Evolutionary Psychiatry

I started out on this essay writing thing in January ‘24 thinking I could write forever about new stuff. Interesting stuff (to me only as it turned out … obviously.) And for a time, it seemed that I was doing just that. Then sixteen essays later, and, as irony would have it just after I had said ‘I’m now more than a quarter of the way through the year and finding no shortage of subjects to write about.’ I suddenly dried up. Ran out of things to write about. No. That’s wrong; rather I felt that I had said everything I had to say.But that isn’t quite right either. I usually put a book to bed by writing a review on Goodreads. Maybe that habit let the steam escape, so my creative boiler didn’t have enough oomph left to keep the old essay flywheel spinning. And now here we are, two years after my icebreaker essay and I have had my new one welling up inside me for a month or six.It was daughters of course that pushed me over the weir. My firstborn, the forty-something, suggested that with the new chapter starting in my personal life during Summer 25, perhaps I should write something (she actually suggested a song) something more personal, more vulnerable, sounding less lecturaceous (my word not hers.) And with a not-immediately-obvious synchronicity, one of the fifteen year olds asked me whether the word ‘phallic’ was always about shape.We were in Shrewsbury Castle grounds. It was during the 2025 Shrewsbury Summer Festival. They had a pair of vaguely flame shaped carved sculptures on the lawn. Clearly not at all phallic in any way.She had a second question lurking in her secret agenda of course, but I didn’t know that, so I just blundered on, answering the first one straight – ‘ Hmm, not shape so much, I think. It’s more about representation of the masculinity of the member rather than just about its shape.’Then I remembered the scene from How I Met Your Mother where a ‘Seventy eight storey pink marble tower with a rounded top and two spherical entry-ways at the front’ rose from ‘wild brunette’ bushes and I thought ‘… but yeah it probably is always about shape.’But before I had the chance to enlarge (!) on that, she continued … ‘So what is the female equivalent?’The word ‘Yoni’ flashed through my mind from a discussion over a book with ex-wife No1, about three and a half decades earlier, but you know, I’m a man and I didn’t know exactly what the word meant. More to the point I didn’t want to embarrass myself by sticking my neck out into the mysterious arcane world of feminine pudendal detail with my adolescent daughter. So I just lied and said ‘I didn’t know, maybe there wasn’t one.’Funny that ‘mysterious arcane’ thing, and the masculine guilt I felt, more than half a century after it was instilled in me by my mother who would habitually use her arsenal of taboo and innuendo to suppress my curiosity. A mere male could never understand the complex secrets of women’s bodies. Peculiar then that I was still humiliated into the inability to speak more than half a century later – by which time I had surely experienced (and probably discussed with their owners) a significantly greater variety of women’s bodies than my mother had known in her sexually repressed lifetime. Anyway, hobbled by that ancient stigma I was, and the word remained unuttered.By that time we were on the sculpture lawn itself. Zoe pointed to the flame shaped sculptures, now visible from a different angle. With an instant laugh of realisation, it was suddenly clear what her train of thought had been.My first reaction then (also not stated out loud) was that the smartphone has a lot to answer for. I recall learning in that book discussion 35 years ago, that most women then had no idea what a ‘man’s eye view’ would be, and they were advised by the (female) author to use a mirror and be prepared for a big surprise. Yes that was in about 1990, not 1890: 1990. Hmm must have been the smartphone that had educated my teenager then.It took a few weeks for me to look up that word ‘Yoni’ or maybe the quasi-phallic equivalent should have been ‘Yonic?’ Did it exist or was the whole discussion part of my imaginative memory?And yes, it exists, and yoni of course IS more than just about shape. As we might expect, the feminine has a subtler and more layered depth to it than the masculine. I’m quoting Emma Wilkin here:‘‘Yonic’ is derived from a Sanskrit word, ‘yoni’ (योनि), which means ‘womb’, ‘uterus’ or ‘vulva’, as well as ‘source’. In various Eastern religions and spiritual traditions, the yoni is revered as a symbol of divine feminine energy and fertility, and the origin of life. The concept of the yoni is often associated with the goddess Shakti in Hinduism, representing the creative and nurturing aspects of the universe. ‘Hold that thought, because I’m going to take a big sidestep here.I buy Dawkins. Pretty much a hundred percent. Smug bugger that he is, I believe he’s got evolution absolutely right. I have no difficulty believing his thesis that we phenotypes, from fungus to sapiens, are simply supercomplex shells that give ‘our’ genes the mechanism of potential immortality – or at least, the closest that Planet Earth can offer by way of immortality.So I always look for evolutionary mechanisms for just about anything complex, from psychoses to social culture. For example, I believe (with Randolph Nesse) that psychoses emerge under the control of genes that make us more likely to create the next generation and raise them to reproductive age, whether or not that success gives us pain and grief in the process. And I believe that cultures emerge, as described by Joseph Henrich, from an exactly parallel process from the memes (Dawkins’ word) that survive and propagate themselves best by the simple circular metric of survival and propagation.Now the crucial mechanism of mammalian evolution comprises mating and gestation, and considering humans, we have a situation where women carry a child for about a year before they are physically ready to start making a new one, whereas men are capable of siring a few hundred (at least) in the same span of time. Now that gender-differentiated mechanism is a simple truth that has been used (almost always by men) to justify polygamy and male sexual unrestraint. The argument for asymmetrical sexual behaviour goes like this: ‘That’s the way we were designed, so that’s what we should do’ – in an absolutely indefensible male-centred logic.Philosophically we can throw it out immediately. Hume’s law says that you can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is.’And we can think immediately of other ways that human design is obviously not worthy of generating normative argument. Our eyes for example are similar to the convergently evolved eyes of cephalopods, and logically enough, their optic nerves sit behind and therefore out of the light-path of their photoreceptors. Our optic neurons form a layer sitting in front, obscuring our light sensitive cells and making our retinas functionally inferior since we come from a different ancestor. No one suggests that this means that our arrangement is superior because nature designed us that way, or that octopuses should be placed in more highly paying jobs that require visual skills.We can also throw out the ‘men should be less sexually continent than women’ idea mathematically by pointing out that any actual living carrier of genes has two parents, one male one female. So the actual amount of progenerative mating is exactly the same on average between men and women. That means that if some men could or should sire five or six hundred children a year, then five or six hundred men aren’t going to father any. That’s an oversimplification of how statistics works, but it’s the seed of a sound counterargument against drawing out a justification of socially bad behaviour from the numerical differences of human gender.And I am nailing my opinion to the mast here. I do believe that … This is a public episode. 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If you prefer to read the essay I wrote before I read it out loud, (together with links to references) then . . .and while you’re here, please . . .Cheers, Nick This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com

