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Podcast Notes: Win-Win with Liv Boeree - Episode #7: Joseph Gordon-Levitt: AI and The Film Industry
Episode Overview In this episode of the Win-Win Podcast, host Liv Boeree interviews actor, writer, director, and producer Joseph Gordon-Levitt. They discuss the current state of Hollywood amidst the ongoing writers' and actors' strike, focusing particularly on the implications of generative AI on the film industry and broader creative sectors.
Key Topics Discussed
- Current Hollywood Strike
- Background: The strike involves SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) and the Writers Guild of America (WGA), marking the first joint strike since 1960.
- Reasons for Strike:
- Concerns surrounding residuals in the streaming era.
- The threat of emerging technologies, particularly AI.
- Residuals Explained
- Definition: Payments actors, writers, and directors receive for their work when it continues to generate revenue.
- Current Issues: Existing contracts do not appropriately cover new distribution methods (like streaming), leading to insufficient compensation for creatives.
- Impact of AI on the Industry
- Generative AI in Hollywood: The growing concern that AI could replace human jobs and diminish the quality of creative output.
- Training Data: Many generative AI tools are trained on existing creative works, leading to potential exploitation without compensation for the original creators.
- Proposed Solutions: Gordon-Levitt argues that AI should compensate creators whose work is used in training data.
- Philosophical Questions
- Human versus AI Creativity: The discussion raises questions about the nature of creativity and the differences between human-generated and AI-generated content.
- Interpretability Problem: Current AI models (e.g., large language models) operate as "black boxes," complicating the ability to trace back how outputs are generated.
- Societal Implications
- Job Displacement: The potential for AI to drive human creators out of work, leading to a decline in new creative content generation.
- The Future of Creativity: Importance of fostering a system that incentivizes human creativity alongside the use of AI technologies.
- Addictive Technologies
- Effects on Human Connection: Exploration of how AI and technology are reshaping human relationships, including discussions around AI companions and their potential addictive nature.
- Educational Focus: Emphasis on teaching future generations how to combat addiction to technology.
- Competition vs. Collaboration
- Personal Experiences: Gordon-Levitt shares insights from his background in acting and directing, emphasizing the balance between competition and collaboration in the creative process.
- HitRecord: The platform's philosophy promotes collaboration over competition, allowing creators to build on each other's work.
- Cultural Reflections
- Storytelling and Content Quality: Concerns regarding the prevalence of low-quality "junk food" content and the impact of profit-driven storytelling on the creative landscape.
- The Role of Optimism: Gordon-Levitt expresses the need for balanced narratives that include both positive and negative visions of the future.
Key Takeaways
- Hollywood is in a pivotal moment, grappling with the implications of AI and the relevance of traditional compensation models in a digital landscape.
- The challenge is to find a balance between leveraging AI for creativity while ensuring that human creators are compensated fairly.
- Promoting collaboration over competition can lead to more innovative and inclusive creative processes.
- Addressing the addictive nature of AI-driven technologies should be a priority in education and development for future generations.
Conclusion The episode highlights the importance of rethinking how the film industry and other creative sectors integrate emerging technologies like AI, emphasizing the need for a supportive ecosystem that values human creativity and connection. Gordon-Levitt's insights underscore the potential for a more compassionate and collaborative future in the arts.
Additional Resources
- [HitRecord](https://hitrecord.org/)
- Joseph Gordon-Levitt's works and articles linked in the show notes.
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Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Win-win podcast. Today, I am speaking to Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Now, Joe, well, he doesn't need much of an introduction, really. He's an incredibly successful Hollywood actor. Here's just a few of the things he has been in. But aside of acting, he's also an incredibly successful writer, director, and producer, including founding the Emmy Award-winning production company HitRecord. And one of the reasons I wanted to speak to him today is he is someone who truly understands the tension between competition and collaboration, especially within the creative process.
0:38Plus, of course, he's someone who has very real first-hand experience of how competition plays out in the cutthroat world of Hollywood. We also go into the big strike that's currently going on between writers and actors and the studios, in part around the potential disruption that is likely to come from generative AI. And on that topic, we also dig into things like digital actors, AI girlfriends, even AI-generated porn. So a bunch of topics you may never have heard him speak about before. Super fascinating to hear his insights. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Let's dig in.
1:26So, Joe, there's this huge strike going on. SAG-AFRA, but also the Writers Guild of America. Yes. are striking against the, and I can never say it, the AMPTP. Yeah. Who is sort of the... The studios. The studios. The brief way to say it. The studios. And it's the first time they've striked together since 1960. Right. And from what I can tell, it's a combination of concerns about these things called residuals and also concerns about emerging technologies, such as AI. And you actually just wrote an op-ed, really good one, in Washington Post. Thank you. Discussing this concept of residuals and how stream, like basically they need to be updated now that we're in the era of streaming and possibly AI as well.
2:16Can you explain a bit sort of what these residuals are and why they're no longer working? Sure. Well, I'll start with just an annoying disclaimer, which is I'm not fully educated on all the deal points being negotiated in between SAG-AFTRA, WGA and AMPTP. There are other experts you could talk to that know a lot more about the strike. Like the piece I wrote about was sort of taking one aspect of what some of the unions are concerned about, which is AI, and broadening that out to say like this is mattering in Hollywood, but Hollywood might be a bit of a canary in the coal mine. And in fact, this might matter to so many industries.
2:53But we can get to that in a second perhaps just to answer your question as directly as I can. What are residuals? Residuals are what you call it in show business when you keep getting paid basically. Um, if I make a movie, I get paid to shoot that movie. But then if that movie is still making money X years later, I am entitled to some piece of that. And I get residual checks. Actors get them. Writers get them. Directors get them. Musicians get them. That's pretty much it. Most of the other myriad people who are involved in making a movie or show don't get residuals. Arguably they should. and as you said the residuals are kind of insufficient when it comes to stuff playing on the streaming services the netflix the disney plus etc because they're new and the stream the residual contracts were negotiated a long time ago so a big part of what people are striking for now is residuals on these streamers what i was writing in my piece has less to do with the streamers or kind of show business as it currently exists and more thinking about how show business might change in light of the rise of artificial intelligence.
4:06You talked about this issue of like training data because so many of these generative AI tools, they're trained off just millions or billions of images or footage or whatever pieces of writing that just currently exist on the internet. and people's hard work is being used to create these tools, which then they cannot monetize. And not only can they not monetize it, but it's likely to also then put a percentage of them and a growing percentage of them out of a job. So what kind of structure could be implemented to mitigate that effect? So the basic principle that I advocated in my piece is that if an AI uses your work, it should pay you.
