Podcasts about warner brothers

This week, the boys head back to Roman Polanski-ville for the third time to discuss the pivotal 1965 film “Repulsion”. This “dangerous” film is Polanski's first English-language movie, shot in London during the peak of the French New Wave (Polanski is a Polish-French filmmaker). “Repulsion” offers indie-film groundedness, a gritty reality, noir-inspired neorealism, and an upheaval of social values of the time- sexual liberation, classism, irony, and iconoclasm. Also, we all had different levels of enjoyment, which led to one of our finest broad conversations! Grab a beer and listen along. linktr.ee/theloveofcinema - Check out our YouTube page!  Our phone number is 646-484-9298. It accepts texts or voice messages.  0:00 Intro; 3:34 John's mini-review of “Back to the Future: 40th Anniversary”; 8:27 Gripes; 20:34 1965 Year in Review; 41:03 Films of 1965: “Repulsion”; 1:12:06 What You Been Watching?; 1:22:34 Next Week's Episode Teaser Additional Cast/Crew: Gérard Brach, David Stone, Catherine Deneuve, Ian Hendry, John Fraser, Gilbert Taylor, Yvonne Furneaux, James Villiers. Hosts: Dave Green, Jeff Ostermueller, John Say Edited & Produced by Dave Green. Beer Sponsor: Carlos Barrozo Music Sponsor: Dasein Dasein on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/77H3GPgYigeKNlZKGx11KZ 
Dasein on Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/dasein/1637517407 Recommendations: Weapons, The Monkey, Welcome to Derry, Pennywise, Say Something, Task, It: Part One, It: Part Two, The Haunting of Hill House, The Vanishing, Mr. Scorcese, The Tenant, Chinatown, Rosemary's Baby. Gripes & News: AMC, IMAX, AI, The NYC Marathon, Running in Movies, FEUD: Disney + Google (YouTube TV) Additional Tags: Stephen King's It, The Tenant, Rosemary's Baby, The Pianist, Cul-de-Sac, AI, The New York City Marathon, Apartments, Tenants, Rent Prices, Zohran Mamdani, Andrew Cuomo, Curtis Sliwa, Amazon, Robotics, AMC, IMAX Issues, Tron, The Dallas Cowboys, Short-term memory loss, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Netflix, AMC Times Square, Tom Cruise, George Clooney, MGM, Amazon Prime, Marvel, Sony, Conclave, Here, Venom: The Last Dance, Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, Oscars, Academy Awards, BFI, BAFTA, BAFTAS, British Cinema. England, Vienna, Leopoldstadt, The Golden Globes, Past Lives, Apple Podcasts, West Side Story, Adelaide, Australia, Queensland, New South Wales, Melbourne, The British, England, The SEC, Ronald Reagan, Stock Buybacks, Marvel, MCU, DCEU, Film, Movies, Southeast Asia, The Phillippines, Vietnam, America, The US, Academy Awards, WGA Strike, SAG-AFTRA, SAG Strike, Peter Weir, Jidaigeki, chambara movies, sword fight, samurai, ronin, Meiji Restoration, plague, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, casket maker, Seven Samurai, Roshomon, Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood, Stellan Skarsgard, the matt and mark movie show.The Southern District's Waratah Championship, Night of a Thousand Stars, The Pan Pacific Grand Prix (The Pan Pacifics), Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch, Larry Ellison, David Ellison, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg.   

From College Engagement to Radio Stardom: Ronald Reagan's Ascent to the Hollywood B-List. Max Boot discusses how Ronald Reagan's father, Jack, secured a job as an administrator of welfare for the New Deal in late 1933. Meanwhile, Ronald developed into a successful young football star at Eureka College, where his steady girlfriend was Margaret Cleaver, known as Mugs. They were deeply in love and engaged to be married, but after graduation they separated, and Margaret, following a trip to Europe, fell in love with an American diplomat and returned the engagement ring to a crushed Reagan. Margaret's father, the Reverend Cleaver, was highly influential, acting almost as a surrogate father to Dutch Reagan. Dutch Reagan possessed a magnificent, compelling voice for storytelling and, graduating from college in 1932, recognized that while movie studios were absent from the Midwest, radio stations were plentiful. He landed his first radio job in Davenport, Iowa, and quickly succeeded, transferring to a larger station in Des Moines, where he became a very successful sportscaster known throughout the Midwest as Dutch Reagan, the voice of the Chicago Cubs and the White Sox. In Hollywood, Reagan was recognized as a heroic figure with a consistently sunny disposition and initially started in B-pictures at Warner Brothers. Reagan's movie career generated good income, and he demonstrated responsibility by moving his parents out to Hollywood. He met actress Jane Wyman at the Warner Brothers commissary, and they were married in January 1940.

Stocks wrapping up a not-so-spooky October, with the major indices all notching solid gains. The names helping boost the Nasdaq, and why boosted AI capex spending in two tech giants are sending the stocks in very different directions. Plus A streaming scoop up. How Netflix could be eyeing Warner Brothers assets, and how it could impact the media space.Fast Money Disclaimer  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This week we talk about odd concert moments, Hades 2, Halls of Torment, Power Wash Simulator 2, Ball x Pit, Dungeons and Dragons, Frankenstein, Annie Hall, Now is Tomorrow, the Necronomicon, Mafia: The Old Country, King Sorrow, We Used to Live Here, the Scholastic Werewolf Book, Catan, Civilization 5, Feral History, Star Wars, Dungeon Crawler Carl, Paramount wants Warner Brothers, the Monster Mash movie, The Hunt for Ben Solo, Amazon games, Xbox makes a ridiculous demand, The Odyssey, Something is Killing the Children, Buck Rodgers, and Barry's Steamer: How to Cope with Boredom and Loneliness: A Guide for the Isolated. So do the mash, it's time for a GeekShock!

Join Logan Janis and the Mostly Superheroes team for a special Halloween edition of Friday Live! In this episode, we discuss the latest news, including the potential acquisition of Warner Brothers by Paramount, and share some fun updates from Arena Andy. Plus, we highlight some great shows and movies to watch this spooky season. Don't miss out on our indie podcast's latest episode!   00:00 - Introduction and Newsletter Update 00:57 - Welcome to Friday Live: Halloween Edition 02:17 - Arena Andy's Review of Slow Horses 05:20 - News and Rumors: Warner Brothers Acquisition 10:11 - Murphy Lee Halloween Party Highlights and Show Wrap-Up Sources: MostlySuperheroes.com YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook @MostlySuperheroes ScreenRant Bloomberg Hollywood Reporter Comic Book IGN Subscribe and support our indie podcast at www.MostlySuperheroes.com ©2025 Carrogan Studios

#podcast #veterans #halloween The DD214 Network podcast features a lively discussion among veterans about various topics, including Halloween costumes, gaming experiences, military training, reality TV shows, and the unique culture within the military, particularly the concept of the E4 Mafia. The hosts blend humor with serious reflections on their experiences, creating an engaging atmosphere for listeners. They also touch on controversial subjects like sex cults and media representation, emphasizing the importance of community and shared experiences among veterans. In this conversation, the speakers delve into the complexities of corporate decisions in the entertainment industry, particularly focusing on Warner Brothers and its potential acquisition by major streaming services like Netflix and Apple.Chapters00:00 Intro01:18 Halloween Costumes and Celebrations04:17 Gaming Discussions and Experiences09:47 Special Forces Training Insights20:02 Current Events in Special Forces and Competitions25:03 Football Attitudes and Training Challenges26:38 Military Training and Accountability28:53 The E4 Mafia: The Backbone of the Army33:11 The Importance of Leadership in the Military38:23 Finding Accountability in the Ranks41:13 Pop Culture and Controversial Figures45:17 The Balance of Humor and Seriousness in Conversations47:12 The Impact of Substance Use on Creativity48:11 Warner Brothers' Corporate Decisions51:48 The Future of Warner Brothers: Netflix vs. Apple53:57 The Consequences of Corporate Conglomeration56:14 The Economic Implications of Gaming Releases58:32 The Value of Entertainment Beyond Money01:00:06 Corporate Control Over Media and Technology01:03:44 The Battle of Tech Giants: Apple vs. Samsung01:11:21 Comparing Headset Specifications01:16:39 Practical Applications of VR Technology01:23:20 Veterans' Benefits and Resources01:33:34 Encouragement and Support for VeteransDD214 Network PodcastDirected & Produced by Jonathan ‘Clean' SanchezHosted by Joe Squillini & Jay CampbellEdited by Clean Sanchez Media, LLCMusic by Shrieks666 ("Shadow Surfing," "Voices Getting Louder") – Check them out on Bandcamp!Website: CleanSanchezMedia.comAffiliate LinksGovee - https://govee.sjv.io/CLEANStreamLabs - https://streamlabs.pxf.io/CleanHemper -https://www.hemper.co/DD214Disclaimer: This Podcast contains adult language. Adult Supervision is advised.Fair Use Disclaimer:The content provided on this podcast may include material subject to copyright protection. In accordance with the principles of "fair use" as defined in Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, the use of copyrighted material on this podcast is for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research.The determination of whether the use of copyrighted material constitutes fair use is made on a case-by-case basis, taking into account various factors outlined in Section 107. The inclusion of such material is not an endorsement by the DD214 Network Podcast or Clean Sanchez Media, LLC, but is meant to enrich and contribute to discussions within the specified purposes of fair use. All copyrights and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.Shop official merch for DD214 Network: http://www.CleanSanchezMedia.com

While this was originally posted in the fall of 2019, for the third year in a row I'm reduxing it.  It is, again, an appropriate meditaion for this quiet time of year, as the football games are starting to pass us by even if their music is still in the air. The warmth of the summer is still around, sometimes, but mostly it's cooling down, and it's a time for comfort food and old memories and people not seen in a long time.  And, certainly, thoughts of mortality , of the time gone and the time left. "Never let a night like tonight go to waste." ==================================================== Considering whether Gen X views of life, death, and immortality were shaped by two mid-80s films: Highlander (1986) and The Lost Boys (1987)   Yes yes yes, I said Steward Copeland at about 9:12 and realized just moments ago that I completely meant Douglas Coupland, who wrote Generation X: Tales For an Accelerated Culture in 1991 https://www.coupland.com/books/generation-x-tales-for-an-accelerated-culture And my point there is that in 1987 the Lost Boys was certainly depicting Gen X characters with Gen X actors, but nobody called them Gen X at the time.   Interview with the Vampire was published in 1976 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interview_with_the_Vampire Its sequel, The Vampire Lestat, was 1985   The Mystery of Dracula's Castle - a scooby doo mystery in all but name, with inspiration from Christopher Lee's Dracula over and over. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068985/ The Hunger  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085701/ The Lost Boys - straight to the tagline https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093437/taglines Highlander https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091203/ Cocoon https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088933/   Siskel and Ebert - Lost Boys starts at 9:44 -  https://siskelebert.org/?p=2948 Highlander is the first one here, about 1:30 - they both disliked it rather a lot https://siskelebert.org/?p=1496   First chapter of The Golden Bough - Frazer calls the King a "murderer" rather than a "killer" so I'll randomly note that A) in the 1536 battler in Highlander, the Macleods are fighting the Frasers and B) "Matador" is literally "killer" in Spanish   The Spirit of Christmas, which spawned South Park, references Highlander's repeated line "There Can Be Only One" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0122264/   When talking about Reactives and the Awakening, probably worth looking at this previous entry on my blog https://crisis.generationalize.com/2014/01/reactiveness.html   Unrelated but it's a photo series called Lost Boys - millennials back at home after college or high school or whatever they decided they could do. https://www.businessinsider.com/liz-calvi-lost-boys-photo-project-2014-9#calvi-started-with-her-good-group-of-guy-friends-but-eventually-branched-out-to-look-for-more-subjects-in-town-nolan-pictured-here-is-currently-studying-graphics-in-college-and-he-lives-with-his-parents-for-the-summer-2 Here's the archive she set up https://seulementdanslereve.tumblr.com/archive And her home page https://www.lizcalvi.com/commissions   "Vampire of the Mists" (1991) was a few years later, so probably influenced by Anne Rice and The Lost Boys and everything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_of_the_Mists   Wikipedia sayeth that Peter Pan first appeared in a novel in 1902, while the play first appeared in 1904. He's very much of the Nomad archetype. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Pan Completely unrelated, except insofar as Aiken Drum (the character) is much like Peter Pan and has other Nomad / Reactive archetype indicators https://manycolored.fandom.com/wiki/Many-Colored_Wiki   Pogonip club house http://deepbluemoon.com/misc/pogonip/ Other locations - the interiors were on a set at Warner Brothers https://www.visitcalifornia.com/attraction/lost-boys-santa-cruz-tour   Gregory Widen, screenwriter for Highlander. Born in 1958, he's a late Boomer. He also wrote Backdraft. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0927074/ Russel Mulcahy - his director credits here include the music videos - which included Video Killed the Radio Star by Buggles, which unfortunately I can't find, so here are some others. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0611683 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Uxc9eFcZyM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iyv905Q2omU Max has mission style outdoor lamps - not too common at the time. (Although it was becoming popular again) https://casetext.com/case/l-jg-stickley-inc-v-canal-dover-furn Grandpas house is here (interiors were a set at Warner Bros.) - a very 1900s house  http://www.mobileranger.com/santacruz/pogonip-the-cowell-family-polo-and-a-poltergeist/ CSUN Queen show, 1989 - there will be another episode one day about why this matters….but I didn't even have a chance to get into, here, how I and Angela and 150 of our closest friends did a field show with two songs from Highlander, plus Bohemian Rhapsody https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjkHl0paHbM

