Office. Joining me is jeff okeefe and sarah clip. I am pleased to have both of them here. Let me begin with you, tell me what happened . The trump administration, the president , and other key leaders were saying they had the votes, and in fact, they did. Was it difficult to pull this off . Absolutely. They have been trying for weeks, charlie, and they did it today by the skin of their teeth. The magic number was to get it over 215, 216 which they barely did. They called the vote shortly thereafter. No democrats voted for this. Article conservatives dont ardent conservatives dont think the bill went far enough. They decided they had to do it on thursday and they did it. It is a significant achievement, whether you are a fan of this president or republicans or not, there is no denying the house pulled off something many thought they could not do. This is the first major legislative achievement for House Speaker paul ryan, who has been on the job a little over 18 months. Certainly of course, the signature achievement so far for President Trump. Yet the senate remains, if you thought the house was difficult, let me introduce you to the upper chamber. [laughter] the senate is going to be a struggle. You already have two republican senators who have come out today and said they do not support this bill. Some of them are very concerned about medicaid. The American Health care act will cut a lot of money from medicaid. We do not know exactly how much. We are still waiting on the cbo score. It is probably in the neighborhood of 800 billion, which is a huge concern to the senators in the states that expanded medicaid. This is a big victory for republicans. Now, the senate has to go go through a lot of the fights that the house already did. There is discussion the house the senate might start its own bill from scratch. This is one victory in an ongoing fight. Now the focus turns to the senate and what they are going to do. Charlie there has been much discussion, including with my aboutgue john dickerson, the president as to what was in the bill and not in the bill. Give us a sense of the key aspects of that conversation. Part of the debate over the last three or four days. What is in the bill and what is not in the bill . The president suggested this is a bill that protects people with preexisting conditions. He said he wants to sign a bill that protects everybody with preexisting conditions. The problem with those statements are there are actual provisions that are not good for someone who has a preexisting condition. One of the ways that the conservative members of the house caucus were brought on board was by letting Insurance Companies in some states seek a waiver to charge sick people higher premiums. This is really a nonnegotiable for the Freedom Caucus. There wanted to get rid of this rule called community rating. If this bill that the house passed goes through, if it is signed into law by President Trump, we will once again have a market were sick people will have higher premiums. Charlie and sometimes high deductions, too. Yes. Charlie when you look at this bill and who gave up what, who made the toughest compromise . I think it is more mainstream, moderate republicans who had to go along to get the concessions sarah was just talking about. These ads write themselves. Democrats are in fantastic political position, because now they get to run campaign ads against Republican Senate are republicans across the country. To cut hundreds of billions of dollars from medicaid. If you got cancer, you will have to pay more for your health care. If your mother is sick, you have to pay more for her Health Care Plus your own. All sorts of different kinds of ways they can spin this. We had a Group Interview with nancy pelosi, and she conceded saying it is much easier for us to talk about things and they are going to be taken away from americans as to when you are trying to explain what you are going to do to change a big law that really is becoming a settled issue for many americans, even if they have general concerns with it. I would say it is people who faced difficult reelections next are in the suburbs, certainly in the northeast, surly some for congressional districts and a handful of congressman in california that will face an interesting and challenging time in the next few months explaining what they did, especially if that estimate from the congressional budget office, the nonpartisan counters comes back and demonstrate yet again that tens of millions of people could Lose Health Care coverage and that this bill could potentially cost billions of dollars to the federal government. That was a big risk they took in having this vote, not knowing exactly the potential cost of it come and in many cases, nubbers members conceding that they did not read the thing. Charlie why did the president feel like he had to do this now instead of going directly to tax reform . Because you need a lot of the savings that republicans helped to generate from health care in order to help pay for an figure out tax reform that is the basic policy answer. But he also knows that if you cannot get health care, it may be impossible to get tax reform, and maybe very difficult to do anything else, and they needed to get to a point where they got a win. House republicans said, we can government and come together on something as difficult as this was. It was a big step. Rightfully today, wanted to celebrate that with House Republicans and delayed his trip to new york to see the australian Prime Minister in order to do so. Thinge, to date, the only congress has given him is the nomination of Supreme Court justice neil