We’ve spent a century conditioning ourselves to believe that if we aren’t "producing," we aren't "valuable." But in 2026, the machines can out-produce us all. This episode is about The Great Decoupling—the moment we stop being high-end processors and start being the source. We dive into the "Productivist Fallacy," why Maya and Chris are grieving the loss of their utility, and why your "Why" is the only proprietary data left that the machines can't touch.

It’s time to move from being a resource to being the source.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

• Yale Budget Lab – March 2026 Report on Creative Automation.
• Immanuel Kant – The distinction between Instrumental and Intrinsic Value (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals).
• IDIBELL UB Brain Cognition Group – 2026 study in Advanced Science on human imaginative leaps.
• James Taylor – SuperCreativity and the concept of Centaurs vs. Cyborgs.

THE BOOK Lessons From a Terrible Photographer is out now. It’s part memoir, part field guide, and part honest conversation about what it actually costs to build a creative life. If this episode landed, the book goes deeper into finding the "Source" when the "Resource" runs dry.

LINKS

• Website: terriblephotographer.com
• Support the show: terriblephotographer.com/support
• Subscribe to Pub Notes: the-terrible-photographer.kit.com
• Instagram: @terriblephotographer
• Patrick on Instagram: @patrickfore
• Email Patrick: [email protected]

Email is always open. Questions, thoughts, hate mail. I respond to everything. Link above.

The Terrible Creative is written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Images Licensed through Adobe Stock. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California.

Getting good at your craft is supposed to be the goal. But for a lot of us, competence became the cage. This episode is about the feedback loop nobody warns you about: the better you get, the harder it is to leave. And what we build around the good thing to protect it.

Also, some honesty about why I called this show "Terrible" that I haven't said out loud before.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Bartleby the Scrivener - Herman Melville (1853)

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - T.S. Eliot (1915)

Robert Berglas - Self-Handicapping research

THE BOOK

Lessons From a Terrible Photographer is out now. It's part memoir, part field guide, and part honest conversation about what it actually costs to build a creative life. If this episode landed, the book goes deeper.

Get it here: https://www.amazon.com/Lessons-Terrible-Photographer-Photography-Probably/dp/B0GRGLYKYS/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0

LINKS

Website: http://terriblephotographer.com

Support the show: https://www.terriblephotographer.com/support

Subscribe to Pub Notes: https://the-terrible-photographer.kit.com/223fe471fb

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/terriblephotographer/

Patrick on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/patrickfore/
Email Patrick : [email protected]

Email is always open. Questions, thoughts, hate mail. I respond to everything. Link above.

The Terrible Creative is written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California.

Where does creative obsession actually come from? Not how to manufacture it. Not how to find it on a vision board. Where it actually lives. How it grows underground without your permission. And what it sounds like when it finally tries to break through.

This episode is the follow up to Episode 61: Obsessed. If you haven't listened to that one yet, start there.

This week I go back to a specific moment. Sixteen years old, a Mac G5, a cosmos built from scratch in a high school art room in Freeport Illinois. Two strangers from the Art Institute of Chicago who saw something I didn't. And then the long, complicated story of what happened to that signal when the framework got louder than I did.

We also get into David Lynch, Jon Batiste, the 19th century psychology of monomania, and a John Updike line that I think is one of the most honest things ever said about what separates artists from entertainers.

Clips used in this episode:

David Lynch on his childhood memory that inspired Blue Velvet

Jon Batiste on being misunderstood his first year at Juilliard

WALL-E opening sequence

Music: OK Go, Obsession

Lessons From A Terrible Photographer is available now on Amazon. Get your copy here

Website Support the show Subscribe to Pub Notes, the newsletter Terrible Photographer on Instagram Patrick Fore on Instagram

Email: [email protected]

Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California.

What separates a photographer who makes important work from one who just makes good photos? It might not be talent. It might not be gear. It might be something harder to name and harder to fake.