What does it take to keep your voice—and your purpose—strong through every season of life? In this episode of Unstoppable Mindset, I sit down with my friend Bill Ratner, one of Hollywood's most recognized voice actors, best known as Flint from GI Joe. Bill's voice has carried him through radio, animation, and narration, but what stands out most is how he's used that same voice to serve others through storytelling, teaching, and grief counseling. Together, we explore the heart behind his work—from bringing animated heroes to life to standing on The Moth stage and helping people find healing through poetry. Bill shares lessons from his own journey, including losing both parents early, finding family in unexpected places, and discovering how creative expression can rebuild what life breaks down. We also reflect on 9/11, preparedness, and the quiet confidence that comes from trusting your training—whether you're a first responder, a performer, or just navigating the unknown. This conversation isn't just about performance; it's about presence. It's about using your story, your craft, and your compassion to keep moving forward—unstoppable, one voice at a time. Highlights: 00:31 – Hear the Flint voice and what it takes to bring animated characters to life. 06:57 – Learn why an uneven college path still led to a lifelong acting career. 11:50 – Understand how GI Joe became a team and a toy phenomenon that shaped culture. 15:58 – See how comics and cartoons boosted classroom literacy when used well. 17:06 – Pick up simple ways parents can spark reading through shared stories. 19:29 – Discover how early, honest conversations about death can model resilience. 24:09 – Learn to critique ads and media like a pro to sharpen your own performance. 36:19 – Follow the pivot from radio to voiceover and why specialization pays. 47:48 – Hear practical editing approaches and accessible tools that keep shows tight. 49:38 – Learn how The Moth builds storytelling chops through timed, judged practice. 55:21 – See how poetry—and poetry therapy—support grief work with students. 59:39 – Take notes on memoir writing, emotional management, and one-person shows. About the Guest: Bill Ratner is one of America's best known voice actors and author of poetry collections Lamenting While Doing Laps in the Lake (Slow Lightning Lit 2024,) Fear of Fish (Alien Buddha Press 2021,) To Decorate a Casket (Finishing Line Press 2021,) and the non-fiction book Parenting For The Digital Age: The Truth Behind Media's Effect On Children and What To Do About It (Familius Books 2014.) He is a 9-time winner of the Moth StorySLAM, 2-time winner of Best of The Hollywood Fringe Extension Award for Solo Performance, Best of the Net Poetry Nominee 2023 (Lascaux Review,) and New Millennium "America One Year From Now" Writing Award Finalist. His writing appears in Best Small Fictions 2021 (Sonder Press,) Missouri Review (audio,) Baltimore Review, Chiron Review, Feminine Collective, and other journals. He is the voice of "Flint" in the TV cartoon G.I. Joe, "Donnell Udina" in the computer game Mass Effect, the voice of Air Disasters on Smithsonian Channel, NewsNation, and network TV affiliates across the country. He is a committee chair for his union, SAG-AFTRA, teaches Voiceovers for SAG-AFTRA Foundation, Media Awareness for Los Angeles Unified School District, and is a trained grief counsellor. Member: Actors Equity Association, Screen Actors Guild-AFTRA, National Storytelling Network • https://billratner.com • @billratner Ways to connect with Bill: https://soundcloud.com/bill-ratner https://www.instagram.com/billratner/ https://twitter.com/billratner https://www.threads.net/@billratner https://billratner.tumblr.com https://www.youtube.com/@billratner/videos https://www.facebook.com/billratner.voiceover.author https://bsky.app/profile/bilorat.bsky.social About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog. Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards. https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/ accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/ Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below! Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset . Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts. Transcription Notes: Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:21 Well on a gracious hello to you, wherever you may be, I am your host. Mike hingson, and you are listening to unstoppable mindset. Today, we get to have a voice actor, person, Bill Ratner, who you want to know who Bill Radnor is, go back and watch the old GI Joe cartoons and listen to the voice of Flint.   Bill Ratner ** 01:42 All right. Lady Jay, you better get your battle gear on, because Cobra is on their way. And I can't bring up the Lacher threat weapon system. We got to get out of here. Yo, Joe,   Michael Hingson ** 01:52 there you go. I rest my case Well, Bill, welcome to unstoppable mindset.   Bill Ratner ** 02:00 We can't rest now. Michael, we've just begun. No, we've just begun.   Michael Hingson ** 02:04 We got to keep going here. Well, I'm really glad that you're here. Bill is another person who we inveigled to get on unstoppable mindset with the help of Walden Hughes. And so that means we can talk about Walden all we want today. Bill just saying, oh goodness. And I got a lot to say. Let me tell you perfect, perfect. Bring it on. So we are really grateful to Walden, although I hope he's not listening. We don't want to give him a big head. But no, seriously, we're really grateful. Ah, good point.   Bill Ratner ** 02:38 But his posture, oddly enough, is perfect.   Michael Hingson ** 02:40 Well, there you go. What do you do? He practiced. Well, anyway, we're glad you're here. Tell us about the early bill, growing up and all that stuff. It's always fun to start a good beginning.   Bill Ratner ** 02:54 Well, I was a very lucky little boy. I was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1947 to two lovely people, professionals, both with master's degree out at University of Chicago. My mother was a social worker. My father had an MBA in business. He was managing editor of Better Homes and Gardens magazine. So I had the joy of living in a better home and living in a garden.   Michael Hingson ** 03:21 My mother. How long were you in Des Moines?   Bill Ratner ** 03:24 Five and a half years left before my sixth birthday. My dad got a fancy job at an ad agency in Minneapolis, and had a big brother named Pete and big handsome, curly haired boy with green eyes. And moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and was was brought up there.   Michael Hingson ** 03:45 Wow. So you went to school there and and chased the girls and all that stuff.   Bill Ratner ** 03:54 I went to school there at Blake School for Boys in Hopkins, Minnesota. Couldn't chase the girls day school, but the girls we are allowed to dance with certainly not chase. Michael was at woodhue dancing school, the Northrop girls from Northrop girls school and the Blake boys were put together in eighth grade and taught the Cha Cha Cha, the waltz, the Charleston, and we danced together, and the girls wore white gloves, and we sniffed their perfume, and we all learned how to be lovers when we were 45   Michael Hingson ** 04:37 There you are. Well, as long as you learned at some point, that's a good start.   Bill Ratner ** 04:44 It's a weird generation. Michael,   Michael Hingson ** 04:46 I've been to Des Moines before. I was born in Chicago, but moved out to California when I was five, but I did some work with the National Federation of the Blind in the mid 19. 1970s 1976 into 1978 so spent time at the Iowa Commission for the Blind in Des Moines, which became a top agency for the Blind in well, the late 50s into the to the 60s and so on. So   Bill Ratner ** 05:15 both my parents are from Chicago. My father from the south side of Chicago, 44th and Kenzie, which was a Irish, Polish, Italian, Jewish, Ukrainian neighborhood. And my mother from Glencoe, which was a middle class suburb above Northwestern University in Evanston.   Michael Hingson ** 05:34 I Where were you born? 57th and union, north, south side, no, South   Bill Ratner ** 05:42 57th union is that? Is that west of Kenzie?   Michael Hingson ** 05:46 You know, I don't remember the geography well enough to know, but I know that it was, I think, Mount Sinai Hospital where I was born. But it was, it's, it's, it's a pretty tough neighborhood today. So I understand,   Bill Ratner ** 06:00 yeah, yeah, my it was tough, then it's tough now,   Michael Hingson ** 06:03 yeah, I think it's tougher, supposedly, than it was. But we lived there for five years, and then we we moved to California, and I remember some things about Chicago. I remember walking down to the local candy store most days, and had no problem doing that. My parents were told they should shut me away at a home somewhere, because no blind child could ever grow up to amount to anything. And my parents said, You guys are you're totally wrong. And they brought me up with that attitude. So, you   Bill Ratner ** 06:32 know who said that the school says school so that   Michael Hingson ** 06:35 doctors doctors when they discovered I was blind with the   Bill Ratner ** 06:38 kid, goodness gracious, horrified.   Michael Hingson ** 06:44 Well, my parents said absolutely not, and they brought me up, and they actually worked with other parents of premature kids who became blind, and when kindergarten started in for us in in the age of four, they actually had a special kindergarten class for blind kids at the Perry School, which is where I went. And so I did that for a year, learn braille and some other things. Then we moved to California, but yeah, and I go back to Chicago every so often. And when I do nowadays, they I one of my favorite places to migrate in Chicago is Garrett Popcorn.   Bill Ratner ** 07:21 Ah, yes, with caramel corn, regular corn, the   Michael Hingson ** 07:25 Chicago blend, which is a mixture, yeah, the Chicago blend is cheese corn, well, as it is with caramel corn, and they put much other mozzarella on it as well. It's really good.   Bill Ratner ** 07:39 Yeah, so we're on the air. Michael, what do you call your what do you call your program? Here I am your new friend, and I can't even announce your program because I don't know   Michael Hingson ** 07:48 the name, unstoppable mindset. This   Bill Ratner ** 07:51 is unstoppable mindset.   Michael Hingson ** 07:56 We're back. Well, we're back already. We're fast. So you, you, you moved off elsewhere, out of Des Moines and all that. And where did you go to college?   Bill Ratner ** 08:09 Well, this is like, why did you this is, this is a bit like talking about the Vietnam War. Looking back on my college career is like looking back on the Vietnam War series, a series of delusions and defeats. By the time I the time i for college, by the time I was applying for college, I was an orphan, orphan, having been born to fabulous parents who died too young of natural causes. So my grades in high school were my mediocre. I couldn't get into the Ivy Leagues. I got into the big 10 schools. My stepmother said, you're going to Michigan State in East Lansing because your cousin Eddie became a successful realtor. And Michigan State was known as mu u it was the most successful, largest agriculture college and university in the country. Kids from South Asia, China, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, South America all over the world came to Michigan State to study agricultural sciences, children of rich farmers all over the world and middle class farmers all over the world, and a huge police science department. Part of the campus was fenced off, and the young cadets, 1819, 20 years old, would practice on the rest of the student body, uniformed with hats and all right, excuse me, young man, we're just going to get some pizza at eight o'clock on Friday night. Stand against your car. Hands in your car. I said, Are you guys practicing again? Shut up and spread your legs. So that was that was Michigan State, and even though both my parents had master's degrees, I just found all the diversions available in the 1960s to be too interesting, and was not invited. Return after my sophomore year, and in order to flunk out of a big 10 University, and they're fine universities, all of them, you have to be either really determined or not so smart, not really capable of doing that level of study in undergraduate school. And I'd like to think that I was determined. I used to show up for my exams with a little blue book, and the only thing I would write is due to lack of knowledge, I am unable to complete this exam, sign Bill ranter and get up early and hand it in and go off. And so what was, what was left for a young man like that was the theater I'd seen the great Zero Mostel when I was 14 years old and on stage live, he looked just like my father, and he was funny, and if I Were a rich man, and that's the grade zero must tell. Yeah, and it took about five, no, it took about six, seven years to percolate inside my bread and my brain. In high school, I didn't want to do theater. The cheerleaders and guys who I had didn't happen to be friends with or doing theater. I took my girlfriends to see plays, but when I was 21 I started acting, and I've been an actor ever since. I'm a committee chair on the screen actors guild in Hollywood and Screen Actors Guild AFTRA, and work as a voice actor and collect my pensions and God bless the union.   Michael Hingson ** 11:44 Well, hey, as long as it works and you're making progress, you know you're still with it, right?   Bill Ratner ** 11:53 That's the that's the point. There's no accounting for taste in my business. Michael, you work for a few different broadcast entities at my age. And it's, you know, it's younger people. It's 18 to 3418 years to 34 years old is the ideal demographic for advertisers, Ford, Motor Company, Dove soap, Betty, Crocker, cake mixes and cereals, every conceivable product that sold online or sold on television and radio. This is my this is my meat, and I don't work for religion. However, if a religious organization calls, I call and say, I I'm not, not qualified or not have my divinity degree in order to sell your church to the public?   Michael Hingson ** 12:46 Yeah, yeah. Well, I, I can understand that. But you, you obviously do a lot, and as we talked about, you were Flint and GI Joe, which is kind of cool.   Bill Ratner ** 13:01 Flynn GI Joe was very cool. Hasbro Corporation, which was based in Providence, Rhode Island, had a huge success with GI Joe, the figure. The figure was about 11 and a half inches tall, like a Barbie, and was at first, was introduced to the public after the Korean War. There is a comic book that was that was also published about GI Joe. He was an individual figure. He was a figure, a sort of mythic cartoon figure during World War Two, GI Joe, generic American soldier, fighting man and but the Vietnam war dragged on for a long time, and the American buying public or buying kids toys got tired of GI Joe, got tired of a military figure in their household and stopped buying. And when Nixon ended the Vietnam War, or allotted to finish in 1974 Hasbro was in the tank. It's got its stock was cheap, and executives are getting nervous. And then came the Great George Lucas in Star Wars, who shrank all these action figures down from 11 and a half inches to three and a half inches, and went to China and had Chinese game and toy makers make Star Wars toys, and began to earn billions and billions dollars. And so Hasbro said, let's turn GI Joe into into a team. And the team began with flint and Lady J and Scarlett and Duke and Destro and cover commander, and grew to 85 different characters, because Hasbro and the toy maker partners could create 85 different sets of toys and action figures. So I was actor in this show and had a good time, and also a purveyor of a billion dollar industry of American toys. And the good news about these toys is I was at a conference where we signed autographs the voice actors, and we have supper with fans and so on. And I was sitting next to a 30 year old kid and his parents. And this kid was so knowledgeable about pop culture and every conceivable children's show and animated show that had ever been on the screen or on television. I turned to his mother and sort of being a wise acre, said, So ma'am, how do you feel about your 30 year old still playing with GI Joe action figures? And she said, Well, he and I both teach English in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania school system, and last year, the literacy level of my ninth graders was 50% 50% of those kids could not read in ninth grade. So I asked the principal if I could borrow my son's GI Joe, action figures, comic books and VHS tapes, recordings of the shows from TV. And he said, Sure, whatever you want to try. And so she did, and she played the video tapes, and these kids were thrilled. They'd never seen a GI Joe cartoon in class before. Passed out the comic books, let him read comics. And then she said, Okay, you guys. And passed out notebooks and pens and pencils, and said, I want you guys to make up some some shows, some GI Joe shows. And so they said, Yeah, we're ready. All right, Cobra, you better get into the barber shop, because the barber bill is no longer there and the fire engines are in the way. And wait a minute, there's a dog in the street. And so they're making this up, using their imagination, doing their schoolwork, by coming up with scenarios, imaginary fam fan fiction for GI Joe and she raised the literacy level in her classroom by 50% that year, by the end of that year, so, so that was the only story that I've ever heard about the sort of the efficacy of GI Joe, other than, you know, kids play with them. Do they? Are they shooting each other all the time? I certainly hope not. I hope not. Are they using the action figures? Do they strip their guns off and put them in a little, you know, stub over by the side and and have them do physical battle with each other, or have them hump the woods, or have them climb the stairs, or have them search the trees. Who knows what kids do? Same with same with girls and and Barbies. Barbie has been a source of fun and creativity for lots of girls, and the source of of worry and bother to a lot of parents as   Michael Hingson ** 17:54 well. Well, at the same time, though, when kids start to react and relate to some of these things. It's, it's pretty cool. I mean, look what's happened with the whole Harry Potter movement and craze. Harry Potter has probably done more in the last 20 or 25 years to promote reading for kids than most anything else, and   Bill Ratner ** 18:17 that's because it's such a good series of books. I read them to my daughters, yeah. And the quality of writing. She was a brilliant writer, not only just the stories and the storytelling, which is fun to watch in the movies, and you know, it's great for a parent to read. If there are any parents listening, I don't care how old your kids are. I don't care if they're 15. Offer to read to them. The 15 year old might, of course, say mom, but anybody younger than that might say either, all right, fine, which is, which means you better do it or read, read a book. To me, sure, it's fun for the parent, fun for the kid, and it makes the child a completely different kind of thinker and worker and earner.   Michael Hingson ** 19:05 Well, also the people who they got to read the books for the recordings Stephen Fry and in the US here, Jim Dale did such an incredible job as well. I've, I've read the whole Harry Potter series more than once, because I just enjoy them, and I enjoy listening to the the voices. They do such a good job. Yeah. And of course, for me, one of the interesting stories that I know about Jim Dale reading Harry Potter was since it was published by Scholastic he was actually scheduled to do a reading from one of the Harry from the new Harry Potter book that was coming out in 2001 on September 11, he was going to be at Scholastic reading. And of course, that didn't happen because of of everything that did occur. So I don't know whether I'm. I'm assuming at some point a little bit later, he did, but still he was scheduled to be there and read. But it they are there. They've done so much to help promote reading, and a lot of those kinds of cartoons and so on. Have done some of that, which is, which is pretty good. So it's good to, you know, to see that continue to happen. Well, so you've written several books on poetry and so on, and I know that you you've mentioned more than once grief and loss. How come those words keep coming up?   Bill Ratner ** 20:40 Well, I had an unusual childhood. Again. I mentioned earlier how, what a lucky kid I was. My parents were happy, educated, good people, not abusers. You know, I don't have a I don't have horror stories to tell about my mother or my father, until my mother grew sick with breast cancer and and it took about a year and a half or two years to die when I was seven years old. The good news is, because she was a sensitive, educated social worker, as she was actually dying, she arranged a death counseling session with me and my older brother and the Unitarian minister who was also a death counselor, and whom she was seeing to talk about, you know, what it was like to be dying of breast cancer with two young kids. And at this session, which was sort of surprised me, I was second grade, came home from school. In the living room was my mother and my brother looking a little nervous, and Dr Carl storm from the Unitarian Church, and she said, you know, Dr storm from church, but he's also my therapist. And we talk about my illness and how I feel, and we talk about how much I love you boys, and talk about how I worry about Daddy. And this is what one does when one is in crisis. That was a moment that was not traumatic for me. It's a moment I recalled hundreds of times, and one that has been a guiding light through my life. My mother's death was very difficult for my older brother, who was 13 who grew up in World War Two without without my father, it was just him and my mother when he was off in the Pacific fighting in World War Two. And then I was born after the war. And the loss of a mother in a family is like the bottom dropping out of a family. But luckily, my dad met a woman he worked with a highly placed advertising executive, which was unusual for a female in the 1950s and she became our stepmother a year later, and we had some very lovely, warm family years with her extended family and our extended family and all of us together until my brother got sick, came down with kidney disease a couple of years before kidney dialysis was invented, and a couple of years before kidney transplants were done, died at 19. Had been the captain of the swimming team at our high school, but did a year in college out in California and died on Halloween of 1960 my father was 51 years old. His eldest son had died. He had lost his wife six years earlier. He was working too hard in the advertising industry, successful man and dropped out of a heart attack 14th birthday. Gosh, I found him unconscious on the floor of our master bathroom in our house. So my life changed. I My life has taught me many, many things. It's taught me how the defense system works in trauma. It's taught me the resilience of a child. It's taught me the kindness of strangers. It's taught me the sadness of loss.   Michael Hingson ** 24:09 Well, you, you seem to come through all of it pretty well. Well, thank you. A question behind that, just an observation, but, but you do seem to, you know, obviously, cope with all of it and do pretty well. So you, you've always liked to be involved in acting and so on. How did you actually end up deciding to be a voice actor?   Bill Ratner ** 24:39 Well, my dad, after he was managing editor of Better Homes and Gardens magazine in Des Moines for Meredith publishing, got offered a fancy job as executive vice president of the flower and mix division for Campbell within advertising and later at General Mills Corporation. From Betty Crocker brand, and would bring me to work all the time, and would sit with me, and we'd watch the wonderful old westerns that were on prime time television, rawhide and Gunsmoke and the Virginian and sure   Michael Hingson ** 25:15 and all those. Yeah, during   Bill Ratner ** 25:17 the commercials, my father would make fun of the commercials. Oh, look at that guy. And number one, son, that's lousy acting. Number two, listen to that copy. It's the dumbest ad copy I've ever seen. The jingles and and then he would say, No, that's a good commercial, right there. And he wasn't always negative. He would he was just a good critic of advertising. So at a very young age, starting, you know, when we watch television, I think the first television ever, he bought us when I was five years old, I was around one of the most educated, active, funny, animated television critics I could hope to have in my life as a 56789, 1011, 12 year old. And so when I was 12, I became one of the founding members of the Brotherhood of radio stations with my friends John Waterhouse and John Barstow and Steve gray and Bill Connors in South Minneapolis. I named my five watt night kit am transmitter after my sixth grade teacher, Bob close this is wclo stereo radio. And when I was in sixth grade, I built myself a switch box, and I had a turntable and I had an intercom, and I wired my house for sound, as did all the other boys in the in the B, O, R, S, and that's brotherhood of radio stations. And we were guests on each other's shows, and we were obsessed, and we would go to the shopping malls whenever a local DJ was making an appearance and torture him and ask him dumb questions and listen obsessively to American am radio. And at the time for am radio, not FM like today, or internet on your little radio tuner, all the big old grandma and grandpa radios, the wooden ones, were AM, for amplitude modulated. You could get stations at night, once the sun went down and the later it got, the ionosphere would lift and the am radio signals would bounce higher and farther. And in Minneapolis, at age six and seven, I was able to to listen to stations out of Mexico and Texas and Chicago, and was absolutely fascinated with with what was being put out. And I would, I would switch my brother when I was about eight years old, gave me a transistor radio, which I hid under my bed covers. And at night, would turn on and listen for, who knows, hours at a time, and just tuning the dial and tuning the dial from country to rock and roll to hit parade to news to commercials to to agric agriculture reports to cow crossings in Kansas and grain harvesting and cheese making in Wisconsin, and on and on and on that made up the great medium of radio that was handing its power and its business over to television, just as I was growing As a child. Fast, fascinating transition   Michael Hingson ** 28:18 and well, but as it was transitioning, how did that affect you?   Bill Ratner ** 28:26 It made television the romantic, exciting, dynamic medium. It made radio seem a little limited and antiquated, and although I listened for environment and wasn't able to drag a television set under my covers. Yeah, and television became memorable with with everything from actual world war two battle footage being shown because there wasn't enough programming to 1930s Warner Brothers gangster movies with James Cagney, Edward G   Michael Hingson ** 29:01 Robinson and yeah   Bill Ratner ** 29:02 to all the sitcoms, Leave It to Beaver and television cartoons and on and on and on. And the most memorable elements to me were the personalities, and some of whom were invisible. Five years old, I was watching a Kids program after school, after kindergarten. We'll be back with more funny puppets, marionettes after this message and the first words that came on from an invisible voice of this D baritone voice, this commercial message will be 60 seconds long, Chrysler Dodge for 1954 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I watched hypnotized, hypnotized as a 1953 dodge drove across the screen with a happy family of four waving out the window. And at the end of the commercial, I ran into the kitchen said, Mom, mom, I know what a minute. Is, and it was said, it had suddenly come into my brain in one of those very rare and memorable moments in a person's life where your brain actually speaks to you in its own private language and says, Here is something very new and very true, that 60 seconds is in fact a minute. When someone says, See you in five minutes, they mean five times that, five times as long as that. Chrysler commercial, five times 60. That's 300 seconds. And she said, Did you learn it that that on T in kindergarten? And I said, No, I learned it from kangaroo Bob on TV, his announcer, oh, kangaroo Bob, no, but this guy was invisible. And so at five years of age, I was aware of the existence of the practice of the sound, of the magic of the seemingly unlimited access to facts, figures, products, brand names that these voices had and would say on the air in This sort of majestic, patriarchal way,   Michael Hingson ** 31:21 and just think 20 years later, then you had James Earl Jones,   Bill Ratner ** 31:26 the great dame. James Earl Jones, father was a star on stage at that time the 1950s James Earl Jones came of age in the 60s and became Broadway and off Broadway star.   Michael Hingson ** 31:38 I got to see him in Othello. He was playing Othello. What a powerful performance. It was   Bill Ratner ** 31:43 wonderful performer. Yeah, yeah. I got to see him as Big Daddy in Canada, Hot Tin Roof, ah, live and in person, he got front row seats for me and my family.   Michael Hingson ** 31:53 Yeah, we weren't in the front row, but we saw it. We saw it on on Broadway,   Bill Ratner ** 31:58 the closest I ever got to James Earl Jones. He and I had the same voice over agent, woman named Rita vinari of southern Barth and benare company. And I came into the agency to audition for Doritos, and I hear this magnificent voice coming from behind a closed voiceover booth, saying, with a with a Spanish accent, Doritos. I thought that's James Earl Jones. Why is he saying burritos? And he came out, and he bowed to me, nodded and smiled, and I said, hello and and the agent probably in the booth and shut the door. And she said, I said, that was James Earl Jones. What a voice. What she said, Oh, he's such a nice man. And she said, but I couldn't. I was too embarrassed. I was too afraid to stop him from saying, Doritos. And it turns out he didn't get the gig. So it is some other voice actor got it because he didn't say, had he said Doritos with the agent froze it froze up. That was as close as I ever got to did you get the gig? Oh goodness no,   Michael Hingson ** 33:01 no, you didn't, huh? Oh, well, well, yeah. I mean, it was a very, it was, it was wonderful. It was James Earl Jones and Christopher Plummer played Iago. Oh, goodness, oh, I know. What a what a combination. Well, so you, you did a lot of voiceover stuff. What did you do regarding radio moving forward? Or did you just go completely out of that and you were in TV? Or did you have any opportunity   Bill Ratner ** 33:33 for me to go back at age 15, my brother and father, who were big supporters of my radio. My dad would read my W, C, l, o, newsletter and need an initial, an excellent journalism son and my brother would bring his teenage friends up. He'd play the elderly brothers, man, you got an Elvis record, and I did. And you know, they were, they were big supporters for me as a 13 year old, but when I turned 14, and had lost my brother and my father, I lost my enthusiasm and put all of my radio equipment in a box intended to play with it later. Never, ever, ever did again. And when I was about 30 years old and I'd done years of acting in the theater, having a great time doing fun plays and small theaters in Minneapolis and South Dakota and and Oakland, California and San Francisco. I needed money, so I looked in the want ads and saw a job for telephone sales, and I thought, Well, I used to love the telephone. I used to make phony phone calls to people all the time. Used to call funeral homes. Hi Carson, funeral I help you. Yes, I'm calling to tell you that you have a you have a dark green slate tile. Roof, isn't that correct? Yes. Well, there's, there's a corpse on your roof. Lady for goodness sake, bring it down and we laugh and we record it and and so I thought, Well, gee, I used to have a lot of fun with the phone. And so I called the number of telephone sales and got hired to sell magazine subscriptions and dinner tickets to Union dinners and all kinds of things. And then I saw a new job at a radio station, suburban radio station out in Walnut Creek, California, a lovely Metro BART train ride. And so I got on the BART train, rode out there and walked in for the interview, and was told I was going to be selling small advertising packages on radio for the station on the phone. And so I called barber shops and beauty shops and gas stations in the area, and one guy picked up the phone and said, Wait a minute, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Are you on the radio right now? And I said, No, I'm just I'm in the sales room. Well, maybe you should be. And he slams the phone on me. He didn't want to talk to me anymore. It wasn't interested in buying advertising. I thought, gee. And I told somebody at the station, and they said, Well, you want to be in the radio? And he went, Yeah, I was on the radio when I was 13. And it just so happened that an older fellow was retiring from the 10am to 2pm slot. K I S King, kiss 99 and KD FM, Pittsburgh, California. And it was a beautiful music station. It was a music station. Remember, old enough will remember music that used to play in elevators that was like violin music, the Percy faith orchestra playing a Rolling Stone song here in the elevator. Yes, well, that's exactly what we played. And it would have been harder to get a job at the local rock stations because, you know, they were popular places. And so I applied for the job, and   Michael Hingson ** 37:06 could have lost your voice a lot sooner, and it would have been a lot harder if you had had to do Wolfman Jack. But that's another story.   Bill Ratner ** 37:13 Yeah, I used to listen to Wolf Man Jack. I worked in a studio in Hollywood. He became a studio. Yeah, big time.   Michael Hingson ** 37:22 Anyway, so you you got to work at the muzack station, got   Bill Ratner ** 37:27 to work at the muzack station, and I was moving to Los Angeles to go to a bigger market, to attempt to penetrate a bigger broadcast market. And one of the sales guys, a very nice guy named Ralph pizzella said, Well, when you get to La you should study with a friend of mine down to pie Troy, he teaches voiceovers. I said, What are voice overs? He said, You know that CVS Pharmacy commercial just carted up and did 75 tags, available in San Fernando, available in San Clemente, available in Los Angeles, available in Pasadena. And I said, Yeah. He said, Well, you didn't get paid any extra. You got paid your $165 a week. The guy who did that commercial for the ad agency got paid probably 300 bucks, plus extra for the tags, that's voiceovers. And I thought, why? There's an idea, what a concept. So he gave me the name and number of old friend acquaintance of his who he'd known in radio, named Don DiPietro, alias Johnny rabbit, who worked for the Dick Clark organization, had a big rock and roll station there. He'd come to LA was doing voiceovers and teaching voiceover classes in a little second story storefront out of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. So I signed up for his class, and he was an experienced guy, and he liked me, and we all had fun, and I realized I was beginning to study like an actor at 1818, who goes to New York or goes to Los Angeles or Chicago or Atlanta or St Louis to act in the big theaters, and starts acting classes and realizes, oh my goodness, these people are truly professionals. I don't know how to do what they do. And so for six years, I took voice over classes, probably 4050, nights a year, and from disc jockeys, from ex show hosts, from actors, from animated cartoon voices, and put enough time in to get a degree in neurology in medical school. And worked my way up in radio in Los Angeles and had a morning show, a lovely show with a wonderful news man named Phil Reed, and we talked about things and reviewed movies and and played a lot of music. And then I realized, wait a minute, I'm earning three times the money in voiceovers as I am on the radio, and I have to get up at 430 in the morning to be on the radio. Uh, and a wonderful guy who was Johnny Carson's staff announcer named Jack angel said, You're not still on radio, are you? And I said, Well, yeah, I'm working in the morning. And Ka big, get out of there. Man, quit. Quit. And I thought, well, how can I quit? I've always wanted to be a radio announcer. And then there was another wonderful guy on the old am station, kmpc, sweet Dick Whittington. Whittington, right? And he said at a seminar that I went to at a union voice over training class, when you wake up at four in the morning and you swing your legs over the bed and your shoes hit the floor, and you put your head in your hands, and you say to yourself, I don't want to do this anymore. That's when you quit radio. Well, that hadn't happened to me. I was just getting up early to write some comedy segments and on and on and on, and then I was driving around town all day doing auditions and rented an ex girlfriend's second bedroom so that I could nap by myself during the day, when I had an hour in and I would as I would fall asleep, I'd picture myself every single day I'm in a dark voiceover studio, a microphone Is before me, a music stand is before the microphone, and on it is a piece of paper with advertising copy on it. On the other side of the large piece of glass of the recording booth are three individuals, my employers, I begin to read, and somehow the text leaps off the page, streams into my eyes, letter for letter, word for word, into a part of my back brain that I don't understand and can't describe. It is processed in my semi conscious mind with the help of voice over training and hope and faith, and comes out my mouth, goes into the microphone, is recorded in the digital recorder, and those three men, like little monkeys, lean forward and say, Wow, how do you do that? That was my daily creative visualization. Michael, that was my daily fantasy. And I had learned that from from Dale Carnegie, and I had learned that from Olympic athletes on NBC TV in the 60s and 70s, when the announcer would say, this young man you're seeing practicing his high jump is actually standing there. He's standing stationary, and the bouncing of the head is he's actually rehearsing in his mind running and running and leaping over the seven feet two inch bar and falling into the sawdust. And now he's doing it again, and you could just barely see the man nodding his head on camera at the exact rhythm that he would be running the 25 yards toward the high bar and leaping, and he raised his head up during the imaginary lead that he was visualizing, and then he actually jumped the seven foot two inches. That's how I learned about creative visualization from NBC sports on TV.   Michael Hingson ** 43:23 Channel Four in Los Angeles. There you go. Well, so you you broke into voice over, and that's what you did.   Bill Ratner ** 43:38 That's what I did, darn it, I ain't stopping now, there's a wonderful old actor named Bill Irwin. There two Bill Irwin's one is a younger actor in his 50s or 60s, a brilliant actor from Broadway to film and TV. There's an older William Irwin. They also named Bill Irwin, who's probably in his 90s now. And I went to a premiere of a film, and he was always showing up in these films as The senile stock broker who answers the phone upside down, or the senile board member who always asks inappropriate questions. And I went up to him and I said, you know, I see you in everything, man. I'm 85 years old. Some friends and associates of mine tell me I should slow down. I only got cast in movies and TV when I was 65 I ain't slowing down. If I tried to slow down at 85 I'd have to stop That's my philosophy. My hero is the great Don Pardo, the late great   Michael Hingson ** 44:42 for Saturday Night Live and Jeopardy   Bill Ratner ** 44:45 lives starring Bill Murray, Gilder Radner, and   Michael Hingson ** 44:49 he died for Jeopardy before that,   Bill Ratner ** 44:52 yeah, died at 92 with I picture him, whether it probably not, with a microphone and. His hand in his in his soundproof booth, in his in his garage, and I believe he lived in Arizona, although the show was aired and taped in New York, New York, right where he worked for for decades as a successful announcer. So that's the story.   Michael Hingson ** 45:16 Michael. Well, you know, I miss, very frankly, some of the the the days of radio back in the 60s and 70s and so on. We had, in LA what you mentioned, Dick Whittington, Dick whittinghill on kmpc, Gary Owens, you know, so many people who were such wonderful announcers and doing some wonderful things, and radio just isn't the same anymore. It's gone. It's   Bill Ratner ** 45:47 gone to Tiktok and YouTube. And the truth is, I'm not gonna whine about Tiktok or YouTube, because some of the most creative moments on camera are being done on Tiktok and YouTube by young quote influencers who hire themselves out to advertisers, everything from lipstick. You know,   Speaker 1 ** 46:09 when I went to a party last night was just wild and but this makeup look, watch me apply this lip remover and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, no, I have no lip.   Bill Ratner ** 46:20 You know, these are the people with the voices. These are the new voices. And then, of course, the faces. And so I would really advise before, before people who, in fact, use the internet. If you use the internet, you can't complain if you use the internet, if you go to Facebook or Instagram, or you get collect your email or Google, this or that, which most of us do, it's handy. You can't complain about tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. You can't complain about tick tock or YouTube, because it's what the younger generation is using, and it's what the younger generation advertisers and advertising executives and creators and musicians and actors are using to parade before us, as Gary Owens did, as Marlon Brando did, as Sarah Bernhardt did in the 19 so as all as you do, Michael, you're a parader. You're the head of the parade. You've been in on your own float for years. I read your your bio. I don't even know why you want to waste a minute talking to me for goodness sakes.   Michael Hingson ** 47:26 You know, the one thing about podcasts that I like over radio, and I did radio at kuci for seven years when I was in school, what I really like about podcasts is they're not and this is also would be true for Tiktok and YouTube. Primarily Tiktok, I would would say it isn't as structured. So if we don't finish in 60 minutes, and we finish in 61 minutes, no one's gonna shoot us.   Bill Ratner ** 47:53 Well, I beg to differ with you. Now. I'm gonna start a fight with you. Michael, yeah, we need conflict in this script. Is that it The Tick Tock is very structured. Six. No,   Michael Hingson ** 48:03 no, I understand that. I'm talking about podcasts,   Bill Ratner ** 48:07 though, but there's a problem. We gotta Tone It Up. We gotta pick it up. We gotta there's a lot of and I listen to what are otherwise really bright, wonderful personalities on screen, celebrities who have podcasts and the car sucks, and then I had meatballs for dinner, haha. And you know what my wife said? Why? You know? And there's just too much of that. And,   Michael Hingson ** 48:32 oh, I understand, yeah. I mean, it's like, like anything, but I'm just saying that's one of the reasons I love podcasting. So it's my way of continuing what I used to do in radio and having a lot of fun doing it   Bill Ratner ** 48:43 all right, let me ask you. Let me ask you a technical and editorial question. Let me ask you an artistic question. An artist, can you edit this podcast? Yeah. Are you? Do you plan to Nope.   Michael Hingson ** 48:56 I think conversations are conversations, but there is a but, I mean,   Bill Ratner ** 49:01 there have been starts and stops and I answer a question, and there's a long pause, and then, yeah, we can do you edit that stuff   Michael Hingson ** 49:08 out. We do, we do, edit some of that out. And I have somebody that that that does a lot of it, because I'm doing more podcasts, and also I travel and speak, but I can edit. There's a program called Reaper, which is really a very sophisticated   Bill Ratner ** 49:26 close up spaces. You   Michael Hingson ** 49:28 can close up spaces with it, yes, but the neat thing about Reaper is that somebody has written scripts to make it incredibly accessible for blind people using screen readers.   Bill Ratner ** 49:40 What does it do? What does it do? Give me the elevator pitch.   Michael Hingson ** 49:46 You've seen some of the the programs that people use, like computer vision and other things to do editing of videos and so on. Yeah.   Bill Ratner ** 49:55 Yeah. Even Apple. Apple edit. What is it called? Apple? Garage Band. No, that's audio. What's that   Michael Hingson ** 50:03 audio? Oh,   Bill Ratner ** 50:06 quick time is quick   Michael Hingson ** 50:07 time. But whether it's video or audio, the point is that Reaper allows me to do all of that. I can edit audio. I can insert, I can remove pauses. I can do anything with Reaper that anyone else can do editing audio, because it's been made completely accessible.   Bill Ratner ** 50:27 That's great. That's good. That's nice. Oh, it is. It's cool.   Michael Hingson ** 50:31 So so if I want, I can edit this and just have my questions and then silence when you're talking.   Bill Ratner ** 50:38 That might be best. Ladies and gentlemen, here's Bill Ratner,   Michael Hingson ** 50:46 yep, exactly, exactly. Now you have won the moth stories. Slam, what? Tell me about my story. Slam, you've won it nine times.   Bill Ratner ** 51:00 The Moth was started by a writer, a novelist who had lived in the South and moved to New York City, successful novelist named George Dawes green. And the inception of the moth, which many people listening are familiar with from the Moth Radio Hour. It was, I believe, either late 90s or early 2000s when he'd been in New York for a while and was was publishing as a fiction writer, and threw a party, and decided, instead of going to one of these dumb, boring parties or the same drinks being served and same cigarettes being smoked out in the veranda and the same orders. I'm going to ask people to bring a five minute story, a personal story, nature, a true story. You don't have to have one to get into the party, but I encourage you to. And so you know, the 3040, 50 people showed up, many of whom had stories, and they had a few drinks, and they had hors d'oeuvres. And then he said, Okay, ladies and gentlemen, take your seats. It's time for and then I picked names out of a hat, and person after person after person stood up in a very unusual setting, which was almost never done at parties. You How often do you see that happen? Suddenly, the room falls silent, and someone with permission being having been asked by the host to tell a personal story, some funny, some tragic, some complex, some embarrassing, some racy, some wild, some action filled. And afterward, the feedback he got from his friends was, this is the most amazing experience I've ever had in my life. And someone said, you need to do this. And he said, Well, you people left a lot of cigarette butts and beer cans around my apartment. And they said, well, let's do it at a coffee shop. Let's do it at a church basement. So slowly but surely, the moth storytelling, story slams, which were designed after the old poetry slams in the 50s and 60s, where they were judged contests like, like a dance contest. Everybody's familiar with dance contests? Well, there were, then came poetry contests with people singing and, you know, and singing and really energetically, really reading. There then came storytelling contests with people standing on a stage before a silent audience, telling a hopefully interesting, riveting story, beginning middle, end in five minutes. And so a coffee house was found. A monthly calendar was set up. Then came the internet. Then it was so popular standing room only that they had to open yet another and another, and today, some 20 years later, 20 some years later, from Austin, Texas to San Francisco, California to Minneapolis, Minnesota to New York City to Los Angeles. There are moth story slams available on online for you to schedule yourself to go live and in person at the moth.org as in the moth with wings. Friend of mine, I was in New York. He said, You can't believe it. This writer guy, a writer friend of mine who I had read, kind of an avant garde, strange, funny writer was was hosting something called the moth in New York, and we were texting each other. He said, Well, I want to go. The theme was show business. I was going to talk to my Uncle Bobby, who was the bell boy. And I Love Lucy. I'll tell a story. And I texted him that day. He said, Oh man, I'm so sorry. I had the day wrong. It's next week. Next week, I'm going to be back home. And so he said, Well, I think there's a moth in Los Angeles. So about 15 years ago, I searched it down and what? Went to a small Korean barbecue that had a tiny little stage that originally was for Korean musicians, and it was now being used for everything from stand up comedy to evenings of rock and roll to now moth storytelling once a month. And I think the theme was first time. And so I got up and told a silly story and didn't win first prize. They have judges that volunteer judges a table of three judges scoring, you like, at a swim meet or a track beat or, you know, and our gymnastics meet. So this is all sort of familiar territory for everybody, except it's storytelling and not high jumping or pull ups. And I kept going back. I was addicted to it. I would write a story and I'd memorize it, and I'd show up and try to make it four minutes and 50 seconds and try to make it sound like I was really telling a story and not reading from a script. And wish I wasn't, because I would throw the script away, and I knew the stories well enough. And then they created a radio show. And then I began to win slams and compete in the grand slams. And then I started submitting these 750 word, you know, two and a half page stories. Literary magazines got a few published and found a whole new way to spend my time and not make much   Michael Hingson ** 56:25 money. Then you went into poetry.   Bill Ratner ** 56:29 Then I got so bored with my prose writing that I took a poetry course from a wonderful guy in LA called Jack grapes, who had been an actor and a football player and come to Hollywood and did some TV, episodics and and some some episodic TV, and taught poetry. It was a poet in the schools, and I took his class of adults and got a poem published. And thought, wait a minute, these aren't even 750 words. They're like 75 words. I mean, you could write a 10,000 word poem if you want, but some people have, yeah, and it was complex, and there was so much to read and so much to learn and so much that was interesting and odd. And a daughter of a friend of mine is a poet, said, Mommy, are you going to read me one of those little word movies before I go to sleep?   Michael Hingson ** 57:23 A little word movie, word movie out of the   Bill Ratner ** 57:27 mouths of babes. Yeah, and so, so and I perform. You know, last night, I was in Orange County at a organization called ugly mug Cafe, and a bunch of us poets read from an anthology that was published, and we sold our books, and heard other young poets who were absolutely marvelous and and it's, you know, it's not for everybody, but it's one of the things I do.   Michael Hingson ** 57:54 Well, you sent me pictures of book covers, so they're going to be in the show notes. And I hope people will will go out and get them   Bill Ratner ** 58:01 cool. One of the one of the things that I did with poetry, in addition to wanting to get published and wanting to read before people, is wanting to see if there is a way. Because poetry was, was very satisfying, emotionally to me, intellectually very challenging and satisfying at times. And emotionally challenging and very satisfying at times, writing about things personal, writing about nature, writing about friends, writing about stories that I received some training from the National Association for poetry therapy. Poetry therapy is being used like art therapy, right? And have conducted some sessions and and participated in many and ended up working with eighth graders of kids who had lost someone to death in the past year of their lives. This is before covid in the public schools in Los Angeles. And so there's a lot of that kind of work that is being done by constable people, by writers, by poets, by playwrights,   Michael Hingson ** 59:09 and you became a grief counselor,   Bill Ratner ** 59:13 yes, and don't do that full time, because I do voiceovers full time, right? Write poetry and a grand. Am an active grandparent, but I do the occasional poetry session around around grief poetry.   Michael Hingson ** 59:31 So you're a grandparent, so you've had kids and all that. Yes, sir, well, that's is your wife still with us? Yes?   Bill Ratner ** 59:40 Oh, great, yeah, she's an artist and an art educator. Well, that   Michael Hingson ** 59:46 so the two of you can criticize each other's works, then, just   Bill Ratner ** 59:52 saying, we're actually pretty kind to each other. I Yeah, we have a lot of we have a lot of outside criticism. Them. So, yeah, you don't need to do it internally. We don't rely on it. What do you think of this although, although, more than occasionally, each of us will say, What do you think of this poem, honey? Or what do you think of this painting, honey? And my the favorite, favorite thing that my wife says that always thrills me and makes me very happy to be with her is, I'll come down and she's beginning a new work of a new piece of art for an exhibition somewhere. I'll say, what? Tell me about what's, what's going on with that, and she'll go, you know, I have no idea, but it'll tell me what to do.   Michael Hingson ** 1:00:33 Yeah, it's, it's like a lot of authors talk about the fact that their characters write the stories right, which, which makes a lot of sense. So with all that you've done, are you writing a memoir? By any chance, I   Bill Ratner ** 1:00:46 am writing a memoir, and writing has been interesting. I've been doing it for many years. I got it was my graduate thesis from University of California Riverside Palm Desert.   Michael Hingson ** 1:00:57 My wife was a UC Riverside graduate. Oh, hi. Well, they   Bill Ratner ** 1:01:01 have a low residency program where you go for 10 days in January, 10 days in June. The rest of it's online, which a lot of universities are doing, low residency programs for people who work and I got an MFA in creative writing nonfiction, had a book called parenting for the digital age, the truth about media's effect on children. And was halfway through it, the publisher liked it, but they said you got to double the length. So I went back to school to try to figure out how to double the length. And was was able to do it, and decided to move on to personal memoir and personal storytelling, such as goes on at the moth but a little more personal than that. Some of the material that I was reading in the memoir section of a bookstore was very, very personal and was very helpful to read about people who've gone through particular issues in their childhood. Mine not being physical abuse or sexual abuse, mine being death and loss, which is different. And so that became a focus of my graduate thesis, and many people were urging me to write a memoir. Someone said, you need to do a one man show. So I entered the Hollywood fringe and did a one man show and got good reviews and had a good time and did another one man show the next year and and so on. So But writing memoir as anybody knows, and they're probably listeners who are either taking memoir courses online or who may be actively writing memoirs or short memoir pieces, as everybody knows it, can put you through moods from absolutely ecstatic, oh my gosh, I got this done. I got this story told, and someone liked it, to oh my gosh, I'm so depressed I don't understand why. Oh, wait a minute, I was writing about such and such today. Yeah. So that's the challenge for the memoir is for the personal storyteller, it's also, you know, and it's more of a challenge than it is for the reader, unless it's bad writing and the reader can't stand that. For me as a reader, I'm fascinated by people's difficult stories, if they're well   Michael Hingson ** 1:03:24 told well, I know that when in 2002 I was advised to write a book about the World Trade Center experiences and all, and it took eight years to kind of pull it all together. And then I met a woman who actually I collaborated with, Susie Florey, and we wrote thunder dog. And her agent became my agent, who loved the proposal that we sent and actually got a contract within a week. So thunder dog came out in 2011 was a New York Times bestseller, and very blessed by that, and we're working toward the day that it will become a movie still, but it'll happen. And then I wrote a children's version of it, well, not a children's version of the book, but a children's book about me growing up in Roselle, growing up the guide dog who was with me in the World Trade Center, and that's been on Amazon. We self published it. Then last year, we published a new book called Live like a guide dog, which is all about controlling fear and teaching people lessons that I learned prior to September 11. That helped me focus and remain calm.   Bill Ratner ** 1:04:23 What happened to you on September 11,   Michael Hingson ** 1:04:27 I was in the World Trade Center. I worked on the 78th floor of Tower One.   Bill Ratner ** 1:04:32 And what happened? I mean, what happened to you?   Michael Hingson ** 1:04:36 Um, nothing that day. I mean, well, I got out. How did you get out? Down the stairs? That was the only way to go. So, so the real story is not doing it, but why it worked. And the real issue is that I spent a lot of time when I first went into the World Trade Center, learning all I could about what to do in an emergency, talking to police, port authorities. Security people, emergency preparedness people, and also just walking around the world trade center and learning the whole place, because I ran an office for a company, and I wasn't going to rely on someone else to, like, lead me around if we're going to go to lunch somewhere and take people out before we negotiated contracts. So I needed to know all of that, and I learned all I could, also realizing that if there ever was an emergency, I might be the only one in the office, or we might be in an area where people couldn't read the signs to know what to do anyway. And so I had to take the responsibility of learning all that, which I did. And then when the planes hit 18 floors above us on the other side of the building, we get we had some guests in the office. Got them out, and then another colleague, who was in from our corporate office, and I and my guide dog, Roselle, went to the stairs, and we started down. And   Bill Ratner ** 1:05:54 so, so what floor did the plane strike?   Michael Hingson ** 1:05:58 It struck and the NOR and the North Tower, between floors 93 and 99 so I just say 96 okay, and you were 20 floors down, 78 floors 78 so we were 18 floors below, and   Bill Ratner ** 1:06:09 at the moment of impact, what did you think?   Michael Hingson ** 1:06:13 Had no idea we heard a muffled kind of explosion, because the plane hit on the other side of the building, 18 floors above us. There was no way to know what was going on. Did you feel? Did you feel? Oh, the building literally tipped, probably about 20 feet. It kept tipping. And then we actually said goodbye to each other, and then the building came back upright. And then we went,   Bill Ratner ** 1:06:34 really you so you thought you were going to die?   Michael Hingson ** 1:06:38 David, my colleague who was with me, as I said, he was from our California office, and he was there to help with some seminars we were going to be doing. We actually were saying goodbye to each other because we thought we were about to take a 78 floor plunge to the street, when the building stopped tipping and it came back. Designed to do that by the architect. It was designed to do that, which is the point, the point.   Bill Ratner ** 1:07:02 Goodness, gracious. And then did you know how to get to the stairway?   Michael Hingson ** 1:07:04 Oh, absolutely. And did you do it with your friend? Yeah, the first thing we did, the first thing we did is I got him to get we had some guests, and I said, get him to the stairs. Don't let him take the elevators, because I knew he had seen fire above us, but that's all we knew. And but I said, don't take the elevators. Don't let them take elevators. Get them to the stairs and then come back and we'll leave. So he did all that, and then he came back, and we went to the stairs and started down.   Bill Ratner ** 1:07:33 Wow. Could you smell anything?   Michael Hingson ** 1:07:36 We smelled burning jet fuel fumes on the way down. And that's how we figured out an airplane must have hit the building, but we had no idea what happened. We didn't know what happened until the until both towers had collapsed, and I actually talked to my wife, and she's the one who told us how to aircraft have been crashed into the towers, one into the Pentagon, and a fourth, at that time, was still missing over Pennsylvania. Wow. So you'll have to go pick up a copy of thunder dog. Goodness. Good. Thunder dog. The name of the book is Thunder dog, and the book I wrote last year is called Live like a guide dog. It's le

