Podcasts about photoshops

I denne episoden snakker Thomas Moen med Thomas Lundström, en kreativ fagperson fra Grove Media i Helsinki, Finland, som har revolusjonert sin arbeidsflyt for produktfotografering ved hjelp av AI-verktøy. Lundström deler hvordan prosessen hans har utviklet seg over seks år, fra tradisjonell studiofotografering til en innovativ hybrid tilnærming som kombinerer ekte produktbilder med AI-genererte bakgrunner.Du vil lære praktiske tips for små nettbutikkeiere om hvordan du kan utnytte AI-bildegenererings-verktøy som ChatGPT og Photoshops generative fill for å skape profesjonelle produktvisualiseringer uten dyre studieoppsett. Lundström forklarer arbeidsflyten sin som gjør det mulig å lage flere høykvalitets produktbilder på under en time, gir veiledning om belysning, kameravinkler og effektive prompteteknikker, og deler sine spådommer om hvor AI-bilde- og videogenerering er på vei de neste 6-12 månedene.En viktig  episode for nettbutikkeiere som ønsker å løfte produktbildene sine samtidig som de sparer tid og penger. Følg Thomas Lundström for flere AI-fotograferingstips: Youtube: ⁨https://www.youtube.com/@thomaslundstrm Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thomaslundstrm/ Nettside: https://www.grovemedia.fi/--- Bli med på vår Mastermind for små nettbutikker her: https://moenco.no/mastermind Sjekk din marketing score for å finne ut hvor bra nettbutikken din gjør det: https://nettbutikk.scoreapp.com/ Gå til https://moenco.no/webinar for å Sjekk ut webinaret vårt, tilpasset små nettbutikker som tjener under 2 mill i året. 

Sichat Mussar for Yom Kippur | 5785, by Rav Moshe Taragin  Dissecting the Pathology of Sin; Seeing Through Fantasy and Photoshops; 3 Tips For Immersive Yom Kippur: Watch Your Tongue, Ignore Your Watch and Avoid "Sunday Thoughts"

Today Dave and Will run a two-man booth to talk their Weekends in Fun, do a deep-dive on the recent Kate Middleton photo-editing allegations, NFT Nick aka The Guy You're Trading Against, Oscars discussion, and more. Enjoy a free one-week trial on Patreon for additional weekly episodes: www.patreon.com/circlingbackpodcast Watch all of our full episodes on our new YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/circlingback  Shop Washed Merch: www.washedmedia.shop  (0:00) Fun & Easy Banter (14:10) Recapping This Weekend in Fun (39:40) Touching Based: Kate Middleton Missing Update (56:12) This Is Who You're Investing Against (1:09:30) Dave's Breaking News: NFT Nick Returns (1:14:20) Oscars Recap Support This Episode's Sponsors Mugsy: www.mugsy.com (STEAM for 10% off) Squarespace: www.squarespace.com/steam (STEAM for 10% off your purchase of a website or domain) Aura Frames: www.auraframes.com (CIRCLING for $20 off) Naked Wines: www.nakedwines.com/steam (enter STEAM for both the code AND password to get 6 bottles of wine for JUST $39.99 with shipping included)

New Princess Diana and Prince William merch - ⁠⁠https://www.bonfire.com/store/to-di-for-daily-podcast-with-kinsey-schofield/⁠⁠ Kinsey on Instagram @⁠⁠kinseyschofield⁠⁠ Please subscribe! ⁠ToDiForDaily.com⁠'s Kinsey Schofield breaks down the latest controversy over the Princess of Wales' Mother's Day photo fail. Who is to blame? How did it happen? Is it a big deal? What is the solution? Visit ⁠ToDiForDaily.com⁠ for additional information. Kinsey Schofield is a Los Angeles-based royals expert and the host of the To Di For Daily podcast. The To Di For Daily podcast cover art was designed by famed pop artist, Analy Diego. You can now listen to these interviews wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Search To Di For Daily or Kinsey Schofield.

WELCOME TO THE THE MELANINOCRACY  Get out of the way! It's Black History Month!!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5Mf0X1oDHM Universal Music Group to remove songs from TikTok after failing to reach deal: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/universal-music-group-remove-songs-tiktok-rcna136506 FKA twigs says ‘all record labels ask for are TikToks': ‘I got told off for not making enough effort': https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/fka-twigs-tiktok-instagram-label-b2082496.html  Senators use mean words to demand tech executives take action to protect kids online: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/01/31/technology/child-safety-senate-hearing These ‘toys' are killing our kids op ed by Julie Scelfo in the Hill: https://thehill.com/opinion/4438362-these-toys-are-killing-our-kids/ Joey on Stuff Mom Never Told You breaking down Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA): https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-mom-never-told-you/what-is-kosa-and-why-is-it-so-scary FCC moves to criminalize most AI-generated robocalls: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/fcc-moves-criminalize-ai-generated-robocalls-rcna136347 Photo of Australian lawmaker digitally altered by news channel to have bigger boobs and a cropped top: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/31/world/australia/australia-georgie-purcell-9news-photoshop.html  RuPaul's Drag Race star Crystal speaks out after Laurence Fox loses libel case: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/crystal-drag-queen-laurence-fox-high-court-b2487199.html  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this week's episode, I have TikTok Star Mackenzie Barmen. We talk about what she has already accomplished in her very short time in LA, as well as some of the projects she has planned for the future. There is so much more so make sure you tune in.Show NotesMackenzie Barmen on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mackenziebarmen/Mackenzie Barmen on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mackenziebarmen?lang=enMackenzie Barmen on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAP_cFPc2fqGTe50YhOlkDg/videosMichael's Online Screenwriting Course - https://michaeljamin.com/courseFree Screenwriting Lesson - https://michaeljamin.com/freeJoin My Newsletter - https://michaeljamin.com/newsletterAutogenerated TranscriptMackenzie Barman:There's a part of me that worries on some level all the time, but then there's a stronger part of me. I think that's pretty delusional in a good way, that I'm like, no, I am certain that I'm supposed to do this, and I just can't falter. I just, I'm doing,Michael Jamin:You're listening to, what the Hell is Michael Jamin talking about? I'll tell you what I'm talking about. I'm talking about creativity. I'm talking about writing, and I'm talking about reinventing yourself through the arts.Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of, what the Hell is Michael Jamin talking about? Well, I'll tell you what I've been talking about. If you've been listening to any number of my podcasts or by social media, I've been saying the same thing a lot. I've been saying, if you are an aspiring whatever, if you're an actor or a writer or performer, put your work out there. Just start doing it, and the more you do it, the better you get. And then my next guest is someone who did just that and is doing that, and I discovered her maybe a year or two ago, and we're going to talk, and she's big. We're going to talk to her about her journey here. Mackenzie Barman, thank you so much for coming here. Lemme tell you when I first found you, and then you'll Yes, please. Then we'll tell you were doing a bit, it was a piece on you were reciting nursery rhymes, and you playing two characters.You generally will talk about this, but you generally do two characters have, and you're both, and usually it's kind of a sweet and naive version of you. And then there's kind of a meaner more, not sinister, but cynical. And I guess she puts you in your place. She's a little, and she wants up making you cry a lot. And so the sweet one was talking about nursery rhyme, and the other one was telling you, you're so naive, you have no idea what these nursery rhymes are about. And so that blew up and that's how I found you, and it was really funny. I loveMackenzie Barman:It. Thank you.Michael Jamin:Well, tell me, what is this? So you're huge on TikTok, you have almost 3 million followers, which isMackenzie Barman:AlmostMichael Jamin:Huge. I've written for shows that haven't been seen by anywhere near 3 million people. So you have a giant following, but tell me, so why did you start doing this?Mackenzie Barman:Well, I was an actor in the pandemic, and I didn't really know what to do with myself. And so everyone was on TikTok for fun. That was when TikTok was really blowing up, and I kind of just decided to start making videos and then not taking it seriously at all. But then I was like, well, it gives me a kind of a platform. And no one was really using it like that yet. But I started to see some sketches pop up and I was like, huh, or viral videos, whatever. And then I ended up just at random seeing somebody write about a nursery rhyme in a Facebook status. And I was still using Facebook, which I don't, and I was like, oh. And I learned in that moment what that nursery rhyme meant. So I just on a whim made that firstMichael Jamin:Video. So that was one of your first videos?Mackenzie Barman:Yeah, it was one. I did a whole series of those ones. So I did it and I just kind of improvised it. And the next morning I woke up and it had gone kind of viral, and so I made another one, and then I made another one and they kind of just blew up. And so, yeah, it was kind of random.Michael Jamin:But your intention, it was boredom or was it, you said you wanted to have a platform. What was your goal?Mackenzie Barman:Well, it was a little bit out of boredom, but it was more so like, well, let me put myself out there. And I used to go to a lot of casting director workshops and when I lived in New York City, and they would always say the same thing when YouTube was really big, make your own web series, put yourself out there, all that stuff. And so that's always been in the back of my mind, and I've always kind of considered myself a multihyphenate. I also shoot and direct and all that stuff, so I was like, I need to do that. So that's why I've always kind of focused on acting, being the primary thing in my videos. Let's get to that.Michael Jamin:Yeah, I was going to say, it's really smart. You show a range. I mean, you have, like I said, the sweet side, and then the other side is, and sometimes you play well, you're always playing characters, but to me it's smart. You're showing your range as an actor.Mackenzie Barman:Yeah.Michael Jamin:What do your reps have to say about all this?Mackenzie Barman:They love it. I actually got my managers through TikTok, they found me and oh myMichael Jamin:God, really?Mackenzie Barman:I had already had voiceover representation through my agency, but I didn't have a manager or anything. And I met my manager, Rachel. I loved her right away. And they love it, and they love the content and that it's acting first and the series and all that.Michael Jamin:So they give you any feedback or No, they just like, we love it.Mackenzie Barman:No, not really. They just let me roll with it. Yeah.Michael Jamin:Interesting. And then what other opportunities have come from all this?Mackenzie Barman:Gosh, well, one of the coolest things is the relationships that I've built with other creators, especially actor creators. And you just kind of know when you vibe with some people or when I watch certain people, I'm like, I know our brains work the same way. So I seek those people out to become, I love getting to know the people that I admire. It's cool to meet people talent first, and then it's doing a play with somebody. IMichael Jamin:Know you collaborate with people sometimes. I've seen some of those videos you've done.Mackenzie Barman:I've done a couple. I'm going to be doing more now that I'm in LA and with a lot more people. But that's been a really cool thing that's come from this. DidMichael Jamin:You start this in New York your first three years? Yeah. Oh, really?Mackenzie Barman:Okay. Yeah, I just moved to LA a few weeks ago. I was in New YorkMichael Jamin:City. Oh, when you said you changed your apartments, I assumed you were moved, okay. From in la, but you're Oh, you're, well, welcome to la. Okay. Thank you. Wow, this is a big adjustment for you. So what prompted you to move to LA then?Mackenzie Barman:Well, my managers are out here, and since TikTok, I've really, it's funny. I was always kind of like, I wanted to really be such a chameleon and not hone in on any one thing. I didn't want to just do comedy. I didn't want to just do drama. But now with TikTok, it's really pushed me more into comedy, and I've found that I really do love it. So out here, there's so many comedy opportunities, and I'm going to be doing part of a live show on December 10th, and just being, I just needed to be out here.Michael Jamin:Okay. So how did you get, you've only been here for three minutes, so how did you get this live show already?Mackenzie Barman:Through a friend of mine, actually, through social media. Someone you, ohMichael Jamin:My God, so smart. I'm always yelling at people. They're like, do I have to be in la? I'm like, well, this is where everyone is. I mean, why would you know? What were you doing? Were you doing a lot of theater in New York?Mackenzie Barman:Yeah, so I did a lot of regional theater. I did an off-Broadway musical, and then when the pandemic happened, I was really trying to shift into more TV and film work. I really wanted to be on tv. I still do. That's really my big focus is to be on tv, be in movies. But I was kind of transitioning and doing the casting director workshops and doing all those things, and then the pandemic hit. But yeah, mostly theater. I'm a theater girlMichael Jamin:Now. Did you study, where have you studied? Did you study in college? Where did, yeah,Mackenzie Barman:I went to a SUNY school and I loved it. I went to SUNY Potsdam in upstate New York, and I studied theater and theater education. I didn't really start doing plays until high school and in high school. SoMichael Jamin:You're from New York?Mackenzie Barman:Yeah, I'm from New York. FromMichael Jamin:New York, okay.Mackenzie Barman:Yeah, born and raised, upstate New York, near Albany. And then, yeah, I moved down to the city to be an actor and do all that. Right.Michael Jamin:Wow. You've only been here three weeks and so much has already happened for you already.Mackenzie Barman:What do you think? Yeah, I'm trying.Michael Jamin:What do you think It's a culture shock. What do you think?Mackenzie Barman:Right now, I'm in my lust for life extrovert phase where I'm like, because a homebody pretty much, I'm an extroverted homebody, so I like to be home a lot. But right now I'm just trying to be out a lot, meet people that I've, and just kind of be really social,Michael Jamin:Been amazing. How did you get into play? Okay, you moved here. Did you stay with a friend when you found your, how did, because I'm telling people come out. How did you do it? How didMackenzie Barman:It was a pain? So I visited last August, and I stayed with one of my managers. Actually, I crashed at her place. I went a couple different places, but she's the best. I love her. And they're in the West Hollywood area, so it's really the only place I know. So that's where I am now. I'm in West Hollywood. And then I looked at a couple apartments when I was here, but I really didn't know where I was. I kind of did, but I don't really know. And then, so I just, Zillow and Trulia, and I ended up finding this apartment on Trulia, and I had a couple of friends come look at it and FaceTime me,Michael Jamin:And it was good enough.Mackenzie Barman:I was like,Michael Jamin:And then Did you drive here? YouMackenzie Barman:Flew here? I drove,Michael Jamin:Yeah. That's how you do it. Did your car. Wow. Now tell me, when you start posting, these are thought out, these videos you make, how much time do you spend a day making, and how many times do you post a day?Mackenzie Barman:It's really funny. I usually post once a day at most. I really should try to post once a day at least. It's usually every two or three days. Oh, really? Yeah. But I've been kind of busy, but it was once a day when I was doing the nursery rhymes, but I kind of got a little burned out, I think.Michael Jamin:Yeah, you do get burned out. It'sMackenzie Barman:A lot. It's a lot. It's a lot. Yeah. But I don't write anything beforehand. I improvise everything, but I kind of write it in my head as I go, and I have a loose idea going into it of if it was a nursery rhyme or something, I would have to research and have the facts ready. I would do that research beforehand and then kind of reference it as I improvised it. But for the character stuff, it's all kind of, they kind of just take over. I take a backseat,Michael Jamin:But you must edit some stuff out, or no, is everything what you say goes in?Mackenzie Barman:Sometimes if I say something and then I'm like, even if it's improvised, I'm like, huh, you know what? I think I want to tweak that and put the intonation somewhere else, or put a micro look or an eyebrow raise kind of somewhere else. I'll redo it. But most of the time it's my first take, honestly.Michael Jamin:So, okay. I was going to ask you where you're editing it because you're like this, you're holding it, and you do your one line, and then you turn around and do the other line, and thenMackenzie Barman:I swap. Yeah.Michael Jamin:So you're not even editing it?Mackenzie Barman:No, because I shoot in the app, unless it's Snapchat filters, which a couple of my characters are Snapchat filters, in which case I'll film them. It used to be that if I was doing the Snapchat filters, I would just shoot one character as a monologue and then post that. But then with my Danny and Bab series, this new, these characters, I haveMichael Jamin:The ugly babies that you post.Mackenzie Barman:They're adults. Okay. I just, I'll pull up his filter, shoot his line, save the video, switch the filter, do her response.Michael Jamin:I'm surprised you can't even remember what you just said. You know what I'm saying? With the last character just said,Mackenzie Barman:Yeah, I don't know. It's just kind of alive in that moment. ButMichael Jamin:Are you thinking in advance, okay, this is going to do well, or this is just what I want to do today? Do you care?Mackenzie Barman:I do care only because I kind of have to care. I feel like it influences so much. Now your numbers and all that stuff, but I also care because I want people to like it. I want people to genuinely have a response to it that's a little deeper maybe than normal. On TikTok scrolling, which I do get a lot. I'll get people being like, wait, this is actually, so peopleMichael Jamin:Are, well, your fans really loved you. I've read some of these comments, and what surprises me is that you interact with pretty much everyone.Mackenzie Barman:I try. I try and they're smart. Okay.Michael Jamin:Why do you try?Mackenzie Barman:Because it, it's weird. It's like this weird, I don't really ever go to anyone's profile or whatever, but I can almost hear the comment in my head, and it almost in that brief moment feels like a conversation's actively happening. So I'm bantering with this person, or I don't know. It's just, it's fun to be engaging. And I've had people respond when I do engage and they're like, oh my God, I can't believe you applied. And that to me is just so lovely.Michael Jamin:It is lovely, but it's so much work on your part.Mackenzie Barman:I know, but I sit and scroll a lot. So it's like part of the package. It's like part of producing the video almost is then the engagement after. And I don't do it as much as I used to, but I do. It depends on what mood I'm in.Michael Jamin:I wonder though. I wonder what you're supposed to do when I started, are you supposed to, I'm not even sure when I get, my page is very different from yours. They have questions for me. They want, as opposed to you. I think they're like your fans, they just want to, and so they'reMackenzie Barman:Just making a commentary on itMichael Jamin:Or something. Well, they really like your show. They like what? You're the fans. And so I just don't know what the rules are. I don't know if you're supposed toMackenzie Barman:Interact yourself. I dunno. And it depends. If somebody does leave a nasty comment or say something mean, which is oddly really rare, don't come from me guys. Don't start. But it's rare. They're pretty good, my, because some people get it bad for some reason, and I don't really get that.Michael Jamin:Yeah, go on. What do you do?Mackenzie Barman:Wait, I've lost my train of thought. WhatMichael Jamin:Was it? You said? Some people come after you and they're mean,Mackenzie Barman:And either I'll completely ignore them or I'll delete it. If it's a needle in a haystack and it's just something mean, I'll delete it. But sometimes I'll respond with sarcasm or I'll make a sarcastic response video, and then it makes it funny. So then it's like, oh, this is actually a joyful experience. But most of the time I'll just ignore them if I do get them.Michael Jamin:And you don't block 'em, you just ignore them?Mackenzie Barman:Yeah. I don't really block anybody unless they're trying to impersonate me, butMichael Jamin:Even, yeah. Wow. You don't even block the haters.Mackenzie Barman:Not usually. There's been maybe two or three.Michael Jamin:Oh, wow. I get more than you do I get more than haters than you?Mackenzie Barman:They don't really come for me. It's weird. I don't know.Michael Jamin:Wow. But now you're putting yourself out there. It's pretty vulnerable. I mean, it may hit, it may not. It may be funny. It may not be. I mean, was that hard at the beginning for you to do that?Mackenzie Barman:Yeah, I think the nursery rhyme videos did so well. Those were just one of those weird viral things where every video was getting a million plus and it was every day. It was just crazy. And now it ebbs and flows so much with TikTok. And now I have more normal numbers, I think. But I definitely do get a little anxious about that. Sometimes I'm like, oh gosh, I thought this video would do better. Or I'll post something out of my norm and then I wake up and it's done really well, and I'm like, oh, and then I'll try to do that again, and then it doesn't do as well. So it's like a flash in the pan thing.Michael Jamin:Do you share it as well on Instagram? I mean, what do youMackenzie Barman:I do, yeah. Yeah,Michael Jamin:Immediately. Same content. You just put it up there.Mackenzie Barman:Yeah.Michael Jamin:Do you put it anywhere else?Mackenzie Barman:Not really. I've put a couple on YouTube. I really need to start utilizing the YouTube shorts because I think where it's at and Snapchat, I need to start utilizing more. I think they're up and coming. They're coming back. You thinkMichael Jamin:So?Mackenzie Barman:They're coming back? I think so.Michael Jamin:How many hours a day or minutes a day do you spend on this?Mackenzie Barman:I would say on average, I probably spend an hour on a video.Michael Jamin:Really? Okay. It's not nothing. It's not nothing.Mackenzie Barman:Yeah. It's not nothing. But it's not like I know some people put in and you can tell some of these videos are gorgeous and the editing is, but since it's just me, it's also a lot harder for me to film outside of my hand, setting up the tripod moving and just a lot more to do. So it's just easier for me toMichael Jamin:Do. Do you have a list of ideas that you keep? And are you running out of ideas?Mackenzie Barman:I always feel like I'm running out of ideas. I always think if a video, especially if a video does really well, I'm like, I'm never going to do this well ever again. But I don't usually keep a list of ideas. Sometimes I'll jot down, I have a bunch of notes, like separate note app ideas. But a lot of the times it's just, if I have the thought, I'll just record it. That's why a lot of the times I look kind of like shit in my videos a little bit, because I film them. Usually my ideas come right in the morning, and so I'll just wake up and film an idea, and then it's, before I've even brushed my teeth or anything, I'm just gross. But it's when, and I just do it.Michael Jamin:And you put it up. It's so interesting. I don't know. Is there a fear? Is there any fear associated? It seems like you don't have any fear at all about this.Mackenzie Barman:I feel like I do. I feel there's a constant anxiety of one. I have imposter syndrome pretty intensely.Michael Jamin:Okay. And who do you think you are? Do you, you're not, is thatMackenzie Barman:I don't come from an industry family or any kind of connections like that. So I'm always like, who am I?Michael Jamin:But they have imposter syndrome too, because their mother and father was, they're famous. So I think they have bigger imposter syndrome than you do. You'reMackenzie Barman:Self made. I'm learning that. I'm learning everyone deals. There was a great Viola Davis interview where she talked about imposter syndrome, and it was great to hear that.Michael Jamin:What did she say?Mackenzie Barman:Just that it never goes away and that she was doing, oh gosh, what was the movie she did with Denzel Washington?Michael Jamin:Oh, was it Fences?Mackenzie Barman:Fences? Yeah. I think it was about fences. And she was talking about she was playing that part and was like, who am I to do this? It may have been that, but she was just talking about that, and I was like, that's really refreshing, because I think I look through rose colored glasses at these celebs sometimes, and I'm like, oh my God. They're so confident. But we're always seeing the best take, and we're always getting, especially as you get more involved in the industry, you start to see that it's all kind of smoke and mirrors. You just have to fake it.Michael Jamin:I read an article yesterday about Brian May from Queen. He said he still has some imposter syndrome, and he's Sir Brian May, and he's like, why isn't they call me, sir?Mackenzie Barman:It's wild. Yeah, it's wild. But that there is fear there. There is that fear of the imposter syndrome of like, oh my gosh, who am I? And it's silly. It's silly. And I know that, butMichael Jamin:Are you monetizing TikTok or no? Yeah. You are? Yeah. In the creator fund?Mackenzie Barman:Yeah. So they have the creator beta program or program beta, whatever it's called. Great. IsMichael Jamin:That effective use?Mackenzie Barman:I dunno, maybe, but I don't dunno. Interesting. It's nice because you can only monetize on content over a minute, and most of my content is over a minute, so it really was a good thing for me. Yeah,Michael Jamin:You'd have to change anything.Mackenzie Barman:Yeah.Michael Jamin:But you have to have a personal account, not a business account. Right? Isn'tMackenzie Barman:That what you maybe? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know.Michael Jamin:Now, in your reps, as I was checking out some of your videos, you are, it's funny that they said this, but they like that you're in character. They like that you're acting. And I was curious, why don't you, or have you thought of, this is me today. I'm not going to act today. This is me. This is, I'm want to table my life. You're not doing that though.Mackenzie Barman:Yeah, no. I've done a couple of videos like that. I've probably done 10 or 12, maybe 20. I don't even know how many I have on my page, but where it's me doing something. But I feel like sometimes it feels like I'm always in a bit, and I don't know if that's being an actor or if it's my own neuroses, but if I am in front of a camera, it's kind of hard for me to be just me, unless I'm doing a podcast and talking to somebody. But if it's me looking at myself on video, I'm always going to be like, ha.Michael Jamin:It'sMackenzie Barman:Difficult for me sometimes. But I do think about that because there is a part of me that really wants to be more like, wait, okay, so here I am as a person. Get ready with me. As I tell you this story, I thought about doing more of those just because it is fun to do that.Michael Jamin:Right? But theMackenzie Barman:Math is always on. I don't know.Michael Jamin:That's more of a you thing. It's so interesting. I wonder, I was going to ask if you feel almost trapped in this persona that you are now?Mackenzie Barman:Yeah. Yes and no. No, probably not. I don't think so. I think I play such a variety of characters on my TikTok.Michael Jamin:Except for yourself. You play characters exceptMackenzie Barman:For you. It's never really me. Definitely the closest one to me. And I think I'm pretty split right down the middle between the dark me and the innocent me in the nursery rhyme videos. And that dynamic is, in a lot of the videos, there's always me and me and whoever else, Chelsea or whoever. But I'm definitely split right in the middle. But if I had to lean, I would definitely lean toward the happy, bubbly me. That's probably the closest to me in any of my videos.Michael Jamin:But not that you should, I'm just pointing out you're not sharing anything really personal or intimate about yourself orMackenzie Barman:No, no. In a weird way, I think that it's like, I don't know. There's a part of me that likes, there admires those celebs that you really don't know too much about Florence Pugh or Jennifer Lawrence. They give you glimpses into their life, their personal life. But there always is this level of mystique to them. And not that I'm trying to be mysterious, but I do think that it in the long run might serve me better as an actor to be more private than to be so human. I don't know. Well,Michael Jamin:It's interesting because it's also like you must know Elise Meyers, because I mean, she's big, but you're up there. I mean, you're not far behind her, and she's more, and it seems like she's doing what she wants to do, but she's more actor and she's more, I guess, personality.Mackenzie Barman:Yeah. Yeah. I love Elise, and I don't know her, but I love her because she's so just herself. She might have self-doubt, whatever. I have no idea. Imposter syndrome and stuff, but she appears and she does speak on things, her iss, and she's just so honest about it. And I do love that. I don't know. I just can't do it.Michael Jamin:Right. Well, you're being authentic or IMackenzie Barman:Can, but yeah, I don't know. It's just tricky. There is that kind of want to keep this, but who is Mackenzie thingMichael Jamin:And what surprising opportunities have come from this or partnerships or relationships or whatever.Mackenzie Barman:I'm trying to think. Besides auditions and stuff.Michael Jamin:So you've gotten direct auditions from this? IMackenzie Barman:Have.Michael Jamin:How did that work?Mackenzie Barman:Well, a lot of the times I'll go through my reps and then my reps will reach out to me, say, oh, you've been actually personally requested for this.Michael Jamin:That's a big deal.Mackenzie Barman:It really is. And I've gotten some callback. I've gotten, most of the time, if I audition for projects like that, I'll get a call back and then go whatever, and then it doesn't happen or whatever for whatever reason. But it's happened, yeah, a few times. But a lot of the time too, I don't know. I really don't know how much, because I get auditions through my agents, a normal actor would. So I don't really know on the back end of it how much they're like, oh, here's her video. I don't really know.Michael Jamin:But do your reps try to sell you like, Hey, she's got 3 million followers on, because that would be good to help sell the show when you book it or whatever.Mackenzie Barman:Oh, I think so. Yeah. I think that's definitely a leverage point. Working on treatments and stuff. There is work that I want to put out and produce and whatever, and I do think that helps and is a big aspect ofMichael Jamin:It. So is that on your resume, like your follower account on your acting resume or no?Mackenzie Barman:I don't dunno. Actually. It mightMichael Jamin:Be it. Should it be right? Shouldn't it be?Mackenzie Barman:I think in today's world, yeah, I think it probably should. It probably is. And it probably needs to be updated, actually, now that I'm thinking about it. But yeah, I think it is on there.Michael Jamin:One thing you don't do, I don't think you do, is sell merch.Mackenzie Barman:No, I did one drop and I had a bad experience.Michael Jamin:What happenedMackenzie Barman:With doing it? I think my problem is I am not a salesy person. And when I was trying to sell or advertise my merch, those videos did not do well and not a of lot of eyes saw them because the people who would typically see my content, it was so out of the realm of what their algorithm would be that it didn't pop up for 'em and it just didn't do well. And I was like, you know what? And I didn't like working with, so if I think if I did, I would just do it myself.Michael Jamin:Wait, weren't you doing print on demand? How is it?Mackenzie Barman:I had worked with a merch company. I don't even remember the name of the company actually, but I had worked with a merch company and it was just a quick drop. I think typically if it's a first time, they'll do a limited drop to see how it does and then moveMichael Jamin:On. You work with the merch company. Why don't you just go to some place that print on demand? I have five T-shirts if you want to make 'em one at a time.Mackenzie Barman:Well, it was kind of near when I was kind first starting out, and it's one of those things where you kind learn as you go approached. They had reached out and they said, Hey, we think McKenzie would be great. And they'd worked with other people. I think that's how it went down, or no, no, that's not true. I think it was my idea to make merch. And then I had, they were recommended because they had worked with some other great people and were really successful. So I think it was just my particular launch didn't do.Michael Jamin:Didn't do well.Mackenzie Barman:Yeah.Michael Jamin:Hey, it's Michael. If you like my content and I know you do listening to me, I will email it to you for free. Just join my watch list. Every Friday I send out my top three videos of the week. These are for writers, actors, creative types, people. You can unsubscribe whenever you want. I'm not going to spam you, and the price is free. You got no excuse to join. Go to michae jamin.com. And now back to what the hell is Michael Jamin talking about.What about brand deals? Are you working with people with companies? Yeah.Mackenzie Barman:Yeah. I've done some brand deals, which are so fun. I want to do more of them because they're just fun. It kind of gives me a, because a lot of the times there's no guiding light in my videos. It's just what's ever in my head. So when I have a brand to work with, it's fun. I can work around that.Michael Jamin:Did you hook up onto the backend of TikTok, or, I don't even know they hook you up, or no.Mackenzie Barman:Well, I think a little bit. I'm so bad. I don't really know all the business backend things of TikTok. I've seen some ads and stuff you can apply to be a part of this ad or something, but the pay is really low sometimes, or it's like a share a revenue share system, and I just don't want to be bothered with that. So these ones, they'll come through my management or my agents and be like, really? Hey, they want to work with me. Yeah,Michael Jamin:But do you have special agents, social media agents, or No, just your acting agents?Mackenzie Barman:Yeah. At my agency, they have a department for everything. So I'm working with an agent there. Yeah. Oh,Michael Jamin:Wow. So interesting.Mackenzie Barman:Yeah, I'm still learning too. It really is a business. And you'd kind of go to theater school and you're like, okay, yeah, sure, it's a business, but then you're in the world and you're like, oh, this is a business.Michael Jamin:Alright, so is this your primary income or no?Mackenzie Barman:No, kind of. So I do a lot of things. So I also run a video production company. You do? It's very small, but it's called Real You, and it's a demo reel production company for actors. So basically, yes, I work with actors. I was an actor who had a MISHMOSHED demo reel of all these different student films, or you just wouldn't get the footage. So it was always a hassle if you didn't have stuff to put a reel together. And so I basically sit with actors, figure out their branding, their type, whatever, and then write them scenes and then film them. But professionally, I have a real camera and all that good stuff.Michael Jamin:And how do they find you? These peopleMackenzie Barman:Through my website or there's a business website and stuff. And it's funny because all of the SEO is for New York, and so I need to figure out a way to make everyone know that we're in LA now. So I do that and I do voiceover, so I do commercial and animation. Well, nothing animation yet. I audition a lot, but I'm hoping to book something soon. But a lot of commercial work and radio stuff, so I just have a lot of,Michael Jamin:But it seems very smart what you're doing. You're also working with, you're meeting actors, you're working with actors, you're making contacts, and you're getting paid for it out here. It'sMackenzie Barman:Making me a better writer, a better director, a better actor, because I also edit the scenes. Each scene is about a couple minutes long, and so I know when I'm directing them and shooting it, oh, this was helpful in the editing process, or, oh, this was actually difficult.Michael Jamin:So it's interesting though that you write stuff for them, but you don't write for yourself. You just impro yourself.Mackenzie Barman:I do write some stuff. My tiktoks, I don't write for some reason. I really should maybe try to sit and write something. I think I just write backwards when I'm doing that. But when I'm writing treatments, we're working on TV stuff, then I'll sit and write if it's because a lot of the stuff that I write is for me, but it's also for other people.Michael Jamin:Right. Yeah. It's so interesting. Like I said, I thought what you're doing was so smart because you're really showcasing your writing, you're showcasing your acting, and you're, your range, your acting range by playing all these different characters. It just seems like that's exactly what you should be doing. Yeah.Mackenzie Barman:Yeah. I'm really trying to build a brand there. And it's nice because it kind of acts like a resume or a reel. I'm like, just go watch my tiktoks and you can see, you can see what I'm all about.Michael Jamin:Wow. And what about the partnerships, the other actors that you're working with? Tell me a little bit about what that had led toMackenzie Barman:The actors that I shoot forMichael Jamin:Or that you shoot with or that you collaborate with.Mackenzie Barman:Oh, man. Well, I've only collaborated with a couple people. My friend's Taylor and James, who are content creators, and they're both actors. They're amazing. They live in la. I did a video with them, and I actually shot this morning with Laura Clary. Do you know Laura Clary? She's great. She's so funny. She's like an internet queen. And so when I'm shooting with them, I love working with other people, a theater person. So it's in my soul to have tangible people with me. But most of the time I'm alone. So when I'm working with another actor, it's just the best, especially when I'm just bantering freely with them or, because Laura, for instance, she wrote a script for us, and when I clagged with Taylor and James, we kind of improvised it, had an idea of what it was going to be. It was like a curb situation. We had the bones, but Laura wrote it, and then we kind of improvised on the fly. It was great. I loved it.Michael Jamin:And they're pretty much want what you want. They want to get more traditional acting on TV and film.Mackenzie Barman:I think so, yeah. Well, I know that some of them do. Laura's already established and stuff, but my client actors, they're all either working actors who want to update their reel or want to add a very specific, they need a detective scene, or they need this specific type of scene. They'll come to me. Some of them I've become really good friends with just because I'm like, oh, I love you.Michael Jamin:I mean, you've only been in LA three weeks. Are you going to get involved in the theater scene or the improv scene, or what are you going to do?Mackenzie Barman:So I really want to get into the comedy scene of the character shows and a little bit of standup. I'm going to kind of play on the 10th. I'm going to have a five minute set and this show. So I think I'm just going to totally improvise it and just see what happens. This is my first show. So who caressMichael Jamin:And where is that going to be?Mackenzie Barman:That is going to be, oh, I don't know where it's going to be. Actually, I don't,Michael Jamin:By the time this airs, it'll be too late. But I'm just curious as to,Mackenzie Barman:Yeah, I don't know. It's called One Star Review. It's like a comedy showcase.Michael Jamin:It's amazing how quickly you jumped into it, honestly, you jumped into it. I don't,Mackenzie Barman:I always feel like I'm not doing enough. I always feel like I need to be doing, but I probably am fine.Michael Jamin:It's only been three weeks. Yeah, I, but it seems like, I don't know. I admire you because you're not worried about figuring out. You're just doing it. It'll fall into place. And I think a lot of people are afraid to try and to, yeah,Mackenzie Barman:I think that I'm definitely always a little bit afraid. There's always a part of me that is like, oh my gosh, what if I run out of money? What if I don't? I don't really have anyone really to fall back on in that way, any connection. I just don't have, there's no alternative for me.Michael Jamin:But you didn't in New York either. I mean your family, but there are upstate New York,Mackenzie Barman:And it's just really tricky. And I think that there's a part of me that worries on some level all the time, but then there's a stronger part of me. I think that's pretty delusional in a good way, that I'm like, no, I'm certain that I'm supposed to do this, and I just can't falter. This is what I'm doing.Michael Jamin:When you mean do this, what do you mean? Do what?Mackenzie Barman:Just be an actor and be in this industry. I've always felt that way about myself, and it's weird. It's a weird just knowing, and I don't want to come off pretentious at all about it. I'm not saying, oh my God, I'm so good. It's more of just like a, no, I know this is what I have to do. It's weird.Michael Jamin:But I'm wondering if you, because you got a giant following. I mean, and it's weird. On TikTok, you have 3 million fans, but on any given day a hundred makes, it doesn't mean 3 million going to see your work. The algorithm is so weird. But I wonder if you have any bigger plans from this or from, what are they then, other than getting cast and having someone else? What else?Mackenzie Barman:No, so really, I really, truly, I think that I need to create the vehicle for myself. And I think a lot of people do that and need to do that. I don't think people just, it's rare that you're just discovered or someone's like you. I'm going to cast you. It's just so rare. And so I am definitely being proactive with writing and stuff, and I've written a pilot. I have a treatment for that pilot, and that's the clearest idea I have. I'm also writing a one woman show at the moment, like a stage show. Great. I'm in the early planning stages, early as is. I just had this idea two days ago of a monthly kind of mackenzie and Friends comedy show.Michael Jamin:WhatMackenzie Barman:Kind of show? I think I want it just to be a variety show of whatever the comedians want to do.Michael Jamin:And it'll be a stage show.Mackenzie Barman:Yeah, stage show. And I would just host it. But also, I have treatments that I'm working on for TV series and movies, and so I'm flushing those out, getting everything in order. I really, really want to pitch in 2024 and be ready for that. And I also want to write,It's something, excuse me, that I kind of recently, I think I always have liked that part of the process, but I think in my mind, I always thought to be a writer, you have to sit down and write, there's only one way to do it, and this is how you have to do it. But I'm learning that it's just not that way. I think David Mamet, he paces and he talks out loud before he ever sits down to write. And so I did. I host a podcast that I'm bringing back in January that I had Cola Cola on, and I love them. And I was talking to them and I was saying that, oh, I'm not a writer. And they were like, no, you just do it backwards. And they write on TV shows and all that. And it really changed. They had an effect on me when they said that because it really changed.Michael Jamin:So what is your intention with the podcast then? You're busy. Well, theMackenzie Barman:Podcast. I know, I'm trying, I'm so the podcast, it's called Bullshittery. It had one season, but I did it on TikTok Live, and I did not like that format at all. I thought it would be fun and experimental, and it just felt like a TikTok Live and not an actual podcast. So I'm doing it now in person in January, now that I'm here, and it's like an interview-based podcast, but it's very loose structure and just chatting with different people that are kind of in the industry, our comedians, and just a loy sheet of shit.Michael Jamin:You're going to rent a studio for that?Mackenzie Barman:I'm going to do it in my apartment. InMichael Jamin:Your apartment? Yeah. Very good. So you got to get another microphone. Is that what you're going to do? I got toMackenzie Barman:Get another mic.Michael Jamin:And you got to edit it though.Mackenzie Barman:And I got to edit it. Yeah,Michael Jamin:That's work too.Mackenzie Barman:I know, I know. And TikTok live was easy because the sound and the video were just there. I really didn't have to edit that. But this I will, because I'm going to up the quality a little bit. I'm going to use a proper camera and do it. Do it right.Michael Jamin:You can need a couple cameras. You probably, you want two cameras and maybe a master. Right.Mackenzie Barman:I was thinking that of either doing one and just keeping it in a two shot the whole time, which some people do. But also doing the single cam on each side. I don't know yet. I don't know yet. I'm open to suggestions if you have any. Oh,Michael Jamin:I don't know. There are studios that you can go and rent it out and they'll do the whole thing, but you pay by the hour.Mackenzie Barman:I know. I, I did that once in la. It was actually a great experience. I love doing it, but I'd rather, because I don't have any sponsors yet. Once I get sponsors, then I can kind of up my,Michael Jamin:I think you need around 10,000 downloads to get meaningful sponsors. I think IMackenzie Barman:So, I think so. Yeah.Michael Jamin:You're probably not there yet, but you will be. Don'tMackenzie Barman:Think. But I'm also a terrible marketer, so when I was doing the podcast before, I posted a couple of videos and I was like, this just is not me. And I need to get past that. I need to just sell my stuff, but I feel guilty.Michael Jamin:But I bet you people don't even know. I mean, people don't, you've got a giant following. They may not be aware of it. You don't have to market it. You say, oh, by the way, new episode tomorrow. I haveMackenzie Barman:Some, no, I know. I really just need to do the clips, the podcast clips.Michael Jamin:Yeah. Yeah. You'll figure it out.Mackenzie Barman:Yeah, I'll figure it out. Yeah,Michael Jamin:You will. I mean, you absolutely will. And maybe you'll do characters talking about your podcast.Mackenzie Barman:I know. I do want to do that. I want to do bits. If I have someone to banter with and go into character with, I'll definitely do that. Yeah.Michael Jamin:It's amazing how when I moved to la, I was young. I didn't have any of this shit that you got going on. I didn't even occur. I don't know. I wasn't as extroverted and as, I don't think, as confident as you are. So yeah, you're going places.Mackenzie Barman:I'm trying. I really am trying. Well, I know where I have to end up, so I know that I need to get in there.Michael Jamin:And when you say, and okay, you want to be on tv, you want to be, the problem is not many sitcoms anymore.Mackenzie Barman:I know. Well, I really, I am more of a streaming series girl. My ideal dream seriously would be to be a series regular on an hour long drama, drama d kind of a show that would be like,Michael Jamin:Tell me what show that you absolutely love that you wish you could be part ofMackenzie Barman:Something,Michael Jamin:And it doesn't have to be on the air anymore. SoMackenzie Barman:Yeah, there's a couple there, obviously. Huh? Well, I loved Big Little Lies. I love an ensemble like that. The White Lotus. If I could be on the White Lotus, that would be the, honestly, above all, that would be the show I would want to be on right now.Michael Jamin:Wow. Okay.Mackenzie Barman:Succession would've been one that I would've wanted to be on. It has that snarky, realistic element to it that I love. But I also love shows like Search Party or The Comeback. I want to do a mockumentary. I want to play a version of myself. Right. Yeah.Michael Jamin:I don't, well, you can do a series on TikTok. Just bang something out.Mackenzie Barman:Yeah. Yeah.Michael Jamin:I don't know. You already are. You kind of already are.Mackenzie Barman:I kind of already am. And I do try to sprinkle in dramatic elements too sometimes. And I don't know, it's funny. I like to evoke weird reactions from people. I'm laughing, but I'm also upset. I making people feel like that.Michael Jamin:I wonder, I think you're going to get to the point, I don't know, maybe you already are, where your reps, your agent manager, whatever, introduce new clients to you as to spring help springboard them. You really have a big platform. Has that coming? Has that happened yet?Mackenzie Barman:No, not yet. I don't know. It's so hard now because it's so forward facing too. I feel like there are some people that just do so well with the pop culture element of being present and being up to date with pop culture, I think is so huge. And I don't really touch upon that too, too much. So there's that small aspect I think that's keeping me from going even bigger. You know what I mean?Michael Jamin:Well, you did a piece where you kind of made fun of Congress when they were doing the TikTok here. Yes.Mackenzie Barman:Yeah. I'll mess around with it sometimes if I see a good opportunity and I'll do it.Michael Jamin:But you think you need to be more topical?Mackenzie Barman:I think from what I see, and this might just be because we all have different worlds now too, which is another thing from my world, it seems like the people that do really well and that become kind of more forward facing are people who lean into pop culture and things that are really trending in that moment. And I feel like I maybe just don't do that enough. Not that it's a bad thing. It's almost intentional maybe. ButMichael Jamin:Are you studying people wondering, are you trying to emulate other creators? Is that what you mean?Mackenzie Barman:No, I don't think I'm trying to emulate any other creators. I honestly think my biggest influences come from people outside of TikTok.Michael Jamin:Who are they then? Who are your influences?Mackenzie Barman:Like Lisa Kudrow, Tony Collette, actors,Michael Jamin:Amy Think, Amy Poller,Mackenzie Barman:Amy Poer, the classics. They're like,Michael Jamin:And do you think of them to get inspiration, or what do you mean when you mention them?Mackenzie Barman:I think that's just what comes together in my brain. It is all in there, and then it just all goes away, and then something comes out from it. I don't think I'm actively thinking like, oh, I need to channel Amy Po here, or be, I think the person that I'm closest to unintentionally, but I'll notice it sometimes, is Lisa Kudrow. I think I just love her so much and her isms that I feel like I might imitate her more than I even realized. Watch videos sometimes I'll be like, that was very Lisa cre. I'm like, that moment. But I think I'm developing my unique voice that's a blend of all these people.Michael Jamin:That's the step. And then I was going to say, how do you use art to influence what you do if you do? Yeah.Mackenzie Barman:How do I use art to influence?Michael Jamin:Yeah. I don't know. I guess what I'm asking is where are you drawing inspiration from? Who would you love to be? And maybe it's Lisa Kra. I know your version of them, but whatever.Mackenzie Barman:Yeah, I don't really know. I feel like I always have the thought in my brain that I, I'm very conscious about what I'm putting out. Is this too silly that it's dumb? Or is it too serious that I feel like, oh my gosh, I don't even know what really influences myMichael Jamin:Well, are there videos then that you don't put out? I mean, you shoot and you're like, eh, I'm not putting this up.Mackenzie Barman:Rarely. Most of those are the silly tiktoks of if I see a viral sound or something and I'll just do it, but I won't post it, I'll just do it. I dunno. It feels weird. It feels like I'm breaking some rule with myself to go outside of, and it might be this snobbish thing that I'm doing. It might be like, oh, I need to be this character actor person. And then if I break out of that and I'm just like a real girly girl, I don't know, maybe. I don't know.Michael Jamin:Well, but that's interesting. I feel there are certain trends and there's certain challenges you could do, and I don't partake in any of that shit. I feel like I'm too old for it, but I also feel like that's just not my brand. I'm not going to do any of that. And I wonder if you feel the same way.Mackenzie Barman:Yeah, I'll watch them and I'll enjoy them. Even sometimes I'll do them and I'll record them, and then I've posted a couple some, but most of the time it just feels weird to do it. I feel like I'm like, again, maybe that's that imposter syndrome creeping. I'm like, nobody wants to see me do this. Nobody wants to hear me talk about this or,Michael Jamin:Yeah, but then, and you might be right, the thing is, you might be right. You might try that. And if you get almost, I dunno, whatever, a low view count, then you're like, I guess they didn't want to hear it then. And it may just be random.Mackenzie Barman:And then you're in your head like, oh my gosh, if I'm my real self and they don't like it, right? Oh my God, they don't like me, do I? And I think maybe that's part of it too. It's like I am confident when I'm acting because it's not me anymore. It's like it's somebody else. Their fear is gone really of like, well, if you don't like it, it's not me. You don't like, it's them you don't like. But when it's just me being myself, I'm questioning my humor. I'm questioning my relatability. I'm questioning my, am I girly enough? Am I quirky? It's too many thoughts.Michael Jamin:No, I get that. I mean, on the occasions that I'm funny in my video, I'm like, this better be funny. This guy says he's a comedy writer. What's going to throw shade at me? And they'll be, right.Mackenzie Barman:Yeah. But I admire that. And it seems silly when I'm talking about it, it seems like just be yourself. I know people love me, but I don't know. It just feels weird. But I admire so much, and I watch all the videos of people who are just like, story time. I'm going to tell you this time. And I love that. I don't know. I just feel like if I do it, I'll record it and watch it. I'll be like, the story is dumb. Or I don't know, a lot of self-doubt, but it's weird. It's like I can have self-doubt here, but then I'm like, no, this is amazing. Somewhere else.Michael Jamin:Right. Okay. And is there any thought, I guess there isn't because you kind of improv this, but I'm always thinking, I better get too, because people got that thumb on and they can scroll so fast. Do you give any thought to that? How fast you're going to get this thing moving? How fast you're going to get to the good part?Mackenzie Barman:Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. Because I think sometimes the music helps if people, that's why I always will use sinister music, because people immediately are like, oh, what's going on here? And I think that will compensate for me taking my beats and taking my sweet time with it. Because at the end of the day too, I love storytelling and I love of keeping people engaged with something. So I kind of let the music do that part. But I do think about that, oh, I should really get to it quickly within the first 10, 15 seconds at least. But even then, it's too late.Michael Jamin:It's so interesting. I don't know how we're supposed to handle any of this, but again, I guess I want to get back to you before I get to let you go, before you respond. The relationships that you've formed, I guess they are your fans and you correspond with them, whatever.Mackenzie Barman:And a couple have become friends, a couple of Really, yeah. There's a couple people that I've just messaged and just vibed with you just kind of, most of the time it's like nothing. But doMichael Jamin:They reach out to you first? Or how does that work?Mackenzie Barman:Yeah, there have been a couple people that I noticed will comment a lot, and then I'll kind of randomly respond to dms on Instagram. I respond to a lot of dms, honestly. But then sometimes if there's just, you just know energetically. If they're kind of odd or they're kind of pushy or they say something weird, then I'm like, okay, bye. But sometimes they'll be kind of funny and kind of like bantering. I'm like, huh, okay. There's a girl, Faye, I love her. Shout out Faye. She's from Ireland. And I love people that are not from the United States, too. If you're from England or Ireland or somewhere, I'm going to love you automatically. But she's from Ireland, and we were kind of joking about her teaching me an Irish accent, whatever. So we were like voice memoing back and forth. And then she's the one who now Photoshops my Danny and Babs photos. She's just amazing at it. And she's like, I'll just do it. Don't worry about it. I'm like,Michael Jamin:Oh, wow.Mackenzie Barman:Okay.Michael Jamin:Isn't that nice? IMackenzie Barman:Love her. I love her. Wow.Michael Jamin:It's such an interesting, I don't know, community, and I wonder how big this thing is. I wonder how many creators. There's a small circle that I seem to be in, and I'm like, is this everybody? Or am I missing about 10 billion of us?Mackenzie Barman:I think it's both because I feel like it's a small world. Most of the time, the people I know, the other people that I know and influencers are comedic content creators. But then there will be somebody with 12 million followers who I've never seen or heard of before, and I'm like, I did not know you even existed, but you're so famous on the internet. And I'm like, I've never seen you. So it's weird.Michael Jamin:And you reach out to them, or No, you just follow them orMackenzie Barman:Something. Oh, no, I'll just hear about it. Or I'll see a random person pop up on TikTok and go to their profile and they have 12 million. And I'm like, I have never seen you before. It's just odd. It's suchMichael Jamin:An odd thing. There's this woman that I follow, and maybe you've heard of her. She's digging a ton under her house, butMackenzie Barman:I want to be on that.Michael Jamin:Yeah. I don't know where she lives, but she has a house and she's literally digging. She has a lab coat, and she's pouring concrete and she's digging, and it's just her passion. But I don't know if she's a, I don't thinkMackenzie Barman:She is that legal. Can you do that?Michael Jamin:Right. And she's not really, I don't think she's a certified structural engineer, but she has all these books and she's reading them. She's like, and this is how I learned how to do the electricity. It's like, oh my God, I just had to read this book. And so she's like a mad scientist. And then she was picked up on Yahoo. Yahoo did an article about her, and then I DMed her. Look at, you're on Yahoo now.Mackenzie Barman:Oh my gosh.Michael Jamin:There's just so many interesting people doing interesting things. I'm like, wow.Mackenzie Barman:No, I know. I'm deep on some tiktoks. I love conspiracy talk. I love it. I don't buy into it, but I love it.Michael Jamin:But see, I don't want to, don't think you want to get too far. You don't want to.Mackenzie Barman:I know.Michael Jamin:I know. You can keep them from a distance, but you don't want to,Mackenzie Barman:You start to tread a line where you're like, wait a minute, this is suddenly not where I want to be. That happens.Michael Jamin:Right? Wow. Mackenzie, thank you so much for joining me. What an interesting, again, I have such admiration for what you do and I'm a fan, and there it is. Yeah,Mackenzie Barman:I mean, you too. I mean, we got to talk shop too at someMichael Jamin:Point. Well, when we finish this, we will do that, but I want to make sure everyone knows where to find you. So tell everyone what all your handles are.Mackenzie Barman:Yeah, follow me guys. I'm at Mackenzie Barman everywhere. So I'mMichael Jamin:EverywhereMackenzie Barman:At Mackenzie Barman. I'm mostly on TikTok and Instagram. But follow me on YouTube too, because I'll be there and SnapchatMichael Jamin:Can find me. I dunno anything about Snap, but alright. Thank you again and don't go anywhere. I'll sign off. I won't. Alright, everyone, another great talk. Be like her. Go follow her. Just put yourself out there and then work on it and you'll get better and better. Okay, everyone, until next week, keep creating.So now we all know what the hell Michael Jamin is talking about. If you're interested in learning more about writing, make sure you register for my free monthly webinars @michaeljamin.com/webinar. And if you found this podcast helpful or entertaining, please share it with a friend and consider leaving us a five star review on iTunes that really, really helps. For more of this, whatever the hell this is, follow Michael Jamin on social media @MichaelJaminwriter. And you can follow Phil Hudson on social media @PhilaHudson. This podcast was produced by Phil Hudson. It was edited by Dallas Crane and music was composed by Anthony Rizzo. And remember, you can have excuses or you can have a creative life, but you can't have both. See you next week.

