My name is Donna Cachitas McCallum and my name sign is a D on the palm of my hand. Let's see, well, I began interpreting in 1983. I was a student interpreter at that time. Well, it's kind of a funny story. I had seen music performances where they had interpreters by the side of the stage and then I saw deaf people talking during the break and I wondered, what is that? That's really interesting. I went home that night and I had a roommate in the apartment I was living in.  I said, well, where did you learn that? Where did you learn the sign? She said, well, there's a course at my college where you can take sign language. So the very next semester I did enroll in a course and I started learning it, fell in love with it and then I took another course and another and then I decided that I would go to NTID because I heard they had an interpreter training program offered. I applied, hoped that the best would happen. I was indeed accepted and then I entered it. It was so exciting to study interpreting, but the most exciting part of the whole thing was being able to make so many friends, learn from the deaf people on campus and become more firmly ensconced in the deaf community. I do speak a little bit of Spanish. I didn't at that time. I didn't know that much, but later on I got my bachelors in Spanish. So I didn't know it at the time, but later I did major in it. I think that learning ASL, to the extent I did, opened my mind, my brain to be able to learn other languages as well. Yes, I came to enter the interpreter training program in 1982 in the fall. I graduated in 84. In 1983 I began as a student interpreter. I worked for the Department of Interpreting Services here on campus at RIT. And most of my interpreting at that time was not the classroom. It was more the social aspects of campus life. That was before VRS, before the relay services that were offered. There was a special room on campus that was specifically for interpreting telephone conversations. It was called intercom. I also provided services for dorm meetings and presentations with audiences that were mixed deaf and hearing. That sort of thing. Yeah, I know it's really funny. When I look back, it seems, let's see, my mother I think was born in 1920. And she saw so many technological changes and advances. And the same thing is true for me. All we had was intercom at that time because we're no computers.  So it's a whole different technological world we live in now. Yeah, exactly. I think the same thing for women's rights and what it's like now compared to how women live then. My mother, my grandmother, our great-grandmothers, if you think about it really compared to now. You know, we have all these rights. We can vote. We can work. All the things that we take for granted that they didn't have at that time. Right? In terms of interpreting poetry, both signed and English poetry, hmm. I met Jim Cohn during the interpreter training program here at NTID. And he was a poet. He wrote a lot of poems. And he was very encouraging. That's how it starts. There was a black student union performance. And they were doing for colored girls who considered suicide when the rainbow is enough. And that play had several poems interspersed between the other dramatic action on the stage. So I was working on that. I was doing some translation to be able to interpret the performance. And Patrick Grable came to the performance. And he cried. He was really touched by it. I'd done so much work on the translation, really in-depth work to be able to give a clear ASL rendition of that piece. It's very powerful. It was a wonderful experience. But I don't think that was the first time I'd interpreted poetry. I think the first time I did poetry was through, well, hmm. It's hard to remember the chronology of it all. Most of my experience with interpreting poetry was Jim's work. I would interpret for his readings. He wanted his work to be accessible to deaf people. He was studying interpreting. And he realized that this could happen. You could have an interpreter who could render the same message. And he wanted to really relate with and touch and connect with this new community he was becoming a part of. He'd see deaf people doing their storytelling or performing. And he'd say, you know, that really is a beautiful language. And that really is poetry. He would tell them that. And I remember very clearly that he was encouraging people like Peter Cook to pursue that. He said, what you're doing actually is poetry. They are poems. And it seemed like there was a lot of cross-fertilization between the deaf community and Jim. He was trying to encourage this new idea of ASL poetry to take flight. And he was learning more about what the deaf people were and what ASL poetry would be. And he basically lit the match that sparked the fire that took off after that time with ASL poetry. There were lots of different venues, somewhere at Writers and Books. And there was Jazz Berries, which was a restaurant downtown. They had a stage. They had a series. I think it was once a month, Friday nights or something like that. And they would have a hearing and a deaf poet, both of them performing in turn. And so there'd be interpreters providing access for both audiences there. There was another restaurant in town at the time called Snake Sisters. They had performances also. So Jazz Berries, Snake Sisters, Writers and Books, I think those were the three primary venues that Jim was doing organization for to make sure there were poetry series occurring. Well, it was a really exciting time in terms of translating poetry because, yes, I did work by myself, but I also worked with friends. Worked a lot with Susan Chapel. I worked with you also, Miriam. You gave me advice sometimes. And also with a lot of deaf people, like Debbie and Peter Cook. And the way that would go was I would have the poem on the paper. I would read it over. I would think really hard about what it was trying to say, try to figure out how I might translate this, how I would give a commensurate rendition to be able to show the true intent. So I would show Debbie my work and I say, do you think this is clear? Do you think it works? And I really wanted to have equivalence with the poet. So I would work with lots of different people. Do you mean during the translation process did I feel that it was clear or that I could go ahead with what I was doing? I didn't feel not only that I could ask other people. I felt like I had to ask other people. I needed a lot of help with this. I had the poet's work and sometimes if the poem was very dense, very challenging, I understood the English fine. But how was I going to render this in ASL to give the commensurate meaning? How was I going to be able to provide the same images and the same resonance to a deaf audience? So I couldn't work alone. I didn't feel that was an option. Now, there were some people, well, probably for the hearing poets, but also some interpreters who looked to scans at this. They looked at our work, the group of us that was undertaking this kind of effort at the time. And we thought it was new and exciting. Let's give it a go. Let's try. We'll just give it our best shot and see how it flows. We talked to the hearing poets, the deaf poets. We're working with all of them. We were part of this wonderful hurricane of effort, but there were other people, especially interpreters, who were saying, what the heck are you doing? You don't know ASL poetry. You don't know what you're doing. You don't know what the right form is, and you don't have a template of how to do this. You don't know what ASL translation really looks like in terms of poetry. It's such an elevated usage of the language, and English is elevated that way, and you don't even know how ASL could be rendered that way. So we felt like, yes, but if we don't try it, then we'll never know what happens or how to go about it. So I mean, the question is, how do we do a new thing? Somebody always has to start this new enterprise and take baby steps, sometimes make mistakes, be a little awkward, and later on it moves out. That's the hope anyway. I feel so lucky that I was part of that, that we did do that, because those were foundational years. I feel like the hearing poets and the deaf poets at the time were really working together. They were influencing each other, and I think that that was what was going on in our group called Bridge Of. Also, we had hearing and deaf people working together in a consolidated group. Oh, I think if we talk about that later, it'd be better. First, I think I'd like to talk about the translation process, and then we'll get to the other stuff later. Yeah, that sounds good. So my process for interpreting would really depend a lot on who I was working with. Jim, of course, well, I lived with him, so I saw him every day. So I could ask him a lot of questions about it, but that gets sticky sometimes, because if I asked a poet what they mean, they've worked so hard to write this poem, they've really crafted it and picked specific words for specific intentions. And if I said, what does this mean? He'd say, well, the meaning's right there. It's already there, of course, it's obvious. So that gets tricky sometimes, but it's very important in the translation process to know that you've got the right idea in your mind. You'd fully understand it if you attempt to translate it into another language. I also quite often worked with another hearing poet named Todd Beers. And that was a very cool process because Todd was also a painter, and his poems almost looked or felt like small miniature paintings, just like miniature paintings, but in words on paper. So I would read them and I felt like that's great because I would read this and see a picture in my mind immediately because it was so much like a painting, and it seemed a little bit easier to be able to render that in ASL. So Todd would sometimes sit down with me, we would meet together, and he would even just read his poetry for me so that I could work on the timing. He would make audio recordings once in a while, and then he would give me the whole set and then I could take them home and work on it. So first I would translate and then I would have to practice the timing to make sure that I would start and end at the appropriate times for when he started and did. I would work with other poets and the timing was tricky. It's really important in your work to address that because sometimes a poem will be really long, just verses and verses and verses, but the point of it will be at the very end. So sometimes I would have to reorder the poem and take things that occurred in the end in the written form and move them up to the beginning, which