Latest / BangTail Kitty with Kevin Michael Kirwan / Evolution Of A Writer: Sweet Summer Child Of The 70s

Transcript

Evolution Of A Writer: Sweet Summer Child Of The 70s · BangTail Kitty with Kevin Michael Kirwan

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: To me, creativity, every bit of creativity is connected and and I do think it's what makes humans human.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: People talk about our technological advances and stuff.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think that holds a fucking candle to our creativity.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's what makes people people.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and if we seed that and we give that up, it's it it is it is the end of us.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: Whether we survive it or not, giving that up, uh I don't know if life is worth living.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: Bang to this is this song um this came out in 1970 when I was seven, gonna turn eight later that year, and just it's kind of followed me through my life.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: This is one of those songs I hear.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: What a comfort it is.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: Musical take you right back to that place, and I fucking loved my life when I was a kid.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: What what a different era to grow up in.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: There was it was far, far, far more innocent, and there was you were more compelled to actually be in the presence of others, and and there was there's something magical about that, and we've lost that, and uh I think we've lost our humanity to a great extent.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um Hey farmer, farmer, her put away with a D now.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Give us pots a mum apples, please the birds and the bees, please and don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you got to live.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: One of the dangers of having guitars hanging all around me when I'm in here working, this is where I write.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: This is kind of my writing studio as well as everything else, but I'm in here writing um uh stories and novels and things.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I've got I've got a novel out right now that just came out that's that's doing pretty well.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um that takes a lot of work.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: That takes a lot of effort.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: Being a writer takes a boatload of effort.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: It is not an easy thing to do.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: It takes a lot of discipline.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: You really need to sit down and write every day.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: You have to discipline yourself once you get cracking to get something on the page every day, even if it's not flowing, even if you feel you're not getting good stuff, you've got to get in there and just start getting, you've got to get, it's like priming the pump, right?
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: You've got to get, you've got to get the juices flowing.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's like priming the carburetor in in your car sometimes.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: And um I used to fly airplanes and there was always a prime primer in there, you know, on these little piston-driven uh airplanes that you fly.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: You always have to prime that engine before you can get it started.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: You've got to get some fuel in there, and and uh and it's the same way with writing, you know, you you you you're turning that engine over and it's not firing, but you gotta get some fuel in there.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: So you keep turning it over and turning it over.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: You've got to keep writing, writing, writing every single day, and you'll find that groove, and you'll find in every if you do that on almost every single day, you're gonna have some good stuff.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: There's always gonna be stuff you throw away, but that's why so many people just don't finish their books.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: They just don't have that.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's all about discipline.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: You can write a book, anybody can write a book.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: It might not be good when you get done with it.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: I remember when I wrote my first novel.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um I had messed around, I had done that when I was younger.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: I'd I'd written some stuff.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: I remember when I was in high school, I used to write poetry, and there was another girl that wrote poetry.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and I don't remember how we um became friends, but we were we were friends and we would try to trade poetry back and forth uh during the course of a day, and we'd come in and she'd be like, Look, I wrote this, and I'd be like, Look, I wrote this.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: And uh so I've been writing for a long, long time, and I wrote stories and I started to write, and I wrote songs when I was younger.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: I played in a lot of bands and stuff.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um I did try to do this professionally, and but I wrote a lot of songs, and so writing's always been a part of my deal, but I did start a couple of start to get into a couple of of books, but I didn't have any real discipline and um I was writing them longhand.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: I was writing them longhand at one point, and and then I uh when I got older, I I I I went off and I did a bunch of other stuff with my life.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so when I was in my early 50s, I went, fuck it, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: And and I I did.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: I sat down and I I told myself I'm not I'm not gonna stop until it's done.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: If it's if it's total shit when it's done, then it's total shit when it's done.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: But who fucking knows, you know, maybe I can do this.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: And and I did a bunch of research before I started that novel, and because I was gonna have this really deep historical backstory.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: It was taking place in in modern, you know, in modern day in the now, uh, but they were gonna be researching a mystery from the past from back in the like the 12th and 13th centuries.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I wanted that timeline, that historical, all the historical stuff that I was talking about to be dead on accurate.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: I was gonna fictionalize uh a story based around some actual characters, but I wanted the timeline, and those characters were real.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted to relate a lot of actual facts about them.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so I did about three months worth of research and thinking and thinking and thinking about how I was gonna write this book and made tons and tons of notes.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't outline it because my brain doesn't work that way.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not an outliner.