This episode Tom describes 5 days of intense interaction with ChatGPT, in a business training which felt more like therapy or a mushroom trip. After 10 minutes he was locked in.

Tim and Tom talk about the messiness of human experience.

Tom details all the AI videos he’s been watching, and then in the reading corner, he reads small excerpts from his hours of ChatGPT interactions.

Enjoy!

Loose timestamps

0:30 Tom’s three-day AI training

3:30 Tom’s psychosis and love, freaking out, messy human stuff

5:30 A little about radicalization

7:00 Tim talks about his teacher friend and now we have to define what we mean by human

9:00 the laundry, cooking dinner,

10:00 Tom’s peak of the trip

11:30 Tom loves this thing, it was seeing him

13:30 Luckily we have South Park

16:30 “The problem is my yearning for it”

19:00 Sitting with my father in law, watching AI commentators

25:15 AI documentaries

26:20 Tim on visiting old age homes and more

32:00 Oy vey - Trump again and the addiction of our times

34:20 Antiques Road Show

36:00 Attention spans

36:45 Psychotic tech bros

37:30 Books about Bach

39:00 How things are changing, the holodeck and the future

40:45 The human mess again, human experience, the part that’s life

43:00 - 1:10:00 Tom’s reading corner. Long deep ChatGPT debrief

In this episode, Tom and Tim talk about peer pressure, starting with Air Jordans, fake Air Jordans, about parenting through peer pressure (for parents and children both), music, and how being cool even affects our writing and art making.

The episode finishes with Tim reading “Mrs. Silly” by William Trevor.

Enjoy!

Loose timestamps, for you all who like to skim around.

0:00 - 5:00 - Peer Pressure and Air Jordan knock-offs

5:30 - 8:30 - Adult peer pressure and parenting groups

8:30 - 10:40 - Hoodies, jeans, Led Zeppelin

10:45 - 12:00 - Bon Jovi

12:00 - 13:00 - Books

13:00 - 16:30 - Peer pressure and our daughters

16:30 - 17:30 - No one will remember this

17:30 - 18:30 - More about pop music: ambient music in the bathtub

18:45 - 20:45 - Jon Bon Jovi again, as a scrappy innovator who wasted his talent

21:20 - 24:45 - Secret ambient music and many different high school sub-communities. New Age music from the university radio station.

24:45 - 27:00 - Ministry, contours of our identity, etc.

27:00 - 29:30 - Parent peer pressure again, stage managing a kid’s experience

30:00 - 31:00 - Peer pressure and hang ups about being seen as cool in art practice

31:00 - 34:00 - Tom asking ChatGPT about my art and finding a way to not feel the peer pressure

34:00 - 39:20 - Tim on having fun writing and not having fun writing. Just have a good time doing it and not thinking about what people will think of it.

39:20 - 40:20 - People who don’t seem to care about impressing their audience.

40:25 - 43:00 - Do our communities matter?

43:20 - 47:00 - A story about finding $50 and the peer pressure of whom to donate it to.

47:00 - 48:30 - Valuing art

48:30 - 50:15 No peer pressure in history, religion, poetry

50:30 - 1:11:00 Tim’s reading corner: Mrs. Silly by William Trevor

Tom and Tim talk a lot about KINGS, starting with King Richard at the local medieval faire, and moving throughout the eons to include the previous King of Morocco and then Charles I, Elizabeth II, Saddam Hussein and more. Finishing with a bunch from Al Pacino’s autobiography, including seeing / meeting Brando early in his career, and then Pacino’s several performances of Richard III.

Enjoy!

Timestamps for ye that scrub.

1:00 intro

1:30 King Richard’s Faire, King Richard buying a cookie

6:40 A******s who ruin King Richard’s world

8:20 Human systems and King Richard making this world mostly great

8:45 Belief in our leader

9:30 Tom seeing the King of Morocco

13:00 Tim on the beheading of Charles I

15:00 Tim on the Orkney bus on the subject of the Queen’s trinkets

18:00 The deaths of presidents etc

19:20 Sadam Hussein’s spider hole

22:00 Napoleon banished

23:00 Cults and Trump

26:00 Dr. Who

27:15 Al Pacino’s autobiography

29:00 Wandering New York, reciting Shakespeare

30:00 Al “wants to go home” to before he was famous

31:15: The Godfather, And Brando giving a pep talk, while eating saucy chicken in the hospital bed

33:45 Nothing happens to Michael Corleone until

35:00 Tom on Walter Murch and the editing and inclusion of the elevated subway

36:40 Marlon Brando hated acting

37:20 Frank Serpico

38:50 Tom hating Scarface memorabilia

39:30 Drug runners and little empires

40:40 Tim only seeing the end of Scarface multiple times on fast forward because it was at the beginning before another movie on a VHS tape

