Can You Use AI To Make Good Art? — With Fred Graver

0:00 The industry is in a tailspin. There are fewer opportunities for writers and producers and people who make things. And I really had the conviction that AI can help you figure out who you are, how you have to survive in this world, and also how to make things that will then promote you and promote your career.

0:19 Depending on who you ask, right now is an apocalypse for creative people, or it's like the best time to be alive ever. I think it's one of the most important questions about AI as a technology. Can you use it to make good art, or can you only use it to make slop? That's why I'm extremely excited for this episode.

0:37 My co-host, Natalia Quintero, interviewed Fred Graver. Fred is a four-time Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and technologist who is using AI all the time to make really great stuff in film. And he came on to share how he uses it, how it can be used as a creative tool, and the dirty secret in Hollywood that a lot of people use it even if they won't admit to it.

1:01 So, Natalia, tell us about the conversation. It was so cool to talk to Fred and to learn from someone who's been a leader at the top of their industry for so many decades. And what's interesting is that Fred has actually done this a few times. He started his career as a Disney Imagineer. That's the coolest thing.

1:21 Kind of the dream job. And then he built this incredible career at VH1 and MTV. And then he kind of threw it all away and became the head of TV at Twitter when it was a startup. And that didn't totally make sense. But he had this really interesting thesis of wanting to get closer and closer to the audience.

1:43 And now he's done it again. You know, he's basically built what... will be compound producing and rebuild the production process from the ground up using his decades of expertise, an Emmy award winning artist to do it all over again. And we all get to use his skills. So if you want to be a producer, now you can produce like Fred.

2:07 I love it. It's a great episode. Let's dive in. So Fred, thank you so much for being with us. And I want to start by actually just maybe getting a little bit of background on your career and how you got here. This maybe let's start at the top. You're a professional writer. Yes. How did you get into that?

2:39 I came to New York and I could type over 100 words a minute. And we are back in the day of IBM Selectrics and printers copies and all of that. And I went to work and, oh, and I knew how to copy edit. And I went to work at the National Lampoon. And I was hired there because I could type and I could copy edit and I wouldn't screw up the joke.

3:05 So a bad copy editor would go, well, this isn't grammatically correct. And I would understand, no, that's the joke. And I began editing stuff at the National Lampoon and writing for the National Lampoon. So that's, yes, that's how I got started, which for people who are watching, who are in every audience, yes, your technical skills count.

3:29 They will often get you in the door, particularly to jump ahead, you know, the whole kind of, you're gonna get replaced by somebody who knows how to use AI. People who understand what's happening under the hood are going to be incredibly in demand, I think. So I went to work from there for David Letterman, for Late Night with David Letterman, and stayed there for a long time.

3:54 It was a great gig, and Then went to work for Norman Lear. In the 70s, Norman was the king of television. I think he had four or five hit shows in the top 10 of the Nielsen rankings at one time. And he also was socially aware and very smart, and he was doing some new things with television. And I got hired, I worked with him.

4:16 It was an incredible learning experience, which then translated into my being a comedy writer, and I worked for Cheers and In Living Color. And then I heard a modem. And the first time I heard a modem, which was actually in the 80s, I just went, okay, this changes everything. Everything's going to be on something on your desk, and you're going to be able to do everything yourself.

4:43 And so my first kind of tech gig was I was working with the Disney Imagineers. And there was this effort back in the day. It was Mike Ovitz and Jeffrey Katzenberg and those guys. And they were terrified. This was like the late 90s, early 2000s. They were terrified by the Internet. But, you know, they began putting real bets down on what is this thing going to be.

5:07 I was... there and I was at MTV networks in the kind of early web days. And then I took another right turn. I got hired by Twitter. This would be late 2000s, right? It's like the second year that Twitter was around. And the theory was if famous people that people love, celebrities or TV shows, are on Twitter, then people will get on Twitter.

5:32 And that's the best advertising we could do. And so that was my job was to get the bird and real use cases onto the screen. Probably best case that ever happened was the famous Ellen DeGeneres selfie. That was how many million dollar worth of advertising. I did that and then I was doing some consulting and things and somebody said to me, hey, there's this machine learning thing that's AI And the engineers don't understand how people talk.