In this week's episode, we offer some tips and tricks for writers dealing with bad reviews. We also look at how Facebook and Amazon ads performed in July 2023. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Progress Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 163 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is August 4th, 2023, and today we're going to discuss how to handle bad reviews. Before we get into that, let's have some updates on my current writing projects. I am making good progress on editing Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods, and if absolutely everything goes well, hopefully the book should be out by the time episode 164 of this podcast comes out, so I'm hoping we'll be finished sometime in the coming week after August 4th. I have also written a bonus short story that I will give away for free in ebook form to newsletter subscribers when the book comes out. It is called The Final Shield and that will set up some of the stuff that I have in my next epic fantasy series because while this is the last Dragonskull, it will not be the last book…epic fantasy series I write in the realm of Andomhaim. I think there are many more stories to be told there, so The Final Shield will set up some of the conflicts that will take place in the new series, so look forward to reading that when that comes out. We are about halfway through listening to…proof-listening to Dragon Skull: Curse of the Orcs, so hopefully that will be coming out in audiobook in a few weeks, if all goes well. And then once Dragon Skull: Crown of the Gods is done, it'll be time to write the final Silent Order book, Silent Order: Pulse Hand and I'm hoping to have that out sometime in September if everything goes well. 00:01:35 Ad Results for July 2023 Before we get into our main topics and some reader questions, let's see how my ads did for July 2023. First up, let's look at the Facebook ads. As usual, this is what I got back for every dollar I spent on the ads. For Frostborn, including the audiobooks, with every dollar I spent on ads, they got back $7.82. For Ghosts, including the audiobooks, with everything I spent…with every dollar I spent, I got back…$4.17. For Cloak Games and Cloak Mage, for every dollar I spent I got back $4.57, which doesn't include the audiobooks. And for Silent Order, for every dollar I spent, I got back $4.88. And since there are no audiobooks for Silent Order, that obviously does not include audiobooks. Unfortunately, Cloak Games and Cloak Mage never really sells enough audiobooks to really move the needle. But other than that, everything was going well in Facebook ads this month. This is also the only reliable way I have found to promote audiobooks: advertise the ebooks, and if you sell enough ebook copies, eventually the needle will move on some audiobooks. For Amazon ads, the only thing I'm advertising right now is Dragon Skull: Sword of the Squire. Remember, that for an Amazon ad to work, it needs to generate a sale for every 6-8 clicks on the ad. For Dragonskull, for every dollar I spent, I got $4.00 back and I had a sale for every 0.74 clicks. So that was performing well. Now, if you've been listening to the show, you might remember that in past months, the Dragonskull Amazon ads made more, but the reason it generated less per dollar spent was because the book was on sale for $0.99 for Bookbub, so Sword of the Squire made less, but overall the Dragonskull series as a series made more money, so it was a pretty good month for advertising. 00:03:20 Reader Questions and Comments Before we get to our main topic, we have a couple of questions from readers this week. Our first question is from Ken, who says: I'm listening to Dragonskull Book #3 on Chirp. Will the rest of the series be available soon on this platform to listen to? As I mentioned earlier in the show, #4 is about halfway done and should be out in next few weeks and after that, we do we do plan to continue putting out more Dragonskull books as long as the budget and everyone's health holds up. So hopefully sometime next year we should have all nine up on the Chirp store for you to listen to. Our next question comes from Doug who says: Is there character art available (other than book covers), like concept art? Also for the races, monsters, landmarks, castras, and so on? Unfortunately not. I do quite a bit of Photoshops for both book covers and for Facebook ads, but I've never really commissioned any official art. The book covers and Facebook ads are meant to evoke the feel of epic fantasy, so that when the reader looks at the book cover or the ad, they know immediately, that it's for epic fantasy. So I've never really commissioned independent art to use for the book. But thanks for reading. 00:04:31 Introduction to Today's Topic: Handling Bad Reviews Now on to our other main topic of the week, which I'm afraid is a topic that comes up pretty often in the writing online community space. It's how to deal with bad reviews. It's time for that doleful yearly tradition, or though, honestly, that tends to happen every few months: New author freaks out about a bad review and then the Internet falls on his/her head. The latest freak out, the one that inspired this episode, involves BookTok, a subset of the TikTok video social media app which, in my opinion, just combined the least desirable features of YouTube and Twitter and somehow make them worse. Anyway, to sum up, a BookTok person gave a new author a mostly favorable review, but complained that the ending was predictable. The author took this personally and shot back, which resulted in the traditional Internet rage pile up and the author's book contract cancelled. Granted, at least this time the author didn't drive to the critic's house and attack the critic with a wine bottle. That actually happened once. Or otherwise show up in critic's house or workplace. If you are a writer, there is one rule and one rule only you must follow with bad reviews: Never ever, ever respond to reviews. In other words, you just got to suck it up and move on. I know what I'm talking about, I'm afraid. I have been doing this for about 12 1/2 years now and I've gotten every kind of bad review under the sun. Here are just a few of the negative opinions that people have either 1: written in bad reviews or 2: taken upon themselves to e-mail to me personally or send via Facebook Messenger: The book is badly written. The book is an insult to the English language. I hate the main character. The main character had no flaws. The main character had too many flaws to be believable. The main character was too self-loathing. The main character really should have been more self-loathing. My wife is an English teacher and she was laughing at how bad this book was. This book was Christian propaganda. This book was anti-Christian propaganda. There was too much profanity, there was not enough profanity. The book was too long. The book was too short. Things that happened in previous books were referenced in this one. Somehow the author insidiously wrote this book to deliberately insult me on a personal level. I am annoyed that the main character was not near to his children. I am recently divorced and I hate this book because the main character reminds me of my ex who was the literal embodiment of the devil and the ultimate source of all evil in the cosmos. The main character's romantic choices were wrong. I emailed the author detailed criticisms with this book and he never responded. Clearly, he hates his readers. Too much violence, not enough violence and of course, others related to that vein. There is also for a while a guy writing like 3,000 word reviews on his blog about how much he hated my books. He stopped eventually and I hope he found a girlfriend. So for all the stuff listed above, I only very rarely responded, and only when it was something simple and factually inaccurate that I could easily and quickly point out, like someone complaining that the book wasn't available on Google Play when it really was, that kind of thing. Overall though, I avoid responding on the Internet to anything even remotely negative. And to be fair, after 12 years of publishing, I don't feel the need to respond. I don't feel much of anything at bad reviews other than a moment of vague annoyance, like when you see someone driving inattentively. Like when you're a new writer, bad reviews really do sting. But I haven't been a new writer for a long, long time now. Silent Order: Thunder Hand was book #142 and after 142 books, I can't even remember what I actually wrote half the time, let alone the opinions people might have had about it. By the time I get to book four or five in a series, I have to spend a lot of time searching the previous books with Control+F to remember important details. I am always grateful when someone enjoys the book and indifferent when someone does not. But for the new writers who haven't yet written so much they can't remember everything they've written, here are some tips and tricks to help you deal with bad reviews.   00:08:21 Tip 0: Pen Name If you're just starting out, maybe you should write under a pen name. Like if you haven't published anything yet, then you're just starting out, that might be something to consider. I didn't obviously, but I'm told for people who do, it's useful element of psychological compartmentalization (that's hard to say!), but anyway, all the bad reviews are for pen name, not you and that way you can shrug them off more easily. Now to the rest of the tips.   00:08:50 Tip #1: You aren't Obliged to Have an Opinion Number one: you aren't obliged to have an opinion about a bad review. Social media creates the illusion that you have to have an opinion about everything. This is especially true on Twitter, where everyone has a hot take about the latest events of the day, like there's a news event of some kind whether serious like the war in Ukraine, or trivial, like a celebrity says something dumb, and many social media users feel the need to express an opinion about it. For what is most of that, if not indulging in the vice of gossip? It's talking about people you've never met and with whom you have no relationship. That learned reflex from social media, I think, transfers to some writers who have meltdowns over reviews. Someone posted a bad review of my book. I need to share my opinion about that bad review on social media. But you don't. In fact, I think training yourself not to share every opinion you have on social media is a skill many people would find beneficial. Just because someone didn't like your book doesn't mean you're obligated to respond to a bad review. Indeed, you aren't even required to have an opinion about their opinion. To quote the Book of Proverbs, even a fool, when he holdeth his peace is counted wise and he that shattered his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.   00:10:03 Tip #2: Don't Respond to Negative Emails Tip #2: Don't respond to negative emails. Generally, I try to respond to all reader emails unless it's negative and I don't want to engage. Sometimes you get emails or Facebook messages from someone and you can tell they're just spoiling for a fight, especially if you get an angry e-mail complaining about the book on Monday, don't respond, and they get an even angrier e-mail on Wednesday complaining that you still haven't responded. Arguing with people over the Internet is almost nearly always an enormous waste of time. If it's a concrete problem that's within my power to fix, like corrupted file, reader can't find the book and so forth, then I'll respond. Otherwise, it's just not worth the energy and getting into an argument over the Internet is always more of a time and energy sink than you might anticipate.   00:10:51 Tip #3: Don't Engage in Reader-Oriented Spaces Tip #3: Don't engage in reader-oriented spaces. Generally, I think it's best for writers to stay out of reader- oriented spaces, especially if the writer's work is being reviewed or otherwise discussed in that space. Now, what do I mean by reader-oriented spaces? I mean a place like Goodreads, a site that's devoted to book reviews, or a YouTube book reviewer's comments section, or the feed of a BookTok video creator. Those areas of the Internet are devoted to readers discussing books, and it's never a good idea for an author to inject themselves into the conversation there. It's especially a bad idea if the writer's book is the one actually being discussed, because that sort of discussion can spiral out of control very quickly. So if you're a writer, it's best to avoid Goodreads and Booktube and BookTok. If you really must engage there, it's probably wisest to create an account under a different name and never ever mention your books. 00:11:43 Tip #4: Read the Other Reviews Tip #4: read the other reviews. If a bad review really gets under your skin, it might be worthwhile to read the other reviews the person in question has posted. This is easy on Amazon or Goodreads. You just click on the viewer's name and you'll see their profile page along with all of the other stuff they've reviewed. Often you'll discover that the reviewer just hates everything. Or you'll see that the reviewer dislikes something you strongly like or likes something you don't, which gives you an easy way to discard their opinion. On a more serious note, you'll sometimes see that the reviewer is in chronic pain, and bad reviews are a way of lashing out. A while back, a study found that many of the high volume Internet reviewers are homebound and frequently dealing with high levels of chronic pain. Like if you click on their reviewers profile on Amazon and see that they're also reviewing adult diapers, compression socks, orthopedic shoes, and back braces (sometimes with excruciating detail), they've probably got a lot of other problems to deal with,  which shows once again that it's best not to engage with bad reviews because you never can tell what someone else might be going through. 00:12:43 Tip # 5: Delete and Block as Necessary Tip #5 delete or block as necessary. Bad reviews are one thing. But if someone makes a nuisance of themselves on your social media pages or keeps emailing you, go ahead and block them. I haven't done that done…this all that often, but I have done it. It's not something I'll do right away. Sometimes online writing lacks nuance and you can completely misinterpret what someone was saying, or there are technical difficulties. Once I have a Facebook comment along the lines of, I hope your head gets chopped off. 5 minutes later, the second-half of the comment came through: because it makes up for what you did to that character lol lol, great book. Looking forward to the sequel. So that can sometimes happen. But if someone is consistently unpleasant, I'll just block them. Accepting that bad reviews exist is a necessary state of mind for a writer. Tolerating bad comments on your own social media and website is not. The block button is there for a reason.   00:13:32 #6: Plod Onward Number six: plod onward. The best writing advice is to keep writing. If you do that long enough, eventually you will build a much thicker skin to criticism. You will learn not to take any bad reviews personally and move onward. There are few substitutes in life for sheer plodding persistence. Hopefully, if you are a new writer, these tips will help you learn to handle bad reviews without a public Internet meltdown. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