gorsuch. They have a working they have a working relationship. We have a sense of how the white house and how the house can work together. Depending on how the final Health Care Bill will look like and sara is the expert on this on how exactly they would save money or to move money around, it would make doing tests are from a policy standpoint as well. Charlie sarah . Sarah it would be a step forward, but we are seen that seeing that health care is becoming this allconsuming task. Back in january, President Trump said he wanted to sign and sign an Obamacare Repeal bill in his first day of office. It is hard to see a timeline where republicans are both able to finish health care this year and go into tax reform given all of this work that has to be done. The senate is talking about writing its own bill, starting from scratch and sort of merging those together. When you look at the legislative calendar, it seems hard, but not impossible to achieve both health care and tax reform, two major policy overhauls in the same year. Charlie, there was a moment today at the white house rose president nt where the said, maybe we should get rid of paul ryan, no, he is going to stay. The president did not deny that he had thought about it, and did nothing to suggest that he wants ryan to stay put and is happy with the work he has done. Clearly, that relationship has been strained. It wouldve been far worse if this had not happened both for ryan and for trump, but more importantly, for their relationship. Of those two are not able to work together, the Republican Party and their ability to govern would be seriously jeopardized. Charlie paul ryan has consistently said ever since obamacare was passed, republicans had said, we got to do something about it. They try to change it in every possible way including a court challenge. Here it is, finally having a republican president , not to have acted on this according to paul ryan would have been to define of their own constituency. It wouldve been an existential crisis. He made the point on the house floor before the vote. He said, look, there are people in this chamber who are here because they vow to take this vote. If we do not take this vote, their entire political existence is called into question. They understand that much of their political success in recent years has been to rail against legislation like this. They needed to demonstrate that they tried very hard to get it done. One of the interesting dynamics we have seen developed is that no one wants to be blamed for stopping this. In the first round of negotiations, the Freedom Caucus was a roadblock to passing the health bill. It was then the moderates who were in the hot seat. It is like this Health Care Hot Potato that no one really wants to drop, even if they are not thrilled with the final product. I think we will see that dynamic play out in the senate. One of the things i learned from this Health Process is that nobody at the end of the day wants to be the one with the finger pointed at them, saying you are the one standing in the way of this Campaign Promise we have made for seven years. I think that will be a motivating factor in the senate to try to pass something. It does not look like the house was able to do this, but we were the place where it all fell apart. Charlie when you look at this bill, which many people have not [laughter] the point has been made how rare is that that people are asked to vote about something that they do not know what is in there . Sarah it is incredibly rare. This is what happened with the Affordable Care act. Republicans demanded they needed to be a score before you vote. It also seems quite risky for the republican members. It has been mostly democrats chastising republicans for doing this. We could see a cbo score in the next week or two that shows millions of people losing coverage. That vote has since been taken. You cannot take back the fact he you voted for it. It seems quite the risk republicans are taking decide to vote for a Health Care Bill not knowing who was covered in how much it will cost. Charlie they can go to their constituents and said, they did it. We said we about to repeal and replace obamacare and we did it. We dont know for certain, charlie, that they have. The way that it is written, it is not a wholesale replacement of the Affordable Care act. It is a sweeping, conservative rewrite, what elements but elements of the law will still be there. If you are one of those ardent conservatives who wanted to see completely wiped clean and your clean, then you are not going to be happy. If they go on a week long recess, that is underway, if they get asked by someone at the Grocery Store at a town hall meeting next week, what is really in this thing . If they then struggle to answer that, even their republican supporters would wonder, was that the best thing to do . It shows you they were willing to put all of that at risk and still hold a vote because they understood that the consequence of dragging it out even longer and possibly fumbling the ball yet again was worse than taking the vote now starting this process and taking it over to the senate. Charlie so, is it greater than 50 50 that the republicans will be able to vote in the house and senate. Sign have something signed by the president that will be a republican act of health care . Sarah i think it is an uphill battle, but the desire to have something is very strong. Given republicans control the senate, the house, and the white house, it would be hard to say that we were not able to get this done. And they hold 52 seats. The question will be whether they get at least 51, because