So the deaths of despair have generally been defined as self-harm, which includes unintentional and intentional drug overdose deaths, alcohol-related deaths like cirrhosis of the liver, and of course suicide. I'm Shannon Monet. I'm a learner chair of public health promotion and associate professor of sociology in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. My research is really interested in social disparities in health as well as geographic variation in a variety of health outcomes. Most recently I've been interested in trying to understand the causes and correlates of disparities from drug, alcohol, and suicide mortalities and related diseases of despair. So one of the things that I think distinguishes these types of diseases and deaths from some other types of mortality, for instance heart disease or stroke or cancer, are that drug, alcohol, and suicide mortality seem to have an underlying link in terms of main drivers of them are things like depression and anxiety and frustration and dislocation from social institutions which include things like not having a job, having a lot of family distress, and not being connected to social institutions. Individual level data on these things are really hard to come by and so oftentimes what we have to do is aggregate up to larger geographic levels like the county level for instance and when you do that what you're doing is using contextual indicators of things like poverty and unemployment to try to predict overall rates in these areas and that of course is flawed because we don't have information on the individual person who died other than their sex, their race, their age so we don't know about their whole life course and the extent to which that influenced the way in which they died or influenced their first initiation of drug misuse or alcohol misuse or when the mental health problem started to develop. One of the things that my research really shows is that drug, alcohol, and suicide mortality are very geographically dispersed, range pretty substantially across the country from really low rates to really high rates. In general the most salient predictors of county level high rates of drug, alcohol, and suicide mortality is not only current economic distress, the conditions that are present right now like poverty and unemployment and disability, but a more of a long-term transition into economic distress. So places that were once economically stable and even prosperous in the 1980s because of strong manufacturing industry because of unionization, those are the places that have seen the most significant economic decline over the past three decades or so and that decline matters just as much as kind of chronic long-term economic distress. So at the absolute level poor economies really matter, lack of opportunity really matters, but so does change as sort of a shock into that labor market. The other thing is that the media often use the sentiment that addiction doesn't discriminate and of course that's true, anyone can become addicted, but it's also true that drug overdose mortality rates are much higher in some geographic areas than others and one of the problems that can arise when we say addiction doesn't discriminate is that it assumes that we should just distribute resources equally and oftentimes the places that are dealing with the largest consequences get undercut because of that. On election night when the returns were coming in what I noticed from the map is that the places where Donald Trump was winning, especially places where he wasn't predicted to win, that map looked an awful lot like my drug overdose mortality map and so I purchased some data just for Michigan at the time and ran a basic correlation and noticed that counties where Trump overperformed the most relative to how the previous Republican candidate did those places had the highest drug alcohol and suicide mortality rates and then I purchased the rest of the national data and expanded that from there and found that he overperformed the most in counties where drug alcohol and suicide mortality rates were high, but even more than that he performed the most in places that were distressed upon all kinds of indicators so not just mortality but also economic distress, family distress, places for instance that have high rates of divorce were also more likely to be places where Trump overperformed and places that have less social capital so opportunities for building social relationships, organizations that people can be involved in all of these factors were partial explanatory indicators of why Trump overperformed in the places that he did. I'm from upstate New York and when people think of New York they often think about it as a really liberal state. The reality is when you go north of say Westchester County if you get out of the city at all the level of conservative increases as the further north that you go so I'm from a rural town, a very conservative town and a lot of people in that town voted for Trump and they were very enthusiastic about it and one of the things that they know is that they feel like the Democratic Party has really helped the poor people the most and kind of forgotten working class folks in small towns and these are people who are working they're working in jobs like diners, their mechanics, their bus drivers, some of them are small business owners who have seen the profits significantly decline because of increased regulation that might make sense for corporations but doesn't make as much financial sense for small businesses. What they're seeing is that the best and the brightest leave the small town to go off to college and never come back and that leaves a larger and larger concentration after multiple generations of the people who are least resource and most vulnerable and those people tend to not be working and people in my town see this and they get frustrated because it's a small town you know everybody so if there's one grocery store to go to and you see somebody using their snack benefits on food that you can't afford to buy yourself then that is a big frustration for people who live in my town. They're also increasingly saying that young people here don't want to work that there are jobs available