In this episode, Rich and Paul discuss how working in the media shapes our perspective on human nature. They delve into artists' take on media and compare true artists who express themselves authentically, regardless of audience preferences, to those who create content solely to cater to the constraints of the platform or audience. This podcast is sponsored by Aboard.

So rich.

Uh, not too long ago we had an episode about Mr.

Beast.

Yes.

Top of the YouTube food chain, Mr.

Beast.

right, that's right.

Mr.

Beast likes to do big charity things on YouTube.

He has lots of fans.

And

Lots of fans.

Kids love him.

Kids love him.

a, he is a, he's a big old deal, Mr.

Beast.

And, uh, you came in today and you said, I just can't stand that guy.

Well, I just didn't like the stuff I, I thought it

was, I thought it was a optimized.

It was just, just sugar and fat.

Like it was just optimized to just be digested instantly and

hit like the right receptors.

And it's, um, I, I, who am I to decide what people should or shouldn't watch

you're, you're no one to decide that, right?

Like, that's

I, I'm no one to decide that.

I do get to decide what my kid watches until he's slightly larger than me

physically, and then he won't, he'll do

Oh, this is, I don't, people don't talk about this.

Like the, the amount of lockdown related to YouTube that has to happen in a house.

It's, it's, kids will prefer watching YouTube to playing video games.

Like they will prefer watching YouTube almost anything.

And, and.

and

Let's just to be clear, we're not talking about explicit content.

We're not talking about curse words.

It's normal stuff,

No, it's, I, I'm gonna watch someone play Luigi's

Haunted Castle for four hours.

it's just turning.

I could just see my kids' brain getting turned into a fine pace.

There's a long a, a few podcasts back.

I was pointing out how dumb everything was, how impatient everyone was,

was, and I wanna call you out for something you said to me.

Sometimes you said to me, and I'm paraphrasing, sometimes you just wanna

lay there and eat a scoop of ice cream.

That's what you said to me,

I mean, it's, that's the story of my life up until Manjaro.

On occasion I do it, I veg out, I like, I'll watch the dumbest thing,

or I'll just not wanna think too hard.

But I don't think it's good to lay down and eat ice cream for six hours straight

Here's what's tricky.

It's a tricky part about working in the media.

Is that your initial fantasies of what human beings are like are demolished.

When you do anything real at any particular scale, the emails

you get are from people who hold abhorrent belief systems who

weren't able to perceive beyond the headline of the article you wrote.

The people who, most of the people who watch succession can't pour milk

out of a jug, and yet they'll tell you that that's the smartest show on tv.

Okay, so it's just like you are really up a

to succession.

It might be the smartest show on

It doesn't matter.

People like warm moving shapes in aggregate and it's, this is what the

internet has taught us over and over is that there, you know, there's

always this idea that like, oh man, if we could just tap into human

potential and just let everybody have a voice, what a society we would have.

It's not working out that way.

we te we did it.

We did it and it actually turned out that humans are not here for like a long time.

We're here for a good time.

Like it is not, you are not

I'm just looking for a good time.

what humans are, man.

It's just you got chimpanzees with guns and, and so like, there is that, and

so then there was a part of you, you have to decide this is a hard choice.

I, I've made this choice.

Other people make it in different ways.

Do you, and this is, this I think is a complicated needle to thread, okay?

Because Mr.

Beast is human seo.

He said, I see what the robots do.

I will, I will feed the fire and let's see what people say.

And anything that makes my audience in aggregate happy, I'll do more and more of.

By happy you mean bigger,

bigger, more money, brighter graphics.

You know, it, it's what you see is as time goes on and more and

more SEO content, everything, everything approaches essentially

what would please a baby, right?

So like a baby likes bright colors, loud noises,

time.

Yeah.

ice cream.

Right, like just sort of soft foods and, and so Mr.

Beast is, is sort of headed towards a kind of soft baby kind of content.

Look baby, I gave the dog a biscuit.

Like that's kind of the end game.

Here

It is, and you know, I, I'm not gonna sit, let

me, let me be realistic here.