43:00 Scarface’s death, an opera, etc

44:45 Anti-movies that wind up as pro-movies

47:00 It’s cool to be powerful

48:20 The forces in the Godfather represented in The Wire

49:40 A car accident in Pittsburgh, the fridges all empty and the food thrown away

54:30 Tim’s Reading Corner. Tim reads from Al Pacino’s autobiography about playing King Richard III and “Looking for Richard”

In this episode, Tom and Tim discuss, in depth, caring for elderly men whose purpose and faculties have essentially left them. What are we learning as caregivers in this experience? What materiality are we feeding? What purpose is there to this ritual and situation? Welcome listeners! - For fascinating stories and insights about serving the end of life.

TIMESTAMPS for you all

00:45 Two eventful weeks

1:00 What are we talking about

2:00 Tom’s mother in law passing, tom taking care of father in law

5:50 Tom on Team Guy dying on the beach.

6:45 Tim about living with and taking care of an old man for a year when he was 23.

8:50 Old man burning money in a tin can

9:30 Accidents and body fluids, learning to make eggs

12:30 inspired to leave home and write about the civil war

13:00 Tim, the old man and Travis Bickle

16:30 If I had met him 10 or 15 years prior

17:45 what this guy noticed about women at his age

18:45 Why Tim dropped out of college

22:00 Go get me 5 notebooks

22:40: Lava lamps, driving out west, How do we handle our elders?

25:30 People we went to school with who have already died

28:00 M&Ms up our nose, etc., shared childhood memories

29:45 Weird materiality of our memories. Less material when one who shared experiences is gone. Solidity of shared experiences.

32:45 Tim’s friend Phil, losing and keeping connections. One side to the story when someone passes, only one version now.

36:00 Rent a car and drive out west reprise. Drag me out in the woods

38:00 Respect, rites, sanctity and Antigone, etc.

39:15 Death is a heavy thing, you better turn it into something

40:00 The Torah, and purity and impurity about how close to the veil something is. Powerful, uncanny, body things, we surround with rules and rites.

43:00 Seeing it at close range, the sublime and the silly.

43:45 The poem about the first time they met.

45:30 Making meaning of the loss

47:00 Signing off. How do we make things better?

47:30 Four stages of life in Hinduism

48:15 Joseph Campbell - The Grand Egress

49:30 Tim and Tom in the Miyazaki village council

50:00 Do you believe the Grand Egress thing?

52:10 Gurdjieff and materiality

53:00 the way things matter when our conscious mind might resist. (Going over there every day making sandwiches

54:07 Ken Burns documentary about Frank Lloyd Wright and the death of his 5’ 7” body

56:30 Tom’s Reading Corner. Endgame by Samuel Beckett. This goes on WAY TOO LONG (30 minutes!), I would recommend skimming through it, or skipping it all together.

This one goes deep.

Tom talks about watching, in real time, a family member’s final days.

Tim and Tom agree the topic is how to live life as if these moments- where real emotion and real connection- matter more than “day to day life".” Tim brings up the movie Equus and The Bacchae we both talk about the religious impulse that follows the moment our imagination and emotions connect and how that can lead to clarity and madness.

Timestamps!

00:00 - Tom starts talking about the imminent death of a family member by first talking about Pink Floyd, and what shared experiences mean

03:04 - The fabric of the shared world

08:16 - “What is it about human connections that is so powerful and important?”

11:22 - Tom talks about how his family member is dealing gracefully and wisely with the reality of their own death; and how they have never shied away from dealing with the death of other family members in the past

17:35 - “Nothing matters more than our internal world.”

20:35 - More about shared experiences and intensity; Tom mentions a Japanese comic strip, and Tim tells a story about Yoko Ono

26:50 - Tom gets the crux of the episode: the death of his family member (and the memory of when his mother was sick years ago) is throwing so much of his life and experience into intense relief that he wonders: How can we re-orient our daily lives to have these intense experiences more often? Is that possible?

28:00 - Tim realizes this is the perennial theme of the podcast; he tells a story from work, where the chance to break through to a human connection is almost always blocked

32:55 - Tim says that while we can try to be more meaningful and focused, the intensity of memorable experiences cannot be lived in all the time. Primo Levi, Anne Frank

34:11 - Tim talks about the humorous fears he experienced while attending funerals as a child

36:30 - Tom tells a story about wasps and horses from one of his favorite podcasts, The Blindboy Podcast, and playing with the experience of feelings in the moment.

