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Audiovisual Cultures episode 101 – Subversive Spanish Cinema and Language with Dr Fiona Noble automated transcript


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they say Saudi official cultures the podcast that explores different areas of the arts and media join me your host Paula player and the researchers practitioners and enthusiasts I made along the way see our website at audio visual culture so wordpress dot com and other links in the show notes for more information four nine enjoy the show hi folks how you tan Hey it's Paul here just a quick note before this episode begins the sign quality isn't brilliance on my hands and I've been having some issues with my microphone to breeding %HESITATION what it is some hope and I've got it sorted tight noisy but there are some episodes coming up that just aren't really the best quality so I'm really really sorry by thoughts as a Sam trying to figure out I think it's got something to do with my EKG and if that means anything to you being turned up too much and I probably thought it was lower than it was and I have the microphone a bit too close to my mice so I think that's what's caused it and I think I was playing around with it because the feed back through my head phones stopped working and I've been a bit to sort it's when I've been wearing headphones because it's supposed to feed back my own voice so I don't sign muffled to myself and not has been really quiet lately and I thought it was broken but it sucks he just really quiet I don't know what it is I'm still struggling with the sign levels on my computer and stuff signs been weird and computer for awhile so when I turn the volume up I can hear myself but then if I'm speaking to somebody else they are really super noise and I can't take it was highlighted as sue him yeah it's complicated I'll keep playing around with it and hopefully future episodes will be an improvement but this episode and the next one they're not great because of this issue so I'm hoping I've got it sorted it's noisy and it will be a bit more pleasant to listen to after days so thanks for bearing with me and my amateur are recording audios as ever psyche right enjoy the absolute all right hello hi is it going Eugene gente another or do you base your cultures the podcast that explores the fascinating areas and creative practice and person humanities research which is important right I'm calling and I am absolutely thrilled to be joined by my very dear friends doctor if you're not hello and we're going to talk about her research and contemporary Spanish cinema minds maybe she other areas as well let's see how you get on stay very warm welcomes you feel thank you so much for joining me thank you Paula it's a pleasure to be with you yeah so like again like dying back together a little just to I know we're maybe missing a few other key players but you're starting so some of you may or may not know CNN and I became friends when I had a short stint in operating way way back in twenty thirteen long time ago because not each other we're getting a little definitely you know I'm so glad to have you and show that night this is very important past experience has way way back and started this podcast because I think you might actually be one of the reasons why this all costs even exists and that's certainly why it has been a member of the house and I remember this is like may my memory is broken in many ways but I remember this distinctly years ago and I had a conversation and Aberdeen the sinking straight well it's not really just from study start where scholars cells are teachers are it's already in Seychelles studies socks one of the reasons why one of the things that has led me paying more attention to that or do you bet on socks so you're integral to this podcast it's a great time each option here all about so nice I remember that conversation see because it's something that that I do really been thinking about it kind of post PhD and post kind of fitting into a specific place in the university and then thinking about your research and where that was going on yeah for me I'm always trying to emphasize the fact that it's not just kind of visual culture because that's the environment that we came out of an opportunity really that was the key term I think that was circulating about tying the actually you know thinking about cultures Pluto and then also thinking of buying yeah the fact is not just special you know with stock audio dimension as well which is really really important and quite often get forgotten about I think that's really lovely that Sam this podcast or at least the name of the podcast have germinated from the conversation way back when in Sydney and I spent on it returning journey stretching out my own knowledge is already as well this is going to come right actually right on the package and one eight eight yesterday we send audio drama producer on weekends really super nerdy stuff about you know pounding and sanity what signs and it still cost I can't wait for that was the year should be hostile but anyway really really generated by journey clock that's not what we're talking about eight you are somewhat of an axe first I would think it's safe to say and contemporary Spanish cinema magic published three fantastic important batch cults first it Spanish sentiment the politics of performance knowledge publishes plans free and twenty translate I think for our listeners to help them get to know you have the %HESITATION but would you be happy to give us maybe a better democracy your research yeah course yeah I was he said my E. eighty out of expertise is contemporary Spanish cinema although that is broadening ites in current research to think it bites audio visual cultures more broadly so not just in a mob thinking of buying television which I mean where do we even pick television that's perhaps another conversation we can have you know Netflix CD's so I am kind of starting to think more broadly up bites the objects my research is not necessarily just kind of cinema in the conventional sense but that certainly we are my E. OB expertise lies I did my PhD in twenty fifteen or finished in twenty fifteen at the university of Aberdeen and dot forecast body specifically on city key figures in content despondent Cinemark and what I'm seeing contemporary in the context of the peach tea that was kind of poll seventy five eve so post death Frankel islands you know up to the present day are up to date twenty ten certainly with the PhD research more recently it ready search is focused on much more contemporary works you looking out Spanish cinema since the crisis and the economic crisis in two thousand seven thousand eight am I also kind of Netflix pretty CD's as well this thesis looked at children performers and immigrants so thinking about a specific identity positions on high with the was a representative do you sell them in the case that the SS the book is sort of %HESITATION or the thesis rather was a jumping off point for the peak in the sense that performance is one of the categories I looked up in the thesis and it became the main focus of the monograph the actually it involves a lot of new research it's not just kind of a revision off the thesis the deal so the biggest body focused on performance and performers in contempt responded cinema and it looks at the relationship between performance and politics in particular so not just kind of party the text but also the political in other shapes and forms I guess it feels quite strange talking about the big Canary because it in a lot of ways it feels like that's the past and it's quite strange when you don't use all this work into something and then you almost don't even remember for you to it for that because you've moved on and you're thinking about new projects the picture was it came out last year islands it's available Wednesday and it looks out VDS he spotted she films from the content to peers that are some that go back to the capustan competed as well but most of them are killing more recent films I'm quite well known sounds quite canonical films if you want to use that term so the likes of almost all of our is a key figure in the picture if I remember rightly I think there's one of his films in each chapter because performance is such a key theme in his work and I think you could probably write a whole monograph of art performance in an almost over his work I also look at films like I can have a so the Spanish black and whites retelling of Snow White and it's a silent are content to silent film as well which is interesting when we're talking about sirens and style that features in contempt a phone or conceptual division cultures I guess moving forward because I think you know right where my research is going I've got you on going projects at the minute so are you have a big project on the work often on the only one that I know what he's a key you can simply Spanish filmmaker and he's also been working recently in English language filmmaking then I've also got a project on gender and signed so coming back to our conversation about audio visual cultures and the kind of aural dimension of visual cultures it's very much in preliminary stages of research but you know it's also kind of looking at gender islands representations of signs both the sonic dimension goals the visual representation of science as well sorry I feel like I was a really rom believe responsibly didn't really give an overview of what I'm about asshole I sang on the screen people always treated us right and I have to remind them you're on a podcast I've invited you to come on to talks he made a bright start then you're apologizing to be talking to me about just relax and calm the little agency given the content they obey it's fine it makes me feel better this is maturing I'm kind of sars people around blended rate so there's loads there that's great he'd take on that and they they go for it because the case is you know just offense and a cat and a bit more detail like with your bank the first is Spanish and I'm not just those three words there's so much shame there said David west you know I mean so what do you mean basis first what do you mean by Spanish would be made senator what do you mean based foundation what do you mean basis versus sentiment what do you mean basic first it's fine you know it's a lot it's so there's neat and just those three words never mind the next words in the title city have certain salts for a summer what is it needs to be subversive what do you identify since arsenal's Spanish summer yeah that's such a good question I think that was one of the key points that came back for and I'd submit the first draft of the manuscript to the publisher is on the talks about four I needed to do to prove that threat and the idea of subversive Spanish cinema city the big not that it wasn't there but that you know just by adding things like and the conclusions each chapter unexploded back you can prove that threads together and the artists such leaders on their anonymous obviously they are such pertinent questions that really made me think about the significance of the title and how it related to what I was talking about it because I think if you look at the carcass of material for the big and the filling car pass it probably looks quite mainstream in some ways I'm not necessarily looking hot experimental filmmaking in Spain that's not part of what that be extending there's some really interesting things happening in kind of alternative cinematic practices worst filmmaking practices in Spain especially kind of post economic crisis that's not my forte told us not something I'm particularly knowledgeable back to somebody like Rebecca notes and he she has the blog nobody knows entity where she talks about Spanish cinema I don't know how active she is barking at the minute she's from the northeast actually and I don't know if you've ever come across sorry but she's a really knowledgeable person I buy alternatives Spanish cinema practices that's not what this because it's not a private kind of we cannot what's happening with the mainstream if that makes sense it's more about looking hot you know the key players all Spanish cinema there are some films in there that are less well known there are some filmmakers you know the likes of petrol model of our who is probably you know the most well known Spanish filmmaker certainly in the U. K. ET bought depict deals rather with subversive nests within those kind of mainstream contacts and looking out hi %HESITATION the position of filmmakers who were working under Franco's the likes of Carlos Salazar or at least customer Langat one into the burning them he's the uncle off have yet course people like them your last identifying filmmaker is under Frankel working June the dictatorship cheating the very strict censorship conditions that there were at the time so it's looking at those kind of precursors to what's happening in contemporary manifestations of performance and that presentations of performance in Kentucky's funny cinema and kind of seeing that flag comes through you from those oppositional filmmakers into the present day and what that looks like and how you can become %HESITATION means all speaking out against the common additives or the dominant ideas in society that makes sense yes absolutely I'm not a man not draws in those other identities you're talking about as well as to make a child's sense of arsonists and those types of records show Saturday and then hi performance encompasses anything you know anything about it society or here we are sure that Jones and I'm not sort of stuff so yeah I imagine there's a lot going on there and such for it will grind for politics and I mean it's interesting by Amin I know so little of what was going on and stand at the minute reminds me of the nasco J. isn't his attention because even just since you've done some of this research the rise of the far right I think it's happening really very prominently then if you're looking at a lot of lasting creative send some makers so is there anything and what what he has done and there is that sense and I was looking at that like high contemporary hi recent doesn't come up too because you provision twenty twenty but realistically academic publishing is relational so you know what's the most recent sounds say and you're right that's a good question on a day off the top of my head I would have had some from maybe twenty twelve twenty thirteen at the absolute latest act isn't really bad that you forget what which phone do you want to know yeah without looking upset you know I had late last month despite him does so I'm so excited by almost over just twenty thirteen we went to the same screening of that when you're in an Aberdeen if you don't I remember you being really indignant about the gay sex in the not so let's well because they can see and I think it was yeah I think we had a really interesting conversation about that actually but yes I think that off the top of my head off the top of my head I think that was probably the most recent films obviously post economic crisis but you know we're not talking nearly eight years ago not your soul yeah things have changed a lot and yeah you're right politically there's been a dramatic shift I think Spain in particular is really interesting in terms of that kind of party politics and the arts and culture ski %HESITATION because there's a fatty nines to political culture amongst actors writers particularly like in the filmmaking and visual arts industries you know there's a very prominent culture of speaking against right wing decision made today were right wing party politics right wing governments are but it it might be and I think that's historical to certain and because you've obviously hides the Francoist dictatorship three nineteen thirty nine to nineteen seventy five which is obviously a right wing regime and I think even under the Congress regime so the filmmakers I was mentioning like along governor them and sell it off you were in contrast leaning and and in opposition to the star quests regime on their policies on and so on I think doc feeds to do for you and I've got this body art Spokane culture all actors writers filmmakers producers you have it might be so the likes of pad on the door for the likes of technologies like that have your birthday I'm sure almost all known and even the the online world than others obviously as well could be less than one here in her body politically active they will be going to demonstrations they will be signing petitions they will be writing a collector is against public figures or decision making revived it might be I'm thinking about the Iraq war as a key example for you had people like Happy Birthday I'm on the tools are not about them it's all have our burdens mother he's also about a prominent or was she just passed away actually was about a prominent political figure as well and I don't know that's something I don't think we have here where there's that kind of value process that S. contingent of performers let's call them performers because that's what they are with a broad label actively you know not just in their work but you know kind of personally are you fatty politically aware and politically active so I think it is something that is quite specific yeah the idea of politics and performance are believed linked in Spanish culture and stops we are part of the idea for the book came from I guess the schools within those towns do you have any specific examples of what game what do you mean by performance and hi it's not political or ice politicized could you just give us maybe one or two examples just as opposed to illustrate some of those ideas nine absolutely so course hard to pick just one or two the one that jumps I initially is bothered that these data from bad thought which is biotics the legless yeah it's known as the lost circus in English was produced in twenty twelve but it's set in nineteen thirty seven and nineteen seventy three so you got palindromic setting in terms of tying marker is obviously it's made in twenty twelve so you've got that triple time structure or time frame to the film and it looks like a circus troupe so you have to keep characters two protagonists who are clients the kind of sidelined happy client and in nineteen thirty seven the figure who will become the sideline witness says his father being rounded up by Franco's forces in the civil war and you've done all the moment in seventy three where he's become this client in the circus group and I guess just as a kind of really rudimentary instruction Spanish history seventy cities key moment because Frank was I. L. at this point he will die in nineteen seventy five and you know has received a pass over to king Juan Carlos well at the point in nineteen seventy cedar key political tensions going on with for example the Basque separatist group ETA and you know you got this off the nation's capital Blanco who to rich living pets is the successor to Frankel so there's a lot going on historically at that moment the film uses the location of anybody that was cut either hosts which is the valley of the fallen just on the outskirts of Madrid in Spain where until that it recently I found closure means were but it but this volley was constructed partly body or mostly by Republican prisoners in the aftermath of the civil war it is always a commemoration of the Frank was fallen but doesn't commemorate the publican fallen at the same time that their bones and actually kind of built into the framework of the structure because a lot of them died while they were building so it's a very controversial site as you can imagine in Spanish politics and actually very recently I think I was just able to include it in the big chunks of it's one actually moved from the site your prize money will grins because obviously it's problematic in the content the contacts that you've got the means of are a right wing dictatorship and wasn't ever brought to consequence over there the crimes that he committed and likewise has officials as well so it's a really controversial site and it's a site that still mostly to this present day certainly when we've lost in Spain it was still a site of commemoration of Frankel and his regime and his principles and on the anniversary of his death there would still be demonstrations and whatnot there are so many prominent site I'm very problematic site on the law of the scenes of this film or some of the scenes in this film or stage on this monument and I remember I was in a conversation with you right the S. and higher you know there's this monetize each and then off the site as well because not only has it become a segmentation it's also a film sat right it's become part of the film industry it's become a way of making money in the film industry so it's certainly not easy to teens are all these tensions I think that is one example where you've got this body all VS confrontation of performance on politics some of the examples in the other films are kind of less obvious or last demonstrative in that we have the political side of things one of my favorite films in that B. is by a filmmaker cultural monuments to isn't that a well known beyond Spain but he's also a very unspoken political figure in Spanish culture and you know to the extent that he even kind of reminds