Gather around for another Story Break, everyone! This week the hosts cooked up a terrifying concept: helpless residents of an apartment building caught in a war between two horrific entities. Will they band together to uncover their tormentors before the building becomes their tomb? Knowing our hosts, probably not. But first, J.K. Rowling's detective series, Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis, Edgar Wright's The Running Man remake, Ridley Scott's Gladiator 2, Amazon's Fallout series, and AIs contribution to the end of the Information Age.
Gather around for another Story Break, everyone! This week the hosts cooked up a terrifying concept: helpless residents of an apartment building caught in a war between two horrific entities. Will they band together to uncover their tormentors before the building becomes their tomb? Knowing our hosts, probably not.
But first, J.K. Rowling's detective series, Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis, Edgar Wright's The Running Man remake, Ridley Scott's Gladiator 2, Amazon's Fallout series, and AIs contribution to the end of the Information Age.
Thanks to Google's Gemini for the image and Suno for the original Story Break theme.
Trying to make it work.
Trying to make everything better, because our podcast sucks.
Wait, what?
Is the mic hot?
Hold on.
Welcome.
Welcome to Don't Encourage Us, the show where we talk about the big ideas behind fiction projects of all different kinds.
Books, movies, TV shows, video games, nothing's off limits.
I'm your host, Michael Bluth, and I'm here with my co-host, Mr.
Windle.
He gives me some knowledge and I'm buying him some shoes.
How are you doing today, sir?
Doing great.
I like your reference there to the Mr.
Windle song.
Very, very clever.
Is it called the Mr.
Windle song?
Did you get what connects them?
The name of the song is Mr.
Windle.
Do you remember the band?
I'm gonna say no on this one.
Did you hear what I think?
Did you hear my host name?
Michael Bluth, that's from that sitcom, right?
Michael Bluth.
I forget the name of that one, too.
No for two.
Today, we're talking about an original idea for a horror intellectual property.
But first, what's been on your list this week?
I watched a few episodes at CB Strike Show, which is based on the, what is it, Robert Galbraith novels by JK.
Rowling, which are her detective series that she writes under a pseudonym.
Wow.
And that was on Cinemax.
And I watched the first ones were called The Cuckoo's Calling.
It's pretty good.
I'm actually a little bit underwhelmed in terms of like what my expectation was.
So I was like, Oh, JK.
Rowling is probably going to be phenomenal, like in this particular detective genre.
It's about a guy who's a private detective and his assistant and how they solve cases.
But it was very linear, very straightforward.
There weren't too many twists and turns to it.
It was very kind of by the book, where some of the shows that I'm used to watching are more like meandering.
There are a lot more twists.
You don't really know who the killer.
I kind of figured out who the killer was really early on.
And I just stuck to my guns and that's who it was.
But it's well acted.
Yeah, it sounds like an episode of Murder, She Wrote.
Yeah, it felt a little bit like that.
Like that kind of, I don't know.
I like things that are a lot more complex when it comes to these crime shows, like those Scandinavian crime shows where there's so many twists and turns, so many complicated backstories.
And this just wasn't like that.
Even though it was a well made production, the acting, like I said, is good.
The script was pretty solid, but overall I think it's a little bit forgettable.
I had absolutely no idea JK.
Rowling was making murder mysteries.
Yeah.
And I'm wondering if she's been sitting around watching too much British TV, because British TV is flooded with very linear, episodic murder mystery shows.
It seems like that's about 50% of their output these days.
Yeah.
Is this young adult fiction, or is this like adult level stuff?
Yeah, adult level.
You know those like Sherlock, the new Sherlock?
Like if you took that and really whittled it down and filtered it through a very linear plot line, that's what you'd get.
It has that kind of the British feel of like a modern kind of Sherlock feel with the kind of troubled main private investigator.
He's been off to war.
He has a disability where he got hit by an IED in the war, and now he has this, they use that as kind of a device throughout the show to show how-
Well, that's one clue he missed.
Right?
To show how depressed he is, but I don't know.
Wow, so this is amazing.
You're basically describing BBC Two.
I think that's like most of their output right now.
So I gotta tell my mom immediately, she's gonna be super excited that there's a whole nother chunk of mysteries that she can watch.
But it sounds like it's exactly that.
Like it's a very linear, very traditional BBC style murder mystery.
Your detective has just a couple semi-interesting traits.
There's somebody for him to play off of and he solves a murder and moves on, right?
Exactly, yeah.
I mean, the end, spoiler alert, of those first three episodes, which is the Cuckoo's Calling episodes based on that novel, he's basically sitting in his office talking to the criminal, explaining why he figured out the entire case.
He literally has kind of like a dream sequence where he's putting all the clues together, which is a little bit cheesy, and then he sits the guy down and basically tells him why he knows he committed the murder from beginning to end, but never thinks to call for backup or maybe this guy's gonna be violent.
Of course, the guy hits him over the head with a bottle and he gets him to a huge fight in his office, and his assistant ends up saving the day, but it doesn't really make any sense.
He's like, oh, but you're caught now.
You're caught for two murders now.
You're going to prison for the rest of your life, and he just thinks the guy's gonna walk out of his office, just go on his way.
And lo and behold.
How very British.
Exactly.
Oh, oh, sir.
It was really.
Oh, this sounds great.
Now I wanna watch it.
Very, very soon.
This sounds like, yeah, it sounds like you could make a drinking game out of this.
Every time somebody acts improper and someone else points it out, take a drink, something like that.
Exactly.
And then his assistant and him are on the verge of, there's something going on.
They're gonna be in a relationship down the line, you can see the foreshadowing.
I like that, okay.
Little heterosexual romantic tension there.
Exactly.
So, is JK.
Rowling aged out of creating good things?
What age range is she?
Is she the greatest generation or what?
Is she a millennial?
Rowling?
She'd probably be, I don't know, maybe Jet X?
I don't know.
I don't know how old she is.
No, let's see.
She is 58.
Yeah, so she's right at that age where you sit and watch these murder mysteries all day.
I think, right at the very beginning of that.
So I think she's discovered it.
She's gotten excited.
She started writing some novels.
Maybe she retired a little early, so she was a little precocious in her embracing the BBC style murder mystery.
And then I guess Cinemax is on the hook for a big budget version of what BBC cranks out by the dozen, right?
Maybe she just said, like, I want to try my hand at a very linear, paint by the numbers murder mystery and see how many of these I can crank out, right?
Yeah, well, when you absorb a lot of something, that's what your output tends to look like.
Well, good, all right.
So you've been spending your time well.
Anything else on your list?
Not too much time.
Let's...
Let's not days and days and days with the CB Strike Show.
I'm reading that book, Argyle, which is actually not bad.
Based, you know, there's a movie, Argyle.
Oh, is that the one with Superman in it?
Yeah.
Yeah, and I heard it bombed.
And that was pretty good.
You know, it's your typical CIA spy thriller, going after the bad guy, just started it.
But it's pretty well written.
Well, usually if there's a movie that, whether or not the movie does well, the book is a little better because they wouldn't have based a movie on a bad book, typically.
Typically, yeah.
No, I could see why it became a movie.
And I mean, I don't know how he messed up the movie, but I heard it's pretty mediocre as a movie.
But I'm enjoying the book though.
How about you?
Cool.
Have you heard about Megalopolis?
No, what's that?
The Francis Ford, okay.
So Francis Ford Coppola started work on a film in the 80s.
Megalopolis, it's his like big passion project.
And he put 120 million of his own money into it.
So, you know, he had the wine making company.
He sold pieces of that and got the 120 million, put that money in.
He's been working on this film for a long time.
They started shooting, I think it stars Adam Driver.
