Studio Sessions
Discussions about art and the creative process. New episodes every other week.
Links To Everything:
Video Version of The Podcast: https://geni.us/StudioSessionsYT
Matt’s YouTube Channel: https://geni.us/MatthewOBrienYT
Alex’s YouTube Channel: https://geni.us/AlexCarterYT
Matt’s Instagram: https://geni.us/MatthewIG
Alex’s Instagram: https://geni.us/AlexIG
Studio Sessions
24. Boredom: The Long Lost Catalyst for Original Ideas?
In this episode, we delve into the impact of modern technology on creativity. We discuss how the evolution of media consumption, from radio and TV to the internet, has changed the way people engage with music, art, and culture. We reflect on the loss of boredom as a creative catalyst, noting that constant access to information and technology may be stifling originality.
Our discussion turns to the dangers of over-relying on AI tools like ChatGPT for creative processes. We emphasize the importance of personal engagement in artistic tasks, even when technology offers convenient shortcuts. We share personal anecdotes about the challenges of maintaining authenticity in a formula-driven industry and explore how algorithms and commercial pressures can lead to homogenized art. The episode wraps up with a thoughtful examination of how to balance technology with genuine creativity, encouraging listeners to find inspiration in their own experiences and resist the allure of easy solutions. - Ai
Show Notes:
Save the Cat by Blake Snyder - https://savethecat.com/
Critical Drinker - Falling Down: • Falling Down - The Great American Lie
Tetragrammaton - Laird Hamilton: • Laird Hamilton
Ghosts of my Life by Mark Fisher: https://bit.ly/3VZ9xcv
Spinning Plates - https://www.spinningplatesmovie.com/
If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We read and appreciate all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode.
Links To Everything:
Video Version of The Podcast: https://geni.us/StudioSessionsYT
Matt’s YouTube Channel: https://geni.us/MatthewOBrienYT
Matt’s 2nd Channel: https://geni.us/PhotoVideosYT
Alex’s YouTube Channel: https://geni.us/AlexCarterYT
Matt’s Instagram: https://geni.us/MatthewIG
Alex’s Instagram: https://geni.us/AlexIG
Who has contacted this $5 bill?
Speaker 2:Oh.
Speaker 3:Welcome to another episode of.
Speaker 1:Shit Show. We had a nice dinner together.
Speaker 3:Cute dinner date Cute little dinner date. Matt's drunk and he's having a sugar crash right now.
Speaker 1:I just want to go home and watch episode three of the latest season of Fargo. That's all that matters to me.
Speaker 3:Matt's deep into a glass of whiskey had a big piece of chocolate cake, french fries bread.
Speaker 1:I really toured different culinary regions. I had burrata with artichoke from Italy, I had like a salsa verde soup with roasted cauliflower and then some curry fries from Amsterdam, falafel and kebab. It was delicious.
Speaker 3:You can tell by the booze that it is indeed.
Speaker 1:The more buzzed I get, the closer I get to the microphone.
Speaker 2:I'm just like hey what are we talking about?
Speaker 3:If these episodes are, we will go back to our regularly scheduled programming here before too long. But you know, what it's our podcast.
Speaker 1:If we want to do it on Friday nights, drunk.
Speaker 3:We'll do it on Friday nights.
Speaker 1:Waiting for the storm.
Speaker 2:It actually is pretty they keep pushing it off.
Speaker 1:They canceled some big event down in, like the riverfront and council bluffs, because of these storms that were supposed to come in and this still hasn't happened. It's gonna be dark out and they were gonna go.
Speaker 2:We, we, we could have done the event banana, banana.
Speaker 3:What are we talking about? I't know.
Speaker 2:It had been a golden afternoon and I remember having the familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
Speaker 1:If you wanted to hear music back, then it was filtered through the radio stations.
Speaker 3:All you had to do was infiltrate Well filter through television, and if you couldn't infiltrate that, no chance.
Speaker 1:No chance. Yeah, I mean, maybe you could try to get at a small radio station in a smaller city and hope that it catches on and then spreads. So everybody's attention was focused on and if I'm overlooking anything my apologies, but I'm just thinking about what I would always see back then, which is radio play, and then somebody's on the ed sullivan show or on the you know this talk show or this variety show listening to the um born standing up.
Speaker 3:Yeah, he talks about like he was on carson 16 times but it was guest hosts he was like the guest host comedian yeah and then cars's like alright, I want you to come on to like a main show.
Speaker 3:And he went on and he was doing his act and it cut to like a clip of Carson just dying. And then all of a sudden he's a household name. Yeah, and you know, within two months he's selling out arenas. Yeah, then within two more months he's the hottest comedian in the world and he's selling out arenas. Then, within two more months, he's the hottest comedian in the world and he's selling more tickets than any comedian in the history of the art form has done. And it was just like that.
Speaker 1:Right, right, yeah, if you were on Carson, especially as a stand-up comedian.
Speaker 3:And you got that like yeah, Especially if you got invited back, yeah.
Speaker 1:Which you know. Seinffeld always tells that story about how he came back. I think three times I was a king maker, yeah, and it was just like through the stratosphere guys deal with nbc, all that stuff. So to just to wrap up the point, the point for me was well, and that, just that was because everybody was focused, everybody watched carson, that's right.
Speaker 3:What else are you gonna watch? 10 30, everybody you're not watching tv right and so.
Speaker 1:So you know. The question is have these massive cultural shifts, especially in popular culture, music, art, movements, whatever, have they sort of appeared to dissipate because our attention is divided across so many different areas, because the internet lets us access everything, everything everywhere, all at once? Um, you, literally can you know? I mean, when I was a kid, we either had to listen to the radio with a tape in the cassette player and record the song so we could listen to it when we wanted to, because we didn't. You know, as a kid, you didn't. You couldn't easily just like take your money to the store and go buy this stuff. I mean, you could, but you had to have your parents take you. It wasn't just down the street from me, you had, like you know, 10 miles into town, or we would watch mtv and you had to wait until it came on. Yeah, you had to wait for the video to show up and then, when it did, you watched it.
Speaker 3:You're pumped, it means everything, because that's all you got.
Speaker 1:You might have a VHS ready so you could record the video.
Speaker 3:If you've got to go to the bathroom, you better hit it during commercial quick.
Speaker 1:And now it's on demand. And again does that mean that for some reason? And again, so does that mean that for some reason we just there are, the shifts are smaller because they're in all these subcultures and subsets of music and art and all that stuff and are they?
Speaker 3:maybe they're happening in all these micro fractures but, then over time that builds up and everything just opens up at once. Maybe that's you know. You talk about these changing. You said everything looks like 2009. I would argue everything digital at least looked a lot shittier in 2009.
Speaker 3:People just didn't have a comprehension of making things right or doing things with, you know. So we've learned. It's taken us 15 years to learn, yeah, and now the fluency is higher, right, well, so is. Is there about to be a spree of interesting stuff that comes out of that, because the fluency is so much higher and suddenly you can work at the speed of thought You're not working at fluency, I look. I'm not going to argue, though, that, like there's consumer culture and things like that have had an influence. Um, algorithm driven content optimization and things like that have had an influence. Like I think that's that's a given um, and you know, yeah, do you have all like everybody's in their own little bubble taking in their influence? And but maybe because everybody's in their bubble, it just takes time for these things to start to. Like you had five sources and the whole world was watching those five sources, yeah, and then that melded together into something new, so much better, because you almost had like less experimenting.
