Latest / 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast / With Great Power #287... 22 Panels with Mark Russell & Bryce Ingman

Transcript

With Great Power #287... 22 Panels with Mark Russell & Bryce Ingman · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels. My guests today are a couple of my favorite people in comics today, if only because of their weird, dark sense of humor that…
• 0:15
  Tad Eggleston: Somehow allows them to still, like… Not be morose.
• 0:21
  Tad Eggleston: thinking the world is about to end people in real life. Bryce Ingman and Mark Russell. How's it going, guys?
• 0:30
  manru: No, good.
• 0:31
  Bryce: Going well. Good to be.
• 0:33
  Tad Eggleston: Bryce is shaking his head at me. Is it because you… you have become that morose person in real life, or because I nailed it?
• 0:42
  Bryce: You know, it depends on the day. It depends on the day. There are days when I feel…
• 0:47
  Bryce: But… but there's always… there's always glorious, joyful things about life, and can't ignore those, even in the face of…
• 0:56
  Bryce: Tough times.
• 0:58
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, I was just… I was just commenting that,
• 1:01
  Tad Eggleston: Between the two of you, you had 3 books come out this week,
• 1:05
  Tad Eggleston: Mark had the AWA Protobia Aggie, you had… Bryce had the second issue of Death Dog, and then Mark had the… the Mad Cave Terror Bite,
• 1:19
  Tad Eggleston: That was very, very heavy on the terror side.
• 1:23
  Tad Eggleston: And in them, you explored both, well, I mean, the capitalism and technology that you often explore, but particularly in Death Dog and Aggie.
• 1:37
  Tad Eggleston: I don't want to say you don't explore this as well, because it's hiding in the other ones. Sometimes not hiding, but you really…
• 1:46
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I just read Death… re-read Death Dog, and, like, particularly the end… the end second. Why hat? Why hat?
• 1:54
  Tad Eggleston: Potato!
• 1:56
  Tad Eggleston: just, like.
• 1:57
  manru: Love that. I love that. That was the dog's word, potato.
• 2:00
  Tad Eggleston: Yes, see, my dog is named Potato, so I probably love that even more than you do.
• 2:07
  Tad Eggleston: But maybe not, maybe you had a childhood dog named Potato. I don't want to take that away from you, Mark.
• 2:12
  manru: Well, that's pricey.
• 2:13
  Bryce: Don't fight over a potato, guys.
• 2:14
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 2:19
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, no, and Mark had the AI that actually made the world better by forcing people to look at
• 2:30
  Tad Eggleston: The humanity of the world, and the… and the…
• 2:35
  Tad Eggleston: Nuance, the… the… how… how nice things happen in between the…
• 2:42
  Tad Eggleston: in between the lines, I guess?
• 2:45
  manru: Yeah, I mean.
• 2:46
  Tad Eggleston: offline.
• 2:47
  manru: I tasked myself with what I thought was sort of, like, an impossible writing task, was, like, to make a, like, a positive story about AI, because I've been wallowing in, like, all of the, sort of the tech nightmare stories that I've been writing with, like, Vanishing Point, and,
• 3:02
  manru: And,
• 3:05
  manru: terabytes. But I thought, you know, part of the mission of the Protopian series that I'm writing these comics for is to
• 3:12
  manru: give a somewhat hopeful view of the future. And I thought maybe this would be the one way that AI could actually, help us. It'd be like if it was, like, an algorithmic reality that forced us to experience each other's worlds
• 3:26
  manru: And, like, was trained not on the data that we put online or in social media, but on watching our actual lives, and reminding us that we're human beings away from the computer.
• 3:39
  Tad Eggleston: It worked.
• 3:39
  Tad Eggleston: It worked, as did Mark and his… or his Bryce and his puppy dogs. Tell me about how Death Dog came about, because that's just such a weird and cool concept.
• 3:51
  Bryce: You know, it's funny that I just recently heard Mark say this about Aggie, that it was like he kind of gave himself a challenge, and it was…
• 4:01
  Bryce: the same thing with Death Dog. I, I… as we…
• 4:07
  Bryce: As our human society toys with fascism again, global fascism, the thing that…
• 4:13
  Tad Eggleston: That's the nice way of putting it.
• 4:14
  Bryce: Yeah, yeah, no.
• 4:15
  Tad Eggleston: Voice with. Yeah.
• 4:17
  Bryce: You know.
• 4:21
  Bryce: Since their last… since the last time we really toyed with it in the… in the 30s and 40s.
• 4:25
  Bryce: What scares me the most about it is how technology could make… can make it so much worse, is making it so much worse.
• 4:34
  Tad Eggleston: It is making it so much worse.
• 4:35
  Bryce: And, for a long time, I've found these
• 4:40
  Bryce: Robotic dogs, to be terrifying.
• 4:43
  Bryce: The concept of this wonderful creature, a dog, that is…
• 4:51
  Bryce: the other creature on Earth that's probably the most loyal to human beings, being…
• 4:57
  Bryce: Reimagined as something to control us, kill us, hurt us.
• 5:04
  Bryce: it's upsetting to me on multiple levels. And so then I said to myself, well, can you think of a way to make a robot dog in that kind of a world that is a hero?
• 5:17
  Bryce: And so that was the writing challenge that I gave myself, and…
• 5:21
  Bryce: And, hopefully I was successful, because I… I wanted to show that it's the soul of a dog that matters, not the…
• 5:30
  Bryce: You know, the fifth.
• 5:30
  Tad Eggleston: Jaw.
• 5:31
  Tad Eggleston: Physical body, or the jaw, yeah, the jaw power.
• 5:37
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 5:40
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I, I, and this is why I've liked your work.
• 5:46
  Tad Eggleston: Both of your work.
• 5:47
  Tad Eggleston: For as long as I've known you, is… is you…
• 5:53
  Tad Eggleston: are in no ways unaware of the existential abyss in front of us, but…
• 6:03
  Tad Eggleston: But still managed to both laugh at it and find… Hope?
• 6:10
  Tad Eggleston: I guess?
• 6:14
  Tad Eggleston: And, and, and we should probably quickly describe your, your, your local terabytes, though I almost want to turn off my, my,
• 6:22
  Tad Eggleston: my headphones while you do it, Mark, because, man, did you
• 6:26
  Tad Eggleston: Fuck with me on that one.
• 6:29
  Tad Eggleston: Literally.
• 6:30
  manru: The Terabytes, for those who don't know, is an ongoing series. I think there's gonna be, like, 18 or so issues of this.
• 6:38
  manru: with the framing story, sort of like, you know, Tales from the Crypt, but instead of a Crypt Keeper, the framing story of mine is these androids that land on Earth, and find it completely depopulated. No people around, and so they sort of task themselves with figuring out what happened.
• 6:56
  manru: To… to the humans that they were expecting to find on Earth. And every… the main story of each issue kind of, like, gives you a little more clue of what… what happened to the human… why the human race isn't around anymore. And in this particular story.
• 7:10
  manru: The main story is, like, they come upon, like, like, like this strange windowless building that's covered with moss and vines and stuff.
• 7:18
  manru: And they, they download, what they can retrieve what is apparently, like, a diary entry from this building, which turns out is a prison. And they get the story of this guy who is, like, imprisoned in this automated prison.
• 7:31
  manru: Where you are… you are go… you are sentenced to go higher up in the building, depending upon how long your sentence is. The longer your sentence is, the higher you go up, and also the worse the prison is. And it's completely automated. There are no guards.
• 7:44
  manru: There's no one you can really appeal to to talk, or a judge, or a warden, or anyone you can talk to to make a complaint, or ask to see a lawyer. You can ask to see a lawyer through your digital interface that you have on your cell, but only if you have enough money to actually call the lawyer.
• 7:58
  manru: So it's sort of a catch-22. It's like, how do I earn the money to call a lawyer when I need a lawyer to, you know, get money to put in my funds?
• 8:07
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and you also need to have the money to buy your food and whatnot, like, you're paying…
• 8:14
  manru: Don't have the money.
• 8:15
  Tad Eggleston: and…
• 8:16
  manru: Right, to pay for their imprisonment, they, they just… you pay for it with more time. So most people in this prison end up, like, not serving down their sentences, but just having more time added to them. And so it's kind of the, the, the hellish nature of,
• 8:32
  manru: technological apathy, or the sort of apathy that we can create by automating technology to deal with things that used to take human effort, and about how many people will fall through the cracks when we completely implement a digital, sort of AI-driven society.
• 8:53
  manru: In this case, the main character wasn't even guil… didn't even commit a crime, he… or at least is unaware of what that.
• 8:59
  Tad Eggleston: Right, unaware. It has a very Joseph K, the trial thing.
• 9:03
  manru: He's like a 21st century Joseph Kay, where he's trying to figure out the whole time what he was even convicted of, and they won't even want to tell him.
• 9:12
  Tad Eggleston: So, actually, as I'm seeing… I mean, we just brought up the trial reference. When I was reading your death dogs, I was thinking of both Fahrenheit 451 and Snow Crash.
• 9:25
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so you guys are both clearly well-read, both in a literary sense, but also, like, you're so on top of, oh my god, again, existential abyss. I'm like, right now, I'm just curious, like.
