(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

Podcast version here.

(Transcript)

So, interesting thing about this American life.

This American life is run uh, a little bit like a co-op.

So everybody, generally speaking, makes the same amount of money, including Ira Glass himself.

They all make the same amount of money, according to him.

So it's because of that, that there's a lot of tape out there, of Ira, just talking, because the way that he makes extra money is by going and doing speaking engagements, right?

So you'll have an evening with Ira Glass, at the 92nd Street Y, and stuff like that, or such and such person, interviewed by Ira Glass, he's out there, making money, getting that paper, as one might say.

And it's in the middle of all these various sort of speaking engagements that he does that he said something that a lot of creative people turn to, when they're looking for some sort of guidance, some sort of level of inspiration, right?

And he talks about when you're 1st starting out, and he talks about how you use your taste to guide your creative journey, right?

And he says that when you're 1st starting out, you have this fantastic taste.

And the work you're doing doesn't add up to the great taste that you have.

And so you constantly work towards trying to get to a point where your taste matches the level of work that you're doing and really the key in the end is to just keep working and do lots and lots of work and eventually your work gets to this point where it matches your taste.

I think it's good advice.

And I think it's it's simple, and it's it's easy to understand.

It really does have the most important core concept with any artistic endeavor is that you just need to keep working.

Keep working, keep working, keep working.

It can't not get better, right?

And I've considered that unassailable, really, for a very long time, until just a few days ago.

Uh, Joshua Rothman.

In the New Yorker.

He's got a regular column called Open Questions.

And in this very short column, you can read it.

He's talking about a couple of books, and he's talking about the idea of taste, right?

And he wrote something in this very brief piece that is kind of sticking with me.

So I'm thinking through it.

Here I go.

Here's the quote.

The world is always telling you what to like.

As a result, taste is suspect.

When are you expressing your true self, and when are you allowing others to reshape you?

Visit one beautifully appointed Brooklyn apartment, and you'll admire the owner's taste.

Visit 10 identical apartments, and you'll wonder if having perfect taste actually means having none at all.

There's this idea out there that a lot of people like to stay away from, this idea that free will does not exist.

One of the aspects of this argument is that with every move you make in the world, with every thing you think, with every action you take, you are, at that moment, being influenced by about 10,000 outside forces.

Your upbringing, that book you read, that commercial you just saw, all of these exterior forces, are constantly putting pressure your thoughts and your actions.

How, then, could you or anyone have free will?

And then there's that really nasty Einstein quote, right?

If the moon were sentient, it would be 100% convinced that it was choosing to revolve around the earth.

Anyway, you can go real deep into the hole.

Does free will exist thing, if you want to, me personally, it's something that you can never really prove, so I don't spend a lot of time with it.

But that idea that you are secretly, unbeknownst to yourself, being changed and influenced by something.

Does call something like taste into question.

Why do I like this thing?

Why do I believe this is the way?

Is it something that I've decided for myself?

Or is this something that has been delivered to me by some sort of, I don't know, subliminal message from such and such thing?

Sticking to your guns as hard as an artist.

You have to be, well, they say you have to be fearless, but no one's fearless, everyone's constantly terrified, you have to sort of sojourn despite the fear, right?

And because of that, you are a ship on the ocean, and the instruments that you use to navigate the ocean need to be unassailable.

They need to be something that won't fail you.

And according to Ira, that thing that won't fail you is your taste.

But then along comes Joshua Rothman, in the New Yorker, saying taste itself, is suspect, because where does it come from?

Do you think something won't work because of something someone else told you, or do you really and truly believe that?

It's not a lot of fun to think about, because you want your thoughts to be your own, and you want your impetus as an artist to be your own.

But is it?

I will admit that throughout my life, there have been things that I've sort of clung to as an artist or storyteller or whatever you want to call it, that I have eventually discarded, left by the wayside.

I realized that this thing that I was using as a rule, was not, in fact, a rule, but someone's idea.

And ideas aren't rules.

I think the real quick example of that is in audio drama, there's the idea of a framing device.

You're listening to this story, and it's fiction, and it's dramatized.

Why is it only audio?

And there are some people out there who think that you need to always, with audio drama, come up with a reason why it is only audio, which is why you have a lot of audio dramas out there that are just like the tapes of this person.

Right?

This is the audio diary of the scientist creating the thing.

Stuff like that.

And for a while, I sort of thought, yeah, that makes sense.

You need a framing device.

You need a reason why it's audio only.

And so what you'll see with the 1st things I made, like live from the zombie apocalypse, or Omega station, those were framing devices.

One was a radio show, the other one was communications between space stations.

And that's what you were hearing.

But then when I started doing Midnight Burger, I thought to myself, why?

I mean, why do I need this?

Why do I need this?

It's audio because I say it's audio.

It's audio because of what you get to focus on.

It doesn't have to be audio for any real reason in the story.

That was something that I was regarding as a rule.

As a rule of taste, let's say.

And it fell by the wayside.

Where did that come from?

I don't know that it came from me.

But I did see a lot of audio dramas out there, all of which were through a framing device.

And in my mind, I thought this is the way.

This is appropriate.

But it wasn't.

So your taste, according to Ira, this thing that you used to navigate your creative life, can be flawed.

It's not unassailable.

It's not a constant.

Which means You can lead yourself down the wrong path using this.

Tool that you thought couldn't fail you.

The rules by which you are using to judge your own work can be called into question.

Now, that doesn't have to be a big deal.

The tools that we use to make it through the world, don't have to be perfect.

They can get you, at least in the right direction.

But when you're trying to see through the fog, when you're trying to get a true sense of the direction that you need to go.

What is the unassailable thing?

What is the thing that will never fail you?

And I think the only thing is desire.

What you want to do, even if there's this part of you that says this is wrong, you still have this desire to do it.

Maybe your taste is telling you that something is stupid.

But your desire to do it is still strong.

In the last episode, I talked for a 2nd about artists and how artists can be sometimes considered to be notoriously self-interested, which is absolutely true.

I wonder if.

Because your desire is the only thing that won't fail you, is that maybe a reason why so many artists are self-interested bastards, is because the only thing they have in the end is that desire, their own personal desire to do this thing.

And taste, in the end, is subjective.

Our desires rarely survive contact with reality.

You have a desire to be a billionaire, but reality is right there, stopping you from being that.

And maybe that's what this taste is, this taste that iverglass is talking about is what happens when your desire as an artist comes into contact with reality.

You have this desire to do something, and taste says, no, don't do that.

Is that.. A good force to have.

There are a lot of artists who don't actually know how good their work is.

There are people who spend their lives talking for a living and hate the sound of their own voice.

Is this their own idea of taste attacking themselves?

Like an overly active immune system. Trying to attack a foreign body.

Because an interesting desire, an interesting impulse, as an artist can often be regarded as a foreign body, something to be attacked.

You'll do something new or try to do something new as an artist, and voices will come to life saying, you can't do that that way.

And a lot of heroic artistic stories out there revolve around someone who, everyone told to stop, and they didn't, they defied taste.

So what does this leave us with?

We have within ourselves, this standard that we use to judge the work that we make.

And we quite often view this voice as unassailable.

It's inside your head.

How could it be wrong?

And what Joshua Brothman proposes is that it can be wrong.

That this voice in your head may not be coming from in your head.

The call might actually be coming from outside the house.

Is this voice that you've used to guide your art, is it flawed?

Has it been influenced?

Okay, so that's a lot of thinking out loud that I just did.

So how do we boil this down?

There you are.

You're sitting there, and in front of you is something that you just created.

You are, as per usual, judging the shed out of it.

Consider for a moment. That the voice that you have in your head, that voice you use to judge your own work, that that voice could be wrong.

In fact, that voice might not even be yours.

It is entirely possible that you don't know what you have in front of you.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hated Sherlock Holmes.

Led Zeppelin hated Stairway to Heaven.

John Steinbeck hated the grapes of wrath.

Tchaikovsky hated the nutcracker.

Franz Kafka hated basically everything he wrote.