Okay.

My kid, my, I have a 10 year old boy.

Yeah.

I tried to sit him down on like Ken Burns Jazz,

Now I gotta tell you.

docuseries.

Having young children both gives you tremendous faith in humanity

and challenges it very profoundly

All at once.

Yeah.

Right.

You're like, oh, you know, you like that one song you enjoy.

Take Five by Dave Brubeck.

Maybe you'll like this documentary about jazz.

Yeah.

How did that go?

Look, I, I, I, my parents didn't pay attention to

me when I got home from school.

I had no activities.

I had like nothing going on.

No jiu-jitsu, no soccer, no nothing.

I would sometimes be allowed to leave the house and play stickball.

I grew up in Brooklyn, but other than that, they paid no attention.

Most of the time I watched TV and when I watched tv I watched Tom and Jerry.

Sure.

A lot like hours of it, like just, and I didn't li, I didn't smile or laugh

cause I'd seen them all within the first

months.

Now, you know.

You know a nice moment in your life is when it would get dark outside

and your face would be illuminated blue as you sat there alone in

America watching Tom and Jerry.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So,

bleak

know, it's not like I was watching, you know, history channel,

like I wasn't doing that either.

I do think there's something different

you.

Were a nerdy kid.

You were interested in the computer.

You got there

before.

This is, this is like, I'm in my like eight or nine years old.

I'm

talking, oh yeah.

It's a disaster.

disaster, right?

And so, You could blame my mom and I'm trying to be like, open-minded

about this and, and not, you know, not be the old man who's like, well,

on my day we used to read a book.

Right?

I, I don't wanna be that.

And so I'm thinking back and I'm thinking, I used to just veg out.

Like I used to just sit there and watch that stupid cart.

I'd get my homework done.

She's like, you can watch TV now.

And then she would just essentially dole out secondhand smoke while I'm

smoke and talk on the telephone.

Those are the

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

That was, motherhood.

That was mothering.

She,

every song

seventies and

put the receiver to her neck and go lower it.

Yeah.

then I'd,

she'd get, and, and as she said that a a like puff, the magic dragon

level of smoke would pour out of her body.

So

I'm thinking about that and I'm thinking about today and how.

Aggressive we are with this stuff and, and I think I, I do see it as some important

differences and I want to highlight them.

Um, the local television station was buying blocks of Tom and Jerry cuz it

was cheap to put 'em on the air before the news kicked in at six o'clock.

o'clock News man.

Yeah.

Um, what

a terrible killing in Bay Ridge.

And also traffic on the ones.

Yeah,

All of that.

Now, what you have today, right, is two important things that have changed.

One is the instrumentation around what success looks like

is much finer grained and.

Apps.

Like you don't get credit for a YouTube view unless certain

amount of it has been watched.

12 people in Germany think you're the tops.

Exactly.

So the, the sort of micro analysis and the, and, and

the metrics you can pull off of this stuff has incented people to just

continue to refine the, the work so that it's not about a creative work.

Look, there were orchestras.

I'm going to, I'm gonna vouch for Tom and Jerry for one second.

An entire orchestra.

There was no sound effects.

It was like the big, the guy who held the big symbols would like smash 'em

together whenever Jerry hit his face, you

what it is though too.

The, the creative cycle and the loop was much.

Longer.

Right?

So you had to make a whole cartoon, not woody woodpecker, right?

You have to conceive of the woodpecker.

You have to figure out what the woodpecker's gonna look

took

People love that woodpecker and every, it still takes months, every time

you want that woodpecker to do something.

Okay?

Big hit goes for years.

Woody Woodpecker, et cetera.

Mr.

Beast is able to know in minutes how things like, I'm sure at this stage

in his career, cuz I can do this.

I, if something goes out into the internet instantly.

You see the feedback on Twitter and you kind of know like in a

minute if you have a hit on your hand or not, you're just like, oh,

okay, well that one's not gonna go.

And, and so like what I, what I see with Mr.

Beasto, there is no point.

Mr.

Beast.

Can only Mr.

