TRASHFUTURE - Crisis of Infinite Farleys feat. A.S. Hamrah

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

We start by looking at Canada’s destiny as the last holdout of Deloitte Pride Float liberalism, and then Neom’s ongoing woes as executives supported by McKinsey start frantically figuring out how to make the whole thing work economically. Then, film critic A.S. Hamrah joins Riley and November to talk about AI in the film industry, and the studio executives’ bizarre desire to algorithmically raise the dead. Buy A.S. Hamrah’s book The Earth Dies Streaming here! Get access to more Trashfuture episodes each week on our Patreon! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Hello everybody, welcome to this free episode of TF. It's the free one. It's the I love our various audio setups one, I love it so much. I'm sat directly behind Riley like the gunner in an F-16. It's like, I'm like whispering in his ear from behind everything that I say. He can't look me in the eye or control me. Oh no, am I gonna break my neck on the canopy? Fuck.

The thing is, you think that this job is easy, and it is. It is catastrophically easy apart from the part that seems simple, which is organize four microphones and get a recording out of them, and then at some point in that there exists a kind of Gorman-Gust-like audio mixer situation that I don't understand, but like, Nate understands, and Riley and Milo understand, I'm just kind of baffled. But I feel like I've witnessed, like, a nuclear reactor being disassembled and reassembled in front of me, in the sense that I'm very impressed and also my skin is melting. Hehehehe. Comrade Dyatlov. I have unplugged and replugged so many things today. Yeah. Now, we also, we have Riley's the pilot, we have Milo, who's the bombardier, and then

we have the front and back ball gunners. Air traffic control. Air traffic control is neat. Actually a slur for you to call me that. It is of course, November and Hussein. Now- Looking forward to being hosed out of the turret later. Now, you'll also have seen this is a two-part episode because in probably about 30 or so minutes you're going to hear November and I interview Nplus1's film critic, A.S. Hamra, about AI and representation in the movies. I have a good feeling that that's going to be a good interview, mysteriously. Yep. I have a good feeling that that's gonna be a good interview, mysteriously. Yep, yep.

Somehow, I just have an inkling that it is an interesting conversation that I'm looking forward to all of you hearing. However, before that, we of course have some news. I mean, first and foremost, the main piece of news we're gonna talk about, just for the sake of talking about it, because it would be bad if we didn't, is, you know how we said that Trump is Hitler and everyone around him is Hitlerite and they want to do Hitler things? Well, again, we were right, like they're just straightforwardly disappearing, like green card holders in the US for organizing Palestine protests.

So what you're talking about, November, is Mahmoud Khalil, who is a graduate student at Columbia, basically got snatched from his university-owned accommodation by ICE. By the way, this was also, if you wanted to know, this is someone who was, let's say, it was tweeted by fucking Shy Davidi that, oh hey, ICE, you know, this guy, you gotta get rid of this guy. Oh yeah, I mean, the role of a lot of these kind of campus Zionist organizations is to point the finger on people and to put a target on their backs.

And this is exactly what they've done. And now they have a federal government that's even more willing than the Biden administration to coordinate with them to do that. And there's something that was really like kind of Coen Brothers' tragicomic about this in that Ice Asians obviously are oafs, right? And so what happened was they came to the door said, uh, your student visa is revoked and you're getting, you know, like, arrested and deported, but he's not on a student visa, he's a green card holder, he's like a permanent resident, so they said, well, okay,

well, I guess that's revoked too, and you're still getting arrested. Which is incredibly illegal, like, flatly unconstitutional, but it doesn't matter because they're holding him, like, god knows where, you know, away from his lawyer. And we don't even know whether the courts are going to stand up to this. And, you know, this is, this is something I think the worry of course is, well, this is just like where it's all going, right? Like there's, there is the, the populist turn in the global north seems to be converging on Pinochet. Yeah, this is the thing, right? I think what we're litigating now, and I think why the response to this specifically

is so important, is we're litigating what states in the West, or whatever, are going to look like and how they're going to act for the next little while, right? I think that's the thing. And if you don't have a kind of, like... This is the kind of thing that becomes normal very quickly, right? And not to live out, but to do the this is not normal thing so long as it's accompanied with like, meaningful action is important, right? If Trump is going the Pinochet route, does that mean he's eventually going to get overthrown

by like a leftist revolution, then he's going to go and have to like live with Keir Starmer? From your lips to God's ears, I will look forward to Trump pretending to have dementia. I smell a sitcom. Yeah. Okay, little Keir I call him, he's always saying, why do you leave stuff in the sink? I say, look, I'm not gonna grin it up, someone's got to. Yeah. So, I mean, we don't know how this is gonna play out yet, but it's a grim portent, and

it's something that portent and it's something that only could have happened with the Democrats having laid all of the paving stones leading up towards it, and it's something that the Stama government is 100% in lockstep with domestically. It's so cool that we're living in Barry Weiss's world. Yeah! Or like, Libs of TikTok, or whoever. It really feels like the fucking, it feels like the play Rhinoceros, right?

Like all of the worst fucking monsters on earth are just like the, the, the people who kind of control everything now and everything is resistant to thinking. I say, I say Barry Weiss in the sense of like, you know, she was trying to sort of get, I mean, she spent so much of her career, like of her life trying to get Palestinians deported from Columbia University specifically. So you know, the long game does pay off, I guess, if you're evil, maybe? I guess they just wanted it more, I guess, you know? But I guess the other thing here, and this is setting you up for the segue, Riley, if this is something that happens unchecked,

then every state is going to act like this. I mean, you know, some of them do to more extent than others, but like, it's just gonna become completely normalized. Except, there's one exception in the world. A country which I firmly believe will be the last redoubt of neoliberalism, the last woke country on Earth, the great nation of Canada. Yeah. We don't know where the first Deloitte Pride float was put in a parade, but we do know where the last one will attend a parade.

The Deloitte Pride float in Toronto will run over a heap of American bodies. That's right. Deloitte Canada is going to be formally separated from Deloitte rest of the world. It's going to become a vestigial, the name is the same same but the companies have nothing to do with each other. Like Aldi Nord and Aldi Soot. So, essentially, what has happened is Mark Carney, technocrat extraordinaire, has now been, he's replaced Trudeau as the leader of the Liberal Party, he's now Canada's Prime Minister, and it looks like... Yeah, Canada's hardest man has been selected to fight

in single combat for your sovereignty. Yeah, that's it. Canada's hardest man, a banker with a body count that he accumulated just with a pencil. Yeah, he's like John Wick, what he does with that pencil. The number of impoverished British people alone he's killed is like, you know, ahead of the Bank of England. This is not a man to fuck around with yeah as we say Canada's strongest lib soldier

You know I think it's instructive as well Since we're doing a segment. I've entitled here Canadian Dawn To think about who the losers are because I love thinking about losers. I love talking about losers And there's two big losers here right loser number one talking about losers. And there's two big losers here, right? Loser number one, Christian Freeland. Oh, that is so satisfying personally to me as the ex-co-host of The Bottleman, is just be like, sorry Christian, go back to UPA summer camp. She's gonna have to go back to a Nazi paper. With a total of 8% of the vote suffering a more damning defeat than the Waffen SS Galician Division.