6:10 And people don't know what to talk about when they get to the machine. And so I became a conversation designer at Microsoft. I was literally scripting bots. And I was working with the AI teams. And it was... It was weirdly fascinating because you're just dealing with what's going to become AI, what's going to become this interface, and trying to figure out what will that conversation be.

6:40 Also, it is a conversation. I think what a lot of people, when they freak out about AI, and they freak out about an enormous box of things instead of all the things that are inside, but they're kind of they use it as a search engine or it gave me the wrong... and they don't realize, no, it's a relationship.

6:58 I was doing that, I was writing, then they moved me to writing presentations. Microsoft's great kind of secret sauce is they have decades of data about how people use their software. If you're United Airlines and people are calling in to do whatever they're going to do, can we have AI bot can we have co-pilot go through everything you we already know from 30 years of you guys using software to help them solve their problem And so I did that for for for quite a while writing these presentations Saying here's what AI is and here's what it does and and Here's your problems and the solution to your problems oddly enough our Microsoft products are Of course they are.

7:46 Of course they were. What's so interesting to me about your career though is that at every sort of major turning point you kind of, you have turned towards technology as early as joining the Disney Imagineers which at the time was revolutionary and the work that they did has been so revolutionary. What do you think has been the core insight that you've taken at every turn, like from the Imagineers to, you know, you worked in like the golden era of TV.

8:19 Yeah. But you also turned from that to go to Twitter, which must have been a bold move. Like there must have been sort of like a key insight that led there. But like what have been the key insights and those different pivot points? There's two answers. One is the real answer, which reveals me to be a terribly shallow person.

8:40 Sometimes you look at something and you just go, I want in. And for me, growing up, I grew up on the south side of Chicago, and I watched way too much television. And all I thought to myself is, I want to be on the other side of that screen. I want in. So it's I want in there. It's I want in because there's some very funny people doing stuff here.

9:04 And I like funny people. And I get along with them really well. I want in. The technology turn for me, again, I hear a modem, and this was in the days of like CompuServe, and there's no browser, there's no, it's just, But the first thing I joined was the Whole Earth Electronic Link, the well. And so the Twitter people, it was Chloe Sladden and Dick Costolo, and I met with them and I was like, yeah, these are my people.

9:36 And I think they're doing something so new and different. It'll just be fun. It'll be really great. And so there was that. For me, it's a little harder right now. My old tribe is not thrilled with the prospect of what this is going to be or what it might mean. And yet there's a new group of people, which I want to be very careful, it's not defined by age.

10:05 It's defined by a sensibility and a mindset. There's a new group of people who are storytellers and who are in what I still call show business because they don't think like David Ellison. They blanket and a garage and put on something. And they're beginning to see, okay, wait a minute, there's this thing, oh, what does C Dance do?

10:30 Or how can I do this with Google Story Studio? Or how can I do, oh wait, this is really interesting. And then they begin kind of getting in and playing with it. And those people, to me, that's the group where I go like, okay, I want in, or at this point, I really do feel like, okay, I might be one of the first kind of settlers.

10:52 If there was one key insight that you took away from working early on with like the Imagineers, like what might have that been? The Imagineers were founded by Disney to help him build stuff in the theme parks. And anytime new technology came around, the Imagineers, a group of the Imagineers would be assigned to figure out what does that mean to us?

11:16 The most threatening thing in the late 90s for Disney was that technology was going to give the audience unprecedented access to IP. That you could suddenly digitize a copyright. You could take Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and let your imagination run free. And this is terrifying. At the same time, you could also see that the audience is going to be in this new place and they're going to want to have access to that stuff.

11:54 So the insight was suddenly there was a brand new tension. There was a new tension between what the audience and creators would have access to and be able to make versus what you were able to make given the moat around your business and the barbarians were building bridges over the moat. Hmm. So fast forwarding to MTV, VH1, and the work that you did there, what do you think might have been your key takeaway then having worked in the golden era of television?

12:37 Yeah. So the key takeaway for me, again, was open it up to the audience. And that's your survival. And what does that mean? So for example... I created a show called Best Week Ever, and it was doing very well. And we had created a Tumblr just for the producers to talk to each other. And we realized suddenly that there were 10 or 15,000 people reading our Tumblr.

