Hello, Ben McSweeney. Hi, boss. What's happening, Captain? He always calls me boss. You're the one who calls me that. You've called me that since, like, the first few times we met. I do. It's like an affectation almost, but I do remember that I think it was probably Joel who called me out for it when he was like six. Oh yeah. So he was just

like, why do you call my dad boss? I'm like, because it pays me money to do things. So Ben McSweeney,

you may know, I'm talking to the audience now, you may know him as the artist of the Shlawn

sketchbook pages going all the way back to Way of Kings. He is one of the

artists here. You are one of the very first artists I ever hired. You're the first artist I

hired that I didn't know. How about that? And Isaac comes first, but yeah. Yeah, actually, Jeff

career is the person I hired to do the Launtress map before I even knew Isaac. So he's first and then

Isaac to do Mistborn. But Ben had done some really fantastic fan art for Mistborn. And when I was

looking to pitch Way of Kings in 2007, so it was only two years after my career started, I was looking

for someone to do concept art for the pitch

on the way of Kings. And I think I went to like three people and I asked them about doing

concept art. And Ben was the one that got back with like a professional. Like he was timely and he said,

this is what it'll cost and this is what I can do. And the others were

really flighty. And you were like, and I need to pay you more than that because you're not charging

enough. You didn't charge enough that I upped your pay. I had wheel of time money then. So they were

paying me well enough that I could pay the artists. Like my first piece I commissioned, I think

I only commissioned for a couple hundred bucks. But what you did for me, the first thing was the pitch for Stormlight. So this is character sketches of Caledin, Shalon, Dallan, Dallan, and Yasta. It was called Marin back then. Yeah, he was called Marin. I hadn't changed his name yet. Yeah, and there was Dallan, yeah, there was, uh, it was Shalon, did we do a Yassna back then. We did a Yassna. We did the famous Zeth. We did a Yassna because, the iconic Zeth. Yeah, because Yasna looked too much like a witch the first time. That sounds familiar. I'm like, can we make her a little less like a witch, a little more like a Chinese gentlewoman.

Sure.

And that's the Yostin that we ended up with.

But those five pictures, I took to Tom Doherty's office in the Flatiron Building in New

York.

I remember.

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