th of February and form that conjunction. So it’s the first one where we’re gonna really start to get an idea of what that energy is all about.
  So let’s talk a little bit about Mercury-Pluto conjunctions and what some keywords are when it comes to that. I know in the past we’ve seen events like investigations, like Pluto’s good at digging in deep and getting into the bottom of things and Mercury has a natural curiosity of wanting to like, look into and understand and report things. So I know in the past with different Mercury-Pluto combinations we’ve had like, exposes of reporters doing a deep dive into something and like, revealing something where there’s been like, an uncovering of something.
  AC: Yeah. It’s very, Mercury-Pluto’s very like, info dump, secret documents, you know, declassified or leaked. There’s also, you know with Mercury-Pluto, there’s this obsession with like, secret pathways and hidden connections. And you know, obsession of course is always a Pluto word, but there’s, you know, with Mercury it’s that finding the real truth or what’s really going on or finding proof of the thing. And as with other, you know again, as with Pluto generally but especially with Mercury, there’s this dynamic of trying to – of going deeper and deeper to try to find out what’s really happening, or maybe in Aquarius’s case with Pluto in Aquarius what will really happen and getting totally lost in you know, the catacombs, the labyrinth of service tunnels and wires and routers and you know, like, getting lost in the depth, the complexity of the depths.
  CB: Yeah. That impulse of Mercury-Pluto to delve into hidden truths and to see the deeper meanings in things. You know, in its highest expression, it’s like that reporter who’s like, following a case or like a trail for like, 20 years, or that like, police detective that’s like, trying to solve a case for 20 years and has this hunch and just like, follows it through until eventually they’re vindicated and it turns out they’re right, and all of their, you know, intense focus and determination to get to the truth pays off. And then it’s like, the other side of that is that person that becomes so obsessed with the idea of something and that they’ve found a hidden truth that is being like, locked up or is being hidden away from people that’s being suppressed, that they get sort of fixated or obsessed on something that they can’t let go of and it turns out in some instances to not necessarily be true so that it becomes not a healthy or positive thing, but you see both sides of that coin when it comes to Mercury-Pluto.
  AC: Yeah, it’s very Russ Cohle from True Detective, for those of you who’ve seen that. I keep telling you to watch season one of True —
  CB: I know —
  AC: — Detective, and you keep —
  CB: — I’m sorry —
  AC: — not doing it.
  CB: — you’ve mentioned it. I just immediately —
  AC: The character Russ Cohle —
  CB: — you’ve told me like, five times.
  AC: — has a Mercury-Pluto conjunction, I guarantee it.
  AC: He also is a – his worldview is also sort of psychedelic nihilist, but yeah, that like pursuit of the truth —
  CB: I was thinking of the Zodiac was the one I was thinking of, the David Fincher film where there’s one guy that like, has like, an idea, like one detective that has an idea like, the entire time of who the killer is, but yeah, they never fully apprehend him because he like, dies before they arrest him.
  AC: Yeah, there’s this sort of noir gumshoe getting lost and changed by pursuit of the truth. It’s sort of like if you take the Nietzsche quote, the like, if you stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you, but it’s like, if you research the abyss long enough, you study the abyss, right, if you’re assigned the case of the abyss, if you study the abyss long enough, the abyss starts studying you, and you too are changed by that.
  CB: For sure. All right. So what other ideas do we have here? So there’s like, taboo subjects can sometimes come up and sometimes that can be good, sometimes that can be bad. Since it’s happening in Aquarius, there might be a technological component to it or like a social component to it. A scientific component to it actually would make a lot of sense – the scientific bent to Aquarius has become much more clear over the past several years after Saturn went through Aquarius and also with Pluto in Aquarius here.
  AC: Yeah, there may be some contribution to the potential cosmological crisis that Pluto in Aquarius has in store. You know, that’s happened before with Pluto in Aquarius, you know, like – one of the things that Mercury-Pluto can do is also negate information. Like, you find out that this whole thing is fake, or this whole set or this whole way of thinking is based on a falsified dataset or you know, et cetera. And that’s part of that sort of obsessive truthiness of Mercury-Pluto, right? It’s not just finding true things, it’s also discovering that things are not valid or true.
  CB: Yeah. And that’s actually even more relevant here now that you mention that side of things, because even though it doesn’t go exact, like, Jupiter’s only at like, seven degrees of Taurus early in the month. So it’s still pretty closely squaring Pluto, so what we have also tied in with this is a Jupiter-Pluto square, and Jupiter has to do with like, truth and knowledge. And I know back when we had the repeated Jupiter-Pluto conjunctions in 2020, there was a lot of debates about like, truth and knowledge and sometimes good versions of that, of people trying to get to the truth or get to the bottom of things, and other times, the more tricky side of that, which is for lack of a better word, like, conspiracy theories or becoming obsessed with an idea that something’s being suppressed or controlled or manipulated even if that’s not necessarily true or even if there’s like, a more simple explanation for something.
  AC: Yeah, or realizing that things are always being suppressed, controlled, manipulated, and then having that drive you crazy and coming to the wrong conclusion.
  CB: Right, or not real —
  AC: Because – yeah. Like, oh my god, there’s manipulation, and then jumping to like, the wrong conclusion based on that. Encountering some of these I would say historically constant barriers to the truth and then getting, you know, having one’s thinking deformed by that.
  CB: Or not realizing that the supposed like, idea or conspiracy that you become obsessed about is actually a form of control itself —
  AC: Yeah, yeah.
  CB: — and manipulation that’s being used against you even though you’re under the premise that you think you’ve found the truth to something.
  AC: Yeah, yeah, and that’s exactly the kind of like, now we’re getting into the paranoid, this is real but actually I learned this was fact which made me buy into this other fake thing, but then – you know, like, that’s definitely Pluto-Mercury energy, right? It’s like, well, this is true – like, if this is untrue, then the opposite must be true. Oh no, that was a trick too, but I can’t go back to my original position, like, deeper, deeper down.
  CB: Yeah. It becomes like, recursive. The last thing that this makes me think of is I saw like, a notice recently that was sent out by like, an antivirus company that was talking about how they think that like, AI is gonna be used inorder to leverage things like digital blackmail as well as AI’s gonna be used to create bigger and harder like, computer viruses or to disable software antivirus and things that are meant to protect people online digitally. So this could be like, an interesting early preview of that with like, Mercury conjunct Pluto just because Mercury in Aquarius especially has that digital component whereas Pluto can sometimes be the underworld and what is the underworld in a digital or internet context? It can sometimes be like, hackers or people that are like, up to no good when using computers and technology.
  AC: Yeah, and I would say that makes me think of the Mars conjunction with Pluto, which happens a week later, and Mercury will still be in the same sign, and so once we get to the 13th and we’ve got Mars-Mercury in Aquarius with Pluto and the Sun, and so you know, again, one of the things I wanna know about because it’s gonna happen – I’d rather know sooner than later – is what does Pluto in Aquarius as threat look like? Right? And that, should we say, like, AI boosted computer viruses or using drones for nefarious purposes, you know, or whatever, like some sort of leverage of this newly emerging, fringe technological applications to do harm seems like that’s going to happen. It’s like the fake Biden thing – that was always going to happen, so let’s see what it is. And so the Mercury-Mars with Pluto seems like that. It seems like we’ll at least get a taste of what that looks like and what form the destroyer will take during this 20-year period.