4:49And so if someone's work is included in that training data that trains an AI model, then that person deserves some kind of compensation whenever that AI generates revenue. Now, that's a tall order that raises all sorts of very complicated question, who gets how much, et cetera. And it's also a tall order just technologically in that as far as I understand the technology, it's actually impossible right now to even track that. They don't even know what training data influences any output that the large language model or any of these AI models make. Because they're like kind of inscrutable black boxes.
5:29That's part of the problem. That's my understanding. Yeah, there's this whole problem called the interpretability problem. Which is crazy. Which is just so crazy that there's a new technology that's extremely powerful and going to change the whole world. If you ask the people who built it, how does it work? They're like, we don't know. It just works. we put an input we get an output we kind of trained it through a trial and error thing we told it when we liked what it did we told it when it we didn't like what it did and uh we don't know what it's going to do but uh it's pretty good look at this pretty picture isn't it nice oh you want a funny poem about yourself in the style of shakespeare here you go you know and then we're just like well this is so fun so yeah it's it's almost like you know when it comes to art you're like you're you're taking a vibe right it's it's ingesting a vibe that someone has created and And it's outputting a slightly different vibe in a more efficient way.
6:19Yeah. Well, the temptation, I think, and a lot of the responses that I've gotten to the piece, one of the, I think, most, one of the responses that's worth the most consideration that I think is the most interesting sort of rebuttal to my position is, hey, don't humans do the same thing? Don't humans ingest lots of influences and mash it all up in their heads and then they spit out something new? Isn't that what humans do? Why should a human be able to do that? It's not like a human writer needs to pay every author that they've ever read. So why should a computer have to do that? And I think that's a really interesting rebuttal.
7:02it gets to me right to the crux of a very basic philosophical question, which is, well, are these systems the same as humans? I would point to some important differences. You know, a human, if we use the example of the human writer who's read lots of books, why doesn't that human writer need to pay the authors of all the books that they've read? well the human writer is combining those books that they've read with a lifetime of unique human experience and a large language model is not now a response to that forgive me if i'm monologuing but this is something i enjoy thinking about a response to that could be well eventually ais will have their own lifetime of experience and you know they'll they'll be who knows what they'll have but you could fix a particular camera feed and a particular audio feed and particular whatever other sensors or inputs you want to, you know, assign to a particular AI large language model and turn it on for 10 years or whatever and say, now that thing has 10 years of experience.
8:08And it's processing all of that video and audio and other sensor data in addition to all of this, you know, the training data that's currently used with normal large language models. And then would that be the same as a human? It's a good question. I mean, I don't think you can even use like time in the same way. Because these things are operating at a different speed internally. Like their clock speed is like legitimately different to a human brain. Yes, that's true too. So 10 years in human time is not the same as 10 years in machine time. Very true. It could be getting 10 years of experience in 30 seconds.
8:42Like honestly. I think that's right. That time is just not a one-to-one thing. But I think there's actually 100 different factors like that. Where it's not a one-to-one thing. And so for me, the comparisons feel like projection. They feel not totally dissimilar to how some people personify their cars. And of course, there are important differences between a large language model and a car. But some people feel very personally and emotionally connected to their car. And they name their car and they talk to their car. And when their car is not doing well, they feel like the car is hurt. and you know they they end up having relationships well more and more we're going to start having relationships with these you know models and is the car a sentient being where do we cross over where's the where's the line where we say the car is not sentient and this large language model is I'm not claiming to have an answer to that, but I think it's sort of flip and misanthropic, in my opinion, to quickly compare the large language models and the humans and say, make the claim, the rebuttal to my assertion that a human maybe deserves residuals in a different way than a large language model does.
10:06Yeah, and the thing is we can see the real world harms that are going to emerge on humans. We're going to see people losing their jobs. And again, it's often, going back to the movie industry, it's presumably going to be the actors and the industry people who aren't the big stars. They don't necessarily have a voice, but they are actually an integral part of the ecosystem. And if more and more of them are losing their work, also it raises the other problem. If eventually enough people are going to go out of work, then there's not going to be any new training data. Yes, yeah, yeah. So now it's going to be just like this recursive training upon itself, and then we might even start to lose the soul of the human essence.
10:47I think that that is a real concern, and I would hope that if a residuals program like this, if you take it to the nth degree and you imagine the most kind of optimistic version of it, it would properly incentivize the continuation of human creativity. not in a let's look backwards and do it how we did it in the past kind of way, but let's create a well-running market dynamic for the continuation of human creativity. And as AI models are sort of harvesting the human creativity, there is proper incentive and compensation for humans to continue to be creative. Yeah, because you even actually made a really good point around even medical professionals.
11:34You said in your article, a doctor's work produces a lot of intellectual property in the form of medical records. And many doctors sign contracts allowing hospitals or whoever to take sole ownership of those medical records. If the doctors had known this intellectual property would be used as training data for an AI that would then put them out of a job forever, they too would never have signed those contracts. So like this, it seems really crucial to figure out because the movie industry is probably one of the first places where this is going to impact. It turns out that making art with AI is, I always assumed it was going to be science or something like more accounting or robotics.
12:09I always thought art would be the last untouchable thing. I used to think that too. It's funny how I was totally wrong about that. I suspect it's something to do a little bit with good art actually has sort of an error rate in it. Yes. There's this unpredictability and it's okay to have errors. And those errors are actually what create this like nuance and this uncertainty. You don't have to get it exactly right. There is no exactly right in art. That's why these LLMs are good at it. Things that they have to get exactly right reliably, they can't do yet. But I want to just emphasize the point you made.
12:40I'm not just talking about Hollywood. I don't know that I would have written that piece if it was just about Hollywood. That would be less interesting and less relevant to me. The point is, like I said, that Hollywood could be a sort of an early sign of what's to come in so many industries. The same – whether it's doctors or it's gardeners. You know, they're like – the thinker who I love most who talks about this stuff or a lot of what I'm advocating is inspired by ideas that he's put forward. His name is Jaron Lanier. And one example he often uses is gardeners. That if you imagine a future of gardeners, what's going to happen soon enough is – and I'm just kind of paraphrasing what he says here.
13:22the Google cameras will show up and observe a trillion gardeners and what they do and turn that into data and crunch the numbers and infer, therefore, how to power the robots that then do gardener work. Because it'd be way easier to just watch the human gardeners and train an AI rather than programming the gardener robots how to garden. They won't be able to do that. And so the question is, will those human gardeners continue to be compensated for having their work mimicked? And will there be even a continuing incentive, maybe, ideally, for there to be more creative gardening, for gardeners to get creative in their solutions and how they do what they do?
