#gotta get transcripts from 2 different universities ($100+..)

[uhjpg]

thinking about all the things i need 2 do for my grad school application

[holyhellpod]

4. Fambily

In this episode, we skim the surface of the fambily dynamics in Supernatural, which are--ah. Dicey at best. 

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Transcript under the cut!

Content warnings: domestic violence and family abuse

[Growl]

Ah, the Winchesters. Where do we even start. Unhinged, deranged, and continually traumatised in every way, Sam and Dean complete each other. At least, that’s what the show wants us to think. Despite the ways they betray each other, lie to each other, and  piss each other off, they are fambily. And fambily is the most important thing. The concept of Fambily in the show Supernatural (2005-2020) takes many twists and turns throughout its run. In the first five minutes of episode one, the heteronormative, nuclear family of John, Mary, Sam and Dean is ripped apart by an unknown, antagonistic force that represents all the evil in the world. It creeps into a nursery and eviscerates a white, blonde mother while preying upon a 👶, I mean, how much more evil can you get? It’s fantastic that, in the later seasons especially, Supernatural embraces this idea that fambily doesn’t end in blood, but blood doesn’t always mean fambily. By the end of the series, the fambily concept has expanded to include two dads, an aunt and uncle, and a thirty-year old infant. I’m going to talk about the finale in its own episode, so that my ire will have its proper outlet. 

When the show starts, Sam, Dean and John have each other, and only each other. By the time season 2 really kicks off, Sam and Dean don’t have John anymore, but they do have Bobby Singer. The concept of the triumvirate follows them throughout the series as though they’re in a less sexy Italo Calvino novel—first Sam, Dean and John, then Sam, Dean and Bobby, then Sam, Dean and Ruby, then Sam, Dean and Cas, then Sam, Dean and Mary, then Sam, Dean and Jack. It’s broken in seasons 13-15 when Cas comes back and they have a family of four, and then five when Mary can stand to see her boys.  

But the Winchesters are not the only fambily in Supernatural who matter. In season two, we’re introduced to the Harvelles, mother Ellen and daughter Jo, who are a hunting fambily who run a hunter pub in the middle of whoop whoop. A pub that Eric Kripke famously hated, and rejoiced when he burnt it down at the end of season 2, because the Winchesters and by extension everyone they know aren’t allowed to have anything good ever. It’s revealed in season two episode “No Exit” that John got Jo’s father killed on a hunt, which obviously affects Jo more than it does Sam and Dean. 

[Editing note:] Okay I’m editing this episode, and I’m not happy with it. I’m not going to scrap it completely because I think I do have good points to say, but the general analysis of this episode is so surface level. It is basically contributing nothing to the conversation. And I started this podcast in order to actually contribute something to the culture. I could make a bunch of text posts on tumblr or I could spend hours and hours and hours and hours of my life to something that — I don’t know. Is it bringing me joy? Not at the moment. But, yeah. So I’m not going to scrap this episode completely but this is my way of saying from now on the episodes are going to take as much as they will take and I will commit myself to having deeper and more thoughtful analysis. And if I have to spend an entire episode on one aspect of one thing, I will. I could be at university right now studying a masters or a PhD in fucking literary analysis but instead I’m sitting on my bed making a Supernatural podcast because it brings me joy. It does. It really makes me happy and I don’t want to abandon this project, because people are listening to it. I don’t know why, I don’t know what you like it about it, but you’re listening. And I just think I owe it to myself to make things that I support 100%. So I’ll continue this episode and hopefully this rambling hasn’t put you off it completely. But from now on, I’m going to really, really talk about things that matter in regards to Supernatural… Kind of an oxymoron. Kind of a contradiction. But things that contribute to the cultural consciousness instead of just rehashing the road so far. That’s all I want to do. I want to contribute. I want to say good…ful things. Okay this is making me happy. It’s already working, it’s already making me happy. I’m just going to keep rambling and laughing. Okay so, more thoughtful analysis, deeper analysis. Things that make you think. Things that make me think. Instead of just a bunch of words that mean nothing. Okay, continuing on.

Okay to figure out which episode this was I had to watch a little bit of season two, and I’m still on my season 13 rewatch. The difference between the two seasons. I don’t know if I can even put into words the growth this show has gone through, and the characters have gone through, over the last 15 years. It would be like summarising my own growth by combing through my extensive diary collection and the years of societally- and governmentally-enforced heterosexuality that has plagued my entire life. Those boys are babies in season two. The bootcut jeans alone. Sam is literally 23 years old. I don’t even talk to 23 year olds. I block them on social media.  

The Harvelles are a blip in the Winchester map. While the actors Samantha Ferris and Chad Lindberg did attempt to resuscitate their cultural currency months after the show ended by participating in an event — okay I can’t. I can’t even go into it. Like, clearly Samantha Ferris heard back from her representation as soon as she started posting those tweets and realised she wouldn’t continue to get money if she endorsed, well, the gays. And Chad Lindberg was just using the clout to push his Etsy wares like a 14th century merchant, so I gotta respect the hustle. But Jo and Ellen die in season 5 episode “Abandon All Hope” and are barely mentioned again except the episode Ash appears in, season 5 “Dark side of the moon,” Jo in season 7, “Defending Your Life,” and Ellen in the season 6 episode “My heart will go on.” They didn’t exactly leave what you would call a lasting impact for the next, you know, ten seasons. 

To be honest, I’m not sure when it’s revealed that Bobby’s wife died after being possessed by a demon. It’s made clear in season 5 “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,” and I did not have to look that up, because season four and five are burned into my retinas like a particularly nasty sun flare. Bobby outlines the horrific way he killed his wife, because why not throw some spousal violence into the mix, and later in season 7 “Death’s Door,” it elaborates on their life together. I saw this sentiment expressed on TikTok, which we all know as the foundation of cultural knowledge, which was that fambilies don’t need to be two parents and children. Fambilies can be spouses or partners. You don’t need to have children in order to be a fambily. I think that’s a very nice sentiment and I’ve chosen to adopt it for these purposes. Bobby and his wife Karen are a fambily. While Karen wants kids, Bobby chooses not to have them for fear of becoming like his father and repeating the trauma he inflicted on Bobby. Bobby and Karen’s fambily dynamic is ruptured in the same way that John and Mary’s is—by an intrusive, demonic force that brings Bobby into the hunting world and ends Karen’s life. But by the time we see him at the end of season 1, Bobby is already ingratiated into Sam and Dean’s lives as their surrogate father, and this bond only deepens as the show progresses. Bobby expresses the sentiment to Dean to not be like John, that Dean is already a better man that his father ever was. Isn’t that what we all want to hear? That we have superseded our parents and outgrown them in ways they could never comprehend? Don’t we just want to be better than the generations that came before us, in order to mould a better world for the generations that come after us? Don’t we want to make things easier for our children, and our friends’ children, and our siblings’ children? Dean is a better man than John, and Bobby is better man than his father ever was. It’s about breaking the cycles of intergenerational trauma. I have to believe that Sam, Dean and Bobby did this, because then it’s possible for me to do the same thing. Include here that speech about representation in media that I didn’t bother writing for the last episode. Bobby is the surrogate father to Sam and Dean, a better father than John was, a better hunter even. He crafts an entire network of hunters who report to him, as seen in the season 6 episode “Weekend at Bobby’s,” and he continues to act as Sam and Dean’s mentor until his death in season 7 “How to win friends and influence monsters”. An alternate universe version of Bobby is introduced in season 13, which I have my reservations about, and he and Mary get together, which again, why. Season 13 is so hard to sit through. 

A fambily that is introduced late into the series and is simply NOT given enough screen time is the Banes fambily. In season 12, “Celebrating the life of Asa Fox,” we are introduced to the Banes twins, Max and Alicia, who are by far the most gorgeous hunters we’ve seen in the series. They are hunters raised by a witch, Tasha Banes, who doesn’t appear yet, and they manage to survive the trial by fire that is overcoming the demon Jael. Later in this season, in the episode “Twigs and Twane and Tasha Banes,” both of which are written by the late great Steve Yockey, we are introduced to Tasha in a way that seems awfully familiar: Alicia calls Sam to say their mother has gone missing on a hunt, and hasn’t checked in in a few days. By the end of the episode, Alicia and Tasha are dead, and Max has ostensibly sold his soul for the power to bring Alicia back. The Banes twins’ storyline directly parallels Sam and Dean’s from the pilot, but it’s a tragedy from the outset. We already know Tasha is dead and they can’t save her, however, like Dean does for Sam at the end of season 2, Max chooses to save Alicia at the expense of his own soul. Spin off when. Banes twins series when. I’m waiting. They were in two episodes and I’m still thinking about them. The Harvelles are dust. 

In season 7, “Reading is Fundamental,” a waifish 17 year old honour’s student Kevin Tran breaks into a rehabilitation facility to steal a tablet. This starts a chain of events that ingratiates Kevin Tran in the apocalyptic, death-succumbing world of the Winchesters, starting with Dick Roman, head leviathan, and continuing, but not culminating, with his death at the hands of Gadreel, who was possessing Sam, it’s a whole thing. Any time you attempt to summarise anything on Supernatural, you sound like a lunatic. And I say that as someone who has a supernatural podcast, with an audience of only supernatural fans. We are lunatics, but we’re lunatics together. Kevin’s arc was cut way too short, but we at least got to see him with his momma Linda in the beginnings of season 8 with the unfortunately named episode “What’s up, Tiger Mommy?” It introduces Linda Tran as a capable and worldly woman, hell bent on protecting her son. She offers up her soul among other things in exchange for Kevin and the tablet with him. During the episode, she is possessed by Crowley, and Dean attempts to kill him, which would mean killing Linda as well. Kevin considers this the ultimate betrayal and leaves with his mum. Later in season 9 episode “Captives,” Linda is reintroduced as a captive of Crowley, who escapes with Sam’s help. Back at the bunker, she reunites with Kevin, who is now, thanks to the Winchesters’ incompetence, a ghost 👻. My macbook keeps suggesting little emojis in the smart bar so I just gotta put ‘em in. That’s the last we see of Linda, so I’m drawing my own conclusions about whether she gets to live a long and happy life. Kevin is a fan favourite and despite my reservations about Osric Chau which I will not get into like ever I really like Kevin too. He outsmarts Crowley many times and shows remarkable tenacity to get an impossible job done. His desire to see his mum again, the driving force behind his actions, mirrors Dean’s desperation to have his fambily together again like they used to be. I would call this a parallel but I don’t believe they purposefully did this, I just think they accidentally rehashed the same tired storyline they’ve been peddling since 2005. But yeah, if I was Kevin and all I had was my mum, seeing her again would be the driving force for my actions as well. Kevin’s father is never mentioned, and it honestly isn’t a big deal, which is great. Sometimes fathers are just absent, and you don’t need throw a hissy fit about it or make it your entire personality, Dean.

Missouri Moseley, played by the inimitable Loretta Devine, is introduced in the first season, episode “Home,” in which she helps out on a case involving Sam and Dean’s childhood house. We find out that Missouri is a long-time friend of John’s and helped him to understand that supernatural forces were behind Mary’s death. She is Sam and Dean’s first point of entry into the world of the Supernatural, and they didn’t know it until they meet her in “Home”. In season 13 episode “Patience,” another layer to Missouri’s character is added with the advent of her family: estranged son James and granddaughter Patience Turner, who is also a psychic. We get a lot of backstory for Missouri in this episode, even if it is sloppily written and contradictory to the way they initially set her up. If Missouri and James had been travelling when he was a child, why was she stationed in Lawrence in both 1983 and 2005? What did he mean that Missouri was hunting? I can’t be bothered unpacking the confusing bits of information presented in this episode. It’s not a good episode and I really don’t see why everyone goes apeshit for Bobo Berens. He kills Missouri in this episode, in a really horrible way. Like the history of Supernatural’s racism and misogyny should not be dumped on one man, but nor should it be perpetuated and it is continually throughout the entire show. Confusing, contradictory and badly written backstory aside, she is an interesting character, and her willingness to sacrifice herself to save her family echoes that of Mary in “Home”. I’m actually really mad that Patience never gets to have a relationship with Missouri, and later in season 13 episode “The Bad Place,” Patience’s father tells her that if she leaves to help The Winchesters and uses her psychic abilities, she’s not welcome back in his house. To me that’s just unnecessary. We have a family that has already been ruptured by the death of Patience’s mother, further ruptured by Patience’s father cutting off contact with Missouri, and then to go a step further he disintegrates their family unit by kicking Patience out. Like how much loss do the Moseley-Turners have to endure? It’s really just cruel at this point. But Patience does find family with Jodie, Donna, Claire, Alex and eventually Kaia, and while I love the concept of found family and this found family in particular, it comes at the expense of biological family, which is something that the show has pushed from the very first episode. So that’s evolution in itself. Going from “fambily is the most important thing to these characters” to “found fambily is where we find love” is great, but ripping apart a biological fambily like the Moseley-Turners, and indeed starting the episode by saying Missouri has been shunted out of her son and granddaughter’s lives for trying to bring her son comfort, is just fucked. Like, I couldn’t name a single Bobo episode that I actually like without having to comb through them. I’m trying really hard not to shit all over him because as a writer I know how much that sucks and I know how hard is it for any marginalised writers to get a start, but I’m allowed to have my vendettas. 

If you’ve watched the “Runs In The Family” angels MV from 2010, and only if you’ve watched the “Runs In The Family” angels MV from 2010, you will understand just how jacked up the angel family really is. The angelic counterpoint to Sam and Dean are the archangels Lucifer and Michael. We are introduced to two different versions of Michael—one in season 5, who possesses their dad in 1979 and their brother Adam in 2010—my god that was literally over a decade ago—and Apocalypse World Michael, played by four different actors: Felisha Terrell, Christian Keyes, Jensen Ackles, and Ruth Connell, who plays Rowena. I don’t know what in the hell Jensen Ackles was doing performance-wise when playing Michael, but I consider it a federal crime akin to drug trafficking or money laundering. As for Christian Keyes playing Michael, Andrew Dabb, you know what you did and you’re going to have to live with that.  

In season 5, during the apocalypse, Michael and Lucifer only interact in the last episode, “Swan Song,” but the entire season is built around their conflict. Lucifer disobeyed their father, and Michael as God’s most powerful weapon must defeat him. It’s meant to mirror Sam’s descent into, uhhhh, badness or something, disobeying John to run away to Stanford, or, like, drinking demon blood? It’s unclear. Lucifer and Apocalypse World Michael interact in season 13, and Michael kills Lucifer only to take over Dean’s body and start a season-long arc of, like, bad acting and barely thought-out plots. I would say to Jensen Ackles “don’t quit your day job,” but this is literally his day job. 

The angels as they’re introduced in season 4 are warriors of god, and all they know is obedience and killing. Even Cas can’t break out of the cycle of killing his angel siblings, and often justifies it by saying that it’s for the greater good, that he needs to do it to take down a stronger force like Raphael or Metatron. Anna manages to break free of her family by falling and becoming human, but when Cas betrays her and the angels capture her, she is lobotomised, tortured and sent back out to kill Sam. Then she’s burned to a crisp by Michael possessing John, not the last time a woman would burn to death on this show. The angels are dysfunctional at best, and actively hostile to each other, especially Castiel, the infamous spanner in the works. I could write an entire academic paper about how the angels think of Castiel as this rebel slut who murdered his way to the top and is going to be the downfall of angel kind, but Dean thinks of him as this little nerdy guy with a harp he carries around in his back pocket. Which honestly Cas would love because he’s obsessed with Dean and wants to touch his butt. I don���t know what else I can say about the angels without turning this into a dissertation, so I’ll continue on.

While all seasons of the show are about family, season six is especially about matrilineal family. It introduces the concept of the mother of monsters—Eve—and focuses on Mary as a solution to the loneliness the characters feel after her death. Samuel Campbell, Mary’s father, is brought back to life and manipulated by the promise of seeing his daughter again. He asks Sam and Dean what they wouldn’t do to see Mary again, which is kind of the general thesis of the show. What wouldn’t John, Dean and Sam do for each other? Dean sells his soul. John makes a deal with the demon who killed Mary. Sam teams up with Ruby to kill Lilith in revenge, which begins as a suicide mission because he doesn’t know how to handle his grief for Dean. The difference is that Samuel betrays Sam and Dean, his own grandchildren, for the promise of seeing Mary again. This cardinal sin alienates him from being a good guy, because good guys never betray Sam and Dean. Sam and Dean are our protagonists! Our heroes! The bringers of the light! The knights in shining armour! The white on rice. The cherry in cherry pie. They are the ones we’re meant to align ourselves with, because it’s their story the narrative is telling. And anyone who doesn’t align themselves with the Winchesters is an enemy who needs to be defeated.   

We’re introduced to the character of Gwen in the first episode of season 6, “Exile on Main Street”, and she says in the episode “Family Matters” that Samuel, the patriarch, doesn’t like her very much because she reminds him of Mary. While Samuel, Christian, Gwen and co are technically family, Dean has no connection to them past bloodlines. And as I said before, while family doesn’t end in blood, we learn throughout this season that blood doesn’t always mean family. Gwen dies in the episode “And Then There Were None,” because of course she does, and Mary doesn’t come back, at least not in this season. 

In “Family Matters,” the alpha vampire, played by the irreplaceable Rick Worthy, mentions that “we all have our mothers,” referring to Eve, the mother of monsters, the one who spawned every other monster and who has been trapped in purgatory ever since. Eve is pulled from Purgatory to wage war against the hunters and Crowley because they have been preying on her first borns, the alphas. I love Eve. I love her. She’s my favourite villain after Metatron. Mainly because I think she is like… sexy as hell. Like wow I am just so attracted to Julia Maxwell and this, like, bored smokey affect thing she does where she barely moves her mouth when she speaks and her strong brow makes her seem so intimidating. I don’t know anything about her personally, but I feel like she would’ve bullied me in high school, and I’m into it. It’s really hard to judge just from this one role whether she’s a good actor because Eve has such limited range and few things to do, but I really wish she’d gotten more screen time. Yeah, she’s doing the bare minimum and I’m completely obsessed. But Eve isn’t just a monster, she’s literally THEE milf. The original milf. And I really think she should’ve stayed around, but since they kept Lisa alive they had to kill at least one high profile woman. 

Continuing with the family storylines in season 6, Dean tries to establish a family with Lisa and Ben, and for the most part succeeds. He gets a job, plays the role of the doting boyfriend and stepfather, and protects them as best he can. I’m going to spare you the rant perched at the tip of my tongue about how this is at best a lavender marriage or staying together for the kid, and that Lisa only exists to be an ideal for Dean, not an actual partner he can grow with throughout the rest of the show. It’s his first attempt at a fambily outside of Sam, Bobby and John, and it fails miserably because Lisa isn’t a good match. The fact is, she will never be able to fit into the hunting world because of the way the writers wrote her—as mother and girlfriend archetype, and we’ve seen how well they do with those—in fact they actively paralleled it in “Exile on Main Street” where they had Dean hallucinate Azazel coming back and pinning Lisa to the ceiling. It couldn’t be more obvious that they don’t respect her. At least they didn’t fridge her for Dean’s man pain. It’s honestly horrible because Dean put so much effort into believing this was his one chance at happiness, and when it crumbles like a tim tam in hot tea he beats himself up for it and uses it as an excuse to never be happy. 

He does seem to be happy for the most part with Lisa, but because Sera Gamble doesn’t know how to write interesting or complex female characters, when Sam reenters the picture it once again becomes about the original premise: two brothers on the road, fighting the forces of evil. There’s no room for any women in that sphere. Up until this point I think—correct me if I’m wrong—there has been one female hunter who survived, and she was in one episode. The hunter Tamara in season 3 “The Magnificent Seven,” whose husband died in maybe the most sadistic way anyone has died on this show. Don’t rewatch it, just google it. All women die, including Mary, their mother, who is brought back in season 12 and killed in season 14. AND FOR WHAT? For WHAT Andrew Dabb.

Often, the loss of a parent, child or significant other is used to excuse bad behaviour and terrible choices. The hunting life causes Mary’s whole family to die before she can escape it, and because she makes a deal with Azazel for John’s life, the same demon John makes a deal with, Azazel kills her anyway. John abused his kids and brought them into the hunting life, because he was obsessed with getting revenge for Mary’s death. Sam does the same thing when Jess dies in the first season, and it starts a 15-season long arc of pain and misery. He sets Lucifer free in the season four because he is obsessed with getting revenge for Dean’s death and obsessed with the power drinking demon blood gives him. Then again, Sam is actually right for saving people by exorcising demons, which is literally the first part of the family business motto,  instead of just gutting them with the demon knife, but because Dean doesn’t agree with it, it’s bad. Sam always wants to do the right thing, he just gets a little caught up in the details. But you know what? Bloodfreak rights. 