filmmaking and decided to put all this comes up on you choose because you believe they should be accessible for all you know so he's a really interesting figure on his phone the little kid to get us so anything you want in English from twenty ten is about a little girl whose mom dice and her dots played by one they will both dole starts to dress up as the mother as part of their canoes mourning and healing process as a really beautiful phone it's not very well known it was hard to get a hold of until he put on you cheat for everyone said to see it deals with the politics of identity and gender and sinking city subversive nice within these mainstream venues because you know he is a white middle class men who cross dresses as part of you know he's killing and grieving I'm just doctors hearing even process having lost his wife and her mother thought it's interesting because I think the film acknowledges that read the film's not trying to say well you know it's okay just you know fight man can get drug too and it's all good you know that's not what it's about you but it's about how you actually his contact with a performer becomes part of the healing process and something that he can do to help his daughter gave her mother there's really obvious kind of political examples and then there's some of the more subtle political examples with it's maybe more by the politics of the patriarchy the politics of normativity the politics of white male privilege I'm kind of navigating those things so yeah that's two examples I could pick high but there are so many more be sure to pick because they will to be the best next on the rooms are really really helpful especially because you want to start considering it is a performance space but then it's a mask we don't think of it as a performance space but of course let's not many artists must reading reading out carnage saying if you're interested in giving regular support for the podcast that aren't too keen on peach tree and I know I have membership options and buy me a coffee dot com forward slash P. eight there where you can get the same extras as well as some others exclusive buy me a coffee head over to buy me a coffee dot com forward slash P. eight B. LA bart to price membership options or drop a fiver into this charge thanks and enjoy the rest of the episode something we talked about it quite a lot is to post docket damage to your alternatives I could demonstrate riches Europe most people he still have a Honda and wastes some academic publishing but we are working on getting me here anymore and and if you need to say so E. G. the extremely important markets being a school teacher needs all done some nominal worksheet and what we slow in going through the past couple of years and I'm really interested in hearing about your experiences a languages teacher specifically but I think if you're happy to be can talk about it right alternative academic experience and your experiences are pushing a little bit and not around are you straight up I thought that that meant that and we're seeing signs you in that area it's such an important aspect of I mean what would even call out just if I could demand generally recognized that so many of us are coming through the system you know getting a PhD and doing it quite successfully actually you know having a good CV doing all the right things and for one reason or another not ending up working in academia whether that's your choice that's me or whether that's trying to not managing to get a job or deciding to alter you know there's there's lots of reasons for that and I think it is something that I'm quite open about you personally about my circumstances you know there was a part of me that one thirds if you're not working in academia would be something that held me back if I wanted to continue with the search bar I would have to see that for now it doesn't seem to be and I think that more and more of us are choosing to take alternative paths because that's what works for us and we're not willing to sacrifice what happened is certain aspects of our lives to have the academic journal so yeah for me I feel quite happy with where things are I mean there is a part of me that we'd still love to have an academic position in a university but for now you as a mom of two young boys if you you know you aren't going to be level for very long as much as the days can be fat a log right now %HESITATION I'm quite happy with this balance I've caught between work so non academic work and then mom life and then you know research is there as well but that's what we were talking %HESITATION obviously before we can start recording you know it's a jungle and it's difficult and you know sometime I'm sorry question it and think should I be doing this this this you know is this the right thing by actually one of the most liberating things up pricing two bites at is that it's all on me so you know if I don't feel like doing something academically I don't have to E. there's no obligation I'm doing for I want to do because I enjoy it and yet is aspects of it that don't enjoy so much if there's a deadline coming up and you have to her mind to something and you're not really in the right frame of mind well I don't know for me it's working really well actually and I think I just acknowledge not you that I can't do everything so I have a job I have a career and a house you know my kids and you know I'm a relationship on and those are the things that are important in academia or research isn't there and it's really important to me it's not the defining component of my identity anymore which I think I don't I think we may be all go through that with the PTSD if it becomes like this huge thing and it can become really difficult to see yourself thanks right if not but for me you know it's just well this is me and I do all of these things I don't think because more and more of us are in that blue it doesn't feel so scary anymore I feel quite I feel quite at peace with my decision and from what I can tell it's not a negative you know people are still interested in what you have to say even though you're not working in an institution I mean I do have to say that I am really lucky to be able to like I have an honorary affiliation with autumn university I'm done I'm not being really supportive in terms of like right in the library access so you know I do have certain privileges although I'm kind of on the fringes of on the margins of academia like I do you have certain privileges that I benefit from in terms of being able to access material online and just having that support of an institution here you know are they if I'm doing any sort of applications while I've got the ordinary affiliation and then also a personal level I'm able to carry on academics Hughes who are so supportive and so generous with their time you know and so willing to have a little fun even some academics who I've never met personally but I know him through Twitter and deal with an application for me or the latest chapter for me my gas social media and you know networks like Twitter arms being able to you keep in touch with people virtually on a huge part of that feeling like an accent community even though you're not in an institution so it works for me just not true and you know as long unless it is working then I'm just going to keep going I think what's your thoughts on how do you think it's kind of manifesting like nowadays with that kind of alternative path or paths to academic work yeah I think decision ready useful socks I am maybe I haven't paid my spouse and she community has not steady I think of my social media activity has come of it all cast mostly I think so I don't feel is embedded in the circles but I know exactly what you mean because I have imparted stopped short it is rainy sunny day make friends I mean that's when rich water became a political science tests that's what it was amazing work for people like us that we would find each other I mean there are mutual friends of ours yeah I'm mad to became friends on Twitter and I became friends with someone like summer first already good friends now you know so that's really valuable and it just happens that your academic researchers as well which is not right you know so it's a great taste for showering and start earning and redeeming about you people last time I eat spoke at a conference certainly a person should was in twenty seventeen I had on my batch renounce scholar in people challenge me but actually chose not to stay independent because I don't think that's ever cherry nobody's ever truly independent and expose and days become something that's separate from independent thought makes sense that the language around this is very interesting to me I'm people said freelance just implies that you're ready to take on more coming yes I am because I need the money so yeah I am I am for hire that's exactly what I want said communicate using work freelancing on the straight answer that way you I will take on commission park you know some of that my recent publications I've done have been commissioned things and things that I've been asked to contribute take now wouldn't that things that I would have seen a call for papers and gone I have just saying you know it was somebody asked me today not causing the accident so I did that and then a girl I need more money to not %HESITATION which is nice because you don't usually get that ready an accent I focusing it's nice that you get the sort of monthly publishing publishers get your money so I suppose in terms of the community that's a good question because I I don't ring I'm sorry I suppose it's what we make it ourselves to immigrant communities is really great here leaves here right here south part of that community you don't feel alienated from up I don't know because it's because I spend ten more Africans coming part of podcasting community which is a great community because such young medium that we're all helping each other which is really nice so it feels a bit like that and it rains where so go well I don't know how to do this morning Heidi dammit here's how to dance here's this other way it's Janet people's history of the nation you because they know stops and they want to help you learn no stocks and you can help our people that aren't you know since it's quite similar and not even just scrap underlines and there's no real institution for it it's it's like pre university you know why so yes this is a very long way of saying I don't necessarily know my answer it's not so it's really really good questions as we talk about perjury you know it's just I suppose to find a way of keeping your hand then so you don't really ever closed the door behind G. you know I certainly burnt bridges possibly that I can never cross but you you're not in a sense you may well have the door open it might just be asked charts the enrollments and you know %HESITATION but it's great to hear that you're happy the kids we've both done nice where you're strapping around the country Janney centerpiece really far away from where you left it in somewhere you might want to where your family is the people that you know how are you going I mean I really want this job got it three six hundred miles away from where she won't stay in my life yeah in terms of location yeah the tricky one definitely and I think you know that's kind of why men in terms of like compromise or sacrifice and what you're willing to do or not do you or for your willing to go or not go and I think for me if you're attached to anyone in any way shape or form which I think we all are in different ways because as you said none of us are truly independent RIAA you know academically or personally and I think having to operate and make a decision to move elsewhere you know it's not just me that's a consideration and not question that is a big factor for me and you know I was quite selective even when it was kind of actively applying for academic jobs I was really really careful about which ones I applied for he didn't just apply for anything and everything because I'm not that there's loads to apply for but you know I really have to see myself and my family moving there and living there it wasn't just awhile there's a Spanish job let's go for that and you don't have to be the right fit for all of us you know not questions even more complicated when they are little humans to think as well so yeah I think it is part and parcel of the academic environment as an and I think it's a decision that you need a car you know that you you're comfortable whether you're not in that spot I think you're right I think that obviously keeping a Honda and that's definitely something I'm keen to do moving forward I'm actually like and we talked about this before the fact that we've been in a pandemic and everything's moved on lighting has actually been one of the few positives to come across this recent pandemic because I've actually been able to participate in a lot of the bands I would've been able to do physically in person or I might be able to do one of them fox the fact that everything's moved online is actually benefits it's people like myself or maybe constrains physically geographically by eat their job or their family or accessibility for disabled people in a for effort is that impeded off from accessing certain events or certain places the pandemic has actually opened a lot of things up so for me being able to participate in the political this clown she CD's that Santiago on S. that organized or you know I did a talk as part of the university of west ministers research seminar CD's it would have been unlikely that I would be able to go to Westminster for either one or talk it just it wouldn't have been feasible with as you can do online great you know I'm sitting here in my house everyone else is in their house listening to that I can talk about maybe people can learn about it and it's been one of the few positives to come out with us and I think moving forward I do hope that not something that we hold on to you and we think about alternative arrangements it doesn't have to be a replacement for in person events but why not screen there so that the mom who's picking our kids a bad can listen to it or you know the person you can't fly because they're terrified of flying had listened to it whatever it might be whatever the reason is it's opened our eyes to actually how we can make academia more accessible which is not a bad thing I don't think transaction date a great summer day I did a test someone are in Switzerland from this corner of this heist I was able to enhance your talk at Westminster from Newcastle upon Tyne so it's been great to be able to say that I mean he suggests %HESITATION unless and then everybody needs thank but to support friends stand on my arm and right cheeky comments and you know and then the child well I want justice I did not listeners I did not do that I wanted to say that but I did not do that I was very well but he had to go so you said Glenn said right here Johnson makes online on the child has just started to cry you know it's just full of nonsense you know I was going to tell testicles in Belfast from here and I was just regions and across you know it's just you know it's not and so I was in hindsight and I know it I jumped on the single tear Westminster hangers right now all this stuff has already come do you not respect to read this and I'll trust lacks just stopped senseless cross street search yes it's it it's opened up about the dusting it's open it up to the people and not just the ivory tower now I'm not so so important so so important she because a lot of different backgrounds and style which may not have been technical rates and talk continued personal work we might be searched Jan type people service desk dot different mindset needs to be a white country and people who just want to turn out for us this might not understand the thing understand thinking comes are staying against the prize and that's really nice and slow and steady wins world definitely we'd love for you to be part of the conversation with AP cultures called on Instagram Facebook and Twitter and we also have discord yes it may I like to talk about you than your joke mark the kids teach teach languages English French and Spanish ranch you've got a wee bit of anguish thanks channels to your box I guess you teach about a German as far as that right yeah you know which is huge impressive to me and you know I meant a language learner and then also signed somebody I don't know how you think about this but I feel like I'm somebody who does not have an option to change for languages and I don't know it's not it's not since you're not maybe it's just it takes sometimes it takes the accent I don't know that I just do not have that ability to pick it up never have to cram really super hearts just learn a little bit of that I am always fascinated to speak to anybody he has a whole other languages and their variants just on the right cyst and Madison and and then they'll get you in terms of culture it's such a fascinating things also we were talking about earlier that's where we start reading that he's thanks from there he can think differently and there's a different version of the eight and a different language I was wondering as far because your research is on Spanish cinema and I suppose it's quite technical to research when you J. modern languages and then you top shot see another saying it's not sure sentiment receipt or whatever thank you well I talked to the language learning you don't have to do it that way you know but there is stock barriers and all you did in the subtitles and somebody else's translation that you're relying on so I can really fascinated by all those sorts of various I suppose yeah I just wanted to see what your thoughts on those kinds of things might be I'm thinking of right this kind of ironic deals where I think I was finishing my masters and writing like a research proposal for PhD I don't remember Janet Stewart leading the workshop on it and she said to me you don't see that you're fluent in Spanish and I was like okay but it's not all the S. because why else would I be doing one and she said no but people can research Spanish cinema with being fluent in Spanish and thought always stuck with me because I thought well I just assumed that they would know what I I didn't realize I would have to spell that you know and make that explicit and I think it's one of those things that when you become fluent in another language you know the isn't one that you've been brought up with you almost kind of forget that before you can do is not necessarily something that other people can do and I'll often say you know what I'm doing things for the kids at school it's obvious like how do you not know that where it's not and I see this call can you not see that that word would mean not and he's like no I cannot see that that's your brain your brain just Knowles that dot the connection and not how it works so it doesn't make sense to me so I quite often brings things off and actually remember like repeating stuff a whole more thinking to do something to do in class he's kind of my Guinea pig because he would see himself probably similar to our youth you yourself so he would say he's not natural learn language learner doesn't have that kind of affinity for it his brain just doesn't work cannot wait and he find it really hard at school it is I mean I didn't start learning languages so I was in secondary school I don't know if you were the same yeah and we have all contacts with language learning English Chinese school and you know we go arbitrarily assigned to you either French or German woman back into first year I really wanted French for no reason really other than I just fancy French but we didn't get a choice it was right here you go even this class unless you had a specific reason like I don't know you have friends family anybody visit the members every summer and you know you could just already speak about French well you might get French than or similar for German you good German cousins so you've got German but most people just got runs in the fitness classes and I got German and like I remember my teacher being so excited about you know like all you're so good to German and you really get a lesson she keep up and to be honest humble heart I didn't really try that hard because it obviously just kind of came naturally and I didn't have to do much work I really enjoy it and I did pick somewhere can cause a good kid at school and works pretty hard quite studious I wasn't like you know Boston my god every night trying to learn the full copy I could delete the page once or twice and it would go and they just kind of it kind of works and I mean I don't know why I really actually like to learn more about the science behind it and what it is about our brains help us learn I think if you've got a good memory and if you've got a quick official name a name that you are more likely to be predisposed to that language learning affinity I don't think it's necessarily true but I think there is more likely that that's a possibility and I think I have a really visual memory I don't know I don't know it's totally photographic but would be bordering on photographic but I can remember doing full cut checks at school as a student and you know it would be she would say the word in German and I