• 9:43
  Tad Eggleston: what do you read? What do you watch? What do you talk about? And this is the right time to ask, because I know that, like, half the time when you talk about it, you're talking about it with each other. So I'm just gonna step back and, like…
• 9:54
  Bryce: Well, lately, lately, we spend a lot of our time talking about pleurbius on Apple TV.
• 10:01
  Bryce: That's… every week, Mark and I are like, oh, what do you think of the latest Purbius? And, you know…
• 10:08
  manru: What do you think is going on with the world? Like, what do you think the nature of this… I don't know if you haven't seen it, I would… I highly recommend.
• 10:15
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't yet. It's on my list.
• 10:18
  manru: It's a very engrossing TV show, and I think a big part of it is that, you know, the… the mystery is one that we haven't really seen before on TV, and yet it's not really clear what it is. It does a good job sort of revealing itself slowly, so you're trying to figure out exactly what is going on. But it does extremely well.
• 10:37
  Bryce: Yeah, and you know, it's one of those shows that… which are always my favorite kinds of shows, or books, or anything, that… that there's a lot to chew on, and the next day after I watch it, it's still kind of in my head, I'm still kind of…
• 10:51
  Bryce: replaying scenes, thinking about themes, thinking about, like Mark said, how… how this world, without giving away what… what the premise of the show is, how this world is… is different from ours.
• 11:09
  Bryce: And we all sit silently.
• 11:12
  Bryce: But it's fantastic. I mean, I couldn't recommend it more.
• 11:16
  Tad Eggleston: What about,
• 11:20
  Tad Eggleston: the non-entertainment stuff, are you guys… are you… do you allow yourself to be wired in, or… or…
• 11:27
  manru: I've been reading a lot of,
• 11:28
  Tad Eggleston: get up through osmosis. What?
• 11:30
  manru: Byung Joel Han, who's a Korean philosopher who writes these short books in, like, the Burnout Society and, The Death of Eros, all of which seem to boil down to, like.
• 11:42
  manru: The gig economy and social media are destroying us as a species.
• 11:46
  manru: Or at least leaving us completely without any sense of solidarity of other human beings, viewing each other as competitors, and making it increasingly impossible to, feel anything that we… that previous generations would have identified as love.
• 12:03
  manru: Oh, go ahead.
• 12:04
  Bryce: Oh, I was just…
• 12:06
  Bryce: made me think about something that's been in my head the last 24 hours. I was reading about, and it ties into the gig economy, I was reading about how in one of the Home Depots in the Los Angeles area, the Home Depot has started deploying sonic weapons
• 12:23
  Bryce: against the migrant workers, the lowest of our gig economy workers, to drive them away from the Home Depot parking lots.
• 12:34
  manru: ironically, that's the only reason anyone goes to Home Depot, is to… to get… to do projects. They're going to eventually hire these guys to do.
• 12:41
  Bryce: Yes. They have had, for so long, a symbiotic relationship, right? The Home Depot and the gig workers, as sad as that kind of economy is, they were helping, benefiting each other on some level.
• 12:57
  Bryce: And now, because of ICE, and because Home Depot has decided that they would rather stand up to the
• 13:04
  Bryce: Migrant workers than the government.
• 13:07
  Bryce: They're deploying sonic weapons against them, which…
• 13:10
  Bryce: I don't know how that's legal, I don't… it's probably not, but nothing's legal anymore, I guess.
• 13:17
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, we are in an era where being illegal is hard if it… if it…
• 13:23
  Tad Eggleston: If it, benefits Dear Leader.
• 13:26
  manru: Yes. Well, and it's utterly cynical, too, because they know full well that anybody buying, you know, like, this much material at Home Depot is going to be hiring these guys, so it's just sort of like, well, as long as it's not on our territory, or, you know, it's…
• 13:40
  manru: It's like, we don't care if we hurt the people that are, like, making our business model possible, as long as it's giving us the appearance of being hostile towards it. You know, it's like… it's like… it's like buying…
• 13:52
  manru: Cocaine, but then, like, Voting for, you know, big…
• 13:57
  manru: Jail sentences for your drug dealer, you know?
• 14:00
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 14:01
  Bryce: But, you know, when you said soulless, like, yeah, that's as soulless as it can get, this.
• 14:07
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 14:07
  Bryce: Who's been, you know, benefiting from these people for decades, now turning
• 14:13
  Bryce: you know, this… what I was talking about earlier, this new technology, turning it against those same people.
• 14:20
  Bryce: It's so messed up, so backwards, so soulless.
• 14:24
  Tad Eggleston: I am pleased that there seem to be…
• 14:30
  Tad Eggleston: more people pushing back. I read that just this morning that both, as ICE moves into Columbus, both the mayor and the
• 14:43
  Tad Eggleston: Chief of police have put out statements saying that, that…
• 14:48
  Tad Eggleston: City resources will not be used, and oh, by the way, here are all of your rights.
• 14:56
  Bryce: Yeah.
• 14:56
  Tad Eggleston: Which, of course, immediately had them…
• 15:00
  Tad Eggleston: pegged as un-American Traders by Stephen Miller and Elon Musk. It's so funny to hear from Elon Musk.
• 15:08
  Bryce: Yeah, don't tell people their rights, that's… that's the most.
• 15:12
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean…
• 15:13
  manru: Well, it gives them the illusion that they actually have them, you know, and that's just cruel.
• 15:17
  Tad Eggleston: It's like… it's like they decided that it would be a good idea to go after a senator war veteran.
• 15:24
  Tad Eggleston: Astronaut, who, again, Just, just told people their rights.
• 15:34
  Bryce: Yeah, it's madness.
• 15:37
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 15:40
  manru: Yeah, it's beyond purity, and I'm glad that there are so many people pushing back. In fact, most people see me pushing back, but at the same time, it seems like an unfathomable nightmare to me that even, like, 30 to 40% of the people in the country
• 15:52
  manru: would even entertain the idea of, like, you know, deporting people to countries they've never been into. And, you know, people who aren't even criminals, people are just, like, you know, picking their tomatoes, people who are framing their houses. And also, you know, the, like, like.
• 16:09
  manru: treating people who are exercising their First Amendment rights to protest as, like, terror groups. To me, it's just like, if you told me we would have been here this quickly, like, 10 years ago, I would… I would not have believed you, and yet it seems like
• 16:22
  manru: They're… every…
• 16:24
  manru: I have yet to, sort of, I mean, it seems almost impossible to underestimate how far we've fallen as a republic.
• 16:31
  Tad Eggleston: But honestly, I think that that was one of the powers of Aggie, is that…
• 16:39
  Tad Eggleston: That guy who online is supporting… All of this nonsense.
• 16:45
  Tad Eggleston: Doesn't support it when they're the… it's their neighbor.
• 16:48
  manru: Or… Yeah, and yes, it's… Maybe the benefit of the algorithm is to sort of, like, force it, but if it were to do that…
• 16:56
  Tad Eggleston: It's… it's incredibly… Frustrating that there's such a cognitive disconnect for people.
• 17:06
  Tad Eggleston: Between this mythical Terrorist.
• 17:14
  Tad Eggleston: illegal lately in, and the guys in the Home Depot parking lot that helped build their kitchen floor.
• 17:21
  Bryce: Right.
• 17:23
  Tad Eggleston: But, it does seem that when you can cross that.
• 17:29
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, hell, look at Marjorie fucking Taylor Greene.
• 17:36
  Bryce: Yeah.
• 17:38
  Tad Eggleston: Has… has suddenly realized, oh, wait a minute, these aren't…
• 17:41
  Tad Eggleston: like, you said it was gonna be bad people. These aren't all bad people.
• 17:46
  Bryce: Yeah.
• 17:47
  Bryce: Interesting.
• 17:47
  manru: There will be a certain percentage of people who actually mind being lied to, but it seems like a lot of them not only don't mind being lied to, they expect to be lied to, or they, you know,
• 17:58
  manru: Or they don't… never believed it themselves, they were just hoping you would buy into the lie, and therefore not… not… not create any problems for them when they… as they implement, you know, fascism by degree.
• 18:08
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 18:09
  Bryce: I mean, there are undocumented Americans who I have spoken to who believed that lie, and who supported Trump
• 18:18
  Bryce: In the last election, because they were like, well, he's not coming after me, I'm not a bad person, I'm just here working and doing my thing.
• 18:25
  Tad Eggleston: I'm paying taxes.
• 18:27
  Bryce: Yep, I'm paying taxes, I'm not breaking any laws, I'm not getting arrested, and they believed it, which is even sadder to me, that, you know, the people that are getting kicked out of the country, some of them
• 18:38
  Bryce: Believed that he was only going to target criminals and the worst people.
• 18:44
  Tad Eggleston: Qresearch put out their… Annual, like, these were our cool charts from the year.
• 18:54
  Bryce: It starts.
• 18:55
  Tad Eggleston: And therefore, there was one making the rounds that I don't think quite says what most of the people reposting it
• 19:03
  Tad Eggleston: were thinking it would say, or think… think it's saying, but it was essentially, like.
• 19:09
  Tad Eggleston: The percentage of people who get their news from various places based on education level, and… and, like.
• 19:17
  Tad Eggleston: highest educated is, like, Atlantic, and then…
• 19:21
  Tad Eggleston: New York, you know, very much the way you would somewhat expect it to be. Except that if you also look and go, oh, wait a minute, which ones cost the most versus which ones cost the least, it also lines up pretty well. And when you dig into the methodology.
