52 Jokers Wild

We Are The Champions

We Are The Champions S2E27

We share a conversation with Billy Schwer, a world champion boxer who fought his way to the top and found himself struggling when the limelight fade. And yet he was able to turn it all around, face his fears and become a champion helping others, especially middle-aged men, find new meaning in their lives. Providing encouragement against the feeling of impostor syndrome. Showing that our vulnerabilities quite often demonstrate our strengths. Whereas sometimes we think we have to be strong and quite often that makes us weak and vulnerable. In ways that we can't comprehend. We're not just contenders, we’re champions in the game of life. So play the game, enjoy the chaos and enjoy the show.

Mixing Cocktails in the Bar of Life

Mixing Cocktails S2E26

Our special guest this week is Lori Gatsi-Barnett, Entrepreneur, Motivational Speaker, and Founder of JoinHer.com. Garvin confesses that he is tool-less, but when it comes to handiwork, he is adamant that that’s someone else’s problem. Meanwhile, George has all the tools and know-how to use them, most of them, while Lori argues that more women know how to use the tools than men. Then we got onto big cars and little cars and Lori got Garvin to blush, momentarily. Then he went off about his G-Wagon. (“What’s a G-Wagon?” asks George.) The discussion merges into the importance of coffee breaks to chat with colleagues and solve problems and how these days, with no chat at breaktimes, mole-hill problems often turn into mountains. Lori talks about why it is important to understand your own worth so that you can eliminate your fears. So, another show full of philosophical banter, tool rattling, and a mouse.

Thank God It's Friday

Thank God It’s Friday S2E25

We've been talking about The Boomtown Rats and found ourselves being connected with the actual song proving the algorithms are working away. What further amazed me? Because we had not listened to the song, I Don’t Like Mondays before we did the show, all the way through this show we were talking about the issues discussed in the song. The very girl who had a Silicon chip in her head that went out and did the deed that she did, which wasn't very pleasant, seemed to be suffering the same pressures, we were talking about, that society put on all of us, the humdrum of the world we are living in, the pressure pot causing us all kinds of problems that make us want to explode. And we were talking about how if we don't work on these problems and release the pressure. We will either implode, explode, or stop functioning altogether. In this show, we talk about having to slow down to begin to appreciate who we are as human beings. And by not overly worrying about the future or fretting about the past, we can start to see what it is that we meant to do now and not overthink it.

Don't Like Mondays

Don’t Like Mondays S2E24

What keeps on seeping through is there is only time! So that negativity has to go, and we have to accept the little wins. Garvin reminisces on a video clip of a Marathon ad from 1987 when he had hair and saw himself as a Boomtown Rat. He considered himself to be a bit of a Bob Geldof avatar with his hair and accent in London. So here we are. Back on a Monday morning in 2021, even though our show goes on Friday. We have these little trepidations that have seeped in from the weekend. Who is this all for? What is the way forward? What are we going to do? And what's been happening is we get those little chitter chatterboxes bringing us back to where we were a year ago. Are we doing the right thing? The little nerves start to get in there and you can hear it in our voices as we started to shake a little bit. We have to talk through where we are going and what are we going to do. However, this morning is quite interesting because we had a little bit of a buzz and that's not too bad.

8 out of 10 Cats Prefer...

8 out of 10 Cast prefer …

This week we have our guest, Rian Lanigan from Sandler Training, and he is a podcast host. We talk about creating podcasts and how to find audiences. The topics diverge from what we believe to what’s beyond belief and just fantastical. Diversity of conversation leads to how important critical thinking is and understanding the process so that everyone has a voice, including Garvin. No, wait, he always has a voice! Rian shares with us how he is going about building his guest list and the way he has racked them to gradually move up the ladder and how by simply asking he has had some amazing new guests, including BAFTA nominees. The whole process of ranking talent gets Garvin reminiscing about his courting days, where he wasn’t shy to run up to the best-looking girls to ask them to dance. Images of “A Beautiful Mind” flash into George’s head as he pictures Jon Nash suggesting how all the guys go for the beautiful girl’s best friends because they don’t want to first get ditch by their favourites only to get ditch because the next girl knew they had become second best. All this leaves the beautiful girls feeling unwanted because no one will talk to them – except Garvin. 8 out of 10 Cast prefer …

