WEBVTT 00:00.400 --> 03:26.168 Welcome to the real Photoshow. My guest today is Tim Carpenter. Tim and I met up at the 2024 Chico Review to talk about his latest book, Little, published by the Ice Plant. We talk about how little is the last in a trilogy of Tim's books, local objects and Christmas Bucks Pond Road, both also published by the Ice Plant. And even though Tim was on photo work with Sasha Wolf in 2023, to talk about to photograph is to learn how to die, his wonderful essay on photography on the creative process. We don't take as deep a dive into that book as he and Sasha did, but we do end up having an amazing philosophical conversation about photography, about his work and his style of writing in that book. And I really enjoyed that conversation. Tim is incredibly smart, and I love speaking with people who are smarter than I am, and I learned a lot. And I think you will too. Or at the very least, you will really enjoy this conversation. But before we get to that, real Photoshow is sponsored by the charcoal Book Club. As a member, each month you'll receive a new museum quality photo book, hand picked for you by a team of expert curators and artists who love, study and work in the photography industry. Sometimes it'll be a classic title every bibliophile should own. Sometimes it'll be a new release from an emerging artist who is poised to make big waves. On the fourth week of each month, you'll receive an email announcing the upcoming book of the month, with images, published, descriptions and notes from guest curators. And if you already own one of the upcoming books, you can notify them within seven days by clicking the button at the bottom of the email that says already have this book, and they will work with you to swap the book out for one of similar value that you don't have. So check out charcoal Book club@charcoalbookclub.com and become a member today. And just one more plug for this episode. My dear friend Donna Sterling, who is also a co founder of the MFA portfolio review homecoming biennial show, has created a photo book, why am I sad? To be published by Cara Verlog, that delves into the complex relationship between mental health and photography. It's a deeply personal yet universally resonant work that explores the struggles of depression and mental health, reflecting on the silent battles that millions face daily. So you can pre order that book on Kickstarter. Just search for Donna Sterling, which looks like Dana d a n a s t I r l I n g, or search for why am I sad? And pre order that book on Kickstarter today and just one last personal note. I'll be taking the rest of the summer off from real photoshow. I'll be traveling with my daughter to Bulgaria to visit some friends, and then I'll be doing my annual family vacation with my three sisters. On top of that, I am finishing up a class that I'm teaching, so I just need a little break. But I'll be back in September with more episodes that I recorded at the Chico Review and, of course, episodes recorded not at the Chico Review. So thank you for listening. Enjoy this episode with Tim Carpenter, and we will talk in September. Well, hi, Tim. Thanks for making some time here at a Chico review. I know everybody is, so. Yeah, I really appreciate this. 03:26.224 --> 03:29.960 Not a problem. I love being here, and I love every opportunity to talk. 03:30.040 --> 03:30.624 Oh, that's great. 03:30.672 --> 03:31.424 As you can imagine. 03:31.472 --> 04:03.230 Yeah. Well, you do it well and you write well. Yes. Thank you. So you were on Sasha Wolf's show, and you guys broke apart and talked about your work in depth. And, of course, to photograph is to learn how to dye your book, your treatise on photography. So we won't do too deep a dive into things that people can go and listen to on Sasha Wolf's episode with you. But just as a quick sort of summary, if you could just tell us a little bit how you end up getting into all of this. How you end up getting into photography. 04:03.310 --> 04:03.662 Oh, my gosh. 04:03.686 --> 04:06.398 And it could be shorter, briefer than what you did with Sasha. 