required a lot of memorization. So first I would do the translation and then I would have to memorize and practice to make sure that the timing fit the spoken rendition of it. If a person is reciting their poetry, what they're trying to express has to somehow line up with the signs, but if the point comes at the end of their spoken performance, and I've front loaded it to the beginning, it's very tricky, but when I look back at that, wow, what a challenge, but so much fun. It was such an amazing time. It was very rich. Our lives were all about learning this language. And this experience of translating really, I think helped our language abilities in ASL as we were growing in that endeavor. Yes, I would feel that it definitely had a positive impact on my interpreting too, because just working with a language or a translation capability would force us to look at the form of English and then take off that form and superimpose the form of ASL that try to preserve and maintain the meaning. We would always try to imagine how would a deaf person express this idea and keep that in mind as we were translating the English poetry. So I used quite often Debbie and Peter to ask about their opinion of what I was doing, did it work, did it not work. Also down in the cellar, people who were performing down there, I would ask, folks, is this clear? Is it not clear? And get a lot of input from them. I can't remember exactly how I began interpreting for Debbie. I met her kind of early on. She wasn't living in Rochester at the time. She was living in Cleveland and performing with the Fairmont Theater of the Deaf. So that troupe came to give a performance on campus and when they were done afterwards, somebody had a party someplace and I went to that party and I met her in person. And later, I think in the semester or quarter system, she came to study, I think, graphic design and then got her bachelor's in that. So I would see her in the cafeteria. And one time I said, hey, I think I met you before at that party. And then from then on, we were friends. And we had something that, you know, friends have.  I just know we will be friends. That's what occurred when we met each other. Debbie had a lot of skills. She was a clown, a storyteller, and then she added more things to her repertoire, poetry being one of them. And Jim was very encouraging to her. He was saying, look at your own work as if it were poetry, because it is. It really is a poem and she did accept that framing of it and it became even more creative as time went on. So at that time, it was Debbie and Peter and Jim and I, we were all friends. But looking back, trying to remember the first time I actually voiced for her, I don't know. Cause in my mind, I've always voiced for Debbie. But I can't remember exactly the first time that started. I think that, yeah, I think it might be that. It was either, I think the first time, maybe it was in the Cellar, the Deaf Poetry series that was occurring there. There were Deaf poets who would come to the Cellar bar and they would, yeah, wait a minute, I wanna start over. Let's start again, okay. Oh, you mean during the performances, during that, just last minute, somebody would voice something? Yeah, I did go to the Cellar. I was somewhat involved with that series. I went as a participant to watch, of course. I wasn't living with Jim yet at the time.  And that may be the first time that I interpreted for Debbie in the Cellar. It's possible. I can't really remember. But we did that, we did that Cellar series. And then around the same time, there was an RIT Community for Nuclear Awareness group. And often they would have these Coffee House performance hours from time to time. They would have jugglers performing, hearing poets, and deaf poets. Everything was voice interpreted or sign interpreted at the time on campus. So Debbie did perform at those events also and Jim would perform. There'd be jugglers, musicians, all sorts of acts. And I would end up interpreting for that, peering or deaf, whatever. So I did do that. So I was interpreting in that particular situation. I may have one time or another voice for Debbie during one of those events. Yes, I was there. It was incredible, really. Well, you gave me that DVD, The Sampler, and I watched it. And I recalled, oh, that's right. It was incredible because that was my classroom. I was in the interpreter trading program and that's the classroom we met in. That was the very room. And Alan Ginsberg was sitting right in front of me. There we are at our desks and just sitting right in front of there. We were so fortunate because here we were having this personal face-to-face meeting with Alan Ginsberg. It was incredible. I also remember that I felt a little trepidation because Alan Ginsberg's sitting right there and of course the hearing world looks up to him. He's this amazing, lauded poet. But here in our audience, we also had some amazing luminaries from the deaf world. Patrick Grable was sitting there. And I was wondering, okay, we know in the hearing world that Alan Ginsberg is respected, but we have this incredible deaf performer here who does the most amazing, beautiful work. And in his community, in his world, he has looked up to in the same capacity that Alan Ginsberg is. And so I felt that I wanted people to see in the hearing world how that equivalence could be made. And I knew that the interpreting process would be part of that. So I was concerned about the effectiveness of the communication about whether these two luminaries would be able to recognize each other's greatness. And of course it did indeed happen. And the DVD helped get my memory going a little bit about that, especially in terms of the interpretation. Alan Ginsberg read from Howell. Oh, let's start again. Alan Ginsberg read from his poem Howell. And Kip Webster was interpreting it. And I remember when he got to the part, the hydrogen jukebox, Kip fingerspelled it. And Patrick Grable asked the question of Alan, why did you pick those two words? And Ginsberg explained his reasoning and then asked, do you feel that there could be an equivalent translation or would it become quote, dead in translation if you tried to put it in ASL? And then Patrick Grable said, do you mind if I give it a go? And he produced this incredible translation on the spot. It was just so powerful. That moment was amazing. Oh, I just got goosebumps. I thought, wow, look what he just did. It was just an incredible translation that he rendered right there. Those words, hydrogen jukebox, just those two words became a full ASL poem that Patrick Grable had just performed. And I thought, wow, that is so cool. We have something very exciting happening here. Yes, I really felt that. That wow moment was right there. And when that occurred, that moment, I was so relieved because Alan looked and said what he said to Patrick and Patrick understood what Alan was trying to say. And I felt, okay, the communication did indeed succeed. And the interpreter part of me was very relieved and felt good because I'd been involved in some translation and I knew that it could work and indeed it did work. Some people say it can't, this could never occur, but it really did succeed. And no, I never did create my own poetry. My introduction to poetry separate than studying the classroom was for Jim because, well, Jim, his particular style of poetry and who he is as a poet, what he likes is very much informed by the beat generation. And so quite often in his own work, he'll be looking at everyday sort of prosaic things and focusing on the image of it. William Carlos Williams, it has a famous quote, I believe it's a quote attributed to him, no ideas but in things. And I take this to mean that if you're describing what you see, then you're also showing its essence and that there's something more profound in the everyday. What presents itself to us in its image or iconic form represents something much more profound about the human experience in and of itself. That's my interpretation of that quote. And that's what Jim was trying to look for in ASL poetry and what he indeed saw evidenced in ASL poetry, those images, that iconicity. So that kind of poetry, if it's written in English, seems to be something that can be more easily rendered in ASL. Well, that's interesting what you were saying about, sometimes you can provide images to people and you don't fully understand it, but what you're left with is the feeling of it. And so I feel that poetry is actually beyond the words that are used to communicate it in a sense. The meaning actually is beyond the form, beyond the words.  A poet works really carefully to craft and select the correct words to bring forth that image, but the resonance is beyond what you're actually receiving. So you say you were at a poetry reading or whatever or you interpreted it and you didn't fully understand it, but you could feel the meaning viscerally, even though you didn't understand it. I think the meaning itself is not in the cognitive part of your mind, it's more within your heart and how it hits you there. You understand it with your heart, not necessarily your mind. And so I think a poem which brings forth a picture that somehow resonates within you because it touches the human condition. I think that voicing for Debbie's poetry was quite different for me. If I had an English poem, I had to do a full translation to the best of my ability and I wanted the deaf people to understand it as clear as they could. Now of course they're actually seeing the hearing poet at the same time and they know what it looks like on me and they're also hearing it, but voicing for Debbie, I would write down the words and it wouldn't necessarily look like a poem. I mean sometimes what I had written on the page would look like a poem, but my feeling was that the audience, the hearing audience members can also see the images that Debbie's putting forth. So they're watching somebody perform, Debbie perform in ASL and they're hearing my voice at the same time as sort of a support for what they're seeing. So they're getting double the amount of information, they're hearing my words through their ears, they're taking in her images through their eyes and they're getting both channels. Yeah, we as interpreters had to be careful because you can't assume that just because we know sign language, we can anticipate what hearing audiences will be able to understand and what they won't. It's very hard to know that. Some things are obvious, like in Debbie's poem, Missing Children, there's a part where we're showing a boy planting seeds and the father encouraging him to keep planting and there's a body shift between the father's character and the son's character. And