 served on the Hillman messenger together. Chris, did you go to Placer High School for what, three and a half years? Chris, can you hear me? Yeah, yeah, I just, you kind of like cut a few times out. Yeah, so you went to high school for three and a half years, you left early, right? Your, your sense kind of funky. It's not on my end, it's coming through. Ah, okay. I'm on, I'm using Explorer. I wonder if I should go to Chrome. Do you think that'd make a difference? I have no idea, let me, you heard me before I got started. We were chatting before the show. Yeah, yeah, no, it's just kind of like you got into it and then it kind of went, you know, kind of fuzzy and stuff. Well, let's keep going and see if it works out. So what are your reflections on Placer High School? My reflections on, I thought it was a great place. I thought it was good for, good for somebody who knew what they were doing Placer High School. I kind of sailed right through. I know other people had difficulty, but I'm surprised seeing schools today here, especially here in New Zealand, where the kids are like pulled up because they have the wrong types of socks on or something really dumb like that or they have to wear uniforms. And I remember going to Placer High School wearing whatever I wanted to and choosing what I wanted to take, having total freedom. It was like going to university when you're 14, which was kind of cool. And so do you feel like it prepared you well for life? It prepared me well to go to university, just the way they ran things. Like we'd show up before school started and feverishly try to get our classes and our schedules because we had to get certain requirements. And yeah, yeah, that was good. You know, yeah, I guess it did. I guess high school kind of served its purpose that way. I don't know how much it was deliberately from Placer High School or just some of the lucky, I was lucky that some of the people who I spent time with were there. And you left early though, so you couldn't wait to get out of there. No, I just couldn't see any point in continuing. I kind of got all my credits and I would just spend six months, just three or four, whatever, the rest of you have six months of the year, just hanging basically and taking wiffle ball courses or whatever, when, yeah, I was kind of ready to go on and do some live life. So what did you do after you left high school? I got a job on the railroad. It was the best way to start. It was absolute worst job I ever had in my entire life. Nothing could match it. And I think everybody should start their work career with that job. It was so funny. The job interview was basically this guy from Montana, me and my brother, he's going, so you're going to show up tomorrow. We say, yeah, yeah, we'll be here tomorrow. Are you going to be here tomorrow? Yeah, yeah, we'll be here tomorrow. If you don't show up tomorrow, the Mexicans will have to work twice as fucking hard. We'll be here tomorrow. And as we were talking to him, some guy doing what we're going to do, humping the big railroad ties and stuff fell down and broke his ankle. It was so funny. It was a great job. It was me and my brother and about a really old guy on a bike, what we call them hobos back in the day. Couple of other guys, but mostly about nine Mexicans fresh across the border, who they just go up and down the railroad working this cancer-inducing, back-breaking job to send money back home. That's what I did after high school. For how long? Because you visited me in central Queensland. When was that? Yeah, yeah, I'll be honest, I only lasted three weeks on the railroad. My brother made it for six. And then I got a nice landscaping job digging trenches. And then I think by November had enough money to get a backpack and go to the South Pacific. My friend Leo kept raving about the trout in New Zealand and let's go to New Zealand and let's go to New Zealand. And so I saved up my money and worked my ass off and he didn't. So I went alone. That's kind of when I went through New Zealand and then saw you up in Queensland. Gladstone. Yes. And how did that trip affect you? Because now you've ended up in New Zealand. Oh yeah, it was kind of a bit of a circle. Yeah. Met somebody when I was down here. It wasn't like a romantic thing just friendly and just exchanged letters back and forth over the years and about 2007. Wow, nearly 15 years ago. 15 years ago, that kind of brought me back down here. Yeah. But how did the 1984-85 trip affect you? Did it work out as a template for your life? It kind of matures. Traveling matures you more. When I went to university, I was only about a year and a half older than everybody else and I just felt like they were babies. But just about, I don't know, you just experience and see a lot more and learn more about yourself. Get to see things of different parts of the world. Yeah, so I took a year off after high school to work in Australia. Then I went to community college and I worked landscaping as well and swinging your pick and swinging your shovel. Boy, it was really tough in Sacramento heat. In Sacramento heat. And really, really hard, hard, hard soil. And usually it's only Mexicans who do this work because people from Australia and England went understand it's really poorly paid. It's like a little over the minimum wage. I was making $4.50, $5.50, $6 an hour. How about you? I don't know how much it was but it was more than washing dishes in a restaurant. But yeah, I realized right away the guy who's making all the money is the guy who owns the company and makes the designs. And then when did you begin university and where did you go? I tried to do community college like you. I was taking, I tried to do the morning, I don't know when I did that. I worked at a bakery from like 3 a.m. to 6 or 7 a.m. cleaning up after the bakers. They're messy people. And then I think I had another job and then I tried to do night classes at Sierra College and dropped out of that, worked construction labor and then started in the academic year. 85, I think a sex state. Yeah, yeah. But let's go back to high school. We weren't close friends. We were like acquaintances who had a similar interest in journalism, right? It was the newspaper that kind of brought us together the extent that we connected. Is that fair? How do you... Yeah, yeah, that was it, yeah. Because we didn't hang out outside of journalism. High school's really clicky, yeah. I would try to mix it up sometimes and just eat at different tables. But it was, yeah, the runners were paying with the runners and whoever hand with the who-evers. And it's probably high school all over the place, pretty clicky. And what's your reflections on your time at the Hulman Messenger? So in my senior year, I was the editor. The year before Eric Sholsky was the editor. What do you remember? Were you there for what, six months, a year? No, I thought I got in there when I was a sophomore. Oh, okay. I think you guys voted me like most power hungry because I became feature editor or whatever. Okay. I loved it. It was just the way to write. And our system of education here, kids can't learn how to do that. They just take one little module and then move on to the next one and to be able to like create something. When did that paper come out once every two weeks or something? Yeah. Yeah, it just forces you to be organized and to write and yeah, I loved it. You know who's down here now too is Eddie Nolan. Did you, were you on the paper with him, weren't you? Oh, the photographer did? Yeah. Oh, wow. He's living over in New Plymouth right the other side of the island. Oh, wow. Yeah. He emailed me. I think it must have been about eight years ago, Cohen. Dude, tell me about New Zealand. I want to come down. So I remember a series of interactions that I had. So I became the editor and inspired by the week long journalism conference that we went to in San Francisco, I wanted to install certain changes. So I changed the name of the paper to the Hillman Messenger and I wanted to install a certain layout. And then I remember you pushed back and then I remember going, oh yeah, okay, maybe I shouldn't try to install a certain uniform layout. And then you said, no, you've got to have structure. So I remember it's the trying to work things out with other people to what extent you need like a uniform layout to what extent you need to just let all the editors do their own thing. What do you remember about power struggles and conflicts, if any, with regard to those papers? I think it was just that the whole pressure too, I happened to do it once every two weeks. It really, it was like a pressure cooker at times. And I can't remember a lot of too many, too many conflicts, but the stress and the pressure, I kind of do remember that. Yeah, and that was pretty unique in a high school setting. I remember, we kind of changed the layout to kind of mirror the USA Today. Yes, we were tremendously influenced by the USA Today. Yeah, yeah. Eddie actually sent me an article I wrote in editorial. And oh my God, if I could go back to that young Chris and smack him across the head. It was so conservative. It was so conservative and so like academic. It was like everybody has to take math and everybody was like, oh my God, I'm telling kids now, don't bother, you're never gonna use fractions in your entire life, you know? Now, I'm a man of strong opinions and strong will and my recollection of you is, you know, similarly very strong opinions and very strong will. And so you didn't bend to accommodate people, generally speaking, is that fair? I don't know, I don't know. I'd have to hang out with a 17-year-old Chris, but I could imagine that. And I don't know whether that was an ego thing or a chip on the shoulder thing. Yeah, there's definitely a chip on the shoulder and I think chip on the shoulder is better accurate description than smart Alec, but there's definitely both, is that fair? I'd possibly, yeah, yeah. And that would be fair, yeah. I just, I think what I was really tuned into too, or maybe hypersensitive to was, I get that in junior high school as well, is just the kind of elitism of that town we lived in. I remember my mom. Tell me more, tell me more about that. Oh, well, when I was in junior high school, I knew I was as smart as those other fellas, but they were in the accelerated class or whatever they called it. And I remember saying to my mom, I'm going, I'm a smarter, smarter than these guys and I can't get into this accelerated class. And she was so cool. She says, oh, Chris, tell me, tell me who's in that? I said, well, there's Clark. Oh yeah, Clark. Yeah, his dad does what, oh, it's a town doctor. Right, okay. And then I said, who else is in it? She says, I said, Adrienne, oh yeah, her dad is a real big architect in town, isn't he? Yeah, yeah. Who else is in it now? And kind of after the third or fourth time, we went through a couple of people and what their fathers did or mothers did. I don't know. I think the points sunk through. Wow, I just looked up Hillman Messenger and it's still called the Hillman Messenger. So when I took over, it was called the Messenger. So I forever changed the name of our high school newspaper. Forever, Brad, what was it called beforehand? It was just the Messenger. All right. And I changed it to the Hillman Messenger. So what did your parents do for a living? My dad's electrician. He worked down at Sacramento, just building the big courthouse buildings, big, huge buildings. He'd run all the electrical work. And mom was, mom looked after us, yeah. So your chip on the shoulder was, tell me more, it was against the elite of structure, the town? Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know where, you know, something I had to work through, part of growing up, I guess. Part of it, something that might have been, I don't know, just the kind of, kind of bullshit that goes on. I think it was in the, it's in the high school too, you know, just that sort of structure hierarchy. I've always sort of chafed under hierarchy. I think I have a reputation here being anti-institutional, which doesn't help me get a job in an institution. Anyway. Is that a reflection of your relationship with your father? Sounds like psychotherapy. No, not at all. It was good. Then where does it come from? So normally people with a chip on their shoulder against authority comes from their relationship with their father. I mean, that's what it is for me. Oh, I don't know. And I don't know if it's about authority either. It's, I don't mind authority. I don't like hierarchy. I don't like, I don't like brainless hierarchy. Like we do it this way because we do it this way. Ah, so it's going to ask you if you- Yeah, maybe I got that from my parents. I, you know, it's like, yeah, I don't like that. So it's going to ask you when, when you let go of the chip on your shoulder, but it sounds like you still have like that, that negative feeling about hierarchy, right? Oh yeah, I don't know if that's an audit chip on my shoulder. That's just me being a healthy anarchist, I guess. I don't know. Do you have a chip on your shoulder? I don't think so. But you said that something works against you even today because you don't like hierarchy, but that's different from a chip on my shoulder. That's just not liking certain power structures. And so you don't like certain powers. I don't like top-down power structures. I've worked on a lot of boats too. And you can get little egomaniacal captains and they might be good sailors, but I don't like that kind of leadership. I don't want to be under that kind of leadership. Yeah, I remember that from high school with the newspaper because there was a little bit of, you know, Chris is explosive and he doesn't like to take orders. I remember a little bit of like navigating around that. And so that rebellion against hierarchy is still very much with you. I don't know. I guess, you know, yeah, if I was in a, well I was in a work situation where the manager managed by being a bully basically. And yeah, I didn't last very long there. I tendered my resignation after six months. So that's not a chip on my shoulder. That's just me valuing myself in situations and power structures I want to be in or don't want to be in. So I think you graduated with an undergraduate degree in history from where and when did this happen? Sex state. And when? Oh, I think 89, that was the four years, yeah. Okay, and was that a good experience? Oh yeah, sex state was kind of fun. It was kind of, you know, kind of disjointed because I lived in Auburn. I just commute down. So I never really kind of got that student buzz, housing, you know, when you live together in a party house or anything like that. But it all worked out. I spent a year in England too. I had a year exchange my third year, went to England. And spent that in London. That was a cool experience. And then after you graduated from college, where did you go? I moved to England because when I was a student there, I met a gal and she came over to California to warn you from my last year at uni. And then we moved to London and I was there till, oh gosh, 2002, I think. And this is the mother of your children? Yeah, yeah, yeah. My children, my daughter's 32 now, 32 and 30. Wow. And was this your first girlfriend? Huh? Was this your first girlfriend? No, no, no. A couple right after high school. Yeah. And then what was the experience like as an American in England? It was, it was, yeah. We kind of had to live in real kind of working class, lower economic kind of areas, just because we got together too young and didn't have careers to buy better houses or get better houses. So that was, that was kind of tough. It was tough. Yeah, it was fucking tough. And then, yeah, yeah. And I was a house dad for a couple of years too. And that was really fun, special, but really isolating as well because all the working class moms around kind of didn't know what to make of me and all the working class husbands that would come home and they wouldn't know what to make of me. It was interesting, it was really interesting. And what did you do for a living? I was a residential social worker for a few years. Kind of like care work, which was really special. And then I trained as a teacher and became a teacher, a primary teacher. And how did you like it? I liked it. It's teaching takes a long time to learn how to do well. And I think after three years, I finally kind of felt like I knew what I was doing. In the last three years I was there was at a really beautiful country school in a village south of Canterbury in the southeast. And it was a really nice experience. It was really sweet. There's like, I don't know, in that the vignettes I wrote, there's one where we walk up to the Norman church for the Christmas service. And I tried to kind of capture that. It's just really special. Filling like I was part of a community. So by that time, when I told them I was resigning and I was moving back to America, they were surprised. To them, I wasn't an American anymore. And I think to me, I probably wasn't so much anymore either. So that was... How did you make friends? Oh, that'd be a different one. I mean, one friend, one friend I met doing care work and he's still, I call him my best friend now. He's still living in England. But we worked together. We spent some shifts together when I was a care worker and just shared a lot of life experiences. I never just kind of like, I just found like in England, you don't make teaps of friends or acquaintances. You might make a few close friends, but when you do, they're close friends forever. So yeah, just different situations. What did you miss, if anything, about America while you were living in England? At the beginning, I missed cracker checks and I missed Denny's breakfasts until on one trip, I went back to Denny's and it just tasted like garbage. It was the memory I missed. Cracker checks, but that just faded. That faded and maybe, oh, I'd have to remember how to do this when I went to visit my parents. It's just how to do the light chit chat when you meet people on the street because the English weren't too into that. Just those kind of social grease, the pleasantries that as you walk down the street and see your neighbor, you exchange, blah, blah, blah, you know, nice day, whatever. Did you develop any interest in British sport? It's no British sport. Soccer, I started watching soccer and understanding that. I watched the NFL because they'd have it, it was only an hour long and it would be the highlights. And that kind of killed the NFL for me because when I came back to visit my folks from time to time, I tried to watch a game and it was so grinding the boring with the stop, start and the commercials. And soccer is like 80 minutes nonstop, 90 minutes, 90 minutes, yeah. That's right, that's right. In England was, yeah, that was David Beckham in England and it was fun to watch. So one time England beat Germany for the first time in years and I hear a big noise outside and me and the kids go outside and there's like an impromptu parade around Canterbury. Everybody's pouring out of the pubs and pouring out of their houses. It's just hilarious. So the subtlety of the English, did you take note of that? Did it, the world of you? No, I don't think so because yeah, I didn't really, my first day in England when I went over as a student, I met up with some Americans went to a pizza hut with them and they were just so loud and rude. It was the last time I spent time with Americans when I was in England. So I find like whenever I've lived in a different country, I've tried to just become part of the crowd, you know, become part of the community. So I didn't really feel like there was like an Americanism that graded. Maybe there was, maybe, you know, that they just faded over time or got kind of filed down. But I don't think, because I did some traveling before and just had pretty open-minded parents, I don't think I was too stuck in values or ideas. But who knows, they talked to somebody that I lived with them and maybe they heard me moaning about the size of the house or the snail trails are on the carpet and who knows, I might have been invariable, but. Was there anything you learned about America from living in England? You watching from the outside? Yeah. Yeah, it's really, it's really hard to tell. I mean, I was like 15 years there and I've been, had a bit of a gap back in the States and then 15 years here. So I, hmm. But you didn't come back to see America with new eyes. Oh yeah, I mean, because I came back quite a lot to visit my folks and stuff, I'm sure my eyes kind of feel to be changed quite a bit. My daughter was born with a physical disability, so we used the National Health Service over in England. And that was one thing that was shocking in America, it was just how the health system punishes the poor or punishes anybody who needs to use the health system. So that was, I guess I learned a lot about that aspect of America and those limitations. What about America's more robust freedoms such as to own a gun or more robust First Amendment? Did you develop it? I don't know if, yeah, First Amendment being more robust, I'm not sure the British press covers things a lot better sometimes than the American