In this episode we discuss the developments surrounding the "Superman" movie's impressive performance on streaming, debate Warner Brothers' aggressive "for your consideration" Oscar campaign, examine why the movie's success seems to "disturb so many people," James Gunn revealing his take that Lex Luthor hates metahumans because he sees their powers as "cheating", the DCU's potential use of the controversial comic "Salvation Run", the mysterious removal of David Corenswet's Superman costume from the Warner Bros. Studio exhibit, your favorite Superman movie posters, and much more.

HUGE week for corporate nonsense. Just unbelievably bad decision. We're talking one company buys another company with Warner Brothers officially up for sale, the low low price that the James Bond rights sold for and Bob Iger stepping in to stop a Star Wars Kylo Ren solo movie at Disney. Plus we talk Batman and Darkseid updates in the DCU, a Transformers/GI: Joe animated series in the style of Invincible, Gev V Season 2 and more! Thanks for listeningNew bonus let's play video out now! Entire back catalogue also available now with let's play videos, exclusive pods, Q&As, ad-free feeds and early access on bigsandwich.coMaso on Two in the Think Tank Episode 500: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ2TvELVDe4Maso on The Mish & Zach Podcast for Two Eps: https://www.youtube.com/@mishandzachPLEASE be aware timecodes may shift up to a few minutes due to inserted ads.00:00 The Start07:21 First Batman Movie in New DCU13:02 James Gunn on Darkseid Possibilities15:26 Warner Bros Officially For Sale26:36 What's Happening with James Bond29:47 Cancelled Kylo Ren Star Wars Movie Details39:44 David Fincher's TROS Sequel Pitch41:09 Energon Series Announced (GI Joe, Transformers, Void Rivals)45:08 Gen V Season 2 Full Season and Full Spoiler Review59:41 What We Reading, What We Gonna Read01:09:05 Letters, It's Time For LettersSUBSCRIBE HERE ►► http://goo.gl/pQ39jNJames' Twitter ► http://twitter.com/mrsundaymoviesMaso's Twitter ► http://twitter.com/wikipediabrownPatreon ► https://patreon.com/mrsundaymoviesT-Shirts/Merch ► https://www.teepublic.com/stores/mr-sunday-moviesThe Weekly Planet iTunes ► https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-weekly-planet/id718158767?mt=2&ign-mpt=uo%3D4The Weekly Planet Direct Download ► https://play.acast.com/s/theweeklyplanetAmazon Affiliate Link ► https://amzn.to/2nc12P4 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Justin and Kyle are back in the podcast cave to talk about the recent rumors of Warner Brothers being sold to Paramount as well as sharing their review for season 2 of Peacemaker.

Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Derek Sivers is the founder of CD Baby and author of "Hell Yeah or No" and "Useful Not True." He shared how he graduated from Cal Berkeley in two years instead of four because the "standard pace for chumps" - a lesson that shaped his entire career of institutional skepticism and unconventional thinking. From creating viral shipping emails to understanding why explorers make bad leaders, Derek shares why being busy means being out of control, how your first thought is an obstacle to your best work, and why you can't predict what the world will want from you until you try everything and listen closely to what it's telling you. Notes: No Speed Limit – Most things are paced so the slowest person can keep up. If you're driven and motivated, you can go so much faster than the standard pace. I graduated from Berkeley in two years by learning four semesters of harmony in one hour. "The standard pace is for chumps. You can do so much better than that." Question the Standard Process – When someone says you must go through usual channels or something will take a certain time, assume there's probably a hack. Develop institutional skepticism - there's usually a better way than how most people do it. Create Opportunities, Don't Wait for Them – You don't have to wait until a company is hiring. If you can see how to benefit them, walk in and show them what you can do for free first. Alan Tepper made Warner Brothers more money than anyone that year by just showing up with a plan. Make Everything Valuable to Others – The starving artist spends all their time on work valuable to them but not to others. Use money as a neutral measure - if you can make money with your art, it ensures what you're doing is valuable to other people. "It's almost impossible to predict what the world will want from you... Keep yourself out there and listen closely to what the world is telling you it wants from you." Stand Out by Being Different – Don't imitate what everyone else is doing. I wrote a silly shipping email in 10 minutes that became one of the most viral emails ever mentioned in business books. Ask yourself constantly: What has nobody done before? The First Follower Creates the Movement – We focus on the shirtless dancing guy, but the first follower is what made everything happen. Until then, people kept their distance from the freak. If you find someone doing something great, follow them and show others how to follow. Every Sentence Must Matter – My books are 90-100 pages, but start as 1,000-page rough drafts. I spend 1-2 years full-time chopping every sentence that doesn't absolutely need to be there. "I'm not gonna put a single sentence out into the world that doesn't need to be there." Make every word count - eliminate everything that doesn't add value. Hell Yeah or No is Context-Dependent – This tool is for when you're overwhelmed with options and need to raise the bar. Straight out of college, say yes to everything because opportunities are like lottery tickets. Once something rewards you, then say no to other things and double down. Busy Means Out of Control – "Busy to me implies out of control. You're busy if you've let other people shove shit into your schedule." Leave space instead of filling it - that time to think is what creates valuable insights others don't have time to develop. Your First Thought is an Obstacle – Don't honor the thought that came first. In brainstorming, acknowledge the first idea, then keep going - don't stop at two or three. Even silly ideas can seed great ones you'd never reach without that stepping stone. All Beliefs Are a Myth – People worshiped Zeus for centuries; now we call it mythology. But we say our own beliefs are true while others' are superstitions. I expected China to be awful from American news, but found it wonderful - question what you've been told. Use Prejudice as Your Compass – If you notice you're prejudiced against something, that's exactly what you should explore. Burning Man sounds awful to me; therefore, I should probably go. Steer into your biases to overcome them and gain new perspectives. Explorers Make Terrible Leaders – Explorers try everything and change direction constantly, which frustrates teams. Leaders go in a straight line to a clear destination, unwavering in mission even if the path changes. I loved changing my mind, which made me a bad leader until I learned the difference. Set projects with clear missions, even if you're personally exploring other things. Try Everything Until the World Says Yes – I had a booking agency, a record label, a recording studio, and my own music - all failures. Then, a side project to help friends (CD Baby) took off. You can't predict what the world wants from you, so try many things and listen closely to what it's telling you. Reflection  What "standard pace" are you accepting in your business or career that you could actually accelerate if you questioned it? Where have you assumed something has to take a certain amount of time just because that's how it's always been done? Are you spending time on work that's valuable to you but not to others? How could you test whether what you're creating actually solves problems people are willing to pay for? Are you acting more like an explorer or a leader right now? If you're constantly changing direction, how could you set clearer missions for your projects while keeping your personal explorations separate? Resources & References Derek's Content: Derek's website and blog  "Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy" (First Follower) TED Talk - Derek Sivers  "No Speed Limit" essay  Former Episodes Referenced #647 - Tim Ferriss - Chasing Your Curiosity #562 - Nikki Glaser -  The Creative Process of a Comedian  #644 - Blaine Anderson - Confidence, Curiosity, Connection  Episode Timestamps 02:20 Early Life Lessons from Kimo Williams 05:21 Corporate Lessons and Unconventional Paths 09:10 The Power of Adding Value 13:57 Viral TED Talk: Leadership Lessons from the Dancing Guy 22:03 The 'Hell Yeah or No' Philosophy 27:29 The CD Baby Experience 28:02 Starting an Online Record Store 29:10 Creating a Unique Shipping Notice 30:01 The Viral Impact of Creativity 32:53 The Importance of Regular Writing 35:17 Questioning Assumptions and Beliefs 36:23 Exploring New Perspectives 40:41 The Explorer vs. The Leader 48:21 Advice for Aspiring Leaders Resources: Read: The Score That Matters Read: The Pursuit of Excellence Read: Welcome to Management To Follow me on X: @RyanHawk12

This week Dan and Chris discuss some recent TV news, including the possible return of The Inbetweeners, the departure of Strictly Come Dancings presenting team, the Stranger Things finale going to cinemas and Warner Brothers offically taking offers for sale. Plus we review Stick and Nine Bodies In A Mexican Morgue.

Warner anuncia que está estudiando diferentes ofertas de compra. James Gunn ¿se despide?. ❇️ Si quieres saber más de El Sótano de Planet os dejamos todos los enlaces de interés: 🔷 PÓDCAST IVOOX: https://www.ivoox.com/podcast-podcast-el-sotano-del-planet-podcast-superman_sq_f173777_1.html 🔷 TWITCH: https://www.twitch.tv/elsotanodelplanet 🔷 YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVezUEZeVU2pDJvQ0NFM6CQ 🔷 INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/elsotanodelplanet/ 🔷 FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/ElSotanoDelPlanet 🔷 TWITTER: https://twitter.com/SotanoPlanet 🔷 DISCORD: https://discord.gg/qtarkDZpyB (Si no funciona la invitación, solicitadlo por redes sociales y os ofreceremos la nueva invitación activa) 🔷 E-MAIL: ElSotanoDelPlanet@gmail.com 🔷 PÓDCAST ITUNES: https://podcasts.apple.com/es/podcast/podcast-el-s%C3%B3tano-del-planet-podcast-superman/id1041625748 🔷 PÓDCAST SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/1nlF54BDI8dsIxo6Az51zK?si=5XQJoWR1Rq6kN-FMo9RN2g 🔷 PÓDCAST ANTIGUOS: https://go.ivoox.com/sq/1136166

We explore how the dreamy delicacy of Crazy Fingers came about at a time of great tumult in Grateful Dead history, with visits from new record company boss Al Teller of United Artists and Seastones composer Ned Lagin, plus a stop at Winterland for the Bob Fried Memorial Boogie.Guests: David Lemieux, Al Teller, Ron Rakow, Ned Lagin, Gary Lambert, Michael Parrish, Danno Henklein, Ed Perlstein, Geoff Gould, Jay Kerley, Blair Jackson, Shaugn O'Donnell, Chadwick Jenkins, Christopher Coffman, Nicholas MeriwetherSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

SPECIAL DROP FOR SATELLITE SISTERS WHO DREAM 0F WRITING ROMANCE! It's never too late to totally switch it up. Just ask Sue Fleishman who went from being a Communications Guru at big entertainment companies like Universal, Amblin and Warner Brothers to rebranding herself Campbell Linden, Romance Novelist! On today's episode, she shares her story including a juicy Hollywood bad-behavior- behind-the-scenes tale and how she came up with her nom de plume. Millennial Mentor Leah is jealous and tests out her own potential pen name.To follow Campbell Linden and her books: Buy the latest Settle For More on amazon.Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorCampbellLinden/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/campbelllindenauthor/Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@campbelllindenWebsite: https://campbelllinden.com/Check out the trailer for Robert Evan's film The Kids Stays In The PictureArticle in Stanford Longevity Magazine RX Creativity for Health Life and Fun by Laura Holson featuring Sue Fleishman.Novel Liz mentions by Lian Dolan about Gen X Couple: The Marriage Sabbatical HOMEWORKWhere to go for your own creative inspiration.Sue recommends: Find a class at Grub StreetLeah recommends:Stephen King On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.Anne Lamott. Bird By Bird.Liz recommends: Mr. Scorcese 5 part doc by Rebecca Miller. A new series on Apple TV + about Martin Scorcese and his life's work.Love, Gilda. Documentary about Gilda Radnor. Weaving together recently discovered audiotapes, interviews with her friends, rare home movies and diaries read by modern day comediennes (including Amy Poehler).If you are new to Lizness School, we suggest you listen to Season 1 to hear all about Liz's year as a Stanford Fellow. Everything from Neuroscience and Chinese History to Pickleball! Plus a great community experience with her fellow DCI Fellows.Season 2 is about how she puts her lessons to work in the wild.To listen to Liz +. Leah's recap of Lizness School Season 1, go to our FINALE here.For more on Liz Dolan, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠For more on Liz's work in podcasting, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠Satellite Sisters⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow Lizness School on all podcasting platforms including ⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify.⁠⁠⁠⁠On Instagram, follow the show at ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/liznessschool/⁠⁠⁠⁠ and follow Liz at ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/satellitesisterliz/⁠⁠⁠⁠.Follow Producer and Millennial Mentor Leah Sutherland @leahhsutherlandd on Instagram and Leah Sutherland on LinkedIn. To email Lizness School with your own voicememos/questions/thoughts/suggestions for Liz or Leah, use ⁠⁠⁠⁠liznessschool@gmail.comThe Distinguished Careers Institute is a unique program for late career people. Fellows are graduate students at Stanford University, able to take classes in any area. ⁠⁠⁠⁠Complete information here.⁠⁠⁠⁠Email the podcast ⁠⁠⁠⁠liznessschool@gmail.com ⁠See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome back to The Lawcast! This time our hosts cover the infamous disaster that was the one and only Heroes of Wrestling pay-per-view.It's a legend show from 1999 featuring many big names of the 1980s and 1990s: Jake Roberts, Yokozuna, King Kong Bundy, Jim Neidhart, Tully Blanchard, and more. Unfortunately we know wrestlers from the 1980s didn't really take care of themselves and a lot of these guys were in rough shape. And Jake Roberts showed up in no condition to perform but was unfortunately allowed to wrestle anyway. And disaster ensued.Plus we discuss WrestleDream, Seth Rollins vacating the World Heavyweight Championship, and Warner Brothers being up for sale. 

