The relentlessly prolific Jason Carman is making the films our culture needs: optimistic, inspiring and positioned at the frontiers of modern tech and science. In under two years, he has shipped more than 70 high-quality mini-documentaries exploring the startups shaping the future, racking up over 130,000 YouTube subscribers along the way.
His new venture, Story Company, premiered “New Space”, its 100+ minute-long exploration of the modern space industry, to a packed San Francisco theater this year. Story Company has multiple projects in the pipeline, including a full-length sci-fi feature. Ultimately, he intends to create a new generation of sci-fi films: a Star Wars for the 21st century.
I love Jason’s ambition, drive and enthusiasm (not to mention his filmmaking chops), which is why we awarded him a $100k O’Shaughnessy Fellowship last year.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
— Jim
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Highlights
The Power of the Editor
“Another funny little quirk about our company is that we require every single employee to be an editor. Which is, I think, unique in that Elon has this whole thing of, “The factory is the product, not the Tesla, not the rocket, not the car, not the rocket, it's the factory.” I similarly believe that is true with editing for film. You could give a great editor bad footage and he can make a great edit. You could give great footage to a bad editor and you would get a very bad edit. So I think editing is the bottleneck. It's the most impactful part of the process, and it's the part that we've spent the most time investing people and processes and infrastructure into to really make sure we can grow out more. “
We Need More Directors To Adopt the Founder Mindset
“We need more writers and directors and producers who treat making a movie like they're building a company rather than making a movie. The directors of old, I'm talking about, not even old really, but all of them, all the greats that you can think of built businesses to make their movies. That's how dedicated they were to this. Lucas founded companies, Spielberg founded companies. They did multiple at one time. Kubrick built his own editing facilities and a trailer that could follow him around the sets…”
With Science Fiction You Think Beyond Your Timespan
One of the principles I'm starting to see that sci-fi uniquely does, much like history, is it gives you the ability to think beyond your lifespan. And that's I think one of the most important tenants that we need to get into the heads of people alive today, especially our children, is stop thinking about just yourself and the problems you're staring at. Think about the problems of tomorrow and the opportunities of tomorrow. And I think that sci-fi fans, as soon as you start reading a few of these great sci-fi books, your mind immediately starts thinking like, "Okay, I'm not going to live to see this, but we should still do it”
The Gap Between You And The Greats is Small!
“I learned two years ago when I started doing S3 … that the distance, the gap between genius people that you look up to and you is so much incredibly smaller than you could ever imagine. That would be it. I think I just am confounded every year since, every month, every day since of how small that gap is and how it all seems to just come from a place of self-belief. I think that's probably the number one problem with our age, if I had to say, is that far too many people today couldn't imagine that they could do, not even impossible things, things that other people are doing, let alone impossible things, and that it all just comes from a limiting self-belief.”
Books & Movies Mentioned
Books
I Am a Strange Loop; by Douglas Hofstadter
The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism; by Howard Bloom
One Summer: America 1927; by Bill Bryson
The Hypomanic Edge: What Built America; by John D. Gartner
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; by Douglas Adams
Movies
New Space (directed by Jason Carman)
Flow (directed by Gints Zilbalodis)
My Dinner With Andre (directed by Louis Malle)
Star Wars (directed by George Lucas)
A Complete Unknown (directed by James Mangold)
Tenet (directed by Christopher Nolan)
Dune: Part Two (directed by Denis Villeneuve)
Transcript
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well, hello everyone. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. I was very excited for today's recording. My guest is Jason Carman, one of our OSV fellows, and just a dynamo who, Jason, man, do you ever, ever sleep? You are the founder of the Story Company. I love your quotes too. "Story inspires science. Science makes story real, but then we're in the golden age of science, but the dark ages of storytelling." Jason, welcome.
Jason Carman:
Thank you. Thank you for having me. This is more exciting for me just because before founding this company that I've wanted to have found since I was nine, which sounds ridiculous and like a lie, but I swear it's not. I was working on an incredible job I had, and I was really burnt out and tired of making these weekend documentaries, and it was the most serendipitous message from you after a hike with the roommates saying, "Oh, I'm so burnt out of making these documentaries," but it was a message from you and the fellowship that gave me the confidence and the support to make the jump to doing this full time." Quite literally would not be here today if it weren't for that support, so thank you. It's an honor to talk beyond that because I've come to really enjoy actually the show quite a bit. A few people I'm filming with, I go type in their name on the internet, and you're the only one that has interviews with them, which I think is a great sign. It means you're talking to rare people, so thank you for doing this.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
My pleasure, and let me just add an addendum there. I have every confidence that with or without me, you would be doing what you're doing. We find that people like you are really gracious in your thanks to us, but by hook or by crook, Jason, I think you would be sitting exactly where you're sitting right now. Let's dig into the, since you were nine. Steven Spielberg, kind of same story. They made a movie about it. It wasn't a very good movie though, unfortunately, but Spielberg, same thing. A lot of people that I talked to, burning desire to do something from when they were a kid. What was it when you were nine? What flipped that switch?
Jason Carman:
It's a weird, I think I have a full story of it. I think it just takes a few minutes to tell, but I really like the story because I think it properly, honestly shares the events that occurred and the psychology wrapped in with that rather than some, I watched a movie and I knew that I wanted to be the best filmmaker of all time. It's nothing like that. It's totally, I think it's a funny story and very, I don't think there's any psychological warping that happens. Essentially, it started originally because of laziness, which is really funny because I don't think laziness is normally a big part of my day-to-day anymore. Basically in fifth grade, a teacher had a book report that was required. You could either write it or uniquely, I think the school was trying to be more cutting-edge, you can make a video report instead.
I was like, "Oh, that sounds easier than writing a five-page paper," which is hilarious. They're on because every day I write five pages now for scripting and things, and I love writing now, but back then I was afraid of it. I made this video, it was really bad, but I became, there's a moment in the video where I added a little sound effect, like an MP3, really low quality sound effect of a bomb going off with a paper mache bomb I made. It was a prop and it was a whole thing. I was excited about the magic of combining two different parts of that process and making it, and together they were sort of a stronger whole. That process just set me off into the interest of making little videos with the USB flip cam recorder. I was lucky enough to go to Italy, I think that summer with my parents, and we took a few family trips and I was a kid, and that was, I think, the highlight one.
I just remember filming everything and the culture shock of going to Europe as a kid when you've never been there before and you have no idea what the culture is. It's so many things that capture your mind and are incredibly interesting. Like, "Oh my gosh, why are there so many naked people everywhere in statues?" I remember as a child, that was particularly interesting to me, and I was like, "Why is this happening?" All of the, yeah, I could go on about that, but it really started out this love for me of just filming things. Then I had an uncle who was a technologist, and he and my dad both sort of put this imprint on me of just storytelling being a valuable thing. I mean, my dad would tell me stories going to sleep every night as a little kid, and he was sort of like a generative AI back then.
I mean that in the sense of, I don't think he would take offense to this, they weren't these carefully crafted stories. He was sort of just making it up every next sentence and to the point where he'd start falling asleep and then the stories would start not making sense. I'm like, "Dad, I don't understand why the superhero was about to save the woman, and then she turned into a crab," and he was like, "Oh, sorry, I fell asleep." It's like, okay. Then my uncle was a big fan of technology and building a fiber optic network in rural northern California and was just a big technologist. That's definitely where I think I caught the technology bug at a young age. He, on the flip side of that, was a big believer in the value of storytelling. I remember one day I told him that I wanted to maybe try out some green screen stuff and my family's home desktop computer was not going to cut it.
I don't think it would even have the ability to stack two video layers on top of each other, the low amount of compute it had. I go to my uncle and I think I'm 10 or 11, and I'm like, "Hey, how do I do this?" He was like, "Oh, well, you need to go tell your parents you want a MacBook Pro 13-inch 2012 or 2013 edition. I was like, okay. I went to my parents and they were like, "That's a $3,000 computer. You're 10. No," but I think this is the next part that they say is what I think set me on the course I'm on. Was that, "No, but we'll help you save up for it," and so then two years of selling lemonade during the summers and mowing lawns and being a janitor in their dental practice. Over about a year and a half, two years of saving money, I had the money for the computer, and then I went and bought it at the Apple Store in Sacramento, and it was just Christmas for me.
It was like this insane feeling. I think then when I loaded the footage that I shot that then week, I learned about the computer and had it sitting on the flip camcorder for two years. I think that part might be made up, but that's how I remember it, but hey, who knows? Loaded in the footage and it just didn't work. The green screen footage, it wasn't lit properly. It was not working. I think in combination with saving up for it for two years, wanting to do this thing all the while and then it not working, sort of set me on this obsessive, I want to figure it out path versus just immediately downloading Minecraft and playing video games and not learning all the CGI visual effects stuff, I then went on to learn after as a result of the frustration and interest and how do I make this thing work.
I think that weird combination of events is what lead me here. Then as time's gone on, I've learned and grown more interest in the art and the depth of storytelling in the business side of how do you make a new film studio in the 21st century that works and is successful and big? Anyways, but I think that's the initial spark for sure.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, I mean, there's so much to learn there, right? Because overcoming obstacles is how you get better at a craft. I mean, it's part of our ancient DNA, I think, see problem, try to figure out, and then you continue to try to figure out, because once you solve the first problem, you get a better problem, and then the better problem is harder, and then you get a much better problem. It's like the line from Game of Thrones, I change it to failure is a ladder because each time you're climbing up that ladder, you're getting better problems, which makes you better. A lot of people lack that sort of impetus. It's kind of like high agency versus like, "Oh, I confronted it once. Fuck it, it didn't work. Close the MacBook. I'm going to play World of Warcraft or whatever." To me though, I love that it's almost a set piece because I was writing in my notes as I was getting ready to chat with you. Your origin story is great. You're the plucky underdog, becoming the rebel alliance leader against the entrenched antagonists. You have a heroic mission.
