[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hey, everyone, and welcome to the Actorzilla podcast. I'm James Larson, and today we have Jim Johnson, the founder and owner of Accenthelp.com. Of course, that's not all he does. He is a full professor of voice and dialects at the University of Houston and so much else.
How's it going, Jim?
[00:00:24] Speaker B: It's. It's going okay. I also teach at a university, so it's nuts right now. Yeah.
[00:00:33] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Okay. Was that right, what I mentioned about the University of Houston?
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Well, I had a little glitch, so I couldn't hear some of it, unfortunately. But, yeah, I'm at University of Houston, and I've stepped in this year as the chair of the department, which is fun. It's so fun. I can't begin to explain how fun it is. No, thank you. I don't. It's awful. So it'll be lovely when that's done, but it's ramping me up to officially retiring from the university at the end of this year.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: Oh, really? Oh, wow. Okay.
[00:01:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:07] Speaker A: Well, congratulations, then.
[00:01:09] Speaker B: Well, thank you. It's making me all the more ready for it, so, hey.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: Awesome. So I would love to just hear a little bit about your background and about your journey, because I see that you're also an actor and voiceover artist. You've got a great voice, of course. And, yeah, I see your bio right here, but I'd love for you to lead me through that a little bit in your journey.
[00:01:37] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. Well, I'm an Iowa boy originally. I was born and raised, spent my whole life in a really tiny town of, like, 900 people in Iowa, and then went to a small school nearby for my undergrad in mass communications. And then I switched over to theater, but they didn't quite have a theater degree, like a one person department. And then in the end, I went right on to grad school, partially because I was so clueless for grad school, for MFA and acting, and met my wife there. And then the two of us, who's an actress, and then the two of us got married, and I fell into a teaching job. The one thing I knew in grad school is I didn't want to teach.
And so I fell into a teaching job for one semester and went, oh, my God, I actually love this. And then we moved to Chicago for ten years. And while I was there, I was teaching, but I was teaching remedial english composition, but I was training.
Kanye's mom was my boss.
[00:02:39] Speaker A: Are you serious?
[00:02:40] Speaker B: Yeah, she was my boss at Chicago State. Yeah, I taught there for six years. And then while I was doing that, both of us were working in theater. I was training further as a voice teacher because I found myself interested in that and then also had our own little small theater company. And I also ran a children's theater for a bigger theater company for a little while and sort of trying to piece it all together.
And then I ended up teaching.
I was part time for a year, filling in for somebody at DePaul, at theater school DePaul. And then ended up doing two full time years there for somebody.
And then at the same time that that was ending, our son was turning school age. So then we went, what are we going to do? And we ended up looking all around and ended up getting an offer and coming down to Houston, to University of Houston temporarily, 23 years ago.
And we ended up staying because we actually went, wait, there's actually some really good things here.
It was great for our son, but also both of us for our work.
And then everything that people were asking me for was accents and dialects. So then that became what more and more of my focus became and eventually turned into accent help.
And now we go every summer and teach with the Prague Shakespeare company, which we absolutely love doing.
[00:04:15] Speaker A: Is that in Prague?
[00:04:17] Speaker B: Yeah, it's in Prague. They do a summer Shakespeare intensive that's a month and a half long, and it's great. And I think this year there's probably going to be 100 to 120 students who come over the course of the six weeks, and there's going to be about 50 faculty or something like that. So the great thing is we also get to meet. We have all these students from all over the place, but we also get to meet all of these fellow faculty from a lot of places. So I get to meet a bunch of new, fascinating people every summer that we've been going. Yeah. So I love it, and I love the city of Prague. So there's no saying no to that.
[00:04:58] Speaker A: I've been to Prague, too, and it's a magical place, for sure.
[00:05:03] Speaker B: It's striking. We kind of joke that it feels like, in areas of it, like you're on the back lot of a film studio because it feels like you can't have this much history, like, right up against each other. These are, like, set pieces leaning up against each other in the back lot.
[00:05:21] Speaker A: And every corner is, like, historic. I mean, it's a very historic.
Go ahead.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: Sorry. I was going to say, I understand in Athens, Greece, when they were digging the subway, they were having to keep choosing because all they would find was they would dig into another chunk of history. And it took them forever to build it because it's Greece, but also because they were figuring out, well, what do we keep? And what are we okay with destroying in the process of building the subway? Because there's so much history.
[00:05:55] Speaker A: Right.
[00:05:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:56] Speaker A: That's amazing.
[00:05:58] Speaker B: What was it that took you there?
[00:06:01] Speaker A: Oh, man. I went there in college on, like, a choir trip. We went through Germany. We went through most of Germany, and then we went to Prague, too.
And that was just worth the cost of admission right there.
[00:06:15] Speaker B: Oh, that's fabulous.
[00:06:16] Speaker A: Yeah, I would love to go back for it. So it's in English.
Are they all local to Prague, then?
[00:06:26] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, most of the students are Americans who come over there, but there are students from. We've had students from China and India and Brazil and Germany and the UK. And since Russia's aggression with Ukraine, they've been giving a scholarship to ukrainian students every year to come.
And a couple of them get to get room and board or get food as a part of it and get the tuition waived and all that. So we have students from a lot of different places.
[00:07:05] Speaker A: Yeah, right. That's awesome.
Well, thanks for sharing all your journey in that. That's really fascinating.
It's kind of funny because you almost made it seem like you fell into doing voice and dialects. Is that.
[00:07:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
You know, in this business, you got to hustle, and you kind of got to look for opportunities. And I didn't want to run a children's theater company, but they reached out to me because they needed somebody, and I went. Yeah, sure. And fumbled my way through for a little while.
A lot of fumbling our way through whatever doors are open is what happens. And then I just kept stepping through. And I will say, the nice thing is, I was enjoying a lot of what I was stepping through. I was enjoying enough of it, at least, to keep stepping through in that direction. But I'm still all over the place to a degree. But it really wasn't until maybe ten years ago at the most that I was really starting to say no to things, because I was still trying to say yes to everything in order to figure out what the hell works.
Part of me retiring now at age 58 is because I'm trying to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life. I think we're all on a journey of figuring out what in the hell we're doing.
[00:08:35] Speaker A: Speaking of that, what do you want to do with the rest of your life?
[00:08:39] Speaker B: Thanks, dad.
[00:08:42] Speaker A: Yeah, you'll grow up.
