Racism as Entertainment: Rae Lynn Barnes on Darkology and American Culture

00:00 - 00:25
(Intro music plays) Andrew Keen: Hello! My name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen on America, the daily interview show about the United States.

00:25 - 00:54
Andrew Keen: Hello everybody. It wasn't long ago that Donald Trump showed his dark side, shall we say, by retweeting an image of Barack and Michelle Obama represented as apes. It created, as always with Trump, a degree of controversy. He never apologized, of course, and his defense, both from himself implicitly and from some of his supporters, was that critics—which certainly would include myself—lacked a sense of humor. It was just a form of entertainment.

00:54 - 01:21
Andrew Keen: This rather unpleasant episode brings to mind a new book that's out—an interesting new book about entertainment and race and racism in American history called Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment. It's by my guest today, Ray Lynn Barnes, who is joining us from New York. She teaches at Princeton University. Ray Lynn, congratulations on the new book.

01:21 - 01:31
Andrew Keen: Coming back to the latest, or one of the latest Trump episodes when it comes to race, does this bring to mind in some way some of the themes you deal with in Darkology?

01:31 - 02:00
Ray Lynn Barnes: Absolutely, and thank you again for having me. I’m so happy to be here. Yes, so when Donald Trump sent out that meme, for lack of a better word, he was trying to reanimate a centuries-long cultural trope that has been a dominant joke in white supremacist history.

02:00 - 02:30
Ray Lynn Barnes: And the common phrase of "this was just a joke, you’re not taking this more lightheartedly" is a way that a lot of these more vile and disgusting dehumanizing caricatures of Black Americans has been relegated as somehow socially acceptable or innocuous, going back to American slavery.

02:30 - 03:00
Ray Lynn Barnes: This specific image is quite interesting because one of the first people to really publicize Blackface was a man named P.T. Barnum, famously of the circus. He ran the American Museum in New York City. And one of the things he did when in the mid-19th century we were first learning about evolution, was hired a disabled man who he put into a human zoo and made dress up to be like a monkey, like an ape, a Black man that white people would come and examine as if he was the missing link in evolution.

03:00 - 03:15
Ray Lynn Barnes: And instead of giving him a stage name, he was just called the "What Is It?". And so you can draw pretty much a straight line from that moment to Donald Trump.

03:15 - 03:26
Ray Lynn Barnes: That was really in the context of the rise of Abraham Lincoln and a fear of emancipation. And so a lot of times political cartoons in the 1850s and 1860s would portray Abraham Lincoln with the great "What Is It?". And so we see just a really straight line from this kind of visual caricature.

03:26 - 03:41
Andrew Keen: It’s interesting that you bring up Barnum. I’ve often heard people describe Trump, not always critically, as the P.T. Barnum of American politics. Is there something unique about that? I mean, were there P.T. Barnums in other cultures or is it a uniquely American thing?

03:41 - 04:09
Ray Lynn Barnes: Well, I would say that we've always had con men, no matter where you are in the world. But what P.T. Barnum was excellent at, what his sort of catchphrase was, was called "Bah humbug," which maybe you've heard if you've seen an adaptation of Scrooge before or A Christmas Carol. In the 19th century, that basically meant like, "you're fooling me, bullshit."

04:09 - 04:36
Ray Lynn Barnes: And so what P.T. Barnum did that was really brilliant is he oftentimes would create fake hoaxes. But he put his museum directly next to all of the major burgeoning newspaper companies in the 1830s, 40s, and 1850s when newspaper and daily papers were really exploding as the number one form of mass media in America.

04:36 - 04:58
Ray Lynn Barnes: And so his entire fortune and success was based off of creating sensations—media sensations—that had nothing to do with reality except for normally grounded in pretty horrific stereotypes, whether that was racial, gender, sexuality, and getting people to pay an enormous amount of money to come and see that.

04:58 - 05:25
Ray Lynn Barnes: The first major exhibit that he has is a woman named Joyce Heth, who was an enslaved Black woman that he owned and purchased. He purchased her in the American North in Philadelphia, enslaves her, continues to enslave her in New York City. And the big claim to fame was that she was the so-called wet nurse or the woman who nursed President George Washington.

05:25 - 05:39
Ray Lynn Barnes: And so the play there was, if he's the founding father of the nation, what do you make of this enslaved woman? And so I think there’s a lot of parallels between how Trump plays the media and his concept of fake news and what P.T. Barnum did. And so I think that’s the most direct connection.