• 19:38
  Tad Eggleston: you discover they didn't ask income, they only asked education level. I mean, they asked a bunch of other stuff, but they didn't have an income question, which means the education level's kind of a proxy. But that's… that's… that's a whole different thing. It was when I was looking at the study that I found something really, really interesting.
• 19:55
  Tad Eggleston: Which is that… Democrats… have, like.
• 20:02
  Tad Eggleston: 8 to 12 news sources that…
• 20:05
  Tad Eggleston: More than 50% of them trust.
• 20:10
  Tad Eggleston: Republicans have won.
• 20:14
  Tad Eggleston: The only news source that more than 50% of Republicans trust is Fox News. So even when it comes to all of their other news sources, most of them don't trust them. They just don't trust ABC anymore, or…
• 20:27
  manru: Well, and the irony is…
• 20:28
  Tad Eggleston: banana anymore.
• 20:29
  manru: This focus on Fox News started, like, during the Iraq war, because they were the only news source that was reporting positive things about the war. Like, the war is going well, this was, like, indeed justified, Saddam Hussein has all these weapons of mass destructions.
• 20:45
  manru: And when it came out, you know, towards the end, that the war, in fact, was not going well, that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.
• 20:55
  manru: it didn't… you know, you would think… you would imagine that moment that Fox News' model would have been destroyed, that people would have abandoned them en masse. But the opposite happened. They consolidated around Fox News, and I think that's maybe the moment in which our republic died, when conservative media
• 21:13
  manru: in Fox News, and also the podcast that sort of came up later.
• 21:17
  manru: they all kind of realize that not only do these people not care if you lie to them, they want you to lie to them. And they will only look to you for, for reality and anything else that, like, that is not confirmation bias. They will just ignore or will, you know, sort of…
• 21:33
  manru: believe is part of this grand conspiracy against the worldview. They will all choose their worldview over, over facts. They'll all choose what they would prefer to believe over the, over…
• 21:44
  manru: their own lying eyes, and I think that was…
• 21:47
  Bryce: How they view… what they view as a win.
• 21:51
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 21:52
  manru: Yeah, it's not really about, like, information, or the truth, or finding reality. It's more about, like, college football. It's more like, this is my team, and as long as they win, I don't care if we have to lie to do… it doesn't matter which tactics you have to do to win. The important thing is that our team wins.
• 22:11
  Tad Eggleston: Sounds, disturbingly accurate.
• 22:16
  Tad Eggleston: Though, I still… the part that struck me was how little they trust anybody.
• 22:21
  manru: Yeah.
• 22:22
  Tad Eggleston: Even on their side.
• 22:23
  manru: Most people are not in that worldview. Most people are not in that, that,
• 22:28
  manru: not in that tunnel, not in that bubble. So, if, you know, you're not confirming the bias, then you're puncturing it, and that's… Right.
• 22:37
  Bryce: That way… And that's scary.
• 22:39
  manru: They built their entire identity around this, so it's like, it's like somebody walking up to you and saying, your God is a lie.
• 22:44
  manru: Right. So, so, no, actually.
• 22:46
  Tad Eggleston: As I'm starting…
• 22:47
  manru: to live with that knowledge.
• 22:49
  Tad Eggleston: As I'm starting to do the next-degree math in my head, essentially what we're saying is if they trust Alex Jones, they might not trust Alex… well, no, Joe Rogan and Alex Jones often agree, because they're buddies, but if they trust Alex Jones, they might not trust Ben Shapiro, and therefore, their numbers aren't going to cross over, and the only place that they.
• 23:08
  manru: Like a reign of terror effect, right? Where it's like, you believe that everybody outside the bubble is, like, lying to you, or is trying to destroy…
• 23:16
  Tad Eggleston: your faith, or whatnot. But they only feel like Fox News.
• 23:21
  Tad Eggleston: their bubble.
• 23:22
  manru: center of the bubble.
• 23:22
  Tad Eggleston: their bigger bubble. Everything else is a smaller bubble.
• 23:26
  manru: It's like.
• 23:26
  Tad Eggleston: There's only one big bubble.
• 23:28
  manru: The people who are more credible than within the bubble are not the moderates. The people who are more credible within the bubble are the people who are even more extreme, because you feel like they're taking you even, you know, further into safety to your…
• 23:39
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 23:40
  manru: your belief system. It's so… it's like, once you… I can see Mark writing right now. It's like… it's like a tug-of-war.
• 23:49
  manru: And once you snap that rope so that you don't have to ever listen or even think about what the people on the other side of the rope are saying, then everybody on your side of the rope immediately lurches, you know.
• 24:02
  manru: 10 feet to the right.
• 24:04
  Tad Eggleston: And you believe that it's the majority.
• 24:07
  Tad Eggleston: Somehow.
• 24:08
  manru: As it is within your, within your bubble.
• 24:11
  Bryce: And this is why it's hard for some of those people to…
• 24:16
  Bryce: to see, like, what's happening with ICE and similar issues where…
• 24:22
  manru: People's rights are being trampled, that…
• 24:24
  Bryce: Perhaps they would normally care about.
• 24:27
  Bryce: is that they're not interacting with those people. No. You know, when they do, they kind of get slapped in the face with reality, but…
• 24:36
  Bryce: It's easy for people in a lot of parts of this country to just stay away from people that are in any way different from them.
• 24:44
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 24:45
  manru: Yeah, social media has allowed us to sort of silo ourselves in a way that wasn't really possible before.
• 24:50
  manru: And so, not only… it used to be, you know, when everybody watched CBS News or NBC News or whatever, it was like you were playing cards. There were conservatives, there were liberals, but they were all playing with the same deck of cards. You could play poker with those people, because you all were playing from the same deck of facts.
• 25:06
  manru: Now, it's like playing poker against somebody who's got their own deck of Old Maid cards. It's like, not only do they have quote-unquote alternate facts, but a lot of times, they don't even see…
• 25:17
  manru: the important issues worth talking about as being the same things as you do. They'll bring up things that are, you know, that you've never even heard of, because within the bubble, they have a completely different sort of news diet.
• 25:27
  Bryce: That world that, you know, thinking about All in the Family in light of Rob Reiner's murder.
• 25:34
  Bryce: that world that existed where that was one of the most popular pieces of media, and it was about an America where people interacted with people who had opposite opinions, worked through them, talked about them.
• 25:48
  Bryce: Didn't necessarily agree with each other at the end of the day, but still cared about each other.
• 25:54
  Bryce: And, and weren't speaking to isolate.
• 25:58
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it's been a long time since I watched any All in the Family, but I think… I think one of the parts that's missing is talk to each other. Because even… even when we're around.
• 26:08
  Tad Eggleston: people who might be different from us, more and more subjects are just considered absolutely taboo. I mean, the number of times where it's like, oh, I don't want to talk politics, I'm like, I wasn't talking politics, I was talking healthcare.
• 26:20
  Bryce: Talking life.
• 26:22
  Tad Eggleston: talking healthcare, because my wife's in the hospital. For sure.
• 26:27
  Bryce: So true.
• 26:27
  Tad Eggleston: You know, not…
• 26:29
  manru: a year.
• 26:29
  Tad Eggleston: That wasn't supposed to be political.
• 26:32
  manru: Most of my family, on my mom's side, are, you know, they're deep red, sort of, MAGA conservatives, and on the rare occasions I encounter them in the wild.
• 26:41
  manru: they're totally polite, they're nice to me, you know, we still interact as family, and but they think anybody with my beliefs is probably secretly a terrorist, you know, but it's just because…
• 26:53
  manru: You know.
• 26:54
  Tad Eggleston: Except…
• 26:55
  manru: If you don't have a daily interaction with people who disagree with you, you, you know, your imagination takes over.
• 27:02
  manru: Everybody but…
• 27:04
  Tad Eggleston: Everybody but everybody with your beliefs are terrorists, and you'll come around one day.
• 27:09
  Bryce: Yeah. Is probably what they're thinking. Open, right.
• 27:12
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. I mean, one day, he'll get tired of that big city, and he'll come back here, and…
• 27:19
  Tad Eggleston: Everything… That's actually…
• 27:21
  manru: different about MAGA, though, than any other sort of political movement I've, I've ever experienced before in my life, is that, how much it sort of intertwines itself with the personality of the person.
• 27:33
  manru: who holds those beliefs? Like, I've… I've never, like, I've never experienced somebody, unless they were, like, a campaign worker or something, wearing, like, a hat, or a sweater.
• 27:44
  manru: Or, you know, where, you know, of, like, the candidate they had voted for in the election. And, you know, it's like, I can go all day without talking politics. In fact, I prefer not to. I prefer to have a date just talking about pop culture or sports or something.
• 27:58
  manru: But these, these, these family members of mine who are in the MAGA right can't go, like, 5 minutes without, like, you know, talking about illegal aliens, or Muslims, or something they, they, you know…
• 28:09
  manru: something they got off of Fox News, you know, the MAGA ecosystem is, like, taken over their entire personality. And, you know, it's almost like witnessing a zombie take over.
• 28:22
  Bryce: Very much so. Yeah, it's hard to even imagine somebody, like, running around wearing, like, a Joe Biden hat.
• 28:28
  Bryce: Right. That was the right.