[00:08:45] Speaker B: Well, definitely. Accent help is a big focus of it. I want to continue to do that. One of the things that I love to do is travel. So that's another thing that Prague is great. I want to continue to do the Prague work. I absolutely love the people there and that place, and I do love, uh, and the people that I've had here at the university, and I've done, the last few years, created, through my website, a diversity and inclusion scholarship for a student in cooperation with Prague shakes. They're being really generous as well about a student from, uh, who goes tuition free and gets room and board included.
So I want to continue to do that, and I'd love to grow that, actually, to have more students who otherwise may not have this opportunity to be able to go and do that. So I want to keep some degree of philanthropy as a priority for me. But I also really love travel, so that's part of what I love about Prague. But also, I have a campervan, and my wife even tolerates it and enjoys it. And so we've traveled all over. Well, the current one is a 2014 Ram promaster diesel.
And so this is my biggest one. We've done some really small ones, but this is a pretty good sized one. I can actually stand up in and have built out. It was already built out, but we've been ripping out their stuff that wasn't so great and redoing it. So it's like a gas stove. There's a composting toilet, there's a bed, there's a fridge, there's a sink, and 25 gallons of water and all that kind of stuff.
[00:10:31] Speaker A: Do you have the influencer, like, wood paneling in there?
[00:10:35] Speaker B: Well, there actually is some wood paneling in there. I don't think I'm influencing anybody, but I am enjoying myself.
[00:10:43] Speaker A: Accent help. Influence it is.
[00:10:45] Speaker B: It's the accent van.
[00:10:46] Speaker A: Yeah, but lots of you could have, like, what is the international phonetic Alphabet? Isn't that.
[00:10:53] Speaker B: There you go. Write it with phonetics on the side. Accent fan.
[00:10:57] Speaker A: Accent help.
[00:10:58] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a huge part of what I do is I travel around and record people.
I've been in all of the lower 48 states and travel around and record people, and I'm always expanding the materials that I've got by gathering more recordings, and then I give free updates to anybody who's gotten them. With all the new, like. Like, I've just been gathering a bunch more Cajun recordings recently, and this past summer did a big trip up through, like, oklahoma.
Oklahoma and Kansas. And so adding some things that'll be in some future updates as well.
[00:11:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. That's so perfect because traveling, obviously. Yeah. You get to experience all the accents, so it's like you have a reason to travel, too. It's not just.
[00:11:48] Speaker B: Yeah, so it does make it a write off because of all, the only thing I'm doing is working.
But also it's the affordable way to do it because I end up, I mean, sleeping in Walmart parking lots in a camping van a decent bit, but also seeing some lovely parts of the country that I otherwise wouldn't get to see and talking to people. I just love the conversations, like getting to hear about the culture of wherever I'm at. I love that aspect of what I'm doing.
[00:12:17] Speaker A: Right. Yeah, that's really cool. I mean, accent help, is there part of like a travel blog section on accent help?
[00:12:27] Speaker B: Oh, there hasn't been. I just haven't had time.
I end up spending so much time when I'm on the road, I'll gather a bunch of recordings and then I'm sitting there editing all of those recordings because if I don't edit them as I go, I will fall so far behind.
Part of what retirement is going to be is me actually slowing down a little bit because I tend to go breakneck speed. And I'll be recording from like 08:00 a.m. Until about 05:00 and then I'll be editing them that evening, and then I'll get up early the next morning and finish editing and then go and record more. So to me, part of it is going, all right, I'm going to get, like four recordings today instead of eight. And I'm going to sit down and edit those, and then I'm going to look around a little bit. Yeah.
[00:13:15] Speaker A: And where do the recordings go? I mean, are they for the international dialects of English archive or are they for.
[00:13:22] Speaker B: No, those are because I've done some recordings for them, but they're actually a part of the accent help materials.
[00:13:28] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:13:29] Speaker B: Cool.
[00:13:30] Speaker A: That's awesome. Yeah. Anyone who doesn't know, go to accenthelp.com.
[00:13:35] Speaker B: Obviously.
[00:13:35] Speaker A: We've been talking about it, actually. Yeah, I could look it up. I forget, but I've used Jim as a resource for years. I mean, probably over a decade.
German.
I had this scene where I had to do a german accent and I think I booked it. So thanks.
[00:14:00] Speaker B: Hey, cool.
[00:14:02] Speaker A: It was an off Broadway show and yeah, I think there were two accents that I had to do.
I've only had amazing things to say and I always point people to go to accent help.
[00:14:13] Speaker B: Oh, well, thanks. I appreciate.
[00:14:15] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's really cool. And now I want to see. I think you should make a YouTube channel on your travels now. No, I'm serious. Those would get a lot of views because accents are huge on YouTube, by the way. Like doing 50 accents in a minute. You should do that stuff, too. That'd be amazing.
[00:14:36] Speaker B: Well, certainly with the. I enjoy that travel and I enjoy the conversations, and then I appreciate that I'm creating materials that people can use. I don't think I would enjoy enough making the videos to make it worth me doing. If somebody's willing to follow me around and do it, I would love to do that.
[00:14:57] Speaker A: Good partner, right?
[00:14:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:02] Speaker A: That'S cool. So when did you start accenthelp.com?
Where did that come in? Your trout in your journey?
[00:15:12] Speaker B: Yeah, that was like 2007. So 16 years ago and 1617 years ago now.
I had talked about it a couple of years before that with a friend of mine, Kate Devore. And Kate and I worked on a few sets of materials together for it. And then she had some other interests as well. And I was like, look, I really am interested in doing the deep dive into more obscure accents that are not the main ones that people are after. And so that's where we sort of went, okay, you do your thing. I'm going to do my.
I. And I had always kind of run the business side of it, but then I started doing the deep dive into the rest of the accents. And then I also ended up working with Michelle Lopez Rios, who's a former student of mine, funnily enough, and a really wonderful, talented actress and coach as well. And she teaches at DePaul. And so I've worked with both of them on that. And then my wife has actually gotten involved as well. She's primarily an actress, but it ended up being, she was good with accents and dialects and got asked a little bit to do it. And then I started to get too busy, started funneling things towards her, and then she ended up. Now, funnily enough, she's doing more coaching than I am, like, this year, because there's a bunch of things that I'm like, I got no time. I got to do this. So she's busier than I am right now with some of that coaching. Yeah, but it got started.