13:06 And it literally was just like, read the audience signal, see what's going on. And it was a complete accident. That's so interesting, because it then sounds like your move to Twitter was kind of like further embracing the audience, right? Like moving. It almost seems like at every point in your career, you've taken a step closer to the audience.

13:24 I think that's really true. If you start out as a writer and you want to use AI, I have kind of a few things that I kind of say you should do. You should create a who I am as a writer document. And you should throw in your inspirations, what you love, what you read, what you aspire to do, all of that.

13:43 And then you also have a document that this is the thing I'm working on. Right? And it could be... And by the way, you don't even need to be specific about... I have this idea. I have this thing that I really, really, really want to kind of get at. I want to think about. In the same kind of way that like Joan Didion once said, I don't know what I think about something until I write about it.

14:04 I have this thing I want to explore. And AI is great at that. And then you go... You begin... putting as much as you know about that thing in. And the first thing you can say to AI is, does this idea and this person that I'm describing have anything to do with each other? Right? And then you kind of play around with it.

14:24 And the third question is, who's out there? Is there an audience out there for this thing? What platforms are they on? How do they consume media? What are the questions they care about that relate to the thing I'm writing or even bigger questions that they care about? Somebody in the Atlantic did this, I think.

14:43 They created the focus group for something. And you could actually literally do that. Like create a focus group of eight people from a range where there's a guy over here who's the guy you really wish you hadn't invited into the focus group because he's really negative and you have somebody who really loves what you're doing.

14:58 and begin working on the idea that you're working on to get feedback. And so none of that is about AI writing for you. Everything is about having AI as kind of a virtual writer's room, as a group of intelligences that can help you think through things. Compound Writing, which is a great plugin that Katie Parrott on our phone bill.

15:19 Yeah, give her all the credit she can get. Which I'm a big fan of Katie, she's fantastic. And that was built off of Kieran Klassen's Compound Engineering plugin. And what makes so much sense about those plugins is that they are built by experts in their domain, right? So the reason why I use compound engineering is because I'm not an engineer, and I trust Kieran as a really brilliant engineer and now actually a whole team that maintains that particular plugin.

15:49 And so when I want to build a new product, I want to defer to experts in that field to... follow the steps that they would take in order to build a product so that I'm doing it safely and following best practices. The same for writing, right? Katie has codified at least her approach to writing, the kind of writing that she does.

16:11 And one of the things that you've been exploring is how to codify writing in your capacity. Can you speak a little bit more about that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So think about... There's a kind of core that exists, and what you pour into that core are two different things. One is expertise around, so in my case, it's expertise around creating entertainment product.

16:42 And there's a fair amount of product design and product management that goes into this. And you get the expertise of everybody, and so much of this has been published, and so much of this is freely available. You could go into everybody from David O. Selznick to Francis Coppola to Quentin Tarantino, to all the way down the line.

17:07 There's all the expertise. It goes around writing, it goes around producing, it goes around editing, it goes around marketing and distribution. There's even people who are just really brilliant, who are just like business operations and legal people. And there's this, you can put all of that, and I'm building that, where I'm kind of like going in and going like, You're going to make 1,001 decisions in the next week, probably.

17:32 So half of this is, here's the experts, right? And that AI has ingested all this, thought about it. And if you're going, okay, the marketing people and the writers are disagreeing. Right? The writer thinks these characters are answering these questions and the marketing people say, I can't sell that.

17:51 Right? Well, what are other ways people have solved those issues? Just to give you advice, just to suggest or kind of like help you mediate that, which by the way, also results in less friction because so much of this in show business gets personal, People get in a huff, they walk away, they have horrible fights.

18:15 The best part about this is when the movie comes out or the TV series premieres, everybody's patting themselves on the back. Oh, we made it despite this. I'm like, stop. Why did you, you didn't have to do it in the first place. The other half though is also your personal culture. So if you're a production company or a studio, or you have a way of doing things and thinking about things, and you can put that into the hub of the AI central core as well.

18:44 And everybody who's part of the process has already also said, here's a document about who I am. Here's what my career is all about. Here's the kind of way I work. And so now you've got this kind of really great Petri dish of cultural documents that AI can help you think through. And the last thing I'll say is, people in show business still make things the way Henry Ford made cars.