When Cas dies in season 13, Dean is so overcome with grief, a grief that echoes John and Sam’s, that he mistreats Jack and threatens to kill him. In season 14, Nick, Lucifer’s vessel, boo snore hiss, kills everyone involved with the murder of his wife and child before he finds out that it’s actually Lucifer’s doing, and then he tries to raise Lucifer from the empty because he’s addicted to killing? Whatever, stop employing Mark Pellegrino. Stop writing men as obsessed with getting revenge 

The biological fambilies in Supernatural suck shit. Honestly every time I watch an episode about fambily I’m even more glad I don’t talk to mine. Dean and Sam need to spend some time away from each other, while they’re both still alive. Their fambily dynamic gets better as the show progresses, and I was pleased to see in season 12 that they do away with the codependency, constantly sacrificing themselves for each other, isolating themselves, betraying everyone they know for each other—they started to act like, you know, normal people. And that’s good. Sure, the show would not be anywhere without John sacrificing himself for Dean, and Dean sacrificing himself for Sam, and honestly that’s what made those first few seasons amazing. But after a while it becomes lazy writing, not parallels. A parallel that Supernatural pulled off is Sam comforting Magda in season 12 episode “The Survivor” in the way he needed to be comforted in season 1 and 2 as a psychic child. A parallel is Dean preparing Cas’s body for cremation in season 13  in counterpoint to the way Cas remade Dean’s body in season 4. This show can absolutely do parallels, some of the most beautiful parallels ever put on screen, but the last season was such lazy writing that I cannot forgive it. 

This has been an overall negative episode of Holy Hell, and that sucks. I don’t want to be so negative. I want to talk about the good things that Supernatural did, and share in joy with you all, so now I’m going to talk about the only positive I see with fambily in the entire show. 

For Dean, everyone older than him is a parent to disappoint, and everyone younger than him is a little sibling to protect. Cas is the exception, as there’s no way to define Dean and Cas’s relationship without acknowledging the reciprocal romantic ways they care about each other. Dean says on multiple occasions that Cas is like a brother to him, and that he’s Sam and Dean’s best friend. He actually drops the line, “After Sam and Bobby, you are the closest thing I have to family,” on Cas in season 6, and he acts like it’s nothing, but you can see in the expression on Cas’s face that Dean just recontextualised the entirety of Cas’s being in one sentence. Cas falls for Dean, gives up his family for Dean, and decides to follow him in the first act of free will we see on screen. And Dean, who has never known love without pain, says to Cas, you are fambily to me, I actively choose you, you belong in my life. But to belong in Dean’s life is to follow his plan, and when Cas doesn’t, he is punished for his hubris. Dean loves him, and he never even admits it.

Charlie becomes like a little sister to Dean, as does Jo. Jack is unequivocally Cas’s son, but becomes something of Dean’s son as well and some would argue Sam’s son. Claire becomes Cas’s daughter, but imprints so much on Dean that many, myself included, have come to consider Dean her father as well. If you subscribe to the idea that Dean and Cas are old marrieds, Dean would be Claire and Jack’s stepfather, and they would be a nuclear fambily all on their own. In season 14 “Lebanon,” when John says to Dean that he thought Dean would have settled down with a fambily, Dean says, “I have a fambily.” Just thinking about it gives me goosebumps.

Cas chooses to be a part of Claire’s life in season 10 “The Things We Left Behind” because he feels guilty about what happened to her after he possessed Jimmy, but after getting to know Claire he cares for her. The crime that is Claire and Cas not interacting after season 10, my god. That’s his daughter, you ghouls. But Claire and Dean do get more moments together. Dean, Sam and some British guy save Claire from turning into a werewolf, and Claire and the rest of the Wayward Sisters save Sam and Dean from the Bad Place. The Wayward Sisters are a found fambily all on their own, and since I could devote an entire episode to Jody’s little brood, I have chosen not to talk about them much, because this episode is at least half an hour, 34 minutes, and it would take up too much of my time. Claire is one of my favourite characters and I’ll be talking about her in the next ep, so stay tuned for that. 

Even before Jack is born, Cas becomes his protector. He goes from trying to convince Kelly to end her and Jack’s life, to being her pseudo-husband and the surrogate father to her child. To me personally, it’s the best thing this show has ever done. Cas, Kelly and Jack love each other in a way that is so wholly uncomplicated, that is so pure and so good. Once Cas becomes Jack’s protector, there’s never any question of whether they would hurt or betray each other. He is Cas’s son, his baby boy, and he loves Cas so much that he resurrects Cas from the empty. When they meet for the first time in season 13 “Tombstone” after Cas comes back, they fit into each other’s lives so easily. This is the part in writing this where I was absolutely sobbing my dick off. There are so many moments between them that show the kind of love that each of these characters deserved. Sam and Dean deserve to have that love from their father, and so does Cas. And together they build a family unit around caring for Jack that does indeed end the intergenerational trauma that plagues the Winchester fambily.

And that’s why season 16 is so important to me. I can make things better. Dean sorts his shit out, all of his shit: his alcoholism, depression, ADHD, borderline personality disorder, suicidal ideation, sexuality, gender, the fact that Cas is literally the love of his life and he gets to save him from the Empty the way Cas saved him from Hell. They plant flowers in the field where Dean spread Cas’s ashes in season 13, and they get married at Jody’s cabin with all their loved ones left alive. Claire walks Cas down the aisle and Jack is the flower girl, because he’s literally a three year old baby. Sam and Eileen raise a bunch of rugrats and the Wayward fambily continue the hunting legacy and have a Sunday afternoon roast every week. Dean and Cas raise Jack right, they cut up oranges for soccer practice and watch all his school plays. He and his cousins grow up knowing what it’s like not only to be loved, but to be looked after, to have all their needs met. They grow up normal, and the trauma that plagued their family is a thing of the past. It’s good, you know? It’s just fucking good.

[cruddyborderlandstheories]

oh? Typhon?

hell yeah

Here’s some transcripts and speculation

i want you guys to imagine these with a very thick new york accent. 

Recording 4: “I remember the day I arrived on Promethea. Those buildings looked so majestic! I was so busy sky-gazing that a thief stole the pants right off my keister! Promethea’s no Pandora, but a city is still plenty dangerous! I knew this was the sorta place I would either find my destiny or die in a gutter! And thanks to my partner slash nemesis, Azlan DeVega, Promethea was almost both!”

Recording 5: “I thought a city like Promethea would be crammed full of opportunity. But, actually, it was a tinderbox of violence and greed. Corporations were pulling out, calling the joint a dead end. People were starving! Eating stone soup and boiled rats to get by. But, somehow, I survived. It was a real wrong place at the right time type of situation. You know, sometimes the trick to being successful is just staying in the game longer than the other guy.”

Recording 3: “Azlan DeVega: my partner slash nemesis. He talked a big game, but there was a reason why he was down on his luck. He was lazy! But I was hungry to prove myself. Then, one time, we were wandering through the Quazmarian Quarry and I fell through some brittle rock! Azlan calls down: “Nice knowing ya, Deleon!”, grabs my stuff, and splits! Well, I had to find another way up. And, bam! That’s when I found the Vault! I guess the moral is: sometimes you gotta fall before you make it big.”

Recording 1: “I saw the key just sitting there in front of the Vault. Good thing I didn’t open it! I gave the Vault Key to Atlas, got a butt-load of cash and the rest is history! Anyway, as soon as I made my money, who shows up at my door but Azlan DeVega? Sayin’ that I owe him half of the cut! Baloney! I was on my own, and after that, whenever someone wanted to find Eridian ruins, they called me! Typhon Deleon! The first Vault Hunter!”

Recording 2: “So I found that Vault! Atlas was lagging behind those other guys! They almost got wiped out during the corporate wars and were looking to rise from the ashes, like the, uh, what’s it called? The fire bird. Anyway, the Atlas CEO was getting desperate just throwing explorer(s?) at ruins. Now, I never thought growing up on Pandora would do me a lick of good, but I spent my childhood hunting Eridian ruins and that gave me the edge! How about that; Pandora is good for something!”

(I got REALLY distracted while writing this and started analyzing all the Sanctuary 3 footage we got lmao so expect a post on that soon)

So to start, I find it really interesting that Promethea already had a city on it before Typhon arrived. I had assumed the city popped up because Atlas got rich from the discovery of Eridian ruins on Promethea, but that doesn’t seem to be the case! It looks as though a bunch of different corporations all had their hands in the city, but pulled out once the going got tough.

Wild.

Ah, Azlan DeVega. 

Azlan apparently means “Lion” and DeVega means “of Meadow”. This is kinda important for 2 reasons.

1. A very important lion in greek mythology is the Nemean lion, which had golden fur that was impervious to physical attacks and was the child of Typhon. 

2. “of Meadow” didn’t really turn up anything of note within Greek Mythology directly, however! it did return the Epimelides, goddesses of meadows, which translates to “Protector of Sheep”. Sheep and Lions in general are usually associated with Peace, which I thought was a pretty neat connection. I wonder if Typhon is lying... 

3. There’s also this neat bit of mythology here: “When a lion attacked her father's sheep, Cyrene wrestled with the lion” and “when Eurypylus was still ruling Libya, a monstrous lion was created, which was a great terror to the citizens. So Apollo sent Cyrene to kill the beast. After she succeeded, she was made the ruler of the city Cyrene”. I don’t know if this has anything to do with this story tbh but Cyrene is suspiciously similar to Tyreen lmao. Her name even means “Sovereign Queen”... Supreme queen... god queen...... I wouldn’t be shocked if Tyreen goes after Azlan DeVega and/or his descendants

So we’re 100% definitely visiting Quzmarian Quarry, right? This is somewhere on Promethea, so we’ve got a few options. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s where the abandoned research base is. 

I say that mostly because it looks as though there’s a door in the floor here. It’d make sense if Typhon fell somewhere and found the Vault there, that Atlas would rush on top of that and ensure nobody else was getting in.

Also, this confuses me, because in TFTBL, its mentioned that Gortys was “Atlas’s last ditch effort at opening a Vault”, but they had the opportunity here! What gives?! I imagine there was resistance, but it sounds like Typhon escaped with the Vault Key just fine, which is weird to me. I suppose if we’re considering opening the Vault being the be-all end-all then Atlas had opened a Vault on Pandora, too. It’s just that they never killed the Destroyer... since, well, y’all know what happened to Steele. And if we’re not considering the Destroyer’s Vault to be a tally in favor of Atlas, then perhaps something attacked those who 'opened’ the Vault and they could never actually access the things inside. It’s likely then, that their technological advances were due to basic Eridian treasure troves, like the one in Captain Scarelett’s DLC (y’know, just, without the Leviathan). 

Furthermore, we can be certain there are at maximum 3 Vault Keys at play in BL3, and minimum there’s only 1.

The one used to open the Vault on Promethea.

The ‘Vault Map’ we see in the Holy Broadcasting Center.

And the Vault Key Lilith had in Sanctuary.

Personally, I was of the theory that the Vault Key we see in the HBC is the same Vault Key from Sanctuary. It’s literally described as a map of Vaults on other worlds, which is what Lilith discovers at the end of BL2 and obviously something happened to Sanctuary before the events of BL3. Of course, its possible this is also the Vault Key used to open the Vault on Promethea, which could mean there’s only one Vault Key (weird considering it takes 200 years to naturally charge, but considering there are Sirens about that can charge the Vault Key forcibly using Eridium, not too weird. Let’s not think about the fact that Eridium only started appearing after the opening of the first Vault for now cuz im super tired lol)

“Sometimes you gotta fall before you make it big”. 

100% this is foreshadowing for the game’s story somehow and you can’t convince me otherwise.

“Whenever someone wanted to find Eridian ruins, they called me!” 

I find it kinda interesting that Tannis never mentions Typhon in BL1 in any of her ECHO logs detailing her time spend on Pandora trying to find ‘evidence of alien life’, however if this is due to DAHL not wanting to use an Atlas schmuck’s info or because the writers created his character for BL3, I’m not certain. Let’s pretend it’s the first one and move on because it really bugs me that Tannis is forced to look for evidence of alien activity on Pandora when apparently Typhon grew up there and “spent [his] childhood hunting Eridian ruins”. 

A reference to the “fire bird”. I know, I know, its a reference to a phoenix, but honestly? how fuckin’ cool would it be if this was actually a reference to the ‘Firehawk’? the mass murdering bounty hunter like the Lilith Firehawk? like if the Firehawk was actually a mythological thing in the borderlands universe. I mean, there’s a pistol called Firehawk in BL1 (y’know, before Lilith starts her cult), so I wouldn’t put it past them to pull that shit. It would kinda make sense for the bandits (who are usually DAHL workers in the first place) to start worshiping the Firehawk as a god if there was a precedent for it already. Even better if it was a dude god, which, outside of Jack not knowing Lilith was alive, could explain her usage of the voice changer.

As for my shitpost? Because you all knew it was coming....

Tannis, Tyreen, and Troy are all descendants of Typhon Deleon in one way or another.

Look at that poster. You tell me it doesn’t look like he’s wearing that giant-ass feather collar Troy’s got going on. 

All their names start with T (oh, such compelling evidence I have here, I know!)

Tannis and Typhon both have yellow goggles

Typhon is basically known as the father of all monsters lmao and he worked with Atlas and baby you KNOW im in love with the Atlas and the Calypsos theory. maybe perhapeth they used Typhon’s dna or his cryo-frozen body to create the twins and thats why they believe the vaults are their birthright, hmmmm?

but hey maybe that’s just because he helped lead to the opening of the first Vault which, y’know, lead to the opening of all the other Vaults. all of which house Vault Monsters

[thegoodplacepodcasts-blog]

Ch. 1: Michael Schur

Ch. 1: Michael Schur.

Featuring the voices of host Marc Evan Jackson (MEJ) and creator of The Good Place, Michael Schur (MS). Intro and outro features D’Arcy Carden (DC) as Janet, and Ted Danson (TD) as Michael. Clips from 1X1 of The Good Place include the voices of Kristen Bell (KB) as Eleanor Shellstrop, and Ted Danson (TD) as Michael.

Ding!

DC: Hi there, I’m Janet. Welcome to The Good Place, the podcast.

TD: Janet, what is a podcast?

DC: It’s like the radio but there’s no music and literally anyone can do one at any moment about any subject. And, there’s a billion of them!

TD: Sounds great! Hope you enjoy this week’s episode!

[Opening music]

MEJ: Hello everyone, welcome to The Good Place podcast. I’m Marc Evan Jackson, I play Shawn. First things first, there will be spoilers from the first 2 seasons of The Good Place on NBC, so if you haven’t seen Seasons 1 and 2, stop listening immediately, do not read a single word about the show, and go bac and watch those episodes on the NBC app, Amazon, iTunes and GooglePlay. Out guest is the creator of the good place, Mike Schur. Mike Schur, welcome!

(read the full transcript below) 

MS: Oh thank you!

MEJ: Everything is fine.

MS: [Laughter] If only that were true.

MEJ: When you set out to create the most by the numbers cookie cutter uh, rehashed element of American network television, uh, where did you begin?

MS: [Laughter] Uh… I don’t know, I don’t know whether I should answer that as the bait you are intending it to be, or for real.

MEJ: Bait.

MS: Bait, okay. Uh, okay. I was just like look man, let’s just go right down the middle. Let’s just – let’s just, nothing too fancy, nothing too crazy, let’s just knock 100 of these suckers out and go home.

MEJ: 13 at a time. Only 13 at a time. [Laughter] I’m making reference to a bit(?), a conversation that Mike and I have shared many times on set, which is when I began as Shawn, we would find ourselves between takes going like, I have just received the information of what the show was –

MS: – Right…

MEJ: Because it hadn’t aired yet and it was all very secret, and then of course in my initial information of the show also came the twist that happens in episode 1X13.

MS: That’s right.

MEJ: The Holy Motherforking Shirtballs. So between takes, I was shell-shocked and (?) and was sitting there going, “Are you sure this works? “

MS: Yeah.

MEJ: This is a very unusual half hour of American network television.

MS: The answer to that question is – was no, and remains no. I’m not sure that it works. But the very funny thing that happens – so I knew because you had been on – you had been on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and before that you had been on Parks and Recreation, and you had uh, you been in other shows that I’ve worked on, and we asked you to play this part where you were playing essentially like a demon – the worst demon right, the head demon guy. And the day that you were showing up on set, I thought oh no, I gotta – I gotta tell Marc real quick. I gotta go tell him, explain what the show is. And so I went to your trailer and I came in and I said, “Hey, do you know what – do you have any idea what is going on in this show, and you were like, “No I don’t”. And in that moment I realised like for the 40th time of what would – will eventually be like 500 times, like, “Oh no, I need an hour. Like I have to – I need an hour to explain to you what’s is happening.” Because not only do I have to explain the original premise of the show, and everything that had happened up to the moment you were going to enter the world of the show –

MEJ: – Correct –

MS: – I then had to explain the future of the show.

MEJ: Yes.

MS: And so you sat there as I as – I was like, “Okay let’s go back for a second here, here’s the beginning.” And I watched – it’s very fun, it’s very fun on this show to do this. It’s like, it happened with Tiya Sircar who played the Real Eleanor in Season 1.

MEJ: Real Eleanor, later uh…

MS: Later Vicky.

MEJ: Vicky, yes, of course.

MS: So I, it was a similar thing where it was like – we had her audition in with this, she was this saint who had been you know, we had – we had a read…

MEJ: Saving orphans.

MS: Saving orphans and doing like all this amazing stuff, and then I brought her all the way up through like… you know, the very – almost all the way to the end and then stopped, and then like later had to have to have her back and to say like, “Okay, everything that you did was a lie.”

MEJ: [Laughter]

MS: And so it is a very fun experience. I mean it was, it’s less so now obviously because we are two years in, but at that time it was so funny to go into your trailer and try to explain, in 12 condensed minutes what the hell was happening.

MEJ: Parenthetically, I will just let the listeners know, there had already been a knock on my door prior to your arrival that was some, uh, the base camp PA saying to me, “There was a van waiting for you to take you to set.”

MS: [Laughter] So, yeah like…

MEJ: So it was –

MS: The clock was ticking.

MEJ: Truly abbreviated, you got to the – you sat down and said I’m about to give a great deal of information.

MS: That’s right.

MEJ: You super did.

MS: Yeah. [Laughter]

MEJ: And then at the end, you took a breath and you said, “Do you have any questions?” And my first question was legitimately, “They let you make this? Like, are you certain this works?”

MS: Yeah, I know. But you know the interesting thing about what I go back to – the beginning of it, the only way to… The only way this happened, there were two things that made it happen. Number one is that the network said foolishly to me, “You can do whatever you want.” Like after Parks and Rec ended and Brooklyn (Nine-Nine) was on the air, they basically said, “We’re going to put 13 episodes of something on the air and you can do whatever you want.” Which is obviously an incredibly rare thing. It’s a wonderful thing, it’s a lovely thing, it’s rare, it-

MEJ: It feels like a mistake.

MS: Yeah, it does, yeah. It feels like an error, an unforced error on their part and they – they said that – and what happened was because they had said that, I sort of felt this weird responsibility. I felt two responsibilities: one to them to do something good, to thank them for their largess, and then the other was to do something really weird and different, because how often in anyone’s life does one get the chance to do anything he or she wants with impunity? And so instead of just doing a sort of, you know I had been – at that time I had done like, 12 straight years of some version of goofballs in an office, it’s – I started on The Office and then Greg Daniels and I did Parks and Rec together and then Dan Goor and I did Brooklyn Nine-Nine together. So I had been doing sort of office comedy for like a dozen years.

MEJ: Great ensemble cast who love each other.

MS: Great ensemble cast, yeah, but fundamentally based on Earth.

MEJ: Right.

MS: Based in reality, and so when someone says, “Okay, you can now do whatever you want,” I sort of thought if I could do whatever I want, then I should do… whatever I want! I should take that to heart so that was the – those were the impeti (impetus?), or the beginning of this.

MEJ: At what time did getting outside the box of an ensemble cast within an office become – expand to involve the afterlife? Where did that process come from and what was your own conception of what happened next?

MS: Oh ho, just two little questions for –

MEJ: I’m gonna be here in my own little corner…

MS: It was a very organic and natural-like development process in which I just, it was a thing that interested me, that I had never written about, but I had sort of thought about like what… what if the beginning of it was like, what if it’s like a video game – what if life is a video game where you’re going around and you’re, you’re winning or losing points in every action, and what if at the end of the end of the day where your time is up, your scores is calculated and the people with the highest scores go zoop [up] and the people with the lowest scores go, zoom [down]. And then that led to like, okay, well that that’s a… That’s a very sort of money-ball universe, right? That’s a universe that’s like, ‘look it’s not personal, it’s not…

MEJ: – It’s stats.

MS: It’s just stats and (7:15)

MEJ: It’s ____?