can remember right that was the start were dying in the first call I mean I could actually visualize on the page so I think that that helps a lot I don't know what else you know I I actually really like to learn more about the science behind it and how do we learn languages but before I do know is that the more you read in your own language another languages the better your language will be on the easy it'll be to learn other languages so I'm learning Portuguese tonight as well just on Duolingo I'm not doing anything more adventurous than not but it's something that I've been interested in for a while Scott had a colleague who was from Portugal and he would talk to me in Portuguese and then I could understand what you saying I can reply to really frustrate me so I'm trying to do Portuguese on dealing with the site and it's fascinating because there are so many connections with Spanish but then the pronunciations really different and sometimes appear random words like I was doing the animals one and hunt looked at it for awhile and but to fly can often light but don't know what is important is I just have a gas and just hit the spot and some like money put aside which is but you're fine Spanish and it's no it's bullet that which is like totally different and it fascinates me I'm like right linguistically then we're just going to let that come from because you would assume it would be more similar to the Spanish and it's not or like words like milk it's late chance Bonner so alley C. H. eat nine kind of opposite leaks but in Portuguese it's lit TCI but spot with a team instead of a C. age so there's obviously kind of something happening linguistically there that I don't know the history all of our flight that's come to be that way but you can see the connections across the two languages are least icon but maybe that is just my brain but yeah I think it is it is really fascinating and I think I remember like being away on holiday and heating other people speaking I don't know let's see cool ash I like being really annoying I can understand them because you start to forget that the actually there are languages that you have no idea how they work because when you know a lot of the month languages you know Italian I don't speak it I could probably work because most of what's been said or if there's something that indirect wholly work but you know something like Polish or other eastern European oranges I would have no clue it feels like I get really annoyed to like all I don't know that is this is really frustrating so I think when you're talking about that kind of frustration and not hurdle in trying to get to the next bet I think the key there is actually just being surrounded by it twenty four seven and I think living in the country is pretty much the only thing or living with somebody who speaks a language you can talk to you in that language all the time even even then you're not totally immersed in it because that he was not in that language you know you're not eating all the time and I think for me my Spanish is my strongest language it does go through peaks and troughs you know they'll be times when it's better than others and not could be because of other factors like they've got a lot going on %HESITATION stressed I've not really been invested much time in it my brain's not really in the right place it might not be to halt the actually then I can start spending time on again so I'm watching a Los fantasies on Netflix right nine because thought is you know an amazing we'd say immerse yourself in the language I listen to Spanish music so I go back to the CD's I ball I was living abroad and you know I was able to go to like a snack or a good thing glass and see what was in the charts and buy stock on a listen to that and sing it and not help this well and then you're just reading in the language as well but obviously the research for me is part of keeping my language alive as well because it helps me to keep it there so it's a bit like playing a musical instrument or exercise we are if you don't use that then you do you lose it it does disappear you know hence why teaching German for me was quite a lot of fun last year because I haven't used since seventeen years so going back to that was a real challenge but it was also really interesting because it actually brought back a lawful I knew already and just was kind of lurking in the back of my brain but I couldn't quite remember that a lot of that I was having to do you on the hoof when I was googling things before it's cute worker what they mean so I knew that they were simply I'm sorry I'm not doing any German this year so that's Beverly I can focus on Spanish and French I kind of feel like a sense of mourning for like how to get my Spanish was when I was living in Spain because you can't replicate out here it's impossible and I got to the point where you know I'd be in the shower and that kind of you know we have you have like your daily thoughts in the shower late night with any state stay or whatever it is you're thinking about it I'm sure it's not just me the house that I would be thinking in Spanish or you know I've been dreaming in Spanish because you're literally immersed in it and it doesn't take long for that to come back you know I can have a conversation with our friends from on the phone in Spanish and it's the it again or you know I'm if I'm watching a lot of Netflix in Spanish than it does start coming back you start thinking about it more so yeah I think if I was going to give advice for like high %HESITATION to be sure language on to that next step is just trying to merge yourself in it still reads listen and converse city con but that's obviously be difficult when you're not in the environment I wonder but it's not it's not it's not L. his friend that's you he mentioned maximum members telling me that it's as if you're brand styles to languages away in the order in which you burn them soon our English will be first and then for me it will be friends snacks because that's what I didn't scale and I did it for GCSE I was okay because I work I worked really hard to let and it's going to be so you know that was me working super hard it can deal somewhat at United's can read no okay that does multiple choice questions probably help because you got a chance to get in something right but it's the oral and the last thing I think because as you say it's an honor student it's really talks I understand better it's Spanish for awhile because I was listening to you did you language Spanish classes for him but I it's it's just even just great stories Senate it's really fun to listen to you so if you didn't you may get a short Spanish you either way I think it's really useful to take kids and it's just reading reading some stories and they're trying to get a big channels different accents from all the different faces so my lesson is getting ready to get it but then I get obsessed with one of my find another podcast naked obsessed on the Selena state because I'm a nurse so I have to do things you know and ridiculous to see signs and it is the same as generating about less than Irish because marriage is very beginner but I was trying to listen to it just because you get used to the signage that and then you only know how where does that's unique and then you know you sort of get it but it thank you say you see the connections because even with Irish there are some very big similarities with artwork and the rates of some birds and things you know they're quite similar actually transformation compartmentalized in concert times when I've been in space in west from and I'm trying to talk to her mom and what comes it is French I haven't yes French since I was nineteen where is not French coming home is because it's the next language and then there are times when I'm trying to do make shooting go Irish on a little come this is Spanish I can't reach it you know and it's really really interesting high brand works you know hi IT service operates the languages and the different parts here shrews memory banks you know so yeah it be ready counselor mark I thought yeah and I think I see Israeli just to jump in on that like I was talking about this the school actually not long ago because so are two year olds it's obviously just a speech is starting to develop really quickly it seems out of no where but you know I was trying to say to sculpt the actually I think it's a lot I don't know I I mean a current speak as an expert in child speech acquisition of course well for me it feels like when you're learning a foreign language like they've been listening to English or whatever language it is you know they've been listening to their mother tongue since they were in the room you know since they could hear me all and that kind of insight into that image and vitamin and they've been listening to that since they were born every single day but they can't produce the same amount of stuff so they can understand the law but they can't necessarily could you stop themselves and it's the skills of perception in production are obviously two different things and I think that's what you're talking about we are you know a word columns I always think those moments are quite interesting because you're under pressure a lot moment yeah you're not it's not that you're reading attacks in trying to work it will okay see this word but let the what could that mean in this context you're in this stressful situation where you're trying to produce the words so much and that your bodies in this high alert type panic state linguistically shopping for this word in your brain and something comes out and hunt really thought about things being filed in a certain hardware but for me it's interesting because Spanish was the most recent language that I learned so I started with German and I did French and then I did Spanish I did all city and then I dropped Germanic capped off the Spanish and French but then obviously Spanish because I invested so much more time in and spend more time there and you know research to academically and whatnot and it's obviously become the stronger but then going into the school setting and having to teach predominantly French to start with was really daunting and people are probably thinking will fire you wanted you could degree in French but yet that I haven't used it in like eleven years or something hunt being used on a French but it's amazing what is actually the %HESITATION what you've retained and what comes back to you know find out with the German this year because you know I haven't haven't used German I dropped it first you need and you know I haven't been to Germany since then or it's still there it's in the back when I did actually sometime my friend ditions in German are actually like sometimes stronger than the Spanish because I did all those basic full cap stuff at school so we did all the animals we did all the colors and we did all so all those kind of boycott basics are still the leading German and sometimes it's not it should be like I think one of the kids asked me for like ten pin bowling was an insect contractually know that Spanish because we didn't do hobbies because we skirt suit or we maybe did it but we touched on it quickly and then we moved on and so the obvious ones I maybe know all the more kind of specific ones I may be doing or if I've never been tent in billing in Spain which I haven't I don't know why C. ten pin bowling in Spanish because I've never had to use it and the kids can put you on the spot you know they'll be like how to say this I am I often just say if I don't know you may think she's on the shelf one got one free night which I don't know every single word or %HESITATION sometimes style I would admit I don't know and I'll just be like you know you're going to come with the word for unicorn is like what is the unicorns or German enterprise that is thank you call for a night you got a device in your pocket house the whole of the internet and I know but they still want to ask me those moments of like when you're trying to find the words I either it comes out in their own language or you make this massive full path for you see a false friend and it's not actually like I always tell the story I tell the kids as well as school like when I was working in the skill in Spain and it was like one of my first days there and you know I was meeting colleagues in the staff room and hears me like freshly graduated from undergrad like twenty one or something twenty two maybe and talking to this older teacher and she's like all S. three S. thing weakens the bottle each day we need to respond as people and you maybe know that this already they love to talk about their ailments a love to talk about it what's not going so well that's a big study type it's like also the weather like we love to talk with the winner let's start with your health so she's like a spring wheat was the product I was like wow that's like a lot of information considered I'm just meeting you you're telling me that you're constipated and like what you obviously feel they can talk openly to that's great and then my friend said yeah you realize that because the bottom means stuff not like blog topic called thank okay right that makes more sense she's not telling me about her bowel movements just tell me that she's got a cold right okay I can get on board with that and you know I'll never forget that words never because that was my first encounter with it and I made this like horrendous mistake or like the time I told my E. slot me in Spain that my great grandmother had broken her a lot %HESITATION instead of her head because I said good window instead of cut it on we still isn't anything alike in English they don't really send out like in Spanish but that's what can I do and I think it's not no well %HESITATION I also ask the cockroach is that of a spoon you never forget those moments you know that's how we learned to make mistakes and we we learn from them and I think like having the confidence to try even though you maybe aren't the best I think doctrines for so much and that's why I try and tell the kids at school from there all about us about trying to speak in another language and language you're going to say something stupid like I've done and I tell them my mistakes I'm trying to ease at them that they were never totally totally fluent like we don't know every single word in English even as native English speakers so I think it's just yeah but being open to embracing your mistakes and it's a constant learning process because language is evolving all the time as well and we seem not like with the pandemic like look at all the card today that we are using that meant nothing or made something totally different and you know the word blockchain will be like a trigger for us all for decades to come I think I think language learning it's something that we we struggle with in this country years native English speakers team get on board with sometimes and I know sometimes I see that you can schools where off what's the point you know writes I don't speak French was point me learning package I cannot speak English and you know I think actually it's one of the most important things that we can study and learn because it's crucial to our species are culture communication whether it is just your own language and I think that is the other side of actually learning other languages teaches you about your own language and make sure the flax and not be becomes but what we're talking about right being a different person in another language and I think that is a key part of that was language learners we've probably all had the experience of trying to talk another language and struggling to get %HESITATION we are across and that can feel really strange but then you have to kind of discover who you are you know it's really interesting I didn't I didn't be read and I'm talking about this I think it's fascinating that obviously is something that we reflect on the law at work and it feels like an uphill battle sometimes trying to teach languages and an uncle phone contacts because there is a lot of resistance to it and people find it hard that's the other thing people find a high read more no sadly not part of our schooling system from early enough in any sort of meaningful way hopefully that is changing in Scotland for the one plus to you but it's a long road I think to get there would you like to receive updates thanks and special offers straight to your inbox and visit audio visual cultures tower presto com to sign up to our mailing list thank you for all the sites there's a lot here in the next year we grew as this all of my interviews is because that is only scratching the surface on your show me yes we can expand on search you're always welcome back again this is not your podcasts is that that's mine it's been a real joy %HESITATION I spend reading of the actually date to talk about a lot of things because again on the other side of that as a language learner ands and destroys it could just mumbling stream very slowly let's let me get here encouragement like caught you know as well I think that's really important so I hope that she's %HESITATION anybody else he's last name because I think it is fascinating that sent us some fascinating area of culture and I agree you know I think it's something that we're very robust shop actually in this country and starring other people's languages and opens up so much cheer left experience I think even if it's just mysterious she compared it race music actually impacting you right learnt some music when I was a teenager and I was always better at the scenery of the naxal playing at that and I think it's very similar with language right I understand the scenery behind it I understand how the language works signed the comics is at work I can explain it all to you I can expand right this is highest sentence structure works and Irish can I tell you an example sentence gives me house on artistic you're at all right so it's really great and said here the other side of the box as well and also you know Hyatt and schools and see your other interests you Roger now there's things that you do this year I'm not standing ready I'll shoot you net I do want to keep anymore you've been so generous with your time but you want to point people to where we can find you because you've got a really lovely blog and cheer practice on some of the solutions are you happy sad just point people towards where we can read more of your stuff yes of course so yeah I have my blog which little bit neglected by I'm hoping to revive that and especially with the the new projects on the front on the loan that I know I'm hoping to give myself an enforced %HESITATION right saying that line of some sort for that to the blog astonished in Philly %HESITATION dot wordpress dot com you know I've got a kid a mixture of stuff on there it's not just Spanish cinema stuff there are kind of reviews of films I falls or thought some films I've watched or study and or come across in my typing working in Spanish cinema but there's also stuff on the %HESITATION up by being a PhD candidate of course it is a blog post on the department's E. vicerex finance on my advice which is quite a popular post I think is probably my most visited cities of posts so yeah there's a mixture of stuff on there on Twitter you'll find me are you an actionable and then I'm also on Instagram and I'm trying to remember my handle is off the top of my head I think it's Dr underscore teacher underscore mom is a private account well it's only private because I post some pictures of the kids on there never their faces or anything so I'm happy for people to follow me there as well it's just it might not be very exciting from an academic perspective it's more my mom life on my mornings you know sometimes the odd things thrown in that a bright and academia or teaching hours once I was posting this account from trying to meet regardless but nicer so there are some random things on there and I think that's it is it or I guess by email as well Shawna dot noble at Durham dot AC dot UK is the academic one I use most of the time so yeah you'll find me there and I'm happy for people to follow up and see what I'm saying and engage in dialogue and whatever that might be wonderful thank you so much and thank you for your time thank you for your amazing very end thank you for being an awesome given I thank you for being a Michael Katz thank in a long time coming out than I was when trying to like start the site for a while so I'm really delighted that we manage to see make the most of my child free afternoon yeah having a kids catch up first and then the card in this it's just been such a jolly and my Cup feels soul fool contributor so yeah I'm just delighted on I'd be equally clients come back and chat more another day so yeah let's do that we should do some maybe topic isn't spending ages since I've done that's what you made in China but it hasn't happened since it would be ready costs that may be reaching a gardenia vests or you know I'm so excited I haven't seen it since we went to the cinema to see and if they get to see it again stamina holds up thank you the kids should do like a virtual viewing together and then in afterwards that would be cool the sun right thanks units are okay thank you Paula
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transcript

Audiovisual Cultures episode 98 – Just Chat Positivity with Uncle Dominic automated transcript of full live recording


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well hello and welcome to another episode of audiovisual cultures a very warm welcome if you’re joining us on the live stream or the replay after as well um it’s quite a rare event when i do a live recording like this it’s quite exciting and um i’m doing this because of my guests today which i will talk to you about in a moment um so audio visual cultures if you’re joining us for the first time it’s a podcast that looks at all the nooks and crannies of creative practice arts and humanities research and cultural production it’s a very borderless approach to looking at cultural phenomena just the sort of thing that we’re doing right now um so i’m your host paula blair and i am really excited to be joined today from tapai taiwan by my guest uncle dominic to talk about live video casting and wherever else our chat takes us and we’re going to talk probably mainly about dominic’s show just chat with uncle dominic but we’ll we’ll see where everything takes us so i’m going to bring uncle dominic in now hello welcome hello everyone i’m uncle dominic thank you for inviting me to your podcast paula you’re so welcome yes it’s uh it’s so great to connect with you and um i’m i’m loving your outfit i’m loving your spider-man hoodie that you’ve got on there

i love spider-man a lot because it has the the one of famous quotes right saying uh we with great power comes great responsibility so so it’s a good thing excellent yeah yeah he’s probably one of my favorite as well um so i’m like you’re so welcome and would you be happy first of all to tell us a bit about yourself just introduce yourself and tell us the sorts of things that you’re working on and then we’ll try and get into a bit more detail about those for sure well hello everyone i’m uncle dominic um right now i’m i actually have my own show on twitch and also on youtube under uncle dominic’s story time or in just chat with uncle dominic um what i do uh that is just part of my part-time job kind of so because i want to bring like more motivation to the world and more things because i’m an educator in taiwan so i teach i teach in schools public schools and private intuition as well and so one of my friends actually came to me one day and said dominic you have all these great you know telling stories and talking to people um why don’t you have like your own podcast and i was like what i can do that i said sure you can do it you can try and so that kind of you know put me into the map so i started doing this and i’ve been approached by a few people about talk to talk about motivational stuff uh things that we can help uh younger generations so that’s what i’m excited about right now to you know to help younger people with their questions in life and so uh yeah so that’s why i’m doing this for once right so yeah that’s so that’s a little bit about myself um and education i’m i’m just a teacher uh in a school nobody’s just a teacher it’s a very important thing today my mom i’m always gonna say you’re just a teacher why aren’t you a doctor i’m like oh well you know teachers well who teaches doctors to do anything hello that’s true right so yeah you’re very important people of course you are vital people what do you teach dominic um in taiwan i actually teach english language right so i teach the language english here um yeah so uh but before when i was in the states i used to work as a photographer and i teach people how to do photography and so back in the states but yeah so i’ve been in taiwan for 14 years now so in taiwan i i cannot teach photography here because they are actually much better than me and language barrier-wise so that is a problem and so yeah so i verge into teaching education and i thought that’s actually pretty helpful as well with a little bit from my background as well so yeah because my mom used to be a teacher uh in the school a long time ago so yeah it’s kind of i guess you could say it runs in the family somehow right okay oh that’s brilliant so yeah so your your vocation very much is feeding the work that you’re doing with your video casting on twitch and youtube then that’s right yeah yeah great so um yeah i suppose there’s quite a lot to get into then because you know you’ve mentioned language and then you’ve and i know that from watching some of just chat you’re most of your guests are are in asia somewhere and um you know so i was i was quite keen to know um you know how you how you get guests and i think it’s quite useful if there are other podcasters and video casters watching that’s something we can talk about is those connections that people make uh like right now i’ve been approached by a few um shows as well like like you approach me and they all liked the motivational part that i i’m putting it out so i feel like yeah so that’s what it is it’s a start so i told my wife i was like some i got invited again for another as another guest at another show and i was like so does that make me famous i feel like no it’s it’s it’s good that people are seeing the motivational things and try to put it out there right because i i try to do so much right and i can only get so much viewers and but i want to do this because i want you know younger learners well younger generation they need to to hear this sometimes and so i do this at school at my own schools as well like when i teach even though i’m teaching english i will teach a life you know life to my students and if they’re experiencing certain problems i told them you can always come to me i can help you if i cannot help you i’ll try to find some ways or someone else for you to talk to or share with them my life experiences as well um i would not say i have a perfect life and i will not say i have the the lowest of life but you know i i go through life just like everyone else everyone has problems so that’s why i want to put it out there in the sense of more real you know just like realness in struggle so i have my own struggles and some the guests that i invited on my show so far most of them have their own problems in life but they are very motivated to to share what they know and which is good because we can see real life struggles and share it to the world and at the same time you know share it to the world how we overcome them or with the knowledge that we have do you guys say what i’m saying paula of course yeah that makes a little sense yes and and i think it’s really refreshing to have and maybe this ties in with the persona of uncle dominic as well it’s really refreshing to see more men especially opening up over those sorts of media because um i feel like we’re very slowly encroaching on macho cultures and men aren’t supposed to talk about their problems they’re supposed to just get on with it and that’s repeated across many different cultures um so it’s really it’s quite great to see young men taking on a and i think what your uncle dominic title does is it it’s it sort of highlights okay i’m in a caring role and it’s does it you know so it’s um it’s making it more acceptable for men to be able to do that and um you know that it’s it’s quite useful actually for all of us to lay these things on the table and say we’re all going through this stuff but this is how we can have resolve and get through really challenging times and how we can respond to them so it’s it’s quite you know it’s a nice show to listen to to just hear oh that this person has overcome that adversity in that way um or this thing happened in their life and that was how they confronted it you know and it doesn’t mean you know it’s not the way that influencers say you should just revolutionize your life it’s not it’s it’s real life stories that people are telling you so i think that’s been really useful to hear i like to influence the influencers right right now in this generation i’ve never seen it before but it’s it’s been picking up like crazy like everyone wants to be an influencer on instagram tiktok um on all those platforms i mean they’re showing something for for the people in the world to see but most of the times what they show are not real right they show it because they want to sell stuff sell their brand for me i have nothing to sell so all i have is i want to share my experiences right and for other people to see and so it is like you said it’s very hard for for men to open up uh so far most of my guests guests are men so which is pretty interesting so uh most of the women actually turn turn down the show like they don’t dare to come on because they’re shy so in this case in my in my in my podcast most of the most of the guests are guys so which is very interesting in some ways but like you said it’s very difficult for us to open up even for me to actually start this i have this idea to to share this for almost over a year i’ve never done it it’s just i never dared to put it up never there to record myself you know and just i was like oh what should i do what should i do eventually you know just a tiny little push from one of my students it’s like you know you can do this why don’t you do it i was like really i should do it yeah and that’s where i picked up you know so that’s where i go from there uh but i’m not gonna say it’s all smooth you know it’s not smooth i’m trying to put motivational things out there but there are so many bad things in the world so it’s still it’s still a hindrance but you know we we have to move on like keep on you know like trials right this trials there’s stones in front of us we just have to go over the stones right just keep moving eventually you know eventually the world will get better i hope right people will get better more people will be more motivational um inspire more confidence in their life right that’s what we need because i think young people right now needs more confidence in their life so they can overcome uh certain trials right um yeah so yeah i don’t wanna talk too much no well that’s why i invited you on my podcast was to talk to me so talk away um no no it’s it’s great i mean i mean it’s great that you have that emphasis on talking to younger people and that you know of course is from your background as a teacher in schools but i find and maybe some of your guests find this as well that even as an adult there are things you don’t hear as a child that maybe you needed to hear but you don’t learn them until you’re well into adulthood and so i’m very open to the idea of having almost a second childhood and you know actually just relearning some of that when you’re at a time in your life where you can really understand it and apply the learning you know so i’ve i find it useful to to listen to the stories that people are telling on your show as well um yeah so i mean i i think yeah i think any of us at any time of our lives you know even if we’re around the same age you can be that almost parental generation person to a friend you know at times because i think there are times when we can revert to our childhood state and i think especially the way the world has been this past year so i think probably a lot of us have had to facetime a lot of maybe early drama and things yeah it’s difficult like with the covet 19 in the world right now everyone’s um the profession has to change the you know like for example my pay wise my uh my salary is actually cut in half because uh my income is has been cut enough because of covered 19. and i still have rents to pay children to feed you know families feed and then taxes and stuff and all those things but uh these are what what we say uh you know like negative stuff in the world it affects us but it just depends on how we see it right if we can change the perspective of how we see things uh we we can be better in some ways right and so that’s the one reason why i want i want to start my podcast because i want people to try to see things differently because i tend to see things differently sometimes like see different perspectives but of course it’s not always what people want to hear you know for example i have children on my own so i have three kids and so i’ll tell my older son don’t play too much computer right don’t use it too much your eyes you’re gonna break your eyes right so and he’s like no it’s not i’m not gonna break my eyes you know it doesn’t it doesn’t work like that i was like yeah it does look i’m wearing glasses but those kind of logic does not help you know and so we have to tend to try to look at a different perspective by saying okay son i like your spending time on the computer maybe there’s something you can show me that you’re doing well on the computer so you know things like that so like the other day he showed me his uh was it that thing that he made on his what minecraft you know young younger gen the games that they play i was like wow so you made a house okay so something like that maybe we just so as a parent or as older people we need to kind of try to see things differently you know but i guess it’s also affected in culture because we i had a talk the other day with uh on my chat um we’re talking about the asian culture versus the west western culture right okay where for example if the western uh let’s say the western culture a kid from the western culture when he when he or when he or she falls down the parents were like go pick them up or not right so when they pick them up or they will say are you okay are you all right is everything fine right but for asian countries a bit different like when when a kid fall down the first thing you’ll hear is like why did you fall down you know why did you run too fast i told you so you know so it’s kind of like a different upbringing right so there is good and bad of course but i tend to like if we if we as parents are able to see things not negatively like oh are you okay like towards another person more caring i think the younger generation will actually have you know better childhood i guess right uh i mentioned a lot younger generation because i’m pretty old right now i’m around 40 right so i can say people younger than me yeah so yeah so yeah um so things like that so that’s what i want to say and i want to tell people but of course it’s not good to hear it sometimes the younger people will feel like it’s like nagging you’re nagging me right so i kind of want to bring it out in a more reality form that you know these things does happen to it happens to everyone so i want to talk about it happens to everyone we cannot hide it we have to uh you know break break through the wall you know and share it now as as a as a man it’s difficult for me like for example it’s hard for me to show my feelings to my wife sometimes like she’s like yo you don’t hold my hands anymore and it’s like ah why don’t i hold my hold on my whole hands i don’t know why it’s just it’s not like i’m a touchy feely kind of guy you know it’s hard to open up sometimes so um doing this podcast actually helps me as well because i feel like if i do good out there good will come back if i motivate people i will motivate myself as well right um just like there was a youtuber that i was watching the other day he told us he said everyone has the same amount of time in a week what we do in that time you know brings brings a success or differs between different people so if i wake up in the morning the first thing i do is i look at my cell phone and go through instagram or whatever instead i could have used that you know few seconds in the morning when i wake up look in the mirror and say i’m gonna do well today so that actually brings a little bit of impact to your own life and to you know anyone’s life right or if you if you’re a kid and you’re in a house if you wake up in the morning instead of going downstairs and say hey mom what’s for breakfast you could say hey mom good morning right did you stick well things like that i mean it’s just a small tiny thing that can actually brighten a person’s life like a person’s attitude like if i actually if my kids actually wake up in the morning say say hey dad good morning i was like oh i feel good you know i feel good not not a whole good but still good all right it’s just one step upon one step we build upon opponent it’s just one tiny happiness about another happiness eventually you know i feel like eventually everything will fall into place and everything will picks up from there so it becomes like a seventh habit right a habit right yeah yeah good good habits yeah that’s really nice no no no it’s it’s good yeah um no because i think these these things all tumble into one another i think and i suppose with some yoga’s with your show it’s a way of just doing that on a more public level and it feels that because you know i mean we’re we’re both fairly small shows you know i’m not gonna pretend that this is a you know multinational conglomerate conglomerate or anything like that well that’s the thing right that’s why i feel right when i first started it i always took how many viewers do i have you know how many people are watching this and i try to promote my channel so i was like and then someone actually told me it’s not important how many viewers you find it’s more on what you show and what you give you know so if i’m giving good stuff good vibes to people i feel like if one person gets it i mean that’s good enough right so and he actually said that eventually eventually you know or may not but eventually one good will bring another good so you might get in 18 months or two years later your channel is going to blow up you know so but i guess most people are looking at the quick way of making money or whatever but i feel like this is not about making money this is more about you know sharing my motivation or motivate people out there you know one or two that’s i think that’s good enough i mean if there’s more great if there’s even more you know even better but it it has to pick up from somewhere you know because we talk about money right money money spent okay i don’t think people will actually spend money to go to a course to get a motivational course like for example if i’m having a seminar for uh two thousand dollars you pay two thousand dollars to come come to my two-hour seminar of of being happy i mean who would do that right i’m sure there’s gonna be rich people who like do not have have time in their life so they’ll spend two thousand dollars to go to this kind of seminar sure but this is not about that this is more about we need we are giving uh positive things out there throwing more positive things out there because there’s too many bad things out there in school so i just want to do a little bit all right just like this there’s a story right there’s a story about the the boy and the starfish on the beach did you have you heard that story before it sounds familiar but please do tell it right so there there is a boy right that walks walks on a beach and he saw all the little starfish on the beaches right so what he does is he picks up one and throw them back into the ocean right picks up one throw them back to the ocean and someone actually go to him and say why do you do that you know there are so many starfish you’re not gonna you’re not gonna be able to help them all so the boy replied well for this one it matters right so we’re actually doing one step at a time throwing starfish back in uh it doesn’t matter we cannot save everyone but we can save who we can so pretty much like do what we can right and i had a guest yesterday um yesterday on tuesday um he actually mentioned to me dominic we cannot control everything everything is gonna happen we just have to do our best i was like yeah that’s it you said it pretty well we have to do our best what we can do just do it you know if we cannot do it you know why worry you know we should just do what we can so that’s it right i feel like in life it’s we get stuck sometimes we get stuck about thinking about we can’t do this we can’t do this this problem but we shouldn’t think about why we can’t do this we should be thinking about what can we do you know not the part that we cannot do right just like the saying of uh do we see the glass as half cup full or is it half glass empty all right so yeah did you did you get what i’m saying yeah um i was wondering as well uh because i think it might be useful for i think as i say for anybody else who’s doing this kind of work is um actually choosing a platform on which to do all of that you know so there’s the work itself but then it’s um how do we decide how we put it out into the world so you’ve been doing live shows at set times and twitch isn’t that right right and um and i’m quite interested in that because i i i watch live streams of talks you know and you know people presenting talks and things on twitch and it started out i believe as a more of a gaming platform so people just watch yeah um so i was wondering about you know your decision to do that kind of show on twitch and you know is that um you know is that the idea of it is to try and get that international instagram capture immediately i started on facebook right so i have this i have to i started on facebook and i was i was recording my uncle dominic story time so and so what i do is read english books and share it to my my kids and my students right and so i initially did it on facebook and eventually i felt like i need to do more i can do more i mean and so my my students told me yeah do a chat you know share your share your positive out you know to everyone i was like yeah i should do that but um i guess like i mentioned i’m pretty scared at first you know doing a recording is different doing a live stream is different you know being live with another guest is a different thing you might say the wrong thing and you cannot you cannot cut it out right it’s there yeah and so uh and the reason why i picked twitch at first was because i i had a trouble with using youtube i wasn’t very good at using youtube i couldn’t i don’t know how to actually turn on the live streaming on youtube so i had a hard time at first i was like oh it’s pretty difficult and someone said well try twitch i was like oh yeah i should try twitch and so i went twitch and i saw it was actually much easier to to live live stream on twitch and so i decided to try to live stream on twitch first and then record it and then edit a little bit of it and then put it on youtube so i can have both of both worlds and so and and put it in facebook as well but again um it’s not it’s not gonna make money for four for one but it’s more like i’m putting things out there um hopefully some it will change someone’s life and someone will approach me and say thank you dominic uh your show helped me so you know something like that just like as a teacher like i i teach i’ve been teaching students in taiwan for 14 years um i don’t many thank yous for one but i do get occasionally where some students come to me um give me a flower and say you changed the way i think about english you change the way i think about life i was like ah thank you that’s it that’s all i want to hear you know as an educator that’s how i feel i did something i hear a little bit good that means it’s motivated me to do more to help others and maybe that person that i help actually help more people so in this way it’s a win-win win for me win for them right and yeah so this will be better yeah those ripple effects say you know that that drop that just ripples out that sounds like yeah yeah that’s great yeah that’s interesting about twitch because i’ve considered it as well and i just haven’t been too sure because i think i think you’re right i mean you know i i’m using a stream yard right now to to do this on youtube because it just is so much easier and you’ve got a bit more control with them with what you can do and um yeah yeah with stream yard and you know and i don’t have a huge following on youtube as well and i think with twitch it’s really nice because you actually you down on the sidebar you’ve got this ticker of who’s streaming and how many you’re watching and and you can actually just click on stuff you you it might suggest things that are similar to the thing that you’re watching you can go around one that you like yeah exactly yeah so it’s actually it seems that people are people’s what people are streaming is more findable on twitch so i do wonder if that’s something i should consider sometimes for this show but i think for me i’m primarily edited audio so you know i just like to do this sometimes because it just it’s just a bit different you know and then somebody like you you’re very happy to come into your life recording on video you know not not all of my guests like their video to be used so um right so that’s the thing i feel that i shouldn’t hide in a way i should share it you know and because if i hide myself most of the time if i have problems i hide it it’s gonna the problem is gonna pick up right um i i learned that from my dad actually my dad’s a little bit different uh he has lots of problems in his life but he never tells me his problem never and so every time i see him he’s happy you know he’s enjoying life he’s doing well but he has so much problem i didn’t know that only when he he left this world and then i start you know picking things up from his friends or whatever and i realized oh my gosh my dad has so much problems in his life but he didn’t share it and so because he didn’t share it in in this way i felt like i don’t know what to do when this happens so i feel like i need to put it out there in case you know if i die one day my children be like oh look look i’m on youtube oh my dad is still here you know things like that so they can learn something from me in the future like you know so i feel like i shouldn’t hide so much like i feel yeah you know hiding it’s it’s it’s good to help you but i feel like we should you know share it most times like you know like the concept of writing down your journal or your diary right right so here’s the thing that i always ask why do we write it down on a journal diary do we don’t want others to read it or do we secretly want someone to read our diary or journal why do we write it down you know and we put it at places where it’s reachable by anyone you know so there has to be a reason why journals and diaries existed is it because when we pass on from these lives someone will actually read our diary and journal to find out what’s going on so that’s not a secret anymore so why do we actually do it right i think it’s because we are shy but we secretly want someone to read our journal and read our diary so they can enjoy our life in in some ways right

it’s a process it’s an outlet for it so even if i mean i think for me the idea of the finished your full diary with every page written on it for me that’s the legacy of what was the live act of the sharing you of getting it out of your system and then whatever happens with that happens with that you know um i suppose in a way it’s an archive for yourself of your own memories and and this kind of thing it’s you’re creating an archive for yourself and then for your your children and um you know so you you leave a legacy and it is an interesting i don’t know if it’s a bit morbid that thought overnight it’s going to be full of our ghosts someday you know the documentary will be around longer than we will for sure and then it’s such a lovely thing to think that you know in a hundred years time somebody might still be benefiting from what we put out into the world which is really interesting that’s that’s why i feel like you know what we put on right now might not affect anyone so much like not many viewers but eventually one day you know someone will watch it and you know change something like you said an archive it’s definitely an archive we have to look at the generations now everything is internet now right everything is is computerized so if if we don’t move on with the times we’re going to be stuck behind you know like if i share all my motivational stuff or my strugglings in life in a diary in my journal who’s going to read it you know one day if if my house get burned down like no one’s going to be able to read it and so i need to put it up there so you know on the internet on the web i think that’s the best way to put things out and i notice there are there’s not a lot of people doing it but i do notice there’s a few and so i feel it’s better than none so so add adding more to it you know help out more yeah and um yeah i was wondering as well if you’d be interested in talking about the experience of you not just putting your own thoughts out there but but hosting a show where you facilitate other people putting their thoughts out there um but that experience that we’ve we’ve all had to do this past while of doing it remotely um i was wondering what how you felt about that and how that’s going for you um yeah if when i first started it um i actually pre i write down a lot of questions i want to uh thought provoking questions and you know and using some quotes like i mainly use a lot of quotes on my show so finding good quotes and sharing it out and asking for opinions uh using these quotes to talk with our guests or to my guests um because of this procedure i when i first started with my first few episodes it’s kind of i feel like well someone mentioned it to me um it’s kind of like i’m going through the process i should um slow it down and and take the examples and try to break it even deeper and so that’s what i’ve been trying to do for the last past two episodes um talking to my guests and actually um having less questions but more on trying to figure out the experiences that they had um you know the the share to others so we can actually dive deeper into more understanding of what things happen so um that process is i know gradually picking up so eventually i think right now i i’m in more comfortable zone um when i talk to my guests and asking them um certain questions to actually find out more about their life and their opinions because i know everyone has different opinions your opinion would not be the same as mine but um trying to bring it out out there into the open uh it’s a process but yeah so it’s all process you know at the same time i’m trying to learn how to use the computer how to live stream at the same time you know doing all those little gadgety things and my first episode was terrible out of terrible first episode out there i thought it was really good but it was not it was too much graffiti things are going around and then one of my episodes i tried to put a moving text on it and it eventually i made a mistake the moving text has actually audio on it so what we are discussing the text is still talking i’m like oh no i messed up so much and i realized i shouldn’t do so much of this graphic things on it because i need i need my audience to focus on what’s on the show what’s important which is their experiences so um yeah so finally i settle down with something more you know subtlety and then just focus only on what the my guest has to say and how we can talk about this questions right about this that we have because it’s important to actually to uh you know take someone’s thoughts and opinions and actually you know break it apart not break it apart isn’t bad but breaking apart and finding out why they think that way and how we can actually benefit from it you know so yeah so in in a sense i could say i should humble myself down and listen to my guests and try to figure out why they think that way