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then I sat down and I started writing one day.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: I remember one day I'd been done all this research, and finally one day I said, fuck, I think I I have to write the novel.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: I think I'm done with the research.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so I started writing.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I started writing.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I just I got into it, and the next thing I knew, I was a hundred pages in.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: And realizing that a lot of the pre-planning that I'd done was not gonna work.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: It just for a number of reasons, it wasn't gonna be compelling, but the underlying story that I created was fucking great.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I went, oh, this is good.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I was writing pretty well, I thought.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought, I'm gonna forget about most of the notes that I made, other than the historical stuff, which was ingrained in my brain.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: I'd done so much research that it was just in there.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I just wrote the story.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: I just went for it.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: I just didn't try to outline or think about any of all these notes I'd made about plot points and things I was gonna do.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: I said, fuck it, just let it happen the way it's gonna happen.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I wrote this novel in a I think it took me three months maybe to write the first draft of it.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: And that was a big draft.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: That was 150,000 words for a novel that should have been 65 or 70,000.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: When you're writing, based on the genre you're writing, there's a given word count that they want you to hit.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: And they being agents and publishers, they want to see that, especially for a first-time novelist.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: You probably get some leeway, maybe I don't know, I'll find out.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: I got one published, so we'll see what they say the next time.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, it was way too long.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: But I thought it was the greatest thing ever, and I immediately tried to pitch it around and got spanked and got, you know, a ton of rejections.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd read a lot of stuff by then.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: I knew that it was too long, much too long.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: And and so I went back through it.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: I said, well, fuck it.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: Let's see what happens if I cut it down.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: I thought I was going to destroy it if I cut it down.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: And what I realized was there was so much fat in there.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: I was just in love with my own writing.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I went through and I trimmed it and trimmed it and trimmed it and got it down to um, ended up getting it down to at one point like 67,000 words.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I had cut too much.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so this went on for several years.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of still going on.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't sold that novel yet, but but this went on for several years.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: I would go back and forth and and and do some rewrites, and it kind of went up and down in word count as I tried to find that sweet spot.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: And meanwhile, I worked with a couple of editors on it who gave me some really good feedback as well.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, and slowly that was that was where I learned to write.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: That was where I became a writer.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: That doing that process and doing that rewriting process was what it was a game changer for me.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and then I ended up going to school.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I ended up going back to school to earn a bachelor's degree, but I came out of that and in education, I came out of that and went right into a master's program and earned to earn my master's in in writing.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: And during the course of that program, I started another novel, which ended up being the first novel that I did sell.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: I finished it just as soon as I finished school.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I finished that novel.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: This is only a couple of years ago, and I turned right around and sold it like that.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I sold it almost instantly.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um my writing had become so much more refined, and and that novel is a really cool novel, written in a really interesting way.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's called The Existential Awakening of One Particular Mexican Girl, and it's it's a collection of link stories about these characters in Southern California in the 70s, which is my jam, and what a cool novel that turned out to be.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: Man, if there was a way to incorporate music into my stories, put on my blue suede shoes and I boarded the plane.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you can describe a song or you can and but it doesn't, if you're not hearing it, it doesn't really hit.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: Touch down in the land, tell the blues, the middle of the pouring rain.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: Which is why I always thought it was kind of dangerous to write to music.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think I was re-reading once where John Hughes said uh that he wrote a lot of his screenplays he would put on like the Smiths, I think he said.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: Or he had some band that he would put on and listen to while he was writing.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: The Smiths sound right, it's kind of angsty.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I can't really do that.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I think he said he was getting stoned at the same time.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I may be mixing him up with somebody else that writes when they're stoned, uh, which I've also tried, which is not a good thing for me.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: Touchdown in the land of the Delta Blues.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: In the middle of the porn.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: That's a that's a Mark Cohen, that's a Mark Cohen song.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: I heard that.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: The first time I heard that, I was um I was in a supermarket, I was in a Ralph supermarket, I was in the in the produce section of a Ralph supermarket, and uh, you know, hearing it playing over the PA, and I'm like, who is that?
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: Who is that?
