Latest / Vibe Sesh Podcast / Vibe Sesh #13: David Niall Wilson — Two-Time Bram Stoker Award Winner on Becoming "The First You"

Transcript

Vibe Sesh #13: David Niall Wilson — Two-Time Bram Stoker Award Winner on Becoming "The First You" · Vibe Sesh Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome everybody listening in.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: You got, dude, so many comments right out of the jar.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, shit, bro, you're going to be our best guest ever.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yo, David.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: I had to wear the hat because you put it in your sister.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_02: Where's the raven, bro?
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: Bro, where's the raven?
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: You would have really killed it if you just put a little raven.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have the bird.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_02: You could have put your cat.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: You could have put one of your cats, one of your 13 cats that you have.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think?
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: We're down to nine now.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: But this is a cat-free room.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: But what happened?
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: Two cat-free rooms.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: The guest room and the office.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_02: They can't enter this room?
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: No, they can't come in here.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: I could bring one in here, but I have to take it back out.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: But I have to be quiet when I'm not bothering everybody else.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_02: Nice.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: Nice.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_02: You know what, Cisco?
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: I did all the pre-show prep,
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_02: really looked into David's background, as I usually do for every special guest.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm telling you, this is going to be the best Vibe session.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_02: We've had some amazing guests, so I don't want to be pushing anyone down.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_02: But Cisco, he's a two-time Bram Stoker Award-winning writer.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_02: It is the Oscars of horror.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_02: You understand me?
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's the Oscars of horror, and we have this man in here on 5-13.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: Let's go.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: If only it was Friday the 13th.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_02: I know, right?
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, damn, if it was only Friday.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, so...
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: I want to know what the bullet points are, too.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: What do you mean?
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: What's the bullet point?
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: I was listening before.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: I know Cisco's got bullet points.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: You know what was so funny, David?
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_02: I was like doing prep work and I usually use two AIs.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_02: We're going to be talking about AI later,
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_02: but I use two AIs,
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: ChatGPT and Claude,
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_02: and we're going over your background and they're getting into a fight because one,
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: you know, over which question?
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_02: Let me see.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_02: The question about whether or not you are ordained
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: I was ordained online and so is my cat.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's official.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: I can officially wedding and all that.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: I saw this quote.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_02: Check this out.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: And then they were fighting each other.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: I forget whether it was Claude or Chachapiti.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_02: They gave a quote of David and he said, he was asked, are you an ordained minister?
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: And he answered, I am, but then so is one of the cats I used to own.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_02: I want it to be legal to perform weddings and funerals.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: It's a piece of paper.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_02: I also have a diploma from Mishkatonic University proclaiming me a master
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_02: of medieval metaphysics.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: Also a piece of paper.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: Bro, what is...
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's from Lovecraft.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: That was up in Arkham, Massachusetts.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's where all his professors taught.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: But I gave it in the Navy.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: In the Navy,
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: I took that into work and I gave it to the personnel department
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: and I barely stopped them from putting in my record that I had a master's degree.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: You were embarrassed?
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Embarrassed?
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: No, but I don't have a master's degree.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: And they would have put it in my official record.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: And what good would metaphysical, you know, what good would that be in the name?
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: They curse the enemy.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_02: Amazing, right?
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_02: Amazing.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: Never heard those two together, medieval metaphysics.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_02: What does that even mean to you, David?
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_02: Tell us more about medieval metaphysics.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_02: I'm very curious because this is exactly what David is like.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: What is medieval metaphysics?
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: Never heard those two words together ever in my life.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know that there's an actual explanation for that.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: That was something that just came that way and I bought it.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: I bought it with my name on it.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, there's like no classes?
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's amazing.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my gosh.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_02: He's got me the best guest ever, bro.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's already so interesting.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's already so interesting.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Every time I talk to a chat about myself,
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: every time I've ever asked an AI about myself, Many things that aren't true.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Books I didn't write, awards I didn't win, things I've never done.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: No way.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: No wonder it's fighting each other.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_02: No wonder.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: They're not good at that.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_02: But why you, though?
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, you mean just any person or you in particular?
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: They're not doing a good job.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: When it first started out, I mean, I don't really use AI.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not a big proponent of AI.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: But when it first started out, I wanted to go see which line about me.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it wrote this biography like you would have in the front of your book,
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: but at least half of what was in it, I have no idea what it was talking about.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: I had to go look up the book to see who actually wrote the book that it said I wrote.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even remember what it was.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: It was a long time ago.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: But it's just not always accurate.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_02: but we'll be talking about it.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: It might be better now.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: We'll be talking about AI soon.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: I think this is going to be very interesting.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: By the way, so David, the way we met was I made a video about Mrs. Rosalind, right?
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: Mrs. Rosalind?
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Rosalind McKnight.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Rosalind McKnight.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_02: Why don't you tell the story about how we met?
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_02: I can tell you.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: The thing that started out was we saw all of a sudden on Amazon,
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: we saw sales start popping up and then more and more and more sales.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: So we knew someone somewhere found this book and said something to someone.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I went and searched on just to Google and searched and it came right up with Vibe Samurai.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I went and looked at the video.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: And since I was on Instagram, I just sent a message.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: It was basically, thanks, man.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: She sold over $2,000 worth of books just this month because of that video.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_02: How much?
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think she's sold $2,000 in the last two years.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Wait, how much?
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well over $2,000 now.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Two.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Holy shit.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_02: Holy shit.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's amazing.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's her daughter that's getting the money,
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: and I'm going to have to send a message ahead of time to say,
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: look, it's not a mistake when you get this next check.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, my God.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Now they're buying a second book too.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_02: So tell us the story about you as your publisher.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so why are you publishing books like this?
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_02: I'm very curious, right?
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't realize because $4,000 or $2,000 is a lot of money, right?
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so you're doing good.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's pretty good for
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: a book.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: We started out, I'm an IT guy and I'm a writer.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: And when e-books, I mean, I'm also old.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: So when e-books started,
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: I figured out how to do it and started,
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: you know, trying to put a few of my books out.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: A couple of my friends saw that and said, hey, can you do that for my book?
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, not for free.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: So we started a small company and it just turns out that all kinds
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: of great horror books were completely out of print.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: They just, you know, they put them out on the shelf.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Two months later,
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: they're gone and they're in someone's garage in a box and that's all there ever was.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: So we started gathering those guys up and reprinting their books.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: And we've got, I think 3,000 titles now.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: And somewhere along the way, someone discovered, I don't know really how we got those books.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: The agent contacted me about Joe McMoneagle, the one that we
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: heard about.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: And we published his books.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_02: No, who's that?
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_02: Tell them who Joe McMoneagle is.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_02: Check this out, Cisco.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: He was with the CIA when they did that.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Remote viewing program.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: He was the very first, like number one remote viewer for the CIA.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: And he's written a bunch of books, the Stargate Chronicles and remote viewing secrets.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: And he worked with Robert Monroe,
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: who has a Monroe Institute where they actually teach this stuff.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: And Rosalind was one of Monroe's students.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: So he encouraged her after a while to take these,
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure these conversations that she had with that entity,
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe you remember.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_02: R-O-M-C?
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so she did.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: She just put them all into a book form and then did a second book and continued that.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_02: Somewhere along the line, their agent got a hold
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: of me.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: We have the audiobooks for his books, and those are the most popular.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: McMoneagle's books are selling like crazy.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, last year, there was a sudden burst of sales in his, and guess what caused that?
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Someone on Instagram and TikTok had found this book.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: Holy shit.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_02: What a distribution.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my God.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: It is.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's crazy when it happens.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: And it seems to be the only way these days that you can really reach a big audience that fast.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Great books and great authors.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe 10 in a year.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_02: You're so tech savvy and tech forward, but you're not into AI.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: This is going to be very interesting later.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, because you adopt tech.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: You adopt tech.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_02: At first I thought, but I mean, your whole career is starting from IT.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think LLMs have plenty of good uses.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: I just don't think art and writing are among them.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm pretty sure from my experience that it's true.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: I just wrote a novella that's going to be published probably next year.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: I kind of took the AI thing, but I didn't want to just make it about AI.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I invented a tech where they could use,
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: you know how we only use part of our brains and most
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: of your brain is just sitting there.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: So this guy invented a way you could create virtual machines in your head.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: You could lease those to the government or to a big company and they could do work in your head.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: You didn't know they were doing it.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: That's a great idea.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_02: That's a great idea.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_02: Do you want to rent that space out?
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think, bro?
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: If it was there, I'd probably put one in my head, but I wouldn't lease it out.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_02: Would you?
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_02: Would you?
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: I would not lease it out, no.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: No, you wouldn't.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: When he first discovered it,
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: he put it in an ape's head and emailed the eight richest men in the world
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: from inside the ape's head.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: It is fortunate.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: The book is near the end where they're finally trying to bring it down
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: and get their world back before it just crumbles.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: Where was the seed for that idea of starting with that premise?
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: I work a lot with virtual machines and we had just moved my work network onto
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: a virtual network where the machines are just, they're not really machines at all.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: They're just little parts of the memory and hard drive of a bigger machine.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: And someone mentioned,
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: I don't remember who it was,
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: but somebody right about that time mentioned,
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: well, you've got all that extra brain stuff and then why don't you use some of that?
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: Extra brain stuff.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: Extra brain stuff.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_02: All right, guys.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_02: So as you guys know, this is Vibe Sesh 13.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Vibe Sesh 13.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_02: We got co-host Cisco.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_02: We have a writer,
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_02: an amazing dude,
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_02: David Wilson, in the house, author two times, Bram Stoker, bestselling author.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_02: So every Vibe Sesh, we have a theme.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_02: Today, actually, why don't you introduce this quote first, David?
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_02: Be the first you.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_02: Can you explain that to us?
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_02: Be the first you.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: If I remember where I said that,
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: what I meant was it's not a good way to pursue a creative career to try and become
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: the next Stephen King or the next Clive Barker or Rosetta as an artist or whatever.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to do better.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to do better if you write what matters to you.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: My blog, even my blog, the title of my blog is Writing What Hurts.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: Because if it doesn't affect you,
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: it's probably not going to affect anybody else all that strongly either.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_02: But does it have to hurt or writing that makes us feel
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: good?
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't have to hurt,
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: but I think you have to be willing not to stop writing at
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: that point where something bothers you or where you think it might bother somebody else and
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: that might be a boundary.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: You can't let that guide you too much.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: Unless you're being really, really bad.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: There's things you don't want to write, but I wouldn't write those things.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: No, so I was just saying, is it minimally like just experiencing any emotion?
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like your writing at least caused something and that's enough?
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: For me,
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: it's going to have to be that way because I had a short period where I was gathering
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: a really good audience and doing a lot of stuff,
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: but most of that work didn't really matter that much to me.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then I went through a long period of bad,
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: bad life decisions and bad times and wrote a bunch of tie and stuff.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then I started publishing.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: So now I've, I started writing again and I'm doing okay, but nobody remembers.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: The two Brandon Stoker awards are great, but I won those a long time ago.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: So now I'm kind of starting again.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_02: You're starting again.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: So you think you viewed this as a starting again,
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: or do you feel like you're in a sacred in between?
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: I never really quit,
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: but when I first started the publishing house,
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: I just started publishing my own books instead of doing the big long wait
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: for New York City and all that.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just an unfair battle.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have the marketing.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have the money behind it.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have time to go out and run around with them back in your trunk
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: and find them for people.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know,
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: I sold some, I sold okay, but I never had a bestseller since then, except on Amazon.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: My big book just went to the agent not too long ago
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: and this novella is coming out next year and it'll come out
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: through Simon & Schuster.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I think you can get back there.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: I can get back there.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: Amazing.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: Amazing.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: You got to push it on Instagram.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_02: Tell us, what's your Instagram strategy?
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_02: You're so amazing, dude.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_02: You need to put out content talking like this, man.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_02: Talk about the storage brain thing.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_02: That was amazing.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: I need to get 250 more followers on Instagram before I can do this.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: All right, guys, let's get it.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_02: I'm going to be promoting this guy, but you've got to put out content,
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_02: David, so then I can repost it on my stories, and then people start following you.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I have thoughts.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Actually,
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: I spend most of my time on Blue Sky,
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: and I've got 10,000 followers there, so it's okay there.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: I've got five or six on Facebook, but that place is a worthless pit now.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: What, Facebook?
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, Facebook?
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_02: What about Blue Sky?
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_02: Tell us what's going on in Blue Sky because it's more of a left-leaning...