This week, the boys head to the jungle for one of Amazon Studios' first films, James Gray's “The Lost City of Z”. That's pronounced “Zed” for you British purists. The film stars Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson with a beard and glasses, and Sienna Miller. It was produced by Brad Pitt's Plan B and was SOMEHOW filmed on a $30 million budget, half of which was spent flying the dailies out of the actual Amazon jungle. We get drinking with a few mini-reviews at the top, and Jeff must have started early because he recorded with his microphone facing the wrong way. Luckily, Dave has fixed Jeff & John's crap many times before. Grab a beer and listen in! linktr.ee/theloveofcinema - Check out our YouTube page!  Our phone number is 646-484-9298. It accepts texts or voice messages.  0:00 Intro; 6:11 “Good Fortune” Dave & John's mini-review; 9:15 “Anemone” John's mini-review; 12:06 “Blue Moon” Dave's mini-review; 13:53 “Tron: Ares” John's mini-review; 17:54 Gripes; 19:08 2016 Year in Review; 37:17 Films of 2016: “Lost City of Z(ed)”; 1:35:45 What You Been Watching?; 1:46:51 Next Week's Episode Teaser Additional Cast/Crew: David Grann, Tom Holland, Edward Ashley, Ian McDiarmid, Matthew Sunderland, Jared Leto, Jeff Bridges, Aziz Ansari, Keanu Reeves, Seth Rogen, Keke Palmer, Sandra Oh, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Ethan Hawke, Richard Linklater, Bobby Cannavale, Margaret Qualley, Daniel Day-Lewis, Ronan Day-Lewis, Sean Bean. Hosts: Dave Green, Jeff Ostermueller, John Say Edited & Produced by Dave Green. Beer Sponsor: Carlos Barrozo Music Sponsor: Dasein Dasein on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/77H3GPgYigeKNlZKGx11KZ 
Dasein on Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/dasein/1637517407 Recommendations/Tags: Rocky, I Play Rocky, Alex Murdaugh, Gangs of New York, Peacemaker, Invasion. Additional Tags: The Dallas Cowboys, Short-term memory loss, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Netflix, AMC Times Square, Tom Cruise, George Clooney, MGM, Amazon Prime, Marvel, Sony, Conclave, Here, Venom: The Last Dance, Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, Oscars, Academy Awards, BFI, BAFTA, BAFTAS, British Cinema. England, Vienna, Leopoldstadt, The Golden Globes, Past Lives, Apple Podcasts, West Side Story, Adelaide, Australia, Queensland, New South Wales, Melbourne, The British, England, The SEC, Ronald Reagan, Stock Buybacks, Marvel, MCU, DCEU, Film, Movies, Southeast Asia, The Phillippines, Vietnam, America, The US, Academy Awards, WGA Strike, SAG-AFTRA, SAG Strike, Peter Weir, Jidaigeki, chambara movies, sword fight, samurai, ronin, Meiji Restoration, plague, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, casket maker, Seven Samurai, Roshomon, Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood, Stellan Skarsgard, the matt and mark movie show.The Southern District's Waratah Championship, Night of a Thousand Stars, The Pan Pacific Grand Prix (The Pan Pacifics), Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch, Larry Ellison, David Ellison, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg.   

Time now for our daily Tech and Business Report. Today, Warner Brothers says it's considering selling itself, adding it's already received several offers from potential buyers. This comes after the company announced plans to split into two businesses earlier this year. For more, KCBS Radio anchor Holly Quan spoke with Bloomberg's Kelcee Griffis.

and the Turd in the Car Recapping The Dead Files Fatal Attachment (Season 2 Episode 1) which aired August 10, 2012.  This week, TAC digs into one of the most haunting (and surprisingly sweet) early episodes of The Dead Files: Fatal Attachment. A small-town dentist's office is plagued by strange activity, a sad little girl spirit, and the looming shadow of an abusive father. Amy and Megan unravel the mystery behind Lavina Wall's tragic story — and discover just how much empathy can tether the living to the dead.Expect stairwell chills, ghost logs, creepy teddy bears, and yes… The Turd in the Car.Haunted dentistry, toxic family secrets, and more than a few laughs — So, grab your radiator moonshine, and join us where… The Activity Continues. Content Warning: In this episode we mention domestic abuse. Also, we swear.  Chapter Markers00:00:00 Intro00:02:11 Overview! 00:03:14 Segment One – The Set Up00:26:35 Segment Two – The Investigation00:41:33 Segment Three – The Reveal00:57:22 Research and Rabbit Holes01:05:30 Outro/Disclaimer Episode links:https://emohealth.org/welcome-dr-grimes/ - he runs a monthly clinic for the uninsured!Article about a para normal group coming in in 2009! Mountain State Paranormal: https://www.hurherald.com/obits.php?id=33967Another article from 2011: (use an ad blocker)https://theresashauntedhistoryofthetri-state.blogspot.com/2011/11/breaking-news-dr-grimes-dental-office.htmlLavina's True storyhttps://theresashauntedhistoryofthetri-state.blogspot.com/2011/11/lavinas-true-storydr-grimes-office-part.htmlBlog about the dental office https://theresashauntedhistoryofthetri-state.blogspot.com/2012/04/dr-grimes-part-3-carlas-story.htmlThe Dead Files Official Podcast: https://pod.link/1642377102 The Activity Continues is a paranormal podcast where soul friends Amy and Megan chat about true crime, ghost stories, hauntings, dreams, and other paranormal stuff including the TV show, The Dead Files. Our recaps are full of recurring jokes about recurring tropes.This episode was recorded on September 24, and released on October 16, 2025. Disclaimer:This podcast is in no way affiliated with Warner Brothers, HBOMax, the Travel Channel, Painless TV, or the TV show The Dead Files or any of its cast or crew. We're just fans who love the show and want to build a community of like-minded people who would enjoy hanging out and discussing the episodes and similar content. Credits:Hosted by: Amy Lotsberg and Megan SimmonsProduction, Artwork, and Editing: Amy Lotsberg at Collected Sounds Media, LLC. https://www.collectedsounds.com/ Theme song. “Ghost Story” and segment music by Cannelle Background music: “Beyond the Stars” by Chris Collins Engage!Our website, https://www.theactivitycontinues.com/ Leave us a Voicemail: https://www.theactivitycontinues.com/voicemail/ (might be read on the show)Newsletter sign-up:  https://www.theactivitycontinues.com/newsletter          Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theactivitycontinues We're on (almost) all the socials too @theactivitycontinues SEND US YOUR PARANORMAL STORIES!Email: theactivitycontinues@gmail.com and maybe it will be read on the show!Voicemail: https://www.theactivitycontinues.com/voicemail/ to leave a message and maybe it will be played on the show! BE OUR GUEST!Are you a The Dead Files client, or a paranormal/spiritual professional, and are interested in being interviewed on our show? Let us know by filling out our guest form:https://www.theactivitycontinues.com/guests/intake/ Affiliates/SponsorsPlease see our Store page for all the links for all our current affiliates. https://www.theactivitycontinues.com/store/  Thank you for listening, take care of yourselves. We'll see you next time!If you want to hear us early and ad-free EVERY week, become a Patron, join our Ghosty Fam and get bonus exclusive episodes! https://www.patreon.com/theactivitycontinuesSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-activity-continues/exclusive-content

Welcome to Multiverse News, Your source for Information about all your favorite fictional universes While Marvel Studios allegiance to San Diego and Hall H seems to have waned in recent years, not so for last weekend's New York City Comic Con where our favorite cinematic universe teased the latest and greatest for their small screen offerings. Let's rundown the biggest headlines from Marvel Television:Wonder Man released its official teaser trailer alongside the announcement that the 8-episode series had been delayed from December 2025 to January 27, 2026Fans in attendance were treated to an exclusive trailer for Daredevil: Born Again Season 2, presented by Daredevil actor Charlie Cox who was reunited with Jessica Jones actor Krysten Ritter. The series was confirmed for a March 2026 release on Disney Plus and we also learned Wilson Bethel's Bullseye will return and Matthew Lillard will be an antagonist to Vincent D'Onofrio's Kingpin. Separate from NYCC, but still worth mentioning on the subject of Daredevil: Born Again, speaking with Entertainment Tonight Marvel TV Head Brad Winderbaum shared the season's connection to Spider-Man: Brand New Day, saying "We are communicating a lot with the team on Spider-Man: Brand New Day to make sure that there's coherence there. We don't want to spoil anything, but it very much exists in the same world and it is important."VisionQuest and Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man Season 2 were confirmed for Fall 2026 release windows, while X-Men '97 Season 2 was announced for Summer 2026. All three shows debuted exclusive trailers not yet released to the public and both animated series confirmed their third seasons to be in development.On the DCU TV side of things, Peacemaker Season 2 aired its final episode last week, and while we'll avoid getting specific with spoilers given the recency, when asked about a third season James Gunn did provide comments on the series' future and its impact on the DCU at large, saying, “This is about the other stories in which this [cliffhanger] will play out,” he said. “Never say never. But right now, this is about the future of the DCU.” Gunn also shared that he spoke with Ryan Reynolds about a Deadpool cameo in Peacemaker and that while the actor was interested, the logistics required to pull off the crossover were ultimately deemed too daunting.Despite Tron: Ares' number one spot debut at the box office last weekend with a $60.5 million global haul, the numbers are disappointingly muted when weighed against projections of $85-95 million and a reported $180 million budget. The film currently holds a 56% on Rotten Tomatoes and B+ Cinemascore.HBO revealed the debut trailer for Game of Thrones spin off A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms at New York Comic Con last week and has announced a premiere date of Jan. 18.Bradley Cooper is in talks to star opposite Margot Robbie in the Ocean's Eleven prequel at Warner Bros. Twisters director Lee Isaac Chung is attached to direct with Robbie's Lucky Chap producing.Warner Brothers has announced that an untitled follow up to A Minecraft Movie will hit theaters on July 23rd, 2027. Jared Hess returns to direct and will write the script with Chris Galletta, one of the writers of the original.Disney has officially resumed development on a live action adaptation of Tangled. The project has The Greatest Showman's Michael Gracey attached to direct a script from Jennifer Kaytin Robinson. Scarlett Johansson is being eyed to star as Mother Gothel.Christopher Briney, one of the leads of Prime Video's The Summer I Turned Pretty, has joined HBO Max's Emmy-winning comedy Hacks for its upcoming fifth season, which is currently in production.