Speaker 3:That could happen right so it was just like okay, what's next? And that comes together, all the clay from all these like broken pieces comes together to form this new thing. And now, yeah, you have all of these little bits and pieces.
Speaker 1:Maybe a couple of globs over here come together and a couple over here, and it's just slower to build but and then another aspect of that, I think, is because of the access to it all the time and the information that's out there. Analyzing and breaking down the different artistic forms you know I think about when I know is in the thick of screenwriting, there's a book called save the cat by Blake Snyder and it was great because he looked at all these movies from the past, especially more quote unquote commercial movies, and he was able to sort of find these common ingredients, these common elements of formula, if you will. You know this happens generally around the eight minute mark and generally this happens around the 25 to 30 minute mark. And breaking down these things that were page 18.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That were sort of predictable and and some of these movies were really very successful, critically received movies and maybe the author wasn't super conscious of hitting all these perfect story beats. But that book I you know, you know, caught a lot of attention in the screenwriting world and I think a lot of screenwriters started writing to that formula and so it could contribute to the sameness of everything because we're all being, we're all, we're all in on the formula, because of the access to that information.
Speaker 3:You also have the introduction of capital to so many fields. Sure, there's always been capital, like there's always been. But God, it's crazy to think, like the Beatles were as I hate to just stay on that but I mean, like some of that later stuff was just not, I guess even that, though to an extent like you could, but it's chicken and egg, but like you had the flower power movement and the hippie movement and things like that. But yeah, some of that stuff was just crazy to think that they still had the level of success that they had, because today the point I was making off of Save the Cat is we talked about this.
Speaker 3:You know, in the last episode, like all studios want to do, is it's finance. It's how can I model? This yeah it's as little risk as possible. Yeah what? Okay, you see that number in cell. You know 476.
Speaker 1:This needs to be lower than this number here right, but but even with us as people trying to make work you know us shooting street photography or landscapes or whatever we're shooting, us writing a screenplay, us making a YouTube video how much does our ability to just so easily consume it all, especially its structures and its um, its look, its tone, it's vibe, the things we're seeing over and over and that to permeate our subconscious, but then also the people that have actually, like broken down stuff that was successful, or stuff that was impactful, or stuff that really moved people to analyze what all of its ingredients and elements are, especially against other things like it, to sort of come up with this formula. And again, not that we're all consciously applying a formula to our work, but even on a subconscious level, are we more creating derivative works or imitating other people than? Taking the Quentin Tarantino example, a little bit of this Korean action movie, a little bit of this old western.
Speaker 3:Are you saying, like having access to a library book and six video essays is almost worse than only having access to three films and no guidance?
Speaker 1:So this is the last point that I'll make how has all of this stuff killed boredom?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And the ability for us to access information, to watch stuff to be jacked in. What role has that played in giving us all these leaping off or starting off points that we have a baseline?
Speaker 3:it's like an illusion of understanding too, because it's like you're really not like if. If you watch something that's like this was the point of this movie yeah or something you'd be really well made.
Speaker 3:But I don't think any director or any writer or any painter or any artist worth their worth acclaim is making things with like this is the point I'm trying to make, and sometimes that stuff breaks through, but most of the time it just feels flat. Yeah, so you know, if you're watching something, it is the illusion of understanding in a lot of senses, like you're watching a video and it's like this is the point of this and this is why the director did this or why the writer did this, and it's like then you leave it.
Speaker 3:You're like, oh, I get it and it's, it's like, really you don't have a higher level of understanding than if you were to just watch the film a couple of times and thought about it critically, but you have this illusion that you understand it better, right, and then you go and you make some derivative of that illusion right and it's just completely detached from anything. You'd have been better off just watch the movie two times and write down 10 things that you felt.
Speaker 1:Well, you start to see a recipe and you start to you start to you start to see a recipe and you start to you start to you start to you start to just make things based on a recipe, versus having a combination of talent and just sort of like a real primitive understanding of, of just storytelling in general. Um, based on everything. You've watched everything. You've read all the stories that you've that you've consumed in your whole life. You've watched everything. You've read all the stories that you've consumed in your whole life. And again you're going to.
Speaker 1:I remember that scene in whatever, and mine's kind of like that, but it's different because the character and the specifics of what you've built are going to make it different. But it's evocative of that thing versus a facsimile of it. So how do we really challenge ourselves with everything that we have at our disposal? The two hours I might spend at night watching the critical drinker talk about falling down and me letting that permeate into something I write because I'm replicating it, versus creating something new from my perspective, but drawing on that as influence or inspiration? And what role does boredom, being bored play in innovating? In music, in the written you know written stories, youtube videos, whatever it is you're?
Speaker 3:making. Now, define what you mean when you say boredom, because I I think I'm more of like, like I think boredom is important, but it feels like that's like a bit, because in my head I'm like almost ambiguity, like lack of specificity, when you're approaching these things and you're you know, like you said, it's not a, it's not a exact replica, or you know the idea of an exact replica. It is just you're taking this thing, you're filtering it through your perspective and then you're spitting it back out.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And rather than well. I saw it, I watched a video on it and then I yeah.
Speaker 1:Not that this happened, but I had thoughts of you know, uh, jackson pollock, you know, and not saying that boredom helped him find he's a cia psyop bro his style of painting. But what if you're just in the studio and you're like I'm fucking bored? Yeah, what's that? Look like I? I don't know. I just felt like I just got bored and had an impulse Threw some paint on there Threw some paint. That's interesting. Yeah, off you go.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And a whole movement. Think of these artistic movements.
Speaker 3:I do think it's funny watching anything pre-internet and you can kind of see people doing this thing, which I would love to do where it's just like man. There's nothing else going on. It feels like it's been eight hours. It's been one, yeah, because time moves slower when you're not plugged in, and then you're just like, ah, fuck it, I'm gonna read that book yeah ah, fuck it, I'm gonna write right what can I do to kick start something?
Speaker 3:yeah, you just sit down and experience because it, like, I mean, if you, if you, you know, if you were to go off the grid for a little bit and have no electricity?
Speaker 3:yeah and so I say no electricity because, like that eliminates movies, that eliminates computer right, a lot of stuff. Like eventually, you're just gonna be like, all right, fuck, what's that book about? Like you're just gonna jump into it. You're just gonna be like, all right, fuck, what's that book about? Like you're just gonna jump into it. Or you're gonna be like I guess I could write something right now. Yeah, and it almost like boredom. I hate to like pull this into the the war of art thing, but it's like boredom is almost a a really good counterpoint to resistance. Yeah, like, if you're just bored, I feel like people are more afraid of being bored than of the resistance to starting something. But there's something like there's not a lot of things that are. You know that I would rank above that like resistance to starting something. Yeah it, it's a pretty powerful force.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Whatever that is, but I think boredom might be more powerful. So it's like just being bored and being like oh fuck, let's see what this is about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because there's something in boredom that is, I don't want to be bored where there's something in resistance which is.