I feel that most hearing people would see that miming or the role shift of a father and a son and they don't need words describing everything about that action, they'd be able to figure it out. They can see what the expression of the father would look like and what the son would look like. So in my voicing, I just said the father and his son, the father and his son, I just said that, kept it simple. No, I would come up with all the words, Debbie never contributed the words, maybe once or twice, but not often. What would tend to happen is that I would video her doing her performance and that I would watch it over and over again and I would try to figure out what might be a good match in terms of what I would say. I'd do my own work and then I would ask other friends to watch it with me. I'd say, oh, these parts give me a hard time or what do you think, does this sound okay? I work with you sometimes that way, Miriam and I work with Susan also. Sometimes Jim would help me, not much, but once in a while I would ask his opinion. Kenny too, yes. Yeah, definitely Kenny. We work together quite often and I think that we influenced each other's work. In the beginning I used too many words and Kenny didn't use enough, but I think over time we evened out to where we were voicing about the same amount as each other. We both were trying to find our way, what the best fit would be. Really, honestly, in our group, I mean, we were the only people who were doing this, so we were just flying by the seat of our pants and trying to figure out how to do it right. We did it through experience, really. We did trial and error. We'd perform, we'd gather some feedback. We would incorporate that feedback and make modifications according to what people liked and didn't like. Yep, sometimes I would show Debbie. I think she was a little worried in the beginning about whether I was representing her correctly, but as time went on and we were having more success and more positive feedback, she just trusted me and she just said, go for it. You seem to be doing fine. People are responding well, so she just said, go for it. I think it was just the right time, the right place, the right people. Right, to try to match her, mm-hmm. I did, mm-hmm. Yeah, it was fun. Does she live in New York City? Nice. So when I was an interpreter, there was a class that Stefa was teaching that was called Sign Dance. I think that's what it was. There might have been another teacher. I'm pretty sure it was Stefa. She would use signs along with the dance movement and I took that class. And I don't know, I'm trying to remember if Debbie was in that class, she might have been. It was really fun. Plus we did some improv, some improvisational work and some trust kinds of dance movements. Later on, Stefa and David had a studio, it was a dance studio and it was located right downtown Rochester. So they would have these regular improv groups. I was in it, Susan Chapel, Kenny, Debbie, Peter Cook, Jim, Stefa, David. I think sometimes other people may have joined but this was our core group that tended to show up. Very, very powerful time because it wasn't really necessarily about communication with languages, about communication through your body. Very creative, extremely creative. And it also felt therapeutic at times. All of us working together and all of us having our different relationships and connecting together. And I think it also spawned some ideas for future poems, both for the hearing people in the group and the deaf people in the group. I think that experience brought us closer together and helped us create more as a group together. Nothing, nothing is documented from that time. Just our minds, just our feeble minds and our failing memories. But that was a strong impact on me. I remember some specific instances from that time and it was very powerful for me. One way it influenced me was to become more comfortable with my body. And it made me a better interpreter because when you're an interpreter you're wearing this language on your body so of course it would help in that particular way. How did bridge of come about? Well, let's see, at that time we in our group felt that we wanted to accomplish two things. We wanted to show our work to the world, to the grander world stage and audience and also we wanted to have some gainful employment and we wondered if there was a way that we could actually make a living from showing our work. And I can remember in our apartment that was on Arian Crescent Drive in Rochester, really small, cute little apartment. We had this little living room and we were all sitting on a cushion on the floor facing each other and coming up with ideas and talking about this idea, should we try it? I remember finally we all just said, let's do it. We made a brochure to advertise the group and we tried to get some gigs and we did. It was very exciting time. It was really fun, the idea of bridge of. Sometimes Debbie would read a poem that Jim had written and then she would translate it and perform it in sign while he was reading it.  Sometimes you'd have two deaf poets but you'd have voices, voice interpreters. So you'd have deaf poetry translated by a hearing poet. So lots of different combinations within that group. Really fun. And the name came about, well, partially it was a joke. Prepositions are very difficult in, on, to, over. They're very tough for people who are learning a second language. When someone studying English the second language prepositions are really difficult. When should it be in, on, at, over, above? Those sorts of things, very challenging. So that idea of struggling with English is difficult for deaf people because they're second language learners of English. So that's what the of part was. And the bridge of course was joining two lands, the deaf and the hearing, separated by a river but having a bridge joining the two. Plus, plus with bridge of, the dot, dot, dot part at the end of it felt like we're open to the possibilities of what can be and the great beyond in the future. So that's what that dot, dot, dot at the end of the name is. No conclusion, just sort of. And then, how many times we performed? I think, let's see. I think we were together only one year. I think it was about a year, maybe not even a full year. I remember performing at the Clearwater Festival in New York, that was in the summer. And then I remember performing in Vermont in the fall, I think. So maybe it was only, I don't know, spring through wintertime, maybe that was the duration if I remember right. I don't know. It's really challenging. You reminded me this morning about where you've got a mixed audience of deaf and hearing members and sometimes one faction of the audience wouldn't be satisfied. Sometimes the other one wouldn't. So you couldn't always assume that you would be providing access to everybody. Most the time at work for a general audience and most people really enjoyed it a whole lot. And also, the five of us would be creating things together, sometimes poetry and sometimes more like performance art. Our work tended to be political in nature. We always had a message. Some of it was humorous, of course, and some of it was stories or whatever or funny, but tended to be political. Yep, that's what the five of us did. I believe that stuff as influenced was felt in Bridge of. All five of us had been in that dance group in the improv sessions. And so then we transferred a lot of those concepts to our group work. Yes. Yeah, I remember that. Oh, with the Ronald Reagan mask. Yes, and the fire. I remember that. Yeah, I'd like to see that again. It's nice that you have some documentation that you have this. Great. Oh, it's so nice. It's interesting. You sent that DVD and I looked at it and went, oh my God, that time was so precious. It was so unique. What a time it was. The way that we all worked together and how we influenced each other. It was so inspiring. Now, here. It started here. Yeah. Yeah, it was amazing. Truly. Yeah, you have good memory. Oh, right, right, yeah. That workshop. Well, I partially took it for myself, but the Wallflower Collective. Wallflower Dance Collective. It was a performance group and it was comprised of women. It wasn't the more traditional ballet. It was more modern dance and they always had a message behind their performances. It was always a point to them. Quite often political in nature. I interpreted for a performance for them in, I think it was at the Clearwater Festival. Not sure, really. It's just terrible. I don't remember. I remember where, but I did interpret for that group a couple of times and I was taking dance classes on a regular basis at the time. During the summer, that group offered workshops in Brattleboro, Vermont and I decided to take a two-week workshop with them. Every day it was dance classes for two weeks. Night, it would just kind of hang out. It would schmooze with each other. Nope. Just dance. Really, just dance. How did it start? The National Deaf Poetry Conference? Well, let's see. So it seemed that deaf and hearing poets were getting together. It seemed like there was a poetry scene here in Rochester and Jim wanted to convene a conference of people from all over the country here in Rochester. He wanted to have a formal deaf poetry conference. He invited LMA Lentz, Clayton Valley, Peter Cook, of course, and Debbie Rennie and one more, Patrick Gravel. My role was to interpret for Debbie. Now, there wasn't any relay. There wasn't any way to get hold of people. Nowadays, of course, you could go on Skype or you could have VRS or whatever, but what we would do is video ourselves, introducing ourselves, hello, I'm an interpreter. This is my name. I'll be interpreting for you at the Deaf Poetry Conference, blah, blah, blah. We just wanted them to get a visual on who we were and welcome them and say how excited they were to be coming to Rochester. So we sent these tapes to all the poets and I think that some of the poets may have sent back videos of their work for us to look at too so that they could introduce themselves to the interpreters in the same way. Some of the deaf poets were open to working with interpreters and others felt that they didn't necessarily want to do that. They wanted to use their own words and then just give a written rendition to the interpreter to read. So there were different styles for each poet. Some people wanted to just give out a piece of paper for people to read and not have an interpreter. So I was with Debbie for the whole conference, the same as I had been always voicing for her. Kenny and Peter were paired together the same way they'd always been working together. Kenny, of course, is involved with the creative process