0100 | December 02, 2019
100th Episode
The hosts reflect on the last 100 episodes. What have they learned about each other, and about the issues they’ve discussed?
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| C.T. WEBB: 00:18 | Good afternoon, good morning, or good evening. And welcome to The American Age podcast. This is C. Travis Webb, editor of The American Age, and I am speaking to you from Southern California. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 00:27 | Hi, this is Steven G. Fullwood. I’m the co-founder of the Nomadic Archivists Project, and I’m coming to you from Harlem. It’s a rainy day, but it’s a wonderful day. |
| S. RODNEY: 00:38 | Hi, I’m Seph Rodney. I’m a senior editor at the Hyperallergic blog, and I once founded something back in London when I was a student there, a small radio show called The Thread. I think that’s what gave me the experience to feel somewhat competent about being on this broadcast platform now, so I’m glad for that. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 01:05 | Where are you coming from? |
| C.T. WEBB: 01:05 | Just to remind our– yeah. Where are you? Where are you, Seph? |
| S. RODNEY: 01:10 | Oh, sorry. That’s right. I’m speaking to you from the South Bronx. Whoopsie. |
| C.T. WEBB: 01:14 | That’s all right. This is to remind our listeners that we practice a form of what we like to call intellectual intimacy, which is giving each other the space and time to figure out things out loud and together, and this is our 100th time doing that, so. Well, I meant to get one of those party, New Year noisemakers, and then thought, “Oh, it’ll just be obnoxious to the people that are listening, so I won’t do that.” So whoop, whoop. So we interrupted our series in comedy, which we’ll pick back up next week with Seph’s piece on Patrice O’Neal and that conversation, but we wanted to mark the 100th episode because it’s a thing. We’ve done a thing. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 02:03 | We’ve done a big thing. |
| C.T. WEBB: 02:03 | I’d like to think a 100– not that it wasn’t a thing before that, but I don’t know. 100 feels substantial, and we talked amongst ourselves, “Oh, what do we want to do for the 100th?” I think Steven had suggested, “Well, why don’t we just kind of talk about the podcast and sort of where we’ve been with it and how we’ve grown and moments and things like that?” So that’s what we’re going to do, so Steven, Seph, one of you want to jump in? |
| S. FULLWOOD: 02:30 | Steven-Seph. |
| C.T. WEBB: 02:34 | There’s a comma there. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 02:36 | It’s only one T off from having the same names. Stephen, Steven. Go right ahead, Seph. |
| S. RODNEY: 02:44 | Okay, so I made a list. I looked over the podcasts that are available on iTunes, which does not– |
| C.T. WEBB: 02:51 | Which is all of them, by the way. |
| S. RODNEY: 02:53 | Well, it’s almost. No, no. The ones that you and I did, Travis, before Steven joined, I don’t think they’re all there. |
| C.T. WEBB: 03:03 | There should be. They should be, so yeah. They should be there. It all pulls from the SoundCloud, so the way it works, for people out there that probably don’t care or do, basically, iTunes doesn’t actually hold your recording. You need another host for it, and then iTunes basically takes the stream from that service. So all of our stuff’s up on SoundCloud and has all been pulled into iTunes, so it should all be there. I mean, you might need to load more episodes or something like that, but I don’t want to get too far into it. But anyway, it doesn’t matter, so it should be there. If it’s not, then it’s a problem. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 03:41 | Well, yeah. Yeah, 97 of them are up, and that’s why I think we’re kind of– |
| C.T. WEBB: 03:46 | Yeah, I think we’re good. |
| S. RODNEY: 03:48 | Oh, okay. So the ones that stand out to me, the ones that I really were moved by, the conversation that we had on fathers, I remember that being particularly powerful and resonant. I really liked the one in the series of discussions we had about Michael Jackson. I liked the one where we came to the conclusion that our gods require sacrifices. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 04:17 | That was really lovely. |
| S. RODNEY: 04:17 | And yeah, we look at our celebrities as kind of gods. Oh, by the way, and the one on fathers, I really liked the question that you came up with, Steven, which was “Where does it hurt?”, in our conversation around trying to figure out how to get someone to ask that question in the first place and, even further down the line, how to answer it. I really liked our bit about the poems we loved. I liked when we exchanged those poems, and we talked about them and really appreciated how much of ourselves we revealed to each other through talking about that work. |