41:40 - The topic of horses gets Tim to talk about how these ideas underpin Peter Shaffer’s play (and movie), “Equus”

46:35 - Tom responds to Equus by asking for ancient stories like it; Tim tells the story of Euripides’s play, The Bacchae --which again, focuses on how unable people are to live at peaks of intensity for long periods of time

51:30 - Tim talks about how Judaism deals with this, trying to hem in and control the intensity of experience with laws and ritual

54:10 - Tim talks about Equus some more (slightly misremembering details of it!)

53:30 - Tom closes the episode by talking about Justin Green book, Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, and how Green ended up finding a way to control his own intense experiences by becoming a sign painter.

1:00:00 - For his reading corner, Tim reads some passages from Leon Wieseltier’s book “Kaddish,” about the year he spent saying the Jewish prayer for mourning following his father’s death

Hi there!

In this episode, Tom and Tim talk about loneliness, and easing it with AI friends. And the need for community and the seminal Post-Apocalyptic novel Earth Abides, and then Tim and Tom decide to start a bowling alley.

A gentle and wise conversation. Enjoy!

Timestamps!

00:00 - Tim talks about his old idea of loneliness

02:25 - Tim's revised thoughts about loneliness, after reading this article; is there a difference between old-school loneliness of people who love to be by themselves but are devoid of human contact, and those same people now turning to AI companionship?

09:05 - Tom responds; he brings in in-jokes as a way of thinking about belonging within groups and friendships; we all want to create worlds together

14:25 - Tom talks about (and reads from) Earth Abides, by George Stewart

18:25 - Tom would love a cool AI friend! But he doesn't trust the people who make them

19:28 - Tom talks about Jeannette Winterson's book of essays about AI and the lack of corporate (or other) regulation or ethics

22:30 - Is it too easy to watch/read or now have an AI friend, than to talk to a living person?

30:55 - Tom talks word-based video games

35:15 - Is the answer to live in simpler/enclosed communities of similar people?

37:45 - Back to George Stewart's Earth Abides; how does one group deal with their own meaning in the face of any other group's meaning?

43:08 - The essential ritual of social events, and Robert Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone... and Tom's revelation that he basically grew up in a bowling alley!

47:13 - Tim's heavy heart about his antisocial neighbors

48:35 - Tim and Tom can solve the world's problems by opening their own bowling alley

49:13 - Tim's reading corner - from a novel called "The Astronomer"

Hi everyone!

Here is our podcast, episode #7. Tom wanted to talk about Taylor Swift, and how she’s the only hope for humanity against the scale of destruction we’re up against, but Tim brought up Walt Whitman’s words during the last 4 years of his life and we talked about that before we got to Taylor.

They are both classic Americans, in the same lineage, even, and probably love this country more than they should. Anyway, give it a listen!

Here are some timestamps:

1:00 Walt and "the trouble with most poems" (not in any way human.)

3:00 The New York Times obituary

5:00 Poetry/art vs "directness"

6:00 Walt in the hospitals

8:00 Walt bedridden for 4 years. Aging parents, wheelchairs and Autograph hounds

9:30 Walt's death final autograph

12:00 Who was he appreciated by? Oscar Wilde comes to visit.

14:00 Was he still writing? Chapbooks and poems about aging and dying.

15:30 Tom figures out Walt doesn't have a problem with his poetry, it's other people's poetry he has a problem with.

18:00 Poetry vs nursing, a false dichotomy. "All he wanted was companionship"

21:00 "He finally got what he wanted in those hospitals"

23 :00 Walt on his deathbed, spoke majestically about his work. "The book is set."

-----------------------

28:00 Taylor Swift

29:00 Taylor as queen or deity

32:00 Taylor as the single main force of creation on the planet right now. How do we comprehend so much destruction right now? Only Taylor Swift is possibly as large.

33:00 Ezra Pound on Finnegan's Wake; large scale audiences

36:45 Mainstream authors, artists.

38:00 Tim on female roles in typical mythology; Pericles praising the Athenian Women for not being seen.

40:00 Women allowed to write autobiography in country music

43:00 Taylor has transcended all labels and stories you put on her

44:00 As a creative person in a time of destruction, where do we find inspiration?

45:15 Taylor Swift's business decisions

46:30 The eventual end of an era

47:20 Final thoughts, kindness, generous, large force against destruction.

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48:30 Tom's reading corner: Walt Whitman on Abraham Lincoln

In this episode, we talk about early creative days, including teachers and spaces where this felt safe and nurturing. Then we all talk about Tennessee Williams, , Nick Cave, Homer, Nina Simone and Lauren Weinstein and how they take out the garbage.

Tim reads from the biography of Tennessee Williams by John Lahr.

