Six episodes in, the host finally takes the guest chair. Brandon Keith Osborn on getting his start shooting his friends' bands at Numo's and the High Dive in early 2000s Seattle, messaging band managers on MySpace while pretending to be a bigger deal than he was, and talking his way into press passes for Minus the Bear, Them Crooked Vultures, and Tom Petty at The Gorge in front of 20,000 people. Plus Home Depot floodlights on his first fashion shoots, the lie his mother told to get him into Art Center, and studying under Paul Jasmin.

New work with a past guest is coming soon. So is the next guest, and he's a Hall of Famer. That's all we're saying.

Craig Semetko didn’t pick up a camera until he was 40. He was a comedy writer and performer, working a corporate gig that took him around the world, and he bought a Nikon so he’d have something to shoot with. A woman at the lab told him he had a good eye. That was the whole permission slip.

In this episode we get into comedy as the strange cousin of photography, both of them built on timing and on withholding, and his master’s degree in consciousness studies, which turned out to be a thesis on serendipity. We talk about the dog in Varanasi that jumped into the frame on cue, the publisher he lost while lying in a hospital bed, the double lung transplant, and what the work becomes when you can’t walk the streets anymore.

His third book, America Unposed, is out now from Leica.

Some mentors tell you what to do. The rare ones show you who to become. Errol Gerson has spent 55 years teaching Entrepreneurial Spirit at Art Center College of Design — 6,000 plus students, and I was lucky enough to be one of them.

In this one I turn the mic around. We get into his four years inside CAA in 1999, when he stood in front of the entire music industry, said the letters “MP3,” and got told he belonged in a mental institution. We trace the same fear across every era — film to digital, the internet, and now AI — and land on the thing that never changes: the work doesn’t die, it just changes shape.

But the heart of this episode is Errol himself. A refugee from South Africa who landed in America with a backpack and nowhere to live. Seven months homeless, thirty cents an hour washing dishes, and a full USC scholarship handed to him on graduation day. He shares the water-pump story that taught him you have to give before you can receive, why he “rejects the word rejection,” and the four circles of a life that actually fits together.

This is what In the Static is about: keeping the people close who keep you going.

Write in — inthestaticpod@gmail.com. Watch the full video on YouTube.

Made by For Reel Life Studios.