there is no democrat who plans to vote with them. As it was described to me by democratic aides yesterday, we are sitting on our hands watching republicans deal with this. Charlie ed and sarah, thank you. We will be right back. Stay with us. Charlie 23 years ago, three selfdescribed hipsters created a free montrealbased magazine, which quickly developed a reputation for bold, provocative reporting. It was called vice. It has since become a Multimedia Organization valued at nearly 5 billion. Along the way, the company has eschewed many of the trappings of traditional news media and instead created what it calls immersive journalism. As harden described news with an edge. Vice news tonight was launched. George smith is the founder and a host of their with the documentary series on hbo. Eekly documentary series on hbo. And josh is the executive Vice President of news executive producer of vice news tonight. I am pleased to have them both back on this program. Tell me vice media is, as if i did not know. We started the magazine and in montreal, and then we came down here as the first dot com revolution kind of went bust. We then moved to brooklyn and started being a digital company. We were the first to do online video and native advertising and all that good stuff. We then got bigger and bigger and grew internationally. Now we are in 80 countries and a tv networks. We are online. We have mobile. We have agencies, we have record leabe record labels. Charlie it is a Media Company . That at about 5 billion . Last year. [laughter] charlie your show is about hellbent libertarianism . Yeah. I was lucky that i got to spend time with david. Charlie we loved him on that show. I loved him. We met when he was shooting page one, and we butted heads in the n we becamed the really good friends. I remember when they called me, they said if we get chain, will you come to dublin for round two . We said sure. It was kind of a lovefest. They sent up all these irish musicians, and we danced around this crazy castle together. We had a lot of fun together. But he was one of the best. He called it right. Of no rules, nonparadigm, nonpolitical. Olemic. Paradigm, nonp charlie is it news or entertainment . It is news, but it is entertaining news. I think that, you know, one of the things, to speak of reviews or critiques, the first review of vice news is that New York Times said and i am paraphrasing, but it is hipsters with skinny jeans and tattoos highfiving in war zones. Everybody was bummed, but i said look, they are not saying this stuff is not great or good news. They are not getting us on the facts. They are just saying we look different from them. If we look different from them, guess what . That is our audience. That is the millennials. So you can have the older generation, but we will take the younger generation. If youre making fun of the way we dress, it is a win. Charlie you have the hbo series, then you decided you wanted to come up with a nightly presentation. It was a combination. Charlie he said it was his idea and that it was not a combination. [laughter] richard loves the news that we create for hbo. And so, he loves what we do for hbo, and we love being on hbo. It is a great platform for us. When he came to us and said, we want to do this all the time and we want to do it nightly. It was a big conundrum because we did not want the voice of god or hosts, or to look like other news. It would just be derivative of what they would be. So, we had to reinvent news which is hard to do. So, i got sick of actually being beaten by this guy at all the awards shows every year when he was at bloomberg. We would always be up for best magazine, and he would win it. [laughter] when we wanted someone with a Creative Vision to say, im going to reinvent news, which is hard to do because it has to be recognizable enough to call it news, but different enough so we are not derivative of anything else. Charlie you have been in Time Magazine and really made Bloomberg Businessweek a magazine. You had no trepidation about this, because when you were leaving, you had tons of people who wanted you to come. Why was this right for you . It was a combination of things. I like solving problems, and the naughtier the problem, the more interested i am. But what i learned over the years and i have been blessed with having good patrons, is that you need support because you are not going to get it right the first time out. When you are taking on a big media problem, like how you get people to watch something that has not changed in 60 years, on the one hand, there was shane who was the right kind of media kind of being media rogue and saying we are going to do it differently. We will figure it out. It was expressing the kind of commitment that you need and the insistence on quality. I felt safe, because jumping into the most competitive landscape, delivering news over the air, is not a safe thing, but i like for all the things i was interested in, you could be smart, get permission to experiment, and that is a dream. That is what you want to be able to do. Charlie what are the elements of the nightly show . Josh when shane and i first spoke about this and i think i have said this to him and i said, nobody needs this, right . The media has changed so much. If you are an engaged news consumer, you are getting it all day on your phone, over the radio, watching tv. Nobody needs it to just tell you nobody needs anyone to just tell you what happened. What happened is pretty obvious. If you are going to do this, you have to make people want it by seducing them. You have to give them something a little familiar. We are unconventional in