One of the few politicians on earth who can claim to be less popular than Keir Starmer. Yeah, it turns out people didn't actually want like Hillary Rodham Canadian. Genuinely, it's so funny. It was her fucking turn. She coordinated her exit from the liberal front bench at exactly the right time, calculated to do maximum damage to Trudeau who All Canadians are united in hating like just a little bit less than Donald Trump basically But if she was she had it all perfect. It was her turn It was it was obvious to every Canadian like commentator for years that she was the putative next prime minister And then at the moment where she could have just like reached out and taken it,

everyone forgot, oh yeah, this is a singularly off-putting and weird, unappealing person. And so like the former governor of the bank of England comes in almost what seems by accident with like six weeks to go and just clinches the job that she should have had. The only bigger loser in this situation. Hold on, before you get to the only bigger loser Wait that's Mark Carney's music Is that an interest rate rise?

Another another victory for the glass ceiling, but like also You know how John Feteman can't keep stuff because he keeps with his stroke-addled brain uh, like showing them combat gore videos of like, like russians getting like uh blown up by grenades and shit the only politician internationally who could speak to him and relate to him on that level who also probably like follows the like ukrainian combat gore accounts christia freeland now washed i regret to say yeah she's gonna like i don't know what the fuck she's gonna she's probably like yeah there's no usaid for her to go back and work for now. She's gonna start a podcast That's what they're all doing right? A podcast or a cooking show or like a combo of the two

She's gonna be on season two of Megan's show about like wellness What I learned about myself from like massacring 60,000 Russian conscripts in in the Donbass, you know So this is Freeland. Freeland is... Washed. She's out! The only person, the only person who I think it might be more embarrassing to be in Canada right now than Kristi Freeland is Pierre Polyev. Yeah, I love this guy. He's the only guy, just by fate of like circumstance and geography, to lose on betting on being

like Trump. He's the only guy to do it. Everyone else gets returns. It's like a roulette wheel with like 99% red spaces, right? It's like being struck by fucking lightning. Like there's there is no chance that if you go in and like 2024 as a conservative politician being like, I'm going to be like Canadian Trump that you are expecting a year later to be to be like, like fucked with like this. It's like what we said in our in our episodes with with Liv and Luke, right, which is when the real thing is there right south of of the border, and starts like, acting unpredictably, then you had to have had one more idea. ALICE Something unpredictable, but in the end it's real. I think the thing is as well,

that the conservative energy in Canada being with Doug Ford right now is beautiful. In times of crisis, you know, in dark days you return to the comforting embrace of a fat red man. Y'know? Well, that's the thing, Pierre Poliev is now having to say, I am not MAGA. I am not a MAGA person. He loses on both sides because Trump, correctly, thinks that he's a pussy and says so publicly every chance he gets. But he's also too mega for anyone else who is like, any activated Canadian who is busy recreationally

smashing Californian wine bottles. The thing is, Canadian politics, you know if you hear us talk about Canadian politics on this show or whatever, you know that what happens is the liberals are spot welded into power until they're swept out by a 97% margin every sort of 12 to 20 years. Yeah. Basically. You're just like the Canadian electorate at some point after sort of like decades of liberal regime goes, wait a second, I hate these guys.

And then they elect Stephen Harper, right? And then they get like, you know, five years or whatever. And then the Canadian electorate goes, wait a second, I hate these guys and then they elect Stephen Harper, right? And then they get like, you know, five years or whatever and then the Canadian electorate goes, wait a second, I hate these guys, go back to the regime. Right? Oh fuck, we elected some real sex freaks. We gotta go back to the liberal guys. And so now, like the switch has been pushed, it's like you get an extra time for regime. Yeah. The liberals have played their lifeline. Yeah. The computer take away two random wrong answers. for a time for regime. The liberals have played their lifeline. Yeah.

Computer take away two random wrong answers. Yeah. How come the both remaining answers are Doug Ford? Look, I mean, ultimately, I also don't want to say that means that Poliev isn't going to win. But I think the fact that he's even in striking distance of a minority government. We know that it doesn't matter, right?

We live in times where like votes doesn't, votes don't matter. Like even kind of like institutions don't matter. What matters is vibes, vibes only. This is the only thing that has a material effect on the world anymore. And the vibes are washed. Mm-hmm.

That's right. So sorry, Pierre, what should have been a victory lap, a layup, you could have been making Bitcoin the only legal tender of like the Canadian parliament restaurant. You could have been doing that. And now all of a sudden Trump has made politics real again in a way that it hasn't been for Canada in a long time. And it's looking, it's looking like you might not win or if you win, you might get a minority government. And it's all looking a lot closer than it would have been. Even if you win, you're going to be

miserable and you have to sit in the big cuck chair and it just fucking sucks, you know? The Canadian prime minister sits in the cuck chair and watch the American president fuck his wife. No, Cuban actually. Very good, very good. Look, we're getting off Canada. Before we talk to our guest, look, it happened again.

Whoever works at Neom, who has a friend at the Wall Street Journal, who they call whenever Neom upsets them, has called their friend at the Wall Street Journal again. And is not yet inside a suitcase. It's so funny to me that this is the only competent human intelligence spying work left is the Wall Street Journal at Neom. Because if you're a Russian spy right now, if you're Jan Masilek, right, what you're doing is- Who we will talk about on Thursday. Yeah, you're doing kind of a Coen Brothers movie

where you get a bunch of Jim Bulgarians to follow around dissident journalists, right? And you talk in a group chat about, oh, maybe we Novichok them or whatever. If you're a British spy, you spend all of your time watching those guys, right? It's all kind of comedy. I love that Jan Masilek watched Pain and gain and was like this is a great strategy for running a spiring actually

I think this would be excellent Yeah But if you work at the Wall Street Journal you are having like secret meetings with your your source in a parking garage And if you fuck up everybody gets bone-sword, that's the real shit. That's the only real spying left So we have more Intel because guess what? It's somehow going even worse. I have to revise a previous statement I used to make about Neom, which is that of all of their five locations, you know, of the line, Oxagon, Trojina, Sindala, Sindala, the island that's just covered in like yacht clubs and hotels, just the luxury island.

At least that one makes sense. Sure. It's a marina. How hard could it be? I was wrong. Very difficult. It was supposed to be the launch party for the new Saudi Arabia. Will Smith, Tom Brady, and other celebrities gathered on Sindala in the Red Sea, packed

with luxury hotels, super yachts floating nearby, while Alicia Keys played for business executives who had flown in from London and New York. This was the lavish opening, but the truth for the project was less glamorous. The relatively simple low-rise development Sindala was over three years late and three times over budget. Hotels were unfinished, high winds disrupted ferries and made golf impossible to play, and much of the site was still under construction. Made golf impossible to play. I've never played golf, but I feel like if wind prevented me from playing a game of golf, I would feel like kind of divine intercession, you know, just like, fuck you.

No, do not do this. None of this place is allowed to exist. And this is the bit that they did to be like the easy thing. The thing to have something built. This is the quick win. It's taken four years and it's three times over. It's cost four billion dollars just to build some hotels. I guess what I didn't think, right, is I didn't think of the whole context.