Something that you created is sitting right in front of you.

Consider for a moment that it's time to set it free.

Set it free of the judgments you've placed upon it.

It's okay to be critical of your work.

It's okay to approach your work with an analytical mind.

As long as you consider, for one moment, that that voice in your head telling you that your work is not good enough yet.

It could be very stupendously, amazingly.

Wrong.

-j

Fringes

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Transcript:

Hi, my name is Joe, and I work in an underappreciated medium.

Is this the support group?

We're into our 5th year doing Midnight Burger.

And Finlay and I are very proud of the little community that's formed around the show.

And sometimes I think about the fact that I would have no idea how to explain all this to your average human being, you know, that guy sitting next to you on the plane, who asks you what you do for a living.

When you think about sci-fi or any kind of fiction, really, you think of the usual places you go to find it. Books, TV, film, graphic novels.

No one ever thinks of it coming from an audio medium.

And so because of that, you have to stick to the sort of lawless outer rim and set up your own little outpost.

Never taken seriously or let into the wider conversation that's taking place in the zeitgeist, and all of that's fine.

In the end, maybe it wasn't that interesting of a conversation anyway.

It does get you thinking, though, about people's brains.

In the Midnight Burger community, for whatever reason, the neurodivergent is the neurotypical.

Throughout our community, there are all sorts of people with all sorts of oddly working brain parts, like an island of misfit toys, but for brains.

And I'm no brain expert, but I don't think that's an accident.

I don't think that's a coincidence.

People gravitate toward the thing that speaks the best to their particular syntax.

Sometimes that's not a book.

Sometimes that's not a graphic novel.

Maybe it's a TV show or a movie, but a lot of those, uh, suck these days, I could go off about the new generation of Star Trek shows, but I don't like to talk shit about people.

I'm not exactly sure where audio drama fits in with all of the other forms of storytelling, but it has something to do with what a friend of mine told me one time.

He had just been to see Captain America the Winter Soldier.

And I asked how he liked it, and he said something weird.

He said, There's this part of the movie where he, Captain America, has a list of all the things that he missed, while he was frozen under the ice for all those years.

And they're random things like, you know, Thai food, right?

And my friend said that he would have watched an entire movie of just Captain America doing that list.

And I agreed, actually.

That does sound like you know, an interesting movie.

Audio drama comes in somewhere in there.

I'm not sure what you call that place.

What my friend described was not a book.

It was not a movie or a TV show or a comic.

It was something else, and something that was needed.

His brain needed something that he wasn't going to get from anything out there.

The common conception is that if it's not a book, and it's not a comic or a TV show or a movie, it's not real.

But people slip through the incredibly large cracks between these mediums.

And audio drama can be there for those that slip through.

There's a 1000000000 brains out there.

They're not all going to fit into the few boxes that are out there.

The same goes for people who write things.

A long time ago, I met a playwright named Michelle Carter.

Michelle was a bit new in the playwriting world.

She had just gotten some notoriety for writing a play called.. Called Hillary and Soon Yi Shop for Ties.

And a lot of people really liked it.

And she was relatively new to playwriting.

And I was at a playwriting festival with her, and she was talking about how she ended up writing plays.

She was a novelist.

She wrote primarily short stories and taught short story writing at University of San Francisco, and that was her life.

And then she got into a car accident.

And she got really, really bad, brain damage.

And after a long time of recovering and that whole process, when she finally started to get back to her life, she realized that she couldn't write anymore.

For whatever reason, she sat down in front of the keyboard and she just couldn't do it, like it didn't make sense.

She could still read books, and still teach people how to write them, but writing herself became this foreign thing after she had received this brain damage, which is wild, right?

So she just thought that was her life.

And then, one night, a friend drug her out to see a play, and she's sitting there in the audience, and she's watching this play happen, and she thinks, wait, I think I can do that.

And so she sat down in front of a keyboard, and she could write dialogue.

She just couldn't write narratively anymore. And did really well for herself too.

She's won the Penn Award for drama a couple of times.

Maybe there are too many brains out there of different shapes and sizes for us to say that these things, books, TV, movies, these are the things that everyone enjoys, and so you now must find a way to fit yourself into one.

And then as I was thinking about this, a whole other conversation came into my head, and since this is the place where I think out loud about things.

I'm gonna keep doing that.

There's a lot of people out there, these days, lamenting the loss of the monoculture.

We don't have rock stars anymore.

We don't have movie stars anymore.

Rather than that one show or one book or one movie that everyone engages with, We have a 1000000 tiny little fandoms all over the world.

How will we be able to ever have a cultural conversation ever again as a society?

And I understand that sentiment, but it's not as though all of these differences in people's brains showed up all of a sudden.

It's entirely possible that those different minds have always been there, and the only difference now is our awareness of them.

And I wonder if there ever really was a monoculture.

Back in the day where there were only three TV channels, and everybody watched I Love Lucy.

Are you trying to tell me that no one was left out in the cold culturally?

For a long time in our history, there have been people out there languishing in the cultural darkness.

And with this kind of diaspora from the monoculture these days, they can find a home now in weird fandoms and antiquated art forms.

Somehow, our show has become one of those.

I don't know that the audience for audio drama will ever be big, but I do think it's always been there.

And it's only now that they've been able to find this home.

So I'm thinking about two things in my mind right now.

I'm thinking about, one, this idea of this sort of universe of fandoms out there.

And the other idea of the monoculture, and how everyone seems to be abandoning it, and how it doesn't work anymore, and how the closest thing that we can get to a unifying cultural moment is like Barbenheimer or something.

And I think the reason why I'm thinking about these things at the same time is because there's a relationship between the two of them.

I don't think that any of this is going to stop.

These weird things that we make out on the fringes are just going to get easier and easier to make.

And the big dinosaurs of monoculture are just going to get more and more expensive, and there will be more and more pressure put on them to make a zillion dollars in the 1st 5 days of something's existence.

Everybody's best friend Netflix is currently in negotiations to buy Warner Brothers.

To the tune of about $86 billion, giving them access to a massive library of movies and television.

Netflix isn't buying Warner Brothers because they love the WB.

They're buying Warner Brothers because they don't have any choice.

It's expand or die, because, for whatever strange reason, none of the major streamers seem to be able to compete with just plain old YouTube.

YouTube is the most popular reason why people watch a television these days.

And it's an existential threat to them.

Such an existential threat that they are buying literally a cursed company.

To quote Julia Alexander in the verge.

"Every company that has ever bought Warner Brothers has killed itself."

AOL in 2000, AT&T, and 2016.

At 1st glance, you may be thinking to yourself, well, this is great.

I'll be able to, you know watch more stuff on Netflix now.

And that may be true.

But the unfortunate fact is that when corporations are allowed unfettered access into any sector of our lives, they try to turn it into an ATM, and they ruin it.

I was 8 years old when I moved to Los Angeles and I turned on KROQ, 106.7, and it was an independent station playing alternative music that I had never heard before.

And it was transformative for me.

It changed my life, that music.

It was the soundtrack of my life.

That station is still there, but that station is gone.

Because at some point along the line, corporations were allowed to buy as many radio stations as they wanted to.

And they absolutely ruined terrestrial radio.

Sadly, we see all of that happening again.

Just like they did with terrestrial radio, major corporations were allowed unfettered access into a space, and they are now in the process of ruining it.

And as chaos reigns supreme, and everybody buys everybody else, here we all are, out here in the lawless provinces, making as much stuff as we can.

As it turns out, people out here making weird things for weird brains were at a safe distance from the massive cultural train wreck that's going on right now.

So what does that mean for us?

We weirdos out here.

In 1995, Thomas Cahill wrote "How the Irish Saved Civilization," offering the theory that Ireland became a safe space for Western thought while the European continent descended into the Dark Ages.

And that's a wildly simplistic and perhaps a bit biased view of history.

But the idea is interesting.

What do we, out here, keep safe?

While everything else goes to shit.

Are we the proverbial meek, inheriting the proverbial earth?

Honestly, that's probably a bit too simplistic and biased too.