  CB: Yeah, well, and Pluto amplifies things that are small or that are preexisting and like, blows them up into much larger things or takes them to much further extent or to their utmost extreme. So even if there’s things that already existed prior to this or concepts or things that were done, Pluto’s just gonna magnify and take it to its utmost extreme in terms of versions of manifestations of that. It actually reminds me there was one thing that I mentioned in the Pluto in Aquarius episode as well as maybe in the year ahead forecast about Pluto in Aquarius and one of my keywords for it was like, “cataclysmic events that cause an irreversible shift in intellectual and social trends.” And like, I was like, throwing out just random ideas like, you know, what if there was like, some major thing that like, knocked out part of the internet or the entire internet – how would that affect society or things like that.
  But an event that I found like, right after I recorded that episode that was in a Pluto in Aquarius period was the destruction of the city of Pompeii during the Roman period happened early in a Pluto in Aquarius period, where you had like, a volcano go off and had it just like, decimate and completely bury this ancient Roman city that then was just like, gone for centuries. Although interestingly with that, the fact that it was buried suddenly and then later it was like, rediscovered, and as a result of that, like researchers and archeologists have been learning a lot about Roman society and like, customs and things like that by digging this city up and like, finding, you know, how it was set up and how it worked because it was so much – it was preserved by that. And in addition, recently, people have been developing technology to read some of the ancient scrolls that were solidified by the volcanic ash and stuff, but some of them were preserved so they can’t be unrolled because they would just immediately disintegrate, but now they’re starting to use x-rays so they can read some of those scrolls. So there’s this, like, additional Pluto component to it as well.
  AC: Yeah, yeah, that’s interesting.
  CB: Anyway. Just wanna mention that.
  AC: But yeah, and then – right – so again, the Mercury leading into the Mars, and between the two we have the New Moon in Aquarius, which is worth mentioning.
  CB: Yeah —
  AC: Is it on the 8th, 9th? It’s the 9th, right?
  CB: It is the 9th, yes. So this is a New Moon at 20 degrees of Aquarius, and the closest configuration to it, interestingly, is a square with Uranus, which is gonna be at 19 degrees of Taurus at that time. So there’s this interesting sort of like, disruptive component to it or unexpected component to this New Moon.
  AC: Yeah, there sure is. And at the risk of sounding like a broken record, you know, like, this is the first New Moon in Aquarius with Pluto there. Right? And so a New Moon is this, you know, is the Sun and the Moon having their monthly operations meeting like, about how things are gonna go for the next month, and generally they do one in each sign per year, right? So this is the yearly Sun-Moon conjunction in Aquarius. What are things like in Aquarius? What is there to be done? What has happened? You know, just sort of an assessment. And so this is the first of, I don’t know, 20 meetings that will occur with Pluto in the sign, and so we have both of the luminaries, you know, sweeping beams across this territory that now contains Pluto. You know, again, I think with a little attention, this – February can be really useful for people so that they can orient to this particular component of the next 20 years, because it’s just, you know, we get a little, we get a very brief pop back into Capricorn in Q3 or Q4 of this year, but that’s the anomaly. Like, it’s basically, like, this is going to be part of the next two decades, and so the sooner you figure out what you’re gonna do with that, what it means, the better, right?
  CB: Yeah, for sure. I think the Uranus square adds this feeling of like, sudden emotional shifts that’ll be prominent around the time of this New Moon.
  CB: Posible drives for like, independence or like, freedom is often a very intense feeling, but it’s gonna be amped up with Pluto also being copresent in the sign at the same time. There’s gonna be feelings of like, liberation but also a need to try to learn how to manage volatility, because Pluto and Uranus, when they’re configured, bring a sense of volatility, especially emotional volatility, and I think that’s gonna be present with this New Moon at the same time.
  AC: Yeah. I mean, in some ways we have – yeah. So we have the square to Uranus, which is the – you know, with Uranus, it’s always how do I break from whatever my normal pattern is, how do I break from the pattern of the world to get something better? Right? You know, that is the mindset of rebellion or nonconforming is “It’ll be better than if I don’t,” right? Like, I’ll have more freedom or more of what is desirable in life if I don’t just go along with the program. And so, you know, it’s interesting, because we have with the Sun and Moon there with Pluto, that’s kind of telling you a little bit about the real or what the program is, and I don’t mean that in like, a secret world government way. I mean in an astrological way. Like, what is the Pluto in Aquarius program? And then Uranus is like, yeah, coming from the square, is offering something different or is suggesting something different. Like, how do you do something else in order to mitigate what seem like the downsides of the Aqaurius stuff? And in some ways, this is recreating the Aquarius-Taurus tension from 2021, 2022, and the beginning of 2023 when it was Saturn in Aquarius square Uranus in Taurus.
  CB: Yeah. One of the positive things about this New Moon to balance out some of the erraticness or the instability of the Uranus square is Mercury’s very closely applying to a square with Jupiter at the same time, that I think is gonna complete within the same day or within the same 24 hours, where Mercury’s at seven degrees of Aquarius and it’s applying to square Jupiter at eight degrees of Taurus. So there’s a little bit of an optimism and a little bit of an expansive quality to communications during this time. And sometimes, since it’s a square, things can be like, a little bit too optimistic or go a little bit overboard, but ultimately I think that energy being tied in with this New Moon is a little helpful and stabilizing, especially since it’s occurring just before we get the really intense ramp-up of the Mars-Pluto conjunction going exact just days later.
  AC: Yeah, there’s a sense with that Mercury-Jupiter connection of, “Oh, there are adaptations,” or “Oh, there’s a plan that navigates this and accomplishes that.”
  CB: Yeah. And it’s just gonna be emphasizing the Jupiter-Saturn sextile that is still present and is still one of our main outer planet aspects that was really dominating in January and is largely continuing through February, although it’s gonna get marred a little bit as soon as Mars into Aquarius because then it’s gonna start squaring Jpiter, and that’ll be one of our primary aspects of the very late part of February. But here at least with the early part of February, I like that we still have the balance between the Jupiter-Saturn being emphasized and the tendencies towards growth and expansion versus consolidation being evenly balanced at this time.
  AC: Yeah, it’s a good anchor.
  CB: Yeah. All right. So that is our New Moon that’s taking place on February 9th. And then after that, things start to shift. We get probably our most major shift of the month, I would say, because it’s like, first half of the month versus second half of the month is pretty much Mars’s ingress into Aquarius —
  AC: Yeah, I would say that’s the most jarring moment of the month.
  CB: Yeah, for sure. So that ingress takes place either late on the 12th or early on the 13th depending on your timezone, but then we get a Mars-Pluto conjunction, and this aspect is important in the broader scheme of things. This is our first hard aspect between Mars and Pluto since the square that occurred back in October, I believe; that was the main aspect that we focused on that set off so much stuff back then.
  AC: Yeah. And so, yeah, like, the Mars-Pluto, again, I’m looking for Mars blowing on the Pluto bassoon. Thank you, comment section. You know, when Mars toodles on the doom horn, what do we – what song gets played? Because there are going to be probably 10 conjunctions between Mars and Pluto while Pluto’s in Aquarius, so let’s see what it looks like. And again, some of it I would assume would be military in nature, but with Pluto, you also see for lack of a better word like, underworld organizations, for like, cartels, ISIS, you know, these kinds of organizations. And you know, quote-unquote “terrorists” or murderers or you know, like, the sort of whatever the villain, whatever title we’re using for villains at a particular point in culture. And so, you know, again, Pluto corresponds with that layer of the human world among others, and so with Mars, I’m looking for the threats, right? Like you said, what does the AI-boosted computer virus look like? What does the cartel drone swarm do? Or you know, whatever it is.