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Jesse McLaren is a Jimmy Kimmel writer.Show NotesJesse McLaren on Twitter - https://twitter.com/McJesseJesse McLaren on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/larenmcjesse/Free Writing Webinar - https://michaeljamin.com/op/webinar-registration/Michael's Online Screenwriting Course - https://michaeljamin.com/courseFree Screenwriting Lesson - https://michaeljamin.com/freeJoin My Watchlist - https://michaeljamin.com/watchlistAuto-Generated TranscriptJesse McLaren:If something just pops into your head on a Saturday of a story that, you know, you'll be talking about Monday, right? Like, I I did it. I got, I got something I know is like, gonna be really funny to pitch on Monday, right? So it's actually a little bit of a relief. It's not like, oh, I can't stop thinking about work. It's like, oh, and now I don't have to stress Sunday night or whatever. It's like, I know that, well, I'm gonna go into Monday with something I think is, is strong.Michael Jamin:Hey everyone, it's Michael Jamin. Welcome back to another episode of Screenwriters. Need to Hear This. I got a very interesting guest today because he's gonna tell us all about something I know very little about, but I always aspired to do when I was younger. This, this, my next guest, Jesse McLaren, is a writer on Jimmy Kimmel. And again, I like, yeah man, I, I just wanna know all about that. Cause as a child, I was like, man, I, that, that would've been the, the pinnacle. But I went another way. I went into sitcom writing. But, but, but, but with how we met, we were, I was walking the strike line outside of Disney and then Jesse goes, Hey man, I know you. And he pulls me over cuz he follows, I guess he follows me on TikTok or Instagram. And I was like, Hey, what do you doing? And he's like, I'm on Kimmel. So, welcome to this show. Thank you Jesse, for being here.Jesse McLaren:Thank you for having me.Michael Jamin:Yeah. I wanna know all about, and I asked you, I asked him you know, you, I guess I'll talk to you like how you broke in and you're like, Twitter. So tell me what that, how that all came about?Jesse McLaren:Yeah. I'm you know, like I, I've always wanted to work in late night. That's always been my end goal. And, you know, as aMichael Jamin:Kid, sawJesse McLaren:ConanMichael Jamin:AsJesse McLaren:A child. Yeah. Yeah. I remember like cutting school to see Conan. I, I grew up in Long Island andMichael Jamin:So you go into the city to see a show.Jesse McLaren:Yeah. I just remember like watching in between, you know, the the segments, just watching the people behind the scenes going like, how do I end up working here when I was like, you know, 16 maybe.Michael Jamin:Wow.Jesse McLaren:And then I always watch work late night. Yeah.Michael Jamin:And then what did you think about, like, usually you, you write a packet and you submit, right? Is that, but you didn't do that,Jesse McLaren:That's usually what you do. Yeah. I mean, I for Kimel they found me on Twitter. So, you know, after I, I started tweeting jokes and making videos on Twitter as much as I could for a period of time. I used to work at you know, for a while I worked at different TV shows. So I, I'm one of the, I think many people late night who worked production jobs first. Right. I used to work at the field, field departments and that kind of thing.Michael Jamin:Yeah. I noticed it. So you worked like, on, on Colbert, you did a bunch of different showsJesse McLaren:Right. Yeah. I worked on a lot of daytime TV shows, Uhhuh , kind of, it's actually kind of a similar structure, you know as far as how the show runs, but it's obviously very different content. Right. Michael Jamin:But why didn't you ever start writing packets and submitting, or, I don't even know how that works. Why, why didn't you do that?Jesse McLaren:Well, I did. So when I was, you know, I, I, my first, I, you know, landed a job that was my dream, which I worked at the Colbert Poor. Right. doing production, doing you know, the field department when he would travel to DC and that kind of thing. And interview congressman. Right. A series called Better Know A District. Mm-Hmm. . And whenever a writer job opened up there, anyone who was in the, you know, a PA or an ap, which I was, or anything like that, they would submit a packet. And you know, then starting, like, you get to know the writers and you start hearing rumors like, oh, you know, they're starting a new show called Larry Wilmore. Right. And, you know, our whatever. And you start submitting packets to whatever you can as someone who's not represented, but someone who kind of has,Michael Jamin:So how do you submit even if you don't have an agent?Jesse McLaren:Well back at that point, it was like, if you, you know, like you have a friend of a friend who's like submitting and they'll say, this is the email we're told to send it to. By this time it kind of becomes this like, network of just like, you know, so like, if you find out about a packet, you might tell some of your other friends, there'sMichael Jamin:A packet going on. So. Okay. Good. So how did you make, how did you have friends that knew all this?Jesse McLaren:I think that was from working at Colbert, you know, I was, I interned there, I applied as in when I was in college, I applied to be an intern at Everywhere, but I ended up at MTV Networks. Right. And you know, it was like my second to last semester I was interning at Nickelodeon mm-hmm. and like in a tape room, just like, just filing tapes. And I, and in the orientation I heard someone in the elevator go, oh, you know, I'm gonna be at the Daily Show. And that's went wait, that, that was a possibility, you know? Yeah. and in New York at that time, yeah,Michael Jamin:Go ahead. No, tell, keep going. This's just fascinating to me. Go ahead.Jesse McLaren:This the, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report were like the two shows under MTV that were actually a show that shot and you would actually be part of a production, you know? Yeah. so I applied to be at the Colbert Report. I think it helped that I already had an internship with NT Networks and I interned there eventually, you know, made connections there, which sometimes throughout the next few years, like if they needed a PA for the week, I would come by and that kind of thing.Michael Jamin:See, this is what I'm always telling people. I say, get as close as you can physically to the job you want. And that's what you did is as an intern or pa whatever it is, you're just getting close. Just so you could learn, be around it, hear from other people, and just make those contacts that way. Right. And then, yeah.Jesse McLaren:Yeah.Michael Jamin:And then when you're putting together packets, I mean, each show they kind of do, they kind of want different stuff? I mean, they might, they must say they do, they must say no, Conan's voice is this and, you know, were you studying the Yeah,Jesse McLaren:I mean, every packet's way different. I mean, the, at the time the Colbert packet I remember was like pretty intense. It was like, you had, you had that segment, the word Uhhuh , I dunno if you're familiar with the show, but that one. But it was pretty, it was, you know, a to camera on one subject and it would have all these editorial like voices through text, just kind of like shining in Okay. As jokes. But also, and it was kind of complicated, especially if you've never written for, you know, like it's one thing to write a page of monologue jokes, but it's another like, write an entire one of these segments that has to like, you know, be about a topic that needs attention and then it's written in a clever way and, you know, so, butMichael Jamin:So you're basically coming up, were you coming with any original stuff or just like, okay, here's my version of, you know, of that the word or you, or you coming with any new bits for him to do, you know what I'm saying? Any like, you know,Jesse McLaren:Yeah. Any packet I've ever seen has always been different. Some, so that show specifically, I think they really were like, like focused on what they want. Right. For the packets. Like one of these segments we do one of these segments, we do, maybe it, you know, I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was pretty much like especially cuz that that was show wasn't like monologue jokes. It was a character who had a very specific point of, you know didn't realize he was saying funny things like that kinda thing.Michael Jamin:Right. And so you turn you hand in these packets. It's not like they have a hiring season, they justJesse McLaren:No. IfMichael Jamin:You get lucky, if they, if they were hiring today, great. If not, maybe they keep you on file. Is that how it works?Jesse McLaren:I guess. I mean, I've never gotten hired from a packet, so it's like, I don't, you dunno. I think every show is completely different and I think every you know, I'm not entirely sure how we do it at Kimmel, but I, and I know they found me through, through Twitter. I know other people have written packets for them, but I, and so onMichael Jamin:Twitter, this is amazing. So you're just going out. What were you doing at the time? You've been on Twitter for how, for how long? How many years?Jesse McLaren:Like a while , I mean, I worked at like, so let's see, probably like eight years. I've been like actively really using it aMichael Jamin:Lot. And so every morning you, how would, like, before you get hired by Kimmel, what's your, what's your process for writing? You just come up, you sit down on the table, you read the newspaper and you try to bang out 10 jokes or what do you do?Jesse McLaren:No, I think it's more quality over quantity for that kind of thing too. Cuz you just wanna, I think the thing with Twitter is it's like, you know, but when the news story happens, this wave and you kind of want to get the funniest joke in there as early as possible.Michael Jamin:But are you ta Okay, so, but are you just putting it on your feed or are you writing it under el someone else's comment? Like a news, someone like newscaster's comment and then you, you know, to try to get their trafficked?Jesse McLaren:I think it, no, just writing a joke about, everyone's talking about one thing, you know, if you just have the perfect thing I'm trying to think of a good example. It's really hard off the top of my head. ButMichael Jamin:So you just post it in your, your feed, you give it a hashtag hope someone would search for it, hopes hope one of your whatever friends will follow you. Retweets it and it goes viral. Yeah. That's your plan, that's your, that's your plan basically. Yeah.Jesse McLaren:I think every social media's a little different, but like, especially Twitter, the whole thing is trying to get retweets. That's how something, and so how very quickly could have, you know,Michael Jamin:But then how, okay, so something would occur to you and then you'd write a couple jokes or just one or what, or as it as it comes, you just tweet it. And now did you have a schedule? Did you have any kind of discipline to this or were you just like, whatever came to you?Jesse McLaren:I don't think I had any discipline. No. I think with Twitter it's like, you know, it's in a, an addiction almost. It's just uhhuh. You'll be out today with your friends, you'll look down at your phone, just see like, oh my God, I can't believe, you know, just something happened. AndMichael Jamin:Okay. So you, you're on there a lot then basically you're,Jesse McLaren:I used to be on there very often. Yeah.Michael Jamin:Really. And so on an average day before you were found, like how many tweets would you send out in a day?Jesse McLaren:I don't know, maybe like five to 10 kind of. Okay. It's hard to tell. Yeah.Michael Jamin:And then some would get, but a lot ofJesse McLaren:It would also, yeah. And a lot of it would also just be like at work. I also worked at Buzzfeed for a while. Okay. So I kind of, one I in real life had knew people who you know, we followed each other on social media, but they had big social media followings. So they saw something, I tweeted a joke that they liked, they might retweet it and that would get me more followers. And then it also just working there really taught me a lot about how social media works and yeah.Michael Jamin:What, what, what did you learn that you could share? Like what's your take big takeaway?Jesse McLaren:Well, I think, I mean specifically with jokes and Twitter, I, you know, one, they all change over time a little bit. But I, I think Twitter consistently, like the, if you want a lot of people to see something you made, it almost doesn't even matter how many followers you have. But if you can get something retweeted a lot, it can kind of just work away brush fire where, you know, you might have, you know, 30 followers, but if someone sees it and retweets it and more people do it, it could, butMichael Jamin:Are youJesse McLaren:Creating a brand 30,000?Michael Jamin:Yeah. Are you staying on brand when you do this? Or are you like, cause it's one thing like, okay, this guy tweets out funny topical jokes every day and he is not tweeting out what he ate for lunch. Like, you know what I'm saying? Do, are you staying on brand? I'm a joke writer and that's it.Jesse McLaren:I don't know. Maybe, I mean, yeah, I don't know.Michael Jamin:You don't know. You're just going with it. Whatever was wor I mean, it worked. I'm just curious how it, how it worked.Jesse McLaren:Yeah, I mean, to me it was just always jokes and you know, I would also, you know, make videos or Photoshops just, you know, pieces of actual media, that kinda thing, Uhhuh. But it was always the goal of, you know, tweeting something and seeing as many people trying to get a lot of engagement with itMichael Jamin:And thenJesse McLaren:Hopefully something funny. Yeah.Michael Jamin:And then someone found it and then had, tell me how Kimmel came about.Jesse McLaren:I think, well over time, like, you know, I, the more I started realizing that this could lead to a writing job more than I, you know, I used to work at the Colbert Report, I submitted packets places, but that never really did anything for me. Right. Always, you know, never WereMichael Jamin:You frustrated? Were you frustrated by that? Were you upset or what, you know, when you weren't getting hired, what, how, what was your take on that?Jesse McLaren:Yeah, it's frustrating. It's also, if I go back and read one of those packets now I like can't do it. You know? So it's like, at the time I thought this is like the best interesting thing I've ever written. How could they not hire me? And thenMichael Jamin:Interesting. And really, cuz you've really grown and that just comes from practice, you think? Or what?Jesse McLaren:Yeah, I think, you know, it's any, anything that gives you actual feedback is really important. And to me, Twitter gave me feedback. I'm really like, you know, not comfortable on stage. I don't have that drive. I don't like doing Right. Performance.Michael Jamin:I asked you that if you're a standup and you're like, no, I don't want to, I don'tJesse McLaren:Wanna do standup. Yeah. It's like, I never no interest. I like the one, the few writers who doesn't wanna be on camera Uhhuh. But Twitter for, that's why for me specifically, it was a really good way to learn how to be a better writer just because you'd see what people actually find funny and especially once, you know.Michael Jamin:Okay. So then how, so someone, somehow, one of your tweets, do you know which one landed on the, on the desk of Jimmy Kimmel somehow?Jesse McLaren:I'm not sure which one. I think it might have been about Mike Ee.Michael Jamin:Oh,Jesse McLaren:Okay. I feel like it was like some kind of like, I tweeted something, I just remember I think like Julie Louis Dreyfus maybe retweeted it or something. It's like sometimes you would see like, oh, this person retweeted or tweet, you know?Michael Jamin:Right. Jesse McLaren:And then I just remember like within quick succession, like Jimmy and a couple of his writers our producers followed me like within like 15 minutes. So I don't know if it was from that tweet or if it was from, you know.Michael Jamin:And how would you, how would you know? I mean, you're not following your followers by the second, I mean, no,Jesse McLaren:I, I if it says like, when, like, I think when someone verified, followed you. Okay. At that point it would be like, before people were verified, they were like, you know,Michael Jamin:And so you noticed they followed you and you're like, damn, this is good. And then what happened?Jesse McLaren:And then yeah, I eventually they reached out and just said, Hey, when, you know, we would respond to know more about you. And eventually that kind of turned into an interview process, you know, once I expressed.Michael Jamin:But they didn't ask ask you to submit a packet though?Jesse McLaren:I didn't end up submitting a packet for them. No.Michael Jamin:They just looked at your body of work on Twitter and go, okay, this guy's funny, consistently funny. Right.Jesse McLaren:Yeah. I think, I think I kind of treated that week as my, or whatever it was as my packet where I would just consistently tweet things that I thought were in the show's voice or that they would maybe see and go, God, I wish, you know, we should have, we should have thought of that. You know, anything that I can think that they might think that is like what I really tried to do. AndMichael Jamin:Okay, so then they hire you. Tell me what your day is like. Well, first of all, are you working in person or are you on zoom or remote or now, you knowJesse McLaren:Yeah, we're in person.Michael Jamin:Yeah, you're in person. So you go to work, you show up, what, 10 o'clock?Jesse McLaren:Yeah, we start early at home and we write a lot of our jokes at at home first, which is great.Michael Jamin:. So you come in prepared. How many, how many jokes will you have when you come into work?Jesse McLaren:We will, you know, we'll write anything from, they'll always say it's quality over quality. Right. You know, they don't wanna have to sift through too many jokes just cause you wanna, you know so like, I would say that anywhere from 10 to 20 is normal.Michael Jamin:You feel good about it, you feel good there. Okay. These are, and then,Jesse McLaren:But it's, it matters. Which of your jokes get kicked. So in the morning then, you know, they'll kind of, I think Jimmy will go through all the material and at that point, you know, that's, that's all you care about. You know, you don't care about how many jokes you sent, you care about how many eventuallyMichael Jamin:Get. And so on a good day, what, how many of your jokes will get in on, on into the mono? You're talking about the monologue now?Jesse McLaren:Yeah. Yeah. I could someone told me when I started I've heard this from other shows too, people say like, one is a good day or is an amazing day. Right. That's something I've heard like at Colbert. And I think that kind of holds up. Like if you get, but it's more about, you know, it's not just jokes, it's kind of over time. Like, if you have one joke a few days in a row, maybe that's not great. If you have one day that was just incredible, you had a segment you wrote that did really well, you'd feel good. Right? And the next day you don't get any jokes, you know, you just be like, okay, well I had a great day yesterday and today I didn't get as many on.Michael Jamin:What, what do you do with the jokes that don't get selected? Do you tweet them or are they just go in the garbage?Jesse McLaren:I used to, sometimes I would tweet them, but it's, it just felt like, you know, you never know if a story's gonna come up again in some way you don't expect. Okay. And maybe that joke is worth revisiting. It's rare. You, you don't wanna read pitch a joke ever, you know, I'm sure. No,Michael Jamin:You don't wanna re No, you don't wanna pitch it again to, to, right. But yeah, I think you can retool it and change it enough to make it fresh.Jesse McLaren:Yeah. But also at a certain point you're like, well, this already failed some kind of test to this joke. You know? Right. Cause you never completely confident in a joke. You're like, well, if the show didn't want this, maybe it's not the best joke. So I've, in the past, a joke didn't get on, I tweeted it and it just fell flat and no one cared. And I'm like, oh, well,Michael Jamin:MustJesse McLaren:ThatMichael Jamin:Must not be funny. But, so if, when you come into work, let's say, all right, let's say you you put together 10 jokes. How long would that take you to, before you feel, okay, is it an hour work? How long does it take you to do that?Jesse McLaren:It's like they send out, you know, they'll send out topics in the morning. A writer's assistant who gets a very early will send out topics and then you send your jokes. And that's usually a period of about an hour and 50 minutes.Michael Jamin:But we'reJesse McLaren:The start out later. You can start out earlier youMichael Jamin:Know, are, when you, they say topics, are they giving you the setups of setups or they just say, we, you know, we wanna do jokes about inflation or whatever.Jesse McLaren:Yeah. Like here are like five, eight to whatever story, like five, eight stories that are good, whatever. Okay. If you have another story story, you think, okay, we should cover that. Go ahead. But it's like a good, just kind of keeps everyone grounded. At least we're all talking about similar things. TheMichael Jamin:Same thing. You see. That's interesting because like, I, I've tweeted a couple of jokes just as you know, when I had downtime, well, more than a couple, but whatever there I, I, I found if I went onto a website, I'm just curious what your take is like going on c n n or whatever, or, or ha Washington. Any website, New York Times, Washington Post go on their site and reading their headline or reading the article to me was not helpful. Cuz they already had an angle. Whereas I just wanted to get this, gimme the straight line. And so I would go into other, they would just like the news to, you know, you know, aggregators I the straight just gimme the straight line so I don't get any spin on it. And then I'll come up with a spin. Is that how you do it or no,Jesse McLaren:No, I think we just see the, the headline and to write jokes for something, you have to kind of think of every angle you can to see if there's something funny. So yeah, I think that usually works itself out because whatever the story is, you know, you're, it's more the headline and the facts of it that you're just trying to find any do youMichael Jamin:Feel you've gotten better at this over the years? Is it coming? Does it gotten easier for you?Jesse McLaren:I think it has gotten easier, but it's not like, oh, I get this many jokes on now as I think now, just the process is more I can recognize a good joke. Yes, I can, I can edit myself better now. Right. I can say, you know what, instead of saying sending these 15 jokes, I'm gonna send these eight and this is probably the best. You know, I think that's what I've gotten better at.Michael Jamin:And this is something that you do, even when you're in a b obviously when you're in a bad mood, when you're not in the mood to be funny, you gotta be funny.Jesse McLaren:Yeah. And it's, it's, but yeah, I, I just, I love it. I love sitting down and writing. I morning is my favorite part of the day and right know, I kind of like the way that it's, our day is structured where the most high pressure part is over with as quick as possible. Cuz once that's done, you kind of did as writers, at least for everyone else, the day is structured a little different, but for us it's like you have to really be on point in the morning.Michael Jamin:And how many monologue writers are there on Kimmel?Jesse McLaren:I think altogether we have, I should know, it's probably around 15 to 20 writers in general. Wow. But we're not split like other shows. NotMichael Jamin:Some other shows. Yeah. How do the, how do other shows do it? I cut you off. Some have monologue writers then what else?Jesse McLaren:I think like Fallon, I know had a friend there who was like, he was like, I'm a monologue writer. Like I write monologue. I think every show, you know, all these shows, I think every show kind of like figured it out for themselves. Yeah. So every show is a little bit of a different, like, universe kind of built around the same thing. But some of them are just, you know but some of them are separated where it's like, these are the monologue writers. These people write segment pitches or bits. But you kind of all do everything. AndMichael Jamin:So, okay, Seth, tell me what it's like. Okay, so you come to work now, you're given, you know, I don't know, whatever, 10 jokes. Now you're in the office and, and then what's next?Jesse McLaren:It depends, you know, with the jokes, you, if you, you also pitch any bits you could think of, like something that would just have more substance and be, you know producible. It's very important. You know?Michael Jamin:And that seems to be the hard part for me. How, how do you come up with that?Jesse McLaren:You know, I think that's what I was good at on Twitter is I think that's kind of what they liked about my Twitter. I would, you know, like one example I could think of that I think that they saw was Sarah Huckabee Sanders was giving it was like, you know, when Sarah Huckabee Sanders first started, there was a lot of attention on her. And everyone's like, who is this person? And mm-hmm. , she, I think she was talking about sinkhole under the White House. Do you remember? That was a story. It was like, I, I don't remember that White House. Yeah. It was like one of these things, like at the time it was just like, what the fuck? It's like there are sinkhole opening up under the White House and there's, you see like pictures of caution tape and there's jokes about like, you know, they're sinking into hell or whatever it is. But she said in you know, she was, I remember what it was exactly, but she was maybe saying there aren't sinkhole under the White House, but whatever she was saying, she was denying that this was a thing. So I, you know, am able to, I even used After Effects to have her slowly sinking as she said that. And then, you know, she like plummets through.Michael Jamin:But that, that's a funny bit. But that would've been, that would've gone in the monologue, right?Jesse McLaren:Yeah, I think so. So that, and, and, and that's something that but that's something I did before Kimmel. But that I think maybe got their attention maybe when they said that's the kind of thing we want, you know? Right. But that's what our show would consider. Like, a bit something that has some production to it that you could get that done by the end of the day. Mm-Hmm. . And the fact that I kind of knew I could do this myself, it wouldn't look nearly as good as our team cuz they're professionals. Professionals. Right. But I know that if I pitched that at the show, I know like, okay, we can get this done by four o'clock, whatever taping is today. ButMichael Jamin:You wouldn't on the show, you wouldn't have done the app. You wouldn't have done the, the graphic. Someone else would've doneJesse McLaren:It. No. Yeah. Yeah. So just helps tap the knowledge. Yeah. It just helps to know like, cuz he never,Michael Jamin:It's producible. Yes. Right.Jesse McLaren:Drives people crazy. Yeah.Michael Jamin:But do and do bigger bits, like any kind of, you know, do you also do like something that are more stagey with him or out in the field or whatever? Do you pitch that as well?Jesse McLaren:Yeah, I mean, those are you know, always a very specific thing. You know, it'll be like, those will be like an assignment. It'll be, Hey, by five o'clock, send some ideas for, you know, this actor wants to do something with us and they're promoting this movie where they're a fighter pilot or something. And you'll go, okay. Like, and we'll have them for two. Maybe you'll get, maybe you'll get something like that. We'll have them for a couple hours. Right. And so, and they can't change it to cost or whatever because they're becoming right from thing. You know, there's always like you, it's all restriction. Yeah. It's all you take, you take, especially in late night, it's like, what can we make the most out of, out of this? And yeah. And then there are some times that we do, we are able to do something that is time and production and people, you know, is a bigger thing.But, you know, for our main day to day Uhhuh , it's always thinking about making this producible. Making sure this is something that we can get done in time. Right. That's exactly right. You never wanna get them wet. Nothing where they have wardrobe change, , you know, like their hair wet. But now what is the, what is like the, the contract cycle look like for a late night writer is like how long? Yeah. How long is your contracts usually? Three years, I think. Which I think is typical of Yeah. Like you have an option. I would assume a new writer would've an option for like 10 weeks or something. No, and then, well, I think, I think it's the op It's that thing where you're, well, I'm on cycles. I think about like 13 weeks, something like that, right. From their side. Like, they can get rid of me every 13.That's the way I always, always understood it when I worked in daytime. That's how it was. Like, you know, not even as a, just as like a field producer or whatever. They had me on, I think the same exact situation where every 13 weeks when I was at like you know, Rachel Ray or whatever the daytime TV show was, it was like every 13 weeks they might get rid of you or you could yeah. You're outta your contract after one year, two year, three years, depending on what they give you. That kind basically pay, pay raise. Right. That's what that, that's what that means. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, you renegotiate, you know? Right. You, yeah.Michael Jamin:Hey, it's Michael Jamin. If you like my videos and you want me to email them to you for free, join my watch list. Every Friday I send out my top three videos. These are for writers, actors, creative types. You can unsubscribe whenever you want. I'm not gonna spam you and it's absolutely free. Just go to michaeljamin.com/watchlist.Jesse McLaren:You've been, well, you've been on staff now for what, five years on Kimmel? Lemme see. Yeah. Yeah. So you're not sweating it out every 13 weeks. The way someone who just started would be sweating it out. You know, I don't, yeah. I, I, yeah. I always am just like, so feel so lucky that I get to work in late night at all. And, but I can never, and and I'll always, if I have a bad week, I'm like, I'm gonna get fired. That's just always the way my brain just works. That's part of the way I motivate myself for good or bad. But it won't compare to that first 13 weeks where legitimately you're like, I might not be good at this job. I don't know. Cause I have no point of reference in how much collaboration is there with other writers? Do you have a writing room?We don't have as much of a writing room on our show in terms of like every day. Like, it's like we have a morning meeting of writers every day kind of thing. Uhhuh we just have our room just for like, oh, today we're just, it's more casual. Mm-Hmm. , it's more people have, if you're having a problem with something, you're just like, I can't figure out the ending to this thing. Whatever. Right. That's when you'll, we'll be like, oh, let's, you know, just bring it up today. And then there's a lot of just kind of casual. You just pull someone else in to something. You know, sometimes it's like, I have a really funny idea, I think for this guest coming up. I don't watch the show though. Like, do you watch this show? Does this make sense? Do you wanna team up with me on it and we'll both play together? Or that kinda thing. Yeah. Now,Michael Jamin:So who is it, I'm sure that, I'm guessing there's a head writer on Kimmel who reads all the submissions and decides what to give to Jimmy for his ultimate approval. Is that how it works?Jesse McLaren:Yeah. We have head writers who split, you know, responsibility. Yeah. Okay. And yeah, you know, because our show is so quick, you know, everything would be filtered through head writers or if it's like the show's starting in five minutes, it's like, just show him whatever, you know, if you need something approved for that night and he's in the makeup chair, maybe you would.Michael Jamin:Right. are you on the floor during taping or no?Jesse McLaren:Yeah. not often, no. I mean, our studio you know, I have just for like, I, I haven't too often now our our, our studio is a little cramped, so we don't really go in there tooMichael Jamin:Often, so, but you watch it. I, I guess in your office you have a live feed, you know, line. Yeah.Jesse McLaren:We, we, we'll watch it from, I mean it's, I'm saying this now because we just went through a pandemic, so we're still like, everything is still like very restricted and everything. Yeah. we're still like, you know, obviously you know, but we, we would normally watch it from like a green room in, in the building that would be like, you know, where everyone would just kind of meet up and watch the show.Michael Jamin:Right. See what works and what doesn't work.Jesse McLaren:Is there a posts the pandemic? It'sMichael Jamin:You know, do you talk about it afterwards? Or like, are you done once the show's done? Do you all go home? What what's next?Jesse McLaren:I think so. I mean, for the, for me, for the writers, like the staff writers, that's pretty much then you're just getting ready for the next day. Uhhuh you know I'm sure for the producers and other people on the show, it's a different story that, you know, but for us who have the easiest job, because we're our, you know, like I said before, the pressure for us is done in the morning. That's when we really have to get, you know, our ideas out and everything. Are there not as much sweating at that point?Michael Jamin:Are there many In my mind it's mostly a young, young person's game that there aren't, and I could be totally wrong about this, but there aren't, are there, are there many like people maybe my age who are still writing for, for late night? Or do they move on theJesse McLaren:Things? No, I think for sure.Michael Jamin:Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, obviously Robert smis like the famous guy, but I, I didn't know like what kind of, you know, did these guys, did they bounce around from show to show? Is that how it works?Jesse McLaren:No, I don't know. Cause I think a lot of these shows are pretty like, you know the writer, there's not a lot of writing turnover. Some of them I think there are, but you know, where I've worked at Colbert and came, there's not as much turnover. And I think, yeah. The age ranges, you know, are pretty significant. You know, I think that at Colbert there's writers who have been there for since I interned there in 2008 who are still writing for him and Right. Michael Jamin:Interesting. Jesse McLaren:Yeah,Michael Jamin:So I mean, cuz you, I don't wanna,Jesse McLaren:I don't wanna name anyone as the old guy or something.Michael Jamin:Yeah, I know.Jesse McLaren:That's cool. Definitely different. Yeah.Michael Jamin:But they've been around the block. You must get their stories. Hey, what was it like writing for Jack Benny? I mean, you must, you must want to get their, their stories out of them, right? You know?Jesse McLaren:Yeah, absolutely. Like, yeah, there's writers who I, you know, didn't realize, you know, there'd be a sketch that I watched when I was 15, I thought was the funniest thing in the world. And you can find out that they, you know, my buddy wrote it and you're like, oh, that's so fucking cool. OrMichael Jamin:That's great. Yeah. Yeah. So your goal is basically that you want this to be your career forever until you're done?Jesse McLaren:Is that, yeah. I don't think it's sustainable, but it is. Like, I would just, you know, I'm just really love late night. It's like whyMichael Jamin:Do you think it's not sustainable though?Jesse McLaren:I, well, I just think it's tough. You know? I think it's so much of getting a job in late night is luck. No. So, and I'm a pessimist in general, so the fact that I've got this job, I was like, you know,Michael Jamin:But at this point you're proven. I mean, you've proven yourself. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I mean, I don't know. Right. You've, I imagine you've made contacts, you've proven yourself. If you were to start on another show tomorrow for a different post, you know I don't know. Like I I'm sure you'd be like, okay, I know how to do this job. Right?Jesse McLaren:Yeah. I'm sure. Like, it's interesting, you know, we'll have a guest host on over the summer and it'll be like a really wide range of Right. Personalities. Like RuPaul David Spade, an actor who isn't an entertainer in that way, who, you know, just were kind of like a movie star. And it's like, you'll see some people, like, your jokes just do not,Michael Jamin:They don't how to deliver like Yeah,Jesse McLaren:Yeah. Not that now how to deliver it. They just don't pick your jokes. They just, your humor doesn't match up with them. And some of them are like people. You are your comedic heroes and you're just like, ah.Michael Jamin:Yeah.Jesse McLaren:So it's, it's, and I think it's, it is a little bit of a diced role too. Like if you you know, matching your writer with your hosts sensibilities and stuff, it's kind of like there's a tricky thing there. So I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of like just luck that goes into ending up at one of these jobs and having it really, really click.Michael Jamin:Well, what would you, what do you imagine is going on with the James Cordon writers? Like when, you know, cuz obviously they're all, they're outta work. What, what do you think is going through their minds? You know,Jesse McLaren:I don't know. I mean, I think everyone has a different, like writers are all so weird people. They all come from like, not everyone is like me, say like, I wanna do this forever. Like, some people are like, well, I'm gonna go back into this business. Some people are standups and they'll go do standups. Some peopleMichael Jamin:Do you think some people wanna go back into like, like a corporate or something? Like some regular business?Jesse McLaren:Yeah, I think I, I feel like I've seen writers, like, especially from when I was at Colbert so long ago, just like, you know, end up leaving and doing things like in other genres, right. Children's stuff. Like, or just, you know, just kind of like, not necessarily stay in comedy day, late nights, stay in writing even. Right. So, I don't know, I, I couldn't speak for the court and writers and I think there was a lot of people who yeah, like had to stand up and do other forms of of comedy that, you know,Michael Jamin:Do you have, like, do you have a process or do you have a way of looking at the world or opening your mind to think of funny things? You know, is there, what's, how do you pro do you approach any, I mean, I have my own thoughts, but I wanna know what your thoughts are.Jesse McLaren:Yeah, I, I think I do things an analytically uhhuh or I, I, I, I write in the least funny way, you know? What does that mean? You know, when I, like when I first started at this job, I to have to, I've never had to like write 20 jokes in the morning, that kind of thing. And that, that was the main thing. I was like, I I'm not gonna be able to do it. I'm not gonna be able to do it.Michael Jamin:Mm.Jesse McLaren:And I would like literally write a post-it of like, ways to view possible, ways to get a joke out of a news story. Okay, I lost that post now. Like now I don't need that. But at that time I was like, cuz if I'm gonna need to write like three to four jokes out of just, and some news stories are just inherently not funny at all. Not only, you know, serious, but some of 'em are like, sometimes our topics for jokes will be the Dodgers are up in game two of the World Series and that's, you have to write jokes about that. And then the next night it's the Do Dodgers are up three in game three of the World Series and you have to write jokes about that. And it's like, howMichael Jamin:Do you go about doing that? What's, okay? So can you walk me through that? That sounds horrible. . Like, I don't know what's funny aboutJesse McLaren:That. Yeah, yeah. It's the thing. So it's just like, you have to think what cities are, what city are they playing? Also sports is my weakest area, right? It's like, what city are they playing? Okay la And you know, and you're just like, St. Louis, what can we make, you know, just whatever it is, whatever. If it's the NBA or wherever, like what are any associations between these two cities that someone, that there's some connection that you can make like, you know one celebrity who maybe lived in famously lived in just something, you know, and like, but something I maybe missed yesterday. You know, like it's tough. Yeah. Those are,Michael Jamin:I would think that's really tough. Like yeah, I, I might strike out on doing that. I really do. I really might. Like shit, I, I don't know. You're on your own, like, because I don't, you don't have a strong enough attitude or is it enough? Yeah, there's no, there's no attitude behind it. It's almost fact, you know? Yeah.Jesse McLaren:And if I have like two hours all my jo, most of my jokes will be in the last 10 minutes every time no matter what.Michael Jamin:Really?Jesse McLaren:That's, yeah.Michael Jamin:Do do. Where do you do? SoJesse McLaren:I think a lot ofMichael Jamin:Couch on the desk. Do you have a place you go?Jesse McLaren:Yeah, I'll do it on the couch or yeah. When I first started I was doing coffee shops just to force myself to like be somewhere Uhhuh . I have like, you know, I have a d d too. It's like any, you know, I have to really focus and I have to really force myself to focus sometimes. Cause it's so easy to just say, I'm just gonna like look at my phone. Or do you know?Michael Jamin:Are you able to turn it off though? I imagine like on, on a Saturday or Sunday big news story, you go, oh shit, this, we know we're gonna be talking about this on Monday.Jesse McLaren:Yeah,Michael Jamin:Definitely. And do you start making notes or you're like, ah, I'm off the clockJesse McLaren:, I'll make notes for sure. But that's actually really helpful because you know, if something just pops into your head on a Saturday of a story that, you know, you'll be talking about Monday, right? Like, I I did it. I got, I got something I know is like gonna be really funny to pitch on Monday. Right? So it's actually a little bit of a relief. It's not like, oh, I can't stop thinking about work. It's like, oh, now I don't have to stress Sunday night or whatever. It's like I know that well I'm gonna go into Monday with something I think is, is strong.Michael Jamin:So for you it's almost like solving a puzzle Sounds like joke writing.Jesse McLaren:Yeah. A little bit. Yeah.Michael Jamin:Do you have, do you do any other kinds of writing though?Jesse McLaren:Not much. You know, I do a little bit of like, just do, I've written like specs and stuff like that for fun to grow that muscle. Right. But really, it's mostly like joke writing and that is the, the main writing I do. And especially cuz you know, it is these, the job is a lot. It's demanding, you know, when the show is on, it's like, you know,Michael Jamin:And I noticed cuz you still post a on, on Twitter and TikTok a little. But has that fallen by the wayside for you? I mean, you're busy.Jesse McLaren:Yeah, I think a little bit for sure. Like one when the show is on on and you don't wanna tweet something that would've been Right. Funny on the show, you know? Right. that doesn't do anything for you. And, and to an extent, like, you know, Twitter was always my end goal was always working in, in comedy and working and getting paid to write jokes and Right. I've done that and, you know, so it's like, I doesn't really, you know, the more Twitter now is just more for fun or whatever, Uhhuh . But yeah. That's why, you know, when you ask how often you tweet, like back when I was really hungry for trying to get a late night job, I would be really, anytime I saw a news story, I would just try to get the funniest joke as early as I could.Michael Jamin:Right. You want Right. You wanna be first. Exactly. How do you, how do the, do you think the other writers mostly break in packets or unconventional ways?Jesse McLaren:I think all, all sorts of ways. I mean, everybody you know, it's like a, it's, I don't know who said this, but I, I I've heard, you know, someone describe a writer's room, especially in late night as like a superhero team where everyone has their own like superpower. You have some people who are just really good political writers and can be sat tired, really, if some people who are just really strong standups and can write like, you know, barbs and that kind of thing that are like, you know Right. Getting strong, like gross kind of jokes. And that's just, do youMichael Jamin:Feel your, what do you feel your specialty is?Jesse McLaren:I don't, I think, I think bits is what I always feel the most comfortable in. And, you know, that kind of thing of uhhuh doing something with video. And anything with's. Like, you know, if I see video, especially just having worked in TV for as long and that and that kind of thing, I just can know like, that footage of Biden doing this, we can add this toMichael Jamin:It. Right. So you think very greatJesse McLaren:Screen.Michael Jamin:You think very visually then what's the, what am I looking at? Not what am not, what am I listening to? What am I watching?Jesse McLaren:Right. Yeah. I think so. Yeah. And over the years I've, you know, gotten more into the joke writing itself and you know, I really love writing jokes, but I think the strongest area for me is definitely this kind of visual things. ForMichael Jamin:Sure. Now what's your takeaway when you write something and it bombs, they pick it and it bombs .Jesse McLaren:Yeah. That's always, and that happens. It's, yeah, I don't know. I think that with our show, the good thing about it being fast paced is by the next day you don't remember.Michael Jamin:Right, right.Jesse McLaren:Just the way, like there's, I've never had something over the next day. I'm like, oh my God. You know? And I'm just like, okay, well that didn't go great. And then you, you just avoid doing whatever that did wrong. If you could figureMichael Jamin:Out, are you hugely embarrassed? To me, it's when I pitch something and it bombs to me, it's funny. I'm like, I just like, wow, guess I'm diluted. But I guess, but do you feel that way too? Or you just, oh my God, I'm I'm gonna be fired ?Jesse McLaren:No, I never think I'm gonna be fired. Cause in the end it's like, you know, like none of us knew if anything like the joke was picked, like we thought maybe it would work. So it's more, it feels like it's not just on you. Right. And nothing's ever like bombs to like, it's like people are like booing, you know?Michael Jamin:.Jesse McLaren:That's funny. You like when people boo. Cause that's at least, that's fun. But it's never just like dead silence. Especially in that kind of environment. But you do have things sometimes that just don't work great. For sure. Like, you just, and it's always just like, we just didn't have, you know, it's like, let's make a movie trailer for the new Guardians, the Galaxy, but we'll make it like, and it's just like, all right, that's not gonna look that great if we're gonna have it done in three hours. Yeah.Michael Jamin:Right, right.Jesse McLaren:I think we could do it and just doesn't quite work. It is like, should have worked, but, you know, maybe it just, if it needed another hour love or, but who'sMichael Jamin:Doing, I mean, are you, do you have a producer that you generally work with? Because that would be the producer's job is to put something like that together, right?Jesse McLaren:Yeah. I mean, as a writer you oversee that kind of stuff with directors and producers. Oh, okay. And it's always like, you know, you know, if something wasn't ready for error, you wouldn't air it. Like, if there's no Right, you know, you do make those determinations, sometimes you will say, Hey, you know what, we have an hour left on this. It's not gonna make it like, it's not worth, let's make, let's say this for tomorrow. Or just didn't work.Michael Jamin:Do you have advice for, for people trying to, who would either wanna break in or try to become good joke writers or what, you know, what are your, what advice, wisdom can you share?Jesse McLaren:I, you know, for me it's like, you know, this, the advice I got you know, when I was at Colbert, someone, they read my packet and that was a really nice thing that they did for their staff members. Mm-Hmm. If you're like a PA and you submit a packet, they at least read it and give you some feedback. One thing they said is they, they told me is find a way to get feedback. Do stand up, find a way where you're actually reading these jokes yourself, Uhhuh yourself. And, you know, for me, I think that, you know and I'm sure like any standup comedian would roll their eyes at this, but for me, that was Twitter because that is the place where I figured out I got reception. If a joke was really bad, if it was really funny, I would at least get some kind of like, okay, this is, this kind of joke is funnier.You know? And I think just forcing yourself to get some feedback finding yourself, whether that's performing live or some way on the internet like I did. Finding a way that you have to actually be accountable for your jokes. And it's not just throwing them out into a void. Mm-Hmm. . Because, you know, I think that's why when I wrote packets when I was a lot younger, I thought there was the funniest thing in the world. How could they not hire me? And I read it now and I'm like, yeah, of course they didn't hire me. Yeah.Michael Jamin:Right.Jesse McLaren:This is really good,Michael Jamin:You know? Cause since you, you mentioned it, I I dunno if you heard of my, my first job, I worked with a guy named Marsh McCall, who was the head writer on Conan. I think that's season one. Have you heard of him?Jesse McLaren:Marsh? Michael Jamin:Well, he died a few years ago, but Oh,Jesse McLaren:Okay. Yeah.Michael Jamin:But he was the head writer. He was the head writer in Conan. He gave me some great advice for joke writing when I was on Just shoot me the first season. And he said, if everyone's going this way to get to the joke, go that way. You know what I'm saying? Like, don't try to, whatever path it looks like is the natural way to get the laugh, find somewhere else, because you're never gonna, everyone else is going that way. They'll be, they're gonna beat you. You gotta find your own path. Do you think that, do you think the same way?Jesse McLaren:No, I don't think that, I mean, I, I think that's good advice, but I think for someone as for someone like me, I wouldn't see that until after the fact. I would write jokes first and then when I edit it, you know, like, like I said, I think I've gotten better at editing. That's when I would maybe see that of like, I just know that this is a good joke.Michael Jamin:But, you know, well, let me see this though, because sometimes I, sometimes on social media, someone will say something and I'm like, oh, I got the perfect response. And then I'll scroll down the comments and I'll see, has anyone said this yet? Yeah. And if someone's already said it, I feel embarrassed for myself. At first I feel relieved that I didn't write it down and embarrassed that I, that I didn't do better than that. You know?Jesse McLaren:Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's why Well, that's why I'd always be after. Yeah. And after a while you start to like, just know that that's gonna be that thing. Like something happens, you know, you already know before you look in the replies, everyone's already made this joke for sure.Michael Jamin:Yes. Right. And so you gotta Yeah. If, if it's that easy, don't do it. Find , but Yeah.Jesse McLaren:And, but sometimes it's like, it's just clearly it's that, it's that because it's the funniest joke and it's like, you know it's unavoidable almost sometimes. Right. You know, when, you know, I think about things like, things like, you know, the Rudy Giuliani landscape, four Seasons, landscaping things. Like, there was just some things that were like, you know everyone was making the same jokes, but you just kind of had to because it just kind of called for it.Michael Jamin:Right.Jesse McLaren:But yeah, for the most part, I think that I just try to, you know, I'll write eight jokes for something, six of which aren't even like, like, would be embarrassing if everyone even read it. It's just like trying to just get some kind of thought out. Right. And you have two and maybe one out of the two you're like, I think that's the strong point of view. That's something that no one else would've thought of orMichael Jamin:Right. So sometimes just you, you actually have to just write it down. Yeah. And move on to the next one and then edit yourself later just so that you can get to the joke. Right. Just so you can find it.Jesse McLaren:Yeah. I'll do a lot of just vomit of like, like just write eight, just thoughts about this story. Right. Even if they're not, especially if they're not playing, just write anything you want. And then, you know, sometimes just that statement is the, is the joke or, you know, but yeah.Michael Jamin:It's so interesting. Yeah. Jesse tell people, I wanna thank you so much for, for giving me all your time. I think I, this to me is so interesting. I, I'm fascinated by what you guys do. It's a world I know nothing about. So, but, but tell people how they can follow you or find you on, you know, social media if they wanna be. I think you're gonna get a bunch of new fans now.Jesse McLaren:Oh, well, yeah. I'm Nick, Jesse on Twitter. As long as we're still all on Twitter and yeah. And that's, you know, that's pretty much where I post most things. Do,Michael Jamin:Do you worry about that going? Yeah, as long as we're still on Twitter. I mean, do you worry about starting from scratch if we all decide to go to some other platform?Jesse McLaren:I did it first, but now at this point I'm just like, let's just do it. YouMichael Jamin:Think, why do you feel that way?Jesse McLaren:I don't know. Cause I think when we go to a new thing like Blue Sky, you start toing. Oh, the people I like find me and I find them, you know?Michael Jamin:But Are you on Blue Sky? Not yet. You I am,Jesse McLaren:I am on Blue Sky. You gotMichael Jamin:Preapproved because it's hard to get approved.Jesse McLaren:Yeah, I shamelessly tweeted I does anyone have a Blue Sky code? See exactly what it, I don't know what my name is on it, but I think it's just Mick, Jesse on that too, by . Does anyone have a Blue Sky Code? And one person messaged me and was like, I do. And then I, I got on that way.Michael Jamin:And they gave you their code?Jesse McLaren:Yeah. I, I just don't know how the invite codes work on Blue Sky. And like, I had, like, it says under your name, like in by code, then it says zero. And then like, after like a couple weeks now it says I have one. And I'm like, oh, I have one now. Wow. Like, I'm giving that to my wife or like, you know, whoever wanted one,Michael Jamin:Whoever wants one. But you're not, you're not really on it yet, or are you?Jesse McLaren:I, yeah, some, yeah, a little bit. Yeah. But it's, it's pretty good. It's like the most closest. It's the closest to Twitter. I think I've, we've found.Michael Jamin:But you're not worried, I mean, you don't have nearly as many followers on Blue Sky as you do on Twitter,Jesse McLaren:Right? Yeah. But at the same time, it's like the Twitter followers. Like I have over a million followers and I feel like if you tweet something that's not funny, it still gets like 11 likes and that's it. You know, like it's kind ofMichael Jamin:Of what On, on, on Twitter you mean?Jesse McLaren:Yeah. I think that like really theMichael Jamin:People have disappeared.Jesse McLaren:Yeah. Or just that, that's just always the way it is. Like, it's like, I think it, the algorithm, the way it works just to like, it shows the tweet to like X amount of people, 10 people. If none of them engage with Right. People look at it or care, then it just doesn't show it to more people. Right. So I think, you know, I don't know. I think that, so it's just as long as you have a network of funny people and if that's what you wanna do comedy you have funny people that follow you and you follow them back. And then I think if you move to a new platform, you could still find a good audience to like, share funny things.Michael Jamin:Interesting. Right. Okay. Yeah. So again, you're making a case for getting out there, you know, making friends with people and, and getting close to the job you want. Yeah. Yeah.Jesse McLaren:Right. Yeah. And yeah, and, and working in TV really helped too. For sure. Yeah. Right. Yeah.Michael Jamin:Yeah. Exactly. You started at the bottom. Good for you. I'm impressed, Jesse, you, you did it . Yeah,Jesse McLaren:You did it well. Yeah, it was nice meeting you on the picket line and it was a pleasure. I recognize you from TikTok cause I think you come up in my algorithm all the time. Cause I'm always looking at any kind of screenwriting or comedy things. So you'll pop up and I say, oh, I know that.Michael Jamin:That's great man. I want to thank you again so much for taking your time. It was a great talk. I really appreciate this. All rightJesse McLaren:Everyone. Yeah. Thank you for having me on.Michael Jamin:Thank you. Big round of applause for Jesse. Go follow him on TikTok or Twitter to anywhere. We'll see wherever, wherever he goes next. . Wherever it is. All right, buddy. Thank you so much. Great talk everyone. Until next week, keep following me. I post check out my newsletter, Michael jamon.com/watch list from, have my best my content sent to you. All right. Until next week keep writing. Thanks.Phil Hudson:This has been an episode of Screenwriters Need to Hear This with Michael Jamin and Phil Hudson. If you're interested in learning more about writing, make sure you register for Michael's monthly webinar michaeljamin.com/webinar.If you found this podcast helpful, consider sharing it with a friend and leaving us a five star review on iTunes.For free screenwriting tips, follow Michael Jamin on social media @MichaelJaminWriter.You can follow Phil Hudson on social media @PhilAHudson. This podcast was produced by Phil Hudson. It was edited by Dallas Crane. Music by Ken Joseph. Until next time, keep writing.

Our Boy Marcos puts together a list of the Top 5 members of the HEAT organization that could use Jimmy's dreads. Make sure you check the segment out on our Twitch for the hilarious Photoshops of our favorite HEAT stars. 