many, many ways. The thing we are very conventional about is, you watch a show, youre going to hear a lot about what happened in the world today and you understand it better. That is the basic value proposition. From there, we looked at what conventional news delivered. We saw that it is the only news product where it is on at the same time. It has the same format which is one person behind a desk. Oftentimes, they are doing the same kinds of stories. So, lets start over. Lets make the thing we want to make. The visual inspiration in some ways was saturday night live on the one hand and sesame street on the other. Not because we want to be funny or childish, because they know who they are marketing to. You go to saturday nigh live becuase you want to laugh and you go to sesame street educate your kids. No matter what the problem there they are trying to solve, they have moves. Saturday night live does it with shorts, commercial spoofs, they have ways to package all of those ideas. Sesame street is sometimes an ethical dilemma and the characters get involved. The first to talk about was having moods. Not just an anchor at a desk. As good as we are at immersive journalism, we need more than that. We need data that moves on screen. We need animation. One of the reasons people have fallen out of favor with tv news is that if you do not have footage, you do not have a story. So, early on we have said there are a lot of things that happen in this World Without a camera. How are we going to capture it . Charlie that is interesting you say that. The Big Media Companies and i will add fox to it. They all reach up to 5 million or 6 Million Viewers a night. Is that out of favor . We have the youngest audience according to nielsen of any new show on the cable networks. There is some consistency, obviously. Charlie 12 and 13 . [laughter] i am sure hbo would be thrilled if it was. Somee has to be personality in the presentation but there has to be some personality in the presentation. Charlie what is the personality . It is not an anchor or a voiceover. It is a mix. Your audience is tracking stores outside of your news program in they are bringing context to it. They are going to put up with some longer form storytelling. We do packages that are sometimes anywhere from four to 12 minutes. We do it on the faith that if they like it they will come back again. I think if you look at the numbers, then you say ok, hbo is in 30 million homes. The networks are in full distribution. So they are in hundred million homes. B, if you look at some of the top news shows that are 200,000, 300,000 the fact were doing 500,000 off the bat and were the number one digital for hbo is fantastic. If you combine the nightly and the weekly, we are doing somewhere north of 5 million ourselves. So, now it is video on demand. It is not applestoapples, but the numbers are very similar. Charlie what is the difference between what you are doing and what he is doing . He does all the work and he will take me out to lunch. [laughter] i work on some of the longer detail stuff. I do some of the interviews. I like to get into the field and shoot, but i dont have a lot of time. Charlie you are an executive as well as being onair. The weekly is my baby, but josh is on weekly and on specials and on nightly. Charlie when is that show on, vice . Friday nights. Charlie take a look at this clip from the season five premiere from february 2017 which features you reporting from the north sea on the cause of Climate Change. Here it is. We just landed here in the north sea on one of the biggest Oil Platforms in the world. We are talking to a company who has admitted Climate Change is real and supported the gop ecoprotocols. E we are going to see how big oil and gas can do something to reduce emissions. [end video clip] charlie you see what i see there is reporting, and i see a lot of video, well done. And i hear a lot of music. [laughter] that story is actually about there is a lawsuit against exxon that is being put forth by a number of attorneys general in america. Saying they knew about Climate Change, yet spent they developed they spent millions of dollars to say that it wasnt happening. A lot of the same scientist that did research into tobacco did the same for big oil. We were talking to a lot of lawyers about the lawsuit, which isnt great tv. So we went and said, norway is interesting because they are progressive government, yet, they are the biggest oil and natural gas producers. And they say, yes Climate Change is happening because of oil and gas, and we have to do something about that so we are doing carbon capture. All of those rigs are actually energy coming from hydro. So to have an oil company tell the truth was fantastic. They are on these platforms. Back in the 1980s, the elevated the platforms by eight to 12 feet. It cost them millions and millions of dollars. They said we had to get them insured for many years. They were raising everything by eight feet and now it comes about that that is the level of sea level rise, and so it was sort of a gotcha moment. Charlie you shoot and broadcast the same night . Yes. Charlie do you have to do that or can you package stuff and decide . We have longer lead stuff we invest a bunch of time in. We just, you know, on the show last week we did a piece we started shooting really in december about Gang Violence in chicago. Takes a long time. But we are oftentimes really just cutting in the control room , and we go live two or three nights a week needing to feed live to hbo and what youre seeing has just been dispatched. Were trying to strike this balance. We need to use that time to get as