[00:16:47] Speaker A: No, go ahead.
[00:16:48] Speaker B: Sorry. Go ahead. Oh, just got started.
It's yours, James. I'm waiting for you.
[00:16:55] Speaker A: No, I'm just curious if there's specific accents that you both specialize in, or is it like every accent that you have on your site.
[00:17:07] Speaker B: Kind of every accent, except, I mean, there's always some that are asked for a lot more. So I've got them in my back pocket.
And so I've got more in my back pocket than most people probably do, but there's still some that I'm like, at the least, I have to remind myself of it. And on occasion, one of the things that I do, too, is people will send me a script and I'll record their lines for them. So they've got it in the dialect. And sometimes I do need to respond and go, look, I don't think this is not the best thing to serve you.
And sometimes that, frankly, is about, do you really need some old white guy doing this jamaican accent for you? And sometimes somebody is kind of insistent and is like, yeah, because you know more than I do. So then I can guide them through this some degree. But it's part of what I've been. A couple of things that I've been trying to do with something like that is I am getting more and more recordings of native speakers demonstrating everything. And then those are the materials, too that I'm drawing from to do these scholarships.
So rather than getting rid of those materials, I decided it would be better. Well, what if I continue to provide those materials, but I try to turn it into something that's sort of feeding back into the community by creating this diversity and inclusion scholarship as a part of that. So, yeah, that's where that stuff came from.
[00:18:43] Speaker A: That's great.
Was there something that drew you to accents and dialects initially, or was it just.
[00:18:54] Speaker B: Well, when I was in grad school, they went, hey, you should teach the voice class.
And so I ended up assisting one year and then teaching in another year, and I went, okay, this seems to be a route for me. So then I was training in voice work, and it really was.
And accents and dialects were something that I found interesting, but it was really that I was doing the voice work and at some point went, oh, crap, I'm going to have to probably do some coaching of accents and dialects, and I'm probably going to have to teach this. That made me go, okay, like, phonetics. I learned it in grad school and forgot it immediately because it was garbage to me. And so I was like, oh, man, I'm going to be asked to teach this. So I got to figure this out and figure out if I care enough and if there's a reason to even do it. And then I really got into it and went, oh, there actually is. But the way that I had learned it, I don't think really served me, and I don't think it serves most people. I was learning broad transcription of phonetics, and it helps you kind of get close, but the point of the work is to not. Like, I could get close by representing it with my own made up spelling, but in order to get more precise with it, you have to use something more like narrow transcription, and it's being more specific with the symbols and getting into these things that are called diacritics, where you're adjusting the symbols to represent the sound more precisely. And I will say, in the long run, I don't even care as much that my students know those symbols, but that they know the principles behind them. So I teach. Well, you see some of it back behind me here, but I teach it more for the concepts of it than for the memorization of it. So I have no interest in having my students do a bunch of transcribing of, like, a whole paragraph. I still don't see a big payoff from that. Where I see the payoff is having them transcribe a single sound within a word to try to figure out how they describe what that is and get their ears and brains to be able to perceive something more precisely than they used to be able to, and then trying to get their mouth to be able to reflect that as well. Trying to match up their brain and their ears and their mouths to being able to get around doing these elements of an accent. Yeah, right.
[00:21:41] Speaker A: Obviously, you work with a lot of students.
What would you advise someone who's trying to learn their first accent, maybe for an audition or for a role?
Do you have any beginner tips for people?
[00:21:56] Speaker B: Well, yeah, there's certain sounds now where to go. So there's kind of three major elements of it. One of them is that there's the sounds, and a big part of it that people need to focus on is, well, what's going on with the r sound? And then also, like, these different vowels? Well, there's patterns with the vowels that you can follow. And there's this guy, JC Wells, who wrote a book, and he actually said at some point he was sort of like, man, if I knew people were going to really use this so much, I would have thought a little bit more about the words that I created for this. But he created this thing that people use a lot now in theater land and elsewhere for these lexical sets of words. Like, for me, for example, trap and bath are two different lexical sets of words. But in my accent, they're the same sound, but there's some accents where it's more like trap and both. So there's a difference between those and so recognizing. Oh, here's that subset, or there's a really important one that I substitute, one of his words. I change his word palm to father. So I call it Hell's corner, and it's father lot cloth thought. And you have to figure out Hell's corner for almost any native speaker accent, because if you don't, you don't get that. Being from the midwest, it's father lot cloth thought. And being from New York, it's similar, but it's father lot cloth thought. And then being from Boston, it's different. Father lot cloth thought.
So it's those subsets. And if you're from the rockies, in general, it's all the same. Father lot cloth thought. So recognizing, like, these subsets, most people from England, it's something in a three category along the line of father lot cloth thought that distinction. So recognizing, like that combo of words or those vowels, clock in those is huge. Like that makes a big difference. But then once you learn just a few of those, you've got most of it covered. Then it becomes about, okay, what's going on with placement and what's going on with intonation.
And like with my students right now, I've been teaching a couple of foreign language accents. So French and then Spain, Castilian Spanish, we're in the midst of. And so, recognizing that almost all of the sounds are potentially the same for all foreign language speakers, there are some differences, but mostly they are the same. So then the thing that makes them different is the placement, the sense of where the sound lives in the mouth or the posture, the mouth posture, oral posture, and then the intonation. What's the musicality? And I would say with. I mean, you see, I demonstrate a lot with my hands as I'm talking about this stuff. What's incredibly important is getting the intonation, for example, and that if you physicalize the intonation, that you're much more likely to get whatever that sound is that you're targeting. If you're doing these elements of this intonation with the demonstrating it with your hands, then you're more likely to get it through physicalizing it because it gives you a visual and it gives you a kinesthetic in addition to the auditory of listening to it.
So that, I would say, is a huge thing. Try to physicalize whatever it is that you're working on. Even with the vowel sounds, some degree of physicalization whether it's demonstrating with the hand or literally getting up and walking around on it on the floor, like, kind of laid out where the vowels happen to help you to figure it out, can make a massive difference for people depending on what their learning styles are that seem to be their fastest way in. Yeah.
[00:26:28] Speaker A: Thank you for that. That was like a little mini, mini master.
[00:26:31] Speaker B: Long answer.
[00:26:32] Speaker A: No.
[00:26:33] Speaker B: There you go.