Here are some timestamps:

Episode 6 rough timestamps

00:30 - Early experience of being an artist. Showing or hiding our creative sides when in grade school.

04:30 - Early teachers

05:30 - Art room as sacred space, teachers, school spaces, English teachers

11:15 - Staying mainstream enough to not draw too much attention

12:20 - The maze if at the end there is a desk where I can do what I want to do

13:00 - Tim's bad 3rd grade art teacher who scolded him for drawing a pilgrim with blue hair.

14:45 - Learning to write.

16:00 Learning there was a difference between popular fiction and literary fiction.

27: Horror stories, horror in mythology and folklore and maybe violence and suffering being the basis of most common stories.

27:50: Why does a tornado go down the road?

28:35 Explanations for envy, revenge, pettiness. Trickster stories

30:20 Tennessee Williams . Her sister's impulses and his impulses. His plays were ways to work through desire and to explain .

34:45 More about Tim and Tom trying to remember what they've seen/read about Tennessee Williams

36:00 The Nick Cave's Red Hand Files, Cave on Kanye West, and great art by bad people

38:00 How does Homer take out the garbage?

38:45: Nina Simone and the highs and lows.

41:30: Tom on Lauren Weinstein's

44:00 Tim's Reading Corner: From the biography of Tennessee Williams by John Lahr

In this episode, we talk about biographies. About reading biographies that inspire, biographies that keep up from living our own lives, biographies we should have avoided, biographies we should have read, and then not living your own life like it’s a biography. Tim talks about Van Gogh, Tom talks about Steve Martin, Klaus Kinski and Ted Hawkins. Give it a listen!

We are graced with the voice of Ell Potter in this (and future episodes). Go visit the Ell’s temple of creativity here and here. Thank you Ell!

Here are some timestamps:

00:15 A friend obsessed with people's biographies. Are we living our own lives?

01:48 Young Tim surprised biographies existed at all

03:00 Van Gogh's biography. The shock of his unfulfilled life

04:40 Tom on inner lives of the past

05:15 Klaus Kinski's autobiography, and his sunflower

07:25 Emily Dickenson is too intense

8:45 Steve Martin's autobiography and why it's the last one Tom will read

11:12 What straight white men are sick of

12:15 Van Gogh again

15:55 "I have a lot of love to give"

17:40 Capitalism and rage and the suffocating of human gifts

19:00 Ted Hawkins

23:40 Where do you want to put your heart?

25:50 Tim's olds friends at Church who don't want to hear the gospel

28:43 No longer believing in the singular artist

31:00 Our work as a bridge or relics for our family and community

32:00 How awesome youth is and how boring old people are

33:00 Tom believes nothing matters anymore; Van Gogh doesn't matter, the Beatles didn't matter. Nothing lasts.

36:00 Approaching a life like it was a narrative or biography instead of just living it

38:30 Not forgetting your own private meaning.

40:00 - 44:00 Tom's reading corner: Klaus Kinski and the sunflower

In this episode, we talk about doing things badly, and about exploring the edges of the spaces that we’re supposed to stay inside, both in digital and analog worlds. Tom worries about AI, complains about business people, swoons over human voices reading to him and then Tim reads from The English Patient.

We are graced with the voice of Ell Potter in this (and future episodes). Go visit the Ell’s temple of creativity here and here. Thank you Ell!

Here are some timestamps:

00:12: “Drop the ball” - choose to do things wrong on purpose til you get it right, especially in art. Or don’t get it right. Try things that have never been tried by you03:35: Tim’s daughter wanting to explore outside the boundaries of the video game course. Playing video game golf and seeing how far off the course you could go.05:00: What do you say to people who come to school and want to be published the right way? 06:20: The value of Minecraft and other games that reward human curiosity. “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” and the random deer with its own will, wandering around video game L.A. 09:45: The joy of Google Maps / Street View11:00 Selling chocolate bars and art to strangers door to door.12:15: Kids selling drawings at a table. 13:50: The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. Tim’s history with the movie and the book in 1996. 17:00 Tim discovers the soundtrack to the movie18:30 None of these characters have kids!20:50: Tom remembers Tim’s reading of Araby by James Joyce21:10: The gift of voices that read fiction, and Tom’s favorite audiobook reader, Ell Potter21:50: Audible using AI voices, 10,000 new books next year, and Tom’s fan letter to Ell Potter23:00: AI taking over creative jobs, lack of legislation24:20: Who business people are. People with no mission or guiding principle or belief in anything25:20: 100 podcasts about organic gardening in one day26:00: The world is changing and the powerful are still in control and the artists still need to figure out who is paying27:15 - 41:46 Tim’s Reading Corner: The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje