Welcome to Church of the Chair where we celebrate all the things we do while seated. I'm your host E here with my guest Chad Lutsky and we're doing something different today. We are doing a live collab starting with a brainstorming session this morning. We should be going for about an hour roughly. It might last longer. I don't know how long this is going to last, but you guys are going to be able to witness the inception of the idea all the way hopefully to publication. The tentative plan right now, me and Chad talked about this yesterday is we'll do all the brainstorming, get everything set up before we start writing, and then we will write it live also. When I write my sections, I'll be live on my channel. They'll be live on his or I'm not sure if we're going to be able to do that all the time, but that's the game plan right now because sometimes I wake up three o'clock in the morning and I just want to start writing. I guess I can just go ahead and click live, I guess. But anyways, how are you doing Chad? How you been? I'm doing all right man.  I just woke up, so if I'm not the bubbly personality you're expecting. I apologize. I was telling Chad yesterday I get up between five and seven every day and my alarm clock is set for six. Sometimes I wake up before, sometimes I turn it off and sleep in a little bit, but this morning I wake up and it's daylight and it's already eight o'clock. I'm like, well, shit, because I set my alarm from Monday through Friday so I can sleep in if I can on the weekends. And of course today being the day I have something to do, I forgot to set it for Saturday or Sunday. No, Sunday. See, I don't even know what day it is. I forgot to set it for Sunday and I woke up at eight. I'm like, I'm surprised I woke up in time at all because I took a gummy last night. But anyways, so yeah, that's the gist of everything. Where do you want to start, Chad? Just that, I guess as a, just preface it by saying, yeah, we haven't really talked, the only thing that we've talked about is the plans that we think we want for when the book is done as far as the publisher or whatever. And then this is not horror, that we were going to do something that's more along the lines of crit lit or southern goth or I guess something like that. And it'll still have teeth. It just won't be horror. Yeah. Yeah. Other than that, we haven't really, we haven't thrown out any ideas. All that's reserved for here to so that people can be kind of a fly on the wall. We get, we were talking yesterday how I've gotten so many questions about, you know, how do you collaborate? How is the, you know, and the process is actually different with each person that you collaborate with. But people are really fascinated by how it works. And so, yeah, that'd be cool to open the door and let people come in and see. You've worked with Tim Meyer, Mayor, is it? Meyer. Okay. Tim Meyer and John Bowden. Have you worked with anybody else yet? Yeah. Terry M West. We wrote a novel together. Yeah. I sort of worked with Bob Ford. We have something on the way, way back burner that we had been doing. But the, the, it's early. It is really not even that early. I've been up for two hours. So, so I should, I should, but I'm not, I'm not a coffee drinker. So, I'll be fine once I get to the bottom of this cup.  Yeah. It's just like it and I'm still super tight with all of them. It's just that for one reason or another, you know, like probably the one that I'm closest with the most is Hunter Shea. Dude ghosted me. We were, we were writing something.  I'm like, yeah. I'm going to say this. I love Hunter. Love him to death. Love his work. Love him. But I, I, I cannot imagine a collaboration with Chad Lutsky and Hunter Shea. It is completely two polar opposite styles. Like he is all about, you know, the, and this is not, this is not, he's a good writer too. Don't get me wrong.  And then you got Chad over here with his, you know, slice of life stories and everything. It actually, it probably made for an amazing collaboration. But I don't think it would be like you, you, you both would have to write each chapter. If you get what I'm saying, like, you know, you wouldn't be able to go back and forth with chapters. You'd have to layer each other because you're good at one thing. He's good in another. Well, he's good at the same stuff you are, but he, I guess, what's the best way to put it? He uses more words, I guess, to, to get, to get points across.   Yeah. His, if you think of like, if you hand somebody a creature from Hunter Shea and you say, this is a big flip book, it's like, yeah, it is, but it's so much more than that. That's underselling it. You're absolutely right. And that's definitely, definitely not what I was getting at. I know you know, but I just not forming the words right now because I love his stuff.  So that's not even what I'm talking about. It's literally just the style, like the cadence of the words would be so different to have, to have you and him on the same.  It might not have been the only thing, but it was a misconception that all I wrote was horror. Because the only thing he had read from me at that point in time was everything is horrible now, which is like a Bentley Little book. I've been reading way too much Bentley Little. It was Bentley Little Cosmic Horror thing. And that's like the, probably the worst possible example of my stuff that you could possibly pick up. And by now, I'm sure Chad agrees. But I've always been character first, theme second. And then the next thing I worry about is just pacing.   And that's how all the pin names really got started because I would write literally any genre. I would see something and I'd be like, I can do that better, or at least as well. So let me try this. To bash Hunter for a second on our collaboration, we had a couple chats, stream yard chats and stuff, and we're spitballing ideas. And we had started our alien abduction novel that we were writing. I had just written or I just read Communion by Whitley Stryver, terrifying book that I hadn't ever read before. And so we were playing kind of in Hunter's ballpark.  It's just one of the best coming of age books. I get a message from him. He's like, Hey, do you want to write a book together? And I was like, freaking James Newman. And I said, I would love to, but I'm writing something with Hunter. So Hunter starts ghosting me soon after that with our project. I get back with James. I was like, Hey, man, I'm ready if you are. He's like, Sorry, dude, I'm right with Ronald Kelly. Dude, Hunter, Hunter, Hunter owes you for that one. He owes you like the case. I know you don't, you don't drink anymore. He owes you a case like Arizona sweet tea or something.  I have collabed with TC Parker. I've collabed with Darren Kapoff and I've collabed with the very, very little known book, Pig with Craig Saunders. I don't know what happened to Craig. Craig kind of fell off the face of the earth for me. So I took the book down because I couldn't send them royalties. I don't know what happened to him. Another person I collabed with is Lee Thompson. And that didn't even come out because he just, once again, he just disappeared. I'm really, really worried about Lee because no one's talked to him. Not even Brian Keane.  But I'm not gonna, I can't do anything with it because I don't have his permission to. But yeah. And Pig was, it's funny because me and Craig were both better outside of the horror genre, but we're both horror fans. So we came together to do like this small town almost zombie possession story. It wasn't really zombies. It was just, it was actually the local drug dealer was poisoning people and those, and the drugs were, were changing people's minds and making them. So it's kind of like a feral, like what is it, 28 weeks later kind of deal. It's not really a zombie. Like you can kill them normally, but, and they all shared a hive mind because of the chemicals. It was a very wild book. It was also super short is like 45,000 words. And we probably should have fleshed it out more. Neither one of us was happy with it after publication. And so it wasn't that huge. Yeah. Hello everybody, by the way, we were just talking away rambling on, but yeah, that one was my first long form collaboration. And we literally just went back and forth chapter to chapter. I'd write, well, you know, that denotes exactly what you think it does. But let's see here. The first, my first one was with Lee, Lee Thompson, then Craig, and then I met Darren and TC around the same time. And I wrote both of those, both of our first collabs together at the same time. So I was writing Wicked, no, I take that back. We had Wicked Rex of the West. And then I was writing We Are Legend and Maiden at the same time, which was, which was actually good because anytime it kind of sunk up, synced, kind of synced up well. So I would write, you know, something for We Are Legend, send it to Darren, and then he take about a couple of days or two a week. And then during that time, while I was waiting, I could work with TC, because TC was much faster. And then, you know, it just seemed, it seemed perfect. But my point is Chad is absolutely right. Every single collab I have done has been done differently, because sometimes we will, you know, layer, like me and TC layered, we didn't really just hand off a character to each other. Whereas with Darren and our first collab, I believe we just passed our characters. No, we didn't pass our characters back. We stuck to what characters, you know, we had been writing already. And then for the Wicked Wrecks of the West, what we did was I did all of the, the blending is what we called it, where you go in to make sure if anything sounds like it's a different author, you know, clean it up. And then Darren did the next book. And TC did the entirety of Maiden, because she's just a better writer than me, period, hands down. Her vocabulary is better, her sentence structure, all that stuff.  