04:06.454 --> 05:45.094 Yeah. Yeah. No, well, I mean, the quick story is that my dad and I am my dad's son in so many ways. He's an engineer, not a train engineer. But the only reason I say it is because he's been really into trains his entire life. And part of being into trains is photographing them. For a kid, that's the reason he got his first camera as a kid. And the culture around photographing trains is massive. What that meant is he had cameras his whole life, and that meant that he, for me and my sister, who's closer to me in age, he gave us cameras, just point and shoots and plenty of film. And I think right away, I just knew this was the thing that made sense to me, and I loved it. And so I owe that to him, of course. But then, in many ways, kind of a late bloomer in life. And it just took me a long time to kind of figure out myself. And so it was into my thirties and then quite into my forties, where I was like, well, I got serious about taking some pictures. I got really lucky in that I had a job at the Portland Art Museum. There was a curator of photography there who took me under his wing. Guy named Terry Todemeyer, brilliant photographer, passed away a few years ago. But, like, it was just, you know, it was just some people who said, you know, like, hey, I see something going on here and I want to move this. You know, I think I can help you. And then another guy is named Robert Lyons. Like, he founded the Hartford art school's MFA in photography. And I met him at ICP in, like, just, you know, kind of a personal vision class. And he said, I see what's going on here, and I think, I think I got something for you. And, like, so it's just people, you know, wanting to be generous and wanting to help. And that's, like, where I am in my life now is like, you know, now I'm in a position to be generous and to help, and it feels really good to kind of, like, do that back. 05:45.222 --> 05:46.262 Yes, absolutely. 05:46.326 --> 06:21.458 Yeah. And you mentioned the book I wrote and this, that's my primary energy right now. But, like, you know, I'm really, I'm still primarily a photographer, you know, like, I'm secondarily a writer, as you know, like, but I'm so, I'm working on that. But, like, it's, it's really become very gratifying to kind of do both things. And right now, I feel like actually, the work in progress that I have right now that is really, it is actually relating to writing. And so, you know, like, it's just, it's become now like a snowball effect that's really been very, very fruitful for me, really, you know, and I feel like I'm in a really good place about thinking, you know, doing both of those things. 06:21.514 --> 06:27.972 Well, I don't think you could write. To photograph is to learn how to die without, you know, a life of experience doing it. 06:28.036 --> 06:59.328 Well, thank you for serving. Yeah, no, I mean, you know, like, I don't, this is gonna sound silly to say that it wasn't obvious to me when I started writing it, but like people said, you know, it's been a long time since a book from the perspective of a photographer's come out. It's been years since Shore and Adams wrote those things or Wright Morris, you know, like, all that kind of stuff. And, you know, a lot of the great writing right now is more from the kind of third person, you know, critical stance, even among photographers. So, yeah, it had to be a first person book, I don't think. I'm not a critic of photographs, you know, like, I just. That's not where my mind is. 06:59.384 --> 06:59.744 Right. 06:59.832 --> 07:13.768 So it had to be a kind of a first person. Here's why I do this. Here's why I think other people that I seem to connect with do it, you know, and. And not. Let's talk. You know, it's not a critique, you know, or a critical kind of view on photography. Right. 07:13.784 --> 07:19.064 You're not tearing down in this. No, no. Yeah. It isn't like this is the way, or. Yeah. 07:19.152 --> 07:42.496 Oh. You know, the other thing is, like I said, when I argue for something, it doesn't mean that I'm arguing against the other things, you know, as I'm just trying to carve out a little area that I think, you know, has been interesting and beneficial to my life. And there's certainly other ways to go about this, you know, like. But here's one. You know, and way more people have responded than I ever imagined would, and so that's been really. You know, that's just been the nicest thing. 07:42.568 --> 07:54.976 Right. And, you know, stylistically speaking, about the book, you have the. And you introduce this very early on. There's the main text in black. Then there's the emphasis text, clarifying text in blue. Right. 07:55.008 --> 07:55.416 Yeah. Yeah. 07:55.488 --> 08:09.416 And then there are the. I think you call them. The idea is so succinct, so irreducible. Irreducible. That's it. You didn't need to restate or put in your own words, then. That's in red. And at first, I found it confusing. 08:09.528 --> 08:14.940 Sure. So did we, by the way. Me and my editor, Mike Slack, we found it. 08:15.280 --> 08:31.574 But when you realize that you could just go ahead and read the black and return, or I. If you really get stuck or focused on a point, go ahead and read the book blue and the red, it actually works really well. In fact, it started to seep into my mind as if I was a researcher. 