press. It's like, you'd find an article by Noam Chomsky in The Guardian, but you'd never find an article by Noam Chomsky in an American newspaper, which, I mean, that's not really free speech or First Amendment if you could say what you want, but nobody's gonna let you platform it. Yeah, I did my master's in, when I was in London, I was just reading books voraciously after my BA, all on American society and foreign policy especially. And did a master's at the University of London on American, kind of American studies, area studies it was called. So I suppose I was outside the States early on in my time in England, being a bit of a research scientist picking away at what America is and who it is. Did you encounter much anti-Americanism? No, no, I can't remember any of that at all. I know sometimes you come back, especially like during the Gulf War and they might ask you a question, it's sort of like here, they just wanna know, are you a Trumpster or not? And if you're not, then you're okay and they'll talk to you or they find out that, yeah, you're not waving the flag and invading Iraq and they'll, I don't know. I just noticed sometimes that little, just like we do with anybody trying to smell out who they are or their values. Did you notice any major misconceptions that they had about America or Americans? No, no, I mean, I don't think so. Because I wasn't really walking around like an American. When I lived up the coast here, it was a total Maldi community and I joined the rugby team. This was 10 years ago. And I seriously started to think I was a Maldi, I was a six foot tall Maldi guy in the rugby field. So, I just forget like, what identity am I? Am I an American? Am I a British? Am I, so I don't know how conscious I might have been about people's misconceptions. And it was through a process too, where maybe I was losing some of my misperceptions. So what year did you leave England? 2002, 2002, moved back to California and I realized what I saw in England was that these people couldn't move back to the village where they grew up because it'd been gentrified and houses were out of reach, you couldn't afford them. And when I moved back to Auburn, the same thing, the same thing was there. It was, even if I managed to get a teaching job in California, I don't think I could have afforded to live in Auburn. And I was like, hey, I've got six years experience. They just didn't want to have a bar of it. The California bureaucracy is amazing. I almost would have had to do another liberal arts degree to be able to be recognized as a teacher in California. So one day I just Google teaching Alaska and a month later was at the job fair up in Anchorage and got a job like that in Juneau. And how long were you in Alaska and what was that like? I was here for three years. I was in Juneau for two years. It would be a beautiful place if you haven't been. It's just a lovely place to go. Beautiful striking scenery. And the last year was up in Barrow, which is as far north as you can get basically in the United States. That was a fun year. It was a frustrating year, but fun year. How so? How was it frustrating? How was it fun? This was my third year as a special education teacher. And the way Juneau worked is we were special educators within the schools. And then we had the person in the Department of Education who's in charge of special education in the district. So if we have an issue or want something, we go to her in Barrow on the North Slope. I was told to use a program with these kids. And I said, well, it's not the right program because that's for comprehension and these children's needs are desolating, which coding or whatever. And so I went to the head of special education and said, I need a program to suit the kids I'm working with. And the next thing I know I'm called in by the deputy principal who's from Texas or Georgia or something and she says, now, Chris, I just want us to start here. I want to explain our hierarchy here at this school. And I basically found out after a week that I was working in a school run by fascists from Texas basically. It was interesting. And everybody else, they didn't care. They just put their head down, teach what they always teach, don't deviate. It was just like, yeah, you talk about America, land of the free, that was, oh my God. I wouldn't call that freedom. They were just like suffer through three years because your pension's based on the highest wage and Barrow had the highest wage. And then you go somewhere else where you really want to be bizarre. And in just the patriotism too, with the hand over the chest and the Pledge of Allegiance and the geno's quite liberal and bearless. I mean, the way they ran this school, it's just bizarro, bizarro. What is it about the patriotism that struck you? It was just mindless. It was, that was 2005, that was like mirrored, mired in Iraq. I think my nephew was there once or twice already and I'm just not questioning anything. It was America's great, America's doing good. All those fucking Arabs just fucking paved it. Sorry for my language, but fucking paved it. That's a direct quote. Yeah. Yeah. And the Pledge of Allegiance blew me away. I mean, in England, you don't see flags flying. They don't have to fly a flag in England because you know you're in England. And even in New Zealand, if a flag is flying, it's really odd. You wonder if it's just some right-wing farmer or something. It's really rare to see flags flying. So yeah, I just wasn't used to that and the Pledge of Allegiance, it's just odd. It's, and I try to have conversations about brainwashing and pedagogy and everything we do in schools teaches and what are we teaching by doing this? And I just couldn't have those conversations. What do you remember about 9-11? I saw it on TV when I was in England. They kept showing it on the news. And your reaction? I mean, it was quite terrible. It was like 3,000 people dying. I don't think it was a surprise. Right, you feel like it was to be expected blowback from American adventurism? Yeah, I watched Imran Khan before, you know, this was before he was prime minister because it was 15 or 20 years ago, almost now. He went around and he interviewed farmers in Pakistan. And I listened to those farmers explain why the Twin Towers would have been targeted and was just blown away by, I mean, these are farmers who probably never, you know, I don't know how much schooling they have or whatever, but their understanding of the political situation and the economic situation that a lot of the world is trapped in. It was just, it blew me away. Yeah, it's not condoning it or anything. It's just saying if there was going to be a target, it would be the financial center. But you weren't tempted to sign up for the Marines to go waste some Harjes? I see it. I think I have more and more in common with that Pakistani farmer than I do with George Bush. Right. A lot more in common. And so I know my family were not, you know, that might grew up during Vietnam. That's when we, that's when we were born, you know, I don't know what your parents did. My parents fought a lot for the first couple of years and then my dad kind of saw the light and we always had a kind of a jaded view towards the American empire and what you call adventurism. Yeah, my parents were in Australia. So I mean, Australia fought with America in Vietnam, but none of my relatives fought in Vietnam. Yeah, that was, there was no draft. That was all volunteer, I think, to go to Vietnam for Australians. I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure yet. New Zealand it was, New Zealand. Those guys, they were volunteered. They wouldn't, nobody would go if they didn't want to go. What's your attitude towards the American armed forces? I do like militaries. Costa Rica, they were smart. They did away with their military. Costa Rica is the only country in Central America that hasn't had a military coup. I will spend some time in Nicaragua. I lived there for three years and their military was, you know, I don't know, it's different now. 2006, it's painful what Ortega's done to that place. But there was a good vibe back in 2006 when I was there. And that was, I think it was because they overthrew their army and they made their own. So I don't know, I don't know. $800 billion a year on a military that just attacks countries that can't fight back. I was something shameful about that. So how would you describe your worldview? It sounds anarchist. My worldview. Yes. World view. Milton Shung. Yeah. I don't know, we're just all, we all want to be happy. Well, you only accord yourself an anarchist. So I'm offering that back to you in your own words. If I had an ideal way that we could run ourselves it would be us running ourselves, you know. Not having to be mandated here in New Zealand mandated to some certain group jobs like education and stuff to get a job, you know, that kind of bullying and mandating that. I don't think we need that. I represented democracy is really flawed. I think we need something a little more flexible that can respond to popular needs. I really got into Murray Bookchin. Have you ever heard of him? No, say the name again. Murray Bookchin. He wrote about something called social ecology and I liked his municipal communalism. That was kind of cool. But it very decentralized societies. So that sounds a little libertarian. Well, you kind of can have libertarian that's like a businessman's libertarian which is let's be libertarian for me. Business with no rules. Kind of like a libertarian right. But you can also have a libertarian kind of anarchy as well. Libertarian left. Yes. I think Chomsky calls himself something like that. Libertarian anarchist or something like that. So it just didn't mean that. So Murray Bookchin, he went from anarchist to libertarian socialist communalism seeking to reconcile Marxist and anarchist thought. Sounds about like him. Yeah. But would that reflect your worldview as well? Well, I mean, if I had to choose an ideal kind of way to maybe organize ourselves, I think that'd be worth a try. Yeah. Yeah. We had the funniest time. When I was in England at university, the university was gonna close one of the campuses. And so we occupied it. It was hilarious. Shut down the university and occupy it. And I was studying Russian history at the time, the Russian revolution. And I guess this is how you can change too, but we had a student union and the student union would hold these meetings and want consensus on everything. And so these meetings would go on till three or four in the morning. And the police were about ready to raid us and kick us out and take