14:07And that would be the ideal rather than just saying like, OK, all human gardeners are now shit out of luck. Yeah. It actually sounds like this would be the path to a necessary form of UBI. Yeah, well, that's exactly it. And to parrot Jaron again, he expresses a lot of concern about UBI because historically, anytime you put all of the economic power in one kind of centralized government dole, you run into big, big problems, right? That's communism. So that's why he really emphasizes the need for a market dynamic. And it's not out of being any kind of like rabid capitalist or anything, but just out of understanding that taken to the extreme, central planning doesn't work.
14:50And so how can we have a balance where there's a strong safety net, but still a market dynamic so that there are those incentives for people to take initiative and be creative. Right, that little sprinkle of competition. Yeah. That's, you know. Right, right, right. That's your big thing. That's my thing, yeah. How do we find the right amount of, just the right amount of competition where it's not so much that efficiency always wins? Because if we're going to just let efficiency rule the roost, then the AIs are going to be more efficient than any human. And so we're just going to end up with all the power and we're essentially redundant.
15:25But if we don't have some competition and allow some degree of meritocracy and market forces, then we leave ourselves extremely vulnerable to centralized control, which is bad. Yeah, yeah. To me, it's like a question of what to do with the predators. Because if you just make it purely about, well, it's just competition, every man for himself, law of the jungle, then the predators will come and prey on those who are, you know, in more disadvantaged positions. Or who aren't willing to play that game. Yeah, right. And so do we want the predators running the world? Or shouldn't there be enough rules to be like, okay, being a total predator is not the winning strategy.
16:17And unfortunately, I feel like we're too far in that direction where predatory businesses tend to win. where if you can make your burger and fries full of sugar and other things that are addictive, even though you know that's not really good for your customers, it's not good for their health, but they spend their money and they kind of can't help it and you're preying on their weakness, but McDonald's wins. Well, is that what we want or wouldn't it be better if there were enough rules to where you can't be the winner by being the worst predator. Basically, rules that realign the incentives such that the biggest payouts go to the companies that actually do the things that are best for everybody, that actually enrich and uplift their consumers as opposed to addict them and get them hooked and like this was unhealthy.
17:13That's it. And I get how that's hard because who gets to decide what's good for people? What should they be eating? And, you know, the, I guess, libertarian argument would go, well, no people should decide that. It should just be up to the market. And even though it's not perfect, it's the best we have. And I think there's truth to that. But taken too far to the extreme, we get these bad outcomes. We have to find the balance. I'm certainly not advocating in central planning or communism, but there's got to be a middle ground where there's enough rules and regulations to temper the predators. And like you say, make sure that the people who are really doing right by their customers are winning.
17:59You mentioned this idea of junk food. It made me think, a thing that really scares me is the idea of, you know, storytelling is one of the most powerful tools we've had. Writing, human writing. You know, you touched on it before, how there may be something like intangible but extremely valuable that humans put into their storytelling. And I'm really concerned that if we sort of, A, outsource more and more to LLMs to, for example, write movie scripts or, you know, write cartoons for children. And especially if it then puts all the writers out of a job. So it's now just kind of training on its own, like, its own sources over and over again.
18:40We're going to create essentially like the junk food of content. Yeah. Of movies that like, just get all of like our dopamine switches going just the right way. Like, I don't know whether, not necessarily superhero movies, but it feels like there's a sort of genre of movies kind of doing that already a little bit, right? There's a lot of copy-pasting going on. Well, that's the thing. They very much do it already. And so there's a really, this reminds me of an interesting comparison. I'm just going to keep parroting Jaron Lanier all day long. But he makes a comparison to the way people talk about AI today to the way people talk about the invisible hand, the market, right?
19:20I guess the invisible hand is Adam Smith, right? And it's sort of a personification of market forces. And it's an inscrutably complicated kind of mathematical system that, you know, has a ton of inputs and spits out outputs of like here's what the economy should be producing, here's what the prices ought to be, et cetera. And there's some real value to the invisible hand. But what you're describing is exactly happening as a result of listening too much to the invisible hand, and it would happen even more if we listened too much to AI. In that what I mean is you're talking about storytelling and sort of outsourcing storytelling to AI.
20:01Well, we have very much outsourced storytelling to the invisible hand, meaning most of the most skilled and talented writers nowadays, if they want to make money, well, they have to write shows and movies and things that will make money. And if money is the number one priority, then that's the invisible hand, right? That's basically what the invisible hand means. and this is why we get these kids cartoons which aren't probably very good for kids and we get a lot of the movies that are the most mainstream successful movies nowadays are probably not really so great for people not all of them there are plenty of exceptions I think there are some great movies out there and there's some great kids content there's great stuff people who manage to somehow straddle both and please the invisible hand and make something great it's very hard and it's certainly the exception and much more common is stuff that really makes a lot of money.
20:59And, well, no, it's not so good for anybody, but it made a lot of money. It's the tyranny of using a single metric to find success. Yeah, so there you go. There you go. And so I feel like a lot of what could happen with us outsourcing more and more decision-making and work to AI is sort of taking what's happened with runaway capitalism and amplifying it a lot. Yeah. And it's not working now, and it's not going to work any better. That's another more near-term concern about AI. Basically, anything that is slightly misaligned for human health, the thing with AI is that, by definition, intelligence, if you can hack intelligence, it's multi-use.
21:42It's omni-use. So anything that there is an incentive to use it for, it will be used for. So that includes everything that's really good for us, but everything that's really bad for us. And if you're already in like a system which is slightly misaligned for actually what's good for human health and biosphere and everything else that we depend upon, you're just going to speed up that dial. That's right. Just speeding the whole process up. Yeah. And now is the time to be having this conversation. Yes. Yeah. And it's interesting because I'm far from an expert in existential risk or AI safety, but I'm an enthusiastic hobbyist.
22:18I have a morbid fascination with these topics. I enjoy, in some weird way, reading about them and learning about them. Also, as you know, my wife Tasha does work in that field. She's very much an expert in that whole world. So I'm exposed to these ideas a lot. And it's interesting because to me, what we just talked about of kind of taking some of the pitfalls of runaway capitalism and turning dial up like you just said, that seems like a really grave risk. And it seems like that's maybe talked about less in some of these AI safety and X-risk circles. and I know there are good reasons for that but I would love to see that also talked about more.
23:08I think Tristan Harris and Azar Askin, the Center for Humane Technology, do a good job of talking about that concern with AI. How would you like to see AI used in the creative process? That's a cool question. I would like to see it make it easier for people to express themselves. Basically in the same way that it has gotten easier and easier, and that's good. It's much easier to make a movie now than it was when I was a kid. When I was a kid, if we wanted to make a video with my friends, we had a VHS camera, and we would try to make a video, and then you couldn't really edit it. Or you could if you had two VCRs, you couldn't really put music on it.
