I don't know. Tattooing is all about people, man. It's all about the experience. You could do a bad tattoo on someone. If you give them a great experience, they're going to love you. Yeah. You know what I mean? I do that all the time. Just kidding. Just kidding. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of Books Closed. Thank you for joining me. I'm your host, Andrew Stortz.

I've really been enjoying all the discussion I'm seeing around episode 54 titled Is This the Tattoo Apocalypse?

It's been cool to read all of your comments since it's a pretty complex topic that has plenty of room for all of the contrasting opinions.

In our last episode, I spoke to Leo Zuluetta, and he told this story about getting his first tattoo from Mike Malone. When he got it,

he didn't know who Mike was, and it was a pretty serendipitous experience in hindsight. While I was

making that episode, I was watching through some old tattoo-related videos, and with a little serendipity of my own, I found this clip of Mike Malone being interviewed.

When I got along in tattooing, it was still sort of a new solve.

It wasn't all crowded up with tattoos.

There was very few tattoos around.

Tattooing wasn't as popular.

And when we began tattooing, it was more of an apprenticeship situation and you kind of humbled

yourself before a teacher and tried to get him to show you as much as good and there wasn't as much information so you had to do a lot of stuff for

yourself you had to be real you know you had to be more inventive and resourceful but now it's it's a

regular profession a young person that wants to tattoo merely has to go to the to his local magazines still and pick up one of how many tattoo magazines

that are in another stuff with ads for places where you can get great tattoos, places

where you can buy good tattoo designs, places where you can buy decent tattoo equipment.

I mean, it's all right there.

The keys to the highway are all laid out.

You might be thinking, wow, I feel exactly that way right now in 2024.

And I could definitely pick out some comments from the last few weeks that are echoing this exact

sentiment about right now.

And I believe that this can feel true today, the same way that

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