Jason Carman:
That's kind of I like though. I like that those words are great, and I love that idea. I think it's perhaps a little grandiose for what my mission is, but I love it nonetheless, so I take it with honor.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
The other thing you say, I mean, it sounds like we're quantumly entangled because I think I out lazy you, I think I'm possibly the laziest person that I know anywhere, and it's like the old German or Prussian general. He was asked, "How do you assign your soldiers?" One of his remarks was, "Well, if they're lazy and dumb, right to the front, cannon fodder. If they're lazy and clever, I put them at the top of the highest command," because people find out the easiest way to get anything done.
Jason Carman:
That's something I tell my team the time is that I think there's a Bill Gates quote that's similar to how he sort of thought about building Microsoft. This idea of laziness wins because you're going to find systems and efficient ways to do things. I tell my team this all the time, "Find a lazier way to do it." We have a few incredible people on the team. One guy who is at Pixar for 25 years now, and now he works with us, which is dream come true. It's so cool.
I remember trying to explain this concept of like, "You're trying too hard to make it look good. You got to find a lazier way to go about it." He was like, I think at first he was like, "I got to quit. This is not a good place for me to work as an artist." Then I think over time he realized, "Oh wait, wait. No, no, no. The point is that I get to do more art in finding a lazier way to go about this thing." Lazy has all this negative baggage with it, but in fact, it can be a great force motivator.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, and that's interesting. We were chatting before we started the official podcast and talking about this is an interesting time for you because you're literally building out a team. How's that going and what do you look for? When I put a team together, I always try to hire people who have cognitive abilities that are very different than my own or creative abilities that are very different than my own because I'm loaded with blind spots. We are all loaded with blind spots. I think one of the better ways is to find that person who isn't, right? "You see all the stuff, I don't, will you please work for me or with me?" How are you proceeding on that building out of the team?
Jason Carman:
I spent quite a bit of time thinking about it, and when I did S3, the docu-series, exploring all these deep tech companies, deep tech requires a rare level of commitment and work ethic from its employees to build rockets, satellites, and robots that work. I mean, you're working an incredible amount of hours on the weekends with a high potential of failure. That was my bar going into it just from immersion of not being in Hollywood or looking at other jobs where there's a nine to five expectation or something like this.
I mean, I'll caveat everything about to say with, I don't know, let's check back in a few years or five years. So far I think it's working, but I think number one is we look for people that have exceptional ability in portfolio work because we're mostly hiring people that have worked either adjacent to the industry in film and media creation and in general, we're looking for full stack filmmakers, which sounds like a very tech term, but the intention is that you're not just an editor, you're not just a director. You can do multiple things or you've demonstrated the ability to learn multiple things quickly and you're not just a part in the team. I think an issue with one of many issues with the Hollywood model today is that people right now are incentivized to take, they're paid for how long they're staying in a period of production, whether it's development, pre-production, production, post-production, and marketing. They're paid for their time there. How does that incentivize you to move through that ...
Jason Carman:
They're paid for their time there. So how does that incentivize you to move through that quickly or efficiently at cost? It doesn't. It incentivizes you to stay there and get your hours up. And so, "Oh no, there's another pre-production delay. Oh no, there's another delay." It's like they're getting paid more, of course they would do that. It makes sense. And so I think the ability to have... We want people that can work at every stack of that pipeline and have multiple skills is one.
The next thing we do is once you've identified them, we're trying to show them how this is their dream job. And it's easy for me to believe that because I've worked at multiple companies and I've been lucky to work at multiple companies that were, at some point in my career, dream jobs for me. However, I'm a kid that grew up wanting to watch Star Wars and wanted to be a visual effects artist and make the next Star Wars. And so going to apply for a company that says that they want to do that is exceedingly rare and especially in such a foundational way where a conversation at launch can lead to a new faction in the intergalactic war of the series we're writing or a new design decision for the architecture of that faction or whatever.
And so, it's really easy to sell the company to really talented people based on the idea of like, "No, no, no, no, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to build a company that's trying to make the next generation of great sci-fi films." Because that, I know, it just doesn't come along ever. And so that's easy. Once that's out of the way, we're onto the third thing, which is we try to scare people before we hire them. And we want them to know how hard it would be to work here. We don't sugarcoat it. We don't try to hide it. We tell them that we have a SpaceX expectation.
At least in the first five years of building the company, the company is your life in that this is an incredibly rare opportunity to work at a place that wants to make freaking sci-fi movies and have that make money and make sense on a business level. It requires a rare level of work ethic too. The original Star Wars is made for 17 million, mostly outside of the Hollywood studio system. And Lucas thought he would do it for 3 million. And I think if a few things had gone differently, he could have done it even cheaper. And so, the capital efficiency story and the story of working exceedingly incredibly hard to do that is really important.
And so, we try to scare people and let them know the expectation is that you're going to work crazy hard. There's basically, you're on call at all hours and that anything less than that won't be tolerated because that's what we require at this stage. One day I don't think we'll be quite that militaristic, but right now I think it's what's required to make this work and make it make sense. What I've learned now after doing this for eight months is that there's a balance between the SpaceX kind of burn out all your employees' way, and the artists don't work well with that.
And it's not to say, oh, artists are softer than aerospace engineers. But it's more to say that the work is a little different. If you're trying to create art, there's things that are somewhere to engineering. In engineering, you're only enemy is the laws of physics, or not even enemy but your constraint. In art, there are no constraints. So as a result, it's a very different kind of work process to get to something that's really quality. It's not necessarily just about throw the editor or the engineer at the problem until it's done and sit on them until it's done and really burn them out. You can't really do that quite the same way. It's like a different approach.
And so, that's where it's like we're hiring people that want to do that. You cannot make somebody who doesn't want to work crazy hours and do these things we just talked about do that, I don't think. I think you have to already want that. That's what I wanted when I was working in other places. I think every person we've hired now wants that too. I'm pleased to say the only thing I've had to do as a manager and a leader in the past eight months is tell certain employees to slow down and sleep and actually save themselves, which I think is a good sign.
Another funny little quirk about our company is that we require every single employee to be an editor. Which is, I think, unique in that Elon has this whole thing of the factory is the product, not the Tesla, not the rocket, not the car, not the rocket, it's the factory. I similarly believe that is true with editing for film. You could give a great editor bad footage and he can make a great edit. You could give great footage to a bad editor and you would get a very bad edit. So I think editing is the bottleneck. It's the most impactful part of the process, and it's the part that we've spent the most time investing people and processes and infrastructure into to really make sure we can grow out more. And we're always looking to hire really incredible editors. They're rare, because again, we want full stack editors, which means you could do a bunch of things.
I think that's most of the hiring process. Yeah, it's really incredible work ethic, a rare level of work ethic and commitment. We're not looking for people who want a job. We're looking for people who want to join a cult and build the next Disney, the next Lucasfilm. And who, when we say that, we can tell that they want to do that because they start jittering and that means they get it. It means that I'm just like them, they're just like me. From childhood we've grown up looking at these movies and be like, "Oh my God, it'd be an honor to make those movies." And so we're hiring people like that who can learn really fast too. And that's one thing, one point I think I'll say is the team we've brought on, our foundational team is incredible. I mean just from the learning right alone.
And I can call it each individual member of the team over six months... So at the beginning of six months, my lifelong producer and friend... I've been able to hire three lifelong friends who in middle school, high school, we ran a little movie making cult, I will say, where we made a bunch of short films, even a feature film. And then we all kind of went to college and said, "Okay, one day we'll be back together and we'll do this for real." And that's happening now. One of those people is my producer and she didn't know Photoshop. Didn't even know how to open it. Or she probably knew that, but now she designs all of our merchandising and our apparel. And if you look at our apparel, it's incredible. She is the only one that's doing that. There's no AI. It's just her and incredible work ethic and learning rate.
Our composer, also a lifelong friend, didn't know how to edit at all. Now he edits tens of shorts or vertical videos per month that are going viral and helping us reach our main target Gen Z audience. I could go on about every single member of the team. It has this incredible ability to learn new technical skills to make incredible stuff. And I think that that's really important, especially as we look to make the next industrial light and magic for ourselves. We look to make the next visual effects company, the next editorial company to make our movies.
And so the ability to have a team that can learn technical processes to make art really well is really important. Sorry, I hope that's not too long of an answer, but I think it's pretty much all right now what I'm focused on. Is who are the right first 10 people at the company that will, as we scale to a hundred people in the future, hopefully it takes a while to do that, I don't want to speed run that, they've set the culture, the tone and the level of quality of work that we want to see going forward.
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:33:04]
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, there's so much there in what you've just said. I also, kind of heard Timothée Chalamet in you. I loved his speech. I loved his speech where it's like, "You know what? I am not going to be up here and be humble bragging. I want to be the best. I really aspire to greatness." And I love that aspect of what you're building because you do too. I had the opportunity to meet several of the people that you mentioned. And Star Wars, so I met him, my kids went to school with Ron Howard's kids. And so, he would have us over for New Year's Eve every year. And essentially there was always one surprise guest.