Ever feel like you had to start over from zero? I sit down with writer and teacher Peter William Murphy, an Irish expat who rebuilt after a family business collapse, a serious injury, and a move to Reunion Island that reset his path. I wanted to understand what it really takes to choose growth when life gets loud, and Peter shows us how clear decisions, steady practice, and honest support can open new doors. We talk about the power of owning your choices, moving through anxiety, and asking for help before pride gets in the way. Peter explains how he built Peak English to help students raise their IELTS scores and change their futures. We get into how online teaching actually works when you design it with care, why in-person connection still matters, and how writing became a tool for clarity, confidence, and service. What I love most in this conversation is Peter's calm style of resilience. It is not flashy. It is daily. If you are starting over, switching careers, or simply trying to make your next decision with intention, you will hear practical steps you can use right away. I think you will walk away encouraged, with a clearer view of what steady progress looks like and how to keep going when the ground shifts under your feet.   Highlights:   00:10 – Meet the guest and set the theme of choosing growth over comfort. 01:12 – Hear how a family hospitality legacy shaped early values and work ethic. 02:25 – Learn how the 2008 crash ended the bar and pushed a search for a new path. 07:37 – See why a one-way ticket to Reunion Island became a turning point. 10:11 – Follow the move into teaching without a degree and the first classroom wins. 14:20 – Pick up online teaching tactics like gamification and lesson design. 15:56 – Understand imposter syndrome and the pivot into writing and Peak English. 21:16 – Get a clear take on when online learning works and when it does not. 28:38 – Compare virtual vs. in-person speaking for connection and impact. 32:41 – Learn Peak English's mission to make IELTS success more accessible. 46:32 – Try a simple decision tool: write pros and cons and choose with intent. 54:55 – Hear the advice to younger self: talk to someone sooner and keep going   About the Guest:   Peter William Murphy is an Irish writer, educator, and host whose path has been anything but conventional. Raised in a small family-run hotel on Ireland's west coast, Peter immigrated to America following the hotel's closure, attending school there before returning home to rediscover his Irish roots—and a deep love for sport. But beneath the rugby and soccer fields, a creative instinct stirred.   When the 2008 crash brought down his family's business for a second time, Peter booked a one-way ticket to an island off the coast of Madagascar with just €20 and no job prospects. After a brief period of sleeping rough, he was helped by strangers who offered support without judgment—a lesson in quiet empathy that never left him.   Peter made his name on Medium, where he was curated 39 times for his memoir-style essays on travel and the lessons learned along the way, before pivoting to sharp, comedic takes on current affairs. Notable among his growing body of work are original characters like Jack Hennessy, a wry Irish journalist with a nose for trouble, and the Rick and Morty-inspired duo, Peta and Freeman—two chaotic, absurdist voices that serve as both satire and self-reflection. He now splits his creative focus between personal essays, humor writing, and his new livestream comedy podcast, The Peter and Philip Show, which he co-hosts with author Philip Ogley and which is gaining a mini-cult following on Substack. Peter is currently working on a book loosely inspired by his global misadventures, missteps, and the redemptive power of human connection.   Some of Peter's creative and personal heroes include Hunter S. Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, as well as his mother, father, and brother—who continue to inspire his voice, values, and pursuit of honest storytelling.   Peter is currently developing the Peta and Freeman series into a comic and is halfway through writing his first novel, The Red Beach in Paradise, which tells the story of his time on Réunion Island through the fictional lens of Jack Hennessy. While Peter still teaches full-time with his own private students, he is also working on opening an online school to help students prepare for exams and gain university admission across Europe. Every cent he earns from his writing goes directly toward making that school a reality.   Ways to connect with Peter:   My GoFundMe to fund the school: Link here Peak English Instagram account: Link here Peak English TikTok: Link here My substack that contains writing and podcasts: Link here My Medium Account: Link here     About the Host:   Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening!   Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast   If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset .   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review   Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.       Transcription Notes:   Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:20 Hi, everyone. Welcome wherever you happen to be to unstoppable mindset where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. And today, I think we're mostly going to get to do the unexpected, which is anything that doesn't have to do with inclusion or diversity. Peter Murphy, or Peter William Murphy, as he refers to himself in all the emails that he sends to me, is a writer. He has been a teacher, has an interesting story, I think, all the way around, and I'm not going to tell it, because it's more fun to listen to him tell it, and we'll see what we can learn from it and how we progress. So anyway, Peter, I want to welcome you to unstoppable mindset. We're really glad you're here.   Peter William Murphy ** 02:00 Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.   Michael Hingson ** 02:03 And although Peter is Irish, he's in Turkey today, or he's he's over there, so he does move around, as you're going to learn in the course of this next hour or so. So why don't we start, why don't you tell us, kind of about the early Peter, growing up and so on.   Peter William Murphy ** 02:19 Um, well, I'm from truly, county Terry in Ireland, beautiful small town in the west coast, the Southwest we I come from a family of Hoteliers and publicans. My great grand Well, yeah, my great grandfather had the Meadowlands hotel in Chile, and then passed to my grandfather. But then after that, my father decided to open up his own bar. And that's kind of where after growing up, you know, around the hotel and, you know, seeing all the customers talking to people, very social kind of atmosphere, but unfortunately, it closed down. We had to move to America, back to Ireland. I attended Glendale Abbey school in County Limerick and yeah, I had a great upbringing, great family, but unfortunately, I never really liked school, if I'm be honest with you, which is a strange thing for a teacher today, I did not do well in school. I did just okay. But after the economic crash in 2008 Unfortunately, our family business closed down, so I had to try and find my own path. It was a little bit different than Ireland and I took off, got myself a teaching cert, and went to Reunion Island. And from there, my story kind of took off, and it's kind of where I learned a lot of my lessons. And after that, I just kept on going and didn't stop.   Michael Hingson ** 03:59 So why did the family business closed down the first time.   Peter William Murphy ** 04:04 The first time was because my grandfather basically needed a retirement, and he sold the hotel. And then my father then decided to open up his own bar, and just rising then 10 years later, that closed down during in 2011 I think there is a big economic crash in Ireland, rents went up. People weren't eating or socializing like they were, and through no fault of RL, it was just time to close the doors, which was a pity, because name of the bar was wooly Darcy's. It was a fantastic bar, very social, no televisions, very traditional, and yeah, so we all kind of had to go off and find other ways. And, you know, figure out who we are without, say, bars or. Hells or general hospitality and so kind of, yeah, right.   Michael Hingson ** 05:06 Well, so what? What was the reason for commuting or immigrating all the way to America after that?   Peter William Murphy ** 05:14 Well, we immigrated to America after   Michael Hingson ** 05:17 the hotel, yeah, after the hotel closed, right?   Peter William Murphy ** 05:21 Yeah, that was in 1998 and we were there for maybe two years, I believe, I'm not sure, and went to school there. My father worked in summers pubs, which is owned by my uncle in Boston, and then he made enough money to come back to Ireland in 2000 and open up his own bar. But yeah, it's just,   Michael Hingson ** 05:49 why America? Why America? When the hotel closed, half   Peter William Murphy ** 05:53 our family live over there, so my mom's side of the family live in America. Yeah, okay,   Michael Hingson ** 05:59 well, that makes it a little bit more logical that you would you would consider doing that.   Peter William Murphy ** 06:05 Oh, I loved it, Michael. I After, after two weeks, I was no longer Irish. I was playing baseball, eating pizza. I good American accent. I loved America, I   Michael Hingson ** 06:17 must say now, so are you in the Boston area?   Peter William Murphy ** 06:21 Yeah, we lived in West Roxbury, okay, just outside the city.   Michael Hingson ** 06:26 I lived in Winthrop Massachusetts, which is by East Boston, for three years. Very nice. So I never really got a Boston accent, but I do know how to say things like, pack your kind of have a yacht, you know? I can, I can still do it. Great accent, actually, but that's lovely. But I enjoyed being in Boston and just being around all the history. It's pretty, pretty amazing. But then you move back to Ireland, so that worked out, and he started a bar, and then you did that. So when, when that closed, and then you left again? Why did you leave again?   Peter William Murphy ** 07:06 Uh, basically, um, it feels difficult, kind of speaking about publicly, but I, I was kind of Joe there's, and I say that because there are people out there with bigger problems than me like I was a rugby player and the son of a publican. So for my formative years, my identity, for me at least, was kind of set. I was either going to be a rugby player or I was going to work in a bar or go into hotel management or something like that, but I had a pretty horrific leg injury during rugby training, and I suffered a few blows to the head, and then the bar closed down, so it was like one year you kind of had it all figured out. And then going into university as a young man, I had nothing. I could barely really walk I my family identity was gone. We're in the midst of a economic crash, a depression, and then I kind of developed my own sort of depression, but I, at the time, I didn't know it was depression. It's only Lacher that, when I spoke about it to professional that I kind of, we kind of spoke through and just said, Yeah, that's what it was. So I kind of, I wouldn't say, lied to my parents, but I told my mom, who's listening? Hi, Mom, I love you that I got a job in France, and I'd gotten an English certificate, and I didn't want to do University. I wanted to take a year out because I just couldn't handle it. Um, so, you know, I thought solving my problems would, you know, going away would solve my problems. So I there was no job in France. In fact, I wasn't going to France. I booked a one way ticket to Reunion Island, which is an island often called to the Madagascar in the Indian Ocean.   Michael Hingson ** 09:22 So why there? Why there? Because my friend   Peter William Murphy ** 09:26 was there, and he was there getting University credits for his degree. And, you know, back then, I wasn't a very good listener. I was a bit silly. I'm sure he told me all the details, but I just, I just heard son see maybe a job, and it's not and it's not Ireland, you know, it's not gray, it's not depressed. People aren't on social welfare. Let's, let's go. So I booked a one way ticket with what remained in my savings. And blew over there. And Michael, I'm going to be honest with you, when I landed at the airport in fentanyl, and I was hit with the hot Island air, and I could see it the volcano and, you know, the blue ocean surrounding me, I immediately regretted my decision. I want to go home, but I couldn't, because I had no money to buy a return ticket. So then the kind of Island Adventure kind of started, and yeah, I was stuck there for two years trying to get home.   Michael Hingson ** 10:34 Did you ever kind of make peace with all that and decide that maybe it wasn't such a bad place?   Peter William Murphy ** 10:40 Yeah, I, I, I kind of, because I'm a storyteller. I love writing, so I'm good at, kind of, you know, I wouldn't say I think all writers are good at, you know, giving dramatic effect. You know, maybe there, there's instead of one shark, there's five sharks. Instead of a storm, it's a cyclone. But when I would tell people about it, I would say it was difficult, but looking back at it now, it was probably the best thing I ever did, just taking that leap and going for it.   Michael Hingson ** 11:19 Did you ever finish in going to university? Or did you ever   Peter William Murphy ** 11:23 No, I just kept going. Kept going, kept going. I I got a job teaching English at a course. A lady by the name of Daniela from Angola gave me my first ever job, and you know, we hit it off. And this is back in 2011 or 12. I After about six or seven months working with her, so all the kids love me, the students love me. I learned a lot about her kind of holistic approach to education and teaching, and we were speaking in her kitchen one day, and she says, okay, when all this is over, what are you going to do? And I said, Well, I'm going to try and open up my own school. And she seemed surprised, but yeah, over 1310, or 11 years later, I'm not sure that's exactly what I'm trying to do now, is open up my own school.   Michael Hingson ** 12:21 Tell   Peter William Murphy ** 12:22 me about the school. Well, my wife, well, I'll go back a little bit. When I finally built up enough money to fly home, I got a job working with a man from America, actually teaching students in Cork. And I said I wasn't ready to go back to university just yet. I'd been in university for three years before I left, and it just something wasn't clicking with me. I'm an intelligent enough person, but in university just something, it just wasn't clicking. So I've decided to, you know, go to Turkey, simply because it was, you know, the closest. It wasn't like France, which is familiar, and it wasn't like, you know, far away, like China or somewhere like that. So I went there and got a job. But within six months, I think I landed a very, very good job at the top private school there, and they knew that I didn't have a degree. They just knew that I had selfless certificates and TEFL and other English certificates. But they have about 60 campuses in Turkey, and they gave me, and one of them is a university in Istanbul. So I was given a lot of education. By then, I was kind of a teacher for 15th. I observed, if I was doing a lesson, I'd be observed lots of seminars, getting more certificates, learning more and more. And you know that as time went on, I just kind of became Mr. Murphy, you know what I mean? I became a teacher, kind of, I proved myself, and just my students started getting good results. The parents were very fond of me. My colleagues were fond of me, my boss, my principal was fond of me. So I went from kind of not really having any identity, not knowing what I was doing, to kind of having it. So I stayed working in this big school for eight years, and to get back to kind of your question on the degree and the school i i was chosen by them to give a talk in Istanbul to all my peers on online methodology and how I help kids. Do you know? With gamifications, using the right websites for them, things like this, I slowly became very adept at, and they asked me to do it the second year. And then I got offered by Pierce in Turkey, which is an educational publishing company, and to do seminars on their behalf. And then this is, it was the first time since I left Ireland. This was in 2002 or three where I began to have imposter syndrome, where I was like, Okay, I know I'm good, but am I better than the people who I'm, who I'm speaking to, you know, and I raised this with the person who gave me the opportunity, and he said, Everyone feels, feels this way, you know. But I couldn't shake it, so I decided to in 2023 to step back from teaching, and I told my principal that I'm going to take some time away from it, and I became a writer on medium, and my writing on medium then took off. I started making a lot of money, and I found myself in this little hole where everything I was I was trying, was working for me, but it still didn't feel like something that I could 100% stick with well, which is why I started writing the book, and then it's why my wife and I decided to open up our own course, which will be a methodology, kind of created by the two of us, a curriculum, curriculum created by the two of us, which will have third party eyes who will sign off on it, and it's called Peak English, and we'll take it from there. So that's kind of my long answer to your very simple question.   Michael Hingson ** 17:05 Sorry, Kay, that's fine. Going back to when you went to Reunion Island. Do you think there was something deeper than just escaping from Ireland and the life you had, or you think it was just that simple?   Peter William Murphy ** 17:24 Um, yeah, it's strange, because I have a great relationship. My brother, my father and my mother were all very close. But I, I think, I think I became afraid of life, you know, because, you know, my father's my hero, of course, and he's a well respected man in the community. He He was awarded, I can't remember the name of the award, but basically, best host of the Year, Best host in Ireland last year by the hospitality board in the country. And when I saw what the economic crash did to him, it didn't break him, but when I saw that what it did to him, I was like, my god, if life can do that to my dad, take away his bar, you know, make him sad, or whatever it's like, what's it going to do to someone like me, you know, so I became very afraid of life, and I suppose I just wanted to go somewhere that felt other worldly, and that just felt so different, you know, that just so different, Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 18:38 well, and, and now you say that you really feel that it was the best decision that you could make.   Peter William Murphy ** 18:48 Yeah, I wouldn't change it for the world. I mean, I've got some great stories. Yeah, halfway through a book about it now. So hopefully in the next year, that book will hopefully get published, and if not, I'll put it out there myself.   Michael Hingson ** 19:06 So when the pandemic hit, how did that affect or deal with your teaching and so on? Because you were teaching all that time since you you stepped back from that in 2023 so you must have had to deal with a lot of stuff with the pandemic, I would think,   Peter William Murphy ** 19:25 yeah, I know a lot of people suffered during the pandemic, but if I'm going to speak, it was difficult for everyone, but if I'm going to just for me in my apartment in Turkey, it was a good pandemic for me, you know, I took the opportunity to learn the guitar, get better at my job, did a lot of study, got more certificates, and also. Uh, I was familiar with Zoom before the big zoom thing happened. So I kind of knew before our first online lesson. You know, I spent about maybe three weeks because we went into lockdown in Turkey, I think March 2020, I believe we were a bit Lacher than most, but we, we stopped school in February, I think, and there was about a two or three week time where they were trying to figure it out. And, you know, you you know, everyone's going to go. If America and England are go and China are locked down. We're going to be locked down too. So I started doing tutorials on Zoom Near Pod, other online teaching websites, and started learning about them. So when the first lesson started on Zoom, I was really good at it, and all the students loved it. I wasn't the only teacher who did that. Lots of my colleagues I did that. But, you know, the pandemic was definitely a time where a lot of us who were lucky enough not to get ill were able to, you know, put more strings to our boat, right?   Michael Hingson ** 21:24 What do you think about all the discussions and all the arguments and all the conversations that go on now about online teaching as opposed to doing it live, and where, where all of it fits in. Can people really do it, you know, kind of what are your thoughts   Peter William Murphy ** 21:47 for children? I do not recommend this as the primary source of their education. I believe that socializing is very important for them, even having a teacher. You know, one of the biggest things you can do as a teacher with your classroom management is where you stand in the classroom. You know, being able to observe the students, then knowing that you're there as a present all the materials that you would have in the classroom. These are all things that actually, they need something small, but they do help kids that kind of five minute break every 14 minutes where they can run outside, keep a ball around and talk to each other. That's really important, yeah. But if you're talking about maybe between the 18 and up age group, I think it depends on the person. I've had students who who are prepared for IELTS, and they have needed a top score, and only have three months, and we've been face to face, working, helping them with their writing, doing everything, and it just doesn't work. There's something about the school environment where it just doesn't rub off on them. But then the minute you get them online and you start introducing games, you gamify it, just do lots of different things with them, for some reason they feel more comfortable. It could be an anxiety thing could be where they just feel more relaxed. At home, everyone's different, but for children, from my experience, definitely face to face learning is the best. Zoom is okay in an emergency. I do not recommend hybrid learning whatsoever.   Michael Hingson ** 23:40 Yeah, it's a it's a challenge. I know, for me personally, I can do online and, or and, or I can do things in person, in terms of learning and so on. I'm used to doing a lot of things outside of the typical corporate or office environment. So I can do that, but I also value and appreciate the social interaction when you go into an office and you have an opportunity to to meet with people. The only thing I would would say is way too often, unfortunately, people socialize so much that they forget in a work environment, you're really there to work and really need to figure out how to focus more on getting the job done. But I think there are a lot of aspects to that as well, because it isn't necessarily that people are lazy, but by the same token, if they don't really recognize what the job is about and what they're doing and that they have to put the appropriate time into it, or figure out a way to put in the appropriate time, then that's, you know, an issue too.   Peter William Murphy ** 24:58 Yeah, I would, you percent people. Be With You.   Michael Hingson ** 25:01 I think that, yeah, it's interesting. I've had a few people on the podcast here where we've talked about time management. We've talked about how people work in Europe, as opposed to in the United States, and some of the statistics that show that, in reality, if people put in longer days, but don't spend as many days at work, like if you put in 410, hour days, as opposed to five, eight hour days or something like that, you tend to get more work done, which I think is very interesting.   Peter William Murphy ** 25:36 Yeah, I've noticed that too, since I started working at home more and more. That I had a discussion with my wife the other day, and I said, you know, I think I need to rent an office, you know, because whilst I do like having, you know, low overheads and not paying rent. There is something about getting up in the morning, putting on a nice shirt, black coffee, and walk to the office. And you know, have your work day. One thing that I'm noticing is working online, with writing and helping students, is I'll wake up at 5am and I'll shower and I'll I'll work from 6am until midnight, and I am looking at my looking at myself in the mirror the next day and saying, Joe, this is unsustainable, like we It's you can say to yourself, oh, sure, just, you know, make your own routine. But it's very hard to stick to a routine if you are, you know, writing articles, if you have meetings at various times throughout the day, if you're dealing with multiple time zones. So there's, there is something attractive of going back and renting an office, you know, having a base where work is work and home is home. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 27:10 and I, and I appreciate that. I, I personally am able to work at home and separate that out. But I do know what you're what you're saying. And not everyone can do that. I've just done that a lot in my life because I've worked for companies where I worked remotely anyway, so I'm used to that, but I also appreciate your discipline. I'm sorry   Peter William Murphy ** 27:35 you've got discipline. It's something I need to work   Michael Hingson ** 27:38 on. Well, I guess that's probably it, yeah, I guess that's that's probably it. And I have enough other things during the day that demand time. So for example, at five o'clock, that's the time to feed the guide dog, and he wants to eat. And if I don't do that, I'm going to hear about it. So what's your dog's name? His name is Alamo. Like the Alamo? Yeah. So, you know, the issue is that I do have some things to help keep me honest, but, yeah, I can be fairly well disciplined with it, and I can make that work, and I understand that a lot of people can't. The other thing for me being a public speaker is I'm not as great a fan of speaking virtually, speaking online, as I am speaking in person. And the reason is, and it took me a while to kind of figure out why I didn't really like it as much as as probably some people that I don't have nearly the same kind of connection with the audience to whom I'm speaking if I'm doing it online, and I don't get to hear their reactions to things that I say. And for me, having that audio interaction, those auditory signals are part of what tells me if I'm doing a good job or not. On the other hand, I've done this long enough that I can pretty well tell what's probably going to work and what's not. So I'm perfectly happy to do virtual presentations, but if I have a choice, I like to do it in person, right?   Peter William Murphy ** 29:09 Yeah, I agree with you there. There is something very cool about being up on stage, yeah, and talking to a lot of people, but my favorite part has to be afterwards, when you're having the teas and the coffees and you're talking to everybody in the lobby. I really do love that part.   Michael Hingson ** 29:29 Oh, yeah. Well, and I try to integrate some of that even into the talks that I give, so that I have audiences participating. And sometimes the participation may be that I ask them something to answer, and sometimes it's how I tell a story to draw them in. And I've had any number of people tell me we were just following you down the stairs in the World Trade Center as you were telling the story. You were just so. Vivid with what you were saying. We were right there with you. And that's the thing that I think is a lot harder to do in a virtual environment than it is in a in an environment where you're actually speaking to people.   Peter William Murphy ** 30:13 Yeah, that's I told you when we had a chat before I came on, that it's really great honor to speak to you. And you know, I really do love your story and the way that you tell it, and of course, about your guide dog that led you out. It's really like an amazing story   Michael Hingson ** 30:36 well, and you know, it's it, it's a team effort. Both of us had jobs to do, and it was a matter of me being the team leader and keeping the team on course and doing the things that we needed to do. But it did work out well, and I'm glad about that. So it's that's important, but tell me more about the school that you're trying to start as you're working toward it, what will it be? Well, we   Peter William Murphy ** 31:07 are deadline to open it up was in three weeks ago, we found three buildings. I can't go into the detail, but it's, let's just say that, you know, someone said one price in the advertisements, and then when we got face to face, there was a new price. There was a lot of that kind of carry on. So my wife and I had a discussion, and we said, let's put peak English online first and get a base in because we do plan to either maybe perhaps move to Ireland in the future. So it is going to have to be a business that can, you know, move anywhere. We are going to have to have a online base. We've started working with the school in Brazil, and we've got some clients in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. So it's a nice space to get online at the moment, as we head into September, when all the kids are back to school, and then we will start small. We on sub stack. I started a small GoFundMe to help me reach my goal before the deadline, and people were very, very supportive. They gained a lot of traction. And then I spoke with my subscribers, and I said I gave them the plan because I like to tell them to know what's going to happen if they're paid subscribers, because everything I make from my writing goes directly back into education. So everything I make from medium top back, everything it goes towards building the school. And we are now going to go into September on a good footing, but we're going to have to downsize our expectations and perhaps buy some or smaller but our methodology and our mission will remain the same, to make education affordable, to help students pass their IELTS exams, to give them an opportunity to go work in Canada, America, the UK, Ireland.   Michael Hingson ** 33:15 So yes, that's peak English. Well, there you go. Which is, which is pretty cool. Well, what does your wife work? Or does she just help you with the school? Or what does she do?   Peter William Murphy ** 33:26 My wife? What does she do? My wife is an artist. She's a gamer, she's a teacher and she's a website designer. She's everything. She's the Peter whisperer. She's definitely good at when I'm in a whirlwind writing or, you know, I'll do too many things at once. She's, she's like a tablet for ADHD. I think she just, she's good at, kind of directing me calm down. So she she knows everything. Michael, she's a teacher, English language teacher. Graduated from Palm college, university, and she worked in an ink, in a in a college, and she's just about to embark on her Master's. So one of us will get that degree.   Michael Hingson ** 34:18 Yeah, one way or another, you'll have one in the family. Yeah,   Peter William Murphy ** 34:22 exactly. Well, she has one, but she'll get a master's. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 34:26 you'll have a master's in the family. Do you have any children? No, no, no, we're children. No children yet? Well, that's another thing to look forward to in in the future, which is, which is,   Peter William Murphy ** 34:38 where we don't know what to do. We love turkey, but also we want them to have a, you know, a Turkish. We want them to, you know, have an appreciation for Turkey and for Ireland. So we're trying to figure out where would be the best place to to raise kids in the in. You know, current global environment. And you know, despite all the trouble that Ireland has in 2008 every time I go home, it's still solid ground. And you know, it's the older I get, the more I'm kind of, I think we will end up there eventually, but we'll see. Yeah, well,   Michael Hingson ** 35:28 it'll all work out in time. I suspect you strike me as individuals. Yeah, you strike me as a person that will, will make things work out. And you're, you're willing to step back and and do it in a methodical and in very positive way, which is, which is pretty cool. Well, tell me about some of your writing. What kind of what have you written?   Peter William Murphy ** 35:54 Well, I told you about the book. I'm halfway through. It's the working title is becoming useful. Then on medium, I started writing about mental health, and I got imposter syndrome again. Of course, there's nothing wrong with writing anecdotally about your experience, but sometimes on the internet, it's probably better not to talk about kind of medical kind of things, you know what I mean. So I said, well, what could I pivot to? And I started writing travel memoirs about my time on the island, and I ended up getting curated about 40 times by medium selected for curation is basically where they choose the staff choose your story, and they give it a boost into the algorithm, and basically it just gets sent all over the internet. So that happened 40 times. Then I wrote for your tango, which is a New York based website. And then after a year and a half on medium, I pivoted to sub stack, where I continued to do my writing. And about three months ago, sub stack began doing live streams, kind of like on YouTube or Instagram, they have these live streams on sub stack. So I didn't feel comfortable talking about my teaching on sub stack, because I felt like my my writing persona, not that it's controversial, had its own space in my life, so I kept it separate from my teaching, and I spoke with a friend, and we saw everyone on Sub stack was doing these live one hour streams. So we thought we would do a comedy show. So we started doing these 1015, minute comedy shows live on substack, and they became very popular. And a lot of you know big authors like Walter Reed, Robin wilding, who would be very popular on that website came on as guest, and it's kind of this new outlet where everything leads back to teaching, where I'm learning about video editing now and how to reach an audience, and then straight away, with peak English, I said, Okay, so that's that. Now I know more about how the internet works, so now open up a Tiktok and an Instagram and, you know, focus that into peak English. So our Instagram account now is growing. It's got close to 1000 followers, and our Tiktok is just open. So, yeah, going to use what I learned from sub stack to reach more students give more tips on how to pass exams on other social platforms.   Michael Hingson ** 39:12 Okay, and you've, you've created some fictional characters along the way, haven't you?   Peter William Murphy ** 39:20 Yeah, I have Peter and Freeman, who have a small little cult following on on substack, kind of based on a relationship I have with a friend of mine and my brother and I. My brother has done the Olympics. He's done the not as an athlete, but he's worked for Warner Brothers and other companies, doing the filming of it, and we're both very much in the film. We're working on a script, and we're trying to develop something at the moment together. Of course, our day jobs are our main focus, but it's very nice to have a similar interest with your brother, that you can just work. Worked on together, you know,   Michael Hingson ** 40:01 yeah, well, you know, back in the days of old radio, there was a ven Troy lacherist, Edgar Bergen, who had his creature, Charlie McCarthy. And it was interesting that a lot of times Charlie spoke for Edgar. Edgar would, would would communicate through Charlie, as opposed to just communicating himself, and it was a way that he felt comfortable doing, which was interesting.   Peter William Murphy ** 40:32 Yeah, that's interesting with Murphy's Law, which is my medium pending, after about a year and a half, I, you know, I said I can't keep writing about the island or this or that, or memoirs. I have to try grow as a writer. So I started trying different styles. I started writing a satire. I started writing a political satire or just pure comedy pieces. And lo and behold, I was okay at it, and they gained traction, and they were funny. And this is strange, so then Murphy's law went to kind of satire. And then I started writing about politics, say what's happening in the USA, the friction over there, some other world events. And I enjoyed it. The editors liked it, and it was published in some very good publications. And it was great. I found many voices, you know, but as time went on, and I love medium, and I love substack, it's, it's my passion, and it has helped me grow, not just as a writer, but as I mentioned earlier, helped me hone all the skills I use that become, you know, big enough on it into how I can create this business that my wife and I try to open up, and it has really helped. But you are always chasing the algorithm, you know, and I would rather have a product out there that helps people, you know, pass their exams, give them guidance with these as, you know, do volunteer work, things like that, that will actually help people. And people will remember it as peak English, as a brand that will help them, because Murphy's Law and the exile files online, I love them, and they are my babies, but they are very much passion projects that, like Reunion Island, have helped me figure out what I want to do. You know?   Michael Hingson ** 42:58 Yeah, well now you talk about Murphy's Law. And of course, we all know Murphy's Law is, if anything can go wrong at will. But there was a book written years ago that was called Murphy's Law and other reasons why things go wrong. And the first, I think I've heard of that, and the first thing in the book after Murphy's Law was o'toole's commentary on Murphy's Law, which was, Murphy was an optimist. I always thought was cute. I like that. Murphy was an optimist.   Peter William Murphy ** 43:30 Well, it's, you know, I think in life, like you said yourself, when, when that terrible day happens in the World Trade Center, it was like you could either lose your mind or you stay calm, you know. And no, I think, I think everybody, kind of you know, can learn from that, from learn from your book, that you just have to keep going moving forward. People react differently to different you know, setbacks like I mentioned, with the leg break and the bar closing another young man, it might, it might not have affected them at all. They would have said, It's okay. I just kept going. But it just so happened that it affected me that way. And you my brother, for example, he stuck it out. He stayed in Ireland, and he he did it so it's it really does depend on the person and how they how one can deal with what life throws at you. Some people think it was like it was the best thing I ever did, but looking back on it, like I wouldn't change it, but looking back on it, I would have liked to have done it, maybe in a calmer way.   Michael Hingson ** 44:56 The other the other side of that though, is that. So there are a lot of things that happen around us, and we don't have any control over the fact that they happen as such, but we absolutely have control over how we deal with what happened, and I think that's what so many people miss and don't, don't deal with and the reality is that we can always make choices based on what goes on around us, and we can do that and and that can be a positive thing, or it can be a negative thing, and that's a choice that we have To make.   Peter William Murphy ** 45:37 Yeah, you're dead, right? Yeah, I, when I first came to Turkey, I was only supposed to be here for three months, you know, but there was something intoxicating about the country. There just the smell, the food people and I about six months into my stay here, back in 2013, or 14, like I did, have that decision where I had to kind of look at myself saying, Am I staying here because I'm running away, or am I staying here because I feel this is where I can achieve what I want to achieve. And I stayed because I felt this was like the environment where I could kind of deal with myself and kind of deal with life, and, you know, just be who I wanted to be, not that I couldn't do that in Ireland, but just the 24 year old version of myself. That's what like he was thinking, you know? And I got to respect that,   Michael Hingson ** 46:46 sure. And the other part about it, though, is that you you at least ask yourself the question, and you really took the responsibility to try to make a decision and come up with an answer, which is what a lot of people avoid doing.   Peter William Murphy ** 47:01 I wrote out the pros and cons on a piece of paper. I still have that piece of paper under your bed, and went up to the top of the mountain. There's, there's a huge mountain next to the city here. I'd go up there every day, but I just sat down and I just stared at the piece of paper. And there was just something where I said, you know, I have to try and become something here, you know, because if I can become something, even if it's something small, like something, you know, as humble, as just being a language teacher or helping one person or two people, it doesn't matter if I can do that here, then it would have been worth it. Yeah, of course. If time goes on, you learn more, you become stronger, you become more educated, you become trained. And then if you just keep going, no matter how you know down the dumps you were in the past, if you just keep going, one day, you will wake up and you will know exactly who you are and what you're supposed to do, and that's kind of what Turkey and Reunion Island gave to me.   Michael Hingson ** 48:10 Do you think that as you were growing up and so on, that the system failed you?   Peter William Murphy ** 48:18 I do remember one time. And I have to preface this for saying that I hold nothing against this person, but I remember I went to the psychologist or counselor in, I won't name the university, and the university I went to and and I didn't know them at all, and I sat down and I told them I was struggling with mental health. And, you know, there was, I'm not saying anything now like but there was a lot of young men taking their own lives in Ireland around this time, a lot and women, and I wasn't like that at all, but I was feeling down, and I wanted to see what the university could do for me. And I remember just being turned away saying, Come back next Tuesday, you know, at 405 and I did find it very hard to kind of like communicate and get help in university through Washington, like I didn't need directions on how to get to the Lacher hall or anything like that. I knew all that, but there was something else going on that I needed help with, and there, it wasn't there at all. Since then, of course, in the last 1516, years, Ireland is, you know, I suggest mental health capital of the world. But when, when I was there, maybe, maybe I just caught them on a bad day.   Michael Hingson ** 49:58 Yeah, hard to say. But the. Other part about it is look at what you've done since then, and look how you talk about it today, which really illustrates a lot of resilience on your part. And I'm sure that that's something that had to develop over time, but you still did it, and you became a more resilient individual because of all of that.   Peter William Murphy ** 50:22 Yeah, I'd say I've got that for my mom and dad. They're very resilient. But also that resilience has changed from, you know, booking a one way ticket to reunion and, you know, just doing all that crazy stuff, then go ahead and stand ball bus rides around Turkey, not knowing where I'm going, not having money, not enough for rent, all this kind of stuff. But it's changed because I remember I got a job partnering with a recruitment company that's based in Amsterdam, and I remember just willy nilly booking the flight over to Amsterdam, and just kind of, I just gotten married, and I Michael. I was not resilient at all. I did not want to go, I did not want to travel, I wanted to be at home with my wife, you know what I mean? And so I definitely got softer in other ways. So your resilience does change. It becomes more kind of a mental toughness than, say, that kind of young book physical resilience that you had when you were younger. It completely switches.   Michael Hingson ** 51:32 Yeah, well, and I think resilience is, is really, to a large degree about the whole concept of, well, mental toughness, or maybe the ability to look at what you're doing and going through and being able to make a decision about how to proceed, I think that's really kind of more of it than anything else, right, right? And so resilience, I think, as oftentimes, it's a term that's overused, but the reality is, I think what resilience really is is your ability to keep things whoever you are, keep things in perspective, and be able to step back and ask the tough questions of yourself and listen to your inner self and get the answers that you need. Yes.   Peter William Murphy ** 52:25 If that makes sense. It does. It makes perfect sense. Just gotta keep going. Yeah, yeah, yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 52:35 You do have to keep going, and it's kind of important to do that, but you've had a lot of different things that you've done. You know, you've been, you're an author, by the way. Do you still make drinks anywhere?   Peter William Murphy ** 52:51 No, I just at home, right away home. Good for you. Yeah? Yeah, we it's a drinking God. Drinking is such a funny one. It's something that just, I don't know, dissolved from my life. When I aged 30, I didn't become a teetotaler or anything like that. Like I'll still have red wine and I'll be here with friends, but I rarely touch the stuff. And I think it's mostly due to the fact that I start work so early in the morning, you know, and I just cannot wake up with any sort of grogginess. I leave black coffee, you know, look at the news for 20 minutes, pet my cat, take a shower and then start, yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 53:42 Well, my wife and I used to have a drink on Friday night. I mean, we're capable. We were capable of going to restaurants and parties and occasionally have something. But I know since she passed in 2022 we were married 40 years. I part of honoring her is that I have a drink on Friday night. One drink. I don't because I've never nice. I've never really felt that I need to have alcohol or anything like that. I've never been a great fan of the taste, but I have a drink to honor her on Friday night. So that's kind of fun.   Peter William Murphy ** 54:21 Yeah, that's very nice. I mean, we it's my wife's birthday in two days, actually, so I'm very lucky. She's very she's like me in a way. I want to take her to a nice, fancy restaurant, or to do this and do that, but she just wants a chicken burger. And hello, yeah, so we just go out to our favorite restaurant. And you know, they're good burgers. They're pretty gourmet, but yeah, she's pretty down to earth with me. And yeah, we have a lot of fun together. And yeah. But I'm currently planning her birthday presents as as I'm speaking to you.   Michael Hingson ** 55:07 If you could go back and talk to a younger Peter, what would you what would you tell them? What would you want them to learn?   Peter William Murphy ** 55:15 Oh, I would tell him to go straight to a to talk to somebody, yeah, just to go straight to talk to somebody, that's the biggest thing. I had an interview where I was the host yesterday with a man who does Astro photography, and one of his, you know, other projects he does. He's a recovering alcoholic. Where he's he really talks about, you know, men talking to other men too, like, if your friend call, pick up, always speak. Tell people what's going on. Of course, don't nag people and to tell them every problem you have, but if you're down into dumps, you should talk to somebody. So anybody who's like young, you know, late, late teens coming up, should definitely talk to someone straight away, because I think a few simple sentences from a professional could have saved me a lot of let's call them headaches in the future, all   Michael Hingson ** 56:28 too often we the way we're taught. We just don't get encouraged to do that, do we?   Peter William Murphy ** 56:34 No, no. People listen. People are good. People will do what they can. But I think sometimes, I think the way it's framed maybe scares men. I think we're a lot better now, but maybe 1015, years ago, and even before that, trying to get a kid to, you know, talk to professional, nobody wants to be different in that way. You know, back then anyway and but it's so healthy. It's so good to have someone who can regurgitate back what you've just told them, but in a clear, calm fashion that you know makes sense. It does the world of good. It's, it's, it's better than medicine   Michael Hingson ** 57:27 for most. Puts a lot of things in perspective, doesn't it? It does, yeah, which, which makes a lot of sense. Well, yeah, I think this has been great. I've very much enjoyed having the opportunity to talk with you and and and hear a lot of great life lessons. I hope everyone who is out there listening to us appreciates all the things that you had to say as well. If anybody wants to reach out to you, how do they do that?   Peter William Murphy ** 57:57 Well, we're on Instagram as peak English. We're also on Tiktok as peak English,   Michael Hingson ** 58:04 peak as in P, E, A, K, that's right   Peter William Murphy ** 58:07 behind me here. So if anybody can see it's there's the spelling on my wallpaper.   Michael Hingson ** 58:14 And, yeah, a lot of people probably aren't watching videos, so that's why I asked you to spell   Peter William Murphy ** 58:19 it. Yeah? Well, actually, I'm blocking it, so I moved out of the way. There   Michael Hingson ** 58:23 you go. Well, I won't see it,   Peter William Murphy ** 58:27 yeah, so I Yeah. So that's the best way to get in contact with me. You can Google me. Peter William Murphy, medium writer, I pretty much on the top of the lid, if you're interested in writing, also the exile files. And we're also on YouTube with the exile files, so there's lots of stuff going on. This is an English speaking audience, so I'm assuming nobody's going to want lessons from me. So if you're interested in my writing, check out medium and sub stack. And if you know anybody of friends who needs English, tell them about peak English, and I will help you.   Michael Hingson ** 59:11 There you go. Well, I don't know, there may be people who aren't the greatest English speakers listening who, who might reach out. Well, I hope that they do, and I hope they appreciate all that you've offered today. I really appreciate you coming on and spending an hour with us. I hope that all it's an honor. Oh, it's been fun. And I would say to all of you out there, I'd love to hear what your thoughts are. Feel free to email me at Michael H i@accessibe.com that's m, I, C, H, A, E, L, H, I, at accessibe, A, C, C, E, S, S, i, b, e.com, love to hear from you. I'd love to hear your thoughts wherever you're listening. I hope that you'll give us a five star rating. We really appreciate your ratings and your reviews and Peter for you and for all of you, if you know anyone who ought to be a. Guest on the podcast. We're always looking for people to come on and tell their stories, so don't hesitate to provide introductions. We love it. We really appreciate you all doing that. And again, Peter, I just want to thank you for for coming on. This has been a lot of fun today.   1:00:14 Thank you so much. It's pleasure to speak with you.   **Michael Hingson ** 1:00:23 You have been listening to the Unstoppable Mindset podcast. Thanks for dropping by. I hope that you'll join us again next week, and in future weeks for upcoming episodes. To subscribe to our podcast and to learn about upcoming episodes, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com slash podcast. Michael Hingson is spelled m i c h a e l h i n g s o n. While you're on the site., please use the form there to recommend people who we ought to interview in upcoming editions of the show. And also, we ask you and urge you to invite your friends to join us in the future. If you know of any one or any organization needing a speaker for an event, please email me at speaker at Michael hingson.com. I appreciate it very much. To learn more about the concept of blinded by fear, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com forward slash blinded by fear and while you're there, feel free to pick up a copy of my free eBook entitled blinded by fear. The unstoppable mindset podcast is provided by access cast an initiative of accessiBe and is sponsored by accessiBe. Please visit www.accessibe.com . AccessiBe is spelled a c c e s s i b e. There you can learn all about how you can make your website inclusive for all persons with disabilities and how you can help make the internet fully inclusive by 2025. Thanks again for Listening. Please come back and visit us again next week.