the university back. And so what I did, I don't know how I got in this group was we staged a coup and we overthrew the student union and we took charge of the occupation to where one person was in charge of security and organized all the security, one person did this. I found myself as the information minister. If it didn't come from me, don't believe it. It's just a rumor. Important, if true. As rumors were going everywhere and people were like panicking and frightened and stuff, you know. And I just like, I got quite into it. And then I thought, oh my fucking God, I'm a Bolshevik. There was the Minshivik was the student unions. I'm a Bolshevik. I'm Drozinski. Oh my God. I was great. It was great for understanding the history of that epic and Russia that just. Yeah. I don't think I would do that now. So have you been politically active aside from that incident? Politically active. It was kind of cold when the Gulf War was trying to start when all this stuff about weapons and mass destruction. He knew he was going to invade no matter what. And my parents and me and my daughter, she was 12 at the time, we all went down to the state capital with our science and protested. That was kind of cool. I mean, that kind of stuff. Politically active in Barrow, Barrow, aside from the school where I work, to actually know that some of the administrators and people I worked with, the rest was great. I actually ran a film, a film night. Once a month, I would show a film, a documentary on globalization. I guess that was politically active, kind of getting that way. I always wanted to introduce a film. Films have to be introduced. And that was great. That was great getting small crowds and introducing a film and watching a film, trying to talk about it afterwards and stuff. Have you ever done psychedelics? Yeah. And what was the upshot? I kind of like it. I like the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the bardo. Are you familiar with that? Nope. Oh, okay. It's sort of like, I mean, it's all metaphor. It could be all metaphor. I don't know, I haven't been there yet. But say when you die, the first 20 days are just paradise. Everything is joyful. You get to meet up with your old families, kind of like that picture on the back of the Jehovah Witness, you know, catalog, whatever they call that, the rush tower. Beautiful. Really nice. But then as the days progress, the edges start to fray and the rot starts to happen and the terror starts to come. And according to, I guess, some Buddhist belief is, when you get so terrified in the bardo, that you just run between any copulating people and you can find, you know, just run. Then you start the cycle again. You're, you know, they're your mom and dad, basically. But if you can go through the whole bardo, no matter how terrible it is, you know, equanimous, this is just a projection of my mind. This is just, and you get through the end of that to the 40 days, then you can decide whether you wanna come down or whether you want to, whether you can be reborn or not. And I just love that concept of being able to face whatever, that's the whole metaphor of it, is whatever life kind of like is throwing at you, can you be equanimous? Can you say, okay, what am I gonna learn from this situation? It really sucks and it really hurts, but I have to learn from this situation. Or do you just go running off, you know, whether it's not copulating people, it's sex or drugs or alcohol or any kind of escape. That's a cool metaphor. And before psychedelics, I just, the last time was like, I wouldn't be on the edge of, I wouldn't be on the precipice. I don't wanna, you know, I don't have any expectations. I don't know what's gonna come at me. Can I do it openly? Can I be there, a fearless open to anything? And psychedelics can be really good for that. You know, it's open the mind and what happens, happens. Yeah. So you, go ahead. Sorry. You left Alaska in 2005. They were talking about drugs, you're changing the subject. Sorry, I didn't wanna. Yeah, no, no, yeah, yeah. 2000 and 2006, 2006, yeah, that academic year. And then came back to California and then went to Nicaragua for three months. Okay, then a little village in the middle of nowhere highlands teaching English. That was very cool. And then to New Zealand, 2007. And why have you lived in New Zealand to the last 14 years? I just, I like it. It was a bit like Alaska. I just showed up and introduced myself and got a job back before I was 50. And just, it was just more relaxed kind of for your easy going, less pressure. You get sick, you go to the doctor, it's a health system. And I think after England too, I guess I've been anglicized a bit like that. I tried to move back to the States in 2015. I was a university lecturer in Minneapolis for a year and just decided I wasn't an American anymore and came back here. Can you tell me more about what led you to that realization? I just found it really, it was a harsh place. I found America a harsh place. I felt like I was being nickel and dime today. I had to pay for everything. Health insurance was just blew me away. And just, I just felt like people were talking passionately about subjects and I just thought they were missing it. It's like, I just tried to say, you know, it isn't race, it's economics. And try to take conversations in different places. And tell me more about that. Where were people talking about race when you think the main issue was economics? Oh, it's kind of like, it's just like in education, when they talk about the tail, there's always 20% that are below standards and never meet the standards or 20% who, whatever, you know? And then you look at the economy, you know, of course those 20 are usually brown, it's 20%. And if you look at the economy, there's like a 20% that is always trailing, that's always scraping by or in poverty. And that 20% is usually brown as well. So is it race? Is it education failing? Is it the economy? Is it an unjust economic system that needs that 20% to be where they're at? So that the middle 40 can be comfortable? But is that kind of like? Yeah, what's your answer? Oh, I definitely think it's the economic system, yeah. Is that because if you said it was race, it would be the, you know, the end of your life implied society? No, if you said it was race, then you're missing the real target. You're missing the target, which is economic power. If all the focus is on race, you're not focusing on the unjust economic system. Capitalism rolls on however it wants to while you're focusing on race. Maybe that was it. It was like where best, where most effectively to put your focus. And I just felt like sometimes some of the issues they were talking about where they're almost like diversionary in a way or important and vital, but unless you attack that the real target, then you're gonna be talking about the same thing 40 years later. It's interesting though, you've always chosen to live in whiter places than California or the United States. Like Alaska is far whiter than California. United Kingdom is far whiter than America and New Zealand's far whiter than America. Yeah, but the places I lived were a lot less whiter than California. Auburn anyway, Northern California, where we went to high school. That's a very conservative place, Auburn. Yeah, it's Redneck, right? That's the first time I've ever heard the term Redneck until I moved there. So when I did in Alaska, I was in communities of 80% in Opiat. Or when I was, when I'm here, when I lived up the coast, that was like 80%, 90% Maori. Here in Gisborne, we're like 50%, 50%. So yeah, not really whiter. Britson maybe, but the places I lived were working class brown mixed. So what do you notice about race relations in places outside of California that you've lived such as United Kingdom, Alaska, New Zealand, compared to race relations in California? Well, Barrow was kind of difficult. That was the school. And the school system was all, all the teachers were from the lower 48. And then they passed that no child left behind, which meant every teacher aide had to have at least two years of community college, which meant there were no native community college. There were no native teacher aides. The teacher aides were taxi drivers from Thailand who come to Alaska for 10 years and work their asses off before they go home and retire. That race relations, that was bizarre. 50% of the high school, 50% in high school dropout rate. And in the administrators would blame the students. So that was some serious race relations going on. And here, here's an interesting, interesting kind of setup too, because they have the treaty and the treaty, kind of like America signed all these treaties with the Native Americans and then wipe their asses with them right afterwards. But here, which they did, which the Crown did, it was hauled back through the high courts in the 1970s and made pretty much part of the constitution. So now the treaty is quite, it's quite interesting race relations. But even though the Maori might just be 15% of the population, it's always well-represented. And you can't like just forget that, yeah. What are daily race relations like between Maori and Anglo in New Zealand? I guess that would really depend too on which group you're talking to, can you? There's a beautiful lake down the road by Keta Moana, which is Tuhoe Nation. Tuhoe, I think Tuhoe were a bit like the Seminole. They were never really conquered. And they've managed to now, they run that whole national park and they've closed it off for COVID even though there's no COVID here. But that kind of power, that kind of autonomy, they have their own education system. Kids can go there, they can go to mainstream schools. But still, what's the 20% tell? The poverty, they're the brown people. So that kind of race relations is still there. The prison system here is pretty much like America with a really high capital, per capita imprisonment rate. And they're usually all brown, mostly. And why do you think that is? Oh, I don't know, institutional racism. It's population control. Why does America have so many young black men in prison? Why do you think? Because they commit such a high rate of crime. Right. They're there for a reason. Yeah. Yeah. I guess I would say, well, are we like off topic when you look back at the economy, why is there such a need for crime in those communities? I don't know. I don't want to justify anything. So let's get back to drugs. Do you think that more widespread psychedelic use could expand people's minds, expand their consciousness and create a better world? I think Thunwell. Thunwell. Just recreational drop in acid