And so I find myself sat next to the director, auteur of Star Wars, and I'm sitting there and I'm asking him a bunch of questions because I grew up on Star Wars. Star Wars was my Matrix when I still remember standing online and you could feel the energy just because of the buzz from the movie. But one of the things that amazed me about him was he has an incredibly competitive streak. I would ask him, and I will not name the other directors I asked him about, but wow blunt and like, " That guy doesn't understand that this is show business." And then he underlines with his hand, business. And I see that in you too because I love the fact that you're already talking merchandise, right?
Lucas, I don't know if it's an apocryphal story or not, but he nailed it when he made the deal with the movie company. No, you know what? I'll just take the merchandise. I'll just take the merchandise. And of course that created such a fortune. Another thing that I found interesting as I deal with creatives is that idea that you have to almost create artificial constraints. Like Lucas, 3 million, "I can make this for 3 million." And it ends up being more, but what if he said, "No, I want a hundred million," or whatever the equivalent back then would've been, probably wouldn't have get made.
And so going into it with, "Here's my minimum viable product," so to speak, to use founder words. I just love that kind of energy in creative people because I think your call out on the difference between engineers and creatives is bang on. I deal with both. We have verticals. All of our verticals are areas that I love and that I think have huge arbitrage opportunities. So Infinite Films, why did I do Infinite Films? Because I love movies and I always have loved movies, and it was pissing me off that I wasn't seeing any movies that were inspiring. I wasn't seeing any movies that were like, "Hey, you know what? There's a lot of geniuses in the world, and guess what, we've got this new thing called the internet where we can connect with them, we can find them."
That's why we founded the fellowship. We can find and fund geniuses at a level that was unthinkable just like 15 years ago. And so, what do you think? Because I also grew up watching in reruns, I will admit, but Star Trek. And Star Trek was really, really, at least from my view, kind of an optimistic take on the future. And then, I kind of thought about it and I was like, "When did sci-fi turn? When did it go from..." Because early sci-fi was really optimistic, really optimistic. And then it seemed to me that between, I don't know, I think the assassination of Kennedy was a big deal. I think because that speech, "We will go to the moon." That kind of fire energy and meanwhile the engineers are sitting there going, "Well, we don't have any of the tools that we need to get to the moon."
But they got so inspired and then of course him being assassinated, then you get the oil embargoes by OPEC. And by the way, I went from age 10 to 20 in the 1970s. And good and bad, the '70s were the worst fucking decade of all time, except you got Star Wars, you got a lot of cool stuff. But then you also had the oil embargo by OPEC that leads to Soylent Green. Soylent Green is people. And then it just got so dark, right? 9/11 happens. We get Children of Men, we get all of this just like you might as well just kill me now because the future is going to just suck. What are your thoughts? What do you think about how... Because I am sensing in your work and other work, a real turn and I'm really excited about it. I'm really rooting for it. But what do you think? Is it just part of our... Because we are feeling creatures who also happen to think, we are not necessarily thinking people or creatures that also happen to feel. Emotions have a 4 million year head start on stories but stories, I believe, and I want to get your take on this, really have to appeal to emotion, I think. What do you think?
Jason Carman:
They have to. And oh my gosh, there's way too many things that I'd love to comment and talk about on what you just said. And I think uniquely... So I spent the weekend, an hour, the weekend I got away from work and just drove kind of south and re-listened to one of my favorite interviews with Lucas. Because okay, this is where I'll get spicy. I've been thinking a lot about how spicy will I publicly be about some of my opinions on Hollywood. And I've pretty much lying and I'm like, "No, I'm going to be fully honest about how I feel." I think I've thought really hard about, for many years, what's wrong with Hollywood? Why are movies worse? Movies take longer, cost more money and are worse than ever before. Why is that happening?
And I think there's sort of two top level answers. The first answer is that, oh, the studio executives are greedy, which I think is a very obvious thing to think. And then the second one that this one really upset me the most was the response, critical response and the WGAs or the Writers Guild's response to CGI and visual effects. And to take a step back here, when I was a kid after I... So I get the computer and I learned Blender, which is a pretty exciting week to talk about this because back then in 2011, 2012 Blender was this sort of new open source software. It was about to go through this big UI/UX change, Blender 2.7. It was an open source software made in Europe and it basically was made by some guys who were like, "This is ridiculous that all the 3D software costs tens of thousands of dollars per license seat. We should make an open source 3D software that anyone can use to make movies."
The industry didn't just say that that wasn't possible. They downright laughed at it. It's an incredible week. And so, I went on to go and learn Blender, be a huge supporter of it. And I remember even as a stupid 12-year-old, 13-year-old, being like, "I'm going to one day make a movie studio that uses only Blender and revenue and profits from it will support open source plugin development and tools we'll build for ourselves. We'll also make open source to support the software that supported me in our journey." And now in five years ago, Blender starts to become a legit software that more people are using in industry. Originally, people just start using it because it's the only free software that can convert between all the file types. That's the reason they're using it. And they start using, they're like, "Wait, it's really good actually."
And then this week, Blender just won the best animated picture at the Oscars for a open source Blender movie. The amount of emotion that that gives me having been an early fan, going from, " This is a stupid piece of software, it'll never do any real work," to just a decade later winning an Oscar, it gets me incredibly emotional. And to take a step back again, I wanted to be a CGI visual effects artist. That was my first actual job I wanted in the industry. I didn't really want to be a writer or director. I was obsessed with just the art of creating digital images, fell in love with it. And Star Wars was like Lucas built ILM just five miles away from me over here to make the visual effects for his movie. I was like, "I want to work at ILM one day. That's my dream."
And around the time I'm doing that and really interested in this, Life of Pi comes out and it's this incredible movie about that story. It's got this tiger in it that looks photo real. It's incredible. The Tiger made the movie in a way, and they win best visual effects, as they should, with 11 days of money left in the bank account. The team for that movie, Rhythm and Hues, relocated three times across Canada and the United States to take advantage of tax incentives every time for the studio. And due to the contracting that happened, the studio did not have to pay them the overages, the overtime fees that the visual effects company included or visual effects company incurred to make a first ever super realistic tiger.
So the film goes on to be pretty damn successful, win Oscars and then Rhythm and Hues goes out business because the studio refused to pay the overages. Now that I'm a business owner running a studio, I can understand the studio's plight a little bit more of like, you made an agreement, this is how long it took you to do it, you didn't do it. On the other hand, all studios are really optimizing for is trying to win Oscars. The amount of money they spend in the Oscar campaigns to do this is insane. So when you have a film that does it, not then respecting and paying back the people that did it is really tragic.
So point being around then I realized that, okay, we're living in a very broken ecosystem where that's happening. And then I started to look deeper and I realized that the visual effects companies have been trying to unionize for a while just so that they could have the simplicity of like, "Hey, we don't want to uproot our family every few months to take advantage of a 20% tax advantage and incentive to make freaking movies." We make movies really, we can't figure out how to just have our artists live in the same place and build a family and a community there?
And then I realized that there was a specific group of people that were trying to stop visual effects. They weren't supporting visual effects in CGI. They were in fact trying to block them from doing unionization. And they were the reason, in my opinion, that movies are bad. And that's the WGA. They four times have blocked visual effects from creating their own guild. Every other part of the industry has a guild, directors, producers, writers, cinematographers, the visual effects, and CGI doesn't. And they use this, they made up this bullshit lie that the reason movies started getting bad in the 2020 times is because of CGI, which is ridiculous. It's not true.
And this starts to catch on in mainstream and people think like, "Oh, it's a bad movie because the CGI is bad." First of all, the CGI is rarely bad anymore. And even back then it wasn't. The writing is bad. And so anyways, I go on this tangent to say that my general theory now is, going back to that initial question of why do most movies suck today? How do you fix Hollywood? If you could change one thing, what's the one thing that you do to increase the quality of movies, and maybe you get to even increase the capital efficiency of movies too at the same time? What's the one [inaudible 00:53:45]? Do you unionize CGI and visual effects workers? Do you remove greedy studio executives? What do you do?
And for a while, basically what I've landed on is that you need to... Whose fault is it? I pretty squarely landed on it's the fault of directors and writers and producers today. And that we need more writers and directors and producers who treat making a movie like they're building a company rather than making a movie. The directors of old, I'm talking about, not even old really, but all of them, all the greats that you can think of built businesses to make their movies. That's how dedicated they were to this. Lucas founded companies, Spielberg founded companies. They did multiple at one time. Kubrick built his own editing facilities and a trailer that could follow him around the sets.
They did outlandish things that if a normal director today would be like, "Oh, but my latte is not here by 10:00 AM and my Hollywood... Oh, and the script's not that good and we need to hire five more writers to make it good." The quality of the director today in Hollywood has just plummeted compared to what directors of the 20th century were doing to make the fricking movies. And so I think you have to have a fully verticalized... My theory is that it's like you need the director to also be a producer that's own money is on stake, meaning that it's my money making the movies I'm making. So I'm very motivated to do it in a capital efficient way.
And that limitation of I don't have an infinite budget is what makes the movie good. It incentivizes me to want to figure it out. Sometimes you'll run over budget, sometimes you'll be below budget but it's the fact that it's my money on the line too that is motivating me on that. I'm a big fan of making sure that your value alignment is square, right? Whether it's an employee or a founder or whoever. And so I am pretty firmly set that the reason Hollywood sucks today is that we don't have enough directors and producers that are taking risks in this way. You see it a lot now in the art house community. A24 has done a wonderful job of enabling this where they're like blank check. Not even a blank check but "Here's your budget. We're not going to touch how you do it."