[00:26:34] Speaker A: I loved it.
I love what you focus on is specificity, because that leads to authenticity, I feel like.
And not making a caricature of the accent, but, like, having a real way know.
[00:26:50] Speaker B: Yeah. And I do think there's some value to caricature. I think there is, like, the Disney version of an accent. There's value to that, because part of what it tends to do is it kind of points out the, like, puts a heavy thumb on the scale of here is what people hear when they hear something and go, oh, French. Like, they clearly go, that's what that is.
[00:27:14] Speaker A: So do you think leaving. Do you want to stay in that caricature, or is the point to reach, is to point it out with a highlighter and then back off, or do you stay in that highlighted position?
[00:27:26] Speaker B: I think it completely depends on what your goal is. Like, if you're trying to be that Disney character who's doing that. If your role in that production, the story that you're telling is two dimensional frenchman. Well, then, yeah, stay in that mode when you've got to get beyond that. One of the things that I like to say, I was just using this yesterday in coaching. Somebody is saying to this person, like, I'm getting a lot of. You're not from here. I don't know. You're foreign. I don't know where you are from. Oh, there. You're from that specific place that we're working on.
Oh, yeah, you're from that place.
I like to think of it as vaguely european, but this wasn't even targeting european.
[00:28:12] Speaker A: That's your next website.
[00:28:14] Speaker B: Vaguely european.
It's my next road trip.
[00:28:18] Speaker A: Yeah, that'd be awesome.
[00:28:19] Speaker B: But being careful that we don't create any moments where we go, oh, wait, no, you're german. Because German was not our target. Our target was something else. And so we want to keep giving them the, oh, yeah, you're from there. No, I don't know where you're from. And that's absolutely fine. And then these little moments where it goes, click, oh, yeah, from there. Oh, yeah, you're from there. But being careful that we don't send the message, oh, wait, you're this other thing.
[00:28:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
That's a huge point in all accent work because even for big Oscar nominated films, sometimes the accents are the weak point, possibly because sometimes they go into different, they don't hit those key points is what you're talking about of like, basically. Yeah. Like.
[00:29:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:29:10] Speaker A: Do you, do you think that there is a method to, like, being consistent in an accent if you're doing a theater show or if you're doing a film or is there some way just having a key into it or what would you advise?
[00:29:26] Speaker B: Definitely having a key into it. I mean, it's one of the things when I'm coaching somebody that I'm always listening for is a little something to try to key them in.
Part of the deal is you got to spend some time in it. You also have to realize, and I think this kind of comes back to what you were talking about, the caricature and then making it real is you do need to recognize that it's not just, I think a lot of times when people are talking about accents, they think it's all about the sounds.
And it's like, well, there's also, like, there's the spirit of the place. There is the culture of the place. And some of that is stereotype. Right. Where we go, oh, when you think italian, what is it that you immediately think? And some of those things may be helpful for you to get there, but then you've got to expand beyond that, but still have this cultural awareness because that has to infect you and you have to actually transform. And that's one of the things that I think it demands is that you absolutely have to transform. You can't still just be you. What you've got to do is amplify elements of you and also expand upon elements that you don't tend to bring into play a lot.
I like to think of it as more of an expanding thing than a, oh, I need to do this thing over here because I think sometimes that leads people to be two dimensional again, instead of trying to find the whole human, because it is like, well, you were cast in that role, so it's appropriate for you to bring you to it. But now, how do we bring out elements of you that lend themselves to this character and lend themselves to this accent and culture and that will help to reinforce it because sometimes it's sort of like, well, you dropped out of the accent there. You did everything right, but it still doesn't sound right. And so that can be placement, it can be intonation, it can be sounds. And frankly, it can almost be the actor not quite believing themselves in that, not allowing themselves to transform because they're holding too much onto bringing it to them and not also letting themselves transform. And we all transform and shift moment to moment in real life. We just have to do it even more for theater stuff and for film stuff. Yeah.
[00:31:57] Speaker A: Do you think that this kind of goes back to what you were saying about, can a white man teach a jamaican accent sort of thing?
Do you think what the future of accents is about being authentically yourself? Do you think that's part of what you were talking about as far as not being confident? And maybe sometimes I do accents that are appropriate for my ethnicity, mostly. But do you think that that's kind of. Obviously, culture has kind of changed in the last 1520 years as far as that acting needs to be, that actors should authentically represent themselves on screen, basically, and in theater, too.
Do you think that has impacted accents at all, or how actors think about accents?
[00:32:53] Speaker B: I hope so. I do think that there are times that it may be demanded of you that you play something that seems culturally inappropriate, because audiobooks, for example, tend to be a single individual doing all of it. There are choices that are sometimes made now to have multiple people voice it. What I will say is, if the central voice in a book is a jamaican, I should not be reading that book. And I'm going to give my sense of it is. It's my responsibility to say no.
Right. It is my responsibility to say, no, I'm not appropriate for this.
This is not appropriate.
And there are plays on occasion where somebody might play multiple characters, and they actually need to represent someone that's outside of how they present.
So I think we do have to be careful about narrowing it too much or broadening it, however you want to look at it too much.
But we also have a responsibility to go, no, this is not. Yeah, this is not. And I think it is up to some individuals to draw some of those lines, but we all need to recognize that we do have responsibility.
But like I said, I had to make a decision about, well, do I just not do materials on this accent because it's not me, or do I get rid of certain things because. And I made a decision to go ahead and work on those, but then what I do is I donate the proceeds. I donate from those to a scholarship. So I'm like, okay, so I'm providing something to people that some folks want, and I'm getting authentic voices to present those.
And I'm using the money from that to try to make a difference with it rather than to enrich myself.
And these are the choices that I've made, that different people will make different choices, and I haven't always made those choices. I have done some things in the past that have been inappropriate, and I'll continue to do inappropriate things into my future. If you ask anybody who knows my sense of humor, I'm horribly inappropriate and sarcastic and all those things. But we have to make decisions and draw lines for ourselves, and I think it's part of our responsibility.
[00:35:35] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I think that's a very ethical way to go about it.
[00:35:41] Speaker B: I think it's also just not an easy answer, and there's no such thing as a right answer. It's sort of like us border policy, immigration policy. There is no right answer, and there's certainly no easy answer. And so where I do have trouble is when people think that it's easy and it's simple and it's like, no, it's not easy and simple nothing. Very few things are. Yeah.