much up to date stuff into the show. Were going to do it. We also know that like planning, preparation, longterm story telling is our hallmark. Were blending those two things. Charlie you said somewhere story selection is about asking whether we can add value. We dont just want to do another story then another. Yeah. Look, i am very cognizant as an avid news consumer. Im tracking a lot of stuff all day. If youre just going to tell somebody something, and i can find that information out in a bunch of different places then you have not distinguished yourself at all. One the ways this has come up for us is the election of donald trump has been like a volcano and there is lava everywhere. A lot of times thats trumps tweets or other things. Or so, like aweek lot of newsrooms, we were just tearing up lineups all day long. There is so much stuff going on. I think what we discovered was that we were, for that period, really doing things that were not as value added as we ought to be doing. We decided to step back. We decided to step back. If people already know he tweeted the media is the enemy to people, what is the point of adding more to that outrage . What can we actually do with our 30 minutes a night that is going to distinguish us . Were really kind of protecting that time. If we overlap with somebody else, we better overlap for a good reason. We better have Something Different and additive. There are so many choices. Were new. We look different. Use that. Charlie this is for both of you. Whats the profile of the people who watch your show or theyre all your shows. Shane yeah. Young, affluent, diverse. Charlie all that. But have they been news watchers . Have they been news watchers or are they people simply turned off by news because they were tired of it and thought it was boring and didnt believe in Appointment Television or anything like that . Shane we have both. Josh a little from column a and a little from column b. We make this nightly show, slave away, get it to 7 30, push it out, and one of the first things we heard from hbo is a lot of people Binge Watching and would save up a couple episodes and bingewatch it which is interesting behavior for a news show. Not one weve heard of before. Charlie people all the time come up to me and say i devote my saturday mornings to watching your shows. I take five hours and go through it and what i like, ill watch, and what i dont, you know, i skip right through it. Josh it gives you more liberty because it allows you the extra day of consideration to do something you might not have been able to do if youre just responding to deadlines. It is interesting our users want us in the present tense. They are not expecting us to tell them the future. They dont necessarily demand that everything we do be up to date provided we keep adding value to it. Shane on the audience, when you talk about millennials, 18 to 34, 18 is much different than 34. So we have people who have been disenfranchised by main stream media and we have people who charlie disenfranchised by main stream media meaning what . Shane they dont feel it speaks to them or that there have been scandals. So basically theyre saying im going to these guys over here. Then we have other, younger kids who have come up because their older brothers or sisters or whoever were watching vice they sort of have been reared on vice news so were their goto on the younger edge of it. And then there are people who compare us to all the other sort of main stream media and say they do stuff thats not on the news cycle or they go behind it. Charlie you know, during, when john stewart was at the helm for the daily show everybody was saying, this is not really good. That is a comedy show, not a news show, and john would be first to tell you that. It was about satire but at the same time the story you always heard was is it good or bad that so many young people, this is the only way they get news. They watch the daily show. Josh i think its good. Shane i think its good because theyre getting news. Charlie then johns show, news as much as josh well, issues. Shane he was talking about issues. He was popularizing it. Josh you also cant enjoy it unless you know the news. That is the thing about that critique. Otherwise the references pass you. Charlie that is a good point. Josh otherwise all the references pass you. So that was a kind of like, i believe an underestimation of so that was a kind of like, i believe an underestimation of that audience in the same way i think our audience is a little bit under estimated, too. You cant enjoy a 12minute piece about Gang Violence in chicago unless you come to it prepared. And have a little bit of a knowledge. Charlie i think you said somewhere, too, vice doesnt assume that young people dont care about news. They assume that they do. Its presented to them in a way that is part of who they are and their own sort of lifestyle d. N. A. Experiences. Josh one of the things in Business News where i was for six years, that you sort of forget, is people actually want to feel something when they watch the news. You know, you mentioned the music under shanes piece. One of the things that one of the things i have learned in part from shane and from spike jones and others is that people dont mind feeling something while theyre learning something. If you can show them a great character, move them, thats okay. And so i think a lot of our audience comes, they may not be expecting it, but i think that is the reward if theyre careful watchers that they met someone they can remember and attach to that issue. Charlie where is it going . What is your trajectory . Shane for news or the