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Mis entrevistados en este episodio son Anny Gabriela Ventura Puac y Jairo Chamalé Lemus. Anny es ajquij(guía espiritual), politóloga e investigadora, actual curadora en jefe de Espacio/C. Nacida en Chuwila, Chichicastenango, Quiché, Guatemala. Es mujer Maya Kiche con identidad diversa, sanadora y contadora del tiempo. Tiene estudios en Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, Relaciones Internacionales y una especialidad en ODS para Naciones Indígenas. Es confundadora de Espacio C, en dónde se ha desempeñado como gestora cultural desde 2013 y curadora en Jefe desde 2023.En Guatemala su trabajo está presente en diversos espacios sociales, políticos y culturales, como consultora independiente para organizaciones no gubernamentales, trabajando con niñas, mujeres y adolescentes mayas y no mayas a nivel nacional, en temas concretos como empoderamiento político, salud (diabetes / VIH) y sanación desde la Cosmovisión Maya.Jairo es persona disidente, del territorio Poqomam de Mixco, viajero e investigador se la religiosidad popular, las expresiones culturales y la espiritualidad de su contexto cercano. Es guía de turismo y estudiante de antropología.Notas del EpisodioAnny y Jairo y el Cristo NegroEl camino de peregrinacion entre Mixco y OaxacaQuirio Catano y las origines del cristo negroLas diversas formas de sacrificar y bailarLas colonizaciones de EquipulasEl base de cristo negro en el mundo maya/mexicaEl crisis climatico y la falta de ofrendasLas consecuencias de la perdida de hospitalidadLa memoria vivida del intercambio intercultural antiguaTarea Abisaí Navarro María Jacinta Xón / Proyecto Tux Cocina Gourmet de OrigenHoja de Pacaya - InstagramLos Cofrades Chichicastenango - Instagramespacio/C arte+memoria - InstagramTranscripcion en espanol (English Below)S6 - Anny Puac & Jairo - Peregrinacion a EsquipulasChris: [00:00:00] Bienvenida y bienvenido al podcast El Fin del Turismo Annie y Jairo. Gracias a ambos por acompañarme hoy. Me encantaría que pudieran contarles a nuestros oyentes desde dónde llaman y cómo aparece el mundo ahí para cada uno de ustedes.Anny: Muchas gracias, Chris y buenos días a quienes nos escuchen o buenas tardes o buenas noches, dependiendo su zona horaria.Mi nombre es Anny y yo le saludo desde el territorio maya K'iche' de Chuwila, K'iche' Guatemala específicamente.Jairo: Buenos días a ambos, para mi un gusto estar por acá. Sawe ta inteer winaq (Buenos días a todas y todos) mucho gusto desde el territorio pues Poqomam de Mixco y también desde las cercanías a la ciudad de Guatemala, pues gracias por esta [00:01:00] oportunidad para compartir conocimiento.Chris: Y gracias a ustedes dos. Yo estoy aquí en Oaxaca y el mundo parece obviamente un poco raro. Bueno, quizás no es obvio, pero parece más raro día por día. Estamos aquí hoy para hablar de Esquipulas en Guatemala. Y Esquipulas es el lugar de varias iglesias que han abergado al cristo negro de la ciudad, que es famosa por sus supuestos milagros durante los últimos cuatro siglos.De manera similar, la peregrinación al santuario es la más grande de América Central y la segunda más grande de las Américas, con lo que leí, 5 millones de personas que lo visitan cada año. Ahora, para empezar, ¿Estarían dispuestos a explicar que impulsó a cada uno [00:02:00] de sus intereses o relaciones con este lugar y la práctica de la peregrinación?Anny: Sí, por supuesto Chris. Pues, yo desde como mi relación, digamos personal o individual como familia, yo tengo, digamos, como clara la idea de cuando inician estas peregrinaciones, de pronto, cuando yo ya tenía unos siete u ocho años de edad, así, para decirte que yo tengo claridad, pero cuando yo retrocedo a los archivos de la familia, pues veo que el tema de peregrinar a Esquipulas, pues comienza con mis abuelas.Jairo: Entonces yo te podría decir que dentro de mi familia, la peregrinación a Esquipulas , así quizá llevará mínimamente unos 80 años presente en la familia, sobre todo del lado de [00:03:00] mi abuela materna. Que ella es de un territorio K'iche' de Quetzaltenango, en donde pues empezaban el viaje, en conjunto, allá fuera un viaje de barrio organizado por el barrio, o era un viaje familiar, entonces se iban uno o dos buses en aquel tiempo cuando no había tanto transporte, verdad? Era un lujo también irse por alguna ruta en donde hubiera paso para bus. Y pues, lo que no se pudiera transitar ya en bus, pues se hacía caminando, se hacían burros, pero, más o menos por ahí viene un poquito la historia de de cómo inician estas rutas de peregrinaje en mi familia, digamos. Con el caso de nosotros, yo no tengo conciencia de pequeño de haber, pues, llegado a Esquipulas. Bueno, hay un dato bien interesante, cuando yo cumplo 40 días de haber nacido, mi familia decide llevarme a [00:04:00] Esquipulas, eso pues está en el archivo fotográfico de la familia como agradecimiento, porque al final nací con... nací bien.Jairo: Y entonces la familia decide peregrinar es el dato más cercano que tengo de la personal de las idas a Esquipulas. Claro, esto siempre lo he tenido muy familiarizado dentro de mi contexto cercano, puesto que la gente pues de mi municipio suele ir justo organizada en excursiones de las diferentes organizaciones religiosas que hay en mi municipio.Estas, pues designan fechas y son buses llenos de aproximadamente 50 personas. Cada bus suelen llegar hasta tres, de acá de Mixco, pues que se van para para Esquipulas. Y ese es algo bien interesante porque es pues, parte de la modernidad, digámoslo ir en bus, pero hay muchas anécdotas de las personas de acá del pueblo que [00:05:00] cuentan cómo, pues iban de una forma más rústica, verdad? Que podía ser, pues en peregrinaje caminando, que no era la única peregrinación, de hecho la del cristo negro de Esquipulas. Hoy puntualmente, vamos a hablar de ella.Pero pues están también las peregrinaciones Antigua Guatemala que está aquí cerquita, aquí detrás de nosotros hay un cerro que es el cerro Alux. Este cerro se cruzaba, pues caminando, todavía lo hace la gente caminando porque detrás del cerro está, pues la bajada para llegar a la Antigua Guatemala.Chris: Gracias. Gracias a ustedes. Pues así, por conocer un poco más de sus historias, como de peregrinación, me gustaría saber un poco más si se podrían ofrecer algo de la larga historia de Esquipulas, del cristo negro y pues, ¿Cómo se originó la la peregrinación? ¿De donde viene esa historia?.Jairo: Bueno, como lo mencioné antes, diciendo algunas [00:06:00] palabras en el idioma poqomam. Es el idioma que se hablaba, pues en nuestro pueblo. Lo voy a decir nuevamente más despacio para, pues, describirles que es lo que dije, técnicamente es:Sawe' ta inteer winaq, kiroo wilkee' chipam ma' q 'oriik taqee, reh ma' ojeer winaq reh qatinimiit Mixko' buenos días a todos. Qué gusto pues poder compartir estas palabras y también un poco de la historia de la gente antigua de nuestro pueblo. Porque pues, la verdad es que el peregrinaje a Esquipulas está muy relacionado e intrínseco con la gente de Mixco y justamente también con el territorio oaxaqueño. Mi nombre, pues es Jairo, Jairo Andrés Chamale Lemus. Yo pues pertenezco a este territorio, a la gente maya poqomam. De acá es la mitad de mi familia de mis antepasados. Y , pues me dedico al turismo. Yo soy guía [00:07:00] de turistas de hace aproximadamente ocho años ya desde que me gradué muy joven. Y, pues me he dedicado justo a peregrinar para que las personas conozcan también el contexto histórico de Guatemala y de las diferentes expresiones culturales, religiosas y también de resistencia de la gente en el territorio de lo que ahora conocemos como Guatemala.Pues también, soy estudiante de la carrera de antropología, de la licenciatura específicamente en antropología, y pues me he dedicado también a estudiar el caso del idioma maya poqomam en Mixco, que es una comunidad muy cercana a la ciudad de Guatemala, que hemos tenido pues un impacto, demográfico y social, pues bastante fuerte, pues debido al crecimiento del área metropolitana de la ciudad de Guatemala. Es algo a lo que me he dedicado a estudiar durante los últimos años. Y también, pues, a [00:08:00] documentarlo, porque tenemos muchas prácticas culturales y espirituales en nuestro pueblo, que han ido desapareciendo conforme este avance demográfico de la ciudad, muchísimas gracias. Rontyoox aq'oo taAnny: Bueno Chris. En realidad hay un registro, digamos histórico, donde dice que el primer peregrinaje que se inicia a Esquipulas, fue en Marzo 1595, cuando la imagen sale del taller de este señor escultor Quirio Cataño, que sale hacia Esquipulas, hacia Chiquimula. Esto está al oriente de Guatemala. Nosotros lo conocemos como la zona caliente de de Guatemala. Pero es la zona, digamos, como caliente árida. Es un territorio en donde hay comunidad Xinca, Popti', si no estoy mal Chortí también. Y pues, la producción que se [00:09:00] tiene por las tierras de por allá, estamos hablando de frutas de algunas plantas, de algunos tubérculos más o menos, pero más que todos se dedican a la fruta, verdad.Esta primera peregrinación la documenta y la registra el cronista, que se llama Miguel Álvarez. Y él dice que, cuando cuando salióó del taller y se dirigió hacia Esquipulas la imagen iba haciendo diferentes milagros en todo el recorrido hasta llegar a la basílica. Entonces habían personas que le pedían justamente que, que por favor que la imagen pasara por lo menos una noche dentro de la casa de las personas para, bendecirlo. Y Y más o menos se calcula cada año, digamos en la actualidad, ahora en Guatemala y en alrededor de 300 mil personas de todo el mundo, más que todo entre México, Centroamérica, países del sur, por ejemplo de Perú [00:10:00] de Ecuador de Ecuador, Bolivia, si no estoy mal, es como mucha la cantidad de gente que llega, más o menos entre noviembre, que ahorita es como una fecha de noviembre y diciembre y todo enero, digamos, esas son como los tres meses de muchísima más afluencia de personas que llegan llegan a la basílica, verdad? Entonces se le puede llamar romerías, se le puede llamar una peregrinacion que peregrinación, usualmente, pues ahí si que las personas que visitan puede ser que hagan así como un día de visita nada más o puede ser que pueda prolongarse una visita hasta por 10, 15 días, verdad?De la ciudad de Guatemala, hasta Esquipulas hay una distancia más o menos como entre unos 220 a 250 kilómetros y se recorre, si vas como en romería, pasando por lugares como muy puntuales de toda la peregrinación, en promedio [00:11:00] cada día tú vas haciendo un tramo de 40 kilómetros, al día, digamos si tu intención es ir en peregrinaje así. Entonces eso es más o menos como más datos históricos y el relato, verdad?Chris: Y estoy un poco curioso, dentro de las estancias, al llegar a Esquipulas, si yo fuera peregrinando, por ejemplo, ¿ Qué haría? ¿Se van parando para hacer sus rezos? Me gustaría saber por alguien que nunca ha hecho una peregrinación, como aparecía esos días antes de venir.Anny: Bueno, yo te voy a contar un poquito el relato de de mi familia porque mi abuela materna, ella sí era una señora, pues muy católica, no? Entonces, pues ella, su peregrinaje, digamos para ella, era su sacrificio, verdad? En el año, decir bueno, por agradecimiento [00:12:00] a mi salud, a los milagros que me concedió, porque era como muy devota. Era el hecho de salir en ruta de peregrinaje. ¿Qué implicaba esto? Inclusive, preparar comida para no digamos como perder el tiempo, tú pensando en qué comer durante el camino, porque la idea para ellos y para ellas era, pues, ir en como en recogimiento, en rezo constante, en oración, digamos en petición, ir como parando cada cierto tiempo, verdad? Cada 40 kilómetros, porque que ya dentro de la comunidad, católica-cristiana, hay puntos que están como marcados dentro de la ruta en donde tú puedes ir parando con cada familia, porque puede ser que tengan una réplica de la imagen del cristo negro, porque de hecho, cuando fue la primera peregrinación, puede ser que esta familia haya sido una de las [00:13:00] familias que recibió por primera vez el cristo negro.Entonces se convierte como en ese punto de de parada, verdad? Entonces, cuando hacen ese punto de parada, pues ya bajan. Bajan a hacer oración, bajan a platicar y a convivir con las personas de pronto, a compartir un alimento. Ya sentir, pues, así que también como su fé, su devoción, pero al mismo tiempo su convivencia, su alegría en este, en este tramo de compartir no?.Entonces eso digamos, es lo que usualmente, pues se ve. Yo también he visto otras personas que, por ejemplo, ya cuando quedan unos, son los últimos 20 kilómetros de recorrido por ejemplo, descienden de sus vehículos y caminan de rodillas esos 20 kilómetros hasta llegar a la basílica. Entonces, pues, los ves, ya puede ser que sea solo el papá con con el hijo, o el papá y la mamá, o pues la diversidad de personas que puedan llegar, que van y que pues hacen su penitencia, y [00:14:00] entregan digamos, pues su sacrificio de esta forma. Así como hay personas que puede ser que, que durante toda su ruta de peregrinaje, hay un ejemplo de unos, de unas personas cercanas a nosotros que tienen un conjunto de marimba, de música, y pues lo que hacen es que van con un vehículo y van ejecutando música todo el trayecto hasta llegar a Esquipulas, y ya cuando llegan a la basílica, bajan con sus instrumentos y se dedican a cantar ya sea una canción, un tiempo, verdad?Ahí, entonces, pues yo creo que depende, varía mucho de lo que te puedas tú dedicar o el agradecimiento que tú quieras pues dar, o a lo que, pues, lo que tu corazón salga, no? En mi caso como muy puntual, pues nosotros hacemos el recorrido completo los 220 kilómetros en vehículo hasta llegar a Esquipulas. Y luego, pues ahí ya, o sea, nos establecemos [00:15:00] y como nuestras dinámicas son un tanto como diferentes porque yo no soy católica. Yo soy de la cosmovisión maya, y pues ahí he crecido buena parte de mi vida. Mi concepción como de ver esta ruta de peregrinaje es diferente, porque si bien es cierto el que el cristo negro, pues es una figura de un cristo crucificado cristiano, Jesús, nosotros aprendimos a ver cómo la historia del pueblo Poptí y Chorti y Chortí, en cuanto a que esta ruta de peregrinaje es bien interesante, porque durante toda tu ruta más, más o menos, me atrevería a decir que tal vez un 70 de la ruta, tú vas encontrando montañas de obsidiana, entonces es una ruta que en sí es una ruta de sanación y para nosotros, digamos dentro de la cosmovisión maya está muy relacionada con el Nahual Tijax, que es la obsidiana y para [00:16:00] quizá buena parte de Oaxaca o de su Istmo o de la cultura Náhuatl, por ejemplo, está relacionado con Tezcatlipoca que era justamente esta veneración de esta mujer que decían que era brillante y color de cobrizo y de nigriso verdad? Y por tanto, Y pues tú sabes que ambas piedras o estos relatos que nos cuentan, pues es justamente sanación y de ahí que nosotros creemos que por eso el cristo negro es tan milagroso cuando se trata de temas de salud.Jairo: Desde nuestro lado, por así decirlo, forma parte ya de un peregrinaje que no solamente se hace el 15 de enero. Claro, el 15 de enero es el día establecido para hacer el peregrinaje de cristo negro de Esquipulas. Pero pues, muchos de los grupos que les comentaba que son bastante diversos acá en Mixco, grupos religiosos principalmente católicos, o pues sincretizados de [00:17:00] alguna forma, establecen también estas visitas como parte de su organización dentro del grupo de personas que inciden.Y entonces si, justamente dentro del bus, también se suele, pues, ir rezando el rosario, que es esta práctica de ir rezando las novenas con un orden establecido con cantos y la gente, pues suele ir desde que salen de ciudad de Guatemala o desde que salen de acá desde Mixco, que hay que cruzar la ciudad y luego la ruta hacia el oriente de Guatemala, la gente va haciendo estas oraciones cada cierto tiempo, pero depende mucho del grupo y de qué tan católico sea de alguna forma, porque hay grupos que solamente lo hacen como una excursión claro. El fin principal es de la visita, pues a la basílica del cristo negro y la veneración de cristo negro como tal.Y, pues solamente llegan en en el bus hasta la basílica y algo que caracteriza mucho a la cultura de [00:18:00] Mixco, es el, la quema de pólvora. A nosotros nos fascina la pólvora y cuando llegamos a Esquipulas justamente esa es la premisa, no? Llegar a quemar bombas de sonido, de sonido estridente en aviso que la gente de Mixco ya llegó.Y también fuegos pirotécnicos de colores. Es bien curioso porque depende mucho del grupo y a lo que el grupo, pues aunque sea católico o sincretizado con lo maya, a lo que este grupo religiosamente se dedique, encaminado a eso va la actividad que se va a realizar allá.Tengo conocimiento de un grupo que, de hecho, ya se documentó a gracias al CECEG, al Centro de Estudios Culturales de la Universidad de San Carlos, de Guatemala, es el grupo El Baile de Moros de los Seis Toritos, que es básicamente un grupo de danza tradicional que nace en la aldea Lo De Bran que está acá en Mixco siempre dentro [00:19:00] del área metropolitana y ellos, pues se dedican a bailar El Torito. El Torito es básicamente la representación de una danza que se hace en alusión a dueños de una finca y el trato hacia los animales. Entonces los animales tienen una especie de de revelación contra este dueño de la finca, una historia bien, sutilmente contada desde lo maya también. Y entonces van a hacer esta representación de la danza a Esquipulas. Esto lo hacen justamente para la fiesta del cristo negro. Bailan todo el día, durante tres días seguidos frente al atrio de la iglesia de Esquipulas, mientras millones de personas visitan la basílica de cristo negro y en ese momento ellos están bailando ahí.Chris: Qué fascinante. Me encanta ese sentido, esa onda que, que hay tanta diversidad, en la forma, los caminos, las celebraciones que se niegue un poco [00:20:00] ese sentido occidental que es como de siempre asumir o buscar una sola respuesta, una sola historia, una sola manera, de actuar, de entender.Y así fue sorprendiente para mí por leer, por investigar las historias de Esquipulas y de las peregrinaciones porque encontré muchas historias diversas. Entonces voy a leer un poquito de lo que encontré y me gustaría escuchar de ustedes, si se podrían comentar un poco de si hay sentidos de "eso es como puro chisme o es un rumor" o si hay capas y capas dentro de las historias de Esquipulas y las peregrinaciones.Entonces, pues la primera va que "en la ciudad sagrada de Copán se celebraban grandes fiestas en honor [00:21:00] a dios maya Ek-Kampulá que significa: 'el que empuja las nubes', pues se le atribuía el poder de alejar las lluvias y permitir los días del sol necesarios para preparar la siembra.Ek-Kampulá que era de color negro, estaba rodeado con una antorcha en la mano izquierda. Su figura se puede apreciar en las graduadas de uno de los templos de Copán." Ahora, el segundo."Algunos relatos dicen que la figura del cristo negro fue ordenada por los conquistadores españoles en Guatemala en ese momento para facilitar la conversión de los pueblos locales al cristianismo."Ahora, el próximo. "Las leyendas piadosas afirman que la imagen se oscureció debido a los misioneros españoles que deseaban convertir a los [00:22:00] nativos que adoraban a la deidad nebulosa pagana Ek-Kampulá en el área que también era representada como una figura oscura." Entonces, supongo que mi pregunta es como, ¿Cuántas de estas historias han escuchado Y ¿Cuáles historias son las meras meras verdaderas según ustedes? O si hay capas y capas y capas de historias en qué todas merecen su lugar.Jairo: Yo creería que, Copán tiene un papel bien importante dentro de lo que estamos hablando. Ahora es un sitio arqueológico del área residencial o el castillo, por así decirlo, y los templos de la gente maya de ese tiempo, recordemos que es el clásico. Y pues esta ciudad fue colonizada por otra ciudad que se llama Quiriguá, que está siempre en las riberas del Río Motagua, un río muy [00:23:00] importante que comunica toda la parte de las montañas de Guatemala con el Caribe. Y en Copán si hay muchas expresiones espirituales. Seguro, Anny nos va a ampliar un poco más de esto. Pero lo que yo he visto son muchas expresiones, rituales espirituales y también, un centro de peregrinaje como tal ya fungía Copán. O sea, ya era una capital política, religiosa y cultural muy importante que está muy cerca de Esquipulas. Es increíblemente como un sitio maya tan importante del clásico está tan cerca a una ciudad, que es tan importante para todo el área mesoamericana. Es decir, desde México hasta Costa Rica, conocen al cristo negro de Esquipulas. Y pues también algo que a mi me llama la atención relacionado a lo que acabas de decir es como, Esquipulas, pues si es un referente para la gente pues católica, la gente católica que no es maya va [00:24:00] también a Esquipulas como una forma de peregrinaje, pero, a mi me llama mucho la atención, la práctica también de la espiritualidad maya y otras espiritualidades que se llevan a cabo en Esquipulas, no?quizás no es tan directamente relacionado con la figura que acabas de mencionar, que yo he escuchado como Ek-Chuah, sino que es esta figura de la piedra de los compadres, que es una leyenda, no? Una leyenda de adulterio, por así decirlo, en el cual hay dos piedras que están pegadas en alusión a dos amigos que llegan al peregrinaje de cristo negro de Esquipulas y en un acto sexual, estos compadres se quedan pegados como castigo por haber cometido el adulterio. Esa es la leyenda. Y en esa piedra, pues se practica la espiritualidad maya, es decir a pocos ni siquiera un kilómetro de la de la basílica del cristo negro de Esquipulas, puedes ver esta piedra donde la gente coloca, [00:25:00] pues, sus candelas, su incienso y hay altares dedicados completamente a la espiritualidad maya dentro del mismo pueblo.Entonces esto va un poco aunado a lo que nos decía Anny no? Como la figura de cristo negro, también es muy representativa y es la reminiscencia de algo que se practicó muy fuertemente durante la época prehispánica.Yo no descartaría del todo, pues el valor de Ek-Chuah dentro de estas prácticas espirituales y que sí, definitivamente los españoles, trataron de tomar elementos de la de la espiritualidad maya que ya eran importantes para imponer la religión católica. Pero la gente maya, yo siempre lo digo, fue muy estratega y lo es hasta la fecha para continuar resistiendo, practicando, pues la espiritualidad tamizado con elementos católicos y con este significado profundo.Anny: Sí, yo también voy a coincidir un poquito en el [00:26:00] tema de no descartaría la relación que se tiene con Ek-Chuah, porque está asociado con la deidad Chortí. El otro punto que tú hablabas del tema, un tanto político, sí hay algunos historiadores, políticos que justamente, enuncian este uso de figuras que está asociada con el trabajo y sobretodo, digamos a la carga y explotación laboral de los campesinos, y cómo también estas zonas fueron como fuertemente impactadas durante el tiempo de la colonia. Entonces eso, yo tampoco lo, lo descartaría y tampoco diría que es un mito. Por ejemplo, yo, sé que la antigua población de Esquipulas, fue una de las ciudades en este punto incendiadas por los españoles durante la invasión aquí a Guatemala el 1525 verdad?[00:27:00] En el centro de la plaza de Esquipulas, según cómo lo relatan, decía que habían, cuatro árboles de de pochotl que es la ceiba, que la ceiba pues ahí si que para nosotros es un árbol sagrado, verdad? Porque bajo sus sombras, siempre se han realizado ceremonias vinculadas con prácticas agrícolas, que duraban desde el solsticio de invierno hasta el equinoccio de primavera.Entonces se iniciaban más o menos también en esta zona por el 21 de diciembre, pero tenían ritualidades más unciosas, por ejemplo, como el 15 de enero. Y de ahí que parte que una de las fechas propicias para visitar Esquipulas sea 15 de enero. Entonces, las otras fechas de celebración que iban entre el equinoccio y el solsticio.Del 15 de enero al 25 de febrero, más o menos 40 días. Porque en 40 días estábamos viendo que se operaba el paso del sol por el cenit en la otra banda del [00:28:00] trópico, en un punto en donde estaba hasta cierto punto equidistante del círculo máximo de la tierra, donde según la posición del sol, se tomaba la medida del tiempo en que se produciría el fenómeno de la tierra que ya fuera el fenómeno del niño o de la niña, como se le nombra, verdad?Exactamente, se hacía esto dentro de los días comprendidos del 20 al 31 de enero, que es cuando se operan como los fenómenos en los hemisferios, y de ahí es como de donde viene esta creencia de las cabañuelas, de cuando muy va iniciando el año más o menos por ahí, entonces hay como una relación también ciclo-agrícola y por eso es que a mí no se me hace como un mito el hecho que está asociado con Ek-Chuah porque Ek-Chuah de hecho está asociado con en este, no me gusta llamarlo Dios, pero con la energía del trabajo, verdad? Porque me parece que esa es como la expresión correcta. En cuanto a lo del señor de Esquipulas, la [00:29:00] relación de las ceremonias con la natividad de cristo, digamos, así como el establecimiento de la festividad del señor de Esquipulas el 15 de enero, pues si siguen teniendo continuidad con las formas religiosas prehispánicas en el área maya guatemalteca, los antiguos habitantes de Esquipulas, si hay un relato, de Castañeda que lo mencionan en lo en el 55 que se dice que , "adoraban a un Dios que era el protector de las siembras de la cosecha y del trabajo."Esto lo dice, este historiador "que seguramente él dice no pertenecía a las deidades mesoamericanas, especialmente al panteón mexica, universado en momentos previos a la llegada de los españoles. La representación antropomorfa de las deidades no era desconocida en Mesoamérica, por el contrario, era abundante y generalizada desde Sinaloa hasta Honduras. [00:30:00] Además, 'del Dios principal,' el comenta fray Diego Durán, 'él hace como una alusión, con Tezcatlipoca, que él dice era una piedra muy relumbrante y negra como azabache obsidiano. Piedra de la que ellos hacen navajas y cuchillos para cortar.' Además, ciudades era de palo entallada en una figura de un hombre todo negro de las sienes para abajo con la frente, narices y boca blanca, de color de indio bestia" dice él, "de algunos atavíos galanos a su indiano modo a lo primero que tenía era unos ojeras de oro y otras de plata. En el labio bajo tenía un bezote de laverde cristalino en el que está metida una pluma verde y otras veces es azul, que después de afuera parece esmeralda o rubí. Era este bezote como un geme de largo encima de coleta de caballos que tenían la cabeza. Entonces, lo que se puede apreciar en esta descripción [00:31:00] de Tezcatlipoca corresponde casi literalmente a lo que se pudo percibir como la primera figura del cristo negro, especialmente en la representación de las imágenes talladas en madera que se veneraban en las ciudades periféricas del imperio mexica. La diferencia en el atuendo de ambas deidades radican las connotaciones religiosas de cada una de las culturas, materias, simbologías, espirituales y atributos, pero en esencial es parecido e indescutible indiscutible.Recordemos que la celebración principal, digamos de la obsidiana de Tezcatlipoca y de lo que tú mencionabas relacionado con el tema de las lluvias, pues era justamente esto, la petición para que lloviera, sobre todo por ser tierras en este punto, muy áridas, muy secas . Y bueno, yo me quedo por aquí.Chris: Bueno, muchas gracias Anny y Jairo, para explicar un poco de eso. Entonces, [00:32:00] así, me gustaría preguntar cómo dar los cambios en los objetos de los mayas a los cristianos y la naturaleza de la peregrinación, hacia el turismo. Es una pregunta rara, pero, ¿Ustedes creen que los viejos alimentos, o energías, o antepasados todavía se alimentan?Es decir, para vivir en un lugar ya una década que tiene una sequía, que también saqueo, que va empeorando y empeorando, poco a poco me voy pensando si hay una falta de rezos de conocimiento, de recuerdo, de memoria, de ofrendas. Anny: Bueno, yo es en realidad esta sequía saqueo, esta crisis climática y toda la crisis alrededor de la tierra, a mí, en lo [00:33:00] personal y tanto en lo comunitario, a mí me parece que es una crisis a nivel comunitaria, nacional, mundial en donde todos los territorios, se han visto afectados. Por ejemplo, así como aquí en Guatemala, que tenemos zonas como muy áridas, muy secas, que por su propia condición geográfica en donde han estado, sin duda se ha intensificado en estos últimos años, derivado del saqueo del recurso natural, sobre todo en estas zonas del oriente de Guatemala que son montañas que están, pues ahí si que dedicadas a la explotación de material para la construcción. Hablemos de piedra, hablemos de arena, hablemos de cal, por ejemplo, y de otros elementos que son para la explotación minera. Así como hay otros aquí en Guatemala, donde pues la zona es bastante húmeda, pero sus montañas son [00:34:00] propicias para el oro, para la plata, para el cobre, para el zinc y para otros elementos. Entonces, yo si siento que aparte de que falte de repente un toj, un pagamento, o un Xukulem, como nosotros decimos, dar la gratitud a la tierra que sin duda, pues es evidente cuando, y eso es evidencia no solo en la explotación de la tierra, sino que es evidencia en el sentir de las personas, porque usualmente, se piensa que un peregrinaje únicamente es ir a ver una figura, verdad? O una persona, una deidad, un cristo, ir a esa energía y sentir la energía para yo recargarme, sin considerar que yo al momento que también me voy a recargar de esa energía, estoy siendo un tanto extractivista muchas veces con mi práctica. Pero mi práctica también va más allá de enajenarme de qué está pasando, porque si bien es cierto, tengo ahí al cristo negro frente a mí y soy muy devota, pero entender que el cristo negro también puede estar [00:35:00] presente en las montañas, en los ríos, en los valles, en los lagos, en las cuencas y en todo eso que a mí me da de comer, en todo eso que a mí me permite vivir. Entonces, yo creo que más allá de que falta un rezo, yo sí creo que falta mucha conciencia, mucho trabajo espiritual de hacerle ver a las personas, a los peregrinos, a las peregrinas que mi ruta de peregrinaje, o sea, por donde yo paso, existe porque hay un territorio, un territorio que es ajeno a mi territorio, pero que aun así yo paso porque voy a ver algo en específico, pero que eso también tiene un impacto y que eso también tiene una responsabilidad. Preocuparme por todo lo común que pasa alrededor de de mi territorio, de mi país, del mundo, por ejemplo. Entonces, Mas allá de yo decirte si mira, Chris, falta que la gente reze, falta que la gente ofrende para que ya no haya sequía, que si bien es cierto, tiene una parte súper importante, es muy espiritual y que nosotros que [00:36:00] hemos visto que es verdad. O sea, no es un mito, no es una mentira, sino que es verdad, pero tiene que ir de la mano la ritualidad con mi práctica, tiene que ir de la mano mi discurso con lo que yo estoy haciendo y con los enunciados y los postulados que yo tengo en mi compromiso con la tierra, verdad? Osea, para mí ese es como, como el punto focal, verdad?Jairo: Sí, Chris y Anny pues, también he de añadir que, mucho de la modernidad y la facilidad para poder llegar a establecer una ruta de peregrinaje, también, pues influye dentro de las prácticas sociales y culturales, y pues si de tal vez, una ofrenda o un rezo, también estoy de acuerdo con Anny en ese sentido, es la conciencia de las personas, no? Y no se trata en el caso de la gente, pues católica de ser anticuados y de decir, bueno, vamos a irnos callados todo el [00:37:00] camino, aunque eso es una práctica que hacía la gente antes, verdad? Lo nombro como la gente antigua de Mixco lo dice. Ya no se tiene el respeto, dice la gente, por llegar y ir en una ruta de oración y de pedir o de agradecer. Y pues, por tanto, llevar una actitud de respeto, sino que ya se toma como un viaje de excursión y puede llegar a pasar, cualquier cosa dentro de ese viaje a excepción que se visita a la basílica y se visita a cristo negro. Pero dentro de ese viaje también de muchas personas ya no toman en cuenta el significado, o siquiera la ruta en la que están atravesando, verdad?Creo que es parte de la influencia occidental, de alguna forma de los medios también, que no han difundido pues, esta historia, porque esto que estamos hablando no te lo cuentan en los medios de comunicación. Ni siquiera dentro de la iglesia católica. La iglesia católica te dice que está cristo negro de Esquipulas, que es un día reconocido [00:38:00] dentro de la espiritualidad, por así decirlo, guatemalteca, religiosidad popular, como querramos llamarlo, pero no te hacen este trasfondo histórico que hay dentro de él, verdad?Pues la iglesia católica se encarga de lo litúrgico si vamos a llamarlo de esa forma, se hace una misa, se participa dentro de las misas. Pues hay frailes franciscanos que están constantemente bendiciendo lo que se compra como souvenir dentro del lugar. Pero que más que una oración que haga falta, creo que si hace falta entender un poco más que es lo que estamos haciendo, pero pues es parte del cambio socio cultural influido, como digo por lo occidental de alguna forma, que está permeando pues esta memoria histórica en cuanto a la visita del cristo negro. No digo que deje de ser fuerte porque esto tiene muchísima fuerza todavía dentro del contexto mesoamericano.Chris: Claro, claro, [00:39:00] gracias a ustedes dos. Pues la mayoría de las pláticas en el podcast, son críticas, de lo que falta, lo que no hay, en en el mundo, en la cuestión del movimiento de viaje de devoción también, y agradecimiento.Bueno es obvio como las dinámicas transaccionales o capitalistas, etc afectan los movimientos de la gente. Cómo se proceden, como llegan, como piensen en sus movimientos, también queremos pensar en otros mundos, y parte de eso, tiene que ver con lo que algunos llaman la hospitalidad radical. Es decir, como lo más básico, según yo, la hospitalidad local, enraizado, para el extraño o extranjero o extranjera, etc. Entonces, tengo curiosidad por saber ¿Qué tipo de hospitalidad [00:40:00] radical ustedes han encontrado en Esquipulas o en la peregrinación, si es que han encontrado algo.Anny: Bueno, no te voy a hablar como mucho de esto, porque no tengo como una experiencia, porque no ha sido mi búsqueda también, como encontrar esto. Siento que es como un paso como más personal individual, quizá de de soledad, pero de de sentirte bien en el, así que solo, en el buen sentido.Te puedo decir que hay gente que tiene como muchas experiencias, verdad? De de encontrarse con las personas que abren las puertas de su casa para que estén, para que visiten, para que entren. Claro, ahorita pues mucha situación ha cambiado. Siento que la seguridad ya no es la misma. La situación que atraviesa Guatemala. La conflictividad que se ha ido acrecentando en estos últimos años con estas [00:41:00] miradas fascistas también, con la división entre iglesias, por ejemplo, entre protestantes fascistas, radicales, y protestantes neopentecostales. Y todavía medio que la iglesia evangélica presbiteriana, que es la que intenta mediar entre ambas y la iglesia católica. Todo esto, además que el oriente de Guatemala está catalogado como zonas de bastante menudeo de narco, corredores de narcotráfico también. Entonces, todas estas situaciones políticas y geopolíticas han ido modificando mucho el hecho de que tú busques tu propia protección y que la gente también, cuando no son épocas de de peregrinaje, no tiendan a abrir sus casas, sino que quizás las abren más como para cuando hay un poquito más de afluencia, pero ya es como muy poco ver este tipo de dinámicas. Lo otro es que mucha gente mayor, digamos de la zona ya ha [00:42:00] fallecido. Y pues ha quedado como gente joven, inclusive gente que no es ya de Esquipulas, sino que por tema laboral ha migrado ahí, entonces ya va perdiendo como un sentido de pertenencia, verdad? De como ese sentido de comunidad. Pero si algo yo puedo rescatar de hace como mucho tiempo y que nos queda de repente el bonito recuerdo y la historia que quizá Jairo quiere hablar ahí un poquito, es de cómo se fueron tejiendo ciertas rutas comerciales entre por ejemplo, Oaxaca, Mixco y la gente de que aprovechaba para ir a Esquipulas. Y también como pensar cómo fueron cambiando también los productos de consumo, porque ahora, pues, vemos una invasión de productos plásticos, verdad? Provenientes de China, de estas grandes pirámides de estafa que y de explotación de mano de obra en Malasia, que te viene producto chino también de por allá o de la india, por ejemplo. Vemos como la entrada de mucho de este, [00:43:00] de este producto, verdad?Entonces tampoco es que podamos estar hablando como de esta comunidad, o de encontrar como redes de comunidad en cuanto a la economía o en cuanto a la producción, porque es ahí si que tú sabes que el capitalismo es voraz y la globalización y todos estos factores que están pasando en este momento son muy crueles con las dinámicas y las formas de vida de acuerparnos, de querernos, de apapacharnos y que se intensifica cada vez más.Creo que ahí si que lo importante es, nombrarlo para que si alguien quizá no se había dado cuenta de cómo se han ido afectando las dinámicas. Pues ahora lo, se se pueda ver, verdad? Y que a veces también es un poco como egoísta de mi parte, porque ves ahí vamos al hecho de que, como yo solo lo voy una vez allá, pues no me importa al final, como si tejo o no tejo, verdad? Puede ser que sea el pensamiento de alguien, verdad? Bueno, yo [00:44:00] solo voy una vez, yo voy a lo que voy y no me importa pues si hay alguien ahí que me pueda acuerpar, recibir o lo que sea.Entonces también como estas dinámicas, estos pensamientos frívolos que también por la misma dinámica de la vida, de la economía y demás, se intensifican no? Entonces, pues yo pues yo, eso te podría decir.Jairo: Si, dentro de como el capitalismo, el sistema capitalista, ha influido también dentro de estas dinámicas. Yo puedo nombrar puntualmente durante las últimas veces que he ido a Esquipulas, justo desde acá de Mixco, como pues lo económico ha afectado, o sea, el nivel socioeconómico también determina lo que vas a llegar a hacer verdad? Porque muchas personas de que vienen de acá, ni siquiera pues ya piensan en hospedarse, sino que van en la noche, madrugada de un día, y se quedan en [00:45:00] el bus o solo van y peregrinan, rezan, dejan sus candelas, no se paga hotel y regresan, verdad? Eso ha sido en un par de ocasiones. Si bien, pues hay ahora opciones de hospedaje digámoslo de diferentes tipos, que se suelen reservar con anticipación. También está esta otra situación, que también deja un poco de lado a lo que se solía hacer de preparar comida, de llevar ya huevos duros, como le decimos nosotros, huevos cocidos con salsa de tomate, eso es muy de viajar en este contexto de Mixco, los tamales de viaje que les llamaban también que es básicamente pasta de maíz cocida con la tusa, que es la cáscara del maíz. Estos tamales, pues servían para eso, para poder mermar el hambre mientras se llegaba a Esquipulas y que ahora esto ha sido poco a poco reemplazado justo lo que nombraba Anny, por productos pre-elaborados, frituras, que no tienen ningún [00:46:00] sustento, ni siquiera enlazan, con la memoria de la cocina, sino que técnicamente es algo que se desecha. Y claro, la basura, también otro papel importante, porque tenemos poca educación o ninguna en cuanto al ambiente y las empresas que nos hacen responsables de sus paquetes, de sus sobrecitos, de sus botellas y todo esto, resulta en los caminos y, pues sí, es una ruta de peregrinaje, pero también hay basura plástica, verdad? Dentro de esa ruta de peregrinaje. Y, pues, nombrar también, este era un poquito la cereza del del pastel que yo quería dejar para esta conversación, porque, como las dinámicas económicas han afectado rutas comerciales y de peregrinaje que puede que lleven alrededor de 2 mil años de existir, verdad? Tu que te desenvuelves en Oaxaca, puedes preguntar sobre cristo negro de Esquipulas y vas a encontrar a mucha gente que es devota al cristo negro de Esquipulas [00:47:00] y que probablemente tengan una réplica, pues en varios lugares de Oaxaca. Sobre todo el área, pues de el Istmo, verdad? En el, en el área también, zapoteca, vas a encontrar mucha gente que es devota y producto, pues de ello eso, ya lo tenemos, pues registrado antropológicamente. Ya no se da, pero gracias a las abuelas de mi pueblo esto sobrevive y es como nosotros, como Mixco estamos en medio de una ruta comercial entre básicamente, el centro de México y el oriente de Guatemala que está hacia allá. Entonces, pues Esquipulas está casi, en un punto distinto a esta ruta, verdad?Pues hay una memoria de de cómo nuestra gente antigua de Mixco interactuaba comercialmente con gente que venía del centro de México. Y esto lo tenemos evidente en el uso de la indumentaria maya del Poqomam de Mixco, que tiene muchísima influencia de la indumentaria que viene del pueblo [00:48:00] zapoteca, y del pueblo mixteca, en Oaxaca y producto de ello, sé que en el audio no saldrá, pero lo voy a describir. Tenemos acá estas fajas, estas fajas vienen de santo Tomás Jalieza en Oaxaca. Las famosas fajas de Jalieza, que se utilizan en Oaxaca y que formaban parte de la indumentaria antigua de Mixco. Esto cambió más o menos a mediados de los años 60s.Hay memoria, yo escuché de boca de muchas de las señoras antiguas de acá de mi pueblo que decían, venían las mexicanas a vendernos ropa, técnicamente, pero no es la ruta de Tapachula moderna, ahora que se va por la costa, sino que se refieren a textiles. Y esto encontramos fotos, inclusive fotografías del siglo 19, de finales del siglo 19, principios del siglo 20 en el que vemos el uso de estas fajas, y las reconocemos técnicamente por esta figura que seguro, pues ya la, la verás más representada en en Oaxaca. [00:49:00] La gente acá en Mixco le dice a esto los bailadores, en Oaxaca les tienen un nombre, ahora específicamente, no lo recuerdo, pero es gracias a este danzante o bailador que reconocemos las fajas que vienen de ese lugar porque en Guatemala no encuentras ninguna otra faja que sea de este material, porque es lana, o bien puede ser bastante grueso el tejido en telar de cintura con estos diseños.Entonces, gracias a Abisaí Navarro, que ojalá pueda escuchar este material, es un amigo que es de Oaxaca, quien conocí por las redes sociales, en quien básicamente se ha dedicado a documentar las expresiones culturales también de Oaxaca y de la espiritualidad en los pueblos mixteca y zapoteca. Y él me envió estas fajas desde Oaxaca. Osea, yo ya no puedo decir las compré con señoras oaxaqueñas. Yo como mixqueño, no las compré con ellas porque ahora vienen en bus, la dinámica comercial cambió y además en Mixco ya no se usa la [00:50:00] indumentaria maya, de uso diario. Este es por un lado, y por el otro lado, también tenemos a este otro lugar que se llama Yalalag, que es gente zapoteca también, en el cual usan esta prenda sobre la cabeza, ellos le llaman tlacoyales o rodetes, que consiste pues en lana cruda, de de oveja teñida, colocado sobre la cabeza, que es la emulación, pues a una serpiente. Esto, pues, tampoco esto no lo traje de Oaxaca, esto lo conseguí pues gracias a una historiadora justamente de Chichicastenango que Anny conoce, María Jacinta Xón, ella pues su papá se dedicó muchísimo tiempo, y ella también se ha dedicado, pues a la elaboración de hilos y a la obtención de la seda, y el papá de ella que ya descansa, pues fue con quien pudimos investigar un poco de dónde venía esta lana. Esta lana ya no se produce ni siquiera en Chichicastenango, en el contexto de Anny, sino [00:51:00] que básicamente esta es la última que él tuvo la oportunidad de teñir, pero es exactamente la misma lana que inclusive él desconocía su procedencia sin pintar, de dónde venía.Y ahora esto ni siquiera aquí en Guatemala se consigue, entonces es la evidencia de cómo Mixco en medio de una ruta comercial entre básicamente todo el área de el Istmo y la costa sur hacia el oriente de Guatemala, que es otro mundo que, de no haber llegado la invasión española y de no haber este sistema que de alguna forma ha ladinizado decimos nosotros, o sea despojado de su identidad a la gente maya. Y, pues, tendríamos una gran diversidad también de personas en aquel territorio. Y pues es un poco de las dos prendas que acá en Mixco se utilizan todavía por las mujeres que participan en las cofradías, pero los nos hace pensar en las mujeres de Oaxaca también. Es bien curioso. Tengo un video que lo describe, si gustan lo pueden ver allá en mis redes sociales, [00:52:00] aparezco como "hoja de pacaya" y hay un video donde hablo de esto del tecoyal justamente.Anny: Si, Chris y algo que yo, quería como agregar nada más a la conversación. Es el hecho de que, en medio de esta forma de turismo que muchas veces es gentrificador y que también como que estas dinámicas de ir y venir hace que justamente todo alrededor de lo que sucede en Esquipulas pues cambie su dinámica Si bien es cierto, ahora cuando vas tú a Esquipulas, ya hay hoteles de repente, tal vez no de cadena, pero si de cinco estrellas. La gente ha intentado mantener hoteles que sean como de su familia. Pero eso no quita, por ejemplo, que ya haya más lugares de recreación, de consumo, de compra y de intercambio comercial.Porque pues tú sabes que al final, la situación económica, creo que a nivel mundial no es del todo buena para ninguno, [00:53:00] verdad? Entonces, pues siempre se busca la manera como de irte agenciando de ciertos fondos. Pero, ahora que lo pienso mejor, digamos en esta conversación, yo si puedo ver algo muy especial. Por ejemplo, aquí en Guatemala, hay dos lugares más en donde hay peregrinación a ver a cristo negro, que no tienes que ir a Esquipulas y que lo encuentras, aquí, de de donde yo vivo más o menos es a una hora, se llama Chinique de Las Flores. Y luego de Chinique de Las Flores a más o menos como unas tres horas, puedes llegar a Cunén. Cunén, también aquí en K'iche', que son estas, rutas de peregrinación para ir a ver también, réplicas del cristo negro de Esquipulas, pero que entonces ahí si te puedo decir que estamos encontrando aquello que una vez encontramos en Esquipulas [00:54:00] hace más de 400 años por así decirlo, 300 años.Entonces, lo estamos volviendo a encontrar ahí porque, claro, son zonas todavía de pronto un poco más pequeñas, en donde todavía el ambiente es más, comunal, comunitario, en donde, pues todavía es de pueblo, le decimos nosotros, todavía sí que está la esencia conservada de un pueblo. Entonces no se convierte en un lugar para ir a quedarte y pasar ahí una semana, que sé yo, sino que se convierte en un lugar de visita, de recogimiento de sí, ir a hacer tu tu peregrinaje, tu oración, tu penitencia.Entonces, a mí me parece que ahí todavía es en donde, donde se encuentra una esencia muy, muy rica.Chris: Pues, gracias a las energías, a los dioses y dioses que todavía hay lugares y gente que honran esas, esas tradiciones y las de también como Jairo [00:55:00] mencionó, que pues la memoria también está pegado dentro del textil, de tejido, justo tambien he visto como una una bebida chocolatosa tradicional aquí en Oaxaca que, según algunas personas tiene su origen en en el K'iche'. Aunque, se dice que ese proceso, esa receta no existe en el K'iche' ahora, pero todavía la memoria existe dentro de esas prácticas no? Entonces la cuestión de la hiper movilidad y el sentido de guerra constante en muchos sentidos en el el mundo contemporáneo, ¿Cómo piensan que, la peregrinación o las posibilidades de peregrinar pueden ofrecernos una manera, o maneras, o caminos a [00:56:00] socobar, la hiper movilidad, a la guerra, la comida chatarra como mencionaron, estas dinámicas y estructuras económicas que, pues nos están matando poco a poco? ¿Qué clave puede tener la peregrinación en un mundo donde queremos vivir?Anny: Pues yo creo que la responsabilidad de cada uno de nosotros que, que vamos con llevar también mensajes de esperanza, o sea, siempre hay rutas no? Está la ruta migratoria, está la ruta de la mariposa monarca. Está que esa peregrinación que hacen, van y vienen, y estas peregrinaciones que nosotros también hacemos como personas humanas, independientemente de si seamos cristianos o no, pero siempre hay una ruta que tú buscas de peregrinaje para sanar tus [00:57:00] dolores, tus enfermedades, tus traumas, tus miedos, así sea que tú vayas a peregrinar a una montaña, un volcán, un cerro, a una iglesia, a una basílica a donde sea.A mí lo importante, y lo que me parece a mi súper esperanzador es que tú tengas como también ese compromiso de compartir una luz con quienes tú te vayas encontrando en el camino. Puede ser que también tu peregrinaje entonces no parta desde el hecho de, ah voy a ir pensando solo en rezos, no, sino que, ¿Qué también puedo yo compartir en el camino?O sea que otras rutas también puedo ir yo dejando, mencionando, creo que esto lo hemos logrado con bastante efectividad cuando pensamos en las rutas migratorias y como podemos echarle una mano a les compas migrantes verdad?, Entonces a mí me parecería que una estrategia pues muy parecida, podría ayudar bastante, a ver esto con otros ojos y a ver esto, pues más allá de, [00:58:00] o sea, que que siempre podemos hacer varias cosas, cuando tenemos de repente solo una finalidad, pero al final podemos ir haciendo como mucho, entonces yo creo que como mensaje yo, eso te dejaría, o sea que, pues al final en medio de toda esta hiper movilidad, pues que la aprovechemos, no solo para quemar codos, sino para ir dejando otros mensajes a la gente, verdad? De cómo también nos vamos moviendo, movilizando, qué vamos pensando y qué está pasando alrededor del mundo. Jairo: Sí, bueno, entender que nuestras dinámicas han cambiado con el tiempo, que somos una generación que nos tocó ver cambios abismales dentro de las dinámicas de como nos hemos relacionado con otras personas, cómo aprendemos incluso porque ahora pues gracias a la hiper movilidad también, inclusive, pues a la tecnología conocemos nuevas cosas, pero no dejar de lado el en el caso, pues de la gente que peregrina, verdad? Las [00:59:00] reflexiones que hacíamos, el por qué se hace, un poquito, y también el que hacer de nosotros cuando vamos a un lugar y cuando nos movemos, verdad? El hecho de verdad estoy comprando con las personas que son de allí o me estoy yendo a meter un supermercado, de verdad esto beneficia la comunidad o esto beneficia a una empresa, pues que al final explota personas y que les compra super barato y regateado el producto, verdad? Creo que se ha mantenido, pues al menos en Esquipulas esa dinámica de consumir, pues lo que es de allí, la gente, pues esfuerza mucho porque saben que hay, personas de muchos contextos que vienen a ese lugar, por lo menos una vez al año. Entonces, entender estas dinámicas, creo que es un reto también dentro de nuestro contexto y entender también que el humano siempre se ha movido. Gracias a las personas [01:00:00] antiguas que se movieron hace 3 mil años hacia acá es que nosotros tenemos estas evidencias históricas y aprender de esas movilidades también, cómo nosotros generamos un buen impacto cuando nos estamos moviendo, pienso.Chris: Que vamos aprendiendo y recordando a la vez, cómo movernos con respeto y agradecimiento y devoción a lo que nos da vida. Vamos a asegurar que las imágenes de esos textiles hermosas, van a salir con el episodio, en el sitio web web de El Fin del Turismo. Y también los nombres y contactos si quieren de los compas que mencionaste Jairo. Y pues ha sido como un gran conversación, y me dan muchas ganas de seguir con esa [01:01:00] cuestión de peregrinación.Y en el nombre de de nuestros oyentes, me gustaría ofrecerles mis a agradecimientos más sinceros a ambos ustedes por acompañarnos hoy, y estar dispuestos a enfrentar y luchar con algunas de las contradicciones y pues también las colonizaciones que han afectado al acto y al arte de la peregrinación en nuestros tiempos. Si los oyentes tienen ganas a conocer más de lo que ustedes hacen en la vida, ¿Hay una manera de comunicar o conectar?Anny: Sí, por supuesto, en nuestras redes personales, yo soy la curadora en jefe actual de Espacio C, en Chichicastenango, entonces pues por ahí pueden , encontrarme en Instagram, o en Facebook, se escribe [01:02:00] ESPACIO/C ARTE+MEMORIA. Y luego en mis redes personales, por si alguien pues también desea buscar. Yo me encuentro en Instagram como "Anny Puac," así me pueden encontrar a mí también en Instagram para que pues vean, de pronto un poquito también de, de mi trabajo y, luego en nuestras redes comerciales como Los Cofrades Chichicastenango, así me pueden, nos pueden ir encontrando y pues ahora Jairo.Jairo: Gracias. Yo he tratado de crear contenido no de lleno, tampoco tan comercial. He hecho reflexiones en cuanto a estos elementos, ahí sí que de ambos lados, verdad? De la espiritualidad en Guatemala en general, tanto de lo católico como de lo maya, y cómo esto tiene un punto medular, es un poquito lo que ha sido mi [01:03:00] premisa durante los últimos años, evidenciar que no es netamente todo católico, cristiano y que hay elementos pues de la espiritualidad maya que prevalecen como lo que hablamos hoy.Me pueden encontrar pues, como Hoja de Pacaya en las redes sociales. La hoja de pacaya es la que se usa para decorar en las puertas de las fiestas acá en el contexto pues de Guatemala. La pacaya es una palma. También se come la flor durante los viajes, justo durante los peregrinajes. La flor de la pacaya se envuelve con huevo y se le pone salsa de tomate encima y es algo muy para viajar. Y pues, a la hoja de pacaya le dicen dentro del contexto guatemalteco a las personas que les gusta la fiesta y que no se pierden ninguna.Entonces es un poco la premisa de mi usuario, porque pues sí, me gusta documentar las fiestas, pues que se llevan a cabo en Guatemala con trasfondo, quizá de análisis [01:04:00] y de reflexión. Y pues, gracias por el espacio. Estoy muy agradecido por ello, a ambos. Chris: De nuevo, muchísimas gracias a ustedes dos por sus tiempos hoy, por sus reflexiones y sus compromisos en el mundo, en la vida. Anny: Qué gusto conocerte también. Y pues ahí estamos siempre en comunicación. Yo te de con un fuerte abrazo y no haber un fuerte abrazo a tierra que de Oaxaca también.English TranscriptionChris: [00:00:00] Welcome to the podcast The End of Tourism Annie and Jairo. Thank you both for joining me today. I would love for you to tell our listeners where you are calling from and what the world looks like there for each of you.Anny: Thank you very much, Chris, and good morning to everyone listening, or good afternoon or good evening, depending on your time zone.My name is Anny and I greet you from the K'iche' Mayan territory of Chuwila, K'iche' Guatemala specifically.Jairo: Good morning to both of you, it's a pleasure to be here. Sawe ta inteer winaq (Good morning to all of you) a pleasure from the Poqomam territory of Mixco and also from the outskirts of Guatemala City, thank you for this [00:01:00] opportunity to share knowledge.Chris: And thank you both. I'm here in Oaxaca and the world seems obviously a little weird. Well, maybe not obviously, but it seems weirder by the day. We're here today to talk about Esquipulas in Guatemala. And Esquipulas is the site of several churches that have housed the Black Christ of the town, which is famous for its supposed miracles for the past four centuries.Similarly, the pilgrimage to the shrine is the largest in Central America and the second largest in the Americas, with, from what I read, 5 million people visiting it every year. Now, to start, would you be willing to explain what prompted each of [00:02:00] your interests or relationships with this place and the practice of pilgrimage?Anny: Yes, of course Chris. Well, from my personal or individual relationship as a family, I have, let's say, a clear idea of when these pilgrimages began, suddenly, when I was about seven or eight years old, so, to tell you that I have clarity, but when I go back to the family archives, well, I see that the issue of going on pilgrimage to Esquipulas, well, it begins with my grandmothers.Jairo: So I could tell you that within my family, the pilgrimage to Esquipulas, well, maybe it has been present in the family for at least 80 years, especially on my maternal grandmother's side . She is from a K'iche' territory in Quetzaltenango , where they would begin the trip, together, there was a neighborhood trip organized by the neighborhood, or it was a family trip, so one or two buses would go at that time when there wasn't much transportation, right? It was also a luxury to go by some route where there was a bus stop. And well, what couldn't be traveled by bus, well, it was done on foot, they used donkeys, but, more or less that's where the story of how these pilgrimage routes began in my family, let's say.In our case, I was not aware of having arrived in Esquipulas when I was little. Well, there is a very interesting fact, when I was 40 days old, my family decided to take me to [00:04:00] Esquipulas, so that is in the family's photo archive as a thank you, because in the end I was born with... I was born well.Jairo: And then the family decides to go on a pilgrimage. This is the closest information I have about the person going to Esquipulas. Of course, I have always been very familiar with this within my immediate context, since people from my municipality tend to go organized in excursions from the different religious organizations that exist in my municipality.These, well, designate dates and are buses filled with approximately 50 people. Each bus usually arrives up to three, from here in Mixco, well, they go to Esquipulas. And that is something very interesting because it is, well, part of modernity, let's say going by bus, but there are many anecdotes from people from here in town who [00:05:00] tell how, well, they went in a more rustic way, right? It could be, well, on a walking pilgrimage, which was not the only pilgrimage, in fact that of the black Christ of Esquipulas. Today, specifically, we are going to talk about it.But there are also the pilgrimages to Antigua Guatemala, which is very close by. Here behind us there is a hill called Alux Hill. This hill was crossed on foot, and people still do so on foot, because behind the hill is the descent to get to Antigua Guatemala.Chris: Thank you. Thank you all. So, to learn a little more about your stories, like the pilgrimage, I would like to know a little more if you could offer something about the long history of Esquipulas, of the black Christ and well, how did the pilgrimage originate? Where does that story come from?Jairo: Well, as I mentioned before, saying some [00:06:00] words in the Poqomam language. It is the language that was spoken, well, in our town. I'm going to say it again more slowly to, well, describe to you what I said, technically it is:closely related and intrinsic to the people of Mixco and also to the Oaxacan territory.My name is Jairo, Jairo Andrés Chamale Lemus. I belong to this territory, to the Poqomam Mayan people. Half of my family and my ancestors are from here. And, well, I am dedicated to tourism. I have been a tourist guide for approximately eight years , since I graduated very young. And, well, I have dedicated myself to pilgrimages so that people also learn about the historical context of Guatemala and the different cultural, religious and also resistance expressions of the people in the territory of what we now know as Guatemala.Well, I am also a student of anthropology, specifically a bachelor's degree in anthropology, and I have also dedicated myself to studying the case of the Poqomam Mayan language in Mixco, which is a community very close to Guatemala City, which has had a very strong demographic and social impact, due to the growth of the metropolitan area of Guatemala City. It is something that I have dedicated myself to studying during the last few years. And also, well, to [00:08:00] documenting it, because we have many cultural and spiritual practices in our town, which have been disappearing as the city's demographic advances, thank you very much. Rontyoox aq'oo ta Anny: Well Chris . In fact there is a record, let's say historical , which says that the first pilgrimage to Esquipulas was in March 1595 , when the image left the workshop of this sculptor Quirio Cataño, heading towards Esquipulas, towards Chiquimula. This is in the east of Guatemala. We know it as the hot zone of Guatemala. But it is the zone, let's say, like hot arid . It is a territory where there is a Xinca, Popti' community, if I'm not mistaken, Chortí as well . And so, the production that is [00:09:00] They have in the lands over there, we are talking about fruits from some plants, some tubers more or less, but most of them are dedicated to fruit, right ?This first pilgrimage is documented and recorded by the chronicler, who is called Miguel Álvarez. And he says that, when he left from the workshop and headed towards Esquipulas, the image was performing different miracles along the way until reaching the basilica . Then there were people who asked him precisely that, please, that the image spend at least one night inside the house of people to bless it. And more or less it is estimated every year, let's say currently, now in Guatemala and around 300 thousand people from all over the world, mostly between Mexico, Central America, southern countries, for example from Peru [00:10:00] from Ecuador from Ecuador, Bolivia, if I'm not mistaken, it is like a lot of people who arrive, more or less between November, which right now is like a date from November to December and all of January, let's say, those are like the three months with the greatest influx of people who arrive at the basilica, right? So you can call it a pilgrimage , you can call it a pilgrimage, what pilgrimage, usually, well there if the people who visit can do like a day's visit only or it can be that a visit can be extended for up to 10, 15 days, right?From Guatemala City to Esquipulas there is a distance of approximately 220 to 250 kilometers and if you go on a pilgrimage, you go through very specific places along the entire pilgrimage, on average [00:11:00] Every day you are doing a stretch of 40 kilometers, a day, let's say if your intention is to go on a pilgrimage like that . So that's more or less like more historical data and the story, right?Chris: And I'm a little curious, inside the estancias, when I arrive at Esquipulas, if I were on a pilgrimage, for example, what would I do? Do they stop to say their prayers? I would like to know from someone who has never made a pilgrimage, how it looked those days before coming.Anny: Well, I'm going to tell you a little bit about my family's story because My maternal grandmother, she was a lady, very Catholic, right? So, for her, her pilgrimage, let's say, was her sacrifice, right? In the year, to say well, out of gratitude [00:12:00] to my health, to the miracles that she granted me, because she was very devout. It was the fact of going on a pilgrimage route. What did this imply? Even preparing food so as to not say waste time, thinking about what to eat along the way, because the idea for them was, well, to go in a kind of contemplation, in constant prayer, in prayer, let's say in petition, to stop every so often, right? Every 40 kilometers, because within the Catholic-Christian community, there are points that are marked within the route where you can stop with each family, because they may have a replica of the image of the black Christ, because in fact, when the first pilgrimage was, this family may have been one of the [00:13:00] families who first received the black Christ.So it becomes like that stopping point, right? So, when they make that stopping point, they go down. They go down to pray, they go down to talk and to socialize with people, maybe, to share a meal. And to feel, well, like thei

En este episodio, mis entrevistados son Laura Sofía Montoya Gómez y Carlos Alberto Montoya Correa. Carlos es arquitecto egresado de la Universidad Nacional sede Medellín. Experto en planificación, gestión y ejecución de proyectos de desarrollo urbano con énfasis en viviendas económicas en tratamientos de expansión urbana, consolidación, mejoramiento de barrios, renovación urbana y en zonas con restricciones geotécnicas. Ha participado como gestor en la ejecución de más de 50.000 viviendas económicas desde el sector público, en proyectos de cooperación internacional, de aplicación de políticas nacionales y de ejecución local en varias ciudades de Colombia (Bogotá, Medellín, Armenia, Bucaramanga, Rionegro y Bello). Ha sido docente en la Facultad de Arquitectura Universidad Nacional sede Medellín y ha participado de publicaciones colectivas de carácter técnico.Sofia es arquitecta egresada de la Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana. Magíster en Arquitectura, Crítica y Proyecto de la misma institución donde actualmente también es docente en el área de Taller de Proyectos. Ha participado durante más de 13 años de varias colectividades en la ciudad de Medellín, donde ha podido desarrollar proyectos de investigación en el área del patrimonio urbano-arquitectónico que han sido publicados mediante recursos financiados a través de los estímulos de la Secretaría de Cultura Ciudadana. Es cofundadora de la Corporación Proyecto NN, organización sin ánimo de lucro que acompaña procesos comunitarios y promueve la educación y la dignificación de los espacios de encuentro populares.Notas del EpisodioQue esta pasando en MedellinEl encaricimiento de la ciudadEl turismo sexual y el pueblo moralistaLa gentrificacion de Pablo EscobarLa construccion y venta de vivienda paisaResentimiento y el dios dineroLas mascaras del gobierno“No se puede morir del exito”El derecho a la ciudad y viviendaTareaProyecto NN - Sitio Web - InstagramTranscripcion en Espanol (English Below)Chris: [00:00:00] Bienvenida Sofía, bienvenido Carlos al podcast El Fin del Turismo. Muchas gracias por estar conmigo hoy para platicar de este tema, pues si, tan complejo. Me gustaría preguntarles en dónde se encuentran hoy y como se ve el mundo para cada uno de ustedes allá.Sofia: Bueno, estamos aquí en la ciudad de Medellín. Estamos juntos en mi casa, Carlos es mi padre, y bueno, decidimos juntarnos para tener como una conversación más fluida, desde aquí, desde mi casa en el centro de la ciudad, que es un centro, pues además, bastante particular. Pues Medellín es una ciudad montañosa que queda en los Andes. Es un valle. Y digamos que el centro de la ciudad tiene, pues, unas dinámicas muy distintas a muchos centros de otras ciudades. Carlos: Es una ciudad muy estrecha [00:01:00] y tiene en el costado oriental y occidental un par de montañas llenas de barrios. Aquí mismo por la ventana se ve toda las montañas urbanizadas y en el centro está, digamos la metrópoli, lo que pudiéramos llamar una ciudad más tradicional, mientras arriba son barriadas o comunas populares. Hoy en día, muy populares para cierto turismo.¿ Y usted dónde está? Chris: Pues yo llevando en Oaxaca, en la capital de Oaxaca, México también en un valle un poco mas amplio geográficamente que Medellín . Conozco Medellín porque andaba como turista hace 15 años quizás allá. Y pues empezando toda la [00:02:00] investigación para este episodio, encontre como muchos Entonces me gustaría leer unas citas de esos artículos para los oyentes que quizás no conocen Medellín, no saben qué está pasando allá, según los medios masivos. Entonces, primero este, Nomad List. "Nomad List es una plataforma que publica su ranking de los destinos más populares para trabajar de forma remota. Colocó a Medellín en segundo lugar, el año pasado entre 157 ciudades de Latinoamérica." El próximo dice que "en la colonia de Manila de Medellín hay alquileres a corto plazo cuyos propietarios ganan más de cinco millones de pesos colombianos por mes o alrededor de $1,000 estadounidenses."El próximo decía que "aunque no se llevó [00:03:00] a cabo, el presidente local dijo en ese momento 'que prohibiría los alquileres a corto plazo en la ciudad como medida para prevenir el abuso y la explotacion sexual infantil. En esa búsqueda por encontrar una solución a ese flagelo, Guitierrez, el presidente local se reunió con representantes de la plataforma de Airbnb para llegar a un acuerdo.Desde entonces se ha trabajado de común acuerdo con las partes en conjunto para evitar medidas extremas, pero si establecer acciones que permiten prevenir este delito en la ciudad" Siguiendo, "en tanto, el número de apartmentos anunciados en Airbnb, la popular empresa de alquiler de propiedades vacacionales, subió de 8 mil en octubre de 2022 a 14 mil a [00:04:00] finales de 2023, según datos recabados por AirDNA."Y finalmente, "los datos recientes dice que Medellín recibe 1.7 millones de visitantes extranjeros a una urbe de 2 millones y medio de habitantes." Entonces, me gustaría empezar preguntándoles a ustedes dos sobre la gentrificación en Medellín. Yo encontré otro artículo sobre el tema. Y quizás se se exhibe, expone un poco de lo que está pasando allá y dice que "Wilson y Felipe, ambos se reservaron sus nombres reales. Son dueños, cada uno, de un bar cafetería en Manila en El Poblado, una de las zonas más turísticas de mayor actividad económica. Los dos vecinos son de los pocos que quedan en su [00:05:00] cuadra, porque prácticamente todas las casas de la zona se transformaron en restaurantes, pequeños hoteles y hostales, escuelas de español o viviendas para alquileres cortas a través de aplicaciones como Airbnb, que toman los extranjeros y que en parte son la causa del sobrecosto en los precios de la vivienda para los habitantes tradicionales. Entre 2022 y 2023, los arriendos crecieron entre 50 y 100%.Este barrio cambió demasiado, dice Wilson, era familiar y vea, se volvió tierra de viciosos y jíbaros que atiende a domicilio. Toda esa 'gentrificación' como le dicen, es a raíz de los inversionistas extranjeros y se encareció todo. Carlos, tú has trabajado para empresas estatales en Medellín y Bogotá, la Empresa de Desarrollo Urbano. y [00:06:00] sofia, tú has trabajado en el Proyecto NN ahí en Medellín. Entonces quizás podrían ofrecernos una idea de lo que ha sucedido en Medellín en los últimos años y las últimas décadas en términos de gentrificación y qué papel tiene que desempeñar el turismo y los turistas en ello. Carlos: Pues yo, yo percibo esta situación como supremamente novedosa y reciente. Vale decir que Medellín en los 90 era una ciudad a donde no venía nadie. Es decir, la situación de violencia urbana. Toda esta crisis que desató el narcotráfico en la ciudad nos tenía marginados del resto del mundo. Era una ciudad bastante poco atractiva por lo violenta y de inversiones relativamente paralizadas.[00:07:00] Sofia: Fue la ciudad más violenta del mundo. Carlos: SíSofia: En cierto momento Carlos: Y necesitó de una estrategia de atención entre la presidencia de la república y la alcaldía local que ustedes en México le llaman "presedencia local" para encontrar alternativos de futuro. Se llamaban los seminarios de muchas conversaciones.Entonces, lo primero que quiero enseñar es que es un hecho muy nuevo, y muy reciente. Nosotros para ver un extranjero, era un futbolista que venían a los dos clubes. De resto aquí no venía a nadie. Ver rostros chinos o japoneses o alemanes eran, eso es muy sui géneris. Y el paisa, la cultura antioqueña es una cultura supremamente hospitalaria.La gente acá desborda de amabilidad. Es una cosa muy curiosa. El solo hecho de sentir a una persona de otra [00:08:00] región, no necesariamente extranjero, puede ser de otra región colombiana. El antioqueño desarrolla un, unas habilidades y unas formas de relación, muy amenas, muy atractivas. El antioqueño es una persona muy conversadora, muy dicharachero, y es muy abierto. Es muy tranquilo en las relaciones, diría eso en principio. Entonces sí, si sentimos, realmente se siente abrumadora la presencia de extranjeros, porque es notoria. Aquí mismo nosotros vivimos aquí. Yo vivo en un par de cuadritos donde los hoteles pequeños proliferan en dos cuadras han, se han desarrollado en los últimos tres años.cinco, seis, siete hoteles, y la presencia del extranjero, es notoria. Y como le digo en un principio, era muy bienvenida, porque el extranjero, pues trae monedas con un [00:09:00] cambio muy fuerte y también aquí, el país es de una mentalidad comercial y negociante extrema. Aquí el negocio se ve pa vender un hueco, pues hacemos otro hueco.Es decir, la gente aquí es supremamente ingeniosa en la forma de establecer negocios. Sofia: Si, y, y creo que la ciudad hizo un esfuerzo institucional por cambiar también la narrativa. Pues porque, como lo dice Carlos, estuvo muy estigmatizada, pues somos la ciudad de Pablo Escobar. Cierto.Eso es una carga como simbólica muy fuerte. Y entonces se ha hecho pues un un esfuerzo, por mostrar otras cosas que también somos. Creo que el reggaetón tiene mucho que ver como con la visibilidad de la ciudad también. Cierto, porque digamos que el reggaetón no solamente pues han salido grandes estrellas, grandes cantantes pues como de de aquí de Medellín, sino [00:10:00] que el reggaetón pues como muchas otras géneros musicales, pues como que en salsa o, o bueno enaltece, pues esas figuras como el narcotráfico de bueno, como cierta estética también. Y entonces es muy atractivo para muchos extranjeros venir a conocer la ciudad del reggaetón.Y esa era una cosa que estaba pasando, digamos, de una manera más orgánica y más lenta antes de la pandemia. Con la pandemia se corta y luego de la pandemia, si se desbordó. O sea, ocurre como un fenómeno desbordado. También me imagino, pues como por esas ansias de mucha gente de viajar y de pues, de haber estado como paralizada en sus lugares, y la ciudad realmente no estaba preparada.O sea, yo creo que todo ese esfuerzo institucional que se hizo, no se midió tampoco, como hasta, hasta dónde podía llegar, cierto? Porque, si bien es cierto que la ciudad es supremamente hospitalaria y acogedora, digamos que el clima es una de las cosas que también [00:11:00] a muchos extranjeros les llama la atención. Es un clima muy ideal, cierto? Un eterno verano. Pues, obviamente también hay unas estructuras, que ofrecen cosas. Hay mucha droga, hay mucha prostitución, cierto? Es una ciudad como también para un turismo que no deja tantas cosas buenas. Además, bueno, tú sabrás y tendrás del conocimiento, el turismo así no sea, pues, este turismo como de drogas y de prostitución y de fiesta desbordada. El turismo es un fenómeno que tiende como a arrasar, cierto? Es un fenómeno que encarece, entonces. Sí, creo que en en un principio, es una ciudad que un poco quería que esto sucediera, pero en este momento no sabe muy bien cómo manejar. Carlos: Si también hubo un momento en que cuando la ciudad empezó a despegar, hubo cierto turismo académico, porque la ciudad empezó a ser muy sonora en cuanto a ciertas transformaciones [00:12:00] urbanísticas. Esta es una ciudad que tiene una empresa de servicios públicos muy poderosa. Nosotros tenemos en Medellín, la alcaldía es la dueña de una especie de multinacional criolla que le vende servicios públicos y energía eléctrica. Le vende energía eléctrica a Panamá, a Ecuador y le brinda servicios públicos a unos 90 municipios en Colombia. Entonces, la ciudad tiene una capacidad de inversión social realmente notoria.Y entonces la ciudad empezó a hacer eventos académicos para mostrar. Por ejemplo, Bogotá, que es la capital de Colombia, tiene 8,000,000 de habitantes. No ha podido construir un metro. Chris: Wow.Carlos: Y el metro de Medellín está cumpliendo 30 años. Lo que quería señalar es que se desarrolló una forma de turismo muy curiosa. Y es que aquí vienen extranjeros a visitar barrios populares, a meterse en [00:13:00] Moravia o en lo que aquí llamamos Comuna 13, en un hecho muy curioso por lo menos porque pues ir a un barrio popular donde, donde no hay servicios cómodos, donde no hay locaciones, donde pues, a ver como el espectáculo popular. No sé, es una cosa muy, muy curiosa y es increíblemente desbordado.Es decir, hay lugares donde no cabe la gente físicamente y siguen yendo, o sea allá, son, todo eso es incómodo. Pero la gente sigue yendo, no se como a que, pero siguen llegando. Sofia: Es una pregunta que nos hacemos constantemente, pues, de hecho, varios amigos siempre me dicen como, es que, a qué vienen? A qué vienen aquí?Pues no entendemos a qué vienen, tal vez porque uno tiene naturalizado. No sé, pues todo lo que pasa aquí, pero uno sigue sin entender, Carlos: Pero, diría, el turismo está asociado como a los centros de negocios, a los centros [00:14:00] históricos, a los centros culturales, pero que los barrios populares se volviesen un objetivo turístico.Entonces, al principio, un turismo como institucional y académico. Aquí se hicieron eventos donde llegaron 2 mil estudiantes, de universidades de todo Colombia, de Ecuador, y de países vecinos, a ver lo que estaba pasando en Medellín. Pero de ese turismo muy institucional, académico de centros de estudio, de aulas, se transfirió, a un deseo de conocer los barrios populares y entonces el turista, el otro turista, perdóneme que hable así de, el que viene un poquitico maliciosamente a buscar como huellas del narcotráfico, o consumo, o redes de prostitución, se pega ahí y hay en estos momentos una acción entre Manila como sitio receptor de turismo y [00:15:00] Comuna 13, como sitio. Como Manila se controla, en ese acuerdo, en ese pacto entre empresarios del turismo y presidencia local, se hace unos pactos de control. Entonces el turista ya no trae las niñas al barrio Manila, sino que van a buscarlos en la Comuna 13. O sea, pero sigue siendo el barrio popular un centro de atracción de turismo inusitado de unas escalas tremendas y hay una avidez, nos hago mucho realmente de qué pues realmente pero, pero está mezclado el turismo tradicional, el turismo popular y el turismo como académico si pudiéramos decir se entremezclan. Están ahí todos mezclados. Desbordando, desbordando la ciudad, encareciendo mucho. Se siente verdaderamente. Sofia: Es que en este momento, Medellín es la ciudad más costosa de Colombia. O sea, por encima de Bogotá.Chris: [00:16:00] Mm.Sofia: Que eso nunca había pasado. Siempre, pues, para alguien de Medellín ir a Bogotá era más costoso. Carlos: No, y un empleo, por ejemplo, mira, yo tuve el mismo cargo, se puede decir el mismo cargo, en Medellín y en Bogotá. Y por el solo hecho de estar en Bogotá, la asignación salarial, es más del doble. Entonces, Bogotá pues es la capital, eso mismo ha de pasar en todos los países del mundo. Pero yo mencioné que es una ciudad estrecha, tiene mucha posibilidad de crecimiento y de oferta habitacional. Al llegar este turismo, prácticamente copó todo el interés de los empresarios y ya, construir viviendas económicas aquí no le interesa nadie.Chris: Y pues me gustaría llegar profundizando esa última noción o esta consecuencia del turismo, de la despojo, perdón en la ciudad, pero primero, me gustaría abrir un [00:17:00] poco de esos temas de la imagen de Medellín que quizás se da a los turistas extranjeros, como mencionaste Sofia, como mencionaste Carlos, de la prostitución y también el narcotráfico, una nota de la investigación que hice dice que recientemente el alcalde Guitierrez anunció que el ciere de 150 propiedades que en su mayoría están vinculados a la plataforma que habrían sido utilizadas para fines de turismo sexual y explotación de niños, niñas y adolescentes en la capital antioqueña. Ahora, en primer lugar, tiene a recapitular los imaginarios coloniales de violación o coerción. En segundo lugar, puede implicar a menores de edad. En tercer lugar, los servicios que prestan a las trabajadores sexuales en un lugar determinado pueden ocultar fácilmente la presencia de crimen [00:18:00] organizado, Dadas las complejidades y contradicciones presentes en el tema de turismo sexual, en un campo de trabajo en el que muchos están tratando de superar prejuicios y criminalizacion. ¿Cómo ven ustedes dos estos temas en en este momento? Sofia: Pues a ver, lo primero que yo quisiera decir es que las redes de prostitución pues, o de trabajo sexual o de trata, pues, como de personas no iniciaron por la movida turística. O sea, esta ciudad siempre ha sido un lugar donde el trabajo sexual ha sido, como uno de los rubros de la economía, incluso, pues, en la época del narcotráfico. O sea, siempre ha sido así. Pues, como que las paisas tienen fama de ser mujeres bonitas. De bueno, tanto dinero que se ha movido en esta ciudad también, digamos que viene amarrado, pues como con ese tipo de actividades. [00:19:00] Entonces simplemente yo creo que el boom del turismo simplemente encuentra una estructura vieja que está que funciona muy bien. Es una estructura que ya existía. Lo mismo pues que lo de las drogas. O sea, lo que pasa es que aquí las drogas, tal vez en los 90s, no se consumían tanto en la misma ciudad, porque todas se exportaban, pero la estructura está y pues simplemente el turismo se pega de esa estructura. Entonces, aquí la gente, pues es como también muy moralista y a todo el mundo le parece horrible que un gringo ande con una muchachita, pero esa muchachita ha andado con los mismos países de aquí toda la vida. Que les parece terrible, es que está sucediendo en los barrios tradicionalmente ricos de la ciudad. Y eso es lo que les molesta, porque prostitución, pues nosotros, que siempre hemos vive en el centro, siempre ha estado, siempre ha existido y esa dinámica no es nueva. Entonces, digamos que me parece que el paisa bueno, todo lo que hemos dicho, lindo del [00:20:00] paísa, pero también es muy moralista y se escandaliza, pues solamente cuando están al lado de su casa. Carlos: Claro, pero además de que eran estructuras de negocios ilícitos asociados entre sí, es decir, narcotráfico y todas estas otras patologías sociales. A ello, el turismo, lo que hizo fue darle una manifestación inmobiliaria porque antes, claro, pero en los barrios ricos no. Sofia: O muy, o muy puntualmente, pues, o muy, muy escondido.Carlos: Muy escondido, cierto?Pero, pero como se vio una fuente de negocio, como yo puedo arrendar y obtener, como dijiste, 2 mil doscientos dólares en arrendamientos, pues la visión de negocio y mercantilistas del paisa que la tiene por naturaleza, se embarca y entonces se asoció la droga y estos negocios, estas patologías sociales ilícitas a una versión [00:21:00] inmobiliaria.Y ahí sí, la versión inmobiliaria tiene efectos en la economía de los arrendamientos, en la economía de varios de prestigio. Y entonces ya eso se vuelveSofia: Molesto. Carlos: Una problemática de otra índole. Sofia: Molesto y visible. Pero lo que yo quiero anotar es, por ejemplo, en la época los 90, en El Poblado, había fincas gigantes donde eran, pues como burdeles y pues los narcotraficantes iban allá y se encerraban, pero como estaba encerradito todo el mundo sabía que allí sucedían ese tipo de cosas. Llegaban, veían a las chicas llegar, o sea, como toda la dinámica, pero como sucedía ahí puntualmente. Pues, cierto, como en la época, no pasaba nada. Carlos: En esa época, los narcos trajeron a todos los artistas importantes, de habla hispana. Todos los artistas, no quiero decir ningún nombre, algunos ya están difuntos, pero los artistas más importantes estuvieron haciendo shows en esas casas campestres donde [00:22:00] obviamente en el entretenimiento del narco, pues están desafortunadamente, las niñas bonitas paisas que Sofia: Pero entonces, claro, esto era como puntualmente y era como una actividad que hacían los narcos, ya cuando sucede esto, pues es que ya es en tu mismo edificio, en el barrio que has habitado toda la vida.Y entonces ahí, si se vuelve como muy abierto, como muy escandaloso, pues para esta sociedad que es como tan moralista. Yo, por ejemplo, no creo que eso sea una patología social. O sea, yo creo que pues finalmente, así como hay hombres que entregan su cuerpo y se vuelven sicarios y pueden sufrir, pues su cuerpo está expuesto a que les pase cosas horribles.Pues hay mujeres que también encuentran en su cuerpo, pues una manera de sobrevivir y creo que, finalmente es una expresión como de la desigualdad, cierto?, y de la oportunidad. O sea, hay muchas mujeres y yo las conozco que que estudiaron una [00:23:00] carrera, o sea que no es que tengan tampoco necesidades, pues como vitales y deciden elegir ese camino porque es muy rentable, cierto?Y esta es una ciudad que lo permite. Entonces, por ejemplo, no, no lo veo desde ese punto de vista tan moralista. Lo que sí es cierto es que precisamente por esa moral, como tan católica que tenemos todavía en esta ciudad, no hay mecanismo de control porque el único mecanismo de control es, decir que está mal, criminalizarlo y no se pasa de ahí, y no creo que pronto vayamos a pasar de ahí. Entonces, pues yo no veo, que eso, primero ni vaya a seguir sucediendo, creo que va a seguir sucediendo. Ni tampoco veo que haya como una actitud desde la institucionalidad más inteligente.Carlos: Sí, las medidas del alcalde son más, más que todo anuncios para calmar el alboroto de la élite.Sofia: Es que eso no tiene efecto. Carlos: No tiene efecto de nada. Chris: Gracias. Gracias, Sofía [00:24:00] y Carlos por sacar esas contradicciones que están ahí dentro de las dinámicas en Medellín. Pues más allá del turismo sexual y a veces junto con ello, es el turismo de drogas o narcos. Y un artículo de mi investigación dice que. Un comerciante en Medellin cuenta que algunos habitantes de La Comuna la promocionan como la "cuna" de Escobar para atraer más clientes.Es más rentable, dice. Aquí compran camisetas de él, eh, ave María, todo lo alusivo a Pablo se vende mucho, dice el hombre que por seguridad, pide no ser citado. Y es que, pese a que la zona luce pacificada por el turismo, el control sigue en manos de los combos. El comerciante afirma que ahí operan bandas pequeñas [00:25:00] como Los del Uno, Los de Dos, Los Pirusos y Los Negros.Ellos cobran cuota por negocio chuzo al aire libre y hasta parqueadero. Aquí no se abre un local sin su permiso. Y también pasa con los cuentos Airbnb que están empezando a abrir.Ahora, una colega investigadora que trabaja junto a activistas en Colombia, me dijo hace un año aproximadamente que los carteles de narcotráfico en Medellin habían comenzado a utilizar Airbnb como una forma de lavar dinero.Seguramente esto ha sido así desde hace mucho tiempo en el sector de inmobiliario normal, pero este simbolizaría una conexión directa, entre el crimen organizado, el turismo y la crisis de la vivienda. Entonces, ¿Qué piensan ustedes sobre la posibilidad de que los narcos, ya sea en [00:26:00] Medellin o la Ciudad de México, sean en secreto propietarios de Airbnb?Sofia: Pues, bueno, frente a la primera pregunta o parte de la pregunta de lo de Pablo Escobar, pues es innegable, pues, que es una figura demasiado importante y no solamente, pues, como figura particular él, sino porque es un estereotipo de lo que somos. Yo no diría que los colombianos, pero no me siento pues como para hablar por todo el territorio nacional, pero si es un estereotipo de lo que es un paisa. Y por eso, pues muchas personas dirán horrible, no me quiero identificar con esta persona, pero así lo digan, pues tenemos mucho de él, pues así como él tiene mucho de nosotros, pues es que tenemos una cultura que es compartida. Y finalmente, pues uno tiene tíos, amigos, pues que parece que tienen algunas, características de Pablo Escobar. Es un es un personaje pues que es muy cercano, para [00:27:00] nosotros. Y así la ciudad intente, digamos, desde la élite, desde lo institucional, rechazarlo, es algo que es imposible, es imposible pues como negarlo. Carlos: Sí, por ejemplo, en Comuna 13, parte del show o del evento turístico, es hacer muchas alusiones a la figura de Pablo Escobar. Entonces, está el tipo que tiene una fisionomía igualitica, como si fuera un actor, un doble y una serie de eventos cuando Escobar no tiene nada que ver ni con la violencia urbana que tuvo Comuna 13, pero es una forma en que la mentaría popular ve que explotar la figura de Escobar, pues es muy rentable para cierto turismo extranjero que todavía quiere circular versiones, relatos, que ya son [00:28:00] completamente míticos o legendarios porque son totalmente inventos, para traer clientes.Sofia: Sí, y y además, uno se pone a pensar porque es que mucha gente se ofende. Osea, incluso pues me ha tocado presenciar momentos en que alguien se ofende porque un turista o un extranjero dice como "uy, yo vine porque es la ciudad de Pablo Escobar y me emociona y quiero una camiseta," cierto? Pero es como, no sé si uno va y visita la ciudad de Al Capone. Pues es como lo mismo, simplemente es como un mito. Es una figura, cierto? Pues los criminales también han sido igual de atractivos que los personajes que son buenos, incluso, pues yo creería que los personajes malvados son los que son más atractivos. Entonces, claro, aquí hay mucha, mucho resentimiento pues ante esa figura, pues porque todavía hay familiares de las víctimas, o sea, es una historia demasiado reciente, pero para el extranjero es simplemente una historia más, una historia de lo que ven en las películas. Y yo siento que muchas [00:29:00] personas que se, que se ven atraídas como por esa figura tienen como una noción del asunto muy infantil.Pues creen que realmente es un personaje de una película, cierto? No entienden que realmente pues que esta ciudad explotó en bombas. No lo conciben y pues yo que no estoy tan adulta a mí me tocó. O sea, es una cosa que es demasiado reciente y todavía esta sociedad está muy traumatizada por eso.Entonces, por eso es que hay tanto recelo, pero al mismo tiempo, es una oportunidad de negocio porque vende demasiado. Carlos: Mira, nosotros vivimos aquí, pues en el centro de la ciudad y mi señora y yo, estaban ellos muy chiquitos. En la noche, contábamos las bombas, una, dos, siete, ocho, porque yo no sé si conoces la canción de La Noche De Chicago... de Mirta Castellanos.Bueno, una canción que narra el enfrentamiento [00:30:00] de los gángsters en Estados Unidos contra la policía. Eso fue una masacre tremenda entre ambos bandos. Aquí vivimos eso, pero no era con ametralladoras, era con bombas. Pues, es decir, este tipo voló un edificio en Bogotá, el edificio del DAS.Voló un avión de pasaderos civiles en el aire, o sea, un un personaje real. Y eso suena como fantástico, que eso no es realidad, pero eso es realidad. Esta ciudad estuvo marcada por escombros de todas esas detonaciones, además de que las masacres juveniles solo para crear caos. Pues estar un grupo de muchachos departiendo en en una discoteca y llegar grupos de sicarios solo por el solo hecho de que al otro día en las noticias, haya pavor en toda la ciudadanía porque se pensaba ganar esa guerra de esa manera. Sofia: Terrorismo pues, [00:31:00] entonces, como cerrando un poco, pues para nosotros todavía es una historia dolorosa. Pero si uno también, como se pone en el papel de alguien que está en otro país y tiene otra realidad, pues claro que es una historia supremamente atractiva.Y fuera de eso, puedes ir a la ciudad que fue la ciudad más peligrosa del mundo, pero ya sabes que no te va a pasar nada. Pues, okey, digamos, hay cierta seguridad, porque realmente aquí los turistas están cuidados y no están cuidados por la policía. Están cuidados porque las estructuras criminales, como ya lo dijiste, enlazando con la segunda parte, las estructuras criminales ya dieron la orden que a los turistas no les puede pasar nada porque están vinculados directamente a su negocio. Entonces es por esto que tenemos un gringo, pues que pena decirlo así, pero, así le decimos nosotros, un gringo, en un barrio popular y es más fácil que le pase algo a uno que es de la misma ciudad que a ellos. No les va a pasar nada, por qué? Porque son fuente de dinero y porque si los matan o si les pasa algo malo, van a dejar de venir.Carlos: El negocio [00:32:00] se daña. Sofia: Exactamente, es como, no sé si sabes pues, pero aquí a la, a los expendios de droga se les dice plazas. Y no hay lugar en la ciudad más seguro que una plaza, porque es que en una plaza a ti nadie te va a robar. porque pues está totalmente controlado y no le vas a dañar el negocio a los que tienen el negocio.Entonces, obviamente es muy atractivo y aunque uno podría decir que gente tan boba o lo que sea o no entienden la historia, no están interesados en la historia, pues es que es una historia que realmente es muy atractiva. Pues porque aquí él contó un par de cosas, un par de titulares, pero todo lo que tiene que ver con los narcotraficantes de nuestra región es bastante fantástica.Pues es, y por eso es que le han hecho series a Pablo Escobar, porque es que realmente es un personaje, pues muy interesante, muy interesante y con unas historias, pues que, que son cinematográficas. Entonces, como no se va a sentir el mundo atraído hacia eso. Carlos: El tipo vivió una película en carne propia continua, pues [00:33:00] todo, la cárcel, las escapadas, los negocios que montó, la estrategia de llevar la coca en aviones.Sofia: Y entonces asociado a lo que decías, pues que esta estrategia, pues como inmobiliaria o está de vínculo con los Airbnbs, pues claro a mí no me parece extraño, es que estas estructuras son supremamente inteligentes. Van adelante, claro. Y donde vaya mucho dinero siempre va a estar detrás pues, bueno, ¿Cómo lavamos dinero? Es que nos entra tanto dinero que tenemos que lavarlo. No lo vamos a lavar vendiendo empanadas. Vamos a lavarlo con algo que genere mucho dinero. Entonces, siempre, pues es que aquí han lavado plata con todo lo que uno se imagine y siempre han tenido casas, negocios, las farmacias, por ejemplo. Carlos: Y y Chris, la actividad inmobiliaria. Ya cuando yo estudiaba, obviamente, yo tengo 68 años. O sea hace 35 años que estudiaba la zona de prestigio de El Poblado [00:34:00] era toda de casas campestres a las cuales se ingresaba por rieles, o sea. Sofia: Por un camino de piedra. Carlos: Si, sin una infraestructura urbana. Y en 30 años, el paisaje es lleno de torres, absolutamente lleno de torres, saturado. Lavado, aquí no hay una economía como para que mucha gente pudiente desarrollara no, no. Eso solamente se explica porque, pero era el negocio formal. Sí, y ese "negocio" entre comillas, no, no ocasionaba la molestia como ahora la, la gentrificación, antes , por el contrario, toda la élite valorizó sus fincas para en ella desarrollar torres, se llenaron de dinero, con dinero que era con seguridad absoluta en un porcentaje muy alto finanzas para lavar.Sofia: De negocios ilícitos. Y el crecimiento de esta ciudad y sí, porque es un crecimiento demasiado [00:35:00] rápido. Pues a ti te, te debió haber tocado El Poblado ya totalmente lleno de torres pues. Pero lo que quiero decir es que acá no hay una economía tan grande como para que eso sucediera tan rápido. Entonces, pues es obvio, o sea, ahora nos parece como "uy podrían ser dueños de Airbnb." y yo diría, quién más? Quién más va a ser dueño en esta ciudad de ese negocio? Quiénes son capaces de comprar edificios enteros? O sea, quiénes tienen el dinero para invertir? Carlos: Y para recuperarlo contra rentas cortas, es decir que me parece que es una inversión de mucho riesgo. Porque cualquier evento. Sofia: Pues la misma pandemia. Carlos: Lo lo puede tirar al suelo, cierto? Quién puede arriesgar eso? El narco.Sofia: Es que mira que aquí tradicionalmente en la ciudad, acá les llamamos "panaderías paracas." Pues y son panaderías que venden el peor pan. O sea, nadie compra. Pero funcionan 24 horas. Carlos: Y son super [00:36:00] lujosas, o sea lo que son muy bien establecidas.Sofia: Y son negocios que nunca tienen clientes y venden un pan horrible y nadie les compra, pero siempre están ahí en las mejores esquinas.Carlos: Abiertas todo el tiempo. Sofia: Y además, tienen ligado como que eso lo inauguró Pablo Escobar, pues como un sistema de vigilancia. Entonces, en la época de Pablo escobar, eran los taxistas, cierto? Había como una red de taxis asociados y todavía creo que eso funciona. Pues y quiénes van a esas panaderías? Es decir, o sea, siempre siempre el narcotráfico, claro, tiene que tener negocios legales, pa poder, pues, si pa [00:37:00] poder. Chris: Órale, pues qué fuerte y todo y supongo que debajo de todo, hay como más evidencia más capas de crimen organizado, no solo narcos, pero también el estado. Pienso como en una corporación de nivel mundial que se llama Blackstone, que ya ha pasado en lugares como Barcelona y otros ciudades en donde, [00:38:00] eh, se compran un edificio, se desplazan toda la gente, o sea, todos los residentes adentro y se convierte todo en Airbnb. O sea cada depa es un Airbnb ya, como 30, 50, 100, lo que sea, y se emplean, negocios tras negocios, tras negocios para, por ejemplo, los sistemas de organizar reservaciones, de la limpieza. Pero todos los trabajadores, todos los negocios no son parte de Blackstone. Son como empleado como freelance, no? Entonces ni hay ninguna cara vista en ese dinámica que está sacando, desplazando a la gente de sus edificios.Sofia: No, yo iba a decir que de pronto aquí no, no, no es tan visible aún eso como de comprar edificios ya habitados, pero sí de construirlos. O sea, ya si se están [00:39:00] construyendo muchos edificios totalmente de Airbnb con inversiones extranjeras o locales, porque hay un personaje, pues aquí que que está como abanderado de ese tema y que dice que va, va a llenar todo Airbnb y que le parece bien.Pues yo siento que está empezando a suceder. Está empezando a suceder. Chris: Gracias, Sofía. Y pues, los efectos de turismo [00:40:00] excesivo, el sobreturismo y la gentrificacion en Medellin parece que han llegado muy rápido y fuerte. Sin embargo, los últimos años han surgido cuentas en las redes sociales criticando al turista, al nómada digital o al gringo, por lo que está sucediendo. ¿Es eso lo que ustedes todos también ven allá y están de acuerdo con la evaluación?Sofia: Pues, a ver, resentimiento. Mm, no me parece que sea muy visible. O sea, me parece que hay como mucho escándalo, moralista. Pero pues, a a ver hubo como una pequeña marcha en el alrededor del Parque Lleras en contra pues del Airbnb, en contra de la explotación sexual infantil, pero no es muy masivo. O sea, ahí sí siento que culturalmente somos. O sea, aunque el paísa puede ser muy [00:41:00] beligerante como en sus palabras, como que parece muy bravo y furioso, realmente somos muy sumisos y sumisos ante el Dios Dinero. Entonces, mientras haya negocio, se acepta, se moverá, cierto? Y entonces, este efecto, pues como que de hecho, pues en en otras conversaciones hemos dicho bueno, yo no lo llamaría gentrificación.Pues lo llamaríamos turistificación porque es una cosa que se está generando desde el turismo específicamente porque la gentrificación habla más desde un desplazamiento de un grupo social a otro, pero no necesariamente se refiere al turista. Y claro que hay un efecto porque en este momento hay una burbuja inmobiliaria.Están muy costosos los arriendo en Medellín, el costo de la vida está altísimo. Y eso digamos que aunque se concentra en el sur, en El Poblado y en Laureles, pues en el occidente, eso tiene una onda expansiva, pues que afecta como el resto de la ciudad y realmente los arriendos se han encarecido, digamos de lo más costoso a lo que era pues como más barato. Y si nos afecta a todos, [00:42:00] pero yo no veo a nadie ni organizándose, no? Carlos: Ni siquiera la relación que estableciste en una pregunta anterior con la oferta de vivienda. Porque, digamos una cosa es que algunos edificios obsoletos o que se desarrollen nuevos edificaciones para atender turistas, pero supuestamente la oferta de vivienda tradicional de la ciudad debería continuar, pero no ha sido así.O sea, la situación se ha agravado porque ya te mencioné. Esta es una ciudad muy estrecha y es una ciudad que no tiene suelo de expansión. No tiene para dónde crecer. Entonces, cuando este tema llega al tema inmobiliario, uno pensaba que iba a haber una reacción, no necesariamente resentimiento, sino una reacción social. Sofia: Por lo menos de exigencia pues ante las autoridades, pues, que tomen conciencia en el asunto. Carlos: O institucionales, o de los gremios, pero no. Porque finalmente hay [00:43:00] negocio y el negocio opaca todo en la cultura y en la mentalidad nuestra. Yo creo que, que todavía una respuesta ante la crisis, yo creo que la crisis va a seguir acentuándose. Va a seguir manifestandose y acentuándose, y que una reacción o una respuesta empresarial, institucional. Sofia: O ciudadana... Carlos: Exactamente, todavía no, se ve muy clara.Sofia: Sí, porque si uno, si puede decir bueno, "hay gente que no le gustan los turistas," pero no es una cosa generalizada, porque de nuevo, si hay como un espíritu como hospitalario o si el turista te trata bien a ti, porque lo vas a tratar mal. O sea, yo no he visto, pues, que en un negocio alguien vaya a tratar mal a un turista que no le quiera vender. No, eso no sucede. Pues, entonces no creo que esté sucediendo algo así. Pues, creo que, la situación, digamos, económica y social, estaba muy densa, pues está como muy [00:44:00] fuerte aquí en la ciudad y la gente simplemente está intentando sobrevivir.Carlos: Y digamos, el malestar que se presentó en Manila y sus alrededores es porque ciertos eventos de drogadiccion y prostitución era muy visibles. Cuando se logra el pacto de ocultar, pues todos tranquilos, porque la gente aquí es muy mojigata. Esto es una una sociedad simplemente conservadora, "católica" entre comillas y con que la cosa no se vea, pues está bien. Sofia: Yo también quería anotar que, que claro que han habido como unas pequeñas manifestaciones en El Poblado, cierto?, de residentes que se han visto afectados. Pero eso no tiene eco en toda la ciudad porque es que eso finalmente gente rica que está molesta porque ya no puede vivir en el arrendamiento, en el barrio que vivió toda la vida, sino que le toca desplazarse a otro menos cómodo.Pero no es como que se vayan a quedar sin posibilidad de vivir en la ciudad, por ejemplo. Me parece que no es como algo tan crítico. Y eso no va a tener eco en la [00:45:00] ciudad porque un montón de niños ricos se quedaron sin poder pagar su apartamento, pues, o el apartamento que quieren o en el barrio que quieren.Simplemente claro está desplazando un poco, entonces hay nuevas zonas. Eso si se llama gentrificación, estos barrios más tradicionales, más populares están siendo ocupados por estas personas de clase alta de nuestra ciudad que han sido desplazadas por la gente de clase alta del mundo, cierto?Y entonces esta gente que habitaba en esos barrios tradicionales, pues le toca coger para la ladera, cierto? Para los barrios populares. Y bueno, y digamos que esa es la incomodidad. Pero yo no siento que sea algo generalizado.O sin mucha fuerza, o por lo menos no con una llamada clara a la [00:46:00] acción. Chris: Vale, vale, pues muchas gracias, Sofía, Carlos. Entonces, si no hay tanta resistencia en las calles, me gustaría preguntarles de las acciones del gobierno de Medellin. Entonces, en mi investigación para el episodio, yo leí algunos artículos que ofrecen los siguientes datos:Ahora, "Medellin tiene un déficit de más de 50,000 viviendas según Viva, según la empresa de vivienda de la gobernación de Antioquia."Ahora, "Juan Camilo Vargas, director de Asohost, el [00:47:00] gremio de esta actividad en Colombia dice que el 40% de sus operaciones se concentra en Medellín y que el negocio no es ilegal. Entonces un alcalde no puede pasar por encima de una norma nacional."Ahora "Y aunque no ha tomado medidas concretas, el alcalde Gutiérrez también ha enviado señales de posibles restricciones para el negocio de los hospedajes cortos. En la ciudad más de 1700 lugares operan sin licencia según el sistema de información turística."Y finalmente "No vamos a acabar con las plataformas, pero si habrá regulaciones, dijo el mandatorio ante el consejo el 4 de marzo." Dice "No puede ser que en tres años hayan aumentado tanto los arriendos [00:48:00] o que la vida de nuestras familias se vuelve imposible por las rentas cortas."Entonces, pues el gobierno local habla de adoptar una postura dura contra el tráfico sexual relacionado con el turismo y la crisis de vivienda. Y dadas las fallas en Barcelona para enfrentar las consecuencias del turismo, incluso después de que su alcalde fue elegido por hacer exactamente eso, ¿Qué esperanza cree que existe a nivel gubernamental en Medellin? Sofia: No, claro esto una, pues, qué pena decirlo. Pero Chris, es que nosotros tenemos un alcalde que se cree Batman. Pues que anda en un helicóptero diciendo que va a perseguir el mismo a los ladrones, pero es toda una fachada y digamos que nuestra sociedad compra eso. Pero pues se cerraron tres apartamentos, tres edificios, o sea, se cerraron unos cuantos negocios.Eso sale en la primera plana. [00:49:00] Pero pues yo, yo tengo gente cercana que ha invertido en Airbnb. Y no han tenido ningún problema. No les han hecho ningún requerimiento. Nunca les han visitado la policía. Claro, creo que depende mucho como del administrador de la propiedad, no admitir lo que se supone que en la plataforma no está admitido, cierto? Que tengamos esta persona cercana que que está, pues como inversionista de un Airbnb, si dice nosotros no admitimos nada de eso. Y las veces que hemos tenido intentos de que alguien entre a alguien, se llama la policía, y claramente de una se expulsa a la persona. Bueno, digamos que si hay un procedimiento, pero ni siquiera a esa persona, la policía se lo va a llevar.O sea, a mí me ocurrió una cosa una vez, y es que yo estaba en una portería de una unidad en El Poblado y entró un extranjero con dos niños pequeños, con dos niños de 10 años. Y yo pensé que eran [00:50:00] sus hijos, pues como yo pensé que eran sus sus hijos adoptivos pues, pues, como que, bueno, simplemente yo vi a entrar un un hombre con dos niños, pero sí me llamó la atención como estaban vestidos los niños.Y le pregunté el portero, como esos son los, pues como que estaba confundida si me llamó la atención en la manera en que estaban vestidos. Y el portero me dijo no es que estos gringos vienen a hacer eso en ese apartamento y yo, pero ¿Por qué no estamos llamando a la policía? Y él me decía "es que los tienen que coger con las manos en la masa."O sea, no hay, un procedimiento tampoco para hacerle frente a esto. Y es una cosa que muchas veces sucede, pero no hay herramientas institucionales para que deje de suceder porque finalmente ellos están protegidos porque están en el interior de un apartamento, porque el dueño del apartamento está de acuerdo. Bueno, digamos que es toda una cadena. Entonces realmente es difícil del desuno de vista legal. lo que creo es que nuestro alcalde y muchos otros que hemos tenido son maravillosos haciendo anuncios, [00:51:00] cierto? Siendo portadas de periódico. Carlos: Aunque, aunque hay anuncios en el aeropuerto ahí, pues tú te bajas de un vuelo internacional y en el pasillo vas a encontrar... Sofia: Si, que que no, que no se admite esto, pero igual siempre vas a poder acceder a ello.O sea claro, y son muy buenos haciendo anuncios, así como han hecho anuncios de muchas cosas. Pues como se va a acabar la criminalidad, o sea, van a pasar muchas cosas, pero en el cotidiano, pues uno ve que eso no es cierto. O sea, uno se va para el Lleras y uno sigue viendo pues, toda la dinámica cierto?. Qué era muy escandaloso, Chris, y que creo que ya dejó de pasar, que es que uno se iba para el para el Lleras. Pues que no sé si estás ubicado en El Poblado, como en el mejor dicho, es como el centro del turismo, en el barrio de El Poblado, y uno veía niñas indígenas que bailaban por monedas, cierto?. Y era como, ya ni siquiera era [00:52:00] necesariamente, es que ellas fueran prostitutas, sino no que estaban, digamos, haciendo algo que la gente consideraba muy indigno y que eran niñas y que eran indígenas. Al lado de todas las, cierto? Trabajadores sexuales que se estaban, digamos, ofreciendo sus servicios. Y eso fue lo que más, alarmó a la gente, como, porque tenemos estas niñas indígenas, y entonces, bueno, la actitud fue, se van de aquí, ya no pueden estar, le quitamos las niñas a los papás. Bueno, un montón de acciones que uno sabe desde adentro que no van a tener absolutamente ningún efecto y que es posible que esas niñas la vayan a pasar todavía peor de lo que ya la pasan, cierto?, bueno, como que yo la verdad no creo que vayan a cerrar Airbnb. No creo que vayan a prohibir el Airbnb en Medellín. Carlos: Pues yo veo muchas construcciones para adelante. Y tengo compañeros o amigos ex alumnos arquitectos que dicen que los negocios que les están entrando es diseñar y construir [00:53:00] Airbnb.Sofia: Si. Y fuera de eso, pues, porque es que esos anuncios son muy fáciles de decir. Pues incluso yo he visto que en otras ciudades han empezado a regular. Que hay zonas de la ciudad que no se admiten los Airbnbs o que, digamos tienen un tiempo, mínimo, o sea que son 30 días mínimo, entonces son estancias cortas, pero de un mínimo, o sea, no es, voy a pasar el fin de semana en Medellín y me voy a des cualquiera, sino vengo a trabajar. Pero eso ni siquiera ha sucedido.O sea, no hay una mínima regulación, entonces, pareciera de pronto, si se leen los titulares pareciera pero hasta ahora no ha pasado nada concreto. Carlos: Y hay muchos enterramientos, por ejemplo, de que el presidente local, fue financiado por todo este sector inmobiliario y pongámosle raya, relacionado con el turismo. Entonces él, él no tiene capacidad moral de controlarlos. Chris: Pues justo me encontré una cita del arquitecto Joseph Bohigas, [00:54:00] y el dice que "en la segunda ciudad de Colombia, aún hay tiempo para evitar las imágenes que se repiten hoy en Barcelona," que "Medellín no puede morir de éxito." Carlos: Pues él nos lanzó esa frase porque acordáte que te mencioné que hubo un turismo académico muy fuerte y una, pues pretendía cierta hermandad entre Medellín y Barcelona. Pues eso no tiene nada de hermanos, pero la academia va para todo. Entonces, toda esta oleada de arquitectos y urbanistas de Barcelona estuvieron aquí, asesorando a las alcaldías, a los gobernadores durante unos 10 años seguidos. Todos los arquitectos importantes de Barcelona tuvieron aquí y el vino. Y él nos dijo esa frase por ahí en el 2007. Estaba en alcaldía terminando Fajardo cuando el dijo ojo que una ciudad puede morir del éxito. Entonces desarrolle la idea y [00:55:00] más o menos decía pues la gentrificación, el encarecimiento, la turistificacion fueron cosas que no, que él anunció.Claro, esta es una ciudad sin mar. La gente viene a montañas y la vegetación. Tú sales de Medellín a dos horas y estás como en una selva. No es una selva, es un bosque tropical tremendo, muy atractivo. Yo creo que ese es un atractivo que la ciudad también ayuda a traer mucha gente, es decir, Santa Fe, Antioquia, Guatape, Jardín, son municipios relativamente cercanos, muy, muy atractivos para el que viene realmente a descansar, cierto? Entonces yo creo que esto podría ser una oportunidad. Esta situación de gentrificación, turistificación, encarecimiento, actividad inmobiliaria, que de, que está abandonando la vivienda, digamos para el, para el residente. Podría ser la oportunidad para que ese morir del éxito pudiera ser confrontado [00:56:00] mediante políticas.A eso requiere mucho liderazgo de la alcaldía, mucho. Actualmente yo no veo la alcaldía con comprensión estratégica de lo que puede estar pasando y de cómo esto pueda grabarse mucho. Sofia: Sí, sí, gracias, Carlos. Para terminar nuestra conversación, me gustaría preguntarte Sofía sobre el proyecto que nos pusimos en contacto. El Proyecto NN, me encantaría que pudieras explicarnos qué es el Proyecto NN y qué hacen ustedes ahí en Medellin? El Proyecto NN es una corporación sin ánimo de lucro, pues que está interesada por apoyar procesos como de organizaciones culturales o sociales, digamos en zonas periférica de la ciudad, aunque también hemos trabajado o nos interesa mucho también la parte, digamos pedagógica o la parte de [00:57:00] formación en temas relacionados con patrimonio, con urbanismo, cierto? Como con, cultura en general. Sofia: Somos varios arquitectos que hacemos parte, pues de la organización y todos somos profesores universitarios. Entonces, bueno, tenemos como ese interés por la pedagogía y digamos que ese cruce de la pedagogía y la dignidad espacial, y el interés por los espacios de encuentro, digamos comunitarios, pues nos ha llevado apoyar estos procesos, a encontrar mecanismos o idear proyectos para dignificar esos espacios donde la gente se encuentra, donde la gente se encuentra generalmente a compartir, pero también a aprender y a buscar como salidas para gestionar la propia vida, cierto?, digamos, para superar esa desigualdad que muchas veces también tiene que ver con la desigualdad en la oferta de oportunidades, precisamente, incluso desde la, desde la educación. Y pues, porque, aunque supuestamente en Colombia, la educación es un derecho, pues realmente no se [00:58:00] cumple cierto?. Y vinculado un poquito como a esta idea de la vivienda, pues también se supone que en Colombia, la vivienda digna es un derecho, y eso es algo que vemos que no se cumple.Y, pues, ahorita mencionábamos un poquito como la conformación de la ciudad, y podemos decir que, pues esos lugares en donde la vivienda digna no se cumple, pues se da sobre todo en las laderas, cierto? En la parte alta de la montaña. Y es allí donde estamos trabajando, donde vemos precisamente que hay un tipo de urbanización, pues como muy precaria, donde los servicios básicos no están cubiertos y donde un espacio comunitario, pues cubre realmente muchas de las necesidades de las personas, cierto?Incluso, pues , como espacio de socialización, cierto? Como espacio de encontrar pares, cierto? Para enfrentar, pues, esa situación. Entonces, bueno, eso es lo que hacemos desde el Proyecto NN y bueno, y digamos que intentamos [00:59:00] reflexionar teóricamente, pues, este asunto del derecho de la ciudad y el derecho de la vivienda, pero también estamos intentando, pues, como adelantar proyectos que tengan que ver transversalmente con este asunto. Ahora en compañía de Carlos, pues que Carlos ahorita les, te contará un poco. Pero Carlos, pues es un experto en mejoramiento integral de barrios, bueno, en todas estas intervenciones que se puedan hacer en estos, en estos lugares de la ciudad, estamos, liderando un proceso de formación, pero también un proceso constructivo, si puedes llamarse así, de prevención de riesgos y desastres.Pues, porque en estos barrios el derecho a la ciudad es eso cierto? Esta gente bueno, viven unas condiciones precarias, pero además, están arriesgando sus vidas, cierto?, porque, no tienen las condiciones urbanas, pues, para que su vivienda sea una vivienda segura.Y entonces estamos encontrando y a [01:00:00] mecanismos, pues, para transmitir algunos conocimientos técnicos y pues, para mejorar esas condiciones de vida. Entonces, digamos que, pues para nosotros el derecho a la ciudad tiene que ver también con esto, cierto? De, bueno, el estado no lo puede resolver. Pero entonces, como comunitariamente encontramos alternativas para mejorar estas condiciones. Carlos: Yo agregaría que para mí, por lo menos en la experiencia profesional que he tenido, literalmente el derecho de la ciudad es derecho a la vivienda. Yo no concibo ni siquiera la ciudad sin oferta de vivienda, sin vivienda. La ciudad es un lugar para vivir fundamentalmente y dentro de estas estrategias de gestionar la vivienda.Pues, pues, vos, sabes, Chris que Colombia y Medellín es una ciudad muy, muy determinada por por el desplazamiento desde las regiones. Es una ciudad que recibe población migrante expulsada por fenómenos [01:01:00] violentos, por buscar oportunidades, por la misma atractividad de la ciudad, porque es una ciudad que se mueve, que mueve la economía.Entonces, precisamente el sector inmobiliario, digamos entretenido con Airbnb, la alcaldía que no sabe para donde mirar y la gente llegando desde las regiones expulsada de muchas formas, se ubica en unas laderas muy, muy inhóspitas, de muy difícil adiestramiento, de muy difícil urbanización. Entonces vemos que allí, desde la formación, desde la capacitación, desde la pedagogía, de, pero siempre llevando a la práctica con la red de monitoreo de puntos críticos en un barrio, con la identificación del que es un punto crítico, con los factores de riesgo del barrio. Estamos tejiendo con ellos y el lugar de reunión, la sede de Somos Por [01:02:00] Naturaleza y el Proyecto NN, ahí nos encontramos construyendo con la gente conocimiento, oportunidades, posibilidades. En eso estamos. Chris: Orale, pues suena un proyecto increíble, necesario y muy hermoso. Entonces, gracias a ustedes dos y también en el nombre de nuestros oyentes, me gustaría agradecerles a ambos por estar dispuestos a hablar conmigo sobre estos temas hoy. Igual fue muy revelador para mí y espero que poco a poco se sigan construyendo la derecha a la ciudad, a la vivienda, y la solidaridad, con la gente ahí en Medellin. Entonces, ¿Cómo podrían nuestros oyentes seguir a sus trabajos, compañeros? Sofia: Ah, bueno, nos pueden seguir en en Instagram, @ProyectoNN. Ahí intentamos compartir, pues, como parte del proceso de los proyectos [01:03:00] que que tenemos en curso y bueno, próximamente también vamos a actualizar la página www.proyectonn.com Y bueno, por ahí pueden ver como, como las cosas que estamos haciendo y adelantando. Y pues también, muchas gracias a ti por la invitación.Siempre son temas muy bacanos como de conversar, reflexionar, chévere.Carlos: Así que a la gente de Oaxaca y a usted Chris que se interesaron en estas conversaciones, pues muchas gracias.Chris: Gracias, Sofía. Gracias Carlos. Bonito día.English TranscriptionChris: [00:00:00] Welcome Sofia, welcome Carlos to the podcast The End of Tourism. Thank you very much for being with me today to talk about this very complex topic. I would like to ask you where you are today and what the world looks like for each of you there.Sofia: Well, we are here in the city of Medellin. We are together in my house, Carlos is my father, and well, we decided to get together to have a more fluid conversation, from here, from my house in the center of the city, which is a very particular center. Well, Medellin is a mountainous city that is in the Andes. It is a valley. And let's say that the center of the city has, well, very different dynamics to many centers of other cities.Carlos: It is a very narrow city [00:01:00] and on the eastern and western sides there are a couple of mountains full of neighborhoods. Right here, through the window, you can see all the urbanized mountains and in the center is, let's say, the metropolis, what we could call a more traditional city, while up there are neighborhoods or popular communes. Nowadays, they are very popular for certain types of tourism.And where are you?Chris: Well, I was in Oaxaca, the capital of Oaxaca, Mexico, also in a valley that is a bit larger geographically than Medellín. I know Medellín because I was there as a tourist maybe 15 years ago. And so, starting all the [00:02:00] research for this episode, I found how many... So I would like to read some quotes from those articles for the listeners who may not know Medellín, don't know what's going on there, according to the mass media.So, first up is Nomad List. "Nomad List is a platform that publishes its ranking of the most popular destinations for working remotely. It placed Medellin in second place last year out of 157 cities in Latin America."The next one says that"In the Manila neighborhood of Medellin, there are short-term rentals whose owners earn more than five million Colombian pesos per month or about $1,000 US."The next one said that"Although it was not carried out [00:03:00] , the local president said at the time 'that he would ban short-term rentals in the city as a measure to prevent child sexual abuse and exploitation. In that search to find a solution to this scourge, Guitierrez, the local president, met with representatives of the Airbnb platform to reach an agreement.Since then, the parties have worked together in agreement to avoid extreme measures, but to establish actions that allow preventing this crime in the city."Continuing, "Meanwhile, the number of apartments listed on Airbnb, the popular vacation rental company, rose from 8,000 in October 2022 to 14,000 at [00:04:00] the end of 2023, according to data collected by AirDNA."And finally, "recent data says that Medellín receives 1.7 million foreign visitors to a city of 2.5 million inhabitants."So, I'd like to start by asking you two about gentrification in Medellin. I found another article on the subject. And maybe if you show it, it exposes a little bit of what's going on there and says that"Wilson and Felipe, both of whom withheld their real names, each own a café-bar in Manila in El Poblado, one of the most touristic areas with the greatest economic activity. The two neighbors are among the few left on their [00:05:00] block, because practically all the houses in the area have been transformed into restaurants, small hotels and hostels, Spanish schools, or short-term rentals through apps like Airbnb, which are taken over by foreigners and are partly the cause of the high cost of housing for traditional residents. Between 2022 and 2023, rents grew between 50 and 100%.This neighborhood has changed a lot, says Wilson. It was a family-oriented neighborhood, and you see, it became a land of drug addicts and drug dealers who provide home delivery. All this 'gentrification', as they say, is due to foreign investors and everything became more expensive. Carlos, you have worked for state-owned companies in Medellín and Bogotá, the Urban Development Company. And [00:06:00] Sofia, you have worked on the NN Project there in Medellín. So perhaps you could give us an idea of what has happened in Medellín in recent years and decades in terms of gentrification and what role tourism and tourists have to play in it.Carlos: Well, I perceive this situation as extremely new and recent.It is worth saying that Medellin in the 90s was a city where nobody came. That is to say, the situation of urban violence. All this crisis that drug trafficking unleashed in the city had us marginalized from the rest of the world. It was a rather unattractive city due to its violence and relatively paralyzed investments. [00:07:00] Sofia: It was the most violent city in the world.Carlos: YesSofia: At some pointCarlos: And it required a strategy of attention between the presidency of the republic and the local mayor's office, which you in Mexico call "local presidency" to find alternatives for the future. They were called the seminars of many conversations.So, the first thing I want to show is that it is a very new and recent fact. For us, to see a foreigner, it was a footballer who came to the two clubs. Otherwise, nobody came here. Seeing Chinese or Japanese or German faces was very unique.And the paisa, the Antioquian culture is a supremely hospitable culture.People here are overflowing with kindness. It's a very curious thing. The mere fact of feeling a person from another [00:08:00] region, not necessarily a foreigner, can be from another Colombian region. The Antioquian develops skills and ways of relating, very pleasant, very attractive. The Antioquian is a very talkative person, very talkative, and is very open. He is very calm in relationships, I would say that at first. So yes, we do feel, the presence of foreigners really feels overwhelming, because it is noticeable. We live here. I live in a couple of small blocks where small hotels have proliferated in two blocks, they have been developed in the last three years.Five, six, seven hotels, and the presence of foreigners is noticeable. And as I said at the beginning, it was very welcome, because foreigners bring coins with a very high exchange rate and here, the country has an extremely commercial and business mentality. Here, the business is seen to be selling a space, so we make another space.I mean, people here are extremely resourceful in the way they do business.Sofia: Yes, and I think the city made an institutional effort to change the narrative as well. Because, as Carlos says, it was very stigmatized, because we are the city of Pablo Escobar. True.That is a very strong symbolic burden. And so an effort has been made to show other things that we are as well. I think that reggaeton has a lot to do with the visibility of the city as well. True, because let's say that reggaeton has not only produced great stars, great singers, like from here in Medellin, but [00:10:00] that reggaeton, like many other musical genres, like in salsa or, well, it exalts, well, those figures like drug trafficking, well, like a certain aesthetic as well. And so it is very attractive for many foreigners to come and get to know the city of reggaeton.And that was something that was happening, let's say, in a more organic and slower way before the pandemic. With the pandemic, it was cut off and after the pandemic, it overflowed. In other words, it happens as an overflow phenomenon. I also imagine, well, because of the desire of many people to travel and, well, to have been paralyzed in their places, and the city really wasn't prepared.I mean, I think that all that institutional effort that was made was not measured either, as to how far it could go, right? Because, although it is true that the city is extremely hospitable and welcoming, let's say that the climate is one of the things that also [00:11:00] attracts the attention of many foreigners. It is a very ideal climate, right? An eternal summer. Well, obviously there are also some structures that offer things. There are a lot of drugs, there is a lot of prostitution, right? It is a city that is also for a tourism that does not leave many good things. Also, well, you will know and you will have the knowledge, tourism even if it is not, well, this tourism of drugs and prostitution and unbridled partying. Tourism is a phenomenon that tends to be devastating, right? It is a phenomenon that makes it more expensive, then. Yes, I think that at first, it is a city that kind of wanted this to happen, but at this moment it does not know very well how to handle it.Carlos: Yes, there was also a time when the city began to take off, there was some academic tourism, because the city began to be very loud in terms of certain urban transformations [00:12:00] . This is a city that has a very powerful public services company.In Medellin, the mayor's office is the owner of a kind of local multinational that sells public services and electricity. It sells electricity to Panama and Ecuador and provides public services to some 90 municipalities in Colombia. So, the city has a really notable capacity for social investment.And then the city started to hold academic events to show off. For example, Bogota, which is the capital of Colombia, has 8,000,000 inhabitants. It has not been able to build a subway.Chris: Wow.Carlos: And the Medellin metro is celebrating its 30th anniversary. What I wanted to point out is that a very curious form of tourism has developed. And that is that foreigners come here to visit popular neighborhoods, to get into [00:13:00] Moravia, or what we call Comuna 13 here, is a very curious fact, at least because you go to a popular neighborhood where there are no comfortable services, where there are no venues, where you can see the popular show. I don't know, it's a very, very curious thing and it's incredibly overwhelming.That is to say, there are places where there is no room for people physically and they keep going, that is, there, they are, all of that is uncomfortable. But people keep going , I don't know why, but they keep coming.Sofia: It's a question we ask ourselves constantly, in fact, several friends always ask me, like, what are you here for? Why do you come here?Well, we don't understand what they're coming for, maybe because one has become naturalized. I don't know, well, everything that happens here, but one stil

