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Not much of a podcast, just wanted to get online to recap 2022.
My name is Mr Benja, and I come up with ideas about art, design, and development. This podcast is helping me do something productive with these ideas.
2022-12-29 Recap
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Benja: I really don't know what the heck went on in 2022. There was so much madness, so much craziness, so much out of control changes in the paradigms that we've been used to that I have no basis for which to discuss it, except that it was interesting and that is going to allow you, myself, and anyone interested, the ability to create new and awesome things.
because that's what I'm all about with creativity and creation in general. And I want to talk about it a little bit. This is kind of our 2022 wrap up, but here it is. This is Mr. Benja's A D D experience. Glad to have you with me. Thank you for following along. Be sure to check me out at mr benja.com or wherever you listen.
Follow. And this is not just a podcast by the way, which is one thing I'm gonna get into with a whole ADD Experience. It's not just a podcast. It's the whole gamut of what I'm doing. That's why I called it the ADD Experience all about art, design and development, making things happen and creating. So just last week, I want to thank everybody for their support on the Kickstarter campaign that I did.
It was one of the things that I kind of hinted at doing and talked about doing in 2021. Didn't really get around to it until 2022, but that's how resolutions are, right? I got around to it at the end of 2022. I wanted to take this podcast and all my media production, not just the podcast to the next level, what that actually meant in terms of my commitment, my delivery.
The production quality and so on. I wanted to make sure that it was moving forward and it matched what I was doing in my life. So I ran this Kickstarter program, right? It was only seven days long. A lot of people didn't hear about it because my art, my marketing is pretty bad. I'm still not good at it, but I hope I got out to enough people and it was successful.
You can check that out as usual on my website. But, I've got some pretty sweet goals, pretty sweet rewards that I, I put out there. I will be go doing some video and website recognition for people. I will be, uh, there's a custom t-shirt that I also have that I'm gonna be putting out there, and I've contacted a few of you already for input on how I'm going to get that out to you.
This stuff will get out in the next month or so. We'll see what happens with. Now if you got any questions, I'd be sure to just ping me here or wherever you can find me. A few of you ask some questions. I'm gonna be getting to, to the questions and we'll answer those on the podcast. Wanna make that a regular occurrence where I take input from you guys and answer it appropriately?
Obviously, priority and my effort will be put towards the, those who have backed me in some way also. , opening up for sponsorships on these episodes, so you'll be able to definitely sponsor things and, , get things happening from your side of things, whether you want to promote, whether you want to just make a shout out or whatever.
You can make that happen and maybe, I don't know, maybe I'll confine that to Kickstarter or maybe I'll find some other way of doing that, but let. Creative consultations. I've been doing those for a while now. Never really opened it up and let people know that I was doing those on a large scale, but as part of my new marketing efforts and everything for 2023, I'll be doing that.
More of that also. And we've also got some custom, custom art that I'm gonna be getting out there. So we'll see what happens with all that. Love everybody who supported the Kickstarter, and I literally wanted to do the Kickstarter to, as I said, kickstart Jumpstart. You know, put foot to the ass of what I'm doing in the future and what I'm doing right now.
It's marketing, it's a new kind of product creation that I'm not used to, but I'm embracing this unfamiliar territory, which is where I think creativity lies and which, what gets me to my topic for 2023 and looking back at 2022, I suppose I'll do a new 2023. preview podcast of sorts.
Looking Back At 2022
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Benja: But what I want to do, what, what I did in 2022 was really look back at all the craziness that was going on.
And if you don't think it's an amazing time that we're in, then you really need to stop and just consider what all has happened and what all is going on, where we're going. , just the sheer amount of change that has happened. It may not seem like a lot, but we're still dealing with repercussions of the pandemic.
You know, we're, we're switching into this phase where the monetary system and the economy is changing. We've seen Bitcoin, NFTs, and a lot of financial products related to the block. come crashing down in a lot of ways. If you haven't heard of the FTX scandal with Sam Bankman Frid, that's, that's just phenomenally mind blowing how that level of fraud happened at such a simple and basic level on a complicated platform.
So really basic activities just on a new technological platform, and this is changing the way the world works. We're. , billions just go missing and it's going somewhere, right? Whether it be the Bitcoin farmers, the miners, whether it's going to random financial institutions or undercover, shady business scammers.
You know, swindlers, that, that's a lot of it. I don't mean to paint. It si too negatively, but hey, million, billions were lost, just disappeared. So these have effects across the globe and across humanity, and we see other things happening, such as the advent of ai. This stuff has been around for a while, but now, now look at what's happened with the art scene.
Look at what's happened. , you know, advertising and marketing and the ability to predict what humans thought was extremely unique and say, well, no, a computer can predict what you're going to like, what you're gonna get into. And of course it'll, it's not, it's not perfect. But the point is that many advancements were made and we're going many, many crazy places with this.