05:39 - 06:01
Andrew Keen: Subtitle of your book, as I said, is Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment. Are you suggesting in a way that race, racism, even slavery became one of the central features of American entertainment? Not just in the 19th century during slavery, after the Civil War, in Jim Crow, and even today?

06:01 - 06:26
Ray Lynn Barnes: Absolutely. So Blackface and minstrel shows, which were three-part shows starting in around 1828 and then really exploding in the 1840s, was the essential or quintessential American form of entertainment. It was our first cultural export that we export throughout the English-speaking world to Ireland, throughout the British Empire, so South Africa, Australia, Tasmania, but also throughout the Trans-Pacific in places like Japan which I talk about in the book.

06:26 - 06:50
Ray Lynn Barnes: And so Blackface and minstrel shows are considered the height of American entertainment or our one cultural contribution until in the mid or early 20th century we begin arguing that perhaps jazz is the better representation.

06:50 - 07:14
Ray Lynn Barnes: And part of the way in which that sort of cemented is the federal government during the mid-20th century federalized Blackface. They made it a requirement of schoolchildren in curriculum. Everybody who was in the army during World War II would receive Blackface songbooks and that was an expected form of pastime.

07:14 - 07:34
Ray Lynn Barnes: During the Great Depression, the WPA had an enormous Blackface division. And so from that moment on, it was really married as the ideal form of a unique contribution to American—or sorry, world music, dance, stand-up comedy, variety show—all of these forms of entertainment that we find very recognizable have their roots in the minstrel show.

07:34 - 07:54
Andrew Keen: Yeah, it’s interesting with your reference to Blackface and the minstrel show. I grew up in England and we grew up with a show called The Black and White Minstrels, which we watched as kids in all the innocence we had, no idea I guess we didn’t really think this thing through. Are you suggesting, Ray Lynn, that all forms of this kind of entertainment were by definition racist?

07:54 - 08:23
Ray Lynn Barnes: So this is one of the interesting things. Most of the time, especially in the 20th and the 21st century, people who engage in Blackface say, "Well, I’m not racist. I’m honoring Black culture." And we even see that with the arguments related to Megyn Kelly, for example, with the Halloween costume scandal.

08:23 - 08:49
Ray Lynn Barnes: And I think part of that comes down to the very issue of the fact that this was federalized. And what I mean by that is Blackface minstrel shows which are, when you look at the books, when you look at the words, the language, the stereotypes, are incredibly, incredibly derogatory and offensive.

08:49 - 09:12
Ray Lynn Barnes: But for about 70 or 80 years during Jim Crow America, were presented in American public schools as if they were an accurate representation of Black history and Black life, especially in American slavery. That part of what it meant to be enslaved in America was apparently to be tap dancing, strumming your banjo, like the song "Oh Susanna".

09:12 - 09:41
Ray Lynn Barnes: And so when somebody like President Trump says, "Oh, well slavery wasn't so bad," they're in some ways radically, radically misinformed by this tradition, this cultural and social tradition that was celebrated in American schools. Now, obviously he grew up through the Civil Rights Movement and all kinds of other racial movements, so when he says that now it's doing something quite damaging.

09:41 - 09:50
Ray Lynn Barnes: But you can in some ways understand why in the turn of the 20th century up through perhaps the 1940s, some people did think that they were honoring Black society when in fact they were denigrating it.

09:50 - 10:11
Andrew Keen: Well, your book is comprehensive and it came out of your PhD thesis, so you probably know more about this stuff than anyone, Ray Lynn. What did the African American community think of Darkology and this white obsession with appearing Black and supposedly entertaining each other?

10:11 - 10:33
Ray Lynn Barnes: Yeah, so Black responses to minstrelsy has a very long and rich history. Primarily because if you wanted to be a performer, whether you were someone who wanted to be a musician, a dancer, a comedian, an actor, for most of American history in mass media, a Black person would be forced to engage in Blackface or degrading racial stereotypes.

10:33 - 10:55
Ray Lynn Barnes: So Frederick Douglass, for example, the most photographed man of the 19th century—the reason why, in America (the Queen of England is the most photographed person of the 19th century)—part of the reason why he's doing that is because he wants to show people what a Black person actually looks like, someone who's regal and dignified and beautiful and elegant.