but they can't find people to take those jobs and that you know frustrates people in my hometown that are working class and feel like they're just breaking their back to make ends meet and that so many resources appear to be going to the low-income people in that town. They're also seeing increases in drug overdoses and police officers are frustrated because they're spending a lot of their time having to revive people and carry Narcan and it limits their ability to call on other problems that arise because if their time is so taken by these drug overdoses and it's a resource that isn't available for other kinds of responses so ultimately people in my town express a lot of frustration with political elites with academic elites they watch different news than I watch they read different things that than I read and the message that they're getting from the sources that they're consuming media from are that America is in pretty dire straits things don't look to be going very well and it's the Democrats fault and what we really need is someone to come in here and just blow everything up. One of the big debates is whether this is really about economic distress or racial resentment and I don't think that those are competing explanations so in places that the economy declines those places are really vulnerable and ripe to internalizing messages of racial resentment and sociologists have been talking about this for a long time when the economy is going well overt expressions of racism decline and when the economy is doing poorly and they're and it feels like it's a zero-sum game and there's a limited number of resources available then racial resentment tends to increase the other issue is that we have to remember that Donald Trump lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes so not only did Hillary Clinton receive more more votes than Trump but Trump actually underperformed relative to Mitt Romney he received a lower percentage of the vote share in 2016 compared to what Romney received in 2012 but because our system is based on the Electoral College what that means is that some states matter more when it comes to the election outcome and in this particular case Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan were the three game changers Trump won those three states by a combined 77,000 votes spread across three states if we just break it down to Pennsylvania for instance he won Pennsylvania by 26,000 votes and over 60 percent of his victory share there of those 22,000 votes came from one county LaZern County which is the home to Wilkes-Barre now Wilkes-Barre is one of these places that has experienced significant economic decline over the past 30 years the income there meeting hustled income in LaZern County is now lower than it was in 1980 quarter of prime age men and women are not working they're either unemployed or they're out of the labor force all together and so when we start actually pinpointing the regions where Trump won where he wasn't predicted to win these are the game changer regions the swing places those are places that have experienced significant economic decline and that's not to say that other parts of the country didn't have large concentrations of highly educated and affluent people also voting for Trump but we need to distinguish between whether our question is who voted for Trump versus what was the difference maker for Trump winning this election in the primaries Hillary Clinton won southern states won western states she won the states that a democrat likely would have won in the national election anyway okay sanders won the primary in states in the industrial midwest that then trump ended up winning in the national election so the question is then for democrats going forward is it more important that your candidate win the so-called swing states versus the majority of states because right now the system is based on whoever gets the most delegates but whoever gets the most delegates might end up being irrelevant in the national election if increasingly our elections come down to a handful of states a lot of people in the media and academics in the public were surprised at the outcome of this last election and and there have been all kinds of explanations of trying to understand why what happened and underlying a lot of these explanations is that this was just an all of a sudden thing that oh my gosh our country just changed overnight what the heck went wrong when the reality is the cues have been there for a long time that since the 1980s the overwhelming majority of places in this country have not received any of the economic gain increasingly more and more income and wealth are filtering into the hands of very very smaller groups so that we have a massive income and wealth inequality problem in this country and that didn't happen overnight so well we have devalued trade skills we've devalued work in manufacturing and increased the value that we place on technology and finance large swaths of this country have been left behind it's been building for the last three decades and it's not just about the economics it's not just about the paycheck we used to be a nation of producers we used to actually make things and now the highest paid jobs are people who click a button on a keyboard and move money from one balance to another balance and so increasingly people in the US and even internationally are feeling disconnected from their labor they feel like their their work is devalued underappreciated it's not meaningful and that meaning has influence for the rest of of their lives it affects mental health physical health it affects family relationships and so all of this decline together this kind of package or basket of decline the chickens are finally coming home to roost on this and and people are reacting with their voting behavior now i've always been interested in trying to understand social and geographic disparities in a wide range of health outcomes and i always said i wasn't necessarily interested in what the health outcome was i was just interested in the things that led to inequality but then when i started to try to understand what was going on with substance misuse disparities and i started to see these