24:02It was all very difficult. And it looked like what it looked like. Nowadays, what my kids have and their ability to make a video just on a phone is so good. It's so good. They can really make a great looking video. Their tools are better. And so I would hope that AI takes that to the nth degree to where if you have an idea, you have something you want to say that you can use AI tools to really help you say it, to really make it be exactly what you have in mind. And whether you're making a movie or a video game or whatever it is you're making, the tools can like really help you find exactly what you had in your head and bring it into the world without having to do hours and hours of learning just editing software that kind of thing yeah i mean there are there are some real like potential pitfalls there in that like i do think that there's there's collateral outcomes to for example practicing a musical instrument that's different than if you just said to an ai tool like hey play me a guitar solo or whatever or play me a drumbeat that sounds like this.
25:19Sitting there and doing it and driving it into your body, this is that thing that's like, you could call it intangible, you could call it hard to empirically describe, and for empiricists, that might mean that it's irrelevant or not admissible to an argument, but I really do think there's all kinds of things that we can't even necessarily identify or label that happen when, as an example, you spend the time to learn how to play the drums and it's in your body. Right, the somatic. New things happen. Yeah, I was reading. Basically, you store information in different parts of your body, like the knowledge, and particularly something as physical as a drum.
26:07Right, right. We now know that we have a significant number of neurons in our stomachs. It's almost like a second brain. And the more we look into it, it's like the nervous system does seem to be much more distributed than we thought. It's not so much in this like cognitive thought. There is this like somatic way of knowing, like embodied way of knowing that we might be losing. Yeah, and it comes back again to this idea of junk food, almost like instant gratification. Like when I, in some ways, like mid-journey, I love it. Like I'm bad at art, although actually I used to be good at like hand drawing, but I've never learned how to do digital art.
26:40And now I can dream up something and I have it in an instant. Right. But it feels, there's this like slight like eww feeling. I'm like, oh, I'm just getting anything I want. I have it like that. And there's, maybe there is, again, like a value or like a cost that comes with instant graphification that we don't quite know how to measure yet. Yeah. I mean, it's not that. It's fascinating because I'm sure there's ups and downs. You know, they would have said the same thing about, and I think they did say the same thing about a piano. When a piano was invented, it was like, wait a minute. You can just push these buttons and you get a perfect scale every time I had to train for years on my horn or my unruly string instrument.
27:29Oh, I see, because it's discreet. Yeah, it's discreet. You can be nobody, have practiced it, not at all, and you just go bling, and it's a perfect pitch. It makes that note every time. That's hard on more old-fashioned musical instruments. And there were, I think, I'm not a music historian, but I think there were arguments made that like, this is going to destroy musicianship. And then of course, you know, the piano gave rise to Bach and etc. And like, that happens over and over again, as technology intersects with creativity. You know, people thought that movies were going to ruin acting. And in a way, they did.
28:09But in a way, there's also a beautiful new kind of acting that didn't exist before movies, before the close-up. And so you're always kind of gaining and losing. And I'm sure that's going to happen with AI. The question is, will we be able to mitigate some of the pitfalls as we amplify the upsides? Do you think audiences would want to see a digital Joe act in a movie? I think there's going to be, first of all, fuck if I know. But I think there'll probably be some amount of the audience that cares that it was a human. And will continue to care about that. I wonder if that's going to be just a legacy thing, though, because those of us who remembered the good old days.
28:57It might have become a generational thing. If you grow up in a world where you never see actual, wait, that's taken with usual light bouncing off their face. Yeah, yeah. I don't care about that. If you've never been raised in an environment where that matters or was even in existence, you might not value it. I wonder. I do think there's going to be a component of that. It'll taper off as us oldies that grew up with that die off. but I also think there's probably something basic about it that will continue to be there even with younger people who grew up with the new technology because we're social animals and we care what other people think and we care who other people are and we want art and media or entertainment that reflects that, that lets us know that makes us feel like we're connecting to other people in some way or the technology would just be so good at fooling us that we won't know or care.
29:55That's also a possibility. I would be wary of that. I think we might disappear into a whirlpool of bliss. So speaking of that, I recently rewatched Don John. Speaking of a whirlpool of bliss.
30:16Tenuous thread. But, well, okay, going back to this concept of AI and junk food. Yeah. Arguably there's going to be no greater source of digitally induced dopamine than AI porn. 100%. So my first question is, because Don John was your first feature directorial. You directed it, you acted in it, and you wrote it. You wrote it. How on earth, first of all, do you direct a thing that you are playing? because you're also in every single scene. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do you do that? Well, that's the point of view that I'm used to. I'm used to the actor's point of view. So directing from that same point of view feels familiar and makes sense.
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31:01There's even, I think, times where as a director, I'm able to steer a scene better as an actor than I would be if I weren't in it. Because if you're a director, you have to come up and talk to the actors. about, you know, the last take and what you might want differently. And sometimes just putting those things into words can be distracting, whereas... And sort of take you out of the moment. Yeah, whereas, like, if I'm acting in a scene and I get a sense that, like, I think the scene needs to be a bit more this way, sometimes I can steer it that way just by what I'm doing in my performance. the other actors, you know, good actors will pick up on what the other's doing, and it'll happen in a more kind of subtle and less explicit way.
31:51So there are upsides. At the same time, you're totally right. It's, there's also downsides to, there's a reason why usually there's the actors on camera, and then there's a director who's not on camera. And, you know, I've done a number of things now where I'm doing both, and I do think I probably suffer the downsides. I look forward to, I want to at some point soon direct something I'm not acting in. Sounds easy. It must have been so exhausting. Yeah. In my head, you're like running back and forth between like the monitor and the thing. But I guess they can just show, you know, you've got the monitor in front of you.
32:27Yeah, there's some of that. There's some of that. It's true. So why a movie about porn addiction? Yeah. Well, it's exactly, I actually really like your segue, even though I laughed at it. And it's one of the reasons I continue to be very proud that that's my first movie. Because I do think that porn and or broadening it out, just addictive technology, addictive media technology, is one of the greatest threats to our civilization on the horizon. And depending on how you define porn, everything's fucking porn. whether it's explicit sex porn or it's news porn or it's movie porn or it's entertainment porn like TikTok just what you know something that's served up like my thing like my Instagram feed is just all these animal videos that just hijack my brain exactly I'm very entertained but I'm like entertaining myself to death yes I'm using ourselves to death you know that book no I've heard of it yeah I've not read it yet it's a great book but because that's how how would you really define porn?