10:55 - 11:15
Ray Lynn Barnes: So that’s sort of the jumping-off point in terms of abolitionists taking Blackface seriously. I would say a critical sort of climax comes at the turn of the 20th century when we get the advent of what was called Ragtime or the derogatory term "Coon songs".

11:15 - 11:36
Ray Lynn Barnes: Where you have a lot of Black musicians who are now one or two generations out of enslavement, they are born free, and they want to have ownership over their music. And so they’re trying to sell sheet music, they’re trying to travel the United States, but what they come up against again and again and again is that white Americans expect them to perform in minstrel shows and Blackface.

11:36 - 12:05
Ray Lynn Barnes: And so many of them do have to perform that in order to get on stage. But a really critical thing to understand is a lot of times what they’re doing when you look at those scripts in terms of Black Blackface performers is they’re really making racial parodies of what it's like to live as a Black person in Jim Crow America.

12:05 - 12:28
Ray Lynn Barnes: And so there was very much an insider understanding in the Black audiences of what was being made fun of, but for white audiences they did not understand that nuance and continued to just look at it sort of flatly. And that’s an issue that goes all the way up through stand-up comedy in present times as how, you know, do you use the N-word while you perform, do you not, what is appropriate in terms of racial representation.

12:28 - 12:53
Ray Lynn Barnes: But an enormous part of my book that I’m really proud of is looking at what everyday Black Americans began doing during the 1940s, 50s, and 60s who had enough of this. Who understood that, you know, these are not just silly jokes. Okay, yes, we’re all supposed to know that it's funny for some reason if a Black person is eating chicken or watermelon—why is that?

12:53 - 13:14
Ray Lynn Barnes: They start to recognize that this seemingly innocuous harmless joke is actually the sort of seed of most of American racism that they were fighting. The why is it okay to lynch somebody? Because you’re dehumanizing them. You don’t see them as a human being. Why shouldn’t they have the right to vote? Because you’ve dehumanized them. They shouldn't have the right to vote.

13:14 - 13:38
Ray Lynn Barnes: And so what we see is that starting in the 1940s, a lot of Black veterans—men who served in World War II—who encounter these shows in the context of service abroad and also on the home front are completely disgusted by the troop entertainment that's being offered to them in their segregated troops.

13:38 - 14:03
Ray Lynn Barnes: Come back home, and then when they have children who are the baby boomer generation—and these are the children who are integrating American suburbs, integrating American schools—are horrified to discover that what their children are learning in history, English, music class are required minstrel show performances.

14:03 - 14:31
Ray Lynn Barnes: And so they go to the NAACP, they organize amongst themselves and try to fight against Blackface being the standardized part of American curriculum and also within social political power because this was the number one entertainment form in terms of charity productions run by the Elks Club, the Rotary Club, and all sorts of different social outlets.

14:31 - 14:53
Ray Lynn Barnes: And so they immediately recognized that this in some ways a white child in America could learn this in school, could then go serve in the military where they’re asked to perform this, go to a college that is racially segregated, perhaps does not allow women, and this is the art form that they are using to raise money.

14:53 - 15:15
Ray Lynn Barnes: And then when they graduate, when they go into corporate America and they join these civic societies like the Elks Club or other clubs that were seen as very patriotic and positive things to be a part of, one of their main forms of fundraising are Blackface shows. And so Black families immediately realized that this cycle needed to be stopped and that putting their life on the line to change American culture was a critical part of the Civil Rights Movement.

15:15 - 15:26
Andrew Keen: Who in particular was effective in arguing that this was so troubling? James Baldwin comes to mind. I'm guessing that his generation of writers, thinkers, academics would have been most opposed to this. Is that fair?

15:26 - 15:47
Ray Lynn Barnes: Absolutely. So one of the major early writers is James Weldon Johnson, who was a novelist and a poet and he also made an enormous amount of money writing Coon songs. He then stops and becomes the president of the NAACP.

15:47 - 16:10
Ray Lynn Barnes: And so he's part of that early Harlem Renaissance generation that are really trying to change cultural representation. But then when we get to the more familiar era of the Civil Rights Movement, there's a man named Henry Lee Moon who is the head of publicity for the NAACP.