company . Charlie both. Start with the company. Shane well, we started when i first came to talk to you. We were sort of 1 of 10. Then we were 1 of 4. Now were 1 of 1, the largest new Media Company in the world. We want to take the new out and be the largest Media Company. Charlie i heard everybody was running out to brooklyn. I thought i better find out whats going on. I went out there. Shane yeah. Well, everything is going on out there. Thats the hub. Charlie okay. So the trajectory is what, though . For the company. Shane for the company, show, for the next two years its boring. We go into a country, we launch the tv network. We push all that into mobile. We launch our studios. Then we go to the next country. Its just bang, bang, bang, launching all of our platforms in 80 countries. The big question isnt what we do over the next two years, which is just expand, expand, expand, it is what do we do after that . Because you have vice on hbo. You have, you know, vice on sky. You have vice on times india. At some point you have to go direct to consumer. And i think that is where everything is going. Charlie when . Shane well now, i think if you charlie when will it be predominant . Shane i think we are seeing it beginning. Netflix. Obviously the success there, success with amazon. Now apple is signaling theyre going to enter the fray. Hulu. So its going to be and then youre having skinny bundles and everything going to spoke so what is going to happen is youre going to have, lets say, 30 things that you pay for and some of them will be over the top and some will be old school tv but its happening today. The fact that at t is buying time warner is because of that. Because that is what they have to drive data which is video. Charlie good luck. Josh thank you. Great to see you. Charlie back in a moment. Stay with us. Ive spent my life planting a sizesix, nonslip shoe into that door. On this side, i want my customers to relax and enjoy themselves. But these days its phones before forks. They want wifi out here. But behind that door, i need a private connection for my business. Wifi pro from comcast business. Public wifi for your customers. Private wifi for your business. Strong and secure. Good for a door. And a network. Comcast business. Built for security. Built for business. Ways wins. Especially in my business. With slow internet from the phone company, you cant keep up. Youre stuck, watching spinning wheels and progress bars until someone else scoops your story. Switch to comcast business. With highspeed internet up to 10 gigabits per second. You wouldnt pick a slow race car. Then why settle for slow internet . Comcast business. Built for speed. Built for business. Charlie in 2002 Tabitha Soren began photographing a group of Minor League Draft picks for the oakland as. For the next 15 years, Tabitha Soren captured the lives of players working to achieve their dreams of playing in the big show and the ones that never made it. The photos and the stories behind them are captured in her new book. It is called fantasy life baseball and the american dream. She also has a new project called surface tension opening this month in san francisco. I am pleased to have her back at this table. Welcome, welcome. Tabitha thank you. Charlie where have you been . Tabitha well, i have been following some baseball players, but in that 15 years i also had three children, got married, and i sort of disappeared from television. Charlie your husband occasionally stops by to tell us about his latest magnus opus. Tabitha true. Thats right. So i havent always been a baseball fan. But when my husband Michael Lewis wrote money ball after the reporting was done he still really wanted to continue to hang out with billy bean so he dragged me to spring training in 2003. You know how you make those compromises in relationships, and when i got there i was really happy that i went, because i met 21 guys from the 2002 draft class at their very first spring training and i felt as an artist, how often do you get to meet a whole group of people embarking on the exact same journey at the exact same time . And their faces were so full of hopefulness and purpose that i had a hard time figuring out, you know, how fast to get started. So, when i met these players i actually assumed they were just on their way to the major leagues. That it was inevitable that they would get there, and i had to learn through hanging out with them for a long period of time that, really, only 6 of them get there. And i actually figured out eventually i would i assumed i would fall in love with baseball like all of the fanatics in the stands. And it never really happened. But what the project turned into was much more about resilience and striving and what baseball says about american culture, because these guys know only 6 of them get there, but theyre pushing, pushing, pushing anyway. And i felt like its not just professional athletes who are driving themselves at that speed and with that endurance and risking injuries and leaving college. I feel like a lot of americans push themselves that hard. Charlie these photographs are linked by stories from dave eggers. Tabitha thats right. We are both from the bay area and he is a very generous soul as im sure you must know. So when he found out i was doing this, he asked if he could help. I said, why dont you write one of those art essays at the beginning of the art book . He said, tabitha, nobody reads those stupid things. I dont want to write something nobody is going to read. So he wrote a short story instead, which i never would have asked dave eggers to write a short story for me, but he did. He