This week I walked into an APA Peer-to-Peer Photo Book Critique in San Diego with six copies of my own book, a smug attitude, and some assumptions that didn't survive the first thirty minutes. What I saw that night from two photographers, Michele Zousmer and Andrew Hertel, forced me to sit with a question I keep asking about other people's work but rarely ask about my own.

Who is this for? And what drove you to make it?

This episode is about obsession. What it looks like when it's real. What it costs. And what it means when you've been swimming in borrowed obsessions long enough that you stop noticing.

People and work mentioned in this episode:

Michele Zousmer, documentary photographer. Her Irish Travellers project is some of the most honest and important photography I've seen in years. Website: michelezousmer.com Instagram: @michelezousmerphoto

Andrew Hertel, fine art nature photographer based in San Diego. His Japan book White Silence was made in a single day in Hokkaido. It shows. Website: andrewhertel.com Instagram: @andrewjameshertel

This week's clip is from @dishcreates on YouTube, talking about choosing a new artistic obsession. Worth your time.

Lessons From A Terrible Photographer is available now on Amazon. Get your copy here: https://a.co/d/0aqcL8Rq

Website: terriblephotographer.com 
Support the show: terriblephotographer.com/support 
Subscribe to Pub Notes, the newsletter: the-terrible-photographer.kit.com/223fe471fb Terrible 
Photographer on Instagram: @terriblephotographer Patrick Fore on Instagram: @patrickfore

Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. 
Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. 
Episode photography from Adobe Stock
Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California.

This is the last one.

Four episodes. Four quadrants. Four different ways of asking the same question: who are you — really — when nobody's grading you?

In the final episode of the Johari Window series, Patrick texts eight people the same question without defining the word first. A photographer in Texas who's bored at events but wants the money. A friend who performs down to what shoes she puts on. A pastor in Iowa who said he doesn't feel fake — and then sent a follow-up voice note from a friend's house over Long Island iced teas that changed everything.

Not one person said they don't perform. Not one.

The Unknown is the fourth quadrant. In the original model it was framed as a limitation — territory nobody has access to. Patrick thinks that's the wrong way to look at it. Especially for creatives. Especially for people making personal work in the gaps between the jobs that pay the rent.

This episode is about the version of yourself that exists underneath all the other versions. The one that neither you nor anyone else has fully seen yet. The one that isn't always good. Isn't always safe. Isn't always received.

And why you might make something from there anyway.

In this episode:

Eight people, one question, no definition provided. What performing actually means when you ask people who have been doing it their whole lives. The pastor who works every day to keep two versions of himself close enough to touch. The stylist Patrick hired because he fell for the full version of her on Instagram — and what the transaction cost. The irony of finding more of yourself in a podcast garage than in a building founded on the radical idea that humans should show up whole. The serial killer problem and the Pokemon Go executive — and the question neither of them can answer. Why the Johari Window isn't a self-help tool. It's a mirror. And mirrors show you everything. The 16 year old, the 21 year old, the 31 year old — and who Patrick has been making this for all along.

The Johari Window — the complete series:

Episode 57 — The Glass House: The Arena. Visibility versus being known. Episode 58 — The Tell: The Blind Spot. What everyone around you already knows. Episode 59 — The Facade: What you hide. What it costs. Episode 60 — The Unknown: The version of yourself that doesn't exist yet. And why you make something anyway.

On Harrington:

Back in episode one Patrick pushed back on the model. Said the Arena requires two people. That you can't open the door alone and expect to be known.

He still believes that.

But Harrington was right about the window itself. It's neutral. It's just glass. It shows you what's there. It doesn't tell you which parts are good and which are dangerous. It doesn't sort the rooms for you.

What you do with what you see — that's on you.

If this series landed somewhere:

Email Patrick. He reads everything and responds to most of it. The emails that cost something to send are the ones he remembers longest.