I have let Substack do its automatic transcript thing this week. If you want to see my original essay you can find it . . .Thanks for listening to Nick’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com

A few weeks back I mentioned Randy Nesse in the context of his aside about ageing. Long story short, I was so impressed by this guy’s discussion that I bought his book Good Reasons for Bad Feelings. His angle is to look at how evolution accounts for the most complex aspects of human biology. I’m loving it. His focus is looking for evolutionary reasons for psychological conditions. You might think that would be nothing new, though he points out that it was something very new when he picked up his interest in it half a century ago. Surprisingly, it still is a relatively uncommon way of looking at psychological disorders. And thirdly people often misunderstand the mechanism in ways I will refer to. Something I admire – try to aspire to myself and routinely find tough – is finding simple metaphors to illustrate complex things in a clear way. And I would give Nesse at least eight out ten for this. What he is dealing with is fearsomely complicated, and he comes up with some beautiful metaphors, perhaps the smoke alarm is his best one. However complexity still rises like the morning mist to blur the light of dawn (see what I did there?) Anyway – the discussions make so many turns that it’s still fairly easy to get tangled up. Thanks for reading Nick’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.So I’ll cover the smoke alarm illustration since I have mentioned it. He’s talking here about anxiety. Anxiety is universally seen as a problem, but he points out that people without anxiety die young – and maybe back in the day that might have meant too young to reproduce, so it’s a good trait to have at least a bit of. Then he points out that smoke detectors sometimes give false alarms. They give false alarms more often than they fail to operate when there is a fire. If they never gave false positives then the range at which they are sensitive would have to be set artificially high on the risk spectrum. That might, or probably would, allow more fires to start without setting off the siren at all. Thinking about it, a false positive alarm is a minor annoyance, a false negative (ie a failure to sound the alarm at all) can be a disaster. Now,  think of your ancestor at the water hole. If she was anxious and thought that the rabbit in a shrub was a tiger, she might have wasted a few calories running away. But if she is so laid back that she assumes the tiger is a rabbit or even a really cool stripey cat, then she becomes lunch. That your ancestor survived means she was, let’s say, anxious enough, and quite likely a bit too anxious, but not far too anxious, otherwise she’d have died of thirst. Viewed in this way we should be grateful that evolution has gifted us the ability to be anxious, and hardly be surprised if it has left us with more false alarms than we would like.Apart from giving us a neat academic explanation for one of the ways stuff might be as it is, he points out that it can be surprisingly therapeutic for someone suffering from chronic anxiety to be able to see their own situation as a poorly adjusted but necessary alarm mechanism rather than (wholly) as a pointless damaging disease. So, what about the ancestor who would have died of thirst if her anxiety was tuned so high as to make her nothing but a bag of nerves? Well there will always be outliers on the bell curve in the generations that evolved since waterhole days, and secondly in the modern era or actually at any time when there were social groups, maybe someone else would bring the water. And so it remains that the evolution of anxiety has every incentive to raise alarms at least as often as necessary, and it doesn’t have much incentive to care about being cool.Another way he illustrates that anxiety may be a positive is by examining why women live longer than men. He suggests that women don’t actually live longer, it’s just that men tend to die young. He has written a paper about this which mentions ‘Being male is now the single largest demographic risk factor for early mortality in developed countries.’ Old men, he explains, don’t actually peg out much before old women. What happens is that silly young men accidentally kill themselves because they don’t have enough anxiety, and this brings the average down. (Women in these terms have about the right amount of anxiety.)Now, sex and drugs and rock and roll are all most exciting for men at the same age as violence and extreme sports, so by the time our hero tops himself by jumping off a cliff in a batsuit, he has probably already done more than enough mating to propagate his lack of anxiety. I tried to check this thesis out by downloading life expectancy tables from the UK Office for National Statistics and they didn’t seem to confirm it. I graphed life expectancy as a percentage differential between male and female by age. Having taken account of Nesse’s statement, I expected the lines to start widely separated and then to sweep together just after the age when men stop being recruited to the armed forces. After that I thought that the small remaining  differential would perhaps taper away to zero just before the few remaining centenarians died. The difference doesn’t seem to behave like that though. Maybe there are other factors, maybe men don’t stop being life-threateningly silly until they are in middle age, or maybe my understanding of statistics is rubbish. As observed by Mark Twain in a famous statement generously attributed by him to Benjamin Disraeli – The study of statistics is a notoriously difficult area of basic maths to interpret correctly. If anyone would like to clarify this is a comment to me I’d be really grateful. I should mention that anxiety or the lack of it is not the only reason for early male mortality mentioned in Nesse’s paper. Maybe if I can’t work it out myself I’ll submit a query to my favourite statistician Tim Harford and report back here if I get a response.Meanwhile three of Nesse’s recurrent threads are, * Avoiding what he calls VSAD or viewing symptoms as diseases.* Avoiding the temptation to search for what gene causes what disorder. Better ask what environmental situation may have led to the evolution of a pattern of behaviours that increases evolutionary ‘fitness’ – inevitably by the incalculable interaction of multiple genes influencing emotions and hence behaviour.* And his third recurrent thread is speculating on how what may have been a good evolutionary response has evolved into what are some of today’s most debilitating disorders. I have already given an example of the third one, so what about the other two?That first one about viewing symptoms as if they are diseases provides a nice illustration of how he clarifies stuff, but it still remains fearsomely complicated. I don’t blame Nesse for this. If he oversimplified the subject with the risk of misinterpretation, that would be much worse. So on the subject of VSAD, he points out that psychological difficulties are widely considered to be diseases or disorders, but say coughing, or pain, or running a temperature are considered as symptoms. It’s easy to understand that physical symptoms have benefits. Pain helps keep you out of danger, coughing expels the mucus that your body makes to trap bugs, and fevers provide a better environment for your immune system to work fast. Once we realise that mental pain has a function similar to physical pain then it’s possible to consider where it came from and how to deal with it, maybe even whether to deal with it. But it’s still complicated. In physical medicine for example, there aren’t just symptoms and diseases, there are whole syndromes or collections of chronic symptoms again which don’t map neatly one to one against diseases. This muddies the water. And so it is with mental problems. The water here is already muddy, so it’s not an easy thing to clarify.On the second line, that one about mapping mental problems to genes. He shows how a great deal of work has proven fruitless, and it shouldn… This is a public episode. 