Beast it up?

Like, yeah.

I mean, he could turn to the camera and be like, really?

Why are we making these videos?

But no one will care.

Right?

He's created an envi, he's just a machine for creating certain

sensations in humans, and he's able to profit vastly as a result.

Yeah,

Yeah, and I, I've said before,

it, going back to the Tom and Jerry Point and the Woody Becker point.

We're on a cycle of days, hours, minutes.

You know, you can, you get the reaction very, very quickly.

Tom and Jerry, man, they put that out and people would be like,

ah, you know that one where the cat fell off the kitchen table?

That was good stuff, Mike.

Well, I mean, it's, it's, it's more than that.

It's, it's actually stuff from the fifties and sixties cuz it's cheaper

to just buy syndication of old stuff.

It was very expensive to, the local station's not gonna produce new cartoons.

is a shame though, that local TV produced shows

went away from the world.

They were the ones that would get

Oh,

I, it was amazing.

like Captain Tommy Space Cadets and just all that good stuff.

Anyway,

was another character, there's another distinction I would make, which

is that when Tom and Jerry ended, it ended and then something else came on.

Yeah.

Uh,

by giving the kids to the, the power to on demand, just eat gobs of this stuff.

Um, I think, I think that kind of control that early.

Uh, well, here's, lemme put it differently.

I'm as guilty as anyone else.

If I've got like an extra 30 seconds waiting for the bus,

I'll eat a snack of dumb shit.

Yeah.

You know how, you know our society is failing.

People take the bath, the phone to the bathroom when they pee.

I'm really good at It man.

used to be like, it used to be like, mm, I'm gonna take it in there.

I gotta, I gotta about five minutes to go.

But no, it's like I gotta, I, I have to get like urine outta my body,

but I don't want to miss a moment.

I'm gonna watch a YouTube video.

We've made this point before,

Yeah.

I mean, we've pretty much have like five points, so I wouldn't worry about it.

No.

Fine.

No, but I guess, I guess here's, I like a long song,

uh, like American Pie by Dominic Clean Real

not a good song.

I don't like that

song.

long time

But I like a song that you kind of have to put the work in,

and then when it culminates and it starts to come together and like out of

oh, like, like off the album tales of the topographic oceans.

But yes,

Not that either.

Not either of those actually.

Appetite for little snack size bites of information.

I think has put us in a place where you know all the algorithms and

they're manipulating our children.

It's just us.

It's us.

We have any waking moment we can, we can duck out and take a little bite of

something and watch a dog, like, you know, balance a bird on his nose, like, and

My my pin tweet on Twitter, which I have never

received any feedback for Uhhuh.

Uhhuh.

Um, for those who don't know because they have a life, you can put one

tweet at the top of your Twitter account and it says, we did this to ourselves.

ourselves.

That's it.

That's the name of this podcast

it is an unforgivable sentiment.

In right now to say, Hey, I think actually this might just be humans,

uh, rather than Mark, you know, people think Mark Zuckerberg or, or, or, well,

it's tricky with Elon Musk because he does seem to actually have a paranoid

desire to squash most liberal thought, but I don't think Zuckerberg does.

And, uh, and, and so like we're living.

In this world where we get really, really paranoid and so on.

But I actually think most things like there needs to be a corollary to Occam's

Razor, which is the general triviality and chimp like behavior of aggregate

humans explains most internet things.

Exactly.

I mean, I, I, I think, I think our desire for.

Sort of that immediate gratification and the tech is getting better and better

Sure.

it.

Um, we'll take it.

I was like, yeah, wait, what?

I can tap three places on my phone and then chicken pad tie shows up.

I mean, of course.

That sounds excellent.

I

you explained to me for a while, while you were never gonna make

another phone call to deliver food again.

And I was like, ah, come on man.

Get over yourself.

when's the last time you spoke to anyone?

It's been a while.

like beyond

This is like four years ago, and you're like, why would

I ever call another restaurant when I can hit some buttons?

And now I'm like, yeah, no.

No one would ever, I'd rather go pick it up.