• 28:30
  Tad Eggleston: make Joe Biden hats? I mean, I do remember the waltz hat, but only because they put out the camo one as the joke.
• 28:39
  manru: I mean, I can understand wearing one if you're at an event, or, you know, you… it's, like, the election day, but yeah, you're not gonna wear them. Yeah, to me, it's, like, the fact that it's, like, so pervasive in everyday life, even when there's no election happening, says, like, something… that this… this fuels something of their… their… their personality, that this has, like, replaced something… this has filled a hole where something else needed to be, that there needed to be…
• 29:01
  manru: some sort.
• 29:02
  Bryce: Only Joe Biden… attire, I saw…
• 29:06
  Bryce: you know, over his presidency, were MAGA people wearing, like, insulting Joe Biden, like, attire?
• 29:13
  manru: There's always just… Yeah, they're mocking a counter movement that doesn't really exist.
• 29:19
  Bryce: Yeah, why is this, like, how you dress? Why is this your identity?
• 29:24
  manru: Yeah.
• 29:25
  manru: And I think part of it is that it's incredibly easy, you don't have to think about it, you know? It's the same reason why the number one country star in America right now is, like, an AI…
• 29:35
  manru: you know, thing. It's like… it's, like, more about the lifestyle and more about, you know, this is what I… this is, like, reinforcing my identity than it is that, like, I actually enjoy this, or I actually believe this. It's more just, like, this… this gives me the permission to… to exist. And I think it's… it comes much more out of, like, a…
• 29:54
  manru: An inferiority complex, and like a deep sense of conviction.
• 29:59
  Bryce: Like, identity comfort food.
• 30:02
  manru: Yeah.
• 30:04
  manru: reassure me that I'm a good person, that I'm doing the right thing, and, you know, and then I'll… you can push my mother down the stairs if you want to, you know?
• 30:16
  Bryce: Yeah.
• 30:17
  Tad Eggleston: So, something that popped into my head as I was, like, half-awake listening to a podcast yesterday, and heard somebody describing
• 30:27
  Tad Eggleston: a small-town area, you know, a place of less than 30,000 people. I'm like, that's not a small-town area.
• 30:35
  Tad Eggleston: Small-town areas that I know are, like, less than 10,000, often less than 5,000.
• 30:42
  Tad Eggleston: and, and, like.
• 30:47
  Tad Eggleston: I don't have the number of people who live in towns of less than 5,000, because I haven't found that, but as you were talking, I did 76% of all towns.
• 30:56
  Tad Eggleston: In the United States, incorporated areas have fewer than 5,000 people.
• 31:01
  Tad Eggleston: So, I wonder if… we…
• 31:09
  Tad Eggleston: Sometimes, like, really lose track of the fact that… that it's not just, internet silo, but… but…
• 31:20
  Tad Eggleston: Bye.
• 31:22
  Tad Eggleston: not being willing to have conversations face-to-face. It's becoming more and more of… A physical silo.
• 31:34
  Tad Eggleston: You know, you're literally…
• 31:35
  Bryce: Which, you know, which is the way things used to be, right? Before it was easy to get around, before we had mass communication, yeah, people were siloed like that.
• 31:44
  Bryce: But we didn't have the destructive side of mass communication, the internet, you know, weapons of mass destruction.
• 31:54
  Tad Eggleston: Hey, we're not using those at home!
• 31:57
  Bryce: Yeah, yeah.
• 32:00
  Bryce: Yeah.
• 32:02
  manru: Yeah, I think one of the really insidious things about the modern digital media age is that, you know, before, when, you know, the Hearst newspaper or, you know, the official state news would tell you something.
• 32:17
  manru: you could choose to not believe it, or you could say, well, that's clearly a lie, and, you know, or your friends and your family would act as, like, sort of a bulwark against that, you know, or your union or whatever would say, well, that's not actually what's happening, here's what's happening. But what social media has allowed people to do is to pretend to be your friends and family.
• 32:34
  manru: So, some anonymous user in Belarus, or, you know, some, like, Russian…
• 32:40
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I was about to say, bought in Belarus.
• 32:43
  manru: can convince you that there's somebody you go to church with, or that somebody you might go to church with, or somebody you might live down your street, and… and convince you of something that you… that no…
• 32:54
  Tad Eggleston: Let's be real, they have all of our data now. They can say that there's somebody who lives down your street. As long as you don't actually go down and ask that person down your street, hey.
• 33:05
  Tad Eggleston: You know that thing you were saying to me online yesterday? You'll never know that it wasn't that person down the street.
• 33:12
  manru: Yeah, back when Facebook cared about such things, they did, like, a survey to find out, you know, like, what, you know, which, which…
• 33:19
  manru: Sort of community pages were run by bad faith overseas actors and shut them down.
• 33:25
  manru: And they found, like, the top 10, sort of, like, evangelical Christian sites on Facebook were all run out of Russia. They were all basically…
• 33:34
  manru: Well, I mean… Lance, because this is…
• 33:37
  Tad Eggleston: Everybody knows that Russia is a hotbed of Christian love… and community.
• 33:48
  manru: This is what every bad faith actor understands, and this is not new either, this goes back to my childhood, when I grew up in a church like that, where, like.
• 33:54
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 33:55
  manru: every con man who came through town came to your church because they knew that, like, if you're in that church, you automatically have a level of trust with people. People trust you just by virtue of you being there and looking like them.
• 34:05
  manru: And so they're willing to, like, invest in your get-rich-quick scheme, or to, like, give you their money
• 34:10
  manru: for something, because you've established trust… immediate trust with them on the deepest level possible. And that's exactly what, you know, bad faith actors like, like con men, like Donald Trump, like, Vladimir Putin, realized that if you can just show up at people's churches, or convince them, or convince the evangelical leaders to, like.
• 34:29
  manru: co-sign you, or create a page that convinces them that you're on their side, that they automatically give you trust, and then you can tell them whatever you want about, you know, drinking their own urine to cure COVID, or, you know, about how the Democrats control the weather. You can tell them anything you want, and they'll believe
• 34:46
  manru: something outlandish told to them by somebody they imagine is in their community, then they would, you know, if you, you know, somebody who's not in their community.
• 34:55
  Bryce: Even in a cave.
• 34:56
  manru: Come on, man.
• 34:57
  Bryce: Even in a case where you might see Somebody in your community who's
• 35:02
  Bryce: an evangelical priest or a pastor or whatever, being shot.
• 35:07
  Bryce: with non-lethal rounds in the head by ICE.
• 35:11
  Tad Eggleston: And still be like, no, no, no, that's not my kind of Christian.
• 35:16
  manru: Yeah, it's okay.
• 35:16
  Bryce: Look at that apple.
• 35:19
  Tad Eggleston: That's the wrong kind of Christian.
• 35:21
  Bryce: Yeah, that guy who was standing there yelling at the ice.
• 35:24
  Bryce: Praying, praying for the ice.
• 35:26
  Tad Eggleston: But… but actually, I'm gonna… I'm gonna bring this back to… to… to Aggie and Death Dog, because I think part of…
• 35:32
  Tad Eggleston: part of the power and hopefulness of both Aggie and Death Dog is showing how important trust at an individual level can be. So how does one balance, you know, a world that
• 35:47
  Tad Eggleston: Collectively can be very untrustable with finding a way
• 35:53
  Tad Eggleston: Because if we go around dis… I mean, distrust is what you get in terabytes, you know? Rather than everybody leaving jail.
• 36:02
  Tad Eggleston: everybody else decided, oh, I'm gonna have 5 years knocked off my sentence. Won't get me out, which means that I'm gonna have to go back upstairs, because I don't work down my sentence here, I only work up my sentence here, but I would rather do that than trust this guy and walk out the front door.
• 36:21
  manru: Well, yeah, the reason why they're able to, like, operate a prison without any guards is they make it utterly impossible for the prisoners to trust each other. Right. So the prisoners then become their own guards, which I think is sort of the way, you know, the gig economy works. It's like, there's no such thing as strikes or solidarity, there's only viewing your fellow workers as competitors.
• 36:40
  manru: And so it makes it impossible for you to ever, like, sort of, like, you know, get together with them to, like, to work towards a better system.
• 36:49
  Tad Eggleston: So how do we, like, flip that? Because it seems like we have this trust in…
• 36:55
  Tad Eggleston: big, monolithic, untrustable things.
• 36:59
  Tad Eggleston: And lack of trust with All of the individuals, because the big monolithic
• 37:07
  Tad Eggleston: Things have told us, oh, you can't trust them.
• 37:10
  manru: Well, frankly, I think, we still can turn back the clock on this, but I think it needs to be done soon. I think it needs to be done soon by people who still remember what things were like before, because once you have
• 37:24
  manru: people coming into adulthood, thinking this is just the way things are, becomes infinitely harder to sort of reclaim the sort of the lost connections that we had, because they don't know any better. They don't understand that things could be different.
• 37:40
  Bryce: That's why you see so many, such a large percentage of the protests in the last year being carried out by people who are older than us, you know, people in their 60s and 70s who remember.
• 37:53
  manru: A functioning democracy.
• 37:55
  Bryce: And remember, fighting for things, and achieving things in a democracy, which…
• 38:00
  Bryce: for most of our life, we have not experienced. We've experienced, you know, a slow… slowly creeping loss of rights and freedom.
