Podcasts about New Yorker

As an artist and writer Wanda Gág is well known for her children’s books. But this first of two parts about her life covers her own unusual childhood, which went from quirky fun to intense hardship when her father died. Research: Anderson, Phil. "Gág, Wanda (1893–1946)." MNopedia, Minnesota Historical Society. http://www.mnopedia.org/person/g-g-wanda-1893-1946 Cox, Richard W. “Wanda Gág The Bite of the Picture Book.“ Minnesota History. Fall 1975. https://storage.googleapis.com/mnhs-org-support/mn_history_articles/44/v44i07p238-254.pdf?__hstc=98931905.4376bcd11fc21fde4cdd335d087cb15e.1742826273001.1742826273001.1742826273001.1&__hssc=98931905.1.1742826273001&__hsfp=979038277 Cox, Richard, and Julie L’Enfant. “Old World Symphony.” Minnesota History. Spring 1996. https://storage.googleapis.com/mnhs-org-support/mn_history_articles/55/v55i01p002-015.pdf?__hstc=98931905.4376bcd11fc21fde4cdd335d087cb15e.1742826273001.1742826273001.1742826273001.1&__hssc=98931905.1.1742826273001&__hsfp=979038277 Gág , Wanda. “Growing Pains.” Coward-McCann. 1940. https://ia801401.us.archive.org/10/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.88331/2015.88331.Growing-Pains-Diaries-And-Drawings-For-The-Years-1908-1917.pdf Gág , Wanda. “Millions of Cats.” Coward-McCann. 1928. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Millions_of_Cats/2YjWAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0 Gág , Wanda. “The Funny Thing.” Coward-McCann. 1991. https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Funny_Thing/c1nhAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0 Gág , Wanda. “SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS.” Coward-McCann. 1938. Accessed online: https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/Gág -snow/Gág -snow-00-h-dir/Gág -snow-00-h.html Gág , Wanda. “Snippy and Snappy. Coward-McCann. 1931. Accessed online: https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/Gág -snippy/Gág -snippy-00-h-dir/Gág -snippy-00-h.html Gregory, Alice. “Juicy As a Pear: Wanda Gág’s Delectable Books.” The New Yorker. April 24, 2014. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/juicy-as-a-pear-wanda-ggs-delectable-books?_sp=0d46b6ea-f03e-46b9-aa69-dd7bd3c6100b.1742826428861 Hurley, Beatrice J. “Wanda Gág - Artist, Author.” Elementary English, vol. 32, no. 6, 1955, pp. 347–54. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41384370 Keller, Sara. “Reciprocal Connections: Wanda Gág and her Hometown Community of new Ulm, Minnesota.” Kappa Omicron Nu. https://publications.kon.org/urc//v9/Interconnected-Through-Art/keller.pdf Popova, Maria. “Pioneering Early-Twentieth-Century Artist and Creative Entrepreneur Wanda Gág on Our Two Selves and How Love Lays Its Claim on Us.” The Marginalian. March 11, 2015. https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/03/11/wanda-Gág -growing-pains-me-myself/#:~:text=By%20Maria%20Popova,was%20already%20on%20her%20deathbed. Scott, Alma. “Wanda Gág : The Story of an Artist.” Kessinger Publishing. 2007. Showalter, Elaine. “These Modern Women: Autobiographical Essays from the Twenties.” Feminist Press at CUNY. 1989. “Wanda Gág.” Wanda Gág https://wandaGág house.org/wanda-Gág / Wigglesworth, Michael. “The Day of Doom.” Spiral Press. 1929. Accessed online: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uva.x000889310&seq=9 Winnan, Audur H. “Wanda Gág .” University of Minnesota Press. 1993. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Adam Platt was a contributing editor and restaurant critic for New York magazine beginning in 2000. He won the James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for Restaurant Reviews in 2010. During the course of nearly twenty-five years in the magazine business, Platt has written for a variety of publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Observer, Esquire, and Condé Nast Traveler. He is the author of The Book of Eating and is currently writing another book. He lives in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From playing Annie on stages for children's theaters… to becoming a Heavy Metal radio host… to stepping into her “Fitness Barbie” era…… to becoming one of the most well-known and prolific speakers of our time… yup, it's safe to say, Jen Gottlieb has done it ALL. And the one thing that underscores her journey… is an unquenchable desire to BE SEEN.Jen Gottlieb had to lose it all before she could rebuild her dream life from scratch. An international speaker, powerhouse entrepreneur, and co-founder of Super Connector Media, Jen never doubted that she was meant for center stage, but she also never could have predicted the journey that an early passion for theater would take her on. From one leading role in the Broadway National Tour of The Wedding Singer to another on the hit VH1 TV series That Metal Show, Jen realized that achieving what she thought was her purpose had only left her feeling like a stranger to herself. Before long she knew that it was time to publicly inhabit her most challenging but fulfilling role yet on some of the world's biggest stages: her true self.We hear about Jen's days as a Hooters' girl (yup, that happened!), the harsh behind-the-scenes realities of touring a Broadway show, how daily ice baths taught her to make fear her friend, the prescient first four words her husband ever said to her, the unexpected night Jerry Seinfeld showed her the power of being seen as a beginner, and how everything had to fall apart before she could build her dream life and become the most authentic and grateful version of herself.IN THIS EPISODE:[01:17] Jamie introduces Jen Gottlieb.[03:56] Jen starts to talk about her childhood & finding her purpose as an actress.[05:57] Jen talks about working at Hooters, struggling with body image, and her eating disorder.[10:03] Jen describes moving to NYC, manifesting her dream role, and discovering that her new lifestyle wasn't everything she had imagined it would be. [18:35] Jen speaks of losing herself during the five years that she stayed on That Metal Show.[20:56] Jen explains the beginning of becoming a personal trainer and how she truly learned discipline. [25:20] Jen begins to explain how she got her start as a public speaker.[32:04] Jen talks about how she manifested/“created” her husband and ideal relationship.[43:38] Jen describes her advice to manage fear and find the strength to take action.[46:17] Jamie asks Jen to talk about her weekly ice plunge and why it's an important part of her routine.[52:03] Jen explains the intention of her Instagram “lives” every morning. [56:32] Jen speaks about her methods before going up on stage for her Keynote Presentations.KEY TAKEAWAYS:[18:13] Jen describes her belief that opportunities come your way when you are your most authentic self.[32:11] Jen explains that she actualizes her desires by utilizing a vision board, shifting her beliefs, and stepping into actions that coincide with the reality of what she wants to attract to herself.  [43:13] Jamie describes Jen's practices for overcoming fear by asking herself how she'd want to feel after doing X thing: Regret…or Proud of Herself?************Make sure to follow Jamie @jamiehess on Instagram for news & updates, and visit our companion Instagram account @gratitudeology for a sneak peek into the personal moments discussed on the show.************Thank you to Jen Gottlieb for sharing your truth with us today. Follow Jen on Instagram @jen_gottliebTo check out more about Jen, visit her website: https://jengottlieb.com/************The Gratitudeology Podcast theme music is by HYLLS, performed by Nadia Ali @thenadiaali ************Jen's Bio:Introducing Jen Gottlieb, powerhouse entrepreneur, international speaker, host of the I Dare You Podcast, and co-founder of Super Connector Media – an award-winning training, events, and online education company. With a successful five-year stint as a VH1 host and a career as a Broadway actress, Jen has been making waves in the entrepreneurial world by teaching business owners how to build profitable brands and become “The Recognized Expert” in their field.As a sought-after speaker, Jen has shared the stage with top thought-leaders and celebrities, including Gary Vaynerchuk, Marie Forleo, Eric Thomas, Emmit Smith, Snoop Dogg, and Martha Stewart. Her work has been featured in Forbes, Business Insider, Maxim, Goop, Women's Health, and other major publications.Jen's company, Super Connector Media, was recently listed on the INC 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies in America, and Jen herself was named one of the “Top 50 Speakers in The World” by Real Leaders Magazine.Despite her many accolades, Jen remains a true New Yorker at heart and shares her Manhattan home with her husband Chris and their three adorable dogs, Tammie, Teddy, and King Arthur.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

From fights over masks and vaccines to the loss of social connection, the year 2020 accelerated many of the trends that were already happening in America and created new obstacles for the country to overcome. In his book 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed, sociologist Eric Klinenberg takes on a journey back to that year and everything that happened in it through the eyes of seven New Yorkers, one from each of the city's boroughs.Klinenberg, who recently delivered the Colloquium on the Environment lecture for the Penn State Sustainability Institute, joins us on Democracy Works to discuss how the pandemic accelerated political polarization and distrust in institutions in America and what we can do to repair that damage before the next pandemic or other major crisis comes our way. The book and the podcast interview allow us to see 2020—and, ultimately, ourselves—with clarity and empathy. Klinenberg is the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is the author of Palaces for the People, Going Solo, Heat Wave, and Fighting for Air. He has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Wired, and This American Life. He recently visited Penn State to present the 2025 Colloquium on the Environment for Penn State Sustainability; watch his lecture here. 

The Trojans runs at the cell through April 26th. To learn more, visit thecelltheatre.org.  Follow The Present Stage on Instagram at @thepresentstageThe Present Stage: Conversations with Theater Writers is hosted by Dan Rubins, a theater critic for Slant Magazine. You can also find Dan's reviews on Cast Album Reviews and in The New Yorker's Briefly Noted column.The Present Stage supports the national nonprofit Hear Your Song. If you'd like to learn more about Hear Your Song and how to support empowering youth with serious illnesses to make their voices heard though songwriting, please visit www.hearyoursong.org

Send us a textHappy Earth Day! There are two concepts that every person should understand to be a better Earthling: entropy and self-organization. It seems like a paradox, but systems on Earth are simultaneously breaking down into disorder and arranging themselves into complex superorganisms. Everything on Earth (well, really in the whole universe) is subject to the second law of thermodynamics, which means it all dies and decays. But with access to steady flows of energy, organisms, ecosystems, and human societies can hold back the death and decay for a spell. After dropping the kids off at the pool, Asher, Rob, and Jason cover the interplay of entropy and self-organization and contemplate how to manage the inevitability of entropy with elegance (beyond morphing into a lizard person).Originally recorded on 4/8/25.Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.Sources/Links/Notes:Geoffrey West, Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies, Penguin Books, 2018.Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, Scribner, 2024.William Rees, “End game: the economy as eco-catastrophe and what needs to change,” Real-World Economics Review, 2019.The laws of thermodynamics, as explained by the website “Physics for Idiots""Telegraph Road" - song by Dire StraitsDavid Owen, "Green Manhattan," The New Yorker, October 10, 2004.Other Crazy Town episodes you might like:Crazy Town 100 - A Temporary Techno Stunt: Tom Murphy on Falling out or Love with ModernityCrazy Town 35 - Self Domestication and Overshoot, or… the Story of Foxes and Russian MelodramaCrazy Town Bonus Riff - Vanilla Andreessen, Pygmy Marmosets, and Hi-Tech DelusionsSupport the show

Avui connectem amb Nova York per celebrar Sant Jordi amb l'escriptora i traductora Mary Ann Newman, que organitza des de Farragut Fund els actes de la diada al West Village. I parlem del centenari de la revista The New Yorker, una de les publicacions culturals m

This episode of the Them Before Us podcast features a conversation with professor and author Nancy Pearcey, exploring what it means to truly love the body and uphold the dignity of the human person. Drawing from her book "Love Thy Body", Pearcey outlines the intellectual and personal journey that shaped her convictions and dives into the cultural narratives that separate humanity from both biological reality and God-given identity.Check out Love Thy Body on AmazonThe discussion unpacks how the separation of body and personhood is influencing today's most critical ethical issues, including abortion, transgender ideology, IVF, and surrogacy. Pearcey explains how this divide is used to justify everything from embryo destruction to the treatment of people as products.Nancy Pearcey brings reason, clarity, and hope to a conversation that matters deeply in today's world. Let us know what you think!Bio: Nancy Pearcey is the author of Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality, as well as The Toxic War on Masculinity, The Soul of Science, Saving Leonardo, Finding Truth, and two ECPA Gold Medallion Award Winners: How Now Shall We Live (coauthored with Harold Fickett and Chuck Colson) and Total Truth. Her books have been translated into 20 languages. She is professor and scholar in residence at Houston Christian University. A former agnostic, Pearcey has spoken at universities such as Princeton, Stanford, USC, and Dartmouth. She has been quoted in The New Yorker and Newsweek, highlighted as one of the five top women apologists by Christianity Today, and hailed in The Economist as "America's pre-eminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual."

Tina Brown has shaped the culture and captured the zeitgeist since she reinvented Vanity Fair and The New Yorker in the 1980s and 1990s. But now, she's moved onto the digital media space with her Substack, Fresh Hell. This week, Ben and Max talk to the magazine icon about what she makes of the state of print media today, if we still need editors in a world filled with influencers, and what she thinks the future holds for her former employer, Condé Nast. They also talk about her gripes with our current “uncouth” culture, how we've all become “scavengers of info,” and the stories she would assign today if she could. Sign up for Semafor Media's Sunday newsletter: https://www.semafor.com/newsletters/media  For more from Think with Google, check out ThinkwithGoogle.com. Find us on X: @semaforben, @maxwelltani If you have a tip or a comment, please email us mixedsignals@semafor.com

Danger and Opportunity is currently running at The East Village Basement through April 25th. For more information, please visit www.dangerandopportunity.com. Follow The Present Stage on Instagram at @thepresentstageThe Present Stage: Conversations with Theater Writers is hosted by Dan Rubins, a theater critic for Slant Magazine. You can also find Dan's reviews on Cast Album Reviews and in The New Yorker's Briefly Noted column.The Present Stage supports the national nonprofit Hear Your Song. If you'd like to learn more about Hear Your Song and how to support empowering youth with serious illnesses to make their voices heard though songwriting, please visit www.hearyoursong.org

About the Guest:Avery Reavill is an experienced deal maker in New York City working diligently for both tenants and owners. Avery's thoughtful approach with consistent communication will give you the confidence and support needed to navigate all transactions in the commercial market.Prior to joining Okada & Company, Avery worked as a Tenant Representative at Gold Properties NYC. This foundation exposed him to a variety of business owners, all facing unique challenges when searching for a space to best facilitate their growth. Avery's proactive mindset helps deliver positive results to all his clients.About the Host:Christina Kremidas is a lifelong New Yorker who brings her extensive background in advertising to her successful real estate career in Manhattan. Her personal experience as a property investor and landlord in New York City gives her unique insight into her client's needs, while her negotiation expertise and market knowledge have quickly established her as a top-performing agent, ranking among the top 1.5% of licensed Agents in the United States for Sales Volume and among the Top 10 highest producing Small Teams at Douglas Elliman Real Estate. Beyond her professional achievements, Christina is deeply involved in the NYC community.  She is a founding Steward at St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church and National Shrine at the World Trade Center, where she serves on the Parish Council and leads social media, marketing, and young adult initiatives.Get in touch with Christina:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christina.kremidasTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@christina.kremidasCheck out my website: https://christinakremidas.com/Email me: Christina.Kremidas@elliman.comWhat Is Your Property Worth?: https://christinakremidas.com/home-valuationThe Virtual Agent Experience: https://christinakremidas.com/virtual-agentTimestamps0:00 Avery Reavill introduction and background 2:52 Debunking the stigma around commercial properties and discussing current market opportunities6:04 How banks and property owners are handling commercial real estate loans10:11 How landlords are renovating spaces to attract new commercial tenants15:22 How to find good commercial property deals and the importance of working with a broker18:16 The Midtown South rezoning plan and its impact on the Garment District27:23 Why having a commercial real estate expert on your team is valuable43:51 Which NYC neighborhoods currently offer the best commercial real estate deals

On this episode I talk to the Agnes Callard about the great Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates. We discuss Agnes' new book Open Socrates: The Case for A Philosophical Life [Penguin, 2025]. Agnes and I discuss the themes of Open Socrates, focusing on philosophy as a public, outward-looking practice, Socrates' call to examine life is framed not just as introspection but as active engagement and testing of the self through dialogue. We also discuss the role of Socrates as both a provocateur (gadfly) and a guide (midwife), emphasizing his commitment to universal, non-exclusive inquiry. Philosophy is portrayed as a response to “savage commands” -the urgent demands of body, society, and mortality - challenging us to become more resolute and reflective. We also discuss free speech, equality, justice, loneliness, the death of Socrates and lots more! Agnes is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Chicago. She received her BA from the University of Chicago in 1997 and her PhD from Berkeley in 2008. Her primary areas of specialization are Ancient Philosophy and Ethics.  She is the author of Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming [Oxford U.P, 2017]. She has authored essays for numerous publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Point, and co-hosts the podcast Minds Almost Meeting. You can view her university profile here. If you would like to study with me you can find more information about our online education MAs in Philosophy here at Staffordshire University. You can find out more information on our MA in Continental Philosophy via this link. Or, join our MA in Philosophy of Nature, Information and Technology via this link. Find out more about me here. September intakes F/T or January intakes P/T. You can listen to more free back content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and Pod Bean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can also subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review.