08:31.662 --> 08:32.414 Oh. Uh huh. 08:32.502 --> 08:38.630 And I was highlighting with red and blue highlighters and making notes in the margins. 08:38.670 --> 08:38.990 Like. 08:39.070 --> 08:44.990 Like, you put me in this place where I was doing research using your book that you had done your own. 08:45.110 --> 08:46.342 It's a nice way to hear it. Yeah, I like that. 08:46.366 --> 09:21.148 Yeah. And it was. It. Which I think, also, physiologically speaking, helped me take it all in. Right. Cause now I'm in research mode right now. I'm like, oh, I need to write something about this, too. And so I need to really pay attention to this. The other kind of effect it has with the way you phrase things, the way you. That first person idea is there's a very stream of consciousness kind of idea. And that because of that other blue and red text, it's like we're seeing your thought process. Here's your thought. And this is what you were thinking about when you were thinking about that thought, right? 09:21.204 --> 09:21.396 Yeah. 09:21.428 --> 09:22.596 Yeah, I really love all of that. 09:22.628 --> 10:22.718 Well, thank you. You know, I mean, you know, and probably most people can tell that the genesis is in David Foster Wallace because, you know, like, I was, you know, fairly early twenties when he started publishing essays in Harper's, and then I really loved those. But I loved the way these, you know, like that it kind of went forward and backward, and it had these footnotes, and then, you know, I got ahold of infinite jest and. And all that, and I just. I was like, you know, well, first I was like, I'm not as smart as this guy, but I. But he's mapping the way my brain seems to work. And I think, you know, in all. In some degree, all of our brains are like, you know, kind of just doing this, like, you know, constant kind of like, yeah, there's maybe one train of thought, but where all these other things are coming in, some are. Some ideas are getting rejected, some ideas are getting accepted, some are getting followed. And so, you know what? It became obvious. And again, like, I'm gonna say some things that, like, it seems obvious from the outside, but when you're ahead, when you're in the weeds, you just don't kind of think about it. But, like, you know, mike slack, again, he's like, well, you know, you're kind of writing. You're right. The book is evoking this thing that you are writing while you're doing it, you know, and it's just like, the experience of it happening. 10:22.774 --> 10:23.182 Right. 10:23.286 --> 10:51.836 You know, and just because all I am is a magpie, that's all I can, you know, is, like, I grab every idea that I can possibly get from. And it's not just from reading philosophy and literature. It's, you know, it's from all of, like, the wholeness of our bodies and, like, our, you know, like, well, and not only movies and music, but, like, I. Food and, like, your relationships and all these kind of things is like, you just yanking in all this kind of stuff and seeing what you can make of it. And so I just, you know, we kind of then ended up enacting that on the page. 10:51.908 --> 11:07.896 Right, right. And this is going to be maybe overly simple, an oversimplification, obviously, because the book is, yeah, thorough. But one of the things that kept coming back to me as I was reading it is the idea that almost like the. The Heisenberg effect. 11:08.008 --> 11:09.220 Oh, huh, right. 11:10.360 --> 11:33.720 The fact that we're observing and photographing is influencing what we're observing and photographing. Like. Like the relationship is so connected, is so not linear back and forth. What's the word? Reciprocal. The relationship is so reciprocal either through collaboration or just. Just the fact that we're looking at a landscape and thinking in a certain way and we're representing it in a certain way. 11:33.800 --> 11:34.636 Absolutely. 11:34.808 --> 11:47.700 Everything is so mediated. Right. There's us, there's the camera, and there's the thing. We're photographing the place or the person we're photographing. And so, yeah, it really helped, I think, sort of make everything feel more seamless in a way. 11:47.740 --> 12:36.632 Good. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, kind of what you were saying in there and what Mike and I kind of identified as another metaphor way we were thinking about it is that it did sort of mimic photography. And that, like, those quotes that I said, that irreducible, that's kind of like the tree in the photograph. You can't mess with it now. You're still controlling where you're standing. You're controlling all the technical controls of your camera. So there is, you know, but, like, the book sort of enacts, like, this idea that, like, there's part of me that's controlling this. And then, like I said, some of these quotes that just can't. They can't change, they can't be assimilated, they can't be owned by me. And that's really important. Like, that's another metaphor. Photography is. I think it's really important with the kind of camera work that I do and that most people I know do, is that we can't own and assimilate the world, and we have made our peace with that. Yeah, I really like that idea. So it was part of also enacting that idea. 12:36.696 --> 12:46.164 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. All right, so let's talk about what's coming up. Right. So you are about to publish a book called little. 12:46.252 --> 12:46.708 That's right. 12:46.764 --> 12:53.388 And it is the end of a trilogy with local objects and Christmas Day, Bucks Pond Road. So local objects is the earlier work. 12:53.404 --> 12:53.724 That's right. 12:53.732 --> 13:38.248 Christmas Day, bucks Pond Road, and with local objects, when you're specifically pointing at things in this semi rural landscape. Right. And with Christmas Day, bucks pondental, there's almost more of a sense of, like, getting lost. Right. As wandering through. But, yeah, and there's this sort of dark heaviness to the photos as well. In Christmas day, pucks pond. So then with those two books, maybe give a little more specific description on those two. How does little and trilogy, which you just showed me, some f and G's. So thank you. For those of you who don't know what I'm saying, folds and folded and gathered. I'm sorry. Folded and gathered. But, yeah. And just with that quick look, I got the sense that there was a coming together of these other two works. I don't know if that's true. 13:38.264 --> 15:08.376 Yeah. Thank you. I'm glad. I'm glad for that. So what happened, I'll give you the background, is that when local objects was just a set of pictures, Brad Zeller, who is one of the reviewers here's here with us this week, he looked at, like, a couple, 300 of them, and he gave me some. He liked all the pictures. He's like, but the one thing that he said was, this is like a thousand lonely walks home when I was a teenager. All right? So that kind of gave some body to some things that were kind of the ideas in my head already. It was so important. It was, like, a little zen for me, because what that means is that now you're talking about a time and a place, kind of a cyclical walking home and walking back. And so I was like, okay, that's going to guide the edit. And if you see local objects, you'll see that there are things that the protagonist, let's say, sees repeatedly, and those occur seasonally, and they occur throughout the book. Then there's also points in the book where, you know that the protagonist has made only a few steps and is moving through. So there's kind of temporal sequences. There's just, like, in the world sequences. So time and, you know, time and space both happen in there. The other thing that was important, though, is, like, I had a lot of pictures. It was a lot of pictures about kind of youth. So there was a lot of, let's say, skateboards, there were basketball hoops, there were trucks. There were all these kind of things. And I took those entirely out because I didn't want anything that had a sign or a symbol to it on its own. And rigorously, if you look at local objects, you're going to see that there's almost nothing in there that's going to point to something else, you know? 15:08.448 --> 15:12.180 No, no, there's a. It's almost a more architectural. 15:12.480 --> 16:26.800 Yeah. No, it's just trees and, you know, it's things, you know, and it's a certain distance from the world. So, like, that was an important room. And the reason I tell you that it's going to. It comes back in love. And that's why I'm going to say this. But so also, so what I. From what Brad said, I really think about everything I do as sort of aspects of myself at different times. And so, like, you know, local objects would be the aspect of me. 1516 or 17, somewhere in there, you know, kind of starting to realize that, you know, there's some other life for you. So then bucks pond road came around that. You're right. They were. They were. All the pictures were made in one day. I did talk with Sasha about this. It was kind of a period of my life where I didn't feel as in control of the picture making. So that was a different kind of thing. Whereas I felt like, in control of what I was doing in local objects. I just was kind of along the ride, just, like, figuring out what I was doing at the time with Buckspond Road. So that came around. But then the important thing to say is that aspect of me is maybe even a time ahead of myself. Like, okay, I'm 55, but, like, I was almost thinking, what am I going to be 60 or 65 when, like, things have kind of, like, what's going to be the change there? Like, what's that like? And not to put a too fine a point on the metaphor, but it is winter, you know, and winter is the metaphor for getting older, you know, like the winter of our lifetimes. So anyway. Okay, so then. 16:26.840 --> 16:42.060 But actually, on that point, what. One of the things I did notice about Christmas day, bucks Pond road, and I'm. I'm not sure if you mentioned this in Sasha's show is there is this vantage point of looking down quite a bit. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which has. Brings in a little bit of that darkness, I think. 16:42.180 --> 16:52.820 No, that's a nice observation. Thank you. Almost all the pictures in my mind are messed up. As far as composition, though, there's a lot of looking down. There's a lot of kind of looking back. 16:52.900 --> 16:53.180 Yeah. 16:53.220 --> 20:01.866 You know, I may have mentioned the. To Sasha, but if not, like, I second guessing oneself, like, literally my protagonist is saying, what did I mess up that now I've gotten in this position where I'm not in control of things. And that was an important. That seemed to be how my life was for that time. And so then, cool. I got out of that time, I was able to look a little bit reflectively or critically back on it and say, well, I wasn't that in control, but. So the pictures show that. But you're right. No. There's a lot of looking down at just blankness. And, you know, it wasn't a terrible time in my life. But it kind of was a kind of sucky time where things were kind of blank. So that made sense. But then so, okay, so. But there were still some ideas from local objects that I was still really interested in. I had a few pictures of my nephew. Who one day gave me this great gift by. He and I just walk, and we took a lot of picture walks. But he picked up some very large oak leaves. And he was only. He was six or seven at the time, maybe even five. I don't know. He picked them up, and he, you know, suddenly they're his wings, and he's, like, flapping them. And I just took a quick. By the way, I said, you know, like shooting with a Mamiya seven two. Like a rangefinder. Trying to photograph a person in motion is the dumbest thing in the world. But, you know, like, nonetheless, that was. That's the machine I had and still have. So. But I got. I got a few great pictures, wonderful pictures of him. Just in kind of this fluid motion with. With, you know, his imagination of the wings. What I really learned from walking with him. Kind of, like, got me back to my childhood. Is like he was always looking, and he would see a mark or a trace in the land. Something maybe something man made, something not. But he'd like, timmy, what is that? And sometimes I had answers, and sometimes I didn't. But I started to tap into this time, and it started to resonate with me. Is like this time when you see nation signs or things that seem to be symbols. And, you know, your young brain is trying to, like, knit this together and figure out what this is. And so what little is really focused on is figuring out what may or may not be signs or traces or marks. And I did use one picture of him. Because it was important for this book to not be its first person in the entire way. Except for you get one view of him, which was important for me to kind of flip it to a third person view. To really, like, talk, think through that idea of imagination. You know, like a young person. When we're figuring out the world, we're seeing these things. And we're saying, well, I might imagine this as this, or I might imagine it as that. You can pick up leaves, and suddenly they can become wings for you, you know? And so the title little obviously takes it to somewhere I wanted it to be, to, like, a six or seven year old aspect of myself. The other thing I should say is that Vic Chestnut's first record was called little. And the way he wrote, characters oftentimes talked about their youth and talked about them getting to a point where maybe things are going to be cool and maybe things are not going to be cool for that life, you know, and this kind of precipice, this point where, you know, who knows what's going to happen? And so I just. That kind of idea has really animated what I was thinking about in that series. So there's a couple different reasons. 20:01.898 --> 20:02.138 Yeah. 20:02.194 --> 20:03.386 That it's going called little. So. 20:03.458 --> 20:06.770 Yeah, yeah. And should I ask about an essay? 