yeah that’s really interesting it’s interesting that you bring up your um your graphics because um you know i know the little um the little intro graphic that you have that you’re talking about and i think i really what i really appreciate it about it is it quite lays bare the process of making something like that because it’s you know it’s it’s more of a screencast of you putting it together and so it’s become you know it’s um if people go to your to you to your site i’ve put the link in the comments for your youtube channel if people go and have a look at that you’ll see what i mean where it’s it’s like you’re building it in the program and um and so it comes alive in front of you and um it’s as you say it’s i think any podcaster any video caster when they’re they’re just starting out it’s not perfect it’s you know there’s constant problems there’s it’s a total learning experience because we are amateurs doing this a lot of us and we don’t have that formal training in broadcasting so we don’t know how to hide a lot of that stuff or how to integrate things necessarily and so you’re learning all the time on the job and so it’s you know you should feel really positive if i thought that that’s part of the process and it’s normal and actually it’s quite endearing and it’s um it just shows you know there is work going on to producing something like this and i think audiences need to be aware of that that it’s not just a click a button and it happens it’s actually quite a lot of preparation on it so that’s the thing i was reading up another person he was telling he was he was actually advising all the youtubers out there and i thought this is a really good um advice right he said we should not put up content make content because we want people to see this content right we should make the contents evolve around us so that’s what he’s saying so he’s saying that he does not spend seven six days a week to record his content and you know five hours a day just to think about what he should put what should he record it should be more like recording his life and what evolves around him so i feel like that’s a great example and i and i do my recordings now recordings for my story time only on weekends when i have some free times with my kids and so when they are sleeping i’ll do my own story time and do the recording there but for live stream of course there’s certain time for it i feel like i need to have a certain set time for my guests to come in and talk about or for me to actually talk about some topics right so i feel like if we spend less time thinking about the process and more about the actual things that we are sharing i think in this way the audience can actually feel how you know real this is and at the same time experience it um actually be in the conversation with us um can you know yeah so it feels like they’re there listening to our conversation that’s going on about life and which is great because i know people out there are afraid to to talk afraid to voice out and so i feel like if we create these platforms that you you created your platform audio visual cultures and i’ve seen some comments and stuff and you have some great guesses but yeah this is it right this is it we put it out there not many people can voice out their opinions but there’s gonna be one or two that actually have an opinion and this will actually you know help you help us you know want to understand what’s going on all right um i actually like to watch one of the live stream um of a book author her name is sandra she wrote his book called uh always be happy right always be happy her book and so um she always live streams every other week all right and on it she talks about happiness right she gives a topic happiness and she waits for everyone to ask her questions about happiness and she answers them and so she breaks out a way to have the audience you know interact with her but you notice in the chat there’s so many people watching her but only five or six actually talk to her but i mean even the five or six there’s gonna be people that oh yeah i have the same question so there we go i don’t have to ask it again you know so if we put it out there we record the content because we want to share you know our life our experiences people will eventually want to see it want to hear it want to learn from it but i feel like if we put out you know comedy contents you know all these things sure people are going to watch it people are going to there’s going to be views more views on comedies and stuff it’s gonna but this is not what we want we’re focusing on oh oh this is not what i want i’m focusing on real life you know real life thoughts and you know things that can help us in our life in our daily struggles so it’s a different kind of genre right but still it’s different we’re not gonna i don’t think we’re gonna expect 2 000 viewers right how many views do we have right now actually i don’t see at the moment too

and hello to whoever you are and very welcome um yeah people have been coming in and i’d i think um we’ve had a maximum of three at any time while we’ve been doing this um but it’s quite early in the morning here in the uk and it’s i think just right at the end of the working day where you are in taiwan and america is not awake yet so you know it’s it’s just one of those things where um because it you you were saying you’ve got set times and that’s really good that’s a really good strategy if you’re doing a live show and because mine is mine is primarily edited audio as i say it’s more of a negotiation with the guest if there’s a guest on or when i have time and that sort of thing so this was just uh this was a sweet spot where we could both do this and that’s why we’re doing it at this time so um you know that’s that that’s just how that rolls but it’s great to see and i like i like putting i always put a video version of mine on youtube anyway because it helps with accessibility because you can use options um but it’s you have some of the feedback actually just as you say that um some really lovely feedback i’ve had is that people do really like seeing this they like seeing the conversation rather than just listening to it they’re like seeing the interaction of people on cameras yeah so so i think you know what you’re doing makes complete sense especially when you’re talking about things that are maybe quite emotional or life events and that sort of stuff because it’s just it is as if you’re in the room with those people and you’re having an intimate conversation you know so it’s not all planned it’s not all written down like i mean yeah it’s real life so like whatever is in my head i’m bringing it out so that’s what it is right so this way people can actually feel more you know like into it like it’s real this this advice is real it’s not it’s not a made-up advice where i’m looking at a script i’m not so yeah yeah you’re not going oh you you need to be happier in your life so you need to buy this product to do that you know it’s like this is a real life event this is the choice these are the choices you can make and how you confront that how you deal with that how you move on from that you know and um that’s really useful and i suppose it’d be nice to just quickly come back to that point you were making about you you tend to shape it around quotations that you find you know you you’ll take words of wisdom from maya angelou you know and quite common sayings and you know that sort of thing and get your guests to really think that through and go right well what does that mean to you how do you approach this and um and i think that’s a really nice way of shaping it as well and um i mean all the ones i’ve heard so far i think they’re from i think they’re i think they’re english sayings you know they’re in some form of english and or they’ve been written in english that sort of thing and i was wondering because um you said you you you lived in the united states for a long time and um i was just wondering about that um you know sort of why english and is that just the common language where you are for for all the different people yeah for english yeah i was just wondering a bit about that um i’m originally from malaysia i was born in malaysia okay so um but i was brought up in english environment so i speak you know completely english mostly english right um and so but my mom is my mom lives in australia and so i i’ve been in australia i live in the u.s before i came to taiwan so i’ve been living in all the english speaking countries right but taiwan is not english country so when i when i first got here it was a bit difficult with the language as well and so it’s just you know breaking the barrier of you know the language barrier so after the first couple years eventually i picked up some chinese and so yeah and so i’ve been here for 14 years so i’m able to go outside and buy food in in the chinese language and speak in chinese language but still it’s not my main language so sometimes i’m having difficulty in speaking it getting the right tone to it so that’s why most of my guests are all english speakers because i want to speak only in english because if i try to speak in chinese sometimes it’s difficult to do it although saying that i actually did one episode last tuesday live with a chinese speaker and someone told me dominic you should try doing one in chinese i was like oh man really it’s like yeah do it do it do it okay so i went around and tried to find some guests and i actually found one and he’s actually a retired teacher but i learned that he was also a counselor at school so i learned a lot from him and so but all this conversation is all in chinese so at the same time i felt like oh somehow my chinese has improved but the whole point is it’s not all about me right it’s all about the content what we want our viewers to see so i feel like you know language shh it’s a problem for you know but english is definitely out there people definitely knows english because i’m living in taiwan i feel like i should you know contribute a little bit to the taiwanese people by speaking a little bit chinese and get the chinese speakers to share their feelings because if i don’t know if you know this but there are a lot of motivational speakers in english but very little in chinese language yeah have you ever wondered why i’ve been thinking about it why yeah no go ahead yeah yeah it’s an interesting question well i i feel like let’s say that this way i feel like because the chinese culture of asian culture like we don’t like to give advice on things so much based on another person’s life for example if you’re if your life sucks okay your life sucks okay that’s it i’m not gonna go in there why does your life sucks right how can i help you with your life right and so but yeah so that’s why i guess that’s why there’s not many motivational speakers in chinese in the chinese language so having one out there actually helps out a lot as well i feel right so different language out there that’s so interesting um yeah teacher sorry i’m just trying to date with this echo just turn the mickey and dying to see if it helps um but uh yeah that’s so interesting um because i don’t know it makes me feel like well or does that just indicate that english speakers talk a load of nonsense all the time and is it more um practical to to or just you you’re just not getting into everybody’s business is it that kind of cultural difference but also as you say i think we were talking earlier about well it’s it can be a cultural thing whether you how much people share and what’s your internal life and that sort of stuff but yeah i think it is i suppose being that pioneering beginning to it and if you’re somebody who you come from this english-speaking background and then you’ve um you know you you’re trying to assimilate into uh you know a more chinese taiwanese area and then you know it’s you’re trying to marry up those cultures rather than you clash them i suppose is that right is that yeah well i feel like sometimes it shouldn’t be that way it should be like yeah but anyway it does happen because people tend to you know genderize or racialize that oh yeah there’s many western podcasters but there’s very little asian podcasters right and so there’s gonna be things like that but i feel like it doesn’t really matter in in the sense that who does it or you know what’s out there it should be like are you doing something to put it out there and so i’m doing something to put it out there are you guys doing something to put it out there i mean you know that’s that should be it right i’m very happy that paula is doing something out there as well right in your audio visual culture podcast and i’ve seen a lot of good stuff in it uh actually a lot of good stuff in it thank you yeah for me to compare up to you i i feel like i’m not up there yet i’m only on episode six right only episode six you know and so but you have like you know so it’s different so it’s more like i’m putting things out there and you are putting things out there so it’s all about you’re doing something on your part giving the best of you out there to the people out there in the world and i’m doing the best i can to the people out there in the world and i feel like english is because it’s a language that i speak so if i can speak in other languages then i’ll i’ll probably do those right but in in this in a sense english is the only one i speak right now and plus a little bit of chinese so and so if i can do those you know i would i would if i can do other languages like italian french sure if i can or japanese yeah but i cannot so for this case i will hope that there’s gonna be other japanese viewers out there who are interested in doing your own motivational podcast in japan do it you know that’s what we do that’s what we need that’s what people need you know we need to uh we’re not politicians i mean we’re not someone up there we cannot be in a government sharing our thoughts we cannot but we can show our thoughts in on on the web so people can actually see it um gain something from it learn or not learn from it you know yeah

great now that’s that’s really useful to hear yeah it’s it’s come up a few times when i’ve had uh buyer multilingual podcasters come and speak to me and um because there’s a guy who lives in switzerland but he speaks or not sister in sweden but he speaks english swedish and arabic so he does his podcast in whatever language his guest is happiest with and most of it is in english and it’s something i do wonder about is um you know is there provision for podcasting in all of the languages because it just feels that english is so dominant anyway globally and it has to be i feel like english is like the the global language right now right it’s like international language like everyone learns it because we we need to learn it and then you know yeah so like recently the last past two years two years ago yeah two years ago yeah two years ago taiwan said we want english to be the second national language in taiwan and so and everyone’s like what oh no wow is that possible you know and so it’s difficult to put a language as your second language right in your country and so because of that everyone almost everyone in taiwan are actually you know pick pacing things up by learning english and so a lot of english intuition into intuition are having lots of students and because they want to learn from it practice improve their english you know and there are lots of more foreign foreign teachers from other countries coming to taiwan to actually teach english i mean this is a good step i feel like english is important out there um before i used to think chinese and english is important because china has so much business opportunities for people to go there um but of course recently with a lot of you know political things happening in the world people are changing their mind oh we don’t want to go to china anymore we’re going to focus on different languages so i feel like it doesn’t matter right it’s more matters on what we want to learn like i feel like english is definitely important for me i like i like the the language english language and the japanese language and the chinese language and so i didn’t this two languages are great uh you know if you have those three languages i feel like you can go around the world and still do things of course i cannot go to italy but if i go to italy i’m sure they can still speak english they’re pretty sure right so yeah english is definitely we’re right so it’s a language that you have to learn you have to know it we don’t really have to like note 100 the language i mean it’s good enough to conversate and to get around i think that’s good that’s good enough right um okay now it’s just interesting to hear hear your thoughts about that i get i get worried that it’s much too colonial and um it’s taking over and i’m trying my best to learn different languages that aren’t english and but yeah it’s good to hear your perspective on it if you want to talk about colonization that’s a different whole point of view like i was in australia for a couple years before i live yeah my mom’s there now so um a lot of australians the older the the older generation they don’t like the japanese people because of the world war before right the war that had with the japanese and so when i was there they thought i was japanese so they don’t like me i was like i’m not japanese i’m not i’m not they i don’t believe you i don’t care go away you know so all these racial things is there okay but we we don’t want to feel that way i mean cause colonization happens you know people move to different countries it happens you know immigration you know these things happen you know so but we have to think about we are all humans right we’re just living in different worlds and trying to move and try to you know how do we say survive in this world right uh a lot of gamers out there love to play games like survival games right and so this is this is real life survival it’s like you find out what’s best for you and your family and you want to move there and you want to live there and so and yeah so that’s it you know we i have friends and families who want to move to the uk as well um and love australia i want to move to australia i mean this is what they feel you know if i feel like i like my life here in taiwan i’m here i’m still here i’ve been here 14 years so i definitely love it here and so but i’m saying you know it doesn’t matter where we go i feel like it’s just it’s all about yourself our own happiness and all our own thoughts right we if we feel like if we feel going to the uk is actually beneficial for me and my family then why not go do it right um go do make make your life there i’ve seen people done it so i’m not saying it’s bad i’m saying it’s what makes you happy go follow it and do it if it doesn’t makes me happy then why should i do it if i’m happy where i at where i am i should just stay here and you know focus on my life here but if i’m happy elsewhere then i should try to you know move on and do what’s happened you know happiness is actually important right it’s very important everyone’s everyone looks for it some some people cannot find it but it’s there we just have to actually you know dig deeper and find it okay that’s it yeah it’s really good to hear your thoughts on that um so uncle dominic is there anything we haven’t touched on say that you really wanted to put out there that you really wanted to tell people about it by any of your other work or or anything like that anything at all yeah uh well i think i touched on everything we pretty much talked on everything and i but if you do i do feel like for the viewers out there who are watching us right now watching this show um don’t be afraid to to ask questions don’t be afraid to go look for opportunities to improve yourself and to improve um if we talk about language improve your language but mentally improve what you think in your mind be positive you know be positive in life is i’m not going to say it’s easy to be positive in life it’s difficult it’s difficult every day i’m getting bashed down uh by negativity even today this morning even yesterday at work so it’s like that it’s going to happen you know bad things are going to happen it’s going to hit us um even while i’m doing my podcasting and doing my guest show it does happen but we should not let it drag us down we should not let drake’s down we should you know look at the positive side of things try our best to look at positive side of things and then you know yeah move on so to all of you guys out there i would like everyone to you know take the time you know you can come come to come to my youtube watch my watch my talk shows i’ll be as a guest in my talk show or at polar shows you know and well ask questions even even as a guest but just in as a viewer ask questions or email uh anything you know everything’s pos any there’s so many ways to communicate with us i mean that’s what i want people to know there are ways to help help everyone we just have to well there are ways to help everyone the the channels are there you just need to you know i know i cannot say take a pen and write a letter type on your computer right now you know talk to us there we go that’s it that’s what i want to say yeah that’s that’s really helpful yeah and i i very wholeheartedly second that that’s we’re easy to find and um yeah we’re very happy to hear from people because i think both of us were actively looking for guests to be on our shows so um so if you look at if you if you just search for just chat with uncle dominic and i’m going to put some links down in our in the show notes wherever you’re getting this so you can just get just find that really easily and audio visual cultures as well i think that’s a really really great note to wrap things up on and um yeah do you have any social media that you would like people to go and visit as well uh yeah if you yeah well paula already mentioned it you can find me on uncle story time with uncle dominic on youtube you can find the uncle dumbling on twitch tv and you can actually message me on twitter at uncle underscore dominic and if you go on facebook if you’re at facebook you can look up uncle dominic’s story time so i am there and so yeah so you can look me up in almost every social media sites out there i think pretty much even on tik tock i am even on top okay it’s not much on tick tock but i am on there so you can fight look look look me up there as well uncle dominic so yeah i’m old that’s like uncle dominic four day isn’t old come on why i was gonna put grandpa dominic but i haven’t reached those things no we’re still millennials we’ll cling on to that for a while well thank you paula for actually having me on your show as a guest it’s been great yeah it’s been a real joy thank you so much for taking the time i know it’s been um it’s difficult to try and get around the time difference and your working day and everything and i really really appreciate your flexibility with that and it’s been just an absolute joy to talk to you thank you for your time thank you so much for having me and it will be a good morning for you too as well in the uk yes my day’s just getting started here we go thanks get pumped up now all motivated to go out and meet the world absolutely absolutely okay thanks okay um just uh just a quick note everybody uh thank you so much for joining wherever you’ve been listening um if you’ve been watching this on youtube at all uh there’ll be an audio edit of this going out in audi visual cultures it’ll probably be a bit later on in the summer maybe later august for that and um you can pick the audio up just about anywhere you get your podcasts so apple podcast spotify etc and um just thanks so much and if you’re happy to um share this that would be amazing that would really help me and uncle dominic out so much and um if you’re looking for any extras as well as what we provide for free then have a look at audio or have a look at patreon.com forward slash av cultures and see what we’re up to over there but for now thank you so much and have a good day or evening wherever you are in the world and we will catch you next time

transcript

Audiovisual Cultures episode 84 – Selling Democracy: Examining Language in No automated transcript