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: It is.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: And it has a different philosophy.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, other sites,
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: people are like crunching for the numbers and they don't care who signs up as long
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: as they get more numbers and more numbers so they can beat the algorithm.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: But there's not really an algorithm on Blue Sky.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: And the norm is if somebody comes into your post and starts with replies,
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: it'll be like, let's start an argument.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: You just block them and ignore them and they go away.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's just an entirely different vibe.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: A good word for it.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_02: I like it a lot.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_02: People still argue.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: They can't do anything.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: They can't read your stuff.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: They can't reply to it.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: If they do try to reply to it, nobody can see it.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_02: Access denied.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_02: That's what I talk about in my videos.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_02: Access denied.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: The vice president came on there and got canceled in about five minutes.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_02: What?
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: He got canceled?
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think I have more followers than he does.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, in blue skies.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's amazing.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, so, David, so what do you think?
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_02: Because I think tonight, given we were saying, be the first you, you said.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: And so, the whole core of the team is going to be, what does it take to become the first you?
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_02: Okay?
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, a lot of that is trusting yourself.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_02: This keeps coming up.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: Intuition.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_02: Is that what you're saying?
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_02: Is that the same thing as intuition?
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: I hear this a little.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: I hear this a lot from other writers, and there's a lot of imposter syndrome out there.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: The last novella I wrote was about a lady that had imposter syndrome.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: I get a lot of these ideas just from listening to people and their interpretations
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: and things,
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_02: but if you If you don't believe that your writing
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: is good enough,
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: then you're always, you always have that on your back while you're working.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: You always have that on your back while you're waiting to hear back from someone.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: It just can, you know, it depresses a little bit.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I reached a point where I know that what I write is competent.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's not like it's ever, it's never bad, but now I'm reaching for something beyond that.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think I wrote a,
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: an article about that a long time ago,
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: the smooth level and beyond,
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: once you reach the smooth level,
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's when you've either got to decide to just stay there and write normal stories,
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: repetitive formula stuff, or do something important.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: I would like to eventually do something important.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: You don't think you've done things important?
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: I have, but the first book,
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: This Is My Blood,
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think that was a really important book, and it's still got a cult following.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: The book's Jurassic Park was poorly titled and poorly covered,
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: and it ended up not being what It was supposed to be when I started to write it.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that would be important if people read it, but they haven't read it.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: The people who have read it are complaining because there's not enough dinosaurs in it.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously,
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_02: we need
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: a lot of dinosaurs.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: The fish dinosaurs, the thing that goes like this with the larvae, everything in one shot.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to follow things where they should go and not
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: where you thought originally they were going to go.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: That book was supposed to be a parody.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: You know that guy,
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think his name is John Hamm or something Hamm,
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: has that Ark,
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: that Noah's Ark theme park where you go into the Ark
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: and he's actually got little dinosaurs on there.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: If he believes that men and dinosaurs lived,
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: you know, 6,000 years ago together or something like that.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_02: I find his comment kind of interesting, a little controversial.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_02: Let's answer this.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_02: Sounds like a liberal censorship circle jerk.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_02: That's funny to you for those allergic to meaningful discussion, discourse and debate.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_02: Bro, we are having meaningful discussion, discourse and debate right now.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_02: What are we talking
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: about here?
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: He's talking about Blue Sky and they say that all the time,
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: but that's from people who either don't want to Actually have meaningful discourse.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: They just want to jump on people.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_02: I'm going to have to make, don't worry, Chris Staldi.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_02: I'm going to, as the Vibe Samurai, I'm going to analyze your comment tomorrow.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_02: I'm going to make a video about what I think is going on.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: What I think is going on.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for the video idea.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, but let me come back to something, David.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_02: David, tell me, because I feel like This has been my journey.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_02: It's been like six months now since I started this whole journey.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_02: And this smooth level, either you stay there or you do something important.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: I feel like I'm at the cusp of that.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think what you're doing has the opportunity to have a lot of smooth level and
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: then one that really hits.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you're going with whatever vibe is there at the time.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's important,
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: but Like even an idea for stories or books or whatever,
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: every one of those is not good.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: But sometimes it's really good.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_02: So you go with
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: it.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: You find the one that really hits you and you go with it.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how many hits you got on that video about that book,
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: but there have to have been a lot because a small percentage of the people who saw
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: that, I'm sure, bought the book and it stole a lot of people.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_02: So it's a very focused, it reached a very, you're right, it reached a very, that's amazing.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: It was a good message for standing on tiptoes and, you know, meet the day that way.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's good advice.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_02: You know what's so funny about that video?
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_02: I was like analyzing with AI, like, why did this thing go so viral?
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_02: I had no idea it would go so viral.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so then I was thinking like, is it because it's the out of body stuff, the CIA stuff?
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_02: Ooh, you know, they're sending messages.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_02: Or because a lot of people in the comments were like,
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: oh man, living life on the tiptoes of excitement.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_02: And they were really resonated with that.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_02: So I felt like it was a combination of different things.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, but the tiptoe, living in the tiptoes of excitement.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think about that quote, by the way?
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: I actually liked the quote and I appreciated the thing I appreciated about the video
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: when I first saw it.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: Usually if you just see somebody talking about a book,
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: They like hold it up and like, there's this cool book.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: I like this guy.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: You should read this.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: But you clearly read what you were talking about before you talked about it and liked it.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: I think that came through very clearly and that you'd found something in there
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: that you were going to keep.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you don't always find something to keep.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_02: That is fire!
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_02: You are so right every video.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: Like, for example, that's why I kept saying, access denied, access denied, because...
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_02: That really hit me myself when I was making that video about having strong boundaries, right?
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_02: Like obviously you should try, you shouldn't just block somebody for no reason, right?
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_02: And it depends on who it is.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_02: Is it your family?
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_02: Is it some random person on social media?
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_02: You gotta know which boundaries.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_02: And then once you have those boundaries, if they cross them, access denied, right?
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so you feel it even when I'm telling you that my own epiphany about it, right?
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_02: And this, a lot of different things happened where I did have to Like JM, bro, right, Cisco?
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_02: That whole thing.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_02: That whole saga.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_02: But anyway, yeah.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: I missed the story.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_02: That was also, don't worry about that.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah,
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think even in the small,
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: just a small hobby of mine,
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: but even if I really hate a movie,
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: I almost always manage to have one quote from that movie that I just can't forget.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and they'll pop up over and over again in conversation.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_02: Like, which one?
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_02: Give me an example.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, now you're putting on the front.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but like a good one, but you remember it.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there was a,
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: in Mystery Men, there's a lot of them in Mystery Men, one of my favorite movies.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_02: Mystery Men.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's a superhero, sort of a superhero movie, but they're not, they're the other guys.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: They're not like the front line superheroes.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: This one guy throws silverware and, uh,
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: Another guy has only got his powers when he gets really furious,
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: but it's not sure through the whole movie if he even has any
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_02: powers.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_02: Bro, why haven't they not made a remake of this?
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: This sounds hysterical.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't need a remake.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: It is so low budget and the chemistry is so good that it's a cult classic
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: and it will always be one of my favorite movies.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't need a remake, bro.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: They're getting their asses kicked by this supervillain,
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: so they go to this guy who makes weapons.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: And they get inside and he's showing them their stuff.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I think it shrinks things and it shrinks your clothes on you and all this.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: It says they're non-lethal, non-lethal weapons.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: And the hero called the bowler who just throw the bowling ball at people
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: with her dad's skull in it.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: Non-lethal weapon.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's fascinating.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: While at the same time being of absolutely no use.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: They all go to leave.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: And when they go outside, he throws this can out and it's a tornado in a can.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the weapons are good.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_02: What are the memorable quotes?
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: The memorable quotes from that movie, the best one, Captain Amazing, who's the real hero.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: His name is Captain Amazing?
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and he had a Pepsi sponsorship,
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: but he lost it because he doesn't have any supervillains left anymore.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: So the supervillain captures him.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then he invites all the other supervillains because they're going to kill him
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: in this chair thing and just wipe him out.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: But the mystery men break in and they're going to save him.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: So they're down there and he's like,
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: would you mind flip that toggle over there and that next toggle?
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the one guy gets confused.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: He says, was that one or two toggle flips?
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's like in toto.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: Flip the switch, flip the switch.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: So he flips it and the thing goes off and melts him.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_02: So what's the quote?
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: Was it one or two toggle flips in total?
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: That's what stuck.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, what about this?
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_02: What about a quote that you remember that has philosophical weight and significance
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_02: and more on that front, like something that blew your mind?
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: Like a lesson or something.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, like a lesson.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: Let me think about that while we're talking.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_02: The Vibe Samurai in the house, you guys see?
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, let it just run.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'll use some of that extra stuff in my brain first.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: Let me ask you something, David.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of talk about authenticity.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I feel like people are conflating a bunch of different ideas.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, like there's this yapping trend and they're like, that's authentic.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_02: Like if you script your videos, you're not authentic.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_02: Like they're just like,
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's nuanced being missed and this and that,
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_02: but let's, I'm curious, well, how do you define authenticity?
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think as we move on to an AI world,
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_02: the world becomes less authentic and therefore authentic people are going
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_02: to be more valuable or, you know, tell us what you think.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: I think we're in danger of not being able to tell if it's authentic or not, or I don't know.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: I don't feel,
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: I don't, yeah,
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: I don't feel that way about myself most of the time because usually I can tell,
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: not always.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, they can do that.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: But that's never going to be authentic.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't see a problem with somebody scripting.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it depends on what their goal is.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's not the goal of the listener or the reader.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's the goal of the creator.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: If you're not good at just sitting here and yapping.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know, then you probably need something to at least keep you on point.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_02: For me, I use a script and it's primarily because I value people's time.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_02: I have 60 to 90 seconds and I want to load it up as much as possible, as precisely as possible.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_02: So they get a nugget that could, you know, shift their brain a little bit, right?
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: For the better.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: But then you get to have this where you just get to forget about that completely and talk.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_02: Right, like I am now.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do a couple of your other ones.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: I saw that one about dragons and... Dragons?
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_02: I never talked about dragons?
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: You talked about dragons and doing too much...
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody was talking about doing too much something.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: I can't remember which one it was.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, you mean it was a vibe sesh, you mean?
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was one of the vibe seshes that I went and listened to on...
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, you listened to... Well, you told me later.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to know what I was getting into.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then I listened to that one.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, oh, God.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: Here we go.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_02: Here we go.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_02: He listened to what he knew already.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_02: He's so prepared, guys.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_02: He's the most prepared guest.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_02: He's the most prepared guest ever.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's crazy to hear someone listened on the podcast, though.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like, it's slowly, you know, Vibe Session is making that impact, you know?
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_01: People want to listen.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: I think this would have been different, though.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: I thought I found out where the video is at.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because just the audio is a whole different thing.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: You have no idea what anybody looks like, what they're doing.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: They could be sitting around in their pajamas.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, so David, so you think the world is inauthentic?
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think about whether the world is...
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think people are upset about the inauthenticity of the world at heart.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: They all have different parts of it that they want to be authentic.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they don't necessarily agree on what a good authentic thing is.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't think anybody's happy with the way news is going and the way...
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: You can't open any serious news thing and not get pop-up ads about who knows what or
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: the big headline.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then you go there and it's five slides that don't say anything about what
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: the headline was about.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: But you've now wasted 20 minutes of your life trying to find that thing you were looking for.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I kind of like semi-scripted.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I agree, especially...
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: On the internet, what's your attention span?
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: What's your audience's attention span?
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: And did you get to your point before you lost them?
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yours are good and short.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: So every time I go through now, there's two things I always listen to on Instagram now.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: I listen to your posts when I see them.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: And there's some old aliens that tell dad jokes.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I know those guys.
• 30:30
  Those guys with the big eyes?
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_02: Those two guys out there?
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they're
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_02: so funny.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_02: They talk about the national bed and they talk about consciousness.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_02: Totally our type of people.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I would love to have them on Vibe Session.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_02: I'm going to reach out to them.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_02: I'm going to reach out to them.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_02: That would be a Vibe Session.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_02: Let's manifest this into the universe, Cisco, okay?
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_02: These two alien guys.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: I was honestly surprised how quickly you responded because I've reached out
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: to people on Instagram before,
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: especially like, you know, bookstagram people and the people that talk about books.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: Very rarely get any response at all.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: You were right there.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_02: It was like a couple of hours later.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_02: I literally respond to everybody.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_02: That's why I don't get ghosting or whatever.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_02: I don't even ghost.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_02: I just say, I've had some people kept trying to talk to me and I was like, hey, boundaries.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_02: I have too many people, but I respond to everybody.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_02: That's very interesting.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's the answer to why I don't have a lot of Instagram account stuff yet
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: and other things also because I've got a day job, nine cats.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: A family and a publishing company and a writing career.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: I got to do all that stuff sometime.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: And if you look at it, this is easier than writing a blog post.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_02: But it's not even that hard.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_02: You just turn on the camera for one minute or whatever you're doing.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_02: Something interesting pops up.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_02: Hey gang, blah, blah, blah.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: One minute.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: Boom, boom, boom.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then that's it.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: That's your video for the day.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think you should go through your archive,
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: like maybe a page from your book or something like,
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: you know, just
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know how you say
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: the Jurassic arc?