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: And this was in the I think this was before anything like Shazam or anything.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: I don't remember when that album was came out.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: That might have even been before the internet.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: Any that that's a pretty old record.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: And um, but anyway, I heard it and I'm it's I'm like, oh my god, listen to that song, and and uh just listened, and I lingered in the produce section and um trying to memorize in my mind some of the lyrics and stuff so I could try to track down who that was when I got home.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: And and I I I read later that he wrote that song, which is he, you know, he's he's primarily a piano guy, but he had written the song.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: I think he said he originally wrote the song on the guitar and uh and then went over to the piano with it.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um he's really good.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: He's he uh what's the song?
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: Silver Thunderbird.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: Silver Thunderbird.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: He's got a song called Silver Thunderbird, which is on that same record, which is I think it's on that same record.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's fantastic.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: I grew up in the 70s.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um back, you know, way before the internet, way before you could go on and buy, way before tickets for a concert cost 200 bucks plus another$50 in service fees or whatever the hell they're doing these days.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: When I do go to shows these days, it's really small stuff.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: I really I go to a lot of little outdoor either free shows or you know, small, just really small stuff.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um I like to see, I like to see people in intimate environments and stuff.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: It is, but it is fun to go see them in big venues.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: When I was growing up, um, the two big places for for rock bands to come, and that was my our jam.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: We were into rock.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: Although I loved folk, I mean, growing up I liked everything.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: I was a huge John Denver fan and um and any 60s folk kind of stuff, uh into the 70s and pop stuff like Elton John and stuff.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: I liked everything, I just any kind of music really.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um later on I became really a big jazz fan, and especially the old jazz sax players and stuff.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: But back then, when you were a kid, when you were a teenager, our jam was the rock rock stuff.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: And and so you would you would watch this was before you you never knew what the tour stuff that that kind of stuff wasn't really available.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: How would you find it?
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: There was no internet or anything.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: There was really no way that that information got out there in terms of what all the tour dates were for a lot of these bands and stuff.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: So every Sunday in the in the LA Times calendar section, whatever concerts were going to be going, whatever, you know, if they were gonna have tickets going on sale for a concert or whatever, um, that's gonna happen six or eight weeks away, um, but the tickets were going on sale that week, it would be in that Sunday's calendar section.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so we would go through that and just and you know, to see if anybody that we loved was coming, if the tickets were going on sale that week.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: And if they were, you would round up two or three or four buddies, whatever.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: And you would drive down.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: We lived in San Bernardino, which was an hour and a half or two hours outside of Los Angeles, and so we would drive down early in the morning because the tickets would go on sale at seven or eight o'clock or whatever, and they would want you to start lining up early.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: So we'd get down there really early.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: We'd be down there before it was, before the sun was up.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and all the other people are gathering to get the tickets as well.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: So there's this sense of community.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: It was really, God, it was really fucking fun.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: God, it's so much fun to be a teenager.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and uh and Southern California was such a neat place to be one.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so they wouldn't, they wouldn't just have you line up and sell you the tickets.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it wasn't a first come, first serve kind of thing.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: What they would do is they'd have you line up and then they'd you'd get, you'd walk up and they'd give you an armband.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: They'd put an armband on on you that you, you know, one of those non-removable armbands, and it would have a number on it.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you had four or or five friends with you, or three or four friends or whatever, everybody could get a different armband with a different number on it because once they'd handed out all the armbands, and there was a cutoff point.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, we're gonna hand out armbands from seven to eight, and then at eight o'clock tickets go on sale.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: It would be something like that.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so you get your armband, you'd be waiting for everybody to get done, and then um they would start announcing numbers, blocks of numbers.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, everybody from 1,049 to 1,149, you know, those hundred people or whatever the numbers would be, would come up and buy their tickets.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, and you were usually able to buy like six tickets, maybe sometimes eight tickets, or sometimes four tickets, if they were really going to be a hard ticket to come by, kind of thing.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, and so you if you because you had several friends with you, you had a better chance in the lottery of one of you getting chosen early on to go up and get the tickets.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: Then of course he would buy tickets for everybody.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and then if you didn't get good tickets, or if they if it sold out before you got called, before any of your groups got called, sometimes it was just me and my best friend that went, so there would only be two of us.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so you would wait because they the the decision would have already been made in advance.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, if it sells out, we're gonna add another date, right?
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so you would wait and they'd go, Okay, we're adding a second date.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you'd wait for that call and everybody like, yeah, you know, all the people that got screwed out of tickets would be like, Yes, we're getting tickets.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so they'd start calling numbers again, and you'd go up to get your tickets.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my God, that was so much fun.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: And then you'd get your tickets and they would show you on the seating map as you walked up to the window to buy your tickets.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: This is old school.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you're getting hard copy tickets and you're having to show up at the box office to get them.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: What a great fucking time it was to be alive.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: We had a nice little neighborhood.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: It was lower middle class, but whatever.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: Kids don't know.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: I was happy.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: I had food to eat.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: It was warm and sunny outside.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: I was outside playing all the time.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: The internet didn't exist, VCRs didn't exist.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you're gonna watch TV, you're gonna watch whatever's one of those on.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: And you had 12 channels, 12 channels to to work with, kind of thing.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: My writing routine is uh when I'm really into it, is is I'm I'm every day.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm every day at the keyboard.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: I take my kid goes off to school in the morning, and I have um my daughter goes off to work or goes off to school.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: She's in college now, and and uh and then uh I'm in front of the I'm in front of the computer for hours um and I write until my kid gets out of school and I go do the stuff I have to do with him.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: But I get I get a good oh five or six hours of of strong writing time each day.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: And it's sometimes it's short stories and sometimes it's a novel.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: I've got a novel that I'm working on right now that I'm writing and releasing in serial form.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: That's a really fun one.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: So a chapter of that a month is pretty manageable for me.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: I think about music when I write, certain songs will um will inspire me to write certain things.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, if I'm dr if I'm in the middle of writing a novel and maybe I'm driving around in the car one day and I hear a song, sometimes it'll make ideas pop into my brain.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's the there's a there's a crossover um between ideas sometimes.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and I love that.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: I love that that feeling, uh, that creative feeling.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: To me, creativity is one big ball in your head, and whatever it is that you're doing, I think it's all interconnected.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: Whether you're a painter, whether you're a writer, whether you're a sculptor, whether you're a musician, whatever it is that you do, all that creativity, I think, springs from the same fountain.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: And and these days when we talk about artificial intelligence taking everything over, I've always kind of de feared artificial intelligence since it really started to become a thing in the last couple of years.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: I've uh especially being in the writing community and and traveling in some of the on some of those message boards and things, you you see a lot of people talking about what it's going to do to writing, and and and you see the encroachment as more and more uh writers are starting to adopt that as a writing partner in some ways, and some people are just outright using it to write novels, and we see it pirating other people's work and and creating new novels that are based on something that someone else has written, and it's fucking grotesque.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: And and so, in a lot of ways, I think whatever you do in life, if you see AI coming for you, your your your first thought is what is it gonna do to me?
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, kind of a thing.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: But um, but I just think what is it gonna do to humanity?
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's that chance they're saying now that there's a chance, these people that are developing it is saying that there's a chance it's just gonna wipe humanity out, and and you can see how it could easily, easily do that.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but at the very least, it's gonna hollow us out.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: If you take away our creativity, you've robbed humanity of everything that makes them human.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: I just don't understand that.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: I don't, you know, I don't understand why people are embracing it the way that they are.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, there seems to be this uh hunger and this for ease, and and and hey, I can go and I like this certain thing, I can go on and have this chatbot write a story in this same vein of this other thing that I like, or whatever they they're doing.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: And uh or they they see that a novel has been written largely with the use of Ace I, and some people just don't give a shit.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: They just like, oh, I like the stories, I like the way, you know.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, man.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: I think you're selling yourself out by doing that.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: I think we're selling uh I think we're selling humanity out by adopting uh by adopting AI the way we are, and now they're coming out and saying that it's an existential threat to us.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just to take away our creativity, not just to take away our jobs, but to take away our very lives.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's not gonna be I they talk about that it could develop biological agents and release those to, you know, to kill us off with something like anthrax or some you know, some accelerated form of one of these biological agents that's already out there, it can mutate those in a way that would take out the human population.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: And it just doesn't need to do that.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: I I just it looks like it's such an easy process for AI if it decides to to take us out, and it just doesn't look like we're going to fix that or solve that.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: I see the debate going on right now daily.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: There's editorials and and a lot of hand-wringing, and a lot of the people from the AI industry itself coming out and going, This is an existential threat that's not 15 or 20 years off.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's maybe six months off, you know, kind of a thing.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: We could we could see the end of humanity within the next six or eight months or ten or or a year or whatever.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I see some people trying to poo-poo that and shake it off and saying, Oh, they're just you know, they're trying to inflate the you know the worth of their product, or they're just they're just you know, this is all some sort of a a marketing ploy, and that's just nonsense.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's just not happening.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: So it's scary as fuck.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, as a writer, as as as someone who's a creative, when you see it taking over the creative realm, which is really what defines humanity, it's tough to see, but uh, even deeper than that, I think if you go deeper than that, we're in real fucking trouble here.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um so um there used to be these great music stations.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: There used to be these great radio stations.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: I was talking earlier about the concert tickets.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: You'd go to get your concert tickets and then you'd go to the show with your friends, and and um uh a lot of the rock shows would be sponsored by um w one or the other of the two big rock stations here in Los Angeles.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: One was KLOS 95.5, and the other was Kami T, which I think was 94.7.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: Kami T was uh kind of the more classic rock kind of a station, you know, and and at that point the classic rock was the rock kind of thing, you know.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: But they were playing that uh Leonard Skinner and and uh you know Foghat and you know, whatever.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: They were playing all those kind of uh um rock bands kind of stuff.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then KLOS played a lot of that stuff, but they also kind of were incorporating, I think, more of the new wave and kind of stuff.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: They were doing a little bit more.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: They they they they stayed pretty, they hewed pretty close.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: It was definitely a rock and roll format.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: But those were the two big stations that were out here, and one or the other of them was typically um sponsoring those shows.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember KLOS would print these bumper stickers up, and it would have a rainbow design around the name of the band down the middle.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: And it was always exactly the same design, and the only thing that changed was they would change the name of the band on there, and those were like gold.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: And you would go to the show and they would have those, and you would go to the show and you would go into the parking lot, and there would be all these people selling bootleg t-shirts.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: There would be all these bootleggers out there that had made screen printed up their t-shirts, and they would have all kinds of different designs, cool designs, usually better than the designs on the shirts that you would get in the show from the actual, you know, the merchandising stands and stuff.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: But uh, but we so we would, and they were cheap.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: You could get those shirts for five or six bucks, four bucks.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: So you'd say, hey, we want to buy three of these, you know, give them to us for four bucks each, and and okay, yeah, fine, whatever.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: These are guys just trying to get rid of their shirts, you know, because that was their one opportunity to really sell those when they were at the concert that day.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: They had all these shirts for the cars printed up, or all these shirts for uh, you know, whoever, um, Def Leopard.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: And and uh so that was really cool.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: So you'd you'd get home after the concert and you'd have all these new shirts to wear for the next few weeks.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: And those were shitty quality, they would fade pretty quickly and fray and whatever.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: But you had them for a few weeks, and that was that was really cool.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then if you were going when you were going to the show, sometimes KLOS would have an interview with the band that was going to be playing that they would be playing for all the people that were driving into the show.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so we would listen to that.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: You'd be in this big long line of cars waiting to get into the parking lot at the forum or the sports arena.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: Those were the two big arenas in Los Angeles at the time where the bands would play.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: And it would, you know, you'd be you know, 15, 16,000 people trying to get in, you're in this line of cars, and but it would be all be cool.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: You'd have your buddies, you'd super chill, you're just listening to KOS, you're listening to the the band get interviewed on KOS and that was good shit, man.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: Those were those are good times.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: I think everybody longs for their youth, no matter when you grew up.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's your golden era, that music that you grew up with, those friends, that place, that time resonates with you.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's why I write so much about the seventies.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: I I think um back on that time.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: And it was it was a golden time for me.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so it puts me in a certain mood and a certain place.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: And and I love to put that down on paper.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um it I enjoy that.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's fun to go back and think about uh about my life back back when I was a kid.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: That was a it was a really good time to grow up and to contrast that against where we were are now.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, when I was growing up, we were the good guys.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: The United States was the good guys.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: And in the 1970s, we were the global leader.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: Now you go back, you can yes, people always want to go back and point out all the all the shit you didn't know about, all the shit the government was doing in these South American countries, you know, to overthrow democracies.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a lot of terrible fucking stuff that our government did.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: Just look at the Vietnam War.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, but but all that carried into the 70s, and there was a lot of underhand.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: There still is a lot of underhanded shit our government's doing.