Speaker 3:I don't want to do this work. Yeah, in resistance, which is I don't want to do this work. Yeah, boredom is scary. In a way, boredom is like I'm bored and I have to spend complete time with myself.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Which that's not terrible, but if you've been plugged in constantly for years it's going to feel pretty terrible. Yeah, you're going to be going through one screen withdrawals like real, actual dopamine withdrawals, yes, and you know you're. You're not going to. It's not going to feel good. And then also, just like I like noise, I like I even have, like the CRT, I just leave it on the screensaver most of the time Cause I like noise.
Speaker 3:I even have the CRT. I just leave it on the screensaver most of the time because I like the noise that just buzzes you. Yep, I do too, and I don't like silence. Silence is terrifying.
Speaker 1:Like you, know I rather Well. I'll give you an example of boredom that I've experienced as a dad. I have had both my kids home for three days this week and they're together and they'll come down and they'll be like Dad, we're bored and I'm like I'll turn it on the TV.
Speaker 1:They don't have phones and iPads that they have access to. They certainly get their share of screen time on the television, watching shows together during breakfast or whatever their little schedule is. But they'll come down, they'll say they're bored and then I'll hear them upstairs Within 10 minutes. Some big new thing is going on.
Speaker 1:They've got the whole room tore apart. They're building something, they're playing with their Barbies or whatever they're playing with, and they've created a whole world. They're using their imagination, they've unboarded themselves, yeah, and I really love it because I know what's gonna happen, because it happens to me yeah, it's a good lesson to get myself out of feeling bored sometimes and I'll be like it's just so you know what I can use a shelf right, you know I could.
Speaker 1:I could use a little shelf right there for my cameras and I go out in the garage and I build a shelf yeah uh, I don't, you know, I I did that that little camera shelf in my studio.
Speaker 1:I'm like, I mean, obviously a shelf isn't a super complex thing, but most people buy two brackets and a piece of wood. Right, I'm like, well, how could I make this just out of wood? And you know, I cut the little triangle pieces and I screwed them in. Well, it's going to bow in the middle. I better reinforce it. You're also doing a little bit of problem solving. It's just like incredibly stimulating. Then you get to stand back and go you know, I made this.
Speaker 3:It's a little shitty, but it works I spent a whole day making these guys yeah, yeah I've been here for so years, all of these guys so I just think I was listening to.
Speaker 1:Of course, you know, our we're, of course, fully sponsored by rick rubin and tetragrammatim, and I was listening to the laird the laird hamilton one and he's like you know how we came up with like three fin surfboards yeah, we were bored yeah we had one fin surfboards. I'm like what if you put three on?
Speaker 3:what if we put yeah, we didn't we?
Speaker 1:they're not thinking of the physics and how these fins are gonna act in the water. They put the three on there and they completely revolutionized surfing yeah and he's like we literally were bored yeah and we're like let's just put more fins on it. Yeah, I mean seriously, some of this stuff happens because people are like fuck, I don't know.
Speaker 1:Let's strap Billy to the skateboard and shove him down the hill. Let's see what happens. Yeah, fuck it, send him. Yeah, I'm not advocating strapping people to skateboards and sending them down a hill as a means for-, but maybe we are, but maybe we are.
Speaker 3:Maybe it's a metaphor, alex. I think we all need to strap ourselves to this game. I um? No, I do think there is. There's something to be said about just not giving in to that immediate, just like I need some kind of stimulation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well like.
Speaker 3:And here's another thing too right, I need to like I'm gonna open up youtube. What's new? What do we have that's new? What? Uh, you know, I want to fuck. I just don't feel like doing anything. What podcast? New podcast came out. Like there's just. I'm not saying any of that stuff is bad either, but there's just something to being like just gonna sit here, yeah, and it's like it's funny, though, because there are like I'm like oh, like, pick up that book, read that book, book.
Speaker 3:Well, technically, that's giving in to it, right, that's in a way it's similar, I think, if you're like, but you need activity, I think, to use boredom as an effective tool to progress at something that you want to progress at identify what those most important, most valuable tasks are and then use those as your boredom outlets. Let yourself get bored and then use those tasks as your way out. And if you don't want to do one of those tasks then well, I'm just sitting here. Then I guess I'm just going to sit here and watch birds.
Speaker 1:And I've used, you know, getting into a book, as maybe first instinct is, I kind of want to escape my boredom here and if I read this it's doing something, especially if it's a little more heavy. It's not just like you know, a romance novel or you know a sci-fi. How long is this book actually? Like 200 pages. I read it on the Kindle, so I know so I you know, I'm like
Speaker 1:highlighting. The hell out, I'm gonna start reading this to break out of this. Yeah, and you know this. You know that's part of why I I do mark up my books. I'm like, especially a good one, like this.
Speaker 3:Should we do a book club episode on this? This is like the first book that we both read together.
Speaker 1:We probably should, pretty and I have, you know, I, I think I, yeah, I want to do a little bit of work just to like, so I don't want to.
Speaker 3:I don't want to make it too much like an intellectual exercise.
Speaker 1:No, but I just want to make sure that I'm, you know, I'm so. I'm the person that, like If we were going to talk about a movie or I was going to make a video, essay or something. I would need to watch the movie three, four times to really process it Same thing with a novel or whatever. My first pass at something is very much on the surface and I don't know that that's like a reading comprehension thing or it's like I'm riding an emotional versus like the deeper layers of it.
Speaker 1:So I'm processing it on a different level and for me to like really get to those those deeper, those deeper layers of the onion, I really do have to read things multiple times. Now, will I read the entire book word for word two or three times? No, but I part of why I highlight it. It's like a. It's like a like a the breadcrumbs leading you back to source like and it's.
Speaker 3:It's typically a good retention exercise, like you can pull it up and, yeah, the context exactly comes back, it comes back and then that's what it is.
Speaker 1:It's just a way for me to put my brain back into what I was experiencing when I read it. Because if it's not, if it's more, a little bit more abstract or it's a big concept that I am not really um, don't have any kind of map for. And again back to cartography I know I talk about all the time like that. First read is like, okay, I know where the water is and I know where the land is. Second read is like oh, okay, I know the mountains and the thing like I, that that's all it is. Like, oh, okay, I know the mountains and the thing like I, that that's all it is.
Speaker 1:But it takes me a lot of a lot of passes to really develop that, to to feel like I could sit down and and have a really valuable conversation, both valuable for me, valuable for you and valuable for listeners. To try to call out a book like this and say what I really connected with, what I was struggling with, and actually this conversation about boredom, about the dispersal of our attention across so many different places on the internet. That's all the reaction to everything I've been watching and reading with Mark Fisher and Ghosts of my Life and Capitalist Realism and Hauntology and all that. I want to try to come up with that devil's advocate point of view where it's like, especially because we feel like there's a lot of emotion in these books.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Like personal loss and sort of like. I miss the good old days a little bit when, like when, a new album came out.