  And then on a personal level, you will probably not find yourself in control of a cartel drone swarm or targeted. And so what Mars-Pluto on a personal level is it brings up hidden power dynamics in a person’s life in whatever house area of the chart it’s in. And it’s worth noting this is Pluto in a new sign, so it’s like, stirring up power dynamics in a different area of life than you’re used to. We’ve been doing, stirring up power dynamics in the Capricorn part for a long time. But what does it look like in the Aquarius part?
  CB: Yeah, for sure. We have seen a lot of that with the Capricorn side, so it’ll be interesting to see this version of it in Aquarius and maybe having that happen in a more digital sense, like a more digital realm, or in a more social sense. But some of the keywords that we’ve used for that previously that have been really relevant for Mars-Pluto combinations are like, power struggles and control, large acts of aggression, obsessive behavior or even possessiveness. But also going too far or the excessive use of force, so that one of the antidotes to that or the things that usually we recommend or we advice during these periods is exercising self-control and awareness and caution so as to not go too far if you have like, an aggressive reaction to something is a common thing that comes up in Pluto things, because Mars is itself like, the use of force, and Pluto always takes things to extremes. So when you combine those, sometimes you get – either you’re on the receiving end of that, or in other instances, if you’re the one that’s acting aggressively, sometimes there can be a tendency to go too far and to need to exercise some sort of restraint.
  AC: Yeah. It’s with Mars-Pluto, Pluto can trigger the sort of the struggle against annihilation feeling, the like, oh my god, if I don’t – like, the fighting for your life response when it’s not appropriate, right? Which is exactly the kind of fuel you need to massively overreact to things.
  CB: Sure, yeah. Although, I mean, sometimes it is needed or —
  AC: That happens, but for most of us, most of the listeners, you’re probably not actually fighting for your life most of the time that emotional response gets triggered. And if you are actually fighting for your life, you’ll probably have very clear confirmation of that.
  CB: Sure. Yeah. Pluto stuff sometimes also makes me think of there can be like, Mars-Pluto is like, the stalker like, aspect in terms of – or can be one of them. We’ll also talk about like, the Venus-Pluto conjunction that can be relevant to that as well later in the month – actually just a few days after this – but that obsessive thing of that feeling of like, if there’s somebody out there that’s just like, doing obsessive acts of aggression but that it’s something that’s being done that’s behind the scenes or that’s subtle so that it’s hard to fight against or hard to like, negate. Yeah. So that’s one of our main – that’s probably our most difficult aspect this month. I’m trying to think of other ones, but that’s probably the one that has the greatest potential for being kind of tricky to navigate.
  AC: Yeah, yeah. That will probably take some navigation to move through those days with grace.
  CB: Yeah. So unfortunately, that’s kind of coinciding with Valentine’s Day because it’s hitting on the 13th but it’s still pretty much there on the 14th, so be careful surrounding that in terms of interpersonal relationships and things and some of the dynamics that we had talked about here just now.
  All right. So that takes us to – related to that, which is our next major ingress, which is that Venus just days later by February 16th moves into Aquarius and then conjoins Pluto. So then we get a lot of the same energies that we’ve been talking about with Mercury and Mars in terms of things of like, intensity, obsession, sometimes taking really small things and making them really big things, and we bring it more directly into the realm of interpersonal relationships and love and social interactions between individuals much more directly.
  AC: Yeah. Yeah, with Venus-Pluto, you get extremes of affection and its negation, where – you know, like you said, the stalker archetype. The like, “Oh, you love me, you just don’t know it yet,” right? Like that kind of creepy tunnel of thinking. And then you also get the frustration or heartbreak of having affections or love just completely negated. You know, Pluto has that ability to just completely negate for a time.
  CB: Yeah, for sure.
  AC: And then what’s —
  CB: — and the painfulness of the rejection of that, which is the double side of that coin, because that’s also … Yeah, one of the things sometimes with those extreme cases of the stalker scenarios where they’re like, hurt by something and then they pursue despite that, which is kind of hard to deal with.
  AC: Yeah, it’s that Mars-Venus with Pluto period is certainly not helpful for Valentine’s Day adjacent activities. It’s not the energy we want. Which goes on to confirm my years-long quiet campaign to reschedule Valentine’s Day to a more astrologically appropriate time. There’s nothing —
  AC: — even as someone with Venus in Aquarius, I don’t think there’s anything particularly romantic about the time when the Sun’s in Aquarius every year. You know, again, we should move it to the day that the Sun hits the exaltation degree of Venus, which is unfortunately already Saint Patrick’s Day, but.
  CB: I think – you’re saying we should move – you’re arguing that we should move Valentine’s Day to Pisces season roughly, and I feel like you’re a little biased there as a Pisces, I have to say.
  AC: I’ve got Venus in Aquarius! I think Aquarius stuff is way sexier than most people, but even so, it’s just not good timing. It’s not a passionate – Aquarius is not a passionate, Venusian sign. It’s in fact reputed to be the opposite.
  CB: Yeah. All right. Well, I’m gonna argue then for my Sun sign and say Scorpio season would be the best place to move Valentine’s Day, and to bolster that argument, I will point out that most people that are born during Scorpio season were conceived about eight to nine months earlier, around Valentine’s Day.
  AC: I feel like you’re making a case for my position.
  CB: Okay. Well, we’ll talk about this later offline. This’ll be a bonus episode. All right. So going back to Venus-Pluto. Other things – there can be positive things. I mean, magnetic charisma and allure, having deep, passionate connections with other people can be a bonus side of this you know, this energy, to give some like, positive stuff. Sometimes like, that feeling – which can be a good feeling even though we’re focusing and noting obviously there can be unhealthy sides to that – the feeling of like, being willing to almost like, say that you would like, die for somebody is very like, Venus-Pluto, and certainly the —
  AC: Deep, terrifyingly deep intimacy.
  AC: And vulnerability.
  CB: For sure. So there can definitely be good things to that that we don’t want to overlook, but yeah, just be careful about other sides of that – attraction to toxic relationships, power struggles or manipulation through love or through attraction and things like that. And just setting healthy boundaries and communication I think can be very useful during this time as well as just like, awareness and self-reflection of like, am I going too far? Is this, you know, obsession warranted or wanted? Is this like, a healthy attraction or attachment to somebody or you know, is this taking things a little bit too far? And sometimes that’s hard, you know, with almost every transit, that’s hard to analyze when you’re right in the midst of it, like you’re in the eye of the storm. And sometimes it takes like, getting some distance from the transit to really fully be able to assess that properly, but they’re still good questions to ask yourself if you get like, wrapped up in some whirlwind thing at this time.
  AC: And what’s interesting is that Venus and Mars do a conjunction not too much later. Right? And so every time we have a Venus-Mars conjunction, it sets the stage a little bit for Venus-Mars things for the next year and stuff. And so, you know, we have Venus-Mars conjoining at roughly six degrees Aquarius, conjunct Pluto square Jupiter. I wonder if this is, I don’t know, this is like the – if there will be numerous announcements about the next generation of sex robots or, you know, how this gets Pluto in Aquarius’ed.
