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With Great Power #317... 22 Panels with Jason Cohn · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:00
  Jason Cohn: Cohen.
• 0:01
  Tad Eggleston: Well, that's true, too. So, good evening, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels. My guest tonight is Jason Cohn, the… is it director and producer, or just director? What's your overall title on this?
• 0:16
  Jason Cohn: Let's say director and writer.
• 0:18
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, director and writer of the upcoming
• 0:23
  Tad Eggleston: documentary. I almost said manga, and then I realized that I was just reading a word.
• 0:30
  Tad Eggleston: documentary on Tezuka, the god of manga, and I'm glad I watched your trailer, because if I hadn't, I would have mispronounced Tezuka. I would have said Tezuka. In my head, it's always…
• 0:44
  Jason Cohn: he's been…
• 0:44
  Tad Eggleston: Suzuka. Until I watch the trailer, I'm like, okay, gotta get that right.
• 0:50
  Tad Eggleston: Then, of course, I come clean on having not known it, but that's just, like, that's my autistic self. I… I…
• 0:56
  Tad Eggleston: I always say it out loud.
• 0:58
  Jason Cohn: I think a lot of people say Tezuka. You know, in Japanese, you kind of don't… you just don't emphasize syllables. Like, in English, where it was like, emphasize the syllable, but in Japanese, you just… they're all kind of the same, so it's like, Tezuka.
• 1:10
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and I emphasize syllables even more than most people do in English. I have friends who give me a hard time for how I pronounce, like.
• 1:18
  Jason Cohn: It's a level.
• 1:20
  Tad Eggleston: No, I come from Wheaton, Illinois, but everybody's like… like, my best friend will be like, no, it's Wheaton. I'm like, I know, Wheaton! She's like, no, not Wheaton.
• 1:31
  Tad Eggleston: eaten.
• 1:33
  Jason Cohn: My mentor went to Wheaton.
• 1:36
  Jason Cohn: Yeah. Back in the day, yeah.
• 1:37
  Tad Eggleston: Wheaton College.
• 1:38
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 1:39
  Tad Eggleston: Wow.
• 1:40
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 1:41
  Tad Eggleston: The, the, the, the…
• 1:43
  Jason Cohn: evangelical…
• 1:44
  Tad Eggleston: It is… it is the most right-wing evangelical that you can possibly be, and still be accredited.
• 1:53
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, and he's not like that, but that.
• 1:55
  Tad Eggleston: No, plenty… I mean, that's… Wes Craven went to Wheaton College.
• 2:00
  Jason Cohn: Oh, wow, that's interesting.
• 2:02
  Tad Eggleston: Trent Reznor went to Wheaton College.
• 2:05
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, I think it, people come out the other side sometimes, the opposite of how they… they try to… how they try to form you.
• 2:14
  Tad Eggleston: And, or they went for other reasons, or they were able to get a scholarship because of, like…
• 2:22
  Tad Eggleston: But like I said, like, it's as far right as you can get and still be accredited. So, I mean, they got rules about dancing and premarital sex, and there's chapel that you're supposed to go to and whatnot, but they teach evolution.
• 2:35
  Jason Cohn: Hmm.
• 2:37
  Tad Eggleston: In fact, they're so serious about that, that every time there's ever been somebody who ran for the… the Wheaton…
• 2:44
  Tad Eggleston: public school board.
• 2:48
  Tad Eggleston: expecting, like, an endorsement from Wheaton College because they were running on a, intelligent design platform or whatever. Like, the biology department will go into the president's office with their resignation letters ready.
• 3:03
  Tad Eggleston: To make it clear that the college will not be endorsing.
• 3:07
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, yeah, interesting.
• 3:10
  Jason Cohn: I've never been… I've never been there.
• 3:12
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, but they also have, you know, the Billy Graham Center, which the only time I was ever there had an exhibit on Cortez, and how he…
• 3:21
  Tad Eggleston: he, he, brought Christianity to the, to the savages of… of…
• 3:28
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and what really blew my mind is, like, the artwork showed the brutality, and I'm like, wait a minute!
• 3:37
  Tad Eggleston: People burning as if, like, it's a good thing?
• 3:41
  Jason Cohn: Cognitive dissonance much?
• 3:45
  Jason Cohn: Classic.
• 3:50
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, you know, Christianity, like all religions, has a lot of good ideas, and can also be, like…
• 3:58
  Tad Eggleston: Taken a lot of interesting directions.
• 4:01
  Tad Eggleston: Billy Graham himself was interesting at the end of his life.
• 4:05
  Tad Eggleston: When he started, like, disavowing some of the places the evangelical movement had gone.
• 4:11
  Tad Eggleston: But… but that's not Tazaka, that's… that's…
• 4:14
  Jason Cohn: That's me.
• 4:15
  Tad Eggleston: going down a rabbit hole, because I do that. Tell me about Tazaka, because I'll be honest, I know Astro Boy mostly because I know Pluto.
• 4:26
  Tad Eggleston: I know that he's the godfather of manga.
• 4:32
  Jason Cohn: Yep.
• 4:33
  Tad Eggleston: I've read some Blackjack, I've read a couple of his Shakespeare adaptations, but as much as anything, I know that he's a big deal more than…
• 4:43
  Tad Eggleston: I like… know about them. Yeah.
• 4:47
  Jason Cohn: That's good to… that's good to know. I mean, I'm actually kind of at this stage where I'm trying to kind of get some sense of what the English-speaking…
• 4:56
  Jason Cohn: audience what the readership knows about him, so, like, you know, I'm counting you as a pretty die-hard comics fan, and so far…
• 5:04
  Tad Eggleston: Not as deep into manga yet. Like, I know that as I get deeper into manga, at least for me, he's a direction that I've… I mean, that's why, when I saw this, I immediately emailed.
• 5:16
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 5:17
  Tad Eggleston: Dustin and said, hey, I want to talk to this guy, because, like, it's been on the to-do list, is I want to learn more about Tazaka.
• 5:24
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, I mean, he's… so he… Tezuka is, like, the starting point for modern manga. Like, you know, really right at the… at the beginning of modern manga was Tezuka. So…
• 5:40
  Jason Cohn: right after the war, he started publishing. He was only 17 years old when he started publishing his first, like, four-panel strips in the local newspaper. Okay. But very quickly after that, he started publishing long-form
• 5:57
  Jason Cohn: comics, which had not really been done in Japan, and…
• 6:02
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 6:03
  Jason Cohn: That, just really… it created a boom, like, you know, instantaneously. Like, the one that… that a lot of, the artists from, like, the 50s and the 60s will point to is one called Shin Takarajima, which means New Treasure Island, which was, like, maybe 50 or 60 pages.
• 6:21
  Jason Cohn: And it was sort of, you know, just this kind of jaunty boy's adventure story, really colorful.
• 6:30
  Jason Cohn: But, what it did, which hadn't really been done before in a Japanese comic book, was using what they called cinematic techniques, you know, where they really broke down…
• 6:42
  Jason Cohn: the, the scene into multiple camera angles. So you'd have wide shots, and then super tight shot… tight shots, and, you know, you'd move the camera, so to speak, so that your, you know, one camera angle would be profile, and then you'd be, you know, like.
• 6:59
  Jason Cohn: straight on into the guy's eyeball, or whatever. So the kind of things that people are used to seeing in film to break down a scene, he started doing in comic books, and this was at a time when, you know, Japan was recovering
• 7:15
  Jason Cohn: You know, really actually a very long way from having recovered from the economic devastation of the war. And there was really no… there was no television yet, very few people could afford, to go to a movie, you know, go to the movie theater.
• 7:31
  Jason Cohn: So, in terms of entertainment, comic books really were it, especially for young people.
• 7:38
  Jason Cohn: Somebody made the point to me, too, that there was, like, kind of a lot of,
• 7:44
  Jason Cohn: A lot of kids, like, really were struggling to read at that period because education had gone downhill during the period… during the, the war period.
• 7:56
  Jason Cohn: You know, there was a shortage of books, and textbooks and ink, and paper and everything, you know, because everything went to the war effort.
• 8:02
  Tad Eggleston: Probably teachers.
• 8:04
  Jason Cohn: And teachers, yeah, I mean, really everything. So a lot of kids…
• 8:07
  Tad Eggleston: Male teachers got conscripted, female teachers got put to other work.
• 8:12
  Jason Cohn: Absolutely.
• 8:13
  Tad Eggleston: to, to, to rebuild that… I don't know, I mean, it's a… it's a…
• 8:19
  Jason Cohn: So, 1945… Kind of a history junk.
• 8:21
  Tad Eggleston: too, so that's a common theme anytime…
• 8:26
  Tad Eggleston: Anytime war hits an area is that, like…
• 8:30
  Jason Cohn: And Japan in particular, you know, Japan was really, you know, it was total war for that country, right? I mean, it was all-encompassing. It wasn't the way it was for us in America, where, you know.
• 8:43
  Tad Eggleston: No, it was… it was closer to Europe, but Europe didn't have Nuclear bombs dropped on them.
• 8:51
  Jason Cohn: Right.
• 8:52
  Jason Cohn: So, but anyway, to get back to the point, like, a lot of kids kind of came out in that period, that early post-war period, 45, 46, 47, like, not really great readers. So comic books were really helpful. It's a great way to learn how to read, you know?
• 9:07
  Jason Cohn: And, so it kind of became what a lot of people called the dominant media in Japan, certainly for, like, a 15-year period there, you know…
• 9:17
  Tad Eggleston: There's an argument that it still is.
• 9:19
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, probably not as much as it was even, like, 30 years ago, but it's still… it's still really big. But, you know, the internet and everything has changed everything, but… Yeah. When I was living there, which was, like, in the late 1990s… I mean, I…
• 9:32
  Tad Eggleston: I've never lived there, I'm only going secondhand. I just hear that, that, like, the Digest manga…
• 9:39
  Jason Cohn: So I lived there…
• 9:40
  Tad Eggleston: Well, massive numbers.
• 9:41
  Jason Cohn: Totally, like, compared to America, absolutely, and it's super popular across all age groups, which is very different from here, and genders and everything.
• 9:50
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 9:51
  Jason Cohn: But, like, when I was living there, which was the late 90s, you would, you know, if you walked into a noodle shop, or a coffee shop, or if you walked into a subway, or whatever, everyone would be sitting there reading a comic book. That was just… that's just what you did. And, you know, when I go back there now, it's not that everyone's staring at their phone. So, like.
• 10:10
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, I sometimes read comics on my phones.
• 10:13
  Jason Cohn: Might not mean…
• 10:15
  Tad Eggleston: They're not still reading comics.
• 10:17
  Jason Cohn: Absolutely. There's still a lot of that going on, but I feel like it's dropped a level from the height, which was probably the 80s and 90s.
• 10:27
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I just had to bring that up particularly because I actually read particularly manga, probably more on digital devices than in.
• 10:38
  Jason Cohn: Hmm.
• 10:38
  Tad Eggleston: Physical form, just because… so many of them are SO many volumes to put.
• 10:45
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, I know.
• 10:46
  Tad Eggleston: You gotta figure out where to get them, or whatever.
• 10:49
  Jason Cohn: Take up a lot of space.
• 10:51
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, and I can get a Viz, like, the Viz… both the Viz and the Shonen Jump
• 10:58
  Tad Eggleston: Are, like, $3 a month.
• 11:01
  Tad Eggleston: maybe $4 a month for one of them. So for, like.
• 11:04
  Tad Eggleston: 8 bucks a month, I have…
• 11:07
  Tad Eggleston: Just a massive amount of manga at my fingertips.
• 11:11
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, yeah, it's a better… it's a… it's a good deal. It's a good deal.
• 11:15
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I've been… I've been trying… We set a goal.
• 11:22
  Tad Eggleston: When they announced that we were in the… the… the last… saga of… of… One piece.
• 11:32
  Tad Eggleston: We set a goal to try to read it by the time it ended.
• 11:36
  Jason Cohn: like.
• 11:36
  Tad Eggleston: catch up. And I hit…
• 11:39
  Tad Eggleston: Chapter 678 today. I finished Volume 69. So, like, that would be a quarter of my bookshelf.
• 11:49
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, yeah, you just run… you run out of room at some point.
• 11:51
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Yeah.
• 11:53
  Jason Cohn: So Tezuka was, Tezuka was the guy, man, like, every… all of the… the great…
• 12:00
  Jason Cohn: manga artists from that, you know, sort of golden age period, 50s, 60s, and 70s, they all, started… In the 80s.
• 12:10
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. I mean, I would… Yeah.
• 12:12
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, but that was, like, the guys who kind of came out in the 80s, they were sort of then, like, the next generation. Right. They were influenced by the people that were influenced by Tezuka. But I'm saying, like, the sort of Golden Age guys, 50s, 60s, and 70s, they were all basically, you know, raised on Tezuka comic books. And…
• 12:30
  Jason Cohn: You know, like, Urasawa, you know, who wrote Pluto.
• 12:38
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 12:39
  Jason Cohn: and so many great things. He basically.
• 12:40
  Tad Eggleston: Azadora. We've read all of Azadora on 22 panels, too.
• 12:44
  Jason Cohn: Oh, cool.
• 12:45
  Tad Eggleston: Waiting for the next volume.
• 12:46
  Jason Cohn: I haven't read that.
• 12:47
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, it's so good.
• 12:48
  Jason Cohn: Okay, I'll check it out.
• 12:49
  Tad Eggleston: That's his current one.
• 12:50
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, I know, I haven't gotten to it yet.
• 12:53
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, he's a great so good.
• 12:55
  Jason Cohn: But he… what he said is that, you know, basically everything was Tezuka until Otomo came out with Domu and Akira, and then, you know, then everything was…
• 13:08
  Jason Cohn: was Automot.
• 13:09
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 13:10
  Jason Cohn: But, I mean, that's… that's Urasawa's take. So that, you know, basically…
• 13:15
  Tad Eggleston: some sense.
• 13:15
  Jason Cohn: That brings you, like, basically into the 80s with still the… the Tezuka period.
• 13:21
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 13:22
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 13:23
  Jason Cohn: And plus, he, you know, the other thing is that he was the pioneer of anime. You know, he had the first independent animation studio, created the first…
• 13:32
  Jason Cohn: you know, weekly, Japanese, animated cartoon for television. You know, the first one to export Japanese animation to the West.
• 13:44
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and his characters were huge. The other reason I jumped immediately on the press release was in a weird piece of synchronicity.
• 13:54
  Tad Eggleston: I was wearing a Sankey Adams hat.
• 13:57
  Jason Cohn: Mmm.
• 13:58
  Tad Eggleston: When the press release went out!
• 14:00
  Jason Cohn: Cool one, man. I've seen that. Yeah, I want to get that one for myself.
• 14:04
  Tad Eggleston: That's actually, like, that's the on-field professional baseball cap.
• 14:09
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he's their… Astro Boy is their, is their mascot, and I think that.
• 14:14
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it was only from 65 to 68, so it was a short period.
• 14:20
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 14:21
  Tad Eggleston: They're now the occult Swallows.
• 14:24
  Jason Cohn: Right.
• 14:25
  Tad Eggleston: But… but, like, I mean, that's the equivalent of, like, rather than the Miami Marlins having, like, the Miami Mice and Mickey on… on the hat.
• 14:36
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 14:37
  Tad Eggleston: True.
• 14:39
  Jason Cohn: Well, there's still a lot of places where, you know, you see, you know, Astro Boy all over the place in Tokyo, and…
• 14:46
  Jason Cohn: they play the theme song in the subway station at some of the stations, and that kind of thing. I mean, he's… it's, he's really, like, a pretty transcendent cultural figure in Japan. It's… it's actually kind of wild how, you know, the fact that we don't know him at all. Like, everybody knows Miyazaki.
• 15:04
  Jason Cohn: But Tezuka is, like, pretty… it's pretty obscure to most people, but his… in terms of, like, cultural impact, Tezuka's a way, way bigger deal than Miyazaki.
• 15:16
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, what, what you,
• 15:19
  Tad Eggleston: have written at the very beginning of your Kickstarter page is,
• 15:26
  Tad Eggleston: He's often compared to Walt Disney, but that's a disservice to Tezuka.
• 15:32
  Jason Cohn: I think it is.
• 15:34
  Tad Eggleston: I agree with you. I mean, again, I… I'm a,
• 15:39
  Tad Eggleston: I'm a novice when it comes to Tezuka, but not at all in terms of…
• 15:45
  Tad Eggleston: like, the impact. I'm fully aware…
• 15:48
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, the number of U.S. artists who I hear bring up Tezuka.
• 15:54
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, yeah.
• 15:54
  Tad Eggleston: I talked to Joe Kelly and Ken Nomura, and Ken Nomura has, you know, some Japanese background and lives in Japan now, but it was Joe Kelly that brought up Tezuka.
• 16:06
  Tad Eggleston: He's a Brooklyn kid.
• 16:08
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, yeah.
• 16:11
  Jason Cohn: Well, you know, I mean, the comparison with Walt Disney is pretty fraught, because, you know, the truth is, like.
• 16:19
  Jason Cohn: Walt Disney was not a great artist, but he was a phenomenal businessman.
• 16:25
  Jason Cohn: And he was a visionary, there's no question about that.
• 16:29
  Tad Eggleston: He also wasn't a comic artist.
• 16:31
  Jason Cohn: Whoa.
• 16:31
  Tad Eggleston: They made Disney comics, but they came mostly after the movies and the shorts, and he never drew those, even if they tried to pretend that he did.
• 16:41
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, but I think that for Tezuka, he probably would have been happy to, you know, start out as an animator. It was just sort of a question of opportunity. Animation really didn't exist in Japan when he started. There was…
• 16:54
  Jason Cohn: you know, Touhou Animation was there, or Toei Animation was there. But, you know, especially during the war, it was not creating anything.