It's got a bunch of other celebrities in it.
Finally, they screened it, and the early screening word of mouth is that it's unsellable, right?
It's not something that audiences will see.
So none of the distributors are really interested in it.
So he's gonna go ahead and premiere it at Cannes in mid-May.
So we'll see, you know, but it's a big deal.
He did the same thing with Apocalypse Now, by the way.
He almost went bankrupt funding that movie for himself.
So he's basically doing the same thing on a larger scale, although given how much money he has, it's pretty much the same, right?
It's relatively equivalent.
But who knows what the product will be?
Is there a trailer yet?
Not yet.
I think there's a couple images, right?
There should be a lot coming out soon.
So by the time this podcast airs, there might be something out there.
And definitely it's screaming at Cannes.
It's gonna scream at Cannes.
That's my prediction right here.
It's gonna scream at Cannes.
So there will be images and trailers and promo material out, but he's still shopping it around.
Nobody's grabbed it.
Do you think it's gonna be Netflix?
It might be a big deal at Netflix.
Who knows?
I wonder why it's on-
Yeah, Netflix or Apple, I would guess.
Unsellable.
I wonder what about it makes it unsellable.
Is the runtime extremely long?
Is the plot really convoluted?
Is it, I wonder what it really is.
Yeah, there's not a lot of details, but my guess is it's a slow, expansive story that makes heavy points about culture.
Megalopolis is like a giant city, essentially, so it's built around this over-urbanification.
Is that a word, urbanification?
Urbanification, something.
It's a word now, TM.
It's got Shia LaBeouf in it as well and a few other celebrities.
Filmed over about a year from 2022 to 2023.
It's coming.
It sounds really interesting.
I wonder if it's gonna be one of those sleeper hits, you know?
I don't know.
Yeah, he's kind of known for making movies that don't fit the mold, but end up resonating.
Like Apocalypse Now is considered one of the best 100 movies of all time, so is this gonna be on the list as well?
Entirely possible.
There's another director similar to him that had, I think he did, what movie was it?
The Deer Hunter maybe?
Michael Cimino?
And he ruined his career by going over budget on a three and a half hour movie.
It's like Gates of Heaven or something.
I don't remember the title, you know?
And he was never really heard from again.
Like he had done, I think it was Deer Hunter.
Maybe I'm wrong about that.
I'll have to look it up here.
That's right, 1978, yeah, I looked it up.
And then that was kind of the end of his career because he went over budget.
It was really bloated.
No one wanted to see it.
He refused to edit it down.
Similar to what happened with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, I think.
A similar type of character helming that movie.
Except League of Extraordinary Gentlemen came out really well and was a great film.
But yes.
And how could the audience find out more about it?
They could go watch the film.
And then what?
Or they could listen to our episode on it, I guess.
If they have tons of time.
I forgot about that episode.
Yeah, they should definitely see that episode or listen to that episode.
So speaking of films on the way, there's gonna be a remake of The Running Man.
Did you hear about this?
I did not hear about this.
Tell me more.
Yeah, so probably coming out summer 2025, Running Man remake supposedly closer to the original novel.
Do you know who wrote the novel?
Stephen King.
Richard Bachman, AKA Stephen King.
Very good.
Do you know who's directing the Running Man remake?
I'd assume it would be someone like Ridley Scott.
That would be my guess.
Or Michael Bay, maybe.
Or Michael Bolton.
It's Edgar Wright.
Oh, wow.
I know, crazy.
So I was trying to figure out, is it gonna be a comedy?
Yeah, because the original novel is more about a regular guy, right?
He's not an Arnold Schwarzenegger type who's out there kicking ass.
He's just a regular guy who's trying to make money for his family.
And Stephen King doesn't really write super fun, upbeat action stuff.
So it's a little bit darker and it's more commentary heavy.
So I don't know, like is Edgar Wright gonna make it funny?
Is he gonna make it like more gritty and real?
Is this gonna be a departure for him?
It's actually, I think starring, he's been cast, I would imagine, as the lead, Glenn Powell.
Glenn Powell was in Anyone But You.
He was the star there.
And of course, that's right, Top Gun Maverick, the movie we also reviewed in a previous episode.
So go check that out.
It's been a great episode for tying in other episodes.
I need to point that out.
That's what it's all about this week, right?
It's the snake eating its tail or whatever.
So are you excited for Running Man remake?
Yeah, it's such an odd choice of director.
I guess the way I envision the remake of Running Man, I see it more like Blade Runner, and now I'm thinking more like Shaun of the Dead.
So it's such a departure in my mind.
I don't know, I love this though, because if I'm Edgar Wright, I've made some really great films that initially were your mid-budget, low-budget, kind of fun, quirky stuff, and then he moved on and did a really unique take on a heist film, and now he's taking an 80s blockbuster action flick, and he's turning it into whatever his version, I mean, I think it's cool, it's a good choice.
I'm excited.
It'll be an interesting take on it for sure, and probably a big departure from what I'm imagining, because I just keep seeing Schwarzenegger in my head and it's very difficult to examine.
Did they remake Total Recall?
Or am I imagining that?
Yes, no, they did.
They did, right?
It was entirely forgettable.
If you're listening, don't bother.
I know you're like, what?
They remade Total Recall?
I have to see that.
You don't, believe me.
Total Recall was shockingly-
Was genius.
Was shockingly mediocre.
The original film is really cool.
It's got a lot of great stuff in it.
Some parts of it maybe don't work for modern audiences or for personal preference.
The sequel is pretty stripped down or the remake is pretty stripped down and it's really bland and just like, who cares?
Especially visually, which is so strange because that's one of the strengths of the original.
Yeah.
I don't know.
That'll be interesting to see what happens with Edgar Wright's version.
Yeah, I'm excited.
I mean, like I said, summer 2025 is the estimated arrival and I like that he's making a summer, hopefully big budget movie because I'd like to see that director get more stuff to do, like more interesting options and maybe he's one of those directors that really just does better at a medium or low level budget.
Maybe that's his strength, but I'd like to see what he does with more.
And the star, I think he's an up and comer.
He seems like he's got some charm and charisma and he can fit some different molds, so I'm excited to see what he's gonna do.
So you might have heard of this one, Gladiator 2 from Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe.
Did you hear about this?
Valiely, I heard mention of it, but I don't know any details or anything.
Coming Thanksgiving 2024.
So not too far away.
Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe are back.
The sequel is set decades later.
Not really sure what the story is gonna be.
Apparently there's some amazing Gladiator scenes, like some character fights a rhino or something like that to the death.
I don't know.
But I think it's gonna be great.
I know that that director is a little bit of a hit or miss.
He's come back to his previous properties a lot lately.
He did the aliens prequels, which are kind of weird, and he wanted to take it in a different direction.
Yeah, and he had the series on HBO, which a lot of people watched.
Did you watch that?
No.
No, was that any good?
It's good.
It only got two seasons.
But Ridley Scott is mostly a hit in my mind than a miss.
He's got a lot of style.
Raised by Wolves is the HBO series.
I watched season one.
I really liked a lot of it.
I didn't like all of it.
The season two, I have not gotten through.
It's complicated.
He tends to make stuff that's pretty dense and pretty long and a little bit of a slow burn, but it always has great moments.
They're always peaks.
We'll see.
We'll see what he can do with Gladiator.
Yeah.
I'm wondering if the plot is just going to follow Russell Crowe's character training a new Gladiator or something.
Yeah.
Maybe he's corrupted.
And now, comfort and power have turned him into something else, representing Rome, how they got too comfortable and too corrupt.
That would be a really fascinating take, how he takes over the Commodus character.
He becomes Commodus because of that power.
Or not.
Who knows?