  CB: Oh yeah, I mean, that’s – there’s already debates about that, because there’s like, companies are creating AI apps to be like, relationship apps that people can go and talk to an AI and fall in love with, and that’s already raising like, major debates and concerns about like, whether that’s ethical for these companies to be doing that and other things like that.
  AC: Yeah. Yeah, sex robots, dating simulator, waifu technology, like, that’s kind of all there. I think when we were talking about it on the yearly, I said that this configuration reminded me of the name of a video game that’s pretty good called Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime. Great cooperative game. Maybe that’s the safe thing to do during Venus conjunct Pluto is play Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime.
  CB: Yeah. I mean, I do think it would be interesting; let’s actually pay attention to that for news stories. I know there was one listener that sent me a movie that was about, that just came out close to Pluto ingressing into Aquarius, and it was about AIs falling in love. So it was interesting seeing the coinciding of that and yeah, I mean, there’s gonna be some interesting discussions about that over the next 20 years for sure. Like, I’ve always thought that. So it’ll be interesting to pay attention to some early examples of discussions about that of how themes of like, love and relationships and uniting between two individuals or entities come up during this time and how that’s sometimes mediated by technology and what happens when that’s taken to its utmost sort of extreme.
  AC: Yeah. I’m sure we’ll have some news stories by the time next month’s podcast rolls around.
  CB: For sure. For sure. All right, so that is all taking place, the Venus-Mars conjunction, around the 21st and 22nd. Is there anything else we wanted to mention about that, about Venus conjunct Mars at this time?
  AC: I don’t think so. I think we covered that it’s very relational, and it’s bringing all this Pluto – you know, it’s bringing this Pluto in Aquarius stuff into the relational realm pretty immediately.
  CB: Yeah. So themes like assertiveness and initiation in love, having a strong sense of attraction and magnetism, like there’s a very physical, kind of like sexual component to Venus-Mars conjunctions. It’s like the classic configuration that has to do with that and the sort of like, give and take of a passionate relationship. But also like, creativity and artistic expression is a notable Venus-Mars manifestation as well, so sort of like acts of creativity as well could be relevant during that time. But also people have to be careful about like, impulsiveness and like, hasty decisions in terms of relationships and interpersonal connections, and you know, the desire to like, rush into things without proper consideration.
  AC: Yeah, absolutely. I’m also – just as a side note, as a observer of the Russo-Ukraine War, you know, that began with a Mars-Venus conjunction, and this is Mars-Venus conjunction in Aquarius, and the chart for Ukraine has lots of things in Aquarius, including Venus. And so I’m just curious, and then the current Russian chart also has Saturn in Aquarius, and so I’m just – I’ll just keep an eye on that. No strong predictions. But I think that will almost certainly indicate some meaning, some shift that will be meaningful, at least in retrospect but maybe noticeable at the time.
  CB: Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned that because that’s definitely still ongoing and relevant. And then another adjacent thing that came up when I did the Pluto in Aquarius episode was initially I just thought it was like, a one-off or a two-off thing in terms of how China kept coming up in the context of technology, but then I kept finding more and more instances of that with Pluto in Aquarius when I went back and did the full history. And Nick Dagan Best, actually, was the one that ended up pointing out to me that I didn’t know that we had a timed chart for China, for the current government of China that was founded in 1949 on an eclipse – which I did know about the eclipse because I found that in part two of the eclipses episode in November, I just did not know we had a timed chart, and it actually has Aquarius rising with the Moon in Aquarius. So Aquaris is actually very important for the current state of China, and so that’s very interesting in terms of Pluto going into Aquiarus and that becoming much more emphasized and relevant there for the next 20 years but also some of the historical technological connections between China and Aquarius and the interactions with the West having to do with technology and sometimes the transfer of technology or sometimes issues of like, power and control over technology between China and like, other countries.
  AC: Certainly. Well, and it’s worth noting that the Sibley chart for the US also has an Aquarius Moon.
  CB: Oh wow. Okay. So that’s an interesting both connection between the two countries then in terms of relationship but also in terms of both having over the next 20 years like, a Pluto-Moon transit.
  AC: Yeah. And it also speaks to their origin. You know, both the United States and the current regime in China were both big experiments that were conscious attempts to break with history.
  CB: Right. That’s a great point. Like, ideological sort of governmental experiments on the one hand with like a, you know, democracy with the US, and then on the other hand with communism with China.
  AC: Yeah. And you know, again, not just let’s try a new thing, but let’s very consciously reject the previous thing.
  CB: Right, which is very Saturn. Like, Saturn rejects things. But with Aquarius, one of the differences when I did the Aquarius episode a year ago with Bear and Aerin is that we talked about how Capricorn as a feminine sign ruled by Saturn is a little bit more backwards looking, and that’s where you get some of the feelings of like, conserving the past or consolidating the past and what you have built up to this point, versus Aquarius as a masculine sign – or however you wanna phrase that – as a diurnal sign is more also oriented towards time but it’s oriented towards the future and like, looking towards or envisioning like, a better future.
  AC: Yeah. Or just accurately predicting a bad future to not get the worst from it. Yeah, I’ve taught Aquarius and Capricorn this way for years. Yeah, it’s time, right? It’s time and history, but you know, in one case you’re looking forward and one you’re looking back. You know, you’re projecting out timelines, hoping things will work out a certain way, you know, according to plan in Aquarius, right? And then, you know, the weight of the past is there in Capricorn. And I think that’s very borne out by Pltuo’s passage through Capricorn.
  CB: Yeah, for sure. Well, and it also —
  AC: You know, and there’s a lot of – go ahead.
  CB: It also circles us back around to what we mentioned earlier in terms of the experimental disposition of Aquarius; it’s partially due to that forward lookingness, of its like, looking to the future and wanting to get there, but sometimes its orientation towards that can by myopic in terms of not thinking about what other implications there are that might come from that.
  AC: Yeah. I mean, well, for me it really goes back, it all goes back to that experimental dynamic, because out of the experiment we get these sort of positive narratives of like, grand discovery, moving closer to the truth, but then you also get like, all of the horror – there’s a whole horror subgenre that extends out of experiment, right? Like, you get Human Centipede themed. You know, you get Frankenstein, Human Centipede, like, the horror of the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, like, you know, you get all of these, like, you know, you get the feeling of being experimented on like a lab rat, right? And both that and all of the positive things – that’s just part of experiment and that’s, you know, that’s Aquarius.
  CB: Yeah, for sure. The Pluto in Aquarius thing that Leisa had originally seen of like, Mary Shelley having Pluto in late Aquarius on the Midheaven and then developing like, Frankenstein and all of the philosophical implications surrounding that is something we talked about a lot on the Pluto in Aquarius episode —
  AC: Yeah, it’s great.
  CB: — but then it was interesting is somebody pointed out that there’s a movie on Frankenstein that’s coming out soon, which is really striking now that Pluto’s going back into Aquarius.
  AC: Yeah, that’s really good. And you know, if anybody, you know, wants to go back and read the novel, right? Frankenstein: Or, the New Prometheus – Frankenstein’s monster, which a lot of the book is from the perspective of, is such a detached, melancholy Aquarius existentialist, right? You know, it’s like pondering creation as the created – the created product of an imperfect creator. Right? It’s from the point of view of the experiment, which is the monster, and anyway I remember reading that and I was like, “Oh, this is really perfect.” Like, it’s just – like it’s kind of a horror book, but it’s really like, a lot of it is like, kind of melancholy proto-existentialist thinking from the perspective of the monster as the, you know, result of the experiment.