19:11 There's this assembly line. And if you say to them, no, make it a circle. So by the way, the marketing and business people are talking to the writer and the pre-production people now before you start making decisions that get locked in or whatever. Sometimes the production company has got 10 people, 15 people.

19:30 Sometimes it's a writer who at this point is the entire team. Right. So what I love about plugins in particular is that they demystify what is otherwise a really complicated process into simple steps, right? it's the only thing that AI can do really well. It's like follow directions clearly. And I find at least AI to be as powerful as the instructions are.

19:57 So what I love about, again, like the, the engineering tools that, or the plugins that our team has put out is that when it comes to engineering, I understand that there's basically like three steps to engineering. And what Kieran has done is just kind of like codified what excellence looks like in those three steps.

20:14 First you make a plan and, There's all kinds of things involved with making a good plan. So we'll follow the instructions on that. Then we follow that plan and build something, you know, based on kind of like that PRD or that kind of set of requirements. And then we'll review that plan and kind of like build on it.

20:31 It's kind of like that loop that you discussed. What in its most basic form do you think is that loop for writing or producing in your case? Yeah. We'll break it into three steps. There's ideation, and we'll call it architecture or design. It is the thing that produces a script, right? And that's the first thing, is you get something that is a written document that is the best embodiment of the idea you're trying to work on.

21:09 The next phase is production. And it's everything from how do we prepare to make this thing? And it's a very similar process whether you're working with a straight-on regular kind of movie or TV series or a hybrid series that uses some AI. Or even in all, I'm working with a studio now, and we're making an AI animated series.

21:37 And the way we're doing it is they've hired a bunch of writers. to create something. There's an animation studio in India that's doing the animation. Some of it's with AI, some of it isn't. And then there's a group of computer scientists in Zurich. I don't know why they're in Zurich. It sounds... I keep imagining a Goldfinger's lair up in Zurich and they're like, we're watching.

22:00 And they're trying to figure out how do you build AI software that would keep the people with it. So there's this production process that's everything from pre-production considerations to keeping everybody going within the production. And I would include editing in there as well. And there's a lot of stuff in there.

22:18 There's storyboards. It's fascinating to me that Martin Scorsese is one of the first people to kind of come out and go, oh, I'm working with this company that's creating storyboards with AI. And people freaked out about it. Like, well, what about the storyboard artists? And I think Scorsese, I don't know.

22:35 Scorsese is like... You're going to have to get another job. It's the mob. So there's the production phase, and AI can help with that. And then there's the how do you reach the audience with this thing phase. How do you market and distribute this? What's fascinating to me about having worked with a couple of production studios in Hollywood is the marketing people are all in on figuring out how to use AI.

23:05 To the point where they will create a campaign for something, and they work with companies that are doing it with AI. They will watch intent to purchase a ticket or ticket purchases based on a trailer, and they will rewrite the trailer almost on an hour by hour basis. You go, OK, let's A-B test this.

23:25 Let's try this. Let's try that. And that, again, AI can be part of that process. What I think is fascinating is, again, you make it a circle so that here's the ideation and design and architecture phase, and it works. Why not have the marketing people right away going, well, let's create a proxy trailer for that.

23:47 Let's see if we can sell tickets to that even though it doesn't exist yet, right? Which is essentially what show business has always been about. So those are the three phases, and that's where I think in every step, AI can speak to the people who are doing it and can inform the decisions that everybody's making.

24:06 So let me make sure I got that. So it's ideation, and then it's basically the production, which includes a bunch of things, and then there's the marketing, like the connecting to the audience in a loop. Yeah. How do you... Thank you for, by the way, cutting it down to three. I've never done it before, and that was very helpful.

24:25 Okay. I mean, this is so helpful to me. I'm the reason why I enjoy using AI and why I got into using AI is because, you know, Anthropic describes themselves as like AI for problem solvers. And I think it's such a smart description because I think it's totally right. You know, like for ambitious people, like you just want to do great work.

24:50 And AI at its best, I find, allows me to do great work. Mm-hmm. But also when I'm getting creative and doing work that is fun and not in my line of expertise, it's easy to make AI slop, which is where these plugins are such helpful boundaries. They're sort of like the rails in a bowling alley that keep you from going off into the dark side of AI slop.