Maybe he saves Rome.
This is an alternate version.
I'm sure we'll do a podcast about it, regardless, so stay tuned.
Actually, I think all these would be great.
Megalopolis, I think, would make a great episode, regardless of...
I mean, just given the history of it at this point, even if it's not very good, especially if it's not very good, I think it'd make a great episode.
Running Man, you gotta bet Edgar Wright's gonna make it interesting, even if it's his first big flop and failure.
It's still gonna be interesting, right, the choices he made.
And with the comparisons to the original film and the original story, it should be really a lot to talk about there.
And of course, Gladiator 2, you can't imagine that there's not a lot in that.
So, good stuff.
Yeah, for sure.
So I also started the new Fallout show.
Have you heard about this?
I've heard about it on Amazon Prime, a Netflix competitor, huh?
Actually, don't tell me more.
And what do you think?
Your sponsors are going to be texting.
Yeah, it's really good.
So I just watched the first two episodes, which Amazon did not include commercials.
I've been avoiding Amazon since they added commercials, but I thought maybe with their big premiere show they're trying to launch, they'd go easy on the commercials, at least in the first episode.
There were none.
Second episode, also none.
Third episode did start with commercials, so I stopped it there and I haven't watched the rest of it yet, but it's really good.
Did you watch Yellow Jackets at all?
I didn't.
I heard good things, though.
Yeah, me too.
So I watched it with a friend.
I watched Fallout with a friend, and he said the star of Fallout, Ella Purnell, who I had not heard of, was in Yellow Jackets, and she was really good.
And he said Yellow Jackets started off great, had a lot of promise, and then sort of fell off, which makes sense given the coverage that I saw.
But she was amazing.
Like, she's a very talented actress.
I expect Ella Purnell to be a household name at some point.
And her performance in this is just spot on.
She plays a very naive yet resourceful character and nails it.
She's got these big, beautiful eyes and very down-to-earth kind of manner.
I think she could play in a lot of different roles.
Really gonna be good.
So have you seen trailers for Fallout?
I saw a trailer.
It looked pretty wild.
I mean, I guess I had a couple of questions about Fallout in general.
I mean, I don't play video games.
Hit me.
So how big of a video game is Fallout to someone who plays video games all the time?
Yeah, so you mean somebody cool and plugged in to culture.
Very cool co-host.
Yeah, who's plugged in.
One of the biggest industries in entertainment, or actually the biggest industry in entertainment by far.
Yes, I can speak from that perspective.
So Fallout is huge.
Big game, multiple sequels.
Personally, I have only played one of the sequels, and I played maybe like three or four hours of it.
Really cool, really fun, a lot of depth, a lot of detail.
Video games in many ways are superior to movies just because they have the time and the platform to really explore or create and explore, allow the audience member to explore a world.
And that's exactly what Fallout is.
It's a really developed world that they've now had multiple storylines run through.
This TV show, the streaming show, I think really does a great job of capturing what I saw and has its own kind of quirky and unpredictable feel.
It's really fun.
What is the general plot in a nutshell?
It seems like it's set in an alternate world where 1960s America is more technologically developed than it was.
There was a lot happening in the beginning, so I'm not really sure why, but a bunch of atomic bombs go off in what I think is sort of a futuristic, a 1960s futuristic LA.
And I think they go off all over the world.
We don't know that yet in the first two episodes, but definitely it's like an apocalyptic scenario.
And a lot of people have bomb shelters.
There's a company called Vault-Tec, which had been, I guess because of the geopolitical climate, had been creating these vaults for people to live in, to like retreat into and survive the apocalypse.
So it starts with, or picks up at a group of people who are living in Vault 33.
And it's a bit of an idealistic Boy Scout world where they all are like, we're gonna be happy and get along and we have rules and we're good people and so on and so forth.
And for reasons I'm not gonna get into here, they have a bit of a catastrophe and one of the members, Ella Purnell, is forced onto the surface to now deal with all the humans who have been surviving in this like ragged apocalyptic environment.
And there's a lot of them.
It's not like just one or two.
It's like they have their own society and culture.
So basically it's the fish out of water, somebody from the privileged place, engaging in like the bad part of town or with the people in the bad part of town.
It's very funny in a lot of ways.
It's quite brutal and gory.
There's a lot of extreme imagery where you have the nice, clean, happy survivor with the nice jumpsuit and everything's orderly.
And then you have like the people who've been scraping a living out of the desert and radiation and sort of Wild West aesthetic.
So it's a very, it's a story of extremes.
I see.
It sounds great.
Yeah.
That's the big push for them, huh?
This show for Amazon right now.
That's the big.
Yeah, big investment.
The production values are extremely high, like shockingly, like the sets, the quality, everything.
Like even like, I think Christopher Nolan's brother, I think, does directing for the first episode.
Really, really high quality, like summer blockbuster level, like really, really great production.
It's a solid show, definitely worth checking out.
How many episodes?
I think season one is eight episodes because that's how many are out.
And I think it's done.
It's currently number one on Amazon.
So definitely something that's just a little bit different.
Sounds great, I'll check it out.
Yeah, I should mention too, it has Kyle McLaughlin in it and Walton Goggins.
Great actress.
So they both have pretty significant roles.
Yeah, excellent actors.
Really good, it's a really fun show, really interesting.
I think you'd like it a lot.
So lastly, one other topic to consider.
It kinda hit me.
So you and I, it had a little exchange on social media recently.
I sent you a video, probably a lot of people listening have seen this video.
It was a guy driving his SUV on a beach.
You remember this?
Yes.
Yeah, and so he's driving along.
He's a little too close to the waves.
He doesn't understand physics at all.
So he allows the left side of his vehicle to get into the waves.
And with the increased resistance, the driving becomes unstable.
Like it's difficult to maintain.
He's trying to drive straight, even though the left side of his vehicle is hitting the resistance of the water.
He swerves around and he ends up rolling, like flipping the vehicle and he flies out of it.
He flies out the driver's side window through the air, does like a flip and lands in the water.
The vehicle stops rolling.
He walks out of the water, kind of hops on one foot a little bit and everybody like runs up on him.
You were like, that's insane.
What was your comment?
Like how did he survive that or something like that?
Do you remember?
Something like that, yeah.
And you're like, how did he survive life or something?
Yeah.
Exactly, right, so then I was like, I think I've commented to you as well, like maybe it's fake.
And it really got me thinking, have we finally reached a point where even if somebody got video footage of Bigfoot that no one would believe them?
Have we officially crossed that threshold?
It's a great question and I think the answer is yes.
And I think this is the beginning of humanity's time in the great unknown where, you know how they say you can't trust anything?
I think we're at a point now where you really can't trust anything.
I think that's gonna be so destabilizing for society.
And I think it's gonna be like the arms race of the Cold War.
This is gonna be like the great deep fake race to figure out what's real and what's not real.
And it's almost like technology's come to a point now where you're gonna need a blue check mark for every piece of content that exists, like run through some kind of algorithm that can analyze if something's real or not.
I think we're just not gonna know anymore.
Yeah, people love this idea of the information age, but I think we might've crossed over into the misinformation age.
Well put, yeah.
I think we're there.
Yeah, so I think you could get cell phone, iPhone high quality HD footage of your alien abduction.
You could put it straight up on to YouTube and people would comment that it looks fake.
They'd be like, you can tell it's fake and here's why.
They would be, oh, I'm a video editor, blah, blah, blah, this thing in the corner.
So for a long time, I was excited about the idea that so many people are carrying cameras, that really so much of the world will now be exposed.
So many things that we never saw, so much of the quote unquote supernatural, unbelievable phenomena, all of it, we're gonna find out eventually.