• 38:08
  Tad Eggleston: And as much as that's true for us, that's even more true
• 38:14
  Tad Eggleston: for the next generation. I know, Bryce, you work in a middle school, I work in a high school.
• 38:22
  Tad Eggleston: it's gonna… it's gonna feel weird that I say this, but when Wyatt, at the end, was talking about how he'd never had anybody worth appreciating before.
• 38:31
  Tad Eggleston: Not only was I thinking about that, but also what popped into my head, and this is for you, Nate, 6-7. Which, like, the more… the more I think about it, the more I've read about it, the more I've talked to kids about it, the reason that's a thing is because it's nothing.
• 38:47
  Tad Eggleston: That, that…
• 38:48
  Bryce: It belongs to them.
• 38:49
  Tad Eggleston: It belongs to them, and they've also, like.
• 38:53
  Tad Eggleston: It's their way of just, like, our world is absurd, it always has been.
• 39:00
  Bryce: Yeah. Yep.
• 39:01
  Tad Eggleston: But also, I'm gonna throw something out, because you guys are both nerds.
• 39:04
  Tad Eggleston: What's the answer to the ultimate question?
• 39:08
  Tad Eggleston: Of life, the universe, and everything.
• 39:14
  Bryce: Bryce is smiling.
• 39:16
  manru: I don't have that answer.
• 39:19
  Tad Eggleston: Neither one of you have read Hitchhacker's Guide to the Galaxy?
• 39:21
  manru: Oh, 42.
• 39:22
  Tad Eggleston: 42. What's 6 times 7?
• 39:26
  Bryce: 42.
• 39:29
  manru: You gotta.
• 39:30
  Tad Eggleston: You might be onto something here, this is all I'm saying! So Bryce, talk to me about creating Wyatt, and creating this boy that lives in this world that…
• 39:45
  Tad Eggleston: Has never really cared for him.
• 39:47
  Tad Eggleston: But he's still not… Jaded.
• 39:52
  Bryce: No, it's easy to… I think, you know, when you're that young, I think you…
• 39:59
  Tad Eggleston: He's not young, he's 13.
• 40:00
  Bryce: He doesn't feel he's young, but…
• 40:04
  Tad Eggleston: Everybody thinks I look like a kid, even though I'm 13.
• 40:07
  Bryce: Yeah, yeah. You're right. And that's… and that's purposeful, right? Because he… he lives in a world where childhood is kind of ignored.
• 40:16
  Bryce: Which, based on my experience working in a middle school and in this modern world,
• 40:26
  Bryce: there is a lot of that. A lot of the adult world just kind of washing its hands of responsibility for the current generation.
• 40:37
  Tad Eggleston: They just need to go to work.
• 40:38
  Bryce: Yes. And…
• 40:40
  Tad Eggleston: They need to contribute to society, Bryce.
• 40:43
  Bryce: That's where we're headed.
• 40:44
  Bryce: If we don't…
• 40:45
  Tad Eggleston: Enough with those socialist child labor laws.
• 40:49
  Bryce: Right.
• 40:50
  Bryce: as long as they're old enough to follow directions, then they have value, right? As labor.
• 40:58
  Bryce: And, so Wyatt is a representation of that trend, and, a cautionary You know, example,
• 41:11
  Bryce: And, you know, you pointed out sort of the key…
• 41:16
  Bryce: Line in the whole book, which is that he doesn't feel like he's ever had anyone
• 41:21
  Bryce: Who really had his back, or cared about him.
• 41:24
  Bryce: Including his family.
• 41:26
  Bryce: As is illustrated in the story.
• 41:28
  Bryce: And this robot dog is literally the first entity, that…
• 41:37
  Bryce: Is willing to go to bat for him and cares about him.
• 41:40
  Bryce: And, that's kind of the whole key to the relationship and the story, and what I'm trying to say is… is, we all… we need to prevent
• 41:51
  Bryce: the Wyots of the world from being in that position.
• 41:54
  Tad Eggleston: In whatever ways we can.
• 41:57
  Bryce: And… and take care of these… these kids, because… They're our future.
• 42:02
  Bryce: I mean, it's such a cliche to say things like this, oh, the children are our future, but…
• 42:07
  Bryce: I mean, they are. And if we have any hope for this planet.
• 42:12
  Tad Eggleston: Well, also… That generation…
• 42:13
  Bryce: It has to be something better than what's coming.
• 42:16
  Tad Eggleston: But also, we've got the gerontocracy going, the boomers essentially decided not to get into politics.
• 42:23
  Bryce: Yep.
• 42:24
  Tad Eggleston: They are literally our future, probably sooner rather than later, because whether the gerontocracy will give up, like…
• 42:33
  Tad Eggleston: Do they have more than a decade left before their hearts just give out?
• 42:37
  Bryce: Right, very true.
• 42:39
  Bryce: You're right, and the voices that are the most powerful are not voices of people, like, in their 50s or 60s.
• 42:46
  Tad Eggleston: No.
• 42:47
  Bryce: Or are people in their 30s and 20s that are coming up in politics?
• 42:50
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but, but, I mean, part of that is because…
• 42:55
  Tad Eggleston: It was a time where there was kind of a mentorship program in…
• 43:01
  Tad Eggleston: In… in politics, where… where, like…
• 43:05
  Tad Eggleston: People would do a job and then move up to the next job, and they'd help the people who worked under them get their job, and whatnot. And again, like, the idea that Congress has gotten this old means that there are two whole generations.
• 43:22
  Bryce: Haven't had their voice yet.
• 43:23
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I did agree.
• 43:25
  Tad Eggleston: bother to ever really get the…
• 43:28
  manru: I think it's a broader… this is a broader symptom, too, where it's like, once you started, like, like, making it harder to retire, once you started getting rid of the good middle-class jobs, the people who had those stayed… they put their claws in, they stayed in them.
• 43:42
  manru: And so you didn't see the turnover from generation to generation that you had. Like, once the boomers got into these jobs, and to a large degree, you know, started destroying them.
• 43:52
  manru: It's like they didn't want to leave, you know, and the people who were coming up, the Gen Xs and the people after.
• 44:00
  manru: you know, there weren't the… there weren't the avenues of social mobility, there weren't the middle-class jobs available in the way… same way they were… there were for boomers, and I think what you see, like a lot of… it's like the cynicism.
• 44:13
  manru: Of just realizing there's no hope for you, there's no… Right. That there's no opportunity, so you check out.
• 44:20
  manru: That's why there's such a gerontocracy, and why so many other subsequent generations have just sort of checked out of politics, or have gone, you know, to extremism, because the old, methods of social mobility and, like, political engagement have kind of been consumed and discarded by
• 44:40
  manru: The, the boomer generation.
• 44:42
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 44:42
  Bryce: Purposefully.
• 44:44
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I mean, as you were saying this, I'm sitting there going, oh, wait a minute. So, where the boomer generation started holding their jobs.
• 44:51
  manru: Yeah, became… with tenure who's, like, under the age of 60. It's almost impossible.
• 44:57
  Tad Eggleston: Right, and where it started becoming hard for the next generation was that point
• 45:03
  Tad Eggleston: We're gonna call it the Reagan years.
• 45:05
  Tad Eggleston: Where… where we continued to have continual growth, except that the growth was only in terms of profits for the rich. So we weren't… we didn't continue expansion.
• 45:19
  Tad Eggleston: We didn't have a need for more workers.
• 45:23
  Tad Eggleston: We just had more pro… It's almost like somebody could have predicted this.
• 45:29
  Tad Eggleston: That's all I'm sayin'!
• 45:31
  Bryce: Yeah, yeah.
• 45:32
  manru: I think that, you know, my sort of grand theory is that, like, after World War II, when the United States was not only, you know, building its own service economy, but it was rebuilding Europe and much of Asia, American corporations were rebuilding the world.
• 45:47
  manru: and were, like, really kind of the only industrial power left in the game, it was very easy to, like, create a good life for IBM employees, for, you know, Ford employees, and also to be incredibly profitable as a corporation. And then in the, like, 70s and 80s…
• 46:04
  Tad Eggleston: But…
• 46:05
  manru: But the other thing…
• 46:05
  Tad Eggleston: Something that's important to remember is they weren't Incredibly profitable by today's standards.
• 46:14
  manru: Well, they weren't… I mean, they were creating… they were incredibly profitable, but it wasn't just, like, digital money. Like, you weren't creating iPod numbers, like, on a spreadsheet that no one could ever hope to spend, because it was an actual economy. It was a physical economy, not.
• 46:27
  Tad Eggleston: Yes.
• 46:27
  manru: Digital, monetary, financial economy.
• 46:29
  Tad Eggleston: They were consistently growing by, like, 10-12%, not by 70% per year.
• 46:35
  manru: But I think what happened was, like, you know, when Japanese and German, you know, like, industry rebuilt in the 70s, and were ready to compete with the United States on a global scale, you know, as were the economies of Western Europe.
• 46:50
  manru: that there… it was no longer such an easy game for American corporations, and given the choice between, well, what do we… what do we sacrifice? Do we sacrifice, like, the,
• 47:00
  manru: the ever-increasing American standard of living of the labor force, or do we sacrifice the profitability of our corporations? The nation collectively, or at least through our political leadership, decided to preserve
• 47:12
  manru: the corporate profitability over the rising standard of living, which is why in the 80s he started getting these massive tax breaks. He started seeing, you know, more and more capital being dumped into financial, like, private equity.