  CB: Right, because the monster ends up being imperfect and not fully human and therefore is rejected by its creator, but then the creation gets angry at its creator of like, “Why have you rejected me and what do I need to do in order to achieve your love?” essentially. And it’s crazy because like, I think we’re gonna have some dynamics like that when it comes to AI of like, humans create an imperfect being that achieves like, some semblance of humanity and maybe it doesn’t achieve full sentience of what we consider to be human, and therefore gets treated differently, but like, how do that work out and what does that dynamic or relationship become?
  AC: Yeah, yeah. And then there’s also – yeah, absolutely – and then there’s also just, how should we say, you know, we’re always creating new people, including ourselves, right? As things change, like, we get formed by the world. Right? And we too are our own lab rats, and we don’t always love the results.
  CB: For sure. Circling back around to Venus conjunct Mars, wanted to —
  CB: — mention a few other keywords. No, I love these digressions. This is a good episode; I like these discussions. So sometimes impulsiveness and hasty decisions in relationships can come up, jealousy and possessiveness, aggression and conflict in love is a pretty straightforward like, delineation of Mars conjunct Venus to pay attention to, as well as this sort of like, attraction to drama and conflict. So again, the antidote to this are things are self awareness and healthy expression, balancing passion with reason can be really helpful during this time as well as healthy communication and setting boundaries and maybe even having creative outlets in which to express some of that energy so that it doesn’t get sort of bottled up at the same time.
  CB: Yeah. All right. So that’s bringing us to the later part in the month and to our second lunation, which is, you know, the Sun moves into Pisces and we begin Pisces season on the 18th, which I have to mention still the highest episode that I did of the zodiac series is still Pisces season. I have to express some disappointment to my Scorpio brothers and sisters that Scorpio episode has not beaten Pisces yet, so I need people to still get on that and raise some of those numbers for those different signs because I am surprised that Pisces was the last episode I did and then it’s just like,blown all the others away. I’m not sure – it may have had something to do with the guest, but we’ll have to see. Remains to be seen.
  AC: No, it’s just the best sign.
  CB: Okay. All right. Well, that’s still up for debate. Let’s see how things go this year.
  So let’s talk about this luntion; let’s talk about this Full Moon in Virgo that happens after Pisces season has begun.
  CB: And it’s important because then the Sun has moved into Pisces, Mercury has moved in Pisces, which is the ruler of this lunation, but they’re all running into our friend Saturn, which is at nine degrees of Pisces at this point. So this lunation is very much colored by a Full Moon that’s opposite to Saturn, and that as soon as the opposition goes exact with the Sun, the Moon then applies to the exact opposition with Saturn, so that’s one of our main signatures for this Full Moon is the heaviness of that Saturn configuration. Although there’s a little bit of mitigation, because the Moon is gonna be trining Jupiter at 10 degrees of Taurus at the same time, and that may not be able to like, fully offset Saturn, but certainly both of those energies are present in this lunation.
  AC: Yeah, so this really, to me, this really seems like a check-in with Saturn, magnified. Right? As this occurs at the end of February, we will be approaching the year mark for Saturn in Pisces; Saturn moved into Pisces I want to say the 7th of March of 2023, and so we’re coming up on a year, and so to me this asks the question, this is sort of a forced review of how you’re doing with Saturn in Pisces. Right? And so with Saturn with the Sun’s conjunction to Saturn every year, it’s a little bit like project management audit. It’s also on an emotional level like, how are you managing the weight? Right? If this particular period has you bearing more Saturnian weight in one area of your life or another, like how are you doing with that? With it being in Pisces, the two sort of situations or images that come to mind – like, if you are swimming, you know, Saturn in Pisces for some people including those of us born with the Sun and Mars and other things in Pisces, you know, it feels like doing laps in the pool but with weights attached to you. A lot of times I use the like, “jogging with weights,” “mountain climbing with weights” for Saturn’s effect. In this case it’s swimming with weights. Like, are you being pulled down? Or how are you managing to resist – what buoyancy or what are you using to buoy yourself to balance out the downward pull? On a more positive side with Saturn in Pisces, maybe a fishing metaphor – like, you’ve hooked something tremendous, powerful, with a lot of weight and are struggling with that. Like, how are you gonna land this mighty fish?
  CB: That’s a great metaphor.
  CB: It makes me think of – what this Full Moon makes me think of is how when sometimes we’re having really heavy stuff or obligations or other things that are slowing us down or dragging us down in one part of our life, which here is represented by the Pisces area of our chart and of our life, whatever house that coincides with – sometimes just by virtue of that area of our life having greater gravity for a period of time, it can effect indirectly other areas of our life that then there’s like, tensions with or where it can kind of slow down at the same time. And I think that’s part of what this Full Moon in Virgo is doing, is it’s highlighting to some extent how some of the changes and how some of the obstacles that are happening in the Pisces part of our chart is also causing some tension with the Virgo part of our chart and whatever house that coincides with. And this Full Moon’s gonna put more emphasis but also kind of like, shed some light on some of those tensions and ask us to see if there’s a way that we can resolve some of them where maybe the Pisces stuff has really demanded more of our attention lately over the past year, but we’re sort of forced to look back at the Virgo area of our chart exactly opposite to that and see if there’s ways that we can bring balance to that or to redistribute the weight at the same time.
  AC: Yeah or just what are the – yeah, like you said earlier, what are the effects on Virgo-land of the events that have been transpiring in Pisces-ville? And that’s especially true in this case because we have the ruler of Virgo, Mercury, with the Sun and Saturn in Pisces during this Full Moon, and this Full Moon is just a few days before a kind of rare, interesting, perfect three-way conjunction between the Sun, Mercury, and Saturn at nine Pisces. And so, you know, there’s a mercurial – how should we say? What’s going on here with Mercury moving to conjoin the Sun is that there’s this, you know, purgation of the thinking and the communicating in order to get to the right perspective. Right? With Mercury exactly conjunct the Sun, the cazimi point, you know, it’s a clarity point in thinking, and the positive gains during this period are usually negative in the sense that it’s not thinking about it this way that’s not useful. And so in this case it’s like, this seems like there’s a real focus on like, what perspective to take on Saturn in Pisces, like getting the right perspective, getting the right framework in order to move forward and that having very tangible, very real, clear effects on what’s going on in the Virgo part of life.
  CB: Yeah. Like, I know somebody who’s had this in their 4th house recently with the Saturn transit, and there’s been really heavy stuff in their home life and with their parents. But then as a result of that, they’ve had to put more attention on the obligations of that and not been able to proceed as much as they would like in terms of their career lately because they’ve had to focus so much attention and responsibility on the home life. So there’s probably other combinations of that, so that people should think of their chart and think of what that axis is of houses between Pisces and Virgo is and how the Pisces stuff has been demanding more attention and obligation and probably will still continue to – because, as Austin said, just a few days after this, we get the Sun-Mercury-Saturn conjunction in Pisces, so it’s not like those obligations and that heaviness is going away, but occasionally we still have to like, look back to what that’s detracting from or causing us to move our attention away from and sort of like, check in on that other area of our life opposite to that from time to time to see if we can redistribute things at all at this point in that cycle.