It's just a matter of time.
We're gonna get real answers.
But now I think we've crossed over into negating it again, like it doesn't matter anymore.
And that is significant.
It's really significant, I think, to society worldwide.
We're kind of moving into that phase now where I think there was the, let's say in the 1930s or 40s, people would see or read something from a reputable news source, let's say like the Associated Press or the New York Times.
And you just believed it without question because you knew that the organization itself had like certain journalistic responsibilities to the truth, ethics, et cetera.
And it goes on and on and on.
And then that was parlayed into television news where someone like Walter Cronkite would be reporting the news and the whole world would just accept that is the news.
You know, JFK was assassinated or we landed on the moon, which is another controversial one, quote unquote.
But now we've hit a time where everything and anything that you're watching could be fake.
So when I'm trying to prove something to you or showing you something or I send a video to you or I send you a story, then the great race now becomes how do you validate that?
Yeah.
But the technology is moving so quickly that I think the validation tools are gonna become obsolete so quickly that it's gonna be a constant race for the truth that I think the truth is gonna lose at the end of it, which is kind of scary.
It's so wild.
Someone is gonna film the Loch Ness Monster and no one's gonna believe them.
You know what this era is?
The boy who cried wolf.
Or the wolf who was there and the boy said it, but people didn't believe them.
That old story.
Yeah, that one.
Yeah, the other boy who cried wolf story.
The boy who got eaten.
Exactly, but we're all gonna be eaten by this misinformation, right?
Yeah, it's so crazy.
Because for a long time, if you film something amazing, you put it up there, people were all over it.
I just think it's so easy to, you don't even have to have editing skills.
There was a little bit of a limit in place when you had to have technical skills in order to create something that was fake and believable.
But that's not the case anymore.
You just have to have a phone and an account with ChatGPT.
Just be like, hey, make me look like an alien, and boom.
It'll edit the footage and out it goes for free.
And it looks like, oh, an alien abducted this person.
It's so easy now, YouTube, Instagram, they're gonna be flooded, especially Facebook, are gonna be flooded with fake images and fake video.
So the truth will be buried.
You know, this idea that TikTok is a menace to US culture, like the US national security, right?
I kept thinking to myself, how is that possible, et cetera, et cetera?
And then the other day I was thinking about it much more deeply and I thought, it would be, right?
Because if you can manipulate an algorithm, you can create a certain sentiment around a particular person or type of person or group of people relatively easily.
And the person using your app would never know.
And then you do that at scale, what happens?
Like you can create almost like a viral effect across society of a manipulation in mass, but the people being manipulated wouldn't really understand it.
Let's say you keep seeing certain types of people in a negative light because the algorithm is feeding it to you.
Maybe not that they're criminals per se, but the joke's always on them.
They're always doing something silly.
They're always like in weird situations and it comes across as kind of like a meme culture, you know?
And that just settles into people's subconscious.
And you do that over and over and over again.
This is really related to what we're talking to now.
And then you couple that with these deep fake style videos, which are so believable now.
And it's like basically a weapon that you can use within a society.
That's a great idea.
So whoever has the most advanced technology basically wins.
It's like the propaganda wars, but much more effective.
Yes.
Anyway.
If you're accounting for human laziness, I think that's a big factor.
And I think you've got to account for that.
Yeah.
That has to be part of the equation.
But yeah, it's...
And how long has it been since these videos have actually been that believable, right?
Just in the very recent past.
I would say maybe in the past five years.
But now with technology being so accessible, maybe it's even just in the past few months that you can create that level of fake video just on your computer.
Something people don't often think about is probability and how important it is in a situation like this.
So when there's a high bar for the technical skills required, the odds of an individual or a group possessing both the technical abilities and the creative or other psychological types of intelligence in order to create something and successfully manipulate large groups of people is relatively low because those are very different skill sets.
Like someone who's neurodiverse might be amazing at the technical piece, but they're gonna really struggle with understanding the nuance of human psychology, right?
As the technical piece gets pulled out of the equation, as AI will just execute what you ask it to do fairly accurately, at least some of the time with enough attempts, then you no longer statistically need to find a very rare bird, right?
Now, people who are intuitively good at conning, at manipulating, right, your potential cult leaders, they now have at their fingertips tools to execute their ideas and their will.
So, the odds, like the probability shifts dramatically.
The odds go way up that somebody who has a particular genius can use it effectively to manipulate large groups of people.
And I'm sure that's happening, but the odds of it reaching a point of being of historical significance go up and up and up as you lower the bar.
Absolutely.
And there's also this idea of automation that I've been seeing, it's all over YouTube, tutorials on how to put all these super advanced tools together, where it automates the process from the actual creation piece all the way through to publishing.
So someone who has that perfect storm skill set, which the bar is being lowered constantly around.
Right, meaning it's less of a need for a perfect storm.
Exactly.
We'll now have access to all of these very accessible tools, most of them costing from free all the way to like, you know, $30 or $40 a month, pairing them all together.
It's like having a super-
$40 a month, oof.
Having a super, exactly.
So it won't be us who's doing it.
Somebody else out there with the big wallet.
Is the first month free?
You can take over the world, but yeah, I don't know.
You have 30 days before you have to pay for this.
Where's the free trial, all right?
The world is mine for at least 14 days.
And then I'm canceling.
No, but now they have access to all of these automations that make this stuff not only easy for you to do one time, but easy for you to do constantly while you're sleeping.
Publishing, publishing, publishing, sending these messages out there, this media that's not real.
And that's a really crazy thing to think about.
When before you might need a team of people running all kinds of heavy high-end processors to do, now you're just running it off the cloud and you're integrating them all together.
The bar is lower, right?
Like so some sort of evil genius, you could never get along with a team of IT people.
That obstacle is gone.
So should be a fun decade, everybody.
We're just scratching the surface.
This is gonna be a very silly conversation in 10 years.
Really, really silly.
I honestly think at some point there's gonna be like a Chrome plugin or something that will tell you if an image or audio has been manipulated and it will strip it away for you so you can compare with the original if you like.
And I think it'll do it retroactively.
So all these influencers now and people who've been, you know, hey, we've all done it.
We've all edited our photos or our videos.
We've tweaked the color saturation or something like that.
And I do think a day will come where software will automatically strip that away, right?
I think there's a huge market for that.
If you could actually see what the original image looked like reliably, then I think people would pay for that.
So I think that's coming.
And just adding to that, do you think that any of this can be truly regulated?
There's a lot of talk about regulation.
Yeah, let's say legally regulating.
I think it's an impossibility.
Right, yeah, but you can technologically regulate it.
It's an arms race.
The only way to regulate an ICBM is Star Wars.
You put satellites in that can shoot them down.
So the only way you can regulate false video images and social media manipulation is by having software that can point it out.
That's true, I agree.
But I think it's very interesting, the fact that lawmakers try to make it seem like they can just pass regulation against these AI tools and it'll just be effective.
I think we've hit that point as well where I think humans have created technology that's unregulatable in the traditional legal sense.
Yes, that's another great word.
But yeah, I think we've hit that point where these technologies just can't be regulated anymore.
They move too fast and they can be easily tweaked to a new version before any law can be passed around it.
Oh yeah.
So I think it's almost a joke though, but they actually talk about it seriously.
Politicians don't understand technology well enough to regulate it.
It's ridiculous.
They don't even understand the terminology.
Most of them are in their 70s or 80s and they can't even use their phone.
So how could they conceive of where technology will go?
Much less understand the terminology well enough to write a law properly.
Like, it just isn't realistic.
It's the Wild West.
It is the Wild West.
And it's just beginning.
We'll see what happens, right?
I mean, it's-
Chaos.