tight connections to this sense of anime and aimlessness and anxiety and frustration and that all made sense given that the economy has been declining in these places for a long time and and so i thought you know what are the common the common binds here and that's what really got me fascinated and interested when you see these problems affecting rural areas that you know drugs have always been an issue but you know heroin kind of came along and is now decimating small cities and rural areas that just don't have the resources to combat it and you know i think i just wanted to try to understand why this is happening so the majority of resources thus far have gone into trying to increase access to treatment and naloxone narcan brand name which is the antidote to an opioid overdose and tremendous amount of resources have been spent on these things and certainly treatment is important in increasing access to narcan is important but we're not going to narcan our way out of this because the problem is bigger than opioids it's bigger than drugs the problem is a result of long-term economic decline and social decline our relationships have disappeared we have traded space and houses which have continued to get bigger for friendship which has continued to decline okay we've we've given up connection for stuff in the united states and so what that means is that in order to solve the opioid problem and all the connected problems with it is we really have to get down to the core foundation of those problems and that has to do with people feeling like there is no meaning in their life and that things are worse off than they were in the past


of the script. Seeing it as sequential, seeing some images is more important than others and all that. All the judgment is where the the guilt comes in. It seems in the world, like, it seems as if persons let other persons down. It seems as if persons do things, bad things to other persons. And there seems to be a sense of guilt from doing the wrong things or not doing the right thing.  Much to the surprise when you start to look it back, the guilt comes from ordering the thoughts that produce the world. The guilt comes from the beliefs that I can order my own thoughts. If those thoughts were real, then guilt would be justified and inevitable. The atonement and the miracle shows that they're not real. And that's why it alleviates the guilt. You can see where, if you really believe that guilt was in terms of behavior, I got a movie we saw when a man loves a woman, you know, where there was a lot of things that came up about seeing your children, you know, at the end when he was going off to another place and he said, I'll call you every day, you know, and this and that. It seems like, it seems like if you could do enough of the right things, you can alleviate and overcome guilt in that sense. I remember a Chicago song by Peter Sotera, I will make it up to you, I promise you. Kind of a deal. It's impossible. It's impossible to do enough of the right thing or make it up in a form-send. Atonement. Right. It's impossible.   It will never, ever happen again. What can I do, you know, as a fury of what can I do to make it up to you? Is it anything? Tell me, I'll do anything. Anything. Please. Don't leave me and this and that. Is this somehow the atoning can take place out there on the screen? What a glorious thing to realize. It can't. Oh, good. I'll stop trying. But it is, the guilt is coming about from trying to order and judge the world. All the, all the preferences, all the hierarchies, all the things that I feel are the important stuff and the indifference stuff and the unimportant stuff. All is ordering of thoughts. That's where the guilt is coming from. So then it makes sense to watch my mind and to try to say, I, instead of ordering my own thoughts, instead of ranking things and making hierarchies in my mind, I would rather have a miracle. Which just sees illusions as illusions. Which has no order of difficulty because it doesn't seem one situation is any different than another. I mean, that's like a real alternative to ask for. That will bring about the end of guilt. So in a sample that you gave of infidelity, the ordering of thoughts is not specifically related to infidelity. It's just ordering of thoughts in a general sort of way. It seems like in this world there are heinous crimes.  And if there will never be a way out of it, they've done it. They've actually committed this heinous crime. And when you get to the chorus, the chorus is not only saying that there's no difference between shoplifting and mass murdering, but there's no difference between mass murdering and thinking about mass murdering. There's no difference between mass murdering and thinking about shoplifting. Mass murder, shoplifting, thinking about mass murdering, thinking about shoplifting. There's no difference between thinking about shoplifting and acting out and mass murdering because it's all, there's still an ordering of thoughts that are going on. It's not like a continuum with them. Well that then works and in that perspective there's a difference between committing mass murder and thinking about film skiing. I mean it doesn't have to be in our moral code. It's still ordering of thoughts. I like skiing or whatever. That's what we were getting at this morning because Rhonda brought up some points. She said she wanted to go into this idea of private minds and private thoughts. She was saying it has to be more than just keeping a secret from someone. Did she call a practice session for life? She said no, it's regular session. But the whole idea is that everything that you perceive through the body's eyes is the private world. But Cosmo says you constructed it as a private world. And so it's not about a personal thing of keeping a secret from somebody else. In a personal sense it goes much, much, much, much beyond that. And it's neat when you can just start to say, okay I see what I'm going to have to look at here. I'm not going to have to try to make amends and make it up to everybody I've ever heard in my life in a form sense. But I am going to have to change my perception. I'm going to have to let go of my thinking. It's producing, seeming to produce