So I started this, wanting to talk about how there's no ideal medium, and there needs to be different mediums for different brains, and wound up on this sort of global thing that I'm doing, but to connect the two...

Making things on the fringes is very gratifying, and also takes a lot of work.

But it can feel a little bit lonely.

And it can make that conversation you have with the guy sitting next to you on the airplane pretty awkward, and your parents will never really know what the hell you're talking about.

But it's very possible that operating on the cultural fringes is actually the key to survival during the sort of cultural upheaval that we're currently in, and that we'll see more of in the years to come.

I know I sound like some sort of cultural doomsday prepper right now.

I know I sound like a person who is foreseeing doom and gloom.

But right now, what we're seeing in the world of culture and entertainment is conglomeration, everybody buying everybody else, and everything moving towards, you know, eventually in the future, there is only Netflix.

And that is the only place you get television and movies from.

That is, of course, very bad.

Because, like I said, when a major corporation moves into any space, they just ruin it.

And are we eventually going to be left with just rewatching the office over and over again?

Maybe not.

Because certainly, there's all kinds of wonderful things still being made out there. 10 years down the road?

I don't know.

What I can tell you is that making things out here on the fringes like this, in times of upheaval and conglomeration and chaos, it's nice to be out here.

It's nice to feel a little bit untouched by it.

And that way out here, you know, on the lawless outer rim, if you can build a thing, get some people to come to it, then you can kind of, you know, take care of your people, tell your story, do your thing, and just kind of watch as...

Well, things kind of burn to the ground, you know?

But beyond the survival part, I go back to Thomas Cahill and his possibly imagined Ireland, where you are keeping something safe, keeping something preserved.

And on the mainland, as people descend into this cycle of doing the same bullshit over and over again, you as an independent creator, a bit untouched by all of that, can continue to say ever forward.

That way.

Now, I can hear my own bias as I'm talking, right?

Thomas Cahill, as an Irish American, imagined the Irish as saving everybody.

Myself as an independent creator, sees independent creators as saving everybody.

I can hear it.

But, I think for the time being, I will operate as if I am correct.

And honestly, I think you should, too.

If there's ever anyone I really want to talk to when I'm making these things, it is 2 particular constituencies.

Either the people who are mid making something and doubting themselves, or people who have not gotten to work yet.

It is time to get to work.

No matter how stupid you think your idea is, no matter how much you think it sounds like this other thing, no matter how much time you don't have, the time is now to get to work.

Things are on fire just a little bit, guys.

And we are out here, trying to build, while other things burn down.

So I'm afraid it's time to get to work.

This is me calling you in.

I'm tagging you into the ring.

The time is now.

Pick up the pen, or whatever implement you use.

It's time to get to work.

It's entirely possible we've got a world to save.

-j

Podcast version here!

(Transcript)

So the other day I was watching an interview with Ryan Coogler about the making of Sinners, and he was asked about what his non-negotiables were. What were the things that he would not budge on when trying to make this movie?

One of those non-negotiables was that the whole thing be shot on film, and the interviewer asked him why he would make something non-negotiable that 95% of the audience probably wouldn't even notice.

And he said something interesting, he said, "Just because they can't articulate why they like something, I think it still affects them." And I've been thinking about that. In 1886. Georges Seurat and Paul Signac kind of went on an impressionism side quest by engaging in something called pointillism.

Rather than brush strokes, they created images through a series of dots. Not unlike pixels in a digital image. I'm sure you've seen it. Through a series of dots of pure color, they trusted the human eye to blend the colors and see things like a scene on a Sunday in the park.

The same thing happens with film.

You see a rapid succession of images, and as you hit 24 images per second, there's a moment when your mind says, I'm going to see one fluid image now. I have this experience making Midnight Burger. Sometimes I can't find the sound I need, so rather than settle for something I don't like, I combine three unrelated sounds and when played in the context of the scene, the audience hears the one sound that I want them to hear.

There's three sounds there, but they hear one sound

In the audience, there's another audience, a shadow audience. There's this thing in everybody's head that watches and takes in your art along with them. This little voice in their head that when you see a movie on film instead of digital, the little voice says, yeah, that's good. We like this.

And then the front of your mind says, this is good. I like this. This invisible art enjoyer, this ghost in the audience, in the end, they are the one running the show. If you can't win over the shadow, you can't win over the person that casts the shadow.

So many times in my life, I've talked to someone who's just seen a thing. They've just seen a movie or a play, or there's a new album that has come out or something like that, and I'll ask how they like it And the response that I've sometimes gotten is what I believe is really the death nail of piece of art, which is the following.

"It was good."

That's it. It was good. It didn't really have an effect. The, "it was good" response is usually for something that's constructed very well and logically. And plays out in a logical and structured way, but there's nothing in it for the shadow, for the Secret audience member, for the person in the back of the audience member's mind.

Apparently the movie Memento, an early Christopher Nolan film. It doesn't make any sense. I can't really remember. It's been years since I've seen it, but apparently, notoriously the film does not add up, plot wise. But the movie got a real cult following and it got a lot of fans, even though in the end it didn't make any sense.

So what is that about? Well, that's about the fact that the front of your mind, is not the one running the show in the end. Things like "Some problems with the plot maybe not all adding up exactly right," can be forgiven as long as the shadow in the audience is really, really loving it.

Which is frustrating because it's much easier to just make something logically work than it is to do this unknowable thing for this unknowable art enjoyer that's out there because you can never talk to them directly. When you ask people how they like something, they'll just respond.

"It was good."

And what that means is there was nothing in it.

It was fine.

It was a painless experience. So there you are with this person that you have to make happy that you can never talk to and is kind of unknowable.

So how do you deal with that? How do you make something that appeals to the viscera of people, that appeals to the part of themselves that they themselves can't articulate?

This is one of the many things about being a creative person that's so frustrating because it is so unknowable.

So for a long time I was asking myself, you know, how do I, how do I deliver this unknowable thing to this unknowable person? But then I kind of realized that, part of being able to appeal to that secret side of people is in forgetting about them altogether.

It's kind of shocking, even though so much of art is about delivering it to some sort of audience, it's shocking how much of making your art has to do with forgetting about those people because that really is one of the ways of addressing this unknowable person in the audience is by forgetting about them entirely. And if you're forgetting about them, you're forgetting about the audience member that they're attached to.

You are forgetting completely about the audience, which by the way is what the whole thing really revolves around. ' cause nobody wants to make art in a vacuum sharing it with people is really kind of the point.

But to make something worth sharing, you have to forget about the sharing part. It's a huge conundrum. It's something that people struggle with their whole lives, and if you're not supposed to follow this, if you're not supposed to think about this audience, whether they be knowable or unknowable, then what do you follow? How do you navigate things? And I think one way of going about this, is to focus on the shadow in yourself, that unknowable part of yourself. Are you doing the logical thing in your art, the thing that makes the most sense?

Or are you following where your interest is taking you? Do you want to do something because it makes sense, or because that's where you're interested in going, because sometimes where you're interested in going with your art is not the most logical place, and the front of your mind will say, what are we going in this direction for?

And you kind of have to say to yourself, I don't know, but I know that's where I want to go. I know that there's something there for me. There is something inside of me that says, go there, even though you can't come up with a reason why.

The more and more I think about art, the more and more I think about how it's not a logical communication. It's not a debate, it's not a philosophical discussion. It's something intrinsic in yourself reaching out to the intrinsic parts of others, those parts that we can't quite know

That is in the end truly a connection.

Because there's all kinds of people out there that you can intellectually agree with and intellectually communicate with. But can you connect to them?

This may shock you to hear, but throughout history, artists have been accused of being notoriously self-interested. Breaking news. Now, sometimes the reason for that is because the artist is a jackass, but I think part of that may be related to the fact that, as someone making art, you look out at an audience full of shadows.

They are unknowable and unnameable, and they are the ones you have to connect with. And the only way to really do that is to listen to, as closely as possible, that shadow in yourself. By connecting with that shadow within yourself, you then connect to theirs.

