The How This Works show

In this episode, Carl talks to Skipper about his work as an architect, how the term sustainable design isn't good enough anymore, how linear perspective was developed in 1413, and his work on Banning Ranch Park and Preserve.

Starting with being born in Roswell, New Mexico, living in Turkey, and then settling in California, their conversation gets into how sustainable design (the idea of using less) really needs to shift to the idea of regenerative design (works more like nature or generates energy), passive solar, how today's lumber is different than old-growth lumber, Formosan termites, building with cold form steel or light gauge steel, Filippo Brunelleschi, Albrecht Dürer, the Acjachemen in Orange County, and the history of the Banning Ranch site.

Here are two examples from Carl's work — the top one's a concept from Banning Ranch and the bottom one's the Waterwise Community Center in Montclair, California.

Stay tuned after the outro to hear Carl talk more about Chinese landscape painting.

This episode was edited and mastered by Troy Lococo.

Special Guest: Carl Welty.

Links:

• How an Alien Autopsy Hoax Captured the World's Imagination for a Decade

This show with Thejus Chakravarthy ranges over a wide variety of topics but along the way we find out about his professional and life experiences in making change in the world.

We start with his origins crowning in a cab in Mumbai, India, the ease in which his right shoulder dislocates after a show once upon a time with his hardcore band Lovers and Killers, the joy of Royal Farm (RoFo) fried chicken, and the brilliance of a 'hot now' Krispy Kreme donut. Skipper and Thejus also get into his two books, Brushfire and The Flywheel and The Lever where they get into some of the foundational details, including Henry Ford's creation of the 40 hour workweek, the Stanford prison experiment done by Dr. Philip Zimbardo, Stanley Milgram's experiments on obedience to authority figures, the notion of 'it's always the system', the Ben Franklin effect, Thejus' experience creating an instructional system out of open source technologies, Donella Meadows' essay on leverage points, and Gamergate. See if you can pick out the Seth Godin namedrop.

Interesting note about Thejus' previous band — Lovers and Killers, then Caestles, and now Queen Wolf as well as a second band called Infinite Pizza. While he formally left that band about five years ago, they're still making music and he helps with production and occasionally contributes. Here's an audio family tree/playlist:

Queen Wolf and Infinite Pizza are both on Bandcamp, if you want to indulge deeper.

After the outro music, you can hear Skipper spring on Thejus a request to read the opening bit from "Brushfire".

This episode was edited and mastered by Troy Lococo.

Special Guest: Thejus Chakravarthy.

Links:

• Ford factory workers get 40-hour week on May 1, 1926

On this episode, we talk to Nova Stanley — who's 17 — about his work as an artist, about his attending one of the top fine arts high schools in NYC during a pandemic, and his experience as a transgender male.

Along the way, we get into so many topics — how Nova only snaps with his thumb and little/pinky finger (on both hands), how he comes from a family of artists and creators, getting inspiration from nature and his sisters (versus media and friends), how he's missing Brooklyn after his family temporarily relocated up-state, Soul (the Pixar movie), how he started working in digital media on his dad's computer, what remote school looks and feels like in one of the top fine arts schools in NYC, making a portfolio to apply to colleges, the impact of social media — even Instagram — on him, his exit from social media (mostly), his experience as a trans male, binge watching all 15 seasons of Criminal Minds, and his love of My Brother, My Brother and Me, a podcast by the McElroy Brothers.

Here are three views of the work pinned to the wall above Nova's desk, something he mentions during the show:

Nova cites a statistic around how one out of every 200 people identify as trasngender. But upon digging into the actual article from the American Journal of Public Health, it turns out that they discovered in 2016 that the ratio was 390/100,000. And as a fraction, that works out to 0.0039. 1/200 is 0.005, fairly close. The article also posits that the fraction of the transgender population is going to rise as more people come out and transgender identities are normalized.

Throughout the episode, we hear Nova's life as one full of interuptions and household goingson, including the family pets. Stay tuned for one of those bits after the outro music.

This episode was edited and mastered by Troy Lococo.

Special Guest: Nova Stanley.

Links:

• Pixar's Soul

Stephanie Krivitzky, currently in New York City, talks to Skipper about how she gets things done, starting with family discussions around the dinner table and then into her current role as creative director at Misen, a cookware company.

The conversation hits so many points, starting with her frustration with baths, how the notion of logistics eventually fed into the concept of getting things done, how hustling and freelancing built her discipline, using your own motivations and demotiavtions as an aligning principle, how getting things done for other people is different than when you're working for yourself, thinking about the Eisenhower Matrix graph with its four quadrants of high/low impact and high/low effort to prioritize your work, what happens when you never do a thing you're supposed to (read: like Skipper's example of not being very good at flossing at night), to-do lists as part of the process of reflecting back on how something went, and how she thinks of her own to-do lists as little diaries.

Towards the end of the episode, Skipper mentions a card-based productivity system of which he couldn't recall the name. It's called Analog.

After the outro music, you can hear Stephanie talk about her friend of 14 years already wanting to listen to this episode. 😃🎉

This episode was edited and mastered by Troy Lococo.

Special Guest: Stephanie Krivitzky.

Links:

• Misen cookware

Starting under mentorship with James Beard winner Barbara Lynch, Nicolai Lipscomb has chefed at some of the best restuarants in the world, full stop — Arzak, El Celler Can Roca, at Fundacion Alicia with scientists and nutritionists under the direction of Ferran Adria and Pere Castells, the list goes on and on. And so this conversation with Skipper Chong Warson ranges the globe, starting in Half Moon Bay, Calif. to bungee jumping outside Vancouver Island, British Columbia to working in high pressure kitchens in Boston, Mass.; San Sebastián, Spain; Girona, Spain; and back to northern Calif. again among other locations.