MS: (7:23) That’s a really obscure reference for anyone who –

MEJ: They’ll get it.

MS: Yeah.

MEJ: [Laughter]

MS: But – so that – and then it sort of unfolded naturally. Well then, what kind of – like how are those points calculated, what is the morality of the universe, who’s deciding this, what does it all mean, and then it just slowly started unfolding from there and my own – my own – to answer the second question briefly, my own conception of the afterlife was essentially nil at the time, in that I’m not a personally religious person. I’m not deeply religious, I was exposed to a lot of different kinds of religion growing up, I don’t know that I ever took to one specifically, but I think that’s good. I was sort of a blank slate coming in, and when I first started working on this show I read a lot of religious conceptions of the afterlife which are fascinating, all of them are fascinating. They have a lot of overlap, they have – there is a lot of big promises… Big promises there –

MEJ: – Oh for sure.

MS: Uh…

MEJ: The streets are made of gold…

MS: Yeah, that kind of thing, so those were all really interesting, but after I read about all – I spent like 4 months reading nothing but the religious conceptions of the afterlife, and immediately thought, oh this is pointless, because this is not a show about religious conceptions of the afterlife, this is a show about an ethical conception of the afterlife. So I junked all that and started on a crash course of philosophy – which I had a little bit more exposure to, but not much, and I just started like, consuming philosophy and ethics and that’s where we are today.

MEJ: When you say a little bit of exposure you were talking about undergraduate…

MS: Couple of college classes, and as a personal sort of hobby slash interest. I would occasionally read things of an ethical nature, articles or – or you know, just random things. I – I enjoy reading the ethesis column (?), it’s literally at that level. I like to say I have a roughly speaking Wikipedia level understanding of ethics, and it has since grown since I have been immersed in it for a couple of years now, but that was the – the switchover from religion, from reading about religious conceptions of the afterlife to reading about ethics was kind of the key point in the development of the show.

MEJ: Now it does not escape my attention that you said, “At the time I did not have – I had a nil conception of the afterlife.” Has that changed in the – since we began?

MS: I don’t know, I wouldn’t say it has, honestly what I have… I don’t know that I believe or don’t believe anything more or less about the afterlife now than two years ago. I do believe that I have a much greater sort of interest in and feeling for ethics and – and the just the kind of like, day to day, live your life decision making process that humans are literally forced to dodo – like, we don’t have a choice.

MEJ: A… a moment –

MS: Yes. If you – if you choose not to engage in ethical thought, that in itself is an ethical decision, right? So you’re just choosing to ignore these decisions that you have to make…

MEJ: – That presumes that you are aware of those decisions.

MS: True, but ignorance of the law is not a defence against – a defence against illegal activity.

MEJ: [Laughter] You’re on your guard.

MS: I had an interesting as– One of the more interesting corners of ethics that I wandered into was: there is a group of people – not a group of people, there are some thinkers, some philosophers who believe the moral choices that humans have to make every day are so awful and so terrible, and put you under so much stress and strain and sadness –

MEJ: Mmhmm.

MS: And they further then say, and when you didn’t ask to be brought into this world, you didn’t – no one said, “Would you like to participate in human activity or not”, you were just born, right –

MEJ: That happened.

MS: And they believed that because of those two things; because you did not have a say in whether you are a human, and because being a human is so morally twisted and awful, that it is immoral to decide to have children, and the only moral action that the human race should make is to stop procreating and die off.

MEJ: Mmhmm.

MS: So you can get into these really fun, weird – like, well here’s the natural conclusion of this kind of thought, right, and that to me, that is – that’s the stuff that I – that I have a deeper understanding of now, and a more nuanced understanding of all these different kind of approaches to whet to – to answer the question of what it’s like to be a human being on Earth.

MEJ: That sucks.

MS: [Laughter]

MEJ: That’s pretty terrible.

MS: Yeah.

MEJ: And that’s season three, you’re saying…?

MS: [Laughter] It’s a comedy show, remember? So you probably won’t get into that, but it is – it is shocking when you – you come to these guys and these come to really shocking conclusions about the mo– about the human condition and they are – at the very least I find them all fascinating to read about.

MEJ: You have created one of the smartest, dumbest show on television, where philosophy and fart jokes often share the same paragraph.

MS: That’s correct, yes.

MEJ: Are those two sides of who you are as well?

MS: A 100 percent, yes, of course. I mean – like that… the… Before the we started – the writers started working on the first season, I wrote a list of 6 things on the wall that every episode had to do, and number 1 was, is it funny. Because we were like, well it is a network comedy show, right, and if it’s not funny, we are blowing it. So we started with – so number 1 was, “Is it funny”. My number 1 fear is that people watching this show would suddenly feel like, ‘Why are you just lecturing me on how to live my life’, that is not the point of this show at all. The point of this show was to raise questions and – and we need to do that in a funny way, so if the episode wasn’t funny, if there wasn’t enough comedy in it, it would go away. So to answer our question of course those are two aspects of my personality but also it’s a specific goal of this show to never seem like we are just being like it was a – like it’s homework.

MEJ: Sure. I think this show does that really successfully I feel like the – I think you and the writers are really… Definitely able to say quickly, and… and within dialogue, here are the rules as humans, we have these choices to face, we have ‘A’s or ‘B’s and you know absent the sort of __ like, why do you make these choices.

MS: Right. Number 2 is if the characters are being developed. It was a huge deal for season 1 because there were these – we had these flashbacks, these were the moments that – knowing what we were going to reveal at the end of the year we had to explain by the time we got there, we had to have explained to the audience who these people were, and essentially why they ended up in hell. That was the big thing and if you… if you didn’t understand why all four of them were being tortured, then it was going to seem like a rand– then the twist would seem random, it would seem like, “oh…”

MEJ: Information laid over the mantel (??)

MS: Yeah, exactly.

MEJ: Which could have been anything  

MS: Yeah and – and… and not – it had to be properly set up in the usual suspects way, where like you… When you think back on it, you were ‘oh from the very beginning they knew exactly where they were going’, so that was number 2 – were the characters being developed. Number 3 was, does the episode ask and answer a question about ethics, about good or bad behaviour, obvious reasons for that. Number 4 was, was it compelling. We had this – I had this real fear we would seem like we were spinning our wheels. This was something Damon Lindelof talked to me about, because I consulted him a lot before while I was working on this show in the early days, and one of the things he said about when they ran into trouble on Lost was when they felt they weren’t – they were spinning their wheels, they were just like adding new characters and, and like kind of, you know, running in place and you get an episode like Jack gets a tattoo in Thailand or whatever, and it’s like… You’re like, well that’s not compelling. This show has to be endlessly compelling and full of momentum in order for it to… feel vital and interesting. Number 5 was, is it consistent with the long game, right, we couldn’t do – the long game being they were all in hell, they’re being tortured – we couldn’t ever do anything that would… that would seem like it was – that it contradicted the big picture, the big secret picture. So it was literally – we were literally at the level like you couldn’t ever see Michael – Ted’s character – alone you can’t ever see him, because if he were alone he would be… He would not be in character, right, he would –

MEJ: He would be evilly chuckling

MS: He would be evilly chucking and laughing hysterically at all the foibles (?) that the humans were undergoing, so we had all these really specific rules of like, is there any moment in the entire show where – when if you went back and looked at it, you went ‘well this moment doesn’t make any sense’, which was hard but fun, and then the last one was, are we making use of this premise. Basically like, we set this show in the afterlife. If we didn’t have one insane thing… a dog flying into the sun and exploding, or…

MEJ: Teacup.

MS: Teacup. Or something that – or something magical, something insane, Janet popping in and out, something that was… you were like well, this couldn’t happen anywhere but in the afterlife, if we didn’t do it at least once in an episode, we felt like, well we were blowing it. So that was the six things we feel that every episode had to do.

MEJ: I… I think you have a bright future in television.

MS: [Laughter]

MEJ: At what point did you – so I think it’s interesting to realise, this was a good show before episode 1X13 when all of our minds were blown and the carpet was pulled out from all – from underneath each of us. At what point in your conception of it did you decide, ‘oh I’m going to press reset at the end of Season 1 and undo all or most established reality…’

MS: It was part of the pitch of the show, yeah, so I had the idea to do this like… money-ball heaven calculation videogame kind of stuff…

MEJ: Mmhmm.

MS: And then I thought, the fun of this… The premise of the pilot was a woman gets put in the upstairs when she belongs to the downstairs and she’s like, ‘uh-oh, I’m in trouble.’

MEJ: The original title was upstairs downstairs.

MS: [Laughter] That’s right, and then I got sued for some reason…

MEJ: That’s strange.

MS: So I was like, oh, that’s good, that’s strange, a woman who wasn’t good hiding in plain sight amongst all people who were amazing, I was like okay but that – premises in TV especially burned off real quick and then you’re left with ‘what’s episode 4’, so before I committed to that premise, I thought, ‘well where could it go’, and I thought well, there’s this guy who is a moral philosophy professor who’s supposed to her soulmate, and she goes to him for help and he gives her lessons and okay, that’s something that could get me couple episodes, but then every time I would sort of manoeuvre around and sort of play it out, I would get to a point where I was like, and then what, and then what, and then what. Like it’s just – she’s just hiding over and over and over again, she’s almost getting caught, she doesn’t get caught, she figures her way out. I actually – one of my all-time favourite shows is The Shield and if you watch The Shield, Vic Mackey – Michael Chiklis’ character –  he was a corrupt cop and he was always almost getting caught and the – Shawn Ryan. the writers of the show had this insane ability to over and over and over again – for him to write scenarios where he would wriggle free, he would find loophole, backdoors, he would sneak away, frame someone else and it never got old and for a while, I thought, well, if they could do It in a drama, I could do it in a comedy.

MEJ: Right.

MS: And for a while, it was going to be that. It was just going to be, she constantly was almost getting caught, she wriggled free, and then I – again when I played it out, it just sounded boring. It just sounds like, and after –  audiences are savvy and after the seventh, eighth, ninth, twelfth, fifteenth time she wriggles free, you’re just going to be bored, so and I thought, wait – what if the whole point with – she’s not wriggling free, she’s – a guy, there’s a puppet master letting her wriggle free because that was torturing her that was the – and that was the beginning of it, that was the ‘oh wait a second, now I get it’, now this whole thing is it’s a… I – at the beginning it was like a, it was just an accidental trip to heaven and like, oh no that’s No Exit. It’s a really advanced No Exit – a Sartre play about the 3 people who were trapped in hell forever and they all had – and in No Exit, they all have very specific personality traits that drive two or one of the other one insane and miserable. There’s a woman who is really vain and she doesn’t have any mirrors, and there’s a guy who is a coward and… and he can’t bring himself to sort of make a move on the pretty woman and the – one of them is a lesbian and she is furious that there is no – that she, you know if you’ve read that play. It’s a wonderful play, it’s a very famous play, and as soon as it became No Exit in my head it was like, oh now – and now it all makes sense, because now I fool the audience into thinking that they understand what’s happening, and if I make the audience think, ‘oh, I get it she’s just going to constantly wriggle free’ and then at the end it’s like oh no, you were being tricked by the puppet master.

MEJ: And of course the whole thing is heightened and… and further spurred along by Eleanor’s confession, she then has co-conspirators in the form of Chidi, initially who is facing a tremendous moral dilemma of, “do I out this person or do I help this person?”

MS: That was a huge, a huge – a realisation was, and this came actually from talking to Ted Danson about it at the beginning, that there was a huge… Ted was like – Ted really loved the premise and he loved the show and he’s really excited about it but he was sort of like, “I don’t know what I’m playing until the end, until the twist, like I’m just playing… I seem to be just playing the same thing,” – which was a guy who is like, so happy about his creation, who is worried that there’s something wrong with it, that’s really fun to play but after a certain point it becomes like, the same thing over and over again, and I was like, you know, he’s totally right. And then I started to think – the same problem that was going to plague me in the original premise was going to plague me with his character, which was he – as the sort of like architect of the neighbourhood was going to be doing the same thing over and over again and so then I thought well, then the answer was to change the dynamic. So halfway through the year instead of her almost getting caught and wriggling free, out of nowhere halfway through the year, she will confess and now everything changes, and now Michael gets to play a totally different thing, which is, oh my god, who are you, how did you get here, all that sort of thing and all that stuff is now out in the open, and then that – then it became well, then you go back and you look at the whole year and you think to yourself everything was going really great for Michael. He was torturing everyone real– his crazy experiment was going really well until somehow, Chidi got to her enough where she confessed, and then it all fell apart. And then like, big chunks of the story just kind of fell into place as soon as we found out we shouldn’t wait for the end of the year for something interesting to happen. It’s a good lesson in general, right? Do something interesting earlier than you thought you were going to.

MEJ: I mean… I feel like this podcast as a podcast could end on that note, that’s a beautiful – that is… You talked about Ted, how… at what point in your mind, did Michael become Ted Danson? At what point was Eleanor Shellstrop, Kristen Bell?

MS: It’s a good question. I mean we never – I never talked to anyone else about either of those two roles.

MEJ: Wow.

MS: So I – It was like it was a – the, as archetypes, they were as – as perfect like, platonic ideals of characters. Those two were the first two choices. I talked – I knew Kristen, Kristen and I met when we lived in new York in 19– 2001 or something, she was doing theatre, I was at SNL, and we knew each other then, and I’ve, sort of seen her occasionally, and I – we remained quasi friends for a long time. She’d been on Parks and Rec a bunch of times. So – and I heard that her show might be ending, House of Lies might be ending and I felt, well, man, like there’s no one in the world I can think of who can play a like, a like… A likable a-hole better.

MEJ: Ashole .

MS: That’s right. She’s uniquely charming as a – as a human being, she is uniquely charming.

MEJ: Indeed.

MS: And so I had – I brought her into my office and I said, “I’m going to tell you a story, and I’m going to pitch a show to you, and this characters yours if you want to do it. If you don’t, no harm, no foul, we won’t stop being quasi friends…”

MEJ: Right.

MS: …and just told her the whole story, and then she was like, “Alright, I’m in”, and then it turned out crazily that she and Ted were friends – which I didn’t know –

MEJ: – I didn’t know that either.

MS: They had done a movie together called Big Mira– Big Miracles, I think it was called, it was a movie about the whales trapped in the ice in Alaska years ago, and yeah, they’d done a movie together and so when I met with Ted – which was a… for me personally was like a highlight of my career because I just am the biggest fan – he said, who are you thinking about for Eleanor and I said, I’ve talked to Kristen Bell about it and he like swooned, like she’s the… like, ‘I love her’… They had just gone out for dinner a week earlier or something, totally coincidentally. So it felt – a lot of times in my experience, when things are like – when the universe seems to line up to help you sometimes, like it – sometimes it does the opposite.

MEJ: That’s true.

MS: And then it’s just like the monkey and Donkey Kong just throwing flaming barrels at you, the universe is, and then somethings it’s just hey you – it’s… Everything’s going to work out and that sequence of time, from the time when I like, started telling people the idea through those two signing on, it was like, oh my, everything was working out perfectly, and the other – the last key was getting Allison Jones, the casting director, to sign on to fill the rest of those roles because there is no one better on earth at what she does –

MEJ: she’s fairly skilled.

MS: [Laughter]

MEJ: And she has a good rolodex (?), is that sort of thing…

MS: Yeah. Well, yeah.

MEJ: Let’s talk – we’re going to talk to Allison in one of these episodes of the podcast, to talk a little bit about that. But I’m curious, briefly, your take on some of the casting of the other roles of the ensemble. The one that stands out immediately is the role of Jianyu, or Jason – Jason Mendoza. That had to be an interesting task, because it had to be someone we would believe as a silent monk at first.

MS: That’s right.

MEJ: So it couldn’t be a known actor, had you put Eugene Cordero or someone better known in that, I think the audience would have sniffed it and said, “That guy speaks I have seen that guy speak before.”

MS: “I know who that guy is”, yeah.

MEJ: Right.

MS: It’s like when you’re watching like, a thriller and there’s a known actor playing a relatively minor part, you’re like, well that guy’s the killer.

MEJ: Straight Law and Order.

MS: Yeah, no, that was a big… There was a very specific set of criteria for all – each of the other four actors, and they were… It was like, for casting directors it was an obstacle course, it was like okay, we need to find an East Asian or Filipino, preferably, unknown man, who is both a wonderful silent film actor…

MEJ: Yes.

MS: And also a skilled comedian who can play a dumb guy from Florida.

MEJ: Right.

MS: That is not an easy thing to find. And the same is true of Tahani, the description was Indian or Pakistani-born, flawless upper-class British accent, also very tall, which – that was key she, had to be very tall.

MEJ: Because you had already written the giraffe lines.

MS: Because – well, no, the idea was for Eleanor’s nemesis – once Kristin signed on, it was like, well, who is Eleanor’s nemesis? And Tahani had already existed, but I altered it to be… like, I need to find the perfect person that specifically Kristen Bell would be, would feel is like better than her. It’s a key part of Eleanor’s personality profile, that – what makes her the most upset was that people – when she perceives that other people think they are better than her. So Tahani had to be tall and glamorous, it was described as in one set of sides as sort of Indian or Pakistani Grace Kelly.

MEJ: Oh, wow.

MS: That was the idea. So we were like, well, good luck Allison Jones, go find this and then one week later she was like, well we found her and her name is her name is Jameela Jamil and so that –

MEJ: Not an actor at the time.

MS: Not an actor.

MEJ: A BBC presenter.

MS: That’s right, a BBC – just like, a host, she would go out with a microphone and interview people to – like, “Hey”…

MEJ: At which she is enormously skilled, have you seen any of it?

MS: Yeah.

MEJ: She's phenomenal.

MS: So it was like –

MEJ: She should be hosting this podcast.

MS: [Laughter]

MEJ: Aw man!

MS: It’s not too late, we can start over and just junk all this.

MEJ: [Laughter]

MS: Anyway, the point is that those… Those character descriptions, I mean, just think about Chidi’s character description. He was a Senegalese ethics professor who also went to American schools, but speaks like five languages, who is tortured by indecision… The – the really fun like, the – the most fun part of casting is dreaming up insane people and wondering if they are out there and then find –and then getting someone to say, oh I found him, I found her, here she is… And, by the way, it should be noted – and this is how good Allison is in all of these cases –what I do with her and this comes – she also cast Brooklyn Nine-Nine and she also cast Parks and Rec and she cast The Office, I always say the same thing to her, which is, “This is what I have in mind. There is obviously flexibility here, if you find a person who fits every profile or piece of Tahini, except that instead of Indian or Pakistani-born, she is from South Korea or she is from Lima, Peru, or whatever, that’s fine. We can – we’ll, we will rewrite all the unimportant things if we get the important things, and then the amazing thing is you never have to do that, because she always finds the person you’re looking for.

MEJ: She certainly did it, and you certainly did it because the cast is amazing. Which brings us to Janet, both as a character and as an actor, like that’s a – the rules for the neighbourhood, the number of participants that – Janet in the neighbourhood, where did some of this things some from?

MS: So Janet in the original from, the very in the original outline that I have, Janet was a kiosk. It was a… It was a sort of place where, it was like a storytelling device, an information delivery system which was when Eleanor needed something, she could go to like a kiosk and just like, press a button and talk to essentially Siri, right.

MEJ: Right.

MS: And she would say like hey, is there someone in this neighbourhood named this, or is there someone here who is an ethics professor who can teach me about ethics, and a voice would emerge and it was like KITT from Knight Rider…

MEJ: Sure.

MS: And it would be a… Like yes, there is a person and here you go, and here he is, he is over here, go see him, and it’s like a weird quirk of the writing process, but it took me like months to figure out that it would be more interesting if it were played by –

MEJ: A human being.

MS: A human being, yeah. So then it was like, this is so much more fun. It’s just a – and y’know what? We auditioned more people for Janet than any other part.

MEJ: Fascinating.

MS: And the people ranged – one of the, like, just as some examples, we – we auditioned people in age from 14 to 70, I think.

MEJ: My goodness.

MS: And one of them was J.J Totah, who is now on the show Champions, he’s a young actor he’s on the show Champions, in the Mindy Kaling and Charlie Grandy show and he was in – J.J. is like, at the time he was like 14 or 13, and he was in the room waiting with D’Arcy and so D’Arcy looked over at him and said, “I’m not getting this part, like, what is happening…”

MEJ: Right, ‘this is strange’.

MS: But it’s because we just didn’t know – the number of possibilities for that role was so massive that we were just like, literally here is the character description: anyone on Earth, and so it took a really long time to figure out – in part because I didn’t, and still don’t, at some level 100% understand Janet. Like, I talk to D’Arcy all the time. D’Ar– one of the biggest reasons D’Arcy got the part is because she has an extensive improvisation background.

MEJ: Mmhmm.

