I'm Hemmant Mehta and I'm Jessica Blumkey and you're listening to the

podcast for Friendly atheist.com you can now listen to all of our episodes and

see show notes at friendly atheist podcast.com.

Jessica Hagee is an artist and writer best known for her insightful and hilarious webcomic indexed in which she

draws charts and vend diagrams connecting completely different ideas and

getting us to think about them in different ways. Her latest book is The Art of War visualized. It's the Sunzu Classic

reworked and with illustrations. So Jessica, thanks for being here. Thank you very much

for having me. So why the Art of war? Of all the books you could have chosen to illustrate or to show in another way, why that one?

Well, I never read it and I saw that we had three copies of it in our basement and it just felt like something I had to sort of get into my brain like I'm missing this chunk of the cannon you know and then I picked it up and I started reading it and I was like this is this is stuff that I've heard everywhere but here it is all in one place and it makes so much sense now. It makes sense in context and it was one of those like when you're window shopping and you're sort of walking along and you're like

I want that I want that I want to go in that store and get that thing right now and I

got that way with this book. Were you like reading the book and thinking to

yourself how could I illustrate this or was it like I

wonder if I could?

It was sort of the whole book is about 300 verses so it's biblical and it's sort of

measure and tone and I was like these are nice little

captions and I just have to put the images on them so I was like I'm just gonna

start doing this and get it done. Do you when you start a like that, do you look through the book as you're going

through and like just start at the beginning and here's the first couple of passages and I wonder

what I could do with that or is it, oh here's a passage, I can do something with it,

and you piecemeal it and work it together until, oh, okay,

I have a whole collection of stuff here,

and now I can put it all together.

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