Electric Sheep Nightmare

Electric Sheep Nightmare. S2E22

Garvin and I invited Dylan Hogan, one of our Interns, onto the show. Which was a bit daunting for him. Especially, as we started off with Art Masking Fluid. This led us onto green screen effects and into sci-fi. We did try to bring it right back again to some kind of normality but that was short-lived. We moved on to androids and electric sheep. At one point Star Trek turned up in the middle of it as well. We looked at whether or not do we need to have tin cans to sail around the universe? Or do we just need to dematerialise from here and materialise somewhere else? Though this is probably the best idea, we haven't yet got that technology - yet. We conclude that the aliens might just be shouting at us, but we can't hear because we're not tuned into them properly. From Garvin’s perspective, they need to tune in to us, not the other way around. Who's got the superior intelligence? At the moment Garvin thinks he has, so they’ll have to do as he asks otherwise, they can clear off somewhere else. Poor Dylan just struggles to make sense of it all feeling totally flummoxed trying to keep up with each thread of the conversation. Will he survive?

#FILMACADEMY #FILMSCHOOL #PODCASTSHOW

Can Do! Will Do!

Can Do! Will Do! S2E21

Don't let things that you don't know stop you from moving forward when there's something easier that you could do just keep on moving. That’s something Garvin and I have found. You know we have had blocks in developing certain projects at the moment, and it's just that there are things we don't know at the moment and they are blocking or stopping our way forward. But that hasn't stopped us from moving forward in recording these shows. The shows are giving us the opportunity to talk things through and work things out and reflect on what it is that we're doing and where we are. The shows have been very useful because they're also helping us relate other stories to one another about the journeys that we've been on and what things are important. I think one of the things that we've realised in this session is that families are important, work comes second, and any other projects should come third. And as Garvin rightly said, we've actually reached this point in our lives where it's not about just surviving, and sustainability. It is about self-actualization. It is about seeing all those activities throughout the whole of our lives that we've had an inclination about, putting all the dots together, lining up and linking them together, and realising what we need to do to accomplish these dreams. We want to see that Eureka moment. We want to see the light bulb come on, and then we want to sit down in the dark and watch the picture perform in front of us. That's where we are now.

#FILMACADEMY #FILMSCHOOL #PODCASTSHOW

Take Stock

Take Stock S2E20

This week, we have come to the end of a slight journey that we've been working through and that part of the journey is that we've had a couple of interns with us. We still have one of them with us, but the other two interns fulfilled their obligations to us last Friday. So, we found ourselves coming to the end of that chapter, which is really good because they produced some amazing work. I've managed to get one of the people connected up to somebody else. Really appreciate that. So, we are sowing seeds out there in the industry which will hopefully get some of those guys some work.

But what this means is that we've come to an end of a journey. We have lots of media that we've suddenly to go through, and we're taking stock. We’re starting to work out what we have got? What does this actually mean for us? Where does this leave us? We still have a show that we have to produce every week, but we've got nearly 300 pieces of media or thereabouts that we can distribute. across various different social networks. We’re still trying to get a handle on what those social networks are all about. We do not necessarily understand the social networks, but we also are aware that lots of other people don't understand them as well, and as they seem to be successful why shouldn’t we be. So, we are taking stock.

I Don't Know & I Don't Care

“I don’t know. I really don’t know”. S2E19

This was the quandary Garvin and I found ourselves in when we started this show. We were flummoxed. It was totally beyond us. We had started to question ourselves about everything. Were we going in the right direction? I don’t know. Could this be the wrong path? I don’t know. Do we care? No, I don’t…. Probably not. We were on the journey and open to… Hang on. The universe is about to interrupt us again. To through in the spanner that will dash all our plans but may, just might give an interesting twist to the story that was totally unexpected. The visitor, also on a mission that could just change everything.

The Passion Project

The Passion Project S2E18

An Uncontrollable Beast, or something we should simply put to rest? With the Elephant in the Room, we have to look at the burning questions. In the bull ring, are the elephants competing with each other? Or collaborating with each other to focus on the audience and performance? If we just hold onto the seed of our passion nothing will happen but if we bury it in the ground and let it die it will root itself and become a big tree. With patience, we can wait to reap the fruits. Is this story really about our passion projects? Is there a time when we should let them go and bury them? Is this our uncomfortable elephant in the room? Are our jokers wild uncomfortable? This week the elephant in the room gets pretty scary as we consider controlling the uncontrollable. How most of the time we're trying to put up parameters so that we can control the environment we are in, but is that possible?