| C.T. WEBB: 05:02 | We should go do another poetry one. I mean it’s not like– |
| S. RODNEY: 05:05 | We should. |
| C.T. WEBB: 05:05 | We certainly didn’t expend all of our favorites. There’s no way. |
| S. RODNEY: 05:10 | No way, and there’s more. But I’ll stop at the Me Too conversation, at least the particular– rather, the particular point in the conversation, which we concluded that part of the issue with the movement, which it has not yet dealt with, is how we as adults can be honest with each other about wanting to play with power in the sexual encounter and play with dominance and submission and how that kind of play, that kind of desire to have fun in that way spills over into our other lives, into other parts of our lives. So it spills over into the workplace, certainly. It spills over into the domestic sphere outside of the bedroom. It spills over in ways that we haven’t yet really been able to wrap our heads around, so all of these episodes have really stuck with me. |
| C.T. WEBB: 06:27 | Yeah. I didn’t make a list. I certainly reflected on conversations we had. The Me Too one wasn’t one that definitely came to mind, and at the time, one of the things that– I think we have great conversations, but, certainly, when I reflect on them, I’ll think, “I should’ve mentioned that,” or, “Oh, that’s right, that connection,” or, “Oh, that was a really good question or comment that Steven or Seph had had. I wish I would’ve responded this way.” And around that one, I think that got me somewhere as far as thinking through that problem of the Me Too movement, and I had remembered that I had wanted to bring up Edmund Burke at the time, who has this really wonderful– it’s basically a conservative philosophical– a champion for conservatives, at least intellectual conservatives, but is a very insightful critic around this issue of violence and playing with violence and that what is titillating to us is our proximity to it as long as you aren’t actually in it, right? |
| C.T. WEBB: 07:43 | So it’s like getting as close as possible to the violence before it just becomes dumb, mute violence because there’s a kind of– there’s a kind of monolithic stupidity to violence. Actually, it shuts down all of the things that it titillates, and it’s an analogue to the podcast in this way that the podcast format as we’ve landed on our particular way of doing it is a way for us to come up very, very, very close to actual intimacy and what an intimate, open conversation amongst friends would be like. And the thing that I had been pushed on very early with the podcast when Seph and I first started – Steven, before you had gotten involved – was that “Oh, well, you guys agree too much.” We certainly had our disagreements on the podcast, but that, “You probably need to– there needs to be a little bit more conflict, or you’ve got to spice it up,” or whatever. And I regret that I ever listened to that advice, not that we did that, but I regret that I ever took that advice seriously because the relationship between the three of us is, for me – I mean it quite honestly when we say it at the beginning of the podcast – intellectual intimacy, and my intellectual intimacy isn’t about spicing it up and it being dramatic. That’s not the point for me, right? Once you get to that, it just becomes kind of heavy-footed and uninteresting and dumb. Anyway, I’m sorry. Go ahead. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 09:27 | What do I have to say? Actually, I was trying to hope, “Keep talking, Travis. Keep trucking, Travis,” because I’m trying to find something on the internet. It’s from the film Waking Life. |
| C.T. WEBB: 09:37 | Linklater’s. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 09:39 | Yeah, because I can’t– |
| S. RODNEY: 09:39 | That’s a great film. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 09:40 | And I can’t find the actual– oh, I did find it. Great. So it’s from a section where he’s talking to Timothy “Speed” Levitch and they’re on the bridge – I think the Brooklyn Bridge – and Timothy Levitch says, “Giacometti once was run down by a car, and he recalled falling into a lucid faint, a sudden exhilaration, as he realized that at last something was happening to him.” And I’ve always connected that to violence or a conflict in some ways, and I feel like the play with violence, like you said, the dumb, sort of dumb, flat violence– but there’s getting to close to violence, and it makes the blood pump and the heart pump. It gets people excited, so why wouldn’t violence become a part of our sexual play. And it’s always been a part of the sexual play when it comes to sex, right? The chase, the “Oh, no. I don’t want it,” and all of that, to me, they’re interesting parts of that for me. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 10:42 | I want to say that what I’d done throughout the last almost two years now is to– I’m holding up little tiny books, mini composition books, so I prepare for our talks. I think about what you guys say, so I write down some of the more salient things that just hit me. I was like, “Oh, I want to talk about that,” or, “I think that’s a very good point.” But I remember my very, very first composition book, I was trying to figure out how to learn how– I was trying to– I said to myself I wanted to learn how to talk with you both, and initially, we were talking two-to-two as opposed to all three of us. And so what I said here was, “I want to learn how to be comfortable being uncomfortable talking about an issue with someone and learning how Travis talks, learning about Travis,” and more so about Travis and less about you Seph. But as I mentioned to you before, I said, “Mingus and Lawrence had a Seph, but then you and I became friends.” So now, I had a Seph, right? And I have a Travis, but it was to earn it through friendship and through this discourse about a variety of things. Our first conversation, Travis, was about Mulholland Drive. |
| C.T. WEBB: 12:04 | I remember. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 12:04 | And I had just finished watching it. I was so excited, but it’s a chunky conversation where, I think, at one point, you said this off the recording. “We have to learn how to interrupt each other,” because there was a, “Now, you talk,” and, “Well, now, you talk. Well, now, you talk, and you talk,” and then, “Goodbye, everyone.” And I thought that was so funny, and before all of this was– before you guys even invited me to be on the podcast, I was looking at doing my own podcast. So I was like, “Well, this is a good learning experience,” and to listen to our podcast, they’re interesting. I’m so glad that someone edits them, but I wanted to have more fun with you guys. I wanted to be responsible for my ideas and to issue those ideas and put them out there no matter how tangled up they might be or misshapen. I just wanted to love them and then put them out there and see how they land. And so also speak slowly, which I have yet to do, but that I was thinking that I was sitting with, of course, a philosopher, an art critic – and a very sensitive critic as well – and a hippie. I was like, “I don’t care what you think about zodiac. I don’t care what you think about these things.” These things have a measure of meaning for me, and so– |
| C.T. WEBB: 13:24 | That’s such a Capricorn thing to say. |
| S. RODNEY: 13:26 | That’s funny. That’s funny. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 13:28 | I don’t care what you think. |
| S. RODNEY: 13:29 | Yeah, that’s funny. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 13:29 | And it’s funny because I remember when I had a– I wrote something on Facebook the other day. I was like, “I remember caring about what other people thought of me until I didn’t,” and so I like this experiment. This experiment is useful to me, and, total transparency, when Sarah came on as one of our speakers, I was thinking about leaving only because I was working – I’m still working on – our book. Seph and I are working on a book at the moment, and I was feeling a little stressed around submissions and reaching out to people. And October was the most insane month of my life, and I’ll just stop there. But thank you for inviting me on. I appreciate it, and it’s been a good learning experience. |
| C.T. WEBB: 14:21 | If I can jump in for a second, so a couple of things that you had said, one, I feel like two sort of tracks happened in the podcast. One was Seph and I figuring out how to have the conversations that we’ve had for years on a podcast because we’ve had– I mean, of course, they’re not anything that is somewhat artificial because this is an actual artifact that’s being made. Of course, it’s not exactly the same, but, I mean, I think we have now approached pretty close to how Seph and my conversations have been over breakfast in Long Beach for years and years and more stretched out visits when Seph was in the UK. But then the other track in the podcast was me learning what you just, I think, very aptly characterized, learning how to talk to you, Steven, and learning the subtleties of your communication, so that’s something that I’d know that I missed early on. |