The topics range from talking about thrill seeking in motorcycle riding/bungee jumping, homemade Eggo waffles cooling on chopsticks, falling into and grinding through the ever challenging work of making and serving some of the most highly regarded food in the world while racing the clock and the swirling kitchen chaos, the requisite patience to not rush food, the secret to great paella, the importance of downtime in working as a chef, and the brain drain in running restuarants that's happening during COVID-19.

One thing that we learned is that restaurants are the number one employer in Calif. And working backwards from the idea that the golden state has 1/8 of the United States population and by some estimates the various 2020 shutdown orders will end up closing 50% of restaurants that aren't backed by chains or corporations, that's a huge impact of which we weren't aware.

While recording, Skipper mistakingly attributes Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours of work equals mastery theory to "Blink" instead of "Outliers". (He corrected it with Nicolai offline as soon as he was able.)

Stay tuned after the outro music for a bit of tape where Nicolai first mentions working on the line for the first time in six years.

This episode was edited and mastered by Troy Lococo.

Special Guest: Nicolai Lipscomb.

Links:

• Adrenaline

Having grown up with the idea that she wanted to perform and make music, Selena Rosanbalm talks with Skipper about being a musician and the work she’s done to write, record, release, and promote an independent album in 2020 with everything that's going on.

The conversation has a wide swing, starting with her love of yacht rock (think Michael McDonald or Hall & Oates or the Doobie Bros), her fear of things underwater, her early thrill with performing "I Just Can't Wait to Be King" from The Lion King, the number system for calling the chords of the songs to everyone on-stage, how some musicians are still producing new cassette tapes, how being an independent musician is more work than it may seem (because not everyone's Bono), Black Sabbath's debut album done in one take (allegedly), how the name Rosie and the Ramblers came about, and how the cover art for Selena Rosanbalm started with a piece of photo equipment.

Stay tuned after the outro music for a piece of tape where Skipper asks if Selena and the members of her backing band wear masks when performing.

This episode was edited and mastered by Troy Lococo.

Special Guest: Selena Rosanbalm.

Links:

• What is Yacht Rock?

This episode of How This Works addresses adult subject matters and contains adult language.

As a marketing veteran, Brad breaks down the world of cannabis in this conversation with Skipper. There are stops along the way to talk about Shakespeare, punk rock, William Randolph Hurst, how the illegality of marijuana affects the prison/jail system in this country, the history of reefer madness, how President-elect Biden and speaker Pelosi are closer in age to the assasination of Lincoln than to the present day, H.R.3884 - MORE Act, and the tobacco industry among other subjects.

Learn about happens to the human body when you smoke, eat, drink, or otherwise consume cannabis and CBD products. Also, what you should look out for when you're looking for quality CBD products. Brad also talks about his recent work with Tha Hood Squad, a nonprofit street organization, black and brown led, working to fight against overpolicing, racial profiling, and living with gentrification in east Palo Alto (northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California) — which is right across the street from a significantly more afluent part of town.

This episode contains some explicit language and adult subject matter. Stay tuned after the outro music to hear Skipper lay out with some expletives about one of the goals of How This Works, "F-word it, own the thing that you know!"

This episode was edited and mastered by Troy Lococo.

Special Guest: Brad Bogus.

Links:

• Remembering Longtime Theatre Director Sidney Berger

Recorded at the end of October 2020, Jackie and Skipper talked about some number of topics, including how being parents helped them both do better work, how Jackie thinks about recruiting as an art and a science, how fit is both important for the job seeker as well as for the company, how you should never settle for a job (unless you're a contractor), how all designers should have a portfolio, and how important it is to do your research before you apply for a job.

Our show starts with a flub but we quickly recover. We talk about what it means when a designer uses off-the-shelf templates for their resume. Jackie's advice? Designers, design your resume. Also, send the right cover letter.

Stay tuned after the outro music for a triumphant moment where technology didn't win. Which means we won. And that's always a good day. 😂

Special Guest: Jackie Velasquez-Ross.

Links:

• InVision

We talk with Dr. Peter Chin-Hong from University of California, San Francisco about his expertise as an infectious disease clinician on the novel coronavirus and COVID-19. We'll talk about the current state of the pandemic in California, around the country, and in the world at-large. We also get into what's happening with the vaccines (including the FDA approved Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine that uses mRNA to rewire a genetic trigger to the viral proteins) as well as other therapeutics, pandemic fatigue, and how holiday travel might work as other get togethers.

But we didn't just talk about the biology or healthcare. We also talked about how Peter — or as his students call him, PCH, which are his initials as well as California's famous Pacific Coast Highway — got interested in medicine while he was growing up in Trinidad and Tobago. We also talked about racism is a public health concern and how Twitter provided not only community for him this year but also a way to learn from others in the larger medical community.

Stay tuned until the end of the episode for a funny bit waxing about technology problems while recording.

Special Guest: Dr. Peter Chin-Hong.

Links:

• Wikipedia entry on Trinidad and Tobago

We recorded this episode when the west coast fires were raging all up and down California, Oregon, and Washington state in Sep 2020. We talked about Amy's journey to becoming a stage actor as well as what her world looks like today as a company member for Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) during COVID-19.

One thing we talked about during this episode is how much the arts bring into the U.S. economy every year — on average, $877B is added to the economy, it employs 5.1M people, and is 4.5% of the GDP.

Stay tuned until the end of the episode for a funny bit of tape about the "Scottish play".

Special Guest: Amy Kim Waschke.

Links:

• Robyn Hunt