Versus I'm terrified when we go to start making our first real movies of what Hollywood's going to try to make me do to make our movies. We're going to be like, " Okay, great. We've agreed on a five or 10 million production budget for our first big sci-fi movie. Awesome." And then they're going to be like, "Oh, well we want four line producers who've made sci-fi movies like that before." They're going to get in there and they're going to tear up my budget. They're going to be like, "No, you can't. There's no way you can do the visual effects for under 2 million." Like, "Yes, I can. Get out of my way and let me do it."
And so this is what I think about the most about. And I think the reason we've got here is because we started, I think, in the past 20 years, directors started to, I think, forget that movies are a new emerging thing and a new sort of technology too, and a new art form. And as a result, started to think about it way too much as a fine art and less of craft in a kind of practical art form that requires every art form. You have typography, you have painting, you have music. Film is the ultimate, it's like the masterwork in a sense because it requires every other art can come into it. And frankly, nobody knows how to make a good movie still. We've made 3 million, or I think just a little over 2 million movies in the history of mankind. We made 300 million books since the printing press.
There's not that many good books still today. Great books, legendary books, there's not that many. And we barely know how to make... We now are starting to understand how would you write a good book, but nobody knows how to actually make a good movie still, this is still uncharted territory in a way. For a long time I started growing up thinking like, " Oh, I'm bad. I'm not a good director or writer for being so interested in the business side of things or the financial side of things or wanting to build a visual effects company to make my movie."
And then it's like I go back and I listen to the greats and that's all they're thinking about. It's like the quote of when painters get together, they don't talk about paintings, they talk about the cost of turpentine. And you listen to these things about these interviews with Lucas, that's all they're talking about. They're talking budget, they're talking about schedules, they're talking about the business logistics side because they realize that is the movie. So I don't know, I could go down the tangent of this, but I share that to say that's my whole belief at this point. Is that you have to fully have a vertical, a single entity company person needs to own that film.
This model we live in now where we've made the film business an industry where there's clear jobs and ins and outs for the creatives is an abomination of what it should be and what it used to be. And it's why movies are going down. It's like when did sci-fi turn? I think as much as what you said, it's a cultural response, but I think it's like all I would say on that, I think it's a very simple answer. Is that it's a hell of a lot easier to make a movie that is scary or negative that feels realistic and feels real and like a good movie that's scary and negative and pessimistic than the opposite.
It is hard as hell to make an optimistic movie or to make one that properly makes you feel good. And so, my opinion is that people that make movies that are negative or, "Oh, it's real life and look at these things." That's easy. Real life is very dark and hard. We have a negative bias built into our DNA. It's making Forrest Gump that's nearly impossible. Making a good movie that feels optimistic and doesn't just come off as corny and stupid, it's not natural. It's really hard to do that. And that's the calling of artists, that's the calling of filmmakers in my opinion. And so whenever I see another Arthouse film or another film that's just negative, I'm just like, "It's easy. It's not hard to make a movie that's negative like that." It's hard to make one that is anything but is sort of my view.
And so I think as the film industry became more of an industry, as we started to delete the lines and borders between us and become more of an interconnected world, we're more exposed to this negative, the reality that can be very negative at times. And movies start to go that direction too. And because movies get easier to make with technology, the barrier to entry is lower, the amount of pain you have to go through to make movies is lower. And as a result, we have directors and writers and creatives that just aren't built like they were used to and aren't the same level of great and grit that they used to be. Because I think once you go through the great and grit to make something great, why would you make anything other than the best you possibly could? So that's a really long not clear answer or not clean answer. But I think that's kind my view and answer to all of it, I guess.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, there is so much that we could talk for another three hours, just like you just said, right? Because I completely agree. Another maxim of mine is I look for things to root for as opposed to against. Because finding things to root against is so fucking easy. Literally it's just like shooting fish in a barrel. Finding things to root for is a lot harder. Making movies like you make, right? I'm convinced that the power inherent in making those things to root for in a movie, it is overwhelming. For example, when the chopsticks caught the ship, I defy you to find anyone of any political persuasion unless they're in a death cult somewhere who did not get the shivers when they saw that happen. How long was that? It was like, if you watch the longer version, it's like 90 seconds.
Jason Carman:
And so this is the crazy part about this is that we made our first frontier film, which is a new category of film, at least that's the way I'm thinking about it. Is it's not a feature film, it's not a short film, it's not a documentary. This thing that we're trying to pioneer, this frontier film, our first one was about space, specifically New Space, which I worked in for two years. And my whole goal, and I started feeling pretty stupid about this goal by the end of the movie, but now I feel pretty good about it, was like when I joined this satellite company that is now just a block away from me, 200,000 square foot most amazing office in San Francisco, looks like the Avengers HQ and they're building satellites in an urban city that go to space and provide internet for people super affordably, I didn't know anything about the industry that enabled that or that this company was a part of.
And so I had to read a bunch of books, talk to a bunch of people, and really do a lot of research and just kind of be in it for two years to understand, "Okay, this is what New Space is," what it came from, all this stuff. And so what I set out and then doing S3 a year after that, I realized there's 50 New Spaces. There's 50 different industries and revolutions that are going on in these industries right now that is a mix of new technological enablement as well as just problems with what we're talking about in the film industry, this decrepitation of artistry and quality in business sense has happened to every industry in the past 20, 30 years. And every industry is trying to have its own little revolution right now.
And so I realized, "Oh, that's what frontier films need to do." I wanted to basically, if anyone was like me two, three years ago when I joined Astranis, "What the hell is new space? How many rockets have we launch?" Just all these obvious sort of things once you're in it that aren't obvious if you're not in it. I wanted to make a film for each of these industries that you could just hand to someone and say, "Hey, it's okay if you know nothing about this thing. By the time you're done with this, you'll understand the basics, what's going on today in the next 10, 20 years, why you should be excited and why you should be excited about it."
And so it's kind made for the lay audience because that's who we all are before we learn this thing. And I got the coolest piece of feedback on it where there's a friend's, I think, parents or cousins or uncle, some family relative, was living in Texas near SpaceX and their relation to SpaceX mentally was like, "Oh yeah, it's pretty cool. We see rockets kind of go up and come down. Don't know what they're doing. I hope they're not littering, I guess," was kind of their view on this.
And they sent the film to them and they watched the film. They canceled their Friday night normal movie night, or I guess they didn't cancel, they just watched our film instead. And they called their family member after and be like, "Oh my God, this is crazy. This is happening right next to us? Why did nobody tell us? Why didn't we know about this? This is insane." And now they're the biggest fans of what's going on. And it just made me so emotional and happy to think like, "Okay, yes, we did it. That's what we want to be able to do with these frontier films." And the point being, I say that to say in response to what you're talking about, people just don't know why it's a big deal.
And I think on the nonfiction side of our business, because we want to be the best science and technology storytellers so we can be the best science fiction storytellers and it's a virtuous cycle, I think. To do that we just have to tell people. And it's weird because you immerse yourselves in these worlds of new space to tell these stories and then by the end of it you're like kind repeating this obvious information but you're immersed in for years, it's like, duh. But you have to remember, "No, no, no, you didn't know this a few years ago." And that this is information that the other 8 billion people just don't have and needs to be packaged in a clear way. So point being, it's just the information of the story, the basic level of here's the story of this rock and why this thing landing in these Mechazilla arms is a big deal.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, I love the idea. It's also a very optimistic take and I share it, which is you can't get mad at people if they don't know what's going on. We have a series that gets interrupted all the time because we're working on so many other things, but we call it the Great Reshuffle. Right now we are going through the biggest transformation in I think maybe all of human history, and every day I wake up thinking I am so incredibly lucky to be alive at this point in human history because wow, the more you see.
And that's why I got so excited about you and your application and watching your movies because I love the fact that they do exactly as you said, they introduced... There were a lot of your movies, and I've watched most of them, there were a lot of your movies where I like to read about a lot of different things and see a lot of other things, but honestly, you introduced me to several companies I'd never heard of and I'm like, "Holy shit, man, this is really amazing." Has there been a bleed-through from when you make the movies about the cutting edge companies? Are you taking away principles that you're seeing at that company and building them into your own?
Jason Carman:
Yes. I mean, the original reason I started doing S3 back then, which is now we're kind of bringing back S3 in a way, but also continuing its heritage and the same idea through Frontier Films, although we have a lot of problems with it that we're trying to fix and we're actively thinking about... With it. But the reason I did it originally was just out of personal self-curiosity of like, okay, I never knew that this crazy company Astranis existed. Are there other companies like that? And I think I would like to work on a company like this or build things like this that create great things that give a lot back to humanity and make a better, brighter, abundant future. Who's doing that? Where are they doing that? What can I learn from them? It was a fully purely selfish interest when I started the project. And so yes, I'm doing it now and I'm doing it for future things I want to build too and looking at these other companies and thinking, what are the... Can I learn vicariously through them? Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, and kind of back to the overall goal to make incredibly great science fiction movies. But first, let's understand the science. Josh Wolf over at Lux said something to me that really stuck with me. He goes, "I love science fiction because it turns into science faction," and the idea, again, going back to what do we want to build? What kind of future do we want? And we all have different takes on that, right? You, you're young, you want to build your future and the future for your generation, which I love. But me, I have six grandchildren. I want them to live in that world and I want to do everything I can to nudge the world toward that. That's a very arrogant statement, but like-
Jason Carman:
No, that's what... It's sad that we have to say that, but I think one of the great principles, one thing I've been thinking about a lot is what are the common optimistic sci-fi principles that come from stories like that? What changes? Because I'm a new deep science fiction fan, I've been a fan of Star Wars and bits of Star Trek, and in the idea of being in space since I was a little kid, but I was not a space nerd or buff or geek. I didn't know the difference between Leo and Geo a few years ago. I'm brand new to it, which is wonderful because I'm able to take this sort of beginner's mind. I have the skill of my craft and the ability to make a good image and a film, but I'm brand new to learning sci-fi in space in a way, like less than five years.