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I enjoyed listening to Bob Fischer the other day discussing animal welfare. I specifically liked his focus on how one should distribute a budget for charity between human welfare and animal welfare. Before he gets into the different philosophical or logical ways that people might approach the problem, he looks at a model for how we can assess animal suffering on the same scale as human suffering. He approaches this by assessing what he calls the relative Moral Weights of different species.Thanks for reading Nick’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.In his research, as director of the The Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals, Fischer revisits experimental data and metastudies of different metrics both on what you might consider intuitive measurements (for example, should we consider how many neurons each animal has in its brain?) and harder evidence, (say, captive animals may exhibit distressed behaviours that we can measure without anthropomorphising their ‘emotions’) His results are well-argued and for the sake of this discussion I’m going to assume that they are justifiable and robust. He concludes that if we are comparing the suffering of a pig with that of a human, there might be a multiplier of something around say three. That means that the suffering of one distressed human might have the same moral weight as that of three pigs, but with a margin of uncertainty. An octopus might be a smaller differential (as we will understand if we have seen that Netflix documentary) and if we considered a shrimp we would see a bigger gap. Perhaps the most surprising conclusion from his research and the one he asked us to take away, was that if you are comparing human suffering and shrimp or insect suffering we should be considering factors of maybe tens or hundreds but not thousands or millions.  Interestingly with reference to that, when the discussion swung to saving people from malaria, it didn’t mention the plight of the mosquito at all.The first thing we might wonder, is why this matters if we can never know what it feels like to be a shrimp. That’s why I think his metaphor of a charity budget was a good one. If we see that farmed shrimps suffer stress which causes physical damage or death, and let’s say I take a factor of 1/500 for the moral weight of a shrimp then yes, for every $500 I donate to human welfare why not donate one dollar to make shrimp farms more humane? Now put like that it even seems that perhaps 1/500 is being unfair to the shrimp. And of course we might look at how many humans my $500 helps and how much and how many shrimps my $1 affects and adjust my donations accordingly. Fischer also looks at how different people would assess these things and I won’t repeat that here, but he labels them as utility, risk aversion, futility, and ambiguity aversion, so we can note that there is a variety. It’s not an exact science.It’s helpful to be able to use these logical analytical techniques to depersonalise these discussions. This helps us make good decisions about suffering, life and death which can easily become emotive and tribal, even political. So I would agree that this is a good starting point, and I am quite comfortable in using this kind of logic in choosing how to spend my money. But Fischer is also a professor of philosophy, so what about the famous ‘lever on a railway points’ dilemma? The runaway train is coming and I have to choose whether to push the lever on the junction one way to save the life of a human who is strapped to the rails of one siding, or to push it another way and save 500 shrimps, or three pigs, or an octopus. Which would I choose? Well, even on our worst day pretty well everyone would save the human. Wouldn’t we? Same maths same research, but for this thought experiment at least, an entirely different result.So why is there such a discrepancy? I think it lies in the difference between consciousness and awareness, and that difference lies in what time means for different creatures.Going back to my earlier essay on consciousness, I used consciousness and self-awareness fairly interchangeably. Perhaps I might better have suggested a spectrum going from intelligence through consciousness to awareness. Actually I think it’s more like three distinct steps rather than a continuum.But firstly these words are woolly, so I have to define what I mean by them as I go. I was listening to a debate the other day between Steven Pinker and one Jagadish Vasudev (aka Sadhguru) about whether consciousness is a miracle. That interchange, I wouldn’t call it a discussion, didn’t resolve anything, because these two guys have absolutely different definitions of both the word ‘consciousness’ and the word ‘miracle.’ One was saying that if we remain deliberately unsophisticated, then we feel a sense of wonder when we observe nature, the other said that physical systems may still be logical even when they become so complex that they appear to transcend mechanism. Both of their points of view can live perfectly happily in the same universe, (Unlike for example a discussion on religion between Christopher Hitchens and Anne Widdecombe or one on truth between Donald Trump and any number of people who will never have the chance to debate it with him.) So when discussing stuff like this, it’s better if I define what I mean by these woolly words as I go along.  Are all animals intelligent? Yes in my definition they are, and not just animals. The definition I am using here is different from what others may use, so I’m specifying it as the ability to take stimuli and then modify one’s own behaviour to optimise the result. All animals must be able to do that, because they have to carry out whatever actions they need to keep themselves alive. Some are hard-wired, some are explicit. I might say I am more intelligent than a bat even though the bat can catch a fly in mid air in the dark. Why is that? Well, it’s because I can consider abstract concepts of echolocation and triangulation and algebra and Newtonian physics. The bat could never grasp any of those concepts. So I am using some kind of active intelligence whereas the bat is just using muscle memory and intuition. Either way the calculation works, and actually much faster and more easily for the bat than for me.None the less I’m ticking both our boxes for crossing the threshold of intelligence.  Japanese metro slime mould, any plant that turns to the sun, an abacus and my laptop all tick that box too, perhaps even a mousetrap, so it’s a pretty low threshold. It’s also easy to grade a scale up from the threshold and calibrate it experimentally.I am tempted to feel that there are two kinds of intelligence here. One that we might call the hard-wired type of calculation, (and hard wired has an interesting etymology here because a computer does most smart stuff using the opposite of hard wiring) and the other being the explicit kind, where the knowledge is held outside of the organism and considered what we might call academically. But that distinction is actually what I am calling awareness and why I am making these distinctions at all, so bear with me.Next up, consciousness. Perhaps generic consciousness or maybe the potential for cognition. Anyone who doesn’t think a dog or a horse or a cat has conscious has never looked one in the eye. But what does that mean? As a starting point, I’m calling consciousness the ability to differentiate self from environment and to reflect on that, even at a rudimentary level.Perhaps the defining point then is humour? I googled – ‘do animals have a sense of humour?’ I got a couple of not very convincing results about rats laughing at hypersonic frequencies, abused bees becoming pessimistic, and gorillas finding double-meanings in sign language vocabulary. These animals are all showing something more than say our best AI models are doing at the moment. So I’ll give them a tick for cognition – meaning the ability to find meani… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com