How do toys shape who we become? Today, I sit down with a fascinating toy historian Chris Byrne who reveals the hidden power of play - from how different toys develop everything from relationship skills to problem - solving abilities.    We explore why true play isn't about reaching an end goal, but about embracing the pure joy of the journey. Whether you're looking to understand the art of playing alongside your kids or giving them space to explore independently, this episode will transform how you think about playtime. Join us for a rich conversation about rediscovering the magic that happens when we give ourselves permission to simply play.   After exploring the art of play with our toy historian today, I want to share something powerful with you. My book Fertile Imagination tackles a crucial truth: we can't guide our children toward imagination if we've lost touch with our own. I'll show you the exact framework I used to reawaken and strengthen this superpower – the same one that transformed both my life and my three sons'. If you're ready to rediscover your creativity and childlike zest for life, grab your copy now: https://bit.ly/fertilebook     In this episode, you will hear:    Play is a process, not a means to an end, and embracing it can reduce stress. Imagination influences every decision we make. Playing with toys helps kids develop problem-solving and relationship skills. Adults benefit from play too—it fosters creativity, joy, and innovation. Letting children lead playtime strengthens their confidence and creativity. Kids learn by doing, and unstructured play is vital for their development. In corporate settings, a playful mindset can unlock new ideas and innovation. Fear of failure limits creativity—kids don't judge play, and neither should we.   This episode is brought to you by:    Fertile Imagination: A Guide For Stretching Every Mom's Superpower For Maximum Impact – My book is available as a hard cover, paperback, and also as an audiobook. If you are on the go and wish to quickly jot down where you can purchase the book then head to: https://bit.ly/fertilebook.    If however you want to grab the audio version then head to the show notes to click the direct Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Fertile-Imagination-Stretching-Superpower-Maximum/dp/B0CK2ZSMLB   About Chris Bryne   Chris Byrne has spent over 35 years in the toy industry, holding major marketing and creative roles before launching Byrne Communications, a consultancy specializing in product development, strategic planning, and marketing. A passionate advocate for the power of play, he has studied its impact on child development and creativity across industries. He has appeared on major media outlets worldwide, sharing insights on toys, play, and innovation. He also co-hosts The Playground Podcast, diving deep into the toy industry's past, present, and future.   SHARE this episode with fellow moms and entrepreneurs who want to bring more creativity into their lives! Chris's insights on play, imagination, and innovation are a must-listen for anyone balancing motherhood and career growth. Let's embrace play, rediscover joy, and inspire the next generation! Supporting Resources:   Website: https://www.thetoyguy.com/  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thetoyguy/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thetoyguyofficial/ The Playground Podcast: Spotify & Apple Podcasts Subscribe and Review   Have you subscribed to my podcast for new moms who are entrepreneurs, founders, and creators?  I'd love for you to subscribe if you haven't yet.    I'd love it even more if you could drop a review or 5-star rating over on Apple Podcasts. Simply select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” then a quick line with your favorite part of the episode. It only takes a second and it helps spread the word about the podcast for writer moms. About Fertile Imagination   You can be a great mom without giving up, shrinking, or hiding your dreams. There's flexibility in how you pursue anything – your role, your lifestyle, and your personal and professional goals. The limitations on your dreams are waiting to be shattered. It's time to see and seize what's beyond your gaze. Let's bridge your childhood daydreams with your grown-up realities. Imagine skipping with your kids along any path – you, surpassing your milestones while your kids are reaching theirs. There's only one superpower versatile enough to stretch your thinking beyond what's been done before: a Fertile Imagination. It's like kryptonite for impostor syndrome and feeling stuck when it's alert!    In Fertile Imagination, you will awaken your sleeping source of creative solutions. If you can wake up a toddler or a groggy middle schooler, then together with the stories in this book – featuring 25 guests from my podcast Unimaginable Wellness, proven tools, and personal anecdotes – we will wake up your former playmate: your imagination!  Advance Praise    “You'll find reality-based strategies for imagining your own imperfect, fulfilling life in this book!” —MARTHA HENNESSEY, former NH State Senator    “Melissa invites the reader into a personal and deep journey about topics that are crucially important to uncover what would make a mom (and dad too) truly happy to work on…even after the kids are in bed.” —KEN HONDA, best-selling author of Happy Money    “This book is a great purchase for moms in every stage of life. Melissa is like a great friend, honest and wise and funny, telling you about her life and asking you to reflect on yours.” —MAUREEN TURNER CAREY, librarian in Austin, TX           TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Chris: I really believe is what we play with as kids really becomes, we become a lot of that. And we had a basement in our house that had a room in it, that had a window in it. And my brothers and I would create puppet shows. And we would do that. And we would just go round up all the kids in the neighborhood and say, you have to watch this puppet show. And they did. I mean, they were good. But it was really about storytelling. It was about connection. It was about making things up and just feeling very alive in that moment, feeling very connected to who I was at that time and being able to share that with other people. 00:00:43 Melissa: Welcome to the Mom Founder Imagination Hub, your weekly podcast to inspire you to dream bigger. Plan out how you're going to get to that next level in business, find the energy to keep going, and make sure your creative juices are flowing so that this way you get what you really want rather than having to settle. Get ready to discover how mom founders have reimagined entrepreneurship and motherhood. Ever wonder how they do it? Tune in to find out. 00:01:09 Melissa: And stretch yourself by also learning from diverse entrepreneurs who might not be moms, but who have lessons you can tailor about how you can disrupt industries and step way outside of your comfort zone. I believe every mom's superpower is her imagination. In this podcast, I'm gonna give you the mindset, methods, and tools to unleash yours. Sounds good? Then keep listening. 00:01:36 Melissa: So how do toys shape who we become? Have you ever asked yourself that question as you are giving your child a toy? If that toy is going to influence their career choices ahead or the way that they are, their character. Today, I sat down with a fascinating toy historian, Chris Byrne. 00:02:04 Melissa: Now he is a 35 year plus veteran of the toy industry. He's held major marketing and creative positions earlier in his life. And he's appeared on TV talking about toys and play in the US and around the world. He's even been on the Live with Kelly and Mark show as a regular guest. And he has his own podcast, by the way, the Playground Podcast. 00:02:29 Melissa: So, Chris reveals today the hidden power of play, from how different toys develop everything from relationship skills to problem-solving abilities. We also explore why true play isn't about reaching an end goal, it's about embracing the pure joy of the journey. So, whether you're looking to understand the art of playing alongside your kids or giving them some space to explore independently, this episode is going to change how you think about playtime. So I encourage you to join us for this rich conversation about rediscovering the magic that happens when we give ourselves permission to just play. 00:03:10 Melissa: Okay, so before we jump into the conversation, I wanna just let you know that after the conversation, I would invite you to explore the art of play with my book, Fertile Imagination. Why is that relevant to you as a mom? Here's what I want you to know. It's really hard to guide our kids toward imagination if we've secretly lost touch with our own. So in my book, Fertile Imagination, I share with you the exact framework that I used in order to reawaken my imagination, play with my imagination, stretch my imagination, and strengthen what I believe to be our greatest superpower. 00:03:56 Melissa: So this framework is super simple to follow. It is guided and it is also provided in lots of really cool journaling question prompts in the book. And it's gonna be the same exact process that I used in order to really get back in touch with that little childlike spirit that all of us has, but maybe we forgot we have held quite tightly close to our hearts. 00:04:22 Melissa: So, I invite you to go ahead, rediscover your creativity, and see if you can find your childlike zest for life. Because I really believe that it's hard to teach our kids things that we may have forgotten are natural to us, and maybe came naturally to us when we were younger. So enjoy the conversation. The link to the book is available in the show notes where you're listening to this. Let me read the actual link so that you can learn more about my book, Fertile Imagination. 00:04:53 Melissa: It is a bit.ly link. So it is bit.ly/fertilebook. You can absolutely grab a copy right there of Fertile Imagination. If you wanted the audio version that is available exclusively via Amazon. So go ahead and check out the show notes for that link. Thank you again. And I hope you enjoy the conversation and let me know what you think at the end, I will share with you my top three takeaways that you can apply to your immediate mom life. Thank you so much. 00:05:28 Melissa: Chris Byrne. I am so excited to have you here on the Mom Founder Imagination Hub. How are you? 00:05:35 Chris: I am very well. I'm so excited to be with you. Thank you so much for the invitation. 00:05:40 Melissa: I couldn't get enough of your TED Talk. I was like, oh my gosh, he's not just a toy historian. He's like a toy psychologist. I loved it. I loved it. So welcome to the show. Chris, I want to just start with the big, big question on my mind. Help me understand from your perspective, decades in the industry, learning about the art of play, like what is an imagination to you and do you consider it a superpower? 00:06:12 Chris: Well, I absolutely consider our imagination our superpower. It is the one thing that, really one of the many things that really define us as human beings. Nothing happens in our world that doesn't start in the imagination. It can be, what do I want for lunch? Or what do I want to be when I grow up? Or should I marry this person? Or should I have children? 00:06:34 Chris: Or whatever it is because we begin in the imagination and other kinds of animals, you just put food in front of them and they eat, it's instinctual. But for us, it's not- as humans, it's not just instinctual. We literally create our worlds on a daily basis and that starts in the imagination. 00:06:54 Melissa: I agree. And it's interesting because as a fully grown adult, I would say that when I was writing my book, Fertile Imagination, and I see it as like a superpower for moms who are technically adults. I feel like it's a topic that is seldom discussed amongst adults. Like, is this something that you are noticing? Or maybe, you know, people that have that childlike quality because of your industry? What's your take on imagination, the art of play, and being an adult? 00:07:30 Chris: Well, I think all of those are really critical to who we are, because play is really the act of asking a question, what if? What if I do this? What if I, you know, as an adult in can be, what if do whatever? For me, as a kid is like, what if I jump off this wall? What's gonna happen? You know, but we grow up and we have a little bit more, more adult kind of perceptions, if you will, for that. And it really is like trying to spin out a scenario. 00:08:06 Chris: So if I am going to take a new job, for example, what is that gonna be like? Who am I gonna be working with? And we begin to develop stories around things in our imagination. And those stories are very important because we really can't take action to make things real until we've imagined them as a concept. 00:08:28 Melissa: Yeah. And so, okay. So this is something that I'm struggling with right now. This is like real time, I need some help, get me unclogged sort of stuff. So this idea of having a story in my mind and having a vision I want to make real, the vision side of it is so hard right now for me to see, mainly because it's like, there's things that I've envisioned in the past, but I haven't made happen. So I don't know kind of like how to play myself to a solution or a vision or just kind of like, think with a little less of like the past, you know, like hindering this vision. 00:09:15 Chris: Right. It's a great, it's a great thing. I mean, I'm sorry you're going through that, but I think that if you look at how a child plays, right, when they get an idea and they don't sit there and think, well, if I just do this or I do this or I do that, it's going to be fun, right? They come, that's not fun. I'm done. I'm on to the next thing. And I think as adults, we should do that too. If something is becoming too much effort, if it's not working, then we just drop it and go on to the next thing. 00:09:47 Chris: And I don't think there's any harm or foul in that. And I think that when you look at a kid who is imagining and playing, they're not judging the play as they're doing it. They're looking at well, where did this take me and where should I go next from it? And it's a much freer, kind of more peaceful way to go through the world. 00:10:08 Chris: I mean, I talk about things that I've done that turned out to be mistakes. And I call them I said, well, that was a once in a lifetime experience. As in I don't have to do that again. I learned the lesson. 00:10:20 Melissa: Yeah. And I think, you know, approaching any problem from that perspective releases that pressure to get it right the first time. And it gives you like the levity to get back up and just be like, okay, let's go at it again. And I imagine like, cause I noticed also, and I know that this side of it might be a little bit more conventional thinking, but like, you actually bring these ideas into corporate settings, you know, the art of play. 00:10:51 Melissa: And I'm like, if I think about the different environments where it's not okay to play. It's not okay to make mistakes. Like how do you sell that idea of we're just playing right now and don't get frustrated if it works or not in like a corporate setting, you know? 00:11:11 Chris: Well, one of the things that's so interesting in a corporate setting is people come into a meeting or a brainstorming and they're focused on one specific outcome, right? So if you're focused on an outcome, you kind of end-run the process of play because play is a process. Play is asking, what if, you know, let's go down this road and let's go down this road and see what it is. So I always encourage people to be as off the wall as possible. I will give you an example that almost got me fired. 00:11:43 Melissa: This is a good one, okay. 00:11:44 Chris: And nobody will like it, but I was working with Ideal, with Ideal Toy Company and we had the Shirley Temple doll. And nobody, we had these porcelain $400 Shirley Temple dolls and Shirley Temple dolls were huge in the '30s and still with doll collectors, but nobody was buying them. And we thought, how do we get rid of them? And I said, well, why don't we put them on the QE2 and use them as skeet? Like people can launch the doll. 00:12:11 Chris: So the brand manager got really mad at me. And told me I was inappropriate. But as we talked more, we ended up doing a doll collecting event with Cunard that actually turned out to be good. So the idea is, go out there and play off the wall in a safe environment, obviously. So the idea of creating an environment where it's safe to play, where it's safe to have that sort of impulsive childish response to a situation is okay. 00:12:45 Chris: We would never have promoted that in a corporate sense. But the idea that we were just playing with ideas and being silly. That opens the pathway to being really creative and to seeing what could actually work. And then once you get that, you put the action steps in place to get to the next step. 00:13:05 Melissa: Yeah, I think just, you know, going crazy and just really trying to break out of conventional thinking and our very logical pathways in our mind, it's like first we do this, that, the other. It's almost like some sentences, right? And the way we like greet each other, it's so like rehearsed that to come up with something like, oh my gosh, I love your outfit. You know, it reminds me of like a toy soldier or something. It would be like way off, but it would start rapport, I think. Rapport or like, you know, people would be like, kind of weirded out. But I've always tried that. How can I not weird people out? 00:13:44 Chris: Well, it's, right, well, that's always a question, but I don't really worry about that too much. But I think that one of the things, again, as I was saying about process, but also getting over fear, right? As adults, we think, well, what if I get it wrong? Children, when they play, if you watch them play, they don't worry about getting it wrong. They just think, well, that didn't work. That didn't do what I wanted it to do. Let me do something else. They haven't built a hierarchy of judgment and really being unkind to themselves about doing something wrong. 00:14:19 Chris: And if you embrace play, there's really no kind of, you can't be wrong when you're playing, right? Some things may be practical, but there's imagination and there's spinning things out, things that might never become real, but then things that actually could practically become real. And the process of getting to that point is actually pretty joyful. 00:14:42 Melissa: And I think we could all use some more joy these days, that's for sure. Adults and children alike. So let's see, let's go back in time. So let's go back to the time where you recall maybe playing with a toy and feeling like an insane amount of joy. If you can think about, you know, your one moment or one of the moments, I'm curious to hear your perspective. 00:15:06 Chris: Well, it's really interesting because one of the things that I really believe is what we play with as kids really becomes, we become a lot of that. And we had a basement in our house that had a room in it. They had a window in it. And my brothers and I would create puppet shows. And we would do that. And we would just go round up all the kids in the neighborhood and say, you have to watch this puppet show. And they did. They were good. But it was really about storytelling. It was about connection. It was about making things up and just feeling very alive in that moment, feeling very connected to who I was at that time and being able to share that with other people. 00:15:52 Melissa: Wow, so that's interesting. So it's funny because I feel like maybe I was, because I was an only child for most of my upbringing, like a lot of the things I did were just on my own and I had to really figure out how to make something out of what was around me. So let me share like this one thing that I would do to just pass the time. And of course, like in the background, like there was like maybe Magnum P.I. playing or, you know, name- Hawaii Five-0, whatever my mom was into. 00:16:25 Melissa: So I would go to the closet and I would take out a shoebox. And I would proceed to create like a scene. So they're called dioramas. I looked it up because I was like, this is a weird thing that I just kept doing all the time. And then I would create little figurines and put like little slots, you know, on the sides and move the little carboards in and out, you know. And I was like, okay, I have to ask Chris, like, what does that say about me? I have no idea. 00:16:56 Chris: Well, I mean, I would say it sort of starts you as a storyteller, which is what you're doing today. You're telling stories and you're facilitating other people telling stories. But it's also, I mean, especially for children at that age, it's about trying to make sense of the world and the stories they tell us, like trying to make sense of relationships. I'll tell you another story. 00:17:18 Chris: Years ago, we were playing with some kids with Barbie dolls. And they had all these different Barbie dolls. And one kid took all the blonde Barbie dolls and they were making fun of the brunette Barbie doll. And we were just watching this and going, yeah, this is somebody who is working out a reality in their life. 00:17:38 Chris: And that is really what play is, because even as she, in this case it was a girl, became powerful in that situation, was able to stand up for herself, you're giving your brain the sense that you can actually do this. If you do it vicariously, you've already had that experience on some level. So that when you confront that in real life, it might be easier, or you might have a solution. 00:18:03 Chris: I mean, how many times do you go into a situation, an interview or whatever, and you've rehearsed what you're gonna say? And your brain already knows that. It's like visual, what they talk about in sports about visualizing, you know, the outcome. You know, you're already having that experience, which is so cool. Cause our brain doesn't know the difference sometimes between reality and what we imagine. 00:18:24 Melissa: I love that. I love that. And so, yeah, who knows what I was trying to work out? There are a lot of things going on in my home. I'll tell you that much. But yeah, I think, you know, that idea though, just like trying to work things out that, you know, maybe you don't have that first person experience with, but like doing it through the use of a toy. Have you noticed at a curiosity any sort of changes with the dynamics between toys and kids now that there's like AI sort of toys out there? 00:19:01 Chris: There are so many different types of play experiences. What we were just talking about is more traditional doll or action figure or stuffed animal kind of play where a child is really doing that. Some of the other stuff with AI or licensed space like Star Wars, Marvel, all of that is beginning to understand yourself as a capable human being. 00:19:23 Chris: So for example, if I'm a superhero, I can feel. I can have the feeling of what it's like to be a superhero. And I always say, if your life is all about mom is in control, eat your peas, get in the minivan, do your homework, suddenly if you're a superhero, that's very empowering. And then empowering as an individual to be able to confront the world in a different way because you're empowered. So it's very classical, the kind of totemistic idea that we take on the powers of the superheroes. 00:19:59 Chris: And even though we're not gonna fly, we're not gonna lift, we're not gonna pick up a truck, we're not gonna do that, you have the emotional sense of capability, which is really what it's all about. 00:20:10 Melissa: That's interesting. I think, I mean, I don't know. Now that I think about my kids, for example, their toy experiences these days is really YouTube videos and playing video games and things like that. And I wonder if that's also along the same thread of what you just said, feeling the different capabilities like running fast or jumping high, things like that. 00:20:37 Chris: I think definitely. I mean, it's, you know, YouTube videos are like today's cartoons, right, on some level. You know, I grew up watching cartoons and, and it was- so they're looking at who are my role models and who are, you know, somebody's doing something. Oh, I'd like to try that. And, you know, or oh, wow, they tried that, I'm not gonna do that, but what would it be like if I did this kind of thing? 00:21:03 Chris: So I think that it's a window on the world and people are always concerned about screen time and I'm never concerned about screen time so much as I'm concerned about what's on the screen. So that is what's being modeled through the YouTube things, things that you as a mom or a parent want your child to be consuming because it can be very supportive or it can be kind of dangerous depending on what kids have access to. 00:21:30 Melissa: Yeah. And it's so interesting what you're sharing right now, because I mean, I had Saturday morning cartoons, for example, and I ate a lot of cereals with all the dyes and all these other things. And my kids literally tell me, they're like, oh, we want to have Saturday morning cartoons just like you. But of course, it is that YouTube thing. And I limit it to SpongeBob. Like, that's appropriate for their ages right now. 00:21:54 Melissa: But I think that's so interesting, this whole idea of rehearsal and visualization and imagination. I wonder because when it comes to toys and just the way that they've changed through the years, how did, for example, Tickle Me Elmo, how did that support people in terms of capabilities or anything? I'm curious. 00:22:22 Chris: Well, Tickle Me Elmo was kind of an outlier in that, you know, in terms of classical play. Tickle Me Elmo became a fad, right? And fads take on a life of their own. They kind of jump the shark or jump from the toy industry because Tickle Me Elmo started as an entertaining little preschool doll for preschoolers, infants and preschoolers. Suddenly it becomes this whole cultural phenomenon that everybody has to have. 00:22:50 Chris: It becomes, so it's a fad, so it becomes kind of a marker in time. So if you were around for Tickle Me Elmo, and you remember that, it's sort of a springboard to your memories of what the latter part of 1996 was about, because that's when Tickle Me Elmo was really huge. So that's not really kind of play in the way that I talk about it a lot. That becomes a cultural event. And my other joke about Tickle Me Elmo, Tickle Me Elmo was $40 really, basically, or more. You know, you can have a Tickle Me Elmo and be really cool for a lot less than you can have a Birkin bag. 00:23:26 Melissa: Wow, yeah, that's true. That is true. It's so funny, this conversation just takes me down the whole nostalgic route. Like I'm thinking about my Steve Urkel joke pull doll. Do you remember that one? 00:23:39 Chris: Yeah, yeah, of course. 00:23:41 Melissa: Yeah, so anyways, I'm totally like aging myself right now. I'm like, oh, I had Steve Urkel and I had Popples and all the like. What do you think, you know, nostalgia? Let's talk about that. Because I feel like a lot of marketers use that, you know, in order to kind of like pull forth a certain generation, let's say. And I even feel like at a supermarket, like I'm like, I think they know who their shoppers are with the music. But let's talk about nostalgia. 00:24:09 Melissa: Like, and again, thinking about more quote unquote modern toys, you know, like. And back to like these like electronics, like do you think that it'll be the same sort of calling card, I think is the right phrase? Like when someone starts saying, oh, like, let's say 10 years from now, you know, what's the name of the- Stumble Guys? Like, do you think that people will say like a certain like thing on video games and it'll have the same emotional pull as like Tickle Me Elmo, Popples, or Cabbage Patch? 00:24:41 Chris: It's hard to know. The thing about nostalgia is it's really for adults, right? Nostalgia is for people looking back. When you're three and four, you're not nostalgic for much. You're not remembering much. Maybe you remember your pull ups, right? When you had your pull ups. But you don't, you're not really nostalgic for something because you haven't been around that much. 00:25:03 Chris: The challenge from a toy marketing standpoint is relying on nostalgia to sell toys. Because I mean, yes, there's a certain level of you as a mom had My Little Pony or Littlest Pet Shop or any of those huge hits, Masters of the Universe. And you want to share those with your child. But for it to engage your child's imagination, there has to be something authentic to them. It's not just, mom liked this, so I'm going to like it too. That doesn't really work. 00:25:31 Chris: Look at Barbie and how Barbie's been redefined over the years, because Barbie always reflects the culture at any given time. So in 1959, she could be a fashion model or a bride, right? Pretty much, those are the Barbie options. Today, there are hundreds of careers and there's hundreds of abilities. And Barbie, the Barbie line looks like the world kids are growing up in, just as it did in 1959. It's just a more diverse and broader world with more possibility for girls and women today than it was in 1959. 00:26:08 Melissa: So when it comes to the toy industry, who's actually using their imagination to come up with like what to make for the future? Like, is it a combination of kids and adults? Is it like who's actually imagining like right now, like in the Mattels, et cetera, you know, what's coming down the line like 10 years from now? It's going to be hot and cool. And like, how do you how do you imagine something like that? 00:26:36 Chris: Well, it's hard. I mean, I think I think it's like, you know, my crystal ball usually needs a shot of Windex so I could get a clearer sense. But it's more an art than a science, that's for sure. And it's looking at trends. It's looking at how are kids playing, how are they interacting, how are they socializing, what is fun to them, and what's going on in the culture at large. Because the toy industry always reflects the culture. 00:27:03 Chris: We're always reflecting, because kids, you know, most healthy kids, they aspire to being big. They wanna grow up and they want the things like their parents have. So back in the, you know, in the early 2000s when cell phones came out, you saw tons of preschool cell phones, right? You don't see that so much anymore because the preschoolers have a real cellphone. 00:27:25 Chris: But you see things that will allow them to feel like they are part of the culture and they are growing up into it and that they are older and perhaps more capable than they really are because that's an important imaginative tool to help in the maturation process. 00:27:41 Melissa: That's fascinating. So that's true. It was definitely a lot of like, I don't know, mommy and me things. Like you see them with like a cash register or like a Target cart, right? The plastic little one, right? Cause their parent is shopping at Target. And so I wonder because it's like, there's some habits that as a parent, like maybe we wanna shake off ourselves, but we're inadvertently doing a lot. 00:28:06 Melissa: So like the cellphone one, I'm like, oh God, yeah, mommy has a cellphone and now her child does too. And it's like, how can I stop? And it's a reinforcement, but I'm wondering, okay, so in terms of the future and in terms of toys, have you ever done or seen any sort of things where the mom was playing with the child versus the child was playing by themselves? Like any differences there? 00:28:31 Melissa: Because I would love to just kind of inspire a listener right now to consider the fact that actually getting lost in play with their child can be even more beneficial than just having your child play with a toy to the side and you're doing something completely different. 00:28:52 Chris: I think that is critically important. One of the things that we're talking to parents of Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids. And Gen Alpha was born 2010 to this year. And one of the things that parents talk about is some of the best part of their day is when they're playing with kids. And what I always suggest is that if you're playing with your kid, especially if they're a preschooler, let the child run the play and you respond. Don't tell them, oh, look at this, oh, do that. 00:29:24 Chris: And you don't have to teach, it doesn't have to teach them anything, right? It doesn't have to teach. Kids are going to learn. So really letting that child's imagination drive the experience because, you know, I think every parent has had the experience where your child comes up with something and you go where did that come from? 00:29:45 Melissa: 100%. All the time. 00:29:47 Chris: And it's because they're sponges and they're listening to their absorbing everything and then they're processing it to their childlike brains or their childish brains. So I think that letting the child do that, but being there and being in communication is really important. 00:30:02 Chris: When I was growing up and maybe when you were too, we had three different worlds. We had kid world where no adults came in and the kids were doing that. We had adult world where we weren't allowed, where the parents would do that. And then there was family world, which is dinner and vacations and being yelled at about your grades or whatever that was. 00:30:21 Chris: But those three worlds don't really seem to exist anymore. And parents and kids are much more integrated in one another's lives. I think that's an outcome of COVID. It's actually a very positive outcome from COVID. Because you as mom and dad, have fun with your kids. Come on. It's, again, back to the idea of process rather than outcome. They don't have to become an expert ball player. They don't have to become an expert thing at times. They can actually just learn and play and discover the world and share those discoveries with you. 00:30:51 Melissa: Yeah, I love that. And I think it's an opportunity for someone that has to think a lot in life and feels the stresses of life to kind of let go and just stop thinking and just going with what is. Be present. You know, be totally present. 00:31:12 Chris: Be totally present and just be open to what it is. It's trying not to, as I was saying, it doesn't have to have a definitive outcome. And the one thing I think we've lost track of, often in our culture right now, is the idea of embracing process. It's really okay to make mistakes. It's really okay to try something, as long as you get up and start again. 00:31:36 Chris: I mean, how many times have you, I was talking about, for me, I learned to ski late. And I'm a really mediocre skier. I'm enthusiastic, but I'm not good. And I had somebody who was teaching me and he said, Chris, eventually I was scared. Eventually you're gonna have to point your skis down the hill. So I did it, I fell a lot, I did that, but I was so eager to learn that I'd fall and get up again. 00:32:04 Chris: I had to learn how to get up, but that's the thing that I think is, you know, if you have an idea of where you'd like to go but embrace the process on the way there because who knows what you're going to learn and what you're going to discover. 00:32:16 Melissa: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I think that's the key to any goal. It's just you have to really fall in love with the process as you head towards the vision the goal, you know, whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish. And I also love the fact that, you know, as with play it's like there's something that's so pure about it, you know, when left on unmanipulated. 00:32:40 Melissa: It's like as a parent, we might have this desire to like educate our kids up to wazoo with regards to like every educational toy out there and every moment with we're with them, we're teaching them another language or coding or something. But I think, you know, just being open to a little bit, you know, unstructured play and that time with your child has so many benefits. And I think, you know, Chris, the work that you're doing just stay connected to like play as just being fun and okay and positive is is really helpful. Thank you so much for the work that you've done. 00:33:18 Chris: Thanks. I mean, I really do think that it as I mentioned, joy before it really does open the door to being joyful and going, oh, wow, that's fun, you know? I mean, when was the last time you said, oh, wow, that's really fun. 00:33:31 Melissa: 100%. Yeah, for sure. Thank you so much, Chris. So where can listeners continue to learn about their favorite toys, about you, about what's up ahead in the toy industry? 00:33:42 Chris: You can come see the toyguy.com. That's probably the best way. And then on Instagram, I'm thetoyguy. So, yeah. And I post a lot of pictures from things like toy fairs and different things and things that are fun for me and that make me giggle. 00:33:58 Melissa: Thank you so much, Chris. Have an awesome one. 00:34:01 Chris: Thank you. 00:34:03 Melissa: My three takeaways for this conversation that you can absolutely take to the bank and apply in your home are, first, this idea that playing with our kids has benefits for our kids, but also for us, especially if you're a super busy mom. It helps put you in the immediate present moment. So that's a big, big perk right there. 00:34:25 Melissa: Second is this idea that it's all about the process as opposed to the final answer. And that's something that I know is hard to think about when you're constantly thinking about what's next in your life. So thinking about play as something that you're doing and it's a process instead of to put together that Lego piece might be a great shift in your thinking and could relieve you of the stress and pressure of getting things right. 00:34:54 Melissa: Second, no, actually my third point here, my third point would be that in terms of the benefits of playing, I hadn't realized how psychologically deep some of these toys touch the minds of our kids. So the simple fact that we are thinking about, you know, working out relationships when you're doing a diorama, which may have been the case for me personally or maybe you're thinking about whether or not you have skills like a superhero, which was something that Chris shared, I just never thought about how psychologically interesting playing with a toy could be. 00:35:32 Melissa: So you might want to reconsider this idea that playing with a toy is just a way to distract your child or keep them focused on something other than breaking things. There could be real psychological value and also something for you to just consider psychological opportunity when it comes to the choices behind the toys we put in front of our kids. 00:36:00 Melissa: So I hope you enjoyed this conversation. Again, this episode was brought to you by my book, Fertile Imagination. I am excited about it. It's a guide for stretching every mom's superpower for maximum impact. Your imagination is your superpower. That is why I had Chris on the show today. I encourage you to check out the show notes where you could actually purchase the book and let me know that you did. I am always available for conversation and any questions. Thank you so much and I appreciate you. And until next Tuesday.

Join host Carol Pankow in this thought-provoking episode of Manager Minute as she sits down with VR fiscal powerhouses Katie Marchesano, Chris Merritt, Allison Flanagan, and Sarah Clardy. Together, they unpack the pressing fiscal issues shaping the vocational rehabilitation (VR) landscape, including: ·  Navigating fiscal forecasting challenges · Addressing technology gaps · Strengthening collaboration between program and fiscal teams The conversation highlights the vital role of policies, training, and institutional knowledge in sustaining VR programs while anticipating future shifts, such as technological advancements, fiscal constraints, and potential WIOA reauthorization. Don't miss this episode, packed with actionable insights and expert reflections to keep VR programs thriving!   Listen Here   Full Transcript:   {Music} Katie: I'm really excited for that tool to be shared, and I think it's going to be a really helpful tool for the agencies.   Carol: This job takes constant attention to detail in what is happening. It is always going to be work.   Chris: More people are going to be reaching out asking for fiscal forecasting and understanding how to look at this program in the future.   Allison: One of the things that pops in my mind that might happen over the next three years is reauthorization of WIOA.   Sarah: I think we're going to see some new resources, hopefully in the technology world develop, that will assist our agencies so that their focus can remain on the customers where it belongs.   Intro Voice: Manager Minute brought to you by the VRTAC for Quality Management, Conversations powered by VR, one manager at a time, one minute at a time. Here is your host Carol Pankow.   Carol: Well, welcome to the manager minute. Joining me in the studio today are my colleagues Katie Marchesano, Chris Merritt, Allison Flanagan and Sarah Clardy. So this might be a little bit of calamity for our listeners, but we're going to do it. So how y'all doing today?   Sarah: Great   Chris: Great.   Allison: Good.   Katie: Wonderful.   Carol: Awesome to hear it. Well, we have had quite a journey on the QM for the past four years. The fiscal focus was a new aspect of the grant, and we are so grateful to then Commissioner Mark Schultz for realizing that TA in this area was an essential element to the work. And since we're in this final year of the grant, we wanted to have a chance to visit together, share our insights with the listeners into the whole fiscal picture across the VR program, and discuss our perceptions and perspectives. So buckle up, folks, and we're going to dig in. So I want to start with how you each found your way to VR. And I'm going to start with Chris to talk about your journey into VR.   Chris: Well thanks, Carol. Mine's a little bit different than most people. I did not start in VR. I have a very different background. All fiscal for the most part. But I came to work at a fiscal state unit and learned about VR there. Loved it, loved it, loved it. And then was kind of asked to be part of this Ta team and couldn't say no because it's just an incredible program and it's a little complicated. So being able to help the states understand it better is what brought me to this team.   Carol: Well, not you, and you're being modest now. Tell them about like a little bit more of your background because you have an interesting educational background and all of that.   Chris: Yeah, I do. So I'm an environmental engineer by trade. Worked in that field for a while. Learned that sampling sludge was not a cool thing to be doing. So went to work for a small business that was just starting on Department of Defense World. Loved all the fiscal part of that. Went back to school and got my MBA and have been doing fiscal stuff ever since. So yeah, it's a long road that brought me here, but I'm happy I took it.   Carol: Yeah, we're glad you're here. How about you, Miss Allison?   Allison: Well, it's kind of hard to believe that I have over 30 years in this VR journey, and it actually started out in the field as a VR technician, and I just fell in love with the mission and purpose of VR. So I quickly changed my direction to be a VR counselor, and then that evolved to other promotions and positions throughout the year, where I ended up being director of both Kentucky Blind Agency and then moved to Florida as the General Agency Director. And when the VR TKM opportunity came about, I was ready for a change, especially after being a director through the pandemic and through the implementation of WIOA. I was looking forward to just a new opportunity, new learning areas, so this has been a great jump for me. I've enjoyed it very much.   Carol: Why don't you tell them too about your other gig with NRLI a little bit. We'll make a plug there.   Allison: Yeah. So part of the VRTAC-QM is the National Rehabilitation Leadership Institute through San Diego State University. I have the honor of continuing Fred McFarland's legacy, who began this program about 25 years ago. And it is a program that is building the future leaders in the vocational rehabilitation field. And it's been a joy to see these leaders be promoted throughout their careers. Being stepping up, having an interest at that national level, the issues that are facing VR. So it is definitely a part of my job with QM that I hold near and dear to my heart.   Carol: Yeah, it's good stuff, I love it NRLI of our favorite things to participate in when we get to do training. So Katie, over to you next.   Katie: Well, my journey with VR started when my brother was receiving VR services, and he actually is who inspired me to go and get my bachelor's degree in psychology and work in social services. That led me to Department of Workforce Services, where I spent 13 years in various roles and capacities, which ultimately led me back to VR.   Carol: Awesome sauce. And last but not least, Sarah Clardy.   Sarah: So I started out about 24 years ago out of college. I was working in banking full time and going to school full time, and had an opportunity to come on with a state and Missouri vocational rehabilitation, had an opening for an assistant director of accounting and procurement. They had some systems and processes that were a little out of whack and needed some help with reorganizing pretty much the whole accounting structure. So I came over at that time and started in with Missouri, and then spent 20 years there and got to spend half of that time in the field directly with our field staff and counselors and really take this program to heart, and then had an opportunity four years ago to join the VRTAC-QM. I had said for a long time we needed technical assistance in the fiscal realm for years and years. I was thrilled that Mark Schultz saw the vision and made it happen.   Carol: Good stuff. Well, now we're going to enter the danger zone because I have some questions for you all. Not exactly sure how this is going to go, but we are going to do our best. So y'all jump in when you want. So what has been your biggest realization or aha moment since you started with the QM. And Allison, I'm going to have you kick us off and then other folks can jump in.   Allison: Honestly, Carol, there's been a lot of those aha moments for me over the last, you know, almost three years with the Technical Assistance Center since my experience in VR started in the field and I was a counselor, kind of the program side is where my comfort level is or my knowledge and experience. So when I joined the fiscal team there, definitely there was a lot of those aha moments, mainly a lot of the things that I did not know or did not realize even as a director when I came over. So one of those aha's is the director. Even though I received these beautiful monthly budget reports for my fiscal staff, even though I had a leadership team that we reviewed budgets with, understanding the fiscal requirements in and out, the uniform grant guidance and all the regulations. And, EDGAR, all of that, I think, is critical for any director or their leadership team to have knowledge of. And that was definitely one of my aha moments. And one of those things I go back, wow, if I could go back and be a director, I would be a lot smarter after being on the technical assistance side. And like I said, there's been a lot of those aha moments. I could share tons of them, but a couple other ones that jump out is just that critical need for that program side of the House and the fiscal side of the House, to always be communicating and always making sure they're checking with each other. On whether it's a new implementation, whether it's expenses, contracts, doesn't matter. There needs to be that collaboration happening at that level. And then probably the technology challenges is another one of those constant aha moments in the year that we're in and how reliant we are on technology. I am still amazed that there is not technology out there that will do what VR needs it to do, right off the shelf.   Carol: Amen, sister. You said it all. No, but I'm sure there's people that want to say some more.   Chris: I found it interesting when I came over that not every single, not a single state has it right. I thought that there would be more that are fully knowledgeable and are running with it and doing all the great things they are doing, the great things. They just don't have 100% right.   Carol: You are making me laugh with this because I'm just going to say I have to jump in on that. Sarah and I right away, in the beginning, anytime we had met with RSA we learned something new, we're like, uh, I gotta call back to Minnesota, tell them, because we realized, like, hey, we thought we were sort of doing it right, but we all realized things. We went, uh, yeah, we had a little slight misstep on that.   Katie: I would agree with that. Like, we came from a state that was in an intensive agreement. And, you know, I was like, man, we really got it wrong. But then, you know, it's a huge learning curve and there's a lot of people that are putting in their best effort, and they're still just a few things that aren't quite right.   Chris: Absolutely.   Katie: Another realization that I had was we have this table of contents for a grant management manual that we send out to agencies. And when I received it in Wyoming, I was intimidated by all the things that needed to be included. But my aha moment was when you break that down into individual items and you really look at it, it's things that are already in place, the policies and procedures that you're already working on. It's just finding a way to get that on paper and put it into some sort of policy and procedure and internal control. So realizing that states have the capacity to do that, just figuring out how was an aha moment for me.   Sarah: You know, when I came in, I was thinking back to 2017 and RSA came out with guidance on, I'm going to say it, Period of Performance. And it dominated our whole agency for a good nine months, trying to understand the guidance, looking at systems. We had to do a whole overhaul with the way we looked at obligations, just we spent a massive amount of time and effort to right size our systems, internal controls and all of that because prior to performance sets the beat for all of financial within a VR program. So coming into the QM, I really assumed that more agencies knew of Period of Performance and had gone through at least similar steps, or at least had internal conversations. And what I found was completely the opposite. Somehow a lot of folks missed the memo and that work hadn't been done. And of course, we've been running Fred Flintstone style, trying to help agencies get up to snuff. So that's the piece. I think that's been the most interesting. I think for me.   Carol: I think along that same vein for me was really that realization states are more different than I thought because I figured we all had the same information. We all kind of operated sort of the same. You might have your own internal systems, but I remember, Sarah, you and I talking that first year just going like, oh my gosh, everybody is organized so completely differently. They approach their work so completely differently. There isn't just one size fits all. Like, hey, you should do it this way. And like, everybody can do that. Uh uh, it is like having an IPE for how the fiscal is managed. Individualized we need to give very individualized TA. So what do you guys view as the number one challenge facing our programs nationwide? And Sarah, I'm going to have you start us with that.   Sarah: Okay? I'm going to say it I think Allison said it earlier. We are lacking in the technology space. I think a couple of things we have, the pendulum has swung to the other direction and before it was spend, spend, spend, a lot of agencies made adjustments so that they were increasing their spending. The large carryover balances weren't so large. Now my concern is how are we looking at our finances to see if we can still sustain that. And in order to get accurate projections and for leadership teams to have the conversations about where they stand financially, we have to have technology systems in place that are reliable, are tracking period of performance, can provide those fiscal calculations in terms of where we stand on all of the different requirements, so that we have a constant pulse on where do we stand as an agency. And I liken it to being in private industry and a CEO knowing at all times how much does it cost to make the widget? How many widgets are we making and what amount of time? All of those kinds of things. And I feel like in that space right now, we have agencies that are trying to figure that out, and we have some that are in a very delicate position, and it can cause a lot of catastrophe and crisis if that's not solidified. So really, it goes back to having reliable technology that will take care of all of that. And that includes our CMS, our Case Management Systems space. A lot of our vendors are struggling in that Period of Performance area, and we're not there yet. We have a lot more work to do.   Carol: Well, it's like a $4 billion industry, you know, and I feel like we're still using an abacus or something in some cases for tracking the money. It is the most insane thing I have ever seen.   Allison: And, you know, related to that technology challenge, though, is knowing that, that challenge is there, knowing that the technology is not correct. I think what adds to the complexity of that is the fiscal staff or the just the staff within the VR agency. They lack the fiscal knowledge enough to know if their system is working correctly or not, or know how to go in and make the adaptations needed to assist them. And that's a challenge within itself.   Chris: And I will piggyback right on that, because the thing I think that we've struggled with is we have lost so much institutional knowledge that people don't stay in jobs like they used to. And so if these policies and procedures are not written down, you get new people coming in, they don't know what they don't know. And if the technology is not working right, they don't know that that's not something that they can handle. So it's a lack of that long time knowledge that used to be in this program.   Katie: Yeah, Chris, that is exactly where I was going as well, is the loss of staff and institutional knowledge is huge, and it really highlights the importance of getting policies and procedures in place and not waiting till that person has their foot out the door and is ready to head out to make sure that you're getting that in writing. You know, succession planning and really building up success in the team.   Carol: I think for me, one of the things I see, because I love that whole organizational structure and non-delegable responsibilities, I love that area. I think one of the biggest challenges facing the program is the whole shift in how things are organized between if you're in a designated state unit within a designated state agency, and that centralization we have seen of all the fiscal functions along with IT and HR and all of it, but I feel like VR has lost control. And so as these services are centralized, and not that they can't be, but that they get centralized to a point that the VR program has lost complete input control direction. I mean, you've got directors being told you can't spend anything over $5. It has to go through 40 layers. You can't hire anybody. Staff cannot travel to go see customers like all of that. If we can't fix this structure of how things are put into play in each of these states, I really see kind of the demise of the program. As we see things get buried, the program gets buried down within these big agencies. The lack of control ends up leading to problems with them and being able to carry out the mission. And it's really hard to get a handle on that. And I know Congress has given, you know, this leeway so that states can organize like they want. But boy, the way they're organized right now, it's pretty tough.   Allison: It's a double edged sword when you think about it, because you're probably like me Carol, as former directors, we wanted more money going into the consumer services. We wanted it going to support our customers. We wanted to find ways to reduce any kind of administrative type expenses so that that money can go there when the centralized functions were really being pushed at the state levels. In my mind at first, I will say this, at first I saw, yes, this is a benefit because we're going to have these shared services, we're going to be able to spend more of our funds on our customers. And I still somewhat agree with that approach because it is a cost savings. But what has to happen, though, is that balance, what you talked about, the balance where VR still has control over the decisions or they are included in those decisions and the restrictions that have been put in place has to be lifted. But I do see the benefits of those shared services as long as the structure gets set up right.   Carol: Right. And that's been few and far between.   Allison: That needs a national model.   Carol: It does. And that's been a problem. I mean, if there's anything anyone can work on, little congressional assistance in that or whatever, you know, getting some of that rewritten, how that looks.   Sarah: Well, and I came from an agency that was able to retain an entire unit of 13-ish folks when all of those consolidations were occurring because within our Department of Education, our commissioner understood the complexities of our award and knew that if all of those positions rolled up to a department level, they weren't going to be able to support the program and were able to coordinate with our state leadership. And it served the program very, very well. So I think we have a little bit to be desired still in that space to get agencies the support that they need 100%.   Carol: So what has been your favorite thing to work on or accomplishment in your role? And Katie, I'm going to kick that to you to start us off.   Katie: Well, I've really enjoyed my role here with the QM. There's a lot of things that I enjoy, but the task that I've enjoyed the most is really having the ability to dig into the new uniform grant guidance that went into effect October 1st of 2020. For one of the things that I did while doing that was I took the old uniform grant guidance and the new ones and did a side by side where all of the things that were taken out were redlined and all of the things that were added were highlighted, and I'm really excited for that tool to be shared with the agencies right now. That's with RSA to get the stamp of approval, but I've used that tool already to help update all of our things on the website and all the tools that we're sharing with everyone, and I think it's going to be a really helpful tool for the agencies.   Carol: I love that tool, Katie, so much because even when we were down doing to last week and some of the just the nuance pieces that came out, when you're reading it and you go, okay, that language did change. Like there is a slightly nuanced variance to this that I hadn't completely grasped until you see it in the red and the yellow, and it all highlighted up. I mean, it was pretty nice.   Katie: Yeah, they did a lot of plain language changes, which is really evident when you look at the side by side.   Chris: I'll jump in here and tell you what my favorite thing is. And it's when we were working with a state intensively and, you know, we've been working with them for a long time, and you get to know them really well and you understand their environment and how things work, and they come to you and say something really profound, like, I was watching this training the other day and they got this wrong, and they got this wrong and they got this wrong. It is like a proud parent moment. When you go, they understand what the program is supposed to be doing, and they understand when other people not necessarily are getting it wrong, but mostly they're able to recognize what's not absolutely correct. And it just makes you feel like, oh, we have come so far.   Carol: It's like fly, little bird, you're flying.   Chris: Yes.   Allison: That's probably one of my favorite parts too, Chris, is the state work that we've done and how you get to know these state people. There's so many amazing VR staff across the country, and their hearts are all in the right place, and they want to do good. That's what I've enjoyed is getting to know these people better, broadening my network as well because I learn from them. But just being that resource I do like, I'm one of those weird people that likes digging into the laws and regs and finding where is that gray, vague area that we can interpret a little better. So part of the TA work, you know, really digging into some of the laws and some regulatory guidance I've enjoyed as well.   Carol: I have a story I love to share. I was having a breakdown probably a year ago, Sarah's laughing at me, I had a breakdown. You know, you're providing TA to state you're so ingrained with them, especially when they have a corrective action plan, you feel like you're part of them. I always say we, you know, when we're talking because I feel like I'm part of their team and we've been working on a particular piece of it, and nothing that we sent in was anything RSA wanted. All I knew was that this was not what they wanted, but we couldn't exactly figure out what they wanted. And it was driving me crazy. And I'd called Sarah and I said, I think I have to quit being a TA provider because I suck at this. I'm not able to help them. I haven't been able to figure this out. I am done, and I went to bed that night. I actually was on site with another state and I woke up at two in the morning and I do my best thinking as I'm sleeping. It's so weird. I've done it my whole career. I wake up in the middle of the night and have an idea. I woke up at two in the morning. I'm like, oh, I know what they're talking about. And I got up and I typed, I typed for like three hours and then got up for the day and got ready for the other state. But exactly what was needed was that, I mean, when we ended up meeting with the state and then they met with RSA, and that was the thing. It was the thing that was needed to get accomplished. And I felt super proud that we could kind of like, figure it out. It took a while. I almost quit, but, we got there in the end.   Sarah: You know, being in the final year of the grant, everybody's asking the question, what comes next? And of course we don't know what comes next. But I think my favorite part is looking back and building the relationships. So kind of touching on what all of you all have said. Relationships are important to me. Building the trust we are learning alongside of them just like they are. I always say there's no top of the mountain that any of us are ever going to reach when we've arrived. It's a daily learning process, but the program financially is so complex and trying to take those federal requirements And each of the state's requirements, which we've acknowledged already are all different, and bring that together in the center. And there's never been a resource to help agencies get down in the weeds, look at their systems, look at their processes, and help them navigate through that. And so just having something to offer and having directors send an SOS text at 9:00 at night, or we've talked to directors who have been in tears or excited because something really great has happened, and they want to share the success. It's all of that. Just being able to provide that valuable resource and support them along the way has been very rewarding for me. I know, and you all, but especially I think for the States.   Carol: So if you had a crystal ball, what would you predict regarding the financial state of the VR program over the next three years? And Chris, you get to start us on that lovely prediction.   Chris: Okay. Well, since I don't have a crystal ball, I think Sarah touched on this a little bit earlier. So for several years, the message from RSA and from Congress has been to spend, spend, spend. And so there's been a lot of changes in all the agencies to be able to spend more, to spend quicker, to do everything quicker and faster. And I think the spending is catching up. And I think that it might go too far. Like Sarah mentioned, the pendulum is going the other way, and I don't think the fiscal forecasting is robust enough to be able to predict when it's going to get hard. And since most directors do not come from a fiscal background, most directors come with the VR heart that you know is what a counselor has, paying attention to that. Fiscal forecasting is going to be a critical, critical point. And I know that most states are not doing it right. So that's my prediction. More people are going to be reaching out asking for fiscal forecasting and understanding how to look at this program in the future.   Sarah: And I think to tack on to that, I think we're going to see new technology and new resources emerge that will assist our agencies. Again, like Carol said earlier, some days it feels like we have our big chief tablet out and we're still doing things old school. And I think the only direction to go is up. So I think we're going to see some new resources, hopefully in the technology world develop, that will assist our agencies so that their focus can remain on the customers where it belongs.   Allison: And I would have to say ditto to both of that, especially the fiscal forecasting and the pendulum swinging the other way. And a lot of states considering order selection or going into order selection. But one of the things that pops in my mind that might happen over the next three years is reauthorization of WIOA. I know the discussions are happening with Congress right now, and if that implementation happens, you know, what's it going to look like? Because ten years ago when WIOA was passed, it was a huge impact on VR. And it still is. I mean, we're still challenged with trying to get everything implemented, trying to spend the minimum of our 15% on Pre-ETS. There's just so many things that we're still working on through. So very interested to see where that's going to go.   Carol: And I definitely think like nothing ever stays the same. So we always think like we're going to get to the place and it's just going to be even flow, like it's all going to be cool. We don't really have to pay a lot of attention, and I don't think that's ever going to be the state of the VR program. Like it's going to constantly need people paying attention. Whether the pendulum is one way and we have loads of money or it's the other way and we have no money now, like we have to somehow try to like even this out with the fiscal forecasting and all the things you're doing. But if you think you're going to get to the place where like, oh, I've reached it, Nirvana, it's all great. That's never going to be like this job takes constant attention to detail and what is happening. And so it is always going to be work. It's going to take a lot of effort from a lot of people. And as all the new people keep coming and going, figuring that out for the team so that you can sustain the practices and things that you have that help you to understand what's going on.   Katie: Yeah, I would just agree with everything that everyone already said. One of the big pushes that was brought up at CSAVR, is technology, and I think it is going to be interesting to see what kind of technology is introduced in the next three years that's going to help assist our programs.   Carol: So what is your best piece of advice for our listeners? And I'll let anybody open that one up.   Allison: I'm going to say you need to have a deep bench of leaders who are adverse in the financial requirements, maybe incorporating fiscal training for all staff on an annual basis, whether that's just refreshers or making sure new folks being hired understand all the requirements. But fiscal needs to be part of your ongoing training with staff. It's just critical.   Carol: I'd say, for directors coming in, I know the tendency is to want to be like, I have to know everything. I'm the director, I need to know all things. And even when you don't know the things, you pretend, you know the things. Don't pretend you know the things you don't know. Like you need to be humble and figure it out and learn and be willing to learn. For a lot of folks that are growing up in the VR system, having that sort of physical part of your brain, it may not be completely there. You're like, I went into VR because I didn't want to do math, and now you're in charge of, you know, $300 million in a program. And so you've got to just continue to learn and chip away and figure out how you can gain that really strong understanding, because you cannot just hand that off to some other group and think someone's managing that for you, because the buck really does stop with you in the end. As far as the responsibility over the control and allocation of the VR funds. So please keep learning, as Allison said, and be open and be humble when you don't know things and ask.   Sarah: There's a song by the Beatles called With a Little Help from My Friends. Everybody needs a Little help from time to time. And I know over the years we've worked with most of the agencies, but there are some that we haven't, and I've always assumed they're good. They don't need us. They're fine. It's not always necessarily the case. So acknowledging if I pick up a phone and call a peer or a fellow director, or hopefully the TAC continued to exist beyond this grant cycle. Reaching out and asking for help is okay, and it's encouraged.   Katie: Yeah, mine will be through the lens of policy and procedure. That's where I keep hitting. That's my passion on this QM team. We have a ton of resources available, and if you're struggling, you're looking at that table of contents saying, I can't do this. Reach out, give us a call. We can help you with prompting questions just to get the thought process going. And you can do it. It's going to be okay.   Chris: Ok, my piece of advice is to make connections. And I think everybody has kind of said that in their own way. But make those connections so that you have people you can reach out to and ask questions of whether it's us at the TA center, other states, other fiscal people. You need to be able to ask, how do you do this? What do you think of this idea that I have? How would you handle this? I mean, being able to have that connection and that type of conversation is critical 100%.   Carol: Well, I sure appreciate you all. And while we're still around, all our listeners can still connect with us. And we do have a QM fiscal email address. I will spell out for you. It is QM f I s c a l at v r t a c-qm.org. So qmfiscal@vrtac-qm.org. So please do reach out. We still are around for a little while and we can be your phone a friend. So thanks for joining me today guys I really appreciate it.   Chris: Thank you Carol. This was great.   Allison: Thanks for having Us.   Sarah: Thank you.   Katie: Thanks.   {Music} Outro Voice: Conversations powered by VR, one manager at a time, one minute at a time, brought to you by the VR TAC for Quality Management. Catch all of our podcast episodes by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening!

n this episode of the Building Texas Business Podcast, we dive into the entrepreneurial journey of Summer Craig, founder of Craig Group, a strategic consulting firm. Summer shares how a vacation epiphany led her to start a business while caring for a newborn. Her firm now partners with private equity-backed companies, helping middle-market businesses transition from startups to structured entities ready for expansion. We explore the early challenges of entrepreneurship, including securing initial revenue from clients like Gulf States Toyota. Summer discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic unexpectedly fueled growth in the middle market and healthcare sectors. She emphasizes the importance of building high-quality teams through strategic hiring, focusing on complementary skills and an ownership mentality. Craig Group stands out with its hands-on approach and a patent-pending software platform for sales and marketing forecasting. Summer highlights the significance of creating a flexible work environment that prioritizes excellence and authentic client relationships. Her innovative approach to consulting demonstrates how companies can adapt and thrive in challenging business landscapes. The conversation reveals the delicate balance of cost-saving strategies and necessary investments. Summer shares insights into maintaining a remote work culture built on trust and continuous improvement. We learn about the power of problem-solving, client feedback, and the determination required to transform business challenges into opportunities. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Summer Craig, founder of Craig Group, shares her entrepreneurial journey that started with an epiphany during a vacation while caring for her newborn. Craig Group focuses on strategic consulting for private equity-backed middle-market companies, helping them transition from successful startups to structured entities. The early days of the business involved securing foundational clients like Gulf States Toyota, with initial revenues critical for startup success. Summer discusses the positive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on business growth, particularly in the middle market and healthcare sectors. Strategic hiring decisions and fostering a company culture of complementary skills and flexible work environments are highlighted as key to building high-quality teams. Craig Group differentiates itself with a hands-on, results-driven approach and a patent-pending software platform that enhances sales and marketing forecasting. Building trust with elite clients through effective communication and personal interactions is emphasized as crucial for maintaining successful business relationships. The episode underscores the importance of collecting client feedback to ensure service excellence and continuous improvement. Summer uses her passion for mountain climbing as a metaphor for her entrepreneurial journey, highlighting the determination and vision required to navigate business challenges. The conversation concludes with reflections on the importance of strategic growth consulting and the ongoing journey of team building and client success. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Craig Group GUESTS Summer CraigAbout Summer TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode you will meet Summer Craig, founder and CEO of Craig Group. Summer's passion for excellence has helped fuel her company's growth, and she and her team's authentic approach to delivering for clients has formed relationships built on trust. Summer, I want to welcome you to Building Texas Business. Thanks for taking the time to come on the podcast. Summer: Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here. Chris: So I know there's a lot for us to talk about. I want to start with giving you the opportunity to tell the audience who your company is and what are you known for. Summer: Yeah, absolutely. First of all, I love your podcast. I love what you're doing, telling people's stories, so I'm glad to be here. Chris: Thank you. Summer: Yeah, my story is a unique one, very interesting. It actually started with an actual epiphany that I had. I had a true, you know, entrepreneurial lightning strike moment. That that moment was sitting in Frisco, colorado, on vacation, while rocking my three month old third child, which is never the time that you should start a company. But I but that was my I had an epiphany, and the epiphany really was this that I was always going to work very hard, I was going to outwork the people around me, I was going to outwork my peers and I was in a fantastic role, fantastic job. But I had the epiphany that if I was going to always work that hard, no matter what, I could create more value for myself and for the economy by starting my own firm. And I knew that I needed to start my own firm because of that that, if I'm going to always do this, why not build something instead of working for someone else and creating value for somebody else? So that was the epiphany, and it was a true anxiety ridden, sweat inducing moment when I knew that I was going to start a company, you know, despite having a newborn third child. But fast forward. And you know, we're five and a half years later, and you know, we have a firm of 32 people and it turns out the Epiphany was the right way to go for me, that's a really unique story. Chris: And I'm sure your husband thought it was part of brain fog, but you proved him wrong. Summer: Yeah, actually he's been nothing. I think he said okay, sure, you know a little bit, maybe a little more, thinking like oh, we'll see what, we'll see what actually happens here. Chris: Okay, so. So it sounds like the inspiration for you was I want to do this for myself and build something that's mine. Tell us what it is that you've built. Summer: Yeah, absolutely. So what we've built is we built a strategic consulting firm. So we consult with sponsor-backed typically private equity-backed portfolio companies. We really focus on the middle market, lower middle market. What we do with those companies is we come in at different phases in the hold period even pre, even in LOI and we support top line organic growth. So we've built a system of tools and a system of really smart people and a platform that creates a formulaic way to streamline processes, streamline people, streamline technology for growth in these companies. The solution is really right size for companies that have been really successful but haven't really worked on their operations and growth. So they're selling whatever they're selling widgets, whatever it is but have they truly really looked and said is there anybody else I could sell to? Could I be doing something better? Could I be faster, could I do this more cheaply? They haven't really had to do that, but when the PE sponsors come in, you definitely do have to do that and what we're finding is that in a lot of in-house and PE there is a trend of hiring operating partners, which is a newer trend. So some have expertise on top line growth, but for the most part, that expertise is not in-house. So the PE firms need to go outside of their doors to get support to help these firms grow. Chris: So it sounds like you take a company that's almost been successful, despite themselves. That's right and help them systemize that that's right, so that they can maybe leverage it for more success. Summer: Well, yeah, and I mean I hope some of my clients are listening, but many are in Texas and I'll say it's so impressive, a lot of industrial manufacturing it unbelievably successful, either family businesses or entrepreneur-led businesses. But you're right, they haven't really had to. I'm using, you know, using air quotes here, but try that hard because they've had a great product right they've had a great story. the entrepreneur, the founder, had a really great connected network right, so that gets you to a certain amount of growth. But then when you have, you know, pe dollars coming in who are betting on you, there's a growth mandate and the growth mandate that that activity to grow is not the same as what it takes to start a business, so growth is harder and it takes more structure, and that's exactly right. We come in and say, man, this is awesome, how can we take what's awesome, do more of what's awesome, and let's try to reduce some of the risk that you have in the business, probably because nothing's repeatable, nothing's written down, maybe there's no technology supporting system, so we help them build that structure. Chris: And it helps them go to scale. Summer: That's exactly right. Chris: So let me take you back to the beginning, right after the epiphany. What were some of the first things you remember doing to kind of start the business? And, as you said, you build this thing of your own. What were some of those basic building blocks and things you did? Summer: Yeah, Well, for me personally, it was. The first thing was, you know, pray, look for guidance and then talk to people. So I spoke to a lot of people in my network just saying, hey, I've got this crazy idea, I want to build a firm. And the initial idea, while still very similar to what we do, was really around looking at sales and marketing and being able to tie the two together and prove ROI. So that's the crux of what we do right is show your work, show that this works. And I have a long career of traditional marketing. Marketing and marketing has always struggled to tie themselves to results. And that was really, you know, the core idea, you know, back when I originally founded it. But at the time I was working for Gulf States Toyota best people in the world and I'll never work for another company again. That was the, I think I topped out working for them and being, you know, affiliated with the Friedkin family. They are just salt of the earth. So I was very lucky. At the time when I had my epiphany, I said, well, wouldn't this be great if I built my business plan and I started my company but I already had a client? Wouldn't that just make me feel better? Chris: For those of you listening, it's the ideal thing to do. Summer: It really is the ideal and I think, as an entrepreneur especially somebody that I wanted to do something, but it does mitigate some risk when you first file that paperwork and you know you've got some revenue coming in. So I was lucky enough to have Gulf States Toyota before I actually quit my job, they had agreed to hire my firm, which at the time was me, and we had a great relationship and we ended up entering into a contract where I was consulting with them and I was able to do that the day I officially opened, you know, opened Craig Group and opened my doors, and I think that gave me just a little bit of peace, knowing that there was revenue coming in while I was building all the structure that you have to do, which, honestly, is quite painful. Chris: Right, it's very painful. It's always more work than you even can think. Right, absolutely. Summer: And if you've not done it before, which? Who has? That's something, that's a skill set that you know. I mean, I guess you know lawyers do it all the time. You probably do it all the time, right, setting up entities. But if you I just had this, I you know, probably should have advised, got more advice, but I definitely was able to say, oh well, I can do this, I can. And what state do you incorporate and why, and what do you do, and who do you bring in, and is it all those questions? As an entrepreneur, you have to just do it. Chris: We advise on those issues all the time. I was in a conversation yesterday with someone on the same issues and always tell people look, because as the entrepreneur, the other thing you're doing at the very beginning is trying to save every penny you can, and people will maybe try to do it themselves on the legal side, and I try to counsel people. It's an investment in your business, not an expense, and but try, you have to keep it manageable you're exactly right, exactly right. Summer: And luckily I was at that juncture. It was a small enough entity where I was able to get by with it. I don't cannot today with. I have, you know, a wonderful legal team, but that time, you know, just as an entrepreneur, it's really a pain, it's overwhelming, just to figure out how do I, how do I get you know, a wonderful legal team. But that time, you know, just as an entrepreneur, it's really a pain, it's overwhelming, just to figure out how do I, how do I get you know, get started. But again, I was lucky that I had a client and so I had revenue coming in. It really enabled me to get a lot of things done because you didn't have to worry so much about that. And I remember thinking my first goal was, oh, you know, back half of the year, six months, if I could just, you know, make my salary back right, thinking like, oh, I'll just replace my income. Well, that I quickly got client two, client three, and that I blew past that goal. It was amazing. It was a little bit of a you know it, who you know. I really talked to people and got advice and those ended up being some of my clients eventually, when people that I was asking for advice. So that was great. But it was such a funny little goal, which was okay, because if I can do that, then it's like, okay, I've done something that hasn't been a detriment to my family. I'm adding to the family kitty. Well, we realized like, oh wait, now I can. There's more here. Chris: So I was just thinking as you were answering that question. You said it's been just over five years. Summer: So, given the calendar, that means you started in 2019 and then the world went upside down. Chris: So let's talk about, I mean, every business that starts out. It's going to face some headwinds and obviously this was a pretty big one. But just walk us through some of the challenges you faced and how you managed through that, given that you just had this new business. Summer: Absolutely Well, of course, like you know we. Business. Absolutely Well, of course, like you know we. I was just looking at right before COVID so COVID was in March and February I was just looking at expanding and getting some more office space because I'm hiring people. I was looking at leases. So that was hilarious, right, because the minute COVID hit, you know you don't sign the you don't sign the lease, which was great that we hadn't signed it yet, so that was just a fortuitous that was a God thing, but I will say there's a few good things that came out of COVID. In general, COVID was very good for Craig Group and here's why it was good for Craig Group. I think that middle market businesses that I was working with and we also work with healthcare companies as well, especially healthcare technology, B2B and B2C healthcare I think that what COVID brought to us was that people always did, but then they had to go and find your business online Right, and probably on their phone Right. So if you were not ready with a digital presence and for sales and marketing, so if somebody could not seamlessly buy something from you online or if they couldn't research your product online, you were toast in COVID. Chris: Very true yeah. Summer: And even B2B industrial manufacturing businesses that never cared a day in their life about their website. All of a sudden they need their spec sheets to be posted online because they can't drive over and drop them off in person right? They're not going to trade shows, right? So website, but not just the website, really the content, the interaction. And then how good is your email response? How good is your team on the phone? How good are they at working those leads that just got spotlighted? And on the healthcare side, as you can imagine, about COVID, people are scared to death. At that time, telehealth was nascent. Chris: Right. Summer: Pretty terrible still, kind of, and they realized we have to invest here. Patients don't know how to get in touch with us. Everybody's scared. People aren't coming into the doctor's office or the hospital because everyone's afraid that they're going to get COVID. So the messaging opportunity for what we do, which is growth, really about growth. We no longer had to convince our clients you need to take action, because before pre-COVID, and even either at the same time of COVID, there was also this shift with the markets too. Around PE also said oh wait, this has been like really good times and I actually need to start building organic growth instead of just buying another company and doing roll-ups. So this happened very right after COVID. So those two things we did not. We stopped having to tell people. People would ask us why are you doing growth support? We don't need that, right, and nobody says that now, right, no, there's no argument. So COVID, plus what was happening in kind of the deal-making PE market, which we can, that's another. That was another big change for us, but it just helped people say, oh my gosh, we need help. We need help right now. And that was a huge. It was a huge growth time for us. So we grew significantly in 2020 and 2021. Chris: Stars aligned, it sounds like. Summer: Stars aligned and again, it was just one of those who would have. There would have been no way to know. Chris: Forecast, foresee or plan no way. Summer: The only way that I was able to do is I said we were able to kind of make hay, which was okay. We have a door here, so how can I be really good about scaling in a smart way? So I didn't hire tons of people, I hired slowly. I never wanted to have layoff right, so I was able to say I have an opportunity, let's scale slowly. Due to that growth, we're also bootstrapped. So we were able to fund our whole company out of revenue which, especially at that time, I wasn't going to go fundraise. It was just so we were just. We're really lucky that we were able to build something, grow, but grow in a. We weren't growing too fast that we were getting out over our skis. We were able to service our clients, grow, you know, as needed. Then it ended up being a good time for us to kind of get our feet under us about who we are as a firm. Chris: It's a great segue when you talk about the growth you were seeing from the client revenue side forced you to start building your team. Yes, so let's talk about how you went about. One setting the strategy of not growing too fast, because you can fail when you do that, but really focusing on making sure you're making the right hires and adding to your team in the right way. Summer: Yeah Well, I'll say I don't always make the right hires and I've made so many mistakes. If you said that, we'd know you're lying, yeah if there was a thing that I think I could always do better at, it was being even better at hiring. I mean, to me it's the hardest thing that I think we do as business leaders, as CEOs and entrepreneurs. So that is something that I think you just get better at, but you still fail. So that's hard. I have no secret. I have a few things I've learned on that side, but I will say, on the growth side too. Before that, as a person, I'm just a fiscally conservative person in general, so I think some entrepreneurs can get especially more kind of visionary and I think I for sure hold the vision, but I'm very conservative. But that helped us. I think I've had to almost pull myself off of that, so I almost can be too conservative, right. So that's something that I've had to learn about myself, which is I need a counterweight to say you know, do this. But at that time it worked. It was a good way to scale. So I am conservative there, but I did realize in terms of people, if I was really going to grow and we have this value prop about growing with sponsored backed businesses. I myself while I am married to somebody that works in PE and I know a lot about PE. I never myself worked inside the doors of PE and I really had to have that in my firm in order to just have that credibility, you know, just to. Okay got it right and so I did decide very early on. We're growing, we're having a lot of success. I knew that I had to have somebody else at a partnership level that was going to be able to move us to the next level, and it had to be somebody that did not have my skills. Chris: Hello friends, this is Chris Hanslick, your Building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders? Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm at boyermillercom, and thanks for listening to the show. Summer: So I needed somebody that was very, you know, has a different background than me, had a different skill set than me, and so that was, you know, really a game-changing hire. So we brought on at that time Libby Covington. And again, she comes out of private equity, she was in-house at Cap street but also worked at law firms and then had also operated in-house with the Doggett family, so we had a lot in common in that sense. But I knew what she brought and what I brought were going to be complimentary to the market and that was ended up being true. You know that that was. But it was hard right, deciding to bring in, you know, somebody. It's really hard. Chris: You make it sound really easy. Summer: It's not. Chris: Because a lot of people entrepreneurs, maybe just humans in general we tend, you know people that we're like, so you tend to hire people like you Absolutely. Instead of doing. What you should be doing is what you did. And how do you hire someone that fills you out right the other side of the skill sets that you don't have to make the strong team. So you know, kudos to you for seeing that, and I know of Libby from her days at Cap Street. So so then you bring Libby on and there's 30 other people you've hired in a few years. Summer: That's right, that's right. Well, I have, you know, tricia Eaton. She started with me. She was actually my first employee, trisha Eaton, she started with me, she was actually my first employee. She now is in an operations role for me. She's been with me since day one. You can do anything. She's the person that can do anything. You just give her a problem and she just goes and solves it. So she has just been my right-hand woman and I couldn't do this without her. So we had her, we had Libby and then, quickly, we had to hire some subject matter experts. So me and Libby cannot keep delivering all the work. Patricia can't deliver all the work. So we really had to go and fill out the teams and I focused on hiring high-margin employees. So where could I bill and where could I charge for their expertise? Sure, right. And then if there was employees where we didn't really use them that much or it was really low margin, we would usually go with consultants. So I had a bench of 1099s. And we still do. We've less. So now we still do. And again, that was another way where we scaled more slowly. So it didn't, you know, have to get ahead of ourselves on building. When was it the right to have the full-time versus the part-time. That was also a benefit of COVID. So I think COVID and I'm seeing this today too it really, I think, enabled people to work the way that was better for them, like there was a new definition of work. Chris: For sure. Yeah, and it's being talked about every day. Summer: Of course, and especially in your industry too, in law firms with a very kind of traditional track, and I think there's people that say I want to work and do really good work, but I can't work in this way, and whether it was in the office or not, but even if it was maybe I want to do great work, but I need to do it 30 hours a week because I'm taking care of my aging mother or I want this lifestyle. I will make less money, but I need to work this much time from this location. So we leaned in hard on that Huge value prop for us. So I think that was one of my successes of being able to hire really great talent, because I was able to align with the times, because it was what it was but also to truly say I want your best work. I don't care if you need to live in Miami, right, I don't care. If you're telling me I really have to work 30 hours a week because I have personal responsibilities, I'm like great, give me your best 30 hours a week. To me that's better than any you know 40 plus hours a week person. That isn't maybe the best. Chris: Sure. Summer: Right. So I, we scaled that, we scaled through that way, we also would. We have a and we still do this today. We bring people on and we do a 60 day trial, and so and it's written, it's papered up and it says if this isn't a fit fit, we're going to separate fast. Chris: Yeah, there's a lot of value in that and it does help the saying of hire slow, fire fast, absolutely. So you get a test run at it. Summer: That's right, and sometimes you can't hire slow. Sometimes I wish I could. I've got I don't know four roles we're hiring right now and I need them to be filled yesterday. Chris: Right. Summer: But at least we've learned that we do have to have a trial period and we have to be eyes wide open about it. You know we're and I. Just part of our culture and it's part of our values is we do excellent work. So excellence is part of our culture. But also, if you can't meet that excellence, you will be let go, like we fire people, and it's not a scary thing, it's just. You know we're, we just have no tolerance. You know, and what we talked about we something we say in houses we don't have. Just you know we're, we just have no tolerance. You know, and what we talked about we something we say in house is we don't have middle managers. You know we don't have that. You're, you're, everyone's in the spotlight. It's that ownership mentality that's right and everybody's like that, so everyone's in the spotlight. There's no middle, you know. So you years, I mean there's been lots of not home runs you know, it's been you know there's hills and valleys there with hiring. Chris: Well, that's good for people to hear. Right, You're not always going to get it right. There's ups and downs, just like in life. But if you're, if you have a mission, like like Craig group does and like our firm does, then you know what your why is. And if something veers off from that, then you stay true to the why and then make those hard decisions. Summer: Yeah, and it always is. It's always hard. It's the hardest thing we do. Chris: No doubt. I want to talk a little bit about innovation, because clearly what your company's doing is innovative and for PE firms. But just in your space, how do you go about fostering innovation amongst your team and encouraging it within the company? Summer: Yeah, I mean, I think that it is who we are. Honestly, it has to do with every single person that we hire. Again, even going back to that, we don't have any middle managers mindset, which is there's no medium, there's no mediocrity, we're always how could you have done better? How could we have done something faster? Wait, what tools did we not use this time? So those questions are asked. Every engagement we have, I'll say we're doing something pretty different. We do have a few competitors out there not very many, but we do something unique. I mean, we are consultants, we do consult, but we're certainly not a consulting firm typically. You know, we're not an Accenture right, because? Why? Because our people actually get in and then they actually do the work, Not that we don't do at Accenture, but that's our model, it is what we do. So we're boots on the ground, so we actually do the work. So we're not an agency, but we do some agency work right. So and then on the technology side, we have a software platform. It's patent pending. It's all about forecasting and how do we get better at forecasting sales and marketing? And if we can forecast better, we can then make action and take action more quickly. And so those are the three things we do. And again, we have some competitors, but what we do as a company inherently is pretty innovative, Like we're doing something a little different, Like the skill set is a little different. We move faster, you know. We have a different, you know. So we are doing something different. I think everybody at the firm knows that and they're aware of it, it's just ingrained in your culture, it's just who they are. Chris: They know it, and I've been to your website so I'll tell you it absolutely comes across from your website, which I know is part of the thought that went into design of the website. Right, you show up different Yep, so it seems like that's part of when you're hiring these people you're looking for someone that can fit that. Summer: That's exactly right that DNA that innovative mindset. It's right and something that Libby and I talk about all the time and again, I fail on it. Sometimes I succeed, but we hire and we've really landed on this for Craig Group is we have to hire for people that just figure it out? They just get it done. It's like I don't really care what they're, you know exactly what they know or what they've done. It's like can you solve this problem? Just you know, almost like if you just did a business school case and put it in front of them and said solve it. Chris: Well, I'm curious because I've been reading a lot about this lately and we have some internal debate about it in our recruiting process. Summer: Do you do any kind of role play as part of your process to put them in the position or challenge them to see how they problem solve. You know, we don't do it formally and I think maybe we also thought about doing it formally like a formal case. We do it in an informal way, which is here's a situation that we're in Usually, it's a real, it's a real client situation and we say hey, what do you think about this? And let them, you know, talk it through. Right so we do it as part of our interview process, but we certainly don't have it formalized and I think maybe we should. Chris: I feel like there's a lot of value in it. I've heard people a lot smarter than me talk on it, and you know the question is and it is the question of does that scare a candidate away? And my answer that is well, if it does, and maybe we learned something early on we should have won't find out till a year later. Absolutely. I'm kind of at a mindset. It seems like a good idea. Summer: I think it's great. I would agree wholeheartedly. If somebody's scared of any kind of testing, then that's probably not a good. It's probably not a good choice. Chris: It was not going to be the person that says let me prove to you I can do this, I'll figure this out, right. So just interesting. You know people's mindsets on that so that always leads me, maybe, into the culture of Craig Group. How would you describe it and what are some of the things that you believe you're doing that help foster and allow it to grow? Summer: yeah, yeah, I'd say that our culture again, we you know excellence in our work is really the number one pillar. We have a thing on our on our mission also. This is no bs. What we mean by that is we show up authentically. We're real, we're real people, we're real humans. We have, you know, everybody that I work with either is caretaking for somebody else in their family, whether it be aging parents, children. They're passionate about volunteering and they're doing that. So we are whole humans and whole people and so I believe in like I don't want to if somebody shows up in an inauthentic way, it's like I'm fine, everything's fine, and I have no tolerance. So we have this real culture of authenticity, excellence, absolute excellence in client delivery. So everybody shows up with that. It's our culture, because we talk about it in hiring, we talk about it in our all-hands monthly meetings, we talk about it in the way we behave, which is we meet people where they are today. So it's okay in Craig group to be very authentically who you are. So that's just how I am, that's how I run the company, so, so we have an authentic culture. But what that also means is everyone at the company we're on, we're remote. We do have a lot of people in Houston, but we are remote. But that does require people to communicate with each other, which is are you okay, all right, picking up the phone and saying because you, if we're all going to have no bs and we're going to work hard, you have to know what your team how, what is your team okay? Chris: what's going on in their life? Summer: yeah, might impact their ability to deliver excellence 100, which is like tell me, do you need help? Chris: my follow-up question was going to be you sounded like a remote company. So, yeah, creating the, the connectivity of that culture, especially at that level that you're trying to achieve, has got to be challenging because you're not in person. Summer: It's so hard, it's so hard and again, I think it's. You know, we have a cameras on culture, you know, and everyone's cameras are on. I mean, I spend, we are all on. You know, video calls all day. Which pros and cons. Chris: Right. Summer: But I think that everyone's leaned into that. There know we can't be grumpy about that. We're not, you know, and everyone's also required to do really good work. But part from a training standpoint, and I think we're getting better at this, I think we can keep getting better. We're not perfect, but working asynchronously, which is what remote work is Right. Not everybody knows how to do that. Like you can't assume that everybody just knows how to work asynchronously. It's a skill set. Knowing when to do async work versus when do you need to have an in-person meeting, knowing when those workflows that is not something that I think you can just know. Chris: Sure. Summer: And so we definitely have an expectation that everyone works really efficiently asynchronously, and I love asynchronous work. Personally, I think it's way more efficient than getting in a big meeting full of people all at the same time and wasting everybody's time. But there is also this time to get everybody in the meeting and you know, sit together. But we are doing better at training people about asynchronous expectations. So we use you know, very technology heavy, very tool heavy. So we use a tool. There's a tool called Loom. It's a video tool. Basically, you can explain something really quickly on your own time and then send it to people so then they can go figure out what you're trying to explain to them. even if you couldn't meet in person. We use project management software. Basecamp is the one we use. Other people use Asana, so we use Basecamp, and all of our work is asynchronously matched. And so I think that culture though one thing that does it, we move really fast. So the culture is again with the excellence and you can move fast with async work. Sometimes it slows you down, sure, because you need to just pick up the phone Instead of you know, so you can. And that's a lot of times where I get into things Is, hey, let's stop doing this Call like call each other, you know somebody's not understanding, right, but our culture is really, we move really fast. Our clients have extremely, extremely high expectations. I mean our clients are you know? PE firms. They're, you know, there's no tolerance. Chris: And they're worried about the ROI and they want the growth yesterday. Yes. Summer: Yesterday and they, you know. So we work under that pressure with all of our clients high intensity, high growth. So we're high intensity, high. You know that we match our clients. We're yeah, that's what, that's who we are, and I think it works really well with a remote team. I think we've been able to hire people that want that, that high intensity work. If you don't want it, you can tell and it doesn't work with that. Chris: It shows up real quick, it shows up. Yeah, so you were talking about, you know, your base clients, the PE firms. Let's talk about what are some of the things you found to be successful for you and your company to kind of build and maintain those relationships so that you keep them and you get more. Summer: Yeah, absolutely so. I think it's challenging to, I think, sell anything which we're selling a service, right, but I think it's challenging to sell into. I don't want to put them all in the same basket. So not all PE or independent sponsors are sponsored, because they're not all created equal, right, so that's. I can say that but it is a tight group of people. It's a it's tight knit. It's a small group. I think it's an it's elite. Most people that have those roles are very well educated. They have great experience. I think you really have to be trustworthy, like they are not going to pull in a partner that has not been vetted. You know that, had that, that hasn't really been like. You know this is the real deal. So those relationships are really hard-earned. You know those are not easy to come by. I will say me and Libby both have our own sets of networks. That was enabled, sort of the catalyst. But the only reason why that's been able, we've had success, is because we've had to prove it. And when we prove it, you know, we then can build onto the next one and the next one. And I mean our model would be that we become a partner with the firm and that they bring us in on multiple portfolio companies and that's what happens, right. But it's hard. It's not something that you don't. You know we're not selling. You know something that's not high value, high stakes, and we really are a partner. We're not a, you know, a vendor and that takes a lot of trust. We have to spend a lot of time. Chris: Yeah, it's funny because I can totally relate. Our mindset here at the firm is the same. We want to be as we say this all the time the legal partner to our clients, an extension of the C-suite, not a vendor, not a commodity, but an actual value-added partner. Summer: Yes, that's exactly right. And it's hard to get there. You don't just say that and you know you're like oh, I want to be your growth partner. I want to be a member of your management team. It's like OK, prove it. Chris: Right. Summer: Right, and so I think that we do that. I think our team consistently delivers best in class results and best in class work. We're also right sized for the lower middle market and middle market, and I think that's what needs to happen. We can't you know it's not Bain, right? No, and they can't, they couldn't, they can't do it anyways Right, but we're also not, you know, your sister's brother that's going to help you with sales and marketing. That you know out of their garage. So I think we're right size and for our size, like for where we are in the market, I think we're an absolute best in class option and we've had to prove it and prove it and that's also why we have best in class talent, because we've proven it and proven it. But it's definitely been. You know it's a hard fought. It's hard fought. Chris: You know every single win is a hard you're only as good as the last one, that's right. Summer: I mean it's dig and ditches hard. You know, it's like we have to say. I mean we're making sure that every time we deliver the work product, the trust and then also the ability to immediately implement our plan, and that's one of we really stake our hats on that, like we don't just give you a here's some really great ideas that you can't implement, nor do you have the money to go hire the team to do it. So we really just hang our hat on, let's roll, let's go, and it's like ready to go, and so that's hard, it's hard work. You know this is tough and so that's exactly right We've got. You know we need that to be so good that the firm, the CEO of the port co and the firm are going to say man, that was really worth it. What would we do without that team? How would we, where would we be right now without that team? Chris: Where else can we use them? Summer: And that's what they. You know it's like we can't. We have to. You know, we have to keep. I think we can always get better. Chris: The results would suggest that. But to your point, the last word you just said right was if you don't have the mindset of continuing to, how can we improve? You're going to get left behind. Summer: That's right, and I think, a lot of my core team. You know one of my senior strategists, Macy Allen. I think every time she works on something, she comes up with another innovative idea about. You know what, if we would have done this or wait this tool, can we try out this tool? We're really leaned into that technology and AI in our work, but I think that what works so well is the answer is yes. Bring it in, let's try it, let's test it no-transcript and just your leadership style. Chris: How would you describe that and how do you think it's evolved since you started this five years ago? Summer: Yeah, well, I mean, I think it definitely has evolved, you know, I think that also going from having you know two people to this very large team. We're very flat organization so we don't have lots of hierarchy. So most people directly report to me probably too many, which is something we're working on. But I think I've got a very straightforward management style so there's really not a lot of dancing around things. There's not a lot of confusion. If I'm telling you something, it's probably going to be very clear. I also give feedback continuously. I believe in spot feedback so we don't wait and write it down and wait for the quarter end to go back and like report. I think that's just tiresome. So everyone is encouraged to give spot feedback both you know, positive and negative and do it in that moment. Sometimes I will do it in our project management tool and say spot feedback and just put it. And that way if it's written. Sometimes they can have some time to react. Chris: Right. Summer: As opposed to kind of. Chris: I like how you signpost it though. Yeah, I say spot feedback. Summer: Like prepare thyself. You are getting feedback. Yeah, and I put it and I just say it, and I think that I lead with kindness, always, always. I think that truth without kindness is cruelty and that's a direct quote from my husband, jason Craig, one of his themes and I think that being kind to people, even when you're frustrated and is, is the only way to be. So lead with kindness, but also tell the truth, which is this you know this went well, this didn't go well, you know, but it's not. It's not about you as a human. You know this isn't a. You know we're not making a personal judgment about you, but this work product, you know, wasn't what it needed to be or whatever it is. But I tend to give feedback. You know, again, it's rapid, it's in this, it's like I lead. You know, very, you know, crisply in the moment I've had to get even more efficient with that, with a lot of people you know, and I don't see all the things, and so I definitely try to speak to every a lot of people to get you know other people's opinions on work product. So I talked to a lot of people. I talked to clients ask for feedback and then go and manage my employees. That are what I heard from clients. So yeah, I think I'm a management style again. I think I get a lot of feedback, a lot information, but crisp, kind, but really Christmas and some compassion right, always, always. Chris: So that's something you mentioned. I don't think a lot of people think to do or they think to. They think about it but they're scared to do it, and that's get feedback from your clients. Summer: Yeah. Chris: Right, it's the most valuable feedback you can get because you're really trying to serve the clients. But if you're not delivering what they want in the way they want it, you're missing the mark. Right, you can work hard and you can believe it's excellent, but if they don't believe it's excellent, hard and you can believe it's excellent, but if they don't believe it's excellent. So anything you do this kind of systemize that, or is that just you know periodic check-ins with your clients, or I don't like that. Summer: You know people will disagree with me on that and there's a whole theory in marketing around, you know, net promoter scores, which is it's just a survey, essentially that we're just not big enough for that. Like I need to be able to call all my CEOs which I do and can, and I get feedback and write it down. I mean, you know, and I talked to all of my CEOs at least every other week and I asked them all every time, you know, and sometimes they would say I don't even know, go talk to the other team and I do which is great, because if the CEO doesn't know if if anything's good or bad, that's great. Chris: That means there's no problem excellent. Summer: But no, I do it continuously. I see that as really one of my roles in sort of steering the ship is talking and saying you know what's, you know and I want everything. I want silly stuff, little bitty, you know things. I got some of that last week. It was a really super small thing, but that you know it matters. That's right. You know I don't, you know I want all the things. So I just try to have a relationship that's very trustworthy. It's informal in the sense that we can talk. I want that kind of relationship. I don't need it to be something that's this big thing. Chris: You don't need an email saying click the button and fail the survey. Summer: I really hate it. I really do I mean again somebody's going to quote me on that in a few years when we do that and send the email but I just no thanks, We'll ask directly? Chris: I don't. I'm not in favor of them either, and I don't know that you get the most authentic feedback. Yeah, right now, at some point, if you're so big, maybe you don't have a choice. Summer: But yeah never lose the personal yeah, that's right, that's right. Chris: Summer, this has been such a fun conversation. I want to just end on a few lighter notes. Okay, what was your first job growing up? Summer: oh, lifeguard, life lifeguard. Out at pecan grove, country club, out in richmond texas, which might have been my most favorite job I've ever had. I still like love it taught because you had to wear. Chris: You got to wear a bathing suit. You were the most tan you ever did. I was the most tan. Summer: I also love to swim. I love teaching swim lessons and I was a swimmer, and it was just it was great very good. Native texan native texan born in odessa, texas. Yeah, native native Texan Lived in Oklahoma, lived in Illinois, but I'm back in Texas. Chris: Okay, so do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Summer: Tex-Mex, all right yeah. Chris: I usually ask people this question, but you have three young kids so I don't know. But if you could take a 30-day sabbatical, where'd you go and what'd you do? Summer: Yeah, my husband and I, even though we live in the flattest part of Texas I think that's under sea level we really love to mountain climb. So we're hikers and climbers. We try to take a pretty big trip every year or so if we can. We did a really big trip this summer. It would be a no-brainer. I mean we would go and climb a really big mountain. Aconcagua in South America has been on his list. I can't quite get it on mine because it's a 30-day trip and I can't. I've got a 11-year-old, a nine-year-old and a five-year-old and I can't quite do that. But if I could wave a magic wand and I could be gone for 30 days, I would go climb Aconcagua and spend time in South America. Chris: How cool. That's a good one. Well, thanks again for taking the time. Love your story. Congratulations on the success that you've already achieved and that I know that's in your future. Summer: Thanks, Chris, appreciate having me on. Special Guest: Summer Craig.

In this episode of Building Texas Business, I chat with Renee Morris, Chief Curl Officer at Uncle Funky's Daughter. We explore her path from management consultant to leading a national hair care brand. Renee shares her approach to maintaining business control by relying on personal savings and family support rather than external investors. She discusses forming partnerships with major retailers like Target and Walgreens while building a creative team to drive innovation. I learned how she tackles recruitment challenges and ensures brand visibility at a national level. Looking ahead, Renee explains her vision to expand into skincare and education, and serving communities of color in new ways. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Renee Morris discusses her journey from management consultant to Chief Curl Officer at Uncle Funky's Daughter, emphasizing her desire to balance career ambitions with family life. We explore Renee's decision to purchase an existing company rather than starting from scratch, leveraging her experience in sales and marketing strategy within the consumer products sector. Renee highlights the importance of having a financial safety net when transitioning to entrepreneurship, sharing her personal experience of not drawing a salary for years and relying on her husband's support. We talk about Renee's strategic decision to avoid third-party investors to maintain control over her business, focusing on conservative growth and solving customer problems. Renee explains her approach to forming strategic partnerships with major retailers like Target and Walgreens, discussing the role of distributors in helping small brands enter national markets. We discuss the challenges of recruiting and nurturing talent, emphasizing the importance of fostering a collaborative environment that encourages innovation and creative thinking. Renee outlines her vision for expanding the brand into adjacent areas such as skincare and education, aiming to serve the community of color more broadly. We explore Renee's leadership style, focusing on adaptability and learning from failures as she considers new business ventures. Renee shares personal insights from her early career and hiring experiences, emphasizing the importance of trusting one's instincts during the recruitment process. We examine the role of social media and influencers in maintaining customer confidence and visibility during brand transitions, particularly when changes are made to product packaging. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Uncle Funky's Daughter GUESTS Renee MorrisAbout Renee TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode you will meet Renee Morris, chief Curl Officer at Uncle Funky's Daughter. Renee shares her passion for helping curly girls solve their hair problems with unique and innovative natural hair products. Renee, I want to thank you for coming on Building Texas Business. It's so glad, happy to have you as a guest. Renee: Thank you, I'm excited to be here. Chris: Okay, so you won the award so far for having the coolest and, I would say, funky, but that would be. Renee: Play on words Right. Chris: But as far as a name for a company, uncle Funky's Daughter, yes. Okay, tell us what is your company known for and what do you do? Renee: So Uncle Funky's Daughter is a hair products company. We're based here in Houston, texas. I bought the company, so the parent company is Rotenmore's Consumer Group. But I bought the brand Uncle Funky's Daughter 10 years ago from a husband and wife team. So Uncle Funky's Daughter curates natural hair products for women, men and children who choose to wear their hair naturally, and so that's shampoos, conditioners, curl definers, moisturizers, stylers, finishers. Shampoos, conditioners, curl definers, moisturizers, stylers, finishers you name it, we make it. We also have a thermal protection line for women who want to blow dry and style their hair with heat, and we're distributed nationally Target, walgreens, kroger, cvs, heb, locally, so you name it, other than Walmart, we're there. Chris: Beauty Easy to find, easy to find, easy to find well, I have to ask this because I have daughters. I mean Sephora or Ulta. Renee: No, Sephora or Ulta. Yet we've been working that line. We can talk about that as part of this deep dive, but we've been working that line and but no land in Sephora or Ulta just yet okay, very good. Chris: So how did you find your way into the hair care product world? Because you didn't start there. Renee: No, I am a former management consultant 20 years management consulting, advising clients multi-billion dollar companies on how to drive revenue growth and through sales and marketing. And I was a mother of three kids. At the time my son was probably three or four, my daughters were two and I was flying back and forth between Houston and New York for a client. And I had this realization that I didn't want to do that as a mom. I needed to be home, but I still wanted to be a career person. So I knew I am not built to be a stay-at-home mother. That is not who I am, and COVID taught me that with isolation. And so what I started deciding was I wanted to figure out what I wanted to do next and I realized I had some options. Right, it's that fork in the road that you go through. You start to look inwardly every time you have that fork in the road and I did that and I said okay, your option A is to go find a company based in Houston and be a VP or senior VP of some operation. Option B is you find a small company and you're like a big fish in a small pond kind of thing. Option C is you just go do your own thing. And after I kind of went through it, I realized I worked for the Coca-Colas, like in GE Capitals of the world, in my past. I didn't want to go work for a big company. I didn't think I wanted to work for a small company because of my personality style, right, um. And so I decided I wanted to go buy something and then or have my own company. And so then the question becomes do you build or do you buy my? I'm a management consultant by heart, so it's always go buy something. Why? Because I can take it, I can fix it and I can grow it. And so then it became all right, well, what are you going to go buy? And so, like most people out there, they're thinking about buying a company. I started reaching out to brokers, I started doing some networking, calling attorneys, people that work on deals, that kind of stuff, just putting my name out there, and I got all the things that you normally get when you're looking to buy a company the gym, the dry cleaner, the storage facility, the gas station, all the things that I didn't want to buy because I didn't have a passion for them. And so, also, for background, my consulting experience in sales and marketing strategy has been predominantly in consumer products. So I know consumer products, I know revenue growth, I know marketing strategy. So I was like okay, so I kept looking and I used this hair product called Uncle Funky's Daughter. I found it when I first moved here in 2000. Like all curly girls out there back then, that was almost 20 years ago, my goodness. But 15 years ago back then there weren't a lot of natural hair products out there for women of color and women of curly hair with curly hair specifically. And so I googled when I first moved here natural hair products, curly hair, houston and Uncle Funky Stoddard came up. I've never heard of this company right. So I go to rice village and buy this product and I start using it. Extra butter, start using it. And for those out there that are, you know, african American descent, you know thick, curly hair, we do this thing called two strand twists to what. I love it. Two strand twist. Chris: Okay. Renee: So, you take your hair and you twist it in like instead, instead of braiding it, you put it in twists, and there are single twists all over my head right. So that's how I would style my hair wear it, rock a two strand twist. Those out there will understand that, look it up and then Google it and then and so that worked on my hair really well. And so, again, for those with tight, curly hair, finding the right hair product that works for your hair is tough. It is not easy, as you know. One of your team members, courtney, was talking about. She's gone through all the products Because you go through this product journey trying to find something that works for you right. So found Extra Butter, worked, loved it, and then I would stop using it while I'm traveling because I would forget it right at home sure. I would go back to some other competitive brand and it didn't work for my hair. So I'm like, okay, uncle Funky's daughter is the only thing that works for my hair. So I go in to get my Uncle Funky's daughter one day, after I, you know, had braids and wash them out. And yada, yada, yada. I'm going in, I'm getting my extra butter and this guy behind the counter who I bought hair products from for the past at this point, five years, says yeah, my wife and I are going through a divorce and I'm like, oh, so I do have an MBA right. I'm not some, you know, trying to sound like a shark, but my MBA said distressed asset might be willing to sell stress asset might be willing to sell. Like literally, that is the voice that went in my head. And so I was like, oh really. So I stood there in that store and I just chatted with him for hours and about the company, you know what, you know personally what he was going through, because divorce, you know, for those that may have gone through it, can be an emotional, you know troubling time. So I was a listening ear. But as I'm listening, I'm also thinking about like, okay, what's the story behind the brand? Is this going to resonate? And I'm also watching people come in and out, right. And so I said, well, if you guys are you guys thinking about selling it? And he gives me a story about you know what's happening with the sell and cell and I said, well, if you're ever thinking about selling it, let me know. So I walk out, I Google, because you know this is horrible to say, but divorces are public right right. Chris: Is it filed in state court? Renee: it's a public record so I'm figuring out what's happening with the divorce and I find out that the company is in receivership. And for those who don't know, because I did not know at the time what a receivership was, a receivership happens when a divorce is happening and the husband and wife aren't operating, behaving appropriately. Chris: Well, they can't agree on the direction of the company and it can be not in a divorce. But basically, owners cannot agree and a court may appoint a receiver to run the company. Renee: Exactly. Thank you, that's why you're the attorney and a court may appoint a receiver to run the company Exactly. Chris: Thank you. That's why you're the attorney. Renee: Have a little experience with that yes, so the judge had appointed this guy to be the receiver. I reached out to the gentleman and I said I'm interested in the sale of Uncle Funky's daughter, if that so happens to be the case. And so the one thing I did learn and you can probably expound on this is oftentimes in a divorce, when the receiver comes in, at that point that receiver is really thinking about how to get rid of this asset. And so those are all the things that I learned during this process, and I was like, okay, so he wants to sell because he wants to get paid and he knows nothing about this business. Chris: He was, you know no offense, no emotional tie to it, for sure no emotional tie. Renee: He's an older white gentleman who knows nothing about black hair products and so I was like, okay, so he doesn't know, he doesn't have an appreciation for the value of the company. And so I reached out and I said, okay, here's a number. You wouldn't believe the number I gave him and he counted with some minor you, some minor adjustment, and we bought this company for less than $100,000. And they had a revenue at the time. When I saw their tax returns, I think it was maybe a million or so that they claimed in revenue. At some point they said, but at least for sure I think our first year of revenue was probably around and it was a partial year. Probably a quarter million dollars is what revenue they generated, and so we really, if you talk about a multiple of sales, we bought it on a tremendous it's a heck of a deal the deal. Okay, I can't find those deals these days. If anybody has one of those deals, you come let me know and so. So that's how we ended up buying this company ten years ago and shortly thereafter, target comes knocking at the door and says, hey, we were having this discussion with the owners about, you know, potentially launching. Would you be interested? And I'm like, absolutely. And it was because they were going through this divorce that they couldn't get over the finish line, right? And so shortly after we buy, we're launching in target. But before I did that, one of the first things I did was because, if you ever, if any, it's probably so old you can't find it. But the label. When I first bought the company, when I was buying it, it was this woman's face with a big afro on the front and it had a cute little 70s vibe on it and it was in this white hdpe bottle which, by the way, those aren't recyclable. So I said first, we need to change this, we got to change the packaging, we got to upgrade the label, we need to make it universally appealing to all curly girls, because if I look at a woman with a big afro, I think tight, curly hair like mine right and our products work across the spectrum from wavy, like Courtney, to really tight, like Renee, and that wasn't representative on the label okay so we redesigned the label, changed the bottle from an HDPE bottle to a PET bottle, which is recyclable, and then just upgraded this packaging to what I consider a sleeker new look. Chris: Very good, Great story, Thank you. So back up a little bit, share a little bit, because so you go from big corporate consulting job some comfort in there probably. You mentioned travel and you did mention the mom aspect playing a role. But let's talk a little bit about actually getting the courage to take that leap out of the big corporate role into. I'm going to buy something that's all on me now to either make it or break it. Yeah, that had to be scary. Renee: It was, and I am fortunate in that. You're right. I had comfort. We have financial security. I had a husband who was, who still is, who's a senior executive in medical devices has nothing to do with anything about consumer products, but you know, we have the luxury for him to say I can carry this load, financial load, and I think that's the big mix, right? I tell people all the time if you're going to take that leap, you got to make sure you've got cash flow, because for not only for your, you know, for the company, but for you personally, right? Because there were several years where my husband called my business a hobby Because I was contributing nothing to the financial plan. Chris: In fact, you were probably taken away. Yeah, I was taken away. Renee: So every year I mean. So I wasn't drawing a salary. I didn't draw a salary for a couple of years after I, I didn't draw a salary until our tax accountant said you have to draw a salary because we're changing you from whatever tax to an S-corp. And I was like oh, wow, really Okay. So what am I going to pay myself? Okay, and then he goes Well, you have, and it has to be reasonable. So for probably three or four years after I bought the company, I didn't draw a salary. I was paying my employees but I wasn't paying myself. And so I think and I say all that to say yes, it takes a leap, but it also takes the ability and the willingness to take that financial hit Right. So were there things that we probably wanted to do as a family that we didn't do? Probably so. Chris: Yeah. Renee: Because I'm growing this brand and was there times I went to my husband like I need another thirty thousand dollars? Probably so. And because one of the things I specifically had chosen is I did not want, and I currently still don't want, to pull in private equity, vc any type of third party investor funding. That is a personal decision I've made and it's because I am a former accountant and I'm extremely financially conservative and I also don't want different incentives to help influence how I run my business, different incentives to help influence how I run my business, and what I mean by that is I personally just didn't want to have a PE company saying you need to do these three things because your multi, your EBITDA needs to look like this and your revenue growth needs to look like that. Right, so I could have we could have easily grown really fast, like a lot of brands do, and grown themselves out of business, or, but I chose the path to grow really conservatively Now, and so I think I say all that to say I think, yes, financially speaking, having the bandwidth to be able to float yourself and your company for a while is critical, and so don't take the leap if you're still, if you're at your job today, living paycheck to paycheck right, you have to have a cushion. Your job today, living paycheck to paycheck right, you have to have a cushion. So what that means is, maybe if you're trying to start the company, then you're running your business while you're living paycheck to paycheck and oh, by the way, you gotta stop living paycheck to paycheck because you got to start to build that cushion, right. So some of the you got to make sacrifices and I think that's the hard thing. Not everyone's willing to make the financial sacrifice that it takes to really run and grow a business without third party support. Now, in today's world, you can go get bc capital funding and you know money is flowing, or at least it was, you know but there, but there's sacrifices, but there's sacrifices with that, and so, yeah, that's great advice, you know. Chris: The other thing that you mentioned, as you were evaluating companies is one of my favorite words when it comes to business is passion. You passed on a ton of things because you weren't passionate about it. Renee: Yeah. Chris: You found something you were passionate about, and I think that's a lesson for people too, right Is? It's not easy to do. As you mentioned. Sacrifices have to be made. So if you're not really passionate about that decision to go be an entrepreneur, start your own business. It's going to be tough. Renee: Yeah, it's going to be tough, and so, because I have to wake up every day, I my passion is really helping people solve problems, and I do that through hair, because hair is a problem in the curly hair community. How do I maintain frizz? How do I keep it under control? How do I keep it healthy so it doesn't break? How do I keep it healthy so it can grow? How do I stop the scalp irritation? There's so many problems that happen in hair and so I what I think about. Like literally yesterday I was with my marketing team and we're talking about a campaign for the next month for products etc. Or really November, and I said, OK, what problem are we helping her solve? And that's literally the way I think about stuff what problem are we helping her solve? Because if we're not helping her solve a problem, then I don't have anything to talk about. Chris: Ok, Right, yeah, it's not going to move off the shelf. Renee: It's not going to move off the shelf thing to talk about. Chris: Okay, right, yeah, it's not going to move off the shelf. It's not going to move off the shelf. So another thing that you kind of alluded to, you went through somewhat. It sounds like a kind of transforming the business that you took over, right? You mentioned the product label and packaging. Let's talk. What else did you, you know, in taking that business over, did you find yourself having to change, and how did you go about making those decisions? Are either prioritizing them and you know we can't do it all- at once yeah, so what walk? us through some of the learning you went through that well, you know what's interesting is. Renee: So it wasn't much of a transformation, but it was. If you think about learning from a marketing standpoint, if you're going to buy a business, especially a consumer product company, and you buy it in today's world where we're so used to knowing who the owner is the first people don't like change. So one of the first things I had to do was convince our current customers that nothing had changed other than the label. The minute your package changes and it looks different, they're like the formulas have changed, it's not the same be the same. It's not the same product. So the first thing I had to do was convince them that this is the same product. In fact, I brought back discontinued SKUs that the receiver had stopped selling because they were slow moving. **Chris: How did you go about convincing the existing customer base? Nothing changed. Renee: So news articles, facebook articles, facebook social ads, like having live conversations, going live on social media all of those were things that I had to go in and dispute or Dubuque being like I was the person respond. There was no team, it was me and one other person. The first person I hired was a social media person. Okay, wasn't a warehouse person, it was a social media person because I knew being the being in the face of the customer was so important. So being live and answering questions online, answering the phone and people would call they will go. I heard that this wasn't the same formula. No, ma'am, it's the same formula. And actually having those, it was me having those live, one-on-one conversations. And so I think really touching the customer and being personal with her was the key to our success in in gaining that confidence. And we also you know this was early in the days of influencers we also had to partner with people to be able to talk about. Like it's the same stuff, guys, this is the bottle. This is the old bottle. This is the new bottle. This is both sides of my hair, no change. Chris: Okay, okay, very smart to especially, like you said, I mean so many people now the social media influencers have such impact on what products get picked up in the mainstream. Advert Hello friends, this is Chris Hanslick, your Building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders? Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm at boyermillercom, and thanks for listening to the show. Chris:So let's move forward a little bit. Part of changing things new products. There's a level. You mentioned your marketing meeting yesterday. What do you do within the company to help kind of foster innovation and inspire your people to be innovative about the products? Renee: That's a tough one because it's hard. Here's the challenge that we have as a small company. As a small company, it's hard for me to afford to pay me like the equivalent of a me right. The woman or a man with the MBA in marketing who's got, you know, 10 years at Coca-Cola. I am oftentimes recruiting talent, that's learning and I'm teaching, as they, you know, grow up in our company and so innovation is really. You know, I'm usually in that meeting asking the provocative question Like do these assets, does this story come together like cohesively, what problems are we helping them solve? Like, I am there helping them think through and push their thinking a little bit forward. We'll sit and we just do brainstorming with, you know, little toys in the room and stuff to play with, but it's really just helping them kind of. All right, just toss some ideas out there. Let's just throw like what is this, what does this mean? What's her brand voice? What does she sound like? What does she look like? Like asking those questions to help them just kind of think outside of the box. Now, if she looks like this, so what kind of tone is she going to have? All right, so what would she say then? Okay, so let's talk about, like how then that manifests itself and how it shows up creatively, and so just helping them kind of drill down to the so what is really kind of the role I like to play. It's the role I'm playing right now because I'm looking for a marketing director. Chris: Okay, yeah, anybody listening out there. Renee: Anybody listening out there? Submit resumes. Chris: So you talked about some major players as partners that you have right, yeah. Target and Walgreens and CVS, et cetera. So let's talk a little bit about that. How did you go about? You kind of you told a little bit about Target, but what have you done and what have you found to be successful? And maybe strategies that weren't successful in forming those relationships, but maybe, even more importantly, fostering and maintaining those relationships. Renee: So forming on the forming side retailers. For those who may or may not know the space, they want to come to you in one of two ways either direct or indirect through a distributor. For a small brand like mine, it's usually hey, I don't want to service direct, I want you to go through a distributor. And usually it's because when you first launch, you're going to be in a handful of their stores not full distribution is what they call it so not in all 1700 Target stores, but I think we started out in a hundred and so we had to go through a third-party distributor, and so that distributor then opened the door to other national retailers for us. So if you're thinking about launching into a national retail partner and you're a small company like mine, your best route to market is finding a distributor that represents your category in a national retailer. So whether that's peanut butter, hair products, lotions, flat tires, whatever, so you have to go and find that distributor. So that was step one. Once we got that relationship, our job is to grow it by driving traffic through the stores and getting that sell through. If it's not generating units per store per week, it gets pulled right. So one person wisely said a retail shelf space is like real estate. Once you buy your home, you don't want to lose it to foreclosure. So once you've got that slot, my job is to defend those two slots. And when I say we're national retailers, we're not like a P&G where P&G dominates the shelf. We've got sometimes two slots, sometimes four, but we're not, we don't have 10. So our slots are really important for us at a retailer and so for me, maintaining the relationship comes back to driving the traffic to the store. But, more importantly, supply chain. So when I talked about growing too fast for some brands and having measured growth, it was very important for me because I understood I came from a consulting company, although I did did sales and marketing most of what we did as an organization was supply chain. I wasn't the supply chain person, but I like to say I knew enough to be dangerous when I bought Uncle Plunky's daughter. So because I understood supply chain, I knew that not, we could not risk. We needed to have safety stock, we need to have inventory levels that look like x, and so that's why I did what I called measured growth. And so you know the distributor may come to me and go. I can get you into Kroger, walmart. Nope, we're going to do one retailer a year, one big guy a year, because I need to make sure I can scale, I need to make sure my contract manufacturers can scale, I need to make sure my team knows what to do and they know how to execute and fulfill the requirements of that specific retailer and so that we are successful. So that was the way that we grew and that's kind of the way we've continued to grow. Chris: That's so smart, that discipline right. It's easier said than done, because you just start a company and you go a couple years not making any money, or what you do make you put back in the company and then you got all these great opportunities. Come at you once. Renee: It's easy to say yes yes, yes, yes and yes, but you can't fulfill those promises, no one will come back. And there are horror stories where brands have been like yes, I'll go into Target, walmart, kroger, heb, cvs and Walgreens all at the same time and they can't meet the demand or they launch and they don't have enough awareness in the consumer market to be able to support and drive the traffic in all of those stores. So you really have to focus on how you're going to grow, where you're going to grow, and how you're going to drive traffic into these markets and into those stores. Chris: I mean any details you can put behind that, just as some examples to make it a little more tangible of things that you did, things that you thought about. Okay, we have to get this right to kind of prove that we can go to the next level. Renee: Yes. So for Target we did a lot of in-store events, so we took Target. So imagine if I was doing replicating this across like five different retailers. But for Target back in the day, for social media was much more organic and less pay-per-play than it is now, right, so we would do like it's a 10-day countdown. You know, to Target we're launching in 10, 9, 8, like on social media, it was like running ads. Then we did a find us in the Target, so we would do these fun games on social media and our followers would have to find us in their local Target and if they found us and they won a gift card, so we were doing anything we could. We would do in-store events where we would just have a table popped up where you can try products, give away products, get coupons, you name it. We were doing it. Gotcha, we were doing events outside the store. Inside the store. I was rogue because I didn't have permission from Target to do this. I mean because that would have cost me tens of thousand dollars, right, Target, I hope you're not listening and so we would literally just grab a camera and kind of come in and we would kind of sneak our little basket through the store down the hall and we would sit in there and the manager would come like, oh, we're just doing some footage, and I would say I just launched and I'm really trying to help my business and they would get it because you know, their local store manager, and so they would allow us to do like a little bit of a, a little bit of a pop-up shop kind of thing, and they would allow it. Now, today they probably wouldn't allow it because we're probably a lot more disciplined, but 15 years ago, 10 years ago, they would allow it and so, yeah, so those are the things that we had to do. So imagine if I was doing that for sally, for walmart, for kro, all in the same year, and I'm still trying to drive the traffic right, because we were still a small brand. Chris: Sure. Renee: I still call us a small brand because you know, if I go to you and I say, have you heard of Uncle Funky's Daughter? And your answer is no, then I'm a small brand, right. If I say you cause, everybody's heard of Clorox, coca-cola, pepsi, all the things, right, lacroix, you name it, they've heard of it, they haven't heard of Uncle Funky's Daughter. And so we're still in constant mode of brand awareness, and so trying to build that brand awareness and drive demand in every retail shelf at the same time would have been a daunting task for a brand like ours. Chris: Sure, do you still have the Rice Village? No, okay, shut that down we shut it down. Renee: I shut it down when I bought the company. That was the condition of the acquisition, because the day that I went and discovered who the owner was of the brand and I was sitting there chatting up the guy, in about a four hour period that I was there, maybe three people walked into that door okay so that you know, my brain said all right, that's a like a revenue killer. I'm not, you're not driving revenue right you need to focus on driving traffic on the retail shelf, and so are. We have no physical retail store now. Will we once again one day, maybe in a different format? Right, because now you, my friends? Other people have said you guys should open up a salon, and I'm like so maybe we'll open up a salon where the products are available and featured, but a retail store exclusively focused on our products will not be in a timeline. Chris: Okay. So there's an example right of an idea from friends. Maybe you thought about it, of branching out from what's core to your business. So far you've said no because you haven't done it. Maybe it's still out there. Why have you not done that? And I guess what could you counsel some listeners if they're faced with that? Or maybe they've done it and trying to make it work Again. That's another danger point, right Before you kind of branch into something different. Renee: So there are two things what I think about. Again. I always go from management consultant first right when I think about my business. I don't think about it personally, right, I think about it objectively. So I can go deep in my vertical or I can go wide horizontally, and I can do both. And so right now, where we are as a brand, honestly, is we need to go deeper in R&D and innovation. So we have not had an opportunity to launch a new product since COVID, and so we're in the process of developing a new product, so that's my primary focus. A new product line so we're developing a new product line, so that's my front focus. New product line so we're developing a new product line, so that's my front focus. Then, as I start to think about adjacency, about how do we take our core and expand and pivot beyond. Do you go to Skin next and stay in consumer products and go into Skin? Do you go in the two places that I'm more actively looking at Skin is out there as a product extension, but that's still core to Uncle Funky's Daughter. Do you go and do you buy another small company within Rote Morris Consumer Group and now you build a portfolio of brands? Because that's, really what I wanted to do when I started Rote Morris Consumer Group. My vision is to have a portfolio of consumer goods brands that meet the needs of the community of color, whether it's beauty, so for beauty. So that could be hair, that could be skin, it could be makeup, it could be a variety of different things that help her solve her problems every day. So that's really the vision. And then I bought this building a couple years ago and we have this wonderful, amazing space, and so and I open up this space I'm looking around. What are we gonna do with the rest of this space? We have this whole first floor, we have a whole second floor that's unoccupied, and even before I bought the building, this idea of building talent and a pipeline of funky junkies is what we call our followers funky junkies yeah that's what we call our followers, our customers. But how do you start to build not only a pipeline of loyal customers but a pipeline of loyal users? And so I started thinking about what if you actually had a trade school? What if you actually started? What if you were the next Paul Mitchell for African-American hair products, right when there's a Paul Mitchell school and you're teaching natural hair instead of you know other treatments that they do, and those exist outside of Texas. There's one that exists in Houston, but not focused on natural hair, but focused on beauty school. And so for those people out there who choose to have a different path in life and not go to college, but they're looking for a vocation or trade school and they want to be a hairstylist or barber, do you create a space for them to be able to do that? So that's the second adjacency. And then the third adjacency is then do you go the other end? So I know how to do hair, I'm learning how to do hair, I've got hair products, I'm doing hair on the other side and that's where the salon comes in. So in all both ends of the spectrum, I am a deep analytical person, so it's understanding what's happening in the market. So in the salon side, you look and you have to figure out and this is for anyone right. You never take a leap in adjacencies just because you think you have the money, the capability, the resources, whatever. You have to understand what's happening in the market because you're not smarter than the whole market. You might be smarter than a couple people in the market, but not the whole market. And so when I look at the hair salon space, I knew of several people in the Houston market that had launched salons and they had failed. They had failed within a three-year cycle and they had failed because the type of offering service offering that they wanted to provide was challenging. And that's the same service offering that we would need to provide as a brand. Chris: Right. Renee: And resources and talent. Going back to this other end of the pipeline I was talking about, in the supply chain, those can be sometimes challenging resources to recruit and retain in a salon side, and so when I do the analysis, it's looking at the risk versus reward. How am I smarter than the next person? How do I learn from those failures and ensure that I can recruit talent where I'm not? I don't have a high degree of turnover. I can create brand consistency. I can create service levels that meet the needs of not only what I want to offer, but what our customers expect. I need to exceed it, and so, because I haven't gotten that magic formula yet, we're leaving the salon right here in the marketplace. Chris: It's still on the drawing board right. Still on the drawing board, I like. I like it well, as it should be, until you figure it out, right? Yeah well, so let's turn a little bit and talk a little more about you yeah in leadership. How would you describe your leadership style? How do you think that's changed or evolved in the last 10 years? Renee: so I am a type a, hardcore type a. I am a driver and I know that about myself. But I also know that one of my weaknesses as a leader is I don't micromanage. What I have learned to evolve because of my consulting background, right In a consulting world you know 20 plus years is how I was trained. I'm a former salesperson. You just go get it done right, you know. So that is that's kind of like my bread and butter, and you have a team of type A's that are pretty much driven just like you are. So when you guys have a clear plan and you've got the end goal, all you're doing is managing the type A's to make sure that they get to the goal right at a very high level. No one needs to. You set meetings to review the spreadsheet and the spreadshe's done right. Fast forward to Uncle Funky's daughter. You set meetings to review the spreadsheet and it's like, oh, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, what you wanted me to do, so it requires much more. What I'm learning is it requires me to evolve my leadership style from one that's hands off, that's a little bit more hands-on, to make sure that my team understands where the bar of excellence is what our customers want from us, what the implications are when we miss deadlines, what the implications are if we ship the wrong product to the wrong customer, and so showing them and teaching them is where I've kind of learned. That's where my role is as a leader, really helping them really understand the implications of behaviors. And so I've evolved to from a leader that's I'm still. I still tell my team hey, I don't micromanage. If I have to, if I know it before you do, that's probably a problem, and so so they understand that, and so I think I'm still evolving my leadership style to adapt to a smaller company with a different team that thinks differently from the type A consultants with the MBAs that I'm used to working with, to the ones who you know maybe they don't have the MBA or maybe they're going to get it, or maybe they have a desire to get there, and so it really has required. It's a growth opportunity for me that I'm still learning to grow in, to be able to shift my mental mindset away from I got a team of driven people to I got a team that needs to be inspired, you know. Chris: Yeah, that's great. So what have you done to try to help you in the hiring process? Make sure you're making the best decision you can make about who you're bringing on your team? Renee: You know it's the hire slow, fire quick. Chris: Yes, another easier said than done. Renee: Easier said than done and that's where I am right now. Even in this open marketing director job that I'm looking for, it's really making sure I've gone through I go through so many, I go through all the resumes. My assistant will filter out the trash. But once she's filtered out the trash, I'm looking at those resumes going okay, is this someone who's going to? Because I'll openly say the reason I'm looking for a marketing director. I'll tell you this story. So I hire this person and she's from Adidas. She comes from Adidas background in marketing and she's Under Armour in marketing and she was in Latin America director of Latin America markets and she's just moved from Houston. So I'm thinking I've got a Latina because it's part of my demographic. That's awesome. She's got this global brand experience that's awesome. All in athleisure but transferable skills. It's marketing. She quits three months later, found another job in athleisure. So I interviewed, interviewed and found this one and this woman, you know, sold me on. I mean we had multiple conversations. I was like you know, sold me on. I mean, we had multiple conversations. I was like you know, hey. Chris: I'm really concerned about whether or not you know you can migrate from big company to this small company Cause it is a very valid concern. Renee: It's a big change. Right, you don't have a team. Your team is a team of three, not a team of 20. Right, and so your role really changes. And so she. You know, she convinced me that, but the lesson learned was that you know my spidey senses. I didn't listen to them. Like my spidey senses said, she may not stay. Like there were little things that happened along the way you get enamored with all the other stuff. Right, but I was so hungry to have a big company, someone to come in to show my team other than me, for them to hear it from someone other than me that this is what marketing looks like, Right, this is the marketing discipline that we need to have. And so she came in. She brought some marketing discipline. She heard that, you know she brought some value in the three months, but it was. It's been really a painful learning process, right, because now I'm short of marketing director, I'm stepping in, yeah, yeah. Chris: Well, what you alluded to there, right, is just the cost hard cost and soft cost when you make a bad hiring decision yeah Because you know you're having to fill the role or someone else. Renee: Yep, so that distracts, you, it's me right now. Chris: It distracts you from doing your full-time else. Yep, so that distracts you. It's me right now. It distracts you from doing your full-time job. Yep, you're now spending time going through resumes and going to be interviewing and you wasted, if you will, all the time on the one that only lasted three months. Yeah, so there's a lot of cost there. There's a lot of cost there. Renee: And then you're sitting there and knowing I've got to restart this whole process, I've got to try to maintain the momentum within my team this is the second marketing person they've had in the past year so and so how do you start to just kind of manage through that and so, instead of and when you get burned, that one time, as I'm looking at resumes, I'm looking at people with deep experience in a particular industry and I'm going oh nope. Chris: Learn, that is, that there's that bias creep right you're. You have to not let yourself penalize these people you've never met, just as they might look the same on paper yeah, as the one bad actor in the group. Renee: Yeah, and so you and you're right, and so I'm going well, and I'm having these conversations and then yeah, so it's just. Yeah, I think that's like one hiring, firing, hiring slow, firing quick. Chris: Sometimes, even when you hire slow, you still get I tell people it's part science, it's part art and it's the more process I think you can put in place and follow the better. But you're never going to be 100 right and I think figuring out the characteristics that work in your organization is something that you can incorporate into your hiring process and know that this is the kind of background traits, characteristics that thrive here. Renee: Yeah, and even and I would also say, listening to that, you know, those spidey senses that are coming with those thoughts creep in like, and they were coming like there were things, there were triggers that happened through the hiring process. Then I was like I'm not sure she's going to be a good fit. Like you know, for example, she called and said hey, can I work from home? I was like no, you cannot work from home. So that was like that was. Oh, renee, we're gonna do a whole episode on work from home. Oh yeah, oh yeah. And so those were the triggers of like, okay, she might not be the good fit. And when those were the when that happens to you, you got to listen to it and like and be okay with backing out. But I didn't listen to the trigger because we were so far down in the negotiation and I should have just said, you know, I don't think this is going to work out Right, and rescinded the offer. But I had already extended the offer, right, and I didn't want to have egg on my face. Chris:Sure. Renee: So I mean I, what I should have done is just let my ego go, rescinded the offer and continue to look. Chris: Yeah, or at least be upfront about this is starting to give me concerns. Here's why. Renee: Yeah. But I you know you know it's which I did that I did that okay, she covered it up she covered that up. She told me exactly what I wanted to hear, but still the those doubts were in my head and I should have listened to my gut. And that gut is a powerful thing. You know that, maxwell Galt, maxwell Galt Gladwell, it's a powerful thing. And if, when you listen to it, you're usually right, 100%. Yeah, 100%. Chris: Renee, this has been a fascinating conversation. Just to wrap it up, I have a few just personal things. I always like to ask yeah, what was your first job as a kid? Renee: Newspaper. I was a newspaper girl. You had a newspaper route? Yes, Absolutely I did. I'll be darned. My sister got up in the morning and helped me through my newspapers. Chris: You're not the first guest. That was their first job it was fairly common. Renee: You had to make me dig deep for that one. Chris: Okay, you made me dig deeper on this one. Sometimes people say this is the hardest question. Yeah, do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Renee: Barbecue no sauce Seasoned, very well seasoned, no hesitation. Chris: No, no hesitation and the woman knows what she wants. Yes, right. Renee: Don't bring me brisket with sauce on it. No. Chris: No sauce Extra seasoned. Renee: I want seasoned brisket, the moist kind. Okay, and, by the way, I'm not a Texan, but I moved to Texas and now I've been here 15 years and now it's like brisket barbecue. It's the only thing that I eat. Chris: I eat it's the only thing I want to eat. I might die of a heart attack, but it's the only thing I want to eat. I love it All right. So because you have four kids and I know your life's running crazy, this will be more of a fantasy. Renee: Yeah, if you could take. Chris: If you could take a 30 day sabbatical, where would you go? What would you do? Renee: Oh, I would be somewhere, probably in South Africa, in the, probably on a safari. I would tour safaris. I would go South Africa, kenya. I want to see the migration of animals. I would do that. Chris: I love it. Renee: That's where I would be. Chris: Renee, thank you so much for being on. This has been just a pleasure getting to know you and hear your story. Renee: Thank you. This is awesome. I listened to NPR how I built this. So this is like my. I feel like I'm excited. I've kind of done the NPR check. I like the how I built this check. Do you listen to that? Chris: I do, I do, I love it. I love that analogy. Renee: Yeah, it's great. Chris: Thanks again. Renee: Thanks for doing this. Special Guest: Renee Morris.

