Note: Here’s another posts where I kind of interview myself as a way to talk about stuff that’s bouncing around the ol’ noggin’ of mine. Usually I like to try and go personal with these, but decided to take it elsewhere this time. Regardless, hope you enjoy. I had fun writing this one.
Hey hey hey, Matt! We haven’t done one of these in a while.
What’s up, brain? Haven’t done what in a while? You mean a writing piece where I speak to myself like I’m some kind of lunatic?
Yes, exactly that. But I think you’re hitting this from the wrong angle.
That’s what she said. But what angle should I be taking on the topics I want to write about today?
This is less “the ramblings of a madman” and more “the ramblings of an extremely lazy madman.”
I see… In other words, I could write some kind of essay or personal anecdote to cover the topics bouncing around my head, or I can take the easier path and pretend I’m interviewing myself in order to avoid writing thesis statements and paragraphs and conclusions and all that kind of Essay Writing 101 bulllllllllllllllllllllshit.
Exactly. Don’t need to follow any kind of 5 paragraphic structure. Just you, your thoughts and…
Jazz hands.
Yes, jazzy hands.
By the way, is “paragraphic” a word?
I doubt it. But I’m too lazy to look it up and it looks right. But surely, it’s not. It’s fun to make up words, though.
Kind of like “genderally.” Remember when we did that one? As in “genderally speaking, men do this, women do this.”
Yeah, yeah, I was there when you came up with that. I remember.
Remember when dad used to come in from a long drive home and would pitch bumper sticker ideas to my brother and me? He always was so proud of the stuff he came up with, even though most of them were pretty …
Groan inducing? Yeah, they were bad. But what I wouldn’t give to have him pitch one to me right now.
Isn’t that the truth? Wish I had possessed enough foresight to write some of them down. Maybe they would have aged better than my 15-year-old brain assumed at the time.
Yeah.
Yeah… *sigh*
Are we stalling? I feel like we’re stalling.
Not quite “stalling.” More “getting warmed up.” But let’s get this a’crackin’.
Okay! I already know the answer to this, but what’s been on your mind recently?
Nuclear weapons.
Jesus effing Christ ARE YOU OKAY, MAN?
Yes, put the hyperventilating brown bag down. It’s not like that. I mean, yeah, I’m good, but this isn’t something dark or “you need to be worried scenario.” I’ve been thinking about nuclear weapons because of the Christopher Nolan Oppenheimer movie coming out this July. Every time you go to a movie or watch the NBA playoffs, you see a trailer or TV spot for that movie. NBA Action and J. Robert Oppenheimer, it’s faaaaaaaaaaantastic.
I REMEMBER THOSE COMMERCIALS. Magic Johnson’s smile transcends, dude. But this is all so strange to me. When I think of summer, I immediately think of both basketball and summer blockbusters and adding J. Robert Oppenheimer to that mix is such a weird combination.
Now I am become death, the destroyer of backboards. But even beyond that, “the bomb” has always been something I’ve been fascinated by.
… Please continue but I’m worried.
Settle. Down. Look, the almighty YouTube algorithm is smart and insidious. You watch one Oppenheimer trailer and YouTube is going to think that that’s all you want to see. So, I’ve been going down a bit of an atom bomb rabbit hole. You’d be amazed at how many YouTube videos there are on the subject. There are videos about the history of the bomb and the bombs that followed. There are videos about the science of the bomb and how they work. There are videos that do nothing but compare the destructive power of the first Hiroshima bomb and all the bombs that followed. There’s…
My favorite is the video of the hydrogen bomb they exploded under water to see what would happen.
See? SEE? Micro-dosing the apocalypse is endlessly fascinating. I also think it’s lowkey hilarious how governments and militaries in the 1950s and 1960s had a “fuck around and find out” mentality. But yeah, that stuff is kind of fascinating.
And terrifying. Can’t forget that piece.
Yes! Exactly. That’s part of the appeal, for lack of a better word. There’s this piece of our brains that will always rubberneck wrecks on the side of the road. We like to think that we do so purely out of concern for complete strangers, but we’re partially full of shit… Partially. We also rubberneck because there’s a side of our brain that either thinks we want to see carnage or because we actually do want to see carnage. I haven’t decided where we actually fall on that. What say you, subconscious brain?
Oh, I know where we fall.
You do?
Oh yeah. Remember that time you were walking to work, and some dude was standing on top of the Castillian residential high rise because he wanted to jump off of it?
Oh yeah… I had forgotten about that.
I think there’s a side of us that will constantly be endlessly voyeuristic about stuff like that. And you indulged that thought for all of one second before the better side of us remembered that that was a human freaking being up there and that that person was having a really, really shitty day.
Yeah. It’s all coming back to me now. The police were already on the scene and thankfully were able to talk him down. Hope he’s doing well now.