I first realised I was destined to be the next Frank Lloyd Wright very early. That was clear because I liked his work. I could draw and I understood physics which would be useful for the structure of those cantilevers. It followed that my stuff would be like his stuff, and my most beautiful works would surely be better looking than his worst ones, and so one day coffee-table books would have to be dedicated to my buildings. And sure enough, in good time, I arrived at the School of Architecture. Now – I just had to learn the skills of building design.So we learnt about bricks and steel, and concrete and glass, about hot and cold water systems and structural calculations and about the difference between cesspools and septic tanks. We learnt about contracts and specifications, about quantity surveying and the terms of agreement between architects and clients. We learnt about how one decomposed snail in a bottle of ginger beer had opened the branch of law that allows architects to get sued by people who aren’t their clients. We learnt about the history and philosophy of building design – ancient, modern and postmodern, we learnt how to create drawings to seduce clients (and our assessors) and how to make the drawings that described what would be built. We went out to study villages and towns and cities and vernacular farm buildings. We learnt about Planning Control and Building Control, and about the Cement and Concrete Association and about the Building Research Establishment. We learnt ergonomics, the requirement for pram stores and ventilated food cupboards in postwar housing, about traffic, and psychology, about determinism and the difference between front doors and back doors, about wayfinding and ecology, about trees and what kind of shrubs you plant to stop people taking shortcuts across flower beds. Interestingly in those days, although I remember one tutor mentioning the ‘sequence of trades,’ we never learnt either project management nor health and safety. The world has moved on since then. And one day we sat in the lecture hall in a course named ‘Design Factors and Methods.’ As the lights dimmed we waited to learn how to design buildings. The lecture was rubbish. I didn’t understand it then and looking at the notes now, it wouldn’t have made a jot of difference if I had done.For example, our lecturer gave us this diagram.He explained, ‘The design process has three stages – the exploration of options, known as brainstorming or divergence, the working out of how it all fits together – and the coming together of solutions as you converge on the result.’ I recall that I was naive enough to copy the diagram and to try to use it in my next student project. It didn’t work of course, but what did work to some extent was thinking about all that other stuff we were learning about, then fiddling with everything in more or less random ways over and again until I got something I liked. What I discovered by experience could have been put into its own academic gobbedygook. I could say that ‘design is a non-linear process’ it progresses in a strange geometrical path composed of circles and dead ends. It uses a lot of paper and even more erasers. It takes place in two stages. The first stage takes several weeks. It is known as the displacement-activity phase and comprises days of chatting, scribbling, and late nights partying. The second stage comprises no more or fewer than exactly two all-night sessions preparing the presentation, and it is known as the panic phase. This process produces symptoms in the student combining those of hangovers and jet lag at the precise moment when the work is to be criticised by rather disappointed tutors.Design, I discovered, could be identified as an activity which needed one week more than it got.So in a nutshell. I spent six years as a student of architecture practising building design without having any idea of how I was doing it. In case you have missed my name on your coffee table books, don’t be surprised. I won an RIBA award for the design of one small building early in my career, the next twenty years trying unsuccessfully to copy the recipe for that design again, and the third and most enjoyable part, learning how to manage people and construction sites.And surrounding us all as students was the insecurity of knowing that architecture as a creative profession had a bad reputation in the public eye. That still surrounds architects now and has been the water that the profession has swum in since the mid 19th century.  Whatever age we live in, it seems that old stuff is generally accepted and the modern is decried. A contemporary account of the nineteenth century redevelopment of Paris for example mentioned the speaker’s reaction to its newly-redeveloped imperial boulevards,“We weep with our eyes full of tears for the old Paris, the Paris of Voltaire… when we see the grand and intolerable new buildings.” and meanwhile the British Palace of Westminster aka the Houses of Parliament were being rebuilt in a sham mediaeval style in what we might now call a populist response against the modern architecture of the day.So what was it and what is it that great architects have that they didn’t teach me? At the time I probably would have said ‘an ego the size of a planet,’ and now I might say ‘some vision that they had the need to express.’ It comes to the same thing. Most of the iconic buildings designed in the early twentieth century seemed pretty ugly when I was a student and I still think of them as inelegant today. But there’s no doubt that those early modern masters were inspired by a vast creative vision and purpose. Each of them described in their own way what they cared about in terms of the function of buildings, their proportions and their expression of materials as serving the population of the modern age. Between them, they changed the face of the world. For the better? Yes, I think so.  I found myself walking around Paris last week. That’s the main reason why this essay is late. I find that the endless magnificence of those classical facades, whether wrapped around the Palace of Versailles, the Louvre Museum or wallpapering the blocks that line any Parisian boulevard, say nothing to me other than shouting the power of wealth. Whereas the Centre Georges Pompidou literally (yes literally) took my breath away. Its expression of structure, and mechanical services as the voice of a new language touches me in a way that makes me see all buildings both ancient and modern with new eyes.And I think that’s what allows some architecture to transcend into art. I don’t think that’s about design at all and it’s certainly not about choice of style, I think it is the difference between art and craft. What distinguishes all art from craftsmanship, is that craftsmanship may express skill and refinement and beauty, and it may be functional and ergonomic, but its purpose is not to express any cultural meaning. Craftsmanship probably has style, but it doesn’t have language, because it doesn’t say anything except ‘I have been well made’. Art on the other hand sets itself apart because it communicates whatever the artist feels passionate about, and with its message, it offers a way for us all to see not just the object itself but the whole world differently. In that context, I have never really understood why singers are referred to as artists, whereas any decent comedian ticks that box the moment they open their mouth.As Picasso famously once said or perhaps didn’t, ‘The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.’ So long as it does that, art can be ugly and it can be devoid of craftsmanship. I’m not saying that the world is better because it contains Tracy Emin’s bed or Marcel DuChamp’s urinal. But I do think it’s better because of the emotions and conversations that surround those things. Such reactions challenge our own creativity and prompt us all to do something more than turn up and live.So that’s my distincti… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com