And one of the principles I'm starting to see that sci-fi uniquely does, much like history, is it gives you the ability to think beyond your lifespan. And that's I think one of the most important tenants that we need to get into the heads of people alive today, especially our children, is stop thinking about just yourself and the problems you're staring at. Think about the problems of tomorrow and the opportunities of tomorrow. People often criticize the Mars people who want to go to Mars and set up a base there or terraform Mars, and they think it's crazy, but it's like you forget we built cathedrals over 300 years, multiple generations of builders built these incredible buildings in Europe and they were just buildings. We're not even talking about a second home for humanity. Why wouldn't we literally move heaven and earth to make that happen for our children and our children's children and so on?
And I think that sci-fi fans, as soon as you start reading a few of these great sci-fi books, your mind immediately starts thinking like, "Okay, I'm not going to live to see this, but we should still do it. And still realizing that it's still worth spending the money and the time to do these incredible things for our kids and our kids' kids and so on." And so I think that that's one of the unique things that great sci-fi does, is that longevity view that it's beyond yourself, I think.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, and that's a really transitive belief as well. Because for example, my old world of asset management, the best time horizon you can have is infinite because then don't, one of the biggest problems in people trying to manage their money, they all have different goals, but essentially they don't want to be sleeping rough and they want to have a reasonably good chance to help their kids, their grandkids, et cetera. But what really happens, again, back to the we're feeling creatures that also happen to think, hyperbolic discounting is the number one problem with people trying to make decisions. It's like they only think about right now. And that is useful in certain domains in storytelling or trying to get somebody to take an action immediately.
But if you bring hyperbolic discounting to everything, you're fucked because essentially your world is what you're seeing right now and only today. And if it happens to be awful, like in markets, if it's a down market, then "Oh, the world's going to end and oh, this is it. This is the big one." And if it's a boom market, "I got to get more of that." But it goes across domains.
If you think about the fullness of time, if you think about what could possibly be, most of it's going to certainly happen after I'm dead and gone, after I've shuffled off this mortal coil, but while I'm here, it makes me actually feel good to be focusing on this stuff because literally, if I can make the world like 0.0001% a little better for not only my grandkids, but for everyone's grandkids, for your generation. And the other thing that I like is, especially your generation, just listening to what you said about the great filmmakers of yore, everything is cyclical. And so you get these things where you had those people doing those things. Then, as you say, it becomes an industry. I'm making air quotes here. Then it just kind goes down, down, down, down, kind of Kafkaesque metamorphosis.
But then a whole new group, a whole new generation comes along and says, "What the actual fuck? Let's reinvent." And so it's kind of like it's reinvention, but it's also remix. You can see you now have some history. When they first invented movie cameras, what did they film? Plays, because they didn't think of any other way to use it. And it's easy for us to think, "Oh, what dummies they were." We do exactly the same stuff. When a new technology comes along, we find an analog in the past, and that's the way we use it.
Jason Carman:
It makes me think of generative AI. The first thing people are thinking to do is like, "Oh, we'll replace movies." And it's like, "No, you're not. It's not going to work." I'm very bearish on the idea of AI technology just replacing filmmakers and movies outright. It took me a while to get there, and I still have some nights where I'm like, "Is that true?" But I think we can't imagine generative media is going to be a totally different thing than interactive media or just normal entertainment media. So I 100% agree with that idea.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, and if you think about it as a tool, generative AI is going to be an amazing tool. It already is an amazing tool, but where people get tripped up, I think, it's like we are going to be, over the next 10 years, there's going to be a tsunami of slop. Slop movies, slop writing, slop music, slop fucking everything.
Jason Carman:
The sloppocalypse.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
The sloppocalypse. And what is going to be the thing that is going to make the next gen of the big successes get that success? It's going to be their vision, their humanity, et cetera. So it's like the old saw AI isn't going to take your job, a human using AI probably will if you don't do it. And it's just like, I've been dreaming of AI since I was younger than you are now. I'm a journal keeper, and I found a writing when I was 22 about the Alpha Machine Man, and Micro Man, and I was like, "I can hardly wait."
Jason Carman:
Yeah. It's happening, it's finally... I mean, it's so interesting. One thing I kind of wanted to ask you about, especially in thinking about this kind of talking about hyperbolic discounting or negative bias is the name of your show, infinite, infinite, Infinite Loops. What are some of the other interesting ones that you've come across? These negative infinite loops or I guess positive ones if those exist, but hyperbolic discounting seems like a very clear one, but in doing this show, what are some of the other ones that stick with you or you immediately... Some of these common tenets that you, yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
So Infinite Loops, I'm a huge fan of Douglas Hofstadter, and I was rereading, I Am a Strange Loop, and I was thinking about it and thinking, well, basically a lot of lives get screwed up by getting caught in infinite recursive loops. And so for example, if we are constantly living in the past, if we are constantly obsessing over some event in our life that didn't go the way we wanted it, and we just keep going back to it, you start this negative compounding that then creates a habit that then creates the way you think and the way you think determines how you act. And so you get in this negative downward loop.
But then I thought, "Well wait a minute. There can be infinite upward loops too." If you start thinking rather about possibilities and ways that we can become better as people, as individual people, as groups, as societies, the world itself, basically what you've got to do is talk to smart people like you who are doing incredible things to give people the, "Oh, I can start thinking about that." And then if I'm lucky, they'll start really thinking about that and that becomes an upward trajectory for that infinite loop.
And try to remind them on the downward, because compounding works both ways, and we always talk about positive compounding. Negative compounding is really a bitch because if you continue to repeat the same type of behavior that leads to negative results, it just literally, it's a life destroyer. But also the other thing that inspired the name is I'm a huge fan of history and it's like Pearl Jam, "To and fro, the pendulum throws. We are here and now, then we're gone to and fro to and fro." And if you just look at these sort of cyclic infinite loops and you just start to dissect them, you see that you can break out of negative ones and you can reinforce positive ones.
And the way to do that is to have a completely, I joke to you, it wasn't a joke. This podcast is based on the movie, My Dinner with Andre, which was made in 1981, and it's literally two people talking. And I loved that movie when I saw it for the first time and I got bullied into doing this podcast by a very agentic young guy who worked for me at OSAM. And then I'm like, "Okay, but here's what you're going to have to deal with." And so I'm trying to just remind people, give them a peek at yeah, we all know there's horrible, horrible things going on in the world. That's a given. That's always been a given throughout history. If, however, we were going to quantify it, we are living at the best possible time in history. If you understand history, it really sucked for most people.
Jason Carman:
Yeah, not a great time.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Not a great time. Really bad, right?
Jason Carman:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And so the fact that we get caught in these kind of negative downward loops takes our eyes off the much bigger picture, which is if you look and you see those graphs, it's because they do the graph wrong. They're using an analog graph and they're like, "Yeah, it just bumps along and it's a line down here and then it goes straight." No, if you did a law graph, you would see that yes, there are these cycles that can be upward trajectory or downward trajectory, but we've all got to do our part there because Rome fell, 1,000 years of darkness. I mean, I think about what if Rome never fell? Mars would probably already be occupied by human beings.
Jason Carman:
For sure. That's actually really interesting about experiments. There's no reason that we couldn't have had... Yeah, the entire industrial revolution and everything that's coming down, the science revolutions couldn't have happened a thousand years earlier. That's totally, that's super interesting actually. Wow.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, actually, and I'll probably pitch you on it at some point. I want to make a movie about it, right?
Jason Carman:
That's a good idea.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I just think how much fun would it be if we just one thing changed and all of a sudden we find ourselves living in 2025 and AI has been around for 150 years and...
Jason Carman:
You know, it's interesting, I know that you're a proud American like me as well, and I think about this question too, is it's like, "What if Rome never fell?" And I think we don't even have to wonder that. We get to wonder what if America doesn't fall? And that sounds like a horribly negative question and way to word it, which I kind of say intentionally because it's like we've never, humanity's never had a hyper-advanced civilization that is producing so much culture, so much innovation, so much life survive a long time.
I mean, there's other famous people who graphs and have an analytical background who I think would say that America's done and it's time for other world powers to take the spot. I guess I wonder how you think about the future. For even taking a step back from America specifically, but just... I don't know. I spend so much time talking with people who work in defense or space and this gets existential very fast because small little decisions have big consequences for many billions of people. And it's an incredible time to be alive and a terrible time in some ways. And I wonder how we stored that into making sure Rome doesn't fall.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah. First off, I think of America as an idea less than a country and-
Jason Carman:
Yeah, right. It can be universal and it is in many ways and it should be even more.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
It absolutely can be universal. And yet we do have this negativity bias, humans, me, you. I'm not saying they over there, I'm saying all of us, our human O.S has a negativity bias because that makes sense. In the 98% of evolution where we were wandering around in tribes, novel dangers were really important for us to be able to see quickly and act upon, usually emotionally, terrified, fear, flee. So along comes America at the Age of Enlightenment. I think we also were lucky when we were formed because the Age of Reason, the Age of Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, all of those ideas were percolating in the minds of our founders.