25:16 How is it that you find these three steps might help someone who is not familiar with using AI in this kind of like writing capacity or actually someone who is an expert in sort of like being a writer or a producer? How would these three steps help them, you know, build even more beautiful, valuable work that is not AI slop?

25:41 Yeah. The first match you've thrown into the gas can here are the words AI slop, right? It is the thing that terrifies everyone, right? And again, I go back to my... my kind of show business metaphor or framework, right? If all you need is a sheet and a garage and some chairs to put on a show, why doesn't everybody put on a show?

26:12 Well, first thing, not everybody's gonna put on a show. Annie Leibovitz once said, everybody has a camera that's better than the camera that I used for 30 years in their pocket. But there are very, very few people who are taking pictures like I take. So the first step here is in defining who you are and what you're trying to do and thinking deeply about them.

26:40 And in fact, I say in all three steps, you want to begin by thinking deeply. There was a book that was very popular for a long time, and you don't hear much about it, called Flow. Flow. And it was all about what it is to be in that state where you're composing or writing or painting or whatever. And you're just locked in, you're in the zone.

27:04 For me, in all three of these steps, if you haven't begun, By going there first, you're not going to get a good product. You have to start with uniquely you, what you know, spend a day or two dumping everything you know about what you're going to do onto a page, right? Do it by hand, do it by whisper, do it by whatever, but empty out.

27:34 You will never have that opportunity again once you open AI. There's one chance to kind of be yourself and confront the idea or confront, how am I going to produce this really, really well? Or confront, how will we reach the audience? And all three of these are really important expertise and very, I don't think anybody has all three.

27:56 Maybe, no, I don't think anybody, I think people, any single person knows how to find all three people. But you have to empty out, you have to do this yourself as a human being. then the nice part is it's a very lonely business. And for all of us, it's like, well, great, I can throw all this stuff out.

28:15 What am I going to do with it once I do it? Ah, now there's AI. Now there's Claude or ChatGPT, and we can have this discussion about which one I like or anybody likes. But you go in and you say, this is who I am. This is what I'm doing. Let's talk about this. One of the things that I love that I actually did very early on I asked Claude, I'm a writer, I'm a producer, I'm trying to do these things.

28:43 How can you help me? What can you do for me? Oh, should I be using Claude Code? Should I be using, back when Cowork was a separate thing, should I be using Cowork? I read about these skills. What about, you know, and there'll be people on Substack publishing crazy stuff. And by the way, you don't need those subscriptions.

29:01 You can have everything. But there's people publishing all this stuff, and I will feed it into Claude. And I'll say, is this useful? And Claude might say, no, we're already doing that. Or yes, I can build that with you. And so I built a process. that began with myself and then began with almost conversation or relationship with the AI that helped me do it better.

29:27 And so in each of those steps, so if you have, I have many friends who are producers, and that's a tough process. job. You are the drill sergeant. You're making sure things get done faster, better, and cheaper. And you can keep your schedules. You can keep people in touch with each other. You can find tax incentives.

29:48 You can find what the union is requiring. You can find all of these things in one tool. And the same with marketing. You've got these tools Within Claude, specifically Claude and Chat GPT now, it almost feels like everything for everybody, all the time, everywhere. It's starting to get there. The question is, can it do...

30:13 your version of everything all the time for you when you need to have it done. And that's where the real skill is. That's where you kind of go in and go, this is my culture. This is what I care about. This is what the priorities are. That's so interesting. So it sounds like you're saying before you can really get any value out of these tools, you really need to not touch these tools and really go inward, like really understand.

30:38 I really firmly believe that. And I don't know. I... I firmly, firmly believe that it could be that's how I started. Back in the day, if you wanted to convince somebody to do something, you'd write something and you'd pitch them. And it was everything that you knew about the thing you were trying to do.

31:02 And you would edit that, you'd figure it out, you'd go, I've only got 120 seconds with this executive. Or it's a five minute meeting. And the minute they start talking about their weekend in the palms, you're sunk. Right? But, oh, now it's down to two minutes. That's how I began. And I still believe after a lot of, actually, I'll give you an example.