Speaker 3:Especially in the Fisher books, yeah, yeah, yeah, especially as it relates to music.
Speaker 1:So part of me is just like bit when, like when, a new album came out, especially in the fisher books, yeah, yeah, yeah, especially as it relates to music. So part of me is just like, well, are there, are there other angles to that argument? Um, or the flip side of that argument, that shine a light on other things that are that are, that are part of that? That these things happening, but it's on such a small scale that we just don't see it in mass culture at all.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I was thinking about earlier and we won't spend a lot of time on this, but I was thinking about that big movement in the culinary arts toward deconstruction and using liquid nitrogen and turning things into. You know, something is is tastes like a s'more, but it's literally like a, like a food made out, like a little campfire made out of food, playing with texture yeah, like all this crazy stuff that they did that just was like out of, just like from another planet in the culinary world.
Speaker 1:You know, that was so like staked in tradition, you know in the French and you get you know fusion cuisine and and and again like that, um, kind of I think it. I do not remember the source of it, but I feel like a lot of this came out of Scandinavia, playing with liquid nitrogen and and really experimenting with the form of presenting food to people. And then this famous restaurant in Chicago and I hope I'm not butchering the pronunciation, I think it's Alinea A-L-I-N-E-A. It's a really good documentary about it and the chef that started it. But you know just the. You know they were like a three Michelin star, like restaurant, best restaurant in the world, you the world, these crazy awards because he was completely reinventing what you ate?
Speaker 1:You know what I mean, and this is 2000s. You know what I mean. So what areas had massive breakthroughs and massive changes? And maybe it just didn't permeate the greater awareness of mass media and mass culture like nirvana and the grunge movement did, um, especially because the restaurant stuff wasn't connected to youth culture as much it was, yeah, it was older.
Speaker 2:Yeah, older, you know yeah what role does that play?
Speaker 1:I mean grant. I think his name grant grant shatz. I'm so sorry for the people that are that are restaurant people. We are not, so what role does that play? I mean Grant. I think his name is Grant Schatz. I'm so sorry for the people that are restaurant people.
Speaker 3:We are not, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:This guy a little too much whiskey.
Speaker 3:What do they say? The problem about people who read too much is they always butcher their pronunciation.
Speaker 2:We'll clean it up in the show notes.
Speaker 3:That's just too well read.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's going to be a lot of show notes in this one. All you, buddy.
Speaker 3:I do feel like we almost need to do show note purges every once in a while, though, Because it does feel like some of them fall heavier than others. You just need to be like get all this out of here. Get all this out of here. Yeah, what fields are evolving? If you're dialed into one particular field and then that stops evolving and you're like time is standing still and it's like, not necessarily like your subculture may have stopped having something to say, or music's just in a dormancy period, you know.
Speaker 1:But like crazy, shit's going on in physics but we don't hear about it in the mass culture because it's hard to yeah contextualize physics in a way that's like as visceral as smells like teen spirit.
Speaker 3:You know, it's not gonna hit everybody like that music, you know where nothing crazy is going on. Yeah, the social science.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a whole lot.
Speaker 3:No, I, I, yeah, it's. It's harder to you know, experience, the. I mean the lowest hanging fruit of cultural change is pop music.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:Popular movies, maybe, maybe, yeah, I mean popular movies. I mean now, what is it? Just, I'm sure I mean it's true internet. It like memes that lasts for more than a year like what like the type of YouTube videos that are out there yeah like um, you know, you know, mr b style videos extreme concept spectacle based, you know stuff and again.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's like unplugged from, unplugged from our, our world, and see what? Like you know, there's probably not a lot of crazy stuff happening, and I mean, what? What are some things that we're plugged into? That's not like like musical theater. Yeah, musical theater is probably in like a bit of a dormancy period right now yeah or like theater. I'm sure there's crazy stuff that's being done and tried and I'm like some of the stuff with live theater and film and stuff like that's pretty, pretty exciting. I want to see where that goes Street photography.
Speaker 1:You could argue that photography has. I don't know that what people are photographing is in the images.
Speaker 3:Once we break away from YouTube, what is street photography? I just got a new Fuji and I took pictures of a person on the street and that's street photography. Once we break away from that, like there's actually really interesting work to be done in street photography right now, because what do you do?
Speaker 3:when you're in a world where you know there's all like super, you know super polarized subcultures and and like all of these different places, and you know different feelings on privacy and what should and shouldn't be allowed in a public place. Yeah, I think there is interesting work to be done. It's just some of that has been redirected towards some of that energy that would be used like oh, let's just explore this because it's in front of us is being used to mimic, like you put out earlier, being used to mimic stuff that's easy to access right, well, and that another point that I was gonna make you know some of our fears with artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1:We were talking about this because we were reading something that you felt had some indications that it could be possible that you know, chat GPT was used to maybe write a rough draft of this thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you know, bear with me while I get through this point, but you know some of the fears about chat GPT. Even if it's, even if we ultimately end up writing the final piece, quote, unquote ourselves, is chat GPT sort of just like a shortcut to that formulaic rough draft that gives us a starting off point and while we might enhance it or adjust it, it's not this sort of wholly original work.
Speaker 3:Right same thing we're taking language like the most important building block of our humanity. You could argue language, language and visual, I mean, and I I classify those two things pretty close together. Um, yeah, we're taking language and you know, like, like you might know how to design a car with the little clicks online and you're like, I built this car myself, but then you have no idea how the components work.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:Or like you can design a house but you have no idea what goes into building a house. We're doing that with language. We're automating the process. We're letting something else, somebody else, some greater power whether that's a collection of information being run through, like a collection of data sets being run through a you know a bunch of processing power, or you know the ability to build living quarters or to get our own food or things like that we're outsourcing that, and language is way more important than any of those things I just mentioned.
Speaker 3:in my opinion, and yeah, that's the danger, right Is? You have this, you're outsourcing the structure of that and you could see how that could be detrimental. Over time, you lose the ability to what if, in order to write anything, if you need to go to chat GBT or you could be like, I can write it, but really you're just mimicking the language model right there's no that understanding of what's going into. Yes, sent like a sentence or yes syntax.
Speaker 1:yeah.
Speaker 1:And then the concern to us the more people use language learning models to write a rough draft, even whether it's a legal brief or you know an original article for good housekeeping is there, you know it's, it's a, it's a way to, to shortcut to the reward, it's a way to get the heavy lifting done, and it's a and.
Speaker 1:Is it ultimately going to kind of create sort of like a similarity, a, a a a similarness between all these different written forms? So the other example is we have been doing that right. We consume all these movies, we listen to music, we find the formula, we build our own language learning model, in a sense creating languages for the form of a movie, the form of a street photo, the form of this, whether it's on a conscious or subconscious level, and it's easier for us to create a facsimile of the things that we've seen before than to try to make something that isn't that, that it comes from a truer place. Again, you're always going to to be influenced, you're going to have stuff that you draw on, but you're not like looking at it and going, oh, okay, so an act two.
Speaker 1:They did this okay, so when I write my act two, I need to do this. I'm going to change this, okay. Yes, okay, that's that. That is essentially performing the same function that I see here over here, but this is soulless. This has nothing to it. It is vapid and untruthful and impure, and I see a lot of similarities there.