[00:36:09] Speaker A: It's naturally complicated, which means that it can't have a simple answer that's going to fix everything. That's not how life is in the grays, not in the black and whites.
[00:36:22] Speaker B: There's no easy answers in parenting. There is no right answer, and you will screw your child up. You just don't know how.
[00:36:30] Speaker A: All the parenting advice I don't have a child, but all the parenting advice I think I would take from the Simpsons, probably.
[00:36:36] Speaker B: I think, you know what? Hey, just keep kicking them into play. Keep kicking them into play. Keep them alive. Keep kicking them forward. Yeah.
[00:36:48] Speaker A: That's kind of fascinating. I'm kind of curious where you talked about getting the accent in your body and even about fitting the project, like, fitting the accent to the project that you're doing. Obviously, if you're doing a very realistic dramatic film, it's going to be different than if you're in beauty and the beast on stage. You know what I mean? Yeah, big time. Yeah. How do you approach that as, like you're an actress, obviously, but how much of do you ever get into acting technique? Or is it just as far as, how does that intersect with accents?
[00:37:26] Speaker B: Absolutely.
I do appreciate that. My colleagues here at the university, we recognize, like, in my voice class, I'm not teaching voice. I'm teaching acting through the voice.
I know somebody who was at a place where they were like, you're not allowed to do scene work with students because it's a movement class. And it's like, what the hell are you talking about, that's just stupid. That kind of territorial stuff is stupid, I will say. Sometimes, like, a director will be sort of like, yeah, but I don't want you to work with them on the acting or at all about what words they stress. Like, what are the line readings? And that kind of stuff. And I'm like, well, that's impossible.
It is impossible because the nature of how you pronounce the word depends on whether you're stressing it or not stressing it and where it fits in context around other words. So we have to work on a line reading. We can work on five possible line readings. That's absolutely appropriate for us to keep the options open.
But you absolutely have to have, as a dialect coach, you are kind of in the middle because you're trying to help the actor do their thing, and you're trying to help the director to get the actor to do their thing. And sometimes I'll get actors who are sort of like, give me acting notes and I'll get directors who are sort of like, give them a little directing. But then there are others who are really protective of it and keeping it separate. But there's no full separation.
You have to get into the acting because sometimes it is also like, okay, things are sounding right, but right now, just let the accent go for a moment. Keep it right, but don't focus on the accent. Can you do the acting so that I can hear it in context? I need them to try it so that then we can work on it.
It is impossible to separate them. Yeah. So there does have to be a trust thing that you have to build, and it can take time to build that, but there absolutely has to be a trust.
[00:39:46] Speaker A: Do you do a lot of consulting in that way?
[00:39:50] Speaker B: Every time I'm coaching, I mean, there's a degree of consulting that's going on. True.
Yeah.
Just somebody I was working with yesterday doing a virtual coaching for something.
Needing to work with her.
Well, it's a camera project, and needing to work with her because it's a camera project, she was playing it so small that she was defaulting to mumbling, and it was not quite the accent, but she was mumbling. Mumbling is one of those tools that actors use a lot to disguise the fact that they don't quite know it.
Yeah, exactly.
I think there's some fabulous work, but sometimes I use as a little bit of a joke, Tom Hardy in that. One thing that Tom Hardy does a lot in projects is I find him very difficult to understand a lot, and I do find that a lot of actors use to disguise the fact that the accent is not accurate. And so it's like, no, if anything, we need to go a little bit bigger. We need to go think theatrical for a moment or think cartoon for a moment so that we can go, okay, it's not that sound. It's actually this. So this person was not quite getting the accent because she was underplaying it, prepping for camera work, and it was like, we need to make this just that little bit more so that you get it.
[00:41:30] Speaker A: True for that actress in particular. But for me, that almost sounds like a confidence in the accents issue.
If I was doing that, maybe I'd be like, oh, I don't feel that confident in it. So I'm just going to kind of make it so subtle or underplayed.
So how do you find the balance between overplayed and underplayed?
[00:41:51] Speaker B: I guess, in general, I would say part of the process to me is, if anything, we need to overplay it for a little while and then start to find the mellowed out version. So I'm going to go geeky for just a moment.
This is the chart for all these vowels in phonetics. Right in the center of it is the schwa, the a sound. Well, this is much larger than what your mouth actually is, and this actually represents how these happen in your mouth. This is the front of your mouth, the back of your mouth, top of your mouth, bottom of your mouth. And so the symbols are trying to represent those sounds and basically where they occur.
And the more that you bring it towards the middle, the more that you're mid centralizing it. So you're kind of reducing it, and you're probably making your mouth space smaller. Well, if you start really small, it may be hard for you to feel like you've got it, and it's certainly hard for me to hear whether you've got that, whether you've got a sound that's more like this because you're doing this.
And so I want to go, wait, let's take it out here. Okay, great. Now let's do a mellowed out version of that, rather than something that is indistinct enough that it's like, oh, actually, you were doing something more here than here, and this distinction is tiny, and that's why we need to go here rather than here, so that you can really feel the difference and I can hear the difference, and then we can mellow it out so that it kind of keeps the nature of what it is without keeps the nature of what it is without overdoing it in the long run or losing the nature of what it is. And it becomes this sort of neutral sound that. I don't know what the hell you're saying. I don't know what you're saying, and I certainly don't know what the accent is. Yeah, right.
[00:43:54] Speaker A: So would you say for some reason, in my head, it popped, like the lucky charms box? Like, you start on the lucky charms box where it's like, oh, look at me. Lucky charms. It's like, start broad. And you can always. You're saying basically that it's easier to pull back than it is to expand.
[00:44:13] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. I'm going to agree with that. The lucky charms one is tough because it's significantly inaccurate as opposed to Lumiere. Right. That Lumiere is like, oh, that's very, very accurate. And it's over the top.
[00:44:33] Speaker A: Oh, you mean lucky charms.
[00:44:35] Speaker B: Lucky charms is way over the top and not fully accurate. It's kind of mixing different elements of different irish accents and then some other stuff. And sometimes there's green clovers and there's blue hearts and there's. I don't remember what they are. Boy, I haven't had lucky charms for ages.
[00:44:54] Speaker A: The only good parts were the marshmallows. Isn't that. Is that.
[00:44:57] Speaker B: Come on.