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this is audiovisual cultures the podcast that explores different areas of the arts and cultural production with me paula blair visit patreon.com forward slash av cultures to find out more and to join the pod this is a run through of a talk i’m going to give to a friend’s ma module called language and film and television my presentation is called selling democracy examining language in no i’ve been doing some comparative research on the use of archival footage in the 2012 films no and good vibrations and this was by way of expanding outwards and starting to do comparative studies from my research on film and visual culture in contemporary post-agreement inverted commas post-conflict northern ireland and the comparison was to examine the ways cultural products dealing with the past so these two feature films that deal directly with the past so they’re based on true stories they’re versions they’re imaginings of a truth they’re not trying to be truthful be or give accurate accounts but they both are grounded in actual history by use of archival material and i wanted to examine the different ways that they both do that and i’ve been doing that recently on my blog before i left academia that was an article i was working on with intention to send it to a journal but things went very wrong and i got very ill and it’s taken me a few years to find my way back to it and try to do something with that because it was that’s quite a late stage of drafting that all of that happened and i’d done so much research that i wanted to try and revive that again also thinking about it in light of you know because noah’s about the referendum the plebiscite in chile that resulted in a return to democracy of a kind and i think just seeing that thinking about that again in the light of what’s happened in the uk after the eu referendum and a very slim majority wanting to leave without really knowing what that is and i think you know it’s about a not just so slim majority wanting to move into democracy but again not necessarily quite knowing what they’re voting for so just some very broad reduced context of history-ish of chile the republic of chile is a former colony of spain it has a long history of resistance to any kind of rule from the pitches the indigenous people of that part of latin america they lived independently from the incas when the region was under inca rule and then when spain colonized again they continued to have a very successful resistance and live independently of from the colony and then in 1818 chile was declared independent and a republic in its own right and then in around 1888 the republic had essentially quashed them a pitches they were really very marginalized they were beaten back and things have really changed substantially for them in the past 140 years geographically because i think that’s important and i’ll talk a little bit in more depth about the geography of chile in a bit it’s a long strip on the southern cone that is surrounded by natural frontiers so in the north it’s got the atacama desert which is the driest place on earth to the west it’s got the south pacific and many many islands off the west coast to the east it’s really shaped in the east by the andes and bordered by argentina on the east and then on the site at various sites because it curls around the size of the cone that southern part is really bordered by the antarctic you know across this long strip of a country you’ve got really extreme temperatures and real extremes in humidity in this one country the different parts of it just have very very differing geographical features and so those natural frontiers make it shaped a bit like an island even though it’s part of a really huge subcontinent and it’s really interesting if you look at the film by patrice yogusman the pearl button who he goes through that geography and describes it as very similar to an archipelago really because of the islands and it’s for the islands where a lot of the pitches still are and they’re really quite pushed out and marginalized there’s not just so many of them in mainland chile anymore industrially chile is probably best known for its mineral resources it’s a major global exporter of copper and lithium i mean so many of our batteries and things anything you have that is run by batteries lithium has very likely come from chile and probably similar with a lot of the copper that we all use and that is in all of our basic appliances and things in the early 1970s i think the election was it was 1969 or 1970 under democracy a socialist government was elected with salvador allende as president and in 1973 this was overthrown in quite a shock military coup then the junta that followed this that was led by general augusto pinochet ruled for 16 years and during that time thousands of people were killed or disappeared or interned and tortured in detention camps or they were exiled and particularly the exile that’s an important point when we think about no this is in part a reason why i am very interested in the comparison between northern ireland and chile because i think a lot of that geography but a lot of those figures i think have crunched numbers a bit and if you look at the likes of population size and then percentages of how many people this involves it’s quite similar in number even though the scales are vastly different and so i think it’s really useful i think in terms of affectivity and i suppose having empathy for each other and seeing those connections where people are marginalized and they’re fighting for the rights the culture that comes from that in a ways that we use cultural products like films to try and come to terms with the past and try and hold account to the past even when we might be on the side of a thing it’s not necessarily a good or the best thing it’s really quite a tricky one ethically this one so noel directed by pablo loren and this is really the third in his loose pinochet trilogy released in 2012 it’s a critical reimagining of the plebiscite held in 1988 looking specifically at the no campaign and so the no vote was to say no to eight more years of penichet automatically without an election and no one by i think it was a 56 percent electorate majority there was a general election in 1990 and pinichat lost a consultation government so a coalition socialist government was then fairly consistent until recent years so we really were thinking about the way that this film looks back to that past this session is really about thinking through different approaches to language and this from i think from a more very very broad strokes linguistic point of view which is the angle the module is coming up this is for so some general discussion points around this i’ve got subtitling in there but i’m not really going to get into that myself but that’s something i’m encouraging the class to look at but things that will point out things like cultural currency and what does that mean what does that communicate accents and exiles because i think uh just looking at gay garcia bernal is really important for that and why casting him is so significant and then communication through song and dance and thinking about indigenous people in their languages what i’m really going to focus on in the rest of the session i’ll look at it a bit in the presentation but then when i move on into looking at the film and sequences from a film we’re going to look at film language because that’s probably where i come in really as the outsider to the class is thinking through aspects of film language that students from a linguistic point of view will necessarily have the terminology for so to think about international cultural currency what i mean by that just looking specifically at the star of the film gail garcia bernal he’s probably the only actor in the film that would be internationally recognizable the rest are all very well known in chile but not really well known unless you specifically seek out chilean film and so gail garcia bernal brings a huge amount of star part people will go to see no in the cinema because it’s a girl garcia bernal film he has that kind of attraction but also he’s important because actors can be indoor texts they bring baggage with them from their previous projects and i think specifically in this because as we’ll look at in a bit his character renee sevedra one of the ways that he traverses santiago and surrounding areas is on a motorcycle and one of the things garcia bernal will have been famous for at this point is starring as the young ernesto che guevara in the motorcycle diaries from 2004 there’s just um an evocation there of this guy has played revolutionaries before and i think renee is an accidental revolutionary in a way because he really wants to stay out of it and he gets embroiled in it his character is very interesting because he’s an amalgamation of many different people he’s an individualized fiction of lots of different people who ran the campaign i think through him that’s where the marketing language is really dissected and investigated it’s probed and i think the film takes a skeptical in the sense of stepping back and looking at the details considering the evidence using skeptical in that way when i say he takes a skeptical look at such a character he’s also somebody who’s multilingual he brings a lot with him because we’ve seen him in francophone and anglophone films quite a lot too he’s really recognizable also importantly for this film he’s distinctive because of his mexican accent and that’s really important because his character rene sevedra has been an exile he is a returned exile so that’s notable and he’s somebody who is in stark contrast to people he encounters of his father’s generation and who know his father who end up walking out of the campaign he’s leading because they’re so disgusted at the marketing language that he brings to it and the way he’s packaging and selling the idea of happiness through democracy he’s somebody who doesn’t quite sit right with everyone so he’s this insider outsider he’s got this ambivalent personality that all comes through in his mexican accent so to think a bit more about that i think there’s a sense of betrayal from his father’s contemporaries and colleagues and friends you get the sense that because this is somebody who’s referred to as being known well by the leaders of the new campaign it’s likely this person is a known socialist he’s talked about in present tense which is an indication that either he is a disappeared person and they don’t know what’s happened to him or this is somebody who’s still in exile he remains in exile presumably in mexico because it’s not safe but we don’t get the details of that this is just something unspoken that is implied that we just have to make conclusions about from knowing the context i think it is very important to just stress that he is a combination of lots of different real people and there’s not really a personal criticism on any one person it’s really just taking a critical look at the campaign and how it operated and how the ads went because it resulted in democracy but what kind of flavor of democracy was it and again this is where there’s a similarity with the northern ireland peace agreement and that it’s a very uneasy piece and there are things that people have had to let go that really cause a lot of harm and i think something very similar has happened in democracy coming to chile where it hasn’t necessarily been better for everybody so just a little bit more an accent i think it’s notable that on the yes campaign the initial i’m not sure if the name of the character has ever actually said i haven’t managed to clarify this to searches but the guy who seems to be initially leading the the yes marketing campaign is argentinian and so he is presented as a sympathetic outsider from a parallel political situation in the bordering country so this is 1988 and earlier in that decade argentina had recently emerged from its own military dictatorship and it was in substantial international debt and so i think the idea here is that the character in presenting to the yes board on which there are military leaders there are very right-wing politicians this is somebody who is telling them quite candidly you know we wish we had a pain a chat because our country’s in a bit of a mess now since we moved back to democracy rather than dictatorship and so you guys are super lucky and we’re super jealous so it’s that attitude that he brings to it he has a very romantic vision of life under dictatorship because he is from the status quo he is not somebody who would be in any way marginalized or his rights impinged on those are more things that are very useful to think about in terms of aspects of language so if we think then about national cultural currency now a really fascinating part of no and one of the reflexive things that it does is you have real people coming in and re-performing those earlier versions of themselves so an example is patricio bagnados who was very well known very recognizable in chile a broadcast journalist from a left side of the political spectrum we need to check the details if you want to look into this more yourself as far as i’m aware he was somebody who hadn’t really been allowed to work properly for a while he was somebody who was suppressed by the dictatorship and so he is recruited by the new campaign to do a lot of the presenting of the new television segments so this idea that they had 15 minutes a day in the run-up to the election so he was doing a lot of work with those and it’s really interesting because you have scenes where it has the actual man playing himself about 23 years earlier that’s just one example there are loads of examples of this because a lot of the players in the new video so a lot of the singers a lot of the actors they come back and they re-perform and they have recreated costumes and they’re all of course visibly older because they’re all supposed to be reasonably young and carefree in the videos and of course they’re 20 odd years older and so that’s clear young people who were saying their 20s before first time around they’re now in their mid 40s and 50s and so on and so everybody looks visibly older and so there’s a very conscious device happening here where it’s this collapse of the past and the present for me anyway they evoke this feeling of it’s still not over they’re still campaigning for this it’s still very much in the present because things are not as they should be for society so there’s a lot of that there are a lot of recognizable people from the real world in this film as well if we think about that then because if we think about the archival footage we have something that’s really very poignant in the film and we can think about dance as language and what that communicates so if we think about the quicker i’m not sure of the pronunciation there so forgive me if i’m getting that wrong this isn’t a dance that depicts according ritual i think specifically it’s between a rooster and a hen the idea is that it’s associated with rural laborers so it’s the courtship between a farmer and a rural woman this is something that was appropriated by pinochet’s dictatorship it was declared as the national dance of chile in 1979 so this is a good six years into the dictatorship and awful atrocities happening to the people lots of oppression of rural people there’s an absence of men because it’s mostly men who are the ones who get arrested get interned or disappeared and so on just at the mirrors hint that they could be dissenters a protest to this was the women who were say the spices of men who had been killed or disappeared or exiled the spices to people who had been lost to the dictatorship in some way they would dance this cording dance alone and visibly alone in collectives and so this is something that is used to very poignant effects in the campaign and it’s focused on a bit during the film and i think specifically renee isn’t happy about the inclusion of this because he’s trying to paint a picture of the joy that will come to chile when they vote for democracy he’s very much of the school of let’s move on and forget the past shall we i think in part because he’s been shielded from it he’s been very far away in mexico which is very far north from chile it feels like a world away it’s a whole subcontinent away he’s been very distant from the whole thing but also economically it doesn’t affect him his life doesn’t change he’s not really even that interested and he keeps complaining that everything’s a drag he doesn’t like the pulling of the heartstrings that this does he doesn’t want people to feel sad he wants people to feel joyous and he wants to manipulate them into buying no as a product buying in to know basically again thinking about more marginal ways of communicating the pitches they make up something like 85 percent of the indigenous people in chile and i highly recommend if you watch the pearl button there’s quite a lot from them in interviews where you know they speak their own language and explaining i think there’s some so i need to re-watch it actually if i remember correctly they talk quite a bit about really having to cling on to their own language and it being very marginalized and that spanish is really taking over and specifically in in the film no their absence is notable there’s an absence of them visually but references to them are very much implied so the pitches they are talked about and very derogatory language is used about them specifically by lucha guzman who is the boss of renee and the the advertising company that they seem to work for he also becomes the leader of the s campaign so renee is equivalent on yes when he’s talking about demo pitches to one of the other yes campaign leaders he uses homophobic and racist slurs there’s an acknowledgement of the erasure of indigenous peoples in the misunsen so in the decor of a restaurant that we see renee and luchuwin early on there’s a jungle-like setting it’s not fully clear there’s a figure that’s quite possibly inca or i’m a pichi but it’s quite a fetishized image of a native that idea so again there’s just this acknowledgment that there’s erasure of these people going on they don’t have a voice but they’re fetishized for a themed restaurant for example so again they’re used to buy and sell notably when the first televised campaigns go out and there’s a long sequence in which everybody is watching the no one and then straight after the yes video there’s a pardon in the s segment with rapa nui children singing for pinichat so some of the lyrics in this song are mahu ariki nui the child you see her visibly crying as she’s singing these words and maori this means healed great lord i think it’s appropriated as quite a patriotic bent there’s footage of this child who’s very scantily clad because she’s in traditional married dress traditional polynesian dress of the general hugging and kissing her in the context in which this is presented you don’t know why this girl’s crying i think in the montage that it’s put into it’s presented as if she’s just so proud but you don’t know if she’s crying because she’s made to do this and she’s actually miserable who knew who knows or did it means so much to her and then he’s on a photo opportunity where he needs to look like well i love all of my peoples including these um polynesian people on easter island which is a geopolitical territory of chiles so there’s a very propagandist thing going on it’s does he actually care about indigenous people well he certainly goes to great lengths to look as if he does and i think this is very notable because if you look in contrast at the no campaign there’s an absence these people aren’t there at all yes acknowledge them and they acknowledge them in quite negative ways or presented as positive but actually very appropriating ways and this is so important because no just doesn’t acknowledge them you would think that yes being shown to be derogatory towards them would imply that the no leftist people would be true socialists and that they are fighting the corner of the indigenous people as well but they’re just completely absent and so i think that absence that silence is amplified by the fact that they’re actually acknowledged at least even if it is in derogatory ways by the yes campaign so i think there’s actually quite a lot to unpick there and so just to think then a little bit more about that geography so if you’re watching on the video on screen i’ve got a map view of chile in the south pacific you can really see the difference because marked by the pin is where easter island is or rapa nui and how very far away from santiago it is and mainland chile you can also just see this series of islands that chili bricks sign into there too and then it’s just this long strip along the bottom cone and it breaks up into many many islands i think it’s interesting to point this out from a language point of view because if you look up some information on rapa nui today it seems like spanish is becoming increasingly popular as a language and marry less so and i think politically if it’s of interest if you want to explore this further i’ve written about this in a blog recently just tracking to quite severe swings between left and right in the government of chile and it’s interesting because in chile the same president cannot hold office two terms in a row so i think in a way from a very uninformed point of view i’m suggesting that it feels like there’s just this continual every four years passing between right and left right and left right and left governments because you can’t return the same president for two terms in a row you can return the same president innumerable times but they just can’t hold office two terms in a row and if somebody’s really popular so it has been passing between the same two people for a while now so it’s been a socialist and then a billionaire right winger and back and forth and back and forth for a bit it’s indicative of a country that today doesn’t really know where it stands on these things it can’t settle and then there’s no type of government that can really get a good run up things to maybe address issues the socialist coalition different parties made this up and that’s why you’ve got that six banded rainbow because those colors each represent the sex parties involved in the coalition they between them were in par for let’s say from 1990 until was it 20 i’m not oh i can’t remember neither year but i think definitely 2010 somebody right wing was voted in i remember that because it was the same year that david cameron became prime minister in the uk with the coalition government so i think for nearly 20 years don’t quote me on that do check but i think for a good block of time it was passed between different socialist parties i think there was tremendous frustration at the idea of well we’re just gonna throw up a monument to these things and then not really ever dealing with anything that happened and so i think a lot of people got off scot-free including pinochet himself i mean he remained leader of the army for a good few years and then when he retired he was wanted in many countries and he was arrested in london at one point but he never was charged for anything he was never charged for his crimes and his human rights abuses he got away with everything and he died in 2004 he got off scot-free so and no one from his administration as far as i’m aware has ever encountered any justice for um anything that happened there’s just a huge amount going on in this one film that you could go off and explore keeping it relevant to thinking about language you know it’s really important to think then about i think the song sequences in those parts with the rapa nui language the maori language songs because they come up in the subtitles i think no matter what language you have your subtitles in they come up in the roman characters it’s the maori that you’re reading so you don’t actually know what is being said in the song so this is something i had to search for and figure it out i think there’s nothing from them pictures speaking at all in it so thinking then about where i come in with thinking about language you’re thinking about the film language and this so i’ve already mentioned things like elements of the misunsense specifically decor so what are we talking about when we say reading film language so the four main areas to breakdown is cinematography editing nissan and sound so the cinematography is everything to do with camera so that includes where it’s positioned proximity what kind of focus has it got what kind of lens has it got what kind of camera is it is it digital is it film is it 16 millimeters at 35 what’s the focus like is there a focus rack is it on a zoom is it not is it moving is it static what kind of movement is it is it panning is it dollying is it zooming is it dolly zooming so there’s loads of areas to go with that with editing we’re thinking about everything to do with how the film is put together and plays out on screen this is the cutting what way is it cut what kind of transitions are we seeing are we thinking about in camera editing are we thinking about editing styles are we thinking about very long takes or are we thinking about lots of cuts happening in a short space of time what is the structure of the film those sorts of questions then with misonsen this is everything we can see in the frame and so this includes lots of elements so this includes colors that we’re seeing it includes the actors where actors or things are positioned so they’re blocking it can include where they are relative to the camera at any time the props the decor the lighting is their shadow is there not what’s going on with costumes what are people wearing where are they what’s their location what’s their setting are they inside are they outside what sort of building is it uh what sort of place are they in all of those sorts of things so absolutely everything that you see is the amazon sen then with sound with the audio this is everything you can hear and this could be music and this can be diegetic or non-diegetic or extra diegetic music and dialogue can be sound effects or a voiceover whether it’s in stereo or mono what the balance is and i think the balance is a really interesting one with no because if you haven’t already i highly recommend watching know with headphones on because some very interesting stuff is going on in the sign balance it switches between your ears depending on what you’re seeing and i think there’s something in that relationship those are the sorts of things that we’re thinking about because all of these things on their own and working in conjunction with each other they all communicate loads of stuff without the film actually blatantly telling you things just some examples from this so earlier i had mentioned when i was talking about cultural currency i mentioned that gail garcia bernal had starred in the motorcycle diaries and i think it’s pretty significant that one of his vehicles of choice and the one that we see him use the most and know as renee cevedra is a motorcycle so i want to think about what kind of vehicle is this it’s a solitary use vehicle pretty much it has connotations of being alone being strong being independent being free and free is the key word because it’s a sense of freedom and happiness through freedom that renee sells as an advertising designer an executive so on screen if you’re seeing it is a still from the film of him on the open road he’s quite central in the frame he’s outside the city of santiago he’s on his way to a big choice where they’re all going to get together and discuss the campaign okay so this is evocation then of freedom so he’s on a country road he’s flanked by trees and countryside and so i think this is a really notable image of renee this is one of the ways that we can start to learn about his character through looking at the ways in which he moves through space so another one this next shot i want to look at is a shot of renee on another one of his vehicles of choice the skateboard so what kind of vehicle is this well it’s a single occupancy vehicle again it’s a sequence in which he is in a very carefree way just sailing on down the road he’s weaving around things it’s a very 80s sense of freedom as well because i mean i for one i can’t really look at especially a grown man on a skateboard and not think about back to the future not think about marty mcfly especially with the jeans and the type of trainers that renee savage is wearing at this point you know in the shirt hanging out from under his jacket the very 80s hair he’s got this little tiny it’s not even a ponytail it’s just this little very eeries his hair is verging on a mullet and then just this one long length of hair in the middle and so you can see that a bit from the back view of him on the skateboard and so again there’s there’s just this characterization of him as a lone wolf type character he traverses space with ease he’s very comfortable with being on his own you know even though he has a small child he’s very often leaving him with the nanny he doesn’t use his car all that often so he he has a car and it’s ref i think it’s referenced more than he actually uses it you see him more in the skateboarder in the motorcycle and he’s never carrying anything he never has a bag or anything even though he’s supposedly working on stuff all of the time he’s very mobile and so i get this idea especially when we see him on the skateboard and he’s waving around he’s not really holding a straight line or anything and it’s very early on in the film we see him on the skateboard i think it’s this idea of his mobility and the ease with which he moves he veers left and right because i think he’s very malleable at this point i think he becomes more rigid as the film goes along and he’s in a more you know the motorcycle in the car you need to stick to your lane basically whereas in this he’s in his lane but he’s veering around so i think that’s pretty significant and that’s a clip that with the class i want to look at try to do a sequence analysis on this because other things going on here are there’s a lot of sun flare okay so there’s this idea that it’s very early morning it’s a very bright sun we’re southern hemisphere so i guess it’s spring in october so i think this is a very springtime sun if i’m right about that very long shadows lots of sunflower going on the camera is very mobile we see renee from a lot of different angles and importantly this is one example of nanny where the camera crosses the line okay it crosses the invisible both the 180 and 30 degree rule lines it’s quite disorientating it’s just a little bit jarring it’s not hugely jarring because i think this happens where the camera is actually moving it’s not cutting when it does this but it’s jarring in the sense that your position has changed and your point of view of looking at renee is changed within the shot so i think again there’s something going on there that really needs to be probed a bit more so this is a point where for the class that’ll be running i intend to then have a more general discussion and if anybody has any specific questions about anything that’s where i will want to draw on those and then also look at sequence analysis and look at parts that i think are very notable and demonstrate those issues in film language that i think are important and should be useful to bring to a module that’s coming from more of a linguistic point of view some recommended viewing if you want to try to get up to speed on a lot of these broader issues initially i highly recommend just about any film by patricio guzman but i think especially the pearl button and nostalgia for the light really very beautiful deeply moving and quite difficult to watch at times but highly worth it films from 2010 and 2015 and he himself is in exile and has been living in europe since the early 70s but also from the 1970s the battle of chile i think they’re really important films to try and get up to speed with a lot of the issues that would help fill out the backdrop i’d also recommend tony monero and post-mortem which again are very difficult films to watch but are really worth watching if you get through them and they are the first two of this loose pinichet trilogy from pablo lorraine they’re all linked by the actor alfredo castro who plays lucho guzman the leader of the yes campaign in no he plays the lead character in tony monero who is obsessed with tony monero in the film saturday night fever and he’s a bit of a microcosmic look at a type of dictator character and he’s also in postmortem as a morgue worker who falls in love with i think she’s a dancer who seems to be a revolutionary so those are very difficult views but they’re really worth watching if you can and for the class i’ve also supplied a bit of a reading list that isn’t on here a few details on the last side just if people want to get in touch and check out the rest of what i do including a link to my blog where i have been writing about know quite recently thank you very much for visiting my page this has been a cozy peapod production with me paula blair the music is common ground by airton used under a creative commons 3.0 non-commercial license and is downloadable from ccmixter.org episodes release every other wednesday subscribe on apple podcasts spotify amazon music or wherever you find your podcasts see the show notes for a video link if you need auto captions be part of the conversation with av cultures on facebook and twitter or iv cultures pod on instagram as well as patreon membership one-off support is appreciated at buy me a coffee.com forward slash pea blair i produce and edit the show by myself and i am grateful for any support for this work for more information and episode links visit audiovisualcultures.wordpress.com thank you so much for listening catch you next time