• 17:03
  Tad Eggleston: So that's… that's… that's interesting to me. Do you think that… I mean, because I know him.
• 17:08
  Tad Eggleston: As the god of manga.
• 17:10
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 17:10
  Tad Eggleston: But…
• 17:11
  Jason Cohn: Always obsessed with animation.
• 17:14
  Tad Eggleston: So animation would, like, like, would have…
• 17:18
  Jason Cohn: it might have been his first love, I mean, you know, the access with, with comics, it's just so easy as a kid to just draw, and to draw comics, but I think, you know, he was obsessed with animation, and I think that that's how… that's what inspired him to innovate that style of drawing manga that sort of replicates cinema.
• 17:40
  Jason Cohn: was because he was trying to create in manga the feeling of motion, the feeling of animation, you know, that he wasn't seeing in manga. So he was, you know, figuring out, borrowing techniques from film.
• 17:54
  Jason Cohn: And from animation to basically create manga that felt like animated film.
• 18:01
  Jason Cohn: But his, you know, he grew up in a slightly more wealthy than average household in Japan, and his dad was…
• 18:11
  Jason Cohn: you know, kind of Western-oriented, I would say. You know, pretty liberal-minded guy, especially for the time. And he had a baby pate, you know, projector.
• 18:25
  Jason Cohn: In the house, and so he would play, you know, Fleischer Brothers cartoons, he would play
• 18:32
  Jason Cohn: early Walt Disney cartoons, and and Tezuko was just obsessed with that stuff from a very young age, and I think that, you know, that's… that's what he always really wanted to do, and in a way, he kind of,
• 18:46
  Jason Cohn: You know, he mortgaged his whole life
• 18:50
  Jason Cohn: to create animation. So, like, the… at a certain point, the manga that he was working on, like, you know, 18 hours a day, was paying the bills, but… because he was massively successful as a manga author, but he was funneling all of the revenue from that into…
• 19:10
  Jason Cohn: a…
• 19:11
  Jason Cohn: an animation studio that really struggled always to make money, because the business model wasn't really there for it. So he was, like, constantly… it was a hamster wheel for him of constantly creating manga to try to, like, make the animation studio work, you know?
• 19:28
  Tad Eggleston: See, this is… this is fascinating to me, because one of my minority opinions is… is that, like…
• 19:36
  Tad Eggleston: Comics not only are… are…
• 19:40
  Tad Eggleston: the most versatile, and for me, best medium, but, like, that there's literally nothing that they can't do as well or better, and Tezuka and what he…
• 19:53
  Tad Eggleston: inspired afterwards is such a huge part of why I believe that they can even do motion better than film.
• 20:00
  Tad Eggleston: So the idea that, like.
• 20:05
  Tad Eggleston: They were second to him, because he wanted to go do the motion, rather than imply the motion, make you feel the motion, you know.
• 20:15
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I think…
• 20:17
  Jason Cohn: It's a great point, and it's a totally valid opinion. I think that maybe…
• 20:23
  Jason Cohn: to apply it to Tezuka, you have to know a little bit more about him. He… he was also… this guy was a polymath, like a… like, really, he was a… you know, people throw the word around, but he really was a genius. He probably could have been successful at any number of…
• 20:38
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 20:39
  Jason Cohn: different things. One of them was music. He was, like, a concert-level pianist, and he was also a, he was obsessed with theater. He liked theater acting, he wrote for the theater, he tried his hand at directing, I think, a little bit.
• 20:55
  Jason Cohn: So, I think that animation came closest, you know, it was able to integrate the voice acting and the music and all of that stuff in ways that manga couldn't do. But he loved manga, I mean, don't get me wrong, you know, but…
• 21:10
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, no, and I didn't… I didn't think you were saying that you didn't, I was just…
• 21:14
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 21:14
  Tad Eggleston: I'm always… And again, like, like…
• 21:18
  Tad Eggleston: That's why I also prefaced it with, like, for me.
• 21:21
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 21:22
  Tad Eggleston: Comics are the perfect medium.
• 21:24
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 21:24
  Tad Eggleston: there's nothing they can't do. I mean, even when you're talking about music, you know, because that's the, you know, action and music are the two things that people will always bring up. Oh, comics can't do this, I'm like…
• 21:35
  Tad Eggleston: Dude, read some great manga, and you'll see the action. Go read Dave Chisholm, or Stephen Frank, and you'll see the music.
• 21:46
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, not just see, but feel, you know, if you've got any hint of what it's supposed to sound like, you'll hear it, and if you don't, you'll create it.
• 21:55
  Jason Cohn: Yup.
• 21:56
  Tad Eggleston: With… with the right hands.
• 21:58
  Jason Cohn: Have you read, have you read the manga Blue Giant by, Ishizuka?
• 22:03
  Tad Eggleston: It's so on my list. I haven't yet. It was actually Dave Chisholm that told me I needed to.
• 22:09
  Jason Cohn: You'll feel like you're listening to music while you're reading it.
• 22:12
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I know, Dave Chisholm,
• 22:15
  Tad Eggleston: his two… or three absolute masterpieces. He's actually the only…
• 22:21
  Tad Eggleston: talking about polymaths. He makes graphic novels and single-issue comics these days, too, but he's also a PhD in jazz trumpet. He actually teaches a comics and music class at Rochester Institute of Technology.
• 22:37
  Jason Cohn: Oh, cool. That's awesome.
• 22:39
  Tad Eggleston: But, but he did a book called,
• 22:43
  Tad Eggleston: Chasing the Bird about Charlie Parker in California. He did a book called Enter the Blue that was commissioned by Blue Note Records for their 80th anniversary.
• 22:53
  Tad Eggleston: that's… that's fiction, but with a lot of… a lot of Blue Note history woven into it, and it's just kind of about chasing the muse, chasing the…
• 23:04
  Tad Eggleston: You know, that, that, that, that…
• 23:07
  Tad Eggleston: improvisational groove, that sort of thing. Yeah. And then, most recently, in that line, he did a book called, Miles Davis and the Search for Sound, that's kind of about his, like, on-the-corner sketches in Spain, you know, when he started really exploring
• 23:26
  Tad Eggleston: Non-jazz music, and… and trying to…
• 23:30
  Jason Cohn: a very arranged… the…
• 23:32
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 23:33
  Jason Cohn: With Gil Evans, yeah.
• 23:35
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 23:35
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 23:36
  Jason Cohn: That's very cool, I'll look for that. That's my.
• 23:38
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, all from Z2 Comics on those.
• 23:41
  Jason Cohn: Okay.
• 23:41
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, Dave Chisholm's just a… like, again, he's just…
• 23:46
  Tad Eggleston: And he was the one that said blue note, er, not blue note, blue…
• 23:49
  Jason Cohn: Blue Giant.
• 23:50
  Tad Eggleston: Blue Giant, was another one.
• 23:52
  Jason Cohn: This is kind of a little plug for our Kickstarter, but we were able.
• 23:58
  Tad Eggleston: Please, that's what you're here for.
• 23:59
  Jason Cohn: Well, you know, gotta…
• 24:02
  Jason Cohn: Gotta do my sales job, gotta do my… but we're, one of the things that we're gonna be offering as rewards is… this is actually very cool. We're… we have… we got permission from the Tezuka Estate to,
• 24:17
  Jason Cohn: To have contemporary artists, animation and comic book artists from around the world.
• 24:24
  Jason Cohn: do original illustrations based on Tezuka characters, which they don't really…
• 24:32
  Jason Cohn: allow that, you know, unless it's, like, specifically something that they commission. But, so one of them is actually Ishizuka, who's the Blue Giant creator, did one, which is really super cool. He chose a kind of obscure Tezuka character named Acetylene Lamp, who's a kind of…
• 24:51
  Jason Cohn: One of his recurring bad guy characters.
• 24:56
  Tad Eggleston: Very cool. Actually, as soon as you said this, it reminded me of another Kickstarter that I did.
• 25:05
  Tad Eggleston: And have since talked to the publisher of, but about a different Kickstarter. Did you see this one a couple of years ago?
• 25:13
  Tad Eggleston: Magnetic press.
• 25:15
  Jason Cohn: Tommy?
• 25:16
  Tad Eggleston: artists.
• 25:17
  Jason Cohn: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great, yeah.
• 25:19
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it was.
• 25:20
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 25:21
  Tad Eggleston: Absolutely fantastic.
• 25:22
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, and that one was… that one was.
• 25:24
  Tad Eggleston: And as Joe Kelly and Ken Nomura doing something based on blackjack?
• 25:28
  Jason Cohn: Right, exactly, yeah. And it has, what's his name, Nunez? No, what is his name?
• 25:34
  Tad Eggleston: Victor Santos did one.
• 25:37
  Tad Eggleston: Or a couple.
• 25:38
  Tad Eggleston: I thought that, did Michael Avon Oming do one? Maybe he just did a print.
• 25:47
  Jason Cohn: Minnie Rullies is who I was thinking of, yeah.
• 25:49
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, Kenny Ruiz, Juan Diaz Canales, just Black Sad.
• 25:54
  Tad Eggleston: That was one of the things that interested me, is that, like, it was… creators from
• 26:02
  Tad Eggleston: All over the world.
• 26:04
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's the same kind of thing that we're trying to do with this Kickstarter.
• 26:10
  Jason Cohn: You know, collectible set.
• 26:13
  Jason Cohn: Is, you know, we want to make the point that even though he's not that… Tezuka is, for whatever reason, has been sort of overlooked in the English-speaking world, he's massively popular all around the world.
• 26:25
  Jason Cohn: You know, he really.
• 26:26
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean…
• 26:27
  Jason Cohn: known in France, in Spain, all over Latin America.
• 26:31
  Jason Cohn: Germany.
• 26:32
  Tad Eggleston: like…
• 26:35
  Tad Eggleston: I think that has everything to do with… and two things. First, he's not overlooked by artists in the English-speaking world. Like, you won't come across a lot of, like, serious cartoonists, like.
• 26:48
  Jason Cohn: Virginia.
• 26:48
  Tad Eggleston: Any of the cartoonists that are, like.
• 26:51
  Tad Eggleston: like, Paul Pope knows all the great, you know, because he spent so much time just studying everybody and anybody.
• 26:58
  Jason Cohn: I mean, he lived in Japan, too, also.
• 27:00
  Tad Eggleston: But he was into Tezuka before that. He was into lots of… I mean, part of the reason he wound up in Japan was… he was part of a program… he was actually the first Mangaka
• 27:12
  Tad Eggleston: first American mangaka. He got hired by…
• 27:16
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 27:17
  Tad Eggleston: I think it was Viz, but I don't remember.
• 27:20
  Jason Cohn: Maybe…
• 27:21
  Tad Eggleston: credential.
• 27:22
  Jason Cohn: I think it was Kodansha, yeah.
• 27:23
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, Kadansha. To… to… And he had a great time.
• 27:30
  Jason Cohn: Fair.
• 27:31
  Tad Eggleston: But, but, like… After that, it's the same problem that all
• 27:37
  Tad Eggleston: non-English artists have is, is, like… English speakers tend to be… How do I put this?
• 27:48
  Tad Eggleston: Dumb. We're dumb.
• 27:51
  Tad Eggleston: We go, we go, if it's not in our language, we don't like it.
• 27:57
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, I mean, look, shit gets lost in translation, you know, and so there's that, and we are, like, in spite of… we're…
• 28:06
  Jason Cohn: We're… in spite of the fact that, you know, English is spoken all over the globe, we actually become weirdly parochial in our tastes as English speakers.
• 28:17
  Jason Cohn: where we, you know, we're just… we just resist subtitles and… and all of that.
• 28:22
  Tad Eggleston: If I'm being really, really generous, I think the way I'd put it is… the, the, the British…
• 28:32
  Tad Eggleston: were the empire builders, and therefore, maintaining English and English only to them was part of asserting dominance.
• 28:43
  Tad Eggleston: And the Australians, and… the… the Americans…
• 28:50
  Tad Eggleston: don't have to learn other languages. Like, you can't… you can't really live in Europe and not know 3 languages.
• 28:57
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, it definitely helps.
• 28:58
  Tad Eggleston: Not easy to.
• 28:59
  Jason Cohn: Yep.
• 28:59
  Tad Eggleston: You know, you can't live in Africa or India and not know 2 or 3 languages. You can't live in China and not know 2 or 3 languages.
• 29:08
  Jason Cohn: Yep.
• 29:08
  Tad Eggleston: You know,
• 29:11
  Tad Eggleston: Even in South America, it's a good idea to know English and Portuguese to go along with Spanish.
• 29:17
  Jason Cohn: Yup.
• 29:18
  Tad Eggleston: You know, just because of proximity to other people that…
• 29:23
  Tad Eggleston: have other languages… I mean, and you don't have to spend as much time learning it, because you're gonna wind up picking up more of it.
• 29:30
  Jason Cohn: Yeah. But I mean, I think one… more specifically with America, what happened is we created our own.
• 29:37
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 29:38
  Jason Cohn: we create our own media, right? So we had our own…
• 29:42
  Jason Cohn: television cartoons, right? We didn't need to import them. But, like, if you look at, you know, Mexico, Peru, Chile, like, people have been, since I launched this Kickstarter, I've been getting random emails from people in places like Chile.
• 29:55
  Jason Cohn: telling me how much they love Tezuka, and how much, you know, Astro Boy meant to them growing up. Well, they didn't really have their own, you know, locally produced cartoons, so they had the option of either, you know, importing, like, the Looney Tunes and Hanna-Barbera stuff from America, which is very expensive.
• 30:13
  Jason Cohn: or getting the Japanese stuff, including, like, Astro Boy and.
• 30:17
  Tad Eggleston: Oh.
• 30:18
  Jason Cohn: came by the White Lion much cheaper. So just like, you know, just like Japanese cars were kicking, you know, Chrysler's ass in the 80s, Japanese cartoons were kicking Hanna-Barbera's ass
• 30:31
  Jason Cohn: You know, all over the world, because they were just on price point, they were just more affordable. But what's also kind of interesting is that, like, they…
• 30:39
  Jason Cohn: a lot of these people say that, you know, and Jorge Gutierrez, the great animator of Book of Life and other stuff, he told me this, because he grew up in Mexico, and he said that he just thought that, like, Astro Boy fit Mexican culture better than the American cartoons.
• 30:59
  Jason Cohn: Partially because it was, you know, serial rather than episodic, so it felt more like a telenovela, and, like, the emotional content of it felt more like telenovelas, like, more melodramatic, you know?
• 31:14
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 31:15
  Jason Cohn: So…
• 31:15
  Tad Eggleston: I, I, I think, I think, there's more in common between…
• 31:22
  Tad Eggleston: Central and South American and Asian family structures, too.
• 31:28
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, maybe.
• 31:28
  Tad Eggleston: more… much… I mean.
• 31:31
  Jason Cohn: Right.
• 31:33
  Jason Cohn: Multi…
• 31:33
  Tad Eggleston: One of the places…
• 31:34
  Jason Cohn: generational.
• 31:35
  Tad Eggleston: Right, one of the places where the United States
• 31:38
  Tad Eggleston: and Britain, in particular, are just real outliers in the world, almost, is like…
• 31:46
  Tad Eggleston: The fact that, like, oh, you're supposed to grow up and go… go live your own life somewhere else, rather than…
• 31:53
  Jason Cohn: Get the hell out of the house, man.
• 31:54
  Tad Eggleston: Grow up, and we'll expand the house, and you'll take over primary management of the family business.
• 32:02
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 32:03
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, very…
• 32:04
  Tad Eggleston: It was so…
• 32:05
  Jason Cohn: That idea is very true.
• 32:06
  Tad Eggleston: The world has, like, 3 or 4 generations living in the same place.
• 32:11
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 32:12
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, and Jorge actually said that he would… he would watch Astro Boy with… sitting on the sofa with his grandmother, and he'd be explaining, you know, he'd be explaining that Astro Boy is sad, you know, because his parents, you know, didn't want him anymore because, you know, the… the… or his creator.
• 32:29
  Jason Cohn: Didn't want him anymore because he wasn't gonna grow up like a real, you know, human boy.
• 32:34
  Jason Cohn: Right. And his grandmother was crying because it was so sad, you know?
• 32:40
  Tad Eggleston: God, you're gonna, you're gonna, like, the problem with this podcast is my reading list is already, like, taller than me.
• 32:47
  Jason Cohn: Oh, man, you want.
• 32:47
  Tad Eggleston: I didn't want to go, like…
• 32:49
  Jason Cohn: You want me to give you some recommendations of, of,
• 32:52
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, we'll get there. We'll get there. That's how… that's how we end shows. I mean, I pick them up as we go. I mean, right now, I'm already going, oh, I need to jump on Astro Boy, both the comic and…
• 33:06
  Tad Eggleston: And the, the, the anime…
• 33:09
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 33:09
  Tad Eggleston: sooner rather than later. But, like, there's only so many hours in the day, Jason.
• 33:14
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, I know, I know. Well, I mean, I would… I think… personally, I think his manga are more interesting, even though he, you know, was obsessed with animation. He did some very cool animation. I think his manga are more interesting, personally, and…
• 33:27
  Jason Cohn: And one of the things that's so interesting about him is, you know, he had… he died young, he died at 61, but he had… he got started so early, you know, he was…
• 33:35
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 33:36
  Jason Cohn: Professional comic book artist from the age of 17, so that's like 45 years that he was…
• 33:41
  Jason Cohn: working, and he moved through many different periods, you know, like…
• 33:47
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 33:48
  Jason Cohn: the immediate post-war period was very different in Japan from, like, the 1960s, which, you know, like, the US, you know, had, like, a big sort of countercultural component, and…
• 33:59
  Jason Cohn: So he had to, like, really change his style. He had to really, like, adjust and flow with the changes in the audience and the market, you know, because the audience was growing up, and he couldn't keep, like, creating stuff for, like, 13-year-old boys anymore. He had to start creating for high school students and college students.