She writes like Peter Straub, but it reads like Stephen King. And that's no shitting on Peter Straub, but I've always found King easier to read than Straub. But yet she uses the same vocabulary as Straub would. While maintaining amazing character development, amazing plotting, pacing, all that stuff, she's just absolutely fantastic. And at this point, I have no idea where she is either. It's like, it's like I'm murdering my collaborators because this is the third one in a row that has disappeared. The only one I'm still in contact with is Darren. But anyways, I'm sure she's alive and well somewhere. Just everybody's got stuff going on right now. So getting to hang on. Oh, that was on mute. Oh, you were on mute? Yeah, I started talking and I realized I was on mute. Oh, what were you going to say?  That's kind of how kind of how wormwood was with Tim, where because we had two different voices. So he would like write a chapter or two. And I would go and do everything from completely rewrite it to essentially delete it, especially when he tried to get supernatural on me with the book a couple times. I had to reel it in. But yeah, that was that was completely different. Whereas with Bowdoin, while his his prose is more poetic than I am, we have a lot of similarities, big time, and we can mock each other really well. So it's just passing it back and forth was no is no problem. There's no it feels seamless by the time we're done. I remember when I was working with Lee, one of the when I sent him my first pages, the short story that you guys will never see probably, but I sent him my first pages and he goes, dude, you write just like me. Like, I got to go pick up some of your other stuff. I'm like, no, you know, it's nothing like this. What I'm doing is I'm mimicking you. Because he has a very unique style. It's very close to yours. It's short. It's punchy. It's to the point. It's like, basically, that's where I learned with working with Lee Thompson is where I learned the style for south of here. And I just completely stole his style. And then I morphed it into into my own because he's nowhere near as dirty as mine. Yeah, it has a werewolf on an Haley. Yes. Which we're not doing anything supernatural here. But I figured I'd have my wolf blood going on. And Joe said, it's like I'm murdering my collaborators. Great poor Chad. He wants your back Chad. If Chad just suddenly disappears, there's gonna be a lot of very upset people. Not that nobody was upset when the other people disappeared, but they're really gonna come after me because Chad is a Chad is a darling in the community. I say that in the best possible way. People love you, man.  Yeah. I had a couple questions too. Yeah. Are you writing this under Edward Lorne? I can if you want me to. Well, you had mentioned about working with some publishers and I'm just wondering in the future that's gonna let me let me tell you what's happened recently.  I can do whatever I want with it. I would have to sign another one, which wouldn't be retroactive. So anything that I do before that next contract, I can still put Lauren on. That's why Lauren is available to up for sale now. That's why anyways, but retroactively. Now, the only issue is if I were to sign again, I might have to take these videos down. But if we cut them all together or whatever and I send them to you and you upload them to your channel, there's nothing I can do about that. Because there was a there's a clause in that contract that states that it's only things underneath my control. And that's why whore babble was able to keep up the short story they narrated for me on their channel. That's why the audio books were left alone because I share the rights with the narrator, most of them are royalty shares.  And also I'm under contract with audible. So the contract with my financiers does not override existing contracts. But all those things would have to go away. Eventually, things that are contract now, it was something up on your channel. Then 100% we wouldn't have to do anything with it. It could just sit there kind of like storage. But so that's an option. And I will they gave me an entire year last time to prepare and get everything ready. So we wouldn't even be in a big rush if we had to do that. So if you want to do Lauren, that's fine. But in the future, we may not be able to use the Lauren name for if we do more than one book kind of thing. Yeah. That's up to you, man, whatever you want to do. I'm more I'm more concerned about, let's say the book is published.  Well, now you're attached at the hip with me on a book. Well, that's fine because we would be under contract. If we saw if we sold the book, and we were under, we could even write up our own contract. Like, you know, we have a five book deal to work with each other kind of deal. And that would supersede the deal with these guys. So it would I would still be able to get the main thing is that the betting of boys doesn't exist. That's the main thing that they're worried about. And because I cannot take it down permanently from Amazon, it'll always be there as least at least as a placeholder. Then that's what they're concerned about because I can't wipe it from the internet. I can't take it off Goodreads. I can't take down reviews of it, that kind of thing. But since that contract is null avoid, because they technically were in breach of it. I was three weeks out from a payday and they had to cancel the contract because none of those things went forward and they didn't want to pay me because those things weren't going to happen. I am still, however, in good standing with them because I talked to them about all this stuff and it was the same thing. You can do whatever you want. You're out of contract. We hope that you choose not to do anything else like the betting of boys, which is funny because I think, no, no, I was about to say I think personally that South of here is worse as far as offending people because there's a good point to betting of boys, whereas South of here is just, you know, we're all bad and trying not to be. It's that final line, that thing.  But anyways, so I wouldn't worry about it. If you want me, I can always, I can always boot up a new pen name. I got a whole list of them over here. I can throw together. But that is something to worry about. Also, if we go to publishers and those publishers like we don't want to be attached to Lauren because that's happened in the past. I completely missed out on a random penguin deal because of Lauren. So that has happened. I'm just trying to make you aware of everything that could be a you're going to have, you're going to have a lot of people you don't even realize don't like me say they're not going to read the book. That's another thing if Lauren's name is attached to it. So it's up to you.  But do you have a book that I'm sorry, do you have a pen name that you plan on building? Another one that you plan on building? I don't have to tell you off. So no, not that I can use with you. I do because I don't know if I'm going to be making the new pen names public or not. I have two of them coming up. One of them is more recent, the most recent one is about a month ago.  And they realize that people are going to be reading during this time. Raw Dead? Raw Dead and Uncle E? No, we're not doing that. It'll be a completely different face. It'll be completely different everything. And I've hired models in the in the past for the back covers of my books.  I'm not killing anybody. Craig Saunders is fine. I'm sure and so is Lee Thompson, I would hope. And I know TC Parker is alive and well. Well, I mean, I'll let you make the call. I just want I want to do what we can to make the book as successful as it can be. Oh, 100%. Now we can use Lauren, man, I have no problem using Lauren. But like I said, keep keep in mind that there are going to be people who refuse to even like beta read or read the book that you know that I know you know because you think them in the back of your books that are not going to want to touch this with a 10 foot pole. But then again, we are doing these things live. So I mean, they're going to know anyways, even though I've changed the name of the channel and everything. But I would go over possible Cynthia Pickle breath. No, who are you, Charles Dickens? Anyways, but I don't want to go over possible pin names that I have because if we don't use any of those, then I won't be able to use them live. So that's something we'll definitely talk about in the text messages or emails or whatever.  