deaths. It's like, yeah, it's fun. But I think it's really come to the forefront of some counseling too in therapy, especially PTSD. It's really, it's a really powerful medium. I mean, there's a huge amount of research. It's inevitable that it's gonna be increasingly decriminalized, that it's gonna be increasingly used in therapeutic ways. It's gonna have much more widespread psychedelic use in the future. Yeah. It's gonna become a big business. Right, right. What about cannabis? Do you have any thoughts on cannabis? I think as a medicine, as a medicine, it can be amazing. I smoked a spiff with a friend a while ago and I didn't really enjoy it because I just wasn't able to concentrate that well. I was a high, but I kind of liked being able to focus. See psychedelics, they just take you away from that. I was just like, you are somewhere else now. So cannabis, yeah, I don't think I'd ever really become a user, but I don't think that should stop it being free. It's a plant for Christ's sake. What kind of patronage to government is gonna tell us we can't eat that plant or we can't smoke that plant? That's kind of mind-blowing when you think about it. What about it? It's like the government's telling me I can't eat a mushroom that grows naturally out of the ground because it's a certain type of mushroom. Those kind of rules are, they deserve to be, they deserve to be struck and off. Call it decriminalization or legalization or whatever. What about cocaine, meth, heroin? You think they should be decriminalized? Yeah, those are like really chemically mixed ones. Did you, I don't know, you grew up in Auburn. Did you feel like meth was so easy to get, wasn't it? I had no experience. I had no knowledge of that. Oh, right. Oh my God. It was like, it was like Metal Vista was like meth capital of the world, the state anyway. Oh really? Yeah. I didn't know. It was after I was done with running and out of high school, shit. We'd just been days speeding. Oh really? Yeah. And do you think it caused any permanent change in your brain chemistry? How would I know that? No, because I was an athlete, I always knew too. It's like, okay, my heart rate's been up for a way too long time to come off this. Yeah. No, that kind of stuff, that's kind of drugs. They're just, they just wreck communities. You could say the same thing about Candice, I guess too. But yeah, I guess that they have classes. I don't know, it's, yeah. Why do you think you've been able to do drugs without ruining your life and other people will do some drugs and it ruins their life? I don't know. I don't know. I had a great, I had this class at this high school. I had a year at the high school here in town and the principal gave me, I'm just gonna come around this a long way, sorry. He gave me about $15,000 just to kid out this classroom like universal design, bean bags, high tables, low tables, you name it. And the kids just studied what they wanted to study when they were in my classroom, it was fantastic. This one kid wanted to study addiction. Because he saw a lot of that in his house and in the community he lives in. And that was really fascinating. And he was coming up with like, you could have a predisposition or peer pressure. Peer pressure was another one of them. Lots of different reasons. Yeah. So when did you get your PhD and assume it was in history? No, that was in education. Okay. Yeah. That was 2015. Yeah, started in 2012. From which university? From University of Canterbury down in Christchurch. Oh, right. Do you live on the South Island? No, I'm on the North Island. But the thing about a PhD is you can do it anywhere. Right. So I designed a research project I could basically do by chomping over my garden fence. So I spent a year at school and that was my research. I went to Christchurch for about four or five months to get started, take some methodology classes and some research classes and get my proposal together and then bug it off back home. And was the time spent, effort spent on getting a PhD worth it? I think in some ways it was a really fun three years. I got a scholarship and I was paid to read and write basically which was for me that was a pig in mind. But for the town I'm living in, I think it may have overqualified me to work in any of the schools. So did that help or not? It helped me get a job at a university in America for a year. But that was not a good experience. Huh? No, the year in America was good. It was interesting. I bought a little house and fixed it up and it was really fun. I met some wonderful people and I just didn't want to spend the next 10 years at an institution like a university, chasing tenure, getting full professorship, whatever. I just didn't want to do that anymore. And the pay wasn't too well. It was a private university. So it wasn't like a bad experience. It was just realizing I wanted to go home. So what was the first book that you published? It was an edited volume, postgraduate study in Aotearoa, New Zealand. That was, yeah, that was each chapter was written by somebody doing a graduate, postgraduate degree, sort of like, if you could talk to yourself before you started, what would you, what advice would you give kind of thing? So in the year, about five more followed that from different countries. There's an American version, a British version, a South African version. So tell me more about these books and what needs are they? Oh, they just kind of like student self-help ones. And it was sort of like a leg up too. I thought I could get some editing and publishing experience and they could get some, you know, be published. It's so important to be published. So I've given them a format for that. And it was just fun project work. Yeah. When I came back to New Zealand, I just couldn't walk right into a job. So I worked on about four of those. I got my first royalty check too, after having four books with this publishing company, academic books. And it was, I wrote it down somewhere, $269.87. Congratulations. Yeah. Academic books, they're just like, no, who reads them? Okay, tell me about understanding behavior, listening to the language of action and online course. Oh, you're looking at my website. That's, yeah, I do have, okay, the monies and textbooks I was thinking. So I tried to, I made it really cracker outline for special education teachers to teach people special education. And that sort of came from that manuscript. I got about 60% of it done and then COVID hit and my partner dropped out and blah, blah, blah. So that course just kind of took some of that material. It's all based on Drikers, every behavior is communication. It's just kind of trying to get teachers to see what the behavior is communicating rather than demand that the child just complies. And so people wanna get this, how much does it cost them? I don't know. I think it's like, if I think to renew your license in a lot of places in North America, you have to have a certain amount of credits of professional development. So that was for a company over there who markets things that way to where a teacher can take a few modules and get a credit for taking the module. Yeah. I think it's about, I don't know, $30, $40 put at this cost. Okay, and then when did you start publishing outside of the Academy books? I started writing my first novel. I think it was during, when I couldn't find a job here, I just used unemployment as a way to start writing and sent that away and got a lot of rejections. And then I wrote another one and sent that away and then got a small publisher in America to take it on. And then I got her to take the other two, the first one I wrote and the one I wrote afterwards. And yeah, that was a neat lesson in sort of how publishing works nowadays is what she was doing, sorry. The first book that you got published was from the Lucid series? Yeah, that's right. American Dreamer. American Dreamer. So I guess that's some pretty political stuff in it. Her dystopia is sort of plays with alternate histories and like, so this one, hers is the pivot of 1944 where one of Wallace was on the ticket. He was vice president again, Henry Wallace rather than Harry Truman. I not just kind of played with that. So what year was this published? The first one. This was 2020. She actually had these manuscripts for like three years before she managed to publish them. So that came out in 2020. And the other two came out in 2021 at the Lucid series. So we have a few authors from our Placer High School year. I published a book. Stuart McAldry, I believe is published. Do you know anyone else from our class who published? I don't know. I think, I don't know what year April White was. Oh yeah, she read a whole bunch of erotica. No, no, it's not just erotica. She writes a lot of youth fiction too. She's really good. She's her own publisher, indie publishing. And she's doing really well. Yeah, she's done very well. I think she was a couple of years below us. And Stuart McAldry published a novel. Stuart McAldry. Yeah, football player. Okay, what kind of novel was it? Who was it about? The Bass Loner file. Berkeley professor Lee Tomlinson is in Moscow to research a book that will resuscitate his career when someone slips a classified file into his suitcase. So it's set in 1995. Oh right, that sounds fun. So he wrote a column for The Messenger. Okay, I'd have to, yeah, I'd have to see a picture and kind of open the file cabinet in my memory. I'm sure Stuart, wait a minute. Yeah, I think. Stuart McAldry, he got a football scholarship to Cal. Wow, huh, huh, yeah, interesting. Yeah, and out of all the books that you've published, which one has the most meaning to you? Well, I've got three coming out this year and I think the one I really like, I look forward to reading again. I've got like an author of proof copy and that's called Miss Step. And that's that site, just my first sort of kind of classic science fiction. And it was just really fun to write. Wait, isn't the Lucid series science fiction? Yeah, I guess you'd call that science fiction too. But, you know, Miss Step is science fiction with spaceships and different planets and things like that. It's where the Lucid series is kind of more about alternate histories and it's all sort of time traveling things, yeah. And were you into science fiction as a child? Oh, God, yeah. Yeah, I've got into Robert Heinlein, I'd write every book he read and I mean, I had a hanging chair in my room and I would just sit in that and read books until one or two in the morning every night. My dad would knock on the door and I'd like to bet on Chris. Okay, okay, since I finish. Yeah. Just just read and read and read