Roger Daltrey is 80 this year and significantly, he’s still alive. Significantly because it’s almost sixty years since he sang ‘I hope I die before I get old’ and only two years since he said ‘I still do.’ In case you are too young to remember the Who, do yourself a favour and discover them soon.When I put together the equality and diversity statement for my own website I thought long and hard about all the classifications where I should deny prejudice. I came up with nine and the first (I listed them alphabetically) is age.  Thankfully, this is something (unlike skin colour or gender for example) where we can still say whatever we think without risk of being cancelled. So I should be able to put my thoughts on that one down here without fear of losing friends.When I was in my early fifties, I realised that I felt more happy and content than I had ever been before. Now in my late sixties I still feel that way, actually more mentally alive than I have ever been, less limited by my own doubts and beliefs, and more sure of my own position. Freer – I like the word ‘fulfilled.’ Of course my eyes and my ears and my lungs and my prostate gland and my muscles and my joints aren’t what they once were, and they all keep reminding me of my mortality. But on the other hand, my creative output in the past ten years has by far exceeded the total of that from the first five and a half decades of my life. And yet, if you were to ask me if I want to live another thirty years, that would be a definite no. Ask me if I think the world would be better run by youngsters or oldies. Again – I have no hesitation at all in saying by the young.Is that an anomaly? How does it follow? Well for a start from a personal point of view there is that body-wearing-out aches-and-pains thing. This means that one day I won’t be able to focus so well on whatever is coming out of my mind. But there is more to it. As an aside, I think most people are much more creative when they are younger. But it’s much more than that. I believe progress of culture should trump the contentment of individuals and I’m happy to put my life on that line.So as a self-admitted fan of youth, I had to have a self-critical giggle when I compared two recent episodes of the 80,000 Hours podcast. Here’s my personal evaluation: * 75 year old Randy Nesse  – rich deep wisdom* 29 year old Laura Deming  – thin emotive fluffThis is significant because coincidentally in both cases, the discussion was about ageing and whether we should think about stopping it. The interview with Laura Deming was a real disappointment for me both in style and content. Despite being an expert in the subject, she refused to answer several significant questions about ageing. And insisted on focussing instead on why she personally has been passionate about this for the past seventeen years. To save you the arithmetic, that means she started out on this journey when she was just twelve years old. I found her narrative so obscure that I couldn’t resist checking the transcript to see whether it had been compressed and edited, but there are all her ramblings reproduced verbatim just as large as life. I have copy pasted in this footnote over five hundred words from the transcript. And in those five hundred words she says nothing more or less than research into extending lifespan has progressed in the last 50 years, and then evades answering the question of what ageing actually is.But as a real believer in evolution, I gladly admit  that nothing succeeds like success. After all, this woman is not a scientist, she is a venture capitalist who’s enthusiasm has raised $tens of millions for scientific research in just a dozen years. I guess she is sparkling proof of Khalil Gibran’s thesis about the significance of the ‘meaningless half’ that I discussed a couple of weeks back. Deming admits her own horror of the idea of death and incapacity of old age and her life is dedicated to fighting that monster and even to denying any suggestion that ageing is a natural course. Meanwhile conversely the recent 80,000 hours interview with Randy Nesse mentioned ageing as a tiny sidetrack just before the close and concludes the exact opposite. Nesse was asked why we age, and I loved his eloquence. He explained that as an undergraduate he had proposed that ‘it would be good for the species if natural selection made some individuals die each year so that the population could turn over and the species could evolve faster and adapt to changing environments.’Yes I thought, ‘that’s exactly what I think’ in a delicious moment of pride before the fall. Nesse then immediately u-turned by reminding us that evolution doesn’t actually favour good philosophical ideas unless they manifest themselves as a mechanism for the propagation of genes. That good for the species for the oldies to get out of the way thing just didn’t have such a mechanism. He realised instead that our organism takes what I would call ‘a budget of total good health in a lifetime’ (and he calls antagonistic pleiotropy) and skews the delivery of that budget to maximise our physical powers at the moment when we are ready to reproduce, leaving us to suffer the consequences of the tail-end after we have passed on our genes. Yup that’s evolution for you. Nesse concludes ‘ageing isn’t a disease, it’s not something you can fight, it’s something that you might as well be appreciative of, that natural selection has given us all so much extra vigour early in life’Now I love that. Not only can this guy talk in sentences that transfer information, but he also speaks with the good sense embodied in the Serenity Prayer – that’s the one about having the strength to change what you can, the serenity to accept what you can’t and the wisdom to know the difference.Having said that, I am feeling guilty about my negativity on the Deming episode so I want to pick up a couple of the more interesting philosophical threads from that discussion before I consider what ageing actually is.If we did all live forever would it make us nicer people? Apparently there is a part of game theory that reveals that games that go on forever encourage mutual support and collaboration whereas those that don’t, don’t. Well yes that makes sense. But I don’t think it’s enough – firstly Deming specifically wasn’t talking about living forever, just deferring the moment by a decade or ten. Secondly, the extension of old age just isn’t enough to turn our aggressive cultures for the better unless we also take out our competitive youth – and that raises all sorts of other questions about demographics and possibly eugenics. Let’s not go there.Another question was wondering if we live forever, would that rob us of meaning in our lives by taking the urgency out of our YOLO? Now on that, my knee jerk reaction is to sympathise, but only to a limited extent. I have never needed the idea that You Only Live Once to inspire me. I find interest in what is before me to give meaning to my day to day existence. If nothing is pushed at me by my environment. I’m quite capable of playing with a piece of paper, taking the dog for a walk or listening to a podcast. There is lots of research to show that we are happiest when finding meaning in the present, and that contentment is derived from making continuous achievable progress rather than meeting targets. Nesse talks about this stuff elsewhere in the same episode. Now I do see my own life overall as a trajectory, but to have the lid taken off. Would that spoil it or improve it? Actually neither, not really. I only see my life that way in retrospect. It doesn’t inform my enjoyment of today.I was really surprised that the Deming interview didn’t mention demographic economics. It was explained to me when I was about 30 by a pension salesman that I should really be worried about this. He explained that public pensions don’t work by investment in funds for the future, as I might have intuitively expected. They work from year to year. I’m … This is a public episode. 