16:10 - 16:32
Ray Lynn Barnes: And so he's just getting thousands of letters sent to him both by Black and white American families who are saying, "You know, my church is putting on this show. This seems inappropriate. I don’t know how to handle it. Do you have any advice?" or "My child is being required to be in the show and I talked to the principal and they didn't understand. What can I do?"

16:32 - 16:54
Ray Lynn Barnes: And so the NAACP begins to piece together that there's a problem here. One of the most interesting letters that I happened to come across was a man who was serving a church mission in South Africa wrote to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he was quite young.

16:54 - 17:15
Ray Lynn Barnes: And he said, "I’m encountering a lot of these minstrel shows. This doesn’t seem appropriate, especially as a man of God. Do you have advice? And PS: I heard this interesting speech you gave—I remember a line, 'I have a dream.' Could you send me a copy of that? What was that speech?"

17:15 - 17:34
Ray Lynn Barnes: And so over time a lot of the major Civil Rights leaders start to recognize that on the ground this is something that's very important because when a Black family is trying to protest an amateur minstrel show, it's very different. They're not fighting Hollywood, they’re going to the people with local power. This might be the principal, the pastor, the dentist that they are having to deal with and having to have these very complex and honest conversations about American race relations in the context of Jim Crow America.

17:34 - 17:54
Andrew Keen: Yeah, and one of the astonishing things that I got from your book is the extent to which presidents even embraced this culture. Everyone from FDR, who you certainly wouldn't have expected it of I guess in retrospect, to Gerald Ford.

17:54 - 18:15
Andrew Keen: In an odd way, Ray Lynn, would it be fair to say that your book should probably be called Whiteology? Because it's more about white America than Black America. What is it about this Blackfacing that made it so attractive to white America? Is it because they wanted to feel superior? Because it’s an intrinsically racist society that they found Black America somehow funny? What’s your interpretation of this American way of entertainment? What does it tell us about white America?

18:15 - 18:37
Ray Lynn Barnes: Yeah, so the very first sentence of the book is "Darkology is a cultural history of white supremacy and amateur Blackface minstrelsy in America during the 1800s and 1900s." And you're exactly right. This is a history of white supremacy. Now, Darkology is an interesting term. I actually learned it from Bing Crosby, but it's a term that goes back to the 1800s.

18:37 - 19:04
Ray Lynn Barnes: And it basically was an insider slang between performers, not just Blackface performers but performers at large, and it meant the act of learning to represent Blackness in a way that was funny. So reading how-to guides, reading scripts, and learning in their mind to master Blackface in a way that in a very perverted sense was supposed to represent Black people as hilarious—which obviously they’re not accurate in any representation.

19:04 - 19:22
Ray Lynn Barnes: But to get back to your question, yes, this is a product of a white supremacist culture, including the people—the Black Americans who were forced to deal with it, who were forced to perform it. And yes, obviously it's a sense of racial superiority in every way.

19:22 - 19:50
Andrew Keen: So—so—so let me maybe rephrase the question. So America we know was a country divided by race, both before and after the Civil War, during and after slavery. It was the whites mostly who held power almost—almost completely held power: economic, political, cultural, military, force, everything, morality. Was this—I mean, if there’s a, I don’t know, a Freudian or a psychological interpretation of this, was this Darkology, this obsession with making Black people appear ludicrous, was this a kind of guilt? Why were they doing it? They held all the cards in the first place.

19:50 - 20:23
Ray Lynn Barnes: I think it is an intergenerational way to teach white supremacy in a way that is funny. And I think we often discredit that—and this is part of what Trump does so powerfully—is that when you use humor to degrade people, you can get away with it, but you're also doing something that's completely devastating.

20:23 - 20:53
Ray Lynn Barnes: And so I think that through using catchy songs, very easy dances, classic jokes, there’s a longevity and an intergenerational teaching that allows new generations that perhaps would be more open to an interracial society to be policed quite young and understand, "Oh actually, this is something deviant in American society that you are trying to do."

20:53 - 21:20
Ray Lynn Barnes: Because obviously a child’s natural reaction is just to love everybody. You have to teach hatred, you have to learn racism. But in terms of white guilt, I think in a lot of ways it came down to economics. So one of the classic arguments of when Blackface is first created is it's at the beginning of the abolitionist arguments.

21:20 - 21:49
Ray Lynn Barnes: And in the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, you have an enormous amount of people immigrating to the United States from places like Ireland, Germany, etc. And so Blackface was a way to culturally teach all of these new people who were trying to be white but were being ethnically divided that if you want to be a part of white America, part of being white America is to be against Black America.