[email protected]

Connect:

Website: terriblephotographer.com
The Book — Lessons From A Terrible Photographer: terriblephotographer.com/the-book
Support the show: terriblephotographer.com/support
Newsletter — Pub Notes: the-terrible-photographer.kit.com/223fe471fb
Instagram — The Terrible Creative: @terriblephotographer
Instagram — Patrick Fore: @patrickfore

The Terrible Creative is written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Episode photography from Adobe Stock and Unsplash. Recorded from a garage in San Diego, California.

Episode 59: "The Facade" The Johari Window Series — Part Three

Some weeks Patrick knows exactly why he's making this podcast.

Other weeks he almost quits.

This week he almost quit.

In Episode 59, Patrick pulls back the frame on the third quadrant of the Johari Window — the Facade — and what it actually costs creative professionals to maintain the gap between what they show and what's driving the showing. The polished portfolio. The confident host voice. The finished frame with the 400 failed shots cropped out.

This isn't an episode about lying. It's about omission. And about what happens when you build a professional identity around a creative practice that has no letter grade, no client approval, no clean signal telling you whether what you're making is landing or disappearing into silence.

Patrick talks about Episode 7 — the color theory episode where he ran out of ideas and made something anyway. About the specific loneliness of having no one to call mid-crisis who has the context to help. About talking creative decisions through with AI because that's what the forest looks like sometimes. About the analytics graph that will eventually reduce this episode — this specific vulnerable, costly, self-inflicted colonoscopy of an episode — to a data point.

And about why he kept walking anyway.

In this episode:

The almost-abandoned Johari series — what Patrick was going to make instead and what made him stay. The Facade as omission — how showing only the product accidentally creates a culture of impostors. The feedback loop problem — why the podcast is the hardest creative work Patrick has ever done to measure, and what his brain does in the absence of data. The AI collaborator admission — the specific loneliness of having context nobody else has. The difference between performed vulnerability and actual vulnerability — and why Patrick monitors that line constantly. The color theory episode — what episode 7 actually proved about whether the podcast could survive without a plan. The forest — the dim flickering light, the disappearing trail, and the thing that terrifies Patrick more than getting lost.

The Johari Window — where we are:

Episode 57 — The Glass House: The Arena. Visibility versus being known. 
Episode 58 — The Tell: The Blind Spot. What everyone around you already knows. 
Episode 59 — The Facade: What you hide. What it costs. Coming up — The Unknown.

The three words that describe this episode:

Bleeding. Silence. Walking.

If this one felt uncomfortably familiar:

That's the episode working.

Email Patrick. He reads everything. Some weeks your email is the only signal he gets that any of this is landing.

No pressure. But also — no pressure.

Connect:
Email Patrick: [email protected]

Website: terriblephotographer.com
The Book — Lessons From A Terrible Photographer: terriblephotographer.com/the-book
Support the show: terriblephotographer.com/support
Newsletter — Pub Notes: the-terrible-photographer.kit.com/223fe471fb
Instagram — The Terrible Creative: @terriblephotographer
Instagram — Patrick Fore: @patrickfore

The Terrible Creative is written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Episode photography from Adobe Stock and Unsplash. Recorded from a garage in San Diego, California.

Everyone around you already knows.

Your clients see it. The people who've worked alongside you see it. The people who love you have probably tried to name it — in ways you found reasons to dismiss.

In Episode 58, Patrick continues the Johari Window series by moving from the Arena into the most uncomfortable quadrant: the Blind Spot. Not the things you're hiding. The things you don't know you're broadcasting.

Using his own creative identity as the case study — the self-deprecation, the Terrible brand, the mid-sentence bail — Patrick traces the armor back to its origin: a three-bedroom house in Freeport, Illinois, a dinner table where the competition was already over before it started, and a crayon surrender he signed before he was old enough to know what surrender meant.

This episode is about the system you built to survive. Why it made sense when you built it. And why it might be costing you more than it's protecting you now.