of the poetry Peter performed. So it was a little different than my role with Debbie because I don't create it. Most not, no, was separate. My role was as a strict interpreter. I mean, once in a while I might give some distance to Debbie, like it might look better if you do a little bit of this or that, but generally I kept my ideas to myself. You want me to explain that? Okay. I don't remember who named it that, but for this particular conference most of the interpreting was closed loop, meaning that if you wanted to hear the voice interpreter you had to wear special headphones so you could hear our voices. In the auditorium, I think in Jazz Berries, also I'm not sure, or maybe it was just in the theater, Panera Theater and NTID, right? What we did was recreated the structure with foam cushions, sort of a box and then covered it with black cloth and the two interpreters assigned would sit inside it. It felt like a cocoon. It was really nice to be in there. And that way, if they were hearing people who didn't want to hear the voices and just enjoy watching the signs they wouldn't have to hear our voices escaping from that cocoon. We would speak very quietly anyway but we just wanted to make sure they didn't hear it if they didn't want to. When I look back, I can imagine that I felt very protected in that little shell, very intimate with my voicing partner. It might have been hot in there. I don't remember. Do you remember being hot in there? Right, right. Yes, it was very intimate, very close. We were really right on top of each other and it was wonderful to be able to give that support. You didn't have to worry about what it might look like to the audience if they could see us going, you're doing great or like, I need to hold your hand and petting your back. You're doing a great job. Go for it, that kind of thing. It was wonderful, wonderful environment for teamwork. Before the conference opened, oh yeah, I was very nervous. I was really scared because now what we'd been doing on a local scene was gonna be open more to the national scene. People from all over the country were gonna come and see what we'd been up to. So here it is, here's what we're doing. It was very exciting of course, especially to see all the different deaf poets one after another perform their work and then there was this panel too. The panel of poets talking about their poetry, just a thrill, really, it was. I was terrified, I was on this panel, it was worse than if I'd been interpreting something because I hadn't been using my own voice in interpreting work. I would voice Debbie's work or I would sign other people's work. I was always being somebody else, always conveying something not self-generated. I mean, it was my work of course, but it depended on somebody else's ideas. On this panel, I was being asked what I thought, asking me to talk about things and so I was really scared and I wasn't used to that role. I wasn't used to people asking me what I thought about things personally. Right, very new, yes, very new. And when something new comes along, some people are thrilled and other people are more trepidatious and feel you shouldn't go there. So there is always pros and cons to these sorts of things and that's always been the case for anything new that comes along. Some people are always resistant to change. They're going to resist new ideas. Yeah, then she moved to Sweden. Mm-hmm, wow, oh, it was so amazing when I went to Scandinavia with Debbie. It was far out, so what happened was, let's see, Debbie went during the summertime, I think she went to Denmark and she taught a workshop and gave her performance and showed poetry there and there was a woman from Denmark there who was also deaf and she said, wow, I want to put together a tour for you, I want you to go around Scandinavia and show this and I want you to have an interpreter come with you. And Debbie said, well, I just happened to have an interpreter I can bring with me. Donna, I'll check and see, she said, Donnie, I said, oh yeah, and so I went and it was so much fun. So the very next year, I think it was the fall, end of summer and into the fall, early fall, I guess. So what happened was, well, she was already there. I flew and met Debbie in Sweden and each country we went to, we would first get there and we'd meet all the deaf people that we could and we would start asking them what their signs for certain words that we had in the poetry would be because Debbie wanted to take the sign language that she was used to and put in the words from the local lexicon. So, you know, she wanted to make sure that she was able to accommodate that but of course there were some things that were universal like the son and the father that I showed before. Of course, those were things that everybody would understand but she wanted to introduce it by using the local sign for a father or the local sign for a son and then the action would be clear enough. So right away, as soon as we hit the ground in a new country, we would make it our goal to find out what the local signs were so that it would fit the work better and then be more easily comprehensible to the local deaf people. And I voiced everything in English because almost everybody speaks English in those areas who would come to the performances that we were doing at the time. When she moved to Sweden, when she moved to stay, let's see. I moved to the farm in 1989. I was there till 92, 88. I went on that tour of Scandinavia with Debbie in 89. So I guess she moved in 89 also. Once in a while, she'd come back to the US and I would interpret for her a few times. And we see each other once in a while now but just a visit, just to catch up, to take friends but it's never for work anymore. Yeah. No, I haven't voiced for her for a deaf poetry in a long time but you have to know when she moved to Sweden I moved to a small farm community and there were no deaf people anywhere around there so. And the Rochester scene was still very hot and very happening, the poetry scene but I left around that time and moved and I would come back once in a while and I would see what was going on but it wasn't with the same velocity as before when I was involved. Well, I did say a few things like this before I think but I think that poetry is a way to represent feelings, bring them forth sometimes with pictures to be able to show these profound sentiments that we have within us. A poem can show something spiritual, something that's not known with the head but it's somehow within our subconscious brought forward and then tried to communicate and it's about the human experience, something that inspires us. And it's like you said before, it's beyond words and it uses words but when you hear it or see it or read it, the feeling you get transcends the words that are used so it's transmitted through words and signs that culminates in something that's beyond those words and signs. I've said many times that maybe missing children is my favorite poem. I just watched it with another hearing friend from Canada who speaks French. We were watching this together on the DVD you sent and she was so touched by it, was so poignant and I was touched by it too. I think it tells a bigger story than what is even shown in the poem and I think poetry does that quite often and that's what we enjoy about it. Yeah, I do sometimes read poetry with my kids and it's really fun because my son is now in second grade, he has this wonderful teacher, comes to the class with a guitar sometimes and sings with them but this teacher also has the children memorize poems. After they memorize the poem, then they'll recite it to the class and then my son will bring it home on a card. The poem will be printed on a card and it's so nice to have it. So there's different colors, red, yellow, purple, whatever and we have this little stack of different colors for the different poems so we have that as a record of his poetry readings from second grade. Yes, some, not always, not always but some, yeah, some rhyme and some don't. It's funny, when I started interpreting for Debbie, but yesterday I was talking with Susan Chappell about this and I think I started interpreting for her because she was doing tours of different schools and performing her clown work and Susan said, no, that was much later. She said, you started with poetry but I think it started with storytelling and then later morphed to the poetry interpreting for her. I don't know. Clearwater, you think it's the first time that I interpreted for her? Yeah, 85, I think 84, 85, maybe 83 even? 84 I think, I think it was 84. That's when I started interpreting at Clearwater, yeah. And Debbie performed, yeah, she did. She was doing storytelling there. That's true that year. So maybe that was it, but not, no, I don't think Clearwater was the first time I interpreted for her for storytelling because there were some performances in, there was this woman who was organizing the storytelling at Clearwater and she lives in North Carolina, Louise Kessel and she invited Debbie and me to come down to North Carolina twice to do a little tour of storytelling down there. Nope, I think we did it. Thank you.


