Orderly in life. Violent and original in work.
Joined April 2007
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“Stanley is very monastic. He’s a great beard scratcher. He thinks; he rubs his beard. He expresses himself quietly. I can’t say he’s reasonable . . . There has to be a certain unreasonableness in any serious creative work.”
-Saul Bass
I miss the Ted Talk days. I made a decent living writing and coaching for them. Yes, 80% was bullshit, but the machine had to be fed. It was a jobs program for narcissistic midwits. Surely that has a societal value in a WPA kind of way.
Perhaps when AI takes over, we’ll run TED back as a collective delusion presentation. “Humans still matter!”
One of the things that hasn’t been talked about with Elizabeth Holmes:
She was created in the era of the Ted Talk Entrepreneur.
Between 2011-2015 (after the release of the Social Network), there was an entire apparatus built around “Child Prodigies”: college accelerators, young entrepreneur organizations, etc.
I watched countless founders of hard tech companies present fraudulent products at conferences. They had fake studies with fudged numbers. Most of the adults in the room excused it as “faking it ‘til you make it.” But Holmes was the one who rode the wave better than anyone else.
When the Ted Talk Era came to an end and people finally came to their senses, she was still running the same playbook—and in the most scrutinized field there is: medical technology.
When people ask how she got so far, it’s largely explained by the period she did it in. And she got caught when the world suddenly woke up.
I was going to milk the sympathy, but I guess it’s better that my cancer diagnosis came up negative in the long run.
S-M Robinson retweeted
A few years ago I started posting stories from work. Funny things happened from time to time, but I always thought my job (and life) was unglamorous and fairly mundane, so I didn't expect anyone to pay attention.
But it turns out that people are really fucking interested in what happens behind the scenes in the film industry. Naively enough, I had no idea how obsessed people are with movies.
Maybe it's because of the cringy nature of amateur film commentary. Most of these guys don't understand cinematic language (or that "cinematic language" even exists), so they concentrate on the political aspects.
And by "political" I don't mean the ideological debate. I'm talking about who's up/down/in/out, whether the film was "faithful" to the source material, and budgets vs. profitability.
(The financial commentary is especially laughable, because even after 25 years in the business I don't have a good understanding of motion picture finance.)
But once the critics run out of the mundane tabloid and business critiques, they get into the actual ideological stuff.
They try to shoehorn everything into some old trite narrative.
Because the only thing that gets people more worked up than movies is national and geopolitics.
So I tend to ignore the film nerds and critics, just like most people engaged in the act of creation ignore the nerds and the critics. Because we know they're never going to get it, and engagement is futile.
But ignoring the critics led me to ignore the broader conversation around film. And that's a shame, because often the audience has interesting things to say about movies. Even if they didn't like the films, and even if it's inarticulate, it can still be really interesting.
Sometimes my online friends suggest that I start writing film criticism. But I try to stay away from it. Mainly because (again) film criticism is cringe, but it's also because arguing with ignorant nerds on the internet is exhausting. It's like digging a hole in the sand. It's fucking pointless.
But I will keep talking about the movies I like, and I'll keep answering questions about the technical stuff. I enjoy doing that, and it's also a good filter because it flushes the self-righteous (and ignorant) film nerds to the surface.
But creatively I'm moving away from the film business, because there are far more interesting things to write about. And if I keep writing about movies, I run the risk of turning into another hack critic.
So I'm working on a new book. Hopefully It'll be ready in November. There are a few movie stories, but it's mostly about other (more interesting) things like love and sex and fathers and duty and obligation and failure.
I think you'll like it;)
ChatGPT is doing amazing things for the email-job workforce. It is enabling amazing strides in “meeting about meeting” integrations that were never thought possible.
This is the real promise of AI technology, and it is worth any price to obtain. These tapped-in people are the future, whether you like it or not.
S-M Robinson retweeted
Most of the things in politics that fool much of the US electorate don't fool anyone in foreign intel.
I always look at July 4th as an unbirthday of sorts. As the ‘most American person I know’ to many people around the world, I like to rest today and let others pick up the mantle.
It’s your time to shine, patriots. 🇺🇸
Medusa seriously messed me up as a child.
As a direct descendant of John Adams and Henry Adams, I was always perplexed at how revolutionary history was taught growing up.
There was always this “skip over Adams” sentiment, and bagging on him because of the Alien and Sedition Act. The Act is never framed as a necessary evil in a confusing time of revolution and war, and the tactics for passing it were purely political to dunk on Jefferson’s Francophilia.
But Adams was the moral and intellectual engine of the Revolution. All his contemporaries spoke to that glaring fact. Yes, he was hotheaded and verbose, but he was one of the prime movers that created the world we live in.
"JOHN ADAMS DESERVES THE CREDIT"
@ericmetaxas argued that John Adams, not Thomas Jefferson, was the strategic architect of American independence. "John Adams was the genius, the selfless genius."
@Bannons_WarRoom
I warned my in-law that he shouldn’t run for a state office, as he was unlikeable, wasn’t as smart as he thought he was, and had no appeal against his opponent. He’s the kind of guy who “strived to be a Rhodes scholar” but didn’t have any of the intellectual chops.
He lost his race 80-20 yesterday, and plowed unknown thousands into the race.
Some people just need to learn the hard way.