It is not logical. It is unfortunately very magical.

So you have to stay very still. And very quiet and listen to that part of yourself, because I truly believe if you get in touch with that unknowable part of yourself, it connects you directly to that unknowable part of anyone.

And you don't really know in the end what the reaction will be when that connection is made, but I can guarantee you the reaction will not be:

"It was good."

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So the other day I took a look at the stats for this thing to find that people are actually listening. I think that's great. I hope you're enjoying it. I hope you're getting some use out of it. I get a lot of use out of it. It really helps me to think out loud about these things, but it's been a minute, and so I wanted to get one in before the end of the year.

Things have been really busy. Midnight Burger sometimes fills all of the empty space in my life, and it's the only thing I have time for. But in the new year, I am going to endeavor to get back to doing these because they're really helpful for me. And if they're helpful for you, that's even better.

So at the end of the year, I wanted to quickly talk about two text messages that I got from my dad. The first one was the type of text message that I get from him from time to time where he drops a crazy story on me from when he was young. When he was young, my grandmother was a bit of a wandering rich lady and kind of dragged him all over the world for a while, and it's because of that that he wound up going to high school in Morocco. And the most recent story he told me was about when he and his friend were on a beach in Morocco and he was about 14 years old and he had his guitar with him and he was playing a Bob Dylan song.

Coming up the beach was this lady who was flanked by two dudes in suits, and she walked up to him and he played a song for her. He played, I think, "Bob Dylan's Dream." Turns out the woman that he played the song for was the mother of the King of Morocco. He played a song for her and she said, "Thank you," and she kept walking along the beach.

He dropped stories like that on me all the time. You know, one day there was a bat in his room and he had to shoot it with a slingshot and then throw it over the balcony. He jumped into the ocean one day and was surrounded by man-of-war jellyfish that could instantly kill you. He had to all of a sudden leave Morocco one day because my grandmother's latest husband may have been a smuggler.

Things like that. And then the second text I got was about the present day, which was him telling me that he was finally going to retire. As I'm recording this, last night my dad played his last gig ever as a musician. Now this is not the first time he's retired, but for some reason this one does feel like the last time.

It makes me a little sad, to be honest, and I think it makes him a little sad too. But he is pushing 80 and I think he's beginning to wonder why he's wandering around with this heavy thing strapped to his shoulder. These two texts encapsulated his life as an artist. His very first gig on a beach in Morocco at 14 years old, playing for the mother of the king, and now his final gig playing in a weird little town in Texas.

I think it's a nice feeling to have something in your life that you've been doing from a very young age to your current age. That thing that's been like your companion, something that becomes ingrained in your DNA. But it did get me thinking about starting things and how we feel about starting things and why we stop ourselves from starting things.

We stop ourselves from starting creative projects for a million different reasons. I think the main reason is probably we don't start because we don't want it to be bad, and we don't want to spend a lot of our time doing a very bad thing. That's understandable. That's a whole hobgoblin of its own that we could talk about at a different time.

One of those myriad reasons why we don't start things has to do with age. We feel like we're too old. We feel like it's too late to start something. We have this concept—I don't know where it comes from—but we feel like when you're young is when you start something. You start this thing when you're young, you develop it over the course of your life. Then in your old age, you look back on all the great works that you've created. Sometimes you get to a certain age and you think, "I'm too old to start a new thing. This is not something that people my age do."

But when you really drill down into that thought and you really look under the hood, you'll see that that's not exactly true. Vera Wang didn't enter the fashion industry until she was 40. Laura Ingalls Wilder didn't publish her first Little House book until she was 64. When Frank McCourt won the Pulitzer Prize for "Angela's Ashes," right before that, he was a 66-year-old high school teacher. These things that we make, they can happen at any time, at any stage in our life. Sometimes it only happens when it's time for it to happen.

Now I've been a writer all my life. It's the only thing that I've done with any consistency in my life. But I didn't create Midnight Burger until I was in my late forties. And though I've done other things in my life that have been more financially lucrative than Midnight Burger, Midnight Burger is definitely the most successful thing that I've written in terms of something that I feel good about, something that feels like I'm finally writing the way that I want to.

In Midnight Burger, we talk about the past, the present, and the future, and how these moments all exist simultaneously right now. And we all live forever in every moment we've existed, but the only moment that you have access to is right now. So as we move this moment of now into this new year, maybe we should try and let go of the lamentations of the past or the anticipation of the future and acknowledge that there is only right now. Now is the only moment you have. So now is the only time to start.

Okay, everyone, here we go. Another year.

-j

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So there's a whole lot of takes out there about AI art. A lot of them are really brilliant and really make you feel better about being a creator amidst this, you know, tide of total garbage. But there is an air of sadness to it all. It doesn't really feel like it can be stopped.

People like to feel like artists and not everyone can be in artists and AI art gives people a fraction of a percentage of the feeling of what it's like to actually create something. And for them, that's as close as they're ever going to get. So for them it's enough. On top of that, you have the fact that at the current moment, AI seems to be the only thing making the US economy look good. I say, look, not is. So all these takes are like, "This sucks. Not much to do about it. I guess we just keep being awesome." And I guess that's the only thing to do.

We can keep shaming people when they upload their favorite artwork so that they can do some nonsense with it. we can try and fail to get politicians to regulate it, and in some cases, sue. But it doesn't feel like any of that is going to stop anything, at best delay it. I've heard a lot of references to Pandora's Box when talking about AI, and some have gone so far as to say in the myth of Pandora's box, after the horrors of the world escape from the box, try and remember what's left at the end is hope. It's the last thing left in the box. In the end.

The thing is Hesiod's story of Pandora is still debated to this day regarding what was actually left behind in the box. Some say it's hope, some say it's not. Also is probably a jar, not a box.

We don't know what's at the end of this thing. But it has been great to hear a lot of these takes that are essentially, "This sucks, but at least we're in this together, hand in hand against the machine."

That has felt really good. So this post is not like an attempt to weigh in on AI. I think the conversation is over and what we're left with is sadly, you know, "This sucks. Here it comes."

But the reason why I wanted to talk about it, to think out loud about it, is because the conversation has caused me to think about something I've never thought about before: The effort required in the art's creation being intrinsically embedded in the art itself. The rigor as part of the expression.

When you're showing someone something that you've created you are, in addition to the story your piece is telling, you are telling them the story of how it was made. You are telling them the story of your process. Now, they may not know your process, but the story of it is still there in what you've created.

They can see that. They can see that someone did something. The work behind something great is always implied. The story behind your story is always there, and if the story behind what you made is "I pressed a button," then the creation itself is a lie. It's a lie because it implies a story in its creation when there is none.

There's a photographer in Virginia. Named Em White. Em takes pictures of the same things a lot of photographers take pictures of scenes in nature, portraits of interesting people, But Em uses a large format camera made of wood, and steel and glass on a huge tripod. A camera not that much different from some of the first cameras ever used. She covers panes of glass in photoreactive chemicals, loads them into this massive device, opens the shutter, and waits and waits.

Her pictures are monochrome and ghostly. The feeling that you get when you're trying to recall a moment in your head. You can't look at EM'S photos and not think about her. Out in the humid Virginia Summer, shoving half of her body into a dark bag as she develops these plates right there in the back of her van, you can feel it in every single photo.

The the story of everything she does is embedded in the art she makes. The two are inseparable. Now, maybe you don't have to struggle as much to make what you make. Maybe you have it a little easier, but that doesn't matter because at the end of every great work is a revelation to the audience of what we as humans are capable of. What we are watching or absorbing or reading, as much as the work itself is the story of humanity and what is achievable through passion, sacrifice, and fortitude. Every work subtly dedicated to all of us here on earth right now. Look at the things we can do.

This has led me to a really weird thought. Art isn't inherently beautiful.

It doesn't make sense coming out of my mouth, but, but that's what I'm left with. And then it doesn't make sense that it doesn't make sense. But eliminating the human element from art makes it nothing. I'm sitting here asking myself, if the Sistine Chapel was made with AI, how would I feel?