Speaker 1:Like I want to get that rough draft Like hey ChatGBT, I need you to write me five talking points for a review for AirPods Max headphones from the point of view of a video editor. You know, okay, got it and see some of that stuff.
Speaker 3:It's like like, hey, I need you to write me a quick letter to so, and so it's like it seems like it's not that important yeah it's like yeah, that just makes that so much easier and in some things I would probably agree.
Speaker 3:It's yeah, it's not that important. But there's just like I. Just what scares me is I don't know where to draw the line of like, like you know, it's like oh, I need to write a letter to my neighbor and so why not just? You know, I could spend 30 minutes writing a letter, or I could just do it in five minutes, chat to your PT and send it off. It's like. It's like you could argue, it's not that important, it's just a quick letter, but it's like, maybe a letter writing sitting down, writing a letter to your neighbor, is the most important thing you could spend 30 minutes doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Sharing who you are as a human with the person that's sharing a locational proximity to you.
Speaker 1:Or the shortcuts I took back in the day we got assigned measure for measure in Shakespeare class and I'm like I'm not reading this thing.
Speaker 1:I'm just going to get the cliff notes and go through that and I'll get the gist of it like, yeah, you understand on a surface level the plot of the of it and maybe they talk about some stuff from a more you know literary analysis, you know point of view as well as cliff notes, can, um? But you're missing out on the entire experience of reading it, the emotional ebb and flow, the your own interpretation of it, looking up what that word means.
Speaker 3:What's really funny. What really set that point home was I was reading Moby Dick. The cliff notes from Moby Dick are about as far away from the book as possible. Right, yeah, it's like a very plot-centric like this, this and this, and it's like you're not reading that book for the plot.
Speaker 1:Like look at how he plays with language.
Speaker 3:Look at how creative and how just like absolutely nuts. Some of his metaphors are. Look at how effective he is at building these scenescapes with nothing but you know language.
Speaker 1:Well, and just like, what does the rhythm of the writing do to you emotionally while you read it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, Just the way the words are put together.
Speaker 1:I mean, Shakespeare was written in iambic pentameter. Guess what isn't written in iambic pentameter? The cliff notes on Measure for Measure.
Speaker 3:You're kidding. No, guess what isn't written in iambic pentameter? The cliff notes on measure for measure.
Speaker 1:They are not now, with now with um definitely again right right me cliff notes, but in iambic yeah, yeah so you know, um, yeah and it's.
Speaker 3:It's just like these little things where it's like, oh, this isn't that important. It's like maybe that is important, yeah, and I again I'm not like saying it is important, you need to do that, yeah, but I don't know that I would necessarily prescribe skipping that no, I know, yeah and um, you know, so I just and I use, I use, I mean yeah yeah, I don't use chat gpt, but I use language models and, like sure you know, I've been playing around with them for two years now, like more than more than most people, I feel like.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 3:I get a lot of enjoyment. I think they're great tools for learning.
Speaker 1:They're great for sourcing information and but yeah it's like I think you have to know yourself. You have to have that self-awareness to go like am I using this to kind of cheat? I'm just going to have it write a cover letter for me. I don't want to write a cover letter. Well, what does that say about how?
Speaker 2:badly. You want the job.
Speaker 3:Some things like that though it's like I don't know. This is interesting because I almost can see it as like a form of protest in situations like that, Like, I think, cover letters for mass applications are bullshit.
Speaker 1:Yep, absolutely.
Speaker 3:I think most people that are hired to do that are you know they're underpaid and they're probably not loving what they do, and you know you're going to spend an hour and a half of your time stressing over a cover letter and some fucking uninterested person is going to look at it for a quarter of a second and disregard it and then move on to something else and you've wasted an hour.
Speaker 1:so it's like so you're saying I'm going to use this soulless thing yeah, like to for a soulless, soulless process, exactly, and so I'm like that's fun and to me, like fuck your process.
Speaker 3:I disagree with this. And now I have a tool. Agreed, I'll play your game, yep, but I'm not gonna fucking play your game. You don't care, I'm not gonna care yeah, a hundred percent, totally agree, and I think what we're you know, but then watch that too, because that's slippery slope, right, yeah. You start saying, well, you don't care, I don't care. Movie studios start saying, well, if the audience doesn't care, we don't care, yeah well, and then like what is you know?
Speaker 1:like you know, you know, this has your name on it. You know like what? If there's one person there that reads it? And they do have the soul, but it's for this other thing that you're trying to do and this is their day job. Blah, blah, blah. They see that you did the chat GPT cover letter and it brands you in a sense yes, this is the guy that just uses chat.
Speaker 1:Gpt, this is the girl like gpt, yeah, and what does that say about someone and again not making any judgment, but what does it say about someone that, in the face of a soulless thing, tries to give it soul, yeah, or calls it out with soul in?
Speaker 3:some way there, there's a way to be like I'm writing this in protest right chad gbt give me a cover letter, but the first letter of every sentence spells out I'm writing this in protest, but the cover letter is all about how, if you get hired at that business, you're gonna overhaul everything, starting from you know you'll work your way up from the mail room all the way up to the executive suite.
Speaker 1:You're gonna over the first that business First thing.
Speaker 3:I'm outlawing cover letters. Look, I'm not like anti, like I get the purpose of a cover letter, sure. The thing I'm saying that is stupid about cover letters is people expect you to give your time and passion and pour into that cover letter and they don't give it the same respect. Yeah, no, and that's that's annoying. Yeah, I remember writing essays in college and you could tell, like if there was a professor who gave a shit, yeah, and I would walk to the end of the earth for that man, that's right, as long as I could do it in three hours the day it was due yeah, that's right, no, like I always approached it with, like a higher intellectual frequency.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Then if some of them were just like they're just going to check the page count, that's right, and they're going to read the first two sentences and, if it fits, the page count in the first two sentences aren't nonsense, you know, you could even put little Easter eggs in there and they wouldn't find them ever, yep, and it's like. So if that's the effort you're gonna give it, then why am I gonna sit here and give you effort? Yeah, I'm not. Yeah, and that's that's what I'm more flailing about against.
Speaker 3:Sure, you know, for that kind of stuff, use Chad's UPT yeah you know, but hopefully maybe it just makes everybody dial in a little bit more. Yeah, all the teachers. But see, it's everybody's lazy. I think not everybody's lazy, that's I won't get back. I think people we have a capacity for laziness, yeah people tend to laziness. I tend to laziness, I do too. It's just or shortcuts what is the quickest way for me to get from point a to point b and when you have a technology, that's right there.
Speaker 3:That's like yeah, it's pretty fucking easy yep, I think a lot of people are going to choose that over just putting in the work. Why? Because it and it gets into again using, like seeing things through this lens of data and efficiency. If that's the only lens, then what's the point in just doing something? Because of doing it, it's really hard to find that point.
Speaker 1:So that's the danger of and that's the concern is that the tools and the demands on us and all of that stuff lead us to go. Yeah, that residential building looks great. It's got the thing, the look, the that tested well on folks. People just send it, just get it over with, or we've got.
Speaker 1:We've got four months to have this done, yeah just get it, just yeah just whatever like you know, and then, then again, you know how is all of that are? Are the seduction, uh, of laziness, or the shortcut, or the easy way? How does that lead us to everything being the fucking same, everything just being?
Speaker 2:Because all you have to do is reach like. I mean it sucks.
Speaker 3:But yeah, all you have to do is reach the tipping point of like 51%.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all this has worked in the past. So you know all these things, whether it's a building, a car design, whatever, all that has worked in the past.
Speaker 3:So you know all these things, whether it's a building, a car design, whatever, all that's worked.
Speaker 3:I get excited when I hear people like rebelling and you know people talking about how the internet sucks and stuff like that, because I'm like like maybe there is just something that kind of you know just kind of guides people and it's like this is trash, this is unacceptable yeah I mean, you know, if you're gonna, if if we're gonna complain about the market being, you know, this people-driven entity and yeah, that gets manipulated, like hopefully there is a little mechanism, a correction mechanism in there that's like, hey, this sucks, this is not meeting my expectations, right, and you know, I I have I've had more conversations than I ever have about people who are like, yeah, google sucks, like the internet sucks, yeah, youtube, honestly, dude, youtube kind of sucks yeah it's it kind of stinks.
Speaker 3:it's hard to find stuff on youtube other than like unless it's a new video or there's like I was looking for, looking for something yesterday and like and even even on Google, like the article. I sent you the article about Kid A. Yeah, that was archived. Yes, Because the website went dead a couple of years ago. Yep, and I mean it. It was hard to find. Yeah, you had to go to.
Speaker 3:I'm like yeah'm like yeah, like I understand going to, you know the way back and doing that is its own thing, but it was very difficult just to find index in regular google, like even if it's a dead site, it should be right easy to find. But you search it and it's like rolling stone article. Oh yeah all of this bullshit that got published in like the last two years and I was typing in like very specific, like well, that's where you want. I'm like google you're a search index. You're not a pure rate.
Speaker 1:My results don't promote results yeah like that's what do your job, but we want to promote stuff because we have to make money and we, so we move from our core mission don't be evil what? You're looking for right away to promoting a bunch of bullshit from whatever companies pay up, including our subsidiaries and uh, it was just frustrating, like I.
Speaker 3:But yeah, what gives me hope is that people are kind of complaining and like this sucks. That's what I mean. I hate this. I don't like this.
Speaker 1:This is trash, and that's what I mean like when I like like I try to look at this stuff in the macro sense to try to feel like is there like what's the temperature of the macro sense? To try to feel like is there like what's the temperature of the room right now? And I feel like and again it could be sort of my couple quadrants of YouTube, of the many, many quadrants that YouTube has, and I'm talking like types of videos, genres cultural big website.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, but in my area is there, are there enough people that are going like I'm? I'm sick of this, I'm sick of the analytics, I'm sick of being like herded into making like retention editing. That's been on the in my world. The zeitgeist in my world is everybody rejecting retention editing now because, um, they all thought they had to have 47 cuts in the first eight seconds of their video just to, like, get people to stay tuned in.
Speaker 3:Well, now, nobody, nobody actually knows how to cut a movie anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I face this at work all the time.
Speaker 2:It's like.
Speaker 3:it's like there there are basic principles that literally developed from the first film on, from the silent era of like how we cut stories. Yeah, so they can be visually comprehended right once you understand those.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you can start to play with the form a little bit right, but intention editing came around and you had people that learned that and they're like well, this is just a style and this is my style. It's like no, no, there's like bait. Like like you can't just be like you can't just learn some words and letters and start spewing words and letters randomly on a paper and be like can you read this? And it's like there's no structure there. Right, it's like no, but this is my style, this is how I write, this is my style. It's like no, no, no, you have to understand like you have to write in sentences. Still, well, the problem with you have to learn basic grammar with retention editing is.
Speaker 1:They could point to a piece of YouTube analytics and say, but it's working, it works, it's very so, I'm right.
Speaker 3:Peace, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:But then what's always the counter to that? Yes, you're getting short-term results, but what's the ultimate cost of the long-term? Long-term? Yeah, and I think, hopefully too we're seeing, you know, a shift in those areas of of thinking of that. Everything comes back to dress park. Um, you're so preoccupied with what I could.
Speaker 1:You just have to think if you should thinking about what the cost of something is. And again, those short-term games, and that's what youtube analytics is, for it is. I mean, today, you know, I published a video on my photography channel and for a couple hours it was a one of the ten. You get that little woo yay people are watching whatever, and it'll sink its claws into you and make you just start trying to chase that dopamine hit and try to and try to get those a plus on your report card every single time you put something out there yeah
Speaker 1:uh, I released another video on my main channel and I'm like my audience isn't. This is not the video that's for them. Um, a video about how to get like a. You know, take high quality footage from modern cameras but make it look like older footage from a camcorder and, um, but I sit there and I go. If I made a video to chase the short term results, it wouldn't be a video I really liked. And with this video, I know that ultimately it's going to get, you know, picked up in the search results and people are going to be looking for you know how to, how to do this and follow the tutorial and all that, and it'll get the the views um, long-term. And again, not that that's my primary motivation. My primary motivation is I've got something to say about this. I think this is cool, that you can do this with modern footage and make it look like shit from a camera you really zagged on it, which was good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I'm like I, this is the video I want to make.
Speaker 3:is there anything I care about like, and we can wrap up pretty soon, but is there anything that you can think of where, now that you've had some time from it and I'm talking like five, 10 years- yeah.
Speaker 3:That where you made a short term, a decision based on short term results, and now you can see I mean the obvious one in this. This is one that comes to my head. It's like up until like two years ago, dude, I couldn't. I couldn't navigate for shit. Like I just didn't have a good like, like in the world spatial awareness of like where I am and like for this street or this street I was just so reliant on gps.
Speaker 3:I don't really use gps that much anymore, like if I'm going somewhere across town I've never been, I've got to be there. I've got 25 minutes and it's 24 minutes away. I'm gonna use gps. Yeah, I want to know what exit to get off, absolutely, but most of the time I don't use it. And I mean, you know, using a flip phone helps with that right kind of forces.
Speaker 3:You to do that, but I mean, yeah, that like and even um, a couple years ago, like it was hard for me to sit down and read. I've always read a lot, like I read all the time as a kid, sure, um, and then you know I read a lot during college and things like that. But you know, especially like COVID, like you know, kind of a year where I was more I guess I was just more watching videos and stuff like that was kind of right before I hit that peak where I was just like fuck this, yeah, like, and that's when I deleted all my social media and just became an absolute Luddite again. But it was just hard for me to read stuff. Get into Part of that is ADHD and being able to sit down and just calm the monkey mind for a little bit, but part of it, I think, was just I had started consuming all of this short-term content and, like lost the ability temporarily to process and it happened quick yeah.