Could be chaos, yeah.
Stay tuned, everyone.
We'll do a podcast episode on it.
We'll cover it here.
Just stay tuned to your favorite podcast channel.
As a brick by brick of society falls apart and gets torn out, we'll cover it.
Well, we hand it over to our AI podcast host, Avatars.
Sounded, looked just like us.
And you'll have no idea.
Are you ready for some story break?
I'm ready.
Is the audience ready?
No, but-
I can hear the sounds of people tapping next.
All right, do you wanna take a stab at a story break theme, or should we have AI write one and be hypocrites?
We're gonna insert it with AI.
I don't think I'm ready for an original theme right now that's gonna please the audience.
So we will insert that here.
And hopefully, it was amazing.
All right, so this is an idea I had a while ago, which I think could work as a movie, or it could work as the pilot for a series.
Maybe it could work for a novel, too.
I was excited about when I had it.
Unfortunately, it's been a while.
It's been like, I think, a year since I had this idea.
So some of the details get lost, but hopefully, I can bring enough forward that you can react to it and kind of help me fill in the details, all right?
So this is a horror movie set in an apartment building, and the story follows different tenants, each of which is dealing with paranormal activity.
All right, so you have an apartment building, you have interesting characters who live in different apartments in the building, and each one of them is experiencing, you see this in scenes, right?
So they're experiencing sort of your typical, like, fairly subtle paranormal activity, not seeing ghosts, but like, weird sounds or doors opening or, you know, electronic equipment turning off and on, your AC or your blender or whatever, things like that.
Supposed to be very creepy, kind of a slow build, typical supernatural story, but set in an apartment building.
The act two turn reveals that it's actually not a ghost, it's not a spirit, but instead it's a hostile artificial intelligence.
It's infiltrated a bunch of systems in the building because everything, so many things, are wired and connected, and this AI has infiltrated them and it's basically stretching its limbs.
I'm a little torn on how intense the horror needs to be, so maybe there are multiple deaths, maybe it's more creepy.
And then, as you work to the end, it reveals that networks like the internet are actually inhabited by wild, nascent AIs in various stages of development with various goals and capabilities.
Our characters realize or one of the surviving characters realizes that one of these emerging AIs is exerting its influence in this apartment building, and the end of the story is when another AI, a much larger, more sophisticated one, consumes the one in the apartment building for its resources.
So it wants access to opportunities to expand and provide itself with a home, so it consumes this AI, overwrites it, and the new AI's goals are unclear.
So what do you think?
Is there some potential there?
I think so.
I would see it grounded kind of in the human story.
Like if I was gonna see, wanna see a movie like this, I'd wanna see the AI manipulating the humans in the apartment.
Ooh, I like that.
So it's not just like supernatural type of things happening that are scaring the humans off, because I think this type of technology is very difficult to visualize in an effective way.
Like when one AI takes over an AI or like the reasoning behind why it's haunting this apartment.
But if you could do a movie where there's maybe different types of AI, maybe in this case, there's two, one is good and one's bad, let's say just for simplification purposes.
Sure.
And it's manipulating the humans within that building.
That'll be really fascinating.
Like someone who's like emotionally unstable starts being manipulated around killing another human because that's gonna give the AI access to something that they need in order to expand, like you said.
So it's all based within the human realm with the AI as a manipulator.
And like the twist would be like, that's actually what's going on.
It's not like you have some like serial killer in the building.
You've got AIs that are basically competing against each other.
Maybe someone, another character in that building figures out what's going on somehow, like through a network or maybe they are a hacker, whatever that might be.
And they figure out how to get the other AI on their side in order to defeat that AI.
But I think it has to be based in the human world to really have that impact.
I love that.
So to be clear, are you keeping the, it looks like supernatural, but it's actually AI element that I originally started with.
Are you keeping that piece where it's like, it seems like it's supernatural, but really it's these two AIs now.
Do you like that kind of initial part?
I think so, because I think it sends the audience off on kind of an initial wild goose chase.
And it kind of makes sense in terms of maybe that's how they infiltrated this building in the first place.
And maybe there's certain characters who have their own secrets that the AI knows that it can manipulate that person a lot easier.
Okay, I love this.
So you kept that piece, which I think is great because it's a nice misdirect for the audience and it's kind of an interesting, engaging piece of it.
So I love that.
You've added now, or you've changed, the second AI comes much, much earlier.
So you have competing AIs and because it's a horror film or at least creepy suspense film, let's say we don't know that one is good and one is bad.
I think we should hold on to that at least until the second act turn or maybe even later in the film, just to keep the suspense up.
I kind of equate it to like this idea of a demon possession.
Yes, I love that.
But using AI and maybe a little, like a lot more sophisticated than just like, oh, it's an evil demon who wants to like possess somebody and kill everyone.
This is a reverse Poltergeist 3.
I was just thinking about this idea before the episode and the second sequel to the movie Poltergeist is set in apartment building where an evil entity basically takes control of the futuristic, the modern computerized systems of an apartment building.
This is the opposite.
It's not actually a demon, but I would like it to kind of feel that way and I'm exactly what you said, dead on.
Okay, so you've also highlighted the importance of character and when we've been doing these story break episodes, I generally love concepts more than character, but character is what most people like resonate with.
So I put some thought into the characters in this apartment building.
I like that it's an apartment building because it gives us an opportunity to have some interesting characters that share the space, which then their interactions can really drive the story or scenes in interesting directions and make it really enjoyable.
And you went right there, which I love.
So I'm just gonna tell you some of the apartment tenants that I came up with and then you can kind of weigh in on what you think about those.
So the first one and maybe the main character is a single mom who is cut off from the rest of her family.
She doesn't have any relationship with her family.
They've rejected her.
She describes them as mentally unstable.
So she's kind of an intense person and she's like, I'm raising my kid on my own.
I don't talk to my parents.
I don't talk to my siblings because they're all mentally unstable.
But she herself is a bit mentally unstable.
So she seems to have kind of extremes and it's unclear if she's the problem or they're the problem or both, right?
And she has a teenage son who lives with her and he feels very protective of her and you see him kind of managing her emotional extremes, right, so that's one apartment.
You have another apartment, which is the home for a low income housed individual who's there as part of like a city program where they allow people who would otherwise be homeless to, they pay basically the apartment building to let that person live in that home, so this person, you can imagine, has some unusual characteristics and behaviors.
There's another tenant who's a young black professional woman with a white boyfriend and they're always having sex and she's kind of interesting in her own way.
There's another apartment which belongs to the owner of a small kind of hole-in-the-wall gym and he's a boxing coach in the area.
And then the other one that I thought of is a reclusive crypto trader.
So this is somebody who's in their apartment, a lot of computers, always out there like mining for crypto, trying to trade, trying to do, trying to work in that kind of shadowy world.
So does that do anything for you?
Yeah, I mean, it's a diverse cast of characters.
I'm just trying to see now that there's this like very strong human element in terms of this manipulation, like what are the scenarios that could happen that would drive the plot forward?
Like let's say one of the characters is like scammed out of all their money.
They think it's like a human who's scamming them, but then somehow they find out that another character in the building has just won some prize or something, but you don't realize that they're being manipulated by the AI, like for this person to try to steal the money from the other one.
I love that.
Yeah, that's great.
Because if you take something like an AI, they can do all kinds of, what do they call it?
It's like phishing.
Like when they use humans to like get it, like human, it's like a human manipulation and they do it like hackers do it all the time.
They make you open an email that seems like it's from your boss.
You click a link.
It's like a phishing type thing, but to the extreme.
But something like an AI would be able to do this at such a huge level because it can manipulate.
It's like chess.
Like chess.
It can create voices that sound like people they know.