And the only thing I can come up with is, "Well, this sucks now." My reaction is, "Well, of course a machine can make this. The point is that a human did. Someone like me."

Somewhere in the ocean of AI takes, someone said, "If you're skeptical of the existence of the soul, have a look at art made without one. Now, how do you feel?"

I'm depressed by all of this. It's going to ruin the internet for a while, but it has brought a lot of clarity to me about why we do all these things. And I've had to ask myself a lot of questions that I wouldn't have had to ask myself.

And after all these questions, I come back to the most important one. Can we make it through this? Honestly, I don't know.

But look at what we can do.

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Transcript:

So I was asked by someone to read the first few pages of their audio drama, and it had the problem that you may recognize as "Blade Runner Theatrical Release Syndrome," AKA "You have a complicated world mythology. And so you roll out a narration at the beginning that lets everyone know what's going on and where we are and what the rules are," stuff like that.

So what I wanna do in this situation is give them the old chestnut of "Show. Don't tell." But we're talking about audio drama. So how exactly do you show? What is the audio drama version of "Show Don't tell?"

Because Audio drama shares so much DNA with audio books, We feel pretty comfortable with narration, but I think the problem with that is that books aren't narration. A good book doesn't just plainly give you the story in the way that narration does. A good book makes you work for the story the same way that an audio drama should.

Oftentimes in audio drama, we put narration in there because we don't have the option of showing anyone anything. But no one wants a plain explanation of the world. They want to be invited into it. So what is that invitation? If your story begins "The year is 2195, and because of a blank, it's caused the earth to blank, and now we all have to blank for our blank." If you do that, what do I do as an audience member?

There's nothing for me to figure out. There's nothing for me to activate on.

I'm not curious about anything because you've already told me everything. I referred to this as "Blade Runner Theatrical Release Syndrome." In case you're not aware, in the theatrical release of Blade Runner, there's narration in the film explaining the world to the audience. It's really bad and unnecessary. And Ridley Scott and Harrison Ford fought against it really hard. Harrison Ford apparently performed it really badly on purpose so that they wouldn't use it, but they used it anyway.

I wish I could have originally experienced the movie without that narration, because I would've had the experience of investigating the movie, looking at the clues that it gave me to piece the story together myself. I wish the movie could have just been showing me things, not telling me things.

In audio drama, you don't have the option of that amazing shot in Blade Runner when the flying car goes into the sky and you'd see the giant future dystopia city. So what do you do in audio drama. When you want to show and not tell what do you do?

What you can do is something that I would call a slow widening of the lens. You start with something very recognizable and then slowly draw in different aspects of this new world.

Let me give you an example. Uh, we're gonna call this. "Werewolf cop" Okay?

In this world, lycanthropy is a problem and it's very contagious, and the whole world has to approach it like it's a pandemic.

I think the wrong thing to do is begin the story. In the year 2036, the first infestation of lycanthropy happened, right? I don't wanna do that. That's bad. I am bored now because as an audience member, I have nothing to do.

So consider starting your story like this with something very recognizable. A police sergeant starting his morning shift, having coffee at his usual place. The owner starts complaining to him about crime and how the city is going to hell, and something's gotta be done. And the cop keeps getting calls on a CB about some sort of code W in in progress. The code W is in progress and he keeps ignoring it. So finally he can't ignore it anymore, and he heads to the scene.

The police have the building surrounded, but inside are not bank robbers, but a werewolf. And from there you keep widening the story. There's a dedicated department for this. There's a wall around the city to keep the werewolves out, et cetera, but you're never told that by a narrator. You experience it in real time with the characters.

Okay, now I wanna stress that I don't think this is a good idea for an audio drama. In fact, it's quite bad. But I'm doing it to illustrate what the idea of "show don't tell" sounds like in an audio drama. Rather than a big, sweeping camera shot of a dystopian city, It's the slow trickling in of the world you've created, rather than a massive wall of explanation that exhausts the audience before the story even begins.

And when the story slowly trickles in like that, with each little bit of information you're getting, it hints at a very big world and it really draws people in.

Now look, are there audience members out there that want the whole story given to them on a silver platter? Yes. Are there people who like the theatrical release of Blade Runner because they like the narration because the movie tells them exactly where they're going. Yes. Are there even more of these people than you, or, I think also, yes, but this is audio drama and that's not your audience.

Your audience wants a challenge.

They want a mystery. They want something that they can figure out for themselves. And every time you tell your audience something plainly with narration, you are taking that opportunity away from them. Take the time to live in the world you created, and they'll want to live in it too, and they'll maybe even want to stay.

I think people worry when they're writing a story, that they're not going to be understood, and that's a very natural feeling. So the inclination is to do a lot, really make sure you're being clear. But I think you need to have more faith in your audience.

They'll always surprise you. There's this magical moment that happens when an audience truly grips the story when they reach a level of understanding that maybe you didn't think possible.

When they do get there, it's not going to be because you led them there with your hyper-specific narration. It'll be because they chose to follow you into your story as you explore it.

And when that moment of understanding happens, that's when you'll finally be showing them something instead of telling them.

Transcript:

In the Paris Review right now, there's an interview with Elliot Weinberger. Elliot Weinberger is an essayist. Uh, he is kind of the master of the impersonal essay, so his essays throughout the years have never been in the first person. They've never featured himself. His essays are, they kind of read like extended encyclopedia entries, but then also he would do things like read a 500 page book about the Naked Mole rat and then write a two and a half page essay called The Naked Molerat.

When asked about this, he would say that, you know, according to the common logic, the only thing he should be writing about is, uh, a bunch of cabbage farmers in Eastern Europe and Russia, because that's his background. And he had this quote in this essay that, uh, I thought was interesting and it made me think of actually something else entirely, but here it is:

He said, "I do find it dreary, that these essayists end up writing about themselves so much. Even if they're taking documentary information, they add a lot of personal response to it, which seems to be what the new quote lyric essay is. I have no interest in first person investigation. Personally, I've never found myself to be an interesting person."

That made me think of a period of my life when I was going to New York a lot. I was a playwright living in Oregon, But I was going to New York a lot.

I was spending a lot of time there, and I was spending a lot of time with, you know, New York writers. It's really easy to develop a bit of an inferiority complex in that environment, not just because some of them were much more accomplished than myself, but also because they were all interesting people.

They all had very interesting stories. They all had stories of, you know, being a photojournalist in Vietnam, things like that.

Stories of growing up dead broke, stories of being unhoused for a while. And in that environment, you start to think, well, what is so interesting about me? How do I have the right to be here amongst all these other people, all these other people who have these very interesting stories? Because my story, at least from my perspective, is really not all that interesting.

And that brings up the idea: Do you need to be an interesting person to write something interesting.

Fran Liebowitz, speaking of New York writers, would say there are no prodigies in writing because you have to have lived the life. You have to have a life that you can write about in order to write well.

But does it all need to be personal narrative? Can you have a mundane life or an uninteresting backstory and still write well? Well, certainly not every person with an interesting life story as a good writer or even a writer at all, but there is a certain amount of pressure to have an engaging life story.

In 2005, Oprah picked a book. For her legendary book club called A Million Little Pieces. It was a harrowing memoir of addiction and recovery. That was later found out to be largely made up. The author James Fray was then dragged back on Oprah and was forced to confess his sins. The book in the eyes of Some was now invalid because it wasn't true.

He said the story was real so that it would be more popular. Readers striving for that sort of authenticity probably comes from living in some sort of age of the inauthentic. Everything is digital. Everything is mass produced and comes from China. So people search for real things, but it does send me down a rabbit hole.

You liked the story when you thought it was real. Now that it's not real, you don't like it, even though the story stays the same. That's a whole other post. But to get back to my original point...

We're currently in a very memoir centric era. Not just because memoir is more popular than it's ever been, but because of social media and the internet.

Every day we are awash with stories and fragments of stories from people that are allegedly true. People are broadcasting their personal narrative more than in any time in history, and there sits boring you. Your childhood was okay.

