Editing The Pen Addict 530/transcript (section)

== CY talks about creating a flexible music nib and meeting Ralph. ==


'''CY:''' Yeah. So I'm just going to skip ahead like a year. I'd been I managed to make this flexible music nib. And it really, I guess, launched, quote unquote, my career, quote unquote, because there were there are a few people who saw what I did and believed in me. And I'm very grateful for these people. If you're listening to this, you know who you are. But yeah, they believed in me. They asked me to make some nibs for them. And they were happy enough to to share that on on their feeds. And then slowly I got inquiries. And at that time, I hadn't intended to really do this as a, I suppose. Anything beyond a hobby. Mm hmm. So I was really quite taken aback. I had like 80 followers on Instagram back then. And yeah, I got these requests. And again, going back to this Yahoo auctions, I found these pocket pens, these Japanese pocket pens for like dirt cheap. You know, bring them in, polish them up, and then I would sell them on Reddit for a little bit of a profit. Not too much. You know, I'm just making back on really shipping. But then the act of selling those pens, you know, that was another hook for me. Mm hmm. But then, again, I got into the nibs because first I thought it looked cool. Second, nobody else is doing it. And then I found Ralph Reyes's profile. And for those of you who don't know, at that time, this was around, you know, between 2016, I want to say, to 2019-ish. Sailor stopped making Naginata Togi nibs. Or maybe they didn't stop making it, but they were not for sale. Right? You couldn't get them anywhere, even in Japan. And I saw this kid who was really making really cool stuff. Whether you like the aesthetics or not, that's separate. But, you know, he was making overlays on the nib. He was making monster nibs, you know, five-layer nibs. And I was like, wow, that's incredible. That's so cool. And you couldn't get any of these because he worked on, you know, a different schedule from everybody else. And, you know, you really, really, you just had to be lucky to get one. And in the 2019 Tokyo International Pen Show, Ralph came to Japan. Because I think he had met Nagahara-san, might have been DC. And then he was inspired to come to Japan. And I decided, you know what, I'm going to grab hold of him. And I'm not going to let him go for the entire weekend.

'''CY:''' He didn't know this, of course.

'''CY:''' So I was very fortunate to meet Ralph. We had a great time. I was, you know, helping him translate. And he was showing different people his nibs. And at that time, I thought of making them. But I also had no idea where to start. So I asked Ralph, I said, hey, Ralph, you know, what are you using to make these? He says, oh, I'm just using a laser welder. And I looked one of those up. And yeah, that cost 20 grand starting. So I was like, okay, that's not what I'm going to use.

'''CY:''' So I bought this Amazon. I bought a welder on Amazon. It's like this yellow made in China one. And it's a pulse arc welder. And I had several nibs re-tipped to have the, you know, extra large tipping. And then just left it there for a year. So remember, I met Ralph in 2019. I bought the stuff. I was so scared to even start. I didn't do anything until January of 2021. Wow. Because I was just, I was worried about messing up. And, you know, I'd really like to succeed. I really like to be able to create things. So failure, failure is scary. It's scary to me. But then one day, I came back home this cold January afternoon.

'''CY:''' And I think my girlfriend was, you know, she had to do her nails or like, you know, go to the hair salon or something. So I had the entire afternoon to myself.

'''CY:''' And I said, you know what? I'm just going to do it. And in that single moment of courage, I created my first stack nib on a momplot 146. For which Jacob says I'm crazy because I should have practiced on hundreds of things first. That was literally going to be my comment. But yes, go ahead. And then I wrote the article, The Anatomy of a Stack Nib. And I wrote that article and I write the articles that I do on my website because it's not really documented anywhere. You know, especially not in English. But even in Japanese, this is really not documented. Who's making them? What's the process of making them? And I just thought for all the mythology around stack nibs, we know surprisingly so little about them. So why not take my experience? Maybe this will benefit somebody else. Maybe somebody else is going to read my article and think to themselves, hey, I'm inspired to make these. Just like how when I saw Ralph's website, I said, hey, maybe one day I want to do that too.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, that's pretty cool. And as we go through this show, we're going to talk about how things have progressed. And the things that are interesting to you now.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Before we do that, I want to rewind just a little bit because we've mentioned Jacob and we've mentioned the podcast before. How did that come about and that you had started writing and making things? How did you and Jacob meet and decide to have a podcast?

'''CY:''' Yeah, so I met Jacob, I want to say in March, February or March of 2019. And we met up and we said, hey, there's this pen addict guy. He's always talking about some stuff on the podcast, but this pen addict guy is always late.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' He's late and wrong a lot.

'''CY:''' We knew this stuff like three months ago. Why is he talking about him now?