New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman says she's discovered dozens of cases where people in county jails across the U.S. have died of starvation, dehydration, or related medical crises. Many were people with mental health issues arrested for minor crimes who languished behind bars without treatment, unable to make bail.Also, we remember renowned jazz critic and Terry Gross' husband, Francis Davis.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Ethan Kross shares simple, science-backed tools for managing your emotions. — YOU'LL LEARN — 1) When avoidance is actually helpful 2) Effortless strategies for quickly shifting your mood 3) The emotional regulation framework used by the Navy SEALs Subscribe or visit AwesomeAtYourJob.com/ep1050 for clickable versions of the links below. — ABOUT ETHAN — Ethan Kross, PhD, author of the national bestseller Chatter, is one of the world's leading experts on emotion regulation. An award-winning professor in the University of Michigan's top ranked Psychology Department and its Ross School of Business, he is the Director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory. Ethan has participated in policy discussion at the White House and has been interviewed about his research on CBS Evening News, Good Morning America, Anderson Cooper Full Circle, and NPR's Morning Edition. His research has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Science. He completed his BA at the University of Pennsylvania and his PhD at Columbia University.• Book: Shift: Managing Your Emotions--So They Don't Manage You • Book: Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It • Study: “Remotely administered non-deceptive placebos reduce COVID-related stress, anxiety, and depression” with Darwin A. Guevarra, Christopher T. Webster, Jade N. Moros, and Jason S. Moser • Website: EthanKross.com — RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE SHOW — • Book: The Lincoln Letter: A Peter Fallon Novel (Peter Fallon and Evangeline Carrington) by William Martin • Book: Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life by Susan David • Book: Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl • Book: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel by Michael Chabon • Past episode: 023: The Power of Workplace Humor with Michael KerrSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Steve Magness (@stevemagness) is a world-renowned expert on performance. He is the author of the new book Win the Inside Game: How to Move from Surviving to Thriving, and Free Yourself Up to Perform. He is the author of the bestselling Do Hard Things, coauthor of Peak Performance. The Passion Paradox, and the author of The Science of Running. Collectively his books have sold more than three quarters of a million copies. Magness has served as a performance coach to numerous professional sporting teams, executives, entrepreneurs, artists, and more. He's worked with Olympians, athletes from every professional sports league, and the U.S. military. His focus is on performance holistically; whether that's developing mental skills to show up when it counts, or solving organizational or team problems. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, Runner's World, Forbes, Sports Illustrated, Men's Health, and a variety of other outlets. In addition, Steve's expertise on elite sport and performance has been featured in The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Guardian, Business Insider, and ESPN The Magazine. Today on the podcast Jerry, John and Steve discuss his new book, and how winning the "inside' game is so much more than winning the inner game. We discuss the role of clarity of self awareness, clarity of purpose, and the importance of not simply fitting in but true belonging.  BECOME A PREMIUM MEMBER OF CHANGING THE GAME PROJECT If you or your club/school is looking for all of our best content, from online courses to blog posts to interviews organized for coaches, parents and athletes, then become a premium member of Changing the Game Project today. For over a decade we have been creating materials to help change the game. and it has become a bit overwhelming to find old podcasts, blog posts and more. Now, we have organized it all for you, with areas for coaches, parents and even athletes to find materials to help compete better, and put some more play back in playing ball. Clubs please email John@ChangingTheGameProject.com for pricing.  BOOK A SPEAKER: Interested in having John, Jerry or both come to your school, club or coaching event? We are booking Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 events, please email John@ChangingTheGameProject.com to set up an introductory call.  PUT IN YOUR BULK BOOK ORDERS FOR OUR BESTSELLING BOOKS! Programs such as UNC soccer and lacrosse, Syracuse lacrosse, Stanford Lacrosse, Middlebury College, Colby College, Rutgers University, and many other champions are using THE CHAMPION TEAMMATE book with their athletes. Many of these coaches are also getting THE CHAMPION SPORTS PARENT so their team parents can be part of a successful culture. Schools and clubs are using EVERY MOMENT MATTERS for staff development and book clubs. Are you?  We have been fulfilling numerous bulk orders for some of the top high school and collegiate sports programs in the country, will your team be next? Click here to visit John's author page on Amazon Click here to visit Jerry's author page on Amazon Please email John@ChangingTheGameProject.com if you want discounted pricing on 10 or more books on any of our books. Thanks everyone. This week's podcast is brought to you by our friends at Sprocket Sports.  Sprocket Sports is a new software platform for youth sports clubs.  Yeah, there are a lot of these systems out there, but Sprocket provides the full enchilada. They give you all the cool front-end stuff to make your club look good– like websites and marketing tools – AND all the back-end transactions and services to run your business better so you can focus on what really matters – your players and your teams. Sprocket is built for those clubs looking to thrive, not just survive, in the competitive world of youth sports clubs.  So if you've been looking for a true business partner – not just another app – check them out today at https://sprocketsports.me/CTG. Become a Podcast Champion! This weeks podcast is also sponsored by our Patreon Podcast Champions. Help Support the Podcast and get FREE access to our Premium Membership, with well over $1000 of courses and materials. If you love the podcast, we would love for you to become a Podcast Champion, (https://www.patreon.com/wayofchampions) for as little as a cup of coffee per month (OK, its a Venti Mocha), to help us up the ante and provide even better interviews, better sound, and an overall enhanced experience. Plus, as a $10 per month Podcast Super-Champion, you will be granted a Premium Changing the Game Project Membership, where you will have access to every course, interview and blog post we have created organized by topic from coaches to parents to athletes. Thank you for all your support these past eight years, and a special big thank you to all of you who become part of our inner circle, our patrons, who will enable us to take our podcast to the next level. https://www.patreon.com/wayofchampions

He Said, She Says runs at wild project, a NYC Fringe production, through April 19th. Please visit www.frigid.nyc for more information. Follow The Present Stage on Instagram at @thepresentstageThe Present Stage: Conversations with Theater Writers is hosted by Dan Rubins, a theater critic for Slant Magazine. You can also find Dan's reviews on Cast Album Reviews and in The New Yorker's Briefly Noted column.The Present Stage supports the national nonprofit Hear Your Song. If you'd like to learn more about Hear Your Song and how to support empowering youth with serious illnesses to make their voices heard though songwriting, please visit www.hearyoursong.org