On this episode, my guest is Craig Slee, a disabled writer, consultant and theorist dealing with mythology, folklore, magic and culture, exploring life through the lens of landscape, disability and fugitive embodiments.He has contributed essays and poetry focusing on the numinous and disability to various anthologies including The Dark Mountain Journal. Craig has also co-facilitated multiple seminar series at the Dresden Academy for Fine Arts, regarding ableism in the arts, as well as how ableism affects our relationship to space. In 2023 he was one of the speakers at the World Futures Studies Federation 50th Anniversary Conference, introducing the concept of (Dis)abling Futures. Craig resides in the northwest of England.Show NotesCornwall and the Seasons Who Gets to Decide What it Means to Know a Place?The Folding in of Identity to TourismA Question of Productive vs Generative AbilityAbleism and AttentionFinger Bending and the Freedom of MovementRedefining and Remembering Other Forms of MovementWhat is Stillness?The Dance of MountainsObeying LimitsHomeworkCold Albion (Craig's Blog)Goetic Atavisms (Hadean Press)Craig's Blue Sky Page | Facebook PageTranscriptChris: Welcome to the End of Tourism, Craig. Craig: Thank you for having me. Chris: Yes, it's great to be able to speak with you today. I've been ruminating for a couple of years now as to the themes that we might speak of. And I was introduced to you via a mutual friend and have come closer to your work via the Emergence Network's online gathering, We Will Dance With Mountains, in the last quarter of 2023.And so, to begin, I'd like to ask you first where you find yourself today and what the world looks like for you, where you are. Craig: Where I find myself today is by the canal in my flat, looking out the window, just as evenings coming in, in the northwest of England, in Lancaster, and it's chilly here which is actually a good thing, I guess, these days.Chris: Perhaps I could ask you to elaborate a little bit on what Lancaster looks like, but I know that, you know, from our conversations previous that you grew up [00:01:00] in Cornwall, a place that was previously, a town, an area devoted to fishing and mining, and from what you've told me, it's also become a massive tourist trap that you know, from the little that I've seen online, that the area receives around 5 million visitors a year, and tourism makes up about a quarter of the local economy.So I'm curious what you've seen change there and what do you think has happened to Cornwall and its people as a result and maybe there's something in there as well regarding Lancaster. Craig: Yeah, so I should emphasize this. I was born in Cornwall. My family has been lived down there for many many generations anyway and my father's side of the family actually, at various points, worked in the tourist trade as well before they went on to other things.And, [00:02:00] yeah, I mean, I left because, frankly, there was no jobs that weren't tourism. I came to Lancaster to study because one, I have a physical disability which means that Cornwall is a very rural area, so you need to drive everywhere, and that's fine, I drove at that point, but for good or ill, a more urban center was better for me later in life as I left.But the way that it shifted, even in the years when I was growing up, was that, you know, essentially was a rural area where nothing really happened socially or culturally that much until the summer seasons. So, you were very, very aware of the seasons in terms of, you'd have visitors [00:03:00] starting, and that was when the town would wake up, and then it was kind of dead for the rest of the year, so it was very much one of those things where the tourist trade has actually made me more aware of human rhythms in the natural world than perhaps I would have been, because it's so based on seasonal stuff.And just looking at the way the infrastructure because a lot of the towns and areas, they boomed a little bit well, quite a lot in certain areas with the tin mining of the 19th century. But a lot of the architecture and things like that was 19th century. So you had small villages and slightly larger towns, and they have very, well, I guess some people, if they were tourists, would call "quaint, narrow streets."And when you have that many visitors, in the summer, you can't get down the streets. [00:04:00] You can't drive it because it's full of people walking. You know, there's an interesting anecdote I'd like to recount of when my father, he was a vicar, he was a priest, moved to a new area he would go to the local pub and all the locals would greet him as the priest and be like, very polite.And then when it would come out that my dad was actually a local, that he was born down there and part of the family, everybody would relax. And there was this real sort of strange thing where people came and stayed because it was a lovely area, but there was still that whole issue with second homes and certainly keeping an eye on things from a distance here during the pandemic when people left cities during the pandemic, they went down there amongst places in Britain.And that meant that, [00:05:00] literally, there were no houses for newly starting teachers, you know, teachers who had got jobs and were moving down there, couldn't find places to live because during the 2020 and sort of 2022 period, everything was just opening up either as Airbnb because there was this influx from the cities to the more rural areas because it was supposedly safer.You know, and I feel like that's a reflex that is really interesting because most people think of it as, oh, "a tourist area," people go there for leisure, they go there to relax and get away from their lives, which is true, but under a stressful situation like a pandemic, people also flee to beautiful quotes isolated areas, so there's that real sense of pressure, I think and this idea that we weren't entirely sure, growing up, [00:06:00] whether we would have a place to live because a lot of the housing was taken up by people with second homes. And plenty of people I went to school with because it's a surfing area took the knowledge that they learned in the tourism trade, and actually left and went to Australia. And they live on the Gold Coast now. So it's this self perpetuating thing, you know? Chris: Well, that leads me to my next question, which kind of centers around belonging and being rooted and learning to root, maybe even becoming a neighbor or some might say a citizen of a place.And with tourism or a touristic worldview, we seem to be largely stunted in our ability to know a place, to become part of that place in any significant or enduring sense of the word. And so, I'm curious what your thoughts are on what it means to know a place, [00:07:00] and perhaps on the often mad rush to say I know a place for the sake of social capital, you know, given the context of the kind of relative difficulties that one might incur, or in a place like Cornwall, and the relative degree of exile that forces people out.What do you think it means to know a place in the context of all of these economic pressures denying us that possibility, or at least making it really, really difficult. Craig: I think we have a real problem in modernity with the idea of knowing as a sense of capture, right? So if I know you, I have this boundary of this shape, this outline of Chris, right, that I can hold, that I can grasp. And I think sometimes when we say, "oh, I know a place," or, "oh, I know a person" there's no concept of the [00:08:00] ongoing relationality. You know, you capture the image and then you keep it. And it's a whole construct of extractive knowledge that really, I think, comes down to the idea that the humans are the ones who get to decide what a place is, right?So. I could say in the standard sense, "Oh, I know Cornwall because I, you know, I grew up there for nearly 20 years." My family has been there since about the 1500s. You know, "I know a place, it's in my bones." Yada yada yada. All the metaphors you want to use. But the fact of the matter is, the place itself influences me more than I influence it. So there's this strange sense of belonging in which modernity [00:09:00] says "I belong" or "it belongs to me" rather than perhaps the place has extended hospitality to me and allowed me to grow and I could live/work in a place for 30 years and never know it because we're not comfortable as a culture with the idea of going, "I don't know this place."And it's a variety. It's always changing. And I think about all the times I used to watch the sea and talk to folks whose parents were fishermen or lifeboatmen, and they'd be like, "Yeah, we know the waters, but the waters can change. We know roughly what they do under certain conditions, but we don't know them completely, because they can always surprise us."And So, when somebody says, "oh, you're from Cornwall, you're a Cornishman," and all that sense of identity, [00:10:00] I'm like, "yeah, but that's, that's both really fluid for me, because, you know, there's a lot of history." Is it the tourist world of the 20th and 21st century, or is it the farming and the mining that goes back to the Neolithic?How we relate to a place purely in a modern sense isn't, to my mind anyway, the only way to conceive of belonging because, even though I'm now 300 miles away from there, I have its isotopes, its minerals from drinking the water in my teeth, you know. So, on some level, the idea that you have to be in a place also to belong to a place is something that I'm curious about because, there's this whole notion, [00:11:00] "you're only in the place and you've been in a place for this long and that means you know it and you're local." Whereas growing up, there was this sort of weird thing where it was like, "yeah, you might have been here 30 years and everybody knows you, but you're not a local." Right? You still belong, but there was this other category of " you're not local or something like that."And so it's complicated, but I really do, for my personal take, tend to look at it as a, the landscape, or wherever it is, influences my sense of belonging in a non human context, or more than human context, if that makes sense. Chris: Hmm. Yeah, there's so much there. Yeah. I mean, I'm also, in the context of identity, also wondering in what ways, not only has the tourism industry shaped one's identity of being local, which [00:12:00] is, I think, a huge issue in over touristed places in the last, you know, 10 or 20 years, as identity politics rises into the mainstream, and but then also not just the industry and the interaction with foreigners or, or guests, or tourists, but the way in which the image of that place is crafted through, often, ministries of culture or heritage, you know, so you could grow up in a place that isn't necessarily overly touristed or anything like that. But then have your identity crafted by these ideas of culture or heritage that the government's, federal and otherwise, have placed on people.Craig: And especially because where I come from, Cornwall, actually had its own language, which died out, which was on the verge of dying out in the 19th century. And slowly there are more speakers of it now. And you go back there now and you'll find, [00:13:00] even when I was growing up it wasn't so prevalent, but you'll find a lot of the signs for the street signs will have the English and the Cornish.So that's where the government has embraced this identity and enhanced it after people have been saying, you know, "this is a language we've rebuilt it. It's cousin to Welsh and Breton. We should use it. It's part of our identity and it's got folded into that." And so the infrastructure itself is now been part of that. You know, those very same streets have a name that wasn't known for like, 50, 60, maybe to 80 years, and suddenly people are now deliberately using the old names in non English languages because of that. And it's very strange because, especially in the UK, what with all [00:14:00] of Brexit and all that, there is a very weird sense wherein the rest of England, i. e. North and London and those sort of areas don't understand because Cornwall was a peripheral area and much like Wales, there's a lot of distrust of central government. Hmm. So, you've got this whole construction of a personal identity of nobody actually really understands what goes on outside. Either they're incomers, either they're emmets. You know, which "emmets" is the old English for "ants." Referring to tourists as ants in a kind of, yeah, they get everywhere. And the whole notion of who we are is always constructed. But in that case, going away and coming back to visit, I'm going, "Well that street didn't [00:15:00] have that label on it when I left. But it does now. And so in a certain sense it's the same place, but it's got this overlay of somewhere different that really enhances that sense of layers for me of "which Cornwall?" "Which of any of these places are we talking about?"Like you say, is it the one you see on a picture postcard or an Instagram or is it the ones who sat there as kids going, right, 'there's nothing to do, let's go and drink in a field?' You know and all of these things can co exist.Chris: Hmm, right. Yeah, I just interviewed a friend of mine, Christos Galanis, who did his PhD on hillwalkers, as well as homecomers in the Scottish Highlands, so people who spend their weekends climbing, summiting the Highland Mountains, and also the Canadian or Americans who travel to Scotland on heritage trips or ancestral [00:16:00] journeys. And he mentioned how in the Highlands that the governments have placed the original Gaelic place names on all of the the signs there, whether you're entering a village or perhaps on the street signs as well.And that he said that something like "only three percent of the of the people in Scotland actually speak, speak Gaelic," so they see the sign, they see the name, the vast majority of people, and they have no idea what it means. And I also remember the last time I was in Toronto, which is where I'm from originally, or where I grew up.And my family grew up in the east end of town, and the main thoroughfare in the east end of town is largely referred to as "Greek Town." You know, when I was a kid it was certainly Greek Town. The Greek letters, the Greek alphabet names as well as the English names of the street signs in that area.But it's much, much, much less Greek than it was 25 years ago, right? So again, [00:17:00] this question of like, is that to some extent trying to solidify the kind of cultural geography of a place. That people come to that street and that neighborhood because they want to experience Greekness in its diasporic kind of context.And yet, so many of those people, so many of those families have moved on or moved along or become more Canadian in their own sense of the word, so. Craig: Yeah. It's very strange as well because things like that attract... there's a loop obviously, because you'll get people coming to experience the greekness or the cornishes, and people will be like, oh, we should open a business that will enhance the greekness or the Cornish of the place, and that will draw, and it just becomes this thing and, yeah.Yeah, it's very strange. And I would totally agree with you on that one. Chris: Yeah. [00:18:00] Yeah. Until like a Greek person from Greece or a Cornish grandmother comes into town and says like, what? No, that's not Yeah. Oh, yeah. So I'd like to shift the conversation, Craig, a little bit towards ableism, and begin with this question that comes from our dear mutual friend Aerin and who admits that she's happily robbed it directly from Fiona Kumari Campbell.Yes. So, you might have heard this question before but she she felt the need to kind of pose it anew and and so the question is this. How does disability productively color our lives and Aerin wanted to ask it, to modify it slightly and ask, how does disability generatively or creatively color our lives? Craig: I can't speak to anybody's life other than my own really. But I would say that for me disability has, [00:19:00] one, given me a real sort of ability to look at the world and go, "you guys think this is how everything works and it clearly doesn't."You know, it has given me a generative gift of going, "hold on, what people think of the default really isn't the default, because I was never born as the default, and so I've had to find my own way of relating to the world" and that means that anybody goes anytime anybody goes "Oh, well, everybody knows..." or "the only way to do it is this?" I am always going "are you absolutely sure about that?" You know, "are you absolutely sure that what you're looking at or experiencing or noticing is only perceivable in one way, it's only ever [00:20:00] frameable, in one context?" But also this idea for me that disability is simply a fact.It's not good or bad. It is a thing that exists in the world and ableism is essentially the urge to measure against the vast field of disability and impairment and go, "We don't want that. That's the worst thing to be. So, we will strive to not be that." As Fiona Kumari Campbell would say, " It sets up a ranking and notification and prioritization of sentient life."So, this is why we, to a certain extent, we have such a obsession with youth culture. Young, healthy, fit folks are in some way better than the elderly. Oh god, nobody wants [00:21:00] to get old cause, if you're of white extraction, "oh, they'll probably stick you in a home."Nobody wants to conceive of the idea that actually you can have a generative and intimate relationship with somebody, not necessarily a romantic one, but a deep, deep friendship that also involves, frankly to put it crudely, perhaps wiping somebody's arse, right? There's this whole notion of messiness and failure and why Aerin reworded it from "productive" to "generative" is that whole idea of being productive, of having capitalist use, to produce, to make for purposes. And for me, disability and the field of disability in which I exist says "I exist and I don't have to be productive." it really [00:22:00] challenges the capitalist framework for me. And also, ableism, because it's set up to rank things like speed, mobility, all kinds of things like that, having a disability where you're sitting there going, but there are other ways to do this. There are other ways to exist. To notice the way our bodies move that are mostly ignored in the sense of "yeah, we don't pay attention to our posture or our muscle structure or what our guts are doing because we're all already forced along to the next thing.You know, we're already touring from, "okay, I've got up in the morning. Next thing I've got to do is have breakfast," right? And if you can easily shift between those stages, so you get up in the morning, start your breakfast, put your clothes on easily. [00:23:00] You don't think about it as much, but if it takes you 10, 20 minutes to even get out of bed and you have to do specific things, maybe exercises, maybe things like that, the whole process thickens.And in a sense, for me, it's an antithesis to escapism because there are things you cannot escape. There are things you have to deal with. And because there are things you have to deal with, you have to pay attention to them more. And that means the most ordinary mundane thing becomes or can become, if you're willing to gently sense it, a lot richer.So, this is one of those interesting things where if people want to go places to experience new things, Okay, that's a whole issue that you've obviously talked about throughout the podcast, but there is a certain sense in [00:24:00] which we don't even know where we started from. We've not explored our own bodies.I mean, I wrote a piece in 2020 when all the lockdowns hit that got shared around various bits of the internet and I think even in the newspaper at one point in, but I got a request to syndicate it, of how to exist when you're stuck in your house. You know, what do you do to "keep," in inverted commas, "sane," which, of course, is an ableist framework, but what do you do to stop yourself from losing mental health? How do you function? And I broke it down and I sort of made practical suggestions of, this is how I, as somebody that doesn't actually have a, quotes, "normal life," and spends a lot of his time unable to travel or go out much, stops myself from feeling isolated, [00:25:00] because I've ended up having to learn to explore what some might regard as a limited domain.But to me, that limited area, that limited domain has given me this sense of vastness that's, you know, I can't remember which philosopher it is, but there is a philosopher who basically says, I think it is a Camus, who says "you just need to reopen when you're in your room and the whole world will reveal itself to you."And when you don't have a choice, when you're stuck in chronic pain, or sickness, or something like that and you have to work out what to do with your limited energy, to embrace life, there becomes a sort of challenge, to go, "okay, how can I feel like things are enriching? How can I, almost metabolize the things that other people would reject.⌘ Chris Christou ⌘ is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.You know, [00:26:00] because disability is so "Oh, it's so sad he's disabled. Or we've got the cure for this and that. And we've got to cure it." And it's not really about ameliorating suffering. Which is a good thing. It's an analoid good to ameliorate any form of suffering. But there is this sense that the only way to perceive the world is through a so called "non disabled" abled body.The only way to experience a rich world, and again, I'm not knocking people who do a lot of travelling per se, but the only way to experience the world is to go on long journeys, and backpack and explore you know, new ways of thinking. That's great. And I'm not saying you can do exactly the same at home, but you can also become radically hospitable to yourself and to the environment in which you find [00:27:00] yourself.And that opens a whole lot of doors that I think I would regard as generatively colouring life and revealing life. In a way that was possibly occluded before. Chris: Yeah, I mean, so much of what I've come to in the research around tourism and hypermobility is this question of limits.And that certainly comes up in other themes, in other contexts. But not just the limits to one's place. Like, where does your place end? But also the limits of the human body. And, when we talk about freedom generally in the West, or in, in the context of modernity, it's so often pinned or underpinned via the freedom of movement, in part, because I know you're coming from the other side of the Atlantic, but certainly in, in this part of the [00:28:00] world, in the Americas and especially North America, freedom is understood as freedom of movement because that's in part how, the states and, and the nation's existences are justified.And so, I would just ask you what you think of that in the context of freedom being, of course a synonym for liberation. And how so many of our western notions of freedom are attached to movement and have. To a large degree become glorified in the hyper mobility of our times.Craig: I would agree with you. I think it was always there because of the colonial urge, but I think North American notions of freedom have, through a certain cultural hegemony, filtered back. You get it in the media, even Star Trek, you know, the final frontier, you know. Things like that. Or wide open spaces. There's still this notion of, freedom to move, room to live. It has its own European context and [00:29:00] horrors, unfortunately.But also, I think the notion of freedom as freedom to move. There is a question there for me, because I'm not sure we know what we're doing when we move. Right? And one of the questions that always was raised for me is, if I raise my finger, as I'm doing now, and I bend it so it's 90 degrees, how did I do that?What did I do? Well, science would say, okay, you used all your tendons and so on and so forth, and I'm like, yeah, "okay, those are nice descriptors. But what did I actually do?" Where's the connection between the impulse and the urge to bend my finger? Right. I don't know what I did there. I just thought I'm gonna bend my finger and the [00:30:00] finger bent But there's a whole bunch of stuff going on.So when I'm thinking about freedom of movement First the question is, "freedom to move in what way?" Right? So the the classic example is, in perhaps North America and and English speaking countries is "to go where I want, when I want, with none to to gainsay me, none to say you can't go there," which has been problematized thanks to the history of enclosure of land and capture by state and political actors, but also this notion that if you get into a city and you can go and people go, "Oh, I'm free to go wherever I want."I always sit there and I'm going, "yes, but you can go wherever you want, but if a place has stairs and no lift..." right? I [00:31:00] can't go there. So do I have less freedom? Well, according to the traditional notions of freedom, yes. I am less free. When I grew up, as an example in the UK I went to America when I was about four or five, and I was absolutely stunned by the amount of public toilets that had a disabled toilet.Right? Because virtually nowhere where I grew up at that point had a disabled toilet. This was due to the fact that the U. S. has a disability rights movement that was slightly ahead of the U. K. 's. So I was freer to go about my holiday in the U. S. than I was technically at home. I couldn't go certain places because there weren't toilets, or there weren't ramps, because that had not been legalized. You know, there'd been no legislation. In the UK, there was [00:32:00] no disability legislation until 1995. You know, so technically, I was born in 1981. I had no specific extra legal rights that I needed for 14 years. Now some would say, "oh, that, you've got freedom there... the law has given you freedom.It's giving you the ability to move, but it's only given me the ability to move in approved ways, right? And so every single time somebody talks about room to move, my query is always, okay. "One, as I said, move in what way? And two, who taught you what method of movement is approved or disproved?" So, particularly in Europe, we have folks like the Romani, the Irish travellers, [00:33:00] even the so called New Age travellers, right, who are nomadic folks.And despite this obsession with freedom, the idea that people are nomadic, are shiftless and rootless, still exists. Yes, a degree. The degree of privilege, the degree that I could be, quote, "more confident going into public spaces." And you'll see this in American history and throughout European history as well.And when I was talking about the nomadic folks, I was saying, you know, there are only certain people who are allowed to move in certain ways, to travel in certain ways that are approved. In similar ways with disability there were only certain kinds of people who were allowed into public spaces.They might not have been legislated against in the mid twentieth century. They might have struck those off the books, but at [00:34:00] various points, at least in the US, if you look up the Chicago Ugly Laws, people who were regarded as vagrants or unsightly, were not allowed in public spaces. They could be jailed for that.It's not just loitering. It was very much anything that could give offense because they were physically disabled. Or, the idea that the physically disabled are more likely to be begging or doing things like that. That was all folded in. So, this notion of freedom as the ability to move and move in space.Despite the North American urge to be like, "well, nobody can tell me what to do." There's still a certain level of certain forms of movement are privileged or regarded as normal versus others. So, you know it's weird if you don't stay [00:35:00] in one place or perhaps, it's weird if you don't have a reason for your seasonal job, right?When I was a kid and a teenager... like I said, where I grew up was kind of known for surfing, right? And I met folks who would come from places like Australia and live in Volkswagen transporter vans and work in the seasonal hotels and then go surfing. And then sometimes in the winter they disappear off to Morocco.And you wouldn't see them for six months and they'd come back and there's all this kind of idea of Differing rhythms, which has really influenced my entire life because those folks, they were there there were hundreds of them you could see them parked on every road and I knew several of them very very well, but the fact of those seasonal rhythms, which weren't [00:36:00] approved. It wasn't approved that they didn't stay in one place and pay taxes. To some that might be, you know, "Oh, that's freedom! That's telling the government, I don't have to pay your taxes or I don't have to stay in one place and be a registered visible citizen. I can be a free spirit and go to Morocco whenever I want. But, the fact of it is, if you walked on the, on the roads, people would look at you funny, right?If you look at people who do long distance walking in areas that are drivable, I mean, especially I guess in North America, that's looked at as very, very, very strange, because you guys don't have the infrastructure. So, for me, it's this really strange notion that we're fixated on particular kinds of movement to do with agency and power, right?And we, we will say, "oh, [00:37:00] that's mobile, that's fast, that's quick, that's agile." And I'm always curious about what criteria we're using to say, "oh, that's fast, that's agile, that's nimble," when you look at the so called natural world, and you've got plants that are seemingly immobile, but they actually turn to the sun.You just don't notice it until you stick it on a stop motion camera. And then you're like, "wow, they move." But you could go past that plant every single day and be like, "yeah, it doesn't move. It's a plant. It just stays there." Right? Because our perception of what movement is and what is approved is based around one, what we're taught and two, what we see every day.But also three. What we can't notice unless we're forced to look at the same thing over and over again, right? [00:38:00] Because our tendency is to see one thing, think, "Oh, I know it. I've spotted it. I know what it is. I've identified it. It's fitted into my matrix of identity. I can move on now. It's all sorted." But the whole ethos, I guess, that I'm coming at iswhat if you don't know? What if you don't know? What if that microphone that I'm speaking into and you're speaking into it looks like a particular thing and you think you could describe a microphone to somebody but go down to say the flows of the electrons and it's a context issue. You know? And, and So, I'm interested in thinking about what are the contexts are in the room with us right now that we're not even paying any attention to, and not even in the room, in our own bodies, in our own language.Chris: Wow. Yeah, again, there's so much there. My [00:39:00] my thoughts just flew off into a million different directions. And I feel like it would probably take me a while to to gather them in.Craig: No problem. You do what you need to do. I mean, that's, that's the whole point. Chris: Yeah. So I had a queer crip travel writer named Bani Amor on the podcast in season three.And we were talking about the fallout and the consequences of the COVID 19 pandemic. And she said something like, you know, "the settler can't stay still. That the pandemic showed us that we can't stay still." In the context of that time that so many people who had been engaged in and who glorify or who simply have been taught to live a hyper mobile life, that there was this opportunity to question [00:40:00] that, to bring it into a different context.And I know a lot of people, couldn't necessarily leave their houses in the quote unquote lockdowns. But I don't think that wouldn't necessarily stop people from tending to or allowing themselves to witness the more than human world in that way. And so, my question is, assuming we have the opportunity, in some manner, in any manner, how do you think we might have our understandings of movements subverted, or at least challenged, by virtue of looking at the movement in the more than human world.Craig: Great question. I think one of the biggest notions, and I just want to return to that phrase, "the settler can't stay still." And really, agree with that, and so add to secondary things of what actually is stillness, right? We have [00:41:00] this idea of stillness as immobility, as, as, as perhaps staying in one place.Not moving, but actually, if we look at what we're doing when we're actually apparently still, there's still movement going on, right? There's still movement going on in our bodies. There's still a different kind of mobility going. And we're not the only ones, right? The more than human does this exactly as well.If you look at a rock, oh, you think a rock doesn't move? I mean, it doesn't move, but then you have erosion, right? Then you have the rain, and the way that particles are shaved off it, and it shifts. So, when we're thinking about outside, when we're thinking about... and when I say "more than [00:42:00] human," I'm not saying "better than human," I'm saying "exceeding the human," I just want to make that clear, it exceeds the boundaries of the human. Disability as mutual friend Bayo would define it is, I believe he said "it's a failure of power to contain itself." So, that's Bayo Akomolafe. And this notion that the world and the modern human flows through and beyond any sort of boundary, right? So, any outline we form is not immune in the sense of there's no boardwalk, right?A wall is not an untouchable upright edifice. It's actually touched and permeated, right? So everything in the more than human context interrelates and is, to a certain extent, degrees of [00:43:00] permeable. So, yeah, our cells keep certain things out, and let certain things in, but even the things they keep out, they're in contact with.They're relating to. Right? Because in the same way, with COVID 19 vaccine, people think, "oh, it's a vaccine. It's immunity, right? It'll stop me getting COVID. Or it'll stop me getting this, or stop me getting that." What it actually does is it has an interaction with your, the vaccine has an interaction with your immune system.There's a dialogue, there's a discussion, a call and response, which then engenders further responses in your body, right? So, there's constant relation that is ongoing. So, nothing is one and done, right? To borrow from Stefano Hani and Fred Moten No motion is ever completed, right? Nothing's [00:44:00] ever finished. It's not like we're gonna get off this and, and you'll be like, "oh, I've finished recording the podcast." Sure, you've hit the stop recording button, but the recording of the podcast is still ongoing. And there's this fundamental ongoingness, which is a product of the world.The world is worlding, right? And that means the most ordinary, mundane thing you can think of is ongoing. The mug I have right in front of me right now with tea in it. It's ceramic. It's been painted, but it's still ongoing, right? It still has the relation to the machines that shaped it. And it also has this ongoingness with the human history of pottery.Right? And people go, Oh, that's ridiculous. That's not practical. You know, "it's a mug," but I always [00:45:00] think. Isn't that just commodification? Like, is that not just saying it's a commodity, it doesn't have a story? Like, I don't want to get all Marxist here, but there's that real alienation from ongoingness and the fact that we also are ongoing attempts at relation. We're not even fixed identities. Our movements cannot be technically circumscribed because I have a disability which means I can't dance. Right? I use a wheelchair. I can't dance. I can't do the tango. Right? Okay. But everybody uses dance in a context of bopping to the music and doing all this thing and it's a bit like freedom. You know, everybody assumes that dance is a particular thing.But as Bayo and We Will Dance with Mountains, the course, the whole point of it being [00:46:00] called We Will Dance with Mountains is the fact that mountains don't dance like humans. Mountains dance like mountains. And the only way we spot how mountains dance is to actually pay attention to them and attempt to relate to them.We can't get out of our framework completely, but we can be open to say, what does our framework for a mountain miss about those massive landforms? What are we missing when we say a mountain doesn't move? And that's where you have references to indigenous and local stories that actually talk about these landforms, these places, these folklore places, as the living, moving beings that they actually are.Hmm. You know. Yeah, "okay, that stone circle over there was because a bunch of women were dancing on a [00:47:00] Sunday and in a Christian country, that's bad, so they got turned to stone," or in Scandinavia, "that rock there, it's actually a troll that got caught out in the sun." that these are living, ongoing beings and events, which it's not woo, it's actual or intellectual, I think.If you look at anything for long enough, you start to notice what's ongoing with it, even something that's solid and fixed. And that, to me, the gripping is the bending of the perception, right? That is queering, but crip-queering is that point where you have the restriction involved. People will talk about queer liberation, and yeah, we want crip liberation. That's cool. But if you think about crip liberation as, it might actually be the limits that bring us liberation.And then, if you track back [00:48:00] into mythologies long enough. You've got figures like Dionysus or then poetic gods who say, they're the ones that fetter you. They can bind you, but they can also set you free. And that is really interesting to me that a lot of these liberational figures also have a side that they can tie you up.And I don't just mean in a bondage sense. It's this notion that the two things, the two complexes are part of a whole thing, and you can't divide it into restricted and free and you can't escape. You can't pull a Harry Houdini from existence, which, to a certain extent, some people, when they go on holiday, engage in tourism, they're trying to escape for a little while, their other lives. But we all know you can't escape them. Mm-Hmm. But the inescapability of it is not bad. Right. By default, it's not [00:49:00] bad. It can be, but the assumption something is inescapable, just like, oh, something is disabling. Mm-Hmm. the assumption of good and bad. If you can hold that in abeyance and actually look at it for a second and go, Okay, what's going on here?Maybe our conceptions of this need reevaluating. Now the reason we don't do this on the regular, even in modernity, is because it takes a lot of effort and time to focus. And that's another benefit that I get as a disabled person, right? Because I can't use my time for a whole bunch of things that non disabled folks can.So I've got more time, I've got a different relationship to time and space, which means that I can sit and look at things with that differing relation to time and space, and be like "Huh, I never noticed that." And then I get to talk [00:50:00] about this stuff to folks like you, and people get surprised.And they're like, "you think about this all the day." I'm like, "no, I don't think about this. This is my life. This is how I live. This is my embrace of life, right? And this is my freedom to literally, Be like, " well, okay, my restrictions. How do they actually open me to the world?" And I'm not offering a prescription here, because everybody's different.But it strikes me that even the most nomadic person always carry stuff with them, right? And to borrow from Ursula K. Le Guin with her "Carrier Bag Story of Fiction," which Bayo talked about in We Will Dance The Mountains, the idea of what we're carrying is really interesting, but how often do we rummage in our own bags?Hmm. [00:51:00] Right? How often do we take off our backpacks and rummage just for the sake of it? Often we just look in the backpacks for something specific. Hmm. Right? Oh, I need a map. Oh, I need a chocolate bar. Oh, I need my, you know my iPad. We rarely stick our hands in and notice the way our clothing might shift around our fingers or the way, you know, the waterproofing is possibly coming off and means that the fabric has these different textures because we don't take the time and there's nothing wrong with that, but it's the fact that we don't have that relationship to time and space.And babies, kids do. It's why kids put things in their mouth. All those things where you're like, "Oh no, don't put that in your mouth, it's bad for you." They don't know that. But the whole point of putting it in their mouth and feeling it is to try and not [00:52:00] understand it, not get it.There's nothing there in a baby in its early function that says, "I must understand what that is." The understanding comes upon you through experience. But there's no bit, at least as far as I can work out, that's like, "I must understand what it is that I'm putting in my mouth."It's more like, "hmm, that tastes interesting, it has some interesting textures," and then your brain does all the work or your brain and your body mind do all the work, but the personhood isn't also doing all the work, just like the "I" of my body, right, my relationship with the "I", as in my sense of self, I have to expand that to my entire body, You know, because there's so much going on right now in this conversation that I'm not aware of, right?There's stuff going on in my room that I'm [00:53:00] not aware of, but it's going on now. And so I have to expand and that expansiveness also means I sometimes have to venture into realms of pain, right? Because I have chronic pain. And in order to fully experience that, sometimes I have to encounter that pain.I have to slow down and focus and go, "Oh, the chronic pain that I was mostly ignoring because just in the background, it suddenly leaped to the fore because I'm paying attention." Now, modernity says you shouldn't do that. You shouldn't do stuff that causes you pain. Understandable in a certain context, but If I didn't understand that the pain was also part of the experience and changes how I move, if I didn't understand that chronic pain changes how time stretches, then I wouldn't be where I am.So the more than human permeates the human in ways [00:54:00] that the human is either deliberately trained to deny or doesn't even know is going on and the pandemic basically was, in my eyes, the more than human kind of knocking on the door going you are not this completely hermetically sealed box, right? Your society is not a hermetically sealed box. Chris: Amen. Amen. I mean, could have gone in a lot of different directions, but here we are, at least being able to reflect on it in a good way, and I'm reminded, this notion of abeyance and attention and, and the expansion of the I.I'm reminded of this, this line from Simone Weil who said that "absolutely unmixed attention is prayer." And so, I think that it, something like that is worthy of the times we, we wish to live in and perhaps sometimes do. Craig: [00:55:00] Definitely.Chris: And so, you know, I wish we had more time, Craig really getting into some beautiful black holes there. But hopefully we get the opportunity to speak again sometime.Craig: I'd be, be happy to. Be happy to. Chris: And so before we depart, I'd just like to ask the kind of token question that always comes at the end of interviews, which is where can our listeners find your work?And I'm pretty sure you had a book that came out last year entitled, Goetic Atavisms, if I'm not mistaken. Craig: Yes, I did. So you can find me on my mostly moribund, but strange little blog at cold-albion.net. And you can also pick up the book, which is, to be clear, more of an occult angle on this, but it also brings in the disability angle directly from the publisher Hadean Press or you could get it from, you know, the Bezos Behemoth, if you really [00:56:00] wanted. I am also not really on social media as a project, but I'm also on you know Blue Sky, so you can search me up there, or Mastodon, which you could always search me up there, and I occasionally post things on there.Chris: Wonderful. Well, I'll make sure that all those links and connections are available for our listeners once the episode launches. And I very much look forward to reading Goetic Activisms myself. So, thank you so much, Craig.Chris: Thank you, Chris. Get full access to ⌘ Chris Christou ⌘ at chrischristou.substack.com/subscribe

On this episode, my guests are Jesse Mann (editor-director) and Tyson Sadler (director), the brains behind the documentary The Last Tourist. Jesse is both a picture editor and director whose professional work has spanned commercial, tv and film projects. The Last Tourist is her second feature film as editor. Her first film, as both editor and director, Material Success, screened internationally and won the Audience Choice at the Canadian Film Festival and Best Film at the Canadian Film Festival (2012). Most recently, she both directed and edited the online horror mini-series “The Confinement” (2021). She is a member of the Directors Guild of Canada and an associate member of the Canadian Cinema Editors. Jesse has an B.F.A. from Ryerson University's School of Image Arts.Tyson Sadler is an explorer, traveller and award-winning filmmaker. He has directed video content and documentaries for The New York Times, Associated Press, and The Huffington Post. His films have been screened at festivals around the world including Tribeca Film Festival, South by Southwest, The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival. An early pioneer i virtual reality documentary, he has worked tirelessly to use cutting edge technology to tell stories that build empathy around causes such as climate change, forced migration, and human rights.Show Notes:The Film's InceptionIndustry PolarityRegulating TravelAddressing the Root ProblemsGreenwashing Animal and Child Welfare TourismHow the Wealth Gap Increased During COVIDWhat was Left on the Cutting Room FloorHomework:WATCH THE FILM HEREThe Last Tourist Film Website | Instagram | FacebookThe Last Tourist TrailerJesse Mann's Website | InstagramTyson Sadler's Website | InstagramTranscript:Chris: Welcome Jesse and Tyson to the End of Tourism Podcast. Jesse: Thanks Chris for having us. Tyson: Thanks for having us. Chris: Thank you so much for joining me today to talk about your documentary film, The Last Tourist. So, it was released in 2022 to great reception.And as you might imagine, many of my listeners have pointed me in its direction. And after watching the film, I found myself really grateful that people finally approached these themes in the medium of documentary filmmaking and with what seemed to be a budget to do justice to what those themes confront. And so first I'd like to ask you two how The Last Tourist got started and what the inspiration behind the film's creation was and how did you decide to write a treatment for it? Tyson: Ultimately, you know, I think the inspiration for The Last Tourist came from a combination of personal shared experience and a shared passion for travel and particularly responsible travel.You know, in early 2018, I was approached [00:01:00] by the executive producers to write a treatment, for a short film around responsible tourism in the country of Peru. And through, you know, some follow up conversations, we sort of quickly realized that we had an opportunity because, a large scale documentary, on the subject of responsible tourism just didn't exist yet. I mean, we have wonderful films out there which challenge our conversations with our relationship with climate change and our relationship with our food source like An Inconvenient Truth or like Food Inc., but we didn't at that time yet have a documentary which really challenged our perceptions of the global impact of the travel and tourism industry and so over conversations with with our team and the producers we quickly realized that we had a unique opportunity to make "An Inconvenient Truth" for the travel industry and in early 2018, we seized on that opportunity to explore the positive and negative impacts of tourism on destinations.Jesse: And I think just to add to what Tyson was saying, I think originally [00:02:00] it started off as a short project and yourself and the executive producers who brought us together kind of pushed for it to become the large scale project that had ended up being filmed in 15 different countries or 16 with 400 hours of footage.So, sometimes you don't know, especially myself as a co-writer and editor, when you come on to a project, in the initial stages, you think, "Oh, you know, this is wonderful. It sounds like a great project." I had been an avid traveler, lived in a few different countries over 20 years and I thought, yeah, this is a story that needs to be told, but I will say in no way in the beginning, did I ever think it was going to be, and I think Tyson didn't either, was it going to be such a huge project. And you comment, Chris, on the expansiveness of the subject and the different kind of facets of the tourism [00:03:00] industry we were able to look at.And really I have to say that I'm happy that we got to touch on all those points and to the chagrin of my personal sleep and Tyson's as well, but it started off small, I have to say that, and it grew into something tremendous that I think we're very proud of.Tyson: It really was a natural progression of our desire to raise awareness about responsible tourism and its consequences. We had our world premiere, honestly, I think it was about two years ago now at the Vancouver International Film Festival, two years ago. And a little over two years ago, a little over two years ago.And the film is still doing a festival run. Just last weekend, Jesse was at the the Innsbruck Film Festival and it's still been getting a wonderful response, great conversations around it. And we're streaming on platforms around the world, you know, Crave in Canada, Hulu in the U.S., Amazon Prime in other countries. I was just in French Polynesia and was able to find our film on Amazon Prime, which was really delightful [00:04:00] to see that. Jesse: Yeah, it makes us happy as filmmakers to know that the story that we spent a lot of time trying to create in a way that we thought would connect with audiences worldwide is actually getting out there. And so it's really nice to be speaking to you on your podcast as well and kind of extend that out to potentially more people who haven't seen the film or some who just want to talk more about the topics. Chris: And I wanted to ask you two, given the fact that the film was released, you know, still very much in a pandemic during the, the COVID 19 times what the reactions were given the fact that tourism had ground to a halt in that time you know, I received a lot of Mail regarding your film, like, ah, you have to check this out.You have to watch this, right? And so a lot of people really excited about the project, about the film. But then I guess I'm also curious about[00:05:00] if there was much of an industry backlash in regards to the degree of sincerity perhaps around which the film exhibited these kind of deep and sometimes dire consequences that visit themselves on places and people in the name of tourism.Tyson: Yeah. I think the reactions to the film have been in my experience, almost entirely positive. But people don't come to me with criticism, they come to me with congratulations, but I think there's a lot of individuals in the tourism industry and sponsors that have really welcomed our film, The Last Tourist, as a necessary and eye opening piece of work.It sparked a lot of interesting conversations and prompted the industry to, in many ways, I think, reevaluate some of their practices. You Jesse: If we back it up to when we were just when we were meeting with all of the different professionals that we interviewed across the different facets of the tourism industry, I mean, when you and I were writing the story, there were so [00:06:00] many different conflicting opinions on how to solve one issue that we still come across that sometimes when we meet those industry experts outside of, let's say, film audiences.Because When we were writing it, we had to kind of decide which side of the coin we were going to follow through our story with, and whether it's a topic of let's say regulation, that was a topic that Tyson and I had a lot of conversations about when we were making the film because the industry in itself is kind of very polarized in terms of regulation.There's some strong proponents within the tourism industry who want regulation. And then there's some who are very against it. And Tyson and I had a lot of conversations about that. And I think we still do when we meet certain industry professionals out there and I think that's a really important topic as well.[00:07:00] Now that you are bringing up, post covid and the pandemic where we saw kind of what happens when things are shut down. You know, we see both the positive and the negative. I mean we mentioned it in the film, but almost every single person that we interviewed in our film lost their means of income during that time. Gone.And at the same time, the world experienced kind of you know, a refuge from, you know, airplane emissions and damage to destinations. And, you know, these were calculable things like we could see that this was a definite impact. So, I think there's these kind of topics and these conversations are where we see a lot of polarity.And I think that we tried our best to focus on the people and the developing nations in our story. But, there are a lot [00:08:00] of stories that were left on the cutting room floor and so it is good to discuss them after in a podcast like this. I know that's kind of a long winded interjection, but I do believe that we do have some polarity for sure Tyson and I have come across, but just not in terms of what Tyson is talking about, in terms of not not so much with the audiences It is more a bit in the industry. Tyson: I'll share an observation. During the process of creating this film, we interviewed literally dozens of travel experts, you know from academics to tour operators across the industry.It's universally recognized that responsible tourism and sustainable tourism is a good thing. But then when we dive a little bit deeper I found a very fractured kind of industry because everybody believes that they know how to do responsible tourism, right. And everybody else, often, isn't executing responsible tourism correctly.And so, on a foundational level, sure, we all believe in responsible tourism, but I think, the approach at how we get there isn't universally accepted, throughout the industry, and I think [00:09:00] that that's, on a basic level, we kind of explore those themes in the film as well as we interview people who kind of take different approaches to how to engage responsibly with tourists and host communities.Jesse: And we had to make some hard decisions, obviously based on the research that was coming in on what side we wanted to promote in the story. But sometimes I think it's fair to say, Tyson, if you agree with me that we did try to leave it a bit more open for audiences to try to make their own decision based on what we had learned, because it's not always an easy answer for every situation.It's quite nuanced, I think. Tyson: Absolutely. Chris: And you mentioned Jesse, regulation. In terms of the people you interviewed and your research, generally speaking, what does that look like, or what might that look like in particular locales or within the industry?Jesse: Well, I think we've seen quite a bit of it post pandemic because where we thought there was going to be [00:10:00] an ease back into traveling that has not happened. All the reports are coming back in that tourism is back up in droves and a lot of the same problems, if not more are back with travel again.And so we've seen places like Machu Picchu has started regulating the amount of people that are able to visit annually. Worldwide, there's different popular tourist destinations who have decided to limit the amount of tourism and tourists that come to certain destinations.You know, I think when it comes to destinations, we just have to be really careful that it doesn't become a tax that is elitist because that happens a lot with regulation across the board. You've seen it with cigarettes, you've seen it with airfare as well. You're paying a higher price for travel. And although I do believe personally and Tyson, you [00:11:00] can speak to this as well, but because we haven't discussed this recently, but when you put a strong tariff or tax on travel, I think it is important, but I think it has to be calculated so that it's not elitist because if we only have people traveling in the world who can afford it, if it becomes so unaffordable, this is totally against the core value of travel, which is to unite all people of all different socioeconomic statuses and really connect with different cultures and people, and if it's just suddenly becomes for people who can afford a really overpriced flight, I think that will completely take away the value of the core value of travel.But I do strongly believe that, and this I think is a very controversial thing to say. I do believe that things have to be regulated and there has to be something done, especially about the amount of flights that are happening on this planet. Because, you know, for instance, I don't know the statistics for Canada, but I was looking at it the other day for[00:12:00] the UK.And I think something like 70 percent of all flights in the UK are taken by 15 percent of the population, and I don't doubt that that's very similar for a lot of the Western world without knowing all the statistics specifically, so I think that that has to be really taken into consideration when putting out regulation in terms of flights or destinations and such.Chris: Yeah, I've thought about it quite a bit as well, and the elitization of travel, and this understanding that, well, we remove subsidies, for example, for air travel or other things, that we'll just have rich people flying around the world, which is more often than not the case already. Most flights are undertaken for business travel and that's a huge thing that I think most people don't know about, but instead of getting people with corporate backed funds or just rich people flying around the world, we're obviously looking for people with strong principles and good behavior to be the ones [00:13:00] traveling.But then how do you measure that? How do you quantify that in a way that honors the kinds of worlds we want to live in? And it's not just this like, oh, it's impossible. Sure. And we could take that understanding that to quantify such a thing would be next to impossible, but then it could also open up these kind of doors of imagination where in like what kind of infrastructures would we want to put in place that were not maybe Government sanctioned or not maybe top down, but actually from the bottom up, creating these kind of international or intercultural bonds and practices between people that would allow not just for the kinds of people who locals in quote unquote "destinations" want to receive to be able to travel, but then also to create the conditions whereby that kind of, for lack of a better word, behavior or principles could be deepened in the world.I mean, it'd be extremely difficult to, [00:14:00] to manage, but How would you quantify that? How would you measure that? Jesse: Yeah, and I think that's such a, such a complicated issue and I love what you're saying though. I think it's absolutely wonderful. And I do think it's possible to move in that direction.I'm not sure I have the answer for that and maybe Tyson wants to speak to it, but I also want to say that something that I think could be part of the solution is also promoting train travel as well. And I know that that kind of that stops at domestic. But at the same time, you know, I think governments should be allocating a lot of funds to push train travel to create and develop train travel and to also subsidize train travel more because it's just a wonderful way to reduce emissions and to actually continue allowing people to travel. Tyson: Yeah. There are some countries here in Europe, Jesse, and I think Europe is just far beyond a lot of the rest of the world. Canada, I think we're still living in the dark ages, you know, when it comes to long [00:15:00] distance train travel.Jesse: That's a shame. It hasn't been made a priority. Tyson: It just doesn't exist.Chris: Well, I'm curious also for you two how your own travels in your lives might have come to bear on your production or pre production and research in the film. Maybe you could tell us a little bit of how you've seen the world over the course of your life and your travels and if that came to bear at all in the making of the film.Tyson: Personally for me, I traveled extensively, for 20 years prior to embarking on this film. I worked in the travel industry. I worked for an airline for many years. I was also a journalist and I've done work for several large publications, which allowed me to travel to very, some very remote and exotic destinations around the world.This travel really exposed me to the beauty and the wonder of the world. But also the environmental and the cultural challenges that a lot of these destinations face. You know, the experiences, with travel for both work and for pleasure, I think they served as a [00:16:00] catalyst, for me just to delve deeper into this topic.And so when I was approached about directing and writing a film on this topic, I don't think there could have been a better fit. Like it just, everything just kind of fell into place and I just felt like I was really well poised because prior to that I had traveled to 70 different countries in a number of different capacities.I had personally engaged in a number of behaviors that we are critical of in the film in terms of animal interaction, you know, interaction with other cultures. And my travel through two decades was really an eye opening and learning experience for me. And what this film really is, I think for me and in many points in the film is a reflection of my past travels and things that have been illuminated in my mind in terms of what are some important aspects that we really need to address if we want to be more conscious and responsible travelers.Jesse: And I think from my end I surely [00:17:00] had not traveled to as many destinations as Tyson. But I did indulge my wanderlust in my twenties and thirties. I lived in a few different countries, Holland, South Africa, Germany, Canada. And I think that the absolute best aspect for me personally of travel is meeting the people.I absolutely love meeting people in different cultures and seeing the differences and the similarities and learning the wisdom as much as I possibly can in such a moment of my life, when I'm in a destination, if it grants me such a gift. And I think from that, I still do have such a deep, deep gratitude to my privilege and being able to travel in and meet such people.I've made such beautiful friendships over the course of 20 years and many I still keep in touch with across the various places I've lived. And I think that when you come back, [00:18:00] perhaps from living in different cultures in different countries and you come back to your home, the place you were raised in and where you were born and where you were raised culturally, and you can note the vast differences, and it's not a negative thing, but you start to pick up on the ways in which many people can see different cultures or different countries in a way that is completely disconnected from the actual truth and and this knowledge often comes with privilege.I was privileged enough to be able to travel to these destinations to meet certain people and to dissuade certain prejudices, but not everyone can. And so part of this film, I have to say, ironically, is that if you can't travel, this film is also a wonderful film to watch because it's something that you can meet these people [00:19:00] in these destinations.You know, there's so many places that I've been to also that are so many places I have not been to that were featured in the film as well. And with documentary filmmaking and making, and especially as an editor, I really do feel like I get to know these people so well, and I don't think that's just exclusive to myself.I think audiences, hopefully, if I've done it correctly, if Tyson and I have, have made the film correctly, that these people's hearts have come through in the film. And, this is something that Tyson and I really worked hard on. And I'm sorry if I'm deviating from the question a bit, but it does connect very deeply to my love of travel is is people and also my love of editing people and so it was something we worked really hard to focus on is how do we give these people a podium. They have their voice there. They're saying their truths. How do we give them a podium [00:20:00] and as the white filmmakers who are coming into different countries, how do we take a step back and really let them preach their wisdom? And so it was a balance for us really in finding the right voices, obviously speaking to the right professionals and speaking to professionals within different cultures that you see featured in the film and really making sure that their knowledge, their voice, their direction was giving us direction on how we edited and formulated the story and stories of everyone that we met in the travels of the production as well. Chris: And on that note, I'm curious for each of you, what was the most important topic or theme that came up in the film for you personally?Tyson: For me, maybe it's an echo of Jesse's sentiments there, but really it comes down to the impact on the communities that so graciously host us when we when we do travel. Travel you know has you know has an encyclopedia [00:21:00] of challenges that come with traveling responsibly unless we address the people. And I think we address this and the the film addresses this, but we can't begin to you know to start focusing on the environment unless we first focus on the communities who are there and helping them emerge from poverty. We can't begin to focus on how we can solve the problem of poaching in the African savannah unless we first address the root causes of why it's there and how it affects the host communities and how poverty affects people's decisions to be involved in this trade. Jesse: That was something that Jane Goodall was was really adamant about speaking in the film about as well Tyson: Yeah, and so to answer your question Chris, I mean ultimately it comes down to the communities and the people, the humanity of it all. First, we need to address the human aspect and then we can address the secondary aspects of what it means to be a responsible traveler.[00:22:00] Jesse: So for me, personally, the most incredible voices in the film that when they came in, I just thought, "oh, wow," were definitely Lek from Elephant Nature Park and one of our contacts in Kenya Judy Kefergona, who ended up being one of the main speakers and narrators throughout a huge portion of our film.These two women were just heroes. Like just with Judy, with the words that she was able to express for the people working in not just only the tourism industry in Kenya, but the people of Kenya who were vulnerable to unethical tourism, and then speaking to so many different subjects that were connected to so many different stories worldwide with such eloquence and such power and such knowledge [00:23:00] and encourage really, I think. She spoke about these topics. I was just enamored, just blown away and so grateful for her coming onto our film and Lek Chailart is just a modern day hero. She is the tiniest woman with the biggest heart who when I saw her story in our film against the backdrop of these beautiful giants, these elephants that she has rescued. And essentially she's an elephant whisperer in the truest sense of the word. And it's just such a magical thing to see.Listeners won't be able to understand this. I'm getting goosebumps when I just talk about her and this was the kind of thing that when Tyson and I were looking through footage and looking through stories that we were looking for, "Oh, that's the moment, ah! the moment. I got the goosebumps. That's it. It's there. And we found it in the stories, not just these two women, everyone you see featured in the story and some that were left on the cutting room floor, unfortunately there that gave us beautiful insight that we still used in crafting the story, that just wasn't able to [00:24:00] make it into the actual film for timing constraints.But really, I would have to say that these two, it's not specifically the stories, although both of them touch on really important stories, including child welfare and animal welfare, which to me, those two stories were really close to my heart. And we felt really strongly that they needed a really important part in the film.But it was really these two women who I just felt so grateful for in the film. Chris: I mean, the, the chapter on animal welfare was quite devastating for me in part because it had reminded me that in my early twenties, I had visited Thailand and I had gone to an elephant sanctuary. Not a zoo but a sanctuary, and had the opportunity to ride an elephant for a short time, and I felt really uncomfortable probably because I was on top of an elephant, just the kind of immediate awkwardness of such a thing, having never seen one in person, having never [00:25:00] experienced that before, but also kind of like, "what am I doing here?" And so, that part of the film really kind of opened up for me why I felt that perhaps existential discomfort, not just about being on top of an animal of that size, but in the context of the dynamic, you around how that was happening and why that was happening and not having the context for it so long ago.And of course, this is one of the things that we touch on in the episodes, in the interviews, in the podcast, is how can we come to understand these things when our visits are so short in these places, when we are only in a place for just a very brief time and there's really no context for the history and the culture and the political dynamics that surround these things.And then, most travelers, most tourists just end up leaving and the consequence of one's presence on the scene is kind of forgotten, at least by the tourist or traveler. Yeah, so thank you for [00:26:00] for that. Jesse: That question did come up actually at the recent screening of the film in Innsbruck at the Nature Film Festival, whereas someone in the audience asked very specifically, even though it would be great to stay at a destination for a long time, most people are, saving up for short travel when they have time off work. And they need to take this kind of tour because they can only afford this one. And what do you say to those people who want to travel better, but feel like they're kind of stuck or don't know where to go. But I would say in short, I think that touches on an issue that we have in the modern world with a lot of things. We are all overtired, overworked, and we don't have time to be ethical, we don't have time to do the research, we don't have time to investigate, if anything is against our core values, and we don't have time to and I get that, you know, it's not easy for everybody.And if you do have the [00:27:00] time and you are able to really do a deep dive then you're very privileged, because you have the time, which just means that you have the money. So we did try to give a lot of smaller tips at the end of the film in terms of how you can do smaller acts of, of kindness and of conscious traveling, to travel local, to put money into local economies to make sure that you're not requesting your sheets to be washed every day, making sure that you're traveling using reusable, to make sure that you're and I guess this goes into a little bit more of the extensive questioning is to ask the destination that you're traveling to what their policies are in connection with the locals, in connections with the environment. Unfortunately, there is a lot of greenwashing in tourism. And you know, that's in all industries right now worldwide. So it's not going to be so easy for someone who isn't an investigative [00:28:00] journalist to really find out the truth behind it all the time, but we can do our best.And there are quite a few links on the website thelasttouristfilm.com where you can see some of the different organizations that we spoke with that have lists upon lists of different collaborating companies that you can look to that can can show you places that are not greenwashing or that are working with locals, but back to the idea of taking the time and it is about taking the time, whether it's an hour even, just to take the time and do a bit of research and this especially comes back to the topic of child welfare and people who are still, en masse, volunteering worldwide to orphanages and orphanages where children have existing family members and that these orphanages have become of monetary value to developing nations [00:29:00] because they make money and it's really easy for us to pass judgment on places that do this, and it's definitely wrong, but if we as travelers are going there and saying with our travel dollars, this is something we want to invest in, then people in developing nations are going to say, this is how I make money.And it's the same with animal welfare. You pay for an animal sanctuary that you haven't done the research on. They're going to keep perpetuating that cycle. It's going to be the same with child welfare. So, if you do want to be ethical, you have to fit in a little bit of research in your travel time. And that's it. And I know it's not so easy for everybody.Tyson: Yeah, I'd like to expand a little bit on a theme that sort of both of you have talked about. Jessie, you had mentioned greenwashing. Chris, you had mentioned that you had been to an elephant sanctuary in Thailand. One of the most memorable takeaways that I had from this film is just the massive amount of greenwashing [00:30:00] and deception that exists within the industry.I came to know a lot of companies that appeared to just be normal travel companies doing the same thing that has been going on in the travel industry but marketing "green" although nothing really changes. It's just their marketing strategy that's changed. If we look at, for example, in Thailand, there are a number of places that call themselves an elephant sanctuary, an elephant retirement home, an elephant rescue center. And we can't rely on those names anymore to know that the service provider is giving us an ethical experience. We really need to ask deeper questions. It's the trend in the industry now to use this type of language, " sustainable," "responsible," "eco," all of these buzzwords.And I've just come to find these completely meaningless, in those terms. We really need to ask some deeper, more challenging questions of these experiences and the tour operators and the service providers to actually know whether what they're doing is ethical or not because it is very easy to call yourself a [00:31:00] sanctuary, when in fact, it's the complete opposite. If it truly was an elephant sanctuary, we wouldn't be able to ride the elephants, in that place and they would be providing them a life of dignity free from exploitation. And it's the same with children. Calling these places orphanages ,I think it's a misnomer. It's incorrect. You know, 70 percent of children who live in these quote unquote "orphanages" actually have at least one living parent.But it's all under the guise of trying to gain sympathy from the traveler. "Oh, come see an elephant at a retirement home. Come see a child at an orphanage." It's just a piece of marketing that doesn't reflect the truth. We have a lot of companies doing the same unethical practices they've been doing for decades.However, they've just really changed their marketing to appear more green.Chris: Yeah, it seems to be a never ending cycle where responsible isn't good enough, that now we got to be regenerative. So many of these words just end up becoming, marketing tools. Tyson: I'm hearing that word a [00:32:00] lot more these days as well. Chris: Yeah, so how do we proceed, not just with a degree of dedication towards research and, and and planning, but also deep discipline as to how these words are unfortunately, as you said, becoming kind of meaningless in their significance..I want to take a little turn with you both to ask about what happened as the film was going through post production and its release because most of the footage that you have is quote unquote pre pandemic and the COVID 19 pandemic hit, obviously, in 2020 and from what I understand your team was entering into the post production process and, of course, tourism ground to a halt almost completely, worldwide. And throughout the film, there are people that you two interview that contend with the consequences and context of tourism and look [00:33:00] to a more honorable path that it might take. But I'm curious in regards to the people that you did interview who had found a degree of success and perhaps within a more small scale, a more honorable way of doing tourism that those flights, those trains, the reception of people in their villages went from a hundred to zero, basically overnight.So much of the dire consequences of tourism revolve around or end up as exile, local people can't afford to produce food anymore in their places. And the education systems kind of move them towards getting jobs in the next city or even in other countries, and I'm curious in the context of the film and I guess the treatment that you put forward, you know, never perhaps thinking that something like this could happen. What was the fallout among the people that you interviewed in regards to their understandings of tourism and if it was [00:34:00] still this kind of for lack of a better word, golden goose or calf or sacred cow that they could rely on for the rest of their lives.What did you hear kind of in the ether as you were doing that post production? Tyson: I think it substantially expanded the wealth gap. I think during COVID the people that were hit the hardest are the people in the tourism industry that often are paid the least.Depending on what their jobs were, they were the ones who were suffering layoffs and they were the ones whose businesses couldn't afford to sustain themselves. And so I think, for the most vulnerable populations, the pandemic was absolutely devastating.People couldn't afford to put food on the table and pay rents, not just, I think, in developing countries, but even in the developed world. Airlines were laying off massive amounts of employees. Hotels were cutting staff. This was a global challenge that affected everyone. However, at that same time, we did hear stories that, you know, CEOs of major airlines were taking million dollar bonuses[00:35:00] for cutting costs. And that was an observation of mine, through that experience, you know, that the people who needed tourism the most for daily sustenance and to put bread on the table were the ones who were absolutely the most affected and the people kind of at the top of the tourism industry were still fine and they were also taking bonuses, which really bothered me just because the wealth gap just seemed to get further and further apart through that. But we do know, with the stories, that were featured in our film... there's a wonderful lodge in Ecuador, a homestay that we look at and they lost their income during that time.The elephant sanctuary in Thailand, the one that does do great work, not one that greenwashes an elephant sanctuary but they lost a lot of revenue where it was very challenging to feed the elephants and to house the elephants because they didn't have that revenue coming in to support the project. Jesse: We were hearing in in Africa, right?Some of the rangers [00:36:00] were who were placed in defense of the elephants and animals and rhinos and such were just gone. They just weren't there anymore at that time because if they're not getting paid, they can't stay there. And so poaching also went up in those areas as well.But you know, I think that in terms of what the positive was, I think a lot of people were hoping that post COVID that there was going to be hope for change, for renewal for doing things differently. And I think this was in when we were in post that this was maybe, potential to show people how things can be different by showing kind of the polar opposite and the effect and also showing how intrinsically connected people's livelihoods are to this industry and how vulnerable they are to massive change like this. I mean, the Dominican Republic that has [00:37:00] almost 90 percent of their GDP related to tourism? Tyson: Island nations are the ones who are most affected by tourism. You know, the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic. The Caribbean islands specifically. I don't know if it's as high as 90%, but the vast majority of their GDP from island nations comes from the travel and tourism industry, and they were certainly hit the hardest during the pandemic. Jesse: And so I think that we can see from that, I think the hope for us during post production was, okay, you know, this is a horrific blow to the people most vulnerable in this industry, but if we can get this message out after the pandemic, perhaps this could be something that could really change. And to be fair, change is slow sometimes and I mean, it's wishful thinking that post pandemic right after that suddenly everyone was going to become ethical travelers but I see so much potential just in the discussions online the people that we're [00:38:00] meeting at different screenings, the interest that we're getting worldwide, just to have these conversations and see that there is an interest in change.And when you talk about moving change, it does often come from the people, and I think, across the world over the past few decades, we've all been seeing again, I think our power as people, as citizens, as individuals, and the power that we have to come together over certain issues that we feel need radical change and even if it is slow change, I do see the inklings of that change happening within the tourism industry and I think it's really positive.Tyson: You still have a lot of work ahead of us. Chris: Amen. I think that's really, really important and, and perhaps fits properly inside of the context of the dominant culture, at least of North America or the quote unquote West, wherein, the pandemic also produced a deepening of the [00:39:00] culture of "everything now."Suddenly it was like, "okay, well, I can't go out here, so everything has to be deliverable, and at the tip of your fingers, right? And what might come with that is this notion that, we also expect social change to happen overnight. Right? And that it might be overshadowed by this kind of dominant culture of wanting everything now and also the unwillingness to do the necessary work, which is sometimes generational.Right? Not just a week or a month or a year, but generations.In that regard, the themes of the film are extremely broad and you go into a lot of detail and depth with each. So I'm very grateful for that, but I'm also curious what might've gotten left out.What might, one day end up on a director's cut of the film. Jesse: Oh, so much. Tyson: Ask the editor. Jesse: Oh. Well, I mean, you had so many stories that you brought [00:40:00] to the table that were beautiful, beautiful stories. Forgive me. I don't remember his name and you'll remember Tyson.But one of the. Tyson: I know who you're talking about. Jesse: Oh, do you? One of the men you interviewed at the UN had a really beautiful story to tell. And then we also had a really beautiful story from Costa Rica. An animal welfare and environmental story. Oh, my goodness. There were so many stories.Tyson: We had a wonderful story from Cusco Peru with an organization that was putting the first female porters on the Inca Trail and really fighting for gender equality on the Inca Trail.Jesse: What was that company's name again, Tyson? Well, the reason why I bring it up is because it's so unique that I just think, "oh, we should definitely highlight that to listeners" because they were taking female porters and they were reorganizing the whole industry based on their [00:41:00] precedent because they were treating porters with dignity, with safe conditions, with, valuable wages and this is something that's just not done across the industry on the Inca Trail with the male porters and there was some really, really horrific footage that we came across of the way these porters were living just not too far from where the tourists were sleeping comfortably in their tents. And this is a wide practice across the industry and Miguel from this company Evolution Treks and the gallon, do you remember his full name, tyson? Tyson: Miguel Angel Gongora Jesse: from Evolution Treks, yeah, a wonderful, wonderful man who was really, really passionate about changing the industry. And we spoke with many of the female porters, and yeah, that was a story that we were really, really sad to lose that [00:42:00] story. Tyson: Yeah. Yeah. With only 90 minutes, you know, we yeah, really had to make some challenging decisions on what to be included in the film and I really feel that a 90 minute film can scratch the surface, it can spark some interest in a number of these themes, but certainly, and maybe that's next steps for us, but I certainly think that what this the subject matter, deserves is a series, you know, cause we could dive much deeper.Jesse: Tyson and I have been talking about it. Tyson: Yeah, we, we can dive much deeper into each of these subjects and create a 90 minute doc on each of them. And so, at some point in the future, we'll be making some pitches and writing some additional treatments into how we can make a six part series and expand on the themes in this film, you know, from the environment to gender inequality to animal welfare and everything deserves a lot more time, but hopefully, what we've done with this film is just been able to spark a number of conversations and inspire people to go and do some additional research [00:43:00] into how these themes impact these communities.Chris: Yeah, well, thank you both so much for that. I have a lot more questions, but maybe that'll also be saved for a sequel. Jesse: Yeah, we'd love to speak to you again, Chris, if you'd like, in the future. Chris: That'd be great. Before we finish, I'd like to ask you what might be next for you two in your respective filmmaking and writing lives?Tyson: My world currently revolves around photographing wildlife particularly large wildlife. Yeah, I've been spending a lot of time traveling recently and in the ocean. I mentioned to you, I mean, tomorrow I'm hopping on a flight and I'm heading to Norway to go photograph large marine mammals in Norway. So that's that's where my life is taking me right now is in pursuit of wildlife filmmaking and photography. Jesse: Although I wish I could, I could say similarly, I right now my life is a little bit calmer. I had a baby 20 months ago. So, I've been on an extended maternity leave [00:44:00] and I'm currently just in development of projects for the future.I finished up this project in full right before my child was born. And I still have a few projects that were finished up recently, but as of the moment I'm completely in development and yeah, I really look forward to developing something with Tyson in the future in regards to what he was talking about a series on travel and on a lot of stories that we were so passionate and so blessed to come across, but that we just didn't have the ability to give the podium to in our film, but yeah, so I'm really excited for the future and just coming from this festival that I was at recently, I'm just so invigorated with the energy of the audiences and the passion to travel better and to demand better travel from the industry and from travelers as a whole. So this just really gives me a lot of hope. Chris: Well, congratulations on your [00:45:00] motherhood. Thank you. And having a little one in your life and this work and Tyson and the opportunity to be able to travel as you do, and to try to honor the lives of those beautiful four leggeds and no leggeds and the tailed and finned ones. So finally, how can our listeners watch The Last Tourist? Are there any screenings coming up? Jesse: Definitely on the website, thelasttouristfilm.com, right when you go to the webpage, there's a whole list of all the different avenues you can watch the film.But maybe Tyson could elaborate more. Tyson: Absolutely. Yeah, you can connect with us on Instagram at Last Tourist Film, as well. We're just kind of wrapping up the fall festival season before we do some additional screenings next spring. We just wrapped up in Germany and Iceland.I think streaming is the best way to find us, in Canada we're streaming on Crave. In the United States, we're streaming on Hulu. Delta Airlines, Emirates Airlines. In other countries around the world, you can also find us, I [00:46:00] know in France, in French Polynesia, Hong Kong on Amazon Prime. And there's a number of other markets that the film will be opening in very shortly which is really exciting.It's not available everywhere, unfortunately, around the world, but if you have a desire to see it, you know, please get in touch with us and we'll do our best to make sure that you have an opportunity to see the film. You can host a private screening. There's a number of ways that you can see this film, but please let's keep the conversation going.Let's get in touch. I'd love to hear from a number of the listeners, and let's find a way that we can allow everyone to see this film. Jesse: And what's been really exciting is we've got a lot of interest from schools. So, educational screenings have been happening all across the world, and that's just been amazing.Those are the best for us, I think. And I would just say, if any of the listeners have any further questions for us, we're always open to taking questions and chatting. Personally, Tyson and I can both be reached at our Instagram. So you can I think Tyson's is @TysonSadler, and mine is [00:47:00] @JesseMann, two S's, two N's. So if you want to leave that for your listeners, they're welcome to contact us. And anyone who's listening can contact us directly that way, who want to host a screening or find out ways to watch. Chris: Absolutely. Yeah, I'll make sure that all the websites and handles are available for our listeners at theendoftourism. com. And on behalf of them on behalf of myself, I'd like to thank you both for joining me today. Your film is incredibly inspirational, necessary, and deeply important for these times and I don't doubt that our listeners think the same. So, I wish you the most beautiful paths ahead on your travels with your families.And ...We get the opportunity to speak again sometime. Tyson: Thank you, Chris. This has really been a meaningful conversation. Thank you. Jesse: Yeah. Thank you so much for giving us this space and I wish you all the same. Chris: My pleasure. Get full access to ⌘ Chris Christou ⌘ at chrischristou.substack.com/subscribe

On this episode, my guest is Sean P. Smith, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Culture Studies at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Much of his research has focused on the relationship between social media and tourism, and how colonial histories shape today's ideologies and visual cultures of travel. The inequalities that result from many forms of tourism development, he argues, are intimately linked with how tourists create content for Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, and the ways tourists frame themselves in landscapes and alongside local residents often replay colonial hierarchies.Show Notes: Why Study Instagram?The Pre-tour Narrative (Edward Bruner, Raul Salazar)The Habitus of Tourism (or How We Got Here)The Promontory Witness (or that photo)The Logic of InfluenceEmptying the Landscape (John Urry)The Techno-Generational DivideMedia EcologyOther Horizons in OmanHomework:Sean P. Smith - Tilburg UniversitySean P. Smith: Twitter / X | Instagram | Google Scholar (Articles)Transcript:Chris: [00:00:00] Welcome, Sean, to the pod. Thank you so much for being willing to join us to speak about your work. Sean: Thanks very much for having me. Chris: My pleasure. I'm curious, Sean where you're speaking from today and, and how the world is, how the world might be housing you there. Sean: Well, it's very rainy and dark. I'm in the Southern Netherlands, an area called North Brebant, where I just moved less than a month ago.So, in many places of moving around, if so, getting used to this one. Chris: Sean, I found out about your work from one of the pod's listeners who sent in a link to one of your academic articles entitled, Instagram Abroad, Performance, Consumption, and Colonial Narrative in Tourism. Now, I've been ruminating on the effect that social media has on tourism, spectacle, surveillance, and cultures of disposability for a long time now.So I'm really excited to speak with you today. And [00:01:00] likewise parts of the podcast are shared via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, so there's always this sense of kind of feeding the machine. unaware and perhaps more aware each time. And so first then, I'm curious why focus on Instagram in the context of critical tourism studies? What makes it different from say Facebook or Twitter?Sean: Yeah, that's a really good question Chris. I think with Instagram, in many contexts around the world, certainly not universally, but it's the social media platform that is most readily identified with not just tourism, but the way that people represent themselves engaging in tourism. It's very image driven.Of course, people do write captions, they do engage in other forms of storytelling, but nowadays it's mostly pictures and especially reels, arguably in the last few years. And for a long time, this [00:02:00] has been could almost say the dream work of tourism going back 200, maybe longer years. So even though today, I think you can find forms of tourism well represented TikTok to varying degrees on Facebook.Instagram, at least in many of the places where I've conducted research, is the place that one goes to both learn about places to travel and also to show how oneself travels.Chris: And I'm kind of imagining that we're more or less in the same age range, but I'm curious if on your travels, you mentioned just briefly that you had also spent time backpacking as a younger person and I'm curious if Instagram existed at the time and also if this dream work was evident to you in your travels.Sean: It was. I think I was relatively young when I got my first [00:03:00] smartphone, but certainly not as young as people nowadays. I must have been maybe 22 or 23. So I did have some years of traveling before I think Instagram really reshaped the way that tourism is done, not just for people that actually use this app, but regardless of whether or not anyone's ever downloaded it on their phone, I think Instagram has had a significant impact on the way that tourism is done. So when I first got a smartphone, I was in a period of my life where I was able to travel quite frequently and that was something that I was really pursuing at the time. And Instagram was a way that I was able to engage in a long running interest in photography, but also kind of a diary of where I had been, but certainly one that was legible and sort of visible to other people.And it was through that, you could say "performance" of travel that began to think a bit more critically about this app and other social media [00:04:00] platforms as well. And the way that it was reshaping tourism destinations. Chris: Mm. Mm. Yeah, you mention in your work this notion of the pre tour narrative.And I'm wondering if we could unpack that a little bit for our listeners and what part Instagram plays in this pre tour narrative. Sean: Yeah, I'm very happy to point that out, because I think this is, this is an important way to think about tourism, and that particular phrase I'm drawing on the work of Edward Bruner, who was an American anthropologist.And that's also been picked up in other realms to be identified as what other people have called tourism imaginaries, such as in the work of Raúl Salazar. So what this concept of the pre-tour narrative describes is that before people travel to a particular destination, they are exposed to [00:05:00] various forms of representation.And oftentimes this is very image based or narrative based. So we would see this maybe thinking back in the era before social media, images encountered in magazines and films, perhaps novels, other forms of storytelling, such as just talking with people who have been to places that one wants to travel.However, in social media, as it's become more integral to the way that people conduct their everyday lives, let alone traveling. It's become the dominant engine for the way that the pre tour narrative is formed. Many people who use Instagram as a space to learn about places to travel, they will encounter images of these of these places on this app or and not just sort of the way that it's portrayed, but what people do in these spaces, the people that live [00:06:00] in the places they're going to visit. So, this process of the formation of a pre tour narrative has really always been a part of tourism. But I think it perhaps it's if not accelerated, then certainly taken a bit of a different form with the advent of social media.Chris: So on some level, it's not just the question of what you're going to go see, but also how you're going to see it, how you're going to stand in front of that tower or restaurant and see, experience, what's there. Sean: Yeah, that's a really good way to put it. Chris: And I know it's a little early in the interview, but I'd like to jump into the heart of the matter and your critiques, if we can. You know, you wrote this incredible article Landscapes for Likes, capitalizing on travel with Instagram. And, in that article, you wrote that, deep breath, "Instagram's networked architecture and affordances produce three [00:07:00] outcomes that circulate and magnify utterances about travel to a degree impossible in pre-networked media.One, a mediated travel habitus hegemonically informs prevailing aesthetic norms. Two, the scalability of embodied performances entrench the motif's narrative underpinnings. And three, the monetizable market of Instagram encourages neoliberal notions of the branded self." Now that's a beautiful mouthful. And so I'm wondering, if you might be willing and able to flesh out these three outcomes for our listeners. Sean: No, that's brilliant. And it's nice to talk about these things, perhaps when they're written that can be quite a bit denser.So maybe we can start with the first idea, this mediated travel habitus. And with the word habitus, I'm trying on the work of [00:08:00] the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who theorizes he's talking about class and culture and ways that people display their belonging within a particular class.And the reason that I'm looking to Bordeaux here is tourism and travel, really, it's important to look at this as a practice that has been connected to what Bordeaux might call the pursuit of distinction, to the search for an acquisition of cultural goods. You know, we might think of cultural goods as being a painting or a taste and a particular kind of music, clothes, certain way of speaking even. And when one amasses certain, certain cultural goods, and they're recognized as being part of the upper classes, being marks of somebody who is [00:09:00] sophisticated, somebody who is typically from a fairly privileged financial background, these cultural goods are desirable.So, this background I think is important because tourism from its modern beginnings in the 18th century has been obtaining these experiences and often physical artifacts that can be a way of claiming a certain social status. So, maybe you've discussed this in other podcasts already, but, when the Grand Tour began in the 1600s, but really took off in the 1700s there was this process in which the aristocratic men, young men, were sent on a tour around Europe, and they would go to capitals like Paris, later Vienna, and then especially places like Rome, and, where they could encounter the remnants of the Roman Empire and classical learning. [00:10:00] And this was meant to do a few things in the first sense. It was meant to introduce them other parts of the world, to certain historical understandings. They could refine their Latin. They could get better at French and then they could go home and be recognized as a sophisticated member of the aristocracy. And this practice really became quite popular up until about the turn of the 19th century, when it stopped briefly because of wars on the European continent, and then after the Napoleonic Wars ended, it basically exploded. So when we think about over tourism now in 2023, this was, you know, 1815, 1820s, and this was a period where all of a sudden there were more tourists than ever before.And what that meant is this practice, which had only been done [00:11:00] by the wealthiest classes, was now something that the middle classes could engage in and that produced a kind of anxiety, where how was one able to become a distinguished or sophisticated traveller. How was one able to obtain the cultural goods provided by travel if everyone was doing it?So, the habitus of tourism, the kind of implicitly learned practices and sensibilities that developed during the Grand Tour experienced this period of challenge where people had to look for a way to find distinction by other means. And I think this beginning led to this friction where now you see people who are trying to go places that no other tourists go, trying to take pictures that no other tourists have taken, trying to be the only person in a picture of a [00:12:00] famous place. So this way of understanding how to be a tourist has become enshrined in the kinds of images that we see in a space like, like Instagram to the extent where I think these images are circulating the ideologies of tourism. The scalability refers to, in social media studies, the way in which a single image can achieve a degree of circulation that is not really possible in pre-networked media. So, by networked media, we can think of platforms like Instagram. We can think of Twitter, anything where the possibility of likes and retweets or reposts achieves a degree of visibility what we might call going viral.So what I was writing about in that article was this particular composition called the "promontory witness" where you have typically one [00:13:00] person who's standing on a promontory or we can say the edge of a cliff the top of a building, in front of a waterfall and they're looking really, really small as compared to the vast scale of nature.And people see these images and they understand through the mediation, the widespread circulation of these images, that this means something important about travel. This is what I mean by the mediated habitus of travel, that taking an image like this and being a person in a promontory witness image has a particular value. It is a way of claiming distinction, again, in Rodrigo's terms. And by taking a promontory witness image, one is able to circulate that image on Instagram in a very different way than before the social media platform existed. So, you know, we think about images circulated in tourism before Instagram.It would either be, say, in a family photo album. That people used to have projectors. [00:14:00] People used to maybe send holiday pictures to family and friends, basically whoever they could, you know, show it to, but this is a really, really small circulation, unless somebody was able to get an image in a magazine or some sort of formal publication. But what really shifts with scalable social media is that somebody can take an image and there really is the potential to go viral.I think in Instagram, the potential to have an image seen by a really significant number of people is less than on a platform like Tik Tok. But there remains the possibility if I post a promontory witness image and I put a geo tag in a place that is particularly trendy at this, at this moment and I put the right hashtags that thousands of people can witness this image and because of that possibility, I think there's a degree of enlistment, a degree of interest in [00:15:00] participating in this trend because taking a promontory witness picture is going to have much more possibility of going viral of leveraging these architectures, these scalable architectures.Much more so than if it just take, if I take another image that isn't so popular on a platform like Instagram. Chris: Thank you. Thank you, Sean. Yeah. So there's, there's a lot in there I'm going to come back to in just a little bit. But I wanted to just finish off this one last part because you kind of, you know, mentioned it a little bit.The monetizable market of Instagram that encourages neoliberal notions of the brand itself. And, you know, I pulled this, this other sentence from one of your articles where you write that "as a banal mediator of travel and tourism, Instagram can encourage tourists to imagine themselves as a capital generating brand." Sean: It's really a comment on the attention economy structure of social media platforms, [00:16:00] where I want people to see my pictures and I want to get likes.And I say that very much as being somebody who continues to study social media and tourism from a critical angle. When I post something I'm always aware of how it's going to be received. Some part of me, even when I'm very aware of the issues with thinking this way potentially is I always want it to gain more visibility.If I post something and it has less likes than something I posted previously, this will likely incur some degree of thinking, what did I do wrong? What could I have done differently? You know, maybe I'm just produced such interesting content. And what I think is really taking place there is that we're constantly thinking about ways to achieve visibility in a way that is not dissimilar to the kind of negotiation that celebrities and [00:17:00] other public figures have to go through when managing their, what we might in today's terms, call their brand, where because there is always this metric of how popular one is or how visible one is in the form of likes or in the form of reposts or retweets or what have you it's means that we develop a way of always orienting towards this possible public. We're always thinking about the people that are going to see whatever kind of thing we say online, and we, I think much of the time, are hoping that it's going to be received.If not, you know, people are going to like it, if it is going to maybe change the way that people think about something, if it's going to influence them in some way. And Instagram, of course, is like other social media platforms, is monetizable in the sense that when one gets a lot of followers, you know, if I continually create fantastic travel content and I get tens of thousands or more followers, then [00:18:00] that means that I am able to start making money from it. I'm going to be paid by different companies to come and stay at a resort or go on some sort of guided tour and take an image or make a reel of this experience and post it on Instagram, talk about how great it was, and then tag the company.And that's a way of them bringing in business. This is how advertising works. So, people become advertisers. But even before that influencer level, I think those of us who are not influencers, and I am certainly not, there's a degree to which we are participating in this logic because even if we don't have any designs of becoming influencers, we still want our posts to be liked and this ultimately influences not just posts we make, but the kind of traveling we do and the kind of relationship we have with the places to which we travel.Hmm. Chris: Well [00:19:00] contentious at the very least. But thank you for that, Sean, for being able to flesh that out for us. And I'd like to return back to this notion of the promontory witness, and you know, because even before Instagram I remember seeing in my backpacking years, these same photos, right?The photo of the person, of their back to the camera facing the open horizon, you know, whether it be a cliff face or a desert or whatever it is, and spreading their hands or arms and, just this kind of emanating freedom, I guess.But you also mentioned that this kind of perspective, if you want to call it that, manufactures emptiness because there's nobody else in the photo, and this is so much a part of the kind of sometimes they're Instagram reels, or sometimes they're photos of people, what it looks like when people are at tourist destinations, actually taking the [00:20:00] photo in front of the Eiffel Tower, or the Great Wall, or the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or whatever, and there's actually hundreds.And thousands of people taking the same photo or trying to, and everyone wants to have that photo without anyone else in it. And so, just a little preamble to the question again, in Landscapes for Likes, you write that "this manufacturing of emptiness privileges tourists as the sole consumers of a landscape, and with its residents hidden from view, a landscape is voided of its human and temporal context. Thus abstracted, place is relevant as little but a visual commodity." And then just another quote that I think brings a little something else to the picture is that "the promontory witness motif scrubs the landscape of the tourist destination of any sign of human habitation, but that of the tourist, singularly pictured in a position of mastery that confers [00:21:00] possession over the destination." And so there seems to be a kind of shared understanding in critical tourism studies that modern and especially social media based travel photography emphasizes empty spaces, of course, minus the Instagram user, the person photographing question. And so I'm curious, why is identifying the emptying of the landscape so important for our understanding?What does it do to us as photo viewers? Sean: Yeah, that's an excellent question and I think I'm very, I'm very interested in this composition, which the lone tourist and the landscape, which, mean, other people before me have pointed to, and at least John Urry.And I think there are two things happening here. For one, it's the kind of picture that's due to the mediation of what we can think of as a travel habitus, due to the way that [00:22:00] people have learned about how to do tourism and to represent themselves doing tourism and the most sophisticated way or in the way that is the most likely to gain them social distinction. They take these images because they've seen these images before and they're attractive images as well. Maybe they're attractive because we have, through seeing so many pictures like them, we've been taught or sort of subconsciously imbibed the aesthetics as being something that we value and are attracted to.One degree of what's of what's taking place. And to another extent, when it comes to this notion of possessing something of being the only person that that goes there, this kind of image of the tourist being the only person in a landscape or in front of some sort of cultural monument is , a way of [00:23:00] claiming a symbolic status, which links back to this ideology of getting off the beaten track. So, I imagine if you're experience backpacking and my own there's a real interest in getting off the beaten path, of going to places that aren't touristy, of being a traveler and not a tourist. And part of the way that the success in getting off the beaten track is signified is being the only person in a photograph.You know, we as backpackers or tourists don't want to be associated with other tourists. And there's very little better way to represent not being another tourist than being the only person in a particular image.Chris: Yeah, it [00:24:00] makes you wonder. And putting together the research for this episode, I came to this, this kind of possibility, question, consternation, And it arose in this way. And so the, the next question, which kind of relates to the last one is, do you think there might be, or is a connection here between the emptying of the photo of humans or locals and the emptying of places of humans and locals, and that is in the context of the gentrification of local people and culture in tourist destinations. Sean: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's a very good point. I think especially because gentrification is aesthetically produced through a kind of emptiness or a kind of minimalism. And this gentrified neighborhood is not something that is crowded. It is not some place that there are a lot of wayward signs, [00:25:00] wayward, quote unquote.It is a space which is typically designed according to what might be understood as a globalized regime of clean lines and interesting fonts and a lot of white space. So thinking about the way that that works and everything from upmarket coffee shops to designing neighborhoods that are meant to attract capital on upper middle class consumers and residents.I think that does link quite persuasively with this desire to be the only person within this landscape. I mean, what ultimately is taking place in both processes is that, no matter where somebody is going and taking a promontory witness picture, there are people who live there. There's people who've always lived there and been a part, in many ways, of the land that is being made into a landscape.And by not including [00:26:00] them, within these pictures or in processes of gentrification, actually through state-sanctioned programs or other forms of state-sanctioned investment, local residents are being pushed out to make way for different people, the tourist in this case. There is a process of erasure and, and often what can be conceived as really a very colonial process of taking over, taking over a space and privileging the owners of capital, who in this case, typically are tourists.And of course, it's a little bit different when you're taking a picture versus when you're taking a picture in a place that is not considered part of the Global North. But tourists typically have a lot more privilege and financial resources than local residents.And when they're not in these images, but the places in which they are are included, then at least when we're seeing pictures of it, how [00:27:00] do we imagine who, who controls the space? How do we imagine who has a right to this space? It would be the person in the photograph, the tourist, rather than the people who actually live, work, and, and shape these landscapes.Okay. Chris: Since Instagram tends to be the go to medium for these images and for images in general, as far as social media is concerned, do you think that Instagram then is a tool and driver of gentrification? Could we say that with a sense of coherence? Sean: I think it's as much a tool as, as many other tools and it is very easily leveraged to that end by actors who are seeking to mobilize processes of gentrification. And then I think this is pretty well documented for instance, in Yoo Jung oh's article Instagaze, Aesthetic Representation and Contested Transformation of Woljeong, South Korea.Well, she was [00:28:00] writing about Jeju Island in South Korea, and how once tourists started to take particular forms of images often of being one person in a beach, then different interests were able to move in and realize the value of this image and find ways to capitalize on all of the tourists that wanted to come and take that same image. So what that led to was the beach front where, this is largely a fishing community and other sort of small scale, more artisanal economies, was remade into cafes and restaurants and guest houses in a process that.I think it can be widely recognized in tourism development around the world. But what the author, Yu Jung Oh, is saying, is showing there, is that this was largely motivated by the ability to take this image, that [00:29:00] a tourist could go and purchase a coffee or something, and they would be able to take that image for their Instagram. So there's a really clear linkage there and I think that linkage can be made in many other places as well. But I think in that sense, Instagram and social media is, is can be leveraged for gentrification as, as many other tools can be and are being.Chris: Thank you, Sean. And so, know, for the rest of our time together, I'd like to kind of lean on you a little bit for your personal opinion. I know that sometimes working in and living in academic worlds that's kind of something to be left the doorstep before you walk in. But you know, you mentioned this notion of networked media and pre networked media and kind of social media falling into this wider term of networked media and since these mediums have only come to exist, in terms of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, [00:30:00] we're talking 15 years at the most, and then the extension or prototypes of those existing in the previous 10. So about 25 years, maybe. And I'm curious in this regard you know, I imagine that you're about my age, maybe a little bit younger so I'm curious if you have a lived memory of how things were before social media and perhaps even before the internet, what do you think we might be losing by virtue of not being able to remember the world without social media Sean: yeah, great question. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah, very good question. Very, of course, fraught. So I guess for context, I was born in 1988. And. So I, got a cell phone at 16, and again, I got a smartphone and Instagram and WhatsApp. So I'm really in two minds about this. And in the first sense, I think it's important to be aware of [00:31:00] how with any new technology there's a great deal of anxiety and resistance and what might be called panic. And this isn't just social media or it's not just television, but we can go all the way back to radio, to novels.People were worried about that, to the written word back in the ancient Greek era. People were concerned that when we start writing things down, this is going to make it very difficult to remember things, and we're going to be less successful orators and our reasoning will be diluted because we start writing things down.So there's always this kind of fear of new technology, and part of me wants to recognize that this is just another one of those periods in which some sort of transformative technology comes along and many of [00:32:00] the generation who can remember what it was like beforehand is going to feel varying degrees of nostalgia for that period.That said, it's also difficult to not, at the same time, say that something really significant has, has, has happened, to not feel, I mean, honestly, I do certainly feel nostalgia for periods before social media. Some of the things which I think have been changed is the interest in finding ways to represent oneself, traveling. And this isn't to say that whenever one goes somewhere, one is always sort of seeing it as if from the viewfinder or, well, it wouldn't really be a viewfinder of a camera so much as, you know, one's phone screen.But that leads to. In being very interested in taking images that would be successful within the attention economies of a platform like Instagram, it can be difficult to [00:33:00] not see the world as if from the perspective of what would make a good picture for Instagram. There's a lot of different people who've come up with critiques of this process.I mean, if you think about it in terms of spectacle, you know, like Guy DuBord's idea that we're no longer, and he was writing in the 60s, you know, that we are seeing relationships, not between people, but between people and images. And so some sort of fundamental human connection is being lost because all we're doing is just relating to images and using images to relate to other people.I'm not so sure about universalizing that idea, but the ubiquity of social media and the Challenges to not somehow be on one of these platforms, in some even practical way does mean, I think, that there are significant influences in tourism as much as anything. Chris: Yeah, my my phone died the other day, abruptly. [00:34:00] And you know, I still have this computer that thankfully allows me to have this interview with you. And I can still access Facebook and Twitter, but for whatever reason, I can't access Instagram. And you know, it's been a few days and I'm really loving it.And then this morning I realized that I had planned to upload a post for the podcast. And then I was just like, okay, well, my best recourse of action is to just stay calm and wait, right? Yeah, and it's a big question, and I think it's something that, I wonder if young people, say people born, you know, 2000 or after would be able to answer with, with any, without having lived in a time without social media, for example. And so this kind of like brings us a little bit towards the towards theme of media ecology, which, you know, we talked about just very briefly before we started our interview here and I had taken Andrew McLuhan's Understanding Media [00:35:00] Intensive last year.He was also on the pod in the, in season three and just generally speaking for our listeners media ecology, within media ecology, the focus is on the medium and not just the message. It's a way of taking to task the context of our technology and not just the content.And so this manufacturing of emptiness of people and places as brands and I'm curious, isn't this to a large extent, also contingent on our tools, on the limits and architecture of the camera, for example? You know, do we stop with Instagram or do we look at all social media and later all tools? Because these media exist within each other, right?Instagram is a medium within the internet, I suppose, and then the internet is a medium within the phone. Maybe you could make that argument. It's not to say, if we didn't have these things, if we didn't have Instagram, if we didn't have [00:36:00] social media, would the promontory witness just disappear? I don't think it's as easy as that. But Would it be as intensely magnified in our time? Sean: So yes, I think the question of magnification is really what sits at the heart of social media because if we're looking at the medium of Instagram, then we have to think about photography and which was invented in the 1840s.And then if we think about photography, we have to think about painting the way that landscape has been represented in many different cultures, both in painting in the Western, Chinese and many other traditions, but then also in poetry and literature. So with all of these things, there's a precedent.And I think if you look at something like the Promontory Witness, this composition and this the visual formation of having one person immersed within a landscape or standing at some edge of a cliff, that's been around for [00:37:00] 200 years at least. You can see some in the later 1700s that look like this, but then the desire to be the only person in a particular place to have gotten off of the beaten track and be the distinguished traveler, that's also been around for, for a very long time. So that's why I think I'm hesitant to sort of pin the blame on Instagram.And I think my thinking around this has taken a bit of it, not exactly a turn, but it's changed a bit. So I think there's a real tendency to look at platforms like Instagram as only being spaces in which processes of gentrification can gain momentum, or only be spaces where one is almost disciplined into being a neoliberal subject who, is working sort of subconsciously thinking about how to brand oneself all the time, specifically in places of tourism, you know, that it's a way that people [00:38:00] only think about the pictures. They only want to go take a picture in these places. They don't actually want to have any experiences in this place or relationships with the people there. And I think that really exists. That is absolutely one dimension of what takes place with social media platforms. But as many people I've spoken to say, social media is a double edged sword. And where that's really been driven home to me has been where I've been conducting research for the past almost two years now. Sometimes they're in person, other times digitally, in Oman, a country in the Arabian peninsula where I was interested initially because it was becoming more popular as an international tourism destination. So, I went there after the pandemic expecting to meet all these people who were experiencing the problematics of international tourism as we know well, I think from your podcast among other, among other spaces.And there's some of that, absolutely. But what I also found was that, in the past few [00:39:00] years, people who are living in Oman, and this is both Omanis, people who have citizenship and then also residents, so there's about 40 percent of the country is made up of people who don't have citizenship in Oman, like many other Gulf countries.And in the past few years, I mean, we're talking five years, maximum ten years, there's been this surge of interest in nature, or we can say is the non human or even the more than human environment and what's can be understood as domestic nature tourism, I think, like many places around the world, domestic nature tourism in Oman became was very popularized during the pandemic when people could not travel abroad. But what this meant is that people saw these images on Instagram and Instagram is really most popular app in Oman, next to WhatsApp, and that introduced them to parts of the country that they'd never [00:40:00] interacted with before.And Oman is this incredibly various and fascinating environment where there's mountains that are, you know, over 3, 000 meters higher, what is that 10, 000 feet you know, all of this coastline and with coral reefs and these waddies or slot canyons. And people began to engage with the environments in a very different way to go on hiking trips, to go on canyoning trips and social media was this massive part of that. You know, this is where people learned about this possibility, this is where people met people to introduce them, to take them safely into these spaces. They'd never been on a hike before. You know, Instagram is where they're going to meet somebody to go out into nature with.And it's not to say that this doesn't have problems associated with it, and everything I suppose related with tourism does, but I think it also represents a case where Instagram, in this sense, was a way that people are actively connecting to nature, and in a place [00:41:00] where, you know, Instagram existed and was widely used before nature tourism was a thing.And I think this kind of flips the narrative a bit where in Western Europe, where I'm sitting right now, for instance, there's been this long time practice of nature tourism, you know, going back to, again, the 1900s. You know, people started climbing Alps in the 1850s and so forth. And then Instagram comes along and everybody's saying, oh, people just want to climb the mountain to take a picture. you know, they don't actually care about nature. Well, in Oman, people weren't really, not that many people were climbing mountains, before the ability to take a picture existed. So, there's a bit of a different trajectory in which people began to relate to a particular space and to the kinds of experiences that one can have engaging in nature tourism.So in that sense to go back to your to your question about what do we essentially do with this platform? [00:42:00] And how do we address the problematics? I don't think that I mean, I think that Instagram will not be the most popular platform forever, certainly, but social media, or this kind of connected media, barring some kind of unforeseen complication. I mean, looking at you, AI. But this sort of communication is here to stay probably. So, can we find ways in which this space is can be generative of community could be generative of care and ethical forms of travel? What might that look like? And what kind of imagery might be associated with it?Chris: I'm curious in that regard, Oman to me is someone who's never been and probably, you know extremely ignorant to any of the nation's culture or history. I imagine modernity to be something of a recent arrival in that place, relatively speaking, correct me if I'm wrong, of course. And I guess what I'm curious about in the context of your research and most [00:43:00] recent research is if you've seen the conflicts that might arise in terms of traditional hospitality? What it means to be in a place, as opposed to a landscape, what it means to be a host, as opposed to, I guess a landlord, in the Airbnb sense of the word and perhaps also what it means to be a traveler as opposed to a tourist within the context of these new economic dynamics in Oman and if Instagram has anything to do with that? Sean: No, that's, that's a wonderful question. It's one I really appreciate as I continue to work there and spend time with people who've been incredibly generous showing me around and introducing me to what their life is like as people who participate in tourism. I mean, the first thing I would say is the Oman, the Arabian peninsula and really Arabic speaking cultures generally is hospitality is one of the most fundamentally [00:44:00] important things in social relationships. In what it means to be a part of this culture, one is hospitable to guests, to friends, to family members. It's almost difficult to understate how integral this is. I mean, it is, in many cultures, hospitality is big, but it's very big in this space.And so I think it's a particularly well suited question to, you know, how is tourism and how is social media impacting this code of conduct and, you know this really wonderful practice that I think, you know, the rest of the world can stand to learn a lot from.So, to your question about sort of where my mind sits in this span of development. Oil was discovered in the 1960s and kind of transformative effect as it has everywhere. And in this time, there was a great degree of urbanization. People could get services rather than relying on culture, trading, which comes from a pre oil economy.[00:45:00] Now, you see, I think, a couple things. For one thing, cultures of hospitality, I think, were already being disturbed by the way that neoliberal capitalism tends to work, not just in Oman, but anywhere around the world. It encourages people to find ways to profit themselves and to think as individual agents rather than as being part of a community, having responsibilities to the humans, but also nonhumans to the land as well as to one's family.So that process is already in it's already taking place before tourism began to take root. And I think there are some spaces in which tourism is developing in such a way that it's very profit oriented. And where people are incentivized to privilege [00:46:00] their own gains over those of others.However, there are other ways I think in which people who, say we're living in the city, are meeting people who live in fairly remote areas, under the auspices of tourism. Because they're engaging in tourism, they're meeting people who are living in these spaces and often chatting with them or sharing a meal or sharing coffee or something like this.Sometimes these people who are living in places that are becoming tourism destinations are part of the industry and sometimes people are not, but as it stands now, it seems as very much a preservation of hospitality within this, this particular context. As with anything, I think the question of tourism is to what extent this will become commodified or not, like how do we make money off of this culture of hospitality?How do we turn it into a tourist product? You know, we can sell Oman as being it's hospitable, come meet the locals. But in the way that people continue [00:47:00] to practice it, both people who are living in Oman and being domestic tourists and also people who are seeing tourists come to where they live in ways that they haven't before. To me, it still seems like it's very robustly in place.Chris: Good to hear. And I very much look forward to the publication of your research. Hopefully it'll see the light of day soon, perhaps. Sean: I hope so. Yeah. Things are in process for sure. Chris: Okay. Well, I'd like to thank you, Sean, on behalf of our listeners for joining us today. And you know, this leads me of course, to the question of how might they be able to get in touch with you or follow your work. And if that includes an Instagram handle. Sean: Yeah, that's, that's fine. So I I recently started another Instagram account. I had my own account and stopped posting about 2019.And then I got interested in it again. I opened a new account, which is sort of more research facing. So yeah, if people wanna check that [00:48:00] out, it's @SPSMITHS, so S-P-S-M-I-T-H-S or email spSmith@tilburguniversity.edu. So always pleased to hear ideas and of course things that I've missed because of course I have so much to learn in this space.So I would really look forward to feedback and ideas. Hmm. Chris: Well, I'll make sure all of that's on the End of Tourism website and the podcast page when the interview launches and as well as the other authors, researchers and works that you mentioned earlier on. So once again, it's been amazing, Sean, thank you so much for being able to really flesh these complex ideas out for us and we'll see what happens, right?Sean: Absolutely. Thanks very much for the invitation. And as always, I'll look forward to continue listening. This is such an excellent project. Chris: Thank you, Sean.This episode and others like it are created and made possible by the generosity of Substack subcribers like yourself. Similarly, I have subsidized the work of the pod with my own time and money. This is a labour of love and lineage that requires the support of others. Please consider offering a gift in return, whether that include upgrading to paid subscription, making a one-time donation, sharing the podcast among your people or being willing to reach out and assist in production (as others have). Thank you. Bless. Peace. Get full access to ⌘ Chris Christou ⌘ at chrischristou.substack.com/subscribe

On this episode, my guests are Martin Lena and Linda Poppe of Survival International. They join me to discuss “fortress conservation” in the Congo, the issues facing Kahuzi-Biega National Park, and the recent victories of Survival International there. Linda is a political scientist and director of the Berlin office of Survival International, the global movement for Indigenous peoples' rights. She is also part of Survival's campaign to Decolonize Conservation, which supports Indigenous peoples, who continue to suffer land theft and human rights abuses in the name of conservation.Martin is an advocacy officer for Survival International. He primarily works on Survival's campaign to Decolonize Conservation and has collected testimonies directly from communities facing violations of their rights in the name of conservation. Show Notes:What Conservation Looks like in the Democratic Republic of the CongoThe Evictions of the BatwaSafari Tourism in DRC ConflictThe Militarization of Conservation in Kahuzi-Biega National ParkLand Guards vs Land GuardiansOrganizing Victory! Scrapping French Involvement in Kahuze-BiegaThe German Government Continues to Fund the ParkSolidarity: How to Respond / Act in ConcertHomework:Survival International: French government scraps funding plan for Kahuzi-Biega National Park, citing human rights concernsSurvival International Decolonize Conservation CampaignBalancing Act: The Imperative of Social and Ecological Justice in Kahuzi-BiegaTranscript:Chris: [00:00:00] Welcome to the End of Tourism Podcast, Martin and Linda. I'd love it if I could start by asking you two to explain to our listeners where you two find yourselves today and what the world looks like there for you. Linda: Well, hi everyone. My name is Linda. I work for Survival International and I'm in Berlin. I'm at home, actually, and I look forward to talking to you and chatting with you.It's dark outside already, but, well, that's, I guess, the time of the year. Martin: And I'm based in Paris, also at home, but I work at Survival's French office. And how does the world feel right now? It feels a bit too warm for October, but other than that. Chris: Well, thank you both for for joining me today. I'd like to begin by reminiscing on the season three interview that I had with your colleague Fiore Longo, entitled "Decolonizing Conservation in Africa and Beyond."And in that interview, we discussed the history [00:01:00] of conservation as colonization in the context of Tanzania and the national parks that were built there and the indigenous lands that were stolen in order to do so. I'm curious if you two could offer a bit of background for our listeners in terms of the history of conservation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and especially in regards to the Batwa people and the Kahuzi Biega National Park.Linda: We were quite you know, astonished of the colonial history that, we find in the park where we're here to discuss today. Well, the Congo, obviously, you know, was a colony. And I think in this context, we also need to look at the conservation that is happening in the DRC today.And a lot of the things that you have discussed with our colleague, feel very true for the DRC as well. And the, the park that we're going to look at today, I think it's probably [00:02:00] also the best example to start to explain a little bit what conservation looks like in DRC. It's an older park, so it was created a longer time ago, and it was always regarded as something that is there to protect precious nature for people to look at and not for people to go and live in.And this is exactly what the problem is today, which we see continues, that the people that used to live on this land are being pushed outside violently, separated from the land which they call home, which is everything for them, the supermarket, the church, the school, just in the name of conserving supposed nature.And unfortunately, this is something that we see all over the DRC and different protected areas that exist there, that we still follow this colonial idea of mostly European [00:03:00] conservationists in history and also currently that claim that they're protecting nature, often in tandem with international conservation NGOs.In the park we look at today, it's the Wildlife Conservation Society, and they're, yeah, trying to get rid of the original inhabitants that have guarded these spaces for such a long time. Martin: To build on that, in our campaign to decolonize conservation and survival, we often say that fortress conservation has deep colonial roots and you can definitely see that with the the actual history of the of Kahuzi Biega National Park because it started as a reserve that was created by the Belgian colonial government in 1937 and It was transformed into a national park after independence.So in the 70s, but it was still designated as such following the lobbying of a Belgian conservationist. So it's really the continuation the Western and the European will to keep controlling the, [00:04:00] the independent territories. And that in Africa oftentimes was done through conservation.Linda: And it also has this idea of, I think a lot of the conservation projects that we see, Martin just said it, there was also this post independence push on creating national parks, which was obviously related to the idea that Europeans might lose hold of control in certain areas, so they were pushing for the creation of national parks like the Kahuzi Biega National Park.And that is the setting that we're talking about, basically, something that has very colonial roots and has been pushed into the post colonial era, but in a way which is actually very colonial. Chris: Thank you both for that brief, brief history and introduction into what we'll be speaking about today, Linda, you mentioned that so many of the circumstances around the creation of these national parks includes the exclusion and [00:05:00] displacement of the original inhabitants.And in this case, among others, this includes the Batwa people. And so I'd like to just give our listeners a little bit of a context for what's happened to the Batwa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And so the statistics tell us that "over 90 percent of the 87, 000 indigenous Batwa people in the park have lost legal access to their native territory, turned into conservation areas, and who are desperately poor," according to a 2009 United Nations report.Now, in a recent Reuters article, it's written that, quote, "Local human rights and environmental experts say that the authorities failure to fulfill promises to the Batwa has undermined efforts to protect the forest and its endangered species, including some of the last populations of eastern lowland gorilla.Some of the Batwa around the [00:06:00] park participate in the illegal poaching, mining, and logging that are destroying the gorilla's globally significant habitat. As a result, the conservation outlook for the park is critical, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature." The article goes further and says that "the Batwa have no choice because they are poverty stricken, according to Josue Aruna, president of the province's environmental civil society group, who does community outreach for the Batwa." It seems in this way that the land rights and traditional lifestyles of the Batwa are intimately tied to the health and survival of the ecosystems within the national park, which they've been excluded from, and that their poverty is a consequence of their displacement. Do you think that the issue is as simple as that? Martin: It's always interesting to read these reports from the conservationists, whether it's the IUCN or the NGOs, because the problem is always "the local people. So they are poor and they [00:07:00] have no choice. They participate in poaching." and it's always their fault.Like you were saying, if they end up being poor it's because they were evicted from the land. And as Linda was saying earlier, the forest and the land more generally is everything to them or was everything to them. So it's not only the place where they get food, it's also the whole basis of their identity and their way of life.So once they lose that, they end up in our world, capitalist system, but at the lowest possible level. So, that's why they end up in poverty. But it's a problem that was created by the conservationists themselves. And even when you read Their discourse or their position about trying to improve the situation for the Batwa, it's always about generating revenue ,lifting them out of poverty, developing alternative livelihoods. But what we are campaigning for is not some alternative to the loss of their rights. It's Their land rights themselves. And to go to your other question [00:08:00] about the fact that the loss of their land rights has led to a degrading in the health of the ecosystem.I think, yes, for sure. That has been the case, and it's what we're seeing all around the world in these protected areas that are supposed to protect nature. But actually, once you evict the best conservationists and the people that were taking care of the land for decades, then there is room for all kinds of exploitation whether it be mass tourism or luxury safaris or even mining and logging concessions.So it's not a coincidence if 80 percent of the biodiversity on the planet is located in indigenous territories. It's because they have lived in the land. It's not wild nature. They have lived there for generations. They have protected it and they have shaped it through their practices. So, to us, the best way to protect this ecosystem is to ensure that their land rights are respected and blaming them for poaching or putting that on the fact that they are poor, it's just [00:09:00] dishonest and ignoring the basis of the problem.Linda: Yeah. I agree. And when you just read out these sentences, I noted down like the way it was formulated, as a result, the park is threatened. It's again, just focusing on the local people as being the problem. Like the protected areas, they are to protect an area from the local people, which I think becomes very clear in the way you explained it. And also, like, Martin, I'm quite struck by the idea that they talk about poor people, but ignoring that, you know, their actions that of the Batwa have also caused this poverty. So it's, in a way, you know, first you make people poor and then you kind of insult them almost for being poor and then, you know, acting accordingly.I think that is quite, you know, ignoring what has happened. And I think it's the same with [00:10:00] the general model of conservation. Like the sentences you read, I mean, there is some sympathy in it, you know, it sounds like, "oh, these poor people," you know, "in a way we regret what has happened and that they were evicted."But it's like "those poor people," they don't really look at, you know, why were they evicted and what are the consequences for our kind of conservation today? Like the consequence could be that the Batwa can return to their land because they are the best guardians and because it would give them a base to, to live, not in poverty.So that consequence, they don't see it's because they ignore all the things that have caused the supposed poverty and have caused this kind of conservation that we see. So, don't think about what we've done in the past, we'll just go on, but that is a problem because they don't learn any lessons from what has happened and that land rights should be so important.Chris: Yeah, I think that it definitely points towards this notion that I think a lot of people are becoming apt to in our [00:11:00] times in these days, which is the general kind of approach to the dilemmas in these contexts are to look at the symptoms of the dilemma and not the causes.And in the context of the eviction and exile, displacement of the Batwa people, one of the articles mentions that "one of the consequences of the induced poverty includes the endangering and further endangering of the eastern lowland gorilla." And I mention this because in my research leading up to this interview, this conversation, I looked into the tourism offerings in Kahuzi Biega, in the National Park, and I found the following.I'm just gonna read off a list of what I did find. " Gorilla safaris, or trekking. Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Center tours. Camping safaris. Cultural tours. Bird [00:12:00] watching. Hiking. Climbing and boat cruises." And so my next question is this. To what extent does the safari tourism in the national park play a part in this conflict?Linda: Oh, that's a super interesting question. I mean, it obviously depends on the specific park that you look at. But I think I would say in almost any national park that we look at in Survival, there is some kind of idea that this park needs to have tourists. Tourists need to come and go and see the beauty of nature, ideally Western tourists, so that they become involved in conservation and donate money, and also in a way that tourism would be a way to pay for services that are related to maintaining the park.So it's something that usually always pops up. It's kind of, it's like twins a little bit. And, you know, I, I work on, on [00:13:00] mostly German politics and how they relate to this conservation. And it's something that you can't really separate where you read about conservation projects that the German government funds, you will always also read about tourism.So they're very interlinked. In some parks, you know, there isn't a lot of tourism because the situation is not very attractive to western tourists, but the idea is always there. And then the extent to which tourism actually happens obviously differs and then has different effects. In some parks that we work on, There's a lot of tourism, there's a lot of creation of infrastructure for tourists, hotels, for roads, for tourist vehicles to go places.Then it obviously has a much stronger impact on the area and also on the people that live there. If there are less tourists, then the actual effect of tourism is, of course, a little bit less than it might sound in these proposals to have tourists there at all.Chris: In the [00:14:00] context of conflict zones, which from what I understand this particular park in the Congo is a conflict zone, or at least parts of it, that tourism can act as a kind of barrier between local populations or local ecologies and the consequences of those conflict zones, right? But it doesn't necessarily stop the conflict. It just turns it underground, it turns a kind of blind eye to it, waiting, in most instances that I know of, until the organized crime in the area ends up getting, you know, their hands into the economy of, of the tourism itself.Martin: Yeah, I mean, I agree with Linda that it's always there and it's always under the discourse and it's never only about conservation, there's always tourism. And often the national parks are created for this purpose. If you read the UNESCO definition or the IUCN definition of what a national park is, it says it's also for [00:15:00] recreation.So these places are built for tourists. against the locals. So, yeah, it's always there and it's even in the definition.Linda: So yeah, when you said tourism is a barrier in some cases tourism can amplify the problems that are there because there is more eviction or there's more interest of, for example, governments to evict people, to create this great picture of nature, which is so attractive to tourists.So I think, I would find it as something that can really worsen the situation. I think from what I've seen, you know. We sometimes talk about sustainable tourism or respectful tourism, but in the terms of conservation projects, my impression really is that it's been harmful.And the indigenous populations that work in tourism, which is one of the things that funders of conservation projects often [00:16:00] say, that they can find jobs in tourism. A lot of these jobs are not very good. And I would argue that a lot of times people need to take these jobs because they have lost the choice to not take a job and live from the forest.Chris: Yeah, it's an interesting thing to wonder about in the little research that I did around what's happening in this particular park in the Congo, that there are rebel groups. It is a conflict zone, and yet there are these tourism offerings, right? And that surely, the champions of the National Park and conservation and in many areas would say, "well, you know, the more, the more tourism we can get in here the more we can undermine at least the economic causes if not the political ones that are contributing to the violence," when in fact, from what I can understand from Survival's work, that this is just deepens the causes that produced that conflict and that exile in the first place.Linda: Yeah. And I think there's also [00:17:00] perception of injustice, which we shouldn't underestimate. I mean, if you're an indigenous person that has been violently evicted or whose family has been violently evicted from a certain area, and then you see, Western tourists mostly, which are rich, you know, pay a lot of money for these trips, are allowed to go in and use that area in a way. I think that also creates, yeah, a sense of injustice, which is also, yeah, it's quite, quite sad. Chris: Mm hmm. Definitely. And then that's certainly what we see in over touristed places around the world and in places that are just starting to become over touristed, this kind of deep resentment amongst locals for the inequalities, the growing inequalities and yeah, as well, the injustices that these industries bring.And so on that point of conflict zones, especially in and around Kahuzi Biega. I wanted to ask you both a question around the militarization of conservation. So, [00:18:00] some people believe that militarized park police, which is what exists in this park, are a necessary evil.Officially, at least, "the guards protect the park from armed militias or rebel groups in the area, ensuring that they stay out of the park." Of course, those who they confront and sometimes attack also include the indigenous people, the Batwa in this case, who are trying to retake and reclaim their ancestral lands.And the argument is that without the guards, the land would fall into the hands of much more malevolent groups or forces. And so how do you think the presence of armed conflict as well as militarized conservation guards complicates the issue? Linda: That's a tough question. Well, maybe I can just give like a little anecdote.It was actually about this park, the [00:19:00] Kahuzi Biega National Park, and we were talking to German politicians and government officials about the problem of conflict and about the problem that these park rangers you know, are trained and have a lot of weapons, which seems very militant. And they, they were seeing the problem.They were seeing that this is probably not the best thing they should do, support security forces in an area which is already so problematic. But their thinking was, if we don't give them the money, now we have created this this force, basically. We have hired people, we have trained them.Now, if we stop supporting them, what are they going to do? You know, they're gonna maybe take the training and their weapons and make it even worse. So in a way, I mean, this was off record, right? They were just kind of thinking out loud. But in a way, they were seeing that the projects that they have supported have created structures which [00:20:00] very likely will increase conflict.And it seems quite obvious also because you see all these conflicts with indigenous peoples. So, I'm not going to say that it's a very peaceful area and there is not a need maybe for people to defend themselves. But in a way, the structures that we have in militarized conservation are not the solution.You know, they make the situation much more complicated than it initially was. And now, like, in this park, we're in a situation where we witness terrible human rights abuses, and everyone's scared to act and do something because it could get even worse. And it's, yeah, it doesn't seem like a very good solution.I think we need another way. We can't just stick our head, and say, oh, you know, we just go on, we'll just go on and then let someone else deal with it in a few years. I don't think that's a very good solution. Very good example.Martin: And it's questionable also to what extent do these these guards, these armed [00:21:00] rangers actually protect the, the parks and the species because they are here supposedly to fight against illegal wildlife trade and poaching and everything.But what studies have shown is that the root cause of of poaching and of the, of the illegal wildlife trade is mostly the demand for such products that comes from industrialized countries or at least other parts of the world and the system is made for the guards to take action against the local population and not against the actual criminal networks that lead to illegal wildlife trade and poaching.They get money for people they arrest and the easiest people to find are the locals that are trying to get to their ancestral lands. And there's also sometimes the park management involved in these criminal networks. So, you pretend to put in place a system to fight against illegal wildlife trade, but there ends up being no choice but [00:22:00] for the guards to, to take on the local people. Linda: Maybe we should also think about the indigenous populations as guards, or maybe guardians is the better word, of this area. And if we zoom out of the DRC and look at South America, where we have much stronger land rights... it's not perfect, but of course, better for indigenous people.They often act as guardians or guards of these territories, even though they're also confronted with illegal logging, quite brutal illegal logging, for example. But in a way, they are there and they, of course, are supported by authorities ideally, in defending these territories, but you see a less violent or militarized conflict because you have the indigenous guardians, as opposed to starting out with their protected [00:23:00] areas and armed guards, which are not just there to defend themselves, but have extensive rights of use of violence, and they don't have to fear any repercussions if something goes wrong and they kill, for example, an indigenous person.I mean, that's what we've seen in this park, that they can basically act with impunity. Chris: And thank you, Linda, for offering that example of the difference or the contrast between places like the Kahuzi Biega National Park and the DRC and other places in South America, for example, where there is this inherited intergenerational understanding of guardianship and while there's only maybe a half a century of conservation industry in these places, of course, they're an extension of the colonial project or projects that were undertaken much further back in time in places like Africa and places like the DRC before it was known as such.And then what happens, you know, after X amount of [00:24:00] generations after this kind of exile and displacement, that there is no lived memory anymore of what it means to be a guardian of your place. And I don't just mean as a title, but in terms of how you guard that place, as an indigenous person.We might be able to say that the Western world or the modern world that that's very much what we've become is people who are unable to remember or have a lived memory of what it's like to adequately stand as guardians for a place. You know, I think with the work that you two in Survival International are doing, there's a path forward towards that.And I'd like to remind our listeners that we're also here speaking today in part because there was a victory that was won by Survival International on behalf of the Batwa people and activists like yourself. And so I'd like to just read very briefly from [00:25:00] July 2023 press release from Survival International, in which it is said that, quote, "in a landmark decision, the French government has scrapped its plan to fund the controversial Kahuzi Biega National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo."France's Minister of State for Development, francophonie and International Partnerships, Chrysoula Zacharopoulou, confirmed that the plan to begin financing the Kahuzi Biega National Park has been scrapped. Ms. Zacharopoulou said, quote, "It has been abandoned, in line with our requirement for the respect of human rights."So first of all, I'd like to say congratulations to you both and to your teams at Survival for for getting this this victory and for doing the work you need to do in order to get there. And I'd like to [00:26:00] ask about the strategies that were employed in order to revoke French support for the park. You know, so many of these efforts and victories are either ignored in the context of the endless dilemmas or they're celebrated kind of superficially without considering the work it took to organize such campaigns.And so my question is, how has this campaign been organized by Survival International? Martin: Well, to give a bit of context the first time we heard about the French Development Agency planning on funding Kahuzi Biega, it was in the exact same time period as the publication of a report by Minority Rights Group International detailing brutal waves of violence in 2019 and until 2020 of appalling human rights abuses. So, atrocities that including murder, torture, rape [00:27:00] the burning alive of children, the burning of villages. So, we are, in this context, where we are reading the minority rights group report and understanding the scale of these waves of violence against the Batwa.And around the same period, we see that the French Development Agency has been a delegation, including the director, has been to the park and plans on funding it. So, of course we are appalled and and decide to write to the French Development Agency, but also to the to the ministry that has oversight.So, one of them is the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. And then we wait. And then we also got the support of a senator who also sent a letter and asked a question in Parliament to the government about their plan to fund this park in the context of these human rights violations.And so in July 2022, so last year, they decided to suspend temporarily the project. It was also in the context of an internal scandal because there was an expert[00:28:00] in the field and contracted by the French development agency to carry out a feasibility study. And he was basically saying around, and it can be heard in recordings saying that basically the study is just a formality and that the decision to fund the park has already been made.So there's both scandals. An internal scandal about the due diligence apparently being considered a formality on the field and the scandal of the very detailed report that had just gone out about the atrocities. So, that led to a temporary suspension. And they said that they would conclude the study and look into the abuses into social aspects.And then a year passed and we kept sending letters, of course, and doing some public campaigning about it on social media, et cetera. And then the senator asked again a question in July this year, and that's when we learned that the project was cancelled. So, of course, it's a victory, and it shows that sometimes the government actually does have the oversight[00:29:00] on the development agencies and takes the right decisions.But, of course, it's just the whole model still needs to be challenged and the park still has many international backers, even in the context of the atrocities that we that we know about. Chris: Mm. So the senator that asked about the status of the funding and found out that it was in fact scrapped, the scrapping of the funding was never made public until that point?Or there was never any press release saying so? Martin: No, they made it public, In the answer to the question, orally, in, in commission in Parliament. Chris: Mm. And would there be no way that the French public, for example, would be able to find out about this otherwise?Martin: I don't think so. And to be honest, I'm not even sure the decision had been taken before. I think they looked into it again because the senator asked a question again, but that's just speculation. Chris: And you spoke about writing letters, obviously to politicians and to the ministries [00:30:00] and also social media campaigns. Do you think there was more of an effect on the scrapping of the funding because of the public campaign, the social media campaign? Martin: Yeah, I think and that's basically the whole premise on which our campaigns are based is that an efficient mobilization of the public opinion will lead and the fact that the public cares and is informed will lead to a more efficient lobbying and advocacy of the governments and, and other government agencies. So yeah, I think one can't go without the other. And I don't know what would have happened if only the Senator had asked the questions or if only the Senator had asked a question or if we had only sent a letter and no public campaigning at all, or no press release, or no social media, I don't know. So I think, yeah, both go hand in hand.Chris: Mm hmm.So do you think that without the report from the Minority Rights Group, that the funding would have gone ahead, regardless of what was actually happening there? Martin: It's possible because we know that the funders were aware for years and [00:31:00] years of the human rights violations. And even before the waves of violence that are described in the report, we know that they were aware of that risk of violence at that time and of the human rights violation in the whole context of the militarized park.So, I think it could have very well gone ahead, because the other funders knew and kept funding it. And yeah, it's very important to get that kind of report with very detailed testimonies and information from the ground, and really documenting these atrocities. Otherwise, it's just business as usual.Chris: And the original proposal for the funding at least by the French government or the ministries involved, they were basically just promoting conservation in the way that it typically is. That's what the funding was for? Martin: Well, it's hard to know because they never published anything and actually, they never actually started funding it.It was just, just a project. Like I said, they went on a visit there and started making [00:32:00] promise to the local conservation agencies and to the local authorities. It's not clear to this day what exactly they were planning on funding, but it was clearly stated that there were planning on supporting the park itself, but I don't know for which kind of activities, but still, funding the same structure that that has been responsible for these abuses is still unacceptable.Chris: Mm hmm sounds "sketchy," as we say in English. And and so for our listeners, just a little bit of further context while France simply abandoned plans, the country had not yet made, or the government had not yet made, Germany continues to finance the park despite France's, however, subtle acknowledgment of human rights violations.And so, Linda, my question for you is, first of all, why is Germany funding a national park in the DRC to begin with? And, if you know, [00:33:00] how does that money get spent? Linda: Well, I guess the, the German interest in this park is pretty old, so the German government started funding the park already in the 80s.And there were some other projects even before that, supposedly. But it's considered to be a very, well, it obviously is a very long running project financed by the German government. And some local people call it the German park, because they assume that without the German funding, it wouldn't even exist. Like the kind of money that has been given over decades and the kind of things that have been funded, the infrastructure, the Congolese conservation authorities, the park rangers, you know, all the things that were funded basically crucial for the park to function. So yeah, it is a very German funded project. And also the German government has for very, a very long time looked at it as being a prestigious [00:34:00] project.You know, it was this great park, the gorillas, you already mentioned it, you know, and the Germans been funding it, which when you know a bit about German history, post World War II, there was a lot of interest in biodiversity and conservation funding because it was a good thing to do, which gave Germany a little bit of a different international picture than it had after the war.So there was a lot of interest in funding projects, and they were perceived as being fantastic, and they were shown to be these great projects that Germany is supporting internationally. And then, obviously, it isn't, but the German government has been very, very good at denying that there are these problems, and the role that it has had in facilitating these horrific human rights abuses. Mm. Chris: And how, if at all, has the German government responded to the [00:35:00] scrapping of the French funding? Linda: Very good timing, because I just got a response today, actually from the German government. Mm. 'cause we did point out to them that the French government has decided to not fund the park because of the violations of indigenous people's rights and because of human rights concerns. So we pointed this out to the ministry again, just in case, they would not have learned about this themselves. But the reply basically doesn't address this at all. You know, this was what we wrote the letter about and the replies about all the great things that the German government keeps funding and the improvements it is supposedly seeing on the ground and these improvements justifying their continued support.So it's just a letter explaining why they continue funding it and not addressing why maybe partners like the French government have decided not to fund it. And it's something that we have seen over the years. I think [00:36:00] survival first raised human rights violations in the Kahuzi Biega National Park in actually 2017, so that's quite a few years ago.There was a Batwa family. A father with his son, a teenage son. They were going into the park to collect herbs for medicine because another son of the family was sick. They encountered park rangers who killed the teenager and hurt wounded the father. So it was quite a terrible incident.And the father wrote to the German government, to the funders, and he complained about these human rights violations and the fact that the Batwa had lost access to the park and to their livelihood because of the German funding. The German government just said, "well, you know, there's not much we can do about it, basically."They tried to pay some money, but then really nothing, nothing else happened. And over the years, the situation hasn't improved. It has [00:37:00] gotten worse. But the German government keeps saying that they have faith in the Congolese conservation authorities and they do not see grounds to stop the funding or the project.They keep saying that they see progress. And things will get better. And we know it hasn't gone better. Chris: I'd like to return anyways to this this question around tactics and strategies and organizing. It seems that activists and those not directly involved in social movements struggle with the weight of our times.I mean, it's you know, kind of hard to ignore these days. And so, given that the German government, I imagine, is the obvious next target in the campaign to defund Kahuzi Biega, or at least the conservation authorities and programs there, what tactics, what strategies are being employed by Survival in your campaigns, [00:38:00] and how might our listeners in Germany, France, Europe, and, and beyond, how might they participate?Linda: That's a very good question, because, as I said, you know, Survival has been working on this for a few years, and there's a little bit of frustration, of course, that not much is happening in the terms of acknowledging the problem of funding this park. I think what Survival, what we're thinking is, quite important in this issue of conservation is making sure that donors in the West understand that this is a very symptomatic problem.So, a lot of conservation projects function like this and it is because there is this underlying problem with them, that they do not acknowledge land rights. But they continue to say that certain government authorities or certain conservation organizations are best put to run these places. It's the same with the [00:39:00] Kahuzi Biega National Park.The German government now says, "well, we know there are problems, so we pull in the WCS. They're the conservation organization and everything will be better. But it won't because they also have a record of not respecting indigenous people's rights. So, we need to make them understand that there is this underlying issue of not acknowledging indigenous people's land rights.And we try to do this by pointing out that this is a problem which is happening in a lot of national parks. So, protected areas that Survival has looked at in Africa and Asia, almost all of them, even the ones that we were told were good examples, have these problems. And we try to show that to the donors that have such big impact on these conservation projects and make them rethink what they're doing.It's a very difficult process, of course, because they've always done it in a different way. And now it's hard for them to think [00:40:00] about, you know, giving control and power to local people, which until now they've always said is a threat to conservation. It's like a total turn of what they assumed so far.But for us, it seems like that's the thing that we have to do for them to actually acknowledge the problem, because otherwise all the solutions that they come up with are not real solutions. They put people like the WCS in power, which is also not going to respect the Batwas' rights. Chris: Yeah, I think one of the critiques around development is in the context of these industries, especially things like conservation, volunteerism is another one that as industries, you would imagine that they would have in their mission statement, or vision, or ten-year plan, the slow and intentional disappearance of their own industry, right? Because if what they were [00:41:00] doing was working, we would need less of them. And there would be less of them, but here we are, right? And it's just, of course, a massively growing industry, both conservation and volunteerism. Martin: Yeah, it's true that our key targets are the donors, because like many of the issues that indigenous peoples are facing across the world, the root of the problem and the funding for these problems come from the West and our societies. So that's going to remain one of our targets and key part of the strategy. I think we are starting to see a shift in the discourse, in France, at least. And when we talk to the politicians, we also see that shift, that shift in the discourse of the conservation NGOs, but it's still as harmful. So instead of saying that these places are wild and empty and that the local artists are destroying it or encroaching, well, they still say it, but they also say that what we were saying before about the poverty issue and that [00:42:00] they will generate new projects and new activities and development basically.So, I think that they are starting to acknowledge the presence of these people. They couldn't be further from recognizing their land rights because, like you said, otherwise it means their own disappearance, and they're not built for that. Linda: Yeah, so it's a difficult, it's a difficult thing. I mean, I think we try to talk to people that are more inclined to understand the importance of indigenous people's rights so that we can have a base of people that support our campaigning, which is very important for us.And then we select our targets and try to engage the people that support us in convincing these targets to change projects or change their minds. And sometimes, you know, that can just be it a tweet that texts someone who we know makes decisions about certain [00:43:00] projects, try to raise awareness that there is concern about this project, that some people disagree, that this doesn't comply with human rights, that this doesn't comply with, agreements or treaties they're supporting for indigenous people's rights.And sometimes it's a more complex lobbying strategy. So there are different things we try to do and sometimes, like we saw with the example of the French government, sometimes it works because there's timing, there's different things coming together. But obviously, even though we have a lot of strategies, it's always difficult to know what will work in the end.So we try different things and try to engage with people that will help us spread the word about the need to decolonize conservation and do it differently and acknowledge land rights. And sometimes it's little things that really change a lot. Sometimes we work on something for a long time and it wasn't the right strategy and we need to change.[00:44:00] Chris: Well, speaking of how might our listeners find out more about Survival International and the decolonize conservation campaigns and especially around the work that you two are doing. Martin: Well, I strongly encourage people to read more of our campaigns on the website, on social media, also to subscribe to our newsletter, because that's where we mostly share our urgent actions.So which are one of our tools to put pressure on the targets. So, mass emails basically sent by our supporters to the targets about specific projects. And we also publish some video, direct video testimonies in our tribal voice projects, as we call it.So if they want to listen to, to the victims explaining the problems they are facing, but also the way of life that they have lost or sometimes more inspiring things about the resistance and and the fight. I think it's also very interesting to hear directly from the people affected.But yeah, I strongly encourage people to join the movement by [00:45:00] any means possible. And sometimes as Linda said, just small actions like a tweet or sending an email through these campaigns can be can really make an impact and and it does help ensure that the advocacy and the lobbying is effective.Linda: Yeah, and I think it's also a nice way to picture that you're showing solidarity with, for example, the Batwa, who often perceive the Western donors as being the cause of their problem. And I think for them, it's nice to see that there are also people in the countries that, where the problems originate that are standing up for their rights and supporting them.And I think it's probably the least we can do also, because we're so obsessed with African nature that I think it would be a very good step for us to think about the people that live in these places.Chris: Yeah, absolutely. And maybe not immediately or superficially in part because of the inundations and the dilemmas in our times, but that kind of [00:46:00] solidarity can begin to break down as well, the largely like unconscious nationalist tendencies we have when we think of other people in other countries, we always associate those people with their governments, right?Which is just like, absolutely ridiculous when anyone thinks of themselves in relation to their own government, right? But these are two faces, two voices of the resistance that are working on behalf of many others.And so I just wanted to reiterate that we're here today just to have the chance to be able to speak about a little bit about this this small victory that all willing will lead to many more to much bigger ones in regards to the Decolonize Conservation campaign of Survival International.It takes work and I'm grateful to be able to speak with you both today and to have you share some of your work and your dedication with our listeners and I will make sure that all of those links that you mentioned, Martin, will be on the End of Tourism website and available for our [00:47:00] listeners to sign up to the newsletter and follow on social media and of course participate if they so wish.Thank you both. Linda: Thanks. Martin: Thank you.​ Get full access to ⌘ Chris Christou ⌘ at chrischristou.substack.com/subscribe

On this episode, my guest is , a friend and scholar who recently completed his PhD in Cultural Geography from The University of Edinburgh where his research centered on themes of displacement and memorial walking practices in the Highlands of Scotland. A child of Greek political refugees on both sides of his family, Christos' work looks at ways in which ceremony and ritual might afford us the capacity to integrate disconnection from place and ancestry. Further, his research into pre-modern Gaelic Highland culture reveals animistic relationship with mountains which disrupt easy definitions of colonialism and indigeneity.Show Notes:Summoning and Summiting a DoctorateThe British Empire & EverestThe Three Roots of FreedomHillwalkers and HomecomingThe Consequences of Staying and LeavingThe Romans Make a Desert and Call it PeaceFarming EmptinessLandscapes as MediumsRitualized Acts of WalkingHomework:Christos Galanis' Official WebsiteTranscript:Chris: [00:00:00] Welcome, Christos, to the End of Tourism podcast. Christos: Thank you, Chris. Chris: Thank you for joining me today. Would you be willing to let us know where you're dialing in from today? Christos: Yeah, I'm calling in from home, which at the moment is Santa Fe, New Mexico in the United States. Yeah, I moved out here for my master's in 2010 and fell in love with it, and and then returned two years ago.So it's actually a place that does remind me of the Mediterranean and Greece, even though there's no water, but the kind of mountain desert. So there's a familiarity somehow in my body. Chris: Sounds beautiful. Well I'm delighted to speak with you today about your PhD dissertation entitled "A Mountain Threnody: Hill Walking and Homecoming in the Scottish Highlands." And I know you're working on the finishing touches of the dissertation, but I'd like to pronounce a dear congratulations on that huge feat. I imagine after a decade of research and [00:01:00] writing, that you can finally share this gift, at least for now, in this manner, in terms of our conversation together.Christos: Thank you. It was probably the hardest thing I've done in my life in terms of a project. Yeah. Nine years.Chris: And so, you and I met at Stephen Jenkinson's Orphan Wisdom School many years ago. But beyond that from what I understand that you were born and raised in Toronto and Scarborough to Greek immigrants, traveled often to see family in Greece and also traveled widely yourself, and of course now living in New Mexico for some time. I'm curious why focus on Scotland for your thesis? Christos: It was the last place I thought I would be going to. Didn't have a connection there. So I did my master's down here in Albuquerque at UNM and was actually doing a lot of work on the border with Mexico and kind of Southwest Spanish history.I actually thought I was going to go to UC San Diego, partly because of the weather and had some connections [00:02:00] there. And two things happened. One was that you have to write your GRE, whatever the standardized test is you need to do for grad school here in the US, you don't have to do in the UK. So that appealed to me.And it's also, there's no coursework in the UK. So you just, from day one, you're just doing your own research project. And then I wanted to actually work with what Was and probably still is my favorite academic writer is Tim Ingold, who was based in Aberdeen up in the north of Scotland and is kind of that thing where I was like, "well if I'm gonna do a PhD What if I just literally worked with like the most amazing academic I can imagine working with" and so I contacted him. He was open to meeting and possibly working together and so I was gonna fly to Scotland.I was actually spending the winter in Thailand at the time, so I was like, if I'm gonna go all the way to Scotland, maybe I should check out a couple more universities. So, I looked at St. Andrews, which is a little bit north of Edinburgh, and then Edinburgh, then visited all [00:03:00] three schools, and actually just really fell in love with Edinburgh, and then in the end got full funding from them. And that took me to Scotland. And I didn't know what was in store for me. I didn't even follow through on my original research project, which had nothing to do with Scotland. The sites that I was actually proposed to work with was on the Dine reservation out here in Arizona. There's a tradition, long tradition of sheep herding and there's a lot of, some friends of mine have a volunteer program where volunteers go and help the Diné elders and herd their sheep for them and what's happening is they're trying to hold on to their land and Peabody Coal, a coal mining company, has been trying to take the land forever and so by keeping on herding sheep, it allows them to stay there.So I was actually kind of looking at walking as forms of resistance and at that time, most undocumented migrants trying to enter Europe were walking from Turkey through Macedonia. So I was actually going to go there. And yeah, once I kind of hit the ground, I realized that that's way too ambitious.And I [00:04:00] decided to focus on this really strange phenomenon called Monroe Bagging in the Highlands of Scotland, where people work all week in their office, Monday to Friday, and then spend their weekends checking off a task list of 282 mountains that they summit. There's 282 of them and they're categorized that way because they're all over 3, 000 feet, which for us in North America, isn't that high, but for the Scottish Highlands, because they're very ancient, ancient, worn down mountains is pretty high.And also the weather and the climate and the terrain make it pretty treacherous out there. So it's, it's not an easy thing. Yeah. And I just thought this is a really weird, strange way to relate to mountains and to land. And it seems like a very British thing to do. And I kind of just got curious to figure out what was going on and why people would actually do this.And it came from a very, actually, critical perspective, to begin with. As things unfolded, that changed a fair amount in terms of getting to know people. But, yeah, that was Scotland. And, I think looking back, I think [00:05:00] I was called there by the mountains. I can give the bigger context maybe later on, but essentially one of the main mountain called Ben Cruachan, in Argyle that I ended up most working with and kind of going in and doing ceremony for, and with. I ended up later meeting my what would become my wife and married into her family and on one side of her family, they are literally the Macintyres who are from that mountain. So yeah ended up kind of going there and marrying into a lineage of a mountain that was the center of my my dissertation.So in the end I think I was called there. I think I was called to apprentice those mountains. And then I feel like my time ended. And I think this dissertation is kind of the story of that relationship with that courtship.Chris: Beautiful. Well, thank you so much for that beautifully winding answer and introduction. So, you know, a lot of your dissertation speaks to kind of different notions of mountain climbing, summiting, hiking but you also write about [00:06:00] how our cultural or collective understandings of mountains have defined our ability to undertake these activities.And I'm curious, based on your research and personal experience, how do you think mountains are understood within the dominant paradigm of people who undertake these practices. Christos: Yeah, good question. I would say, I know I don't like to speak in universals, but I could say that one universal is that, as far as I can tell, all cultures around the world tend to not only revere mountains, but tend to relate to mountain peaks as sacred.And so in most cultures, at least pre modern culture, you will always find a taboo around ever actually climbing to the top of a mountain, especially a significant mountain. So ways that you might worship a sacred mountain, for example, you know, in Tibet is to circumnavigate. So hiking, walking around a mountain three times or walking the perimeter of a mountain, kind of circling [00:07:00] around and around the summit.But it would be absolutely abhorrent to actually ever climb to the top. So one thing I was interested in is what happened, what shifted, where in the past people would never think of climbing a mountain summit to that becoming almost the only thing that people were focused on. And I didn't know this, but out of all countries, the country that most intensely kind of pursued that practice was, was England, was Britain, actually.So it's really fascinating. There's this period, the Victorian era, where basically Britain is invading other countries such as Nepal, India, into China, into Kenya, parts of Africa, South America certainly here in North America and the Americas and of course mountain ranges serve as pretty natural and intense frontiers and barriers, especially back then before. You know, industrial machinery and airplanes and things [00:08:00] like that, you're going over land. And so to be able to get through a mountain range was a pretty intense thing. Really only became possible with kind of Victorian era technology and because they were able to penetrate these places that people really couldn't have before it was a way of kind of proving modern supremacy or the supremacy of kind of modern secularism.Because even in places like Sutherland and the Alps, the indigenous Swiss also considered like the Alps sacred, the mountain peaks and wouldn't climb them. And so as the British kind of came up into these mountain ranges. They had the idea of proving that essentially there were no gods on these mountaintops.There was nothing sacred about them. It's just a pile of rock and anybody can climb up and nothing's going to happen to them. And so they really started setting out to start summiting these mountains. And it was mostly military engineers. There's a big overlap between kind of military engineering and surveying and [00:09:00] map making and this kind of outdoor kind of Victorian kind of proving your manhood against nature kind of thing.And so it's a strangely poetic and very grief soaked proposition where increasingly humans had the technology to penetrate anywhere on the planet, you know, more and more. And maybe I'll just go into the story of Everest because it was perceived that the, the earth had three poles.So the North pole, the South pole, and Everest is the highest peak on the whole planet. So there was this race to set foot on the North Pole on the South Pole and on Everest. I don't know much about the North and South Pole expeditions I think they were first but Everest was kind of like yeah I think Everest was the last literally the last place on earth that humans weren't able yet to physically step foot on. And so the British set out to be the ones to do it after World War one. And there's another overlap where most of the men that were obsessed with mountain summiting after World War I had [00:10:00] been through the horrors of World War I and had a lot of PTSD and shell shock and kind of couldn't reintegrate back to civilian life.They kind of needed that rush of risking your life for some kind of larger goal, which warfare can provide. And, slowly they kind of got better technology and eventually by, I think it was maybe 1952, 1953, they finally conquered Everest. And it's almost like the moment that they penetrated this last place of wilderness that was holding out the British Empire started collapsing, which the timing is quite fascinating. You know, they lost India and Pakistan. And as soon as you kind of are able to dominate everything, there comes this nostalgia immediately for wild places. And this is where Scotland comes back in. Where, Scotland, the Highlands have been inhabited for tens of thousands of years.There's nothing wild about them. There were villages everywhere. But what happened through the [00:11:00] 16, 1700s was the Gaelic population, the indigenous population were ethnically cleansed. And then kind of the lands that follow for maybe 100 years. And then when the English started coming in, they were like, "Oh, this is wilderness.These mountains have never been climbed before. We're going to be the ones to conquer them because we're the superior race." And they did so, and when I chose the the title of my thesis used this little known word, Threnody, which is actually from Greek, Threnodia, which translates something as like a song of grief or a song of lament.And I think for me, this incessant kind of like summiting of mountains and risking and sometimes losing your life to penetrate these places where you actually don't retain control, or it's very hard to retain control, right, because of like storms in the weather, that it's almost like a kind of mourning for the loss of the very things that this technology has kind of erased or has compromised.So it's almost, I can't even put into words the feeling around it, but it's almost like, [00:12:00] You're doing the thing that's destroying something, but you have the impulse to keep doing it as a way of connecting to the thing that's being lost, if that makes sense. And I can imagine, you know, maybe all the work that you've done around tourism might have a similar quality to it.There's, I don't know, there's like a melancholy that I experience interviewing and going out with these people that I don't think they would ever be conscious of or even name, but there's a longing for something that's missing. And so that's where also this kind of song of lament theme comes into my, into my dissertation.Chris: Yeah, it's definitely something that shows up over and over again in these conversations and thank you for putting it into such eloquent words is that. I think it really succinctly speaks to the, the condition or conditions at hand. And I guess I'm curious you know, in regards to what you just said about notions of freedom [00:13:00] that are often experienced in touristic experiences or contexts and some of your dissertation centers around the freedom that your friends and hill walking acquaintances experienced there in the Highlands and freedom can often seem like a kind of recurrent trope sometimes in describing the tourist's reasons for travel.And surely outside of a trope for many people's reasons for travel you know, especially in the context of migration. Beyond the surface, we can wonder about the inheritance of ancestrally or ancestral indentured servitude, the commons and the lack thereof in our time and also like a kind of communion or relationship with what you refer to as other than human worlds. And I'm curious what kind of contradictions or insights came up for you in regards to the supposed freedom that was either found or sought after by the Hillwalkers you encountered.[00:14:00] Christos: Thank you. Yeah, I think before I started going deep into this, I probably, I probably shared most people's notion of freedom, which most of us don't ever really sit and wonder that deeply about.But there's a section of my dissertation where I go deep into freedom and I actually look at three different cultural and kind of etymological or linguistic lenses through which to understand freedom. And there's two that the people I interviewed, I think, were most practicing. So the word freedom itself comes from the Germanic, and it's two words.It's broke frei, which is "free," "to be free." And dom, translates kind of as "a judgment." So if you know like doomsday or the doomsday book. What the doomsday and judgment day actually mean the same thing It's just doom is like the older Germanic word for judgment. Okay, and so freedom can kind of translate as like freedom from judgment freedom from constraint and it has this quality of like spatially removing [00:15:00] yourself or getting distance from something that might constrain you, so you mentioned indentured servitude and slavery, which are as old as human civilization across the world.And all these different things that, basically, we are more or less constrained by, whether it's, family, the state, our living conditions, poverty, excess wealth, you know, all these things that might, or the expression of our true life force. And so for a lot of the people that I was working with, that was certainly what they would describe, you know, like I work in an office as a manager Monday through Friday in Edinburgh, and then it's only on the weekends that I get out into the hills and I truly feel alive and free, right? Because I'm in this vast expanse and, I mean, It's not my climate. I'm Greek by both sides. Wet, soggy moss and mold and endless rain and drizzle and cold and dark is not my thing, but it is visually stunningly beautiful. And you know, [00:16:00] and I'm sure we all know the experience of getting up to a peak of something and that sense of kind of almost being removed from the everyday and that sense of like maybe connecting to something higher or bigger.So that sense of freedom is obvious. The other, another lens is through Latin liberty or libertas, which comes from ancient Roman society, which was a heavily hierarchied society where up to 60 percent of people were actually slaves. So, there's a big distinction between those who are free and those who are slaves.And so the idea of liberty, and this also came up with my informants is the idea that you have to compare yourself to another and the more freedom you have compared to someone else, the better it feels. And I think of that as all the mechanics of like air airports and you know, first class lines and first class seating.I had the experience once flying because flying from New York through back to [00:17:00] London to get back to Edinburgh. And for the first and only time in my life I was bumped up to first class for some reason, I don't know why. But it was on, I don't know, one of the newer kind of jumbo jets, and the difference between economy class and first class in many ways is pretty profound.At the same time, it's ridiculous because you're all sitting in the same tube. But I remember the feeling that happened once we took off and they drew the curtain between the first class and everyone in the back. And it was this experience where everyone back there just disappeared.It's just kind of like, you can't see them, they're out of sight, out of mind, and you're just up front. You can lay down completely horizontally in these chairs, you have real glass, glassware and real cutlery, you know, and people treat you super, super nice. But like, in order to enjoy that, you need other people to not be enjoying that, right?So the idea of liberty kind of requires another, or it's almost a zero sum game where someone else has to be losing for you to be winning. And you know, I think of that with tourism, the idea that those of us from the North, you know, are stuck [00:18:00] at home in the winter while those with money, you know, can fly off to Mexico or Costa Rica and stuff like that.So that difference that like your experience is enhanced by other people's discomfort or suffering. And then I came across another lens, which comes from the Greek. So the Greek word for freedom is Eleftheria. And I didn't know the etymology, but one of my office mates in Edinburgh was from Greece, and we sat down with like a Greek etymological dictionary and I discovered that the Greek notion of freedom is completely different.It's almost counterintuitive, and it translates as something close to " loving the thing you were meant to love" or like "being the thing you were meant to be." And even more distinctly, the rios part in Eleftheria would translate into something like "returning to your home harbor after like a long voyage," and it's that, it's literally the experience of coming home, [00:19:00] which in a way is the freedom of not wanting to be anywhere else or to be anyone else, which is in some ways, I think to me, the most true freedom, because you don't want for anything, you actually love everything you are and everywhere you are, and you don't want to go anywhere else.So in that way, I think for me, cultivating a connection to place as an animist, you know, and I think that's a lot of what you and I I imagine experienced, you know, listening to Steven Jenkinson's many stories that keep circling around this idea of, you know, belonging is cultivating that place in you or that muscle in you that doesn't want to be anywhere else, doesn't want to be anybody else, but is actually satisfied and fulfilled by what is, which it's probably at the heart of most spiritual traditions at the end of the day, but to think of that as freedom, I think for me, really, really changed my perspective from, the idea of going around the world as I have and certainly in the past to experience all these different things and to [00:20:00] feel free and to be a nomad versus I would say the freedom I have here of loving Santa Fe and not imagining myself being anywhere else right now.Chris: Well, the theme of homecoming is definitely woven into this work, this dissertation, alongside hill walking.They seem, generally speaking, superficially very disparate or distinct activities, homecoming and hill walking. One is going and then it's coming. And I'm curious if you could elaborate for our listeners a little bit of what those terms mean, and where or how they come together in your work.Christos: Yeah. So the title of my dissertation, you know, is a "A Mountain Threnody: Hillwalkers and Homecomers in the Highlands of Scotland."So I set out to study hill walkers, which is basically a British term for going out for a walk or a hike where the focus is summiting some kind of peak, you know, whether a hill or a mountain, but that's what most people do there. When you set out on a walk, it's just assumed that you're going to end up going to the top of something and then [00:21:00] back down.What ended up happening is actually through Stephen Jenkinson's Orphan Wisdom School, I met several other Canadians of Scottish descent who had already or were planning on going quote "back" to Scotland to connect with their ancestral lands and their ancestors which is a lot of the work with Stephen's school and that, you know, that idea of connecting with your ancestry and with your roots and with your bones.And I kind of just started following along and interviewing people and talking with people that became friends just out of curiosity, because, you know, that's a lot of my background with being first generation Canadian and growing up in a huge Greek diaspora in Toronto and speaking Greek and going back to Greece multiple times and this idea of kind of being Canadian, but really home is in Europe and Greece, even though I've never lived there.So, there's a lot there, personal interest and eventually against my supervisor's advice, I was like, this might be an interesting [00:22:00] conversation to put these two groups together, these people who are spending their weekends summiting mountains in the Highlands and then these other people coming from Canada and the US and New Zealand and Australia who are going to the same mountains to connect with their ancestral, you know, lands and and people. And these two groups are probably the two biggest sources of tourism, like, in the Highlands, which is fascinating. Wow. Except that the one group, the Hillwalkers tend to imagine that they're in a pristine wilderness and that there's never been anybody there. And the homecomers like to imagine that the hills used to be covered in villages and their own people that were there for thousands of years and that they're reconnecting.So it's interesting how the same landscape is both imagined as being repopulated and also emptied. And that both groups are kind of searching again for this kind of belonging, right? This belonging through freedom, for this belonging through ancestry. The other piece that gets, [00:23:00] well, you know, we're interviewing this, we're doing this interview November 21st and we're, I think most people these days are pretty aware of what's going on in Israel and Palestine and this idea of home because to have a homecoming means there has to be somewhere out there that you consider your home.And that's such a loaded, loaded, loaded concept, right? Like many wars are fought over this idea of who a land belongs to, right? I mean, I know you and I have talked about both our families being from the borderlands with Greece, Macedonia, Albania, and those borders just change over and over and where you belong to what is home keeps changing depending on which war has happened, which outcome and things like that.And I think for those of us, I'll say in the Americas, who don't have deep roots here this idea of home being somewhere else other than where you live, is a very complex prospect because certainly when I go to Greece, people don't recognize me as being home, you know, they, they consider me a Canadian tourist. And at the same time growing up in Canada, I certainly never felt [00:24:00] like, "Oh, Canada is like my ancestral home. You know, it's, it's skin deep. My parents came over in the sixties. Right." So this idea of homecoming and, you know, maybe we can just riff on this for a bit. Cause I know you've explored this a lot. It's like, is it tourism or is it something else? Because a lot of people in Scotland, including people I interviewed, just laugh at these Canadians who come over and just start crying, standing over some rocks in the Highlands and who will buy some shitty whiskey at a tourist shop and feel that they're connecting with their roots and buy bagpipes and by kilts and all this stuff, whereas like most Scottish people don't wear kilts and don't blow bagpipes and don't necessarily drink whiskey all day, so there's these kind of stereotypes that have often been just kind of produced by the media, but it's almost like, other than that, how do people actually connect with the homeland, right?Like, what does it even mean to connect with a homeland? And one thing that I found that I think is one of the most powerful things is the idea of walking. So [00:25:00] this is why the comparison and the contrast with hill walking and homecoming is most people, when you go back to your homeland, there's something really central about walking in the footsteps of your ancestors, right?So walking around in the same village, walking the same streets, going to the same house, maybe even if it's not there anymore, going to... I remember going to my mom's elementary school in the little village that she grew up in the mountains of Greece and walking down the same hallways with her, and we went to the auditorium, and she, showed me the little stage where she would literally be putting on little plays when they were, like, in third grade and there's something about standing and stepping in the same place that is so fundamental. And so I'm kind of looking at homecoming through these kind of memorial or commemorative practices of walking. So it's not just walking, but walking and activating a landscape or activating the memories that are kind of enfolded in a landscape. And I've come to believe and understand that walking is a kind of almost magic technology that I [00:26:00] almost see it as really like opening up portals to other times and other places when done in a ceremonial kind of ritualized manner.So a lot of my work again, as an animist and kind of being as far as I know, the first in my field was just cultural geography, to kind of bring an animist lens to the field and kind of look at how, doing ceremony on a mountain, going into these glands and doing ceremony is more than just the material kind of walking, but is actually kind of connecting with these memories and these people in these places.In a way that's, I think, deeper than tourism and that's maybe the distinction between tourism and let's say homecoming on the surface that you might actually be doing almost the same thing, but I think there is this kind of animist lens to understand homecoming through where you let's say you bring a stone from home or you take a stone and bring it back home you know, like these kinds of Ritualize little practices that we do to connect with the place that I don't think tourists do in the same way, [00:27:00] you know?Because in tourism, you're often just trying to get away from where you live and experience something different, where this is trying to reconnect with something that's been lost or something that's in the past. Chris: Yeah, definitely. This leads me into a lot of different directions, but one of them is this question of animism that I'd like to come back to in just a moment but before we do, I want to ask you about. These heritage trips sometimes they're referred to as within the tourism industry, homeland returns which in most cases is a paradox or an oxymoron because most people are not returning to the places that they either were born in or lived in.They, typically, like myself, had never actually been there before. I'll just pull a little quote from your dissertation because I think it precedes this question in a good way. You write that quote, "the commissioner of Sutherland advocated for a state administered program of colonization in the Scottish Highlands, similarly arguing that the [00:28:00] Gaelic race and its inferior temperament presented an obstacle to the onward march of civilization. Locke set out a vision for the colonization, displacement, and reeducation of Gaelic Highlanders, where eventually, quote, 'the children of those removed from the hills will lose all recollection of the habits and customs of their fathers.'Locke's vision has broadly come true," end quote. And so, within the context of the wider spectrum and calendars and geographies that we've kind of been discussing, but more specifically in the context of Scotland, I'm curious if the people that you met there, either locals or visitors and especially in the case of those coming for a homecoming or heritage trip had an understanding of these things, of this history.Christos: No, that's what I found out. [00:29:00] What I've found in my lifetime, cause this isn't the only kind of project around this kind of theme that I've done. Maybe we'll get, I did another project with Mexican friends going back to Spain and kind of repatriating or reconnecting back through the kind of the displacement of the Spanish civil war.But what I've found is those of us of the colonies, that's kind of what I consider myself in ourselves, like people of the colonies. I'm not sure if it's better or worse that we're the ones that hold on to the stories and the memories and the people back quote "home" or in the "homeland" for the large part have moved on and don't really give much thought to these histories of displacement.It's almost, oh my God, it was strange to be in this country where most of the place names in the Highlands are Gaelic, and 98 percent of Scottish citizens cannot read or understand Gaelic, so partly it was this strangeness of being in a country where only two out of every hundred people could even understand the names of the places where they lived, even [00:30:00] though they had never left there and their people had never left there.And you know, if you let that sink in, it's like, let's say you and I being of Greek descent, imagine if 90 percent of Greeks couldn't understand Greek, you know what I mean? And couldn't understand the name of their own village. And well, there's, here's another angle to this in Scotland.When you want to learn traditional Gaelic fiddle, you go to Cape Breton in Nova Scotia in Canada because that's where the Highlanders who immigrated to Nova Scotia in the past kept the tradition pure and kept fiddle playing what it had always been. Whereas, you know in Scotland now, they're into hip hop and trap and drum and bass and stuff like this.And so if you're Scottish and you've never left Scotland in order to connect with the music of your ancestors you have to go to Canada, so most people that I interviewed and I think this is fair, you know to assume of most people Don't [00:31:00] think much about the ethnic cleansing that went on whichever side that they were on And it's kind of left to us in the colonies either to also let it go and move on and try to settle into these new lands or you kind of keep holding on to this memory of a place you've actually never lived, you know, and it's almost like both propositions are grief soaked.Both are kind of almost an impossible poem to hold because obviously there were people here before our European ancestors came. Obviously, we don't have these deep roots or memories or connections to this place. We don't have ceremonies or songs or much that's derived from this land, at least not yet.And yet many of us lose the language and the ceremonies and the traditions of the places where our ancestors came. It's almost like at least we still know where we've come from. Whereas to be in Europe, or at least in Scotland, and to have never left, but to nevertheless have also lost the connection with [00:32:00] your own ancestors and your own language and those places it's almost like a parallel process where there are people that get on the boats and leave, but there are people that are left behind. But it's almost like, regardless whether you leave or whether you stay, the fabric of that culture just gets completely rendered and torn apart by that displacement. And somehow, even though you never leave having so many of your people leave actually kind of compromises the ability to stay where you are, and to be connected to where you are. ⌘ Chris Christou ⌘ is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber!I interviewed one woman who had an ancestor who in Scotland, they call like psychic abilities, the second sight.So the idea of having kind of psychic premonitions or all of a sudden knowing that like your brother has died, even though he's in Australia, you know, that kind of thing. That people had that when I lived in Scotland and when they moved to Canada, they actually lost that ability. You know, so it's this idea that it's not that you carry almost these knowledges or abilities just in you, but it's actually comes from the connection [00:33:00] to the place.And once that connection becomes severed, you lose those capacities. And I've actually never said this out loud, but I wonder how much the people that stayed behind actually lost because of all the people that left, if that made sense. It's almost like, how does a culture stay resilient when almost everyone between the ages of like 20 and 40 leaves and never comes back.I think you could consider that this is all just stuff to wonder about. But like, for those of us that come from these kind of like largely settler countries like Canada and the U. S, we're still living through these questions. We're still living through these implications of like, how long do you hold on to the past? And at what point do you just kind of let go and move forward? And If you do so, how do you move forward in a place that you don't have any roots?Chris: You know. I remember going to see, going to my father's village in northern Greece for the first time some eight years ago, and knowing that I had [00:34:00] one baba or grandmother left there, and after searching for a few hours, she was hard of hearing at the time, finally found her, finally found the house and shared a delicious meal and traded photographs.I had no Greek or Macedonian language ability at the time. And then I was I called a taxi later on some, you know, at the end of the day to go back to the city, to the hotel, and standing in her garden there, she began to weep, right, without having said anything, even with the language barrier, I could understand what she was saying, and she was, she was mourning the migration of my family or my side of the family, or my father's side of the family to Canada, and then, her son and his family to Germany.And so, there's this question of what comes upon the people that quote unquote "stay." that's so often lost in the discourses [00:35:00] around migration, kind of always focusing on the individual, the migrant themselves, or the places that they arrive in.But do we just let it go? And how do we do that? I have this other quote from your dissertation that lands really strangely in this moment, in this conversation and it has to do a little bit with the kind of what I think you refer to as a national geographic imaginary.And so this is the response of the people in Scotland, in the Highlands embedded and engaged and indebted to these hill walking and homecoming industries. And so in your dissertation, it's written that "in February of 2017, an uproar on all sides erupted when, in a rare sign of bipartisan solidarity, both Mountaineering Scotland and the Scottish Gamekeepers Association attempted to pressure the Scottish government to abandon a [00:36:00] proposal to increase woodland cover, trees, from 17 percent to 25%. by 2050. The commitment to plant 10, 000 extra hectares of trees between now and 2022 was made in the government's draft climate plan. The protesting organizations argued that there had not been enough consultation and consideration given to the changes to the highland landscape that would come about by this tree planting initiative.And they were voicing their concern on whether, quote, 'adequate weight is being given to the significant changes this will have on the landscape of Scotland, and in particular, the dramatic open views and vistas which have come to signify to the outside world that which is unique about our country.'" End quote.And so this seems to be, to some degree, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but a manner of contending [00:37:00] with that past in a way that is, you know, perhaps ignorant of it. Or that is perhaps also faithfully serving the needs, the economic needs of the people, of the place.Christos: There's a lot there. I'm, what's coming to me, do you know this quote? It's from ancient Rome. It's a bit convoluted, but this is a Roman text talking about the colonization of Britain, so of the Romans conquering the Gaelic people in the Picts, but it's In a speech written by this Roman historian that he's attributing to like the Gaelic king, basically. So it's not, this wasn't actually said by a Gaelic king, it's just a Roman kind of putting these words in his mouth to kind of create like a battle scene, but but a lot of people quote this and it's from the Gaelic perspective referring to the Romans saying "the Romans make a desert and call it peace."[00:38:00] And that's kind of what's happened in Scotland is the villages were cleansed, literally. You know, the houses were burned down and knocked down. The people were forcibly, sometimes violently, thrown out of their homes into the cold. Many of them just had no prospects to be able to stay and move to Glasgow.And many of them, you know, came to Toronto and Saskatchewan and North Carolina and all this. And so after they left, these highlands kind of became empty, like this vast emptiness. And then once the Victorian English came into that landscape and started painting it and writing Victorian poems about it, this aesthetic of this, treeless, vast expanse became kind of that National Geographic kind of aesthetic of the mountain peak and the colorful heather and then the loch or the lake, kind of [00:39:00] reflecting the mountain.You can just imagine the scene, right? Of like the mountain peak being reflected in inverse in the lake, you know, kind of thing. It's just that perfect kind of symmetrical perspective photograph or painting. And then that kind of became the symbol of freedom and tranquility which is basically like a site of ethnic cleansing becomes a symbol of beauty.And then what happens is you keep managing the landscape to maintain that aesthetic, which is why you find the strangeness of, like, environmental groups arguing that planting trees is ecological vandalism, that you're ruining the ecology of a place because your trees are gonna get away in the way of these vast expanses.So it's it's this weird wondering on, like, how certain aesthetics become symbolic of something. And then you manage the land, to maintain that aesthetic. Even though it's [00:40:00] absolute death for the wild, the wildlife and even the people in that landscape, to maintain it in that way. The thing that might not be obvious to most people which wasn't I didn't know about this whole world before I moved there, but Scotland's one of the few if not only place in all of Europe where you can still be a feudal lord like they call it a laird, l-a-i-r-d, but it's like a lord where all you need to do to be a lord is you just buy land and if you have enough land you're you claim title of Lord Wow.And most people that are lords in Scotland these days are not even British. You have people from Saudi Arabia, from all over that have bought up the highlands in many ways. And they have these estates and you know, Balmoral estate, which is like the Queens, or I guess she's dead now. Now it's King Charles's estate.And what you do is maybe once a year you and all your rich friends from all over the world fly in [00:41:00] and do this traditional game hunt where you might be hunting deer, but more often you're actually hunting wild birds. You know, so grouse especially. If anyone's seen, I find it fascinating watching Downton Abbey, that TV series, because it's kind of, it covers a lot of the kind of that, that time in Britain.And there's an episode or two where they go into the Scottish countryside to go, you know, go hunting. So it's this weird aesthetic where you dress up in a certain way, kind of like an old time Scottish lord, and you go out on the land with dogs and you shoot down birds, and in order for the birds to live there you need the landscape to basically be wide open, because that's actually what they prefer.And so, this is why, again, for the context of that quote, you have an environmental group, and basically, rich, elite gamekeepers working together to keep the government from planting trees in this landscape because it's in both their interest to maintain [00:42:00] this landscape as an ecological wasteland, essentially that people can't sustain themselves off of or people can't live in So you're kind of farming emptiness if that makes sense in a way you're like cultivating emptiness. Yeah. For tourism. Which again I mean, you've been talking to so many people about this subject. To me, it's fascinating what tourism can be or what it can mean, you know, or like what need is trying to be fulfilled in these, in these landscapes that often get kind of territorialized as touristic, you know, because most people, when they travel, they don't go to walk around the suburbs of a city. There's only certain places that tourists are drawn to, right? Hmm. And so I'm always curious about why and what tourists are drawn to, you know, what is like almost like the resource there that is being extracted. In Chris: the context of your work, you know, largely in regards to, to landscapes and we've spoken a fair amount today about [00:43:00] landscapes as, as objects at the very least.But in, in your dissertation, you know, there was a line that struck me certainly I think coming from your animist tendencies and sentiments where you say that "landscapes are mediums and landscapes are a process," and I'm curious, as we kind of wind ourselves towards the end of our time together, if you could elaborate on this for our listeners a little bit, this, this idea of landscapes as mediums or as processes.Christos: Yeah, so I've done my, my PhD in the field of cultural geography, or sometimes called human geography, which is kind of like anthropology except kind of rooted in place, I'd say that's the big difference. It's not as popular here in North America, but in the UK it's much more popular. And probably the primary focus in that field is landscape, which I think most people might be familiar with that term in terms of like, maybe landscape [00:44:00] gardening or landscape painting.But when you get deep into it, which is kind of what grad school is, is you're like a big weirdo and you just get so deep into something so friggin specific that, you know, most people think you might think about once in your lifetime, but you end up spending nine years thinking about and writing about.It's almost like you can't perceive a place without some kind of filter, if that makes sense. It's almost like there's no such thing as just like a place or land that's just objectively out there. Like, I spent most of a winter, you know, down where you are in Oaxaca, but you having lived there for this long, like if you and I walk around in the streets of Ciudad Oaxaca, you're going to perceive so much more than I am, or at least many different things than I am, right?I'm going to be purely a tourist, I'm going to be reading on a surface level where you might have dozens of memories come up from your time living there and different things that have happened. And [00:45:00] so, in that way, like a landscape is almost, is always like a medium, meaning like our own perceptions, our own projections, our own memories are always affecting the way that we perceive a place.And so cultural geography, the field that I'm in, kind of looks at that. It looks, literally at the kind of the, the collision of culture and geography and like the politics of a place. You know, I was talking about like earlier about landscape management. You know, there are people that are choosing how to manage the landscape in the highlands, where to allocate money and where to cut money from.And all of those decisions are based on preferences of aesthetics and land use, in terms of landscape. So for anyone that's interested, it's a fascinating field to start looking at what we perceive in a place or in places [00:46:00] and how, what we perceive or what we wish to be there affects, you know, the politics of a place.And again, the contemporary crisis right now, Israel Palestine, this question of like, who belongs there? Whose land is it? What do you see in that landscape? For some people, they see an ancient Jewish homeland that these persecuted people are trying to return to and reclaim and for other people, they see, you know, an indigenous Arab people that are being displaced by outside colonizers and, you know, both in their way are right and wrong.I'm not going to wade into the politics of it, but the way that landscape is used as a medium, politically, economically, culturally, is a really fascinating subject, at least for me.Chris: Well, thank you for that, and to finish up with a question around pilgrimage, which Jerusalem being the quote unquote, "holy land" and where so many pilgrimages landed in in previous times and of course in contemporary ones as [00:47:00] well. I'm curious about what you could describe as ritualized memorial acts of walking. And I'd like to finish by asking what have been the most achieved and enduring acts of ritual that you've encountered? What lessons might they have to teach us in a time of hypermobility?Christos: Again, that's like a huge question. Okay, I'll try to be succinct if I can. I don't know why I'm drawn to these kinds of histories, but anywhere I go in the world, I tend to be drawn to, yeah, histories of displacement, I would say.It's a strange thing to be interested in for most people, but it probably speaks to the fact that I am the fourth generation of men to leave the country that I was born. You know, that's between both sides of the family, it's not all one lineage. But being of Greek descent, Greece has long been a country where people leave, you know?Like, right now, the [00:48:00] United States is a country where people come to, but to be claimed by a place where for hundreds of years now, so many people, whether by choice or circumstance, leave their home probably does something to you, you know? And so Anywhere I've traveled in the world, I tend to either seek out or be sought out by these kinds of histories, and so I referred a bit earlier to this project I did years ago where I was spending a lot of time in Mexico and ended up meeting what became a friend is an artist from Mexico City, Javier Arellán, and he was second generation Mexican.His grandfather was from Barcelona in Spain and was a fighter pilot for the Spanish Republic, so like the legitimate democratically elected government of Spain. And when Franco and the fascists kind of staged a coup and the Spanish Civil War broke out you know, he was on the side [00:49:00] of the government, the Republican army.And Barcelona was basically the last stand of the Republicans as the fascist kind of came up from the from the south and when Barcelona fell everyone that could literally just fled on foot to try to cross into France, nearby to try to escape, because knowing that if they were captured they would be imprisoned or killed by the fascists who had basically taken over the country now.But the French didn't want tens of thousands of socialists pouring into their country because they were right wing. And so rather than letting people escape they actually put all the Spanish refugees in concentration camps on the French border. And that's where my friend's grandfather was interred for like six months in a place called Argilet sur Mer, just over the French border.And then from there, Algeria took a bunch of refugees and he was sent to Algeria. And then from there, the only countries in the whole world that would [00:50:00] accept these left wing Spanish refugees was Mexico and Russia. And so about 50, 000 Spanish Republican refugees relocated to Mexico City. They had a huge influence on Mexican culture.They started UNAM, like the national university in Mexico City. And my friend Javier Grew up in Mexico city, going to a Spanish Republican elementary school, singing the Spanish Republican National Anthem and considering themselves Spaniards, you know, who happened to be living in Mexico. And so when I met him, with my interests, we, you know, overlapped and I found out that him and his wife were soon setting out to go back to that same beach in France where his grandfather was interred, in the concentration camp and then to walk from there back to Barcelona because his grandfather had died in Mexico before Franco died, so he never got to return home. You know, maybe like a lot of Greeks that left and [00:51:00] never did get to go back home, certainly never moved back home.And so we went to France and we started on this beach, which is a really kind of trashy touristy kind of beach, today. And we thought you know, that's what it is today, but we then found out talking to people that that's actually what it was back in the 1930s, 1940s was this touristy beach and what the French did was literally put a fence around and put these refugees on the beach in the middle of like a tourism beach literally as prisoners while people on the fence were like swimming and eating ice cream and, you know, and being on vacation.So even that site itself is pretty fucked up. A lot of people died there on that beach. And it was 15 days walking the entire coast from the French border back to Barcelona. And whereas Javier's community in Mexico city actually raised [00:52:00] funds for us and we're really excited about this idea of homecoming and going back home to Spain.We quickly discovered when we started talking to locals about what we were doing, they would stop talking to us and walk away and they didn't want anything to do with us. They did not want to know these histories. They didn't want to touch it. And what we found out is like Spain has never really dealt with this history.And it's such a trauma and nobody wants to talk about it. So again, it's this strange thing where it's like us from the Americas, you know, my friend from Mexico was wanting to return home and it was a strange trip for him because he thought of himself as a Spaniard returning home and these Spaniards were like, "you're a Mexican tourist and I don't want to talk to you about the civil war, you know?"And I think that really hurt him in a lot of ways because he almost kept trying to prove that he wasn't a tourist, whereas for me, I knew that I was a tourist because, you know, I have no history there.[00:53:00] In terms of pilgrimage, I've done other pilgrimages, other walks I won't get into now, but there's something about walking a landscape or walking a land as opposed to driving, obviously, or flying that the pace of walking, I think, allows you to interact with people and with places at a rhythm that is maybe more organic, maybe more holistic. I did do the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrimage in Spain, like I did that another 15 days as well. And for me there's nothing like walking. You know, there's, there's something that happens. To your mind, to your body, to your spirit when you're moving that I've never experienced through any kind of other travel.And unfortunately there are only so many places in the world where you can walk for days or weeks on end that have the infrastructure set up to do so. And I know that here in the Americas other than walking on busy roads, it's pretty hard to get long distances through walking.And so I think another thing that tourism has done is kind of cut off the transitional kind of walking and you just kind of fly off and just kind of plop yourself [00:54:00] down and then get extracted out through an airplane, but you don't have the experience of seeing the landscape change day by day, footstep by footstep, and experiencing the place at that speed, at that pace, which is, you know, a very slow pace compared to an airplane, obviously.Chris: Mm hmm. Perhaps, perhaps very needed in our time. Christos: I hope so. I think there's something about it. I think there's something humanizing about it. About walking. Chris: Well, I've asked a lot of you today, my friend. And we've managed to court and conjure all of the questions that I've, that I had prepared for you.Which I thought was impossible. So, on behalf of our listeners and perhaps all those who might come to this in some way, your dissertation at some point down the road, I'd like to thank you for your time and certainly your dedication.And I imagine a PhD, nine year PhD [00:55:00] research process can be extremely grueling. That said, I imagine it's not the only thing that you have on your plate. I know that you're also an artist a teacher, writer, and Kairotic facilitator. I'm saying that right. To finish off, maybe you'd be willing to share a little bit of what that entails and how our listeners might be able to get in touch and follow your work.Christos: Yeah, first I'll just say thanks for reaching out, Chris, and inviting me to do this. I've listened to your podcast and love these kinds of conversations around these topics of place and belonging. It's obviously deep in my heart and I said this to you earlier, other than my supervisors and my examiners, I think you're the first person to read my dissertation, so I appreciate that you took the time to read it and to draw quotes and to discuss it with me because, I think most people that have done a PhD know that it can be a pretty solitary process to go so deep into such a tiny little corner of like knowledge that for most people is not what they're interested in every day and to [00:56:00] share these stories. Thank you. So yeah, my website is ChristosGolanis. com. And part of what I do is working with this Greek term, kairos. So in Greek there are at least three words for time. One is chronos, which is like linear time. One is aeon, which is like kind of eternal time.And one is kairos, gets translated as kairos, which is like almost the appropriate time or ceremonial time. And my best definition of that is you know, there are some things that are scheduled, like you and I for months ago planned this particular time and this particular day to do this interview.But deciding, let's say, when to get married with your partner doesn't follow any kind of rational, linear timeline. That's more of a feeling. And so the feeling of like when some, when it's appropriate for something is what Greeks consider to be keros, like, you know, keros for something like it's, it's the appropriate time for something.So. What I do is I kind of counsel people to craft [00:57:00] ceremonies or rituals for big transitions in their lives to mark things in their life through ritual or ceremony. Like I said, for like a homecoming two weeks of walking the coast of Spain can be a ceremony, right, of kind of walking your dead grandfather back home. I think there's something about the impulse to go out into the world, to find something, to integrate something, to process something, right versus staying right where you are and kind of with community, with others. It's kind of ritually marking it, integrating it, and you know, it's cheaper, it's easier on the environment, and sometimes can, can go a lot deeper than going away and coming back, and maybe not much has changed.But it can be dealing with the transition of someone from life into death or a birth or a career change. And so basically using ceremony and ritual to really mark and integrate these significant moments in our lives so that we can be fully with them as they're happening or as they've happened in the past, but haven't been able to be integrated.So that's some of the kind of [00:58:00] work that people can do with me if you want to reach out through my website. Chris: Well I very much look forward to seeing and hearing your dissertation in the world outside of these small groups of podcast interviewers and academics. So, hopefully one day that's the case if there's any editors or publishers out there who enjoyed what you heard today and want to, want to hear more, please get in touch with me or Christos and we can, we can get that into the world in a good way.Christos, thank you so much brother. It's been a pleasure and I hope to have you on the pod again soon. Christos: All right. Thank you. Get full access to ⌘ Chris Christou ⌘ at chrischristou.substack.com/subscribe

My guest on this episode is Healani Sonoda-Pale, a Kanaka Maoli Human Rights advocate for Self-Determination and a Water Protector who has been organizing at the intersection of the indigenous struggle for liberation and environmental protection in Hawai'i. She is a member of the Red Hill Community Representation Initiative and the spokesperson of the Ka Lahui Hawaii Political Action Committee. Healani was born and raised on the island of O'ahu where she resides with her family.Show Notes:The Beauty of the Pandemic Shutdown in Hawai'iThe Fallout of the Lahaina Fires in West MauiNo ControlsManufacturing the AuthenticReopening for Tourism in the Midst of CatastropheLocal Schism: Those in Favour and Those AgainstThe Tourism at the Heart of the Housing CrisisKa Lahui Hawai'i Political Action CommitteeThe Water Crisis in OahuDecolonizing Tourism is an OxymoronSolidarity with Kanaka MaoliHomework:Healani Sonoda-Pale InstagramKa Lahui Hawai'i | TwitterOahu Water Protectors | Red Hill Community Representation InitiativeTranscript:Chris: [00:00:00] In the first season of the podcast I spoke to Hokulani Aikau and Vernadette Gonzalez about the attempts to decolonize tourism in the Hawaiian islands. And following that Kaleo Patterson. Who offered a deeper historical and cultural background into the ongoing us occupation of Hawaii. The military industrial tourism complex, and some of the traditional forms of hospitality that Hawaiians have engaged in. Since then, and especially because of the wildfires that spread through west Maui this past summer. Listeners have asked again and again, to return to the islands, to host the voices of those. They're now struggling with another catastrophe. Who are offering resilience and resistance. In the face of these enduring consequences. And as such, I welcome.Healani Sonoda-Pale to the pod. Thank you for joining me today, Healani.Healani: It's my pleasure to be joining this podcast and to help [00:01:00] spread the message about tourism in Hawai'i. Chris: Healani, could you do us the favor of elaborating a bit on where you're speaking from today and how the world looks like for you?Healani: Okay. So I'm a Kanaka Maoli woman, born and raised in Hawai'i on the island of O'ahu. I have been in the Hawaiian movement for liberation and self determination for nearly 30 years. I am a student of Dr. Haunani-Kay Trask, and I am on the front lines of many, many issues. The issues that we face today are, many of them are a consequence of tourism.The desecration of cultural sites. The degradation of our beautiful beaches pollution, traffic, overcrowding, the high cost of living in Hawai'i, the extremely high cost of housing in Hawai'i. These are all because of tourism. This is happening to Hawai'i. [00:02:00] As a result, direct result of the tourist industry, which Hawaii relies on.And in Hawaii, we have two businesses. We have the military industrial complex and the tourist industry. Those are the two worst industries to rely on, number one. And they are the most exploitive and extractive industries to have. They do not enhance our way of life here on, on these islands in Hawaii.They do the opposite. They have brought many of us to the brink where we are now, most of us living paycheck to paycheck. The average cost of a house in Hawaii is a million dollars.I believe Honolulu is the number one or at least the top three most expensive cities in the United States to live in. So tourism is a plague in Hawaii. It is a plague upon this place and it has caused us to [00:03:00] struggle on a daily basis, not just financially and not just socially, mentally as well. Having to deal with tourists on a daily basis in Hawaii is frustrating, so that's kind of like the space I'm coming from. I am involved with the water issue, protecting our water, which is now something that is a huge issue. I'm very much involved in the Red Hill issue. I'm involved with protecting Iwi Kūpuna, which is our traditional Hawaiian burials. I'm involved with the repatriation of our land. Again, another big issue. It never ends because the, the economic, social pressure to take and take and take until there's nothing left is relentless. So that's the space we're coming from. So you talked about COVID, right? You started this podcast in the beginning of COVID and COVID was an eye opener for a lot of people in Hawai'i. When COVID happened, [00:04:00] the state of Hawai'i shut down and tourists weren't allowed here during our shutdown.I believe it was like a year and a half. It was beautiful. Even though we were living in the middle of a pandemic, our beaches were empty. There were no lines at the stores. There was no traffic. Even the air we breathed seemed cleaner. The water we swam in, in the ocean, didn't have this sliminess on it, from tourists with suntan lotion swimming in it all day, right?So the fish came back. Even the plants and the land was happy. I mean, it was a beautiful time. Even though it was sad because we were living through a pandemic, it was a beautiful time for us as Kanaka because we got to see Hawai'i without tourists. And that really opened the eyes for people who usually are not as [00:05:00] critical of tourism, as many of us have been so more people in Hawaii started saying, especially Kanaka Mali, well, how do we move forward without tourism?But when the state opened up again, tourism came back and it came back with a vengeance.When you look at what was happening on social media and, you know, what people were posting and across all the islands, we saw some frustration. We saw people posting about interactions they were having with tourists at sacred sites and beaches. People were more aware that tourists were there after COVID because we were able to enjoy our beaches, enjoy our islands without them.And then when they came back, it was not only dangerous because we live 2, 000 miles away from the nearest continent. So, they were bringing in the COVID. I mean, from the time of [00:06:00] Captain Cook, tourists, visitors, explorers, missionaries, they have been bringing in diseases when, when Captain Coke arrived in 1778. We didn't have any immunity to these diseases, and so now, I think for a lot of residents here in Hawai'i, our eyes have been opened on what we have to give up for tourism.We have to sacrifice not only our beautiful island life, but a way forward that doesn't include commodifying who we are as a people, our culture, everything. The state's been talking about diversifying the industry here in Hawai'i, right? They wanted to look into agriculture was one. They've never seriously taken that up. And they always fall back on tourism.Chris: And why do you think that is? Because it's just so easy.Healani: Because they've invested. It's a multi billion dollar business. There's hotels. Waikiki [00:07:00] is loaded with hotels. It's business interests. It's those that have been in control of the tourist industry, wanting to keep control of that and wanting to keep their financial interests protected and keep going.So that is, that has been a problem. And of course we have strong lobbyists here in Hawai'i for the tourist industry. It is an industry that is supported by taxpayer dollars. It's one of the few industries we give millions of dollars of our money. It's a private industry supported by taxpayer dollars.So it's a private industry that we support that exploits not just our resources, our culture, but they have really degraded our way of life here. They've made everything so expensive that most of our people, most of the indigenous people of Hawai'i have moved away because they can't afford to live here.Chris: And you know, I'm curious [00:08:00] in this regard, to what extent do you think that this Government money and government decisions played a part in these wildfires that passed through West Maui in August, you know, like reading and researching for this interview and seeing what's been shared online and social media, the term management and mismanagement continues to arise in and among social movement activists.And I'm curious to what extent you think that either government action or inaction or the tourism industry had a part to play in what happened this past summer.Healani: The Lahaina Fires. was so tragic and the tragedy continues months after. The suicide rates are on the rise in Lahaina. Families are still displaced, thousands of them. They were just [00:09:00] a few days ago, I had posted about it. They were just given again, eviction letters. The last time I was in Maui was there.The first set of eviction letters that went out. So they're being housed in hotels, 7,00-8,000 of them; families that have lost everything, in hotels. And now they're being told to leave to make way for tourism, to make way for tourists. That's the enormity of the pressure that tourists, tourism brings with it. The pressure to a piece and to serve and to put tourism first.Just going back to my childhood in school. We were basically brainwashed into thinking we need tourism. Without tourism, we wouldn't have jobs. There would be no money, you know? So it's been kind of ingrained in us. And that's why I think COVID was super important because it was an eye opener for a lot of us.Because they saw really [00:10:00] what was possible, a world without tourism. And so the pressure to support, to push tourism, to... "they always say, we want to support small businesses," but it's really not about small businesses. It's about those huge, multinational corporations that have invested millions.into this industry and have supported and lobbied for their industry, for the tourist industry. That's what it's really about, to a point where they really don't care about the people, the residents of Lahaina. They're literally traumatizing these families again and pushing them around to make room for an industry that we all pay to support.And the Lahaina fires is a result of corporations, land grabbing by corporations of [00:11:00] tourism gone wild, literally. The whole culture of Hawaii is about making sure tourism is going to be okay in the future. We're one big resort. That's what we are.Hawaii is one big resort. Everything is catered for tourists first. It's always tourists first, residents last. And kanaka maoli not even considered, like we're not even in the equation, except when they want us to dance hula, and when they want us to chant, and when they want us to teach tourists how to make leis. So the whole Lahaina situation is very complicated.Tragic, and it continues to be tragic. Over a hundred people died in those fires. And Lahaina is like a real big hub for tourists, and has been. It's like the Waikiki of Maui. So having that burned down, I think, was a big loss for the tourist industry on Maui. [00:12:00] So they are trying every which way to bring that back. In fact, today they're going to unveil the strategic plan for the next few years for Maui, which again, is just a slap in the face. It's insulting to the people of Lahaina. They're actually having it in West Maui. It's insulting to the people of Lahaina to have now a discussion about how to move forward with tourism while they're still displaced. There's thousands of families that don't know where they're going to be next month.There are thousands more that don't have access to clean water, don't have jobs, that have multiple families living in their homes and they're going to have a big presentation on tourism today. That's what we have to deal with.There is a mythology that's been built around the tourist industry that basically tells us, you know, [00:13:00] we need tourism. We need tourism. For some reason, we won't be able to survive without tourism. So that's the culture of Hawaii. And that's what I've grown up in. One of the things that is concerning about tourism is the fact that there's never been an environmental assessment or environmental impact study done on the effects tourism has on Hawaii .There are no controls. There's no control of how many people will be allowed in, how many people will be allowed at a certain beach, how many people will be allowed to swim and hike up to a sacred pond.There's nothing like that. It's like a free for all here in Hawaii when it comes to tourism.With tourism comes a thriving sex trade. So we have a number of brothels that, of course, are illegal, here in O'ahu. And a real epidemic with a [00:14:00] high number of missing and murdered Native Hawaiian women and girls. Hmm. This is the average characteristics of a victim of a missing girl is 15 years old native Hawaiian.And that's you know, that's the reality here in in Hawaii. So tourism is one of those industries that has a lot of low paying jobs. People have to work two to three, sometimes four jobs to survive here in Hawaii because Hawaii has the highest cost of living and one of the highest in the United States and it's really a struggle to make a living off of the tourist industry.Once tourism gets a foothold in your community, then it's very difficult to get tourism out. And right now, I'm in the midst of a struggle with keeping tourism out of East Maui.[00:15:00] They're expanding tourism into rural areas because they want to make these real authentic experiences for tourists.And they want to provide cultural experiences for tourists now. And the last couple years, the Hawaii Tourism Authority has done something called destination management, which is where they give money to non profits to host tourists in these real authentic settings, where they get to work in the taro patch or they get real cultural experience hiking or storytelling or something like that and in exchange these non profits get paid.The reality of this Destination Management Program that they always give Hawaiian names to -Aloha Aina, Kahu Aina -the reality of these programs [00:16:00] is that they're actually community bribes.Residents are less tolerant of tourism these days, especially post COVID. And so these programs, like the Destination Management Programs that they're now doing, and have been doing for a couple years are community bribes that help residents swallow the bitter pill of tourism. And that is pretty much how this whole thing kind of plays out.Whatever financial benefits we get out of tourism, they're short lived and they aren't sustainable. And in fact, they threaten a sustainable and livable future for residents here, especially Kanaka Maoli.Chris: Do you see any parallels between the quote return of tourism following the COVID-19 lockdowns and later after the fires? Was anything learned by the inundation of [00:17:00] COVID carrying tourists?Healani: Yeah, so I see parallels between what's happening with tourism post COVID and what's happening with tourism post-Lahaina fires. And what's very clear with the government here, the local government has made very clear is that tourism, no matter the cost, in terms of our health and safety, comes first.And that has been shown over and over. While, when they opened up tourism, the COVID numbers went up. And because, of course, people are bringing COVID in. And that put the numbers of people in the emergency rooms and in our hospitals that went way up. We don't have the capacity and we still don't have the capacity to serve thousands and thousands of residents and tourists at the same time.In terms [00:18:00] of medical health care. And so we, you know, we're in a really tight spot for that, you know. So we were really struggling because our hospital and our medical system was overrun.We had sick tourists and we had sick residents. And when you look at the numbers, it was the Native Hawaiians and the Pacific Islanders who were not just catching COVID more, but also dying from COVID more often than others. And with Lahaina, same thing. Instead of waiting, holding off on reopening Lahaina and Maui for tourists, they opened it up super early.In fact, they opened it up a month ago, for tourism. They opened up line up for tourism and families are still suffering. Families don't know what's going to happen next month, where they're going to be living next week. There's [00:19:00] thousands of displaced families still in Lahaina, yet the pressure to open up to tourism is so immense that they did it anyway. So what happened with COVID and the Lahaina fires is that they really show that what they're prioritizing.They're not prioritizing the health and safety of, of the residents, let alone Kanaka Maoli residents. They're prioritizing business interest.Chris: Mm. Hmm. Really just showing the true face, the true nature of the industry. Right. And then not in any way surprising why locals, both residents and Kanaka Maoli would be so upset and so angry, not just with the industry, but with tourists as well when they arrive having no understanding of this. Right. And so my next question kind of centers around locals there, workers, especially. And in this particular article, It says that, "as tourists returned to the [00:20:00] island, displaced residents are still in need of long-term solutions for their future, most notably in terms of long-term affordable housing. Currently. Quote, "a coalition of 28 community groups have staged what's being called a 'fish-in' on Kaanapali beach to help raise awareness of the ongoing impacts of the Malai wildfires. Wearing bright red and yellow shirts, the protesters have pledged to fish along kind of poly beach. An area usually crowded with sunbathers in swimmers, around the clock 24 7, in order to bring awareness to these issues. And so in terms of strategy and solidarity, How have local people and organizations responded in the context of these last few months.Healani: Yeah. Many locals work in tourism. So a lot of people in Hawaii felt that the reopening was too fast, too early. There were other ways they could have dealt with. They always use the term 'affordable housing,' they always use that to [00:21:00] develop. Here they use small businesses to justify prioritizing tourism. So, their whole justification for opening up to tourism early, in Lahaina, was to support small businesses. But there are other solutions. We all know that. They give billions of dollars to Israel and to Ukraine for a war that has nothing to do with us, to other countries who are doing whatever they want with it. But when it comes to this whole issue of tourism and the displaced families, they could have supported these families and for at least a year supported these small businesses like they did during the pandemic, but they chose not to.There's other solutions they could've used, but for them, opening it up was more important than making sure families were okay.So, there is a split between some residents who feel they need tourism and some [00:22:00] who don't. And it's usually, again, business owners who rely on tourists for their livelihood. And like I said before, any kind of benefit we get from tourism is really short lived and the effects of tourism, not just on our environment, but on our society and on our economic system is more detrimental than beneficial.I'll give you an example tourism fuels people from other places wanting to buy a second home here. Tourists come to Hawaii, they see how beautiful it is, they love the beaches, of course. We have like really good weather on a daily basis. So when they come here to visit, they wanna buy a second home here.⌘ Chris Christou ⌘ is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Right now we have a housing crisis in Hawaii, and the reason for this housing crisis is because we have [00:23:00] tens of thousands of empty homes. In fact, we could put all the houseless people that are in Hawaii right now into these empty homes. And we would still have thousands of homes left over. And that is one of the reasons why number one, we have one of the, like the highest housing costs. The average house right now sells for a million dollars.It could literally be a shack on a piece of land. It'll sell for a million dollars in Hawaii. It's because of the demand for housing here in Hawaii. And it's because of the fact that a lot of the housing that we do have are usually second homes. And lots of times they use it for short term housing rentals as well. And I just want to clarify the numbers for the short term housing rentals. There's about 30, 000 residential housing units that are being rented to tourists, instead of residents, instead of locals, instead [00:24:00] of Kanaka Maoli, so that's part of the problem here. We don't have a housing shortage.We have a shortage of housing rentals or landlords that want to rent to residents.So, what we gain from tourism doesn't even come close to what we are losing from tourism, from the tourist industry.Chris: Uh, Wow. . It's just a. It's incredible. How so much of this, this desire to vacation, escape, have fun, rest, make money "passive income" lead so much to the detriment of neighbors, of what might otherwise be neighbors in our midst. And I know that, I think I've read the other day that there's this group Lahaina Strong, that was asking for government intervention. Is that right? Healani: Yeah. So they've asked. Yeah, that's a, that's a good point. [00:25:00] Lahaina Strong, one of the lead groups in Lahaina, have asked for the mayor and the governor to intervene and to ask short term housing rental owners to provide long term housing solutions for those, the displaced families. And that hasn't happened yet.It's been months. It's been September, October, November, over three months. And these families, their future is still up in the air. They don't even have reliable housing. So again, it just tells you what the priorities of the state is. Honestly, I don't think they're going to get what they want.Chris: Thank you, Healani and for being a witness to all this and proceeding accordingly. I'd like to, if I can ask you a little bit more about your political work. If I'm not mistaken you're a spokesperson for Ka Lahui Hawai'i Political Action Committee. Could you explain a little bit about [00:26:00] this organization? What the name means, how it was formed its principles, goals, and actions, perhaps. Healani: Okay, so yes, I am the spokesperson for Ka Lahui Hawai'i, and I am part of the Komike Kalai'aina Political Action Committee, which is a national committee of Ka Lahui Hawai'i, which means the Hawaiian Nation.We are a native initiative for self determination and self governance. We were formed in 1987 by Kanaka Maoli, Indigenous Peoples of Hawaii, as a response to the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, and as a way forward for our people to seek out justice and to create our own way forward by creating our own nation.I have been with Kalahui Hawaii since 1993. And I [00:27:00] joined after watching Dr. Haulani-Kay Trask do her speech on the grounds of Iolani Palace, where she proclaimed that we are not American. And that was an eye opener to me. And I joined Ka Lahui and I transferred to the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, became her student. A lot of the work that we've done has been nation building. We are a nation in exile, literally. We take stances on issues a lot of times. And the issues we've been doing has been from water issues to intellectual property rights, to land rights, to tourism. The issues we cover is literally anything that affects us as a, as a people and as a nation. So we cover a wide [00:28:00] spread of issues. Most recently it's been the water issue that we've been really focused on. And when you look at the water issue, again, you see the disparity there. We are in a water crisis on the island of Oahu. We are encouraged to practice conservation measures. However, the tourist industry, hotels with pools and fountains and large golf courses, which have to be watered daily, are not being told the same thing. They are the exception. They continue to waste water while on O ahu are concerned about the future.Of our children and grandchildren because we're not sure if number one, there will be clean water and number two, if there is clean water, there'll be enough clean water for everyone in the future, but the hotels in the tourist industry, they don't care. They have swimming pools and[00:29:00] golf courses.Tourists are not told to come here and conserve water. You know, in fact, they waste water in the tourist industry and you can see it. Are you seeing how they waste it? It's pretty visual and obvious. So Ka Lahui Hawaii has been active On the front lines with Mauna Kea issue, and we have treaties with other Native American nations. We've gone to the U. N., our past Keaāina, our governor, Merilani Trask helped to draft UNDRIP, which is the U. N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which is one of the most important documents that have come out from the U. N. for Indigenous Peoples and has reasserted all of our rights to self determination.There's about 400 million indigenous peoples around the world, and UNDRIP [00:30:00] is important to every single one of us.Chris: Well, thank you for, for that and the work that you do with Ka Lahui, Healani. I'll make sure that the requisite websites and links are up on the homework section and the end of tourism podcasts for our listeners. Now, in my interview withHokulani Aikau and Vernadette Gonzalez, they spoke of various projects within the tourism sector, undertaken by indigenous Hawaiians to uncover and share with tourists or visitors, the histories of the people and place so often ignored by the industry. Now in order to do this, to educate, many people work within the confines of the structures and the systems we already have, that is to decolonize tourism, for example. Now if we weren't limited by those current structures and systems. How would you personally want to proceed hosting the other, the foreigner? How would you want them [00:31:00] to proceed towards you and your people? How might you imagine such relationship to unfold? Healani: Yeah. Yeah. Decolonize tourism. That's an oxymoron. I don't believe in decolonizing tourism. The nature of tourism, it's like colonization. The nature of tourism is to exploit, is to extract everything it can from a place and from a people and it commodifies, things that to us are spiritual, to us are sacred, tourism commodifies it all. To decolonize something that was not created from indigenous peoples is impossible.We can decolonize our world. But we cannot decolonize systems of [00:32:00] oppression because they're set up to oppress us. And so that is, I don't know what to say. It's like I said before. You know, they keep changing the name, you know, Hawai'i Tourism Authority even though they have leadership that is Kanaka and they're trying to be culturally sensitive and they are doing, you know, destination management practices kind of thing and working with nonprofits and cultural groups.It's still tourism. It's still a business that wants to benefit from our land, from our water, from our culture, from our people. And when we talk about decolonization, when we talk about working against systems of oppression, it's really about us rebuilding our own systems that counter their systems.So it's all systemic, right? It's like a system of power that benefits one group [00:33:00] over the other. It stems from colonization, which is a system of power that is working against us. So to counter that, we have to create our own systems. We actually have to reconnect and recreate our old systems. So Franz Fanon talks about this. When colonization happens, what they do is they compartmentalize our world.So, you know, where we see the world as living, as where we see ourselves as part of nature, and part of this living system where there's balance. We give and take from the land. We take care of the land, the land takes care of us. In our cosmogonic genealogies as Kanaka, it tells us basically our universal perspective on all life, which is basically we are related to all the animals and plants and to the islands itself, because what it does is it recites the birth of every [00:34:00] living thing in Hawaii that was here during the time we were here, before Captain Cook arrived, but it connects us to this world and it tells us our place in it. And when colonization came, what they did was they ripped our world apart.And they separated us from nature. They separated us from our ancient beliefs. They separated us even from our belief in ourself. And many Native people, I'm sure can relate to this, but it's like living in two worlds. We live in a Hawaiian world, and we live in the Western world. We act a certain way in the Western world because of the way it's organized. And in our world, it's different. So, it's important to understand that we cannot infiltrate a system. Without the system infiltrating us. We're going to change before the system changes because these systems have been in place [00:35:00] for centuries.So I don't even want to answer the question about hosting foreigners or others because that's not even something that's on my radar. I don't imagine tourism in my future or in the future of our Lāhui, or in the future of our people. Kalahui, Hawai'i has taken stances against tourists and tourism. It's not worth what we have to give up to host foreigners. And I could go on for hours with stories of our people, putting themselves at risk, saving tourists in the ocean, and not even getting a word of thanks. Having tourists pee on our sacred sites, having tourists throw rubbish on our beaches. It never ends. So I think it's cute that they want to decolonize tourism. It's a multi billion dollar business. You cannot decolonize tourism unless you take [00:36:00] the aspect of capitalism out of it. It's like decolonizing money. How are you going to do that? It's like you need to build systems where you can sustain yourself and your people outside of these capitalist and outside of these corporate systems of power. Healani: Yeah, so what I would want to say to those who want to stand in solidarity with Kanaka Maoli, with the Native people of Hawai'i, I would say stay home. Help us spread the message that we do not want or need visitors to come to our islands. As the Native people of Hawai'i we're building our own food systems, we're bartering. We're trying to move forward as a people away from these other systems, away from tourism, away and out from under military occupation.It's a struggle that we're in. I think for those that are listening, it's important for you to[00:37:00] spread the word about the struggle that Native Hawaiians are going through in our own homeland and our struggle for liberation and to support us in whatever way you can. So I think it's important to support us from afar, I would say.And if you're here anyway, like if you end up coming anyway, then support. Don't just come here. Give back. Help out a Hawaiian organization. Help out a Hawaiian on the street. 40 percent of all houseless in Hawaii are Indigenous Hawaiians. And we only make up 20 percent of the population in our own homeland. 50 percent of the population in Hawaii's prisons and jails are Hawaiians.We have low educational attainment. We die from diseases that other people usually don't die from. We have probably the highest suicide rates in Hawaii. High infant mortality rates. So this isn't our paradise. But we have to make it a paradise for tourists. And that's something we can't continue to do.The reality of the [00:38:00] situation is that it's destroying our future right now. And you look at what happened to Lahaina, and that's all because of unsustainable development, high cost of living, corporations running amok, diverting the rivers, water being diverted to hotels and golf courses, instead of letting water just flow freely from the ocean, from the mountains to the sea.So that's what we're dealing with, and if you are thinking about coming to Hawaii, please, please think again and just support a Hawaiian organization in their struggle to reclaim what we lost. We did something around tourism. It's a survey that we gave to tourists who are here anyway, right? So that is our pledge for tourists if they are gonna come here. And we've had it out for a few years. We've tried to get like the airlines to push it out and stuff like that to raise awareness. Now they're doing more of that, which is good. [00:39:00] And I appreciate that. But ultimately, we don't want people to come here.Healani: That would be the end goal because Hawai'ians are displaced on our own land.This is our mutual aid that we set up to help families of Red Hill who still don't have clean drinking water, which is nuts. And this is two years after, right? So if they want to help with that, we appreciate that. Chris: I'll make sure that our listeners have all of those available to them when the episode launches.Healani: Because we're basically providing services to the residents, but Yeah, that's pretty much it. I can't believe people think they can decolonize tourism. It's freaking nuts.Chris: Yeah. I keep coming back to this notion that, you know, [00:40:00] part of colonization of our minds and the wars against us tend to stem from a war against the imagination and a war against us being able to imagine other worlds and just things completely differently. And I also think that when people don't have examples to follow of what that might be like to, to imagine things differently, and then also to not have the time to do that.You know, people tend to fall back on kind of simple alternatives, I guess.Healani: I think it could be useful for a little while, but it's like, we've got to work towards not sustaining it, but dismantling it, somehow getting rid of it.I mean, look at what everything that's happened to Hawaii, COVID, Lahaina fires. Our wildfires are like happening more and more. We have more on this island now than we've had before. It's just a matter of time before we have our own huge fire that's going to be devastating on this island.Chris: [00:41:00] I'm very grateful for your time, and I can tell very clearly that you're one of those people that's offering an example for younger people on how things might be different. So, I'd like to thank you for your time, your consideration. And I'll make sure, as I said, that all of these links are up on the End of Tourism website when the episode launches and and on social media as well.Healani: Awesome. Thank you so much. You have a good day. Get full access to ⌘ Chris Christou ⌘ at chrischristou.substack.com/subscribe

On this episode, my guests are and of the Podcast.Clementine Morrigan is a writer and public intellectual based in Montréal, Canada. She writes popular and controversial essays about culture, politics, ethics, relationships, sexuality, and trauma. A passionate believer in independent media, she's been making zines since the year 2000 and is the author of several books. She's known for her iconic white-text-on-a-black-background mini-essays on Instagram. One of the leading voices on the Canadian Left and one half of the F*****g Cancelled podcast, Clementine is an outspoken critic of cancel culture and a proponent of building solidarity across difference. She is a socialist, a feminist, and a vegan for the animals and the earth.Jay is a writer, artist and designer from Montreal and is the author of the Substack jaylesoleil.com and the zine series What Else Is There to Live For. Jay is also the co-host of F*****g Cancelled.Show Notes:Clementine & Jay's TravelsThe NexusIdentitarianism and Identity PoliticsGentrification & SolidarityHow Nationalism Leaks into the LeftThe Contradictions of IdentitarianismFreedom, Limits and GuesthoodBorders and BiomesThe Quest for Offline CommunitiesRadical & Reciprocal HospitalityAuthenticityHomework:Clementine's SubstackJay's Substack (including Dumplings & Domination)Clementine's ShopJay's StoreF*****g Cancelled ShopF*****g Cancelled PodcastTranscriptChris: [00:00:00] Welcome to the pod, Clementine and Jay. It's an honor to have you both here today. Each of your work both individually and together has been a great influence on mine and definitely eye-opening and if I can say so much needed in our time. So thank you for joining me. Jay: Thank you, man. Thanks for having us.Clementine: Thanks for having us.Chris: So, I'd like to start, if we can, by asking you both where you find yourselves today and what the world looks like for you through each of your eyes.Jay: Well, we both find ourselves in Montreal which is where we live. I was working in homeless shelters for years and then I got let go cause I tried to unionize the one I was working at. Actually I succeeded in unionizing the one I was working at. And they mysteriously did not have any money to renew my contract after that.And yeah, so I'm writing and I just launched a new solo podcast about like world history outside of the West. And so I've been working on that. It's called [00:01:00] dumplings and domination, which are two things that human beings love. And Yeah, so that's, that's what I'm up to. Clementine: Yeah, so I'm also, yeah, I find myself in Montreal, in the snow, and I guess, relevant to the topics of this podcast one of the things I'm grappling with now is my perpetual existence as a unilingual anglophone in the city of Montreal, which is a bilingual city, but it's a French city, like.Actually. And I'm planning on having a child and I'm planning to have this child here. And so I'm facing the dilemma of being like an English speaker whose child is not going to just be an English speaker. And so I really need to learn French, basically. So this is my struggle, because being 37 and only speaking one language my entire life, it's like super hard to learn another language.And I've really, really struggled. A couple times I've made an attempt to learn French, and it's like really [00:02:00] frustrating, but that is one of the things I'm grappling with. I feel like it's relevant to the podcast, because in many ways, even though I've lived in Montreal for like almost seven years, there's a way in which I still am kind of like a tourist here, because I haven't learned the language.So, will I complete my transition into becoming Quebecois? Chris: Yeah, maybe so. Jay: Only time will tell. Chris: I was just reading this biography of Ivan Illich, who's like was an Austrian philosopher and he said that like trying to learn a new language, especially if you're immersed in the place is the greatest measure or degree of poverty that one can undertake because of the degree of dependence that they have on other people and not just dependence, but like dependence on their hospitality, assuming it exists in order to, you know, be able to understand what you're saying and communicate in that way. Clementine: Like Montreal is interesting because at least in the neighborhood that I live and in many places in [00:03:00] Montreal, it's functionally bilingual. So it's not like learning in an immersive environment as if you went somewhere and everybody's speaking that language.So you kind of just have to or you won't be able to communicate. Like you have to learn here. You know, when I'm fumbling around trying to speak French, people just start speaking English to me because even if they're a francophone, like, at least in the neighborhoods where I live, most people are bilingual, and they speak better English than I do French, so they will accommodate me, which is polite of them, and also, It does not help me learn, you know?Jay: Whereas the government of Quebec will not accommodate you. Clementine: No, the government will not accommodate you at all. And so, like, it's only in circumstances where, like, I desperately need to understand where, like, there's no, there's absolutely no accommodation. So. Chris: And that kind of touches on my next question, which is, you know, in terms of the travels that you two have.Has there been that degree of poverty elsewhere? I mean, I imagine you might have traveled to other places maybe in Canada, maybe elsewhere. [00:04:00] What have your travels taught you each, if anything, about the world, about your lives, about culture? Jay: Yeah. I had kind of an unusual relationship with travel.Because as a kid, I moved to a different country every like three or four years cause of my parents work. And so, yeah, I grew up like in Asia and not just like dipping into a place and then like leaving right away but spending years of my life in each country. Right. And like learning the languages and stuff.And so, yeah, I think that was a quite an unusual way to kind of experience travel as a kid. And I think that it did definitely have a lot of impact on me. Because I think that travel in general, I think is a wonderful and amazing thing, you know, which is why people like to do it. And it can be really profound for your mind and your understanding of the world and of other people, you know but obviously there's travel and then there's [00:05:00] travel.I feel really grateful that I was able to see so much of the world by living there, you know and I think that it was really important for me in my kind of embodied understanding that other people and other parts of the world are, you know, just as real and just as important and just as embedded in history as I am and as like the people are in my passport country, which happens to be Canada, you know?Clementine: Yeah. I've traveled a little bit, but I think for me, like, When I was young, I was too crazy to travel, you know, and I truly mean that, like I have complex PTSD and like as much as my life was so chaotic and like really, like, you know, on F*****g Cancelled, Jay and I talk about how we're both alcoholics in recovery, like, When I was drinking, I always wanted to be someone who traveled, and my life was very, like, chaotic and full of violence and danger and all those types of things, but the PTSD made it really hard to do [00:06:00] anything because I was always scared, you know and being a woman traveling... like, in recovery, I've wanted to try to travel more, but the combination of one being a woman traveling alone, it does come with certain risks to it.You're more vulnerable in certain ways and then add that to the PTSD. It's like... it's super anxiety producing, you know, so it's something that I've done a little bit but not as much as I would have liked to and I guess we'll see like what the future holds with that. One thing is is that like I learned to drive pretty late.I learned to drive in my 30s and once I learned to drive going on road trips was actually a way that really opened up travel for me because having my car with me gave me this sense of like safety, basically, that I could leave a situation like I was there with my car. So I had like the independence to like not be dependent on like strangers because I was afraid of them basically.But we went on a podcast tour last [00:07:00] year and drove like all across the United States in like a month and like drove down to like Arizona and like back up the West coast. And like, that was really, really cool. Chris: Beautiful. Thank you both. And so, you know, it might seem a little strange for you two to be invited on a podcast about tourism, migration, hospitality given that, you know, perhaps on the surface of things, your work doesn't appear to center around such things, but I've asked you both to speak with me today, in part, because I see a lot of parallels between what you've both referred to as the nexus in your work and what I refer to as the, a touristic worldview. And so to start, I'm wondering if you two could explain for our listeners, what the nexus is and its three main pillars.Clementine: So, in shorthand, or in, like, common language, you might call it social justice culture. There's a lot of different ways that this culture has been talked about but it's a particular [00:08:00] way of doing politics on the left, or left of center. And. Like, Jay and I come from inside this culture, so we are coming from inside social justice culture, being, like, leftists and being queer people and having existed in, like, progressive social justicey spaces for our entire adult lives, basically.And basically, we're noticing that there wasn't really language to talk about some of the phenomenons that were happening inside social justice culture or even, you know, social justice culture itself doesn't really give itself a name. Like we can call it social justice culture or we could call it something else, but it doesn't really have a name that it like claims for itself.It basically describes itself as like just doing politics or like being morally correct, you know, right? Yeah, being right. So we just started using the nexus as kind of like a placeholder for talking about a phenomenon that like doesn't really have a name. And we were trying to describe like this social phenomenon that we were totally [00:09:00] immersed in that there wasn't really language to describe. And we pulled out like three components that we saw interacting with each other to produce this phenomenon that we were calling the Nexus. And those pillars or components would be cancel culture, social media, and identitarianism. So, you maybe want to say more. Jay: Yeah, and we were just noticing how like when those three components were interacting on the left, you know they were producing a kind of like fourth thing that we were calling the Nexus and it's just like cancel culture was kind of this, you know, this culture of disposability and very sort of like intense acrimony functioned to sort of like boundary the whole thing and to keep, you know, certain views out and keep certain views in and sort of like establish the boundaries of what was thinkable or not.And the identitarianism provided the sort of ideological underpinning of the whole thing, like a way of making sense of the world, a [00:10:00] way of thinking about any problem and any issue, you know? And then social media was kind of the medium in which it was all taking place. And that was providing a lot of the kind of like the scaffolding of what it ended up looking like.Yeah. Does that make sense? Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you both. And so I like to start then if I can with with identitarianism and you know as it pertains to, I guess, the end of tourism podcast and the way I've come to understand it is that to be a tourist isn't just to be a foreigner, but a stranger to the place one inhabits.And so in this sense, I feel that people can be tourists in their own homes and to a large degree the housing crisis, among many others seems to enable and ennoble this, you know, people know that they won't be able to afford a rent increase. And so they don't bother getting to know their neighbors or participating in the community.And beyond that community is often described in demographic terms, you know, the black community, the queer community, et cetera. But rarely [00:11:00] anymore in terms of the diverse people that you actually live beside or near. And so, for me, this is where tourism not only hits home, but is kind of unveiled as maybe beginning at home.You know, it's not just an industry, but something akin to a lifestyle or culture, as you said, Jay, of disposability. And so in this context, what I understand is identitarianism seems to enable this kind of touristic mentality of not needing to think of myself as a person of consequence in my building or in my neighborhood because I'll be out of here in another year or two anyway, right?And so I'm curious what you think of this idea and whether you think that identitarianism is a consequence of these crises that exist today, like the housing crisis, like landlordism, for example. Jay: Yeah, I definitely think it's all connected.And I think that I think that a huge part of all of this, right, is accelerating alienation that people are experiencing under the [00:12:00] dominant form of neoliberal capitalism. And alienation just describes this deep embodied sense of disconnection from oneself, from one's work and from one's fellows.And this is a concept that goes all the way back to Marx and before him even, you know, but Marx, I think correctly identified that capitalism had a mechanism within it that amplified this, this sense and created more of it. And I think that as we hurdle down the path of neoliberal apocalypse, we're sort of like more and more exposed to the sense of alienation.And so what does that mean? It means that we end up feeling like we don't know who we are. We don't know where we are. We don't know who the people around us are. We're just sort of floating, we're atomized, you know. We don't have roots or the connections that we do have feel fleeting and shallow.You know, and it produces obviously a deep sense of like misery in a lot of people, [00:13:00] whether they know it or not, I would say. But it also produces a longing for connections that feel real and that feel authentic. And I think that the turn towards identitarianism that has become more and more apparent over the last like decade or so both on the left and the right because I think that the rise of like the alt right, for example, was very much an identitarian movement as well. Yeah, it's that, that pivot towards identitarianism is a consequence of people feeling like they have no connections and they really want connections. They want to feel embedded in something, you know and so they're looking for other forms of community that they can belong to other than the communities that they actually live in, you know, because those communities that they actually live in have started to feel so disconnected and illusory, right?I do have more to say about the concept of like authenticity and all of this, which I think is like really foundational to tourism. But I will pass the mic. Well, I feel like we're probably going to get [00:14:00] into it later. Clementine: Okay. Well, yeah. So I mean, I think when talking about identitarianism, it's useful to make the distinction between identitarianism and identity politics.And we make that distinction on the podcast, but in case listeners aren't really familiar with the term identitarianism, I think it's useful for us to be a little bit clear about what we mean. And basically, identitarianism is distinct from identity politics. So, identity politics is just basically saying that identity matters when we're thinking about what is affecting people's lives, right?And when we're organizing politics, when we're trying to think of solutions where we can make the world better, identity is going to play a role. And that just means we're acknowledging that things like racism exists, homophobia exists, like, sexism exists, that the ways that our lives are shaped are impacted by identity.And like, we agree with that, we're not against that, as a framework. But identitarianism takes identity politics to a new place, where it basically does two main things to it. One, it [00:15:00] acts as if identity groups are homogenous, or share, like, very intense essential qualities, you know? So, when you make a statement, like, the BIPOC community thinks this.You're being identitarian and you're also being essentialist because you're actually making a statement in which you're saying that billions of people share a view, which is incorrect and also, like, very disrespectful to the vast diversity of thought that exists within any identity group, right? So it's actually like, it's an expression of essentialism and this belief that, like identity groups share essential qualities.And it erases, like, the vast political differences and personal differences that don't exist always within any identity group. And then secondly, Identitarianism acts as if identity is the primary or only way that power functions. So when we're trying to understand, like, what is wrong with the world, and what is going on, and why are we all suffering?Identitarianism [00:16:00] encourages us to look first, and maybe only, at identity as the way in which power is divided and organized. And so, in this way, you know, we have people, like basically collecting identity points. And what I mean by that is, like, adding up their various identities to try to understand their lives and their access to power.So people will be like, okay, I have these identities that are considered marginalized identities, and then I have these identities that are considered privileged identities. And so if I do some math, I'll be able to figure out where I stand in terms of power, right? And this is a total oversimplification of the way that power works.Identity is probably impacting your life in various ways. and may have a role in like your access to power, but it is not the only thing, and it's not as simple as just adding and subtracting to try to figure this out, and many, many things are lost when we are only using identity as the way to understand power, and so like when you're talking about, I just want to say that like that what you said [00:17:00] about people moving, I think is really fascinating because I moved like every year or two years.My entire, like actually I kind of haven't stopped because I've only lived where I currently live for like just about two years. So, I've basically been doing that since I was 16. I'm 37. Wow. Chris: Wow. Wow. Clementine: You know, and like, I don't mean cities, but I mean neighborhoods and at least apartments, you know, and actually my current neighborhood I've lived in probably the longest that I've ever lived anywhere but I've still moved several times and I've managed to stay in the same neighborhood, but like over the course of my teenage years, all my entire twenties and into my thirties, like, I was just constantly moving.And, you know, I, I had a sense of place in terms of the city I lived in. Like, I was living in Toronto for most of for my twenties. But I lived all over that f*****g city. Like, all over that city. You know, I didn't live in any particular neighborhood. And so because of that, like, I didn't really have that sense of like place and like there wasn't really a point in knowing my neighbors because it's true. I was going to [00:18:00] be moving and I knew that and so that is like a material reality that is being structured by capitalism and by landlords and rent and not having enough money and not having housing security.And identitarianism isn't really helping me to understand that, right? Like I can't really make sense of that experience if my only lens that I'm looking at the situation with is identity. And that's just like one example, but there's many, many things that, identity as if it's our only frame is not going to help us to understand.Jay: Or like it, it might help you feel like you understand it, but it's probably not going to give you a very good explanation, you know clear picture. Yeah, it's like there's this word that I stumbled across recently. I think it's like "monocausotaxophilia" I'm pretty sure is what it is and it's like the it's like the obsessive belief that like one there's like one answer for everything or like one thing can help you explain everything and it's it's like a common like logical fallacy that humans fall into, where like we just we discover something that really seems like it's right and then we're [00:19:00] like this can explain everything we can just apply this to everything, you know, and I think that identitarianism is like a an excellent example of this tendency that humans have Chris: Yeah.Wow. Kind of monotheism for politics, I guess. It's fascinating for me because I see a lot of these identitarianist dynamics play out in the context of tourist cities and the one that I lived in, still live around, just not in anymore.And then of course the people that I interview who deal with over tourism and of course all the crises that come with it. And so You know, like in the early pandemic, for example, in places like Oaxaca or Medellin in Colombia, for example, they suddenly became hotspots for digital nomads and other tourist escapees.And the consequences of over tourism in these places already existed, but once travel restrictions had [00:20:00] dropped and vaccines were doled out, places like this, and maybe the more obvious ones like Bali or Hawaii or Barcelona those consequences exploded and, you know, the number of visitors skyrocketed. And so both local people and foreigners opened Airbnb after Airbnb, and this is kind of what ended up happening in a lot of places in the, in the course of, you know, a couple of years essentially deepening the economic and social divisions in those places. And so what we've seen is that people simply tend to point their finger at the tourists, at the foreigner, ignoring the economic and political issues that affect these things.And so, what's arisen on the internet at least have been faceless social media accounts basically cancelling tourists or foreigners for you know anything you can think of for being cheap, people complaining about prices on their YouTube video or whatever, and others criticizing local cultures for X Y Z Zed pardon me and some Some who [00:21:00] refuse to, like, to speak the local language, for example, all of which, you know, constitutes bad behavior.And even still, like, other people, foreigners who become landlords in their new homes, right, who move to another country and just, you know, rent a nice place and then put it on Airbnb or something. And so, I'm curious about the individual? And why do you think, in so many of these cases, especially in regards to people who claim to be leftists or anarchists or radicals, that the focus is squarely put on individuals or individual behavior as opposed to the conditions or systems that created that behavior?Jay: Oh yeah, I mean, we've become like ludicrously unable to actually look at structural causes of anything in a way that allows us to formulate policy and work towards policy. Like, I think that like one of the major like failings of the left currently is that it is, especially in like the Anglo world, like completely f*****g unmoored from policy.I think in the US there's like a really [00:22:00] obvious reason for that, which is that there is, you know, no political party that's even remotely. So the idea that you could, that you could have policy that you like is sort of like nonsense to people in the first place. Right.So everything then becomes about either it would become either about individual behavior or about some sort of like more radical revolutionary option, you know but the radical revolutionary option doesn't exist. So it's all about the individual behavior. And a comparable situation is going on elsewhere in the Anglosphere as well where the sort of like political avenues for policymaking are severely lacking.So I think that there's this like strong, strong emphasis on the individual, on individual behavior, on moralizing on sort of angrily saying what should be true rather than working with like, you know, like reality. Yeah. Clementine: Yeah, I think that people, like, we haven't seen an effective left in our lifetime, like, you know, like we haven't seen the left making gains, like, for [00:23:00] millennials, like basically for our entire lives, you know?We haven't seen movements be successful, and so we feel very powerless. Like, there's a deep, deep sense of powerlessness in the face of capitalism and in the face of climate change and in the face of so many of the horrible conditions that we're living under, and we don't have a lot of evidence of things working, but we know we have the power to take down some individual person and publicly humiliate them and destroy their life.And so I think people get very addicted to that sense of power because it is like a balm to the abject helplessness that we feel under capitalism where we don't have a lot of power to really make the changes that we want to make, you know, but one of the things we're always talking about on the podcast is how cancel culture, while it provides this like temporary relief and this feeling like we're doing something like we have power.In fact, it erodes the very conditions that would allow us to have real power and the conditions that would allow us to have real power are solidarity. Right. Like, the one thing that the working class of the world [00:24:00] has that the capitalists don't is our numbers, right?Like, they have all the money and the use of force, you know? But we, there's just lots of us, and also we are the ones who make all their s**t. Like, or like, run their little online companies or whatever it is that they're doing now. Yeah, exactly. So, it's like literally the workers of the world are the ones who actually make capitalism run and there are no profits if the workers of the world organized and f*****g withdrew their labor, right? But currently, we don't have any conditions of like an organized working class movement that could actually threaten to do something like that. And so, there's no real avenue. Like unions have been like totally f*****g eroded there's no solidarity.There's no, like Workers movement that is being effective. I mean there are attempts at it like there was I don't know what happened with it because I'm off social media now, and I haven't been checking the news, but there was a gigantic like uprising of Bangladeshi textile workers who were like going on strike and like the police were trying to totally shut them down.I don't know what ended up happening kind of disappeared off my radar, but I think any movement for solidarity, you [00:25:00] know, cancel culture b******t aside, because honestly, it is such a distraction. Like it's annoying and it's a distraction would have to move towards like international solidarity.And I think that this is something that... we don't even have, like, solidarity, like, where we live, let alone solidarity, like, across the globe with workers in different places, you know? But under global capitalism, I think we're going to have to start looking with an internationalist lens and thinking about what would it look like to have the workers of the world actually uniting.Jay: Yeah. It reminds me of gentrification, you know? It's like, individual gentrifiers are sure like annoying, right? You know, people who sort of like don't belong there and are bringing their like annoying habits into the neighborhood or whatever, you know, and driving up prices and all this.But at the end of the day, this is like a structural issue that can only be solved by policy, right? You can't, you can't just sort of like be hostile towards gentrifiers and expect that to sort of like end up with anything other than you being angry and other people perhaps being frightened for like a couple of years until the [00:26:00] process of gentrification is complete.And I think that you know, there's like a similar thing with tourism, you know, I mean, tourism is just kind of like gentrification on like a, an international scale in a certain sense. Yeah. Chris: Yeah. Yeah. I mean here in Oaxaca, tourism is like 85 90 percent of the economy in the center of the city. And so it's all changing really quickly, wherein, people are sometimes hearing more English than Spanish in the streets, right? Not just in Oaxaca, but in other places as well. So there's this relative and understandable kind of resentment against the foreigner, but then when we have these gatherings and, you know, people ask me, well, like, "what should we do?" And I say, "well, go talk to the tourist, like, you can build solidarity with that person, even if it's by them understanding what's going on here, and maybe not coming back. As an extreme example, right. But what's also happened as a result, not just this waving or wagging the finger at the individual, but also in the context of identitarianism, reconvening the nation state.[00:27:00] And so my next question.. It kind of feeds off of the first and has to do with the effects or consequences of this kind of pseudo cancel culture that arises from tourism crises in places like Oaxaca and others. And so what you tend to see are locals identifying tourists or foreigners based on skin color.In Latin America, you know, the tourist is by and large the gringo, or the gringa, basically a white American. And what's happening as a result, especially among people who consider themselves, again, leftist or anarchist, is that they end up self identifying in opposition to the foreigner. And so what we see is an over identification, or what I will call anyways an over identification, with one's own skin color, class, and especially, especially now, nationality.And so, understanding the other as American means I'm Mexican or Colombian, or whatever, right? And I'm curious whether or not either of you consider [00:28:00] identitarianism to be a child of nationalism or how nationalism fits into these contemporary understandings of identitarianism.Jay: Right, right. Well, okay, I definitely have some thoughts about that for sure. I would say that like, nationalism is certainly one of the kind of original modern identities, right?And it was very much like crafted on purpose to be that, which I think that a lot of people don't know, unless they've like, you know, done like a sociology degree or something, but nationalism and the nation itself was like a modern invention created a couple of hundred years ago for specific political purposes, namely to unite quite disparate populations within at that time, mainly like European countries and to try to get the children of those people to think of themselves as like French instead of Breton, you know and to get them to speak French instead of Breton, right? As an example. And there is similar cases all over Europe. Anyways, that being aside, yes, like [00:29:00] nationalism certainly is like a form of identity and one of the most important forms of modern identity. I think that when we talk about identitarianism, often we end up not talking about nationalism very much because on the left, nationalism tends to be sort of like not the most important identity.It's one that you kind of downplay, especially if your nationality is one of the privileged Western rich nationalities, right? However, obviously if your nationality might you know get you points in, in whatever sort of like game you're playing, then you might, you might play it up.Clementine: Yeah, I have a couple things to say about this. I mean, one, the nexus or social justice culture, that we talk about on F*****g Cancelled, comes out of the United States of America. And the United States of America, they don't know that they're in the United States of America. So, Jay: This might be surprising to people because of the number of flags that are everywhere in America, but they don't know that they're in america.Clementine: They think they're just in the world. They think that that is the world, you know? And so, [00:30:00] there is this like, this lack of awareness or like basically they're not contextualizing what they're thinking and doing in an American context, even though it is, and then they're exporting that to the rest of the world, especially like English speaking places.But then it like leaks out from there. But it is an American way of understanding things based in an American context and an American history, right? And so you see this a lot with identitarianism where the popular framings and understandings around race, for example, that are going around social justice culture right now are specifically coming out of an American context and American constructions around race, and they don't map on perfectly to other contexts, but because it's being exported, because Americans are exporting their culture all over the world, we, in other places, are expected to just take it on and to start using that framework. And people do, but it doesn't really work properly. It doesn't really make sense in a different context. So that is a way in which like nation kind of disappears even though it is operating [00:31:00] in the way that identity is actually being shaped. Another thing that happens, and Jay and I were just talking about this for an upcoming episode. Another thing that happens is that because in North America anyway, like we don't really use nation as a category in identitarian thought, what ends up happening is that people actually racialize their national identity in a weird way to make it make sense in identitarianism. And so one of the ways that this can happen is that people from South America who are white, in a Northern American context, are sometimes racialized and considered people of color because they are not speaking like English as a first language, for example, or because there's cultural markers that are showing them as not North American, and so therefore they are impacted by various types of discrimination and so on and so forth, but in their context, they are actually racialized as white, but then in North [00:32:00] America, they may be racialized as non-white. And so this actually comes through like a I mean, first of all, it shows that race is like a made up category that can shift and be expressed in different ways.But also it is partially like the narcissism of North America that can't conceptualize difference, basically, and understand that, like, a person can actually be white and from South America and speak Spanish, for example. Jay: Which, like, this can also sometimes, we were joking about this, too, because it's true, like, this can also sometimes extend to people not being sure about, for example, like Portuguese people, and sort of like racializing Portuguese people on the basis of their sort of supposed affinity with like Latin America.⌘ Chris Christou ⌘ is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know, one thing that I want to mention too, you're just reminding me of this because of my research that you, that you mentioned is that like racialism, which is the idea that race is important and, and as a major identity category that people should care about a lot, let's put it that way, has often existed very [00:33:00] uneasily with nationalism.And so for a lot of like neo Nazis, they're not necessarily like opposed to nationalism, but they would, they would treat racial affinity with much more importance than they would a national affinity, especially when the national affinity is seen to have been kind of polluted by like foreign elements, for example, you know, and a big part of the national project has been to say that, like, we are all members of this national identity, sort of like, no matter who we are, blah, blah, blah. Right. And obviously some of us are more than others, right, is usually is how it's gone, but it tries to integrate like many different groups of people, including, you know, in the United States, for example, including like black Americans.Right. And, you know, the project of the integrated military, for example, has been a big part of the American national imaginary but if you're a white racist, you're not interested in a sort of national identity that, that includes black Americans as [00:34:00] well.Right. And this is also somewhat true on the left in different ways. But yeah, I'll just put that out there. Yeah. And then I guess the only other last thing I would like to say about this is that when we are anti essentialist and anti identitarian on the left, one of the things that, that like an anti racism that is rooted in an opposition to essentialism will argue and put forth is that race is a constructed and made up concept, right, which is something that I believe: race is not a real thing.It is like racism is real, but racism is based on the invention of this way of dividing up people based on race. And so there's a lot of anti essentialist leftists who are arguing this, but one thing that is important is to not confuse race, which is a made up category, with culture and ethnicity, which are real things, right?And one of the things, like, Jay and I have been talking about, and we're going to do an episode about this, or, like, related to these ideas, is, like, we actually care a lot about things, like, language protection, [00:35:00] culture protection, like the importance of people being able to keep and protect their cultural identities is like, it's a very important thing in respecting people's like human dignity.And in Canada, where colonialism has so thoroughly attacked indigenous Canadian people's cultures. They don't have their languages anymore. And like, Protecting language is, like, hugely important for people's mental health and well being, right? So, dividing those two things, that being, like saying race isn't real doesn't mean that we're not in favor of protecting culture and language.Yeah. Chris: Right, right, right. Of course. What's interesting about the, I guess, the reactions to overtourism here, it's not just that, Oh, the gringo is an American, so I'm a Mexican, but it's also racialized. It's also, okay. So who I see on the street, white people, and because I'm dark skinned, it reinforces those dualities, binaries, et cetera but it re-racializes local people, and in the context of Mexico [00:36:00] anyways the roots of their understandings of their racializedness, if I can say that comes from the imposition of race, of races, by the Spaniards, onto them, and saying this is who you are now, 400 years ago.Right? And so the new invasion, the tourism, right, is recapitulating that dynamic in ways in which people internalize the racial impositions that were put on them 400 years ago. Or their ancestors, right, I should say. So it's just mind boggling.Clementine: Yeah, I think, I think it's interesting though, right? Because how do we hold, like, the importance of culture and language and ethnicity while also acknowledging that those things were always shifting, changing, like, were never a static, constant thing, you know?That always included diversity, and within it, language is always changing and evolving. Culture is always changing and evolving, but also those things are real things that you can speak about and point to, and definitely notice when they'restolen from you or when you're no longer allowed to speak your language.Right. So yeah, like, I think we tend to go [00:37:00] to extremes. It's either like it doesn't exist or it's not important, or it's like a very essential, like static thing that has always only been one thing. Chris: Yeah, and also for a lack of history, right? I've been doing this investigation into Macedonian culture, ethnicity, history, etc, in part because my father is a first generation immigrant to Toronto, but from Agaean Macedonia and, you know, the Ottoman Empire was there controlling those lands for four or 500 years.And so the Ottomans were Muslim and the Macedonians weren't Macedonians to them, they were Christians. They were a Christian race, Mm-Hmm regardless of their language. And then when the Ottoman Empire fell, the Greeks and the Bulgarians ended up fighting over that territory, that land, that a lot of people considered to be Macedonian.And so the Greeks and the Bulgarians referred [00:38:00] to the Macedonians as the Macedonian race, no longer the Christian race, but the Macedonian race. So anyways, beyond that, once you get into the 20th century and start speaking in a global context, it's like, no, no, no, they're not the Macedonian race, they're a white race from Macedonia.And so, just this idea that race is inherently tied to skin color is very contemporary and it depends, of course, where it's coming from and who it's coming from, right? This idea of what race is becomes very fluid. I wanted to ask you two about escapism. I was just listening to your episode on freedom as a principle. Mm hmm. One of your most recent episodes and in it, you two speak of carceral institutions, jails, obviously, and I don't think it's very difficult to imagine how a touristic worldview, one built around escapism arises so fervently among people who feel powerless [00:39:00] to change the conditions in the culture that are oppressive and domineering.At the same time the glorification and commodification of that escapism through tourism creates a kind of a culture of abandonment and disposability, in the sense that you're leaving behind all your people and then once you get to this place, well, you're actually not responsible for anything you do there because it's not my, it's not my people, not my home.And so I'm curious, do you think that the freedom, that is usually couched in the freedom of movement has limits? And what do you make of the the inability to stay still in the context of all this?Jay: Man. Yeah, I mean it just makes me think about my own sort of like internal struggles that I have where like, basically like whenever I'm not doing very well, I have this part of me that wants nothing more than to just f**k off and travel sort of like indefinitely. It's like one of my strongest like internal urges, you know.I [00:40:00] don't know. I just keep thinking about that. But yeah, I mean, another thing that comes to mind for me, that is not, not a direct answer to your question, but it's just something that's coming up for me is that like, I think for like so many people in the wealthy West, you know they live in places that are comfortable because they're in the wealthy West, but they're like psychologically so destructive because it's just like these like vistas of like parking lots and like box stores and like depressing nothing places that no one could ever love and I think that like for a lot of people, and I hate to say this because it sounds like snobbish, you know, but it's like, whether or not they know it they are being psychologically attacked by the f*****g places that they live, you know, and there's a part of them that is like, I want nothing more than to get out of here, you know, and see something beautiful, and my question is sort of like, why can't we live in beautiful places? You know, and, and I actually like do live in a beautiful place and I love where I live, you know, [00:41:00] and the neighborhood in Montreal where I live is like gorgeous, you know it's a beautiful place to just walk around and look at stuff.It's very f*****g pretty. And there's a reason why I live here, you know, and I lived in other parts of the city and, and I gave up. You know, bigger, cheaper apartments to live here because I like how it looks and I like how it makes me feel to sort of like leave my house and f*****g walk around. And other people like it too.Millions of people come to Montreal as tourists. We actually have tourists in this neighborhood. And, and like when I leave my house and like walk around the corner, there's like lineups of tourists, you know that I have to sort of like navigate to like get to the gym.Because they're flocking around because it's f*****g nice here. But like a lot of places in North America are really not nice. They're not nice places to look at. They're not nice places to live. You can't f*****g walk anywhere, even if you wanted to you know, everything basically looks the same as everything else, you know?And yeah, it's not surprising to me that people would want to get out of there. Right. Also though, as I say this, it's not just North America that people [00:42:00] come from when they're tourists, right. Right. We're seeing like a gigantic increase in tourism from countries like China. Japan has always produced a lot of tourists, you know? So I think like part of it is just that like, as people get wealthier the desire to just see different things and whatever is always present in people and if they can do it, like there's no particular reason why they wouldn't but I think that it's, it's definitely worth trying to imagine what travel could look like and what like guesthood could look like, you know outside of a context where it's all just like this very commodified process that is not necessarily very great for the people who are on the kind of like hosting end of it.But yeah, again, like I live in a heavily touristed city, but apart from the tourists being quite annoying to have to walk around, like when there's like snow everywhere and they're taking up the whole sidewalk apart from that, and the fact that like Airbnb is a big problem in Montreal they don't bother me much here and I think that like a big part of that is just the, like, you know, Montreal is a very wealthy city, you know, so like an influx of like wealthy [00:43:00] foreigners doesn't like impact it that much other than to sort of like inject cash into the economy, which is not such a bad thing, right? And I do think that like part of the answer to all this is that we need to be like taking seriously internationalist solidarity and like the development of places that are not as developed.And it reminds me of like sort of debates about immigration to the West, you know, and it's like immigration, is a complicated topic and people have lots of different opinions about it, but like a lot of people on the liberal left will, will, will act like immigration is all by itself, like an amazing, awesome thing, always. And then people on the right will act like it's this terrible thing always. And I'm like, I don't know, it's kind of a neutral thing, you know, like there are good and bad things about it. Obviously people being able to travel is like a nice thing. I'll just say this, like, I think that like immigration is a good thing when the places that people are coming from are not so undeveloped or so poor that it's like forcing people out. Right. You know what I mean? And yeah, I dunno, , that was, that was like five [00:44:00] different tensions, so That's great. Chris: Love it. Clementine: So what, what is coming up for me is I saw this drawing that was like of whales swimming in the ocean.And it was like, basically saying something like, borders aren't real, because like, there's no borders in the ocean for whales or whatever. And this is part of this, like, thing on the left, and it's kind of related to what Jay was just saying, that, like, on the left, we do have this, this big like, belief in things like open borders or just free movement, free travel as, like, this positive and, kind of obviously good thing that we should support and I understand it, but at the same time, the fantasy that there aren't different areas in the natural world is false.There might not be borders, but there are biomes. And one of the things about travel that I don't think gets talked about a lot, and that is a big issue with, like, environmental destruction, is actually the reality of biomes and the fact that the movement of people across the world at the rapid way that we do it now [00:45:00] is moving plants, microbes, fungus from biome to biome and in different biomes the way that evolution works is that, like, those ecosystems were totally separate for all of this time, and then when some new, plant, animal, microbe, fungus gets into this new ecosystem, it may be that the other beings that live there have no defense against it, right? And then it causes massive problems, such as what goes on with invasive species.But like, just as a random example, like one of the major things that's causing extinction of bats is the introduction of this fungus into North America that comes from Europe or something and it comes on like tourists. They come and they don't know that they have it on them because it's just like little fungus and then they go and they visit bat caves and then they accidentally infect the bats and the bats are all getting sick and dying, you know, and so I just bring up this random example because the question of like what does it mean to be responsible when we go somewhere [00:46:00] when Even us just going there can cause problems that we didn't intend, you know?And it is a really complicated question. I'm not saying I necessarily have the answer. But especially from an environmental perspective, even if we get climate change under control, even if we deal with, you know fossil fuels, which we're not even close to dealing with, but even if we deal with that, we would still have this big question of, if we are going to continue to travel, say we get rid of planes, and then we have like airships and we're able to fly in a way that's not killing the climate, we still have this big question about what it means when we're bringing things on our clothes by accident.And I'm kind of like, instead of like security at airports, like I wonder if there could be like these places where we go in and we basically have to like leave our things. And like, when we arrive, we get like a special clothes that we wear. I don't know what it would look like because we're carrying fungus on our clothes.Jay: So. It would be really interesting to think about borders in a better world, you know and what that might look like, because I can imagine something like where it's like a supra national kind of like agreement between [00:47:00] different countries and stuff. And like the border is the border of the biome, not the border between the countries, you know?Clementine: Yeah, and I was just talking about it on like an environmental level, which I do think is very important and doesn't really get talked about enough. But I also think we can look at this on a human level where, you know, if we're thinking about like invasive species and like a plant coming in and just growing and taking over, we can also think about how when we bring.You know, for example, English, we can think about English as an invasive species, you know, like English is a species that's going to go there and because it's the language that if people speak more than one language, one of the languages that they speak might be English because it's kind of like taken over the world, then it means more and more people are going to be speaking English and then other languages are going to start dying out.And so this is like literally what an invasive plant species does, you know? And so I think, We need to think about that when we're bringing English into a space. Like, what are we doing in that space? How are we changing that space by bringing English into it? And I say that very self consciously as a unilingual English speaker, but [00:48:00] it is, you know, like.So, like, this idea of what it means to be a responsible guest, what it means to be somewhere, to visit somewhere, we need to think about, not even just the more obvious things, like throwing our garbage around, or being totally disrespectful, or using a place as a party spot, and then leaving, like, all of those things, I think, are very obviously disrespectful, and we need to be more considerate, but there's even more subtle ways, where just our very presence and the way that we bring ourselves can have an impact that we don't intend. That I think is part of the conversation about what it can mean to, to travel in a more ethical and responsible way. Chris: Amen. Amen. Yeah, I'm reminded of, and I don't know how relevant it is for the conversation, but I'm reminded of Terrence McKenna, the great psychedelic bard. He had a hypothesis that the main vehicle of evolutionary change or growth wasn't human beings or mammals, for example, but language.And we were just vehicles for language's evolution and spreading. And that languages are just fighting this secret battle, this secret [00:49:00] war. But, anyways. To speak to what both of you are saying, I interviewed, a man named Daniel Pardo in the first season of the pod, this activist from Barcelona, and he said, you know, "in no way can tourism be sustainable because we can't extend it to everyone on the planet. Like, it's actually impossible to ensure that seven or eight billion people can go on vacation once a year or fly. Right? He said, "there's no right to fly." And, so it's important to ensure that people have these freedoms, but then to what extent can they actually be applied? And I remember being back in Toronto last summer for a few months, and there were whole families and communities of migrants sleeping in front of churches on the street because from what I understand, the Canadian government the year previous had let in something like a million migrants and maybe half of them went to Toronto because it's the financial hub of the country. And there was [00:50:00] simply nothing for them there. There was no plan for them, by the government, there was no jobs, no social support, nothing, right?And so they ended up on the street, sleeping on the street in front of churches, en masse. In terms of the people that I knew who grew up there, and myself, we had never seen that before. And so you can create the freedom to migrate and things like that but what is at the end of that movement, right? So there are definitely these dynamics and nuances that need to be spoken of in terms of travel and the way people travel and the borders and, and biomes that affect the way we move. Yeah, and of course, I could go on and on. I have two more questions for you two, if that's alright? Sure. Okay. So on some of the f*****g canceled podcast episodes you have subtitled the theme of the quest for the offline left. And, you know, I think [00:51:00] largely emphasizing the word offline. And so, you know, what do you think being together offline and organizing offline can do to people whose lives have been shaped around online and social media mentalities?I mean, the three of us are more or less of the age that we still have a lived memory of life before the internet, but what about those who don't? Clementine: Yeah, absolutely horrifying. I mean, I think we are social animals who evolved to be together, looking at each other's faces, like, talking and being in the same space together.Like the alienation that Jay was talking about before, like both leads to our compulsive social media use and our desperate attempt to find community through that, and also completely contributes and worsens the problem, making it a million times worse where we are staring at our phones when we are literally, actually, physically together and could be having a conversation.And that is really like sad and depressing. And I [00:52:00] think that in terms of organizing across difference building solidarity with people... like on the Internet, we can believe that a community is people who share either like an interest or an identity category with us. And that is a community online whereas in real life, community is going to be full of people who are not necessarily like ourselves, who we might not share interests in common with, and we might not share identities in common with, but they actually are the people who are in our spaces in real life, and we actually share many things in common with them that we might not realize because we share a place together, we share a world together and being able to build relationships with people who are different from ourselves is, first of all absolutely necessary as a political strategy if we want to get anything done on the left.But also, it's deeply enriching for our human lives, you know, to be able to meet and talk to people who are not exactly the same, not the same age, not sharing the same politics, like, who are just different from ourselves. So I think it's very important. The other thing is like, the absolute erosion of our [00:53:00] attention span due to social media.I have recently not been on Instagram for, like, a month, and I feel like my brain is, like, damaged, and I'm, like, recovering from a severe damage to my attention span, you know? Like, I wasn't able to read books for years, because I just didn't have an attention span to, like, really keep up with it.It was, like, way harder for me than it used to be when I was younger, you know? Because I have been on the feed that is giving me just five second blips of information and then giving me something else and getting my brain hooked on this, like, dopamine response cycle, which is absolutely horrifying.So, I think it's also really bad for us, like, mentally in terms of our ability to think critically and at length and to, like, pay attention to what we're thinking about. Yeah, Jay: I think that the internet gives people the illusion that things are happening that are not actually happening You know like I don't know you make a a really good post and 2, 000 people like it Wow.Okay. They're all scattered across the f*****g planet. [00:54:00] You know what I mean? It doesn't, you don't know them. It doesn't translate into anything, right? It feels good. And you feel like maybe you're influencing the discourse or something like that, you know but it doesn't translate into anything.And it can give you It can give you the idea that like to be politically active and to be politically successful is to get more people liking your f*****g posts or whatever, you know, but it's not true, right? It also gives people the illusion and Clementine was gesturing at this that a group of people, it's not even really group, it's like a category of people that are like you, is a meaningful sort of group to be in. But let's say like, take like queer people, like LGBTQ community. Okay. And then you extrapolate that to like the whole world, or you can even just extrapolate it to like North America. You know, that's like a scattering of people that are spread out over this enormous geographic area.You couldn't possibly meet them all. Not only because there's so many of them, but also because they're so scattered, right? And you couldn't possibly organize them all and like, and so [00:55:00] on. And, and it's not a community. It's not a community. It is. It's like there's a word I'm looking for and I was, I've been trying to think of it for the past, like five minutes, but I'm just going to say it's like an electorate or something rather than like rather than like a community, you know it's like this, it's this like demographic group that like marketers might market to you or that politicians might try to get to vote for them or something like that. But that's not, that's not what a community is. That's not what a real group is like a real group automatically encompasses difference.Like a, a sort of like authentic human group, like always has differences of like age and occupation and often ethnicity and all these sorts of internal differences that, you know, human groups have always had. Right. And when we try to sort of like make these groups based on identity, which the internet makes very, very, very easy.We like miss. The people that were actually around, like, yeah, but yeah, as for the offline left, I mean, we desperately need to be organizing and in the real world, and I think that[00:56:00] that's not to say that like you can't do anything on the internet.Like the internet obviously has massive advantages for many, many reasons, you know. F**k, there's this like, there's this like image in my head. I'm a very like visual person. I get these like pictures in my head and then I'm like, I have to explain this picture. But it's like the, the thing about like the, the, the groups being this, these kind of like electorates, it's like, if you are this electorate, then you're only choice is to sort of petition your leaders to do something for you. You know what I mean? But like if you are a real and authentic community, you can organize your community to enact something in the real world, you know? And I don't want us to always be in the position of petitioning our leaders, because it presupposes the leaders, it presupposes that we accept their authority, you know, it presupposes that we don't have another option other than to allow a tiny class of parasitical, like rich people to rule everything for us, you know but I would like us to move away from that.Clementine: Yeah. Like just one other thing about that is you'll [00:57:00] see, you know, this gesturing towards actual organizing but through posting, but it's missing the actual organizing piece, which involves building relationships, right? And building trust. And so one of the things you'll, you'll see, like in the last couple of years, I've seen it a few times with different political things that are going on where people will just randomly call for like a mass strike and they'll make a post about it.And they'll be like, on this day, we are calling for people to strike for like this political issue. I saw it for like abortion rights in the United States and I recently saw it for solidarity with Palestine. But it's like, people can't just walk out of their jobs randomly because they will be fired.Like, the point of unions and the point of organized labor is that you have this guarantee where all of these people are taking this risk together in an organized and strategic way and they are trusting each other that they are doing it together and it is their numbers that makes it so that the boss can't just fire them all.And they have strike fund. There's a lot of them and they're [00:58:00] supporting each other to do this and it's organized and they've actually built enough relationship to be like, okay, I trust that my fellow workers are going to do this with me. So, like when I take this risk, it's like the risk is mitigated by the numbers and I know I'm not alone in it.Right. But a social media post cannot produce that. It is not relationship. And so random people reading that, like they're like, "should I just walk out of my job tomorrow?" Like, probably if they do that, they're going to be the only person at their job who's doing that, and they're just going to be fired or reprimanded, best case scenario. And that is not organized at all. And, and so then people are like, "Why aren't you guys walking out of your job? This is not solidarity." And it's like, "you're right. It's not solidarity. Because the solidarity hasn't been built." Like, you have to actually build trust with people to get them to take risks. And if you don't build that trust, and you don't have those actual real relationships, it's not a good idea for people to take those risks because they'll be by themselves taking those risks. Chris: Yeah, begs the question if in order to have solidarity with people elsewhere, does it [00:59:00] have to exist at home first?Clementine: I would say yeah. Absolutely. Jay: And solidarity is kind of meaningless if it's just you. Like it kind of has to be organized, you know, like in some meaningful fashion and that can take place in a small scale or a large scale. But if it was just you feeling solidaristic, like it doesn't, yeah, Clementine: like for example, with the Bangladeshi textile workers, you know. If there was organized labor in North America and say, for example, that like the H&M's were unionized, which I do not think that they are, but if the H& Ms were unionized because, like, the clothing at H&M all comes from Bangladesh, the workers could choose to do a solidarity strike, to strike alongside the Bangladeshi workers, so that the retailers were striking alongside the textile workers, right?And that would be very effective and very cool if that was happening, but in order for that to happen, the retail workers first have to be organized, and they have to have unions, and they actually have to have like an organized labor force here in order to do any kind of meaningful action in [01:00:00] solidarity with the workers in Bangladesh.Chris: Food for thought. Yeah. Thank you both. So my final question. Of the main themes of the pod, one is radical hospitality, which, to me at least, stands as a kind of antidote to industrial hospitality. You know, the systems, the