| C.T. WEBB: 15:26 | And I had a moment a couple weeks ago when I was like, “Oh, I’m starting to actually really hear Steven.” I forget. You had basically said– we were kind of tussling a little bit about racism in a contemporary context, and you said, “And still goes on.” You knew where I was going with the argument. I was basically wanting to push that there had been some progress around this particular thing, and you knew where I was going with it. And very sort of subtlely, there was just a tone to it, and I knew what you meant in that moment and was able to engage with you in a familiar way. And I valued that. I was like, “Okay. I’m actually starting to pick up on some of Steven’s subtleties and actually hear what he’s saying by not saying it in such an overt way.” And I don’t know. That matters to me. It’s hard. Friendship is something.s I do not overuse the term. Seph knows this about me. My mom is German, and at a very young age, my mom was always like, “Americans use the word ‘friend’ too much.” Yeah, it’s just that– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 16:48 | I agree. |
| C.T. WEBB: 16:49 | –in Germany, a friend, that is a special category. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 16:53 | I completely agree. |
| C.T. WEBB: 16:55 | And I don’t have a lot of friends, and I’m very happy with that. And I’m also very happy that I now count you among them. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 17:03 | And I appreciate you too. Yes. |
| C.T. WEBB: 17:04 | And that is not– and I have no problem telling people that I would not necessarily consider them a friend. I would consider them a colleague, someone I like, someone I’m friendly with, of course. I mean, you should be polite to everyone. |
| S. RODNEY: 17:17 | Agree. |
| C.T. WEBB: 17:17 | And I care about other people but, actually, in a way that there’s a kind of closeness and familiarity and circle of concern. Yeah, that’s a very happy byproduct of the podcast for me. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 17:35 | I concur. I concur. |
| C.T. WEBB: 17:39 | As Sarah came on briefly, I was a little worried about whether you would stay or go too, actually. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 17:49 | Oh, well, what made you think that? That’s interesting. |
| C.T. WEBB: 17:52 | You were talking less. Yeah. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 17:56 | I wonder if that’s September until October because those months were really– I say, “October,” but September was pretty busy. And I think I was just worn down emotionally and physically, and, I mean, people said, “Take care of yourself.” I was like, “But I’m so excited about doing everything,” and so. |
| S. RODNEY: 18:14 | Well, you did have a lot on your plate, and you had just started that position at NYU, right, working with Dr.– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 18:22 | Deborah Willis. |
| S. RODNEY: 18:23 | –Deborah Willis, yeah, and all the stuff around the Nomadic Archivists Project, all the traveling, all the family stuff that was happening with you. Yeah, there was a lot, but I remember Travis and I did have a conversation. And I said that I was concerned about you not leaving but actually kind of falling away in the podcast. I felt like if we could sort of divvy up the oxygen in the room, it felt like the rest of us were taking more of it and you were taking less in certain instances. But then I think it shifted. And, I mean, I don’t even remember exactly how many broadcasts Sarah was on, but it was something like the second or third. By the second or third, it felt like you had come back into that stride that I felt you’d always had with us, and I think it did work for a moment. Sarah actually found a way to have her own section of the room and have her own voice, and I like Sarah’s voice. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 19:29 | Me too. |
| S. RODNEY: 19:29 | I genuinely think that she’s just a real intellectual, and she’s not afraid. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 19:35 | She’s brilliant. |
| S. RODNEY: 19:36 | Yeah, she’s not afraid to say, “No, I actually disagree with you on this, and here’s why,” and break it down. But yeah, I talked about that with Travis. Your contributions– I don’t want to make it sound like that. There has to be a way to make it sound less Amway. The things that we– what we construct together just is so nuanced and exploratory and profound that I just don’t see how we could have something as good if you guys weren’t involved. I can’t imagine. There is no substitute for Steven. There is no substitute for Travis for me. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 20:34 | I agree. |