I only thought of Sindala as like, okay, it's an island. They're going to build a lot of marinas and hotels on it. It's going to be a very luxury island. I forgot that like, it's just not close to anything. Yeah. Did you also forget that there might be a reason why nobody's built like a kind of luxury island on this particular island already, which is that anytime you try and golf, the wind smacks the ball back into your face. No, I think the reason was that they just didn't have enough access to eight year olds

who could drive an articulated truck. I think once you sort that out just didn't have enough access to eight-year-olds who could drive an articulated truck Yeah, I think once you sort that out, you can pretty much build whatever you want So Mohammed bin Salman was a no-show at the 45 million dollar opening party How do you ghost your own like tent pole projects dude? Like do you have anxiety? Get the fuck out there I want to see you flashing the creepy smile and like getting hit in the face with golf balls. I got one GTA four mission. He did not have the confidence of his own convictions. He also was just simply not able to like stand up to the fact that his shit was

failing. Mohammed bin Sulkin can't even turn up to his own opening. Wow, pathetic. So behind Niamh's problems are a dance of mutual delusion in which the crown prince pushed for fantastical plans and executives systematically shielded him from the full scope of the challenges and costs involved. I love Saudi downfall. I love like late stage, like end of the war Hitler looking at a bunch of maps of golf greens.

Yeah. He's also in a room with a load of Germans, but they have the frameless glasses on. It's like, okay, we can't finish the line and it's like, no, this is fine. Morphosis and Foster and partners, they will bring in the steel and the glass to build the second skyscraper. Ah, my shake. Norman Foster has been dead for a number of years. Does thy befall?

But where's Zaha Hadid? Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. We've only got Bella Hadid. MBS being like find Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid and have them bone-sort. Bring them to the inner-suit guys. Have them exhumed and then bone sawed again. The cadaver bone sawing. So executives shielded him from the full scope of challenges and costs, according to more

than a hundred page internal audit of the project reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. They audit this internally? Well, that's actually one of the funniest things. Just like MBS says, I want you to invent Golf 2. And then somebody from Ernst & Young has to, like, sigh more deeply than they ever have and open a new Word document. OK.

Bring me both Ernst and Young, bone sword. OK, I guess Golf 2, you're trying to get a high score this time. It's going to make a billion dollars an hour. You're actually trying to get hit in the face with the ball. That's how you score the most points. It's golf too. Golf too is also where the golf course is like a straight line

as well, right? Yeah. It's golf, but we're just spelling it with a U. That's the U. Check this out. Golf too. It's a course that's a straight line. There are two holes, one behind each person.

It's 170 kilometers long. I want you to invent a game called Shadow Golf. No, I'm still working on the main one. No, think about this. Two people at the opposite ends of like a hundred meter green and they each have a driver and then there's like a countdown clock, like three, two, one. And then golf does need a shot clock. That's yeah. You're cooking with that one. And then the holes are behind them and then you have to get the ball into the hole behind the other guy. How about that? Yeah, I've heard of people doing that.

OK, the audit report labeled final draft. So neon audit report one use this one final, final, final, final draft. Found that executives at times aided by the project's longtime consultants McKinsey and company systematically used unrealistically Rosie as I mean this McKinsey in a suitcase Just like a whole baggage carousel No Grave robbing is a much more serious offense due to misunderstanding, Mohammed bin Salman is brought British character actor Mackenzie Crook.

So, Mackenzie, they plugged unrealistically rosy assumptions into Neom's business plan to justify the constantly rising cost estimates. Do you remember when Pete Buttigieg got interviewed by the New York Times editorial board and they asked me about working for Mackenzie? Just the guy being like, but you worked for a company that made the detectorists. So this is the, in a sign of massive ambitions to the project, the draft board presentation for last summer, paid capital expenditure required to build the YUM to its end state as $8.8

trillion, more than 25 times the annual Saudi budget. That's, that's a decent amount of money, but that's fine. Listen, if nobody in Saudi buys anything else for 25 years years, for 25 years, it's sound. It's fine. And also remember they used to say it was going to cost half a trillion and now it's 8.8 trillion. Well, listen, they kept adding new luxury shopping destinations. Yeah.

What do you want me to do? Not shop in their luxury shopping destinations? I need 8.8 trillion dollars. Yeah. Well, when it's 170 kilometers long, you need a Gucci store every seven kilometers or so because no one's going to want to go more than seven kilometers for Gucci. Yeah, that's a walkable neighborhood thing. In the Maglev monorail, seeing all the Gucci stores blend past my vision like the end of

2001. Oh, forgive Mohammed bin Salman for trying to build a walkable city. What do the left even want? So, it's, um, they hope now that private investors will share the burden with them. That's so the handshake meme in the end for fuck it. We'll just hope that, you know, industry does it is Kier Starmer, Mohammed bin Salman. It's about as unrealistic as one another. When you think about it, Mohammed bin Starmer, there you go. I kind of respect MBS more because at least his thing, for which he's just like, ah fuck it, maybe, you know, like companies will do it, is, you know, massive Gucci lying across the desert.

Whereas Keir Stama's is just keep the shit out of all the rivers, you know? So, a Neyam spokeswoman said the Wall Street Journal was incorrectly interpreting the figures. However, she declined to provide additional detail, but only saying... Just like, no, you are wrong, actually. She said further, Neom champions excellence, professionalism, diversity and ethical conduct. I'm sure it does. Uh-huh. I tell you what, they pay those eight-year-olds pretty well to drive those trucks.

The project's priorities are intact and the project remains on track, demonstrating tangible progress. It really is downfall at this point. He's in the Fuhrer bunker. I mean, I've been saying this for a long time, but Saudi Arabia is the one country that we should actually have regime changed. It's fucking hope left in Pandora's box. We gave up on regime change one country too early.

We did all the wrong ones. We should have fucking invaded Saudi Arabia, taken their fucking oil, expropriated. They don't know what to do with money. They're governors to Spodek. Fuck them. So Mohammed Mansalman is a fan of video games and sci-fi movies and would frequently push for the ideas of quite insane things, such as zero gravity architecture that

looks like it defies physics. For example. This is such a like richy rich thing. I love this. A feature known as the chandelier, an empty glass building more than 30 stories Tall is planned to hang upside down from a giant steel bridge in the line. Yeah I just that's the opposite of an idea. That's just dig a really big hole

Well, it was more like build a really big bridge and then hang a 30 story glass skyscraper from underneath it That was so empty. That will always be empty. Like a massive vase. Yes. Yeah, someone's gonna have to get Mahmoud Bin Salman a gigantic bunch of flowers to go in his huge vase. Crucially, this hanging inverted skyscraper, it's gotta happen in the place where the wind

is so bad you can't golf. Yeah. And eventually it'll be a place where someone does a reverse 9-11. Like it sort of gets destroyed by it. Close the loop on history. 19 Americans just hitting a golf ball into the fucking upside down glass bars. It was designed by Marvel film designer Olivier Praun, who was brought in because staff knew the prince liked his movies.

Olivier Praun is also like pretty good. His name is Olivier Prawn but they changed it out of silence. However, all of the building's plans that they had would have involved building the equivalent of all the office buildings in Midtown Manhattan three times over in one decade, which would have required significant portions of the world's available steel. What if instead of Neon, three more Manhattans? Just like copy and paste, like control C, control V, V, V, right? Like left to right, they're on the same like latitude and they just go outwards.