  AC: Yeah. It’s really, it’s very much like a management check in. Like, okay, how are you managing what Saturn is doing? Saturn’s going to be doing that for more than another year; it’s been doing it for a year. Like, how are you doing with this? Is there, you know, again, if you’re getting dragged down, can you add more life preservers? Is there the equivalent of those adorable little water wings they put on kids? Like, if you’re feeling like you’re having a hard time managing the downward pull, what would buoyancy – what buoyant things can you cling to or add to your situation?
  CB: Yeah. And that might be where the Jupiter part of things comes in, because —
  CB: — all of these combinations, you know, that Full Moon is taking place on the 24th and then as you said a few days later we get the Sun-Mercury-Saturn conjunction at nine degrees of Pisces on like, the 27th and 28th. But then that’s also sextiling Jupiter, and as soon as Mercury and the Sun completes the conjunction with Saturn and gets that check-in and that re-emphasizing of the Saturn component of conservation and obligation and obstacle but also long term work and perseverance, immediately after that you get the check-in again with Jupiter, which is the sextile to Taurus and this sort of like, more growth and expansion and optimism of that configuration. So all of this is just emphasizing the Jupiter-Saturn sextile itself and the attempt to balance between growth versus consolidation, but it’s first gonna emphasize the Saturn bit and then the Jupiter bit.
  AC: Yeah. Right. The growth versus consolidation or expansion versus contraction – again, like, lift, buoyancy, versus the pull of gravity.
  CB: Yeah, exactly. And it’s a good time for that check-in as well, because while Saturn’s gonna stay, you know, in Pisces for a while, for another couple of – a year or two, Jupiter at this point is gonna start picking up steam after February, and it’s gonna zoom out of Taurus by May and June. So this is the early bit of the year where we have a nice balance between those two areas to some extent and can attempt to rebalance them a little bit more than at other times, whereas by the second half of this year, we’re gonna be running into more tension and more conflict with the growth versus consolidation energies when those two planets move into a square.
  AC: Yeah. Even though the two planets have in many ways opposing forces, they’re at a position where those two can be connected. Right? Again, like, the weight versus the buoyancy, whereas when Jupiter moves into Gemini, it’s more like, you know, gyrocopter versus submarine. Like, you can’t combine those two vehicles into a cool double vehicle. Like, the two directions are too stark in their contrast, whereas this particular arrangement – Jupiter and Saturn have the – we have the opportunity to bring both elements in and integrate them much more smoothly. Also, one final thing, just because we were talking – we talked earlier about global seafaring trade routes. This seems like it also points towards trade route stuff. Not necessarily an attack, but like, you know, if one of the ongoing Saturn in Pisces concerns is sea lanes for trade, this is a lot of focus on Saturn with Mercury, right? Mercury, who’s our resident merchant of the solar system, and then with the Sun focusing on that too, I would look for announcements, plans, ideas, projections around seaborne trade around this time.
  CB: Yeah, that would make sense. It’s like, something gets stuck or slowed down because of the intense focus on Stuarn with Mercury and the Sun there and kind of like, publicized because Mercury puts things on blast. But then it’s like it gets unstuck not long afterwards when everything runs into Jupiter, and so there’s an attempt to look at how to resolve something and how to make things start moving again more freely.
  CB: Tied in with all of this is the Mars-Jupiter square that we haven’t mentioned, I don’t think, yet, which is February 26th and 27th, which is happening basically around this entire time period.
  AC: Yeah, it’s kind of – and that’s interesting and slightly problematic in the sense that we’ve been talking about the Jupiter sextiling Saturn and Jupiter offering this positive or buoyant counterpart to Saturn, but Jupiter’s kind of under attack —
  AC: — right now. There’s something getting in the way of the help. Like, help was on the way, but then help has its own battles to fight.
  CB: Yeah. There’s some sort of potential for conflict there. Mars-Jupiter can be very, like, risk-taking, so in a personal life thing, it can be people taking risks or venturing outside of their comfort zone. Sometimes the positive side with that can be like, increased just energy and enthusiasm, but a tendency to unbalance things like, pretty quickly. And especially because Mars is earlier in zodiacal order and it’s overcoming Jupiter, typically from like, an ancient standpoint, that’s delineated as like, the conflict side of things or the warlike side of things overcoming and getting the upper hand over the peaceful side of things or the more balanced side of things —
  CB: — that things suddenly get more like, fiery for a period of time where the – because one of the reasons why Mars was delineated as a malefic in ancient times is they said that it has a tendency towards being excessively fiery, whereas the benefics – like Jupiter and Venus – tend towards moderation. So somehow the excessively fiery tendencies getting the upper hand at this time towards the later part of February.
  AC: Yeah. It looks disruptive. You know, if we’re looking at, you know, Jupiter in Taurus is like, trying to keep the spice flowing, and Mars in Aquarius is very much like, outsider or rogue forces in an angle on the stability privileging Jupiter in Taurus. I don’t know. Yeah. It’s interesting. But yeah, I would also – I would look at those global trade choke points around that time; I’d be very surprised if there aren’t important developments. And I think it – again, I don’t think that Saturn in Pisces is only interested in the Red Sea. I think that, you know, there are a half dozen choke points which are probably relevant, will be active and activated during these periods.
  CB: Yeah. Or maybe for some people, maybe the choke part is in your heart —
  CB: — and that’s what we’ll need to, exactly. We’ll have to explore. So other positives in terms of personal stuff with Mars-Jupiter can just be increased motivation in a positive sense, taking bold actions, and achieving ambition goals, I think is some of the most positive manifestations of how that could work out. The negatives, though, are things like impulsiveness, being over confident, being reckless or taking on too much, like rushing into something that turns out to be much bigger than you realized at first or than perhaps you’re able to handle.
  AC: Yeah, the negative of Mars-Jupiter is the classic biting off more than you can chew.
  CB: Right, exactly.
  AC: But yeah, it can yeah – but it can also be fun. It can be like, the willingness to take a risk, to take a stab at something, to you know – yeah, to boldly venture forth.
  CB: Yeah, I mean sometimes – there’s some things in our lives where it’s only because we didn’t know how big that project is and we didn’t have a full idea of the scope of what that would entail and that we just like, dove into it, it’s only because of that impulsiveness or that boldly walking tinto an area that we hadn’t discovered before – it’s only because we don’t know the scope of it that we did that thing, and in the end it ends up being way more work and way more of an overburdening thing than maybe we realized it would be, and maybe we wouldn’t sign up for that if we knew. But sometimes that can work out for the best, and sometimes it’s like, sometimes there’s some things that’s better you don’t know going into it so you don’t realize how overwhelming it is, but you can still accomplish great things having done that.
  AC: Yeah. Sometimes boldness is more important than accurate intelligence, and then sometimes, not so much.
  CB: Yeah. Sometimes boldness gets stuff done in the world, and there’s, you know, that’s something we learn a lot from our Mars people and like, from our Aries people especially, you know, the one that’s like, first to do something, the one that’s like, the first in the breech or what have you.
  CB: Maybe that’s not a good —
  AC: Things actually don’t do —
  CB: — analogy.
  AC: — don’t go that great.
  CB: First in the breech?
  AC: The frontlines of armed conflict, but I think we all know where you’re going.
  CB: Sure. The pioneer or like, the explorer – the intrepid explorer who, you know, is the first to go out and do something from their own like, courage or boldness.