Like what what is a pro from not using Lauren? Well, there at the end, Lauren Lauren's selling again, oddly enough. Before I went away, I was selling maybe 2030 books. And that's, that's even with South here with new releases, I was selling like 2030 books a month. And now that I'm back, I'm selling anywhere between 40 and 50. I don't know why I'm not doing I did one video saying they were back up and now people are just, you know, people are buying. So the the cons to using Lauren would be like I said, the there are going to be a lot of people in the in the communities you run in that are not going to read the book or not going to want to blurb it or not even going to want to read it to blurb it that kind of thing. As some of them might even shock you. But it's because they're decent people who just, you know, happened to bump into me at the wrong time in my life kind of deal. The other I don't I don't really other see any other cons other than the fact that like I said, we would have to sign a contract for a certain amount of books together so that there was a contract that superseded the whatever contract I'm going to sign in the future. Now, is anything going to happen with that after the strike is over? I hope so, but I have no guarantee if those projects are, you know, going to be viable to begin with. So do I have other outlets? Yes, I do. Are they going to ask for the same thing? I honestly don't know, because the last people that I worked with sprung it on me last minute, they were they were just going through they did a background check on me, of course, because they were going to be, you know, investing in me. And then with the background check, their person found all the Lauren boats, because I made them aware of the name and all the other names I tell any person that I'm in business with about all of the names so that if anything comes out, you know, they're not surprised, that kind of thing.  But they sprung it on me, they're like, what is the bedding of boys about? And I explained it to him and I was like, it's it's not kitty stuff, is it? Like, you know, they actually thought it was erotic. They didn't bother reading it. They still haven't read it. And I was like, no, it's not. And they're like, well, it sounds that way.  How does it sound like that? I will never forget this conversation. Like, yeah, we're going to have to do something about that. Can you take that down? Like, we'll pay you. I'm like, I can take it down, but it's still going to show up.  Like, yeah, that's gonna, this is gonna be a problem. I'm like, okay.  And so, yeah, but anyways, I get to keep the money because they're in breach of contract. That's a good thing. Yeah, me. But the, had the strike not happened, I would have been an even better position. Anyways, so that's the only thing I have right off the bat would be that people would come out of the woodwork. But I told you this last time also that there are people who are not going to want to read this. Well, I'm not as worried about the community as there used to be the horror community, which is what we're most affiliated with, even though it's were adjacent to that. It'd be 100% people from that community. You wouldn't have to worry about that as far as success for the book. I realize over the years that the horror community that we're affiliated with, it's much smaller than they think they are. I know. I told Todd Keasling this a while back and I was like, I don't want to sound like a douchebag, but it's not as important as you think it is. It's not. It isn't. My case in point, my buddy, Pat Ivano, which I have talked to you about who used to write horror. He makes nearly mid six figures on his excuse me self published stuff. Nobody knows who he is. And he doesn't, he barely has a social media presence. He's not affiliated with any of the people that we are who seem like big rock stars in the small scope of things. And it's like he's a really good example. And I've got other friends too who are making a great living self publishing zombie fiction, post a pack, all this kind of stuff. And nobody knows who they are. Right. No, absolutely 100%. It happens all the time. Yeah, six figures on self published isn't that, isn't that rare? It is rare. It's hard. But it's, it's, but it, but there's more people doing it than you would think. You know, I would say it's more than 1%, which is what most people think.  They would put their book up for 99 cents and people at that point in time had not even considered being able to buy a book for a dollar, not after 2000. That was, that was ridiculous. So they would constantly, yeah, Amanda Hawking started off as an indie author, just throwing stuff, literally unedited content up on Amazon. And same with Blake Crouch, Blake Crouch started off the same way.  But anyways, the, I completely lost my train of thought there. Where were we going with that? We're talking about the horror community being raised small. So here's when my eyes opened up. So I brought up a certain big name author that neither one of us have a good opinion of to one of the people that I've been working with. Okay. He's a, he's a director, done some major projects. And he literally asked me who.  But as like, to me, this person was a significant deal, at least in the community. And I thought it was wider. I didn't think of who you were talking about. Now I know exactly. Yeah. But it's not that we don't like him as we don't have a high opinion. Anyways, but it's the, what I'm getting at is I mentioned that, and we were on a conference call. And I said, this person, I brought it up because of some other thing that, anyways, it doesn't matter what happened. His name came up. And the one person who's now a good friend of mine at the time, just an associate, but real good friend of mine said who. And I explained as like, never heard of him. And then there was a woman laughing off that wasn't even a part of the, the conversation. And my friend Esther was like, I heard of him the last time I heard of him was like the nineties. So it's like, I didn't even know he was still doing anything. And that's, and as well as telling Todd Kiesling is you'd be surprised at the people you think are major names in this, in this industry. Don't get anywhere near the, the, I guess accolades that you think they might, or the, you know, not these outside of the community, nobody's even heard of them. And I thought that was, I thought that was interesting. So that changed my entire perspective. When you, when you have to constantly talk about your accolades, chances are you did not this is true. This is absolutely true. Yes. And that's, that's another reason why I don't even go in for awards. Oh wait, it's kind of like putting the cart before the horse. But another thing is I don't, I don't know if you know this about me. I don't participate in awards at all whatsoever. No matter what name it is, I don't agree with it. But I am willing to do it with you. I just, if we were to ever win anything, I'm like it once again, part before the horse. If we were to ever win anything, it would be a hundred percent you accepting and all that stuff. So I don't, I don't do that. I'm just letting you know. Just letting you know up front. Hey, Brad, hello everybody, by the way. What are you talking about, Hayley? May I like Hayley, Luggle Queen, Brad? Yeah. Derek. Derek in here. Oh, I see it. Yeah, you have to do what Joe said. That's right. All right. Any more? Yes. Yeah, go ahead. I only had a couple. Now, can you think of a creative way to collaborate so we can have writing streams where both of us are writing the same book at the same time? Yes. We would use StreamYard. We might have to like go have these on StreamYard Premium or whatever, because I think we only get so much time to actually be live. I think it's 20 hours and then after that we have to start paying now. It didn't used to be like that. But I had to do it when we were doing Nano-Rymo. And since you were a guest, so I wasn't worried about that. But if you want to do it that way, what we would do is we would do it on StreamYard. We would share our screen and we would use Google Docs. So if we both want to work on something at the same time, we would go to the same Google Doc, and that's how we would do it. And you can literally, you'll have a different colored cursor than I would, and we could hop back and forth in real time. I'm more concerned about the like, do you have a creative ideas for the actual writing process where we're writing, we're able to write at the same time? The only thing I've ever written like that before. The only thing I would say is the way that King and Straub did it, or at least the way they described doing it, literally King would be down writing and Straub would tap him on the shoulder or something, like literally tag in and be like, I have something for this. And then he would jump in and he would write. And then it would still go back and forth. But as far as both of us writing at the same time, we could go live on both of our channels at the same time, or we could do StreamYard and we can both share our screens. I believe