Or they could have had three more Manhattans in Saudi Arabia. Well, try getting your hands on three Manhattans in Saudi Arabia, let me tell you, it's a tough fucking job. Just place them randomly around the world, like, sort of, like, equally. What's the Lagrange point of the third Manhattan? So check this out. The design involved also an amusement park built a thousand feet in the air and theatres suspended between parallel towers.

But this is all suspending things, you maniac. But this was all supposed to be accomplished at a construction site with virtually no labor, no port, few roads and little electricity. Stop suspending things from other things. They're challenging while there's your problem. This is so fucked you wouldn't even know where to start. They want to break you. I feel taunted.

So this is the fun thing, right? So all of this means that the line was getting astronomically more expensive per square foot, and that all of those assumptions that economies of scale would bring prices down obviously never materialized. The original architect of the line tried to express concerns about the fact that these like economies of scale would never materialize to MBS himself, but he was prevented from ever talking to him by NEOM executives who never wanted him to hear any bad news. So one way executives hid rising costs was to beef up profit assumptions.

So I'm going to read the next paragraph to you completely exact. I'm not going to change one word, one editorialize at all. To cover the gap, estimates for the rate at an inventive glamping site were readjusted to $704 a night from $216, or a boutique hiking hotel room was pegged at $1,866 a night up from 489. Yeah, price of the glamp going up. These changes help push the internal rate of return up to 9.3, which is the project

benchmark. So basically that's like, okay, every time they come into contact with reality, they just have to triple all of the prices that everything is going to cost in the off. Yeah, for the other two, Manhattan's. Yeah, Riley, unrelatedly, I predict that we're going to have an amazing financial year in 2025 for the business. If we just put the minimum Patreon contribution up to $1,000 per month per listener, I've got big plans. We're going to buy a Rolls Royce made entirely of gold. Bonesaw all of the listeners who do not increase their pledge.

So basically, Antony Vives, the former deputy mayor of Barcelona. Why? What? What a pedigree. Yeah, well, he was he was one of the ones that fled. OK, one of the many Mercedes, like triple parks in this sort of loading and unloading zone of the airport. Yeah, it belongs to him, right? He's also one of the people who was like, you know, in this sort of loading and unloading zone of the airport. Yeah. It belongs to him, right? But he's also one of the people who was like, you know, quoted in one of the other exposes for what I assume is the same people working at Neom as being one of like the horrible

executives. So the audit said, Anthony Vives, who oversaw the broad vision at Neom and then ran Sindala, justified rising costs with these higher assumptions on revenue. Rather than reassessing them as too expensive to continue with the plans, he told McKinsey consultants in an email, quote, we must not proactively mention cost at all. Yeah, no, of course. Because MBS doesn't want to know. What he wants to know is how you play golf too. A key driver of the cost has been the line's 1,640 foot height. Engineering and construction challenges make it hard to build profitable super tall towers everywhere,

let alone in the desert. I have a question. Yes. Can't you just lie to the guy? Can't you just like Potemkin line? Can't you just put up a big like wooden hoarding or something? And then he drives around it or he looks at it from like, I don't know, a fucking heliculture or something.

He goes, cool, the line exists. Goes back to the same palace where he's just going to be doing like, you know, watching like AI videos on his phone all day and just is like reassured, you know? Like, why has nobody considered that maybe the best way not to get bone-sword is refuge in audacity and you do the thing that might get you bone-sword and you just lie? So this is why I think that the Neom staff who were urging executives to reduce the height to a thousand feet as opposed to 1640. No, no, no. A thousand feet is so high. It's so high. You don't negotiate with these people. What you do is the Mel Brooks, like a

Hollywood executive thing. You go, yeah, sure. Absolutely. Two thousand feet even. And then you just don't do it. So at a Neon board meeting last spring, the Crown Prince responded to Neon Staff by quote, clarifying the inappropriateness of reducing the height. Oh, OK, that's good. He was wielding the fucking TF2 medic bone saw at that moment. Oh, you nerds, you boffins with your laws of physics.

I am armed with the laws of vibes, the laws of what is epic. I was right. Vibes are the only thing that lives on. Yeah, that is right. Have the people who are working on Neom who want to distract me have been someone have they considered putting on a musical about Nazi Germany? So, wow, he seems really into this. Officials mothballed the portion of a rail line that involved digging an 18-mile tunnel through a mountain.

They delayed the first piece of the line, which has already been reduced to one and a half miles from 10 miles planned earlier. The current aim is to open the first half mile to place the World Cup stadium on top of by 2034. So it's going to just be, they're just building a really high stadium. That's all. We need a, we need a, we need the first portion of the line intact so that we can do the world cup that we got by bribing people. Yeah. We need to have St. Stadium style IDs.

We do live in the dumbest fucking reality. The fact that the Saudis have just bought the world cup despite being like the most insane country on earth and having like nothing to do with football. And everyone's just like, yeah, fine. We can't actually, it's impossible for us not to sell the world cup to Saudi Arabia. We'd love to not to like FIFA guy walking out with like fucking like gold sovereigns falling out of his trouser pockets going like, yeah, no, completely above board actually. So normal. Yeah, we're going to put it. Yeah. They're going to put it on top of a big stick. That's fine. Whatever. Yeah You know what if Killian Mbappe sort of runs too fast and falls off it? That's just fine. He's gonna get hit by fucking gold So Dennis Hickey who oversees development of the line said we'll start to go vertical

Hopefully at the end of this year. So just like full just like full self-driving was always come the lines always come in It's just around the corner. Yeah Dennis Hickey, who gave his speech wearing a scarf. Just to end here. At Sindala, the Island Resort remains unfinished. Restaurant workers have been reading books to pass the time without any guests to serve. The golf courses and hotels four months after the party, nothing is open to the public. Incredible. You can't even glamp after all that. You cannot even glamp. You can't even glamp. I mean, to be fair, I do love that it's called an inventive glamping location because there's

nothing more inventive than glamping in a fucking wind tunnel in the middle of the desert that's run by a despotic king. You gotta be inventive to make it work. Yeah, that's very true. All right. Look, let's flip over into part two where November and I talk a little bit about the silver screen with AS Hamra. ["AS HAMRA"]

Hello, and welcome from part one. And what a great first part it was. Oh yes, personally. Well, I think we all remember our favorite bit. Anyway, it is Riley in November and we are here with a heavyweight for all cinephiles today. We are speaking with A.S. Hamra, film critic for N plus one with work in numerous other outlets and author of the

Earth Dies streaming film writing from 2002 to 18. And we are going to talk a little bit about some of the writing and thinking that you've done about AI in the movies from a critics perspective. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much for being here today. Thanks for having me on. Yeah.