• 34:20
  Tad Eggleston: Were those… were those decisions…
• 34:24
  Tad Eggleston: Was it he was changing for the audience, or he was changing as he aged, and it went with the audience?
• 34:31
  Jason Cohn: Oh, I think that he, like, at first, he was,
• 34:35
  Jason Cohn: He was changing out of, like, a very fierce… Competitiveness.
• 34:40
  Jason Cohn: You know, like, he didn't like the fact that there were young guys who came up who had been reading him when they were little, who are now creating something that was different
• 34:51
  Jason Cohn: from the kind of stuff that he was doing that was more popular than him. He couldn't stand that there were people creating stuff more popular than what he was creating. So he was like, okay, I'm gonna… you know, he was, like… and he was pretty open about it. He's like, I'm getting on this bandwagon, and I'm gonna show that I can do this style better than those guys.
• 35:11
  Jason Cohn: And, so he started, you know, he…
• 35:14
  Jason Cohn: If he… for years, he was doing only, you know, like, this stuff for, you know, young kids, and it was very, you know, kind of optimistic, and…
• 35:24
  Jason Cohn: Well, optimist is probably the wrong word, because there's a lot of death and things that you wouldn't, you know, expect to see in a comic book.
• 35:32
  Tad Eggleston: to coming out of war years in Japan.
• 35:35
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, right, there's a kind of real… there's a kind of realism that would have been very meaningful.
• 35:39
  Tad Eggleston: There are different definitions.
• 35:42
  Jason Cohn: agree.
• 35:43
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, he was… yeah, we can totally have that conversation, that's… that's super interesting, but, like…
• 35:49
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, Godzilla makes so much sense for Japan.
• 35:52
  Jason Cohn: in a Japanese context, and then in an American context, it's like, wow, that's weird.
• 35:56
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 35:56
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 35:57
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 35:58
  Jason Cohn: Totally. No, but he, he was, you know, super successful all into the mid-1960s with that, you know, stuff that was sort of adventure comics for young boys.
• 36:09
  Jason Cohn: And young girls, he kind of created the shoujo comic genre as well, with Princess Knight, who was, you know, really the first one, and kind of created all those tropes. But,
• 36:23
  Jason Cohn: once the mid-60s started happening, and you, you know, you start having things like, you know, protests against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty and stuff like that, you have the rise of the Japanese
• 36:35
  Jason Cohn: you know, communists, like the Red Army, the terrorist group, and stuff like that.
• 36:41
  Jason Cohn: you start getting comics that are addressing a very different sort of attitude and audience, and some of these… some of these authors were pretty explicit about the fact that they thought that Tezuka was old hat, you know, that he…
• 36:58
  Jason Cohn: that…
• 37:00
  Jason Cohn: you know, he kept doing the same thing, and people aren't interested in that anymore. And especially when he would go to his studio.
• 37:08
  Jason Cohn: you know, his animation studio, and his young animators that he hired were reading other people's comic books. You know, there was this style that came up that was kind of pretty, as I was saying, pretty explicitly
• 37:21
  Jason Cohn: in, you know, reaction to Tezuka's style. It was called Gekiga.
• 37:28
  Jason Cohn: And so these, you know, people were reading the Gekiga comic artists, and and it infuriated Tezuka, and so he, like, basically went through these, you know, long…
• 37:40
  Jason Cohn: Kind of slumps, he would call them, where he was…
• 37:43
  Jason Cohn: working on, you know, creating a new style, like a more mature style, a darker style, a more cynical style, some would say a more nihilistic style. And a lot of it was, I'm just gonna say this outright, a lot of it was pretty bad.
• 37:58
  Jason Cohn: Some of it, you know, like, kind of unreadable, I think he would admit that.
• 38:03
  Jason Cohn: But when he came out on the other end of it, like, his… his version of Gekkigo was really compelling.
• 38:11
  Jason Cohn: Like, you know, cause he was… A philosophically very…
• 38:16
  Jason Cohn: Deep, thoughtful guy, and he was able to bring, sort of, layers of…
• 38:22
  Jason Cohn: a sort of sophistication into his version of Gekkiga that wasn't necessarily in the other guy's version. It was… it was Tezuka, you know? It was Tezuka, but Tezuka for a more…
• 38:36
  Jason Cohn: you know, adult audience, you know, maybe a more cynical audience. So yeah, so some of that stuff… so I guess all I'm saying is that, like, when you talk about, like, you know, Tezika recommendations, it's really, you know, era to era, it can be so different.
• 38:51
  Jason Cohn: You know.
• 38:52
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I mean, I think…
• 38:55
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, you mentioned polymaths earlier, like, I find that I… in terms of the art that I love, I am attracted to two things. I'm attracted to polymaths. I'm attracted to people who
• 39:08
  Tad Eggleston: do…
• 39:09
  Jason Cohn: other sorts of things.
• 39:10
  Tad Eggleston: Or even more so, when it's clear that they take influence outside of the arts.
• 39:17
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 39:18
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, I love that Rivers Cuomo of Weezer went and took, like.
• 39:24
  Tad Eggleston: programming classes at Harvard so that he could
• 39:30
  Tad Eggleston: created database of… of his musical thoughts to me.
• 39:35
  Tad Eggleston: Easier to…
• 39:36
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, or Brian May of Queen, who's, like, you know, was this.
• 39:40
  Tad Eggleston: A literal rocket science.
• 39:42
  Jason Cohn: A literal rocket scientist, like, a little, little… Right.
• 39:46
  Tad Eggleston: But… But, but even… even… even beyond, like, the polymath, polymaths, and the… the…
• 39:55
  Tad Eggleston: We'll call, we'll call it poly art, you know, the people who… who… change their mediums.
• 40:03
  Tad Eggleston: My favorite artists are always ones that are never… comfortable… with… stagnation. Never comfortable being static.
• 40:17
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 40:18
  Tad Eggleston: You know, whether it's David Bowie or Pearl Jam, whether it's,
• 40:23
  Tad Eggleston: God, so many directors, so many musicians, and you see it, frankly, in comics probably more than anywhere, where it's like, oh, I've done this, I'm great at this, but I want to do that.
• 40:36
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, yeah.
• 40:38
  Jason Cohn: But I think it's really hard to do when you're someone who, like, like Tezuka had done, like, basically gave birth to a medium, was so.
• 40:49
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah!
• 40:50
  Jason Cohn: for Astro Boy and for, you know, certain characters for kids, to then break out of that and say, I'm gonna do something completely different. And, like, imagine this, so because we were making the Tezuka Walt Disney comparison. So, Walt Disney, of course, is famous for, you know, Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse.
• 41:10
  Jason Cohn: like, very kid-oriented. What if Walt Disney started making adult erotic animation or comic books?
• 41:19
  Tad Eggleston: It's the cat.
• 41:20
  Jason Cohn: Chris the Cat, or comic books about incest, you know, because Chris has made a book called Ayako, which is all about this family that's mired in these generations of incest, and it's really, you know, super troubling. It's actually a great
• 41:35
  Jason Cohn: great manga, but it's kind of a little bit hard to read. Like, imagine… imagine Walt Disney trying to do that.
• 41:42
  Jason Cohn: Like, it just could never happen.
• 41:45
  Tad Eggleston: No, I mean, or if he did, like… It would likely be career-ending.
• 41:52
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 41:52
  Tad Eggleston: At least, at least, at least in terms of…
• 41:57
  Tad Eggleston: And he might have been… I mean, there are definitely people who have done stuff like that, where it's like, okay, I'm gonna live off the residuals of this while I do stuff that nobody who loves
• 42:07
  Tad Eggleston: Me will actually still like.
• 42:10
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, yeah.
• 42:11
  Tad Eggleston: And there are people who, I mean, like, I mean, I even think, like… Cameron Crowe.
• 42:20
  Tad Eggleston: just wrote his autobiography, and… and there was a… there was a fantastic chapter. He got to spend a year with David Bowie.
• 42:28
  Jason Cohn: Hmm.
• 42:29
  Tad Eggleston: And it was essentially the year before David Bowie went and did his Berlin trilogy.
• 42:36
  Tad Eggleston: So, it was, like, the year before David Bowie all but completely reinvented himself.
• 42:42
  Tad Eggleston: and, and, like… Those 3 albums are brilliant, but if you love Ziggy Stardust…
• 42:49
  Tad Eggleston: You're not automatically gonna jump on.
• 42:52
  Jason Cohn: On low, or whatever, yeah.
• 42:54
  Tad Eggleston: Right! You know, my son is a massive Nine Inch Nails fan, so, like, the first Bowie album, and he's, at this point, a huge Bowie fan too, but, like, the first Bowie album that he gravitated towards was, Outside.
• 43:10
  Tad Eggleston: which was essentially Bowie messing with… with… Industrial Electronica.
• 43:16
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 43:17
  Tad Eggleston: You know, and the thing is, like…
• 43:21
  Tad Eggleston: it's a better-than-average industrial electronica album, but not, like, the best industrial electronica album, and, like, if you love David Bowie, it's like, what the hell is David Bowie doing? Yeah.
• 43:35
  Jason Cohn: But if you really love David Bowie, you have to let David Bowie explore.
• 43:39
  Tad Eggleston: Absolutely. No, no, no, no, I agree.
• 43:42
  Jason Cohn: I can't stand it when people are like, I don't like it because it doesn't sound like, you know, play the hits, you know?
• 43:50
  Tad Eggleston: Right. No, I always laugh when I'm at a Pearl Jam concert, and like, it turns out that half the people around me don't like anything after their third album. And I'm like…
• 44:00
  Tad Eggleston: you know, they'll ask me what I want to hear played, and I'll go, I want to hear this, and they'll be like, what? I'm like, yeah, it was off of the last album.
• 44:09
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I haven't even listened to that!
• 44:11
  Jason Cohn: I just want… I just want to listen to the… into the, into the wild soundtrack over and over again.
• 44:16
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's a good soundtrack.
• 44:18
  Jason Cohn: It's a great soundtrack.
• 44:19
  Tad Eggleston: But, you know, half the Pearl Jam fans don't actually want to listen to that.
• 44:23
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, that's good.
• 44:24
  Tad Eggleston: That's after…
• 44:25
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, that to me is as good as anything that Pearl Jen did.
• 44:28
  Tad Eggleston: They want to hear 10 over and over again.
• 44:31
  Jason Cohn: We are.
• 44:32
  Tad Eggleston: Into the Wild is great. I like ukulele songs just as much from Eddie.
• 44:38
  Tad Eggleston: I think my favorite… my favorite album is still Vitaly, just because I was just the right age when it came out.
• 44:45
  Tad Eggleston: I think… I think the album I think is best is No Code, and that's… that's, like, one of my…
• 44:50
  Jason Cohn: I got record, yeah.
• 44:51
  Tad Eggleston: That's one of my seriously minority opinions again.
• 44:55
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, I've always really liked that record. It has good songs.
• 44:58
  Tad Eggleston: But I also.
• 44:58
  Jason Cohn: on your podcast, you start… you start talking about a comic book.
• 45:02
  Tad Eggleston: Anything.
• 45:03
  Jason Cohn: then you move to music, and then…
• 45:05
  Tad Eggleston: Talk about whatever.
• 45:06
  Jason Cohn: Okay.
• 45:07
  Jason Cohn: I like it.
• 45:08
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, we'll come back.
• 45:11
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, when are… when are we gonna… when are we gonna talk about, you know, urban planning? Are we gonna move on to urban planning?
• 45:18
  Tad Eggleston: You know, there is a great comic on urban planning.
• 45:21
  Jason Cohn: Well, Beth is a good comic on everything.
• 45:23
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, don't get me started. I'm an autistic polymath, Jason.
• 45:29
  Jason Cohn: So what's, what's the urban planning doc, or urban planning comic?
• 45:34
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, give me just a second. It's actually by,
• 45:40
  Tad Eggleston: Have you seen the book,
• 45:48
  Tad Eggleston: There's a book that came out just a couple years ago called The Dawn of Everything.
• 45:54
  Jason Cohn: By David…
• 45:55
  Tad Eggleston: Schraber and David Wengerald.
• 45:57
  Jason Cohn: Totally read that book, loved it.
• 45:58
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, fantastic book.
• 46:00
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 46:03
  Tad Eggleston: And this is… it's not completely urban planning. Hold on, let me…
• 46:07
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, there's not much related to urban planning in that.
• 46:10
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, no, no, no, that's also not a… that's also not a, graphic novel.
• 46:19
  Tad Eggleston: The graphic novel is called Cities Made Differently by David Graber and Nika Dubrov.
• 46:24
  Jason Cohn: Oh, okay, okay.
• 46:26
  Jason Cohn: I'll read anything by David Graber, that's cool, I'll check that out.
• 46:29
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it's full of playful graphics, provocative questions, a curious fact. This book asks what makes a city, and how we might make them differently.
• 46:37
  Jason Cohn: Love it. Cities made differently?
• 46:39
  Tad Eggleston: Cities made differently.
• 46:41
  Jason Cohn: Okay, I'm looking for it.
• 46:42
  Tad Eggleston: Came out in November of 24.
• 46:46
  Jason Cohn: Thanks for the recommendation.
• 46:47
  Tad Eggleston: Like, that's what I do. I talk about books, mostly comics.
• 46:54
  Tad Eggleston: It's a non-fiction graphic novel from Penguin Remington House. I'm trying to figure out which imprint.
• 47:04
  Tad Eggleston: Correct details… oh, MIT Press, of course!
• 47:08
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, that makes sense.
• 47:10
  Tad Eggleston: I love the…
• 47:11
  Jason Cohn: my team.
• 47:11
  Tad Eggleston: Press does graphic novels.
• 47:14
  Jason Cohn: I think you're the first person I've talked to who read, The Dawn of Everything, although I know it was a… it was a bestseller, or a, you know, successful book.
• 47:21
  Tad Eggleston: so good, and, like, we're gonna go… we're gonna… we're gonna circle back on, because the person that I read it on the recommendation of was Dave Chisholm, who I was talking about his music comics.
• 47:31
  Jason Cohn: Cool.
• 47:33
  Tad Eggleston: Because there's a lot of… this is the other reason I love comics, like, it seems like all of the autistic artists that like to learn about everything make comics.
• 47:44
  Jason Cohn: I mean, it's people… it's people who sit indoors for very long periods of time, absorbing huge amounts of stuff, and then…
• 47:53
  Jason Cohn: And then…
• 47:54
  Tad Eggleston: They want to figure out how things work, and then they want to show people.
• 47:58
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, yeah, that's a good… that's a good way of putting it.
• 48:01
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no.
• 48:03
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, again, not to say that other art forms don't attract plenty of autistic people and… and plenty of…
• 48:11
  Tad Eggleston: polymaths. It just feels like there's a higher percentage of them in comics than any other place I go. Yeah. Like, like, you talk to… like, again, I work in a high school, and like, if I'm talking to a history teacher, and… and… and I start talking the literature of the era.
• 48:30
  Tad Eggleston: That we're talking about…
• 48:33
  Tad Eggleston: to emphasize something, half the time, they don't seem to realize that it's the literature of the era. If I start talking the science of the era, they really don't know it's the science of the era. You talk to a cartoonist about the stuff going on.
• 48:49
  Tad Eggleston: They know that Beethoven and the Revolutionary War were at the same time.
• 48:55
  Jason Cohn: Yeah. Yeah, they're smart.
• 48:59
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, for that matter, another great one last year, did you see,
• 49:03
  Tad Eggleston: I think it was Einstein and Kafka Land?
• 49:07
  Jason Cohn: No.
• 49:08
  Tad Eggleston: Ugh.
• 49:09
  Tad Eggleston: This guy, and he used… he used…
• 49:17
  Tad Eggleston: and he talks about it in the subtitle. It's Einstein and Kafka Land, How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up With The Universe. So, he uses…
• 49:29
  Tad Eggleston: kind of the Alice in Wonderland through the Looking Grass motif.
• 49:33
  Tad Eggleston: talking about Einstein working on relativity, but also through the lens of he and Kafka, who was reinventing the short story at the same time, were also in the same city, hanging out around the same people.
• 49:50
  Jason Cohn: Same part. Were they actually friends? I didn't… I never heard.
• 49:53
  Tad Eggleston: There's no… and, like, the book doesn't… I mean, the book…
• 49:58
  Jason Cohn: They're never leaving.
• 49:59
  Tad Eggleston: like, implies a little bit that Kafka might have been at an Einstein talk, or Einstein might have been at a salon that Kafka was talking about, but it doesn't…
• 50:09
  Tad Eggleston: And in, like, the introductionary stuff, it makes clear, like, this is a work of fiction. We don't KNOW that they inspired each other.
• 50:20
  Tad Eggleston: But we don't know that they didn't, and what we do know is they were both in… I think it was Prague?
• 50:29
  Tad Eggleston: during these incredibly important years for both of them.
• 50:35
  Tad Eggleston: And Prague wasn't that big of a city, and it had certain cafes where academic types hung out.
• 50:43
  Jason Cohn: Yep.
• 50:44
  Jason Cohn: Well, you know, the thing about, the thing about comic artists, like, you know, my friends who are not, comics fans, they don't get this, but…
• 50:56
  Jason Cohn: Comic book artists are basically filmmakers, But they don't get to.
• 51:02
  Tad Eggleston: And costume designers, and set designers, and actors.
• 51:05
  Jason Cohn: and screenwriters, and cinematographers. They do… they're… they're making films, just two-dimensional films, but they're doing… they're playing all the roles.