Episode 788 Batman HUSH 2 Part 1: Sean and Jim dip back into the world of Batman with the follow up to Hush with Hush 2. On this episode, we cover Batman 158-160. We open up by chatting briefly about some of the NYCC news. Sean is a cohost on “Is it Jaws?” Check it out here : https://twotruefreaks.com/podcast/qt-series/is-it-jaws-movie-reviews/ Coming Up : Legion Part 2, DC KO, Flash Upcoming: Green Arrow, Green Lantern, The Flash, Longest Halloween, Wonder Woman, JSA, Justice League, DC/Marvel Crossover, DC KO and upcoming DC events, and much more. Show Topic Request Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe5l4gZgdGrNpLXAN4NdcAI0WF7fM7yhjHJ3upZ3azEc31zuw/viewform?usp=sharing Contact Info (Social Media and Gaming) Updated 9/23: https://ragingbullets.com/about/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/401332833597062/ Show Notes: 0:00 Show opening, http://www.heroinitiative.org, http://cbldf.org/,http://www.DCBService.com, http://www.Instocktrades.com, show voicemail line 1-440-388-4434 or drnorge on Skype, and more.   3:05 Hush 2 1:57:14 Closing We'll be back in a week with more content.  Check our website, Twitter and our Facebook group for regular updates.

Are the DCU and MCU crashing at the same time? Theo Harvey and Mr. Benja weigh James Gunn's direction, the Peacemaker S2 finale's mixed vibes, first reactions to the Wonder Man trailer, and NYCC chatter—asking if “being interesting” beats being good. Smart, funny, no-fluff debate from Show vs Business.00:00 Introduction and Show Kickoff00:11 DCU and MCU: Are They Failing?01:01 NYCC Report and Wonderman Trailer02:38 Checking In: Personal Updates05:13 The Creative Process and Challenges19:41 AI in Creativity and Industry Concerns25:56 AI's Impact on Hollywood and Business36:16 50 Cent and Tyler Perry Embrace AI37:34 AI in Marketing and James Gunn's Influence38:15 Peacemaker Season 2 Review39:09 James Gunn's Signature Style40:37 Mixed Reviews and Spoilers for Peacemaker43:04 Warner Brothers' Future and James Gunn's Role44:32 Corporate America and Leadership Changes47:34 Marvel and DCU: Current State and Future53:53 Wonder Man and Marvel's New Direction01:01:58 Viewer Comments and Candace Owens Discussion01:11:34 Final Thoughts and Upcoming PlansYouTube Video: https://youtu.be/HWJHxfe20V4 #DCU #MCU #Peacemaker #Wonderman JamesGunn #Podcast #Entertainment----------Show vs. Business is your weekly take on Pop Culture from two very different perspectives. Your hosts Theo and  Mr. Benja provide all the relevant info to get your week started right.Looking to start your own podcast ? The guys give their equipment google list recommendation that is updated often Sign up - https://www.showvsbusiness.com/----------Follow us on Instagram - https://instagram.com/show_vs_businessFollow us on Twitter - https://twitter.com/showvsbusinessLike us on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/ShowVsBusinessSubscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuwni8la5WRGj25uqjbRwdQ/featuredFollow Theo on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@therealtheoharvey Follow Mr.Benja on YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/@BenjaminJohnsonakaMrBenja --------

Dr Richard Talbot: "I'm writing a paper on ailments of the heart." Nora Prentiss: "A paper? I could write a book!"LTP Noir is back with "oomph" and a deep-dive into 1947's Nora Prentiss, directed by Vincent Sherman, a love affair that literally goes up in flames. Not only does Josh give his final word on this compelling "Women's Noir" but shines deserving light on the career of Ann Sheridan, an outlier Warner Brothers star who held her own in the feisty world of Crawford, Davis and De Haviland. Plot Summary@2:30; Production Feature@24:00; LTP Noir Review@48:00

Bobby Weir & John Perry Barlow's classic “The Music Never Stopped” came into being when the music was briefly in danger of stopping, the song transforming from live jam to final form as the Dead struggled to solve the financial difficulties that came with a retirement from the road.Guests: David Lemieux, Ron Rakow, Steven Schuster, Steve Silberman, Sean Howe, Shaugn O'Donnell, Chadwick Jenkins, Christopher Coffman, Graeme Boone, Eric Lindquist, Benny LanderSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week, the boys cover “Fight Club”, the 1999 movie that is both an of-its-time dark satire and a should-have-been-released-in-2025 heat check. Before we dive into it, we need to get drinking! So we discuss the new Paul Thomas Anderson “Dr. Strangelove”-esque gripping satire (maybe?), “One Battle After Another”, the new Daniel Day-Lewis film “Anemone”, directed by his son, Ronan Day-Lewis, and John made it to the red carpet premier of Guillermo del Toro's latest fright film “Frankenstein”. We also discuss “Highest 2 Lowest” and “Swiped”. It's a busy show! Grab a beer and listen to us drunkenly talk about movies!  linktr.ee/theloveofcinema - Check out our YouTube page!  Our phone number is 646-484-9298. It accepts texts or voice messages.  0:00 Intro; 04:12 “One Battle After Another”; 12:06 “Anemone”; 17:27 “Frankenstein”; 21:53 1999 Year in Review; 44:00 Films of 1999: “Fight Club”; 1:32:58: What You Been Watching? 1:51:15 Next Episode Additional Cast/Crew: David Fincher, Chuck Palahnuik, Jim Uhls, Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Meat Loaf, Zach Grenier, Helena Bonham Carter, Jared Leto, Holt McCallany, Dust Brothers, Jeff Cronenweth, James Haygood, Daniel Day-Lewis, Ronan Day-Lewis, Sean Bean, Samantha Morton, Leonardo DiCaprio, Benicio Del Toro, Paul Thomas Anderson, Sean Penn, Thomas Pynchon, Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, Alana Haim, Guillermo del Toro, Mary Shelley, Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Christoph Waltz, Mia Goth, Charles Dance, Felix Kammerer, David Bradley, Lars Mikkelsen, Lily James. Hosts: Dave Green, Jeff Ostermueller, John Say Edited & Produced by Dave Green. Beer Sponsor: Carlos Barrozo Music Sponsor: Dasein Dasein on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/77H3GPgYigeKNlZKGx11KZ 
Dasein on Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/dasein/1637517407 Recommendations/Tags: Highest 2 Lowest, Final Destination: Bloodlines, The Lost Bus, Swiped. Additional Tags: The Dallas Cowboys, Short-term memory loss, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Netflix, AMC Times Square, Tom Cruise, George Clooney, MGM, Amazon Prime, Marvel, Sony, Conclave, Here, Venom: The Last Dance, Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, Oscars, Academy Awards, BFI, BAFTA, BAFTAS, British Cinema. England, Vienna, Leopoldstadt, The Golden Globes, Past Lives, Apple Podcasts, West Side Story, Adelaide, Australia, Queensland, New South Wales, Melbourne, The British, England, The SEC, Ronald Reagan, Stock Buybacks, Marvel, MCU, DCEU, Film, Movies, Southeast Asia, The Phillippines, Vietnam, America, The US, Academy Awards, WGA Strike, SAG-AFTRA, SAG Strike, Peter Weir, Jidaigeki, chambara movies, sword fight, samurai, ronin, Meiji Restoration, plague, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, casket maker, Seven Samurai, Roshomon, Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood, Stellan Skarsgard, the matt and mark movie show.The Southern District's Waratah Championship, Night of a Thousand Stars, The Pan Pacific Grand Prix (The Pan Pacifics), Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch, Larry Ellison, David Ellison, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg.   

Warner Bros. Discovery Inc.’s film chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy talk about why the movies "A Minecraft Movie" and "Sinners" were so successful at the box office this year. They also say there will be sequel to "Minecraft" released in July of 2027. They speak to Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw at Bloomberg Screentime in Los Angeles.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Front Row Classics is taking a look at one of the most underrated films of Humphrey Bogart's career. Brandon is joined by author and film historian Christ Yogerst to chat about 1937's Black Legion. The film, directed by Archie Mayo, is a hardboiled socially relevant film that still shocks in 2025. Brandon and Chris also discuss the risk Warner Brothers took in brining it bringing it to the screen.