| S. RODNEY: 20:35 | I don’t know. Yeah. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 20:37 | No, I feel that way too. I also feel like you guys– so there are two things. One is I appreciate what we talk about. I’m interested in thinking about those things. Some things I don’t think about. I’m like, “Oh, there’s an opportunity to think about that subject and kind of figure it out,” so I love that. And then also, really, that intellectual intimacy, I really appreciate you showing some skin, that you have skin in the game, so it’s not an intellectual exercise. And you both have included family members or other things that– I want to talk to humans. I don’t want to talk to– I don’t want to just exercise my mind and say, “This is what I think about this.” I want some anecdotes. I want some other things. I want some messiness. I need to know that there is a human I’m talking to, and that’s what I feel The American Age does, one of many things that American Age does for me. I want to see people, and I want to talk to people. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 21:35 | And it’s not a matter– it matters to me that people, that you Travis, that you Seph allow yourselves to be vulnerable and to be open, that you’re both brilliant thinkers, but did you care about people? That means a lot to me too. If you were both like misanthropes, I couldn’t do it because I’m like, “Well, what the fuck do you like?” And so I just need to see– it makes me think of a Francis Bacon painting where I feel like you guys move, and there’s motion. I need to see the motion. I just don’t need to see clip after clip of static images. I like the way he paints for the most part and that there’s movement in his paintings. I need to see that movement, and that’s what I hear in the way that you guys intellectualize and think about and pull apart and put back together and argue about certain subjects. So that’s really necessary for me as a human. |
| S. RODNEY: 22:43 | I hear that, and there was a good moment for me. I mean, I didn’t expect to do this when we started talking about Michael Jackson, that moment when the conversation started and I admitted or confessed or revealed that I had been molested as a child. I remember that that kind of knocked us all back for a couple of seconds. We were like, “Oh, what do we do with that?” It seemed important though. As you said later on, Steven, it seemed important in that podcast or for that conversation for that admission to be the sort of start of it. I think it was a way for me to recognize that I do, did, and do have skin in the game when it comes to talking about issues of child molestation, so for me, it was important and worthwhile to do that. |
| C.T. WEBB: 23:35 | Yeah, there were two things that occurred to me as you were both describing that. One, I do feel like we go places with the podcast, and when I say at the beginning, “Figure out things out loud and together,” I literally do figure things out with you guys. Seph had written something recently for that fellowship, that you want to be surprised by some of the things you write, and I am surprised by the things that Seph or Steven or even that I will say in those moments. And that is a big part of what intimacy is for me, is sort of that process of rediscovery over and over, and there’s always that element of like, “Oh, that’s lovely. Oh, that’s the thing.” That’s the thing that I like, that moment, and that certainly describes the podcast that we’re talking about with the Michael Jackson– and Seph being really brave enough and vulnerable enough to say that and then going somewhere with it, right? I mean, this is one of the weaknesses of current discourse is, “I feel. I feel. I feel.” Like, “Okay. All right. This is good, and.” |
| S. FULLWOOD: 24:56 | Right, and what do we do now? |
| C.T. WEBB: 24:57 | Right, and now, what are we going to do with that? |
| S. RODNEY: 25:00 | Right, I do love– sorry. Sorry to interrupt, Travis, but I do love the moment in that conversation where a way’s into it, we all kind of concluded, and here’s that moment where we kind of meet in agreement. We all concluded that just because someone has been victimized does not necessarily mean that they are in a position to have the greatest clarity on what should happen in terms of punishment or in terms of retribution, that sort of thing. I love that we did that, that we were kind of all vulnerable, but then we didn’t turn that into, “Well, victimization, victimization. We have to do– we have to completely upend the system so that the victims are always kind of taken care of and made better, made whole in some way.” Yeah. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 26:02 | That’s powerful. I was thinking about this idea of– and I’ve mentioned a few times this idea of innocence, right? Well, there are two things. Two things are pushing out of my brain. Okay. I’m going to go back to the Mingus thing so a friend of mine named Mingus so a friend of ours, Travis, Seth. Mingus asked me earlier, before I got on the podcast, whether or not we review the podcast before it’s uploaded, and I said, “No.” I said, “We just record it. It gets taken care of by Chris, and then it’s uploaded.” And what he was getting at was what if we say something we don’t want to– what if we reveal something that we don’t really want. And I said, “Well, I did have a moment where I said something about my former employer, and for a hot second,” I said, “I was thinking about it as it was going on. I was like, ‘How does this sound? How does this sound?’ And then I realized,” I said, “Fuck it. This is actually I feel about this.” And it wasn’t a, “Oh, come at me. I’ll show you receipts.” It was more like, “This is how I talk all the time, so why am I trying to edit myself in a podcast?” And I like the messiness, and I like the vulnerability. And I like things that I’ve shared, and that person on the podcast, I like him. He’s fine. I like these men who are talking about their lives, and I think that the best of the podcasts that I listen to on the regular have that vulnerability and that messiness and that hilarity that I get a lot from my close friends and stuff or the people that I love, like Maria Bamford, who’s not a friend but an amazing comedian to me. And so I need that to feel alive. |
| S. RODNEY: 27:55 | Agreed. |
| C.T. WEBB: 27:57 | I had two things that I want to get in before I lose track of them, and then we probably are coming up on time. Maybe we could talk– obviously, we could talk for a lot longer, I know. But, I mean, there’ll be maybe five more minutes or something like that, but anyway. One, the podcast improved immeasurably once Chris got involved, so early on, and involved at all levels. He doesn’t just edit the podcast together. When we say “edit”, exactly like Steven said, we don’t ever edit anything out. Maybe if I say “like” too much, that might get edited out, or if there’s too much umming, that might get edited out. |
| S. RODNEY: 28:33 | Or the moments when we take to look up something on the internet so we can figure out what exactly we were referring to, that gets edited out. |
| C.T. WEBB: 28:42 | Yeah, yeah. That kind of stuff gets edited out, and then Chris wrote the intro music, which is using a sample of Fanfare for the Common Man. And so, I mean, he put that together and then got involved in the upload and all the rest of that, kind of all of the nuts and bolts, the mechanical things that have to be taken care of for the podcast and dramatically improved its consistency, its sound. And we’ve made plenty of errors in recording the podcast. I mean, right now, you are listening to an error. I am traveling, and my mic that I normally have isn’t working. And so I’m having to record this on an iPhone, which I never do, and so, I mean, you’ll probably be able to as a listener. But Chris is going to go in, and he’s going to do all this work and try and make it sound good. And we’ve had other mistakes, and Chris will sit there for hours using audio software to try to clean up so that it’s professional quality. So I wanted to say, A, thank you very much, Chris Ebmeier, for doing that. I’m always grateful for it. |
| S. RODNEY: 29:48 | Amen. |
| C.T. WEBB: 29:49 | And he’s here even though he’s not here. He’s the first listener, so I want to acknowledge that. And then the other thing is that what really matters to me – and I didn’t even think about this before, but this is one of those issues of figuring things out when we’re taking – is I love that we do this with all of the things that we just said where our focus is not to be contentious but is to actually get somewhere and give each other space and be vulnerable, and it’s called The American Age because I’m an American. You are an American. Seph is an American. Steven is an American. I resent to hell that that term has been hijacked by assholes and jingoists and white nationalists, and we talk about being agreeable; fuck you all that don’t feel that way about being an American. It is not what you say it is. You don’t get to demarcate what it means to be an American. So a weighted name like The American Age, which Seph knows was very consciously chosen, I love that we get to own that space. We get to say, “No, this is what we think it looks like to be engaged in this project and not what you think it looks like to be engaged in that project.” |
| S. RODNEY: 31:14 | And I think that we really got to the nitty-gritty of that, of the ideas that underlie that kind of reification, I suppose, of the term or kind of reconsidering of that, of what constitutes being American. When we had the conversation on the noble lie and we talked about meritocracy, I remember really liking that because what came out of that conversation was that, in a way that’s really clear to me now, I embody all these contradictions that are very much in this nation, right? The noble lie that I could pull myself by my bootstraps and it’s such a stupid term. I hate using it because I don’t know how, physically, one– what would that even look like? But nevertheless, the term is in our cultural– |
| C.T. WEBB: 32:15 | I think it’s supposed to be– I think it’s supposed to be oxymoronic. I think that’s its point. |