Welcome to CreateCon. I am so excited you guys are all here. Tonight is all about celebrating the creative process. They are called Optical Animals. They do video design and really dope projection mapping. Without further ado, I would like to introduce to you Optical Animal, Max and Austin. Hi everyone, I'm Max. I'm Austin. We're Optical Animal. We're a creative video design studio out of Brooklyn. We do all kinds of things from projection mapping, which involves projecting with multiple projectors onto large facade surfaces or 3D sculptures to create perception bending effects, to doing creative visual designs for installations that are built with custom LED fixtures and other kinds of custom technology. We also do live visuals for concerts. Austin could talk about that. We work with musicians and bring every single element of their show to bring a full cohesive audio-visual experience to have the huge shows that you'll see at the Palladium, Staples Center, or any other venue across the world. Of course, at the backbone of everything we do is the system. We work on custom hardware and software solutions to always have the most powerful system we possibly can to have our custom assets running in real time. Today we're going to talk to you guys about our projection mapping process. Before we dive into this prototype installation that we've built for you guys here, we want to talk a little bit about what goes into the projection mapping process. In the case of this installation, we have a 3D sculpture, which actually began as a 3D model in a piece of software. We take that 3D model and then what we have to do is design visual content that will be projected onto it. In order to do that, we take the 3D shape and unwrap it into a two-dimensional pixel map. That looks kind of like this. Up here what you're seeing is the pixel map that is actually being used to generate content for this sculpture. Each and every one of those letters and shapes represents one of the surfaces on the sculpture. What we do with that pixel map is then create visuals, animations, to then align with all those pixel maps. Then what we do is use the projection mapping process. In this case, we're actually using a software called MadMapper to do the mapping aspect. We'll open up MadMapper and we'll show you guys a little bit of that process. Each and every one of those surfaces, we have individual control over. We're able to pinpoint the exact position of each surface and that allows us to basically have the projections lining up exactly how we want them on the 3D sculpture from wherever the projectors are coming from. We actually have two projectors right now that are hitting the sculpture. There's one there and there's one there. Basically, the one on the left here, or stage left, is projecting onto this side of the sculpture. The one on stage right there is projecting onto the other side. That way we have the perfect optimal angle of projection for each. Right now, we're only using two projectors to illuminate this installation, but really projection mapping is amazing because it's such a limitless possibility for creativity. Really the only limit to how many projectors you can add together to create cohesive installation is the technology you're working with. That's why we're really excited today to talk about Intel Optane Memory because that has really allowed us to take our projection mapping process and push it even further because what we do when we do projection mapping is we're layering up multiple layers of content, running multiple pieces of software, and this can be really taxing on a system. When we're designing a system for an installation like this, we actually have to test it out ahead of time and find out exactly what it can do. We want to figure out what are the limits, and then when we get to that limit, we want to lock it in, get everything dialed in, and we don't really want to push it that much further. What always ends up happening is we have these installations running on site and then maybe the creative director comes up, and what they usually say is, you know, we like it, but can you actually add a little bit of something here? Maybe make it move a little bit more, make it more dynamic, that's the word we hear a lot. A lot of times we get asked to do these last minute changes, and I sometimes have to resist that and say, well, you know, this is already dialed in, like we don't want to necessarily bring in new content because it's already running live in front of an audience and we don't want to see any frame rate drops. So, you know, sometimes I have to say, well, sorry, but this is how it is. But I'd really love to be able to give them the freedom to expand the installation, to add things last minute. So let's actually bring someone up from the audience to be our resident creative director. Anyone? Can I? Yep. You were quick to raise your hand. All right, come on up. Welcome to the stage. What's your name? Chrissy. How long have you been a creative director? Two years. Awesome. All right. Great deal. So, okay, so come on, take a look over here at our touch screen interface here, and we're going to teach you how to use it a little bit. So each of these lines here represents a layer of content. So what you can actually do is on the right side, there's a slider which brings up the opacity of that layer of content, and then each of these squares is a different option.  So go ahead and give it a try. Bring that slider on the bottom layer up. Great, great. Okay, cool.  Yeah, go, perfect. Awesome. So right now we have some tracers going on. Go ahead and select some of the different options for that top layer. We can see what those look like. Okay, cool. So we have all these different clips loaded in that show the different options for that layer. So now let's bring in this other layer here and see what's going on. This is the 3D content. Okay, cool. So we have some 3D-perspectivized content. Wait, what was that creative director? You want more options for that layer? Yes. Oh, okay, well, okay, you know what? Let's go ahead and drag some new content in. And audience, keep your eye on the sculpture and you'll notice that even though we're loading in content in real time and free programming the installation, playback is still seamless. Okay, so now we have some several other options. Let's look through those other options in the 3D layer. Okay, let's watch this one for a second. Okay, she doesn't like that one. All right, we're moving on. I like that one. She likes the first one. Okay, cool. So, wait, what was that? You still want more? Okay, all right. Give me more. Okay, fine, all right. So the creative director has asked us to add more layers. We already have three layers running and before you add that in there, Austin, I just want to say, you know, we wouldn't normally want to go beyond three layers, especially with a system that's using spinning hard drives because when you're running multiple clips simultaneously that can really throttle the hard drive. So with Intel Optane Memory, we had the opportunity to add on even more layers and actually just a quick aside, as we were testing the system out before the show, we actually tried to run as many apps as we could simultaneously. So we had Resolume, After Effects, Premiere, a video game, and Chrome, and MadMapper all running simultaneously with video running in real time and there was absolutely no hiccup, no frame rate drops. So let's just go ahead and see what else we can add in. So bring in the extra content. What's the layer here? Why don't you bring up that layer with the slider and then let's select some of the different clips, this top layer here. Great. Okay, so we have some cube chases that sort of flash and illuminate the structure. You can select your favorite one. Having trouble telling the difference. Okay, I guess that one's different. All right, wait. Yeah, that was kind of like a random one. This one versus this. Okay, this or this? I think, yeah. Yeah, that one looks tight. Okay, cool. All right. So we agree. It's not enough. You want more? Okay, fine. Let's add another layer. All right, let's see what else we can do. Let's add a layer of masks. So this next layer, what this is going to do, this first one actually basically brings in another look that ends up covering the whole sculpture and release it sort of. Yeah, so here's the look. So it reveals the grid underneath. So it's a really cool 3D Perspectivized Effect. Just a real quick aside. Again, for those of you in the front row, right in the center, you guys have the best view. This is actually the perspective that we render all the content out from in our 3D model. So for those of you on the sides, it might be a little bit distorted, but with this perspective content, it's really money right from the center there. Okay, cool. So then we have this other one, which is a mask layer that reveals different aspects of the sculpture underneath. So what do you think? Should we use the one that brings up the extra look or should we have the one that reveals the sections? Am I supposed to select the one or the first or the second one? I feel like you want me to select this one. That's what you're going at. No, no, you're the creative director. It's all up to you. Right, okay. I feel like that's the one, right? Okay, cool. So let's bring in another layer. Let's just keep going. All right. So we got another layer here. We're going to add some atmospheric content. So basically what this layer is, is this footage of dry ice smoke. So it adds a little bit of an organic feel. Overall, everything keeps it just a little bit extra textural. So go ahead and select one of those options for that textural layer. This one seems like the most intense one. That one's good. Actually, you know what we could do is just real quick, let me bring these other ones down so we can really see what that layer is doing. Okay, cool. So this is the... Oh, nice. Okay, good. This one's not enough. So it's basically this one versus this. So that one's the one. I think that's a great one. That's the one, that's the one. All right, nice. So let's bring up the other ones to see our full combination. Great. So I think we did a pretty good job with this, but wait, you still want more? I want more, oh my gosh. Okay, wait, you want it to be interactive? Yes. Okay, well, all right. Well, let's see what we can do here. I've got this leap motion, which is actually a infrared motion tracking camera. And so what we're going to do is we're going to add in an interactive layer here. And let me just bring down the other layer so you can really see it. So what you can do with this layer is actually take your hand, move it over, and then you can lift the particles up, or you can move it left or right. Yeah, so just play with that. See what you can do with those particles there? Articles, okay. Bring your hand up, like lift them up. Nice. Woo! So cool. All right, let's have a hand for our creative director. Thank you so much. Great job. So yeah, I hope you guys enjoyed that. I hope you learned a little bit about projection mapping and how that works. So thank you guys so much, and we'll see you after.