is incredibly prolific. I feel very lucky. Charlie theres a movie, is it the circle . Tabitha yes. Cant keep up with him. His wife is no slouch either. Charlie lets talk about the pictures then come back and find out whatever happened to you. Tabitha im still here. Charlie yes you are. Lets look at the first one. Tell me what the photographer saw here. Tabitha so that is the stockton ports dugout in stockton, california. Theyre a Minor League Affiliate of the oakland as. And i felt like that picture encapsulated sort of the daily routine, the groundhog day like grind of people being bored, other people being upset. And apperture publishing helped me take 15 years of work and pare it down into this visual, alternate reality of the long bus rides, cramped motel rooms, injuries, friendships charlie all built on a hope. Tabitha well, you have to believe youre going to make it or you wont. We cant all be derek jeter. I think they know that logically at some point, but if you dont believe youre going to be, if you dont believe youre the person who is going to win the game, get the oscar, go from mail room to board room, as an american were really wrapped up in what i think is a slightly false premise, that if you have a dream and you work hard, success is within anyones reach. I think thats not logical. Most people know its not logical. In this case and in a lot of cases where youre trying to be the exception, youre trying to be number one, its the dream that matters. Charlie lets look at the second picture. Tabitha the picture on the left is ben fritz in a pool during spring training. It is very hot as you know, so they would cool off in the pool. The reason i like it is thats what you see on the surface, but what it means to me is that you can take the personal and go universal with this. We are all trying to stay afloat. I think that you cant tell whether hes sinking or whether hes floating. Looks like an under water super hero. He is a guy who showed up at spring training. Everyone assumed he was going to make it. He showed up injured. He had surgery. He got another injury. He kept going and pushing and pushing and i just feel like thats what we all do. We learn resilience that way. Thats derek jeter at his last home game. Charlie number two. Yes. Tabitha so he is the exception to the rule. Charlie because of supreme talent or because of Something Else . Tabitha i think all of it. I think lack of injuries. I mean, injuries play a huge part in derailing these people. Charlie okay. Look at the next slide. Tabitha this is clinton iowa. And its so hot there that they have showers attached to the outside. So probably most of the photographers were inside the stadium taking pictures of the game and i probably got bored and wandered outside and i caught this young man, who probably plays Little League and probably idolizes the people on the field, taking a break. Charlie what am i looking at . Tabitha this is oakland coliseum. They have an annual night where they not only explode fireworks but let all fans down on field. This is the case where i feel like art is really an antidote to the busy, over scheduled lives we all lead. In this case i wasnt interested in the fireworks. I was interested in what happened after, just like the name that these guys are making for themselves within baseball is less interesting to me than how they rebuild their identity afterwards. Charlie they call it the night on the green. Tabitha yep. Charlie this is rain. Tabitha it was a torrential downpour when i arrived to shoot one of my players who was now in the independent league, which is basically hed been released. And it was so stormy outside. I didnt feel safe carrying my equipment. So i stayed in the car and my breath fogged up the window. Charlie this is from surface tension. Tell me what surface tension is. Tabitha so the last picture we saw is a harbinger of this next project. I like it so much because the aesthetics from the stadium shot in the rain really relates to this new work. Im taking letting people use my ipad and im using the ipad and i let the dirt and grime and fingerprints build up and then i go into the history and grab a link that i have looked at and pull it up and then i shoot it with an 8 x 10 view camera, one of those very old cameras that you put the black hood over you so that the negative is the is this thick. Im using an analog process to shoot a digital project. Its something that i think speaks to the struggle of forces within our heads, while were trying to deal with email and texts and various screens in our lives, i feel Like Technology has created a lot of tension and distraction in our heads. And this visually gets at that. Charlie when did you decide you wanted to be a photographer . Tabitha well, i have always taken pictures. My dad was in the military, so i took pictures all the time as sort of a memory bank. They were not interesting pictures. It was a catalog basically. My bed, the rug, my desk, outside of the house. We moved so often that i would forget. And once i got very successful in television, i felt like the work i was doing was getting more and more main stream. The higher i rose, the more watered down it got, and the less agency i had over the creative process. So for me, art was the solution to that. I feel like i can get to a truth in the work, but its less of a who, what, when, where, and why, and more of an emotional truth. There is more room for subtle and nuance, which is what i was looking for. Its hard to cram that into a threeminute news segment. Charlie you couldnt have the creative thrill that you have now . Tabitha it wasnt quite as focused as