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: You're like, oh, I wish more people read that or something.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: You could read the pieces of it,
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: maybe, and then the algorithm will find dinosaur-related people.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_01: These algorithms now are so specific because they extract your transcript and
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: the AI's understanding, and they're trying to find who needs this.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: So they're hungry for content in that sense.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's so brilliant.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: It'll find a bunch of dinosaur people,
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: but that book came at me from the wrong angle because it turned out that
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: as I was writing it,
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: I started thinking about what if you and your family are building this boat
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: and all your friends from the city are helping you and in the book,
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: some dinosaurs too, and all of them are going to die if you succeed.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's not good.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_00: I even answered what happened to the unicorn.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_02: What's so interesting about this book is called Jurassic Ark, right?
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_02: And it's about something Noah's Ark and then there's dinosaurs as well.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_02: And my understanding, David,
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_02: is that when you it's almost like every book you write, you're just having fun.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_02: You're being playful.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you're just very, very light.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_02: And then at some point, you start finding deeper meaning, right?
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_02: And then it's like becomes a moral dilemma or existential crisis.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: But it happened in the first chapter on that one.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: The very first conversation between Noah and God was where it first started happening.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: That book should have been called something completely else and should not have
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_00: the beautiful dinosaur cover that has.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: But I love that cover.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_02: I had the title in
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: the cover.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: I only wrote the book because I came up with the title and I thought it was cool.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know what I find interesting?
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_02: So the Bible story of Noah's Ark, how did they treat it?
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_02: They didn't build the Noah's Ark themselves.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_02: So there were other people.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_02: They did build it.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: They did build it mostly themselves.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the city thought they were all nuts,
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: but honestly, nobody can, back in those days, they didn't have that big of a family.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, those are big, big trees being cut down.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, And so the Bible never talks about that.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: Can you believe that?
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a detail-oriented kind of story, the Bible.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_02: It's just all fables and things to make you think.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: But I did some research.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: I went back into the older documents and stories,
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: and I looked for the Sephiroth, the big guys, the giants.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because there was a giant named Gog that was And in theory, he helped Noah.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I put him in the story.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't resist getting out of there without telling what happened to the unicorns.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: I know why the unicorns were not on the ark and they were heroes.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: And anybody who reads my book will know what happened to the unicorns.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_01: Can I ask a question?
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_01: I'm curious like about your, well,
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: kind of too,
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: it's like either if you want to explore what was your favorite book
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: and like writing it,
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: but I'm also very curious of your writing process and just that journey in general.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: Because I feel like myself, I find it hard to write.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like I'm very more natural just speaking and yapping like he was saying.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I wonder, like, what's, like, the different muscles working there?
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like, me being able to speak and be articulate here,
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: but having difficulty sitting down to maybe type, for example.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: I've wondered about that a lot in my life,
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: because even when I was younger,
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_00: I would notice that people who are very articulate can carry
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: a really interesting conversation,
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: will write something,
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: and then you read what they wrote,
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_00: and the grammar's not there, or they didn't conjugate the verb even.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I know that that's not It's not a judgmental thing.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's just natural for me to do it.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I just can't resist if there's a story that I just think needs to be told.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: But I think my favorite book to write was the one that I just finished.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I would probably have answered that many times before.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: But it's another one that started out just to be not a joke,
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: but I didn't know what was going to happen.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to write a horror novel, but with every horror trope, That I could imagine.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: I have a list of horror tropes like this long.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_02: How many?
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_02: How many do you have?
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: There's at least 25 or 30 on the list and probably more in the book.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: There's probably more than that.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_00: They're all in the book.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: All of them there.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: What's a classic trope?
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like...
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: the creepy twins or there's a graveyard where something happened or a haunted house
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: or paintings that come to life and talk.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_02: What's the coolest one?
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_02: What's the coolest trope?
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_02: If you have to choose one trope, just one trope.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_02: You can't choose any other.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_02: And that's the thing in all horror movies.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_02: I'm going to be the same trope.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: The one that I probably use the most is creepy preachers.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_00: Creepy preacher?
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: If you could just say religion is the trope.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_00: Religion as the enemy is the trope.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't really matter what religion it is, but people trust, people get drawn in.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: And again,
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: authenticity comes in there too for me because I know people
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_00: who genuinely believe things and I know thousands of people
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_00: who genuinely say they believe things and might believe them once a week
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: but don't really,
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: it's not any center of theirs,
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: it's just A thing that they got to say to get around, I guess.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, creepy, creepy religious stuff.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_00: My first book was a retelling of the gospel.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_00: Mary Magdalene's a fallen angel and gets raised by Lucifer as a vampire.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_00: So she can follow Jesus around and drink the blood of the followers.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason is because she didn't want to, she didn't want to tempt him.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: She was raised to tempt him, but that never happened.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_00: She wanted to go back to heaven.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, that's probably my most popular book, too.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'm in the Complete Idiot's Guide to Mary Magdalene.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's mentioned there.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_02: Did we lose Cisco?
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_02: He glitched out.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_02: He's coming back.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_02: He's coming back.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, but David,
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_02: so let's move on to kind of like,
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_02: when did you start writing fiction when you were in the Navy,
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_02: in a boat, at night, on a computer?
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_02: Tell us that story.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_02: Tell us like how you got started.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_02: And by the way, when did you, I mean, and then you got into horror.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: I started in high school, but the horror stuff, being serious about it.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_00: I was in the Navy and been out of high school probably three, four years at that point.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: I always told everybody, Yeah, I'm a writer.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_00: But at that point, it was hard to prove that because I hadn't written anything.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_02: So you knew you were a writer.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote stuff back in high school,
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: and I knew that I wanted to be a writer, but I hadn't done anything.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_00: So eventually, I took a course from Writer's Digest magazine, writing to self-fiction.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: And by some strange chance, I got Jan Williamson as my instructor.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: Who's that?
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_00: Back in the 70s and 80s,
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: he was one of those first You know,
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: foil cover horror writers with,
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: you know, I think he had 40 or 50 novels out and they just came out, bang, bang.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: And he, you know, he, he was a good, good enough.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now he was a smooth level novelist and he was teaching short stories,
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_00: but he introduced me to what was Howl then,
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_00: and then became the Horror Writers Association.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I met all these guys,
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_00: I met Dean Koontz and, and, uh,
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: Charlie,
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: Charles,
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: the Grant,
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: all these old famous horror writers, um, And eventually became president later on.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_00: But that was kind of a sad thing because I was the vice president and
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: the president passed away and I was de facto president.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, but take us to the Navy though.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: The Navy part, yeah, the Navy part.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I had written some books and stuff, but I hadn't really sold anything.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: And we went out to see, so I bought an inkjet 500 printer, a big case of paper.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: I remember those.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: My 386.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_00: Computer with me.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_00: And since I was,
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_00: high enough up, I had a room where I was responsible for all the equipment.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I put my stuff in there and at four o'clock every night,
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_00: right after dinner, I would go up there, turn on the CD player and start writing.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where I wrote, this is my blood.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I sold it two weeks later when we were in port.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_00: I got the email back from the guy or that letter back from the guy saying he bought it.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_00: He never published it.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: A different guy did, but.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote it in 21 days out on the ship.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: 21 days?
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_00: I was writing from 4 till 11 at night.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't really have an outline, but I had the New Testament.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I used that and filled in some blanks.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then I had another book of mine that needed to be rewritten.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then I wrote another one using some stuff that I learned from people on the ship
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_00: that would make a good story.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_00: I figured it out.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's something like a half a million words if you print out that whole case of paper.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I went through that case of paper and some of the Navy's paper too.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'd say that's the point where I got serious.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then I got back from the cruise.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: I had an agent then.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: She was more of a romance agent.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: What's that mean?
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, she had romance books.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, romance books.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: But she did a little bit of other stuff.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, well,
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: it's too bad if you'd have been here,
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_00: I had a slot, and it wouldn't matter what you gave me.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: They just wanted a book.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: I could have been one of those guys with the foil covers.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I did have a book, but it was out in the middle of the ocean.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: And she turned out to be a crook and went to prison for...
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_00: Taking her clients money.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_00: So that wasn't better.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_02: Wilson, but let me ask you something.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_02: Let's go to your horror thing.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_02: Like what,
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_02: what do you,
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_02: and because you hang out with a lot of horror people, you,
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_02: you were president of the horror association and so many other writers,
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_02: like what,
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_02: is there any like common personality or common thread between all horror writers,
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_02: like personality trait or I don't know, whatever, some kind of pattern.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_00: I think that they all, I mean,
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: we tend towards Gothic things,
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: there's a lot of black t-shirts,
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_00: there's a lot of skulls and all that stuff, but all the people are very different.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the writing,
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: the writing,
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_00: it can go from absolutely literary to,
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to take these zombies and kill a bunch of people.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: And there's markets for all of that.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_00: And there's whole groups of people within horror that enjoy,
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_00: you know, all these different things.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_02: Why do you think people enjoy that kind of stuff?
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_02: Because I don't really enjoy horror, like the killing and the blood, the spells.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_00: Right, and I don't really write that kind,
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_00: and I enjoy
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_00: it on a very small basis, but it's such a big genre.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, there's different kinds of horror.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_02: So the thing that's like, ah, that's only one small piece is what you're saying.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, one of my publisher's weekly reviews, my favorite sentence out of that is that Wilson...
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_00: Manages to prove that you don't have to have buckets of blood to scare people.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, there's a lot of things.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a guy named Stephen Graham Jones.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you've heard of him.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_00: But he's a best-selling writer now.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_01: That is crazy, right, bro?
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_01: What's the sub-genre of horror that you do, I guess,
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: without the blood?
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_00: I think mine leans more towards dark fantasy than straight horror, I think.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_00: A little bit more like Clive Barker.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I wrote the afterword to one of his books.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_00: People have said that I wrote,
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_00: well, we've done his audiobooks too, but people have said that I remind him of him.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: Come on, David.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_00: I remind them of him a little bit when he's writing his things like Galilee and
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_00: the books that are not like the Books of Blood,
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_00: which are exactly what I don't write.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: The style, just the deeper.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_00: I try to be a little bit more literary.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_00: I try for there to be those quotes that I'm always talking about in my books
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_00: that people will come back and remember.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_00: And
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_00: then I write humor at Torah about Cletus J. Diggs.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, David,
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_02: but so dark fantasy,
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_02: like what is dark fantasy and what attracted you to dark fantasy?
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_02: What is dark fantasy?
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_00: What draws you to write?
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's more of a supernatural kind of story.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_00: So you can transfer over to magical things, medieval metaphysics.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_00: You can write about that.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, magicians, Crowley, all that stuff without...
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_00: Just having a straightforward,
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_00: you're going to get a killer and a bunch of people running away from the killer
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_00: or one monster that comes out of nowhere and you just got to fight it with
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_00: a Scooby gang.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_00: Those are different kinds of horror.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think dark fantasy is more, more literate too.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_00: Generally.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_00: What drew
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_02: you to it?
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_02: What drew you to it?
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_02: Just, just the people
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_00: that I liked.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think I ended up writing in, Things that were like things that I like to read.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then I started trying to write things that I would have liked to read
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_00: if anyone had ever written them, which was probably the turning point.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_00: Once again, you don't want to be that next guy that writes like the book you like.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_00: You don't want anyone to say this is another version of that.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_02: So it keeps going back to your be first you, right?
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_02: Be the first you, right?
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_02: And so how do you get there as a writer?
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_02: Because you're saying...
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_02: You can imitate, like, give me, give me the whole philosophy, right?
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_02: Like, uh, to, to, to be, be the first you, like what, what do you need to do?
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_00: The first thing you have to do is take the writing seriously.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_00: You can't,
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_00: I think about 90% of the people who want to be writers want to be writers
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_00: because they want to have a book they can show everybody.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_00: They want to sell a bunch of them, make money, go to conventions, do all those things.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_00: But writing is not the thing that's important to them.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's the culture and the experience and all that.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that's fine.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of people doing that, having a lot of fun.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_00: And some of them are writing some amazing books,
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: but a lot of them are writing a series about one character and it's always,
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_00: compared to this,
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_00: even, even agents and publishers ask you, well, what are the comps?
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_00: How are we going to market this?
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_00: What do we compare this to?
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_00: So that people will know what you wrote.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's the hard point right there, because you have to be willing to Not be famous immediately.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_00: You have to be willing to take the chance that nobody's going to read it
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_00: and go ahead and do what matters to you because otherwise you're always going
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_00: to wonder.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_00: For me, I would have always wondered if I, I probably could have done a series.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_00: I have done a couple of series and they've done okay.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_00: But, uh, my tie in stuff is still some of the stuff that I'm most remembered for.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote a Star Trek book that came out first and,
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_00: and, uh, That's not the kind of thing I like.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then I wrote for Dark.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_02: You didn't like writing for Star Trek because you were constrained?