'''CY:''' But in all seriousness, we listened to the pen addict and we thought, hey, there's so much information that's locked here either in Japan or in Japanese. And maybe there's an appetite for people who don't want to do that deep, intensive research. Because anytime you want to find out anything about anything in Japan, you're committed to hours and hours and hours of research. And I'm sure, Bradley Dowdy, for your blog, to research high-tech C, you probably spend 10 hours just trying to find where the information is. Not even talking about translating it, digesting it, and then formatting into your own words. Right. And information shouldn't, especially in, what are we not, 21st century, this shouldn't be locked up like this. And so we decided, hey, maybe it would be fun for us to start a podcast to just specifically discuss stationary in Asia, but more specifically stationary in Japan. Because I think Japan is really the holy land for a lot of stationary enthusiasts. But I think a lot of people just don't really know what it's like here. How are people using their stationary here? That's the question we get most. What's the difference between the Japanese stationary scene and the Western stationary scene? And so we talked about it for like, you know, a year. And it was always like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we should start the podcast. Maybe when we have time. And in March, right before everything shut down, I said, you know what? That's enough. I'm buying, I'm looking it up, buying mics, and we're going to do it. So, you know, just one weekend in March, we sat down, we recorded our first episode.

'''CY:''' And, yeah, we published it. It was, I think we might have done two takes. But it was really fun. We didn't get everything perfect. The audio is probably really bad. But it was a start. And we actually got listeners from the very, very beginning. And we did weekly episodes for one month. And then we switched to our current cadence, which is bi-weekly.

'''CY:''' The podcast has been one of the more rewarding things that I've done. And because we always get the feedback, you know, thank you for talking about this on the podcast. Without this, we would never have known. And that's really the initial purpose of our podcast. And funny thing, actually, going back to meeting Jacob, I actually found him on Reddit. He had posted his kind of event recap to the Pelican Hubs and to Wagner. And I was always very worried. I think when you don't know anybody in the community, you're worried about, you know, showing up. And, you know, what if nobody likes you? You have this imposter syndrome. Or at least I did. And so, you know, you have to remember that everybody here speaks Japanese. And as a non-Japanese person, it was very intimidating. So I sent a message. I was like, hey, you know, how is it like there? Are people nice? And then when I met him, you know, six months later, I told my girlfriend, I said, that's a celebrity. He takes really good photos.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So confession time. The first part isn't a confession. The first part is that y'all make my favorite podcast. And it's the way you present information. Like I can tell, like y'all are really trying to answer questions and provide information and go in depth on topics that you explained correctly. Like we, you know, necessarily in the rest of the world don't necessarily have either the access or the ability to digest or to even locate. So I appreciate that very much. And the confession is I normally run about two or three episodes behind. I don't listen to it currently. But I, to, you know, like when the episodes drop, I don't rush to listen to it. And I do that because I want, I don't want to say, speak about the same topics that you do. So I want to have this, this gap, like out of respect as like, I don't want to feel like I'm just regurgitating. Y'all talk about so much interesting stuff that I want to talk about constantly, but I don't want to feel like I'm just regurgitating what you said is because you're going to do it better. So that, that's my secret confession is I'm usually about three episodes behind because I don't want to, I don't want to jump in and kind of distract from the awesome conversations y'all have going on. So I just appreciate what y'all do very, very much. And it shows the work that y'all put into it and the way, you know, the, the information's presented and detailed and do it from like an education perspective. Like, Hey, we're going to talk about this, you know, topic and why, you know, these decisions were made on this topic. And then, you know, also have the, the great color of, Hey, let's go to the pen store and tell everyone how great the Japanese stationary scene is, which believe me, we're going to get into that as we go through this show.

'''CY:''' Well, you know, um, the, the structure of how we present our podcast, I think, obviously I think we enjoy what we put out. I think we put out a good product. I think it's also sometimes a little bit difficult for, uh, because there's so much information, it's actually more difficult to digest. And a feedback that we get quite a lot is, you know, we have listeners tell us all the time, you say, I had to listen to the episode three times in order to catch everything. And then, you know, I'll go back and listen. Now I'll hear something that I didn't hear on the first time. So, so that happens quite often, actually.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Yeah. It's great. And, uh, so I, I just implore y'all to, to keep doing what you're doing and, and shout out to Jacob. Uh, y'all, y'all have a great chemistry together. I love, uh, how y'all go back and forth and kind of like Myke and I, not to like compare the two, but like, it's like, you will just agree to disagree sometimes. Right. You see things differently and it's good to have that perspective, um, from, from different topics. You know, even if it's like, Hey, I don't like this ink color, you know, or Hey, I don't like this paper intent.

'''CY:''' You know, Brad, uh, I can't stop people from having bad taste.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' You try though. You're, you're putting in the work, which that's what I want to talk about. Next is spreading the, your, your good taste around the world, specifically in the U S recently. So we're going to talk about the crazy trip that you were on recently. I have so many questions. We're going to take a break real quick, uh, hear from our buddy, Myke, and then we'll be right back.

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'''Brad Dowdy:''' So you just spent how many weeks in the U.S.? I spent five weeks in the U.S. Five weeks in the U.S. So I want to know how this idea of coming over to the U.S. kind of percolated up. Were you thinking, hey, I want to go to a pen show and, you know, see what's up and, you know, meet some people that, you know, I talked to online? Did that turn into like, was it like a single event thing that turned into this really broad, wide-ranging trip, which we'll get into all the details. So tell me the pre-planning of your recent trip to the U.S. What was the process behind that?