Just before we get into more of the details of this article you've published in Fast Company about the drive of generative AI companies to make filmmaking more uncanny, uncomfortable and difficult to watch. It seems as though a conspiracy theory has arisen, which I am now of course a full truther, which is Brady Corbett, director of The Brutalist, has not seen North by Northwest and may never have watched a single film by Alfred Hitchcock. Well, that's very unfair to Brady Corbett. He pronounces his name Corbett. He has seen

films by Alfred Hitchcock, of course, but in the interview that I quote in my piece, he's conflating two separate Hitchcock films. Which would not, you know, people make mistakes and they misremember things, but in this context that becomes a problem. What he misremembered in this case was a conversation that was supposedly meant to be in Norwegian, which was kind of largely nonsense, right? And this was part of his justification for something that we'll get into using AI, potentially. Right. He claimed that there's a scene in the film North by Northwest in which Cary Grant is

at the UN and during that scene there are a pair of people speaking fake gibberish Norwegian to each other. That does not happen at any point in North by Northwest but Brady Corbett made it worse by saying that he didn't want to be in that kind of a situation that's why he used a re-speecher for the brutalist and he then made the point that not using a re-speecher would be like having characters in brown face as happened in films at that time. North by Northwest notably is not a film like that.

In fact, the scene that he's kind of referring to features a South Asian actress, which I mentioned in my piece. What he's thinking of is the first maybe four or five seconds of the second scene in the movie Torn Curtain, which is from a few years after North by Northwest by Hitchcock, in which we see briefly two Norwegian sailors on a ship conversing in what turns out to be kind of half Norwegian and the, you know, Hollywood Norwegian of some sort. Mm. It's very, it's a very, it's a very Brady Corvade thing to do

to remember the Torn Curtain, but not North by Northwest, if that makes sense. Yeah. One thing that's interesting about, you know, he claims that he was watching, or he says that he was watching this with his daughter, who is half Norwegian. Courbet's filmmaking partner, Mona Fastfold, is Norwegian, and so the daughter understands Norwegian. But the scene that we're talking about at the very beginning of Torn Curtain is really about three and a half seconds long. It's complete

throwaway that's not important to anything else that happens in the film. So I could understand if you were Norwegian and you saw that you would think, oh that's dumb. Or that's... To wake up the Norwegian audience, the entire significance of the two Norwegian guys. Yeah, but it's not something that I think would be very offensive to anyone. You know, it's a non-thing in the movie. These characters are characters we never... They're barely characters. We see them from behind, kind of.

They're not in the rest of the film. It's interesting as a pool to talk about representation, right? But it's also interesting that his proposed solution there, not to represent different people, different cultures, different languages by, you know, employing any of them necessarily, but to outsource this to sort of an AI that will generate kind of plausible Norwegian, right? Well, he doesn't offer a solution for what Hitchcock should have done in North by Northwest, which is what he's talking about, or actually in reality, torn curtain. But what's interesting about it to me is how his process of trying to authenticate something

is itself an AI-like hallucination. We talk about AI hallucinations, you know, as AI, you know, breaks down, it starts to speak in gibberish and to, you know, put out misinformation and to conflate things. You know, this is a process that's similar to things that happen in the human mind, but they can be corrected when you're speaking to someone. You can say to someone when you're talking to them, oh, you're thinking of a different movie. When you're relying on AI, you're no longer in that position because you're not really talking to anyone. It's not a two-way communication. No, and it's communication with something that's gonna generate the most plausible thing,

which is not necessarily the same as the most authentic thing. And I think those two impulses and where they differ is gonna... There's a real contradiction in that, no? Well, Brady Corbett talks a lot about authenticity, You know, I feel like I said in the piece, the more they talk about authenticity, the farther they get away from reality. So you know, talking about authenticity is maybe not what should be happening here at all. You know, in the case of The Brutalist, one of the principal actors, Adrian Brody, is Hungarian, American.

So he had some familiarity with Hungarian to begin with. I don't understand why anyone involved in this movie felt the impetus to make sure that the spoken Hungarian was spoken the exact proper accent. I don't think accents in movies matter at all, actually. And to people concentrate on them too much and make too much of a thing about it. Mason- My impression as well is that there's not very much spoken Hungarian in The Brutalist. ALICE It's voiceover when letters are read and so on. NARES Hmm. And I don't know, it's interesting as well to talk about authenticity in that sense when one of the things that I've read about The Brutalist is architecture critics have been

absolutely derisive of its architecture, right? And you'd think that that's a much more central element of the film than the vowel tones in a sort of a voiceover, right? In terms of like, you know, how it contextualizes brutalism and all of that. And I think it's maybe the right decision to say, well, that doesn't matter because, you know, I'm interested in this sort of like this story that I'm telling this fiction, right? But to then have that kind of disjunction between we're gonna be very very authentic about the vowels, but not so much about the buildings in my architect movie. If I may jump in, the buildings, especially those that are shown in the sequence towards

the end, like we are honoring the life and work of this fictional architect, were in fact also generated by AI. I think they push back on that a bit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He claims that that's not the case with those images. You know, regarding the buildings, I know some architecture critics who are very, very upset by the brutalist and by Megalopolis. And I find their reaction to be, you know, humorous. They are overreacting.

It doesn't matter if all this stuff about architecture is 100% accurate. There's plenty of professions that are portrayed in movies inaccurately. If you were a nurse and you went to see a movie, there's a lot of hospitals and doctors and things in movies. Nurses are portrayed inaccurately. Many professions are portrayed inaccurately.

Many processes in those professions are portrayed inaccurately, many processes in those professions are portrayed inaccurately in movies. It's only that certain classes of people are allowed to complain about it as much as architecture critics are. And we for some reason, we had to indulge these architecture critics that are many, many, many articles about this in regard to the brutalist and to Megalopolis. It was a big year for whining architecture critics in the cinema. I want to bring it back, though, to something that you both mentioned earlier about sort

of authenticity and accuracy. And you write about the movie here in your article, where Tom Hanks and Robin Wright are given an AI-driven de-aging process that is referred to as the youth mirror system. So I'll read from your article. While Zemeckis was shooting here, the youth mirror system he and his AI team devised consisted of two monitors that showed scenes as they were shot. One, the real footage of the actors unaged as they appear in real life. The other using AI to show the actors themselves at the age they were supposed to be playing.

Zemeckis told the New York Times this was crucial. Tom Hanks, the director, explained could see this and say to himself, I've got to make sure I'm moving like I was when I was 17 years old. No one had to imagine it. They got the chance to see it in real time. No one had to imagine it is not a phrase heretofore associated with actors or the direction of actors. I think that gets to the core, I think, of what we're talking about, to the core, I think, of what we're talking about, about authenticity versus holding up mimetic accuracy as some kind of end-all, be-all for filmmaking. The point is you have to imagine it, right?

Well, just to use the phrase, no one had to imagine it is terrible. The whole point of creative work and art is that it was imagined by someone. you know? So for Zemeckis to use that phrase is odd and telling. And you know, for Tom Hanks or anyone else to think that they could move as they did when they were 17, if they're now 67 or 75 or however old they are, they can they can imitate how they think they moved when they were 17. They can imitate how a 17 year old moves that they have observed, but they can't, it's not a one-to-one relationship at all, which is what both Zemeckis and Hanks are kind of pretending is the case when

they use the system in which they can immediately see themselves de-aged. Does it strike you as kind of a hostility to abstraction, like more generally than just AI even, but like this whole kind of tendency to be like, this must be 100% representational as much as we can get it. Yes, that's an excellent point because literalism I think is a big problem in the U S and, uh, you know, in, in all aspects of American popular culture and American life,

there's a kind of almost biblical literalism at work that is absurd, you know? And I don't understand really how it started or why this quest for absolute screen realism exists. In a sense, it's as old as the cinema. You know, one wants one's effects to look real. Even if you're Georges Méliès, right? Making trick photography films in 1901,

the whole point is to trick the audience into believing that it's real. But that's not the same thing as what the discourse around AI is like. Now they're saying it is real. Of course, it's not real at all. I think as well, that gulf between the aspiration there and experiencing it, I've found that a lot of AI stuff that I've seen has been profoundly alienated.