And it's easy for us in hindsight to say, "Well, duh." No, man. At the time, every country was ruled by a king or a queen or a dictator, and that was it. The Hobbesian life is brutal, nasty, and short. And you were part of the Newtonian machine because science comes in here too. When Newton came out with the principal, everybody was like, "Oh, it's a clockwork universe. We can fine tune it. We can predict everything." And then of course, the quantum guys came along and say, "Hold my beer guys. No." But at that time, all of these were really new ideas. By the way, the original, Jefferson's original was life liberty in this pursuit of property, not the person of happiness.
Jason Carman:
I didn't know that. Wow.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And so the reason though, life, liberty, pursuit of property, happiness, those kind of rights for your average individual were not present. They weren't there. If you weren't part of the ruling aristocracy, there were two forms of law, one for them and one for everybody else. And so these ideals were absolutely inspiring to thinkers of the era when we were founded. But as you just pointed out, the idea of America is universal. And again, I'm an evidence guy and okay, there's a great book called Reimagining the Beast about improving capitalism by Howard Bloom. And basically he's saying, only free markets, if you look at all of the promises made by all of the religions of human history, "You're going to get to the Promised Land, follow me, well bring you to the promised land," and then we throw in political religions like communism and socialism, and we'll throw free markets in there too. Which one delivered on those promises once? Once?
Free markets, free minds, rule of law, the average person is going to be at a level playing field. Now people listening might say, "Well, that's bullshit. There's all of this." There are of course all of those problems, but if you take that as you're given, you're like, "free speech, rule of law, the ability to just do things." There's a great book by Bill Bryson, America One Summer, and it's about the 1920s and literally we are so new in terms of back then people could just do whatever they wanted to. The guy who did Mount Rushmore, he didn't ask anyone's permission, he just went and did it.
Jason Carman:
I think about when they turned on the Chicago pile reactor and they just turned it on under a football stadium and covered it with graphite bricks. And it's like, "Sorry, what?" It's a great example. Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah. And so this idea of agency being some foreign thing, that's what built America. If you think about American DNA too, this is another part of it, I think, there's a good book, well, there's a good book title. The book itself isn't great, but it's called The Hypomanic Edge, What Built America. And if you think about it, the author makes the argument that third, fourth, fifth generation Americans have kind of different DNA than say European or Asian societies. And the point that the author makes is who came here? You are talking about people who literally left everything they knew, everyone they knew, all of their own history and said, "You know what? I'm getting on that ship. I'm going over there and I'm going to see if I can make my life a spectacular thing."
And that is a very different underlying structure than any other country. And the other thing about America, it's kind of like St. Paul, he memed Christianity into existence because he was like, "People, it doesn't matter what gods you got brought up under like your frog god or your sky god or all that, don't worry about those. I have the greatest deal in the world for you. There is one God, and it doesn't matter who you are, what color you are, what sex you are, where you were brought up, you can worship this one true God." And in America we made the same deal. I can't move to Switzerland and become a Swiss person. I can't move to Germany and become a German person. Anybody can move to America and become an American.
Jason Carman:
Yeah, that's right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And it is that aspect that is so both incredible but also fragile, right?
Jason Carman:
Yeah. It's the immigrant opportunity. And I look at, we're all immigrants to life. None of us, it doesn't matter where you're born. It's like when you become an adult and it's your time to go make your mark in the world, it's like you're just as fresh as anyone else. And that spirit and that opportunity of the ability to create a different and brighter future for yourself, for your family, for other people, I think that is something that people in the 20th century seem to have had so much more viscerally. It's so unpopular and rare today. And I think that's why I'm so attracted to it in the deep tech world or in the world of founding or building things because it's much more common there. It's like these people that are 20-somethings, 30-somethings, it's like you said, it's not an age, color, or gender thing. It's really just an agency thing. And that culture of agency, it's weird to say it went away, but in some ways it did, in some ways it didn't. But it's so inspiring and motivating.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And it's like we are coming out of a managed reality, I think. And I think that what's happening now is just for me so exciting because there's young people like you, and that just really gets me chuffed. It's like, "Holy shit, we can partner with Jason and we can do all this fun stuff," and then it becomes that infinite upward loop. And there's so much to be excited about. There's so much to be really optimistic about. And yet again, if you study evolutionary psychology and biology, you understand why it's also hard. And so I am incredibly optimistic that we can keep this going, that we can, as I see young people like you saying, "Hey, wait a tick. No, I'm not buying into that. I'm going to do this," I'm going to support you. I'm going to support all of those people. Because at the end of the day, critics are gongs at railway, just banging away. They're just yappers, right?
Jason Carman:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Okay, fine. It's really easy, it's a default position. Be that way. I don't really care. As long as there are people like you and other people that we're working with, everyone on the team here at O'Shaughnessy Ventures, I'm going to remain incredibly optimistic. Now we're going to change subjects because I loved your PowerPoint date of Bob Dylan. So I too love Dylan. And I watched the movie with some friends last week not knowing or not connecting the fact that I was going to when I was researching and going back through your stuff that I would see that again. And so first off, it's really funny. And who was playing your date? Because obviously-
Jason Carman:
Yeah, she was a paid actress, but she wasn't acting. Well, I mean, we basically were like, "Hey, here's the tenant one we did. We need you to do this. We're not telling you the movie it's about. We're not giving you lines. There's no second takes. It's just there're paying you to show up and then act as you would. You can be positive, negative, we don't care. Just do your thing. Our only request is try to be natural and don't force it." And so that's who she was.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, I liked it because she was good.
Jason Carman:
She was great. She was hilarious.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
She was really funny and her facial expressions were spot on, like when you showed the Marlboro's.
Jason Carman:
It's so fun. I mean, it's tough. I really want that show to just exist. I really get squirmy about being on camera, and I don't think we'll do more episodes of it. The original intention was like, "Oh, we'll keep doing this because this is a great marketing tool for our movies, is if we create a show like this." But we committed to trying out three total opposites. But I'm too squirmy on it. I don't think I could personally be the one that does it, but I think it's a hell of a show concept and someone should do it. I think it's a lot of fun.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah. Well, we're working on several things with you. That might be just another one that we'll add to the list because it's incredibly entertaining, but it also is chock-a-block full with information, which I also love.
Jason Carman:
Yeah. It's kind of fun, yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I like the movie. I loved the, "I have a slight about this, Bob Dylan is kind of an asshole."
Jason Carman:
You agree or disagree?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I agree.
Jason Carman:
Yeah, for sure. He's absolutely an asshole.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I love Bob Dylan's music. I was brought up, I'm the youngest of six and by a mile, I'm the martini baby. Mom and Dad, thank God, thank you for having those martinis and cigarettes that led to me because there's nine years between me and my next youngest sister.
Jason Carman:
Got it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
So I had all of these older sisters bossing me around. But the good news was I'm probably one of the few 64-year-old white males who knows the lyrics to every Supreme song because I was hanging out with my sisters, but I also got Bob Dylan and was listening to it as a little kid because they were discovering it. And so it's like, "Yeah, of course he's an asshole, but Steve Jobs was kind of an asshole too”.
Jason Carman:
Yeah, I think all great people are on some degree. Part of the deal, part of the deal.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
It kind of is. And so I thought it was hysterical. I also liked the movie a lot. I did think that, I love music and so I know a lot about music history and that whole, they really did kind of cast the folk people as the villains, right?
Jason Carman:
It was interesting. A little bit, but also, I don't know, I also felt like I didn't take away that the folk people were the villains. To me, it felt like, it still felt like, "Goddammit, we fought for this folk festival to exist and we've like climbed this uphill battle and we're not going to let this upstart kid who we gave a stage now take it away from us." I totally get it. I don't know. To me it came off as very, I can see both sides of it very clearly and felt-
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I tried to see both sides. But on the one hand, what I saw was it's a lot like what you said about Hollywood earlier. It starts out as this really cool, fresh new thing. We're going to have a music festival that is devoted to folk, which is very Americana, and we've got Woody Guthrie, we've got Pete Seeger, we've got all these incredible people. And then you get Dylan in there and they love Dylan because he's like a poet. But what worried me as you look at it whenever something... It's like art, right? Do you know why the Impressionists are called the Impressionists?
Jason Carman:
They're trying to copy the previous?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
No.
Jason Carman:
No?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
No. The Impressionists got their name from the French Academy of Art, which had become so stultifyingly filled with stasis and no new ideas that they were doing everything they could to tear down the new artists. So they said, " This looks like they are children finger painting. I just have a brief impression of what I want to do. This is horrible stuff."
Jason Carman:
Good accent.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And that happens all the time everywhere. The one group starts out as radicals and then they get in control and they become instantly stasis obsessed. "We're going to keep it this way forever, and this is the best it is." And I saw a hint of that with not Seeger. I love the, Ed Norton as Segeer, what an inspiring choice, by the way.
Jason Carman:
Oh my gosh, so good.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Right?
