🎙️ What’s This Episode About?

Mac Wynter is a musician, animator, freelance illustrator, event organiser, teacher, and the founder of Stripped MCR and QuAC, a UK-based queer arts collective. He also used to go by Mickey Taylor, but Mickey’s dead now. He said so himself.

Mac joins John ten years after their first on-camera conversation, and wastes no time catching up on a decade of reinvention. From a former career in the adult industry and touring music to going back to university at 29 to study animation, Mac talks about what it looks like to genuinely start over, the skill sets that travel with you whether people respect them or not, and why he still thrives on pressure even when it probably shouldn’t work.

They get into the creative world’s darker side too: the mental health toll of pouring yourself into art, the threat of AI to a generation of animators, and what it means to keep building when the industry keeps shifting under your feet. Mac talks about his children’s books, his autism diagnosis, and how working in animation led him back to teaching kids the things he didn’t have growing up.

There’s also the queer arts scene in Manchester, the nudist cabaret niche he somehow spotted and ran with, and a lot of unfinished business he fully intends to come back for. He’s chaotic, hilarious, and exactly as much as he was ten years ago, in all the best ways.

🗣️ Why Listen?

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