  AC: Yeah, yeah.
  CB: Yeah. All right. That’s really – we’re super late in the month at this point, and bringing us —
  AC: And it’s a leap month.
  AC: Which is kind of fun. Or it’s a leap year, and therefore we have an extra day in February. So that conjunction on the 28th of February is actually not the end of February; it’s one more day in which, you know, the configuration is basically the same.
  AC: Just slightly past.
  CB: There’s a 29th, okay. That’s cool; that’s good to know. Looking at other configurations here. Mars is coming off the square with Jupiter by the 29th. The Moon goes into Scorpio and squares Mars and opposes Jupiter. But I’m seeing like, we’re seeing previews and echoes of things coming up like, all these planets in Pisces are heading towards Neptune next month in March, and we can see that by the end of February, Jupiter is within eight degrees of its conjunction with Uranus. So that Jupiter-Uranus conjunction is really starting to heat up at this point by late February, and we know that that will go exact in late April, I believe, right?
  AC: Yeah, I think it’s —
  CB: Or is it May?
  AC: — no, I think it’s late April. I wanna say the 20th or something? I don’t know. It’s definitely —
  AC: — late April.
  CB: Yeah, yeah, it’s the 20th – you’re right.
  AC: But yeah, just a little like, overview comment. So, you know, a lot of this month is just a ton of stuff in Aquarius. We’ve still got plenty in Aquarius by the time the month ends; we’ve still got Mars, Venus, and Pluto. And so even though we emphasized the initial ingress of Mars and Venus and their conjunctions with Pluto and also their exact conjunction, they’re still together in Aquarius for not just the rest of February but for much of March. But by the time, you know, we’re in this last portion of the month, we’ve really got our focus split between those three planets in Aquarius and four planets in Pisces. Right? Which is actually quite a bit. You know, if you looked at this as a nativity, like, there’s a lot going on in Aquarius and there’s a lot going on in Pisces. They’re reasonable stelliums on their own.
  CB: Yeah. So really pay attention to – especially in the first half of the month – most of the month, the Aquarius part of your chart and most of the activity taking place in that house and in that area of your life. And then once we get later in the month to the shift to the Pisces sector of your chart and what’s happening in Pisces with, you know, a brief sort of interlude when you get that Full Moon in Virgo that’s really emphasizing the opposite side of the chart from Pisces and whatever that house is. But those are like, the three main active signs this month.
  AC: Yeah. And what is all this Pisces stuff doing to poor Virgo?
  CB: Right. Yeah. Virgo is getting the short end of the stick during this time to some extent and getting the opposition and the tension aspects from all of the Pisces stuff. You know what’s wild though is when Neptune goes into Aries here in the next couple of years, where all of a sudden we’re gonna be in a period where Neptune’s not in Pieces and more importantly it’s not opposing everything in Virgo for like, the first time in a decade, and I think that’s gonna be a pretty interesting shift to get back to a more rounded period in Virgo history where Virgo’s able to be like,much more grounded and much more methodical and clear-headed than it has for a while where it’s been just getting hit with the opposition from Neptune over the course of the past decade.
  AC: Yeah. I think that’s a very safe assumption. I remember some years ago when Neptune opposed my Saturn in Virgo; it was so hard to Saturn. It was so hard to keep things organized and on track. You know, my attempts at discipline at the time required four times as much energy and were half as effective. Neptune in Pisces has definitely made life harder for almost every single degree of Virgo. Got a few more left to go, but most of it is starting to recede into the rearview mirror.
  CB: Yeah, you know, that actually just reminded me – I was thinking of elections, because elections are really rough the past decade when you try to do a Virgo election, which is supposed to be very grounded and very clear when you put Mercury in Virgo on the Ascendant, but oftentimes we’ve been having to deal with this opposition from Neptune at the same time, which you know, changes the nature of the election. I just remembered, though, that brings me to the election of the month, which I completely spaced out and didn’t mention, and that’s actually towards the very beginning of the month. So let me pull up a chart for that.
  AC: Do it.
  CB: All right. So our election this month is actually very early in the month. It’s on February 6th around 8:10 A.M. Or 8:10 in the morning local time. So set it to 8:10 roughly. Don’t change time zones or anything like that. You’re gonna set it to 8:10 your time, and you’re gonna end up with something close to about 11 degrees of Pisces rising. So you end up with an electional chart where Pisces is rising, and the ruler of the Ascendant is Jupiter, which is down here in the 3rd whole sign house in a day chart. So this is a chart that’s somewhat geared, then, towards communication and other 3rd house topics as a result of that 3rd house emphasis with the ruler of the Ascendant. So the Moon is up here in Capricorn; it’s in early Capricorn in our time zone, and it’s applying within 13 degrees to a trine with Jupiter, which is a nice little case of bonification of the Moon. This chart really emphasizes the sextile with Jupiter and Saturn and kind of baking this into the chart.
  It does involve putting Saturn very close to the Ascendant with Saturn having just risen, but this is mitigated by the fact that it’s a day chart, so that Saturn is more constructive and is less malefic, and also because you still have this nice sextile with Jupiter as the ruler of the Ascendant back to Pisces and back to Saturn with reception, since Saturn is in Jupiter’s sign, and that really helps to take some of the edge off of Saturn. So even though there will still be some of those qualities of Saturn by putting it in the rising sign and putting it close to the Ascendant of like, seriousness, of sort of dispassionateness to some extent, it’ll be balanced out in a very positive and constructive manner in terms of balancing those themes of growth and expansion versus consolidation. That’s really the key for this chart.
  The chart does have Mars in the 11th house in a day chart, so it might not be great for friends and groups and alliances and the possibility for some conflict there, so I wouldn’t use it as a major 11th house chart, if that’s what you’re trying to start. But otherwise with Jupiter in the 3rd house, I think it would be good for communication, for things having to do with your neighborhood, which is a 3rd house thing. Sometimes education or learning, other things related to like, relatives – what are some other like, 3rd house activities? I’m spacing out, Austin.
  AC: I mean, whatever your weekly schedule is. Creating schedules. You know, going about regular duties. Going through communications, answering emails, doing responses. Let’s see, chatting with siblings —
  CB: Yeah, sibling relating things. Karina in the live chat says starting a daily practice; I think that’s a really good one, and it’s actually really good here because that would bring in the 3rd house component with Jupiter but also the 1st house component with Saturn because Saturn is good at things that build up slowly over time and things that take repetition and like, working towards something for an extended period of time rather than having immediate gratification.
  Yeah, so this is our electional chart of the month; it’s our auspicious election. Leisa Schaim and I are researching – we’ve got a bunch of other charts for February, and we’re getting ready to record our monthly Auspicious Elections Podcast for patrons, which we’ll record and release some time in the next few days here. So you can get access to that by going to our page on Patreon. And otherwise, we also have our 2024 Electional Astrology Report still, where we picked out charts for the next 12 months. So if you’re looking for long-term elections for the next year, you can find out more information about that at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/2024Report.
  All right. So that is the election for February, and that’s kind of it for the astrology for February. That’s kind of bringing us to the end of this month. Somehow we did it in a solid two hours and 15-ish minutes. It pales in comparison to what our four-hour year ahead forecast.
  AC: Yeah. Yes it does.
  CB: Yes it does. Okay. Well, this was a lot of fun. This was good.
