Steve Martin appeared on The Tonight Show many times with guest hosts. Once Johnny Carson himself was the one laughing, Martin was selling out arenas within months, because at 10:30 at night everyone was watching Carson. Now that attention is split across everything, we wonder whether the big cultural shifts have thinned out, and whether we've lost the boredom that used to send people to a book or a blank page. One of us has kids who come downstairs to announce they're bored, and 10 minutes later they've built a whole world upstairs. One of us remembers Laird Hamilton telling Rick Rubin on Tetragrammaton that surfboards went from one fin to three out of boredom.
Then we turn to language, which is the last thing we'd want to hand to ChatGPT. Writing a letter to a neighbor yourself might be the most important thing you do with 30 minutes. The CliffsNotes for Moby-Dick keep the plot and lose everything Melville does with words. A cover letter that nobody will read closely is another matter, and we argue over whether a soulless tool is fair game for a soulless process. It ends on a horror script one of us wrote years ago, about a woman and her husband stuck on a plane on a snowbound runway that was built over a cemetery. Some readers told him to drop the ghosts and write it as a straight drama about her.
-Ai
Show Notes:
Save the Cat by Blake Snyder - https://savethecat.com/
Critical Drinker - Falling Down: • Falling Down - The Great American Lie
Tetragrammaton - Laird Hamilton: • Laird Hamilton
Ghosts of my Life by Mark Fisher: https://bit.ly/3VZ9xcv
Spinning Plates - https://www.spinningplatesmovie.com/
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