Oh yes. Obviously, that's something that you can use creatively, alienating your audience sort of on purpose, but like it seems to be trying to do exactly the opposite and I feel more alienated from it. A lot of the AI comes from the desire to make fantasy films look more realistic. There's a reason that this is referred to as AI slop, which I'm sure is a term that you're both familiar with. It doesn't look good. It doesn't look real.

There's dragons in it or whatever. You know, there's no AI-generated film that has looked even remotely, you know, real. I mean, they look, they look eerie. I mean, it's interesting as well, because if you look even within the genre or anything like that, you can get like, you know, beautiful sort of like hand-drawn animation or like CGI. It's beautiful. But instead of that, I tend to think of AI more than anything as a labor issue. In terms of, like, you don't want to pay artists, whether they're animators, whether they're CGI people, whatever, you don't want to pay those people, you don't want to have an industry that can support those people, even. And so, you know,

what do you do to try and avoid that? And the answer is, it just kind of fall on this technology that generates something that's maybe kind of acceptable. And it's interesting to me that it's never just sort of pitched as that, everyone knows it's that, everyone knows this idea of like, slop. But sort of even at the higher end, the more sort of like, culturally aspirational

and it's all like, no, this is representation. It's very, very like accurate. And it's a quest for accuracy. Right. The labor issue is perhaps the issue involving AI, generative AI. There's several levels here. First, the question is, are the people making AI who are so intent on selling it to everyone, are they self convinced? You know, have they fooled themselves into thinking that this looks good because they enjoy using the technology or whatever it is they're doing.

That's a question that no one ever really raises. The second thing is that what does acceptable mean, right? Of course, none of this is acceptable. It doesn't look acceptable. It looks like trash. And you know, you could do it with just a camera with no effects. You know, I saw someone imitating the beginning of the, of an Evil Dead movie that of course Sam Raimi made without any kind of even computer effects. What is the point of imitating something that has already been done without any of this technology? There's no point to that.

And the studios would love it if they could get rid of all their employees. You know, if they could get rid of everybody, you know, if they could make movies with no labor costs, they would be very happy. And as another piece I wrote in Fast Company during the SAG and WGA strikes kind of touched on this, which is that the audience is being trained since, you know, the days of family animated movies and Pixar movies in the 90s to accept movies without human beings. And I think actors really did themselves a disservice when they all started being excited

about having voice parts in big animated movies. Because what they've done is essentially given their voices away. Now their voices at some point will be able to be recreated using AI without them. And that is the end goal. This is the two goals of Hollywood studio filmmaking right now are to reduce labor costs as much as possible to get rid of theatrical exhibition and make everything to be streaming. And, you know, that's the world that they want. They want streaming movies with no people involved in making them. I mean, and we want, we talk about no people, right?

You know, you talk about this as a labor issue. This is something that you highlight in your article that I went to go look at Respeacher about, which is you can buy the voice of a dead person. You know, you can make a dead person say whatever you want. You won't stop working even after you die because the Respeacher voice marketplace, I think this is, again,

this should be actually hilariously grim. It offers you your ability to employ Chris Farley and Orson Welles alongside another voice actor who's like licensed his voice to Reese Beecher. Yeah, it is ghoulish. It's a, and it's also saying, I think, if you sort of extrapolate out the labor issue as well, it is a Hollywood studio could be able to say,

okay, we don't need to hire the next Tom Hanks. We don't need to try and find the next Chris Farley. We all saw, you know, the skit with the van down by the river. We can just keep remaking that, for example, with people who will do motions over which we will reskin Chris Farley, which we've captured from, you know, numerous SNL appearances or whatever. And then we use respeecher to just buy his voice.

And now what we've done is we have broken the job of being Chris Farley, which used to be something Chris Farley did all of, right? We've broken it down into, okay, well, who can kind of move like Chris Farley? You know, and okay, well, we licensed Chris Farley's voice from Respeacher. We've now broken that.

And now there are probably lots more people who can just move like Chris Farley than are Chris Farley. So then the value of Chris Farley goes way down and you do not have to pay a celebrity as much. A farliness as a deflationary commodity. It's not just that Chris Farley performed all of that labor as you mentioned. It's that he was the only person that could do it. No other person could do it. There was only one of him. Same thing with Orson Welles' voice. People could imitate Orson Welles. Of course, many comedians or whatever,

whatever, the rich little type people could imitate the voice of Orson Welles, but it's not the same thing. Now you can recreate the voice of Orson Welles exactly and direct it and manipulate it and so on. And as Nicolas Cage says in that piece that I wrote for Fast Company, he doesn't want anything happening to him, his voice or his body or his face after he's dead. Okay, so Orson Welles, Chris Farley, those two people were never asked this question. Do you want anything to happen to my face, voice and body after I'm dead? So even if their families sign off on this, it is still not ethical. It is still immoral. And I don't think there's any argument to counter that. It's also like, if you wanted to use, you know,

if you wanted to reference Orson Welles, right? If you want to do something derivative of Orson Welles or Chris Farley or whoever, right? I think there's, there's already lots of ways to do that that are not just ethical, but sort of like artistically more interesting because they're not just imitative, right? There's, if I do an impression of Orson Welles, whether it's a good impression or a bad impression, there is, there's some acting happening there. There's something involved in there that isn't just this kind of mysterious pile of algorithms. Right. It's your version of this with whether it it would have and that might make it more

interesting or funnier, et cetera. Yeah. And the impression that I got from your article is that you kind of see the industry becoming like even more sort of self-referential. Is that fair to say? Well, yeah. What interests me, I think, in that particular piece was this idea of immortality that is so upset, you know, baby

boomers and, you know, the so-called tech oligarchs are all obsessed with this idea of immortality now. This is a form of trying to create immortality. And it's especially, you know, generationally bad. You know, we live in this kind of gerontocracy, this kind of necrotic, you know, world in which those, the people in charge see old versions of themselves as actually younger versions. You know, everything is confused in their minds now. If you take old film and recordings of Tom Hanks from the eighties or nineties or whenever, that's old material, but it's used to make him young in the present. It's interesting as well that, of the kinds of immortality that are being explored, the literal kind, the, you know, take all my blood out and replace it with young blood, whatever,

that's something for oligarchs, the kind of immortality that an artist gets, even a very successful one, you know, sort of at the top of this huge, huge industry, is die like normal, but act forever. And act forever at this particular, like, fixed age. It's, in the movie Breathless, the character played by Jean-Pierre Melville, the director, is at a press conference where he's asked by Gene Seberg, I believe,

who's a reporter, you know, what was your artistic goal or something like this? And he says, my goal in life was to achieve immortality and then die. So people today want to achieve immortality by not dying. It's like the Woody Allen joke. And this has been a problem before AAI existed. George Lucas, James Cameron, other filmmakers are allowed to endlessly tinker with their

films to bring them up to the standards of the present, even though they were made in the past. They have this strange view of creating this perfect object that will live forever, will always look fresh and new, because we can now remake the negative, as David Fincher has said. There's something about franchises in here as well, I think. This idea of we're going to have kind of like everything is an expanded universe or everything fits into an expanded universe of some big kind of like tent pole intellectual property. And not to say that you can't do interesting things with that, like you know everyone likes

Andor, right? But like at the same time I feel like that fits into what you're talking about, the kind of future of the industry being this very, like, incestuous, very, like, inward-looking thing. Well, what interests me about that particular idea is how much entropy sets into it. You know, we all know that the, you know, for instance, you know, that the Ben Affleck Batman is not as good as the Christian Bale Batman, right? They can keep bringing out new versions of Batman, which they will continue to do. But there's the, the farther they get from, you know, moment of, of, uh, you know,

real artistic achievement, the worse the product gets. So it's a fantasy of theirs, of the studios, that they will be able to regenerate the validity of this IP that they own. And if you see what's going on with Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings stuff now, that is obviously the case. I mean, everyone thinks it's slop. Hmm. You know? So we talked about the encroachment of generative AI into the entertainment industry, into the arts more generally. And one of the things that always strikes me about it is it, to me,

it's a way of number one, the executives to claim a great deal more direct ownership because they can say, okay, well, you know, I don't need to, I don't need to trust that there will be a lighting guy who understands lighting, who I incidentally have to pay light. It. I, my, my fantasy is I can type into a box light it better and then it will just happen for me. Yes. You can claim some creative prestige from that too. You can be like, well, I'm not a director, but I'm kind of like a director. Yes.

And also, right, that the fantasy increasingly, it seems from the outside looking in of your executive, especially an executive who's in charge of franchises or streaming, and these things are increasingly coming closer together, is the way that they treat the creation of art as a commercial product is almost like that they're resentful that they're not just Microsoft or Goldman Sachs who is able to just issue a financial product that will generate a set return for a certain amount of time. There almost seems like resentment like, oh we got, we have to make another Batman movie. Why can't we just type Batman movie into the, into little text box and then we just get to enjoy our returns without having to like

even do the diminishing amount of returns of art that actually goes into the making of a thing, if you know what I mean. Yes, well, I mean they are essentially just brand managers now, but of course they're pretentious brand managers because it's Hollywood. So, you know, executives think that they're artists in general. The problem that they face, which I encountered many times in my old job when I was a semiotic brand analyst in the television industry is that oftentimes executives don't even watch the products that they make. So what you're

saying, yeah, I think that is a fantasy of basically running a bank, but still pretending you're an artist. It also, it's the fantasy of, okay, I'm an executive, but I don't have to rely on Orson Wells anymore. I don't have to rely on Tom Hanks. I now have, I can be as much of an artist as them. And I think a lot of this also comes down to the industry creating a kind of curatorial experience now of filmmaking. It's like, okay, you go in and is it the best product in this sort of like George Lucas vein that they can make it?

And this even goes back to Brady Corbett and The Brutalist. But are the Hungarian accents perfect? That's what we're looking at. Is this going to be good for someone who is a curator, rather than seeing art as a medium of communication where one person communicates to another? It's just the sort of veneers of art are being stripped away from the industrial product. And it is now just something that's like... It's almost like a grade of like a steel ingot. It has more or less impurities in it. And when

it comes to art, I think that's one of the things that makes people so react against the use of things like AI because it feels uncanny. And I think all of it is wrapped up in the ongoing commercial logic of making art as a product. It's almost like this was built in. It's just, it took a while for us to get there with large language models. Well, there's two things about that I think that are important. The first, perhaps less important one is that the idea of achieving the uncanny has been an aspect of cinema since the beginning. So that's not necessarily a negative thing. An actor like Lon Chaney, right, in the silent era was trying to do that. You know,

someone like Daniel Day-Lewis is doing that, right? They're, they're trying to create an uncanny experience in which we see a figure who is not us, but might represent something that is frightening to us, some kind of evil or what have you. So the creation of the uncanny is one of the jobs of the cinema, essentially. Not every film is trying to do that, but many are. What you said first, I think, is something that is very actively happening. Just last week, David Zaslav, the CEO of WBD, was complaining about the failure of the second Joker movie, Joker Folia G, which for some reason people at Warner Brothers thought a film with that title would be successful.

Okay. So Zaslav is saying that he doesn't want to work with these, you know, high brow, auteur directors anymore. I'm not sure. I can't recall what his exact words were, you know? So basically they're saying, even Todd Phillips is too artistic for us now. Okay. So, so now, you know, they don't want any directors that are going to do anything interesting. So whether you like Joker, Folly a Jew or not is not the point. It's just not what Warner Brothers thought it was going to be turned out to be or was at the box office. So much less a director like Orson Welles

or say Lars von Trier or someone, they don't want anybody to actually be a director. You know, that is very threatening to them. And to a large extent, this is true of actors too. Nobody really wants a Chris Farley around anymore. He's unpredictable. He's irresponsible. He may say something offensive to people. You know, they don't want anyone who exhibits any of these kinds of tendencies, either as a director or an actor or a human being.

There's a Werner Herzog quote, speaking of directors and speaking of, uh, difficult directors, uh, that I, that I wanted to, to kind of put to you, which is, um, this idea that part of what a filmmaker's job is or even like what, what sort of culture's job is, is to provide fresh images. Right? And that's a civilizational-y important thing. To have that kind of supply of new images, new ideas, and if you don't have that, that's

something that has kind of like doom before you, right? And if we're now looking at something that definitionally cannot provide new images because it can only sort of like imitate, then where, where does that leave us? Well, I think there's a generational issue here again, because you know, Hertzog is right, but how immune is Hertzog to this kind of thing? Remember that Hertzog said that he cried when he first saw baby Yoda, this kind of thing. Remember that Herzog said that he cried when he first saw baby Yoda. And Herzog is making an animated movie now called I think the Twilight World, which is

based on a novel he wrote about a Japanese soldier in the Philippine jungle who has not surrendered at the end of World War II. So we will see what Herzog does with this animated movie. You know, Herzog comes from a generation of directors who are in love with technology and they embrace technology no matter what. You know, Herzog made a 3d movie, as you know, Herzog made that movie with American Express, you know, I mean that's not technology, but it's related to what we're talking about. I don't think directors from that generation, whether it's Herzog or David Cronenberg or George Lucas,

I don't think any of them are immune from this because they just love technology and they embrace every new technology and it's part of their core being to do that. They see that as a fundamental to the art form or even to humanity. Cronenberg is always talking about how technology is an extension of the human body and so on. But now he would say that. Well, yes. But now he's just conflating AI with computer generated imagery when he says that as one does when talking about this stuff as we have even done, you know, even though they're two

separate things. There's a lot of disappointment in the world. I remember seeing Paul Schrader sort of thinking aloud on Facebook, maybe too aloud, about AI-generating scripts and being like, well, these ideas, they're as well-developed as any of mine. And it's like, I think it's a really interesting point because there's this real vulnerability there that I think you've identified to just this technology that strikes me is really like poisonous to everything that filmmaking and everything yes film is you know Paul Schrader is from that generation too of course that's yeah yeah absolutely but Paul Schrader is like a troll on on social media yeah he's

essentially a troll with lots and lots of reply guys and he just posts stuff on Facebook all the time I mean he has no sensor, a self sensor going. So it's best, I think, oftentimes to ignore things that Paul Schrader is saying. But it is an emanation from his, you know, from his psyche to say something like that. So I think just to just to round out the segment, right. I wanted to bring it back to Reese Beecher and to Brady Corbett and talking about the use of AI in The Brutalist, because, you know, I looked into exactly what because there was this an outcry, right, about the use of AI in The Brutalist. Because you know, I looked into exactly what, because there was this, an outcry, right, about the use of AI in The Brutalist. And his response is he says, I have so much respect for Respeacher.