MS: And I sort of said to her at the beginning, “We are going to figure this out together. Like, we're going to… it’s going to be trial and error, you’re going to try things with Janet that we’ll say no, that’s not right, and you’ll try something else and we’ll say no, that’s not right”, and we’ll just triangulate how Janet is and how she behaves and what, what she is, and we – and that’s why a lot of her jokes are her telling people what she isn’t, like it’s – it’s, someone referred to her as a computer –

MEJ: – Not a robot.

MS: Not a robot, not a computer, not a girl, not a woman. It’s because we kept on saying like, we’ll, we’ll define her by what she isn’t, and it’s a – it’s a crazy thing to do, but because she’s so skilled as a performer she’s managed to create this character where like even if you can’t quite define it, you get it. Like when you see Janet do something, you know that’s either something Janet would do or would not do. That’s all D’Arcy.

MEJ: It’s pretty fascinating. Her… her flip side, bad Janet also has to be fun to conceive of and write for.

MS: [Laughter] Yes, wonderful and also like, so fun to give D’Arcy, again, a different thing to do. I mean, some – a lot of ideas like that just come from like, we’re underutilising – like, she’s so good as Janet, but also she’s not getting to like, show off her skills. Like we… when we had Adam Scott on the show playing Trevor, a terrible, terrible demon –

MEJ: Right.

MS: The fun of it was, I got to call him and say, “Do you want to play the opposite of Ben Wyatt, like you have been –“

MEJ: Oh, that is fun, yeah.

MS: “– Like I’ve been writing for you for five years at that point on Parks and Rec as like this really wonderful, kind-hearted gentle person…”

MEJ: An optimist.

MS: An optimist and he has – if you have seen the movie Step Brothers, this completely other gear that he can shift into and be so funny and so I got to call him and say, like, hey come play anti-Ben Wyatt and he was like, sounds great, so that – bad – things like bad Janet come from things just like, we have a performer who has, who is like a transformer that has not been allowed to transform into the robot or whatever it is so it was like, alright, go nuts.

MEJ: That was a fascinating conception. You’ve been very egalitarian in not establishing any religion as being completely right. There is one special person that we’ll hear in this clip.

KB: So who is right? I mean, about all of this.

TD: Well let’s see. Hindus, a little bit right, Muslims a little bit, Jews, Christians, Buddhists… Every religion guessed about 5%. Except for Doug Forcett.

KB: Who… Who is Doug Forcett?

TD: Well, Doug was a stoner kid who lived in Calgary during the 1970s. One night he got really high on mushrooms, and his best friend Randy said, ‘hey, what do you think happens after we die’, and Doug just launched into this long monologue where he got like 92% correct. We couldn’t believe what we were hearing! That’s him actually, right up there. He’s pretty famous around here. I’m very lucky to have that.

MEJ: Who… who is the actor or person who plays Doug Forcett, and how did that come into being?

MS: That guy, we're - we're like, who should be Doug Forcett and that guy is Noah Garfinkel. He's a writer, he worked with my wife at New Girl for many years, and he's the best friend of Joe Mande, who's a writer on the staff, and he just... The – the description was a stoner in Canada in the 70s, and Noah's hair was absurd and floppy and he looks like a Canadian stoner so we were like yeah, there you go. What we didn’t anticipate that was so fun was the placement of the painting – or photograph – would mean that Noah, who was not an actor at all, would be in essentially every bit of promotion of – for this show for a year and a half plus. Like he was every shot of that office, he's just standing right over Ted Danson's shoulder. The most wonderful thing was at the end of the year when we were shooting 1X13, we were shooting the Bad – in the building downtown – it’s the bad place sort of HQ...

MEJ: Mmhmm.

MS: And it was one of the last days of shooting, and Noah came to the set, and when he walked onto the set, Ted Danson reacted like Bono had shown up.

MEJ: I was there, it was amazing.

MS: Yeah, right? And it was like, he’s posed for pictures and it was like, and then he hugged him, and Noah came up to me and was like, "What is happening? I don’t understand my life right now!"

MEJ: Yeah, Ted Danson is one of those people who in the – in the shooting in the first season, he and I sometimes would be hiding behind the pocket clown doors in Eleanor's bedroom, y'know, waiting to make an entrance, and we would be having a nice conversation because he's an absolute delight. And I would come to my senses and realise like, I'm sitting on a bed whispering with Ted Danson, trying not to get yelled at by Kristen Bell because she can hear us as we sit here and giggle...

MS: Yeah.

MEJ: It was a little insane, and the fact that I had this experience just last week getting ready for this podcast, where the intros and outros were being voiced by D'Arcy and Ted and Ted Danson said my name in the credits, and like, that’s a thing!

MS: Yeah!

MEJ: 'Cause that’s Ted Danson.

MS: I have a – I have a thing that happens all the time where he calls me on my cellphone and I look at my phone and it says Ted Danson.

MEJ: Yeah, dude.

MS: And it's like, no, obviously it's not Ted Danson, who is it really? Who is it calling me?

MEJ: That’s phenomenal. As we were walking into the studio to record this last week, he said, so, you're hosting this and I said yes, and he said, are you hosting it as you, or as Shawn, and I said, come on, man .

MS: [Laughter]

MEJ: Like there’s not a – not a ton of blue sky (??) between those two guys and he said, "I know, sometimes I feel like I'm playing Ted Danson playing Sam Malone playing Michael."

MS: [Laughter]

MEJ: I said, hey man, if it works...

MS: Yeah, A, if it works, do it and, B, that’s he’s a... He's a very modest person considering the career he's had.

MEJ: He's really lovely.

MS: Yeah.

MEJ: I mean, he's – I think he’s got a bright future as well.

MS: Yeah.

MEJ: You developed a fun game of swearing substitutes. Eleanor finds when she arrives at The Good Place that she's not able to say words that she wants to say and is confused by it.

MS: Right.

MEJ: Was that simply because you were going to be on primetime network television?

MS: Yeah, it was a creative workaround for NBC FCC regulations, but I also - I liked it as a solution, because part of the premise obviously is that she is put into a place that seems like Paradise, and for her, it's anything but. And obviously that’s by design, it's secretly her torture device, but I like the idea that she would be constantly frustrated by not being able to express herself the way she wanted, and furthermore that the explanation for why that was the case is that incredible, good, kind, soulful, positively-charged people who were in that world collectively said that's the way they wanted it, which again feeds into Eleanor’s persecution complex. She feels like she's always – there's always people who feel like they're better than she is, and so for her trying to swear and not being able to because all the people who deserved to be in The Good Place have, are the kind of people who would never swear, and don’t like it when people swear. It was like 11 different levels of enjoyably torturous for her.

MEJ: Did Standards and Practices give you any trouble with your substitutes?

MS: They did not! They were very cool with it, I think they enjoyed the ingenuity a little bit you know, like they were sick of having battles where you know, as a writer you would try to get a dirty word through the censors, and they would fight you on it and you would say this other show did this and that and whatever, and they didn’t have to do that anymore. We were just saying the word 'fork', and there is nothing wrong with the word 'fork', even if the context in which were saying it makes it clear that you're using a different word.

MEJ: There’s a distinct rhythm to 'motherforker'.

MS: Yeah.

MEJ: That is unmistakably a substitute for something.

MS: Yeah, and I particularly liked 'shirtballs', like 'shirtballs' is wonderful, it's just two incredibly benign words put together that make that reference a really... a really un-benign word.

MEJ: This makes me think I remember of - I think it was from Amy Poehler’s book, her audiobook, you guested with her and talked about the conceptions of the names of substitutes. Other things you considered for Leslie Knope.

MS: Right.

MS: Shellstrop was another ridiculous last name, were there any other Eleanor Shellstrops that you –

MS: There were – there were a lot, I don’t really remember them, but it was just this weird thing where I realised her name couldn’t be Jane Smith.

MEJ: Right.

MS: That it was – like part of the, part of the way that she immediately knew that there was a problem and stuff is that she was like, oh I have this very unique name and someone else must have had the same name, if it were like – it seemed like it had to be kind of – and in order for, we’re pulling this... One of the parts of the ruse was the idea that these seemingly omniscient forces that choose this things had somehow screwed up, right, and so the part of what made it unlikely-seeming, and also inevitable, and also funny and all of those things was the idea that two - it wasn’t two Jane Smiths, it was two crazy-name people, and the way that the story unfolded is that two people named Eleanor Shellstrop were in the same moment, in the same time, and one of them is a good person who saved the other one's life by shoving her out of the way and - of this y'know, crazy accident and so the more specific it got the more – it needed to be really, really specific, it couldn’t be Jane Smith or else it would be kind of weirdly boring and sort of predictable or something, so I don’t know where Shellstrop came from it was just – I start sometimes, when I need to come up with names I literally – stick it with Lizzie who is sitting to my left, who works in the writers room, can attest to this, I just start typing letters.

MEJ: You’re describing your writing process as literally, monkeys at typewriters.

MS: Yeah.

MEJ: Eventually arriving at Shakespeare.

MS: That’s exactly right like instead of Shakespeare it’s the name Shellstrop, which I don’t think Shakespeare ever came up with.

MEJ: Goodness.

MS: [Laughter]

MEJ: Why do you hate Arizona and Florida?

MS: I don’t hate them, but they are insane places. Florida is insane, especially Jacksonville areas and a crazy – Jacksonville is, by area, I think, the largest city in America. It’s just a weird creeping virus that keeps expanding outwards because Florida, like Texas – where my family was partially from – has no zoning laws, so Jacksonville just keeps expanding like a disgusting fungus and –

MEJ: This is darker than I anticipated to hear from you.

MS: And – and by the way, come on, I mean, every insane thing that has happened in America in the last 50 years can be traced in some way –

MEJ: – To Florida

MS: To Florida. When I was at SNL actually, I wrote a sketch – it was a commemorative plate series, it was just Florida’s worst moments, it was like… At that time it was like Elián González, and then there were shark attacks every week, and then you know blah blah blah… Anyway, and then Arizona is like west coast Florida basically Arizona is insane. I mean, Sheriff Joe Arpaio (?) alone makes Arizona deserve a part of what it gets.

MEJ: Sheriff Joe (??)

MS: Yes, the “innocent of all charges” Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

MEJ: Chapter 1, the pilot airs. Was the reaction different that you expected?

MS: No, generally speaking… The reaction is very favourable. It is easy to get a favourable first impression when the first two faces that people see are Kristen Bell and Ted Danson as was the case.

MEJ: America’s sweetheart.

MS: America’s sweet– Two America’s sweethearts, so the feedback was generally favourable. There was a, a – something I was not used to was having to bite my tongue, right, because some of the reviews and some of the feedback was, well it’s an interesting idea, but there’s no way… where does it go, you know, and of course at that time we all knew where it was going, and so I was like – we did the TCA panel, you know, there was the Television Critics Association panel for new shows and the television critics have seen the pilot and they ask you about it and you answer questions and it had to be really tight-lipped and careful.

MEJ: Very embargoed.

MS: Very embargoed, yeah, and – but we’re also… The trick was we couldn’t say we have to be tight-lipped and embargo-ey about this, because we didn’t even want them to know there was a twist right at that time. It was a comedy show, it was just a comedy show with an interesting premise and so I was terrified – I think the reason why the twist was so effective in large part was that no one knew it was coming, right, it was like if, if you go into a movie, if you go now into an M. Night Shyamalan movie, you are… the whole time from the moment you see the trailer or hear the title, you’re like well, let’s figure out the twist.

MEJ: Everybody’s dead.

MS: [Laughter] So I didn’t even want people to know there as a twist, so we had to talk about it in an embargoed way, tight-lipped embargoed way without letting them know what is it that we were doing. It was a very dicey – Jameela likes to say now that she just – from the time she found out about the twist, anytime she talked to anyone – if anyone asked a question about the show, it was literally the level like, ‘is it fun being on the set with Ted Danson’, she would just like, clam up and run away ‘cause it was like, we were all so scared.

MEJ: Petrified to spoil it.

MS: That’s right, except for ted. Ted ran around and apparently told every single person –

MEJ: Is that true?

MS: Yeah, Ted, after the… after it happened, Ted said, “I’m so relieved because I told so many people,” and I was like WHY, and he was like well, what he said was that he would tell people about the show and he would explain the premise, and they would go, ‘oh that sounds cool’ and then he would kind of get angry, defensive and go, ‘no it’s more cool than you know, because here is what really happens at the end…’

MEJ: That’s a very natural instinct.

MS: Yeah.

MEJ: To go, it’s not some fluffy show about heaven.

MS: That’s right.

MEJ: Oh my goodness.

MS: So he apparently told 70 people.

MEJ: Now that said that audience likely knows this, maybe you do not – you didn’t tell the other actors playing Chidi and Tahani and Jason and Janet about this until… halfway through the season, more than halfway through the season, or two-thirds, maybe three quarters of the way through the season. There’s a fascinating video from you and Kristen Bell – Kristen Bell shot a video on her phone of you telling those actors what happens in episodes – I guess in episode 1X13.

MS: So yeah, we – I told Ted and Kristen, because I thought actors of their stature deserve to know what they are getting into, and if Ted – if I had lied to Ted Danson essentially by saying you’re playing an angel and later, I said guess what, you’re the devil and he didn’t like that idea, I would have felt bad. So I – the two of them knew, and the writers obviously knew, and some of the producers knew, but the other four cast members did not, and none of the guest cast – like I said Tiya Sircar, for example, didn’t know and so yeah… When – when I decided it was time to tell them, because we had committed to it, we had cleared it with everyone we needed to clear it with and we had decided it was the right way to go creatively, we sat down after like, a read-through for episode 10, I think, and told them and Kristen videoed it. You can see it on her – it’s on her, it’s on her Twitter feed for a while…

MEJ: I think it’s still – I mean, people wrote about it.

MS: Yeah.

MEJ: Please look it up, it’s hilarious.

MS: It’s pretty funny.

MEJ: And fascinating. I have watched it 1000 times.

MS: Well, the good thing was we – I was terrified at every stage that they were going to – that, that it was going to leak out, and I was further terrified that people were going to guess it en masse, like in the society we live in and the world we live in of entertainment, everyone guesses everything and so what I ran the – when I explained the ending to the four actors who were steeped in the show the most of anyone in the world, they were playing the characters on the show and they – I grilled them afterwards, I was like “did you see it coming? Did you guess this? Did any part of you…” blah blah blah blah blah and when they said no, it gave me a lot of confidence that we were actually going to get it to airing without anyone finding it out.

MEJ: I, unusual for this, read every comment on any website –

MS: Did you, really?

MEJ: I did, I went deep-dive, as we get to episodes 1X11, 1X12, just to see if anybody sniffed it or if anybody was looking for –

MS: And what did you find?

MEJ: Zero.

MS: Really?

MEJ: Exactly what happens in this show itself happens after episode 1X13, and the twist aired which was… A couple people were like, ‘holy cow I jokingly said this, you know, several months ago to a friend, what if this was all whatever but I didn’t mean it, I didn’t…’ Nobody – there was nobody online that said, “I knew it!”

MS: Right, someone told me that there was a Reddit comment – or a thread, even, that where someone was like, ‘so hey here’s my theory’ and then it kind of didn’t go anywhere, petered out, and then after that happened, someone wrote ‘hey that guy was right!’ And they went back and found that guy and that guy was like, ‘oh yeah, I did say that…huh.” He’d forgotten about it and moved on.

MEJ: Was that person named Doug Forcett?

MS: [Laughter] That would be amazing.

MEJ: Mike, will you come back? We have a thousand things to ask you and would love to talk more about obviously episode 1X13, one of the biggest twists in American television history…

MS: [Laughter]

MEJ: Take that, Lost! So many things to ask you, but one of the things that we’re thinking about doing is well, asking people about good stuff. What’s good, a charity you support, or something that makes you happy…

MS: Oh boy, there are so many things… Charity – I sup– I’ve gotten extremely into a sort of charitable giving, there’s a whole division of ethics that’s devoted to the idea of where one should spend ones’ charitable donations.

MEJ: Interesting.

MS: There’s a hardcore utilitarian named Peter Singer, who is a very famous philosopher in Princeton, and he’s pretty – He’s a little too hardcore for my taste sometimes, but his whole thing is, look, I first learned about him – this will take a second, I apologise – but I first learned about him… he wrote an article for the New York Times Sunday magazine years ago, where it was right after Warren Buffett had decided to give 30 billion dollars to the Gates Foundation, and he – and people were saying he was the greatest philanthropist in history, like, dollar for dollar the great – he’s going to be the greatest philanthropist in history, and Peter Singer wrote this article and said, no he’s the worst philanthropist in history because sure, he gave 30 billion dollars to charity, that’s wonderful. He also still has 30 billion dollars.

MEJ: Mmhmm.

MS: So imagine I told you, there’s a man who had 30 billion dollars and wasn’t giving any of it to charity. What would you think of such a man? You would think, ‘what a cheap bastard’, right?”

MEJ: Right.

MS: And I was like well, that’s a really interesting argument by Peter Singer – so he’s written a number of books that I’ve read, and number of articles that I’ve read, and his basic – his thing is, is: you need to be efficient. You need to like, say, okay look, I’ve a hundred dollars to give to charity, I love the orchestra…

MEJ: Mmhmm.

MS: I love the symphony orchestra, so I’m going to give a hundred dollars to the symphony orchestra. It’s good, perhaps, to think to yourself, ‘Well, symphony orchestras are lovely, they’re wonderful things’. However, right now in West Africa, there are children who are dying of malaria and they’re dying of malaria because they’re bitten by mosquitos that could – that are transferring malaria into their blood, and for about 4 dollars you can buy a net that can go over a cot at night that keeps mosquitos from biting children and killing them. So instead of giving 100 dollars to the symphony orchestra, it might behove one to consider saving 25 human lives by donating that money to a charity that buys mosquito-proof nets.

MEJ: Sure.

MS: And it’s – it’s like, a lot of things with utilitarian ethics, there’s a sort of slippery slope there. If you – if you completely devote yourself to that line of thinking, you end up doing nothing but spending all of your time in just – and resources – it’s what… It’s like a utility pump, that’s what they say, like you don’t want to just turn into a vessel for sending money and resources to other people because it’s not a verdant life you’re leading.

MEJ: Right.

MS: However, that line of thinking has become very interesting to me. So there’s a website that’s – givewell.org, that basically goes out and researches like, the charities that do – that stretch your charitable dollar the farthest, and you can go there and say like, okay, well here’s – they, they do a lot of really intent vetting and they make sure that everything checks out and that, all that – they’re using the money efficiently – and all that sort of stuff. And so what – at the end of the year when I decide where I’m going to send charity money that’s a, that’s one of the first places I go. Now, obviously each individual person has to decide what makes sense for him or her, in terms of what, you know, you want to support, but it is a cool thing about the modern world, that we now have websites like these where you can say like, if I wanna be the most maximally efficient about giving money to charity that – they – these people can help me figure out how to do that.

MEJ: Mike, last question. At some point a decision was made not to introduce the character Shawn until episode 10 of the 13 episode first season.

MS: Right.

MEJ: When the show is eventually cancelled, do you acknowledge that that will have been the reason?

MS: I would say that it’s far more likely that the reason will have been too much Shawn.

MEJ: Hmm. Agree… to… disagree…

MS: [Laughter]

MEJ: Mike, thanks so much for your time.

MS: Thank you for having me.

MEJ: Yes, and thank you for listening. This has been The Good Place, the podcast. I’m Mark Evan Jackson. Go do something good.

[Closing music]

DC: Hi there! The podcast is over. I think what I’m feeling is… sadness.

TD: Oh, don’t worry Janet! This podcast is the most perfectly engineered invention since the paperclip.

DC: Fun fact, the man who invented the paperclip is in the Bad Place. For tax evasion!

TD: It’s available on Apple Podcast, and all major podcasting platforms, or wherever you get podcasts.

DC: Stop saying podcasts!

TD: Hosted by Marc Evan Jackson.

DC: Produced by Graham Ratliff (?).

TD: Written by Lizzie Pace.

DC: Music composed by David Schwartz. Yay!

Ding!

what’s good?

givewell.org

A nonprofit dedicated to finding outstanding giving opportunities and publishing the full details of our analysis to help donors decide where to give.