| S. RODNEY: 32:18 | Oh, okay. Okay. That’s it. It’s designed that way. Right. It’s in our cultural lexicon, but nevertheless, that is to a great extent what we all have done because there is very little in our respective pasts, in our familial structures that would indicate to any high school guidance counselor that we would end up being where we are now. We are generated precisely by those incredibly conflicting oppositions. We are very American in that sense, and there was nothing in my family history that would indicate to anyone who cared that I would end up– that I would end up being in the position in my life I am now. So here we are. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 33:20 | Here we are. |
| C.T. WEBB: 33:21 | Yeah, yeah. Steven do you want to have the last word? |
| S. FULLWOOD: 33:28 | No, I love Travis and Seph and our conversations. I’ve done [names?]. Enough, so. |
| S. RODNEY: 33:39 | Well, I do want to ask– I do want to ask a question though. It’s a real question. It’s, what’s the future of The American Age look like? I mean because I do think that there is a way in which we want, need a woman’s voice, and Sarah didn’t work out. Sarah just couldn’t keep doing the podcast, but I wonder how it would change if we did have a woman who is like us and unlike us, who could bring a different kind of set of questions to the conversation. |
| C.T. WEBB: 34:24 | So I guess we can figure this out out loud and together. I’m on the other side of that now. That’s how I felt before, but I don’t feel like Sarah was a mistake at all, right? I think Sarah contributed ably when she was here– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 34:44 | Agreed. |
| C.T. WEBB: 34:44 | –and noticed when she was gone, right? So it’s not that all. I mean, if we think of it as a relationship, as a friendship, I’m not often in friendships on the prowl for another friend to add into the mix. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 35:07 | Oh, fair enough. Yeah. |
| S. RODNEY: 35:10 | Yeah, fair enough. |
| C.T. WEBB: 35:09 | And when someone can be added to the mix, that’s a great thing, and I’m very open to that. And I would continue to be open to that. I would be very open to adding another voice, particularly a woman’s voice for all the reasons that we’ve talked about off the air about it, but I don’t know. What are we? Going to interview people? And so like, “Can you be our friend now?” Like, “I don’t think so.” I don’t know. I mean, I feel slightly more mixed about it than I did before the Sarah thing. |
| S. RODNEY: 35:44 | Well, what it sounds like to me is that you want it to happen organically. |
| C.T. WEBB: 35:48 | Yes, that’s exactly right. Yeah. |
| S. RODNEY: 35:48 | You don’t want us to have a call out on Facebook saying, “Please join us,” right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 35:58 | Fair enough. I agree. I agree, so keep your ears pricked up for maybe someone who fits. |
| C.T. WEBB: 36:08 | I want to say a couple of things if we’re going to close. Thank you for the people that listen. I mean, we actually do have listeners. I’ve gotten a couple of emails. Seph has gotten emails. People have mentioned to me in conversation, not all the time or something like that, but we have people that will engage with the podcast on Twitter. So if you are a regular listener, you are not alone. There aren’t many of you, but that’s okay. And the podcast is something that I’m committed to and engaged with, and I will say it not ironically, I love you Steven and I love you Seph. And I enjoy our conversations, and it’s a pleasure. |
| S. RODNEY: 37:00 | Thank you for that. Yes. Yes. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 37:01 | Thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. |
| S. RODNEY: 37:04 | Yes, and I love you both. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 37:07 | Ah, okay. I guess I’ve got to say it. I love you both too. |
| C.T. WEBB: 37:11 | You don’t have to say it. You can say it when you’re ready. You say it when you’re ready, Steven. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 37:13 | But I did that before on a conversation. They were like, “I love this process. I love this process,” and I was dead silent. But it was a mean dead silence, so I was just like, “I don’t feel this way and also on the contrary, and it’s all true.” But yes. |
| S. RODNEY: 37:29 | That is good. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 37:29 | But anyhow. Blah, blah, blah. Love you. Blah, blah, blah. Yeah. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 37:35 | Love you. Mean it. |
| C.T. WEBB: 37:35 | All right, and we’ll speak to you guys later. And we’ll pick back up with comedy next week. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 37:40 | Take care. Bye-bye. |
| S. RODNEY: 37:40 | All right. Bye, guys. |
| C.T. WEBB: 37:41 | Bye. |
| [music.] | |
References
**No references for Podcast 0100**