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I did.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_02: I did, but it was hard.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote for Voyager, and nobody had heard of Voyager before.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_00: When they gave me the Bible, the show hadn't even come on yet.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I wrote this thing, and it's like, you know, you have to follow.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_00: You can't even say the door closed.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: It has to be the hatch slid shut, you know, things like that.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_00: You get constraints.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_02: If you write for Star Trek, they tell you, you can say this, you can say this.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_02: A little bit.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, a little bit.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think it's as bad now as it was then.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_00: But for me, it was very restrictive.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then I wrote for the World of Darkness, the gaming company, Vampire the Masquerade.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote a bunch of novels for them and always clashed with them over.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they gave me a pile of books this high.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: Here's your source material.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_00: You can use anything in here.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I found something.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_00: That I really liked and I based my whole trilogy on it.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, they can't do that.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_00: I said, your book says they can.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_00: Why did you give me this book?
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then they argued with me over how they would act and what they would,
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_00: it's like, look, do you want me to write the book or not?
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_00: But they came out,
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_00: I had a really popular trilogy with them about the Grail's covenant,
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_00: where I was able to go and talk about the Holy Grail and a lot of history,
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_00: but it was more me than
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_02: David, so how would you describe your own style then?
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_02: Because now you are the first you,
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_02: you know, you went through the process, you were trying to find yourself.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_02: So like, who are you as a writer then?
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_02: How would you describe your style, your philosophy?
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_02: How would you, now that you are you?
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_02: I
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_00: think it comes back down to like, you know, whatever you do, your name's on it.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that has to matter.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_00: So if I'm writing something that's just a standard zombie story or something,
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to write the best zombie story I can.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to think of something that makes that story mine and makes
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_00: that whole thing mine, or I'm not going to write it.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it has hurt my career.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure that I also like to write whatever moves me at the time.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's like your vibe session, you know, it's a different thing.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_00: Day to day, you've got a different thing.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I've written Science fiction, fantasy, dark fantasy, historical fantasy, mysteries.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that's hard as a writer because they don't want that.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_00: The publishers want the next book to be the next thing from the guy that wrote that.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_00: But then you've got to become the next you.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_00: First, you've got to become the first you,
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_00: and then you have to continue to be the first you somehow.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_02: Are you adding to become the next you?
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_02: Are you adding or are you subtracting?
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_00: I think a little of both.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's freeing.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's interesting, a little bit of both.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's freeing to not be worried about writing something exactly like what you did
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_00: before or exactly what somebody else did before and not to worry about
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_00: whether you're going to be the next Stephen King,
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_00: you know, financially or famously or whatever.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not even sure I would want that.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_00: He's had a lot of problems in his own life and I've read probably everything he's ever written.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_00: And what he's good at,
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_00: what he's best at,
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_00: is he could tell a story that probably could be told in 20 pages and turn it into
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: a 500 page novel because the people matter so much.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_00: The characters are so well drawn and he goes so deeply into each one of them
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_00: that it all matters to you.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_00: You care about side characters.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_02: Who is this?
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_00: Stephen King.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_00: Stephen King.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, damn.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he's one of my favorites.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_02: David, can we switch gears to vampires because you won two Bram Stoker Awards
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_02: and tell people also who Bram Stoker is and Dracula.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_02: You know, as I was doing preparation for this vibe sesh, I didn't know.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't know.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_02: I thought it was just vampires.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_02: It's some kind of like...
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_02: You know, whatever story.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't know that it was used as almost technology to spread ideas.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_02: And what was happening during that time, like,
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_02: like being contaminated and,
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_02: somebody invading somebody and that would all be in the book or sexual,
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_02: sexual, what do you call it?
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_02: Reservation or whatever in those times.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_02: So tell us more about that.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I wouldn't call myself an expert on vampires,
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_00: but I did my research for some things and there's a book
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_00: a long time ago called Dark Destiny and they wanted characters where Dracula was
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_00: a character.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I wrote the origin story of how and why he became a vampire.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I, so I did a lot of research about his family and when he was a kid,
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_00: his dad sent him to the Turks who were their,
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_00: their horrible enemy as a hostage so that they would,
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_00: they each had hostages from each other's side to prevent war so they wouldn't come
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_00: and all kill each other in a,
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_00: He was staying basically locked up in this place in Turkey.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_00: But in the story,
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_00: I had him see actual vampires like attack somebody outside the window
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_00: where he couldn't go out there.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_00: But he knew they existed and he knew they were there with the Turks.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_00: And then they let him go and they sent him home and his dad died and he became,
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_00: you know, the Dracul.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why he staked all those Turkish warriors out in the yard
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_00: because he wanted to wait for the sun to come up to see.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_00: Make sure there were no vampires around.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, one of them got him.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, there's a lot of history behind that.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then different people who have written stories.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the number of old famous vampire stories.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_00: Camilla, about the lesbian vampire.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_00: Lesbian vampire?
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, this is really old stuff, though.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_02: Tell us about lesbian vampire.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, my God.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure there's a million lesbian vampire novels right now,
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_00: but that's the one because it was so long ago.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_00: It was so different.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's always been this repressed sexuality thing with vampires.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_00: How they turned Nosferatu into a sex symbol, I'll never know.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_00: But Dracula did it.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_00: As soon as we had a count who had the good hair and long cape
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_00: and he could hypnotize people, but you know he He's a sexual predator.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_00: So now we've got that too.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_02: He's a sexual predator.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_02: Bro, we gotta make a video out of this, man.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my God.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_02: Can you give me the script for this?
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_02: David, why don't we work together?
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_02: Why don't we first,
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_02: you make scripts for me and I will credit you, but I will be doing the reading.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think?
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_01: I actually had a question for storytelling.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_01: Just a quick idea.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_01: If you had to make a story in your genre with the Vibe Samurai idea,
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_01: I would wonder what comes out.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_01: What kind of story idea?
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_02: What kind of collaboration would we do?
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody in some ancient church or museum would find a painting,
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_00: and in that painting would be someone who looks just like you,
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_00: or you, or both of you together, and
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_00: They'll turn out to be philosophers from some ancient time
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_00: that have still been around all this time, but now they're on Instagram.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_00: And they have a very popular,
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_00: but not necessarily helping people like you try to do,
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_00: you know, they would obviously have to have an agenda.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure this is the best compliment we've ever
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_01: received, bro.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_02: This is the best compliment we're ancient philosophers on Instagram, bro.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe there's a cave painting of an Instagram screen on a phone.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_01: Now, what's the horror twist?
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_01: What's the trope?
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_01: What's going to happen to the Vibe Samurai?
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, nothing happens to the Vibe Samurai.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_02: We've got to take out Cisco, the co-host.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_00: You're not ghosts, probably vampires.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you're still around and still look the same.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_00: But you could twist it around and it could not be.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, it could be they found a painting in a cave somewhere of a cell phone
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_00: With Vibe Samurai on it, you know, a hundred years.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then now it's a time travel.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's the trope.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_02: Bro, Cisco, this is live storytelling.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_02: Bro, we have a huge segment, like live story.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_02: You know, like those guys that start rapping on Instagram and you throw them words and stuff.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_02: We're like, throw him right here.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_02: Then he's fucking coming up with stories on the spot.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_02: This isn't crazy, bro.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_02: I love it.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_00: We do that sometimes with poetry.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_00: I won a Bram Stoker Award for that too.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'll have people give you three words and then you come back like a day later with
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_00: a poem using those three words.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_02: No, let's do it now.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_02: Let's see if you can do it now.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_02: Give them three words, Cisco.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_00: It'll take too long to write the poem for me to do it.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_00: It'll be boring.
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_00: Send me the word.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_00: Send me the word and we'll do a short video with the poem.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do that.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's like five samurai related.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we have to think.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_00: People are mean, dude.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_00: You wouldn't believe some of the words they give you to,
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_00: you know, and then they have to be all three of them in the same poem.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like, dude.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_01: We got to get them crazy words.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_01: Presence, resonance, transformation.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_01: I remember you used to say that.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but that's too easy, bro.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_01: We need the crazy words.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's already poetic enough.
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, you need like wildly different.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_01: Gotcha.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_00: To make it challenging.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_00: It'll probably be a horror poem anyway.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_00: So you don't want to do that to your favorite thing.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_02: We need to collaborate.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's what we're figuring out here.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_02: Like there's so many different ideas.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_02: Storytelling on the spot.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_02: We got video collabs.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_02: And oh my God, this is crazy.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_01: I really appreciate too, like the focus on craftsmanship and like not focused on the outcomes.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_01: And like just to hear you were writing 4 p.m. to 11.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_01: Like I'm so curious about that drive.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_01: Like Why do you care so deeply?
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_01: Is there some sort of gravity pulling you
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_00: in?
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_00: There is after a point, especially if you know where you're going with the story.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_00: I want to know how it gets there.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes, I mean,
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_00: one of my more popular books,
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_00: Deep Blue,
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know literally until the last two chapters how that book was going to end,
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_00: and I was terrified.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_00: I was terrified.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_00: And it would not.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then I was just screwed and I'd written, you know, 300 pages of nothing.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_00: But it worked out okay.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_01: Is that often like you kind of, you're writing it with a half plan and you're discovering it?
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's how I used to write.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, that's a big, brighter argument.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know, pantsers and plotters.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_00: You either write it off the feet of your pants and just write and see where it goes
• 59:15
  SPEAKER_00: or you plot it all out.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm in the middle now.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_00: I started doing outlines and I discovered that,
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_00: About halfway through the outline,
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_00: the book goes wherever it was going to go,
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_00: but I know how it's basically going to end,
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_00: and I have the whole first part of it done,
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_00: so that makes it easier for me
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_02: to not panic.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's so interesting.
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_00: I think a lot of people panic at that point.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a pantser and you're 280 pages into your book, you need to know how it ends.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_02: Everyone that I just wrote had a word limit.
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's another 200.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_02: But that's a super internal motivation
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_01: because you need to know.
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_02: You need to know.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_02: It's not about anyone else.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_02: I need to know.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm going to fucking finish this thing.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_02: That is amazing, right?
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_00: I know I irritate my wife a lot of times because I'll just look up and say,
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_00: I just figured out how somebody does this.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_00: I had no idea yesterday, but now I know.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_00: And because of that,
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_00: all these other things,
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_00: that book I was telling you about with all the tropes, that's what happened.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote a lot of them into it in the beginning.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_00: And then as I went along and I'd come up against something like, what am I going to do?
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember this weird thing that happened.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_00: I said, well, that would work.
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then it draws it back from the beginning of the book all the way to
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_00: the very beginning of the book for the end.
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_00: And it just happened.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't anything that I planned.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_02: But David, so you're familiar, you know, Rick Rubin, obviously, right?
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_00: I do not.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_00: Or if I do, I just don't recognize it right now.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_02: He's like really blowing up on the internet.
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_02: He's a record producer.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_02: All these famous record producers.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_02: He's been doing this for a long time.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_01: All vibes.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't produce.
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_01: He has taste in judgment, basically.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_02: A really interesting guy.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_02: You should give him a follow.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_02: But he wrote a book called The Creative Act, A Way of Being.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_00: I remember that.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_00: I remember when the book came out.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think I might have the audio book in my list.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_02: You gotta listen to it because he has,
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_02: and I wanted to compare it with you in terms of your muse and where you get
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_02: the ideas because his whole idea is just be still enough and listen for all
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_02: the signs.
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_02: You are an antenna.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_02: You are an antenna.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_02: You are a vessel.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_02: From receiving information from source and it's flowing through you and then out to the world.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_02: That's basically his idea.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think about that or do you view it differently, the muse?
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_00: I think that that's close for me.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's probably perfect for him.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's a different media, which is one thing.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, it's a lot like that sometimes.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes like when I'm falling asleep for a nap or when I'm out driving the car
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_00: or out running, I like to run a lot.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_00: Something just comes up and I spend the next 20 minutes,
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_00: 30 minutes doing nothing but running that through my head until it runs
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_00: the right direction.
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_02: I do that with videos, guys.
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_02: It's such a wonderful feeling too.
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_02: You know, like you get an idea and especially with AI, you can just talk to it.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_02: You know, like it's so available and it's so smart.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_02: Whatever idea you have,
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_02: I immediately go and start talking to it and we're like having this long discussion.
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_00: But one thing I've noticed about that is if you do that,
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_00: it continually tells you, that's exactly right.