They're using this technology in a very ethical way. Again, we've said that we've said I don't think they are. This is a company based in Ukraine and involved an extraordinary amount of manual labor. It created jobs, it didn't eliminate jobs, but there's so much disinformation about what this is. It was important to Adrian Felicity and myself to honor the nation of Hungary by making their offscreen Hungarian dialogue perfect. A lot of companies make companies like this sign NDAs, but we've splashed it all over our end credits

because we were never ashamed of it. We were never hiding it. It's actually a shame nobody asked me sooner because I would have spoke about it more openly. I'm actually very proud of the work we did. I don't think I have ever read a more defensive statement on the use of a technology from someone who, I don't know, whether or not he knows that this is something that is, I think, as we've sort of laid out, a tendency even if not just technology that is poisonous to filmmaking because it turns like questions

about authenticity or representation into mimesis and accuracy and pure sort of self referential infinite reuse of things. You know, it goes back to you don't have to imagine it, right? It's like he must, to make a statement that defensive, he must on some level know. Well, yeah, I mean, he was backed into a corner essentially, you know. I mean, I think Brady Corbet is a good filmmaker, but in this case, he became defensive because he got caught doing something. The whole point of using a re-speecher in the Brutalist was that it would be invisible to the audience. No one would know that the Hungarian accents and the Hungarian voiceover dialogue had been messed with, right?

So when you get caught doing something you were trying to hide, then you become defensive, and that's what happened with him, I think. I mean, all this stuff about honouring Hungary and honouring workers in Ukraine, you know, I mean, this is, you know, that just means any technology is good, I guess, if there's workers involved. I mean... NARES I like the job creators line, particularly. It reminded me in some some ways of like, it's different in the sense that it's technical rather than just scale. But I think a lot about like, through like maximalism of like early epic films, like

we're gonna build the biggest sets, right? And it's like, at a certain point you go, well, okay, yeah, maybe I killed like 50 horses by having them like run over wires for this battle scene, but you know, creates a lot of jobs. Well, that's true. I mean, yeah, it's, it's, it's not a good, you know, the, the fact that those battle scenes look so much better than ones using computer generated imagery is, you know, another, another topic, I guess. But, uh, you know, it's fine.

We'll just get AI horses. Yeah. I mean, the AI, whatever ant creatures, AI, the end of the enemy can be portrayed in AI and so can the masses be portrayed in AI. You know, we don't, we don't need actual masses of people anymore. We don't need any of that. Right. Take me back to Mosfilm getting like three regiments of Soviet troops for Waterloo.

You know, okay, there's one thing I was going to put in that piece that I didn't put in because you know, there's, you know, it's a limited word count that's related to what you just said, November. In the 20s, in the late teens, early 20s, Erich Von Stroheim was known for his strict adherence to this kind of fanatical realism that extended to the underwear his actors were wearing. So you know he's making a film that takes place in a certain time period. The women have to be wearing the proper you know foundation garments that you know would have been worn at that

time even though they're not visible to the audience because they're wearing clothes over them. I guess it's apocryphal, but supposedly he wanted Austrian soldiers to be wearing the proper underwear that they would have been wearing at the time the film was taking place, right? This is none of this is visible to the audience, right? But the point of that, that's the opposite of AI now, is that the actors knew that they were wearing that underwear. And that was Stroheim's whole point. The actors wearing this underwear are going to perform differently than actors who were just wearing their own underwear under their wardrobe costumes. Okay. So AI, you know, uh,

is pretending that they're doing something like that, right? But they're doing the opposite of that in fact. And so when Brady Corbett talks about re-speecher, he's trying to pretend in a way that it's a version of the underwear in an Erich von Stroheim film. But it's not the same thing at all because it's done without the actors. It's invisible to the audience just as the underwear was invisible to the audience. But it has nothing to do with the actors anymore. You know, I mean, there might be some fundamental, so to speak, layer of

the actor there, but it could be done just as easily without the actor. It goes back to what I was sort of doing my Chris Farley example. It's basically a form of division of labor. It's the, okay, Adrian Brody, you make the movements, you say the words, but we're going to get someone else to do the accent. And then, then it's going to be that whole idea that this is me creating a performance that you are going to see then becomes blurred. We've now divided up the labor of playing Laszlo Toth, essentially. Well, I mean, the Italian cinema for many years did not record live sound, direct sound

on set. So if you were to see a Fellini film or a Visconti film, the voices were not recorded live and they're dubbed in later, okay? So that's a kind of division of labor too, because it could be someone else's voice. But the point is, it is the voice of a person. And there is a decision being made here by, you know, by human being to give a certain kind of performance, even if they're putting their voice into someone else's mouth. So, you know, this is especially done in Italian cinema so that international actors

could appear in Italian movies, even if they didn't speak Italian. So, so, so we have to make a distinction between these things, right? You know, someone who's an advocate for AI will say, well, why was that okay? And this isn't, you know? Anyway, look, I see we've been going for a while, and I just wanna say thank you so, so much for coming and spending some time with us today. A peek behind the curtain,

there was a few technical glitches, but you were very patient with them, and I'm glad we waited it out because it has been a real pleasure to talk to you. Well, thank you, Riley November. I'm happy to have been on. Yeah, anyway, we're just gonna go back into the TF Studio with the rest of the gang for the outro, Milo's dates, all that good stuff. But once again, A.S. Hamra, thank you

so much for chilling with us today. Thank you. All right, we're back in the room. Thank you again to Mr. Hamra and thank you to you, the listener for your $1,000 a month contribution that you made. Just remember how your bones feeling pretty good. It's pretty, pretty, pretty attached to each other. How do you like all your sinews? Huh? pretty attached to each other. Yeah. How do you like all your sinews, huh? Just really think about that, you know, like really think about your connective tissues. Yeah. Anyway, anyway, thank you for listening. Don't forget.

There is a Patreon. It is a second episode every week. $1,000 a month. $1,000 a month. Milo is going to be in Sindala. He's going to be. Sindala show canceled due to golf ball barrage. But you can still see me in Perth, Saturday 15th. That's this week. Canberra, Sunday 16th.

Brisbane, Saturday 22nd. Tickets flying out the door for that, despite putting on an extra show. Get in fast. Sydney, 23rd. That's a Sunday. And then Melbourne for like a month from the 27th of March. So, you know, there's less urgency there.

Yeah, that's right. You've got time if you're in Melbourne. All right. All right. So we'll see you in a few short days. Bye, everyone. Bye. Bye. Thanks for watching!