20:06.850 --> 20:24.730 There is no writing in this book. I'm a guy, you know, I gotta tell you. So I teach, you know, a lot. I teach photo book stuff. And, you know, this is almost always one of the. I was about to say pain point, and I will say it's a pain point. A lot of people want to have writing in their books. And, like, I was like, you know, cool, but all you need to do is convince me that the writing is integral to the book. 20:24.810 --> 20:25.386 Right? 20:25.538 --> 20:36.894 I don't want writing that is about the book. The book has got. The book has to be. The writing has to be part of the book. And if the writing's not there, the book has to fail. That's. That's all my requirements are, you know, that's what I want. 20:37.022 --> 20:44.534 I love books where the writing is the book. Plus, in some ways, like, oh, I love this story and I love this book. Yeah, yeah. 20:44.582 --> 21:43.710 Well, and you don't want any. I would never want anything expository about the work, you know, if it's kind of some obtuse story, you know, like, that's great, but. And I will tell you, this feeds into this rule that I have for myself and for all my students. Is that a photo book, an exhibition or whatever, should be the least amount of things you need to have to make it. And that means the least amount of design moves. It means the least amount of pictures. It means if there's no, you know, if there's some writing and you can take it out and the work still works, then you take it out, you keep reducing until you've got this irreducible thing again, this thing that cannot be, you know, cannot be taken away from without damaging it. If we get to the point where we know where the damage happens, then I feel like we know where we are, you know, so that's really good. And so listen. But also somebody says, I need these words. And I was like, if they can sell me on it being integral, I'll be like, cool, fine. But I would have to say Buckspond Road does have one line from Marilyn Robinson in the colophon. There is nothing in this colophon. There's just nothing. So it's pretty bare. 21:43.830 --> 21:58.278 Yeah. Oh, yeah. So now with your book little, in terms of it being the end of the trilogy, how is this putting a sort of period to the end of the other work? 21:58.374 --> 22:40.080 Yeah, well, so maybe I wouldn't say that it does put an end. Maybe I'm gonna say cyclical, you know, and I would like that idea for maybe it to be, you know, so if. If local objects was me at 15, 1617 and Buckspond Road was, you know, again, this maybe sixties, some. Something like that, now I'm going back to the five, six, seven year old. And, you know, it's just a cycle. You know, like various different aspects of me had made some sense of things, has not made some sense of things. Now, I would say that maybe this sort of brings things together because it's the first time I've ever acted in a way that I wanted to emphasize first person and third person. So maybe that's how kind of it knits the previous two books together without, like, say, ending them, for example. 22:40.120 --> 22:40.552 Right, right. 22:40.616 --> 23:17.368 But it's, you know, it's a good. It's a really good question. But because I do think that it does sort of bring some themes or some ideas together, funny enough, yanking them back in time, you know, like at a previous time. But, like, kind of using. It's a really important thing for me to use what I call a third person picture. I don't use them very often, you know, so it was, it was a really important kind of thing. And figuring out where it landed in the book and what it did for the book to bring that all together. I mean, also, the other thing I would say is that the books that I've done with tis, with deadbeat, with Chris Graves, those have also had aspects that sort of feed into this bigger thing. So. So while I do call these a trilogy because they're my main monographs with the ice plant. 23:17.424 --> 23:17.832 Right. 23:17.936 --> 23:20.280 Other books have sort of fed into different aspects. 23:20.320 --> 23:20.616 Absolutely. 23:20.648 --> 23:28.232 And they've even, in fact, because I'm just always shooting in Illinois, there's actually, like, subject matter that has cropped up, reappeared in different of these books that I've done. 23:28.256 --> 23:36.674 Right. Well, I don't know if. If you've talked about this either, but the older I get, the more I realize how much more all the work is connected. 