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Quite a simple subject today, but like all this stuff, it’s a bit more interesting when you zoom in a bit.How do we see? Well, as everyone knows, eyes are like cameras. There is a lens at the front that focuses an upside down image on your retina, just like the film or CCD at the back of a camera. Obvious right? God or evolution designed it, humans copied it. Problem solved. That’s how we see. But all that your eyes actually do is they put a flat image into your head of the light that is reflected from objects in the real world. Now that’s a pretty clever trick, and it is complicated enough to have been cited as a proof of intelligent design and therefore the existence of God. That was before archaeology showed just how the eye actually has evolved from light sensitive cells, not once but numerous times with different types of eyes. Not only that, but at least twice eyes like ours have evolved with convergent results. Cephalopoda (that’s squids and octopuses to you and me) have eyes almost identical to mammalian eyes geometrically, but different enough structurally to show that we don’t share a common eye-enabled ancestor. In fact as scientists look at the evolution of the eye, they discover that the earliest type of light sensitive perception evolved before the first brain. Think about it; a brain wouldn’t have had much to do unless it had some means of understanding the environment. So it makes sense that it needed eyes, or ears or some input device, and keyboards definitely weren’t around at that time. From then on, like the partnership between dogs and humans, it seems that eyes and brains evolved together, each influencing and encouraging the development of the other.What happens to that little upside down picture that has been cast by your lens onto the retina anyway?  Presumably, because the image on your retina is upside down, your optic nerve includes a 180 degree twist?  But where does it go after that? Does it lead to a little screen inside your head where mini-you is looking at it to tell the brain what’s going on? Well surprisingly, it doesn’t work like that at all. After splitting up so both eyes are messaging both halves of your brain, the other end of the optic nerve fans out, leading to all sorts of places.  So let’s look at an infant. All those colours and shadows in three dimensions are carefully focussed into a little picture, which is then sent out to lots of different places in our little friend’s head to be made sense of.  By the time we are old enough to write and read stuff like this, the process of understanding the world we live in is so familiar with us that it seems it must always have felt like this. But actually it takes us humans months before we learn how to interpret that information, and understand that it represents the world.There is a great little experiment that was done by Held and Hein in the early 1960s. I guess it would be undoable now, but I don’t think I’m being cruelly exploitative to the participating kittens by referring to it here 60 years later. Two infant fluffballs opened their little eyes for the first time to discover that they were suspended in baskets from a rod. This horizontal rod was pivoted in the middle and there were systems of pulleys and chains arranged so that each of the kittens saw exactly the same things in front of their eyes. Imaginatively in the age of op art, they were given black and white lines to look at. I would have chosen other stuff like balls of string and mice, but whatever.  One of the kittens’ legs poked out through the bottom of its cradle and so it was able to move about. It could walk around clockwise or anticlockwise around the central pivot. It could also turn on its own axis and move towards and away from the centre point as well as crouch down and stretch up while seeing its surroundings. The other kitten’s basket was driven by gears and stuff so it was subject to an identical set of visual stimuli and moved about in exactly the same way, but this second kitten’s legs were kept within its cradle so it had no way of relating what it saw with what it did.  And after six weeks, our scientists were able to establish that the second kitten remained effectively blind while the first had been learning to see and explore.  This isn’t really so surprising. Thirteen years earlier, the Austrian researcher Theodor Erismann had put inverting goggles on his assistant Ivo Kohler to turn everything he saw upside down. Kohler first of all stumbled about comically, but in less than two weeks he was able to ride a bicycle.  Not only that, but you can watch the original video-documented experiment on Youtube today. Within a couple of weeks Kohler was perceiving the world as it is. See – I have swapped the word see for perceive. Was he seeing it as it was?  Well that depends on definitions I suppose.So although it feels natural to us that the world is as we see it, what we actually have is a way of using the fact that light conveniently travels in straight lines to give us enough information to make a data matrix. This is sufficient for us to decode and use in our interactions with our environment. We end up with the feeling that we know what the world looks like but we don’t really. Colour for example is an interpretation we make of the way certain types of energy transmission bounce off certain chemicals.  Colour doesn’t exist ‘out there’ It only exists by the interactions between the world and our perception.  What about the physical geometry of the world, if not its colour?  Well, like the kittens, that is something that we can test in other ways. We compare our real world experience of other senses and our motion with what we see, so we can be pretty sure that if we see a brick wall we shouldn’t drive into it whatever colour it may or may not be.Let’s look at the geometry of the world at a more detailed level. If we see images of textures that look like kitten fur we know that the feeling will be soft; whereas things that glow may be too hot to touch. The point being that we know this not because we are given a hard wired index of ‘fur’ = ‘soft’ and ‘glowing’ = ‘hot’ at birth, but because we learn these things as we go along, just as the kittens learned (or didn’t) that moving their cute little paws in a certain way carried them towards those delightful black lines.So what about bats; how does that work? Well we learn to perceive the real world by interpreting the light that comes to us having been reflected from its surfaces.  Maybe sunlight, maybe artificial light. But the point is that the light that bounces off what we are looking at (or maybe is refracted through it, same difference for the point I’m making) comes from something outside of us.  That doesn’t work in caves or on dark nights.  What is good about light as a way of picking up information is that it travels in straight lines. This means that we learn to do what you might call empirical triangulation. So we can work out where stuff is. We can’t do that with sound because as we know, sound wraps its way around obstacles and we can hear birdsong through the window. But actually that’s not really because light is light and sound is sound, it’s more to do with wavelength.  Visible light travels in waves about 500 nanometres long, that’s half of a thousandth of a millimetre, or a hundredth of the thickness of a single strand of kitten fur. So we can use light to recognise fur because those waves don’t wash around stuff that is so much bigger than they are. On the other hand a sound wave, say middle C has a wavelength of about 1.3 metres and the A at the bottom of the piano, about 12 metres, so those audible sounds are easily able to wrap around obstacles and get to our ears. The lower the pitch, the more they find their way around and through stuff, which is why you can hear the bass so clearly from that hot hatch going down the high street.  Now, we might hear a fly buzzing, but we cou… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com