33:37You could say, well, porn is if you can see the penis entering the vagina. Like, is that what we're actually defining as porn? I don't think that's the most important definition of what you'd really call pornographic media. I think to me, it's what you just said. Is it hijacking your brain? Is it, you know, there's that Daniel Kahneman book, Thinking Fast and Slow. And he talks about how there's, you could sort of simplify the brain into having these sort of two ways of thinking. And one is sort of more animalistic and one is more cerebral. And one is harder work. The cerebral, it takes, science can say it takes more calories to do the cerebral one.
34:19It's harder. It makes you tired. You don't want to do it. But you can get good at it. You can build up those muscles and it can be invigorating if you get used to it, but it's tiring. Whereas the more, what he calls system one, the more sort of animalistic, primal thinking it comes very easily it's addictive it doesn't take as much energy and you can just go and go and go and bliss out on it and so to me the question is like is a piece of media whether it's a video or it's a piece of writing or it's a video game or whatever else it is is it appealing to that Kahneman version of system one or system two is it the fast thinking the easy animalistic thinking or is it the slow cerebral thinking?
35:05I like to think of it as sort of, I mean, there's some aspects of like intuition, which I think is actually higher mind. But I think in this definition, you know, think of it as like limbic system, kind of lower, you know, more basic reptilian nature based. And then we've got our like higher mind, our prefrontal cortex, something that can actually reflect on a situation. Yeah. And I completely admit that it's a problematic distinction and there's all sorts of good that can come from your intuition. and from your basic instincts, and so it's complicated. But I think it's a distinction worth acknowledging.
35:37And if I were to try to define pornography, it would be the stuff that leans really hard into your animal brain and just doesn't really activate at all or discourages you from activating your more cerebral brain. It's kind of the thing where you lose yourself. I think that's a common thread. Yeah, well, that's the phrase in Don John. That's what the narrator says, I lose myself. Right. Yeah. And there's something beautiful about losing yourself if you talk about it in terms of like flow or meditation or art or love or whatever. So what's the difference there, actually? What's the difference between when you're in a flow state, let's say you're writing and you lose yourself writing a script.
36:15Yeah. Or you're on a Pornhub spiral. Yeah. And you lose yourself and you come up for air when you're finished. Yeah. What is the tangible difference there? Yeah, it's a really good question. So there's that book called Flow by – his name is something like – I'm going to mess it up. It's like Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi. He's like – it's a Hungarian writer, psychologist. It's a great book and it's all about sort of a scientific psychological study of what he – I think he coined the term flow. and I believe he talks about how there are versions of it you can get from addictive behavior like gambling or sex or things like that but there's different versions of that I mean like you're a very successful and very artful you know poker player that's different than you know burning out on a slot machine and obviously there's different kinds of sex there's like sex addict sex and then there's you know deep profound loving sex and so it's it's the lines blur a lot i suppose um but i don't know what's exactly the difference maybe uh like is it is it is it benefiting you are you getting to where you want to go or is it taking you somewhere where you wouldn't go if you had control yeah maybe it's again going back to alignment is it aligned with what your higher goals are.
37:37Yeah, I like that. That's great. Right? Like if you're in flow state because you're writing a script that you're just dying to write and you lose yourself in that, like you come out, the product, the end product is, you're like, wow, I have this wonderful thing that I can go on and do something with. Yeah. You lose yourself in a porn spiral or whatever it is. You actually often, you're like, oh, there's, I mean, some physical gratification or something, but you don't necessarily have anything to show for it. That's right. You might even have some fried dopamine circuits to show for it. That's right.
38:05That's right. Right. And this is what, this gets back to the who should win and what should be the incentives for companies building these technologies. Because currently they're incentivized to be more predatory. And that's why you get the TikTok and the Facebook and the Instagram, et cetera, which are optimized because they'll make the most money if they just prey on our kind of lowest selves. but couldn't you couldn't you apply similar technologies to help the customers help the users, the people to achieve the things they want to achieve I think you could but currently if you try that you'll lose your company will lose to the predators that's this Moloch concept you might not want to do the shitty thing for your customers But if you don't do it, your competitor is going to and they're going to win market share faster.
39:03So you end up, everyone ends up doing it and you end up in this like race to the bottom. That's why libertarianism is stupid. Because of that. Right. Because there needs to be an overall agreement that we don't lose ourselves to this stupid tragedy of the commons. Right. You can't, there are these aggregate incentives that no amount of higher mindedness are able to, or there's too many people in a system to all coordinate effectively. And so these crappy incentives end up winning. Yeah, I'm with you. I used to be like, I was like, no, this makes sense. Just let them, you know, the market's really smart, let it go and so on.
39:42It's like, no, it doesn't. there are certain like gravity wells or something that we sort of get sucked down into and we just can't get out because the incentives are too strong and that's that's this thing some people call it moloch some people call it you know tragedy of the commons you know there are many different names for it but it's these it's these misaligned incentives that we if you just leave fully competition to run its run its course we end up in a bad place and so that's where we need some degree of checks and balances to stop those crappy things from happening. And that's not to say you go then all the way to central planning and communism.
40:18Nope. You don't have to. But you got to find the happy balance in between. Yeah, totally. Thoughts on AI girlfriends? Yeah, I mean, Her is one of my favorite movies. Thoughts on AI girlfriends. This is what's going to happen. I mean, if you take what porn is today, that's the obvious logical next step. and it's going to be so addictive. And I really think that if there's one thing, people are asking a lot nowadays, like what is it that we need to learn? Like what should kids learn now? Now that AI is going to be able to do all the jobs, like so what do they need to learn? I would say, and I have to give credit to, this is largely Tasha's idea.
41:06If there's one thing that we should be teaching kids, It's how to fight addiction. It's how not to get addicted to stuff. Because that is where it's all headed, is just these super, super addictive experiences and technologies, whether it's an AI girlfriend or it's your AI best friend or it's your AI colleague or it's your AI, whatever. It's going to be these synthetic relationships that are way more powerful than your brain is, that are taking the patterns that it's getting from billions of other users and turning that against you to addict you. And it'll be extremely hard to break out of, probably harder than heroin or whatever else.
41:54And if we let that be what runs us, we're just going to all turn into hopeless junkies. Yeah, I mean, the pushback, and it is a valid pushback that I've heard is, well, in a world where people are, let's say that for whatever reason, it is hard to have real human connection. People are more isolated. Let's say another pandemic rolls around or something like that where people don't get to actually meet face-to-face. And the skill of human connection atrophies. What do we do with particularly young men who are frustrated, you know, this epidemic of loneliness, if we could have some form of digital intelligence that is able to sort of fill that gap and provide some form of connection that does seem to truly like make people feel good and placate, like that seems, it doesn't seem like the best option, but it's like the best of a bad, you know, sort of the next best case.