21:49 - 22:15
Ray Lynn Barnes: And I see that throughout the book in different historical moments where groups that would never be historically or culturally white—for example, Japanese Americans during World War II who are in the American West and in concentration camps—are forced by the federal government to put on these shows. And so it really becomes not just a symbol of whiteness, but a symbol of American identity and American culture at large.

22:15 - 22:30
Ray Lynn Barnes: That what it means to be American is to understand that there is this gender-racial hierarchy supposedly always with Black people on the bottom.

22:30 - 22:45
Andrew Keen: So this is quite a—well, it’s more than quite, it’s a very critical reading, Ray Lynn, of American history, you don’t need me to tell you this. Are you suggesting that the real narrative of American history, even after the Civil War through Jim Crow, perhaps even up to today, is that of white supremacy?

22:45 - 23:15
Ray Lynn Barnes: Unfortunately, yes. I mean, and that doesn’t just go against Black people, it goes against Native Americans, pretty much every group of people. But yes, I mean, internal struggles within the United States are incredibly complicated, right? There’s always been class warfare, gender—women getting the right to vote extremely late.

23:15 - 23:38
Ray Lynn Barnes: But at the end of the day, when you look at what animates most, unfortunately, pieces of legislation and elections, it does come down to American race relations.

23:38 - 24:00
Andrew Keen: It’s a very—excusing the pun here—rather dark take, Ray Lynn, on American history. Trump, of course, wants to, seems like, ban Black history, shut a lot of the African American museums and all that sort of thing. In your view, if indeed American history is defined by white supremacy—I'm not sure I agree, but some people might—how do you get rid of this? Is it just ingrained into the very fabric of American society and history? Is it something that can be washed out?

24:00 - 24:32
Ray Lynn Barnes: Well, I would say when I'm teaching, I don’t say the defining feature of America is white supremacy. It’s the pursuit of freedom. And a lot of that pursuit of freedom has to do with overcoming race relations and gender and class, right? We are a country forever in development.

24:32 - 25:01
Ray Lynn Barnes: And so part of this book is looking at what some of those major roadblocks have been in the cultural sphere because that’s normally a place that we don’t look. We typically keep law and politics separate from what’s going on in pop culture, and part of what I'm showing is that they are intimately integrated and supporting each other financially, socially, etc.

25:01 - 25:22
Ray Lynn Barnes: But in terms of Donald Trump and his aggressive stance in terms of whitewashing history, that’s actually a huge reason why this history in terms of Blackface history has been unknown to most Americans because it was considered censored history.

25:22 - 25:46
Ray Lynn Barnes: In some ways that’s actually a positive response to the Civil Rights Movement, that Blackface was so heavily removed not only in terms of its performance but also the history and teaching of it as America's most popular cultural form just in terms of the numbers—you know, millions and millions of Americans every night were engaging in this.

25:46 - 26:10
Ray Lynn Barnes: But when we look at Donald Trump’s obsession with sort of erasing or controlling the history of Black history, you just have to ask yourself why. What on earth is wrong with talking about the diversity of America? And I should say that I am in no way negative or down on American history, which might sound strange given the book that I wrote.

26:10 - 26:38
Ray Lynn Barnes: But there is no universe in which I would have otherwise grown up in a teamster working-class labor family as a woman and would have ended up teaching at Princeton University. That story is an American story. And I often tell my students to look around, and we have such diverse classes with students from all over the world, men, women, every sexual orientation.

26:38 - 27:08
Ray Lynn Barnes: And I say, "This is the success of American history." And so part of what we have to do is honor all of the people who came before us who stood up to things like minstrelsy, who allowed us to be seen as full people deserving of American rights.

27:08 - 27:35
Ray Lynn Barnes: And so part of the destruction of what Trump is doing when he's trying to sanitize history is really watering it down for all of us. I mean, some of the most amazing stories come from Black history. And I don’t know if you know who Robert Smalls is, but I mean, that's one of the best stories in American history.

27:35 - 27:57
Ray Lynn Barnes: A man who had been enslaved during the Civil War commandeers a Confederate ship, frees his family, and then he becomes an elected official, goes to Washington D.C.—I mean, that's an astonishing story about change, change that's only possible in America because at the end of the day, what rules is not the president, it's the United States Constitution and the beliefs that were laid out in the Declaration of Independence that we are all trying to pursue.