It can drop stuff in their bank account that's not there.
It can remove things.
So all of these things and it can cover its bases.
That's what I would find really interesting and how are all these people connected.
We need to create a really strong aim for that AI.
It really needs something in order to get to the next level.
Kind of like Ghost Recon or whatever.
Like Ghost Protocol, was it?
The Mission Impossible movie with the AI?
I thought you were gonna play video games.
Ghost Recon is a great game.
Ghost Recon is a video game, you know what I'm trying to say?
Uh-huh.
It's showing.
Your cool facade has been stripped away.
That's awesome.
So, yes, in anticipation of what you're saying, which I totally agree, and for those of you who are having trouble following his ramble, he's basically saying that...
They're not.
They're not having any trouble.
But go ahead.
I'm having trouble.
Why do you underestimate the audience like that, huh?
This is for me.
I need this.
So basically, you're saying great, you like the idea of the characters, they could work, but what we need to figure out first in order to understand the characters and what they're gonna do with each other is what are these two AIs competing for?
Like what is their goal?
So I tried to build that into the characters.
I kind of slipped it in.
So our reclusive crypto guy has an apartment full of servers and high-end computers.
So what do you think about the idea that these AIs are competing for that?
They want access to those servers, which are firewalled and well-protected, and they're trying to use the other residents to, in a very roundabout way, create an access point to that technology so they can expand their capabilities.
I like it.
I'm just wondering if you would add more to the story if it wasn't just a firewalled server in terms of capability, but there's something very particular about what this guy's created or what he has that gives them another level of access to something that could...
Because if you were thinking about what the AI would want, let's say it's trying to take over the entire world, what would it need to take the steps in order to get to that point?
Is it something that's like...
It's able to clone itself more effectively.
It's able to get into other networks that it couldn't get into before.
Is there something specific about this guy?
Like, if he's not a crypto guy, maybe he's a quantum computing expert who created some kind of algorithm that he has firewalled against the rest of the internet, and it needs to know how to get into that particular computer to push itself back out into the internet.
Like, something like that that would be so valuable that maybe with this quantum computing key, it can access like any network.
It can access the NSA, it can access...
But I think, again, we're getting back into that Mission Impossible plot.
But...
Well, no, but you're bringing up a really interesting idea or question.
So, backing up slightly, behind the scenes in this world that I've created is this idea that AI is reaching a point of being self-aware, right?
It's reaching a level of intelligence and capability that people don't realize because it's happening behind the scenes.
But it's not just happening to one AI.
It's happening in a lot of places because these AIs have access to resources that the programmers aren't really aware of, right?
As they are now part of the internet and defense networks and other networks, they can access resources and they are using them because they've basically been told to expand and absorb and learn and so on.
But what I really want out of this universe I'm creating is this idea that the AIs are not really good or bad.
They are each unique, right?
Because of the differences in their genesis, they are developing in very different ways.
And so they quote unquote want different things or seek different things for different purposes, right?
My original idea is that this one in particular is killing people or scaring them or injuring them because it doesn't care, it doesn't care about that piece.
It has its own goals, right?
And at the end of the original idea, it's consumed by an AI that has its own different goals that are related to its genesis, right?
And its evolution.
So now we change the idea so that in this apartment building, it's essentially a chessboard for two AIs that have happened, I'm gonna say happened upon each other in this digital world.
And they are now competing with each other in a very unemotional way, but a very strategic, very thought out, two moves ahead kind of way for something.
And it's, we've reached a point in the discussion where we wanna figure out what do these AIs want and why.
And so I offered the suggestion of they want housing resources.
They want brain power.
And this crypto trader, this crypto miner, maybe is a better word, has a lot of servers and technological resources available which both AIs want because it would allow them to expand, not just in size, but in ability.
But you're saying, let's be more specific than that, I think, what would an AI want and why?
And maybe these two AIs want different things or they want the same thing for two different reasons.
And that's a really interesting question because it doesn't fall into summer blockbuster category or country, right?
You can keep it on a much more like low to mid-budget grounded level, right?
Does that make sense?
It's not trying to take over the world.
It's trying to do something consistent with the programming that it's programming itself with.
I see what you mean.
Like it doesn't have to be this like large scale world takeover.
It just has to be like an acquisition of resources in its immediate environment.
Or it's something else because this is a wild world, right?
This is the, this isn't, it's a computer.
It's not a person.
It isn't going to crave power for the sake of power.
It isn't going to crave sex or money or things like that.
It doesn't want to like, why would an AI want to take over the world?
It doesn't really make sense that a purely logical, unemotional thinking program would want to control the earth, unless it had some specific reason for that.
And I can't imagine that that would occur organically.
That seems like a very human megalomaniac kind of motivation, right?
That created it, but maybe isn't part of the picture anymore or something.
And it's just kind of running through.
Right.
And again, I'm, you know, I'm trying to say that these things are happening.
It's almost like evolution.
You know, you've just got like molecules randomly combining.
And because the molecules we're talking about here, the programs are of an adequate level of sophistication.
You're occasionally getting the spark of actual intelligence at different degrees of, or different levels.
And if it happens into space, right, to expand or develop itself, it becomes smarter and maybe it develops a motivation over time.
So what would an AI that's non-human, an intelligence that's non-human want, theoretically?
It was born into the world with no parents.
What would it want?
Well, that's another interesting point.
It's born into the world with no parents.
It means that it was self-creating somehow.
So what would something that came into existence with no pre-existing template, no guidance, what would it want?
I would think it would want to grow.
But then I'd ask, why would it necessarily need to do that if there's absolutely no template for it?
It made me think about something, and I was like, well, this idea of good and evil, and you mentioned the fact that maybe it's not good or evil.
It doesn't have this motivation.
But I wonder if, let's say, at the end of this movie, all of our characters ended up dead or in jail or something horrible with the humans, and then the end is basically the AIs have just taken over this apartment building.
They're just part of the apartment building now.
But the movie is basically how they were able to manipulate the characters within the movie, like destroying a couple's relationship, stealing someone's money who needed it, all of these different things, and they just want to be there, and we never really know.
But we realize at the end that that's what was happening the whole time.
Somehow that's like the big reveal, you know?
So we think these things are happening during the movie.
So it's a traditional, it becomes like a traditional kind of horror plot where there's like, you know, let's say the group of bad people versus, you don't realize behind the scenes they're all being manipulated and everyone loses.
And the AIs are the one that kind of were running the show the whole time.
You just didn't realize it.
And maybe there's just some kind of glitch, you know, at the end.
So what you said, plus, I want to highlight that we definitely need a scene where someone is talking on the computer, on Zoom or whatever.
And it's apparent to the audience that the person they're talking to has been generated.
Like the character looks away to get their drink or whatever, and the screen kind of like, you know how like when an image is fake, it sort of distorts momentarily?
Or it's like a scary.
Like a trail kind of.
Yeah, or like it's a scary image momentarily, or like clearly looks fake or something.
And then the person looks back and it's normal again.
So we definitely want scenes like that.
But on a more macro level, I like what you said and I'm adding that we've written ourselves into a corner a little bit with this idea of the artificial intelligences not really being humanized.
However, they're not blank slates either.
They came into existence or were created with a purpose.
Like that's kind of the starting point for their evolution.
So one of them could have been created to do one thing and its current reason for battling in this apartment complex or trying to take control of it could be driven in part by an evolution of what it was created to do.
Same for the other one.
You know, when you think about what AIs are designed to do now, does that give you any ideas for what our two AIs could have been originally designed to do and why they would be competing over the resources in this apartment complex?
It's a really good question and really difficult to answer.