this world. It's a mind overhaul to use our title of the pamphlet we're working on. This is how all illusions came about. The one who makes them does not see himself as making them. And their reality does not depend on him. Whatever cause they have is something quite apart from him. And what he sees is separate from his mind. He cannot doubt his dreams reality because he does not see the part he plays seem real. No one from a dream the world is dreaming for him. He becomes a part of someone else's dream. This would apply to a lot of the anger and the frustration that you feel in terms of the world. It's like how can I be the dreamer of the dream? Why am I answering to my boss? If I'm the dreamer of the dream, why am I going up, up, up, up, up? When he barks a command out, why do I jump? Am I a part of his dream? He becomes a part of someone else's dream. This is what I, the deeper I went into this, the more it was like there was a strong call and I was seeing where I'm being called to a very high calling. But this is not going to be a calling where I'm going to be barking or responding to anybody else's barks. And every time there would be even a little twinge of something in there, then I would see, wait a minute here, what am I doing? Am I the dreamer of the dream? It's kind of like, it's to take an example, you know, there have been people that have worked with the course, studied the course and they start to make a livelihood out of the course, writing articles about the course. And then after a while they think, well, you know, it would be nice to get more access or have my articles read by more people. So if I could just get an article in a national magazine on the course, oh, that would be good. So you go, that's that's, and then you have the editor of the national magazine on the course who has all his restrictions and requirements and deadlines, get this in, but I got to have it in by such and such and this and that and this and that and guess what?  You know, I mean, that's just another example of how our path that we're, I mean, we're all being called to is not barking, not responding to the bark of someone else, to coming to a place like Tom was bringing up last night in our little session when the question was asked about relying on the Holy Spirit. If you're going to respond to a voice, respond to that voice, the deeper you go in this, the more you come to see, if I'm going to have a boss, why not make my only boss the Holy Spirit? But at the same time, I think it's helpful to think in terms of moving in that direction, because if I'm not clear enough that the Holy Spirit is coming through loudly strong, I've got to take steps in that direction. For me, it came in the form of the last formal job I had. I did not have a boss standing over me telling me what to do and asking me where I was going and what I was doing.  I like everything you're doing, so just keep doing more of whatever you want to do. And so, I mean, for me, it was the symbol of moving in that direction of having more autonomy and having less of this external, worldly voice telling me, you have to do this, you have to do that, you have to do this, you have these deadlines, that kind of thing. I made it all up myself.  There were any deadlines for things to be done. It was because I decided I wanted to do it. So it wasn't anybody else standing over me. And for me, that was a great symbol of moving in that direction. But, you know, I don't think, I mean, what you're talking about is what we're moving towards, not necessarily, which is very important. You have to articulate that. Yeah, I have to have a clear view and keep remembering what it is I'm looking towards, what I'm moving towards, you know, so that I have that clearly in my mind all the time, but also to see where I perceive myself and say, you know, yes, I'm going to move in that direction, but as I perceive myself right now, I have to take steps, it seems that I'm taking steps in that direction. Yeah, even the idea of consensus, I know a lot of people have wanted to just sit down. Some people do sit down with their bosses and really go into things deeply. In some situations, it doesn't seem like that's an option. But I would say that the messengers of peace, or when you come together for your logistical meetings to do what we're doing, that can be a very present symbol, so to speak, of what we're talking about here. And that's what, this is the model for that.


Welcome to another episode of Coffee with Richard, I'm Richard Hines. Today's subject is going to be for my protection people out there. I think this is going to be an interesting subject and nobody talks about it. I haven't seen anything on it so I'm going to talk about how to start a protection dog in two different ways. I have my two instructional videos on protection and the first one is how to play with your dog and get the elite skills through a toy. So you can build your elite protection dog skills of technique and control before putting them in real aggression with a decoy. The second part of that video is starting dogs from scratch with no toy development straight to aggression. So I show both versions, so again the toy one is developing in play and then going to go into the aggression phase the same as those other dogs are doing with a decoy. The difference is the toy develop dogs are developing the techniques behind the scenes before real aggression training starts. So when they get to real aggression with a decoy the skills are already built in there making things much easier when a real decoy steps in to put real pressure and aggression on the dog. So there's a big difference. So in that video my first instructional on protection training I do both to show people how to start the dog in play if you don't have decoys to work with and just take your time and play with your dog to develop those elite skills and again other side of it I show going straight to real aggression with no toy development and having to teach the high elite exercises while being in a fully aggressive high state of emotion doing the same skills. So there's a big difference and since I'm working with this other shepherd right now it's a perfect way to show people the difference