Giants
All of us, urchins, on the quiet battlefield.
(Transcript.)
So I'm in the middle of a very busy time right now.
And, uh, I should be moving on to the next thing, but I literally just cannot move on to the next thing.
I needed to do something different, and also did not have the energy to go and do something different.
And the microphone was right there, so I pressed record, because there's been this thing on my mind lately, and I want to talk about it.
So, about a year and a half ago, Apple, you know, the phone company.
They decided that they were going to start taking 30% of all the money that went through the iOS Patreon app, on the iPhone, 30%.
Now, does Apple add 30% of value to the show?
No, they do not.
They were doing it. Because they could, because they were a giant, and just kind of said, nice app you've got there.
Be a shame if something happened to it.
And that was going to be 30%.
On top of the 12% that Patreon already takes, which is going to be a real big deal for us.
So we tried to figure out ways to, you know, deal with it.
But then, I watched.
As another giant came along, and sued Apple, and these two giants went to war, and the other giant won, and all of a sudden, that 30% wasn't happening.
And I just kind of sat there.
Also about a year and a half ago, Spotify decided that it was going to start highlighting different podcasts of different genres, and they were focusing on fiction for a few weeks, and so they contacted us, and they said, hey, can we highlight your show?
And we said, sure, I have no idea what highlighting means, but yeah, go ahead.
And they basically turned their algorithm on full blast, and suddenly everybody on Spotify was getting our show thrown at them for a few weeks.
And it made our numbers go artificially through the roof.
And there was this bizarre few weeks on the charts.
We were actually beating the Ben Shapiro show.
It was a wild time.
And then they stopped doing that, and our numbers went back down to normal.
It was fun.
But they just increased the numbers for our show with a flick of their wrist, which, to me, implied how easy it would be for them to flick their wrist in the other direction.
We live in a land of giants.
I had this professor in college who said, culture is a battlefield of images.
And I've kept that with me through my life.
It's a good analogy.
And I've always imagined culture as this war of images and ideas always being waged.
I've never felt like I fought in that war, though.
I never felt like, you know, a soldier sort of loading their blunderbuss or whatever.
I always felt like I was watching this battle from the trees.
I think we all kind of feel that way.
We watch from the trees as giants go to war, right?
The Catholic Church, Marvels, the Avengers, Vogue magazine.
We watch these giants try and become the dominant paradigm, and we watch the spectacle of it.
And then after the battle, we sort of sneak onto the battlefield. And look for bits and pieces of things that we can use, and we take those bits and pieces of this cultural war and we incorporate it into the things we make.
A gospel song from the 1920s.
A scarf from the '80s, an idea from ancient Egypt.
We live in a land of giants.
All of us, urchins, on the quiet battlefield.
The other day, it was announced that there was going to be a merger of two media companies.
Two giants becoming an even bigger giant.
This is a merger that will result in a lot of people getting fired, less movies being made, TV getting stupider, because the amount of debt accrued for this merger means that there's going to be a lot of pain and a lot of stupid things happening.
Also recently, we saw a war, a war that nobody wanted.
A war that nobody wanted, and will do nothing.
The interesting thing is, this war might lead to money drying up from one of the giants, one of the giants, that is investing in the endeavor of these other two giants, merging.
One giant attacks another giant, preventing two other giants from becoming one big giant... and we just sit there.
We live in a land of giants.
And by we, I don't just mean independent creators.
Even if you are the big director making the big movie, you are doing that in service of one of these giants, these hulking masses that have become far too powerful.
We live in their shadow, hoping they don't look our way.
But every once in a while.
Fee fi, fo, fum.
I'm taking 30%.
I don't know if there's much to be done about it, other than the usual things, but the usual things to be done to eliminate these giants, they take a very long time.
They work very slowly.
And I have, at this stage in my life, never met a giant slayer.
And of course, you can try and live your life and make your stuff in a safer place that is away from these giants.
Unfortunately, everyone likes to hang out where the giants are, so you kind of have to hang out in the land of giants.
Everybody knows how dangerous it is, but they do it anyway.
So how do you function?
How do you live in this land of giants?
How do you live in the land of giants until one day the giants are all gone?
Well, there's still joy to be had in the land of giants.
With the rise of any culture, there is always the rise of a subculture.
There's a lot that thrives in the shadows of these really big things.
There's a lot of really great work that can be done in this shadow just as long as they don't turn your way.
There's joy to be had in the land of giants.
And then every once in a while, you know?
They're enormous footprints make a nice lake.
They, unbeknownst to them, blaze a trail through a forest that you found impassable.
There's joy to be had, even though they're tremendous, even though they're terrifying.
There's joy to be had.
Just to never, ever, take your eyes off them.
-j