23:36.762 --> 23:39.082 Oh, absolutely, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 23:39.266 --> 23:42.098 Projects start to just dissolve away, you know? 23:42.114 --> 25:00.152 And the thing is, I don't travel to make pictures. I just keep going there. I mean, I travel to my home in Illinois to make pictures, but, like, I don't go to other places. And so, like, it's just become a really fruitful way for me to work. It just, it makes sense for me. And, you know, because then I get to see the same old buildings, same old trees, you know, like, through the years and in different light during a day or through the seasons. It's all become really important to me. And I've said this before, but I'll say it again, it's like this massive flux of the world outside of us is sort of matched by this massive flux inside of us. And so if I found if I can go to the same place over and over and over, that external variable, I can tamp it down a little bit. Now, you can't tamp it down entirely, but I can tamp it, and I can focus more on these internal things, like, how am I a different person than I was a year ago? Because I know I am, you know, and, like, how am I even changed from six months ago? Or how is my mood even different from this morning? You know, like, so it allows me to kind of, like, just think back. And that's why, that's why you hear me talking about aspects of myself, right, in the, in the pictures and not new subject matter. It's really new, kind of. I'm always a guy who's just trying to figure out new formal strategies. You know, like, that's the only way that I'm going to make my pictures much different is figuring out how my formal approach to the world, what is the distance I'm placing myself against the world, and what's my relationship to all those external things. 25:00.256 --> 25:00.848 Yeah. 25:00.984 --> 25:02.824 So that's the important part of it for me. 25:02.912 --> 25:13.780 You mentioned with little, this sort of not knowing how things are going to turn out, that idea. Are you sort of tying that to kind of where we are right now in the world? 25:15.560 --> 25:35.594 No, it's a good question. Yeah, no, I think there is that tension, and especially right now in the United States is like, yeah, we're on a precipice, you know, like, you know, I'll just even relate this back to, you know, when Obama was elected. Like, me and my friends, we were like, holy shit, like, things are going the way that we think that they should you know, like, people are going to be more respected, and, like, I. 25:35.602 --> 25:37.018 Felt like we turned a bit of a corner. 25:37.074 --> 25:39.070 We're gonna have better lives, you know? 25:39.530 --> 25:40.010 And then. 25:40.050 --> 25:58.968 But, like, how quickly the backlash to that, like, only eight years later, you know, like. And, like, all our dreams are kind of. Of dashed, you know, like, our hopes are dashed and how quickly that happened, and it's just sort of mind blowing, but, like, you know, we've had these cycles before. You know, like, history has had these cycles before, and. 25:59.024 --> 25:59.776 Absolutely. 25:59.888 --> 26:27.866 I was almost talking. I was talking with Brad Zeller about this. This is a little dorky kind of talk, but we were, you know, I said, like, I think the Obama presidency was, like, the enlightenment, and then the Trump thing is a romantic, capital r romantic rebellion against, hey, we don't. We don't like this science and ideas. Like, whatever we feel is right is what's right. You know? Who cares about facts anymore, you know? And part of me, you know, you kind of understand that. That's kind of like, that's been our history for thousands of years. 26:28.018 --> 26:32.602 Human nature, to have this faction that wants to push back. Yeah. 26:32.786 --> 26:57.082 But, you know, I am so interested in these inflection points in our lives, and they are, you know, obviously kind of wrought larger in our societies is like, yeah, man, who knows? Like. Like, things could get better, things can get worse, and even if things get worse, we're probably gonna figure out a way. You know, like, somehow, you know, like, despite ourselves, we'll figure out a way. I don't know. But that thing has always been. That part of that thing has always been interesting to me. 26:57.146 --> 27:03.274 Yeah. It also goes back to that idea of first person, third person. Like, you're thinking more externally. 27:03.362 --> 27:04.810 Yeah, precisely. Right, right. 27:04.850 --> 27:06.578 Well, this has been great. Thank you. 27:06.674 --> 27:07.346 My pleasure. 27:07.418 --> 27:10.910 Yeah. So nice to see you in person. To see everyone in person. 27:11.450 --> 27:14.766 It is so much better. Yeah. To look into your eyes and computers. 27:14.858 --> 27:15.182 Great. 27:15.246 --> 27:15.510 Yeah. 27:15.550 --> 27:16.822 All right, well, thank you very much. 27:16.886 --> 27:17.534 My pleasure, Michael. 27:17.582 --> 27:18.318 All right, bye bye. 27:18.334 --> 27:18.930 Bye. 27:24.550 --> 27:35.670 Real photoshow is produced by me, Michael Chovendalton, music by Matteo Chovendalton and Jim Raimundo. If you like the show, please rate and review with all the stars on your listening platform.