in how it looks and the outlook to dogs. So I'm going to show you some clips here and you're going to see the black German shepherd Axel he has an orange ball that I throw out there and we're doing holding next to the leg on the long line the first step of developing control and I want you to see the difference in the attitude of these two dogs who are both exactly the same age when we started these skills Axel the black shepherd was almost a year old in that in the video I'm going to show you here the clips when we started him in play protection and this other shepherd Achilles all same age about a year old and we're doing his side with no play development straight to a real aggression protection. So I want you to see the difference in the state of mind when you start two completely different pathways. So watch here and just watch the clips will be quick just watch remember the black shepherd is doing play control and Achilles the other German shepherd is in real aggression real fight mode watch the difference in the two the way they bark the way they push forward the energy so just take a look at these two dogs and the difference in the way they look sound and act Axel the black one while you do this you get a lot of talking because you get a lot of driving passion he loves that ball more than anything so but you see it's controlled easily it's not into the lines in the right where Achilles on the other hand wants me bad wants to fight me cannot control himself his mind is all over blast into the lines he popped the punk brown collar off that's how much power he's been putting into those lines to come and get after me right one is in a passionate state a play state just let me have my toy can I please have my toy but he knows he's got a bark and stay active and try to control himself on the leg to get the ball to play with it Achilles on the other hand just you challenge him at all and he thinks there's any whiff of a fight it is on right he is coming and he wants to put the fight he is in overdrive real fight drive is what we call that the fence drive fight drive and he is not playing right so and I just put up a few clips of him over the last few days to a week of with me with no equipment on this guy is coming for me whether I have equipment on or not he does not care he just wants me he wants to beat me down eat me up but that's what we want in the end on a real protection dog now we're just trying to gain control over this because we don't want out of control undisciplined protection dogs because that is a lawsuit in the making also making confused dogs of when they can use something when they can't it's all over there is no real boundaries to the game if you don't create them and make them understand the game of protection in my system is a game of absolute control it's black and white there is no gray area right that mistakes can happen I won't allow it has to be solid solid 100% on the money right on the technique control and when we tell them they can do something and they are not allowed to do something and just hold their ground until we say otherwise that is a real protection dog okay so but you see if you start in play drive and you do these things dogs are a little calmer right they can think clearer it's easier to bring them down in order for them to learn when you go straight into real aggression and you get fight it is much harder to bring them down to think clearly to learn the exercises of control because they just lose their minds and go into absolute fight mode right so it's two completely different mindsets now I have said one's not better than the other both are fine as long as you know what you're doing right so that's why you mostly see right in sport dogs I always talk about this if you see any of my shots in verse real protection dogs or anything like that I was showing shots in dogs or IPO ring sport dogs and hunting dogs in one of the videos and showing that in the sports the trainers want them calm and wait there for their reward their toy bird right decoy who's a toy shots and decoy with the sleeve on who's a toy it's the dogs are not going after man it's about playing with the suit the sleeve are going to get the duck okay it's all in prey drive I've always said in sport training it's much easier right to get a dog to learn and to control sport dogs much easier right yes you got to control the drive and adrenaline but that's why sport trainers and hunters don't give any reward to the dogs unless they're in a calm state because then it would very be very difficult for the sport trainers and hunters to deal with their dogs right because the dogs if they got emotional would be blowing out and just breaking the exercises right and the trainers would have a very hard time trying to hold them in and control them okay so that is why the sports dog protection sports hunters all want calm state before they reward and again in the protection sports they're not hunting the man they don't want to really fight the man it's about play right it's all about playing and playing with the sleeve and all that there's nothing personal to the man okay and I've explained that in the other videos I had a long video on showing the differences in the mentality and psychology of the dogs in the games and the psychology the game tries to put all the dogs to keep them down and not let them be emotional because then it's very difficult to difficult to control them so but in real protection right we need real aggression and we need real talking and we want real fight at man not going after the equipment okay so it's much harder to bring these guys down and concentrate them on holding control exercises when they're just like this I gotta fight I just want to hurt them right let me fight them okay big difference in in the emotion the energy the drive okay and the clear thinking here with the killies little bit of a problem right for us as the trainers now of him is when he came to us the trainers who do protection at their facility the canine officers dogs are great breedings are great but the training is geared a certain way without control so it's constantly shopping there and then grabbing the sleeve and playing and all that right so the