Here's what happened on the full show available on my Patreon.1 – 0:00:00 – Red Wings suck. Alan Thicke died; Dude Shadoway interviewed Alan back in the day.Lady bites ball sack so hard she touches teeth.2 – 0:20:42 – Porting in WLAV feed. Circus as Kanye West meets Trump.3 – 0:29:16 – Clues and Categories.4 – 0:42:19 – Richard Sherman hates NFL. “Poop fest”. Sherman when he went crazy in an interview. Math is hard. Sports updates.5 – 0:55:03 – Photoshops of Julius doing nice things. Jeffrey Willis updates.6 – 1:05:26 – Kenney in Nashville is flipping out. Matthew McConaughey's parents loved to fight and bone. McConaughey's Dad asked to see his son's penis. Callers talking about having ‘The Talk'.7 – 1:27:29 – More callers regarding having ‘The Talk'. Sports updates.8 – 1:35:55 – Name that Christmas Song Challenge; interrupted by ‘Brought to you By'.9 – 1:52:34 – Idiot robbers accidentally call 911 on themselves.10 – 1:57:50 – 10 minutes with Huge. Sports updates.11 – 2:18:46 – Confusion on how audio works on WJRD.12 – 2:29:49 – Tommy Elrod story of betrayal. Callers with stories of revenge.13 – 2:42:06 – More callers with revenge stories. Alan Thicke died. Idiot woman dragged off plane.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-eric-zane-show-podcast/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

  Richard Gale & Gary Null PhD Progressive Radio Network, January 7, 2022 During the past two years, the rise in wokeness and its cancel culture has shocked the sensibilities and moral fabric of the nation. It has fuelled divisions between races, class and economic status, levels of education and political allegiances. However, the anger that wokeness has carried into civil discourse is a symptom of a much deeper causal factor buried in the national psyche; that is, America's pervasive “reality deficit disorder (RDD).” This is a condition that has proliferated across the American landscape since the Age of Enlightenment and the 19th century's advent of scientific materialism as a secular religion.  The proponents of modern behaviorism and the neurosciences are likewise saturated with RDD. The Woke self-congratulating experts and false prophets are its public face.  These are plastic liberal intellectuals who have found reinforced their sense of self-righteousness by spreading the post-modern gospel of Robin DiAngelo's 2018 bestseller White Fragility. Despite the widespread adulation DiAngelo has received from liberal educators, the mega-corporate elite, and the left media, she has managed to jockey herself away from the deep scrutiny her writings and lectures deserve.  An exception is Jonathan Church, author of Reinventing Racism, who brilliantly exposes DiAngelo's flaws and deconstructs her façade of her impartial objectivity.  Church takes a more philosophical offensive to shed light on DiAngelo's implicit biases and contradictions that in turn distort the very ideas she attempts to proselytize. While we agree wholeheartedly with Church's polemic, we would take a more cognitive approach and state that DiAngelo's racial theories of irredeemable Whiteness as an inherent social construct have no basis in reality whatsoever. White Fragility reads like a tantrum by an author with a third-rate intellect who is deeply confused about her own gender and racial identity. “All white people,” DiAngelo wants us to believe, “are invested in and collude with racism.” If you were born White then racism is built into your socialized development and behavior regardless whether your family background is exemplary of racial justice or not. There can be no escape from this curse, DiAngelo suggests, no redemption or purification by fire regardless of how much penitence, public service or charity you perform for the greater good. We wonder whether she would include the indigenous blond hair, blue-eyed Finno-Ugric peoples inhabiting the northern forests and tundra of Scandinavia and Russia's Kola Peninsula as being socially structured and therefore colluding in the world's racism. The author reminds us of someone who has read every published book about chocolate and thus feels qualified to write one of her own despite never having tasted chocolate. Philosophy and postmodern sociology in general, notably the modern philosophies of science and mind, often suffer from this mental affliction. They write books about other philosophers' books who in turn wrote books about their predecessors' scribbling. Right-wing critics of wokeness and certain factions within postmodern Critical Race Theory likewise indulge in a similar cognitive hallucination built upon feeble-minded pre-Galilean superstitions. Their perceptions about themselves and the world, their righteous anger and biases, are similar to dreamscapes, phantoms they have conjured and which can have dire long-term consequences to the welfare of innocent victims prejudiced and canceled by their vitriol and condemnation. There have always been conflicting ideologies, cherished beliefs and inflamed emotions towards racial discrepancies, social order and justice or how the nation should be governed. But today these cognitive afflictions, masquerading as passions and righteous causes have disintegrated into tribalism. This is now fomenting new class and racial distinctions and struggles as well as media turf wars. No one can accurately predict where this collective reality deficit disorder will lead ultimately but it certainly won't contribute to a positive advancement of human well-being. It repeats the old adage of garbage in, garbage out. “The greatest need of our time,” the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote in his Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, “is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning we cannot begin to see. Unless we see we cannot think.”  Merton believed that this “purification must begin with the mass media.”  We would suggest it also begins with our educational institutions. Teachers who embrace White Fragility's social folly and logical fallacies need to introspectively gaze and observe the destructive ataxia nesting in their own minds.  If anyone wonders why the nation is so angry, screaming and protesting, one reason is because the failed neoliberal experiment, the culture of political nepotism, a captured and biased media, and a thoroughly corrupt judiciary have created this horror show. And DiAngelo seemingly wants to gather tinder to keep racial conflagrations burning. "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous," Martin Luther King lamented, "than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." It is our deep ignorance about not first knowing ourselves and appreciating our intrinsic interconnections with each other and the environment that perpetuates the suffering around us. These deeper existential relationships can potentially outsmart and surpass the benefits Critical Race Theory has to offer. Underlying any social structure is to be found cognitive causal relationships. This includes our attachments to whatever accomplishments and failures we experience in our lives through racial identity, which may lead to a reality deficit with all of its superiority complexes, apathy and depression. First, there is sufficient empirical science to reach a consensus that we are a culture that has become habituated to mistaking its unfounded perceptions about itself and the world as reality-based. This applies to our cognitive conceptions of Whiteness, Blackness, Yellowness, etc. Church makes this clear; DiAngelo's use of the term Whiteness is “nebulous” and “vague.”  He points out that her logic falls into a Kafka Trap, referring to Kafka's novel The Trial when an unassuming man is dragged into court and accused for an unspecified crime; subsequently his unwavering denial is itself interpreted as absolute proof that the accusation is true. “Yes, all white people are complicit with racism,” writes DiAngelo, “People will insist that they are not racist… This is the kind of evidence that many white people used to exempt themselves from that system. It is not possible to be exempt from it.” Consequently, for DiAngelo, Whites can only speak about their “whiteness” in terms of how it reinforces an implicit racism within the social system. But from a neuro-scientific perspective, all colored racisms are skewed perceptions of reality. For example, when we gaze into a deep azure sky we immediately assume there is physical blue over our heads. However, there are no blue-colored photons reaching our retinas. Rather, our brains receive the emitted photons and through a complex channeling of information from the eye to the visual cortex. The brain then Photoshops the color azure and projects it through our glance into the empty space of the sky. The same is true whether we gaze at a verdant forest canopy, a fiery sunset, the fluorescent, shimmering hues of a fanning peacock's feathers or observing an African, Asian or European person crossing the street. There is nothing mysterious behind this; it is visual brain science 101. No neuroscientist questions this visual phenomenon.  We reify the sensory stimuli the brain receives from the objective world and then grasp and cling to these as being factually real. Theoretically race may be understood as only a conventional or relative appearance arising to our mental perceptions. No absolute objective claims can be made about it; therefore, there cannot be any absolute analyses or one-size-fits-all solutions for confronting racism either. In striking contrast to White Fragility's cognitive deficiencies, we may consider an argument posed by the great Jewish German existentialist Martin Buber. Buber speaks of an I-You relationship when we engage with another person as another subject instead of as an object. There's a subject there, and that subject is every bit as real as the subject over here. For example, as much as I might care about my own well-being, then so does another person. To transcend White Fragility's divisions and its many shortcomings, which relate to others as I-Its -- as mere objects -- we simply need to be aware of Buber's advice, and become fully engaged with that reality. Buber highlights this as a profoundly existential problem in modern society. It is debilitating.  It is dehumanizing, although for DiAngelo and the cancel culture preserving racial I-It relationships is not only valid but essential. When we regard others simply in terms of whether the color of their skin is appealing or unappealing, pleasant or unpleasant, superior or inferior, and so forth we are bifurcating impressions that have no substance in reality. We are simply treating other sentient beings as if they have no more sentience, no more subjectivity, no more presence from their own side than a robot or computer. But that seems fine for DiAngelo and her tragic dehumanizing dogma. If DiAngelo were unintelligent or had severe brain damage, we might understand and would certainly sympathize. But she -- and we would argue many of those who would carry White Fragility's banner into school classrooms -- are likely very educated people. That is the calamity and the clear evidence for the deep-seated spiritual impoverishment when a person is viewed as nothing more than the race of their physical bodies. If anti-racial wokeness is true, then the more deeply we probe and investigate it, the truer it should appear. This was one of William James' fundamental principles when he made efforts to turn the psychology of his day into a valid science. If James' methodology had not been obliterated by the rise of behaviorism in 1910, psychology would be completely different today. We might actually be treating and curing people of mental disorders without prescribing life-long medications. On the other hand, if DiAngelo's hypothesis is false, the more deeply one investigates, which includes introspection, the more false it will appear. That is where robust inquiry comes in: to determine what is simply true regardless of whatever your personal unsubstantiated and biased beliefs about it might be. What you believe has absolutely no impact upon whether something is true or not. This is also basic Buddhist epistemology that has been repeatedly replicated by contemplatives for several millennia. Neuroscience, including its gross failures and tendencies towards metaphysical realism, has more to tell us about the inherent dangers in White Fragility's doctrine. First, modern brain science has not produced an iota of evidence to confirm that the mind and consciousness are solely a product or output originating in neuron and synaptic activity. None. Contrary to the evidence, most neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists nevertheless embrace this opinion as a settled matter. But it is ridiculous to believe that evolution somehow dragged along our ancient single-celled ancestors until some point was reached when a conscious mind -- a “nothing” that is not observable, not measurable, not quantifiable, without atoms or photons, mass, electric charge or spin – mysteriously arose out of something, such as genes and biomolecular phenomena. Therefore cognitive scientists pretend to know something about the mind and consciousness when in fact they haven't a clue. Although DiAngelo is not stating that socialized racism among Whites is genetically determined, the trajectory of her argument has the potential to lead towards that conclusion. She does consider systemic White racism as being unconscious. Therefore she has moved her social theory into psychology. Since modern psychology today is becoming increasingly informed by the neurosciences, which in turn is being informed by evolutionary biology, it is only a small leap away to find her theory complementing genetic determinism as a means to explain Whiteness' conditioned racism. If her socialized determinism, and that of the neuroscience and evolutionary biology fields, are correct, then it would break the fundamental physical laws of energy conservation and causal efficacy. In effect, DiAngelo is saying White people have no choice. It's socialized chemistry or its socialized chemistry; either way its socialized chemistry.  In effect, DiAngelo is admitting that her own perceptions about reality are fundamentally flawed. Why is that? Dr. Donald Hoffman has been a professor of neuroscience at the University of California at Irvine for over three decades. He has an impeccable background having studied artificial intelligence at MIT. But unlike the vast majority of his colleagues, Hoffman broke ranks and passed beyond neuroscience's 19th century mechanistic base and dared to study modern quantum physics and relativity theory. Theoretical physics is almost anathema in human biological research and medicine, which is why these soft sciences have made so little progress to improve human health and well-being. Hoffman has performed hundreds of thousands of simulations comparing different species and their chances for survival based upon their ability to perceive and comprehend reality more accurately or not. His discoveries are startling and utterly revolutionary. Hoffman discovered, across the board, species that best perceive reality go extinct more rapidly than competing species that only perceive what is necessary for them to remain fit and survive. During an interview following a TED Talk, Hoffman stated, “according to evolution by natural selection,” – and here he is limiting himself solely to evolutionary biological theory and not the various competing theories about the nature of consciousness – “an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.” In other words, evolution has nothing to do with perceiving reality more clearly, but only to be more fit in order to adapt, survive and procreate. And now physicists are even telling us that the primal cause behind all physical objects may be consciousness itself, which has no association whatsoever with natural selection. For example, Professor Edward Witten, regarded as “the world's smartest” physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, has been compared to Newton and Einstein. Witten doesn't believe science will ever understand consciousness. “I think consciousness will remain a mystery,” Witten stated during a lecture, ”I have a much easier time imagining how we understand the Big Bang than I have imagining how we can understand consciousness.” Or we can listen to Stanford University theoretical physicist Andre Linde: “The current scientific model of the material world obeying laws of physics has been so successful that we forget our starting point as conscious observers, and conclude that matter is the only reality and that perceptions are only helpful for describing it. But in fact, we are substituting the reality of our experience of the universe with a conceptually contrived belief…” One may feel our critique is too abstract with little or no practical application; however to at least conceptually understand race in terms of our sensory perceptions can have enormous benefits to cut through and lessen the false semblances that arise from reality deficit disorder that winds up producing books such as White Fragility. Moreover, contrary to DiAngelo's arguments, British journalist Melanie Phillips offers a clearer understanding for why we should not rely upon the pundits of anti-racial wokeness to save us from ourselves. Despite disagreeing with Phillips on many of her other socio-political positions, she correctly identifies the fundamental flaws being voiced by arrested development wokeness across our campuses and within the corporate wing of the Democrat party. First, it is unable to establish a hierarchy of values and morals. For example, if one refuses to say that any lifestyle or culture is better than another, then it cannot be said that liberalism is better than conservatism or any other ideology.  Consequently, faux liberalism cannot legitimately defend the very principles upon which it defines itself: racial and gender equality, freedom of speech and religion, justice and tolerance, and class struggle.  It contradicts its own principles and follows DiAngelo's footsteps to remove the dignity of the individual, which in the past was at the heart of authentic liberalism and once served as its moral backbone. What we are witnessing therefore in Woke liberalism – and in DiAngelo's reinvention of racism -- is “the strong dominating the weak,” and this is an ill-liberal ideology that is already showing signs of having catastrophic consequences in classrooms and the workplace. Finally, if DiAngelo's theory is correct, then all Whites, without exception, in American history, were unconsciously transmuted into racists starting at the time of their birth. What is her proof? Is there any scientific evidence to support this outrageous claim? Did she consider the lack of sensitivity towards other peoples and races who were victims of racial identity and violence, such as the Jews who experienced genocide at hands of their Nazi overlords? And what would she say against those Whites who have fought against racism throughout the American experience, such as the Abolitionists in the US and UK who put their bodies at great risk?  In principle she is labeling them too as racist despite their fighting, protesting and even dying as committed anti-racists. Many Whites have embraced other races and cultures with open arms; however, DiAngelo wants us to believe this legacy was a sham, because in some strange voodoo way they were unconsciously racist. Is this not the height of hubris and arrogance?

A necessary off-shoot of 'Bezo's Bikes,' Ryley brings our attention to some truly horrendous lower end bike offerings he found on eBay. Magical frames, extremely questionable build quality, and horrendous Photoshops await. This doesn't make much sense without visuals, so I'll be posting the bikes we were ragging on to our Instagram account (@bikelanepodcast) so you can put eyes on them yourself, and truly be horrified. I still want to actually buy one of these and try to ride it, time will tell.

Parker Molloy: So you've been writing this awesome newsletter over on Substack, called The Sword and the Sandwich. Can you tell me a little bit about that?Tal Lavin: Yeah, so I launched, actually, this month, October 4th, and it's a really odd... It is an odd mix. Like, I recognize it's an odd mix. The sword is first of all, because I own a bunch of swords, and love them, but also, it sort of symbolizes like I'm writing about the American right and far-right, and then the sandwiches are very literal. Like, for a really long time, I have been obsessed with Wikipedia's list of notable sandwiches, which has hundreds of sandwiches on it, from all over the world, and I have wanted to address this in some systematic way. I love projects that have structure that I can f**k around within, like a sonnet.So the premise is I'm going through every sandwich on that list. It's very arbitrary, you know? Obviously a Wikipedia thing, so it's... But I'm treating it almost like a sacred text, and then going through it and writing essays, or interviews, or recipes, or stories about each sandwich. We've covered the American hero, the bacon sandwich, and bacon, egg, and cheese, and now this week, we're on to bagels, which is exciting for me, so yeah, this week's content is harrowing tales of child abuse and bagels.That's just such an interesting combo. And just to be... Like, those are separate posts. They're not-Oh, yeah, it's not-They're not one in the same.Yeah, so it's like Monday is the s**t that will horrify you, and then Friday, we're riding into the weekend--is the stuff about the American right.No, Friday is the-Horrifying bagels.No, I really aim not to traumatize anyone with my sandwich posts. These are nonviolent sandwiches. It's like I need the break, psychically. Maybe readers do too. Sometimes, it's really hard to shift moods, when... Like, the current series is about corporal punishment in evangelical households, and the sort of ways it impacts people as adults. So it's really hard for me sometimes, to switch modes. I almost resent it. I'm like, "Ugh, now I have to write about bagels," but then I spend an hour researching and writing about bagels, and I feel better, and then dive back into hell.Yeah. Well, as you mentioned, you published the first of a three-part series on corporal punishment, evangelicals, and the "doctrine of obedience," as you write in the piece. I found it fascinating because I honestly didn't... I've never really thought about the history involved in all of that. I'm used to people on Twitter being like, "I don't think it's wrong to hit kids. I got hit, and I'm fine," and then you look at them, and you're like... They're not fine.No. Yeah.No, it's like, "Oh, you think you're fine. But are any of us, really?"I'm not.I'm definitely not.I'm so not fine, and I wasn't raised evangelical. I'm a Jew, and I'm a childless Jew even, so it's not... I can keep some distance from the material. Well, obviously so many people shared their pain with me for this series, lots of different facets of their pain, their stories, how they're coming to terms with it, how they're healing, and to me, not to be melodramatic, but it felt like, "Oh, this is why I became a journalist," and like, I have to hold this pain gently, and treat it well, and treat it as the sacred trust it is. I mean, I don't believe in any god, but whatever. Sometimes I think of things as holy or sacred, as just a stronger word for like really important. Feels necessary.I've been astounded at the response. I mean, I tried to... I have a tic about historical research. Like, almost every piece I've ever written has some element of history in it. I also dove a ton into primary sources for this piece, which in this case was Christian parenting guides, of which I read big swaths or the entirety of like three or four books, and then tons of people's testimony about how these doctrines affected them.And then, I looked at what's the historical context? Like, why did all these books start getting written in the '70s and updated in the '90s? I mean, corporal punishment obviously has been around forever, but like, corporal punishment as sort of a political necessity and as a theological doctrine really arose as like... and the evidence is pretty clear, in the books themselves, and also in like the historical record, that they arose as basically a backlash, both to the work of Dr. Spock, who wrote Baby and Child Care, and he was super popular, and everyone loved him, and he was also an antiwar activist in his later years, and got arrested protesting Vietnam. And he said don't hit your kids, right?It's hard to overstate how much these authors hate Dr. Spock. Like, they hate him. They think he sucks, and he's the reason everything's wrong, but anyway, you have this Dr. Spock influence telling you not to hit your kids, and then essentially what these books posit, or what they feel they're reacting to is like, a lot of the movements in the '60s were student-led. The antiwar movement, the gay rights movement was a youth-led thing in many cases, or perceived as a youth-led movement, the feminist movement was really led by young women, and the sort of curative, the corrective force is writing these books.James Dobson, of Focus on the Family fame, his first book was called Dare to Discipline, like he's like, "We're fighting against this godless heathens that tell us not to hit our kids." So basically, they're saying chaos and social disorder starts in the home, and you have to hit your kids to get them in line.I cannot wait to read the second and third piece of this, because the first one is great. It really starts to get into Dobson, and The Pearls, and all of that stuff, and the responses have been heartbreaking, that I've seen from people, where they are talking about how it affected them on a personal level, and on one hand, it's amazing that the story has resonated with that many people, and that that's clearly captured what they're feeling and what they're going through, and I mean, that's just you being a great writer, and interviewer, and researcher. I mean, beyond that, it's just so profoundly sad that there are so many people in this world who have been hurt in that sort of way. They haven't felt able to express these ideas themselves, for fear of backlash or for fear of coming off as weak. That was another thing that I saw in some of the replies here, but-Or because they were taught that it was holy, that it was ordained by God, and a lot of the people, the people who spoke to me, have left evangelicalism. There's a process, it's like a very common term, and sort of ex-evangelicals. Basically, it's just calling it deconstruction, sort of tearing down the doctrines you were raised up with and figuring out a new way forward, and I really applaud people who are doing that work. It's very difficult. It's very painful.My Substack's really new. Like, I have 3,000 subscribers. It's small. The post, as of now, it's been out for less than two days, and it's gotten 50,000 views almost. I think to me, that's just an indicator of how it resonates, how people... I mean, first of all, I think there are a lot of outsiders who are sort of horrified, and then there are a lot of people who are like, "This was my childhood. I've never heard it discussed this way. I've never connected these dots." And the heartbreaking thing is like people are so grateful, grateful, that someone cares, anyone, about what happened to them. Generations of kids, generations. Like, the people who talked to me ranged from 22 to 65. It's very much a live issue, and it's still happening, although spanking is, thankfully...I hate the term spanking, actually, because spanking, I think has a lovely place in kink, but when you're talking about it in child-rearing, you are talking about hitting kids, so I've actually sort of very consciously, in my public speech about this stuff, stopped using that term, because it feels like a euphemism to me. You're talking about hitting children with the intent of causing pain.That's exactly it. I made the mistake of not writing down any questions, because I was like, "I know you. We're going to just-"We're just going to vibe about-Yeah, and it's like, "Oh, man. This is so dark and hard," you know? But that's what I love about your writing. You wrote this amazing book, Culture Warlords.And yeah, it was about basically me f*****g immersing myself in online Nazi life for like 18 months, and it was hard. It was a hard thing to do, as a Jew, as a person, who doesn't like seeing clips of murders on my phone all the time, presented as just and right. But I guess yeah, my beat is like looking into darkness and coming back out with a report.It feels weird to be like, "You're so good at this," you know? This thing that involves hate, and darkness, and pain, but your book was my favorite book of last year, and it's one of those books that I recommend to anyone who's at all curious about what's happening in the world, because I don't think you could talk about any current event without talking about how so much of our lives is affected by the far right, and white supremacist groups, and antisemitic people, and it's really kind of scary how much all of that overlaps, you know? You have the white supremacist groups.They tend to overlap in their beliefs with a lot of the evangelical groups, which tend to overlap with a lot of the anti-LGBTQ groups, these sorts of things where there's a very powerful and strong coalition of people that, I don't know, they just make the world a worse place by what they do and what they say, not by existing. I mean, I'm all for people existing. I want to make that clear, but I think that their actions and what they do just makes things so much harder. Is there anything in going into writing that, or in just your work generally, that surprised you? Were there any ideas that you had, that you had to challenge and rethink along the process?Well, so one of the big... How do I put this? Okay. I will answer your question after, but this is something that... Culture Warlords was my first book. I had never written one before, and it has some first book syndrome, which is like I put too much of myself in it, you know? Where it at points bordered on the memoiristic in ways that I now look back on with a little bit of regret, just in the sense that it feels a bit self-indulgent sometimes, like we didn't need a chapter on my childhood.The other major regret I have is not including... I did address transphobia in these contexts. I didn't address it as much as it deserved. Like, it should have had its own chapter, and I'm working on a second book right now, called Lone Wolves Run in Packs, which is about sort of debunking the sort of Lone Wolf theorem that people radicalize in isolation, that sort of white supremacist terror arises because individuals make choices. It's much more about the communities that these kinds of extremism arise from.And I know transphobia is going to be at the center of a lot of what I write, because it is, at the moment, as Judith Butler very eloquently articulated recently in The Guardian, at the forefront and center of all of these rising fascist movements. And I mean, it is all interconnected. Like, that's what makes it sort of endlessly fascinating and sometimes a bit overwhelming, is like you don't know when to stop researching.For example, part two of this series is about basically how child corporal punishment affects romantic relationships in the future. Essentially, it's like if you grow up in an environment where you're told... where you accept pain as your due, and specifically in an environment where God is invoked constantly, your sinful nature is evoked constantly, and one of the more terrifying aspects of this whole Christian corporal punishment thing is like, there's a very strong recommendation in all of these parenting books. It's like, "After your kid gets spanked, first of all, if they cry too much from spanking, they're trying to manipulate you, so spank them again. And then also, like hold them, and tell them you love them, and explain, like whisper to them gently about obedience."It's creepy as f**k, to me, but it also is like, this is trauma bonding. Trauma bonding is a concept in psychology. It's a big way of how abusive relationships work, where basically, you're traumatized by someone. They hit you, they belittle you, whatever, and then they make up with you afterwards, and hold you, and comfort you from the trauma that they inflicted. So, these parental doctrines are essentially... And they're not unique to evangelicalism. I think the unique part here is that sort of theologically mandates in some circles and some biblical interpretations, but like it is pretty common, and the people that I see, who are defending hitting kids in my mentions, are like, "My parents always apologized after, and told me they loved me, and I turned out great," and like, "Did you? Because you're defending hitting kids to me. Like, you're pro-child assault, so I don't know how fine you turned out."But at any rate, at any rate, basically my A thesis of the second part, and this absolutely bears out in the 150 people that talked to me, many of them, and most of the people who responded to my questionnaire, which is a smaller subset, said like, "I was primed for abusive relationships. Like, I was primed. I knew how to pretend. I knew how to conceal my emotions. I was taught that I was worthless. I was taught that I deserve violence, and I could expect it from the people that loved me. Like, that was the lesson of my childhood, and of course, it went on to affect what I accepted as proper treatment in romantic contexts." And there's tons of other s**t. I mean, sorry. I'm babbling at this point, but it's like...You know, now I'm like reading a whole new set of primary sources, with Christian homeschooling materials, and these doctrines about patriarchy and submission, and like specifically it affects girls very strongly. Men are also affected, boys and men are also affected for sure, in slightly different ways. And I mean, of course it's all connected, right? If the people that I talked to did some really brave work in moving away from the ways they were raised with this kind of brutality, many people don't do that work, for many reasons, and go on to reproduce it in their lives.Like, it's really, really hard to say, like, "My parents, who loved me and who I love, hurt me, and did wrong," or like, "I hit my kids, and I was wrong to do that." It's like really, really, really hard, to make those moral distinctions, to assess your past and present critically, and a lot of people are neither inclined nor able to do that. And with all the empathy and respect that I can muster, I think one of the roots of authoritarianism in our country, and especially among the Christian right, is...And this is a nascent understanding. It's not backed with science. It's more just like what I've been researching lately. I think there is a current of tremendous violence that undergirds this culture. It's like, because hierarchies of sex, of gender, of spouses and children as property, you know, are at the core of this doctrine, and enforced by often brutal, often daily physical violence. So it's a self-reproducing ideology in that sense.Right. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, that's a great point. You know, one other thing I wanted to kind of touch on here, not to change gears too sharply, but one thing that I think that both... Because we both worked at Media Matters for a little bit, and one of the things there is just sort of examining the right-wing media ecosystem, which exists on big and small scales. You have Fox News, which is large, but you also have weird little networks of right-wing bloggers, that coordinate very closely, and that's not something you see on the left as much, or at all. That's why there's this ability of people on the right to really get people who oppose them to be quiet, to shut up, to go away, to not bother them because it becomes not worth it.And I know that there have been times where I've seen something, and I'm like, "I want to write about this," and then I have to think, is it worth it? And when you wrote your book, that was after you had already not only been targeted by randos online, but you had ICE giving you s**t. You had DHS upset, because you tweeted about an ICE agent's tattoo, which you were not the first person to tweet that, and you were really one of the few people who actually said, "Oh no, I mistook that tattoo. I am sorry. My mistake."But it was clear that there was this idea that you were influential in a certain sense, and they wanted to just make your life kind of hell. What was that like, and how does that affect what you write about and how you write about it? I mean, in the sense that there has to be sort of this fear that every time you go into writing these stories that you're going to get targeted. And I know that it can take a major toll on you, and I think that... I don't know. Just any time I see something like that happen, it just breaks my heart, because you do such great work, and yet you've had the federal government giving you a hard time, and trying to push you out of your job.Yeah. I mean, it sucked. That was back in 2018. But it recurs daily, in this very warped way. I got Ken Klippenstein in The Nation, to kind of tell my story through... We sued ICE under FOIA to be like, "What do you actually have?" And they didn't have my tweet, because I had deleted my f*****g tweet, which by the way, didn't say, "This guy's a Nazi." It was just a picture of the tattoo that ICE had tweeted out, without the guy's name, and it looked like an Iron Cross, and then like a picture of an Iron Cross. It was sort of like a question mark. Whatever. It was a late-night thing. I'd seen it tossed around in different circles already online.And I deleted it after 15 minutes. I was like, "I made a mistake," you know? People pointed out it might be a Maltese Cross. And the next morning, ICE issued a press release, blaming me. We FOIA'd their emails, and they were like, "Ah, we don't have her original tweet." No one had it. Like, given all the people that picked over every aspect of my life, you think someone would have screenshotted that original tweet if it truly virally influenced a trend. It didn't. It straight up didn't. That's not factual. But at the time, I mean, I was very young. I mean, not very young. I was younger, and naïve.You're like, "It was three years ago."I've aged 40 million years in the interim because that was my first... I had written a bit about the right. I'd started writing about it. I wrote my first piece about the far right in 2017, so I was pretty new in that realm. I'd had a couple of Daily Stormer pieces about me or whatever, but... It sucks, it hurts, it's weird, but when you are public, you kind of expect it. I was public on a much smaller scale than I am now, and I was employed. I was a fact-checker at The New Yorker.Oh, god. It was just like we were getting so much... The fact-checking department was getting hate mail, and at the time, right? I was very earnest. I loved my job. I loved my coworkers. It's still the best job I've ever had, probably ever will, because it was fascinating. I was learning something new every week. Like, I got to do research all the time, and it was great. Great. I called fascinating people constantly. But like, I really was like, this is... I was very like, this is impacting poorly on the company. This is impacting poorly on my peers. Like, I must sacrifice myself, because I just don't belong here anymore.And of course, like I was getting so much hate mail, and segments on Fox about it, because ICE painted a giant target on my back over a lie, because I was a convenient target. I mean, it's like The New Yorker. She's a Harvard graduate. She's Jewish. She's fat. She's the media. Whatever. Like, I was a very convenient culture war proxy. It was also at a time of very intense outrage at the whole babies in cages thing, so it's like let's throw some meat to the lions or whatever, and the meat was me.I mean, so it's like, I was so naïve, and so traumatized frankly, that I was... It was an awful week. Like, I self-harmed for the first time in ages. Like, you know? And it still comes up constantly. Any time I say anything, someone will be like, "Didn't you accuse a veteran of being a Nazi?" I'm like, "No, I didn't." Anyway. But like then you sound all tinfoily, when you're like, "The government was lying." Like, it's hard to... And I was stupid. I was stupid to resign, and thus cement a narrative that I'd done something wrong. I have so many regrets about how I handled all that s**t, like now, now that I've been through the fire a bunch more times.I will say, though, it severed me from traditional journalism, at least staffed traditional journalism. Like, I've written in a lot of publications, from The New Republic, to Vice, and whatever. I've had freelance bylines all over, but I've basically, besides a brief stint at Media Matters, which I got laid off for pay, for like money reasons, like they were trimming down their extremism department, which seems like a weird decision in retrospect.Yeah.Like, I haven't had a staff job since, and now I'm Substacking. I appreciate the stability of Substack. I also am like, obviously there's TERF ambivalence. Like, the first Substack experience I had was like Glenn Greenwald being like, "How dare you tweet," you know? And saying like I think Substack shouldn't have these outspoken TERFs on it anymore. Which f**k Glenn Greenwald. He's just like a troll all the time. I call him “Glerb” in my head.Glerb.Anyway. Whatever. It's not so interesting. I've written about... One piece that kind of goes into my reflections, and what I'd learned from that whole shitty, depressing incident, and its various ripple effects, like Laura Ingraham calling me a terrorist and stuff. I had a conversation with Lyz Lenz, who writes the Men Yell at Me newsletter, where we talked about kind of what it feels like to get these kinds of mobbings. They are absolutely techniques to silence. They are very frequently employed by the right, because the right has a much stronger villain of the day kind of methodology. That's what they do. That's like... We've studied right wing ecologies of information, and like, essentially it's like, yeah, a villain of the day can go through so many iterations, from all of these ideologically completely uniform, like punitively distinct media brands. It's a little like the five minutes of hate thing from 1984, and when you're the subject of it, it's very... And I've talked to a lot of women particularly, and transwomen, women through queer women, just women, basically, through... I'm sorry to make that... I didn't mean to make that as a distinction. It's just more like the different loci of vulnerability.We're good.It's like been almost exclusively women, through the process of like, "How do I get my information offline? How do I deal?" I have some practical tips, mostly just sign up for DeleteMe. It's a useful service. Anyone who's a journalist, frankly I think should be signed up for it, because you'll have... Chances are, you'll have your time in the hopper, especially if you are not a conservative white man. But like, a lot of it is emotional guidance. Like, the way I describe it sometimes is like having the roof ripped off your life. Like, you feel like you're just toddling along, a relatively insignificant figure, and suddenly, you're in a national spotlight as villain of the day. It's a f*****g traumatizing experience, really. I feel like this podcast is you asking reasonable questions, and then me like just rambling.No. I mean, it's all very fascinating, because it's hard to explain to people who haven't gone through anything like this, because on a smaller scale, I've gone through this. Like, there was one time, I was at home, and I was just sitting there, and Andy Ngo posted a thing that was... It was like a photo that showed his backpack, with white dots on it, and I said that it looked like a pigeon pooped on him. I thought that was just kind of funny, and I closed Twitter, and I took a nap. Then when I woke up, I had people who were like, "Wow, you were cheering for him to be poisoned with cement milkshakes and beaten to death," and I'm like, "What the f**k?"So then I delete my tweet, and I say, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean for it to be taken that way," et cetera, et cetera, and one thing I've learned is if you publicly acknowledge something and if you publicly apologize for it, they go, "Ha, we've got you." And that happened with... I remember there was one time, there was a trump rally, where David Weigel at The Washington Post tweeted out a photo that showed the rally kind of half empty, but he took it from a weird angle. It was an accident. He accidentally showed the rally looking small, and Trump himself, who at the time was the president of the United States, tweeted out a demand for an apology, so Dave responds by saying like, "Yeah, sure. I'm sorry. That was a mistake. Here. Here are some other photos from the event. We're good, right?"And then the response to that was Trump then said, "You should be fired," you know? It's this whole thing where if you ever acknowledge that maybe you got something wrong, that is what they just cling onto and create their narrative around.Yeah, I mean-That's why it's so frustrating.... it's “don't show the whites of your eyes” kind of vibe.Yeah.Oh, Andy Ngo is such a putrid f**k. I really hate him. I called him a... I think I called him a fascism-adjacent dipshit in my book, like down on paper. I wish it was in the index as like, "Ngo Andy, fascism-adjacent dipshittery of,"See also.Like, yeah. Right? He sucks, and he's so deeply transphobic and racist. Like, all of his... It's interesting. Like, he's a very big purveyor of the five minutes of hate format, and he always highlights gender-nonconforming protestors. He highlights black protestors. It's very calculated. It is very... obviously comes from very deep-seated bigotry on his part, and to me, that is just factual. It's the way he works, and he knows who his audience is, and he is who he is. We met once, because I was covering this conference. It was like him and-Oh, I remember that.It was in the book, yeah. It was like him and Tim Pool, like organized this conference to prove how tolerant they were, and I wound up being chased out.Yep.Which to me was pretty... And then they were like, "You were chased out? You just walked away, while being followed by people." And like, okay.Well, and also you were live-tweeting it at the time, so it was very clear what was happening, you know? It's like anyone who was reading your tweets saw that you were... they were... There were people there who were treating you horribly, and then you-Well, Ngo said I look like a pigeon, and that I'd waddled away, which like, pigeons are very noble birds. They can eat garbage without any adverse effects, and they successfully hide their young offspring such as I've never seen a baby pigeon. So, I admire the pigeon as an urban bird, and I don't find it offensive. And you know what? But whether I waddled, or sauntered, or whatever, people were screaming at me, and I would describe that as being chased... It's so surreal. You wind up in... I think I opened the chapter on that rally by just being like, "I'm sitting at home, arguing about whether I was chased or not." Like, you wind up in these obscene, stupid semantic scenarios, and they were like, "We're going to get security footage from the casino." It was held at a casino, "Like to prove that you weren't chased." And they never produced the security footage. They found like one security chief guy who was like, "No one was chased, probably." Because of course he would say that, right?Yeah. They're not going to be like, "Yeah, someone was chased, and we just kind of sat back and were like, huh."Like, "Yeah, people routinely get ideologically run out of our casino." Like, you know? And they're so enamored of gotchas. They also love choosing the most unflattering pictures of me online. I think also when you're a woman, and like, so they inherently see you in this sexualized way, the sheer amount of fucked up s**t that's happened with my photos... Someone posed as me on 4chan, and it was like, "I'm Talia Lavin, a journalist, and here's a bikini photo of me to prove it," and three separate times. I had posted one bikini photo in the history of time on the internet, and like, it's just weird s**t, like saying, "You look like a neanderthal," or weird Photoshops. You know what I'm talking about.Oh, absolutely.Like, it's very sexualized, and it's also this mix of like, "You're disgusting, and I'm going to sexually demean you, and..." Like, I will say, that's one of the things that I know has left some residual psychic s**t. Like, I've had periods of my life where I look in the mirror, and I'm like, "Am I the monster they think I am?" You know? And it really depends. It's like, if I'm having a good day, mentally, it all just slides off my back. If I'm having a bad day, it can sink in. And this, "Don't feed the trolls" s**t, like they're not going to go away.No.If you feed them or not.Yeah.Like, you know? It's not... You can't blame people who are targeted for how they react.Right. Yeah, and that's the thing. It's like, I still don't know what the right way to respond to-There isn't like-... harassment is, because there's not, yeah. It's just a bad situation, and it's... I mean, that's part of the reason... I don't know. I felt there came a time where I couldn't just mentally commit to having a full-time job, if that makes sense. I mean, I kind of got to this point where my mental health had just deteriorated from a lot of the same stuff that you were just kind of talking about, where-Also Media Matters specifically is like, look at horrifying and traumatic s**t all f*****g day.Yeah. It's like, I love the-Write it up in these little bulletins that no one reads. Like, I mean, it's great, and they do great work, but like-Great work, but-... it is a tough organization to work in.Yeah. I mean, and I feel like it's only gotten harder over the years, because it used to be like, "Hey, look, Bill O'Reilly said something that wasn't true." And now it's like, "Oh, Tucker Carlson invited the grand wizard of the KKK to..." You know, and you're just like, "How did we get here?" And especially the people there who have to do so much of the research on 4chan and all the online stuff. That is-Well, I mean, that was my job.Yeah, that was you.Every time I talked to... Every time someone would say to me like, "Oh wow, I can't believe that you have to do..." I'm like, "At least I don't have to watch NRATV every day. I don't have to go through 4chan." I mean, people would point out to me whenever something I tweeted would end up being screen-capped and posted to 4chan, which was sometimes helpful, and sometimes I was like, "I don't need to know this," you know? And it's just-It's like, "Just FYI, they're posting pictures of you on 4chan."It's like, "Oh, cool, cool, cool." But yeah, I mean, it's tough, and it takes a toll on you that I don't... I don't know. And it's hard to just go, "Well, it's only a few people. It's only 10 people or 100 people out of millions out there," you know? Or something like that. But I mean, if 100 people are tweeting about you nonstop, or messaging you, or trying to start a harassment campaign, it feels like it's the whole world. It really does, and it eats away at... It was eating away at my ability to stay focused on work, and doing what I wanted to do, so I mean, that is personally why I was like...You know, it's like I had a lot of reservations when it came to making a jump to trying to do a newsletter, and especially with Substack, but ultimately, I was like, I think this is the better option for me personally, because it provided a certain level of stability, a certain level of just me being able to write a bunch of things in advance, and if for two days, I can't work or can't function, essentially, then I'm okay, you know? That's kind of one of the plus-sides there.Yeah, I mean, freelancing is super “publish or perish.” It's like, if I don't write, I don't get paid, and sometimes it's hard. I mean, yeah. I mean, that resonates so much, and I think like, I mean, people have asked me, or concerned family members have been like, "Why don't you write a cookbook? Like, why don't you do something different?" I'm like, "Yeah, no I will." Like, my third book is definitely going to be like a food-focused memoir. That's the plan. But I have... And when I'm talking about my current work, I'm...Oh. Oh, now I remember what I was going to say, about why it feels so powerful when even a relatively small number of people are coming after you. My therapist, not to be like, "My therapist," but my therapist, who I started seeing just before the whole ICE thing, and he's lovely, and we've been in this therapeutic relationship for years, he's like, "It's evolutionary." There's a reason why we selectively remember bad things, selectively prize, or sort of focus and obsess on bad voices about us. It's because there is an evolutionary mandate to be aware of criticism, so you don't get kicked out of the tribe and lose your security and your food. Like, there is an evolutionary mandate to keep an eye on criticism, and it's a self-preservation mechanic in its way.It only becomes maladaptive in this completely unprecedented context, of like within a minute, a million people can see your stupid thing. Like, Twitter I think in particular, is very the sort of, "I'm talking to my sphere, and then suddenly it gets catapulted into a much larger one." Like, that's a unique feature of the platform. It's part of what makes it fun, is being able to see voices that you never would have heard, and people from all over the world, and all that stuff, but it can entail this relatively traumatic leap from like, "I'm just talking to my buddies," to like, "Now everyone's criticizing me for something," and sometimes, it's from people who are leftier than me, and sometimes that can be more painful, because I'm like, "I probably agree with you. I just wish you weren't being such a dick about it."Yeah.Or, "Am I wrong? Should I retire and become a Benedictine monk?" And then it's from the right, and to be honest, that's less painful for me most of the time, because I'm just like, "Ah, I'm used to genocidal f*****s being horrible, because I'm anti-genocide."Whoa, bold position, anti-genocide.I mean, like I don't... Yeah, and like, I... Ugh, whatever. So, context collapse is a major thing, but also, there is an evolutionary... Not that I'm so into evolutionary biology, because I think it's a lot of b******t sometimes, but there is a survival value in looking at critique. It's just the level, and ubiquity, and immediacy of that critique. Like, these are not your tribe. They're not going to imperil your food, but you're still wired to be like... You know?Yeah.To keep it in mind, because they also might kill you, or whatever.Yeah. I mean, it is good to... There is that line, of is it good to be aware of criticism or not? There are obviously things, you know, threats to your life, and those are important to know, and to be aware of, because you don't want to be harmed by someone, you know?Or your family.Yeah, or that is another one. I mean, I've had situations where it's been... I've gotten messages from people who were talking about my family, and where they live, and stuff like that. It's like, "What is wrong with you? Why would you do this? Because you disagree with something I wrote online? Because you disagree with me?" Those sorts of things, it's... A lot of it's-It's very... Yeah.Yeah, it's a product of this time of hyper-connectedness that we live in, you know? And the way we communicate, which is kind of... I mean, that's kind of the angle that I'm trying to think about a lot of things. I mean, that's kind of the premise of my newsletter, is just-The present age.Yeah, it's like here we are, and everything is insane, and I don't know what to do, you know? But we're trying to get through it. I mean, with the pandemic especially, so much of our communication has shifted to the internet, that might not have been before, but I mean, in my case, and maybe yours, it's like, yeah, it was already on the internet, but you know? It's like, I was already spending way too much time on social media before the pandemic, before it was cool.It's like, I'm a weird recluse.Yeah, exactly.Like, half my friends are online. Like, yeah.Yeah.I mean, I think it just helps me to reframe. I think a lot of people who are in this experience, especially in the first time or first several times, are like, you know, "Am I weak for feeling bad?" I'm like, "No." It's human nature, you know? You're not weak. Like, please don't beat yourself up about having feelings about people saying terrible things about you. Like, you know? That's part of my like Talia's pep talk for traumatized victims of the right-wing hate complex thing. You know, and there's also the like, "Am I wrong for seeking it out?" I'm like, you know, it can be a discipline thing, to try to not seek it out all the time. Well, yeah, it's also human nature. Forgive yourself for that, for wanting to know. That is also a very natural impulse.In my case, I mean, stuff does happen that I need to be aware of. You know, when literally the organizer of Unite the Right, Jason Kessler, posted my mom's office address on a Nazi blog. S**t like that, like I need to know. I need to warn, and I feel so f*****g guilty that my family has to suffer for my choice to traumatize myself every day. I mean, it is interesting. I do feel like the evangelical series that I'm working on now is like... is interconnected with a lot of this stuff, in ways that are maybe less explicit, maybe less overt, but I think it is interconnected. I also think these are just stories of pain that deserve honor and telling, and careful telling.But I do think it's interconnected. I also think like, you know? In my experience, if you deep dive and learn a lot about one thing, you see the way it shows up in lots of other places. I've rarely regretted learning a lot about a subject in my time. Like, could I be focusing on the Charlottesville trial? Could I be focusing on militias? Could I be focusing on what are the Oath Keepers up to lately? Like, could I be focusing on the antivax white nationalist nexus? Of course. There's so many topics. There's like-Yeah, there's no shortage.Yeah, I had to explain to someone, when I'm talking about like I study the far right, there's a massive range of topics, covering tens of millions of people. It's not like, "How could you have such a narrow beat?" It's not narrow.No.And it almost mirrors in that sense, like my experience of academics. I was very serious as a student, and I didn't do a PhD. I thought about it, but it was like I was studying one poet, and all their works, and how they came to translate things the way they did, and the deeper you dive into one topic, the more of a world it encompasses. Like, you learn one thing, and you learn the history of it, and something else, and something else, and something else, so I rarely regret my sort of history-based and deep dive model of things.It's sometimes very intensive. It requires a lot. I think I've bought, for this project, I have bought eight or nine books already, including some that are only available on paperback, so I'm going to get a copy of God, The Rod, and Your Child's Bod in the mail, which I then... Once I read it and use it, I plan to publicly burn it.Yeah. I mean, that's going to... I feel like buying that is something that ends up getting you on a watchlist or something.You'd think, but you know what? Like, corporal punishment is legal in public schools in 19 states.Yeah. I mean-It's legal in private schools in 48 states. My home state of New Jersey is one of the two that's banned it in private schools.There you go. See? “New Jersey. We've banned something.”Jersey pride.Yeah.Jersey pride. And I feel conflict when I'm talking about should it be... Like, many countries have outright banned corporal punishment, of any kind, even by parents. You know, even by parents, whatever, including by parents. Sweden was the first, in 1979, and like, is that what I'm advocating for in the US? If we had a less s**t justice system, and a less racist justice system, and whatever, it's such a punitive and carceral society, maybe. That's not what I'm advocating for when I'm just saying like, "Don't hit your kids" on social media a lot lately. I do think it's a very reasonable demand to say like, ban it in schools. Like, because people get paddled in schools every day, and it's disproportionately black students that get paddled.And that's-By paddled, I mean struck with a board to cause pain.Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, and I mean, that's another issue in itself, is that you know, with any policy, with any sort of action, it's the enforcement of said action or policy tends to affect marginalized groups more than everyone else basically, but I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me. You are one of the smartest people I know, one of the best writers I know, and I cannot recommend enough that people subscribe to The Sword and the Sandwich for both sword and sandwich posts, because-Yeah.... you will learn something in both.Yeah, I'm like looking at all this stuff about the history of the bagel right now. I found this New York Times article from 1960, that called bagels... What was it? "An unsweetened donut with rigor mortis."Like, okay, first of all, it's so good. I'm unabashedly pro bagel in my life, so-I don't trust anyone who's not pro bagel, to be honest, so-Yeah, so there is the sandwich part. The sword part is, you know, rougher, but they're both valuable in their own way, and thank you so much for having me on.Of course. Any time.Yeah. And I enjoyed this kind of loose, wide-ranging conversation.Yeah, it was great! It was so much fun. I really appreciate it. Get full access to The Present Age at www.readthepresentage.com/subscribe