[rennyji]

June 9th evening afternoon tweets

U know looking back, at the state party school that I transferred to, in 2010, what they taught was done poorly & the subjects were out of date. I’m sure they’ll beg to differ. While they and their involvement of a “situation” strives to keep me writing in the midst of studying-

- other schools were teaching agile software practices, cloud computing, data warehousing, or even with a simple Java programming class: how to run JUnit test cases.-

- for months I tried contacting a professor for an old assignment and notes related to handling Java programming with sql database coding, never gives me what I want. Basically always says he’s too busy-

- in the party school, while their sister state university of Binghamton was teaching Java with Eclipse, enterprise style repositories and JUnit test cases, party school was using a baby program called Dr. Java.-

- my transcript is proof of the courses you teach. The duration of the situation and the kids is proof of a distraction in my priorities. My 4.0 high school GPA is testament to my academic caliber. Me, I like using the luxury of time to learn a course until it’s mastered.-

- students would say professor ravis course was 1 of the important courses. Didn’t do so well the 1st time amidst obstacles. Wanted 2 take theCourseAgain.  Ur partySchool’s conflictResolution VP insisted I take remaining courses @ a communityCollege so that Im out of their hair.-

-can you imagine this dip sh*ts advice? From a 4.0 gpa at Iona with scholarships and free laptops to a community college. The b*stars went out of his way to convince my parents I’m crazy after he had the faculty monitor me on the harassment on the day of my life 2012 finals.-

The amountOfDamage that partySchool, those spitefulKids did, along w/the rest ofThe “situation.”U should see some of theseFacesIm thinking why the f*k are U in myLife, while these randomly angry agenda fueled gamePlayers areIrritated theyre not wanted playing god w/some1’s life.-

- to some of the randomly angry agenda fueled game players, you wanna say have some dignity and move on.

The orchestrators are trying to figure me out. Put corny high school paths of doing what you love my way and things will follow. How old am I? How do you explain ur perverted presence in my life? Something can be learned from the Indian concept of arranged marriages-

- back in India, families strive to get their kids to perfection. Find a family, a women, that’s exceptional and meets standards. We wish a similar exceptionalism for careers, futures, education, etc. I come from this culture. In my family, father sought out opportunities in the-

- alien country of America and took care of his family and his extended family back home. Uncle went off to a different part of India and worked as the closest contact to Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi with his Italian wife Sonia. My father, my uncle, did these things thru-

- hard work without distractions and American party schools constantly getting in the way. It is beyond me, why my parents aren’t defending their culture and allowing these racist Americans to walk all over us, especially me.-

- the thing that’s absolutely beyond me is, I don’t do drugs, I don’t drink, just minding my business, I’ve done nothing to no one, if there was anything to clear up-done it 100 times over. Why’s are these freaks pursuing me I.e. the orchestrators. For 8 years, I’ve put aside my-

-likes, habits, grasping with the American dictators cruelty. Now after all that, they want to prostitute my life for entertainment while not disclosing what they do. American or not, what human being stands by while the orchestrators electrocute someone? -

- what do the orchestrators tell their following? Hey everyone, on behalf of the party school, we want are Renny to party like it’s 1999…

Moving to normal tweets again…

Americans are worse than the Germans were with the Jews In Nazi Germany…everything they do is superficial and not from the heart…

#Loki airs today on Disney Plus…

You’d be surprised how many things from ages ago, or even eight years ago, can come in handy, in the present day, today…

Saw The Wedding Ringer the other day…great movie…seeking a female best friend though, not an audience…

You gotta check out the @TouchofModern app from the App Store or Google Play Store. They have the coolest things for sale…

so a thought...-

-in a very convincing manner, the orchestrators make it clear to me that they're going to, subtly put, "do away" with me, while in this, or at the end of this. Something this big, after 11+years, even if it were just legally, the "situation" does not have a happy ending-

-i don't think my own parents go through my written material...for one thing, i think there's something paraphrasing what i write to them. regarding the rest of America, I think a filtered version is being delivered to you of what happens to me or what I write. -

- for some of you, you're in a fun game. keep track of where he goes, send it to the medium/platform - i guess?! There's the children like sounds, but at least so that group will help me, there is another group doing something else. -

- both of which are illegal. The children like sounds are arrogant. They're convinced its just them. When this first started, I called the police several times about this whole "situation", from start to finish, in its peculiarity. They lied to me and didn't help me. -

- When I went to the FBI, they gave me something to perpetually write on, for the hackers. The party school wanted to get rid of me and had their Conflict Resolution help the kids who started this instead of me. -

- The secondary group of orchestrators - for distraction purposes - and the primary group of orchestrators (to make their cause relevant with past trivial issues) want me to perpetually talk about the party school, the girl, and the random kids from the beginning of all this.-

- thats done, i moved on, i left the country cuz I didn't want to be bothered. But the orchestrators - their whole band - followed me there. -

- You as a people, because instructed or otherwise, talk about the past garbage that happened at the party school, like its the most-matter-of-fact-thing. But there is something else happening: abuse. -

-In myLife, in these 11+years, firefighters willExtend a hand, but also hide "theSituation." The police exert authority&play in2 the situation. The FBI enables theSituation. The partySchool wants 2 save its ownSkin. In an American conspiracy against 1 person, I left out 1 group.-

- In just going through past job application emails, I see the part where they ask you, "if you're a veteran?" They ask did you serve your country. Some people join the military for better opportunities after their service, and some are in it for the service. But when a normal-

- person thinks of a soldier, they think of someq going off 2 the Middle East &nabbing some bad guys. But we say "Thank U for ur service." Well, guys, myAmerican citizenship is being violated. There is a massiveConspiracy against 1 American. Illegal all around with illegal tech.-

- everyone is taking facts for granted and taking the extra measure of not talking to the person involved, for 11+ years. Being an American requires the extra step of compassion and a heart in your actions. While I understand you blow things up, I am in need of your compassion.-

- I am in need of  an exemplary American, such as a soldier, "fighting for this country" (as they say), to defend my rights against a government that allows this to happen. It's been 11+ years. Why are you taking this for granted and not investigating?-

-If you were to help me, unlike the others who say through obligation, duty, what they were instructed, or mechanically: "Thank you for your service." , I would say it from the bottom of my heart. -

-Why won't even you not look into what's going and help me? Is it because of my Indian skin and do I remind you of the Middle Eastern Muslims that you're stereotyped to being against? Is it because I'm not a blonde white girl that you allow this to happen to me?-

- To fight for my citizenship's entitlement, you don't need to go to another country. Stop this illegal thing and the façade of the orchestrators from happening. -

-If its because you see me as an enemy, then do me the kindness of ending me like you do with the rest, rather than having these disgusting pigs of orchestrators keep their word of "doing away with me."

Verilux Sun Lamps - might give you an energy boost...

I think there are aromatherapy oils that you can apply on the skin for their health benefits...who knew...

June 9th morning tweets, right side up, in tumblr blog link below:

https://rennyji.tumblr.com/post/653508979370180608/june-9th-early-morning-tweets

[newagesispage]

                                                                          OCTOBER    2019  

 PAGE RIB

 Stephen King has released yet another: The Institute

*****

Salmon Rushdie has given us Quichotte

*****

October 1: Jimmy Carter is 95!! Go Jimmy

*****

For some new discoveries and theories on the often told tale, check out Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the secret history of the 60,s by Tom O’Neill.

*****

Metallica has cancelled their tour.

*****

The Creamery Bridge in Vermont was closed for a time because of a Sasquatch scare.

*****

Days alert: Woo Hoo!! Dr. Rolf is back!! ** Why do they keep using that ‘WET PAINT’ sign all over the town square? A joke?  Really painting the sets and they just leave them up for an inside laugh? ** The Shah/Jen story was good.. it showed what a good actor he really was. He was always so blah! It’s funny that as he left us , we finally get his back story. He even mentioned Norman Bates. ** Stefan is out.  Claire is in.  I loved Dr. Rolf’s “pro life” line. Will many of the young girls get pregnant, ( think Lani, Ciara, Gabi, Sarah, Haley and Kristen) and will all the babies get mixed up and will Days jump a year ahead? Well, that’s the rumor. ** What is up with Hope?

*****

Senator Chuck Grassley is applying for his second bailout since October for the farm he owns. ** $30 billion in welfare has been given to farmers.

*****

This whole vaping scare is not really a surprise. Why do companies have to be so greedy and fill these with nicotine anyway? Why do good flavors have to be taken off the market because parents can’t keep them away from the kids? Can’t we have fun flavored simple mist in a vaping apparatus that has no dangerous chemicals? So many people just need that occasional outlet and something to do when relaxing.

*****

Spy devices were found near the White House. They believe Israelis are responsible.

*****

Word is that around Liberty University, Jerry Falwell Jr. uses fear in dealing with staff and sends them pictures of his wife in sexual situations.

****

They need to make a biopic about Rickie Lee Jones and it should star Hillary Swank. JS

*****

A CIA source has been pulled from Russia they say because Trump can’t be trusted not to tell Putin who he is. The operative is the agent who confirmed the interference in the 2016 election and has worked there for decades.

*****

Rose McGowan and some of the Me too movers and shakers would like Lisa Bloom to be disbarred after her dealings with Harvey Weinstein.

*****

Mark Sanford is running for President.

*****

Sarah Palin’s husband has filed for divorce.

*****

Stacey Dash was arrested for domestic battery in Florida.

*****

Stranger Things has been renewed for season 4.

*****

Hey.. Robert King.. Glad that U R back!

*****

People from Alabama were calling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in a panic after scary clown 45 included them in the path of Hurricane Dorian. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross threatened to fire meteorologists who contradicted the idiot.

*****

John Legend and Chrissy Teigen got into it with the Pres. She called him a pussy ass bitch.

*****

In the 80’s, 80% of our clothing were made here in the U.S., now it is 3%.

*****

The House Judiciary committee is holding hearings about hush money to Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels.

*****

Conversion therapy leader, McKrae Game has announced he is gay.

*****

It is odd that we don’t hear more about women who are addicted to crime shows. It is such a thing.

*****

Weight Watchers is not WW. OK.

*****

North Carolina’s political maps have been deemed unconstitutional and must be redrawn.

*****

In Nashville, Rev. Dan Reehil has banned Harry Potter books at the St. Edwards School

*****

Why does Fallon imitate his guests all the time? He is always repeating what they do much like a child would.

*****

Scary Clown’s personal assistant, Madeline Westerhout is out.** John Bolton is out.

*****

$32.50 for a Trump key chain? What?

*****

SNL started off the season with a bang. Woody Harrelson hosted and ended by showing support for Greta Thunberg. The next hosts will be Phoebe Waller- Bridge, David harbor, Kristen Stewart and Eddie Murphy.

*****

A man was chopping down an old diseased tree when a cannonball fell out of it. This particular cannonball in a tree was near a home that was used as a hospital during the first battel of independence, Mo. in the Civil War.

*****

In Kentucky, Mitch McConnell said yes to treasury funds for an aluminum plant backed by a Russian oligarch. He said no to treasury funds for coal miner’s health care and pensions.

*****

Joe Biden pledges to take no fossil fuel money but then attended a fundraiser hosted by Andrew Goldman, founder of Natural Gas Company, Western LNG.** It’s so sad, Biden leads which makes it seem that the people who pay the least attention decide who is going to run this place.** He really has to stop saying, “Look”,  all the time.

*****

The Sept. 12 Dem debate was exciting, I loved the kudos that Biden and then others gave to Beto for his actions in Texas after the shootings.  Other than that Biden seemed to stumble a lot especially with his, “make sure the kids hear words” stuff. O’Rourke seems to have finally hit his stride with, “Hell yes, we’re gonna take your AR-15’s.”  I’m not even sure I agree but I loved so much that he had the guts to say it. I’m in! His only real problem was the color of his tie, it washed him out. Later, Briscoe Cain sent a tweet to Beto: My AR-15 is ready for you.** Yang, as usual was not given enough time but he did calm the others when they wanted to spar. He spoke so clearly and did not sidestep.  He had a great point with the U.S. not starting wars because we are not too good at rebuilding. Case in point: Puerto Rico. He also proposed $100 in democracy dollars so people can participate and give to the candidates they believe in. He seemed to tear up when talking about missing his son’s first day at school.  His salesmen pitch like giveaway was too much though. ** Buttigieg had a good idea with his ‘community rural visas’ to bring immigration everywhere.** Warren and Sanders were straight forward with no real surprises. Gotta thank Bernie for reminding us that he didn’t vote for Bush’s war or Trumps military spending bills and the crowd seemed to love him. Both at the debate and after (like Bari Weiss on Maher’s overtime), people keep calling Bernie ‘President’. Accidents? ** Harris was cool and calm but seemed a bit scripted.  She was the only one to really bring up Trump. ** Protestors had to be cleared as Biden started his final words. They were yelling, “We are DACA recipients. Our lives are at risk.” I’m sure it had to unnerve him as he began to talk of his sad life and his family. The late night comics said that he did a good job but I didn’t think so.** Klobachar told us a lot about herself. I think I learned the most about her. Castro, who I really liked a lot at the first debate, should just get out after this performance. ** Why was Rahm Emanuel there?** The Trump campaign sent a banner flying over Texas  Southern University. ** DeBlasio is out.

*****

By the end of September, Warren is #1 in New Hampshire. She is 2 points behind in the nation and Yang is #4!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“We will no longer sell the AR-15 to the public.”- Colt   Thanks Beto!!  A simple candidate has made more positive change than Scary Clown. Stop being so scared Dems, change can happen!

*****

When Warren was on Colbert she said,” Why don’t we just quit now and do a selfie line?  The selfies are the most fun about this. Really? The night before, after her rally she selfied for 4 hours.

*****

Young people will propel the changes in the views of this country. The young demographic thinks differently on guns and climate and the young usually rule eventually. VOTE!!

*****

An intelligence official filed a formal whistle blower complaint against our ruthless Archie Bunker on steroids about his interaction with a foreign leader. It seems that it was a phone call with Ukraine’s Zelinski about the Biden’s but things are still unfolding.  Did he pressure people to work with Guilliani? The transcript is out and Pelosi has started a formal impeachment inquiry. When the WH sent talking points to their republican colleagues to try to calm the waters, they accidently sent them to the Dems too.  The WH also moved the info to a private server as we now know there is even more stuff there. Wouldn’t it be justice if the private server brought him down? ** Blame is flying everywhere. Trump has thrown Barr and Rudy and even Pence into the mess. Rudy tells us that he went to the Ukraine for the state department but they say no! He has been so rude and unhinged on the talk circuit. He has now been subpoened.** Joseph Maguire, acting director of National intelligence was only on the job a few days when he was informed of the whistleblower complaint. He was questioned all day in hearings and was very polite. Both sides could calm down on the snarky.** The Secretary of State is basically holding down 3 jobs.  The WH is quite under staffed  and there is talk that they may bring in outside people to handle the situation but Trump does not want that.  The campaign is where they will really fight, that is where all their money is. ** The ambassador to Ukraine has stepped down.**

*****

Now word is that Trump and Barr tried to get Australian PM Scott Morrison to look into those who were behind the Russia investigation. Pompeo is now getting pulled in too. It is really like the tin foil hat conspiracy guy down the street is running this country.

*****

Never compare your insides to someone else’s outside.  -Thank you Rob Lowe

*****

Hillary and Chelsea are headed out to promote their new book, Gutsy Women. It is impeccable timing but I am sure she is so sick of talking about the big blowhard elephant in the room. It really is time to hear from her again.

*****

Law and Order SVO started its 21st season with a little nod to Gunsmoke. What a great touch.

*****

Has the military really spent $200,000 on Trump’s Scottish resort?

*****

What’s up with the Cleveland Browns? They are winning.

*****

4 feet of snow in September in Montana?

*****

Seth Meyers went too far with his Rudy hate. I am a bit disturbed that Seth, Maher and Colbert get nearly as bold in the other direction as Fox News. Yes, these are evil people running the country and there is enough that they do without calling them out on things that are not your business.  About Rudy marrying a second cousin, Seth said “that’s awful.” Don’t pass your prejudice and judgement on these people like others do on color and religion et al. Cousins can marry, it’s not illegal and how might that make the children of cousins feel?  

*****

Pennsylvania  Senator Michael Folmer was arrested for child porn that was on his computer and has since resigned.  I am sure that if he went on Fox and said nice things about the fearless leader that he could get a job in the White House. It seems to be the way it is done, Fox is the audition.

*****

Robert C. O’Brien is the new National Security Advisor.

*****

The family of John Dillinger do not believe that he is in the grave. A body id buried in Indianapolis but they have asked for an exhumation.

*****

Millions came out on the 20th to ask for action on climate change. Go Greta Thunberg !! Some are spinning it that since she is autistic, she has been abused by her parents by being forced into her activism. I have seen no evidence this. She makes more sense than most leaders on the subject. Fox’s Michael Knowles even called her mentally ill and has since apologized. Thoughts? ** Central America is starving to death because of the impact of climate change. Reports from the Trump administration prove this and aid has been cut off which causes migration.

*****

Trump us jumping into bed with Saudi Arabia who has the 5th largest defense budget in the world. Troops are being sent to Iran.

*****

Doc Martin is here with its 9th season. The dog will fall in love. The Doc and Louisa’s relationship is doing well as their careers are shifting. It all just reminds me how much I want to live in Cornwall.

*****

The biggest grossing tours of all time as of this year are. 1. Ed Sheeran: The Divide 2. U: 360 3. Stones: A Bigger Bang 4. Guns N Roses: Not in this lifetime 5. Coldplay: A Head Full of Dreams 6. Roger Waters: The Wall 7. AC/DC: Black Ice 8. Stones: No Filter 9. Bruno Mars: 24K 10. Madonna: Sticky and Sweet

*****

James Corden put Bill Maher in his place. Fat shaming is as wrong as any other. Bullying is never funny. The week after Maher’s rant, Michael Moore went on and had lost some weight. Hmmm.

*****

Hiking with Kevin has the best guests, there is really a cross section of all kinds of people.  A hike seems to break down defenses and the stories are great!!

*****

The North Dakota pipeline spill that was said to be 10 gallons worth was really millions of gallons.

*****

Almost Family is a show about a sperm donor. It is good to see Tim Hutton again.

*****

A woman gets a late night show.. check out A Little Late with Lilly Singh.

*****

Prodigal Son stars Michael Sheen as a serial killer called The Surgeon.

*****

Julian Fellowes will bring us The Gilded Age about 1885 New York.

*****

Some are freaking about all the official stays at Trump properties. The whole thing is a ridiculous mess. Mitch and the boys would be screaming to the heavens if this was a different President. The really sad part is that the crews that are just there to help POTUS and the VP say the stays are so costly that their expenses won’t even cover food. ** Did a Glasgow refueling stop finally tip off the house oversight committee to the far reach of all these expenditures?** They claim there is never anything to hide. Why do they always hide everything?

*****

Demi Moore has a new tell all titled Inside Out that seems full of revelations.

*****

Check out the saga of the Donald J. Trump state park in NY which is really nothing more than a tax write off full of overgrown land and abandoned old buildings.

*****

Check out the Art Bell vault.

*****

Scary Clown was going to meet with the Taliban at Camp David as 9/11 was upon us.** The Taliban says their doors re open.**Word is that the congressional inquiry into 9/11 has 28 redacted pages which showed evidence of the Saudi’s involvement in the attacks.

*****

Scottish courts ruled that Boris Johnson illegally suspended parliament.

*****

From his reaction, Colbert behaves like Letterman in that a guest should dress a certain way. Personally, I like Conan’s casual ways. Now, I like Colbert but he also seems to push people to talk politics when they don’t really want to. Move on!

*****

“We are in a very difficult situation at the moment, especially in the U.S., where all the environmental controls that were put in place, that were just about adequate have been rolled back by the current administration so much that they are being wiped out.” –Mick Jagger

*****

“When you’re 85 years old and you have children and grandchildren, you will leave them nothing if we don’t vote these people out of office in Brazil, in London, in Washington. They are ruining the world.” –Donald Sutherland

*****

Check out the new film, The Burnt Orange Heresy.

*****

Finn Wittrock, Paul Giamatti and Amy Irving will appear in A Mouthful of Air.

*****

“The lungs of the earth are in flames.” – Leo Dicaprio. The Amazon, the world’s most diverse eco system is getting no help from its own leaders and they won’t accept help from the G7. It’s all about building more crap to them. It is as if three fourths of the U.S. was on fire.** Wouldn’t it be a great idea if Jeff Bezos, who has taken flak for not paying taxes and for workers conditions would step up and pledge a huge sum to help save the rainforest that bears its name?? The world needs heroes.

*****

Better Call Saul has wrapped season 5.

*****

Hasbro has bought Death Row Records.

*****

The San Francisco board of supervisors has declared the NRA a terrorist organization.

*****

New SNL cast member Shane Gillis who was in hot water after racist remarks surfaced, has been let go before he ever hit the stage.

*****

Mike Pence claims he was bit by American Pharoah but his trainer is not too sure about that.

*****

Obama Netflix?

*****

Kieran Culkin and Jazz Charton had a little girl that they named Kinsey Sioux.

*****

Dollface on Hulu looks interesting.

*****

In sexual harassment news: Brett Kavanaugh has been hit with other allegations. Not all accusations are coming from the victims.** Placido Domingo has been accused by 20 women of unwanted advances.