Jason Carman:
I was in love, 100%.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Anyway, but it was the guy who started the festival. He was turning into the little fascist. "No electronic music, this is forbidden." And you've got Dylan going, "Fuck you, man. This is creativity. This is where the world's going. Get in the boat-
Jason Carman:
It's interesting.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
... or stay on shore."
Jason Carman:
Also, side note, you've got to do some voice acting if we ever do an animated film here. This is an impressive range. It is interesting, because you can think about a totally different way that could have gone down where you totally could have had the festival guy get up and be like, "Okay, everybody. We have Bob Dylan, he's going to play some different music tonight." And you could have prefaced it a little bit and if the concern was like, oh, it's not folk. It's like you have three days of folk or two days of it. I do agree, the festival could have handled it totally differently.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
But here's the thing, I think that that... Look, if I have any political philosophy, it is only I am fiercely anti-authoritarian. They make my skin crawl. And because no, this is the way it is, this is the way it will always be. It's never going to change, it's perfect, and it's the enemy of everything that I am about. And the thing that I thought was really interesting was, yes, they could have done that. Yes, they could have gotten up and said, "Hey, Bob Dylan, who we love, by the way, has some new music. A lot of you might not like it. You might not think it really fits into our genre, but hey, give it a shot." That would've gone really, really differently. But it's that authoritarian nature prevents them from doing that. It is like the scene where he goes and shows up at the public TV and he's playing with this blues and jazz legend, and Pete Seeger, I thought that that scene actually informed Seeger's character better. A little worried, ooh, but okay. And then what does he do? He picks up his banjo and joins him.
Jason Carman:
Yeah. Well, it reminds me of that opening scene, which I think for young people was such a jaw dropping scene. When you meet Pete Seeger, who's the sweetest bear of a character, he's in court for a song that is like, oh, it's a bad song. And then he starts playing what we, today... I think my jaw dropped when I heard This Land is My Land.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Exactly.
Jason Carman:
What? This was a song we were worried about. But my God, that's the beauty of history is then to go and learn the story of that song and why it was treated like that. It's so, so fascinating.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And again, it's the story within the story, because it was the status quo, like communism is bad implying that this land is everyone's. What are you a commie? That wasn't what the song was about, but when you start seeing things through a uni-lens. The uni-lens that everyone was looking through back then was must defeat communism, USSR bad. And while that's true, they took it to these crazy extremes. And we can't have people singing songs about this land being their land. No, this land is our land. The joke, well, it wasn't a joke, it was Jay Paul Getty, the famously awful human being who did very, very well in the oil business once said that, "Hey, the meek might inherit the earth, but not necessarily its mineral rights."
Jason Carman:
It's a hell of a quote actually. Wow. There's another project. There's a project we should definitely talk about offline sometime, but there's so many incredible biopics that have not been made.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Oh.
Jason Carman:
So many.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
So, so many. You could devote... If we made nothing else at Infinite Films, we could probably do incredibly well with just a bunch of biopics.
Jason Carman:
I have an idea. I have an idea about this we should talk about sometime.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Let's do that offline though, because we don't want to give away all our secrets.
Jason Carman:
No, no, no.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I'm going to shift gears again because-
Jason Carman:
Just for fun.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
... we also seem to really like the same movies. I love Tenet and everybody-
Jason Carman:
It's not a popular movie.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Oh, man. When I said that I loved it people would just look at me like I had three heads. And the whole Sator palindrome, that alone-
Jason Carman:
So cool.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
... it's just so cool. He made an entire movie around it and it worked and he-
Jason Carman:
It's so cool.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
... actually pulled it off.
Jason Carman:
We would say that, many wouldn't, but I would fully full heartedly agree, probably more than most.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
But again, this is the, hey, show people, don't tell. I don't expect people just to know about the Sator palindrome and that they found it in Pompeii in, what 78 or 79 AD. But I love stuff like that.
Jason Carman:
I got to ask you, before we go into Tenet. What do you think, you are far greater of a historian and knowledgeable person about this sort of thing? What is the Sator Square from your understanding? Why did it exist? What was it for? There is, as far as I could tell, just zero understanding as to what that thing was back then or what was it?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Okay, I have to adjust my woo setting here. I've got to turn my woo all the way up if you want a really wild, crazy answer or turn my woo all the way down if you want-
Jason Carman:
Can we get both? Can we just-
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, well, let's do both.
Jason Carman:
Let start with the low woo.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Let's go low woo, Sator-Rotas creates. If you look at it, Sator-Rotas, goes backwards and forwards. It creates what?
Jason Carman:
Palindrome.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
An infinite loop.
Jason Carman:
Yeah, there you go.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
It creates an infinite loop because you can read it anyway, you can read it up, down, across, diagonally, it still implies the same thing. I think, honestly, if we apply Occam's razor, some very clever person was just fucking around and they're, oh-
Jason Carman:
Neat.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
... look at what happened.
Jason Carman:
Cool.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
This just neat. And then I find it very interesting that the founders of two of the biggest religions of today, Siddhartha Buddhism, Jesus Christ Christianity, neither of those guys ever wrote anything down, ever. And so why is that interesting? A bit like this, and you'll see I'm coming at this in a really circuitous way, so you got to bear with me.
Jason Carman:
No, [inaudible 01:46:54].
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Jesus never wrote anything down, Siddhartha never wrote anything down, and yet the texts from Buddhism, the however many noble truths and the 15 zillion different paths and all this stuff, they were the guys and women trying to figure out what the fuck was Siddhartha going on about. And then same with Christ. Christ was not a Christian, Siddhartha was not a Buddhist. What happens is somebody clever, for whatever reason. In this case, I'm not saying that this is religious in any way, but if you want to go the religion route, there's a hidden anagram, Pater Noster, Our Father. Christianity was just getting its legs there when this first one was found in 79 AD.
The Romans weren't having it, and yet they were very taken with the way it worked out and so it became a puzzle. And so people began basically putting their own belief structures on the Sator palindrome, on the Sator Square. And so if you take the simplest explanation, somebody clever just came up with it and he was, oh, that's cool. And he carved it in the thing and then it just started showing up everywhere. Because, again, what's one of our basic human instincts is we love to solve things. Our brains are prediction machines, basically, like large language models predicting the next token. Hello. We've got one of those right here, and that's what we do.
Now if you want to turn it all the woo, all the way up, it was an ancient civilization that was space faring. It was the ability, it was the coordinates to how to make sure that earth remains intact and that doesn't need any patches. I have 20 pages on what this might be. I should have reviewed them before our conversation. And if you want to have real fun, just go into your favorite large language model. Now, we have our own AI in-house here because we want the un-lobotomized version of all these large language models, and so I'll send you some of them.
Jason Carman:
I'd love it, That is fascinating.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
It gets really crazy really fast. And I always have to say, now get rid of any humility, get rid of... And I want you to make outlandish wild speculations, and they always end up in the sphere of quantum entanglement or consciousness and these are the [inaudible 01:49:57].
Jason Carman:
That's our new limit of what we don't know right now.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Exactly.
Jason Carman:
I'd love to read that. It's really interesting too is we start to push up against, there's xAI, which is… and then Claude 2 from Anthropic, seemingly the two AI labs that are most interested in using AI to now crack new bounds of knowledge. And it's like large language models too are just going to be limited until we can start doing that and things will get very interesting as we start to be able to go beyond with the local maximum of knowledges.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well, absolutely. That's why Jobs, again, computers or bicycles for the mind. AI large language models are rocket ships for the mind. They are giving your average human more leverage than entire societies could ever throw at a problem. And if you understand the leverage inherent in... This is Promethean fire.
Jason Carman:
It's insane. It's like intelligence [inaudible 01:51:04].
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
It scares a lot of people too.
Jason Carman:
For sure.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Let's get back to movies because-
Jason Carman:
Back to movies.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
... you are so good at making them. David Fincher said, "Movies aren't finished, they're abandoned." How do you know? Is it an emotional thing? Is it a logical thing? How do you know, okay, it's done?
Jason Carman:
I used to think that quote, because I think Spielberg had a similar one. I used to think that quote was dumb and was like, no, it's a skill issue. Movies can totally be finished. Now I do not believe that and I fully believe that quote. It's a really hard... I'm dealing with it right now, I'm in post-production hell on the first short film I've done in six years in our first fiction project as a company. It's called Planet. It's a little ambitious and we're struggling with it now, but that's good. I think it means we picked a good idea that we're struggling with and my view is I'm a very learning growth mindset person and my God, what we've learned from Planet is just already insane. I can't wait to go and tackle the first fiction feature film here in a few months as a result of all the learning.
But I don't know, it's a hard question to answer. I'm a big deadline oriented person. Get a draft done, iterate it. I believe iteration is the key. I think what I learned with Planet is that the iteration should have happened more in the script stage rather than... The story was really developed for the movie for over a year, but the script was rushed. As a result, two weeks before production we wrote in extra scenes so that we could have more optionality in editing, which is great. We have the optionality, the issue is just the optionality.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Don't worry.
Jason Carman:
This is really good learning. A director I'm really inspired by who I think is, well, I was about to say does this really well, is Denis Villeneuve for Dune. He meticulously plans everything. But then I learned, there's another hour and a half of Dune 2 that they shot and didn't use. And so I'm, oh, never mind. Clearly this is something that everyone's dealing with is the inefficiency of making a movie sometimes.