On this episode, my guest is David Bacon, a California writer and documentary photographer. A former union organizer, today he documents labor, the global economy, war and migration, and the struggle for human rights. His latest book, In the Fields of the North / En los campos del norte (COLEF / UC Press, 2017) includes over 300 photographs and 12 oral histories of farm workers. Other books include The Right to Stay Home and Illegal People, which discuss alternatives to forced migration and the criminalization of migrants. Communities Without Borders includes over 100 photographs and 50 narraatives about transnational migrant communities and The Children of NAFTA is an account of worker resistance on the US/Mexico border in the wake of NAFTA.Show Notes:David's Early YearsLearning about Immigration through UnionsThe Meaning of Being UndocumentedNAFTA and Mexican MigrationThe Source of Corn / MaizeBinational Front of Indigenous Organizations / Frente Indigena de Organizacaions BinacionalesThe Right to Stay HomeAndres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) CampaignThe Face & History of Immigration in the USAImmigration Reform and AmnestyThe Violence of Fortuna Silver Mines in OaxacaSolidarity, Change and OptimismHomework:The Right to Stay Home: How US Policy Drives Mexican MigrationIn the Fields of the North / En los campos del norteIllegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes ImmigrantsCommunities without Borders: Images and Voices from the World of MigrationThe Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico BorderDavid's Twitter AccountDavid's Official WebsiteTranscript:Chris: [00:00:00] Welcome to the End of Tourism podcast, David. It's an honor to have you on the pod. To begin, I'd like to ask you where you find yourself today and what the world looks like for you there. David: Well, I live in Berkeley, here in California, and I am sitting in front of my computer screen having just what I've been up to today before talking with you. Chris: Hmm. Well, thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for your work. Perhaps I could ask you what drew you to the issues of labor and migration.David: Sure. Well, I come from a kind of left wing union family, so I knew about unions and workers and strikes and things like that from probably since before I can remember. And so I was kind of an activist when I was in high school, got involved in the [00:01:00] student movement in the 1960s at the University of California, got involved in the free speech movement, got tossed out by the university, actually, and wound up going to work after that, really, because I got married, had a daughter, and I got married, had a daughter, and, I needed to get a job and, you know, worked for quite a while as a a printer in the same trade that my father was, had been in went back to night school to learn more of the, of the trade, how to do different parts of it, how to run presses and so forth and then got involved, this is, you know, in the late 60s, early 70s got involved in the movement to support farm workers, really, and I was one of those people, you know, if you're my age, you remember this, if you're younger, you probably don't, but we used to picket supermarkets to try to get them [00:02:00] to stop selling the grapes and the wine and the lettuce that was on strike, and we would stand out in front of Safeway and other supermarkets with our red flags with the black eagle on them, And ask customers, you know, not to go into the store, not to buy the products that farmworkers were on strike against.And I got really interested in. I'm curious about the workers that we were supporting. You know, I grew up in Oakland and so I didn't know anything about farm workers, really. I didn't know anything about rural California, rural areas, didn't speak Spanish didn't know much about Chicano, Latinos.Oakland's a pretty diverse city, but in the area of Oakland where I grew up in you know, in our high school, you know, the students were African American or they were white, and that was a big racial question in, in school when I was in high school. So I grew up not knowing any of these things.[00:03:00] And Because I was involved in, you know, standing out in front of these stores and supporting workers, I, you know, began wondering, who are these workers that we're supporting? And eventually, I went to work for the union. I asked a lawyer friend of mine who was in their legal department if they needed any help, and of course he said yes.I went down to, Oxnard and de Santamaria began working for the union, originally taking statements from workers who had been fired because of their union activity. I didn't know much Spanish, so I had to learn Spanish on the job. Fortunately, you know, the workers were very patient with me and would help me learn, help me correct my still bad pronunciation and bad grammar.And, and I began to learn. And that process has been going on ever since, really. That was a, that was a formative time in my life. It taught me a lot of [00:04:00] things. It taught me about, you know, the culture of. farm workers who were mostly Mexican in those years, but there were still a good number of Filipino workers working in the fields.That eventually led me to the woman I eventually married, my wife, who was the daughter of of immigrants from the Philippines from a farm worker family. So I learned about that culture and I began learning about immigration, which I hadn't really known anything about growing up. Why people come to the U.S., what happens to people here. I, I saw my first immigration raid. When I was an organizer, I later became an organizer for the union as my Spanish got better. And I remember going to talk to a group of workers that I had met with the previous night, who were worked up in palm trees picking dates.And I went down to the date grove, this was in the Coachella Valley, and there was this big green van, and there were the [00:05:00] workers who I'd been talking to the previous night being loaded into the van. I was just You know, really shocked. The van took off. I followed the van all the way down to the Imperial Valley, to El Centro, where the detention center was.Stood outside the center trying to figure out what the hell is going on here. What am I going to do? What's going to happen to these people? And that was sort of an introduction to the meaning of being undocumented, what it meant to people, what could happen. And that made me an immigrant rights activist, which I've also been ever since, too.But also, over time, I got interested in the reasons why people were coming to the U. S. to begin with. You know, what people were finding here when people got here was very, very difficult work, low pay, immigration raids, police harassment, at least, and sometimes worse than that, poverty. You know, Why leave Mexico if this is what you're going to find?[00:06:00] And it also made me curious about the border. And so that also began something that has continued on in all those years since. I eventually went to the border, went to Mexico, began getting interested and involved in Mexican labor politics, supporting unions and workers in Mexico, you know, doing work on the border itself.After the Farm Workers Union, I worked for other unions for A number of years and they were generally reunions where the workers who were trying to join and we were trying to help were immigrants. So the government workers union, the women in the sweatshops sewing clothes or union for factory workers.And so my job was basically to help workers organize and. Organizing a union in the United States is like well, you know, people throw around this word, you know, this phrase class war and class warfare pretty freely, but it is like a war. You know, when [00:07:00] workers get together and they decide they want to change conditions and they want to you know, get the company to, speak to them and to deal with them in an organized way.They really do have to kind of go, go to war or be willing to, for the company to go to war with them. You know, really what people are asking for sometimes is pretty minimal, you know, wage raises or fair treatment at work or a voice at work. You know, you think, you know, what's wrong with that. But generally speaking when employers get faced with workers who want to do that they do everything possible to try and stop them.Including firing people and harassing people, calling them to meetings, threatening people, scaring people. You know, there's a whole industry in this country that consists of union consultants who do nothing but, you know, advise big companies about how to stop workers when they, when they try to organize.So that's what I did for about 20 years. Was help workers to get organized, form a union, get their bus to sit down and talk [00:08:00] to them, go out on strike, do all those kinds of things. And eventually I decided that I wanted to do something else. And I, I was already involved in, you know, starting to take photographs.I would carry a camera and I would take pictures of what we were doing as workers. We would joke about it, kind of. I would tell workers, well, you know, we're going to take some pictures here and you can take them home to your family and show them, you know, that you're really doing what's right here and 20 years from now you'll show your grandkids that, you know, when the time came, you stood up and you did what was right and people would joke with each other about it.And I discovered also that you could use them to get support for what we were doing. You know, we could get an article published in a newspaper somewhere. Some labor newspaper might run an article about us. You might get some money and some help or some food or something. But after a while, you know, I began [00:09:00] realizing that these photographs, they had a value beyond that.And that was that they were documenting this social movement that was taking place among immigrants and, and Latino workers, especially here on the West Coast of people basically trying to. Organize themselves for social justice in a lot of different ways, organizing unions for sure, but also trying to get changes in U.S. immigration laws, immigration policies those people who are citizens and able to vote, registering to vote, political change. You have to remember that if you go back to the 1960s or 1970s, Los Angeles was what we used to call the capital of the open shop. In other words, it was one of the most right wing cities in America.You know, the mayor Sam Yorty was a right wing Republican. The police department had what they called the Red Squad, whose responsibility it was is to go out and to deal with [00:10:00] people that wanted to change anything or to organize and Unions or strikes or belong to left wing political parties or whatever.And today, Los Angeles is one of the most progressive cities in the United States, and it has to do with what happened to those primarily Central American and Mexican and workers of color, women, who over time got organized and changed the politics of Los Angeles. And so, you know, I was really fascinated by it.This process, I was involved in it as an organizer and then later as a somebody taking photographs of it and writing about it that and so that's, that's sort of the transition that I made for the last 30 some odd years. I've worked as a freelance writer and photographer, basically doing the same kind of thing.I look at it as a way of organizing people, really, because the whole purpose of writing the articles and taking the [00:11:00] photographs is to change the way people think, and make it possible for people to understand the world better, and then to act on that understanding, which to me means trying to fight for a more just world, a more just society.And so. That's what, that's the purpose of the photographs, that's the purpose of the writing, is to, is to change the world. I think it's a big tradition in, in this country, in the United States of photography and of journalism that is produced by people who are themselves part of the movements that they are writing about or documenting, and whose purpose it is to sort of help to move forward social movements for social change.Chris: Amen. Some of the stories you were mentioning remind me of my mother who also worked for a labor union most of her life. And I was definitely still very much concerned with the state of affairs. I should [00:12:00] say that you know, I'm incredibly grateful as well to have a man of your stature and experience on the pod here to speak with us your work Has definitely opened my eyes to a lot of things I hadn't seen living here in southern Mexico, in, in Oaxaca.And one of these, these books, which I'd like to touch on a little bit today, is entitled, The Right to Stay Home. how U. S. policy drives Mexican migration. And we're actually at the 10 year anniversary of the publication of this book. So I feel honored to be able to speak with you in this regard about it.And, you know, it's, for me, someone who was a backpacker and a tourist, and then later a resident of this place, of Oaxaca, to come to understand much more deeply the complexities and nuances around migration, and especially in the context of Mexican migration to the United States. [00:13:00] What's left out of the conversation as someone who grew up in urban North America and Toronto, Canada very much on the left in my earlier years, in terms of organizing and, and and protesting, the, the, the dialogues and the conversations always seem to be around the the treatment of migrants once they arrived and, and not necessarily, as you said, why they left in the first place, the places that they left and the consequences to the places that they left.And so I guess to begin, I'm wondering if you could offer our listeners a little bit of background into How that book came to be written and what was the inspiration and driving factors for it? David: The book came to be written to begin with because I began going to Mexico and trying to understand how [00:14:00] the system of migration works in the context of the world that we live in, you know, people call it globalization or globalism, or you could call it imperialism.So I was trying to understand that from the roots of first having been involved with people as migrants once they had arrived here in the U. S. I was trying to understand Well, two things. One was why people were coming, and also what happens to people in the course of coming. In other words, the journey that people make.Especially the border. The border is the big And the border has very important functions in this because it's really the crossing of the border that determines what the social status of a migrant is, whether you have papers or not, whether you're documented or not, which is a huge, [00:15:00] huge, huge distinction.So as a result of that, and as a result of kind of listening to people listening to the movement in Mexico talk, about it, investigating, going to places like Oaxaca. I first wrote a book that tried to look at this as a system, a social system. It's really part of the way capitalism functions on a international or global basis in our era because what it does is it produces Displacement, the changes that are, you take a country like Mexico, and this is what the first book, the first book was called Illegal People.And what it looked at was the imposition on Mexico, for instance, it starts with NAFTA, the free trade agreement. In fact, the first book I ever wrote was about the border and was called The Children of NAFTA, the [00:16:00] North American Free Trade Agreement. But this book Illegal People, what it really tried to do is it tried to look at the ways in which People were displaced in communities like Oaxaca.And of course, for Oaxaca, Oaxaca is a corn growing state. It's a rural state. Most people in Oaxaca still live in villages and small communities. Oaxaca's a big city, and there's some other cities there, but, but most people in Oaxaca are still what you call rural people. And so NAFTA, among the many changes that it imposed on Mexico, one of the most important was that it allowed U. S. corn corporations, Archer Daniels Midland Continental Grain Company other really large corporations to dump corn in Mexico at a price that we were subsidizing through the U. S. Farm Bill, our tax money. In other words, we're, our tax money was being [00:17:00] given to these corporations to lower their cost of production.And that allowed them to go to Mexico and to sell corn at a price that was so low that people who were growing corn in a place like Oaxaca could no longer sell it for a price that would cover the cost of growing it. That had an enormous impact on people in Oaxaca because what it did was it forced people to basically to leave in order to survive.It's not that people were not leaving Oaxaca already before the agreement passed. There were other reasons that were causing the displacement of people in rural communities in Oaxaca. A lot of it had to do with this relationship with the U. S. even then, but certainly NAFTA was like pouring gasoline on all of that.And so three million people was the estimate that in a period of 10 years were displaced as corn farmers in Oaxaca. That's a huge percentage of the population of Oaxaca. [00:18:00] And so people were forced to go elsewhere looking for work. People went, you know, to Mexico City. You know, Mexico City, the metro system, the subway system in Mexico City was built primarily by workers who came from somewhere else.A lot of them from Oaxaca. Who wound up being the low cost labor that the Mexican government used to build a subway system. They went to the border, they became workers in the maquiladoras, in the factories that were producing everything from car parts to TV screens for the U. S. market. And then people began crossing the border and coming to the U.S. as either farm workers in rural areas of California or as low paid workers in urban areas like Los Angeles. So one of the big ironies, I think, of it was that here you had farm work, farmers who were being forced off their land. And remember that these are corn farmers, so [00:19:00] the Domestication of corn happened first in Oaxaca, and the first earliest years of domesticated corn, thousands of years old, have been discovered in archaeological digs in Oaxaca and caves near Oaxaca City to begin with.So here we have people to whom the world really owes corn as a domesticated crop, who are winding up as being wage workers on the farms of corporate U. S. agribusiness corporations in California, Oregon, Washington, eventually all over the United States. That was the migration of Oaxacan people. And so you could sort of see In this, as sort of a prism, what the forces were, what the social forces at work are, in other words, that in the interests of the profits of these big corporations, these trade agreements get negotiated between [00:20:00] governments, okay, our government, the U.S. government negotiates with the Mexican government, but that's like David negotiating with Goliath, or the other way around, rather, you know, The agreements are really imposed. It's not to say that the Mexican government of those years was opposed to it. It was a neoliberal government too, but the power in this negotiation is held by the U.S. government. And so that trade agreement in the interest of making Mexico a profitable place for, you know, Archer Daniels Middleton to do business gets imposed on Mexico. And then as a result of that, people get displaced and they wind up becoming a low wage workforce for other corporations here in here in the U.S. In fact, sometimes they Wind up working for the same corporation Smithfield foods, which is a big producing corporation [00:21:00] went to Mexico. It got control of huge areas of a valley called the Peralta Valley, not that far from Mexico city. And they began. Establishing these huge pork or pig raising facilities.In fact, that's where the swine flu started was because of the concentration of animals in these farms. Again, displacing people out of those communities. And people from the state of Veracruz, where the Perote Valley is located, many of them wound up getting recruited and then going to work in North Carolina at the huge Smithfield Foods Pork Slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, North Carolina.So that sort of tells you a lot about how this system works. It produces displacement. In other words, it produces people who have no alternative but to migrate in order to survive. And those people go through all the things that people have to go through in order to get to the United [00:22:00] States because there are no real visas for this kind of migration.And them wind up being The workforce that is needed by the system here, Smithfield Foods or other corporations like them in order for them to make high profits here. And in the process of doing this, I was developing a a relationship with a very unique organization in Mexico, in Oaxaca, a part of which exists in Oaxaca, called the Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales, which is the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations.And this is an organization that was actually started by Oaxaca migrants in the U. S., in Los Angeles, and then expanded both into the Central Valley here in California and then expanded back into Mexico in Baja, California, where there are also big corporate farms where primarily Oaxaca, people from Oaxaca are the workforce, and eventually chapters in Oaxaca itself.[00:23:00] And so I would got to be friends with many people in this organization, and I would go and take photographs at their bi national meetings, they would have meetings in Mexico where people could come together and and talk about their situation. And, you know, I began, obviously, listening to what people were talking about.And, People developed this, I think, very kind of path breaking, unique analysis of migration in which they talked about a dual set of rights that migrants need and migrant communities need in this kind of world. And so, What they said was, on the one hand people need rights as migrants where they go.In other words, people, when they come to the United States, need legal status. People need decent wages, the ability to organize, you know, an end to the kind of discrimination that people are subject to. But, [00:24:00] people also need a second set of rights as well, which is called the right to stay home. And that is the title of the book, The Right to Stay Home.And what that means is that, People need political change and economic and social change in their communities of origin, which makes migration voluntary. So these are communities that are so involved in the process of migration that it would not make any sense to say that migration is bad, because In many cases, these are communities that live on the remittances that are being sent by migrants, by members of people's own families who are living and working in the United States.So the discourse in these meetings was sort of on the order of saying that people have the right to migrate, people have the right to travel, people have the right to leave, but they also have the right to stay home. They have the right to a decent future. A young [00:25:00] person who is growing up in Santiago, Cusco, Oaxaca in the Mixteca region of Oaxaca, for instance, has a right to a future in Oaxaca so that you can make a choice.Do you want to stay and have a decent life for yourself in Oaxaca, or do you want to leave and hopefully have a decent life for you and wherever you go, whether Baja California or California or Washington State? So in order to have a Right to stay home. What has to happen? What do people need? It's kind of a no brainer. People need well high farm prices to begin with. They need the ability to raise corn, tomatoes, Whatever crop it is that they need and sell it at a price that is capable of sustaining those families and communities. People need education.They need healthcare, but people also need political change because the Frente Indígena is a political organization. And so it was fighting [00:26:00] against the domination of Oaxaca by the old PRI, the party of the institutionalized revolution, which had been running Mexico for 70 years, trying to find a government that would begin to push for those kinds of social rights.And that was you know, a very important kind of eye opening for me was to hear people talking about the right to stay home, so much so that I said, you know, we need a book about this. So we're not just describing the system itself, how it works, but we are talking about what are people's responses to it?What do people think should happen here? And this was one of the most important developments of it. And it was not just. The people in Oaxaca, the more I did work on trying to investigate it and document it, there's part of the book, and also this was being done in people's [00:27:00] voices, the main voice in the right to stay home belongs to Rufino Dominguez, who was one of the founders of the Frente Indígena, who was my teacher in this, and so at one point they did knock the PRI out of power in Oaxaca and elected a governor, Gabino Cuei, who turned out to be not as good as people had hoped that he would be, but he was not the PRI.And he appointed Rufino, the head of the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to Migrants. So here was Rufino who had, was a left wing radical who spent his whole life opposing the government in Oaxaca, who then joined it for a while until he could no longer stomach what was going on there and had to leave.But. Pushing for that kind of political change in Oaxaca. There's another part of the book that talks about the miners in Cananea near the border with the United States. And their Effort to try to. win justice from this huge corporation that [00:28:00] was basically intent on destroying their union. And when they were forced out on strike, those miners also had to cross the border to Arizona to become workers in Arizona to survive.Again, you know, you see how the system is working here, but they also were talking about what kind of political change has to happen in Mexico for the right to stay home. to become reality. And that movement in Mexico grew strong enough so that, you know, after The Right to Stay Home was published, some years after, since it was, as you said, 10 years ago that Andrés Manuel López Obrador campaigned.He went all around the country speaking in every little tiny village that Mexico has, practically, in the course of four years. And one of the main things he talked about was the right to alternatives to forced migration. And I was there in Mexico City in the Zócalo when he took office. He finally won it.I don't want to go into all the things that had to [00:29:00] happen for Andrés Manuel López Obrador to win an election and become president of Mexico. But in his, in his inaugural speech as he was being sworn in, he talked about, we are going to make Mexico into a place where Mexicans can be happy living, where you don't have to go to the United States in order to survive, and I think you can talk about the, Things that the Mexican government has not been able to accomplish in the last four or five years.But I think one thing is beyond question and that is that that has been the main direction of the policy of the government of Mexico in that period of time because that's what got him elected. was this idea that, as he said, we are going to reject the liberal, neoliberal hypocrisy of the last six administrations in Mexico, meaning no more trade agreements like NAFTA, no [00:30:00] more opening Mexico up to U.S. corporations to come in and make money and as a result of which everybody's going to have to leave, that there had to be some kind of different direction in Mexico. So, in a way, I think that. Maybe that book, The Right to Stay Home, was like a little grain of sand that joined with other little grains of sand like it in helping to move forward that process of political change, because it happened on really on both sides of the border.Gosh, millions and millions of Mexicans who are living in the United States. So the process of political discussion that goes on about the kind of government Mexicans should have happens not just in Mexico, it happens here too. You know, part of Mexico is here on this side of the border. So you know, the book, and the book actually was published in Spanish and in Mexico as well too.So I think that it talked about things that were very important to people. [00:31:00] At the time, and that people are still debating about what has to happen in order for the right to stay home to be a reality. And I think it's something very important for people in this country to listen to and to think about as well, too, because in all the debates about migration that happen in here in the U.SThere's not a lot of attention that's paid to this whole idea of the two sets of rights, what has to happen. You know, certainly, you know, there are people like Trump and the right wing of the Republican Party that just, you know, never going to talk about anything like this. But even among Democrats, even in the Biden administration, you know, it's really too much about how to manage the border, you know, which basically boils down to how many people are we going to detain and deport.Rather than thinking about what kind of [00:32:00] world do we want to live in. Therefore, what kind of places migration going to have in it? ⌘ Chris Christou ⌘ is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Chris: Yeah, I mean, it's, it's it's been fascinating reading and rereading this book in, in, in part to be able to give voice to not just migrants and not just migration issues in the places that people move to or migrate to, but also in the places that they, that they leave behind and the voices of the people that they leave behind.And you know, I think for. Many North Americans, especially those who are first or second generation citizens of those countries of Anglo North America, of Canada and the United States, that these are, these are the stories these are the voices that that maybe they haven't heard of in their own families as well.And so, you know, you started to mention a little bit about this. the kind of superficiality, perhaps, if I'm, if I can say it in that, in those terms, of the [00:33:00] political conversation around migration in the United States, in Canada, and perhaps even in Mexico. And so I'd like to ask you about the reception and perhaps the fallout Once the book was published, and I'm curious how the declaration to the right to stay home or the right to not migrate has altered at all the political or social social landscape in rural Mexico, you know, at least in terms of the people that you know in these places.And also if there was any response, any, any ground shaking movements as a result of the book coming out among activists in the United States. David: Well, I think that the book contributed to an important change. In the immigrant rights movement in the United States here, because, you know, having participated in that movement as an activist [00:34:00] for, gosh, 40 some odd years now, maybe more, Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986 with the so called amnesty law.Which not only gave amnesty to undocumented people, but also made it illegal for undocumented people to work in the United States after that and started the whole process of the border militarization. In fact, you know, the negative parts of that bill were so bad that many people like myself opposed the bill, even if it had amnesty in it, saying that it was not a this was not a good deal.And I think that over time. You know, history has proven that we were right not that amnesty was unimportant and not worth fighting for, but that the price that we paid turned out to be much higher than people were willing to give it credit for, you know, at the time. But what was also really missing from that debate, for instance, in [00:35:00] those years, was any sense that we had to really deal with and think about the causes of migration and the roots of migration, the displacement.It was really all about the status of people when they were here. You know, should it be legal or illegal for people to work? Should people get papers or should people not get papers? And that was a very limiting Conversation, because what really, what it really meant was that it could not acknowledge the fact that the migration from Mexico is not going to stop.For instance, the, in that, in that bill, the, the qualifying date for amnesty was January 1st, 1982, meaning. That if you came before that date, you could apply for the amnesty and get legalization, and if you came after that date, you couldn't get it. For people migrating from [00:36:00] Oaxaca, for instance, almost everybody came after.So all the Oaxacans who came to the United States, hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people really hardly anybody. Qualified for amnesty because of that bill, which is one reason why legal status is such an enormous question for the Oaxacan community here in the U. S. So it, the, the discussion of that bill didn't acknowledge that and also by setting that date, it was, I think, very cynical because Mexico had what was called the Peso Shock in 1982, where the economic crisis in Mexico got so bad that Mexico had to devalue its currency.And what that meant was that thousands, hundreds of thousands of people in Mexico lost their jobs and had to come to the United States. And by setting that date, January 1st of that year, what you were really saying is, none of those people are going to qualify for amnesty. So they were [00:37:00] already here. But also it didn't acknowledge that, you know, in the, that, that bill set up a a commission to study the causes of migration, supposedly.And that commission came back and recommended the negotiation of a trade agreement between the U. S. and Mexico. And it said, well, in the short run, maybe this would result in the displacement of a lot of people, but in the long run, it would lead to the economic development of Mexico, and then people would have jobs and they wouldn't have to come here.Well, that was another very, very cynical kind of thing, because the negotiations of NAFTA started not long after the report of that commission, and in fact, NAFTA did lead to the displacement of millions of people in Mexico. There were four and a half million migrants from Mexico living in the U. S.when NAFTA went into effect and by 2010 it was [00:38:00] 12 and a half million people. So an enormous increase in people and the rise in Mexican living standards. Never happened. Well, that's not true. When López Obrador finally came into office he began taking measures to raise wages and raise the living standards in Mexico, which previous administrations had resisted bitterly because they wanted to attract investment.And things have started to improve economically for workers and farmers in Mexico a little bit. But up until then, so being unable to face the roots of migration and its connections to corporate America and the way our government was on the one hand producing migration or doing things to produce migration on the other hand making The status of migrants, illegal criminalizing it here.It was a really, a very difficult debate for people in [00:39:00] the immigrant rights movement. As a result, a lot of organizations said, well, MSD, we need MSD. Let's just forget about a lot of other stuff. Let's just get down to seat on what we paid a really bad price for it. Today I think there is a lot more discussion in the immigrant rights movement about what happens in Mexico and Central America in particular that causes people to come to the United States.I think still there's not enough of a willingness to deal with the economic part of it. the poverty. So these days, the way it gets dealt with is mostly by talking about the violence in Honduras. For instance, San Pedro Sula, which is called the murder capital of the world. You know, I wrote a whole article about how did San Pedro Sula become such a violent place to begin with?And what did it have to do with U. [00:40:00] S. companies going and growing bananas in Honduras? But in any case it gets put down, I think too much to violence, to the exclusion of the causes of the violence. What is the, what is the root cause of violence in Central American countries? The Civil War in El Salvador was fought about who was fighting on what side, what kind of changes were people proposing.The more you unpeel it, the more you look at it, the more you see that this is really, again, about the economic and political relationship between the U. S. and China. Those countries. And so I think that books like Illegal People, like The Right to Stay Home, played a role in trying to get us to look more at this as a whole system, what produces migration, and then criminalizes migrants here.I think that it's a very [00:41:00] limited accomplishment. Because we still have an extremely unjust immigration system. You know, we all hated Trump and the detention centers and, and his racist orders. But the reality is, is that we have more people crossing the border this last year than any other previous time in our history.And we have thousands and thousands of people living in detention. In the United States in detention centers and in detention centers on the Mexican side of the border. And this is under a democratic administration. So, I think that we have to be real about how limited our impact has been up to now.But, having said that, I think it is still a big advance for us to be able to talk. in this country, in the United States, about the roots of migration, and also be able to reach out to organizations and people and communities in Mexico and talk about, well, [00:42:00] okay, what is our, what should our relationship be?Well, how do we work together? How are we going to be able to try and change this system together? I think those efforts are kind of only starting, really. I don't think there's nearly enough of it, but I think that's the future. That's where the change is going to come from. Chris: And I can't stress enough, you know, how devoid of complexity and nuance most any political conversation has these days, and that most people don't go looking for it, in part because You know, most people haven't been taught.So, you mentioned a little bit earlier, as you wrote in, in your book, The Right to Stay Home, about the consequences of mining companies, as an example, in, in Mexico. Foreign owned mining corporations. And Here in Oaxaca, it's very well known that these corporations undertake geological testing without the [00:43:00] consent of communities, that they lie to the communities about concessions when trying to push their way into the territory, and then sponsor community violence by dividing the people against each other through bribery, corruption.Intimidation, threats, and sometimes assassination. And so, I'm curious, first, if you could offer a little bit more of what you've seen in this regard, and secondly, why do you think that in this example that, you know, Canadians, in the context of the one particular mine here in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca, is a Canadian owned mine, why they have no idea that this is happening on foreign soil in their names?You David: know, I wrote a long article about San Jose del Progreso in the Vice Centrales in, in Oaxaca, and Fortuna Mine there, which is a Canadian, Canadian company. And I think this is [00:44:00] another way of seeing what this kind of, just to use shorthand, this free trade arrangement between the US, Canada and Mexico, what it really means for people on the ground.Mexico in previous administrations changed this mining law so that it became possible. And the purpose of to make it possible for foreign corporation to get a mining concession anywhere in Mexico and develop a mine without having to get the consent of the people who live in the community around it.Basically saying that, you know the Mexican government was entitled to sell off these concessions regardless of what the people there thought about it. And so the purpose of this was to, again, attract foreign investment into Mexico. This is part of the neoliberal policy that says [00:45:00] that the economic development policy of Mexico should be to sell pieces of Mexico to foreign investors, to foreign corporations.And supposedly this money is going to make life better. For people in Mexico well, first of all, it's a very corrupt system, so the selling of mining concessions involves, you know, millions and millions of dollars that wind up in the pockets of those people who grant the concessions. So it was a source of enormous corruption in the Mexican government in granting those concessions and in passing that change in the law to begin with.And then in fighting for changes in the legal system, the free trade set up, those mining corporations could then, basically, it gave them not only a kind of impunity against communities that protested about it, but in which they could even sue the Mexican government. If the Mexican government tried to stand in the way and say, well, you [00:46:00] can't develop the mine, then the mine could sue the Mexican government and say, well, you deprived us of potential profits and you owe us millions of dollars.And there were decisions like the metal cloud decision that allowed for this kind of thing to happen. So what this meant is on the ground, you have mining mining concessions sold and mines being developed all over Mexico. In the face of local opposition, and the mine in San Jose de Progreso is a really good example of that, where you have a Canadian company that comes in and says, okay, we are going to, in fact, they weren't the originators of the mine, they basically bought a mine that had been played out by previous owner.And so we are going to dump a lot of money into this and we are going to make it a producing mine and the impact on the community. We don't really care. And so the impact is really enormous. You know these are open pit mines. They're a scar on the land. They [00:47:00] contaminate the water, the aquifer, so that these farming communities can no longer support themselves in the same way.In order to develop the mine, what they do is they divide the communities. And so, as you said, in San Jose de Progreso, they bought off the town's, the town's government who basically gave the company permission to do whatever it wanted to in spite of local opposition. Then when local opposition got organized to, to oppose it, the company cooperated with the with the local leaders that it had bought off to basically go after those leaders in a very violent way.So, Bernardo Vazquez. who had was from this community. He had actually gone to the United States and become a farm worker in Petaluma, in California. And then seeing what was happening in his community, went back to San Jose de [00:48:00] Progreso and to and began leading the opposition. And he was then ambushed and assassinated.Other people in his, around him were also killed, and then the violence went both ways. People on the other side got killed. And so this whole community became a warring camp, camps against each other. You know, I remember when I visited there, there are two taxi companies in this community. There's a taxi company that's associated with the People who are pro mine and the taxi company is associated with people who are against it.And you better not get into the wrong taxi because you could, some terrible things could happen to you. I took pictures of these threats that were spray painted on the walls of, some of the irrigation canals there, Bernardo Vasquez, your time has come, you know that was before he was assassinated.A lot of the people who work in the mine come from somewhere else, some of them from Canada[00:49:00] but it takes a few of the jobs in hand somehow. to certain people in the community there as a way of buying them off and giving them a stake in the continuation of the mine. And so what happens is that you have a community that's a continuing, a continuous war with itself.And this happens all over Mexico. In fact, it's not just Mexico, this is happening in El Salvador, it's happening in Guatemala, and actually mostly by Canadian companies. So you ask, do people in Canada know about this? I think there are some journalists like Dawn Bailey who have Canadian journalists who have tried to write about it, and tried to make people in Canada aware of it.I don't think that most people in Canada have the faintest idea of what those corporations are doing, and that's because I think the corporate media in Canada has very little interest in showing that, partly because, you know, they have the same basic set of economic interests that the mining corporations themselves do.[00:50:00] Probably share, same shareholders, who knows? In any case That's something that could happen and that should happen if people in Canada became more aware of what these companies were doing and then began taking action in Canada to try to restrict them. I think it would have a big impact on the ability of these communities in Oaxaca to survive.I think that San Jose the Progresso is going to be a war with itself and this continuing political violence is going to happen. Until the company, basically until the company leaves, really. I don't see any other solution, I don't see how the mine can continue operating there under any ownership and not have this war taking place there.So, but I think that the way to get that company to leave is for people in Canada to take some action in cooperation and in solidarity with the people in that [00:51:00] community. So, maybe by Organizing delegations from Vancouver or Toronto down to San Jose del Progreso would be a way of helping that to develop.That's possibly something that might happen, but basically you need that relationship in order, I think, in order to stop this from happening. Chris: Hmm. Thank you. Yeah, and you know, of course it just ends up contributing to migration, right, and exile, displacement within those communities. And and so I'm curious, what do you think the right to stay home or the right to not migrate can offer us as modern people, as citizens or migrants in the context of the current crises and perhaps the crises to come?You know, you mentioned that Immigration the numbers, the number of people coming into the United States over the last year has just been unprecedented. The number of migrants [00:52:00] flowing through Oaxaca, for example, in Southern Mexico right now is unprecedented and it really seems, you know, like.not just my opinion, but in terms of statistics and predictions and all of these things, that it's only going to get more unprecedented. So I'm curious what you might, what you might think that this, this declaration, the right to stay home or the right to not migrate, might offer us going forward. David: Well, I think it offers us something to fight for.That it gives us a vision of what a future could and should look like in the communities where displacement is taking place. In San Jose de Progreso, for instance, the right to stay home means a community that's not at war with itself, which means that the mining operation has to end. But, Ending the mining operation doesn't necessarily mean that people are [00:53:00] going to have an educational system or a health care system that's capable of meeting their needs.So you need political change in Oaxaca, San Jose de Progreso, and Mexico in general, that is able to deliver those things. For people. I think we could take that same thing and and look at people coming from Venezuela. There are a lot of Venezuelan migrants who are crossing Mexico coming to the U.S. border. On the one hand, the U. S. government is sort of a little bit more friendly. to Venezuelan migrants, although it's still doing whatever it can at the border to try to keep people out. Because, you know, this gets used in the media in the U. S. as a way of saying, well, this is the proof that the socialist government in Venezuela is incompetent and corrupt and ought to be removed, which has been U.S. policy for a long time. But in reality, the economic problems in [00:54:00] Venezuela would certainly be a lot less if Venezuela wasn't subject to the U. S. sanctions regime, which is basically sought to strangle the Venezuelan economy. And so the people who are leaving Venezuela, whether they're middle class people who are, you know, fed up with the problems of Caracas or whether they're poor people who have you know, have to migrate in order to survive those are due to U.S. policy again. So really, the right to stay home means in the United States that people in the United States, progressive people especially, have to seriously take a look at what the impact of U. S. policies are on the people that are being subjected to them, and to begin with, cause no harm.That would be a good starting place to stop those policies that are actively producing migration. You know, the people who drowned in the Mediterranean, those 600 people who [00:55:00] drowned in that horrible boating accident, who were they? A lot of them were Afghans. A lot of them were Iraqis. Why were they leaving?What were they doing on that boat? They were the product of that U. S. war. Now, I was a very active, you know, opponent of, of the war. I went to Iraq twice to try to make connections with trade unionists and other people in Iraq who were trying to fight for kind of a progressive nationalist solution to the economic problems of Iraq in the wake of the occupation to end the occupation.But you know, that's kind of what we need. We need to take responsibility for the impact of what this government has done. When we take a look at what the, what is going to happen to the people of Palestine and Gaza, [00:56:00] Under the bombardment, you know, if people were able to leave Gaza, there would be literally hundreds of thousands of people going wherever they could.And the Middle East simply in order to get out from under the Israeli bombs. And those bombs are coming from where? They're coming from the United States, that military aid package. You know, you cannot have a military policy and a military aid package the way the U. S. passes them without its having enormous impacts on migration, on the displacement of people, and at the same time it also Produces impacts here in the U.S. that we also need to take a look at and see what the relationship are. You know, people migrate in the U. S. as well, too. We have factories to close when Detroit stopped being an [00:57:00] auto manufacturing center and the Factories in Detroit closed, the car factories, thousands and thousands and thousands of auto workers became migrants in the U.S., going from city to city to city, looking for. So the price of the economic crisis that exists for us isn't felt just by people in Mexico or Palestine or Iraq. It's felt here in the United States and in Canada too. These problems They require a political solution, you know, they require us to organize ourselves in a way that is strong enough to force political change on our government here, so that it takes responsibility for the past devastation.And the past displacement and also stops doing the things that are going to keep on causing it in the future. And then I think we can think about kind of repairing the world. I think we have to repair the world, too, after this. But the first thing we have [00:58:00] to do is we have to stop hurting it. We have to stop the damage, and that means having enough political courage and enough political power to make our government do that.That's a tall order. That's a tall order. I don't think it's something from today to tomorrow. But it's a long process. You know, I'm a, I grew up during the anti Vietnam War movement and the civil rights movement, and I saw this country at a time when it was possible and when we did it. So I'm the optimist.I believe that it's within our power to do this. But looking at where we are right now, I think we have a long way to go. And so, you know, if what I do contributes is granito de arena to it, you know, a lo mejor. Chris: Thank you so much, David. Yeah, it's definitely really, really important to hear words such as yours in a time of deep nihilism.[00:59:00] And, and also the absence and I think the disregard of, of Elder Voices in our midst and in our movements. So, I deeply appreciate your willingness to speak with me and, and to our listeners today. And just finally, before we depart, how might our listeners find out more about your work?How might they purchase your books? David: I have a blog and a lot of what I write and the pictures that I take are up there and I put them up there pretty regularly. And so the way to find it is to Google my name, David Bacon, and the blog is called The Reality Check. And so if you Google that together, you'll find it and that's how you can connect.Chris: Thank you so much, David. David: My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Get full access to ⌘ Chris Christou ⌘ at chrischristou.substack.com/subscribe

If you want to know the 5 Most Common Recovery Roadblocks with Chris Tronsdon (an incredible anxiety and OCD therapist), you are in the right place. Today Chris and I will go over the 5 Most common anxiety, depression, & OCD roadblocks and give you 6 highly effective treatment strategies you can use today.  Kimberley: Welcome everybody. We have the amazing Chris Trondsen here with us today. Thank you for coming, Chris. Chris: Yes, Kim, thanks for having me. I'm super excited about being here today and just about this topic. Kimberley: Yes. So, for those of you who haven't attended one of the IOCDF Southern California conferences, we had them in Southern California. We have presented on this exact topic, and it was so well received that we wanted to make sure that we were spreading it out to all the folks that couldn't come.  You and I spoke about the five most common anxiety & OCD treatment roadblocks, and then we gave six strategic solutions. But today, we're actually broadening it because it applies to so many people. We're talking about the five most common anxiety treatment roadblocks, with still six solutions and six strategies they can use. Thank you for coming on because it was such a powerful presentation. Chris: No, I agree. I mean, we had standing room only, and people really came up to us afterwards and just said how impactful it was. And then we actually redid it at the International OCD Foundation, and it was one of the best-attended talks at the event. And then we got a lot of good feedback, and people kept messaging me like, “I want to hear it. I couldn't go to the conference.” I'd play clips for my group, and they're like, “When is it going to be a podcast?” I was like, “I'll ask Kim.” I'm glad you said yes because I do believe for anybody going through any mental health condition, this list is bound, and I think the solutions will really be something that can be a game changer in their recovery. Kimberley: Absolutely, absolutely. I love it mostly because, and we're going to get straight into these five roadblocks, they're really about mindset and going into recovery. I think it's something we're not talking about a lot. We're talking about a lot of treatment, a lot of skills, and tools, but the strategies and understanding those roadblocks can be so important. Chris: Yeah. I did a talk for a support group. They had asked me to come and speak, and I just got this idea to talk about mindset. I did this presentation on mindset, and people were like, “Nobody's talking about it.” In the back of my head, I'm like, “Kim and I did.” But we're the only ones. Because I do think so many people get the tools, right? The CBT tools, they get the ERP tools, the mindfulness edition, and people really find the tools that work for them. But when I really think of my own personal recovery with multiple mental health diagnoses, it was always about mindset. And that's what I like about our talk today. It's universal for anyone going through any mental health condition, anxiety base, and it's that mindset that I think leads to recovery. It shouldn't be the other way around. The tools are great, but the mindset needs to be there. Kimberley: Yeah. We are specifically speaking to the folks who are burnt out, feeling overwhelmed, feeling a lack of hope of recovery. They really need a kickstart, because that was actually the big title of the presentation. It was really addressing those who are just exhausted with the process and need a little bit of a strategy and mindset shift. Chris: Yeah. I don't want to compare, but I broke my ankle when I was hiking in Hawaii, and I have two autoimmune diseases. Although those ailments have caused problems, especially the autoimmune, when I think back to my mental health journey, that always wore me out more because it's with you all the time, 24/7. It's your mental health. When my autoimmune diseases act up, I'm exhausted, I'm burnt out, but it's temporary. Or my ankle, when it acts up, I have heating pads, I have things I can do, but your brain is with you 24/7. I do believe that's why a lot of people resonate with this messaging—they are exhausted. They're busting their butt in treatment, but they're tired and hitting roadblocks. And that's why this talk really came about. Kimberley: Yeah, exactly. All right, let's get into it here in a second. I just want to give one metaphor with that. I once had a client many years ago give the metaphor. She said, “I feel like I'm running a marathon and my whole family are standing on the out, like on the sidelines, and they're all clapping, but I'm just like faceplant down in the middle of the road.” She's like, “I'm trying to get up, I'm trying to get up, and everyone's telling me, ‘Come on, you can do it.' It's so hard because you're so exhausted and you've already run a whole bunch of miles.” And so I really think about that kind of metaphor for today. If people are feeling that way, hopefully they can take away some amazing nuggets of information.  Chris: Absolutely. That's a good visual. Faceplant. Kimberley: It was such a great and powerful visual because then I understood this client's experience. Like, “Oh, okay. You're really tired. You're really exhausted.” ROADBLOCK #1: YOU BEAT YOURSELF UP! Okay, let's get into it. So, I'm going to go first because the number one roadblock we talked about, not that these are in any particular order, but the one we came up first was that you beat yourself up. This is a major roadblock to recovery for so many disorders. You beat yourself up for having the disorder. You beat yourself up for not coping with it as well as you could. You beat yourself up if you have OCD for having these intrusive thoughts that you would never want to have. Or you're beating yourself up because you don't have motivation because you have, let's say, some coexisting depression.  The important thing to know there is, while beating yourself up feels productive, it might feel like you're motivating yourself, or you may feel like you deserve it. It actually only makes it harder. It only makes it feel like you've got this additional thing. Again, a lot of my patients—let's use the marathon example—might yell at themselves the whole way through the marathon, but it's not a really great experience if you're doing that, and it takes a lot of energy.  SOLUTION #1: SELF-COMPASSION So what we offered here as a strategic solution is self-compassion—trying to motivate and encourage yourself using kindness. If you're going through a hard day, maybe, just if you've never tried this before, trial what it would be like to encourage yourself with kind words or asking for support, asking for help so that you're not burning all that extra energy, making it so much harder on yourself, increasing your suffering. Because I often say to patients, the more you suffer, the more you actually deserve self-compassion. It's not the other way around. It's not that the more you suffer, the less you deserve it. Do you have any thoughts on that, Chris? Chris: Oh yeah. I would say I see that across the board with my clients, this harshness, and there's this good intention behind it, this idea that if I can just bully myself into recovery. I always try to remind clients that anxiety-based disorders, it's a part of our bodies as well. Our brain is a part of our body, just like our arm, our tibia, our leg, all these other bones, but there's a lack of self-empathy that we have for ourselves, as if it's something that we're choosing to do. Someone with a broken leg doesn't wake up in the morning and get mad at themselves that their leg is still broken. They have understanding, and they're working on their exercises to heal. It's the same with these disorders.  So, the reason I love self-compassion is when we go and step in to help one of our friends, we use a certain tone, we use certain words, we tap into their strengths, we use encouragement because we know that method is going to be what boosts them up and helps them get through that rough patch. But for some reason, when it's ourselves, we completely abandon everything we know that's supportive, and we talk to ourselves in a way that I almost picture like a really negative boot camp instructor, like in the military, just yelling and screaming into submission. The other thing is when we're beating ourselves up like that, we're more likely to tap into our unhelpful habits. We're more likely to shut down and isolate, which we see a lot in BDD, social anxiety, et cetera. But that self-compassion isn't like a fake pop culture support. It's really tapping into meeting yourself where you're at, giving yourself some understanding, and tapping into the strategies that have worked in the past when you're in a low moment.  I know sometimes people are like, “I don't know how to do that,” but you're doing it to everybody else in your life. Now it's time to give yourself that same self-compassion that you've been giving to everybody important to you. Kimberley: Yeah, and we actually have a few episodes on Your Anxiety Toolkit on exactly how to embrace self-compassion, like how that might actually look. So, if people are really needing more information there, I can add in the show notes some links to some resources there as well.  ROADBLOCK #2: THERE WILL BE HARD DAYS  Okay. Now, Chris, can you tell us about the second most common or another common anxiety roadblock around this idea that there will be hard days? Chris: There's always these great images if you Google about what people think recovery will look like versus what recovery looks like. I love those images because there is this idea. We see a lot of perfectionism in anxiety disorders. In OCD, we see perfectionism. So, this idea of, like, I should be here and I should easily scoot to the end. It's not going to be like that; it's bumpy, it's ups and downs. We know so much factors into or impact how our mental health disorder shows up. We can't always control our triggers. Sometimes if we haven't slept well or there's a lot of change in our life, we could have more anxiety. So, it's going to ebb and flow.  So, when we have this fixed mindset of like, it has to be perfect, there has to be absolutely no bumps on the road, no turbulence, we're going to set ourselves up for failure because the day we have a hard day, we want to completely shut down. So I really believe, in this case, the solution is thinking bigger. If you're thinking day to day, sometimes if you're too in it, you're dealing with depression, you're really feeling bad, you skipped school because you have a presentation, social anxiety is acting up. You think bigger picture. Why am I here? Why am I doing this? Why have I sought out treatment? Listen to this podcast. What am I trying to accomplish?  SOLUTION #2: KNOW YOUR WHY I know for me in my own recovery, knowing my why was so important. There were certain things in my life that I found important to achieve, and I kept that as the figurative carrot in front of the mule to get me to go. So, that way, if I had a rough day, I thought bigger picture. What do I need to do today to make sure that I meet my goals? And so, I believe everybody needs to know their why.  Now, it doesn't have to be grandiose. Some people want to build a school and teach kids in underprivileged countries. Amazing why. But other people are sometimes like, “I just want to be able to make my own choices today and not feel like I base them out of anxiety.” There's no right or wrong why, but if you can know what beacon you're going to, it really helps you get through those hard days.  What about for you? When we talk about this, what comes up for you? Kimberley: Well, I think that for me personally, the why is a really important mindset shift because often I can get to this sort of, like you said, perfectionistic why. Like, the goal is to have no anxiety, or the goal is to have no bad days. We see on social media these very relaxed people who just seem to go with the flow, and that's your goal. But I have to often with myself do a little reality check and go, “Okay, are you doing recovery to get there? Because that goal might be setting you up for constant disappointment and failure. That mightn't be your genetic makeup.”  I'm never going to be like the go-with-the-flow Kimberley. That's just not who I am. But if I can instead shift it to the why of like, what do I value? What are the things I want to be able to do despite having anxiety in my life? Or, despite having a hard day, like you said, how do I want that to look? And once I can get to that imagery, then I have a really clear picture. So, when I do have a bad day, it doesn't feel so defeating, like what's the point I give up, because the goal was realistic. Chris: For me, a big part of my why in recovery, once I started getting into a place where I was managing the disorders I was dealing with—OCD, body dysmorphic disorder, I had a lot of generalized anxiety, and major depressive disorder—I was like, “I need to give back. There's not people my age talking about this. There's not enough treatment providers.” There was somewhere, like in the middle of my treatment, that I was like, “I don't know how I'm going to advocate. I don't know what that's going to look like, but I have to give back.” And so, on those hard days when I would normally want to just like, “Well, I don't care that it's noon, I'm shutting it down, I'm going into my bed, I'm just going to sleep the rest of the day,” reminding myself like there's people out there suffering that can't find providers, that can't find treatment, may not even know they have these disorders. I have to be one of the voices in the community that really advocates and gets people education and resources. And so, I didn't let myself get in bed. I looked at the day as quarters. Okay, the morning and the afternoon's a little rough, but I still have evening and night. Let me turn it around. I have to go because I have this big goal, this ambitious dream. I really want to do it. So that bigger why kept me just on track to push through hard days. ROADBLOCK #3: YOU RUN OUT OF STAMINA Kimberley: Amazing. I love that so much. All right. The third roadblock that we see is that people run out of stamina. I actually think this is one that really ties into what we were just talking about. Imagine we're running a marathon. If you're sprinting for the first 20 miles, you probably won't finish the race. Or even if you sprint the first two miles, you probably won't finish the marathon.  One of the things is—and actually, I'll go straight to the strategy and the thing we want you to practice—we have to learn to pace ourselves throughout recovery. As I said, if you sprint the first few miles, you will fall flat on your face. You're already dealing with so much. As you said, having a mental health struggle is the most exhausting thing that I've ever been through. It requires such of your attention. It requires such restraint from not engaging in it and doing the treatment and using the tools. It's a lot of work, and I encourage and congratulate anyone who's trying. The fact that you're trying and you're experimenting with what works and what doesn't, and you're following your homework of your clinician or the workbook that you've used—that's huge. But pacing yourself is so important. So, what might that look like? Often, people, students of mine from CBT School, will say, “I go all out. I do a whole day of exposures and I practice response prevention, and I just go so hard that the next day I am wiped. I can't get out of bed. I don't want to do it anymore. It was way too much. I flooded myself with anxiety.” So, that's one way I think that it shows up. I'll often say, “Okay, let's not beat yourself up for that.” We'll just use that as data that that pace didn't work. We want to find a rhythm and a pace that allow you to recover. It's sort of like this teeter-totter. We call it in Australia a seesaw. You want to do the work, but not to the degree where you faceplant down on the concrete. We want to find that balance.  I know for me, when I was recovering from postural orthostatic tachycardic syndrome, which is a chronic illness that I had, it was so hard because the steps to recovery was exercise, but it was like literally walking to the corner and back first, and then walking half a block, and then walking three-quarters of a block, and then having my husband pick me up, then walking one block. And that's all I was able to do without completely faceplanting the next day, literally and figuratively.  My mind kept saying to me, “You should be able to go faster. Everybody else is going faster. Everyone else can walk a mile or a block. So you should be able to.” And so, I would push myself too hard, and then I'd have to start all over again because I was comparing myself to someone who was not in my position.  SOLUTION #3: PACE YOURSELF So, try to find a pace that works for you, and do not compare your pace with me or Chris or someone in your support group, or someone you see on social media. You have to find and test a pace that works for you. Do you have any thoughts, Chris? Chris: Yeah. I would say in this one, and you alluded to it, that comparison, that is going to get you in this roadblock because you're going to be looking to your left and your right. Why is that person my age working and I'm not? It's not always comparing yourself. Sometimes, like you said, it is people in your support group. It's people that you see advocating for the disorder you may have. But sometimes people even look at celebrities or they'll look at friends from college, and can I do that? The comparison never motivates you, it never boosts you; it just makes you feel less than. That's why one of my favorite quotes is, “Chase the dream, not the competition.” It's really finding a timeline that works best for you.  I get why people have this roadblock. As somebody who's lived through multiple mental health disorder diagnoses, it's like, once we find the treatment, we want to escalate to the finish line, and we'll push ourselves in treatment sometimes too much. And then we have one of those days where we can't even get out of bed because we're just beat up, we're exhausted, and it's counterproductive.  I wanted to add one thing too. The recovery part may not even be what you're doing with your clinician in a session that you are not pacing yourself with. My biggest pacing problem was after recovery, not that the disorders magically went away, they were in remission, I was working on doing great, but it was like, I went to martial arts, tennis, learned Spanish, started volunteering at an animal shelter, went back to school, got a job, started dating. It was so much. Because I felt like I was behind, I needed to push myself.  The problem that started to happen was I was focusing less on the enjoyable process of dating or getting a job, or going back to school. I was so fixated on the finish line. “I need to be there, I need to be there. What's next? What's next?” I got burnt out from that, and I was not enjoying anything I was doing.  So, I would say even after you're managing your disorder, be careful about not pacing yourself, even in that recovery process of getting back into the lifestyle that you want. Kimberley: Yeah, absolutely. I would add too, just as a side point, anyone who is managing a mental health issue or an anxiety disorder, we do also have to fill our cup with the things that fill our hearts. I know that sounds very cliche and silly, but in order to pace ourselves and to have the motivation and to use the skills, we do have to find a balance of not just doing all the hard things, but making sure you schedule time to rest and eat and drink and see friends if that fills your cup, or read if that fills your cup. So, I think it's also finding a rhythm and a balance of the things that fill your cup and identifying that, yes, recovery is hard. It will deplete your stores of energy. So, finding things that fill that cup for you is important.   Chris: Well, you just made a good point too. In my recovery, all those things you mentioned, I thought of those as like weakness, like I just wasted an hour reading. Sometimes even with friends. That one, not as much, because I saw value in friendship. But if I just watched a movie or relaxed, or even just hung out with friends, it felt like a waste. I'm like, “How dare I am behind everybody else? I should be working. I should be this. I should move up.” A lot of should statements, a lot of perfectionist expectations of myself.  So, the goal for me or the treatment for me wasn't to then go to the other extreme and just give up everything; it was really to ask myself, like you said, how can I fill my cup in ways that are important and see value and getting a breakfast burrito with a friend and talking for three hours and not thinking like, “Oh, I should have been this because I got to get my degree.” I'm glad that you brought that up. I always think of like we're overflowing our cup with mental health conditions. We have to be able to have those offsets that drain the cup so we have a healthy balance. So, a great point. ROADBLOCK #4: NOT OWNING YOUR RECOVERY Kimberley: I agree. So important. Would you tell us about owning your recovery? Because you have a really great story with this. Chris: Yeah. People ask me all the time how I got better. A lot of people with body dysmorphic disorder struggle to get better. Obviously, we know that with obsessive-compulsive disorder, major depressive disorder, et cetera. So, a lot of people will ask sometimes, and I always say to them, if I had to come up with one thing, it was because I made my mental health recovery number one. I felt that it was like the platform that I was building my whole life on. I'm so bad with the-- what is it? The house, the-- I'm not a builder.  Kimberley: Like the foundation. Chris: Thank you. Clearly, I'm not going to be making tools tomorrow or making things with tools. But yeah, like a house has to have a nice foundation. You would never build a house on a rocky side of the mountain. And so, I had to give up a lot, like most of us do, as we start to get worse. I became housebound and I dropped out of college, and I gave up a job. I was working in the entertainment industry, and I really enjoyed it. I was going to film school, and I was happy. I had to give all that up because I couldn't even leave my house because of the disorder.  SOLUTION #5: MAKE YOUR RECOVERY THE MOST IMPORTANT THING So, when I was going to treatment and I was really starting to see it work, I was clear to that finish line of what I needed to do. So I made it the most important thing. It wasn't just me; it was my support system. My treatment was about a four-hour round trip from my house, so my mom and I would meet up every day. We drive up to LA. I go to my OCD therapist, and I'd go to my psychiatrist and then my BDD therapist and support group, and then come home. There's times I was exhausted, I wanted to give up, I was over it, but I never ever, ever put it to number two or three. I almost had this top three list in my head, and number one was always my recovery. My mom too, I mean, when she talks, she'll always say it's the most important thing. If my job was going to fire me because I couldn't come in because I had to take my kid on Wednesdays to treatment, I was going to get fired and find a new job. We just had to make this important.   As I was getting better, there were certain opportunities that came back to me from my jobs or from school. My therapist and I and my mom just decided, “Let's hold off on this. Let's really, really put effort into the treatment. You're doing so well.” One of the things that I see all the time, my mom and I run a very successful family and loved ones group. A lot of times, the parents aren't really making it the priority for their kids or the kids, or the people with the disorders aren't really making it a priority. It's totally understandable if there's things like finances and things, barriers. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about when people have access to those things, they're just not owning it. Sometimes they're not owning it because they're not taking it seriously or not making it important. Or other times, people are expecting someone else to get them better.  I loved having a team. I didn't have a big team. I came from nothing. It was a very small team. I probably needed residential or something bigger. I only really had my mom's support, but we all leaned on each other. But I always knew it was me in the driver's seat. At the end of the day, my therapist couldn't save me, my mom couldn't save me, they couldn't come to my house and pull me out of bed or do an exposure for me, or have me go out in public during the daytime because of BDD. I had to be the one to do it. I could lean on them as support systems and therapists are there for, but at the end of the day, it was my choice. I had to do it. When my head hit the pillow, I had to make sure that I did everything I possibly could that day to recover.  When I took ownership, it actually gave me freedom. I wasn't waiting for someone to come along. I wasn't focusing on other things. I made it priority number one. I truly believe that that was the thing that got me better. Once again, didn't have a lot of resources, leaned a lot on self-help books and stuff because I needed a higher level of care, but there was none and we couldn't afford it. I don't want anyone to hear this podcast and think, “Well, I can't find treatment in my area.” That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying, whatever you have access to, own it, make it a priority, and definitely be in that leader's seat because that's going to be what's going to get you better. Kimberley: Yeah, for sure. I think too when I used to work as a personal trainer, I would say to them, “You can come to training once a week, but that once a week isn't going to be what crosses you across that finish line.” You know what I mean? It is the work you do in the other 23 hours of that day and the other seven days of the week. I think that is true. If you're doing and you're dabbling in treatment, but it's not the main priority, that is a big reason that can hold you back. I think it's hard because it's not fair that you have to make it priority number one, but it's so necessary that you do.  I really want to be compassionate and empathize with how unfair it is that you have to make this thing a priority when you see other people, again, making their social life their priority or their hobby their priority. It sucks. But this mindset shift, this recalibration of this has to be at the top. When it gets to being at the top, I do notice, as a clinician, that's when people really soar in their recovery. Chris: Yeah. We had a very honest conversation with my BDD therapist, my OCD therapist, and my psychiatrist, and they're like, “You need a higher level of care. We understand you can't afford it. There's also a lot of waiting lists.” They're like, “You're really going to have to put in the work in between sessions. You're supposed to be in therapy every day.” We just couldn't. All we can afford is once a week. They said, “Look, when you're not in our session, you need to be the one.”  So, for instance, with depression, my psychiatrist is like, “Okay, you're obviously taking the medication, but you need to get up at the same time every day. Open up all your blinds, go upstairs, eat breakfast on the balcony, get ready, leave the house from nine to five.” I didn't have a job. “But you need to be out of the house. You need to be in nature. You need to do all these things.” I never wanted to, but I did it. Or with my OCD and BDD recovery, I didn't want to go out in public. I felt like it looked horrendous. I felt like people were judging me, but I did. Instead of going to the grocery store at 2:00 in the morning, I was going at noon. When everyone's there for OCD, it was like, I didn't want to sit in public places. I didn't want to be around people that I felt I could potentially harm.  My point is like every single day, I was doing work, I was tracking it, I was keeping track, and I had to do that because I needed to do that in order to get better based on the setup that I had.  I do want to also say a caveat. I always have the biggest empathy for people or sympathy for people that are a CEO of a company or like a parent and have a lot of children, or it's like you're busy working all day and you're trying to balance stuff. I mean, the only good thing that came from being housebound is I didn't have a lot of responsibilities. I didn't have a family. I wasn't running a company. I wasn't working. So, I did have the free time to do the treatment. So, I have such sympathy for people that are parents or working at a company, or trying to start their own small business and trying to do treatment too. But I promise you, you don't have to put your recovery first forever. Really dive into it, get to that place where you're really, really stable. It'll still be a priority, but then you will be a better parent, a better employee, a better friend once you've really got your mental health to a level that you can start to support others. You may need to support yourself first, like the analogy with a mask on the plane. ROADBLOCK #5: YOU HAVE A FIXED MINDSET Kimberley: Agreed. That's such an important point. All right, we're moving on to roadblock number five. This is yours again, Chris. Tell us about the importance of specific mindsets, particularly a fixed mindset being the biggest roadblock. Chris: One of the things that makes me the most sad about people having a mental health condition because of how insidious they are is it starts to have people lose their sense of identity. It has them start to almost re-identify who they are, and it becomes a very fixed mindset. So, if you have social anxiety or social phobia, it's like, “Oh, I'm somebody that's not good around people. I say embarrassing things. I never know what kind of conversation to lead with. I should probably just not be around people.” Or, let's say generalized anxiety. “Deadlines really caused me too much strain. I can't really go back to school.” BDD. “I'm an unattractive person. Nobody wants to date me. I'm unlovable.”   We get into these fixed mindsets and we start to identify with them, and inevitably, that person's life becomes smaller and smaller and smaller. So, the more they identify with it, the more that they become isolated from others, and they have this very fixed mindset. I think of like OCD, for instance, isn't really about guidelines; it's all about rules. This is how things are supposed to be. What happens is when I work with a client specifically, somebody that's pretty severe, it's trying to get them to see the value in treatment and to even tap into their own personal values is really difficult. It's like, “Treatment doesn't work. I've tried all the medications. I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm just not somebody that can get better.” SOLUTION #5: GROWTH MINDSET What I tell clients instead is, “Let's be open. Let's be curious. Let's move into a growth mindset. Let's focus on learning, obtaining education, being open to new concepts. Look, when you were younger and the OCD didn't really attack you, or when you were younger and you didn't deal with social anxiety, you were having friends, you had birthday parties, you were going to school, and everything. Maybe that's the real you, and it's not that you lost it. You just have this disorder that's blocked you from it.” And so, when clients become open and curious and willing to learn, willing to try new things, and to get out of their comfort zone, that's where the growth really happens.  If you're listening to this podcast or watching it right now and you're determined like, “This isn't working; nothing can help me,” that fixed mindset is never something that's going to get you from where you are to where you want to be. You have to have that growth, that learning, that trying new things, expanding.  I always tell clients, “If you try something with your therapist and it doesn't work, awesome. That's one other thing that doesn't work. Move on to something else.” That openness. What I always love after treatment is people are like, “I am social. I do love to be around people. I am somebody who likes animals. I just was avoiding animals because of harm thoughts.” People start to get back into who they really are as soon as they start to be more open to recovery. Kimberley: Yeah, for sure. The biggest fixed mindset thought that I hear is, “I can't handle it.” That thought alone gets in the way of recovery so many times. We go to do an exposure, “I can't handle this.” Or, “What if I have a panic attack? I cannot handle panic attacks.” It's so fixed. So I often agree with you. I will often say, this work, this mental health work, or this human work that we do is shifting the way we see ourselves and life as an experiment. We always have these black-and-white beliefs like “I can't handle this” or “I can't do this. I can't get in an elevator. I can't speak public speaking,” or whatever it might be. But let's be curious. Like you said, let's use it as an experiment. Let's try, and we'll see. Maybe it doesn't go great. That's okay, like you said, but then we know we have data, and then we have information on what got in the way, and we have some information.  I think that even just being able to identify when you're in a fixed mindset can be all you need just to be like, “Oh, okay, I'm having a very black-and-white fixed mindset.” Learning how to laugh and giggle at the way our brain just gets so determined and black-and-white, like you can't do this, as you said, I think is so important because, like you said, once you get to recovery, then you go on to live your life and actually do the things that you dream, the dream that you're talking about. It might be you want to get a master's degree or you might want to go for a job, or you want to go on a date. You're going to be able to use that strong mindset for any situation in life. It applies to anything that you're going to conquer.  I always say to clients, if you've done treatment for mental health, you are so much more prepared than every student in college because they haven't gone through, they haven't had to learn those skills. Chris: Yeah, no, exactly. I remember like my open mindset was one of the assets I had in recovery. I remember going to therapy and being like, “I'm just going to listen. These people clearly know what they're doing. They've helped people like me. Why would it be any different?” And I was open. I can see the difference with clients that have a more growth mindset. They come in, they're scared. They're worried. They've been doing something for 10, 15, 16 years, and they're like, “Why is this guy going to tell me to try to do different things or to think different or have different thinking patterns?” But they're open. I always see those people hit that finish line first. It's the clients that come and shut down. The family system has been supporting this like learned helplessness. Nobody really wants to rock the boat. Everything shut down and closed. It's like prying it open, as most of the work. And then we finally get to the work, but we could have gotten there quicker. Everybody's at their own pace, but I really hope that people hear this, though, are focused on that openness. You were talking about like people thinking they can't handle it. The other thing I hear sometimes is people just don't think they deserve it. “I just don't even deserve to get better.” You do. You do. That's what I love about my job the most. Everybody that comes into my office, and I'm like, “You deserve a better life than you're living. Whatever it is you want to do. You want to be a vet. How many animals are you going to save just by getting into being a vet? You got to do it.” My heart breaks a little bit when people have been dealing with mental health for long enough that they start to believe they don't even deserve to get better.  SOLUTION #6: IT'S A BEAUTIFUL DAY TO DO HARD THINGS Kimberley: I love that. So, we had five roadblocks, and we've covered it, but we promised six strategies. I want to be the one to deliver the last one, which everyone who listens already knows what I'm going to say, but I'm going to say it for the sake that it's so important for your recovery, which is, it's a beautiful day to do hard things. It is so important that you shift, as we talked about in the roadblock number one, you shift your mindset away from “I can't do hard things” to “It's okay to do hard things.” It doesn't mean you've failed. Life can be hard.  I say to all my patients, life is 50/50 for everybody. It's 50% easy and 50% hard. I think some people have it harder than others. But the ones who seem to do really well and have that grit and that survivor's mindset are the ones who aren't destroyed by the day when it is hard. They're willing to do the hard thing. They're okay to march into uncertainty. They're willing to do the hard thing for the payoff. They're willing to take a short-term discomfort for the long-term relief or the long-term payout. I think that mindset can change the game for people, particularly if you think of it like a marathon. Like, I just have to be able to finish this marathon, I'm going to do the hard thing, and think of it that way. There'll be hills, there'll be valleys, there'll be times where you want to give up, but can I just do one hard thing and then the next hard thing, and then the next hard thing? Do you have any thoughts on that? Chris: I'm glad that this is the message that you put out there. I'd say, obviously, when I think of Kim Quinlan as a friend, I think of other things and all the fun we've had together. But as a colleague, I always think of both. Obviously, self-compassion. But this idea of it's a beautiful day to do hard things, I like it because we've always talked about doing hard things as this negative thing before you came along, and by adding this idea of it's a beautiful day. When I look at all the hard things I did in my own recovery, or I see clients do hard things, there's this feeling of accomplishment, there's this feeling of growth, there's this feeling of greatness that we get. Just like you were saying, beyond the mental health conditions that I dealt with, when I start getting into real life after the mental health conditions now are more in recovery, every time I choose to do hard things, there's always such a good payoff. I was convinced I would never be able to get through school and get a degree and become a licensed therapist because I struggled with school with my perfectionism. It was difficult for me to get back in there and to humble myself and say, “Hey, you may flop and fail.” But now I'm a licensed therapist because of that willingness to do hard things.  I could give a plethora of examples, but I want people to hear that doing hard things is your way of saying, “I believe in myself. I trust myself that I can accomplish things, and I'm going to tap into my support system if I need to, but I am determined, determined, determined to push myself to a level that I may not think I can.” I love when clients do that, and they always come in, they're like, “I'm so proud of myself, I can't wait to tell you what I did this weekend.” I love that. So, always remember hard things come with beautiful, beautiful, beautiful outcomes and accomplishments. Kimberley: Yeah. I think the empowerment piece, when clients do scary, hard things, or they feel their hard feelings, or they do an exposure, they'll often come in and be like, “I felt like I could do anything. I had no idea about the empowerment that comes from doing hard things.” I think we've been trained to think that if we just avoid it, we then will feel confident and strong, but it's actually the opposite. The most empowered you'll ever feel is right after you've done a really, really hard thing, even if it doesn't go perfectly. Chris: Yeah, and so much learning comes out of it. That's why I always tell clients too, going back to one of our first roadblocks, beating yourself up prevents the learning. Let's say you try something and it doesn't go well. I was talking to a colleague of ours who I really, really like. She was telling me how her first treatment center failed. Now she's doing really well for herself down in San Diego. She's like, “I just didn't know things, and I just did things wrong, and I learned from it, and now I'm doing well.”  It's like, whenever we look at something not going the way we'd like as an opportunity to learn and collect data, it just makes us that much better when we try it the other time. A lot of times these anxiety disorders were originally before treatment, hopefully trying to find ways to avoid our way through life—tough words—and trying to figure out, like, how can I always be small and avoid and still get to where I want to be? When people hear this from your podcast—it's a beautiful day to do hard things—I hope that they recognize that you don't have to live an avoidant lifestyle, an isolated lifestyle anymore. Really challenging yourself and doing hard things is actually going to be so rewarding. It's incredible what outcomes come with it. Kimberley: Amazing. Well, Chris, thank you so much for doing this with me again. We finally stamped it into the podcast, which makes me so happy. Tell us where people can hear about you, get in contact with you, and learn more about what you do. Chris: I am really active in the International OCD Foundation. I'm one of their board members. I also am one of their lead advocates, just meeting as somebody with the disorder. I speak on it. Then I lead some of their special interest groups. The Body Dysmorphic Disorder Special Interest Group is one of them, but I lead about four of them. One of their affiliates, OCD Southern California, I am Vice President of OCD SoCal and a board member. We do a lot of events here locally that Kim is part of, but also some virtual events that you could be a part of. And then, as a clinician, I'm a licensed clinician in Costa Mesa, California. I currently work at The Gateway Institute. You can find me either by email at my name, which is never easy to spell. So, ChrisTrondsen@GatewayOCD.com, or the best thing is on social media, whether it's Instagram, Facebook, or X, I guess we're calling it now. Just @christrondsen. You could DM me. I always like to hear from people and get people's support, and anything I can do to support people. I always love it. Kimberley: Oh my gosh, you're such a light in the community, truly. A light of hope and a light of wisdom and knowledge. I want to say, because I don't tell you this enough as your friend and as your colleague, thank you, thank you for the hope that you put out there and the information you put out there. It is so incredibly helpful for people. So, thank you. Chris: I appreciate that. I forgot to say one thing real quick. Every first, third, and fourth Wednesday of the month at 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time on the IOCDF, all of their platforms, including iocdf.org/live, I do a free live stream with Dr. Liz McIngvale from Texas, and we have great guests like Kim Quinlan on, so please listen. But thank you for saying that. I always try to put as much of myself in the community, and you never know if people are receiving it well. I want to throw the same thing to you. I mean, this podcast has been incredible for so many. I always play some of this stuff for my clients. A lot of clients are looking for podcasts. So, thanks for all that you do. I'm really excited about this episode because I think it's something that we touch so many people. So, now to share it on a bigger scale, I'm excited about it. But thank you for your kind words. You're amazing. It's all mutual. Kimberley: Thank you. You're welcome back anytime. Chris: And we're going to get Greek food soon. It's funny [inaudible] I'm telling you. It's life-changing. Thanks, Kim. Listen to other episodes. Kimberley: Thank you.

Welcome from Chad, Jon, and Chris Thank you Jason W, Ceri W, Lee K, Scott K Big Podcast news: https://www.patreon.com/posts/92555028 Holiday Gift Exchange! 2023 Cotr Highlights All Swag has shipped. AMA  Farewell!

Welcome from Chad, Jon, and Chris Thank you Andreas R, Ross G, Brian S,  David S Big Podcast news: https://www.patreon.com/posts/92555028 The Con has happened and we have tales to share! All Swag has shipped. AMA  Farewell!

Welcome from Chad, Jon, and Chris Thank you Ziggi W, Glenn H, Stefano L, Daniel M The Con is happening in 3 days! (and already happened if not listening live) Italy a huge event in Milan, the 28th of October, contact Lorunks on Discord Top 4/Bottom 3 player cards from Return of the King Saga boxes AMA  Farewell!

Finding that secret sauce can lead to success, but it's not always easy to find. In this episode of the Class E Podcast, we talked with Chris Sexton, founder of the barbecue catering company, Sexton's Smoke-N-Grill. From learning countless lessons in the Greenville Starts program to dealing with personal health concerns, Sexton discusses the future of his company, how he has become more appreciative of his skills, and the importance of keeping priorities straight as an entrepreneur. Guest: Chris Sexton Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sextonsmokingrill Host: Mary Sturgill Producer: Isabella Martinez '24   TRANSCRIPT:  MARY: Hi there, everyone. Welcome to this episode of the Class E Podcast. You know, this is the podcast that is brought to you through a partnership between the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Communication Studies Department here at Furman University.  Today's episode is part of the everyday entrepreneur series in which we talk to entrepreneurs who have graduated from our GVL Starts program. And the reason that we're doing that is we want you to hear their stories and be inspired by them wherever they are in the process of their venture. So today we have a very special guest, Chris Sexton, who is the owner of Sexton Smoke-N-Grill, and a new venture that he's calling Mr. Sauce It Up. Chris, welcome to the show.  CHRIS: Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me.  MARY: Chris, I'm so happy that you were able to join us today because one - I'm gonna look right into the camera for the YouTube people - Chris' food is amazing. Now when I was in, you know, I was a broadcaster for 20 years, and when I was in Texas, the broadcasters and you know different people in the community, they call us celebrities or whatever, but we had to judge barbecue competitions. So I've judged many a barbecue competition in my life. And Chris' is by far the best of any that I have done and it all boils down to the sauce, which I imagine is where the Mr. Sauce It Up came from.  CHRIS: That is exactly where Mr. Sauce came from. I've created a new sauce using fruit, alcohol, and just a wide imagination to come up with different sauces. We've got about 10 to 15 sauces that we do.  MARY: Yeah.  CHRIS: All incorporating fruits and alcohol like I said. Like you can take Hennessy bourbon… MARY: Don't give your whole secret away.  CHRIS: No, everything's not coming, but we've got great stuff coming.  MARY: We don't want people to copy it. And you will want to once you taste this, you'll want to try to redo this at home. Tell us about how you got started with this. Because you're in finance.  CHRIS: I'm in finance. So to be honest with you, from working in finance, I've always had a passion for cooking. I started cooking when I was like 14 years old working at a little restaurant in Greer with legendary Peggy Davis. She owns Peggy's Diner in Greer. Started working with her, handing out trays… and I kind of fell in love with that whole environment of cooking, creating. Did that all the way through high school… worked at McDonald's. But the sauce and the cooking came from truly talking on the phone with a guy from Mississippi on the phone about a car deal.  MARY: Oh, wow. CHRIS:  And he asked me what I was doing for Thanksgiving. I told him I was going to try fried turkey. He said you need to smoke it.  MARY: Yeah.  CHRIS: And that day, I smoked a duck, a turkey and a…a duck, a turkey, and a Boston butt.  MARY: Wow.  CHRIS: And they all came out great.  MARY: Yeah. On your first time. CHRIS: On my first time, it came out great. Not perfect, but great. MARY: Right.   CHRIS: But it was addictive. It was like it was something that…it's what I needed at that point in time to slow me down and give me some perspective. MARY: Yeah.  CHRIS: And from there it's just kind of bloomed and grown from there.  MARY: Yeah. What inspired you? Was it just the conversation with him or have you always… I mean, you've kind of always been a little a foodie. CHRIS: A foodie.  MARY: I mean, I consider you a foodie.  CHRIS: So what really inspired me is the process.  MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: I fell in love with it. And I'm a person that loves serving people. So getting to feed people, seeing smiles on their face, people honestly patting your back saying this is the best barbecue I've ever had.  MARY: And there are some smiles when they eat your stuff.  CHRIS: And it's encouraging. So the sauce idea actually came… I made a dish, not gonna say what dish it is, and my mom tried it and when she got done, she says “man, this would be good on some chicken wings.” MARY: Yeah.  CHRIS: And so me being who I am, it took me like three years… I sat there and thought about it and one day while I was at work, all my great ideas come on the clock… So I was sitting there one day and I'm like bingo. I figured out how to do it, I tried it, and I kind of took it off from there.  MARY: Yeah.  CHRIS: And that's… the biggest thing about my barbecue is it's different. MARY: Yeah. It totally is.  CHRIS: And I refuse to do what everybody else does. And my goal with my business is to create a new space in a traditional market.  MARY: Yeah.  CHRIS: When you go to restaurants and you go places… that's the other thing that inspired me…I'm tired of eating vinegar based, tomato based, mustard based barbecue sauces. You know, I want something different and so that's what we've done. MARY: So you have…how many sauces did you say now?   CHRIS: Got around 10 or 15 sauces. MARY: Yeah.  CHRIS: The newest…the newest sauce that I'm working on would be a Carolina white sauce. Carolina is known for that fruit flavor for peaches and things of that nature.  MARY: Right.  CHRIS: So imagine taking your traditional yum yum sauce mixed in with a little bit of fruit.  MARY: Oh yeah.  CHRIS: And we're working on that and actually combining the smoked brisket and pulled pork with fried rice with that yum yum sauce.  MARY: Oh my gosh. My mouth is watering.   CHRIS: So, yeah. Look for us on Tik Tok soon. MARY: Yeah, there you go. When we were in the… we were in Greenville Starts cohort together, and the first time I tasted Chris's sauce, I was like, “Chris, you need to call this the best damn sauce ever.”  CHRIS: That is actually the slogan. “The best damn sauce you've ever had.”  MARY: Yeah. Yeah. I love it. CHRIS: I tell people… I'm trying to be humble, but when you have something that's different, you have to let people know.  MARY: Exactly.  CHRIS: And this is when you taste it, it just… it kind of shocks you because you're not… you're thinking barbecue sauce.  MARY: Totally.  CHRIS: But it kind of just catches you… you're like what is this?  MARY: Yeah.  CHRIS: And it just kind of sucks you in.  MARY:  Well, and I think you just said it correct. You're taking a space that is so kind of entrenched in kind of the flavors that are there. And you're creating something new with the idea of barbecue. And I love that. Can you talk us through the process of creating this business because I guess you started with the smoking first and then the sauces and then where are you… how, you know…do you have a website? Do you have a restaurant? How are you coming together?   CHRIS: What we're doing now is… So this is how I initially started out. I was at my desk at Ford one day having a conversation with someone that asked me about catering.  MARY:Yeah.  CHRIS: So I hopped online, in between calls, looking at what I had to do to get started so I went online, I got my EIN…and kind of got in touch with state and got everything going. MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: That was in 2016. So for the last three years off and on, I've done a lot of catering. A lot of on site. My biggest thing is on site grilling. MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: I put on quite a show when I grill.  MARY: I mean you can tell with his personality. You're the entertainment and the food.  CHRIS: So yeah, if you're looking for an entertainer and a grill master, I'm your guy. So we… that's my big thing is I travel, I take my grill, I like to set up shop.  MARY: Yeah.  CHRIS: And I also work with… I've been working… I had been working before I took my current job with the church during the Wednesday night Bible studies. I'm big on… like I said my dad is a Baptist preacher.  MARY: Right. CHRIS: So we grew up in the country and all I know is fellowship and eating. I've probably eaten in every county in the state.  MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: Every, every type of food you can have, but those experiences is what inspired me. But long story short, the business idea and the model came from just three years of having to stop and go because working back and forth, and now learning how to balance time, family, and everything. The Mr. Sauce It Up will give me the opportunity to kind of work and service people and enjoy it and also make my first big shine through Mr. Sauce It Up.  MARY: Yeah. So I want to talk a little bit about… because entrepreneurial, you know, ventures are, it's a journey, right? And I know we all have setbacks, and I know that you've had some setbacks, including a health setback for a while that kind of made everything go on pause. So how are you doing now? And let's talk about the setbacks and how you overcame them.  CHRIS: Oh, wow. So it's crazy the night that we had our finale. Our, you know, our big pitch.  MARY: Yeah.  CHRIS: I found out I had a nodule on my thyroid that they had to go in and remove. They thought it was small, but it ended up being like the size of a baseball. MARY: Wow. CHRIS: So it sat on my chest and it kind of impacted me. Dealing with things like that… it impacts…your thyroid is your gas and keeps you going. MARY: Yeah, yeah.  CHRIS: So for like the last three years, I've ran on nothing but adrenaline and you didn't know it. So it's taken me a little… little bit of time to adjust to being normal and not having that excess energy and just you know being actually knowing what it feels like to be tired and having to take a nap. MARY: Right. CHRIS: So for the last six, you know, part of that I ran on you know pretty much adrenaline because the thyroid and I were back balanced. Kind of and it… but it gave me an opportunity to really sit back and refocus and re-  kind of gave me a bigger hunger for what I want to do. I've looked at food trucks, and things like that, but a crazy and a funny fact about me is I've had 22 wrecks in my lifetime.  MARY: 22 wrecks? CHRIS: 22 automobile accidents.  MARY: Oh my goodness, Chris. CHRIS: So me driving a food truck probably nobody around here wants.  MARY: They don't mix.  CHRIS: That's not a good mix so I'm in the process of trying to find a building either…. I would prefer Greenville, but the Spartanburg area is also something I'm open to… to certainly barbecue out of. But until then, I'm gonna let myself and also cakes and sweet potato pies…  MARY: Yeah. Oh my god. Sweet potato pies.  CHRIS: …kind of feed my business and my picture while I kind of work my nine to five and do your day in and day out thing.  MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: The struggle. You know, being an entrepreneur… it takes a… you got to have a little bit of crazy in you to be an entrepreneur. But the biggest thing you have to have to be an entrepreneur is being resilient.  MARY: Yes. CHRIS: You never know what obstacles are gonna come your way. I never expected and never thought I was sick MARY: Right. You had no idea.  CHRIS: I had no idea. You know, and even through it, you got to, you know, one of the mottos I live off of is fake it till you make it.  MARY: Right.  CHRIS: You got to go into every day, no matter what's going on, with a smile on your face, press through. And you kind of put it behind you and live in that moment because you never know life can be taken from you at any given moment. So you got to enjoy it no matter what's going on. And that's what's kind of helped me evolve and get to the point that I'm at now. And for me, I've learned you know, when things are going… when things are going at their best is when things…your biggest hurdles are going to come. MARY: Yeah.  CHRIS: For me, I spent all last year partnering with people and creating a lot of partnerships I kind of had to give up. So to kind of reinvent myself and roll back out and rebrand as Mr. Sauce It Up, it's going to be really exciting and I think it's the right way and path to go. The biggest thing I can tell other entrepreneurs is don't be stubborn.  MARY: Yeah.  CHRIS: For a whole course, through Greenville Starts, everybody told me, “it's the sauce, it's the sauce, it's the sauce.”  MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: And I love cooking. I love grilling.  MARY: Yeah.  CHRIS: And a couple of weeks ago… I'd say a couple of months ago, it finally dawned on me “Hey, you've got a product that nobody else can do.” MARY: Right. CHRIS: This is your…this is your headline and this is your angle. I'll still grill and barbecue and do barbecue and whatnot. But…I have a gift that I gotta give the world.   MARY: Right. That's your foot in the door -  think the barbecue, but the sauce is so scalable. I mean it gives me goosebumps just thinking about where you could go and seeing this on grocery store shelves. I mean it really does. CHRIS: That's my ultimate goal. My ultimate goal is to… MARY: I mean I literally just got goosebumps.  CHRIS: We've got here in Greenville…we've got we've got the Duke's manufacturing. I want to have something similar to that here just pumping out sauce so hopefully when you're getting you know your Chick fil A… go to McDonald's get a sauce packet, and you'll see my pretty face on it. MARY: I love it. I love it. And you said some really good things about there in that comment about being resilient and not being stubborn. And I think being willing to go with the flow because I know you were in talks about a space right when you got sick. And so every… I mean literally everything went on hold.  CHRIS: So with the space…this is another thing that when in the restaurant business, it's a risky business… MARY: It is.  CHRIS: For me, the biggest thing is finding people that want to invest and that will roll the dice on a restaurant. MARY: And that's true for all restaurant owners.  CHRIS: That's been the biggest challenge, but the buildings I looked at have been highly competitive.  MARY: Yeah.  CHRIS: I looked at a property in Duncan… was looking at property in Duncan and somebody came in at the last minute and outbid me by like 30 grand.  MARY: Right. Wow.  CHRIS: And being in finance and being the underwriter you… the risk… I'm very careful if that's the risk I take and I evaluate it making sure I'm making solid decisions.  MARY: And you understand that risk.  CHRIS: Yeah, because being in business for yourself, is a risk alone. MARY: Absolutely. CHRIS: You don't want your business upside down and trying to make back money that you may not be able to get back. That's not a wise move so we kind of backed off a bit. And it's been a blessing because like I said had I got into it then, gotten sick, we would have been in a worse situation. So thankfully, we got into a position where we're able to press pause and my true belief is that when my opportunity and my time is there, it's gonna happen but until then we're just gonna keep doing what we have to do.  MARY: One hundred percent. One hundred percent. So what's been the most rewarding thing about starting this venture for you? CHRIS: Networking and meeting new people.  MARY: Yeah.  CHRIS: And to be honest with you, the other thing people don't know about me is I'm kind of shy.  MARY: I don't believe that for a minute. Because the first night we were in Greenville Starts together, I mean, we clicked, obviously but…but yeah, no. But you, probably like me, I have to overcome it when I'm with people. Once I get there, I'm fine.  CHRIS: So I guess you can say my shyness comes out different. When I get nervous and get shy, it's like lights on, like camera on, game on, let's go. So you never really know it. So I embrace it. And being able to… this has taught me how to fight through that and how it really… I guess having a good time meeting new people and the biggest thing I think I'd say is just learn. Being an entrepreneur has taught me so much and it has stretched my limits. And so when I was younger, I was a hothead. MARY: I believe that.  CHRIS: Something happened… something happened and I'm, you know, fired up. MARY:  Right. CHRIS: So for instance, a couple of weeks ago, my first time back out and I go to leave and my grill catches a flat tire.  MARY: Oh, no. Yeah.  CHRIS: And the old me would have been saying Sunday School words and throwing stuff and all upset. We just pressed pause and regrouped and it has made me grow and develop patience. And understand that some things you cannot control. If you can't control it, you just move on.  MARY: I would think that this entrepreneurial process that you're on, and that health scare, that major health scare, probably both had something to do with that kind of, okay, it does no good to get upset about this stuff, just deal with it one thing at a time. CHRIS: Well there's another factor in there also. I've got a grandson now.  MARY: Oh yes, that's true. Happy Grandfather.  CHRIS: So, being a grand dad, it kind of…I would say the moment I took my daughter to the hospital.  MARY: Yeah.  CHRIS: Got the call. I had to take her to the hospital. That's when life changed.  MARY: Yeah.  CHRIS: We just kind of… I don't know it's something about having a grandchild that you can give back to them.  MARY: Right.  CHRIS: It kind of changes you. At the same time, it just shows your new appreciation for life. So all of that within the three month period, it really has slowed me down… made me appreciate life even more. But at the same time, it's made me a fighter. It's really made me a fighter and made me...  MARY: Yeah, because you want to be around for him. CHRIS: Yeah, to be honest with you, this whole get up, I've thought about for the last four years.  MARY: Yeah, this is what it's gonna look like. CHRIS: Yeah. And going through that experience gave me the courage to kind of step out of the shell and put it out there and move forward because what's the worst thing that can happen? Somebody will laugh at you? MARY: Right. Exactly.  CHRIS: You know at the end of the day, this is who I am.  MARY: And who cares? If they're laughing at you, they're looking at you?  CHRIS: They're looking at you. They're going to remember.  MARY: Right.  CHRIS: This is who I am. A little country guy from South Carolina just trying to sell some good barbecue and sauce.  MARY: Yeah, I love it. Chris, I love it. So we were, like I said we were in the Greenville cohort, Greenville starts cohort together, and for those of you may not know that's like an eight week program where the participants could expose everything from, you know, fundraising, capital to legal issues and things that of course, you're not an expert in everything, right? And so we learned so much to marketing. I mean, you name it, we touched on it in that class. What were some of the takeaways from that that you are implementing now? Almost a year later.   CHRIS: Want to hear a good story? MARY: Yeah always.  CHRIS: It kind of goes with the question you asked me previously about my experience.  MARY: Yeah.  CHRIS: Do you remember the night that we wrote the breakup letter?  MARY: Yes. We had to write a breakup letter to our business. And you know, you're the second person to bring this up in these conversations, but his breakup letter was amazing. But go ahead.  CHRIS: I lived my breakup letter this year. And that night, the night that we had read that letter out loud and share that experience…  MARY: Yeah.   CHRIS: I lived it this year. And going through it and living it and seeing your dreams kind of, let's just say be taken away.  MARY: Yeah, yeah.  CHRIS: It makes you appreciate your gifts and it makes you appreciate what you did. So, without Greenville Starts, I probably wouldn't have pushed through this year. I probably would have gave up and just gone back to working the nine to five and just you know enjoy life but my experience with Greenville Starts and having to, you know, go through a made breakup with something that you love and then having to go through it actually, it kind of gave you…I can go back and I can remember some of the speeches that the speakers gave. I will say it gave me motivation and courage and more than anything else it taught me that I'm not a know it all. I've worked in the banking industry for years as a banker and on the other side of the fence, telling people no to loans and being actually on the opposite end of it - trying to be approved, trying to get all your documents together gives you a whole new appreciation for what people on the other side go through. We've been on both sides. I have an appreciation for both now. But I will say that Greenville Starts… it gave me the courage to bounce back and gave me that fight and it prepared me for the hurdles that were ahead. So if anybody in Greenville County has a business idea and they feel like they can make it, but their confidence is an issue, I would definitely recommend Greenville Starts. We have the all-American, the GOAT, the great, the best hair, Brian Davis. He just…has a way of inspiring…inspiring you. Like just…any of our cohorts, I think about you guys and where you're at and I see your successes and it motivates you. You see other people being successful and that pushes you on.  MARY: One hundred percent. Which is the whole reason we do this podcast is to share your all's stories with the public so that we can encourage other people to go ahead and follow their dreams and create their ventures, you know, and I mean, you talk about Greenville Starts being an inspiration, you're an inspiration to, I know our entire cohort.  CHRIS: I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I think, you know, God puts you in a certain place at a certain time. And I think I feel like that was a perfect time because like going into it, I'll be honest with you toward the end of class I kind of felt like something was off. It drained me. It drained me. It put me… I don't like talking about this aspect of it, but it impacted my mental health.  MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: It gave me some anxiety and put me in a depressive state and it you know, that's not me. MARY: Right. CHRIS: One hundred miles per hour, 100 days a week.  MARY: Yeah.  CHRIS: So at the end of the class, it was like okay, what we got going on? And you guys really pushed us through. It's like a family. It's not just like a class. It's not just like a group of people. It feels like family and a cheerleader group.  MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: I've coached football, played football. I love sports and I love that team aspect. And that's what it felt like. Each week it wasn't a competition against each other. It was a way that we can push each other…push each other to make each other better. It's been a year and a half now. And when you can go back and recall specific conversations and specifics in a needed time, that's when you know it had an impact on you. That's what Greenville Starts said to me.  MARY: Yeah. CHRIS: It put a lot of information in this encyclopedia up here.  MARY: Yeah. I love that. I love that. What advice do you have to other entrepreneurs that you… either from Greenville Starts or just your personal experience?  CHRIS: I'm going to steal one from Ted Lasso.  MARY: Okay.  CHRIS: The great Ted Lasso. You got to believe. And what he also says…that's number one is believe.You got to believe in yourself. You got to believe in the process and you got to trust, you know, that the good Lord put you in a position he gave you whatever gifts that you have for a reason. And you have to follow the plan in your process. When things get hard, you got to go harder.  MARY: Yeah.  CHRIS: And when things get easy, you got to kind of scratch your head and say, why is that so easy and know that something's coming. MARY: Right. Be prepared.  CHRIS: Be prepared because something's around the corner. The other thing is, I'm a Florida State fan. And the reason I'm a Florida State fan is because of…He talked about a lot about what you do when people aren't watching.  MARY: Yes.  CHRIS: And as an entrepreneur… it's what you're doing behind the scenes and when people aren't watching is what's going to make you successful. You know, the… you know, I cook a brisket 26 hours for it to be gone in 30 minutes.  MARY: Right.  CHRIS: So it's what I do behind the scenes and the effort and what people don't see is what makes you a great entrepreneur and a great… and great at what you do. And the last is something I learned from a guy named Tom Leopard back in 2012. Your priorities. As an entrepreneur, you have to have your priorities in order. It's got to be your faith, your family, and your fortune. If those three get out of whack at any point in time, it's time to step back, reevaluate, and bring them back in line and then things will start flowing so greatly. So always remember your faith, your family, and then you're fortune and as long as those three are aligned, you can always be successful and bounce back.  MARY: I love that. The three F's.  CHRIS: The three F's.  MARY: I love it. So you brought some… before we let you go, you brought some goodies for us. So, boy, I wish people…I wish we had smellivision because that cake smells so good. Oh my gosh. So Chris, what do we have here? This is one of the cakes that you do.  CHRIS: This is my spin on a…You lived in Kentucky?  MARY: I did not live in Kentucky.  CHRIS: I don't know why I thought you lived in Kentucky. So, this is my take on a Kentucky butter cake.  MARY: Okay.  CHRIS: So I call it a Carolina butter cake.  MARY: Yeah.  CHRIS: It's a pound cake with some secret flavors.  MARY: Okay.  CHRIS: As all things as Mr. Sauce It Up does, we also do cake glazes.  MARY: Yeah.  CHRIS: So this has a pineapple. No, I'm sorry…a peach mango rum glaze to it.  MARY: Yeah. Oh my goodness. This is going to be so good.  CHRIS: Mixed in butter. Something I came up with. I am the king of taking a recipe and turning it into my own. MARY: Right.  CHRIS: So, that's what I do the best. I don't… You know, if I go out to eat I'm probably going to take two… two combos, two meals and turn it into one.  MARY: And put them together.  CHRIS: So this is kind of what I've done with this and created my own flavor, but I feel pretty confident, I'm willing to bet you a $1 to your paycheck that you've never had a flavor like this.  MARY: All right, let's see it.  CHRIS: Let's see. Let me pull out my Dexter knife.  MARY: He's going to pull out his Dexter knife. Oh yeah, that's a Dexter knife. All right. All right. All right, let's cut into this sucker. So remind me again what the glaze is?  CHRIS: This is a peach mango with a hint of rum.  MARY: Okay.  CHRIS: And some other stuff that I can't really share with you at the time. I'll share with you at the time.  MARY: Right let's go. Cheers.  CHRIS: Cheers.  MARY: Oh my gosh.  CHRIS: Mmm. Mama where you at? Come on over here, get smacked.  MARY: That is so good. Did you say mama come on over here, get smacked?  CHRIS: Come on over. Come on over.  MARY: Oh yeah. So, we're going to have to change that phrase, well or add to it…the best damn sauce…the best damn glaze…because this is good stuff.  CHRIS: Thank you so much. Thank you so much.  MARY: Oh my goodness. Alright. So again, we'll have the links to how you get in touch with Chris wherever we're posting this podcast, both on YouTube and all of our podcast channels. Just look under the copy, the body copy. And you'll see that there because you… if you are having an event, you want to hire Chris to cater that event. Again, it's the entertainment and food. You can't beat that. CHRIS: Let me tell you.  MARY: Yeah.  CHRIS: I didn't mean to interrupt, but this cake is good.  MARY: It does taste good.  CHRIS: It tastes good. I'm a pound cake foodie and I think I've found something here.  MARY: I think you have too.  CHRIS: Not to brag, but yeah.  MARY: I think…I can't put it down. I got to finish eating so I can say the rest of the show so I can close the show out. Oh my gosh. So good. Alright. How do people get in touch with you if they want to get some sauce or they want you to cater an event?  CHRIS: Cater an event. You can find me on Facebook - Chris Sexton or Sexton's Smoke-N- Grill. Also on Instagram, it's Chris Sexton or Sexton's Smoke-N-Grill. Email me at sextonssmokengrill@gmail.com. www.sextonssmokengrill.com. And that's just Sexton's, Smoke, the letter “n”, grill.com. Or you can call me 864-680-4629. We got the sauces.  MARY: Alright, Chris, thank you so much.  CHRIS: Thank you. Anytime. Anytime.  MARY: So remember, if someone you know is an entrepreneur or has an idea, Greenville Starts is a great place for them to get started or if they're somewhere in the process along the way and they just need that little extra “umph” to learn things that they don't necessarily know, then that's a great place. So, in order to get into the next cohort, all you have to do is Google Greenville Starts and Furman and it should be the very first link that pops up and get yourself on that list.  The other thing I wanted to remind everybody of is that we have the Paladin Pitch competition, which if you are a Furman student, you can win $10,000 for your venture. That's coming up in April, but you have to participate in some pitch competitions before that. So, contact the Hill Institute, get your pitch to them and start working and then from all those pitches throughout the year, they'll choose the finalists to pitch in April. So be thinking about that, be brainstorming. If you want to do something, now is the time to do it. So, that does it for this episode of the Class E Podcast. I'm your host Mary Sturgilll. Remember this podcast is brought to you through a partnership between the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Communication Studies Department here at Furman University. It is produced by student producers, Kayla Patterson and Eliza Polich, a true example of the Furman Advantage. And remember, you can get this podcast two ways now - you can listen to it wherever you listen to your podcast, we also have a YouTube channel where you can watch it and you can see this beautiful cake that we just ate and see us eating it. And we also.. follow us on Tik Tok if you're on Tik Tok because we just started a brand new Tik Tok channel and you'll see a lot of the outtakes and a lot of cool stuff on behind the scenes stuff on that Tik Tok channel. Until next time everybody, dream big.    

Welcome from (a very sick) Chad, Jon, and Chris Thank you Andrew D, Atte L, Sam VanT, Luke H The Siege of Erebor an ALEP stand-alone quest RRR -Multiplayer The Con is near! Decks we are bringing to The Con AMA  Farewell!

On this episode, my guest is Barbara from No Name Kitchen, an independent movement working alongside the Balkans and the Mediterranean routes to promote humanitarian aid and political action for those who suffer the difficulties of extreme journeys and violent push-backs.Their actions include medical care, distributions of food and clothes, legal support and the denunciation of abuses at the borders, where thousands of human beings keep suffering violence, fatigue and sickness during their migratory processes.No Name Kitchen was born in Belgrade by winter 2017 when a group of volunteers started cooking in Belgrade alongside the thousands of people who were fending for themselves after the closure of the Hungarian frontier. Since then, NNK supports those who suffer the lack of safe and legal pathways, collecting testimonies and denouncing the systematic use of institutional violence at the borders.Show NotesNo Name Kitchen: What's in a Name?Social Media as a Tool for OrganizingThe KitcheneersIt's a Border Crisis, not a Migration CrisisWhy do People Seek Asylum in EuropeHow the EU is Breaking its Own LawsBorder Violence in the BalkansWhat are Pushbacks?The Silence of Big-Name NGOsFrom Hospitality to Hostility: A Story in KladusaMigrants as Puppets in Political WarsThe EU's Racist Immigration ActionsThe Lives of NNK's Guests After the BorderHomeworkNo Name Kitchen Website - Facebook - Instagram - TwitterVolunteer w/ No Name KitchenLatitude Adjustment Program Podcast episode w/ No Name KitchenTranscript[00:00:00] Chris: Welcome, Barbara, to the End of Tourism Podcast. Thank you for joining us on behalf of No Name Kitchen. [00:00:07] Barbara: Thank you very much, Chris.[00:00:10] Chris: I'd love it if we could start off with you telling us where you find yourself today, both geographically and perhaps emotionally as well. What does the world look like for you?[00:00:21] Barbara: So, actually in a very interesting place because I am visiting one friend who was living with me in Bosnia, who's one of the persons that started with me and developed with me the project of No Name Kitchen in Bosnia. And so I'm visiting her that we didn't see her for the last four years because we're all the time very busy with our lives and with our different projects.So I'm here with her these days with plan to head to Croatia next week. Because the political context changed in the borders a little bit in the last month and now there are people on the move in that are passing through Rijeka, this one Croatian city, and I want to go to see the situation there.And then maybe, if I find the time, I will also head Kladusa and Bihac that are the border areas of Bosnia where I used to live in the past and where I spend a lot of time with my life there. [00:01:14] Chris: Mm. Interesting. And you're from Spain originally, is that correct? [00:01:18] Barbara: Yeah, I'm from Spain and normally I, I spend the most of the time in Spain in the last years because sometimes you need a break from the border. Emotionally I feel very well as well because I'm with my friend who is a brilliant person and I adore her. She was a perfect colleague you know, when you're at the border, the life is very tough. You see a lot of people suffering.But having her as a colleague, it was beautiful thing because we gave too much support to each other. [00:01:44] Chris: What a blessing. What a blessing. Mm. [00:01:47] Barbara: I was very lucky. [00:01:49] Chris: Well, I know that a lot of the work that No Name Kitchen does is based in the Balkans and as well in Ceuta in Spain. And we'll come to those regions momentarily.But I'd like to ask you first why no name Kitchen? Why a kitchen without a name? [00:02:07] Barbara: It's a very nice story because No Name Kitchen was born in a very informal way. You know, it is not actually an organization. It's a movement of people. And there are different organizations registered in different countries, but itself No Name Kitchen is a movement of people helping people. And in 2017, so let's make a little bit of context. In 2016, European Union sent money to Turkey to close the border of the Balkans. Yeah. So, in the beginning of 2017, in the winter, many people found themselves in Serbia. They were trying to migrate to go to some country in Europe, and then they found themselves in Serbia with the borders of European Union closed. And many people like were activists that went to Greece to help people on the move because they knew the situation or what was happening since 2015.You probably remember in 2015 all this amount of people that were going from Turkey to somewhere in Europe to ask for asylum, to seek international protection. So many people were in Greece helping. They got information that in the city center of Belgrade, which is the capital city of Serbia, they were like more than 1000 people, mainly from Afghanistan at that moment, many of them minors with no parents, living in the old train station in a very bad conditions. And the weather was horrible. It was super cold. It was probably one of the coldest winters of the last years. So they just went there. They got some food from an organization. They went there and they saw a horrible situation where no one of the big institutional organizations were helping.So then, they, with these posts that they had and asking for, help in social media, in their own social media, people start sending money and they start cooking right away. So, then they found this group of activists from many countries found themselves cooking every day and also together with people on the move and distributing food every day, every night.And then one day, they were like, this seems like an organization. We actually are kind of organization. And then one guy, one from Afghanistan, he wrote on the wall with a spray kitchen. No, because it's like, we have a kitchen, we have an organization, but we have no name. And then it's the same guy.He wrote "No Name," and then it was like, "No Name Kitchen." And it just stay like this. I think it's amazing. It's a very pure name and it really shows what is the way No Name Kitchen movement works. Its informal way of people cooperating and doing things together and helping each other.[00:04:31] Chris: And so in that context, it was a spontaneous organization of people, or how did they, I mean, obviously people heard about this, but how did they come to organize together? [00:04:41] Barbara: Social media is most instant thing, right? So, they opened this facebook profile, and then they say, what is going on. Some journalists started going there because these activists started talking about the situation. So, journalism and photojournalists went there and start showing the images. Mm-hmm. Oh, because it was really like minus 20 degrees and things like that. And people were living in the old train station and were using this wood from the old train station that has this liquid that is toxic.So it was pretty awful. And also at the same time, the activists start hearing all these stories about the pushbacks, which is, yeah, something I would keep denouncing, since then, that is when people try to enter European Union, police will push them back to Serbia with violence, which is totally illegal.So yeah, it was just people that were in Greece trying to help people in Greece. Finally, everybody knows everybody in this activist world, and if you don't know anyone, then you contact someone and then this person will tell you, "Ah, there is this group of people doing that."Maybe you're interested. And then with the Facebook, they started to ask for donations. They started to call for more people to go and help because the situation was a big emergency and needed more, more people. Some other people will give interviews on newspapers, for example. I was not there at the moment. I arrived some months later. And how I met No Name Kitchen is because one girl told her situation to one Spanish newspaper. I read this interview. I found like amazing what they're doing. I found them on the social media and I contacted No Name Kitchen. And then I head to Belgrade few months after. So yeah, spontaneously. [00:06:11] Chris: Within the kitchens themselves, if we can call it that, within the No Name Kitchens, what kind of people end up showing up?Are these people who are already a part of the No name Kitchen Network? Or are they local people as well? [00:06:24] Barbara: Well, we call ourselves "kitcheners." It's many different kind of people. Like really it's, it's people. People want to help. People are good, despite all the politics that surround us, there is a lot of beautiful people in this world, and they can be someone who is. Retired and he was a lawyer in his life and now he finished his work and he's 66 years old and he wants to do something and he goes to Serbia and he spends there two months. He can be someone that's 22 years old and is doing an internship for the university and decided instead of doing a very easy internship, they will come with us and face what is really the situation in Europe? It's a very wide movement of people. Some of them can come to the borders and we have a policy of minimum one month cause it makes everything easier for the work, right? But then also a kitchener is a person that is in his home or her hometown gathering beautiful clothes to send to the border so people can dress nicely and is a person that is making some event in her or his town to raise money to share, to send to the activities. And there's really a lot of people, because many people are good and many people wanna help. They understand we cannot really be living in this Europe that they are making for us, the politicians. No, we need a more human place to live. Yeah. It's true. As you mentioned before, that is more people from the south of Europe and Germany also, not so much from the north of Europe.[00:07:45] Chris: Speaking of the issues in the Balkans, in between Serbia and Turkey and Greece, of course. Perhaps for our listeners, if you could, perhaps there's a way of summarizing briefly the main issues that are arising in Southern Europe regarding these immigration crises.Why is this happening? What are the major positions of the European Union, of organizations like No Name Kitchen, and what does that dynamic look like? From a distance, [00:08:15] Barbara: So first, I wanted to tell you in No Name Kitchen we don't say "migration crisis" because there are not really so many people who are migrating.So the crisis has been it's a border crisis, a political crisis. It's a humanitarian crisis. There are not so many migrants. And if the borders will be open, all this mess will not be happening. Right? So we don't call it migration crisis. So, basically according to the European Union law, if you wanna apply for asylum, if you come from a country that is in war or a country with a dictatorship, that when you complain about something or you can see yourself in jail from a country in conflict or whatever or you're from LGBTQ++ if you wanna apply for asylum is very, very few chances that you can get any visa to travel to Europe. So imagine you're in Syria, you're in Afghanistan, you're in Iraq, you're in Morocco, and you wanna apply for asylum to come to Europe or to get any visa that will allow you to come to Europe by plane.It's very, very, very few chances that they will give you any visa to come. But the European Union law also says that if you're in the European Union soil and you apply for asylum and you apply for international protection, it's your right that the country where you are, it starts a procedure to see and to understand if you really need this protection, which long legal procedure.And it takes a while. Yeah. So that basically is one of the main reasons why people are seeing themselves crossing borders in irregular manners and seeing themselves risking their lives as it just happened now from Libya, this shipwreck in Greece. So people are coming from Libya to Italy and now.A lot of people have died and others are in centers in Greece now. So this is the main point why people will cross the borders in irregular manners. But then there is a problem and it's like European Union is not following its own rules. So then when a person arrives in, for example, let's say Greece, let's say Bulgaria, I say this because they are more in the south, let's say Croatia or Hungary, countries that are bordered with other their countries, the people arrived there and then when they tried to apply for asylum, the most of common thing that can happen to them. And what we've been denouncing since the very beginning because people were explaining to us and we saw it was something very systematically. And it's something that is happening on a daily basis is that police take them back to this other country, which means a pushback. We call this a "pushback."And many times these pushbacks, which are illegal according to the European Union law, come with a lot of violence. Many times the police will steal the things from the people on the move. And many times they take, for example, their shoes when it's winter and then people to walk in the snow in the winter without shoes until they arrive to a safe place.So this is basically why people are crossing borders in this ways. Then another question that is very common, why a person will not stay, for example, in Bosnia, will not stay in Serbia, in North Macedonia, which are safe countries, which are very nice countries. Yeah. So, the problem is that if you look to the numbers, there are very few people, that get asylum there.So, there is people that tried too because it's like, okay, I'm in a safe place. There's no work here, and it's a beautiful place. But then if you look to the numbers, there are very, very, very few people every year that can access asylum. And while also you're waiting for your asylum to proceed, normally they keep you in those camps that really don't have the basic conditions to really have a decent life. I mean, these refugee camps, transit camps; it depends how they them in each country. [00:11:54] Chris: Wow. Thank you. And the major sites that no-name Kitchen operates in include Ceuta in Spain, which surprisingly, is actually on the African mainland. Mm-hmm. As well as in the Balkans in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Patras, Greece. [00:12:13] Barbara: Patras has just finished. Right. Basically many people are not going anymore to Greece as before because in Greek, the polices became very tough against people who are migrating. So, many times people are forced to be in detention centers, like in detention camps while they apply for asylum, while they wait for the asylum to proceed. It's like really a jail. Mm-hmm. So now many people go through Bulgaria and then Serbia.So in Greece there are not so many people anymore as it used to be. And we just close few weeks ago. But we're always open that there are more people start coming to Greece that we can reopen any project there. Okay. [00:12:47] Chris: And these other sites then in Ceuta as well as Serbia, Bosnia, and Bulgaria, these places are so important for No Name Kitchen in part because this is essentially where the movement of people flows through?[00:13:01] Barbara: We are basically in the borders because we do many things, not every day. We share food, clean clothes, provide tools that people can have hot showers, because also the many people don't have access to water. We have a health project that if someone needs a paid treatment because it's like, for example, dentist or for the eyes.And then in the hospital they don't wanna to give any of these treatments and we pay for the private doctors and so on. So it's many activities that we do every day about spending time with people in the movement, listening and spending and sharing our stories. But then all this also bring us to see how much their rights are attacked all the time.So then the aim is to denounce. The aim is that we don't need not to give this charity because there will be justice and then people don't need anymore. So the aim is to denounce what is happening all the time. So, in the place where we're is basically border areas. Mm-hmm. The border areas is where you can see how Europe is really not respecting the human rights.And because quite tough places, there is not so many movements on these areas. So for example, the humanitarian aid is pretty much criminalized. So normally police will disturb you just because you're giving jackets to people. Mm. So it's are places that are strategically for denouncing. And since it just started in Serbia, first it started in Belgrade, but three months after the team moved to Sid, which is in the border with Croatia because many people were there. And it was a point where you could really denounce on the pushbacks from Croatia. So then, all the other projects have been going very much together with the idea of reporting the border violence.Yeah. Mm. And in Ceuta, Spain, which is bordered with Morocco. It's like another border for people because even if it's a Spain, people are not allowed to take a ferry very easily to the mainland, it's very difficult. So there is a lot of bureaucratic problems in the middle, like barriers that are being pushed to the people, so then they don't have the chance to cross legally to the mainland.So many people also risk their life there. And at the same time, sometimes there are pushbacks from Ceuta to Morocco. We've denounced the pushbacks of minors and actually together with other organizations from Spain. And actually the former delegate of the government got investigated for that. And they are under, I dunno how you say in English, like invest. [00:15:27] Chris: Investigations. [00:15:29] Barbara: Yeah. So basically border areas are very much important for what we wanna denounce. Mm. And now we're starting operating in Ventimiglia, Italy, which even inside of Italy is very near France.And we visited the place there and then we saw how there are also pushbacks from France. So this is another place that it could, it could be interesting to denounce, because many, many times people would think like, ah, but this is happening there in Croatia and Serbia you know, like, Serbia is not European Union, so people sometimes think that when we are talking about the pushbacks and all this violence, like very far from us, and it's difficult to make people understand that it's actually with the money that comes from the European Union. That means that if you are from the European Union or you're working here and paying taxes here, your taxes are used to pay to torture people, basically.No. Mm wow. So it's also nice to be inside of Europe to show how this violence is systematic in the different borders. [00:16:23] Chris: Right. And in the context of these pushbacks I imagine they're happening in all different contexts and circumstances. Could you give us a little bit of an idea of what that looks like?I mean, I imagine a few different things. I imagine that people are in detention centers, people are in refugee camps. I imagine that in some instances people are simply on the street and then perhaps in others trying to get a meal. [00:16:51] Barbara: I mean, we don't see the pushbacks. Pushbacks are hidden. And also we are at the other side of the borders. We only can meet people after they got pushed-back.. Yeah. Mm. Okay. So for example, you're in Serbia and this person tells you, like, I just been pushback from Hungary.We're not in the border area. You cannot be at the border. We're in different towns near the border areas. Ok. So a pushback is like a person tries to cross the border in different ways. For example, walking the forest, hidden. It's very common.So these are the stories that people tell to us. And then at some points, police see them in maybe in Hungary or maybe in Bulgaria, or maybe in Croatia. Those are all European Union countries. And then either the police or it can be also neighbors that they believe they're patriots, they'll call the police.Mm-hmm. You can see the people on the move walking and then the police will can arrive there and can take the people back to the border by cars. Many times they need to sign papers that they don't know what is written on these papers. Many times they get lied by the police telling, like, if you sign this paper, you can access to asylum.And actually you're signing a paper that is making you a punishment for something or you're signing that you want to really go back to the other countries, so, you're signing something that you don't know. Many times people get put into detention places. It's very common in Bulgaria and in Croatia for example.And then when they leave these detention places, they are told that they need to pay for their days they've been sleeping there for the accommodation on the food, which is like normally according to what people explain to us, accommodation on food are awful. Many times, not even enough food. And many times we're talking that those are children or very young people, as well.And then police will take them to the border and then force them to come back to the country that is not European Union, which means maybe Bosnia, maybe Serbia, or maybe Turkey if they're in Bulgaria. And many times this comes with very huge violence. As you can see in our websites, we speak often about this. No Name Kitchen created one Network that is called Border Violence Monitoring Network. Border Violence Monitoring Network. Now we are not anymore part of it since last month, because we will report in other ways by ourselves and with other different partners. But there you can find all the testimonies we've been gathering since 2017.And it's how the people describe to us what happens to them. Many times, you can't really see, because many times the people describe to you one situation and then they show you their back and in their back you see the marks of the batons or the marks of sticks or things like that, so it's very obvious to see that the person is injured. Many times people can come with blood or with bruises in their faces because the police did them in their faces. Wow. And then other of the things that is very common is to steal their belongings. So like this, you make more difficult for them to continue their trip because then they take their phones, their clothes, money.So then if you see yourself, for example, in Serbia, again with no phone, with no money, with no shoes, with no basic clothes, then you cannot continue your trip. You need to find a way to get money again. You need to find, like, for example, that your family sends to you and then you can buy another phone and then you can buy new shoes.So you can continue, at some point, your way to try to ask for international protection to some European Union country. Wow. Wow. [00:20:11] Chris: I guess there's this aspect of the state that seems so deeply involved in the suppression and repression of these movements, especially from asylum seekers, right?Mm-hmm. And I think this is something that you hear about quite a bit in many parts of the world where there are these border crises, right? In regards to people who live in the borderlands who are for whatever reason against the movement or flows of people in this regard against asylum seekers in this obviously ends up or can end up with not just hostility, but violence, racism, et cetera.And I'm also curious about the possibility of hospitality in these contexts. And certainly no name kitchen appears to take on that role and that responsibility quite a bit. And it's one of the main themes of this podcast, as well, is hospitality. And I'm reminded of this story that, some years ago and at the beginning of the war in Syria around 2015, 2016, I heard a rumor that Syrian refugees were hiding in the abandoned houses in my grandparents' villages in northern Greece, right on the border with North Macedonia in the daytime and waiting until night to cross the border, mostly to avoid capture and persecution at the hands of either Greek or Macedonian authorities. And last year I was visiting my grandmother there. She confirmed the story and said that this 85 year old woman, she left her house in the daytime, in the same village, with trays and trays of food and jars of water to offer these travelers before they moved along.Since no name Kitchen relies largely on donations, I'm wondering about this notion of old time hospitality as opposed to the kind of industrial hospitality we hear about or we see in the hotels. One of the themes of this season is also about what kind of old time hospitality still exists in Europe, and I'm wondering what you and your team might have seen in this regard?[00:22:29] Barbara: so, this is a very interesting question because things have changed so much during the years, and basically because the authorities have criminalized so much. The people on the move in general, like being a migrant is like being a criminal according to general speech from the politicians, which comes from the European Union. Mm-hmm. And at the same time, it's being criminalized. The help. Humanitarian help is being criminalized. So imagine for example, I wanna tell you the story in Bosnia, because Bosnia is the project where I spent the most of my time in the last years. When I arrived in Bosnia, in Kladusa, that is in the north of Bosnia near Croatia. It was middle of 2018 and people will be very nice. And then people will be very nice with people on the move. So people on the move did not have a place where to stay cause there was no camp created there. And the mayor of the town say that they can use this field and stay. So there was a field. And then like independent organizations or independent movements like No Name Kitchen or others will be building tents, will be providing blankets and showers and so on, because the institutional organizations were doing pretty much nothing.And at the moment, they were like around 1000 people. There, it was already very difficult to cross and there were already a lot of pushbacks, so it was really difficult to cross. And some people stayed there for two years. So imagine how many wow pushbacks can it be that people can stay there up to two years.And the local people were also very nice. They will go to this camp, which is called... to this field. And will bring food, will bring clothes, will spend their cooking together, time with people because they were, lot of families, a lot of children from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Morocco.And so. So it was actually very nice to see. And also from our side with the local people. Local people really welcome us very nicely, because they knew that we are going there to help and they were actually very worried to see all these people in the move suffering so much. You know, because also, it's very hard for them.You have to understand that in Bosnia was a very bad, cruel war, not so long time ago. Right. When you see yourself, that you need to see how children are walking in the night pretty much cold because they were just pushed back with their families. And then you see people with bruises in their faces and things like that.It is also very hard for the Bosnian people. Mm-hmm. But despite that, they were very welcoming and very nice. When the months start passing, the police start criminalizing the humanitarian aids. So, that means that, for example, there was this family that had some people in the move living in their place for free and then the police put them a fine of like, it was like 1000-2000 thousand Euro, which is lot of money for Bosnian income.Then if you have a bar and people can enter your bar, police will go to disturb you. So then in many bars, it started to be written and which is very sad to say and to imagine, but this happens, "migrants not allowed," in the door. Mm, [00:25:23] Chris: because the local people were also being harassed or under threat as a result.[00:25:28] Barbara: So the police will disturb very much the owners of the bars, right. ...where they welcomed people on the move. And then with the time also, because there are many places that do not accept people on the move. Then if you accept people on the move, many people will be there because there is not so many places anymore where they can spend the day.Like, having a coffee, being a pretty woman. So the criminalization of the people on the move started, like actually when the money from European Union came and then a camp was built, finally. A lot of money came. The institutional organizations obviously took over this money to build the camp, and then this speech started because there were like fights, who is going to manage the camps and so on. Then, for example, as it happens everywhere, because this is not exclusively in Kladusa, as it happens everywhere, whenever there are any elections, migrants are used for getting votes. No. So, for example, in 2020 after the lockdown, which was already a very hard period, there were elections in the north of Bosnia, and then the politicians used the migrants for their speech.And a lot of hate speech was spread. So, and even was local people would organize themselves to go and beat migrants. So, it changed from being super nice to the thought that these people are not good. European Union keeps exposing these people. European Union authorities send a lot of money to the borders to keep these people out of the European Union.So something might be wrong with them. European Union feels with the right to beat these people in their faces. To push them back and also with violence. So maybe these people are not so worth it. So, it's like how all these actions that come from all these European Indian countries are dehumanizing people.In a very bad way. Also, people will complain like, "ah, because the people are not clean," and of course they're not clean because the authorities cut the access to water, so they main access to water so you can have a proper shower was cut for a while. Things like that. So it seems very much from the moment that everybody was super welcoming to the opposite.And this is very much related with the speech that EU sends to the people who are trying to seek asylum. [00:27:33] Chris: Mm. So you think that this change in the way that people perceive these people on the move and the flows of people, it comes from the top down that it's a diffusion of EU based, state-based, language that then gets diffused as it rolls down the pyramid as it makes its way into social media, for example.[00:27:59] Barbara: Yeah, sure. The thing is that if the main authority, the main one is sending millions of euros and they say always, you can listen to Ursula von der Leyen for example, who is the president of the European Commission. She will say like, we're sending money to fight mafias of human trafficking.We're sending money to reinforce the borders, to protect our borders. You need to protect our borders because someone wants to attack the border, right? Mm-hmm. You're getting this work protection, right? Are we protecting from a six year old child from Syria? We're protecting from this actually. So, but when you're using these speech, you're making the people understand that we need to get protected from them.So that means these people are dangerous, right? Mm-hmm. And you're telling this. You're sending millions of euros every year to protect the borders and to fight against human trafficking mafias. This is what they say. It's not me. So, of course, a person who is sitting on her house and knows that some people that in her town, there is 800 people, for example, walking that she doesn't know, she would believe like, "ah, these people are dangerous" because what you, what what this woman who has authorities telling the television openly.Right? [00:29:08] Chris: I had an interview with Fiore Longo, who's a representative of Survival International, one of the oldest NGOs in Europe, in the world. And in that interview, she spoke at length about how the major NGOs in the conservation world, World Wildlife Fund, African Parks, and the rest of them, were essentially collaborating with state governments in Africa in order to push indigenous people off their traditional lands, in order to create national parks or national reserves or ecotourism organizations or companies. And I'm curious within the context of the border crises in Europe, how No Name Kitchen sees these much larger NGOs, the ones that I imagine getting money from governments and also helping to change government policy. [00:30:08] Barbara: We, as No Name Kitchen movement do not get any money from the European Union nor from governments. Why? Because if you as European commission are sending these millions of euros to "protect borders," how they say. To close the borders, while you are allowing the pushbacks because the pushbacks are being denounced.We brought this information to the European Parliament. It is there. It's not a secret. Everybody knows this happening. So, if you ask a European commission are sending all these big amounts of money, but then this European commission is sending also lots of money to these people that are rejected and that are abused at the borders, to create camps for them.Yeah, you can imagine how much this European Commission cares these people and how much nice might be these camps. Those camps are catastrophic, horrible. And many people have a lot of scabies. Many people have diseases from bedbugs and come to us actually to ask for cure because they are ignored.So the big institutional organizations, and I don't gonna say names because I'm talking on behalf of No Name Kitchen are many times inside of these camps and are getting money to manage these camps, which many times are like this. And sometimes there is no bedsheet at all. It's just this old, dirty mattress, what people can find when they entering the camp. And so you are getting these huge millions of money from the European Union and then you are keeping quiet about the abuses at the borders, what is this?Everybody can know which organizations they are because actually information is there. And normally they have these big advertisements showing people also, this is something that makes me very angry, because as I tell you, they are people. They're in different circumstances that we're, right now. They're same like you, and they were in their country, living a normal life until something happen.But they don't like to see themselves in this situation. Imagine that you are like now and then a war starts there, and then you need to see yourself asking for shoes, asking for food. This is catastrophe. This is very complicated. This is really difficult for them. But then they get these advertisements on the TV showing people like, "hi, these poor refugees, they need our help. Look these poor children, how much they need our help." But also you're kinda dehumanizing them a little bit. No, because you're showing them as these poor people that didn't know how to do the things by themselves when actually people on the move, in general, they are the bravest people I have ever met.Cause really this journey is something that you really, really need to be a brave person because the most of people will not do the journey. They stay in a calm area closer to their countries. And then they show them like these poor people, like if they will really not have power to change their situation and it's never like this.But then they make these advertisements, obviously. They not only get money from the European Union, but also from donors that with all their good intention want to support these poor people in their refugee camps. For example, Greece put this rule in 2020. This refugee camp, it was at the detention center, but like really like a jail of maximum security. That you really cannot leave this place. So if there is this government making these rules that against the human rights, keeping people into detention center, that's because you're applying for a asylum.But your asylum is, is being analyzed. Why, EU as an institutional organization are supposed to work for the human rights are supporting this and supporting these decisions from the government and then the government will say, "okay, now this kind of organization cannot be anymore in the camps." Then you don't denounce this publicly. You keep quiet about the situation inside of the camps. So are we really here for the people's rights? Or you're here because of your money.[00:33:37] Chris: Wow. And I'm curious about this notion of open borders in the context of tourism as well. Right. Because tourism operates largely on this notion of open borders. Those who can fly, those who can travel, those who have the right passports can go wherever they want.Although you have to go through customs, you have to go through security when you go to a new country, of course, and usually there's limits on how long you can stay and things like that. Generally, the pro-immigration movements there is also very much this kind of discourse, this fight for open borders in terms of asylum seekers and essentially making it easier to create that kind of hospitality that's needed for people in flight, people in exile.And so I'm curious about the dynamic between the two. Right? In a lot of places in southern Europe especially, you see graffiti that says, "migrants, welcome. Tourists, go home." Right? And so I'm curious what you think of these two major avenues or channels of movement in the world between tourism and then the movement of people in flight or in exile.[00:34:56] Barbara: Mm-hmm. Yeah, actually tourism is seen as a very positive thing. And then we already know that actually the reason doesn't necessarily need to be positive.It can make very expensive, your city. If we talk about some countries in the world, it can bring you some pedophiles too; misuse and abuse children. You know, like tourism can bring many good things, many bad things, like everything in life. No. Right. We always say that we don't cross borders, borders crossed us, separate us.So in Spain, for example. I say Spain because it's my country and we also operate there. To listen like, "ah, because we need more children because you know, like birth rate is pretty low," and it's true that we are not having so many children anymore. And we young people and then this and that, but then we have all these people who are, have migrated already, who are living in Spain from different countries, and who are young people that will be ready to study and to get education and to start working pretty fast because we are talking about people who are maybe like teenagers. And so, but the system doesn't try to help them. Doesn't really put any effort. You know, in a Spain, there is one term that is "MENA," to speak about people who have migrated, who are children. So, they normally the fastest called the MENA just to dehumanize one person, because you're using just these letters, you know, MENA means like "Menor Extranjera, Non-Acompanado" (Unaccompanied Underage Foreigner). So you're using just this term look out children, you know, so it's a way of criminalizing them and at the same time, there are no proper initiatives to integrate these people to the system, for example. Then at the same time, we have a lot of tourism and now we have this digital nomad visa.Hmm. So look, in order you get the digital nomad visa, you need to have a pretty high income. Yeah. Right. So, that means that actually this, okay, " these people come to my town and then they'll have a lot of money." But yeah, they can make very expensive here your city. I don't know if you've seen both in Libson and in Medellin there is already protest against digital nomads because they're making everything expensive. Also in Medellin, it seems that prositution Increases, so rich people are abusing people who are poor, women, of course, who are poor.And it raise the prostitution according to what I read and what I report because I also write about these kind of things with colleagues that I interviewed. So yeah, I know, like for example, it's not open borders. Open borders. Last year we were telling, that if we will allow the people who are in the Balkans to enter European Union and to ask for asylum, and also we're asking those of Europe to respect their own law.We're not asking for something very big. We're telling them respect your own law and your own international agreements and respect the human rights. Yeah. Which is basic. We always told like if these people who were in the Balkans were not so much, really, not so much would enter, there would not be crisis anymore.All this s**t would not be happening. And last year we could see when Ukrainian war started and selling millions of people who arriving into European Union countries and could get a house very fast. The children could go to study in short time. They could get integrated into the system in very few times.So this means that we are being racist because why we can host, I don't know how many millions of people born in Ukraine and keeping the war in Ukraine and we cannot host some thousand people who come from Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan. This is racism, basically. Mm-hmm. Because in the Balkans, you find families who are three years in the Balkans, who have children. Three years without going to school.People who are getting themselves poor. You know, people when they left, it's not so easy to do this, this trip. It's very expensive. It's very hard. They have a business, for example, in Afghanistan, and then they go threatened by the Talibans or the one that the children are taken by the talibans to fight whatever.And then they say, okay, let's sell our business. Let's sell our house, our lands. They call this money and let's go to search for the future for our family. Then, they see themselves three years and the children don't go to school, that they cannot work, that they spend all their money every day. Cause there is no way to really find a job or get an income.So finally, this is racism. All this difference between a person comes from Ukraine and a person that is coming from Syria. [00:39:20] Chris: Wow. In regards to the relationships that are built between the Kitcheners of No Name Kitchen and the asylum seekers, do any of those friendships end up developing once those people have found a place to settle, a place to stay?[00:39:41] Barbara: Yeah, yeah, of course. It's true that now, it's not so easy to be spend time together because the police is really much disturbing you because you're giving a jacket to someone. So, it doesn't allow you to spend so much time anymore, together. But in general, what we promote in No Name Kitchen and what is very important for us, that we are really together.No, because we are people. All of us, we are people, just in different circumstances. We're actually all of us migrants. Some of them are local people as well, that are supporting us. Cause many local people support our activities. Maybe not always so active because finance is very tired to be every day in your own hometown doing these things.I'm facing all these challenges. For us it's very important to create networks of trust and mutual understanding. So, it's not only you are helping someone. No, no, it is not about this. It's about, you are there, you are learning with a, with a person. We are spending time with a person.It's amazing for me being volunteer with No Name Kitchen is amazing because you can learn so much. You can meet so much amazing people. And I tell you that I'm here with a colleague that she was with me in Bosnia. And then next week, some friends who live in different European countries are gonna come to visit us. One is originally from Syria. The other originally from Pakistan. Mm-hmm. They're gonna come here to visit because now they are already have made their lives. One is living in France. The other is living in the Netherlands. They have their papers, everything, so now they can travel freely around European Union.So this is very, very, very important for us. And actually these networks are very valuable because maybe some person arrives later to some country and then this person has already friends in this country. Mm. [00:41:16] Chris: Right. And in some instances, some of the people do end up returning, or maybe not returning is the right word, but reuniting with No Name Kitchen and other places to help perhaps serve those on the move for a time.[00:41:30] Barbara: Yeah. Like taking papers in Europe, it takes very long, so it's not so easy. And we started only in 2017. So many of the people that we know, they're still on the way to get papers. Really long process. No, but for example, there is this friend of me who is from Iran and I met him in Kladusa, in Bosnia, and now he's living in France.And the other day he wrote me. He was with two colleagues of me that he also met them in Bosnia and he was visiting them and the newborn baby they have been. And he would really like to come to volunteer with No Name Kitchen because now he has documents that he could. But at same time, because of the working conditions finally in this racist work, sometimes cannot be the same for everybody.Right. So he doesn't have the chance to just get one whole month to come. But at some point, yeah, he's thinking about coming. It can be difficult cause then I tell you that police sometimes are chasing people who are not white. So, sometimes it can be difficult, but at the same time. But yeah. Well the idea is like many of our friends now at some point will start not getting, or are getting documents. So, this is a network of people with people and for people. Mm [00:42:31] Chris: mm Amazing. Yeah. It does remind me of the philosophies and practices of mutual aid, (of apoyo mutuo). [00:42:38] Barbara: But it's very important. The other day I was telling to my therapist because I go to the therapy because of the stress.Yeah. So, we're talking about. And last time I was on the field and then she was telling like, yeah, " who helps you when you're helping?" It's like no, you cannot imagine like people on the move have really tried to help you, as well.You know? Like they cannot help us with that distribution. They can help us giving a lot of support. For example, when I was living in Bosnia and I had like a free day, I would go to my friends, to their squats. They had a very warm stove there. And I would be as there, they would cook for me, know, we would be playing board games, we would be laughing and that was my holiday.And for me that was a great moment, where to spend my free day, with them, and they would be taking care of me because they knew I was very stressed and they wanted me to be spoiled one day.[00:43:28] Chris: It's beautiful. Really beautiful. Yeah. The kind of hospitality that can arise in times of conflict, right? Mm-hmm. And so in a time of border crises seems to exist in so many parts of the world, so few people at least in my purview or my understanding actually know about these border crises or understand the complexity around them.And so I'm curious what kind of advice you might have for people who are either critical of immigration or people who want to understand the issues more deeply, and of course those who support asylum secrets. [00:44:16] Barbara: Yeah, I mean finally we're in the era of information, right? So if you wanna get information, good information, because you need to identify the misinformation sources.If you wanna get good information, there is a lot. So yes, please get informed and also go with people that have migrating and talk to them. Cause you'll meet them and you'll spend a lot of time with them and then you'll see how are their stories behind. And also, I really recommend people to get more information about this because I cannot believe that in the 21st century we are using the money of our taxes to pay for torture.This is just insane because this is torture, really, what is happening at the borders of the European Union. And I guess many people in European Union countries do not want their taxes to be spent like this. But at the same time, they don't get informed about this. There are so many sources of information. From us in our social media, we keep informing on a daily basis about the different things that are happening always. But in general, there are very good newspapers all over in different languages where you can get good information and also go to people and talk to people. [00:45:21] Chris: Yeah. It's I mean, go to people and talk to the people. The people that you know, you would perhaps not even talk to, just criticize, without having anything to do with.Right. And that most of those people that have an incredible unwillingness, like they're willing to criticize, but they're not willing to go and talk to the people who they're criticizing. Right. And it's really interesting because as you were talking about earlier, you know, Lisbon and Medellin and the backlash against digital nomads and things like that.This is happening as well in Oaxaca although against tourists in general. Some people ask me like, well, what do we do? And, and I say, well, why don't you go talk to the tourists? Ask them why they're here. Ask them what their life is like, because there's this image, this single or singular image of the tourist and it's a caricature, it's a stereotype, and it says that all tourists are exactly the same. They come for the same reasons. They do the same things. And they have nothing to do with us, right? They're totally the opposite of who we are and all of this stuff.And it's very, very similar to the way that people especially people who speak poorly of immigrants or people on the move also view this and just this unwillingness to speak with the other, right. Hmm. So much to consider. My plate is full with all you've offered today. And I'm deeply grateful to have been on the receiving end of your words today. I'm curious, Barbara how might our listeners get involved in No Name Kitchen?How might they find out more and follow your work online. [00:47:05] Barbara: Yeah, welcome everybody. We have Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. And also now we started some months ago in TikTok. But yeah, we're on social media and also we try very much to always report everything we know, so people on the move know that they can rely on us if they want to denounce something publicly. And here we are for that. Welcome everybody to follow our task and to get to know more about the situation at the borders.[00:47:31] Chris: Thank you so much. On behalf of our listeners, it's been an honor to speak with you and, and to really get a deeper perspective onto these notions of exile and immigration and borders and border crises happening in the world now. So I'm really grateful for your willingness to speak with us today and to be able to add that layer to the conversation. [00:47:53] Barbara: Thanks very much to you for, invite us, for, invite me, for give voice to the situation and everybody welcome to follow what we do.Thank you very much. [00:48:01] Chris: Thank you, Barbara. Take care. [00:48:04] Barbara: Take care. Bye. Get full access to ⌘ Chris Christou ⌘ at chrischristou.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome from  Jon, Eric, Brad and Chris Thank you Tyler M, Zack P, Helen H, Lars J Announcements and News:  Join the League of Cooperative Gaming Discord for a big LOTR LCG weekend: August 18-20th. Invite link: https://discord.gg/SahjuTx    Christen that Ship winners!  Congratulations to all! Please email us at cardboardoftherings@gmail.com  2022 Swag plus Daan's book Max, alias Whispers; The seas Whisperer Eddie Ashton; USS Eden's Promise Kevin Zorena; USS Second Breakfast  2020 fellowship alt arts Mike Kozlik (Galion on COTR Discord); Belladonna Sebastian Wojta; The Deckbox of the Seas 2020 Fellowship balrog deck box, threat tracker, dividers, and one package of Eye of Sauron card sleeves   Jeff Maynes (Razumikhin); The Elencirya Vingilittle RRR: Multiplayer CotR Mailbag! Who done it? Chad has been taken out by a player card! AMA  Farewell!