• 51:17
  Jason Cohn: And, like, if… I just don't think that… that… that people grasp
• 51:25
  Jason Cohn: how insane that is. Like, how much… like, how focused you have to be to make a great graphic novel or a great comic book, you know, something that… something to look out for.
• 51:35
  Tad Eggleston: to be to make a good one. If you make a great one, it's a…
• 51:38
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, yeah.
• 51:40
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, another thing that I bring up a lot, and like, I read it more because I know the cartoonist that did the comics in it, but it wound up being a novel that I love. Tom Hanks wrote a novel.
• 51:52
  Jason Cohn: Pardon me?
• 51:53
  Tad Eggleston: years ago, called The Making of the Next Motion Picture Masterpiece.
• 52:00
  Tad Eggleston: And essentially, the theme of the novel is that, like, every movie that actually gets made is a miracle.
• 52:09
  Tad Eggleston: bad ones.
• 52:10
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 52:11
  Tad Eggleston: There's so many places where so many things can fall apart.
• 52:16
  Jason Cohn: Fair.
• 52:17
  Tad Eggleston: But, like…
• 52:20
  Jason Cohn: I've been quite enjoying the, the Apple series, The Studio, recently, which, which, it's,
• 52:27
  Jason Cohn: Seth Rogen, it's like…
• 52:29
  Jason Cohn: you know, he's… he's the head of a, of a… let's say a B-tier Hollywood studio.
• 52:37
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 52:38
  Jason Cohn: And it's… and it's… it's a very, sort of, inside joke, sort of.
• 52:44
  Jason Cohn: series about making, you know, the sausage making of, in Hollywood, of films, and it's very funny. Some of it's very funny, but yeah, it gives you… it does make you… it does make you feel like it's a miracle that any film ever gets made.
• 53:01
  Tad Eggleston: No, I got Apple TV after Dennis Hopeless told me to watch Slow Horses.
• 53:06
  Jason Cohn: Oh, I love that show.
• 53:07
  Tad Eggleston: So now I'll have to watch the studio as an excuse to keep my Apple TV.
• 53:12
  Jason Cohn: You probably have to watch 2 or 3 episodes before you're bought in.
• 53:17
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's common.
• 53:19
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 53:20
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, one of my favorite shows ever… is Halt and Catch Fire.
• 53:25
  Tad Eggleston: And it was showrun by a friend of mine, Christopher Cantwell, but he did it before we became friends, so the first time I was watching it, I was like.
• 53:37
  Tad Eggleston: I was… I was actually, like, nervous. I'm like, what happens if I don't like his TV shirt?
• 53:42
  Tad Eggleston: You know, his baby, his… like, I know lots of people like it, but what if I'm not one of them? And, like, for the first 4 or 5 episodes, I was, like, lukewarm on it.
• 53:52
  Jason Cohn: Hmm.
• 53:53
  Tad Eggleston: like, in rewatches, I like them more now, but, like, the seventh episode… I just, like…
• 54:01
  Tad Eggleston: it blew my mind, and, like, that's when I went from watching an episode a week or so to, like, I binged the next three and a half seasons all at once.
• 54:11
  Jason Cohn: Hmm.
• 54:12
  Tad Eggleston: And… and when I texted him that, like, I just… I just suddenly got it, he was able to tell me exactly which episode I just watched.
• 54:21
  Tad Eggleston: You know, even as the creator, he's like, nope, this is where… this is where we caught fire. No pun intended.
• 54:30
  Jason Cohn: I don't… I don't know that show.
• 54:32
  Tad Eggleston: It's great! It's on the, it's about the… the…
• 54:36
  Tad Eggleston: It's like a fictionalized take on… on… Like, the people who made
• 54:44
  Tad Eggleston: Computers, and the internet, and search engines, and…
• 54:48
  Tad Eggleston: So it takes you from, like, 1982 to 1994-ish.
• 54:52
  Jason Cohn: Okay. What's it on?
• 54:54
  Tad Eggleston: Amc?
• 54:56
  Jason Cohn: Oh, okay.
• 54:57
  Tad Eggleston: I'll look for it.
• 54:58
  Jason Cohn: So I'll get it on Hulu.
• 54:59
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, AMC. And, and…
• 55:05
  Tad Eggleston: It's a lot about egos, it's a lot about workplace, it's a lot about creating together, but then competing against each other, and then working again, you know…
• 55:14
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, yeah.
• 55:16
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, it's hard to describe. It's, it's, it's, it's, like, way more about the people, again, the fictional people, but, but definitely, definitely you can see them in…
• 55:29
  Tad Eggleston: and all sorts of, you know, there's the guy that reminds you a lot of a Steve Jobs type, and there's.
• 55:35
  Jason Cohn: the guy.
• 55:35
  Tad Eggleston: that… That is, like, All tech behind the scenes, like…
• 55:42
  Tad Eggleston: And just can't handle the front.
• 55:44
  Tad Eggleston: You know, there's the woman that goes from…
• 55:46
  Tad Eggleston: From being more of the tech to getting the money side, and then becoming the powerhouse on the money side.
• 55:55
  Tad Eggleston: You know, all while, like, Juggling relationships and families, and…
• 56:02
  Tad Eggleston: moves from Texas to California, and…
• 56:06
  Jason Cohn: Sounds cool.
• 56:07
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. I think, I think most cool things aren't about what
• 56:12
  Tad Eggleston: They're about, if that makes sense.
• 56:14
  Jason Cohn: Sure, it's about the relationships and the…
• 56:17
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 56:18
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, the setting is just sort of the setting, right?
• 56:21
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 56:21
  Tad Eggleston: And the setting includes 80% of the plot. It's why, like, it's why I will regularly say, I'm not a plot guy.
• 56:30
  Tad Eggleston: I'm barely even a worldbuilding guy. I care about the plot and the worldbuilding for… for… for what…
• 56:38
  Tad Eggleston: It gives the characters to… to play in.
• 56:41
  Jason Cohn: Hmm.
• 56:42
  Tad Eggleston: For the challenges it gives the characters, for what it forces the characters to…
• 56:46
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 56:46
  Tad Eggleston: adapt to, overcome… like, I can handle almost any plot hole if the characters respond appropriately.
• 56:53
  Jason Cohn: Oh yeah, I'm… I have… I have huge tolerance for… for plot hole.
• 56:58
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Yeah. I have huge tolerance for half-baked worlds.
• 57:02
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 57:03
  Tad Eggleston: No?
• 57:05
  Jason Cohn: There's… there's very little that, like, is so bad that I'll… I'll be… I can't… I just can't do this because…
• 57:10
  Jason Cohn: That doesn't make sense.
• 57:12
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 57:13
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 57:13
  Jason Cohn: Hey, so what did you think of, of Pluto?
• 57:17
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't finished it.
• 57:19
  Jason Cohn: Okay.
• 57:20
  Tad Eggleston: Because… because… I think it might even… I think… I think it's finally available digitally, but when I started reading it, it was only available…
• 57:28
  Tad Eggleston: in print, and it's not so popular that it's easy to put your hands on, other than ordering it, and I never ordered it all together, so it was like, I'd finish a volume and either think about ordering it immediately, or…
• 57:42
  Tad Eggleston: start looking for it every time I was at Kinicuna, or…
• 57:47
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 57:48
  Tad Eggleston: Barnes & Noble or whatever, so I think I've read the first 3 volumes.
• 57:51
  Jason Cohn: Hmm.
• 57:51
  Tad Eggleston: But, I think it's brilliant.
• 57:54
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, it's so well done.
• 57:55
  Tad Eggleston: I think it's completely brilliant.
• 57:57
  Jason Cohn: Yeah. Yeah.
• 57:58
  Tad Eggleston: It made me go back and read the Astro Boy, or the segment… I mean, I did. After, like, the second volume, I figured out what part of Astro Boy it was based on, and ordered just that volume, so that I could read…
• 58:13
  Jason Cohn: The greatest robot in the world.
• 58:14
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 58:15
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 58:17
  Tad Eggleston: yeah, no, it's, it's, it's brilliant. And so is…
• 58:23
  Tad Eggleston: in its own way, it's… it's source material. I think… I think it shows…
• 58:29
  Tad Eggleston: I think Tazaka, in my experience.
• 58:34
  Tad Eggleston: It shows me one of the big similarities between
• 58:40
  Tad Eggleston: Eastern and Western comics is that, like.
• 58:47
  Tad Eggleston: Future generations are built on the shoulders of the previous ones, which means the previous ones…
• 58:53
  Tad Eggleston: Don't always hold up to time.
• 58:56
  Tad Eggleston: Because if you've… if you've read Eurekira, if you read the wrong Tazaka, it's nowhere near as good as Kira. But, as with…
• 59:05
  Tad Eggleston: classic American comics, the best of the best…
• 59:08
  Tad Eggleston: Is still the best of the best.
• 59:10
  Jason Cohn: Hmm…
• 59:11
  Jason Cohn: I'm totally time agnostic, like, I… like, I'm not… like, I'm… I'm married to someone who always wants to see, like, the newest thing, and I'm like, why are we gonna see something that's new and probably not very good when there's so many great things that are old that we haven't seen yet?
• 59:27
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 59:28
  Tad Eggleston: Right. I'm not… I'm probably close to time agnostic.
• 59:34
  Tad Eggleston: The podcast makes me lean new.
• 59:38
  Jason Cohn: Just because you want to know what's happening.
• 59:40
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and, like…
• 59:44
  Tad Eggleston: yes, this is a labor of love and whatnot, but I also, I believe in trying to do things that might make a difference, and I'm gonna make more of a difference for a creator that's working right now.
• 59:58
  Tad Eggleston: Than for one who's not.
• 1:00:00
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, yeah, you're not gonna…
• 1:00:01
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that said, we have a heavy metal book club that we've been reading issue by issue, starting in the 70s.
• 1:00:07
  Jason Cohn: Okay.
• 1:00:08
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so it's not…
• 1:00:10
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, when I'm setting up interviews, I'm not desperately going after the… I mean, I don't turn down the old guys, I reach out to them sometimes, but, like, I'm way more likely to read something new and go, oh, this is amazing, I want to plug the hell out of this kid.
• 1:00:27
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 1:00:28
  Tad Eggleston: than…
• 1:00:29
  Tad Eggleston: then go, oh, you… I mean, we just finished doing Kirby's Fourth World, and I think half the reason that… that I was appealed to the Kirby Fourth World is, like, okay, we're gonna do some old comics here, but…
• 1:00:42
  Tad Eggleston: But it's not what people immediately think of when they think of Kirby, so… so I'm…
• 1:00:46
  Tad Eggleston: I'm still doing something different.
• 1:00:48
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 1:00:49
  Jason Cohn: Well, how about the, how about the, the animated version, the Netflix animated version of Pluto? Did you watch any of that?
• 1:00:57
  Tad Eggleston: I've watched the first episode.
• 1:00:59
  Tad Eggleston: I know that I want to watch more. It's great. But I read way, way, way, way, way…
• 1:01:06
  Jason Cohn: anymore.
• 1:01:06
  Tad Eggleston: Way, way, way, way, way, way. More than I watch.
• 1:01:10
  Jason Cohn: They're both great. I think they're…
• 1:01:11
  Tad Eggleston: 80% of the time when I'm watching, I'm also reading.
• 1:01:15
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 1:01:17
  Jason Cohn: I think they're… I think they're actually both… even though they're not Tezuka, you know, they're adaptations of a Tezuka.
• 1:01:23
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:01:23
  Jason Cohn: story.
• 1:01:24
  Jason Cohn: I actually think they're a pretty good entry point into, you know, Tezuka universe.
• 1:01:31
  Jason Cohn: Yeah. For contemporary readers and viewers, I think they're just so well done, and Urasal was just.
• 1:01:36
  Tad Eggleston: They are.
• 1:01:37
  Jason Cohn: He's so great.
• 1:01:38
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, Urasawa is… I mean, that's… that's why we were… we were psyched when… when…
• 1:01:46
  Tad Eggleston: we discovered Azadora.
• 1:01:49
  Tad Eggleston: podcast crew, because, oh, this is something contemporarily coming out. We can read the volumes when they come out and talk about them.
• 1:01:58
  Tad Eggleston: You know… .
• 1:02:00
  Jason Cohn: Well, here's what Urasawa told me as I got to interview him. He said.
• 1:02:04
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I'm looking forward to that part of the documentary.
• 1:02:07
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, he's really entertaining. He's a… he's just a really lively guy. Especially for, mangakagas, they're not, you know, they can be, pretty, like, shy, and he's not. He's actually pretty outgoing. He actually goes, like, right before…
• 1:02:25
  Jason Cohn: we started… right when we started rolling cameras, you know, we kind of pulled out our list of questions, and he goes, oh, you can put those away, I'm not gonna answer any of your questions, none of those are any good. I love it! Yeah, like, okay, he's just gonna talk, okay, he's just gonna talk. Then he did answer a question.
• 1:02:41
  Tad Eggleston: reason I stopped writing questions.
• 1:02:43
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 1:02:44
  Tad Eggleston: I'll only write questions if somebody asks for them.
• 1:02:47
  Jason Cohn: Right.
• 1:02:47
  Tad Eggleston: And then I keep them as general as possible.
• 1:02:50
  Jason Cohn: You know, as an interviewer, I always write questions, but I also don't stick with them. You know, I let the.
• 1:02:55
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I have…
• 1:02:56
  Jason Cohn: I have to…
• 1:02:56
  Tad Eggleston: trouble with that. Once I've written it down, it's like, I must ask this.
• 1:03:00
  Jason Cohn: No, I don't do that. But I do know…
• 1:03:03
  Tad Eggleston: I wish I could not do that. My brain won't break.
• 1:03:06
  Jason Cohn: as a filmmaker, like, I know that I have certain points that I want to tell in the story, so I want to get this guy's opinion of this, or this guy's experience of that event, you know? Like, I'm trying to get all of these different perspectives on certain things that I know I want to be in the film. So I do refer back to my questions, because I want to make sure that that…
• 1:03:27
  Jason Cohn: You know, the material's covered, right?
• 1:03:30
  Jason Cohn: Right. But also, like, you don't want to…
• 1:03:33
  Jason Cohn: you don't want to… you want the conversation… you want it to be a conversation, you want it to be free-flowing, so I try not to be too rigid about it.
• 1:03:40
  Jason Cohn: But anyway, he goes,
• 1:03:43
  Jason Cohn: he was telling me about his, you know, growing up, reading Tezukah. First of all, one thing he said is, like, his parents were divorced, and…
• 1:03:52
  Jason Cohn: His mom basically had to, like, go to work to, like, pay the bills, and so she basically, when he was really little, he was, like, you know, 5 years old, she would just, like, leave him in the house by himself.
• 1:04:04
  Jason Cohn: And I don't think they had TV, and so, like, his… all his entertainment was these two comic books, and I think that they were both Tezuka books, so that was, like…
• 1:04:14
  Jason Cohn: His whole world was Tezuka as, like, a little kid. And,
• 1:04:19
  Jason Cohn: And then he told me that he read that story, you know, the greatest robot in the world from Astro Boy, and he just cried, and…
• 1:04:29
  Jason Cohn: And that he spent, like, the next 30 years, like, wondering what it was about that story that was so sad. You know, he kept saying, you know, the saddest story I've ever… I've ever heard, the saddest story I've ever heard. He repeated that phrase, like, 5 or 6 times.
• 1:04:47
  Jason Cohn: And… and it, like, it… The question rubbed at him for so long.
• 1:04:55
  Jason Cohn: That eventually, he just decided that he had to, like, explore it.
• 1:05:00
  Jason Cohn: By writing his own version of it, so he… he…
• 1:05:04
  Jason Cohn: he got the opportunity, you know, he hooked up with Makoto Tezuka, who's Tezuka's son, and, you know, asked basically for permission to do it.
• 1:05:14
  Jason Cohn: And, and yeah, he said it was, you know, like, it was so fulfilling for him because he got to, like, explore this… this sort of emotional content that had been eating away at him for decades, you know?
• 1:05:28
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:05:29
  Jason Cohn: Super fascinating.
• 1:05:30
  Tad Eggleston: That, that, I mean, that, that both explains the quality, and, and, like…
• 1:05:37
  Tad Eggleston: is a testament both to Tezuka and a statement about
• 1:05:42
  Tad Eggleston: how so much great art comes about. Like, so often, when you talk to people, it'll turn out that this great thing that you think of as their new thing is like, yeah, no, it's my new thing, but I've been noodling with the idea since I was 6.
• 1:05:59
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 1:06:00
  Jason Cohn: Stuff has to, ferment for some time, for a very, very long time.
• 1:06:05
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:06:06
  Tad Eggleston: Talk to me about…
• 1:06:10
  Tad Eggleston: like, the documentary process. I don't know filmmaking nearly as much, and it's gotta be…
• 1:06:20
  Tad Eggleston: It's gonna be interesting to put together a documentary on…
• 1:06:26
  Tad Eggleston: At least, in part, a static medium.
• 1:06:29
  Tad Eggleston: And who's not alive.
• 1:06:31
  Jason Cohn: Hmm.
• 1:06:31
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, even if there were archival… I mean, it's not… it's not like you're doing a John Lennon documentary, where you can go find the archival home movie footage, or the.
• 1:06:41
  Jason Cohn: the footage…
• 1:06:41
  Tad Eggleston: from the Ed Sullivan Show.
• 1:06:43
  Jason Cohn: There's not… there's not a… Right. There's not a ton of… footage of Tezuka, like.
• 1:06:51
  Jason Cohn: doing his thing, right? There was a documentary… Well, and even then, his thing…
• 1:06:56
  Tad Eggleston: is drawing.
• 1:06:58
  Tad Eggleston: Ha, oh my god.
• 1:06:59
  Jason Cohn: Right. How much can you put the.
• 1:07:00
  Tad Eggleston: guy at the table.