*****

The71st Emmys have come and gone. There is a lot to celebrate in television right now with over 500 scripted original shows. Highlights include Norman Lear winning for Live in front of a studio audience: Norman Lears’s All in the Family and The Jeffersons to become the oldest winner ever at 97. Other winners were Leaving Neverland for best doc.  Glow won for stunt coordination. Succession won for their theme and for writing. RuPaul won for reality host and Drag Race won for show. Russian Doll took home cinematoghraphy. Carpool Karaoke : When Corden met McCartney:Live from Liverpool took home a statue. Peter Dinklage won for best supporting actor, Fleabag won big and Game of Thrones took home the top prize.  Other winners were Bill Hader, Patricia Arquette, Ben Whishaw, Billy Porter and Jodie Comer.  SNL with Adam Sandler and Last Week Tonight were winners.  I was so excited to see that Ozark won for Julia Garner and Bateman for directing. Succession won for directing.  I thought  the fashion went wrong with Amy Poehler, and Dascha Polanco. There was awesome fashion with Regina King, Viola Davis, Maya Rudolph, Bob Odenkirk, Billy Porter, Angela Bassett, Michelle Williams, Kerry Washington, Zendaya, Sarah Silverman, Catherine Zeta- Jones, Karamo Brown, Gwyneth Paltro, Catherine O’Hara, Emilia Clarke, Phoebe Waller Bridge and Niecy Nash.** The In memoriam was fucked up when they honored Andre Previn  but showed a very much alive Leonard Slacken. Let me run that part of the show, they are always messing that up. It may not matter much longer because the ratings were so low. It is already a shame that they don’t broadcast the daytime Emmy’s.

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R.I.P. Jim Leavelle, Carol Lynley, T Boone Pickens, Daniel Johnston, Robert Frank, Ric Ocasek, Eddie Money, Sander Vanocur , Peter Lindbergh, Robert Haunter, Jacques Chirac , Jose Jose , Bob Esty, Wayne Fitzgerald, Jessye Norman and Cokie Roberts.

[katebushwick]