Speaker 3:We're talking like six months, sure, and it just rewires it and you're like okay, then you just spend like six more months regaining the ability to do something that you were able to do for your entire life.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean the, the, the, the phone and the internet does something, especially when you have something out there that has something at stake. And I don't know if this coincides with you having content on your channel or, um, you know again, not like in a big way, but you know, having posted something to Instagram or whatever. You know, for me, I'm, I'm, I am so locked into making locked in baby, locked into those, those spreadsheets.
Speaker 1:Locked into making progress toward what I'm trying to achieve, whether it's increased revenue, providing for my family, the illusion of financial security, all of that crap that stuff hooks into me. And the internet and my phone is a way for me to check on is the needle moving closer to that thing or not? Check on, am I. Is the needle moving closer to the to that thing or not? And so sometimes you know, uh, the rare things that have a commercial break, like a football game or a Hulu show or whatever you know like. Well, let me check my phone and see what my status is.
Speaker 3:Stocks.
Speaker 1:Let me check, check, my, check my YouTube subscribers, I mean sometimes it's just like what new articles have been posted in my newsfeed so that, if there's some that are related to my world, I can get more info and have a better understanding of how things are moving, progressing you know, is there anything I need to pay attention to?
Speaker 3:like man, I gotta see this, because then maybe I can do something with it before somebody else can like. Is there that?
Speaker 1:it's not like is it like um sometimes it's more like just trying to read the room, like what's going on in the culture right now, especially that overlaps with what I'm doing. It's not like what breaking news happened with Final Cut that I need to go report on. I mean, there's some of that, but it's a little bit more just like continuing to kind of take the temperature of things.
Speaker 1:Kind of take the temperature of things and I found, when I, you know I have I don't have any trouble sitting down to read, I read this book in two days because it you know, part of it was, it was inspiring, it was, it was putting into words all the thoughts and feelings that I've been having for a couple of years now. But then I'm trying to really go through my lives and I'm like, okay, like I am struggling with the music element. I love music, all that stuff, but it's so music centric and the points that it's making, that it make I don't have a connection a little bit more obscure.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's just it's just it's.
Speaker 1:It's just a his lens through which to communicate the effects of capitalist realism and all the stuff that mark you know um was impacted by.
Speaker 3:I don't, I don't latch on to that lens yeah, I gotta say, though, I have enjoyed the almost having somebody like hey check this out yeah like this is so important to me yeah and it's like, wow, that's that important to you and see, I'm a little bit more like that's cool. I want to check that out too, like if that's that important to you like I, I think I could at least.
Speaker 1:And I experienced that for some reason with this book, it's it's honestly annoying me a little bit.
Speaker 3:Really, don't get me wrong.
Speaker 1:I listened to joy division. I didn't look up Japan, the artist, that artist, but and there's certainly stuff in this book I wrote down book titles and ordered a couple of them. It does happen. I think there's something that's happening. I've spent too much time on this book with ghost of my lives that I thought that book was going to be about something different expectation to reality and it doesn't mean that I'm not able to like, and this goes back like three episodes ago and it doesn't mean that I'm like because this isn't meeting my expectations.
Speaker 1:I don't think it's good. I'm aware of the fact that it's not meeting my expectations and I'm trying to take it at face value and again, the lens through which he is exploring this. It's just not interesting to me. It doesn't hook me. And so I'm avoiding reading it. Whereas this, I couldn't wait to read another page and I wanted to like not make dinner, so I could keep reading this. You know um, and part of that is I'm just intellectually stimulated. It is, it is, it is um connecting neurons.
Speaker 3:That right book at the right time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but then it's also so inspiring that I'm like well, how does this filter into the work? How do we talk about this in the podcast? What kind of video has this informed my?
Speaker 3:work. I'm in the same. I mean, I've literally finished two other books since starting Ghosts of my Life.
Speaker 1:Just a heads up.
Speaker 3:We got to go yeah.
Speaker 1:Alex's angle's done, so we're over an hour and a half.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I've knocked out two other ones that have been more interesting, interesting and I did get and it's tough the soul one, yeah, yeah, so yeah, I haven't started that one yet, so I will. Uh, we'll have to report back on that. Another book club episode um but yeah, real quick, just to tie that point off. We got to figure out how to fix this camera next week. We'll do that. I have a backup one too so we might have to swap it.
Speaker 3:The battery's a little funky too, yeah, um, but yeah, are there. I mean, are there any other things that come to mind for you where it's like you had that? You know you took a shortcut and it's had more of a relatively long-term effect than you anticipated, or maybe it was something that happened or you're like no, absolutely not.
Speaker 1:When you think of shortcut too, do you mean just like anything, or do you just mean like the cover letter thing, or do you mean like work?
Speaker 3:Yeah, like cover letter work, I think my whole screenwriting career was a weird half and half.
Speaker 2:Is that career over?
Speaker 3:I don't think so. Are you and I going to push each other to some new break?
Speaker 1:I am still working with my buddy, micah, on one script that he's working on right now. Now I'm not writing any words, but there's kind of like, a like I'm trying to like approach it a little bit more like Rick Rubin approaches producing music.
Speaker 3:You're just like yeah, yeah, yeah, that's pretty good. Oh, that's a cool idea. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's more than that too.
Speaker 3:It's like Do you have any skills? No. Do you play any instruments? No.
Speaker 1:What do you do?
Speaker 3:Right, I have really high levels of trust in my taste.
Speaker 1:There's something, um, that I feel like it really in the flow and and and and in kind of a truthful place and how I am talking to him about the story he's telling and and and both knowing where he's going but then listening to the characters, all this stuff. To answer your question, I would come at a story half of like me and like my experiences, my inspirations, my struggles. There were scripts that I wrote from a. You know, an element of the character or something in the plot and, combined with the character, was like a personal trauma or something that really bothered me or something that was connected to something personal, but then I would put it through the commercial meat grinder thing. So this goes back to.
Speaker 1:Steven Pressfield's chapter on being a hack. I would ignore the truth of what I wanted to do because it wasn't commercial or it wouldn't work for the market. So I would try to wedge these deeply personal stories into this commercial context. How can I repackage this and it would make it a hollow vapid impure thing that ultimately wouldn't sell and I would have some friends and colleagues read it and there would always be this feeling of like there's something really here now, do you think?
Speaker 3:it's wrong. Do you think you've come to that realization more recent?
Speaker 1:yes yeah yes, all of this, yeah, all of this exploration, everything from our podcast to reading the war of art, to reading rick rubin's book, to listening to different podcasts, interviews, to hearing casey nice to talk about his approach to the work that he's done, other photographers, all of that you start to go. I remember feeling that the good thing. And then I put it through the commercial meat grinder because I had 115 000 in student loan debt and felt like I had a ticking clock with all this pressure to Get to a place of some kind of financial security. I'm not talking about opulence, I'm talking about I can pay twelve hundred dollars a month every for rent, I can pay my $350 car payment, I can pay my $800 minimum payment for my student loans, like that, and then you know extra money to have a life and you know travel a little bit, um, safer retirement, whatever. Uh, and that pressure made me think that I had to sell something.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so every idea I would have, I would put through that commercial processing, that formulaic processing, the Blake Snyder. Well, this isn't quite like Blake Snyder. I gotta have my act break at this page and I gotta have the midpoint. Uh, this isn't really like a dark night of the soul moment. So you know, whatever, whatever you know what I mean like and you would forfeit it's so interesting though.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's like look man, everything is in my opinion, everything is like a realization process yeah everything is just you do something and you evaluate it and you make you know. You adapt to that new perspective and so I think the fact that you are looking at that old work and being like you know, you've kind of diagnosed it, it's like me looking at myself and being like, yeah, dude, I don't fucking know how to get anywhere.