So, the bomb is fascinating for some of those same reasons, I suppose. The technology and brainpower that went into building the bomb is equal parts God-level genius and God-level insanity, and stuff like that will always pique our interests.
*shudders*
But we need to never lose sight that those bombs have killed hundreds of thousands of people, some of them in the literal split-second blink of a terrifying moment.
I remember when we toured the Hiroshima Peace Museum and they had all of those exhibits of pieces of a wall or steps where a person’s shadow was literally tattooed onto the concrete? Imagine having a fucking shadow be the thing that survives you. Horrifying. Nothing but horrifying. What was that person doing at that instant? Just going about their day like you are now. Here one second; a shadow on a wall the next. And all because two governments couldn’t figure out a way to resolve conflict that didn’t involve an incalculable amount of steer, bullets, blood, and eventually, the atom.
Sobering.
I guess I was wrong that this wouldn’t go dark. But this isn’t actually what I wanted to talk about.
Yeah, let’s go to that. I think we’re also kind of fascinated by the idea of mad geniuses.
Like Oppenheimer?
No, you’re far more basic than that. You’re more fascinated by Christopher Nolan and trying to figure out why he’d be intrigued by this story. We like to think that it’s because Oppenheimer has an interesting story to tell, but we have this sinking suspicion that Nolan is more interested in the…
…in the spectacle side of the atom bomb. All of the “see it on the biggest screen possible” marketing feels kind of gross to me. Because the word on the street is that Nolan wanted to replicate the atom-fucking-bomb explosion using practical effects. No CGI. No bells and whistles. Just movie magic recreating something truly horrific. Imagine being so fascinated by the destructive power of the atom bomb that you not only make a movie about it, but you also decide to recreate the atom bomb explosion using actual explosives and then you implore audiences to come watch it because it’s “cool.” A human story about the moral implications of building the bomb doesn’t need the “biggest screen possible.”
Yeah, there’s something kind of fucked about Nolan. He reminds me a bit of James Cameron. Both guys are great filmmakers who show us stuff we’ve never seen before, but both guys are also…
Borderline psychopathic?
Yeah! Especially James Cameron. He’s mellowed out a lot but remember all those stories where he’s putting his crew and cast through horrific working conditions while being a major fucking asshole?
Yeahhhhhh… But to be fair, some of the imagery he’s put on screen is stuck up in the brain crawlspace and will be until the day you die. Terminator on the Harley Davidson. The Queen alien in Aliens. Jack and Rose boning in a car on a doomed ocean liner. Dude is an iconic image generating machine. Speaking of Terminators, that’s actually what I want to talk to you about here. Not nuclear weapons, but Artificial Intelligence. A freaking I.
LET’S CYBERDYNE SYSTEMS THIS SHIT!
Yeah, look, the image of Sarah Connor holding on to the chain-link fence while Los Angeles disintegrates under a nuclear mushroom cloud is one of the most bad ass scenes our young brain has ever seen. It was like a Megadeth album cover come to life.
(simultaneously)
IT’S SO FUCKING METALLLLLLLL. \m/
IT’S SO FUCKING METALLLLLLLLl. \m/
But Megadeth minus Dave Mustaine’s shitty voice.
The literal worst frontman voice ever. Even worse than Geddy Lee. Yeah, I concur with your “worst frontman voice ever.
Ever.
Ever and ever. By the way, someone needs to remake Amadeus but with Metallica in the Mozart part and Megadeth in the Salieri part. Imagine being in that band’s shadow for 40 years. Not like Metallica was a bunch of geniuses or anything, but they do cast a vast shadow.
Weren’t we talking about Artificial Intelligence?
YES! Okay. So yes, having grown up on Terminator 2, I know that the scary artificial intelligence stuff is coming and probably coming really soon. It may already be here, actually. Did you see that story about there being a fire at the Pentagon and how a major news outlet ran with that story, and it literally impacted the stock market’s price for a few moments, EVEN THOUGH THE FIRE WAS FAKE? And how Ron DeSantis is using AI in his ads to put Trump in all kinds of politically disadvantageous situations? The scary AI stuff is already here.
But?
But for now, I’m kind of enjoying the “everyone dicks around with Artificial Intelligence” thing that’s happening.
What do you mean?
I mean… it’s been pretty entertaining seeing the stuff people come up with just dicking around with AI technologies. Some dude did a video where he asked AI to come up with Texans based on cities and the stuff it came up with was pretty hilarious, especially how it kept making people from Galveston pose in front of refineries. And then there’s filmmaking “what if” stuff that’s been going around.
“What if” stuff?
Yeah, like, people have been using AI image generating programs to see what would happen if you mashed up two disparate movies or movie styles. Like “What if Lord of the Rings but as done by Wes Anderson?” or “What if Pulp Fiction but as done by Wes Anderson?” Or “What if Star Wars,” but done by…
Wes Anderson?
I was going to say David Lynch.
You were?