Woke Critical Race Theory as Reality Deficit Disorder   Richard Gale & Gary Null PhD Progressive Radio Network, July 1, 2021     Let us be clear. The recent rise in Wokeness is another symptom of America's “reality deficit disorder (RDD),” a condition that continues to proliferate across the American landscape since the Age of Enlightenment and the 19th century's advent of scientific materialism as a secular religion.  The proponents of modern behaviorism and the neurosciences are likewise saturated with RDD. The gurus of modern Critical Race Theory, the Woke self-congratulating experts and false prophets, are its public face.  These are plastic intellectuals who have found a righteous purpose spread the message in the Woke Critical Race movement's bible, Robin DiAngelo's bestseller White Fragility. Identity politics, efforts to consolidate groupthink in order to promulgate illusions about race, social status, and gender have found their voice in DiAngelo's and Ibram Kendi's writings.   Despite the widespread adulation DiAngelo has received from liberal educators, the mega-corporate elite, and the liberal media, she has managed to jockey herself away from the deep scrutiny her writings and lectures deserve.  An exception is Jonathan Church, author of Reinventing Racism, who brilliantly exposes DiAngelo's flaws and deconstructs her façade of being objective.  Church takes a more philosophical offensive to shed light on DiAngelo's implicit biases and contradictions that in turn distort the very ideas she attempts to proselytize. While we agree wholeheartedly with Church's polemic, we would take a more scientific approach and state that DiAngelo's racial theories of irredeemable Whiteness have no basis in reality whatsoever.    White Fragility reads like a tantrum by an author deeply confused about her own identity and with a third-rate intellect. “All white people,” DiAngelo wants us to believe, “are invested in and collude with racism.” If you were born White then racism is built into your genetic inheritance. There can be no escape from this curse, DiAngelo suggests, no redemption or purification by fire regardless of how much penitence, public service or charity you perform for the greater good. We wonder whether she would include the indigenous White Finno-Ugric peoples inhabiting the most northern forests and tundra of Scandinavia and Russia's Kola Peninsula are also genetically colluding in perpetuating the world's racism.   The author reminds us of someone who has read every published book about chocolate and thus feels qualified to write one of their own; however, the person has never actually tasted chocolate. Philosophy and postmodern sociology in general, notably the modern philosophies of science and mind, suffer from this mental affliction. They write books about other philosophers' books who in turn wrote books about their predecessors' scribbling. Many authors writing about religion suffer from this same malady.  Right-wing critics to RCT Wokeness likewise indulge in a similar cognitive hallucination built upon feeble-minded pre-Galilean superstitions.  When the time comes to take their last breath, they will have failed to achieve any conscious lucidity to read the last page in the novel of their lives.  Their perceptions of themselves and the world, their righteous anger and biases, will be revealed as dreamscapes –nevertheless the phantoms they have conjured will have had dire consequences to the welfare of innocent victims prejudiced and canceled by their vitriol and condemnation.    There have always been conflicting ideologies, cherished beliefs and inflamed emotions towards racial discrepancies, social order or how the nation should be governed. But today these cognitive afflictions, masquerading as passions and righteous causes such as Woke Culture's anti-racism, have disintegrated into tribalism. This is now fomenting new class and racial distinctions and struggles as well as media turf wars. No one can accurately predict where this collective reality deficit disorder will lead ultimately but it certainly won't contribute to any positive advancement of human well-being. It repeats the old adage of garbage in, garbage out.   “The greatest need of our time,” the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote in his Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, “is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning we cannot begin to see. Unless we see we cannot think.”  Merton believed that this “purification must begin with the mass media.”  We would suggest it also begins with our educational institutions. Teachers who embrace White Fragility's social folly, need to introspectively gaze and observe the destructive ataxia nesting in their own minds.  If anyone wonders why the nation is so angry, screaming and protesting, it is because the failed neoliberal experiment, the culture of political nepotism, a captured and biased media, and a thoroughly corrupt judiciary have created this horror show. DiAngelo seemingly wants to gather tinder keep racial conflagrations burning.   "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous," Martin Luther King lamented, "than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." It is our deep ignorance about not knowing ourselves and appreciating our intrinsic interconnections with each other and the environment that perpetuates the suffering around us. These deeper existential relationships outsmart and surpass any value Critical Race Theory might offer. This includes our attachments to whatever accomplishments and failures we experience in our lives through racial identity, which lead to a reality deficit with all of its superiority complexes, apathy and depression.    First, there is sufficient empirical science to reach a consensus that we are a culture that has become habituated to mistaking its unfounded perceptions about itself and the world as reality-based. This applies to our cognitive conceptions of Whiteness, Blackness, Yellowness, etc. Church makes this clear; DiAngelo's use of the term Whiteness is “nebulous” and “vague.”  He points out that her logic falls into a Kafka Trap, referring to Kafka's novel The Trial when an unassuming man is dragged into court and accused for an unspecified crime; subsequently his unwavering denial is itself interpreted as absolute proof that the accusation is true. “Yes, all white people are complicit with racism,” writes DiAngelo, “People will insist that they are not racist… This is the kind of evidence that many white people used to exempt themselves from that system. It is not possible to be exempt from it.” Consequently, for DiAngelo and Kendi, Whites can only speak about their “whiteness” in terms of how it reinforces systemic racism. But from a neuro-scientific perspective, all colored racisms are skewed perceptions of reality.    For example, when we gaze into a deep azure sky we immediately assume there is physical blue over our heads. However, there are no blue-colored photons reaching our retinas. Rather, our brains receive the emitted photons and through a complex channeling of information from the eye to the visual cortex the brain then Photoshops the color azure and projects it through our glance into the empty space of the sky. The same is true whether we gaze at a verdant forest canopy, a fiery sunset, the fluorescent, shimmering hues of a fanning peacock's feathers or observing an African, Asian or European person crossing the street.     There is nothing mysterious behind this; it is visual brain science 101. No neuroscientist questions this visual phenomena.  We reify the sensory stimuli the brain receives from the objective world and then grasp and cling to these as being factually real. Theoretically race may be understood as only a conventional or relative appearance arising to our mental perceptions. No absolutely objective claims can be made about it; therefore, there cannot be any absolute analyses or solutions for confronting racism either.    In striking contrast to White Fragility's cognitive deficiencies, we may consider an argument posed by the great German and Jewish existentialist philosopher Martin Buber. Buber speaks of an I-You relationship when we engage with another person as another subject instead of as an object. There's a subject there, and that subject is every bit as real as the subject over here. As much as I care about my own well-being, then so do you. To transcend Critical Race Theory's divisions and its many shortcomings, which relate to others as I-Its -- as mere objects -- we simply need to be aware of Buber's advice, and become fully engaged with that reality. Buber highlights this as a profoundly existential problem in modern society. It is debilitating.  It is dehumanizing and horrid, although for DiAngelo and Critical Wokeness preserving racial I-It relationships is not only valid but essential. When we regard others simply in terms of whether the color of their skin is appealing or unappealing, pleasant or unpleasant, superior or inferior, and so forth we are bifurcating impressions that have no substance in reality. We are simply treating other sentient beings as if they have no more sentience, no more subjectivity, no more presence from their own side than a robot or computer. But that seems fine for DiAngelo and her tragic dehumanizing dogma, the output of a massive reality deficit disorder.    If DiAngelo were unintelligent or had severe brain damage, we might understand and would certainly sympathize. But she and Ibram Kendi -- and we would argue all of their followers who carry White Fragility's banner into school classrooms -- are likely very educated people. That is the calamity and the clear evidence for the deep-seated spiritual impoverishment when a person is viewed as nothing more than the race of their physical bodies.   If antii-racial Wokeness is true, then the more deeply we probe and investigate it, the truer it should appear. This is one of William James' fundamental principles when he made efforts to turn the psychology of his day into a real science. If Jame's methodololgy had not been obliterated by the rise of behaviorism in 1910, psychology would be completely different today. We would actually be treating and curing people of mental disorders, and with life-long medications. On the other hand, if DiAngelo's hypothesis is false, the more deeply you investigate, which includes introspection, the more false it will appear. That is where robust inquiry comes in: to determine what is simply true regardless of whatever your personal unsubstantiated and biased beliefs about it might be. What you believe has absolutely no impact upon whether something is true or not. This is also basic Buddhist epistemology that has been repeatedly replicated by contemplatives for several millennia. However, for the Woked who cling to their beliefs most fiercely they are trapped in a cave of their own system's illusions.    Neuroscience, including its gross failures and tendencies towards metaphysical realism, has more to tell us about the inherent dangers in White Fragility's doctrine. First, modern brain science has not produced an iota of evidence to confirm that the mind and consciousness are solely a product or output originating in neuron and synaptic activity. None. Contrary to the evidence, most neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists nevertheless embrace this opinion as being a settled matter. But it is ridiculous to believe that evolution somehow dragged along our ancient single-celled ancestors until some point was reached when a conscious mind -- a “nothing” that is not observable, not measurable, not quantifiable, without atoms or photons, mass, electric charge or spin – mysteriously arose out of something, such as genes and biomolecular phenomena. Therefore cognitive scientists pretend to know something about the mind and consciousness when in fact they haven't a clue.    If the genetic determinism of DiAngelo and other materialists populating the evolutionary and biological sciences is correct, then it would break the fundamental physical laws of energy conservation and causal efficacy. Rather the absolutist determinism that underpins White Fragility's entire message is just the inverse side of the coin with Evangelical creationism. In effect, DiAngelo is saying White people have no choice. It's genetic chemistry or its genetic chemistry; either way its genetic chemistry.  By disguising and recasting an evolutionary and genetic determinism about racist Whiteness into her critical race theory, DiAngelo is in fact admitting that her own perceptions about reality are fundamentally flawed.    Why is that?   Dr. Donald Hoffman has been a professor of neuroscience at the University of California at Irvine for over three decades. He has an impeccable background having studied artificial intelligence at MIT. But unlike the vast majority of his colleagues, Hoffman broke ranks and passed beyond neuroscience's 19th century mechanistic base and dared to study modern quantum physics and relativity theory. Theoretical physics is almost anathema in human biological reseach and medicine, which is why these soft sciences have made so little progress to improve human health and well-being. Hoffman has performed hundreds of thousands of simulations comparing different species and their chances for survival based upon their ability to perceive and comprehend reality more accurately or not. His discoveries are startling and utterly revolutionary.    Hoffman discovered, across the board, species that best perceive reality go extinct more rapidly than competing species that only perceive what is necessary for them to remain fit and survive. During an interview following a TED Talk, Hoffman stated, “according to evolution by natural selection,” – and here he is limiting himself solely to evolutionary biological theory not quantum theories about the natural world or the deeper theories about the nature of consciousness – “an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.” In other words, evolution has nothing to do with perceiving reality more clearly, but only to be more fit in order to adapt, survive and procreate. And now physicists are even telling us that perceiving reality accurately is consciousness itself, which has no association whatsoever with natural selection. Yet this only occur after we have subdued our connate and conditioned mental and emotional afflictions that keep us chained to reality deficit disorder   For example, Professor Edward Witten, regarded as “the world's smartest” physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, has been compared to Newton and Einstein. Witten doesn't believe science will ever understand consciousness. “I think consciousness will remain a mystery,” Witten stated during a lecture, ”I have a much easier time imagining how we understand the Big Bang than I have imagining how we can understand consciousness.” Or we can listen to Stanford University theoretical physicist Andre Linde:   “The current scientific model of the material world obeying laws of physics has been so successful that we forget our starting point as conscious observers, and conclude that matter is the only reality and that perceptions are only helpful for describing it. But in fact, we are substituting the reality of our experience of the universe with a conceptually contrived belief…”   One may feel our critique is too abstract with no practical application; however to at least conceptually understand race in terms of our sensory perceptions can have enormous benefits to cut through and lessen the false semblances that arise from reality deficit disorder and then produce books such as White Fragility and How To Be An Antiracist.   Therefore, if neuroscientists and modern neo-Darwinists such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Robin DiAngelo, who believe they are telling the complete story about human existence, racial differences and a physical causality to the human mind, and that all of these emerged from natural selection, then Hoffman has shown they undermine their own credibility. The entire course of natural selection that gave rise to these scientists and the intellectuals behind Critical Race Theory has nothing to do with knowing reality as it is, including Blackness or Whiteness. Consequently, there is no reason to believe their sociological and scientific convictions are accurate. If we did not evolve to know reality as it is, then their science and philosophies are also irrelevant. They are birdbrained beliefs because none of us – if we take their Darwinian assumptions to their full conclusion -- did not evolve to perceive reality in the first place. Our sole purpose is to make babies and try to survive contently into old age.    Finally, contrary to DiAngelo, British journalist Melanie Phillips offers a clearer understanding for why we should not rely upon the pundits of anti-racial wokeness to save us from ourselves. Despite disagreeing with Phillips on many of her other socio-political positions, she correctly identifies the fundamental flaws being voiced by arrested development Wokeness across our campuses and within the Democrat party. First, it is unable to establish a hierarchy of values and morals. For example, if one refuses to say that any lifestyle or culture is better than another, then it cannot be said that liberalism is better than conservatism or any other ideology.  Consequently, faux Woke liberalism cannot legitimately defend the very principles upon which it defines itself: racial and gender equality, freedom of speech and religion, tolerance, and class struggle.  It contradicts its own principles and follows DiAngelo's footsteps to remove the dignity of the individual, which in the past was at the heart of authentic liberalism and once served as its moral backbone. What we are witnessing therefore in Woke liberalism – and in DiAngelo's and Kendi's reinvention of racism -- is “the strong dominating the weak,” and this is an ill-liberal ideology that is already showing signs of having catastrophic consequences in classrooms and the workplace.   

Trending today, a review of the Billboard Music Awards and Ryan Seacrest's suit on "American Idol." Simone Biles is first woman to land a Yurchenko double pike vault. A Florida High School yearbook Photoshops photos they deemed offensive. Also trending, Martin Bashir slammed for his interviews with Princess Di and Michael Jackson.

Joe Wengert (@joewengert) and Jim Woods stop by the show to talk dead Bumble chats, the fear of assembling furniture, Secret Santa and uncomfortable Photoshops. For the extended version and video of this episode, hit up Patreon at patreon.com/yourethemannowdog    Follow us on Twitter and Instagram: @mandogpod, @chosenberg, @danlippertcool. And if you're so inclined, please leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts, or share us with a friend who might be into it. Thanks!

Crazy cheer-mom creates deepfakes to try and destroy her daughter’s competition, Photoshops new neural filters, trust and Google, India moves towards making cryptocurrencies illegal, and much more! We hope you enjoy the show, please consider supporting us! SUBSCRIBE/DONATE: http://grumpyoldbens.com EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS:Brian GenackTHANK YOU FOR SUPPORTING GRUMPY OLD BENS! NOTES / LINKS: Chicago gun violence leaves 4 dead, … Continue reading "Episode 143: Fake You"

Crazy cheer-mom creates deepfakes to try and destroy her daughter’s competition, Photoshops new neural filters, trust and Google, India moves towards making cryptocurrencies illegal, and much more! We hope you enjoy the show, please consider supporting us! SUBSCRIBE/DONATE: http://grumpyoldbens.com EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS:Brian GenackTHANK YOU FOR SUPPORTING GRUMPY OLD BENS! NOTES / LINKS: Chicago gun violence leaves 4 dead, … Continue reading "Episode 143: Fake You"

Boy Foy. Kurt (or Randy) joins us, talking about Doug's backside. Iggy's got a take. Iggy's passwords. Scams. Netflix. Iggy's Drops of the Week. New Real World: New York may be coming soon. What is the GOAT reality TV show? Pee-wee Herman. Mid-to Late 2000's TV shows doing podcasts now. As Good as it Gets. 1997 Oscars. Father Browneye putting in work with the photoshop. Photoshops can be really good. 

Boy Foy. Kurt (or Randy) joins us, talking about Doug's backside. Iggy's got a take. Iggy's passwords. Scams. Netflix. Iggy's Drops of the Week. New Real World: New York may be coming soon. What is the GOAT reality TV show? Pee-wee Herman. Mid-to Late 2000's TV shows doing podcasts now. As Good as it Gets. 1997 Oscars. Father Browneye putting in work with the photoshop. Photoshops can be really good. 

Guest: Bruce Byers Topics: Photoshop unveils new AI features Photoshops new AI portrait features allow for dynamic and dramatic manipulation of faces to include the ability to change the direction the face is looking, the direction the eyes are looking, the age of subject and their overall happiness or how angry they are among other features. What do we think of these new capabilities? Are we scared by how good these features are at making manipulation so easy? How do we think features like this will affect societies overall ability to trust and believe authentic and honest photos being created by visual journalists? Do we think this innovation will make our jobs harder, or will it just be another in the many innovations that have overall made scrutiny of images and the sources they come from that much more important. DJI Releases the Pocket 2 DJI has unveiled the sequel to the mini gimbal camera, the Pocket 2. This camera improves on it predecessor in many ways and make a gimbal camera easily accessible and pocketable. Does DJI’s new camera intrigue you at all? Would you consider adding something like this to your kit? Did you own the Pocket 1, would you consider upgrading? Does a device like this really have a place in a world with in body image stabilization, electronic stabilization, digital stabilization and stabilization in post? Photographing Women in Public is “Gender-Based Violence” In an opinion piece for the NY Daily News, Jean Son claims that people photographing women on the street without their consent are somehow performing a form of “gender-based violence,” and she is working with councilmen in NYC to restrict such acts. While I think we can all agree that this kind of case will go nowhere, and that the 1st amendment will protect photographers, what does it say about our society that a case like this even exists? How do we feel about Son’s opinion on the issue? Is this even an issue? Additionally, in some cases Son has been able to get police to get photographers to delete their photos. How is this even ethical? What would you do if a police officer told you to delete your photos? If you were in that situation would you stand your ground or just delete on the moment knowing you’ll probably be able to recover them later if necessary?

You got to know Gordon Szeto in S1E42. Michelle and Jeff checked in with Gordon and Glass Key co-owner Matt Osborne for this special episode to see how they're handling all the changes that COVID-19 and the subsequent shelter-in-place have brought. Glass Key Photo is open Mondays through Fridays from 2 to 4 p.m. You can browse their cameras for sale here. We recorded this special podcast at Glass Key in August 2020. Photography by Michelle Kilfeather

On this episode I was joined by the man behind some of the most famous Photoshops in the MMA community, Photoshop Steve! Steve and I spoke about how his page grew to the size it has now, some of the inspirations behind his most popular creations and some of the controversy that has come with it! Steve and I can be found on the below: Instagram: photoshopsteve - Fisticuffs_Podcast Facebook: Fisticuffs_Podcast Twitter: Fisticuffs_Pod Youtube: Dan Lester MMA

