Have you come across any major drawbacks to animation as a medium, especially if your ultimate goal is impact? It's

slow. So it is not, I don't think it's the best medium for breaking news. So I see that as like the biggest drawback. It's hard to react quickly to things. It's also expensive, but it's interesting because it's expensive for a super low budget indie. But if you're trying to make really beautiful sci-fi fantasy second world stuff, it is much cheaper or much more feasible on an indie budget than it would be to do that live action and have all those visual effects. So that is both a pro and a con. And also prejudice. I think definitely some people still see animation as for kids, even though that has never been the case. And I think even some sort of like distributors and commissioners, an animated project has to fit into the bucket of for kids or like the sort of raunchy shock humor, like adult cartoons type of thing. It has to be kind of one or the other, but really animation's medium. It's not a genre. It can be applied to any genre equally effectively. So that's a frustration. I don't think it's a drawback of animation, but it is a drawback of trying to sell animation. So maybe to try to create impact reanimation.

How long will humans stay relevant as creative writers given AI advances? It feels to me like the prospects for writers are a bit worse than for visual artists because there is definitely something to be said that people want to go to a museum or an art gallery. And it does seem like they have this strong preference for it to be like, well, a human made that thing. You know, if you go and print out a bunch of mid-journey AI photos that are like really beautiful and you put them on canvases and you put them in an art gallery, maybe the first time someone does that, it's kind of interesting. But generally, it seems like that's not super appealing. But I wonder if once, you know, GPT-7 or whatever can write at the level of someone who's writing a show for Netflix, because it's so hidden already. And it's not like screenwriters are typically like celebrities either. It's a bit different in the theater. If you're a playwright in the theater, you really are kind of like the main person. But for TV shows and films, it's like, yeah, you know, for fans, they want to know who the screenwriter is. But it's a little bit more hidden. So I wonder if it's, and obviously it's just pure speculating, like anyone at this point, but I wonder if, yeah, that's the kind of thing that might not hang around much beyond the point where you can just sort of objectively say like, yeah, you know, the best script written last year was written by an AI rather than a human.

Yeah. I think that's probably a more productive way of thinking about it than trying to make a judgment on whether AI has better written or visual capabilities now. I guess I think your good point about people's strong preference for something to be made by humans is a good one, but I do think there's a chance it'll apply to some forms of written craft. Like when you think about the fact that people really love having books as physical objects in their houses, even though, you know, we can read all the books on our phones now.

Does this come up for you when you're thinking about like your long-term career? I

think, okay, so emotionally what I feel is I got to execute all my best ideas as quickly as possible while it still matters that I'm the person doing them. And that like, oh, I, you know, I hope AI doesn't replace people in creative things, but I don't, like, I don't think that's necessarily rational or even in my self-interest if, you know, AI is going well and making things great like that that would be good for me like would i rather keep writing novels or have every disease be cured i mean uh well i emotionally i would rather keep writing novels yeah no

it's like and it's very uh very human of you to think that. And maybe this is easier for me to think about because currently my job is being, you know, running this podcast, not doing creative writing. And for me, if you told me like, yeah, in a year, GPT-5 is just going to be the best podcast producer and, you know, manager and whatever, whatever the hell I do every day, it's better at everything. Well, then I could actually be like, oh, great. I get to just write then. And yeah, maybe it's better at writing novels and maybe it's better at writing movies too, but I just love writing. And so it doesn't actually feel too scary to me as long as, yeah, obviously, a lot has to go right for the world to be okay. But putting it aside just say like it's like a it's a good future it's it's closer to these these uh at least positive futures uh if not utopias but um yeah that one doesn't really it doesn't strike me as being terrible personally but it does make sense that because you've already managed to uh do this professionally yeah it's hard to get past this idea of like well technically i could still do all the projects i wanted to do but the public you know maybe many fewer people will read it or see them uh or they don't need me yeah yeah like how challenging is that for you to think about i

think like two sources of motivation for me that are you know, maybe slightly impure, but I think they're the same for a lot of creative people are, first of all, like the drive to make the next thing better and put what you've learned and the new ideas you have into use. And like this idea that you could make something that is novel and just like really good. That's very motivating. And I also, I think, I mean, for me, what art is in any form, whether it's written, visual or whatever, is universal things expressed through unique specifics that right now comes from the person who's making it. So obviously, I have a pretty strong attachment to my own weird little worldview in that way. And I also think, I will say, I think there's a lot of elements of writing that are not putting words on a page or digital page, like the sort of management of story process. And it's interesting to think about what that might look like in a world where all of the actual writing can be done just as well by ai yeah

that's really interesting because um yeah i mean i think it's the case that already you know people um you know are obsessed with doing like uh the wordle or like the spelling bee like puzzles that they do every day which is like not their jobs um and to me writing is kind of the best example that for me like sort of painting yourself into these boxes and being like all right well i need this thing has to uh have a good reason for happening how does this land how do these things come together like you know you don't want to have not to get too like writing advice or something but you don't want to have a story that's like this happened uh and then another thing happened and then another thing happened and then also this thing happened you know you need everything to be tied and be like this happened therefore this happened and because this happened this happens and all has to be interconnected and i find it to be a very compelling yeah very compelling puzzle where i would rather do that than do you know the word or something so yeah i don't know i think there is this a more positive framing potentially where it's like yeah okay ai's are the best at everything however uh boy it would be nice to you know write these stories all these puzzles uh play instruments that you never would have otherwise had a chance to because you were working as like the junior vice president at pepsi and you know that was your entire life and now you get to do things through more for us