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transcript

Audiovisual Cultures episode 74 – MasterTalk with Brenden Kumarasamy automated transcript


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hello and welcome to audiovisual cultures with me paula blair i’m delighted this time to be joined by brendan kamara sami to talk about his most excellent youtube channel master talk brandon and i connected using matchmaker.fm and this is a website that connects podcasts with potential guests huge thanks to our members at patreon.com forward slash av cultures for your tremendous support membership grants early access to new episodes if that entices anyone to help fund the podcast on a regular basis for other ways to support the show and to be part of the conversation i will be back at the end with further details and for now i just want to say i learned loads talking to brandon and he’s doing some really great work with speech coaching and if you’ve been listening regularly to the podcast you might know that this is something i’ve had my own issues and battles with over the past few years so i was really really delighted that he got in touch so i’m sure you’ll learn something from him too and he seems like just a lovely person so do enjoy

brendan hello it’s lovely to connect with you how are you doing today i’m great paul how about you i’m well thanks very much so are you based in montreal is that right that’s correct born and raised excellent um can i just double check the pronunciation of your name just because i don’t want to get it wrong is it okay absolutely yeah of course feel free to just say brendan from master talk when my last name is pronounced kumar sami kamara sami lovely um so we’re gonna talk about your master talk project so you’ve got this brilliant channel on youtube could you tell us a little bit about that absolutely i’m happy to so so master talk is is a channel i started last year to help the world master the art of communication and public speaking and how that got started was when i was in university i used to do these things called case competitions so think of it like professional sports but for nerds so other guys my age or you know playing sports or rugby or cricket or something you know i you know it was clearly it wasn’t built for those kinds of things so what i did instead was i would still eat the same junk food but i would watch other people present presentations and i did that competitively so for in three years presented over 500 times coached dozens of people on public speaking and then after i got a job in the corporate world i just asked myself the following question what can i do to make a difference in the world what can i do to make a change and the idea for master talk came to because i realized that a lot of the content on public speaking on youtube isn’t really good so i started making videos my mother’s basement one thing led to another people started watching it for some reason and then the channel grew and i ramped up production wonderful excellent yes um yeah because i was wondering why would you want to get started and something like that but the more i’ve worked in audio production the more i can hear the sorts of texts that we all have and that compulsion to just fill the sonic space really quickly um yeah so it’s really really looking forward to hearing more about what you do of course of course i’m happy to so so basically what i do is uh from the youtube channel like that’s where i i guess most people interact with me and then of course i have my own clients on the side that i started coaching a couple years ago great and um yes uh because yeah i was i was thinking as well because i think you actually in one of the videos of yours i watched you do point this out that of course you’re making videos and you’re editing them and when i make this podcast i edit it i edit the death out of it um and yeah so i was just because it’s something i’m really conscious of is not taking those moments to pause to get your sentence straight before you speak and those tips that we have so saying um or like all the time and that sort of stuff and i’ve got into the habit of just editing that out so i’m really keen to learn more about how you actually help people overcome those habits when they’re really hardwired when they’ve become really developed embedded in of course it’s not really it’s not easy for sure paul but but the idea is simple the difference is mindset not tactic so for example let’s say an exceptional speaker and an average one we’re always going to forget what we want to say next we’re not geniuses you know there’s always someone a presentation or a conversation like this one where you kind of just say what am i supposed to say next so naturally whether you’re great at public speaking or not we’re both going to get nervous we’re all going to get nervous and think about it what was i supposed to say next but the difference lies in the third bubble because the the speaker’s still trying to practice will do the following uh you know i’m nervous i don’t know what to say next and uh and and i use the filler words to buy time so i figure out what i see next in the sentence but if you’re really good at public speaking that same space you fill with nothing with absolutely nothing and that’s definitely not easy to get right the first time it took me four months to master um personally practicing me two three times a week but i didn’t have the technique i didn’t have a coach so now with the videos my hope is that people can do it in a couple of weeks instead of a couple months so the idea is to always prioritize the removal of the filler words and then over time as they see the number go down like exponentially their confidence as a speaker will increase they’ll say wow i’m really good at this thing and then they’ll stop saying them brilliant and i was wondering as well if you have any tips about the differences between talking for a presentation or a lecture where you have the floor it’s yours people are there to listen to you so they’re going to wait for you and when you’re in a situation where you could be interrupted at any time so such as a meeting or that kind of scenario do you i mean do you have any tips for how to build confidence for different situations as well of course so the way that i see this paula it’s more of a personal take is you should always practice the harder thing so if you want if you’re scared of presenting a topic that you’re passionate about they have an expertise in learn to present something you have no expertise in if you’re worried about meetings and getting asked questions put yourself in a meeting and get people you hate to ask you hundreds of questions so that way you’re always prepared for the easy case center i’ll give you an example to demonstrate this live uh give me a random word