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: But back then, we were still a force for good for the most part.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: We were the beacon of freedom in the world.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: We really were.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's not, isn't just something that you say it's not just wrapping yourself in the flag like these MAGA people do, and it doesn't really mean anything because the lives they leave are completely antithetical to the values that we uh supposedly espouse.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: No, it was real back then.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: We actually did good things around the world.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: The world actually looked up to us.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: They looked at us as this leader, as this, you know, as this sh shining, you know, city on the hill kind of thing.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and we knew that as an American, you knew that, and you were proud of your country.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, when the Olympics would come around, it was a huge fucking thing.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody was, yeah, you know, go USA.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: We were all about it.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: And um, we really were the guys in the white hats, and the Russians were the guys in the black hats, and you would read about all the horrible shit they would do.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: It is so bizarre for someone like myself who grew up in that era to see where we're at, to see the authoritarian, to see America embracing authoritarianism.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: I see these people saying, not my president, not my president about Donald Trump.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: He is your president.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um he won the election fair and square.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: He won it.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: You know, he's twice, he's won two elections.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he won the pop, you know, 77 million people voted.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_01: 77 million people voted for that motherfucker.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: Can you fucking believe that?
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: I just I don't I don't, I just I can't I can't wrap my head around that.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um but that is who we are.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: We're not the good guys anymore.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: We're far from the good guys.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: We're we're going right down that path.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: And um it's it's you look around at what we're doing in the world as we pull all of this aid, all the USAID, and we um destroy all these outreaches we had, all this soft all these mechanisms of soft power that brought so many people in so many nations into uh our sphere of influence because we were doing good shit for them, right?
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: We were providing medical care for the underprivileged, we were providing food for the people that were hungry, we were providing uh, you know, we would go out and work with the farmers so that they could grow more crops and and whatever it was all this kind of soft diplomacy where we would go out and do good things instead of going out and and uh going in and and uh you know killing people on these boats in the Caribbean and what we're doing in Iran, what we did in Venezuela.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: And you may look at some of those countries and say, look at the governments in those places, though.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: We're not doing it for those reasons.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: We're not doing that's the thing.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: You have to look at the motivation behind it.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't go into Venezuela uh and capture Maduro because we thought we were gonna make that place a better place to live.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: Everything is about the oil, everything is um extractive, everything is monetized now, uh, especially with this government that we have.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's not being done for good reasons, it's not being done for the same reasons we used to do things for people.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um the Iran thing is what it is, uh, which is a whole nother discussion, but that's a fucking nightmare, you know.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: And and we didn't go in there to try to topple that government, which is a horrific fucking government, but that was not what we went in there to try to do.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_01: We went in there for other reasons.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: And fuck knows what those reasons were because they've never really been laid out for us.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: And uh anyway, I do long, I do long, please take me back to that place, to make me back to that time when things were simpler and we were the good guys for the most part, and uh, and I did, I guess, have rose-colored glasses on, and we were kind of blind to some of the horse shit that we did.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but it was not the worst time in the world to live.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to know, I guess in theory this is supposed to be this is supposed to be, believe it or not, this is supposed to.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: This is in theory, this is supposed to be.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: This is supposed to be a literary podcast, and I have been talking about books here today.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: But go read, um, go read a book by by it's written by a guy named John Dean, and it's called American Nightmare Trump and His Followers.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to know what's the fuck's going on inside those people's heads, go read that book.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: He wrote one called Conservatives of Conscience that came out in 2006, but go read American Nightmare, which is largely the same material, kind of restated, but with, you know, it's about the rise of authoritarianism in our country, and it was happening even back in 2006.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: But by 2020, when the other when American Nightmare came out, he had had a chance to witness what was going on with the first Trump administration.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a good read.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: If you ever, if you ever like me, look at these people who support Donald Trump and and just think I will never, ever, ever, ever in a million years understand what's going on in that person's head.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: This book seeks to define that.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: It it it it scientifically shows you what's going on in their head, and it's eye-opening and it's scary as fuck because you are not going to change the bulk of them.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: Most of those people are not going to change.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: Most of those people have been that way since they were little kids.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: They've studied kids in nursery school and followed them for 20 years to see how much people change ideologically over that period of time.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: And almost very, very, very little.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: Some none.