  CB: I like this; I’m glad that we’re back to, you know, we had a lot to pack in to the year ahead forecast and we tried to cover everything, so now it’s nice to go in and do the deeper dive into these individual months now that we’re starting to experience them. But also now that we’re only like, a month into the year, we’re already starting to see the manifestation of a lot of the energies and a lot of the things that we predicted in the year ahead forecast, so it’s already fascinating to start to see the year unfold and to see the fulfillment of some of those things already at this stage.
  AC: Yeah, I’m really excited to see, to watch this action-packed first episode of the first season of Pluto in Aquarius. You know, I think it’s gonna set a lot of plotlines up; I think we’re gonna get to meet some of the characters —
  CB: Right. There’s gonna be like —
  AC: — been looking forward to it.
  CB: There’s gonna be like, that weird character that’s introduced that you’re not sure about, but then eventually they become a much bigger character to the plotline long-term.
  AC: Yeah. Yeah, again, with Mercury, Mars, Venus, all sorts of different implications. A lot set in motion. So I’m looking forward to it.
  CB: I like the idea that this is like, the pilot episode for Pluto in Aquarius this month.
  AC: Yeah, we got like, we got some behind the scenes footage. We got a little bit of sizzle reel last year. We got the trailer. But this is the actual first episode. Like, the plot is now in motion.
  CB: Yeah. Now we’re getting to the – as I said – the actual flying cars and robots walking around San Francisco part of history, and this is really happening. So it’ll be interesting to see how it goes and to experience it together as astrologers and to continue to both document things in real time as it’s happening and talk about the astrology and also just note how well it’s working out, and then also try to anticipate and look ahead to the future continually as we always do in these episodes.
  AC: Yeah, I mean, everything we learn this month we can then plug into what we know about what Pluto’s going to be doing in the many years to come. And so – I guess that’s part of the reason I’m excited is like, it’s, you know, you can have the equation for something, but until you actually have a value for the different variables, you can’t actually make a prediction. This’ll be like, filling in some of those variables so you can actually start doing a little future math.
  CB: Yeah. I was talking to like, some students of mine doing a Q&A recently for my Hellenistic Astrology course, and we were talking about that and just that astrology works better and it is often context-specific. And the more you know about the context, the better you can get then at trying to predict the outcome, because the archetypes themselves are so broad and there’s so many innumerable number of possible manifestations of different combinations that you have to know what the context is that you’re applying the astrology to and once you do, you can then do a better job of actually predicting what you’re talking about. Because astrology allows you to figure out the trajectory of something, but you first have to establish what you’re, you know, doing the trajectory of. But the more context you get, the more you can finetune and continue to specify the prediction more and more, and there’s something about that reciprocal relationship that’s very important.
  AC: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. At the risk of oversimplifying the beautiful dialectic between theory and practice, or experiment and evidence, or experiment and data.
  CB: Yeah, that’s a great point. All right. So speaking of February, what do you have going on? What’s coming up for you in February? I know there’s like —
  CB: — a big, looming thing coming up —
  AC: Yeah, that’s —
  CB: — pretty soon here.
  AC: — that’s in March.
  AC: February is the last month – yeah, the last month before the life-changer crawls out of Kait’s body into our shared reality.
  CB: That is a beautiful way to describe childbirth. I appreciate that.
  AC: Yeah, I’m a really good husband. But yeah, so let’s see. I’m working desperately on 36 Faces trying to get that second edition done. You can go to my website; I’ve got a ton of – I don’t know, scores of hours, probably over a hundred hours worth of lectures and classes available for purchase and instant download. I’m not doing readings right now, but I do have – there’s a section of the website for all the people who somehow made it through my three-year program and then graduated. A lot of them do readings, so if you want somebody who I spent years trying to teach how to do the things that I know how to do, those are – the people who’ve accomplished that are all on the website. Book a reading with them. There’s a delightful series coming out from Sphere and Sundry that I elected and had a fair amount of input on – it’s a Moon in Taurus series. It’s Moon conjunct Jupiter in Taurus; it should be delightfully stabilizing – rich, chocolatey stability is what I’m hoping the flavor will taste like – that’s coming out, I don’t know, next couple weeks. And then with Sphere and Sundry, preorders for Thema Mundi close again on the 13th, so the Mars-Pluto conjunction’s gonna shut that down. So yeah, go to Sphere and Sundry – watch for the Jupiter-Moon stuff. Go to my website; there’s a ton of stuff there. Pray for me while I attempt to lock myself in a writing cell and get those decans done.
  CB: Gotta get it done. You’re at the threshold of fatherhood, about the walk across that doorway here. Definitely get that book done so people can stop emailing me about it.
  AC: Oh my god.
  CB: I’m looking forward to it.
  AC: I appreciate/hate the enthusiasm.
  AC: I would like to just get it done so we never have to talk about it again.
  CB: Right. Well, no, once the book gets done, we’re gonna hassle you about a new project —
  AC: I know.
  CB: — writing another book.
  AC: Well, that’s fine. I’ll be excited about writing a new book.
  AC: Rewriting a book that I wrote 10 years ago and being disappointed in how stupid I was 10 years ago is the thing I’m ready to be done with.
  CB: I still remember when you were first writing the book, and we were at a conference, and you read me the one for my decan —
  AC: Oh yeah.
  CB: — and it was such a great delineation I still think about that, and I got an early preview of that. I feel very blessed.
  AC: Oh, that’s nice.
  CB: All right. Your URL’s AustinCoppock.com and SphereAndSundry.com?
  CB: Cool. All right. People should check that out. I’ll put a link in the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website for this episode.
  As for myself, I did that big lots episode and I’m working on another follow-up episode I mentioned that I’m gonna release just to patrons who have access to The Casual Astrology Podcast, where I’m gonna go through like, 20 different example charts that I found that I couldn’t fit into the last episode, and I’m also gonna add that too so that students of my Hellenistic astrology course can also watch that video. So you can check that out at Courses.TheAstrologySchool.com or on my page on Patreon.
  I’m working on the Hellenistic course and working on some new things there to expand it and also get some help, including a partnership with Levente Laszlo, who’s a translator of Greek texts, and he’s gonna be helping me to field questions from students now as a person that’s gonna be on-hand to answer questions that people have about textual things with an actual Greek scholar. So I’m really excited about that partnership and working with him.
  And then also next month I’m gonna be working on that episode on comets, which I’m researching right now and is gonna be a really amazing episode on the most important comets in history and how comets were dealt with by ancient astrologers.
  And then finally I’m still working on the Saturn in Aquarius episode, which will be out at some point, and with all of these episodes I’ll release them for early access to patrons first. So if you’d like to support that work and you would like early access to new episodes, then sign up for my page on Patreon.com.
  But otherwise, I think that’s it for this forecast. Thank you so much, Austin, for joining me for this. This was an amazing episode. And thanks everyone in the audience for joining us as well, for all of your comments; they were really helpful and I appreciate your support. And yeah, good luck, Austin, this month, and we’ll check in again next month. Hopefully you’re still here, still available, before crossing that threshold.
  AC: I hope so.
  CB: Okay. All right. Well, everyone will be thinking positive thoughts and supporting thoughts of you and then you’ll take a break at some point here. I’ll do the forecasts with somebody else and we’ll figure that out when the time comes, but hopefully we’ll see you again next month.
  AC: Yeah. I look forward to it.
  CB: Cool. All right. Thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time.
  AC: All right. Take care!
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