Fantasy map making is one of Autumn and Jesper's favorite topics. In episode 62 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, they discuss where to start when creating maps, how important realism and immersion is and how maps benefit your writing. Map making tools are also on the agenda, as well as, discussing why some authors might avoid map creation and how to overcome the reluctance.   Links mentioned in the show: The Ultimate Fantasy Writers Guide course: https://ultimatefantasywritersguide.com/main/ Fantasy Map Making book: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/product/fantasy-map-making/ (paperback available from Amazon) Map Making 101 blog post: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/map-making-101/    Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday. SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion). Narrator (1s): . You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts. Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello. I am, Jesper. And I'm Autumn. This is episode 62 of the amwritingfantasy podcast and today we are covering one of my favorite topics and it's a fantasy map making I honestly don't know how, how did we wait 62 episodes to cover this? Autumn this is completely wrong. I don't know, cause it's Autumn (53s): definitely, it's both of us. I mean, I, I'm at currently ranking a fantasy map for another author. So yeah, I love fantasy maps. I don't know how we waited so long. Maybe we just thought just talking about a map would be two less fun than getting the visuals, but Oh well we'll figure it out. Jesper (1m 11s): No, it cannot be not fun to talk about maps. It's a, that's a credible, yeah. I mean we amateurs, we should, we should have done this as episode one or something. That's true. It was just, this is, Autumn (1m 24s): well, it's because we're not just world-building, but this is definitely something we both love and so many authors do. I mean, what does a fantasy book without a map in it? It's just, you feel lost for from the get go. Jesper (1m 38s): Yeah. I keep every single week I find some maps on Twitter and then I comment on them just because I liked them so much. So when I was more active on Twitter, I would do the same Autumn (1m 47s): thing. And you're right. I actually kind of, I kind of missing the maps and what people are working on it. I need to add world-building hashtags to my Instagram searches. Jesper (1m 57s): Yeah, yeah, indeed. I mean, I don't care if they, if those Twitter images are like, yeah, somebody made it out of crayon or whatever. I don't care. Just the fact that it's a map I love him. Map I don't care what it looks like. Autumn (2m 8s): Yeah. I mean, I went for my, uh, last book where I was creating a map by newest world that I was making. I actually only did it in black and white, which, I mean, I almost always call her my map, so I was very surprised myself. But there's nothing, you know, it's sometimes fun just to have the shading and keep it simple and it does look better in the book. It's very crisp. Jesper (2m 30s): Cool. Autumn (2m 31s): Yeah. Yeah. The color does make it better to be honest. But black and white can be quite cool. Yeah. I it was, uh, yeah, it needed to get done when it was still, it was fun. I mean, I just recently found discovered cartography brushes for Photoshop and yeah. Oh, nice. Oh no, it's so bad. It's so much fun to have so much ease of creating maps. So yeah, it's, it's what we do, but that's not where we're going Jesper (2m 60s): to start. We're have so much other stuff been going on the last week. Have it. I know, even in your life you've got some stuff going on. Yeah. Well, well, I think in general things have been going quite well. Um, on the, on the work side of things, I'm about halfway through the plotting book, one for our new series. So I'm very pleased with that. So it's, it's going, uh, it's going to be so much fun to write that novel. I'm really looking forward to it. Um, but other than that is also been a pretty well pretty busy weekend last weekend, but also the last couple of weekends because, uh, well this weekend we just, uh, came out of, uh, one of my son's classmates had a birthday parties, so he was at that and my oldest son was at the cinema a cinema together with my wife. And, uh, and we also had somebody who came to look at the house. As I've mentioned before, I think on the podcast that we, we've been trying to sell the house for a long while now. So, uh, it's things or maybe that there's been a bit of an uptake in people looking now, at least we've had three different couples, uh, looking over the last couple, well, two weeks probably, uh, last weekend. This weekend, maybe the weekend even before that, I don't remember. But the last couple of weeks I've been a bit of an uptake. Um, one of them was like, uh, this younger couple and when they were here looking at the house, I, I worry, I already said to my wife, because they really liked the house and then they had to go and have a meeting with the bank of obviously, and I said to my wife, you know, these guys is, they don't have the money to buy this. It's, our house is only like a am, what is it from 2005. Okay. Some of you know, it's a pretty new house, so it's not cheap. So if you're really young as you can afford it, so yeah, lo and behold, they came back on the, uh, okay. It's about 800,000 Danish crowns, too expensive. So that's like a hundred K U S dollars. It says like, you're, you're just will weigh off, you know. Um, and then there was another couple looking. Uh, they looked at three different houses here in, in our area. They actually ended up bidding on one of the other ones, but they bit like what's probably equivalent to 40, 50 K dollars below the price that it was offered. For so yeah, the real estate agent agent just told me, you know, I just told that then, then I'm not even going to tell the, uh, the, you know, the house owner you're bit, because this is ridiculous. Oh wow. You can't beat 50 K below that. I mean, come on. It's that serious. Right? Yeah. That's, that's really it for a bargain. Yeah. I mean, come on. It's ridiculous. So, so that never happened. So they went away. And then this weekend, uh, just a couple of days ago, there was another couple in their mid thirties who came to look at our house and they looked at one more house as well, uh, just down the street that is also for sale. Uh, so they really liked the house. Um, so they, they needed and they have a good, uh, you know, financial, financial, they are, they are doing well enough. So, uh, we'll see what happens. It's, it's only been like one work day since they were here. Right. So I don't know yet. We'll see what happens. But, but I don't know. I mean, why is it that people go out and do like how shopping without checking with the bank first? Well how much they can afford. I just don't understand. Autumn (6m 45s): No, I mean the times I've bought houses, we have always gone and gotten a preapproval and had like a limit and just kind of knowing what we're looking for. But I don't know, maybe that one young couple isn't really, you know, maybe those are first time and they hadn't really figured that out yet. Jesper (7m 1s): No, but isn't it like common sense that, you know, if you want to buy a house, maybe you need to check with the bank how much you can afford. I mean, it's just you, you know, they're wasting their own time driving around. Also probably getting a site excited about somehow we want to buy that house and whatnot. Right. But they're also wasting our time that we have to leave the house and they have to see it and all that. And then it's just all for nothing. Right. I dunno. Autumn (7m 27s): Oh, it's just weird to me. I don't know what's common sense for some people might be a learning experience for someone else. Yeah, maybe. Jesper (7m 39s): Okay. I guess I shouldn't be complaining. At least somebody is, uh, interesting in seeing the houses so that that's of course good. But maybe someday, someday maybe it'll lead into an actual sale, but uh, it's, it's tough. Autumn (7m 52s): Yeah, it is tough. It's still early in the spring, so you'll, uh, you know, to be spring is always win. The house sales and stuff really start moving. So it's, to me it's a good sign that you have people interested early Springs, so that's a good thing. That's a good sign. Yeah. I'm trying not to be too pessimistic, but, but keep in mind that we've had the house for sale for more than a year now. Right. So we've been through a spring already. Oh, that was a bad sprain. This will be, this is the one 20 20th century maybe. Maybe 20. 20 is to write spring. That's right. I like that. I hope so. That'd be a good side. Yeah. How about you? Oh, well, you know, I've moved into our little cabin in the woods that were fixing up, um, as part of our rental agreement. So that's really exciting. Except it is Vermont and it is winter, uh, not quite spring. And part of what we're doing is a little addition on the back and that is am it's really fun to have to do some earth moving and ground work. A small group, small spot, but it's cause it's under an overhang so it's like you couldn't fit in heavy equipment if we had some, but it's a lot of um, handpicking he, uh, I didn't realize, I've learned that the tool I'm using is actually called a pneumatic. It's a pickaxe on one side and it looks kinda like a hoe on the other, right about the right. Writing you know, writers hands. They don't like manual labor like that. Do they know my, um, yeah, my right wrist is a little sore and tired and so, uh, yeah, it's not exactly, I've enough writing right now, but I have to say, I, I the keyboard, it's much easier to type it. So far. I have to say, considering my hands usually get really sore, like if I do woodworking and things, so I'm, I'm not displeased that it's going well. And I learned that some of those common phrases like pick away at things, I think that came from pickaxes and you just kind of take little chunks, big chunks, but it's going, it's all the groundworks almost. It's like 92% done. So this week. Oh, that's funny. Yeah. Well this week will hopefully be actually putting in the floor, uh, and then building the walls and you know, once you got that pretty much framed it and put the insulation, it's starting to feel like, you know, you're, it's amazing how fast a building, especially just a one room can go up. So am right. Yeah. I, I'm really hopeful that it'll be a, you know, a week two next week you'll have to check in and see how far we've come in our little cabin project. If you follow me on Instagram, I have been posting some pictures even on Facebook, on my personal feed. So if someone is interested in actually, yeah, tiny house construction. Am if you're kind of curious, do you know, come look me up and you can see how my homes coming along in between the podcast updates. Cool. Oh, week on the internet with the amwritingfantasy podcast so we have, uh, something quite amazing to mention today. I'm sorry, I can't believe we've held off on mentioning this as well. No, I guess to be honest, like we talked about before we started recording, we should probably have mentioned it a bit earlier as well because it's just a bit down to the wire here. But if you are listening to this podcast episode on the data that it airs, then it will be the 2nd of March. And that means that we have for the first time in six months now we have our premium writing costs open for enrollment. Yay. This is a big course. So it's, and we only do this twice a year. So it's so exciting when we open it up to new students and it's exciting to see the new students too. Yeah, absolutely. But th th th the thing is here that, so it'll be the 2nd of March if you, if you're listening on the day that this episode launches, but the cost active closest on the 5th of March. So you only have a few days, uh, there, uh, there is a link in the show notes, so you can go and check it out if you're interested in that. But maybe autumn maybe you could just say a bit about what's in this a cost that we have named the ultimate fantasy writers guide right. I would love to, because this course is very near and dear to my heart. I actually created this one before we got together and became amwritingfantasy. So this is this course. I created it because, well, one, because I had a horrible time, um, with some in-person courses I took ages ago and I remember English class or so boring and so many of these things, they tell you these adages and they don't really get into the in depth. Or the one course I took was all on mem, you know, it was open to all these other genres, memoirs and blah, blah, blah. And it really didn't help me with fantasy writing and that's what I wanted to learn. So as I got better and got awards and learned what I was doing, I've started putting all those notes together and created this course that it's to me I wanted, I'm sick of always having to go cobbled together and get your information from a hundred different sources or six different courses. I wanted a one stop shop. I wanted to be able to take, um, an idea. It's to, you have an idea for a novel, how to develop that, how to build characters, how to world build, all the important things with fantasy writing and then breaking down the writing from how to write the beginning of a novel, how to write a really riveting middle and not get yourself or your reader lost or board and how, what you need to put in the climax and the ending. And more than that though, I wanted to teach other authors how to go and find, uh, you know, readers, especially as you're writing so that they're there and they're excited for your launch day and you end up launching to reviews and how to edit. Cause I know that was one of what we just talked about editing on the podcast, but editing, that was something when I first got to it I was like, Oh, how do you tackle this? So I have a whole module on editing in there and there's editing on what is indie publishing and talking about wide versus just on Amazon or KDP select and what do you need to do for formatting, what do you need to do per book covers? What are all these steps and pieces? Cause I know the first time I've helped so many authors since then, the first time you upload the Amazon it's so nerve wracking. It is exciting and you have questions. So it actually goes step by step on how to do that. And then the last module is how to go and build an author platform and, and brand. I mean literally I wanted this to be everything from your first novel idea to building your author career business all in one class. So it's a PR. I I know when I first told people this is what I wanted to do, they're like, wow, Whoa, how are you going to do that and hate 12 modules. I did it. Got, you know, the who have gone through it or I love it and I think it's helped quite a few people. And actually I know you yes, we're actually went through it. So I think that's exciting. So yeah, it's quite some years ago now. It's been out for a few years now. So it is really funny. So it is kind of you were helped what helped me beta tested almost so it was fantastic back then and yeah, I am so excited to be seeing it, you know, coming again in new students and it's always a very exciting thing. And I know you said, I think you pulled together some of the testimonials from other students. I did, yes. Jesper (15m 30s): Put together a short, a some clip here that I was thinking to play. Just so people shouldn't take our word for it. Right, so I can just like just play a short clip here if you're okay with, Autumn (15m 42s): yes. Excellent. Okay, let's go. Catherine (15m 50s): Hi everyone. I'm Catherine. I'm currently working my way through the ultimate fantasy writers guide and I've been finding it very helpful. One of my main problems has been plotting. I had a very hard time getting my plot to go through and have continuity after going through the workshops for the plotting section. I have now got a full plot and have begun writing. It has been very helpful for me and I'm sure you will find it very helpful too. Thanks. Jim (16m 22s): Hi, I'm Jim D read fantasy author and I just watched autumn Brits a launch day module. It was a really informative, had a lot of great information. She had ideas I had never thought of before. Really excited to implement her ideas and launching my own book. Thank you. Autumn. Speaker 6 (16m 47s): I highly recommend the ultimate fantasy writers guide because it's one of the best programs I've ever seen. It not only covers pretty much everything about writing from start to finish, including fan bases and stay in confident and everything. It also has things like languages and naming your character's based on that and it has map making it is just so excellent. Jesper (17m 14s): All right. That, that was it. I hope that was loud enough. Uh, I can, uh, some of it was ma ma might be a bit low on the volume, but hopefully everybody could hear it. It came through fine on my end, so hopefully no one's like driving and they're Lily leaning towards their speaker trying to hear those. But hopefully, hopefully the soundtracks will, Autumn (17m 37s): you know, be boosted when we do our post-production. So we'll, we'll keep an eye on that. Jesper (17m 42s): Yeah, well we'll see what we can to make sure it goes through. OK. But, uh, but at least that gives, uh, you dear listener. Um, a bit of a, you know, other people's reflection on the course. Uh, and as I said, a closes on the 5th of March and we only open it twice a year. So if you want to have a look at it, you need to hurry up and click through the links in the show notes and check it out. And uh, if you do come in later and listening to this after the fifth, then you can still follow that link in the show notes. Uh, and that it'll actually there. They will then be the possibility to get your name on a wait list for next time around. So, uh, you can do that. And the additional benefit I would say from doing that is also that you get onto our email list and in between now and next time we're going to email you a lot of good stuff about writing and wealth building tips and all kinds of stuff. So it never stops. We always have tips. We have the podcast, you know, tips we send by emails. So we want to make sure that, you know, we're helping authors and writers from everything, from marketing to how to write well. So it's worth looking us up in at least joining the email list. And then you'll hear about the next course if you miss this one, which will be usually sometime in August. So, gosh, isn't that an age way? Probably. Yeah. Well, time flies. Yes. Uh, and of, and of course if you on the email list and you will get the information timely as well and not last second like this answer and the next time maybe we will do better at about announcing it ahead of time and we'll try at least, I don't want to promise two hours. We'll try. You never know when someone's going to listen to an episode. So you can be listening to this in June. Yeah. Who knows? Yeah, maybe. Yeah, that's true. All right. Um, I think we'll move on. Let's go. So fantasy I was thinking like where do we want to start with the, I mean the, I, I think I would like to talk a bit about where you start with the map and also how a map map can help you with writing. Maybe we could talk a bit about tools that you can use for map creation but I don't know what you think. That sounds perfect. I was gonna say you've only written a book on fantasy map making and you don't know where to start. I mean, come on Yesper you should have this out. Oh, and I'm disappointed. Yeah. Well the, the thing is that with the book writer, you can show the illustration. So everything that I'm talking about and uh, but, but here with audio only, we need to be a bit mindful about how to, how to make this episode approachable. Uh, so it doesn't become too technical about geographics or whatever because that might also be a bit boring to listen to. But when you have a big a book with pictures in it, then it becomes a bit more interesting. It's much easier to show the pictures. But that's OK. I, I, cause I've written tons of blog posts. I mean map making is sort of, I think I had been doing a post on map making and you were, had the book coming out on something with maps and lo and behold, it's sort of how we met Autumn (20m 49s): our first, first, first introduction, way back when on Twitter. So, yeah, this was, I can't believe this is blessing think. So remind them. Oh I think so. I'd have to go back into Twitter and double check. Oh goodness knows. I'm sure it's back there somewhere. It's been years and years and years. But I do remember, I think I had done a map making one Oh one blog post. So if I can do a blog post on that making one-on-one, we can, we can do this with no visuals. Well w we're going to be fine. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I do think we've always, I think we both had the theory, um, that you start with coastlines. That's always where I like to start with my map is actually figuring out which is land of which is water. Yeah. Jesper (21m 33s): Uh, I have one step that I like to do before I even get that far to be honest. Um, Autumn (21m 40s): because I think Jesper (21m 42s): when you're looking at the map uh, I mean of course we are talking about maps that accompanies novels. So what I would like to do before I even do anything, um, and after that I agreed that then its coastlines. But before I get to the coastlines, uh, I like to think a bit about the story that you go into territorial very good point. And then think about, okay, what kind of things do I need on this map to convey the story so that it, it helps the story, right? So it could be like, you know, you need the, you need the mountain where the, uh, well now I'm thinking about the vampire of course from our mix, but something, you know, yeah, you need the grave site for the vampire on amount. Okay, so I need a mountain or I need a magical tower or uh, you know, I need a Capitol city from where the main character comes from or whatever it might be. But, but so I like to write down like a, like a list of, okay, here are the things that I definitely need on that. No, it's very tune just so that I can reference. Autumn (22m 47s): Yes. I think even like, even when you don't realize that you are already creating your world and a map in your mind, you really are, as you start thinking of your story, you think about where the main character, you know, where does the story start. Uh, that's uh, obviously a really good place to maybe start thinking about where your map is. You know, and then you think about where does the character go on the big events? And you start, you're right, you start saying, well, uh, I know with my first book they started in a seaside town and then we needed a big city and then we're going to go across the, uh, big dangerous water and so they're going to go to a desert. So you start making that list of these are the kinds of areas that I want my store things I want to happen in my story, in places I want my characters to go to. And very quickly you start coming up with a map and to scale it back because of the map I have to create this week for another author is only one city. But it's still an entire story. So you still do the same thing in this city. What are the places they're going to go to? The Jesper (23m 46s): taverns, the castle, the pal is the docs, the slums. You're going to start mapping out those areas of that you're going to need to create the story or writing. Hmm. Yeah. And, and that's exactly why I wanted to go when it comes to how does maps actually help with writing? Because one thing is that once you start mapping out things, you start thinking of other things that you didn't have and you can sort of use that as inspiration, which is quite nice. But the other thing is also, I feel like I often, like right now for example, I'm plotting out a book one in our next series. Yeah. And I very often when I sit and I plot a chapter, I ha, I pull up the draft map that we put together. We're not done with the map yet, but, but at least a draft, I put it out just to, because it both gives me a feel of sizes of things, but also distances, which is very, very helpful. Um, so to know, okay, so if, if I'm going to have them go from this city, should that city, how far is it actually on? How, how long will that take them? Right, right. But with, with the map right there, it's so easy to, uh, quickly calculate, Oh, okay, that triple take a week. Okay. Yeah. Then I know that, uh, instead of, uh, just making it up out of the blue, uh, I think it just helps tremendously. Yes. And to add to that, and I mean, once your map has done, and even as you're, you know, writing next novel or a series, but once it's done and you're saying they're going from here to here and you realize suddenly, you know, they're crossing a high mountain or they're crossing a Marsh and suddenly you have hurdles and other things you can throw in there, or at least descriptions. And that's that to me. I mean, that added so much to my first series when I suddenly saw all these places, they would go and develop the cultures that would live in these places and made it all different. And I think it really, the book is so much better because I made the map first. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And, and the other thing is that, uh, well maybe it's a quote, the, uh, best fantasy ride a Brandon Sanderson, right? But he said at some point that the whole Lake of Epic fantasy is immersion. And that I fully agree with, uh, the immersion is what makes a difference. And if you want emotion, I mean, you mentioned it before, what I'm right. I mean, having a map at the front of the book in the first couple of pages that already draws people in. Because also because it's a picture, we like looking at pictures. It, it's much, much easier than reading about, okay, so this city is over there. 500 miles from that city would sits in between. And then there is a Marsh and blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? But pictures right there, you can see it. You don't even have to explain it. Um, so it, it adds that a emotion, but it also adds realism yet, because I really feel like, and this is something I talk quite a lot about in the, in the guidebook, is maps has to be realistic. I mean, unless of course if you are creating a truly fantastical world where like, like the cities are hanging upside down in the hour or whatever, then it's fine. You can do whatever you want, right? But, but otherwise, if you're creating, you're like more traditional medieval Epic fantasy, which is the case for most of us most of the time. Uh, or it could also be an urban fantasy in a, in a, in a bit more modern setting. But even if you have a map there, it has to be realistic. By realistic, I'm talking about stuff like, um, well let's take rivers for example. Right? Uh, so rivers, they leave mountains. Um, but then sometimes in some maps you'll see the illustrator then sort of turns the river around and then it passes through and data or like a second mountain range because before it goes to the sea, right. And rivers won't do that. It would be a very extreme innovation. Yes, it's, it doesn't happen. So it's like an unrealistic floor water. Um, and I could also mention w when a river heads down stream, when it's heading towards the ocean, it won't divide by splitting up S you know, as in one river suddenly becoming two rivers instead, rivers will combine as in two rivers joining to become once. And then on many maps you also see a ton of river deltas. But actually they are much rarer than one thing. Uh, they are usually found near the coastline, so you can add them there if you want. But these are the kinds of things that you really need to think about and, and you know, infuse your map with this kind of level of realism because the reader might not actually be able to put their fingers on what is wrong, but intuitively they will am. They will just feel like there's something that is a bit off here. Something just doesn't compute here. And that breaks the emotion and, and it's just, yeah, it's sad. Autumn (28m 51s): It is. I mean it really, if you haven't studied geology or cartography to spend some time with some real maps, real-world maps, uh, where you live or coastlines are islands and really get a feel for what shapes the land and rivers. And you know, what is theoretically possible. I mean there's always exceptions. Like I can think of, you know, if you had a glacial dam burst and it created a Canyon, you could technically have a river go through a mountain range. It does happen in the Rockies, but this is an incredibly, a rare event and you have to have a geological past and you have to know something about tectonic plates in geology. And so if you don't have that level of knowledge, probably best to stick to rivers, do not cut through the mountains. They, they form little streams go into a bigger, that goes into a river and that goes to the coast and dumps into a Lake or an ocean. That's a pretty safe bet. And you should stick with it. Jesper (29m 50s): That, yeah, I mean it's, it's honestly not because any of this is very complicated. You just sort of need to get the basic stare and uh, uh, but, but the other thing about the geographical things of it is also it, especially when it comes to why, I don't know why we're talking so much about water, but, but they would go, but especially when it comes to water, what has a very, very big impact on maps, but it also have a very big impact on the cultures or the political borders and so forth. Because rivers not only provide fresh water to the people living around the rivers, but they are also this kind of land feature that gives you a border basically. Right. So in, in the old days when, uh, I was just about to say, when you can't build a wall to the country, I guess we shouldn't get into all that tobacco. We said we promise takes out of this. Yes, yes. So, but what I would just met this, that it gives you a natural border, right? You could have one nation living on one side of the river if it's like a big river and another nation on the other side. And it's not necessarily that easy to cross either. So, and it becomes easier to defend as well. So it gives you sort of the lay of the lands with the different nations are kingdoms and so forth and where it makes sense that they would have their borders. The same thing with the mum, right? They also give you natural borders. So yes, Autumn (31m 20s): just about to say, yes, mountains are these natural features where the river is Marsha's, um, places you can't cross mountains. They're wonderful boarders to help develop your nations. And I was going to mention rivers too, but going back to water, uh, they're not just good borders, but they tend to be where towns and cities developed because water is a means for transporting trade goods. It is something we need to live on. And you often protect your clean water source. So that's usually where a lot of the cities of the first earliest cultures are you going to develop near fresh water, drinking water. So that's also important aspect of why we focus on water and rivers. Jesper (32m 3s): Yeah. And it also becomes a sort of the highway of your medieval world, meaning that, you know, traveling on boat downstream and stuff like that, that's by far the fastest way to travel. Or if you're doing like am trading or something, that will also be a way to do that. Uh, the, the fastest and easiest would be to sale. So if the river's like a big river that flows into the ocean or something, uh, then, um, that that's, that's sort of an artery of your trading business in in your world then. So I think that the point about mentioning all of this is, is really to say that there was a lot of things with creating the map that can influence your work Autumn (32m 46s): writing directly or the store directly and then things will start falling into place and making sense once you have a map. And to me, I think the biggest thing is, like I mentioned, I usually develop the map and then I see these areas. And I know the part of map making is also, you know, the, whether you knew mountain rages and volcanoes and the, you get down to the nitty gritty of what it would be like to live in this area. I mean I, food is huge for me who were not talking about water. You know, what people would grow to eat there. And you know, if there's enough resources for the city to grow or a towns and as you start thinking about the food types in the water and the land in the rain, I start developing an actual race in a culture that would live there. And so, you know, my first a story, my first series, there wasn't any traditional fantasy culture is because I made them all up to fit the world I had drawn. That all came from first building the map and then thinking about who are these people that would have lived and grown and adapted to be in this climate. And, uh, that's one of my favorite parts is just, it's the map creates the seed, the kernel that grows into something truly unique and that fits your world in your story and only your world in your story. And it's exciting. Jesper (34m 8s): Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I really feel like when I open a fantasy book, I know I've said this many times on Twitter as well, but when I opened a fence as you book, if I don't find a map within the first few pages, I'm already a bit disappointed. And it's like, I know not every reader is like me of course, but it's like readers really like fence, see the light, the maps, most of them, yes. And it's a bit like, why do you want to disappoint them right off the bat? No. Yeah, it's very true. I just, I mean, the map is going to help you and the reader will love it. So why not? Autumn (34m 42s): Oh, I trust me. I had a, I had a reader who actually really liked the map for my world and obviously they really liked my series. They actually asked if there's a way to buy the map. I mean, talk about getting tingles. That was still, every once in a while he posts a picture of my books underneath the map and I'm like, I don't even have that at my house. I'm so jealous. I want to go there and sit next to his books. Jesper (35m 4s): Yeah, I actually got the, I actually got the map of, uh, of the world that I used for my previous series. I actually got it made in am poster size, so I can actually hang it on the wall when we move at some point. This is how much we love our maps. Yes. Yes. I love it too much, but, but I don't know. It's, it's like I can clearly recall like I probably been like 10 years old or something. Uh, uh, together with my younger brother, we had like this one, you know, these 83 sized pieces paper, it was some, you know, this Brown recycled paper stuff. And we rolled it out across the dinner table, my parents dinner table in the living room, and we had multiple of these and we'd take them all together so they feel like the entire a table. And then we just started, I, I clearly remember like there was no real plan to it, but we just started throwing, okay, so here's some mountains and here's the city. And, and Oh, and then from there it just evolved into some sort of game that we started playing. Right. But, but I still remember that like that's the first memory I have of creating a map and I just loved, and I think my parents hated it because we occupied the table for like four days, but they're on a campaign going, yeah, exactly. Yeah. But, but I, I don't know, I still have that recollection. I, I always, always loved, Autumn (36m 29s): I think it would be a rare fantasy author who doesn't have some kind of map and world-building drive that or appreciation because that's sort of what's, it's a pillar of what makes a fantasy novel, a fantasy novel. And it hasn't been, I mean I've written and I do write occasionally in this world, but you still, you still need to get, Oh go look at the map of, of you know, how far is it from this distance and what are the unique features of this area. Cause I started in Wales and I found a place where there's actually this bridge that crosses an entire Lake in Wales. It's like a mile and a half long. And I'm like that gotta use that somewhere. So it's still an exploration. It's still looking at maps. I think it's just appreciate appreciation for the realism that's there. So I know before we wrap up, do we want to give any like specific steps if you're making a map, you know, we said, okay, list out the areas you need, then you're going to do your coastlines after coastlines. I usually would do rivers. And from rivers cities, but I know also, I mean, do we have to worry about if you're really going to be realistic, you're looking at tectonic plates, which is what would create the mountains, uh, weather patterns. These are all parts of actually making a map and it's, it's complicated, but yeah. You know, sometimes it doesn't have to be if it's a very small map Jesper (37m 54s): yeah, I I, yeah. As you started out by saying in the beginning, I have a full step by step guide on fantasy map making. Uh, and it's both available in an ebook and paperback. Maybe I'll just add the link in the show notes if anybody's interesting. But basically that talks you through step by step what order I would do things in because it does matter a bit. But maybe that's a bit too technical. But actually I was thinking autumn maybe. So if we're going by the assumption here that at least most of all us fantasy writers we like maps. If we're using that SDS assumption, then I think that the reason that sometimes maps are not included in books is because it is Autumn (38m 36s): too daunting to create the map maybe. But if we're now saying, okay fine, there is, you know, you can get the step by step guide on the order of it. So if we sort of put, take that out of the equation and say okay, the problem is then not the fact that you don't know what order to do things in and what to do, but maybe the, the the, if we didn't focus on the remaining problem that might be here and that is actually how do you, how do you make the map you know, why your hand drawing or using software, how do you do it? Maybe that's a good place to sort of wrap up because I think that that, that's probably the only remaining hurdle that I can come up with right here. Well that's fair enough. And I will also, I will try to find the blog post that, um, my little fantasy met making one Oh one that we can add to the show notes as well. But if you're really, I think even when I start with maps, I still do hand drawing. And to me the, one of the biggest things is start with the biggest piece of paper you can get your hands because I, I the, I totally scrunched up my world and it still doesn't look right to me and I keep wanting to redo my original map because I started with like copy paper, you know, something, a letter size and eight and a half by 11 if he raped, drove really small. But you know, go to the art store and buy yourself a poster side sheet of paper and, and start with that. Even if it's going, even if you're not an artist, um, it's just grab a pencil. I'd recommend pencil. I, I like being able to erase, but start with that and start with drawing. You know that for he'll put a. Dot. This is where your book starts. This is that first city. And then work out there from your coastlines. But after that, you know, if you are good with computers, if you, you can take that original map after you get it all sketched out in a raised and everything fit in where you want it to and you can do that online or you can take that and hire an artist to do it and they, they're still gonna say, Hey, you know, you can describe it to me just like you can describe it to your readers. But a visual is so important no matter how rough and how horrible you think it looks. It really helps to have something scribbled out on paper to outline what it is you're hoping to see in your finished product. And there's some great programs out there. There's a photography programs, there's some, uh, people who do roleplaying games. There's some great things that you can make, some half decent maps that are out there. And of course, you know, I like to put all mine in Photoshop because I'm just, I just love Photoshops so much cause you're the person I have definitely grown to be very fond of the program, but it's not the only one out there. There's some other great programs too, so you should learn to, yeah, I can just mention a fractional map one. There's skimp. There is a dope illustrator Jesper (41m 34s): there was incarnate, which has actually become better and better and better with the latest releases that they've made. And then there's also cam campaign cap tracker for three, which is the software that I used before sort of a autumn state and took over the map to sign. But uh, yeah, there's, there's quite a lot of options out there. Some of them are easier to use. Some of them are more complicated. I mean Kemp campaign can talk earth chakra for three. Jesus, that's how to stay. Um, that, that one is a bit complicated to you, that it has a steep learning curve. Uh, but again, I mean go to our YouTube channel and there was actually, again, a step-by-step, I like those step by step things, but there is a step by step video series actually take you from scratch to, uh, using campaign could track over three up and exactly where to click and what to do. So there is that on the YouTube channel if you want. But otherwise there are, there are these different tools incarnate as far as I see, I've not tried it myself, but as far as I've seen all the tutorial videos, it's looks like it's pretty easy to use. Um, and I think what I would say is that if you want to put your map into a book that you're going to publish, then I agree with what autumn said in the sense that it's great to use these different tools or even if you do it the hand drawing, that's fine as well. But it's great to use something to get to an illustration of how, what you want the map to look like, right? So that you can easily see here all the cities here, the mountains and, and blah, blah, blah, blah. Everything is there. And so did you can give it to somebody who knows what they're doing. Uh, and then they will do the final touches on it and shine it up so that it becomes something that you can put into a novel. Uh, because you don't want to put in like let's say a campaign campaign tracker for three on incarnate or whatever, gimp or whatever you're using. You don't want to put ex tracked of that into a novel because it doesn't look professionally enough. So there is that caveat. Yes. But of course, if you can give the artist, here it is, it's exactly like this, you know, in terms of the placement of everything. And then just give them a bit of freedom and say, you know, play with it at the design of it, you know, make it, make it look professional and good. But I just want the different cities and the names and whatnot and the mountains and the rivers and all the other stuff. I wanted to look like this, but the actual finish touch of it or the layout, uh, I don't know if you can use that word, but you can, you know, feel free to, to be an artist and, and make that look really good. Uh, as long as you don't move things around on the map. Right. And being from the artist's point of view where I've done this for other authors, yes. That, that map the sketch, knowing where if someone wants to coastlines is just huge. You, you're going blind if you don't have that. So no matter how you feel about your drawing skills, Autumn (44m 32s): sketch it out and even it helps almost to finish writing the book before you try to get the map completed. Cause you'll be surprised at how many times you add something new through your first book and even through your subsequent books. I mean, I had, I had some features created by my characters that I had to add in later for later additions. But that's sort of the fun of creating a map and actually having the world grow with your stories. Narrator (45m 0s): Perfect. I think that's a wrap. Next Monday we'll cover something that is heavily debated and that is how much should you read when you're writing. If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

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Plus-sized body positivity model Tess Holliday is known for pioneering the #EffYourBeautyStandards and fat acceptance movements. But there’s a controversy over the presence of Photoshop in her photos. Is it hypocritical for someone to be for body positivity while also Photoshopping her flaws? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gabbie Hanna, one of my favorite YouTubers, faked going to Coachella with the help of Kellan Hendry, a 21-year-old photographer who takes ordinary portraits of people and Photoshops them into fantastical wonderlands. They had me and the entire Internet fooled, which made me think about how there is a new artist being born in the digital age: Photo Artists. Along with painters and sculptures, Photoshop and Lightroom editors are using these technologies to create masterpieces. The rise of the "Photo Artist" makes me think about a media studies theory I learned at Cal, which is Walter Benjamin's notion that the aura for a work of art is lost with the rise of mechanical reproduction. Can a highly Photoshopped image be considered art, or does its ability to be reposted make it lose its credibility? What happens when photo and video manipulation goes too far and is used for political gain? All this and more will be discussed on today's episode! Continue ReadingFaking Going to Coachella and the Rise of Photo Artists The post Faking Going to Coachella and the Rise of Photo Artists appeared first on Daisyish Days.

Over on instagram a reading revolution has spurned many #Bookstagram stars, including the delightful Bookish Bronte aka Bronte Huskinson, 22 year old author, visual storyteller and creator of beautiful book photography. A self-appointed champion of creative introverts she loves finding the best book-friendly villages wherever she travels and finds her happy place in a picturesque beach town on Lake George in New York State. We talk Instagram ethics, magical realism, feminism and feminine energy, travelling outside our comfort zones and so much more with Bronte Huskinson.   On this episode we cover:   Content creator Visual storyteller Book photographer Starting instagram to help boost her profile as a writer How her instagram account exploded Discovering #Bookstagram Starting with ‘flat lays’ Having 60k followers on Insta The ethereal quality of her photos Photos of books as an art form Inspiration from the books themselves Magical realism Feminism and feminine energy The hard work it takes to create a good image Clever tricks on Photoshop The growth of Instagram How instagram creates a more level playing field The touch job market for someone her age (now 22) Watching her friends struggle to get jobs Creating her own work How much she earns Whether Instagram will be around a long time People not really using Facebook anymore Wanting to do more than being paid to advertise on Instagram Wanting to be a woman’s advocate The importance of social media in promoting projects Her writing work Accidentally offending people with her book photos India’s issue with stepping on books Marie Kondo chucking out books Using ARCs – Advanced Reader’s Copy of books – when she has to rip things up The history of burning or destroying of books Book called The Binding by Bridget Collins How she Photoshops her images How she lives in a two bedroom terraced house rather than a run down ethereal mansion Taking most of her photos in her hallway Her lovely floor! Lying on books Using a brown wooden floor backdrop Not relating to being ‘an influencer’ How women find it hard to admit they’re good at something Being a ‘champion of creative introverts’ Thriving online Whether introverts are more creative than extroverts Being a painfully shy child – Lisa and Bronte Lisa deciding not to be shy any more Pushing ourselves out of comfort zone Perfecting useful skills age 21/22 Having the resolution to travel more Visiting the hotel that has the staircase on which Mary Queen of Scots walked down the staircase before execution (the Hotel Talbot Hotel in Oundle, Northamptonshire and the staircase said to be from Fotheringhay Castle) The outline of the ring where Mary pressed it into the wood of the staircase. Wanting to do more photos in beautiful locations Spending several summers in New York State Preferring the calm of Lake George and Saratoga to New York City Specials days on the beach at Lake George Her travel ambitions Whether university leavers still go on a Gap Year Realising she can’t do everything Fitting in her instagram account style to travel Being a homebody who wants to travel ‘bookish little places in the UK’ The beauty of Hay on Wye in Wales and its countless bookshops Lisa suggests she visits Haworth to and the Bronte’s house Doing a Wuthering Heights photo on the Yorkshire Moors Lisa’s trip to the house where AA Milne wrote Winnie the Pooh, also the house where Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones died in the pool in the Ashdown Forrest Spending a week in Tuscany and wanting to return to Crete The big discussion on mumsnet and in other media about the responsibilities of ‘Insta mums’ and taking freebies How travel industry freebies often work Instagram changes travel and attracting tourism Instagram also causing problems with over tourism Her trip to Ireland to promote the Happy Pear Book from the Happy Pear Restaurant Lisa getting stopped by police in Sugar Loaf in New York State and accidentally driving into West Point Military Academy when President Bush was about to land How travel can open people’s minds How being on instagram has made her ‘become a better person’ by getting to know people from all over the world How travel is character building Being obsessed with the Runaway by Tall Heights      

Boston Robb talks about Trump photoshopping his social media photos. And talks about the new Attorney General nominee William Barr's take on Cannabis. Then Robb teaches you about Crow, one of the smartest animals in the world. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/bostonrobb/support

About Christine Christine Gritmon helps the busy owners of small, local businesses be less intimidated by social media. Her previous experiences includes marketing work for big-brand beauty, local journalism & newsroom engagement work, and creating funny Photoshops for a comedy website (yes, really). She lives with her husband and two small children in Nyack, NY. I chat to Christine about... Hacks for getting content out there when you're flat out with no time! Ways to create fun content if you're a BORING company! How to use geotagging on social media to great effect when you're out and about Making the most of creating content out of meetings, networking events and meetings over coffee ☕️ Connect with Christine Visit her website On Twitter

This weeks episode of Bravo Happy Hour breaks down everything from Michael Darby's (RHOP) arrest for abusing a Bravo Camera Man, Padma Lakshmi's (Top Chef) op ed in the NY Times and a recap on our thoughts on Jerry O'Connell's new Show Bravo Play by Play. Tune in every Monday to find out what your favorite Bravolebrites are up to off screen! Follow your host @meo.nyc on Instagram and follow @Bravohappyhour on all forms of social!