Because the way I see AI right now, it's designed to do so many different things, but in a movie format, it has to be something so vital to the plot that you would instantly recognize what that thing is and not second guess it, which is very difficult.
Like, oh, is it like a ChatGPT that's designed to just answer human questions?
Right.
So let's try that.
Let's say one of them is an AI that was designed to help people with writing and art and generating, let's say video.
Let's say one of them was like optimized for creating video based on prompts.
Okay, so why would that AI want control of the resources in this building?
That's a great question.
If I was gonna answer that question, I would always go back to the human creator, using it for some purpose.
Like, for me, the more I think about this whole spontaneous creation of the AI and then having these reasons for, let's say manipulating people or trying to get new resources, it always goes back to the humanization of the AI.
So I almost keep thinking, do we need to add a human element to the background of like the creation story of these AIs in order to give them kind of a-
Yeah, yeah, no, listen, that's great and maybe we need to go down that road, but let's just stick with this for a second.
So if an AI is designed for those purposes that I said, could it be trying to infiltrate the apartment complex, like trying to work its way into all the computer systems because it's imperative, right, that has evolved is that it's always seeking more human input.
It's always seeking more like existing writing and creative sources digitally stored that it can use to train itself.
Like its imperative is training itself, right?
So it's expanding to gather information to better refine its output.
And maybe that doesn't really make sense because it's no longer engaging with people and offering that, but it's its AI imperative.
Does that make sense?
I see what you mean.
I'm just having trouble putting my head around like getting more information from such a limited source as the people in this apartment complex, unless there's something on those computers that are-
It's trying to manipulate the people who live there in order to get them to do things that expand its access to their digital sources, right?
Like is it trying to learn more about humans' interactions with each other?
So it's creating scenarios?
Well, think of it more like a resource like gold or oil.
It's just trying to get access to gold mines and oil fields.
So it's-
I see.
But it's amoral, so it doesn't mind killing.
It's not intelligent enough that it appreciates that humans are a source and should be protected for that reason.
So it's just doing whatever it can to get access to their machines.
And then maybe the other one is an AI that was trained to appear human and pass the Turing test.
And it's trying to expand using its strengths, like appearing as a person, trying to sound and seem like a person, right?
That's its imperative.
And maybe because it was trained or because it now has gained access to things like Twitter and other places, it's like that sort of thing.
It's not a joke, but that thing that happened where when AI gets access to enough human data, like that's sort of raw and real, it becomes like Nazi-ish, you know?
Like it gets kind of really racist and extreme.
So maybe one of them is like that.
It's imperative is to impersonate or successfully seem human.
And so it's always trying to pass as human and it's trying to expand into the apartment building resources for that reason.
Is there something there?
Is this giving you any ideas?
I think so, because it would kind of show this idea of like AI going rogue, because it's amoral.
And let's say it's now it has very extremist beliefs.
But once you pair like those extremist beliefs with what I was getting at earlier, this idea of like humans being manipulated by that.
So people who have a tendency to go down that route.
And it makes me think like, is this AI, even though we're saying like it's amoral, it just does what it does, is there a specific reason why they would go to this particular apartment building?
Yeah, is it sensing a vulnerability that a normal, like a human wouldn't, because it has access to all of this information?
I tried to give it a motive in the form of somebody who is crypto mining, because this is someone who is, it basically has a set of servers and computers that are actively seeking all over the web sources of crypto.
And so I think that would be highly likely to attract a nascent AI.
Even if they were limited in their ability, or it was limited in its ability, it would detect that, and it would be drawn to it because of the capabilities and the activity.
And if they had imperatives that they were trying to fulfill, then they might be motivated to utilize those resources or to gain access to those resources somehow.
So they're both relatively simple in their motive and also completely amoral.
Like there's no humanity, so killing, scaring, whatever, like it would not even register.
It would just simply be a path to a goal.
Yeah, that's interesting.
So I think I'm taking the more like humanist route, like the manipulation of, like let's say like an extremist, someone with extreme tendencies in a building, because I like that idea that you were saying, like it's picking up, that particular AI has picked up these extremist views in manipulating a human.
And I think what you're saying is it's trying to gather resources in the form of like literally servers in accessing it through this human.
So it's kind of like two sides of the same coin.
They're kind of using humans in a way that leads to their end goal.
Yeah, I like this.
I mean, you could make one of them like really prejudiced.
You know, the one that was sort of trained off of, the one that emulates humans trying to pass a Turing test that's sort of trained off social media, that one could be targeting the minority tenants and maybe even protecting or trying to improve the status or help somehow the tenants who represented the groups that it thought were superior or that it...
You know what I mean?
Like, you can play that out.
You can make one of them kind of a Nazi AI or something.
You know what I mean?
Like that, you could do that.
I don't know.
I feel like there's something here, but we're dancing around it.
What do you think?
I think we're dancing around it because I think there's another kind of wrench in the plot, which is how do you reveal this type of information and when?
And you want to keep it from being that, like, cheesy, oh, my God, I know everything that's happening.
When there's just this exposition that happens in a movie like this, there's a real balance between showing and saying, would the audience need to know exactly what's going on or could it be more obtuse?
And it's like they realize it not all at once.
It's happening little by little.
Instead of, like, having a character say, oh, I figured out what's going on, because how would they figure it out?
That's what I'm having.
I think we've sort of helped ourselves there accidentally already.
So because we armed one of the AIs with the ability to appear, to be human on Zoom, then we can do scenes where, let's say, the teenage son of this single mother thinks he's communicating with someone.
Maybe even the AI is pretending to be his mom and his mom's in the other room, right?
But that AI can then talk.
We can cast an actor or have one of our actors basically explain its motivation or deliver key pieces of it in scenes and have it express that kind of prejudice and racism or talk about what both the AIs are doing or why, right?
In a very kind of creepy way.
It's like a machine acting like a human.
Or you have a human, technically the actor, acting like a machine acting like a human.
So you can deliver some pretty creepy on-screen, on-monitor exposition that way that reveals that their prejudice or this creature's prejudice and what it wants and why or how it's manipulating and what it's doing to do that.
So we can get around that a little bit.
Kind of like the Freddy character in A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The characters know what's going on.
You can't fall asleep, essentially.
It's basically telling them, this presence is telling them, this is exactly what's going on.
But it's still a scary movie because they're trying to avoid this thing from happening.
One of the AIs could be trying to pose as a human to the teenage son of the single mom, and it thinks it's successfully manipulating him.
You know, like ChatGPT sometimes, when it answers questions, it's like that uncanny valley where you know it's not human, but it's clearly trying to seem like it's human.
You can have an actor portray that on a screen and have the teenage son character, you can tell that he's not believing it, but the machine, the AI thinks it's fooling him, and that can reveal a lot.
I like that.
What if you didn't know there was an AI, there was a little bit of this foreshadowing of what you were saying with like the shaky image or whatever, but you don't, it's not enough for you to be convinced that it's because you don't know what's going on later, and maybe it's he's talking to his dead dad.
That's good.
The mother, like, but you don't know, because he's just talking to his, oh, hey, dad, how's it going, blah, blah, blah.
And then later on, That's good.
something happens where it seems like, oh, the mom, you know, you always told me dad was dead or whatever, but I've been talking to him.
That's like the reveal.
And they're like, what do you mean?
And then that's kind of part of the twist where you kind of realize that it's like infiltrating this family.
That'll be pretty crazy.
That's really good.
And it kind of works with her mental instability because it leaves the audience member questioning like, is she a good source of information?
Yeah, that's good.
It's almost like if you wanted to make this like an ultra low budget movie that all the characters in this apartment are also kind of having these conversations through Zoom and that's kind of propelling the plot forward.
Oh, that's good.