In this episode:

The specific look Alycia gives when Patrick abandons his own story mid-sentence — and what it means that he smiles instead of getting defensive. Steven Berglas and the Harvard research on self-handicapping — why capable people undermine themselves before anyone else can, and why success doesn't fix it. The sociometer — Mark Leary's theory about the internal gauge that monitors social acceptance in real time, and why most of ours are still calibrated for rooms we left twenty years ago. The two kinds of armor: lead and chrome. Why one makes you invisible and the other makes you blinding — and why both are running the same old software. Brian, the coloring book, and the crayon surrender. The Katie problem — what it means to be fully seen, how rare it actually is, and what the armor has to do with why it's so hard to find.

The Johari Window — where we are:

Last episode: The Arena — what you show the world, and why being visible isn't the same as being known.

This episode: The Blind Spot — what everyone else can see that you can't.

Coming up: The Facade, The Unknown, and the negotiation between all four.

If this one landed somewhere uncomfortable:

That's the episode working correctly.

Email Patrick. He reads everything and responds to most of it — especially the ones that cost something to send.

Connect:
Email Patrick: [email protected]

Website: terriblephotographer.com
The Book — Lessons From A Terrible Photographer: terriblephotographer.com/the-book
Support the show: terriblephotographer.com/support
Newsletter — Pub Notes: the-terrible-photographer.kit.com/223fe471fb
Instagram — The Terrible Photographer: @terriblephotographer
Instagram — Patrick Fore: @patrickfore

The Terrible Creative is written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore.
Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions.
Episode photography by Michał Parzuchowski — @m.parzuchowski
Recorded from a garage in San Diego, California.

Episode title and subtitle:

"The Tell" The Johari Window Part Two — What Everyone Around You Already Knows

There's a difference between being visible and being known. Most of us have confused the two.

In this episode, Patrick is sitting at a networking event in San Diego when a graphic designer asks him a question he wasn't ready for: "Who are you to write a book? To make a podcast?" What followed was a masterclass in what happens when radical transparency meets a closed receiver — and why no amount of clever explanation, diplomatic humor, or honest disclosure can open a door that's locked from the other side.

This is Part One of a five-part series on the Johari Window — a psychological model built in the 1950s to map the gap between what we show, what we hide, what others see, and what nobody knows yet. Patrick uses it as a lens to examine what it actually means to be seen as a creative professional in an attention economy that rewards the performance of transparency without any mechanism for checking the real thing.

Also in this episode: why Zach Galifianakis crying at his sister's wedding is the most honest thing in this conversation, what Jerry Seinfeld gets wrong about talent, and what it costs to make the self-deprecating joke when the room can't receive you.

In this episode:

The networking event that started this whole series — and the question that hasn't left Patrick alone since. The Johari Window, explained by an organizational psychologist named Erin over coffee. Why the Arena isn't just built by what you put out — and what happens when the receiver can't take it in. Zach Galifianakis, his sister's wedding, and five hundred people who thought grief was a bit. The mom joke, what it cost, and why Patrick stopped making it.

The Johari Window — the four quadrants:

The Arena — what you know about yourself that others know too. The Blind Spot — what others can see that you can't. The Facade — what you know but keep hidden. The Unknown — what neither you nor anyone else has figured out yet.

If this episode hit something:

This is Part One of five. The series continues with the Blind Spot, the Facade, the Unknown, and the negotiation between all four. Subscribe so you don't miss it.

And if you've ever been in a room where no arrangement of words was going to make it land — email Patrick. He reads everything.

Connect:
E-Mail Me: [email protected]

Website: terriblephotographer.com
The Book — Lessons From A Terrible Photographer: terriblephotographer.com/the-book
Support the show: terriblephotographer.com/support
Newsletter — Pub Notes: the-terrible-photographer.kit.com/223fe471fb
Instagram — The Terrible Creative: @terriblephotographer
Instagram — Patrick Fore: @patrickfore

The Terrible Creative is written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound. Episode photography from Adobe Stock. Recorded from a garage in San Diego, California.

The fear underneath every AI conversation in photography right now isn't really about the future. It's recognition.

In this episode, Patrick sits down with the hard question nobody in the industry is asking out loud: were we already making replaceable work before AI arrived? He traces the argument from a weekend with the Capture One leadership team, through his own portfolio audit, two unscripted phone calls with a working commercial photographer, a portrait session with a professor who had never been photographed, and a Christopher Anderson image made inside the White House that quietly pulls itself apart at the seams.

This isn't an episode about AI killing photography. It's about what AI is making visible — and what that means for the work you make next.

Show Notes

The conversation about AI and photography has been happening at the wrong altitude. Markets, economics, job security — those are real questions. But they're the surface conversation. The thing underneath is harder: what were you making before AI arrived, and why?

This episode starts in Paris, 1839 — the moment photography was supposed to kill painting — and ends with a question you probably haven't let yourself ask yet.

Along the way:

— A weekend with part of the leadership team at Capture One, and why Patrick came home more excited than afraid

— The portfolio audit: scrolling back through his own work with new eyes, and what Gemini did with one of his best-performing images in four minutes

— Two unscripted phone calls with commercial photographer Morgan Turner — including the two words that said everything

— A portrait session with a professor in her fifties who had never been photographed, and what that responsibility actually looks like

— Christopher Anderson's White House portraits, a light switch, and why AI would have removed it

— The difference between a mistake and a strategic sacrifice

— Why the making might matter more than the image

Referenced In This Episode

Christopher Anderson — White House Portrait Series Shot for Magnum Photos during the Trump administration. Worth finding and sitting with. magnum photos.com

Capture One Professional photo editing software and the people building the tools photographers will use next. captureone.com

The Long Middle Series If this episode landed, go back to Episode 40. It's the first in a four-part series on creative loneliness — what happens when you're good at what you do and something still feels off. It connects directly to everything discussed here.

Guest

Morgan Turner — Commercial Photographer, Cranbrook BC Website: mturnerphoto.com Instagram: @mturnerphoto

Episode Photography

Photo by Teslariu Mihai Instagram: @photosbymihai

Links

📖 The Book — Lessons From a Terrible Photographer terriblephotographer.com/the-book

☕ Support the Show terriblephotographer.com/support

📬 Pub Notes — The Newsletter the-terrible-photographer.kit.com/223fe471fb

📷 Patrick on Instagram instagram.com/patrickfore

🎙 The Terrible Creative on Instagram instagram.com/terriblephotographer

📧 Email Patrick [email protected]

Connect

Have thoughts on this episode? Did the audit hit different than you expected? Did you find an image in your portfolio that survived it — or one that didn't?

Email [email protected] — he reads everything.

Something is changing.

This bonus episode is the announcement I've been putting off — partly because I wasn't sure how to say it, and partly because the timing is, as with most things in my life, sideways.

The Terrible Photographer is becoming The Terrible Creative.

Same show. Same voice. Same refusal to pretend I have it figured out. But the door is wider now — because the emails I've been getting for years have made something clear: the struggle we talk about here doesn't belong to photographers. It belongs to anyone trying to make honest work in a world that keeps asking why you bother.

In this episode I talk about why the name was right when it started, why it stopped fitting, and a handwritten letter from a ceramicist in Vermont that I've been carrying around in my bag for eight months. I also talk about the Impressionists, a twenty-two-year-old kid in Los Angeles who told me my work was terrible, and a brand manager who had feelings about a throw pillow.

Oh — and the book is done. Lessons From a Terrible Photographer is real and you can buy it right now.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

• Lessons From a Terrible Photographer — the book → https://www.terriblephotographer.com/the-book
• Jeff Lipsky, photographer → jefflipsky.com

LINKS

• Buy the book → https://www.terriblephotographer.com/the-book
• Support the show → https://www.terriblephotographer.com/support
• Subscribe to Pub Notes (the newsletter) → https://the-terrible-photographer.kit.com/223fe471fb
• The Terrible Photographer on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/terriblephotographer/
• Patrick on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/patrickfore/
• Email Patrick → [email protected]

The Terrible Creative is written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore. Music licensed through Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California.