Welcome from Chad, Jon, and Chris Thank you Niall H, Raymond W, Sean S, Nick A Announcements and News:  Dream-Chaser Campaign is out! Two Towers Reprint Announced FFG LotR Events at Gen Con GameZenter/Artiforge no longer printing Nightmare or POD RRR: Multiplayer Vengeance of Mordor Top 4/Bottom 3 (Someone's best is another's 3rd worst)  AMA  Farewell!

On this episode of the End of Tourism Podcast, I'm joined by Joana and Davide of Stop Despejos (Stop Evictions). Based in Lisbon (Portugal), Stop Despejos is an anti-capitalist, feminist and anti-racist, horizontal political collective, fighting for the right to housing and the right to the city. Through mutual aid, direct action, obstruction of evictions and media campaigns, they defend the right of inhabitants to keep living in their homes and neighborhoods against institutional racism, soaring rental prices, the commodification of housing, touristification and gentrification.As an autonomous grassroots movement, Stop Despejos believes that a trulyinclusive city can only be achieved by collective organization and solidarity networks between its inhabitants.Show NotesThe Question of Rent in LisbonThe Arrival of Ryan Air and Airbnb in PortugalThe Golden Visa SchemeThe Backlash Against ForeignersCan be Change Happen Through Political Parties or Only at the Grassroots?How to Build Solidarity in a CommunityHow Can We Live More Meaningfully?HomeworkStop Despejos Official WebsiteStop Despejos YouTubeStop Despejos FacebookAldrava Co-opHousing Not ProfitTranscript[00:00:00] Chris: Good morning, Joanna and Davide to the end of Tourism podcast. Thanks for joining me today.[00:00:07] Davide: Thank you. Good morning, chris. Oh, good afternoon.[00:00:10] Joana: Thank you for having, yes, good afternoon. Thank you for having us.[00:00:14] Chris: My pleasure, my honor. Now, I'd like, since we're always doing this virtually, and since there's always time zones to deal with and that kind of thing, I'm hoping that you'd both be able to illustrate a little about where you find yourselves today and what the world looks like there a few days after these mass demonstrations that we'll discuss shortly.[00:00:37] Joanne: Yes, well, I'm I'm in Alfama which is a really old neighborhood in the center of Lisbon. Actually Davide lives in the same neighborhood. And today, the weather is great. It's really sunny and you start to see a lot of tourists. You start to notice that you know, these amounts of tourists that we were used to see before the pandemic starts showing up again.And honestly, I'm still recovering from the, the demonstration during the weekend because we were what, like three months working for this demonstration, probably around three, four months. So yeah, it was a lot of hard work, but it was worth it at the end for sure.[00:01:27] Davide: I, I am in the same neighborhood in Alfama, and the sky is perfectly blue. It's classic Lisbon. It's a city that everybody loves.[00:01:38] Chris: Thank you, David. Debbie Day. Thank you, Joanna. And so you both come to us today on behalf of an organization called Stop Despejos. Now, before we get into the gritty details of the demonstrations, I'm wondering if you two would be willing to share a bit about the history of the organization, why it was started, and perhaps when and by whom,[00:02:07] Davide: Yeah, it, it's called Stop Despejos. It just means "stop eviction." It was founded in in 2017, about six years ago because at that time... In 2012, during Troika there was, after, after the financial crisis crisis in Portugal, I mean all over the world in Portugal the International Monetary Fund and the European Union understood that there was a great opportunity for real estate market in tourism in Portugal.And so they convinced the government, the right-wing government to change the law about renting. And it was much, much simpler to evict people. Mm-hmm. It has become much simpler and one of the ways is actually not to renew contracts. Okay. So the contract normally lasts five years. So just five years after the new law, all people were evicted. And so including myself, and that's why we founded this organization. Wow. Joanna, do you have anything to add in that regard?[00:03:18] Joana: Yes, I joined during 2018, so about an year after David joined. Actually, I also got evicted and it kind of started because of that, like I was in a really old place in the center.And my landlord wanted to increase the rent for more than 300 euros. Wow. So that's the thing, like. There is no rent control happening in Portugal. If you are landlord and if your house is falling apart you can ask for whichever price you desire.So, by that time I was doing some research, like thinking to myself, this cannot be legal. Like this is insane. And then I found out that it was indeed legal. And then I was doing another research to see if someone was fighting against this. So that's how I, I found out about Stop Despejos.And by that time, my ex-boyfriend also had some issues with this landlord. So, yeah, that's how I got to Stop Despejos I'm there since 2018. It's also an autonomous collective. So we are not connected to any political party. We are self-sufficient. And we are anti-capitalist as well.And we also work together with Habita, which is also a housing rights association that also fights, evictions, and provides legal advice to people that are on the risk of addiction. Mm-hmm.[00:05:01] Chris: Yeah. And that name popped up as well, Habita, in some of the news press releases that came out regarding the demonstrations of this past weekend.And so maybe we could start from there while it's still fresh in your minds with these recent actions that were organized by, Stop Despejo s. Nice. That came to pass this weekend and, and culminated in, in marches and protests on the 1st of April.My first question is what did each of you see over the course of the protests and what has been the response in the aftermath?[00:05:37] Joana: So this protest was organized not only by Stop Despejos and Habita was also by a lot of different collectives and associations, not only the housing rights collectives, also people that got in involved, dozens of different organizations that were preparing and working for this protest.We got around 20,000 people on the streets. I'm not good with numbers. David is the mathematician. But yes, around 20,000 people on the streets, which is massive for Portugal, to be honest.There wasn't the housing rights protests in Lisbon. I think the last one was organized by Stop Despejos and Habita, which was during 2018, if I'm not mistaken. So yes, personally I wasn't expecting that much people on the streets, but it was really beautiful to see this amount of people organized and marching the streets and asking not only for better housing, but also the right to belong to the city.You know, to have a city that it's not only made for tourists or for or for the rich or for private investors, but for a real inclusive city that is made for its people, for the people that works there, for the people that that lives there. So, that was really beautiful. It was beautiful to watch people shouting. It was really awesome.[00:07:13] Chris: I imagine that being able to see, that amount of people, and not necessarily the number, that kind of abstract 20,000, but the number of people that you would've seen in the streets as well is a really deep way to measure the discontent and the crisis as opposed to just imagining that so many people or just like a few people share these sentiments, right.[00:07:38] Joana: Yes, of course. And you would see everyone on the streets. Like, you would see people that living on the city center, but also people that live in the social neighborhoods, in the outskirts of the city as well.Like all of them together demanding better housing and a better city and rent controls. So it was, it was amazing. When I woke up the next morning, I felt really grateful, even though there was some, there was some police violence at the end of the demonstration. Still, I woke up feeling really grateful for that day, for sure.[00:08:14] Chris: Thank you. And David, how, what was your impression of the demonstrations?[00:08:21] Davide: Yeah, it was, it was impressive. Let me say that Habita is a part of a European coalition called European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and to the City. And together with Habita, we organized the outing Action Day every year.But we could feel it, we could feel it because we have been organizing some preliminary meeting and they were full of people. I mean, you can feel this moment when the people wants to take some action and we could really feel it.It was great.[00:08:57] Chris: In fact[00:08:59] Davide: our previous campaign was called " Retomar la Ciudad" (Take Back the City). Mm. And we really felt that for one day we took the city. Mm-hmm. It, it was great because. I mean, when you are walking in such a big demonstration and you look back and you see the street full of people and you know that you and your comrades are responsible somehow for that, it, it is really an amazing feeling. And now we will see where, what will happen. This depends on us, but also on, on the willingness of other people to, to join ouraction.[00:09:38] Chris: So doing, you know, the research that I could online when I started looking up the protests Lisbon, online in the English speaking world.Anyways, there was clearly this kind of Associated Press press release that came out because every Anglophone media outlet that I could find that had put something out in this regard had the exact same wording. Yes. Right. And, and you, you can start to realize very quickly what's happening in that regard.But one of the things that was written in the press release is this as follows. And it said that"the figures released by Confi which collects data on housing shows that rents in Lisbon, which is a tourist hotspot, have jumped 65% since 2015, and sale prices have skyrocketed 137% during the same period.According to another real estate data company, Casafari, rents increased 37% last year alone, more than current figures in Barcelona or Paris," which are two of the most overt touristed or visited cities in the world."Low wages in high rents have made Lisbon the world's third least viable city to live in, according to a study by insurance brokers, CIA Landlords."And that's not a joke. CIA landlords.Anyways, so I imagine reading this, I imagine that it hasn't always been like this. Right. And I'm wondering if you, could each tell our listeners a little bit about how this came to pass? I know you mentioned the change of the law, of the five year lease law and I guess how you've both seen the city change in the course of your time there.[00:11:37] Davide: Yeah, I, I must say that apart from the new renting law, so what happened also in, I think 2013, it, that Ryan Air came to Lisbon together with Airbnb and this destroyer, I mean, completely ruin in the city. And before that Ryan Air was only flying to Porto. And then the new government was lobbied to allow Ryan Air. Then Airbnb was invented.And Libo is a city where people I mean, there, there's not much job. So people really look into Airbnb as a way to make money. It is so easy. I mean, the only thing that we can sell is ourself, and they were very willing to sell ourselves. Mm-hmm. To, to make a decent salary.I mean, it was really perfect because it's full of people that wants to come to Lisbon because it's such a beautiful city, and we just have this to sell, the city itself.And so all the neighborhoods, the central neighborhood of Lisbon were flooded with Airbnb. It's really incredible. And with Airbnb in town like that, without any regulation, without any regulation, I mean, everybody can rent how many houses or floods you want in whatever situation they are.So the price is skyrocketed. You go from 1000 euro per square meter to buy a house. Now it's 5,000. Wow. I mean, people, maybe bought a flat for 100,000 euro. Now they sell it for 500,000 euros right there. Wow.And now it's, it's even getting worse because, so when in 20 17, I was evicted. My rent passed from 500 euros per month to almost double. But now I, I know people renting a flat, a small flat, like for 1500 euros per month. And the salary is still the same. And then a lot of real estate investment. Really, I mean all, all the big players in the real estate in investment, they just came to town.They started to build luxury condos. There are la luxury condos everywhere in town. Mm. Really? Everywhere. It's crazy. I mean, you see construction sites everywhere, but for room for nobody. Cause the, all these luxury condominiums are, are actually empty. They're just houses that are bought and then sold after a few years and things like that.they're just made to store money essentially. Mm. So there are, there are a lot of economic factor, like one is tourism, and the other real estate speculation.[00:14:30] Joana: And this is all also promoted by the state itself. It's not, yeah. It's not just a matter of, you know, it is the state also giving tax benefits to these private investors, also to digital nomads, you know, that come here and they can, they are the ones that can pay all these higher rents because the minimum wage in Portugal is around 740 euros.And you can find, and there's basements that are 700 euros per month basement. I dunno nowadays exactly how much is a one bed one bedroom apartment in the center. But I would say it's around 1000 euros. You can easily find a one bedroom apartment for 1000 was per month.Yeah.[00:15:23] Chris: Speaking of tourism and Airbnb, we can't really speak about these themes anymore without speaking about there's other names we could use, but digital nomads. And this was another thing that was brought up in the English press releases is around this question in Europe that referred to as the "Golden Visa" And in the report it's written that "the current socialist government announced last month that a housing package among other measures, ended the controversial Golden Visa scheme and banned new licenses for Airbnb properties.Critics, however, say it is not enough to lower prices in the short term." Now, given that, I imagine that you two make up some of these critics, I'm curious if you could explain a little bit for our listeners about what that Golden Visa program is or was and what it has done to the city and culture in Lisbon, if not the country as a whole.[00:16:26] Joana: The Golden visa program is basically the state giving tax benefits to residents from outside of European Union. And all they need to do basically is to buy a property for at least half a million euros and also to create some jobs. But in practice they just need to buy a property.So what happens is a lot of companies are also increasing the prices of houses because they know that someone will buy it for those prices. So that's one of the consequences of the Golden visa. And actually the government is not ending the golden Visa. It's just making some changes and changing the name because they're still giving tax benefits to someone that wants to invest in Portugal. So this is basically the so-called socialist government financing people and companies that are already rich.So it's basically the state giving money to the rich. And these measures are not enough. I mean, this government is only socialist by the name. It's not socialist in practice because even those measures that aim to put Airbnbs back in the market, it's still the state giving tax benefits to those landlords, to those people that own Airbnb.[00:17:55] Davide: Let maybe just a little bit more precise, you know Portugal belongs to the Shengen area. So if you have a Portuguese visa, you can travel everywhere in Europe. So, this Golden Visa program was a way for any outside the European Union to get a visa for the Shengen area by buying a property. And so it is really something terrible. Mm, I mean, to actually sell visas to rich people. It has to do a lot, not just with the fact of making the housing market crazy because of course the, the price is skyrocketed, but also it has to do with money laundering.And it was really, really a bad thing for Portugal in general. And also this idea of digital nomads. It's somehow similar. It targets other kind of people, not the super rich from, I don't know, China or whatever, but it, it targets people working probably in some startup in California or places like that.Just a way to make life easier in Portugal for rich people and more miserable for people in Portugal because the problem is that the economy is not very solid in Portugal. And so instead of investing money in building a better economy, they just trying to attract people that already have money, right?It's becoming like economically very depending of money from abroad, from money, from tourist, money from people that actually work abroad. Just a nice place to live for people from outside and the people from inside. Well, too bad for them.[00:19:48] Joanne: Yeah. The main issue is that the digital nomads usually come to live here earning salaries, wages from their home country. So they come to live here with salaries from the United States, for instance. So for them it's not, paying 800 euros per rent is really cheap. Which is not for us. So, that's the inequality here.[00:20:11] Chris: Yeah. And, and that the place is more often than not, I mean, you could say almost always, but we'll say more often than not temporary in the eyes of the digital nomad, the tourist, perhaps even the people who purchase the golden visa because there's always this sense of, well, I could do this somewhere else, right? Because there's other places to be a digital nomad. There's other places to be a tourist. There's other places to get golden visas and on and on. And so I wanted to ask about the kind of, we'll say blowback or perhaps xenophobia that can arise from these things and does, and has. You know, it's something that I've seen here in Oaxaca over the last seven or eight years, especially in the last couple of years with inundation or flooding of this place with digital nomads, over tourism, Airbnb.And it's been hard personally, but it's been easy visually to watch a kind of resentment and xenophobia grow against foreigners here as a result of this gentrification and culture loss. And so I'm curious if you two have seen anything similar in that regard in Lisboa or how has the general response been, and I think it's important to say here as well, that at least at the beginning when Airbnb tends to create this strangle hold in a tourist destination that a lot of the people who are, who are renting these flats or homes are locals. Right? And then certainly later on you see companies, corporations like Blackstone in Europe taking over.These issues, we often try to make them simple to understand when in fact they're extremely complex and complicated. And so I guess I'm curious what you both have seen in regards to the loss or perceived loss of culture in Lisboa and the reactions from locals in regards to that against the foreigner, or perhaps against the systemic structures.[00:22:21] Joana: Yeah, it's a really, it's a really interesting question. I would let David go first if you, if you have already something on your mind.[00:22:29] Davide: Well, I don't think Portuguese people are very vocal in the xenophobia.As a foreigner myself I never faced it. I mean, in general they're quite polite. Racism is always against black people, or the gypsy. I mean, there is some vague resentment, against tourists, but not too much. You, you don't feel it too much? I mean, I don't feel it, so...[00:23:03] Joana: yes. Me neither.I mean, you have people that feel really annoyed by tourists, especially people that lives in the center, obviously. They feel annoyed, but I wouldn't call it hatred, you know, in the same way that I would call hatred towards immigrants from Nepal or from India.Those are the ones that I would say that get more hatred and also the gypsy community. And people from social neighborhoods. I mean, immigrants that live, in social neighborhoods. So I wouldn't say that there's a lot of hatred towards tourist themselves.I would say only like annoyance, because there's also people that stand that really believes that without tourism we would have no economy. You know, they cannot imagine the end of tourism, let's put it this way. They aren't capable, you know, of imagining a new economy that wouldn't depend on tourism.And you could see that during the pandemic. So I wouldn't really call, it hate, only annoyance. Let's put it that way. Yeah.[00:24:19] Chris: And you had mentioned earlier that the current socialist government is socialist by name and not in practice. And I'm curious, how Stop Despejos sees the necessity of making change from the grassroots, or if there's a possibility of doing that on the electoral level.[00:24:43] Joanne: It has to happen on the grassroot level. Yes. Yes. We do not trust that a political party will solve the issue because, this is an issue that has been increasing of it over the years.And the state itself helps the increase of this issue. So we truly believe that in order for the change to happen, we need to be organized. People need to be organized. It's only through those grassroots movements that we feel that we are able to really create a radical change, a structural change.This is beyond political parties. I think it's more about the people and those grassroots movement. That's why we do not associate ourselves to any political party, even though some of them try. But yes our work is based on social movements and with people.We have tried to stop a lot of evictions that were not made by private landlords. They were made by the state. So, that's another reason. Me personally, I don't trust the state or political parties because the status itself is also able to evict and to destroy people, the right to adequate housing and the right to live in the city.So that's why we need to work with people and to work with the grassroot movement.[00:26:11] Davide: I would say that we are like more like let's say ecologists movement. We are really for system change and and not to change inside the system. But I must say that some people that used to belong to our organization, that really still very close to our organization, they founded a new movement for a referendum to ban Airbnb. Okay.This would be like using the system, but without passing through parties really to use some direct democracy tool inside the system. And now possibly next year there will be this referendum to ban Airbnb. Wow. We don't know because such a local referendum was never used in the history of Lisbon.So it is a tool that only exists in theory. In practice, we do not know. But still, this is something that may be the most anarchist in our group do not like, but in general, we are not against it. The use of this referendum tools.[00:27:19] Joana: Yeah, I think that we are not saying that, you know, every politician is the same or that every party is the same, of course, that we recognize that, you know, some politicians may be better than others.But at the same time it's what David was the saying. We want to make radical changes not outside of the system, not inside the system. Because even with good examples like the mayor of Barcelona, the system itself is so corrupt that it's really hard to make changes within the system.It's not just one person with good intentions that is gonna change the system.[00:27:59] Chris: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, at the end of the day, these issues that you've both spoken to are everyone's issues. They're not left issues, they're not right issues. They affect everyone. And you can kind of see through that and that the political spectrum in that regard is just incredibly divisive.And so I wanted to ask you both a little bit about, your advice suggestions around solidarity.Here in Oaxaca, it's a city that's been more and more touristed over the last we'll say 40 or 50 years. But really not on the tourist map until the last 10 years or so. And then at the end of the lockdowns became this kind of massive escape destination for a lot of Americans and Canadians and Europeans as well.And so there's this sudden kind of, oh, this is too much. And we never imagined it could be this bad, but suddenly we're there and it's here and we don't know how to deal with it. And maybe because of the nature of the history and culture and politics in this part of the world, but there isn't necessarily this, this level of communication, network building, solidarity that there is, for example, in Southern Europe. And so my first question in that regard is, what kind of advice would you offer people working with social movements here and in other parts of the world who need to build solidarity among the, citizenry, but also between organizations who haven't done that before?What advice would you have for them?[00:29:52] Davide: Well, difficult question. Yeah, difficult question. I don't know if we are such a, a good model because our results haven't been that great. But[00:30:02] Joana: it's a long process and I believe that we are still in that process, like in the middle of that process of building solidarity with different movements. I saw more solidarity perhaps during this organization of the protests of the demonstration. But I think it was a process that started already during the pandemic.So it's a long and and hard process to build solidarity between movements because most of the time, I mean, we do not get paid to do this political activity. So, you know, people have their own jobs and their own lives. And sometimes it's really hard to do something as simple as planning an assembly with different organizations or collectives.So I would say I mean, the best advice I could give is to be patient and to accept, really, that is going to be a process that sometimes you feel like you are all by yourself, that you are the only collective doing something. And other times you'll have a lot of people in your public assemblies.So, it's a long process and my best advice would be that, and also to respect the differences between several collectives and organizations and between people. What's the main goal?What's glue sticking all of it together. What are your enemies? Basically, what are the enemies that you are fighting? What type of city or what type of country would you like to live in? So, use your imagination and use it as a fuel also to create goals and to plan.[00:31:45] Davide: One thing is, is to be well organized as much as possible. And being organized for us, it's like we are a perfectly horizontal organization. We don't have any leader, but like something simple. Every time we meet, I mean every week we have one moderator, one taking notes.And then another thing which is important, it's kind of a blend between action and study. It is important to study, I mean, to, to growone's understanding but also it is important to actually act. You need to actually meet people that are in this situation you are fighting against. You need both, both action and, and study. And then one other thing is never get overwhelmed because when you start working, doing activity with people that are being evicted or losing their homes, these are let's say emotionally very heavy situation.And more often than not, these people are actually losing their home. You cannot do too much. And so it is important that you don't feel guilty for that. You don't spend all your life try to save others people life. Because if you do that for six months, then you quit the struggles. So it's better to keep like a lower profile, but to be consistent during the years.[00:33:19] Chris: Well thank you both for that. And then the other side of the question or the coin of the question. So, the first one was regarding social movements and then this next one is speaking to individuals. There's been this for me anyways, this clear view towards tourism as a kind of escapism that masquerades as freedom of choice, especially for those of us in the Americas, right?So the pandemic deepened that, to say the least. And as a result of people getting to choose where they live, the places they choose generally suffer as a result, you know, regardless of people's good intentions or even good behavior. And so sometimes it's hard to resist the urge to blame the foreigner and to focus on them instead of the system and the structures of oppression that it produces.But at the same time, we need the foreigner, in the context of digital nomadism and tourism and the golden visa, we need each of them, each of those people, to understand their consequence in the world. And so finally, I'd like to ask you both, what advice would you have for the tourists and expats who want to experience Portugal or who already live there, who perhaps want to act and proceed as responsible residents, for those who would want to visit.[00:34:53] Davide: Tourist must know that if he comes to Lisbon or she comes toLisbon. She will spend most time standing at other tourist like him. Just like an ecosystem just made of tourist, of tourist. If tourist here live actually in a strange ecosystem made of, just, of tourist then I think it's kind of not very nice experience.So to be more, more precise,half of the time a tourist will look at his smartphone and half of the time at other tourists like him. I think this, this way of leaving or traveling, it is very superficial. You don't get anything to come to Lisbon or to any other place in the world just to spend time look at on a smartphone or looking at other tourists like you.But this is like more moral statement. I mean, people should look inside themselves to start doing things which are more meaningful instead of just doing things that they happen to do because everybody does the same thing.[00:36:01] Joana: Yeah. It's a difficult question. I agree with, with David. I also worked on the tourist industry years ago. And I remember I got the feeling that the tourists in Lisbon kind of felt deceived. They would ask me all the time, where are the locals? Where can I find locals? You know, I only see tourists around me. Like, can you recommend me a place where, where the locals go and so on.So yeah, I would say the tourism basically is not worth it. You know, it's not worth going to Lisbon spending holidays. It's not just a matter of personal responsibility because I understand that people work and they feel the need to spend the holidays on some cheap destination and Lisbon is really cheap for a lot of tourists.It's more about systemic change, but at the same time, I believe that we still need to have some sort of personal responsibility. So I would say just go somewhere else where it's not too touristified, just try to choose another destination that is not totally exploited by the mass tourism to the golden and You know, and the digital knows honestly, I don't know how, how they could be more responsible because they are taking advantage of a situation, where that situation is only possible because the locals are getting affected by it. Maybe try to get involved in your local social movements. Get involved, try to know the neighbors and to do something. Use your privilege in order to change something. But be aware that you are only here because you are privileged enough to benefit from our government. Mm-hmm.[00:37:56] Chris: I think that's really important as well, this notion of, if you're gonna go and live in a place, understand the history, understand the culture, understand where you are, when you are, and get involved, right.Get involved with the social movements and the grassroots of the place. And so, you know, for our listeners or maybe people either visiting Portugal or living there as well, how might they find out more about Stop[00:38:24] Joanne: They can find us on social media.We have a Facebook page, also an Instagram page, and all of our assemblies are open to the public. Everybody can go there. Usually our meetings are on an association called City Guide. In the center, in one of the most gentrified areas of the city center.So it's cool that we have our meetings there. And it's every Mondays at 7:30 PM. Usually we start late cause we're in Portugal. But everybody's welcome. Everybody's is more than welcome. You don't need to to be like a researcher or academic or to even suffer or to have suffered some kind of eviction.Everybody's welcome to our assemblies and to join.[00:39:15] Davide: I would like to say that it's really beautiful to be part of like a movement and a collective, like Stop Despejos. So, when after I joined, I was facing a difficult time in my life. And, and for me it was very important to, to be there. I mean, first of all, to see that there are people with bigger problem than mine.And then it's, for me, it's really a pose from my personal life. I go there and also must say that the people that are involved in this kind of struggle are in general pretty special people. So you meet people you would wouldn't normally meet at work or, or in a pub.It's really enriching things to do.[00:40:03] Chris: Fantastic. Well, I, I'll make sure all of those links for social media and the website are up on the end of tourism website when the episode launches. And from what I understand, there will be some extra media to share.Well, it's been a, a great pleasure to meet and speak with both of you, at least virtually, and maybe one day in person.You'll be welcome. You'll be welcome than welcome, Chris. Yes, likewise.[00:40:30] Davide: Thank you. Thank you.[00:40:31] Joana: Thank you so much, Chris. Thank you for having us. Get full access to ⌘ Chris Christou ⌘ at chrischristou.substack.com/subscribe

In this chat, Brandon and I zero in on the importance of holding our standards, while still prioritizing connection and relationship with our people. It's important for us to consider- is this a true pattern? Or is this an event? If it's an event, what's the best way to address that? Patterns on the other hand, have the power of life and death within our team. Good patterns are the target- allowing bad patterns can sabotage everything we work so hard for. Check it out and please share with your connections if it's valuable! - Chris Thank you sponsors! Liftify is for restorers who are looking to accelerate their online reviews. Consistent and fresh Google Reviews are critical to growing your online presence and establishing trust with your brand. Don't leave it to chance, partner with Liftify and let them capture the feedback your team has earned. https://www.liftify.com/floodlight C&R Magazine is the industry's oldest and longest running media outlet. The team brings restorers all the current news, developments, education and resources that impact our business and the teams we lead. From print media to podcasts, C&R ensures the industry news you need is accessible from anywhere. https://candrmagazine.com Floodlight Consulting Group provides customized consulting and training support for restoration companies looking to grow and scale their business. 100% Tailored to each client Formal consulting sessions for owners and key leaders Full one-on-one access to the Floodlight team and their network of industry experts https://www.floodlightgrp.com Thank you partners! We love our listeners and want them to have access to the very best in tech and supporting service providers possible. We've vetted each of our partners and highly recommend all of them as key assets to help ensure our listener's success. As a way to honor our listeners, each of them has provided competitive DISCOUNTS. Simply click on the link below and take advantage of our ongoing partnerships. https://www.floodlightgrp.com/partners

Join Brandon and I in this recast of our last visit with Ben of Restoration Rundown and Ironclad Restoration Marketing. It was a rad conversation- Ben's a great interviewer, and the convo was hard-hitting around leadership, sales in general, and commercial sales strategy. If you haven't checked out Ben's other shows, be sure to do that too. - Chris Thank you partners! We love our listeners and want them to have access to the very best in tech and supporting service providers possible. We've vetted each of our partners and highly recommend all them as key assets to help ensure our listener's success. As a way to honor our listeners, each of them has provided competitive DISCOUNTS. Simply click on the link below and take advantage of our ongoing partnerships. https://www.floodlightgrp.com/premier-partners Floodlight Consulting Group Equipping restoration business owners to establish processes, develop their teams, increase revenues and grow their profits. Floodlight Leadership Circles The Floodlight Leadership Circles are designed to empower restoration business owners and key leaders through education, training, coaching and community engagement. Monthly Sessions Open Office Hours Expanding Partnerships Of Industry Professionals Customer Segment Leaders Continually-Updated Content Library Rich Non-Market Competing Community https://www.floodlightgrp.com/leadershipcircles Individualized Operations Consulting and Training The Floodlight team provides customized consulting and training support for restoration companies looking to grow and scale their business. 100% Tailored to each client Formal consulting sessions for owners and key leaders Full one-on-one access to the Floodlight team and their network of industry experts https://www.floodlightgrp.com

Episode SummaryChris Farris, Cloud Security Nerd at Turbot, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the latest events in cloud security, which leads to an interesting analysis from Chris on how legal departments obscure valuable information that could lead to fewer security failures in the name of protecting company liability, and what the future of accountability for security failures looks like. Chris and Corey also discuss the newest dangers in cloud security and billing practices, and Chris describes his upcoming cloud security conference, fwd:cloudsec. About ChrisChris Farris has been in the IT field since 1994 primarily focused on Linux, networking, and security. For the last 8 years, he has focused on public-cloud and public-cloud security. He has built and evolved multiple cloud security programs for major media companies, focusing on enabling the broader security team's objectives of secure design, incident response and vulnerability management. He has developed cloud security standards and baselines to provide risk-based guidance to development and operations teams. As a practitioner, he's architected and implemented multiple serverless and traditional cloud applications focused on deployment, security, operations, and financial modeling.Chris now does cloud security research for Turbot and evangelizes for the open source tool Steampipe. He is one of the organizers of the fwd:cloudsec conference (https://fwdcloudsec.org) and has given multiple presentations at AWS conferences and BSides events.When not building things with AWS's building blocks, he enjoys building Legos with his kid and figuring out what interesting part of the globe to travel to next. He opines on security and technology on Mastodon, Twitter and his website https://www.chrisfarris.comLinks Referenced: Turbot: https://turbot.com/ fwd:cloudsec: https://fwdcloudsec.org/ Mastodon: https://infosec.exchange/@jcfarris Personal website: https://chrisfarris.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn and we are here today to learn exciting things, steal exciting secrets, and make big trouble for Moose and Squirrel. Maybe that's the podcast; maybe that's the KGB, we're not entirely sure. But I am joined once again by Chris Farris, cloud security nerd at Turbot, which I will insist on pronouncing as ‘Turbo.' Chris, thanks for coming back.Chris: Thanks for having me.Corey: So, it's been a little while and it's been an uneventful time in cloud security with nothing particularly noteworthy happening, not a whole lot of things to point out, and honestly, we're just sort of scraping the bottom of the barrel for news… is what I wish I could say, but it isn't true. Instead, it's, “Oh, let's see what disastrous tire fire we have encountered this week.” What's top of mind for you as we record this?Chris: I think the most interesting one I thought was, you know, going back and seeing the guilty plea from Nickolas Sharp, who formerly was an employee at Ubiquiti and apparently had, like, complete access to everything there and then ran amok with it.Corey: Mm-hm.Chris: The details that were buried at the time in the indictment, but came out in the press releases were he was leveraging root keys, he was leveraging lifecycle policies to suppress the CloudTrail logs. And then of course, you know, just doing dumb things like exfiltrating all of this data from his home IP address, or exfiltrating it from his home through a VPN, which have accidentally dropped and then exposed his home IP address. Oops.Corey: There's so much to dive into there because I am not in any way shape or form, saying that what he did was good, or I endorse any of those things. And yeah, I think he belongs in prison for what he did; let's be very clear on this. But I personally did not have a business relationship with him. I am, however, Ubiquiti's customer. And after—whether it was an insider threat or whether it was someone external breaching them, Krebs On Security wound up doing a whole write-up on this and was single-sourcing some stuff from the person who it turned out, did this.And they made a lot of hay about this. They sued him at one point via some terrible law firm that's entire brand is suing media companies. And yeah, just wonderful, wonderful optics there and brilliant plan. But I don't care about the sourcing. I don't care about the exact accuracy of the reporting because what I'm seeing here is that what is not disputed is this person, who whether they were an employee or not was beside the point, deleted all of the audit logs and then as a customer of Ubiquiti, I received an email saying, “We have no indication or evidence that any customer data was misappropriated.” Yeah, you just turn off your logs and yeah, you could say that always and forever and save money on logging costs. [unintelligible 00:03:28] best practice just dropped, I guess. Clowns.Chris: So, yeah. And there's definitely, like, compliance and standards and everything else that say you turn on your logs and you protect your logs, and service control policies should have been able to detect that. If they had a security operations center, you know, the fact that somebody was using root keys should have been setting off red flags and causing escalations to occur. And that wasn't happening.Corey: My business partner and I have access to our AWS org, and when I was setting this stuff up for what we do here, at a very small company, neither of us can log in with root credentials without alarms going off that alert the other. Not that I don't trust the man; let's be very clear here. We both own the company.Chris: In business together. Yes.Corey: Ri—exactly. It is, in many ways, like a marriage in that one of us can absolutely ruin the other without a whole lot of effort. But there's still the idea of separation of duties, visibility into what's going on, and we don't use root API keys. Let me further point out that we are not pushing anything that requires you to send data to us. We're not providing a service that is software powered to people, much less one that is built around security. So, how is it that I have a better security posture than Ubiquiti?Chris: You understand AWS and in-depth cloud better. You know, it really comes down to how do you, as an AWS customer, understand all of the moving parts, all of the security tooling, all of the different ways that something can happen. And Amazon will say, “Well, it's in the documentation,” but you know, they have, what, 357 services? Are you reading the security pages of all of those? So, user education, I agree, you should have, and I have on all of my accounts, if anything pops up, if any IAM change happens, I'm getting text messages. Which is great if my account got compromised, but is really annoying when I'm actually making a change and my phone is blowing up.Corey: Yeah. It's worth pointing out as well that yes, Ubiquiti is publicly traded—that is understood and accepted—however, 93% of it is owned by their CEO-founder god-king. So, it is effectively one person's personal fiefdom. And I tend to take a very dim view as a direct result. When you're in cloud and you have suffered a breach, you have severely screwed something up somewhere. These breaches are never, “Someone stole a whole bunch of drives out of an AWS data center.” You have misconfigured something somewhere. And lashing out at people who reported on it is just a bad look.Chris: Definitely. Only error—now, of course, part of the problem here is that our legal system encourages people to not come forward and say, “I screwed up. Here's how I screwed up. Everybody come learn from my mistakes.” The legal professions are also there to manage risk for the company and they're like, “Don't say anything. Don't say anything. Don't even tell the government. Don't say anything.”Whereas we all need to learn from these errors. Which is why I think every time I do see a breach or I do see an indictment, I start diving into it to learn more. I did a blog post on some of the things that happened with Drizly and GitHub, and you know, I think the most interesting thing that came out of Drizly case was the ex-CEO of Drizly, who was CEO at the time of the breach, now has following him, for the rest of his life, an FTC order that says he must implement a security program wherever he goes and works. You know, I don't know what happens when he becomes a Starbucks barista or whatever, but that is on him. That is not on the company; that is on him.And I do think that, you know, we will start seeing more and more chief executive officers, chief security or information security officers becoming accountable to—or for the breaches and being personally accountable or professionally accountable for it. I think we kind of need it, even though, you know, there's only so much a CISO can do.Corey: One of the things that I did when I started consulting independently on AWS bills back in 2016 was, while I was looking at customer environments, I also would do a quick check for a few security baseline things. And I stopped doing it because I kept encountering a bunch of things that needed attention and it completely derailed the entire stated purpose of the engagement. And, frankly, I don't want to be running a security consultancy. There's a reason I focus on AWS bills. And people think I'm kidding, but I swear to you I'm not, when I say that the reason is in part because no one has a middle-of-the-night billing emergency. It is strictly a business-hours problem. Whereas with security, wake up.In fact, the one time I have been woken up in the middle of the night by a customer phone call, they were freaking out because it was a security incident and their bill had just pegged through the stratosphere. It's, “Cool. Fix the security problem first, then we'll worry about the bill during business hours. Bye.” And then I stopped leaving my phone off of Do Not Disturb at night.Chris: Your AWS bill is one of your indicators of compromise. Keep an eye on it.Corey: Oh, absolutely. We've had multiple engagements discover security issues on that. “So, what are these instances in Australia doing?” “We don't have anything there.” “I believe you're being sincere when you say this.”Chris: Yes.Corey: However.Chris: “Last month, you're at $1,000 and this month, you're at $50,000. And oh, by the way, it's the ninth, so you might want to go look at that.”Corey: Here's the problem that you start seeing in large-scale companies though. You or I wind up posting our IAM credentials on GitHub somewhere in public—and I do this from time to time, intentionally with absolutely no permissions attached to a thing—and I started look at the timeline of, “Okay 3, 2, 1, go,” with the push and now I start counting. What happens? At what time does the quarantine policy apply? When do I get an email alert? When do people start trying to exploit it? From where are they trying to exploit it?It's a really interesting thing to look into, just from the position of how this stuff all fits together and works. And that's great, but there's a whole ‘nother piece to it where if you or I were to do such a thing and actually give it admin credentials, okay, my, I don't know, what, $50, $100 a month account that I use for a lot of my test stuff now starts getting charged enormous piles of money that winds up looking like a mortgage in San Francisco, I'm going to notice that. But if you have a company that spending, I don't know, between ten and $20 million a month, do you have any idea how much Bitcoin you've got to be mining in that account to even make a slight dent in the overall trajectory of those accounts?Chris: In the overall bill, a lot. And in a particularly mismanaged account, my experience is you will notice it if you're monitoring billing anomalies on a per-account basis. I think it's important to note, you talked about that quarantine policy. If you look at what actually Amazon drops a deny on, it's effectively start EC2 instances and change IAM policies. It doesn't prevent anybody from listing all your buckets and exfiltrating all your data. It doesn't prevent anybody from firing up Lambdas and other less commonly used resources. Don't assume oh, Amazon dropped the quarantine policy. I'm safe.Corey: I was talking to somebody who spends $4 a month on S3 and they wound up suddenly getting $60 grand a day and Lambda charges, because max out the Lambda concurrency in every region and set it to mine crypto for 15 minutes apiece, yeah, you'll spend $60,000 a day to get, what $500 in crypto. But it's super economical as long as it's in someone else's account. And then Amazon hits them with a straight face on these things, where, “Please pay the bill.” Which is horrifying when there's several orders of magnitude difference between your normal bill and what happens post-breach. But what I did my whole post on “17 Ways to Run Containers on AWS,” followed by “17 More Ways to Run Containers on AWS,” and [unintelligible 00:12:00] about three services away from having a third one ready to go on that, the point is not, “Too many ways to run containers,” because yes, that is true and it's also amusing to me—less so to the containers team at AWS which does not have a sense of humor or sense of self-awareness of which they have been alerted—and fine, but every time you're running a container, it is a way to turn it into a crypto mining operation, in some way shape or form, which means there are almost 40-some-odd services now that can reasonably be used to spin up cryptocurrency mining. And that is the best-case breach scenario in a bunch of ways. It costs a bunch of money and things to clean up, but ‘we lost customer data.' That can destroy companies.Chris: Here's the worst part. Crypto mining is no longer profitable even when I've got stolen API keys because bitcoin's in the toilet. So, now they are going after different things. Actually, the most recent one is they look to see if your account is out of the SCS sandbox and if so, they go back to the tried-and-true way of doing internet scams, which is email spam.Corey: For me, having worked in operations for a very long time, I've been in situations where I worked at Expensify and had access to customer data there. I have worked in other finance companies—I worked at Blackrock. Where I work now, I have access to customer billing data. And let me be serious here for a second, I take all of these things seriously, but I also in all of those roles slept pretty well at night. The one that kept me up was a brief stint I did as the Director of Tech Ops at Grindr over ten years ago because unlike the stuff where I'm spending the rest of my career and my time now, it's not just money anymore.Whereas today, if I get popped, someone can get access to what a bunch of companies are paying AWS. It's scandalous, and I will be sued into oblivion and my company will not exist anymore and I will have a cloud hanging over my head forever. So, I have to be serious about it—Chris: But nobody will die.Corey: Nobody dies. Whereas, “Oh, this person is on Grindr and they're not out publicly,” or they live in a jurisdiction where that is punishable by imprisonment or death, you have blood on your hands, on some level, and I have never wanted that kind of responsibility.Chris: Yeah. It's reasonably scary. I've always been happy to say that, you know, the worst thing that I had to do was keep the Russians off CNN and my friends from downloading Rick and Morty.Corey: Exactly. It's, “Oh, heavens, you're winding up costing some giant conglomerate somewhere theoretical money on streaming subscriptions.” It's not material to the state of the world. And part of it, too, is—what's always informed my approach to things is, I'm not a data hoarder in the way that it seems our entire industry is. For the Last Week in AWS newsletter, the data that I collect and track is pretty freaking small.It's, “You want to sign up for the lastweekinaws.com newsletter. Great, I need your email address.” I don't need your name, I don't need the company you work at. You want to give me a tagged email address? Fine. You want to give me some special address that goes through some anonymizing thing? Terrific. I need to know where I'm sending the newsletter. And then I run a query on that for metrics sometimes, which is this really sophisticated database query called a count. How many subscribers do I have at any given point because that matters to our sponsors. But can we get—you give us any demographic? No, I cannot. I can't. I have people who [unintelligible 00:15:43] follow up surveys sometimes and that's it.Chris: And you're able to make money doing that. You don't have to collect, okay, you know, Chris's zip code is this and Bob's zip code is that and Frank's zip code is the other thing.Corey: Exactly.Chris: Or job titles, or you know, our mother's maiden name or anything else like that.Corey: I talk about what's going on in the world of AWS, so it sort of seems to me that if you're reading this stuff every week, either because of the humor or in spite of the humor, you probably are in a position where services and goods tied to that ecosystem would be well-received by you or one of the other 32,000 people who happen to be reading the newsletter or listening to the podcast or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's an old-timey business model. It's okay, I want to wind up selling, I don't know, expensive wristwatches. Well, maybe I'll advertise in a magazine that caters to people who have an interest in wristwatches, or caters to a demographic that traditionally buys those wristwatches. And okay, we'll run an ad campaign and see if it works.Chris: It's been traditional advertising, not the micro-targeting stuff. And you know, television was the same way back in the broadcast era, you know? You watched a particular show, people of that demographic who watched that particular show had certain advertisers they wanted.Corey: That part of the challenge I've seen too, from sponsors of this show, for example, is they know it works, but they're trying to figure out how to do any form of attribution on this. And my answer—which sounds self-serving, but it's true—is, there's no effective way to do it because every time you try, like, “Enter this coupon code,” yeah, I assure you, some of these things wind up costing millions of dollars to deploy at large companies at scale and they provide value for doing it. No one's going to punch in a coupon code to get 10% off or something like that. Procurement is going to negotiate custom contracts and it's going to be brought up maybe by someone who heard the podcast ad. Maybe it just sits in the back of their mind until they hear something and it just winds of contributing to a growing awareness of these things.You're never going to do attribution that works on things like that. People try sometimes to, “Oh, you'll get $25 in credit,” or, “We'll give you a free t-shirt if you fill out the form.” Yeah, but now you're biasing for people who find that a material motivator. When I'm debating what security suite I'm going to roll out at my enterprise I don't want a free t-shirt for that. In fact, if I get a free t-shirt and I wear that shirt from the vendor around the office while I'm trying to champion bringing that thing in, I look a little compromised.Chris: Yeah. Yeah, I am—[laugh] I got no response to that [laugh].Corey: No, no. I hear you. One thing I do want to talk about is the last time we spoke, you mentioned you were involved in getting fwd:cloudsec—a conference—off the ground. Like all good cloud security conferences, it's named after an email subject line.It is co-located with re:Inforce this year in Anaheim, California. Somewhat ominously enough, I used to live a block-and-a-half away from the venue. But I don't anymore and in fact, because nobody checks the global event list when they schedule these things, I will be on the other side of the world officiating a wedding the same day. So, yet again, I will not be at re:Inforce.Chris: That is a shame because I think you would have made an excellent person to contribute to our call for papers and attend. So yes, fwd:cloudsec is deliberately actually named after a subject line because all of the other Amazon conferences seem to be that way. And we didn't want to be going backwards and thinking, you know, past tense. We were looking forward to our conference. Yeah, so we're effectively a vendor-neutral cloud security conference. We liked the idea of being able to take the talks that Amazon PR would never allow on stage at re:Inforce and run with it.Corey: I would question that. I do want to call that out because I gave a talk at re:Invent one year about a vulnerability I found and reported, with the help of two other people, Scott Piper and Brandon Sherman, to the AWS security team. And we were able to talk about that on stage with Zack Glick, who at the time, was one of basically God's own prototypes, working over in the AWS environment next to Dan [Erson 00:19:56]. Now, Dan remains the salt of the earth, and if he ever leaves basically just short the entire US economy. It's easier. He is amazing. I digress. The point being is that they were very open about talking about an awful lot of stuff that I would never have expected that they would be okay with.Chris: And last year at re:Inforce, they had an excellent, excellent chalk talk—but it was a chalk talk, not recorded—on how ransomware attacks operate. And they actually, like, revealed some internal, very anonymized patterns of how attacks are working. So, they're starting to realize what we've been saying in the cloud security community for a while, which is, we need more legitimate threat intelligence. On the other hand, they don't want to call it threat intelligence because the word threat is threatening, and therefore, you know, we're going to just call it, you know, patterns or whatever. And our conference is, again, also multi-cloud, a concept that until recently, AWS, you know, didn't really want to acknowledge that there were other clouds and that people would use both of them [crosstalk 00:21:01]—Corey: Multi-cloud security is a nightmare. It's just awful.Chris: Yeah, I don't like multi-cloud, but I've come to realize that it is a thing. That you will either start at a company that says, “We're AWS and we're uni-cloud,” and then next thing, you know, either some rogue developer out there has gone and spun up an Azure subscription or your acquire somebody who's in GCP, or heaven forbid, you have to go into some, you know, tinhorn dictator's jurisdiction and they require you to be on-prem or leverage Oracle Cloud or something. And suddenly, congratulations, you're now multi-cloud. So yes, our goal is really to be the things that aren't necessarily onstage or aren't all just, “It's great.” Even your talk was how great the incident response and vulnerability remediation process was.Corey: How great my experience with it was at the time, to be clear. Because I also have gotten to a point where I am very aware that, in many cases when dealing with AWS, my reputation precedes me. So, when I wind up tweeting about a problem or opening a support case, I do not accept as a given that my experience is what everyone is going to experience. But a lot of the things they did made a lot of sense and I was frankly, impressed that they were willing to just talk about anything that they did internally. Because previously that had not been a thing that they did in open forums like that.Chris: But you go back to the Glue incident where somebody found a bug and they literally went and went to every single CloudTrail event going back to the dawn of the service to validate that, okay, the, only two times we ever saw this happen were between the two researcher's accounts who disclosed it. And so, kudos to them for that level of forward communication to their customers because yeah, I think we still haven't heard anything out of Azure for last year's—or a year-and-a-half ago's Wiz findings.Corey: Well, they did do a broad blog post about this that they put out, which I thought, “Okay, that was great. More of this please.” Because until they start talking about security issues and culture and the remediation thereof, I don't give a shit what they have to say about almost anything else because it all comes back to security. The only things I use Azure for, which admittedly has some great stuff; their computer vision API? Brilliant—but the things I use them for are things that I start from a premise of security is not important to that service.The thing I use it for on the soon-to-be-pivoted to Mastodon Twitter thread client that I built, it writes alt-text for images that are about to be put out publicly. Yeah, there's no security issue from that perspective. I am very hard-pressed to imagine a scenario in which that were not true.Chris: I can come up with a couple, but you know—Corey: It feels really contrived. And honestly, that's the thing that concerns me, too: the fact that I finally read, somewhat recently, an AWS white paper talking about—was it a white paper or was it blog post? I forget the exact media that it took. But it was about how they are seeing ransomware attacks on S3, which was huge because before that, I assumed it was something that was being made up by vendors to sell me something.Chris: So, that was the chalk talk.Corey: Yes.Chris: They finally got the chalk talk from re:Inforce, they gave it again at re:Invent because it was so well received and now they have it as a blog post out there, so that, you know, it's not just for people who show up in the room, they can hear it; it's actually now documented out there. And so, kudos to the Amazon security team for really getting that sort of threat intelligence out there to the community.Corey: Now, it's in writing, and that's something that I can cite as opposed to, “Well, I was at re:Invent and I heard—” Yeah, we saw the drink tab. We know what you might have thought you heard or saw at re:Invent. Give us something we can take to the board.Chris: There were a lot of us on that bar tab, so it's not all you.Corey: Exactly. And it was my pleasure to do it, to be clear. But getting back to fwd:cloudsec, I'm going to do you a favor. Whether it's an actual favor or the word favor belongs in quotes, the way that I submit CFPs, or conference talks, is optimized because I don't want to build a talk that is never going to get picked up. Why bother to go through all the work until I have to give it somewhere?So, I start with a catchy title and then three to five sentences. And if people accept it, great, then I get to build the talk. This is a forcing function in some ways because if you get a little delayed, they will not move the conference for you. I've checked. But the title of a talk that I think someone should submit for fwd:cloudsec is, “I Am Smarter Than You, so Cloud Security is Easy.”And the format and the conceit of the talk is present it with sort of a stand-it-up-to-take-it-down level of approach where you are over-confident in the fact that you are smarter than everyone else and best practices don't apply to you and so much of this stuff is just security theater designed as a revenue extraction mechanism as opposed to something you should actually be doing. And talk about why none of these things matter because you use good security and you know, it's good because you came up with it and there's no way that you could come up with something that you couldn't break because you're smart. It says so right in the title and you're on stage and you have a microphone. They don't. Turn that into something. I feel like there's a great way to turn that in a bunch of different directions. I'd love to see someone give that talk.Chris: I think Nickolas Sharp thought that too.Corey: [laugh]. Exactly. In fact, that will be a great way to bring it back around at the end. And it's like, “And that's why I'm better at security than you are. If you have any questions beyond this, you can reach me at whatever correctional institute I go in on Thursday.” Exactly. There's ways to make it fun and engaging. Because from my perspective, talks have to be entertaining or people don't pay attention.Chris: They're either entertaining, or they're so new and advanced. We're definitely an advanced cloud security practice thing. They were 500 levels. Not to brag or anything, but you know, you want the two to 300-level stuff, you can go CCJ up the street. We're hitting and going above and beyond what a lot of the [unintelligible 00:27:18]—Corey: I am not as advanced on that path as you are; I want to be very clear on this. You speak, I listen. You're one of those people when it comes to security. Because again, no one's life is hanging in the balance with respect to what I do. I am confident in our security posture here, but nothing's perfect. Everything is exploitable, on some level.It's also not my core area of focus. It is yours. And if you are not better than I am at this, then I have done something sort of strange, or so of you, in the same way that it is a near certainty—but not absolute—that I am better at optimizing AWS bills than you are. Specialists exist for a reason and to discount that expertise is the peak of hubris. Put that in your talk.Chris: Yeah. So, one talk I really want to see, and I've been threatening to give it for a while, is okay, if there's seventeen ways—or sorry, seventeen times two, soon to be seventeen times three ways to run containers in AWS, there's that many ways to exfiltrate credentials from those containers. What are all of those things? Do we have a holistic way of understanding, this is how credentials can be exfiltrated so that we then as defenders can go figure out, okay, how do we build detections and mitigations for this?Corey: Yeah. I'm a huge fan of Canarytokens myself, for that exact purpose. There are many devices I have where the only credentials in plain text on disk are things that as soon as they get used, I wind up with a bunch of things screaming at me that there's been a problem and telling me where it is. I'm not saying that my posture is impenetrable. Far from it. But you're going to have to work for it a little bit harder than running some random off-the-shelf security scanner against my AWS account and finding, oops, I forgot to turn on a bucket protection.Chris: And the other area that I think is getting really interesting is, all of the things that have credentials into your Cloud account, whether it's something like CircleCI or GitHub. I was having a conversation with somebody just this morning and we were talking about Roles Anywhere, and I was like, “Roles Anywhere is great if you've got a good strong PKI solution and can keep that private certificate or that certificate you need safe.” If you just put it on a disk, like, you would have put your AKIA and secret on a desk, congratulations, you haven't really improved security. You've just gotten rid of the IAM users that are being flagged in your CSPM tool, and congratulations, you have, in fact, achieved security theater.Corey: It's obnoxious, on some level. And part of the problem is cost and security are aligned and that people care about them right after they really should have cared about them. The difference is you can beg, cry, whine, et cetera to AWS for concessions, you can raise another round of funding; there have solutions with money. But security? That ship has already sailed.Chris: Yeah. Once the data is out, the data is out. Now, I will say on the bill, you get reminded of it every month, about three or four days after. It's like, “Oh. Crap, yeah, I should have turned off that EC2 instance. I just burned $100.” Or, “Oh hey, we didn't turn off that application. I just burned $100,000.” That doesn't happen on security. Security events tend to be few and far between; they're just much bigger when they happen.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to chat with me. I'm sure I'll have you back on between now and re:Inforce slash fwd:cloudsec or anything else we come up with that resembles an email subject line. If people want to learn more and follow along with your adventures—as they should—where's the best place for him to find you these days?Chris: So, I am now pretty much living on Mastodon on the InfoSec Exchange. And my website, chrisfarris.com is where you can find the link to that because it's not just at, you know, whatever. You have to give the whole big long URL in Mastodon. It's no longer—Corey: Yeah. It's like a full-on email address with weird domains.Chris: Exactly, yeah. So, find me at http colon slash slash infosec dot exchange slash at jcfarris. Or just hit Chris Farris and follow the links. For fwd:cloudsec, we are conveniently located at fwdcloudsec.org, which is F-W-D cloud sec dot org. No colons because I don't think those are valid in whois.Corey: Excellent choice. And of course, links to that go in the [show notes 00:31:32], so click the button. It's easier. Thanks again for your time. I really appreciate it.Chris: Thank you.Corey: Chris Farris, Cloud Security Nerd at Turbot slash Turbo. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment that resembles a lawsuit being filed, and then have it processed-served to me because presumably, you work at Ubiquiti.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

Welcome from Chad, Jon, and Chris Thank you Gert V, Arjan H, Geoff C, David C  Announcements and News  Random Review Redo: OF PAIN! Top/Bottom player cards from The Two Towers AMA  Farewell!

How Do You Create Raving Fans? Joining us today is Chris Earley, a Personal Injury Lawyer in Massachusetts who is a magnet for raving fans. When it comes to marketing, there is simply no better lead than a referral. Why? Because people who don't know you don't trust you. But a prospective client will trust someone they can relate to you're your former clients. But it isn't enough to have a handful of 5-star reviews that you begged and pleaded for through mass, repetitive emails. Everyone has that. In this podcast, Chris answers some of these questions: You are the master at creating raving fans. What is a raving fan? Why is it important to develop these kinds of relationships? Your attitude towards generating raving fans goes beyond simply having good reviews. You start with the person first and how you can help them. Can you expand on that a bit? How do you go about developing the raving fan relationship? How much time do you spend developing these relationships? How do you get your raving fans to leave reviews or send referral cases? What are some ways that you keep in touch with your raving fans after their case closes? What percentage of your client leads are referral based? Do you find it is easier to connect with a client who comes from a referral v one who comes from a cold call? Why do you think other lawyers might struggle with this initially and how can they overcome it? Visit the Earley Law Group online here https://www.chrisearley.com/ and be sure to check out their extended family of raving fans here: https://www.chrisearley.com/client-testimonials.html. See all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/. Transcript: Lindsey: Welcome to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute, where we quickly cover the hot topics in the legal marketing world. I'm your host, Lindsey Busfield. When it comes to marketing, there is simply no better lead than a referral. Why? Because people who don't know you don't necessarily trust you. But a perspective client will trust somebody they can relate to, i.e., your former clients, but it isn't enough to have a handful of five-star reviews that you begged and pleaded for through mass repetitive emails. Everyone has that. What you need are raving fans who can't wait to tell their friends, family, and random strangers how great you are and how much money you got them. You want the kind of fan who hears someone just say the word car accident from across the room, they drop everything and sing your praises. You want an army of walking billboards. Joining us today is Chris Earley, a personal injury lawyer in Massachusetts who is a magnet for raving fans. Thank you so much for joining us today. Chris: Thank you, Lindsey. It's my pleasure. Thank you so much. Lindsey: Well, you are the master at creating raving fans. So let's start by telling me a little bit about what is a raving fan. Chris: I am hyper focused and dialed in on doing the best job that me and my team can do to make our clients happy. I feel that clients, when it comes to lawyers, don't ask for a lot. I don't think the standard is so high that that does make them happy. But if you can over-deliver, if you can really impress them, they more times than not will become a raving fan. The more you dial in on customer service, holding their hand through the process from start to finish, from intake to end of the case, they remember how you made them feel. We'll get into that about relationships. It's not just a transactional attorney-client, cold relationship, it's a warm, human relationship. That I try to humanize the relationship. I try to make clients feel really welcome. We call it here, our extended family. It's not just group of clients, it's an extended family of people who trust us to handle their case. We take that very seriously and we really do focus on doing everything we possibly can,

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Welcome from Chad, Jon, and Chris Thank you Disco Drew, Lorenzo C, Chris M, Darthmaluus Announcements and News  Two new LOTR: LCG items available: Fellowship Saga, ALEP's The Nine are Abroad Main Topic: Rings of Power discussion.  Farewell!

CHRIS NEWBOLD: Hello, wellbeing friends. Welcome to the Path To Well-Being In Law Podcast, an initiative of the Institute for Well-Being in Law. As you know, my name is Chris Newbold. I serve as executive vice president of ALPS Malpractice Insurance. You know, our goal here on the podcast is to introduce you to thought leaders doing meaningful work in the wellbeing space within the legal profession, and in the process, build and nurture a national network of wellbeing advocates intent on creating a culture shift within the profession. As always, I am joined by my co-host, Bree Buchanan. Bree, how are you doing today? BREE BUCHANAN: I'm doing great, Chris. Great to be here. CHRIS: Good, good. As you all know, Bree is the president of the Institute for Well-Being in Law. Bree, we have some really exciting news to share about the institute and the journey that we're on to engineer this culture shift. Would you maybe give us a clue as to the breaking news that I think that we were so excited about? BREE: Nobody could be more excited than me because you said, you know, Bree is the board president. Well, up until this news, I had two jobs. I was the acting executive director, so I am just delighted to let people know we have hired our first full-time staff person and that is our inaugural executive director. Her name is Jennifer DiSanza. She comes to us with a whole host of experience in wellbeing issues and particularly with the law students. For many reasons, we wanted to bring Jennifer on board, but also strategically, we really realized that's where she's coming from is the future of our profession. And also, aside of where we know there's a lot of behavioral health distress and stress on the youngest members of our profession and the law students. So we're just thrilled to have Jennifer on board. CHRIS: Yeah. See, I had the privilege of serving with you Bree on the hiring committee. Boy, we have a dynamic leader now that will be working day-to-day to think about advancing wellbeing in our profession. You know, there's so much work to be done as you well know. We're actually planning on having Jennifer as our next podcast guest, which will be awesome to be able to just talk about the vision, why she's passionate about this work. It will also happen to be after the conclusion of some strategic planning that we as a board will be doing. So things are just really aligning well with both what has transpired, where we're going, and then focusing on what lies ahead in terms of some big issues that we have to tackle as we think about the wellbeing of lawyers and legal professionals in the profession. With that, today we're going to circle back to, we've spent considerable time in the area of diversity, equity, and inclusion. You know, we had anticipated a three part series on this, but sometimes you extend an offer and you get somebody who's so awesome that you sit there and go, we have to expand this even further. Right? BREE: Along came Kori. Yeah. CHRIS: That's right. Along came Kori. And when Kori came along, we're like, okay, we're breaking the rules. We're totally bringing Kori into the mix. And so we were really excited to welcome Kori Carew to the podcast. Bree, would you be so kind to introduce Kori? And again, this is I know a podcast that we've been very excited and looking forward to. BREE: Absolutely. So Kori is a people inclusion strategist, an advocate, a speaker, a writer, a status quo disruptor. Got to love that. Child of God, wife and mother of two curly-haired, wise, energetic, fierce, spitfire daughters. Her family is multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-religious and spans multiple nationalities. She brings a fierce love of community and belonging that transcends differences to work, ministry and life. She loves to sing, cook, entertain, dance in the hallways at work, we need a video component of that, and read. Equipping leaders to be inclusive, to interrupt bias and disrupt the status quo. At her day job, she focuses on developing and implementing strategies for individual career and diversity and inclusion success, and helps organizations build bridges across differences and improve inclusion. BREE: When she's not working, she focuses her voice and talent on issues of gender equity and rights, inclusion, and human and civil rights, serving in her church and community, and cherishing her phenomenal tribe and community. She's energized by helping people live their very best lives. Kori was the Director of Strategic Diversity Initiatives for seven years at Shook, Hardy. And then she came over to Seyfarth and is now the Chief Inclusion and Diversity Officer there and oversees their really spectacular wellbeing program, Seyfarth Life, and a whole host of other initiatives we're going to hear about. So Kori, welcome to the podcast. CHRIS: Yay. KORI CAREW: Thank you. I appreciate you inviting me to be on this podcast and also very much the work that you are doing. This conversation of wellbeing for attorneys is such an important conversation. It's one that we probably started having too late, and it's one where diversity and inclusion, there's more work to be done than time. I'm super thankful for all that you do and all that you do to help our profession be better, so thank you very much. BREE: You bet. Kori, I'm going to start off. We ask all of our guests a variation of this question. What experiences in your life are drivers behind your passion for work around diversity, equity, and inclusion and belonging and wellbeing? KORI: Thank you for that question. And of course, you're causing me to go down a bit of memory lane. You would think this is an easy question, but it actually is not. It's not as easy because it forces you to look in the rear view mirror and try to understand where the dots connected to where you are. Before I do that, I do want to make one small correction. Seyfarth Life is an incredible initiative at Seyfarth that I am super proud of and one of the things that energized me about joining the firm. It has a steering committee that leads it. It's four partners at the firm, all of whom have a connection to wellbeing and mindfulness. My department and my role actually does not oversee Seyfarth Life, but we do work very closely with them. Because as one of the founding members, Laura Maechtlen noted from the very beginning, there's that intersection between inclusion and diversity and belonging and wellbeing, and the two work very closely together. But my department does not oversee Seyfarth Life. So just wanted to make sure I give credit to the right people. BREE: Absolutely, give credit where it's due. KORI: You know, because they're awesome and they do great work. In fact, if I may brag on them, out of the steering committee members, one of them is the chair of the largest department in the firm and an executive committee member and co-chair of the national diversity and inclusion action team. Oh, wait a minute. No, that's not right. Three are office managing partners. They're part of this steering committee, this leadership group, because they actually practice wellbeing and mindfulness and meditation in their own personal lives and allow it to influence how they lead. So I know Seyfarth didn't pay me to do a promotion, but I felt like I needed to shout some guys out. BREE: Absolutely. KORI: Our talent team helps them quite a bit in terms of organizing programs and handling the administrative and logistic things. Okay. So to answer your question, what are the experiences? I often say this and it is true that when I look at my life in the rear view mirror, how I ended up where I am makes a lot more sense as I connect the dots in ways that I probably couldn't have foreseen. For example, I never intended to be a diversity and inclusion professional. I actually never intended to go to law school. I started my university career as an electrical engineering major. When I came to the U.S., I wanted to build planes. That was my thing. I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer. I wanted to build planes. I loved science. I could spend hours in the lab. One of the best gifts I ever got was a lab coat. My dad had a custom drawing board built for me when I was a teenager that I carried with me everywhere because technical drawing, engineering drawing was one of my top subjects. KORI: So a lot of things make sense in hindsight. I look at my family composition and my sisters and I were all born in different countries. We have different passports. We grew up in Nigeria, a country with over 300 different ethnic groups with different languages and traditions and customs, so there's that. My family is multi-religious, multi-ethnic, multi-national, multi-racial and there's just so much diversity there. You know, in the family tree, there's a granduncle that's a Methodist church bishop, and one that's an Imam. And my grandfather's father was a teacher, was a teacher of the Quran. And so all of that diversity is there in the family, but it probably influenced how my parents raised my sisters and I and how even through childhood, I was always the person who was connecting the dots between similarities between people. And today we would call that cultural fluency, this ability to recognize cultural differences and not judge them but just adapt to them and be able to say, okay, you know what? KORI: It looks to me like person A is looking through a lens that's different than person B, but they're looking at the same thing. So how can I get these two people to be on the same page? So there's that family dynamic. But another thing that happened when I was growing up that I do think influenced me quite a bit. I grew up in Nigeria. Most of my childhood, we had one military dictator after another. So I grew up with coos happening more often than I would prefer. There were times that things broke out into religious violence. You're talking about incidents where a few people are killed or a lot of people are killed and everything goes to standstill, everybody's on edge. You don't leave your home. When the students go on riots because they're protesting something and things get out of hand, you're turning off the lights in your home and sort of huddled together, trying to make sure that you stay together as a family until everything passes over. So that was also something that I grew up around and experiencing. KORI: And then my parents are from Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone is actually my home country. If you ask me where I'm from, I will tell you I was born in Canada, grew up in Nigeria, but I'm from Sierra Leone. Because in my culture, you're where your father's from. So my entire identity has always been that I am from Sierra Leone. In the '90s, Sierra Leone began to experience a very brutal civil war, which calling it a civil war is actually inaccurate. You have a bunch of people with weapons who terrorize the population for 11 years. And it's been one of the most brutal wars that the world has seen at least in recent times. And that impacted my family in the sense that we lost people, in the sense that I hadn't been back to Sierra Leone for a long time. And it kind of started with my mom not feeling it was safe enough for us to go and visit, with grandparents living on the run and being sick and dying and me not seeing them in a long time because of just this state of chaos. KORI: And all of this fueled how I ended up going to law school, wanting to do human rights work, wanting to be a human rights lawyer, feeling as if I learned so much about the American system and the role that the legal profession played in terms of maintaining democracy and freedom and wanting to multiply that. Right. But then I go to law school. I graduate. I fall in love with a boy who I actually started dating in college, and I ended up in Kansas City because I followed a boy. You know, career took a different turn, ended up being a defense lawyer. And then you fast forward to doing an evaluation and me going through a process of saying, okay, I've done a lot of the things I wanted to do. I've achieved a lot of the things I wanted to achieve. I wanted to try cases. I wanted to build this reputation. I wanted to be successful in A, B, C, D. KORI: And I started taking inventory of the things I was passionate about, the skills I developed, the experiences I had and where I was losing time. You know, where was I given my time in community? What were the things that I could lose myself doing in such deep flow that I don't even recognize that time has gone by? And that journey ended up leading me to inclusion and diversity work and I haven't turned back since. There's some aspects of the legal profession I miss. I miss trying cases. I miss solving problems for clients. It may sound like the weirdest thing, but boy, playing around with evidence, rules, and figuring out how to get things in or keep things out is a nerdy love of mine. And so those are just some of the experiences that I would say led me to this love for helping people build bridges and I'm empower people to succeed despite the challenges, and being able to create just a level of cultural fluency amongst groups of people so that we understand how much better we are together as opposed to isolated from one another. So that's a long answer. BREE: Well, what an amazing life you've had to date and an incredible background that informs your work at a depth that I know Chris and I can't even begin to imagine. CHRIS: For sure. Kori, how long have you been more squarely centered on the inclusion and diversity side of things? KORI: I have been for 11 years now full-time diversity. What I realized, you know, somebody asked me a question similar to this, how long have you been doing diversity work, which is different from what I usually hear. I actually did the inventory and realized that, you know, 29 years ago, when I first came to the U.S., that was when I actually started doing presentations. At the time, we called them multiculturalism. We started doing presentations on bridging differences, on being able to understand different cultures and how you navigate it. And so I've been actually teaching on diversity, inclusion, cultural fluency leadership topics now for 29, 30 years. But it being my full-time job, that happened when I left litigation and moved over to Shook, Hardy & Bacon. CHRIS: Okay. I think a good point to maybe start the conversation is, you know, again, your perspective is so unique and informed. For diverse members of the profession, can you talk to our listeners about some of the more challenging aspects of the last couple of years? KORI: Yeah. So the last couple of years have been tough for everyone. This pandemic, it's been brutal and it's impacted us in so many different ways. We've lost our sense of certainty to the extent that we didn't had any. We've lost our ability to have some kind of predictability, something that is a core need, a core need for many of us. Well, not for many of us, for everyone. It's actually a core human need. And so we've been sort of thrown into this whirlwind of uncertainty with no deadline, right? We went from thinking, well, I'll speak for myself. You know, since I'm not a scientist, I foolishly thought, well, maybe in two weeks I'll go back to the office. And then it was a month. And then I thought six weeks. And then I thought for sure by summer 2020 we'd be able to go out and about and things would be quasi under control. And here we are, you know, some 28, 29 months later and we still have COVID. I'm sick right now recovering from COVID after avoiding it for almost 30 months, I get it. KORI: So you have that benchmark that is impacting everyone and the uncertainty that we've seen with everything going on around us. But as with everything, I think people from historically underrepresented and marginalized groups, what happens is the things that... There's this saying that the things, and I'm going to probably say it wrong. And it may be an African American saying, but it's this thing that what gives some people a cold will give others the flu. And so what you've seen then is populations that have been historically marginalized and underrepresented and haven't had access to full equity, had been impacted very differently by the same storm that we're all in. So we're all in the same storm, but we're not in the same boat. We're experiencing it differently. So communities of color, we know got hit by COVID much harder. KORI: And you have that intersection between race, between housing inequity, between education inequity, between healthcare inequity and healthcare access, all of those things coming together to adversely impact some groups more. So if you are someone who is Brown or Black, or from one of these historically marginalized communities, and you are going to work during the pandemic, or you're working from home, you are more likely to have family members who have been directly impacted by COVID, right? You are more likely to have lost family members. You also, generally speaking are more likely to be in a position where you are in an extended family situation where you are responsible for more people than just yourself. You know, one of the things that we know, for example, that impacts generational wealth is that those of us from communities of color oftentimes are responsible not just for ourselves, but for extended family members. KORI: So you have that dynamic playing, then you have the racial pandemic, which has been going on, but in the last two years have come to fevered pitch. And so the daily trauma of dealing with racism and microaggressions then gets compounded by all the incidents, George Floyd, Charles Cooper, and all the other incidents that have been bombarding us from our television screens, from the news reports, from articles. And so now all of a sudden everything is right in your face and you're dealing with all of it at the same time. And so those are some of the things that are professionals from "diverse communities," from underrepresented marginalized communities have been dealing with. And our reserves have been tapped into and overstretched to where for some of us, it feels like it's been just too much. BREE: Absolutely. It's unimaginable just how much to carry on in that space. All of the things that you just described, this litany of horrors is on top of just the day-to-day difficulty as been expressed to me, and reading in my friends of people of color, just the microaggressions and just how hard it is. Just take away pandemic and everything else and the racial reckoning, how hard it can be just to get through the day. I can't even imagine. It is absolutely just too, too much. Kori, there's so much to unpack here. I wanted to kind of pushing us along here talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion and talking about belonging and overlaying that. I mean, when I started looking in the legal profession, we talk about DEI, it was diversity then DEI, and now we're getting into some of the really, to me, needy and interesting stuff around belonging. I know that you created a belonging project at Seyfarth. Could you talk to us about the importance of that, and also about this project that you got started at Seyfarth? KORI: Sure. Let me separate them out. Belonging is a conversation that more and more of us are having, and it is fairly new to the conversation when you're talking about diversity and inclusion. It started with we talked about diversity, and then we started talking about diversity and inclusion, and now we've included equity and belonging. Belonging goes to that sense, that feeling that each of us have when we belong and we feel like we are part of a group and that we belong to something that is bigger than us. It is also a core human need. Brené Brown has this phrase that she says that we have three irreducible needs, and they are to be loved, to connect, and to belong. What we know from the research is that when we don't have belonging, it impacts us. It is wired into our DNA to belong to something. KORI: So we will either have healthy belonging, or we will seek a belonging that may not be healthy and may not be good. This is where you can queue in hate groups and cult because they will do anything to belong. We will also conform to fit in so that we have a quasi sense of belonging. The problem though is that when we don't have belonging, we actually see physiological, physical, spiritual, mental, psychological impact on our wellbeing. It impacts our sense of health. Forget our sense of health. It actually impacts our health, right? We know that exclusion and the lack of belonging actually results in increased depression, increased high blood pressure, increased diabetes. Incidentally, a lot of the same things that racial trauma and microaggressions also causes on the human body. And so if we don't have that sense of belonging, then we are not able to actually actualize that sense of inclusion where everyone is able to be leveraged and their differences and their strengths leveraged so that they can succeed as they want to succeed. KORI: And without belonging, you don't get wellbeing. But conversely, without wellbeing, you can't cultivate that sense of belonging. And so those two things are intertwined as well as this concept of engagement, which also is in the mix, right? You can't create engagement unless you have social connection and belonging. And so all of these things come together. Unfortunately, in many of our organizations, they're treated as separate, right? In many organizations, you have the wellbeing function being managed in a way that it doesn't speak to diversity, doesn't speak to belonging at all. So imagine now we just talked about COVID and we talked about how COVID has impacted everyone. Then imagine you're developing a wellness initiative or a wellbeing initiative and you're not stopping to think, oh, wait a minute, because of diversity, this pandemic has impacted people in different ways. KORI: And so I can't just trot out a wellbeing program without factoring in diversity and how diversity has resulted in different people experiencing this pandemic differently. Similarly, we fail when we try to, for example, have a wellbeing initiative that doesn't stop and think, oh, wow, we're not talking about racial trauma. We're not talking about microaggressions. We're not talking about the impact of implicit bias and exclusion on the psychological and physical wellbeing of the people in our organization. And so what's happening is these concepts are tied together, but in our organizations and most of our organizations, we're not doing DEI and incorporating wellbeing and we're not doing wellbeing incorporating DEIB. Instead, we're acting as if they're completely separate and they're not. CHRIS: I mean, I think it goes without saying, we, I think as human beings, sometimes we compartmentalize of there's this and then there's that. I think that from the infancy of the institute, I think we've emphasized the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion as part of, has to flow through everything, every lens that we look at from the wellbeing perspective. But I have to admit, it's been more challenging than I think, than we've appreciated because sometimes we look a little bit myopically at some of these issues without broadening our lens. That's the perspective that I think that you can bring our listeners that, again, this intersection of diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging with wellbeing, I guess I'd be curious on just, how can we merge? Right? Because again, even the fact that there's organizations that work over here and organizations that work over here, and we really should be just the coalition and the umbrella and the totality of how it all works together is something that I don't know that we appreciate the magnitude of. KORI: Well, and the only way we can appreciate the magnitude is if we have these honest conversations. But we also have to have the conversations around the structural and the cultural underpinnings, right? How do we have conversations about wellbeing that take into consideration differences? That take into consideration, okay, we're telling people, hey, we have therapy or we have EAP, or we have whatever the organization offers. But how do you do that and also acknowledge that for some communities that there is a stigma around maybe going to a therapist? How do you have that conversation with those communities? Or that racial bias and racial aggressions are having an impact on people, but you have an entire generation of Black people, for example, who have survived by plowing through all the challenges that the world has put in front of us. And to sit down and talk about the way in which racism has impacted us is asking us to put our shields down, which means opening up ourselves to attack, which means possibly being accused of playing the race card. Right? KORI: All of things that you may have grown up in a time where we just didn't talk about that in mixed company, we only talked about that with each other. And so there are all these layers, all these layers. I recently listened to a friend of mine, Ratu Basin, and she was talking about how it feels for her as someone of Indian heritage to see how much yoga, for example, has been whitewashed. There's so many conversations to be had even in the wellbeing space, even when we're talking to people about things like self-care. Well, what are you recommending? Because some of the things we tell people to do for self-care, go get a massage, who can afford that? What culture support that kind of self-care? And is that really self-care or is that treating a symptom? Should self-care and wellbeing be about a way of life and a way of working such that we don't need these emergency [inaudible 00:32:26] like solutions to fix the symptoms, right? KORI: And that's the big conversation and that's the conversation I'm hearing some lawyers begin to ask where they say, the organization says they care about wellbeing, but we're getting these other messages that say it's productivity and hours and billables that matter, right? How do we shift the culture and how we're embracing these topics in a way that makes it more meaningful? I just realized, I didn't even answer your second question about the belonging project, but yeah, this is the stuff that to me, I see a lot of potential for us to have really good conversations that can lead to solutions that are more inclusive of a diverse profession. BREE: Kori, you're clearly such a thought leader and a visionary in this space. Can you talk a little bit about how do we get change to occur in a profession, the legal profession that is so reluctant to change? Even more so than general society. Where do you see the bright points of really being able to make some change? KORI: Can you repeat that question? BREE: Yeah. Just about how do we get change to occur in the legal profession? You know, this is a profession that is just so stayed and slow and bound up in tradition. This is the way we do it, that sort of thing. And here you are with these fabulous ideas, working with a very large law firm, having come from another very large law firm so you're in this space. What are your ideas for actually getting real change to occur? Where are the pressure points, I guess? KORI: Well, I think some of the pressure points are actually external. You asked me a question earlier about the last two years, something that I didn't mention that has impacted a lot. It's impacting individuals from underrepresented groups, but it's also impacting our organizations. Is this fake cultural war that is also going on, you know, regardless of what political party you're in, I think we can acknowledge that for the last six years, there has been an attack on everything that we are trying to accomplish in diversity and inclusion. White is now Black, Black is now white. And if we are in a state of being, for example, where I'll use Florida as an example where someone can say, we want to ban any training if it makes someone uncomfortable. What you're essentially saying is let's keep the status quo the way it is, even if the status quo supports white supremacy. KORI: Even if the status quo is inequitable. You would rather keep the status quo than have an uncomfortable conversation. When it comes to the legal profession, in particular, law firms, because of how we are constructed. A law firm essentially has multiple owners. It's not like a corporation that has a board of directors and has shareholders. Let's say you have a law firm of a thousand people and 300 of them are partners. You have 300 people running around who think that everybody should have an equal say in every single decision. It's one of the reasons that law firms function so differently from other companies and why decision making is so different. Everything we do is different. You know, we put people in leadership positions not because they're leaders, but because they're great trial attorneys or they're great business generators or whatever, whatever the criteria is, but rarely is it because someone actually is a good leader. KORI: And so we have this culture that we have built that really makes it difficult for us to have real hard conversations on the things that really matter, on the things that really can make change. So imagine that law firm now sitting in the last six years and even more so in the last three years. I can tell you when it comes to diversity, inclusion, many of us are throwing our hands up and saying, so how in the hell are we supposed to have this conversation then? If you're saying, oh, we can't talk about white privilege because someone says, oh, that offends me. Or we can't talk about systemic racism because someone's going to say, oh, wait a minute, if you say systemic racism is real, then that's anti-American. So we are living in a time where the terms racism, the terms CRT have been completely redefined to where they mean nothing that even resembles what they actually mean. KORI: And then we're over here arguing about these fictitious decisions, these fictitious definitions, and we're not actually doing the hard work that needs to be done, right. Because if you won't even acknowledge that systemic racism is real, then how do we evaluate the systems to see where we may be having inequitable results and then changing those systems? Because if you deny a thing exists, then we can't even address it. BREE: Absolutely. KORI: And so that's probably one of the biggest challenges I see, but also the biggest opportunity. And if anything is going to change when it comes to diversity, we have got to get more courageous about having difficult conversations, but conversations that are worthwhile, they are important. Nothing about creating equity is comfortable and cozy and touchy-feely, it's hard work. It requires us to say some things that we maybe may not have faced before, but we don't get to change what we won't face, what we won't acknowledge, and what we won't be honest about. It's like, you can't write a new end into the story if you won't acknowledge the truth of the story. That's the whirlwind that I think we are in now, not just as a profession, but as a country and a society. BREE: Absolutely. What an incredibly difficult place to be? Yeah, go ahead, Chris. CHRIS: Well, I was just going to say, I want to unpack that more. Let's do this. Let's take a quick break and come back because I mean, my burning question and Kori began to sort of thinking about it, which is what's the pathway to better, more productive, honest conversations, right? Because I think that you're right. The question is, how do we create the environments for ultimately that societal discussion to occur in the most productive way? So let's take a quick break and we'll come right back. — ADVERTISEMENT: Meet VERA, your firm's Virtual Ethics Risk Assessment Guide developed by ALPS. VERA's purpose is to help you uncover risk management blind spots from client intake to calendaring, to cybersecurity, and more. VERA: I require only your honest input to my short series of questions. I will offer you a summary of recommendations to provide course corrections if needed, and to keep your firm on the right path. Generous and discreet, VERA is a free and anonymous risk management guide from ALPS to help firms like yours be their best. Visit VERA at alpsinsurance.com/vera.   — CHRIS: Okay. We are back with Kori Carew, our esteemed guests and the chief inclusion and diversity officer at Seyfarth Shaw. Kori, we were just getting into the, I think the discussion. I feel like we're going deeper than even I had thought we would in the conversation, which I love. You know, as we think now about we need to have the honest conversations, right. And so I would just be curious on your opinion as what's the pathway to get there. If we appreciate that there's a lot of noise and the volume levels are high, and there's a lot of yelling, frankly, on both sides of the equation. What's the pathway toward problem solving, thoughtful discussion, intentional discussion that ultimately advances the dialogue? KORI: Thank you very much for that question. Honestly, it's one I've been thinking a lot about. You know, I did do a TEDx in 2017 and the impetus for that TED really was that question that you just asked, which was, there's a lot of yelling and not enough dialogue that allows us to move into action. Since I gave that TED, I've sort of watched what's been going on in organizations and in the country. I don't think I would change anything about that TED, except that there are a few more things that I would emphasize. One of the first things that we have to do if we truly want to make progress, and I'm going to steal a Nigerian thing, tell the truth and shame the devil. We are avoiding being honest with ourself about so many things. Whether it is just being honest about the experiences people have in the organization, or being honest about where the gaps are, or being honest about what the failures are, or even individual honesty. KORI: That self-awareness to say, you know Kori, you talk a lot about wellbeing and you talk a lot about leadership, but the reason you talk about those things is because you were searching for something that you did not have in the leaders that you grew up under, right? So you were trying to create something for others that you didn't have, but you are also trying to create it for yourself. And there are many days that you totally suck. There are many days that you are making very bad wellbeing decisions. There are days that you are not as inclusive as you would want to be, but it's okay. And the only way you're going to get better is by acknowledging where you're not doing it right. Now, think about that when we're talking about gender or race or LGBT inclusion or disability inclusion. If we as individuals and we as organizations are not willing to be honest about our history, what has happened and what is happening, then we don't even have a starting point. KORI: And the way that we do that is very, very cliché. Getting comfortable with what is uncomfortable. I remember when I first started saying that, when I was at Shook, Hardy & Bacon and it wasn't even a thing many people were saying, and now people say it so often that it has lost its meaning. But it truly is the beginning point. And in too many of our organizations, we are shutting down any discussion or any movement in the name of trying to get consensus, or in trying to water things so much that they're meaningless, right? Or being so hyperworried about future possible hypothetical litigation that somebody may have over something that they don't like that they heard as opposed to possible litigation over people who do not feel like they are being treated equitably. You know, it's like we have to choose our heart. And so it's either the heart of sitting in the discomfort and learning things we may not want to learn, challenging ourselves, reaching deep to say, you know what? I don't really like that. KORI: When you talk to me about Christian privilege, this is a true story. Okay. True story. A [inaudible 00:46:22] of mine talked about Christian privilege. We're talking about something. She said, "Yeah, but there's also Christian privilege and people never talk about that." And can I admit to you that I was like, "Oh, is she for real? We're talking about racism and she's talking about Christian privilege." That was my initial reaction. But I sat with it. You know what? She was right. Because she was Pagan and I'm Christian. I've never had to use PTO for Christmas. My holidays are respected, they are recognized, they are centered, they are prioritized. But other people in this country who are not Christian do not have those privileges. Now that's a benign example because it's not one that makes people get as upset as some of the other topics. KORI: But the first step has to be a commitment to sit through the discomfort, sit through what may rub you wrong, and acknowledge that just because something is uncomfortable or just because something offends you does not mean the thing is wrong or it is offensive. And in many of our organizations, we haven't even gotten past that first part. Then the next part has to be a commitment to learn more. We have to operationalize being able to say to each other, tell me more, and not just, oh, I didn't like that training, or I didn't like what I was learning. But to say to yourself internally, okay, I didn't like that. But rather than projecting how I'm feeling it in this moment, I'm going to put myself in the position of saying, tell me more, help me understand why that bothered you, help me understand why you feel that way. Because until we're willing to do that, we're not going to learn. KORI: And without knowledge, we have no opportunity for growth. Growth comes with new knowledge. Growth comes with practicing new skill sets. Growth comes with trying things that you haven't done before. But if you're more invested in protecting the status quo than you are fighting for change, then the status quo will always win. And the status quo right now, it's not working for a lot of people from a lot of underrepresented and marginalized communities. Those are some of the things that have to happen. Oh, Chris, something else I want to add. Both sides. We got to talk about this both sides thing. Not every opinion and argument is equal, and that's something else that we're not willing to address head on. We've allowed inclusion to be so redefined that some people think it means anything and everything is of equal footing, right. KORI: But someone saying in the workplace, we need to be more inclusive of people with disabilities is not the same as someone saying, I don't think disabled people should have to work here. And sometimes what is crouching in is people want to hide behind inclusion to spew hate or bigotry or an excuse not to make the change and growth that is consistent with the so-called values of our organizations. I'll pause there because you're about [inaudible 00:50:05]. BREE: Yeah. I just want to comment to our listeners Kori's TED Talk, just in your browser, put in Kori Carew and TED Talk. I really encourage people to check it out. It is powerful and profound. So Kori, I'm going to ask you a question here that we also tend to ask this sometimes near the end, if you could look for, I don't know, five years or even a decade. If we can do a decent job around changing hearts and minds and attitudes around diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging and wellbeing too, hopefully, how would the profession be different? What do you want to see? KORI: My goodness, my goodness, my goodness. Excuse me. That cough came up. If we could actually accomplish all these things that we've been talking about for 20 years, we would see leadership teams that are more humble in their approach, leadership teams that are people-centric, organizations that are listening to employees and actually care about what employees want. We would no longer be having conversations as if it's either you focus on the bottom line or you focus on employee happiness. Like we will understand that without happy employees who are engaged and doing fulfilling and meaningful work, we actually don't have a great bottom line to talk about. Right? Our organizations would look like inclusion and wellbeing and belonging, it's just part of the business strategy. It's not this separate siloed thing. It's not this thing that we talk about when we are worried about how the woman or the gays may react. Right. KORI: But it's just something that is operationalized into our values, into our competencies, into how we evaluate people, into how we promote people, and that we are constantly in humility, learning from each other. Right. So that even when somebody who's a chief inclusion and diversity officer, here's a phrase and someone says, "Did you realize that that was ableist?" That I would say, "I didn't. Tell me more." And once you tell me more, I changed my language, because we understand that we're always going to be moving. We're always going to be learning something new and there's always an opportunity to be better. And if we do that, we will also see different representation at all levels. We will actually have critical mass of diversity in our organizations. And then I would be unemployed. CHRIS: I was going to wrap up with this though, Kori, like if I was to serve up to you 500 managing partners, that were, again, I think one of the things that you've already mentioned is every individual in an organization is either additive or perhaps distracts from the culture that you're ultimately trying to create. A lot of the wellbeing discussion is about connecting and emphasizing wellbeing with decision makers and those who set the tone of organizations. And so my question to you is this, if I served up 500 managing partners of all sizes of firms around the country and they came and Kori was the keynote, what would be your message to them? KORI: My message to them would be that they are ridiculously in charge, that things happen in their organizations because they allow it, or they create it. And that by choosing to focus a hundred percent on their inclusive leadership skills and up in their ability to interrupt bias, to be culturally fluent, they could transform their organizations because where the leader goes, everyone else follows. BREE: Right. CHRIS: That's great. That's awesome. Well, again, Kori, you have certainly cultivated my curiosity, which I know is one of the things that you strongly advocate for. Couldn't be prouder to have you on the podcast and the sharing of your perspective. We got to get you more platforms for you to be able to shout loudly about these particular issues, because again, we got a lot of work to do, right. We know that there's a lot to be done in terms of realizing the potential of this profession, to realizing the potential of historically underrepresented and marginalized lawyers within our profession. Bree, I think that we all would agree that even as we pursue our wellbeing mission, that so much more has to be done on the diversity, equity, and inclusion perspective that integrates in the intersection there between those two that lanes need to merge in a much more substantive way. KORI: Thank you. CHRIS: Thank you, Kori. KORI: I appreciate it. I appreciate you having me. I appreciate you allowing Justin to come and hold my hand because she's my blinky today. I appreciate you inviting us to talk about what we're doing at Seyfarth and just my perspective as an individual separate from Seyfarth. Again, I've said this before, the work you're doing is so critically important. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for everything that you do to promote wellbeing in the profession. So important. CHRIS: Awesome. Well, again, thanks for joining us. We will be back with the podcast probably in a couple weeks with our executive director, Jennifer DiSanza, which we are so excited to be having her join us as we talk about the future of where this movement is going. Thanks again, Kori. And to all our friends out there, we will be back in a couple weeks.

Welcome from Chad, Jon and Chris Thank you Pratik M, Jonathan K, Nathan E, Rory H and Mika Announcements and News  Con of the Rings 2022 Tickets on Sale now! conoftheringsmn.com Random Review Redo: The Heroes New Progression: Is there one? I just got the new Angmar Awakens hero box. Now What? AMA  Farewell!  

About ChrisChris Short has been a proponent of open source solutions throughout his over two decades in various IT disciplines, including systems, security, networks, DevOps management, and cloud native advocacy across the public and private sectors. He currently works on the Kubernetes team at Amazon Web Services and is an active Kubernetes contributor and Co-chair of OpenGitOps. Chris is a disabled US Air Force veteran living with his wife and son in Greater Metro Detroit. Chris writes about Cloud Native, DevOps, and other topics at ChrisShort.net. He also runs the Cloud Native, DevOps, GitOps, Open Source, industry news, and culture focused newsletter DevOps'ish.Links Referenced: DevOps'ish: https://devopsish.com/ EKS News: https://eks.news/ Containers from the Couch: https://containersfromthecouch.com opengitops.dev: https://opengitops.dev ChrisShort.net: https://chrisshort.net Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChrisShort TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Coming back to us since episode two—it's always nice to go back and see the where are they now type of approach—I am joined by Senior Developer Advocate at AWS Chris Short. Chris, been a few years. How has it been?Chris: Ha. Corey, we have talked outside of the podcast. But it's been good. For those that have been listening, I think when we recorded I wasn't even—like, when was season two, what year was that? [laugh].Corey: Episode two was first pre-pandemic and the rest. I believe—Chris: Oh. So, yeah. I was at Red Hat, maybe, when I—yeah.Corey: Yeah. You were doing Red Hat stuff, back when you got to work on open-source stuff, as opposed to now, where you're not within 1000 miles of that stuff, right?Chris: Actually well, no. So, to be clear, I'm on the EKS team, the Kubernetes team here at AWS. So, when I joined AWS in October, they were like, “Hey, you do open-source stuff. We like that. Do more.” And I was like, “Oh, wait, do more?” And they were like, “Yes, do more.” “Okay.”So, since joining AWS, I've probably done more open-source work than the three years at Red Hat that I did. So, that's kind of—you know, like, it's an interesting point when I talk to people about it because the first couple months are, like—you know, my friends are like, “So, are you liking it? Are you enjoying it? What's going on?” And—Corey: Do they beat you with reeds? Like, all the questions people have about companies? Because—Chris: Right. Like, I get a lot of random questions about Amazon and AWS that I don't know the answer to.Corey: Oh, when I started telling people, I fixed Amazon bills, I had to quickly pivot that to AWS bills because people started asking me, “Well, can you save me money on underpants?” It's I—Chris: Yeah.Corey: How do you—fine. Get the prime credit card. It docks 5% off the bill, so there you go. But other than that, no, I can't.Chris: No.Corey: It's—Chris: Like, I had to call my bank this morning about a transaction that I didn't recognize, and it was from Amazon. And I was like, that's weird. Why would that—Corey: Money just flows one direction, and that's the wrong direction from my employer.Chris: Yeah. Like, what is going on here? It shouldn't have been on that card kind of thing. And I had to explain to the person on the phone that I do work at Amazon but under the Web Services team. And he was like, “Oh, so you're in IT?”And I'm like, “No.” [laugh]. “It's actually this big company. That—it's a cloud company.” And they're like, “Oh, okay, okay. Yeah. The cloud. Got it.” [laugh]. So, it's interesting talking to people about, “I work at Amazon.” “Oh, my son works at Amazon distribution center,” blah, blah, blah. It's like, cool. “I know about that, but very little. I do this.”Corey: Your son works in Amazon distribution center. Is he a robot? Is normally my next question on that? Yeah. That's neither here nor there.So, you and I started talking a while back. We both write newsletters that go to a somewhat similar audience. You write DevOps'ish. I write Last Week in AWS. And recently, you also have started EKS News because, yeah, the one thing I look at when I'm doing these newsletters every week is, you know what I want to do? That's right. Write more newsletters.Chris: [laugh].Corey: So, you are just a glutton for punishment? And, yeah, welcome to the addiction, I suppose. How's it been going for you?Chris: It's actually been pretty interesting, right? Like, we haven't pushed it very hard. We're now starting to include it in things. Like we did Container Day; we made sure that EKS news was on the landing page for Container Day at KubeCon EU. And you know, it's kind of just grown organically since then.But it was one of those things where it's like, internally—this happened at Red Hat, right—when I started live streaming at Red Hat, the ultimate goal was to do our product management—like, here's what's new in the next version thing—do those live so anybody can see that at any point in time anywhere on Earth, the second it's available. Similar situation to here. This newsletter actually is generated as part of a report my boss puts together to brief our other DAs—or developer advocates—you know, our solutions architects, the whole nine yards about new EKS features. So, I was like, why can't we just flip that into a weekly newsletter, you know? Like, I can pull from the same sources you can.And what's interesting is, he only does the meeting bi-weekly. So, there's some weeks where it's just all me doing it and he ends up just kind of copying and pasting the newsletter into his document, [laugh] and then adds on for the week. But that report meeting for that team is now getting disseminated to essentially anyone that subscribes to eks.news. Just go to the site, there's a subscribe thing right there. And we've gotten 20 issues in and it's gotten rave reviews, right?Corey: I have been a subscriber for a while. I will say that it has less Chris Short personality—Chris: Mm-hm.Corey: —to it than DevOps'ish does, which I have to assume is by design. A lot of The Duckbill Group's marketing these days is no longer in my voice, rather intentionally, because it turns out that being a sarcastic jackass and doing half-billion dollar AWS contracts can not to be the most congruent thing in the world. So okay, we're slowly ameliorating that. It's professional voice versus snarky voice.Chris: Well, and here's the thing, right? Like, I realized this year with DevOps'ish that, like, if I want to take a week off, I have to do, like, what you did when your child was born. You hired folks to like, do the newsletter for you, or I actually don't do the newsletter, right? It's binary: hire someone else to do it, or don't do it. So, the way I structured this newsletter was that any developer advocate on my team could jump in and take over the newsletter so that, you know, if I'm off that week, or whatever may be happening, I, Chris Short, am not the voice. It is now the entire developer advocate team.Corey: I will challenge you on that a bit. Because it's not Chris Short voice, that's for sure, but it's also not official AWS brand voice either.Chris: No.Corey: It is clearly written by a human being who is used to communicating with the audience for whom it is written. And that is no small thing. Normally, when oh, there's a corporate newsletter; that's just a lot of words to say it's bad. This one is good. I want to be very clear on that.Chris: Yeah, I mean, we have just, like, DevOps'ish, we have sections, just like your newsletter, there's certain sections, so any new, what's new announcements, those go in automatically. So, like, that can get delivered to your inbox every Friday. Same thing with new blog posts about anything containers related to EKS, those will be in there, then Containers from the Couch, our streaming platform, essentially, for all things Kubernetes. Those videos go in.And then there's some ecosystem news as well that I collect and put in the newsletter to give people a broader sense of what's going on out there in Kubernetes-land because let's face it, there's upstream and then there's downstream, and sometimes those aren't in sync, and that's normal. That's how Kubernetes kind of works sometimes. If you're running upstream Kubernetes, you are awesome. I appreciate you, but I feel like that would cause more problems and it's worse sometimes.Corey: Thank you for being the trailblazers. The rest of us can learn from your misfortune.Chris: [laugh]. Yeah, exactly. Right? Like, please file your bugs accordingly. [laugh].Corey: EKS is interesting to me because I don't see a lot of it, which is, probably, going to get a whole lot of, “Wait, what?” Moments because wait, don't you deal with very large AWS bills? And I do. But what I mean by that is that EKS, until you're using its Fargate expression, charges for the control plane, which rounds to no money, and the rest is running on EC2 instances running in a company's account. From the billing perspective, there is no difference between, “We're running massive fleets of EKS nodes.” And, “We're managing a whole bunch of EC2 instances by hand.”And that feels like an interesting allegory for how Kubernetes winds up expressing itself to cloud providers. Because from a billing perspective, it just looks like one big single-tenant application that has some really strange behaviors internally. It gets very chatty across AZs when there's no reason to, and whatnot. And it becomes a very interesting study in how to expose aspects of what's going on inside of those containers and inside of the Kubernetes environment to the cloud provider in a way that becomes actionable. There are no good answers for this yet, but it's something I've been seeing a lot of. Like, “Oh, I thought you'd be running Kubernetes. Oh, wait, you are and I just keep forgetting what I'm looking at sometimes.”Chris: So, that's an interesting point. The billing is kind of like, yeah, it's just compute, right? So—Corey: And my insight into AWS and the way I start thinking about it is always from a billing perspective. That's great. It's because that means the more expensive the services, the more I know about it. It's like, “IAM. What is that?” Like, “Oh, I have no idea. It's free. How important could it be?” Professional advice: do not take that philosophy, ever.Chris: [laugh]. No. Ever. No.Corey: Security: it matters. Oh, my God. It's like you're all stars. Your IAM policy should not be. I digress.Chris: Right. Yeah. Anyways, so two points I want to make real quick on that is, one, we've recently released an open-source project called Carpenter, which is really cool in my purview because it looks at your Kubernetes file and says, “Oh, you want this to run on ARM instance.” And you can even go so far as to say, right, here's my limits, and it'll find an instance that fits those limits and add that to your cluster automatically. Run your pod on that compute as long as it needs to run and then if it's done, it'll downsize—eventually, kind of thing—your cluster.So, you can basically just throw a bunch of workloads at it, and it'll auto-detect what kind of compute you will need and then provision it for you, run it, and then be done. So, that is one-way folks are probably starting to save money running EKS is to adopt Carpenter as your autoscaler as opposed to the inbuilt Kubernetes autoscaler. Because this is instance-aware, essentially, so it can say, like, “Oh, your massive ARM application can run here,” because you know, thank you, Graviton. We have those processors in-house. And you know, you can run your ARM64 instances, you can run all the Intel workloads you want, and it'll right size the compute for your workloads.And I'll look at one container or all your containers, however you want to configure it. Secondly, the good folks over at Kubecost have opencost, which is the open-source version of Kubecost, basically. So, they have a service that you can run in your clusters that will help you say, “Hey, maybe this one notes too heavy; maybe this one notes too light,” and you know, give you some insights into Kubernetes spend that are a little bit more granular as far as usage and things like that go. So, those two projects right there, I feel like, will give folks an optimal savings experience when it comes to Kubernetes. But to your point, it's just compute, right? And that's really how we treat it, kind of, here internally is that it's a way to run… compute, Kubernetes, or ECS, or any of those tools.Corey: A fairly expensive one because ignoring entirely for a second the actual raw cost of compute, you also have the other side of it, which is in every environment, unless you are doing something very strange or pre-funding as a one-person startup in your spare time, your payroll costs will it—should—exceed your AWS bill by a fairly healthy amount. And engineering time is always more expensive than services time. So, for example, looking at EKS, I would absolutely recommend people use that rather than rolling their own because—Chris: Rolling their own? Yeah.Corey: —get out of that engineering space where your time is free. I assure you from a business context, it is not. So, there's always that question of what you can do to make things easier for people and do more of the heavy lifting.Chris: Yeah, and to your rather cheeky point that there's 17 ways to run a container on AWS, it is answering that question, right? Like those 17 ways, like, how much of this do you want to run yourself, you could run EKS distro on EC2 instances if you want full control over your environment.Corey: And then run IoT Greengrass core on top within that cluster—Chris: Right.Corey: So, I can run my own Lambda function runtime, so I'm not locked in. Also, DynamoDB local so I'm not locked into AWS. At which point I have gone so far around the bend, no one can help me.Chris: Well—Corey: Pro tip, don't do that. Just don't do that.Chris: But to your point, we have all these options for compute, and specifically containers because there's a lot of people that want to granularly say, “This is where my engineering team gets involved. Everything else you handle.” If I want EKS on Spot Instances only, you can do that. If you want EKS to use Carpenter and say only run ARM workloads, you can do that. If you want to say Fargate and not have anything to manage other than the container file, you can do that.It's how much does your team want to manage? That's the customer obsession part of AWS coming through when it comes to containers is because there's so many different ways to run those workloads, but there's so many different ways to make sure that your team is right-sized, based off the services you're using.Corey: I do want to change gears a bit here because you are mostly known for a couple of things: the DevOps'ish newsletter because that is the oldest and longest thing you've been doing the time that I've known you; EKS, obviously. But when prepping for this show, I discovered you are now co-chair of the OpenGitOps project.Chris: Yes.Corey: So, I have heard of GitOps in the context of, “Oh, it's just basically your CI/CD stuff is triggered by Git events and whatnot.” And I'm sitting here going, “Okay, so from where you're sitting, the two best user interfaces in the world that you have discovered are YAML and Git.” And I just have to start with the question, “Who hurt you?”Chris: [laugh]. Yeah, I share your sentiment when it comes to Git. Not so much with YAML, but I think it's because I'm so used to it. Maybe it's Stockholm Syndrome, maybe the whole YAML thing. I don't know.Corey: Well, it's no XML. We'll put it that way.Chris: Thankfully, yes because if it was, I would have way more, like, just template files laying around to build things. But the—Corey: And rage. Don't forget rage.Chris: And rage, yeah. So, GitOps is a little bit more than just Git in IaC—infrastructure as Code. It's more like Justin Garrison, who's also on my team, he calls it infrastructure software because there's four main principles to GitOps, and if you go to opengitops.dev, you can see them. It's version one.So, we put them on the website, right there on the page. You have to have a declared state and that state has to live somewhere. Now, it's called GitOps because Git is probably the most full-featured thing to put your state in, but you could use an S3 bucket and just version it, for example. And make it private so no one else can get to it.Corey: Or you could use local files: copy-of-copy-of-this-thing-restored-parentheses-use-this-one-dot-final-dot-doc-dot-zip. You know, my preferred naming convention.Chris: Ah, yeah. Wow. Okay. [laugh]. Yeah.Corey: Everything I touch is terrifying.Chris: Yes. Geez, I'm sorry. So first, it's declarative. You declare your state. You store it somewhere. It's versioned and immutable, like I said. And then pulled automatically—don't focus so much on pull—but basically, software agents are applying the desired state from source. So, what does that mean? When it's—you know, the fourth principle is implemented, continuously reconciled. That means those software agents that are checking your desired state are actually putting it back into the desired state if it's out of whack, right? So—Corey: You're talking about agents running it persistently on instances, validating—Chris: Yes.Corey: —a checkpoint on a cron. How is this meaningfully different than a Puppet agent running in years past? Having spent I learned to speak publicly by being a traveling trainer for Puppet; same type of model, and in fact, when I was at Pinterest, we wound up having a fair bit—like, that was their entire model, where they would have—the Puppet's code would live in an S3 bucket that was then copied down, I believe, via Git, and then applied to the instance on a schedule. Like, that sounds like this was sort of a early days GitOps.Chris: Yeah, exactly. Right? Like so it's, I like to think of that as a component of GitOps, right? DevOps, when you talk about DevOps in general, there's a lot of stuff out there. There's a lot of things labeled DevOps that maybe are, or maybe aren't sticking to some of those DevOps core things that make you great.Like the stuff that Nicole Forsgren writes about in books, you know? Accelerate is on my desk for a reason because there's things that good, well-managed DevOps practices do. I see GitOps as an actual implementation of DevOps in an open-source manner because all the tooling for GitOps these days is open-source and it all started as open-source. Now, you can get, like, Flux or Argo—Argo, specifically—there's managed services out there for it, you can have Flux and not maintain it, through an add-on, on EKS for example, and it will reconcile that state for you automatically. And the other thing I like to say about GitOps, specifically, is that it moves at the speed of the Kubernetes Audit Log.If you've ever looked at a Kubernetes audit log, you know it's rather noisy with all these groups and versions and kinds getting thrown out there. So, GitOps will say, “Oh, there's an event for said thing that I'm supposed to be watching. Do I need to change anything? Yes or no? Yes? Okay, go.”And the change gets applied, or, “Hey, there's a new Git thing. Pull it in. A change has happened inGit I need to update it.” You can set it to reconcile on events on time. It's like a cron or it's like an event-driven architecture, but it's combined.Corey: How does it survive the stake through the heart of configuration management? Because before I was doing all this, I wasn't even a T-shaped engineer: you're broad across a bunch of things, but deep in one or two areas, and one of mine was configuration management. I wrote part of SaltStack, once upon a time—Chris: Oh.Corey: —due to a bunch of very strange coincidences all hitting it once, like, I taught people how to use Puppet. But containers ultimately arose and the idea of immutable infrastructure became a thing. And these days when we were doing full-on serverless, well, great, I just wind up deploying a new code bundle to the Lambdas function that I wind up caring about, and that is a immutable version replacement. There is no drift because there is no way to log in and change those things other than through a clear deployment of this as the new version that goes out there. Where does GitOps fit into that imagined pattern?Chris: So, configuration management becomes part of your approval process, right? So, you now are generating an audit log, essentially, of all changes to your system through the approval process that you set up as part of your, how you get things into source and then promote that out to production. That's kind of the beauty of it, right? Like, that's why we suggest using Git because it has functions, like, requests and issues and things like that you can say, “Hey, yes, I approve this,” or, “Hey, no, I don't approve that. We need changes.” So, that's kind of natively happening with Git and, you know, GitLab, GitHub, whatever implementation of Git. There's always, kind of—Corey: Uh, JIF-ub is, I believe, the pronunciation.Chris: JIF-ub? Oh.Corey: Yeah. That's what I'm—Chris: Today, I learned. Okay.Corey: Exactly. And that's one of the things that I do for my lasttweetinaws.com Twitter client that I build—because I needed it, and if other people want to use it, that's great—that is now deployed to 20 different AWS commercial regions, simultaneously. And that is done via—because it turns out that that's a very long to execute for loop if you start down that path—Chris: Well, yeah.Corey: I wound up building out a GitHub Actions matrix—sorry a JIF-ub—actions matrix job that winds up instantiating 20 parallel builds of the CDK deploy that goes out to each region as expected. And because that gets really expensive with native GitHub Actions runners for, like, 36 cents per deploy, and I don't know how to test my own code, so every time I have a typo, that's another quarter in the jar. Cool, but that was annoying for me so I built my own custom runner system that uses Lambda functions as runners running containers pulled from ECR that, oh, it just runs in parallel, less than three minutes. Every time I commit something between I press the push button and it is out and running in the wild across all regions. Which is awesome and also terrifying because, as previously mentioned, I don't know how to test my code.Chris: Yeah. So, you don't know what you're deploying to 20 regions sometime, right?Corey: But it also means I have a pristine, re-composable build environment because I can—Chris: Right.Corey: Just automatically have that go out and the fact that I am making a—either merging a pull request or doing a direct push because I consider main to be my feature branch as whenever something hits that, all the automation kicks off. That was something that I found to be transformative as far as a way of thinking about this because I was very tired of having to tweak my local laptop environment to, “Oh, you didn't assume the proper role and everything failed again and you broke it. Good job.” It wound up being something where I could start developing on more and more disparate platforms. And it finally is what got me away from my old development model of everything I build is on an EC2 instance, and that means that my editor of choice was Vim. I use the VS Code now for these things, and I'm pretty happy with it.Chris: Yeah. So, you know, I'm glad you brought up CDK. CDK gives you a lot of the capabilities to implement GitOps in a way that you could say, like, “Hey, use CDK to declare I need four Amazon EKS clusters with this size, shape, and configuration. Go.” Or even further, connect to these EKS clusters to RDS instances and load balancers and everything else.But you put that state into Git and then you have something that deploys that automatically upon changes. That is infrastructure as code. Now, when you say, “Okay, main is your feature branch,” you know, things happen on main, if this were running in Kubernetes across a fleet of clusters or the globe-wide in 20 regions, something like Flux or Argo would kick in and say, “There's been a change to source, main, and we need to roll this out.” And it'll start applying those changes. Now, what do you get with GitOps that you don't get with your configuration?I mean, can you rollback if you ever have, like, a bad commit that's just awful? I mean, that's really part of the process with GitOps is to make sure that you can, A, roll back to the previous good state, B, roll forward to a known good state, or C, promote that state up through various environments. And then having that all done declaratively, automatically, and immutably, and versioned with an audit log, that I think is the real power of GitOps in the sense that, like, oh, so-and-so approve this change to security policy XYZ on this date at this time. And that to an auditor, you just hand them a log file on, like, “Here's everything we've ever done to our system. Done.” Right?Like, you could get to that state, if you want to, which I think is kind of the idea of DevOps, which says, “Take all these disparate tools and processes and procedures and culture changes”—culture being the hardest part to adopt in DevOps; GitOps kind of forces a culture change where, like, you can't do a CAB with GitOps. Like, those two things don't fly. You don't have a configuration management database unless you absolutely—Corey: Oh, you CAB now but they're all the comments of the pull request.Chris: Right. Exactly. Like, don't push this change out until Thursday after this other thing has happened, kind of thing. Yeah, like, that all happens in GitHub. But it's very democratizing in the sense that people don't have to waste time in an hour-long meeting to get their five minutes in, right?Corey: DoorDash had a problem. As their cloud-native environment scaled and developers delivered new features, their monitoring system kept breaking down. In an organization where data is used to make better decisions about technology and about the business, losing observability means the entire company loses their competitive edge. With Chronosphere, DoorDash is no longer losing visibility into their applications suite. The key? Chronosphere is an open-source compatible, scalable, and reliable observability solution that gives the observability lead at DoorDash business, confidence, and peace of mind. Read the full success story at snark.cloud/chronosphere. That's snark.cloud slash C-H-R-O-N-O-S-P-H-E-R-E.Corey: So, would it be overwhelmingly cynical to suggest that GitOps is the means to implement what we've all been pretending to have implemented for the last decade when giving talks at conferences?Chris: Ehh, I wouldn't go that far. I would say that GitOps is an excellent way to implement the things you've been talking about at all these conferences for all these years. But keep in mind, the technology has changed a lot in the, what 11, 12 years of the existence of DevOps, now. I mean, we've gone from, let's try to manage whole servers immutably to, “Oh, now we just need to maintain an orchestration platform and run containers.” That whole compute interface, you go from SSH to a Docker file, that's a big leap, right?Like, you don't have bespoke sysadmins; you have, like, a platform team. You don't have DevOps engineers; they're part of that platform team, or DevOps teams, right? Like, which was kind of antithetical to the whole idea of DevOps to have a DevOps team. You know, everybody's kind of in the same boat now, where we see skill sets kind of changing. And GitOps and Kubernetes-land is, like, a platform team that manages the cluster, and its state, and health and, you know, production essentially.And then you have your developers deploying what they want to deploy in when whatever namespace they've been given access to and whatever rights they have. So, now you have the potential for one set of people—the platform team—to use one set of GitOps tooling, and your applications teams might not like that, and that's fine. They can have their own namespaces with their own tooling in it. Like, Argo, for example, is preferred by a lot of developers because it has a nice UI with green and red dots and they can show people and it looks nice, Flux, it's command line based. And there are some projects out there that kind of take the UI of Argo and try to run Flux underneath that, and those are cool kind of projects, I think, in my mind, but in general, right, I think GitOps gives you the choice that we missed somewhat in DevOps implementations of the past because it was, “Oh, we need to go get cloud.” “Well, you can only use this cloud.” “Oh, we need to go get this thing.” “Well, you can only use this thing in-house.”And you know, there's a lot of restrictions sometimes placed on what you can use in your environment. Well, if your environment is Kubernetes, how do you restrict what you can run, right? Like you can't have an easily configured say, no open-source policy if you're running Kubernetes. [laugh] so it becomes, you know—Corey: Well, that doesn't stop some companies from trying.Chris: Yeah, that's true. But the idea of, like, enabling your developers to deploy at will and then promote their changes as they see fit is really the dream of DevOps, right? Like, same with production and platform teams, right? I want to push my changes out to a larger system that is across the globe. How do I do that? How do I manage that? How do I make sure everything's consistent?GitOps gives you those ways, with Kubernetes native things like customizations, to make consistent environments that are robust and actually going to be reconciled automatically if someone breaks the glass and says, “Oh, I need to run this container immediately.” Well, that's going to create problems because it's deviated from state and it's just that one region, so we'll put it back into state.Corey: It'll be dueling banjos, at some point. You'll try and doing something manually, it gets reverted automatically. I love that pattern. You'll get bored before the computer does, always.Chris: Yeah. And GitOps is very new, right? When you think about the lifetime of GitOps, I think it was coined in, like, 2018. So, it's only four years old, right? When—Corey: I prefer it to ChatOps, at least, as far as—Chris: Well, I mean—Corey: —implementation and expression of the thing.Chris: —ChatOps was a way to do DevOps. I think GitOps—Corey: Well, ChatOps is also a way to wind up giving whoever gets access to your Slack workspace root in production.Chris: Mmm.Corey: But that's neither here nor there.Chris: Mm-hm.Corey: It's yeah, we all like to pretend that's not a giant security issue in our industry, but that's a topic for another time.Chris: Yeah. And that's why, like, GitOps also depends upon you having good security, you know, and good authorization and approval processes. It enforces that upon—Corey: Yeah, who doesn't have one of those?Chris: Yeah. If it's a sole operation kind of deal, like in your setup, your case, I think you kind of got it doing right, right? Like, as far as GitOps goes—Corey: Oh, to be clear, we are 11 people and we do have dueling pull requests and all the rest.Chris: Right, right, right.Corey: But most of the stuff I talk about publicly is not our production stuff, so it really is just me. Just as a point of clarity there. I've n—the 11 people here do not all—the rest of you don't just sit there and clap as I do all the work.Chris: Right.Corey: Most days.Chris: No, I'm sure they don't. I'm almost certain they don't clap… for you. I mean, they would—Corey: No. No, they try and talk me out of it in almost every case.Chris: Yeah, exactly. So, the setup that you, Corey Quinn, have implemented to deploy these 20 regions is kind of very GitOps-y, in the sense that when main changes, it gets updated. Where it's not GitOps-y is what if the endpoint changes? Does it get reconciled? That's the piece you're probably missing is that continuous reconciliation component, where it's constantly checking and saying, “This thing out there is deployed in the way I want it. You know, the way I declared it to be in my source of truth.”Corey: Yeah, when you start having other people getting involved, there can—yeah, that's where regressions enter. And it's like, “Well, I know where things are so why would I change the endpoint?” Yeah, it turns out, not everyone has the state of the entire application in their head. Ideally it should live in—Chris: Yeah. Right. And, you know—Corey: —you know, Git or S3.Chris: —when I—yeah, exactly. When I think about interactions of the past coming out as a new DevOps engineer to work with developers, it's always been, will developers have access to prod or they don't? And if you're in that environment with—you're trying to run a multi-billion dollar operation, and your devs have direct—or one Dev has direct access to prod because prod is in his brain, that's where it's like, well, now wait a minute. Prod doesn't have to be only in your brain. You can put that in the codebase and now we know what is in your brain, right?Like, you can almost do—if you document your code, well, you can have your full lifecycle right there in one place, including documentation, which I think is the best part, too. So, you know, it encourages approval processes and automation over this one person has an entire state of the system in their head; they have to go in and fix it. And what if they're not on call, or in Jamaica, or on a cruise ship somewhere kind of thing? Things get difficult. Like, for example, I just got back from vacation. We were so far off the grid, we had satellite internet. And let me tell you, it was hard to write an email newsletter where I usually open 50 to 100 tabs.Corey: There's a little bit of internet out Californ-ie way.Chris: [laugh].Corey: Yeah it's… it's always weird going from, like, especially after pandemic; I have gigabit symmetric here and going even to re:Invent where I'm trying to upload a bunch of video and whatnot.Chris: Yeah. Oh wow.Corey: And the conference WiFi was doing its thing, and well, Verizon 5G was there but spotty. And well, yeah. Usual stuff.Chris: Yeah. It's amazing to me how connectivity has become so ubiquitous.Corey: To the point where when it's not there anymore, it's what do I do with myself? Same story about people pushing back against remote development of, “Oh, I'm just going to do it all on my laptop because what happens if I'm on a plane?” It's, yeah, the year before the pandemic, I flew 140,000 miles domestically and I was almost never hamstrung by my ability to do work. And my only local computer is an iPad for those things. So, it turns out that is less of a real world concern for most folks.Chris: Yeah I actually ordered the components to upgrade an old Nook that I have here and turn it into my, like, this is my remote code server, that's going to be all attached to GitHub and everything else. That's where I want to be: have Tailscale and just VPN into this box.Corey: Tailscale is transformative.Chris: Yes. Tailscale will change your life. That's just my personal opinion.Corey: Yep.Chris: That's not an AWS opinion or anything. But yeah, when you start thinking about your network as it could be anywhere, that's where Tailscale, like, really shines. So—Corey: Tailscale makes the internet work like we all wanted to believe that it worked.Chris: Yeah. And Wireguard is an excellent open-source project. And Tailscale consumes that and puts an amazingly easy-to-use UI, and troubleshooting tools, and routing, and all kinds of forwarding capabilities, and makes it kind of easy, which is really, really, really kind of awesome. And Tailscale and Kubernetes—Corey: Yeah, ‘network' and ‘easy' don't belong in the same sentence, but in this case, they do.Chris: Yeah. And trust me, the Kubernetes story in Tailscale, there is a lot of there. I understand you might want to not open ports in your VPC, maybe, but if you use Tailscale, that node is just another thing on your network. You can connect to that and see what's going on. Your management cluster is just another thing on the network where you can watch the state.But it's all—you're connected to it continuously through Tailscale. Or, you know, it's a much lighter weight, kind of meshy VPN, I would say, if I had to sum it up in one sentence. That was not on our agenda to talk about at all. Anyways. [laugh]Corey: No, no. I love how many different topics we talk about on these things. We'll have to have you back soon to talk again. I really want to thank you for being so generous with your time. If people want to learn more about what you're up to and how you view these things, where can they find you?Chris: Go to ChrisShort.net. So, Chris Short—I'm six-four so remember, it's Short—dot net, and you will find all the places that I write, you can go to devopsish.com to subscribe to my newsletter, which goes out every week. This year. Next year, there'll be breaks. And then finally, if you want to follow me on Twitter, Chris Short: at @ChrisShort on Twitter. All one word so you see two s's. Like, it's okay, there's two s's there.Corey: Links to all of that will of course be in the show notes. It's easier for people to do the clicky-clicky thing as a general rule.Chris: Clicky things are easier than the wordy things, yes.Corey: Says the Kubernetes guy.Chris: Yeah. Says the Kubernetes guy. Yeah, you like that, huh? Like I said, Argo gives you a UI. [laugh].Corey: Thank you [laugh] so much for your time. I really do appreciate it.Chris: Thank you. This has been fun. If folks have questions, feel free to reach out. Like, I am not one of those people that hides behind a screen all day and doesn't respond. I will respond to you eventually.Corey: I'm right here, Chris. Come on, come on. You're calling me out in front of myself. My God.Chris: Egh. It might take a day or two, but I will respond. I promise.Corey: Thanks again for your time. This has been Chris Short, senior developer advocate at AWS. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice and if it's YouTube, click the thumbs-up button. Whereas if you've hated this podcast, same thing, smash the buttons five-star review and leave an insulting comment that is written in syntactically correct YAML because it's just so easy to do.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