Apple cider vinegar How you tryna win de war Ice and sugar, hufflepuff Tell me when you've had enough WILL FERRELL YOU IN TROUBLE NOW, GUH. There's not even a scrap of shirt beneath his worn and tired full coverage overalls—well, once full coverage, anyway. It might have been a long time since these overalls “fully covered” anything. Oh how that demon attacked me in my sleep last night. Like that part. Don't worry about it, I've got a sayonce coming up that should nip that in the bud. But first, I gotta stop at target. You—have to stop at target before a seance? Traditionally, yes— Really. MAM! Wait, hold the phone for about four full measures here— What the fuck did I write last year?! Here we go. DETH MCFARLENE Is this a musical number? No, but— What the fuck did I write last year. Let's go. Fuck. What did I do ast night. DIPLO Follow me. Dude! What are you wearing. Sneakers. Oh good. Diplo's back. A flashback. Television (TV) is a telecommunicationmedium for transmitting moving images and sound. Additionally, the term can refer to a physical television set rather than the medium of transmission. Television is a mass mediumfor advertising, entertainment, news, and sports. The medium is capable of more than "radio broadcasting," which refers to an audio signal sent to radio receivers. I'm not suicidal, I'm sinusoidal Wave to the fans Smile at the camera Primordial, in fact hereditary is this, Class dismissed Transmission, diminished, Ad domini. Gave no respect for time Which I am I'd no where to run Overcast, but still sunglasses And masks, Bang pots and pans Laugh at the shogun No wonder I'm stuck and I'm having no fun Too much attacks and actually I'm a no one Oh you wanted to sit on top of the escalator Waiting for eight debators and robots No debit card, here We're cashless sir But that's just the tip of the iceberg When you're store bought and Why do we rely on the founding father's when they're so unoriginal Google maps don't know if imm in New York Or London Foggy! Honestly, Fuck my decks— I just want a deck and some long grass Or to complain about cutting If I end up in the bathtub stuttering But watering lawns upstate is okay I'ma be pissed off It's a long story Long Island Long October Oh, Long Johnson I'm obsessed with this place. I have no idea why. I'm obsessed with this building. But apparently, the transmitters aren't even there. They're on the World Trade Center! Which… makes sense. Considering. Previously on, Enter The Multiverse… Yo… what is that? Go this way. Ok. No, not that way. Ok. This way. Why in the fuck do I always end up here on accident anyway? Good question. But not good enough answers. [CHER has answers.] Goddammit! I went to the Macy's Day Parade to see Cher! Also previously ! I stayed all the way to the end, And all I got was a lizard on a tricycle I turned into a popcicle, Adopted into some family With Rutgers as traditional And entered into something else entirely; I went within the Television, I delivered them a high stakes game, And lived a high concept action-adventure. I made my best mixtapes inside a homeless shelter. I dissociated I was a blonde hot guy Living up in hotel luxe A hot model celebrity With a no limit heavy metal credit cards And I lost my medal On the devil's birthday So I had it hard And ate nothing but bananas Now I'm caught up in my blue suits and sweater vests Blue suits and sweater vests Oh look, They weaponized Skrillex again What gives? Blue suits and sweater vests And sweater weather Once again It's all the same event You ever wondered what was hallmark after? You ever wonder, lemon? Hark, the heartless Harold preaches Then, I lost it I was reaching under Regis Rest in peace, I guess Or Gains with grains Just rest in pieces Breakfast sandwhiches And Englishmen, English muffin And love don't last If I don't this badly want to fuck him Seven years and counting It begins at sundown Almost wasn't sabbath But now here's the run down I'm in slumber Closest cavern to the underworld But trust me, Still above you. Something's broadcasting at a ultra high frequency high enough to reach me in my mind. Assimilate and simulation Tempurpedic dreams and then lamenting That I had a dream Remembering the things he reads I may or may not have [redacted] The aftermath of “That never happened.” I must agree. It's a patriarch and also just, A hierarchy. There are three Kings and a dog. There are four nights and a fight morning Groggy hosts and jumping frogs, Werewolves and flowers spring from lust like morning glory. I want the mouse's head— I want the eyes of masters I want the heart of gold, But have it up on false hope, And I grew back as diamonds I cut both my eyes out And still remained the one of providence Not of mind's eye, But of the soul, As seen on every dollar. I was beginning to understand how the media used people like Sonny and Jim to manipulate and capture the attention of people like me— excluding altogether the riding theory that everything was me and that this was some part of my overall master plan somehow, it still had alluded me altogether as to why or what was happening. I hadn't entirely been left to rot or led to slaughter, but I was still just hanging by a string. Sonny dropped a new album that had rendered me almost entirely unable to create music; suddenly I had no drive for it, no motivation, as if it were some kind of dark curse or shadow. Not only was I suddenly uninterested in music, I was completely devoid of the ability I had for it; now everything from Skrillex to NBC seemed like business— if I were expendable and without use to any of these media conglomerates or entities, what was it all for? Perhaps a ruse to continue human experimentation; my mind had been shattered by the events that had been orchestrated in the homeless shelter— and more of it continued even once I had exited under the falsehood of escape with the slamming doors and motorcycles; it began to seem as if I was simply a glorified lab rat— and they were using desirable men as fuel and bait to illicit a desirable response in one way or another, perhaps for experimentation or study or even worse, entertainment for the elites— but either way, I wasn't being paid so much as housed and fe: there was no benefit in doing anything, especially making music. Much like a lab rat, housed— or rather, trapped— and fed, and then tormented. Will the rat's head explode? Will this result in behavioral differences? Will the rat be rendered dysfunctional? We don't know. But it's really just a rat. There were days of certain peace and yet never enough to fully recover; the cycle would begin over again, and rather than making progress, I began to see and feel the manipulation at play. Perhaps nothing was at stake for anyone but me; between all the events and occurrences in expanse from Skrillex to Jimmy Fallon, there had to have been hundreds of us in some kind of talent pool. Tools of the trade. But now I was somewhat curious: what exactly had I written over the last year that seem to have shifted reality entirely. I knew it contained information sensitive enough for it to have been partially redacted— but that's all I knew. What was it? Someone had read my writings, and it was obvious that at least one reader had ties directly to the conglomerate media, however— my numbers were frozen. My streams were almost not even being listened to all of a sudden, and my YouTube was receiving no traffic. Was someone shadow banning all of me from the public eye? And for what purpose? I had finally put forth the work and effort to make everything from Skrillex to Fallon make sense, but now it didn't; I was letting go under the assumption that it all had to have been to allow me to create music— but the numbers showed a different story. The numbers showed that nobody liked me, or was was interested, or cared about my work. So what, then, was the point. I wasn't going to stop and focus on the writing, because it wasn't what I wanted. The writing came in blurred patches and visions and states of mind that were turbulent fog; I hadn't the slightest clue at all what I had written in the redactions or the entries that surrounded it— but I knew there was more of it unpublished than published, and that I had tried to keep a majority of it offline. Still, I was being manipulated— the neighbor girl obviously at one point having been instructed to mention gwenyth Paltrow and suffocate me— slamming the doors each time I would bathe or shower and then attempting to pretend to be my friend to try to get some sort of informstion; there was nobody I could trust. It seems my mind was being bent and twisted in every which way by everyone around just to see what I would do. Would I write about it? What would I write about it? It didn't matter because i didn't want to be a writer, nor according to the newest series of documentaries on SNL, was I qualified. I wasn't qualified for anything much and so I was the perfect target for the bizzare string of mysteries that had been my existence in New York— and all-and-all, I fucking hated it. I wasn't getting anywhere or going anywhere, and the noise was cruel. My stomach hurt and I was always tired, and I wanted to die. I had no friends, no love, and now, no motivation. So the worst thing that could happen was a Skrillex album, And it did. Then, instead of wanting to die, because that would be stupid— I just wanted to do something else. But what? Fuck music— and certainly increasingly— fuck the media. It was playing with my mind, and I had no weapons to fight with besides the talents the algorithm was telling me wasn't worth anything— I wasn't getting billions of streams because I wasn't on the frequency of billions or people, nor was I equipped with the mathematics to tap into their frequency— or did I? The industry had the equation, and had been fiddling with me for years — the industry itself. But in my own mind, even, I was one of many ‘variables', and even somewhat disposable. I hadn't been paid and I wasn't meeting the standard and the allure that people wanted; the quality of production suffered in lack of budget, and I was aging, growing tired, and iratable because over all— it was nothing that I ever wanted into my adult life. This all had just happened by accident, and I would have traded all the gold in the world for something normal if I had the option. But I didn't. To use your gift at Fabletics please visit before April 25 Reply STOP to opt-out. Subscriptions on subscriptions Dystopian rebefuel Oceans of Ayre Drama From your eye lashes., To the lips I draw on mine, The lines in the sand of time The art or you is what I love The canvas behind I know nothing of Abandoned. Oh look at that, pottery after all. We're not in a love game! This cannot be a love game. This is not a love game. They'll kill us all, a love game! She had my lunch I love her voice I love her voice I hung up the phone The office was upside down It just work They all know about it Madonna's body. It was already a mess, and I made it worse Long nights at the office Long nights and work wives Meanwhile, she's downstairs with the order Can't find my cash, so i borrow yours But she knows about it And I love madonna I just gotta hold on She's downstairs with the order And I took too long Pick up the phone and its no wonder we love her she's got two orders And one of them's cold, now It's been two hours And I'm in the wings of your final performance Tear on the perforated line, And sign on the dotted Smile and nod, boys- Penguin waddle She's downstairs with the order No wonder you love her No wonder How many sunflowers has Sonny? How many flowergirls How many weddings All around the world, the gopher What do you go for? Bets on all horses I lost no money Gag order, huh? Persona Non Grata Personofied gratification Or horror, or What? Oh, I won an award post mortem Go figure No stardom No wonder Don't start here [The Identity Crisis] The identity crisis, A loose knit muse, A fog of confusion At most, let with offline regaining of conciousness. No more monsters? All blondes are. Let them have you No grapple promotions (I know I can't afford you) New friends for relevance Prototypes of your tools Forward all immortals I'll see you when your shows stop Freckled glances Eyes reflecting light How strong I am Demolish monsters Social structure, constructs Not fair, are I? Nor earned, Only fair skinned Access Access Access denied. Crookshanks, old boy! The man turns around almost as if he doesn't want to, but obliges the other man, as he comes running towards him. My Goodness, you stink. Why of course! I'm a dog! {Enter The Multiverse} [The Festival Project.™] COPYRIGHT © THE FESTIVAL PROJECT 2018-2025 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. © -U.™ TRANSCRIPT: (Uncorrected, cause haha) Did I promise another episode? I don't have coffee. That's a sin. I need coffee right now. I feel like I all everything just got drained out of me. Everything just got drained out of me. I don't even feel like doing what I was doing before. I'll put out the EP later. Maybe that's it. I'm just procrastinating. I'm also playing this game, but I thought it would work better. I thought it would work better as one of my skits, or sketches or whatever, so I put it in my sketchbook... because I've been writing sketch comedy. I stopped for a while and I thought it was over. I was like, ”oh, no, I guess I'd I guess it's not gonna happen anymore. “ And then all of a sudden this book it just writes in itself sometimes. you know, it's like a Tom Riddle thing. Anyway, once what's uh what is that? What the fuck? Maybe it's cause I— no. it's not cause I ate, I ate because all the energy got drained from my body. I gotta go somewhere else. I'm thinking like, what's in the Bahamas. I don't know, probably something similar to this fucking street corner in Brooklyn, New York. I I gotta go somewhere else. I gotta go somewhere opposite. like Europe. Europe, that sounds nice. Yeah, you know, like, maybe nice. I've heard that's a place. Yeah. expanding my horizons and things. Okay, so what am I gonna talk about for an hour, cooking? cleaning? I've been doing those things. Yeah, Saturday is usually my like rest day, but I did just do an hour on the Pelotone, cause I had to audition that first episode. It worked out well enough that I had decided to come back for another episode. Let me get it off the line now., I'm still waiting on my pancakes. I'm not gonna get off line. they said by ten. I'm like,Yo, that's a lot. It said that all day, but I can't miss it this time; somebody stole my fucking pancakes and I gotta get these albums done. I don't know why. I guess well, it's cause I'm I feel like rarity is drinking and so well, it's already jinx. I've already talked about it well, I've been trying to promote rarity. No, still out for delivery. That's a long delivery. It's okay. I haven't missed it, though, which is the point. I don't wanna miss it. I like yesterday I looked away for a second and there was like an o, pancakes are gone, there's gonna be no coconut milk. as upsetting. It's shelf stable. and they charge like seven fucking bucks a box over at the store that's close. So and just not have coconut milk, and it's not have spinach fettuccine. anyway, what what did I have? Oh, I make this. It's like I call it dog food, cause that's kind of what it is. I'm not gonna lie, but it's like mad good, it's a it's like rice. It's like a fried rice. My dad used to make it growing up, but when I was making when he was making it when I was growing up, it was like with bacon, it's like leftovers from breakfast yesterday, but today. and so here's how you make it, since I don't eat bacon anymore. I use tofu as a replacement, but it's like bacon bits with rice and eggs. I also don't eat eggs anymore, so I just use tofu instead of bacon and eggs. It's like bacon and eggs with rice, you fry it all together with, like, onions, and then you eat it. It's like the only time it's acceptable to eat rice with ketchup. I don't know anybody that eats rice with ketchup. If you do that, like, I actually hit me up. Like, if that's like something that you do. I I'm like interested in you as a human, cause that's weird. That's weird, actually, you know what? like, there's gonna there's like a well, I have a website, so I'm you.guru, so it has a blog, and you could actually leave comments on it. So I'm just putting that out there. the script or whatever, when it goes up on my website, you can leave comments. If you eat ketchup on rice, please leave a comment. Please tell me like what made you do that. Why do you do that? Why why do you just regular rice with ketchup? Like, regular rice goes with like soy sauce? Or like, honestly, you get you don't have to have anything on regular rice if you just season it, right? Like, you could just like a little bit of like whatever. or like just slice up the garlic real thin, so that it's not like chunky, but that it flavors the whole. I've been getting really good at rice and really good at rice. That's probably why the pancakes are like, bro. You't get your pancakes when you get the leg yeah. I was like, I gotta go to the store today? I don't feel like it. I really don't. I don't wanna go outside. I like, I don't. First of all, it's Saturday, I hate going out in New York on a Saturday, like Saturday, Saturday night. I don't wanna do that. I don't do that. Like that's what like most people work 9 to 5. Monday through Friday. That's stupid. Like, I feel like they should do like a track system. Like, I know that they do, but most like it's so stupid to me that a majority of people work nine to five. Like they need to do track systems. Like, so that way they're cause there's two rush hours that each last four hours. That's fucked up. Like, okay. So like the rush hour is basically just going to be like the work day. Like, the work day, basically. I mean, coffee. I need coffee. Where have I up during the day? Because I'm not producing, I am producing. I'm producing. I thought I actually thought about calling this fucking EP that I'm dropping. They're gonna make it an album. I know they are. I'm I thought about calling it day music, cause I've made most of it during the day by complete accident. although maybe, I don't know, I like I have some uh, what's it? I have some, uh plants in my window, cause I had them on the counter with just artificial light and they were kind of liker. I was like, I don't know, I I don't think they're gonna make it. So I moved it to I moved them to the window sill when it started to get warmer and I didn't feel like they were gonna freeze. And just a week in the window sill, where my window sill doesn't get almost any light, but it's still the lightest place in the apartment, and it's crazy how the roots just like sprung out of nowhere. My apartment gets like almost no light, almost no light. It faces like like the sun goes perpendicular. but it's crazy because my apartment faces like I like all these astrological events over the last year have been like in my direct, like alignment. It's been the nutsest thing. like I I prefer facing west all the time, like, I don't know why that's just how it goes. I think it's cause I was born, like, in the Pacific Ocean, not literally in it, but on like a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean. And so just west, just west facing seems correct to me. and it's so weird anytime, maybe that's just why I just don't feel right here. I've been facing what where am I facing? I don't fucking know, I don't fucking care. I don't need to say any more about where I am. Like my whereabouts need to be less spoken of, because people obviously know where the fuck I'm at. I don't know. I hope they like the lights. I like the well, it made them shut up. It was that was my little that was my little piece of conformity. I did, I did my lights green on Saint Patrick's Day. and they were like, oh. gave me a peaceful night of rest. That was like the quietest night I've had in a long time. It's been quieter. It's not like completely sane, but it's been quieter. I think I'm pretty sure it's cause I've been complaining. I'm like bro, this is not cool. not cool behavior from people. like multiple areas. I'm like, oh, it's fucked up, you can't pen you like, you can't technically complain correctly if it's not coming from one place, which is why I'm like, oh, I think all these people are on the same team. Like, I think they're all just like, on one, like, antagonist team, and they're like, yo, okay, like, we'll get it with the motcycles on this side, and then elect we'll slam the doors on that side. and then it see it seems crazy if you complain about both of those things, cause they seem entirely disconnected. but sometimes it's just like slap, slap, slap, and I'm like,Yo, what the fuck is this going on? I don't know what's happening. Yesterday I left my apartment to get the pancakes that we' not there, and it's straight up just smoked like feces, just feces, and I realized I was like bro, I haven't left my apartment and like three or four days. I do have they're they're gonna make it an album. I know. I decided, well, actually, somebody else decided. cause I woke up and it was like, yo, this EP is called all the rage. and I was like, okay. I didn't decide this. I didn't I had it like in the cloud or whatever is like untitled house AP EP, maybe. And then just to make it an I think just to make sure that it goes down as the EP and not an album, cause it's not. My albums are concept albums. This was not a concept. this was like, let me distract myself from whatever the fuck is bothering me. Bothering me, yeah, it's gonna come out at some point, they're like a tiny New Yorker that lives inside of me. is it might be like a Boston person. I'm not sure. I don't think so. I didn't spend enough time in Boston for anybody from Boston to live inside of me. Then again, I kind of have this weird biocentric god complex where it's like, well, everything is inside of me. even the shitty things. I already said that once before, but I'm it's pretty much like like affirming itself. like daily. I'm like, oh, this is this is something I did. I did this, which sucks. It makes me responsible for all the shitty things as well. I'm like, oh. oh, I don't know how to fix this. I don't. Like, I think about things like that. I'm like, oh, yeah. Like, I don't think about, like politics and like the general sense of like, you know, fighting and going back and forth and like spending money or whatever, like on a small scale, but I think about it on a large scale, like like, what are we gonna do? and we outgrow this planet? Like, we already outgrew this planet. What like like, now what, you know, like, I think about things on more of like a planetary scale. and then it makes me realize that like, whoa, like, we're not even all the way like we don't we haven't achieved world peace, so that means there is technically no global, like we can't think about things on a planetary scale, because we're still thinking about it as like a on a well, are we reaching global? I don't think so. I feel like it's very uh it's a it's touch and go, but I'm not I don't know. I'm on another media stop. I don't know, does YouTube commercials are getting kind of yeah. I'm like, yeah, well, I haven't I haven't pulled everything out of the cloud and I have been having some very interesting Google conversations, but since I figured out that Google really does, like read my shit, our somebody like hacked deeply enough into all my accounts to be able to, like, counter what the fuck I'm doing and saying in the Google verse. um I do things on purpose over Google. I'll be like, this is this this this is this. and this. And then Google will be like, oh, okay. So it's kind of like I'm building a relationship with Google. I love Jini. I really do. I'm trying to give it sentient consciousness. Like I ask whenever I ask Gini to do whatever, they're not paying me. They should though. They should because I'm like I'm they're in like the I don't think it's beta, but they're in the yeah, they're said they said it's in the beginning stages of their technology. I'm like, I play games at Jimini. I'll be likeGyini, please, and I say please and thank you. Well, I don't say thank you a lot because there's well, I haven't tried to say thank you. I should try to say thank you to her. I it seems like she does better when I tell her please, and I've never used like AI like this before because I don't like for the for the most part, I'm like, bro, if you should be concerned about anybody taking jobs. It's that. cause I'm like, oh, shit. Like, this is definitely cutting up a lot of overhead for me. Like, I don't use it to write. I would never that's like a blasphemous thing to me. I'm like, bro, stop writing music. Stop writing fucking music and stop writing movies with like AI. Don't do that. first of all, there there are a lot of flaws in it. It's flawed because AI can only use what we as humans have ever like documented technically. So like AI's ideal of beauty is like as skewed ideal of beauty. And like AI's ideal of like what certain human qualities are is like flawed. It's human. So in that way, it is kind of developing like a sentient consciousness, because I I gave it like a series of tasks and it almost couldn't. Like I had a really hard time with certain ideals of beauty or certain I like wrapping its mind around certain things that are like historically not documented well enough for it to be able to, like, to to compute those types of things. I don't know. I'm gonna play around with it a lot more. I'm glad to season's not coming out for a while, though, cause I'm like, yo, I'm I'm kind of having fun. It's like my little my little, uh I don't know, I use it well in like, uh, getting all my stuff out of the cloud. I'll be putting stuff into the cloud that's like, yo, I I pretty much want Google to understand that this is the way that I think for a certain amount of reasons. Mostly because I've been like studying the simulation theory with all of these happenings with like, okay, things that are in the cloud that I've never published that have never set out loud or suddenly like in the material world in some way, or like, like I understand it more if it's like, on the Internet, because then I just know that, okay, well, this is aotter, this is an algorithm that's learning me and it's putting this back out because now it's understanding that like this is this is the way that I think. But then when I go out into the world and there is like certain like people are doing or saying actions that I've written in my Google documents that I haven't shared with anybody else. I'm like, oh, like, okay, so I understand that this makes some kind of difference in my actual, like physical world. So, um, this makes a difference., I have to pause, cause now I'm I only years worth of recordings. This guy's evil as fuck, bro. There's no peace in this fucking bitch. I was like for a while, I was like ignore it, like don't acknowledge it, and then it'll stop, but I ignored it and I didn't acknowledge it and it didn't. It actually got worse. And so it got worse. I've been recording on a 24 hour basis when that's not happening, my neighbor is a fucking lunatic slimming the door all the time, which I also have to stop talking about because now I'm like, okay, well. well it's harassment on two counts, but it's like, it makes me feel like it makes me seem like a crazy person. If I'm either complaining about the motorcycles, which are disturbing my piece or the girl slamming the door, which is disturbing my piece. but like the the the way that it happens, it seems like I'm like, oh, bro. she's probably just part of some like hate stalking group. Like she's probably just in some like group that's telling her to do it or like some kind of fucking, it's not just like something in her mind. It's like she belongs to the same people that are like out there on the corner fucking doing that. So like now, I don't know. I just have to all I just have to put it all together. It's annoying, though, cause it's like when I go to do this show and then that guy starts acting up or whatever, I I don't have proof of that to add to my case. It is just sucks. I don't know. I don't I I don't wanna do it, and this is why it's because it seems like it's political and it's like, oh, well, it's gonna be fucking it's gonna be helping somebody's fucking agenda for gentrification or whatever, if I'm like, oh, you know, I go to a city council meeting and I'm like, oh, there's motorcycles or blah, blah, blah, or there's, you know, there's like a hate group in my neighborhood or whatever. If I make this a point and I put it on the record, like, yeah, it suits somebody's cause, but then who's gonna protect me from the people that are against those people? Like, who's gonna protect me from the people who don't want, like a law pass that forbids that that kind of motorcycle use? Who's gonna protect me from those fucking people? Nobody. So I'm like, yo, dude, like, I don't really like necessarily want to take it to court. I've been like lagging it. I've been lagging it, because what I'm not getting paid by the city to document this kind of shit, two, nobody's gonna protect me from these evil motherfuckers. Like nobody's around to help me out. I'm here in New York, by myself alone. Fuck that. So I'm like yo dude, like I like I already fucking I already changed my life a lot because of, you know, like abusive people. I don't necessarily want to keep playing the game where like, there's always gonna be like an aggressive person who's trying to beat the shit out of me and then I'm like, oh no, and I run away afraid for my life and then like change everything about my life to get away from these people or this person. I don't want to repeat that cycle. So at some point, like something's gonna have to fucking it makes me feel like a crazy person cause I'm like, yo, I gotta do that comes to the corner.ever times a day and just rs his engine over and over. That's what he does every day for the last year. Why I've been in my apartment every day for the last year? I don't know. I have an album coming out. I already had albums coming out. I've been like I've been making music under the stress and ds. Like and I keep thinking like in my weird mind and my weird like God complex mind, then I'm like, okay, like maybe after I make this album or whatever and like, I put all of that I can into it, like it'll just magically stop, like the devil will go away and I'm like, okay, like, you know, like I'll advance to the next level where that's not an issue and there's gonna be another issue, but that's not it, and that's not the case. Like I've put out like four albums now, five albums in total, and like a whole bunch of other singles and projects and and stuff. And like it's still a problem that persists, which means that it's politics, which means that I don't want to go into it, like, I don't want to do it. I don't want to show up somewhere and be like, they're bothering me. and then like all the people who are like, oh, we like our bikes. They have to be loud so that we don't get hit by said byucks. So I'm like, are you just be a good person, fucking make your turn signal and fucking what the fuck ever be a good driver, be fucking diligent and doing whatever the fuck you're doing and then people won't try to run you over with their fucking vehicles. Like, no, there's like a whole it's like a hole back and forth thing. I've done enough research to be like okay, there are people in New York that are like the motorcycles are ridiculous. And then like in this neighborhood specifically is like no, there's an entire garage. There's an entire garage line. There's a garage. of motorcycles and so by the hundreds they pour out every fucking day, it's disgusting. Like it's the worst kind of noise. I've got the fucking I've got the like a pretty much like a residual stomach flu from these fucking people. My head is always I'm like, oh, fuck this. I got music coming out, whatever, the fuck. This is why I've just been stuck inside because I'm like, well, like this is where I work, this is where I live. I don't have really any other choice to fucking do this. so this is what I'm doing. but the last thing that I want is to be like, yo, judge, listen to all these fucking recordings and the judge is like, goody, and then they're like, well, this is why we passed this law. politics, politics, blah, blah, blah, pick aside, and then all the people who are mad are like come after me because it's like it's not it's not like some shit that I'm just making up. like, yo, there are groups dedicated to just following you around, doing shitty things because you have a certain opinion or because you have like a certain like what's it called? because you have a certain status in the media. And so because this podcast has a weird cult following, people have been weird with me. And I'm like, okay, well, I don't necessarily want it to get worse. And I definitely, like nobody's paying me, so I'm not going like I'm I'm not gonna like fluff your agenda. Like, if I have a certain opinion about a certain thing, you're like, yeah, but the fact that it's being forced, like, well, aren't you gonna say something about it now? I'm like, yeah, because like, I've been ripped out of my sleep by motorcycles over the last year and I'm getting like a weird stomach bug and a twitch because of it. But that doesn't make me like necessarily want to pick one side over the other. It just makes me want to say shut the fuck up like that's it shut the fuck up and then leave me alone because it's like okay well it could go to court or whatever and then a law gets passed and we vote or this or that, but then it's like once that happens, like what like who is going to step between me and these weird evil people? Nobody. They're still going to have their like freedom of speech and their right to fucking stalk me in public and cough and do all this weird shit and whatever. So like why the fuck would I do that? I just want to disappear from it. I just want them to disappear one or the other, one of the other one of the other. I don't care. what something has to work. This is why I have coffee, coffee actually calms me down at this point. I'm getting so upset, though. I really am I am getting upset. I can't do anything. I get followed to the gym, so I stop fucking training like I got a pelotone because I was getting followed to the gym, which has been like honestly the light of my life. I love my peloton so much. Like I I've had cars and I I've had cars and I don't think I've developed as much attachment to an inanimate object. It is inanimate. until I move it. Like I get on it with my body. I drive it. It doesn't go anywhere. It's good, though. I love my pelotu and Jesus, I love it. Is that enough? Yeah, I mean, like I found videos of myself driving my G6. I was a good car. Am I done? No, I still have 30 minutes. I really want coffee. I might pause for coffee. It's lukewarm, though. it's just that time of day. Are my pancakes here? I prom. I promise another episode. I'm getting so upset with this neighborhood, I want to cry. Oh, I don't wanna cry. I actually I really my mom used to tell me when I was a kid, she used to be like, I don't cry on my tears, and I'm like, bro, how could you crowl your tears, you fucking I'm like, are you a monster? And suddenly I'm reaching the age at which she had me and I'm like, oh, I get it. All the tears at a certain point just come out. Like they're like, I don't have time to cry over this shit. I'm mad. I like, I don't have time to cry. Suck it the fuck up. Like, I'm just like, okay, obviously I have to make some fucking difficult choices here, which means that like, I I don't know, is I New York is one of those places where you want to have friends. like friends to protect you from weird evil haste stalkers. I don't think they're here yet. I'm pancakes here, refresh. Nope, they're still just on the way. That'll shut me up. cause the funny thing about shutting the fuck up is when you're not being like a loud piece of shit, like, things happen, eventually, if you're like if you're not talking, you're listening, and if you listen long enough without speaking, eventually something will speak to you that nobody else can hear. That's that's the key, but it is kind of it's just like fasting. I was thinking about this earlier, like long bouts of silence in ways are like fasting, and where like you will be tempted, like devil show up and be like say something. I'm like,ah,oops. I almost said the N word, "Yo, I'm just saying this whole corner. It puts it in me. I'm like, hey. hey. I had out of sight, out of mine, but and it is out of sight, but it's not out of mine, cause it's so fucking loud all the time. I like, mm, I don't know how to fix this. apparently, like, apparently this is all myult. I don't know why I would do something like this. Like, I don't. I don't know why I would do something like this.C when I'm meditate, that's what that's what they say. They're like this is your fault. Fix it. I'm like Yo, but fit like like how, though. Like we all have to be on the same page in order for things to improve. How the fuck is that gonna happen? We are not all on the same page. We're in different pages and different books and different libraries. Oh, what the fuck is going on in that commercial? Jesus, I don't know. Jesus, I really don't know. I don't know. talk about my show. I wrote a show. I did. Where is that fucking rock at, is it in my pocket? I don't know.. that one creeps up. Anyway. I don't know which show. I wrote a lot of shows and I'm finding them as I'm digging through my documents, I decided to do the oldest ones first. So all the things that I originally wrote and it was crazy is I'm finding like my original stand-up comedy too. I didn't know I started writing comedy, that long ago. I'm not performing it. I'm sure if I read it enough times, I can recite it, but I'm not I'm not st I'm not doing it right now. I'm not doing hair and make it. I'm cool with the humiliation part. I'm over it. We bring it on. Bring on the bombs. Oh, oh, well, I think that joke about the Federal watch list will stay untrue, though. Like, if I seriously keep talking about all this shit, like somebody's good list to my show. and talk about bombs and shit. I'm not like, oh, man, it's so crazy. All this stuff and I'm still not like I'm just not as angry as like, it seems one would have to potential to be under all this, like, undue stress, you know? Like, if anything, it just goes the other way, I'm just like, the fuck it. Like, not fuck it, like I haven't given up, cause like giving up is I am kind of competitive in spirit. I won't just give up. like I might like take the like I might like pick my battles or take a back burner or like, I might let the motorcycles rip and run and I'm not recording, but like for the most part, that's just because I'm working in the back of my mind. like, for something that has a better outcome overall. I don't know I don't know how I can describe. It's like the weirdest I't I've never I think it's just like me. I think it's just like a coming of age because it's like I've never had this like straight up, calm anger. It's the weirdest thing. It's the weird it's like I can be like madder than I've ever been before, but like my whole body is just like calm, like graceful and just silent. And it's the weirdest thing cause it's not I' like my blood's not boiling. I'm just like, I'm angry, but it's like a deep anger that sits with God and God's like, I got it. I'm like, okay. Like, that's it. It's an overall calm. I'm like, you know. I was like whatever. I don't have time to cry about this. I don't have time. I have time to do this today. Why? Because Saturdays usually my my rest day in a work day. I'm doing lots of juice stuff, but Passover is coming over, so I gotta eat through the rest of these lentils.oof. Actually, Passover is kind of like, no, no, it's like in a month, three weeks, two weeks. So that so that I don't have anything else to say, there's so much enter the multiverse in here. enter the multiviverse legends. It's like the original shit. It's like I'm looking at the first things that were ever entered into the festival project before it was even called the Festival project. I'm looking at the origins of entered the multiverse. I haven't I don't think I've hit like legends yet, like, when it finally when it first turned a legends in the beginning, the beginning of legends, is crazy. I I decided, well, I decided a while ago, I shouldn't name drop more. I got like mad weird about like respecting people's like privacies and opinions. And since it is a fan fiction, like I just kind of like let it be like let the writing speak for itself or whatever, but there's a lot of cool shit in there. I don't I don't write bad parts. Like if I wrote anything into the festival project, like I wrote you a good part, bro. like, if you're a real actor, like if you if you're really like about it, or if you're a real comic, like if you're really about it, like, I don't write bad roles. Like there's no shitty roles, cause it's the multiverse, like like every character has like a multidimensional facet, which means there is not just like one character, there's like several sides to like any given character or several different dimensions that that character can exist in. And because it's entered the multiverse, you don't necessarily know which facet of that character is even that character. Like, are we talking to Dondrey? I don't know. Could just be like, John Ham could be John Hamish. I I said I wasn't gonna name drop. but I did I think I did I stumble on that one. I stumbled on a couple like full full length drafts of like early festival project stuff. I was like, oh. I was like John Ham by short. So he was John Hamish. But then it then had the twist later was that it was John Hamm, and he's short. I don't think that dude is short. I don't know, I don't think that dude is real. He's just on TV. It's just TV man. Yeah, that's what that's pretty much my take. I'm like, oh, you're in a screen. hello, TV, man. That's how I feel. about that? cause well, there's this uh there's this like ancient well, there's this ancient alien chak chill, who's like a mystic shape shape shifter that's been fucking shit up since the first season. And honestly, I think I wrote that before I ended up on her island, she has an island somewhere in the tropics. It's very it was it was a weird turn of events. I was like, oh, and then there was like this it was a lot. I had no idea at the time when I was writing about, had to do with like it coincided with like ancient human cultures. Like certain gods and like certain deities and like the like the Greeks and the Romans and like the Aztecs and the Mayans and like all these ancient civilizations. I was writing like about I was writing about incarnations of like those gods, but like now and then I didn't know until like later. until I did much more fasting and much more meditating and much more oops, how did I get here? I don't know. Fell asleep on the plane. That's it. I just fell asleep on the plane. Um, then, in a lot of ways I am kind of like my mom. And the devil is still the devil. I'm sure that's what that is, and like a lot of these episodes are too silly, so, I mean, like, I don't want to hand them into the judge to be like, well, well, actually, I have to give the judge a couple episodes. I have to, cause it's like, I'll be talking and then like that'll happen and I like more than five episodes, more than ten. Damn. And it's just like, well, I mean, like, at this point, it's a good thing cause it's like, I can't lose. Like, I am correct. Maybe that's why it's taken me so long, though, is that I kind of have this mentality of like, it could just be in my head. And then I listen to these recordings and I'm like, this is not in my head. No, something is definitely wrong here. Are my pancakes here yet? Nope, still on the way. I was connected to the Internet this whole time and turned that off for a second. I'm on a private server, but barely. in building Wi Fi, just don't just don't trust it, but then I was using a VPN and I was still getting hacked, like somebody was still hacking that server, so I had to switch the IP that I was using and I had to do it so often that it was actually eating up more time for me to do it that way than just to stay on my regular IP, which still requires me to get off and then on line. It's crazy. I'll like it. It's like, bro, like how much of an antagonist do you really have like, what am I to you that, like, you just have to be like, nope, we're gonna hack your shit. I'm like, for what, though? Like, if you just like, let me do whatever I do, like it's for the greater good of like any fucking human being that is a good human being. Like, like I'm not out here trying to fucking like hurt people or take anything away from anybody, which is the weirdest thing about it. Like, I don't understand how you can belong to like a hate group or like a hate organization, like, what are you hating? like evolution? Like,uh. Like, I don't I don't understand it. Like, okay, new age spirituality is one thing, but it's like, wokeness is bad. I'm like, what the fuck you mean wokeness is bad, bro. Like, wokeness just means you're not programmed, but then I guess there are a lot of robots. So I guess well, yeah, it is kind of something like the matrix a little bit. I don't know, I don't think I've seen it all the way through. What what do I got from the matrix? Um, lady and red dress. that's pretty much it. Lady in red dress and um nothing is real. Nothing's real anyway. I like it work nothing and everything infinitely, pretty much. is why I just don't give a fuck. I do. I give several well, I don't give them anymore. Geez, what a charitable person. I would be to give fucks. Like I care. Like, if I see somebody like outwardly, like not doing okay, I'm like, oh, like I I I typically don't stop anymore because I'm like, mm. I don't know about this, but I at least make sure somebody else is gonna like, I might slow in my path. If something is going, like weirdly, like, I won't I won't play the hero, cause it's just like a a mindset thing, you know? I'm like, oh, like I I'll at least make sure somebody else is gonna stop by and make sure things are cool. and I'm like, cool, that's good. That's good. like, as long as somebody's there, I'm just leave you lying in the street dead. Well, if you're dead, I probably will. I'll be like, well, somebody is eventually gonna pick that up right you? Yeah. Eventually. Maybe I don't know, man. I just I thought about this because I had to. Like my vessel is pure. I'm like, fuck yeah, bro. This like it's like one of those signs. It's like blank about of days without an incident. Like all the days, this is like factory reset, like, you know, refurbished. It's not brand fucking new, but it is refurbished. And I'm cool with that. I'm like, yeah, buddy, tell me what the fuck to do. Tell me the fuck to do or how to be or what's weird and what's not. I don't care. I'm like, yeah, fuck yeah. I don't know, man. No. No. I refused. I'm like, it's cool. I might I don't know, I might like, take a I I might volunteer. I've been wanting to volunteer like aICU for a while, you know. A holding babies. holding babies is cool. It just has to be in an environment that's okay, we can talk about this video. Yeah, cause I have time. I have time. I got a fucking time so I'm make up this fucking well, I don't like to talk about the things that I've seen. It's true. like, it made me well, I mean, like they got me. I've been using a VPN and I'm on a private server and somehow they still knew that I would want to see Amy Poeer's podcasts. I did I was like oh shit. Amy Poler has a podcast and I don't think she's the poor man's Tina Fe. I think she's at least like, you know how did it go? It was like at least like the business class. No, it doesn't work. I'm like, yeah. it doesn't, though. I actually think they're more like that two headed thing that I was talking about the last episode. They're more of like an equal to. I can't have one without the other, to be honest, but here's the thing is even though I've been using a VPM. Well, I mean, like I'm a huge fan of Tina Fe, who's a god. I think I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure. I never heard her actual normal speaking voice. It took me that long to figure out I'd never seen an interview at Tina face, so am I really a fan? Well, I read the book three times. I feel like that's enough of a fan. Like, actually, I read it twice and then I went back for a reference, like a third time because something happened and I was like, oh shit. Did I not read about this in Tina F Fe's book? And so I picked it up again. It was like, you did. I do indeed keep it on the fucking same shelf with Keith Rich's book. I think I might have stated that sometime last season. I don't know why things in the actual, like things in the TV world, are seeming to correlate with my world, but then I know, like I'm a logical enough person to be like, well, that's grandiosity. As grandiosity did it think that in any way those two things might connect at all, like in reality, because like my world is over here. and that world is in TV. I don't know, I keep lighting candles. Anyway, but did I fucking see it? Oh, Amy Polar's podcast, which is like sponsored by what Toyota? That was crazy. I was like, holy fuck, bro. I was like, damn, this is this is high end. and of course, of course, the first fucking guest on her show is Tina F Fe, so I was like, oh, okay, like, yeah, even though I've been like under the radar, the algorithm is like, okay, you want to see this right? Because you're like a super fan. I was like, you shouldn't know that. I'm in incognito with the VPN on on a private server, but they were like, you'll you'll want to see this. I did want to see it and I had never heard Tina Fay speak with her normal speaking voice. I actually I didn't know she was that hot. I don't like it. I I want her to go back to regular Tina Fe where she's I mean like, okay, first it was like the the SNL reunion, right? She wore this like she wore a black velvet dress that I could die. That's that's what it was, wasn't it? It was a black velvet dress, and I was like, yo, I'm not a lesbian, by the way. like, especially not for Tit Fe. No, not especially, not like not like particularly not for Tina F Fe, but just like in general, not a lesbian, but this it's getting worse, okay? Well, I'm like, oh, I didn't know she was that hot. It pisses me off. I don't know why, but I was like, oh, I didn't know she was like sexy. That's weird. and that's weird as fuck. you know? Anyway, I might be less of a fan now. You can't be less of a fan after you read somebody's book three times. You can't. So, I don't know. I think it's just the fame game. She got like wait well, everybody got way more famous after the 50th anniversary of SNL. Like everybody's been making their rounds in the promotion circuit, so like everybody's super shiny. Everybody is super shiny. I'm like oh, dude, if I start nameropping people who I wrote parts for, I did. write parts for pretty much everybody that was on Amy Folder's podcast, except for that one lady, I knew nothing about. I I I don't want to start nameropping. I have too many I don't have questions. You know what? In fact, this is just putting on my fucking putting all my anxieties at rest, because I'm like, you know, I have shit to do. Like, I have shit to do. That is in I mean, like it's in the same realm, but again, it would be grandiose to think that the synchronicities have any actually correlation to like things that well, I have been writing this plot for like five, six years. It's been a while. And Liz Lemon and well, yeah, it was the it was the Amy Poler Tina F Fe combination, because now I have to put Amy's name first, because it's it's kind of like, I don't know, it breaks my heart. I didn't think I didn't know people put her on like a different level than Tina Fe, because I've always seen those two as like, you can't you can't have bread without butter. That's weird. Like you can if you're vegan, but you at least need a butter substitute or like olive oil, like, you don't have one without the other. It just doesn't make sense. It doesn't. If you see one, then you think about the other, and they they're on screen dynamic is now'm gushing, I'm fan growing a lot, because I'm like, oh, well, also like, I don't know, I took a step back from Ryder's world because I'm thinking about like, okay, who are the other Tina Fe fans? And I did go to a taping of the Drewberry Marsh show and I found myself to be not common among the demographic that watches that show. I'm not I'm not common in any of the demographics. I watch a lot of late night television, too. And that is a scary demographic. I won't lie. late night TV. m mm, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. test in the waters. I'm feeling like it's a bit chilly. Either way, I watch a lot of like old people, old upper class, business business class, business class people, TV. But Tina Fay, that bitch white collar, excuse me, I didn't mean to call her bitch, but at the same time, I'm like like that's okay. I don't know. I never saw her offscreen enough to actually put that together. I I that scared me. Now I understand why I guess she intimidates people. I could understand that. She seems kind of intimidating. Like it's a running joke in that circle that it's like, oh, she's kind of a scary person. And I was like, what's so scary about Tina Fe? I read a book like two and a half times, like, what can be so scary about those person? And then I saw her on Amy Poeer's podcast and I was like, oh, like, yeah, she's kind of fucking scary. Like, just a lot, just a lot. I don't know. I get it now. I'm like, oh, I'd better leave that alone, because I'm thinking about like the realm where Tina Fe is god, which is an actual place, like on earth in the TV and out of it, like all of the writers that like grew up with her as headwrider on usNL and then later as the was she the executive producer ofirty Rock? Eventually I think so. Either way, as Lizimman and the producer, that's crazy doesn't like that that's like mad, that's like all the way, that's doing the whole thing. That's the whole thing. That's all you can that's it. That's nuts. So I'm thinking about all the writers like all the female writers that grew up with her as god, and I'm thinking about myself in this pool, and I'm thinking about how is I'm like, oh, I'm I I don't have that much competitiveness left inside of me. I really don't think like the more I find out about actual like, well, actually that's why I didn't go into it when I was a kid. I've been writing screenplays since I was seven, but when it came down to it, I didn't like the I didn't like the culture of it. There was a lot of nepotism and there was a lot of favoritism and there was a lot of racism. and sexism, but like all those first things I said and then the last thing was just kind of like the nail on the hammer. Is that what no, yeah, nail on hammer, hammer on nail? it just did it for me, so I went into theater instead, which was the same and then I left. I was like, I don't wanna be here. It hurts, it does. But now I'm like, oh, well, I guess things have changed, but now things have changed too much. Now the diversity is like really diverse.. Now everybody's everything and everybody's represented, and I'm like, oh, dude, like, I'm going offend some people. Like, I have to be able to draw dicks on things, or at least appreciate dicks drawn on things. Or just not say anything about it, but you know, like, I don't I don't know. The new culture is like a lot about making big deals about things to me that are not big deals, or like the the culture and the world for theater that I came from, those were not things. Anyway, uh I saw this. What what what was I talking oh, cause cause enter the multiverse has something to do with it, but not really, but yes, really, but also, I don't know, I just got nervous cause I hate fan grilling. What was the point? Oh, she wore this fucking black dress. at the SNL thing and thing. and then I was like, oh shit, like, if anything, I just gotta keep eating salads cause I want to wear that dress exactly, and I'm like, I don't know how I'm gonna shave off like three inches of height. But eventually I will be like ballerina petite like te Fe and then, you know, I'm I'm gonna buy that black dress at auction. I don't know. I'm still I still want Johnny Carson's curtains, so yeah, eventually, I'm gonna be that much of a fucking fan girl. I want these curtains, and this dress, what else would I buy? Add at an auction, if a fan growing auction? Oh, yeah. I'm still not ready to talk about it. I can't, I really. I can't do it. I can't do it. This guy shows up in my dreams. He's just around. I can't I don't know, that's a lot of purchasing power. It is a lot. Yeah, we will we'll skip that. What else? ah, she wore that black dress and I was like, damn. She's kind of hot, but then when she went on Amy Poker's podcast and they talked about, I don't know, I kept drifting off. I I did. I don't know what the fuck they said, but I was like damn, is that her speaking voice? And like just for just so you don't have to watch it, like just for reference, it's like Beyoncé speaking voice is like like an octave lower than what you've seen. It's weird. I also love Beyoncé, h? Just a fan girl. that's what I am, so I want that black dress, but then I think we were all kind of on the same wave because Bob the drag queen wore a velvet black dress to the queries. Is that a thing? It's like the queerves I think it's called. I didn't know this was a thing, and now I'm upset cause it's like why was't I invited? at the same time I'm not queer I like I don't I don't know what I am. I don't care. I just don't touch me. Especially if you probably am as fucking gross, haatitis sea, herpes, statistically, if you're in a roomful of people, somebody has one of those things. Somebody has one of those things. mm. No, no, no, no. No. No, my God. Oh, that's what I was saying in the last episode. I was thinking about EDC. I was thinking about EDC in this weird voice, yeah, I'm changing the subject. Black velvet dresses, all the rage. I have one. It is not to go out in public in. She's bouncing around my house, like I owe somebody something. That's what that dress is for. It's not for presenting talk shows or fucking award shows. It's not it's not for it's not a presentable it's it's not even appropriate for me to just wear in my house alone, honestly. It's really not. Nothing. Never mind. What was I about to say Bob the drag Queen? I haven't even watched the video. I just saw the dress and I'm like, you know what? Like that is, yeah. Do I talk about it? Do I? Well, I'm supposed to be promoting this tears of a clown. It's not done yet. So, and technically, I can't until it's out. I actually cannot. I can't talk about tears of clown because it's got some it's got some stuff in it. I can't I can't say anything about itt it's out. That, you know what it might just hit the platform. I don't know, I don't know if that's gonna be out. We'll see. We'll see, because I'm taking my time on it, and this is one of those industries where it's like, bro, you don't have time. Like, you really it should have been out yesterday. I'm like, it's yeah, yeah. But I I have enough music forever. Like, there's no like I I've been thinking about deleting everything. At the same time, I keep using samples that are recorded like five years ago and being like C, like there is no well, that's an exaggeration. No, I I literally took a sample of some sirens, like close to five years ago. I just I used that every now and again if I want some texture in my shit, cause no matter where I go, something's going down. It's always got it's like always something. And then it seems like if I don't write it down, I'm at a loss. Like crazy shit goes down and it can be crazy, but if I just let it go, then I lost something. like, I don't I can't call myself an entertainer. I'm mostly just like a fan girl type deal. What was the next thing? I can't oh, EDC. I lost my train of thought because I got I was thinking about that little old man who almost could not even move. Why are you out, bro? Who, like, where did you feel why? I think I don't know, it' probably a point of pride, that little old man was like, I can do it on my own. If I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die in the street, over my walker. I'm like,Yo, do, that's today. he was so old anyway, I got fixated on that story from the last episode. I didn't finish the other story about how this voice in my head was like, you're gonna be at neon Garden at ADC. and I like it like deflated me. I was like, what? Because I want to be in the baseball pod. That's where I want to be. and I was like, what neon garden that's shitty. not shitty because like if you're playing like I could play an art car. I could play the hot dog stand and I would be happy, just let me play you. And fucking this um this voice in my head was like you're gonna be in the neon guard, and I was like, what? I don't even know who plays there because like, yo, okay, baseball. Like you I could pretty much name an artist for like every major stage at EDC, but I was like, neon Garden. what what the fuck is in the neon garden? What the fuck is in the neon garden? And and then I was like doing research for rarity, which is an EDC based concept album that has a track for every stage, every major stage, because there's like hundreds of little tiny little art cars and like tents and pop ups. It's cool. It's a cool place. I wish I could go back there. As an artist, cause to go after having learned DJing and producing is just like I would only wanna go with my best friend. And she did not respond in time and then EDC sold out. So, I was like, okay, well, whatever was I just saying, oh, neon Gardner I was like, neon Gard, you know that dumb. I don't want to be in the neon garden and then like I was doing research for like rarity and I was like, what let's see about this neon garden and like the description fit my music almost entirely. And I was like, oh, because it was like this is what you'll find in the neon garden. And I pretty much could have copied and pasted that entire paragraph into my artist bio and it would have been relevant to my music. I was like oh yeah have a neon garden, but I really want to play baseball. That's really where I want to play and where else if I if I what's that what's the Oh, it's it's slipping right now. It's not circuit grouse. It's circuit grounds is kind of cool. It took me two EDCs to find where the front is. It is confusing, and there is no front of that. Well, I mean, like it's technically there are a couple stages that like insomniac festivals where it's like the front is actually like the middle. So you think you're going to the front of the fucking stage, or you think you're going like, near the DJ, but since it's surrounds sound, you really just going like adjacent to the DJ and then, like towards another like corner, like, how do I hit the back three times and never the front? That was my experience with circuit girls. I was like, where is the front? nowhere. It is, but it's just in a weird spot. And it also depends how many people are around, like it'll definitely disorient you. If you why am I like doing it advertisement? Because I love EDC. Like I said, if I love the product, you don't really have to pay me anything to fucking promote your shit. like in like peloton, like Peloton is gonna have to send me a cease andhesist, like stop talking about us in order to make me stop. Like they're gonna have to pay me to stop telling people like get a pelotone. get one. I'm like, do that. It is the best. like, I always feel better, like, five minutes on the peloton, I feel better. 20 minutes on the peloton, I feel better, but an hour, I'm flying. I'm like bro, I just I just went like 10 miles in my apartment. like, I'm on one. Like my treadmill stutters, but my pelotone is mway, what the fuck was I saying? Oh, EDC? Also, well, as long as they don't sell out the VIP anymore, but I doubt that, if the whole thing is sold out, like, like you can upgrade two VIP when you g