In this episode T. Susan Chang plays host to interview me about my new deck from Llewellyn – The Orisha Tarot. We talk about my 18 year journey with the Lukumi tradition that brought me to this point. This episode is a deep dive into the how and why of this deck an dthe role the spirits have played in its creation too.  You can see the deck and get it from my website here, Amazon, or at your local bookshop.  Think about how much you've enjoyed the podcast and how many episodes you listened to, and consider if it is time to support the Patreon You can do so here. And you should go see all the good stuff Susan is up to here.  If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. Thanks for joining the conversation. Please share the podcast to help us grow and change the world.  Andrew You can book time with me through my site here.  Transcription SUSIE: Hello, everybody! You're hearing a different voice as the host of this week's Hermit's Lamp podcast. I'm Susie Chang, friend of Andrew, and Andrew has kindly invited me to come on the show in order to interview him about his new deck, the Orisha Tarot, since he obviously could not interview himself! [laughs] Normally, at the beginning of an interview, what I would do is introduce the guest, but since the guest is the host, I guess I'll just do a very cursory introduction of what I know about my friend, Andrew. As you know, he is the proprietor of The Hermit's Lamp, the store, which is a touchstone for all of us in the tarot community, and he is the voice behind The Hermit's Lamp podcast. He is an artist in his own right and a creator of beautiful works, decks, and he is also a priest in the Lucumí tradition, and we'll be talking about that some more. But the reason that we're here today is to talk about the Orisha Tarot, which is coming out from Llewellyn in September … What day is it?  ANDREW: Basically, today, according to Amazon.  SUSIE: For real! Fantastic! Yeah, this is very exciting. So, I understand decks are already shipping out, and I was also particularly interesting -- interested -- in doing this podcast because we're both Llewellyn authors. I've got a book coming out from Llewellyn on tarot correspondences just next month. So, shout out to Llewellyn for supporting the work of tarot lovers everywhere.  ANDREW: Absolutely. SUSIE: Yeah! So the Orisha Tarot is officially out. Congratulations! ANDREW: Thank you! SUSIE: It's been many years in the making, hasn't it?  ANDREW: Yeah, I mean it's … It's always one of those things. Where do you count that from? You know?  SUSIE: [laughs] ANDREW: I signed my contract for it about two years ago, maybe a little bit less than that. So that's probably as good a time as any. But even at that point I had already made a dozen cards and had spent five or six years prior to that thinking about it and trying to figure out what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it. So. You know?  SUSIE: Right. And actually, I'd like to back up even further, to the beginning of your story in this tradition. And to find out a little bit. Because it's been about ten years, I think you said? Something like that?  ANDREW: Ten years as a priest.  SUSIE: Mm-hmm.  ANDREW: As of August. It was 2000 when I started getting involved in this tradition. So it's been about 18 years that I've been involved.  SUSIE: Wow. So that's … Really, it's been a long journey for you. And I was listening to your wonderful interview with our friends at the Tarot Visions podcast, and I think you mentioned that you came into it through kind of a circle of friends who were exploring different esoteric traditions, and I kind of wanted to know a little bit more about what drew you. You mentioned that you were, you know, a friend had brought in his own explorations of Lucumí, and I wanted to, first of all, sort of talk a tiny bit about the context of Lucumí, since not everyone will be familiar with it, and also, a little bit more about your attraction to it. Now, as I understand it, Lucumí is a Cuban offshoot of the greater Yoruba African traditional religion, yeah?  ANDREW: So, the story you get will depend a lot on who you talk to. Like many things. Right?  SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: You know, so, at the time of the Atlantic slave trade, Yoruban wasn't really cohesive at all. That whole area was a bunch of city states and so on, right?  SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: So, this idea that there was sort of one cohesive African traditional religion, or ATR, which these things spread from, isn't really historically accurate. You know?  SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: If you came from, you know, the city of Ife, then, you know, your tradition slants in one direction, certain deities are, you know, held above others; if you come from Oyo, then, you know, that's going to have a different set of traditions and sort of a different kind of more primary veneration and tilting towards certain deities over others. If you're down sort of in the coastal parts of kind of western Africa, towards the south end of that sort of prominence, the way in which some of the Orisha are going to manifest, especially the water Orisha, are different than if you're sort of further north, or inland, or in other places. You know, and so … SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: It's important to understand that these sort of … All of these Orisha traditions and their diasporic manifestations, you know, as they found themselves in different countries, throughout the Caribbean and North and South America, they all varied depending on which groups of people were enslaved and brought over, which traditions survived, what happened in relationship to the indigenous culture that was present, you know, in Cuba indigenous culture was sort of pretty much wiped out, so there wasn't much inclusion of that into the traditions, whereas in other parts, you know, especially in South America, you know, some of those cultures continue to sort of live alongside and there's sort of more sharing of ideas. SUSIE: Yeah, it seems like in many of the diasporic manifestations, you see fates that have been heavily syncretized with whatever was going on locally.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think that, you know, the question of syncretization is always an interesting one, you know?  SUSIE: Yeah.  ANDREW: The story that some people like to say is that they were syncretized in order to conceal them and to prevent … SUSIE: Right. ANDREW: And to protect them and to allow them to practice covertly, you know … SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: And I'm sure that that's true in some ways. But also, you know, there's a lot of … In nonwestern approaches to magic and to spirituality, there's often a real sense of "hey, what's that guy good for? What's that spirit …?" SUSIE: Right. ANDREW: "What's that one going to do for me?" Whereas this sort of very practical notion of, you know, you come across somebody and you're like, "well, I read about this guy, what's that saint good for?" SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: And there's the syncretization that happens, for sure, but there's also the notion of like, having more spiritual people in your corner is not a bad idea at all. Right?  SUSIE: Exactly, exactly. ANDREW: And so, so I think the history is interesting to try and unravel, but I think that we'll never really fully understand exactly what was going on with everybody involved.  SUSIE: Exactly. And I think that, you know, people of faith kind of make faith work however they can, right? You know, it's sort of like you'll always have schools of thoughts that try to keep, you know, try to distinguish and separate and go towards a purist mentality in terms of practicing faith, and then there are others who'll say, well, we work with what we've got, you know?  ANDREW: Exactly. SUSIE: Yeah. ANDREW: So, and so, to kind of answer your kind of like, about my lineage … My lineage, as far back as we know it, originates with this woman Monserrate, you know, she's the farthest back that we can trace that, and my lineage originates in Cuba and through those sort of Cuban traditions. So. Variations of the diasporic traditions, for sure.  SUSIE: Right, right. So we're talking about … We're specifically talking about a tradition that came to Cuba through the slave trade.  ANDREW: Exactly, yeah. SUSIE: And do … You actually have some reference to that in, I think, your Ten of Swords card.  ANDREW: Absolutely. SUSIE: Which seems really appropriate, yeah. So, I wanted to know a little bit more about your personal journey, in terms of whether you yourself grew up in any kind of faith community, or whether you were … you know, did you have to rebel against one? did you long to belong to a faith community? What was that like for you and what was discovering this community like for you?  ANDREW: So, I think that one of the best things that my parents did was not raise me with any traditions at all.  SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: My parents weren't particularly religious, you know ... SUSIE: So what did you rebel against? [laughs] ANDREW: I didn't rebel against any- I mean I rebelled against everything. But we'll get to that. But what that meant was, you know, when I said to my mom, I want to go to the psychic fair and find some books on magic, when I was 12, my mom was like, okay. You know, when I like, picked out Alistair Crowley, she was like, sure, go ahead.  SUSIE: Yeah. ANDREW: So, that meant that I like had a lot of space to really get involved and think about other things, you know?  SUSIE: Yeah. ANDREW: You know, other than sort of when my parents split up and we started going to Anglican church, mostly I think because my mom wanted some community … SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: I didn't really have a lot of connection or experience with any kind of organized religion. But what happened was, when I was 14, I almost died in a car accident.  SUSIE: Right.  ANDREW: And after that I wanted to understand everything. And so, I didn't rebel against anything as such, but what I really wanted to know was, like, what does this all mean? Right? Like all of it. You know. At that point I'd already been reading tarot for a year … SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: I'd already been studying Crowley for a couple of years. It was already really invested in sort of a magical world view. And at that point then I just started reading everything I could get my hands on, right? So I'm like in grade 9 and 10, and reading Nietzsche and … SUSIE: Sure. ANDREW: Picking out, you know, people who can talk about these things. The youth group at the church was run by an ex-Jesuit, and so I would like corner him and be like "hey, tell me about this, tell me about that, tell me about this," and for the most part, people would indulge me and have conversations with me about it, you know?  SUSIE: Mm-hmm. Was there another organized religion that you were drawn to? Before Lucumí?  ANDREW: No. I mean, Crowley's work. You know?  SUSIE: Yes.  ANDREW: For me it was basically all about Crowley's work.  SUSIE: And you were in the OTO? ANDREW: Yeah. When I was in my ... It wasn't until much later though. It wasn't until I was, you know, well into my 20s that I actually even considered … I was like, oh, maybe the OTO exists here in Toronto. Maybe I could find people. Mostly I just practiced independently and pursued and tried to talk to people. SUSIE: Right.  ANDREW: Yeah. And then basically I left the OTO and the Armed Solace, which was another initiatory group, and moved into practicing Lucumí, you know? That was my journey.  SUSIE: Yeah, yeah. And it's been, as you said, like an 18-year journey at this point. And, so that's something I wanted to sort of ask you about, in terms of doing the artwork, telling the stories, introducing the wider world to this tradition. You know, often when we are talking about faiths we didn't grow up in, you know, there's this question of whether it's your story to tell, or whether, you know, at what point do you become a representative? And so that's a question I have for you, at what point did you feel that you were invested enough or, you know, that you had a strong enough sense of belonging to be able to bring this to other people?  ANDREW: Sure. So, there's a whole bunch of pieces to that answer. SUSIE: Mm-hmm. It's a complex one. [laughing] ANDREW: Yeah! We'll start with this. When you … When you become a priest, right? You become initiated into a lineage, right? So, you know, and when we talk about ancestors, the word we use most of the time is Egun. Right? We mean Egun to mean, ancestors by blood, and ancestors by initiation, right?  SUSIE: Right. ANDREW: And so, you know, my Egun are those priests of the Orishas, going back to Montserrate and beyond, you know, and they're lost to history beyond that. And so, part of the conversation for me is, this is my lineage, this is my, these are my ancestors at this point, right? And this is something that we take pretty seriously within the tradition, right? Initiation and lineage are really significant. SUSIE: Right.  ANDREW: And so that's part of the thing. Part of it is, although my parents did not practice this tradition, I am initiated into this lineage in a traditional way.  SUSIE: So, so there's a difference here between blood lineage and spiritual lineage.  ANDREW: But the word does not differentiate. We don't differentiate, right? So, if you … We could … You could get a reading, and, your traditional reading, and your reading could come in a good way or a bad way, depending on what's going on with you, from the Egun, right?  SUSIE: Right, right.  ANDREW: And when we're divining, if it's possible, we want to mark who that is, and we would ask, ancestors from the lineage, and ancestors from the blood line, and depending on what the reading came out as, it would guide us. And we could narrow it down, and be like, "Oh, yeah, the ancestors are upset with you, and in this case it's someone from your blood family, or in some other case it's somebody from your initiatory lineage," but we don't differentiate, the word means the same, right?  SUSIE: Yes, I seem to remember reading something this past week about the idea that your, your, they're sort of one set, one bloodline sort of over one shoulder and spiritual guidance over the other, but they sort of combine and you need both. And I guess, you know, speaking about the outlook and cosmology of the faith, would it fair to say that, you come into this religion, but the religion itself proceeds from the assumption that everybody, no matter where you come from, no matter who your parents, or grandparents etc. were, has a relationship, or a potential relationship they haven't yet realized, with the Orisha?  ANDREW: I don't think that that's actually true.  SUSIE: Okay. So that's what I'm trying to get to the bottom of here.  ANDREW: Okay. Before we come to Earth, we choose our destiny. We choose our Ori, right? Ori is sort of, not easily translated into one thing, but if you think of it as sort of your guardian angel, your destiny, and your higher self, all as one entity, that's probably a reasonable set of points to make sense of it, for people who have those ideas already.  SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: And when you choose your destiny, before you come to Earth, it's sealed, right?  SUSIE: Right.  ANDREW: And so, we don't know what all it entails before we come, but if it's part of your destiny to get initiated into the Orisha tradition then opportunities will present themselves for that. It's not to say that you couldn't force them otherwise, but those wouldn't be in alignment with your destiny. And really, when we're talking about sort of initiation, and sort of connection, and those kinds of things, they really all ought to be dictated by either divination, or dictated by Orisha in possession of people, right?  SUSIE: Yes.  ANDREW: It's not really, you know. There are many people who will come, people will come and Orishas are like, "yeah, okay, we'll help you," right?  SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: Or the people will come, and they'll be like, "no, you should go do something else," right?  SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: Either direction, go over that way, go look at these people, you know, like go look at these other traditions. It's definitely not for … It's not meant for everybody, per se, and it's not closed in any, you know, in any particular way, although certain houses and certain, you know, lineages, might be more closed to outsiders than others, based on a whole bunch of different factors, but … SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: It's much more so that, you know, if it's part of your destiny the opportunity will arise, if it's not, then, you know, you might run into it, but they might say, no, you're good, go to the other side.  SUSIE: Right. Well, this is interesting to me because I've noticed that there seem to be a lot of people who are clearly didn't grow up within the culture who have become drawn to this religion or some form of it, some form of the faith, and, you know, taken it on. And, it seems as though there is, you know, a certain openness to those who commit themselves, whether or not they grew up or had family or, you know, understood the culture. Right?  ANDREW: Yeah, I mean I think that, I think that there are opportunities definitely for people to engage and connect with these traditions. And there are definitely practitioners around who are, you know, open to people who didn't grow up in these traditions and so on, for sure, right.  SUSIE: Right, right.  ANDREW: That's definitely a thing, and you know, I mean that, I think one of the things I see that's going on is that, certain people seem like they're looking for tradition, right? They're looking for … They're kind of doing something that doesn't have a long living history, and they're kind of looking backwards for, or looking around for those things that do, you know?  SUSIE: Yeah. ANDREW: I think that's part of why the Tarot de Marseilles is sort of resurfacing. SUSIE: Right, right.  ANDREW: You know, it's, I think that it's why the Orisha traditions are shifting and coming forward more. You know?  SUSIE: Right. That's one of the things that … I guess that's why I was asking you so much about your own background in terms of, you know, working independently versus belonging, right? Because I think that that's something that a lot of us struggle with, especially those of us who grew up, you know, in an era where religious community isn't something that one takes for granted.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. SUSIE: Yeah. So anyway, I think that we should probably turn a little bit to the work itself.  ANDREW: Well, let me finish answering … Cause we started with this question of me and sort of, you know, doing this deck, right?  SUSIE: Mm-hmm.  ANDREW: You know, sort of … And we kind of started talking about the ancestral piece and drifted away, and there are a couple of other things that I want to sort of … SUSIE: Okay, good.  ANDREW: So I mean, one of the things, like I did a bunch of things around creating and starting this process, and getting permission before I started this process, and certainly one of them was sitting with my elders and talking about what I wanted to do, and, you know, getting advice from them.  SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: And certainly part of it was asking the Orishas themselves, asking Elegua for, you know, his blessing to proceed with this project.  SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: And also, you know, sort of sitting down with people and sort of showing my art with, you know, with different people and people of color and so on to kind of consult with my choices around representations and so on, so.  SUSIE: Absolutely, absolutely. ANDREW: I really wanted to, you know, you can never please anybody, and I'm sure there'll be some people who'll be upset by the deck, and well, you know, that's life. Right? But … SUSIE: Right. But it sounds as though you have a lot of support. At least within the community you have access to for the work that you undertook. ANDREW: Exactly. SUSIE: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Cool. So I wanted to talk a little bit about making a tarot deck, approaching a tarot deck, coming out of the various traditions you come out of. So I know that you started out with Crowley and the Thoth deck -- or, I know you pronounce it "Toth," [laughing] and also that your primary commitment as a reader for quite a while has been the Marseilles deck. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. SUSIE: So, how … Why did it seem like a natural choice to you to translate or to represent what you know from Orisha as a tarot deck? You know, I think a lot of people would say, well, you know, since there isn't an obvious 78 card structure, you know, number of deities, all the sort of correspondences that tend to underlie at least the Golden Dawn-derived decks, or the general tradition of tarot reaching back to the 15th century, you know, why, why do a tarot deck and not something more free form like an oracle deck?  ANDREW: Well, because, one of the reasons why I made this deck was because I wanted to create a bridge between the people who have traditional experience with the Orishas, and people who have experience with the traditional tarot structure.  SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: And I wanted to use that … those two pieces as a way of creating a bridge so that people could sort of have more understanding of each other. And of what's going on, right?  SUSIE: Yeah, yeah.  ANDREW: And so, I really, you know, I mean, I've got nothing against oracle decks, I mean I released one earlier in the year. But, in trying to think about something as large and expansive as the Orisha traditions, it really … Having a clear structure, like the tarot structure, allowed me to frame and set the conversation in a way that allowed me to finish it [laughing] cause otherwise … SUSIE: [laughing] Right, it's ... otherwise, how do you know when it's done? [laughing] ANDREW: Yeah, right? I mean, we divine with, you know, upwards of 256 different signs.  SUSIE: Right. ANDREW: Each of those signs is as complicated or as a trump card, or as sophisticated as a trump card … SUSIE: Right. ANDREW: and then there's, you know, depending on who you ask, you know, a bunch of primary Orishas and maybe, you know, like even hundreds if you start getting into different paths and roads, it can expand infinitely in every direction, right? So.  SUSIE: Mm-hmm. I'm curious in whether there's much crossover between the two communities, that you've noticed. I mean tarot, and Orisha.  ANDREW: Sure, lots of people. I know lots of people who are initiated. You know, I mean, that sort of … syncretic piece, kind of "what can I do with this?", you know, that continues to be a problem with a lot of Orisha practitioners' lives, right?  SUSIE: Yeah. ANDREW: It's more purely, just the Lucumí Orisha stuff. Many people practice some combination of, you know, Paulo Moyumbe, and espiritismo, and card reading, and, you know, other things, depending on who they are and what they feel is important and what they have access to. So there's not like … There's not a lot of hard rules … SUSIE: Yeah.  ANDREW: About the Orisha tradition. Certainly not the tradition I practice.  SUSIE: Right.  ANDREW: I mean, definitely don't mix them in one ceremony. SUSIE: But it's okay if you practice them separately.  ANDREW: If you go to church on Sunday, and then you tend your ancestral Boveda, and then you have some Orisha, and you go between them, depending on what you feel and need, it depends on where you go, it's a really common experience for a lot of people. So.  SUSIE: Yeah, yeah, I'm glad you addressed that, cause that's something I was really curious about. You know, you don't dilute your practice by sort of mixing a bit of everything. On the other hand, you're one person, and, you know, if you're drawn to different practices, then perhaps you're drawn to different practices for different needs.  ANDREW: Sure. And if the Orisha don't want you doing that, they'll tell you! For sure. SUSIE: [laughing] Right.  ANDREW: They'll be like, "stop it!"  SUSIE: That's not cool. Yeah.  ANDREW: Yeah.  SUSIE: So, a little bit about what people can expect when they're approaching the cards. Now, it's not like there's a particular Orisha per card. There's Orisha in some representations of some cards, some cards have concepts from Lucumí, some cards have one of the Odu on them, so, sort of like, how did you approach how you wanted to impart all of this information structurally into the deck?  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. So, I really, I wanted to try and avoid what I had seen done in other decks in the past.  SUSIE: Mm-hmm.  ANDREW: Not because it's wrong per se, but because it doesn't give the conversation enough meat. Right? You know a lot of decks would say, well, Shango is the king, and therefore, he's the emperor, and so when I draw the Emperor I'm going to draw Shango.  SUSIE: Right.  ANDREW: And that's fair, you know, I mean Shango is the emperor, he's the king of the Orishas.  SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: But, but there's a lot more to it than that. What does that mean? In what way does kingship or power in that way show up in a variety of different contexts, and what are the different conversations that we could have, right?  SUSIE: Exactly. ANDREW: And so, when I was sort of working with the trump cards, I wanted to embody the ideas that I see being behind, you know, behind the cards themselves: spiritual authority, earthly authority, fortune and chance, you know, like different things. I wanted to sort of embody those bigger ideas and kind of avoid kind of just a straight, this symbol = this symbol here … SUSIE: Yeah, I call that the matchy match. [laughing] ANDREW: Right? Exactly. SUSIE: Yeah, yeah, yeah.  ANDREW: When I was looking at the number cards, which for me often represent sort of more the what and the how of life, right? I wanted to kind of focus more on stories, and those things that tend to be more about particular patakis, or stories or ideas from the lives of the Orishas and the lives of their practitioners and where that kind of overlaps and integrates with those numbered cards. And then when I got to the court cards, I wanted to, I wanted to really kind of explore the way the court cards can be sort of seen to line up with roles people might play in the community. Right?  SUSIE: Right. ANDREW: So, when we're looking at those, we see … One of them, the Aleyo, the new person who's just coming to this tradition, who's ready to learn, and they're making an offering to, you know, the butcher, who is a very skilled and important part of the ceremonies in the community, to the elders who run the ceremonies, and the singers and the drummers and the artists and all of those things, so I kind of went through and sifted those ideas into where I felt they aligned with the court cards best. SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: So, the court cards then become really positions or roles one might find oneselves in, in religion, and over time, with the traditional idea of the court cards, over time we might [00:29:27]. Over time we might be, you know, we might play this role in this community and that role in another community. And so on. So. SUSIE: Right, right. And I think hat underscores what I think sometimes we forget about court cards, which is that we can be any of them, and we are any and all of them at different times.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. SUSIE: So, about that … A word you brought up just before, which I think is pretty important for us to discuss, the word Pataki, the story. So can you tell us a little bit about how that is contextualized within the faith and also, we should mention, that that is the name of the book that goes with the deck, Patakis of the Orisha Tarot. Yeah. ANDREW: So, patakis are the stories of the Orishas and their practitioners that are meant to be instructive, right?  SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: The word parable, you know, is a way to maybe give a different word for it in English.  SUSIE: Right.  ANDREW: And, you know, especially when we're divining, right, we'll often give a proverb, and we'll often, you know, tell a story about the Orishas. And, this is part of this oral tradition of it, that we are expressing these ideas in ways that allow us to tell the person things, in ways that are easier to hold onto, easier to integrate, that give us some meat, rather than just saying, "hey, don't do this thing," which we might also say … SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: We might also tell the story of when one of the Orishas did that thing and what happened to them.  SUSIE: Yes.  ANDREW: "Oh yeah yeah, okay I see that. I shouldn't do that thing, cause this is gonna happen," right? There'll be a problem.  SUSIE: There's something about these stories that's so human and relatable, right? You know? I mean is it not the case that the Orisha themselves were at one time human or before they became more than human?  ANDREW: Well, that's a … That's a contested … Somewhat contested point of view. Many Orisha are what's known as urumole. They came from heaven. Right? They originated purely from spirit.  SUSIE: Mm-hmm.  ANDREW: There are Orishas who are considered deified ancestors, Shango being one of them, you know, Oduduwa being another one. You know, there are these spirits, these people who led great lives and led their communities and so on, and became, you know, deified after their death. The question that comes up in those conversations, then, also is were those lives that Orisha descending and living on Earth for a period of time?  SUSIE: Yes, right. Yeah. ANDREW: So, I mean, I think that it … I think that there's no clear answers to that. But in general, the majority of the Orishas did not start as human, but originated as part of the unfolding of creation, and then came to sort of live these lives and, you know, have these stories and experiences that we now understand. And also, when we're talking about some of these stories, I think that we also need to understand that some of them, and there's no easy historical way to say which ones are not, but a good chunk of them were probably stories about priests of those spirits.  SUSIE: I see.  ANDREW: Made these mistakes in their lives. It's like, "Oh yeah, you're Bill, the priest of Obatala who lived down the road …" SUSIE: [laughing] ANDREW: "Remember when you did this?" "Yeah, I remember," right?  SUSIE: [laughing] Right, right.  ANDREW: And those stories become, you know, part of the myth, right? Part of the lexicon of these traditions.  SUSIE: Yes. I guess what makes me wonder, you know, what their relationship with mortality and humanity is, is because these stories, the emotions and the sort of currents that they represent are things that anyone can relate to. You know, there's jealousy, there's anger, there's, you know, there's infidelity, there's theft, there are things that you don't sort of in the same way that in the Greek mythology you see people, you see deities acting badly, right? Or in ways that show that they can make mistakes too.  ANDREW: Definitely. One of my elders likes to say, you know, "They made those mistakes, you don't need to, okay?"  SUSIE: [laughing] ANDREW: Right? But, you know. We're all human. We're gonna learn or we're not gonna learn. But we'll learn one way or another. Right?  SUSIE: Right, right. So, a little bit more about deck structure. So, first of all, I noticed immediately that there were some sorts of ways in which your experience with tarot informed the deck. First of all, there's a little bit of a thought sensibility, in that your Strength and Justice are ordered in the way that the Thoth deck and the Marseilles deck do, rather than the Rider-Waite-Smith. I noticed that you have ordered it wands, cups, swords, disks, fire, water, air earth, which is a very hermetic thing. And the very fact that you call them disks also comes out of the Thoth tradition. But, I also wanted to know a little bit, for example, of ... I can sort of understand where the structure for the majors comes from, but what I wanted to know a little bit more is about the pips. Because your primary reading background comes from, as far as assigning meaning to the pips, I guess would be based in Thoth originally? I wondered if there was sort of more relationship …. Would someone who comes from a Rider-Waite-Smith tradition instantly recognize, or from a Golden Dawn tradition, instantly recognize the concepts in each of these minor cards?  ANDREW: Well, I mean I think so. [laughing] SUSIE: [laughing] I can tell you that I certainly did. ANDREW: I mean, here's my hope about this deck. You know?  SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: I mean, so, obviously, I started with the Thoth deck, and I read with that deck for many years, exclusively. But I also read a ton of books on tarot, right, during that time. And had a lot of conversations, especially once I started branching out in the communities more, and you know, I mean, I've read lots of books on the Waite-Smith tradition, and, you know, all of that sort of and a bunch of that older stuff, you know?  SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: Hermetic or otherwise. So when I was, when I was creating this deck, there are … People who are reading the book, you'll come to some spots, you'll hit a few cards where it's like, you know, in the Marseilles tradition, people often think of this card this way, and I'll give a little bit of context, and then when you go and read it, it'll make a ton of sense.  SUSIE: Yeah.  ANDREW: And, that's really mostly because I could have, you know, I could have written ten times as much about these cards as I did. But Llewellyn said, you can only make the book [cross-laughter [00:37:02]  SUSIE: Right, right.  ANDREW: And, and I really endeavored to sort of kind of hold what I see as kind of the middle of the road on these meanings, right? I mean I didn't … the numbering is the numbering, and to me ultimately the numbering … I mean, this might be blasphemy from a hermetic point of view, but to me the numbering of the trump cards is really largely irrelevant.  SUSIE: I think it's arbitrary, yeah.  ANDREW: It's a historical precedent that's [inaudible at [00:37:30]. SUSIE: Although, although, Andrew, I think it's important that you made Elegua the Fool. I think, you know. ANDREW: For sure!  SUSIE: Yeah. As the Orisha who comes first.  ANDREW: For sure, yeah, yeah. But, but, you know, choosing Justice to be this number or that number, I'm like, eh. I almost never read the numbers when I read cards, because I just see the cards, right?  SUSIE: Right, right.  ANDREW: So, you know, this deck is really meant to be, you know, a kind of relatively even representation of tarot as it exists today, right?  SUSIE: Yeah, yeah.  ANDREW: And so, there's not … none of it's slanted too much one way or the another. There's no like "Well, you need to know that Crowley called this card the Aeon means, you know the goddess Nuit means this... SUSIE: Right.  ANDREW: It's just not like that at all, right?  SUSIE: Yeah, I mean, my sensation as I was getting to know the deck was really that it was about the stories, and which story fit which card best.  ANDREW: Yeah. It's one of the things that I actually really … I wouldn't have guessed that I would have felt this was so important, but the feedback that I've gotten from the people who've gotten their books already, or gotten their copies already, who I shared advance copies with and stuff, is … including some non-tarot people who just are reading it because they really like me.  SUSIE: [laughing] ANDREW: The feedback I keep getting is that the material is really accessible. And to me, that's like a really important thing. You know? I didn't want to make this difficult, I avoided using as much jargon, or like, you know, Lucumí words, as much as possible. I really, you know, I didn't get into hermetic philosophy particularly anywhere. You know there are all these branches and wings of my own personal experiences and practice, that I just brought them all down to the dining hall, I was like, "All right! Let's all have lunch to talk about stuff in a general way." SUSIE: [laughing] ANDREW: You know, it's hard to make that happen, so.  SUSIE: Right. Well I think that, you know, I think it's really important for anyone coming to this deck to get to know the book, to read the book, really read the book, because it's, you know, it's 350 pages, it's real, it's got every single page not only has a story that's associated with the card, but also sort of breaks down the symbols that you included in the card, what its divinatory meaning might be, and sort of what the advice might be that goes with it. And I found that incredibly helpful in terms of, like, you know, if I came across a card where my own sort of tarot background wasn't making it immediately obvious to me what you were trying to do, I could just go to the book and it was really clear, you know, like within a minute. So, I think that it's … This is one of those things where … And I generally am not a person who believes that readers always have to go to the book, but I think it is really enriching and helpful to contextualize using what you wrote for this deck.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think unless somebody has a strong living practice with like, you know, with a traditional Orisha practice, yeah, it might be hard to start just by looking at it … SUSIE: Yeah, yeah.  ANDREW: Most people who come from those traditions and read cards, as well, then maybe they don't need the book as much, you know. It's always interesting as I share the images on the, you know, on social media and stuff, I get, you know, priests jumping on the thing, and like, "how you choose to represent this here! it's perfect!" you know? SUSIE: [laughing] right. ANDREW: They just get it, right? Because they have both of those pieces. But it's so nice to see people be moved to see themselves and to see the tradition in this way, which is really gratifying.  SUSIE: Mm-hmm, Mm-hmm. Before we move off structure and start talking a little bit more about the art and the specific cards, is there a sort of through line in each suit that we should be looking for? Something that's going on in wands only, something that's going on in cups or swords or disks?  ANDREW: That was … That was a notion that I abandoned along the way. You know, in making a deck there always comes this point where the reality check steps in, and you're like, this is the limit of what I can do, you know.  SUSIE: Yeah, yeah.  ANDREW: And the sort of the idea that there was sort of one through line for each set of suits, I didn't really, I couldn't really find it, and you know there are a couple other ideas about levels of detail and symbolic representations that I just realized I'd be spending another five years like hand-drawing beaded things all day… SUSIE: [laughing] ANDREW: I'm like, that can't happen.  SUSIE: Right, and if … I mean there are certainly color and number correspondences you could have worked with but, by forcing it into you know, existing tarot structure or hermetic structure I think you would have been doing something that was not necessarily conducive to the most rich environment of reading these cards. ANDREW: Exactly. SUSIE: You know what I mean? Yeah, although, I'm looking at … I've sorted it out, separated my deck out, Ace, Cups Swords, sorry, Wands, Cups, Swords, I'm looking at the Aces, and there's definitely, I get at least just from my background, I get an elemental feeling off of those cards, you know, a fire, water, air, earth feeling, and even if that's not something that you intended to do or carried throughout the deck, there's still something there, I think. ANDREW: For sure. I mean, in making this deck it's definitely … A lot of stuff just emerged in the creative process. And although I spent a lot of time thinking and writing and making notes about what went where and why and so on, when I sat down to make the cards, a lot of stuff just emerged as part of that process, you know, from the news, from the creativity, by chance or whatever, my own conscious formulated it, so there's a lot of stuff in there that happened as I was making the cards, it wasn't necessarily fully thought out … SUSIE: But which is just part of you, as a reader and a practitioner. ANDREW: Yeah. I mean, you spend 32 years working with the tarot, right?  SUSIE: [laughing] ANDREW: It's a lot of ideas in the back of the brain there that are trying to come out in one way or another.  SUSIE: Right. So, let's talk a little bit about the way the cards look for those people who haven't been lucky enough to pick up their decks yet. It's a gorgeous production, first of all, I think you, you know … the artwork's just stunning, and Llewellyn did a great job, I think, as well. First of all it's a borderless deck, which, thank you! [laughing] That's …  ANDREW: Llewellyn let me do something that they had never done before, which was: all of the titles are handwritten.  SUSIE: Yeah! Yeah! ANDREW: [crosstalking [00:44:55] to the cards. They're not obscured, they're easy enough to see when you're looking … SUSIE: You can find them.  ANDREW: [crosstalking] Off of the bottom. They fit in more with the artwork, so it's easier to kind of just look at the artwork, or just look for the title when you need to.  SUSIE: Right.  ANDREW: That was something that we had a bunch of conversations with …  SUSIE: I think it was a brilliant choice. Because, you know, it really foregrounds the story of the art. The art fills the frame, you know, everything about it allows you to immerse yourself in what's going on in that picture, and then secondarily you, you know, check out whatever title it was so you can sort of match it up with your own tarot knowledge. But I really appreciated that and I'm really glad that they made that decision and you, you know, suggested it. And also, the colors are so saturated and so bold. So the texture and look that you were going for was based on Gwash, right?  ANDREW: Well, so, actually, what I was … So, I used to paint in Gwash a lot, before I had kids. But, you know, having kids, and having a space to set up art, you know, a small, urban space, isn't really that easy, right?  SUSIE: Right.  ANDREW: So certainly, that's a piece of my sensibility and my aesthetic, but part of what I was really looking for was, you know, starting, it's hard to date now, but starting quite a while ago, I went from being super structured and really trying to sort of make everything perfect, to really kind of moving to a more gestural and looser way of working. And so, you know, this kind of comes out of that, you know, sort of move away from you know, sort of pursuing absolute realism to pursuing something else. And then, the other piece of the aesthetic is, you know, I wanted to include different pieces of symbolism, but I didn't want to make it look like the Thoth deck where there are so many symbols that you don't really know what to look at sometimes.  SUSIE: Yes, yes.  ANDREW: And so, one of the things that I decided along the way was, you know, there's a lot of use of textiles, especially in Africa and west Africa, and the Orisha traditions, there's a lot of use of textiles in making thrones, in making ceremonial outfits, you know, in making panuelos, which are these elaborate cloths that we put on top of the Orisha sometimes. And so I wanted to kind of have a reference to that without trying to like emulate it or create like, recreate specific patterns, but use that visual idea to create a space for that symbolic language to hold, right?  SUSIE: Yes.  ANDREW: For the use of number, and through whatever other symbols got added to those designs and so on. So.  SUSIE: Yeah, I really picked up on the fact that the design sensibility behind this had that sort of sense of, you know, scope and flow and bold lines that you get in textile. And, you know, that's not something you always see in tarot, and so it was really kind of a relief to the eye to sort of not get too, I don't know, bound up in the busy?  ANDREW: mm-hmm. SUSIE: Yeah. I think what we see is sort of a looseness of the line, and … But at the same time a real exactness in terms of what symbols you wanted to portray and the way that you foregrounded them in each card. So, so, you did this actually on an iPad, right?  ANDREW: I did, yeah. I did all of this digitally. I've been working pretty much exclusively digitally for the last five or six years now, I guess, ever since …  SUSIE: Yeah. And does that have to do with being busy, being a parent, you know, just trying to live life in addition to being an artist?  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean I don't have a studio space, you know, I don't have … Toronto is apparently one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in, thanks for that, whoever's responsible for that … SUSIE: [laughing] ANDREW: But space is certainly at a premium. And, you know, the only space where I maybe could do more studio type work is at the shop, and I already spend lots of time at the shop seeing clients and doing other stuff. I don't really want to be at work even if it's sort of as a creative outlet. And the iPad, you know, it's always with me, and when I was making this deck , I would just be like, oh, I've got an hour, time to work on one of the cards a bit. You know?  SUSIE: Yeah. ANDREW: Here's some writing. Or whatever. It's just, it's always at hand, it's super portable, and especially, I got an iPad Pro, like one of the big ones, and an Apple pencil, which finally I was able to make happen through the process and you know, it's the best thing ever, it's just … SUSIE: Yeah, and if you get interrupted, you can just save it, and pick it up later.  ANDREW: And I'm sure, like from a production point of view too, you can work in layers, like in Photoshop … SUSIE: Yeah. ANDREW: It's a real treat. So all the backgrounds are their own layers and all the symbols SUSIE: That's great, yeah.  ANDREW: The line work symbols and stuff. So if I make a mistake, if I change my mind later … SUSIE: Right, right. Plus it gives you more freedom. I mean if you're doing a background you don't want to just stop to make room for the foreground, right?  ANDREW: Right? Yeah. All also, I just sent all the Photoshops to Llewellyn, and they asked me if they could take some of them apart and use pieces for making the box and other stuff, which they did, which is fantastic. I'm so delighted with it. It just, it allows for a variety of options in a way that traditional mediums just don't, you know?  SUSIE: Yeah, I was really excited to realize that you did this in a digital format like that just because I didn't know that you could create art like this in that way and have it come out looking so good. You know? ANDREW: Mm-hmm. SUSIE: And the other thing is that I just, I thought it was really funny, that just practically speaking, that it made so much sense for you. This is one of my hobby horses, the idea of just how difficult it is to be both a parent and a practitioner, you know, just to live your life and try to do this work is a constant struggle. Like, you know, you're in the middle of a banishing ritual and some kid is like, coming through saying, Mom, I missed the bus! ANDREW: Yeah! SUSIE: I mean, it's like it's every day, you know, trying to make that work is tricky for a lot of us. So I'm glad you found a way to make this happen.  ANDREW: Me too.  SUSIE: Okay, so I'd love to, if you feel like it, I'd love to talk a little bit about specific cards. If you could just give me a second, I have to plug … My laptop's going to run out of charge. I just have to plug it in real quick. ANDREW: Yeah. SUSIE: Just, be right there. [pause] Okay, we're good. And I can strip that out of the tape, later on, if you want. Okay. So, let's talk about a couple majors. I wanted to return to the Fool card, cause I think that's super important, where you have Elegua, who is, I guess, you know I don't want to make the mistake of trying to do too much equivalency here, but he is the one who makes communication possible as I understand it.  ANDREW: Yeah. Elegua is the Orisha we speak to first in every ceremony, because he opens and closes the ways, and Elegua is all of the communication everywhere, on every single level, right. If we think about the communication between every cell in your body is that communication between the parts of the universe, you know, nothing exists or could happen without Elegua being there to facilitate that transfer of information from one place to another.  SUSIE: Right. Right. And so, I think, you know, that's what makes it so important and so appropriate that he's the first card in the deck. You have to, even to open your mouth, to gather the air to speak, you have to be there, right, although he also has a presence in a number of other cards as well. And what people will see, when they look at it, is, I guess the, a common representation of Elegua is the kind of stone or concrete head with the cowrie shells embedded in it, right?  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Yeah, when people … A common solution, a relatively common solution to troubles in people's lives is to receive what's referred to as the Warriors … SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: Which is Elegua, Ogun and Ochossi. It's an initiation that you don't have to be a priest to have. Anybody can receive this if it's marked or required. And they come into your life to help you fight your problems and overcome your obstacles and so on. And what there's actually, people are really accustomed to seeing these cement heads with the cowrie shells, but traditionally depending on your lineage, Elegua is … they have marked the path of Elegua, and there are many ways in which Elegua might be made. But I chose to make the one that people understand the most because I wanted it to be somewhat familiar to people, for sure.  SUSIE: Right, and this is actually a symbol that ordinary people might have in their homes, right?  ANDREW: Maybe.  SUSIE: Yeah, yeah. Well, just real quick, after I got your deck, I had the craziest dream, where I dreamed that I got up and I went outside. And this was around midnight. And the UPS truck comes, [laughing] and gives me a package with my name on it, and I open it and I suddenly start to feel really strange like I'm high or I've taken something or ingested some kind of substance, like, just through opening the package. And then I was instantly transported into some kind of rite that was going on in my dining room. And Elegua was there. [laughing] And I thought this was, obviously this is not, I knew almost nothing before this week about this tradition, but, and I certainly have no way of knowing what significance that had or what, you know I certainly can't speak for the tradition in any way, but I thought it was, so interesting that, you know, my dream maker chose to take the delivery of your deck to me as this kind of mind-altering frame-shifting event. and then introduce, you know, this personification of communication, the opener of the ways, into the dream.  ANDREW: Yup. Indeed. SUSIE: So I was very grateful for that experience. Okay. The only other major I really wanted to make sure we talked about was the Priestess card.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. SUSIE: Because it's not what people would ordinarily expect to see in a Priestess card, and I thought you could talk a little bit about what we're looking at and how it relates to the High Priestess we know and love.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. So, this is actually one of the cards that gave me the biggest trouble.  SUSIE: Mm-hmm.  ANDREW: I spent a lot of time working on this card, they're a bunch of drawings that got scrapped along the way, because I was just like, no, nope, no, no, no, that's not gonna cut it, that's too simple, that's too this, that's too whatever, right?  SUSIE: Mm-hmm.  ANDREW: You know, so what we see in the Priestess card, is we see a bunch of cowrie shells, right?  SUSIE: Right. ANDREW: And the dillogun, or the cowrie shells, are you know one of the traditional tools of divination. For olocha, for priests in the way that I'm a priest, it's the way in which we speak with the Orishas. And, when we divine with the shells, we pray, and we invoke an opening with Elegua or whoever, for an Odu, for a sign, like a, the idea almost like a card to sort of … But those energies, those Odu, are the living unfolding of the universe, right?  SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: So, they represent all of the knowledge that was and is and all of the possible knowledge of the future, or the possible unfoldings of the future. And so, those energies that arrive when we do a reading, and come to play in the life of the person who gets the reading done … It's actually a serious ceremony to get a reading.  SUSIE: Yeah. ANDREW: It alters the course of your life, right? And, you know when we think of the Priestess or the Papess, right?  SUSIE: Mm-hmm.  ANDREW: One of the things that we can talk about is knowledge, right? And it's deep metaphysical knowledge, right?  SUSIE: Right. Which isn't readily accessible to you at a surface level.  ANDREW: And, when we think about the Hierophant or the Pope as sort of the outer face of spirituality, the High Priestess is the inner face. She's the inner mystery of that, right?  SUSIE: Right . ANDREW: And she is that knowledge which is hard to get to, that knowledge which is hard won, and that knowledge which is tied to a deep respect and a deep cosmic awareness of the nature of the universe, right?  SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: And so this Odu and the method of divination and the process of divination, to me mirrors that, right?  SUSIE: Correct.  ANDREW: And so the shells become the mouth of the Priestess, right? And if we look at it in a sort of Rider Waite symbol, right? Cascarilla and the Ota, the black stone?  SUSIE: Yes! ANDREW: They mirror, we use those in the divination process, but they mirror those two columns … SUSIE: The boas and jacim, yeah.  ANDREW: The positive and negative vibrations that are in that sort of duality.  SUSIE: And those are a kind of … Are they a yes/no kind of stand-in?  ANDREW: Yeah, we use them and other things to ask specific questions within a reading. We each have … There's about a half dozen Ibo that all have ritual significance, and we use them in different ways depending on the nature of the question we're asking.  SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: And then the other thing that's going on in this card is, usually people divine on a straw mat or a tray … SUSIE: Yeah.  ANDREW: With cowrie shells. And some people use a wooden tray, maybe, but more often than not a straw mat. So, I wanted to create this idea of the straw mat, but then this idea that below it is this sort of cosmic opening, right? This connection to everything.  SUSIE: Yeah. ANDREW: So, this is actually probably one of the most abstracted cards in the whole deck … SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: In that it doesn't really show an Orisha or a thing that is sort of easily connectable, but I think that it really represents a sort of, that depth of knowledge and connection, direct connection to the voice of creation, that I associate with the High Priestess and that you know I associate with this divination process.  SUSIE: Yes. Now the Odu themselves, they're transmitted orally, right? It's not something that you just pick up a book, and not anyone can do it.  ANDREW: Yes. If you're not a priest, you cannot do cowrie shells, right?  SUSIE: Got you.  ANDREW: There's no … The best thing we could say is that you don't have the spiritual license, and my elders would be quite clear, you know, you can do anything you want with these shells, but they don't speak for the Orishas, therefore whatever you get is irrelevant.  SUSIE: Right.  ANDREW: You know … SUSIE: So it's not like what we think of … As tarot readers, we just pick up a deck and anyone can give it a go, this is something that you really need to go through initiation and be crowned as a priest to do.  ANDREW: And spend a long time studying, right? You know you need to understand that there are 256, technically 257 signs. Each of those signs has a specific hierarchical order of Orishas that speak in them. Each of them has proverbs, songs, ceremonies, offerings, taboos, patakis, and then each of those signs can come in ire, like the sign of blessing, or asobo, the negative sign, and then there are many kinds of ire and osogbo, and if you start to multiply those out, you start to realize how many different permutations are possible in this system . SUSIE: Right.  ANDREW: It takes a very long time and a lot of study to really come to understand what all those things mean.  SUSIE: Yeah, and is that something that … So, this is something that you might do as a priest, correct?  ANDREW: Yeah.  SUSIE: And did you internalize all of those 256, 257 signs or was it, is it an ongoing study? How does that work for you?  ANDREW: There's no end to the study. [laughing] SUSIE: Right. [laughing] ANDREW: Like hermeticism. When do you know enough?  SUSIE: Oh, you never know enough. No no no … [laughing] Right. Okay. Well that's really helpful in terms of getting into the card. Are there any other majors that you'd kind of like to draw attention to before we look at minors?  ANDREW: No, I'm happy to take your lead. SUSIE: Great. And honestly I would like to go through every single card in the deck, and I was having a lot of trouble sort of singling out a few that might be interesting to talk about, but given our time constraints, we'll just focus on some. I was looking at … the Nine of Wands, we're kind of going in order here, Nine of Wands [static at [01:04:39] see in this card, it's so interesting, because as I understand it, from your story, this is a representation of Yamaya, or one of her avatars I guess … ANDREW: Yeah. SUSIE: And there's a shipwreck, or an underwater ship, and [static] got a knife, and the knife has clearly just been used. So, maybe you can tell us a little bit about that.  ANDREW: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that people … In making the deck, I wanted to disrupt people's preconceived notions, right?  SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: Of certain things. You know, like people, it's common for people to say, yeah yeah yeah, if you want love, go and talk to Ochún. Right? And Ochún will help you find love.  SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: He might, it's possible, but sometimes [inaudible] Ochún in what context and so on and so on, right? But you know, Ochún also doesn't really dig people complaining very much, it's not a thing that she's really that into … SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: So, depending on the attitude that you're feeling about this, Ochún might also be irritated by you approaching her about it, it's very hard to say.  SUSIE: Yeah.  ANDREW: Which is why, you know, traditional practitioners divine, right?  SUSIE: Right. ANDREW: Because the good answer is, in traditional divination, any Orisha that offers to help you with a problem can help you with that problem.  SUSIE: Right.  ANDREW: Whether we sort of generally associate that with being their purview or not, doesn't really matter, because if they say they're gonna help, they're gonna help, and you just say thank you, right?  SUSIE: Right.  ANDREW: And, so when we think about Yamaya, people think about Yamaya as a sort of loving mother energy, as a sort of always supportive energy, right? You know?  SUSIE: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: We really sometimes people are sent to work with her when they need sort of grounding and stabilizing of emotions … SUSIE: Yeah.  ANDREW: But, you know, Yamaya also has many roads and many avatars, right? So we're talking about, you know, Obu Okotu, it's not gentle, she's really a lot more like a shark, right?  SUSIE: mm-hmm. And so, you know, the idea, the thing that people often say, is that when the ship wrecks, she grabs the sailors and takes them down to their fate, right?  SUSIE: Yeah.  ANDREW: And so there's this real sort of show of strength and power with her that isn't what we would normally associate with it, but which is 100 percent a part of her personality, or at least her personality on that path, right?  SUSIE: Right. And I actually thought that this was … You know, the more I thought about it, the more it tied to my own understanding of this card. I mean when I think of the Nine of Wands, I think of someone who has been derived their strength from the vicissitudes of life, from the experiences of having suffered and having learned.  ANDREW: Yeah. SUSIE: And I think that … I also think of it as a very lunar card, so that made it kind of feel familiar to me as well. But also, the fact that power has a personality and ruthlessness to it, as well.  ANDREW: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean the Nine of Wands often turns up to speak of people who are strong clear incredibly competent, and sometimes hard for other people to relate to because of those things, right?  SUSIE: Yeah. They've been through a lot.  ANDREW: Yeah, for sure.  SUSIE: Yeah. Okay. Fascinating. And plus, it's just beautiful. You see the body of Yamaya, but at first you may not even recognize that it's a human form because of the blue on blue, it's a very underwater card. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Looking at -- Oh, you know, one of my favorite cards of all is your Ten of Cups. And, which I did receive this week, once, and what I love about it is the story that goes along with it. So maybe you could talk about that a little bit.  Sure. So when we were talking earlier in the podcast about picking your Ore or picking your destiny, right? This card represents that process, right?  SUSIE: mm-hmm. ANDREW: You know, when everybody's hanging out in Orun, up on the other side, you know where we're all spirits, eventually, people for whatever reasons decide it's time to come back to earth. You know, decide it's time to come back down here, you know, to the marketplace, to hang out and party, to fulfill something they haven't fulfilled, whatever it may be. And when they make that decision, they go, as my elders described it, you go down the hall to this room where Adela, who is the Orisha who crafts these destinies, as a series of sealed gourds … SUSIE: And that's the picture that we see on the card, we see Ajala with the gourds.  ANDREW: Yeah, I mean I think of it more as a person choosing their destiny. SUSIE: Oh, I see! ANDREW: But maybe.  SUSIE: Could be.  ANDREW: Adula, as far as I know, I've never come across any personifications of them … SUSIE: So this, so in your mind, this was the soul choosing which one. ANDREW: But, and we don't have a sort of super clear sense of karma or carry over from one life to another. It's not really … it's a mystery that we acknowledge that we don't fully understand, right? So you go into a room full of sealed gourds, and you pick something, and you really don't know, it could be horrible, right? It could be great, whatever. But if you've been good friends with Elegua, you know, and you've kind of kept good faith with him, maybe you reach out for something and he gives a little cough and says hey, not that one. SUSIE: [laughing] ANDREW: Don't take that one. Right?  SUSIE: And I love this that you have this little sketch of Elegua under the table, you know, very quiet. Very subtle. Yeah. [laughing] Just giving you a hint.  ANDREW: Yeah. So once you pick your destiny, you go back and see your creator, and then your soul goes into a body.  SUSIE: And you can see in the background of the card, you can see the outline of the Earth, so this idea that you're outside the material realm at that moment, choosing your fate, yeah, mm-hmm. I think that's just really beautiful. And I think it's quite relatable to, you know, in a traditional sense to the Ten of Cups, which I at least think of as the end of a cycle, you know, I often think of it as the end of the complete sequence of minors in some ways, because if you go through correspondences it immediately precedes the Two of Wands. But there's also this feeling, you know when you see the family on the Rider-Waite-Smith Ten of Cups, of this sort of being, they're taking a bow. This destiny is finished! And we're looking towards the next.  ANDREW: People … the belief is that people tend to reincarnate along family

Jonny Sharples has established himself as an essential follow on Twitter, always getting huge ‘numbers’ for his football observations, jokes and Photoshops.  He visited us for a chat about how he started following football (Alan Shearer is to blame), Teletext, Mike Ashley, Twitter, Football Manager, the greatest striker who never existed and football’s relationship with mental health.  You’re probably already following him @JonnyGabriel  The Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) Website is https://www.thecalmzone.net/

Recorded on 8-21-18 The audio is off the whole game. Sorry about that. I'm loud as fuck and the others are quite. Maybe I should say you're welcome. 1:00 Daylight Savings Time 2:00 Geography 4:30 Iraqi analyzes a man's body for 30 minutes 13:00 Lottery 14:00 Pedicures 20:00 Burning Man 38:00 Islam and potential dangers of traveling to Saudi Arabia and other Islamic countries We continue this discussion into general travel discussion. 1:30:00 China is holding an entire race of people as slaves If you'd like to support the costs to keep the show running click the link below. Thanks for listening Support Conversing In Vain by donating to the tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/conversing-in-vain

This week it's all about physical appearances and how that can impact a friendship! Topics include: - My friend won't do anything (camping, go to outdoor concerts) where she can't be in full make-up - My friend Photoshops images of herself online and it weirds me out! - My friend's diet is completely exhausting Content warning for mentions of food + disordered eating in the last question.