So, I'm reading the Los Angeles Times about Saturday's synagogue standoff in Texas. And it says, the Rabbi of a Texas synagogue, it's a reform synagogue, which is about the most liberal of the major Jewish denominations, Rabbi of a Texas synagogue said Monday that he threw a chair at the gunman and then escaped with two other hostages after a 10-hour standoff, crediting past security training for getting himself and his congregation out safely. So he threw a chair at the gunman. Violence, right? Sometimes violence is the right response, right? If he made a bad decision with throwing a chair, that could have escalated. So, sometimes a violent reaction, a tough reaction will escalate, make things worse. Sometimes a tough reaction, a violent reaction will end things and make things better, right? So, sometimes violence is the answer. You often hear this moronic saying that violence is never the answer. Well, violence is sometimes the answer, right? For everything, there's a time and a place under heaven. So, a lot of talk about morality, it focuses on just one value, such as civility or loving kindness or compassion or inclusion. Those values may have their place, but all values exist in a constellation and are competing with other values. And so, sometimes honesty is the right thing to do. Sometimes lying is the right thing to do. Sometimes violence is the right thing to do. So, Dak Prescott, the Dallas Cowboys quarterback, praised the Dallas Cowboy fans who threw debris at the referees leaving the stadium. So one, that was a terrible thing for the franchise quarterback, the Dallas Cowboys to say. And two, that was a terrible thing for the fans to do. And that situation, violence is not the answer, right? One situation, throwing a chair is apparently the right answer. Another situation, throwing debris at the refs, that is not the right answer, right? So, all actions have to be judged within their context, within their situation. And so, this idea that violence is always wrong and violence never solves anything, that's absurd, right? Violence is sometimes the answer, all right? And I like how the rabbi says he credits past security training for resolving this situation. So yeah, the more you train, if it's good training, the better situated you'll be.  But then the second paragraph, the rabbi says he let the gunman in Saturday because he appeared to need shelter.  No security training would say that. That's absurd, that's the opposite of security training. So one thing I noticed after eight weeks in Australia, including five weeks in Sydney, which is like number four safer city in the world according to a recent survey, right? How much more stressful life is in Los Angeles and the big city because you have to constantly say no to other people and constantly be on guard and protect yourself against groups that have a very high likelihood of committing crime. And you don't let someone into your home who's a stranger who needs shelter. You don't let someone generally speaking into your business or to your church or to your synagogue or your mosque or your bowling club just because they need shelter. Now in Australia, you could do that because Australia is a very safe society with high social trust, but in America, we don't have high social trust. We don't have very much in common with our fellow citizens that you have like Jews or a tribe and you have African Americans are often very tribal, Mexican Americans are very tribal and Anglo Americans don't tend to be tribal explicitly, but maybe there's some implicit and okay, these different tribes generally speaking, you know, don't have a lot to do with each other if it's not absolutely necessary because in America, we don't tend to inhabit the same moral universe with our fellow citizens. We inhabit the same moral universe with our fellow Orthodox Jews or our fellow Anglicans or our fellow Seventh-day Adventists perhaps or now our fellow Atonies or whatever your in-group is, but we don't generally share in America a moral universe with our fellow citizens. So it's much more stressful here in Los Angeles, I'm just noticing getting off the plane and navigating traffic because you don't share that moral universe. You can't you can't predict how people will react and then you've got these ranting crazy people and these math freaks and these homeless who almost all of them are mentally ill and or addicted to drugs and alcohol.  If you don't share a moral universe with people, you have to be on guard. And that's tiring. So it's much more tiring and stressful to live in a big city in America compared to a big city in Australia or a big city in many of the Scandinavian countries. There are high rates of social trust in places like Denmark. So I can't believe this guy, he let the gunman in because he appeared to need shelter. All right. So compassion and helping the homeless and offering people shelter is a wonderful quality, but you don't want to just distribute it without discrimination. You need to discriminate. You can't just let people in. He let the gunman in because he thought the gunman needed shelter. That's insane. That's absurd. We can't let people into our lives, into our homes, into our businesses, into our houses of worship just because we think they need shelter. In America, in multicultural, multiracial America where we don't share a moral universe with many of our fellow citizens, you have to constantly be prepared to discriminate, to be on guard and to say no and to distance yourself and to create a safe space within your in-group and exclude outsiders fairly rigorously. Someone who needs shelter. The odds are about 90%, they're mentally ill and addicted. You don't just bring those people into your synagogue. I mean, that's insane. He said the man was not threatening or suspicious at first. Yeah, people who want shelter, they're not generally going to be terribly threatening or suspicious at first. Later he heard a gun click as he was praying. You want to be able to pray without hearing gun clicks, be very discriminating about the people you let into your space to pray with you. And on this similar theme, popular talk radio host Michael Jackson dies at 87, so he dominated the airways at ABC Radio in Southern California from about 1966 to 1998. And what he's well known for was his civility. But he was thrashed in the ratings during the 1990s by the rise of the brash Rush Limbaugh. Now civility is a wonderful virtue. Compassion is a wonderful virtue. Telling the truth is a wonderful virtue. But all virtues have to operate within situations and contexts and constellations, right? So civility is just one of many virtues, right? There are a lot of things in many situations that are far more important than civility, right? So the rabbi escaping from the gunman, right, throwing a chair at the gunman. That was not very civil to throw the chair at the gunman, but that was the right thing to do. Like throwing the chair and getting away from the gunman was 10,000 times more important than civility. So civility is a wonderful trait in talk radio hosts, but it's not necessarily the most important trait. So Michael Jackson said he refused to sacrifice his signature civility for a bump in the ratings. It says, I've been overly polite to guess, showing them greater deference, but I'm not going to become less polite.  So yeah, civility is a wonderful trait, but it operates within a context, within a constellation sometimes, even as a talk radio host, there are a lot of traits far more important than civility, such as, you know, having something important to say or having something new to say. So what Rush Limbaugh launched was a more politically incorrect, a brusher, more visceral approach to politics. And I think some of it was overdone and some of it went too far. And I think much of the sum total of what Rush Limbaugh has wrought has made America a worse place. I think generally speaking, what I noticed in myself and in other people, the more they listen to right wing talk radio, the angrier they get, right? So the angrier you get, the less effective you get. So some people are able to appreciate justice entertainment and sometimes some useful information, but I noticed, you know, a wide number of people just get angry listening to talk radio, right? So when you get angry, that usually doesn't serve you. There are situations where anger serves you. If you're in an alley and someone's trying to kill you or rob you and you have a good chance to defend yourself, then getting angry is the right response, right? If you need energy to do certain important things to take care of certain difficult issues, if you need to have a tough conversation with your spouse, with your sister, with your employer, with your employees, with your neighbor, right? If you need to have some to do some difficult things that are not ordinarily within, you know, your comfort level and you have to get out of your comfort level to do these important things that kind of go against your nature. If you need to confront people and you don't like to confront, then getting angry can serve you, right? When does anger serve you? When it enables you, gives you the power to take care of things immediately, right? Anger that drags on day after day, week after week, month after month, doesn't serve you. But anger in the moment that enables you to get something done that gives you the courage to go out there and do things that you otherwise would not do. Maybe you become a public crusader for safe streets, or you become a public crusader for clean and fair elections, or you become a public crusader to help the homeless, or, you know, whatever you need to do, whatever your mission is, and if you wouldn't otherwise have the fuel, if you wouldn't have the power, if you wouldn't have the drive to get done what you need to get done, then anger can provide that fuel, but it comes at an enormous price. So it works when you need it right in the moment. So let's say someone comes into the chat and says something really obnoxious, and I just confront the person and get angry, right, and deal with the problem, then that's a useful way of harnessing the power of anger to do what needs to be done. If you need to clean up your life, if you need to confront someone, if you need to do something difficult, and if you can make an improvement to your life right now, then, yeah, anger serves you, right? In the moment, cleaning up a mess in your life, yeah, anger serves you.  But day in, day out, week in, week out, just like being angry at Jews, being angry at blacks, being angry at Democrats, being angry at liberals or Republicans or talk radio, that's not going to serve you. And so what I noticed with a lot of talk radio, it largely depends on anger, because anger is like the easiest emotion to immediately tap into when you're doing a show on politics, right? You get something that's visceral, right? It's a hot button issue. And like, it's a lot easier to tap into people's hatred and anger than it is to appeal to the better angels of people's nature. So I'm a right-winger, so you'd think that I'd automatically side with right-wings, syndicated talk radios, you know, just a great thing for America. But much of its lowest common denominator is just going for, it's revenge porn. It's hate porn. It's easy porn. It's just quick, easy, visceral fuel to connect people and to grab their attention. It's far easier to grab people's attention by getting them angry than by enlightening them, by inspiring them, right? You get much more engagement with a social media post or a social media video if it appeals to the visceral emotions of anger and disgust and rage, right? That's the easiest way to get ratings and to get engagement. And you see that with the pundits. They generally play to their particular crowds. Ben Shapiro says the things that make conservatives happy. And Dennis Prager says the things that make his crowd happy. And left-wing pundits play to their crowd, and they kind of rile up their base. And that is good for the career of the pundit who does that. It's good for his income. It's good for his fame. It's good for his social status. It's probably bad for society. So as far as I'm concerned, especially all pundits are pretty much useless. I make occasional exceptions for Ann Coulter. I think Steve Saylor is valuable.   