Chasing Innovation

One early September day I finally managed to have a long conversation with David, a business innovation consultant in his midthirties. In 2012, after pursuing an undergraduate degree in physics and a graduate degree in design, David had founded Newfound, a design and innovation consultancy firm, together with two business partners. During the three months before our conversation, I had participated in different innovation workshops organized by Newfound in New York. David was the most verbal and articulate among the innovation consultants I worked with, and I was eager to have a one-on-one conversation with him. However, it was extremely difficult to schedule a meeting because his consultancy practice at the time of my fieldwork required him to travel extensively inside and outside the United States. One afternoon, however, he texted me to say that if I still wanted to interview him, he could make himself available during a twohour slot the following morning. I immediately responded with “ Yes!” The next morning I arrived at the same shared workspace on the twenty-first floor of a new office building in Manhattan’s midtown in which Newfound’s workshops took place. I found David sitting in a nook next to a floor-toceiling window, looking at the busy street below. Upon seeing me, he smiled and without further ado said “Go for it.” I was not disappointed by our conversation. David responded in detail to each of my questions, taking them in directions that I had not anticipated. As our conversation drew to a close, I asked him what the participants in the innovation workshops he facilitates find the hardest to learn. “ The hardest thing of all is finding ways to do this in your job,” he immediately responded. “Some people come to us and say, ‘I want a job in innovation.’ 2 / Introduction And I’m like, ‘There are no jobs in innovation! Go be innovative in whatever you do!’ ” David’s tone became frustrated. “ The world deserves people who know something about a thing and then choose to innovate that thing. Like, HR managers should be innovative HR managers. And product managers should innovate methods of product management. People should be innovating in place!” He went on to explain that “people look at what we do and think of innovation as something separate from the field of knowledge and experience that they have. But, in fact,” he argued, “you gotta have a minefield of knowledge and experience to innovate—people, teams, organizations, change management.” David paused for a second and added, “and innovation processes: so I get to innovate innovation, you know?” he laughed. “I’ve been doing this for seven years, and I’m an amateur. So you cannot just show up and do this.” After the interview, as I walked along Broadway to the Times Square subway station, I kept thinking about David’s words. David argued that innovation has become such a popular buzzword that everyone—companies and people—wanted to become innovative. His words resonated with some of the flickering advertisements, billboards, and storefronts that surrounded me on the busy street and that announced new products, services, and technologies by using some form of the word innovation. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a more ubiquitous trope than innovation in today’s business world. A 2012 article in the Wall Street Journal presented data that pointed to innovation’s exponential increase in visibility: A search of annual and quarterly reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows companies mentioned some form of the word “innovation” 33,528 times [in 2011], which was a 64% increase from five years before that. More than 250 books with “innovation” in the title have been published in the last three months, most of them dealing with business, according to a search of Amazon.com. . . . Apple Inc. and Google Inc. mentioned innovation 22 times and 14 times, respectively, in their most recent annual reports. But they were matched by Procter & Gamble Co. (22 times), Scotts Miracle-Gro Co. (21 times) and Campbell Soup Co. (18 times). . . . Four in 10 executives say their company now has a chief innovation officer. (Kwoh 2012) However, later, sitting in the subway train on my way to Brooklyn, I realized that David suggested that the immense popularity of innovation has become a double-edged sword. People often came to him thinking they could innovate independently of domains of professional practice and indepth knowledge of such context-specific domains because innovation’s The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 3 popularity turned it into a reified notion, a kind of catchall phrase that was fast becoming devoid of meaning. His assessment resonates with a widespread suspicion. In tandem with the data about the rising ubiquity of the notion of innovation, the same Wall Street Journal article argued that “like the once ubiquitous buzzwords ‘synergy’ and ‘optimization,’ innovation is in danger of becoming a cliché—if it isn’t one already” (Kwoh 2012). A 2013 article in the Atlantic went as far as suggesting that although “mentions of innovation are resurgent,” “actual innovation might be in decline” (Green 2013). Quoting a George Mason University economist, the article argued that since the 1970s, “the forward march of technological progress has hit something of a dry spell, regardless of what all the talk about innovation may indicate.” It concluded with the puzzling fact that “measurable innovation might be on the decline, but, for some reason, we just can’t stop talking about it” (Green 2013). Finally, back home in Park Slope, as I was transcribing the interview with David I noticed a third dimension to his commentary. Although David first argued that people erroneously think that there is “a job in innovation,” he then acknowledged that his job is precisely such a job. David first claimed that people should be innovating in their own domains of professional practice and that to do so they must have in-depth knowledge of these context-specific domains: the “people, teams, organizations, [and] change management.” At this point, however, he suddenly paused and added “and innovation processes,” thus turning the spotlight to himself. Knowledge of “innovation processes” was something innovation consultants must be intimately familiar with if they wanted to “innovate innovation”—that is, to offer their clients better and more advanced strategies of innovation. David’s expert knowledge was thus a metalevel kind of knowledge of innovation, one that could be applied not only to consumer products and processes across different domains but also to itself. David belongs to the steadily growing number of innovation consultants, a professional group of people who help companies innovate their products, services, and structures by means of general, rule-governed innovation strategies that transcend specific contexts. As the Wall Street Journal article noted, “the innovation trend has given birth to an attendant consulting industry, and Fortune 100 companies pay innovation consultants $300,000 to $1 million for work on a single project, which can amount to $1 million to $10 million a year,” according to estimates (Kwoh 2012). Thus, reading the full transcription of the interview with David later that night, it struck me as provocative of more questions than answers. How can we explain the fact that according to David, the popularity of the idea 4 / Introduction of innovation has led people to want to master innovation as if it were a “thing” that could be abstracted from the context of different business practices when he presented himself as someone whose professional practice revolved around the development of innovation strategies that transcended the specific contexts of business practices? What should we make of the fact that David emphasized that he has been offering innovation consulting services for a number of years and yet still considers himself “an amateur. So you cannot just show up and do this,” when the notion that one can “just show up and do this” has been popularized in large part because of the many short innovation workshops and executive training sessions that innovation consultants such as David offer to business executives? Lastly, how should we reconcile the widespread suspicion that innovation has lost its specificity together with the rise of numerous innovation consulting firms that have developed highly specific innovation strategies as well as with the fact that many of these consulting firms have been successfully selling their services to different kinds of business organizations, from small start-ups to established Fortune 500 companies? An Undertheorized Dimension of Post-Fordist Flexible Accumulation Since the 1980s, post-Fordism has been at the center of critical studies of capitalism. In this context, scholars have focused on the nature and implications of the development of new strategies to reduce further the turnover time of capital, that is, the time it takes for capital to complete a cycle from the capitalist’s investment of capital in the means of production to the return of capital to the capitalist after the sale of commodities (Azari-Rad 1999). Their analytic focus has tended to be on the development of more efficient production and distribution technologies. For example, they have discussed the transition to part-time and temporary labor force (Muehlebach and Shoshan 2012; Ho 2009), cheaper manufacturing of goods in small batches and new distribution systems such as just-in-time inventory-flow delivery systems (Elam 1994; Shead 2017), geographical dispersal and mobility (Esser and Hirsch 1994), and the ability to take advantage of up-todate information through computerization and electronic means of communication (Zaloom 2006; Holmes and Marcus 2006). However, post-Fordist flexible accumulation depends on reducing the turnover time of capital not only via more efficient production and distribution technologies but also via a higher rate of product innovation. Organi- The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 5 zations must not only instantaneously respond to but also orchestrate and anticipate market changes by generating a constant stream of ideas for new products and services. The plethora of studies of post-Fordism has thus left relatively undertheorized a key dimension of post-Fordist flexible accumulation, namely, the “acceleration in the pace of product innovation together with the exploration of highly specialized and small-scale market niches” (Harvey 1990, 156). Against this backdrop, what kind of professional expertise might emerge in response to organizations’ need to routinize the fast production of ideas for new products and services? How might such an expertise help organizations generate solutions to future crises whose nature they cannot know in advance, namely, the introduction by their competitors of new products and services that can upend their operations? Put more broadly, what kind of professional expertise might help organizations prepare themselves for and constantly generate the unpredictable in a predictable way, the future in the present, the unknown by means of the known? Scholars have argued at length that the post-Fordist development of more efficient production and distribution technologies has had concrete societal implications. For example, the transition to part-time and temporary labor forces has affected workers’ well-being in numerous ways (Muehlebach and Shoshan 2012). Against this backdrop, how might the promise of the fast innovation of any entity by means of abstract, rule-governed strategies affect cultural notions of newness as well as individuals’ relation to their world—including their own lives—when such a world and lives are seen through the prism of endless innovation within reach? The very idea of the intentional design of organizational structures meant to routinize the fast production of new cultural entities takes us to a relatively uncharted theoretical domain in cultural anthropology. Anthropologists have tended to view innovation as the result of copying errors in the process of social learning and the diffusion of social practices (Boas 1896; Kroeber 1940) or as the contingent, loosely guided, and often unconscious product of individuals’ experimentation with existing practices and constraints (often glossed as “improvisation” or “emergence”) in response to unexpected new situations and crises (White 1943, 339–40; Mead 1953; LéviStrauss 1966, 17–19; Bateson 1967, 148; Bourdieu 1977, 79; Chibnik 1981; Gell 1998, 215; Hannerz 1992; Hallam and Ingold 2007; Pandian 2015).1 In light of this intellectual tradition, what theory might account for a professional expertise that turns on the ability to systematize the fast production of ideas for new cultural entities by means of the development of rule-governed strategies that become part of the organization’s everyday practice? 6 / Introduction The Book’s Argument Based on a four-year ethnographic study of routinized business innovation norms and practices as they find expression in the work of innovation consultants, I address these and additional questions, offering a threefold argument. First, the consultants I worked with were not selling their clients snake oil that entailed little more than the appearance of entrepreneurship and an organizational cool branded with an unspecific catchall phrase. Rather, they were busy developing and helping their clients learn to implement highly specific and rule-governed strategies of generating and imagining ideas for new products and services. Such strategies problematize a number of assumptions about both the business organization and the creative imagination. On the one hand, scholars have rarely viewed creative imagination as one of business organizations’ key dimensions. Yet the rise of norms and practices of business innovation, in which ideation strategies play an important role, suggests that creative imagination is fast becoming one of business organizations’ key components. On the other hand, scholars have often conceptualized creative imagination in terms of fleeting liminality, evanescence, a radical individual property, and a horizon that is removed from the here and now. Yet many strategies of business innovation bring creative imagination into the office or conference room as a stable property or “technology” (Sneath, Holbraad, and Pedersen 2009) that a number of people can generate, share, and debate together for a sustained length of time. Business innovation thus turns out to be a sphere of professional practice that generates new cultural entities by reconciling a professional ethos—with its ideals of rationality, systematicity, and reliability—and a modern-Romantic creative ethos, with its ideals of unpredictable emergence (Wilf 2014a). The possibility of such reconciliation has captured the imagination of business executives and the wider public and played a key role in the rise of a professional class of innovation consultants. Second, many consultants’ substantial achievements notwithstanding, contemporary business innovation takes place in an economic and organizational environment that prizes speed and instantaneous results. This environment significantly shapes the social life of business innovation. Clients’ pressure for immediate results pushes innovation consultants to streamline the production of insights and ideas for new products and services. They consequently abstract and decontextualize the innovation process from the market to which it purports to refer. Although consultants argue that their strategies are oriented toward and take into account the consumer, the latter is often erased in the process of innovation. I show two The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 7 forms of this erasure. In the first, the innovation process discards the need to engage with end users altogether because of a belief that all the needed information about future innovative products and services already inheres in existing products and services. In the second, although the innovation process begins with data collected from end users, these data undergo textual transformations that gradually decontextualize them from any meaningful connection to users. Third, in addition to decoupling the innovation process from the market, some strands of business innovation have become self-reflexive and self-sustaining professional practices whose role is to mediate post-Fordist normative ideals of speed, instantaneity, and creative flexibility both to innovators and to their clients in addition to, and often at the expense of, generating end results that can actually be monetized. The rhetorical power of such practices to signal to clients and to innovators that “innovation is now taking place” emanates from their multimodal resonance with widespread ideologies of organizational creativity. This rhetorical power is responsible for business innovation’s contemporary status as a bulletproof panacea for any entity in need of innovation, including one’s life and self. These different, interrelated, and sometimes contradictory dimensions of routinized business innovation underlie David’s commentary. David complained that people think that innovation is “a thing” that can be abstracted from contextual factors, yet he presented his own professional practice as one that has reached the kind of level of generality that makes innovation appear to be “a thing” that transcends contexts, a perception that has also been encouraged by business innovation’s self-reflexivity, reification, and decoupling from the market. David lamented the fact that people think they can quickly master the principles of innovation and that they do not understand that business innovation consists of highly specialized skills and procedures, yet it is innovation consultants who have formulated easily learnable principles and recipes of innovation, disseminated them in relatively short training sessions, and applied them in concrete innovation sessions to quickly generate insights. Routinized business innovation is thus neither the empty shell that its detractors claim it to be nor is it the holy grail of organizational success that its supporters insist it is. Rather, innovation consultants constantly need to negotiate the tension between their desire to come up with specific practices that could lead to ideas for new monetizable products and services— a goal that requires time and sensitivity to context—and the need to speed up the innovation process and signal to their clients and to themselves that “innovation is now taking place”—an achievement that requires them to 8 / Introduction decontextualize, abstract, and reify the innovation process. To understand this complexity, an ethnographic approach that is sensitive to innovators’ everyday practice is needed. As the author of a recent Wired magazine article noted, “the overuse and generalization of the term ‘innovation’ has led to a loss of understanding of what it is we need when we say we need more innovation. We lose sight of the specific skills and behavior needed to be innovative. . . . We should start talking about innovation as a series of separate skills and behaviors” (O’Bryan 2013). Against this backdrop, I provide a detailed analysis of the skills and behaviors of business innovation consultants based on participant observation in a number of key institutional sites in which they develop, crystalize, and apply those skills and behaviors and inculcate them to business people who are later supposed to implement them in their own organizations. In doing so, I unpack both the potentialities and cultural contradictions of routinized business innovation and tease out their theoretical and practical implications. Commodity Fetishism, “Unmet Consumer Needs,” and the Production of the Future The study of business innovation provides an opportunity to engage with and contribute to critical studies of capitalism as a future-producing and future-oriented social configuration. One focus in this strand of research has been capitalism’s future-oriented discursive practices. For example, in his study of biotechnological start-ups in the United States and India, Sunder Rajan highlights “the grammar of biocapital,” which he describes as a promissory futuristic discourse, an orientation to the future when there is nothing in the present that prefigures it (Sunder Rajan 2006). This orientation is based in an ideology and culture of risk taking (Sunder Rajan 2006, 110; Comaroff and Comaroff 2000; Appadurai 2011; Miyazaki 2007; Maurer 2002; Riles 2004; Preda 2009) and is a condition of possibility for biotechnological start-ups, which depend on significant capital investment when there are no tangible products and revenues in the present that can justify such an investment (see also Taussig, Hoeyer, and Helmreich 2013). Other studies have focused on the production of new subjectivities for capitalism. For example, Rudnyckyj has studied the ways in which moderate Muslims in Southeast Asia learn to reconfigure their approach to Islam and their understanding of themselves as Muslims and thus, “to make the religion compatible with principles for corporate success found in Euro-American management texts, self-help manuals, and life-coaching sessions” (Rudnyckyj 2010). Similarly, Dumit has argued that the pharmaceutical industry expands its The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 9 market by making Americans perceive themselves as subjects who are inherently ill and in need of chronic treatment (Dumit 2012). I complement these studies by arguing that innovation consultants produce the future not only by means of discursive practices and the production of new subjectivities but also by engaging with existing products as future-producing sites in which this future already inheres in embryonic form, awaiting the innovator’s intervention to help it materialize by means of specific practices that involve the innovator’s corporeality and imagination. The conditions of possibility that underlie this approach include culturally specific notions of form, potentiality, evolution, determinism, and prediction. This mode of producing the future provides an opportunity to engage with what Marx called commodity fetishism (Marx 1978). Marx argued that under capitalism, commodities appear to have a nature or life of their own that is reflected in their price. Although it is human labor that is responsible for products’ existence and “life,” this labor remains concealed from consumers (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002). Recent studies of commodity fetishism have tended to focus on branding, that is, strategies of imbuing specific products with quasi-human personality traits with which consumers can identify (Arvidsson 2006; Foster 2007; Lury 2004; Moore 2003; Manning 2010; Lee and LiPuma 2002; Gershon 2017). Against this backdrop, I theorize a different form of commodity fetishism in the course of which innovators conceptually transform existing products into quasi persons that are endowed with a unique creative potential for developing into new products. The innovator does not assign specific personality traits to a specific product but rather invests it with a potential for creative development that, to be sure, is responsible for its present form but also for its future, potentially highly different forms. These innovation strategies migrate to spheres outside of the business world, too, such as that of self-help, where commodities and technologies eventually become models of creative development that human individuals are asked to emulate, as if products’ potential for creative development were antecedent to that of human individuals. Business innovation’s future-oriented approach ultimately turns on efforts to tap into “unmet consumer needs.” Scholars have studied “consumer needs” and their production under capitalism primarily through the prism of the ways in which marketers and advertisers recruit consumers to specific roles and encourage them to experience and inhabit needs associated with those roles, which existing products can presumably satisfy (Mazzarella 2003; Moore 2003; Applbaum 2003; Lury 2004). I highlight instead the coconstitution of products and consumers in the course of the 10 / Introduction innovation process. Ideas for new products shape, and are shaped by, innovators’ ideas about consumers. Future products and “unmet consumer needs” thus come to share an interrelatedly emergent and contingent nature that is nevertheless shaped by the specific post-Fordist business environment in which it is anchored and by the innovator who mediates between them and whose self and expertise, too, are constituted in this process of mediation. The Ethnographic Setting and Fieldwork Beginning in April 2012, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with four innovation consulting firms, mainly in New York City. The bulk of the fieldwork took place with two of these firms, Newfound and Brandnew.2 Newfound was founded in 2012. It has offered innovation corporate training as well as contract work with individual companies on specific projects. Since its foundation, it has collaborated with companies from the banking, apparel, food, education, and tourism sectors and industries on a wide range of projects. Its founders and facilitators base their expertise in design, business management, and advertising. They trace most of their professional lineage to design thinking, a highly influential user-centered design and innovation method that is widely associated with the iconic Silicon Valley innovation consultancy firm IDEO and Stanford’s Institute of Design.3 This lineage has ties to the psychological study of creativity in that design thinking’s key method of ideation—brainstorming—is embedded in the context of the psychological study of creative problem-solving in the mid-twentieth century (Osborn 1953, xiv). I attended four different innovation workshops given by Newfound, the longest of which extended to five weeks. Participants in these workshops came mostly from the start-up sector and the creative industries. The cost of Newfound’s workshops was in the range of a few hundred dollars. Each workshop was usually led by two facilitators and attended by fifteen participants. The shorter workshops focused on the transmission of abstract principles, whereas the longer ones were structured around specific problems presented by real clients. By trying to solve a client’s problem by means of the innovation strategies inculcated in a workshop, participants hoped to gain hands-on experience and what they considered to be crucial skills in the contemporary marketplace. Clients hoped to benefit from the insights generated in the workshops and were consequently willing to underwrite some of their costs. Brandnew was founded in 1994. Since its founding it has collaborated with major companies from different sectors on a vast spectrum of con- The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 11 sumer products and services, one of which has become a standard of innovation in the field of consumer electronics. Its facilitators base their expertise in cognitive science and the study of creative problem-solving with a focus on engineering problems in addition to business management. Participants in its workshops and training sessions tended to be senior executives in large, established companies, some of which were Fortune 500 companies. They were mostly C-level executives (e.g., Chief Innovation Officers) with business management degrees. The cost of Brandnew’s workshops was in the range of a few thousand dollars. Each workshop was usually led by four facilitators and attended by twenty-five participants. In addition to attending Brandnew’s workshops, I participated in a course on business innovation in one of the top five US business schools.4 The course focused on the core principles of Brandnew’s signature innovation strategy. It lasted six weeks and was attended by close to seventy students. It has been offered a few times a year at this school. Although this book does not provide a systematic comparison between the two consultancies, juxtaposed, Newfound and Brandnew offer a good view of the wide spectrum of routinized business innovation strategies and services that are now prevalent in the business world and of the wide range of executives and entrepreneurs interested in mastering and incorporating these strategies. Newfound’s focus on design thinking provides a window into an innovation strategy that has become highly popular both within and outside the business world. In contrast, Brandnew provides insights into consultancies that offer more specialized proprietary innovation strategies. The innovators who work for Brandnew explicitly reject design thinking and its adherence to brainstorming as a method of creative ideation in favor of a much more systematic, quasi-algorithmic approach to creative problem-solving inspired by the field of engineering and cognitive science. Their “no-nonsense” approach found expression in the fact that Brandnew’s workshops that I attended took place in dull, windowless hotel conference rooms, whereas Newfound’s workshops took place in a trendy shared workspace in a new office building—the kind of workspace that has become identified with the start-up sector and the creative industries. Equipped with floor-to-ceiling windows, open spaces, long communal tables, espresso machines, games, and other forms of a “fun��� atmosphere, Newfound’s choice of location reflects the younger demographics of its clients, which stands in contrast to Brandnew’s clients, who tend to be senior executives in established companies.5 Inasmuch as the consulting firms I worked with collaborated with major companies in a wide array of sectors, they provide a platform from which 12 / Introduction it is possible to generalize about the normative ideals and practices of routinized business innovation in the contemporary moment. That said, I am not suggesting that the innovation strategies that these consulting firms develop and disseminate exhaust the entire spectrum of innovation practices that exist now. Indeed, it is important to emphasize that the scope of the analysis I present in this book is intentionally limited in two ways. First, the routinized business innovation strategies developed by the innovation consultants I worked with are highly abstract, formalized, and characterized by rule-governed rationality. These features make those strategies applicable to products and services across different business sectors. Such strategies are thus different from “in-house,” frequently informal innovation strategies and routines developed by many companies that are meant to be applied only to the specific products and services those companies produce and that are not immediately relevant to companies in other business sectors (cf. Moeran and Christensen 2013). Consider, for example, Google’s famous “20% time” policy, which Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, highlighted in their 2004 IPO letter: “We encourage our employees, in addition to their regular projects, to spend 20% of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google. This empowers them to be more creative and innovative” (quoted in D’Onfro 2015). To begin, this innovation strategy is highly unspecific, offering no clear procedures for innovation save for the general allocation of “free” time. Second, it is characterized by a low level of routinization. It does not get “formal management oversight—Googlers aren’t forced to work on additional projects and there are no written guidelines about it” (D’Onfro 2015). Indeed, it appears that only “10% of Googlers are using” this policy because “it became too difficult for employees to take time off from their normal jobs.” In addition, as a former top Google executive put it, for those who do use this policy, “it’s really 120% time,” that is, 20 percent additional time to their normal jobs. Third, even if it were routinized and enforced, this innovation policy could not be easily applied in other business sectors, such as the pharmaceutical industry, where a highly different production model prevails and a high level of collaboration between many people and coordination with regulatory authorities is required. Thus, in comparison with “in-house,” informal innovation strategies and routines, innovation workshops and business school courses provide a vantage point from which it is possible to discern higher-level normative ideals and practices of business innovation as innovators reflexively construct and understand them. The scope of the analysis I present in this book is intentionally limited in a second way. I focus primarily on the idea-generation dimension of rou- The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 13 tinized business innovation, although in practice successful innovation consists of other dimensions, such as market analysis, feasibility considerations, regulatory issues, and organizational politics and resources (Akrich, Callon, and Latour 2002). Indeed, it is indicative that although in practice, idea generation plays a relatively minor role in the overall innovation process (Schumpeter 1943, 132), it has almost always remained the primary focus of the innovation strategies that the consultancies I worked with developed as well as the dimension that their clients were most eager to learn, master, and implement in their home organizations. Rather than assume that this discrepancy distorts the reality of business innovation, I take it to be an important dimension of this reality, one that is indicative of the cultural order of business innovation that begs for a detailed explanation and analysis. The rise of innovation as a key dimension of the contemporary business world as well as the public fascination with innovation have largely been propelled by the fact that norms and practices of business innovation resonate with powerful ideologies of creative agency and selfhood in the modern West. A focus on the idea-generation dimension of the innovation process is thus justified both by this dimension’s saliency in the field of business innovation consulting services and by the role it plays in business innovation’s broader appeal outside the business world. During my fieldwork I attended innovation workshops, training sessions, courses, and conferences. Although participants and facilitators in Brandnew’s and Newfound’s workshops were aware of my presence as an ethnographer, I engaged in data collection, ideation sessions, data analysis, and presentation of final insights to clients as a full participant. I was paired with other participants and worked in teams on specific innovation problems. I complemented these forms of direct participant observation with formal interviews and many informal conversations with innovation consultants and the participants in the innovation sessions and workshops they organized. Against the backdrop of the lack of specificity in critical discussions about business innovation, my purpose is to describe and give voice to what innovation consultants do and how they understand and explain to others what they do as well as to anthropologically theorize this ethnographic material in order to better account for routinized business innovation as a salient contemporary cultural phenomenon. Outline of Chapters The book is divided into three parts that reflect its threefold argument. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the concrete innovation strategies innovation 14 / Introduction consultants develop and inculcate as well as on the cultural contradictions with which they need to contend and the discursive means with which they do so. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the ways in which the contemporary business environment’s emphasis on speedy and instantaneous results shapes the social life of innovation strategies, which become pervaded by decontextualization and increasingly decoupled from the market to which they purport to refer. Finally, chapters 5 and 6 focus on the self-reflexive and performative nature of business innovation, including the ways in which it shapes the innovator’s self and notions of selfhood in the wider public. The second half of this introduction provides a detailed analysis of one historical context that explains the emergence of business innovation as a key dimension of the contemporary business world. This context revolves around a series of transformations in the ways in which organizational and management theorists understood and managed the business organization throughout the twentieth century with respect to the role of uncertainty. Until the mid-twentieth century, organizational and management theorists approached uncertainty as an undesirable feature of organizations, one that must be eliminated as soon as possible. In contrast, in the second half of the twentieth century, they began to conceptualize organizations as entities whose logic encompasses uncertainty as a natural component that provides a crucial resource for their survival by allowing them to cope with unforeseen events in their internal and external environments and even to generate unforeseen events in the form of ideas for new products. Organizational design consequently focused on developing structures that could integrate and generate uncertainty as a routine dimension of organizations’ logic of operation by tapping into and harnessing employees’ creative agency. A number of organizational theorists turned to the creative arts in general and jazz music in particular in search of adequate organizational models. Chapter 1 unpacks in detail the results of these conceptual transformations as they find expression in the radical productivity of the innovation strategies developed by consultants when they are enacted in practice. Drawing on ethnographic examples from one of Brandnew’s workshops in which its signature innovation strategy was inculcated and put to use, the chapter highlights two procedures that account for this strategy’s productivity. The first procedure helps the innovator imagine new products by means of the deformation of existing products according to a series of well-defined steps. The innovator’s strict adherence to a highly focused, rule-governed procedure of imagination and his complete agnosticism to the status of the entities that he deforms by means of this procedure account for the latter’s potential for radical productivity. The second procedure is systematic ab- The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 15 duction. Abduction is the reasoning process typically theorized in the context of scientific practice in the course of which the scientist, in view of a strange situation, forms a hypothesis such that if it were true the situation would cease to be strange. Faced with the deformed objects the innovator created by means of the first procedure, he must think of the functions those objects might be able to perform for a hypothetical consumer such that their strange forms would make sense. Brandnew’s innovation strategy in effect systematizes and professionalizes abduction. The chapter contextualizes the emergence of this productive organizational structure in the broader hypercompetitive world of business innovation that is dominated by the idea that any existing business organization faces the immediate danger of being undone by up-and-coming competitors who are about to launch new “disruptive” products. This framework requires business organizations to prepare themselves for imminent crises whose exact nature they cannot know until they emerge by constantly producing the potential solutions for them in advance in the form of a steady stream of ideas for new products and services. However, innovation consultants must not only develop productive innovation strategies but also contend with the macrosociological landscapes in which business innovation is anchored. Set within a specifically Western modern normative framework, consultants’ promise to build and foster a stable corporate culture of innovation and organizational creativity embodies a basic cultural contradiction because modern-Romantic normative ideals of creative agency connote unpredictability and resistance to formalization and routinization. Their promise to help corporations build a culture of innovation that will generate a stable pipeline of ideas for new products and services is thus the promise to routinize that which ideologically cannot be routinized and whose value is precisely in its resistance to being routinized and professionalized. Against this backdrop, chapter 2 draws on fieldwork in Brandnew’s workshop to analyze the ways in which workshop facilitators attempt to reframe this cultural contradiction and thus encourage workshop participants to inhabit the—on the surface, counterintuitive—idea that innovation can and should be routinized, formalized, and rationalized. They do so by means of different ritual communicative events. They first bring into being the specific macrosociological order that opposes a Romantic ethos (associated with mercurial human creativity) and a professional ethos (associated with rule-governed rationality). During the workshop this macrosociological order then becomes the basis for suggested transformations in the roles that participants inhabit with respect to innovation, namely, from associating innovation with a Romantic ethos at the beginning of the workshop to accepting at its end 16 / Introduction that a professional ethos can lead to successful innovation as a permanent feature of the organization. In chapter 3 I argue that although it might appear that Romantic notions of creativity have been eradicated from Brandnew’s innovation strategy by means of the latter’s algorithmic-like structure, in practice those notions have become this strategy’s very condition of possibility, albeit in a different and rather hidden guise. Focusing on Brandnew’s innovation strategy as it is explained in a business management book, I argue that this strategy transforms human creativity, understood as an unruly property, into a manageable and reliable resource by displacing it from the innovator and consumer to the nonhuman elements of the innovation process, namely, the products and services that are in need of innovation. Brandnew’s consultants argue that all the information the innovator needs in order to generate ideas for future successful products can be found in the history of the evolution of existing successful products. This evolution reveals crucial information about products’ “creative potential” to develop into new products that will tap into consumers’ “unmet needs” before consumers know that they have those needs. The innovator consequently is not required to engage with consumers at all in the ideation phase of the innovation process, only with products. At stake is a double inversion in which the innovator transforms the product into a quasi person endowed with a unique creative potential for development and growth and the consumer into a static, inert, quasi object whose needs and wants emerge deterministically and can be algorithmically inferred in advance by the innovator based on the rule-governed analysis of the product. Creativity is thereby both retained and tamed. The decontextualization that characterizes Brandnew’s innovation strategy can also be found in innovation strategies such as design thinking that, in contrast to it, explicitly emphasize the importance of empathizing with consumers by directly engaging with them. As I demonstrate in chapter 4, at the core of this decontextualization stands the most ubiquitously used material artifact in business innovation, namely, the Post-it note. Drawing on fieldwork in one of Newfound’s workshops, I argue that whereas existing explanations attribute the Post-it note’s ubiquity to the fact that it is a convenient tool with which to conduct brainstorming sessions, an important reason for its omnipresence lies elsewhere: it enables innovators to quickly generate insights in line with post-Fordist ideals of speed and instantaneity. First, Post-it notes enable innovators to produce pseudodata and to decouple data from the market under the guise of its reflection. In the course of the innovation process, innovators represent data about con- The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 17 sumers by means of a series of textual artifacts of decreasing dimensions until the data are represented in the form of single words and even single graphic sketches on single Post-it notes. This kind of representation results in decontextualization and pragmatic ambiguity, that is, signs that point to a wide spectrum of potential objects for those who are supposed to interpret them. Such ambiguity and decontextualization are one condition of possibility for the faster production of ideas for new products, because context is weight. Once the innovator loses the context, he or she can move through the ideation phase more quickly. Second, Post-it notes’ weak adhesive properties enable the innovator to arrange such pseudodata on conventional visual templates of what a valid insight should look like. Such templates might include a two-by-two matrix or a Venn diagram. When innovators arrange and combine Post-it notes with one another on such templates, the result is a quickly generated “ritual insight,” that is, an insight that receives its validity from the conventional prestige of the ready-made visual template that underlies it. Thus, shaped by a post-Fordist business environment that mandates the quick production of insights, Newfound’s innovation strategy is pervaded by decontextualization, too, even though, as opposed to Brandnew’s strategy, it begins with, and purports to be focused on and empathetic toward, consumers. Against this backdrop, in chapter 5 I address the puzzling fact that although business innovation is often decoupled from the market to which it purportedly refers, this decoupling has only partially undermined the perception of its value in and outside the business world. The reason lies in innovators’ efforts to signal to clients by means of different performative practices that “innovation is now taking place.” Drawing on fieldwork with both Brandnew and Newfound, I argue that innovators use specific material artifacts and communicative practices to mediate the notion that their expertise is based in the ideals of flexibility, speed, minimalism, free information flow, and organizational creativity. However, these acts of mediation also have unintended consequences. They clutter the work of innovation and create centers of gravity, opacity, and rigidness. In other words, they both mediate and undermine the ideals with which innovators would like to be associated. I explore this contradiction as it finds expression in innovators’ efforts to mediate their workspace, expert body of knowledge, thought processes, and selves as organizationally creative. In chapter 6 I look at the migration of norms and practices of routinized business innovation outside the business world as a consequence of the rising prestige, visibility, and bulletproof status of those norms and prac- 18 / Introduction tices. I provide an in-depth analysis of “life design,” a set of commercially successful strategies developed by business innovators to help individuals “innovate” their lives and thereby achieve happiness. I argue that the same modern-Romantic notions of the self that provided innovation consultants with a model of creative potentiality and the cultural conditions of possibility for developing design thinking strategies for innovating technologies are now ironically being transformed as a result of the fact that the self has become the subject of those strategies as if it were a technology in need of innovation. The chapter unpacks what reflexivity means for the self as technology, what constitutes a well-designed life, what prototyping potential future lives entails, how the normative ideals of speed and instantaneity that suffuse business innovation affect notions of self-transformation when one’s life is approached as an object of innovation, what the presentation of self in the quest for a well-designed life means when it is the object of brainstorming sessions, and what socioeconomic conditions of possibility enable such a method of “self-innovation,” to begin with. In the conclusion I first tease out a number of theoretical points about routinized business innovation. I then provide a general sociological argument about the function that innovation consultancies perform in the business world, namely, the function of an institutional myth that organizations are ready to embrace as a ritualized, though not necessarily effective, way to cope with the uncertainty and ambiguity that pervade business innovation. The conclusion ends by drawing parallels between knowledge production in anthropology and the arguments made in the book about knowledge production in business innovation. Based on this comparison, I argue that business innovation provides a cautionary tale in light of which recent calls made by anthropologists to revamp and “innovate” anthropological training and work in the model of design should be critiqued. “How Did You Get from the Village Vanguard to Wall Street?” The person asking me this question, a chief innovation officer in a Fortune 500 company whom I met in an innovation workshop, was not interested in the actual route one should take if one wanted to go from the Village Vanguard jazz club, located in Manhattan’s West Village, to the city’s financial hub on and around Wall Street in Manhattan’s downtown. A New Yorker for many years, this person could probably generate the shortest and most efficient route in an instant. Rather, he asked me this question after I had described to him my previous research on the rise of academic jazz music The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 19 programs in the United States (Wilf 2014a). His question was a figurative expression of his surprise at the, on the surface, total disconnect between my previous and current research. To him, the short physical distance between those iconic meccas of the jazz and business worlds was in inverse proportion to what he considered to be the long conceptual distance that separated them. And yet, as I argue in the remainder of this chapter, throughout the twentieth century the conceptual distance between the two worlds has gradually become smaller as a result of a series of transformations in the ways in which organizational and management theorists understood and managed the business organization with respect to the role of creative uncertainty. Those transformations culminated in the idea that business organizations should adopt some of the organizational features that are found in the creative arts in general and jazz music in particular if they want to boost their organizational creativity and potential to innovate. These conceptual shifts heralded the transformation of creativity into an alienable means of capitalist production and of business innovation into a key dimension of the business world, thus providing an important contextual and historical backdrop for the story told in this book. Contexts and Histories: From Designing Predictability to Incorporating Uncertainty Joseph Schumpeter has provided an early and highly influential definition of business innovation. Innovation, according to Schumpeter, is the creation of any new economic structure that can be monetized and commercialized. Such structures can include “the introduction of new commodities[,] . . . technological change in the production of commodities already in use, the opening up of new markets or of new sources of supply, Taylorization of work, improved handling of material, the setting up of new business organizations such as department stores—in short, any ‘doing things differently’ in the realm of economic life—all these are instances of what we shall refer to by the term Innovation” (Schumpeter 1939, 84). The notion of innovation as something that is not limited to technological change in a narrow sense has recently found expression in Clayton Christensen’s (1997) highly influential book The Innovator’s Dilemma, in which he clarifies that “technology . . . means the processes by which an organization transforms labor, capital, materials, and information into products and services of greater value. . . . This concept of technology therefore extends beyond engineering 20 / Introduction and manufacturing to encompass a range of marketing, investment, and managerial processes. Innovation refers to a change in one of these technologies” (xiii). Throughout the twentieth century (i.e., before the recent exponential rise in the number and visibility of innovation consultants), different kinds of professionals—such as psychologists, sociologists, economists, designers, and organizational theorists—had already developed and disseminated business innovation as a policy-driven concept (Godin 2008, 41; Scott 2003, 38). Two strands of research played a particularly important role in this history: (1) economics and (2) management and organizational research. Economists contributed to the study of innovation via the quantification and measurement of productivity in relation to technological change and its commercialization (Christensen 1997; Godin 2008, 34; Schumpeter 1939). Meanwhile, organization and management theorists worked to identify and design organizational models that could boost productivity. Although organization studies did not exist as an institutionalized scholarly field until the late 1940s, by that time the subject already had important precursory work in the contributions of administrative and management theorists (such as Frederick Taylor), who, from the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the first half of the twentieth century, attempted to formulate managerial principles and rationalize and standardize production. These theorists approached organizations as instruments designed to attain specific and predetermined goals in the most efficient and rational way, which was itself amenable to clear formulation. Taylor’s scientific management of production was “the culmination of a series of developments occurring in the United States between 1880 and 1920 in which engineers took the lead in endeavoring to rationalize industrial organizations” (Scott 2003, 38; see also Shenhav 1999). The image of the organization as a welloiled machine in which different parts work in precise and reliable coordination with one another and nothing is left to chance governed these engineers’ vision. They restructured the tasks workers performed as well as the design of the workspace in an attempt to facilitate efficient and reliable coordination. Ultimately, they also restructured the principles of managerial decision-making. Taylor famously argued that under scientific management arbitrary power, arbitrary dictation, ceases; and every single subject, large and small, becomes the question for scientific investigation, for reduction to law. . . . The man at the head of the business under scientific management is governed by rules and laws which have been developed through hundreds of experiments just as much as the workman is, The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 21 and the standards which have been developed are equitable. (Quoted in Scott 2003, 39) Their goal was to reduce uncertainty and even eliminate it entirely or, if it should arise, to resolve it by means of predetermined, rational procedures. Industrial psychologists influenced subsequent approaches to organizational design. As opposed to their predecessors, they viewed the organization as a much more complex entity. They highlighted the existence of discrepancies between intended organizational goals and the goals organizations actually pursue and between the ideal of formal structure and the reality of informal structure. Key among those industrial psychologists was Elton Mayo, who, through a series of studies, demonstrated that individuals do not always function as atomistic, rational, and economic agents but rather follow a complex set of motivations that involve feelings and sentiments that are based in group solidarity (Scott 2003, 62). Mayo’s findings led to a heightened focus on the capacity of managerial leadership to influence the behavior of subordinates. Managers were encouraged to be more sensitive to workers’ psychological and social needs. This organizational perspective highlighted emotional control, anger management, empathy, and strong interpersonal skills as key managerial resources (Illouz 2008). It subsequently led to managerial notions such as job enrichment, employees’ participation in decision-making, and work satisfaction. In contrast to the rational system approach, this framework acknowledged uncertainty as a possible component of organizational reality. However, similar to the rational system approach, its goal was to train managers and restructure the work environment in such a way that this uncertainty would not arise or, if it should arise, it could immediately be resolved by managers who were equipped with adequate emotional skills. In contrast, the third dominant approach in organization studies, which emerged after World War II, conceptualized the business organization as an entity whose logic encompasses uncertainty and flexibility not as undesirable features but as natural components that provide a crucial resource for the organization’s survival (Scott 2003, 82–101). Inspired by cybernetics and information theory, this approach emphasized the distinction between different systems in terms of their complexity. In less complex systems such as simple machines, the interdependence between parts is rigid, and the behavior of each part is highly constrained. These systems are nonreactive to their environment. They function well in stable environments and are suitable for the completion of predetermined, unchanging tasks according to predetermined schemes of operation. In contrast, in more complex 22 / Introduction systems such as social systems and business organizations, the interdependence between parts is less constrained. These systems are loosely coupled and flexible. Uncertainty is one of their key dimensions. Proponents of this approach viewed uncertainty as an organizational resource rather than an anomaly that must be eliminated as quickly as possible. They argued that complex systems can successfully cope with and even mobilize uncertainty because they are able to process informational input of different kinds— both internally and externally derived—and thus change their means for the attainment of specific goals and the goals themselves according to shifting contextual conditions (cf. Akrich, Callon, and Latour 2002, 189). A significant share of organizational theory subsequently focused on determining proper work flows, control systems, and information-processing templates in relation to human individuals’ ability to manage and capitalize on uncertainty. Karl Weick, one of the key figures in this strand of research, argued that “the basic raw materials on which organizations operate are informational inputs that are ambiguous, uncertain, equivocal”; hence, the goal of organizing should be to establish “a workable level of certainty” in the context of which human individuals could function well (Weick 1969, 40; see also Scott 2003, 98). On the one hand, theorists pointed to the limitations of human individuals as information processors in terms of their “low channel capacity, lack of reliability, and poor computational ability”; on the other hand, they pointed to the advantages of “the human element,” such as “its large memory capacity, its large repertory of responses, its flexibility in relating these responses to information inputs, and its ability to react creatively when the unexpected is encountered” (Haberstroh 1965, 1176; see also Scott 2003, 95). They consequently defined the outstanding task for system designers as “how to create structures that will overcome the limitations and exploit the strengths of each system component, including the individual participants” (Scott 2003, 95). Inspired by nascent psychological research on creativity (Guilford 1950; Osborn 1953; Rossman 1935), they approached “individual participants,” especially their potential to act creatively, as crucial resources that can enable business organizations to function better vis-à-vis the increased uncertainty and volatility that characterize their institutional environment. Significantly, a key strand in this research agenda turned to the creative arts in general, and jazz improvisation in particular, as sources of inspiration for the design of organizational structures that could cultivate and tap into employees’ ability to respond flexibly to conflicting and ambiguous information inputs and “to react creatively when the unexpected is encountered” (Haberstroh 1965, 1176). Theorists argued that the jazz template The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 23 could provide inspiration for the design of business organizational structures that were not only flexible enough to cope with unexpected events but also capable of producing unexpected or “virtual” events in the form of novel ideas for new products. These ideas could then be developed into innovations in fields in which to remain stagnant is to perish (Akgun et al. 2007; Dyba 2000; Kamoche and Cunha 2001; Mantere, Sillince, and Hamalainen 2007; Moorman and Miner 1998). Incorporating Jazz Improvisation At the 1995 Academy of Management National Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, a symposium titled “Jazz as a Metaphor for Organizing in the 21st Century” took place. The symposium consisted of a series of scholarly presentations, “a demonstration and discussion of jazz improvisation by panelists who were professional jazz musicians, followed by a concert and social event during which these musicians regaled the audience with superb jazz” (Meyer, Frost, and Weick 1998, 540). The presentations, together with additional articles on this topic, were eventually published in the top-tier journal Organization Science. The authors explained that the symposium had been organized in response to the significant changes in the nature of the challenges that organizations would have to cope with in the twenty-first century. As one author put it, to come up with organizational models that would be adequate to this changing environment, we need a model of a group of diverse specialists living in a chaotic, turbulent environment; making fast, irreversible decisions; highly interdependent on one another to interpret equivocal information; dedicated to innovation and the creation of novelty. Jazz players do what managers find themselves doing: fabricating and inventing novel responses without a prescripted plan and without certainty of outcomes; discovering the future that their action creates as it unfolds. (Barrett 1998, 605) Elsewhere the same author added The mechanistic, bureaucratic model for organizing—in which people do routine, repetitive tasks, in which rules and procedures are devised to handle contingencies, and in which managers are responsible for planning, monitoring and creating command and control systems to guarantee compliance—is no longer adequate. Managers will face more rather than less interactive complexity and uncertainty. This suggests that jazz improvisation is a useful meta- 24 / Introduction phor for understanding organizations interested in learning and innovation. To be innovative, managers—like jazz musicians—must interpret vague cues, face unstructured tasks, process incomplete knowledge, and yet they must take action anyway. (Barrett 1998, 620; see also Weick 1998) The term jazz music encompasses a wide range of stylistic genres and is thus a fuzzy category with porous boundaries. Almost all of the organizational theorists who turned to jazz in search of organizational models focused on straight-ahead jazz, in which a group of musicians improvise on a given (“standard”) tune that consists of a melody and a basic harmonic sequence (a string of chords). Players improvise on these minimal structures by using a stock of conventional building blocks such as short phrases and modes of articulation, which they combine in inventive ways and in response to the real-time contribution of their bandmates. The real-time, improvised nature of this art form means that it is inherently an emergent phenomenon; that is, it results in new meaningful structures that to a great extent cannot be anticipated in advance. Although it is not creation ex nihilo because mature improvisers must master different stylistic conventions and have a thorough knowledge of the canon, the actual outcome of group improvisation remains uncertain and unpredictable. Its creativity resides precisely in these features.6 Organizational theorists who turned to the jazz metaphor usually relied on ethnographies of jazz improvisation or their own experience as semiprofessional jazz musicians to emphasize a number of jazz’s features that are related to the uncertainty that pervades it and that is constitutive of jazz’s very creativity.7 For example, Barrett (1998, 609–12) enumerates a number of features of jazz improvisation that are directly related to creative uncertainty and follows these with concrete advice on how these features can be used in organizational design. First, Barrett argues that jazz musicians intentionally disrupt their habituated playing patterns and put themselves in unfamiliar musical situations that are likely to produce errors and unexpected outcomes. They keep pushing themselves beyond their own comfort zone and thus ensure that their playing does not become stagnant and predictable. Second, musicians use the unexpected outcomes and errors that result from this emphasis as resources and musical opportunities to redefine the context: something that at one point seems like an error subsequently becomes coherent within this new context. In this way, musicians constantly generate and develop new meaningful structures. Third, musicians use minimal structures of communication and planning, which foster flexibility and indeterminacy. A player has only a tune’s basic harmonic The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 25 structure and melody to improvise on as well as the ongoing contribution of his bandmates. These minimal structures foster uncertainty of information. Fourth, the jazz band is structured around distributed task negotiation and synchronization between bandmates. This means that information constantly flows in all directions rather than hierarchically. With respect to each of these features, Barrett makes concrete suggestions for organizational design whose goal is to infuse the business organization with creativity and to create the organizational conditions of possibility for continued innovation. First, organizational leaders must encourage and require their employees to abandon habituated modes of doing things and instead to take risks. Second, they must change their modes of evaluating their employees by treating the latter’s errors as an inseparable part of learning rather than as punishable events. This recommendation first treats errors as an inevitable outcome of learning and then embraces them as a resource. By creating “organizational climates that value errors as a source of learning . . . organizational leaders can create an aesthetic of imperfection and an aesthetic of forgiveness that construes errors as a source of learning that might open new lines of inquiry” (Barrett 1998, 619).8 Third, organizational leaders must develop the equivalent of minimal structures that will sustain maximum flexibility and maintain ambiguity while providing employees with sufficient orientation. Such equivalent structures might be “credos, stories, myths, visions, slogans, mission statements, trademarks” (612). Fourth, organizational leaders must cultivate a work environment characterized by “distributed, multiple leadership in which people take turns leading various projects as their expertise is needed” (618). These and similar recommendations were the outcome of the paradigmatic shift in organization studies that culminated in the realization that contingency and uncertainty have become part and parcel of the environments within which many organizations must function and that a flexible organizational structure has a better chance of coping with such environments for two reasons. First, a flexible organization can better respond to unexpected events in its external and internal environments. Second, it can generate unexpected events that are essential for innovation. Many programmatic calls for business organizations to adopt organizational models from the jazz world and the creative arts have been motivated by the hope that such models can foster a culture of innovation and new product development. If the jazz band enables musicians to produce unexpected events continuously and then to elaborate some of these events into new meaningful structures, then, it is hoped, an organization that adopts the jazz band’s organizational model might be able to produce unexpected ideas continu- 26 / Introduction ously and then develop them into viable innovations in business sectors and niches in which to remain stagnant is to perish. It is for this reason that organizational models inspired by jazz improvisation have been discussed predominantly in the context of “new product development in turbulent environments” (Akgun et al. 2007; Moorman and Miner 1998), “product innovation” (Kamoche and Cunha 2001), and the functioning of small software organizations (Dyba 2000) rather than in the context of organizational change in general (Mantere, Sillince, and Hamalainen 2007). The distinction anthropologists have made between “possible uncertainty” and “potential uncertainty” can clarify the appeal of this organizational strategy. Whereas “possible uncertainty . . . is dependent on past knowledge, calculation, and evaluation (the chances of a particular risk being realized),” “potential uncertainty, by contrast, does not derive from the question of whether one future possibility or another will be realized (as in the case of possible uncertainty) but from a virtual domain with the capacity to generate a broad variety of actualizations” (Samimian-Darash 2013, 4, emphasis added). The “actualizations” that this “virtual domain” can generate may have never taken place before and hence are not known and cannot be known in advance. Creativity in jazz is based in “potential uncertainty.” Organizational theorists found inspiration in the idea that the jazz band functions as a “virtual domain” in which musicians can generate a wide variety of new and hitherto unthought-of musical events and then develop them into new structures whose full meaning becomes apparent only retrospectively because of their emergent nature: The improviser can begin by playing a virtual random series of notes, with little or no intention as how it will unfold. These notes become the material to be shaped and worked out, like pieces of a puzzle. The improviser begins to enter into a dialogue with her material: prior selections begin to fashion subsequent ones as these are aligned and reframed in relation to prior patterns. (Barrett 1998, 615, emphasis added) Organizational theorists found jazz’s “virtual domain” appealing in light of their belief that in turbulent environments that require organizations to incessantly develop new products, services, and structures, organizational structures that engage with uncertainty only in the form of calculating the chances of the realization of a particular possibility that is already formulated and imagined in advance (“possible uncertainty”) might not be very useful. Although managers certainly make conjectures about what might be “the next big thing” and are engaged in calculating the probability that this The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 27 or that next “big thing” will actually materialize, to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace, their organizations must also develop structures that can constantly generate new events that were not hitherto thought of and allow for their development into new products.9 Some of the innovators I worked with specifically referred to the stage in the innovation process in which ideas for new products and services are generated as “the virtual situation,” thus pointing at the fact that “potential uncertainty” rather than “possible uncertainty” was the form of uncertainty to which they oriented their professional practice. The organizational need to foster this specific configuration of creative uncertainty and virtuality that will give rise to hitherto unimagined events explains why many organizational theorists have turned to the creative arts in general in search of new organizational models. Modern Western art is based in the Romantic idea of the creative, as opposed to the imitative, imagination (Abrams 1971). Whereas the imitative form of imagination entails the representation of existing worlds, the creative form of imagination entails the creation of new, hitherto unimagined worlds. I will discuss these and related modern-Romantic normative ideals of creativity in detail in subsequent chapters, for they provided some of the cultural conditions of possibility for the innovation strategies that the innovators I worked with developed. The intimate historical and cultural links between routinized business innovation and normative ideals and practices of creative agency have contributed to making business innovation a powerful cultural trope that has captured the imagination of business executives and the wider public. At the same time, these links have also produced significant complications for innovation consultants who have to convince their potential clients that they have developed the means to routinize creativity and transform it from a mercurial human faculty, as it has for long been understood in the modern Western popular imagination, into a reliable and stable organizational source of ideas for new products and services. Before unpacking these contradictions, however, it is first necessary to have a better sense of what routinized business innovation strategies actually look like and what their added value for business organizations might be.