This week on Skip the Queue, we're stepping into the turret and turning up the tension, as we explore one of the UK's most talked-about immersive experiences.Our guest is Neil Connolly, Creative Director at The Everywhere Group, who have brought The Traitors Live Experience to life. With over 10 million viewers watching every betrayal, backstab and banishment on the BBC show, expectations for the live version were nothing short of murderous.So, how do you even begin to transform a TV juggernaut into a thrilling, guest-led experience? Let's find out who's playing the game… and who's about to be banished…Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is Paul Marden.If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website SkiptheQueue.fm.If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on LinkedIn. Show references: The Traitors Live website: https://www.thetraitorslive.co.uk/Neil's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neil-connolly-499054110/Neil Connolly is a creative leader of design and production teams focused on development, production and installation of live theatre, entertainment, multi-media and attractions for the themed entertainment industry worldwide.Neil began his career as a performer, writer, producer & artist in Londons alternative theatre/art scene. It was during this time Neil developed a love and passion for story telling through the platform of interactive playable immersive theatre.Having been at the vanguard of playable & immersive theatre since 2007, Neil had a career defining opportunity in 2019 when he devised, wrote & directed an immersive experience as part of Sainsbury's 150th Birthday Celebrations. Making him the only immersive theatre & game maker in the world to have HRH Elizabeth Regina attend one of their experiences.In a distinguished career spanning 20 years, Neil has brought that passion to every facet of themed entertainment in the creative direction and production of attractions such as; Handels Messiah, Snowman & The Snowdog, Peppa Pig Surprise Party, Traitors Live, The Crystal Maze Live Experience, Tomb Raider Live Experience & Chaos Karts, an AR go-kart real life battle. Other clients and activations include: Harrods, Sainsbury's, Camelot/The National Lottery, Samsung, Blenheim Palace, Land Rover and Warner Brothers.Neil has worked across 4 continents for many years with private individuals; designing, producing and delivering live entertainment on land, sea & air. A world without boundaries requires freethinking.Neil is currently working with Immersive Everywhere on creative development of show and attraction content for projects across U.K, Europe, North America & Asia. Transcriptions:  Paul Marden: This week on Skip the Queue, we're stepping into the turret and turning up the tension as we explore one of the UK's most talked about immersive experiences.Paul Marden: Our guest is Neil Connolly, Creative Director at The Everywhere Group, who've brought The Traitor's live experience to life. With over 10 million viewers watching every betrayal, backstab and banishment on the BBC show, expectations for the live version were nothing short of murderous. So how do you even begin to transform a TV juggernaut into a thrilling guest-led experience? Let's find out who's playing the game and who's about to be banished.Paul Marden: So, we're underground. Lots of groups running currently, aren't they? How did you make that happenNeil Connolly: Yeah, so now we're two floors under us. There's a lower basement and some other basement. So the building that we are in, there's a family in the 1890s who owned all of the land around Covent Garden and specifically the Adelphi Theatre.Paul Marden: Right.Neil Connolly: And they wanted their theatre to be the first theatre in the UK to have its lights powered by electricity. So they built their own private power station in this building. Like, literally like, all this, this is a power station. But unfortunately for these the Savoy had taken to that moniker, so they quickly built their important institution. The family had this building until the 1980s when the establishment was assumed through the important UK network.Neil Connolly: And then it was sat there empty, doing nothing for 40 years. And so the landlord that is now started redeveloping the building 10 years ago, added two floors onto the top of the building. So now what we're in is an eight-storey structure and we've basically got the bottom four floors. Two of which are ground and mezzanine, which is our hospitality area. And the lower two floors, which are all in the basement, are our experience floors. What we're looking at right now is, if you look off down this way to the right, not you people on audio, but me here.Neil Connolly: Off this side is five of the round table rooms. There's another one behind me and there's two more upstairs. And then I've got some Tretters Towers off to the left and I've got my show control system down there.Neil Connolly: On the floor above me, we've got the lounges. So each lounge is connected to one of the round table rooms. Because when you get murdered or banished, one of the biggest challenges that I faced was what happens to people when they get murdered or banished? Because you get kicked out of the game. It's not a lot of fun, is it? Therefore, for me, you also get kicked out of the round table room. So this is a huge challenge I face. But I built these lounge concepts where you go— it's the lounge of the dead— and you can see and hear the round table room that you've just left. We'll go walk into the room in a while. There's lots of interactivity. But yeah, super fun. Neil Connolly: But unfortunately for these the Savoy had taken to that moniker, so they quickly built their important institution. The family had this establishment until the 1980s when the establishment was considered through the important UK network.Paul Marden: Yeah. So we've got 10 million people tuning in to Traitors per episode. So this must be a lot of pressure for you to get it right. Tell us about the experience and what challenges you faced along the way, from, you know, that initial text message through to the final creation that we're stood in now.Neil Connolly: So many challenges, but to quote Scroobius Pip on this, do you know Scroobius Pip? Paul Marden: No. Neil Connolly: Great, he's amazing. UK rapper from Essex.Neil Connolly: Some people see a mousetrap and think death. I see free cheese and a challenge.Neil Connolly: There's never any problems in my logic, in my thinking. There's always just challenges to overcome. So one of the biggest challenges was what happens to people when they get murdered or banished. The truth of the matter is I had to design a whole other show, which happens after this show. It is one big show. But you go to the Lounge of the Dead, there's more interactivity. And navigating that with the former controller, which is O3 Media and IDTV, who created the original format in the Netherlands, and basically designing a game that is in the world and follows the rules of their game with some reasonable adjustments, because TV and live are not the same thing.Neil Connolly: It takes 14 days to film 12 episodes of The Traitors. Paul Marden: Really? Okay. Neil Connolly: So I was like, how do I truncate 14 days of somebody's life down into a two-hour experience and still deliver that same impact, that same power, that same punch?Paul Marden: Yep.Neil Connolly: But I knew from the beginning of this that it wasn't about time. There is a magic triangle when it comes to the traitors, which is time, space, atmosphere. And time was the thing that I always struggled with. I don't have a Scottish cattle show, and I don't have two weeks. No. So I'm like, 'Cool, I've got to do it in two hours.' So our format follows exactly the same format. We do a breakfast scene, then a mission, then a roundtable banishment, then there's a conclave where the traitors meet and they murder somebody. And I do that in a seven-day structure, a seven-day cycle. But it all happens within two hours around this round table.Neil Connolly: I'm the creative director for Immersive Everywhere. We're a vertically integrated structure in the sense that we take on our own venues. So we're now standing in Shorts Gardens in the middle of Covent Garden. So we've leased this building. We've got a lease that is for a number of years and we have built the show into it. But we also identify the IP, go after that ourselves, we capitalise the projects ourselves. We seek strategic partners, promoters, other people to kind of come involved in that journey. But because we're also the team that are licensing the product, we are also the producers and I'm the creative director for that company. So I developed the creative in line with while also getting the deal done. This is incredibly unusual because other producers will be like, 'Hey, I've identified this IP and I've got it.' Now I'm going to approach a creative agency and I'm going to get them to develop the product. And now I've done all of that, I'm going to find someone else to operationally put it on, or I'm going to find a venue to put it on in, and then I'm going to find my ticketing partner.  But we don't do that. We have our own ticketing platform, and we have our own database, so we mark our own shoulders.Neil Connolly: As well as other experiences too. Back, we have our own creative industry, we are the producers, we are the female workers. So we cast it, we hire all the front of house team, we run the food and beverage, we run the bars. The operations team is our operations team because they run the venue as well as the show at the same time. So that's what I mean. We're a vertically integrated structure, which means we do it, which makes us a very unusual proposition within... certainly within the UK market, possibly the world. It makes us incredibly agile as a company and makes us to be able to be adaptive and proactive and reactive to the product, to the show, to the market that we're operating in, because it's all under one roof.Neil Connolly: This show started January 24th, 2023. Right. It's very specific because I was sitting on my sofa drinking a lovely glass of Merlot and I had just watched... UK Traitors, Season One. Yep. Because it came out that Christmas. Immediately I was like, 'Oh my God, this is insane.' And then I got a text message that particular night from our head of licensing, a guy named Tom Rowe, lovely man. And he was like, Neil, I'm at a licensing event with some friends of mine and everyone's talking about this thing called Traitors. I've not watched it. Have you watched it? Sounds like it might be a good thing. And so I sat back and drank my Merlot. And about five minutes later, I text him back and I was like, Tom, get us that license.Neil Connolly: And then I sent him a bunch of other details of how the show in my head would work, both from a commercial standpoint, but also from a creative standpoint, because I'm a commercially minded creative. Right. So I instantly took out my notebook and I started writing down exactly how I thought the show was going to do, the challenges that we would face and being able to translate this into a live thing. But I literally started writing it that night. And then he watched the first episode on the train on the way home. And then he texted me the next morning and he was like, 'I love it.' What do we need to do? And I was like, 'Get us in the room.' Two days later, we were in the room with all three media who own the format globally.Paul Marden: Okay.Neil Connolly: So we sat down and then they came to see one of our other shows and they were like, 'Okay, we get it now.' And then that was like two and a half years of just building the show, getting the deal done and facing the myriad of challenges. But yeah, sometimes it just starts with the text message.Paul Marden: So they get to experience all the key parts of the TV.Neil Connolly: All the key beats. Like right now, I'm holding one of the slates. They're not chalkboard slates. Again, this is... Oh, actually, this is a good challenge. So in the TV show, they've got a piece of slate and they write on it with a chalkboard pen. This seems so innocuous and I can't believe I'm talking about this on a podcast.Neil Connolly: Slategate was like six months of my life. Not in its entirety, but it was a six month long conversation about how we do the slates correctly. Because we do... 48 shows a day, six days a week. And those slates will crack. They will bash. And they're kind of a bit health and safety standards. I was like, can't have them. Also, they write on them with chalk pens, white ink chalk pens. But in the TV show, you only do it once a night. Yeah.Paul Marden: And then you have a producer and a runner.Neil Connolly: They just clean them very, very leisurely and set them back for the next day. And I was like, no, I've got to do a whole bunch of roundtable banishments in two hours. So we talked a lot about material, about style, literal viewership, because if you take a seat at the table. Yeah. If you're sitting at the table here, you'll notice that we've got a raised bit in the middle. If I turn mine around, the other person on the other side can't see it. So I was like, 'Okay, cool.' So we had to do a whole bunch of choreography. But also, the room's quite dark. Yes. At times, atmospheric. Yeah. In that magic triangle time-space atmosphere. So anything that was darker, or even that black slate, you just couldn't read it. And then there was, and then I had to— this is the level of detail that we have to go into when we're designing this kind of stuff. I was like, 'Yeah, but I can't clean off these slates with the white ink because everyone will have to have like a wet cloth chamois. Then I've just got loads of chamois around my venue that I just don't need.' And so then we're like, 'Oh, let's use real slates with real chalk.' And I was like, 'No, because dust will get everywhere.' I'll get chalk just all over my table. It'll just ruin everything. It'll ruin the technology that's inside the table because there's lots of hidden tricks inside of it. Paul Marden: Is there really? Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Neil Connolly: There's loads of hidden tricks inside the table. So after a while, going through many different permutations, I sat down with Christian Elenis, who's my set designer and my art director. And we were, the two of us were nearly in tears because we were like, 'We need,' and this only happened like.Neil Connolly: I would say two, three weeks before we opened. We still hadn't solved how to do the slate, which is a big thing in the show. Anybody who's seen the show and loves the show knows that they want to come in, they want to write somebody's name on the slate, and they want to spell the name incorrectly.Neil Connolly: Everyone does it on purpose. But I wanted to give people that opportunity. So then eventually we sat down and we were like, Christian, Neil. And the two of us in conversation went, why don't we just get a clear piece of Perspex, back it with a light coloured vinyl. And then Christian was like, 'Ooh,' and I'll make it nice and soft and put some felt on the back of it, which is what I'm holding. And then why don't we get a black pen? And we were like, 'Yeah,' like a whiteboard marker. And then we can just write on it. And then A, I can see it from the other side of the table. Thing one achieved. Two. Every marker pen's got an eraser on the top of it. I don't know why everyone thinks this is important, but it is. That you can just rub out like that, and I'm like, 'There's no dirt, there's no mess, and I can reuse this multiple times, like dozens of times in the same show.' And I know that sounds really weird, but that's the level of design I'm going to need.Paul Marden: I was just about to say, and that is just for the chalkboard. Yeah. Now you need to multiply that. How many decisions?Neil Connolly: How many decisions in each game. But also remember that there are eight round tables in this building. Each round table seats 14 people. And we do six sessions a day. So first ones at 10 a. m. Then we do 12, 2, 4, 6, and 8 p. m. So we do 48 shows a day, six days a week.Paul Marden: I love the concept that these are shows. This is not this is not visitor attraction. This is theater repeated multiple times a day for multi audience is concurrently.Neil Connolly: And I've just spent five minutes describing a slate to you. Yeah. But like, I haven't even got— it's like the sheer amount of technology that is in the show. And again, theatrical, like, look above our heads. Yeah. You've got this ring light above every seat. It's got a pin light. There's also microphones which are picking up all the audio in the room, which again is translating to the lounge of the dead. Every single one of the round table rooms has four CCTV cameras. Can you see that one in the corner? Each one of them is 4K resolution. It's quite high spec, which is aimed at the opposite side of the table to give you the resolution in the TV. In the other room. Then you've got these video contents. This is constantly displaying secret information through the course of the show to the traitors when they're in Conclave because everyone's in blindfolds and they took them off. They get secret instructions from that. There's also a live actor in the room. A live actor who is Claudia? They're not Claudia. They're not pastiches of Claudia. They are characters that we have created and they are the host of The Traitor's Game. Right. They only exist inside this building. We never have them portrayed outside of this building in any way whatsoever.Neil Connolly: They are characters, but they live, they breathe— the game of Traitors, the world of Traitors, and the building that we have designed and constructed here. And they facilitate the game for the people. And they facilitate the game for the people. One actor to 14 people. There are no plants, even though everyone tries to tell me. Members of the public will be convinced that they are the only person that's in that show and that everyone else is a plant. And I'm like, no, because that would be insane.Neil Connolly: The only actor in the room is the host.Paul Marden: 14 people that can sit around this table. How many of them are in the same group? Are you with your friends or is it put together where there are other people that you won't know in the room? If you book together, you play together.Neil Connolly: Yes. Okay, so if you don't book 14 people... Ah, we also capped the number of tickets that you can purchase to eight. Right. So you can only purchase a maximum of eight tickets unless you do want a full table of 14, at which point you have to then purchase a VIP package because you are booking out a whole table for yourselves. The game doesn't work if there's less than 10 people at the table. So there has to be 10, 11, 12, 13 or 14 people sat at a round table for the show to actually happen, for it to work. By capping the number of tickets that you book for eight, then that guarantees that strangers will be playing together. And that is the basis of strangers. Yeah, yeah. Like, you need to be sat around a table with people you know, you don't know, that you trust and you don't trust. Yeah. Fact of the matter. And do you see people turning on the others in their own group? Every single time. People think genuinely, and I love this from the public, you would think that if you're turning up as a group of eight and a group of four and a group of two, that the bigger group would just pick everybody off to make sure that someone in their group gets through to the end game.Neil Connolly: I'm sure they think that and they probably plot and plan that before they arrive on site. As soon as this game starts, gloves are off and everyone just starts going for each other. We've been open nearly two months now. I have seen, like, children murdered of their mothers.Neil Connolly: Husbands murder their wives, wives murder their husbands. I've seen, like, three generations—like, we get, because it's so intergenerational, like our lowest, the lowest age that you can play this is 12. Right. And then it's upwards. I've seen three generations of family come in and I've seen grandkids murder their own nan.Neil Connolly: Absolutely convinced that they're a traitor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%. Or they banish them. Like, it's just mental. I've also seen nans, who are traitors, murder their grandkids.Neil Connolly: Like, and this is in a room full of strangers. They're just like, 'No, I'm not going to go for Barbara, who I met two hours ago in the bar. I'm going to go for my own grandson. It's mental.'Neil Connolly: The very, very first thing that I always think about whenever I'm creating an experience or whenever I'm designing a show is I put myself in the position of 'I'm a member of the public.' I have bought a ticketNeil Connolly: What's the coolest thing that I am going to do for my money? What is my perceived value of my ticket over actually what is the value of that ticket? I wanted to give people the experience of knowing what it was like to be sitting in one of these chairs at this table and feeling their heart. The pounding in their chest and I mean, the pounding in their chest, that rush of adrenaline from doing nothing— from sitting in a chair and all you were doing was sitting in a room talking to people and your heart is going.Neil Connolly: Because you're either being accused of being a liar. And trying to defend against it. And trying to defend against it. Or you actually are lying and you're trying to whittle your way out of it. And that feeling is the most alive that you will ever feel. Not ever. Like, I'm sure they're... No, no, no. But, like, give people that opportunity and that experience, as well as, like, access to the world of traitors and the law and everything else. But also, it's like any other theme park ride. People go on roller coasters because the imminent fear of death is always there. Yeah. And you feel alive. You're like, you've got such a buzz of adrenaline. Whereas, arguably, we do exactly the same thing as roller coasters, but in a much more longer-drawn format and multiple times. Yeah. And people do feel alive. When people walk out of the show, you see them go upstairs to the bar, and they are... Yeah.Paul Marden: You've said to me already that you don't use the word 'immersive,' but you know, I'm, I'm, I'm sat. The company is called 'immersive' everywhere. I'm sat behind the scenes. Okay. I'm sat in the room and the room is hugely convincing. It's like the highest fidelity escape room type experience that I've ever sat in. It feels like I'm on set, yeah, yeah. Um, I can totally believe that, in those two hours, you can slip. I sat on a game. It was only a two-minute game at iApple, but I was being filmed by one of the team. But within 30 seconds, I'd forgotten that they were there because I was completely immersed in the game. I can believe that, sitting in here right now, you could forget where you were and what you were doing, that you were completely submerged in the reality of the land that you're in.Neil Connolly: Yeah, 100%. Like, the world does not exist beyond these worlds. And for some people, like, I have my own definition. Everyone's got a different definition of what immersive is. I've got my own definition. But... I can tell you right now, as soon as people enter this building, they're in the bar, they're kind of slowly immersed in that world because the bar is a themed bar. It's done to the same, like we designed and built that bar as well. But as soon as they start descending that spiral staircase and coming into the gameplay floors, into the show floors, they just forget the rest of the world exists. And especially when they sit down at this table, it doesn't matter. I'm sat next to you here, but you could be sat at this table with your loved one, strangers, whatever. The gloves come off and just nothing exists apart from the game that you're about to go through.Paul Marden: You've been open now for a couple of months. More success than you were anticipating, I think. So pre-sales went through the roof? Yes. So you're very happy with the results?Neil Connolly: Yeah, yeah, we were. Yeah, well, we still are.Neil Connolly: We were very confident before we'd even started building the show, like the literal structural build, because we did very well. But then that set expectations quite high because I had a lot of people that had bought tickets and I was like, 'OK, I need to put on a good show for these people. And I need to make sure that they get satisfaction relative to the tickets that they bought.' But I don't feel pressure. I do feel anxiety quite a lot. Creatively? Yeah. I mean, I meditate every day.Paul Marden: But you've created this amazing world and you're inviting people into it. And as a creative, you're opening yourself up, aren't you? People are walking into the world that you've created.Neil Connolly: Yeah, this was said to me. This is not something that I came up with myself, and I do say this really humbly, but it was something that was said to me. It was on opening day, and a bunch of my friends came to playtest the show. And they were like, 'Oh, this is your brain in a building.'Neil Connolly: And I was like, 'Yeah, I hadn't thought about that.' But yeah, it is my brain in a building. But also that's terrifying, I think, for everybody else, because I know what happens inside my brain and it's really quite chaotic.Neil Connolly: But, you know, this I am. I'm so proud of this show. Like you could not believe how proud I am of this show. But also a huge part of my job is to find people that are smarter than me at the relative thing that they do, such as the rest of my creative team. They're all so much smarter than me. My job is vision and to be able to communicate that vision clearly and effectively so that they go, 'I understand.' The amount of times that people on the creative team turn around to me and go, 'Neil, that's a completely mental idea.' If people are saying to me, 'No one's ever done that before' or 'that's not the way things are done.'Neil Connolly: Or we can do that, but we're going to have to probably invent a whole new thing. If people are saying those things to me, I know I'm doing my job correctly. And I'm not doing that to challenge myself, but everything that I approach in terms of how I build shows is not about format. It's not about blueprints. It's not like, 'Hey, I've done this before, so I'm just going to do this again because I know that's a really neat trick.' I go back to, 'I made the show because I wanted people's heart to pound in their chest while they're sitting in a chair and make them feel alive.'Paul Marden: Is that the vision that you had in your head? So you're articulating that really, really clearly. Is that the vision that you sold to everybody on, not maybe day one, but within a couple of days of talking about this? No, it was day one.Neil Connolly: It was day one. Everyone went, that's a completely mental idea. But, you know, it's my job to try and communicate that as effectively and clearly as I can. But again, I am just one man. My job is vision. And, you know, there's lighting design, sound design, art direction, there's game logic. We haven't even gotten to the technology of how this show works yet, or how this room works.Neil Connolly: Actually, I'll wander down the corner. Yeah, let's do that. But, like, there's other, like, lots of hidden tricks. Like, this is one of the games, one of the missions. In the world and the lore of the show, the round table is sacrosanct.Paul Marden: Yes.Neil Connolly: Traitors is the game. The game is in other people. I can do so many missions and there's loads of missions and they're really fun in this show. But the game is in other people. It's in the people sat on the other side of the room. But also I wanted to do a thing where people could interact directly with the set. And so I designed one of the missions to be in the round table itself.Neil Connolly: So there's a course of these moon dials, which you basically have to align through the course of it. And there are sensors built into the table so that they know when they're in the correct position. How you find out the correct position is by solving a very, very simple puzzle and then communicating effectively to a bunch of strangers that you just met.Neil Connolly: And the sensors basically read it all. And when that all gets into position, the lights react, the sound reacts, the video content reacts, the whole room reacts to you. So I wanted to give people something tangible that they can touch and they make the room react to them. Yes, it's. I mean, I've designed, I've got background in escape rooms as well, right? Um, so I've done a lot of that kind of stuff as well. So I wanted people to feel in touch, same, but like, there's more tangible props over here. Um, yeah, that is a model box of the room that we are stood in, yeah. Also, there's an exact replica of it on the other side of it. There are very subtle differences between it, and that informs one of the missions. So that is two model boxes in this roundtable room. There's one of these in every single roundtable room. So there's 16 model boxes of the show that you're stood in on the set. And again, theatre. It's a show. But it's one of the missions, because I wanted people to kind of go, 'Oh, there's a live actor in front of me.' I'm having fun. Oh, look at all these lights and all the sound. Oh, there's a model box over here. That's in theatre land and blah, blah, blah. But that is also a really expensive joke. It's a really expensive joke. And there's other, like, lots of hidden tricks.Neil Connolly: Let's go look at backstage. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.Neil Connolly: I say backstage, like how we refer to it or how I always go. I use 'I' and 'we' very interchangeably. Like right now you're on the set. Like you're on the stage. Yes. We're just wandering around a long corridor. There are round table rooms off to either side. But like, you know, there's a green room upstairs where the actors get changed, where the front of house team are, where the bar team all are. But as soon as they go out onto the show floor, they're on stage—yes, completely. We'll very quickly have a look at the gallery—yes, show control. Hi, Robbo. Do you mind if I stand in your room for the purposes of the audio? I'm talking to the technical manager, Thomas Robson. We're recording a podcast.Paul Marden: Robbo, oh yeah, okay. My mind is absolutely blown. So you've got every single room up on screen.Neil Connolly: Yeah, so that's great. There's 164 cameras—something like that. But every roundtable room has four cameras in it. Each camera is 4K resolution. So we've got cameras on all of them. We've got audio into those rooms. That's two-way, so that if show control needs to talk directly to them, they just press a button here and they can talk directly to the room itself. Mainly just like, stop misbehaving, we're watching you.Neil Connolly: We've then got cameras into all of the lounges, all of the show spaces, all the front of house, all of the bar areas, the mezzanine and back of house. And then you've got QLab running across all of the different shows. We've got backups on all of these screens. So if one... of the computers goes down, we can very quickly swap it in for a backup that's already running. We've got show control, which is, there's a company called Clockwork Dog, who, they're an amazing company. What COGS, their show control system, is doing is pulling in all of the QLab from sound, all of the QLab from lighting, and also we built our own app. to be able to run the show. So there's a whole logic and decision tree based on the decisions that the public do through the course of the game. So yes, there is a beginning, a middle, and an end in terms of our narrative beats and the narrative story of the show that we're telling people. But also that narrative can go in. Hundreds of different directions depending on the actions and the gameplay that the people do during the course of the show. So, you haven't just learned one show— you have to learn like You have to learn a world, and you have to learn a whole game.Neil Connolly: Like, there's the server, stacks, which we had to build. You had to network and cable the entire building. So we have built an entire new attraction, which didn't exist before. And also we're pulling in information from the front of house system which is also going into the show itself because again, you put your name into the iPad when you arrive on site and then you tick a box very crucially to say, 'Do you want to be selected as a trader? Yes or No.' Because in the game, it's a fundamental rule. If you say no, you cannot be selected as a traitor by the host during traitor selection. That doesn't mean you can't be recruited.Paul Marden: By the traitors later on in the game. So you could come and do this multiple times and not experience the same story because there were so many different pathways that you could go down.Neil Connolly: But also, the game is in other people. Yes. The show is sat on the opposite side of the table to you because, like, Bob and Sandra don't know each other. They'll never see each other ever again. But Bob comes again and he's now playing against Laura. Who's Laura? She's an unknown quantity. That's a whole new game. That's a whole new show. There's a whole new dynamic. That's a whole new storyline that you have to develop. And so the actors are doing an incredible job of managing all of that.Paul Marden: Thanks, Robbo. Thank you. So you've worked with some really, really impressive leading IP, Traders, Peppa Pig, Doctor Who, Great Gatsby. What challenges do you face taking things from screen to the live experience?Paul Marden: Challenges do I face? We're wandering here.Neil Connolly: So we are in... Oh, we're in the tower.Neil Connolly: Excellent. Yep, so we're now in Traitor's Tower. Good time for you to ask me the question, what challenges do I face? Things like this. We're now stood in Traitor's Tower. Paul, let me ask you the question. Without the show lights being on, so we're just stood on a set under workers, what's your opinion of the room that we're stood in?Paul Marden: Oh, it's hugely impressive. It feels like, apart from the fact you've punched the fourth wall out of the telly, it does feel like you're on set.Neil Connolly: It's a really faithful reproduction of the set. So that's kind of one of the challenges is managing the public's expectations of what they see, do and feel on site. So that I don't change the show so that people come and play the game that they're expecting to play. But making reasonable adjustments within that, because TV and live are two very, very different things. So first and foremost was making sure that we get the format right. So the game that people play, which informs the narrative of the show and the narrative structure of the show. Breakfast, mission, round table, conclave. Breakfast, mission, round table, conclave. I've designed a whole bunch of new missions that are in this, taken some inspiration from missions that people know and love from the TV shows, whether that's the UK territory or other territories around the world. And also just other stuff is just clear out of my head. So there's original content in there. paying homage and respect to the world that they've built and allowing ourselves to also play and develop and build out that world at the same time. Other challenges.Neil Connolly: This is not a cheap project. No, no. I mean, the production quality of this is beautiful. Yeah, yeah, thank you. It is stunning. When people walk in here, they're like, 'Oh my God, this is... High end.' I am in a luxury event at a very affordable price.Paul Marden: Thank you. And then we're going back upstairs again. Yes. And in the stairwell, we've got the crossed out photos of all of those that have fallen before us.Neil Connolly: No, not quite. All of the people that are in this corridor, there's about 100 photos. These are all the people who built the show.Neil Connolly: So this is David Gregory. He's the sound designer. This is Kitty, who is Immersive Everywhere's office manager. She also works in ticketing. That is Tallulah and Alba, who work in the art department. Elliot, who's our lighting designer. So all of these people are the people who brought the show to life.Paul Marden: Amazing.Neil Connolly: And we wanted to pay homage to them because some of them gave years of their lives to building the show from literally the inception that I had in 2023. Through to now and others are the people who literally spent months of their life underground in these basements building hand-building this set and so we wanted to pay homage to them so we got all of their photos we did the iconic red cross through it yeah and we stuck them all up in the corridor just because we thought it'd be a nice thing to do.Paul Marden: You're in the business of trading and experiences and that ranges from art exhibitions to touring shows. There's always going to be a challenge of balancing innovation and profitability. What is the formula? What is the magic formula?Neil Connolly: I believe, first and foremost, going back to what I was telling you earlier about us being a collaborative organisation. We are not a creative crack that has been used for the show. We are also the producers of the show. And to make my point again, I'm a commercially minded creative. So I actually sit down with the producers and go, 'Okay, cool.' There are 112 seats in the show.Paul Marden: Yep.Neil Connolly: Therefore, how many shows do we need to do per day? How many shows do we need to do per week? How many shows do we need to do per year? Therefore, let's build out a P &L. And we build a whole business plan based around that.Paul Marden: By having everybody— that you need in the team— makes it much easier to talk about that sort of stuff. It makes it much easier for you to design things with the end result in mind. You don't have a creative in a creative agency going off— feeding their creative wants without really thinking about the practicalities of delivering on it.Neil Connolly: Exactly. So you've got to think like, literally, from the very, very beginning: you've got to think about guest flow. You've got to think about throughput. You've got to think about your capacities. Then you've got to basically build out a budget that you think— how much, hey, how much really is this going to cost? Yeah. Then you build out an entire business plan and then you go and start raising the money to try and put that on. And then you find a venue. I mean, like the other magic triangle, like the traitor's magic triangle is, you know, time, space, atmosphere. That's how you do a show. Like with my producer's hat on, the other magic triangle is show, money, venue.Neil Connolly: The truth of the matter, like I make no bones about it, I can design shows till the cows come home, but I'm always going to need money to put them on and a venue to put them in. Also, I want to stress this really important. I use the words 'I' and 'we' very interchangeably.Paul Marden: It's a team effort.Neil Connolly: You can see that in that corridor. I am not a one-man band. I am the creative director of a company. I am a cog that is in that machine, and everybody is doing... We are, as a team... I cannot stress this enough. Some of the best in the business are doing what we do. And everyone is so wildly talented. And that's just us on the producing side. That's immersive everywhere, limited. Then I've got a whole other creative team. Then we've got operations. Then we've got... It's just mad. It's just mad, isn't it? This is a job. Who would have thought, when you were at school, this was an opportunity? Not my principal or my maths teacher.Neil Connolly: So, sorry, just to balance the kind of economies of scale. That was the question, wasn't it?Paul Marden: Well, we were talking about what is the formula for making that an investment, but you know, the authority here is the effort you've put in to do this feels high, but at the same time, you have to find this thing. There is a lot of investment that goes into the front.Neil Connolly: But that comes back to creatives. Caring and I'm not saying the creatives don't, but I care. I care about building businesses. Yeah, not necessarily like building my own CV, like there's so many projects that across our desks. I'll be like, 'Yeah, that'd be really fun to work on.' But do I think that I can make that a touring product? Can it be a long-running location-based entertainment sit-down product? Can it be an art shop? Like you've kind of got a balance with what do you think is just creatively cool versus what can we do as a company that is a commercially viable and financially stable product? And so all that comes through in terms of the creative, but also in terms of the activities of how we run the building, how this model realizes. Because if you think about it, let's make Phantom of the Opera run in the West End. Yes. The show is very obvious, with many casts on a room, away, fruit team away, terrace, it's a big activity. If they haven't sold half that away, they have to use the whole show and play all those people.Neil Connolly: But if they haven't sold half that away from one of my shows... I only have to activate four of my rooms, not eight of them. Therefore, I don't have to call in four actors. I don't have to call in a bunch of the other front of house team and I can scale in the operations on the back. It's an entirely scalable process. Flexible, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, 100%. But also, like, we've got eight rooms here. If we decide to take this to another territory, and that territory demands a much higher throughput, then instead of eight rooms, I can do 20 rooms, 30 rooms. As long as we know that the market is there to be able to kind of get people through it.Neil Connolly: I love this show and I'm so proud of it. The main reason why I'm proud of it is when the show finishes, let's go into one of the lounges. Have you been into one of the lounges?Paul Marden: I've had a nose around a lounge.Neil Connolly: There are different shapes and sizes. We won't go into that one. We'll go into this one down here. That one, that one. It's always such a buzz when you're stood in the bar and the shows kick out, and you see tables and tables of 14 people going up into the bar.Neil Connolly: Area and before they've even gotten a drink, they will run straight over to their friends, families, strangers, whoever they were playing with in that table of 14, and instantly be like, 'Right, I need to know everything that was going on inside your head, your heart, and your soul over the last two hours of my life because this was my experience.'Neil Connolly: And they'll just go, and they'll be like, 'And this is what I was thinking.' And then I thought it was you because you did this and you touched your nose in a weird way. And then I thought you were sending secret signals. And then everyone's like, 'No, that's not what I was doing.' I was just trying to be a normal person. And they were like, 'Well, why did you say that thing?' It sounded super weird. And they're like, 'That's just what I do.' And it's just totally mental. And then they all get a drink from the bar. And we call it the bar tab chat.Neil Connolly: It's another revenue stream.Neil Connolly: I do talk about this like it's a show. And it is a show. You've walked around, do you think it's a show? Completely. I talk to established houses all the time. Like, you know, the big theatres of the land. Organisations that are national portfolio organisations who receive a lot of Arts Council funding. The thing that they want to talk to us about all the time is new audiences. They're like, 'How do I get new audiences through my door?' What can I do? And I'm like, 'Well, firstly, make a show that people want to go and see.'Neil Connolly: Again, they're like, 'But I've got this amazing writer and he's a really big name and everyone's going to come because it's that name.' And I'm like, 'Yeah, that's wicked. That's cool.' And they can all go pay reverence to that person. That's really wonderful. Whereas when you look at the attractions landscape or the immersive theatre landscape or like anything like... Squid Game, or The Elvis, Evolution, or War of the Worlds, which has also laid reality, or any of that kind of stuff, across the landscape, it is nothing but new audiences. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is nothing but actual ticket-buying audiences.Neil Connolly: And they come from all different walks of life. And what I love is that they do come in to this experience and we hit them with this like secret theatre.Neil Connolly: And they're like, 'Oh my God.' And often it's a gateway to them being like, 'Oh, I didn't realise that.' Maybe I'll go see a Western show or maybe I will go to the National Theatre and see something. Because that's the level of archery. Because those organisations, I love them and I've worked in a few of them, but those buildings can be quite austere, even though they're open and porous, but it's still very difficult to walk through that threshold and feel a part of it.Paul Marden: Whereas coming in here, coming into an event like this, can feel like a thing that they do.Neil Connolly: Because it's the same demographic as theme park junkies. People who love going to theme parks love going to stuff like this because it's an experience, it's an otherness, it's an other nature kind of thing. Because modern audiences want to play and do, not sit and watch. But we all exist in the kind of same ecosystem. I'm not taking on the National Theatre.Paul Marden: Gosh, no. I always talk about that. I think the reason why so many attractions work together in the collaborative way that they do is they recognise that they're not competing with each other. They're competing with sitting on your backside and watching Netflix.Paul Marden: Yeah, yeah.Paul Marden: Our job for all of us is to drag people away from their screens and drag people off of their sofas to do something. And then that's the biggest challenge that we all face.Neil Connolly: I think then that kind of answers the question that you asked me earlier, which I didn't answer. And I'm very sorry.Neil Connolly: is about identifying different pieces of IP. Like, yes, we largely exist in the world of licensing IP. And how do we identify that kind of IP to be able to translate? Not just how do we do it, but like, actually, how do we identify the right thing that's going to... How do you spot the winner? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that is one of the biggest challenges to your point of we're talking directly to people who consume arts, culture and media and technology in a slightly more passive way, whether that's just at home and watching Netflix and then bringing that to life. In a very, very different way. If you have a very clear marketing campaign that tells people what it is that they're buying and what they're expected to see or do on their particular night out, because that's what modern people really care about, what they do with their money. Yeah. And they want to have a good night out. And I'm in the business of giving people a good night out. We also happen to be murdering a lot of people in the course of the show.Neil Connolly: Still a good night out. Still a good night out. But I'm in a place where the dead sit. Yeah, exactly. Lounge of the dead. And like, you know, this is a really cool space. Oh, it's just beautiful. You know, we've got the telephone really works. There's lots of information that comes through that. The radio works, that does different things. The TV screen on the wall, that has the actual live feed into the round table room that you've just left. And there's other little puzzles and hints and tricks in this room, which means that after you've been murdered or banished and you come to the Lounge of the Dead, you're still engaged with the game to a degree. You just don't directly influence the outcome of the game. But you're still involved in it. You're still involved in it. It's super fun. Oh, and you can have a drink in here.Paul Marden: I don't let people drink in the round table. Even more important. What's this?Neil Connolly: The dolls, the creepy dolls. What this is, this is the void. Creatively speaking, this is where all the gold goes when people win or lose it. And the creepy dolls are from the TV show. Ydyn nhw'r un gwirioneddol o'r sioe? Felly, gafodd studio Lambert, sy'n gwneud y sioe tebyg, llawer o brops o'r sioe tebyg i ni eu rhoi ar y ddispleiddio yma. Felly, mae gennych chi'r Dolls Creepy o'r lles 3 yno. Rydyn ni'n mynd i fyny. Yn ôl yma, mae'r peintiwch Deathmatch.Paul Marden: Which is from season three.Neil Connolly: And they get the quill and they write the names and got the quill upstairs. We've also got over here, the cards that they used to play the death match with. Excellent.Paul Marden: So you began your career in theatre. How did that evolve into the world of immersive live experiences?Neil Connolly: Life story. I am the son of a postman and a cook. And if you haven't noticed already, I'm from Ireland. There was no theatre in our lives, my life, when I was growing up. And I stumbled into a youth theatre. It's called Kildare Youth Theatre. And the reason why I joined that is because there was a girl that I really fancied.Neil Connolly: She had just joined this youth theatre and I was like, 'Oh, I'm gonna join that as well' and that kind of opened the world of theatre for me. At the same time, I then got spotted by this guy, his name's Vijay Baton, his real name's Om, but he converted to Hare Krishnanism in the 90s. And he set up a street theatre company in Ireland. He just taught me street theatre. So he taught me stilt walk, he taught me juggling, he taught me how to build puppets. And so I spent years building puppets with him and going around Ireland doing lots of different street theatre while I was a teenager. And doing street theatre and doing my youth theatre and then kind of all of that kind of came to a head when I had to decide what I was going to do with my life. I applied to go to drama school. And I applied to two drama schools. One was Radha. Didn't get in. Didn't even get an audition. And the other one was Rose Bruford. And they took me. And the reason why they took me— I probably wasn't even that good. But on the day that I was auditioning to get into Rose Bruford was the same day as my maths exam for my final exams at school. You call them your A-levels, we call them the leaving certificate.Neil Connolly: And while all of my friends were back in Ireland doing their maths exam, I was in an audition room pretending to be a tree or the colour black.Neil Connolly: Who knows? And they kind of went, 'Well, if I fail my maths exam, I don't get into university in Ireland.' Like, it's just a blanket thing. And so I was like, 'I literally sat across the panel' and I was like, 'eggs, basket.' And they were like, 'cool.' So they let me in based off of that. So I got a classical training. Then what happened is I came out of university. I was living with two of my friends, Natalie and Joe. And we had our own little production company called The Lab Collective. And we just started making shows. In weird ways, we joined a company called Theatre Delicatessen. Let's get away from this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.Neil Connolly: So Theatre Deli was a company set up to take over disused spaces in London and convert them into art spaces.Neil Connolly: Basically legalised squatting. It's the same as like a guardianship. But we weren't living in the buildings. We were just putting on shows and we put on art shows, we put on theatre shows. We did Shakespeare for a while. We wrote our own work and we just did lots of really, really cool stuff. And I worked in music festivals, classically trained actor. So I was trying to do shows. I did a lot of devising. I also joined an improvisation group. And kind of through all that mix, like those years at Delhi, which was making these weird shows in these weird buildings, were very, very formative years for us. The Arts Council wouldn't support the kind of work that we were making. We were like, 'Cool, how do we get space?Neil Connolly: How do we get or make money to support ourselves? And what are the shows? There's the magic triangle all over again. Space, show, money. And that's your apprenticeship, I guess, that brings you to here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, again, I make no bones about it. 10 years ago, I was selling programs on the door of the Royal Festival Hall while doing all of that stuff. So in one of the Theatre Daily buildings, we did a show called Heist, which is you break into a building and steal stuff. That's what the public do.Neil Connolly: And a bunch of us did that. I mean, it's so much fun— kind of doing it. And off the back of that, somebody else basically tried to chase down the crystal maze. And then they went away, and then they called me up and they were like, 'Hey, I've got the rights. Do you want to make the crystal maze?' And I was like, 'Yeah, sounds like fun.' So I got involved with that, did that for a while. And then, from there, this is the end of a very long story. I'm so apologised. Yeah, from there, all of those different things that I've done through the course of my life in terms of operations, designing experiences, being a creative, understanding business.Neil Connolly: Building a P&L, building a budget, talking to investors, trying to convince them to give you money. All of that stuff kind of basically came together. And over the last few years, like the wildest ride is that pre-2020.Neil Connolly: We were just a bunch of people doing a bunch of weird things, making weird shows and weird attractions in kind of different ways. And then that year happened. And I don't know what happened, but literally every single major studio, film, TV production, game designer, licensor in the world, suddenly just went— brand extensions, world extensions, and they all just started calling us. And they were like, 'Hi, I've got this thing.' Can you develop it into a thing? Because I need to extend my brand or I want to build a world and extend that for the public. And we were like, 'Yeah, okay, cool.' And we were just lucky, serendipitously, to be in the right place at the right time. To be those people that people can approach. And we're always, we're very approachable.Neil Connolly: As you can tell, I talk a lot. And, you know, so the last five years, it's just been a mad ride.Paul Marden: So look, Neil, it's been amazing. I have had the most fun. Last question for you. What's next? Are you putting your feet up now because you finished this? Or on to the next? Neil Connolly: Very much on to the next thing. So we're already in production with our new show, which is called Peppa Pig Surprise Party. And that is opening at the Metro Centre in Gateshead next year. Oh, how exciting is that? It's very exciting.Paul Marden: So quite a different demographic.Neil Connolly: The demographic for Peppa Pig is two to five year olds. It's been a really fun show to design and create. To go back to a question that you asked me very early on, there is no blueprint, there is no format. I have embraced the chaos tattooed on my arm. And always when I approach things, any new show or any new creative, I am thinking of it from a ticket buying perspective: 'I have paid my money.' What is the coolest thing that I can possibly do with that money? And so therefore, I'm now looking at families and, like, what's the coolest thing that they can do for that ticket price in the world of Peppa Pig?Paul Marden: Let's come back in the new year, once you've opened Peppa Pig, let's go to Gateshead and see that. That sounds pretty awesome to me. I reckon there's a whole new episode of Designing Worlds for two to five-year-olds that we could fill an hour on.Neil Connolly: Oh yeah, 100%. It's a totally different beast. And super fun to design.Paul Marden: Oh mate. Neil, it has been so wonderful having a wander around the inside of your crazy mind.Paul Marden: If you've enjoyed today's episode, please like it and leave a comment in your podcast app. It really does make it so much easier for other people to find us. This episode was written by Emily Burrows from Plaster, edited by Steve Folland, and produced by Sami Entwistle from Plaster and Wenalyn Dionaldo. Thanks very much. See you next week.  The 2025 Visitor Attraction Website Survey is now LIVE! Dive into groundbreaking benchmarks for the industryGain a better understanding of how to achieve the highest conversion ratesExplore the "why" behind visitor attraction site performanceLearn the impact of website optimisation and visitor engagement on conversion ratesUncover key steps to enhance user experience for greater conversionsTake the Rubber Cheese Visitor Attraction Website Survey Report

Front Row Classics welcomes Steve Cubine and Nan McNamara to the show. Steve and Nan have their own classic Hollywood podcast called, "From Beneath the Hollywood Sign" which covers wide-ranging topics from the Golden Age of Hollywood. The two join Brandon for a deep-dive discussion on the best of Warner Brothers.