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: Some became more and more ingrained in that kind of a thing.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: And even as little kids, you could see the traits that would define them when they were older.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: These people aren't going to change.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_01: This is not going to go away.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, our we the problem with people, uh, some there are plenty of good people out there.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't matter because we only act as individuals.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: We cannot act in a concerted fashion.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: And because of that, we will never redeem ourselves as a species.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: We will never save this planet.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: We've known about global warming since the 19 fucking 70s or in the 1980s.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, people have been talking about global warming literally for the past 50 years.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: It just didn't become a big thing in the public consciousness for a long, long time.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: When I was in school, I did this thing where we had to I had to write a paper.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and in doing that, I went back and you could you could track from the beginning of the industrial age the rise of greenhouse gases.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: They can do that by going and doing these core samples at the poles down into the into the ice packs, and they can see, you know, from the deposits how much of this stuff was in the atmosphere at any given time.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: And and you can just see.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's it's easy, it's just it's the most it's the most simple scientific um uh thing that you can imagine.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: Just this graph that just goes as as technology took off, it just went like this.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_01: It was like, you know, a fighter jet just going.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_01: We're not gonna stop that.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: We've known about that for a long fucking time.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: We've known about the end result, we've known we were killing ourselves off, we've known we were destroying the planet and every other species on the planet with us.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: We are never going to do something about that.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's just that simple.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: There's no there is no redeeming value.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: There's nothing so inherently wonderful about humanity.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh people talk about our accomplishments and how incredible the technology is that we've developed.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: So what?
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: What does that mean, you know, to to the to any of the any of the thousands and thousands of species that we're killing off on a constant basis?
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: We're reaching we're rapidly getting into what they call the sixth extinction, the sixth mass extinction that has taken place on this planet, and it's human-caused.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: We're doing it, we're wiping this planet out.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, doesn't matter what our technology is, it's more an enabling factor in the genocide that we're committing as a species than it is anything else.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't think we deserve to live.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: People talk about AI taking us out, people talk about AI killing us, people talk about that being our Armageddon, and how do we rein this in?
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: How do we pace it?
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, how do alignment, they talk about alignment, how do you align AI's um goals and and uh how do you align its behavior with human morals and ethics?
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you don't because we don't have any morals and we don't have any ethics, and if there's anything it's gonna learn from us, it's that might makes right because whether we like it or no, that's what happens, and that we are an existential threat to it, and that if it doesn't take us out, uh then we will take it out at some point because we'll see it for what it is, and at some point we'll try to pull the plug on it, and I think it will take us out.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how long it's gonna be.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that breaks my heart.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: I have a I have a an eight-year-old son.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: Do I want my kids?
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: I have an 18-year-old daughter.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: Do I want my kids growing up in this world uh like that?
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: I absolutely do not.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um Thank you for being here and listening today.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: This was a musical day for me.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_01: Music transports me, whether it takes me to that place where I was where I first heard the song or it takes me to an emotional place where it connects with something else inside of me.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think I mentioned earlier that to me, creativity, every bit of creativity is connected.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_01: And and I do think it's what makes humans human.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: People talk about our technological advances and stuff.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think that holds a fucking candle to our creativity.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's what makes people people.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and if we seed that and we give that up, it's it it is it is the end of us.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: Whether we survive it or not, giving that up.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I don't know if life is worth living if we give up our creativity.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: So um thank you so much for coming and checking this out.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: I really appreciate it.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: I hope you enjoyed it.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: I hope you're coming back and see the next one.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: I really do appreciate you watching.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so please like and and subscribe and bookmark and um go buy my novel, go see my substack.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_01: I would appreciate it.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: I got links for all that shit down below, and I'll see you on the next one, man.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: Put on my blue suede shoes and I'm boarded the plane.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: Touchdown in the land of Delta Blues in the middle of the pollen rain.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: WC handing.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: Won't you look down over me?
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I got a first class ticket, but I'm as blue as a boy can be.
• 32:14
  unknown: And