and just love science fiction. So you've got several books coming out so walk me through each one. Well, Pirates Come Down, that's gonna come out February 22. And that is a bit of climate fiction, science fiction set in the near future fisheries around New Zealand. It's what I do to buy food is I'm a fisheries observer now, which means I go out to sea for like six weeks and I collect scientific work for the scientist and you check on the bird life and the sea life and keep an eye on the catch data. And so a lot of that is informed Pirates Come Down. In fact, I wrote that when I was on a Korean ship, a lot of downtime on that Korean ship. It's a really fun one. I just read it, read my author copy and I just, it's a cracker of yarn. I tried to make it kind of action to where it just nice flow, you know? How many weeks a year do you spend on boats? Well, last year, last year was kind of interrupted because of our lockdowns and stuff. And that was, I think almost five months of the year. I had a month training based in Nelson on land and then three trips, which are about 18 weeks, how many months is that? Four and a half. Yeah, yeah. So I think four trips would be, probably do it. I'm trying to get one in the next couple of weeks if they don't lock us down, which I think they're going to do. I was looking through an Australian academic press and it listed a book that was a history of the Pacific Ocean. And I was just thinking, how on earth could you write a history of the Pacific Ocean? I haven't read the book, but how big of these ships, how many people are on them? Tell me about life on a boat for weeks on end. Well, it's a bit like a spaceship. I mean, these are like, the big trawlers are, I find no meters, you got to translate, 150, 180 feet. I'm kind of privileged I get to go up to the bridge whenever I want to and I could go out on the deck and do my bird watches and counts. So I get to go outside, but most of life is just inside your inside that ship. They might have four levels or five levels and the factory down at the bottom under the deck and noise and work and more work. How many women are there on these ships? Oh, the Kiwi boats, I found it mixed in the factory. On my first trip, the factory manager was a woman. When I actually worked as a factory hint, not last year, the year before, and my foreman was a woman and I worked with some women. And yeah, yeah, quite a bit down below. On the deck, I haven't seen any female deckhands. And on the Korean boat, all the crew were Indonesian and they were all men. And what are the most dangerous situations that you've been in on a boat? Yeah, part of what I do too is safety audit. So I had a heavy scale I had to lift quite frequently. But what about storms and tsunamis and earthquakes and whales and pirates? You know, you're seeing it in the sea when the waters are 200 miles around the island. It's called the easy. There's just New Zealand boats and about 10 foreign boats chartered to New Zealand companies. Nobody else is allowed to fish there. And yeah, when I was on the Korean boat, a big storm coming up, but first made me go, oh Chris, come look and he'd show me the weather and the winds and I'm checking my phone and seeing the same thing. And so what we did was we just used Auckland islands. It's a sub Antarctic island, extremely beautiful, which features in pirates come down. So we just got about a mile or two offshore and went back and forth all day long using the island as a windbreak while these 80 knot winds were roaring by. So you'd see it coming and move. They would see it coming and move in those big boats. I mean, I was on the first one I was on, they had big swell kind of eight meter swell smashing against the side of the port holer. Like I'm in my room and whack, big wave hits the side of the boat. All they do there, instead of having two nets dragging underneath them, they put one on because it acts a bit as a sea anchor. It takes a lot to stop these boats, these big ones. And so what, eight meters would be probably the tallest wave that you've seen experienced? That's probably the tallest I experienced out there in the Southern Ocean, you know. 24, that's pretty big. Oh yeah. It's a lot of up and down. There are a lot of green-faced people on those for a few days. And how about you, Suffer from sea sickness? Not at all, no. I just found that it didn't happen the last time. I just felt a bit tired, so I laid down for a while, but the first day or two when you're steaming, and you're going fast so the boat's going up and down. And I just found the first couple of times that if I felt about 70 or 80%, you know, I'd go to the toilet and throw up, or maybe twice. And then I'd be fine for the whole trip. I'd otherwise out sailing in the bay, and I just never felt it. And did you go swimming in the ocean off the boat? No, not these fishing boats, no. No. No. Yeah. It's literally like you're on a spaceship, you're on a spaceship in a big blue space. And so did you touch down in, is it the Antarctic? No, those are kind of sought after postings. Those are for observers, those are three month trips. And you got to have a lot of experience. I, you know, different techniques and things. That would be wonderful. So walk me through an ordinary day on a ship? Yeah, because it's very routine. Let's see, on the Kiwi boats, they just work around the clock, but I didn't. So I'd wake up at, say, 6.30 or 7. I'd go down to the factory, and on the factory manager's desk, he'd have to print it off totals of the days catch, the previous day. And I would take all that paperwork up to my laptop and input it into my data, you know, my spreadsheets and things. And then say the net would come up, I'd go up to the bridge and I'd watch the net, take a catch assessment, take a bird assessment, then I'd go down to the factory. I'd do my science work, which might be taking a hundred fish in their sex, finding out their sex and how ripe the female is and noting all that down. Maybe test a couple other types of fish. I might do some other work around the factory, like checking their weights and everything. And then I'd go upstairs and I didn't put all my data. And then I might wait for the next haul. And then the next haul would come and I'd go up to the bridge and I do, you know, then it's just again and again and again. And what's the internet reception like? On the Korean boat, it was nothing. It was absolutely nothing. It was bliss. I got a lot done. On the Kiwi boat, they gave us tokens. As long as you didn't go on a website, you're okay. You could do social media and stuff. And they had Sky TV. I was watching movies in my cabin. And what about sharks? Did you see sharks, whales? We, just the ones that were caught sharks. They got Spiky Dog is a kind of a dog shark. I think a dog shark, we might call it in America. And those were just, those were here. Those were pain in the ass, but I didn't have to deal with them. And what's the smell like? Well, that's funny because it doesn't, it doesn't really smell. I come home and some of my stuff sort of has, I might like take my belt off. Even now, it's like, hey, smell my belt. And it's like, oh, it's fish, but I can't smell it. And I think it's just more from the meal plant. That some of the fish, the boats with meal plants, they grind up the fish they don't want. And then they bake it. And then they turn it into a powder, you know, for mill. But otherwise the fish is really fresh. And so it doesn't smell. It doesn't have a chance to it. Right down to the pounds where they hold the fish. It gets processed. It gets boxed. It gets frozen. That's the shift until all the fish is gone. And then the next net will come. And in between all the stuff is sprayed and kept clean and things like that. So it's not, yeah, not the nightmare story that you imagine or that I've read about, yeah. What's a bird assessment? The what? A bird. Didn't you talk about having to do a bird assessment? What's that? Yeah, it's protected species interactions. That's sort of that part of the job. And some of the money to pay for me, most of it comes from the fishing industry itself. A certain percentage comes from our department of conservation. And so it will be just a count of the birds and the species of the birds behind the boat. And if the boat catches a bird, like it might get stuck in the warp that the cable that's pulling the net up, then I'll process that bird and take photos, take samples or maybe even take the whole bird and freeze it. So it's kind of a real accounting for that. And also checking that the boats mitigation things are deployed and they're working. And did you ever overhear the sailors talking about you? And what did they say? No, no, I think observers have been around for about 25 years now in New Zealand. So, and in deep sea, the deep sea, they want to make sure it's sustainable as well. Right, but you're not just an observer, you're a Christopher McMaster. So any reaction to you that you found interesting from the sailors? They only know about me what I want to tell them. That's kind of cool. So do you get into deep and meaningful discussions far out the sea? The Korean boat was kind of different to where, like the young Koreans who are the officers, they know a bit of English, the Indonesians don't. So that was a lot of solitary time too, which wasn't bad, I did a lot of writing. And otherwise, let's see the last boat. Yeah, I really got on well with the, the barter technician, which means nothing to you. The barter machine is this machine that takes the fish, heads it, tails it, slices it, guts it, basically turns it into prime filets. And his job was to make sure that machine always worked well. And one of the things I would do was like, okay, we have two filets that weighs so much, how much does the whole fish weigh? So we would run tests by taking a hundred fish, run it through the machine, weigh the filets, bloody, bloody, bloody. Yeah, he was good company. We'd always do our tests, go into the workshop, have a coffee, have a nanner. That was kind of nice. But aside from that, no, everybody's really busy working. They were way too hard on New Zealand boats. So you never had a cap? Three hours off around the clock. You don't know what time it is, what day it is, say that again, how many hours on? Eight hours on, eight hours off. So did you ever have a captain who got obsessed with the white whale? No. Okay. No, I just noticed some are really easy to get on with and others are kind of brusque. And how do New Zealanders, how do the Kiwis react to you? How do they understand you? Or what do they say about you? Have you ever