I'd rather go get it.

It's reached that point.

all right.

So there's a thing going on.

Now we're talking about this, but the reason we, what sparked this conversation

actually was there's an article in.

The published press.com, which is a newspaper I know.

I know.

It's a newspaper or

Sounds really great.

It's specifically for creator, creator economy types.

Everybody gets their own newspaper in 2023.

It's fair.

And so they wrote a big article, uh, or a big series of articles called The New

Wave, the Next Generation of Creators.

This part's hard fighting for the soul of YouTube.

First of all, the soul of YouTube, as far as I can tell, is the database that

tracks how many times somebody clicks, like, like on a, on a picture of a

just one big thumb.

Yeah.

But anyway, but let's,

okay, Well you, you read up on this, you point.

You shared it with me yesterday.

What?

Why?

Well, I think this is, so, they're all very young and there's,

you know, they go to creator camp, which I'm not quite sure where it is,

but all the pictures show it's very snowy and you're in a lodge, okay?

And you're like, you're 22 and you have 10,000 followers.

And I, I think I.

um,

There's, first of all, there's always an aesthetic counter movement.

You know, there was Dogman 95 in 1995 where everybody's like,

we're gonna make really, really boring movies that are badly lit.

And, uh, a number of films that nobody can remember came out of that.

And, um, and, and so sort of like, uh, there's always an aesthetic movement

and it's always, you know, tends to be.

The young folks, the people under the, you know, the people who are under

like 30 going, not a hell of it, man.

It's pointless.

Anyway, like they're looking at Mr.

Beast and they're going, I have a medium that I can use to

express any human emotion I can to share stories from my life.

I can be simple, I can be low budget, and I can be interesting

under those constraints.

Rather than constantly chasing this sort of algorithmic, like, I'm gonna

give away more and more money and put a big picture on my face with letters and

words on the screen, on the thumbnail.

Like,

more.

Okay.

I now, now I'm understanding it.

And this is reminded me of a conversation that we had, you and I had with a mutual,

uh, friend of ours who's a musician.

Oh yeah, sure.

And what the tension you're talking about is the

difference between the eternal sin.

of an artist,

which is, I'm gonna make something that everyone is gonna find to be delicious.

It won't actually be how I feel or in a real creative expression

of my own, my true self.

But boy will they find it to be delicious.

true.

The true artist is a, is the chef who, when you go, because he is known, For

his, his fried chicken gives you a brick.

Yeah.

And you're like, well, I guess I'm going to eat it because he made it.

Yes.

And then your teeth fall out and you're like, well he really is an artist.

what we're talking about.

What Mr.

Beast is saying, and you can't fault him for it, is like I studied it and

I optimized for it, and who cares where I grew up or what I'm about,

or what my creative expression is.

it's don't play.

Don't hate the, the player hate the game.

Right.

Like

am an entertainer.

Yeah.

I am here to entertain you.

Yep.

And I am going to give you the best show you've ever seen.

This is about you.

Vaudeville.

Vaudeville.

We just, here we go.

Go to the other extreme.

Right.

And you have Johnny Greenwood.

Leaving Radiohead to make like a found sound album with like a

this, this like musicians in India.

you know Who else is where John Ante or Shanti from?

From Red Hot

Amazing guitarist.

I hate the red hot chili peppers.

I think

He's a really good guitarist.

overrated, but he's a very good

Yeah, I am too.

But he makes like these weird synth drone albums that are like, the

last one was almost Unlistenable.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the other extreme is, I'm going to express myself.

I am

of good though, too.

I just wanna say like, I had to, I had to give it to him.

It was pretty good.

It's kind of a good album.

I mean,

anyway,

Look, the holy grail is when you could tell it's an absolutely

pure distilled expression of, of, of someone's creative soul, but

also resonates with a lot of people.

See,

See, I don't buy it.

Okay.

Explain.

I

don't buy, I, I, I feel that all of this conversation ends up

being, People are looking for where their power and control is under

this giant system, and they're gonna assert it, and then they're gonna

create a little community and the community's gonna meet up and they're

gonna say, aren't we a good community?