picture sure okay you you let me off really easy so what i have to do with pictures i have to create a presentation of thin air okay so here i go lights camera action whenever we take a snap in our lives pictures come to life and in a picture it is not just an image but thousands of words thousands of meanings and thousands of ways of looking at the same exact picture pictures are snapshots of memories that we hold on for a lifetime when we get older and we see our children playing in the grass at five years old or that eight-year-old birthday where their sister runs a piece of cake into their face pictures allow us to capture moments that matter and that’s exactly when this presentation i’m going to be teaching you the history of peaches and how you can take a snap of every important moment of your life so notice how i just did that like randomly this is what i call the random word exercise obviously the first time i want to point out don’t compare yourself to me i literally do this thousands of times like it’s always the first time i got pictures like uh i don’t know and then over time you get better all i’m asking for five minutes of your time with five words spend 60 seconds and just do a lamp post a table you know teapot door one minute each five minutes a day and if you do that for a year you’ll have done the exercise 1800 times and here’s the beauty of this whole thing is that if you can do hippo randomly and you’re passionate about writing and that’s your presentation well if you’re able to present hippo what’s a presentation on writing you’ve been writing for years it’s going to be easy it’s that mindset shift okay that’s really excellent exercise that’s something to try i think um let’s see so you do quite a lot of those types of uh examples in your youtube channel as well and um i mean just like what like what is maybe you’ve said this before but i sort of want to see if we can drill down on this a little bit like what what is it that has really made you want to try and help people with their public speaking you know is it something that you’ve noticed and was it bothering you hearing people not being able to to do that on the fly or stumbling over their words you know what what really was it that made you really want to get into this kind of career pathway yeah absolutely i think it really stems from a value system paula like for me life and happiness stems from just doing great things doing important things doing things that matter and what i realized was you know like the world tells us to find a passion and to figure out what you’re passionate about i honestly think that’s a bad question and the reason is because it’s general it’s vague what does a passion even mean and we’ve spent we try and spend our whole lives trying to chase something that’s so vague in nature that you can have unlimited amounts of and that’s why most people don’t follow their passions because they don’t know what it is here’s a better question what does the world need you most to do right now and why by answering that question you’ll make a decision which is more important than any passion you can ever have when i was 12 i made the decision to not be poor so i went to business school and i wanted to get a job to get out of the poverty line and provide my mother with an opportunity she never had then after that it was to get a job in technology consulting which something i always wanted and then it led to youtube before those decisions i never wanted to be a youtuber which is of all things it’s so scary being on camera like looking at all these weird influencers but the punchline is if i never made the decision to be an accountant i never made the decision to be a technology consultant i wouldn’t have the expertise today to even teach people master talk so i think the point of the conversation is figuring out what you’re willing to stand for for me i realized that there’s a lot of introverted clients that i had back in the day that i still have to this day that had amazing ideas but didn’t want to share it because they thought public speaking was only for extroverts that’s a good category or people who are startup founders really smart individuals you know we’re literally going to change the course of pretty much every human’s being on earth and they were too afraid to share an idea in a presentation i was like seriously you spend like code like years like building this product you can’t spend like 10 minutes presenting it so i just got really passionate because i realized a lot of people had great ideas did not have access to free communication tools because they couldn’t afford rates of like of mine or any other speech code so i wanted to democratize the content and public speaking in a way that someone like dale carnegie couldn’t because he was born in an area or an era of time where this type of conversation wouldn’t even be possible we can’t really hear him or see him in a video and so the the ultimate goal master talk essentially paula is after i die people can still use my content forever yeah that’s really wonderful brendan i i feel like this is the sort of content i would have benefited from many years ago because i’ve had i had a go at being an academic and being a lecturer and i’m a very shy girl in the corner introverted person and it took me such a long time to be able to stand in front of an auditorium full of people and really be not just confident in the knowledge that i had but in communicating it and saying it in a way that was not just communicable but interesting and engaging because that’s the whole other step isn’t it it’s that you can have that ability to actually stand up and and over it but are you then the challenge is making actually really interesting to the people who are receiving it so i mean is that something you progress into as well with your clients absolutely or with really anybody who watches the videos frankly like just give an idea especially since you mentioned being an introvert like a lot of people come up to me and they go like well you know what presentation tips do you have for introverts like or do we make good speakers like of course you do i made a whole video just about that and there’s three things that introverts do better than any other speaker one is that they’re much better at listening so notice in this very conversation you’re having you’re a very very good listener because you might spend more of your time not in conversation versus someone like me who likes to yap a lot that’s why i come on podcast so it’s much harder for me or it was at the beginning of my public speaking journey to tailor my message in a way that someone like you would want to hear it because when i started speaking i was really loud and aggressive so someone like you would be like whoa like this this guy is like crazy right that’s one two is your ability to pause and silence effectively so that’s one of the key foundation foundational skills of public speaking knowing how to pause whenever you want to present something whenever you want to say something that’s super easy for an introvert to do well because they spend most or a higher percentage of time in silence but someone like me silences and pauses is extremely difficult because we get very uncomfortable you almost want to bite your nails when there’s nothing being said whereas someone who reads a book all day i’m obviously generalizing stereotype but you get the idea right they just go well it’s easy and the third thing is that they’re much better at holding space for their audience so since introverts like to keep to themselves a lot more they’re more respectful other people’s spaces so when they speak in a crowd they don’t try and be obnoxious they speak in a way that appeals to more people so even if everyone isn’t going to get super super excited by them they’re going to really like the speaker you never see like an introverted speaker being hated on i’ve never really seen that versus a gary vaynerchuk right who is very very loud so you either really really like them like i do or you really really don’t so you pull into extremes so what’s the takeaway the takeaway here is it doesn’t matter if you’re an introvert or an extrovert what matters is your willingness to dive into what you’re good at and more importantly learn from the other so if you’re more extroverted are you willing to learn from the introverts which i had to do and if you’re introverted are you willing to learn from the extrovert so going back to engagement what you said paula the easiest way to engage people is to present the same presentation 100 times the reason why we aren’t engaging as speakers is not because we’re not engaging people it’s because we keep changing up our presentations if we’re presenting a hundred different presentations we only ask ourselves one question that one question is what content should i put in this thing and then you’re just panicking about that but if you do the same thing over again like the 300 times i’ve presented a single presentation you don’t ask yourself that question anymore because you know the content you’re asking yourself how to engage your audience what emotions am i conveying and what do they actually care about that’s really excellent thanks yeah there’s a lot to think about there as well and i i think just to tease that out a little bit more i was wondering if you had noticed any differences between not just personality types but possibly along gender lines and you mentioned yourself class backgrounds as well because i think just my own experience as somebody who’s grown up from a working class background but also as a woman it can be really difficult to command and hold the space and you’re more likely to be talked over in a situation where they’re say a meeting again for example or a seminar kind of a scenario as well you might be um you know if you pause at all i think i wonder if that’s why say young women even you’re much younger than me if that’s why there’s such a habit of speaking oh and it was like this and then that and then sort of like this and then kind of a bit like that you know so you’re not really saying anything but you’re filling the sonic space up because you i i wonder if that’s a way of holding on to it so i was wondering if you come across any of those kinds of issues in your work and i might try and advise on those no absolutely it’s uh so i definitely agree that there’s definitely gender and cultural differences sometimes especially in the context of maybe a european setting or an asian one in particular like the asia the continent of asia i mean but but i would say in general my my pov on this on my point of view is that at the end of the day we’re all going to have cultural and gender barriers but if you’re a great speaker no one cares about those barriers so i’ll give an example think about susan kane or renee brown they’re excellent speakers they’re also extreme ex introverts but we never look at them and say hey you know because they’re a woman you know they’re they gotta have some sort of different cultural barriers i think the way that we want to think about this to keep it unified and keep it easy to understand is confidence does not stem from a glass of water or some sort of power pose or some sort of wonder woman thing before you present because it’s fixing the symptom not the core issue the core issue for anybody not just women like literally anybody is the belief system in whatever it is that you believe in so in my case i started coaching c-level executives when i was 23 years old so you can imagine the level of insecurity i had as a guy or as a kid rather coaching these these executives who trusted me of their transformation so obviously i knew how to coach them that wasn’t the issue in the same way i’m sure like people you know like you younger women are smart people that’s not the issue it’s that it’s that internal belief system that compass that guides the way that we speak that isn’t directed in the right way so my opinion is the way you fix this has nothing to do with public speaking but rather to do with what you believe in so for me one side of the coin which is the side we don’t want to look at but the side we needed to see is brendan’s too young brendan’s unqualified brennan shouldn’t be making videos on youtube and that’s the voice in that side of the coin that everyone listens to but the other side’s a lot more interesting and that stems from the following question what happens if i do nothing and to ponder that and if i do nothing this is what happens every 16 year old girl and boy in the world who can’t afford me that literally everybody who the the people who want to master public speaking within that demographic when they type public speaking tips what do they find they find a bunch of old dudes who don’t know anything about public speaking so my option a or b isn’t to embarrass myself option a is do the thing right make the videos even if it’s in your mother’s basement even if it’s grainy or option b is hurt millions of people for the rest of time because i’m the only speech coach in my early 20s who has that experience so i’m the only person who can be a role model for a 16 year old girl or boy right and that’s the punchline so the question essentially is who suffers from your inability to take action i’m sure when you started this podcast paula you said oh you know i’m an introvert you know i see all these radio hosts i can’t be loud like them yeah but why did you do it anyways you did it because your community needed the information and that’s all that matters so if you have that belief system and it’s hard to find it’s not easy work but it’s doable because once you get there then it doesn’t matter about gender differences then you’re just going to speak really well and no one’s going to care about any of those things they’re just going to look at you and say paula you’re such an incredible speaker and that’s all that matters gosh yeah that’s really inspiring i’m sure a lot of people out there are benefiting already from that really positive attitude that’s amazing i love the fist bumps

brilliant um okay so let’s see yeah i mean i suppose any other questions i had were probably about speaking at those cultural levels i don’t know how broad or deep you go into specific things or how deep your studies are into well what are what are actually the barriers because you seem to have really good fixes for as like you say you defined between the symptoms and the core problems so is it that you try and target those symptoms that people seem to demonstrate then rather than psychologizing the whole of a person so they can understand but it’s actually just this is how we get you to just do it you know no absolutely i’m sure other speech coaches have their own opinions on things but i think the way i would say it is for me cultural differences is more of seasoning on the cake so in the sense of once we fix that core issue then we can start adjusting our presentation based on the cultural context of the person we’re presenting to so there’s two parts that i would like to talk about so the first part is the cultural context so let’s say when i’m in the uk and i give a presentation i i wouldn’t like i say soccer a lot in the us when i present keynotes obviously i wouldn’t say that because nobody knows what soccer is i would have to say footy or football and you change the terminology and the way you want to do this really efficiently is you want to have a conversation with someone who understands both the culture you want to speak to and the culture you’re in so let’s say i want to speak to the uk and i knew nothing about uk culture i would talk to someone who immigrated from the uk to canada who lives in canada so that way when i ask them questions they’re sensitive to both canadian and uk culture so they can clearly outline the difference for me right i’m lucky i got a bit of friends in every little part of the the globe so i could just ask those people and just go what do you think like same thing with japanese or the opposite right and then from that seasoning you can achieve it second thing that i think is a bit more interesting for people is what i call mirroring or it’s not something that’s invented by me a lot of therapists do this as well but mirroring is essentially mirroring the energy of the person you’re speaking to so they find you a lot more relatable so let’s say you walked into this conversation paula and you said something like this brandon it’s so great to see you this is awesome i would have mirrored the exact same i said you know paul is such an amazing time to be so great to be here but when i turned on the zoom and you and you talked to me and you started with hey brandon how’s it going my goal as a speaker our job is to mirror the person across the call across the presentation to make them feel as comfortable as possible so when i talk to the extrovert and the extrovert goes oh you know brett i’m really excited to be coached by you this is gonna be a lot of fun i’ll be like well me too george it’s gonna be great but then the other side of the spectrum let’s say i don’t know tom or jessica walks in and goes uh you know brenda i’m not really sure about this public speaking thing i’ve been scared for many years well the way i talk them is very different i would say something like well you know i you know i just want to acknowledge you for having the courage just come to this workshop today how about we try a couple of exercises see what happens and we go with it and that is the key to communication mirror the energy of the other person and then the conversations whether it’s a one-on-one or whether it’s a public speaking context becomes a lot more meaningful and becomes a lot more deeper more really excellent advice there thank you brendan okay um so i i suppose just a quick question about your youtube channel because i’m quite interested in the the metaness if um that’s a word probably not um of these kinds of i suppose outputs so even the likes of what i do with the podcast it’s a podcast that explores different areas of culture but it is of itself a cultural products and i was wondering if you think of your youtube channel like that as well so the videos that you produce they are aesthetic objects in themselves and you put a lot of care into how you frame yourself within them and how you structure them and i was wondering about more the production side of things for you so you’ve started in a very um amateur way and i i love the word amateur because i it’s we have to we have to remember the root of that word because i think we’ve come to think of it as you know unqualified or this person doesn’t know what they’re doing but really the root of it is it comes from love you love doing it it comes from that root of of ammo or more and um so to just starting it anyway diy you know from from the house kind of thing and actually we’ve all ended up doing everything that way in the pandemic so um so that to the more polished products that you’re doing now um would you like to say anything about just how you actually produce it put it together and structure it and all those sorts of things as well of course happy to share so so the underlying theme of this whole i would say production spiel is that progression always leads to obsession if you really like what you’re doing so when i started you know i wasn’t really obsessed with anything i just want to be a corporate executive at a company i didn’t really do want too much else in my life make a lot of money donate a lot of money have a great family and then die nothing else planned to be honest it was like much like anyone else was pretty normal person but i was just really frustrated with the content so i just said this is pretty bad let me do i can do better in my basement with the phone so i just took a phone out my mom was kind of wondering what are you doing you work at like ibm why are you like making videos in your basement i was like mom let me just do my thing so it is the over time it went from no production no money nothing and then you know the production got slowly better and better and better and by production i mean me presenting on camera got better because i was terrible and if you don’t believe me look at the first couple of videos they’re still up for a reason so that you can see the journey but the idea was over time it slowly turned into an obsession because i saw the bigger picture for what master talk could be and was supposed to become because i realized nobody else was trying to help the world master public speaking because most speaking coaches in the industry if i’m being very upfront here they make a lot of money so they have no incentive to share their content for free if you’re a speech coach with 12 ceo clients you’re done like you’re done they pay you 10 000 each and then they recommend you to another and at some point you’re charging 30 000 for a package or something and then you’re done like you don’t have to do anything else so you’re never going to create free content and that frustrated me because i said if you’re going to make that much money you should at least give back to society and i’m not here to tell you i charge you nothing for my services but i’m saying at the minimum i should be giving back to the community right it’s that’s stemming from a belief system so that what happened over time mostly because of frustration i just didn’t like the other videos that were uploaded i would say eight nine months into it when i was still making videos in my basement i just looked at you know i went to a lot of personal development conferences think tony robbins esque events and i just said i should do something bigger with this thing and i was just lucky that one of my best friends uh was in the video business since he was 16. so i just said do you want to make my videos do you want to do my production and then he said yes i gave him 25 of my salary we never looked back and the rest was history but i think the idea uh is that once it turns into a mid-session that you do obsessive things so like for example i actually write my content five years in advance the reason i do that is because i’m so obsessed to winning and sharing this content that this has become my obsession so every day i write a youtube script i have content as of this recording until may of 2022. and i film everything i always say my goodness i just made me laugh it’s good but the idea is just uh and i and i record a year in advance so like right now you know when i cut my hair in two weeks i’m going to be filming all of my videos for 2021 in two days right so to make sure i’m always ahead to make sure i’m always ahead of schedule but that you don’t start there you definitely don’t start there where you start with is this stupid phone doesn’t work how do you do this and then over time if it’s something you really want to do uh then you take it a lot more seriously excellent yeah that’s really inspiring i suppose it’s a it’s not this similar story with this one this very podcast as well it’s um i’m just gonna say if i’m able to do this oh now i’m making a podcast and i have a schedule to keep so yeah that’s um i think that’s really inspiring for anybody who might want to try something of their own um but yes so gosh you’re so well ahead of the game then and yeah because another question i had was yeah i mean how do you keep going do you never run out of material so clearly you don’t you don’t run out of material there’s always more issues that arise and that sort of thing yeah no it’s a great question i i definitely think it’s a challenge for certain public speaking especially when i started because you know it’s silences what else do i talk about this thing but over time there’s a couple of things i realized so one is that most sp like actually all speech coaches on youtube don’t don’t even post consistently every week so as long as i just do once a week i’m already ahead of competition so i’ll never do more than once a week because doing more than once a week on youtube so hard really difficult the second part of the equation was those three parts and the second part is obviously asking your audience a lot so what i do a lot on these shows is let’s say after a conversation i have with let’s say someone like you like the first introvert i talked to they would say you know i’m not really good speaker and i was like well why do you think that they’re like oh well i’m not an expert i was like oh i got to make a video on the three lessons i learned from introverts that apply to any present day so what i do is i have like a google keep google keep for those who don’t it’s like a note pad like a note app you can use any note app like a i notes or whatever and then you write a bunch of titles and i i’m not allowed i have one rule i’m not allowed to go to bed unless i write one okay so if it’s 1am and i’ve done all my meetings and i still haven’t ridden it i have to sit down and write it and if i lose an hour of sleep it’s my fault for not being more efficient with my time and the third thing is being open-minded keeping an open mind to just writing whatever you think is best so the same way you know a lot more about audio production than most people on earth i’m the same way with public speaking coaching so because of that unique lens that i have with the content i can create stuff as long as i open my mind to those opportunities so i’ve written in addition to like standard stuff you know like how to be an intro like you know that stuff but i also talk about the three lessons i learned from dance that apply to any presentation karaoke i’m releasing one on rapper or stand-up comedians like magicians i’m just using that creativity but because i’m so ahead of the game like i’m like uh for uh 20 months ahead of schedule now almost two years basically i have a lot less stress right so i’m not stressed to find the next big thing or to get my content ready in two hours or something i can take it easy just say okay what did i learn like yesterday i wrote a presentation on the three lessons i learned from mirrors like the mirror you look at in the morning what how does that apply to presentations so i just keep it going and and luckily for me i don’t know it’s been working out yeah definitely gosh that’s discipline right there that’s excellent um okay great um yeah is there anything else you you want to cover is there anything you feel that you would like to say during this opportunity that you haven’t done yet yeah for sure i’m happy to to kind of close this conversation off my favorite book and my favorite uh life recommendation so the first one is a book that i highly recommend people read it’s called thirst by scott harrison i think it’s the best book on communication public speaking that not many people know about and the reason is because he’s not really a public speaking coach he’s a ceo of a non-profit but the reason why this book is so important is because he raised over 300 million dollars for his charity water right through storytelling branding and marketing but as an npo you don’t have a lot of resources so there’s a lot of lessons you can learn from that book that you can apply to your day-to-day speaking because he actually applies the advice and i use it for all my workshops all my podcasts everything so i highly recommend the read and the life recommendation is my favorite quote which is as follows be insane or be the same if you want to be like everyone else that’s totally okay but if you’re listening to this podcast you’ve made it this far in the conversation you probably want to do something a bit different with your life my advice is the only way to do that is to be a bit more crazy don’t you find it all odd that as a 22 year old i started a youtube channel on public speaking tips of all things then i started coaching c-level executives that’s like ceos at like 23 but i’m also having this very conversation with you on a mattress i still live in my mother’s basement i don’t own a car and i don’t plan on moving out of my mother’s house for another five six years and that’s the point none of those decisions make any sense to anyone except the only person that matters you haven’t guessed so far is you and once you start making decisions that only make sense to you whether it’s starting a youtube channel and some random topic like public speaking and doing all these weird stuff well then by my definition you become insane and when you get to that level you’ll be able to start making decisions that are probably right

that’s wonderful you must have enough material for your own book by this point no doubt yeah uh probably i won’t be releasing one for very long i don’t think so no i don’t know if you’ve got a good couple of years worth of material

sometimes i think about brendan absolutely great um is there apart from your youtube channel this is called master talk is there anywhere else you would like to point people to find you online yeah for sure so for those who to check out the youtube channel like you mentioned paula it’s master talk in one word and for instagram you can also message me there if you want to get in touch with me so that’s at master your talks if you have any questions concerns complaints insults i’m happy with anything don’t be sure to send me a message thank you so much you’ve been so generous with all of your ideas and your time and i really highly recommend anyone really whether you’re a public speaker or even just anyone if you want to work on and improve your everyday speech i think your channel is a really excellent go-to for some really useful tips and food for thought as well i think about life in general thank you so much i really appreciate that well thank you brandon yeah do keep in touch it’d be brilliant to hear from you again of course likewise don’t be sure to send me an email this has been a cozy pea pod production with me paula blair and my very special guest brendan kamara sami from master talk the music is common ground by airton used under a creative commons 3.0 non-commercial license the episode was recorded using zoom and edited by paula blair if you want to support my work without committing to a regular patreon membership you can sell me a fiver by mia coffee dot com forward slash p e a blair any money received goes back into improving the podcast be part of the conversation with av cultures on facebook and twitter and av cultures pod on instagram we’re always happy to hear from potential guests and to have ideas for other shows from our listeners so do please get in touch massive thanks for joining us be accent to each other and catch you next time you