overheard it? Why? Being an observer or being me or? Yeah, people react to you. People react to me, people react to you, people react to everyone. And people often have interesting insights about us that we don't, that we never thought of until we accidentally overheard someone saying something about us when they didn't think we were around. On boats, there's a bit of restraint too, to where I could be at a table, a mess table, and there could be a couple of guys just to our really right wing, rararar. And I can maybe say one or two things, and they are right away that I'm not. But because we're on this confined space together, you just don't have arguments, because there's no point. There's not, I have never kind of seen or got into kind of conflict that way. But on shore, on shore, in New Zealand, on shore, in New Zealand, at a pub, like, how are you coming across? How do they see you? What do they object to, if anything? Do you get into arguments with Kiwis? No, no, not at all. That's what Facebook is for. So you don't argue with people anymore? Well, yeah. Yeah, you do. Of course you do. Yeah. But you want to do it, you want to do it effectively. I don't like, I just arguing. It's like sometimes arguing is a conflict. It doesn't achieve anything. It's a couple of guys I worked with on a boat, and yeah, I didn't argue with them. I didn't have to. I just took care of them in different ways. You shoved them overboard. That's what I get to do with my fiction. I get to kill them in my fiction. And what about the pub? How would you describe a New Zealand pub? Is it the same as an American pub? They're starting to get more here. I went to the Shanghai. It's not the Shanghai anymore in Old Town. It's so cool. Well, have you been up to town recently? Have I been up to town? Up to Auburn. No, I haven't been in Auburn since 2000. Oh, they turned the Shanghai into a brewery. I'm like a brewery restaurant. It's so cool. That kind of thing. There's a few of those. There's a lot more of those in New Zealand now. Yeah. Otherwise, there's the other pubs you just wouldn't want to. They're just like yuck. I'm sorry, they're like what? They're just yuck. I don't know, tacky, cheap and nasty. So I remember American pubs as generally being pretty grim, but a whole different atmosphere in Australian pubs, which I would assume. Families go to the pub in Australia while. Yeah, that's what I guess, like the bar. The bar's in America. I never went to bars in America. They're just not nice places. Yeah. But there's a lot more. I mean, because microbreweries and different types of beer and people's tastes have changed. Minneapolis was wonderful. They had so many good breweries and burger places. I just worked going to town just for that. Yeah. So here, I don't really hang out at pubs. I might go to the brewery with a friend. But this is Amiable. It's an Amiable place mostly here. Yeah. And have you paid attention to any New Zealand sports? Yeah, I got into rugby when I was up the coast. How does a 45-year-old man play rugby? I don't get it. He is really fit. He's the fittest person on the team. This is grassroots. So it's kind of a mix of guys. So I just made sure I was just a super fit. And when I played Pop Warner, I was a bit of a monster on the field. And I translated that into rugby, but it just smashed my body even though I was fit. Do you still have injuries, Roma? Do you still have aches and pains from it? No, they finally went away. It's like what kind of shoulder it was. What's that concussion syndrome that American football players have where they have enough concussions that it does permanent damage to their brains? Yeah. I think they're looking into that in rugby now, too. Oh, yeah. Stopping the kids starting so young. It's a really brutal sport. It was fun to play, but it brutalized me. I bumped into a mom because I worked on a sailing boat in town here, and I bumped into a mom who used to at the school I taught up there. And we're chatting. It was so good to see her, and I said, oh, I remember. I broke your husband's finger. And she said, yes, you did. And yeah, that was a rugby game. And what about cricket? Cricket, I played with you once. And I think now, I think about 10 years ago, I finally understood where an over was. Yeah. So you haven't gotten back out on the wicket and hit any sixes? No, no. The technician I told you about on that one boat, who I talked with quite a lot, he was crazy about cricket. Do you think cricket's gay? No, I just don't get it. I think it's kind of boring to watch. So baseball. How do you spend an ordinary day now, on the shore? Well, today, the day I did a lot of tree pruning and branch sawing and cutting up the wood and mulching up all the branches. That's a lot of mess when you cut down branches. Sure, it's really weird. I got to get over it. So when I came back after working 42 days straight, I got home, sat around for a couple of days and felt guilty because I wasn't working. Protestant work ethic? I guess. I guess, yeah. Were you raised religious? We were brought up as Catholics. And we were really serious about it. I think I wanted to be a priest when I was 13. But then when I was 14, we all stopped going. And this tells you a lot about my mom and dad. I mean, my mom was the one brought up Catholic. But we watched the liberation theology priest in Central America during the real nasty times in the 80s. And I remember it was a time when, I think, some nuns got killed in El Salvador. And we watched the pope in the Vatican's response. And we saw that the Vatican was just supporting the established powers and not the liberation theology guys who were actually working for the people. And we stopped going to church. Sort of never went back. We meaning your family? The whole family, yeah. You basically haven't been back since then? Well, visiting a Catholic church from time to time, you go into a service or a funeral or a wedding or something. But not as a worship or no. I think once you don't buy into the belief system, it's just too hard to interpret the words into a message that you might receive. And what sort of religiosity do you see around you in New Zealand? You don't see too much. I mean, there's Catholics and there's Anglicans and there's kind of the burnt-over religions, the ones that come after those two come, like the Baptist or them. But not a lot. It's not like a really overtly religious country. Yeah. And how would you describe Kiwis as opposed to Americans as opposed to the English? Probably more. A little more self-spoken, a little more, I'm thinking Amy Bull, but I'm also thinking it takes a lot to shock them into action. It takes a lot to get them to go protest and fight. It takes a lot. They're patients. They're patients. They have a lot of patients. Does New Zealand have a child molestation problem like so many other places that we've been finding out about? I think story-wise, it's just been more like from boarding schools. I think there's a boarding school to where the old students have actually had a class-action lawsuit against the school itself for not keeping them safe. But aside from that, and if you don't hear about a lot going on in the parishes and things, we're not family violence. Family violence is a word. Is that more in the Maori community? Oh, to generalize, I'd have to say yes. But they're really careful on the news, not to say, you know, a person of whatever descent. And do you think that's a good thing or a bad thing? That they don't say? Yeah. I don't know. I mean, you don't want to. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I guess I haven't really had too many cases in the news recently. They're just some real violent, nasty ones that make the press and stuff. I mean, just yeah. So not a lot to make me answer anyway. So where do you plan on going next in your writing? I am writing a science fiction love story that folds time and space so that Earth gets a message. And we respond to the message with two ships. And one goes through time and space to the people who sent the original message. And the other one goes to, say, 2,000 light years away. It goes to that planet as it is now, because you send a message, 2,000 years have gone by, by the time it gets there. So two different missions. That's kind of what I'm working on. And I got about a quarter page into it. I'm just, yeah. I got distracted by trying to get all these three books that I'm putting out this year formatted and ready and cover art. It's almost like I need to go away to sea to be able to start writing. So when you wrote for the Hulman messenger, was it under Chris or Christopher? I can't remember. I remember you as Chris. Did you do most people call you Christopher? No, no. I just did that when I started with the academic books. When I started having books come out, I just thought that would be my pin name. Right, that'll fool them. That's about it, yeah. I tried to get people to call me Christoff once, but it never catched on. And what, if anything, do you miss about America? The nature, we grew up with the Sierras right out the back door after living in Alaska. That kind of nature, getting away from it all and winter with snow, rivers, like the American River, you can swim in, that flow with a lot of water all the time. They had that kind of stuff. When I moved to Minnesota, me and Wendy, we drove there from California, bought a car and drove there. It's been quite a while getting to Minnesota. I just went to the beautiful nature. We went across Nevada, it's a national park there, which is the least visited national park in America called Great Basin National Park. It was amazing. You hike up to the top of a mountain and you just have a whole beautiful mountain to yourself. And it gets a lot of moisture from the air. So there's bristle cone pine forests That kind of nature just trips me out, I love it. So how much do you stay in touch with people from high school? Do I what? How much do you stay in touch with people from high school? Really, just, well, it's Eddie. Just, yeah, we got back in touch because he moved to here. We haven't caught up yet because he's on the other side of the island. Others would, I, gosh, yeah. I have to look at like my Facebook Messenger and see if I've actually talked to anybody there. But yeah, not a lot. Some of it is just, you know, catch up and fall out, catch out again and it's a long time ago. Yeah. Yeah. And out of all the places you've lived, do you have a favorite? Favorite isn't. I'd like to go back there for a little while longer or I'd like to stay there forever. No, just favorite. Huh? Just favorite, whatever that means to you. Oh, I love Juno. Juno is a great town. Why? It literally, you know, my mom, I picked my mom up at the airport when I lived there. 