I found a little book entitled Sand and Foam in our house when I was maybe 16 and as I leafed through its pages of verse, one of the lines jumped out at me because I realised immediately that the Beatles had misquoted, or maybe I should say ‘been inspired by’ it in John Lennon’s song addressed to his late mother Julia on the White Album. Khalil Gibran’s 1926 original reads “Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so the other half may reach you.” It didn’t make any more sense to me at that time than the slightly different lyric of John Lennon’s dirge. I was all about economy of effort back then. I recall we were given a task in school to describe the chairs that we were sitting on in sufficient detail that they could have been re-ordered – an exercise in writing that I later discovered was called specification – and I put my pen down having written Grey plastic shell schoolchair on black tubular steel legs with rubber feet. While everyone else was writing half a page or so. The master picked up my paper and said something like, ‘James’ natural penchant for brevity has surprisingly hit the mark for once.’So it didn’t make sense to me to imagine that anyone would ever bother wasting words, or that if they did so, then it might actually improve their message. In fact as I look back, I’m surprised I read any of Gibran’s lines in that little book at all. As a child I would always skip any verse I had found in a book (Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh). And at the age I was when I found that book, I would have run a mile from anything that rhymed unless it was set to rock music.  A few years on, and when we were taught to draw at my School of Architecture, the tutor explained that anything other than the minimum of black line on white paper to describe what was to be built was ‘noise.’ Yes I could relate to that. Our drawing pens were the weirdest arrangement of precision-engineered plastic and steel with a strange little removable sleeve enclosing a spiral airway that was destined to either flood with indian ink, leaving blots, on the paper or else to clog up and produce no mark at all. Stencilling or hand lettering annotations on those drawings with those temperamental Rotring pens was even worse, so again there was even more incentive to minimise – lines and words both.Now I look back on those days and my feelings on brevity and about poetry especially are very different.  I now understand the concept of the ‘meaningless half’ very well, but before I go there, I will take time out here to make a very sincere tribute to brevity for arts sake as opposed to brevity for the sake of the lazy schoolboy on his plastic chair.  I love the economy of line drawings especially. Quentin Blake and Bill Watterson never wasted a single line between them. And I really admire the skill of advertising copywriters who can get so much meaning into so few words – ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ and ‘Genius’ were two marvellous pieces of minimalist advertising copy from the early 1970s. The first one used a non-existent but plausible German phrase to ring more bells than a thousand descriptive words could ever have done in the minds of the potential English car buyer. The phrase reminded us that the Germans could make better cars than us; that there was no point in clinging onto post-war prejudice (very much still a thing in the seventies) and sentimental attachment to our poor old automotive industry (- almost not a thing any more). It was time to face facts and get ourselves an Audi which was technologically superior and actually drove much better too.  Similarly the single word, ‘Genius’ shone a spotlight on the brilliance of the classic gold harp logo on its perfect black and solid white glassful. It raised the humble pint of Guinness extra stout to the status of all those foreign and Scottish drinks about which books and books of b******t were written, and bought by the British public at the time. Both of these were beautiful examples of high art in the new commercial age.Copywriting, Poetry or song lyrics can be so economical because they make use of the culture that the artist and the punter share to communicate much more than what is said. And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, they danced by the light of the moon. With just those few words we know that the owl and pussycat had discovered that perfect ageless love. Why? Because so many other authors had previously pumped those concepts of dance and hand holding and island seashores and moonlight so full of romantic significance, that Edward Lear just had to mention them in verse to pull the heartstrings of the reader over the horizon and into the sunset. Yes, there is something brilliant that pops out of inspired artistic brevity. Haha  – and of course I could prick that bubble by talking about mathematical or physical formulas here too – just a short string of letters and numbers to represent pages of discussion on planetary orbits, curved space and rolling tides. But I’ll spare you the detail. I think you get the idea.Instead I’ll jump back to the Owl and The Pussycat and Khalil GibranThey danced by the light of the moon, the moon, the moon. They danced by the light of the moon.  Hmm more than 50% meaningless padding there.Songs not only pad out the lyrics with repetition and dooby dooby doos, they also demand that the voice, much more often than not, is singing concurrently with other noises. My drawing tutor had described anything but black on white as noise, and of course he was referring to the static noise with which any kind of broadcast or recorded sound was accompanied in the pre-digital era.But although the band or orchestra’s accompaniment may be beautiful, it is still going on in parallel. It is still competing against the singer’s voice for the same pressure waves rattling around through the ossicles in our ears. Not only can we untangle all those multiple simultaneous notes and chords and voices, but they actually intensify the experience, and the message of the song.Or look at the poem,  Jabberwocky. Hardly half of the words in that one are even real words – how is that for distractive noise? And yet from it we can still understand the epic tale of heroism, the weapon’s fine craftsmanship, and the hero’s strength of both body and mind in conflict – set against fearsome monsters in an environment of dark warnings, joyous homecomings and the warmth of a father’s embrace.But these are all examples of creative culture, and what is missing or obscured in them is left out or hidden deliberately because the gaps in the words make space in the mind of the receiving party for imagination to create a richer experience than would have been filled with more description. As Alistair Cooke allegedly once said, “I prefer radio to TV because the pictures are better.” Gaps in descriptive flow, artfully used, allow our imaginations to fill space with something richer than could be filled by the artist. “In radio, you have two tools. Sound and silence.” so said Ira Glass. So silence on radio is like the white space in the graphic design of a website, a glossy magazine or a coffee table book. These media all use other ways of deliberately adding noise or reducing the contrast of black and white. There was a fashion a decade or so ago for putting a copy of a logo on a letterhead or the side of a lorry so big that it overlapped the edges and half its area was lost. These oversized extra logos were always of a very low contrast. Again the design deliberately added inessential repetition and noise, and part of the thing was missing beyond the edges. But again this gave a touch of class by cultural reference, in this case the suggestion is of watermarks and quality. A quality that is at once both ephemeral and also even larger than the page (or the vehicle) which is carrying it.But what about that simple transmission of information rather than art or design, and the m… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com