31:26 Yeah. After a lot of experiments, I still believe that that's the way to do it. I think I was using compound writing and then I was using Claude Code to try and figure out a way to, in kind of five bullet points, hammer away at any idea I might have. And so I gave it three or four ideas and it was, we were refining it.

31:48 Well, that's not quite right. And then Claude said, let me come up with an idea and I'll test it against myself. Oh, okay, Claude. So the idea it came up with was a series, a web series, that would be like Brooklyn Coffee Shop, but it was a group of 60 and 70-somethings who were running the Facebook page for a senior citizen home.

32:19 And it gave all the pros and cons, how it would be produced, who the audience is, how you'd reach them. And I'm sitting there reading it and going, okay, that's not a terrible idea. Wow. And so then I was like, tell me more. What else do you know about this? And it was kind of churning things out. I only feel that the reason I bring it up is I think Claude has learned from me.

32:49 And it's kind of like, yeah, let me dump everything I know about the 60 plus audience. and vertical series like Brooklyn Coffee Shop. And it made that great, I think, a great Facebook connection, which is where that audience is. Yeah. And I kind of like, oh, okay, great. But I feel like it's because it learned kind of that piece of me.

33:08 And who you are. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, one of the sort of like key questions I would certainly have is for like the next generation of producers and writers, how could they have a shot at being the next producer? Fred Graver because the TV industry doesn't exist in the way that it did. And it sounds like maybe what you're saying is so long as you give yourself the space to go inwards and build your own compass and understand who you are and what you want and what it is that you're trying to say at any given moment in time, you can have AI work for you in the different capacities that you would usually need a team to.

33:47 instead of working for AI, right? It's like if you have a compass, you could have it work for you. If you don't have a compass, you're just kind of following Claude in whatever direction it's taking you in. Which is essentially how you have a career in, you know, the minute you say media, I just keep thinking David Zaslav and people who are just like trying to control the vertical.

34:08 You know, to have a career as a storyteller, that's the test. Do you have something to say? And what's great about AI tools is it can help you say it. There are so many ways to help you say it. But it can't give you, if you ask it to tell you what it is you should be saying, you'll get, it goes to the mean.

34:37 It won't do the thing. And some people don't have that thing. I hate to be a jerk about it, but some people just don't have it. People send their kids to my wife. I met my wife at Letterman. And so they come all the time. Once a month, somebody shows up for coffee. And they're like, I want to be a writer.

34:59 And I will always say, and I'm a jerk about it, hey, tell me about the last thing you wrote. If it was more than two weeks ago or a month ago, I kind of go, is there something else you like to do? This is hard. It's lonely. It's full of rejection. And if you're not addicted to the thing, if you don't have to do this, and if you don't have something unique that is just burning there, there might be other places where you can go.

35:33 Where the hard problem is right now, and this is where I stub my toe all the time, I believe that that is, for the first two pieces of the circle, I think all that is coming into place. It's the third piece that's really, really hard. I was really lucky to come up in the second half of the 20th century.

35:57 It was, as you said, the golden days. You got development deals to have an office for a network with the promise that you would write two things. Oh, my God. And they flew you first class, and it was glorious. That's gone. As Bruce Springsteen would say, boys, those jobs ain't coming back. And so, I mean, maybe this takes me to your thesis, right?

36:27 So you shared your thesis. We're hosting a conference in a few weeks called Thesis. It's about what happens after automation. And you wrote your perspective on like what your thesis is of what happens, what comes next. Yeah, so essentially I was saying those first two pieces, the new writer's room, will include AI, right?

36:50 I remember the first time I walked into a writer's room and they had a Google Doc up on a screen that was capturing what everybody was talking about and helping to write. They were trying to... outline a story for an episode. And I was like, oh my God, that's so great. Because you were always before then going like, Kevin, did you get that?

37:11 Did you read it back to us? Make sure you got it right. Now, it was there in front of everybody. I think in that same way, you will have AI in there and they will be asking questions like, OK, this is the season arc. We're here. What happens if... this character is doing that, or even more to the point, right, so there's a micro example, and there's a macro example, which is, okay, we're looking at successful TikTok series, that are, we'll go back to, we'll help Claude with his idea.

37:49 The audience is 55 and older. I need to understand the audience, where they are, what their concerns are. If it was set here, what could I dive into? I need characters that reflect their problems. Let's talk about that stuff. And, and, There's one that you could do it singularly. I think it's much better if you've suddenly got three people with different perspectives.