In this week's podcast, DW is joined by Matt Chambers and Kyle McClendon to make up for the absence of Jeanna, who was drunk and glutened in the nation's capital. The trio cover a wide swath of topics, including their impressions of the new Mercedes Benz Stadium, thoughts about the Falcons preseason against the Steelers and what each person is looking for out of the third preseason game against the Cardinals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Show Notes: 01:11 - Doing Dumb Stuff aka “Throwaway Projects” 06:06 - Combatting Burnout 10:01 - Dumb Projects That Pay You Back 17:00 - Brainstorming and Abstraction 25:19 - chillestmonkey.com 20:19 - “The Iron Triangle”: Creativity, Accomplishment, and Learning Resources: React Native and Chill: A tale of stupid made fast by Charles Lowell Transcript: CHARLES: Hello, everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode 59. We're getting up there, 59. That's like, I don't know, it's not a milestone but it's something. ROBERT: It's like one away from 60. CHARLES: Yeah, it is. It's past middle age. It's like elderly. ROBERT: Start thinking about retirement. CHARLES: Yeah, exactly. JEFFREY: These are our golden years. [Laughter] CHARLES: Welcome to the golden years. ROBERT: All right. Possibly, we need to go and watch the Golden Girls. [Laughter] CHARLES: Actually, I think it was only five or six episodes, maybe 10 episodes, we were singing The Golden Girls theme so it all comes back around. We're here with a very special guest and that guest is nobody. It's just folks from The Frontside -- JEFFREY: I was hoping you would say it was Betty White. [Laughter] CHARLES: We're going to fly it solo or like tri-lo or like trio. ROBERT: Trello? CHARLES: Trello. I, of course, am Charles Lowell. With me is Jeffrey Cherewaty and Robert DeLuca. Hey, guys. JEFFREY & ROBERT: Hey, what's up? CHARLES: We were kicking ideas around and something that's been kind of percolating around the offices is a theme for 2017 is doing dumb stuff, just stuff that has no apparent value but that you can learn from. I think, we each have a bunch of these experiences where we've done something a very little import that ends up being really, really helpful, either both in the short-term and the near-term. JEFFREY: And who knows, maybe this episode will turn out the same way. ROBERT: Oh, how meta. This could become a black mirror episode. I'm start to questioning my values. CHARLES: I know for me, I recently did some explorations into React Native, which I found to be very edifying. I could obviously talk about that experience quite a bit I did on a blog post but I'm curious, if you guys recently had something that was a throw away, something that you did that wouldn't really matter if it had come into existence or it didn't but it's just so happens that in this thread of reality, it did. ROBERT: You know, I have. It's always been centered around the impagination library that we wrote here. I was always kind of intimidated by impagination for some reason because it was this big library that I didn't necessarily understand. I was like, "You know what? I'm just going to go for it. I'm going to go do something dumb with it," and then I just decided to implement the most useless infinite scroll. It solved absolutely nothing and as you're paginating through 500 records of robots from Faker, I sat down and spent six days and wrote some code and implemented it React Native and it was actually the most informative and fun thing I've ever did. I don't feel tied to it. CHARLES: Yeah, so what kind of inspired to do that? Because usually, it feels like there's this pressure to ship something. Ship something is like just go build something but the idea is that you're going to build something that people actually might use. ROBERT: Yeah, I always had that idea. Maybe you can think about it as like feeling getting cornered, like the pressure of shipping sort of pushing me into a corner. Then eventually, I just kind of lash it out like, "No, screw this. I'm out." I'm going to go do something that's not even useful. I don't care. I'm not going to try and support people or make it to something that other people can use. If that is what falls out of this, that's cool but I'm going to totally sidestep and this needs to be something that other people can use. Sometimes, when I go to build a project, I start thinking, "This is going to be in my GitHub public profile. What if somebody comes and finds it? What are they going to think about my code?" And I just shed all of that fear away, then what happened is I learned a ton. After that experience, I was like, "Whoa. This is massively valuable." CHARLES: Yeah, like hearing you talk about it makes me think about one time I went to a Picasso art exhibit and they had all these sketches that he'd made just in pencil from when he was younger and they were in studies. I guess, apparently artists do this a lot where it was like just a goat's leg. Or some old man's nose. You know, just in pencil or charcoal and these are little tropes that he later integrated into all of his painting -- ROBERT: That is an amazing way to put. JEFFREY: It's funny. When you see engineering tutorials are like, "This is how you learn to make software." A lot of times that is the way they're structured it is around studies. Like, "Make this little tiny thing that by itself is worthless but can be part of a greater whole." ROBERT: Yeah, take that impagination infinite scroll thing, I think three months later, it turned into a full on talk about co-chairing between React and React Native but it started with this dumb little project that I decided, "If I don't finish it, nothing bad happens. It just kind of sits there and rots." I feel no guilt. No pressure. JEFFREY: Would you say that was part of your blue period? [Laughter] CHARLES: Yeah, I like you [inaudible] point to like ship it. It's like we have a culture of ship it or don't. In any way, it's entirely up to you. ROBERT: I kind of thought to think about it as the extreme of ship it. Literally, just ship it even if it doesn't work. CHARLES: Right, ship it even if it's wrong. ROBERT: The other thing that I figured out was who is to determine what's wrong or right. I figured out that no one like I figured that out and I choose if it's wrong or right. CHARLES: Right, and it's like whether I learned something or whether I didn't or whether I get to be the arbiter of what I get out of this experience. ROBERT: And you almost always learn something. Always. CHARLES: Yeah, you definitely do. I think it can pay off, both in the short term and in the long term too. I know with my recent experience, I was feeling extreme burnout. I don't know... You feel like the code that you're working on or the things that you're doing have become a burden. I guess that's kind of to your point, Rob like when you are building something that it creates users. It creates code. It creates maintenance cost. It creates contributors. There's all this mass and inertia and momentum that are for it and that can be great if you own something massive, you can have a lot of momentum and it can be extremely energizing. But it can also be a burden, if it's something that you have to carry and you feel obligated to carry. ROBERT: Yeah and when you have those huge successful projects, things that come to mind like Ember or React or Babel or things like that, those are awesome. But I was always experiencing that responsibility with things where I had big plans for them but nobody knew that just by looking at the projects like it was still very much a work in progress. But I felt that feeling in my gut. CHARLES: Right and that mass and that inertia can come completely and totally from an internal source. It's both important for the project to be like these throwaway projects to be completely and totally free from all attachment, especially from your own dreams and your own ego and things like that. ROBERT: And when I learn to let go, that's when I learn that I'll learn. [Laughter] ROBERT: I'm going to learn-learn. CHARLES: I guess, the kind of greater point that I was making is that when you are able to approach a project like that, then it can be a really intense cure for burnout because you are just allowing yourself to create, you're allowing yourself to feel creative and actually deliver something whose success parameters you define entirely. I think, Brandon actually talked about this almost like two years ago with that robot. That project that he did where he was kind of in a similar situation and he really, really needed to do something that was not a web app. I think there was a series of talks that came out of it but that was primarily for the burnout case. ROBERT: I think I can agree with that. I might have been in the similar situation where I was starting to think about the feeling cornered. It was maybe because of burnout. CHARLES: Maybe those are one of the same. ROBERT: Because I felt like I wasn't producing anything and I was like, "I should be doing this stuff but I feel like I should be but I'm not," and the things that I'm doing aren't great enough because the things that I have done in the past and that's a bad way to think about it. JEFFREY: There's something so refreshing about being able to switch contexts of I've been working on this same app for a few months and doing kind of similar tasks over and over and that's such a nice way to create at really recharge like, "I'm just going to do something completely different and see how that feels." ROBERT: Yeah, I've gotten really good at writing computer properties but I want to write something else. JEFFREY: Just like anyone who does a lot of Ember, they're great at computer properties. CHARLES: It really is the equivalent of throwing a dart into a map. If you're feeling burnt out and you're looking for what to do, There are so many things like you actually aren't cornered. You have the universe of possibilities and the dumber the better. Choose something random that you can do in five minutes, do something random that you can do in an hour or a week or something like that so it has that payoff for being an answer to burnout. I've experienced where these types of activities come back and pay you back down the road. ROBERT: It doesn't have to solve a problem. I was always looking for the next project that I could build that would solve a problem. I always felt like I needed to solve a problem and I was just looking at it backwards. You should also be looking at things like it solve a problem. That's cool. But why not take a piece of technology and like, "How can I bend this? What can I do?" And exercise the different corners of this framework or do just something that's totally useless. CHARLES: I remember actually, that was something that Ryan, when he first started coming to the Ember meetups, he was asking questions about it and I think he was coming from Backbone and was -- ROBERT: Just Ryan from [inaudible]? CHARLES: Yeah, [Ryan Ralph?] from [inaudible] and he was asking questions and like, "Yeah, it's pretty good. The only disadvantage right now is you can't have multiple apps inside of a single tab," so literally he comes back the next month with a talk of how I embedded more than one app in a tab and here's what I had to do it. First thing was like, "Let's see how does it break." Let me prod at it and poke it in and just see what happens. I know I had an experience recently where I had done something really, really stupid with Amazon Lambda and I just very recently came back like the fact that I had actually gone through the process of just deploying a very dumb -- ROBERT: How dumb, Charles? Tell me how dumb? CHARLES: Remember when I was going on and on about badges and how we needed to have our own custom badges. I kept on trying to get everybody excited -- JEFFREY: I don't know that we need that. CHARLES: That was pretty much the response that I got from, I think in a poll of nine out of ten. It was 9.11 or something like that. ROBERT: -- That was cool but -- CHARLES: It was cool but no one wanted to put it anywhere. The badge was just a static SPG that was served on top of the Amazon Lambda but as part of that, I had to go through all of the steps through actually getting it to deploy. While that thing was completely useless and it was thrown away, that knowledge ended up becoming useful almost a year later or maybe six months later, something like that. I feel like it was sunny so it had to have been at least six months ago and so -- ROBERT: You know, that it's always sunny here. CHARLES: Uhh... Ish. I mean -- JEFFREY: It's not Philadelphia. ROBERT: I was trying to work somewhere. CHARLES: It was warm but it's a practice that often has long term payoffs. I guess that's just the learning aspect of it, the fact that you're going to learn something. ROBERT: The thing I want to stress here is you don't have to go into it expecting that. CHARLES: Yes, that actually is critical. ROBERT: Yeah, that absolutely is critical because then if you expect that, then the problem with all the things for me started with setting expectations. It was always I had expectations. You take them and throw them out. Toss those things out the window. CHARLES: Zero expectations. JEFFREY: Really, it's an adjustment of your expectations to where at any point, you can say, "No, I'm kind of done with this. I learned something but it's not going to turn into anything," versus the expectation of, "I'm going to make something amazing that thousands of people are going to use." ROBERT: Yeah, that's the way I always start out as like, "Here we go." CHARLES: "I'm going to take over the world." [Laughter] ROBERT: "I'm writing another JavaScript frameworks. Next step, world domination." CHARLES: Yeah, I know it's absolutely important to make sure that if this thing that you're doing just cease to exist, you wouldn't feel good or bad. It wouldn't make any difference. Very Zen, I think. Some people try to approach every aspect of their life that way. I'm not sure if that's healthy. ROBERT: That's another podcast. [Laughter] CHARLES: But I certainly think it is, if you at least allocate a portion of your projects to be that way. I think that applies to any creative endeavor that you try to undertake. Jeffrey, you had some actually some non-programming examples that you were talking about earlier. ROBERT: It ties in nicely to the Picasso thing. JEFFREY: Yeah, actually I was I'm moving right now to a new apartment and I have no architectural background at all but I am comfortable with vector graphics in Illustrator and doing things mathematically precisely in there. I do have a little bit of problem solving that comes out of this. It's not purely exploration but I've been like, "I'm moving to this new place. These are the pieces of furniture I have. How can I rearrange them and play and --" ROBERT: Did you actually set the scale correctly to your -- JEFFREY: Oh, absolutely. ROBERT: Oh, that's amazing. [Laughter] JEFFREY: --Otherwise it's worthless. ROBERT: This is a whole new world. This is awesome. CHARLES: -- Like there's an atomic gauge on the couch. [Laughter] JEFFREY: My couch is six feet, three inches and 24 angstroms. I have not reached that level -- [Laughter] ROBERT: Does Illustrator have that level precision? JEFFREY: It can go pretty far. But yeah, it's just an opportunity to play around and like in a situation where actually moving those pieces of furniture in 30 different ways would be a pain and just unrealistic but thinking about it more in the abstract and just being able to play with it at a scale that's playable with, turns it into something fun and creative. CHARLES: Yeah, I guess that's a luxury that we have, I guess in the modern era of being able to simulate so much and be able to apply this practice of total creativity in a consequence free zone where people might not have been able to do so before. Before the advent of computer-aided design, I don't think that would've been a possibility. ROBERT: There will be a lot of manual hand-drawing and sketches and stuff. JEFFREY: And now software it's at point where -- CHARLES: Or you just get your children to do it. [Laughter] CHARLES: "Move it over there." You guys are sweating but man, I'm feeling really creative. JEFFREY: Yeah, really making stuff happen here. But software has kind of reach the point where we have similar abstractions there to be able to do it, move pieces around like that. Maybe not as fluidly as I'm going to move all these squares around in Illustrator but we're at the point where we can kind of plug in pieces and see how it performs and plug in another piece and see how that performs in a way that feels maybe more creative and less scientific than getting lower down in the code. ROBERT: Honestly, I wonder if this is where React began because the idea of rerendering the entire dom every time was more performant like you just throw something at the wall. See if it sticks. I don't know but -- CHARLES: Yeah, you have to wonder. I'm actually become surprised at the origin story is not more widely known. ROBERT: Yeah, I also don't really know it. I kind of heard of it like -- CHARLES: I remember hearing about it the first time I was like, "That's crazy." ROBERT: Yeah, that sounds like it'd be massive performance hit. That sounds really slow. Why would you rerender everything? CHARLES: Right but then again, it's always getting into pre-[inaudible] optimization. We always fall down these paths of optimizing in our heads. Of course, we want to do incremental rendering. Why? Because it's faster but nobody's actually measured then realized that it's actually the dom that's slow. ROBERT: It's like opening up your world to this. It's just like you explore everything. JEFFREY: That's another thing we can take from design thinking and the philosophies around the design field that maybe aren't as recognized in engineering is the idea of simply brainstorming of being open to dozens of ideas, trying out dozens of ideas and seeing what feels right and being able to have so many ideas that you can throw most of them away. In software, so many times we get to the point where maybe we'll have two or three ideas but none of them are worth throwing away. We feel uncomfortable throwing out any work. CHARLES: Part of it is you were so busy. You have so much invested in your current track that it's very easy because your current track is on Rails. It goes forward, there's clearly a path forward and to hop off of those Rails, it require some sort of energy and are you going to be leaping into like a chasm? I don't know. ROBERT: Or in Jeffrey's case, if your computer dies and you're forced to think without a computer -- JEFFREY: That actually happened the other day. CHARLES: That was amazing. That was worth a story. JEFFREY: I forgot to bring my charger to the office so I have one of those new [inaudible] MacBook with the USB-C charger and we didn't have any backups in the office. I was hacking along on some configuration devops kind of stuff and just kept running experiments and eventually my battery died. Then I was forced to whiteboard out by what I was doing and I came way over to conclusion that I would have ever come to, if I had just been sitting on my computer the whole time. It was another case of where I needed that abstraction away from looking at the code to be able to rearrange the blocks in a way that made sense. ROBERT: Pull yourself out of the [inaudible]. JEFFREY: Yeah, definitely. CHARLES: I really like that idea. Again, I'm not being too familiar with the way that the design world works. Is that kind of like a modus operandis to have too many ideas that you can throw a bunch of them away at any given point? ROBERT: Where you start stealing pieces from all of them and you make one master design. In my digital design class -- shout out to Miss McDaniel -- she would always make us start off -- JEFFREY: Check for that in the show notes. [Laughter] CHARLES: -- She would always make us start off in a sketch book and I remember because I'm not an artist at all. If you know me, I draw even the worst stick figures: my arms and stick figures don't line up. That's how bad it is. She would always make us start off in a sketch book and it drove me nuts. But after doing it for two months, I finally realized the value because she would make us come up with five or six different design concepts. Then after I did the process a couple more times, I realized, "This actually has a ton of value." I sort of picking things from one of the other. It makes you think outside the box. The first couple of ones that I would turn into her she would be like, "You actually have three of almost the same design here. You need to think more outside the box. Think of something that's completely different." Seriously, it's just like you're throwing things at the wall. Whatever freestyle off top of the brain and just let it go. JEFFREY: I'm thinking of a concept side of exercise where maybe you're playing around with layouts for selling a magazine or something and you'll sketch them out and you'll sketch out maybe a few dozen of them but you don't get into the nitty-gritty details. You do it at a very-low fidelity where it's just pencil and some boxes and rearranging those boxes and maybe mark what that box is but you don't worry about the details of that box until you mix and match like, "That layout is not going to be great. This layout seems like it might be along the right track. I like this piece of this one. Let's combine them and make something completely different." Then once you have that high-level view, that make sense to you and you've gone through lots and lots of iterations, then you can start honing in on the high-fidelity details. CHARLES: This conversation makes me feel like there's definite poverty in our processes as software developers in the sense that what I'm hearing is that these things are just taken for granted, that these are the activities that you're going to be doing as part of design and what are we doing if not design. Each of us has these experiences that are kind of these one off things where we actually experience this creative space. It seemed very special and it seemed revelatory but really, it almost sounds like you need to make sure that it's something that you're revisiting again and again and you're doing it as integrated with your work. But I feel like it would be hard to pitch that -- JEFFREY: That's not understood to be part of the software design process. CHARLES: Maybe that's a little bit of what happens when we've put together our design documents -- ROBERT: Yeah, it just occurred to me like looking back through my history of how I landed to be a software developer, I actually wanted to be a designer first. That's why I was in digital design and stuff. I rejected design so much because I thought it was super... What's the word I'm looking for? Flighty? CHARLES: Wishy-washy? Non-committal? [Laughter] ROBERT: Anybody could walk in and say, "I don't like that design. It looks ugly. It doesn't look good," and I thought I was going to programming because it was more black and white like, "This is the right solution. That's not the right solution." As I've worked my way into my career, I actually realized they're actually really similar because you're designing software and software is abstract. As much as you want to try to think about as it's not, you start to develop this mental picture of the programs that you're developing. You're designing these things. It's just a different form of design and design is problem solving. CHARLES: In digital design, it's not artwork. It is measured by some quality. It's just hard to put your finger on but there is some kind of external measure of, "Does this fit the purpose for me, which it was made?" JEFFREY: "Does this solve the problem?" Usually, there are some expectations just like there are software of, "There's been best practices established. Did you stick to those best practices? And if you didn't, Why not?" Because sometimes there is a good reason to break those best practices. CHARLES: Right. I wonder if it would be interesting at integrating into our process like what we think of as the ideal pull request or issue reporting or design document have. It kind of similar to some of the RFC processes out there. It's like, "What are some crazy alternatives?" Not just any alternative -- JEFFREY: I don't just need viable alternative. CHARLES: Yeah, I don't need viable. Give me the in-viable. Give me the ones that are like, "What crack are you smoking? Oh, wait a second... Hmmm..." [Laughter] ROBERT: "All right. Here we go. I got it. It's got to be powered by nuclear --" No. [Laughter] CHARLES: Curious. I'm very, very, very curious. ROBERT: Let the curiosity fly. JEFFREY: Charles, do you had a blog post recently about a dumb project you built. Would you tell us about that? CHARLES: Sometimes, it gets stressful around here. Sometimes it gets stressful in life. Sometimes you just feel stress and there are a lot of things you can do to deal with it. Everybody has their coping mechanisms. For me, one of my secret weapon coping mechanisms -- ROBERT: Not a secret anymore. CHARLES: It's not secret anymore. [Laughter] CHARLES: This also will be in the show notes but I'll go ahead and say it right now is ChillestMonkey.com. If you need to enhance your chill, you can just go to ChillestMonkey.com and I guarantee you will not be disappointed. You will feel instantaneously better. I was in the point where I was feeling a lot of stress. I don't know exactly how it came up but I was actually with Stephanie and she was like, "Charles, you just got to do something stupid. You just got to do exactly what it is that we've been talking about on this podcast. You've got to just do it and you've got to do it fast and you've got to not look back and look forward." I was like, "Oh, my God. You're right." That planted the seed in my brain but then, I think it was the next day, I was talking about ChillestMonkey.com -- go check it out. You can pause the podcast right now and go have a look at it. It's really awesome -- And I was showing it to everybody and then I think Rob were like, "Oh, my goodness. We've got to have this on the Apple TV." ROBERT: It just lands itself perfectly. CHARLES: Yeah, I was like, "Yes. Absolutely we need it on the Apple TV. We need it on the Apple Watch. I need this on my iPhone," so right that minute, I hearken back to the conversation I had with Stephanie and I was like. "This is it. This is perfect scope." I have been looking to build something in React Native. Something that I can just completely and totally throw away, something that fits in a small time box and I also have this opportunity to build this thing that I really need but if it doesn't work out, it's fantastic. I went home. I think that was that very night and started hacking on React Native and took the Chillest Monkey, then put it first into an npm package. You can include it in any React Native application. Then once that was accomplished, I went out and checked the support for Apple TV had dropped literally ten days before, maybe even less. I was like, "It's a sign and this has got to happen." It was a little bit of a slog but we were able to get it up on our Apple TV and with a remote and feel that glassy touchpad, move it over to the Chillest Monkey and open it up and just see those wisps of hair and those tranquil eyes up there and six feet across. It was just such a great feeling. But it was something that was accomplishable within a day or two. I don't think it was more than that but it serve the purpose that I was able to learn a lot about React Native. I was able to learn about packaging, shared components. ROBERT: Actually, I remember we fought about flex box and what not for a little while. CHARLES: Yeah, that's right. I learned about laying out images and kind of the best practice around there. Also, I think this is important as I got to experience a win and it felt good to be able to experience that win. It felt like if I hadn't experienced it, it probably wouldn't have been that big of a deal. But the fact that I was able, it was a low-hanging target but it felt like a big-hanging target. It's hard because there's no such thing as a free lunch but kind of there is, when it comes to little projects like this because when you see something totally stupid come together and it works exactly you wanted it to work, then it feels like you've accomplished something major. I don't know if that's some sort of brain hackery or some sort of life hack or what but that was extremely good for my internal morale. JEFFREY: This is an example of a project where, maybe you didn't get as much creative juices flowing out of it. CHARLES: No. JEFFREY: But you've got a high accomplishment and learning value, which I guess are all, I call that the iron triangle of building dumb stuff. [Laughter] JEFFREY: You can have two of the three. CHARLES: On one side is creativity, on the other side is what? JEFFREY: Accomplishment. CHARLES: -- Is accomplishment, just shipping it and then on the third is time? It's the iron sticks -- [Laughter] JEFFREY: The third side was learning. That's creativity, accomplishment and learning. You can't have all three, sorry. It doesn't work that way. CHARLES: It doesn't work that way. Okay. [Laughter] ROBERT: Then you'll take on a big project, that's how you'll get all three. CHARLES: I like that. JEFFREY: In a particular project where you're having to throw tons of ideas at the wall, You're probably going to be learning, you're probably have to be very creative but your chance of shipping here is much lower. CHARLES: It's almost a detriment. ROBERT: Yeah. CHARLES: Whereas in this case it was take something that is easily accomplishable and accomplished it. JEFFREY: And you learned something from it. CHARLES: You learn and you accomplish but you're not particularly creative. But it's still a feather in your cap. I like that. It's a good way to categorize it. ROBERT: And the accomplishment is how you define it. In this case, you actually finished this project. CHARLES: Yeah. I finished it. We have it on Apple TV. ROBERT: Yeah, and like you said, you have to do that. For me, after I did a couple of these things, actually what I just do, a newsletter has come in and somebody was like, "Look at this new thing," and I'm just going to put it off to the side and then eventually, I'll stack two or three of those things together and decide, "We're going to take all three of these things, we're going to put them all together and see what happens," and that's how GraphQL and dove in to create React app. CHARLES: That's actually a good idea. I like the random newsletter driven development -- [Laughter] CHARLES: -- You're like, "I'm going to subscribe to this newsletter. I'm going to pick one thing from each week and after I have five things, I'm going to build something with those things. ROBERT: Wait. I have a dumb app idea. We could make this just a random app idea generator. It takes ten packages and you see like -- JEFFREY: A bunch are required to build the Hackernews clone. Isn't that a classic newsletter driven development? ROBERT: Or the Reddit clone? This feel like that's the React thing -- the Reddit clone. CHARLES: Yeah. I think it's more like Frankenstein driven development like you've got GraphQL, Vue.js and I don't know... Datomic. JEFFREY: Like a GRD stack -- CHARLES: No, like a rando stack. [Laughter] CHARLES: Rando.js, that would actually be a good -- ROBERT: You hear it first. It's our new JavaScript framework. CHARLES: A stack generator. JEFFREY: It's going to be a high on learning and not so much on accomplishment. ROBERT: You won't ship anything but damn will you learn? Every week! CHARLES: What is an example then? We've talked about the one where the accomplishment. I'm wondering if there's an affinity between those sides of the triangle. What would be an example of a project that was high on creativity, low on shipping? How do you approach projects like that and then make it okay to fail? Because I think, one of the things that was great about the Chillest Monkey Native was I did get to ship it. It wasn't much but it felt great. How do you prepare yourself for those projects which are high on creativity that you're not going to ship? What is one of those look like? JEFFREY: I think those kinds of projects are usually tend to be ones where you're more comfortable with the tools already so that you do have the space to be creative and you're not having to fight against, "I don't know how to do this." The learning is already been done, at least to a point to where you're comfortable enough to go, to feel loose and creative and be able to brainstorm without having to bump up against walls over and over. CHARLES: I guess, tender love is a master of that, where it's really has a deep knowledge of Ruby and systems programming and does some fun and creative. Do I say zany? ROBERT: The Ember example of this, I think it's Alex Matchneer. Matchneer? CHARLES: Matchneer, yeah. ROBERT: Sorry, I cannot pronounce names. The Photoshops, I mean those aren't exactly -- [Laughter] ROBERT: -- Those aren't exactly programming related but -- JEFFREY: High on creativity and accomplishment, low on learning. [Laughter] ROBERT: And then the Ember Twiddle is the one that I laughed out and I was like, "Can React router do this?" CHARLES: I don't actually see that one. ROBERT: Actually, it was broken when I went to look at it but the responses were hilarious. They're like, "Actually, no. I'm happy. I can't." [Laughter] ROBERT: But he always has the Twiddle and he's like, "What about this? It's like the programming equivalent of his Photoshops. [Laughter] JEFFREY: I'm wondering if there are particular, out of those kind of three different types of dumb projects that we've identified. If there are particular types that people gravitate toward like I know that I am higher on the, "Just go, do something creative with tools you already know side," versus, "I enjoy learning," but I'm more likely to want to accomplishment up things and be loosen in my creativity. I'm wondering what the breakdown is among different engineers of those different profiles. ROBERT: It's quite interesting and I wouldn't think of myself as an explorer but I feel like I'm driven by FOMO -- fear of missing out. That's where this comes from for me. All this technology that I hear so many good things about that I haven't even done anything with. I don't even have Hello, World or anything. That's usually where I start picking things up the shelf and I'm like, "What if I did redux, Vue.js and whatever else. Let's see if we can make all these things work together." CHARLES: Do you feel like you can, at least always be kind of touching? ROBERT: Yeah. CHARLES: Pinging different areas of the ecosystem? ROBERT: Yeah, I really like to see what they're doing because they all have different takes on things. I really like what Chris Freeman said, he's like, "I feel like programming is just gaining experience points." Like it's video games where you're just going through and you're getting experience points with different things. That's kind of the approach that I've been taken for the past five months. Since I discovered this, this is just like, "Oh, that look shiny." Maybe that's also driven because of our JavaScript-type cycle or whatever you want to call it, where something new is always coming out. Somebody is always reinventing the wheel. CHARLES: Whenever I see a cool demo or whenever I read a really provocative blog post that guides my exploration a lot, which I guess those things usually are extensions of some activity like what we're talking about that someone did. A lot of really good blog posts are just like, "I've been doing this stuff for five years and I have gained an absurd level of expertise on it. Let me take you to school." I definitely love those but a lot of it is like, "Look at this cool thing that I've done." Without talking about murdering names, what is it? Hakim...? Gosh, I can't remember his last name. The guy who does Slides. Some of his demos for CSS and JavaScript animations back in the day we're just like, "Woah, someone has just revealed a huge power source," and so I want to go do it. But most of that came from him just having to play. ROBERT: Jeffrey, you've actually got my brain ticking here. I'm thinking about where people fall in applying this like just go do something dumb and it doesn't have to mean anything. This makes me starting to think, "Maybe I need to go do something really creative in Ember." JEFFREY: It's making me think that I need to go do some learning -- [Laughter] JEFFREY: -- Just try some new stuff so I have new tools to play with. ROBERT: Because that's the whole purpose of this, right? I just recognized that I am not doing very creative things and the tool sets that I am comfortable with. CHARLES: Yeah, it is harmonious. The more learning projects you do, you acquire tools and then with familiarity with those tools, engenders creativity so you can see how the process feeds in to itself. ROBERT: Now, I'm going to build something creative. CHARLES: All right everybody. There you have it. Go out, build something useless, build something creative, build something that will help you learn and acquire new tools, new techniques and take you [inaudible] and do it quickly.

A little more than 4 year ago on a rainy day in the back room of a bungalow in Venice, California, we recorded the first Ricochet Podcast on an old school MacBook. The cast has changed slightly since then, but through one and a half Presidential cycles, two mid-terms, countless culture wars, good guests, bad guests, Skype glitches, and even bad weather, we have persevered. So it's with great pleasure that we bring you this, our 300th show with guests Harry Shearer and Pat Sajak. We don't delve into the topics here, but rest assured, they are widely entertaining and diverse. Thanks to all you, our loyal listeners who tune in each, and thanks to our sponsors, who help keep the lights on. On to #301! The opening sequence for the Ricochet Podcast was composed and produced by James Lileks. Yes, you should absolutely subscribe to this podcast. It helps! Thanks to the great EJHill for the hundreds of great Photoshops (like this one). Support Our Sponsors! For a limited time The Great Courses Plus is offering Ricochet Podcast listeners a chance to stream their new Video Learning Service: The Great Courses Plus popular collection of business courses – Absolutely FREE! Go to thegreatcoursesplus.com/Ricochet Audible.com has more than 180,000 audiobooks and spoken-word audio products. Get a free 30 day trial and free audiobook at Audible.com/RICOCHET.       Get control of your inbox! Visit sanebox.com/ricochet today and they'll throw in an extra $25 credit on top of the two-week free trial. You don't have to enter your credit card information unless you decide to buy, so there's really nothing to lose. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's true. On today's episode we talk about Facebook's auto-improve features of photographers. The idea that you only post unadulturated photos. . . well that's a lie. Don't miss the viners who are making movies. . . What about noknok?  Do you need that app? Perhaps you do. And then there's the Snapchat email question. Is it possible Twitter is buying Foursquare? Or are they working together for some greater end? And is this the only episode we aren't talking about Dropbox. All that and more on today's episode of Amplify Podcast.

8 AM - 1 - 60 Minutes story on radical islam in Great Britain. 2 - More on islam; Woman photoshops herself into her mother's childhood pictures and they look like sisters!. 3 - Marshall's News. 4 - Chris Rock's SNL monologue joked about the Boston Maratho

Olá Geeks! Está começando o NOVO GV Drops! Nesse programa que, segundo o Fabio Nanni - seu host e editor, promete ser semanal, iremos divulgar novidades sobre o Geek Vox, conversar sobre notícias/virais/memes que estão bombando no universo geek, promover desafios divertidos de PHOTOSHOPS, e ler os emails que os Geeks mandam no feedback@geekvox.com.br num podcast rápido, divertido, informativo e interativo - não deixe de comentar esse episódio aí em baixo! NO PROGRAMA DE HOJE: FLAPPY BIRD - O jogo do capeta que sacudiu as webs e os principais noticiários do mundo nessa semana. PHOTOSHOP DA ZOEIRA: LINKS IMPERDÍVEIS: 5 Minutos - Flappy Bird Marcos Castro - Eu vou me apresentar... Flappy Bird na Folha Flappy Bird Generator VOTE GEEK VOX PARA O SHORTY AWARDS! TODO DOMINGO TEM GEEK VOX! TODA 4ª FEIRA TEM GV DROPS!

The Cast: John Yaglenski, Melanie Bounds, Carol Robert & Gary O'Brien. - Gary Returns - Carol & Gary actually are on the same show at the same time.  No Ian. - The Haunted Mansion queue rehash.  Gary questions why the queue really needed adding to since there was never a wait, but is reserving judgement.  Carol is a little worried it looked a bit "cheap".  John's wondering how it will be lit at night. - John is going to have to slice and dice this episode. - Why don't they offer a photo at the end of the Haunted Mansion ride.  Send it on to Marketing! Combine photos and learn the "Photoshops".  INTERCOT Consulting Services are born! - New Ticketing @ Epcot being tested.  RFID Scanners suggests Gary.  - 2 Brilliant Ideas in one podcast - EasyPass for ThemeParks. - Wait - another one.  Annual Passholder dedicated line.  Bypass those confused by the ticketing process. - New Permanent Home for Mickey Mouse - Town Square Theater.  Magician Mickey will be making an appearance. Hinted to open April 1. - Patriotic Mickey, Frotierland Mickey, The Billies.  Colonial characters including Patriotic Mickey should definately move to the American Adventure. - Gary begs for a trip to Hawaii for all the great ideas. - Free wifi testing @ the Contemporary Resort.  A "flight" of internet at the Wave of American Flavors. - The Tikki Room.  Reopening pushed further back to July 1 - fueling rumours that the old show may return. - Mel hates the Country Bears. Yet another attraction - the Tiki Bears. - Apparently no one has seen the Tikki Room Pre-show.  Google it or hit YouTube, John swears it exists. - Gary & Refurbs - Toontown update.  Mel struggles to describe a peak as we play charades.  Then Gary needs to explain the weenie.  - Grand Floridian Expansion.  Construction between the Polyneisan Luau thru to where the Grand Floridian Pool begins.  Bridal Suites?  DVC?  Reception Halls - we're full of ideas tonite! - INTERCOT's Best Of - Photo Places. Gary takes a pic at the wishing well & the giant troll in Norway (aka Uncle Jimmy).  Carol takes pictures of the icons.  Mel does the character totem pole at the Wilderness Lodge.  John talks about video in front of the Adventureland sign & Epcot's Spaceship Earth. - John's headed to the Hard Rock Hotel and then new Hilton Bonnet Creek Resort. - Mel went back to Universal & liked it much better this time.  She thinks the Mummy is the coolest ride ever!  Don't wear flip flops on the Forbidden Journey.  Gary has another idea - gift shop at the end of the ride with all the stuff people loose on the ride.  Crowd control @ Wizarding World.  Jimmy Neutron going away. - What's an LMNOP?

Be they pits, pock marks, or pimples, we all suffer blemishes that we wish we didnt. Or so we would were it not for Photoshops healing brush. This amazing tool grafts good skin onto bad--and heals the seams in between.

Deke gets things started with a pair of options that can clean out Photoshops plumbing when things get clogged up: Reset and purge.

OK, so if crazy Kim Jong Il does try nuking Hawaii this weekend, don't blame me. He was planning on it before this horrifying and hilarious gallery of shameful Photoshops appeared. Oh god, what have I done?. First Place — Nick Dwyer. Second Place —T. Baxter. Third Place — Dave Corrasa.

Brian's tied up...and the chat room Photoshops him into various situations.

Brian's tied up...and the chat room Photoshops him into various situations.