And then one of them is gonna get an offer.

To make something for five times as much

Well, it's the eternal tension, right?

And then they, it's like an A, it's like a mothership comes over and

sucks them up like a cow out of a field.

Just woo.

I mean, you know, I mean, what's the holy grail?

The holy grail is I express myself and you pay me a lot of money because it

turns out a lot of people want to hear my self-expression, my expression,

which has nothing to do with metrics and whether it resonates or it's

pop, it has has enough pop hooks.

It just turns out that when I express myself, many, many people want to listen

or

of this too, like a, A good example would be like, boy genius,

everybody loves boy genius, which is Phoebe Bridgers and a couple other people.

I'm not afraid you're not a fan, but for the people who love boy genius,

it is the greatest thing that has ever happened in the history of humanity.

greatest

Christ came.

Christ was born and boy genius arrived.

They, they are, they are projecting authenticity.

Yeah.

Not selling out, but also have put out like, A pop album, effectively

an accessible piece of music.

You wanna know who's way better than boy?

Genius Perfume.

Genius

genius.

Yeah.

Frankly, I'm, I'm with you on that.

But the people who, uh, love boy genius think, think they're the greatest.

And the people who don't love boy genius kind of don't say too much

right now online cuz they don't want to get punched in the eye.

But like most of the world doesn't care about boy genius.

Right.

And a lot of people think boy genius is just, just about full of it.

And so like this, you, but you, you're people I know.

You're able to construct this tiny little world and you get to live in it, and you

get to say like, I am affiliated with the, with the true art of the world.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world's going on and saying like, I don't

care about that at all, man.

The hell with that.

That's nonsense.

Yeah.

What I care about are these songs about chess where people

perform them dressed as dogs.

That's the real art.

That's

That's real art.

Yeah.

Over and over and, and it's very hard when you're in those

scenes, cuz I've been in some of 'em.

It's incredibly hard to see that it's a scene.

What you think is you've created a revolutionary pattern for improving

the world and it will always get co-opted once more humans get

involved, not because of capitalism.

Capitalism is the symptom of humans.

the

It is that we are the disease.

And so like, as I look at these creators, I'm like, that is great.

You guys are gonna make some good stuff.

I hope there's more good stuff to watch that's kind of more

slow and more thoughtful.

Because right now, Mr.

Beast is unwatchable to me.

It's like having saccharin poured directly into my eyeballs and I can't close them.

Yeah, right.

And so I'm like, all right, good.

If you want to use YouTube as a, as a communications platform and, and you know,

really like take, take advantage of this platform to create something that's art.

Good for you.

That is great.

And then it kind of stops for me cuz I'm like, there'll be

another one three years from now.

sucks.

Yeah.

I mean, they have to be ok.

If you're gonna keep score by views or money yeah.

You're gonna lose

well and that's, that's what's fascinating about this article, right?

So they're fully into this.

It's the creator economy.

You think

they're gonna like, They're gonna take

over

scroll down.

It's all ANA analytics about this new wave and they're, because

that's how they see the world.

Yeah.

the issue, right, is you're keeping score that

way and that's the big challenge

things without keeping score is essentially appears to be

impossible because no one, I mean, people are sc, it's too scary.

Like to just go away for a couple years and work on something and

come back and say, I don't know.

I hope you like it.

That's like something artists used to do in the sixties.

We don't have that culture anymore as far as I can tell.

We don't, we don't.

And I think that that to me is the loss.

Like if you wanted to, like what's the cultural problem

that I would love to see solved?

It's that people can't go away for two years and work on something weird.

They can't, and when we do stumble on something that seems like.

Sufficiently unique and original because it's a creative work, but also happens

to resonate with a lot of people.

That's a special thing.

That's like a really, really special thing.

And so every so often someone a, usually it's because of constraints

is like a truest form of expression.

Comes out through like just really, really tough constraints.

So there's like a filmmaker named Sean Baker who spent a hundred grand

cuz he didn't have more than that.