Speaker 3:Yeah, this is not good maybe I need to you know, I could have just continued to use gps and never acknowledged it, and this is a terrible metaphor. I get it. This is just the thing that popped into my head of like, um you know, losing skin. It all goes back to the losing our ability for language or losing our ability to communicate, things like that. But yeah, I mean, you realize that there was, you know it, it's now. It's like okay, what comes from that realization like is there still an interest to create work in that.
Speaker 3:What does the next screenplay look like? Where does that come from?
Speaker 1:yeah, and if there is you know, and and I, so I don't think that screenwriting is done, but I think screenwriting as it was happening in the past is done and there are a couple scripts that ultimately have more of the personal element to them and those I think I am not opposed to revisiting.
Speaker 1:And this sounds crazy. I wrote this horror script about a husband and wife that get stuck on an airplane on a runway um in a snowstorm. This was like based on true events in a couple airports where people were stuck on a plane for like eight hours on a runway um and I, you know, I was struggling with all these control issues, like wanting in a situation like that, like being fixated on well, what can I do to get control of this? Like, how do I, how do I will myself either off this plane, even though literally they will, they will not let you, or where do you search for that release valve?
Speaker 3:is that like? Does that? This might have not been the script. I haven't read this, but no, yeah, my head goes like so then you start turning to something that you can try to control, which would be like the your, your, you know, the husband controlling the wife, or right, and so you're just, you're searching for, like this illusion of control.
Speaker 1:And I wanted to create this sort of perfect storm of circumstances where this person was going to have to surrender ultimately and stop trying to control everything and learn something new about themselves and change um, but some horrific things were going to have to happen, whether it was and it was the, the female character that was grappling with this, her relationship with her husband, um, the other passengers on the plane, all of that stuff. And I did like that it was in this umbrella of what felt like a sort of traditional horror movie, but a lot of people who read it went. You know what? The horror stuff? Because the extra element is that this is based on a true thing as well. The runway was built, uh, over a cemetery and that actually happened in Chicago. They demolished a cemetery and built the runway over it. So it's poltergeist on a plane.
Speaker 1:A lot of people were like it's kind of cool that the runway was, uh, was, and this is that's what you did back then. Right, you would be like well. Right, you would be like, well, how do I it's die hard in an elevator.
Speaker 3:You know what I mean? That's my favorite joke. It's like every yeah. It's like it's all right, you got this, but exactly absolutely so.
Speaker 3:So some of the people that read it were like I really love this stuff, that the character it's like I don't think you need them yeah, dude, you need to rewrite that as like a cassavetes film, like just give me a straight yeah and straight-laced emotional drama, and so they would tell me that they're like you really have something with this character and what she's going through, stuck on this plane, especially because we know it's based on stuff that really happened.
Speaker 1:It's not far-fetched, um so, and I would just be like I can't do that because I'm that's not gonna make me any money.
Speaker 3:Yeah and no, honestly, dude you, you had me dial like dial. Then I'm like damn, I need to read this. Yeah, yeah good, and then you said it was built on a cemetery. I was like fuck dude.
Speaker 1:And I think that's what happened when people read the script, because it wasn't until like 45 minutes in an hour in, and then you see, and you're just like and they're like I was really enjoying, yeah, I was enjoying this, and then you just, and you're just like fuck, and they're like I was really enjoying.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I was enjoying this, and then you just and then like oh, now there's like ghosts and it's a runaway cemetery like this is a.
Speaker 1:You know, this is a little too much buddy yeah, because because what you, what the potential for what you could have, you know could have had here it's literally like you've got this beautiful movie and you're like wow, I'm actually feeling some stuff.
Speaker 3:This is good, that's a good character.
Speaker 2:Brought to you by Bose Boeing.
Speaker 3:I'm sure glad we decided to take this Boeing flight. American Airlines. They're going to give us two free tickets after this.
Speaker 2:That's funny though.
Speaker 3:I'd love to see that revisited. They're going to give us two free tickets after this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's funny though.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I I would. I'd love to see that revisited yeah.
Speaker 1:So that's what I mean. I think I would have these, these embers of like something really meaningful and personal and something that I want to explore questions I have about what we do and human condition, all that stuff and then I would wrap it in this super commercial formulaic thing.
Speaker 3:And it would just fall fat Poltergeist on a plane.
Speaker 1:This is the podcast.
Speaker 2:Some exec.
Speaker 1:That was like yeah, poltergeist on a plane.
Speaker 3:That's good, that's good.
Speaker 1:The thing that got me about it was this mashup of true things. There were so many news articles about planes that would get stuck on the runway in a snowstorm for seven hours, and then, yeah, this runway in Chicago that was built over a old Catholic cemetery see, but like you could totally keep that in there, just like you make the ghost metaphor like yeah, absolutely yes, exactly got such a 100% like maybe his like his, you know control thing comes from some like specter of his.
Speaker 1:Well it's. You know there's obviously strong connections to the shining and and, and you know the my take was more about.
Speaker 3:Shining is so like we talked about this on the last one, but that's why it's so good. It's because there's never just like a fuck. He's doing the ghost thing Exactly. And then they did the TV version, yeah, and it was like everybody's just like Right.
Speaker 1:Truer to the novel, but not as good.
Speaker 3:Great, got it. Yeah, ghost haunted cool, whatever Exactly. Yeah Well, so we'll see. We got to come up with the this it's. I don't know what the podcast is, but we're going to come up with a nice change, the bio too instead of conversations about. You know, whatever conversation about, whatever the bio is, I forget. Yeah, it's like we just need the poltergeist on a plane equivalent.
Speaker 1:That's where we could use some comments we could use some suggestions and then maybe we do an episode where I pitch all my old screenplays and you guys tell me which ones are dog shit, don't even bother and then which ones are worth revisiting.
Speaker 3:Yeah, give me be like today's, the screenplay pitch episode, and I'm going to dress up like a studio exec.
Speaker 2:Right, right, right, and we're just going to do the bit and commit to it, and then commit to it, and then you can do what happened when you presented your photos at the gallery.
Speaker 3:I see what you're doing here. I see what you're doing here. Alright, next, and then you like, push like alright, you want a good script yeah the sequel to Transformers. You know how much money this made you know how much money this fucking movie made they're robots, but they can turn Into stuff.
Speaker 2:You get it. Do you get it? Do you understand?
Speaker 3:It looks like it's going over your head. The streets are empty.
Speaker 1:Little inside joke there the streets are empty. It's new york city.
Speaker 2:Listen to me but this is new york city in 2020, but it's empty and it'd been a golden afternoon and I remember having the familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the someone and someone.