[dailyaudiobible]

10/04/2018 DAB Transcript

Jeremiah 2:31-4:18, Colossians 1:1-20, Psalms 76:1-12, Proverbs 24:21-22

Today is the 4th day of October. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I’m Brian and it is always great to be here with you as we come around the global campfire. Just threw some logs on. Got a nice fresh pot of coffee going. And off we go into the wild frontier that is the Scriptures and is our journey through the Scriptures this year. We’re reading from the common English Bible. We just began the book of Jeremiah, so, we’ll continue forward in Jeremiah and then when we get to the New Testament we’ll start another of Paul's letters, the letter to the Colossians. But first Jeremiah 2:31 through 4:18.

Introduction to the letter from Paul to the Colossians:

Okay. So, like we mentioned at the beginning, we’re moving into some new territory, a new letter, an epistle from the apostle Paul to the Colossians. And Colossae was not an unfamiliar city to Paul. It was about 100 miles from Ephesus where Paul spent a considerable amount of time. And, the ancient ruins of Colossae, they have been identified. They’re in the western part of modern-day Turkey but there hasn’t been any major excavation to this point. But ancient Colossae has definitely been identified. During Paul's life, Colossae wasn’t a ruin, it was a cultural melting pot that brought a lot of people together and mingled them. And, so, a lot of philosophical and religious ideas were flowing into the city and these had made their way into the Colossian church. And so, Paul's letter was written as a response. Like Ephesians and Philippians, Colossians is widely considered to be another of the letters that Paul wrote while he was in prison in Rome while awaiting trial before the Emperor. And this letter breaks down kind of into two halves, in two sections. The first is a doctrinal issue. Individuals had come into the church were teaching angel worship and, you know, other foreign rituals. And Paul addressed this by reiterating Jesus is supreme over all of creation, that the universe itself was created by and through Him and is sustained through His Lordship. And then Paul had to deal with an issue that that we see appearing over and over in the New Testament, circumcision versus on the circumcision. And this had become quite a controversy in the early church and we've already seen it many times. This issue had also found its way into the church at Colossae. And of course, Paul's shared his views. He had no problem doing that. So, we see in the early church that some of some of these fundamental issues, they keep showing up in different letters and in different places and contexts because they were widespread and controversial issues of the early church. Ironically, many of these challenges are still with us today in one form or another, making it possible for us to experience growth and correction in our own contexts through these letters. And understanding the Colossians was written by man awaiting a life or death judgment, right? Allows the letter to carry a certain amount of gravity and we should give it the gravity that it deserves. Colossians is a magnificent testament to the Lordship of Jesus in our lives and presents the overwhelming reality of what that Lordship offers to all of humanity. And, so, we begin. Colossians 1 verses 1 through 17.

Prayer:

Father, we thank You for Your word and we thank You for the letter to the Colossians we’ve just begun that shows us how Almighty, how sovereign Your Lordship is and how much we can rest in that. And, so, come Holy Spirit and plant these words in our lives as we continue our journey forward. You are the sovereign God. We return to You as we were reading about in Jeremiah. We come back to You. We humble ourselves before You. We want to walk with You in every moment of this day, in every choice that we need to make, in every conversation that's going to happen in every intent of our hearts, we invite You to be present in it all. Come Holy Spirit align us with Your will and Your ways. We trust You. You will only lead us into all truth. You will only guide us on the narrow path that leads to life and we can't find this without You. We can navigate this without You. And, so, we surrender to Your Lordship and Your authority. Come Holy Spirit we pray. In Jesus’ name we ask. Amen.

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And that's it for today. I'm Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Hey Daily Audio Bible family, it’s John calling from New York City today, from the rooftop of the building that I am working in and it’s a pleasure to be with you guys today. I hope you’re all doing well and that your October is off to a great start. Today is October 1st and I had a great bus ride into the city today. I’ve been doing from Pennsylvania into New York and then back to Pennsylvania. That’s usually about an hour and 45 minute ride or so and I’m thankful that I have a bus driver that’s doing that driving for me because I can be uber productive, typically, on that bus ride. But today, I happen to notice the fella in front of the to the left. I was in an outside seat and he was in an outside seat in front of me on the left-hand side and I happened to look up from actually listening to the October 1st program, Daily Audio Bible program, and I noticed the app on his phone was the Daily Audio Bible program…and that was…well…man…exciting…but there’s no talking allowed on these buses and everyone’s get their headsets on. You come in and out of New York City. It’s, it’s a crazy thing. I’ll tell you more about that at some point in time. So, I get off the bus and he gets off the bus. He’s in front of me, of course, by several people and I have to kind of get through the bus terminal to kind of catch up to him and I do and he still has his headset…and I think I nearly scared the living daylights out of him when I tapped him on the shoulder and stopped and introduced myself. Anyway, his name’s Michael and he takes the bus back and forth from Clinton New Jersey to New York City every day and he’s a Daily Audio Bible program listener. He’s been listening for just about the past month or so. I have no idea if he listens to the prayer request line, but Michael, this is John from the bus and if you are listening I want you know I love you and it was great to meet you today and I can’t wait to see how this program changes your life like it’s changed mine and so many other people. I love you brother.

Hi Daily Audio Bible family, my name is Kaylee. I’ve been listening for a while, never called. I have not yet finished a whole year but it’s been at least three or four years that I’ve been listening on and off. I’d like to reach out for some prayers. A lot…I’ve had a lot happen throughout my…especially this year…but my whole life. I have four children and we’ve been through a lot and God __ to where we are, but as of right now we’re going through some really scary stuff. Two of my children had an incident together. And, you know, __ their safety and everything. And things are looking up, they’re looking great. And now, today, I found out that my son might be prosecuted even though that was never part of the plan. So, he’s 11 and none of this was a danger issue. And he’s getting help. And I don’t want his life to be ruined. So, anyway, I’ve listened to the prayer line before and I’ve prayed for you. I can’t say that I remember you the way that some of you guys do __ to know that other people can just know who you are and be praying for you. So, please pray for me and I promise to try to have the courage to call again. Thank you. I love all of you. And I…

Hi this is Amy from Arkansas and I just heard Sonja from Tampa. Oh my, you just brought tears to my eyes talking about the wilderness. There so many of us who are going to the wilderness right now and it’s so, so hard but it’s just where you put all your trust in Him because He is so worthy and He so great and He will see us through. He is so good to us and it’s just it’s, it’s been, it’s like we come alive in the wilderness because we know that He’s faithful to bring us through and all of our trust is in Him. And I’ve been lifting up all the people with diseases, cancer. And it’s…I just bind that in the name of Jesus because it’s totally from the enemy. When Jesus came to give life and abundant life, the enemy comes, he still comes. And I know we know all that verse but Jesus gives abundant life. And I just bind cancer and I bind disease and I send it to the pit of hell. You just gotta call on the Lord because he is worthy to be praised in everything. I just love you all and thank you Brian so much for this podcast and I just pray you’ll go out and make it a great day.

Hi this is GiGi from Colorado. Thank you all for the opportunity to ask you to pray. I’m having an extremely down day and I really need prayer. It’s been a bad few actually, emotionally, and struggling with faith. We have a children’s home in Haiti and we lost one of our little girls to complications with cerebral palsy the night before last and everyone at the children’s home are just devastated. And it’s sad. You know, we take care of a lot of terminally ill children. So, every time one goes on to heaven, you know, the other ones wonder if their next and it’s just really hard to…to talk to the children and encourage them and help them not to be afraid and to somehow take joy in the fact that a little girl who was trapped in a body that couldn’t move is now looking down at perfect hands and feet and talking, which she never could do. But a lot of kids are in the same situation so it’s really, really hard. I’m depressed because this is just devastating. The little girl’s been with us for 12 years, she’s 13. So, she’s like our daughter. And she was abandoned when she was a baby. So, we’re the only parents that she ever knew, other than the staff and the caregivers. So, just please pray for all of us. We are really hurting and we have a lot of other sick kids. And we are praying for a miracle that they would actually get well while they’re here on earth. Thank you so much.