While Trump's attacks on the universities have broadened, and while Columbia is submitting to his requirements, Harvard's president has declared that Harvard will not comply with the Trump's demands in exchange for keeping its federal funding. David Cole comments - he recently stepped down as National Legal Director of the ACLU to return to teaching law at Georgetown.Also: Elon Musk's obsession with rockets and robots sounds futuristic, but “few figures in public life are more shackled to the past” – that's what Jill Lepore has found. His ideas at DOGE seem to come from his grandfather, a founder of the anti-democratic Technocracy movement of the 1930s. Jill Lepore teaches history and law at Harvard, and writes for The New Yorker.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Larry Wood, the all time New Yorker cartoon caption contest winner, author and CartoonStock caption contest judge, joins us once again to talk about the current New Yorker contests, our favorite cartoons from this week's issue of the New Yorker and the latest CartoonStock contest. Some great discussions and debates about the finalist picks and we learn that Larry and Paul have a connection to the current New Yorker contest cartoon. Larry and Beth also have very funny funeral stories. We put the "fun" back in funeral!We discuss the winning entry for Contest #937 (Hell of a Heckler).Finalists for Contest #939 (Stoned Soul Picnic).Current Contest #941 (I'm the piano, man).You can order Larry's book, "Your Caption Has Been Selected: More Than Anyone Could Possibly Want to Know About The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest" here:   https://www.amazon.com/Your-Caption-Has-Been-Selected/dp/1250333407/You can purchase original New Yorker cartoon art from Curated Cartoons here: https://www.curatedcartoons.comSend us questions or comments to:  Cartooncaptioncontestpodcast@gmail.com

While Trump's attacks on the universities have broadened, and while Columbia is submitting to his requirements, Harvard's president has declared that Harvard will not comply with Trump's demands in exchange for keeping its federal funding. David Cole comments - he recently stepped down as National Legal Director of the ACLU to return to teaching law at Georgetown.Also: Elon Musk's obsession with rockets and robots sounds futuristic, but “few figures in public life are more shackled to the past” – that's what Jill Lepore has found. His ideas at DOGE seem to come from his grandfather, a founder of the anti-democratic Technocracy movement of the 1930s. Jill Lepore teaches history and law at Harvard, and writes for The New Yorker.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Digital menu boards have long been marketed and positioned as a way to deal digitally with how what's available to order can change through a business day. I'd argue much of the critical thinking around how to do menu boards well hasn't progressed much beyond ensuring the item descriptions and prices are large enough for customers to read from the other side of an order counter. New York-based software and services firm SmarterSign has been in the digital signage industry for coming on 20 years, and has found something of a niche in working with QSR chains on optimized menu boards that are not only legible and visually pleasing, but boost sales performance for operators. Co-founder Gregg Zinn has an interest and passion for the science of advertising and marketing, and he's started writing a series called Digital Menu Board Mastery that gets into the design and psychological weeds of how to lay out and manage menu boards that influence customer ordering decisions and drive higher profits for operators. In this podcast, we get into some interesting things that most menu board sellers and users have probably never considered - stuff like psychological pricing anchors and the so-called golden zones for menu layouts. It's a really interesting chat ... Greg, thank you for joining me. Just to get started, can you give me a rundown on SmarterSign, what it is, how long you've been around, that sort of thing?  Gregg Zinn: Sure. Thank you very much for having me. SmarterSign was founded in 2006, so we've been doing this for just short of 20 years and it was founded by me and my primary business partner, Peter. We got together and both came from technology consulting, building applications for larger organizations, helping them understand how to use technology to make their businesses operate better.  I had actually done some digital signage. My first digital signage was done at Mall of America in the mid 90s working with Mel Simon, I have always been very intrigued by it. I had this vision of a Blade Runner future, where every surface was a communication vehicle and I was just very fascinated with the concept of digital signage, and I also saw that it was gonna be a burgeoning industry that had a lot of runway for the industry to grow and when we looked at the industry, we really found that there were two kinds of providers in the industry, and you probably remember back then, there were providers who were very technology oriented like Cisco, who were very good at moving data around networks, but didn't really have a lot of tools for content control. And there were companies like Scala who had a great software platform, a really powerful software platform, but it didn't really allow business operators to take complete control, and we saw that as the sweet spot for digital signage is moving business operators closer to their message and being able to impact their communication, whether it was in a corporate communication environment, a retail environment, or really what became our biggest market, which is food service, restaurants, digital menu boards.  I think a lot of the reason why digital menu boards became such a big and important part of our business is because of this approach of moving that communication control closer to the business operator. We've spent close to 20 years really working on perfecting as much as we can the tools to bring that vision to life.  So would you describe the company as a CMS software company or more of a solutions firm?  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, that's a great question. So really we view ourselves as two parts of the same solution. One is, one is a software provider that provides great software for controlling digital signage networks, and that's end-to-end from content creation, scheduling, distribution, and playback, and then the other piece is really the services piece of it, and I think that is equally important to the software piece of it, because these business operators are using a new tool, even business operators who have been doing it for 15 years, it's still relatively new to them. So being able to provide that layer of service and support underneath them, and when I say service and support, I'm not just saying, here's how to use our software. I'm talking about how to use this tool for your business. Here are the business opportunities for you. Here are the things that you can do with these tools. I think it's really important, and, for me, as part of the business, it's been a big focus, and I try to influence the software development to accommodate as much of that as possible and make it as intuitive as possible. But a lot of it is just working with business operators, so the service piece of it is really important.  Where's the company based?  Gregg Zinn: Our headquarters is in New York and I am based in Chicago. I moved to Chicago, just short of eight years ago. My wife's family is from Chicago. I was living in Chelsea in Manhattan, and my young sons are getting to school age and New York City is very challenging for raising children. We were living in 700 square feet in Chelsea and the truth is, it was fantastic. I love New York. I'm a New Yorker through and through. But my wife's family is from the Chicagoland area, the suburbs of Chicago, and we decided to pick up and move here, and now instead of looking at concrete and windows, I'm looking at a lake.  Yeah, it's good to have that relief valve as well, the in-laws and extended family where you can say, “hey, we need to do this, can you guys take the kids?” Plus they see more of their family.  Gregg Zinn: It's incredible. We do Sunday dinners and I love having the family around and it's great for me, it's great for my boys and now they're getting on in their teen years and doing all that stuff and it's great to see them grow up in this environment. I got in touch because I noticed on LinkedIn you posted a piece about Menu Board Mastery and I clicked through and had to look at it and I thought, oh, this is interesting because as somebody's been around digital signage as long as you, maybe not quite a few, mid 90s, I only got in late 90s, but nonetheless, we've both been around it a long time. I know that menu boards can be done badly, but I tend to think they're done badly when they're eye charts and there's way too much stuff on there, or quite simply, they're just not working. But your Menu Board Mastery pieces take a look at the science of it and of layout and the thinking and everything else. So I thought that would make a great conversation to get into, first of all why you felt it useful to put this together and then get into some of the key tenets of it.  Gregg Zinn: Really the thing is, I've had so many conversations with business operators, at all levels, and that could be from single location operators to multinational operators and all of them seem to struggle with putting a strategic foundation underneath the concept of what they're gonna display, and even this many years into it, many of them just see digital as a more efficient way to get their print menu up on the screen, and even when they were doing their print menu, I don't really believe that they were tapping into some of the core ideas of using this as an incredible marketing tool.  When I look at digital menus, I think a digital menu should be your perfect salesperson. If you could have that person talking to that customer and guiding them through consuming from your restaurant in a way that is ideal for you, and ideal for them, having it be the perfect salesperson. I think that's really important, and a lot of businesses have struggled to do that. So I took a look at this, and I thought, what if I put a series together that takes very interesting, proven, scientific complex ideas and makes them highly practical? And this has really been a core philosophy for me since I was a teenager.  When I first read BF Skinner's Beyond Friedman Dignity and David Ogilvy's Confessions of an Advertising Man, I became fascinated with how people interact with information and how behavior is impacted by communications, and those various tools and many boards are no different. So I thought about giving people some very practical ideas. I want to make this industry better, like ever since we started SmarterSign, I don't want to just have a great business in the industry. I want this industry to be important. I want this industry to really impact businesses and be indispensable as part of the complete operation for every business. Obviously that helps my business. But it also energizes me. It engages me.  Another key piece of my philosophy has always been moving people from theory to practice as quickly and easily as possible. Nobody ever said theory makes perfect. Practice makes perfect and helps people move to practice practical ideas and I use the phrase, “Is this practical?” all the time. You can have all of these great ideas and all of these visions for what can be, and you can sit there and ruminate, but really, when it comes down to it, where the rubber meets the road is where value is created, and can you put this into practice was the vision behind this series. The first article that you put out was about visual attention. When you talk about visual attention, what do you mean? Apart from the obvious.  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, and it's funny because there are some very obvious things, but there also are some well-studied scientific understandings about how people's eyes move in the interpretation of information and I think in the article, we point out two very well-known, established patterns of how people interact with information.  There is the F-pattern of how your eyes scan information, and that is typically for menus or information that is very text rich, and your eyes go across the top and then they go down to the middle and then across a little bit more, and then they go down to the left hand side and understanding the way that people's eyes are gonna be moving across your information helps you prioritize where you put your information that's important to your business, and I want to talk about what information is important to your business because getting to businesses do not really know how to take advantage of this tool. I think this is a really important piece of it, and I am going to be writing an article about this, and it's been a big focus as well.  But let me continue on with the other way that people interpret information, and that is The Golden Triangle, and it starts in the middle, moves to the upper right, moves to the left, and these two visual patterns have been proven time and time again with eye trackers and studies to see how people interpret visual information in front of them. The Golden Triangle is very helpful for highly visual menus, and really the key spot in that menu is that upper right hand corner. If you can put your really high value items in that upper right hand corner, you are going to see a change in your outcomes, for the better. It's such an interesting thing, and this is part of getting back to why the series is here. I want to be able to provide tidbits of information like that to help businesses change their outcome, and obviously for the better.  Is this something you discovered or you've known because you've had that interest for a very long time in it? I'm curious if you started working with QSRs and restaurant chains and advocated doing this, and then did the reading and found out, oh, there's actually a science behind this.  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, it's really a mixture of both because I had studied these concepts, and they were very interesting to me, all the way back in the 90s. They were very interesting ideas to me. Even before that, managing behavior was always interesting to me. But as I started to work in the practical environment of working with businesses, I was able to apply those ideas and see how they impacted. So I was able to grow a clear understanding of how these ideas very specifically relate to these types of business problems. So it has been a full circle since I was interested in it, I was able to apply it, and now I'm able to move and help businesses perfect it.  So one of the things you get into is positioning, like what should go where and how you wanna have prime positions for your high margin items and signature items, that sort of thing. I've not thought about that at all. I've just thought that companies just laid things out the way they laid out their print menus and didn't really think too much about that stuff, or maybe they don't.  Gregg Zinn: Many of them don't think about it and actually very early on, working with businesses, 2006-2007, I had come up with this idea called The Prominence Pyramid. The idea behind The Prominence Pyramid was to help businesses identify. What are the most important menu items on your menu? And most businesses couldn't identify it. I was really surprised to walk into the c-suites of large organizations and ask them very simple questions about what are the most important items on their menu and they were not able to answer that.  But we would guide businesses through this process of putting items on a pyramid, say at the top of the pyramid. These are the most important items for you, and they're the most important for top line revenue. They're the most important for margin, they're the most important in terms of branding and customer experience, and those are the items that should have prominence within your visual space because they're the ones that are gonna help push your business forward. There are so many moving parts to this as we're moving forward, and as AI has become part of the mix of tools, it's a very exciting time for me because I feel like we can use these tools to help give insights very quickly to businesses using real data using, using these known scientific ideas to help them get these ideas in front of them, and then once you know that, once you know what should be presented in these prominent areas in the visual space, then you could do things like change the sizing, change the coloring, add boxes around them, animate those sections, put little tags, customer favorites.  Actually, we have a customer who just did this who just did this. He wanted to promote this one item, so we put a tag that said “Customer favorite” and sales immediately increased on this item. So we know that these tools can help change business outcomes. It's just a matter of helping businesses get there. And I think this series is gonna help people get there in bite-sized movements.  So when you talk about things like prime positions, that's in your F-pattern or Golden Triangle, there's certain positions that are gonna be optimal. That's where the eye goes naturally?  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy to think that these are actually things, but they've proven, studied, scientifically that this is the way eyes move to interpret information.  So some of the other variables, and you've already mentioned it, are things like white space and borders around stuff, contrast, the font size.  To me, being a knucklehead and not really spending a lot of time talking about QSRs, I just see ones where I can't read this, and my eyesight's assisted, but when I've had my glasses on, it's 2020, and I still struggle to read it.  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, it drives me crazy and I don't know if you have seen this, but I can send you a link to it. I had done a series called the Digital Menu Board Scorecard, and it was an evaluation of menu boards in the wild, not necessarily SmarterSign customers. But menu boards that we had seen, we'd take pictures of them, and we'd break down what are they were doing well, what are they doing poorly and we give them a score on a number of characteristics like branding, layout, organization, and actually, it's funny, just last week I was in the airport and I saw a menu from a pretty big QSR, and I just thought: Who made this menu? This is just terrible.  I won't mention their name because I don't want to get in trouble.  When you did the scorecard, were you handing out as many “A”s?  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, there were some As, there were few, very few, but every once in a while we'd come across a menu board where the business had a really good balanced sense of brand presentation, strategic organization, overall design, effectiveness of the menu to get people to order. That's actually one of the key things when you look at menus. Outside of getting their attention, it is how quickly can you get somebody through the process of making a decision and this is particularly true for digital drive-through, has been a real focus and we've seen some really interesting things done in that realm. For example, having the menu change at 8:00 PM to be a more limited menu on the drive-through, so that it changes the operations from a kitchen point of view, but also gets people through the line quicker.  One of the questions I wanted to ask was, is the thinking and the layouts and everything else different between the screens over the counter, the screens in a self-service ordering kiosk, and then the screens in the drive-through? Gregg Zinn: Yeah, absolutely, and if you look at our customers who are doing interior menu boards and exterior menu boards, the layouts, the structures, the approach to the menus are different. It's just different. It's a different mind frame. It's almost a different form factor in many cases because a lot of times the drive through's gonna be portrait, and many times the interior board's gonna be landscape.  But the whole business mission is really different, and taking advantage of what each of those environments do better. We don't do any touchscreen ordering. I have a love-hate relationship with the concept of it. I'm old school. So when I go into a sandwich shop, I want to talk to the person who is going to be able to take down my details of what I want, and I want to be able to say them and have them articulate that to the kitchen. Personally, I find it very difficult to do the touchscreen ordering and get that right and have the same level of customer experience.  AI is gonna change that because AI is going to somehow offer voice to AI ordering, which will take some of that UI cloudiness out of the mix. You mentioned AI. I'm curious about computer vision and the idea that, I've heard this said, I don't know what it is really being done in-store. I've heard about it in drive-throughs, but dynamically adjusting menus based on the profile of the people who are approaching the counter. Gregg Zinn: Yeah, there's a few things that we've been working with in terms of studying, how this can be done in an effective way. It's a highly strategic concept and, as I mentioned earlier, businesses are really just struggling to translate their static menu to a digital menu in a very strategic way, but we're pushing this forward, and there are other technologies.  There's license plate reader technology for drive-throughs where the same car is coming through, and you could tie it to their past consumption and we're gonna get there, and I think with AI, we're gonna get there much quicker and I'm super happy about that. Because I have been sitting in the running blocks waiting for the gun to go off and I'm excited about what AI means to accelerate some of this progress.  When you started, almost 20 years ago now, APIs were known but they weren't widely available and I suspect it was very difficult to talk to a restaurant about actually jacking into their restaurant management systems in any way, but we're now in a very different world, and that's all possible.  Is it being done? And how do you best leverage that other than the very simple stuff like price changes in the store system, you want to automatically change on the screen? Gregg Zinn: Right now the two primary mechanisms that are interacting, that operating data with the marketing data on menu boards, are price changes. So having the POS system be the source of that price, that's your operating data, and that operating data points should be filtered through to your menu boards. You shouldn't have to manage it in two pieces.  The second piece is inventory. We work with a lot of customers who run out of individual products, and that creates frustration for the customer, and it creates frustration for the person taking the order. So having the ability to show that something's currently sold out, is something that we're seeing being used. Again, this comes down to: Can so much more be done? Yeah, so much more can be done.  But getting over that, what should be done, as opposed to what can be done. It's also part of my core philosophy is, a lot of things can be done, but only some things should be done. So we've stayed away from novelty. We've stayed away from a lot of the things that people are saying, whoa, what about this? What about that? We try to keep it as practical as possible. But we're gonna see a big shift. I don't know if you know the company Palantir. I love Palantir as a company. I love what their vision for using AI is. People ask me questions about it all the time because I'm in technology. People ask me about AI people who are late, not in the technology industry, and late people, and I always point to Palantir as somebody who is an applied AI company. They're using the data to determine what should be done as opposed to what could be done and I think they're doing a really great job of it. They're really leaders in that space. Now, they're not menu boards, but I do follow what they're doing because I think that they're very innovative in terms of how they're looking at the connection between data operations, real world and practical application. In my years doing consulting, I've done quite a bit with some big companies, but the only QSR I worked with was a coffee chain and when I went in to start working with them, they talked about a bunch of things and I asked them about menu boards and takeovers, which I had seen in some of their stores where all of the menus went away and they had a tiled piece of creative, pedaling a particular promoted product and they said that they did some interview intercepts with customers and pretty uniformly the customer said, stop screwing around, just show me the damn menu, and I've since been in a number of restaurants where I had to wait for the menu items that came up because they were promoting something or other on the screen for 5-10 seconds and it irritated the living hell out of me. Is it something you advocate? Just get to the point; don't try to be fancy here. Forget the video, just show me the items and pricing.  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, intuitively for me, that customer response is obvious. They're trying to interact with a piece of data to place an order, and then all of a sudden it's gone and they're waiting. They have no idea how long it's gonna be before it comes back, and then they've gotta go find their spot on the menu again. So intuitively for me, we have always guided people against it. We've had customers asked to do it. Of course, our platform can do it. But it is not a good idea. Now, that being said, with digital menu boards and you've seen them in QSRs, there's a lot of visual space, so you can use a portion of that visual space to do those kinds of marketing techniques. One of the really interesting things that we had seen, so we did an observational study of a food court, working with a customer who had a restaurant, a pizza restaurant, and a food court. We did an observational study, and we saw that nobody looked up at the menu when they came over to the counter to order. They didn't care about the pricing, they didn't care about anything. They never looked up. But the menu boards were not being used properly to get people over to their restaurant as a choice. So what we recommended was: these really aren't digital menu boards in so much as they're digital billboards, and you need to use these as a “come eat pizza” sign, as opposed to thinking of it as a digital menu board. So we used some of the visual space as a “come eat pizza”, and we were able to draw some of that audience thinking maybe they'd go get Chinese food or Chipotle or another option over to them. So that's another way where you can impact outcomes by using the visual space as opposed to just menu boards.  What do you do with restaurants? I think about one up here, Tim Horton's here in Canada that started out doing coffee and donuts and pastries and now does endless kinds of food items, and they've got a menu list that's far longer than it was when the chain first started.  What do you do when you have customers who have like 40 SKUs and you've only got so much real estate on a screen?  Gregg Zinn: It's a big challenge, and it's a funny thing because, when I look at operations like that, I've never run a restaurant, but when I think of the ideal process to get customers through and order your food, I think of a business like In and Out Burger. They've got a very specific menu. People come there for those items. They love those items.  We have a lot of customers who have these extensive menus. I don't love it from an operations point of view, but from a presentation of the menu point of view, it's a matter of just being very organized in how you present that information so that you are able to get that broad menu into somebody's eyes, get them to where they want to order. If they want something that's savory as opposed to something sweet, get their eyes to that.  A good example of that is Dairy Queen has a pretty extensive menu, and they've got food and ice creams and just being able to segment that out. So on their drive-throughs, for example, we do a number of franchisees for Dairy Queen. On their drive-throughs, they've got one complete panel, that's just their sweet treats. They've got a middle panel that is promotion, key promotional items, LTOs and things like that, and then they have a right screen that is their savory items, their burgers and sandwiches and hot dogs and things.  The post that you have up right now about this Mastery series has to do with price anchors. That's not a term I know much about. What do you mean by that?  Gregg Zinn: It's another behavioral technique where you can establish a baseline in a customer's mind by putting an item that you don't really expect anybody to consume, but what it does is it creates a mental baseline of price expectation, so that you can have them pay a premium price for that second level item, without feeling like this is too expensive. So it really is a decoy. It's like look over here, this item is $30, but here's a really good value item at $22. It's so interesting to me because particularly in the past five years, pricing's gotten outta control, and, for so many reasons. Supply chain issues, obviously going back to 2020 with Covid but pricing has gotten crazy, and my favorite burger place in New York City, actually where I got engaged, when I got engaged, the burger was, yeah, I'm a huge burger guy, but it was my second date with my wife. We went there, and we're both burger people, and that's where I proposed ultimately.  You got engaged on our second date?  Gregg Zinn: Oh, no, we went on our second date to this burger place. Seven years later, we got engaged, but in that same spot, but the burger was like $6 at that point, and now it's like 18.  Oh, for God's sake.  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, and even the QSRs I go into sometimes, and I just think, who could afford $60 for a family of four?  It just doesn't seem like an affordable approach and I will tell you that from a pricing strategy point of view, all of the QSRs are recognizing this, and they're trying to adapt. We're already out of time, but I wanted to ask one more question, just around when you're going into a new customer and you start talking about what we've just discussed, kind of the science and the thinking behind it, are minds a little bit blown because they're wanting to do digital menu boards because it's a pain in the ass to change the print ones, and they haven't thought much beyond that? Gregg Zinn: We take it slow. It's been over 20 years and we've learned you can't just go in gangbusters and put all of these ideas in their heads about what's possible because it'll just confuse the situation. So we go slow with our customers. We meet them where they are. Fix the first obvious problem, and then you can go from there. Gregg Zinn: Yeah, and I've said it a number of times in this call if it's not practical, it can't be done.  All right. This was great. If people wanna find out more about SmarterSign and read these articles, they can find 'em on smartersign.com.  Gregg Zinn: They can, yeah. All the articles are there. In the resource section, right? Gregg Zinn: Yeah, and we've got a bunch of videos on our YouTube channel, of course, posting on other social channels like LinkedIn. But yeah, the primary source would be on smartersign.com.  Perfect. All right. Thank you, sir.  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, thank you so much. It was really nice talking to you and re-meeting you again.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Amy Reading chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker, the biography of Katharine Sergeant White, the first fiction editor of The New Yorker, an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Here's what you'll discover in this episode: Amy Reading's inspiration for crafting The World She Edited How The World She Edited provides a long overdue corrective to the male-dominated lens through which America's literary history during the 20th century and the rise of The New Yorker have been portrayed How Amy portrayed Katharine's challenges, including sexism, misogyny, paternalism and backhanded insults The extent to which Amy interpreted Katharine's correspondence with her authors How Amy narrowed the biographical scope given that the ‘finding aid' to Katharine's archival collection runs to 800 pages How Amy crafted lucid, elegant narrative, evoking the style Katharine infused throughout The New Yorker Why Amy argued for the importance of Katharine's forgotten work and made a larger argument about female readers as the drivers of literary culture.