42:52Yeah, the question I would ask would be those programs that those example young men are consuming, what are they optimized for? If they're optimized for profit in our current system, those AI girlfriends are going to end up predatory and just taking all these customers. The only fans, digital only fans, bespoke for you, essentially. Yeah, exactly. And it won't ultimately be making those customers what I would call happy. If we're talking about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I would say that's not exactly what I would call liberty, being a hopeless addict. And it's not exactly what I would call happiness, just having this machine that knows how to push your bliss button over and over again.
43:39Whereas if, sure, if it were something like, I don't know, there's this novel, The Diamond Age, where there's a, this is a very prescient old novel from the 90s or 80s or something. and the main character is a young woman and she has this AI kind of book teacher thing that like really, she learns a lot and she grows a lot and it's mind expanding and if AI were doing that and there were AI companions that were helping people really find what I would call something more like self-actualization or happiness or whatever, I'm open to that as a possibility. I'd love to talk a bit about how competition manifests in Hollywood, particularly in the world of acting.
44:29And you're one of the few people who had a very successful child acting career and then also transitioned that into being an actor as an adult. How cutthroat are both of those sort of areas, particularly the child acting? Because I could imagine, in my mind, it seems like a very cutthroat thing. What was your experience like? Well, I mean, it's competitive in that there's a lot of people that want a very few number of parts. So if that's what you mean by cutthroat, then yeah, it's really competitive. It's not cutthroat in that you don't – there's not like anything you can do to sabotage your competitor.
45:11you just go and hope to get the role and your competitor is going and hoping to get the role and someone does so would you say overall you had a very positive experience with it as a kid? overall yeah I would say it was a very positive experience for me I would attribute that to a number of things for one I was really lucky and privileged in a lot of ways a lot of the kids that were doing child acting, their family were relying on them for income. And my family wasn't. My dad had a good job. And, you know, me working as a kid never had anything to do with the money for my family. So that's one thing that made it probably a lot less stressful for me.
46:04I would say also my mom, dad, and others around me, my brother, never really put much emphasis on the glitz and glamour and the various accoutrements and bullshit that comes along with being famous and whatever. And the emphasis was always like I really loved acting. I loved the art and the craft of it even from a young age. And that's what my parents sort of encouraged and supported. And I think that's pretty rare. It's hard to avoid getting seduced by the glitz and glamour stuff. So those are a couple reasons why I feel like it ended up really positive for me. And the competitive part of, I actually think going on hundreds and hundreds and probably thousands over the course of my life of auditions and getting rejected the vast majority of the time, I think ultimately, while it was painful at times, was good for me.
47:05When I go through my life now, or especially in my professional life, but other parts of my life too, I think I probably have a certain sense of like, don't know if this will work out. I hope it does and I'll do my best, but maybe because I'm unlucky today or maybe because someone else just earned it more than I did or who knows why it didn't work out for me today. And I think that's just good to get used to because that's life is really full of that. You know, growing up, I was hyper competitive. Yeah. You know, I was one of those weird kids that loved exams because I felt like often I would get the top mark and I always wanted to find out what everyone else got, which is clearly like very unhealthy.
47:48And our teachers would give me the information, which is also strange. But that created this sense of unrealistic expectations of how the world would be. And then, you know, I remember I got into, you know, even continued through university. And my real wake-up call came when I quit and I had to get a job and didn't get the first job I interviewed for. and that started getting some struggles there. And it was like, oh, actually the real world maybe isn't as easy, but oh, I'm just getting unlucky. And then I got into poker. And now poker will give you a firm reminder of just like you. Sometimes you play great and the cards won't cooperate.
48:24Sometimes you play terribly, you get rewarded. There's all this noisy feedback. Also, especially you're playing tournaments, tournament poker, you only win any money back about 15 % of the time. So 85 % of the time you actually lose. And it wasn't until I really started experiencing this. If you get 15 % of the parts you're auditioning for, that's an incredible number that no one does. That's what I wanted to ask you. Yeah, what is the failure rate? I don't know the numbers, but it's something like, you know, I would go on an audition once or twice a day, most weekdays. and I would get like four or five parts in a year or something like that.
49:08And I was doing really well. Not to pat myself on the back or anything, but that was much more than most of the kids. That's like a 95 percentile type experience. That's brutal. Yeah, yeah. It's just, but again, I feel like there's a certain strength to that because there's a benefit to just taking that attitude of like, I'm just going to try. I'm just going to keep doing it. Would you describe yourself as a competitive person? Yeah, extremely. I was, like if I think of myself as a kid, I would just be, it's funny, I'm thinking of my brother now. So my brother was always a better athlete than I was.
49:52He's also six and a half years older than me. So of course he was better at all the sports than me. And the normal or whatever, the reasonable thing to do would be like, well, I'm seven and you're 13, so you're going to beat me at basketball or soccer or whatever. But no, I was so pissed all the time. But the other funny comparison with my brother is he didn't really care. He would usually be the best guy on his team. I would usually be like the third best guy on my team. but when he would go and play sports he would like play and have fun and it didn't bother him much if he lost and i was just more his attitude and me i was so live or die i would like if we lost i would i would cry and things like that that dan my brother he it wasn't his attitude and uh we were raised by the same parents who were you know um right so you think there is like a nature element yeah definitely and and speaking as a dad who you know I have different kids and not to speak too specifically about any of them but um as a dad I feel all the more confident that like you're born with a certain nature now of course nurture comes into it as well but I do think different people are born in different you know with different uh Yeah, personalities.
51:15Are there any top actors who don't have that competitive mindset? Oh. Like how strongly correlated is it? Do you think it's an integral part or actually you can be anywhere on the competitive spectrum and still make it to the top? Yeah, I would say most of the actors. I'm not sure if you think about that. I don't think about that. Yeah, I would say that probably the vast majority of actors who work a lot are pretty competitive. Did you ever have an arch rival? An arch rival? Yeah, like someone who you felt like may. Yeah, we've talked about this actually. I've told him this. When I was a kid, so Elijah Wood, I don't know if you know that actor.
51:59Elijah Wood, who's a great actor. He and I went on so many of the same auditions and he would always fucking get the part. I was like, God damn it, that kid's here.
52:10The arch rival thing I think is interesting because I noticed I would often get competitive against other women in poker. There weren't many women in poker, but the few that were there that I felt were sort of the same age as me and kind of like the same aesthetic or something, I'd find myself naturally comparing myself to, which was strange. Like, oh, she did well in that tournament. And I'd feel this pang of competitiveness bordering on jealousy. Yeah, yeah. That in many ways was healthy and would inspire me to work harder, but in other ways it was definitely not healthy. And I'm curious whether that, whether it's like an aesthetic thing, you know, when it comes to like, you compare yourself to like another actor.