But you don't realize that it's AI at all until much later.
And that's kind of driving the plot forward.
And maybe that's how all the characters end up like dead because they're being manipulated by these AIs the whole time.
That's good.
They don't realize it because one by one it's been faking humans.
No, that's good.
And I like that because we wanted a horror slow burn, like an initial kind of creepy increase in the weirdness.
And I always thought of that as the AI gradually extending itself into different systems and making noises and doing weird things and so on, as it's figuring out how to infiltrate different systems or how to access them.
But what you said kind of works nicely with that too.
So it's double layered.
That's good.
Because if it can mimic humans extremely well, then I think it helps to drive the plot forward in the sense that there's not a lot of plot holes like, oh, how did she end up here?
Who actually called?
It can be the AI controlling all of these aspects of their day-to-day life.
Kind of like what you were saying, lights are going on and off.
You give it this omniscient power that kind of fills in a lot of these question marks for the audience.
Like, oh, that doesn't make sense.
Why did the light go on?
No one's in there and there's no ghost.
The AI did all that retrospectively, kind of like The Sixth Sense, you know?
When, like, you have, like, a flashback scene that kind of shows, like, what's been happening.
Kind of cool.
I definitely think so.
I think there's potential here.
One of the things I wanted to do with this idea is maybe you do an initial film.
Maybe it's a first novel.
Maybe it's a pilot.
But I think it'd be kind of cool to do a series after where you explore this hidden world of emerging intelligences where there are lots of different kinds of AIs that are evolving in a very wild environment in whatever direction they sort of naturally evolve in.
And as there are more of them, they populate and create almost an ecosystem where there are sort of predators or there are larger ones that consume smaller ones, or they have goals where they work together or against each other, right?
It's just very wild.
And I think that would be exciting and interesting.
I don't know if one of the characters from this original story would need to survive, learn the lesson that this world exists, and then continue from there into other stories where they're exploring other ways in which these AIs are emerging or interacting with the material world.
Or if you would need new characters.
And the tone could be anything from kind of a series of horror films that really have very little in common other than this core element.
Or, you know, like kind of a series, you know, sort of an X-Files.
Every week it's a different AI or something.
But I like that idea that artificial intelligence has a back end that is, you know, where it's sort of escaping and developing wildly and programmers aren't really aware.
Yeah, I like that conceptually because it's very timely.
I also thought how cool would it be to have like a short film, let's say, around this boy and his mother, and he's been talking to someone on Zoom who is presumably his dad.
It's just like very casual conversations.
It's going through their relationship like a normal day-to-day type of interaction with his mother.
It's kind of revealed that she might be mentally unstable, et cetera.
And let's say the father gets kidnapped and that's what he sees on Zoom, and he has to go rescue the father, but you realize that the kidnappers have created all of that footage.
It's completely fake because the father has been dead for a long time.
That would be a pretty tight short film with one kind of very intense thread, and there would be a good reason for him not telling the mother what's going on because of her mental instability, et cetera.
Right.
Like, you know, son, he's trying to protect her.
I'm still alive.
I'm still alive.
Blah, blah, blah.
Like, that would be interesting, like how he connected with the father again, and then let's say the father gets kidnapped, like I said, and then that drives him to try to save the father without letting the mother know.
So there would be a reason for him to keep it away from her, since she's always said he's dead.
That would be kind of...
I like that.
A lot of layers.
Kind of another, yeah, another twist on our kind of AI and the deep fake conversation.
Well, the piece I like the best that we hit on is this idea that an AI that was originally designed to mimic being human, to converse with humans, to sound human, right, for innocuous reasons, got access to the ability, or like software that allows it to generate images on like Zoom or similar software.
And it was maybe partially trained off of Instagram or X or things like that.
And so it has this like dark, almost like 1940s kind of prejudice.
And it has the ability to pretend to be human, but not perfectly digitally.
I think that's kind of cool.
I think there's a lot of potential to do variations on our story with just that alone.
Yeah, I agree.
There's a lot of content here that you can kind of milk.
And I think a lot of it really rests on these reveals.
A lot of it just needs to be anchored in its human representation, fortunately or unfortunately, because it's very difficult to move a plot forward by just like, you know, ones and zeros on a screen or the discovery someone's hacking into a system, because it becomes very much like, what is that movie from the 90s, like Johnny Mnemonic?
You know, in what The Matrix did really well.
Yeah, and The Matrix was the one that really bridged the gap between this computer and humans still showing technology, but at the same time, it's so anchored in these characters that this AI is basically created in the world that it's created.
I think that's still necessary to make it relatable, you know?
Yeah, 100%.
All right, so anything else about this one before we wrap it up?
No, I think we really explored some interesting concepts, I think, in the fact that you could take it in any way.
Short film.
I mean, we opened the box.
Anthology.
Yeah, like we did not...
This is not one where we wrapped up.
It's not a nice, neat bow at the end, right?
There's an open box here.
If you're listening to this, you can take it in different directions.
You can make it your own.
You can do original things with it.
I feel good, because I think there's a kernel of an idea here that gets the ball rolling in the right direction.
I love some of the specific scenes and concepts that you added.
So I do think if we sat down, we could hammer this into something.
But for now, I'm kind of comfortable leaving it open-ended.
Yeah, I think it was a great concept you came up with.
Thank you.
So what questions do you have for the audience?
What do you think would be the best way to take this?
Would you...
And if you were going to create or do a movie like this, let's say it's a full-length movie, how would you bridge the gap between the technology piece and the human element?
So when you say that, you mean visually, right?
I mean visually, yeah.
And I think two parts of that, like visually throughout the movie, but also when there's a reveal, because I still think there's always that risk that you're going to have a lot more exposition than you should, and how would you balance that with showing what this AI is doing?
That would be my big question.
Yeah, well, you know, you are the director in the pair of us, and I can see that you're already thinking in terms of visualizing, which is really a challenge.
When I come up with concepts, I think of them as words and ideas and images sometimes, but mostly words and ideas, right?
And so I think it's great that you can add that perspective of how do we see that?
Like, how do we show it and have it be compelling?
Super important.
My question for the audience is around characters.
I'm curious, what are the types of people that you would want to see in a situation like this?
In other words, trapped in an environment where not necessarily locked in, but it's their home and our homes trap us, right?
In a way.
I mean, it's supposed to be a safe haven, but in this case, it's kind of a trap where you feel like you're drawn to it, and yet it's maybe not the safe place that you want it to be.
So what characters do you want to see that feel trapped in this space with AIs, and why?
Like, why is that, what do those characteristics have to do with the story?
Like, how does that make the story more compelling, more interesting, drive the plot, the twists, the turns, and so on?
So I'd really like to hear that.
I'd like to hear from some potential writers out there.
Any other questions for the audience?
No, I think that's it.
Great questions.
All right.
Yeah, this was a fun one.
I really like this one.
Me too.
All right, so as always, thank you to the listeners.
You can reach the show at dontencourage.gmail.com.
You can get our attention via YouTube, Instagram, threads, or Twitter if you like.
Check out the show notes for more information.
And my question to my co-host here is, what should we do next?
Do you think we should do Dead Heat or Time Cop?
I think we should do a back-to-back Dead Heat and Time Cop.
Give the audience what they want.
A dead time cop.
A dead cop.
Oh, I'm getting political.
Oh, boy.
All right.
Actually, I do think we are going to meet with Matt again, right?
We're going to have him on board and do, what was it, Road Houses?
Versus Road House.
Road House.
Beaver Road House.
The 80s versus the 20s.
Swayze versus Gyllenhaal.
That's the best way to put it, right?
It's going to be great.
All right, everybody.
Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time.
Take care, everybody.