Probably not because he felt like only spend, you know, spending a

max of a hundred grand, um, made a movie on with, with phones, um,

uh, and it's called Tangerine.

And now he's like a big time filmmaker.

He's a bigger

filmmaker.

Oh, Tangerine is great.

Tan's a great movie, but you know, he had no aspirations of

having that open a film festival, right?

Like he just put this thing out and it took, and, and it's part of the reason

it takes isn't, and this is what humans do when they see something like that

is pure and truly authentic, they're appropriated almost instantly and say,

have I sh you have to see the cool thing that you don't know about yet

You actually were like, you have to watch Tangerine.

It's an amazing movie.

I said this to

Yeah, you did.

Yeah.

And it's a beautiful movie and

there's a, it's also, it's two reasons.

One is like a beautiful movie, and the other is, there's like a scene where

there's a guy from the Middle East and they, like, everybody walks in on his

family and you're like, this is my family.

Like, I've never, it's,

It was just incredibly real

You had never seen your family, like represented quite that well.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And, and so every so often you strike lightning, right?

Like, and, and it's just a, it's a beautiful moment because you can

tell, you can tell that's the end of the creative purity for that artist.

Like I could tell that this is gonna be his last

movie.

not gonna make another one with an iPhone.

He's not gonna make another one with an

iPhone.

He's made other good movies,

now and then, like someone, Steven Soderberg will do that.

He'll be like, ah, I'm making a movie with an iPhone.

Roll me around in a rolly

Yeah, exactly.

And, and that's cool.

And you know, like I mentioned Johnny Greenwood before, he does a similar thing

where he looks for those constraints.

I'm gonna tell you something here.

Okay.

Let's.

It's not that one has constraints and one doesn't.

I can turn this into advice.

I can make this into Yadi Ford advisors.

You ready?

Go

The choice that you make isn't what crew you're gonna be in

or what manifesto you're gonna sign.

It's what constraint system you choose.

Mr.

Beast chose SEO and YouTube al algorithmic rules.

That's how he keeps

That's his creative, that's his creative constraint system.

I

I don't think, does he view himself as creative?

Of course he does.

He is creative.

Okay.

He does creative work within the constraints of that system,

except that that is a constrained system that has rewards built in.

And so it gets into a whole nother stratosphere.

The, uh, the other fo and, and when you pick a constrained system, you are kind

of picking a community to belong to.

There's certain things that certain constrained systems align with

communities, so like, I'm gonna make sort of more pure and wholesome YouTube videos

that are low budget and more thoughtful.

Well, I'm gonna align with these kind of people.

Yeah, and I'm gonna do that.

You may not realize this, but whenever you sit down to create something

software, Writing something, whatever you do, any creative act at all, even

ones that people don't even think of necessarily as creative, you're working

backwards from a constrained system.

Most of the time.

You're not picking it, you're saying like, I wanna write a sci-fi novel.

You're not saying like I, you're not looking where the boundaries are.

You're not saying like, I'm gonna write a really good proposal.

Right.

That picking your constraints wisely is the best thing you can do.

It's probably the healthiest thing you can

do

to further your own goals, and so you need to look at people who

work within the constraints who are doing things that you think are interesting.

Choose those constraints and get going.

Unfortunately, the, the overarching constraint is money.

Like, can I do this?

Can I express myself and make a

Then find people who are making just enough money who are doing work.

You think is interesting.

Yeah.

Like the, I I do feel that this is, people tend to optimize for, like, I think

that's interesting and they were able to be really successful with that and like,

1978 and therefore I'm going to do it too.

And it's like, no, the rules have changed and the system isn't there and so on.

So, so that, but that's, that's my advice.

good advice.

That's a, that's a good closer

All right.

All right, we're closing.

Are we done?

We're done.

Oh my

Oh my God.

This was a meaty one.

All right, so, uh, you know what, we have a sponsor.

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it out, and, uh, this is Zdi Ford.

Check out Zdi Ford on Twitter or send us an email at hello@zdiford.com.

We'd love to hear from you.

we'd love to hear from you.

Have a lovely