10 minutes later, I got her walking on a frozen lake towards the glacier. It was an absolutely amazing place. And, and, I'd love to go back to Chile. I went to Chile in 2019. That is a neat country. Those Andes Mountains. Yeah, just don't, just don't crash a plane on them. Just bringing up people to eat, huh? Chile, Chilean Fiasco, I'd like to go back. Huh. The South Island of New Zealand. That's definitely a place. So what's the biggest earthquake you've experienced? The biggest earthquake? Yeah. Probably in the sixes here. Okay. It's pretty good. We're on like a sand dune. So it was like being in a water bed. Yeah. It just kind of went on. And you get kind of tuned into it because when I was in Christchurch, it was a year after their big earthquake. And they kept having a lot of aftershocks, jolts that would be in the five sometimes. And so you really know, like, do I have to worry or do I not? And like our, our, even that six one, it was, it was really deep. And it was just kind of waving along. I just laid in bed and enjoyed it. Christchurch, that scared the poop out of me when I first got there. So when did, when did the Christchurch earthquake happen? That was 2011. Okay. And where were you at the time? I was up in, up the coast in a town called Ruitoria, a little township. North Island. Yeah, in the North Island. Okay. So we just, we just heard about it. But yeah, we have a lot of little quakes quite frequently. I remember the only one I experienced before I left Auburn was the Orville Dam one when I was about six or seven or eight, 4.2. That's the only earthquake I felt in earth, California. And do you want to be buried in New Zealand? Oh, I don't care. That's an SEP. Which is? Someone else's problem. Okay. They haven't bought a plot and... No, no, no. I wouldn't want to do that anyway. Just sprinkle the ashes somewhere. Yeah. Make me useful somehow. And do you, what at journalism, if any, do you pay attention to these days? Let's see. I usually wake up and make a copy and coffee and then I read CNN on my app and then Guardian. I find CNN really boring. Al Jazeera News, we have Al Jazeera. That's just, it's just quality. That's not a lot to choose from. The mainstream media channels, they're just pretty, pretty bad. That's standard for me, like, you know, never asks any question. I used to like going to like indie media. I'd go to some sites, every city would have its sites and sort of like citizen's journalism. That was really cool. But I'm not sure sort of what happened with that movement. And what's it like to get favorable emails and favorable reviews for your books? I imagine it's intoxicating. No, it's really hard to get reviews. I just keep telling people to review my books, but I think American Dreamer has three or four. It has to do with the Amazon algorithms too. To advertise on Amazon, you have to have so many reviews. And it's just like, it's just, it's a real kind of game. Say, now we're not ready to pay people to review your box favorably. Yeah, Amazon doesn't like that. No, I don't need to do that. I think one person gave American Dreamer three stars because they said it was dark. That's a lot of what it was meant to be. Yeah. But no, I imagine if reviews started to pour in, my little heart would be thumping. Sorry. It's like Facebook. I just unfollow a lot because I just don't like to, I just don't like things that make me feel anxious or upset me. So do you get much communion with other writers in New Zealand? You get to go to writer gatherings? We have a little writers group in town here. And we got a grant to produce an anthology of writing. And yeah, we came out with that last year. That was really cool. So that kind of work with other writers was fun. And there's a heaps of networks, the social media ones, and Australian speculative fiction writers. And the New Zealand Wellington has a writers group that I sort of follow and you could ask questions or. So that's kind of cool. But yeah, even in town with the writers group, we're all at different places doing different things. My friend Dorothy, we sort of exchange stories and advice sometimes and stuff. I'm teaching her how to put her e-books into physical print-on-demand formats. That in how to build up a mailing list and have it at Facebook advertisement, things like that. So that's kind of cool. That's why I got into it was I just needed a community outside of the other communities. So yeah, it's been a good network that way. Have you developed any Maori friends or connections? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I lived up the coast for that time. And the town I live in, the boat I worked on was a Polynesian voyaging canoe. So that was a very Māori boat. And what did you learn from these connections? What I learned was everybody's different. Yeah, my friend Jay, he was really level-headed, really cool. He was a teacher up the coast. Oh, so he's mixed. It's like religion. Some Māori are really religious. Other Māori aren't. Some I could talk religion with and some I can't. Like, you know, it's like they're religious and they don't want to be colonized. And that's their colonizer's religion. And I couldn't have that discussion with some of my Māori friends, but other Māori friends I could. And they totally understand. And we could totally explore it. It's just, yeah, everybody's different. Do they live largely separate lives from the Anglo population? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know how easy it is to sort of, yeah. I mean, you've lived in New Zealand for 15 years. So you do know. Yeah, but I lived the first 10 years. I lived with a woman with three Māori children. So I'm not your usual kind of pākia. I worked on a Māori boat. I worked in a Māori school. So yeah, so it's not easy to kind of answer the question. I know there's some pākia in New Zealand who've never been on a marae, who've never, you know, had Māori friends who, you know, so that's, I'm sure they lived quite separate, separate existences. I just never did. What are the challenges that the Māori face that, you know, we wouldn't know about? Like, I have no idea what it's like to be a Māori. Oh, God, wrong person to ask. Ask a Māori person. Wait, you lived with a woman who had three Māori kids. I mean, you taught in a Māori school. So yeah, you do know something about the challenges of Māori. And then again, I don't know, like, a lot of institutions that are set up in a pre-treaty kind of day, a lot of systems that benefit, see, like, our school system really benefits that 30% of kids who go to university, not the others. Those kind of systems and institutions, you know, it's a lot of things that, yeah, I wouldn't face because, you know, maybe because my skin is white and I would be hard for me to call just to say, you know, their experience, poverty, poor living in poor areas, having the guts ripped out of your town because of economic changes. Oh, Ruatori up the coast used to be a thriving farming community, but because they liberalized the economy in the 80s and privatized a lot of things and outsourced a lot of things, a lot of folks missed the, you know, lost their jobs. So you taught in a Māori school. How is that different from teaching Anglo kids of the same age? I don't know, you're kind of more aware of the culture and you try to access that more like one boy, he was total trouble until he got the teachers how to make an eel net and go to the stream and put it in and check it every day. You're kind of thinking outside the box. So in America, Indian reservations tend to be pretty grim places and Indians seem, you know, very much like a lost and defeated people, but that's certainly not my impression of the Māori. They seem to be an honored people in New Zealand. Am I missing it? No, no, you're not missing it. You're not missing it. And even when I worked for the ministry as an education advisor, I'd visit a kura kopapa, which is a Māori school and it's all in Te Reo Māori. And it was just, yeah, trying to, certain cultural things you sort of need to do, you can't just go in there as a professional and hear sign this paper or something. It takes time to develop relationships. So no, you don't get that, but you still get, you know, people living in poverty, you still get low income areas of your city and your town. And have you written about the Māori in any of your books? No, no, I don't think I would either. I mean, a character will be Māori. He's his character on this one mining planet because my character's from Christ's church. But it's just, it doesn't feature us. It's not, it's not major. And I just, yeah, I wouldn't, I'm saying this, I said I wouldn't feel comfortable writing that character, but then again, American Dreamer is a 17 year old black girl from Chicago. So I haven't yet. Yeah. Okay, so what should I ask you about your book, say, in particular that I haven't asked you? I don't know. Pirates Come Down is, it's, you can pre-order it now, and it's coming out the 22nd. If you join me mailing this, you kind of find out little bits of pieces through my newsletter. Yeah. And then the two science fiction books coming out this year. They're pretty good. I like them. I don't see myself. So I know when I've done good writing, when I enjoy reading it. So it doesn't matter so much if anyone else praises it. If I read it and I laugh and I cry and I have a good time reading it, then I know it's good. But how about for you? How do you know when you've done good work? I think I kind of put on my editor hat and I try to read it and just kind of check flow and check the relevance in writing and like every chapter has a purpose or, so a lot of kind of trying to carefully shape it. Like the one I'm writing now, I'm about a hundred pages in. Last night I started to read it from the beginning and just sort of with that hat on and made some changes, made some corrections. Okay. If I wasn't, yeah. If I think if I wasn't satisfied, if I didn't think it was a good read, I wouldn't make a quick out of it. Okay, great. I'm gonna wrap up this live stream and then I'll talk to you on the other side. Any final words, Chris, anything you want to add? Did you say live stream? Yeah. I thought you were gonna tape this and cut some stuff out. No, it's all going out live. No, no. Yeah. Thanks for reaching out. Yeah, absolutely. Listening out there and interested in some nonfiction, nobody really reads or some fiction that is fun to read and yeah, go to my website. Christopher McMaster.com