52:49You know, maybe, did you and Elijah look similar as kids? Yeah, probably similar enough. Same age, like you're talking about, going up, I mean, if you're going for the same parts, it's because you have a certain similarity to you. So, yeah. and um i i that definitely resonates with me if that feeling of jealousy i i do my best to minimize it because i think it's mostly useless i don't want to say it's a hundred percent useless because i think there's probably some small morsel of it that drives you forward or something but mostly i would say it's useless and mostly it's not a good drive uh if anything it could And like if I am, I don't know, making a career decision or something, if I listen to those voices that are coming more from jealousy, and they're certainly still there in my head, I feel like they more often than not are probably advocating for me to make a decision that I'll ultimately not agree with.
53:56in hindsight I don't know taking the short term payoff or something like that this reminds me of something that's related so competition is something we talked a lot about on HitRecord which is this online community of people creating together and making art and entertainment together that I started years ago and we would always one of our sort of refrains was it's not a competition, it's a collaboration. And that was true. Our thing was trying to not see your fellow artists as competitors. But rather than say like, oh, you made something, it's better than mine. Say like, you made something that I like, how can I build off of it?
54:45How can that turn into something that we're all collaborating on that's, you know, where we can make something greater than the sum of its parts? and I definitely think that's great. I still very much believe in that. But there definitely also was a competitive part to it and I don't think that's all bad and sometimes I felt like, well, as I'm promoting this notion of collaboration over competition, I sometimes feel like if I could be more nuanced right now, I would say competition isn't necessarily bad. that can it can drive you it can make you want to say like oh wow that made you know this person made something I do think it's probably more positive to say like how can I make something too not how can I make something better but there you can't deny that we're competitive animals it's sort of part of our you know evolutionary makeup or something and to to fully deny that is probably unrealistic and so So I don't think it's all bad to be competitive.
55:52And ultimately, on hit record, if we're making a bunch of – say we were making a collaborative piece of art, usually the case was that not everybody's contributions would get used. We would try to encourage the leaders of the different collaborative projects to use as many people as possible and to be as inclusive as possible. and we would set up sort of works of art that were naturally, that lent themselves to that kind of inclusivity. But it was inevitable that at some point someone would put some time and effort into contributing to a project and their contribution wouldn't get used in the final production.
56:32And that is competitive, right? That means that someone else got used and I didn't. It's a form of scarcity, which competition needs to exist, right? Right. So, yeah, it's extremely unique in that you have like thousands of contributors, arguably. And you have these like, they're very Burning Man-y, actually. You have these nine core values for anyone who doesn't know. Burning Man is this big festival in the desert that has 10 guiding principles, which are actually quite similar to some of these. You've got, you know, it's not a contest, it's a collaboration. Credit where credit's due. kindness as you know core virtue enjoy the process more than the results so that's a very good one in like any aspect of life frankly yeah um and also fair compensation yeah so this sort of ties back into what we were talking about early on like how it must have been so complicated to figure out if you've got like hundreds of contributors to a piece of which some gets shown you know what that piece of art gets shown for half a second that one for three seconds and so on how did you try you know what was your algorithm for figuring out how to compensate people we in the early days tried to figure out an algorithm and we eventually got to the point where we recognized and embraced the fact that there wasn't an algorithm that always worked and so it was by hand it was human beings going through each one and uh figuring it out and the the advantage that those humans had was oversight from the whole community.
58:05So it was all done very transparently. I did this the first few times, but then other members of the team, the staff would do it because it's really time consuming, go through all the contributions that are in a final production and assign some percentages. But it wouldn't just be that. It would be, here's our proposals. Then we would put that out to the community. And we actually made this really cool software where each line item of the compensation had a comment thread on it. So it made it really easy for anybody to say, like, this line item deserves more or less. Or like, hey, you forgot this person or you forgot me.
58:47And when you have an open discussion about it, we found the problems get rooted out. And we did this for years and years and years with really no issues. And not to say that people didn't sometimes feel, you know, disagreeable or feel like it wasn't fair. Like that did happen, as I think it's bound to doing something like this. And it's not to invalidate their, you know, their objections. But I think doing it out in the open like that made it so that generally it was able to work. But there wasn't an algorithm for it. Wow. I wonder if you did it again, you could use some kind of NFT type infrastructure.
59:36Well, here's the thing, and this is why I was always a little like, do we need, why? Like, the only reason you would need an NFT structure, I guess, would be if there was so much money on the line that hackers were coming and trying to hack the hit record server and our cybersecurity was not up to fending off those hackers. If that were the case, I guess then the blockchain would be useful because it's really hard to hack the blockchain. Right, so indelible. Yeah. But other than that, I don't know that you… Yeah, I mean, I was thinking more from just like an automation process, like save you having to do it line by line.
1:00:14If there was a way to track, okay, this person made this at this point and so on. So it just and then you could have, I don't know, use some kind of fancy data science to come to a waiting system, essentially. Yeah, well, I mean, there's, I don't know that you need to use blockchain for that. I'm not a technologist. But we were never technologically advanced enough to be able to sense. So the way that we would do it, attribution was manually done. That if you would contribute something to the project and your contribution included someone else's as well, you would just have to cite that. You'd list your sort of credits.
1:00:52We called them resources. And so that all happened manually and then would be double-checked so that it wasn't strictly the honor system. Could, I mean, especially now with AI, that could, I think, happen more and more automatically. And it does to some degree on YouTube. I think if you use a copyrighted song, the system can automatically sense the copyrighted song and give attribution and even compensation. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it happened to me. I made a video about nuclear war. and I speaking of like acting I tried acting a thing for the first time and it was I don't know if it was any good but you know the final the main climactic speech of the president in Independence Day which is one of my favorite movies don't judge me
1:01:41I recited the president's speech over the track of him basically because it was making a parallel between nuclear war and aliens I don't know and And I got dinged. It was one of my most successful videos, but I didn't make any money from ads because there was like 10 seconds of the orchestral in the background, and that was enough. To me, that's actually encouraging. Yeah, it works. The system works. That should be able to happen, I hope, at a grander and grander scale as AI training data is resourcing so many different people's work and spitting it back out into these valuable outputs. Speaking of aliens, what's your take on the current alien situation?
1:02:25Those videos are definitely weird, but there's lots of weird things. I don't know. I think it's tempting to jump to conclusions, it seems to me. It's just funny that when there are people for decades being like, the government is lying to us, they're hiding it, they're hiding them from us, and then now that they're talking about it and like saying that they've got it seems like the same people are saying the government are lying they're trying to distract us from something else that they're up to that's the thing it's like so I yeah that's that conspiracy theory mindset of confirmation bias it's a drama that you know we want to have something I don't know I would those are weird videos but you could it seems like there is a signal there there's something you could just as easily probably come up with various other scenarios of why there's those weird videos that doesn't have to be...