About ChrisChris is the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at incident.io, where they're building incident management products that people actually want to use. A software engineer by trade, Chris is no stranger to gnarly incidents, having participated (and caused!) them at everything from early stage startups through to enormous IT organizations.Links Referenced: incident.io: https://incident.io Practical Guide to Incident Management: https://incident.io/guide/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: DoorDash had a problem. As their cloud-native environment scaled and developers delivered new features, their monitoring system kept breaking down. In an organization where data is used to make better decisions about technology and about the business, losing observability means the entire company loses their competitive edge. With Chronosphere, DoorDash is no longer losing visibility into their applications suite. The key? Chronosphere is an open-source compatible, scalable, and reliable observability solution that gives the observability lead at DoorDash business, confidence, and peace of mind. Read the full success story at snark.cloud/chronosphere. That's snark.cloud slash C-H-R-O-N-O-S-P-H-E-R-E.Corey: Let's face it, on-call firefighting at 2am is stressful! So there's good news and there's bad news. The bad news is that you probably can't prevent incidents from happening, but the good news is that incident.io makes incidents less stressful and a lot more valuable. incident.io is a Slack-native incident management platform that allows you to automate incident processes, focus on fixing the issues and learn from incident insights to improve site reliability and fix your vulnerabilities. Try incident.io, recover faster and sleep more.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Today's promoted guest is Chris Evans, who's the CPO and co-founder of incident.io. Chris, first, thank you very much for joining me. And I'm going to start with an easy question—well, easy question, hard answer, I think—what is an incident.io exactly?Chris: Incident.io is a software platform that helps entire organizations to respond to recover from and learn from incidents.Corey: When you say incident, that means an awful lot of things. And depending on where you are in the ecosystem in the world, that means different things to different people. For example, oh, incident. Like, “Are you talking about the noodle incident because we had an agreement that we would never speak about that thing again,” style, versus folks who are steeped in DevOps or SRE culture, which is, of course, a fancy way to say those who are sad all the time, usually about computers. What is an incident in the context of what you folks do?Chris: That, I think, is the killer question. I think if you look at organizations in the past, I think incidents were those things that happened once a quarter, maybe once a year, and they were the thing that brought the entirety of your site down because your big central database that was in a data center sort of disappeared. The way that modern companies run means that the definition has to be very, very different. So, most places now rely on distributed systems and there is no, sort of, binary sense of up or down these days. And essentially, in the general case, like, most companies are continually in a sort of state of things being broken all of the time.And so, for us, when we look at what an incident is, it is essentially anything that takes you away from your planned work with a sense of urgency. And that's the sort of the pithy definition that we use there. Generally, that can mean anything—it means different things to different folks, and, like, when we talk to folks, we encourage them to think carefully about what that threshold is, but generally, for us at incident.io, that means basically a single error that is worthwhile investigating that you would stop doing your backlog work for is an incident. And also an entire app being down, that is an incident.So, there's quite a wide range there. But essentially, by sort of having more incidents and lowering that threshold, you suddenly have a heap of benefits, which I can go very deep into and talk for hours about.Corey: It's a deceptively complex question. When I talk to folks about backups, one of the biggest problems in the world of backup and building a DR plan, it's not building the DR plan—though that's no picnic either—it's okay. In the time of cloud, all your planning figures out, okay. Suddenly the site is down, how do we fix it? There are different levels of down and that means different things to different people where, especially the way we build apps today, it's not is the service or site up or down, but with distributed systems, it's how down is it?And oh, we're seeing elevated error rates in us-tire-fire-1 region of AWS. At what point do we begin executing on our disaster plan? Because the worst answer, in some respects is, every time you think you see a problem, you start failing over to other regions and other providers and the rest, and three minutes in, you've irrevocably made the cutover and it's going to take 15 minutes to come back up. And oh, yeah, then your primary site comes back up because whoever unplugged something, plugged it back in and now you've made the wrong choice. Figuring out all the things around the incident, it's not what it once was.When you were running your own blog on a single web server and it's broken, it's pretty easy to say, “Is it up or is it down?” As you scale out, it seems like that gets more and more diffuse. But it feels to me that it's also less of a question of how the technology has scaled, but also how the culture and the people have scaled. When you're the only engineer somewhere, you pretty much have no choice but to have the entire state of your stack shoved into your head. When that becomes 15 or 20 different teams of people, in some cases, it feels like it's almost less than a technology problem than it is a problem of how you communicate and how you get people involved. And the issues in front of the people who are empowered and insightful in a certain area that needs fixing.Chris: A hundred percent. This is, like, a really, really key point, which is that organizations themselves are very complex. And so, you've got this combination of systems getting more and more complicated, more and more sort of things going wrong and perpetually breaking but you've got very, very complicated information structures and communication throughout the whole organization to keep things up and running. The very best orgs are the ones where they can engage the entire, sort of, every corner of the organization when things do go wrong. And lived and breathed this firsthand when various different previous companies, but most recently at Monzo—which is a bank here in the UK—when an incident happened there, like, one of our two physical data center locations went down, the bank wasn't offline. Everything was resilient to that, but that required an immediate response.And that meant that engineers were deployed to go and fix things. But it also meant the customer support folks might be required to get involved because we might be slightly slower processing payments. And it means that risk and compliance folks might need to get involved because they need to be reporting things to regulators. And the list goes on. There's, like, this need for a bunch of different people who almost certainly have never worked together or rarely worked together to come together, land in this sort of like empty space of this incident room or virtual incident room, and figure out how they're going to coordinate their response and get things back on track in the sort of most streamlined way and as quick as possible.Corey: Yeah, when your bank is suddenly offline, that seems like a really inopportune time to be introduced to the database team. It's, “Oh, we have one of those. Wonderful. I feel like you folks are going to come in handy later today.” You want to have those pathways of communication open well in advance of these issues.Chris: A hundred percent. And I think the thing that makes incidents unique is that fact. And I think the solution to that is this sort of consistent, level playing field that you can put everybody on. So, if everybody understands that the way that incidents are dealt with is consistent, we declare it like this, and under these conditions, these things happen. And, you know, if I flag this kind of level of impact, we have to pull in someone else to come and help make a decision.At the core of it, there's this weird kind of duality to incidents where they are both kind of semi-formulaic and that you can basically encode a lot of the processes that happen, but equally, they are incredibly chaotic and require a lot of human impact to be resilient and figure these things out because stuff that you have never seen happen before is happening and failing in ways that you never predicted. And so, this is where incident.io plays into this is that we try to take the first half of that off of your hands, which is, we will help you run your process so that all of the brain capacity you have, it goes on to the bit that humans are uniquely placed to be able to do, which is responding to these very, very chaotic, sort of, surprise events that have happened.Corey: I feel as well—because I played around in this space a bit before I used to run ops teams—and, more or less I really should have had a t-shirt then that said, “I am the root cause,” because yeah, I basically did a lot of self-inflicted outages in various environments because it turns out, I'm not always the best with computers. Imagine that. There are a number of different companies that play in the space that look at some part of the incident lifecycle. And from the outside, first, they all look alike because it's, “Oh, so you're incident.io. I assume you're PagerDuty. You're the thing that calls me at two in the morning to make sure I wake up.”Conversely, for folks who haven't worked deeply in that space, as well, of setting things on fire, what you do sounds like it's highly susceptible to the Hacker News problem. Where, “Wait, so what you do is effectively just getting people to coordinate and talk during an incident? Well, that doesn't sound hard. I could do that in a weekend.” And no, no, you can't.If this were easy, you would not have been in business as long as you have, have the team the size that you do, the customers that you do. But it's one of those things that until you've been in a very specific set of a problem, it doesn't sound like it's a real problem that needs solving.Chris: Yeah, I think that's true. And I think that the Hacker News point is a particularly pertinent one and that someone else, sort of, in an adjacent area launched on Hacker News recently, and the amount of feedback they got around, you know, “You're a Slack bot. How is this a company?” Was kind of staggering. And I think generally where that comes from is—well, first of all that bias that engineers have, which is just everything you look at as an engineer is like, “Yeah, I can build that in a weekend.” I think there's often infinite complexity under the hood that just gets kind of brushed over. But yeah, I think at the core of it, you probably could build a Slack bot in a weekend that creates a channel for you in Slack and allows you to post somewhere that some—Corey: Oh, good. More channels in Slack. Just when everyone wants.Chris: Well, there you go. I mean, that's a particular pertinent one because, like, our tool does do that. And one of the things—so I built at Monzo, a version of incident.io that we used at the company there, and that was something that I built evenings and weekends. And among the many, many things I never got around to building, archiving and cleaning up channels was one of the ones that was always on that list.And so, Monzo did have this problem of littered channels everywhere, I think that sort of like, part of the problem here is, like, it is easy to look at a product like ours and sort of assume it is this sort of friendly Slack bot that helps you orchestrate some very basic commands. And I think when you actually dig into the problems that organizations above a certain size have, they're not solved by Slack bots. They're solved by platforms that help you to encode your processes that otherwise have to live on a Google Doc somewhere which is five pages long and when it's 2 a.m. and everything's on fire, I guarantee you not a single person reads that Google Doc, so your process is as good as not in place at all. That's the beauty of a tool like ours. We have a powerful engine that helps you basically to encode that and take some load off of you.Corey: To be clear, I'm also not coming at this from a position of judging other people. I just look right now at the Slack workspace that we have The Duckbill Group, and we have something like a ten-to-one channel-to-human ratio. And the proliferation of channels is a very real thing. And the problem that I've seen across the board with other things that try to address incident management has always been fanciful at best about what really happens when something breaks. Like, you talk about, oh, here's what happens. Step one: you will pull up the Google Doc, or you will pull up the wiki or the rest, or in some aspirational places, ah, something seems weird, I will go open a ticket in Jira.Meanwhile, here in reality, anyone who's ever worked in these environments knows that step one, “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. What are we going to do?” And all the practices and procedures that often exist, especially in orgs that aren't very practiced at these sorts of things, tend to fly out the window and people are going to do what they're going to do. So, any tool or any platform that winds up addressing that has to accept the reality of meeting people where they are not trying to educate people into different patterns of behavior as such. One of the things I like about your approach is, yeah, it's going to be a lot of conversation in Slack that is a given we can pretend otherwise, but here in reality, that is how work gets communicated, particularly in extremis. And I really appreciate the fact that you are not trying to, like, fight what feels almost like a law of nature at this point.Chris: Yeah, I think there's a few things in that. The first point around the document approach or the clearly defined steps of how an incident works. In my experience, those things have always gone wrong because—Corey: The data center is down, so we're going to the wiki to follow our incident management procedure, which is in the data center just lost power.Chris: Yeah.Corey: There's a dependency problem there, too. [laugh].Chris: Yeah, a hundred percent. [laugh]. A hundred percent. And I think part of the problem that I see there is that very, very often, you've got this situation where the people designing the process are not the people following the process. And so, there's this classic, I've heard it through John Allspaw, but it's a bunch of other folks who talk about the difference between people, you know, at the sharp end or the blunt end of the work.And I think the problem that people are facing the past is you have these people who sit in the, sort of, metaphorical upstairs of the office and think that they make a company safe by defining a process on paper. And they ship the piece of paper and go, “That is a good job for me done. I'm going to leave and know that I've made the bank—the other whatever your organization does—much, much safer.” And I think this is where things fall down because—Corey: I want to ambush some of those people in their performance reviews with, “Cool. Just for fun, all the documentation here, we're going to pull up the analytics to see how often that stuff gets viewed. Oh, nobody ever sees it. Hmm.”Chris: It's frustrating. It's frustrating because that never ever happens, clearly. But the point you made around, like, meeting people where you are, I think that is a huge one, which is incidents are founded on great communication. Like, as I said earlier, this is, like, a form of team with someone you've never ever worked with before and the last thing you want to do is be, like, “Hey, Corey, I've never met you before, but let's jump out onto this other platform somewhere that I've never been or haven't been for weeks and we'll try and figure stuff out over there.” It's like, no, you're going to be communicating—Corey: We use Slack internally, but we have a WhatsApp chat that we wind up using for incident stuff, so go ahead and log into WhatsApp, which you haven't done in 18 months, and join the chat. Yeah, in the dawn of time, in the mists of antiquity, you vaguely remember hearing something about that your first week and then never again. This stuff has to be practiced and it's important to get it right. How do you approach the inherent and often unfortunate reality that incident response and management inherently becomes very different depending upon the specifics of your company or your culture or something like that? In other words, how cookie-cutter is what you have built versus adaptable to different environments it finds itself operating in?Chris: Man, the amount of time we spent as a founding team in the early days deliberating over how opinionated we should be versus how flexible we should be was staggering. The way we like to describe it as we are quite opinionated about how we think incidents should be run, however we let you imprint your own process into that, so putting some color onto that. We expect incidents to have a lead. That is something you cannot get away from. However, you can call the lead whatever makes sense for you at your organization. So, some folks call them an incident commander or a manager or whatever else.Corey: There's overwhelming militarization of these things. Like, oh, yes, we're going to wind up taking a bunch of terms from the military here. It's like, you realize that your entire giant screaming fire is that the lights on the screen are in the wrong pattern. You're trying to make them in the right pattern. No one dies here in most cases, so it feels a little grandiose for some of those terms being tossed around in some cases, but I get it. You've got to make something that is unpleasant and tedious in many respects, a little bit more gripping. I don't envy people. Messaging is hard.Chris: Yeah, it is. And I think if you're overly virtuoustic and inflexible, you're sort of fighting an uphill battle here, right? So, folks are going to want to call things what they want to call things. And you've got people who want to import [ITIL 00:15:04] definitions for severity ease into the platform because that's what they're familiar with. That's fine.What we are opinionated about is that you have some severity levels because absent academic criticism of severity levels, they are a useful mechanism to very coarsely and very quickly assess how bad something is and to take some actions off of it. So yeah, we basically have various points in the product where you can customize and put your own sort of flavor on it, but generally, we have a relatively opinionated end-to-end expectation of how you will run that process.Corey: The thing that I find that annoys me—in some cases—the most is how heavyweight the process is, and it's clearly built by people in an ivory tower somewhere where there's effectively a two-day long postmortem analysis of the incident, and so on and so forth. And okay, great. Your entire site has been blown off the internet, yeah, that probably makes sense. But as soon as you start broadening that to things like okay, an increase in 500 errors on this service for 30 minutes, “Great. Well, we're going to have a two-day postmortem on that.” It's, “Yeah, sure would be nice if we could go two full days without having another incident of that caliber.” So, in other words, whose foot—are we going to hire a new team whose full-time job it is, is to just go ahead and triage and learn from all these incidents? Seems to me like that's sort of throwing wood behind the wrong arrows.Chris: Yeah, I think it's very reductive to suggest that learning only happens in a postmortem process. So, I wrote a blog, actually, not so long ago that is about running postmortems and when it makes sense to do it. And as part of that, I had a sort of a statement that was [laugh] that we haven't run a single postmortem when I wrote this blog at incident.io. Which is probably shocking to many people because we're an incident company, and we talk about this stuff, but we were also a company of five people and when something went wrong, the learning was happening and these things were sort of—we were carving out the time, whether it was called a postmortem, or not to learn and figure out these things. Extrapolating that to bigger companies, there is little value in following processes for the sake of following processes. And so, you could have—Corey: Someone in compliance just wound up spitting their coffee over their desktop as soon as you said that. But I hear you.Chris: Yeah. And it's those same folks who are the ones who care about the document being written, not the process and the learning happening. And I think that's deeply frustrating to me as—Corey: All the plans, of course, assume that people will prioritize the company over their own family for certain kinds of disasters. I love that, too. It's divorced from reality; that's ridiculous, on some level. Speaking of ridiculous things, as you continue to grow and scale, I imagine you integrate with things beyond just Slack. You grab other data sources and over in the fullness of time.For example, I imagine one of your most popular requests from some of your larger customers is to integrate with their HR system in order to figure out who's the last engineer who left, therefore everything immediately their fault because lord knows the best practice is to pillory whoever was the last left because then they're not there to defend themselves anymore and no one's going to get dinged for that irresponsible jackass's decisions, even if they never touched the system at all. I'm being slightly hyperbolic, but only slightly.Chris: Yeah. I think [laugh] that's an interesting point. I am definitely going to raise that feature request for a prefilled root cause category, which is, you know, the value is just that last person who left the organization. That it's a wonderful scapegoat situation there. I like it.To the point around what we do integrate with, I think the thing is actually with incidents that's quite interesting is there is a lot of tooling that exists in this space that does little pockets of useful, valuable things in the shape of incidents. So, you have PagerDuty is this system that does a great job of making people's phone making noise, but that happens, and then you're dropped into this sort of empty void of nothingness and you've got to go and figure out what to do. And then you've got things like Jira where clearly you want to be able to track actions that are coming out of things going wrong in some cases, and that's a great tool for that. And various other things in the middle there. And yeah, our value proposition, if you want to call it that, is to bring those things together in a way that is massively ergonomic during an incident.So, when you're in the middle of an incident, it is really handy to be able to go, “Oh, I have shipped this horrible fix to this thing. It works, but I must remember to undo that.” And we put that at your fingertips in an incident channel from Slack, that you can just log that action, lose that cognitive load that would otherwise be there, move on with fixing the thing. And you have this sort of—I think it's, like, that multiplied by 1000 in incidents that is just what makes it feel delightful. And I cringe a little bit saying that because it's an incident at the end of the day, but genuinely, it feels magical when some things happen that are just like, “Oh, my gosh, you've automatically hooked into my GitHub thing and someone else merged that PR and you've posted that back into the channel for me so I know that that happens. That would otherwise have been a thing where I jump out of the incident to go and figure out what was happening.”Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friend EnterpriseDB. EnterpriseDB has been powering enterprise applications with PostgreSQL for 15 years. And now EnterpriseDB has you covered wherever you deploy PostgreSQL on-premises, private cloud, and they just announced a fully-managed service on AWS and Azure called BigAnimal, all one word. Don't leave managing your database to your cloud vendor because they're too busy launching another half-dozen managed databases to focus on any one of them that they didn't build themselves. Instead, work with the experts over at EnterpriseDB. They can save you time and money, they can even help you migrate legacy applications—including Oracle—to the cloud. To learn more, try BigAnimal for free. Go to biganimal.com/snark, and tell them Corey sent you.Corey: The problem with the cloud, too, is the first thing that, when there starts to be an incident happening is the number one decision—almost the number one decision point is this my shitty code, something we have just pushed in our stuff, or is it the underlying provider itself? Which is why the AWS status page being slow to update is so maddening. Because those are two completely different paths to go down and you are having to pursue both of them equally at the same time until one can be ruled out. And that is why time to identify at least what side of the universe it's on is so important. That has always been a bit of a tricky challenge.I want to talk a bit about circular dependencies. You target a certain persona of customer, but I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that one explicit company that you are not going to want to do business with in your current iteration is Slack itself because a tool to manage—okay, so our service is down, so we're going to go to Slack to fix it doesn't work when the service is Slack itself. So, that becomes a significant challenge. As you look at this across the board, are you seeing customers having problems where you have circular dependency issues with this? Easy example: Slack is built on top of AWS.When there's an underlying degradation of, huh, suddenly us-east-1 is not doing what it's supposed to be doing, now, Slack is degraded as well, as well as the customer site, it seems like at that point, you're sort of in a bit of tricky positioning as a customer. Counterpoint, when neither Slack nor your site are working, figuring out what caused that issue doesn't seem like it's the biggest stretch of the imagination at that point.Chris: I've spent a lot of my career working in infrastructure, platform-type teams, and I think you can end up tying yourself in knots if you try and over-optimize for, like, avoiding these dependencies. I think it's one of those, sort of, turtles all the way down situations. So yes, Slack are unlikely to become a customer because they are clearly going to want to use our product when they are down.Corey: They reach out, “We'd like to be your customer.” Your response is, “Please don't be.” None of us are going to be happy with this outcome.Chris: Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing that is that we're friends with some folks at Slack, and they believe it or not, they do use Slack to navigate their incidents. They have an internal tool that they have written. And I think this sort of speaks to the point we made earlier, which is that incidents and things failing or not these sort of big binary events. And so—Corey: All of Slack is down is not the only kind of incident that a company like Slack can experience.Chris: I'd go as far as that it's most commonly not that. It's most commonly that you're navigating incidents where it is a degradation, or some edge case, or something else that's happened. And so, like, the pragmatic solution here is not to avoid the circular dependencies, in my view; it's to accept that they exist and make sure you have sensible escape hatches so that when something does go wrong—so a good example, we use incident.io at incident.io to manage incidents that we're having with incident.io. And 99% of the time, that is absolutely fine because we are having some error in some corner of the product or a particular customer is doing something that is a bit curious.And I could count literally on one hand the number of times that we have not been able to use our products to fix our product. And in those cases, we have a fallback which is jump into—Corey: I assume you put a little thought into what happened. “Well, what if our product is down?” “Oh well, I guess we'll never be able to fix it or communicate about it.” It seems like that's the sort of thing that, given what you do, you might have put more than ten seconds of thought into.Chris: We've put a fair amount of thought into it. But at the end of the day, [laugh] it's like if stuff is down, like, what do you need to do? You need to communicate with people. So, jump on a Google Chat, jump on a Slack huddle, whatever else it is we have various different, like, fallbacks in different order. And at the core of it, I think this is the thing is, like, you cannot be prepared for every single thing going wrong, and so what you can be prepared for is to be unprepared and just accept that humans are incredibly good at being resilient, and therefore, all manner of things are going to happen that you've never seen before and I guarantee you will figure them out and fix them, basically.But yeah, I say this; if my SOC 2 auditor is listening, we also do have a very well-defined, like, backup plan in our SOC 2 [laugh] in our policies and processes that is the thing that we will follow that. But yeah.Corey: The fact that you're saying the magic words of SOC 2, yes, exactly. Being in a responsible adult and living up to some baseline compliance obligations is really the sign of a company that's put a little thought into these things. So, as I pull up incident.io—the website, not the company to be clear—and look through what you've written and how you talk about what you're doing, you've avoided what I would almost certainly have not because your tagline front and center on your landing page is, “Manage incidents at scale without leaving Slack.” If someone were to reach out and say, well, we're down all the time, but we're using Microsoft Teams, so I don't know that we can use you, like, the immediate instinctive response that I would have for that to the point where I would put it in the copy is, “Okay, this piece of advice is free. I would posit that you're down all the time because you're the kind of company to use Microsoft Teams.” But that doesn't tend to win a whole lot of friends in various places. In a slightly less sarcastic bent, do you see people reaching out with, “Well, we want to use you because we love what you're doing, but we don't use Slack.”Chris: Yeah. We do. A lot of folks actually. And we will support Teams one day, I think. There is nothing especially unique about the product that means that we are tied to Slack.It is a great way to distribute our product and it sort of aligns with the companies that think in the way that we do in the general case but, like, at the core of what we're building, it's a platform that augments a communication platform to make it much easier to deal with a high-stress, high-pressure situation. And so, in the future, we will support ways for you to connect Microsoft Teams or if Zoom sought out getting rich app experiences, talk on a Zoom and be able to do various things like logging actions and communicating with other systems and things like that. But yeah, for the time being very, very deliberate focus mechanism for us. We're a small company with, like, 30 people now, and so yeah, focusing on that sort of very slim vertical is working well for us.Corey: And it certainly seems to be working to your benefit. Every person I've talked to who is encountered you folks has nothing but good things to say. We have a bunch of folks in common listed on the wall of logos, the social proof eye chart thing of here's people who are using us. And these are serious companies. I mean, your last job before starting incident.io was at Monzo, as you mentioned.You know what you're doing in a regulated, serious sense. I would be, quite honestly, extraordinarily skeptical if your background were significantly different from this because, “Well, yeah, we worked at Twitter for Pets in our three-person SRE team, we can tell you exactly how to go ahead and handle your incidents.” Yeah, there's a certain level of operational maturity that I kind of just based upon the name of the company there; don't think that Twitter for Pets is going to nail. Monzo is a bank. Guess you know what you're talking about, given that you have not, basically, been shut down by an army of regulators. It really does breed an awful lot of confidence.But what's interesting to me is the number of people that we talk to in common are not themselves banks. Some are and they do very serious things, but others are not these highly regulated, command-and-control, top-down companies. You are nimble enough that you can get embedded at those startup-y of startup companies once they hit a certain point of scale and wind up helping them arrive at a better outcome. It's interesting in that you don't normally see a whole lot of tools that wind up being able to speak to both sides of that very broad spectrum—and most things in between—very effectively. But you've somehow managed to thread that needle. Good work.Chris: Thank you. Yeah. What else can I say other than thank you? I think, like, it's a deliberate product positioning that we've gone down to try and be able to support those different use cases. So, I think, at the core of it, we have always tried to maintain the incident.io should be installable and usable in your very first incident without you having to have a very steep learning curve, but there is depth behind it that allows you to support a much more sophisticated incident setup.So, like, I mean, you mentioned Monzo. Like, I just feel incredibly fortunate to have worked at that company. I joined back in 2017 when they were, I don't know, like, 150,000 customers and it was just getting its banking license. And I was there for four years and was able to then see it scale up to 6 million customers and all of the challenges and pain that goes along with that both from building infrastructure on the technical side of things, but from an organizational side of things. And was, like, front-row seat to being able to work with some incredibly smart people and sort of see all these various different pain points.And honestly, it feels a little bit like being in sort of a cheat mode where we get to this import a lot of that knowledge and pain that we felt at Monzo into the product. And that happens to resonate with a bunch of folks. So yeah, I feel like things are sort of coming out quite well at the moment for folks.Corey: The one thing I will say before we wind up calling this an episode is just how grateful I am that I don't have to think about things like this anymore. There's a reason that the problem that I chose to work on of expensive AWS bills being very much a business-hours only style of problem. We're a services company. We don't have production infrastructure that is externally facing. “Oh, no, one of our data analysis tools isn't working internally.”That's an interesting curiosity, but it's not an emergency in the same way that, “Oh, we're an ad network and people are looking at ads right now because we're broken,” is. So, I am grateful that I don't have to think about these things anymore. And also a little wistful because there's so much that you do it would have made dealing with expensive and dangerous outages back in my production years a lot nicer.Chris: Yep. I think that's what a lot of folks are telling us essentially. There's this curious thing with, like, this product didn't exist however many years ago and I think it's sort of been quite emergent in a lot of companies that, you know, as sort of things have moved on, that something needs to exist in this little pocket of space, dealing with incidents in modern companies. So, I'm very pleased that what we're able to build here is sort of working and filling that for folks.Corey: Yeah. I really want to thank you for taking so much time to go through the ethos of what you do, why you do it, and how you do it. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to go? Ideally, not during an incident.Chris: Not during an incident, obviously. Handily, the website is the company name. So, incident.io is a great place to go and find out more. We've literally—literally just today, actually—launched our Practical Guide to Incident Management, which is, like, a really full piece of content which, hopefully, will be useful to a bunch of different folks.Corey: Excellent. We will, of course, put a link to that in the [show notes 00:29:52]. I really want to thank you for being so generous with your time. Really appreciate it.Chris: Thanks so much. It's been an absolute pleasure.Corey: Chris Evans, Chief Product Officer and co-founder of incident.io. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this episode, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment telling me why your latest incident is all the intern's fault.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Steph has a baby update and thoughts on movies, plus a question for Chris related to migrating Test Unit tests to RSpec. Chris watched a video from Google I/O where Chrome devs talked about a new feature called Page Transitions. He's also been working with a tool called Customer.io, an omnichannel communication whiz-bang adventure! Page transitions Overview (https://youtu.be/JCJUPJ_zDQ4) Using yield_self for composable ActiveRecord relations (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/using-yieldself-for-composable-activerecord-relations) A Case for Query Objects in Rails (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/a-case-for-query-objects-in-rails) Customer.io (https://customer.io/) Turning the database inside-out with Apache Samza | Confluent (https://www.confluent.io/blog/turning-the-database-inside-out-with-apache-samza/) Datomic (https://www.datomic.com/) About CRDTs • Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (https://crdt.tech/) Apache Kafka (https://kafka.apache.org/) Resilient Management | A book for new managers in tech (https://resilient-management.com/) Mixpanel: Product Analytics for Mobile, Web, & More (https://mixpanel.com/) Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed! Transcript: CHRIS: Golden roads are golden. Okay, everybody's got golden roads. You have golden roads, yes? That is what we're -- STEPH: Oh, I have golden roads, yes. [laughter] CHRIS: You might should inform that you've got golden roads, yeah. STEPH: Yeah, I don't know if I say might should as much but might could. I have been called out for that one a lot; I might could do that. CHRIS: [laughs] STEPH: That one just feels so natural to me than normal. Anytime someone calls it out, I'm like, yeah, what about it? [laughter] CHRIS: Do you want to fight? STEPH: Yeah, are we going to fight? CHRIS: I might could fight you. STEPH: I might could. I might should. [laughter] CHRIS: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Steph, what's new in your world? STEPH: Hey, Chris. I have a couple of fun updates. I have a baby Viccari update, so little baby weighs about two pounds now, two pounds. I'm 25 weeks along. So not that I actually know the exact weight, I'm using all those apps that estimate based on how far along you are, so around two pounds, which is novel. Oh, and then the other thing I'm excited to tell you about...I'm not sure how I should feel that I just got more excited about this other thing. I'm very excited about baby Viccari. But the other thing is there's a new Jurassic Park movie coming out, and I'm very excited. I think it's June 10th is when it comes out. And given how much we have sung that theme song to each other and make references to what a clever girl, I needed to share that with you. Maybe you already know, maybe you're already in the loop, but if you don't, it's coming. CHRIS: Yeah, the internet likes to yell things like that. Have you watched all of the most recent ones? There are like two, and I think this will be the third in the revisiting or whatever, the Jurassic World version or something like that. But have you watched the others? STEPH: I haven't seen all of them. So I've, of course, seen the first one. I saw the one that Chris Pratt was in, and now he's in the latest one. But I think I've missed...maybe there's like two in the middle there. I have not watched those. CHRIS: There are three in the original trilogy, and then there are three now in the new trilogy, which now it's ending, and they got everybody. STEPH: Oh, I'm behind. CHRIS: They got people from the first one, and they got the people from the second trilogy. They just got everybody, and that's exciting. You know, it's that thing where they tap into nostalgia, and they take advantage of us via it. But I'm fine. I'm here for it. STEPH: I'm here for it, especially for Jurassic Park. But then there's also a new Top Gun movie coming out, which, I'll be honest, I'm totally going to watch. But I really didn't remember the first one. I don't know that I've really ever watched the first Top Gun. So Tim, my partner, and I watched that recently, and it's such a bad movie. I'm going to say it; [laughs] it's a bad movie. CHRIS: I mean, I don't want to disagree, but the volleyball scene, come on, come on, the volleyball scene. [laughter] STEPH: I mean, I totally had a good time watching the movie. But the one part that I finally kept complaining about is because every time they showed the lead female character, I can't think of her character name or the actress's name, but they kept playing that song, Take My Breath Away. And I was like, can we just get past the song? [laughs] Because if you go back and watch that movie, I swear they play it like six different times. It was a lot. It was too much. So I moved it into bad movie category but bad movie totally worth watching, whatever category that is. CHRIS: Now I kind of want to revisit it. I feel like the drinking game writes itself. But at a minimum, anytime Take My Breath Away plays, yeah. Well, all right, good to know. [laughs] STEPH: Well, if you do that, let me know how many shots or beers you drink because I think it will be a fair amount. I think it will be more than five. CHRIS: Yeah, it involves a delicate calibration to get that right. I don't think it's the sort of thing you just freehand. It writes itself but also, you want someone who's tried it before you so that you're not like, oh no, it's every time they show a jet. That was too many. You can't drink that much while watching this movie. STEPH: Yeah, that would be death by Top Gun. CHRIS: But not the normal way, the different, indirect death by Top Gun. STEPH: I don't know what the normal way is. [laughs] CHRIS: Like getting shot down by a Top Gun pilot. [laughter] STEPH: Yeah, that makes sense. [laughs] CHRIS: You know, the dogfighting in the plane. STEPH: The actual, yeah, going to war away. Just sitting on your couch and you drink too much poison away, yeah, that one. All right, that got weird. Moving on, [laughs] there's a new Jurassic Park movie. We're going to land on that note. And in the more technical world, I've got a couple of things on my mind. One of them is I have a question for you. I'm very excited to run this by you because I could use a friend in helping me decide what to do. So I am still on that journey where I am migrating Test::Unit test over to RSpec. And as I'm going through, it's going pretty well, but it's a little complicated because some of the Test::Unit tests have different setup than, say, the RSpec do. They might run different scripts beforehand where they're loading data. That's perhaps a different topic, but that's happening. And so that has changed a few things. But then overall, I've just been really just porting everything over, like, hey, if it exists in the Test::Unit, let's just bring it to RSpec, and then I'm going to change these asserts to expects and really not make any changes from there. But as I'm doing that, I'm seeing areas that I want to improve and things that I want to clear up, even if it's just extracting a variable name. Or, as I'm moving some of these over in Test::Unit, it's not clear to me exactly what the test is about. Like, it looks more like a method name in the way that the test is being described, but the actual behavior isn't clear to me as if I were writing this in RSpec, I think it would have more of a clear description. Maybe that's not specific to the actual testing framework. That might just be how these tests are set up. But I'm at that point where I'm questioning should I keep going in terms of where I am just copying everything over from Test::Unit and then moving it over to RSpec? Because ultimately, that is the goal, to migrate over. Or should I also include some time to then go back and clean up and try to add some clarity, maybe extract some variable names, see if I can reduce some lets, maybe even reduce some of the test helpers that I'm bringing over? How much cleanup should be involved, zero, lots? I don't know. I don't know what that...[laughs] I'm sure there's a middle ground in there somewhere. But I'm having trouble discerning for myself what's the right amount because this feels like one of those areas where if I don't do any cleanup, I'm not coming back to it, like, that's just the truth. So it's either now, or I have no idea when and maybe never. CHRIS: I'll be honest, the first thing that came to mind in this most recent time that you mentioned this is, did we consider just deleting these tests entirely? Is that on...like, there are very few of them, right? Like, are they even providing enough value? So that was question one, which let me pause to see what your thoughts there were. [chuckles] STEPH: I don't know if we specifically talked about that on the mic, but yes, that has been considered. And the team that owns those tests has said, "No, please don't delete them. We do get value from them." So we can port them over to RSpec, but we don't have time to port them over to RSpec. So we just need to keep letting them go on. But yet, not porting them conflicts with my goal of then trying to speed up CI. And so it'd be nice to collapse these Test::Unit tests over to RSpec because then that would bring our CI build down by several meaningful minutes. And also, it would reduce some of the complexity in the CI setup. CHRIS: Gotcha. Okay, so now, having set that aside, I always ask the first question of like, can you just put Derek Prior's phone number on the webpage and call it an app? Is that the MVP of this app? No? Okay, all right, we have to build more. But yeah, I think to answer it and in a general way of trying to answer a broader set of questions here... I think this falls into a category of like if you find yourself having to move around some code, if that code is just comfortably running and the main thing you need to do is just to get it ported over to RSpec, I would probably do as little other work as possible. With the one consideration that if you find yourself needing to deeply load up the context of these tests like actually understand them in order to do the porting, then I would probably take advantage of that context because it's hard to get your head into a given piece of code, test or otherwise. And so if you're in there and you're like, well, now that I'm here, I can definitely see that we could rearrange some stuff and just definitively make it better, if you get to that place, I would consider it. But if this ends up being mostly a pretty rote transformation like you said, asserts become expects, and lets get switched around, you know, that sort of stuff, if it's a very mechanical process of getting done, I would probably say very minimal. But again, if there is that, like, you know what? I had to understand the test in order to port them anyway, so while I'm here, let me take advantage of that, that's probably the thing that I would consider. But if not that, then I would say even though it's messy and whatnot and your inclination would be to clean it, I would say leave it roughly as is. That's my guess or how I would approach it. STEPH: Yeah, I love that. I love how you pointed out, like, did you build up the context? Because you're right, in a lot of these test cases, I'm not, or I'm trying really hard to not build up context. I'm trying very hard to just move them over and, if I have to, mainly to find test descriptions. That's the main area I'm struggling to...how can I more explicitly state what this test does so the next person reading this will have more comprehension than I do? But otherwise, I'm trying hard to not have any real context around it. And that's such a good point because that's often...when someone else is in the middle of something, and they're deciding whether to include that cleanup or refactor or improvement, one of my suggestions is like, hey, we've got the context now. Let's go with it. But if you've built up very little context, then that's not a really good catalyst or reason to then dig in deeper and apply that cleanup. That's super helpful. Thank you. That will help reinforce what I'm going to do, which is exactly let's migrate RSpec and not worry about cleanup, which feels terrible; I'm just going to say that into the world. But it also feels like the right thing to do. CHRIS: Well, I'm happy to have helped. And I share the like, and it feels terrible. I want to do the right thing, but sometimes you got to pick a battle sort of thing. STEPH: Cool. Well, that's a huge help to me. What's going on in your world? CHRIS: What's going on in my world? I watched a great video the other day from the Google I/O. I think it's an event; I'm not actually sure, conference or something like that. But it was some Google Chrome developers talking about a new feature that's coming to the platform called Page Transitions. And I've kept an eye on this for a while, but it seems like it's more real. Like, I think they put out an RFC or an initial sort of set of ideas a while back. And the web community was like, "Oh, that's not going to work out so well." So they went back to the drawing board, revisited. I've actually implemented in Chrome Canary a version of the API. And then, in the video that I watched, which we'll include a show notes link to, they demoed the functionality of the Page Transitions API and showed what you can do. And it's super cool. It allows for the sort of animations that you see in a lot of native mobile apps where you're looking at a ListView, you click on one of the items, and it grows to fill the whole screen. And now you're on the detail screen for that item that you were looking at. But there was this very continuous animated transition that allows you to keep context in your head and all of those sorts of nice things. And this just really helps to bridge that gap between, like, the web often lags behind the native mobile platforms in terms of the experiences that we can build. So it was really interesting to see what they've been able to pull off. The demo is a pretty short video, but it shows a couple of different variations of what you can build with it. And I was like, yeah, these look like cool native app transitions, really nifty. One thing that's very interesting is the actual implementation of this. So it's like you have one version of the page, and then you transition to a new version of the page, and in doing so, you want to animate between them. And the way that they do it is they have the first version of the page. They take a screenshot of it like the browser engine takes a screenshot of it. And then they put that picture on top of the actual browser page. Then they do the same thing with the next version of the page that they're going to transition to. And then they crossfade, like, change the opacity and size and whatnot between the two different images, and then you're there. And in the back of my mind, I'm like, I'm sorry, what now? You did which? I'm like, is this the genius solution that actually makes this work and is performant? And I wonder if there are trade-offs. Like, do you lose interactivity between those because you've got some images that are just on the screen? And what is that like? But as they were going through it, I was just like, wait, I'm sorry, you did what? This is either the best idea I've ever heard, or I'm not so sure about this. STEPH: That's fascinating. You had me with the first part in terms of they take a screenshot of the page that you're leaving. I'm like, yeah, that's a great idea. And then talking about taking a picture of the other page because then you have to load it but not show it to the user that it's loaded. And then take a picture of it, and then show them the picture of the loaded page. But then actually, like you said, then crossfade and then bring in the real functionality. I am...what am I? [laughter] CHRIS: What am I actually? STEPH: [laughs] What am I? I'm shocked. I'm surprised that that is so performant. Because yeah, I also wouldn't have thought of that, or I would have immediately have thought like, there's no way that's going to be performant enough. But that's fascinating. CHRIS: For me, performance seems more manageable, but it's the like, what are you trading off for that? Because that sounds like a hack. That sounds like the sort of thing I would recommend if we need to get an MVP out next week. And I'm like, what if we just tried this? Listen, it's got some trade-offs. So I'm really interested to see are those trade-offs present? Because it's the browser engine. It's, you know, the low-level platform that's actually managing this. And there are some nice hooks that allow you to control it. And at a CSS level, you can manage it and use keyframe animations to control the transition more directly. There's a JavaScript API to instrument the sequencing of things. And so it's giving you the right primitives and the right hooks. And the fact that the implementation happens to use pictures or screenshots, to use a slightly different word, it's like, okey dokey, that's what we're doing. Sounds fun. So I'm super interested because the functionality is deeply, deeply interesting to me. Svelte actually has a version of this, the crossfade utility, but you have to still really think about how do you sequence between the two pages and how do you do the connective tissue there? And then Svelte will manage it for you if you do all the right stuff. But the wiring up is somewhat complicated. So having this in the browser engine is really interesting to me. But yeah, pictures. STEPH: This is one of those ideas where I can't decide if this was someone who is very new to the team and new to the idea and was like, "Have we considered screenshots? Have we considered pictures?" Or if this is like the uber senior person on the team that was like, "Yeah, this will totally work with screenshots." I can't decide where in that range this idea falls, which I think makes me love it even more. Because it's very straightforward of like, hey, what if we just tried this? And it's working, so cool, cool, cool. CHRIS: There's a fantastic meme that's been making the rounds where it's a bell curve, and it's like, early in your career, middle of your career, late in your career. And so early in your career, you're like, everything in one file, all lines of code that's just where they go. And then in the middle of your career, you're like, no, no, no, we need different concerns, and files, and organizational structures. And then end of your career...and this was coming up in reference to the TypeScript team seems to have just thrown everything into one file. And it's the thing that they've migrated to over time. And so they have this many, many line file that is basically the TypeScript engine all in one file. And so it was a joke of like, they definitely know what they're doing with programming. They're not just starting last week sort of thing. And so it's this funny arc that certain things can go through. So I think that's an excellent summary there [laughs] of like, I think it was folks who have thought about this really hard. But I kind of hope it was someone who was just like, "I'm new here. But have we thought about pictures? What about pictures?" I also am a little worried that I just deeply misunderstood [laughs] the representation but glossed over it in the video, and I'm like, that sounds interesting. So hopefully, I'm not just wildly off base here. [laughs] But nonetheless, the functionality looks very interesting. STEPH: That would be a hilarious tweet. You know, I've been waiting for that moment where I've said something that I understood into the mic and someone on Twitter just being like, well, good try, but... [laughs] CHRIS: We had a couple of minutes where we tried to figure out what the opposite of ranting was, and we came up with pranting and made up a word instead of going with praising or raving. No, that's what it is, raving. [laughs] STEPH: No, raving. I will never forget now, raving. [laughs] CHRIS: So, I mean, we've done this before. STEPH: That's true. Although they were nice, I don't think they tweeted. I think they sent in an email. They were like, "Hey, friends." [laughter] CHRIS: Actually, we got a handful of emails on that. [laughter] STEPH: Did you know the English language? CHRIS: Thank you, kind Bikeshed audience, for not shaming us in public. I mean, feel free if you feel like it. [laughs] But one other thing that came up in this video, though, is the speaker was describing single-page apps are very common, and you want to have animated transitions and this and that. And I was like, single-page app, okay, fine. I don't like the terminology but whatever. I would like us to call it the client-side app or client-side routing or something else. But the fact that it's a single page is just a technical consideration that no user would call it that. Users are like; I go to the web app. I like that it has URLs. Those seem different to me. Anyway, this is my hill. I'm going to die on it. But then the speaker in the video, in contrast to single-page app referenced multi-page app, and I was like, oh, come on, come on. I get it. Like, yes, there are just balls of JavaScript that you can download on the internet and have a dynamic graphics editor. But I think almost all good things on the web should have URLs, and that's what I would call the multiple pages. But again, that's just me griping about some stuff. And to name it, I don't think I'm just griping for griping sake. Like, again, I like to think about things from the user perspective, and the URL being so important. And having worked with plenty of apps that are implemented in JavaScript and don't take the URL or the idea that we can have different routable resources seriously and everything is just one URL, that's a failure mode in my mind. We missed an opportunity here. So I think I'm saying a useful thing here and not just complaining on the internet. But with that, I will stop complaining on the internet and send it back over to you. What else is new in your world, Steph? STEPH: I do remember the first time that you griped about it, and you were griping about URLs. And there was a part of me that was like, what is he talking about? [laughter] And then over time, I was like, oh, I get it now as I started actually working more in that world. But it took me a little bit to really appreciate that gripe and where you're coming from. And I agree; I think you're coming from a reasonable place, not that I'm biased at all as your co-host, but you know. CHRIS: I really like the honest summary that you're giving of, like, honestly, the first time you said this, I let you go for a while, but I did not know what you were talking about. [laughs] And I was like, okay, good data point. I'm going to store that one away and think about it a bunch. But that's fine. I'm glad you're now hanging out with me still. [laughter] STEPH: Don't do that. Don't think about it a bunch. [laughs] Let's see, oh, something else that's going on in my world. I had a really fun pairing session with another thoughtboter where we were digging into query objects and essentially extracting some logic out of an ActiveRecord model and then giving that behavior its own space and elevated namespace in a query object. And one of the questions or one of the things that came up that we needed to incorporate was optional filters. So say if you are searching for a pizza place that's nearby and you provide a city, but you don't provide what's the optional zip code, then we want to make sure that we don't apply the zip code in the where clause because then you would return all the pizza places that have a nil zip code, and that's just not what you want. So we need to respect the fact that not all the filters need to be applied. And there are a couple of ways to go about it. And it was a fun journey to see the different ways that we could structure it. So one of the really good starting points is captured in a blog post by Derek Prior, which we'll include a link to in the show notes, and it's using yield_self for composable ActiveRecord relations. But essentially, it starts out with an example where it shows that you're assigning a value to then the result of an if statement. So it's like, hey, if the zip code is present, then let's filter by zip code; if not, then just give us back the original relation. And then you can just keep building on it from there. And then there's a really nice implementation that Derek built on that then uses yield_self to pass the relation through, which then provides a really nice readability for as you are then stepping through each filter and which one should and shouldn't be applied. And now there's another blog post, and this one's written by Thiago Silva, A Case for Query Objects in Rails. And this one highlighted an approach that I haven't used before. And I initially had some mixed feelings about it. But this approach uses the extending method, which is a method that's on ActiveRecord query methods. And it's used to extend the scope with additional methods. You can either do this by providing the name of a module or by providing a block. It's only going to apply to that instance or to that specific scope when you're using it. So it's not going to be like you're running an include or something like that where all instances are going to now have access to these methods. So by using that method, extending, then you can create a module that says, "Hey, I want to create this by zip code filter that will then check if we have a zip code, let's apply it, if not, return the relation. And it also creates a really pretty chaining experience of like, here's my original class name. Let's extend with these specific scopes, and then we can say by zip code, by pizza topping, whatever else it is that we're looking to filter by. And I was initially...I saw the extending, and it made me nervous because I was like, oh, what all does this apply to? And is it going to impact anything outside of this class? But the more I've looked at it, the more I really like it. So I think you've seen this blog post too. And I'm curious, what are your thoughts about this? CHRIS: I did see this blog post come through. I follow that thoughtbot blog real close because it turns out some of the best writing on the internet is on there. But I saw this...also, as an aside, I like that we've got two Derek Prior references in one episode. Let's see if we can go for three before the end. But one thing that did stand out to me in it is I have historically avoided scopes using scope like ActiveRecord macro thing. It's a class method, but like, it's magic. It does magic. And a while ago, class methods and scopes became roughly equivalent, not exactly equivalent, but close enough. And for me, I want to use methods because I know stuff about methods. I know about default arguments. And I know about all of these different subtleties because they're just methods at the end of the day, whereas scopes are special; they have certain behavior. And I've never really known of the behavior beyond the fact that they get implemented in a different way. And so I was never really sold on them. And they're different enough from methods, and I know methods well. So I'm like, let's use the normal stuff where we can. The one thing that's really interesting, though, is the returning nil that was mentioned in this blog post. If you return nil in a scope, it will handle that for you. Whereas all of my query objects have a like, well, if this thing applies, then scope dot or relation dot where blah, blah, blah, else return relation unchanged. And the fact that that natively exists within scope is interesting enough to make me reconsider my stance on scopes versus class methods. I think I'm still doing class method. But it is an interesting consideration that I was unaware of before. STEPH: Yeah, it's an interesting point. I hadn't really considered as much whether I'm defining a class-level method versus a scope in this particular case. And I also didn't realize that scopes handle that nil case for you. That was one of the other things that I learned by reading through this blog post. I was like, oh, that is a nicety. Like, that is something that I get for free. So I agree. I think this is one of those things that I like enough that I'd really like to try it out more and then see how it goes and start to incorporate it into my process. Because this feels like one of those common areas of where I get to it, and I'm like, how do I do this again? And yield_self was just complicated enough in terms of then using the fancy method method to then be able to call the method that I want that I was like, I don't remember how to do this. I had to look it up each time. But including this module with extending and then being able to use scopes that way feels like something that would be intuitive for me that then I could just pick up and run with each time. CHRIS: If it helps, you can use then instead of yield_self because we did upgrade our Ruby a while back to have that change. But I don't think that actually solves the thing that you're describing. I'd have liked the ampersand method and then simple method name magic incantation that is part of the thing that Derek wrote up. I do use it when I write query objects, but I have to think about it or look it up each time and be like, how do I do that? All right, that's how I do that. STEPH: Yeah, that's one of the things that I really appreciate is how often folks will go back and update blog posts, or they will add an addition to them to say, "Hey, there's something new that came out that then is still relevant to this topic." So then you can read through it and see the latest and the greatest. It's a really nice touch to a number of our blog posts. But yeah, that's what was on my mind regarding query objects. What else is going on in your world? CHRIS: I have this growing feeling that I don't quite know what to do with. I think I've talked about it across some of our conversations in the world of observability. But broadly, I'm starting to like...I feel like my brain has shifted, and I now see the world slightly differently, and I can't go back. But I also don't know how to stick the landing and complete this transition in my brain. So it's basically everything's an event stream; this feels true. That's life. The arrow of time goes in one direction as far as I understand it. And I'm now starting to see it manifest in the code that we're writing. Like, we have code to log things, and we have places where we want to log more intentionally. Then occasionally, we send stuff off to Sentry. And Sentry tells us when there are errors, that's great. But in a lot of places, we have both. Like, we will warn about something happening, and we'll send that to the logs because we want to have that in the logs, which is basically the whole history of what's happened. But we also have it in Sentry, but Sentry's version is just this expanded version that has a bunch more data about the user, and things, and the browser that they were in. But they're two variations on the same event. And then similarly, analytics is this, like, third leg of well, this thing happened, and we want to know about it in the context. And what's been really interesting is we're working with a tool called Customer.io, which is an omnichannel communication whiz-bang adventure. For us, it does email, SMS, and push notifications. And it's integrated into our segment pipeline, so events flow in, events and users essentially. So we have those two different primitives within it. And then within it, we can say like, when a user does X, then send them an email with this copy. As an aside, Customer.io is a fantastic platform. I'm super-duper impressed. We went through a search for a tool like it, and we ended up on a lot of sales demos with folks that were like, hey, so yeah, starting point is $25,000 per year. And, you know, we can talk about it, but it's only going to go up from there when we talk about it, just to be clear. And it's a year minimum contract, and you're going to love it. And we're like, you do have impressive platforms, but okay, that's a bunch. And then, we found Customer.io, and it's month-by-month pricing. And it had a surprisingly complete feature set. So overall, I've been super impressed with Customer.io and everything that they've afforded. But now that I'm seeing it, I kind of want to move everything into that world where like, Customer.io allows non-engineer team members to interact with that event stream and then make things happen. And that's what we're doing all the time. But I'm at that point where I think I see the thing that I want, but I have no idea how to get there. And it might not even be tractable either. There's the wonderful Turning the Database Inside Out talk, which describes how everything is an event stream. And what if we actually were to structure things that way and do materialized views on top of it? And the actual UI that you're looking at is a materialized view on top of the database, which is a materialized view on top of that event stream. So I'm mostly in this, like, I want to figure this out. I want to start to unify all this stuff. And analytics pipes to one tool that gets a version of this event stream, and our logs are just another, and our error system is another variation on it. But they're all sort of sampling from that one event stream. But I have no idea how to do that. And then when you have a database, then you're like, well, that's also just a static representation of a point in time, which is the opposite of an event stream. So what do you do there? So there are folks out there that are doing good thinking on this. So I'm going to keep my ear to the ground and try and see what's everybody thinking on this front? But I can't shake the feeling that there's something here that I'm missing that I want to stitch together. STEPH: I'm intrigued on how to take this further because everything you're saying resonates in terms of having these event streams that you're working with. But yet, I can't mentally replace that with the existing model that I have in my mind of where there are still certain ideas of records or things that exist in the world. And I want to encapsulate the data and store that in the database. And maybe I look it up based on when it happens; maybe I don't. Maybe I'm looking it up by something completely different. So yeah, I'm also intrigued by your thoughts, but I'm also not sure where to take it. Who are some of the folks that are doing some of the thinking in this area that you're interested in, or where might you look next? CHRIS: There's the Kafka world of we have an event log, and then we're processing on top of that, and we're building stream processing engines as the core. They seem to be closest to the Turning the Database Inside Out talk that I was thinking or that I mentioned earlier. There's also the idea of CRDTs, which are Conflict-free Replicated Data Types, which are really interesting. I see them used particularly in real-time application. So it's this other tool, but they are basically event logs. And then you can communicate them well and have two different people working on something collaboratively. And these event logs then have a natural way to come together and produce a common version of the document on either end. That's at least my loose understanding of it, but it seems like a variation on this theme. So I've been looking at that a little bit. But again, I can't see how to map that to like, but I know how to make a Rails app with a Postgres database. And I think I'm reasonably capable at it, or at least I've been able to produce things that are useful to humans using it. And so it feels like there is this pretty large gap. Because what makes sense in my head is if you follow this all the way, it fundamentally re-architects everything. And so that's A, scary, and B; I have no idea how to get there, but I am intrigued. Like, I feel like there's something there. There's also Datomic is the other thing that comes to mind, which is a database engine in the Clojure world that stores the versions of things over time; that idea of the user is active. It's like, well, yeah, but when were they not? That's an event. That transition is an event that Postgres does not maintain at this point. And so, all I know is that the user is active. Maybe I store a timestamp because I'm thinking proactively about this. But Datomic is like no, no, fundamentally, as a primitive in this database; that's how we organize and think about stuff. And I know I've talked about Datomic on here before. So I've circled around these ideas before. And I'm pretty sure I'm just going to spend a couple of minutes circling and then stop because I have no idea how to connect the dots. [laughs] But I want to figure this out. STEPH: I have not worked with Kafka. But one of the main benefits I understand with Kafka is that by storing everything as a stream, you're never going to lose like a message. So if you are sending a message to another system and then that message gets lost in transit, you don't actually know if it got acknowledged or what happened with it, and replaying is really hard. Where do you pick up again? While using something like Kafka, you know exactly what you sent last, and then you're not going to have that uncertainty as to what messages went through and which ones didn't. And then the ability to replay is so important. I'm curious, as you continue to explore this, do you have a particular pain point in mind that you'd like to see improve? Or is it more just like, this seems like a really cool, novel idea; how can I incorporate more of this into my world? CHRIS: I think it's the latter. But I think the thing that I keep feeling is we keep going back and re-instrumenting versions of this. We're adding more logging or more analytics events over the wire or other things. But then, as I send these analytics events over the wire, we have Mixpanel downstream as an analytics visualization and workflow tool or Customer.io. At this point, those applications, I think, have a richer understanding of our users than our core Rails app. And something about that feels wrong to me. We're also streaming everything that goes through segment to S3 because I had a realization of this a while back. I'm like, that event stream is very interesting. I don't want to lose it. I'm going to put it somewhere that I get to keep it. So even if we move off of either Mixpanel or Customer.io or any of those other platforms, we still have our data. That's our data, and we're going to hold on to it. But interestingly, Customer.io, when it sends a message, will push an event back into segments. So it's like doubly connected to segment, which is managing this sort of event bus of data. And so Mixpanel then gets an even richer set there, and the Rails app is like, I'm cool. I'm still hanging out, and I'm doing stuff; it's fine. But the fact that the Rails app is fundamentally less aware of the things that have happened is really interesting to me. And I am not running into issues with it, but I do feel odd about it. STEPH: That touched on a theme that is interesting to me, the idea that I hadn't really considered it in those terms. But yeah, our application provides the tool in which people can interact with. But then we outsource the behavior analysis of our users and understanding what that flow is and what they're going through. I hadn't really thought about those concrete terms and where someone else owns the behavior of our users, but yet we own all the interaction points. And then we really need both to then make decisions about features and things that we're building next. But that also feels like building a whole new product, that behavior analysis portion of it, so it's interesting. My consulting brain is going wild at the moment between like, yeah, it would be great to own that. But that the other time if there's this other service that has already built that product and they're doing it super well, then let's keep letting them manage that portion of our business until we really need to bring it in-house. Because then we need to incorporate it more into our application itself so then we can surface things to the user. That's the part where then I get really interested, or that's the pain point that I could see is if we wanted more of that behavior analysis, that then we want to surface that in the app, then always having to go to a third-party would start to feel tedious or could feel more brittle. CHRIS: Yeah, I'm definitely 100% on not rebuilding Mixpanel in our app and being okay with the fact that we're sending that. Again, the thing that I did to make myself feel better about this is stream the data to S3 so that I have a version of it. And if we want to rebuild the data warehouse down the road to build some sort of machine learning data pipeline thing, we've got some raw data to work with. But I'm noticing lots of places where we're transforming a side effect, a behavior that we have in the system to dispatching an event. And so right now, we have a bunch of stuff that we pipe over to Slack to inform our admin team, hey, this thing happened. You should probably intervene. But I'm looking at that, and we're doing it directly because we can control the message in Slack a little bit better. But I had this thought in the back of my mind; it's like, could we just send that as an event, and then some downstream tool can configure messages and alerts into Slack? Because then the admin team could actually instrument this themselves. And they could be like; we are no longer interested in this event. Users seem fine on that front. But we do care about this new event. And all we need to do as the engineering team is properly instrument all of that event stream tapping. Every event just needs to get piped over. And then lots of powerful tools downstream from that that can allow different consumers of that data to do things, and broadly, that dispatch events, consume them on the other side, do fun stuff. That's the story. That's the dream. But I don't know; I can't connect all the dots. It's probably going to take me a couple of weeks to connect all these dots, or maybe years, or maybe my entire career, something like that. But, I don't know, I'm going to keep trying. STEPH: This feels like a fun startup narrative, though, where you start by building the thing that people can interact with. As more people start to interact with it, how do we start giving more of our team the ability to then manage the product that then all of these users are interacting with? And then that's the part that you start optimizing for. So there are always different interesting bits when you talk about the different stages of Sagewell, and like, what's the thing you're optimizing for? And I'm sure it's still heavily users. But now there's also this addition of we are also optimizing for our team to now manage the product. CHRIS: Yes, you're 100%. You're spot on there. We have definitely joked internally about spinning out a small company to build this analytics alerting tool [laughs] but obviously not going to do that because that's a distraction. And it is interesting, like, we want to build for the users the best thing that we can and where the admin team fits within that. To me, they're very much customers of engineering. Our job is to build the thing for the users but also, to be honest, we have to build a thing for the admins to support the users and exactly where that falls. Like, you and I have talked a handful of times about maybe the admin isn't as polished in design as other things. But it's definitely tested because that's a critical part of how this application works. Maybe not directly for a user but one step removed for a user, so it matters. Absolutely we're writing tests to cover that behavior. And so yeah, those trade-offs are always interesting to me and exploring that space. But 100%: our admin team are core customers of the work that we're doing in engineering. And we try and stay very close and very friendly with them. STEPH: Yeah, I really appreciate how you're framing that. And I very much agree and believe with you that our admin users are incredibly important. CHRIS: Well, thank you. Yeah, we're trying over here. But yeah, I think I can wrap up that segment of me rambling about ideas that are half-formed in my mind but hopefully are directionally important. Anyway, what else is up with you? STEPH: So, not that long ago, I asked you a question around how the heck to manage themes that I have going on. So we've talked about lots of fun productivity things around managing to-dos, and emails, and all that stuff. And my latest one is thinking about, like, I have a theme that I want to focus on, maybe it's this week, maybe it's for a couple of months. And how do I capture that and surface it to myself and see that I'm making progress on that? And I don't have an answer to that. But I do have a theme that I wanted to share. And the one that I'm currently focused on is building up management skills and team lead skills. That is something that I'm focused on at the moment and partially because I was inspired to read the book Resilient Management written by Lara Hogan. And so I think that is what has really set the idea. But as I picked up the book, I was like, this is a really great book, and I'd really like to share some of this. And then so that grew into like, well, let's just go ahead and make this a theme where I'm learning this, and I'm sharing this with everyone else. So along that note, I figured I would share that here. So we use Basecamp at thoughtbot. And so, I've been sharing some Basecamp posts around what I'm learning in each chapter. But to bring some of that knowledge here as well, some of the cool stuff that I have learned so far...and this is just still very early on in the book. There are a couple of different topics that Laura covers in the first chapter, and one of them is humans' core needs at work. And then there's also the concept of meeting your team, some really good questions that you can ask during your first one-on-one to get to know the person that then you're going to be managing. The part that really resonated with me and something that I would like to then coach myself to try is helping the team get to know you. So as a manager, not only are you going out of your way to really get to know that person, but how are you then helping them get to know you as well? Because then that's really going to help set that relationship in regards of they know what kind of things that you're optimizing for. Maybe you're optimizing for a deadline, or for business goals, or maybe it's for transparency, or maybe it would be helpful to communicate to someone that you're managing to say, "Hey, I'm trying some new management techniques. Let me know how this goes." [chuckles] So there's a healthier relationship of not only are you learning them, but they're also learning you. So some of the questions that Laura includes as examples as something that you can share with your team is what do you optimize for in your role? So is it that you're optimizing for specific financial goals or building up teammates? Or maybe it's collaboration, so you're really looking for opportunities for people to pair together. What do you want your teammates to lean on you for? I really liked that question. Like, what are some of the areas that bring you joy or something that you feel really skilled in that then you want people to come to you for? Because that's something that before I was a manager...but it's just as you are growing as a developer, that's such a great question of like, what do you want to be known for? What do you want to be that thing that when people think of, they're like, oh, you should go see Chris about this, or you should go see Steph about this? And two other good questions include what are your work styles and preferences? And what management skills are you currently working on learning or improving? So I really like this concept of how can I share more of myself? And the great thing about this book that I'm learning too is while it is geared towards people that are managers, I think it's so wonderful for people who are non-managers or aspiring managers to read this as well because then it can help you manage whoever's managing you. So then that way, you can have some upward management. So we had recent conversations around when you are new to a team and getting used to a manager, or maybe if you're a junior, you have to take a lot of self-advocacy into your role to make sure things are going well. And I think this book does a really good job for people that are looking to not only manage others but also manage themselves and manage upward. So that's some of the journeys from the first chapter. I'll keep you posted on the other chapters as I'm learning more. And yeah, if anybody hasn't read this book or if you're interested, I highly recommend it. I'll make sure to include a link in the show notes. CHRIS: That was just the first chapter? STEPH: Yeah, that was just the first chapter. CHRIS: My goodness. STEPH: And I shortened it drastically. [laughs] CHRIS: Okay. All right, off to the races. But I think the summary that you gave there, particularly these are true when you're managing folks but also to manage yourself and to manage up, like, this is relevant to everyone in some capacity in some shape or form. And so that feels very true. STEPH: I will include one more fun aspect from the book, and that's circling back to the humans' core needs at work. And she references Paloma Medina, a coach, and trainer who came up with this acronym. The acronym is BICEPS, and it stands for belonging, improvement, choice, equality, predictability, and significance. And then details how each of those are important to us in our work and how when one of those feels threatened, then that can lead to some problems at work or just even in our personal life. But the fun example that she gave was not when there's a huge restructuring of the organization and things like that are going on as being the most concerning in terms of how many of these needs are going to be threatened or become vulnerable. But changing where someone sits at work can actually hit all of these, and it can threaten each of these needs. And it made me think, oh, cool, plus-one for being remote because we can sit wherever we want. [laughs] But that was a really fun example of how someone's needs at work, I mean, just moving their desk, which resonates, too, because I've heard that from other people. Some of the friends that I have that work in more of a People Ops role talk about when they had to shift people around how that caused so much grief. And they were just shocked that it caused so much grief. And this explains why that can be such a big deal. So that was a fun example to read through. CHRIS: I'm now having flashbacks to times where I was like, oh, I love my spot in the office. I love the people I'm sitting with. And then there was that day, and I had to move. Yeah, no, those were days. This is true. STEPH: It triggered all the core BICEPS, all the things that you need to work. It threatened all of them. Or it could have improved them; who knows? CHRIS: There were definitely those as well, yeah. Although I think it's harder to know that it's going to be great on the way in, so it's mostly negative. I think it has that weird bias because you're like, this was a thing, I knew it. I at least understood it. And then you're in a new space, and you're like, I don't know, is this going to be terrible or great? I mean, hopefully, it's only great because you work with great people, and it's a great office. [laughs] But, like, the unknown, you're moving into the unknown, and so I think it has an inherent at least questioning bias to it. STEPH: Agreed. On that note, shall we wrap up? CHRIS: Let's wrap up. The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeee!!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

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Chris switched from Trello over to Linear for product management and talks about prioritizing backlogs. Steph shares and discusses a tweet from Curtis Einsmann that super resonated with the work she's doing right now: "In software engineering, rabbit holes are inevitable. You will research libraries and not use them. You'll write code just to delete it. This isn't a waste; sometimes, you need to go down a few wrong paths to get to the right one." This episode is brought to you by BuildPulse (https://buildpulse.io/bikeshed). Start your 14-day free trial of BuildPulse today. Linear (https://linear.app/) Curtis Einsmann Tweet (https://twitter.com/curtiseinsmann/status/1521451508943843329) Louie Bacaj Tweet (https://twitter.com/LBacaj/status/1478241322637033474?s=20) Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed! Transcript: AD: Flaky tests take the joy out of programming. You push up some code, wait for the tests to run, and the build fails because of a test that has nothing to do with your change. So you click rebuild and you wait. Again. And you hope you're lucky enough to get a passing build this time. Flaky tests slow everyone down, break your flow and make things downright miserable. In a perfect world, tests would only break if there's a legitimate problem that would impact production. They'd fail immediately and consistently, not intermittently. But the world's not perfect, and flaky tests will happen, and you don't have time to fix them all today. So how do you know where to start? BuildPulse automatically detects and tracks your team's flaky tests. Better still, it pinpoints the ones that are disrupting your team the most. With this list of top offenders, you'll know exactly where to focus your effort for maximum impact on making your builds more stable. In fact, the team at Codecademy was able to identify their flakiest tests with BuildPulse in just a few days. By focusing on those tests first, they reduced their flaky builds by more than 68% in less than a month! And you can do the same because BuildPulse integrates with the tools you're already using. It supports all the major CI systems, including CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, and others. And it analyzes test results for all popular test frameworks and programming languages, like RSpec, Jest, Go, pytest, PHPUnit, and more. So stop letting flaky tests slow you down. Start your 14-day free trial of BuildPulse today. To learn more, visit buildpulse.io/bikeshed. That's buildpulse.io/bikeshed. CHRIS: Good morning, and welcome to Tech Talk with Steph and Chris. Today at the top of the hour, it's tech traffic hits. STEPH: Ooh, tech traffic. [laughs] I like that statement. CHRIS: Yeah. The Git lanes are clogged up with...I don't know. I got nothing. STEPH: [laughs] Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, hey, Chris, what's new in your world? CHRIS: What's new in my world? Actually, I have a specific new thing that I can share, which is, as of the past week, I would say, switched from Trello over to Linear for product management. It's been great. It was a super straightforward transfer. They actually had an importer. We lost some of the comment threads on the Trello cards. But that was easy enough to like each Linear ticket has a link back to Trello. So it's easy enough to keep the continuity. But yeah, we're in a whole new world, a system actually built for maintaining a product backlog, and, man, it shows. Trello was a bunch of lists and cards and stuff that you could link between, which was cool. But Linear is just much more purpose-built and already very, very nice. And we're very happy with the switch. STEPH: I feel like you came in real casual with that news, but that is big news, that you did a switch. [laughter] CHRIS: How are you going to bury the lead like that? You switched project management...[laughter] I actually didn't think it was...I'm excited about it but low-key excited, which is weird because I do like productivity and task management software. So you would think I would be really excited about this. But I've also tried enough of them historically to know that that's never going to be the thing that actually makes or breaks your team's productivity. It can make things worse, but it can't make you great. That's the thing that I believe. And so it's a wonderful piece of software. I'm very excited about it but -- STEPH: Ooh, I like that. It can make you worse, but it doesn't make you great. That's so true, yeah, where it causes pain. Well, and it does make sense. You've been complaining a bit about the whole login with Trello and how that's been frustrating. But I haven't even heard of Linear. That's just...that's, I mean, you're just doing what you do where you bring that new-new. I haven't heard of Linear before. CHRIS: I try to live on the cutting edge. Actually, I deeply try to not live on the cutting edge at this point in my life. That early adopter wave, no, no, no, that's not for me anymore. But I've known a few folks who've moved to Linear. And everyone that I've spoken to who has moved to it has been like, "Yeah, it's been great." I've not heard anything negative. And I've heard or experienced negative things about every other product management tool out there. And so, it seemed like an easy thing. And it was a low-cost enough switch in terms of opportunity costs or the like, it took the effort of someone on our team moving those cards over and setting up the new system and training, but it was relatively straightforward. And yeah, we're super happy with it. And it feels different now. I feel like I can see the work in a different way which is interesting. I think we had brought in a Chrome extension for Trello. I think it's like Hello Epics or something like that that allows...it abuses the card linking functionality in Trello and repurchases that feature as an epic management thing. But it's quarter-baked is how I would describe it, or it's clearly built on top of existing things that were not intended to be used exactly in that way. So it does a great job. Hello Epics does a great job of trying to make something like parent-child list management stuff happen in Trello. But it's always going feel like an afterthought, a secondary feature, something that's bolted on. Whereas in Linear, it's like, no, no, we absolutely have the idea of projects, of course, and you can see burndown charts and things. And the thing that I do want to be careful about is not leaning too much into management. Linear has the idea of cycles or sprints, as many other folks think of them, or iterations or whatever you want to call them. But we've largely not been working in that mode. We've just continued to work through the next up list; that's it. The next up list should be prioritized and well defined at the top and roughly in priority order. So just pick up the next card and work on it. And we just do that every single day. And now we're in a piece of software that has the idea of cycles, and I'm like, oh, this is vaguely interesting. Do we want to do that? Oh, but if you're going to do that, you probably do some estimation, right? And I was like, oh no, now we're into a place that's...okay, I have feelings. I got to decide how to approach that. And so, I am intrigued. And I wonder if we could just say like ten carts that's how many come into a cycle, and that's it. And we use the loosest heuristics possible to define how we structure a cycle so that we don't fall into the trap of, oh, what's our roadmap going to look like six months from now? JK, what's anything going to look like six months from now? That's not a knowable fact. STEPH: I was just thinking where you said that you're moving into sprints or cycles, and then there's that push, well, now you got to estimate. And I just thought, do you? Do you have to estimate? [laughs] CHRIS: We need a burndown chart through 2024, and it must be meticulously accurate down to the hour. STEPH: I think meticulously wrong is how that goes. [laughs] CHRIS: Which is the best kind of wrong. If you're going to be wrong, be meticulous about it. STEPH: Be thorough about it. [laughs] Yeah, the team that I'm on right now, we have our bi-weekly planning, and we go through the board, and we pull stuff in. But there's never a discussion about estimation. And I hadn't really appreciated that until just now. How we don't think about how long is this going to take? We just talked about, well, what's in-flight? And how much work do people still have going on? And then here's the list of things we can pull in. But there's always a list that you can go back to. Like, it's very...we pull in the minimum and knowing that if we run out of work, there's another place to go where there's stuff that's organized. And I just love that cadence, that idea of like, let's not try to make guesses about the future; let's just have it lined up and ready for us to go when we're ready to pull it in. Although I know, that's also coming from a very developer's perspective, and there are product managers who are trying to communicate as to when features are going to get out into the world. So I get that there's a balance, but I still have strong feelings and hesitations around estimating work. CHRIS: Well, I feel like there is a balance there. And so many things in history are like, well, this is an overcorrection against that, and that's an overcorrection against this. And the idea that we can estimate our work that far out into the future that's just obviously false to me based on every project I've ever worked on that has tried to do it. And it has always failed without question. But critically, there is the necessity to sync up work and like, oh, marketing needs to plan the launch of this feature, and it's a critical one. What's it going to look like? When's it going to be ready? You know, we're trying to go for an event, it's not just know...we developers never estimate anything past the immediate moment where like, that's not acceptable. We got to find a middle ground here. But where that middle ground is, is interesting. And so, just operating in the sort of we do work as it comes up is the easiest thing because no one's lying about anything at that point. But sometimes you got to make some guesses and make some estimations. And then it gets into the murky area of I believe with 75% confidence that in three weeks, we will have this feature ready. But to be clear, I said with 75% confidence that means one-quarter of the time; we will not be there at that date. What does that mean? What does that failure mode look like? Let's talk about that. And can you have honest, open, transparent, useful conversations there? That's the space that it becomes more subtle if you need to do that. STEPH: You're reminding me of a conversation that I had with someone where they shared with me some very aggressive team goals. And it was a very friendly conversation. And they're like, "How do you feel about aggressive goals?" And I was like, "Well, it depends. How do you feel about aggressive failure?" Because then once I know where you stand there, then we can talk about aggressive goals. Now, if we're being aggressive, but then we fail to achieve that, and it's one of those, okay, we didn't meet the goal that we'd expected, but everything is fine, and it's not a big deal, then I am okay. Sure, let's shoot for the stars. But if it's one of those, we are communicating these goals to the outside world, and it's going to become incredibly important that we meet these goals, and if we don't, then things are going to go on fire, people are going to be in trouble, and it's just going to be awful, then let's not set aggressive goals. Let's not box ourselves into a space where we are setting ourselves up to fail or feel pain in a meaningful way. I agree that estimations are important, especially in terms of you need to collaborate with other departments, and then also just to provide some sense of where the product is headed and when things may be released. I think estimations then just become problematic when they do become definite, and they're based on so many unknowns, and then when I don't know is not an answer. So if someone asked, "What's your estimate for this?" And the very honest real answer is I don't know, like, we haven't done this type of work before, or these are all the unknowns, and then someone's like, "Well, let's just put an estimation of like two weeks on it," and they just sort of try to force-fit it into being what they want, then that's where it starts to just feel incredibly problematic. CHRIS: Yeah, estimation is a very murky area that we could spend entire episodes talking about, and in fact, I think we have a handful of times. So with that, Linear has been great. We're going to see just how much or how little estimation we actually want to do. But it's been a very nice addition to the toolset. And I'll let you know as we deepen our usage of it what the experience is like, but that's the main thing that's new in my world. What's new in your world? STEPH: Well, before we bounce over to my world, you said something that has intrigued me that has also made me start reflecting on some of the ways that I like to work. And you'd mentioned that you have this prioritized backlog that people are pulling tickets from. And I don't know exactly if there's a planning session or how that looks, but I have recognized that when I am working with a team, and we don't have any planning session, if everybody is just pulling from this backlog, that's being prioritized by someone on the team, that I find that a bit overwhelming. Because the types of work being done can vary so drastically that I find I'm less able to help my colleagues or my teammates because I don't have the context for what they're working on. It surprises me. I'm like, oh, I didn't even know we're working on that feature, or I don't have the context for what's the problem that we're trying to solve here. And it makes it just a lot harder to review and then have conversations with them. And I get overwhelmed in that environment. And I've recognized that about myself based on previous projects that were more similar to that versus if I'm on a project where the team does get together every so often, even if it's high level to be like, hey, here's the theme of the tickets that we're working on, or here's just some of the stuff, then I feel much more prepared for the work that is coming in and to be able to context switch and review. And yeah, so I've kind of learned that about myself. I'm curious, are you similar, or how does that work for you? CHRIS: I'm definitely similar. And I think probably the team is closer to what you're describing. So we do have a planning session every week, just a quick 30-minute scan through the backlog, look at the things that are coming up and also the larger themes. Previously, Epics and Trello now projects and Linear. But talking about what are the bigger pieces of work that we're moving on, and then what are the individual tickets associated with that that we'll be expecting to work on in the next week? And just making sure that everyone has broad clarity around what that feature set is. Also, we're a very small team at this point. Still, we're four people total, but one of the developers is on a break for a couple of weeks this summer. And so there are really only three of us that are driving on the code. And so, with three of us working on the projects, we try very intentionally to have significant overlap between the various...like, we don't want any one person to own any portion of things at this point. And so we're doing a good amount of pairing to cross-pollinate and make sure everyone's...not everyone's aware of everything, but at least one other person is sufficiently aware of everything between the three of us. And I think that's been working well. I don't think we have any major gaps, save for the way that we're doing our mobile architecture that's largely managed by one of the developers on the team and a contractor that we're working with to help do a lot of the implementation. That's a known we chose to silo that thing. We've accepted the cost of that for now. And architecturally, the rest of us are aware of it, but we're not like in the Swift code writing anything because I don't know how to write Swift at this point. I'd love to learn it. I hear good things about the language. [12:26] So yeah, I think conceptually very similar to what you're describing of still want to have people be able to review. Like, I don't want to put up a PR and people be like, I don't know, that looks like code, I guess. I'm not sure what it does. Like, I want it to be very...I want us all to be roughly on the same page, and thus far, we are. As the team grows, that will become trickier to maintain because there are just inherently probably more things that are moving, more different feature areas and surface area that we're tackling in any given week, or there are different ways to approach that. I know you've talked about having a limited number of themes for a given cycle, so that's an idea that can pop up. But that's something that we'll figure out as we get further. I think I'm happy with where we're at right now, so yeah, that's the story there. STEPH: Okay, cool. Yeah, all of that resonates with me, and thinking about it a little more deeply in this moment, I'm realizing I think something you said helped me put this together where when I'm reviewing someone's change, I'm not necessarily just looking to see does your code work? I'm going to trust you that your code works. I may have thoughts about design and other things, but I really want to understand more what's the change to the product that we're making? What's the goal that we're looking to achieve? How are we measuring this? And so if I don't have that context, that's what contributes to that feeling of like, hard context switching of not just context switching, but now I have to level myself up to then understand the problem that's being solved by this. Versus had I known some of the themes going into that particular cycle or sprint, I would have felt far more prepared for that review session versus having to then dig through all the data and/or tickets or talk to someone. Well, switching back to what's going on in my world, I have a particular tweet that I want to share, and it's one that Joël Quenneville brought to my attention. And it just resonates so much with all the type of work that I'm doing right now. So I'm going to read the tweet, and then we'll link to it in the show notes as well. But it's from Curtis Einsmann, and Curtis wrote: "In software engineering, rabbit holes are inevitable. You will research libraries and not use them. You'll write code just to delete it. This isn't a waste; sometimes, you need to go down a few wrong paths to get to the right one." And that describes all the work that I'm doing right now. It's a lot of exploratory, a lot of data-driven work, and finding ways that we can reduce the time that it takes to run RSpec on CI. And it also ties in nicely to one of the things that I think we talked about last week, where we discovered that a number of files have a high runtime variance. And I've really dug into the data there to understand, okay, is it always specific files that have these high runtime variants? Are there any obvious contributions to what's causing this? Are we making real network calls that then could sometimes take a long time to return? And the result is there's nothing obvious. They're giant files. The number of SQL commands that are being run for each file varies drastically. They're all high, but it's still very different. There's no single fact about these files that has really been like, yes, this is what's causing these files to have such a runtime variance. And so while I've been in the data, I'm documenting it, and I'm making a list and putting it all together in a ticket so at least it's there to look at later. But I'm going to move on. It's one of those I would love to know what's causing this. I would love to address it because it would put us in an ideal state for how we're distributing tests, which would have a significant impact on our runtime. But it also feels a little bit like chasing my tail because I'm worried, like with some of the other experiments that we've done in the past where we've addressed tentpoles, that as soon as you address the issue for one or two files, then other files start having the same problem. And you're just going to continue to chase and chase, and I don't want to be in that. So upfront, this was one of those; hey, let's look at the data. If there's something obvious, let's address it; if not, move on. So I'm at that point today where I'm wrapping up all of that data, and then I'm going to move on, move on to the next thing. CHRIS: There's deep truth in that tweet that you shared at the start of this segment. The idea like if we knew the work that we had to do at the front, yeah, we would just do that, but often, we don't. And so, being able to not treat it as a failure when something doesn't work out is, I think, so critical. I think to expand on the idea just a tiny bit, the idea of the scientific method, failure is totally an option and is part of science. I remember watching MythBusters, and Adam Savage is just kind of like, "Failure is always an option," and highlighting that as part of it. Like, it's an outcome. You've learned something. You have a new data point. You can take that and then carry it forward with you. But it's rough in the moment. And so, I do think that this is a worthwhile thing to meditate on. And it's something that I've had to revisit a handful of times in my career of just like, man, I feel like I've just been spinning my tires all week. I'm like, we know what we want to get done, but just each approach I take isn't working for one reason or another. And then, finally, you get to the end. And then you've got this paragraph-long summary of all the things that didn't work in your PR and one-line change sort of thing. And those are painful, but they're part of the game. Like, that is unavoidable. I have not found a way to just know how to do the work upfront always. I would love that. I would sign up for whatever seminar was selling that. I wouldn't. I would know that that seminar is a lie, actually. But broadly, I'm intrigued by the idea if someone were selling that, I'd be like, well, I mean, pitch me on it. Tell me why I should believe you; I don't, just to be clear. But yeah. STEPH: This project has really helped me embrace always setting a goal or a question upfront about what I'm wanting to achieve or what I'm looking to answer because a number of times while Joël and I have been spelunking through data...And then so originally, with the saga, we started out with why doesn't our math match reality? We understand that if these tests are distributed perfectly across the CPUs, then that should cut the runtime in half. But yet, we weren't seeing that even though we had addressed the tentpoles. So we dug into understanding why. And the answer is because they're not perfectly distributed, and it's because of the runtime variance. And that was a critical moment to look back and say, "Did we achieve the goal?" Yes, we identified the problem. But once you see a problem, it's just so easy to dig in and keep going. It's like, well, now I want to know what's causing these files to have a runtime variance. But it's one of those we achieved our goal. We acknowledged upfront that we wanted to at least understand why. Let's make a second decision, do we keep going? And I'm at that point where, frankly, I probably dug in a little more than I should because I'm stubborn. But I'm recognizing that now's the time to back away and then go back and move on to the next high-priority item, which is converting for funsies; I'll share. The next thing is converting Test::Unit test over to RSpec because we have, I think, around 25 tests that are written in Test::Unit. And we want to move them over to RSpec because that particular just step in the build process takes a good three to four minutes. And part of that is just booting up Rails and then running the tests very fast. And we're underutilizing the machine that's running them because it's only 25 tests, but there are 86 CPUs to run it. So we'd really like to combine those 25 tests with the rest of the RSpec suite and drop that step. So then that should add minimal time to the overall build but then should take us down at least a couple of minutes. And then also makes it easier to manage and help folks so that way, there's one consistent testing framework that's in use versus having to manage some of these older tests. CHRIS: It's funny; I think it was just two episodes back where we talked about why RSpec, and I think both of us were just like, well yeah. But I mean, if there are tests and another, like, it's fine, you just leave them with the exception that if there's like 2% of our tests are in Test::Unit, and everything else is in RSpec, yeah, maybe that that conversion efforts seem totally worth it. But again, I think as you're describing that, what I'm hearing is just like the scientific method, just being somewhat structured in the approach to what's the hypothesis? And what's the procedure we're going to use to determine if that hypothesis is true or false? And then what do we do? And then what are the results? And then you just do that on loop. But being not just sort of exploring. Sometimes you have to be on exploratory mode. But I definitely find that that tiny bit of rigor of just like, wait, okay, before I actually do anything, what do I think is going on here? What's my guess? And then, okay, if that guess were true, what would I be able to observe in the world? Okay, here we go. And just that tiny bit of structure is so...it sometimes feels highly formal to go into that mode and be like, no, no, no, let me take a step back. Let me write down my thoughts. I'm going to have a little checklist and do the thing. But I've never regretted doing it. I will say that. I have deeply regretted not doing it. I feel like I should make a list of things that fit that structure. I've never regretted committing in Git ever. That's been great. I've always been able to unwind it, but I've never been able to not unwind it or the opposite. I've regretted not committing. I have not regretted committing. I have regretted not writing out my hypothesis or approach. I have not regretted doing it. And so, yeah, this feels like it falls firmly in that category of like, it's worth just a tiny bit of structure. There's a reason it is the scientific method. STEPH: Yeah, I agree. I've not regretted documenting upfront what it is I look to achieve and how I think I'm going to answer the question. That has been immensely helpful. Because then I also forget, like, two weeks ago, I'll be like, wasn't there a question around why this was happening, and I need to understand? And all of that was so context-heavy that as soon as I'm out of the thick of it, I completely forget it. So if I care about it deeply or if I want to be able to revisit it, then I need to document it for myself. It's given me a lot of empathy for people who do more scientific research around, oh my gosh, like, you have to document everything you do and then still be able to prove it five years from now or however long. I'm just throwing out numbers. And it needs to be organized enough that someone, if they do question your research that, then you have it there. My research documents would not withstand scrutiny at this point because they are still just more personal notes. But yes, it's given me a lot of empathy and respect for people who do run very serious research, experiments, and trials, and then have to be able to prove it to the world. Pivoting just a bit, there's a particular topic that resonated with both you and I; in fact, it's a particular tweet. And, Louie, I do apologize if I mispronounce your last name, but Louie Bacaj. And we'll include a link in the show notes to the tweet, but Louis shared, "I managed multiple engineering teams before quitting tech. Now that I quit, I can speak freely. Here are 12 things your manager may not be telling you, but I know for a fact will help you." So there are a number of interesting discussions and comments that are in this thread. The one thing in particular that really caught my attention is number 10, and it's "Advocate for junior developers." So they said that their friend reminded them that just because you don't have 10-plus years of experience does not mean that they won't be good. Without junior engineers on the team, no one will grow. Help others grow; you'll grow too. And that's the part that I love so much is that without junior engineers on the team, no one will grow because that was very thought-provoking for me. It's something that I find that I agree with deeply, but I hadn't really considered why I agree with that so much. So I'm excited to dive into that topic with you. And then, as a second topic to go along with that is, can juniors start with a remote team? I think that's one of the other questions when you and I were chatting about this. And I'm intrigued to hear your thoughts. CHRIS: A bunch of stuff there. Starting with the tweet, I love elements of this. Some of it feels like it's intentionally somewhat provocative. So like, without junior engineers on the team, no one will grow. That feels maybe a little bit past the bar because I think we can technically grow, and we can build things and whatnot. But I think what feels deeply true to me is truly help others grow; you'll grow too. The act of mentoring, of guiding, of training, of helping someone on their journey will inherently help you grow and, I think, change the way that you think about the work. I think the beginner mind, the earlier in the career folks coming into a codebase, they will see things fundamentally differently in a really useful way. It's possible that along your career, you've just internalized things. You've been like, yeah, no, that was weird. But then I smashed my head against it for a while, and now I understand this thing. And it just makes sense to me. But it's like, that thing actually doesn't make sense. You have warped your mind to match the thing, not, quote, unquote, "come to understand it." This is sounding too judgmental to people who've been in the industry for a while, but I found this of myself. Or I can just take for granted things that took a long time to adapt my head to, and if anything, maybe I should have pushed back a little more. And so, I find that junior engineers can be a really fantastic lens for the complexity of a project. Like, the world is truly a complex place, and that's just true. But our job as software engineers is to tame that complexity and manage it. And so, I love the mindset that can come or the conversations that can come out of that. And it's much like test-driven development is a pressure on the complexity of your code, having junior engineers join the team and needing to explain how all of the different features work, and what the overall architecture is, and the message passing under this and that, it's a really useful conversation to have. And so that "Help others grow; you'll grow too" feels deeply, deeply true to me. STEPH: Yeah, I couldn't agree more in regards to how juniors really help our team and especially, as you mentioned, with complexity and ¬having those conversations. Some of the other things that have come to mind for me as well around the importance of having junior developers on your team...and maybe it's not specifically they're junior developers but that you just have a variety of experience on your team. It's going to help you lean into a culture of learning because you have people that are at different stages of their career. And so you want an environment where people can learn together, that they can fail together, and they can be public about it. And having people that are at different stages of their career will lead, well, at least ideally, it'll lead to more pair programming. It's going to lead to more productive code reviews because then people can ask more questions around why did you choose this, or why are you doing that? Versus if everybody is at the same level, then they may just intuitively have reasons that they think someone did something. But it takes someone that's a bit new to say, "Hey, why did you choose this?" or to bring up some other ideas or ways that they could pursue it. They may bring in new ideas for, like, why has the team always done something this way? Let's think about new ways that we could do this. Or maybe this is really unfriendly, the way that we're doing this, not just for junior people but for people that are new to the team. And then there's typically less knowledge siloing because then you're going to want to pair the newer folks with the more experienced folks. So that way, you don't have this more senior developer who's then off in a corner working by themselves. And it's going to improve your communication skills. There's just...I realized I'm just rambling because I feel like there are so many benefits that go along with having a variety of people on your team, especially in terms of experience. And that just leads to such a better learning environment and, ultimately, better software and better products. And yet, I find that so many companies won't embrace people that are newer to software. They always want the senior developers. They want the 10x-er or whatever those are. They want the people that have many, many years of experience. And there's so much value that comes from mentoring the next group of developers. And it's incredibly frustrating to me that one, companies often aren't open to it. But honestly, more than that, as long as you're upfront and honest about like, hey, this is the team that we need right now to build what we're looking to build, I can get past that; I can understand that. But please don't then mislead people and say that you're a junior-friendly team, and then not be prepared. I feel like some teams will go so far as to say, "Yes, we are junior-friendly," and they may even tweak their interview process to where it is a bit more junior-friendly. But then, by the time that person joins the team, they're really not prepared. They don't have an onboarding plan. They don't have a mentorship plan. And then they fail that person because that person has worked hard to get there. And they've worked hard to bring that person onto the team, but then they don't have a plan from there. And I've seen it too many times. And it just frustrates me so much because it puts that junior person in such a vulnerable state where they really have to be an incredible self-advocate to then overcome those hurdles from a lack of preparation on that company's part. Okay, I think that's my event. I'm sure I could vent about this a lot more, but I will cut it off there. That's the heart of it. CHRIS: I do think, like, with anything else, it's something that we have to be intentional about. And so what you're saying of like, yeah, we're a junior-friendly company, but then you're just hiring folks, trying to find folks that may work at a slightly lower pay grade, and that's what that means to you. So like, no, no, that's not what this is. This needs to be something different. We need to have a structure and an organization that can support folks at different points in their career. But it's interesting to me to think about the sort of why of it. And the earlier part of this conversation, we talked about some of the benefits that can come organizationally from it, and I do sincerely believe in that. But I also believe that it is fundamentally one of the best ways to find really talented people early on in their career and be in a position to hire them where maybe later on in their career, that just wouldn't happen naturally. And I've seen this play out in a number of organizations. I went to Northeastern University for my college, and Northeastern is famous for the co-op program. Northeastern sounds really fancy. Now I learned that they have like a 7% acceptance rate for college applications right now, which is wildly low. When I went to Northeastern, it was not so fancy. So just in case anyone's hearing that and they're like, "Oh, Northeastern, wow." I'm not that fancy. [laughs] But they did have the co-op then, and they still have it now. And the co-op really is a differentiating thing. You do three six-month rotations. And it is this fundamental differentiator in terms of when you're graduating. Particularly, I was in mechanical engineering. I came out, and I actually knew what that meant in the world. And I'd used Outlook, and I knew what a water cooler was and how to talk near one because that's a critical thing to learn in the world. And really transformative experience for me. But also, a thing that I observed was many of my friends ended up working at companies that they had co-opted for. I'm one of those people. I would say more than 50% of my friends ended up with a position at a company that they had done a co-op rotation with. And it really worked out fantastically. That organization and the individual got to try things out, experience. And then, I ended up staying at that company for a number of years, and it was a wonderful experience. But I don't know that I would have ended up there otherwise. That's not necessarily the way that would have played out. And similarly like, thoughtbot has the apprenticeship. And I have seen so many wonderful developers start at that very early point in their career. And there was this wonderful structure around them joining the thoughtbot team, intentional, structured, supported. And then those folks went on to be some of the most talented developers that I've ever worked with at a wonderfully talented organization. And so the story of like, you should do this, organizations. This is a thing that you should invest in for yourself, not just for the individual, like, for both. Everybody wins in this case, in my mind. I will say, though, in terms of transparency, I currently manage a team of three developers. And we hired very intentionally for senior folks this early on in where we're at. And that was an intentional choice because I do believe that if you're going to be hiring more junior developers, that needs to be something that you do very intentionally, that you have a support structure in place, that you're able to invest the time in where they're at and make sure we have sort of... I think a larger team makes more sense to bring juniors into broadly. That's the thing that I'm saying out loud that I'm like, I should push on that a little bit. Is that true? Do I really believe that? But I think so, my actions obviously point to it. But it is an interesting trade-off space of how do you think about that? My hope is that as we grow as an organization, that we would then very intentionally start hiring folks in a more junior, mid-level to junior and be very intentional about how we support them, bring them into the organization, et cetera. I do believe it is a win-win situation for everyone when done with intention and with focus. STEPH: That's such an interesting bit that you just said because I very much appreciate when companies recognize do we have the bandwidth to support someone that's more junior? Because at thoughtbot, we go through periods where we don't have our apprenticeship that's open because we recognize we're not in a place that we can support someone. And we don't want to bring someone in unless we can help them be successful. I very much admire that and appreciate that about companies when they can perform that self-assessment. I am so intrigued. You'd mentioned being a smaller team. So you more intentionally hire senior developers. And I think that also makes sense because then you need to build up who's going to be in that mentorship pool? Because then people could leave, people could take vacations, and so then you need to have that support system in place. But yeah, I don't know what that then perfect balance is. It's like, okay, so then as soon as you have like five people available to mentor or interested in mentorship, it's like, then do you start bringing in the conversation of like, let's bring in someone that we can help build up and help them be successful and join our team? And I don't know what that magical number is. I do think it's important for teams to reflect to say, "Can we take on someone that's junior?" All the benefits of having someone that's junior. And then just being very honest and then having a plan for once that junior person does arrive. What does their career path look like while they've joined that team, and who's going to be that person that's going to help them level up? So not only make that choice upfront of yes, we are bringing someone on but let's also think about like the first six months of their work here at the company and what that's going to look like. It feels like an important step that a lot of companies fail to do. And I think that's why there are so many articles that then are like, hey, if you're a junior dev, here's all the things that you should do to be the best junior dev. That's fabulous. And we're constantly shoring up junior devs to be like, hey, here's all the things that you need to be great at. But we don't have as many conversations around; hey, here's all the things that your manager or the rest of your team should be great at to then support you equally as you are also doing your best to meet them. Like, they need to meet you halfway. And I'm not completely unsympathetic to the plight; I understand. It's often where I've seen with teams the more senior developers that have very strong mentorship communication skills are then also the teammates that get pulled into all the meetings and all the different projects, so then they are less available to be that mentor. And then that's how this often fails. So I don't think anybody is going into this intentionally, but yet, it's what happens for when someone is new and joining a team, and it hasn't been determined the next six months what that person's onboarding and career path looks like. Circling back just a bit, there's the question around, can juniors start with a remote team? I can go first. And I'm going to say unequivocally yes. There's no reason a junior can't start with a remote team. Because all the things that I feel strongly about come down to how is your team going to plan for this person? And how are they going to support this person? And all the benefits that you get from being in an office with a team, I think those do exist. And frankly, for someone like myself, it can be easier to establish a bond with someone that you get to see each day, get to see in person. You can walk up to their desk and can say, "Hey, I've got a question for you." But I think all those benefits just need to be transferred into a remote-friendly way. So I think it does ratchet up how intentional you have to be with your team and then onboarding a junior developer. But I absolutely think it's doable, and we should do it. CHRIS: You went with unequivocally yes as your answer. I'm going to go with a qualified maybe as my answer. I want this to be true, and I think it can be true. But I think it takes all the more intentionality than even what we've been describing. To shift the question around a little bit, what does remote work mean? It doesn't just mean we're doing the work, but we're separate. I think remote work inherently is at its best when we also are largely async first. And so that means more structured writing. The nature of the conversation tends to be more well-formed in each interaction. So it's like I read a big document, and then I pass it over to you. And at your leisure, you respond to it with a bunch of notes, and then it comes back to me. And I think that mode of interaction, while absolutely wonderful and something that I love, I think it fits really well when you're a little bit further on in your career when you understand things a little bit better. And I think the dance of conversation is more useful earlier on and so forth. And so, for someone who's newer to a team, I think having the ability to ask a quick question over and over is really useful to someone who's early on in their career. And remote, again, I think it's at its best when it's async. And those two are sort of at odds. And so it's that mild tension that gives me pause of like, something that I think that makes remote work great I do think is at least a hurdle that you would have to get over in supporting someone who's a little bit newer. Because I want to be deeply present for someone who's newer to their journey so that they can ask a lot of questions so that I am available to be interrupted regularly. I loved at thoughtbot sitting next to someone and being their mentor and being like, yeah, anytime you want, just tap on my desk. If I got my headphones on, that doesn't mean I'm ignoring you; it means I just need to make the sounds go away for a minute because that's the only way my brain will work. But feel free to just tap on my desk or whatever and grab my attention for a moment. And I'm available for that. That's an intentional choice. That's breaking up my continuity of the day, but we're choosing that for a reason. I think that's just a little harder to do in a remote context and all the more so if we're saying, hey, we're going to try this async thing where we write structured documents, and we communicate in these larger, more well-formed, communicates back and forth. But I do believe it can be done. I think it should be done. I just think it's all the harder for all of those reasons. STEPH: I agree that definitely makes it harder. But I'm going to push a little bit and say that when you mentioned being deeply present, I think we can be deeply present with someone and be remote. We can reduce the async requirements. So if you are someone that is more senior or more accustomed to the team, you can fall back to more of those async ways to communicate. But if someone is new, and needs more mentorship, then let's just set up time where we're going to literally hang out for a couple of hours each day or whatever pairing environment works best for them because pairing can also be exhausting. But hey, we're going to have a check-in each day; maybe we close out each day and touchpoint. And feel free to still message me and interrupt me. Like, you're going to just heighten your availability, even though it is remote. And be aware, like, hey, this person could message me at more times, and I'm okay with that. I have opted into this form of communication. So I think we just take that mindset of, hey, there's this person next to me, and I'm their mentor to like, hey, they're not next to me, but I'm still their mentor, and I'm still here for them. So I agree that it's harder. I think it falls on us and the team and the mentors to change ourselves versus saying to juniors, "Hey, sorry, it's remote. That's not going to work for you." It totally works for them. It's us, the mentors, that need to figure out how to make it work. I will say being on that mentor side that then not being able to see someone so if they are next to me, I can pick up on body language and facial expressions, and I can tell when somebody's stuck. And I can see that they're frustrated, or I can see that now's a good time for me to just be like, "Hey, how's it going? What are you working on? Or do you need help with something?" And I don't have that insight when I'm away. So there are real challenges like that that I don't know how to address. I have gone the obnoxious route [laughs] where I just message people, and I'm like, "Hey, how's it going? How's it going? How's it going?" And I try not to do that too much. But I haven't found a better way to manage that other than to constantly check in because I do have less feedback from that person that I'm working with unless they are just incredibly open about sharing when they're stuck. But typically, when you're newer to a team or newer to a career, you're going to be less willing to share when you're stuck. But yeah, there are some real challenges, but I still think it's something for us to figure out. Because otherwise, if we cut off access for remote teams to junior folks, I mean, that's where we're headed. There are so many companies and jobs that are headed remote that not being junior friendly and being remote in my mind is just not an option. It's something that we need to figure out. And it's hard, but we need to figure it out. CHRIS: Yeah, 100% on we need to figure that out and that that's on us as the people managing and structuring and bringing folks into teams. I think my stance would be like, let's just be clear that this is hard. It takes effort to make sure that we've provided a structure in which someone newer to a team can be successful. It takes all the more effort to do so in a remote context, I think. And it's that recognition that I think is critical. Because if we go into this with the wrong mindset, it's like, oh yeah, it's great. We got this new person on the team. And yeah, they should be ready to go in like two weeks, right? It's like, no, no, this is a different thing. We need to be very clear about it. This is going to require that we have someone who is able to work with them and support them in this. And that means that that person's output will likely be a little bit reduced for the period of time that we're talking about. But we're playing a long game here. Let's make sure we're clear on that. This is intentional. And let's be clear, the world of hiring and software right now it's not like super easy. There aren't way more software developers than there are jobs; at least, that's been my experience. So this is something absolutely worth investing in for just core business reasons and also good for people. So hey, it's a win-win. Let's do it. Let's figure it out. But also, let's be clear that it's going to be a little tricky along the way. So, you know, let's be intentional about that. But yeah, obviously do it, got to do it. STEPH: Wait, so I feel like we might have circled back to unequivocally yes. [laughs] Have we gotten there, or are you still on the fence? CHRIS: I was unequivocally yes from the beginning, but I couched it in, but...yeah, I said other things. You're right. I have now come around; let's say to unequivocally yes. STEPH: [laughs] Cool. I don't want to feel like I'm forcing you to agree with me. [laughs] But I mean, we just so rarely disagree. So we've either got to identify this as something that we disagree on, which would be one of those rare occasions like beer and Pop-Tarts. CHRIS: A watershed moment. Beer and Pop-Tarts. STEPH: Yeah, those are the only two so far. [laughter] CHRIS: Not together also. I just want to go on record beer and Pop-Tarts; I don't think would be...anyway. STEPH: Ooh, I don't know. It could work. It could work. CHRIS: Well, there's another thing we disagree on. STEPH: I would not turn it down. If I was eating a Pop-Tart, and you're like, "Hey, you want a beer?" I'd be like, "Sure," vice versa. I'm drinking a beer. "Hey, you want a Pop-Tart?" "Totally." CHRIS: Okay. Well yeah, if I'm making bad decisions, I'm obviously going to chain them together, but that doesn't mean that they're a good decision. It's just a chain of bad decisions. STEPH: I feel like one true thing I know about you is that when you make a decision, you're going to lean into it. So like, this is why you are all about if you're going to have a Pop-Tart, you're going to have the highest sugary junk content Pop-Tart possible. So it makes sense to me. CHRIS: It's the Mountain Dew theorem, yeah. STEPH: I didn't know this had a theorem. The Mountain Dew theorem? CHRIS: No, that's just my name. Well, yeah, if I'm going to drink soda, I'm going to drink Mountain Dew, the nonsense nuclear option of soda. So yeah, I guess you're describing me, although as you say it back to me, I suddenly feel very, like, oh God, is this who I am as a person? [laughs] And I'm not going to say you're wrong. I'm just going to spend a little while thinking about some stuff. STEPH: I mean, you embrace it. I think that's lovely. You know what you want. It's like, all right, let's do this. Let's go all in. CHRIS: Thank you for finding a wonderfully positive way to frame it here at the end. But I think on that note, should we wrap up? STEPH: Let's wrap up. CHRIS: The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeee!!!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