38:15 And by the way, another way to remove friction in the production process, everyone can hate the AI. So it's kind of like, I love what you're saying, Natalia. Claude's an idiot. But you're working everything out. And you also have this, you really have an expansive intelligence that is thinking about things.

38:35 If you've set it up right, it's thinking about things that you would not have thought of. And so that has to be in there. And you have to be pushing it. And I think that becomes part of the process. Yeah. Do you happen to remember your thesis? I'm curious if you could maybe state a version of it so we have it.

38:52 Yeah, I think I can. And then, by the way, we could also talk about how I used the dev edit to create the original version, and then Georgia had to keep paring it down to something. And what she ended up paring it down to was supporting the show business truism, I may be the only person on the Every Podcast ever who uses the term show business all the time.

39:15 I'm realizing, I'm realizing, old man Graver shows up and talks about show business. So the truism is success is knowing what the audience wants before the audience knows it. AI is really helpful. So go back to my old man series. It could tell me right now a whole bunch of stuff that would slot right into that.

39:47 What it wouldn't tell me is the personal quirks that would make these characters endearing. Right? For example, the guy who did the voices, who does the voice of Homer Simpson, he improvised. Don't. To me, that's the whole story. It's like, OK, we knew the whole thing, and then he improvised that. So AI can help you do a bunch of stuff.

40:16 And then there's these kind of what is inside of you that nobody else has. And if there's two or three people or more in a writer's room, it's fascinating. It's what's inside all of you. OK, there's a guy over there. He went to Harvard. We had to take him. And then there's a couple of other people, and you've got an improv background, or you've got this background.

40:38 Or sometimes, I know I've been in some writers' rooms where you literally brought somebody in who just knows the setting of the show. I worked on an ill-fated show for the producer Jim Brooks that was about a 14-year-old tennis phenom. In fact, the show was called Phenom. And we had in the writer's room somebody who coached teenagers into their tennis championships.

41:06 And he was great at kind of going like, oh, I do something horrible there. Yeah. Right? And it was always kind of helpful. So you've got this writer's room, you've got AI, and that's how it comes together. Yeah. I mean, it kind of feels to me like a full circle, you know, that your thesis is essentially you have to know what your audience wants before the audience knows.

41:33 And going back to... being a kid in the South side of Chicago on the other side of the TV. It's like every step you've taken in your career has been to be on the other side of the television and to close the gap between being the audience and being the producer. And now it's like we're at the singularity where you are the audience and the producer.

41:56 So you have the opportunity to like have that core insight but also to do all of the work to create the show that you think could kind of produce that whole insight into a story that is entertaining and would connect to a broader audience? I had never thought of it as the singularity. It's the Fred singularity.

42:17 Yeah, I have a very good friend, Danny Hillis, who studied AI with Marvin Minsky in the 80s. And yeah, and he constantly jokes that, yeah, that I should just get the brain implant. Yeah. now. Which, by the way, if I can, I will. That's awesome. Yeah, I think that's true. And I think, again, the hard part right now...

42:46 is for those of you who are business people and are watching, it's that third piece here where Kevin Kelly has this great thousand true fans theory, right? You're a musician, you're a photographer, whatever. If you could just get a thousand people to give you $10 a month for a bunch of stuff that you do online, you can make a living.

43:09 And nobody has set that up yet for people who do what I do who no longer have the wonderful golden age of television. And I feel like that's what we finally need. If you're able to, create a really, really funny animated sitcom, and Fox is only buying one a year, where do the other 50 good ideas go? And I keep looking, I point as if it's an actual place here.

43:39 I keep looking at that third sector and going, somehow we need that to happen. So you've done that emptying out process. What happens to us? You're sitting on your computer, you have all of these notes. What do you do? I have a couple of skills that I've built that are my readers, right? And they're the famous kind of readers over your shoulder.

44:04 There's people that I think think like me or would look at this. I've lived in Claude for a long time, so it's the room I keep going back to. And I will say, Claude, this is this, Here's a folder of all my work. You know what I work on. This is what I'm going to do. Let's talk about this. Right? And I think it's, and then I'll say what I, you know, because prompting, it's kind of like, what I need back from you is an analysis of, does this sound like me?