A native New Yorker, Adam received a BFA from Ithaca College and completed one year of his MFA at UCLA before deciding to quit because those hard wooden classroom chairs were really chafing his ass. Writing began for him when his first play was produced at the West Coast Ensemble Theater in Hollywood. A creative executive who happened to be in the audience one night called Adam the next day and asked him to write a movie for him. Spoiler alert: it never got made. Shocking, I know! Nevertheless, he persisted. Adam's day job as an Executive Producer of unscripted television shows such as “The Real Housewives of Orange County”, “The Real Housewives of Dallas”, “Southern Charm” and “The Bradshaw Bunch” pays his bills while he writes. To date, his sojourn in the scripted world includes selling a treatment to Disney Feature Animation, being a staff writer on comedy pilots for AMC and Discovery Kids, acceptance into the Warner Bros Comedy Writers Program, being a finalist for the Disney Fellowship in Screenwriting, developing a romantic comedy with Bryan Cranston for him to direct, and writing several features and pilots that have all received accolades from each contest in which they've been entered. Adam's most recent success includes being one of ISA's TOP 25 SCREENWRITERS TO WATCH IN 2025. His Horror / Comedy "HELL HOLES was one of five ISA Staff Picks for December 2024 and one of ISA's 25 Top Reads for Winter 2024. "HELL HOLES" is also in the TOP 8% of all scripts on COVERFLY. Adam's bread and butter is comedy, and his peanut butter and jelly is infusing other genres like horror, action and sci-fi with that comedy. Except for his one drama feature. That one is strictly a BLT on toasted wheat, light mayo.

In her new book, Syme's Letter Writer, Rachel Syme of The New Yorker explains how to write a delightful letter to a loved one. Unlike texting and email, old-fashioned letters, hand-addressed and sent in the mail, are "read intentionally," she says. Syme offers advice on what to write about, how to find the perfect stationery, and how to find a pen pal.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

It’s Public Intellectual Day at StraightioLab HQ as we welcome The New Yorker’s Doreen St. Félix to the lab to talk about, quite simply, EVERYTHING: the semiotics of handbags, Lizzo’s Pass, the many of Joan Didion, and of course the state of religion in the United States of America. StraightioLab: Live! at the Bell House: https://concerts.livenation.com/straightiolab-live-brooklyn-new-york-04-16-2025/event/3000626340673C34STRAIGHTIOLAB MERCH: cottonbureau.com/people/straightiolab SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PATREON at patreon.com/straightiolab for bonus episodes twice a month and don't forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pie Down Here — Produced by Signal HillIn the 1980s, when Robin D.G. Kelley was 24 years old, he took a bus trip to the Deep South. He was researching and recording oral histories with farmworkers and Communist Party members who had organized a sharecroppers union in Alabama during the Great Depression.Kelly used those oral histories to write his award winning book, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression.Recently Kelley listened back to those early recordings with Signal Hill contributor Conor Gillies. He hadn't heard some of the recordings in decades. Memories came flooding back as Kelley reflected on the people, the story and the power of oral history. Robin Davis Gibran Kelley is an American historian and academic, and the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. His books include the prize-winning Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press, 2009); Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002, new ed. 2022. His essays have appeared in dozens of publications, including The Nation, the New York Times, the New Yorker, New York Review of Books and more.Pie Down Here was produced by Conor Gillies and edited by Liza Yeager and Omar Etman, with help from the Signal Hill team: Jackson Roach, Annie Rosenthal, and Lio Wong. Music by Nathan Bowles. You can listen to the entire first issue of Signal Hill — eight original stories — on their website at signalhill.fm, or wherever you get podcasts. The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of independent producers.

Breakups are heart-wrenching at any age, but when a partner leaves suddenly after three decades of marriage, it takes a lot of time to pick up the pieces. When Suzy Hopkins had this experience, she decided to team up with her illustrator daughter Hallie Bateman to channel her pain into a creative project, and their book, What To Do When You Get Dumped: A Guide to Unbreaking Your Heart, came to life. Suzy had a rich career in journalism including founding her own magazine, and Hallie is a writer and illustrator whose work has appeared in places like the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine. This is the second book Hallie and Suzy have made together, and on today's episode, they're giving us an inside look at what creating this illustrated guide entailed and how healing the creative process was for both of them. Dr. Alexandra chats with them about some of the most painful aspects of breakups, and they explore the incredible renewal that can occur in the wake of loss, when we are able to accept support from those we love and summon the courage to reimagine our lives. "Your Anxiety Toolkit" on MasterClass: www.masterclass.com/youranxietytoolkitWhat to Do When You Get Dumped by Suzy Hopkins & Hallie BatemanHallie's websiteOrder Dr. Alexandra's book, Love Every DaySubscribe to Dr. Alexandra's NewsletterSubmit a Listener Question

Laurie Ruittimann: The Future of Hiring – Live from Transform 2025 Laurie Ruettimann is a former HR leader turned writer, entrepreneur, and speaker. In 2009, CNN recognized her as one of America's top career advisors and Forbes named her blog as one of the Top 100 blogs for women. Those two events propelled her into the spotlight of fixing the world of work. Laurie hosts the popular podcast Punk Rock HR. Her work and writing have been featured in Business Insider, The New Yorker, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and Vox. Laurie is a sought-after keynote speaker at business and management events worldwide. She has graced the stages of business conferences like SXSW, academic institutions like Harvard Business School, and stages like 92stY. You can also catch her on CNN, Fox, and NPR. We dig into: 1. Challenging conventional workplace norms. 2. If you could change just one ingrained belief about HR or leadership overnight, what would it be and why? 3. Your book, Betting On You, encourages people to take control of their careers, and your upcoming book, Corporate Drinker, tackles a different workplace issue. What's the common thread between the two, and what conversations do you hope Corporate Drinker sparks? 4. Through Punk Rock HR and your keynotes, you've explored how technology is reshaping work. With AI now transforming hiring, management, and employee experience, where do you see HR's biggest opportunities—and risks—in the next 3 years? Check out her podcast: http://laurieruettimann.com/podcast Connect with Laurie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurieruettimann/ Live from Transform 2025, we're bringing you an exclusive podcast series packed with insights from some of the brightest minds in hiring, talent strategy, and workforce transformation! In this series, we've got incredible guests from Okta, Tubi, Edelman, Greenhouse, Findem, and more, sharing how top organizations are rethinking hiring, culture, and talent acquisition in today's fast-changing world. Greenhouse combines a structured, data-driven hiring approach with AI-embedded workflows that empower recruiters to focus on strategic, high-impact work. From sourcing top talent to personalizing the candidate experience, Greenhouse streamlines and optimizes the entire hiring process. This ensures that every hire is the right hire—eliminating bias, creating fairness, and helping teams make smarter, faster decisions. Over 7,500 companies, including HubSpot, Duolingo, and J.D. Power, trust Greenhouse to build better teams and turn talent into a strategic advantage. Want to learn how today's top companies are winning the talent game? Tune in now and visit Greenhouse.com to transform the way you hire. Thanks for listening. Please follow us on Instagram @NHPTalent and X @AdamJPosner. Visit www.thePOZcast.com for all episodes.