longer that goes on makes my life much harder I will get it done all will be done 100% all dogs that we do is with 100% will learn the skills and control it just might take a few days more right if they're really throttled like Achilles so if you allow a dog to jump on a line and go crazy with no discipline and no control right like I said many many times before that jumping on a leash and going crazy is not protection it is not a protection dog and people sell those all the time and people think that that's real protection that's chaos that's out of control there's no skill to that and having a working dog just jump on the end of a line takes no skill whatsoever or any effort to teach they do it naturally right just bring something out that they're interested and they'll go crazy on the end of a leash and go nuts without even teaching them right there is no skill to that there is no teaching to that it's just letting a dog go crazy wild no discipline no control whatever you put in there they will go and grab don't even have to teach that either right so when you see that kind of exercise it's just chaotic nonsense that's what we call in our my system pre-protection work right that is getting a dog's energy there and just making sure they bite properly before we go put all the control on it and make a real protection dog right but by no means is a dog that jumps on a leash and does this a protection dog far from it not even close that's what we call nursery school right kindergarten dog so Achilles having this over and over and over in his career up until a year old he has learned that chaos and out of control mentality and no discipline just flying on the end of a line out of control right he will always get his reward of the bite sleep while he's in chaos and no discipline right so you're just rewarding the behavior over and over and over and over and over and over I'm just going crazy right so the dog now understands that discipline has no part of this game he doesn't need to he never has to use his mind he just has to get emotional and go crazy bring a closer right and then of course they give him the sleeve as a reward and he wins again and he now knows that all this chaos and crazy on the line and pulling on a leash and right no structure no discipline no skills gets him what he wants so now a trainer like me who gets this kind of dog goes all right if it was done temporarily you know a few weeks months fine still you're gonna have to turn it around and have to deal with this you know a little bit months to half a year to up to year that's all you know now you got to turn around his whole year of what he thinks of protection or what he knows it as just flip out chaos lunacy no discipline no control chaos there's no rules to the game it's psychotime right which is a lawsuit in the making for a person who buys a dog like this and has this kind of uncontrollable dog in society right now it gives a great dog he's not off the hook he doesn't just go bite anybody it's not like that right that's why we have him because we want the stability that he's a great family dog he's living with four children with us now right I mean he's fantastic as a personality wonderful family dog take him out no problems he's not going after everybody or anything like that it's just when he knows it's party time to do protection he cannot control himself and there are no rules no boundaries and it's on so imagine you go out in public like that and you need him eventually and he's supposed to be here and heal and you just go watch right and his watch is going to be fly off the end of the line and you're going to be going like this and having to hang on for your life because there's no rules no boundaries no discipline all you said was to alert and then the dogs fly on the handle because there is no game right no control how close was the person right so you have no control over any of that it's just a bad terrible I say lawsuit waiting to happen so that's why we have to have such control and such structure no accidents in public all as well they love people love children dogs right they're completely social balanced right no pissy stuff no growling of people for no reason or children okay anybody can pet them unless we turn them on you wouldn't see it that is the ideal protection dog so right now Achilles because he was not developed in play we have to start his structure game right now while he's in high throttle out of his mind mode wanting to eat me alive right I mean he's not playing when he's engaged with me he's coming for me right he's I mean he breaks the prom calls off he's so hard we always have an extra line on because the you know the guy is coming we have to have extra things for security right because he had no development of structure up until he came to me and I'll show it over the next week very quickly we'll have Achilles down perfect off the leash biting when he's supposed to all will be well right it's just we need maybe a few days extra to bring that throttle down and teach that structure so yeah this is big difference between the two okay and on my instructional video again I show many dogs shepherds rut wallers right boxer all starting their real protection game and real aggression from the beginning on how to hold and circle and walk backwards and all those things right in real aggression there was no play development on any of those dogs but it is much easier again if you do it the way I did it with Axel the black German Shepherd with the ball getting to real aggression makes it so much easier right now you're just fine tuning and very quickly I have an elite protection dog that don't need leashes for I mean so giving you there because a lot of people are not aware I get emails all week long from all over the world that they just want to kick in to protection mode and get their dogs really protection trait okay not understanding that there's a difference and prep work right makes a difference so another episode of coffee with Richard so till next time I'm Richard Hines Miami-Dogsburg