that's free no matter how long we go. I don't know. But you should be able to share your screen over on your end and I can share my screen. So if we both wanted to write at the same time, we would be able to share, if I'm understanding what you're asking correctly. No, I'm sorry. Okay, that's fine. No, what I mean is like, how are we going to write the same book at the same time? I'm not talking about, even if we weren't using the internet, even if we were just sitting at home writing our own thing, usually it's like, I need this thing to go by. And then I'm like, okay, here, I'm passing it back. Now you do your thing. But if we're writing different scenes at the exact same time, can you think of a creative way that we like whether, I know that some people are like, I'll take this character, you take this and then obviously you'd have to have some sort of outline, which I'm not against using, but I normally, which I don't like doing it when I'm writing my own stuff, but I can see the benefit of collaborating with an outline. If it's something like that, otherwise it would have to be just be, okay, now it's my turn to write this thing. I just wondered if you had an idea. I think going that route, it would be interesting, but we would 100%, with that idea, we would 100% have to outline. We would have to know what our point was for that chapter. And if we're both writing that chapter, and then we could literally just shuffle them together, like whatever points or whatever, we could do it that way. We could go over live how to, which line should stay, who said what better, that kind of thing. We could always do that. It would be a kind of cool competition too, to see who is more capable. I think that'd be fun, or I don't know. That's a good one. I never even considered writing a book like that. How about we formulate our ideas, and then to where we're like, okay, this is the book we're going to write. By that time, we might have the beginnings by default and outline that we could usually structure into an actual outline, and then be like, okay, I'm going to write this opening scene.  That's pretty much how I did it with TC. To go back to what I was saying earlier, I didn't write the whole thing, and TC came back. We shared. I'll write a chapter. We just did not limit ourselves to not writing each other's characters, I guess, is the way. We wrote just as much as each other in the book, and then she went back and overhauled the entire thing from the ground up. It was a collaborative process to write the book, but it was her process to clean everything up and get it, and I'm pretty sure she rewrote whole chapters. It was all a matter of getting the ideas out on the page, so that we could then make the cohesive story out of those ideas. Most of it ended up staying anyways, but she did have to rewrite whole sections, because either I was slacking that day, or she wasn't firing on all cylinders, whatever. However you want to do this, I'm down for, and the most unique way possible is, I'm down for that, so however you want to try it, man, I am open for anything, and none of this stuff is concrete, so we can change at any state in the game. We can flip and do it a different way if it's not working, or if we find that another way is working better, so on and so forth. Yeah, a lot of our ideas, a lot of the really good ideas won't come until we're there, you know? Or we might have to back up and go, I got something that's going to take this in a whole different direction. That just happened with novel I wrote with John Bowden, and it was gorgeous how it happened, and it turned out, and otherwise, potentially boring book into, you know, one of the best things I've ever written. Okay, so I have, so we're talking like Southern God, grit-lit stuff. Here's the idea, I only brought one idea to the table. Same.  Teen lives with a family that's been forced to raise him. The family deals meth, heroin, whatever, what have you. An event happens that's the last straw for this teen, so he ups and leaves, taking as many of their drugs as he can, would be intent to sell them along the way in order to fund this fresh start. Obviously, they're after him. They're, again, they don't really, they were put into a position where they, I don't know, maybe his parents died or whatever, and they just, he fell into the laps of these people that could care less. So it's almost, almost like a Harry Potter deal, you know, where his parents, his new guardians don't want him. Okay, yeah, yeah. That's the only, I'm not trying to say it sounds like Harry Potter, but that's the closest comparison I have. He meets all sorts of people along the way. Yes, I realize this sounds like a cross between Skullface Boy and Three Smile My Hell. Dude, this is literally, you're gonna get a trip out of what my idea was.  Here's the part you're probably gonna really like. Now that, that's the first idea, then I have an idea that could go along with it and take it into, it would stay the same, everything that I said, but the kid could join a modern traveling like county fair slash carnival, which I know you'll probably get a boner right now. Yeah. But, and that's where the real story begins. Not an old school like freak show type thing, just a regular county fair, potential for lots of shady characters with great backstories. And the whole time this kid is trying to keep secret that this family is after him and that he's still holding these drugs as some kind of desperate plan B. And then maybe even meeting someone in his town at the fair while it's there is the catalyst for him being like, I've had it. I'm taking off. I'm gonna go out with these guys. He could meet a girl, he could meet a guy that he somehow was bonding with or whatever, but that that's my idea. Okay. I like it. And I already say yes, but I'm going to tell you my idea beforehand because it's the similarities are crazy. And I even brought this up to you way back when we were going to collab. There was an idea that I had called goodbye road. And what would happen is there's this dying father who's terminal and he wants to go on the road to visit all of his people before he dies. And but his son doesn't know anything about this, his son is a strange son decides to go with him, which is the road trip thing. So we were both on the same page with the road road trip stuff. Yeah.  But anyways, the he would go, but he's he's on the run. And he he makes it seem like he's on the run with his dad that he wants to go with his dad just because he loves the dad that he could care less. He's really on the run because he stole someone's drugs. And that's the that's the that's the funny part because so that's that's what I was going to tell you. And then along the way they ended up they end up bonding. But it's it's been a story I've been wanting to write almost as long as like the trailer park petal story, you know, that's just something that's been in my head for a while. South of here came about, but I don't know if Goodbye Road will ever get written. So I figured I'd throw that one on the table. But that was my only thing. But I'm down with yours. Do like that. Yeah, like a Palisades Park. Alan Burner is one of my favorite novels of all time. So I am down with the Coney Park idea. So we would have right off the bat, we would have the instigating effect of the family and stealing the drugs and running off road trip section, and then ends up at a Coney Island type fair. And then the ends up bonding with someone there and the people there. And we even end up there at the end, we could have the entire attraction, the entire theme park help him in the end from the drug dealers. I think that would be awesome, almost like turning the entire place into a fun house so that, you know, things are jumping out at these guys. Anyways, I already got ideas pouring out of my head. As soon as you mentioned that, I was like, I see whole scenes in my head. And yeah, so I'm down with yours. We don't have to talk about that anymore. I love that idea. I especially want to break the family. Yeah. So I'm down. I love it. That's already over and done with. And I was going to write everything down, but then I realized that I don't have to do it in real time. I can just go back and watch the replay of the video. Yeah, you just timestamp, like we're, you know, whatever we're at right now. Yeah, I'm going to start about 35 minutes and, you know, go from there. Let's see here. Well, the only reason I was going to use, Haley, the only reason I was going to use the dad was because, you know, it would be the other side of the, it would be the drama side to the action side. So you have the drug dealers coming after the kid. And I was thinking about using mob or something like that, but you had the drug dealers coming after the kid and the father thinking that the boy, you know, the whole book was just going to be to tug at heartstrings. But I really love the idea. Of course, you knew I would of the whole amusement park thing just because I love the characters that we can, that we'll be able to do. Do you want to do this in the past? I think it would be more fun to do it before like the invention of cell phones. Yeah, man. Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the cell phone and literature. I am well educated on 80s and 90s. If we go any farther back, you're going to have to carry us because I know you're only 10 years older than me, but if you go any farther back, I don't know, I know about the 20s and the 40s, but that's about the only thing I would have to do mad research. I mean, maybe late 80s would be would be good. Yeah. And I don't, you know, I don't know. I don't know how these things work. I know that we have a carnival that comes, it, well, we've got a couple that come around here in town, different locations, but we have one in particular that it's one city over that it's the county fair and they show up for like a week or something and then you got your four age. So the whole plate smells like tractor poles and pigs. Yeah. And so, you know, and it never occurred to me that this is just a tour for them, you know, that they're on to someplace else.  That's, you know, you have a wide variety of things with any traveling show. I did a lot of research for the big project that I was working on. I think I told you about that one, but anyways, and I'm still technically working on it. So traveling shows are pretty much my thing right now. Like that's what I have the most, but if you do you want to do a traveling show or do you want to do something like a boardwalk? It doesn't matter to me, I'm hyped either way, but do you want to do a traveling show or do you want to do someplace that's, you know, I like the, I like the traveling thing because I like the idea of constantly being on the run and setting up, tearing down, setting up, tearing down, and just kind of like this, because that's where they live. If it's stationary, then they all have their own homes and their apartments and stuff. So I like the idea of being kind of nomads. Everybody is a nomad. I had one idea that kind of got cut from the process because it didn't make any sense and I decided to use a train instead, but it was pretty much just a caravan of semi trucks and trailers. And in those trailers, there were bunks. And of course, air conditioning and whatnot, they would set the reefer unit for, you know, not freezing, you know, just, just cool enough to wear. They'd be comfortable in the back of the trucks and then like grates over the top that they could cover up if it's raining or for air circulation.  So if you wanted to use something like that, and because it was like one trailer was just for the bunking and then all the rest of the trucks in the fleet.  But yeah, that's, dude, that's all I've been researching is traveling shows like carnivals, circuses, all that. That's all I've been researching for the past three years. So that really, yeah, we're already a step ahead of the game there with that kind of thing. And on top of that, there are thousands of videos online from every single decade time frame of people either documenting their experience living with a traveling show or just interviewing people that work at these traveling shows. So there is a wealth of knowledge online. And on top of that, I got a whole stack of books that are carnival and circus themed, most of them nonfiction. So yeah, dude, you need to read Freezerburn by Joel Anstale. I ordered it and I'm going to get to it, but I got to Broad Street Bastard. Broad Street Bastard will take you. I know a day. It's short, but yeah, Freezerburn, that must be where some of this idea came from because I just read Freezerburn this year.  But it's got a lot more humor than I would want to do. But yeah, it's a great book. And also, shoot, what was I going to say? And I'm already in love with this idea. I'm just throwing that out there. I love it. Because it reminds me of my favorite, while you're thinking, Chad, it reminds me of one of my favorite books. It reminds me of Twilight Eyes by Dean Coombs. It's not really, he's not on the run from anything, but it's definitely about an outsider coming into a, you know, a carnival. There's a guy named Slim McKenzie and he can see, he can see goblins, but to everyone else, it's pretty much like what they live, where, you know, you put the sunglasses on, you can see. But in his version, they're actual like medieval, like not medieval. They never existed, but actual like goblins from folklore kind of deal, fantasy, and only he can see them. And then he ends up meeting a girl who can anyways. But the best part of the book is just them being at the carnival and him working day to day. That's the best part of the book. Just the smells and everything that Coombs evokes is in his top tier carnival story. The only one I like more is G-Globe. But anyways, yeah. I haven't read, I don't think I've read any fiction, other than Priest of Burn, and then of course the amazing Carnival on HBO. Yeah. There's a lot of cool stuff in there. I haven't watched the second season yet. I'm trying to save it knowing that, you know, I will never get another season of it. That first season is absolutely iconic to me. That's an amazing show. And I started watching it after I had my big project idea. And it really helped because I knew what, I'm glad I watched it.  But it was able, I was able to watch that and be like, okay, while it is the same idea, there are different themes, everything. And mine happens from 1920 all the way up to 2020. So it's a hundred year saga, whereas theirs is only during the Dust Bowl and the Depression. But I was able to take the stuff that they did and make sure that I didn't do any of that. But yeah, Carnival is amazing. I just haven't watched the second season. I know it's early, but I want to throw a title out there because I have a tentative title for a, I'm like 30 some thousand words into a western that's like a cult, when to go Western thing that I was started years ago. And it has a tentative title and I love the title so much, but I, it doesn't fit it. It fits it okay. But it fits it this way, fits this idea way better. And that's Planet Caravan. Like the Black Sabbath song? Yeah, but like the Black Sabbath song. I like that. I don't mind that at all. At least tentatively, we can throw that on there. It's like I said, it's much more fitting for this.  That's his whole world. This is how my brain works. I'm just throwing it out there. What if we call it planets caravan? And the guy who runs it is planet. Maybe he's like the size of a planet.  Yeah, we can write that down. Yeah. Let's, uh, let's think about that. Planets.  Like their copyright. It doesn't matter. You can't copyright a song title. You can't copyright a song title. I didn't know that. I can tomorrow, I can write a song called stairway to heaven and put it on Spotify and get paid for it. Oh my God. And there's something that can be done. It is, it is.   You're, it's bad marketing.  So, but yeah, I've got, you know, same beat waters a song. And that's how I found out about that, that you can't, you can't copyright book titles.   I had an editor. I trust you more than I trust them. This is the reason why they're no longer an editor, but I had an editor tell me that song titles were litigious or however you pronounce it, where you can get sued over them, if you put them in the book. So I figured that yeah, I need, I need to look that up, see if that was even true.  I probably should have researched that. But anyways, and we got in a big back and forth about using song lyrics. I was like, I have the approval of the person who wrote the song, and they were, they worked for the publisher, and they were still like, ah, we don't have the approval. I was like, I can send it to you. It's like, we don't want the legalities of having to keep up with that. And it was, it was a artist named John Gomm. If you don't know who he is, I think you dig it. It's G-O-M-M John Gomm. He plays a percussive guitar, and the song is called Passion Flower, something like that. But anyways, he's amazing. Check him out. Same with you guys. Check him out when you have time. Some people were trying to tell me recently that you could have like a very tiny percentage of lyric in there under the Fair Use Act. Yeah, but I wasn't, because I, yeah. Sorry, I keep, I keep talking over you. Say what you have to say, and I'll, I'll make my point. A couple of my books, I have gotten permission from a few of my favorite bands, The Cues and DRI. Let me use lyrics for Cannibal Creator and for Slow Burnin' on Riverside at the beginning of the book. I got full permission. And then for Broad Street Bastard, there's a song, a Black Flag song called Bastard and Love that I really wanted to use at the beginning. I thought, I'll reach out to Greg, Greg Ginn, the guitarist. But I know also Greg, first of all, still owes Henry Rowan's and Frick and Keith Morrison, all those guys from Black, that have been in Black Flag at one point, still owes them royalties. Wow. And I know he's very stingy with the whole Black Flag bars logo. As a matter of fact, I made a t-shirt that you can still get on one of the sites, Red Bubble or T-Public, one of the two, I think. It's got the Black Flag bars and it's got the, because there's a, there's a gazillion parodies out there of, I know you're probably not familiar with the band, but at least the logo. Oh yeah, I am Black Flag. Yeah, I grew up listening to them, the misfits, all of them kind of, yeah.  