that, but, yes. Eventually. I mean, the other thing is that ive got kind of a dark side. Nobody ever tells me to smile in the art world. So if i want to explore panic and dread and anxiety and the conflict of mental turbulence i feel in managing all my devices, then, you know, theyre interested. Charlie do you miss it at all . Tabitha no, not really. The only thing i miss is sort of being at the center of politics or current events. But i think that charlie that is the point of it all. Tabitha well, but there is a lot of other work you have to do in addition. I did tons of stories that werent that important. Because it was my job. Its nice to be able to explore things that occurred in a way thats never been done. So these images are very much talking about how the world is getting more visual than verbal and as a very verbal person i think its interesting that, you know, l. O. L. Is a funny kind of laugh and my daughter sent me a jpeg air kiss to say good night. She didnt even think to call me. Thats, you know, obviously a funny kind of kiss, but i think that the we are substituting a lot of intimacy with these devices. I dont think we know what effect theyre having on us. I can think of a ton of Great Things Technology affords me as an artist and as a journalist and the amount of research and the history you have access to, gps, everything. But i dont think that we are very good at sort of anticipating the effect of technology on us even as charlie in terms of robbing us of some kind of intimacy and personal communication . Just coming together as human beings . Tabitha there is certainly that, but in addition, i think that there is a we dont anticipate the effect its going to have on us even if it incarnates our wishes and our pathology. Its not just screens. Can you think of anything more pathological than Nuclear Weapons . That is a technology, too. We didnt really anticipate the problems that would occur with building Something Like that. Charlie one of the interesting things about technology is that its not just in the hands of good people. Its in the hands of bad people, too. Tabitha sure. So i would also say that so you have this grime, this residue. When we space out on your computer, how many times have you been managing a bunch of different windows and your phone and then its time to go. Whatever the deadline is. And you have no idea what youve been doing the last three hours. Time has disappeared. These fingerprints and grime are sort of a map of what youve been up to. I love the idea that photography can show you what would otherwise be invisible. Charlie thats julian assange, right . Tabitha yes. Charlie thats come from a video of him . Tabitha yeah. I froze a video of him walking into a ted talk or something. So he, basically any time you have him in your work, you are dealing with issues of privacy and surveillance and i think that i i needed to have each one of the pictures connect to some aspect of the internet that we all deal with and, certainly, he belongs in there. Charlie the next one is your daughter sending a virtual good night kiss. This is what you were referring to, right . Tabitha thats right. Charlie she didnt call you up and say, mom i love you, just want to say good night. She just sent you this. Tabitha thats right. So the digital substrate under the analog fingerprints is very obvious because the negative is so large. And i do think the world is becoming more visual than verbal. She transacts most of her social relationships just by sending manipulated pictures back and forth. Very rarely do they have a phone call or a text. Charlie what do you think its doing to her . Tabitha i sound too old if i answer that question im afraid. Charlie i want to know. Tabitha i feel like there is a lack of social development that happens by being able to handle some of the awkward moments that a facetoface encounter requires. Charlie how old is your daughter . Tabitha this one is 15. I have two. Charlie both daughters. How many children do you have . Tabitha i have three children. Charlie michael is crazy for baseball. Tabitha yes. Charlie and he coaches Little League. Tabitha thats right. Charlie and hes obsessed by that, too. Tabitha yeah. They make art with me. A lot of these fingerprints are my 10yearold son playing video games. His hands are fantastic, because they sweat, so they leave these heavy duty drips and easy things to focus on. Charlie all right. Next slide. Tabitha one of the things im trying to get the project to address is us confusing the perfection of these devices with perfection of ourselves. I feel like the apple designers or any designer has made this screen to be perfectly minimal. Its shiny. Its totally smooth. Its meant to resist oil. I am reminding viewers with all of these markings, with our hairiness, and our saliva and our oil, that, you know, our humanity is very messy. And i dont think we should feel physically inferior or i dont think we should deny that part of ourselves even as were dealing with all of this technology. Its kind of beautiful in the end. Charlie fantasy life was published april 1, right . Tabitha thats right. Charlie and surface tension begins exhibitions tabitha this saturday in san francisco. Equinom projects. And then it moves to los angeles in june. Charlie congratulations. Tabitha thank you very much. Charlie great to have you here. Tabitha nice to see you again. Charlie thank you for joining us. See you next time. From visceral performance to fantastical installations made from intricately woven yarn, japense artist Chiharu Shiota captivates viewers with her mysterious and poetic creations. Often dark and enigm