44:36 Like something I would work on? Is there an audience for this on some platform somewhere that feels real? And, What will I need to get to a finished product, a script, or to get it to screen that I don't have now? And the reason I asked that last question is, do I really want to go down the road? I have a lot of, everybody has a lot of ideas, right?

45:03 But it's like, do you really want to go down the hard road of writing all of this to get to, to find people to help you make it or whatever? And I will have a very long conversation with Claude about the reality of that idea. So let's say we get to it and like, okay, great. You know what? I'm working on this.

45:21 And I know kind of my steps for subsequent drafts and all of that, where I'm going to need to go from A to B. And I will tell Claude, here's what we're going to do. And here's what I think the schedule is. And here's when I'm going to deliver this. I have a Claude agent that is my morning check-in. And he's very unpleasant, and I've asked him to be very unpleasant.

45:47 And so when I opened up the computer again that night to say I've got another idea, the first thing in the morning I will get back is, wait a minute. You're working on this. You told me you wanted me to talk about this. And then in the night you came in with this other thing. What are we doing? Right?

46:06 Because you owe this, you owe your thesis statement to every tomorrow afternoon. Right? That's kind of a practical thing. But then the other thing is like it knows... It knows what frameworks I use. I love the Ken Adams because therefore framework. It's what Pixar uses in a lot of their stuff. It's the simplest way to do anything.

46:31 And I'll go, here's my story. Here's what I think I'm doing. Help me figure out if that's doing the work. Plus, by the way, am I still answering questions from my audience? So I'm constantly writing myself. I'm constantly asking questions Claude, to look at what I've written. The compound part is it knows what decisions I've already made.

46:56 And by the way, you can also say, you've clearly rejected the decision you made three days ago. Where's that going? Again, writing is a lonely business. When you have somebody to talk to about these things, or three people, so I'll go from Claude, and I'll take what I'm doing and work on it. I'll go back to ChatGPT.

47:16 ChatGPT is the film school student who has read every guide, seen everything, does not know what it means. It's great at, I know you're trying to do this, and here's the, as they say in the Olympics, the compulsories. Here's what you haven't done or what you are accomplishing. It's very useful in that sense.

47:39 And then I might even go to notebook to say, hey, look at my documents, look at this stuff. And can I listen to the podcast? I am so shallow. I am a sucker for those two podcast hosts going, well, we're talking about something fascinating today. I love Notebook L on podcasts. They're so great. It's the best thing for a writer.

48:05 They love what you're working on. Yeah, so that's roughly kind of like, and it just rinse and repeat. So do you think we might be able to get access to one or two of those skills? Because it sounds like such a valuable, I mean, even this process that you've mentioned that Pixar uses, I wouldn't have known that.

48:25 But once you've codified it, it's such a helpful sort of shortcut to make sure you're following it. I teach an online class. at the Barcelona School of Art and Design. The reason is that European film schools have embraced AI in a big way that American film schools are very afraid to do. And I created a skill that helps you create a pitch deck for your idea.

48:52 which is kind of great. And within that skill, there's the Ken Adams, like, okay, can you in one slide do a, here's the normal world, then this happens, because that happens, they do that. And it basically makes you create the log line and the characters and all that stuff and it won't let you finish each step.

49:15 They won't let you do a step until you've completed the other. So I'm happy to share that with you. I am so excited to try it. Yes, definitely would love that. And it might not be that good. You can tell me. That's... Let me know. Well, perfect. I mean, it's so fun, though. I mean, because then it's like it'll be a second in your brain, you know, to, like, try to follow that process and understand how you might approach.

49:38 Yeah. Yeah. doing that particular step in production. So you have a great sub stack. And speaking of a thousand great fans, I'm a fan of your sub stack. Where can people find you? Oh, sure. It's a subject. It's called the AI Writers Studio. Search my name, Fred Graver, and you can't miss it. Yeah. Cool.

50:00 Terrific. Thank you. Hey, thanks for joining us for this conversation with Fred Graver. If you want to use the skill that Fred shared, it's in the description below. It's really fun to use. I highly recommend it. And you can also find us at every.tube. We'll see you next time. If you liked this video, you should check out every.to.

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