Your job is okay. You weren't a child soldier. You didn't have to survive in the woods for two weeks alone when you were 11. What right do you have to write?

In 1817, John Keats wrote to his brothers about a production of Shakespeare He had just seen. And in that letter he created a term, a term that still survives to this day called negative capability. The idea that in the writing, you negate yourself, you dissolve yourself.

he found Shakespeare to be very good at that. When you look at the length and breadth of Shakespeare's work, I know I at least have a hard time discerning what his actual point of view is. So on one end you have the lived experience gang, and on the other end you have the romantics, like Keats and the big mystery that is Shakespeare. You are either telling your very personal, very real story, or you are engaging in the story, in the writing, as a way of doing the opposite.

Not the reaffirming of the self, but an attempt to dissolve the self, to erase yourself in the face of the story you're creating in an almost Buddhist way. So you have these two sides, but in the end it's a false choice and every writer, I think, falls somewhere between the two extremes.

It does seem these days that the favor falls pretty heavily on the memoir side of things.

But maybe you want to tell a story, but you see yourself as boring. You see storytellers as interesting people with interesting stories, and you don't find yourself all that interesting.

Telling a story doesn't have to be personal narrative. You don't have to always write what you know. Writing doesn't have to be about the consecration of the self. It can also be about a journey out of it. It can be an exercise in empathy and a, for lack of a better word, joining of a collective unconscious.

It could be a journey outside of yourself rather than within.

I know we read all these stories about writers and we see them as having these interesting lives, and they always look so well-dressed and disheveled and poetic in and of themselves. They seem very interesting and you seem well, a bit drab sometimes.

But in the end, you don't have to be that person. And in the end, how much of that is us as a society placing interestingness upon these people whose work we love? You don't have to be interesting to write. You just have to be interested.

Transcript:

These Things We Create are Living Things

So I am recording this on the day of the release of the first episode of Season Five of Midnight Burger.

It's always an interesting day. It's a day full of a lot of questions. I'm wondering how it's going to be received? I'm wondering how it's going to be interpreted. You'd think I would be used to it by now, but it's always fresh because I don't know that anyone ever has a concrete expectation as to how the season's going to start or what it's going to look like.

So you never really know how people are going to react. I mean, you do and you don't.

If you ever have the pleasure of making something that people really like, you'll find that a lot of them come to depend on it for this, that, and the other thing, and that can put a certain amount of pressure on you because you need to stay true to what the story is, but at the same time, you don't want people to feel abandoned somehow, like you've left them behind. I do get emails sometimes from people flat out begging me to go back to what we were doing in season one.

When you really think about it, those complaints are, in my opinion, more about the fact that people are upset that things change at all—not just your show, but everything. I do get emails.

And even though you can put thoughts like that in a certain perspective, and you can say, "Well, it's this or it's that, or it's the other thing," or "There's nothing you can do about it," you still do. You know, you still don't want to abandon people.

The thing about that is when it comes right down to it, you're not all that in control, or at least you're not as in control as you think you are. Or at least for me, that's how it is.

Arseny Tarkovsky was a Russian poet and the father, incidentally, of Andrei Tarkovsky, the legendary filmmaker. One time he wrote, "I would readily pay my life for a safe place with constant warmth, were it not that life's flying needle leads me on through the world like a thread."

You feel like you're being absconded with a bit sometimes. If you tell a story over a long enough period of time, like I've been doing, well, it starts to be its own thing. It starts to take on a life of its own. It starts to have wants and needs like a person outside of yourself, and the longer you work on it, the more independent of you it becomes, and you go from being the creator of this thing to the person who is almost acting like the translator or caretaker of this thing.

This thing is going its own way and you're just there to make sure nothing bad happens.

And while that seems like a strange way to regard something that you create, because it certainly doesn't happen without you there, I really haven't found any other way of thinking about it. These things we create, in a sense, are living things and they move past you.

Which helps when people are begging and pleading with you to do something else with it, because you're not in charge, as it turns out. Maybe you were at the beginning, but now you're following the natural progression of something. It would be like yelling at a river, telling it to turn.

So that pressure that you feel—that you want people to receive it well—can be relieved somewhat by the fact that now, in your apartment somewhere, is this thing that's alive and it's actually not up to you what it does.

And I know I'm supposed to be like an artist and be all masterful and like "this is my grand design" and everything like that. And it is, but it's also—it's about the way that you think about it. It's about the way you think about these things. And this is how I've come to think about this big, long, expansive story that I've been telling. It's its own thing now. And you can see that happen in stories that take place over a long period of time.

You can see there's a point where the creator of this thing tries to reel it back in to the thing that they've created. This is a weird thing to bring up, but there was this moment where I was watching this conversation online and someone was talking about how the characters of Bert and Ernie made them feel more comfortable coming out as a gay man because they were watching this gay couple coexist on Sesame Street.

And Frank Oz, the literal creator of Bert and Ernie, logs on, and he says, "Bert and Ernie aren't gay, because I created them and I decided that they weren't." But it's kind of not up to Frank anymore because he put it out there and it became its own thing, and for him to try and reel it back into his creation—it just doesn't work anymore.

You've got to go where the thing wants to go. These things we create are living things.

It's so weird to talk like this because this is not the type of person that I am. I'm a very—you know, I've never used a smudge stick. Okay? I've never read my horoscope.

But with these things, these things that I make, there is a certain amount of spiritual—I don't know—mumbo jumbo that I kind of embrace because I've never found another way of thinking about it. So on these days when the new thing is being rolled out, there is a certain amount of calm that comes from the fact that I'm not in charge anymore.

These things we create are living things, and you've gone from the thing that created it to really just the thing that feeds it.

And though you may want it to go this way or that way, or the other way, in the end, you're not in charge. Not anymore.

Transcript:

Okay, so this next bit is a little, uh, you know, podcaster inside baseball. So bear with me about a year ago, I guess because we had been doing this for so long, we suddenly became people that others would ask advice of. And, um, that was weird because we have no idea what to say, but a lot of the questions asked are about.

Promotion, right? How do you promote your show? How do you make your show popular? What do you do? Do you do Instagram ads? Stuff like that.

and I never have anything useful to say to this question because there is nothing to say,

Eric Newsom, who's a podcast producer of some repute, uh, loves to tell the story about how a show that he was producing got a full page spread in the New York Times, and it did not move the needle for his show at all.

Ronald Young Jr. Made a show called Weight for It a couple years ago, and it was a critical darling and it won a ton of awards. And then a year later I heard him on a podcasting round table talking about how he still struggles to get people to listen to the show. And he has not made any money from the show.

And the biggest bump in downloads he got was actually from being a guest on normal gossip.

and then just recently author Amy McNee in her newsletter starts talking about how she. Was thrilled because she got word that she was gonna be a guest on. Jay Shetty's podcast. Jay Shetty, one of the biggest podcasts in the world. She was very excited, really excited to talk about her book,

and then when she checked her book sales a couple of days later, she was. Shocked to find that nothing happened. She just talked to millions of people about her book and nothing happened.

I.

And in the newsletter, she goes off on this for a while. She talks about how you know artists are taught to chase external validation. Taught to chase big breaks, but these are flashy opportunities and they rarely translate to anything tangible.

So we're sitting here constantly outsourcing our power and we're kind of being sleeping. Beauty, you know, we're encasing ourselves in glass, trying to look as pretty as possible, and hoping that Prince Charming will come along and wake us up.

I am wondering if the days of the big break are behind us. I mean, certainly there are big hits out there from time to time, but I don't know if there's any way to turn that into some sort of math problem, right? Like you do this plus this and it equals big break.

It seems pretty random, like winning the lottery.

We seem to have this inclination to think of everything as if it were the internet. And what I mean by the internet is, uh, going viral and tons of likes and trending and all that stuff,

but the truth of it is some things just don't operate like the internet. Some things are slow.

When you think about all of the things that went viral, they're gone in 10 minutes. You don't even think about them anymore. I, but there are other things out there

that have a long trailing history.

And even though we regard the internet as this place where things happen instantaneously and are gone instantaneously, there are people and organizations out there who have this long history on the internet.

the internet. Writ large isn't this world of the instantaneous. It's an entire ecosystem, and in any ecosystem, you have things that are short-lived and long-lived. There are things on the internet that are like the GAD fly. They have one day in the sun and then they die.

And I think the frustration of a lot of people may come from the fact that they want to be that instantaneous, instantly popular thing, and it's just not a sustainable way to live.

It's not a sustainable way to exist as someone trying to make things. IThe internet is blindingly fast, but creating a reliable entity there goes very slowly and steadily. Like a tree in a forest, it requires a trillion swirling bacteria, all of them with the lifespan of a few seconds. And beneath that, the mysterious network of Mycelia. You are a creature of this forest of the internet, but you are the slow and methodical timekeeper.

You are not the paramecium. You are not the gadfly, you're the oak. Slow to grow, but once grown a giant.

There's so much out there that tries to seduce us into doing something instantaneously, but in the end, what we've always come back to is just patience and time.

And you know what? That sucks. I really hate that. It would be great if it was instantaneous, if it, it would be great if there was some sort of short path, but I haven't found it. And it certainly sounds like no one else has found it either. So it's all the long road. There's so many people out there who are just in audition mode.

They're creating things on the internet in an effort to get the attention of something or someone bigger than them.

And if that's your chosen path to success, then go for it. I celebrate you. I guess my thing is. When you're making something just to try and get the attention of someone else when your several episode audio fiction is just an audition for a TV studio. I can smell it in the work. It doesn't seem like something you're enjoying.

It seems like a means to an end and that's, it's never fun to listen or watch a means to an end. It is that feeling you get when you're at a party and you're talking to someone and the person you're talking to would much rather be talking to someone else in the end. Unfortunately, it's patience and time.

I don't you hate that?

Transcript:

So I'm at the, uh, beginning of season five right now of Midnight Burger. Uh, for those of you who don't know, I don't write everything first. And then we do the show. I get about an episode and a half to two episodes ahead of the show, and I keep writing and we start producing right about then. So we're kind of at the beginning of things right now and, uh, right now.

I'm having this feeling where I'm at the beginning of the season and I'm looking at the end of the season and it's just such a distant mark. You know, like looking at the Empire State Building from Queens, and it could be a little daunting sometimes. Like there's so much, so much writing to do between where I am now and where we'll be then, and it's just.

It's a lot to take in sometimes and it's a lot to take on sometimes.

There's this short story called The Man Who Planted Trees. It's by Jean Gno. It was written in, um, uh, the 1950s and it was turned into an animated short in the eighties and it won the Academy Award. And it's a story of this. Hiker who is hiking through the, uh, sort of foothills of the Alps. And he finds himself in a really desolate valley.

And there's only one man who lives there. And he starts to get to know this man, this man's a shepherd. And he asks the man why he's living there. And the man says that he wants to transform the valley into a beautiful place. And he says, but you're one guy. And he says, I know every day.

The man takes his sheep out to graze, and at the bottom of his shepherd staff, he has an iron spike and he drives the iron spike into the ground and he reaches into his pocket. He takes an acorn and he puts the acorn in the hole. And he does that several times a day, every day when he takes his sheep out.

And so the man, the hiker who encounters this man, he says, oh, okay. Well I, good luck. I guess the hiker goes off to fight in World War I and gets pretty screwed up as many people did by World War I. And he returns to the valley and he sees that. Over the years, there are now saplings growing things are actually happening, and the man who plants the acorns, he has stopped taking care of sheep because the sheep are eating the saplings.

And now he is a beekeeper. And so the man heals, uh, of his. Of his war wounds there in this uh, valley that's starting to grow. And then he returns again several years later to see that the landscape has been transformed and about 10,000 people live there, and there's a river there now, and it looks completely different from the place that he encountered when he was hiking all those years ago.

And all of this was achieved by a guy leaving his home every day and just. Doing a very simple thing, not taking on a gigantic task, but just doing a simple thing. He takes a few acorns, he makes holes in the ground, and he plants the acorns, and he does that over and over again.

So when I have this feeling, I like to think about this guy. I like to think about this, you know, fictional French man who just. Focused on the things he was doing that day. He didn't think about growing this lush valley. He thought about planting a few acorns today.

That really helps me get through times like this because I shouldn't be thinking about that far off goal. What I should be thinking about is what is it today? Because kind of like the man who returns to the valley and finds that it's lush. I sit here and I look back and there are now literally thousands of pages of dialogue that I've written and.

If I had sat down to write episode one and thought to myself, I have thousands of pages to write, I would've found that just too much. I would've found that a pretty crushing burden. So instead it's just every day a pocket full of acorns, a few holes in the ground every single day, and then one day you look back and there's the valley.

Transcript

So the other day in his newsletter, Adam Mastoianni kind of went off and he wrote 28 slightly rude notes on writing. So it's this list of things and there's one that really cracked me up and I wanted to talk about it. So he said The internet is full of smart people writing beautiful prose about how bad everything is, how it all sucks, how it's embarrassing to like anything, how anything that appears good is in fact secretly bad.

I find this confusing and tragic, like watching Olympic high jumpers catapult themselves into a pit of tarantulas, which is funny because he's a pretty cynical guy himself, you know? So to hear him say like, it's such a shame, he's basically saying, what a shame I exist. You know it, and it's a funny quote, but also it just, it brings to mind something that I think about sometimes about this.

Intense pressure that one might feel to make things in their story go poorly for people. Because if it's, if things go poorly, then that's real and that's honest and that's true. And for anything to go well is of course false

and pandering and delusional. Right

now, there's some celebration of things that end happily, you know, when you have a happy ending to your story or when th happy things happen in your story. But somehow those all always get categorized as a beach read or a nice escape or a safe place. And I am just wondering why is this, why do we have this disdain or this compartmentalization of stories that contain joy?

Why is that the case? I don't know. There's this other, okay, so I think it was Friedrich Mont. Who said this, I might be wrong. He said that the artist portrays the world as either the chicken or the egg. So the chicken, the world as it has become, or the egg the world in its potential.

And there does seem to be this pervasive feeling that the chicken stories, the world as it has become are valid, and the egg stories, the potential of the world are not favorable, right? You are not actually an artist. If you are making the egg stories, the world in its potential stories, right? You're not an art, you're, you'll probably be real rich, but you're not an artist, right?

You can't be taken seriously 'cause you're not being honest with your audience, right? Because honesty, of course, is death and grief and sorrow and murder and dishonesty is. Something working out, something being happy, a good thing happening, a celebration, right? How dare you? How dare you tell that story.

Get out of here. We're all hanging out at the cafe. We're dark artists. How dare you? How dare you brighten our day.

I've certainly felt this in the past. You know, I've, I've felt this pressure to be real and have hard choices in the story. And, you know, if you have a commitment, if you have a true commitment to your story, you will not hesitate to just off everybody in your story instantly. George, our, our Martin style.

So we assume that happiness and joy in a story that we're telling is dishonest or not real.

But I don't think all the writers out there who are writing stories that contain joy and that have happiness, are somehow unaware of the world that's around them. I think Nora Ephron read the paper just like everybody else did. The thing about happiness and joy and happy endings is that they're not a denial of reality.

In my humble opinion, they're like a prayer. A prayer for a better world. Seeing the world in its potential, because the world as dark as it may seem, is always brimming with potential.

I do look around and I see the problems of the world. But I do believe that there is a solution for every single one of these problems.

Potential is ever present. The potential for joy is always there, so why can't we write about that potential? Or at least, why can't we write about that potential and be considered serious artists? I'm not sure.

Maybe because it's so hard to tell stories of death and grief and sorrow and murder, that the only thing you can really clinging to is the fact that you're being honest and that you're being true and you are. The problem is, so is everybody else. But they're being true to the potential and others are being true to the world.

They see in front of them. It's just two commitments to two different things. One to the chicken, one to the egg.