• 47:24
  manru: type thing, and far fewer… far, far, much less capital being dumped into things like Social Security and the social safety net, and
• 47:33
  manru: you know, unions and whatnot, the things that's the idea of improving people's lives. But I think that was kind of the beginning of the end for, for the American dream, for the idea that we could all be middle class, was, that crisis in the 80s where suddenly America was not the only game in town, and we were going to have to compete with foreign.
• 47:52
  Tad Eggleston: I guess… I guess my only argument would be that I think that the fact that there was a crisis, and I don't know if I want to think of it as a full-blown crisis, I'd have to go look at my economic history a little bit.
• 48:05
  manru: Well, I think that what happened was that they, they realized that, you know, American corporations, like American car makers, like Ford and Chevy, weren't selling in Japan, they weren't selling in Europe.
• 48:14
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 48:15
  manru: big gas hogs, but nobody wanted to drive. Nobody even here wanted to really drive them. So, instead of, like, you know, American corporations becoming more competitive or learning, they just start getting massive, massive tax breaks from.
• 48:28
  Tad Eggleston: Right, that's my point. That's why I was given the big air quotes on the crisis. I don't know that it was as much of a crisis as much as there were certain people that wanted to go there anyway, and when they saw even the smallest bump in the road, they saw an opportunity to go, hey, this is the way to do it!
• 48:47
  manru: But there wasn't that for, you know, all these tax breaks, and for, you know, like, basically severing the social mobility ladders.
• 48:56
  manru: In the 60s and 70s, when, you know, there was enough money to go around because American corporations and American industry was dominating the world. It was only when they had to get competitive, and they were faced with this choice of, do we actually want to make better products and compete, or do we want to just stay rich?
• 49:11
  manru: They chose just to stay rich, and the government facilitated.
• 49:14
  Tad Eggleston: No, I mean, the John Birch Society had some impetus, they just didn't…
• 49:18
  manru: The John Burns Society and these right-wing movements.
• 49:21
  manru: They convinced average people, the people working, that this was in their interest, even though clearly it was not. Even though clearly they're, they're, they're stripping their own futures, their own, sort of.
• 49:34
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 49:34
  manru: And convince them, well, we gotta do this to, you know, to fight communism, or we gotta do this to make the world…
• 49:41
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, we're mostly parsing hairs here. I think we're agreeing.
• 49:46
  manru: But I think that was kind of the beginning of the end of the…
• 49:48
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah!
• 49:49
  manru: The idea that, like.
• 49:51
  manru: while everything was good, and you could have it all, the corporations were okay with, like, letting American labor standard of living continually rise, and paying people well, and, like, funding, you know,
• 50:06
  manru: golf clubs for their employees, and then the moment, like, they no longer had the game in themselves, they had to compete with other corporations, instead of raising their game to be competitive, they just said, well, we're just gonna not spend money on you anymore. And that was kind of the end of, you know, we never really had a good political…
• 50:24
  manru: sort of, counter…
• 50:27
  manru: punch to that. It's like, in a lot of ways, I think the, the Reagan 80s were a sort of a revision, a, like a, like a counter.
• 50:37
  Bryce: aggression.
• 50:37
  manru: Against… against the New Deal, against… Yeah.
• 50:40
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, absolutely. Certainly great society, and definitely New Deal. It's like…
• 50:44
  manru: We never really had the counter-counter punch of, like, well, here's the Progressive Era's back, or we're reinstating the old social safety net.
• 50:53
  Bryce: the only punch was the Civil Rights Movement, right? And that is the closest, you know, at the end of the Civil Rights Movement is the closest we got.
• 51:02
  Bryce: to the American dream, being available to the largest amount of people. I mean, prior to the mid-60s.
• 51:09
  Tad Eggleston: the American dream was only available to… But also a part of the end, because, like, Brown v. Board of Education led to WAY more private schools, because they could still keep… and once you had private.
• 51:25
  manru: Even the wrong ability, because…
• 51:28
  manru: By sending state funding to private schools, it's like you're tilting the board even further into favor of the already rich.
• 51:36
  Tad Eggleston: Yep.
• 51:37
  Bryce: And… and I think the thing that, when I was younger, that I was…
• 51:42
  Bryce: blissfully ignorant toward… was this idea that when you have.
• 51:46
  Tad Eggleston: Ignorance Rock.
• 51:47
  Bryce: Yeah, it feels good.
• 51:50
  Bryce: Look at how popular it is these days.
• 51:54
  Bryce: But this feeling that, well, when we make progress, we've made progress. And there's not these forces that are constantly trying to destroy that progress, and push back on that progress. I mean, you look at this meager progress we made in the United States with healthcare.
• 52:12
  Bryce: with, you know, Obamacare, or the ACA, or whatever you want to call it. And every second since that tiny little bit of progress was eked out, there have been these forces just like, we gotta stop that, we gotta get rid of it, we have to go back, we have to stop it.
• 52:25
  Tad Eggleston: More people need to die, and they need to pay more money for it, dammit!
• 52:29
  Bryce: Yes, and they kind of are getting there, right? Like, they're kind.
• 52:33
  Tad Eggleston: Kind of.
• 52:34
  Bryce: a way to push that back and destroy that. It's just… it's…
• 52:39
  Bryce: Not a great thing about the human… about humanity that…
• 52:42
  Bryce: That there's always going to be a certain section of humanity that's just like, fuck progress. I don't like the way things are because they're not as good for me.
• 52:52
  Bryce: When we have progress.
• 52:54
  Bryce: So, no progress.
• 52:57
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, in some ways, it was more honest when it was Kings.
• 53:01
  Bryce: Yeah, because they're like, it's all about me, and if I give you.
• 53:03
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 53:03
  Bryce: because I choose to.
• 53:05
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 53:07
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. I'm rereading 100 Bullets right now, so I'm doing a little bit of that with the…
• 53:15
  Tad Eggleston: the, the, the global… criminal cartels, be it Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso.
• 53:24
  Tad Eggleston: Hmm.
• 53:28
  Tad Eggleston: We talk about such fun things, don't we?
• 53:30
  Bryce: When we used to come on and talk about my bad, there were a lot more laughs.
• 53:34
  Tad Eggleston: There were, there were. Actually, I had to ask you, I meant to ask you, did you, did you, either of you read The Pedestrian?
• 53:44
  manru: Okay.
• 53:44
  Tad Eggleston: The Pedestrian is a superhero-ish comic from Magma that I think won a Ringo?
• 53:53
  Tad Eggleston: I.
• 53:54
  manru: I'm familiar with, you know, I know.
• 53:57
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, yeah, but, like, the superhero will, like, stop for the… the…
• 54:04
  Tad Eggleston: the don't walk sign, and then…
• 54:07
  Tad Eggleston: Speed walk across the street when it… says walk.
• 54:11
  Tad Eggleston: You know, and it made me think very much if you're… Twice the strength of an.
• 54:19
  Bryce: The two men, yes.
• 54:21
  Bryce: Rush hour.
• 54:22
  Tad Eggleston: Any more My Bad on the horizon? I mean, I feel like there's more stories to tell.
• 54:29
  Bryce: But we definitely have more stories to tell, and occasionally we talk about trying to get something going. You know, it's not been greenlit by Ahoy.
• 54:41
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 54:41
  Bryce: We ask every once in a while.
• 54:45
  Bryce: But there's a possibility that we could, you know, do some sort of…
• 54:49
  Bryce: public funding, you know, Kickstart type thing to try to get going again. And we've talked a little bit about that from time to time.
• 54:57
  manru: Yeah, I love working on my bad, I would love to do more, because it's so much easier to write 10 pages.
• 55:05
  manru: than 20, and just half the story. And I think also, to have a collaborator, you know, you sort of, like, got an energy to feed off of, and you, you know, you have a prompt. It's like, if you just sit there and stare at a blank page not knowing what to write, it's much harder than if somebody else has an idea, and you know, okay, well, I can… I can feed into that idea, my tributary can feed into your tributary.
• 55:26
  manru: down the road. It's much easier, right, when you have, like, a scent of something than when you're just staring at a blank page.
• 55:34
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I can become dogged in terms of plugging the hell out of Kickstarters that I like, so, like, if you go that route, let me know.
• 55:42
  Bryce: Okay.
• 55:44
  manru: Any Kickstarters you like now? Any Kickstarters you want to plug?
• 55:47
  Tad Eggleston: Ugh… I feel… or, there, there, no, there's, there's, there's… there is one.
• 55:55
  Tad Eggleston: And see, so you got me off my game. I don't have it, like, immediately up, because I didn't know it was going on.
• 56:00
  Bryce: While you're looking for it, I will say that if people enjoy My Bad, it seems like, Ahoy is still interested in Acid Chimp, because they seem to keep wanting little spurts of Acid Chimp, so at least.
• 56:13
  Tad Eggleston: Acid Chimp is awesome.
• 56:15
  Bryce: Yeah, Acid Chimp seems to have a life still, beyond life.
• 56:19
  manru: As the champ's the breakout character, he seems to be, like, the Fonz.
• 56:21
  Tad Eggleston: Freak Squeal is the one that I was gonna… is, is, it's like, manga…
• 56:31
  Tad Eggleston: slash Dungeons & Dragons-esque… Band-Aid to Snee.