I mean, it's. that we go certain places. And I hope I don't sound like I'm too all around or too random with the topics that I'm dropping here, but going back through 2022 has been a bit of a mind opening, eye-opening, you know, soul altering experience for me and I mean, what else? You've got social movements.
in, in other countries in the United States, we're interacting with each other differently. We've got extreme sides of things in our normal discourse and our politics in the way we compose ourselves and handle ourselves. It's, it's all very strange and I can't, I can't stress enough how much these changes have, are affecting.
because I know it's not just me. I've had to really kick up my meditation practice, my, my thoughtfulness practice. My planning practice, because a weird thing happened to me earlier in the year. I was going about my, my daily what? There's no routine but my daily movements and I had to, I had a thought that, wow.
Can't think straight. With all of this going on, so much was changing. So much was happening. I couldn't make a strong, logical decision to do something because so much was changing. So much had changed. I had people that professed dislike for me contact me saying, Hey man, hope. How are you doing? Hope things are good with.
be strong. And I'm like, okay. And then I had people who I thought were much closer to me or on a friend level get upset and start distancing themselves. I didn't know if it was me. I didn't know if it was something that happened to them. There was so much I was unsure about this year. It was really bizarre.
And I thought it was just me, right? So I'm going about myself doing my own soul searching, meditating and, and so forth. And I start to look around and I think everybody's a bit unsure about things. I mean, e even little stuff, right? And what, what you'll come to find is that there are these enough little changes, enough microaggressions.
I know a lot of people aren't totally down with the term microaggressions, but. , I noticed how the microaggressions of society, of nature, of humanity were pushing us in certain ways that caused us to become unsure of things. A weird example, I was grocery shopping at Sprouts and I asked the guy, Hey, you work here?
What do you. , do you have any type of natural energy boosters that don't contain caffeine? Because I'm, I was looking for an energy drink of some sort that didn't contain caffeine. I've been trying to pull away from that. Ever since my days in the game industry, I've been trying to pull away from caffeine, right, and excess sugar.
So the guy showed me a few options. , you know, quite frankly, I was gonna grab a bunch of Dr Peppers and crack out on some work, but I was like, lemme see if I can do better than this. So I ended up at Sprout talking to this guy about what I wanted to consume. And you know, I didn't like artificial sweeteners.
Hopefully something organic, not heavily caffeinated. And I asked about this old drink that used to be around, um, Hansen's. Hansen's was a soda, but they had an energy drink that went along. that very few people knew about, that's been discontinued for several years. But the regular sodas, apparently, with all this supply chain business of just getting products around the world in the age of Covid, apparently they had problems securing aluminum cans and getting their product into cans.
And the Hansen's company didn't know how to operate without can. . So they basically ended up folding, and you can only find it in certain places now, a very specialized place that's no longer a large scale operation. And I'm thinking, well, there's gotta be a natural kind of soda on the shelves. And there was really nothing to replace it.
And I'm wondering how many other people had run into this where all these things that they relied on were suddenly not. Not available, not in the same form not affordable in their budget because of inflation or whatever. You know, they can't drive to go get it because of gas or whatever. It was just very bizarre, this series of thoughts that came down on me.
I was like, wow, there's so many little changes. We're not realizing. that are our bedrock, our, our foundation, the things that we rely on to do everything, they, they're changing so much. You know, I use, I use a few apps and a lot of them have just decided to just change and not do things certain ways anymore.
Elon Musk Takeover
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Benja: A lot of people who were on Twitter, even though the fundamentals of it may not have changed, the, the story behind it has changed now that Elon Musk has taken. . We'll see what happens with that in 2023. But, you know, that's another 2022 happening. Elon Musk, um, his Tesla stock is tanking and his, his takeover of Twitter is whatever you think of it, causing a lot of turmoil.
Maybe that's the right word. Maybe it's not, but yes, definitely turmoil in terms of the wildness of the change and. , you know, I mean, is it actually becoming a better platform product? I personally think so. It's working better. I used Twitter spaces for the first time, but is it the platform that people want?
That's, that's what I was concerned with in 22. Is it what people want? Do they feel safe on it? Is it a foundation that they can use? Whatever. , hopefully you see what I'm getting at this. Just the bedrock of a lot of things changing and it got me realizing that yes, we are definitely in a new time period.
We are definitely in a new era. If you haven't been able to put a finger on the change and point out this is what it is, trust me, you are not the only one. Stuff is just. that is the hallmark of 2022 and you can't get around it. While physical changes are one thing where the pandemic forces you to like, that was, you know, a couple years ago, the pandemic forced us all to go do, uh, you know, forced us all to work from home.
Forced us to use Zoom more, forced us to teleconference more forced people. not visit their families as much or drive around as much. I mean, we understand that before, for the most part. You can look at those types of interactions and holy crap, I just realized that I hadn't, hadn't unsubscribed from one of my streaming services.
All right, I got, I gotta make a note of that. Uh, I subscribe to AMC Plus and I just realized I gotta get rid of it.
But if you're, if we're looking at the world trying to figure it out, that's quite an impossible task for most, for most anyone. I don't know anybody who's got their heads around what's going on. And this is the beginning of, I think, the global realization of we don't know what we're talking about as a, as a species.