 But really these days, what's the bold choice? If you reside in a world that's full of darkness.

It's very difficult to look and see what could be, and it's very difficult to write about that

because you're afraid to have that hope. You are afraid to believe in a better world.

Unfortunately, the only way that better world comes to be is by seeing it, by envisioning it. If we don't take the time and make the choice to envision a better world, Well then all we're left with is the chicken. 

This Plus This

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Transcript...

So I was talking to someone the other day about the fear of being compared to other artists, how they're scared to start on a project because they're afraid that it's too similar to this other thing that's out there. This is a real fear,

mainly because. The worst thing that you could possibly hear when you're talking to someone about what you're making is to hear them say, oh, so it's just like this. Nothing will turn a pacifist to murder faster than hearing somebody say that. It's really maddening. 'cause you work very hard on this thing and someone comes along and just says, oh, you just did what this other person did.

And they don't mean it in a malicious way. I mean, sometimes they do. But generally speaking, they're just talking to you about what you made and there's no malice intended really. usually, when I've heard that throughout my life, the response from other creators who are sort of commiserating with me is that comparison is suffering.

Don't compare yourself to other people because it's suffering. And I thought that was a Buddhist thing, but it's not exactly a Buddhist thing, right? So the Buddhist thing is attachments are suffering. and I really didn't understand how that's related to comparison necessarily.

but it wasn't just the Buddhists who talked about it, it was also the, uh, stoics, right? It was Marcus Aurelius and that whole gang. And they talked about how comparison involves judging your situation against others and it leads to unnecessary distress.

Uh, and then you had, um, Leon Festinger. Who created the

social comparison theory,

and then apparently Teddy Roosevelt said, comparison is the thief of joy. But honestly, there are so many quotes attributed to Teddy Roosevelt that he can't have said all of those things. Right. But it's still, the connection wasn't there for me. Like, how do I rebuff these people who are comparing my stuff to other people's stuff by saying that comparison is suffering.

You know, I'm not comparing it. They are. So why is it my suffering? Well, it's not my suffering, I don't think. I think that's the thing. 

When someone is comparing your stuff to other people, they have this attachment to something that they know and they're clinging to this thing that they know.

 so that they can further navigate the world that they live in. Because for something to be new that would be scary maybe. Or maybe you just don't know how to regard it, so it's better of course, if you just say, oh, it's just one of these things. Which I guess is Freud, right.

To name it is to claim it is to take away its power. 

and Hollywood doesn't help with this, right? Because in Hollywood it's always, you know, you're trying to pitch someone as quickly as possible. And so you always say it's this plus this. And they go, oh, this plus this. That's exciting, right? The most legendary one was probably Michael Mann in the eighties who walked into a TV studio and pitched Miami Vice by saying two things.

He just said, MTV, cops. And everyone said, oh, well, well, two things that are popular. We love it.

 so for me saying comparison to suffering never really worked because it's like I'm, I'm not comparing it's someone else's. Why do I have to be saddled with the suffering part? And that's because the suffering isn't yours.

It's theirs. The suffering or the attachment, as the Buddhists say, is theirs. They are trying to attach what you're doing to something that already exists. They're trying to attach what you're doing to something that they can recognize and something that they feel comfortable with. And the Buddhist would say, and in doing so, are stressing the identity, right, stressing the self.

This self, which is to the Buddhist, an illusion and does not exist. So through comparison, they clinging to an illusion.

It still sucks to hear though.

The whole thing brings up this dichotomy of like making something, because you want to make something that

people are affected by that is meaningful to people. And so you do, even though you shouldn't think about the reaction of the audience, but in the end you're thinking about this thing. That you can't control at all. You will never be able to control an audience's reaction to something that you make. so the power move is to be one of those artists who truly does not care, right?

You don't care at all about the audience's reaction. You're gonna make your thing, you're gonna put it out there. They can do with it what they will.

But I think there are very few people out there who

would feel comfortable just making something and showing it to no one. You wanna put it on display. You wanna show the world what you've made, which means you also have to think about what their reaction is going to be.

So there's this weird cognitive dissonance. It's like, I want you guys to like it. I want to show it to you also. I don't give a shit what you feel, and it's hard to balance those things, I'm sure the Buddhist would be great at it, right? Because apparently they're great at everything.

But until then, I guess I'll just try and not think about it and try and keep making things.

HopeVisionRepeat

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So, because my creative life has become my entire life and because this creative life doesn't involve some other sort of organization, it's all just me and business Goose media. My life now consists completely of my house, and considering the fact that I work nose to tail at home and the fact that. I can get anything delivered to my doorstep very quickly. In a kind of shocking way means that leaving the house becomes a conscious thing.

I have to like make the choice to do that and everyone should make the choice to do that. It's hard for me to do. I'm kind of a homebody. I like being at home. I like looking out the window. I like working while I'm looking out the window, so I had to, you know, make this conscious choice to get out of the house, go for a walk through the neighborhood, stuff like that.

And I found that I was much more prone to leave the house if I had a camera with me, a camera that was not the camera in my phone. And so I have a, a nice camera and then I got another nice camera. And, uh, I like photography and I like taking pictures. So it was nice. I walk around, take pictures of, you know, birds, the sky.

Strange things I see on the street, stuff like that. There's no reason for it really. It's just an activity that gets me outta the house, right?

So as I enjoyed this more and more, the other morning there I was in the most dangerous place on the internet when you have time and money, and that is eBay. And I bought for the first time since I guess I was a kid, a film camera, and not just a film camera, I mean a film, capital F camera. This is a Ralieicord five.

Medium format. You open the door at the top and look down into it camera, and I ordered this not having any idea how it worked. Just kind of rolling the dice. The camera arrives. I order some film. This is all of course delivered to me right at my door. And uh, I went out the other day and I took a few pictures with it, and it turns out the camera works.

And it turns out the pictures I took looked fine. Now, as it turns out, the camera is not 100% functional. There's a few things that need to be fixed, and now it's sitting in the hands of some, you know, camera repair person, probably out in the Inland Empire somewhere.

But I have to say I really enjoyed shooting with the film camera. As opposed to my digital cameras that I have. I mean, I like shooting with my digital cameras, but there was definitely a different feeling to it and I'm not really sure what it was, and I've been trying to put my finger on it.

I think what it was is the fact that it's all hope. It's hope and vision. Shooting with film. Because you can't look at it and you don't know if you did the right thing until you get the photographs back a couple of weeks from when you shot them, and, and there was something kind of familiar about that for me, and I guess.

Because it reminds me of what it's like to write something. You know, you have a vision and you have hope that it's going to work out, and you just kind of go for it, and you're not gonna know if it worked out for a long time. So it's almost like shooting on film is this expression of the writer's life.

I can't think of anyone who's ever sat down in front of their, you know, Underwood typewriter or whatever, and it's just like, this is gonna rule. This is gonna be so good. Holy shit. Look out. I'm feeling it as I'm typing it. Oh, it's gonna be amazing. It's all just complete guesswork. Flying blind. You have no idea.

But you have hope and you have vision, and then it all comes back to you and you see, you know, what your hope and vision has has brought you. And the more you do that, the same thing with shooting with a camera, with a film camera. The more you do that, the sharper it becomes, the better you become at it, the sharper your vision gets when you're out there shooting.

I've been in the middle of putting together these classes for our Patreon, these sort of like how to write, how to be creative, how to do audio drama, stuff like that.

And it's surprising when you realize how much of the writer's life is just doing it over and over again. Over and over and over again. And that's really the only thing to do. There's no, you know, magic potion, there's no shortcuts. Good writing comes from writing and writing and writing if it's gonna come at all.

' Cause you can keep writing and it can still be bad and you hope that it's not. But you wouldn't stick with it if you didn't have that vision and that hope. The same vision and hope that I walk out onto the street with when I have this film camera. So now I instantly want to go out down the street again and shoot some more pictures.

But of course the camera's in the shop, so of course I bought another one. It's gonna be delivered to me tomorrow probably. Anyway. Hope, vision over and over and over again, and that's all you have.