• 1:07:02
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, yeah. It's cool, it's cool to see a little of it, but you wouldn't want to watch it for an hour, right?
• 1:07:07
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:07:07
  Jason Cohn: There was a documentary made, by NHK, which is, you know, like the Japanese version of the BBC or PBS,
• 1:07:17
  Jason Cohn: A couple years before he died, and he died pretty, you know, suddenly, so it's not, you know, he was, he was still very, ginky, he was still very healthy,
• 1:07:27
  Jason Cohn: at the time when it was made, very active. And, they did something which is very cool. They… they set up cameras, like, remote-controlled cameras in his… in his studio, where he worked by himself.
• 1:07:41
  Jason Cohn: with, like, mirrors and stuff, so it was, like, multi-angle. Oh, wow.
• 1:07:46
  Tad Eggleston: Wow.
• 1:07:47
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, so there's all this… there's… there actually is footage of him working, and it feels pretty intimate, because there's nobody in the room with him.
• 1:07:53
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 1:07:54
  Jason Cohn: That's pretty cool. I kind of… I sort of spent.
• 1:07:58
  Tad Eggleston: But I'm probably the only person who'd happily watch 2 hours of that.
• 1:08:01
  Jason Cohn: Maybe not 2 hours, but it's definitely cool for a few minutes.
• 1:08:06
  Jason Cohn: And I'm glad… I'm glad we have access to it, or I think we'll have access to it. I kind of specialize in this kind of film, like, sort of historical films about, about dead artists.
• 1:08:18
  Jason Cohn: Not everybody wants to make those films, but it's what I really like doing, and I… it definitely helps when it is a, visual medium. You know, I've done it about, like, architecture and design.
• 1:08:32
  Jason Cohn: This one, I think, is just going to be really fun, because the material, the visual material that's there, you know, the animation, the comic books, it's just so, you know, it's just so lively, it's so fun, it's so colorful.
• 1:08:47
  Jason Cohn: You know, plus, then what you get to do is you're weaving that material, that artistic material, with the historical context, right? So there's his…
• 1:08:59
  Jason Cohn: there's his… Personal, you know, journey, his story of, you know, rise and fall and all of that stuff.
• 1:09:08
  Jason Cohn: But there's also the story of Japan in that post-war period, which is just an incredible
• 1:09:14
  Jason Cohn: you know, period in history. You know, a country that was just absolutely flattened, and then rises in a, you know, period of just a couple of decades to, you know, challenge the superpowers.
• 1:09:25
  Jason Cohn: You know, on the economic stage, and the technological stage. So, there's just so much there. It's very challenging, like, how do you weave all of these pieces together, but it's exactly the kind of story that I love making.
• 1:09:43
  Tad Eggleston: And how do you go about,
• 1:09:48
  Tad Eggleston: How do you go about deciding who you want to talk to? And then how do you go about…
• 1:09:54
  Tad Eggleston: Arranging to talk to them.
• 1:09:56
  Jason Cohn: That's hard.
• 1:09:58
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I know, because I do that too.
• 1:10:01
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, it's real. So, I've had a lot of help from, the Tezuka Productions people, Tezuka's son, Makoto.
• 1:10:12
  Jason Cohn: It's been super helpful, and the producer, named Yoshimi Suzuki at Tezuka Productions, they've been super supportive and helpful. I don't know why they're, you know, they've agreed to help me so much, but I guess
• 1:10:27
  Jason Cohn: we just sort of hit it off, and they're just so great. I'm shocked.
• 1:10:32
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Because I've hit it off with you, I'm just shocked that anybody would…
• 1:10:35
  Jason Cohn: I'm a pretty difficult guy, man, I'm a pretty difficult guy.
• 1:10:39
  Jason Cohn: You should see me when I'm drinking.
• 1:10:42
  Tad Eggleston: You've let me go down how many different rabbit holes, and you're still smiling, and talking to me, and interested, asking me questions? Isn't it supposed to be the other way around? But you're a documentarian, so, I mean, you're used to asking questions. I'm done now.
• 1:10:57
  Jason Cohn: You gotta… you gotta like, you gotta like people, I mean, that's for sure, right? And same with being a podcaster, I guess. You have to like talking to people. So I do, and yeah, they've been just super helpful, and you know, they… they hooked me up with Otomo, and they hooked me up with, Gonagai, and Ryoko Ikeda, and Urasawa, and…
• 1:11:15
  Jason Cohn: You know, I don't know if you know this guy, but
• 1:11:18
  Jason Cohn: Marcel Maruyama, who is the founder of
• 1:11:23
  Jason Cohn: M5 Studios and Madhouse Studios is, like, the big…
• 1:11:26
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:11:27
  Jason Cohn: anime studios in Japan. I mean, he was Satoshi Kon's producer, the, you know, the producer of,
• 1:11:33
  Jason Cohn: you know, Paprika, and Perfect Blue, and Tokyo Godfathers, I mean, really some of the great anime of all time.
• 1:11:42
  Tad Eggleston: The answer is, I have vague awareness of most of those words.
• 1:11:48
  Jason Cohn: Okay, listen to me, man. If I have one, like, outside of Tezuk, if I have one recommendation, it's get into Satoshi Kon's
• 1:11:57
  Jason Cohn: films.
• 1:11:58
  Jason Cohn: He was, like, he to me… I mean, like, Miyazaki is… is…
• 1:12:05
  Jason Cohn: a total genius, he's brilliant for kids, but if you want, like, the same level of, kind of, craft.
• 1:12:13
  Jason Cohn: and sophistication, but for adult audiences. Satoshi Kon, to me, is, like, one of the great filmmakers, you know, of the 21st century.
• 1:12:25
  Jason Cohn: And, Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, Millennium Actress is probably my favorite of all of his films. Millennium Actress is just an absolute… it's just a perfect film. It's like a… it's a perfect movie.
• 1:12:40
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and, and, like… I have started watching more movies just because…
• 1:12:48
  Tad Eggleston: My family has a movie club.
• 1:12:50
  Jason Cohn: Oh, cool.
• 1:12:51
  Tad Eggleston: So, so…
• 1:12:53
  Jason Cohn: So my wife, who is not into animation at all, like, really not into anime, I made her watch, Millennium Actress, and first of all, at the end of it, she's crying, and when it was… and when it stopped, she said, that might be the best movie I've ever seen.
• 1:13:10
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:13:12
  Tad Eggleston: And it's currently playing on HBO Max.
• 1:13:15
  Jason Cohn: Oh, you can find it on HBO? Good. Yeah, you know, these… they kind of filter in and out of different things. Yeah, it's probably… yeah, that makes sense. HBO Max.
• 1:13:23
  Jason Cohn: That movie is about… his… all of his movies are about… Kind of the… the…
• 1:13:33
  Jason Cohn: Unreliability of memory in some way or another.
• 1:13:37
  Tad Eggleston: Ugh. You just hit one of my favorite things.
• 1:13:41
  Jason Cohn: Oh, that's, like, it's… so with him, you know, it's… it… it'll… sometimes it'll be, you know, drugs that cause it, or sometimes it'll be, you know, mental illness that cause it, sometimes it'll be, you know, various kinds of delusion. In this case.
• 1:13:55
  Tad Eggleston: How much… how about just, like… Memory is unreliable.
• 1:14:00
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:14:01
  Tad Eggleston: It doesn't have to be caused by…
• 1:14:03
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, it's just the epistemological reality that we cannot trust our… we just cannot trust our memories. But he finds really interesting stories.
• 1:14:13
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I want to say there's even a classic Japanese short story and film about that.
• 1:14:23
  Tad Eggleston: Could… could it be?
• 1:14:25
  Tad Eggleston: Rashomon, maybe?
• 1:14:27
  Jason Cohn: Oh, Rashomon, yeah, yeah.
• 1:14:29
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, Kurosawa's… Yeah, and that's based on…
• 1:14:34
  Tad Eggleston: The short story it's based on is actually, I think, Into the Trees, which was in a book called Rashomon. Rashomon, the story in that book, is a different story.
• 1:14:42
  Jason Cohn: And it's by Kawabata, right?
• 1:14:44
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:14:45
  Jason Cohn: The arc.
• 1:14:46
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 1:14:48
  Tad Eggleston: There's a good manga of that, too.
• 1:14:51
  Jason Cohn: of Roshima?
• 1:14:52
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:14:53
  Jason Cohn: Okay.
• 1:14:54
  Tad Eggleston: I'm trying to… no, I guess it's not still. For a long time, it was literally sitting on my desk, but either the cats knocked it over, or I moved it. One of the two.
• 1:15:06
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, no, that just went on my list.
• 1:15:10
  Tad Eggleston: Cause… cause I'm just looking… I mean, I just love all the names.
• 1:15:15
  Tad Eggleston: For, for, for the…
• 1:15:17
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, please, please get into Satoshi Kon. I'm, like, the biggest, I'm his biggest, champion.
• 1:15:25
  Tad Eggleston: I, I, I, I…
• 1:15:27
  Jason Cohn: And his producer, who we got to interview because he got his start.
• 1:15:33
  Tad Eggleston: The next one's called Dreaming Machine? That also sounds cool.
• 1:15:37
  Jason Cohn: That's a Satoshi con.
• 1:15:39
  Tad Eggleston: It's Production Unknown, it's listed as upcoming on IMDB, so…
• 1:15:44
  Jason Cohn: Huh.
• 1:15:44
  Tad Eggleston: It means it's somewhere in production.
• 1:15:46
  Jason Cohn: Well, unfortunately, Satoshi Kon died of cancer very, very young, 35 or…
• 1:15:51
  Tad Eggleston: That's… that's not good.
• 1:15:52
  Jason Cohn: No, it's not good. So, it might have been something that was in production, and then wasn't finished, and then someone else is going to finish it for him.
• 1:16:01
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and it says production unknown now, so…
• 1:16:03
  Jason Cohn: Oh, yeah.
• 1:16:04
  Tad Eggleston: It might… it may or may not… that's a shame, because there's, like, one picture, and it looks cool, too.
• 1:16:09
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 1:16:12
  Jason Cohn: I think I heard something about, other people taking over a lost production.
• 1:16:17
  Tad Eggleston: It does… it does seem like he's got a regular Co-director.
• 1:16:25
  Jason Cohn: That's possible, yeah.
• 1:16:30
  Jason Cohn: But, Maruyama was his… was his producer for all of these, and he… he was also the producer of, Pluto for Urasawa.
• 1:16:40
  Jason Cohn: And he got his start with Tezuka at the original production, animation production company, MushiPro.
• 1:16:48
  Jason Cohn: mushy production.
• 1:16:49
  Tad Eggleston: That's cool.
• 1:16:50
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 1:16:51
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, wow, yeah, really young, 46.
• 1:16:53
  Jason Cohn: Was he… I didn't even think he was that old.
• 1:16:56
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, 1963 to 2010.
• 1:16:59
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, that was really… that was tragic, because, man, that guy…
• 1:17:01
  Tad Eggleston: My age. That's my age. No, that's not allowed.
• 1:17:05
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, it happened.
• 1:17:06
  Jason Cohn: That guy was gonna go on making great films for a long time, it's really… it's really horrible.
• 1:17:13
  Jason Cohn: Yup.
• 1:17:16
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 1:17:20
  Tad Eggleston: like, I'm going through your filmography a little bit, and yes, I do my research as we talk.
• 1:17:25
  Jason Cohn: That's just…
• 1:17:26
  Tad Eggleston: just how I roll.
• 1:17:27
  Jason Cohn: Sure.
• 1:17:29
  Jason Cohn: Why prep beforehand?
• 1:17:31
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, every once in a while. It depends on how many other things I have going on, how well I… I know of or am intimidated by the per… like, I did… I did lots of prep for Paul Pope.
• 1:17:43
  Jason Cohn: Hmm.
• 1:17:45
  Tad Eggleston: Actually, probably the most prep I've ever done was for Spencer Ackerman.
• 1:17:50
  Jason Cohn: Hmm.
• 1:17:51
  Tad Eggleston: Because, like, at the time, he only had one comic book, but there's that whole Pulitzer Prize thing for, like, investigative journalism that just had me…
• 1:18:04
  Tad Eggleston: But… but anyway, I'm going… I'm going through your… your background, and… and, like.
• 1:18:13
  Tad Eggleston: it's an interesting background, and as you said, it's… you've got the design, you've got the Elliott noise, you've got the Eames.
• 1:18:21
  Tad Eggleston: But there's also, like, a political… thread.
• 1:18:25
  Jason Cohn: Yep.
• 1:18:26
  Tad Eggleston: Are you still working? So how does…
• 1:18:29
  Jason Cohn: I used to work for Frontline, even. Frontline on PBS, which was, you know, investigative.
• 1:18:34
  Jason Cohn: Stuff.
• 1:18:37
  Jason Cohn: that's kind of what I got started doing, but it wasn't really my… it wasn't really my… my thing.
• 1:18:43
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Well, I was just asking, overall, how does that lead you to Tezaka.
• 1:18:51
  Jason Cohn: Well, I was a Japan guy, like, I studied Japanese history in college.
• 1:18:57
  Jason Cohn: And, I lived in Japan for, like, 4 years. So then I, when I came back from Japan, I went to graduate school and studied journalism and started making films.
• 1:19:08
  Jason Cohn: And the two things never really, didn't really meet that much. Like, I wasn't able to do much journalistic work related to Japan, just a little bit. One of the things I did was a radio story
• 1:19:22
  Jason Cohn: about, metropolis.
• 1:19:27
  Tad Eggleston: Woodhouse?
• 1:19:28
  Jason Cohn: was a Tezuka story, which got adapted into a movie in 2011, I want to say?
• 1:19:37
  Jason Cohn: It's awesome. It got adapted into an animation by Otomo and Rintaro.
• 1:19:43
  Jason Cohn: That, you know, came to the U.S. and, you know, and had a nice theatrical run here, and so I got to write a little story about that, a radio story for that, for a syndicated radio show that I was… that I did some work for. And, so that kind of got me thinking about Tezuka as…
• 1:20:03
  Jason Cohn: like, a really interesting character that Americans don't know anything about.
• 1:20:08
  Jason Cohn: So, you know, I got to interview, like, Fred Schott, who, is kind of the dean of manga scholarship in English. He was, like, the first guy to, you know, start writing about manga as, like, a serious thing, you know, a serious area of study in English.
• 1:20:25
  Jason Cohn: He wrote Manga Manga, I think, in the 1980s, before anyone was really thinking about it seriously. But he was Tezuka's…
• 1:20:36
  Jason Cohn: translator, when Tezuka would come here for, like.
• 1:20:40
  Jason Cohn: film festivals and stuff like that. Fred Schott was his translator. So I got to talk to Fred and people like that, and I just started thinking about it, and then it's just one of those things, like we were saying, like, ideas sometimes have to ferment for a long time. I kind of sat on it for, like, 10 years or more, until I had some, you know, free time and just started developing the idea of, you know, making a film about Tezuka.
• 1:21:04
  Jason Cohn: And really, I was… I didn't think that it was gonna get any traction, because,
• 1:21:10
  Jason Cohn: you know, I just… he's just not that well known here, and the way that you have to raise money…
• 1:21:15
  Jason Cohn: you know, makes it hard to raise money on a subject that, you know, doesn't already have, like, a built-in massive audience, you know? It's easy to make… it's easy to make a documentary about Beyonce, you know? Especially when Beyonce…
• 1:21:30
  Tad Eggleston: So many people want to.
• 1:21:32
  Jason Cohn: Correct.
• 1:21:33
  Jason Cohn: And Beyonce won't let you do it unless she gets to produce it and tells you everything that's gonna be in it.
• 1:21:39
  Tad Eggleston: See? So not as easy as you might think.
• 1:21:41
  Jason Cohn: Right. But it's easy to get the money.
• 1:21:44
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:21:44
  Jason Cohn: I think it's hard to get the money, so what I did was I started writing grants to the National Endowment for the Humanities, and miraculously, I got a huge NEH grant.
• 1:21:58
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:21:58
  Jason Cohn: for $600,000, and we were like, full steam ahead, let's make this movie. And then, this guy got elected, you might have heard of him.
• 1:22:08
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that guy.
• 1:22:09
  Jason Cohn: That guy got elected, and he brought in this other guy.
• 1:22:13
  Jason Cohn: to run something called… Did you get…
• 1:22:15
  Tad Eggleston: doged.
• 1:22:16
  Jason Cohn: We got… we got dodged up the…
• 1:22:19
  Tad Eggleston: I won't.
• 1:22:20
  Jason Cohn: I won't say.
• 1:22:22
  Tad Eggleston: We can. We put an explicit on our…
• 1:22:26
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, I got dodged there, and they took away all our… we basically… they canceled our $600,000 grant. So that's why… that's why we're kickstarting, because we need to…
• 1:22:37
  Jason Cohn: racism.
• 1:22:38
  Tad Eggleston: money.
• 1:22:39
  Jason Cohn: We need to raise some money. But we got very lucky, because when that happened, this gentleman, named, Glenn Fukushima, who is a Japanese-American businessman, heard about our story.
• 1:22:51
  Jason Cohn: And he felt sorry for me. And he said, I'm gonna help you out. And so he gave me some money, which has really kept us going. We were able to go to Japan and interview all these guys that we've been talking about, Urasawa, and .
• 1:23:02
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 1:23:03
  Jason Cohn: and Rintaro, and all of these guys. So I've been able to, like, keep the production going.
• 1:23:10
  Jason Cohn: While we get the Kickstarter up and running and all of that.
• 1:23:15
  Jason Cohn: But for your audience, like, the big pitch here is, please, you know, find the Kickstarter campaign and sign up for notifications so that.
• 1:23:22
  Tad Eggleston: Well, we will have links in our show notes, so if you're listening, you have access to a link to the Kickstarter campaign. Click it. Sign up for notifications. When you get notified, give money.