Warner Bros Front Row Classics welcomes Steve Cubine and Nan McNamara to the show. Steve and Nan have their own classic Hollywood podcast called, “From Beneath the Hollywood Sign” which covers wide-ranging topics from the Golden Age of Hollywood. The two join Brandon for a deep-dive discussion on the best of Warner Brothers. You can … Continue reading Ep. 360- Celebrating Warner Brothers with Steve Cubine and Nan McNamara →

David Silver and Raghu Markus explore the life and teachings of George Gurdjieff, the Russian-born mystic and philosopher of consciousness.This time on Mindrolling, Raghu and David have a discussion about:How a teenage David Silver was first introduced to Gurdjieff's teachingsGurdjieff's influence on the 1960s counterculture and the evolution of consciousness movementsThe call to “do only what is new and fresh” and live in search of the miraculousDoing the work literally and figuratively; supporting oneself and moving towards clear mentation Gurdjieff's view of humans as incomplete sleepwalkers, mechanically reacting to lifeGradual awakening through self-observation, inner struggle, and conscious effort Shedding false pretenses to discover a unified, authentic selfHow Gurdjieff's philosophy inspired Ram Dass's spiritual visionThe Seekers of Truth and The Sarmoung Brotherhood The transformative and ongoing practice of self-remembering Pre-order your copy of There Is No Other: The Way to Harmony and Wholeness a profound collection of newly gathered writings from Ram Dass and edited by Parvati Markus. Ram Dass shows us how a house divided against itself—whether that “house” is our individual self or the society in which we live—can come together in wholeness. Learn more: There Is No Other Way Pre-OrderAbout George Ivanovich GurdjieffGurdjieff, who was born in the late 1800's, was a philosopher, mystic, spiritual teacher, composer, and movements teacher. Born in the Russian Empire, he briefly became a citizen of the First Republic of Armenia after its formation in 1918, but fled the impending Red Army invasion of Armenia in 1920, which rendered him stateless. Gurdjieff taught that people are not conscious of themselves and thus live their lives in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep", but that it is possible to awaken to a higher state of consciousness and serve our purpose as human beings. Learn more about Gurdjieff HERE and pick up some of Gurdjieff's most famous work, Meetings with Remarkable Men.About David Silver:David Silver is the former co-host of the Mindrolling podcast. He is a filmmaker and director, most recently coming out with Brilliant Disguise. Brilliant Disguise tells the unique story of a group of inspired Western spiritual seekers from the 60s, who in meeting the great American teacher, Ram Dass, followed him to India to meet his Guru, Neem Karoli Baba, familiarly known as Maharaj-ji. Two days before he left his body, Maharaj-ji instructed K.C. Tewari to take care of the Westerners, which he did resolutely until the day he died in 1997. Silver's #1 charting MGM/UA/Warners film, “The Compleat Beatles” is the critically acclaimed biopic movie about history's most famous band. The term ‘rockumentary' was first applied to this two-hour movie. Rolling Stone recently described the film as a “masterwork.” Silver's Warner Brothers' feature film, “No Nukes” also started the whole trend of music/activism feature documentaries.“His father basically said to him, you must not do anything old, you must always try and do something new and fresh, you must already be honest, you must always support yourself, These were all important in Gurdjieff's life. You must be in search of the miraculous, because what else is there?” —David SilverSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It's been a month since the publication of Hallmarked Man so Nick and John decide to have a ‘Pit Pony Pickleball' match in which they serve and volley Strike 8 examples of Shed tools and Lake springs as fast as they can. After a round of back and forth between Team Lake and Team Shed, they do a flash round of Golden Threads against the clock and then John is given a ‘Final Jeopardy' tie-breaker question about the most controversial perennial plot point in Rowling's work.It's a reverse Kanreki exercise, in other words. In their conversations about each of Rowling's novels, screenplays, play script, text books, and short story collection, Nick and John discussed one Lake spring, a source point of story inspiration from Rowling's life experience and core beliefs, and one Shed tool, her deliberate artistry to craft that inspiration into edifying and engaging story. Here they have a ‘Blitz Chess' match, to switch sporting metaphors, to try and cover as many Lake, Shed, and Thread points with examples from Rowling's latest as possible.Perhaps the most important take-away, though, is the three conclusions about Hallmarked Man they've come to after a month of reading that they think will be the consensus view of Strike 8 after we have Strikes 9 and 10. Make some popcorn, find your score card and a comfortable place to watch and take notes; this is an episode for the ages! (Insert your preferred Wrestle-Mania or like programming promotional hyperbole here.)The Kanreki Index of Rowling's Shed Tools, Lake Springs and Golden ThreadsIn July 2025, Nick Jeffery and I logged a marathon of Kanreki ‘Lake and Shed' video posts at this site in celebration of Rowling's life and work at her 60th birthday. For listeners of this ‘Blitz' Lake and Shed reading of The Hallmarked Man, I repost below an easy-to-access-and-reference single place for readers to find much longer discussion of each Shed tool, Lake spring, and Golden Thread, as well as an introduction to Fourth Generation Rowling Studies hermeneutics. Enjoy!Introduction to the Kanreki Project* The Goal and the Methodology of the Hogwarts Professor Tag-Team Month-Long Birthday Party for Serious Readers of Rowling-GalbraithOn 31 July 2025, Joanne Murray, aka J. K. Rowling and Robert Galbraith, celebrated her 60th birthday. This specific celebration is considered a ‘second birth' in Japan or Kanreki because it is the completion of the oriental astrological cycle. To mark JKR's Kanreki, 還暦, Dr John Granger and Nick Jeffery, both Nipponophiles, read through Rowling's more than twenty published works and reviewed them in light of the author's writing process, her ‘Lake and Shed' metaphor. The ‘Lake' she said in 2019 and 2024 is the source of her inspiration and the ‘Shed' is the alocal place of her intentional artistry, in which garage she transforms the biographical stuff provided by her subconscious mind into the archetypal stories that have made her the most important author of her age.Join us after the jump for the complete compendium of the Harry Potter, Cormoran Strike, Fantastic Beast, ‘Stand Alone' stories, and Golden Thread posts!The Lake and Shed Conversations about the Harry Potter Novels and Extras* Harry Potter and the Philosopher's StoneNick discusses Hogsmeade Comprehensive School, as Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry should be properly called, and John explains the ten different genres that Rowling uses in Philosopher's Stone* Harry Potter and the Chamber of SecretsJohn explores the Freudian parallels that Rowling paints into Chamber of Secrets, and Nick talks about her oldest, and probably best friend Sean Harris, the inspiration for Ron Weasley.* Harry Potter and the Prisoner of AzkabanNick shares the London institution of the (k)night bus. Part drunk carriage, part dormitory for the homeless in foul weather, zig-zaging across London between midnight and five in the morning. John shares the Parallel Series Idea (PSI) and compare Prisoner of Azkaban with Robert Galbraith's Career of Evil.* Harry Potter and the Goblet of FireNick talks about the trip Rowling made as a teenager to Cornwall as a young woman in which some Quidditch World Cup camping may have been involved and about her core beliefs about bigotry and prejudice. John reviews Rowling's tagging Goblet as a “crucial” and “pivotal” part of the seven book series and introduces how the ‘story turn' in a ring composition reflects the beginning and end of the story.* Harry Potter and the Order of the PhoenixNick talks about the darkest period in Jo Rowling's life, namely, her return to the UK from Portugal as a single mother in Edinburgh. With Order of the Phoenix in full nigredo mode John talks literary alchemy.* Harry Potter and the Half-Blood PrinceNick reveals the real life model for Severus Snape, Rowling's Chemistry teacher at Wydean Comprehensive, and his remarkable story and melancholy end. John reviews Rowling's version of the so-called ‘Hero's Journey,' how she re-makes it into a life-after-death ‘Harry's Journey' ten step dance we see in every book — except for Half-Blood Prince with its two chapters before we begin at Privet Drive and its ending without a Dumbledore Denouement or trip to King's Cross.* Harry Potter and the Deathly HallowsJohn and Nick discuss the ‘Deathly Hallows' symbol, a triangulated and vertically bisected circle, from both its biographical point of inspiration to its anagogical or sublime depths. Nick reveals Rowling's story about how she was watching the 1975 John Huston film ‘The Man Who Would Be King' the night her mother died and that believes the “Masonic tag” of the story-line was her sub-conscious source for the Deathly Hallows ‘“triangular eye.” John thinks Rowling is really reaching here, akin to her claim that the name ‘Hogwarts' came from a trip to a public garden rather than the Molesworth books. He reviews the five eyes of Deathly Hallows and explains how Rowling embeds both a key to the four-level interpretation of symbols in how characters respond to that image and a model of how we are to interpret and understand her ‘transformed vision' mission as a writer.* Newt Scamander's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find ThemNick and John return to the books at a reader's suggestion in order to give a Lake and Shed reading of the original Newt Scamander textbook, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Nick relays everything you need to know about the genesis of this work and John talks about Rowling's comments to Stephen Fry in a 2022 interview about “archetypal” animals and the importance of understanding them because human beings are story-telling animals. Her discussion of the Lethifold and Niffler are especially challenging and illuminating.* The Tales of Beedle the BardNick and John fulfill a reader request to discuss the book inside Deathly Hallows (one of three actually…), ‘Tales of Beedle the Bard,' a text that Albus Dumbledore leaves Hermione in his will for her to read and apply to the Horcrux Hunt. Nick tells the story of Rowling's creation of six hand-written copies as six-of-a-kind gifts for those who brought Harry Potter to life. John dives into the center story of the five tales, ‘The Hairy Heart,' and tells the meaning of Harry's heart to draw out what Rowling meant by describing Beedle as “the distillation” of the Hogwarts Saga.The Lake and Shed Conversations about the Cormoran Strike Novels* The Cuckoo's CallingThe ‘Lake' point that Nick explores is the identity of the real Deeby Mac, namely, Di Brooks, Rowling's former security director and currently her office manager, a veteran with years of experience in the SIB. John's ‘Shed' point is his pushback against the idea that Calling wasn't really the first book in the series because Rowling has said she had the idea for it after Silkworm and only chose it because the case would make her detective famous.* The SilkwormThe ‘Lake' point that Nick reveals is the probable identity of ‘Jenkins,' the mystery person to whom Strike 2 is dedicated, a revelation consequent to no little detective work (and a very close reading of Louisa May Alcott!). He also discusses some real-life literary infighting in contemporary London that might have been lifted from the pages of Silkworm. John argues that this ur-novel of the series, its point of conception, is Rowling's not especially opaque guide to how to understand a novelist's life and to appreciate their work, in short, her first ‘Lake and Shed' discussion (albeit one embedded in story).* Career of EvilThe ‘Lake' point that Nick explores is Rowling's personal experience of violence against women and her determination to push back against the misogynist age she believes we have been living in for decades. John details the litany of crimes committed against women in the third Strike novel and suggests that in time, when we have the series as a whole, appreciation of the artistry involved will counter-balance the shock first-time readers feel on entering this boucherie.* Lethal WhiteNick discusses the embedded class struggle in the book and its roots in Rowling's background before dropping the bomb of the real world identity of Jack O'Kent and his unhappy family. John is so taken aback by this revelation that Nick has to prompt the Shed portion of the conversation with a fun history of the Sonia Friedman production of Ibsen's Rosmersholm on London's West End, a show starring Thom Burke as Rosmer and which ended just before Bronte Studios beginning the filming of Lethal White.* Troubled Blood (A)Nick discusses Rowling's history with the divinatory art of astrology and the occult resources and reference works she brought into play in writing a novel whose primary embedded text is a murder scene's astrological chart. John talks about the astrological clock structure of twelve houses in which Galbraith tells this remarkable story.* Troubled Blood (B)Nick discusses Rowling's history with the Clerkenwell neighborhood. John talks about Troubled Blood as a double re-telling of The Faerie Queene, Book One, with Strike and Margot as the Redcrosse Knight and Oonaugh and Robin as Una.* Ink Black HeartNick covers the front and the back of making Lake readings of Strike6 without a lot of circumspection and John talks about the eerie feeling he had while reading this book that the author was ‘having a go' at him.* The Running GraveNick confesses to having felt stumped about what to say as his ‘Lake' contribution to the Strike7 discussion — before his epiphany on a long walk with Addie that almost every buoy or pillar in Rowling's metaphorical place of inspiration finds its reflection in the seventh Galbraith mystery. John refuses to go into any detail about the work's ‘wheels within wheels within wheels' ring structure but shares instead the symbolic depth of Mama Mazu's mother of pearl fish pendant.The Lake and Shed Conversations about the Stand-Alone Works* Casual VacancyNick explains all the projects we now know she was working on between 2007 and 2012, the dates of Deathly Hallows and Casual Vacancy's respective publication dates, as well as the degree to which readers can assume that the novel's Simon Price is a fictional portrait of her father, Peter Rowling. John describes the three Gospel parables embedded in Casual Vacancy and why he thinks the book was a project the author was working on before the Hogwarts Saga as well as why it reflects a religious crisis akin to Harry's ‘struggle to believe' in Deathly Hallows.* Harry Potter and the Cursed ChildNick reviews the history of how Rowling was sold on the idea of a Wizarding World stage production via a bit of bait and switch marketing and John reads the review of the Jack Thorn script by Pepperdine English Professor James Thomas. Neither John nor Nick is a big fan of the play but their back and forth about the several controversies connected with it and the question of its being “the eighth Harry Potter story” are still challenging and fun.* The IckabogNick takes the ‘Shed' point and lays out the controlled demolition of her reputation among Group Thinkers on the Left in the lead up to Ickabog's publication and John shares the meaning of ‘The Ickabog's Song,' the embedded text of the tale, as interpreted by Daisy Dovetail (an embedded author?).* The Christmas Pig (A)Nick discusses Rowling's many interview statements about the Things which were lost and how many of them match up with things she has lost; he takes a deep dive into the Blue Bunny episode outside the Gates of the City of the Missed and Rowling's embedding herself and her daughter Mackenzie in the story. John talks about the Blue Bunny and his being “found” or “saved” as an allegory of the human condition written in the Rowling shorthand-symbols for (and obsessions with) love, salvation, and what is real.* The Christmas Pig (B)Nick by the Lake shares the history of the Murray Family and their beanie pig toys as well as a likely source for the defenestration of DP (in Esquire magazine, no less). John talks about the promise and the limits of reading literature through a biographical lens and then explains the anagogical meaning of the Power palace kangaroo court trial of CP and Jack. Both share their reasons for thinking that The Christmas Pig is the perfect distillation of everything Rowling is doing as a writer, to include the relationship of her Lake inspiration to her final Shed product.The Lake and Shed Conversations about the Fantastic Beasts Screenplays* Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find ThemNick does his signature deep dive into the history of the Fantastic Beasts film franchise's origins in Warner Brothers' determination to keep the Wizarding World profit-pillar in their portfolio alive after the last Harry Potter adaptation — and Rowling's equal determination that they not use their copyright privilege to muck up her legacy with an Indiana Jones meets Crocodile Dundee knock-off. John takes the Shed pole in the conversation and shares his months long pursuit of the shooting text screenplay, the actual last screenplay over which Rowling had control.* The Crimes of GrindelwaldOn the Lake side of things, Nick explores the Johnny Depp casting scandal and the lead-up in 2018 to the 2019 Tweet Heard Round the World. John explains that the cut scenes from this dog's mess of a movie point that the shooting script, i.e., what Rowling wrote and approved before David Yates butchered the film in the editing room, was all about Leta Lestrange. More important, John makes the Shed point that every Rowling book features a text of some kind that the characters struggle to understand — and that Crimes of Grindelwald has ten of these, a veritable library of interior texts to interpret.* The Secrets of DumbledoreNick lays out the drama surrounding the third Fantastic Beasts franchise film and his favorite part of the movie (hint: it's about “confusion”). John reveals why Jacob gets a Snakewood wand and one without a core as well as why he thinks Kowalski is the embedded author in this series.The Lake and Shed Conversations about Rowling's Golden Threads and Shed Tools* Chiastic Structure, a.k.a. Ring CompositionJohn travels to his backyard Mongolian ger, the archetypal circular architectural form, to deliver a firehose introduction to the four essentials of ring writing. He uses slides to depict the structure of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone as his brief ‘for instance' of how Rowling chooses to organize her stories and he provides a list of links (below!) for further reading.* Survey of Rowling's Golden Threads (A)In this first overview of the Golden Threads, Nick and John go back and fourth with four Threads each. Nick gives at least three examples for Bad Dad, Writing about Writing, Violence against Women, and the Evils of Fleet Street. John responds with three or more 'for instances' of Mother Love, Ghosts, Pregnancy Traps, and the Lost Child with Grieving Steward.* Survey of Rowling's Golden Threads (B)In this second overview of the Golden Threads, Nick and John talk about Kanreki red caps and tackle three Threads each. Nick gives at least three examples for Evil Government, Occult tropes, and the Embedded Author. John responds with three or more 'for instances' of the Search for the Real, Embedded Texts, and Shadow Doppelgangers.* The ‘Lost Child' Golden Thread Oeuvre ReviewFor the day before Rowling's 60th birthday, Nick and John tackle by reader request the never before discussed subject of the Lost Child theme in the author's more than twenty published works. They re-introduce the Golden Threads idea — see their Pregnancy Trap podcast or the two Kanreki series on this subject (links in post) — then they do a deep dive into the crowded waters of Lost Children in her work, and then they go out out on a high-wire to speculate about what specific spring in her Lake subconscious mind is responsible for this recurrent inspiration.* The ‘Lost Child' Golden Thread “So What?” ConversationAs a birthday gift of sorts, Nick and John close off their month-long celebration of Rowling-Galbraith's life and work with a follow-up look at yesterday's review of the ‘Lost Child' Golden Thread that runs through her stories. After cataloging the almost forty ‘for instances' taken from the opera omnia in the penultimate entry in this series, Nick and John ask, “So What?” How does the possibility that Rowling had an induced abortion and is sufficiently unsettled by it that it inspires many even most of her books at least in part make any difference in understanding their artistry and meaning?‘Strike Extended Play' or ‘How a Seven Book Series Can Be Stretched into Ten' Get full access to Hogwarts Professor at hogwartsprofessor.substack.com/subscribe

Haunted Prison: A Shadow Devil, 1980 Riot Energy, and a Burned Relic Recapping The Dead Files “Death Sentence” (aka “Prisoner of Shadows”): (Season 1 Episode 19) which aired June 29, 2012.  We review a film shoot inside a decommissioned penitentiary, a whispered “Hey,” a client who took home a souvenir (then… burned it), and Amy & Steve breaking protocol mid-case.  We unpack why prisons hang onto rage, fear, and you-really-shouldn't-take-that energy.  Expect: shadow-devil vibes, wall-crawlers, portal “holes,” and a reveal where the sketch is meh but the consequences are not.  So grab your stolen hat, and join us where The Activity Continues… Patreon: Join before Sun, Oct 26, 2025 for the Birthday Happy Hour + live mini-recording (chat open, Q&A, spooky stories). https://www.patreon.com/theactivitycontinues  Content warningsPrison violence (referenced), discussion of the 1980 prison riot, medical distress, demons/attachments. No gore. HighlightsWhy this prison case hits different: protocol break (Amy & Steve meet pre-reveal)“Don't take souvenirs from haunted sites” — and definitely don't burn themThe “Devil Shop” nickname, shadow-devil activity, and that gross basement holeSound design tricks (insect buzzing = instant dread) and Exorcist homage vibesHow mob mentality supercharges hauntings long after the riot is over Chapter Markers00:00:00 Intro00:00:32 Hello! Housekeeping00:04:14 Overview00:06:00 Segment One – The Set Up00:17:34 Segment Two – The Investigation00:28:03 Segment Three – The Reveal00:38:40 Research and Rabbit Holes00:54:04 Outro/Disclaimer Episode Links:Dead Files episode: “Death Sentence / Prisoner of Shadows”Background reading on the 1980 New Mexico Prison Riot (content caution): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mexico_State_Penitentiary_riotDocumentary series about the riot from 1988 “Shakedown in Santa Fe”https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0910778/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrIwew30GRI Filming/tour info for the decommissioned penitentiary: https://www.cd.nm.gov/divisions/corrections-industries/old-main/old-main-filming-tours/ This site has lots of pictures and floor plans: https://www.cd.nm.gov/divisions/corrections-industries/old-main/Sandi K Shelby: https://share.google/s07n52SOq4Sx1s0gf Terrible Angels: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1727362/Our blog post: https://www.theactivitycontinues.com/blog/the-devils-shop-extras/Beverly McChesney: https://www.theactivitycontinues.com/chat-with-beverly-mcchesney/ The Activity Continues is a paranormal podcast where soul friends Amy and Megan chat about true crime, ghost stories, dreams, and other paranormal stuff including the TV show, The Dead Files. Our recaps are full of recurring jokes about recurring tropes. Sometimes we try to come up with possible explanations for some of the things that the clients experience. But this by no means indicates that we do not believe the clients or are invalidating their experiences. We do believe. This episode was recorded on August 27, 2025, and released on October 2, 2025.  Disclaimer:This podcast is in no way affiliated with Warner Brothers, HBOMax, the Travel Channel, Painless TV, or the TV show The Dead Files or any of its cast or crew. We're just fans who love the show and want to build a community of like-minded people who would enjoy hanging out and discussing the episodes and similar content. Credits:Hosted by: Amy Lotsberg and Megan SimmonsProduction, Artwork, and Editing: Amy Lotsberg at Collected Sounds Media, LLC. https://www.collectedsounds.com/Theme song. “Ghost Story” and segment music by Melissa WestBackground music: “Beyond the Stars” by Chris Collins Engage!Our website, https://www.theactivitycontinues.com/ Leave us a Voicemail: https://www.theactivitycontinues.com/voicemail/ (might be read on the show)Newsletter sign-up: https://www.theactivitycontinues.com/newsletter          We're on (almost) all the socials too @theactivitycontinues Affiliates/SponsorsPlease see our Store page for all the links for all our current affiliates. https://www.theactivitycontinues.com/store/ Thank you for listening, take care of yourselves. We'll see you next time!If you want to hear us early and ad-free EVERY week, become a Patron, join our Ghosty Fam and get bonus exclusive episodes! https://www.patreon.com/theactivitycontinuesSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-activity-continues/exclusive-content

This week, the boys talk a lot about the day's events, including the $55B sale of EA, AI “actress” Tilly Norwood, and the incredible year 2002, before getting into our featured conversation about Paul Thomas Anderson's “Punch Drunk Love”. Check the show notes if you want to scoot ahead to any particular segment of the show!  linktr.ee/theloveofcinema - Check out our YouTube page!  Our phone number is 646-484-9298. It accepts texts or voice messages.  0:00 Intro; 5:36:22 Gripes about EA, Tilly Norwood, and Toilets; 19:51 2002 Year in Review; 57:44 Films of 2002: “Punch Drunk Love”; 1:32:48 What You Been Watching?; 1:37:39 Next Week's Episode Teaser Additional Cast/Crew: Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzman, Robert Elswit. Hosts: Dave Green, Jeff Ostermueller, John Say Edited & Produced by Dave Green. Beer Sponsor: Carlos Barrozo Music Sponsor: Dasein Dasein on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/77H3GPgYigeKNlZKGx11KZ 
Dasein on Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/dasein/1637517407 Recommendations/TagsL  EA Tillly Norwood Toilets Downton Abbey Platonic Practical Magic Hulu Alien:Earth Peacemaker. Additional Tags: Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, Hard Eight, Daniel Day-Lewis, The Dallas Cowboys, Short-term memory loss, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Netflix, AMC Times Square, Tom Cruise, George Clooney, MGM, Amazon Prime, Marvel, Sony, Conclave, Here, Venom: The Last Dance, Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, Oscars, Academy Awards, BFI, BAFTA, BAFTAS, British Cinema. England, Vienna, Leopoldstadt, The Golden Globes, Past Lives, Apple Podcasts, West Side Story, Adelaide, Australia, Queensland, New South Wales, Melbourne, The British, England, The SEC, Ronald Reagan, Stock Buybacks, Marvel, MCU, DCEU, Film, Movies, Southeast Asia, The Phillippines, Vietnam, America, The US, Academy Awards, WGA Strike, SAG-AFTRA, SAG Strike, Peter Weir, Jidaigeki, chambara movies, sword fight, samurai, ronin, Meiji Restoration, plague, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, casket maker, Seven Samurai, Roshomon, Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood, Stellan Skarsgard, the matt and mark movie show.The Southern District's Waratah Championship, Night of a Thousand Stars, The Pan Pacific Grand Prix (The Pan Pacifics), Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch, Larry Ellison, David Ellison, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg.   

This week Dan and Chris catch up on some recent TV news which unfortunately means discussing politics... a lot. So yeah, we talk about the Jimmy Kimmel situation, Apple pulling a show to avoid stoking tension, how Warner Brothers became the bell of the ball, The Muppet Show returning for the 50th anniversary and Catfish The TV Show being cancelled. We also review Alien Earth and Eyes Of Wakanda.

The Deadcast unpacks the two-part extra-heady “King Solomon's Marbles”/'Stronger Than Dirt or Milkin' the Turkey,” using the instrumental to get into the Dead's 1975 dalliances with holography, as well as Phil Lesh's other unfinished pieces from Blues For Allah.Guests: David Lemieux, Ned Lagin, Ron Rakow, Eugene Dolgoff, Michael Parrish, Ed Perlstein, Keith Eaton, Nicholas G. Meriwether, Shaugn O'Donnell, Chadwick JenkinsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.