I think that's been the case for an extremely long time that no individual knows what the heck they're talking about. Computer programmers will be able to tell you that within a computer programming system. No one knows what the hell they're talking about. And here comes a helicopter.
All right. Now that the helicopter's gone by, I shall continue.
You always gotta wonder what helicopters are doing, buzzing overhead at strange hours of the night. Right now it's around seven 30 at night when I'm recording. . So hope everyone's okay.
Cause I don't think that, you know, when you hear a helicopter, you don't think of good thing going on. You think of somebody being chased by a police helicopter or military helicopters or what else is there? You know, medical service. Somebody needs to get somewhere very quickly. Special news report, something is,
What was that one movie? Margin call where the CEOs of a company all had to get helicoptered into the, into the building so they could fix some crazy problem.
Yeah, helicopters. The helicopters are buzzing, folks. That's what's happening right now in 2022. We don't know what's going on. Just helicopters around black helicopters. How'd my Alex Jones impression?
a lot of conspiracies, uh, arising. People don't know what's going on, and this is fascinating to me. Right. Um, you know, even on the entertainment front, avatar finally came out after all this time. You know, black Adam, for whatever reason, uh, had me, had me crying. I'm not, maybe it was my angry black man relating to black Adam.
just, I mean, I wasn't bawling, you know, you know, but, but, uh, eyes watered up, man. I got more emotional in this in, I got more emotional in black Adam than I did with Black Panther, which is very bizarre. Black Panther was definitely emotional, talking about Wakanda forever. By the way, black Panther two wa kind of forever was quite emotional.
Good, solid movie, but it didn't hit me the way Black Adam did, which is a testament to story. that it hits people different ways. Clearly not as good of a movie, but hit me differently anyway. Why am I saying, why am I missioning all this 2022 was wild. And that makes you wonder, what are you gonna, that makes me ask with that in my rear view at the end of 2022, what am I gonna do for 2020?
I'll do another whole podcast session on what 2023 can bring, but it's always good to take a moment and reflect, and if you haven't done so already, go ahead and do that. Even if we're already in 2023 when we're listening to this, go ahead and take a moment and reflect back. Just write out and consider all the stuff that went on the good, the.
the beautiful, the ugly.
What changed you? What stuck out to you? What left a mark on you? Because these are the things that are going to allow you to look forward. Plan. It's going to inform the way you see things in the future. Anything that changes you now or puts a mark on you. Will be. In fact, those things that inform your future.
You're Being Affected
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Benja: So be real with yourself, right?
Whether it's your job, your family, your finances, your economy, your soul, your constitution,
these are all things that will affect. And are affecting you, whether you want to admit it or not. You know, I, I, I always, I, I never took much stock in looking backwards
because I always thought that it held me in the past, but now I'm beginning to understand it, where you can really take a moment.
look back on where you've come to smell the roses that's in the present, I suppose,
and just appreciate your life as it happened and understand and log what was your life
and with. , incredibly interesting moment of change. What are you logging down? Everything's an experience that you can learn from and you should learn in whatever way you can from this year and any year of your life. But this one in particular because with great change, with great. things happening. I say, great and amazing.
When I say those words, I don't mean good necessarily, but with great and amazing things happening
that allows for great and amazing creations to occur. There is more room for what we do as artists, designers, developers, and creator. more spaces are now open for building a new, for creating a new for reconciling and opening avenues for better future, putting stronger things out into the world,
building, growing, and developing our. , because this isn't just about making things, it's about making ourselves. And I really wanna make that clear with, with this whole creation thing, we are building ourselves into the world. Our legacy is being created for everything that we do. The marks that we leave on the world, the structures that we leave standing, the impressions that we put upon people.
internal work reflects to the outside world and helps make it a better place, hopefully.
So going into 2023, I'm not sure how I'm going to format all of these podcasts, how I'm going to build this next set of ideas, but I know that. Imminent Im, I know that I am in a great and new creative spirit. It started up much earlier in the year, and it's going to continue.
Shout out to Theo from show versus business. Shout out to Jeff from Jam City. Shout out to Josh.
from way back in. Uh, rockstar. Shout out to Raphael, currently 3D sculpting his ass off with some awesome stuff. Shout out to Marcellas. Um, shout out to Ryan Dormanesh.
Shout out to Pete. These are all the creators that kind of started with me on this podcast. got me thinking about things in a wildly new way as I put out media for pretty much, I don't wanna say the first time, but in, in a way that was much more personal than it was before. It wasn't just a product. I really started changing things up when I started podcasting.
, and that's gonna be the way it goes for the future. . So if you've got something to say, you've got something to put out there, you've got all the tools, go ahead and start doing that. Listen, think back on 2023. Mark down what you, what you did, what you saw, what you came across, what you learned, what you experienced, what impressed upon you, and what you impressed upon the world.
This is Mr. Benja's ADD Experience. Signing off for this one. Thank you very much. Let's do it big.