Yeah, I've seen stuff like that, yeah. Well, I made my own and it says Jack Flag and the flags are the Overlook carpet. Oh. And he had that taken down and I know it was him because when T-Public contacted me, they told me who, who reported it and took it down and I thought, okay, so this guy's probably not going to let me use his lyrics, but I'm going to ask anyway. So I reached out to SST Records that he owns and then I reached out to the Black Flag website, which is essentially him with other people that are, have never been affiliated with Black Flag. And then I joined, and then someone told me I should join this group, SST Fan Club group or whatever. So I go in there, there's people in there from Ron Reyes, the second singer for Black Flag, he's in there constantly, you know, talking and stuff, other members, fans and so I asked them, is there any way do you guys know how I can get a Holy Greg in? This is, this is all I want. You know, I want some permission to use and that's when a lot of people are telling me about the fair use and I almost did it and I thought, I ain't scared of Greg again, but I got scared and that your copy, you know, find does not have the lyrics in there because I didn't want to deal with. Well, you did the right thing because fair use is denoted by the copyright holder. They, what fair use means is there is, they have to pick out certain pieces. It's the same with videos, movies, books, songs, all that stuff. Fair use is created, what you can use is created by the copyright holder. So to use that, you would have to have knowledge of what that thing is and if you happen to pick the wrong line, which is a, I mean, that's, that'd be like winning the lottery. If you happen to pick the right line, then you're okay, but if not, you can get sued for using it or you're going to have a, at least at the very least, he's going to hit you with a cease and desist and have it pulled down. So unfortunately, I got to run. Oh, you're fine, Viking.  So if you want to, you can catch this at any point in time. I know you showed up late, but yeah, have a good day, man. We're about to go anyways. I can't do them longer than an hour because I got game night tonight. Is there, okay, so we got our, we got our idea. We probably have our, our title. Yeah, this is a very good session. We talked more about, you know, just the collaboration process than, than the actual story, but that'll be, that'll definitely be enough for next time. We can just jump into it next time. Can you, are you able to already tell whether this would be better suited first or third person? What I was wondering was I've long wanted to do, it probably be better as a third, but I really want to say first because it's such a personal story, just this one person. But I would also like to see bits and pieces of the, no, no, let's, let's go first because what I'm, I don't want to take the risk of redoing something I've done in my big project and that's third person almost omniscient. So I have everybody's points of view, point of views in there at some point in time. It's been a long time since I wrote first person though. It's gonna take me a while to get back into it. Maybe not. Maybe not. Maybe this character will start speaking to me right off the bat. I mean, I'm fine with either way. I have, I have a hard time writing longer stuff in first person. Yeah. That's what I was going to mention. It's so much easier and not just to pat it with other characters, but it's so much easier just to jump into another character's head for a little while. Also, I think you can, I don't know why, and this is, this is not true guys. Anybody out there listening for advice is not true. It feels like you can get more descriptive with third person than you can with first person. I don't know why, but it's like in third person, I'm always, I'm always more descriptive than I am with first person.     So that's the only thing. It'd probably be best for this if we did a close first person narrative and we just told this one person's story and then the other characters bleed over into the narrative, then jumping into their heads. I really feel like, yeah, I think I'm one first person. What do you think about, have you ever written in present tense before? Oh yeah, I wrote a South here in present tense, but I've written a lot of stuff in present tense. So yeah, present tense is fine. I have no problem with that. I have no preference, but I do enjoy the urgency of that. Oh yeah. Makes for a fast read and more like that I'm being told a story kind of feel. Yeah, also the publishers that we're aiming at, at least off the jump, prefer that also because they're more either lit, thick or crime. And crime is always better in first person present tense, at least for me. I feel that way. It's like you said, it's the immediacy. It's the urgency. You know, it also gets rid of the, absolutely. I also have no problem getting rid of was in a third person, but I have a problem getting rid of was in the first person. I hope I said that right. But anyways, in present tense, you don't have to worry about that at all. And it seems like you don't even have to replace it with is. It feels more natural to me to get rid of that. It's not really a filler word. Sometimes it's important.  So anyways, that's my two cents. Well, that was productive. And let me know when you are ready to, I don't know if we need to do maybe do at least a rough outline. I mean, you had started talking about one. Yeah, I can do this. This is a book that I could sit down and write right now by myself. So I will definitely, if you want to go over ideas, I have I'm literally bursting at the seams with ideas.  So as soon as I get done here, I'm going to jot things down while I'm waiting for my gummy to kick in because I'm going to take a nap before game night tonight. Anyways, I'm going to write down all these ideas. So maybe the next episode, we don't start right away. We just go over like a rough outline. And then you can accept and get rid of any ideas that I have and you know, same with your stuff, we can blend and all that. So if you want to be thinking, do the head work until next time, do you have any idea when you want to do this next, when you're available to do it next? I'm very flexible. I mean, I'm working, I counted, I am, I am writing 13 different books. Welcome to my world. Some of again, some of the one of them I'm not going to finish. It's just too, it's too dark. I'm never going to do it too dark. Yeah, it's too dark. Put it this way. I don't, I don't believe in trigger warnings. I think they, I think that they are counterproductive for someone who needs them. And I've read articles on the science behind them and how, anyway, trigger, trigger, um, how trigger warnings in a, in of themselves are triggering when they didn't need to be. And this is one book that I would, I would actually have trigger warnings because it deals a lot with things that would not bum somebody out, but could cause relapse. It's, it deals a lot with bulimia, anorexia, self harm, things like that. I don't, I don't want to, I don't want my book to like, yeah. So I'm just not doing it. But anyway, yeah, you know, I'm pro them because I put them in my own stuff. But, um, that's, I mean that it's, it's literally just a personal preference. So I have no problem with you not, you know, not wanting them or not, you know, that doesn't bother me at all. Um, because they're there for the people who want them, not necessarily need them, but the people who want them, they're there for you if you want it, so on and so forth. Uh, but, uh, yeah, uh, I can't. Anyway, I, you got me wanting to read it, you motherfucker. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not finishing it. I just, I'm not. Okay, all right. But anyway, Alec, I'm sorry. It's already been taken Alec, uh, Neil Gaiman did one, and he pretty much said the same thing that Chad said, uh, in the introduction to that collection. Anyways, go ahead, Chad. Uh, the, um, the, uh, so yeah, like 13 books or whatever. But granted, I'm not going in and out of these all day. Some of them I haven't touched for a year or so, you know, that is. You got all kinds of, some of them I might not ever be able to get to. I don't know. I'm, lately I've just been focusing on the, I told you I was writing the cozy mystery, mystery series, which is going a lot smoother than I expected. But other than that, I mean, I'm super flexible.  So I don't want to like, I don't want to wait on it. No, we're doing this now. I just didn't know if you wanted to do it tomorrow morning. Uh, it doesn't matter to me one way or another. Um, uh, we can do it tomorrow. We can do the next day. But yes, the sooner, sooner, the better, because I can, uh, I can do tomorrow. Okay. All right. Tomorrow, same, same that time, same that channel. Yeah. Okay. So tomorrow, guys, if you guys are uh, Sean says, yes, hang on. Yes, the collab we've been waiting for it. Good morning to you, Dujuan. Um, it was going to happen a while ago, but it was like a little bit of misconception, a little bit of, uh, time and a little bit of, uh, how many projects going on because, uh, yeah, it was, uh, we actually wrote a chapter. We wrote, yeah, we wrote like what, 3000 words, 3000 or 4000 words. I don't even know where that is. I don't even think I have it anymore. It was a really good idea. And once again, it was your idea. Um, that whole, anyways, I don't want to, in case we tackle it again, I don't want to give it away.  