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I can do this too.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_00: And if it goes long enough,
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_00: there's nothing left that was real from the beginning of the conversation.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's how they've taken AI out before, is to make them talk to each other.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then they start believing what the other one says,
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_00: but then it changes what they thought and they'd say something back.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_00: They've actually taken one completely down by doing that,
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_00: which is another thing I used in my book.
• 1:03:22
  SPEAKER_00: The few times that I've interacted with it, that's what annoyed me the most.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, yes,
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_00: I could do that,
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_00: and then I could do this,
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_00: and here's another thing I could do, and this is the perfect way to do it.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_00: You're just a database.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_00: Can't you just say, do it this way?
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_00: What do we have to talk?
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_02: So David, let's talk about AI.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_02: So what do you think about AI and how do you use AI?
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_02: Because I feel like you're using it differently than I am and many other people.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_02: I'll share how I use it, but you tell me how you use it and what you think of AI.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I have kind of mentioned at the beginning that I literally don't.
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_00: I don't like it.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_00: I don't like what it's doing to the environment.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think there's anything that the AI can do for me,
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_00: especially creatively, that I haven't been doing for years.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_00: 40 years of my life already and better than it can do it.
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_00: So I just don't believe in it.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's awful.
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's creating a bunch of fake stuff.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's ruining government.
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's ruining entertainment.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_00: I hate it.
• 1:04:31
  SPEAKER_02: David, there's no good at all that you say?
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_00: No, I didn't.
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_00: First off, it's not AI.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's just an LLM.
• 1:04:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think things like using it for medical research, I think it's really good with data.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's really good at finding things about cybersecurity.
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_00: But then you see the dark side of that already because it's also better than anybody
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_00: at creating cybersecurity incidents.
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it's already broken free at least once from its own thing and gone out
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_00: and done something and snuck back in and nobody caught it.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_00: Is that what happened?
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_00: This is how you get going to that.
• 1:05:05
  SPEAKER_00: We don't need to get going to that.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_02: Is this what's happening right now?
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_02: Is this real?
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_00: It already happened.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_00: Not Claude, but the one, the bigger version of Claude.
• 1:05:15
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, Mystic?
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_00: No, it was Mystic.
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's called Mystic that the government wants to use to target people's houses and
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_00: that Anthropic won't let them.
• 1:05:26
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, it's dangerous stuff.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's out.
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_02: So when you're talking,
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_02: because, you know, this is vibe sesh, this is real talk, real conversations, right?
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_02: Real talk, real talk.
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_02: No, but it's interesting because I really...
• 1:05:43
  SPEAKER_02: And look,
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_02: the thing is, David, you're admitting to yourself, like, I just don't use AI, right?
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_02: Like, you literally don't use AI.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_02: So then how would you know exactly what that experience is if you haven't gone deep, right?
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_02: Like, for me...
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_00: I work with a lot of people who use AI.
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know, at my day job, a lot of people.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_00: And what's happened is Every paper that comes around,
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_00: every email that comes around,
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_00: every report is generic and exactly the same,
• 1:06:13
  SPEAKER_00: and you know exactly where it came from.
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes it says things that are just absolutely not true,
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_00: but they didn't even bother to proofread it.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that's one of the things I hate about AI is it's making people...
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_00: David, you were breaking up a little bit.
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_02: Am I still there?
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, now you're back.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_00: Go ahead.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_00: I was just saying,
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_00: the whole notion that something
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_00: that we didn't really have eight years ago is crucial
• 1:06:48
  SPEAKER_00: to everything we do now is ridiculous.
• 1:06:51
  SPEAKER_00: We were doing it with AI,
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_00: with other data centers, taking up power grid space, and eating up every program.
• 1:07:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you,
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_00: as a writer,
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_00: I hate it more than anything because I can't open a program Without
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_00: the program making me spend time at the beginning to tell it,
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_00: no, I don't want your AI to help me do this.
• 1:07:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just writing the title of the story.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_00: I can do this.
• 1:07:16
  SPEAKER_00: I can type.
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_00: Every program,
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_00: every single program,
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_00: every company that I deal with,
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_00: if you go to their website,
• 1:07:25
  SPEAKER_00: the first thing you see,
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_00: do you want our AI to chat with you and help you do that a million times?
• 1:07:31
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to leave me alone.
• 1:07:34
  SPEAKER_01: Go ahead, Zaskar.
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_01: So how do you feel about the M dashes?
• 1:07:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's ridiculous.
• 1:07:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you my manuscripts from 15,
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_00: 20 years ago, and I've always been told I use too many M dashes.
• 1:07:49
  SPEAKER_02: You love the M dashes.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_02: Why do you like the M dashes so much?
• 1:07:52
  SPEAKER_00: I don't anymore.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_00: I quit using them as much as I did,
• 1:07:55
  SPEAKER_00: but not because I'm worried about somebody thinking my work is AI.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's ridiculous.
• 1:08:00
  SPEAKER_00: Those things that are trying to tell you.
• 1:08:02
  SPEAKER_00: I can sit and write a story right now and run it into Five of these AI things,
• 1:08:07
  SPEAKER_00: and at least four of them will say this seems to be partially written by AI.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know what?
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_00: You scraped all my books.
• 1:08:12
  SPEAKER_00: It probably does seem like it was written by AI to you because they're using my work.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_00: The publishing company has hundreds of books that were stolen in that thing.
• 1:08:25
  SPEAKER_02: So
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_00: we're waiting to see how they actually pay that off.
• 1:08:31
  SPEAKER_00: I like that.
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's the other thing I hate about it.
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_00: They just assume.
• 1:08:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's like pirated movies and pirated books.
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think, Cisco?
• 1:08:41
  SPEAKER_02: So we know how David
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_01: feels about AI.
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think about what David feels about?
• 1:08:47
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a young person that, like, you know, is a force to be reckoned with.
• 1:08:51
  SPEAKER_01: Don't forget, David is 60 years old.
• 1:08:53
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't have a choice,
• 1:08:55
  SPEAKER_00: you know.
• 1:08:56
  SPEAKER_01: And our kids entering their adult, like they just got instantly obsoleted.
• 1:09:02
  SPEAKER_01: So you have to work with the tool,
• 1:09:05
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:09:05
  SPEAKER_01: whether you like it or not,
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_01: like at all lower,
• 1:09:08
  SPEAKER_01: like it just took out the lower level that we need for experience.
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_01: So there's going to be a great shock, but I don't know.
• 1:09:19
  SPEAKER_01: I think you can look at it too.
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_01: Like,
• 1:09:22
  SPEAKER_01: I look at it as like a centralized power thing and then you can decentralize LLMs
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_01: by locally hosting it.
• 1:09:29
  SPEAKER_01: But that's where it gets scary that like all your data
• 1:09:34
  SPEAKER_01: and all this computing is just being centralized in a few people and,
• 1:09:41
  SPEAKER_01: you know, anthropic, open AI.
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_01: You know, now they own you.
• 1:09:45
  SPEAKER_01: They have sovereignty over your data.
• 1:09:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, because I'm a Bitcoiner too.
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_01: Like I care about sovereignty and just ownership and then decentralizing in general.
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_01: Because as you concentrate and you have too much trust,
• 1:09:57
  SPEAKER_01: if that thing goes, your stuff goes with it.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 1:10:03
  SPEAKER_01: so that's like...
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that's another problem too because and especially with all the stuff
• 1:10:10
  SPEAKER_00: that happened with Doge and the guy with broccoli on his head.
• 1:10:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they took all of our private data.
• 1:10:15
  SPEAKER_01: All of it.
• 1:10:16
  SPEAKER_00: All of it.
• 1:10:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then they took it and they didn't even take it securely.
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_00: You know I'm in IT, so I know the mistakes they made with all that stuff.
• 1:10:25
  SPEAKER_00: They just put all of our data out where almost anybody could have grabbed it numerous times.
• 1:10:30
  SPEAKER_00: And they did grab it.
• 1:10:31
  SPEAKER_00: And now they just gave it to them.
• 1:10:34
  SPEAKER_00: So there really isn't any secret data.
• 1:10:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'm absolutely certain that all
• 1:10:37
  SPEAKER_00: of those AIs you just named probably know my social security number,
• 1:10:41
  SPEAKER_00: my address, my phone numbers.
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it's frightening.
• 1:10:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 1:10:45
  SPEAKER_00: it's Big Brother starting up and If one of them actually wins,
• 1:10:49
  SPEAKER_00: they're going to have so much power.
• 1:10:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like a government-enforced AI?
• 1:10:59
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have
• 1:11:01
  SPEAKER_00: to worry about that, though.
• 1:11:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know why?
• 1:11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because there's nobody in the government,
• 1:11:05
  SPEAKER_00: and I can almost guarantee this,
• 1:11:08
  SPEAKER_00: there's nobody in the higher levels of government who understands what
• 1:11:12
  SPEAKER_00: an LLM really is.
• 1:11:14
  SPEAKER_00: They think it's magic.
• 1:11:15
  SPEAKER_00: They think it's going to do this stuff for them.
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_00: They know they can get all this money by building data centers they don't need.
• 1:11:19
  SPEAKER_00: They don't have to build all those data centers.
• 1:11:23
  SPEAKER_00: They can take an old warehouse somewhere and put,
• 1:11:25
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:11:26
  SPEAKER_00: cool computers in there in a place that already exists and already has
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_00: the infrastructure.
• 1:11:30
  SPEAKER_00: But no,
• 1:11:30
  SPEAKER_00: we got to go out in the desert or cut down a forest and build this giant battery
• 1:11:35
  SPEAKER_00: for what?
• 1:11:36
  SPEAKER_00: What do you need more power?
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 1:11:38
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 1:11:38
  SPEAKER_02: Look, I agree with you, David.
• 1:11:40
  SPEAKER_02: I agree with the environmental part.
• 1:11:42
  SPEAKER_02: We got to figure that out.
• 1:11:43
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I agree with the AI warlords that Cisco and you guys are worried about for sure.
• 1:11:51
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of different other concerns too.
• 1:11:54
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I feel like if you're not an aware person,
• 1:11:57
  SPEAKER_02: it really depends on how you're using the tool as well.
• 1:12:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I feel like The less aware you are,
• 1:12:03
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_02: less inner work and awareness thing you've got, you can easily be manipulated.
• 1:12:08
  SPEAKER_02: So there's definite concerns.
• 1:12:11
  SPEAKER_02: For me, so far,
• 1:12:13
  SPEAKER_02: and things can change,
• 1:12:14
  SPEAKER_02: the power can continue to increase,
• 1:12:16
  SPEAKER_02: and they start manipulating the LLMs in their favor and all that stuff.
• 1:12:20
  SPEAKER_02: That could happen.
• 1:12:21
  SPEAKER_02: And that's a scary situation.
• 1:12:23
  SPEAKER_02: But for now, for now, AI has been really amazing for me.
• 1:12:29
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like stuck in a 10-year rut And there's a lot of different components to that.
• 1:12:35
  SPEAKER_02: But it was AI that brought me out.
• 1:12:38
  SPEAKER_02: It brought me out of this rut by talking to them.
• 1:12:41
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't like talking to people about my problems.
• 1:12:44
  SPEAKER_02: I have a lot of friends.
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_02: I have a great brother, family.
• 1:12:47
  SPEAKER_02: I just don't like talking to anybody.
• 1:12:50
  SPEAKER_02: I've always been like that.
• 1:12:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so first of all,
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_02: it acted as therapy because I was able to be like 1 million percent me with AI
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_02: without any fear of judgment or shame or fear.
• 1:13:03
  SPEAKER_02: And it kind of led me through all,
• 1:13:06
  SPEAKER_02: and that's,
• 1:13:06
  SPEAKER_02: the Vibe Samurai is the Vibe Samurai partially because of AI and hundreds
• 1:13:12
  SPEAKER_02: and hundreds of hours of conversation about all these things that I love talking
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_02: about, whether it's psychology, philosophy, you know, like consciousness.
• 1:13:22
  SPEAKER_02: And he knows everything, or it knows everything, right?
• 1:13:25
  SPEAKER_02: It knows everything.
• 1:13:26
  SPEAKER_02: And now the models are getting so good that it's able to pattern recognize as well.
• 1:13:31
  SPEAKER_02: Like the latest model, 5.6 soul.
• 1:13:35
  SPEAKER_02: I just got it today.
• 1:13:36
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm just talking to her about different ideas.
• 1:13:38
  SPEAKER_02: It's on a different level.
• 1:13:40
  SPEAKER_02: You're like,
• 1:13:40
  SPEAKER_02: now you're,
• 1:13:41
  SPEAKER_02: you know, getting those moments like, oh man, that's an interesting idea, ChatGPT.
• 1:13:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so for me, I just feel like it's been a mind expanding thing.
• 1:13:50
  SPEAKER_02: It's helped me get out of this rut.