[00:44:58] Speaker A: That's lucky charms.
[00:44:59] Speaker B: Yeah, that's lucky charms. Absolutely.
The super sugar.
[00:45:04] Speaker A: No, we're not going broad. It's about the accuracy of the lucky charms.
[00:45:10] Speaker B: But there's a mixture like lucky charms is like, yeah, we can't really use that one as our example.
True, but the idea of that. I'm absolutely with you on.
[00:45:20] Speaker A: Yeah, right.
Start like you're on a. I was like, what's the.
Tony the tiger? What's that one? Is it there?
[00:45:32] Speaker B: I've never thought about that.
Well, what is he? I think he's doing something roughly generic.
I can't tell where he's from necessarily. Tony the tiger, I think. Are we going to pick apart, like, all the serial voices?
[00:45:49] Speaker A: We should do a whole nother episode just on.
[00:45:51] Speaker B: There's the YouTube video that the world needs now.
[00:45:54] Speaker A: You know what? I would watch that.
[00:45:56] Speaker B: I would watch that.
[00:46:00] Speaker A: Are there any mistakes or things that you would advise against when learning a new accent that comes to mind?
[00:46:11] Speaker B: Well, I think.
Oh, yeah, sure. This kind of harkens back to what we just talked about.
Never let yourself say or believe that it is. Well, everybody who says this mumbles. It's like, no, you're not allowed to mumble. You've got to do a very distinct, understandable version of it. So you're not allowed to do the mumble version, at least to start with. And then another thing that people say all the time, that is a misconception that I'm like, no, we got to redefine this, is people say, well, they're all really nasal. Everybody who says, this is really nasal and almost across the board, they are not nasal. And this is where we've got to make a distinction between nasal and what I'm going to call Twang.
And so Twang is that country music twang, that kind of thing. Right? So Twang is a glorious thing because it's what carries in a space. So it is like an essential tool for actors, for theater, for anything that's larger, having twang will carry. If all you've got is twang, people may not want to listen to you, but they can hear you. So Twang is what I think is happening most of the time when somebody says, oh, it's a really nasal accent, but when it's nasal, it's actually going through the nose, makes it really hard to understand, causes all sorts of other issues and things. It's almost never nasal. Almost always when people describe something as nasal, it's actually twang. So that redefinition, I think, is helpful. I do think that people have to be really careful about basing their accent on instructions on YouTube.
There's a lady who does the New York accent, teaches the New York accent on YouTube, and she needs to be stopped because there are some things that she's teaching that are inaccurate, or a lot of people who teach. Who teach how to do this, and we don't say our t's or those kinds of bs explanations really annoy me. I'm avoiding cussing right now.
[00:48:27] Speaker A: You can cuss. It's fine.
[00:48:28] Speaker B: Okay. They annoy the shit out of me. It drives me crazy because.
Okay, so I'm going to talk a little trash in that.
There was a lady that I was recording at a library, and I went there to pursue a dialect recording or get a lead on it, and she went off on how people speak terribly well. That immediately for me, is a little bit of a red flag thing. And she said, if somebody comes up here and says to me that they're going to go up, they went to the mountains last weekend. I say, where did you go?
And they say, the mountains. And she said, do you mean the mountains? Because they didn't say their tea. And that idea that they didn't say their tea, number one it annoys me because I'm like, you understood them. You're just being an asshole, right? So that drives me crazy. Now. You opened up the swearing door. I'm going to swear like crazy.
[00:49:24] Speaker A: Oh, man.
[00:49:25] Speaker B: Number one. Number one, you understood them. Number two, they said their tea. They just said their tea. Not in the way that you want to recognize it in your narrow definition of a t. When I say mountain, I'm saying a t. I'm just saying it with a glottal element that's getting a nasal release on it.
Let me talk you through what that is. I can't really have that conversation, but that's the kind of crap that a lot of people will say on the youtubes, is that they will bring up something and they'll say, it's always this. And it's like, no, this is a total misconception.
You got to clean that up. You got to clean that up, man.
[00:50:10] Speaker A: Are these accent coaches, or are these people that have the accent naturally and are trying to teach it to people?
[00:50:16] Speaker B: It's a mixture. Oftentimes one of the challenges with somebody who has the accent themselves and is trying to teach it is, funnily enough, they oftentimes screw it up when they're trying to teach it because they're over demonstrating it. And so they start to change certain things, and it's like, okay, you've just made it not accurate, so you almost need somebody outside of it. But with an example of a native speaker to be able to point to and go there. That's the thing.
That is that distinction.
So a dialect coach, in some ways, is like a translator is the one who's trying to serve as the go between between you and the example that you're targeting or between you and the director or whatever that relationship is. Yeah, you are very much the go between person.
[00:51:08] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good point, because even some people that are experts in their field, they might not be experts at teaching, though.
[00:51:18] Speaker B: And that is a challenge sometimes having a person who comes in to consult on the language in a project if they are not someone who teaches the language and has really worked on that. Like, I work with a spanish teacher, and she's really wonderful about being able to explain things for me because she spent her whole life doing that. But if she were just a spanish speaker who's trying to help me with a pronunciation that I've screwed up, she may not be able to really reinterpret it for me in a way that makes it accessible, whereas this teacher, who is fabulous, she's able to reinterpret it for me in a way to make sure that I get it. And that's my job as a dialect coach, is to find, how can I explain this? I'm going to explain it like 37 different ways so that one of them works for you. So I'm constantly physicalizing, constantly doing metaphors and images and that kind of stuff to try to figure out what makes somebody go, oh, wow, that one makes sense to me.
And then they've got to be able to hold onto it when they go away from me.
[00:52:30] Speaker A: Right?
[00:52:30] Speaker B: Like, is that the image or the physicalization or the metaphor or whatever it is that works for you tomorrow, right? Yeah.
[00:52:43] Speaker A: In your career as a professor, have you seen an amount of time it takes to learn an accent, or is there like a daily practice that obviously, probably. You'd probably recommend a daily practice of learning new accents or working on the ones I don't know. What would you recommend as far as that goes?
[00:53:04] Speaker B: It's really hard to say how long it takes, but I think that there almost always is a sleep on it factor. Like sometimes you just sleeping on it, you'll do better the next day, but there will probably be some things that you lose as well, because now you've slept on it and you've gotten away from it. It does take a degree of repetition, but the variation is so massive. I get that question all the time. How long is it going to take me to learn this? And I'm like, I have no idea.