• 1:23:37
  Jason Cohn: There we go.
• 1:23:39
  Jason Cohn: That's… That's how you do it.
• 1:23:42
  Tad Eggleston: This is… I don't like to mess around with fancy ads.
• 1:23:46
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, you're…
• 1:23:46
  Tad Eggleston: It's straight to the point.
• 1:23:48
  Jason Cohn: You're much better.
• 1:23:48
  Tad Eggleston: Want cool things, the people who make them need money.
• 1:23:52
  Jason Cohn: Exactly. You're much better… We're not talking they need.
• 1:23:55
  Tad Eggleston: money so that they can be rich and have champagne and whatnot. They need money because they have rent, or mortgages, or kids in college, or they like to, like, eat more than once a week.
• 1:24:07
  Jason Cohn: And we have to pay editors, and we have to pay cinematographers, and we have to pay…
• 1:24:11
  Tad Eggleston: also need to eat and pay rent.
• 1:24:15
  Jason Cohn: Exactly. Yeah.
• 1:24:18
  Tad Eggleston: I like to make it clear that, like, comics are not an industry where many people are, like.
• 1:24:25
  Jason Cohn: No.
• 1:24:26
  Jason Cohn: No, documentaries.
• 1:24:27
  Tad Eggleston: gold?
• 1:24:28
  Jason Cohn: Nope.
• 1:24:28
  Tad Eggleston: Most… most people involved in comics
• 1:24:34
  Tad Eggleston: are smart enough that they could work at 6… McDonald's for 6 months and become a manager and make more money than they're making right now.
• 1:24:41
  Jason Cohn: Absolutely. And animators are the same thing.
• 1:24:45
  Jason Cohn: Right. You know, especially in Japan, man, animators, you know, most animators have to live at home, you know, with their parents, because they can't afford to move out.
• 1:24:53
  Tad Eggleston: As we discussed earlier, that's not as uncommon in Japan to begin with.
• 1:24:57
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, well, that's true. But still, like, they're not making any money. Like, if I told you how much money they're making in, like, in US dollars, like, a day rate for.
• 1:25:05
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I, I, I'm fully aware.
• 1:25:07
  Jason Cohn: It's pathetic. It's totally pathetic.
• 1:25:11
  Tad Eggleston: I'm fully aware.
• 1:25:14
  Jason Cohn: And, you know, a lot of people blame Tezuka for that, because, when he created Astro Boy, he agreed to do it for Fuji Television.
• 1:25:22
  Jason Cohn: at such a… for such a cheap rate per 22 minutes, that the argument goes, it was Tezuka's curse, that that kind of set the… set the… the rate, basically, it set the standard for how cheap you're supposed to be able to produce animation. And it's, you know, people say that…
• 1:25:42
  Tad Eggleston: And my counterargument is really, really simple.
• 1:25:46
  Tad Eggleston: the option B is, like, you never would have had anime.
• 1:25:51
  Jason Cohn: Never we've had it, yeah.
• 1:25:56
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I don't know enough about Tezuka, maybe you can answer this question. Did he continue to make animation that cheap? Or was that the introductory price? Was that, like…
• 1:26:08
  Jason Cohn: It was sort of the introductory price, but… but what happened was he… well, there's a couple things. You know, he… he definitely did increase the rate that he charged to Fuji, but he also…
• 1:26:23
  Jason Cohn: started getting the fees for the export license, right? So he was selling it to the United States and Canada and other places.
• 1:26:33
  Tad Eggleston: Other things that, like…
• 1:26:36
  Jason Cohn: Right.
• 1:26:37
  Tad Eggleston: counter.
• 1:26:38
  Jason Cohn: And he also kind of invented, like, the merchandising model, right? The media mix model, where he was selling lots of, like, you know, Astro Boy was used to sell everything. Tube socks, and piggy banks, and lunch boxes, and, you know, all of that stuff.
• 1:26:52
  Jason Cohn: So he was making money from that, but then it was all just funneling back into the… into the animation studio. Like, he really never… he never got… he never got rich off of it, and in fact, the two production companies that he started, I think, both went, bankrupt.
• 1:27:08
  Jason Cohn: Right. So he never… he was never…
• 1:27:10
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, you mean he had the same problem that many American artists do? That they're artists, not businessmen?
• 1:27:18
  Jason Cohn: He really was, like, I don't think that he was a great businessman.
• 1:27:21
  Jason Cohn: They are.
• 1:27:23
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, even so many of the artists that have the minds to possibly be businessmen, it's not their passion.
• 1:27:31
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 1:27:31
  Tad Eggleston: So if they're sitting there going, oh, from a business standpoint, it would be good to stop doing this thing that I love doing.
• 1:27:39
  Tad Eggleston: But, I can technically afford it.
• 1:27:45
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:27:47
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, well, even, you know, even the idea of creating the Astro Boy weekly television cartoon, that wasn't his idea. Like, Tezuka wanted to just keep making… he was making, like, little, artsy, animated shorts that he was sending off to European film festivals.
• 1:28:06
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:28:07
  Jason Cohn: that were making zero money. Of course. But, you know, he had some guys in his studio who were like, you know, we can't keep living off of your revenues from your comic books forever, like, we're gonna have to, like, figure out how to make some money. What do you think about this television idea?
• 1:28:24
  Jason Cohn: And he's like, well, I guess we could do television. And they're like, well, okay, how about Astro Boy? That's pretty popular, why don't we do Astro Boy? And he's like, yeah, I guess we could do Astro Boy.
• 1:28:33
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it's why even in the US, often the most successful studios are the ones that find the ways
• 1:28:40
  Tad Eggleston: to… They're not actually the most… visually innovative.
• 1:28:47
  Jason Cohn: Well, look, you have to have… you have to have people running the studio who are smart about business, and then you also have to have, you know, if you look at, you know, Pixar, you have to have people like Brad Bird and, you know, and John Lasseter, you know, who are…
• 1:29:03
  Jason Cohn: You know, artistically, You know, just super.
• 1:29:07
  Tad Eggleston: But a lot of the time, you also have to be able to make something that's compelling enough to make people watch it on the shoestring budget that you're given.
• 1:29:14
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 1:29:16
  Tad Eggleston: Because the shoestring budget represents…
• 1:29:20
  Tad Eggleston: The money that they're gonna give you, and if you want to pay people well, then you need to make certain they don't have to work too hard to get that pittance of a money.
• 1:29:27
  Jason Cohn: Right.
• 1:29:28
  Tad Eggleston: go do something else.
• 1:29:30
  Jason Cohn: So now I'm gonna, like, cross-reference, like, all of the films I've made. So, you know, I made this film about Charles and Ray Eames, the designers, and Charles Eames was, in addition to being a great industrial designer and filmmaker and other things, he…
• 1:29:45
  Jason Cohn: Was a bit of a philosopher, and he really strongly believed in
• 1:29:50
  Jason Cohn: the importance of constraints. He felt that there was no great art.
• 1:29:56
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, he'd get along really well with Matt Madden.
• 1:29:59
  Jason Cohn: I think a lot of… a lot of artists get this… this concept, you know, that you can't have 100% freedom. It's… 100% freedom is actually debilitating, right? Yeah. And so, he… Charles Eames loved constraints.
• 1:30:13
  Jason Cohn: Budgets are a great constraint. Like, budgets really force you to be innovative, to, like, think out of the box, you know, blah blah blah.
• 1:30:21
  Jason Cohn: You have to, like, find new ways of doing things.
• 1:30:23
  Jason Cohn: under budget. And so, you know, when people talk about how
• 1:30:29
  Jason Cohn: there's just something about… about anime that's different from American or European animation.
• 1:30:38
  Jason Cohn: A lot of those things that they're talking about are… tricks.
• 1:30:45
  Jason Cohn: that emerged in Tezuka's Mushi Production Studio as ways of
• 1:30:52
  Jason Cohn: Dealing with the fact that they had no money.
• 1:30:55
  Jason Cohn: Their budgets were so small, they had to… they couldn't do, you know,
• 1:31:01
  Jason Cohn: 12 frames per second, they had to do 6 or 8 frames per second, or sometimes 3 frames per second. And they had to make do a lot of times with just using a single frame.
• 1:31:12
  Jason Cohn: and then doing a slow camera push on that frame. Or…
• 1:31:17
  Jason Cohn: just animating, you know, an eyelid twitching, or a little block of hair. So all of those things we're now completely familiar with as being, like, traits of anime, and we think of those as sort of aesthetic choices. Well, they are aesthetic choices, but they started out as economic choices, because…
• 1:31:33
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, absolutely.
• 1:31:34
  Jason Cohn: Because it was totally constrained by… by budget.
• 1:31:37
  Jason Cohn: Right.
• 1:31:39
  Jason Cohn: So, you know, I don't know, sometimes good things come out of… out of the.
• 1:31:42
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I think lots of good things come out of budget. I, I, I think…
• 1:31:46
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I guess the bigger statement I was making is that I always hope that the budget doesn't include overworking and underpaying your creatives.
• 1:31:58
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, I agree.
• 1:31:59
  Tad Eggleston: making your decisions based on, okay, what's a fair wage to pay the people doing this, and what's a fair amount of work to ask for them? Now, how much is left? What can we do with that?
• 1:32:12
  Jason Cohn: And that's why I think people get the Tezuka story wrong, because they assume that when he was making, Astro Boy for, you know, you hear different numbers all the time, but, like, somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 per episode in today's money, not in 1963 money, in today's money.
• 1:32:32
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:32:32
  Jason Cohn: I don't really believe that, like, I need to kind of figure out what the actual numbers are, but I've… I've heard it stated as low as that. It wasn't because he… they… they weren't underpaying…
• 1:32:47
  Jason Cohn: they're animators. The animators, actually, the ones that I talked to, were very satisfied
• 1:32:53
  Jason Cohn: with their pay, they felt that compared to what they would have gotten at Toei, or working in any comparable field, they were well compensated. They felt they were satisfied, and the working conditions were great. They worked really, really hard. The hours were long, but that was just true of Japan everywhere.
• 1:33:12
  Tad Eggleston: It's somewhat true of artists everywhere.
• 1:33:15
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, but Japan after the war, I mean, it was, like.
• 1:33:17
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, no, I mean…
• 1:33:20
  Tad Eggleston: We talk about the Protestant work ethic in the United States, it ain't nothing compared to…
• 1:33:26
  Jason Cohn: Japan actually has a word, karoshi, which means working yourself to death.
• 1:33:31
  Jason Cohn: It's like… it's… it's like a word, you know? And when you have a word… when you have a word for it.
• 1:33:37
  Jason Cohn: So… yeah, no, but they, they actually, they loved working for Tezika. They felt that they were in the, the place where,
• 1:33:47
  Jason Cohn: where animation was being pioneered in Japan, and they felt that they were paid well. So I think that it's more, what happened
• 1:33:58
  Jason Cohn: once, like, There became a competition, and there were, like, multiple studios fighting for limited broadcast space.
• 1:34:08
  Jason Cohn: Then…
• 1:34:10
  Jason Cohn: I think that, you know, basically the supply and demand kind of went to work, and there were more studios, fighting for a limited number of, you know, broadcast slots, and that just meant that people were getting paid less and less over time.
• 1:34:30
  Jason Cohn: And, yeah, so now it's just really… even though, you know, animation is, like, a huge industry, and it's very popular, and, you know, Netflix and all these other platforms are making a lot of money off of it, the actual…
• 1:34:43
  Jason Cohn: animators, the actual workers in the field are not getting rich off of it at all.
• 1:34:47
  Tad Eggleston: Well, that's because… I mean, we talked briefly off-air regarding baseball parks and late-stage capitalism, and that's because in this so-called late-stage capitalism, we've decided that the only part that matters is the capital.
• 1:35:05
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, the artists are not… are not valued.
• 1:35:08
  Tad Eggleston: So, you know, I mean, this is where I talked briefly earlier about, like, Adam Smith would not recognize this as capitalism, because, like.
• 1:35:20
  Tad Eggleston: He viewed capital as important, And necessary, and therefore worthy of getting
• 1:35:27
  Tad Eggleston: a reward, but, like, because it represented
• 1:35:32
  Tad Eggleston: the financial risk. Somehow, we've set up a system where the capital
• 1:35:40
  Tad Eggleston: gets all of the rewards, and has none of the risk.
• 1:35:45
  Jason Cohn: Fair.
• 1:35:48
  Jason Cohn: Good luck.
• 1:35:48
  Tad Eggleston: No.
• 1:35:49
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, and a lot of cases.
• 1:35:50
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, I suspect when you look at things like U.S. Hollywood and whatnot.
• 1:35:56
  Tad Eggleston: Even more so, because I… I'm…
• 1:36:00
  Tad Eggleston: It would take a good accountant who had access to a lot of stuff, but I suspect…
• 1:36:07
  Tad Eggleston: That when they make a $100 million movie.
• 1:36:11
  Tad Eggleston: They're already paying themselves 40 or 50 million dollars, because they own…
• 1:36:17
  Tad Eggleston: The catering company, and they own…
• 1:36:20
  Tad Eggleston: The camera rental company, and they own…
• 1:36:25
  Jason Cohn: Maybe.
• 1:36:26
  Tad Eggleston: the effects come… I mean, I know in some cases that they do, like, like, so… so I'm certain that there's an
• 1:36:32
  Tad Eggleston: Element of bloat to some of these budgets.
• 1:36:36
  Jason Cohn: Well, I would put it… I would put it this way. You can be a studio executive and fail upwards.
• 1:36:44
  Tad Eggleston: God, yes.
• 1:36:45
  Jason Cohn: But you can't be an artist and fail upwards.
• 1:36:48
  Jason Cohn: If you're… if you're… if you're not creating successful works, You… you starve.
• 1:36:55
  Tad Eggleston: It's hard to be an artist and succeed upward.
• 1:36:59
  Jason Cohn: Yes, I agree. It's hard to be an artist and tread water successfully, yeah.
• 1:37:05
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 1:37:06
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, that's one of the things that I'm hoping to be able to do is, for this film, is spend some time with, young contemporary, animators who are, you know, sort of the…
• 1:37:21
  Jason Cohn: the grandchildren, so to speak, artistically, of Tezuka, and, like, talked about how, you know, the sort of struggle to survive.
• 1:37:30
  Tad Eggleston: I'll be curious as to, like, I'm looking forward to seeing the film, period, but I'll be really curious to see how that works out, because I know…
• 1:37:40
  Tad Eggleston: And again, I'm only a novice when it comes to Japanese culture, even when it comes to manga and anime, which is the only part of Japanese culture that I'm
• 1:37:50
  Tad Eggleston: even a novice in. Well, baseball.
• 1:37:53
  Tad Eggleston: Who?
• 1:37:55
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know if I'm…
• 1:37:56
  Jason Cohn: No.
• 1:37:57
  Tad Eggleston: than a novice in their food.
• 1:37:59
  Tad Eggleston: Among other things, I… I'm allergic to fish.
• 1:38:03
  Tad Eggleston: So… like… like, half the food that… Japanese food that people want to eat, it's like.
• 1:38:11
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 1:38:11
  Tad Eggleston: I'll get sick.
• 1:38:12
  Jason Cohn: That's too bad.
• 1:38:15
  Tad Eggleston: Though there is a great Superman… food manga.
• 1:38:22
  Jason Cohn: Superman? Food Manga?
• 1:38:23
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:38:24
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, oh, oh, I always forget the name of it.
• 1:38:33
  Tad Eggleston: It's called Superman vs. Meshi.
• 1:38:38
  Tad Eggleston: Where Superman flies to Japan to eat fast food every day.
• 1:38:43
  Jason Cohn: Okay.
• 1:38:44
  Tad Eggleston: Sometimes takes his friends with him.
• 1:38:46
  Tad Eggleston: Mission…
• 1:38:47
  Jason Cohn: Meishi means meal or rice.
• 1:38:50
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:38:52
  Jason Cohn: Okay.
• 1:38:54
  Tad Eggleston: He eats almost exclusively fast food.
• 1:38:58
  Jason Cohn: The, the…
• 1:38:58
  Tad Eggleston: the…
• 1:38:59
  Jason Cohn: Japan is pretty aggressive.
• 1:39:01
  Tad Eggleston: The write-up on it is…
• 1:39:03
  Tad Eggleston: It's hungry work being Superman. That's why every day for lunch in Superman vs. Meshi, Superman makes a quick stop over in Japan to try a new chain restaurant. Whether it's a hearty bowl of curry or conveyor belt sushi, the Man of Steel loves to indulge in the delectable delicacies the country has to offer.
• 1:39:21
  Jason Cohn: Nice. Well, this is making me hungry, and it's, getting to be about dinner time.
• 1:39:25
  Tad Eggleston: Alright. Well, I have two closing questions, and I was just thinking that it was time to get to them anyway.
• 1:39:30
  Jason Cohn: Okay.
• 1:39:31
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I do want you to… oh, let me finish that thought, though, is I'm curious… what I do know is that, like, a lot…
• 1:39:38
  Tad Eggleston: There's still a lot of pressure not to talk negatively about the industry.
• 1:39:44
  Jason Cohn: So I…
• 1:39:45
  Tad Eggleston: I wonder what kind of response you'd get
• 1:39:48
  Tad Eggleston: From any younger animator, at least in terms of being willing to talk about how hard it might be, or…
• 1:39:57
  Tad Eggleston: Whether they're underpaid or anything like that.
• 1:40:01
  Jason Cohn: Probably be more…
• 1:40:01
  Tad Eggleston: more than happy to talk about Tezuka.
• 1:40:03
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, yeah. I will come back and talk to you about it after I've done those interviews. I'm curious about that myself, like, I mean, I think that they are going to be very, you know, cautious about… they're not going to want to sound like they're, you know… Ungrateful.