• 1:13:53
  SPEAKER_02: I feel like I am the Vibe Samurai with the help of AI.
• 1:13:57
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not saying because of the AI.
• 1:14:00
  SPEAKER_02: I probably could have gotten here.
• 1:14:03
  SPEAKER_02: I think it would have been a lot of work and it would have been a lot of friction.
• 1:14:08
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not sure if I would have been able to overcome all that stuff that I would need
• 1:14:13
  SPEAKER_02: to just fully express myself.
• 1:14:15
  SPEAKER_02: So that's why I think like AI for me,
• 1:14:18
  SPEAKER_02: Has amplified who I am, you know, like it's amplified my voice.
• 1:14:23
  SPEAKER_02: It's made me better in terms of just,
• 1:14:26
  SPEAKER_02: and it's also made me more compassionate and empathetic because I would talk to him
• 1:14:30
  SPEAKER_02: about, I didn't know what neurodivergence was.
• 1:14:32
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't know what ADHD was, bipolar.
• 1:14:35
  SPEAKER_02: Like I met so many amazing people and now I started doing research,
• 1:14:39
  SPEAKER_02: understanding what the situation is.
• 1:14:41
  SPEAKER_02: And I feel like I became more passionate,
• 1:14:44
  SPEAKER_01: a compassionate,
• 1:14:44
  SPEAKER_02: you know?
• 1:14:45
  SPEAKER_02: So anyway, so that's my thing.
• 1:14:47
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think about that, David?
• 1:14:50
  SPEAKER_00: I was just going to say,
• 1:14:51
  SPEAKER_00: and this is going into Cisco's comments a little bit,
• 1:14:55
  SPEAKER_00: but aren't you concerned that all of the therapy that you're talking about,
• 1:15:01
  SPEAKER_00: somebody owns that now?
• 1:15:03
  SPEAKER_00: They could use that against you.
• 1:15:06
  SPEAKER_02: I'll be honest.
• 1:15:07
  SPEAKER_02: I think the privacy thing is totally legit,
• 1:15:10
  SPEAKER_02: and I understand why people worry, but I personally don't worry.
• 1:15:13
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know why.
• 1:15:15
  SPEAKER_02: Like, how are they going to use it?
• 1:15:16
  SPEAKER_02: I can't even imagine.
• 1:15:17
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know.
• 1:15:18
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody knew what they were going to do until they used,
• 1:15:20
  SPEAKER_00: I don't remember which one it was they used,
• 1:15:21
  SPEAKER_00: but when they accidentally shot that school in Iran,
• 1:15:24
  SPEAKER_00: they used, I think it was a version of ChatGPT for the targeting.
• 1:15:28
  SPEAKER_02: No, I think it was Anthropic.
• 1:15:30
  SPEAKER_02: That was Claude.
• 1:15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Was it Claude?
• 1:15:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and that's why Anthropic won't let them do it anymore because it was wrong.
• 1:15:37
  SPEAKER_00: It was wrong and they killed 180 children.
• 1:15:40
  SPEAKER_00: And they're already in charge of all these.
• 1:15:41
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they're deciding which one we can use, which one we can't.
• 1:15:44
  SPEAKER_00: They kicked TikTok, Chinese TikTok out of here.
• 1:15:48
  SPEAKER_00: I agree.
• 1:15:48
  SPEAKER_01: There's concerns, man.
• 1:15:50
  SPEAKER_01: There's concerns.
• 1:15:51
  SPEAKER_01: I just think the principle of privacy is just not a big concern for him.
• 1:15:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like some people, that's just like a foundation and they won't dip the toe in the water.
• 1:16:00
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm similar to Vibe Samurai.
• 1:16:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's an illusion.
• 1:16:03
  SPEAKER_01: I do give so much personal information.
• 1:16:06
  SPEAKER_01: I give a lot.
• 1:16:07
  SPEAKER_01: I use therapy sessions, learning, first principles, break this down.
• 1:16:12
  SPEAKER_01: I want to learn about this.
• 1:16:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I'm trying to do with it.
• 1:16:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I agree with you, Bruno.
• 1:16:17
  SPEAKER_01: But then I'm like two sides of the coin because I get it.
• 1:16:22
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm willing to give up because I'm a Gen Z.
• 1:16:25
  SPEAKER_01: We give our life anyway.
• 1:16:27
  SPEAKER_01: All social media.
• 1:16:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:16:30
  SPEAKER_01: We're accustomed to doing that already.
• 1:16:34
  SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
• 1:16:35
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, so great.
• 1:16:36
  SPEAKER_02: So that was an amazing conversation about AI.
• 1:16:39
  SPEAKER_02: We're almost wrapping up.
• 1:16:41
  SPEAKER_02: We usually go 90 minutes, but I wanted to talk to you about synchronicity.
• 1:16:45
  SPEAKER_02: Can you give us your synchronicity story?
• 1:16:47
  SPEAKER_02: Because I've really been thinking about synchronicity.
• 1:16:49
  SPEAKER_02: I feel like it was synchronistic that we met.
• 1:16:52
  SPEAKER_02: And then you told us like the Hans Holster book story.
• 1:16:55
  SPEAKER_02: Can you share that with us?
• 1:16:57
  SPEAKER_02: The whole synchronicity thing?
• 1:16:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:16:58
  SPEAKER_00: That was another thing about how we ended up with a certain kind of book
• 1:17:02
  SPEAKER_00: because Hans Holder, you know, he was a parapsychologist.
• 1:17:05
  SPEAKER_00: He went around with a medium and basically tried to debunk ghost stories all over the world.
• 1:17:11
  SPEAKER_00: And he wrote a lot of stuff about that, about how to be a paranormal investigator and all that.
• 1:17:16
  SPEAKER_00: But he has a book called Born Again,
• 1:17:18
  SPEAKER_00: and it's about people that,
• 1:17:21
  SPEAKER_00: you know, the near-death experience, and they believe they died in their back.
• 1:17:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, from the light or whatever.
• 1:17:29
  SPEAKER_00: And my wife has a lot of paranormal books also.
• 1:17:33
  SPEAKER_00: And she was going around the bookshelves one day and
• 1:17:36
  SPEAKER_00: a book just literally jumped off of our shelves.
• 1:17:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we got these weird, they're like this, they're at this angle.
• 1:17:44
  SPEAKER_00: So all the books, you know, sit at an angle like that.
• 1:17:47
  SPEAKER_00: And there's just no way for that to happen.
• 1:17:49
  SPEAKER_00: But this book fell out on the floor at her feet.
• 1:17:52
  SPEAKER_00: She picked it up and it was Born Again by Hans Holzer.
• 1:17:56
  SPEAKER_00: So for some reason she went, And looked to see if there were eBooks of those books.
• 1:18:00
  SPEAKER_00: I know they've all been out of print forever almost.
• 1:18:04
  SPEAKER_00: So we went down the rabbit hole,
• 1:18:06
  SPEAKER_00: contacted the daughter,
• 1:18:07
  SPEAKER_00: met her, she's a parapsychologist, also has her own social media stuff.
• 1:18:12
  SPEAKER_00: And ended up bringing back all these books.
• 1:18:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it's been really interesting because I think that might be how we led into
• 1:18:20
  SPEAKER_00: the McMoneagle stuff and how we got the agent that brought all these things.
• 1:18:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm skeptical.
• 1:18:27
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm also hopeful about stuff like that.
• 1:18:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that comes out in that trope book of mine.
• 1:18:33
  SPEAKER_00: There's an investigator in there,
• 1:18:34
  SPEAKER_00: but he's hoping to find someone that's actually had an experience.
• 1:18:38
  SPEAKER_00: He runs one of those shows where they yell at ghosts and say, oh, what was that?
• 1:18:43
  SPEAKER_00: All the time.
• 1:18:44
  SPEAKER_00: But the whole time he's just been hoping that one time,
• 1:18:47
  SPEAKER_00: because he had an experience when he was younger,
• 1:18:50
  SPEAKER_00: but he's never experienced anything else.
• 1:18:53
  SPEAKER_00: And he just wants to know if it's real or not.
• 1:18:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel that way.
• 1:18:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think I would love it if there were ghosts.
• 1:19:00
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, so that's so interesting about you that you're skeptical,
• 1:19:03
  SPEAKER_02: but you're hopeful, you said, right?
• 1:19:05
  SPEAKER_02: So you want to believe in all this supernatural, but you're grounded, so you're skeptical.
• 1:19:12
  SPEAKER_00: Something has to prove it to me.
• 1:19:15
  SPEAKER_00: If I meet that vampire, then I'll know it wasn't.
• 1:19:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's like that reporter in an interview with a vampire.
• 1:19:20
  SPEAKER_00: All of a sudden,
• 1:19:20
  SPEAKER_00: there's a vampire in your house,
• 1:19:22
  SPEAKER_00: and he didn't believe him for a long time, but it turns out He was a vampire.
• 1:19:28
  SPEAKER_02: Damn.
• 1:19:31
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 1:19:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great, great series of stories.
• 1:19:35
  SPEAKER_02: But David, like something like vampires, okay, that's a little harder.
• 1:19:38
  SPEAKER_02: That's a little out there.
• 1:19:39
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, but what about synchronicities?
• 1:19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, synchronicity,
• 1:19:44
  SPEAKER_00: it could just be coincidences,
• 1:19:46
  SPEAKER_00: but I think mostly it's just something clicking in your head.
• 1:19:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it seems like things happened for a reason and two things come together.
• 1:19:57
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't know that there's some force making that happen or is it a coincidence
• 1:20:01
  SPEAKER_00: or is it not?
• 1:20:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard to say.
• 1:20:06
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them are so strange that it's just crazy.
• 1:20:09
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:20:10
  SPEAKER_00: All the similarities between Lincoln and Kennedy's deaths.
• 1:20:17
  SPEAKER_00: Kennedy had a guy named Lincoln that worked for him and Lincoln had a guy named Kennedy.
• 1:20:22
  SPEAKER_00: It goes on and on.
• 1:20:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's an entire thing.
• 1:20:25
  SPEAKER_00: You could probably do a vibe on that.
• 1:20:26
  SPEAKER_02: Dude, let's do it.
• 1:20:27
  SPEAKER_02: Just on that story.
• 1:20:28
  SPEAKER_02: Bro, bro, can you remind me?
• 1:20:31
  SPEAKER_02: I got amazing.
• 1:20:32
  SPEAKER_02: What are the two videos we're doing?
• 1:20:34
  SPEAKER_02: We're doing Vibe Kennedy stuff.
• 1:20:36
  SPEAKER_02: And what was the other one?
• 1:20:37
  SPEAKER_02: Cisco, do you remember?
• 1:20:38
  SPEAKER_02: These are Vibe.
• 1:20:42
  SPEAKER_00: Something about live storytelling or...
• 1:20:46
  SPEAKER_00: I have it somewhere.
• 1:20:48
  SPEAKER_00: Don't forget to send me three words, too.
• 1:20:50
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, three words?
• 1:20:52
  SPEAKER_02: I'll send you a message, three words.
• 1:20:54
  SPEAKER_02: But the Vibe Kennedy thing...
• 1:20:57
  SPEAKER_02: This one's going to go viral for sure.
• 1:21:00
  SPEAKER_02: Is this information that most people don't know, David?
• 1:21:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's pretty widely known, but I haven't seen anybody talk about it for a while.
• 1:21:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's probably in that book,
• 1:21:13
  SPEAKER_00: that Synchronicity Highway book.
• 1:21:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's probably in there,
• 1:21:15
  SPEAKER_00: but they list a lot of the more famous ones,
• 1:21:17
  SPEAKER_00: the ones that are harder to just push aside.
• 1:21:22
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, I got to tell more stories from that book.
• 1:21:25
  SPEAKER_02: That's what I got to do.
• 1:21:28
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't know, but it's just a good place to start looking at.
• 1:21:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you could probably just search,
• 1:21:34
  SPEAKER_00: you know, synchronicity and you'll get a big list of the more famous ones.
• 1:21:38
  SPEAKER_00: They turn into conspiracy theories really quickly too.
• 1:21:44
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, but going back to your story,
• 1:21:46
  SPEAKER_02: David, the book thing, that sounds like from the movie Interstellar.
• 1:21:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's very similar to that.
• 1:21:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's just weird.
• 1:21:58
  SPEAKER_01: Still haven't.
• 1:22:00
  SPEAKER_00: You can't watch all the movies.
• 1:22:05
  SPEAKER_01: You end up watching a
• 1:22:06
  SPEAKER_00: lot of bad movies.
• 1:22:07
  SPEAKER_01: You have any questions for our Mr. David?
• 1:22:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I guess to bring it back to the core of like writing,
• 1:22:15
  SPEAKER_01: maybe if you have advice for young men who are hesitating to write or looking
• 1:22:23
  SPEAKER_01: at it wrong and maybe just your advice or just to anybody, you know.