27:57 - 28:18
Andrew Keen: Ray Lynn, some people might read this book and think, "Well, I don’t know what the exact numbers are, but I know the vast majority of Americans, white and Black, have settled in the United States in the last 30 or 50 years."

28:18 - 28:44
Andrew Keen: They might say, "Well, this Darkology, this Blackface and the American way of entertainment—especially this tradition of Blackface and minstrel shows—really has nothing to do with my family, didn't show up until the 1960s or the 1970s." What would you say to—it's not really a criticism of your book, but it's more a critique of this endless return to the sins of America, particularly the racial sins?

28:44 - 29:08
Ray Lynn Barnes: So—I mean, yes, in 1965 when Lyndon Johnson changed a lot of the immigration rules, the makeup of who became American changed, in my mind for the better. Where I grew up in Orange County, there was an enormous amount of refugees from Vietnam and their children are who I grew up with and went to school with.

29:08 - 29:26
Ray Lynn Barnes: And so I can completely see that argument that you could say in the last 30 or 40 years that this had nothing to do with me. And that might be true in terms of you personally performing it, but all we have to do is look at, for example, did you ever watch Looney Tunes?

29:26 - 29:55
Ray Lynn Barnes: All of those songs are Blackface songs—all of those songs. But really, part of what this book gets to are the power structures that Blackface created and its longevity. And so what I mean by that is because so many of these shows were charity shows and they happened during Jim Crow America.

29:55 - 30:20
Ray Lynn Barnes: So you would have a fraternal order who maybe was raising money for a hospital. That sounds great, but they're using Blackface to do it, and they’re doing it in a segregated, racially exclusive fraternity, and then they're donating that money to a segregated, racially exclusive part of town.

30:20 - 30:44
Ray Lynn Barnes: And so over time, the wealth gap and the resources that are available to everyday white Americans, including people who are of working-class status who in quite many ways have very little resources, versus what’s happening in other parts of town, begin to separate.

30:44 - 31:11
Ray Lynn Barnes: And so we all live with the ramifications of things like redlining, the ways in which resources and civic resources are distributed. And the other thing that I really get to in this book is how Blackface continued to hold a monopoly over political power.

31:11 - 31:37
Ray Lynn Barnes: Whether that's who gets to become a Senator, who gets to become an American President. And when you're the American President—I have an extensive chapter about Gerald Ford—Gerald Ford was never elected as Vice President, he was never elected as President, but he used Blackface in his first run in the House of Representatives, and then every single year he was part of a Blackface performance and that was his major political campaign all the way up through when he was a President.

31:37 - 31:59
Ray Lynn Barnes: And who you appoint when you’re President, everywhere from the Supreme Court on down, stays after you are President. And so there are people in our lifetime who were put into power or who came up in power in this historical moment with this racial ideology. And so the shadows don’t just go away.

31:59 - 32:32
Ray Lynn Barnes: An interesting example of that is Governor Northam in Virginia who had that scandal of, you know, was the yearbook photo—was he in Blackface, was he the Klan member? Well, he was at the Virginia Military Institute and he was in a fraternal order and he was pursuing medicine.

32:32 - 32:56
Ray Lynn Barnes: My book breaks down why the Virginia Military Institute. Because this was the number one entertainment form in the military and normally in all-male places. And so that’s somebody who on the—looking at it, you know, on a piece of paper you’d say, "Well, this is a liberal man," but in fact his socialization, the way he developed friendships and positions of power as a young man were completely shrouded in this entertainment form, and he will continue to live a long life. And so the shadows don’t just go away.

32:56 - 33:14
Andrew Keen: The shadows certainly don't. Darkology, an important new work, major new work by Ray Lynn Barnes, teaches at Princeton. Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment. It’s not really a very entertaining message, but that may indeed be the point. Ray Lynn, thank you so much, and congratulations on the book. Major achievement.

33:14 - 33:18
Ray Lynn Barnes: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

33:18 - 33:41
Andrew Keen: Hi, this is Andrew again. Thank you so much for listening to or watching the show. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe. We’re on Substack, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, all the platforms. And I’d be very curious as to your comments as well on what you think of the show, how it can be improved, and the kinds of guests that you would enjoy hearing or listening to in future. Thank you again.

33:41 - 33:51
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