• 1:40:19
  Jason Cohn: Ungrateful, or they're dissing their, their, you know, the studios that they work for.
• 1:40:24
  Jason Cohn: I mean, between.
• 1:40:26
  Tad Eggleston: the ingrained cultural respect, and add to that that they're… I mean…
• 1:40:33
  Tad Eggleston: it can be dangerous to badmouth your publisher or your studio or whatnot in the United States, and I've heard that that's, like.
• 1:40:41
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 1:40:42
  Tad Eggleston: the next degree, it's like, oh, oh, you don't think you're paid well enough? Well, you never need to draw again.
• 1:40:50
  Jason Cohn: We can… we can see to it that that never happens, yeah. Right. I'll keep that… I'll keep that in mind. Actually, I haven't really been thinking about that, but that's… that's probably a good, thing to keep in the back of my mind, you know, that there… people are going to be a little bit cautious about how they talk about their industry.
• 1:41:08
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, you might almost be more likely to have some of the established superstars be willing to have that conversation with you than the…
• 1:41:18
  Tad Eggleston: Young, young ones.
• 1:41:19
  Jason Cohn: Otomo was totally trashing the manga today, yeah, for example.
• 1:41:24
  Tad Eggleston: When you hit the point where it's like, haha, no, you need me more than I need you. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:41:28
  Jason Cohn: Ultimo doesn't need anybody, but, yeah, he was totally trashing, like, the contemporary manga, and anime into, well, mostly manga. Like, he was mostly just saying that, you know…
• 1:41:41
  Jason Cohn: it's all driven by editorial now, it's no longer… it's no longer sort of auteur, you know, artist-driven, and it's, you know, he feels like it's really, affected the quality of what he sees.
• 1:41:55
  Tad Eggleston: Alright. Well, I have two standard closing questions. Alright. So, since you're starting to get hungry, and that's my fault, and I have another thing to do in, like, half an hour, we should get to them. Yeah, lay it on. So, my first is a newer one,
• 1:42:11
  Tad Eggleston: I'm, like, four and a half years into this podcast.
• 1:42:15
  Tad Eggleston: And I… I, like… pinch myself regularly, because I feel like I live in the Twilight Zone.
• 1:42:23
  Tad Eggleston: Like, whether it's texting with Paul Pope, or… or hanging out with Mark Russell, or… or…
• 1:42:30
  Tad Eggleston: you know, just the conversations that I get to have.
• 1:42:33
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, you can interact with your heroes.
• 1:42:36
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right. The people who, like, 10 years ago.
• 1:42:40
  Tad Eggleston: I would've said, I'm gonna do… I'm gonna have a conversation with them.
• 1:42:43
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 1:42:44
  Tad Eggleston: You're… you're… you're shitting me, but…
• 1:42:46
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna go to a baseball game with them? Are you on… or, like, are you on Mars?
• 1:42:51
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, these are, it's like people… it's the same with me, like, people that I would be totally intimidated to, like, you know, chat up at a bar, but I get to, like, sit down with them for 2 hours and ask them questions, and it's like, I love… I love that aspect of my job.
• 1:43:05
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and that's where I was going, is everybody in the industry, and for you, I'll expand the industry beyond comics, because obviously you've…
• 1:43:14
  Tad Eggleston: you live in a different industry and have gotten to visit even more, but every… everybody in the industry, and I suspect everybody in any creative industry, like.
• 1:43:24
  Tad Eggleston: Has experiences like this.
• 1:43:27
  Tad Eggleston: So, tell me a story. Tell me one of those experiences that you've had in your life that you just, like, you pinch yourself. You're like, did I really get to do that? How did this happen to Jason Cohn from Southern California?
• 1:43:44
  Jason Cohn: I'm from Los Angeles, so, like, I would, like, you know, walk past, you know.
• 1:43:50
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, so you're gonna tell me you… you were… when I was 7, I… I was hanging out with…
• 1:43:56
  Jason Cohn: Not exactly, but, like, we get a little bit jaded with celebrity, like, celebrity doesn't, like…
• 1:44:02
  Tad Eggleston: It doesn't have to be celebrity.
• 1:44:03
  Jason Cohn: Well, I would say that… so… it's… I'm kind of in the mode of thinking about this project, so I'm gonna say that, like, the one that I was most excited about was Otomo.
• 1:44:14
  Jason Cohn: And, and that, like, everybody that… so I was working with a local crew.
• 1:44:21
  Jason Cohn: You know, local, cameraman, local sound people, local…
• 1:44:27
  Jason Cohn: you know, we call them line producers, you know, people kind of helping, like, field producers, and… Right.
• 1:44:35
  Jason Cohn: They were helping me with doing the interview. My Japanese is, like, okay, but not really great for doing an interview, so I needed a lot of help.
• 1:44:44
  Jason Cohn: And, everyone… we were all just, like.
• 1:44:48
  Jason Cohn: so, like, pissing ourselves because we were going to Ultimo's house, and we were gonna sit in his living room, and he was gonna… and he ended up just being, like, a totally sweet guy. He, you know, he, he signed copies of books for us, and he didn't just sign his name, he, like, drew, like.
• 1:45:05
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 1:45:06
  Jason Cohn: full-on, I mean, I can show you, like, full-on drawings in the… on the opening page of books for all of us. I mean, he was just, like, really generous.
• 1:45:17
  Jason Cohn: He was someone that, like, we all… it's like, dude, this guy created Akira.
• 1:45:22
  Jason Cohn: Like, that… for… especially for the Japanese guys, I think that for them, it was, you know, it was the equivalent of meeting, you know, Scorsese, or Spielberg, or somebody like that. It's kind of like… he's like a monumental figure, you know?
• 1:45:37
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:45:38
  Tad Eggleston: I love that. I love that… I love that… I love… I mean, I love that they wind up just…
• 1:45:44
  Tad Eggleston: Being so cool.
• 1:45:46
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, in the end, you know, they're, they're happy to…
• 1:45:48
  Jason Cohn: I mean, we're talking about a guy that, like, meant a lot to him growing up, like, he was happy to talk about him.
• 1:45:53
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Well, and, like, intellectually, I know that this is the case, that they're all just humans, too.
• 1:46:00
  Tad Eggleston: And that the biggest reason that I've become friends, like, friend friends with so many of my heroes is that, like.
• 1:46:06
  Tad Eggleston: Turns out, even comics geeks don't always have a lot of comic geeks to talk with in their lives. And when it could be a comics geek that's also a baseball geek, or also a, you know, we bond over a lot of the same things that anybody bonds over.
• 1:46:23
  Jason Cohn: Yep.
• 1:46:24
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 1:46:25
  Tad Eggleston: You know, the second we sat down in the room together, we knew that we had one passion in common.
• 1:46:31
  Tad Eggleston: You know, when it comes to adult friendships, that's, like, halfway there, and the next half is effort.
• 1:46:37
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, that's right, that's exactly right.
• 1:46:40
  Tad Eggleston: But it's still… it still takes a moment, sometimes.
• 1:46:44
  Jason Cohn: I felt, I felt very, I felt very bondy with, with, I don't know if he would feel, feels the same way, but, with, Gutierrez, with Jorge Gutierrez, the animator.
• 1:46:58
  Jason Cohn: Who created Book of Life. I went to, like, his house is, like, not far from where I grew up in Los Angeles.
• 1:47:05
  Jason Cohn: And we're both big, big Dodger fans.
• 1:47:08
  Jason Cohn: You know, when he opens up the door, he's wearing a Dodger cap. I think I was probably wearing a Dodger cap, and we just kind of liked a lot of the same things, and .
• 1:47:18
  Tad Eggleston: was hard for me, because I've always been the giant side of the rivalry, except for, like…
• 1:47:25
  Tad Eggleston: It took me a year or so after 89, and the ass-kicking they gave my Cubs.
• 1:47:31
  Jason Cohn: chiropractor.
• 1:47:31
  Tad Eggleston: to really be able to root for the Giants again. But then…
• 1:47:36
  Tad Eggleston: A, one of my best friends is in LA, and his kids are big Dodger fans.
• 1:47:42
  Tad Eggleston: And… and B… Shohei.
• 1:47:46
  Jason Cohn: I mean, if you're… if you're, like, a Japanophile, which I am.
• 1:47:49
  Tad Eggleston: So now I've been…
• 1:47:50
  Jason Cohn: become a big.
• 1:47:51
  Tad Eggleston: Dodger fan.
• 1:47:52
  Jason Cohn: You got the… you got the Shohei, the Yamamoto, the Sasaki, I mean, it's… it feels… it's like, when you go to Dodger Stadium now, like, I don't get to go very often because I live in the Bay Area, but when you go, it just feels like you're in, like, you know, it's like the Tokyo Dome West, you know?
• 1:48:11
  Tad Eggleston: I believe it. I… I… I…
• 1:48:15
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't been to a Dodger game, and I just laughed because I'm looking up Gutierrez right now, and one of the pictures that I saw of him was in a Dodger cap. His Wikipedia picture, he's in a Dodger cap.
• 1:48:26
  Jason Cohn: So he also, he also did a drawing for us, an illustration of Astro Boy, his version of Astro Boy, a very Mexican Astro Boy, which is awesome. People are gonna really want that one.
• 1:48:39
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah.
• 1:48:44
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, Tani's just… And a huge manga fan. Yeah. Huge manga fan.
• 1:48:51
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:48:53
  Jason Cohn: I know, I would like to get him on camera talking about it, but I have a friend who made a film about Japanese baseball, and he wouldn't even talk to her about Japanese baseball, so I don't think he's going to talk to me about manga.
• 1:49:07
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, honestly, from what little I know about him.
• 1:49:11
  Tad Eggleston: or what little he's allowed to be known about him, I think he's more likely to talk to you about.
• 1:49:18
  Jason Cohn: Mongo.
• 1:49:18
  Tad Eggleston: manga than he is to talk to anybody about baseball.
• 1:49:22
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 1:49:22
  Tad Eggleston: Overall, he's just intensely private.
• 1:49:26
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, yeah, I mean, but… and he's, like, the biggest star in the world.
• 1:49:29
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:49:30
  Jason Cohn: I mean, like, can you imagine, like, being… being him? Like, he cannot go anywhere in Japan.
• 1:49:37
  Tad Eggleston: I, I mean, honestly, it, it…
• 1:49:39
  Tad Eggleston: the best way to describe it to an American audience would be to say he's Michael Jordan, except that, like.
• 1:49:46
  Tad Eggleston: as calling Tazaka… like, Japan's Disney is probably not giving him enough credit.
• 1:49:55
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 1:49:55
  Tad Eggleston: Calling Shohei Japan's Jordan is probably not giving him enough credit.
• 1:50:01
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, because we had, you know, at the same time that we had Jordan, we had other big superstars. Right. There's nobody in Japan, in any field, who compares to him for.
• 1:50:12
  Tad Eggleston: Well, there's nobody in… There's so few people in any field that compare to him… Period. I mean…
• 1:50:21
  Jason Cohn: Yes.
• 1:50:21
  Tad Eggleston: One of the things that I appreciate so much about watching him is, like, We are objectively, probably…
• 1:50:32
  Tad Eggleston: With the possible exceptions of Martin Digo and Bullet Rogan in the Negro Leagues.
• 1:50:39
  Tad Eggleston: Watching the greatest baseball player who ever lived in front of us right now.
• 1:50:43
  Jason Cohn: Except for right now, because he's mired in a terrible slump. I don't think he has had a hit in, like, 5 days.
• 1:50:50
  Tad Eggleston: Find me a great hitter who's gone… never gone 5 days without a hit.
• 1:50:55
  Jason Cohn: He doesn't usually slump.
• 1:50:57
  Tad Eggleston: No, but I mean, I remember…
• 1:50:59
  Tad Eggleston: I remember Derek Jeter had a 30-game Hitler streak.
• 1:51:03
  Jason Cohn: Are you serious? Oh my god.
• 1:51:05
  Tad Eggleston: Right. And I think it was, like, 27 games into it, somebody finally asked him the question, like.
• 1:51:12
  Tad Eggleston: what are you gonna do to get out of this? Blah, blah, blah. And he just turned to them and said.
• 1:51:16
  Tad Eggleston: Nothing. I've been watching the tape, I'm hitting the ball hard, it's getting caught.
• 1:51:23
  Jason Cohn: Well, that's not happening with Shohei. Shohei's just hitting ground balls to first.
• 1:51:28
  Jason Cohn: But anyway, he's rolling… he's rolling over him.
• 1:51:30
  Jason Cohn: Anyway, this is not a baseball podcast, but man.
• 1:51:33
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it is 5… er, it is at least once a year. We do have the Baseball and Comics Roundtable every year.
• 1:51:39
  Jason Cohn: Oh, cool.
• 1:51:41
  Jason Cohn: Well, call me in for that one, for sure.
• 1:51:43
  Tad Eggleston: I will definitely. We should stay in touch in general, but now the final question, and I already teased it, particularly because
• 1:51:51
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna ask you to give me a couple of different categories. I definitely…
• 1:51:56
  Tad Eggleston: I definitely want a manga, and I definitely want… an anime, because you're clearly…
• 1:52:05
  Tad Eggleston: way more knowledgeable than me on both of those. But then I want something from literally any other category.
• 1:52:11
  Tad Eggleston: But the question that I always ask last is, tell me something you love.
• 1:52:16
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably a comic, but we don't have rules.
• 1:52:20
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules. But something that you love.
• 1:52:25
  Tad Eggleston: That not enough people around you have experienced, and you really, really want them to, so that you have more people to talk about it with.
• 1:52:32
  Jason Cohn: Oh, it's funny, because the last part of your question, I would usually say a graphic novel or a comic book, because most of my friends are not into it, and they, like… I always talk about comics and graphic novels, and my friends are like, what the fuck are you talking about?
• 1:52:49
  Tad Eggleston: This is why this podcast exists?
• 1:52:52
  Jason Cohn: Yeah. To celebrate.
• 1:52:53
  Tad Eggleston: the medium of comics, because I have too many people around me who they find out I like comics, and they're like, oh, what'd you think of this Spider-Man movie?
• 1:53:02
  Jason Cohn: Right. But for your audience to, like, say, oh, a graphic novel, they're gonna be like…
• 1:53:08
  Tad Eggleston: for my… I mean, Nate Powell gave me X-Men.
• 1:53:11
  Tad Eggleston: Because he's a… he's an indie comic artist. He's not actually around a lot of people that are reading X-Men, but he was reading the current X-Men at the time, and loving it.
• 1:53:23
  Jason Cohn: Okay, well, I'll tell you, I'm really…
• 1:53:24
  Tad Eggleston: So it's your world, it's not my world, it's your world.
• 1:53:28
  Jason Cohn: I'm terrible at being… I'm terrible at being put on the spot with this kind of thing, but I think I'm gonna be able to pull this off. Okay, so I'm gonna… I'm gonna recommend to… to you,
• 1:53:39
  Jason Cohn: a Tezuka… manga.
• 1:53:44
  Jason Cohn: And I'm trying to think… I think…
• 1:53:48
  Jason Cohn: Like, what's the best entry in…
• 1:53:53
  Jason Cohn: I think the one that sort of best sort of gets at his worldview, and just the expansiveness of his universe, and, like, just how…
• 1:54:07
  Jason Cohn: how risk-taking he could be as a storyteller, I would say… Phoenix.
• 1:54:15
  Jason Cohn: Which is, he… that was, you know, they call it his… his… his life's work, because he started working on it in the 50s, and when he died.
• 1:54:24
  Jason Cohn: In the 80s, he was still working on it, he hadn't finished it, and maybe he never really intended to finish it, because sort of the nature of it, it could have gone on forever. But it's this, it's a masterpiece, and
• 1:54:37
  Jason Cohn: It has, you know, different volumes with different stories, and they're all kind of interconnected in crazy ways.
• 1:54:44
  Jason Cohn: And I think it gets at a lot of his sort of philosophical worldview, which mixes, you know.
• 1:54:54
  Jason Cohn: sort of a lot of Buddhist ideas about reincarnation, and…
• 1:54:59
  Jason Cohn: Stuff like that, but also his… you know, he was a scientist, he was a… he was… we didn't… we haven't talked about this, but he was trained as a doctor, he could have been a doctor.
• 1:55:09
  Jason Cohn: He was… so he has a very scientific
• 1:55:12
  Jason Cohn: worldview at the same time, so it's… it's fascinating the way that he manages to kind of meld a, you know, a very materialist, scientific…
• 1:55:24
  Jason Cohn: worldview with also a, you know, I think a very spiritual
• 1:55:29
  Jason Cohn: side of his personality. So I think that's a masterpiece. I don't know which one of them I would necessarily recommend, but, you know, just go in order, I guess. And I think that those are being re-released, actually. They were out of print.
• 1:55:43
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I hope so, because what I'm seeing is out of print right now.
• 1:55:47
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, it's out of print, but I think this summer, by this summer, they're gonna start being available again, I can't remember.
• 1:55:52
  Tad Eggleston: Excellent.
• 1:55:53
  Jason Cohn: it's Kodansha, or Viz, or who's, who's,
• 1:55:56
  Jason Cohn: I should have that information, but anyway, that's a great one. But there's a bunch of other great Tezuka books, but that's a great one to start. Also, yeah, I mean, Pluto or, or Monster by Urasawa, which I think are both very influenced by Tezuka.
• 1:56:15
  Jason Cohn: I mean, Pluto is… literally based on Astro Boy.
• 1:56:20
  Jason Cohn: Okay, so that's that, that's that one. And then you wanted an animation. I think I already recommended Millennium Actress. That's Millennium Actress and Perfect Blue.
• 1:56:31
  Jason Cohn: And if it's Christmas time, then Tokyo Godfathers.