… no, you got me, I was going to say Wes Anderson. He’s the meme of the moment, I guess. But there’s something to the idea that Wes’s filmmaking style is so different from everything that’s out there that is stands singular to itself, so it’s fun to mash up his style with big budget movies that he’d never consider making. I mean, who wouldn’t want a Terminator movie as done by Wes Anderson? Plus, you add in that iconic Alexandre Desplat music, and you have an instant internet sensation. But as fun as it all is, it all feels kind of creepy to me.
Same. It feels unsettling. And even a little dickish.
Yeah. I’m not the biggest Wes Anderson fan and find much of his work highly tedious and grating, but narrowing his art down to his style and his style alone is kind of a slap in the face to his work. Although his art doesn’t speak to me, it’s still art, nonetheless. To put Star Wars through an AI image generator to make a Wes Anderson style movie trailer feels like it doesn’t get the uniqueness of either Wes Anderson or of Star Wars.
I feel like we’re finally getting to the point you want to make about all of this.
Yeah, although I’m kind of enjoying the “dick around with AI to produce funny memes on the internet” moment we’re in, I’m realizing that you can’t really have the good side of AI without the bad side of AI. Like I said, this isn’t even about the scary side of AI with Sarah Connor gripping chain-link fences. Countries are going to need to really get a handle on the national security side of this. But I’m talking about just the bad and sad side of AI that will alter how we perceive the world and the art we consume.
For example?
For example, the other day, I heard John Lennon’s “Grow Old Alone with Me” song, but someone had added in the Paul’s, Ringo’s, and George’s voices over his song. The curious side of my brain caused me to click on it, because I’ve ALWAYS been curious about what that band would have sounded like had they not broken up or had John not been brutally murdered in 1980. But then after hearing it, I just got kind of sad for a bit.
I can’t really separate the Beatles from my life. Their music feels like it’s woven into the very fabric of how I function as a person. And part of that Beatles experience, for me, involves that very “what if” question. I’ll always have that “what if” set of questions rolling around my head. What if they had stuck together? What if John had lived? What if they had toured again? All that stuff. But those “what if” questions… that’s part of the deal of being a Beatles fan. That’s an integral part of my experience as a human being and an appreciator of their art. So, take “Grow Old Alone with Me” for example. I’ve always been curious about much of John’s solo work from the “what if this was a Beatles song” question. It’s a question I’ve thought about countless times… to have someone artificially answer that question with artificial intelligence technologies? It feels like they’re taking something away from me. And the key word is “artificial.” That’s John’s voice and that’s George’s voice and that’s Paul’s voice, but it’s not their voice. It’s a computer program using all existing footage of their voices to approximate their voices. They didn’t actually sing on those tracks, so it’s not their voices, even though it sounds identical to what it would have sounded like.
We’re going to have to learn to navigate this brave new world and it feels like we’re losing something kind of beautiful. Where Darth Vader can live on without James Earl Jones providing his voice, where the Beatles never ended, and where someone can perfectly recreate Wes Anderson’s style without him there.
Yeah, but you didn’t have to click on it. All of these tools are just tools. Like you said, you can’t have the good without the bad, the beautiful without the horrific.
Agreed. For example, this piece right here has been finished for a week or so, but something in my brain told me to wait to his “publish.” Turns out, I read this morning that Paul McCartney is going to use AI to clean up one of John Lennon’s demo tracks, so he can sing over it. That’s probably the best kind of AI technology. It’s John’s demo and it’s Paul circa 2023, but it’s still coming from the two main sources.
Exactly. The good and the bad.
But it all comes back full circle here. We’re all just little J. Robert Oppenheimers using these technologies to monstrously rubberneck some of the more awful parts of life. No, we’re not building bombs in our houses, but we are destroying our worlds, nonetheless. Kurt Cobain is dead, but I also just heard him inserted into a Foo Fighters song via the miracle that is Artificial Intelligence.
But it’s not him. My Kurt Cobain died in 1994. We haven’t even begun to contemplate what this kind of stuff will do to our brains, our hearts, and our souls. Is it really out the realm of possibility that some version of “me” will get to converse with my great-great-grandkids? But it won’t be me. I’ll be dead and ashed into the Pacific Ocean by then. If Artificial Intelligence had existed 30 years ago, perhaps dad’s kind of corny “bumper sticker” slogans would still exist, even though he died in 2003.
I can already sense your jealousy at the T-1000 version of yourself chatting with your great-great-grandkids.
Maybe whatever soul that survives us when we die will be clinging to a chain-link fence in the aftermath, all Sarah Connor style.
James. Fucking. Cameron.
Fucking genius filmmaker, bro.
This was fun. Let’s do this again soon. Doesn’t need to be all heavy shit all the time. Let’s talk about sports sometime.
Or cooking. Or… I got nothing. Maybe I can ask ChatGPT for a topic.
An open and shut book 
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