• 56:37
  Tad Eggleston: That, that magnetic…
• 56:40
  Tad Eggleston: has translated and is kickstarting. Oh, cool. Is at 117,000 out of 7,500. So, like, if you go back it in the next 10 days, you know that you're just getting it, not… Right.
• 56:52
  manru: Yeah, that one blew up like gangstbusters.
• 56:55
  Bryce: Right, right.
• 56:56
  Tad Eggleston: I… here, I'll… I'll, I'll throw it… throw it up on screen so you can…
• 57:02
  Tad Eggleston: Since Mark asked the question.
• 57:04
  Bryce: Yeah!
• 57:05
  Tad Eggleston: And, and, and I just had, I just had, mike Kennedy from…
• 57:13
  Tad Eggleston: From Magnetic on. He was fun to talk to.
• 57:20
  Tad Eggleston: They're a little…
• 57:21
  Tad Eggleston: Let's see, I love how many different references I can see right there. Got some black sad going on, you got some…
• 57:28
  Bryce: Hmm.
• 57:29
  manru: Yeah, it's a hugely successful Kickstarter, look at that.
• 57:33
  Tad Eggleston: 117,000 on… on… $118,000 on a 7400 goal.
• 57:41
  Bryce: That's fantastic. And then, yeah, very nice job they did with it.
• 57:45
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, but apparently it's, like, it's like a school for…
• 57:56
  Tad Eggleston: superheroes, but superheroes in more of the Dungeons & Dragons type, so it's like, there's a werewolf, and there's…
• 58:03
  Bryce: Oh, yeah.
• 58:04
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 58:06
  Tad Eggleston: No, I, I, you know… This big teddy bear type guy.
• 58:09
  Bryce: Yeah, the art's really cool.
• 58:11
  Bryce: I like the art.
• 58:13
  Tad Eggleston: So… and they're actually doing 7 volumes, like, if you go all in, you can get the 7 volumes in, like.
• 58:22
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 58:23
  Bryce: Yeah.
• 58:26
  Tad Eggleston: Which looks pretty awesome. I didn't go that far, because I… I did…
• 58:31
  manru: Real commitment.
• 58:33
  Tad Eggleston: I did too many… I did too many Kickstarters in October, and I'm still paying down…
• 58:39
  Tad Eggleston: from there, but I did get one volume digitally.
• 58:43
  Tad Eggleston: As a starter, because the other thing is, magnetic goes through…
• 58:47
  Tad Eggleston: or distributes… is partnered with Oni, so they distribute. So, like, once it's been funded.
• 58:53
  Bryce: you know, I might not be able to get the cool trunk anymore, but… Yeah, you can get the book.
• 58:57
  Tad Eggleston: They will wind up in stores.
• 58:59
  Bryce: Neat.
• 59:00
  Tad Eggleston: If I love it, I'll be able to go get it. Alright, that sounds like a good compromise.
• 59:05
  Tad Eggleston: Magnetic, they've done one of my all-time favorite
• 59:11
  Tad Eggleston: translations. Have either of you read Mr. Invincible?
• 59:14
  Bryce: Nope.
• 59:16
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, Mr. Invincible… His superpower is that he can move between panels.
• 59:22
  Bryce: Oh.
• 59:22
  manru: That's cool, I like that. It's very beneficial.
• 59:24
  Tad Eggleston: His… his sidekick, 2D?
• 59:28
  Tad Eggleston: Can… can, like, mess with… like, he can pick up the car over here, where it's small, and bring it here, and it'll still be small. Or he can take the small car here and move it there, where it will be huge.
• 59:41
  Bryce: Oh, wow.
• 59:44
  manru: a dog named Gutter.
• 59:46
  Tad Eggleston: No, but, but, like, that's something to toss out there. There was an old man with Alzheimer's that,
• 59:54
  Tad Eggleston: his… his… Word balloons are… are physical, so it can, like, hit you with the word balloons.
• 1:00:03
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, that's interesting. And then there… and then there was a… the one villain could move between pages, so he could, like, open a door on one side of the page to go into the other side of the page, and his hideout was literally in between
• 1:00:16
  Tad Eggleston: The two sides of the page.
• 1:00:18
  Bryce: Can they only go forward? Can you only go forward on pages or panels, or can they go backward as well?
• 1:00:23
  Tad Eggleston: No, they can do both.
• 1:00:25
  Bryce: Interesting.
• 1:00:26
  Tad Eggleston: In fact, my favorite one-page is…
• 1:00:30
  Tad Eggleston: Mr. Invincible, seeing a kid read his new comic, go, oh, wow, man, I can't wait to read more of this a month from now, climbing all the way down through the panels, getting the comic from a month later, bringing it back up to him.
• 1:00:45
  Tad Eggleston: He reads it, but then when you get back down, right before he takes it from the kid.
• 1:00:51
  Tad Eggleston: The kid takes it out of the mailbox and goes, oh, man, I read this already.
• 1:00:56
  Bryce: Oh, neat. Yeah, that's cool.
• 1:00:59
  Bryce: That's twisty. That's an exercise that could be a lot of fun to do.
• 1:01:05
  Tad Eggleston: But, you know. So, it's, it's, holiday, so I don't want to keep too long.
• 1:01:14
  Tad Eggleston: Do either of you have any other things on the horizon that you're allowed to talk about, want to plug?
• 1:01:20
  Tad Eggleston: etc.
• 1:01:21
  Bryce: Mark always does. Go for it, Mark.
• 1:01:24
  manru: Alright, I got a few things. I got a, a war series. I've written a war comic series, which I'm very proud of with Bad Cave called Dog Tag. Hasn't been announced yet, so you're getting the scoop.
• 1:01:36
  Tad Eggleston: Yay!
• 1:01:37
  manru: a, a reporter for the Stars and Stripes from, like, the D-Day invasion till the end of the war, and, artwork by, by P.J. Holden, and…
• 1:01:51
  manru: And it just… the pages just blow my… blow me away every time.
• 1:01:54
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:01:56
  manru: Coming out.
• 1:01:56
  Tad Eggleston: I like BJ, hold it.
• 1:01:58
  manru: Yeah, no, he's great. And, and then also, Wonder Woman, Golden Age, the end of the trilogy for the, Superman Space Age.
• 1:02:07
  Tad Eggleston: When does that start?
• 1:02:09
  manru: That should come out, Spring 2026, issue number.
• 1:02:13
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:02:14
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:02:16
  Tad Eggleston: And that's with Mike again?
• 1:02:18
  manru: Yep.
• 1:02:20
  Tad Eggleston: Alrighty.
• 1:02:22
  Tad Eggleston: Bryce, anything cool?
• 1:02:24
  Bryce: I mean, I… I wish I could do some of that, but .
• 1:02:28
  Tad Eggleston: Another semester in middle school.
• 1:02:30
  Bryce: I'm working, I'm pitching, I got pitches out there, projects I would love to do.
• 1:02:37
  Bryce: What about,
• 1:02:42
  Bryce: like, Ozempic-type drugs having a minor side effect where, like, half a percent of the people who take them turn permanently invisible?
• 1:02:51
  Bryce: And then how society has to deal with all these invisible people that, Ozempic has created.
• 1:02:59
  Bryce: So.
• 1:03:00
  Tad Eggleston: That's a little crazy.
• 1:03:01
  Bryce: Yeah, so, you know, I mean…
• 1:03:03
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:03:03
  Bryce: out there, I'd love to, love to have Greenlit and be working on. We'll see what happens here. And Death Dog, you know, if people buy these first two issues and support these, Ahoy definitely, you know, wants to do more if there's an audience for it, so…
• 1:03:19
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I'll keep plugging up.
• 1:03:21
  Bryce: I'll call soon, if it's coming.
• 1:03:22
  Tad Eggleston: both through here and through the comic shop that I'm now associated with, Modern Age Comics, Algonquin, Illinois.
• 1:03:32
  Tad Eggleston: So, alright, the, the required final question, tell me something you love.
• 1:03:41
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably a comic.
• 1:03:43
  Tad Eggleston: But, we don't have rules.
• 1:03:46
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably storytelling.
• 1:03:48
  Tad Eggleston: But again, with the rules. But something that you love.
• 1:03:52
  Tad Eggleston: That not enough people around you have experienced, and you need them to.
• 1:03:57
  Tad Eggleston: So that you have more people to talk about it with.
• 1:04:01
  Bryce: Okay, well, you know, I'm gonna…
• 1:04:03
  Bryce: play with that question just a little bit, because this is not something obscure, and I'm sure I've talked about it before, but my favorite comic remains Saga by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan, and I feel like…
• 1:04:17
  Bryce: before he took the hiatus, before they took the hiatus a few years ago, it was a book everybody talked about, and everybody was reading, and now I feel like it's kind of…
• 1:04:26
  Bryce: You know, it's still there, but it's not that thing that everyone is,
• 1:04:31
  Bryce: jawing about, and I… I still love it. I still get.
• 1:04:34
  Tad Eggleston: This is where I need to ask you, Bryce, what do your Monday nights look like? Because every four weeks, we have a Saga Book Club on 22 panels. You're more than invited to come join us.
• 1:04:46
  Bryce: Yeah, let's do that, I would love to do that.