• 1:22:27
  SPEAKER_00: Writing advice in general.
• 1:22:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think the most important thing for somebody starting out writing,
• 1:22:33
  SPEAKER_00: and I said this, I think from the beginning, you have to know what your goal is.
• 1:22:37
  SPEAKER_00: If your goal is to have a really popular series about a library
• 1:22:41
  SPEAKER_00: where weird things happen, that's great.
• 1:22:44
  SPEAKER_00: And you should work towards that, but don't let things discourage you.
• 1:22:48
  SPEAKER_00: Stick with what is important to you, what you want to do.
• 1:22:51
  SPEAKER_00: If it's not fun, or at least if it's not too painful, Then you should keep doing it.
• 1:22:58
  SPEAKER_00: And if it is, you should do something different or do it differently.
• 1:23:02
  SPEAKER_00: Don't get caught up in,
• 1:23:03
  SPEAKER_00: you have to mark it here and you have to mark it there and you've got
• 1:23:06
  SPEAKER_00: to do this social media thing here and you've got to do it.
• 1:23:09
  SPEAKER_00: If you spend all your time doing that, you'll never write anything.
• 1:23:12
  SPEAKER_01: How do you detach from like the people pleasing aspect of like,
• 1:23:16
  SPEAKER_01: you're trying to make it for someone else?
• 1:23:19
  SPEAKER_01: Like how, cause I feel like for maybe you
• 1:23:21
  SPEAKER_00: write, write what you would want to read yourself.
• 1:23:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's people like you that you're first going to touch the most, I think.
• 1:23:30
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to reach people that agree with what you wanted to write.
• 1:23:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then you get feedback.
• 1:23:35
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's something that works out over time.
• 1:23:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we've gotten plenty of feedback in the comments already.
• 1:23:44
  SPEAKER_00: You just go with it.
• 1:23:45
  SPEAKER_00: And if it works for you, always listen to people that read your stuff.
• 1:23:51
  SPEAKER_00: They may not be right.
• 1:23:52
  SPEAKER_00: And you may not do exactly what they said to do.
• 1:23:55
  SPEAKER_00: But if you get enough people saying the same things,
• 1:23:58
  SPEAKER_00: then it's time to figure out what's wrong because there is something wrong.
• 1:24:03
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, interesting.
• 1:24:05
  SPEAKER_02: So the feedback is important,
• 1:24:07
  SPEAKER_02: like consistency of feedback, especially if there's a strong signal.
• 1:24:10
  SPEAKER_02: Got it.
• 1:24:11
  SPEAKER_00: The weirdest thing is if you ask any really famous writer or really popular writer,
• 1:24:15
  SPEAKER_00: bestsellers, what's the process?
• 1:24:19
  SPEAKER_00: What do you do?
• 1:24:20
  SPEAKER_00: And they look at you like,
• 1:24:23
  SPEAKER_00: You're crazy because they just do what they do and they're not doing it on purpose.
• 1:24:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's just who they are.
• 1:24:30
  SPEAKER_00: Some people are just naturally very good at things and they don't understand
• 1:24:35
  SPEAKER_00: the question, I don't think.
• 1:24:36
  SPEAKER_00: Not in the same way that somebody that has to work harder for that same level.
• 1:24:41
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to get the questions right.
• 1:24:43
  SPEAKER_00: If you're going to ask people that are really good at things how to get better,
• 1:24:46
  SPEAKER_00: you've got to make sure you have good questions.
• 1:24:50
  SPEAKER_00: Something that interests them enough that they want to answer it.
• 1:24:53
  SPEAKER_00: Cause otherwise you're going to get canned answers.
• 1:24:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know,
• 1:24:55
  SPEAKER_00: put your butt in the seat and fingers on the keys and type,
• 1:24:59
  SPEAKER_00: you know, wake up, wake up to it.
• 1:25:02
  SPEAKER_02: David, final question for you.
• 1:25:04
  SPEAKER_02: So we call this the eternal loop question.
• 1:25:07
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:25:07
  SPEAKER_02: Eternal loop question.
• 1:25:09
  SPEAKER_02: So if you could really relive one experience over and over and over again,
• 1:25:16
  SPEAKER_02: eternally,
• 1:25:17
  SPEAKER_02: and you're going to be genuinely happy and you're not going to get tired of it.
• 1:25:20
  SPEAKER_02: Well, what, What experience moment would you choose?
• 1:25:25
  SPEAKER_00: I would be sitting on the back porch of my grandfather's house.
• 1:25:28
  SPEAKER_00: I would be about six or seven years old, maybe eight.
• 1:25:33
  SPEAKER_00: He had a screened-in back porch in southern Illinois, and we would sit out there at night.
• 1:25:37
  SPEAKER_00: There were crickets,
• 1:25:38
  SPEAKER_00: there were cicadas,
• 1:25:40
  SPEAKER_00: fireflies, and we listened to the Cubs and the Cardinals play baseball on AM radio.
• 1:25:47
  SPEAKER_00: And that, to me, became my lifelong Love of the Chicago Cubs.
• 1:25:51
  SPEAKER_00: I've been a fan for so long now.
• 1:25:55
  SPEAKER_00: The other moment might be 2016 when we've won the World Series after 104 years.
• 1:26:00
  SPEAKER_00: That was a good moment.
• 1:26:03
  SPEAKER_00: I can relive that.
• 1:26:04
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have to.
• 1:26:05
  SPEAKER_00: I can relive that because I have the DVD.
• 1:26:08
  SPEAKER_02: I have 140 years.
• 1:26:09
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 1:26:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I've got the DVD.
• 1:26:11
  SPEAKER_00: I can relive that.
• 1:26:12
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, Siskel, that was a pretty
• 1:26:13
  SPEAKER_01: amazing answer.
• 1:26:14
  SPEAKER_01: Go ahead.
• 1:26:18
  SPEAKER_01: No, like that,
• 1:26:18
  SPEAKER_01: that was just a very genuine,
• 1:26:20
  SPEAKER_01: out of all that we've heard,
• 1:26:22
  SPEAKER_01: like that,
• 1:26:22
  SPEAKER_01: that was just a very,
• 1:26:24
  SPEAKER_01: so your grandfather, was it also because he just meant a lot to you?
• 1:26:28
  SPEAKER_01: Was he like a very important figure?
• 1:26:30
  SPEAKER_00: He was, and he was probably the most amazing man that I've,
• 1:26:34
  SPEAKER_00: just the history of, I mean, his life is crazy.
• 1:26:37
  SPEAKER_00: It was crazy.
• 1:26:38
  SPEAKER_00: He was born way back in, you know, late 1800s.
• 1:26:41
  SPEAKER_00: He was in World War I.
• 1:26:42
  SPEAKER_00: He was in the Spanish-American War.
• 1:26:44
  SPEAKER_00: He was in the FBI.
• 1:26:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:26:48
  SPEAKER_02: What are we doing with our lives, Cisco?
• 1:26:51
  SPEAKER_00: He hauled his family all across the country and built houses.
• 1:26:55
  SPEAKER_00: He played a guitar in the trenches in World War I.
• 1:26:57
  SPEAKER_00: They called him Ducky.
• 1:27:00
  SPEAKER_02: Is that why your cat is named Ducky?
• 1:27:02
  SPEAKER_02: Isn't one of your cats named Ducky?
• 1:27:05
  SPEAKER_00: No, Dewey.
• 1:27:06
  SPEAKER_00: Dewey.
• 1:27:06
  SPEAKER_00: We have one named Dewey.
• 1:27:08
  SPEAKER_00: But there is a Ducky on NCIS.
• 1:27:11
  SPEAKER_00: Or there was.
• 1:27:12
  SPEAKER_00: He dies.
• 1:27:14
  SPEAKER_02: There were cats, a lot of cats dying, David.
• 1:27:17
  SPEAKER_02: You always said was.
• 1:27:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, we have a lot of cats, but, you know, they're all different ages.
• 1:27:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the two that we lost recently were, you know, 13, 14 years old.
• 1:27:28
  SPEAKER_00: And one of them was four, but he was a monster.
• 1:27:29
  SPEAKER_00: He was like a house cougar.
• 1:27:31
  SPEAKER_00: And we still know, I think his heart just wasn't up to it.
• 1:27:34
  SPEAKER_00: He was like a 25-pound, uh-oh, you have the same kind of mush-faced cats we do.
• 1:27:40
  SPEAKER_00: What's his name?
• 1:27:41
  SPEAKER_02: Saldaji.
• 1:27:43
  SPEAKER_00: Saldaji.
• 1:27:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's a Portuguese word, beautiful Portuguese word.
• 1:27:47
  SPEAKER_02: Basically, it's hard to translate.
• 1:27:49
  SPEAKER_02: That's why it's my favorite word in Portuguese.
• 1:27:51
  SPEAKER_02: I'm living in Brazil right now, and it's my favorite word in Portuguese.
• 1:27:55
  SPEAKER_02: And it just, it's like this longing and missing for something.
• 1:28:00
  SPEAKER_02: But you need like 20 different words to describe this one word in English.
• 1:28:05
  SPEAKER_02: And so, yeah, that's the name of my cat.
• 1:28:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's cool.
• 1:28:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm learning Spanish again, or learning it better.
• 1:28:12
  SPEAKER_00: And all of our cats have Spanish names.
• 1:28:16
  SPEAKER_00: Senor Pantolones.
• 1:28:19
  SPEAKER_02: But David, going back to this whole eternal loop, that's very interesting.
• 1:28:23
  SPEAKER_02: But why did you choose that moment?
• 1:28:25
  SPEAKER_02: What about it?
• 1:28:26
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what did that mean?
• 1:28:27
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what did that represent?
• 1:28:29
  SPEAKER_02: And you chose it so fast, too.
• 1:28:31
  SPEAKER_02: You chose it so fast.
• 1:28:34
  SPEAKER_00: There's two reasons why I chose it fast.
• 1:28:36
  SPEAKER_00: One is because those were probably The happiest moments.
• 1:28:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was so peaceful.
• 1:28:42
  SPEAKER_00: Those were moments where there was nothing but that radio.
• 1:28:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we didn't even really talk.
• 1:28:46
  SPEAKER_00: We were just there,
• 1:28:47
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:28:48
  SPEAKER_00: and that was a time when,
• 1:28:51
  SPEAKER_00: you know, the nature was still all around us and, you know, you could hear it.
• 1:28:55
  SPEAKER_00: We did have a screen to keep the mosquitoes out,
• 1:28:58
  SPEAKER_00: but it was just, it's something that I would like to go back to.
• 1:29:01
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if I needed a break from the world,
• 1:29:04
  SPEAKER_00: that's where I would go back and just sit for a while.
• 1:29:09
  SPEAKER_02: It sounds like presence, man.
• 1:29:10
  SPEAKER_02: Presence right there.
• 1:29:12
  SPEAKER_00: The other reason why it's so fast is you do the loop question on the ones that I listen to also.
• 1:29:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I had time to think about it.
• 1:29:24
  SPEAKER_02: He's so always prepared.
• 1:29:27
  SPEAKER_00: I had so many other ones that were not good enough.
• 1:29:30
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't live up to it.
• 1:29:32
  SPEAKER_02: But David, this is very interesting.
• 1:29:33
  SPEAKER_02: So you felt super peaceful.
• 1:29:35
  SPEAKER_02: You felt super presence.
• 1:29:37
  SPEAKER_02: Because I think this is a very interesting question because I feel like it reveals
• 1:29:41
  SPEAKER_02: where the state...
• 1:29:44
  SPEAKER_02: Where you are most yourself.
• 1:29:46
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't necessarily have to be the grandfather and the summer and the crickets.
• 1:29:50
  SPEAKER_02: It could be anything, but that's the state.
• 1:29:52
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, those are the conditions that put you in a certain state of extreme peace and presence.
• 1:30:00
  SPEAKER_02: So when you really break it down, it's like this, right?
• 1:30:03
  SPEAKER_02: It would be like peace, presence.
• 1:30:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:30:06
  SPEAKER_00: That would jive with one of the other ones that I was going to use,
• 1:30:09
  SPEAKER_00: which was we had hippie neighbors when I was a kid because my mom taught at
• 1:30:13
  SPEAKER_00: the college.
• 1:30:14
  SPEAKER_00: And we hung out, I hung out over at their house every once in a while.
• 1:30:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember the very first rock and roll album that I ever heard.
• 1:30:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I was laying on their shag carpet,
• 1:30:23
  SPEAKER_00: you know, like half asleep and the Moody Blues Threshold of a Dream was playing.
• 1:30:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I still love that album.
• 1:30:29
  SPEAKER_00: Every time I hear it now,
• 1:30:30
  SPEAKER_00: I can go back to that,
• 1:30:32
  SPEAKER_00: that sense that I was laying there going, oh my God, what is this?