Being pregnant is hard, but this tapas episode is good! Steph discovered and used a #yelling Slack channel and attended a remote magic show. Chris touches on TypeScript design decisions and edge cases. Then they answer a question captured from a client Slack channel regarding a debate about whether I18n should be used in tests and whether tests should break when localized text changes. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM (https://scoutapm.com/bikeshed). Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy. Emma Bostian (https://twitter.com/EmmaBostian) Ladybug Podcast (https://www.ladybug.dev/) Gerrit (https://www.gerritcodereview.com/) Gregg Tobo the Magician (https://astonishingproductions.com/) Sean Wang - swyx - better twitter search (https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1328086859356913664) Twemex (https://twemex.app/) GitHub Pull Request File Tree Beta (https://github.blog/changelog/2022-03-16-pull-request-file-tree-beta/) Sam Zimmerman - CEO of Sagewell Financial on Giant Robots (https://www.giantrobots.fm/414) TypeScript 4.1 feature (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/announcing-typescript-4-1/) The Bike Shed: 269: Things are Knowable (Gary Bernhardt) (https://www.bikeshed.fm/269) TSConfig Reference - Docs on every TSConfig option (https://www.typescriptlang.org/tsconfig#noUncheckedIndexedAccess) Rails I18n (https://guides.rubyonrails.org/i18n.html) This episode is brought to you by Studio 3T (https://studio3t.com/free). Try Studio 3T's full suite of features for 30 days, no payment details needed. Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed! Transcript: CHRIS: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Steph, what's new in your world? STEPH: Hey, Chris. There are a couple of new things in my world, so one of them that I wanted to talk about is the fact that being pregnant is hard. I feel like this is probably a known thing, but I feel like I don't hear it talked about as much as I'd really like, especially in sort of like a professional context. And so I just wanted to share for anyone else that may be listening, if you're also pregnant, this is hard. And I also really appreciate my team. Going through the first trimester is typically where you experience a lot of morning sickness and fatigue, and I had all of that. And so I was at the point that most of my days, I didn't even start till about noon and even some days, starting at noon was a struggle. And thankfully, the thoughtbot client that I'm working with most of the teams are on West Coast hours, so that worked out pretty well. But I even shared a post internally and was like, "Hey, I'm not doing great in the mornings. And so I really can't facilitate any morning meetings. I can't be part of some of the hiring intros that we do," because we like to have a team lead provide a welcoming and then closing for anyone that's coming for interview day. I couldn't do those, and those normally happen around 9:00 a.m. for Eastern Time. And everybody was super supportive of it. So I really appreciate all of thoughtbot and my managers and team being so great about this. Also, the client team they're wonderful. It turns out growing a little human; I'm learning how hard it is and working full time. It's an interesting challenge. Oh, and as part of that appreciation because…so there's just not a lot of women that I've worked with. This may be one of those symptoms of being in tech where one, I haven't worked with tons of women, and then two, working with a woman who is also pregnant and going through that as well. So it's been a little bit isolating in that experience. But there is someone that I follow on Twitter, @EmmaBostian. She's also one of the co-hosts for the Ladybug Podcast. And she has been just sharing some of her, like, I am two months sleep deprived. She's had her baby now, and she is sharing some of that journey. And I really appreciate people who just share that journey and what they're going through because then it helps normalize it for me in terms of what I'm feeling. I hope this helps normalize it for anybody else that might be listening too. CHRIS: I certainly can't speak to the specifics of being pregnant. But I do think it's wonderful for you to use this space that we have here to try and forward that along and say what your experience is like and share that with folks and hopefully make it a little bit better for everyone else out there. Also, you snuck in a sneaky pro-tip there, which is work on the East Coast and have a West Coast team. That just sounds like the obvious correct way to go about this. STEPH: That has worked out really well and been very helpful for me. I'm already not a great morning person; I've tried. I've really strived at times to be a morning person because I just have this idea in my head morning people get more stuff done. I don't think that's true, but I just have that idea. And I'm not the world's best morning person, so it has worked out for many reasons but yeah, especially in helping me get through that first trimester and also just supporting family and other things that are going on. Oh, I also learned a pro-tip about Twitter. This is going to seem totally random, but it was relevant when I was searching for stuff on Twitter [laughs] that was related to tech and pregnancy. But I learned...because I wanted to be able to search for something that someone that I follow what they said but I couldn't remember who said it. And so I found that in the search bar, I can add filter:follows. So you can have your search term like if you're looking for cake or pregnancy, or sleep-deprived and then look for filter:follows, and then that will filter the search results to everybody that you follow. I imagine that that probably works for followers too, but I haven't tried it. CHRIS: I like the left turn you took us on there but still keeping it connected. On the topic of Twitter search, they apparently have a very powerful search, but it's also hidden, and you got to know the specific syntax and whatnot. But there is a wonderful project by Shawn Wang, AKA Swyx, on the internet, bettertwitter.netlify.com is the URL for it. I will share a link to his tweet introducing it. But it's a really wonderful tool that just provides a UI for all of these different filters and configurations. And both make discoverability that much better and then also make it easy to just compose one of these searches and use that. The other thing that I'll recommend is, I think it's a Chrome plugin. I'm guessing is what I'm working with here like a browser extension, but it's called Twemex, T-W-E-M-EX. And there's a sidebar in Twitter now, which just seems wonderful and useful. So as I'm looking at a Swyx post here, or a tweet as they're called on Twitter because I know that vernacular, there's a sidebar which is specific to Shawn Wang. And there's a search at the top so I can search within it. But it's just finding their most popular tweets and putting that on a sidebar. It's a very useful contextual addition to Twitter that I found just awesome. So that combination of things has made my Twitter experience much better. So yeah, we'll have show notes for both of those as well. STEPH: Nice. I did not know about those. This may cause someone to laugh at me because maybe it's easier than I think. But I can never remember that advanced search that Twitter does offer; I have to search it every time. I just go to Google, and I'm like, advanced Twitter search, and then it brings up a site for me, and then I use that as the one that Twitter does provide. But yeah, from the normal UI, I don't know how to get there. Maybe I haven't tried hard enough. Maybe it's hidden. CHRIS: It's like they're hiding it. STEPH: Yeah, one of those. [laughs] CHRIS: It's very costly. They have to like MapReduce the entire internet in order to make that search work. So they're like, well, what if we hide it because it's like 50 cents per query? And so maybe we shouldn't promote this too much. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: And let's just live in the moment, everybody. Let's just swim in the Twitter stream rather than look back at the history. I make guesses about the universe now. STEPH: [laughs] On a different note, I also discovered at thoughtbot in our variety of Slack channels that we have a yelling channel, and I had not used it before. I had not hung out there before. It's a delightful channel. It's a place that you just go, and you type in all caps. You can yell about anything that you would like to. And I specifically needed to yell about Gerrit, which is the replacement or the alternative that we're using for GitHub or GitLab, or Bitbucket, or any of those services. So we're using Gerrit, and I've been working to feel comfortable with the UI and then be able to review CRs and things like that. My vernacular is also changing because my team refers to them as change requests instead of pull requests. So I'm floating back and forth between CRs and PRs. And because I'm in Gerrit world, I missed some of the updates that GitHub made to their pull request review screen. And so then I happened to hop in GitHub one day, and I saw it, and I was like, what is this? So that was novel. But going back to yelling, I needed to yell about Gerrit because I have not found a way to collaborate with someone who has already pushed up changes. I have found ways that I can pull their changes which then took a little while. I found it in a sneaky little tab called download. I didn't expect it to be there. But then the actual snippet it's like, run this in your terminal, and this is then how you pull down the changes. And I'm like, okay, so I did that. But I can't push to their existing changes because then I get like, well, you're not the owner, so we're going block you, which is like, cool, cool, cool. Okay, I kind of get that because you don't want me messing up somebody else's content or something that they've done. But I really, really, really want to collaborate with this person, and we're trying to do something together, and you're blocking me. And so I had to go to the yelling channel, and I felt better. And I'm yelling again. [laughs] Maybe I don't feel that great because I'm getting angry again talking about it. CHRIS: You vented a little into the yelling channel; maybe not everything, though. STEPH: Yeah, I still have more to vent because it's made life hard. Every time I wanted to push up a change or pull down someone else's changes, there are now all these CRs that then I just have to go and abandon, which is then the terminology for then essentially closing it and ignoring it, so I'm constantly going through. And if I do want to pull in changes or collaborate, then there's a flow of either where I abandon mine, or I pull in their changes, but then I have to squash everything because if you push up multiple commits to Gerrit, it's going to split those commits into different CRs, don't like that. So there are a couple of things that have been pain points. And yeah, so plus-one for yelling channels, let people get it out. CHRIS: Okay, so definitely some feelings that you are working through here. I'm happy to work together as a team to get through some of them. One thing that I want to touch on is you very quickly hinted at GitHub has got a bunch of new things that are cool. I want to talk about those. But I want to touch [laughs] on an anecdote. You talked about pushing something up to someone else's branch. You're like, oh, you know, I made some changes locally, and I'm going to push them up. I had an interesting experience once where I was interacting with another developer. I had done some code review. They weren't quite understanding where I was. They had a lot of questions. And finally, I said, you know what? This will just be easier. Here, I pushed up a commit to your branch, so now you can see what I'm talking about. And I thought of this as a very innocuous act, but it was not interpreted that way. That individual interpreted it in a very aggressive sort of; it was not taken well. And I think part of that was related to I think of Git commits as just these little ephemeral things where you're like, throw it out, feel free. This is just the easiest way for me to communicate this change in the context of the work that you're doing. I thought I was doing a nice favor thing here. That was not how it went. We had a good conversation after I got to the heart of where we both were emotionally on this thing. It was interesting. The interaction of emotion and tech is always interesting. But as a result, I'm very, very careful with that now. I do think it's a great way as long as I've gotten buy-in from the person beforehand. But I will always spot check and be like, "Hey, just to confirm, I can just push up a commit to your branch, but are you okay with that? Is that fine with you?" So I've become very cautious with that. STEPH: Yeah, that feels like one of those painful moments where it highlights that the people that you work with that you are accustomed to having a certain level of trust or default trust with those individuals, and then working with someone else that they don't have that where the cup is half-full in terms of that trust, or that this person means well kind of feelings towards a colleague or towards someone that they're working with. So it totally makes sense that it's always good to check and just to be like, "Hey, I'd love to push up some changes to your branch. Is that cool?" And then once you've established that, then that just makes it easier. But I do remember that happening, and yeah, that was a bit painful and shocking because we didn't see that coming and then learned from it. CHRIS: I do think it's an important thing to learn, though, because for me, in that moment, this was this throwaway operation that I thought almost nothing of, but then another individual interpreted it in a very different way. And that can happen, that can happen across tons of different things. And I don't even want to live in the idealized world where it's just tech; we're just pushing around zeros and ones; there's no human to this. But no, I actually believe it's a deeply human thing that we're doing here. It's our job to teach the computers to be a little closer to us humans or something like that. And so it was a really pointed clarification of that for me where it was this thing that I didn't even think once about, no less twice, and yet someone else interpreted it in such a different way. So it was a useful learning situation for me. STEPH: Yeah, I totally agree. I think that's a really wise default to have to check in with people before assuming that they'll be comfortable with something that we're comfortable with. CHRIS: Indeed. But shifting back to what you mentioned of GitHub, a bunch of new stuff came in GitHub, and you were super excited about it. And then you went on to say other things about another system. [laughs] But let's talk about the great things in GitHub. What are the particular ones that have caught your eye? I've seen some, but I'm intrigued. Let's compare notes. STEPH: So this is one of those where I hadn't seen GitHub in quite a while, and then I hopped in, and I was like, this is different. But some of the things that did stand out to me right away is that on the left-hand side, I can see all of the files that have been changed, and so that's a really nice tree where I just then immediately know. Because that was one of the things that I often did going to a PR is that I would see what files are involved in this change because it was just a nice overview of what part of the applications am I walking through? Are there tests for this? Have they altered or added tests? And so I really like that about it. I'm sure there's other stuff. But that is the main thing that stood out to me. How about you? CHRIS: Yeah, that sidebar file tree is very, very nice, which I find surprising because I don't use a file tree in my editor. I only do fuzzy finding to jump to files. But I think there's something about whenever GitHub had the file list; these are all the files that are changed. I'm like, this is just noise. I can't look at this and get anything out of it. But the file tree is so much more...there's a shape to it that my brain can sort of pattern match on. And it's just a much more discoverable way to observe that information. So I've really loved that. That was a wonderful one. The other one that I was surprised by is GitHub semantic code analysis; stuff has gotten much, much better over time subtly. I didn't even notice this happening. But I was discussing something with someone today, and we were looking at it on GitHub, and I just happened to click on an identifier, and it popped up a little thing that says, "Oh, do you want to hop to the references or the definition of this?" I was like, that is what I want to do. And so I hopped to the definition, hopped to the definition of another thing, and was just jumping around in the code in a way that I didn't know was available. So that was really neat. But then also, I was in a pull request at one point, and someone was writing a spec, and they had introduced a helper just like stub something at the bottom of a given spec file. And it's like, I feel like we have this one already. And I just clicked on the identifier. I think it might have actually been a matcher in RSpec, so it was like, have alert. And I was like, oh, I feel like we have this one, a matcher specific to flash message alerts on the page. And I clicked on it, and GitHub provided me a nice little inline dialog that showed me all of the definitions of have alert, which I think we were up to like four of them at that point. So it had been copied and pasted across a couple of different files, which I think is totally fine and a great way to start, but they were very similar implementations. I was like, oh, looks like we actually already have this in a couple of places, maybe we clean it up and extract it to a common spec support thing, and ta-da, I was able to do all of that from the GitHub pull requests UI. And I was like, this is awesome. So kudos to the GitHub team for doing some nifty stuff. Also, can I get into the merge queue? Thank you. ... STEPH: [laughs] There it is. That is very cool. I didn't know I could do that from the pull request screen. I've seen it where if I'm browsing code that, then I can see a snippet of where everything's defined and then go there, but I hadn't seen that from the pull request. I did find the changelogs for GitHub that talk about the introduction of having the tree, so we'll be sure to include a link in the show notes for that too. But yes, thank you for letting me use our podcast as a yelling channel. It's been delightful. [laughs] Mid-roll Ad Hi, friends, and now a quick break to hear from today's sponsor, Scout APM. Scout APM is an application performance monitoring tool that's designed to help developers find and fix performance issues quickly. With an intuitive user interface, Scout will tie bottlenecks to source code so you can quickly pinpoint and resolve performance abnormalities like N+1 queries, slow database queries, and memory bloat. Scout also recently implemented external service monitoring, adding even more granularity when it comes to HTTP requests and API calls. So give Scout a try today with a free 14-day trial and experience first-hand why developers worldwide call Scout their best friend. And as an added bonus for Bike Shed listeners, Scout will donate $5 to the open-source project of your choice when you deploy. To learn more, visit scoutapm.com/bikeshed. That's scoutapm.com/bikeshed. CHRIS: Well, speaking of podcasts, actually, there was an interesting thing that happened where the CEO of Sagewell Financial, the company of which I am the CTO of, Sam Zimmerman is his name, and he went on the Giant Robots Podcast with Chad a couple of weeks ago. So that is now available. We'll link to that in the show notes. I'll be honest; it was a very interesting experience for me. I listened to portions of it. If we're being honest, I searched for my name in the transcript, and it showed up, and I was like, okay, that's cool. And it was interesting to hear two different individuals that I've worked with either in the past or currently talking about it. But then also, for anyone that's been interested in what I'm building over at Sagewell Financial and wants to hear it from someone who can probably do a much better job of pitching and describing the problem space that we're working in, and all of the fun challenges that we have, and that we're hopefully living up to and building something very interesting, I think Sam does a really fantastic job of that. That's the reason I'm at the company, frankly. So yeah, if anyone wants to hear a little bit more about that, that is a very interesting episode. It was a little weird for me to listen to personally, but I think everybody else will probably have a normal experience listening to it because they're not the CTO of the company. So that's one thing. But moving on, I feel like today's going to be a grab bag episode or tapas episode, lots of small plates, as we were discussing as we were prepping for this episode. But to share one little thing that happened, I've been a little more removed from the code of late, something that we've talked about on and off in previous episodes. Thankfully, I have a wonderful team that's doing an absolutely fantastic job moving very rapidly through features and bug fixes and all those sorts of things. But also, I'm just not as involved even in code review at this point. And so I saw one that snuck through today that, I'm going to be honest, I had an emotional reaction to. I've talked myself down; we're fine now. But the team collectively made the decision to move from a line length of 80 characters to a line length of 120 characters, and I had some feelings. STEPH: Did you fire everybody? [laughs] CHRIS: No. I immediately said, doesn't really matter. This is the whole conversation around auto-formatting tools is like we're just taking the decision away. I personally am a fan of the smaller line length because I like to have multiple files open left to right. That is my reason for it, but that's my reason. A collective of the developers that are frankly working more in the code than I am at this point decided this was meaningful. It was a thing that we could automate. I think that we can, you know, it's not a thing that we have to manage. So I was like, cool. There we go. The one thing that I did follow up on I was like, okay; y'all snuck this one in, it's fine, I'm fine with it. I feel fine; everything's fine. But let's add that to the git-blame-ignore-revs file, which is a useful thing to know about. Because otherwise, we have a handful of different changes like this where we upgrade Prettier, and suddenly, the manner in which it formats the files changes, so we have to reformat everything at once. And this magical file that exists in Git to say, "Hey, ignore this revision because it is not relevant to the semantic history of the app," and so it also takes that decision out of the consideration like yeah, should we reformat or not? Because then it'll be noisy. That magical file takes that decision away, and so I love that. STEPH: I so love the idea because you took vacation recently twice. So I love the idea of there was a little coup and people are applauding, and they're like, while Chris is on vacation, we're going to merge this change [laughs] that changes the character line. And yeah, that brings me joy. Well, I'm glad you're working through it. Sounds like we're both working through some hard emotional stuff. [laughs] CHRIS: Life's tricky, is all I'm going to say. STEPH: I am curious, what prompted the 80 characters versus 120? This is one of those areas that's like, yeah, I have my default preference like you said. But I'm more intrigued just when people are interested in changing it and what goes with it. So do you remember one of the reasons that 120 just suited their preferences better? CHRIS: Frankly, again, I was not super involved in the discussion or what led them to it. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: My guess is 120 is used...I think 80 is a pretty common one. I think 120 is another of the common ones. So I think it's just a thing that exists out there in the mindshare. But also, my guess is they made the switch to 120 and then reformatted a few files that had like, ah, this is like 85 characters, and that's annoying. What does it look like if we bump it up? And so 120 provided a meaningful change of like, this is a thing that splits to four lines if we have an 80 character thing, or it's one line if it's 120 characters, which is a surprising thing to say, but that's actually the way it plays out in certain cases because the way Prettier will break lines isn't just put stuff on the next line always. It's got to break across multiple lines, actually. All right, now that we're back in the opinion space, I have a strong one. STEPH: This is The Bikeshed. We can live up to that name. [laughs] CHRIS: So I do want an additional configuration in Prettier Ruby. This is the thing I'll say. Maybe I can chase down Kevin Newton and see if he's open to this. But when Prettier does break method call with arguments going into it but no parens on that method call, and it breaks out to multiple lines, it does the dangling indent thing, which I do not like. I find it distasteful; I find it noisy, the shape of the code. I'm a big fan of the squint test. I know that from Sandi Metz, I believe, or maybe it's Avdi Grimm. I associate it with both of them in my mind. But it's just a way to look at the code and kind of squint, and you see the shape of it, and it tells you something. And when the lines break in that weird way, and you have these arbitrary dangling indents, the shape of the code is broken up. And I don't feel so strongly. I actually regularly stop myself from commenting on pull requests on this because it's very easy. All you need to do is add explicit parens, and then Prettier will wrap the line in what I believe is a much more aesthetically pleasing, concise, consistent, lots of other good adjectives here that are definitely just my preferences and not facts about the world. But so what I want is, Prettier, hey, if you're going to break this line across multiple lines, insert the parens. Parens are no longer optional for breaking across multiple lines; parens are only optional within a given line. So if we're not breaking across lines, I want that configuration because this is now one of those things where I could comment on this. And if they added the optional parens, then Prettier would reform it in a different way. And I want my auto formatter don't give me ways to do stuff. Like, constrain me more but also within the constraints of the preferences that I have, please, thank you. STEPH: I love all the varying levels there [laughter] of you want a thing, but you know it's also very personal to you and how you're walking that line and hopping back and forth on each side. I also love the idea. We have the idea of clean code. I really want something that's called distasteful code now [laughs] where you just give examples of distasteful code, yes. Well, I wish you good luck in your journey [laughs] and how this goes and how you continue to battle. I also appreciate that you mentioned when you're reviewing code how you know it's something that you really want, but you will refrain from commenting on that. I just appreciate when people have that filter to recognize, like, is this valuable? Is it important? Or, like you said, how can we just make this more of the default so then we don't even have to talk about it? And then lean into whatever the default the team goes with. CHRIS: Well, thank you. I very much appreciate that because, frankly, it's been very difficult. STEPH: I do have something I want to yell about but in a very positive way or pranting as we determined or, you know, raving, the actual real term that wonderful listeners pointed out to us. CHRIS: Prant for life. That's my stance. STEPH: We had a magic show at thoughtbot. It was all remote, but the wonderful Gregg Tobo, the magician, performed a magic show for us where we all showed up on Zoom. And it was interactive, and it was delightful, and it was so much fun. And so if you need something fun for your team that you just want to bring folks together, highly recommend. I had no idea I was going to enjoy a magic show this much, but it was a lot of fun. So I'll be sure to include some links in the show notes in case that interests anyone. But yeah, magic. I'm doing jazz hands. People can't see it, but magic. I like how you referred earlier, saying that today is more of like a tapas episode. And I'm realizing that all of my tapas are related to being pregnant, yelling, and magic shows, and I'm okay with that. [laughs] But on that note, what else is on your tapas plate? CHRIS: Actually, a nice positive one that came into the world...I always like when we get those. So this is interesting because I was actually looking back at the history, and I had Gary Bernhardt on The Bike Shed back in Episode 269. We'll include a link in the show notes. But we talked a bunch about various things, including TypeScript. And I was lamenting what I saw as a pretty big edge case in TypeScript. So the goal of TypeScript is like, all right, JavaScript exists, this is true. What can we do on top of that? Let's not fundamentally change it, but let's build a type system on top of it and try and make it so that we can enforce correctness but understand that JavaScript is a highly dynamic language and that we don't want to overconstrain and that we've got to meet it where it is. And so one of the design decisions early on with TypeScript is if you have an array and you say like it's an array of integers, so you have typed that array to be this is an array of int, or it will be an array of number in JavaScript because JavaScript doesn't have integers; they only have numbers. Cool. [laughs] Setting aside other JavaScript variables here, you have an array of numbers. And so if you use element access to say, like, say the name of array is array of nums and then use brackets and you say zero, so get me the first element of that array. TypeScript will infer the type of that to be a number. Of course, it's a number, right? You got an array of numbers, you take a number out of it, of course, you're going to have a number, except you know what's also an array of numbers? An empty array. Well, of course. So there's no way for TypeScript because that's a runtime thing, whether or not the array is full of things or not. Or imagine you get the third element from the array. Well, JavaScript will either return you the third element, which indeed is a number, or undefined because there's no third element in this array. So that is an unfortunate but very understandable edge case that TypeScript was like, listen, this is how JavaScript works. So we're not going to…frankly, we don't think the people embracing TypeScript and bringing it into their world would accept this amount of noise because this is everywhere. Anytime you interact with an array, you are going to run into this, this sort of uncertainty of did I actually get the thing? And it's like, yeah, no, I know how many things are in the array that I'm working with. Spoiler, you maybe don't is the answer. And so, we ran into this edge case in our codebase. We were accessing an element, but TypeScript was telling us, "Yes, definitively, you have an object of that type because you just got it out of an array, which is an array of that type." But we did not; we had undefined. And so we had, you know blah is not a method on undefined or whatever that classic JavaScript runtime error is. And I was like, well, that's very sad. But now we get to the fun part of the story, TypeScript, as of version 4.1, which came out like the week that I recorded with Gary Bernhardt, which was interesting to look at the timeline here. TypeScript has added a new configuration. So a new strictness dial that you can configure in your tsconfig called noUncheckedIndexedAccess. So if you have an array and you are getting an element out of it by index, TypeScript will say, "Hey, you got to check if that's undefined," because to be clear, very much could be undefined. And I was so happy to find this. We turned it on in our codebase. It found the error in the place that we actually had an error and then found a few others that I think probably had errored at some times. But it was just one of those for me very nice things to be able to dial up the strictness and enforce correctness within our codebase, and so I was very happy about it. Other folks may say that seems like too much work. And, you know, I get that, I get that take. I'm definitely on the side of I'm willing to go through the effort to have enforced correctness, but you know, that's a choice. STEPH: Yeah, that's thoughtful. I like that, how you said you can dial up the strictness so then as you are introducing TypeScript, then people have that option. There is an argument there in the back of my head that's like, well, if you're introducing types, then you want to start more strict because then you're just creating problems for yourself down the road. But I also understand that that can make things very difficult to then introduce it to teams in existing codebases. So that seems like a really nice addition where then people can say, "Yeah, no, I really want the strictness. This is why I'm here," and then they can turn that on. CHRIS: So TypeScript in the configuration has strict mode, so you say strict true. And that is a moving target with each new version of TypeScript. But it's their sort of [inaudible 28:14] set of things that are part of strict, but apparently, this one's not in it. So now I'm like, wait, can I have a stricter? Can I have a strictest option? Can I have dial it to 11, please? [laughs] Really rough me up and make sure my code is correct. But it is the sort of thing like when we turn any of these on; it will find things in our codebase. Some of them, we have to appease the compiler even though we know the code to be correct. But the code is not provably correct as it sits in our file. So I am, again, happy to make that exchange. And I like that TypeScript as a project gives us configurability. But again, I am on team where's the strictest button? I would like to push that as hard as I can and live that life. STEPH: Yeah, I like that phrasing that you just said about provably correct. That's nice. CHRIS: That's the world I want to live in, everything you own in the box to the left, which is probably correct. STEPH: [laughs] That's how that song goes. CHRIS: Yeah. This is a reference to move errors to the left, which I think I've referenced before. But now that I'm just referencing Beyoncé and not the actual article, it's probably worth referencing the article, but the idea of, like, if a user hits an error, that's not great. So let's move it back to QA, that's a little further to the left in sort of the timeline. But what if we could move it to an automated test in CI? But what if we could move it into your editor? What if we could move it even further to the left? And so, a type system tends to be sort of very far ratcheted up to the left. It's as early as possible that you can catch these. So again, to reference Beyoncé, everything you own in a box to the left. STEPH: [singing] Everything you own in the box to the left. CHRIS: Thank you for doing the needful work there. STEPH: [laughs] Mid-roll Ad And now a quick break to hear from today's sponsor, Studio 3T. When you're developing applications, it can often be a chore to work with your underlying data. Studio 3T equips you with a complete set of tools to work with MongoDB data. From building queries with drag and drop, to creating complex aggregation pipelines; Studio 3T makes it easy. And now, there's Studio 3T Free, a free edition of Studio 3T, which delivers an essential core of tools. This means you can get started, for free, with Studio 3T Free, and when you're ready, you can upgrade and enjoy even more features through Studio 3T Pro and Studio 3T Ultimate. The different editions unlock more tools and additional integrations with MongoDB, SQL, Oracle, and Sybase. You can start today by downloading Studio 3T Free, which also includes a 30-day free trial of all the features of Studio 3T Ultimate, so you can try out some of the enterprise features as well. No credit card required. To start your trial, head to studio3t.com/free that's studio3t.com/free. STEPH: I have a question for you that I'd really love to get your opinion on because I myself I'm waffling back and forth where someone brought up some really great points about a concern or just a question they had brought up around testing and i18n specifically. And I agree with the things that they're saying, but yet, there's also a part of me that doesn't, and so I'm Stephanie divided. And so, I'm trying to figure out where I stand on this. So let me dive in and give you some context; I'm going to share the statement/question that they had asked. So here we go. "One of my priorities has been I should be able to review a test without having to reference any other code. References to i18n means that I have to go over to YAML and make sure the right keys have the right values, and that seems error-prone. In some cases, a lack of a hit in the YAML defers to defaults. If the intent is to override the name of model attribute and error messages and it is coded incorrectly, the code fails silently without translating and uses the humanized attribute name, and that would go undetected. If libraries change structure, it might also fail silently as well, so to me, the only failsafe way is to be fully explicit in test." So this goes with the idea that if you're writing tests and then you're testing text, but it's on the screen or perhaps an email, that you're actually going to assert against that string that is shown to the user instead of referencing the i18n keys. And then that also backs up this person's idea that you really want to not have to jump around. If you're reading a test, everything you really need to know about that test should live very close by. And I really agree with that initial statement; I want everything that's very close to the test, especially if it's anywhere in that expectation line, I really want it close, so I can understand what's the expectation, what's under test, what are the inputs, what's the expected outcome. So I wholeheartedly support that idea. But yet, I am in the camp that I then will use YAML keys instead of providing that exact string because I do look at i18n as a helpful abstraction, and I want to trust that i18n is doing its job. And so that way, I don't have to provide that string that's there because then we're also choosing, okay, well, which language are we going to always use for our test? So this is the part where I feel divided. So I'm going to walk you through some of the reasons that I really support this idea and other reasons that I still use the i18n keys and then get your take on it. So there is a part of me that when I'm using the i18n YAML keys, it does make me sad because it reduces the readability in tests. Sometimes the keys are really well named where maybe it's a mailer.welcomemessage. And I'm like, okay, I understand the gist. I don't need to go see the actual string. I also think they highlighted a really good use case where if you're overriding behavior and it could default to something else, your test is still going to pass, and you don't actually know. So I could see the use case there where if you are overriding, then you want to be explicit about the string that you expect back. I also think there are some i18n messages that are fairly complex, and where then I really would like to see the string. So if you are formatting a date or a time or you're passing in just a lot of variables, then there's a chance that I do want to see how did that actually get generated for the person who's going to be reading it versus just maybe it's garbage text that came out? And I want to validate that the message that we think we're crafting is actually the one that the user is going to see. The case against actually being explicit, my biggest one is because then I do see i18n as a helpful abstraction. And I want to trust this abstraction that it's doing its job and it's doing it well. Because then if I do use explicit strings, it makes me sad if I change text from like hello to welcome, and now I have a failing test. I don't like that idea either. So I'm torn between these two worlds of it is very nice to have everything that you need in a test to be able to understand what is the expectation, but then I also lean into this abstraction and reference the i18n keys. So, Chris, with all of that, that was a bit of a whirlwind, [laughs] what are your thoughts? How do you test this stuff? CHRIS: Honestly, I'm surprised that you've got that much division in your own answer because for me, this is very obvious there's one...no, I'm kidding. This is obviously complicated. Similar to you, I think I'm going to have to give a grab bag of answers because I don't have a singular thought of like it is concretely this or that. I tend to go for explicit strings and tests all the way to...so like the readability of a test, and the conciseness of a test is interesting. I will often see developers extract. Say they're creating a user with a specific email, and then they log in with that email later, and then they expect something else. And so the email is referenced a few times, and they'll extract that into a variable called email. And I personally will tend to not do that. I will inline the literal string like user@example.com, and I'll do it in a few places. And I'm fine with that duplication because I like the readability of any given line that you're reading. So I will make that trade-off within tests. This is the thing I think we've talked about before, but the idea of DRY in tests is like I want to be careful applying that idea, Don't Repeat Yourself, to break apart the acronym. Those abstractions I will use them less than tests. And so I want the explicitness, I want the readability, I want to tell a little story, all of that feels true. That said, to flip it around, one of the things that I'm hearing...so I think I'm hearing a part of this that is around well, we can fail silently because we fail symmetrically in both the implementation and our test. Then an assertion may actually match even though it's matching on a fallback. I think that's a configurable thing. I would actually want my test to raise if I'm referencing an i18n key that is not defined. Now, granted, that's different for languages. And maybe this becomes a more complex story of like in production; in a different locale, it will fail because we don't have 100% parity across all our locale files. But fundamentally, I want to make sure that at least exists in our base, which I think typically would be en-US as the locale. I want to make sure all keys are looked up and found, and it's an error otherwise in our test. So that's a feeling. But am I misunderstanding that part of the story or how that configuration typically works? STEPH: No, I think you've got it. But just to make sure we're on the same page, so if you reference a key that doesn't exist, then it is going to fail. So at least you have your test failure is going to let you know that you've referenced something that doesn't exist. But if you are referencing, like if you want to override the defaults that Rails or i18n has provided for a model and say for an error message, if you reference that, but you want to override it, but then you've forgotten, that does exist. So you're not going to get the failure; you're going to get a different message. So it's probably not a terrible experience for the user. It's not going to crash. They're going to see something, but they're not going to see the custom message that you intended them to see. CHRIS: Gotcha. Okay, well, just to name it, the thing that I was describing, I don't know that that would be the configuration for every system. So I would strongly encourage any system where i18n just has a singular behavior which is we fall back to the key. I want my test to absolutely tell me if that's happening. And that should be a failure of the test. But to the discoverability documentation bit, I do wonder if tooling can actually help answer the question. And as I was describing the wonderful experience I had on GitHub the other day, viewing code as just static characters in a file is both true and also, I think increasingly, a limited view of it. We have editors, and we have code hosting tools that can understand semantically our code a little bit better. There's got to be like 20 Different VS Code plugins that, when you hover on an i18n reference, it will do the lookup for you. That feels like a thing that exists, and if it doesn't, well, now I've nerd-sniped myself, and I got a weekend project. JK, I'm definitely not building that this weekend. But that feels like can we use that to solve this? Maybe not. But that's just another thought of where we have these limitations where it's static, like those abstractions can be useful. But if we can very quickly dereference them, then the cost of the abstraction or that separation becomes smaller, and so the pain is reduced. And I wonder if that's a way to sort of offset it. STEPH: If I can poke at that a little bit more, because I think you're touching on something that I haven't expressed or thought through explicitly, but it's the idea of, like, why do I like the abstraction? What is it that's drawing me towards using these keys? And I think it's because most of the cases, I don't care. I don't care what the string is, and so that feels nice. Like, I understand that, yes, we're referencing something. If that key didn't exist, I'm going to see a failure. So I know that there's text there, and that's why I do lean into referencing the keys instead of the text because it feels good to not have to care about that stuff. And if we do make changes to the text, then it suddenly doesn't fail, and then I have to go update a test because we added a period or added a comma. I think that's the path of more sadness for me. And my goal is always a path of least sadness. So I think that's why I lean into it [laughs], I'm guessing. Is that why you lean into it as well? Or what do you like about referencing the keys over the explicit text? CHRIS: No, I think I share your inclination there, and the reason that you're in favor of it, and I think the consistency like if we're going to use i18n, then we should lean in because it's a non-trivial thing to do like porting to i18n projects, and they're tricky. Getting it right from the first step is also tricky. If you're going to do it, then let's lean in, and thus let's use that abstraction overall. But yeah, same ideas as you. STEPH: Cool. I think that helps validate where I'm at in terms of how I rationalize about this where ultimately, I do like leaning into that abstraction. And as you'd mentioned, some of those porting projects, I haven't been on one specifically, but I've seen that they are a lot of work. And so, if we have that in our system, then we want to continue to use it. It does reduce some of the readability. Like you said, maybe there's a VS Code plugin or some way that then we can help people be able to see if they want that full context in the test and not have to jump over to YAML. But yeah, otherwise, unless it's overriding default behavior or complex, then that's what I'm going to go with is with the keys. But I really appreciate this person's very thoughtful question and approach to testing because, normally or typically, I fully agree with I want full context in the test. And this one was one of those outliers that came up for me, and I had to really think through all the feelings and the reasons that I have for those feelings. On that note, shall we wrap up? CHRIS: Let's wrap up. The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeee!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

Farewell to a couple of amazing people: Priscilla and Nigel. Welcome from Chad, Jon, Chris  Thank you to: George G, Neil P, Regan G, Aaron J  Announcements and News  Swag Deadline is fast approaching! Don't miss out. Random Review Redo: The Quests NPA: More common rule questions asked by new players The Glittering Caves: They have a Tactics Glorfindel Round-up Farewells

Steph joins Chris in trying new things! For her, it's a new email client – the Newton email client – because she really wants to love her inbox. She also talks about implementing a suggestion from Chris on improving CI speed. Chris continues his search for the perfect to-do list app. (It's not going great.) But he has made hiring progress and is excited to move on to the next step: onboarding. Together they answer a listener question who asked for advice on crafting project estimates for clients. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM (https://scoutapm.com/bikeshed). Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy. Services down? New Relic (https://newrelic.com/bikeshed) offers full stack visibility with 16 different monitoring products in a single platform. Newton (https://newtonhq.com/) Subscribe to Email Newsletters in Feedbin (https://feedbin.com/blog/2016/02/03/subscribe-to-email-newsletters-in-feedbin/) GitHub - Shopify/packwerk (https://github.com/Shopify/packwerk) Sunsama (https://sunsama.com/) TickTick: To-do List, Tasks, Calendar, Reminder (https://ticktick.com/) Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed! Transcript: CHRIS: I am now recording. STEPH: Me too. CHRIS: [laughs] That's my recording voice. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: That's how you can tell. STEPH: I just like how it sounds suspicious where we're like; I'm now recording, so be careful. [laughs] CHRIS: This is now on the record. Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Steph, what's new in your world? STEPH: Hello. Happy, happy Friday. Oh, I have something that I'm excited or intrigued about. I don't know. Okay, I'm hyping it up. [laughs] But I'm realizing I'm also very skeptical of it. CHRIS: This is the best sales pitch I've ever heard. I'm so excited to hear what this is. [laughs] STEPH: I am trying a new email client; it is the Newton email client. And I so want to love my inbox. I want to check on it. I want to help it grow. Okay, that's the opposite. I want to help get through all the emails that come through, but I just want to love it. I want it to be a good space that I want to go to. And I just hate email so much. And it always feels like this chore that it's really hard for me to bring myself to do, but yet it's really important because a lot of good things come through email. So this is my rambly way of saying I'm trying the Newton email client because I saw on Twitter from Andrew Mason, who has very similar feelings that I do about email, where we are just not fans of it. And we rarely check it and have declared email bankruptcy at several points in our life. And he's also one of the co-hosts for Remote Ruby. But I saw on Twitter that Andrew was talking about the Newton email client and how it actually made him feel that he enjoyed writing and looking through his inbox. And I was like, yeah, that's the sales pitch I need. So I'm giving it a go. It's been only a couple of days. But one of the nice things I have noticed about it is it's very focused, and there's not much noise, and it actually feels like very minimal design where if you open up like a new email, so you're opening up a new draft, there's no much noise. You get to just focus, almost like you're writing a little blog post or journal post or something. It takes away a lot of the noise. While in Gmail, it's going to open up a small window in the right, but then you still have the rest of the noise that feels distracting. So I like that very intentional like, hey, you're just doing one thing, just focus on this. And then also you can integrate other email accounts as well. So you can have one-stop shopping versus Gmail, then you have to click around and sign in, sign out, or visit different email accounts. So we'll see if it helps improve my email life, but that's something new I'm trying. CHRIS: Very interesting. So you're fully on inbox zero life now. That's what I'm hearing. [laughs] STEPH: Ah, hmm. I don't want to lie to you. [laughs] We have a good friendship. I won't start lying now. CHRIS: I appreciate that. So you're halfway to inbox zero. You're not even entertaining that idea, right? This is just you want a better tool to do email. STEPH: Exactly. Inbox zero is not incredibly important to me. But I do want to make sure that I know that I've seen everything important, and I know where to find things. And then making sure that I am responding to people in a timely manner. Those are more my goals. Inbox zero, if that supports it, then great, I'll work on it. But not necessarily that has to be the goal that I reach. CHRIS: Gotcha. I'm not seeing Newton, but I'm intrigued. Particularly on mobile, I have the Gmail mobile app, and that has unified inbox, which I appreciate. But Gmail on the web does not, and I find that odd. And I've never found a mail app that I enjoy because I want some of the features of Gmail. I want to do Gmail snoozing because I still want that to be consistent and whatnot. And to be honest, that's the main way that I get to inbox zero. I just say future me will have more time. I actually tweeted recently. It was a screenshot from my Saturday inbox, which I think was 15 emails that I'd snoozed from the previous week into Saturday morning. Because I'm like, Saturday morning me will have so much time, and energy, and coffee, and it'll be great. And then it became Saturday morning and, ooph, what a view. STEPH: [laughs] Yeah, your snoozing tip has been life-changing for me because that's not something that I was using all that much. The two things are, one, schedule send so that way if I do have a sudden burst of energy and I want to write an email, but I want to make sure that person doesn't get notified until a decent time. Being able to schedule an email and snoozing is amazing. I think Newton and Gmail have pretty much similar features. I was trying to do a comparison. I was like, is there something really snazzy that Newton does that Gmail doesn't already give me? But it looks like they all do about the same, having those important features like snoozing and then also being able to schedule emails. So I think it really just comes down to a lot of the UI, and there may be some other stuff I'm missing since I'm new to it. But that's the main appeal for me right now is the focus and the look and feel of it. So then maybe I will find looking through my inbox a more zenful experience, I think is how I saw them advertise it. CHRIS: Well, I definitely look forward to hearing more as you explore this space. I will say looping back to what you were just commenting on around deferred send, which is definitely something that I use, but you described one of the reasons that I use it. So the idea of wanting to be respectful of someone else and not send them an email on Sunday night because you happen to be working at that point. But you don't want to put that on their plate. I would say equal amounts; that's the reason I use scheduled send. And then the other reason that I use scheduled send is please, for the love of God, I do not want another email back in my inbox. So I will reply to something such that now I'm done with that, but I will schedule send it for the next morning. Because tomorrow morning me can deal with whatever reply this generates. There's some adage; I don't know if it's an adage, but the idea that every email that you send generates 1.1 emails in reply. So emails just have this weird way of multiplying. And so if you send one out there, you're probably going to get something back. And so often, if I'm trying to clear my inbox, I don't want to get another email in my inbox at that moment. So I will not actually send the reply. I will schedule it for a future time because I do not want to hear. I want no new inputs at this point. I'm trying to process them. So that's part of why I use deferred send. STEPH: I had not thought of that, that yeah, that if you schedule it for tomorrow, you've really gamified this inbox zero because you're like, yeah, if you send something, then you might get an email back. But you're like, if I wait till tomorrow to send it, then I'm less likely to have another email, and then I've hit inbox zero, and I'm set for the day. I like it. It seems helpful. CHRIS: Yeah, inbox zero sounds like an altruistic thing, but it is not. It's a way to force myself to have to make decisions, which is something that I want to get better at broadly. And that's part of the role that I have now. A lot of what I'm interested in exploring is just getting better at making decisions, being more decisive, being more action-oriented. Because I just have a tendency to make many, many spreadsheets and think about stuff for a while and take a long time to make a decision. But I don't get to do that, particularly now. But broadly in life, that's probably not the right mode to be in. So inbox zero is another thing that forces me to deal with things rather than just be like, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, and keep looking at the same thing over and over. So just more thoughts about inbox zero, but now I'll stop talking about it. STEPH: I do like that, though. And you're totally right; it can be a very helpful constraint. And I think that's sometimes why I fight it because then I haven't curated my inbox enough that then when I go to it, there are so many interesting things that then I feel a little bit overwhelmed where I'm like, oh well, I want to read this, and I will look at that. And this seems interesting, and maybe I should be a part of this. It feels like one of those like; you could be a part of these ten amazing things. Do you want to be a part of all of them? And given a person that it's hard for me to say no to or recognize that no, I'm just going to not do anything with this, that is hard for me and would be a good skill for me to hone in on and practice and make quick decisions and be very realistic. Because I used to be subscribed to more newsletters, and then I finally had to stop subscribing to them because it had that same effect on me of that FOMO of like, I'm missing out on this great article or this great video. And I've become more honest with the fact that my Saturday morning self isn't going to want to read through a bunch of newsletters and videos about coding, that I'm going to want less screen time. So that is a really good constraint and helpful skill to cultivate for sure. CHRIS: All right, I said it was done, but one more thing. I feel like I've mentioned this in the past, but Feedbin is the thing that I use for RSS. I still believe in RSS as a technology. But everyone's moved to newsletters these days that go via email. Feedbin gives you an email address that you can use to subscribe to newsletters, and then they do the job of converting that into an RSS feed. So for me, I take something that was now a push into my inbox, and now I can pull whatever I want from that RSS feed. And on Saturday morning, if I'm feeling like, with a cup of coffee, I can enjoy some newsletter about all the new hot tips in Svelte land or whatever it is or not. But it's not clogging up my inbox. And with that, I think I'm actually done talking about inbox zero. [laughter] STEPH: Yeah, that's a nice separation. We could keep going. I have full faith in us that we could keep going about this. But I'll share a slightly different update. I've been implementing a suggestion that you provided a couple of weeks back where we were talking about Rspec's selective test running and how some applications will speed up their test. If you change one part of the codebase, then perhaps you only need to test this chunk of test. You don't actually need to run the full test suite. And that is complicated and seems hard to get right, and really requires understanding boundaries. But then also knowing Ruby, then how do you really identify? Do you really know where this method is being called and can identify all the tests that need to be run? I think we'd mentioned before there's a really good article from Shopify where they have worked on this and created an open-source project called Packwerk. So we can link to that article in the show notes. But more specifically, you suggested, well, what if you just change a test file? That seems very low stakes and also has the benefit of creating a reward where if someone does see something that they can improve in a test, then that's a very quick feedback. Let me just get this change. It's going to be fast on CI. I can merge it right away and also saves time on CI. So I've been working on implementing that change. And it's one of those the actual change is easy, like checking with Git to say, "Hey, what files have changed?" Does it have an _spec.rb at the end of it? Great. Does it not? Okay, we've changed some application files. So let's run the full test suite. That part's easy. Getting it integrated into the build system has been more complicated just because this team has done a lot of work around trying to improve and speed up their test. And there's a fair amount of complexity that's there. So then figuring out a way to stitch my change into all the different build processes that take place has proven to be more difficult. But it's also been insightful just because it has now helped me really understand and forced me to learn, okay, what are all the different steps? What's important for each one? Where can I cut off the rest of the running of the test and instead just focus on running these tests? So in some ways, it's been challenging, but then on the positive side, it's been like, okay, well, this has taught me a lot about the existing system. So at this moment, it is still a work in progress. I'll have more updates in the future. I am excited to see the rewards. I've gotten to the point where I just have a proof of concept where I've gotten pushed up, but it's not production-ready. But it's at least I just wanted the feedback that I'm in the right spot and that we're running just the right test. And so far, it does seem like it's going to be a nice win, even if it's maybe not used by everybody because it's probably rare that someone is altering just a spec file. But for people who are looking specifically to improve the CI build time and working on tests, it will be very helpful to them. So yeah, I'm sure I'll have some more updates in the future. What's going on in your world? CHRIS: Well, I definitely look forward to hearing more about that. However, we can improve CI speed; I'm super interested in that as a topic. Mid-Roll Ad Hey, friends, let's take a quick break to hear from today's sponsor, New Relic. All right, so you've probably experienced this before where you're just starting to fall asleep, and it's a calm, code-free peaceful sleep, and then you're jolted awake by an emergency page. It's your night on call, and something is wrong. 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And you can get access to the whole New Relic platform and 100 gigabytes of data free forever. No credit card required. Sign up at newrelic.com/bikeshed. That's newrelic N-E-W-R-E-L-I-C .com/bikeshed, newrelic.com/bikeshed. CHRIS: Well, similar to your email adventures, I continue on my search for the perfect to-do list. It's not going great, if we're being honest. [laughs] To be clear, because I've mentioned this on a few different episodes, I'm not spending much time on this at all, some but not much. And so it's not really moving. But there are two interesting things. I took a look at TickTick, which was one that I mentioned in the past, a tool for this. It seems good. It seems like an intersection between things, which is what I'm currently using, Todoist, which I've used in the past, and some other tools. So I think I'll probably explore that a little more. It seems like a good option. Decidedly, the most interesting thing is a tool called Sunsama, which is different in some interesting ways but very interesting. So one thing to note about it is it's $20 a month, which is a lot of money for one of these tools because most of them are like, "We're $20 forever, and then it's free." And it's a surprisingly low-cost space. And so, they're definitely positioning themselves as a more costly entry. I would be fine with paying $20 a month for a tool if it really is like, no, cool, I feel great. I'm more productive. I'm happier when I'm not working, et cetera. But what's interesting is they seem to do a let's reach out to all the places that tasks can live for you. So there's your inbox for email. There's your Trello board that you've got. There are GitHub issues. There's Slack. There are all these different sources of potential tasks. And they do a really good job of integrating with those other tools and then allowing you to pull that list into Sunsama and then make each day you have a list. And those items can be like, this is a reference to a Trello card on that board. This is a reference to a Slack conversation over there. So I'm super intrigued by it. It's also got a very intentional plan your day mode, which I like because that's one of the things that I'm really looking for is at the end of the day, I want to clean everything up, make sense of all of the open items, and then reprioritize and set up for the next morning so that I can just hit the ground running. That said, I tried it, and it just didn't quite click. And I think it's one of those it takes some effort to understand how to use it. So I'm not sure that I'm going to get there. But it is super interesting because that idea of our work lives in all of these different tools these days feels very true. And so, something that is trying to act as a hub between them to integrate them is very interesting to me. Again, I haven't really gotten anywhere on this. I'm kind of just reading blog posts, as it were. So I'll report back if that changes, but -- STEPH: The search continues for the right to-do app. Yeah, that seems interesting. I don't know why I'm feeling hesitant towards it. I'm one of those individuals...you're right; there are so many tools. And the fact that they integrate with a lot of them seems really nice. I'm at the point where I just grab links to stuff, and I'm like, hey, if this is my priority, I grab a link to a Trello ticket, and then I just copy that into my to-do. I guess I like that bit of work over having to integrate with a bunch of different platforms. Because once you get used to integrating...I don't know; I'm just rambling. But I wish you the best on this journey. I'm excited to hear more. [laughter] CHRIS: Thank you. I will certainly report back. But yeah, nothing pointed to share at this point. But I do have something pointed to share on the hiring front, which is that we have hired some folks. STEPH: Hooray! CHRIS: Yay. So this has been a fun saga across a couple of different episodes. And in my mind, it feels like this much longer, more drawn out thing, but it's; actually, I think, come together relatively quickly, all things considering. We've got someone who's starting in a little over a week's time, and then someone else who's starting in, I think, two or three weeks after that. So that'll be great. Hopefully, we can transition into onboarding, which is a different whole approach. But hiring as a distinct activity can scale back significantly. As we discussed last week, I want to be in the always be hiring mindset but in the more passive mode of having conversations with folks, staying connected. And if a great candidate comes along and it's the right time, then bring them on the team but not actually actively reaching out and all that sort of stuff, which will be great. Because it turns out that takes a lot of time and also a lot of energy for me. Having those first conversations, going into it very intentionally trying to communicate about something, and there's a tone of salesmanship to it that is not my natural resting state. So I come away from each conversation being like, that was fun, but also, I'm drained now. Why am I so drained? So not having that be a thing that is filling up my calendar is great. And also super excited with the folks that'll be joining the team and to be able to now grow our little team and define the culture and the shape of the groups that we will be collectively. I'm excited for that work and what we can build together. So yeah, it's an exciting time. STEPH: That's awesome. Congratulations. Because yeah, everything you're saying sounds like it's just been a lot of work. So that's very exciting. There's someone that I was chatting with earlier today where they were talking about the value and the importance of understanding what your natural skills are and the things that bring you energy. And so you're mentioning there are certain activities that you enjoy them, but they're also draining because perhaps they are on the outer boundary of what you might define as your own natural skill or the things that get you really excited. And I found that all very interesting. It had me thinking about that today about where are the natural areas that I find that I get energy that are easier for me? And then making sure that I'm trying to prioritize my day so that I am more focused on the activities that just align with who I am and also that I'm engaged with and then also looking for ways to stretch. But they made the point that if you are always in a space where you are not using your natural talents, and you're always having to stretch, then that can be what leads to burnout. Versus if you're in that sweet spot, that zone of where you are using your natural skills, but then also stretching a bit. And I think there are some assessments and things like that that will help you then determine what are my natural skills, and what do I like to do with my time? I just like that style of thinking and recognizing, like you said, like, hey, I did a thing. It was fun, but I'm drained. So now I know that this is something that requires more effort for me. Like hiring, that's one for me. I really like interviewing. I like talking with people, but I'm so nervous for them because I know interviews suck. [laughs] I just have so much empathy for them where I'm like, this is going to be a hard day. We're going to make it as pleasant and positive as possible, but I know this is a hard day. And so I feel like I'm in it with them. And so afterwards, I feel that same relief of like whoo, okay, interview day is over. CHRIS: I don't know that I quite achieve the same level that you do but in no way am I surprised that that is your experience of hiring. And just to name it, you're a wonderful human being that feels for the people on the other side of the hiring table. Like, oh my God, this must be so stressful for you. It's so kind of you to be in that space with folks. But coming back to what you were saying a moment ago, that idea of, like, understanding where your strengths are and where they're areas that you're not quite as strong. And I think critically, the question of like which are the ones where I want to just kind of say no to? I'm like, that's fine. This is not going to be a competency of mine. And I'm going to just avoid that or find other people to work with that balance that out. So for me, sales is the thing that I don't think that's ever going to be my bag. I don't think I'm ever going to move in that direction, and that's totally fine. Whereas decisiveness, which I was describing, is like, I think that's the thing I could get better at. That is one that I don't want to sleep on that. I don't want to say, "That'll be fine. I'll just have other people make the decision." No, I need to get better at making decisions, making decisions with less information or more rapidly, having a bias towards action. All those things I think will be deeply beneficial. So I'm trying to really lean into that. Whereas yeah, again, the sales stuff I'm like, yeah, and there's plenty of examples of this otherwise. But I've also been coding a bit more this week, which has been lovely because the hiring stuff has ramped down. And that has freed me up amongst some other stuff that's been going on. And you know, I like to code, it turns out. It's fun. I just clack about on my cherry brown keys, and it's great. STEPH: Do you remember when we first got introduced to mechanical keyboards, and we had co-ownership of one of the keyboards? And we literally had days of where it was like your turn to use the keyboard. And then it was my turn to use the keyboard. How long did we keep that up before we were finally like, we should just buy our own keyboards? CHRIS: It was a while because we were working with a colleague who was trying out a Kinesis, I want to say, one of the split little bowl of keys. But yeah, we had a shared custody over a keyboard, and it was fantastic. I remember that very fondly. STEPH: The days that it was my keyboard, I would go to the office and be like, oh, today is my day at the keyboard. This is great. This is going to be such a wonderful day. [laughs] And now I'm just spoiled. CHRIS: It went on for a while, though. And this was something where we both obviously enjoy this keyboard. Why don't we just buy one of these keyboards? We totally could have done that. And yet, for some reason, both of us were like, no, but what if...I got to think about this. Again, decisiveness. [laughs] We come back to this topic of well; I had to really think about it. And then somebody got the 92-Key test or whatever it was in the office. And so I just went over and poked every one of those for a while. STEPH: Exactly. It was option overload where we're like, well, okay, we're going to buy one, and then you open it up and search, and you're like, oh, you want options? We have options. Do you know about the blues, and the browns, and the colors, and these different options? Like, I don't know any of this language that you're talking about. I just want to clackety-clack. So yeah, it took time. We had to do our research. CHRIS: And then I ended up on basic browns. So here we are. Let's see, popping back up the stack a couple of levels, hiring that went on for a while. Now it is less going on. Although to be clear, like I said, always be hiring. So if anyone out there in the world is hearing what I'm talking about with Sagewell or seeing any of the stuff that I'm putting on Twitter, which isn't much, I occasionally just post screenshots of my commit messages, which recently included better snakes as a commit message. [laughs] I have to dig into that or not. But we were just doing some snake case to camel case conversion. But the commit message was better snake, so here we are. Anyway, if any of that sounds interesting, please do reach out. But I'm excited to transition back to focusing more on the work. On that note, actually, I'm going to call it interesting things that is happening right now organizationally is; we are working with an external security firm to help with some...they helped us out with a penetration test when we needed that. And then they have stayed on retainer and are helping with various different configurations, taking our AWS S3 buckets and making sure those are nice and secure, and all that kind of stuff. But we've recently started to focus more on organizational security, specifically a bowl of acronyms. We've got SSO for single sign-on, MDM for something device management. I don't know what that first M is. I probably should learn it, but it's fine. That's why I've got help on this is I think they know what the acronym stands for. But so we're working on each of those. And on the one hand, they're probably going to be kind of annoying, like having to go through the single sign-on. It's a whole thing, and it's harder to sign into stuff sometimes. I mean, ideally, it's actually easier. But in my experience, it adds some friction at some points. And then MDM means that there's now some profile manager on the computer. So I can say like, "Every computer must have full disk encryption or else you can't use it. And we need a passcode, and it must be this long and those sorts of things." So it's organizational controls that I think are good for us having a robust security setup throughout the organization. But yeah, they're the sort of things that I think historically, I probably would have, as someone working in an organization, had been like, do we have to? Do we need these things? Couldn't I just do whatever? But now there's something about it that I really like. I'm trying to name it in my head, but I'm kind of like, I don't know. This feels like growing up as an organization. And there's always weird corollary that I've been thinking about with the Rails app that we've been building, intimately familiar with just everything that's going into it. And I know the vast majority of lines of code. I haven't written them all, but I've had an eye on all of the different features that we're building in. And it's hard to get out of that headspace where it feels like a bunch of pieces. It doesn't feel like a hole to me, even though it definitely is. But when does a bunch of boards that you nail together become a boat? To make a really weird analogy because that's what I do; it's a hobby of mine. But when does that transition happen? At some point, certainly. But that's harder for me to see on the code side. And organizationally, somehow getting these things in place feels like the organization sort of an inflection point for us, a growth point, which is I'm really excited about it. Even though they're probably going to mean a ton of annoying nuisance work for me because I'm the person in charge of making sure it all gets rolled out. And anytime anyone locks themselves out of an account, I have to help with that. And so it's probably just putting a bunch of annoying work on my plate. And yet, I don't know; I'm kind of excited about it. STEPH: I feel like that shows our roots in terms of how we approach projects that we work on where you mentioned do we need this? Do we need this yet? Because I feel that we're constantly as developers and consultants just we're trying to advise on the more simplified do we need this? Is this the right thing to spend the money on? How do we know? What are the metrics? What does success look like? And all those questions. So I feel like the way you just phrased all of that just really shows that sort of mentality that you grew up with in terms of checking in, and yeah, it's cool. Like you said, you're at a growth point where then it's like, yes, we are at this point that I've asked myself all those questions, and we're here. This feels like the right next step. CHRIS: I like the way you described it as that you grew up with, my formative growing years at thoughtbot. 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Hello, other Stephanie out there in the world. And they wrote in, "Hi, Steph and Chris, fellow software consultant here. And I'm wondering if you'd consider talking about how to craft a project estimate for a client on the pod. It's such an important aspect of consulting." Amen. I added the amen. "And I feel like I'm very much impacted as a project team member when the estimate isn't accurate." Double amen. So true. [laughs] "Would appreciate any and all thoughts, especially since it might be part of my job in the future. Thanks." I just realized I put us in consultant church by adding all those amens, but here we are. [laughs] CHRIS: I'm glad you clarified that they were additions by you and not part of the original question coming in. STEPH: Sure. I don't want to speak on behalf of Stephanie. So I have some thoughts on the matter. I think there are a couple of different ways that we can talk about this particular question because I think there are different formats as to when you're estimating and who you're providing the estimate for. But I'm going to pause because I'd love to see what you think. How do you go about approaching crafting an estimate? CHRIS: Sure. I'm happy to share some thoughts. And for a bit of context, this question came in to us, frankly, many months ago, but I did send an initial reply to Stephanie because I know that sometimes we take a little bit of time to get back to folks. So if ever you do send in a question, know that one of us will probably respond via email earlier, and then eventually, will make it on the show. And again, just to say, we do so appreciate when folks send in these questions. It's an interesting way to shape the conversation and a way to get topics that you're more interested in into the fold here. But so the two main ideas that I shared in my initial reply were, first, is an estimate really necessary? I think that's a critical question because an estimate implies that this thing is knowable. And as many of us, probably all of us, have found out at some point in our lives as software developers, it's really hard to do software estimation, like wildly difficult. And not just the thing that we'll eventually get better at it, which you do, but there's just some chaos. There's some noise in this work that we do that makes it so, so difficult to get it right. So pretty much always, I will ask, like, do we need to estimate here? What if, instead, we were to flip the whole question on its head and say, let's set a deadline. Let's say two months from now that's our deadline. And let's ruthlessly reprioritize every single week to make sure that we're building something that's meaningful, and we're getting there. And obviously, we have to have some general idea of what we're doing. Is two months a meaningful amount of time to build a rocket to go to Mars? Probably not. But is it enough time to build an app that can allow users to sign in and manage a simple list of items? Yeah, we can definitely do that, and we can probably add a bunch of more features. The other thing that I think is worth highlighting is there's a bunch of stuff that is table stakes and very easy to do. But I would, whenever doing estimation, emphasize unknowns. So, where are the external integrations with other systems? Where are the dependencies that rely on other folks to provide some inputs into this process that we can't be certain where there'll be? In my experience, the places where estimates go awry are often these little intersection points that you're like, well, this will probably take a day, maybe two. And it turns out; actually, this can somehow balloon into a month. That's not a thing that feels comfortable saying in an estimation process, but it is definitely real. I've seen it happen so many times. And so it's those unknowns. It's those little bits that I would emphasize as part of the process if you do need to do an estimate and say, all right, here's the boring stuff. I think we can do that pretty easily. But this part, I don't know, it could be a week, could be three months. And frame it in that way that there is this ambiguity there. Because if someone's asking you for an estimate and they're looking for like it is seven days and two hours exactly, it's like, well, that's not realistic. That's not how this thing works. Unfortunately, I wish it did. But pushing back and changing the conversation is the thing that I have found valuable. I think there's some other really interesting stuff in here around the team dynamics that Stephanie is talking about. But I want to send this over to other Stephanie to see your thoughts because I'm super interested to hear what you have to say as well. STEPH: Oh, I like how you hinted at the team dynamics. Yeah, that could be a fun one to circle back to. So I love how you called out highlighting the unknowns. There are a couple of ways that this comes to mind for me. So there's the idea of the weekly or the bi-weekly estimates that we make as developers and designers. So let's say we as a team are getting together to focus on a chunk of work and decide what we can and can't get through. And that feels one of those the more you get to practice it more frequently; you get to ask a bunch of questions. And that feels like a good rehearsal and exercise of how to go through estimates. And I know you and I have pretty similar strong feelings around how those estimates are then treated by the company. They should really just be used for the team to talk through the complexities in the work to be done versus used to communicate outwardly as to this is when it's definitely going to ship. So there's that more immediate practice of providing estimates. And then there's the idea for more of a consultancy or a company, and someone is coming to you, so thoughtbot being a great example of then how do we work with teams that are looking to come to us and gain an estimate for getting a certain feature implemented? So actually, I went to the source on this one. I went to Josh Clayton, who does a lot of the conversations for the Boost team when it comes to talking with clients and about the potential work that they would like to be done. And mostly our work is often teams will hire us. They have specific goals in mind, but they're really looking to hire ongoing development and services. So they really want to add to their existing staff. And then it's going to be an ongoing relationship versus a hey, we need you to quote us for how long it's going to take to implement this particular feature. And on that note, we don't do fixed-bid work. So we don't say it's X dollars for specific features. But on the realistic side, customers are often capped by a budget. And so that estimate is very important to them because it could be a difference between it's a go versus a no go. So if you have larger companies that are like, "Yep, we want to engage with thoughtbot. We really just want additional development power and design services," that's great. For those that are smaller, it could be an individual product owner, and they need to say, "I really want this feature, but I only have this much money. And frankly, if I can't ship it by this time, I'm not going to do it because it's not worth the investment to my company." And then, in those cases, those are the ones that we're going to spend more time with them to talk about what does the fallback plan look like? And what's our opportunity for simplifying the features? And Josh, in particular, referenced this as systems thinking. So he will go through the idea of drawing out the set of steps, understanding the complexity of the different screens. So what are the validations? What are the external dependencies? What is owned by us and what isn't? What is the likelihood that we're going to get permission to simplify or remove complexity? And even then, when we start to provide some estimates, it's going to be in weeks. It's not in hours; it's not in days. It's going to be in a slightly larger time frame. And then we're also going to spend more time in the discovery phase to say, okay, well, we know you need to fix this particular issue, or you need to integrate with this particular service. So we're going to need to ask a lot more questions about your codebase. What problems have you already run into? Have you tried to do this before? Do we have experience doing this? Is this something that we can lean on and ask someone in the team? And, say, how long do you think it would take for us to work on this? And that's knowledge that isn't privy to everybody. It depends on where you're at in your career as to like, oh yeah, I've done this like five times before, and I know exactly how this stuff can fall apart. I know where the complexity lies. So I think that's why estimation is so difficult is just because it does often pull from that existing experience. And so, if you don't have that experience for a particular set of work, of course, it's going to be hard to estimate because you just don't know. So that was a very broad scope of as day-to-day developer and designers; I feel like we're constantly getting practice and estimating and communicating the progress of our work. And then on the larger scope of if you are a consultant who's then looking to give estimates to clients, then understanding what other need can you sell them? Just ongoing development services. Or, if they are a smaller team and very focused, then what legwork can you do ahead of time to de-risk the project? And then understand how much control you're going to have to be able to simplify as you learn more as you go. Because you're going to, you're going to uncover some things, and you're going to learn some things. And what's that collaboration going to look like? I do have one more concrete example I can provide around some of the smaller projects that we take on. So when we are helping someone that's, say, getting a new product out to market, then we do have a more deliberate three, four-phase approach where we first focus on discovery, and ideation, and validation. And then, we move on to iteration and then launching. And I really like how you said about providing a deadline because then that helps us scope aggressively as to what is the minimum thing that we can get out into the world that will be valuable? And then there's usually some post-launch support as well. But that's often how we will structure those smaller, more specific engagements. CHRIS: I think one of the critical things that you highlighted in there is that thoughtbot doesn't do fixed-bid work. So we're going to do these 20 features, and it's going to take four months. thoughtbot does not do that, and frankly, that's a privilege to be able to take that position and say, "No, no, no," we're not going to work that way. But it is, I think, a trade-off. It's not just something that thoughtbot does to be like, listen, that doesn't sound fun. So I'm not going to do that. It's a trade-off. Not doing that comes in concert with saying, "But weekly, we're going to talk about the work that we have done and the work that remains and constantly, ruthlessly, reprioritize and re-decide what we're doing." And it's that engagement, the idea that you can have a body of work, look at it and say, "Yeah, that'll take about six months," and then go away for six months, and then come back with the finished software. Our strong belief is that that's not the way good software gets built. But instead, it's a very engaged team where the product owner and the development team are in constant communication about each of the features that are being developed. And then again, ideally, on a weekly cadence, coming up for air and saying, "How are we doing? Are we moving in the right direction? Are we getting towards the goals? If not, do we need to simplify? Do we need to change things?" And similarly, as I mentioned deadlines, I feel like deadlines is probably a word that many people think of as very bad because deadlines often come with also a fixed scope, but that can't happen. That's two constraints, and you can't have them fighting that way. But a deadline can be super useful as a way to say we're going to put something out there in the future and say we're heading towards that moment. And let's, again, cut scope. Let's change what we're building, et cetera. But critically, not say, "We got a deadline and a fixed scope. We're going to do that." And so it's, again, just ways to gently shift the conversation around and say, what if we were to look at this from a different angle? Because just having a pile of work and saying, "That'll take six months," I've never seen that play out. STEPH: Yeah, to me, deadline is a bad word when the deadline is set by a team that's not doing the work. So if you have leadership or if you have someone else that is setting this deadline and then just passing that down to someone else to then fulfill, regardless of the feedback or how things are going, then yeah, then it can be a nasty thing, which I think is a little bit of in that question that you picked up on that you highlighted where there could be some interesting team dynamics that Stephanie called out, highlighting that I'm very much impacted as a project team member when the estimate isn't accurate. And I'm making some assumptions here because I don't actually know the exact situation that Stephanie is experiencing. But it sounds like someone else externally is setting these team estimates. And so then you're handed this deadline, and then stuff goes wrong, but you're still pressured to meet this deadline. And I've certainly been part of projects that are like that. And then that is one of the number one things that then often comes up in a retro or like, we don't have control over these deadlines, or we don't know why these deadlines are being set. And then people are working extra hours and working nights and weekends to then meet this arbitrary deadline that none of us signed up for, and that's just not fair to treat deadlines in that way. So full-heartedly agree that deadlines can be a very positive thing, but they need to be set by the people doing the work. And then there has to be discussions and updates about how is this going? Do we have control to simplify this? We thought we could do this with this particular external provider. It turns out that that's a nightmare. Is there another provider we can go with? Can we ship this incrementally? Like some features, you can't. They may have to go out wholesale. But is there a small chunk of this that we can deliver that is then a success that leadership and others can brag about? And then we can keep working on the rest of it. So it's always identifying what are the smallest wins, and how do we get there and getting buy-in from the team? Going back to something that you said earlier around, it is a privilege, where so as thoughtbot, we don't do fixed-bid work. And that is a nice thing for us to be able to focus on. But for people who do need to do fixed bid work and are relying on that, I think that often requires more legwork. And maybe that becomes part of your estimate. I'm just making up how I might approach this if I were trying to do fixed bid work. But there's a discovery phase that's very important. So maybe the first part of your estimate is I need to really understand the feature and see the different screens and know what materials we do or don't have. What does the codebase look like? Do I feel like this is a codebase that I can work quickly in? And is it going to be hindersome for me? But answering a lot of those questions to then help me paint a picture of, like, okay, this is a feature that I've implemented before, so I feel pretty confident that I could do this in a month. And then also communicating that this is my estimate but just know it's an estimate. And I will continue to update you each day as to how things are going or each week as to how things are going, and things may adjust. And we can always talk about ways about simplifying this. But I think that's how I would go about it is; frankly, it's going to require more legwork for me to feel more confident as to then telling someone as to how long I think the work will take. I think that's a nice, broad scope of the different types of estimate work to be done with the general idea of if you can avoid estimates and go for more frequent updates, then that's wonderful. But then, if you are forced into a corner where you need to provide an update, then just do as much research and honesty as possible and then still include the frequent updates. CHRIS: Yeah, that I think summarizes it quite well. STEPH: As a side note, it's been a lot of fun to feel like I'm referring to myself as a third person as Stephanie is working through this problem. So that's been novel. But yeah, thank you, Stephanie, for the great question. I hope that was helpful. On that note, Shall we wrap up? CHRIS: Let's wrap up. The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeeeee!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

Steph talks about winter storms and thoughts on name pronunciation features. Chris talks about writing a query to add a new display of data in an admin panel and making a guest appearance on the Svelte Radio Podcast. Finally, Chris decided that his productivity to-do list system was failing him. So he's on the search now for something new. He asks Steph what she uses and if she's happy with it. How do you, dear Listener, keep track of all your stuff in the world? This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM (https://scoutapm.com/bikeshed). Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy. Upcase advanced Active Record (https://thoughtbot.com/upcase/advanced-activerecord-querying) Svelte Radio (https://www.svelteradio.com/episodes/chris-toomey-talks-svelte-rails-and-banking) Things (https://culturedcode.com/things/) Todoist (https://todoist.com/) MeetingBar (https://meetingbar.onrender.com/) SavvyCal (https://savvycal.com/) Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed! Transcript: CHRIS: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Steph, what's new in your world? STEPH: Hey, Chris. We have Winter Storm Izzy headed our way. It's arriving in South Carolina early tomorrow morning. So that's kind of exciting just because it's South Carolina. We rarely see snow. In fact, I looked it up because I was curious because I've seen it every now and then. But I looked up the greatest cumulative snowfall in 1 season, and it was 19 inches in the winter of 1971. I was trying to add an old-timey voice there. I don't know if I was successful. CHRIS: Does 1971 deserve a full old-timey voice? STEPH: Apparently. CHRIS: I feel like people from 1971 would be like, "We were just people in the 70s." Like, what do you... STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: Wait. Nineteen inches, is that what you said? STEPH: 19 inches. That was total for the season. CHRIS: Yeah, we can bang that out in an afternoon up here in the North. So yeah, okay. You were here for the terrible, terrible winter, right? STEPH: Oh, Snowmageddon? Yes. CHRIS: Yeah, that was something, oof. STEPH: I don't remember how many inches. Was it like 100 inches in a month or something wild like that? I've forgotten the facts. CHRIS: I, too forget the facts. I remember the anecdotal piece of data, the anecdata as it were where we shoveled our driveway, and then another storm came, we shoveled our driveway. And then finally, I was living in an apartment, and it was time to shovel the driveway again. But the pile of snow on the lawn was too big. So we had to shovel the pile of snow further up the lawn to make room for the snow that we were shoveling out of the driveway. But I also remember that being a really nice bonding moment, and I met more of the people living in the...it was a house that had been converted into six apartments. So I actually met some of the people from the house for the first time. And then we hung out a little bit more in the day. So I actually have weirdly fond memories of that time. But to be clear, that was too much snow. I will officially go on record saying too much snow. No, thank you again. STEPH: It was a lot of snow. I think it broke Boston for a while. I remember I don't think I went to...I worked remotely for two weeks because they were just like, "Yeah, don't even try to come into the office. Don't worry about it." So it felt like my first dabbling into understanding quarantine [laughs] except at least with less complicated reasons, just with lots of snow. We also went snowboarding in Charlestown, where we were living. And that was fun because there are some really great hills, and there was so much snow that that was delightful. But I'm not expecting Snowmageddon in South Carolina, although people may act like it and rush out and get their milk and bread. But hopefully, we'll get a couple of inches because that'll be lovely. I don't know that Utah has ever seen the snow. So this will be fun. CHRIS: Oh, that'll definitely be fun. I imagine you've got like even if you do get some amount of accumulation, a day later the sun will just be like, "I'm back. I got this," and clear it up, and you won't have any lingering. The year of Snowmageddon, if I remember correctly, the final pile of snow left in July, the shared one that the city had collected. So you'll probably do better than that turnaround time. [laughs] STEPH: Yeah, it's perfect. It's very ephemeral. It snows, it's beautiful. It's there for a couple of hours, and then poof, it's gone. And then you're back to probably 70-degree weather typically what's here, [laughs] which I have no complaints. There's a reason that I like living here. But in some other news, I have something that I'm really excited about that I want to share. So there's something that you and I work really hard to do correctly, and it's pronouncing someone's name. So whenever there is either a guest on the show, or we are referencing someone, we will often pause, and then we will look for videos. We'll look for an audio clip, something where that person says their name. And then we will do our best to then say it correctly. Although I probably put a Southern twang on a lot of people's names, so sorry about that. But that's really important to say someone's name correctly. And one of thoughtbot's projects is called Hub, which is something that we use internally for all of our project staffing and then also for profiles and team information; there's a new feature that Matheus Richard, another thoughtboter, implemented that I am just so excited about. And now that I have it, I just think I don't know how I lived without this. And I want it everywhere. So Matheus has added the feature where you can upload an audio file with your name pronunciation. So you can go to someone's profile, and you can click on the little audio button and hear them pronounce their name. And then a number of people have taken it a bit further where they will provide, say, the American or English pronunciation of their name. And then they will provide their specific pronunciation; maybe it's Greek, maybe it's Spanish, and it's just phenomenal. And I love it so much. And I can't wait for just more platforms to have something like this. So really big shout out to Matheus Richard for that phenomenal feature. CHRIS: Oh, that is awesome. Yeah, we definitely do pause pretty regularly to go scan through YouTube or try and find an example. And often, people just start into talks, or they'll only say their first name. We're like, oh, okay, keep searching, keep searching. We'll find it. And apologies to anyone whose name we still got wrong regardless of our efforts. But it's making this a paramount idea similar to people putting their pronouns in their name. Like, okay, this is a thing that we should get into the habit of because the easier we make this, the more common that we make this. And names absolutely matter, and getting the pronunciation right really matters. And especially if it can be an easier thing, that's really wonderful. I hope Twitter and other platforms just adopt this; just take this entirely and make it easy because it should be. STEPH: That's what I was thinking; if Twitter had this, and then I was thinking if Slack had this, that would be a wonderful place to be able to just see someone's profile because we can see lots of other helpful context about them. So yeah, it's wonderful. I want to hear more people how they pronounce their names. Because I'll always ask somebody, but it would just be really nice to then be able to revisit or check-in before you talk to that person, and then you can just say their name. That would be delightful. CHRIS: I do feel like creating it for my name would be interesting. I actually had someone this week say my name and then say, "Oh, is that how you pronounce it?" And I stopped for a minute, and I was like, "Yes. I'm really intrigued what other options you were considering, though. I would like to spend a minute and just...because I always thought there was really only the one approach, but I would love to know. Let's just explore the space here," but yes. STEPH: [laughs] You ask them, "What else you got? What other variations can I hear?" CHRIS: [laughs] I would like three variations on my desk by tomorrow so that I can understand what I'm missing out on, frankly. There's a theme or an idea that I've seen bouncing around on Twitter now of people saying, "Yeah, I really just want to apply, get hired, work for one day, make this one change to a platform, and immediately put in my resignation." And I could see this like, "All right, I'm just going to go. I'm going to get hired by Twitter. This is it. This is all I'm doing," which really trivializes the amount of effort that would go into it for a platform like Twitter. I can't even imagine what engineering looks like in Twitter and how all the pieces come together. I'm imagining some amount of microservices there, and that's just my guess. But yeah, that idea of just like, this is my drive-by feature. I show up; I work for a week, I quit. And there we go; now we have it. STEPH: Well, we are consultants. Maybe we'll get hired for all these different companies, and that will be our drive-by feature. We'll add it to their boards and be like, "Don't you want this? Don't you need this?" And then they'll say, "Yes." [chuckles] CHRIS: I am intrigued because I can't imagine this hasn't come up in conversations at Twitter. And so, what are the trade-off considerations that they're making, or what are the reasons not to do this? I don't have any good answers there. I'm just asking the question because, for an organization their size, someone must have had this idea. Yeah, I wonder. STEPH: Yeah, there's; also, I'm sure malicious things that then you have to consider as to then how people...because, at the end of the day, it's just an audio file. So it could be anything that you want it to be. So it starts to get complicated when you think about ways that people could abuse a feature. On that peppy note, what's going on in your world? CHRIS: I had a fun bit of coding that I got to do recently, which, more and more, my days don't involve as much coding. And so when I have a little bit of time, especially for a nice, self-contained little piece of code that I get to write, that's enjoyable. And so I was writing a query. I wanted to add a new display of data in our admin panel. And I was trying to write a query, and I got to build a nice query object in Ruby, which I always enjoy. That's not a real thing, just in case anyone's hearing that and thinking like, wait, what's a query object? Just a class that takes in a relation and returns relation but encapsulates more complex query logic. It's one of my favorite types of ways to extract logic from ActiveRecord models, that sort of thing. So I was building this query object, and specifically, what I wanted to do here is I'm going to simplify down the data model. And I'm going to say that we have users and reservations in the system. This may sound familiar to you, Steph, as your go-to example [laughs] from the past. We have users, and we have reservations in the system. So a user has many reservations. And reservations can be they have a timestamp or maybe an enum column. But basically, they have the idea of potentially being upcoming, so in the future. And so what I wanted to do was I wanted to find all users in the system who have less than two upcoming reservations. Now, the critical detail here is that zero is a number less than two. So I wanted to know any users that have no upcoming reservations or one upcoming reservation. Those were the two like, technically, that's it. But say it was even less than three, that's fine as well. But I need to account for zero. And so I rolled up my sleeves, started writing the query, and ActiveRecord has some really nice features for this where I can merge different scopes that are on the reservation.upcoming is a scope that I have on that model that determines if a reservation is upcoming because maybe there's more complex logic there. So that's encapsulated over there. But what I tried initially was users.leftjoinsreservations .groupbyusers.id havingcountofreservations. So that was what I got to. And thankfully, I wrote a bunch of tests for this, which is one of the wonderful things about extracting the query object. It was very easy to isolate this thing: write a bunch of tests that execute it with given data. And interestingly, I found that it worked properly for users with a bunch of upcoming reservations. They were not returned by the query objects which they shouldn't, and users with one upcoming reservation. But users with zero upcoming reservations were being filtered out. And that was a surprise. STEPH: Is it because the way you were joining and looking where the reservation had to match to a user, so you weren't getting where users didn't have a reservation? CHRIS: It was related to that. So there's a subtlety to LEFT JOINS. So a JOIN is going to say like, users and reservations. But in that case, if there is a user without reservations, I know they're going to be filtered out of this query. So it's like, oh, I know what to do. LEFT JOINS, I got this. So LEFT JOINS says, "Give me all of the users and then in the query space that I'm building up here, join them to their reservations." So even a user with no reservations is now part of the recordset that is being considered for this query. But when I added the filter of reservations.upcoming, I tried to merge that in using ActiveRecord's .merge syntax on a query or on a relation, as it were. That would not work because it turns out when you're using the LEFT JOINS...and as I'm saying this, I'm going to start saying, like, here's definitively what's true. I probably still don't entirely understand this, but trying to do the WHERE clause on the outer query did not work. And I had to move that filtering logic into the LEFT JOINS. So the definition of the JOINS was now I had to actually handwrite that portion of the SQL and say, LEFT OUTER JOIN users on and then, you know, the users.id=reservations.userid and reservations. whatever the logic there for an upcoming reservation. So reservations.completed is null or reservations.date>date.current or whatever logic there. But I had to include that logic in the definition of the LEFT OUTER JOIN, which is not a thing that I think I've done before. So it was part of the definition of the JOIN rather than part of the larger query that we were operating on. STEPH: Yeah, that's interesting. I don't think I would have caught that myself. And luckily, you had the test to then point out to you. CHRIS: Yeah, definitely the tests made me feel much more confident when I eventually narrowed down and started to understand it and was able to make the change in the code. I was also quite happy with the way I was able to structure it. So, suddenly, I had to handwrite a little bit of SQL. And what was nice is many, many, many years ago, I recorded a wonderful course on Upcase with Joe Ferris, CTO of thoughtbot, on Advanced ActiveRecord Querying. And I'm still years later digesting everything that Joe said in that course. It's really an amazing piece of content. But one of the things that I learned is Joe shows a bunch of examples throughout that course of ways that where you need to, you can drop down to raw SQL within an ActiveRecord relation. But you don't need to completely throw it out and write the entire query by hand. You can just say, in this case, all I had to handwrite was the JOINS logic for that LEFT JOINS. But the rest of it was still using normal ActiveRecord query logic. And the .having was scoped on its own, and all of those sort of things. So it was a nice balance of still staying mostly within the ActiveRecord query Builder syntax and then dropping down to a lower level where I needed it. STEPH: I love that you mentioned that video because I have seen it, and it is so good. In fact, I now want to go back and rewatch it since you've mentioned it just because I remember I always learn something every time that I do watch it. On a side note, the way that you represented and described query objects was so lovely. I know you, and I have talked about query objects before because we adore them. But I feel like you just gave a really good mini class and overview of like, this is what a query object is, and this is what it does. And this is why they're great because you can test them. CHRIS: Cool. I'm going to be honest; I have no idea what I said. But I'm glad it was good. [laughs] STEPH: It was. It was really good. If anyone has questions about query objects, that'll be a good reference. CHRIS: Well, thank you so much for the kind words there. And for the ActiveRecord querying trail, really, I was just along for the ride on that one, to be clear. I did write a bunch of notes after the fact, which I've found incredibly useful because the videos are great. But having the notes to be able to reference...past me spent a lot of time trying really hard to understand what Joe had said so that I could write it down. And I'm very glad that I invested that time and effort so that I can revisit it more easily. But yeah, that was just a fun little bit of code that I got to write and a new thing that I've learned in the world of SQL, which is one of those topics that every little investment of effort I find to be really valuable. The more comfortable I feel, the more that I can express in SQL. It's one of those investments that I'm like, yep, glad I did that. Whereas there are other things like, yeah, I learned years ago how to do X. I've completely forgotten it. It's gone from my head. I'm never going to use it again, or the world has changed. But SQL is one of those topics where I appreciate all of the investment I've put in and always find it valuable to invest a bit more in my knowledge there. STEPH: Yeah, absolutely same. Just to troll Regexs for a little bit, they're powerful, but they're the thing that I will never commit to learning. I refuse to do it. [laughs] I will always look it up when I need to. But Postgres or SQL, on the other hand, is always incredibly valuable. And I'm always happy to learn something new and invest in that area of my skills. CHRIS: Yep, SQL and Postgres are great things. But let's see. In other news, actually, I had the pleasure of joining the Svelte Radio Podcast for an episode this week. They invited me on as a guest. And we got to chat about Svelte, and then I accidentally took the conversation in the direction of inertia as I always do. And then I talked a little bit more about Sagewell, the company that I'm building, and all sorts of things in the world. But that was really fun, and I really enjoyed that. And I believe it will be live by the time this episode goes live. So we will certainly include a link to that episode in our show notes here. STEPH: That's awesome. I haven't listened to the Svelte Podcast before. So I'm excited to hear your episode and all the good things that you said on it. I'm also just less familiar with them. Who runs the Svelte Podcast, and what's the name of the show? CHRIS: The show is called Svelte Radio. It's hosted by Antony, Shawn, and Kevin, who are three Svelters from the community. Svelte is a really interesting group where the Svelte society is, as far as I can tell, a community organization that is seemingly well-supported by the core team and embraced as the natural center point of the community. And then Svelte Radio is an extension of that. And it's a wonderful podcast. Each week, they talk about various things. So there are news episodes, and then they have guests on from time to time. Recently, having Rich Harris on to talk about the future of Svelte, Rich Harris being the creator of Svelte. Interestingly, if you search for Svelte Radio, they are the second Google result because the first Google result is the tutorial docs on how to use Svelte with radio buttons. But then the second one is Svelte Radio, the podcast, [laughs], which is an interesting thing. Good on Svelte's documentation for having such strong SEO. STEPH: I was just thinking there's something delightful about that where the first hit is for documentation that's a very helpful; here's how you use this. That's kind of lovely. Well, that's really cool. I'm really looking forward to hearing more about Svelte and listening to you be on the show. CHRIS: Yeah, they actually had some very kind things to say about The Bike Shed and, frankly, you as well and our co-hosting that we do here. So that was always nice to hear. STEPH: That's very kind of them. And it never fails to amaze me how nice podcasters are. Everyone that I've met in this community that's a fellow podcaster they're just all such wonderful, nice, kind people, and I just appreciate the heck out of them. CHRIS: Yeah, podcasts are great. The internet is doing its job; that's my strong belief there. But let's see. In other news, I actually have more of a question here, sort of a question and an observation. My work has started to take a slightly different shape than it has historically. Often, I'm a developer working on a team, picking up something off the top of the Trello board or whatever we're using for project management, working on that thing, pushing it through to acceptance. But all of the work or the vast majority of the work is encapsulated in this one shared planning context. But now, enough of my work is starting to spill out in different directions. Like right now, I'm pushing on hiring. That's a task that largely lives with me that doesn't live on the shared Trello board. Certainly, the rest of the team will be involved at some point. But for now, there's that that's really mine. And there are other pieces of work that are starting to take that shape. So I recognize, or at least I decided that my productivity to-do lists system was failing me. So I'm on the search now for something new, but I'm intrigued. What do you use? Are you happy with what you have for to-do lists? How do you keep track of stuff in the world? STEPH: Oh goodness. I'm now going to overanalyze everything that I do and how I keep track of the things that I do. [chuckles] So currently, I have two things that I used to track, and that is...okay, I'm going to expand. I have three to-do lists that I use to track. [laughs] Todoist is where I add most things of where whatever I just think of, and I want to capture it Todoist is usually where it goes. Because then it's very easy for me to then go back to that list and prioritize or just simply delete stuff. If I haven't gotten to it in a while, I'm like, fine, let it go. Move on. And then the other place I've started using just because it's been helpful in terms of linking to stuff is Basecamp. So we use Basecamp at thoughtbot, and we use it for a number of internal projects. But I have created my own project thanks to some advice from Mike Burns, a fellow thoughtboter, because he created his own and uses that to manage a lot of his to-dos and tasks that he has. And then that way, it's already one-stop shopping since you're in Basecamp a lot throughout the day or at least where you're going to visit some of the tasks that you need to work on. So that has been helpful just because it's very simple and easy to reference. And then calendar, I just live by my calendar. So if something is of the utmost importance...I realize I'm going in this in terms of order of importance. If something is critical, it's on my calendar. That's where it goes. Because I know I have not only put it somewhere that I am guaranteed to see it, but I have carved out time for it too. That's my three-tier system. [laughs] CHRIS: I like it. That sounds great, not overly complicated but plenty going on there. And it sounds like it's working for you, sounds like you're happy with that. STEPH: It has worked really well. I'm still evaluating the Basecamp, but so far, it has been helpful. It does help me separate between fun to-do items which go in Todoist and maybe just some other work stuff. But if it's really work-focused, then it's going in Basecamp right now. So there's a little helpful separation there between what's going on in my life versus then things I need to prioritize for work. What are the things that you're currently using, and where are you feeling they're falling down or not being as helpful as you'd like them to be? CHRIS: My current exploration, I'm starting to look for a new to-do list-type things. Specifically, I've been using Trello for a long time for probably a couple of years now. And that was a purposeful choice to move away from some of the more structured systems because I found they weren't providing as much value. I was constantly bouncing between different clients and moving into different systems. And so much of the work was centrally organized there that the little bit of stuff that I had personally to keep track of was easy enough to manage within a Trello board. And then slowly, my Trello board morphed into like 10 Trello boards for different topics. So I have one that's like this is research. These are things that I want to look into. And so I can have sort of a structure and prioritization within that context in my world. And then there's one for fitness and one for cooking. I'm trying to think which else...experiments, as I'm thinking about I want to try this new thing in the world. I have a board for that. So I have a bunch of those that allow me to keep things that aren't as actionable, that are more sort of explorations. But then they each have their own structure. And that I found to be really useful and I think I'll hold on to. But my core to-do board has started failing me, has started being just not quite enough. And then, more so, I wanted a distinct thing for work for a professional context. So I was like, all right, let me go back to the drawing board and see what's out there. And I did a quick scan of Todoist and Things, respectively. And I've settled on Things for right now. It just matches a little bit more to my mental model. Todoist really pushes on the idea of due dates or dates as a singular idea associated with most things. Almost everything should have a date. And I kind of philosophically disagree with that. Whereas Things has this interesting idea of there is the idea of a due date, but it's de-emphasized in their UI because not everything has a due date; most things don't. But Things has a separate idea of a scheduled date or an intent date. Like yeah, I think I'll work on that on Wednesday. It's not due on Wednesday; that's just when I want to work on it. It can have a separate due date. Like, maybe it's due Friday. STEPH: Is the name of the application that you're saying is it Things? Is that the name of it? CHRIS: Yeah, it is. STEPH: I haven't heard this one. You kept saying Things. I was like, wait, is he being vague? But I realized you're being specific. [laughs] CHRIS: It's one of the few things that...yeah, one of the few things that I think is not great about Things. It's from a company Cultured Code, and the application is called Things. And that is all I will say on that topic. Different names maybe would have been better, but they seem to have carved out enough of an attention space. Enough people know of it that if you search for Things and to-do list, it will very quickly pop up. But yeah, that's a pretty ambiguous name. They maybe could have done a different one there. But the design of the application is really nice. It's on my desktop. And now I have it on my phone as well, and they sync between them and all the stuff. So there's never going to be a perfect system. I'm certain of that. I've at least talked myself out of trying to build my own because, man, have I fallen into that trap before. Oh goodness, so many times. STEPH: I'm very proud of you. CHRIS: Thank you. I'm trying. STEPH: But yeah, it'll be interesting to see how it evolves. I continue to struggle with there are these things that come to mind, and I want to capture them during the day. But some of them are just stories I'm telling myself, which would probably be best captured in a journal tool. And then there are notes that I might want to keep on remote work and how people think about that. And so I'm starting to think about Obsidian or a note-taking system for that. And then I've got this Trello board concoction. And now I've got a to-do...and suddenly I'm like, well, that's too many things. And so I'm trying to not overthink it. I'm trying to not underthink it. I'm trying to just find that perfect amount of thinking. That's what I'm aiming for. I'm not sure I'm going to hit it directly, [laughs], but that's what I'm aiming for. Mid-roll Ad And now a quick break to hear from today's sponsor, Scout APM. Scout APM is leading-edge application performance monitoring that's designed to help Rails developers quickly find and fix performance issues without having to deal with the headache or overhead of enterprise platform feature bloat. With a developer-centric UI and tracing logic that ties bottlenecks to source code, you can quickly pinpoint and resolve those performance abnormalities like N+1 queries, slow database queries, memory bloat, and much more. Scout's real-time alerting and weekly digest emails let you rest easy knowing Scout's on watch and resolving performance issues before your customers ever see them. Scout has also launched its new error monitoring feature add-on for Python applications. Now you can connect your error reporting and application monitoring data on one platform. See for yourself why developers call Scout their best friend and try our error monitoring and APM free for 14 days; no credit card needed. And as an added-on bonus for Bike Shed listeners, Scout will donate $5 to the open-source project of your choice when you deploy. Learn more at scoutapm.com/bikeshed. That's scoutapm.com/bikeshed. STEPH: Some of the topics that you mentioned earlier did stand out to me when you're talking about recipes and working out some other topics. Those are things for me that I often just put in notes. So I liked the word that you used for stories that you're telling yourself or things that you're interested in. Is that something that...I don't put it in Todoist or put it somewhere because I don't really have an action item. It's more like, yeah, this recipe looks awesome and one day...so I'm going to stash it somewhere so I can find it. I'm currently using Notion. I used Bear before. It is beautiful. I really liked Bear, but I needed a little bit more structure, and Notion gave me that structure. And so I will just dump it in Notion. And then it's very searchable, so I can always find whatever recipe or whatever thought that was as long as I try to add buzzwords to my own notes. Like, what would have Stephanie searched for looking for this? So I will try to include some of those words just so I can easily find it. CHRIS: I love you're defining yourself as a Stephanie. For a random Stephanie walking through the woods, what search terms? How can I SEO arbitrage a Stephanie? STEPH: What would she look for? CHRIS: Who knows? STEPH: That Stephanie, she's sneaky. You never know. CHRIS: You never can tell. Obsidian is the one that I'm looking at now. But I'm currently using Apple Notes. And it's really nice to be able to search directly into a note very quickly. I have that both via Alfred and then on my phone. And I'm finding a lot of utility in that, particularly for notes, for things I want to talk to someone about. But now there are seven different things, and how are they connected? And where is something? And to the question of where would a future Christopher look for this, let's make sure I put it in that place. But I don't know what that dude's going to be up to. He's a weird guy. He might look in a completely random place. So I'm trying to outsmart him, and oof, good luck, me. STEPH: [laughs] I have heard of Obsidian, but I don't recall much about it. So I'd have to look into it. I do feel your pain around Todoist and where it really encourages you to set a date. Because there are often things where I'm like, I saw something I want to read. And I know there are tons of tools. There are so many tools and videos and things that people could watch if they really want to invest in this workflow. But right now, I've told myself no, and so I use Todoist. And I see something I want to read, and so I just link to it. And I don't have a particular date that I want to read it. I'm like, this looks cool, and so then I add it to a reading list. But that also, I guess, could be something for notes. More and more, I'm trying to shove things into notes, so it feels less like a task and more of a I'm curious, or I'm interested in things that have piqued my interest. Let me go back and look at that list to see if there's something I want to pull from today or I need inspiration. That's what my notes often are; they're typically inspiration for something that I have seen and really liked, or maybe it's a bug that I looked into, and I want to recall how that happened or what was the process. But yeah, my notes are typically a source of inspiration. So I try to dump most things in there. I don't know if that's particularly helpful for your task, though, because it sounds like you're looking for a way to manage the things that you actually need to do versus just capturing all of your thoughts. CHRIS: Honestly, part of it is having a good system for those like, oh, I'd like to read this sometime. Ideally, for me, that doesn't go into my whatever to-do list system. But if my brain doesn't trust that I'll ever read it or if I feel like I'm putting it into a black hole, then my brain is just like, hey, you should really read that thing. Are you thinking about that? You should think about that and just brings it up. And so having a system externalized that I trust such that then the to-do list can be as focused as possible. It's a sort of an arms race back and forth battle type thing of like, I've definitely done the loop of like, all right, I want to capture everything. I want to have perfect, lossless, productivity system, and that is not possible. And so then I overcorrect back the other way. I'm like, whatever, nothing matters. I'll just let everything fall away. And then I'm like, well, then my brain tries to remind me of stuff or tries to remember more. And there's a book, Getting Things Done, which is one of the more common things recommended in the productivity world. And that informs a bunch of my thinking around this, the idea of capturing everything that's in your head so that you can get it out of your head. And in the moment, be focused and in the moment and not having to try and remember. And so that's the ideal that I'm searching for. But it's difficult to build that and make that work. STEPH: It seems the answer is there's no perfect system. It's always finding what works for you. And I feel like it's always going to change from hopefully not month to month because that would be tedious. But it may change year to year depending on how you're prioritizing things and the types of things that you need to remember or that you need to accumulate somewhere. So I feel like it's always this evolving, iterative process of changing where we're storing this. But I feel like where you store the notes and inspiration, that's something that, ideally, you want to make sure that you can always continue to keep forward. So even if you do change systems, that's something that's usually on my mind. It's like, well, if I use this system to store all of my thoughts, what if I want to move to something else? How stuck am I to this particular platform? And can I still have ownership of the things that I have added here? But overall, yeah, I'd be intrigued to see what other people think if they have a particular system that works for them, or they have suggestions. But overall, it seems to be whatever caters best to your personality and your workflow. That's why there are so many of these. There are so many thoughts, so many videos, so many styles. CHRIS: Yeah, I think a critical part of what you just said that feels very true to me is this is something that will change over time as well. Life comes in seasons, and my work may look a certain way, or my life may look a certain way, and then next year, it may be wildly different. And so, finding something that is good enough for right now and then moving forward with that and being open to revisiting it. And yeah, that feels true. So I'm in an explore phase right now. I'll report back if I have any major breakthroughs. But yeah, we'll see how it goes. STEPH: I will say I think the main tool that I have really leaned into, while some of the others will change over time, is my calendar. There are certain things I've let go. My inbox is always going to be messy. My to-do list is always going to be messy. But my calendar that is where things really go to make sure that they happen. And I will even add tasks there as well. So I feel like the calendar will always stick with me because I can trust that as the one source of like, these are the things that have to happen. Everything else I can check for during that day or figure it out as I go. Or if something gets dropped or bounces to the next day, it's okay. CHRIS: Yeah, the calendar is definitely a core truth in my world. Whatever the calendar says, that is true. And I'm actually a...I hope I'm not annoying to anyone. But I'm very pointed in saying, "This recurring meeting that we have if we keep just canceling it the day before every time, let's get this off our calendars. Let's make sure our calendars are telling the truth because I trust that thing very much." And two apps that I'm using right now that I've found really useful in the calendar world are MeetingBar, which I've talked about before. But it's a little menu bar application that shows the next meeting that's upcoming. And then I can click on it and see the list of them and easily join any video call associated, just a nice thing to keep the next thing on my calendar very top of mind, super useful, really love that. That's just open source and easy to run with. The other that I've been spending more and more time with lately is SavvyCal. SavvyCal is similar to Calendly. It's a tool for sharing a link to allow someone to schedule something on your calendar. And, man, it is an impressive piece of technology. I've been leaning into some of the fancier features of it of late. And it has an amazing amount of control, and I think a really well-designed sort of information architecture as well. It took me a little while to figure out how to do everything I wanted to do in it. But I wanted to be able to define a calendar link thing that I could share with someone that really constraints in the way that I wanted. Like, oh, don't let them schedule tomorrow, and make sure there's this much buffer between meetings. And don't let this calendar link schedule too many things on my calendar because I need to control my day, and give me some focus blocks. And they're not actually on my calendar, but please recognize that. And it basically supports all of these different ways of thinking and does an incredible job with it. As an aside, SavvyCal is created by Derrick Reimer, who is the co-host of The Art of Product Podcast, which is co other hosted by Ben Orenstein, former thoughtboter, creator of Upcase, and a handful of other things. So small world and all of that. But yeah, really fantastic piece of technology that I've been loving lately. STEPH: That's really cool. I have not heard of SavvyCal. I've used Calendly and used that a fair amount. And that is so awesome where you can just send it to people, and they can pick time on a calendar and do all the features that you'd mentioned. So it's good to know that there's SavvyCal as well. Well, pivoting just a bit, we have a listener question that I'm really excited to dig into. This question comes from fellow thoughtboter, Steve Polito. And Steve writes in that, "Hey, Bike Shed, I've got a question for you. I find it difficult to know if there's an existing method in a large class or a class that includes many concerns. How can I avoid writing redundant methods when working on a large project?" And Steve provided a really nice just contrived example where he's defined a class user that inherits from ApplicationRecord. And then comments, "Lots of methods making it really hard to scan this giant class. And then there's a method called formatted name. So it takes first name, adds a space, and then adds the user's last name. And then there are a lot more methods in between. And then, way down, there's another method called full name that does the exact same thing. Just to provide a nice example of how can you find a method that has existing logic that you want and avoid implementing essentially the same method and the same class?" So as someone who has worked on some legacy systems this year, I feel that pain. I feel the pain of where you have a really giant class, and that class may also include other modules. So then you have your range of all the methods that you may be looking through gets really widened. And you are looking for particular logic that you feel like may exist in the system, but you really just don't know. So I don't know if I have a concrete method for how you can find duplicate logic and avoid writing that other method. But some of the things that I do is I will initially go to the test. So if there's some logic that I'm looking for and I think it's in this class or I have a suspicion, I will first look to see what has test coverage. And I find that is just easier to skim where I can find, and I'll use grep, and search and just look for anything. In this particular case, let's use first name as our example. So I'm looking for anything that's going to collaborate with first name. Some of the other things that I'll do is I'll try to think of a business case where that logic is used. So, where are we displaying the user's full name? And if I can go to that page and see what's already in use, that may give me a hint to do we already have this logic? Is there something there that I should reuse, or is it something new that I'm implementing? And then if I really want to get fancy about it, for some reason that I really want to see all the methods that are listed, but I'm trying to get rid of some of the noise in the file, then I could programmatically scan through all the available methods by doing something like class.instance methods and passing in false. So we don't include the methods that are from superclasses, which can be very helpful. So that way, you're just seeing what scoped to that class. But then, let's say if you do have a class that is inheriting from other modules, then you may want to include those methods in your search. So to get fancier, you could look at that class' ancestor chain and then collect the classes or models that are custom to your application, and then look at those instance methods. And then you could sort them alphabetically. But you're still really relying on is there a method name that looks very similar to what I would call this method? So I don't know that that's a really efficient way. But if I just feel like there's probably already something in this space and I'm just looking for a clue or some name that's going to hint that something already exists, that's one way I could do it. To throw another wrench in there, I just remembered there are also private methods, and private methods don't get returned from instance methods. I think it's private instance methods is a method that you'd have to call to then include those in your search results as well. So outside of some deeper static analysis, this seems like a hard problem. This seems like something that would be challenging to solve. And then I guess the other one is I ask a friend. So I will often lean on if there's someone else at the team that's been there longer than me is I will just ask in Slack and say, "Hey, I want to do a thing. I'm worried this already exists, or I think it already exists. Does anybody have any clues or ideas as to where this might live?" I know I just ran through a giant list of ideas there. But I'm really curious, what are your thoughts? If you have a messier codebase and you're worried that you are reimplementing logic that already exists, but you're trying to make sure you don't duplicate that logic, how do you avoid that? CHRIS: Well, the first thing I want to say is that I find it really interesting that I think you and I came at this from different directions. My answer, which I'll come to in a minute, is more of the I'm not actually sure that this is that easy to avoid, and maybe that's not the biggest problem in the world. And then I have some thoughts downstream from that. But the list that you just gave was fantastic. That was a tour de force of how to understand and explore a codebase and try and answer this very hard question of like, does this logic already exist somewhere else? So I basically just agree with everything you said. And again, I'm deeply impressed with the range of options that you offer there for trying to figure this out. That said, sometimes codebases just get really large. And this is going to happen. I think the specific mention of concerns as sort of a way that this problem can manifest feels true. Having the user object and being like, oh man, our user object is getting pretty big. Let's pull something out into a concern as just a way to clean it up. That actually adds a layer of indirection that makes it harder to understand the totality of what's going on in this thing. And so personally, I tend to avoid concerns for that reason or at least at the model layer, especially where it's just a we got 1,000 methods here. Let's pull 200 of them into a file and maybe group them somewhat logically. That tends to not solve the problem in my mind. I found that it just basically adds a layer of indirection without much additional value. I will say in this particular case, the thing that we're talking about presenting the full name or the formatted name feels almost like a presentational concern. So I might ask myself, is there a presenter object, something that wraps around a user and encapsulates this? And then we as a team know that that sort of presentational or formatting logic lives in the presentation format or layer. Maybe I'm not entirely convinced of that as an answer. But it's just sort of where can we find organizational lines to draw within our codebases? I talked about query objects earlier. That's one case of this is behavior that I'll often see in classes as, say, a scope or something like that that I will extract out into a query object because it allows me to encapsulate it and break it out a little bit more but still have most of the nice pieces that I would want. So are there different organizational patterns that are useful? I think it's very easy to start drawing arbitrary lines within our codebases and say, "These are services." And it's like, what does that mean? That doesn't mean anything. App Services, that's not a thing, so maybe don't do that. But maybe there are formatters, queries, commands, those feel like...or presenters, queries, commands. Maybe those are organizational structures that can be useful. But switching to the other side of it, the first thing that came to mind is like, this is going to happen. As a codebase grows, this is absolutely going to happen. And so I would ask rather than how can I, as the developer, avoid doing this in the first place...which I think is a good question to ask. And again, everything you listed, Steph, is great. And I think a wonderful list of ways that you can actually try to avoid this. But let's assume it is going to happen. So then, what do we do downstream from that? One answer that comes to mind is code review. Code review is not perfect. But this is the sort of thing that often in code review I will be like, oh, I actually wrote a method that's similar to this. Can you take a look at that and see can we use only one of these or something like that? So I've definitely seen code review be a line of defense on this front. But again, stuff is still going to sneak through. And someday, you'll find it down the road. And that's the point in time that I think is most interesting. When you find this, can you fix it easily? Do you have both process-wise and infrastructure-wise the ability to do a very small PR that just removes the duplicate method, removes the usage of it, and consolidates on the one? It's like, oh, I found it. Here's a 10-line PR that just removes that method, changes the usage. And now we're good. And that can go through code review and CI very quickly. And we have a team culture that allows us to make those tiny changes on the regular to get them out to production as quick as possible so that we know that this is a good code change, all of that. I found there are teams that I've worked on where that process is much slower. And therefore, I will try and roll a change like that up into a bigger PR because I know that's the only way that it's really going to get through. Versus I've been on teams that have very high throughput is probably the best way to describe it. And on those teams, I find that the codebase tends to be in a healthier shape because it just naturally falls out of having a system that allows us to make changes rapidly with high trust, get them out into the world, et cetera. STEPH: This is that bug or inconsistency that's going to show up where on one page you have the user's full name. And then on another page, you have the user's full name, but maybe the last name is not capitalized, or there's just something that's slightly different. And then that's when you realize that you have two implementations of essentially the same logic that have differed just enough. I like how you pointed out that this is one of those things that as a codebase grows, it's probably going to happen, and that's fine. It's one of those if you do have duplicate logic, over time, based on your team's processes, you'll be able to then identify when it does happen, and then look for those preventative patterns for then how you organize your code. How quickly can you make that change? Can you just issue a PR that then removes one of them? But then look for ways to say, how are we going to help our future selves recognize that if we're looking for a user's full name, where's a good place to look for that? And then what's a good domain space or naming that we can give to then help future searchers be able to find it? I also really like your code review example because it does feel like one of those things that, yes, we want to catch it if we can, and we can leverage the team. But then also, it's not the end of the world if some of these methods do get duplicated. There's one other thing that came to mind that it's not really going to help prevent duplicate methods, but it will help you identify unused code. So it's the Unused tooling that you can run on your codebase. And that's something that would be wonderful to run on your codebase every so often. So that way, if someone has added...let's say there was a method that was full name but is not in use. It didn't have test coverage; that's why you didn't find it initially. And so you've introduced your own formatted name. And then, if you run unused at some point, then you'll hopefully catch some of those duplicate methods as long as they're not both in use. CHRIS: I think one more thing that I didn't quite say in my earlier portion about this. But in order to do that, to use Unuse or to have these sort of small pull requests that are going through, you have to have test coverage that is sufficient that you are confident you're not going to break the app. Because the day that you do like, oh, there's a typo here; let me fix it real quick. Or there's this method I'm pretty sure it's not used; let me rip it out. And then you deploy to production, and suddenly the error system is blowing up because, in fact, it was used but sneakily in a way that you didn't think of, and your test coverage didn't catch that. Then you don't have trust in the system, and everything slows down as a result of that. And so I would argue for fixing the root problem there, which is the lack of test coverage rather than the symptom, which is, oh, I made this change, it broke something. Therefore, I won't make small changes anymore. STEPH: Definitely. Yeah, that's a great point. CHRIS: So yeah, I don't have any answer. [laughs] My answers are like, I don't know, it's going to happen, but there's a lot of stuff organizationally that we can do. And granted, you gave a wonderful list of ways to actually avoid this. So I think the combination of our answers really it's a nice spectrum of thoughts on this topic. STEPH: I agree. I feel like we covered a very nice range all the way from trying to identify and then how to prevent it or how to help future people be able to identify where that logic lives and find it more easily. Also, at the end of the day, I like the how big of a problem is this? And it is one of those sure; we want to avoid it. But I liked how you captured that at the beginning where you're like, it's okay. Like, this is going to happen but then have the processes around it to then avoid or be able to undo some of that duplicate work. But otherwise, if it happens, don't sweat it; just look for ways to then prevent it from happening in the future. On that note, shall we wrap up? CHRIS: Let's wrap up. The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. All: Byeeeeeeeeee!!! Announcer: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

About ChrisChris Williams is a Enterprise Architect for World Wide Technology — a technology solution and service provider. There he helps customers design the next generation of public, private, and hybrid cloud solutions, specializing in AWS and VMware. His first computer was a Commodore 64, and he's been playing video games ever since.Chris blogs about virtualization, technology, and design at Mistwire. He is an active community leader, co-organizing the AWS Portsmouth User Group, and both hosts and presents on vBrownBag. He is also an active mentor, helping students at the University of New Hampshire through Diversify Thinking—an initiative focused on empowering girls and women to pursue education and careers in STEM.Chris is a certified AWS Hero as well as a VMware vExpert. Fun fact that Chris doesn't want you to know: he has a degree in psychology so you can totally talk to him about your feelings.Links: WWT: https://www.wwt.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mistwire Personal site: https://mistwire.com vBrownBag: https://vbrownbag.com/team/chris-williams/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate: is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards, while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other, which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at Honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability, it's more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats v-u-l-t-r.com slash screaming.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. One of the things I miss the most from the pre-pandemic times is meeting people at conferences or at various business meetings, not because I like people—far from it—but because we go through a ritual that I am a huge fan of, which is the exchange of business cards. Now, it's not because I'm a collector or anything here, but because I like seeing what people's actual titles are instead of diving into the morass of what we call ourselves on Twitter and whatnot. Today, I have just one of those folks with me. My guest is Chris Williams, who works at WWT, and his business card title is Enterprise Architect, comma AWS Cloud. Chris, welcome.Chris: Hi. Thanks for having me on the show, Corey.Corey: No, thank you for taking the time to speak with me. I have to imagine that the next line in your business card is, “No, I don't work for AWS,” because you know a company has succeeded when they get their name into people's job titles who don't work there.Chris: So, I have a running joke where the next line should actually be cloud therapist. And my degree is actually in psychology, so I was striving to get cloud therapist in there, but they still don't want to let me have it.Corey: Former guest Bobby Allen is now a cloud therapist over at Google Cloud, which is just phenomenal. I don't know what they're doing in a marketing context over there; I just know that they're just blasting them out of the park on a consistent, ongoing basis. It's really nice to see. It's forcing me to up my game a little bit. So, one of the challenges I've always had is, I don't like putting other companies' names into the title.Now, I run the Last Week in AWS newsletter, so yeah, okay, great, there's a little bit of ‘do as I say, not as I do' going on here. Because it feels, on some level, like doing unpaid volunteer work for a $2 trillion company. Speaking of, you are an AWS Community Hero, where you do volunteer work for a $2 trillion company. How'd that come about? What did you do that made you rise to their notice?Chris: That was a brilliant segue. Um—[laugh]—Corey: I do my best.Chris: So I, actually prior to becoming an AWS Community Hero, I do a lot of community work. So, I have run and helped to run four different community-led organizations: the Virtualization Technology User Group of New England; the AWS Portsmouth User Group, now the AWS Boston User Group; I'm a co-host and presenter for vBrownBag; I also do the New England AWS Community Day, which is a conglomeration of all the different user groups in one setting; and various and sundry other things, as well, along the way. Having done all of that, and having had a lot of the SAs and team members come and do speaking presentations for these various and sundry things, I was nominated internally by AWS to become one of their Community Heroes. Like you said, it's basically unpaid volunteer work where I go out and tout the services. I love talking about nerd stuff, so when I started working on AWS technologies, I really enjoyed it, and I just, kind of like, glommed on with other people that did it as well. I'm also a VMware vExpert, which basically use the exact same accolade for VMware. I have not been doing as much VMware stuff in the recent past, but that's kind of how I got into this gig.Corey: One of the things that strikes me as being the right move with respect to these, effectively, community voice accolades is Microsoft got something very right—they've been doing this a long time—they have their MVP program, but they have to re-invite people who have to requalify for it by whatever criteria they are, every year. AWS does not do this with their Heroes program. If you look at their Heroes page, there's a number of folks up there who have been doing interesting things in the cloud years ago, but then fell off the radar for a variety of reasons. In fact, the only way that I'm aware that you can lose Hero status is via getting a job at AWS or one of AWS competitors.Now, the hard part, of course, is well, who is Amazon's competitors? Basically everyone, but it mostly distills down to Microsoft, Google, and Oracle, as best I can tell, for Hero status. How does VMware fall on that spectrum? To be more specific, how does VMware fall on the spectrum of their community engagement program and having to renew, not, “Are they AWS's competitor?” To which the answer is, “Of course.”Chris: So, the renewal process for the VMware vExpert program is an annual re-up process where you fill out the form, list your contribution of the year, what you've done over the previous year, and then put it in for submission to the board of VMware vExperts who then give you the thumbs up or thumbs down. Much like Nero, you know, pass or fail, live or die. And I've been fortunate enough, so my vBrownBag contributions are every week; we have a show that happens every week. It can be either VMware stuff, or cloud in general stuff, or developer-related stuff. We cover the gamut; you know, people that want to come on and talk about whatever they want to talk about, they come on. And by virtue of that, we've had a lot of VMware speakers, we've had a lot of AWS speakers, we've had a lot of Azure speakers. So, I've been fortunate enough to be able to qualify each year with those contributions.Corey: I think that's the right way to go, from my perspective at least. But I want to get into this a little bit because you are an enterprise architect, which is always one of those terms that is super easy to make fun of in a variety of different ways. Your IDE is probably a whiteboard, and at some point when you have to write code, I thought you had a team of people who would be able to do that all for you because your job is to cogitate, and your artifacts are documentation, and the entire value of what you do can only be measured in the grand sweep of time, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.Chris: [laugh].Corey: But you don't generally get to be a Community Hero for stuff like that, and you don't usually get to be a vExpert on the VMware side, by not having at least technical chops that make people take a second look. What is it you'd say it is you do hear for, lack of a better term?Chris: “What would you say ya, do you here, Bob?” So, I'm not being facetious when I say cloud therapist. There is a lot of working at the eighth layer of the OSI model, the political layer. There's a lot of taking the requirements from the customer and sending them to the engineer. I'm a people person.The easy answer is to say, I do all the things from the TOGAF certification manual: the requirements, risks, assumptions, and constraints; the logical, conceptual, and physical diagrams; the harder answer is the soft skill side of that, is actually being able to communicate with the various levels of the industry, figuring out what the business really wants to do and how to technically solution that and figure out how to talk to the engineers to make that happen. You're right EAs get made fun of all the time, almost as much as consultants get made fun of. And it's a very squishy layer that, you know, depending upon your personality and the personality of the customer that you're dealing with, it can work wonderfully well or it can crash and burn immediately. I know from personal experience that I don't mesh well with financials, but I'm really, really good with, like, medical industry stuff, just the way that the brain works. But ironically, right now I'm working with a financial and we're getting along like a house on fire.Corey: Oh, yeah. I've been saying for a while now that when it comes to cloud, cost and architecture are the same things, and I think that ties back to a lot of different areas. But I want to be very clear here that we talk about, I'm not super deep into the financials, that does not mean you're bad at architecture because working on finance means different things to different folks. I don't think that it is possibly a good architect in the cloud environment and not have a conception of, “Huh, that thing seems really expensive if I do it that way.” That is very different than having the skill of reading a profit and loss statement or understanding various implications of the time value of money calculation that a company uses, or how things get amortized.There are nuances piled on top of nuances in finance, and it's easy to sit here and think that oh, I'm not great at finance means I don't know how money works. That is very rarely true. If you really don't know how money works, you'll go start a cryptocurrency startup.Chris: [laugh]. So, I plugged back to you; I was listening to one of your old shows and I cribbed one of your ideas and totally went with it. So, I just said that there's the logical, conceptual, and physical diagrams of an environment; on one of your shows, you had mentioned a financial diagram for an environment, and I was like, “That's brilliant.” So, now when I go into a customer, I actually do that, too. I take my physical diagram, I strip out all of the IP addresses, and our names, and everything like that, and I plot down how much it's going to cost, like, “This is the value of the EC2 instance,” or, “This is how much this pipe is going to cost if you run this over it.” And they go bananas over it. So, thanks for providing that idea that I mercilessly stole.Corey: Kind of fun on a lot of levels. Part of the challenge is as things get cloudier and it moves away from EC2 instances, ideally the lie we would like to tell ourselves that everything's in an auto-scaling group. Great—Chris: Right.Corey: —stepping beyond that when you start getting into something that's even more intricately tied to a specific user, we're talking about effectively trying to get unit economic measures of every user, every thousand users is going to cost me X dollars to service them on average, on top of a baseline of steady-state spend that is going to increase differently. At that point, talking to finance about predictive models turn into, “Well, this comes down to a question of business modeling.” But conversely, for engineering minds that is exactly what finance is used to figuring out. The problem they have is, “Well, every time we hire a new engineer, we wind up seeing our AWS bill increase.” Funny how that works. Yeah, how do you map that to something that the business understands? That is part of what they do. But it does, I admit, make it much more challenging from a financial map of an environment.Chris: Yeah, especially when the customer or the company is—you know, they've been around for a while, and they're used to just like that large bolus of money at the very beginning of a data center, and they buy the switches, and they buy the servers, and they virtualize them, and they have that set cost that they knew that they had to plunk down at the beginning. And it's a mindset shift. And they're coming around to it, some faster than others. Oddly enough, the startups nowadays are catching on very quickly. I don't deal with a lot of startups, so it takes some finesse.Corey: An interesting inflection that I've seen is that there's an awful lot of enterprises out there that say, “Oh, we're like a startup.” Great. You mean with weird cultural inflections that often distill down to cult of personality, the constant worry about whether you're going to wind up running out of runway before finding product-market fit? And the rooms filled with—Chris: The eighty-hour work weeks? The—[laugh]—Corey: And they're like, “No, no, no, it's like the good parts.” “Oh, so you mean out the upside.” But you don't hear it the other way around where you have a startup that you're interviewing with, “Ha-ha, we're like an enterprise. We have a six-month interview process that takes 18 different stages,” and so on and so forth. However, we do see startups having to mature rapidly, and move up the compliance path as they're dealing with regulated entities and the rest, and wanting to deal with serious customers who have no sense of humor about, “Yeah, we'll figure that part out later as part of an audit document.”So, what we also see, though, is that enterprises are doing things that look a lot more startup-y. If I take a look at the common development environments and tools and techniques that big enterprises use, it looks an awful lot like how startups were doing it five or ten years ago. That is the slow and steady evolution of time. And what startups are doing today becomes enterprise tomorrow, and I can't shake the feeling that there's a sea of vendors out there who, in the event that winds up happening are eventually going to find themselves without a market at all. My model has been that if I go and found a Twitter for Pets style startup tomorrow and in ten years, it has grown to become an S&P 500 component—which is still easier to take seriously than most of what Tesla says—great.During that journey, at what point do I become a given company's customer because if there is no onboarding story for me to become your customer, you're in a long-tail decline phase. That's been my philosophy, but you are a—trademarked term—Enterprise Architect, so please feel free to tell me if I'm missing any of the nuances there, which I'm sure I am because let's face it, nuance is hard; sweeping statements are easy.Chris: As an architect, [laugh] it would be a disservice to not say my favorite catchphrase, it depends. There are so many dependencies to those kinds of sweeping statements. I mean, there's a lot of enterprises that have good process; there are a lot of enterprises that have bad process. And going back to your previous statement of the startup inside the enterprise, I'm hearing a lot of companies nowadays saying, “Oh, well, we've now got this brand new incubator system that we're currently running our little startup inside of. It's got the best of both worlds.”And I'm not going to go through the litany of bad things that you just said about startups, but they'll try to encapsulate that shift that you're talking about where the cheese is moving so quickly now that it's very hard for these companies to know the customer well enough to continue to stay salient and continue to be able to look into that crystal ball to stay relevant in the future. My job as an EA is to try to capture that point in time where what are the requirements today and what are the known detriments that you're going to see in your future that you need to protect against? So, that's kind of my job—other than being a cloud therapist—in a nutshell.Corey: I love the approach. My line has been that I do a lot of marriage counseling between engineering and finance, which is a fun term that also just so happens to be completely accurate.Chris: Absolutely. [laugh]. I'm currently being a marriage counselor right now.Corey: It's an interesting time. So, you had a viral tweet recently that honestly, I'm a bit jealous about. I have had a lot of tweets that have done reasonably well, but I haven't ever had anything go super-viral, where it was just a screenshot of a conversation you had with an AWS recruiter. Now, before we go into this, I want to make a couple of disclaimers here. Before I entered tech myself, I was a technical recruiter, and I can say that these people have hard jobs.There is a constant pressure to perform, it is a sales job that is unlike most others. If you sell someone a pen, great, you can wrap your head around what that's like. But you don't have to worry about the pen deciding it doesn't want to go home with the buyer. So, it becomes a double sale in a lot of weird ways, and there's a constant race to the bottom and there's a lot of competition in the space. It's a numbers game and a lot of folks get in and wash out who have terrible behaviors and terrible patterns, so the whole industry gets tainted—in some respects—like that. A great example of someone who historically has been a terrific example of recruiting done right has been Jill Wohlner. And she's one of the shining beacons of the industry as far as how to do these things in the right way—Chris: Yes.Corey: —but the fact that she is as exceptional as she is is in no small part because there's a lot of random folks coming by. All which is to say that our conversation going forward is not and should not be aimed at smacking around individual recruiters or recruiting as a whole because that is unfair. Now, that disclaimer has been given. Great, what happened?Chris: So, first off, shout out to Jill; she actually used to be a host on vBrownBag. So, hey girl. [laugh]. What happened was—and I have the utmost empathy and sympathy for recruiting; I actually used to have a side gig where I would go around to the local recruiting places around my area here and teach them how to read a cloud resume and how to read a req and try to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to actually have good conversations. This was back when cloud wasn't—this was, like, three or four years ago.And I would go in there and say, “This is how you recruit a cloud person nowadays.” So, I love good recruiters. This one was a weird experience in that—so when a recruiter reaches out to me, what I do is I take an assessment of my current situation: “Am I happy where I'm at right now?” The answer is, “Yes.” And if they ping me, I'll say, “Hey, I'm happy right now, but if you have something that is, you know, a million dollars an hour, taste-testing margaritas on St. John island in the sand, I'm all ears. I'm listening. Conversely, I also am a Community Hero, so I know a ton of people out in the industry. Maybe I can help you out with landing that next person.”Corey: I just want to say for the record, that is absolutely the right answer. And something like that is exactly what I would give, historically. I can't do it now because let's be clear here. I have a number of employees and, “Hey, Corey's out there doing job interviews,” sends a message that isn't good when it comes to how is that company doing anyway. I miss it because I enjoyed the process and I enjoyed the fun, but even when I was perfectly happy, it's, “Well, I'm not actively on the market, but I am interested to have a conversation if you've got something interesting.”Because let's face it, I want to hear what's going on in the market, and if I'm starting to hear a lot of questions about a technology I have been dismissive of, okay, maybe it's time to pay more attention. I have repeatedly been able to hire the people interviewing me in some cases, and sometimes I've gone on interviews just to keep my interview skills sharp and then wound up accepting the job because it turned out they did have something interesting that was compelling to me even though I was reasonably happy at the time. I will always take the meeting; I will always at least have a chat about what they're doing, and I think that doing otherwise is doing yourself a disservice in the long arc of your career.Chris: Right. And that's basically the approach that I take, too. I want to hear what's out there. I am very happy at World Wide right now, so I'm not interested, interested. But again, if they come up with an amazing opportunity, things could happen. So, I implied that in my response to him.I said, “I'm happy right now, thanks for asking, but let's set up the meeting and we can have a chat.” The response was unexpected. [laugh]. The response was basically, “If you're not ready to leave right now, it makes no sense for me to talk to you.” And it was a funny… interaction.I was like, “Huh. That's funny.” I'm going to tweet about that because I thought it was funny—I'm not a jerk, so I'm going to block out all of the names and all of the identifying information and everything—and I threw it up. And the commiseration was so impressive. Not impressive in a good way; impressive in a bad way.Every person that responded was like, “Yes. This has happened to me. Yes, this is”—and honestly, I got a lot of directors from AWS reaching out to me trying to figure out who that person was, apologizing saying that's not our way. And I responded to each and every single one of them. And I was like, “Somebody has already found that person; somebody has already spoken to that person. That being said, look at all of the responses in the timeline. When you tell me personally, that's not the way you do things, I believe that you believe that.”Corey: Yeah, I believe you're being sincere when you say this, however the reality of what the data shows and people's lived experience in the form of anecdotes are worlds apart.Chris: Yeah. And I'm an AWS Hero. [laugh]. That's how I got treated. Not to blow my own horn or anything like that, but if that's happening to me, either A, he didn't look me up and just cold-called me—which is probably the case—and b, if he treats me like that, imagine how he's treating everybody else?Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by something new. Cloud Academy is a training platform built on two primary goals. Having the highest quality content in tech and cloud skills, and building a good community the is rich and full of IT and engineering professionals. You wouldn't think those things go together, but sometimes they do. 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We're gonna have some fun with this one!Corey: Every once in a while I get some of their sourcers doing outreach to see folks who are somewhat aligned on them via LinkedIn or other things, and, “Oh, okay, yeah; if you look at the things I talked about in various places, I can understand how I might look like a potentially interesting hire.” And they send outreach emails to me, they're always formulaic, and once in a while, I'll tweet a screenshot of them where I redact the person's name, and it was—and there's a comment, like, “Should I tell them?” Because it's fun; it's hilarious. But I want to be clear because that often gets misconstrued; they have done absolutely nothing wrong. You've got to cast a wide net to find talent.I'm surprised I get as few incidents of recruiter outreach as I do. I am not hireable and that's okay, but I don't begrudge people reaching out. I either respond with a, “No thanks,” if it's a particularly good email, or I just hit the archive button and never think about it again. And that's fine, too. But I don't make people feel like a jerk for asking, and that is an engineering behavioral pattern that drives me up a wall.It's, “So, I'm thinking about a job here and I'm wondering if you might be a fit,” and your response is just to set them on fire? Well, guess what an awful lot of those people sending out those emails in the sourcing phase of recruiting are early career, and guess what, they tend to get promoted in the fullness of time. Sometimes they're no longer recruiting at all; sometimes they wind up being hiring managers in different ways or trying to figure out what offer they're going to extend to someone. And if you don't think that people in those roles remember when they're treated poorly as a response to their outreach, I have news for you. Don't do it. Your reputation lingers long after you no longer work there.Chris: Just exactly so. And I feel really bad for that guy.Corey: I do hope that he was not reprimanded because he should not be. It is clearly a systemic problem, and the fact that one person happened to do this in a situation where it went viral does not mean that they are any worse than other folks doing it. It is a teachable opportunity. It is, “I know that you have incredible numbers of roles to hire for, all made all the more urgent by the fact that you're having some significant numbers of departures—clearly—in the industry right now.” So, I get it; you have a hard job. I'm not going to waste your time because I don't even respond to them just because, at AWS particularly, they have hard work to do, and just jawboning with me is not going to be useful for them.Chris: [laugh].Corey: I get it.Chris: And you're trying to hire the same talent too. So.Corey: Exactly. One of the most egregious things I've seen in the course of my career was when that whole multiple accounts opened for Wells Fargo's customers and they wound up firing 3500 people. Yeah, that's not individual tellers doing something unethical. That is a systemic problem, and you clean house at the top because you're not going to convince me that you're hiring that many people who are unethical and setting out to do these things as a matter of course. It means that the incentives are wrong, it means that the way you're measuring things are wrong, and people tend to do things out of fear or because there's now a culture of it. And if you fire individuals for that, you're wrong.Chris: And that was the message that I conveyed to the people that reached out to me and spoke to me. I was like, there is a misaligned KPI, or OKR, or whatever acronym you want to use, that is forcing them to do this churn-and-burn mentality instead of active, compassionate recruiting. I don't know what that term is; I'm very far removed from the recruiting world. But that person isn't doing that because they're a jerk. They're doing that because they have numbers to hit and they've got to grind out as many as humanly possible. And you're going to get bad employees when you do that. That's not a long-term sustainable path. So, that was the conversation that I had with them. Hopefully, it resonated and hits home.Corey: I still remember from ten years ago—and I don't always tell the story, but I absolutely will now—I went up to San Francisco when I lived in Los Angeles; I interviewed with Yammer. I went through the entire process—this was not too long before they got acquired by Microsoft so that gives you some time basis—and I got a job offer. And it was a not ridiculous offer. I was going to think about it, and I [unintelligible 00:24:19], “Great. Thank you. Let me sleep on this for a day or two and I'll get back to you definitely before the end of the week.”Within an hour, I got a response rescinding the offer claiming it had been sent by mistake. Now, I believe that that is true and that they are being sincere with this. I don't know that if it was the wrong person; I don't know if that suddenly they didn't have the req or they had another candidate that suddenly liked better that said no and then came back and said yes, but it's been over a decade now and every time I talk to someone who's considering something in that group, I tell this story. That's the sort of thing that leaves a mark because I have a certain philosophy of I don't ever resign from a job before I wind up making sure everything is solid—things are signed, good to go, the background check clears, et cetera—because I don't want to find myself suddenly without income or employment, especially in that era. And that was fine, but a lot of people don't do that.As soon as the offer comes in, they're like, “I'm going to go take a crap on my boss's desk,” which, let's be clear, I don't recommend. You should write a polite and formulaic resignation letter and then you should email it to your boss, you should not carve it into their door. Do this in a responsible way, and remember that you're going to encounter these people again throughout your career. But if I had done that, I would have had serious problems. And so that points to something systemically awful at a company.I have never in my career as a hiring manager extended an offer and then rescinded it for anything other than we can't come to an agreement on this. To be clear, this is also something I wonder about in the space, when people tell stories about how they get a job offer, they attempt to negotiate the offer, and then it gets withdrawn. There are two ways that goes. One is, “Well if you're not happy with this offer, get out of here.” Yeah, that is a crappy company, but there's also the story of people who don't know how to negotiate effectively, and in turn, they come back with indications that you do not know how to write a business email, you do not know how negotiations work, and suddenly, you're giving them a last-minute opportunity to get out before they hire someone who is going to be something of a wrecking ball in the company, and, “Whew, dodged a bullet on that.”I haven't encountered that scenario myself, but I've seen it from other folks and emails that have been passed around in various channels. So, my position on this is everyone should negotiate offers, but visit fearlesssalarynegotiation.com, it's run by my friend, Josh; he has a whole bunch of free content on his site. Look at it. Read it. It is how to handle this stuff effectively and why things are the way that they are. Follow his advice, and you won't go too far wrong. Again, I have no financial relationship, I just like what he's done a lot and I've been talking to him for years.Chris: Nice. I'll definitely check that out. [laugh].Corey: Another example is developher—that's develop H-E-R dot com. Someone else I've been speaking to who's great at this takes a different perspective on it, and that's fine. There's a lot of advice out there. Just make sure that whoever it is you're talking to about this is in a position to know what they're talking about because there's crap advice that's free. Yeah. How do you figure out the good advice and the bad advice? I'm worried someone out there is actually running Route 53 is a database for God's sake.Chris: That's crazy talk. Who would do that? That's madness.Corey: I can't imagine it.Chris: We're actually in the process of trying to figure out how to do a panel chat on exactly that, like, do a vBrownBag on salary negotiations, get some really good people in the room that can have a conversation around some of the tough questions that come around salary negotiation, what's too much to ask for? What kind of attitude should you go into it with? What kind of process should you have mentally? Is it scrawling in crayon, “No. More money,” and then hitting send? Or is it something a little bit more advanced?Corey: I also want to be clear that as you're building panels and stuff like that—because I got this wrong early on in my public speaking career, to be clear—I built talks aligned with this based on what worked for me—make sure that there are folks on the panel who are not painfully over-represented as you and I are because what works for us and we're considered oh, savvy business people who are great negotiators comes across as entitled, or demanding, or ooh, maybe we shouldn't hire her—and yes, I'm talking about her in a lot of these scenarios—make sure you have a diverse group of folks who can share lived experience and strategies that work because what works for you and me is not universal, I promise.Chris: So, the only requirement to set this panel is that you have to be a not-white guy; not-old-white guy. That's literally the one rule. [laugh].Corey: I like the approach. It's a good way to do it. I don't do manels.Chris: Yes. And it's tough because I'm not going to get into it, but the mental space that you have to be in to be a woman in tech, it's a delicate balance because when I'm approaching somebody, I don't want to slide into their DMs. It's like this, “Hey, I know this other person and they recommended you and I am not a weirdo.” [laugh]. As an old white guy, I have to be very not a weirdo when I'm talking to folks that I'm desperate to get on the show.Because I love having that diverse aspect, just different people from different backgrounds. Which is why we did the entire career series on vBrownBag. We did data science with Ayodele; we did how to get into cybersecurity with Christoph. It was a fantastic series of how to get into IT. This was at the beginning of the pandemic.We wanted to do a series on, okay, there's a lot of people out there that are furloughed right now. How do we get some people on the show that can talk to how to get into a part of IT that they're passionate about? We did a triple series on how to get into game development with Dennis Diack, the founder of Apocalypse Studios. We had a bunch of the other AWS Heroes from serverless, and Lambda, and AI on the show to talk, and it was really fantastic and I think it resonated well with the community.Corey: It takes work to have a group of guests on things like podcasts like this. You've been running vBrownBag for longer than I've been running this, and—Chris: 13 years now.Corey: Yeah. This is I think, coming up on what, four years-ish, maybe three, in that range? The passing of time, especially in a pandemic era, is challenging. And there's always a difference. If I invite a white dude to come on the podcast, the answer is yes before I get the word podcast fully out of my mouth, whereas folks who are not over-represented, they're a little more cautious. First, there's the question of, “Am I a trash bag?” And the answer is, “No.” Well, no, not in the way that you're concerned about other ways—Chris: [laugh]. That you're aware of. [laugh].Corey: Oh, God, yes, but—yeah. And then—and that's part of it, and then very often, there's a second one of, “Well, I don't think I have anything, really, to talk about,” is often a common objection here. And it's, yeah, if I'm inviting you on this show, I promise that's not true. Don't worry about that piece of it. And then it's the standard stuff that just comes with being me, of, “Yeah, I've read your Twitter feed; you got to insult me here?” It's, “No, no, not really the same tone. But great question; throw the”—it goes down to process. But it takes constant work, you can't just put an open call out for guest nominations, and expect that to wind up being representative of our industry. It is representative of our biases, in many respects.Chris: It's a tough needle to thread. Because the show has been around for a long time, it's easier for me now, because the show has been around for 13 years. We actually just recorded our two thousandth and sixtieth episode the other night. And even with that, getting that kind of outreach, [#techtwitter 00:31:32] is wonderful for making new recommendations of people. So, that's been really fun. The rest of Twitter is a hot trash fire, but that's beside the point. So yeah, I don't have a good solution for it. There's no easy answer for it other than to just be empathic, and communicative, and reach people on their level, and have a good show.Corey: And sometimes that's all it takes. The idea behind doing a podcast—despite my constant jokes—it's not out of a love affair of the sound of my own voice. It's about for better or worse, for reasons I don't fully understand, I have a platform. People listen to the show and they care what people have to say. So, my question is, how can I wind up using that platform to tell stories that lift up narratives that are helpful for folks that they can use as inspiration—in my case, as critical warnings of what to avoid—and effectively showcasing some of the best our industry has to offer, in many respects.So, if the guest has a good time and the audience can learn something, and I'm not accidentally perpetuating horrifying things, that's really more than I have any right to ask from a show like this. The fact that it's succeeded is due in no small part to not just an amazing audience, but also guests like you. So, thank you.Chris: Oh no, Thank you. And it is. It's… these kinds of shows are super fun. If it wasn't fun, I wouldn't have done it for as long as I have. I still enjoy chatting with folks and getting new voices.I love that first-time presenter who was, like, super nervous and I spend 15 minutes with them ahead of the show, I say, “Okay, relax. It's just going to be me and you facing each other. We're going to have a good time. You're going to talk about something that you love talking about, and we're going to be nerds and do nerd stuff. This is me and you in front of a water cooler with a whiteboard just being geeks and talking about cool stuff. We're also going to record it and some amount of people is going to see it afterwards.” [laugh].And yeah, that's the part that I love. And then watching somebody like that turn into the keynote speaker at a conference ten years down the road. And I get to say, “Oh, I knew that person when.”Corey: I just want to be remembered by folks who look back fondly at some of the things that we talk about here. I don't even need credit, just yeah. People who see that they've learned things and carry them forward and spread to others, there's so many favors that people have done for us that we can only ever pay forward.Chris: Yeah, exactly. So—and that's actually how I got into vBrownBag. I came to them saying, “Hey, I love the things that you guys have done. I actually passed my VCIX because of watching vBrownBags. What can I do to help contribute back to the community?” And Alistair said, “Funny you should mention that.” [laugh]. And here we are seven years later.Corey: Well, to that end, if people are inspired by what you're saying and they want to hear more about what you have to say or, heaven forbid, follow in your footsteps, where can they find you?Chris: So, you can find me on Twitter; I am at mistwire.com—M-I-S-T-W-I-R-E; if you Google ‘mistwire,' I am the first three pages of hits; so I have a blog; you can find me on vBrownBag. I'm hard to miss on Twitter [laugh] I discourage you from following me there. But yeah, you can hit me up on all of the formats. And if you want to present, I'd love to get you on the show. If you want to learn more about what it takes to become an AWS Hero or if you want to get into that line of work, I highly discourage it. It's a long slog but it's a—yeah, I'd love to talk to you.Corey: And we of course put links to that in the [show notes 00:35:01]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me, Chris. I really appreciate it.Chris: Thank you, Corey. Thanks for having me on.Corey: Chris Williams, Enterprise Architect, comma AWS Cloud at WWT. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a comment telling me that while you didn't actively enjoy this episode, you are at least open to enjoying future episodes if I have one that might potentially be exciting.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Part I - Live from Con of the Rings! Welcome from Chad, Jon, Chris Thank you to all our generous patrons! This one is on us. Retro Review Redux (with Youx!) Rate the results on FB! Part II - League of Cooperative Gaming Community Hot Jam Jon and Chris share musings with Mike, Wandering Took Shellin drops in from the lake house  Bobbymcbobface's Poetry Corner Ayy-Lep or Ahh-Lep? Farewells

Check my YouTube channel to get the transcription :) このポッドキャストを作るきっかけになった本とポッドキャスト The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity―and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race　Daniel Z. Lieberman, M.D　Michael E. Long YUVAL HARARI: ON WHY BOREDOM IS GOOD FOR YOU https://jayshetty.me/podcast/yuval-harari/ 英語への翻訳はChrisさんにしてもらいました！ありがとうございます