I'm a, I'm looking forward. Yeah, I'll be here at 5 p.m. That's 11 o'clock for you, Hailey. I'm looking at it right here. We have, yeah, the two chapters. How many words? 2070, 2070. I thought it was about 3000, but that's another one I had damn near the whole thing, like in my head. Um, I don't, I don't remember it now, but I remember writing it and having that, that urgency that, uh, uh, coming along. Um, I was, and then other stuff fell in my lap around the same time that you were like, Hey, I got too much going on. And I love that there was a, there was that misconception that you thought I was strictly a horror writer. I love that that was one of it, one of the things, because I was, I was also sitting there at that point in time. I was like, am I going to, am I going to have to, I do remember, am I going to have to mimic him or is this going to happen naturally or whatever? And then I found it was almost like we just end up writing like me, because it seemed like a little more long-winded than you normally were. I think is what happened. And at that point in time, I was writing those more long-winded books. So, uh, and then of course, I go from that to South of here. But I've done, I've done South of here before. South of here was an idea that you pitched when you were, yeah. That's why I dedicated the book. I was too scared. I understand. I understand.  It would have been completely different. It might not have even worked out with both of us. Who knows? Because I, I don't know. But I'm, I'm glad that I got to do it by myself and for nothing else, the experience, the, actually the best part about writing South of here was getting out of my own head because I was in a really bad way at the time. And like I said, in either the intro or the outro, Shell is the one who typed up the book for me because I couldn't sit at my desk. So I was writing it all long hand before I got a new laptop. And she ended up typing up the whole thing. She's done that for me twice so far. And anyways, I'm gonna get mushy if I keep thinking about that. But I was in a really bad place and it allowed me to get, to express my own frustrations with life through a character who has nothing but frustrations. But at the same time, he's kind of, you know, not bothered by the whole thing.   It's almost like playing violent video games when you're in a bad mood. You know, you get to, and I'm a, I have an anger problem as it is. But I say this also, I don't hurt people, I hurt things. So I'll break a toaster or some shit, but I won't touch another human being. That's the kind of anger I'm talking about. But my dad was a very violent, physically violent person, not, not to me, but he had those moments. And I got a little bit of that in me. So I'm always looking for a way out. And that's the best part about writing for me is anytime I need that way out, I don't have to go read. I don't have to go watch a movie, play a video game. I can just play in my own head.  So it was like, I don't know how you do it. It's like, I don't have any other choice but to do it. In fact, my sister who has no filter whatsoever said, I probably would have ended up being a serial killer if I hadn't found some kind of creative outlet. And while I hated her for saying that for the longest time, damn it, it might have ended up true because my brain is not, well, y'all have read my work. Y'all know what I've done. All the horrible things. I had to think about that. It's like hope for the wicked, which is something you need to read. That's the closest thing to South of here. It's a hit man story, but there's two books. There's Hope for the Wicked and Penny's for the Damn. And it's a hit man who only kills pedophiles. I know it's an overdone concept, but when I wrote it, it wasn't. Nowadays, it's like everywhere. But anyways, it's more, it's more landsdale than you might think. And the funny part about it is I hadn't read any landsdale at that point in time. It was very short, choppy, pitch black humor, twists and turns. Just anyways, but, uh, yeah, I, but anyways, there's it. I wrote that in the whole point of that before, before we go. The whole point of that was, is I wanted to get this image. I'm a very visual person and someone I was talking to at the time mentioned, uh, Tijuana donkey shows. And I, of course, the very first thing that happened when they mentioned that was the visual image. I spent three months with that just flashing randomly into my head.  To, to constantly have that image in your head. So I put it in the book and there's only one line in the book about what happens, about what is going on in the moment. And it involves a jar of Crisco, branded Crisco. As you can imagine what the Crisco is used for. And everybody, everybody who reads it swears up and down that that is the most grotesque, detailed description of bestiality they've ever read. It isn't there. The line literally goes, slathered in Crisco, it thrust and was in. That was it. That's the entire line. That's all that's said just before someone rushes in to stop it. And it's, I find that amazing that you can say so little in, especially in fiction, you can say so little and say so much. People swear that that, that, that scene in it, people, I've even sworn that it's five, six, 10 pages long. It's like a page. It's like a half a page, if that the actual scene. But anyways, yeah, I'm just rambling at this point in time. We got, we got good stuff done. Hayley's already eaten her game snacks. That's terrible. But okay, so tomorrow, 9 a.m. my time, 10 p.m. years, hopefully I get up at a decent time so my brain is not a complete fog for the first 10, 15 minutes we're talking. Anyways, but you happy with today? Yeah. Yeah, me too. Me too.  So anyways, thanks guys, thanks everybody for joining us. Tomorrow, you have plenty of shopping time left, Hayley. So tomorrow, once again, same bat time, same bat channel. But until then, all hail the chair.


Good, well, thank you, thank you, friends. I'm a proud member of the board of WIDER and also a proud member of the board of WIGO. So I'm very happy to be at this session. Much of my work is actually on, in this area, is on informality and labor along the lines that Marty and Imran talked about. And the work of WIGO is, of course, very relevant here. So in some sense, if I talked about that, it may be repeating a few things. So I thought, let me just take a different perspective on this altogether and talk about tax policy and informality. Because in fact, it's a completely unrelated, it's a completely different literature. It's a different discourse altogether. It's the IMF Fiscal Affairs Department who deals with those things. But the terms informality, we must tax them, and so on and so forth, appear in that discourse as well. And so I want to talk a little bit about that. But essentially, it's a variation on the same theme, which is that viewing informality as an aggregate lump is analytically wrong and leads you into policy errors. And I want to talk about that in the context of tax policy, just as Imran and Marty have talked about that in the context of labor regulation. So these are some papers that work. This is work jointly with Michael Keane. There's a technical paper. Then there's a more general paper in finance and development, which you're welcome to look at. And there's a blog piece in VoxEU recently. So when you look at tax challenges and we look at documents which lay out tax challenges for developing countries, informality is always put as a challenge, as a problem at the top. Taxing the informal economy actually leads the ADB's tax priorities in a recent document. And reducing informality is put as the objective of tax reform. That's what we should do. We should reduce informality. But what does this actually mean to reduce informality? And is it a useful guide to policy that we use as an indicator of the success of tax policy, some measure of informality coming down in that context? So in the tax context, in the public finance context, insofar as any precise meaning is given to this term, and actually I should say that discussion of informality taxation is really quite imprecise, simply taken to mean non-remittance of tax. If you're not remitting tax, you're part of the informal sector. If you're not remitting tax, which you're due to pay, you're part of the informal sector. But the point is that there are all sorts of reasons why a firm and individual might not pay a tax. They could actually simply be below the threshold at which the tax bites, or they could be avoiding tax, or they could be evading tax. And each of these things actually makes a big difference from the analytical point of view and from the policy point of view. So the basic point that we make, that Mick and