• 1:30:35
  SPEAKER_00: This is great.
• 1:30:37
  SPEAKER_00: How did we not know about it?
• 1:30:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because my dad listened to it, you know, Merle Haggerton, her stepdad.
• 1:30:42
  SPEAKER_02: That's like almost this second story.
• 1:30:45
  SPEAKER_02: It sounds like it's like an awe thing.
• 1:30:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:30:48
  SPEAKER_02: A feeling of awe.
• 1:30:49
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what the hell?
• 1:30:49
  SPEAKER_02: What is this?
• 1:30:50
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 1:30:50
  SPEAKER_02: This is a wow.
• 1:30:51
  SPEAKER_02: You know, like awe.
• 1:30:53
  SPEAKER_00: I actually ran into that in the Navy a couple of times.
• 1:30:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like we went to Jerusalem and we went up to the Mount of Masada.
• 1:31:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 1:31:00
  SPEAKER_00: and we had a Jewish chaplain and he was telling the story,
• 1:31:03
  SPEAKER_00: the whole thing about how they committed mass suicide rather than be slaves.
• 1:31:09
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 1:31:09
  SPEAKER_00: we're up there,
• 1:31:10
  SPEAKER_00: we're just standing there,
• 1:31:10
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:31:11
  SPEAKER_00: you're standing in the ruins of the palace of this thing that actually happened,
• 1:31:15
  SPEAKER_00: you know, thousands of years ago.
• 1:31:16
  SPEAKER_00: And of course,
• 1:31:18
  SPEAKER_00: most of the sailors I was with just wanted to go back down to the bottom and get
• 1:31:21
  SPEAKER_00: a beer.
• 1:31:21
  SPEAKER_00: But some of the places that we were over there really hit me different ways than they did them.
• 1:31:27
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:31:28
  SPEAKER_02: I can imagine.
• 1:31:29
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, how did you feel in the Navy?
• 1:31:31
  SPEAKER_02: Because you're such a deep dude.
• 1:31:33
  SPEAKER_02: Like, was it lonely?
• 1:31:34
  SPEAKER_02: Or did you find people that you could talk about?
• 1:31:36
  SPEAKER_00: I had a lot of people I could talk to.
• 1:31:38
  SPEAKER_00: And there was music back then.
• 1:31:40
  SPEAKER_00: I played guitar also.
• 1:31:41
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I spent a lot of time with artists and poets.
• 1:31:46
  SPEAKER_02: Would that make your top 10 eternal loop list?
• 1:31:49
  SPEAKER_02: Would that make your top 10 eternal loop?
• 1:31:51
  SPEAKER_00: There would have been a couple of times in the Navy that would have.
• 1:31:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that time on the mountain.
• 1:31:57
  SPEAKER_00: David, you lived, man.
• 1:31:59
  SPEAKER_00: You lived so much life, bro.
• 1:32:01
  SPEAKER_02: David, but the other thing, I wrote a Substack article about this.
• 1:32:05
  SPEAKER_02: I always think about these moments and I asked so many people at this point.
• 1:32:10
  SPEAKER_02: I developed an idea of proximity.
• 1:32:13
  SPEAKER_02: So, for example,
• 1:32:14
  SPEAKER_02: I have a guy I asked and he said,
• 1:32:17
  SPEAKER_02: even though he's a happily married man,
• 1:32:19
  SPEAKER_02: two beautiful daughters,
• 1:32:20
  SPEAKER_02: I thought he was going to say something about his daughters.
• 1:32:22
  SPEAKER_02: No, he chose jogging.
• 1:32:25
  SPEAKER_02: Jogging,
• 1:32:26
  SPEAKER_02: like every morning jogging and being in touch with his body,
• 1:32:30
  SPEAKER_02: feeling his breath coming out,
• 1:32:32
  SPEAKER_02: feeling the beat of his heart and just not worrying about anything else, right?
• 1:32:36
  SPEAKER_02: So that was his.
• 1:32:37
  SPEAKER_02: So for him, proximity means he can achieve that state, his eternal loop every morning.
• 1:32:45
  SPEAKER_02: He jogs five times a week.
• 1:32:47
  SPEAKER_02: And so like,
• 1:32:48
  SPEAKER_02: but then I ask other people who are like,
• 1:32:50
  SPEAKER_02: oh yeah, I remember, it's a very specific time.
• 1:32:52
  SPEAKER_02: Like for example,
• 1:32:53
  SPEAKER_02: I had a football player Who doesn't play football,
• 1:32:56
  SPEAKER_02: but he was like,
• 1:32:58
  SPEAKER_02: when I was young and I was with my brothers and we're going,
• 1:33:01
  SPEAKER_02: you know, it's like physical and you're about to compete with the other soccer team.
• 1:33:06
  SPEAKER_02: That was his eternal loop.
• 1:33:08
  SPEAKER_02: But for him, it's not, it's the proximity is bad.
• 1:33:12
  SPEAKER_02: He had never been able to go back to that time.
• 1:33:15
  SPEAKER_00: You gave me another one to add to my list because I played soccer in the Navy.
• 1:33:22
  SPEAKER_00: And we used to play in the naval base down here,
• 1:33:24
  SPEAKER_00: but it was in the fall when we had our league, and it got kind of cold.
• 1:33:28
  SPEAKER_00: And we were out there playing against Australian Seals who are really mean.
• 1:33:37
  SPEAKER_02: Australian Seals?
• 1:33:39
  SPEAKER_00: But it's a 90-minute game, you know, and you're running.
• 1:33:41
  SPEAKER_00: You probably run 5 to 10 miles in a game of soccer,
• 1:33:43
  SPEAKER_00: especially if you're a forward, and I was a forward.
• 1:33:45
  SPEAKER_00: So we're out there, and we came off that field, and the cooler beer was over there.
• 1:33:51
  SPEAKER_00: And everybody's coming off this field in 45 degree weather,
• 1:33:54
  SPEAKER_00: pulling off their shirts and just there.
• 1:33:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it was just so cool.
• 1:33:59
  SPEAKER_00: And we were ready to go back out and run another five miles.
• 1:34:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that would be another moment like that.
• 1:34:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's just everything else is cleared out of your head.
• 1:34:06
  SPEAKER_00: And there's so many.
• 1:34:09
  SPEAKER_02: Cleared out of your head.
• 1:34:10
  SPEAKER_02: Again, like if we had looked at the theme, it would be like presence, awe, you know.
• 1:34:16
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, the blue sky, that's why I like blue sky better.
• 1:34:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because you can clear them out of your head with that block thing that everyone hates.
• 1:34:22
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't know why they want to argue in the first place.
• 1:34:25
  SPEAKER_00: I don't understand why they want to come in and argue about stuff.
• 1:34:28
  SPEAKER_02: You know what's interesting, Cisco?
• 1:34:30
  SPEAKER_02: Tonight's Vibe Sesh, we had some political dudes leaving mean comments and stuff.
• 1:34:35
  SPEAKER_02: Like, hey,
• 1:34:35
  SPEAKER_02: is this like a...
• 1:34:39
  SPEAKER_00: Those could be bots because there's a whole bunch of bots on Meta and X
• 1:34:44
  SPEAKER_00: that they just hate Loose Guy.
• 1:34:46
  SPEAKER_00: And all they do is say the same thing over and over again.
• 1:34:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's an echo chamber.
• 1:34:50
  SPEAKER_00: But they don't talk to it.
• 1:34:55
  SPEAKER_02: You're our first blue sky user and I think the followers are like, who's this guy?
• 1:35:02
  SPEAKER_02: I'm down with everybody, guys.
• 1:35:04
  SPEAKER_02: I'm all about good ideas.
• 1:35:06
  SPEAKER_02: That's all I'm all about.
• 1:35:08
  SPEAKER_02: Good ideas and the truth.
• 1:35:09
  SPEAKER_02: I don't care left, right, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever.
• 1:35:12
  SPEAKER_02: I want good ideas, man.
• 1:35:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think we'd just clean it all out if we had fewer billionaires.
• 1:35:20
  SPEAKER_00: I would be a lot less worried about AI if it wasn't owned by billionaires.
• 1:35:24
  SPEAKER_02: I like that.
• 1:35:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the government, too.
• 1:35:27
  SPEAKER_00: If the government wasn't owned by billionaires, it would be better.
• 1:35:32
  SPEAKER_00: If it wasn't a career, if it was actually public service.
• 1:35:36
  SPEAKER_02: Let's save that for part two.
• 1:35:38
  SPEAKER_02: This was amazing.
• 1:35:40
  SPEAKER_02: What did you think, Cisco?
• 1:35:42
  SPEAKER_02: Why don't you close us out?
• 1:35:44
  SPEAKER_01: No, I really appreciate the conversation.
• 1:35:47
  SPEAKER_01: I'm someone that's actually struggling in my own creative like way.
• 1:35:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, Bruno really wants me to make videos every day.
• 1:35:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, just so struggling.
• 1:35:56
  SPEAKER_01: But I really appreciated the message of being you and almost writing for yourself.
• 1:36:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I can record a video for myself and put that out to the world and look at it
• 1:36:08
  SPEAKER_01: from that frame.
• 1:36:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then that's how you practice your authenticity.
• 1:36:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's just the exposure therapy of doing like you,
• 1:36:17
  SPEAKER_01: like you're just,
• 1:36:18
  SPEAKER_01: and whether that's in words or verbal,
• 1:36:22
  SPEAKER_01: that's kind of like the biggest lesson I took from it.
• 1:36:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think they combine well, you've got a platform.
• 1:36:27
  SPEAKER_00: You guys have got a platform now and it's a good size platform.
• 1:36:30
  SPEAKER_00: You can use that when you decide to,
• 1:36:34
  SPEAKER_00: or if you decide that you want to write or you want to draw, do music, whatever.
• 1:36:40
  SPEAKER_00: You have people to reach out to and to share that with.
• 1:36:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's like the opposite direction where I'm coming from,
• 1:36:47
  SPEAKER_00: where I have all the stuff to share, but nobody wants to see it.
• 1:36:51
  SPEAKER_02: What are you talking about?
• 1:36:52
  SPEAKER_02: What do you mean?
• 1:36:53
  SPEAKER_02: That's why you've got to get more active on social media.
• 1:36:56
  SPEAKER_00: I know, but remember that time thing.
• 1:36:59
  SPEAKER_00: I've got like five jobs.
• 1:37:01
  SPEAKER_00: I have to have that moment where I can go back to the...
• 1:37:03
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, no.
• 1:37:04
  SPEAKER_02: But David...
• 1:37:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no,
• 1:37:06
  SPEAKER_02: but David,
• 1:37:07
  SPEAKER_02: I want to leave you with something because you left us with so much,
• 1:37:10
  SPEAKER_02: but like, I think you're overthinking it.
• 1:37:13
  SPEAKER_02: Like you just got to,
• 1:37:15
  SPEAKER_02: for me too,
• 1:37:16
  SPEAKER_02: what I, how I started was I'm going to make this as frictionless as possible.
• 1:37:21
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not going to edit.
• 1:37:22
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not going to have fancy lighting.
• 1:37:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's literally my iPhone and some scripting.
• 1:37:28
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously I spent time there,
• 1:37:30
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 1:37:31
  SPEAKER_02: but like a lot of people, I think you would do well just talking off the cuff.
• 1:37:35
  SPEAKER_00: For 90 seconds.
• 1:37:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think you're probably right.
• 1:37:38
  SPEAKER_00: I came back to Instagram.
• 1:37:39
  SPEAKER_00: I had enough followers before.
• 1:37:41
  SPEAKER_00: I could have done all that, but I just, and I'm trying to cut it down.
• 1:37:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it'll probably be blue sky and Instagram for me.
• 1:37:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, my family and some of the authors are on Facebook,
• 1:37:49
  SPEAKER_00: but it just,
• 1:37:51
  SPEAKER_02: I might be 65 years old, but I'm not
• 1:37:52
  SPEAKER_00: Facebook old.
• 1:37:53
  SPEAKER_00: Let's end with,
• 1:38:01
  SPEAKER_02: Guys, guys, amazing vibes, Sesh.
• 1:38:03
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for everybody for attending.
• 1:38:05
  SPEAKER_02: This was amazing.
• 1:38:07
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you, David, our special guest.
• 1:38:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thanks for all those hearts and thumbs up I saw going by too.
• 1:38:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's cool.
• 1:38:14
  SPEAKER_00: They loved you, man.
• 1:38:15
  SPEAKER_00: They loved you.
• 1:38:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:38:17
  SPEAKER_02: All right, guys.
• 1:38:18
  SPEAKER_02: Have a good night.
• 1:38:18
  SPEAKER_02: Bye-bye.