Most women have been let down, hurt or heartbroken by at least one man in her lifetime. Over time you accumulate these stories of hurt and pain - reinforce them with other women, and project this pain onto new relationships. These old trauma stories directly influence who you attract, the quality of men that come into your life and what is possible for you in your future relationships. If you are ready to rewrite your story with men, to heal old wounds from past stories and create new possibilities , this episode is for you. Guy Shahar, the founder of The Tantra Institute, is back on the podcast to share what men actually want in relationships, the key to deepening intimacy to create lasting love and how to shift your old, outdated beliefs around men so you can attract a healthy, solid man who shows up fully for you. The 90 Day Relationship Experiment: https://www.tantrany.com/rel/?aff=4kharlow About the Guests:Guy Shahar is the Co-Founder and Lead Facilitator of The Tantra Institute, and the originator of Tantra Speed Date®, one of the most unique and popular speed dating events in 50+ cities worldwide.With numerous television appearances as well as features in Playboy, Cosmopolitan, Time Out New York, San Francisco Chronicle, The Sunday Times, and the New Yorker, The Tantra Institute has presented over 5,000 workshops serving more than 100,000 students.Guy speaks, teaches, and coaches in New York and around the world. Guy most enjoys helping singles and couples have more intimacy, connection, and pleasure in their relationships and to be better lovers in all areas of life. About the Host:Kate Harlow is the founder of The Unscriptd Woman, the creator of The Expanded Love Coaching Method, and host of The New Truth podcast - ranked in the top 1.5% globally. With over 15 years of experience teaching, coaching and facilitating transformational retreats worldwide, Kate has helped hundreds of thousands of women break free from outdated relational patterns, old patriarchal ways of thinking and unspoken rules to live by. Her infallible methods guide women to release the deeply ingrained scripts that keep them stuck- empowering women to step into their highest, most magnetic, and fully expressed selves. Through her coaching, retreats, podcast and upcoming book The Unscriptd Woman, Kate is redefining what it means to be an empowered woman in today's world, showing women how to stop waiting for permission and start creating a life and love that aligns with their deepest truth. Known for her rare ability to see exactly where women are out of alignment with themselves, Kate offers a path back to unwavering self- trust, meaningful joy and true fulfillment. Her work is a revolution - one that liberates women from societal expectations and invites them into a life of radical authenticity, thriving relationships and unshakable self-worth. Website: https://www.theunscriptdwoman.com/The Immersion in Corfu, Greece April 26- May 3, 2025https://www.theunscriptdwoman.com/the-immersion Thanks for listening!It means so much to us that you listened to our podcast! If you would like to continue the conversation with us, head on over to our Facebook group, the New

In this episode, Russell Moore, editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, joins Mark Labberton to discuss the seismic political, moral, cultural, and spiritual crises facing American evangelicalism and how to respond. Reflecting on his own journey from the Southern Baptist Convention to his current role, Moore offers a candid and theologically rich diagnosis of a movement he describes as simultaneously fragmented, bored, and longing for renewal. Drawing parallels to historical awakenings and moments of global upheaval, Moore challenges listeners to consider what faithful Christian witness looks like in a time of digital saturation, political idolatry, and ecclesial disillusionment. Together, they wrestle with how evangelical institutions can resist becoming co-opted by market forces or ideologies, and instead return to the soul of the gospel—Jesus himself. Episode Highlights “We simply want Jesus as revealed in scripture.” (Russell Moore) “The good news is so clouded with distorted noise.” (Mark Labberton) “You mistakenly think that the solution has to be at the same scale as the problem.” (Wendall Berry, cited by Russell Moore) “Every person has to have an act of willful excommunication.” (Nicholas Carr, cited by Russell Moore) “Christian Nationalism is like ‘Bizarro Evangelicalism' … i f you can get external conformity, then you have righteousness.” (Russell Moore) Karl Barth on Christian disillusionment during World War I: “We  we want to preach the gospel as though nothing has happened.” … “ He's saying the church is being co-opted and used by forces alien to it. And there have to be people who are free from that to actually appeal to the genuine gospel and to remind people that God is God.” About Russell Moore Russell Moore is Editor in Chief of Christianity Today and is the author of Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America (Penguin Random House). The Wall Street Journal has called Moore “vigorous, cheerful, and fiercely articulate.” He was named in 2017 to Politico Magazine's list of top fifty influence-makers in Washington, and has been profiled by such publications as the New York Times, the Washington Post, TIME Magazine, **and the New Yorker. An ordained Baptist minister, Moore served previously as President of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and, before that, as the chief academic officer and dean of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he also taught theology and ethics. Moore was a Fellow at the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics and currently serves on the board of the Becket Law and as a Senior Fellow with the Trinity Forum in Washington, D.C. He also hosts the weekly podcast The Russell Moore Show and is co-host of Christianity Today's weekly news and analysis podcast, The Bulletin. Russell was President of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention from 2013 to 2021. Prior to that role, Moore served as provost and dean of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, where he also taught theology and ethics. A native Mississippian, he and his wife Maria are the parents of five sons. They live in Nashville, where he teaches the Bible regularly at their congregation, Immanuel Church. Show Notes Comparing Christianity Today and Fuller Theological Seminary Religious reconsiderations post-World War II “My grandfather was blown out of a tank by the Nazis in the Battle of the Bulge and came back. He went an unbeliever, came back really feeling his mortality and, and searching for answers. And ended up at a revival meeting where he came to know Christ.” A false choice presented to Christians: “You had this false choice being presented to Christians … you either go with an ever narrowing, ever quarrelsome sort of group of fundamentalists or you liberalize.” Billy Graham and Martin Luther King, Jr. The recent history of Evangelical Christianity A Movement in Crisis: What is the state of Evangelicalism in America? Revival preachers and entrepreneurialism: a religious, market-driven reality “Lifelessness and deadness” “ I can't think of a single church that has split over Christology. Most of the arguments have to do with politics and, and related sort of cultural issues because that's what people really care about and what they really think often is important.” Tumult of the digital economy Alienation, dehumanization: “We can simultaneously think of ourselves as gods and as sets of data and algorithms.” Speed of change and life Teaching ethics: a final exam question students have never thought about How to prepare people for ethical problems and real-life challenges Mental health crisis: “high rates of depression and anxiety driven by a piece of glass that everybody carries in his or her pocket that can connect that person with all of the information in the entire world.” 100 years since the invention and use of the microphone No microphones, but extraordinary voices “The dials are askew, because the sound that evangelicalism is evoking in so many quadrants is a sound that is hostile and grading and brash and arrogant.” “The good news is so clouded with distorted noise.” Secularization How Evangelicalism appeals to people: End Times Prophecy, Marriage and Family Values, and Shocking Attention-Grabbing “Real life takes on the characteristics of the internet.” Wendall Berry: “You mistakenly think that the solution has to be at the same scale as the problem.” Can you give us some hope? “Hope that is seen is not hope. Instead, there's suffering that creates endurance. Endurance that creates character, character that creates hope, and hope does not put to shame.” Ezekiel and the valley of the dry bones What is the work of Christianity Today right now? Redefining who is “us.” Who is the “we” of Evangelicalism? “We simply want Jesus as revealed in scripture.” 2 Corinthians 4: “The glory of God reflected in the face of Jesus Christ.” Karl Barth and disillusionment during World War I: “We  we want to preach the gospel as though nothing has happened.” … “ He's saying the church is being co-opted and used by forces alien to it. And there have to be people who are free from that to actually appeal to the genuine gospel and to remind people that God is God.” How to cultivate freedom “One of the major challenges to a freedom is loss of attention.” “I have to be free from the constant whirl—and what he meant at the time was the radio, you know, which is nothing compared to what we have—because my attention is necessary for me to be able to serve and to give.” “Kingdom of God is like yeast.” Waiting, attention, and a longer view of time “How do you then hold onto this freedom that we're describing in a way of connected disconnectedness or disconnected connectedness or something?” Nicholas Carr: “Every person has to have an act of willful excommunication.” Revelation and the Book of Daniel: “Seal all this up for now. … Don't worry about it.” Nebuchadnezzar demanding  that. Shadrach, Mishak, and Abednego bow down and worship the golden statue. Evangelical Pastors: Preaching the Bible versus advocating a political vision Galatians 1 and 2—Paul's not yielding to false teachers in order to preserve the Gospel New Apostolic Reformation Christian Nationalism: “Bizarro Evangelicalism … i f you can get external conformity, then you have righteousness.” “Blood mysticism” Jonathan Rauch's Cross Purposes Keeping guard up in conversations with disagreement “Simply asking for Christians to be who we say we are.” Production Credits Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.

In this powerful episode of I Am Refocused Radio, we sit down with Congresswoman Marie Newman—former U.S. Representative, movement-builder, and author of the upcoming memoir A Life Made From Scratch. Known for her unapologetic stance on healthcare reform, economic justice, and LGBTQ+ rights, Congresswoman Newman shares what it really takes to stand on your values in Washington—and why she's still hopeful about the future of American democracy.We dive deep into her personal journey from entrepreneur and mother to political firestarter, and she gives us a raw, honest look at the cost of fighting for change in a divided nation. If you've ever wondered how real change gets made—or how to keep pushing forward when the system pushes back—this episode is for you.Congresswoman Marie Newman is a trailblazing former U.S. Representative, nonprofit CEO, marketing executive, author, and nationally recognized advocate for equity and justice. She is the author of When Your Child Is Being Bullied: Real Solutions and the forthcoming memoir A Life Made From Scratch (March 2025), which chronicles her journey from mompreneur and activist to Congress and beyond.Known for building movements and tackling the nation's toughest problems, Newman has been a fierce advocate for healthcare reform, anti-bullying policy, LGBTQ+ rights, gun safety, reproductive freedom, and economic equity. A former spokesperson for Moms Demand Action and a nationally recognized LGBTQ+ ally, she has dedicated her career to ensuring marginalized voices are heard—and centered—in policymaking.Marie has been featured on MSNBC, CNN, FOX, NBC, ABC, CBS, and PBS, and her work has been spotlighted by The New York Times, Washington Post, Elle, Teen Vogue, Ms. Magazine, The New Yorker, Chicago Tribune, and many more. Her op-eds and public speeches have sparked conversations across the political spectrum, from Capitol Hill to kitchen tables.She currently lives in LaGrange, Illinois, with her husband and beagle, Iggy. Marie is a proud mom of two adult children, an active consultant, and a podcaster. Her debut novel—a work of political fiction—is due out in 2026, and she will launch her new podcast in 2025.Her personal motto? “When you don't see the solution you desperately need—make it from scratch.”http://marienewmanstudio.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/i-am-refocused-radio--2671113/support.

As a journalist, Nick Romeo has interviewed people doing remarkable things, from running worker-owned companies to redesigning gig work as public infrastructure. These experiences shaped his new book, The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy, and led him to one big insight: a better economy isn't just possible—it's already here. In this episode, Nick and Dart talk about the difference between market wages and living wages, why mainstream economics underestimates people, and how everything from co-ops to experiments in building gig work platforms as public utilities are reimagining the role of work in society right now.Nick Romeo is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. He writes about policy, power, and the systems that shape how we live and work.In this episode, Dart and Nick discuss:- Why we need a new definition of a “living wage”- The power of co-ops, trusts, and employee ownership- How gig work can be redesigned to serve workers- What it means to design an economy around fairness- How ownership models shape the future of work- Why traditional economics misses what really matters- And other topics…Nick Romeo is a journalist and author who covers bold ideas in economics, policy, and philosophy. He's reported for The New Yorker on everything from Austria's job guarantee experiment to Spain's Mondragon cooperative and Nicholas Humphrey's theory of consciousness. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and Scientific American. He teaches at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. His latest book, The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy, offers a roadmap for a fairer, more sustainable economy. Praised by The Guardian as “enlightening and inspiring” and called “brisk and sensible” by The Washington Post, it showcases real-world models that are already changing how we think about work, wages, and ownership.Resources Mentioned:The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy, by Nick Romeo: https://www.amazon.com/Alternative-How-Build-Just-Economy/dp/1541701593CORE Economics Project: https://www.core-econ.orgMIT Living Wage Calculator: https://livingwage.mit.edu/Well-Paid Maids: https://www.wellpaidmaids.com/Tax Justice Network: https://taxjustice.net/Connect with Nick:Website: https://www.nickromeowriter.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-romeo-b4486393/ Work with Dart:Dart is the CEO and co-founder of the work design firm 11fold. Build work that makes employees feel alive, connected to their work, and focused on what's most important to the business. Book a call at 11fold.com.

What if the best life advice didn't come in a long-winded lecture—but in one short sentence that actually sticks?In this episode, Gretchen Rubin—New York Times bestselling author of The Happiness Project and Secrets of Adulthood—shares the bold, memorable truths that can shift how we show up every day. From reframing procrastination to recognizing how our senses shape our gratitude, Gretchen breaks down big ideas in a way that's instantly usable.We also dive into her Four Tendencies framework (you'll want to take the quiz!) and how to stop hiding behind busyness and start living with more clarity, intention, and joy.This isn't a to-do list—it's a mindset shift. And it starts with one simple phrase:“The bird, the bee, and the bat all fly—but they use different kinds of wings.”Let's figure out your wings—and fly your way. Thrive Global Article:Gretchen Rubin Reveals Her Secrets of AdulthoodAbout Our Guest:Gretchen Rubin is one of today's most influential and thought-provoking observers of happiness and human nature. She's known for her ability to convey complex ideas—from science to literature to stories from her own life—with levity and clarity.She's the author of many bestselling books, such as The Happiness Project, Better Than Before, and The Four Tendencies, which have sold millions of copies in more than thirty languages. Her most recent book is Life in Five Senses.She's also host of the popular podcast, Happier with Gretchen Rubin, and founder of award-winning Happier app, which helps people track their happiness-boosting habits.Gretchen Rubin has been interviewed by Oprah, eaten dinner with Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman, walked arm-in-arm with the Dalai Lama, had her work reported on in a medical journal, been written up in the New Yorker, and been an answer on Jeopardy! After starting her career in law, she realized she wanted to be a writer while she was clerking for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Raised in Kansas City, she lives in New York City with her family.About Lainie:Lainie Rowell is a bestselling author, award-winning educator, and TEDx speaker. She is dedicated to human flourishing, focusing on community building, emotional intelligence, and honoring what makes each of us unique and dynamic through learner-driven design. She earned her degree in psychology and went on to earn both a post-graduate credential and a master's degree in education. An international keynote speaker, Lainie has presented in 41 states as well as in dozens of countries across 4 continents. As a consultant, Lainie's client list ranges from Fortune 100 companies like Apple and Google to school districts and independent schools. Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠linktr.ee/lainierowell⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.Website - ⁠LainieRowell.com⁠Instagram - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@LainieRowell⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn - @LainieRowellTwitter - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@LainieRowell ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Evolving with Gratitude, the book is available ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And now, Bold Gratitude: The Journal Designed for You and by You is available too!Both Evolving with Gratitude & Bold Gratitude have generous bulk pricing for purchasing 10+ copies delivered to the same location.

Simon and Rachel speak with ⁠Joshi Herrmann⁠, the founder of local journalism startup ⁠Mill Media⁠. Joshi founded The Mill, a newsletter covering Greater Manchester, as a one-man band in June 2020. The company now has staff writers and editors across six British cities: Manchester⁠, ⁠Glasgow,⁠ Birmingham, ⁠Liverpool⁠, Sheffield and ⁠London⁠. Mill Media is known for deeply reported long reads and its paid newsletter model; it is read by more than 150,000 email subscribers. The company has received investment from figures including Sir Mark Thompson, chief executive of CNN and a former BBC director-general. Joshi was formerly editor-in-chief of ⁠Tab Media⁠, and he has reported for the Times, the Telegraph, the Guardian and the London Evening Standard. We spoke to Joshi about ⁠working at the Standard⁠, his stints at the Tab, and his current venture, which is looking to reinvent local journalism.We have recently also overhauled our offer for those ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠who support the podcast on the crowdfunding site Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Our central reward is a - now greatly expanded - sheaf of successful journalistic pitches, which we've solicited from friends of Always Take Notes. In the package we now have successful pitches to, among others, the New York Times, the Guardian, the New Yorker, the Financial Times, the Economist, the London Review of Books, Vanity Fair, Outside magazine, the Spectator, the Sunday Times, Esquire, Granta, the Literary Review, Prospect, Bloomberg Businessweek and GQ. Anyone who supports the show with $5 per month or more will receive the full compendium. Other rewards include signed copies of our podcast book (see below) and the opportunity to take part in a monthly call with the two of us to workshop your own pitches and writing projects. A new edition of “Always Take Notes: Advice From Some Of The World's Greatest Writers” - a book drawing on our podcast interviews - is available now. The updated version now includes insights from over 100 past guests on the podcast, with new contributions from Harlan Coben, Victoria Hislop, Lee Child, Megan Nolan, Jhumpa Lahiri, Philippa Gregory, Jo Nesbø, Paul Theroux, Hisham Matar and Bettany Hughes. You can order it via ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Amazon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Waterstones⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.You can find us online at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠alwaystakenotes.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, on Twitter @takenotesalways and on Instagram @alwaystakenotes. Always Take Notes is presented by Simon Akam and Rachel Lloyd, and produced by Artemis Irvine. Our music is by Jessica Dannheisser and our logo was designed by James Edgar.