1:03:21I think more interestingly than the videos, because, I mean, again, we're in the age of CGI, generative AI. I mean, no one can trust any video. It could be someone walking down the street, and you just can't really discern any more reality from fiction. More, it's actually the eyewitness accounts that I think are interesting. These incredible pilots. Navy guys, yeah. Yeah, like legit pilots, and there's a bunch of them, and they're sort of describing a similar thing. But that said, And if you're under like eight Gs of force, who knows what kind of things your brain might be hallucinating. Yeah, I don't know.
1:03:53I'm not saying that I know what it is and it's not this. I'm just saying that we humans have a tendency to come up with stories. And the whole point of evidence-based thinking is like, go, go find some evidence. Like, let's see evidence. That video is evidence that there's something going on that's unexpected. but that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be, I don't know, intelligent life from another galaxy or something. One of the things I find so inspiring about you and your work is you are a perpetual optimist. Thanks. Now, we've had many conversations sort of about the scary things going on, you know, the various existential risks and general direction that often it seems like we're going in terms of continuing life on Earth.
1:04:41How do you maintain your, like, optimism in the face of sort of thinking about this stuff a lot? Yeah, that's a good question. I've tried to figure this out myself in moments of self-reflection. I don't have a great answer. For some reason, because I do, I spend a fair amount of time focused on, like, potentially terrible futures. and for some reason they don't quite like on an emotional level make me feel scared or sad. And I don't know why. I actually don't know why. I do think that my emotional makeup changed in some major way after my brother died. My brother died when I was 29. so like 13 years ago.
1:05:37And I do think that ever since then, sort of big or things that should be scary or upsetting are less so to me. But I was really optimistic before that. So I don't know. I actually don't have a good answer. I don't know why. I tend to just kind of feel. If we're talking about how I think, I don't know that my intellectual outlook is very optimistic. But my feelings tend to be pretty. So it's actually a system two, system one thing again. Yeah, maybe. Maybe. Maybe like your body knows. Yeah. Or just needs to in order to survive, in order to feel okay about getting up in the morning and doing stuff.
1:06:27like if I were too convinced by you know the pessimistic system to thinking I would be in trouble well I mean I do think whether or not it's accurate or not the you know the feeling you know your system one being optimistic there is truth to this idea of like thoughts create things feelings create things and a thing that concerns me a lot in tv and movies at the moment is that the ratio of dystopian to utopian or positive visions versus negative visions of the future is so fucked up. I completely agree. It's like 20 to 1, more even. Like, look at Black Mirror. Maybe they've had one utopian episode and 20 dystopian or whichever.
1:07:11Yeah, no, it's really true. Why is that and how do we rectify it? Yeah, I've thought about that a lot because I've put a lot of effort into trying to write positive sci-fi. Not that I'm the most prolific writer ever in the world, but it's harder. It's just much harder than dystopian sci-fi to fit into mainstream entertainment because mainstream entertainment needs to be thrilling. There needs to be an identifiable villain usually, an identifiable conflict. It's just a lot easier to tell a really thrilling and exciting sci-fi story in a dystopian world than in some kind of utopian world. utopian worlds are really hard to make credible uh they just seem phony i think um and uh and if you don't have a good conflict then it's not going to be very entertaining um so i've i mean i've i've noodled around with lots of different variations on this i'm i'm you know working on one now that's like you know but but i'll also be honest i don't want to say too much about it because it's a very early stage.
1:08:18But my initial idea of it was, let's just let's figure out how to tell a positive sci fi story. And as it evolved, and as I was like, Okay, but yes, but now I also need to make it an interesting story. I think I've kept a good chunk of optimism, but it's had to be accompanied by some pessimism as well. And that's probably more realistic. You know, I think to be to tell a story that's purely optimistic is probably just somehow foolish. An author who's done, I think, the best job of this. Do you know the Culture Series by Ian Banks? No, I should look at this. Yeah. The Culture Series? So I think it's 12 different books.
1:09:01It's set far future where humans and humanoids and AI have essentially dominated the galaxy. But there are also many different alien species. and it's the best depiction of like the kind of society I want to live in because it's not even a utopia it's like a protopia like they're working they're always like emerging and like it's not like they've reached some steady state they're still working on developing new tech and like giving but their main optimization function is like choice like maximizing choice for their citizens if you want to live like this and do that off you go but like just don't harm others too much that's like their guiding principles and yet he finds a way to weave in drama.
1:09:44And the resistance and struggle in the characters. And there are bad guys within the story, but it's contained within a utopian universe. So that's actually really... I will look. Culture series by Ian Banks. But also the most popular example of this is Star Trek. Right. Star Trek before it, you know, some of the more recent versions. Well, I haven't seen all the... Like there's a new Picard show, which I haven't seen at all. I'm curious to because my favorite Star Trek was the one starring Patrick Stewart, the Star Trek The Next Generation that was on in the 90s. And then, of course, my dad loved the original one.
1:10:22But that was like that. It was not exactly utopian because there were various conflicts and there were, I guess, wars and stuff. But humanity had made it to the stars and was out exploring and thriving and striving and technology was amazing and that felt like really inspiring. Great, but you're right. There's what sci-fi is doing that nowadays. You've got to write it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Or I'll adapt the culture series by Ian Banks. That would be sick. I'll have to read it. Yeah. I'll have to read it. It started here. Awesome. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks, Liv. This is amazing. Always good to talk to you.
1:11:09thanks so much for listening everyone and of course to joe for this conversation do check out his work i've linked in the show notes below a bunch of resources uh not only of the things that we discussed but also to hit record and of course a bunch of links to joe's work itself go on a binge of his movies they're so good and of course if you enjoyed this please spread the love share it online with your friends however speaks to you and for those of you who are into YouTube, you can actually now cut segments out of the video. There's this option to do that. I can't explain exactly how, but you'll figure it out if you want to share particular snippets from the show.
1:11:46And either way, thank you so much for listening, and I will see you in two weeks.
From the publisher
Hollywood is currently at a standstill due to the joint writer’s & actor’s strike, in part because of the growing threat from generative AI. In this episode, I talk to one of the industry’s greatest talents and thinkers -- Joseph Gordon-Levitt -- about how he believes the industry needs to adapt in the age of synthetic media. We also hear his thoughts on how addictive technology and competitive dynamics are reinventing our relationship with creativity, human connection, even p*rnography!