• 1:04:48
  Tad Eggleston: I will add you to the invite. I think we're gonna be on Volume 5 next?
• 1:04:54
  Bryce: Okay, I could go back and re-read Volume 5, yeah, yeah.
• 1:04:57
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, maybe William's.
• 1:04:58
  Bryce: Volume 12 sitting here, waiting to be read, and I'm excited to read it. I'm always… whenever there's a new saga, I light up. It makes me feel like I felt when I was a kid reading comics, where everything…
• 1:05:10
  Tad Eggleston: I agree with you, though. The hiatus meant that… and I think, actually, as much as anything, it's because so many other cool things started during the hiatus. It's less that saga stopped being cool, and more that there became more other comics worth talking about in that time.
• 1:05:27
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, hell, that's when Mark got started.
• 1:05:29
  Bryce: That's true.
• 1:05:32
  Bryce: And Brian K. Vaughan became a huge fan of Mark, so it's all in your home.
• 1:05:36
  Tad Eggleston: All connected.
• 1:05:38
  Tad Eggleston: Is he? I could believe that.
• 1:05:39
  Bryce: Oh yeah, yeah, he's reached out to Mark before with praise.
• 1:05:43
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, sweet.
• 1:05:45
  Tad Eggleston: How does that feel?
• 1:05:46
  Bryce: But yeah, I will…
• 1:05:47
  Tad Eggleston: And that reminds me that my new last… my new second-to-last question that I forgot to ask, so it'll be the last question this time, after Mark gives me the thing that he loves.
• 1:05:57
  Bryce: Okay.
• 1:05:57
  manru: My pick is, A graphic novel called Elmer, by,
• 1:06:03
  Tad Eggleston: No, you can't do it.
• 1:06:05
  manru: Why, why's that?
• 1:06:06
  Tad Eggleston: Because you did it the last time, I have it, I have it downstairs.
• 1:06:09
  manru: I'll pivot to a different animal graphic novel then. I'll go to Laika by, Adam… I'm gonna screw up his name. What was his name? Adam Abadzan, I want to say? But it, it's, like, tells the, the fictionalized story of the first dog in space, in the Soviet Union in 1957.
• 1:06:29
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like I've read this, but I can't remember.
• 1:06:32
  manru: dog's wife.
• 1:06:33
  manru: It's a wonderful graphic novel, and it's more about the scientists who are working on that project than it is about the dog, but, but…
• 1:06:42
  Tad Eggleston: admit.
• 1:06:42
  manru: Nick.
• 1:06:44
  Tad Eggleston: a bad sis.
• 1:06:45
  manru: Nick Cabensis, that's it. Nick Cabez.
• 1:06:48
  manru: So, but, but yeah, it's, it's.
• 1:06:51
  Tad Eggleston: From 1st, 2nd.
• 1:06:52
  manru: full of humanity, and also it's historical fiction, which I always like, and it's… and it's, like, got science in there, but yeah, it's… for me, it's… it's, like, sort of… totally my bag. It's totally the sort of comic I would love to read more of.
• 1:07:09
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 1:07:11
  Bryce: Second… first second kicks ass. It's a great company.
• 1:07:13
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, they do. Well, and I like them even more now that they… they… I mean, they were already doing both young adult and some adult, but when they created their 23rd Street imprint.
• 1:07:26
  Tad Eggleston: Which is really this year.
• 1:07:29
  Tad Eggleston: you know, they've started doing some, I mean.
• 1:07:33
  Tad Eggleston: I finally got to reap the first volume of THB. Because it finally got collected. Yeah, right, right.
• 1:07:40
  Bryce: Right, yeah, no.
• 1:07:42
  Bryce: Agreed.
• 1:07:43
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I'm… I'm a massive fan of her second, but you reminded me of the other question that I've been, trying to ask more people, because it's…
• 1:07:53
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, every one of these qualifies as an answer for me.
• 1:08:00
  Tad Eggleston: I'm entering my fifth year of doing this, and I feel like my life has become surreal. Like, like, the life that I live
• 1:08:07
  Tad Eggleston: The people that I talk to, the people that I text with, the people that I hang out with, if you told me even 10 years ago, these are gonna be your friends. This is gonna be what you do on a con weekend, or whatever, I would have gone, shut the fuck up.
• 1:08:24
  Tad Eggleston: You know, but I also find that almost everybody in the business has, like, no matter how big or small they are, has some story of their own of this moment that never would have happened if they weren't part of comics.
• 1:08:41
  Bryce: That they still just kind of look back and go.
• 1:08:44
  Tad Eggleston: Wow, did I get to do that?
• 1:08:49
  Bryce: Well, I mean…
• 1:08:50
  Tad Eggleston: That's my thing now, share a surreal story.
• 1:08:53
  Bryce: I mean…
• 1:08:58
  Bryce: I mean, you know…
• 1:08:59
  Bryce: just through Mark, like, meeting Mike Allred, having Mike Allred draw a variant cover for My Bad, getting to hang out with him, be in his home, go to a few parks, you know, this person that, like.
• 1:09:15
  Bryce: when I discovered him, you know, through Madman and his early work, and then was so excited when he started doing a lot of work for Marvel that
• 1:09:26
  Bryce: You know, to me, was sort of like…
• 1:09:30
  Bryce: the closest thing to the excitement of, like, a Jack Kirby or something. Right. You know, that kind of just eye-popping, glorious.
• 1:09:39
  Bryce: fantastic, imaginative art to, like, meet that person, and then find out that he's, like, a really cool guy, a really…
• 1:09:48
  Bryce: Like, just what you would want him to be, enthusiastic about comics and pop culture and life.
• 1:09:55
  Bryce: And cosplay, and all manner of creativity.
• 1:10:00
  Bryce: like, that's a really cool thing that, you know, I wouldn't have expected to ever happen in my life, as much as I love comics. So, yeah. Yeah.
• 1:10:10
  Tad Eggleston: That's exactly the type of thing that I'm…
• 1:10:12
  Bryce: Yeah, so cool.
• 1:10:14
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it's just… -
• 1:10:17
  Bryce: Yep.
• 1:10:17
  Tad Eggleston: And one of mine, Mark, is I sat down and had pizza with you.
• 1:10:22
  manru: That was nice! I enjoyed that. That was a good day.
• 1:10:25
  Bryce: Just because the pizza was good.
• 1:10:27
  Tad Eggleston: you got in my car and wasn't worried about the fact that I might never bring you back to your hotel, and went and had peace.
• 1:10:34
  Bryce: Once you decide on a creative career, it's like you've pretty much given yourself over to the universe already.
• 1:10:41
  manru: You've already made the most dangerous decision you're ever gonna make in life, so it's all downhill from there.
• 1:10:49
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, Mark, something surreal.
• 1:10:51
  manru: Well, for me, it kind of happened very early in my comics writing career. In 2016, I was invited to go to the Miami Book Festival, which I always wanted to do, and never, never
• 1:11:03
  manru: would have achieved just through actual writing, until I got into comics, and then I got invited to go down to the Miami Book Festival at the Author's party.
• 1:11:14
  manru: Art Spiegelman was there, and… and to make it even more kind of surreal, like, this was in 2016, in November, and Trump had just been elected president, like, 3 days before, and, like, everybody was in shock. Everybody was just sort of, like, mind-blown that this kid was…
• 1:11:31
  Tad Eggleston: Six days before the Cubs had won the World Series.
• 1:11:34
  manru: And Art Spiegelman, I mean, I remember talking to him directly about it, and it was kind of like all anyone wanted to talk about at the time, and he's like, to me, it feels like Berlin 1933.
• 1:11:44
  manru: And that sort of stuck with me, and especially because we were having such a great… they had a great party, and it was such a great festival, that it felt like this might be the last good time anyone ever has.
• 1:11:57
  Tad Eggleston: Hmm, yeah.
• 1:11:59
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:12:00
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:12:05
  Tad Eggleston: Anyway, I'm certain it won't be. We have good times there.
• 1:12:08
  manru: No, it wasn't the last good time, anybody.
• 1:12:10
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. We had four…
• 1:12:12
  manru: The last free time I ever had. Yeah.
• 1:12:15
  Tad Eggleston: Hey, we had pizza after that, man.
• 1:12:18
  manru: But that's what I think… It was surreal to me because it was, like, fun.
• 1:12:23
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 1:12:23
  manru: Like, my career had, like, you know, I had hit a milestone, and yet, you know, you couldn't enjoy any of it.
• 1:12:33
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I mean, this was before I'd gotten into this whole comics thing, but, like, the Cubs winning the World Series was a really, really big deal for me for 6 days.
• 1:12:43
  manru: I can imagine.
• 1:12:45
  Tad Eggleston: Six days. Six days was how long I got to enjoy the Cubs winning the World Series.
• 1:12:52
  Tad Eggleston: From Wednesday night until Tuesday… Good evening.
• 1:12:57
  manru: those kills.
• 1:12:58
  Bryce: No.
• 1:12:59
  Bryce: It was a rough Tuesday night.
• 1:13:01
  Tad Eggleston: I…
• 1:13:03
  Tad Eggleston: Always, always, always a pleasure. Stick around for a second afterwards, because I got a couple of questions to ask. But for Bryce Ingman, for Mark Russell, this has been 22 Panels, and we will see you after the next page.