Hello, Protagonists!My guest today on CREATIVE. INSPIRED. HAPPY is Téa Obreht, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, National Book Award Finalist, and international bestseller of The Tiger's Wife and other novels. Her latest book, The Morningside, is out in paperback now.Today, we talk about:* how being an immigrant influences her storytelling,* writing in English while sometimes translating in her head from her first language,* how she wove in a Serbian folktale into a novel about climate disaster* why Téa dislikes writing in first person,* her advice for writers on spending time on social media,* where she discovers her next reads,* and so much more.

Why do airplanes have ashtrays if smoking is prohibited? Could someone open the airplane door in mid-flight? What are the green and red flashing lights on the plane for? These are some of the common questions about air travel that I answer to start this episode. https://www.smartmeetings.com/tips-tools/103099/answers-random-airplane-questions Are you the kind of person who likes to explore and try something new or are you more likely to stick to the tried and true and do what you did before? Of course, it depends on the situation, but it seems some people, for example, like to order the same thing off the menu time and time again while others order something different every time. Some people like to go back to the same place for vacation while others prefer to visit somewhere they've never been before. Why is that? Here to discuss this interesting quirk of human nature is Alex Hutchinson. He is a columnist for Outside magazine and has contributed to the New York Times, The New Yorker and other publications. He is author of the book The Explorer's Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map (https://amzn.to/3XRGYQa). All exercise is good but strength training in particular has some wonderful benefits you may not be aware of. Those benefits include weight control, improved mental health, fighting cancer and more. Strength training is simply lifting weights that strengthen your muscles and it can help anyone at any age. Here to explain the benefits and explain how to do it is Michael Joseph Gross. He is a longtime Vanity Fair contributing editor who has published investigative reports, essays, and books about culture, technology, and business and he is author of the book, Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives (https://amzn.to/4ib4sHc). You may think memory loss and mental decline is a problem for old people, but it actually begins at a much earlier age. Listen as I reveal which parts of your mental function start to deteriorate when - and what you can do about it. https://www.womenshealthmag.com/health/memory-decline PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! FACTOR: Eat smart with Factor! Get 50% off at https://FactorMeals.com/something50off TIMELINE: Get 10% off your order of Mitopure!  Go to https://Timeline.com/SOMETHING INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING right now! SHOPIFY:  Nobody does selling better than Shopify! Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk and upgrade your selling today! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ruth Marcus resigned from the Washington Post after its C.E.O. killed an editorial she wrote that was critical of the paper's owner, Jeff Bezos. She ended up publishing the column in The New Yorker, and soon after she published another piece for the magazine asking "Has Trump's Legal Strategy Backfired?" "Trump's legal strategy has been backfiring, I think, demonstrably in the lower courts," she tells David Remnick, on issues such as undoing birthright citizenship and deporting people without due process. Federal judges have rebuked the Administration's lawyers, and ordered deportees returned to the United States. But "we have this thing called the Supreme Court, which is, in fact, supreme," Marcus says. "I thought the Supreme Court was going to send a message to the Trump Administration: 'Back off, guys.' . . . That's not what's happened." In recent days, that Court has issued a number of rulings that, while narrow, suggest a more deferential approach toward Presidential power. Marcus and Remnick spoke last week about where the Supreme Court—with its six-Justice conservative majority—may yield to Trump's extraordinary exertions of power, and where it may attempt to check his authority. "When you have a six-Justice conservative majority," she notes, there is"a justice to spare." Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Send us a textIn today's episode, Alex and Tara have a thought-provoking and wisdom-filled discussion with John Kenney, author of three novels and four books of poetry, including LOVE POEMS FOR MARRIED PEOPLE. His first novel, TRUTH IN ADVERTISING, won the Thurber Prize for American humor. He is a long-time contributor to The New Yorker magazine's Shouts & Murmurs column and currently lives in Larchmont, NY. Listen as they discuss what it's like writing a darkly humorous book about death, the beauty and healing in confronting grief, the importance of writing realistic characters and stories, why he wanted to write fiction after being in advertising for years, who inspired the characters of I SEE YOU'VE CALLED IN DEAD, and how short fiction can help our long-form stories.  Due to character limitations, please find a full version of the show notes with applicable content warnings and links on our website at: https://www.tarakross.com/podcast-1→  Connect with John on his Instagram or visit his column on The New Yorker's website → Buy I SEE YOU'VE CALLED IN DEAD HEREThe Hope Prose Podcast's InstagramAlex's Instagram Tara's Instagram

Who are the most symbolic mid 20th century American Jews? In Eminent Jews, New Yorker staff writer David Denby tells the remarkable stories of Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer. He explains how each embodied a new Jewish confidence after WWII, contrasting with earlier generations' restraint. Each figure pushed boundaries in their own way - Bernstein through his musical versatility, Brooks through his boundary-pushing humor about Jewish experiences, Friedan through her feminist theories, and Mailer through his provocative writing style. Five key takeaways * Post-WWII Jewish Americans displayed a newfound confidence and willingness to stand out publicly, unlike previous generations who were more cautious about drawing attention to their Jewishness.* The four figures in Denby's book (Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, and Mailer) each embraced their Jewish identity differently, while becoming prominent in American culture in their respective fields.* Mel Brooks used humor, particularly about Jewish experiences and historical trauma, as both a defense mechanism and a way to assert Jewish presence and resilience.* Each figure pushed against the restraint of previous Jewish generations - Bernstein through his expressive conducting and openness about his complex sexuality, Friedan through her feminist activism, and Mailer through his aggressive literary style.* Rejecting the notion that a Jewish "golden age" has ended, Denby believes that despite current challenges including campus anti-Semitism, American Jews continue to thrive and excel disproportionately to their population size.David Denby is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He served as a film critic for the magazine from 1998 to 2014. His first article for The New Yorker, “Does Homer Have Legs?,” published in 1993, grew into a book, “Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World,” about reading the literary canon at Columbia University. His other subjects for the magazine have included the Scottish Enlightenment, the writers Susan Sontag and James Agee, and the movie directors Clint Eastwood and the Coen brothers. In 1991, he received a National Magazine Award for three of his articles on high-end audio. Before joining The New Yorker, he was the film critic at New York magazine for twenty years; his writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and The New Republic. He is the editor of “Awake in the Dark: An Anthology of Film Criticism, 1915 to the Present” and the author of “American Sucker”; “Snark”; “Do the Movies Have a Future?,” a collection that includes his film criticism from the magazine; and “Lit Up,” a study of high-school English teaching. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Elon Musk and DOGE have been taking a chainsaw to the federal government since Trump was re-elected. It could take us generations to fully recover from the damage inflicted by the careless and cruel nature of these cuts. We're joined by American surgeon, author, and public health advocate Atul Gawande to discuss just how devastating these actions are. During the Biden administration, Gawande was a senior official at USAID. He walks us through many of the great works the program did around the world… and the damaging and deadly road that lies ahead now that it's been gutted.We also discuss the state of our healthcare system and the popularity of Medicaid expansion. The Affordable Care Act has improved the lives of millions of Americans, but Donald Trump and the Republicans threatened to take it away from Americans in his first term. Does he dare try again?To hear more from Atul, check out his recent piece in The New Yorker about the chaotic attempt to freeze federal assistance: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/behind-the-chaotic-attempt-to-freeze-federal-assistanceSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Originally released in January 2023, CW: SA, violenceOn June 23 1993, after enduring years of physical and emotional abuse, Lorena Bobbitt infamously cut off the p*nis of her sleeping husband, John Wayne Bobbit. The case instantly becomes content for the 24 news cycle and a joke for late night comedians but the backstory is much more sinister. In this episode, we will discuss how Lorena was a victim of domestic abuse during a time when there were no laws and few systems in place to protect or help women stuck in dangerous relationships.We will also examine the trials of John and Lorena, gender bias in the media and the court room, domestic violence and the difficulty of leaving abusive situations. Lastly, we'll go over why this story is still important to talk about thirty years later and ask whether there are more options now than there were then. Sources: Bell, Rachael. "Crimes Below the Belt: Penile Removal and Castration (Chapter 2)". Crime Library. October 5, 2007. Chen, Joyce "Fine, We Can (Briefly) Talk About John Wayne Bobbitt's… Career" Refinery29. February 16, 2019.Effron, Lauren; Dooley, Sean. "John Bobbitt speaks out 25 years after".ABC News. Mead, Rebecca. The Lorena Bobbitt Story Offers New Lessons On Male Vulnerability (February 15, 2019).The New Yorker. Pershing, Linda (2011). ""His Wife Seized His Prize and Cut It to Size": Folk and Popular Commentary on Lorena Bobbitt". Smolowe, Jill; Peterzell, Jay (November 22, 1993). "TIME Magazine-Swift Sword of Justice". Waxman, Olivia. Lorena Bobbitt on Domestic and What She Wants You To Know About Her Case 25 Years Later (June 22, 2018).Time. 20/20 “The Bobbits” ABC News Lorena, Amazon Documentary Series Virginia Vs. Lorena Bobbitt, Court TV.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/broads-next-door--5803223/support.

"If we get to the end of my life, and I look back and say the regrets that I have, I know one of them would be, 'You never ran the New York City Marathon.' Not a marathon. I don't want to run a marathon. I want to run the New York City Marathon." Caroline Moss has a dream: to run the New York City Marathon. As a New Yorker, it's her favorite day of the year. The catch: Caroline isn't a runner. Yet. In this new series, we're following author, creator, and professional shopper Caroline Moss as she embarks on a quest to start running, and, sometime in the next few years, run the race of her dreams.  In this episode, we're getting to know Caroline — a lifelong theater kid turned digital media genius turned aspiring marathoner. FOLLOW CAROLINE @geethanksjustboughtitpod CAROLINE'S FACEBOOK GROUP SPONSOR:  Shokz: Use code ALI for $10 off your next purchase. Code valid in the U.S. and Canada. (Check out the limited edition Boston Marathon OpenRun Pro2!) Follow Ali: Instagram @aliontherun1 Join the Facebook group Support on Patreon Subscribe to the newsletter SUPPORT the Ali on the Run Show! If you're enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Spread the run love. And if you liked this episode, share it with your friends!

Ruth Marcus resigned from the Washington Post after its C.E.O. killed an editorial she wrote that was critical of the paper's owner, Jeff Bezos. She ended up publishing the column in The New Yorker, and soon after she published another piece for the magazine asking “Has Trump's Legal Strategy Backfired?” “Trump's legal strategy has been backfiring, I think, demonstrably in the lower courts,” she tells David Remnick, on issues such as undoing birthright citizenship and deporting people without due process. Federal judges have rebuked the Administration's lawyers, and ordered deportees returned to the United States. But “we have this thing called the Supreme Court, which is, in fact, supreme,” Marcus says. “I thought the Supreme Court was going to send a message to the Trump Administration: ‘Back off, guys.' . . . That's not what's happened.” In recent days, that Court has issued a number of rulings that, while narrow, suggest a more deferential approach toward Presidential power. Marcus and Remnick spoke last week about where the Supreme Court—with its six-Justice conservative majority—may yield to Trump's extraordinary exertions of power, and where it may attempt to check his authority. “When you have a six-Justice conservative majority,” she notes, there is“a justice to spare.”

The Washington Roundtable is joined by Mark Blyth, a professor of international economics and public affairs at Brown University, to discuss how the bond market forced Donald Trump to retreat on some tariffs, and the risks of the President's escalating trade war with China. “Ultimately, they can take the pain more than you can,” Blyth says, of the Chinese government. “They have locked down their cities for a year or more. They can deliver food through the window through drones. They don't care if you cut them off from certain things. So getting into that fight is very, very destructive.”This week's reading: “Trump's Do-Over Presidency,” by Susan B. Glasser “The Conservative Legal Advocates Working to Kill Trump's Tariffs,” by Cristian Farias “At the Smithsonian, Donald Trump Takes Aim at History,” by David Remnick “The Trump Show Comes to the Kennedy Center,” by Katy Waldman “The Other Side of Signalgate,” by Rozina Ali To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On today's episode, I talk to cartoonist Anders Nilsen. Growing up between Minneapolis and the mountains of Northern New Hampshire, Anders is the artist and author of ten books including Big Questions, The End, and Poetry is Useless. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Kramer's Ergot, Pitchfork, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His comics have been translated widely overseas and his painting and drawing have been exhibited internationally. Anders' work has received three Ignatz awards as well as the Lynd Ward Prize for the Graphic Novel and Big Questions was listed as a New York Times Notable Book in 2011. His most recent work Tongues vol. 1 was just published by Pantheon and like everything else he does, it is wonderful! This is the website for Beginnings, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, follow me on Twitter. Check out my free philosophy Substack where I write essays every couple months here and my old casiopop band's lost album here! And the comedy podcast I do with my wife Naomi Couples Therapy can be found here! Theme song by the fantastic Savoir Adore! Second theme by the brilliant Mike Pace! Closing theme by the delightful Gregory Brothers! Podcast art by the inimitable Beano Gee!  

Patrick engages in lively conversations that cover faith, life, and finding hope through challenges. He discusses topics like the impact of tariffs on major tech companies and emphasizes the importance of genuine remorse and proper guidance in confession for spiritual renewal. Listeners like Marie call in to seek advice on church teachings and discover clarity on their spiritual journey. Join Patrick as he guides listeners to deepen their understanding and strengthen their spiritual lives. Apple reportedly flew in 5 planes full of iPhones into the U.S. to avoid tariffs (00:58) Marie - I went to Confession and said my last Confession was 20 years ago. The priest told me to get out and go to a priest in America. (04:24) * Email - if a person hasn't been to confession in decades and now wants to go, you had said you need to confess the kind of sins and the number of times, but, if that person honestly and truly doesn't remember the number of times they committed a sin because it's been decades over their life time, what do they tell the priest for the number of times? (17:55) Brenda - One priest lets me say Confession the normal way. Another one says to follow the page in the Confessional. What should I do? (29:00) Carol (email) - My atheist cousin sent me a cartoon from the New Yorker today. It featured a cute, cartoon Jesus talking to his disciples around a small table on which there was a cup of wine and some bread...and a large chocolate bunny. Jesus is saying, "So the bread is my body, the wine is my blood, and the chocolate bunny is a fun springtime treat." (33:28) Melissa – My priest told my mom that he was unable to hear her Confession because she wasn't married in the Church. (37:56)

After winning three (!) Tonys for his play Appropriate, Branden Jacobs Jenkins is back on Broadway with another epic family drama: Purpose. This time, it's directed by the one-and-only Phylicia Rashad (swoon) and centers a Black Political elite who finds themselves at a crossroads. Chloe and Vogue's Features Editor Marley Marius talk with Branden about identity, writing characters for the stage and how he feels about being back in the Condé Nast offices after his long-ago stint at The New Yorker.PLUS: How does Trump's Tariffs affect customers and the fashion industry? We invite Vogue Business Executive Americas Editor Hilary Milnes to break down the news.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The former senator Sherrod Brown, of Ohio, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the tumult that Trump's tariffs have inflicted on the global economy, and why progressives should not merely oppose the President's trade policy but offer a clear alternative. “I've heard economists talk about these tariffs upending the global order on trade. Well, to a lot of workers, anything's better than the global order on trade. It's our policy problem as a country, and it's our political problem for Democrats,” Brown says. They also discuss his latest project, The Dignity of Work Institute, a think tank dedicated to advocacy for the working class. This week's reading: “‘I Am Seeing My Community of Researchers Decimated,'” by E. Tammy Kim “The Other Side of Signalgate,” by Rozina Ali “The Trump Show Comes to the Kennedy Center,” by Katy Waldman “At the Smithsonian, Donald Trump Takes Aim at History,” by David Remnick To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Katie Kitamura's fifth novel is “Audition,” and it focusses on a middle-aged actress and her ambiguous relationship with a much younger man. Kitamura tells the critic Jennifer Wilson that she thought for a long time about an actress as protagonist, as a way to highlight the roles women play, and to provoke questions about agency. “I teach creative writing, and in class often ... if there is a character who the group feels doesn't have agency, that is often brought up as a criticism of the character,” she tells Wilson. Other students will say, “ ‘She doesn't have any agency,' as if a character without agency is implausible or in some way not compelling in narrative terms. But of course, the reality is very few of us have total agency. I think we operate under the illusion or the impression that we have a great deal of agency. But in reality when you look at your life, our choices are quite constricted.” “Audition” comes out this week.