Everyone's different, too. Yeah, everybody's different. And I like to relate it to a little bit like a coach at a gym. Like, some people want to come in and go show me the workout and then leave me alone. And other people are sort of like, let me touch base with you every other week to get the guidance. And then other people are sort of like, look, I don't do it if you're not with me, so I need you with me to work on it.
Right now, I'm not able to work with somebody in that way. I can only work with them on the spotty things here and there just because of time limitations at the moment. But I'm retiring soon.
But, yeah, it definitely takes time and some practice. The work that I do with my university students, I tend to introduce an accent, and then our very next session, they'll do, like, a bit of it for me and I'll give them guidance on getting to the next level, and then they'll do it again. And I give them guidance on getting it to the next level. And then they do it our final time, where they show it, and I give them a sense of my sense of, where are you at with this now?
So I have to give them grades, right, but the grade is trying to reflect. Is this, if I heard you at the auditions or at the first read, would I say to the director, I bet I can handle that person with just notes? Or do I say to the director, okay, I'm going to definitely need to work with this person, but there's some good stuff going on, or is it, okay, I can't tell at this point whether they'll be able to get the accent or not, like, in the time that's given and the resources, et cetera, et cetera.
I'm not sure. So that's the variation that's sort of the feedback that I'm trying to give them. But then with my students, I give them the option of always redoing it. Like, they can come in, but they can only redo it at least 24 hours later. So they have to sleep on it and come back because I don't want them to have just gotten feedback from me where I'm guiding them through it. And then I go, yes, that's it. That's it. And then go, good. Now can you do it?
[00:55:50] Speaker A: Good.
[00:55:50] Speaker B: You held onto what I just told you. I'm like, no, great. Now come back tomorrow. Let me hear you again tomorrow, and let's hear if you're still holding on to it. So you got to sleep on it. There's also an online class that I teach that I'll have coming up in April again, that's called the accents class. And it's a four week, eight session where the first session is, like, laying down all the principles that we're going to go through. So it's sort of like information overload.
And then what I've done is I give them my accent help materials for an accent, but I also have created a video that's guiding them through these principles for it in another way that links them all together over the course of the four weeks. And so then they get those materials, and they've only got a couple of days to work on it.
And then they come in and I give them coaching on getting it up to the next level. And then the next time we do another accent, and I will say that sometimes, moving on, they actually gain insights that help them with an accent that we had done previously that they hadn't nailed.
Like we do three London based variations to start with. And they're better at the first one by the time we'd get to the last of those three because of the different things that they've had to have repeated and even done variations on side note, I want to say, sometimes when you're trying to work on something and you keep butting your head up against something, getting in the way, sometimes actually doing the negative thing, the bad thing on purpose, makes it all come together, like, makes you aware of it in a way that you can go, oh, yes, you're right. I am doing that. Now that I've done it on purpose, I can recognize it now. Let me do this.
And then they can make an adjustment.
So I'll do that, especially if I'm coaching somebody on voice stuff a lot, I'll go, yeah, you're going breathy. So let's play with your breathiness. How much more breathy can you go? Okay, and if that's this percent, let's adjust to this percent. Okay, and now I'm going to say that's more 65% instead of 50%. So can you take it back down to 50%? And now can we turn that up to 70? And now can we turn that up to 85? And playing around with it, and now let's take it all the way back down to 15% voiced is all that you get to do.
And playing around with it on those scales sometimes helps people to go, oh, okay, now I've got a handle on it. I can make adjustments.
[00:58:33] Speaker A: That's awesome. Do you have any advice for people that are using your materials, which are obviously really helpful?
Because sometimes I think there's usually a choice on your materials. Right, where you have an overview of the, of the accents and you have examples, or like you said earlier, you can record their lines and do it in that way.
Are there different circumstances you recommend for either, or is it just kind of what that person looks for?
[00:59:06] Speaker B: Well, I would say the recording of the lines is one of those things that comes up a lot for people who are like, hey, I got to tape this and send it in tomorrow. Can I hear you doing this? So then I'll give them a recording of the lines, and if it's not super long and it's taken a huge chunk of time to record their lines, if it's shorter, I'll add a bunch of tips. And sometimes it's really helpful if they go, I'm trying to do this, but I'm trying to be italian, but I keep going to Transylvania when I'm being italian, and I'm originally from here. That can help me to go. Okay, so here's a little tweak because of this. Here's what you're probably doing because you're going transylvanian. So let's make this adjustment.
That's the Italian. Like a roll forward. Right? If you take that and you pull it back, then it becomes concocula. Right. And go into another cereal.
[01:00:02] Speaker A: Here we got to start our.
[01:00:06] Speaker B: We got our whole serial podcast, man. So recognizing. Oh, it's that pullback that's leading me to Transylvania.
Okay, let me do this.
Let me recognize that so that I can make an adjustment the other direction. Right.
[01:00:23] Speaker A: So being self aware of that stuff is helpful, especially in a short turnaround.
[01:00:28] Speaker B: Yeah. And I do think that having in the materials, there's also, like, a native speaker or myself, depending on the accent, reading through the sentences. Right. So they've got the sentences. And then there's even a monologue where I will teach, like, really walk people through this monologue and then give them a chance to hear it in action. So I think having those things to be able to hear it and try to repeat it and try to get it into their mouths, I think there's a lot of value in that.
And then, in the end, it's got to be about you being able to do it on your own. So, do you have the time to work through that process of hearing, repeating, and getting to hear it over and over again and repeat it and get it into your mouth and then try to carry that over into new material, or are you like, this is my material. I got to do it fast.
Let me hear you do my material for me. Right.
[01:01:30] Speaker A: I experienced this, and maybe other people do that are listening that I'm always like, oh, no, I have an audition. I got to speak in a scottish accent by tomorrow.
I need to get out of that hamster wheel of constantly.
I feel like this is true as an actor, too. Actor, musician, which it's always, like, the instrument or the accent, probably, that you don't know that you need instantly, of course, not always, but it's like, oh, I need to know an irish accent, and I've never done it before, but I know all of the british accents and all that stuff.
Do you recommend to your students, obviously, you have a certain time that you see them more regularly, but for people that are on their own, basically, is it like, spend 30 minutes a day on a new accent or anything that you recommend for me personally and everyone else?
[01:02:29] Speaker B: Well, I will say, I think the first thing that I want to clock in that concept is going, you've also got a life, and you've got to figure out your priorities in your life and what works for you.
And I really hesitate to be like, you need to do 30 minutes a day to do this. It's more like, well, what do you got? What do you got, man? And what's your focus? Because if it's not a priority for you, it doesn't matter what I tell you.
What's going to work. Well, what's going to work for you is consistent practice tends to have a better payoff than extensive, brief period of time practice. So sort of like doing a weekend workshop and going through four accents is not going to be as effective for you as spending a week, even 20 minutes a day, working on an accent.
So it's a focused but recognizing it can be brief and it also can be passive. It can be like, okay, on my commute, I'm just going to put in the recording, and I'm going to be listening to these native speakers. I'm going to be listening to the sentences and repeating after the sentences. I'm going to do this on my commute. Whether it's in a vehicle or it's on a bike or it's on a subway, I'm going to plug that in. And even if I have to do it silently because I'm on a subway or I have to be careful how I'm doing it because I'll get bugs in my mouth on my bike.
You doing a little bit of that repeating after it to get the feeling of it and getting that sound that you can hear over and over again, that can help you to find its way into you. It's got to seep into you a little bit. So time helps. Like literally sleeping on it is going to help you a little bit. But also that exposure over time is going to help. Yeah, the massive dose is not going to help you as much as that exposure over time.
The only thing that I will say that because the accents class that I teach is a little bit of a massive dose, but what we do is we do two times a week, and each time is a different accent. But the people who are signing up for it, part of what they're doing, they get all the recordings and everything, so they could deal with it later, too. But a part of what they're doing when they do that is they go, all right, this is it. I'm doing the deep dive right now. I'm going to have to devote a chunk of time to listening to it and sleeping on it and letting it. Now I got to come back to it again the next day. So they're doing really focused work for a month, and then they get the rest of all of the accent help materials over the course of the next year, and then they could go into overwhelm. So I'm always saying to them, no, pick one of the accents that you get and just focus on that one now, because now you got to work it into your life because you just did this boot camp, you just did this intensive, so you've got to ease it in now.
So what's your motivation?
What is it that you want? I guess the upside of a thing like that is people threw a chunk of money at it and they said, I'm going to do it. So now they feel like they have both a financial commitment and they have a crap. I told people I was going to do this commitment, and that forces them to do it.
So anything like, if you haven't read, oh, what's the name of it? Atomic habits.
Great book, fabulous book. Or don't read atomic habits, just look up the summary of atomic habits and you'll get almost all the information that is incredibly useful. Of course, you have to make use of it, but whatever it is that starts to build these habits into you, that serves you.
[01:06:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I just know that for myself, there's such an extreme of last minute preparation or thinking that I'll have three weeks of rehearsal for the play, but it's like you have to get cast in the play, so you have to know the accent before. So it's trying to balance that as a professional actor trying to grease the machine and to know and to learn throughout and not being so last minute, I think, is what the balance I'm trying to find.
[01:07:19] Speaker B: So what I'd suggest is almost look at it, like, over the past year or the past two years kind of track. What are the accents that I've been asked to do? What are the projects that have come up that have either I've been asked to do or I didn't do because I didn't feel like I could do that accent. And when you do the math on that, go, okay, so this is one that I probably need to work on. I always suggest that a couple of the ones that you need to work on is one of them is, what's your market?
I'm based in Houston, Texas. If you're in the Texas market, you need to have a Texas accent, because a lot of the films that come here, they're looking for somebody to do one or two lines who's a Texan, and so they're looking for that sound.
So you want to know something based on what your market, and then what do you look like? What are the things you're getting sent out for? Can you work on that? Because that's what you're being sent out for.
And then it's what just keeps coming up that you would like to be eligible for. Or that if you are an audiobook person, that what is it that you keep seeing requests for? Because that doesn't depend on what you look like or where you're based. So then it's like, okay, great. Let me put my focus on this one. And then as you're working on an accent, I like to say you're not just learning that accent. You are adding things to your toolbox. You're trying to build an accent toolbox. That's what I try to do with my students at the university and with the folks I work with in the accents class is building this toolbox of, like, there's specific accents that I choose because I go, and here's an intonation we haven't touched on yet, or here's a reinforcement of this intonation with this tweak. And if you recognize that all these different accents have that same intonation element, it can make a massive difference. And then you're actually building the possibility that you can do.
You're actually working on Jamaican because you worked on austrian, and you recognize that an austrian accent has very much the same kind of intonation in it.
It can make a big difference. Yeah.
[01:09:38] Speaker A: That was very helpful. Thank you.
It's such an important part about, because, look, we all have limited resources and time and figuring out what's coming up for you and what accents you need to be focusing on, because obviously we're not all going to be doing all the accents.
Is there an amount like, would you say we have probably three to five? I don't know. I don't know if there's probably no answer to that question, but, yeah, I.
[01:10:11] Speaker B: Think there's no answer because I think it could be a pretty big number depending on the individual. True.
And it could be a pretty small number depending on also what kind of projects you tend to work on.
[01:10:25] Speaker A: Right.
Jim Johnson, thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate it.
[01:10:33] Speaker B: Nice to meet you, James.
[01:10:34] Speaker A: Yeah, nice to meet you finally.
[01:10:35] Speaker B: After all, you're a man with my formal name.
[01:10:39] Speaker A: Is your name not. Yeah, your name is.
[01:10:42] Speaker B: I was born a James, but I was never.
If you call me James, I know that. You don't know me.
I was a Jimmy Jimmy. And then I became a Jim at some point.
[01:10:55] Speaker A: Yeah, I remember the lunch lady in third grade tried to christen the Jim, but it didn't stick for some reason. I don't know. I don't.
[01:11:04] Speaker B: I just. I guess I never really tried to change it. It's just what people called me. I was the youngest of five boys, so I put up with being called almost.
[01:11:15] Speaker A: That. I get that. Well, thanks so much. And everyone go check out accenthelp.com. And Jim, is there any other way to get in touch with you or just go to the website?
[01:11:27] Speaker B: Go to the website, I'd say. Because you could email me through the website,
[email protected].
[01:11:32] Speaker A: Yeah, awesome. He is the master of accents. And I have personally benefited Miss services. So everyone go check it out.