• 1:56:36
  Jason Cohn: So those 3 Satoshi Kon films are probably my favorite.
• 1:56:41
  Jason Cohn: And then something, this is still kind of related to Tezuka, but this is.
• 1:56:46
  Tad Eggleston: Come out.
• 1:56:46
  Jason Cohn: This is a book that I'm reading right now.
• 1:56:49
  Jason Cohn: Which is a history book, but a fascinating one, and it's written by a woman named Ada Palmer, who is another just absolute off-the-charts polymath genius.
• 1:57:01
  Jason Cohn: And I found out about her because…
• 1:57:05
  Jason Cohn: she is a massive Tezuka fan, and she's written a bunch of essays about Tezuka. She's, like, really into, you know, cosplaying, and she, you know, goes to Comic-cons and stuff like that. She's really into manga and anime, but she's.
• 1:57:21
  Tad Eggleston: And teaches at the University of Chicago.
• 1:57:24
  Jason Cohn: She teaches at the University of Fucking Chicago in the History Department. She's a Renaissance scholar.
• 1:57:29
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I'm just noticing that she's local to me, because, you know…
• 1:57:33
  Jason Cohn: Right, but she's also at one of the best universities in the world. Yeah. And I think that she's one of the most popular teachers there. And she… so she wrote a book.
• 1:57:42
  Tad Eggleston: She looks geeky enough to be.
• 1:57:44
  Jason Cohn: Oh, she's super geeked, but in an awesome way.
• 1:57:47
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. No, that's what I meant. Geeky is always a compliment when I say it.
• 1:57:52
  Jason Cohn: Yeah. She wears, like, she wears capes.
• 1:57:55
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:57:57
  Jason Cohn: She's just, like, everything about her, she just, like, everything about her…
• 1:58:02
  Tad Eggleston: the Renaissance?
• 1:58:03
  Jason Cohn: That's the book that she gave me, and I'm reading it now, and I'm just about to finish it. I've been reading it for a long… it's a big book, it's like 600 pages.
• 1:58:11
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:58:11
  Jason Cohn: It's about how we understand and misunderstand the Renaissance, and how…
• 1:58:18
  Jason Cohn: for, you know, for hundreds of years since the Renaissance, people have been trying to claim the Renaissance, you know, as saying, like, we're having… we're going to, you know, like, Reagan, we're gonna have, you know, some… what did he call it?
• 1:58:32
  Jason Cohn: morning in America, like, we're gonna have a renaissance in America again. We're always trying to, like, claim the Renaissance, but very peop… very few people really understand what the Renaissance was. So she kind of… she… she demystifies it, she,
• 1:58:48
  Jason Cohn: she breaks it apart, and then she puts it back together again. It's a… it's written in a way that is so lively and fun. Like, I'm, like, laughing out loud at parts of.
• 1:59:01
  Tad Eggleston: I literally just bought it.
• 1:59:03
  Jason Cohn: Okay, that's great. It's, you know, it's, like, it's a big book, so, like, it's like any, like, long history book, at times it can be a bit of a slog, like, there's long parts where you're… she's, like, she's like, I want you to understand these… she calls them our friends in the Renaissance. So there's, like, you know, 15 people that… there are long,
• 1:59:22
  Jason Cohn: chapters devoted to, that she feels like you can't really understand the Renaissance unless you understand something about this person.
• 1:59:30
  Jason Cohn: And, you know, you're… you get through it, and then two chapters later, you can't remember anything about that person. So that's sort of, like, maybe a fault in the book.
• 1:59:40
  Jason Cohn: It could maybe be a little bit shorter, but in terms of her take on history and historiography and the Renaissance, I'm just absolutely… it's just… it makes me want to read, you know, Machiavelli and, you know…
• 1:59:56
  Tad Eggleston: And a four-book sci-fi series, too?
• 1:59:59
  Jason Cohn: Oh, so that's the other thing. She's a best-selling science fiction author. I said she's a polymath.
• 2:00:05
  Jason Cohn: She's a… she's a Tezukah scholar, she's a Renaissance scholar.
• 2:00:10
  Jason Cohn: She's a best-selling author of a science fiction series, which is… or a fantasy series called Two Like the Lightning, which I highly recommend as well. It's great.
• 2:00:24
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, so that's my… I recommend Ada Palmer.
• 2:00:29
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I'm all over this. And, like, the Chicago connection, because, see, aside from having this podcast that I will absolutely invite, only tangentially.
• 2:00:41
  Jason Cohn: Chronicle.
• 2:00:41
  Tad Eggleston: related.
• 2:00:41
  Jason Cohn: And she has her own podcast. She would love to talk on your podcast. You guys would geek out for hours.
• 2:00:47
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Well, but I also book…
• 2:00:50
  Tad Eggleston: Book appearances at a comic slash bookstore.
• 2:00:53
  Jason Cohn: Okay.
• 2:00:56
  Jason Cohn: Well, you should get… you should get Ada, she's the best. She's the best.
• 2:01:00
  Tad Eggleston: So, so yeah, no, I'm, I am… and, like, one of our regulars…
• 2:01:07
  Tad Eggleston: I have a Saga book club, and, and the Saga Book Club has the youngest,
• 2:01:14
  Tad Eggleston: regular contributor to 22 panels on it, and… and… and Bell…
• 2:01:19
  Tad Eggleston: Just… just received a full ride to get her doctorate in chemistry at the University of Chicago, so she's moving… moving to Chicago at… at UC this summer!
• 2:01:30
  Jason Cohn: That's great!
• 2:01:31
  Jason Cohn: Sit on.
• 2:01:32
  Tad Eggleston: So, like…
• 2:01:33
  Tad Eggleston: all the more reason to reach out to a University of Chicago professor, because I can go, hey, you're in the history department, so you can be friends with somebody in the chemistry department, and she needs friends.
• 2:01:45
  Jason Cohn: There you go, yeah. Well, and I… but I understand that her Renaissance history classes are some of the most popular classes in… I mean, they do… they do stuff like… you know, like the… the… how, like, popes are chosen, like the whole, you know, what is it called, the convocation, or what are those called?
• 2:02:04
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 2:02:05
  Jason Cohn: I can't remember what they're called. But it's like, this was.
• 2:02:07
  Tad Eggleston: Conclave.
• 2:02:07
  Jason Cohn: Conclave. Thank you.
• 2:02:09
  Jason Cohn: This was a really big deal. Like, when a pope would die, the conclaves and the choosing of a new pope was, like, a massive realignment in power, you know, power alignments and power, you know, alliances.
• 2:02:23
  Jason Cohn: in European society, every time the Pope would die. So, she does these kind of mock
• 2:02:30
  Jason Cohn: conclaves where they pretend that a pope has died, and everybody has to, like, role-play a different, you know, power, and then play, you know, play out the role of, like, trying to get their pope, their guy, their cardinal, elected. So, I mean, her…
• 2:02:46
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, that's cool.
• 2:02:47
  Jason Cohn: Her class is supposed to be one of the most… I mean, University of Chicago is not famous for being a fun school to attend.
• 2:02:54
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it depends on your definition of fun.
• 2:02:57
  Jason Cohn: I guess so, and it depends on your department, but.
• 2:03:01
  Tad Eggleston: too.
• 2:03:01
  Jason Cohn: But her class is supposed to be super popular, everybody loves it.
• 2:03:07
  Jason Cohn: So tell your friend to take her class.
• 2:03:09
  Tad Eggleston: I will recommend it. I don't know… you know, she's going into a doctoral program, so I don't know how much ability she'll have to take classes outside of her…
• 2:03:20
  Jason Cohn: Maybe not.
• 2:03:21
  Tad Eggleston: Her, her.
• 2:03:23
  Jason Cohn: Maybe Ada will lever out.
• 2:03:26
  Jason Cohn: Ada will let her audit some of the classes.
• 2:03:28
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Well, or I'll just get Ada on my podcast and find out what comics she likes, and then start a book club.
• 2:03:37
  Jason Cohn: She's… she likes a lot of comics.
• 2:03:40
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, there aren't many smart people, like, really smart people, who have been exposed to comics, and by exposed, I mean actually, like, read something great that's not superheroes.
• 2:03:54
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 2:03:55
  Tad Eggleston: That don't wind up liking comics.
• 2:03:57
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, I agree. I agree.
• 2:03:59
  Tad Eggleston: Sometimes they have to get over the hump of its kids stuff, but I bet you even half of your friends, if you could get… if you could find that comic that was for them, and get them to read it.
• 2:04:09
  Jason Cohn: I totally agree, but they're… but they're too busy rolling their eyes, so…
• 2:04:13
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, no, I get it.
• 2:04:15
  Jason Cohn: So, you know, Matt, I kind of like having something that they don't know.
• 2:04:19
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that's fun sometimes, too.
• 2:04:21
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, that makes me… it doesn't bother me that they're not into it.
• 2:04:26
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, my favorite thing to do is, like, when I work days in a comic shop.
• 2:04:32
  Tad Eggleston: is to sell the mom that's in there because she promised the son that she'd take him to the comic shop, and she's like.
• 2:04:42
  Tad Eggleston: Watching the time. Come on, we gotta…
• 2:04:46
  Tad Eggleston: I had to bring him here, because he mowed the lawn, or he got an A, or whatever.
• 2:04:52
  Jason Cohn: What do you have her read? What do you have the mom read?
• 2:04:55
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I start by asking what they read or watch to begin with.
• 2:05:00
  Tad Eggleston: So that I can get a feeling for what they like.
• 2:05:02
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 2:05:03
  Tad Eggleston: But Saga's an easy go-to.
• 2:05:06
  Jason Cohn: You know what? What's an easy go-to is, Allison Bechtel.
• 2:05:10
  Tad Eggleston: Yes.
• 2:05:12
  Tad Eggleston: Allison Bechtel's an easy go-to.
• 2:05:14
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 2:05:15
  Tad Eggleston: So, again, only if they're into memoir-type stuff.
• 2:05:19
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, that's true. That's true. But,
• 2:05:24
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, I mean, her… she did one recently called the Secret… Spent?
• 2:05:29
  Jason Cohn: No, it's fine.
• 2:05:30
  Tad Eggleston: The Secret of Superhero Human Strength, that was her… not her most recent book, but her book before that.
• 2:05:35
  Jason Cohn: Bitcoin, yeah.
• 2:05:36
  Jason Cohn: And it's… I think that, like, a lot of, you know.
• 2:05:39
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, it's fantastic.
• 2:05:40
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, great. And middle-aged moms, I think, would really appreciate it, because it's about, like, you know.
• 2:05:44
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, absolutely.
• 2:05:44
  Jason Cohn: struggle to, like, you know…
• 2:05:46
  Tad Eggleston: I've sold that to plenty of…
• 2:05:49
  Tad Eggleston: But I also have to be in the shop that has that, because too many shops are centered around…
• 2:05:56
  Tad Eggleston: the Wednesday market, so I have to be able to find the trade paperback rather than graphic novel half the time.
• 2:06:04
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 2:06:05
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, Saga's a go-to, Kelly Thompson is a go-to, Kelly Sudakonic is a go-to.
• 2:06:15
  Tad Eggleston: you know, when it's… I mean, like, like… name… name something that… fiction that somebody's passionate about, and that's not a comic, and I can probably pair them with the comic that will get them hooked.
• 2:06:31
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 2:06:32
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I've spent a lot of time trying to figure that out, you know. You love crime shows? Well, read Criminal.
• 2:06:41
  Tad Eggleston: You know, you… and these are just the obvious ones. Like, if we have to start digging deep, there's… there's a deep bench, too, but it's always easy to start with the one that, like, if they like it, they can immediately grab 5 more.
• 2:06:54
  Jason Cohn: Well, I definitely hope that with this film, I'm able to get some people to open their eyes a little bit to manga, and think about it as, you know, not being…
• 2:07:04
  Jason Cohn: all what they think it is, you know? It's not all… .
• 2:07:08
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and that's…
• 2:07:09
  Jason Cohn: That's one of the…
• 2:07:10
  Tad Eggleston: that, like, I just… I write a short piece
• 2:07:16
  Tad Eggleston: for each issue of American Nature Presents.
• 2:07:19
  Tad Eggleston: Which is, I don't know if you've heard of the comic the, Santos Sisters?
• 2:07:24
  Jason Cohn: -Oh.
• 2:07:25
  Tad Eggleston: won an Eisner this year. It's like…
• 2:07:28
  Tad Eggleston: Archie, if they were brown, and sometimes have superpowers?
• 2:07:32
  Jason Cohn: Okay, cool.
• 2:07:33
  Tad Eggleston: You know, and a little bit more of an adult theme.
• 2:07:36
  Jason Cohn: Yep.
• 2:07:37
  Tad Eggleston: But the guys who make it also do, like, an old-fashioned comic scene type thing, where, you know, they'll have a couple black and white comics in it, and I'll have some comics criticism, and whatnot, so I write a column for each one of them. I wrote a little bit about,
• 2:07:56
  Tad Eggleston: And I always… I'm so bad with names that I have to, like, look up the title again.
• 2:08:01
  Tad Eggleston: to make certain I get… the, the, the name… Right.
• 2:08:08
  Tad Eggleston: I wrote a little bit about… Yamada Murasaki.
• 2:08:13
  Jason Cohn: Oh, yeah.
• 2:08:14
  Tad Eggleston: In this most recent one.
• 2:08:16
  Tad Eggleston: In part because, like, if you think you know what manga is, and you go read her stuff.
• 2:08:24
  Tad Eggleston: It's like, oh, wait a minute, this is manga too?
• 2:08:27
  Jason Cohn: Right, exactly.
• 2:08:29
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, the thing about…
• 2:08:31
  Jason Cohn: The thing about manga is that it's every genre imaginable, and.
• 2:08:36
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, the thing about manga is, like, like… Like comics, it's a medium.
• 2:08:42
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 2:08:43
  Tad Eggleston: you know, in the United States, it's become synonymous with wild action, or pick three things that don't belong together, put them together, and it's Delicious in Dungeon, or Way of the House Husband, or…
• 2:08:56
  Jason Cohn: So, but basically, to say that you don't like manga is like saying you don't like movies, or you don't like… Right. Like, it just doesn't make sense. Like, you just…
• 2:09:05
  Tad Eggleston: It's the same as saying you don't like comics. And that's what I'll tell people, is you say you don't like comics, that's like telling me you don't like the written word, or you don't like moving pictures.
• 2:09:14
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, well, yeah, but I agree with you. If we could… if we could tie people down and force them, you know, like in, Clockwork Orange, you know, like…
• 2:09:27
  Jason Cohn: prop their eyes open and make them read manga, they would get it. But… but you can't make them, and that's fine, you know?
• 2:09:33
  Tad Eggleston: No.
• 2:09:33
  Jason Cohn: It's okay for us to have our thing, and they have their thing.
• 2:09:35
  Tad Eggleston: But everybody almost always winds up having… their entry.
• 2:09:41
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 2:09:42
  Tad Eggleston: Whether it's to… I mean, I like to think of it as comics in general, because some of them might never get into manga, just like they might never get into Japanese literature, right?
• 2:09:53
  Tad Eggleston: But I don't think anybody… Actually doesn't like comics.
• 2:09:58
  Tad Eggleston: as a medium.
• 2:10:00
  Jason Cohn: Yeah, a lot of people just don't have the patience for it, but whatever.
• 2:10:04
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I think either they don't have the patience, or they forget that Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbs are comics, or…
• 2:10:11
  Jason Cohn: Yeah.
• 2:10:12
  Tad Eggleston: You know. But anyway, you need to go have dinner, right?
• 2:10:17
  Jason Cohn: You're gonna have to edit this down, man. This is 2 hours plus.
• 2:10:21
  Tad Eggleston: No, dude, I just… I just throw them up.
• 2:10:23
  Jason Cohn: You just, you just throw it up, and yeah.
• 2:10:25
  Tad Eggleston: I just throw it up.
• 2:10:27
  Tad Eggleston: I don't have a profit motive.
• 2:10:29
  Jason Cohn: Right.
• 2:10:32
  Tad Eggleston: You'd be surprised at how often the long ones wind up doing as well, or better.
• 2:10:38
  Tad Eggleston: like, I have yet to figure out… A, I don't trust the data I get anyway, but I've yet to figure out what actually drives most things. There are a handful of people that
• 2:10:51
  Tad Eggleston: That, like, seem to spike my numbers, but not always the ones I expect.
• 2:10:56
  Jason Cohn: I'm sure the word documentary is gonna just drive, you know.
• 2:11:01
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, really, I'm just…
• 2:11:02
  Jason Cohn: I'm gonna put.
• 2:11:02
  Tad Eggleston: your name until they read the show notes, so…
• 2:11:05
  Jason Cohn: All right, man, well, it's been a real pleasure talking.
• 2:11:09
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, keep in touch, I wanna talk again once… once I've seen it, cause… cuz…
• 2:11:14
  Tad Eggleston: I'm fascinated, and I feel like… I feel like we hit it off, I feel like we talk about other things, so…
• 2:11:20
  Jason Cohn: John, if you've got time.
• 2:11:21
  Tad Eggleston: And whatnot. We'll figure out other things to talk about.
• 2:11:23
  Jason Cohn: Totally. We've covered the whole range of human experience.
• 2:11:28
  Tad Eggleston: Close.
• 2:11:29
  Jason Cohn: Well, it's two.
• 2:11:29
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, we touched on city planning, but didn't really get into physics.
• 2:11:35
  Jason Cohn: True. Well, I… you wouldn't want me talking about physics. I don't know anything about physics.
• 2:11:40
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. I meant.
• 2:11:41
  Jason Cohn: Take care of yourself, Ted.
• 2:11:42
  Tad Eggleston: For Jason Cohn, this has been 22 Panels. We will see you after the next page.