Gotta love it that kids are so fast these days. Yes, I know we are supposed to grumble that they have the minds of goldfish, stir-fried in their x-boxes and microwaved by their smartphones. But let’s face it, kids are programmed to be inquisitive and to learn and to be creative and to laugh. In a nutshell that means they are naturally sharper, and can be smarter than the rest of us. And on top of that, this is the age of the kid.  For most of civilised history, the denizens of childhood have been suppressed as inconveniences without knowledge or experience. Childhood then, was not much more than a waiting period for the respectability that was supposed to be delivered on the 21st birthday.  Now we can choose to realise how lucky we are. We live in perhaps the first age where it isn’t considered crazyfringe to respect what kids have to offer. I mean really respect it, not just love it for its cuteness. And if youngsters do have shorter attention spans, then that means they might actually get wherever they are going a bit faster than the rest of us.Take the fourth wall for instance. Ancient Greek theatre didn’t trust either its writers or its audience to communicate between them. And so they typically engaged a ‘chorus’ to explain the dramatic action to the audience. Shakespeare had advanced a bit after two thousand years so he often not only had a couple of storylines going on at once but also maybe a narrator, hovering between the audience and the action on the stage. At the start of Henry V for example the introducing narrator, (named Chorus – a coincidence? I think not.) Refers to the theatre itself, both physically and functionally, and the play specifically. He asks the audience to suspend disbelief sufficiently to image battlefields and palaces within the tiny “cockpit” of a theatre.  But having a guy on stage who mentioned that he’s on a stage doesn’t break the fourth wall. Like Zaphod Beeblebrox, he’s just this guy, you know?  I’m gonna skip over the 20th century now. Why? Because I wrote three paragraphs about it and they were turgid, off topic and boring. So I erased them. Ahhh!  If you want to know about the 20th century, then read John Higgs. That guy is brilliant. Now where was I? Yes the fourth wall. Now – because I’m a wise old man and you may perhaps not be I’m going to patronise you and assume that you need me to explain. The stage of an old fashioned theatre has a back, a couple of sides and a front. These four sidey things all have theartre-ish names, but that’s irrelevant. If we are looking at a play on that stage, then it is as if we are seeing the action through an invisible wall at the front of the stage into the scene within. Invisible to us, but apparently solid to the characters on the other side. If we are watching a sitcom on the TV then the TV screen is the equivalent of that same thing. That is the non-existent fourth wall of the dramatic scene through which we are looking. It was specifically named and attention was drawn to it to by the enlightened French philosopher Denis Diderot, who stated in 1758 that by ignoring the audience, performers could better imitate reality. And so it was that this convention was codified and made explicit. A convention that everyone until the latter 20th century seemed happy to live with, allowing the audience to observe the rather tame inuendoes of Brian Rix or the imagined battlefields of Shakespeare’s ‘vasty fields of France’ So when Shakespeare’s Chorus turns up at the beginning of Henry V, he inhabits the universe of the audience and talks about the play is if conversing with them. During his speech though, the fourth wall is sitting there in its perfect non existence, and its subtle one-way visibility is assumed, respected and unbroken.  Young Prince Hal doesn’t ask Chorus who he was talking to.  So it took centuries and centuries before the self aware self referential late 20th century thought it might be amusing to disrespect that fourth wall by having characters on stage or in a film acknowledging the existence of the audience.  Now as soon as they do that, they are opening up a can of worms of a completely different category from the convention of drama. Because the moment the actors (or rather their characters) acknowledge the audience, they are also acknowledging the fact that they are in an universe-within-a-universe. The artificial universe of the drama exists within and as a subset of the real universe in which the theatre is located on a certain street. Yes it took adults all the time from Ancient Greece to the late 20th century to discover that this idea has creative potential, skipping several golden ages of drama on the way. Even as late as 1990, I remember feeling almost uncomfortable as Francis Urquart addressed me through the camera and TV screen in House of Cards. But I’m an adult –  any kid who has been to pantomime or who has ever shouted ’Behind you, Mr Punch!’ gets it. They get the weirdness of it, and when they read Captain Underpants, they understand exactly why it is that when when Harold orders everyone to stop following orders, it’s even more funny when George tops the gag with ‘We’ve already used that joke in this book.’ Yes, there is actually a fandom page that lists every time the fourth wall is broken in the Captain Underpants books! I know that I jumped from theatre to books there, but the implication is the same. When the fourth wall is broken then characters in fiction acknowledge the existence of an enclosing ‘real’ universe which contains the ‘fictional’ universe that they inhabit. Fictional for whom? Real for whom?So yes, eight year old kids get that stuff that it took adults two and a half thousand years to invent. I’m sorry! However much I tried through three complete redrafts and any number of edits, I couldn’t compress that digression about childhood any more, so it will just have to stay put.Now at last having got that out of the way, I can talk about meta. Before Mark Zuckerberg took all those millions off his share value by choosing it as the new brand name for Facebook, we already had words such as meta-data meta-language and meta-analysis.   So meta, with its data describing data, its language classifying language and its studies analysing studies is a bit of a fourth wall thing.  Break the fourth wall and instantly you open the possibility of one universe inside another. But of course it doesn’t stop there. Meta-analysis, for example, as well as analysing lots of previously published tomes of field research may, also collect other meta analyses. In fact, once you have two levels of looking at something, you always have the possibility of an infinite number of levels – as anyone who has played with two mirrors can tell you.  The characters in a play seemed to have their own self-awareness and lives and cares and history two minutes ago. But now they acknowledge the existence of me and my meta (to them) universe. Not only do I gasp or laugh. I am drawn to postulate about the existence of a meta universe outside the one I know. And suddenly – zzzzip we have an infinite onion-layered universe of universes all nested inside each other. The way that I hear this possibility most commonly discussed is when people suggest that perhaps we live in a digital simulation, and if so, then is that simulation inside another one? Etcetera. Neil deGrasse Tyson makes a convincing argument that if  there are two layers it is statistically almost certain that there are many more than two.So the word meta immediately conjures infinite possibilities outside and bigger than our own awareness. But does it go the other way, downstream?  No not really, not yet. Captain Von Trapp’s kids put on a musical puppet play within the movie Sound of Music but that doesn’t imply that the characters played by the puppets have lives of their own as soon as the show finished.  After they are done singing the Lonely Goat… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickjamesillustrator.substack.com