Do you know why they all do this? Because the older, more effective technique of having a really pretty girl on hand is denied them. So talk radio is largely a rage machine. One thing I would say for Rush Limbaugh is he recognizes primarily in an entertainment medium. And I do not remember feeling enraged by listening to Rush Limbaugh. So I would consistently feel more enraged after listening to Dennis Prager. And I haven't listened much to Sean Hannity or who's that screaming guy, Jewish guy, conservative, one of the top talk radio host, Mark Levine, Mark Levin, like it sounds like a screaming homeless guy. Obviously, his audience is all about riling people up. Now, I like a lot of what John and Ken do in KFI. Talk radio in Los Angeles, they watch out for the average tax-paying resident of Southern California. But again, it's a rage machine. And just like constantly stoking rage, I don't think that really serves people. Now, question in the chat, do I think I have a positive effect on people who listen to me? Yeah, I think I have a positive effect. You're not going to come away from my show, generally speaking, more enraged to the extent that I have any effect on people. I think I might give them an unexpected insight or some useful sources of information. And yeah, I think I, generally speaking, have either no effect or I think I have a mildly positive effect on some listeners. So some people get much more benefit from me than others. So I think people who have suffered or continue to suffer from any of the same addictions or troubles that I've had may get some benefit from like hearing what they're struggling with explicated. So I think a lot of people have troubles. They have misery, they have, their life isn't working, but they can't put a name to it. They can't articulate what's happening. It's just kind of hanging on them kind of a dark cloud or they're just consistently failing in one area of their life. I think some of my streams, people might get words, ideas, concepts, insights, analogies, metaphors that speak to what's troubling them and makes it much more clear. And perhaps encourages them to go get some help, whether it's therapeutic or becoming religious or meditation or yoga or Alexander Technique or 12-step programs, whatever it is. Homeless people have been getting a lot of bad press lately. Because for a while, there is a natural human inclination to feel compassion for the homeless. But there's also a natural human inclination to stay away from people who are obviously deeply troubled and disproportionately dangerous. And so the worse the homeless behave, the more people move away from compassion and towards restriction. So the better homeless behave, then the more people will be interested in helping them out. Am I angry at Richard Spencer? I don't feel any anger towards Richard Spencer. I think with most people, if you have an ongoing anger with someone, you put them in the wrong category. Once you put someone in the correct category, then you'll no longer have undue expectations for them. So Richard Spencer is an attention-seeking provocateur. And he's very good at that. Ben Shapiro takes the most conservative positions possible. And he's fairly good at articulating the most conservative positions possible. Dennis Prager is a talk radio host who has a background in Judaism and he's fairly good at bringing the Bible into modern day political and cultural issues. But he's not a scholar. So once you put people in the category, like I am an eccentric 55-year-old bachelor who has struggled with a lot of emotional addictions and had some recovery from them and made some improvements with his life and has read a lot of books and has experienced some things that may be of interest or used to other people. But I'm not really a scholar. Now I'm not a highly accomplished businessman. I'm not a highly accomplished media personality. I'm not a deeply learned Jew. I'm not the epitome of love and compassion. I'm an eccentric 55-year-old bachelor who's had some experiences and has some ability to articulate various parts of life that some people might find useful. So when you put me in the category eccentric 55-year-old bachelor who has an above-average ability with words and probably reads more books than 99% of people, that's all you should expect from me. I've never listened to any talk radio for more than about three minutes, says Robert. The government stayed a week at a Christian homeless shelter. Yeah, so if you wanna help the homeless, I think go volunteer within a structure where there are people who know what they're doing. So I think there probably are effective ways of helping the homeless but just going out on the street and giving people money or inviting people into your home or to your synagogue or to your church, I don't think it's so effective. Robert says, I miss Milton Rosenberg blasting out across America on WGN.  Me, like pretty much every time I have made a big move in my life, I then spend significant amounts of time writing letters to people who I used to live near and among and hung out with. I'd rather write letters and mythologize the past than build new connections in the present. So I think most, if you're watching me, the odds are you probably don't connect normally with other people and because we are wide to connect, we have to connect. If we don't connect normally with people in everyday life, then we're gonna seek out a connection through addiction, either drugs or processes or through parasocial relationships. So I have a parasocial relationship with many people in my chat. Like I not met them in real life, I don't see them in real life, but I have a sort of relationship, a parasocial. So para means, what does para mean? Come on. Associated with, closely resembling, all right? So para, social. So this resembles a social relationship, like if we were gathering at synagogue once a week and sitting around at Kiddish and talking about life. So if you, in a highly diverse, highly conflicted America where we don't feel like we share a moral universe with many of the people around us, we will often go online to try to get that connection that we're missing in our real life. So our real life, social life is not fulfilling us. We can't talk about the things that are most important to us. We can't talk about controversial issues of race and religion and sex. And so we look for places where we can talk about these controversial things. And so we come to the online world and have a virtual relationship, a parasocial relationship from LA to the subways, beneath New York City, the message is all the same. Stay away from the homeless. Well, they're disproportionately troubled.  Because if you just go off on your own, very likely to do more harm than good.  So I don't believe in moral categories of racism and anti-Semitism. Obviously different groups have different interests. We're gonna see the world differently, experience the world differently and have different moral universes.  I don't think that way.  And so people have life experiences. If you have a lot of negative experiences with members of a certain group, you're very likely to have negative views of that group. Luke brought me to Deep Left Joke, Kenneth Brown. And for that, I am eternally grateful. Luke, you need a prop for these live streams. I suggest you get a haircut and wear a suit and tie for these live streams. I was just planning to do a two-minute live stream, but I just got carried away. I just stimulated by the chat and I was just enjoying my conversation so much that I couldn't stop. So normally I'd put on a nicer shirt and do better lighting. And I would have shaved all my hair off three months ago, but I kept getting all these compliments about my longer hair. So I'm letting it go, letting my hair grow until I hear more comments, hey, you need to get a haircut.  Luke is like my little brother, he's like my bogey cousin from Down Under.  Yeah, because there are hundred times more Gentiles than Jews. I'm not saying getting short, just comb it. I didn't take a comb to Australia because I normally don't comb my hair because I don't have enough hair to comb. So just run my fingers through it after a shower or when I'm in the ocean, just, there goes my yarmulke. Oh my God. So I think I'm doing pretty good considering the Dallas Cowboys had such a devastating loss yesterday. So Steve Saylor notices that the front lash is trending on Twitter. Okay, where's my kippah? So Norm MacDonald had this great joke that his big fear was that some Islamic terrorists would get their hands on a nuclear weapon and explode it and kill hundreds of thousands of people. But his big fear was that this would precipitate anti-Islam attitudes. And so on Twitter, the top story was the synagogue hostage taking in Texas. But then the second top story, now Twitter selects which stories they wanna highlight in their Twitter trending section. So this is curated, it's overwhelmingly done with the leftist agenda. So the number two story that Twitter wants to promote after the Texas synagogue hostage taking is Islamophobia, right? Let's not fall into Islamophobia when a Muslim takes a rabbi and three congregants hostage in a synagogue in Texas.  Hope I'm wrong. People will use it to divide Jewish and Muslim communities so their political agenda, don't fall for it. So Muslim just as a category doesn't really have much meaning. You don't really know anything that someone's a Muslim. There are plenty of Muslims, there are plenty of Muslim areas and groups that never commit terrorism. So just like someone's Jewish, it doesn't really tell you much. But if you know that someone's Ashkenazi Jewish, their ancestors come from Eastern Europe, then you can get more of a picture of someone or if someone is, his family comes from the Middle East for five generations, comes from Iraq for five generations, Iraqi, then you start to get more of a specific understanding. So I think it's most useful for the sake of reality is understand religion as a subset of culture. So just Jewish or Christian or Muslim doesn't really mean anything or Buddhist, right? You need to get more specifics and then the picture starts falling in. So I see religion as a subset of culture. So Southeast Asian Islam is very different from Iranian Islam, which is very different from the Islamic state. All right, so to the best of my knowledge, we haven't had Islamic terrorists from Iran go into the West and start killing people. That's been the Sunni, certain Sunni Muslims have done that, but Shia Muslims have not done that. So just knowing that someone's Jewish, Christian Muslims doesn't really tell you anything. An African Christian, right, is not gonna have very much in common, generally speaking, with a Christian from Northern Europe and or a Christian from the favelas in Brazil, right? So often the culture or the race will tell you more about a person than their religious identification. So in Africa, when the Hutus and the Tutsis were going at it, like one side was genociding the other, there was Seventh-day Adventists who were leading the genocide. Now generally speaking, Seventh-day Adventists are really peaceful people, but in that particular African context, Seventh-day Adventists were leading the genocide. So in that context, knowing that some of the leaders of the genocide or Seventh-day Adventists doesn't really tell you anything. So yeah, Norm MacDonald had this great tweet, what terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans, imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims. So Norm MacDonald, what an under-owner. I read a great profile of him in the Washington Post and he would get all these opportunities and he would just blow it. Like he wouldn't get back to people. He wouldn't be a joy to work with. So very funny guy, but incredible self-destructive tendencies. Now why are so many people dying in car accidents and why are so many pedestrians dying? So the racial reckoning has not just led to this massive increase in murder rates. So murder rates have generally speaking gone up in America's biggest cities by an average of about 25% since George Floyd died, but it's not just murder rates and not just all sorts of crime rates and we saw what happened to those trains in Los Angeles getting looted and we have smashing grabs at many of LA and San Francisco's most exclusive stores, but why do we also have this massive increase in traffic deaths? Like what's wrong with American driving in 2021 and is it connected to the massive increase in crime? So Steve Saylor writes about this, evidence piles up the twin historic disasters of 2020, the dreaded COVID pandemic and the celebrated racial reckoning have left Americans crazier and lazier. So if you're on the right, you should have a negative, a skeptical perspective on human nature, whether you use a Christian language such as original sin or you have some other approach, but to be on the right is to be skeptical of human nature. And so if you remove the safeguards, if you remove deterrence from people, they will automatically start to behave worse.  So Steve Saylor tabulated year-end homicide counts, 2021 versus 2019, from 44 of the 50 biggest cities in America found out the killings were up 45% in 2021 versus 2019. So this is overwhelmingly due to the racial reckoning that took off after the death of George Floyd. Now, what about year-end traffic fatalities for 2021? Well, car crash deaths rose 17% from 2019 to 2021. And I think for similar reasons that we have come to glorify criminals like George Floyd, like what happened to George Floyd was horrible, but he was not someone to be venerated, right? He had a long criminal history and this guy is venerated is insane. So when you start venerating bad guys, when you start venerating people do horrible things, you're gonna get more horrible behavior. So what's going on in our country, what's going on in our roads, bad behavior is being incentivized because police are being encouraged to back off policing. And because human nature is not basically good, then people start acting out more. So in 2020, the quantity of miles driven dropped versus 2019. So you would have thought that that would have reduced car deaths, but the quality of the driving plummeted. So total miles driven in 2020 down 13% from 2019, but deaths per million miles driven went up 23%. And all things being equal, traffic deaths should be dropping because we have superior technology. Now, in 2021, we had miles driven rebounded to only a few percent less than 2019. And but deaths per million miles driven continued at the awful rate of 2020. So when everything shut down in the spring of 2020, many drivers took advantage of empty streets and they started driving recklessly. The Utah Highway Patrol wound up issuing 31% more tickets than 2019 to drivers speeding over 100 miles per hour. And despite all this worse driving, American cops prudently ticketed drivers less, right? You incentivize the cops from backing off from enforcement. So we have worse behavior, more criminality, more bad driving, and cops are enforcing the law less.  So in Indiana, Indiana State Police issued 25,000 of your speeding tickets in 2020. So a 41% decrease in Connecticut. Number of traffic stops dropped from 512,000 in 2019 to 188,000 in 2021. So number of motorists killed by being ejected, which is perhaps the most spectacular way to go, right Steve Saylor here, increased 20% in 2020. So drivers are getting crazier and lazier but not even bothering to buckle their seatbelts. So deaths with an unbuckled seatbelt were up 15%. People are not gonna buckle their seatbelts as often if police are backing off on enforcement. Now you may think, oh, legalizing marijuana, that's gonna cut down on drunk driving. But instead, Americans are driving both drunk and high. The 60% of fatal crashes in 2020 involved impaired drivers in Washington. And an increasing number of these DUI crashes involve multiple substances, such as alcohol and marijuana. So after George Floyd died in late May 2020, our establishment decided that our most pressing problem in this country is too much law and order. That's just a terrible message to send in a country like America that's so diverse and where we don't share a moral universe with our fellow citizens. So we don't have social cohesion and social trust.  So blacks died in car wrecks 36% more often in 2020 than in 2019. Less enforcement, less fewer cops, fewer traffic stops, more bad behavior, more deaths. It's like with the civil rights. Once we, America passed massive civil rights legislation in the mid 1960s, the black crime rate skyrocketed and the black family, the quality of the black family life dramatically declined. So police retreat to the donuts and most everybody will then behave worse, but some groups will behave worse, worse than others. And why does this happen? Because cops figured out by June 2020 that our elite wanted to turn cops into the face of white supremacy. You know, over traffic stops gone wrong. So cops have backed off from enforcing the law. So we've, we've synchronized criminals over cops. And as a result, we've got a ton more dead bodies. So murders and car crashes tend to go up and down together. So the Ferguson effect, murders went up in 2016 by 23% and highway mortality went up by 15%. Then both measures fell during the first three years of the Trump administration before then shooting up since the death of George Floyd. So the Ferguson effect and the Floyd effect have given us a massive increase in murders and in car deaths. Root causes are both depressed police and exalted criminals. When you exalt criminals, valorize criminals, praise criminals and you demean police. This is what you get. And the degree of correlation in the rise of driving demisers correlates with the increase in the motor rate at that city level. So you have the worst increase in car fatalities in Minnesota, home to George Floyd. So Minneapolis where you had, you know, the mayor said, let the looters burn the police station, right? And Minneapolis, you know, launched the defund the police movement. Minneapolis then suffered the fifth biggest increase in homicide. So up 100% in 2019. Austin homicides went up 178%. Auto casualties grew 36%. Portland had 150% increase in murders, 34% increase in traffic mayhem. So in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic in Seattle combined with the George Floyd protests prompted the Seattle police to reassess relying on police enforcement as a go-to tool. So patrol, a lot of cop patrols stopped, right? And then as a result, you got this tremendous ex, this tremendous jump in murders and traffic deaths. So remember the Obama administration turned the Ferguson police department upside down to try to find the racism it knew it must be there. Couldn't find anything. So then the Department of Justice announced, well, Ferguson was operating a speed trap. And this was considered giant national news. Speed traps are good. Like there are far, far, far fewer car deaths in Australia because there's so much law enforcement. There's so many ways of tracking how fast people are driving. There are drones, there are speed cameras. So people in Australia drive much more carefully. As a result, there are far fewer car deaths in Australia. So there's no defund the police movement to speak of in Australia. So Australians take it for granted that you need police and you need police to enforce the law. As a result, Australia has very little significant crime. And then we've got this crazy Vision Zero strategy. The mayor of LA has embraced this, Eric Garcetti, to eliminate all traffic fatalities by trying to rebuild roads to make them too scary to drive fast on and deemphasize law enforcement. So American cities overwhelmingly operated, run by Democrats, they're all adopting this Vision Zero strategy, Daydream, and deemphasizing law enforcement. And as a result of these policies, you have a massive increase in traffic deaths. All right, so not only are we not getting closer to Vision Zero for traffic deaths, we're getting farther away, we're having this massive explosion as a result in part of these Vision Zero strategies. So Steve Saylor notes Vision Zero to reminiscent of the 2002 No Child Left Behind legislation that George Bush and Ted Kennedy cooked up to mandate that all school children score, at least an average score by 2014. So didn't work, right? You didn't change racial gaps in education with this legislation.  Traffic deaths are up 17%. Now, the Japanese have set a challenging but reasonable goal of cutting fatal car crashes from 16,765 in 1970 to below 2,000 by 2025. They are on track. So in 2021, then you had 2,636 car deaths. So Japan, Syria's country, United States is increasingly a land of wishful thinking and make-believe. Bye-bye.