But I think my view is that the one lever you get to control as a builder of any kind is speed. Quality is a function of skill and iteration, or just skill. If you have skill, one year, five years, 10 years, 20 years, 50 years of expertise, the skill output from a single brushstroke or work output is going to be higher. And then if you don't have that, it's iteration loops, infinite iteration loops. And knowing where to... I think other than that it's almost like you can run through your iteration loops faster is my whole theory.
I often push on my team to work faster and I think often in the industry there's a negative association with speed in art. It's like, well, speed is bad. It's like, no, it's not. It lets you actually get more quality, because you get more passes at it. And so I think that's my view is try to cram as much iteration as you can. I don't have a good answer for this yet because it's like I haven't completed a fiction film in six years and none of the ones I completed back then I'm very proud of.
It would be fun to talk about this again in two years. In two years we'll have short film done, two films that we'll attempt to win Oscars with or get nominated for, and then hopefully we're well into production of the first trilogy film, so I'll have more data then. Until then, it's hard for me to say. I do think it's interesting. One other thing I will say is that I believe in imperfection. I think embracing imperfection strategically is a really important part of the film process and that an overly engineered image and overly perfected image isn't cinema. Cinema embraces imperfection and that's where it gives it its character. It's the cut of the diamond, the quality of it too, and better doesn't always mean better. And so I think that's a big part of it too.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And it's funny because as I was listening to you it brought me back to us talking about the reaction of the Folk Festival. Ideas that are strong, don't need a lot of, "No, you can't talk about that. No, you can't talk about... No, you can't play that music because that's not allowed." There's a great quote from Jed McKenna, which is, "If somebody's having a little tea party with Lord Lion and Lady Gazelle and someone else comes along who questions their fantasy narrative, it isn't that they're being mean, it's that your fantasy narrative is a little fragile." The fragility of the Folk festival was, it was too fragile. If it was not fragile, they'd be, "Yeah, do it, Dylan, show us this new stuff. We love it."
Jason Carman:
That's a great point.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And that's why anytime I come up against somebody who's like, "No, we cannot talk about that," I know that they're trying to defend an incredibly fragile idea that's probably incredibly wrong.
Jason Carman:
That's been a big part of my learning, I think, the past eight months is attacking my own fragility, and I think all artists have it to some extent. And I think it's something that really good engineers or builders don't have as much as they are a champion of the best idea. And I think that's been a really interesting thing for me to unlearn for sure, is being willing to attack my own fragility and look at ideas as less holy. There's something about the artistic process that I think at first glance and first interaction feels very holy and spiritual of the idea of, oh, I'm getting ideas from my brain that are becoming these works. It's, okay, well most of them are crap, so does that mean the crap ones are also holy? And it's, no.
I don't mean to totally demean the artistic process and say there's no part of it that's deeper or spiritual. I do deeply believe that there still is, but that's something I've thought a lot about recently in our work is my whole career I haven't been able to be a collaborator, I've been a one-man band. And so now I get on my team, my new job is collaboration solely. That's really what I do. Writing and collaboration, that's it. I'm trying to remove all editing from my table and focus on collaboration with people on every stage of the process and the vision for it and the writing. And even that it's so much more fun and interesting. It's like when you throw different people in a writer's room that you all really trust and you all know, it's like you're throwing different models in a room that all have their different pre-training and data that they trained off of, and as a result you get just such different interesting combinations of knowledge that is really special.
We're deep in the writer's room on four pretty incredible projects, one of which we're working with you guys on and it's just so fun and so that's where it really happens. But I constantly have to check my fragility, sorry to make a bit of a joke there, but it's a real thing, especially with artists. It's like in trying to get rid of that and be a champion of the best idea is the best idea.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
We all do, Jason, like anyone who says I'm not fragile at all, is lying or lacks self awareness. Because as I went through life, one of the things that when I was younger, I was a real proselytizer. I was a real, this is the right way, this is the way you got to do it. And as I saw others and myself stumble, make mistake after mistake after mistake, it really unlocked in me the idea that the average human is quite fragile. The fragility of human nature and of life itself should not be just dismissed because you're going to make a big mistake if you do that.
Another thing that really helped me and was a huge unlock for me was when I started thinking of myself at best as a co-creator. When I wrote my first book and I wrote my first articles and stuff, my wife graduated summa cum laude in journalism and she's an amazing editor, and we had the biggest fight in the world on one of the first pieces I wrote. I said, "Hey, would you take a look at this for me?" And this is back in the early '90s, and so I gave her the paper, I didn't even send it via computer. We're going into the city, we're at Greenwich and we were taking the train into the city that evening, but right before we're getting into the car to drive to the train station, she goes, "Oh yeah, here." And she hands me what I wrote and it was literally a sea of read. A sea of red. And I got so angry. The fight that we had on the train on the way in, it ruined the night. And it was me being the asshole, she was right. I was so like, "this is so precious and this is mine and you want to change it, and you just want to put it in this institutional bullshit voice." No, she wanted to make it much better. And the minute I got over that was when it really got fun. Because it was just like, you know what? All ideas are malleable. I'm going to listen to what other people say because, guess what? They look at the world differently than I do and they have insights that I'm just incapable of having.
Jason Carman:
100%.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Co-create. That was the unlock for me.
Jason Carman:
Well, the AI models are just such a wonderful metaphor for the mind and they're so damn similar, but it's, of course, imagine if you had an AI model with just basically no data to train on, just a limited amount of data, super limited. First of all, it wouldn't generate a good response and imagine if you only gave it one prompt and expected the perfect response. No, it requires ridiculous amounts of data and ridiculous amounts of iteration, and that's always how it will be. There's never going to be an AI ever that even if you give it all the data in the world and a single prompt, that will always be a perfect output of what you wanted. That's where the iteration comes in. I think that ability to iterate and go further and iterate and iterate and iterate is what makes the really special thing.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Totally. I'm a huge fan of Douglas Adams. I think once you read Adams and understand that he's a philosopher and not just a sci-fi writer-
Jason Carman:
200%.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
... he makes so much more sense. As you were saying that, I was thinking of 42, what's the answer to life, the universe and everything. Yeah, 42.
Jason Carman:
I love that book. That book is an incredible one.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, it's a must read in my thing. Well, I'm getting the hook here. My god, it's two o'clock. I can't believe it, we've been talking-
Jason Carman:
This is so fun.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
... for two hours. When you get in flow and just get into a great conversation time just stops.
Jason Carman:
Yes.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And so definitely we're going to do a part two.
Jason Carman:
Awesome.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
But for now, as someone who's heard the podcast in the past, you know what my final question is? I'm making you emperor of the world, you can't kill anyone, you can't put anyone in a re-education camp. You can't, in other words be unauthoritarian. But what you can do is I'm going to give you this magical microphone and it is going to incept all 8 billion people, plus or minus 100 million whenever we happen to be listening to this. You can say two things into it and everybody on the planet, whenever their next tomorrow is, they're going to wake up and they're going to say, you know what? I just had two of the best ideas ever and unlike all the other times where I just let them go, I'm going to actually act on these two things. What are you going to incept in the world?
Jason Carman:
I think I would share my life quote as well as a... I think one would be this idea of I'm not prepared to give... The world emperor probably has a few speech writers too, so my delivery is not going to be as clean as it would be with world emperor speech writers. But the first thing I'd say would be, if you're not already thinking beyond your lifespan, you should really seek to do so. And I think it's the most virtuous thing you could do as a human is to think, obviously, well, maybe it's not obvious, A, outside of yourself and then B, outside of your lifespan. And how can we give back more to our children, our children's children, and make sure our planet and civilization is still around for them to enjoy and deal with? That's probably one.
I think the second thing would be just the same thing that I learned two years ago when I started doing S3 and the same thing I just am learning every day, which is that the distance, the gap between genius people that you look up to and you is so much incredibly smaller than you could ever imagine. That would be it. I think I just am confounded every year since, every month, every day since of how small that gap is and how it all seems to just come from a place of self-belief. I think that's probably the number one problem with our age, if I had to say, is that far too many people today couldn't imagine that they could do, not even impossible things, things that other people are doing, let alone impossible things, and that it all just comes from a limiting self-belief. And I think that's probably the biggest thing. I might just say that twice actually. That one. That would probably be it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
That's great. That's like William James, he said the most profound thing that he ever discovered in all of his studies... Of course, William James is the father of American pragmatism philosophy, was that if you change your mind, you can literally change your future. And back to America, that's a very American idea. Hopefully we can extend it all the way to Mars and beyond. But in the meantime, huge fan of everything you're doing, obviously. We'll have you back on for... I'll send you the 20 pages on the Tenet deal and maybe we'll just do one podcast on that.
Jason Carman:
Well that, or I think next time it should be when our movie comes out, which will be sooner than I think.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
There we go. There we go.
Jason Carman:
I think we could do that and talk about that. That'd be a lot of fun.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
That would be enormously fun. Well, Jason, huge fan. I think you are going to achieve your goals and I'm happy to be one of the members of your group of boosters who want to see you soar.
Jason Carman:
Well, Jim, thank you again for all the support. I can't thank you enough. I'll continue to thank you enough. You're too humble about it and I and the team are working incredibly hard to make you guys proud, and thank you again for the support and doing what you do. And, I don't know, I'm so excited to listen to more episodes of this show too. I've really enjoyed it, and the conversation was so fun and wide-ranging and I need more of your reading list too. My God, I wrote down eight different [inaudible 02:08:20] and books you recommended too. And this was a lot of fun. Thank you.
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