my birthday and I got to paint today that's exactly what I wanted for my birthday. Join me for this lesson and a special little cameo appearance by Mr. Jackson. I'm my art studio buddy. Anyway in this little lesson I'm going to be working on a piece of just watercolor paper and which is nice and inexpensive and also applying ink tense blocks. If you don't know what they are stay tuned.  They work great. Then I use the clear gesso and some workable fixative and voila you get a little painting. So it was fun, it was fast and fun and I'm just so happy I was born. Anyway join me for a fun lesson. Here we go. Okay so here we are with the Derwent Ink Tense Blocks. These are 72. I went ahead and bought the whole shebang. It's a wonderful set. I like how they separate the colors in one of the palettes like this is the warmer tones and the other one is the cooler tones. Now look at the brightness and boldness of those colors and also you have plenty of darks to work with. So hmm why ink tents? Well it's kind of a play on words for intense. They are intense little packs of color that you can use to create under paintings and various other things.  It's 100% acid 100% cotton acid-free and it's a great paper I've found for doing these watercolor under paintings. So I've been using some of their products they've been nice enough to send to me. Here are the reference photos that I chose to work from. They're basically just some photos from my backyard where I live at a I call it the farmhouse and it's where my studio is. But there's some beautiful little wildflowers in my backyard and I often like to snap some photos of them and work from them. I'll be working with a horizontal format with the first photo that I showed and this is just the watercolor paper that I showed before and I've just taped it to my board with a hinge system that I use that I have in many of my other videos. But now I'm going to start applying the ink tense blocks and you're going to see how they kind of go on almost they feel kind of like crayons at first and they don't have a lot of brightness when you first start to apply them. So first I'm just working with a couple of darks. One's more of a dark bluish tealish bluish and it's going to be those dark trees in the background. So I'm going to work with big shapes getting in my darks and also just getting in some of the basic colors. Now what I'm working with here would be called local color which means I'm not doing any type of warm underpainting or anything like that. I'm using the color that is sort of already in the scene. I apologize for my camera sometimes focusing on my hair.  Hopefully it won't get in the way too much.  I like to break them because I use them on their side quite often and if I used the whole stick it really be just too long to work with. So the breaking them actually works well for other purposes which is you can have a travel set you break them up and you you have multiple places you can have them and use them. Now this is a little bit darker when I think I'm using here. Yeah I wanted to get more of those darks. This is even a darker green. I'm going to speed this up a little bit and then I'll add some more commentary when I add the water. Okay here's where I begin adding water. It's just regular water and a brush. I try to use the brush not just painting horizontal or vertical strokes just to get the water on. I use the brush in a painterly way to actually paint the scene as if I was you know using watercolor or acrylic paint. Basically just painting in the shapes as they are in nature and this as you can see look how intense these colors are becoming when I'm adding the water. Now that color that I'm wetting right now was the darkest dark. You see that blue that I have background that's kind of like the blue of the sky. I decided to add like a little bit of a hill or a mountain back there. Now I like to keep my brush kind of holding it flat like I'm doing there and now the neat thing is that you can get kind of fun and creative with this and make some big broad strokes and what I'm trying to do here is emulate those grasses how they're kind of wild and free. Now you couldn't really tell what colors I was adding before because they look so dull going on but now you can actually see that I did kind of emulate some of the local color there. I did get in some darker. I wanted to make like a trail or a path that led into it. All right now all I do is wait for that to dry. I'm actually now here I am applying a little bit of water to the back of the watercolor paper. If your paper buckles adding water to the back like this will kind of flatten it out and smooth it out. All right time to let it dry and add the clear gesso. All right this is just clear liquid gesso. Hang on it's gonna focus in a second maybe. There we go. Liquitex clear gesso. Now why add the clear gesso? Because if I didn't add anything to this the watercolor paper is rather flat or smooth and it doesn't have any grit to hold the pastel.  Like I said the watercolor paper is not that expensive. The other neat thing about this is that it's you kind of loosen up more in doing this technique because you don't feel so stressed over working on a piece of expensive pastel paper so to me it's more fun and we all need to practice more. So these are great little ways to practice. Now again I'm using the clear gesso to apply still with interesting strokes. You know kind of going the way the trees would be and the grasses instead of just doing these big broad horizontal or vertical strokes. You know and it may seem like wow why does that make that much of a difference. Actually sometimes that texture does kind of come through when you when you add your pastels on top of this. So you can see it looks like it's lightening it up and it does in general but it's just because it's wet it darkens up a little bit when it dries. But anyway this is a really neat way to get an underpainting and it kind of forces you to stay loose and have fun and and if there's spontaneous drips and lines and things in some odd places it's going to kind of add to the freedom of your work and keep you break you out of that stiff box we get in sometimes where we think we have to paint everything just perfectly. So I find I absolutely love this technique and it's a great way for me to teach because I can get a lot more people trying these when they don't have to spend so much money. So you know I focus a lot on the beginners on my channel. I know there's a lot of other artists who have youtube channels that have maybe some more advanced things but I just love that some people may think oh I don't know if I could ever do that. Yes you can and that's kind of the point of my lessons is I love to encourage people to at least try this because a lot of people want to be able to paint. All right so I'm going to finish this up and then let it dry. Here are the pastels I've chosen and I have to be honest. I really just chose some that I already had out working with from previous paintings and I just chose ones I thought would work good for this painting. I do add a few more before this painting is done but in general you know I try to keep a pretty limited palette with this. Those are my darks I just pointed to there. All right now this is dry and you can see it is actually darker. Remember when I said it looked a little light when you applied the clear gesso. So you can see now that it is actually it dried darker. Now what I'm doing is I'm getting one of my darks. I think that's a little new pastel spelled in you pastel. They're harder. They're good for initial layers because they don't fill up as much of the tooth and we have limited tooth with this liquid gesso technique anyway. So I'm reinforcing that underneath this is going to be like the darks underneath a little trail that kind of leads your eye back into that and you can see I'm not being super neat here. Again sometimes those loose and free strokes lend itself to a more painterly final result. So I'm going to speed this up a little bit. You'll see I'm just working with the pastels here and you know me I'll probably pop back in and add some commentary but for now just enjoy this process. Okay so it appears it looks like a big dark mess doesn't it? Right here I wanted to point out I'm using a piece of pipe foam insulation. It's just a little thing you can buy at Home Depot, Lowe's, whatever hardware store. It's actually used to insulate pipes from maybe freezing or whatever. We certainly don't get freezing pipes here in Florida but I'm just using it to kind of blend in some of the darks there and it looks pretty dark and moody but when I add my final pastel layers on top it's going to brighten things up a bit. To point out here that this is a point where I used some workable fixative. You saw it pop up there real fast. Blair workable fixative. I just sprayed a light coat in some of the darker areas there and what it does is it adds a little bit of extra tooth.  So it's really a neat technique. I learned a lot of the things that I've learned from watching other artists and this particular technique was from Karen Margolis. So it's a it's a neat way to add a little bit more texture when you've kind of lost some of that tooth. Also you don't ever want to use the fixative at the end of your painting because as you could see when I sprayed it it does darken your work. But in this case it works because you're going to be adding more pastel on top. So it's a good tool to use as a work in progress as your painting. Here's where I decided to finish and I ended up calling this painting Tangled Beauty because it was just a tangle of weeds but you know often things that aren't perfect can have their own beauty. And here's the final resulting painting. And by the way I always forget to mention these paintings are available. If anybody's interested just contact me through a comment on YouTube or through my contact information that's always at the end of these videos. All right time to start the next painting. Now this is just more of the same this time working with the reference photo that was the daisies. They're like a daisy type of flower and I do alter the composition a little bit to make it something that I believe was more pleasing and dynamic. If you'd like to know how to do that watch my previous video on how to kind of spice up your reference photo to make a more dynamic painting. I am going to do a little bit different of approach with this painting. Still using the ink tense blocks that's kind of hard to say. But I'm not going to be doing the local color. I'm pointing out kind of the dark roots and how I'm going to kind of create like a path that leads the eye back in there.   In these cases I didn't. I didn't have a lot of time to paint. My husband was nice enough to take me out to a sushi dinner since it was my birthday. My oldest son and daughter-in-law joined me. It was a wonderful wonderful night but I was kind of painting just because I had been so busy the earlier part of the day. I didn't get to do my birthday painting so this was a little fast. But as I was saying the approach to this underpainting is a little bit different. In this one I'm going to be not using the local color. I'm going to do a warm underpainting. Meaning I'm going to use warmer shades. Now what I love about a warm underpainting is it really makes the regular landscape colors you typically put on top really pop. It creates a vibrancy and almost I don't know. It just seems like the colors are singing rather than just looking flat. So this is kind of my darkest part of that trail. Okay the other dark that's going to be in the background is going to be those trees in the distant background. I am going to you know of course lighten them up a bit because they're far away. Again pardon my hair that keeps getting in the way. I did a big no-no. I always know to pull my hair back and I didn't do it in this case. But anyway I'm going to speed this up. You'll get the idea of the colors I'm laying down. I wish you could see them a little better. And then I'll pop back in when I do the add the water. All right so there you have it. Two fun and free wildflower paintings using inexpensive products for the most part. The ink tents blocks I don't think they're that inexpensive but they're definitely worth the money. I forget that I have them sometimes but it's a wonderful way to do an underpainting and really add some life to your artwork. So I hope you enjoyed this lesson. Please comment, please subscribe, and as always happy, happy painting.


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