I, Mickin and I make, is the reason why a tax isn't paid may matter for policymaking as much as the fact that it is not being paid. And because those numbers that are added up to say this is the total amount of informality. And in fact, the structuring of our tax systems should look not simply at the overall number of tax unpaid or informality, but why those taxes are not paid. So as we say, we believe that this is a much more useful strand of analysis than the general objective of analytical target of aggregate informality and the policy objective of reducing informality. So let me give you a conceptual example. Consider the VAT, which in almost all countries, there's some threshold level of sales above which an enterprise pays a fixed tax on all of its sales, that's a VAT threshold. And in addition, enterprises face some sort of compliance cost in complying with the tax. So suppose for example, that there's some natural firm size which would exist in the absence of the tax. This is their total potential sales. So in the world without the tax, there's this division of firms and there were large sales, small sales, et cetera. And now I introduce this tax which says if your sales are above this threshold, you pay VAT. What sort of responses does that lead to in the amongst firms? Well, you can think of different sorts of responses. One is that the firm whose potential sales are above the threshold stays below the threshold, perfectly legal, but it doesn't pay tax because it's below the VAT threshold. Alternatively, you could think of a firm which fully pays up its tax, it's above the threshold but it decides to pay. And you have things in between where the firms could avoid, could underreported sales. Or the firm could become a ghost firm, as they say in the literature, and not just disappear from the books altogether. These are all different responses that firms make and that we know they make to a tax. And we, Mick Keen and I, we look at this and with this setup, with costs and benefits of doing each of these things, you know avoidance is costly, evasion is costly, high those clever lawyers and so on and so forth. With a set of reasonable assumptions, we argue, and you can look at the technical paper, that firms can plausibly fall into five categories, ranging from the smallest in terms of those potential sales to largest. What does that, what might that look like? Here it is. So we have, what might be termed micro enterprises. These are the smallest of all and they're below the tax threshold. They're below the VAT tax threshold. Then you might call that the adjusters. These are the next size up and these firms will go just below the threshold and they'll be hiding, so to speak, just below the threshold. At this end, they're the compliers. They're very large firms and you know the cost of them avoiding or evading is just too large and they just fully comply and pay up. And in between are, so to speak, partial. People who partially evade the tax, that they under report, okay. And of course there's a cost. If you get caught, you're gonna be punished. There's a probability of getting caught, which may depend upon your size, et cetera. So you have to model all of those things in your economic analysis. And then in the middle, you have the ghosts who just simply disappear from the system. The tax administrators tell us that this is not too bad a way of describing what actually happens in the VAT, in the VAT setup. Now our central point is the following. What here is formality? Well, formality technically defined are those firms which comply with the tax law. It's this category of firms. Therefore, informality of course is the complement of formality. Therefore, all these are informal. But this, all of this is comprised at least of four separate categories. This is a little bit like Marty's triangle with the different categories of informality in the labor arena. And there are different economic incentives in each of these different categories. Because each, the boundary between each of these categories is dependent upon balancing the costs and benefits of being here versus there, being here versus there, being here versus there, et cetera. So overall informality is all these four categories. But our argument is that analytically and from the policy point of view, it's very important to know which of these categories any firm is in. Let's do a small exercise. This is what I just said. By definition, the formula and price of those are complying. The all other categories are informal. But every informal firm is informal in its own way to quote a famous opening line of an old. So consider the following key policy choice, which is often put, which is choosing the level of the VAT threshold. It's a classic policy choice. Where do you choose the VAT threshold? And indeed, when people say, let's reduce informality, what they really mean is reduce the threshold at which VAT bites so that you get more of those small firms into the tax net. That's a classic policy trade-off that you face in policy context. In fact, if I go back to this diagram, what I'm doing is changing the threshold here. That is not going to affect the choices over here at all. The choice for a firm over here is between complying versus partially evading. The costs and benefits here have nothing to do with where the threshold bites up here. Where the threshold bites is over here. These choices are where it matters. So changing the threshold will not affect this boundary at all. Therefore, it will not affect the division between formality and informality as is seen as an aggregate. But changing the VAT type threshold leaves aggregate informality the measure unchanged. I've just shown you that but aggregate informality is all of that. The threshold is over here somewhere. It doesn't affect this balance at all. So changing the threshold does not reduce informality. It doesn't change measured informality at all. But obviously it has really economic consequences. Why? Because it affects these, the composition over here. Some of these firms will now, the incentives to hide below or hide above are going to change. And also some of the, it may spill over into some of these categories. So there are real economic consequences of changing the threshold which is not captured by our standard measure of formality or informality. And that's the general generic point that I want to get across and there's a lot of technical stuff that we do and so on that an aggregate target of reducing informality is analytically wrong and that leads to huge policy errors. Okay. Let me now give you another example, another type of issue. Bringing together the labor regulation and the tax policy issue. Of course most firms face not just tax thing, they face labor regulations. And in fact, they face many different labor regulations. So suppose we have multiple regulations, a tax based system of regulations and a labor system based on regulations. So firms now face two choices. Those five categories are now multiplied by five. Actually it's five times five, it's not five plus five, it's five times five because you have to decide am I going to comply with this, comply with that? It either and neither both at each of these levels. That's how you have to set down the technical problem when you have two sets of regulations. A firm's problem is where to lie relative to each regime and it's a joint problem that the firm faces. How do you then define formality and informality? Is an informal firm which complies with the tax regulation but not with the whatever is one non-compliance in a set of regulation does that make the firm informal? Is it the union of all the non-compliances or is it the intersection of the non-compliances? See, we haven't thought this thing through. We haven't thought about it at all in terms of what actually constitutes our core definition, conceptual definition of informality. And indeed, Mick Keen and I do an analysis of this multiple regimes, of two tax regimes. You have a VAT regime and an income tax regime and together. And we show that actually you can say sensible things. You can say sensible things about choosing the threshold on this versus choosing the threshold on this. That's a question. Will lowering the threshold on this, what will that do to this other thing? Because it may lead to some changes in terms of firms complying or not complying on this side. So combining these two, you can indeed say sensible things about where the threshold should be chosen but it has nothing to do. Nothing to do at all with reducing the total level of informality. That's it. No, it's finished. So the conclusion, informality is not going away anytime soon as Imran and Martin mentioned. The term informality is not going away anytime soon either. However, I think we have to be clear about the concept and the definition. And there's a lot of looseness, a lot of looseness in the literature. And especially in the context of policy, we have to be very, very clear and analytically rigorous. And our basic point is that an aggregative concept and measure of informality, of course, captures some aspects of reality but it obscures more than it reveals. Thank you very much.